Hardly a great Doctor Who story, ‘Planet of the Daleks’ does disappoint in several ways. Not only does it ignore the events of ‘Frontier in Space’ (apart from a few token references), it also resists plot in favor of a Flash Gordon runabout, and, worse, suffers at times from a cruelly slow pace (especially in the first two episodes). On top of this, the balloon escape is a complete joke. 

But having prepared myself for the worst when preparing to re-watch this story, I was surprised how much I actually enjoyed it. It’s quite generic, but not bad for all that – a basic Pertwee Who – and it has more things to like about it than not. First of all, the Spiridon jungle backdrop is fun. One of my favorite aspects of classic Who is its theatrical quality; the wobbly sets, the line flubs, the makeup and costumes – it all amounts to a semi-live performance ‘feel,’ one you’re hard-pressed to find on TV nowadays. In other words, yes, this ‘alien jungle planet’ is obviously a set – what of that? This is Doctor Who, right? And at least the production team has made this one look dense and difficult to get through, unlike so many Who caves that have perfect human-sized tunnels cut into them. And the fungus-spitting plants are great.

The presentation of the Daleks is another satisfying element. Oh, they look kind of shoddy, but they’re believably menacing as they quickly respond to problems (cutting through the door, producing their anti-gravity disc - this was of course before the days of ‘ELEVATE!’). As with the next Dalek story, ‘Death to the Daleks,’ they are depicted principally as scientists here, not the simple squawking tanks they would become in the post-Pertwee days. Their dialogue, although often a bit wordy, is delivered at a brisk pace, which I always feel makes them seem smarter.

Which brings us to the question of the voice artists. The combination of Michael Wisher and Roy Skelton as the Dalek voices is of course an extremely happy one, especially after the awful voices in the previous Dalek story. The success of any Dalek story depends somewhat on successful characterizations by the voice actors, and while Dalek fans don’t ever really get their ‘EXTERMINATE!’ fix here, Skelton at one point really lets ’er rip with his hysterical “LOCATE AND DESTROY! LOCATE AND DESTROY!! *LOCATE AND DESTROY*!!!” And Wisher’s “WAIT!” when the Dalek realizes who the ‘Spiridons’ really are is chilling, and made me jump.

The Dalek Supreme looks great (too bad about the lights, of course) and is generally well-used. There’s nothing all that supreme about many of ‘Supreme Daleks’ in the classic series: most seem to be mere low-level foremen, in fact. But this Supreme Council Dalek, arriving in state with its own attendant guard, gives the impression of a powerful establishment behind the small Dalek control group on Spiridon. Furthermore, when the Dalek Supreme turns and exterminates the Dalek group leader for incompetence, it emphasizes the authority and coldness of the Dalek command. Wisher and Skelton sell this scene beautifully, clearly trying to outdo one another with their rising inflections.

Roy Skelton is also good as the wheezing Spiridon Wester – amazingly likeable and resonant as a character, given his few scenes. He is touching in his moments with Jo (‘Goodbye’), and heroic, even tragic, when he sacrifices himself to sabotage the Daleks’ plague weapon. (This scene is particularly well handled: Wester’s peaceful face fading in as the Daleks shriek with horror - ‘WE CAN NEVER LEAVE HERE – NEVER! – NEVER! – NEVER!’ – is a classic Who moment from my childhood.)

As for the Thals, Taron and Vaber are certainly believable as the bickering astronauts. In particular, Bernard Horsfall really convinces as Taron – he is sympathetic and likeable . . . and yet we can also see why Vaber is so frustrated with his cautious leadership style. 

As for the Doctor and Jo, Jon Pertwee phones it in a bit, but he radiates (genuine?) contempt for the Dalek when they’re in the elevator together, which is nice. And Katy Manning is likeable as ever, and her low-key acting manages to keep her ‘love’ plotline from feeling too forced. 

All in all, ‘Planet of the Daleks’ shouldn’t win any prizes – it’s a routine Pertwee story, all right, but it’s more than worth a watch for some good moments.

People’s impressions of ‘Planet of the Spiders’ seem largely to be dominated by the chase scene in Episode Two, universally (and perhaps somewhat kindly) described as ‘indulgent.’ So, I might as well start with that. There’s no two ways about it, the chase is truly absurd – I mean, Bessie/mini-copter following Whomobile, then Whomobile following mini-copter, then *hovercraft* following *speedboat*? It’s harmless enough, it’s true - even fun if you’ve had a drink or two beforehand. But its sheer goofiness *does* damage the obvious work the production team put into the quiet, rather ominous setup in Episode One.

However, if the story as a whole is undeniably uneven, there’s still much to like about it. The setup, with its mysterious cult operating out of a country house in rural England, is the stuff of classic Pertwee Who. The Tibetan commune is by turns both appealing and eerie, with Lupton’s leading of the chants authentically hypnotic and rather frightening. When the action moves to Metebelis Three, it does look a bit cheap, it’s true, but the planet’s fakey blue skies have a lovely, very ‘seventies fantasy’ quality to them. (The look of the planet reminds me a bit of a Boston album cover.) Some Doctor Who fans, even old ones, complain about the studio-bound limitation of the classic series, and yet I’ve said before that, to me, the theatricality of these productions adds an enjoyable aesthetic that mere realism can’t match. 

And the planet’s ‘Eight Legs’-dominated culture is extremely well defined. A knowledge of Barry Letts’s interest in Buddhism, and his use of it in the earthbound parts of this story, help us to understand his vision of the spiders as the antithesis of the Buddhists’ ‘pure’ Eastern philosophy. The spiders are power-hungry, petty, and obsessed with social rank – and by allying with them, Lupton shows himself to be not just a villain, but a bad *Buddhist* (which is probably worse, in Letts’s book). The individual spider characters are memorable and distinctive – quite a feat, considering they’re identical, expressionless puppets. Of course most of the credit for that must go to the actresses who provide their voices – their vocal timbres are all similar enough to suggest the same species, and yet all three capture their different characters remarkably well.

The ‘Two Legs,’ as many have pointed out, don’t work as well, but they’re more functional than embarrassing. They serve mainly to illustrate the horror of the spider regime, and they actually do that quite effectively. One writer has said that the only thing that makes the Daleks scary is how frightened Doctor Who’s *characters* are of them, and the same principle applies here – when the villagers scramble in fear at the approach of the Queen, we believe in the spiders’ power, simple as that. Many U.K. fans, including ‘The Discontinuity Guide,’ have also criticized the production team for its use of regional accents with these humans. I can understand this annoyance, but as an American, I hear *all* accents on Doctor Who as ‘regional,’ so it didn’t trouble me tremendously. I would even go so far as to say that it annoys me how British fans seem perfectly willing to overlook the English accents in French and Italian locations for ‘City of Death,’ for example, while whining about West-Country ones here. (A much bigger problem is the UNIT haircuts - belief in the ‘militariness’ of this organization has never been so suspended – but that’s another story.)

As for the other characters, Tommy is of course a bit of an embarrassment – an ‘Of Mice and Men’ clichй who doesn’t really seem to fit all that well into this fictional world – but to be fair John Kane plays him with good taste, for the most part. John Dearth sinks his teeth into the ambitious Lupton with much success, and he really sells the scenes with ‘his’ spider, not an easy task for any actor. And the hapless Professor Clegg is used rather cruelly by the script, but he remains probably the most touching figure of the entire story. (Shades of Pigbin Josh.)

When we come to the ‘good’ Buddhists, George Cormack is thoroughly charming as K’Anpo – and yet, the character doesn’t quite work. He’s so obviously there just to set up the Doctor’s regeneration that he never quite engages with the story, or resonates as a full-blooded character of his own. A knowledge of Barry Letts’s personal obsession with Buddhism doesn’t necessarily help our appreciation of Cho-Je, who seems to be scripted entirely from fortune cookies, and Kevin Lindsay’s rather twee performance (speaking of accents, just what exactly is *that* supposed to be?) doesn’t either. Furthermore, it seems odd that a Time Lord would use a projected regeneration for such banal purposes – what does Cho-je actually *do* around the compound anyway? Answer the phone? Catch up on the paperwork? 

Sarah and Yates, on the other hand, are rather well used in this story. I know that Mike Yates is one of the less popular Doctor Who companions, and yet I must say that Richard Franklin’s performance grew on me as I revisited these stories, and I actually quite liked him in this one (flares and all). 

Finally, there is the matter of the Doctor’s regeneration, which is much praised by fans, but which actually seemed a little abrupt to me. To his credit, Jon Pertwee doesn’t ham it up in the least, but his ultimate change seems a little rushed, especially coming on the heels of such much ‘big’ adventure and exposition. But I suppose a fan could read this as a semi-conscious tribute to Third Doctor endings on the whole, which so often had the UNIT family suddenly having a nice laugh about it all. The Pertwee era always had a fundamental safety and innocence to it; in fact, ‘Planet of the Spiders’ is in many ways representative of the age. It’s overstuffed, slightly clunky, a little too loud, a little too long, but pretty watchable nevertheless. Jon Pertwee gets a gadgety chase, a staged fight, and yet somehow keeps his dignity anyway – he is the Doctor. And while these things sometimes make his stories seem a bit shallow compared to others, there’s much to be said for a ‘pure fun’ approach to Doctor Who . . . and I suppose anyone who fell in love with the show as a child would admit that this not always such a bad thing. 

Is it?

The Time Warrior is remarkably inauspicious given that it’s actually quite important, introducing as it does Sarah Jane Smith and the Sontarans. While Sarah in retrospect came out as probably the best companion ever (once the 1970s were out she hardly faced much competition), I sometimes wonder if the Sontarans deserved to become such comparatively big monsters. I know that the only reason they did was because Barry Letts was playing it safe and brought them back for the following season, thereby opening the floodgates, but even so: they’re not bad monsters, by any means, but I can think of better monsters that deserved more appearances (Zygons anyone?). That said, this is their best story, as all but one of the others didn’t have Robert Holmes (also known by his nickname, Lord and Master) at the helm.

Immediately noticeable with this story is the new title sequence, which is fantastic; in fact, for my money it’s the best after the Hartnell original. I prefer it to the Tom Baker version that followed it closely – it’s aesthetically more daring with its broken lines and swirls, and the way the picture of Jon Pertwee zooms out only to rush forward again and become a vortex is a killer. There are no cheesy two-dimensional TARDISes here, either.

David Daker cannot fail to make an impression early on: he is over-the-top to be sure, but not in a way that disrespects the audience like Anthony Ainley’s master would do. Here his performance is loud and vibrant, but carefully and caringly matched up with the tone of the rest of the production. John J. Carney as Bloodaxe, by contrast, is completely swamped. He does his best and so I won’t tear into him, but he simply doesn’t have the energy of Daker’s manic Irongron. However, his patronising and extremely obvious and clichйd characterisation as a West Country simpleton is very annoying, arr, so it be. The set of Irongron’s castle is poor, which is a shame as when it came to period settings Doctor Who was usually on solid ground: its plastic props and painted-backdrop brickwork perhaps explaining why Sarah initially believes it to be a fairground mock-up. Still, barring comparatively short interludes in the past in Carnival Of Monsters and The Time Monster, this is the first story to really make an effort to create a period setting since The War Games in 1969 so I suppose I can forgive them being a bit rusty.

A small globe is a nice idea for a spaceship, especially two decades before Star Trek gave us the Borg Sphere (and the Borg had ripped off the Cybermen anyway). However, the design of their ships – which have since passed into canonicity – were initially conceived so that Irongron could believe it to be a star, while the only reason this monster is called a Sontaran is so that Holmes can make a cheap pun on ‘Saracen’. Bear that in mind when watching the deadly-serious The Two Doctors, which Holmes also wrote but under the thumb of Eric Saward (oh so easy an excuse for a Holmes fan, but there you are). One thing that annoys me though is fans who moan about subsequent plots involving Sontarans attempting to discover time-travel, “when they had it all the way back in the 12th Century. The answer, I’d have thought, is obvious: Linx is from the future, jackasses! I have to say that Linx is brilliant, with Kevin Lindsay’s brooding sadist portrayal stealing the acting crown from Daker; it is hard to believe that this is the same man who played the affable and somewhat effeminate Cho-je in Planet Of The Spiders. As I said, this is the Sontarans’ best story, with Holmes doing what David Whitaker did so successfully with the Daleks: keeping his monsters in the background, as part of a story rather than the be-all-and-end-all of it. Linx is so much more menacing through not being rubbed in our faces all the time.

Jumping to the future, and the Brigadier’s line of “most of their work's so secret, they don't know what they're doing themselves” is a cunning way to avoid having to give a proper explanation why all these scientists are all bundled together for kidnapping. It’s interesting to see that Pertwee is mucking about like Tom Baker did in his last few seasons, but he may be taking advantage of Holmes’s shamelessly boisterous dialogue.

Although Sarah would be brilliant, a lot of this would be down to the relationship she had with her co-stars. This has yet to develop at this point, and her one-dimensional crusading feminist characterisation sees Barry Letts’s drive to be socially responsible misfire. I was going to do the old “DON’T ASK ME TO MAKE THE COFFEE!” bit, but then she actually said that line or thereabouts (I’d forgotten), which had me lost for words. Thankfully she became much more of a realistic character under Philip Hinchcliffe. Rubeish is also a very irritating character, Holmes tastelessly mocking his lack of vision and creating a character straight out of a dated 70s sitcom. He even mentions a scientist called Dingle, for crying out loud. It surprises me as well why he and the Doctor talk abut Sarah with raised voices even though she’s only in one of those temporary cubicles.

The drama of Rubeish’s disappearance is spoiled since we have already seen what happens to the kidnapped humans, but there is a great effect as the Doctor projects an image of Linx on the stairs (look closely and you can see his feet waiting on the landing beforehand). However, as with much of the season the characterisation of UNIT is dreadful, with the grunts living up to their nicknames and shooting at passing insects and the Brigadier uttering out-of-character lines like “oh my giddy aunt!”. 

It’s actually quite effective not letting us see Sarah’s reaction to the TARDIS (doesn’t the prop look tatty here?), instead just showing her wandering around. Her acting as she is captured is excellent, and it is easy to see why she would be so popular once the writers had got the hang of her.

There is some great location shooting (always a strength of the programme), which in part makes up for the tackiness of the studio sets. We see the Sontaran make-up for the first time, and it’s fantastic, much better than it would be in later years. I know it was uncomfortable and severely restricted Lindsay’s breathing, but even so I was sad to see it go in subsequent stories. However, my copy of The Time Warrior is the extremely old BBC video release from 1989 9still in good nick, mind) where the episodes are all edited together into one feature, and it becomes very obvious that Linx only removes his helmet to set up the cliffhanger. It’s slightly strange and not very dramatically satisfying to see him take off his helmet, pose dramatically for a second, then replace his helmet and walk off.

You only get lines like “narrow-hipped vixen!” with Robert Holmes. Sarah’s comment that the castle contains “no lights or cameras” could possibly be metafiction, but really it’s just Holmes having a massive laugh at everyone else’s expense, taking his revenge when Terrance Dicks made him write a period piece against his will (in fairness he turned the tables later with Horror Of Fang Rock). Linx’s comment about human reproduction is very funny, although his genuine interest in the more violent aspects of medieval society turns him into far more than just an average ‘evil’ monster. The robot knight is quite creepy, with its zombie-like gait and distended, out-of-proportion features. The Doctor knocks Irongron’s control unit out of his hand with a crack shot from a crossbow; Russell T. Davies wants a return to the non-gun bearing Doctor. All I can say is, he has a lot of contrary evidence to make up for.

Rubeish takes the idea of time-travel in his stride, babbling like an idiot; is he Holmes’s most annoying character ever? The music here is so rare that there isn’t really a place to discuss it, so I’ll just say quickly that Dudley Simpson, having passed his near-unlistenable electronic phase, is on good form.

Amazingly, Gallifrey is casually namedropped for the first time here as if its name had been known already (another important contribution Holmes (presumably) made to the show). Pertwee’s constant fighting with extras is getting tiresome at this stage, especially as it drives his character into the ground, although it’s not as annoying as him yelling “hai!” with every stuntman that goes down.

Linx’s description of Pertwee as “a longshanked rascal with a mighty nose” is hilarious, but in fairness Holmes chose a description that could equally apply to himself. The plot here is simple without being patronising, allowing for Holmes to avoid clumsy exposition while still keeping the story going. There is a bit of padding, I should say, in part one where the Doctor doesn’t arrive in medieval England until the very end.

The siege scene is fun, being nice and simple (which is not how Holmes had wanted it; his revenge again). The location scenes are very well directed by Alan Bromly, and even in the studio the very mobile cameras are nice to see. However, his handling of action scenes does tend to fall a bit flat. The castle sentry, I should add, is appalling. 

The cliffhanger is spoiled by my clumsily-edited tape, which just shows Linx shooting the Doctor and his subsequent fall to be possibly the slowest action scene outside The Aztecs. In the fourth episode, the Doctor masquerading as Linx to fool Bloodaxe is silly and pantomimic, but by contrast Sarah’s terrified bluff to the serving woman is excellently played. However, her feminist tirade is so clumsily written that I feel the need to point it out even though I went on about it earlier. There is a poor, shaky piece of action as the Doctor swings on a chandelier, and there is a horrible boom mike shadow on Linx at the end.

Holmes’s real weakness was his penchant for anticlimaxes; his endings range from deus ex machina overload (Spearhead From Space, Pyramids Of Mars) to the too lame for words (Terror Of The Autons). This isn’t one of his worst, but writing his monsters to have inbuilt weaknesses like Power Rangers’ enemies makes me cringe a bit. The final explosion is also a bit too simple, although no one can claim it’s not within the show’s limits.

Despite not being the best-realised period piece the show ever did, this is still a great fun story. It’s no classic, but given how most non-classic Holmes scripts get unfairly ripped apart (The Krotons, The Power Of Kroll), this is a story that actually tends to get quite fairly treated – maybe because Holmes’s unwillingness to write to specifications provides his advocates with a scapegoat. I’m only giving this an average rating, which spells bad things as it’s probably the best story of the season, which wasn’t Pertwee’s best. Taken story by story though, The Time Warrior is fairly representative: it has few pretensions (OK so it’s not representative of Planet Of The Spiders), but it’s just good clean fun.

I love the Sontarans and Rutans. The idea of two alien cultures locked in unending conflict across millennia certainly resonates with many political dichotomies in our real world; those real-life dichotomies are usually sad ones, and yet an allegorical reading of the Sontaran/Rutan war is not without its humor too. Sontarans, especially, view everything they encounter *only* as it relates to their holy war – it’s a rather funny way to look at the universe, and how often in life do we see political parties going to extraordinary lengths to tie even the most neutral topics in to their agendas, and fighting as hard as they can *not* to see the other side? This becomes even funnier when we realize that never in classic ‘Doctor Who’ history did the Sontarans and Rutans actually appear onscreen together: we only ever got one side of the story, and we can’t help wondering, considering their insulated approaches to warfare, how often the two races actually met in battle at all. (Some fans have suggested that Russell T. Davies should finally have them meet in his new series, but I hope he doesn’t – I don’t want to see this amusing tradition spoiled.)

‘The Time Warrior’ introduced the Sontarans, and in the context of a refreshingly small-stakes story: Linx isn’t trying to destroy the Earth, or even to take it over – he just wants to fix his spaceship and get back to the front lines. The Sontarans’ fixation on their own private conflict makes them interesting villains in ‘Doctor Who’ history. After all, they couldn’t be further from the megalomaniacal individuals who make up the rank and file of ‘Who’ baddies – their encounters with humans in the series are usually irritating distractions, and here Linx’s annoyance with his situation is amusingly palpable throughout. Linx is humorless and impatient, and as macho as a sexless clone can be, but he is not a megalomaniac – he is simply focused on his mission. And if he can have a little sadistic fun in the process, well, where’s the harm in that? (Personally, I prefer the mask from ‘The Sontaran Experiment,’ but Kevin Lindsay is still marvelous as Linx – even if it is sometimes difficult to hear him as he shouts through his helmet!)

As for the story itself, its plot makes wonderful sense (for once), and events progress very naturally from one scene to another. Robert Holmes’s script may not be as funny as some of his others (specifically, his other [mock-] medieval story, ‘The Ribos Operation’), but it is vividly characterized, and this ‘primitive’ setting inspires the writer to great inventive heights: Irongron’s much-quoted metaphors are just a few examples of his colorful creations here. Some of the ‘medieval’ moments do tend to go a bit Renaissance Faire-y (you certainly wouldn’t accuse the cast of not having fun), but for the most part it doesn’t get in the way of our taking it all seriously. David Daker chews the scenery as Irongron, but likeably so – Holmes always had affection for small people with delusions of grandeur, and despite how hard the writer works to establish the character as a barbaric warlord, we can’t help liking him. (His repeated description of Linx as “Toad Face” gets funnier and funnier too.) Ultimately, Irongron is more like Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirate King than a real villain, and it’s almost a shame Holmes decided to kill him. Donald Pelmear’s take as Rubeish is extremely amusing too, and yet the character isn’t a mere buffoon – he is an absent-minded professor, yes, and yet he accepts the fact that he has traveled in time with a (wonderfully scientific) open mind, and of course it is he who bravely creeps up on the Sontaran and stuns him. And smaller parts like Sheila Fay’s cynical wench Meg and June Brown’s ambitious Lady Eleanor are made just as memorable as the principals.

And then, of course, there’s Sarah. For a generation of ‘Doctor Who’ viewers, Sarah Jane Smith will always be *the* companion, and her meeting with Jon Pertwee’s Doctor here can only be described as historic. The treatment of Sarah would vary from script to script over the years, but here she is everything one could want from a companion. In many ways, Sarah really steals this show – it’s isn’t hard to see why the Doctor is impressed with her, especially when she single-handedly leads a raid on Irongron’s castle! The introduction of a new assistant always presented ‘Doctor Who’s’ writers with an opportunity to reinvent the series, and here, briefly, we certainly get to see the Doctor and the TARDIS with fresh eyes – a rare treat.

A very strong story.

For me, The Green Death is not only one of the best UNIT stories, but one of the best Doctor Who stories ever. It has so many elements in it that contribute to its richly-deserved status as a classic.

Having said that, I'll start by talking you through the story's detractions. The camera-work during the "boating through the maggots" sequence is a little shoddy, with the principal characters and foreground so obviously cut into other shots that the sequence becomes completely unbelievable. Similar problems are encountered when the Doctor and Sgt. Benson attack the maggots. However, Doctor Who was never about superb effects, but about the story.

And so that's where I shall move on to. It is, unfortunately, one of those Doctor Who stories, like The Tomb of the Cybermen and The Caves of Androzani, that has a blatantly obvious moral. Now, don't get me wrong. One of the best things about Doctor Who is its moral undertones. It tries, and often succeeds, to teach us important lessons and principles. But it really grates with me when the moral undertones become,... well, moral overtones, so obvious are they. There are also some important story issues. For example, when the maggot in the Nuthutch is found dead- next to Professor Jones' special fungus, which it has been eating- the Doctor fails to make the connection between the fungus being fatal to the maggots, and the fungus being the basis of a vaccine against the maggots. It's an almost unforgivable scripting error in the sometimes almost omniscient Doctor.

But, I must now go on to my reasons for liking it so much. The minor characters are fleshed out so well that they become really entertaining in their own right. A particular favourite of mine is the BOSS. To hear it humming along merrily is lovely;it is really heartening that the scriptwriters and actors take the time to give the extras real personalities of their own. Stevens is also a refreshing new take on the "unwitting-pawn-controlled-by-a-higher-intelligence" theme. To have a character who can both be completely dominated by the computer, and also remind him to get back on track when he is busy eulogising is refreshing, and his sacrifice at the end is moving: not least because the Doctor accepts that it is something that Stevens has to do to cleanse his conscience. His nod of thank you to Stevens brings out the best in Pertwee's Doctor.

The Doctor also feels somewhat rejuvenated in The Green Death. He is now leaping from cranes, running away from armed guards in sealed compounds, and scrambling through mineshafts. This "action man" feel to the Doctor helps to keep the story ticking along, and also makes him stand out from Professor Jones. If the Doctor was just a thinking Doctor, he would be the same as Professor Jones; but his extra energy gives him an edge over Professor Jones, as well as making his sadness at Jo's departure more profound, because of this juxtaposition.

So, over all, an excellent yarn. Complex characters and an all-action Doctor more than make up for some minor filming quibbles. First class.

The main conceit around which ‘Carnival of Monsters’ is built, that of a ‘human ant farm,’ is enough to fill anyone with apprehension. Plots about shrinking are traditionally more the stuff of fantasy than science fiction – they’ve occasionally been handled well in things like Richard Matheson’s ‘The Shrinking Man’ and ‘Fantastic Voyage,’ yes, but given the inherent limitations of the Doctor Who format (and the tendency towards facetiousness in the previous two stories), we can’t be blamed for approaching ‘Carnival of Monsters’ expecting twee-ness and forced whimsy. And when the first moments of this story present us with a) vaguely Munchkin-like aliens with an absurd dialect, b) a second plot featuring setting and characters that seem to have been copped from ‘Anything Goes,’ and c) a character whose costume is even worse than Colin Baker’s . . . well, as the Minorians themselves might say, one is not encouraged.

But happily, Robert Holmes’s script quickly evaporates any such fears; ‘Carnival of Monsters’ is a brilliant story, full of humor, and yet taking its sillier components just seriously enough to make them work. The approach is satirical without sacrificing the integrity of the ‘straight’ sci-fi approach. The Minorians are obviously fussy bureaucrats, but Holmes fleshes out their society just enough to keep them from being too jokey - the class struggles with the Functionaries, the paranoia about ‘contamination,’ and their strange dependence on the pronoun ‘one’ all combine to distinguish them as a genuine alien culture with its own unique quirks. And the MiniScope (with its ignorant huckster proprietors) is an obvious dig at pop culture on the whole and television in particular, and yet it’s handled with surprising realism and good taste.

In terms of the production aesthetics, the story is a mini-masterpiece (no pun intended); a great example of Doctor Who overcoming its budget constraints. The sets and cast are small, but effective. The Drashigs, as noted many times, are rather surprisingly believable and horrifying monsters. The springing one at the end of episode two is simply fantastic – obviously a puppet, but very lifelike, especially when it suddenly whips its head around to locate its prey. And speaking of the cliffhangers, every one here is a great one – a rare thing indeed for this series!

As for the cast, the familiar faces and voices are a little distracting (Peter Halliday, Harry Sullivan and Davros, all in the same story!), but that’s always part of the fun of Doctor Who anyway. Leslie Dwyer, despite his ridiculous wig, false mustache, and costume that seems to be made partially of candy, is believable and likeable as one of Holmes’s classic charlatan characters. Robert Holmes obviously had great affection for con men and show people, and Vorg is one of his best ‘flawed, but fun’ creations. Michael Wisher is simultaneously comic and sinister as the Shakespeare-esque usurping brother – his dry delivery of the witty lines (and great facial expressions) make the character memorable (and his demise satisfying). Peter Halliday is pompous but sympathetic as Pletrac, Tenniel Evans’s Major is amusingly characterized, and Cheryl Hall and Jenny McCracken turn their smaller roles into ones to remember. (The moment when Claire *nearly* recalls what has happened to them is especially charming.)

And Jon Pertwee is in top form here. This is the mature Third Doctor at his best – vain and condescending to everyone around him (the moment when he tells the Minorians to stop calling him ‘the creature’ is classic), righteously indignant with Vorg when comparing the Miniscope to zoos, but also playful with Jo, vigorous and manly when boxing with Andrews, genteel when reacting to the carnival ‘palare,’ and of course driven by curiosity – possibly the Doctor’s most dominant trait throughout the show’s history. Katy Manning isn’t the star of this story, it’s true, but her performance is also an important part of its overall success.

All in all, ‘Carnival of Monsters’ is a real triumph of the era; if only all Doctor Who stories stood up this well . . . .