Something Borrowed This Way Comes

Whenever asked that ripe and difficult question, “What makes a great Doctor Who story?”, I always opt for that tried and tested principle of “Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.” Where the blue can, of course, be a glib reference to the TARDIS or – more importantly, because the TARDIS itself is not an essential ingredient, except (generally) as a vehicle to transport us to adventure - a quality of mood or atmosphere. Or both, why not. In any case, not ‘blue’ in the sense that Torchwood would have you believe.

Watching Planet Of Evil on DVD, I can’t help but think that this answer of mine must have had its roots in my having grown up in what – if you feel like poking certain sectors of Doctor Who fandom and watching them jump – you might call the “Golden Age”. One of the commentators on the extras refer to this Hinchcliffe era as such, but he’s not ‘trolling’ – he firmly believes it. And why shouldn’t he: he worked on the show in that era and one of the other essential ingredients, I believe, of a great Doctor Who story is a conviction on the part of the writers, producers and pretty much everyone involved in what they are doing. (If you’re in it to piss about and have a laugh – see Graham Williams – then something’s missing.) Still, the key point here is that any “Golden Age” is bound to be measured subjectively.

For some it will be Williams, for some it will be JNT, for many in years to come it will be Rusty. Even though to me they might seem like the sort of people who think Invisible Touch was the best record Genesis ever made. And, in the event that any of them ever read this blog, they would likely snort derisively at everything I have to say. But, heck, what are blogs for? On a Who mailing list I could just randomly insert the words "Golden Age" and could fairly safely guarantee that nobody would read the rest of the post. Here, I can throw the words around liberally and do a little dance like the old guy who gleefully chants "Jehovah!" in Monty Python’s Life Of Brian.

But that would just be giving in to my wicked side.

Instead, I think I’d best just get back to the topic at hand, trusting that, courtesy of my long-winded introduction, now you, the reader, are as conscious as I am that any views I have to offer on a Who story from the mid-Pertwee to mid-Baker era will come with a degree of bias. Not an unshakeable bias – a few stories (e.g. Claws Of Axos) have not been as good as I remembered. While there have also been those, like Robot, that have struck me as a good deal better than I recalled from a previous rewatch. Swings and roundabouts.

The documentaries on The Planet Of Evil DVD seem to spend a lot of time focusing on how heavily this story rips off Jekyll & Hyde, but somehow I doubt Robert Louis Stevenson is turning in his grave. For one thing, it also nicks shamelessly from Forbidden Planet, but that’s a good movie to ‘plagiarise’ and that in turn borrows from The Tempest, so no big deal. For another, SF borrowing from classic stories is something of a given and Doctor Who has always been a repeat offender in that respect, and with The Mummy and Frankenstein to follow in this season, this particular era could be regarded as something of a creative kleptomaniac. But it tends to half-inch things with the endearing impudence of some sort of Artful Dodger – and then goes on to craft its stolen goods into something unique. Like setting a gem in a different trinket, with a charm and character all its own.

Here, Louis Marks conspires with Robert Holmes and they’re such shameless tea-leaves they haven’t even bothered to file the numbers off. It’s patently clear where all the bits came from: Sorenson even concocts an 'anti-quark serum', so that he can be seen imbibing a smoking brew, as he undergoes the Jekyll-Hyde transformation in front of a mirror.

The result is a story that’s not brilliant or genius but all those classic elements that have fallen off the back of a lorry have nevertheless been blended into something original. And if the central aim was to produce a sci-fi retelling of Jekyll and Hyde, then it’s definitely a story of opposites. Matter and anti-matter, Man and Anti-Man, film on an Ealing sound stage and video in the studio.

Aye, there’s the rub. The combination of camera work and design on Zeta Minor’s jungle is entirely worthy of the award for which Hinchcliffe apparently recommended Roger Murray-Leach. You want a wholly convincing alien environment in which to immerse your actors and your audience? You want it all for a few hundred quid? Roger’s your man. And David Maloney (who does love his freeze-frame cliffhangers) does a grand job of adding to the depth and believability of this simultaneously dark and colourful world. I love it now at least as much as it impressed me as a kid.

Against that, in its efforts to keep the narrative moving, the story doesn’t make nearly enough of the Jekyll-Hyde nature of the planet - the contrast between day and night is a tad underplayed for my liking. But even if the script had allowed itself a bit more time to explore that, the main contrast that would have come to light (haha) would have been that shortfall between the excellent film sequences and the limited, too well lit studio scenes. It’s not an unforgiveable production flaw, but the difference is at least as stark as the film sequences are effective.

Luckily - for me anyway - imagination comes to the rescue and it’s easy enough to bridge the gap between what’s on screen and what we’d be seeing if this creative team had been granted more pennies.

In fact, courtesy of Pitch Black – another night-day split personality world if ever there was one – it’s even easier to imagine.

There’s further contrast to come between the earlier planet-based half and the later ship-bound action, with that second half of the story not quite as effective. Again, Roger Murray-Leach does a commendable job on the ship interiors – making simple but effective use of the third dimension and building his sets on more than one level – but ideally at this stage you’d need a greater variety of claustrophobic spaces and hunter-prey action to rival the haunting jungle atmosphere. Something a bit more Alien, perhaps, but again a charitable imagination can make allowances for the fact that this is 70s TV and not a late 70s blockbuster horror movie. And this is horror, make no bones about that. It doesn’t scare the living wotsits out of me now, but my childhood’s not so long ago that I’ve forgotten the effect the sight of those emaciated husks had at the time of broadcast. Terrific stuff, guaranteed to leave a lasting impression.

Ah, but the big budget remake would be to die for.

Or would it. Because, you know, it wouldn’t have Tom in such fine moody and flippant form. It wouldn’t have Lis Sladen in equally fine form, with all that Sarah Jane-Fourth Doctor chemistry out-frothing any Jekyll-Hyde formula. (And yes, shallowness fans, she also happens to be exceptionally cute.) It wouldn’t have Ewen Solon’s commanding (nothing second about it) performance as Vishinsky. Or Frederick Jaeger lending that all-important conviction to what amounts to the ‘mad scientist’ role in this one. In fact, he’s not mad, just a bit deluded and he creates a sympathetic character.

On the plus side, it wouldn’t have Prentis Hancock who plays Salamar who’s not so much at the top of the Morestran chain of command, but over it. It’s not the actor’s fault – although if you’ve seen him in Space:1999 or Who’s Planet Of The Daleks, you could be forgiven for thinking so. In contrast with Sorenson, the character is insane and unsympathetic, clinging obsessively to his suspicions of the Doctor and Sarah in the face of mounting evidence that, even without the aid of a CSI: Zeta Minor team, would safely eliminate beyond all reasonable doubt the remotest possibility of them having anything to do with the deaths.

The remaining crew are variable, but they include Michael Wisher – sans Davros mask – and there’s at least some passing effort made to sketch them as individuals before they all have the life sucked out of them.

And here is where I go off on a bit of tangent, because one of the things I was most struck by was just how much this story must have influenced my own Fourth Doctor novel, Drift. Lurking semi-invisible horror in remote, isolated location; spindly icicle tendrils instead of a (surprisingly effective) shimmering outline of a monster; and a military expedition whose personnel I endeavoured to properly characterise as individuals – real people – before they all got killed. (As always, a lot comes down to what’s planted in the imagination at the grand age of eight, rather than what’s actually on screen, but I could recognise the seeds.) In truth, there’s not a heck of a lot of evidence of the latter in the script, but the variety of actors help and I’m persuaded this is one of the stories that inspired me to adopt that approach.

With the sketchy references to the energy-starved Morestran civilization there are also hints of that wider world-building that Ian Potter explores in his essay for Time And Relative Dissertations In Time And Space. It would have been so easy to just make them a generic human expedition, but no, now we have Morestra – another world in the Doctor Who universe we’re free to visit in our imaginations.

Overall then, this is another of those stories that excites in terms of its possibilities as well as everything it paints on screen. And all the essential ingredients – according to yours truly’s recipe! – are present: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. Of course, there’s more than one way to mix them, and Planet Of Evil would certainly support the fact that it’s impossible to obtain perfect results every time. But I feel the parties responsible at least forged something that will last.

And they even managed to include a bit of foreshadowing, promising more borrowed wonders to come: Planet Of Evil, as an anagram of Vile Plant Foe, must surely be a reference to the season closer, six-part Triffids/Quatermass/The Thing From Another World ‘rip-off’, The Seeds Of Doom. Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe, such a clever pair.