![]() ![]() ‘Frontier in Space’ overcomes these issues by simply being relentlessly entertaining, the dialogue lifting the stock situations and occasionally subverting them. It’s a Third Doctor story that goes on a bit, has the Master turn up halfway through to give it a boost, and features a lot of capture/escape/recapture/escape again shenanigans where people accuse the Doctor of being an enemy spy. This story should not work as well as it does. In which the Doctor and Jo find themselves embroiled in the simmering diplomatic tensions between the Earth and Draconian empires, and start to suspect the situation is being engineered by a third party. It’s also got some of the most intense death scenes in the show’s history. This is a huge shame, but on its own merits ‘The Silurians’ is a smart idea realised with strong characters, plenty of conflict, claustrophobia and paranoia. In isolation it’s a great moment, although as it was a late addition to the script it’s not something that’s built on in later episodes. With its plague storyline, the story expands outwards from its initial setting before settling back there for the finale, which is rightly praised for the Doctor’s moral outrage at the Brigadier blowing up the Silurian base. The Silurians themselves, despite the interesting concept of them having equal if not greater claim to Earth, are thinly sketched and ultimately reduced to more generic antagonists, but the human supporting cast is rich enough to support a soap opera (I know no one is going to commission a spin-off set in a nuclear-powered cyclotron facility – not least because pretty much all the speaking characters are killed – but it would have given The Day Today’s peerless ‘The Bureau’ a run for its money). More than a merely impressive horror segue, ‘ The Silurians’ features the Doctor at his most curious and furious: the scene where the Doctor first meets a Silurian is notable for Pertwee’s gentle, inquisitive tone giving way to a desperate plea for accord this is a fantastic moment for the Third Doctor, a far cry from his more typically glib dismissals of other people’s feelings. It’s a horrifying sequence, filmed on location in London, that culminates in people dropping dead in Marylebone Station and Palmer’s character staggering and slithering down some railings as he succumbs. ‘Inferno’, another great story from this season, had its parallel universe storyline, whereas ‘The Silurians’ has the titular race unleash a deadly plague through the medium of Geoffrey Palmer. These three stories needed a lot going on across their unusual length. ![]() For Season 7, the new production team of Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks inherited their predecessor’s even longer stories (the series consisting of a four-parter followed by three seven-episode stories). ![]() The capture/escape cliché discussed below under ‘Frontier in Space’ was a frequent offender. This isn’t merely people from 2022 looking back and saying ‘Isn’t this slow?’ – when Robert Holmes took over as script editor in 1974 he reduced the number of six-part stories and tweaked the ones the show did make so they functioned like a two-parter and a four-parter. The Pertwee era has issues with story padding. Both sides have their aggressors and mediators, but is this going to end in peaceful settlement or absolute carnage? In which an underground cyclotron facility is built in a cave system containing Silurians: the inhabitants of Earth before humanity evolved from apes. ![]()
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