Frontier in Space is the third story of season ten of Doctor Who, and the sixth of the Pertwee Six-Parters. It was first broadcast in 1973 and stars Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, Katy Manning as Jo Grant, and is, sadly, the final story in which Roger Delgado appears as the Master.
The name "Frontier in Space" is obviously a reference to Captain Kirk's famous line
"Space: the final frontier."
That would mean that a frontier in space is a frontier in a frontier.
It starts with a spaceship flying in space, which nearly hits the TARDIS. The mannys in charge don't know it is the TARDIS, but we viewers at home see and hear it just enough to recognise it. It helps that in the next scene it materialises on the spaceship, where Jo says
"Only you could manage to have a traffic accident in space."
Lol. The plot gets going quickly when Jo sees another spaceship out the window, and then hears a noise that makes it go all blurry for a moment.
The mannys on the bridge also hear the noise, and it has the effect of making them see a different spaceship model... er, or should that be a different model of spaceship? Not much better put like that, is it? They think it is "Draconians" which made my friend Dragon start paying attention to this story. He was even more interested when the Doctor goes to meet with the ship's crew, but the manny he meets hallucinates that the Doctor is an alien (well, a different kind of alien) and shouts out "Dragons!"
Jo sees the same manny as the Doctor, but she hallucinates that it is a Drashig, which is either a continuity callback to the previous story or else it was simply the easiest monster for the production team to lay their paws on.
The two spaceships link up and the crew send a message to Earth asking for help, which links up this scene with a scene set on Earth.
There the Earth President and a Draconian Prince are accusing each other's spaceships of attacking their spaceships, while at the same time denying the other's accusation. The Draconian says
"The treaty between our two empires established a frontier in space."
Clang!
"We have never violated that frontier. You have invaded our part of the galaxy many times."
Also present is General Williams, who is quickly established as being more aggressively hostile towards the Draconians than the President, despite her obvious resemblance to Servalan - the future Earth and setting of this story seems like it could be a forerunner of the Federation of Blakes 7.
The Doctor and Jo are prisoners on the spaceship and are locked in the ship's hold. Neither Jo nor the Doctor understand what is going on, but he sits down and tries to calmly figure it out, quickly deducing that the mannys have mistaiken them for Draconians (although this should not have been a mystery to him seeing as he was present when a Draconian appeared on the crew's monitor to demand their surrender), who he has met before.
Jo: "Yes, but why do they mistake us for these Dragons?"Doctor: "No, Draconians. 'Dragons' is rather an unflattering nickname."
Dragon is insulted by this, and says unless these Draconians can fly and breathe fire, they ought to consider themselves honoured to be mistaiken for dragons.
After a moment's consideration he added without using spaceships or rayguns.
The Doctor has also deduced that the noise they heard caused the hallucinations.
Another scene set on Earth sees the President and General Williams watching a newsreader doing some world-building. If Russell "The" Davies had been in charge back in the '70s this would probably have been a robot Angela Rippon or Richard Baker.
The crew prepare to defend themselves as their enemy does a classic slow-cutting to get into their spaceship. We see that they are not Draconians but rather Ogrons, returning from Dave the Daleks (not counting their cameo appearance in Carnival of Monsters). This explains why the supposed Draconians spoke so slowly when issuing their ultimatum to the mannys - a clever clue dropped in before their reveal.
The Doctor has just about finished using the sonic screwdriver to effect and escape when one of the crew comes to fetch them to use as hostages. The Ogrons break in and start shooting the mannys with their pewpewpew guns, and they also pew the Doctor. Luckily for him they are not using the same pewpewpew guns as they did in Dave the Daleks, so he only falls over instead of being disappeared.
When the Doctor wakes up, Jo tells him that the Ogrons stole the ship's cargo and the TARDIS. Both the Doctor and Jo think the Ogrons must have been W-wording for somebody else, because they are too stupid to have come up with the plan themselves, lol.
The Earth rescue ship arrives and sends a message to the ship.
"Earth battle cruiser to Earth cargo ship number C982. We are now approaching you. Do you read me?"
I know that voice, it's...
It's Willie Caine from The Sandbaggers to the rescue! He boards the ship with his mannys and asks what happened. The crew are too embarrassed to admit that they were fooled by Ogrons, so they lie about the Doctor and Jo being to blame. One of them shouts
"They were helping the Dragons! They're traitors!"
So Willie and his mannys point their guns at the Doctor and Jo. It's not great, but it will have to do as our cliffhanger.
Frontier in Space has a reputation of the Doctor and his Companion spending a lot of their time getting captured and escaping, even more so than other Doctor Who stories, in order to fill up the six episodes. So let's keep a running total of how many times they get imprisoned over the course of it.
Imprisoned counter: Doctor 1, Jo 1
No comments:
Post a Comment