Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Colony in Space Episode Six

The Doctor kicks the button away from the Master with some Venusian Karate, then they are both captured by aliens. Locked together in the set that the Doctor and Jo were imprisoned in earlier, they immediately team up to investigate the alien writings on the walls. This makes it four stories out of four for Doctor-Master team ups.

Caldwell and Morgan have rescued Jo and taken her back to the dome, where Dent orders Jo to be put on the spaceship with the colonists. Caldwell and Morgan have an argument which brings Caldwell's character development arc - on pause (not paws) since the arrival of the Master into the story - back to the foreground. He disobey's Dent's order and takes Jo to follow the Doctor and the Master to the alien city.

The Master finally reveals to the Doctor what we have known since the start of episode one - that he knew about the doomsday weapon from the Time Lords' files. When the aliens come to take them away, the Master uses gas to allow himself and the Doctor to escape.

All the colonists are on their spaceship ready to take off, except for Winton who has a punch-up with an IMC guard. This fight lasts for a surprisingly long time considering it is between two minor characters.

The spaceship lifts off, and then explodes. It's another model shot, of course, but quite an effective one, assisted by way of a quick cut to Jo and Caldwell where we see their reactions. They think all the mannys on board have been killed, and Caldwell feels guilty because he helped the IMC baddys send them off.

The Doctor and the Master reach the doomsday weapon's control room. The Master says that with the weapon he could make the Earth's sun explode "now." The Doctor says

"That's unbelievable!"

"You know the Crab Nebula?"

"The cloud of cosmic matter that was once a sun? Of course."

The Doctor delivers this line as though insulted by the ease of the Master's question.

"That was the result of the super-race testing this weapon!"

Jo and Caldwell reach the alien city. An alien tries to capture Jo but Caldwell knocks it out so, for a change, they are able to get inside without having been captured.

The Master tempts the Doctor in what is surely the key scene of the whole story:

"Doctor, why don't you come in with me? We're both Time Lords. We're both renegades. We could be masters of the galaxy! Think of it, Doctor - absolute power! Power for good. Why, you could reign benevolently. You could end wars... suffering... disease. We could save the universe."

"No, absolute power is evil."

"Consider carefully, Doctor. I'm offering you a half-share in the universe!"

I love the way the Master's music plays in the background behind this speech. The Doctor refuses the offer, of course, and there is a further exchange as the Master asks him why.

"Why? Look at this. Look at all those planetary systems, Doctor. We could rule them all!"

"What for? What is the point?"

"The point is that one must rule or serve, that's a basic law of life. Why do you hesitate, Doctor? Surely it's not loyalty to the Time Lords, who exiled you on one insignificant planet?"

"You'll never understand, will you? I want to see the universe, not rule it."

This beautifully sets out their opposing philosophies, and in doing so more than makes up for the fact that the Master never got a proper introduction as a character back in Terror of the Autons - in a way his introduction occurs here, in his fourth story.

Only when the discussion reaches its end, and the Master moves to kill the Doctor, does the brain alien make his entrance. He challenges them both to justify their presence here, and by implication he is also testing the worthiness of their competing points of view. The brain alien explains that the weapon is the reason for their decline, because "the radiation from the weapon's power source poisoned the soil." This has been cleverly foreshadowed from early on in the story, as the reason why the colonists were having trouble growing their noms.

The Master finishes his argument by claiming that with the weapon they "could be gods." The brain alien, which has presumably already been living with the god-like power of the weapon for a long time, judges the Master unworthy to be a god. He demonstrates a fraction of god-like power when the Master tries to kill him, but he makes the Master's pewpewpew gun vanish. He gives the Doctor the option and ability to destroy the doomsday weapon, and the Doctor says

"Not only does justice prevail on your planet, sir, but also infinite compassion."

Destroying the weapon will also destroy the city, so the Doctor and the Master have to run away. When he sees some aliens running the wrong way the Doctor says

"Come back! You'll all be killed!"

The Master doesn't hesitate for the aliens but, oddly for someone who tries to kill the Doctor so often, he does pause long enough to say to the Doctor

"Come on! Do you want to die with them?"

They meet up with Jo and Caldwell and the four of them escape just ahead of a big explosion, as is traditional.

They are then immediately captured by Morgan and his henchmannys. Morgan is going to shoot the Doctor, the Master and Jo, but they are saved by the arrival of the not-ded-after-all colonists, leading to another gunfight which is won by Winton and the colonists. While this goes on the Master escapes back to his TARDIS and dematerialises out of the story.

Back at the dome, Winton tells the Doctor and Jo that only Ashe was blowed up inside the rocket. The Doctor's TARDIS has been found, so he and Jo can leave. Just before they do, we see Caldwell complete his character arc as he leaves his life with IMC behind and joins the colonists fully.

"Doctor, come back at once!"

The TARDIS reappears in the UNIT lab and it quickly becomes apparent to the Doctor and Jo that, from the Brigadier's point of view, this is still episode one and they have only been away for a few seconds.

"What are you two talking about?"

he asks them.

"Don't try and explain, Jo. He'd never understand."

Because the Brigadier has started on his own character arc - towards being a komedy character who's as thick as shit.

What's so good about Colony in Space?

As tempting as it is to say 'the Master' again, that can only be half the answer since he's only in half the story, lol! But certainly he is responsible for lifting the story from good to great, arriving just as the 'colonists vs IMC' plotline is flagging, and only he could take the role he does in part six, as the friend-enemy who offers the Doctor "a half-share in the universe" and means it.

The plot before the Master showed up was an interesting conflict between the arch-capitalists IMC, a personification of greed, and the colonists who want to escape from the lives they had on Earth to a simpler, Arcadian lifestyle. The writing leaves us in no doubt who are the baddys, since from before they even appear on screen the IMC mannys Dent and Morgan are willing to remorselessly murder colonists to get their way. This means that by the time Winton and some of the colonists fight back we know they are in the right to do so - helped, of course, by the Doctor being on their side.

Caldwell is the character caught in the middle, and the story is really his struggle to make the journey from siding with IMC in his pursuit of moneys to siding with the colonists because they aren't evil murdering baddys. This main thread barely interacts with the second plot about the Master and the alien city and its doomsday weapon (save for the bit about how the colonists were struggling to grow noms due to the weapon's radiation), so it is easy to see how this could have made for a story in its own right - I suggest that this would have really struggled to sustain six whole episodes though, seeing as it was already struggling by the time the Master did arrive partway through part four. Which leads us to...

Pertwee Six-Parter Padding Analysis

Colony in Space is the second Pertwee six-parter, and the first that finds it hard to justify the length. Unusually, the padding falls mainly in the first half of the story - perhaps because this is before the Master arrives, and it is always easier to disguise padding when the production team can throw in an entertaining Doctor-Master scene or the like.

The most visible sign of padding is in the back-and-forth between the colonists and IMC, as each side gets the upper paw over the other in turn, before fortunes are swiftly reversed. There is also the matter of the repetitious cliffhanger ends to parts one and two.

That's not to say the story isn't still great, however, with the final part (and especially its confrontation between the Doctor and the Master over the doomsday weapon) building to an epic-feeling conclusion. But it is best watched episodically, because if you try to watch the whole thing in a single session you will encounter the less-good first half, padding and all, before you get to the superior second half with the Master in it.

Oh, and that bit where the Brigadier repeats his line from part one... you wouldn't notice this if you didn't have the option of watching the whole story in one go, but it's a cheat:

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Colony in Space Episode Five

The recap of episode four shows us the entire gunfight again. Then Ashe saves the Doctor and Jo by arriving in the nick of time, and the Master is not prepared to blow his cover as the fake Adjudicator by shooting them in front of witnesses.

Dent gets captured and makes the rest of the IMC baddys surrender. The IMC baddys are forced to take off in their spaceship. In space, they get a fax (a space fax? Either way, this is advanced technology we're dealing with here) from Earth with a picture of the real Adjudicator, which means Dent now knows the Master is an impostor, and so he orders them back to the planet.

The Doctor tries to warn Ashe and Winton about the Master, but the Master throws suspicion back on the Doctor in much the way he threatened to do in the last episode. It's almost as if the Doctor has forgotten what happened last time - well, it would have been a whole week ago when first broadcast, so perhaps that's understandable?

The Doctor still has a key to the Master's TARDIS (which he obtained all the way back in Terror of the Autons, and is a surprising bit of continuity from three whole stories earlier) so he and Jo go to look for evidence against him there.

The Doctor and Jo find the real Adjudicator's credentials, with a similar picture to the one Dent received, which is the evidence they are looking for to expose the Master. The Doctor also wants to know why he came to this planet, since (for once) it wasn't anything to do with trying to kill the Doctor. Jo goes to leave, and in so doing triggers the master's burglar alarm that they were both very careful not to set off on the way in.

So warned, the Master sees them on a tiny device, which he then turns into a button that he presses to release gas into his TARDIS, which knocks the Doctor and Jo out.

An unnecessarily padded scene of the IMC baddys landing their spaceship reminds us that they are coming back, and then Dent orders Morgan and his other henchmannys to attack the colonists (again).

The Master wakes the Doctor up and says

"Well Doctor, still pursuing burglary, eh? You know, when you stole my dematerialisation circuit, I decided to build in a few precautions."

He wants the Doctor to take him on a date to the alien city, with Jo to stay behind as a hostage.

Morgan sneaks into the dome and captures Ashe. The henchmannys get their guns back, and this leads into another gunfight, very similar to the earlier one, only this time with IMC on the left and the colonists on the right. But because Ashe has been captured, Chess rules apply again and this time it is the colonists who have been checkmated.

The Master locks Jo inside a transparent cylindrical cubicle before he and the Doctor leave his TARDIS. The costumes and set design here remind me very strongly of Dead on Arrival, I suspect one of these stories was an inspiration for the other. 

The Doctor drops the stolen TARDIS key just outside, for somebody to conveniently find later on.

Dent and Morgan have gone crazy with power after winning the last gunfight, and they set up a show trial for Ashe and Winton:

"As legally appointed Governor of this planet, I declare this court in session. Morgan?"

"You are charged with destroying property and equipment belonging to the Interplanetary Mining Corporation, assault and murder of IMC personnel, trespass on a planet lawfully allocated to IMC, and armed rebellion against the lawful representatives of the Earth's government. How do you plead?"

As he has been repeatedly threatening for the whole story, Dent claims he can sentence them to death, but instead wants them to leave the planet:

"The sentence is execution. However, the sentence will be suspended on condition that you and your followers depart this planet immediately."

As the Doctor and the Master approach their city, the aliens do some pretty good impressions of Sand People (--or worse!), not bad for a story made six years before Star Wars.

Dent wants to capture the Master, and sends Morgan and Caldwell to his spaceship (i.e. his TARDIS) to look for him. They find the key the Doctor dropped and so can get  inside. Naturally they trigger the burglar alarm as soon as they do. Even though this clearly has nothing to do with the Doctor, who is still right there with him, the Master says

"I warned you, Doctor." 

and goes to press his button to release the gas upon Jo, Morgan and Caldwell. He seemingly does it in slow motion, and it cuts to the end credits before the button gets pushed.

This is quite an effective cliffhanger in theory, but I've heard the winner of a TV cookery competition announced in less time than the Master takes to reach the button. He reeeeeally milks it.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Colony in Space Episode Four

That's an atmospheric start.

A spaceship flies over. It's only a model, but I've done that joke already back in episode two.

Aboard the IMC spaceship, Winton finds the fake claws for the robots and the projector to make them look like monsters, but Morgan tricks them and pulls a hidden gun to capture Winton.

In the city, Jo sees signs of technology and she is taken to an area that looks rather like the interior of a television studio.

There she meets the brain alien, while outside the Doctor meets some of the aliens at the fake rock and gets taken inside as well.

The Adjudicator arrives at the colonists' dome and meets Ashe, but we don't see his face or hear him speak in order to keep the actor playing him secret for a few more seconds. Then he turns round and his music plays... it's the Master!

Keeping the Master for the second half is just what this story needed to sustain it to six episodes, since the conflict between the colonists and IMC was running out of room for fresh developments. We now have the presence of the Master and the mystery of the alien city to maintain our interest. Cleverly, both of these plotlines were foreshadowed by the Time Lords back at the very beginning of episode one.

The Doctor meets up with Jo, but they get locked in a room by the aliens. Luckily for them, the room is full of pictures that give them the exposition about the aliens - bypassing the need for an alien character to have to deliver a lengthy speech. The brain alien comes in again and examines them both. The Doctor tries to buy their freedom with offers of noms, but he's having none of it and they are kept as prisoners.

The Doctor distracts their guard with a longer-than-it-needed-to-be bit of close-up magic, like he's been hanging around with Vila, then knocks him out with some Venusian Karate so they can escape. When the brain alien returns to find them gone, it sends its minions to chase them around until they get recaptured.

They are taken to another room where Jo thinks they are going to be sacrificed, but then a panel opens up and reveals an even-more-brain alien (who, sadly, reminds me of Moloch). This alien can talk, and it tries to condemn them to death for coming to the "forbidden" city, even though Jo wouldn't have gone anywhere near it if she hadn't been brought here by the aliens themselves, mew.

The Doctor (quite rightly) points this out:

"Surely the basis of all true law is justice? Look, we're both strangers to your planet. The girl was brought here by your warriors as a captive. All we ask is to be allowed to leave in peace."

and the alien lets them go, warning them not to come back or else "be destroyed." The Doctor says

"Thank you, sir. And may I say that I'm overjoyed to find that justice prevails in your city."

and he hardly sounds sarcastic at all.

The Doctor and Jo get back to the dome and see the Master, just when he is in the middle of adjudicating between the colonists and the IMC baddys. He actually seems surprised to see them, and has to take a moment to collect himself before carrying on. He adjourns the meeting to talk to the Doctor.

"Did the Time Lords send you?"

he asks, perceptively. He then almost sounds friendly with the Doctor when he says

"So you've at last succeeded in escaping from your long exile on Earth. Congratulations. What are your plans now?"

The Doctor threatens to expose the Master as an impostor, but the Master has an advantage over him - documents:

"My credentials are immaculate."

"Forged, of course?"

"Oh of course, but immaculate. May I see your credentials, Doctor?"

It's a relief to hear the Master confess his documents are forgeries. For one dreadful moment I thought he might actually be in a position where he would have to do some W-word. He continues:

"What? No interplanetary travel permit? No registration for your TARDIS? No personal identification?"

"Bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo."

"Maybe, but in this regimented age of ours, essential. Without these, my dear Doctor, you do not exist."

This is one of the best exchanges between the Doctor and the Master yet, and shows just how comfortable Jon Pertwee and Roger Delgado have become with the characters.

The Master seems to genuinely not want to kill or even capture the Doctor now, he just wants the Doctor to stay out of the way and not interfere with his plan. He goes back to being the Adjudicator and finds in favour of IMC, asking the colonists to leave the planet "as soon as possible."

Winton is not prepared to give up, and wants to attack the IMC spaceship again - the manny has had one idea he can call his own and so he is sticking with it! He has learned (from the Doctor) to be a bit cunning, though, and he lures them out of their spaceship by impersonating the Adjudicator while the real Adjudicator (well... the Master) is busy talking to Ashe and trying to subtly find out about the alien city. Incredibly, they discuss their plan in front of Evil Norton again, and he unsurprisingly warns his IMC friends that

before Winton shoots him.

A gunfight breaks out in the relatively small dome studio set, with both sides taking cover behind crates and boxes, and it bears more than a passing resemblance to a gunfight from Police Squad!

The Master changes his mind about not killing the Doctor, and decides to shoot him and Jo and blame it on "stray bullets" from the fight. I think they must have run out of time and needed to put something in for the cliffhanger, this definitely has a 'that'll do' feel to it, mew.

Conflict in Literature: Blakes 7 Season Three

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Colony in Space Episode Three

The story so far: I really hope Captain Dent's first name isn't Arthur, or it's going to mean the Doctor's line in The Christmas Invasion makes even less sense.

The Doctor declaws Morgan with some Venusian Karate, and when Morgan runs away the Doctor gets the buttons to turn off the robot.

The IMC baddys land their spaceship next to the colonists. Captain Dent and Caldwell do proper spaceship-landing acting, but the extra standing behind them can't be bothered.

Ashe and Dent agree to send for an adjudicator to arbitrate which of their groups owns the planet (the aliens who also live there are not getting a look in, obviously), and the Doctor is pleased because he wants to tell "the proper authorities" about the robot monster.

Jo and Winton sneak on board the IMC spaceship to look for proof of the robot monsters, but evil Norton warns his secret friends on board about them so they get captured.

Dent tries to blackmail the Doctor, and threatens to blow up Jo with a button if he tells the adjudicator what he knows. Jo and Winton have been manacled next to a big bomb, but they quickly get free. A guard comes in, shoots Winton and recaptures Jo. Winton is only injured and so he still gets away.

Dent sends Morgan to kill Winton, and they have a chase scene on location while some completely undramatic music undermines the scene. I wonder if Jon Pertwee insisted on this as a form of revenge on Winton for his getting to do these action bits instead of the Doctor? Winton runs up to Caldwell, who pretends to shoot him so that the other baddys go away.

This puts together an interesting pairing - not only do they both have fabulous '70s moustaches, this is the most hardline of the colonists opposite the most sympathetic of the miners, allowing for some character building for both of them - Caldwell helps Winton while still warning him to "get off this planet."

Winton stubbornly clings to the idea that an adjudicator will find in the colonists' favour, but Caldwell makes the stakes very clear to him:

"Now IMC want this planet and they're going to have it."

"The adjudicator's decision is law, if he says we can stay..."

"Even adjudicators can be dealt with. Oh, get your people off this planet before someone else is hurt."

When Winton gets back to the other colonists he wants to attack the IMC spaceship immediately, but the Doctor thinks going to Caldwell for more help is a better plan. Caldwell agrees to help the Doctor, and risks his career (and therefore his moneys, a significant step along his character journey) by forcing Dent to have Jo brought back to the spaceship (from where it would be easier to rescue her), but this goes wrong when Jo is captured from the baddys by some aliens who kill her guard after he shoots one of them first.

Not yet knowing that Jo is in the paws of the aliens now, the Doctor agrees to help Winton with the attack on the spaceship, but persuades him to try a stealth plan first, since it is always much easier to do stealth first and then fight when the stealth goes wrong than the other way round.

It lasts long enough for the Doctor and Winton to get inside the spaceship, but then Morgan recognises them and raises the alarm. They still manage to capture Morgan, Dent and Caldwell, so with all their named characters captured the baddys are forced to give up. Dent claims 

"You know this is an act of piracy punishable by death under interplanetary law?"

but because he has so far been claiming that almost everything the colonists have done is punishable by death, there's a good chance he's making this up.

With Jo not there after all that, the Doctor has to go to search for her. He and Ashe find the IMC guard's ded body.

The aliens have not done much in the story up to this, almost the halfway point, but now they take Jo to "their city," the door to which is hidden inside a big fake rock. Unknown perils await Jo inside, so this works well as a suspenseful cliffhanger moment.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Colony in Space Episode Two

A manny comes in and saves the Doctor from being menaced by the robot, even allowing him to reshoot the scene in such a way as to help the Doctor look more dignified when he falls over.

This helpful manny is Caldwell (Bernard Kay), who comes from IMC, the "Interplanetary Mining Corporation," and who claims he didn't know about colonists. This must be a very small planet that whole groups of mannys don't know about other groups and yet keep running into one another all the time, or maybe he is lying like Norton from episode one was?

Caldwell seems to be less of a baddy after he finds out two mannys have already been killed, and seems genuinely sad to hear it from the Doctor, but he does still capture the Doctor to take him back to his speaceship. On the way there they drive past the nondescript bit of quarry where the Doctor left the TARDIS and he sees that it is gone.

On the spaceship it is confirmed, in a scene that we see but which the Doctor is not present for, that the mannys from IMC are baddys who plan to lie to the colonists (just as Caldwell has already lied to the Doctor) that they have "just arrived" and are "surprised and shocked that the place has been colonised."

Their leader is Captain Dent (Morris Perry, Danglars in the BBC's 1964 adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, a similarly avaricious villain to the one he is playing here), and the plot thickens when it turns out that Caldwell really was surprised at the deaths of the colonists, but quickly guessed that Morgan (Tony Caunter) was responsible. Dent and Morgan are clearly greedy enough to do mining and make moneys from it at the expense of the colonists who want to live here, and Caldwell is tempted by this as well, enough to overcome his conscience for now.

Dent talks to the the Doctor to try to persuade him

"What's good for IMC is good for Earth."

but when he fails he quickly orders Morgan to have the Doctor killed and make it look like another monster attack.

On the way back the Doctor and Morgan get attacked by some aliens. The Doctor stops Morgan from shooting them so that he can have a gratuitous fight scene with them.

Meanwhile, the obvious baddy Norton gets the colonists to show him all the ways in which they are vulnerable, such as only having one electrician-engineer, Jim.

"We'd be lost without him."

In the next scene Norton goes straight over to Jim and murders him and frames an alien for it.

Norton then sabotages the power so that the lights go out. Mary says

"Don't worry, Jim'll fix it."

which makes Jo giggle. This is forgivable on the part of Jo, who is from the UNIT era and so doesn't know any better, but for a manny from the future like Mary it is in very bad taste for her to make a joke about one of the most infamous baddys in the BBC's history.

Back in the colonist's house, the Doctor explains his suspicions to Morgan:

"I think the whole thing has been faked by somebody who wanted to frighten the colonists away."

"But these claw marks? I mean, something made them."

"Yes, they could have been faked by some sort of mechanical device."

"You mean with something like this?"

So episode two ends in almost exactly the same way as episode one, with the Doctor being menaced by a robot, except this one has big komedy klaws on it. As if aware how un-menacing this makes the robot, Morgan tries to up the dramatic tension by drawing his gun and saying

"Purely business, you understand? Nothing personal."

He delivers the line in such a businesslike manner that it is only scary in the way that unrestrained capitalism destroying planets to make a few mannys rich is scary... and I suspect this was the writer's entire point, mew.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Colony in Space Episode One

Colony in Space is the fourth story of season eight of Doctor Who, and was first broadcast in 1971. It stars Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and Katy Manning as Jo Grant. It is the second of the Pertwee Six-Parters.

It starts with a scene of three Time Lords telling each other things they already know, where they mention the Master and a "doomsday weapon." Rather than be exposition for our benefit, this is pure foreshadowing of things that will show up later in the story.

The camera dissolves to a close-up of the Doctor's TARDIS dematerialisation circuit. The Doctor is in his laboratory with Jo, where the Brigadier comes in and talks about looking for the Master. The Doctor knows that UNIT can't find the Master without his help, and after the Brigadier has gone he says

 "Well, look what happened last time. The man they arrested turned out to be the Spanish ambassador."

This is almost certainly a reference to Roger Delgado's previous role as a recurring antagonist in the old TV series Sir Francis Drake, where he did indeed play the Spanish ambassador. If the Doctor gets the TARDIS operational again, perhaps UNIT can pop back in time to 1588 and arrest him?

The Doctor thinks he has got the TARDIS operational again, and he invites Jo inside for the first time, where she says

"I don't believe it! It's bigger inside than out!"

If Katy Manning had wanted the job of playing Victor Meldrew in One Foot in the Grave she could have sent this bit in as her audition tape.

As soon as the Doctor plugs in his dematerialisation circuit, the TARDIS starts to dematerialise - well, that is what it's for, after all. The Doctor tells Jo he didn't do it and concludes

"Something's operating it by remote control. The Time Lords!"

Outside in the lab, the Brigadier comes in and sees the TARDIS disappear. He says

"Doctor, come back at once!"

Lol.

The Doctor recognises their destination as "the planet Uxarieus." On Uxarieus, there is a robot doing robot things. When it leaves the shot, the TARDIS appears. The Doctor opens the doors and Jo looks out, but she doesn't have the reaction you might expect:

"That's an alien world out there, Jo. Think of it."

"I don't want to think of it. I want to go back to Earth."

"Look, do you realize how long I've been confined to one planet?"

"All that talk of yours about travelling in time and space, it was true?"

"Well, of course it was true. Before I was stranded on Earth, I spent all my time exploring new worlds and seeking the wonders of the universe."

"But you don't know what's out there."

"Then let's find out. Don't you want to set foot in another world?"

"Well yes, I do, but..."

"Good, come on. We'll just take a quick look around, and then I'll try and get you back to Earth. Alright?"

"Alright."

Jo takes quite a bit more convincing than most Companions do, and it is because she is supposed to be an audience surrogate (a cat would surely have been a better choice for this but never mind), and this is the first time the Doctor has been to a world that isn't Earth since The War Games, all the way back in black and white, so by persuading Jo the Doctor is also persuading the audience to come along with him to explore a strange new world, to seek out new life and new civilisations, and boldly go where no cat has gone before.

When the Doctor and Jo leave the TARDIS together, a green alien with a spear sees them go while remaining unseen by them. He comes back later with his alien friends to steal the TARDIS.

The Doctor and Jo find the tracks of the robot we saw earlier, and then get captured by a manny with a gun. There is a hard cut to some mannys talking about having seen a "giant lizard" and some other mannys not believing them. The Doctor and Jo are brought in and are suspected of W-wording for a mining company, which the Doctor denies as vigorously as any cat would. The Doctor sees they have charts on the wall that show the mannys do not have enough noms.

Two mannys hear something raring outside their set, and when they go outside they see a giant CSO monster!

They telephone for help before something we don't see comes in and kills them. The Doctor and his new friend Ashe (John "Tlotoxl" Ringham) hear about the telephone call and rush off to help. Jo asks her new friend Mary about the monsters, and Mary replies

"There's no animal life, just a few birds and insects."

Er...

The Doctor investigates the mannys' room and sees claw marks. One of the other mannys helping says he saw the monster and

"It must have been at least 20 feet high!"

That's a long lizard! The Doctor shows how he is the clever one when he asks

"Then will you kindly tell me how a creature 20 feet high came through that door?"

The surviving mannys have a big argument about whether they should go back to Earth or not. The Doctor supports Ashe in saying they should stay. It is not clear why the Doctor picks a side here, except that it demonstrates to us which side is right by virtue of it being the side the Doctor has chosen.

Just when the argument is over and the wavering mannys have been persuaded to stay (like they're a colony of John Nathan-Turners), an injured manny comes in and tells them that the "giant lizards" have wiped out another colony on the same planet. This is Norton, played by Roy "Zippy" Skelton.

The Doctor goes back to the room for more investigating, until a robot comes in with great big claws on it. The crash-zoom-to-face cliffhanger had obviously not been perfected yet, since the camera cuts to the Doctor reacting to the robot's appearance, then back to show the robot and the Doctor falling over, and then finally to a close-up of the Doctor's face. But even then, instead of looking past the camera with a steely glare, as would later be perfected by Colin Baker (not too surprising, given how many goes at it he had), Jon Pertwee continues to look around frantically, as if he was not sure which camera was on him.

A more realistic reaction, perhaps, but it makes the ending seem confused rather than dramatic.

Big Breadwinner Hog

This gangster series from 1969 was almost the spin-off of the spin-off of the spin-off of The Man in Room 17, since it was originally intended to feature George Sewell reprising his role as Scaliger from Spindoe, except that Sewell was unable to do it due to his being in another series at the same time - and due to the timing of this series, I have to assume that he was being Alec Freeman in UFO.

Instead of simply recasting the character, as would have been unremarkably common at the time, they changed it enough to make a new character, Ackerman (played by Donald Burton), who had enough character traits in common with Scaliger to fill his place in the plot, but not so you'd notice the swap if you didn't know better. See also: Tarrant in some season 3 episodes of Blakes 7.

Superficially similar to Spindoe in terms of themes and basic plot - in each the title character (Spindoe/Hog) is a new arrival on the scene who upsets the status quo among several factions of gangsters with their own agendas, provoking them into an escalating violent conflict, into which mix is added a down-on-his-luck private detective (Scaliger/Ackerman) and the police.

If you wanted to see Big Breadwinner Hog as set in the same world as Spindoe, you could even assume that the gangsters of this series inherited the power vacuum left by the demise of most of the principal characters of the earlier series, and it would fit.

The chief difference that's immediately apparent is in the title character of Hogarth, a.k.a. "Hog" (Peter Egan), who is a young, up-and-coming gangster, instead of Spindoe's old man seeking to regain his lost glory. But with eight episodes to its predecessor's six, here the plot has more room to breathe and set itself apart, and it quickly twists in ways that Spindoe didn't - whereas Spindoe had a form that was familiar (even to someone only passingly familiar with the gangster genre such as myself), this series was continually surprising me with unexpected turns, and kept me guessing to the very last scene.

Of the many excellent character actors making up the cast, the one I would most single out for praise is Timothy West as the main villain Lennox, who displays a cold ruthlessness throughout, until the moment when he finally has to kill someone himself (as opposed to the many, many times he has ordered a henchmanny to do it), and we see him shaken and physically sickened by the deed.

Taggart: Flesh and Blood

The 1989 Taggart Christmas special was apparently broadcast a little early - on the 5th of September. As with most of series creator Glenn Chandler's episodes, this is a cleverly written piece where multiple seemingly-unrelated plot strands get neatly tied together by the time the end credits roll and the iconic theme music plays us out.

Taggart's complaints that Christmas decorations are going up too early on the 14th December seems absurdly old-fashioned from 30 years on, and it is amusing to see the relief on his face when he is rescued from spending Christmas Day with his relatives to go on a case.

The case itself has no connection with Christmas. A seemingly motiveless murder sees Taggart and his sidekick Detective Sergeant Jardine following up any lead in desperation, including the victim's hobbies. On the night she was murdered, she had been attending a Tabletop Roleplaying Game session, and Taggart sends Jardine along to speak to the other players, inevitably resulting in his joining them for a game.

This gives us a rare (possibly even unique) instance of a mainstream television drama portraying RPGs in the Scotland of the late 1980s. The players of the game are shown to be mildly eccentric, but no more so than is typical TV shortpaw for characters involved in an obscure hobby - certainly there are no signs of the 'Satanic Panic' stereotype that afflicted American players of Dungeons & Dragons in that era - the fact that the murder victim was killed on the same night her character was killed off in the game turns out to be coincidence; a red herring. The game has a 'Killer DM,' but not literally.

The other common roleplayer stereotype, that of socially awkward geeks uncomfortable around the opposite sex, is completely subverted when the RPG club is revealed to be a hotbed (so to speak) of sexual activity, as the girl that Mike 'Smoove' Jardine thinks he's well in with is revealed to us - though not to Jardine - as two-timing him with the game's DM. This has some basis in the reality of Scottish University RPG societies of that period, if anecdotes I have heard are anything to judge by.

It is unclear whether Jardine ever went back for a second game session, but somehow it seems unlikely.

The King in Orange