Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Dæmons Episode Five

Azal uses the power of CSO to become giant again. Bok comes to life again and pewpewpews Yates's gun - presumably Bok can't make him disappear because he's a regular character. Jo gets captured and Yates gets knocked out by some cultists.

Outside, even though the Doctor is aware that they're "facing the greatest danger the world has ever known," he still takes the time to answer Miss Hawthorne's question:

"But your car? How did you make it move by itself?
"Science, not sorcery, Miss Hawthorne."

He shows them the remote control, and Benton exclaims

"I'll be blowed."

It's time for some more exposition, as the Doctor explains to the villagers how the Master's "sorcery" is also science.

"Well, the emotions of a group of ordinary human beings generate a tremendous charge of psychokinetic energy. This the Master channels for his own purpose."
"But that is magic. That's precisely what black magic is!"
"No, Miss Hawthorne, I'm afraid not."

Well that's her put in her place then. I'm only surprised the Doctor didn't tell her to get out of his eyeline while he was at it, mew.

Yates escapes from the church and reaches the Doctor with news of what has happened in the cavern. The Master has decided to sacrifice Jo instead of his cock (lol) so has made her dress up in his idea of a proper sacrifice costume. He also sends Bok out to stop the Doctor or anybody else from coming to the cavern.

The Doctor's device finally makes a hole in the heat barrier to let the Brigadier and the rest of UNIT through. At the same time it also gives Azal and Bok sore heads. After all the UNIT mannys are through the barrier, the machine blows up with the sound of a stock thunderclap, which makes this scarier than it needed to be but may be a subtle indication that Azal was responsible.

The Doctor runs past Bok before he recovers from his headache. As soon as the Doctor arrives in the cavern the Master says

"Ah, Doctor, I've been expecting you."

and there's not a longcat on the shelf wouldn't volunteer to be his cat at this most Bond-villainesque of lines, purr.

The Brigadier has been trying to get into the main plot for four whole episodes, and he finally arrives to deliver the most iconic moment of his career. Yates demonstrates how Bok is standing guard and will disappear anything that comes too near, to which the Brigadier says

"Yes, I see what you mean. Never mind, we'll soon fix him. Jenkins!"
"Sir?"

"Chap with the wings there. Five rounds rapid."

Somewhat less iconic is what happens next, as the rest of the UNIT mannys all try to shoot Bok, with the same lack of effect as Jenkins's effort. Benton blows Bok up with a bazooka, but Bok reforms himself like a bargain-basement T1000 by means of reversing the film footage.

The Doctor tries to bluff Azal that he has a second device ready to give Azal another headache, but Azal sees through this immediately. The Master tries to order Azal to kill the Doctor, but Azal says

"I command. I do not obey."

He's a bit like a cat really.

Next the Doctor tries to persuade him to

"Leave humanity alone. Just go. You've done enough harm."
"We gave knowledge to Man."
"You certainly did. Thanks to you Man can now blow up the world and he probably will. He can poison the water and the very air he breathes - he's already started. He can..."
"Enough! Is Man such a failure then? Shall I destroy him?"

Oops, the Doctor's argument seems to have backfired. Azal should have given knowledge to Cats instead of Man(nys), we would have used the power wisely: to make more Blakes 7 of course.

Azal decides to give his power to the Doctor anyway (because he is like a cat) but the Doctor doesn't want it (because he is also like a cat).

"Then you will give your power to me?"

When the Doctor turns him down, Azal decides to give his power to the Master. But first he decides to kill the Doctor with his lightning, like he's the Evil Emperor at the end of Return of the Jedi. Jo tries to self-sacrifice, and this confuses Azal so much that he blows himself up.

Confused Azal is confused.

The Doctor explains that "Azal couldn't face an act as irrational and as illogical as [Jo] being prepared to give up her life for me," and "all his power was turned against himself. You might say he blew a fuse."

This is the most oft-criticised part of The Dæmons, that this resolution to the plot comes out of nowhere, and I have to agree that there is a lack of any foreshadowing that this was all that was required to defeat the baddys. However there is a certain logic and internal consistency to it, in that Azal (and the alien Dæmons in general) have been presented to us as the inspiration for all the evil demons in mannys' legends, and so it makes a kind of sense that they would be overcome by a good and noble act that is the opposite of what their legendary counterparts might do.

It's just a shame that the Doctor's explanation - the one given on-screen - doesn't say anything like this.

Everybody in the cavern runs outside before the church runs out of ontological inertia and blows up in sympathy with Azal. Bok turns back into a statue and the Brigadier realises that he has come all this way to accomplish basically bugger all.

Benton captures the Master for a moment, but he gets distracted and the Master tries to get away in Bessie. But, as has been established twice now over the course of the story, the Doctor can take control of Bessie using his remote control - nobody can complain that wasn't properly foreshadowed!

The Doctor says

"I want to deal with him later."

(Was this the line that launched a thousand ships?)

The Master replies:

"Do you, Doctor? You always were an optimist, weren't you?"

Even captured, he's still the coolest character in this season. The villagers boo him as he is being taken away by UNIT soldiers, but you can tell they don't mean it really.

Time for a komedy end bit: Miss Hawthorne asks Benton to "do the fertility dance" with her, and I'm sure that this is both literal and a clear euphemism at the same time. Jo asks the Doctor to join in the dance too, which at least could be interpreted a bit more innocently if you were so inclined. Then Mike Yates realises that this means the only named character left for him to dance with is the Brigadier, and with a 'what the hell, nothing ventured...' attitude asks

"Fancy a dance, Brigadier?"
"It's kind of you, Captain Yates, but I think I'd rather have a pint."

which is a diplomatic response, and doesn't close the door on Yates completely. The Brigadier came all the way to Devil's End for some action, after all...

What's so good about The Dæmons?

While Roger Delgado as the Master is certainly still a contributing factor to the greatness of The Dæmons, he can't be given the cat's share of the plaudits in the same way as he can for most of season eight so far.

This is because The Dæmons is very much an ensemble piece, with the various plot threads shared between members of the 'UNIT Family' with everyone getting to do something. As well as the Doctor and Jo, we have Yates and Benton acting like full Doctor Who Companions for much of the story, contributing both on their own and as part of the group. This approach to the main characters in the story culminates with the Brigadier - arguably the least well-served for things to do out of the regulars - achieving an absolutely iconic moment for his character.

The Master, meanwhile, is kept separate from the rest of the UNIT Family (which he has earned his honorary place in by his being in all the stories of this season, which is more than Yates or Benton can claim) for most of the story, only sharing three scenes with any of them, and only two with the Doctor (these are: the scene where Yates and Jo get captured; the climactic confrontation with Azal in the cavern; and the scene of his getting captured in Bessie).

Up until this point he had plenty of scenes, but they were shared either with villagers and henchmannys to begin with, or Azal once we passed the middle of the story. What it means, though, is that this is the first Master story where he at no point teams up with the Doctor, however briefly. Perhaps this is for the best - after all, the Master offered the Doctor "a half-share in the universe" when they last met, so it could well be the writers thought they could not top that here. But it seems to me a shame that they didn't manage to make it five out of five.

The complete UNIT Family will be together only once more after The Dæmons, in season nine's final story The Time Monster. While a very fun story in its own right, it doesn't have the same level of memorable moments and iconic status as The Dæmons, which is why I would consider this story the archetypical example of the UNIT era.

Scary face!

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Dæmons Episode Four

Rather than resolve the Master's predicament straight away, we first see what some of our other characters are up to. Jo decides to go to the cavern by herself.

As part of his instructions on how to build the technobabble device, the Doctor tells Osgood to "reverse the polarity," although he disappointingly doesn't say of what.

Azal talks to the Master in a big, shouty, Treebeard-Omega-Eldrad sort of voice. That's because they're all voiced by Stephen Thorne lol. We see the Master from between Azal's legs (and sometimes a cigar-shaped spaceship is just a cigar-shaped spaceship) and then from over his shoulders - now that his origin has been exposited and he has spoken with a regular character he is no longer quite so mysterious and thus is no longer given the status of a POV monster.

He knows that the Doctor is from the same race as the Master and wants to speak with them both. Azal says

"My race destroys its failures. Remember Atlantis?"

but as the Master won't visit Atlantis until the end of the next season, he probably doesn't. The Master runs away from the cavern and makes a 'phew, I got away with it' face, and then he starts laughing.

Yates sees that Jo is gone and decides to go after her, while Benton and Miss Hawthorne have a drink - well, they are in a pub after all!

The Doctor finishes his explanation to Osgood and goes to return to the village on his motorbike, leaving the Brigadier and UNIT to follow him when the device is finished and gets them through the heat barrier.

Jo and Yates go into the cavern where Yates makes a mess with one of the Master's books, ripped up by the Master's own "booby trap" forcefield - a useful demonstration to Jo in the short term, but surely a massive giveaway that they had been in here in the longer term? Well, a cultist comes in and completely fails to notice, which just goes to prove that you don't have to actually be good at stealth, just better than your opponent's Spot Hidden.

(Somebody tidies up the mess off-screen before the next scene in the cavern. I don't know who, but it is presumably neither Jo nor Yates since many of the pages landed on the other side of the forcefield.)

The Master's henchmanny shoots the Doctor off his motorbike, so the Doctor runs away, having only brought Venusian Karate to this gunfight.

There are then a couple of komedy filler scenes - one with Miss Hawthorne offering Benton some tea (I'm sure I'm not the first reviewer of this story to note that he's well in there, naughty Miss Hawthorne), the second with the Brigadier and Osgood trying to get the device going.

The komedy scenes are placed here in order to contrast with the terrifying scenes that follow, as we see mannys performing the black secret at the heart of their English paradise: Morris Dancing.

The Doctor tries to get past them but he gets captured because, as any Scottish cat knows, the Morris Dancers are evil. Their leader is the Master's henchmanny, who pulls a gun on the Doctor to make sure he doesn't get away.

One of the Morris Dancers has a fight with Benton until he gets knocked out by Miss Hawthorne, who says

"Look, I know these people, they're not wicked. Well... most of them anyway."

The villagers tie the Doctor to a pole with ribbons, and the image of this reminds me of something...

The Master's henchmanny calls the Doctor a "black witch" and suggests that they "burn him."

This leads to the villagers chanting "Burn him!" in such a way that must surely have influenced the witch scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. They're actually about to do this when Miss Hawthorne runs out and shouts "Stop!"

This scene was already ridiculous filler, so the plan she and Benton have come up with seems almost sensible under the circumstances. Miss Hawthorne claims the Doctor is "the great wizard Quiquaequod" and will use his magic power against them if they don't release him. The "power" consists of Benton shooting things (a simpler version of this plan having obviously been rejected as being not convoluted enough) and then the Doctor using his Chekhov's Remote Control from episode one to summon Bessie to run over the henchmanny.

I think what allows this scene to succeed (well... partially) is that Benton is also surprised - because while Jo and Yates saw Bessie operating under remote control earlier on, he didn't. On the other paw, where the scene finally goes too far is when Benton asks

"How on Earth did you do that, Doctor?"

setting the Doctor up for the reply

"Elemental, my dear Benton."

Mew.

In the cavern, the Master has all his cultists present and they do lots of chanting. When the Master goes to sacrifice a cock (or it could be a hen, I suppose, but that's less intrinsically open to my making a cheap joke), Jo runs out from where she and Yates had been hiding the entire time to try to stop him.

But it doesn't matter, because the Master summons Azal anyway.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Dæmons Episode Three

The Doctor confuses Bok by holding up some iron, "an old magical defence," and reciting the first line of a Venusian lullaby (one we will hear more of when he visits Peladon in a later story). Bok does one final, halfhearted rar and then he flies away.

The Master is still disguised as the vicar and he talks to Mr Winstanley, who he is trying to win over without using his normal arm-gripping method.

"All this talk of democracy, freedom, liberty... What this country needs is strength, power and decision! And those are what you can give to it."

Then, when this doesn't persuade him, the Master uses magic to scare Mr Winstanley by causing the wind to blow inside and, for good measure, his theme music to play.

Winstanley says

"I'll do anything you say."

thus demonstrating the "strength, power and decision" of a typical would-be dictator.

The Doctor and Miss Hawthorne argue about whether science or magic are responsible for what is happening, continuing the theme established in part one with the scene between the Doctor and Jo, only a lot more childishly:

"You're being deliberately obtuse - we're dealing with the supernatural, the occult, magic."

"Science!"

"Magic!"

"Science, Miss Hawthorne."

The Brigadier telephones Yates to tell him that the heat barrier is in the shape of a dome all the way around the village, so he can't get in.

The Doctor does a slideshow for the benefit of Jo, Yates, Benton and Miss Hawthorne to give them exposition about aliens with horns. This may be a deliberate parallel with the Master's use of a slideshow back in The Mind of Evil, or maybe slideshows were just the fashionable thing back in 1971 the UNIT era.

"Now creatures like those have been seen over and over again throughout the history of man, and man has turned them into myths: gods or devils. But they're neither. They are, in fact, creatures from another world."

"Do you mean like the Axons and the Cybermen?"

(The earliest and most recent aliens encountered by Benton get namechecked by him here, but the Autons don't get a look in.)

"Precisely. Only far far older, and immeasurably more dangerous."

"And they came here in spaceships like that tiny one up at the barrow?"

"That's right. They're Dæmons from the planet Dæmos, which is..."

"Sixty thousand light years away on the other side of the galaxy."

(I'm not sure why Jo is suddenly an expert on this, except that it keeps the scene from being totally one-sided.)

"And they first came to Earth nearly one hundred thousand years ago."

The Doctor goes on to say that 

"They've been coming and going ever since. The Greek civilisation, the Renaissance, the industrial revolution: They were all inspired by the Dæmons."

and

"All the magical traditions are just remnants of their advanced science, and that is what the Master is using."

This is quite a dump of exposition, only disguised by having so many other characters present for the Doctor to explain it all to, and who can each take a turn interrupting him or asking him questions.

The Master and Winstanley are having a meeting with lots of other mannys, where the Master reveals that he knows the secrets of several of the mannys, including implying that one of them has murdered his wife:

"And you, Mr Grenville, has your wife come back from her sister's yet? Will she ever come back, do you suppose?"

Is this the most subversively adult line of dialogue in all of the original series of Doctor Who, do you suppose?

Because we know who the Master is really, it is easy for us to guess how he found these things out, but the mannys are scared and they stay and listen to him when he starts to use his hypno-eyes on them. He says

"I only need two things: your submission and your obedience to my will."

But they start to turn against him and Winstanley says:

"What's all this about obedience and submission? You said that we were going to rule."

So the master summons Bok to come in and disappear Winstanley. When the rest of the mannys are too scared to act against him, the Master says

"Thank you. It does my heart good to know I have such a willing band of followers."

Roger Delgado has been giving a commanding performance throughout, but this ironic line sets off the scene.

The Brigadier wants to blow the barrier up, but the Doctor tells him it won't work. The Brigadier says

"I'm not going to sit here like a spare... like a spare lemon waiting for the squeezer."

I think the reason he pauses in the middle there is that he realised just in time that he's not allowed to say 'dildo' on TV until after the watershed. The Doctor tells the Brigadier to build a technobabble contraption to blow up the barrier properly, but the Brigadier doesn't know how so the Doctor has to go out there himself. Jo says

"Of all the idiotic plans, as if blowing things up solves anything?"

for which the Doctor gives her into trouble like a massive hypocrite, considering how often he insults the Brigadier's plans himself.

The manny from the pub has been spying on the Doctor, and he now reports what he has learned to the Master. The Master sends a henchmanny to steal Yates's helicopter. Yates chases after him on a motorbike because, like in The Mind of Evil, he has delusions of being an action hero.

The helicopter flies over the Doctor and Jo as they drive along in Bessie, a scene that has echoes of North by Northwest or, since it is a helicopter and not an aeroplane, From Russia With Love. But the helicopter flies into the heat barrier and blows up, no grenade necessary this time.

The Doctor only starts to tell Sergeant Osgood (here acting as the Brigadier's thumbs to do the actual W-word) how to make the device to blow up the barrier, then the Master decides to summon Azal the Dæmon.

Azal is the POV monster, and he becomes so high up (signifying he is giant) that even the Master gets scared and falls over. The camera does a wobbly special effect meant to signify the ground shaking, and the cliffhanger moment is the Master cowering and shouting

"Go back! You will destroy me! No! No!"

While it is highly unusual for a baddy being in peril to be the cliffhanger, it shows how the Master is just as much a regular character as any of the Doctor's Companions from UNIT.

This episode is incredibly heavy with exposition, to the extent that the Doctor resorts to a slideshow, but now that we're through it we can more clearly see the similarities and differences between this story and its obvious influence Quatermass and the Pit.

The similarities are obvious to anyone familiar with both stories, since they both feature an archaeological dig turning up an ancient spacecraft, whose alien occupants are horned, and who have influenced the development of humanity, and whose technology is sufficiently advanced as to be taken for the supernatural.

Looking beyond that, there are plenty of significant differences that mean The Dæmons can hardly be called a ripoff of Quatermass. Here are just some examples:

• Quatermass and the Pit is all about the slow build-up over the course of its episodes, up until the explosive, dramatic payoff at the climax in the final part. The Dæmons, meanwhile, has action from as early as part one
• Quatermass and the Pit is set in London, specifically post-war London, and this setting is a vital element to the story. The Dæmons is set in a rural English village, and this is an essential part of its plot, where the Master can infiltrate the community and our heroes can be easily isolated
• In Quatermass and the Pit the explanation of the aliens is mainly theorising by Professor Quatermass, with nothing ever explicitly confirmed on screen. While in The Dæmons, the Doctor (and the Master) already know about the alien Dæmons from before the story begins
• The character of the Master, who seeks to gain the power of the aliens for himself, has no parallel in Quatermass

So the differences build up to ensure the actual storylines are hardly similar at all. The most direct lift from Quatermass is the live TV broadcast from the scene of the action, that is then cut off. Only this occurs towards the end of Quatermass and the Pit, but early on in The Dæmons (in episode two).

What The Dæmons borrows (or steals, if you prefer) is not whole plots, but rather ideas, or details. For a final example of this, the name of the village, Devil's End, is quite close to the name of the street where the events of Quatermass and the Pit took place, Hobbs Lane/Hob's Lane - with "Hob" being another name for the devil.

This gets even closer if we consider the film version of Quatermass and the Pit (which was made in 1967, much closer to when The Dæmons was made than the 1958 TV series), where the London Underground station setting is Hobbs End.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Dæmons Episode Two

Yates and Benton are having as much fun as the Master, but that is because they were watching a different TV channel. This could have killed the dramatic tension so carefully established at the end of part one by having a comedic moment at this point, but instead it only sustains it and delays the resolution of the cliffhanger. They soon change channels to watch the dig programme, and see Jo and the unconscious Doctor for a few seconds before

It's easy to imagine a modern version of The Dæmons could play even more with the medium of television, in the style of Ghostwatch or the 2018 Hallowe'en 'live' episode of Inside No. 9, although it is equally easy to imagine BBC management* not allowing this precisely because of what happened with Ghostwatch.

Back in the cavern, the Master says

"To do my will shall be the whole of the law."

and his cultists hesitatingly reply with

"To do thy will shall be the whole of the law."

as if they are only just realising how deep the shit is they have gotten themselves into, and that it is too late to back out now.

The Doctor looks frozen solid, even when they take him back to the pub. The mannys from the TV programme and a doctor (but not the Doctor) from the village think Professor Horner and the Doctor are both ded, until the doctor (not the Doctor) hears the Doctor's pulse and two hearts.

The next morning Yates and Benton fly in by helicopter, and see the giant "hoofmarks" leading out from the dig site, from an animal "at least 30 feet tall."

They meet up with Jo and immediately go to the pub - not for drinks, that's where the still unconscious Doctor is having his sleeps.

The Brigadier is on the telephone finding out that the Doctor, Jo, Yates, Benton and his helicopter are all away at Devil's End having fun without him. It's like he missed the first session of their RPG and has to be brought into the plot and get caught up with what has happened so far as quickly and efficiently as possible. This makes for an amusing scene that only works with the Brigadier because he is the character who is supposed to be in charge of the others.

Benton finds Miss Hawthorne, who had been captured off-screen by the Master's henchmanny Gavin, and rescues her. In hiding from Gavin, they find the door down to the cavern, where Miss Hawthorne gives Benton the exposition about "Mr Magister" and says:

"Oh, I should have realised at once, 'magister' is the name given to the leader of a black magic coven."

She doesn't know that he's really the Master though - she must have not watched the rest of this season, lol.

Gavin comes back with a gun and has a fight with Benton until Benton falls on the Master's special evil stone and is knocked out by it. Gavin forces them out of the church, but then he sees a large POV monster and tries to shoot it while Benton and Miss Hawthorne run away. They are the sensible ones, because the POV monster pewpewpews Gavin and he disappears. In other words, this scene plays out exactly like a typical monster encounter in a game of Call of Cthulhu. The POV monster then zooms into the cavern and finds the Master's special stone.

A manny is driving along in his van when he suddenly feels the need to crash it and get out of the van to hold his head - which is lucky for him, because the van then explodes.

The Doctor wakes up and shouts

"Eureka!"

although he is nowhere near a bath. The Doctor is feeling well again, and comes down to the main pub set with Yates and Jo in time for Miss Hawthorne to arrive with Benton. She fills them in on what has happened, ending on

"The new vicar. He calls himself Magister."

"Magister? Yes, of course, I should have known."

"What?"

"Jo, did you fail Latin as well as Science? Magister is the Latin word for Master!"

The Brigadier drives up to the van-driving manny from earlier and finds there is now an invisible "heat barrier" there that sets fire to his stick. I love the way he is completely unfazed by this and simply says

"Must be some sort of heat barrier."

He then telephones Yates to find out what has happened and is equally unfazed by Yates's summation of the story so far, although he does have something of an understated 'Oh FFS!' look on his face when he hears the Master is involved.

The Doctor and Jo go back to the dig site to investigate. They find a tiny spaceship, and the Doctor begins to explain:

"About a hundred thousand years ago..."

But he doesn't get any further than that right now, because the Master has sent Bok to kill them. He runs in and goes "Rar!" and, as scary cliffhangers go, well... let's just say I've seen scarier.

D'aww, with his derpy tongue Bok is so cute!

* The nearest the series has moved in attempting something like this was in the 2007 episode Blink, which not only broke the fourth wall by having the viewers watching at home count as witnesses to the Weeping Angels (thus preventing them from moving while on-screen), but also ended with a montage of real-world statues - with the implication that any one of them could be a Weeping Angel really.

Considering that Blink is one of the most highly-regarded Doctor Who stories made since the series returned to BBC TV in 2005, and how much the makers of the series love to revisit their successes (until these lead to diminishing returns, and sometimes still even then), it is perhaps even more surprising that there has not been any subsequent attempt at taking this any further, which I see as additional evidence that the BBC management must be standing in the way.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Dæmons Episode One

The Dæmons is the fifth and final 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, Katy Manning as Jo Grant, Richard Franklin as Captain Mike Yates, John Levene as Sergeant Benton, and Roger Delgado as the Master.

While not the best story of the UNIT era, and arguably not even the best story of this season, this is nevertheless the ultimate UNIT story, in which the idea of the 'UNIT Family' achieves its perfected form.

It starts on a dark and stormy night, promising that this will be a scary story. Scary Cat is on standby to help me out if it gets too much.

There's a cat! I detect obvious thematic parallels with the shot of the lions in part one of Terror of the Autons; the last story of the season echoing the first. This also reassures any cats watching that everything will be alright in the end and reminds us that cats are best.

A doggy ventures out into the storm and gets wet. The manny who is with him gets attacked by a sound effect, and in the next scene Miss Hawthorne is trying to convince a doctor (not the Doctor) that "he died of fright."

The story then goes very meta, as there are mannys trying to make a TV show within the TV show we are watching.

We are given to understand from their dialogue that a manny called Professor Horner is going to sit in a corner open a barrow (with or without the assistance of Tom Bombadil we don't know yet, but either way it will probably be cut out) and they are going to film it for a TV broadcast.

The Doctor is despairing of Jo who believes in "the occult. Well, you know, the supernatural and all that magic bit" while the Doctor thinks "everything that happens in life must have a scientific explanation." Bessie then starts driving around by herself until the Doctor gives her into trouble. The Doctor then reveals that he did it to troll Jo using a remote control, which gives us all a lol while at the same time introducing the 'science vs magic' theme for this story.

Mike Yates arrives and tells the Doctor about the TV programme that he and Jo are wanting to watch. Due to the law of conservation of narrative detail it is of course the one we saw the mannys setting up for earlier. When the Doctor hears it is being made near a place called "Devil's End" (lol, sounds a bit rude) he becomes interested as well (naughty Doctor).

The TV presenter Alastair Fergus, who is surprisingly not a real-life BBC TV presenter (Doctor Who was using real BBC personalities playing themselves in the show from as early as 1966's The War Machines) but is played by actor David Simeon, records a spooky introduction for his programme, aided by pretty good acoustics for a studio set.

Benton is already watching the TV when the Doctor, Yates and Jo arrive, and so from this point they are seeing what we are also seeing. Alastair interviews Professor Horner, who is a grumpy and cantankerous manny. He wants to open the barrow at midnight of "Beltane, greatest occult festival of the year, bar Hallowe'en."

Presumably he couldn't be bothered to wait six months to do it at actual Hallowe'en? Or perhaps the BBC didn't want a repeat of what happened back when they broadcast Ghostwatch on the night of Hallowe'en 1992?

No, it is actually revealed that this is a "publicity gimmick" for the professor's new book coming out the next day - although I presume that could also have been held back six months if they had really wanted to?

Miss Hawthorne arrives and protests about the dig, although with her strongest argument being that she is "a witch - white of course" and that she "cast the runes" and "consulted the Talisman of Mercury" she comes across as a loony. Somehow this is enough to convince the Doctor that she is right and they have to "stop that lunatic before it's too late" and he means Horner is the "lunatic" not Miss Hawthorne! At first glance this would seem to be the Doctor going back on all the rubbishing of the supernatural that he did in the earlier scene, but I think he just wanted an excuse to go get involved in the plot as soon as possible.

Alastair says that viewers should "tune in to BBC3" to see the dig finish at midnight. This is a crucial piece of evidence for establishing the dating of the UNIT era - BBC3 began broadcasting in 2003 so it cannot possibly be set any earlier than that. Of course this is contradicted in plenty of other stories, such as Pyramids of Mars or Mawdryn Undead, but for now it is one of the most conclusive arguments for UNIT dating.

The Doctor and Jo drive in Bessie to Devil's End, but the wind blows the sign to point the wrong way. Wait, does this mean that even the convenient signposts and establishing shots are on the side of the baddys in this story, mew?

Miss Hawthorne goes to the church and wants to speak to "the real vicar" Canon Smallwood. But the new vicar who has replaced him is Mr Magister, and when he arrives to speak to Miss Hawthorne he is quickly revealed to be...

The Master! Here he appears in one of his most iconic disguises and aliases. He tries to hypno-eyes Miss Hawthorne but it doesn't work, so instead he sends his henchmanny to follow her.

By the time night has fallen, the Doctor and Jo have found a pub where they ask for directions. They are mistaiken for mannys from the TV programme (if it is a mistaik - it could be the episode being even more meta) with one of them saying to the Doctor

"Forgive me, but I thought... well, the costume and the wig, you know?"

The Doctor is confused and says

"Wig?"

Lol. They do get directions in the end, thanks to Jo asking nicely, but one of the mannys sneaks out of the pub to inform the Master they have arrived.

The Master then changes into a fancy costume and goes to the cavern where he meets with some cultists setting up for a ritual, which has attracted Cthulhu's interest to this story.

A tree falls over and forces the Doctor and Jo to leave Bessie behind. They run to the dig as the TV programme starts again, indicating that they do not have much time left until midnight.

The Master and his cultists do chanting that helps to build up the tension, as we cut between them, the Doctor and Jo running, and Horner talking to the TV mannys. The Doctor runs in but is just too late to stop the professor from opening up the wall at the dig. A hole appears and a powerful wind blasts out of it. Quick cutting ensures that we never see anything for long enough to be sure of what is going on, which is incredibly effective at sustaining the atmosphere by forcing our imaginations to fill in what we don't see.

The Master is happy - he laughs and shouts

"Azal!"

but his mannys are scared because they see Bok's eyes begin to glow.

Scary face!

There are plenty of moments here that would have made great cliffhanger points (truly they were spoiled for choice), but for the final shot we see Jo catch up with the Doctor to find him and the professor knocked out

'Oh noes!'

she says, and I suppose that is as good as any of them. Few Doctor Who stories manage to end their first episodes in as scary and suspenseful a way as this one does.

Doctor Who Night 2020: The Phantom Pipers

This year I have been mostly in lockdown because the mannys are worried about the coronavirus. Fortunately there is no coronavirus on the internets, so we held our annual Doctor Who Night there.

The Moonbase sees the Doctor, Jamie, Sailor Ben and Polly team up with the employees of Moonbase PLC to fight the Cybermannys. You can tell the mannys W-word for a private corporation because of the way the base is run with a minimal number of staff, even though the gravitron is capable of devastating the Earth when it (inevitably) goes wrong. And Benoit is obviously their IT manny, since he is the one who suggests they try turning the gravitron off and on again to fix it.

The Doctor, Sailor Ben and Polly have all met the Cybermannys before in The Tenth Planet, but they are new to Jamie, and some komedy arises when he first sees a Cybermanny and mistaiks it for "the Phantom Piper" lol.

Maybe when he says "the Phantom Piper" he really means Pipes? Now that would be scary.

By the time of Tomb of the Cybermannys, Sailor Ben and Polly have left and Jamie has become the veteran of Cybermanny stories. There the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria "Vic" Waterfield (the nickname never caught on, despite the supposed-to-be-Americans' best efforts) meet the Shapmeister himself, here playing Viner, who really gives away what sort of story they are in when he says

"These controls are of their earlier dynasty."

(Well, that and all the references to archaeology and archaeologists.)

Viner is easily the most genre-savvy of the guest characters, and as the atmosphere of the tomb gets to him he has further lines such as

"He's dead. Don't you see, he's dead? It's this damn building. It's alive. It's watching us! It'll get us all! We've got to leave!"

and carries on like that right up to the point where Klieg shoots him.

Aside from having the Doctor, Jamie and, of course, the Cybermannys in common, these two stories also both feature the iconic 1960s Cybermanny music, which does a lot of the heavy lifting in creating the menacing atmosphere as they make their slow advance across the Moon's surface or emerge slowly from their tombs.

Mood