The Devil's Crown

I've said it before and I'll say it again: 1978 was a good year for BBC television. Here is another series from then, which I've known about for a while now, but have only recently been able to see thanks to it being posted in the Yousual place - sadly a poor quality copy with sound that frequently drops or goes out of sync with the picture, the wrong aspect ratio, and with the titles and end credits in French. Despite this, it was a gripping series where I watched through all 13 episodes in quick succession. Hopefully it will get a proper DVD release one day, if not from the BBC itself then maybe from Good Old Network?

The Devil's Crown is a historical drama set over a period of time where characters, even main characters, come and go, grow old and die (or get murdered) as time passes. It is very much in the same mould as Fall of Eagles or I Claudius, both from earlier in the '70s, and would appear to be an attempt to get more lightning out of the same bottle.

This time the setting is England and France in the High Middle Ages, more specifically the years 1150 to 1216, and the drama centres on the lives of the Plantagenet kings of England, Henry ii (Brian "Great Commanders" Cox), his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine (Jane Lapotaire) and their sons Richard i (Michael "not Jayston" Byrne) and John (John Duttine). They are locked in constant struggle against the French kings, first Louis vii (Charles "Pendleton" Kay) and then his son Philip ii (Christopher "Sharaz Jek" Gable), who are the principal antagonists of the series.

The supporting cast is packed full of familiar British character actors such as Patrick Troughton, Christopher Benjamin, and Ian "Josiah Smith" Hogg as knights, and Jack Shepherd, Clifford "Rorvik" Rose and Anthony "heh heh heh" Ainley as senior churchmannys. These latter are significant because of the omnipresence of Christianity in the period, and the king's relationship with the church and the Pope (or his representatives) almost always being crucial in determining the course of events.

The main characters frequently talk to God in the form of soliloquies, letting us know their innermost thoughts, especially Richard who continually wrestles with his conscience - not over wars and killing (which he has no problems with at all, and neither really does the church) but over his homosexuality, which the church tells him is sinful and his family blames for his lack of an heir. This allows for a nuanced and even somewhat progressive portrayal of homosexuality, surprisingly so for a TV series made in 1978.

As with I Claudius before it, this series combines historical accuracy in the events depicted with the most sensational interpretation of the main characters involved. First there is Henry ii, who is portrayed as a manny of extreme passion and anger - easily the most famous thing about him is his outburst when in a rage that led to the murder of Thomas Becket (as seen in the third episode). Then there is Richard i, who is unabashedly and very gay, despite this being a disputed trait of the historical Richard. Finally there is king John, who is cowardly, treacherous, hypocritical and useless, and like every portrayal of him in a Robin Hood story turned up to 11.

With regards to these characterisations, the series appears to me to have been heavily influenced by The Lion in Winter (the 1968 film of which is a favourite of Gamma Longcat), the plot of which directly overlaps with one episode. Then, when only John is left, the final episodes cover a lot of the same ground as Shakespeare's The Life and Death of King John. And when king Richard is on crusade I could easily imagine Sir Ian of Jaffa appearing in the background of events that feature in Doctor Who's The Crusades, lol.

Another way in which the series resembles I Claudius is that it is almost entirely studio bound, with a stylised, theatrical way of representing events beyond the series budget such as battles or the grandeur of Rome or Jerusalem. At times this series steps even further away from realism than I Claudius (which leant heavily on old Claudius acting as narrator when it needed to convey things it couldn't show), and I was reminded of the device used by Terry Jones's 1995 documentary series Crusades of depicting the historical characters as though they were in tapestries or mosaics.

The other thing I was frequently reminded of when watching was the computer game Crusader Kings 2. If you were to make a TV series out of the game then it would end up almost exactly like The Devil's Crown - everything is here except for the most meme-tier levels of incest or horse popes: the problems of gavelkind succession, the need for kings to have heirs and to make marriage alliances, the crusades themselves of course, the aforementioned homosexuality, and a moderate amount of incest.

You could even go so far as to map Character Focuses onto most of the main characters: lustful Henry's is Seduction while pious Louis's is Theology. Richard the crusader specialises in War. Both Philip and John took Intrigue, although even with the +3 bonus John was still shit at it.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Mutants Episode Six

You know, I'm starting to think the Master might not be in this story at all.

The Investigator isn't played by Roger Delgado, he's played by Peter "Saruman" Howell. He wastes no time in nailing his many colours to the mast by investigating the Marshal as soon as he arrives. He lets the Marshal tell his side, which is a mix of truth and lies, and then turns to the Doctor:

"You are a Doctor, I take it?"

"I am, yes."

"Qualified in?"

"Practically everything."

But because of the hostages he backs up the Marshal's story for now.

The hostages are attempting to escape from the room before it gets irradiated, by escaping down the "fuel probe" ahead of the radioactive fuel. In the nick of time they burst into the room where the Investigator was just about to drop all the charges against the Marshal. As soon as he sees they are safe, the Doctor changes his tune completely:

"Investigator, these are the missing witnesses. Jo, Miss Grant here, is my assistant, kept hostage to ensure my cooperation in this travesty of justice. Investigator, I accuse that man and that man of the most brutal and callous series of crimes against a defenceless people it's ever been my misfortune to encounter!"

He then provokes the Marshal into losing his temper (not that difficult) and condemning himself out of his own mouth:

"They're mutants! Mutts! They're diseased! To be wiped off the face of the planet! I..."

Oops. Sondergaard is brought into the trial at this point and is able to back up the Doctor's assertions.

While this is going on, one of the mutants derpily teleports up to Skybase to join in the fun. Unfortunately, the Marshal pewpewpews it as soon as it reaches the trial room, and its appearance (despite being far more derpy than scary) scares the Investigator into siding with the Marshal. Ky and Cotton are taken prisoner (again) while the Doctor, Jo and Sondergaard escape to Jaeger's lab and lock themselves in.

The Doctor and Sondergaard are now able to do the crystallography they were so keen on, plugging the green crystal into the apparatus. With a little bit of technobabble the Doctor realises that they need to put the crystal and Ky together with some radiation, which luckily is already present in the room the Marshal wants to lock them up in. So when the Marshal breaks in (sadly without the need for any classic slow-cutting) and orders Jo and Sondergaard to be taken there, he is actually playing into their paws. Ky takes the crystal and turns into a mutant before their eyes.

The Marshal's megalomania reaches its peak as he tells the Investigator he will not be allowed to leave and will have to live on Solos from now on.

"I shall rule from Skybase."

he announces, and

"We'll begin a new Earth, the centre of a new Empire."

In a callback to their earlier exchange, the Doctor again says "he's quite mad." To which the Marshal replies

"Oh no, Doctor. I told you. Madmen lose. I've won. Solos is mine."

Ky's mutation doesn't stop when he's a mutant, it continues until he becomes a fabulous version of himself with rainbow stripes that remind me of me, so he has obviously reached a higher state of being. He vanishes, and then remembers to open the door for Jo, Cotton and Sondergaard to escape too.

The Marshal is still trying to get the Doctor to make the atmosphere of Solos breathable for mannys, but at the last moment when the Doctor says it is ready he remembers that he doesn't trust the Doctor and so gets Jaeger to turn it on for him, which means that when it overloads and blows up it is Jaeger that gets killed.

The Marshal is about to shoot the Doctor when Ky arrives and pewpewpews the Marshal.

The day has been saved. The Investigator puts Cotton in charge of Skybase, and Sondergaard intends to stay on Solos to help turn the rest of the mutants into fabulous big gay longcat-like beings as well - a worthy goal. As for the Investigator himself, he wants to take the Doctor and Jo back to Orthanc Earth with him, so they sneak back to the TARDIS after a short, unfunny bit of komedy business to end on.

What's so good about The Mutants?

The Mutants is just a really good story, which unfolds a bit at a time until it all comes together at the end. Ky's metamorphosis into a felis ex machina feels earned because of everything that has preceded it in order to set it up as the eucatastrophe.

Despite the non-appearance of the Master, the guest characters we do get are memorable and are used well in their roles. Sondergaard in particular, although he does not have that many scenes, feels like a natural companion (if not capital-C-Companion) for the Doctor from almost as soon as they first meet, who the Doctor treats with respect as a fellow scientist. This is in contrast with Jaeger who, even though he may be the intellectual equal of Sondergaard, is never treated as an equal by the Doctor because he uses his science powers for evil.

The Marshal, as a one-off baddy, has a tough time competing with the Master in the memorability stakes (not being played by Roger Delgado puts him at a disadvantage as well), but is nevertheless shown to be a cunning and resourceful antagonist to the Doctor. He could perhaps have benefited from making a stronger first impression, since his scenes in episode one are shared with the Administrator and Varan, so it is not immediately clear which of them will turn out to be the main baddy.

But perhaps that is a strength of The Mutants - that it does not play out as you might expect it to. As I also said of Ambassadors OF DEATH, it is not a typical Doctor Who plot - the clearest indication of that here is that "the mutants" of the title are not the baddys, they are just googly-eyed monsters who want to have a good time derping around on their own planet without interference from mannys.

For all that is good and fabulous about it, The Mutants isn't a perfect story, and to discuss its biggest weakness we must now turn to our Pertwee Six-Parter Padding Analysis.

Pertwee Six-Parter Padding Analysis

The pacing of the story is such that the padding is disguised about as well as it could be, but there's no denying that the plot has to be stretched to fill six whole episodes. Unlike The Sea Devils, which managed to pad itself out to six parts by throwing in extra scenes with the Master, inessential yet enjoyable, The Mutants simply seems to stretch out what plot it has to fill the time required of it. When viewed episodically (as originally broadcast) it is not so noticeable, but this is definitely one of those six-parters to avoid watching all the way through in a single sitting.

Episode one suffers particularly badly from this stretching, with the Doctor and Jo taking a long time to reach the main plot - and coming so early, this perhaps creates the impression that the story is even more padded than it is. The leisurely start sets a precedent that isn't exactly held to for the rest of the story, but there is a lot of our heroes getting captured and escaping only to be recaptured again soon afterwards that could probably have been left out of a more tightly edited set of scripts.

The cliffhangers are another problem with the editing, and there are two particularly poor examples in parts three and five (although thee are somewhat made up for by part four's cliffhanger being rather good) where the episodes seem to end simply because their 25 minutes is up. Sapphire and Steel may not have been assigned to this story, but it looks as though the manny that did their cliffhangers was.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Mutants Episode Five

This ought to be a really dramatic scene, but the CSO is used in such a way that the space background doesn't track with the foreground, so the scene looks fake and like something out of a Monty Python sketch.

The cliffhanger is not resolved straight away, which is a little unusual. Instead, after the recap it cuts directly to the Doctor and Sondergaard on the planet. They see Jaeger's rockets exploding and the Doctor knows this means his experiment has started.

Back on Skybase, everybody escapes when the camera manages to right itself (so the cameramanny is the unsung hero of this bit). The Marshal summons more guards and they capture Jo, Ky, Stubbs and Cotton. He is then about to have them all shot when Jaeger comes in and has a strop at the Marshal because the experiment failed, thereby accidentally saving their lives.

This develops into a great scene as the Marshal ponders just how many mannys he's going to have to kill to stop the Investigator from finding out what has happened here, then considers maybe he only has to kill the Investigator, before Jo bluffs that she and the Doctor have been W-wording with the Investigator all along.

"He's coming to confirm the Doctor's findings."

she says.

On the planet, Sondergaard again asks the Doctor to go on without him - he's got his martyr-complex character quirk and he's going to use it, mew.

The Marshal takes his guards back to the planet (I love how quickly they travel between Skybase and Solos, sometimes as quickly as a camera cut) to capture the Doctor. This leads into a short chase sequence in which the Doctor avoids the guards or else defeats them using Venusian Karate, until he gets to the teleporter and waves goodbye to his pursuers.

This doesn't actually stop them from following him, as they teleport to Skybase too and continue the chase there. The Marshal captures him just as he thinks he is rescuing Jo and the others. The Marshal still needs the Doctor to help Jaeger make the planet breathable by mannys (since Jaeger has failed to manage that on his own) as well as to convince the Investigator that everything is in order here.

"Marshal, you are quite mad."
"Only if I lose."

He's not the most memorable of Doctor Who baddys, but this line of the Marshal's is so good evil that the Master would have killed for it to be his.

The quality of his guards is, however, pretty low. Jo tricks the one left to guard her, escapes, and frees Ky, Stubbs and Cotton. They use the Marshal's mobile-telephone-on-a-stick, which he conveniently left behind for them to find, to contact the Investigator's spaceship "Hyperion" (is this story set around the same time as Terror of the Vervoids?) and Jo recaps the entire plot so far for his benefit:

"Situation on Solos critical. Marshal's attempts to convert atmosphere is causing severe loss of life. The Administrator assassinated on Marshal's orders. Marshal attempting to maintain complete control of entire planet. He must be replaced immediately. Over."

Stubbs gets shot by the Marshal's guards and the others are chased for a bit before being recaptured.

The Doctor and Jaeger have been spouting a fair amount of technobabble at each other in their scenes together, but now the Doctor gets a chance to deliver some in a more humourous way while still making his point:

"The slightest accident in this stage of the proceedings and we'd all reverse instantly into antimatter. Blasted out to the other side of the universe, as a flash of electromagnetic radiation. We'll all become unpeople, undoing unthings untogether."

The only main character still on the planet is Sondergaard. He is saved from a guard by some mutants and then he manages to talk with them.

Jo, Ky and Cotton are put in a room to be hostages for the Doctor to go along with the Marshal's plan as the Investigator's ship arrives. Cotton starts to fret that the room they're in is radioactive, and

"They'll need to refuel Hyperion, the Investigator's shuttle. They should be putting a probe out any minute now. Then live thesium will start flooding through there. We'll all be done for!"

That's the end of the episode. This is another rather poor choice for a cliffhanger moment, which I suspect was only chosen because of the lack of any other suitably dramatic moments nearby.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Mutants Episode Four

They all get rescued by the spacemanny from earlier, who turns out to be Professor Sondergard

Sorry, I mean "Professor Sondergaard." Even though he has saved them (and Jo twice now) Ky suspects him of being behind the mutations, accusing him of "experimenting on my people." But the others see him as a friend. He helps the Doctor piece together some of the mystery of what is going on on Solos, including that Jaeger's experiments are accelerating natural changes. The Doctor and Ky show Sondergaard the tablets and he does indeed recognise it, as Ky predicted.

With all of the goodys assembled in one place, they are in serious danger of sorting out the plot way too quickly, so the Doctor sends Ky, Jo, Stubbs and Cotton away while he stays to help Sondergaard translate the writing. Is it just me or was the Doctor suspiciously quick in wanting the others to leave him alone with Professor Sondergaard? Naughty Doctor.

I don't usually comment on these things because I don't usually notice them, but there's a TV camera being used in the scenes set in Sondergaard's lab that distorts the picture in a strange way, and once you've seen it you can't unsee it, especially as the other camera's picture looks normal and the scenes cut between the two quite regularly.

The Doctor figures out that the tablets are a calendar. Sondergaard says that one Solonian year is 2,000 Earth years, so the Doctor deduces that each season must be 500 years long. Long seasons are long! He also thinks that one of the tablets depicts radiation, so he gets Sondergaard to take him to the cave with the most radiation, and therefore (in accordance with the need for the visual medium of television to depict invisible radiation visually) the most SFX.

The others escape from the mines and find their way to Varan's village. Either this is because Solos is a small world or it's because they already had the set built. Varan has found some of his warriors who have not fully turned into mutants yet, and they ambush and capture Ky, Jo, Stubbs and Cotton.

In the SFX cave, Sondergaard decides he wants to have sleeps, so the Doctor goes on without him until he finds a glowing statue holding something.

The Doctor pinches the thingy and legs it like he is Indiana Jones (Indiana Who?), although all that chases him is some electric effects, not a giant boulder. He picks up Sondergaard on the way out and they escape together.

On the spaceship, the Marshal hears that an "Earth Council Investigator" is coming to visit. This is almost the exact same point as the Master arrived in Colony in Space pretending to be an Earth Adjudicator, so we are presumably being led to expect that the same thing is going to happen here.

Varan forces his captives to help him attack the spaceship, because Stubbs and Cotton are themselves "overlords" they give Varan the element of surprise, so they all teleport up and start surprising the Marshal's guards. Doctor Who stories are often divided between action plots and investigative or mystery plots, but I've seldom seen such a clear divide between the two as here, where on the one paw we have the Doctor and Sondergaard sitting around puzzling out the mystery, while on the other paw Jo and the rest of our heroes run around getting into fights.

Back at Sondergaard's lab, the Doctor now deduces that the Solonians are supposed to mutate along with the seasons, and the green "crystal" he has stolen taken has something to do with it. Sondergaard doesn't have the equipment required to analyse the crystal, and says "there's only one place." They have already developed such great rapport with one another that the Doctor is able to finish his thought for him:

"Skybase. Jaeger's lab."

Surely the Doctor would have the necessary equipment in the TARDIS as well? It doesn't matter, as the point (from a narrative point of view) is that this means the Doctor has to get back to Skybase, which is where the TARDIS is anyway.

The Marshal demands that Jaeger start his experiment to make the atmosphere breathable for mannys, and so begins a countdown. This makes the scenes of Varan's attack more suspenseful, as they wander around Skybase to the sound of the countdown counting down.

Finally Varan and the Marshal encounter each other. The Marshal shoots the wall behind Varan and, like the window in the plane at the end of Goldfinger, it shatters and depressurises the room, with Varan suffering Goldfinger's fate of being 'shucked into outer shpace' - literally.

The others are all James Bond in this metaphor, holding on and trying to stay inside as the episode ends - a considerably better cliffhanger than the last one!

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Mutants Episode Three

The Doctor and Varan then teleport to the planet. I'm beginning to wonder if every cliffhanger in this story going to be resolved in this way.

The Doctor finally remembers to use some Venusian Karate on Varan, and they become friends. Varan warns the Doctor that he "will not be able to breathe the air on Solos. No Earthman can." This gives the Doctor the opening for the response

"Did I say I was an Earthman?"

Ky is still giving Jo exposition about Solos and the Solonians. He says of the creatures:

"They're people. My people. Or at least they were before the Marshal's experiments."

A creature derps up to them and Ky scares it off with some fire on a stick. There are more of them further into the cave.

The Doctor and Varan also see a creature. Varan doesn't want to go into the cave so the Doctor tricks him, asking

"What, is Varan, the great warrior, afraid of the dark?"

"Varan fears nothing!"

"I'm delighted to hear it. Come on then."

They find Ky surrounded by creatures, each more derpy than the last, and rescue him using fiery torches of their own. The story does a good job in this episode of directly showing as little as possible of the creatures - either we only see them in shadow, or only see parts of them, or when we see their faces it is for quick shots before cutting away. This makes them more effective and mysterious, if not actually scary (they're too derpy for that), and they remind me of, if anything, the ancient Martians from Quatermass and the Pit.

Jo has already run away and she encounters a groovy special effect and a spacemanny.

The Doctor gives Ky the Time Lord box and it opens for him (again). Inside are tablets with writing on them. Both Ky and Varan are disappointed it isn't weapons, which must have been what they asked Time Lord Santa for - at least I think that must be what happens, mew.

Varan leaves to fight the overlords even without more weapons. Ky thinks he recognises the writing - he cannot read it because "it is the language of the old ones" (this line piqued Cthulhu's interest) but he thinks a manny called "Sondergard, a man of learning from Earth" (which begs the questions of why they kept mistaiking the Doctor for an overlord earlier if they were already familiar with friendly scientists from Earth) may be able to, except that this Sondergard was disappeared by the Marshal. The Doctor's first priority is to find Jo, especially when she turns out to not be where Ky left her. 

Jaeger tells the Marshal that 'summer is coming.'

"Ever since we've been here, five hundred years, it's been spring. Now, summer."

The Marshal is more concerned with wiping out "the Mutts," so he teleports down to the planet to take charge personally. He orders Stubbs and Cotton to look for the Doctor, and they find him just after he and Ky have found Jo. There's a lot of getting separated and back together again going on, but these stories don't make themselves six parts long without help, you know.

The Marshal has bugged Stubbs and Cotton to hear what they are saying, so he knows when they have met with the Doctor. Then he has his mannys fill the mines with smoke and blows up the exit so nobody in the mines can get out.

Varan reaches his village to find that everyone except one old manny has become a mutant and gone "to the mines" then he sees that he is also starting to mutate. This is an interesting development as the plot is unfolding to us a bit at a time.

Stubbs and Cotton finally get around to telling the Doctor the Marshal's plan to gas them all, but it is too late for them to escape because by then he has already blowed up the exit and trapped them in there with the gas. While undoubtedly a moment of peril for our heroes, this makes for an oddly undramatic cliffhanger because there is no sudden action or twist. The episode just sort of... ends.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Mutants Episode Two

Ky and Jo get teleported to the planet where they get chased by more of the Marshal's guards. Ky knocks out one of the Marshal's mannys and steals has mask so that Jo can use it to breathe properly.

Back on the spaceship, the Marhsal explains to the Doctor that the atmosphere of Solos will be poisonous to Jo, and the "planet is under marshal law - my law" (hence, as they say, the name). He will only agree to rescue Jo if the Doctor opens the Time Lord box for him, so the Doctor agrees to try.

The Marshal takes the Doctor to a laboratory where he meets Jaeger (George Pravda, Castellan Spandrell from The Deadly Assassin), who is a scientist that the Marshal gets to assist the Doctor.

Speaking of deadly assassins, the Marshal shoots Varan's son with the same gun he used to assassinate the Administrator in part one, obviously an attempt to cover up his own involvement by assassinating the assassin. He then tries to do the same with Varan himself, but Varan runs away in time.

From seeing the equipment in the laboratory, the Doctor deduces the Marshal and Jaeger's plan to make the atmosphere breathable by mannys. At the same time Jaeger realises that the Doctor could help them with their plan and tells this to the Marshal.

Ky tells Jo a lot of exposition about the planet and the exploitation of Solos and the Solonians by the "overlords" from Earth. It is a biased perspective, but we are clearly intended to sympathise with it, and not the opposite viewpoint as epitomised by the obvious baddy the Marshal.

We get a glimpse of a mutant in the cave with them before we cut back to the spaceship, where the Doctor is helping Stubbs hunt for Varan (presumably because it's a more interesting subplot than helping Jaeger with his science - the one the Doctor is supposed to be doing). Varan gets the drop on Stubbs, but the Doctor picks up Stubbs's weapon and pews the sword out of Varan's paw.

Varan explains what has happened in his part of the plot, so now the Doctor and Stubbs know about it. They lie to the Marshal and tell him that Varan has been "dealt with" (meaning 'killed' although the double-meaning is a neat little bit of writing), but the Marshal also lies to the Doctor when he says that Jo has been rescued (which is also not totally a lie because she has been rescued, only by Ky, not by the Marshal's mannys) and that "Ky left her to die" (which is the lie). I think the Doctor only believes this because it rhymes, but it isn't long before Cotton tells him the truth about what really happened.

Stubbs and Cotton are now the Doctor's friends, and they help him and Varan with a plan to get them teleported to the planet. The Doctor tricks Jaeger into overloading the power supply of the spaceship, and when the lights go dim (in accordance with narrative rules around emergency lighting, which apply even under marshal law) he escapes. Unfortunately, it is either dark enough or else near enough to the end of the episode that Varan mistaiks the Doctor for an overlord and attacks him, while shouting

"Die, overlord, die!"

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Mutants Episode One

The Mutants is the second story of the very first season of Doctor Who, starring William Hartnell as the Doctor, William Russell as Ian, Jacqueline Hill as Barbara and Carole Ann Ford as Susan. It is particularly well known for being the first story in which the Daleks appear, and it was written by Terry Nation so it is bound to be great! Which means it is a shame that today I'm going to be reviewing the other The Mutants.

The other The Mutants is the fourth story of season nine of Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in 1972, at which point the earlier The Mutants was retroactively renamed The Daleks. It stars Jon Pertwee as the Doctor and Katy Manning as Jo Grant, and is the fourth of the Pertwee Six-Parters.

It starts with a manny running around on location being chased by Marshal, Stubbs and Cotton (Rick "but words are no more than... words" James). They call the first manny "Mutt" but he doesn't look much like a doggy to me. Then again, doggys do love chases so... maybe?

The Doctor and Jo are in the UNIT lab when a thingy materialises. The Doctor recognises it as having been sent to him by the Time Lords, although it would have been better if it had made a TARDIS-style materialisation noise to tip the viewers off to the same thing.

It causes a momentary time eddy that makes the Doctor say his lines more than once - a clever trick to make them more memorable for us so that we will remember it later on:

"I couldn't, even if I wanted to. No, I'm not meant to. I couldn't open it, even if I wanted to. No, it's only meant for one person, and or creature. It will only open for one person."

The Doctor also says

"It's an assignment."

So presumably Sapphire and Steel were busy? On this occasion he seems less reluctant to do W-word for the Time Lords than usual, perhaps because he recognises it is "a real emergency," or perhaps he's just happy for the chance to get away from Earth - it has, after all, been two whole stories since that happened, mew!

The Doctor and Jo leave in the TARDIS, which dematerialises and then rematerialises on a spaceship.

Elsewhere on the spaceship some other characters are having an argument in which the backstory of this planet is revealed to us by way of them shouting exposition at each other - exposition that they should already know. One of them is Varan, who is loyal to the "overlords" while the other is Ky, last of the Brunnen-G (Garrick "Biggs Darklighter" Hagon) who doesn't like the overlords, but he has to go along with them.

The Doctor and Jo spend a while wandering around corridors and using the sonic screwdriver to open doors and talking about how a book Jo hasn't read is like unto their present situation, so clear early signs of padding. Eventually they encounter the plot when they first have a fight with a "native mutant" and then when they get captured by Stubbs and Cotton.

Marshal talks to Administrator (Geoffrey Palmer, last seen as Masters in Doctor Who and the Silurians). It has just occurred to me that "Marshal" and "Administrator" are titles: "THE Marshal" and "THE Administrator," so maybe one of them is really the Master in disguise? It would be ironic if Geoffrey Palmer is the Master now that he isn't playing Masters - or maybe they are one and the same?

The Administrator is in charge of the Marshal, and gives him and us the exposition about how Earth is about to give the native Solonians independence:

"I take it you've been too busy with security to study the latest reports from Earth? We can't afford an empire any more. Earth is exhausted, Marshal. Finished. Politically, economically and biologically finished."

So this is a fairly unsubtle allegory for the decolonisation of the British Empire that had taken place after World War 2 but which a surprisingly large number of mannys still haven't come to terms with today, never mind in 1972 when this story was made.

The Marshal establishes himself as the baddy when he suggests wiping out the natives and taking over the planet instead, but the Administrator neither likes this idea nor has to go along with it. The Marshal starts scheming behind his back as soon as the Administrator leave the room.

The Doctor gives the Time Lord's container to first the Administrator and then the Marshal, but neither of them can open it. The Marshal tries to pewpewpew it open, but his small fire fails to even heat it.

The Administrator goes to make a speech to the Solonians, where he gets heckled by Ky. The Marshal has arranged for Varan's son to have a secret gun, and he uses it to shoot the Administrator, who goes

With only Stubbs guarding them, the Doctor and Jo escape by the Doctor using the Vulcan nerve pinch on him. They are then stopped from reaching the conference by Cotton. The Doctor is in the middle of trying to bluff his way past when Ky runs out of the conference and touches the Time Lord's container, opening it and solving that mystery - fortunately for us, considering that it is still only episode one, it is immediately replaced with the new mystery of why the Time Lords sent a present to Ky. Maybe it is his birthday?

Jo chases after Ky, who mistaiks her for an overlord and takes her hostage, thinking that the Marshal's mannys won't shoot her. But Jo isn't an overlord, so the Marshal's mannys pewpewpew at both of them - cliffhanger!