It is 1989, and Doctor Who is on its last legs. You may have noticed that I skipped over all of the serials featuring Colin Baker in the lead role—this is not simply because of the poor reputation most of the stories have even among fans of the series, but because none of them offer a particularly compelling monster-centric story to write about. Things started looking up at least a little bit in 1987, when the show went through a small-scale creative overhaul, with a new batch of writers behind the scenes and a new lead in Sylvester McCoy, but none of the active attempts to make the series more ambitious and relevant saved it from going on an indefinite hiatus just as the eighties ended, leaving it at a still-impressive twenty-six consecutive years on television.
The three years with McCoy and lead writer Andrew Cartmel carry a very distinctive atmosphere, one that attempts to mine the best parts of the series’ past, especially its sense of imagination and its capacity for moments of child-friendly horror, and infuse a puckish kind of whimsy and more focus on the characterization of the Doctor and his companion. “The Curse of Fenric”, the classic series’ penultimate story, carries with it the DNA of previous serials we’ve talked about: there’s a the moody atmosphere and marching army of monsters of “The Web of Fear”, a somewhat Quatermass-esque combination of mythology and Sci-Fi similar to “The Awakening”, and even the winking social commentary of “Carnival of Monsters.” Another similarity to “Web of Fear” is its attempt to provide a new interpretation of a well-established monster—but this goes much further in taking its inspirations and playing around with the iconography.
Having already written about a Tom Baker-led serial, we’re taking a big leap out of seventies Doctor Who and into the early-to-mid eighties, where the lead role was taken over by Peter Davison. The eighties ended up being a fairly tumultuous period for the series, following up on the tonal shifts that occurred after complaints of the show’s violent content led to pressure from producers, and where it seemed to gradually slide increasingly into irrelevance, with production problems, creative indecision, and hostility from the top brass at the BBC eventually leading to the show’s fifteen-year hiatus at the end of the decade. The biggest problems of the original run’s final years was still in the future while Davison was there, but you can definitely sense in these early eighties seasons that the show was a little more uneasy, experimenting with different ideas and tones to see what actually worked.
“The Awakening” hails from Davison’s final year, which in turn was following the series’ twentieth anniversary (an anniversary special where Davison teamed up with many, but not all, the previous Doctor actors aired two months before.) After spending an entire year spotlighting the series and its history, a story like this feels like a return to the “classic” mode—it is another plot about an alien presence invading modern England (in this case, specifically said to be 1984), and a plot with more than a hint ofQuatermass and the Pitin it, in which our history turns out to be the product of said alien presence. That’s not a surprising direction to go, considering that Doctor Who had been pulling from Quatermass and the Pit (and the other Quatermass serials) pretty much from the beginning, and this one actually puts that story in a new and interesting context, which scales down the scope of its implications while keeping them equally grave.
As the seventies dawned, Doctor Who went through several major changes: it was broadcast in colour, Jon Pertwee took over the lead role, and for a few years they changed the format of the show, locking it to a contemporary Earth setting without the Doctor’s time and planet-hopping shenanigans. In effect, this meant that most of the stories were made in the image of ones like “The Web of Fear”, with the Doctor working with a special military organization, which placed the “monsters in your backyard” concept at the forefront more often than not. Even with a more traditional adventure story structure in place, the series honed its horror credentials, and the early years of colour Doctor Who scarred generations with serials like “Spearhead From Space” (the first story of the era) and “Terror of the Autons”, which showed everyday plastic objects (including department store mannequins) transformed into deadly menaces—this is the era when the show really started living up to its legacy of making kids to “hide behind the couch.” Meanwhile, other stories, like the early serial “The Silurians” (where the monsters are allowed to be even a little sympathetic) showcased different and interesting ambitions in the monster space. Even when the plots became more limited in some ways, the creative minds at the helm adapted around those limitations and continued to develop the show’s distinguishing features.
Considering that I’ve written about two stories set on our planet, for the sake of variety I’ve chosen to skip to the fourth year in Pertwee’s tenure, when the series returned to journeys across time and space. The second story of the series’ tenth season has many intriguing qualities, including its wonderfully simple yet evocative title*, but most importantly is another serial written by Robert Holmes, who would go on to write previous site subject “The Ark in Space” (Holmes also wrote the aforementioned “Spearhead From Space” and “Terror of the Autons”, so he was making a name for himself on this series early), and with several more beloved stories to his name, he remains one of the more celebrated creative figures in the show’s history. As in his later stories, “Carnival of Monsters” demonstrates Holmes’ knack for infusing even standard-sounding Sci-Fi scenarios with his sardonic sense of humour, and in this case even carries a slyly meta take on the series itself.
Almost four years after “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, Doctor Who returned to the concept of aliens overtaking London—but at that point, the show was in a slightly different place than where it began. The role of the Doctor had been handed off to Patrick Troughton, establishing the tradition that has allowed this series to continue to exist for sixty years by making its lead a character who can change their appearance when necessary. The show also really started to take the form in which it would be known for those sixty years, putting its full emphasis on Science Fiction-based plots, which often meant focusing more specifically on creating new, memorable monsters to give those plots an additional horror bent. The Troughton years were especially rife with monster-centric thrillers, with “The Web of Fear” being a fairly well-known example—and by sharing a milieu with the previous serial I wrote about, it makes for some interesting comparisons in approach.
So, The Outer Limitsis not the only monster-heavy Science Fiction series to be celebrating a sixtieth anniversary this year—in fact, only a month or two separates the debut of that series and the debut of the BBC’s own Doctor Who, which I have written about before as a Creature Classic. That means another series of posts about classic television for the next few months, with each entry analyzing a monster-focused storyline from multiple eras of the show. Considering that its original run lasted for twenty-six years, from 1963 to 1989, and its current one has been airing for eighteen, there are a lot of different eras to choose from.
Even so, I think it’s best to go back to the beginning (or close to the beginning, at least), not only to the original cast, but to the very first, and ultimately most famous, monsters to appear on the show. As I laid out in the “Ark in Space” Creature Classic, the original direction for Doctor Who was for it to avoid Science Fiction cliches in its tales of alien time travellers, which included the deployment of “bug-eyed monsters”—but writer Terry Nation had already penned a storyline, submitted under the title “The Mutants” (although back then, each episode had its own title), involving a battle against an alien foe on a distant planet, and a lack of other suitable scripts meant that his serial was not only given the greenlight, but ended up the second aired story in the series’ history. That in turn meant that, almost as soon as Doctor Who started, it was already moving away from its own internal edicts, and would only move further away when audiences got a glimpse of the first alien menace to appear on the show.
That serial introduced the Daleks, which Nation had specified in the script would be “legless”—it was up to series production designer Raymond Cusick to come up with a final design, a job that was originally assigned to another BBC employee who became unavailable…Ridley Scott (seriously.) It was Cusick who gave the Daleks their distinct pepper pot shape, an inhuman, mechanical appearance that immediately set them apart from the men-in-suits aliens of so much of the 1950s creature features—combined with their staccato, electronically-modified voices, they became mass culture figures almost instantly, recognizable to the large swathe of public in the UK. They became so popular that not only were they figures of reference and parody, and not only was their debut story the basis for the Amicus-produced film version starring Peter Cushing, but Terry Nation, who maintained a controlling stake in them, even attempted to create separate Dalek media projects outside the BBC, sometimes leading to periods where they did not appear on Doctor Who itself. As I said in the older post, the reason why Doctor Who has continued to make imaginative monsters such a core part of its identity is almost certainly because of the perfect notes that Cusick and Nation manage to hit at the beginning of the series.
A follow-up to the original story—now generally referred as “The Daleks”—was essentially guaranteed, and so in the second season, Nation was back again to apply a novel twist to the Daleks: bringing them to our planet. This is the central conceit of “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”, which aired in six parts from November 21st to December 26th 1964, once again the second storyline in the line-up. As the original Daleks story inadvertently set the tone of the series by introducing iconic monsters, this story evolved the series’ approach to monsters by introducing the conceit of monsters appearing in familiar English locations, contrasting the everyday with the extraordinary, which would prove to be one of the series’ frequently recurring motifs.
There are innumerable places out there recounting the long and complicated history of Doctor Who (which will be celebrating its sixtieth anniversary next year), its place within the history of Science Fiction television, its importance to the BBC and UK TV in general, and its dedicated fandom. All of that has already been thoroughly interrogated, and by people far more knowledgeable than me.
So, instead, let’s talk about monsters.
As the old story goes, when the series was being developed in the early sixties, the top brass at the BBC explicitly told the writers to avoid stories about “bug-eyed monsters.” However, the second serial ready to be produced completely ignored this edict, and due to a lack of other suitable scripts, it went ahead—and unfortunately for the anti-bug-eyed-monster producers, the monsters introduced in that second serial were the Daleks, who became immediate pop culture icons in the UK, complete with novelty Christmas records. The show’s time and space-traversing format allowed the stories to theoretically go anyway and do anything, but from that point forward that anywhere often involved some kind of alien monster.
Unlike the other influential creature TV series I’ve written about from around the same time period, like The Outer Limitsand Ultraman, there was never a requirement for a Doctor Who story to include a monster, and there are many that don’t—but the monsters in that series have become such a tradition (almost certainly because of the popularity of the Daleks, due as much to the distinctive visuals invented by production designer David Cusick as it was to the scripts by Terry Nation, although it was the latter who got the copyright) that the series, from the original 1963-1989 run or the current one that began in 2005, has never veered away from them. With a basic concept that gives them a near endless choice of settings and storylines, the possibilities for just what kind of monsters can show up are equally as endless, which has led to a panoply of highly imaginative monsters, some of them becoming recurring presences on the show like the Daleks did, while others only appeared once, but may still have left an impression. As in many classic monster movies, the creativity on display in the stories and monsters is crucial because the limited budget of a BBC production means that the special effects, back then and today, are never going to be impressive or believable, so they have to find other ways to engage, or terrify, the audience.
The original series reached its peak popularity in the mid-seventies, after the starring role of the Doctor was given to Tom Baker (whose pre-Doctor career we briefly touched on in the post about The Mutations—although the performance that got him the job was his turn as the villain in the Ray Harryhausen effects vehicle The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, another monster connection), the fourth actor to take the part, who brought a particular laid-back quirkiness to a role that had been defined from the beginning by eccentricity. Due to the length of his tenure (seven years, the longest any actor has played the Doctor) and the fact that his were the first episodes to air on US TV, Baker ended up becoming the most well-known lead for many years (it sounds like he was aware of this at the time, too, leading to some notoriously diva-ish behaviour on set.) His second ever storyline, the four-episode “The Ark in Space”, aired from January to February 1975, and is a fan favourite—it’s also an important one for the history of the show and its approach to monsters, signalling a new direction that has cast a long shadow over the entire series.
REVIEW ALL MONSTERS 