Jon Pertwee’s first series of Doctor Who was a landmark in the history of the show. As well as introducing a new Doctor, it was the first series to be broadcast in colour.
Pertwee’s Doctor was a flamboyant man of action as well as a mysterious alien scientist. He loved fast vehicles and practiced Venusian martial arts to fight his enemies. Accompanied by his female assistant and with an array of gadgets including the Sonic Screwdriver at his disposal, he was Doctor Who for a generation raised on the James Bond movies.
Series 7 was also different in that the stories were all earthbound, the Doctor having been exiled to Earth at the end of The War Games. (The decision to set the series on Earth was made for budgetary reasons.) This series also begins the Doctor’s tenure as scientific advisor to UNIT, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, a military organisation dedicated to protecting the Earth from extra-terrestrial threats.
Spearhead from Space:
When strange showers of meteorites land in the British countryside, UNIT is on high alert. A blue police box is reported appearing in the same area, and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart expects to see his old friend the Doctor come to help. Instead, he finds a stranger lying in a hospital bed.
So begins the first story featuring the Third Doctor. Disoriented from his new regeneration, the Doctor spends the early part of the story in hospital while Liz Shaw, a professor from Cambridge University, helps the Brigadier and UNIT to investigate the strange meteors, which appear to be made from plastic. After a thwarted attempt by mysterious figures to kidnap the Doctor, he turns up at UNIT Headquarters and eventually convinces the Brigadier that, despite his new appearance, he is the same man who helped UNIT defeat the Yeti and the Cybermen.
The meteors are found to be power units for the Nestene Consciousness, a disembodied alien intelligence which has taken over a plastics factory in Essex. The Nestenes are using the factory to create weaponised mannequins called Autons that are being sent out to shops, as well as replicas of high-ranking officials in an attempt to take over the government. They are also creating a giant, octopus-like creature which they will use to conquer the planet.
The Doctor and Liz eventually help UNIT to attack the factory and defeat the Nestenes using an electric shock device, and the Doctor agrees to stay on as UNIT’s scientific advisor in return for facilities to repair the TARDIS, which has been disabled by the Time Lords as part of his exile. He also insists that Liz stays on to help him with his work.
Spread over four episodes, Spearhead from Space is a very strong start for the Third Doctor’s tenure, and contains one of the most memorable scenes in 1970s-era Doctor Who, that of the Autons breaking out of shop windows on Ealing Broadway and running amok. The Autons are an iconic and frightening villain, marred only be a poor realization of the octopus creature at the end of the story. This is a shame as the rest of the serial, which was shot entirely on film, looks beautiful.
Doctor Who and the Silurians:
The Third Doctor’s second story is a seven-part encounter with the Silurians, a reptilian race who ruled the Earth before humans appeared and who have been in hibernation for millions of years.
UNIT is alerted to a series of power drains at an underground nuclear facility, along with mental breakdowns among the staff. Major Baker, the security chief for the facility, suspects a saboteur. Investigating the caves around the facility, the Doctor and Liz discover a Silurian base, and that the power drains are being caused by a machine used to revive the Silurians from their hibernation.
The story then follows the Doctor trying to broker a peace between the Silurians and humans so that both species can coexist on Earth. However, factions from both sides do not want this. In the end, after foiling a plan by the Silurians to unleash a plague on humanity, the Doctor tricks them into going back into hibernation to avoid a radiation leak.
The Doctor instructs everyone to leave the caves undisturbed so that the Silurians can hibernate in peace and hopefully resume peaceful negotiations when they next awaken. He is horrified when the Brigadier gives the order to bomb the caves, wiping out the Silurians.
Doctor Who and the Silurians tells a powerful, multi-layered story. I particularly liked the way the story showed the Silurians as essentially just wanting to survive, and that both they and the humans had factions that wanted peace and factions that wanted sole ownership of the planet. The Doctor’s compassionate, pacifistic nature shines in this serial, and his disgust at the actions of UNIT at the end is palpable.
The Eleventh Doctor story The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood would revisit several of the themes in this story forty years later in 2010.
The Ambassadors of Death:
The third serial of series 7 is another seven-part one, this time about a mission to Mars that has not been heard from for several months. We pick up the story as UNIT and Mission Control finally make contact with the astronauts, who are returning to earth. No sooner do they arrive than they are captured and imprisoned by General Carrington of the Space Security Department, who claims that they are contaminated with dangerous radiation.
The Doctor believes that the human astronauts are still in space, and that the three captured astronauts are in fact aliens. He volunteers to go up into space in a rocket to retrieve the astronauts from a capsule in Earth’s orbit, and is captured by an alien spacecraft. There he is told that the astronauts are safe, and are awaiting the return of the three ambassadors from the alien planet, who have been sent to make peaceful contact with mankind. However, if the ambassadors are not returned safely, the aliens will have no choice but to attack Earth.
The rest of the story is a race between the Doctor, Liz and UNIT trying to guarantee the ambassadors’ safe return, while General Carrington is trying to expose the aliens in order to inflame public opinion and mount an attack.
The Ambassadors of Death is another story in this series where aliens with largely peaceful intent are misjudged as hostile by humans, this time based partly on General Carrington’s encounter with them on a previous Mars mission. As in The Silurians, the Doctor is able to see the bigger picture and resolve the situation.
Inferno:
The final story in this series features the Inferno Project, which involves humans drilling into the Earth’s crust to harness the energy at its core. During the drilling, green slime is released which, if a person touches it, transforms them into a vicious green-skinned creatures called Primords. The leader of the Inferno Project, Professor Stahlman, is in the early stages of infection, though nobody realises this yet.
During an experiment with the TARDIS console, a freak accident transports the Doctor to a parallel universe where the UK is a fascist state. He is captured by the alternate version of the Brigadier, here called the Brigade Leader, and finds that Liz Shaw is a security officer in this version of reality.
The drill breaks through the Earth’s core, unleashing huge amounts of energy as well as more green slime, which the mutated Stahlman uses to create more Primords out of the Project Inferno staff. The Doctor sees that the energy from the Earth’s core is eventually going to destroy the planet, so manages to persuade the surviving staff to help him repair his TARDIS and return to his own universe, where he manages to halt the drilling and prevent the same thing from happening.
I was too young to remember this series being broadcast, and did not get to see it until much later in life. I do, however, remember reading a Target novelisation of the first story, Spearhead from Space, which made actually watching this particular serial a very interesting experience. It was familiar and yet unfamiliar, as are all the stories that I have mixed memories of viewing and reading.
It is interesting to note that Series 7 established many of the features of Doctor Who that would carry on throughout the 1970s, such as being accompanied by a female assistant and working with UNIT, giving the show a chance to build a strong ensemble cast and paving the way for amazing heights of popularity when Tom Baker stepped into the main role in 1974.
The stories in Series 7 blended action and adventure with some thought-provoking ideas and messages. The seven-episode serials all feel overlong in places, with the plot spread thinly to fill up the time, and it is interesting to note that the following series’ stories are all six episodes or fewer in length. Inferno would be the last story to feature Liz Shaw, though her departure is not shown or mentioned.
Series 8 would introduce a new companion in Jo Grant as well as a new recurring adversary in the shape of The Master, a renegade Time Lord, and further develop the themes from this series.
Leave a Reply