Written by Tom
Team TARDIS have landed on an alien planet with stone forests and metal wildlife. While looking around, Susan is touched on the shoulder by something – presumably the same something that later leaves some glass vials by the TARDIS. Spying a nearby city and wanting to explore, the Doctor sabotages the TARDIS, forcing everyone into the city to find a spare part. Getting separated from the rest, Barbara screams in terror as she’s menaced by an evil toilet plunger…
This is an odd episode in that it features an awful lot of setup but never feels like anything’s actually happening in it. This is largely because of how much it’s willing to embrace atmosphere and tone above all else. Having come up with the idea of a dead planet in which everything’s been putrefied, the production team has gone all in on creating a protracted tone of disquieting stillness, focusing on maintaining a slow pace, bleaching out the visuals, and underpinning everything with a series of ambient soundscapes. This isn’t a bad thing though as their work pays off in spades, making its still aesthetic into something genuinely palpable. The move from the white bark of the forest to the flat metal sheets of the city is particularly effective, any sense of naturalness slowly bleeding out the landscape the further into it we get.
In now-standard Doctor Who style, this stillness is used as a backdrop against which to explore the current emotional relationships of Team TARDIS. You can see this prioritisation of their relationships in the way the episode’s structured: while Act One is us investigating a putrefied forest and Act Three is us investigating an alien city, Act Two is everyone hanging around the TARDIS and making bacon and eggs with a food machine. If this episode was meant to be a purely grimdark romp through an alien world, they’d have put the bacon and eggs in Act One as a calm before the storm; instead, it’s the sci-fi family breakfast which gets centralised at the core of the narrative, both defined by and providing definition to the alien world which lies around it.
Where The Dead Planet advances this emotional content is by being the first time that we see Team TARDIS actually trying to get on with each other. Ian tries to talk to the Doctor one-on-one without arguing; the Doctor asks Barbara if she could talk to Susan; Barbara agrees and tries to console her. The result of this is to actually introduce a feeling of warmth into the show – that these are people who could work together and that these are relationships which matter beyond the mere survival of the characters. It’s leagues ahead of what the past few episodes managed to achieve and, given that watching people arguing for 30 minutes at a time isn’t actually that pleasant, you do end up really wanting these people to have a breakthrough and just enjoy being with each other for a bit.
(It also helps that this is the first episode since the first one to actually give the entire cast something to do. I wasn’t expecting to say this but Terry Nation is much better at emotional storytelling than Anthony Coburn was.)
The inhumanity of the world around Team TARDIS keeps barging itself in though. The fun and games around the food machine are abruptly stopped when they hear something knocking on the TARDIS door. As the episode goes on, their conversations get increasingly peppered with mentions of worse and worse headaches, obviously setting up something which casts a shadow over their immediate futures. And we have the Doctor himself, a character who flipflops between being part of the team and actively working against them on an episode-by-episode basis. The warmth is there, tantalisingly running beneath the show’s surface, but the series is consciously making us wait for it. The tension isn’t whether everyone’s going to get out of the situations they’re in, it’s whether they’re going to be friends by the time they do.
There is a slight issue inherent with this, namely that Doctor Who is now explicitly priming us to want the show to be a certain way and then actively refusing to fulfil those desires. This is admittedly part of how the show set itself up in An Unearthly Child – as an entity unto itself which exists beyond the world of the audience – but it is slightly frustrating to sit down every week and be told that the fun adventure serial you ordered about friends lolling about in space still hasn’t arrived yet. That said, this is obviously where the show is intending to end up. We’re only five episodes into an initial thirteen episode run where the main dramatic pull is whether these people are going to start liking each other or not – of course the end point of it is going to be them coalescing as a team. The question is merely how long the production team’s going to stretch this plot out and whether the audience’s patience is finally going to snap before we get there.
FNORD 