Written by Tom
A minor glitch causes the TARDIS doors to open while it’s dematerialising, spooking the Doctor. Leaving the TARDIS, they find themselves in a rocky landscape filled with giant dead bugs. But wait a minute, it’s not that the bugs are big, it’s that Team TARDIS have shrank and are currently walking around someone’s front garden. Oops. Meanwhile, the businessman who owns the front garden meets with a government official to discuss the new insecticide he’s invented. Upon finding out the government official is going to stop the insecticide from being manufactured, the businessman shoots him dead. Team TARDIS discover the dead body. Alas, that’s when the businessman’s cat decides to pounce…
The episode starts with an extended sequence in the TARDIS of our main cast trying to figure out something that’s gone wrong with the console. We’ve seen the similar sequences in both the TARDIS serial and the Sensorite one – this is a warning sign letting us know that things are about to get meta. And wouldn’t you know it, the next thing that happens is that the TARDIS’ TV monitor scanner explodes, Ian joking that the Doctor could do with getting a new tube for it. Yep, we’re about to go into one of our “Doctor Who as a conscious, antagonistic signal” episodes.
So Team TARDIS venture out of the TARDIS and find that they’ve been shrunk to about an inch tall. Now let’s think about television. Television cameras record real life people and convert the resultant image into a signal. That signal is then sent to a television set and reconstituted on the TV screen. TV screens are relatively small though and so the original image usually has to be shrunk to fit onto the TV set. TV screens in the 1960s were probably large enough that the characters on screen aren’t exactly an inch tall, but the facts remain: the episode features Team TARDIS being shrunk to TV size. More than that, a nexus of ideas are being built here: TV shrinks people, the TARDIS is often described in terms of TV, and this is an episode where the TARDIS shrinks the cast. Reality is becoming porous.
This nexus culminates in the single best shot that Doctor Who has done so far: the one in which the camera pans up from the TARDIS in order to reveal that it’s a tiny item on someone’s lawn. In previous episodes, the use of a model TARDIS in special effects shots has been relatively commonplace, happening in the Marinus serial and right at the start of the Aztec serial. In these examples, we’re meant to be reading the model TARDIS as representative of the actual TARDIS, perceiving it not as being tiny in-universe but as a tiny model representing something that’s big. In this episode’s panning shot, this gets deliberately played with. We look at the model TARDIS and assume that it’s meant to be life-sized; then the camera pans up and it turns out that the model-sized TARDIS is actually meant to be the size of a model. A similar trick has been played before in “The Edge of Destruction”, the episode where the photograph of a landscape on the TARDIS scanner (usually used to represent a live feed) turned out to actually be a photograph of a landscape. The effect of this is to make the distinction between representation and reality porous in the episode. We’re conditioned to look past obvious fakery in our television productions and apply to certain amount of suspension of disbelief to everything we see. Reveals like this cut against that though – turns out that actually we’re meant to be taking what we see at face value here. The tiny people in our TV sets are actually tiny people. The models are actually model sized. Everything is what it seems.
This fits the aesthetic of the episode overall. Initially, the idea of doing an episode where Team TARDIS are extremely small seems like an excuse to do a special effects extravaganza, hence all of the back projections, model shots and giant models of dead bugs. We usually see special effects as a way of helping immersion though, allowing us to see what unreal things would look like should they be real. This is not what the episode is interested in doing though. Instead, what with it’s flat back projections, models that look like models, and the general surrealism of the minature world its trying to represent, “The Planet of Giants” resembles nothing more than some of the earliest silent films from figures such as Georges Méliès and Charles-Émile Reynaud.
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Let’s look at A Trip to the Moon (top left), the famous 1902 silent film from Georges Méliès. In particular, let’s focus on the way it looks. The fact that the background is directly facing us with the characters lined up in the foreground, the depth of field being incredibly shallow, almost like we’re in a theatre watching a play. The fact that the background and props have not only been painted but don’t even try to hide it, the backgrounds having bizarre perspectives which are distinctly unnatural. The fact that it’s plot features a collection of wizards who use a giant cannon to shoot people to the moon, the moon being this giant alien-filled land that also has a human face. Overt artificiality is caked into every part of this film – there is no way of watching this and not being aware that you’re watching a movie.
Let’s also use some of my academic specialism on the history of animation and look at Pauvre Pierrot (top middle), the 1892 silent cartoon that might be one of the first animations ever made. Again, look at the way that the background is kept directly facing the audience and is kept extremely flat with little shading (in particular, note the wall and how we can see the edge of it, solidifying that it is indeed a very thin, flat piece of material), much like a set on a stage. Note how the characters are similarly flat, containing no shading whatsoever, and are positioned next to each other in a line, exactly like A Trip to the Moon. Note how the background doesn’t try to hide the fact that it’s painted, nor have they tried to make the characters look particularly human, instead giving them arched backs and simplistic figures. In short, note the complete lack of interest in realism here – again, there is no way of watching this and not being aware that you’re watching a movie.
Now let’s bring back the screenshot from “Planet of Giants” that we started the post with (top right). Look at the same basic composition as the others – the large background positioned directly opposite the audience, in front of which are a series of lighter figures positioned in a line across the screen, a very theatrical composition. Also notice how the crushed blacks, diminished whites and projection grain of the background make it obvious that it’s a flat screen that’s been positioned behind Ian. It’s an extremely striking image which successfully communicates “Ian is looking at a relatively giant dead person”. What it isn’t is a shot that’s particularly interested in covering up the overtly fake nature of how it was produced. It’s not interested in realism here – something else is going on.
There are multiple reasons why early silent film embrace their fakeness the way they do. A major one is the fact that, at the time that these are being made, film was still a completely new invention. The idea of recording something and playing it back had, up until a few years ago, been literally impossible. So when we watch these early films, we have to remember that the very existence of moving images is new. This was their USP: people had done the impossible and made images that move, come see the results. And so what these films do is that they highlight their artificiality because this highlights how much their images shouldn’t be able to move, thus making the fact that they do even more extraordinary. It’s one thing to film a bunch of actors in a garden playing out a scene, and that would’ve been amazing at the time, but to get a bunch of actors, put them in a cardboard spaceship and then make that cardboard fly – that’s something else.
And this is the mode that “Planet of Giants” is working in. There’s no real way of making the “we’ve minaturised the main cast and they’re now running around a front garden” believable, but it is possible to turn that idea into a series of high-concept bizarre images. So they do that. This is Doctor Who as a spectacle of images, taking a hyper-visual but insane concept and leaning into its visual nature. The result of this is the complete rejection of realism in favour of the absurd. Not since the Marinus serial has Doctor Who been such an openly absurdist text.
The script leans into this on a level beyond pure imagery though, making sure to fill the episode which a range of little ironies and oddities throughout. Upon setting up the dual plots of the miniaturised TARDIS crew and the normal sized humans existing the same space, the episodes immediately starts cutting between the two plots such that the events of both stories keep getting played at weird angles. On one hand, we have the scene where Ian and Susan panic after finding that the sun’s been blocked out, only for us to see that the sun’s been blocked by the government official walking up a garden path, what is an apocalyptic event in one storyline being completely normal in another. On the other, the most dramatic scene in the human plotline is the government inspector being shot, something we never actually see because we’re with Team TARDIS when it happens, the gun shot becoming this explosion in the sky like an oncoming storm. Having setup an absurdist scenario, it’s now using this scenario as a lens through which events are being warped for dramatic purposes.
So what are the events that it’s warping? Really, the real plot of this episode is that an unscrupulous businessman has made an inhuman pest killer and, upon finding out that a government official is going to block its release because it’s scientifically unsound, kills the official. It’s a relatively simple “business vs. science” narrative that wouldn’t be out of a place as the opening of a Play for Today. The miniaturisation plot is here to elevate these material though.
Firstly, it allows us to actually see the effects of the businessman’s pest killer. As Team TARDIS walk around, interacting with creepy crawlies who are all the same size they are, these creatures become personified, allowing us to more easily emphasise with them. Indeed, what with it’s muddy environments strewn with corpses, there is the feeling of a warzone feel to the episode’s minaturised environments, something that would resonate with an audience who were still only a few decades out from the realities of the World Wars. In this regard, the scene where Ian and Susan happen upon a landscape covered in dead eggs is actually quite gruesome – this is presumably the first Doctor Who episode to feature Team TARDIS walking upon a field of dead babies who’ve been killed through chemical warfare. (Given our history, the temptation is also to read the pesticide as analogous to an atomic bomb. I mean, it is a manmade weapon that drops from the sky and turns everything into a petrified jungle ala “The Dead Planet“…)
More than this, it raises the actions of the businessman from the criminal machinations of a profit focused capitalist into something much more apocalyptic. The businessman isn’t just doing a series of shady deals on his way to selling a crap product, his actions are a literal affront to nature with a death toll far in excess of the one guy he shoots, reaching near genocidal levels.
I almost want to say that there’s something quite anti-capitalist going on here – that the minor machinations of unsuccessful businessmen are literally killing the planet – but that’s not quite true (at least, within the episode). Here, the fact that the businessman comes up against a government official proves important. The government official, backed by data taken from respected scientists, represents a systematic check and balance on the businessman, the state having come in to ensure that all private businesses are producing quality products for the public good. As such, it’s not that the businessman is being particularly capitalist that makes him a villain but the fact that he’s working against the social systems designed to keep him in check. We all live in a capitalist society, and the villain is someone who wants to cheat those who abide by the rules of capitalism for his own benefit.
So we have a spectacle-driven piece of absurdism being used to deliver a salient political point about business people working against the betterment of society. It’s amazing. It does feel like a step forwards for Doctor Who too, combining the best bits of the last season into one show. We have the spectacle nature of the Marinus serial married to the production ambition of the Marco Polo serial and the politics of the Sensorite serial, all in one action-adventure package. They’re even continuing to perfect the characters, the moment where the Doctor apologies to Barbara for becoming rude under pressure being an important beat for him. Doctor Who is back and it’s better than ever.
FNORD 