Down the Overflow Pipe (Doctor Who: Planet of Giants P3: “Crisis” Review)

Written by Tom

During a cliffhanger reprise where everything’s been reshot and is now completely different, we see the Doctor and Susan hide in the sink’s overflow pipe, thus avoiding being drowned. Team TARDIS reunite, try to use the telephone to tell the police about the businessman (it doesn’t work), then decide to just set fire to the shed before legging it. Meanwhile, the businessman rings up the government, pretending to be the civil servant he shot in order to file a fake report extolling the virtues of his dodgy pesticide. He does this terribly though, to the point that the telephone operator gets a policeman involved to arrest the guy. Team TARDIS then return to the TARDIS and reverse the miniaturisation.

Originally, the minitaurisation serial was going to be a standard four episodes long before Verity Lambert had the final two episodes cut down into one. You can see how the original serial would’ve split the material, the business with the phone being episode three and the business with setting fire to the shed being episode four. You can also see why the edits were made – the business with the phone ends up being a complete dud that fails to resolve everything, meaning that the original third episode would’ve been twenty-minutes of literally nothing happening. It’s perhaps not the best when a full quarter of your series’ opening serial does nothing but highlight how pointless it is.

Even with the cuts, this issue still largely exists. The fact remains that Team TARDIS literally do nothing to resolve the pesticide plotline. The phone operator figures out that the businessman is shady on her own, and she’s the one who gets the police officer to turn up and arrest the businessman. At most, Team TARDIS save the businessman’s accomplice from being shot, but even that’s barely worth anything when the policeman arrives and arrests him a few seconds later. After this, everyone runs back to the TARDIS and manage to reverse the shrinking pretty easily without the help of anything from the pesticide plotline, implying that its purpose was really was to just get in Team TARDIS’ way and pad the story to last more than twenty minutes. Much of the plot really has been an exercise in running out the clock with weird stuff in order to fill up the schedule.

Sympathy and Understanding from an Insane or a Criminal Mind (Doctor Who: Planet of Giants P2: “Dangerous Journey” Review)

Written by Tom

The cat walks off. When the businessman and his scientist friend arrive to dispose of the government official’s body, the minaturised Team TARDIS scarper, Ian and Barbara hiding in a nearby briefcase. Alas, it’s this briefcase that the scientist picks up and takes inside his shed/laboratory. Ian and Barbara investigate the lab and figure out that the businessman and scientist are manufacturing overly effective pesticides. The Doctor and Susan climb up a drain pipe to rejoin Ian and Barbara, ending up in a sink. Team TARDIS are almost united, only for them to have to scarper again when the business and scientist reappear. The Doctor and Susan hide in the sink’s drain pipe while the scientist washes his hands. This leads us to the best cliffhanger Doctor Who‘s done so far – a shot of the scientist taking out a sink plug, the credits rolling as the sink slowly drains.

After last week set up a pretty complicated collection of elements, this week’s episode settles into something much simpler, becoming the type of pragmatic “how do we survive this environment” adventure narrative that’s commonplace to Doctor Who by now, albeit in an environment that’s more high concept than usual. This is good for us though as it allows us to look a little deeper at the exact mechanics of how the serial’s absurdism works, something I slightly scrimped on last time in favour of everything else going on in the serial.

Let’s take some examples. Last week, Ian and Susan were made to cower from the sudden blotting out of the sun; a jump cut revealed that this was being caused by a somewhat bumbling government inspector walking past, completely unaware that Ian and Barbara were even there. Last week’s cliffhanger of Team TARDIS being threatened by a cat was resolved by it getting bored and running off. The plot content of this week’s cliffhanger is the Doctor and Susan apparently being violently drowned, but the visual content is a thirty-second shot of a sink draining. Each beat works via a mechanism in which something that is life-threatening to the main characters turns out to also be something completely innocuous from the perspective of a normal sized person. It’s this duality and disconnect that makes the episode specifically absurd – that everything in it is both patently ridiculous and genuinely dangerous at the same time.

Like Something Too Big For Its Frame (Doctor Who: Planet of Giants P1: “Planet of Giants” Review)

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.