Format: DVD
Warts & All: Mega Facepalm
Quote: The best laid plans of men and Kraals aft gang aglae.
Review: This opens well, with a soldier striding along all twitchy and jerky before crashing headlong off a cliff. Seriously, if you didn’t know the story had ‘android’ in the title, you’d be thoroughly drawn in by the mystery of what was wrong with him. And the idyllic (actually really picturesque) English village with the locals delivered by truck to start acting really strangely, it all has the surrealist intrigue of an Avengers episode – which makes Patrick (Mother) Newell’s later appearance as the Brigadier’s replacement, Colonel Faraday, a nice touch. The real mystery here though is what have they done to this season’s Doctor Who? They’ve replaced it with a malfunctioning duplicate that, to be honest, marches jerkily along before crashing headlong off a cliff. Probably why I prefer to think of Terror Of The Zygons as the farewell UNIT story, because this is much less a swan song, more of a swan dive. Without the grace.
The Doctor’s got a new coat, but Tom’s performance seems lazy at times, half-hearted as though he knows this is a bit rubbish and not worth the time and effort. He’s not wrong, but it’s a shame when he’s part of the problem. There are occasions when the proper Tom shines through, but he’s given precious little to work with or act against. And he’s not alone there. Lis Sladen is frankly the best thing in the entire escapade, showing some true Sarah Jane spirit (thanks to some of those rusty plot mechanics she gets to rescue the Doctor from restraints twice in one episode) and investing her android self with some nicely nuanced difference. The best bit is (obviously) the Face Off! Moment, Sarah toppling over and having her face fall off to expose her android inner workings – despite her androidness being so heavily telegraphed and confirmed beforehand – is one of the all-time great cliffhanger endings. Never mind that it’s not a very hard fall to dislodge a visage and yet when Max Faulkner’s UNIT soldier he took that tumble into the quarry at the beginning he landed pretty much intact. So intact, in fact, that neither Sarah nor the Doctor manages to detect a hint of artificiality about him, even though surely the basics you’d check for signs of life – pulse, heartbeat, breathing – ought to reveal something a bit amiss.
But that’s entirely illustrative of how this story lurches mechanically along. It’s much more like Sarah’s android, with the face fallen off an and all the machinery exposed, clunking away very hard to make pre-conceived moments happen. Terry Nation appears to have had a jumbled collection of ideas in his head and the writing is like badly oiled clockwork, grinding its gears to contrive assorted moments like that. Few of those moments can match that cliffhanger’s impact, however, and ultimately the overall effect is of pieces of a jigsaw that don’t fit. They’re botched and hammered into place. And he’s clearly obsessed with capsules containing deadly viruses at this point. There’s a small helping of dodgy CSO with the rocket and a particularly poor shot of the android container pods landing behind a hill, but any ropey visuals are secondary to one of the biggest levels of dumb to grace the classic series, as Milton Johns (in a portrayal pitched somewhere in the vicinity of his camp Nazi from Enemy Of The World) realises that he had a perfectly good eye behind his eyepatch all the time. Whatever conditioning the Kraals have subjected him to, this is brain-bogglingly stupid. No matter how far Doctor Who stories might stretch credibility, I can’t believe no-one – like, say, the script editor? – caught this and fixed it.
Even in the company of a long list of elements that don’t make sense, as is the case here, it stands out like a huge facepalm or a Homer Simpson ‘D’oh!’ of epic proportions. The Kraals are among the more rubbish alien villains, which is probably why one ended up running a coffee shop in a comedy short story of mine, with actors Martin Friend and Roy Skelton having to do their best behind rather rigid rubbery masks with no facility for expression and mouths that might as well be in Spaghetti Westerns for all that their movements match the dialogue. Styggron’s great plan is slightly less convincing than the Kraals themselves, with no clear basis for such an elaborate staged re-enactment that I can see. But then, as a Kraal scientist, Styggron does appear partial to orchestrating the odd unnecessary experiment or demonstration. Like when he goes to the trouble of scanning Crayford to construct a new android specifically programmed to be hostile towards Kraals, just to show off his new gun and prove that the androids are not indestructible. Something we already knew when the fake Sarah’s face fell off because she hit a soft tuft of grass slightly awkwardly.
Honestly, I could pick holes in this all day long. It’s a shame that I can’t even find consolation in the guest appearances of Benton and Harry Sullivan, because it’s actually kind of sad to see such favourite characters reduced as they are here. The space-suited androids with the loaded fingers, I guess, make for a striking presence early on, adding to that general strangeness which plays to episode one’s strengths, such as they are, but it really is downhill from there.
A badly engineered robotic story best with limps, tics and a dodgy eye.
