The Dominators

Dear Gary—

I’m so glad The Dominators is not a recon. You have to have the visual on this one just to watch the Navigator and his underling bicker throughout. The facial expressions on these stoic, grim faced, almost straight jacketed Dominators as the frustration mounts is too good to miss, and I can almost hear ‘One of these days . . .’ as the two become increasingly exasperated with one another. However it is the Doctor who ultimately carries through and gives them the ‘Bang! Zoom! Straight to the moon.’

Apparently the Quark robots of this episode were created for their merchandising potential, but I think the Dominators themselves should have been given their own sitcom.

“Command accepted,” Probationer Toba  says through gritted teeth to Navigator Rago time and time again, and time and time again he deviates from the orders (no Dalek he) and wastes precious Quark energy on foolish things like killing and hunting down humans when they should be drilling holes in the planet surface. Time and time again Navigator Rago takes Toba to task for disobedience.

“A Dominator must be obeyed without question,” Rago tells the indolent inhabitants of Dulkis, yet his own subordinate continually questions and defies him. Comic strip lines of frustration seem to emanate from his head each time he returns to find Toba flouting his orders.

The Dulcians themselves provide their own comedy routine. “Better do nothing than do the wrong thing,” is their philosophy, which rather makes a joke out of their Council debate when faced with an alien threat. They have three choices: fight, submit, or flee. They can’t make up their minds to any of them so they just sit back and wait.

This do nothing philosophy also makes a joke of their education. When the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe first meet Educator Balan he trots out his star pupil Kando to recount the history of the dead island of the planet on which they have landed. She almost stands at attention as she recites the memorized words, getting prompts from Balan as she stumbles in her rote.  She finishes with a proud smile, and she obviously had no clue what any of it really meant.

“We are taught to accept fact, being foolish to contemplate fantasy in the face of reality,” she tells our travelers when told they are not from Dulkis. “You are here; this is fact. That you come from another planet I accept because I have no other means of proving it.” And her teacher reiterates, “It seems pointless to spend time searching for reasons to prove facts; a fact is a truth.”

Not very enquiring, these peace loving, do nothing Dulcians. “We have proved that universal gentleness will cause aggression to die.” They have also proved that it causes intelligence, creativity, imagination, and originality to die as well. I can very well see how this pacifist planet was intended as a satirical commentary on the hippie movement.

Cully is the lone stand out: “Vegetables, the lot of you; you don’t live you exist.” However it’s hard to accept him as the rugged individualist he portrays when he is running around looking like Benny Hill clothed in some weird Roman like dress and sandals.

And so we have the Dulcians, eager to lend a helping hand if asked, and the Dominators who never ask for assistance: “What we need we take.” Add the Doctor and his companions to this as a wild card and you have quite a delightful story.

What the Dominators want is to blow up the planet, converting it into an energy supply to replenish their own depleted resources. And if there are any able bodied humans around they will be taken back as slaves. One meeting with the Dulcian Council, however, and Navigator Rago determines that none are even worthy of that.

Two qualities are required of a Dominator, Rago states: “intelligence and detachment.” On the one hand, the potential Dulcian slaves struggle with intelligence. On the other, his own Probationer struggles with detachment. He is surrounded by idiots; one of these days . . . .

The Doctor plays with this theme of intelligence.  “An unintelligent enemy is far less dangerous than an intelligent one, Jamie,” he explains to his companion after failing a simple test the Dominators had set before him. “Just act stupid,” he advises Jamie, and then adds parenthetically, “do you think you can manage that?” Later he exclaims to Jamie, “It’s so simple only you could have thought of it.”

The Doctor and Jamie have this kind of easy, amusing rapport that brightens all of these Troughton stories.

Jamie: “You can’t just take things to pieces—not when we’re flying at heaven knows what speed.”

Doctor: “I think I’ve got it!”

Jamie: “You think; you mean you’re not sure?”

But for all of the banter between the Doctor and Jamie there is some real, heartfelt camaraderie. Theirs is a gentle humor, unlike the Rago and Toba show.

An interesting side note here, Gary. The Dominators run a body scan on Jamie and determine that he is inferior for having only one heart. They assume the Doctor is of the same make up and don’t bother to scan him. Later they scan a Dulcian and find two hearts. A tantalizing hint.

We also get a second appearance of the sonic screwdriver in The Dominators, and we learn that it is “a little more than a screwdriver,” as the Doctor uses it to burn a hole through the wall.

And in the end the Doctor dominates the Dominators, using the Dominator’s nuclear fission seed against them, sending them ‘Bang! Zoom! Straight to the moon.’

I was sorry to see the end of the bickering duo, but the Doctor and Jamie (and let’s not forget Zoe) continue on, as do I, Gary . . .

The Wheel in Space

Dear Gary—

The first few minutes of The Wheel in Space have some interesting echoes from the Hartnell years, but with definite Troughton twists. Something is not quite right in the TARDIS, a familiar theme.  The Doctor tells Jamie to look at the Fault Indicator which is located on the control panel. The TARDIS scanner has been showing pleasant places on the screen and not what is truly outside. The Doctor realizes that this is the TARDIS’ way of tempting them away; of warning them to the dangers that await.  

All of this, Gary, sends me back to Edge of Destruction. In that early Hartnell story the TARDIS, too, was warning the crew of the danger they were in. The scanner was showing scenes that were not of the present. And the Doctor and Susan turned to the Faulticator, which at that time was located behind a panel in the TARDIS wall.

Next we have the Fluid Link. This brings us back to The Daleks.  In this story, though, the Doctor is not pretending that the Fluid Link is out of mercury, it really is. Somehow the mercury begins vaporizing. This leads the Doctor to remove the Time Vector Generator which has the effect of shrinking the TARDIS down to the size of an ordinary police box (shades of The Time Meddler when the Doctor shrinks the Monk’s TARDIS). If he didn’t, the Doctor tells Jamie by way of explanation, the mercury vapors would have overwhelmed them. He then offers Jamie a lemon sorbet from a bag he takes out of his pocket. Hartnell was known on occasion to pull chocolate from his pocket, and of course this links forward as well, but let’s not digress too much.

Now the Doctor and Jamie are in search of mercury (you’d think the Doctor would have learned by now to carry an extra store of mercury on board the TARDIS). This leads them eventually to the wheel in space of our title, a space station observing phenomena in deep space. And it leads them smack into—not Daleks this time—Cybermen.

 The Cybermen and Daleks have been in heavy rotation during these Patrick Troughton years. What I find curious, though, is the inconsistent knowledge humans seem to have of the Cybermen. Their first appearance in Doctor Who takes place in the year 1986. The next few times they appear, the humans the Doctor meets know of the Cybermen but state that they have been extinct for hundreds of years. Now here we are in the 21^st Century and the humans have no knowledge at all of Cybermen—never even heard of them. Curious.

Zoe, at least, is well informed on cybernetics and can readily understand and believe the Doctor when the others can’t comprehend.  Zoe, a fitting new companion for the Doctor and a fitting story in which to introduce her.

Zoe doesn’t want to be a robot. She gets accused of it throughout The Wheel in Space and she doesn’t like it. “I don’t want to be thought of as a freak.  . . . My head’s been pumped full of facts and figures which I reel out automatically when needed, but, well, I want to feel things as well.” Later she states, “I’ve been created for some false kind of existence where only known kinds of emergencies are catered for.”  She doesn’t like this “blind reliance on facts and logic.”

Zoe is almost like a Cyberman in training, but she rebels against it, and lucky for her she meets up with the Doctor. “Logic, my dear Zoe,” he tells her, “only enables one to be wrong with authority.” “Simple common sense” can work wonders. Common sense, independent thought, an open mind—all things counter to the cyber brain and all things the Doctor celebrates.

“Are there any ordinary circumstances in space?” the Doctor queries.  It is the extraordinary that must be accounted for, and it is the extraordinary that a cyber brain can’t comprehend. In discussing Controller Jarvis, a man showing distinct signs of rigidity of thought, a man “who can’t accept phenomena outside the laws of physics,” the Doctor states, “One does wonder what a man like that will do when faced with a problem for which he has no solution.” The Doctor always has a solution. The Doctor can accept phenomena outside of physics; he can abandon logic for common sense.

The Doctor is an anti-Cyberman, and he is just the one to pull Zoe out of the “all brain and no heart” rut she finds herself in.

At the beginning of The Wheel in Space Jamie was despondent over the loss of Victoria. He “couldn’t care less” where they went. Zoe should shake him out of this lethargy.

Hopefully, Gary, this next story will shake me out of my lethargy of reconstructions. At last I have a full story to look forward to. I know there are still reconstructions to come, but the end is in sight. And while I’ll be sad to see the end of Troughton, I’m sure the upcoming Doctors will shake me up sufficiently.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, Gary.

Fury From the Deep

Dear Gary—

Fury From the Deep suffers more than any other story so far from being a reconstruction. I’m having a hard time, Gary, remembering much about it. It takes place at a refinery and rig network and there is some menacing seaweed that is accompanied by surging waves of foam. It rather reminds me of the scene in The Thrill of It All when Doris Day opens her bedroom window and she and her daughter are swallowed by a wave of soap suds.

The seaweed in Fury From the Deep, however, has a sting to it that somehow sickens and entrances humans. There is a Mutt and Jeff duo under the seaweed’s control who go around sabotaging things and a scientist’s wife who gets stung and wanders off into the sea. There is the head of the refinery who has the ‘damn the torpedoes’ attitude,  stubbornly continuing operations as is despite warnings from his crew and the Doctor until he is maddened by the sea menace.

At least the mysterious webbing and fungus in The Web of Fear had Yeti thrown in to provide a proper threat. It’s hard to get really worked up about some seaweed, especially when you can’t properly see any of the action. The Doctor puts this particular fight in terms of matter over mind, and “matter will never conquer mind,” he states, “it’s against nature.” But when there is no matter to see it’s hard to keep the image of Doris Day being swallowed by soap out of one’s mind, even if Victoria keeps screaming at every opportunity.

And that, I have to say Gary, is the most hilarious thing of all. This ominous sea creature, this looming threat, this terrifying matter that is bent on the conquest of the mind is defeated by Victoria’s scream. Poor Victoria just has not lived up to her promise of her early stories. She has been relegated to the fate of most female companions of the Doctor, getting kidnapped and screaming. At least in this her final story her screams come to some good. The Doctor has her scream recorded and amplified, played back in a continuous loop. The sea creature retreats and all is well.

That really is all I take away from Fury From the Deep, Gary, except for the two major distinctions of this story: Victoria’s departure and the first appearance of the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver.

First the sonic screwdriver. Early in the first episode the Doctor pulls this out—“It’s a sonic screwdriver; never fails.” Too bad we don’t have the visual for this unveiling. I’ll have to keep my eyes and ears open to find out when it makes another appearance. There are some other TARDIS/Doctor related revelations in Fury From the Deep. For instance we learn in this story that “the TARDIS is perfectly capable of floating,” when the Doctor makes a sea landing. And it’s no surprise, given the Doctor’s somewhat unpredictable control of the TARDIS, that he doesn’t handle a helicopter very well either despite his long held desire to get his hands on one.  Also, the Doctor pulls out a book of legends and superstitions when seeking to identify the seaweed creature of our story. One can only imagine that the Doctor himself will end up in that book someday, or perhaps already is.

Now Victoria’s departure. It is evident from the start that she has become fed up with life on the TARDIS.  She begins with a frustrated query: “Doctor, why is it that we always land up in trouble?” Despite the Doctor’s assurance that this is “the spice of life,” she continues echoing this sentiment throughout the adventure. “Every time we go anywhere something awful happens;” “I’m tired of one crisis on top of another.” And on and on she goes, on a continual loop just like her recorded scream.

She doesn’t really want to leave the Doctor, she assures him. But just like Ben and Polly, she is tired of the monsters. Jamie takes her exit the hardest. “We are not leaving her, Jamie,” the Doctor insists, “it was her decision to stay.”  But Jamie is not quite convinced. “I was fond of her too you know, Jamie,” the Doctor exclaims defensively. I do believe poor Jamie had puppy dog eyes for young Victoria.

And so Victoria is left behind in this modern world of her future. She is taken in by the scientist Harris and his wife (now recovered from her seaweed sting). I can only hope, Gary, that Captain Hopper from Tomb of the Cybermen finds her there.

 “I don’t really want to leave you,” Victoria says. It’s hard leaving the Doctor notwithstanding the monsters. Thankfully, Gary, we don’t have to leave him yet.

The Web of Fear

Dear Gary—

The Web of Fear (or Return of the Muppet Yeti) is such a well written story that it is only afterwards in trying to recall it that I realize nothing in it really makes sense. Of course, this can be said of many Doctor Who stories, but this one in particular leaves me scratching my head wondering what this web was that the Yeti sprayed everywhere and that caused such fear; and what did the web have to do with the relentless fungus that was spreading throughout London and in particular the underground; and what is with the fog following in the fungus’ wake that swallows people; and how did one reactivated 30 year old sphere multiply into an army of Yeti; and how does any of this really aid the Great Intelligence who just after all wants the Doctor’s mind and could easily accomplish that by simply kidnapping Victoria and/or Jamie without this elaborate mishmash of a plot?

But this elaborate mishmash of a plot is the whole point, isn’t it? If the ultimate denouement doesn’t quite tie all the elements together, who really cares? As long as it is entertaining, well written, and ably acted?

I wish I had seen this story back in the 80’s when I was in Washington and we were running around the Crystal City metro stop playing out our Doctor Who scenario. Doctor Who naturally seems to lend itself to the underground.

Earth also seems to lend itself to Doctor Who. “Funny, isn’t it?” “What?” “How we keep landing on your Earth.”

The Web of Fear takes place some 30 years after The Abominable Snowmen (at least by all written accounts that I can find; although I swear that Professor Travers says that it was over 40 years ago—either the reconstruction audio is faulty, my ears are faulty, Travers’ memory is faulty, or the written accounts are faulty). Professor Travers from that story returns, 30 years older, and with a daughter Anne. We also get the return of Nicholas Courtney who had played Bret Vyon back in The Daleks’ Master Plan of the Hartnell era. Here he makes his first appearance as Lethbridge-Stewart, except he is a Colonel in this story and not yet a Brigadier and no mention is made of UNIT.

The Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria are in the TARDIS when something seems to be amiss. “Can’t control it? We’ll see about that,” the Doctor huffs in a rather familiar TARDIS refrain. After being suspended in space as a mysterious web engulfs it, the TARDIS lands in the London underground where our Yeti/web/fungus/fog/Great Intelligence adventure begins. We again get the one-two-three heads peaking around a corner, which seems to be something of a Doctor-Jamie-Victoria trademark, before the adventure really takes off.

The adventure of The Web of Fear takes place mostly in the London underground as the Yeti, our three travelers, the military, and Travers and his daughter run about in various groups, tangling with Yeti, getting webbed, being threatened by advancing fungus, working out ways to reprogram Yeti spheres, trying to explode things, and regrouping at HQ. (The London underground is much darker than the Crystal City metro stop.)

All the while they try to figure out who amongst them is working for the Great Intelligence. I have to admit, Gary, that throughout I suspected Anne Travers, and I was rather disappointed to learn that it was really Staff-Sergeant Arnold. That is another loose end that needed more explanation. Was he the traitor all along or only after he entered the fungus? And if he was the traitor all along, was it of his own free will or was he being controlled? If of his own free will—why? If he was being controlled, why wasn’t he acting robotic as Travers was when he was controlled?

No, I could much more readily see Anne Travers having had 30 years of stories from her father about the Yeti and the Great Intelligence and the spheres to work out some sort of plot to use this to her own advantage. But this is one Doctor Who story without a human scheming to use the monsters for his or her own end. This story has monsters enough without adding a madman to the mix.

“Let’s get down to some practical soldiering.” Ah, Leftbridge-Stewart.What a refreshing addition he is to Doctor Who. The Doctor flying by the seat of his pants; chaos erupting all around; cast members scattering into various groupings, getting kidnapped, searching for lost members, fighting monsters. “Let’s get down to some practical soldering.” Simple. Direct. Leftbridge-Stewart.

But as always, in the end it is not practical soldiering but the Doctor who winds things up. For all of the Yeti and fungi and fog, it is the Great Intelligence that needs to be defeated. This “formless, shapeless thing floating about in space like a cloud of mist only with a mind.” The Great Intelligence, much like the Elders in The Savages, has studied the Doctor; his reputation precedes him. “Through time and space I have observed you, Doctor. Your mind surpasses that of all other creatures.”

The Great Intelligence wants the Doctor’s intelligence.  It has a contraption for just such a purpose. The thing about contraptions and the Doctor, though—the Doctor can tinker with them. That is exactly what he does, too, with this contraption. Unfortunately he doesn’t let anyone else in on his plan and just when he thinks he is succeeding in wiping the Great Intelligence’s mind, Jamie, Leftbridge-Stewart, and the rest get down to some ‘practical soldiering’ and destroy all the machinery. Great for the immediate threat, but that still leaves the Great Intelligence lurking out there somewhere in space just aching for another Doctor Who serial to come along and resurrect it.

The Web of Fear has all the elements of great story telling thrown together in a grab bag and comes out a winner despite its incomprehensibility.

That is life, Gary, in the Doctor’s time swirl. All the elements are there, swirling about, and most times they come out a winner.

The Enemy of the World

Dear Gary—

Now that Patrick Troughton has had a chance to establish himself as the Doctor, as his own Doctor, The Enemy of the World gives him a chance to establish a solid link to the inalienable character of the Doctor as first portrayed by William Hartnell. Some of the most basic principles of the Doctor are represented in this story, as well as some simple details of his life. However, these only serve to more firmly entrench Patrick Troughton in the role, and to serve as a springboard to ever new revelations.

The Enemy of the World starts with a decidedly non-Hartnell moment as the Doctor strips down to his long johns and cavorts about in the ocean. But this is quickly followed by a Hartnellesque disclaimer of his medical qualifications when his title of Doctor is questioned by his recent rescuer. “Not of any medical significance,” he asserts.

“Doctor of Law? Philosophy?” Astrid presses him. “Which law; whose philosophies, eh?” The Doctor replies. (“One man’s law is another man’s crime,” echoes back from William Hartnell.)When Astrid and her boss Giles Kent try to enlist the Doctor’s help against his doppelganger Salamander, the Doctor queries, “Which side is good; which side is bad; and why should I interfere?” (“I’ve learned never to meddle in other people’s affairs”; “Trust can’t be taken for granted; it must be earned.”)

The Doctor reluctantly agrees to cooperate only in so far as to uncover evidence of Salamander’s true intentions. “”I’ll expose him, ruin him, have him arrested, but I won’t be his executioner—no one has that right,” he exclaims.  (“You stupid butcher, can you think of nothing else but killing?”; “In the first place, Madam, I never kill anything; neither do my friends.”)

Echoes from the past linking us to our present Doctor.

The Enemy of the World has another link to the Hartnell era, and that is the lack of any alien beings. However, this is not like any historical or mystery/murder story of that time. No, this has a decided Troughton flair.

Salamander is a perfect double for the Doctor and Patrick Troughton does a superb job in the dual role as he plays the evil mastermind, the Doctor, and the Doctor impersonating the vaguely Mexican Salamander who has been manipulating natural disasters to gain control of the world while all the while appearing to be the world’s benefactor. (Weather manipulation seems to be an emerging pattern in the Troughton era, Gary.)

The first half of our story is a clever little political intrigue, with Jamie and Victoria infiltrating the Salamander entourage and the Doctor treading warily around Kent and Astrid and later the Security Chief Donald Bruce as he tries to determine “which side is good; which side is bad.” There are assassinations and betrayals, arrests and escapes. In the end there is sufficient proof that Salamader has been manufacturing natural disasters to consolidate his own power.

Here, Gary, is where our story takes on a rather bizarre twist. It seems that Salamander is keeping a group of scientists in an underground bunker to create these disasters, and he has somehow convinced them that this is all in the interest of the war effort—a non-existent nuclear war that they believe is waging out on the surface of the Earth. None of them have been allowed to go to the surface; the few that have gone up have never returned. Salamander is the only person to come and go as he brings food and supplies to the dunderheads below.

Through his impersonation of this evil mastermind, the Doctor convinces Bruce of the truth and unmasks Kent as an original co-conspirator of Salamander (“Any man who resorts to murder as eagerly and as rapidly as you must be suspect”), although the two have since had a falling out and are now working against each other and towards their own ends. Astrid also discovers the duplicity of her boss and stumbles upon one entrance to the tunnel leading down to the hidden bunker.

With Kent and Salamander at each other’s throats, Bruce and Astrid now working to reveal the truth and seek justice, and the highly outraged scientists intent on revenge for having been duped into wasting five years of their lives underground, not to mention wreaking mass murder upon the planet, we are in for one slam bang of a finish.

An explosion nicely takes care of everything, with the good side triumphant and the bad side dead. But it’s not over quite yet. Jamie and Victoria have been sent back to the TARDIS where they meet up with the Doctor. However when an evidently befuddled Doctor instructs Jamie to work the controls they know something is wrong.

“You said we were never to touch the controls.”

Luckily, the real Doctor shows up just in time. The exposed imposter lunges for the controls and the TARDIS dematerializes with the doors still wide open. While the Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria hang on for dear life, Salamander is sucked out into the time vortex.

Yes, Gary, The Enemy of the World has some definite echoes of the past, but it is firmly rooted in the Troughton era. The character of the Doctor is both constant and in flux. It is comforting to have the core beliefs intact, but exciting to have fresh perspectives in personality.

One additional revelation of the Doctor: “I always was interested in phonetics.”

Always we learn something new, no matter how small.

Here’s hoping that somewhere out there in the time vortex you receive these thoughts . . .

The Ice Warriors

Dear Gary—

The Ice Warriors starts with a nice comedy bit highlighting the camaraderie that is developing between our three travelers. It begins with the TARDIS landing unexpectedly sideways (“It was a blind landing”) so that the three have to climb over each other to exit, and ends with the classic one-two-three heads peaking around a corner, one above the other, as they enter the base they have materialized beside. I have to say, also, that the strange, high-pitched 60’s sci-fi music that starts out the story lends an unintended bit of humor as well. I almost expect a green alien woman to come floating by looking for her beloved Dr. Smith.

The base the Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria are entering is reminiscent of that from The Moon Base except instead of controlling all weather patterns this base is focused solely on containing massive glacier movements that have been triggered by the lack of carbon dioxide. It seems that the people of future Earth have developed an inexhaustible food supply that does not require plant life and have replaced paradise with a parking lot so to speak (actually I think it has been replaced with living quarters to house the exploding population). No plant life=no carbon dioxide=New Ice Age. But not to worry, ionizers have been set up at multiple bases around the world to keep the advancing glaciers in check. Seems like it would be easier and cheaper to plant a few trees, but then we wouldn’t have a story.

The Ice Warriors highlights the Doctor Who love/hate relationship with computers/technology. Two of the main Doctor Who antagonists are humanoid beings that have had their humanity removed and replaced with electronics—Daleks and Cybermen. In The Ice Warriors the real threat comes not from the Ice Warriors themselves but from the indecision and dependence on the computer that runs the base.

The Doctor’s unease with computers is established early in the story when he is asked if he has ever worked with them. “Only when I have to,” he replies. And the ineffectiveness of the base leader who relies solely upon the computer is evident from the start. As one of his men says of him, Leader Clent is not a scientist but rather an organizer; “he should have been born a robot.” He doesn’t think for himself, he obeys what the computer tells him. “I do think you might try trusting human beings instead of computers,” the Doctor tells him.  “I trust no one Doctor, not anymore; human emotions are unreliable.” Sounds like a Dalek or Cyberman in the making.

The Ice Warriors of our story do pose a threat. Frozen in the ice, the base scientist unthaws one and we learn that they are Martians who crashed during the first ice age and have been frozen ever since. The recently thawed Ice Warrior, Varga, kidnaps Vicki, frees the rest of his men, and determines that the ionizer of the base is a threat and must be destroyed. The Martian ship, however, doesn’t have much power left and ultimately they don’t pose the real danger for the base. The fact that they have Vicki is the only complication for the Doctor to work out. They do have a weapon of sorts, but that is an easy matter for the Doctor.

No, the actual danger is the fact that there is a glacier bearing down on the base on the one hand and on the other there is an alien ship buried in the ice that may or may not have an engine that could trigger a nuclear explosion if they use the ionizer on the glacier. Couple this with the fact that Leader Clent is crippled by his reliance on the computer, and the computer in turn is crippled by this rock and a hard place riddle, and a genuine disaster is in the making.

“Because it is so logical it can’t gamble; it can’t take risks,” is the reason given for the computer’s indecisive decision to do nothing. It is playing for time. By demanding action, it seems, the crew is asking the computer to commit suicide. I’m not sure about that one, Gary. By instilling a sense of survival in the computer the show is ascribing human like qualities to it. Certainly there are Doctor Who super computers that develop the capacity for independent thought and monomaniacal traits, but there is no indication that the computer of our story is anything more than just that—a computer.

“This is a decision for a man to make not a machine. The computer isn’t designed to take risks but that is the essence of man’s progress. We must decide.” In the end, when pressed to make a choice, the computer implodes and the Doctor and the base’s rogue scientist Penley take over. They use the ionizer, only a minor explosion occurs, the glacier is stopped, the Ice Warriors are defeated, and all is right once again with the world.

This Man versus Technology theme is a fitting one for the Troughton Who era. Patrick Troughton’s Doctor is definitely one for individuality, creativity, impulsiveness. He uses a rock, not a sonic screwdriver. He knows what he is doing—he hopes. Or as he says in this story, “Your regulations do not apply to me; I work in my own way—freely.” Or as the computer asseses him: "High IQ but undisciplined."

One final note about Patrick Troughton, Gary, before I sign off. “I live in hope,” he says in The Ice Warriors. I’m glad to see this theme of hope continuing through from the Hartnell years—“You must travel with understanding as well as hope;” “Isn’t it better to travel hopefully than arrive?”

"I live in hope.”

Here’s hoping, Gary . . .

The Abominable Snowmen

Dear Gary—

I have been looking forward to The Abominable Snowmen for some time—ever since I learned that these lost stories are available in reconstructed form. I know very little of Patrick Troughton as the Doctor, but even my limited knowledge of him strongly associates him with the Yeti. I just did not know that the Yeti were more or less muppets (full-bodied muppets ala Big Bird and Snuffleupagus to be exact). To be even more exact, they are full-bodied muppet robots controlled by the Great Intelligence, a disembodied alien being intent upon conquering the Earth from his base located in a Tibetan monastery.

The Yeti are not the only revelation for me in The Abominable Snowmen, however. I also am getting a clearer picture of Patrick Troughton’s Doctor. He is more than just the Yeti and a recorder, the only two solid bits of information I ever really had of him before now.

“Doctor, you did know what you were doing, didn’t you,” Polly asks of him back in Patrick Troughton’s first story The Power of the Daleks. This echo of uncertainty follows Troughton’s Doctor.

“When you’ve been with the Doctor as long as I have you begin to realize you don’t know what he’s talking about,” Jamie offers up in our story. Troughton definitely gives the impression that he is making things up as he goes along.

“Have you thought of some clever plan, Doctor?” Jamie asks as the two are confronted with a Yeti. “Yes, Jamie, I believe I have,” the Doctor replies. What is this clever plan? To throw a rock at it. I think perhaps he has learned a thing or two from Vicki back in Galaxy Four who “observed, collated, concluded” and then threw a rock at the Chumbly.

“Would you walk up to a creature like that with just a screwdriver in your hand?” Current Doctor would, armed as he is with a sonic screwdriver. Patrick Troughton’s Doctor, however, has not yet gone sonic. For Patrick Troughton a rock will have to do.

And a sonic-less Doctor still yields results. “I’m really rather pleased with myself.” Ah, there is the continuity binding Troughton to all Doctors past and present. Arrogance. But where Hartnell’s Doctor’s arrogance was born of supreme confidence, Troughton’s is born of almost childish delight. While Hartnell would “observe, note, collate, and then conclude,” Troughton simply states, “I know what I’m doing—I hope.” He is flying by the seat of his pants and reveling in his success.

The story of The Abominable Snowmen is a bit disappointing, though. I’m sure much of this is due to the fact that it is another reconstruction, and not having quite the same script strength of some of the other reconstructions it doesn’t hold my interest for long. It also doesn’t help that the monks of our story don’t even come close to resembling Tibetans .

The Great Intelligence is another ambiguous alien with ambiguous motives. Somehow the Yeti it has created (and which are controlled through the use of a chess board) will take control of the Tibetan mountain and from there conquer the Earth. The Great Intelligence has a couple of entranced monks doing its will as well. The other monks are divided into camps of those who trust the Doctor and those who do not.

The Doctor reveals that he had visited this monastery 300 years earlier, and as proof he has the ‘Holy Ghanta’ that the monks gave him for safe keeping the last time he was there. This serves to ally him with the monks as they unite to fight the marauding Yeti and to break the hold of the Great Intelligence. In the end it is rather easy as they just have to smash up some equipment located in the inner sanctum.

I do find it rather amusing, Gary, that in the midst of rampaging muppet robot Yetis we have the monks proclaiming that Victoria “is a devil woman.” And what is her crime? “Headstrong, that’s what she is.” Yes, I’m glad to see that this aspect of Victoria’s character continues to be developed. She is impatient when left behind in the safety of the TARDIS and urges Jamie to go out exploring. Then, when put under guard in the monastery, she gives her jailers the slip to investigate the mysterious and off-limits inner sanctum.

“I just don’t like mysteries,” she declares, and she is determined to get to the bottom of things. Headstrong. Devil Woman. I like it.

I also like that the next story has only two of its six episodes still missing. And I just want to take a moment here, Gary, to note that the Troughton years seem to have gone back to the longer six episode story lines. Some of the Hartnell stories that were six or more episodes long could drag on, but I’m finding that I don’t mind as much with Troughton, even in reconstructed form. I believe that this is partly thanks to some excellent scripts. Or maybe it is just that I haven’t been exposed to most of these stories before and am curious to learn more of Troughton’s Doctor.

Whatever the case, I send this out, Gary, and hope that it finds you somewhere in the swirl of time.