Egyptian mummies building a missile to destroy a pyramid on Mars in order to free an imprisoned extraterrestrial Egyptian god so that he can destroy all life in the Universe. Only in Dr Who! This is another delicious episode from this brilliant period of the series’ history. It achieves a scary, claustrophobic quality despite a lot of the action taking place outdoors, thanks to a force field that confines all the characters to the grounds of a spooky old manor house. The result is that the guest cast stays small— and none of them can simply run away. There are no anonymous extras here: each victim of the monsters is a character we know, and in some cases a character we’ve watched trying to run for his life— only to see there’s nowhere to run. The action may take place in open fields or woods, but it feels like being trapped inside the narrow corridors of the old house, looking for a door that doesn’t exist. Showrunners Hinchcliffe and Holmes want scary for their era of Dr Who: they’ve got it.
It’s now a clear running theme this season that the series is paying tribute to classic horror & sci-fi films. This week its “The Mummy,” obviously. What makes it work is that Dr Who is not just doing remakes or imitations of the classic monster movies of times past: it’s presenting its own entirely new stories— distinctly Dr Who stories— that simply use the old classics as inspiration. With good writing to back it up, the result led one TV critic of around this time to say “Doctor Who is always at its best when its roots are showing.”
Details:
- Credited to writer Stephen Harris, this episode is mostly the work of the incomparable Robert Holmes. The way things are working at this point in the series, writers aren’t bringing story ideas to the Dr Who office. Instead Hinchcliffe and Holmes have decided on a set of stories to do, and then commission writers to work on them. The idea given to the writer was usually no more than a single line, such as: “Write one about mummies.” The story Harris came up with, according to Producer Hinchcliffe, was largely unsuitable but Harris wasn’t available for the start-over-from-scratch that was needed, so Robert Holmes stepped in to essentially write an entirely new story. Onscreen credit remained with Harris because of contracts and BBC procedures and all that legal sort of stuff, but this is a Holmes episode.
- Holmes’ influence is perhaps most visible in the care taken to make something out of every single character, even the most minor bit player whose only dramatic purpose is to be promptly killed by the mummies. This was something Holmes was careful about all the way back to “Terror of the Autons,” where he took care to give a backstory to every single one of the Master’s victims— Holmes knew the villain’s threat was better shown to the viewers if they’re not allowed to simply treat the victims as game tokens.
- At this point I have to bring up a name I haven’t mentioned before, but which was very important to Dr Who (not in a good way) in this era: Mary Whitehouse. Whitehouse was the leader of a political pressure group in the 60’s and 70’s that wanted to clean up popular entertainment. (You thought only the US had groups like that?) She had a lot of targets: music, movies, TV, books. But she hated Doctor Who. Proverbially, children watched it while hiding behind the sofa. The young viewers liked being scared but as far as Whitehouse was concerned the fact that it was scary made it the exact same thing as child abuse. She described the show as “nightmarish” and “brutality for tots.” And that was in the sixties. Hinchliffe and Holmes conscious decision to ramp up the darkness and horror elements in the series infuriated her, and starting with this episode Dr Who was squarely in her organization’s sights. Hinchcliffe says of the campaign “She seemed to think no one over the age of 5 watched Dr Who. In fact it was never produced by the Children’s Department, it was in Drama Serials, and was always meant to appeal to a wider audience. So she was looking at the show from the wrong angle.” [Quote paraphrased from memory.] Whitehouse’s campaign would eventually succeed, and cause the BBC to mandate an era of harmless comedy on Dr Who. But not quite yet.
- In fairness, I’ll grant that this period of Dr Who sees a degree of violence that is not entirely in character for the series. The new series, for example, knows how to scare our socks off with Weeping Angels or spooky children in gas masks, but it would never show us a helpless little man being crushed to death between two mummies, as happens in this story. It’s the kind of moment that makes you stop and say, “Wait, did I just see that in Doctor Who?” And more like that is coming.
- On to more pleasant topics. Take out your notepad for the Great UNIT Dating Controversy. It’s been a while since we got to make an entry, but I’m sure you have it somewhere. As you’ll recall, we previously established through clear, on-screen statements that the Second Doctor met UNIT for the first time in 1979, so the Third Doctor must have joined UNIT as scientific advisor some time after that. In this story, Sarah states that she is “from 1980” and further dialog makes clear she’s referring to the last point of departure in the TARDIS, and the time she’s planning to go back to. The first cracks have appeared in UNIT’s near-future dating: according to this, the entire time the Third Doctor was with UNIT (5 seasons of the show) must have taken place in a single year. (I suppose we could make it almost two years, if “The Invasion” happened in January 1979 and Sarah came from December 1980.) Technically possible, but this is a real stretch. Fans who like “Playing the Game” (as Sherlock Holmes fans call it) now begin to have serious difficulties working these things out.
- Speaking of UNIT, the story opens with the TARDIS en route back to Earth, with the Doctor feeling moody about it. Dramatically, the series has already left UNIT behind but the writers are gradually easing the audience into it, with dialog like this easing the transition. It’ll keep up until Sarah leaves the series— after 5 years with Pertwee’s Doctor, Hinchcliffe and Holmes know the viewers will still be thinking that the Doctor’s working at UNIT even if the series no longer shows it very often.
- We learn in this episode that Sarah Jane Smith is skilled with a hunting rifle. At one point she and the Doctor have a plan that’ll require her to hit a smallish target from a distance. The Doctor offers to help but Sarah says, “I know what I’m doing” as she calmly loads, and later hits the target with one try. There’s an interesting behind-the-scenes story here. Elisabeth Sladen wanted to have Sarah be clumsy with the rifle, and then fire and miss several times before getting lucky enough to hit the target. Sladen said she didn’t see anything in Sarah’s background that would have given her the needed experience with a rifle. It was episode director Paddy Russell who insisted that Sarah would be skilled. One of the few female directors to work on Classic Dr Who, Russell saw it as a feminist issue to show Sarah was as skilled with the rifle as any male character. I side with the director, but not for any reasons of politics whether feminist or otherwise: Sarah Jane Smith is an investigative reporter who would have had plenty of chances to accumulate interesting experiences, and seeing her coolly handling the rifle gives us a reminder that she’s not just a teenager gazing worshipfully at the Doctor .*cough*Jo Grant*cough*
Can History be Changed?
There’s a major step in this episode toward this question, often raised by Doctor Who fandom. Surprisingly, this episode is the first time in a long time that there’s been a chance to raise it.
Way back in “The Aztecs,” the First Doctor warned Barbara “you can’t change history— not one line!” Then in “The Time Meddler” he met another Time Lord trying to change history, and the Doctor knew he had to stop him. “History can’t be changed” had become “History must not be changed.”
We can pursue this question through lots of permutations (why, for example, does the Doctor treat the past from the viewers’ point of view as something different from the “present” or “future” when it should all be the same to him?) but it’s not until this story that we get a really major statement:
At once point our heroes are back inside the TARDIS and Sarah suggests they just leave. Harry suggested this back in “The Ark in Space” but both the Doctor and Sarah refused because it would leave the people they’d met in danger. Here, though, Sarah thinks she already knows nothing bad will happen: “We know Sutekh didn’t destroy the world in 1911 because I’m from 1980.”
To make his point, the Doctor pilots the TARDIS to 1980— and Sarah steps out into the blasted, lifeless landscape of a dead planet. “1980, Sarah, if you want to get off.” So now not only can history be changed, the series actually shows it to us: Sutekh will destroy the world unless the Doctor and Sarah stop him. Since this is a changed history but Sutekh was not a time traveler, we have to assume that the intervention of the Doctor was always a part of what was supposed to happen, so his departure without fixing it is what created the alternate timeline.
This, of course, allows the series to do historical episodes with an alien threat without the viewers saying, as Sarah does here, that they already know no alien invasion happened. Surprisingly, this is the first time since the series started that such a situation actually arose (in “The Time Warrior” there was no question of the Sontaran changing history except for the fates of a band of robbers whose fate no history book recorded anyway). It’ll arise frequently in the future, and the move made in this episode is what allows that kind of story to happen.
Of course it raises a new question: if by failing to act as he was meant to, the Doctor can change history (for the worse in this case) why can’t he change it for the better by intervening in historical tragedies? The new series will eventually answer that question by introducing the “fixed point in time” concept— which raises lots of new questions, but I’ve had enough for now.
Next week: “The Android Invasion” 4 episodes.
