When I first became a Dr Who fan, back in the mid-80s right after the 20th anniversary special, The Five Doctors, broadcast on PBS, Underworld was considered by more experienced fans to be one of the two, or maybe three, worst episodes of Dr Who ever made (the other two dishonorable candidates were The Horns of Nimon and, reaching back into history, the First Doctor story The Gunfighters). In just a few more years, Classic-Who’s final decline would offer new candidates for the bottom tier, but these three are always mentioned in any “worst of” survey of the fans.
Back when I did The Gunfighters in this series of reviews, I offered the conclusion that it was better than its reputation. We’ll get to Nimon in due course, but this week Underworld comes up for review. Does it, like Hartnell’s western, do better than its reputation?
No. Sadly, no. In my opinion, at least, this is the single worst episode of Dr Who, Classic or New, ever. Watching it again was painful, and doubly so coming so soon after the close of the series’ golden age under Hinchcliffe & Holmes (see more on that below). The most obvious flaw is visual: the majority of the story’s action takes place, as the title implies, in a network of underground caves. But no cave sets were built. Instead the whole episode relies on superimposing the actors, using cheap 70s-era chromakey, over still pictures of caves, and occasionally obvious miniature cave models. Dr Who used chromakey extensively from the start of the color era (there was no corresponding technique for black-and-white cameras), and always with unconvincing results, but they generally kept it to a few special effects shots they couldn’t do any other way. Relying on it as a substitute for sets, for the majority of the story, was a huge mistake. There are some reasons why it wasn’t the creative team’s fault (see below for more) but assigning blame is a different question from assessing quality and the fact remains: it looks awful, and that prevents any chance of getting into the story.
But the chromakey isn’t this episode’s only problem. The writing is appalling. The script comes from the team of Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who had contributed quite a few previous episodes, most recently The Invisible Enemy a couple of stories ago. Baker & Martin were generally reliable, although I have to wonder if perhaps their previous successes owed a lot to the script editor they were working with. Both The Invisible Enemy and Underworld are poor (especially with some egregious science mistakes that even Dr Who’s freewheeling attitude can’t cover up). But Underworld is also completely incoherent, filled with jarring cuts from one unconnected scene to the next, characters with all the personality of a plastic board game token, bad dialog, things that happen for little or no reason— when things happen at all, that is, because the script’s worst sin is the worst sin a Dr Who episode can commit: it’s boring. It’s as boring as… I don’t know, unsalted popcorn. For four episodes, virtually nothing happens except a lot of undeveloped characters wander around in a rather listless daze until finally the story comes to an end with a weary sigh.
There are story elements that had potential. The TARDIS materializes on an ancient Minyan spaceship, that escaped its home planet after it was destroyed in a terrible war. Since then, the surviving ship has been in search of a lost colony ship, the P7E, which carried a “race bank” of genetic material they could use to bring back their species. The P7E went missing soon after launch, but it’s now the only hope for survival of their species, so our crew have been in search of it ever since. As the Doctor arrives, they finally locate it, and with the end of their quest at hand they descend into the underground civilization where the P7E is buried, hoping to recover the race bank.
The twist that should have been the center of the story is this: the Doctor reveals that the tragedy of Minyos’ destruction is the origin of the Time Lords’ laws against intervention. In the earliest days of their exploration of time and space, the Time Lords arrived on Minyos where they were taken as gods. Letting it go to their heads, the Time Lords accepted the role, posing as gods and providing the Minyans with advanced technology, thinking they were helping the primitive Minyans build a better world. Instead, they learned how to make terrible weapons before their civilization had advanced enough to handle them, and destroyed themselves. The Time Lords resolved never to interfere in other worlds again. A real kicker to the story is that the technology for regeneration was among the Time Lords’ gifts to the Minyans. Using it, the crew of the Minyan ship have seen searching for the P7E for a hundred thousand years, regenerating every time they reach a point of dying of old age, but it’s become a living hell for them. From what were hundreds of crew originally, there are only four left— because the others eventually got so tired and worn out they either committed suicide or let themselves die without regenerating. The last four are wearily dragging through the same old search routine they’ve done a million times before, exhausted beyond endurance by the monotony of their existence.
The obvious snide joke here is for me to add “exactly like anyone unfortunate enough to watch this whole story through.” But seriously, how can a story like this not be brilliant? The Doctor lives his life repudiating the Time Lords’ non-interference law: how does he react when confronted by the consequences of the Time Lords’ disastrous past intervention, not just the extinction of the Minyan race but the living hell of the four survivors, struggling to finish their quest so that they can finally rest? The Minyans, meanwhile, blame the Time Lords for their plight: “The gods used us for their sport, they were only playing a cruel trick on us all along.” So how do they react to the Doctor? Meanwhile, when the end of their quest comes within view, what does that mean for them?
It doesn’t take the more dramatic new series to turn these questions into a truly amazing episode of Dr Who. Classic Dr Who’s straight adventure format could have run with it. Jon Pertwee at his paternalistic preachy best would have thrived on these ideas; the show in its Gothic Horror phase could have turned it into a masterpiece. But what happens here? All of this gets raised and then promptly forgotten in the first five minutes or so. The Doctor tells Leela the story as if it means nothing to him. The Minyans are suspicious of the Doctor at first but get over it right away. Then everyone just shrugs and gets on with some by-the-numbers running up and down corridors.
Except, as noted before, it’s an unusually listless, and visually unconvincing bunch of running up and down corridors. It’s a crime. A positive crime.
Details
- Primary blame for the debacle comes down to money. By the time they set out to make it, the show had none. There were perennial budget problems on Classic Dr Who, of course, and these tended to be worse in the latter half of each season (they’d inevitably overspend early on, and have to pay for it toward the end). According to interviews, this was made worse by the fact that, here in 1978, inflation was out of control in England (as it was in the US) and that meant a budget established 6 months earlier was already out of date by the time production for a late-season serial came around. I’m not sure how much I buy that excuse: the behind-the-scenes documentary on the DVD puts up a chart of inflation in the UK during the period but it shows that the worst year from that standpoint was two years earlier— when Philip Hinchcliffe was producer and somehow finding a way to get things done even so. I think there’s no way to exonerate Graham Williams from blame for the fact that Underworld was so cash-strapped.
- Nevertheless, it was cash-strapped and whoever is to blame for it, it wasn’t the director and designer who actually worked on the episode. Baker & Martin were told to write an entirely studio-bound story (no money for location work), and even to keep the number of sets to a minimum. They responded by relying on the classic Dr Who running-through-corridors trick as a way of filling the time (though as noted above they did a poor job even of that). The set designer drew up plans for a T-shaped cave set that could be shot from different directions and look completely different from each angle (a tried-and-true method that is used by, and works well for, even high-budget productions). Then the horrible truth came down on them from the production office: even to build a single set would cost more money than they had.
- They scraped up money for the spaceship set, which could double (with redecorating) as the interior of both the search ship and the P7E. Admittedly, it’s a good set. The designer then proposed the idea of using chromakey for all the scenes in the caves. He knew that relying on chromakey, having the actors do their whole scenes in a “limbo” set of bluescreen fabric and trying to match that up with the pictures, would be enormously difficult and would require a lot of extra work from all involved: but it wouldn’t cost them any more money (the chromakey was all done in-camera while shooting). The only alternative would have been to simply cancel this story and put out a shortened season.
- I give credit to the director, technicians and actors who put in the extra effort (by every account, it was a nightmarishly difficult shoot, especially for the director and the technical staff) in order to to what they had to do. It’s a pity that the result was not worthy of their efforts. I place blame on Graham Williams for mismanaging the budget to the extent that such an effort was necessary— as noted above, I don’t think the inflation excuse quite covers it.
- The story is actually drawn from Greek mythology. Noticing that the previous creative team had a lot of success mining nineteenth century literature and horror fiction for story ideas, Williams and script editor Anthony Read had the idea of following a similar tack, looking to even older sources. In this case, they drew heavily on the myth of Jason and the Argonauts’ quest for the golden fleece. (Minyan = Minoan, Captain Jackson = Jason, P7E = Persephone, Race Bank = Golden Fleece, etc.)
- In tapping mythology, Baker and Martin failed spectacularly at checking up on science. There’s an intriguing idea at the start: the P7E is located in a “spiral nebula” from which planets are formed, and since it was the most massive “particle” around, it attracted matter to it and a planet formed around it. This happened much faster than it would in reality (much faster: our heroes’ ship is briefly endangered by particles clumping up around it just in the time it takes to fly through the nebula) but it’s forgivable in Dr Who’s near-fantasy version of science fiction. What isn’t forgivable, however, is a scene when the Doctor and company descend a vertical shaft to reach the ship. Leela’s afraid they’ll fall, but the Doctor says “No, we’re here at the center of the planet, where there’s no gravity.” That’s correct as far as it goes, but— he demonstrates by stepping from the ground he’s standing on (standing) into empty space, where he indeed hangs there without falling, and after everyone follows, they all push off and float gently downward until they reach the bottom, where they can stand once again and immediately walk across a deep chasm over a sagging rope bridge. So apparently at the center of planets there’s no gravity in this one vertical shaft but it’s still there everywhere else. It would have been so easy to just have the Doctor refer to an antigravity beam from the P7E in the shaft, or for that matter just have an elevator. Instead, they try to get clever about how gravity works and the mind-boggling inconsistency that results is so awful that even in an outright fantasy it would draw howls of outrage.
- A final coda to the departed Hinchcliffe/Holmes era: the episodes of season 15 weren’t shot in the same order as broadcast. Of the 6 stories this season, the first three shot were (I believe) commissioned and mostly developed under Hinchcliffe and Holmes, and the final 3 under the new team of Williams/Read. The three “old guard” stories were Horror of Fang Rock, Image of the Fendahl, and The Sunmakers. The three “new team” stories were The Invisible Enemy, Underworld, and next week’s The Invasion of Time. Line them up that way and the change in quality is stark from one creative team to the next. Only moving Invisible Enemy up to be the second broadcast story of the season gives an impression of a gradual shift away from the previous era.
Next Week
“The Invasion of Time,” 6 episodes, the season 15 finale.
