I need to call the Brigadier for this one. Not Lethbridge-Stewart, the one played by Graham Chapman on Monty Python who’d show up to call a halt because things were getting too silly.
This is Dr Who lost in its own comedy. The problem isn’t the quantity of comedy— the series can be as funny as it wants to be, with the Doctor’s comic eccentricity and the often equally eccentric universe in which he lives. The problem is knowing the difference between what parts are funny and what parts turn serious. The show has to take its monsters, and its villains, seriously or else there’s no threat, no genuine dramatic conflict or tension, and so no story. That’s where The Creature from the Pit falls down. The Doctor and Romana quip their way (with admittedly a few very funny lines) through a planet of dimwitted caricatures, all of whom exist not merely to tell jokes, they are jokes. There aren’t any actual characters to be found.
And no genuine peril either. At one point the Doctor’s been thrown into the Pit of the title, and is attempting to climb back out. Clinging to the wall with one hand, he rummages in his pocket with the other and pulls out a book: Everest in Easy Stages. Looking at the first page, he exclaims in dismay, “It’s in Tibetan!” So he rummages again and pulls out a second book: Teach Yourself Tibetan, and starts cross-referencing.
It’s impossible to care about the adventure in a story where stuff like this is going on. It is possible to find the humor funny, and the one thing that saves this story from being a total failure is that a lot of it really is very funny. “Point the dog against the wall!” shouts the villain at one point, when Romana is carrying K-9 who has previously demonstrated his nose laser— nowhere but Dr Who could you have a line like that. But then again, wouldn’t it be even better if we really cared about the story and this came in as a classic bit of comic relief from the scariness? Watching this story, you search in vain for any reason to feel suspense, or excitement, or even to care very much.
Details
- The monster of the story, the titular Creature from the Pit, is infamous in Dr Who lore. It’s supposed to be an immense, shapeless, amoeboid creature oozing its way through the underground tunnels. It was beyond the resources of pre-CGI visual effects on Dr Who’s budget to realize such a creature. To be fair, a couple of miniature shots showing the whole thing in model form are not at all bad— but the physical prop used when characters had to encounter it was… well let’s just say this story is known to fans as “The one with the giant…” er… well, perhaps the best thing is just to show you:
- Seeing it in motion only makes it worse. It’s too bad, the nature of the creature that writer David Fisher described could have been scary enough to override the story’s other flaws. Instead it’s just cringingly embarrassing.
K-9 rejoins the action after two stories’ absence. He has a new voice, actor David Brierley. I’m sure the new guy is a perfectly fine actor who did a perfectly good job, but it’s just impossible to hear him and think anything other than “Hey, that’s not K-9.” It’s not just that the voice is different, Brierley plays a distinctly different character.
Next Week:
“Nightmare of Eden,” 4 episodes
