“The earth is… hungry!”
The TARDIS is forced down on the planet Frontios, home to the last surviving colony of humans after a catastrophe destroyed the Earth, and far enough into the future that it’s even beyond the Time Lords’ furthest explorations. “All knowledge has its limits,” the Doctor says. “Ours ends here.” Because of this he’s unusually reluctant to interfere, for once in his life apparently agreeing with Time Lord noninterference laws. But when the TARDIS itself is destroyed (no, really, it is) he, Tegan and Turlough are marooned on Frontios and have no choice but to get involved.
The colonists’ ship crashed forty years ago, and for the last thirty years they’ve been under continuous bombardment from meteor showers, driving the colony to the edge of extinction. The colonists believe the meteors are the work of aliens planning to invade, but the real danger is below: burrowing creatures called Tractators who can generate gravity beams at will and use them to periodically abduct the colonists by sucking them right down through the ground. It turns out the Tractators caused the original crash with the gravity beams, and have also pulled down the meteor storms, in order to keep the colony helpless on the edge of extinction so they have a ready supply of humans for their sinister purposes, and if the Doctor doesn’t stop them they’ll soon rampage across the whole universe.
Frontios is an oddly frustrating story, with an intriguing concept marred by a lot of problems, both in the writing and in the production. The script keeps introducing interesting ideas and then making nothing of them. The interesting idea that the TARDIS has traveled beyond the limits of the Time Lord’s knowledge is introduced— but has no bearing on the story at all, beyond giving the Doctor occasion to repeatedly insist that no one must ever tell the Time Lords he was there. Turlough has a mental breakdown (complete with foaming at the mouth at one point) due to a “race memory” of the Tractators once infesting his home planet, but the Tractators don’t seem nearly horrific enough to justify such a reaction (though see below). There’s a subplot about a rebellion among the colonists, led by a man named Cockerill, which comes to nothing: the rebellion neither helps nor hinders our heroes and doesn’t even come to its own resolution, it’s just forgotten about after it’s filled up enough minutes on screen that needed to be filled. The Gravis (leader of the Tractators) knows all about the Time Lords and assumes they’ve sent the Doctor to stop the Tractators, and is eager to get his hands on the TARDIS, all as if Tractators are frequent enemies of the Time Lords, but the Doctor’s never heard of them. The Doctor pretends Tegan is an android for a while, for no apparent reason (this one was explained in the script, but the explanation ended up on the cutting room floor: see below).
The destruction of the TARDIS itself is quite a shocking development for a while, although by this point in the series it’s hard to believe that either a meteor strike or a Tractator’s gravity beam could actually destroy it. To its credit, the story doesn’t just reveal that the TARDIS wasn’t harmed after all: it actually plays with expectations since the destruction happens offscreen and when the story reveals that the Tractators can pull things down through the ground, we assume it was just stolen, not destroyed, after all. Then the characters start finding bits of its interior walls scattered around the underground tunnels and we realize it’s really been destroyed. Unfortunately its too-easy restoration strains credibility even more than its too-easy destruction: the Doctor tricks the Gravis into using its gravity powers to pull all the pieces together, and that’s all it takes for them to join back up into an intact and fully-functioning time machine.
The Tractors themselves are a disappointment, but that’s nothing new for Dr Who. The story described them as like giant woodlice (the real ones are similar to by larger than the “doodlebugs” or “pill bugs” found in the US), able to curl up into balls leaving only their shells exposed. The script envisioned them appearing to be boulders then suddenly uncurling to stand up and menace the characters. The production actually hired professional dancers to play the Tractators, who in rehearsals put a lot of effort into studying nature films of real woodlice and working out movements to match the creatures— and then when shooting time arrived, found the Tractator costumes to be rigid plastic statues that could do nothing more than shuffle around (see the Wirrn from Ark in Space for the last time Dr who try to do insect-like creatures, with the same result).
But now let’s turn to the bright spot in this story: this is perhaps Peter Davison’s best performance as the Doctor so far. For almost the first time in his tenure, he’s given the kind of dialog that’s been the Doctor’s trademark all the way back to Patrick Troughton (parts of it sound very Tom-Baker-like) and he gets the chance to show how his performance as the Doctor can work with more Doctor-ish lines. For all its flaws in plausibility, the scene where he tricks the Gravis into using its powers to reassemble the TARDIS is especially good. This is surely one of the episodes Davison meant when he said of his final season that if they’d written him that well all along he wouldn’t have left.
Details
- John Nathan-Turner was very good at publicity, and in the run-up to this story he allowed it to leak to the press that the TARDIS would be destroyed in an upcoming serial, with a few coy hints that the producers thought after 20 years it was time for a change. The news media dutifully went wild over the story, fans organized “save the TARDIS” letter campaigns, and everyone tuned in, boosting the ratings— and then were on the hook for all four episodes until the TARDIS was restored at the end of the story. Of course no one ever had any intention of actually getting rid of the TARDIS beyond the plot of this one story. JN-T would repeat this feat of early viral marketing with a story that the Doctor would finally fix the chameleon circuit in the following season, getting rid of the police box exterior— but more on that when we get to it.
- Turlough’s mental breakdown over a race memory of Tractators on his home planet doesn’t seem justified by what we see on screen, but might have come over better if things had gone as originally scripted. The Tractators have an “excavating machine” that is revealed to be powered by the living mind of a human being wired into it. On screen, this is a fairly ordinary Dr Who sci-fi prop with a captive human sitting in a sort of pilot’s chair at the front of it. As originally scripted, the excavating machine as well as other bits of Tractator technology were to have been actually built out of human bodies broken up and wired together, thus revealing the fate of the humans sucked into the ground by the creatures. It was decided this was just too horrific for Dr Who (plus someone pointed out that tools made of human bone wouldn’t actually cut through stone very well). This straight-out-of-HP Lovecraft touch could easily have justified leaving an instinctive trauma in a population that once had to live on a planet infested by the creatures. Leaving it out of the story leaves unexplained why the Tractators capture humans other than the one they need for the machine as shown, although viewers likely assumed that alien monsters didn’t need a more complex reason than being predators.
- Left on the cutting room floor was a scene shot but cut for time, which reveals that the Doctor pretended Tegan was an android in order to prevent the Gravis from using her to pilot the excavation machine.
- Series lore: although ultimately irrelevant to the story, this business about the TARDIS going further into the future than it’s supposed to, beyond the limits of Time Lord knowledge, is definitely an intriguing addition to what we know of Time Lords. What could this mean? In the new series the TARDIS has traveled all the way to the end of the universe, but if we assume this boundary is a Time Lord law rather than a limit of TARDIS navigation, that doesn’t contradict anything— the Time Lords are gone at the time that happens in the new series.
The fact of a limit on how far in the future a TARDIS can (or is allowed to) travel can be combined with the fact that throughout the Classic series, the Doctor always seemed to visit his home world, and meet other Time Lords, “in order.” There are no River-Song-esque scenes between Time Lords in the Classic series. We can further note that in both The Three Doctors and The Five Doctors, the Time Lords clearly speak as if they are reaching into the past to draw “former” Doctors, on an emergency basis, forward to meet the “present” Doctor— and on meeting each other, the older Doctors say things like “So there are five of me now” as if they know that “all thirteen” (as said in The Day of the Doctor) are not actually running around the cosmos yet.
If we put these clues together, the most obvious suggestion is that there is a “Gallifreyan present” and that it somehow stays synchronized. So no Time Lord can use his TARDIS to visit (what from his point of view is) the future or the past of Gallifrey itself, nor can he meet himself or any other Time Lord “out of order” barring special intervention. The fact that the high council can put multiple Doctors together, plus the fact that River Song shows things have changed in the new series when the Time Lords are gone, suggests this is a matter of law, not of time travel physics— but whatever it is, it seems to be the way things work in Classic.
Returning to Frontios, then, if this is the limit of the TARDIS’ forward flight through time, as well as the limit of Time Lords’ knowledge, the obvious suggestion is that this story takes place in a time that corresponds to that Gallifreyan present: the point in time (from the Doctor’s point of view) that represents now to the Time Lords. This could explain why even the Doctor seems to agree he shouldn’t interfere at this point: Classic mostly took the view that “you can’t change history, not one line” so anything the Doctor does anywhere else he knows will just turn out to be part of what always happened. But if he changes things on Frontios, he’s changing things that might have an impact on his own planet.
This is all speculation, of course. - Production on Frontios was twice marred by tragedy. The original designer for the episode suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be replaced (he eventually killed himself, though that came a year later) and right on the heels of that, the actor cast as the colonists’ lead scientist was murdered on his way home after a costume fitting. Taping had not yet begun and the part was recast, but the two events cast a shadow over the production.
Next Week:
“Resurrection of the Daleks,” 2 episodes or 4 episodes depending on how you look at it (I’ll explain next week).
Program Note:
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Until next week—
—Keith
