Day 141 — May 21st 2021
Inferno Episode Seven
Inferno — Episode Seven
I think after the high stakes of the last few episodes this one was always going to be a bit of a let down, but I’ll confess to being more than a bit disappointed. In my head I was expecting this final instalment to be a desperate race against time with everyone up against the clock as the drill inches closer and closer to penetration. They even set up some intriguing possibilities for what might happen;
Sutton: ‘How are you going to make sure they stop their drilling?’
Doctor Who: ‘I don’t know. Maybe somebody will listen to me there. Sir Keith, for instance?’
Sutton: ‘But he’s dead.’
Doctor Who: ‘Here, perhaps. In the other world, maybe not.’
But then I feel like everyone’s strolling through this episode at something of a leisurely pace. Doctor Who makes it back to his own universe in the opening few seconds and then everyone just sort of trots along. Even that glimmer of hope — that Sir Keith might have survived long enough in this world to help save the day — gets thrown away. There’s no desperate attempts to track the man down, he just happens to stroll into the hut with a sling on his arm.
And even then it boils down to a discussion of red tape. Several people know how to stop the drilling — Greg, Petra and Liz among them — but they all stand around and wait for the clearly insane Stahlman to give the order. Even Sir Keith, who has authority from the Minister to close the project down and knows that Stahlman tried to prevent his return, says he’d have to get permission from the man. It’s a real shame — the last few episodes have been brimming with tension and drama, which all seem to have been exhausted by this point.
It’s not a total bust, though. One of the things that makes Inferno particularly good is that all the characters feel totally real. There’s a scene in this one where Sutton confronts Stahlman, and on the back of that has a discussion about leaving with Petra. All three of the characters have clear and distinct motivations, and I believe in all of them. Even when Stahlman turns into a warewolf.
We also get some of the very best direction in the serial in this episode. There’s a great shot early on when the camera pulls away from Doctor Who laying on the floor, and it’s the kind of impressive camera movement you just don’t tend to see in the show at this point. It’s surprisingly effective. A little later on, when Stahlman has one of his minor breakdowns, the camera moves in to give us an extreme close up on his eyes and that’s impressive too.
On the whole, though, I’m feeling a bit let down by this one. I was hoping to see the story go out with a bang, and was expecting maybe a nine or ten, but I’ll be ending Season Seven on a 6/10.
The Quatermass Experiment
I’ve spent a lot of time during Season Seven comparing the programme to the various Quatermass serials of the 1950s, but I have a confession to make; I’ve never actually seen the original TV serial of The Quatermass Experiment.
I’ve seen the film version, Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit (they kindly sent me a Blu-ray copy of the latter when I accidentally turned up a couple of unseen images from production just in time to be included on the release).
But the original serial has always slipped under my radar. And I know exactly why — when I picked up the DVD set second hand about 15 years ago I was put off by the fact that 2/3 of the original were missing, so skipped straight past it. But today is one of those occasional instances where I’ve only got one episode of Doctor Who to watch, so I thought I’d fill out the rest of the morning by filling a gap in my viewing history.
I’ve enjoyed watching the two surviving episodes although I’ll admit that they’re incredibly slow, even from the point of view that I’m currently watching a lot of telly from 1970. I found myself a bit disappointed by the opening 15 minutes because I thought it was going to set the stock for the entire tale — lots of very plain sets and not much going on.
But then we cut to the site of the rocket’s crash and find a house it’s demolished on the way down and it comes as a real shock. I don’t think this happens in the film version — I think the rocket simply comes down in an open field instead — so it really took me by surprise. I wonder how viewers must have felt about it in 1953? Obviously the shades of the war lay heavy over the whole idea, and coming only around a decade after the Blitz it would land harder than it perhaps does now.
My main take away from the opening episode in particular is realising just how much it inspires The Ambassadors of Death in particular. I always knew there were shades of it in there, but don’t think I’d appreciated quite how much. It also might be heresy for me to say it, but I feel as though Doctor Who might actually fo it better…
Speaking to Andrew Pixley in the 1980s Nigel Kneale wasn’t overly keen on the similarities; ‘I think a number of things turned up in Doctor Who that have been pinched out of my stories. I know I switched on one day and was horrified to see practically an entire episode one of mine stuck straight into Doctor Who…!’, and it’s hard not to see why he’d have been annoyed. That said, he spends a lot of the interview pouring scorn on basically every bit of televised science fiction not penned by him and suggests that he turned down a lot of work as beneath him.
Having finished Episode Two I switched the DVD over to the computer so I could have a browse through the scripts for the missing episodes and round out the story. Doing this was a highlight of the missing Doctor Who stories for me, so I was keen to follow up the experience here. Sadly I didn’t get the chance because the photocopies included on the DVD release are so terrible that I honestly think they’d have been better leaving them out. Yikes!
I’d love to see the Quatermass serials given a new release, perhaps with some fresh scans of the paperwork (and maybe including Episodes One and Two — I know they’re available to watch, but it’d be nice to have the complete set). I’m glad that I can say I’ve now seen all that we can see of this series, and to really appreciate just how much Doctor Who took from them in 1970. It’s been an interesting approach to the series, but I’m looking forward to getting back to something a little bit more like Doctor Who and a little bit less like Quatermass…
Oh, one last thing. Can we start a campaign to have a title card ‘A thriller for television in seven parts by David Whitaker (sort of)’ to the start of The Ambassadors of Death when Season Seven makes it to Blu-ray?
