Day 170 — June 19th 2021
Carnival of Monsters Episodes One and Two
Carnival of Monsters — Episode One
I feel like I’m saying this all the time these days, but the best thing about this episode is the camaraderie between Doctor Who and Jo. This whole episode is raised up by the way they sparkle in each other’s company, and it’s genuinely lovely to watch. Two best friends kicking around in time and space — that’s the perfect formula for Doctor Who.
It only comes up so often now because that’s precisely what was missing from their adventures together in Season Eight. To begin with Jo was very much Doctor Who’s assistant and he treated her as someone who was in him employ rather than as an equal or a friend. I’m so pleased that they decided to shake that up, because I’m not sure I could have stuck three seasons of him being so rude to her at every opportunity.
I’m particularly keen on her teasing his ability to pilot the TARDIS — it’s a tradition which stretches right back to Ian and was particularly prevalent in the Troughton years. Having him stuck on Earth, or heading out only on missions for the Time Lords, means we’ve been lacking the idea that he never really knows where or when he’s going, and I think that’s a pretty fundamental part of the format. I’m glad they didn’t simply give him the ability to fly the TARDIS perfectly as part of lifting his exile.
Jo: ‘Doctor, you’re so stubborn. And you ought to have an L plate for that police box of yours. You don’t even know where you’re going in it.’
Travelling backwards in time again also means we’ve got some more fuel onto the ongoing fire of ‘when are the UNIT stories actually set?’. Jo describes their arrival in 1926 as having ‘slipped back about forty years in time’, which if we’re taking it as literally as we take some of the other dates which get bandied about would give us a 1960s date for all the Earth-bound Pertwee tales so far. If nothing else, I think it’s more evidence that we’re closer to the early 1970s than we are the 1980s or beyond.
This is a great episode for Pertwee’s Doctor Who, and it’s not just Jo who brings out the best in him. He’s totally at home playing up the part of being an old school gentleman — years of mocking pompous bureaucracy have taught him that — and I love how affronted he is by the idea that he may not be all that seasoned;
Jo: ‘Ah, well you see, my uncle hasn’t been terribly well, so…’
Daly: ‘Ah, poor traveller, eh? Not used to it, I suppose.’
Doctor Who: ‘On the contrary, sir, I…’
Daly: ‘Well, never mind. We’ve now got a four for bridge, what?’
If I’ve one criticism, it’s that I didn’t find as much to enjoy in the alien segments of the story as in the Earth-based ones. Oh there’s plenty to enjoy in there, but I can’t help feeling I’d have rather spent the entire episode on the SS Bernice, building up the mystery before you’re thrown a real curve-ball with that cliffhanger. Now I know what’s going on and where our heroes really are, but I still reckon it would have been more fun to string out the mystery that bit longer. It makes me think of The War Games, in which we’re presented with a seemingly normal example of Earth history, only for the story to slowly reveal that things aren’t quite as they seem.
Imagine a version of this episode in which we open on the TARDIS materialising, Doctor Who and Jo getting locked up, realising they’re on a ship which went missing on the very day they’ve arrived… only for a dinosaur to attack them! After a flurry of chaos, the who cycle repeats itself, with everyone saying and doing everything again as though nothing has happened. You can get to the alien world in Episode Two — or even later — and find out what’s going in at the same time as Doctor Who does. As it is we open on an alien world, so the stuff on the ocean always feels slightly at odds with it.
It doesn’t help that Inter Minor isn’t the most exciting alien world the series has ever given us. We only really get to see two sets, and neither of them are especially captivating. Now don’t get me wrong; I know that’s the whole point. This planet is supposed to be drab, grey and lifeless. But that doesn’t stop it having exactly that presence on screen…!
And then there’s the masks on the background artists. Oh dear. Having praised the Ogrons last season as an example of how well Doctor Who can do alien faces at this point in its history, we’re presented with some of the most amateur work we’ve ever had.
Still, it’s testament to just how much I’ve enjoyed the material with Doctor Who and Jo that this episode is still coming out with an 8/10.
Carnival of Monsters — Episode Two
I’m going to start sounding like a broken record here, but I’ve the same complaint for this episode that I did for the first — we could do without all the stuff on the alien world, and instead focus on the other, better, material following Doctor Who and Jo as they slowly piece together what’s going on.
This episode introduces some great concepts which would be brilliant tent poles for a mystery, but the impact is lost because we already know what’s going on. Doctor Who and Jo manage to escape from the SS Bernice via a hexagonal plate in the floor which is invisible to the humans on the ship. They find themselves in a strange mechanical world totally at odds with the setting they’ve just left, and Jo is baffled;
Doctor Who: ‘Just look at this filter circuit, Jo. What a beautiful piece of work. Now then, this must be the output and that must be the input through there. Let’s have a look. Yes, it is.’
Jo: ‘What is it?’
Doctor Who: ‘What is it? My dear girl, this is a perfect example of an early pulse mechanism based on the principal of caesium decay. Oh, this is absolutely vintage stuff.’
Jo: ‘But this can’t be the ship’s engine room?’
Doctor Who: ‘Well, of course it isn’t. I told you. We’re no longer in the ship.’
That all seems fascinating to me. The idea that they’ve stepped off the ship and into… well, where? They find themselves lost among the strange machinery, and it’s actually quite tense to watch. We even get some really effective CSO work when a giant tool jabs into the machine and almost strikes them. It helps that the sets are brilliant, too. There’s something about them that seem oddly timeless. They’re totally at home in the Doctor Who of 1973, but I don’t think they’d look out of place in the Troughton era or Colin Baker’s time either.
When they finally do manage to make it through the maze of electronics they find another hatchway like the one they saw on the ship (although despite Doctor Who’s insistence it looks entirely different…!) and step through it into a cave. Beyond that a vista of marshes in which gas rolls gently across the horizon. All more fuel for the mystery! Where are they? How is this world connected to the SS Bernice? What’s really going on?
Well, we know what’s going on. Because the whole concept has already been explained to us elsewhere in the episode;
Vorg: ‘The Scope is good, old-fashioned live entertainment. The picture on the glo-sphere is an actual projection of what is now taking place deep down inside.’
Kalik: ‘Do you mean that all these creatures are living in there?’
Vorg: ‘Within their own miniaturised environments, of course.’
We’ve already seen the SS Bernice relayed on the Miniscope’s screen, and the world in which Doctor Who and Jo have now found themselves. We’ve had glimpses of Ogrons and Cybermen (the latter of which was strangely exciting to see!) and no matter how hard they try to drum up the danger of the Drashiegs, it’s hard to muster up much enthusiasm.
One of the nice things about being back to adventures in time and space is that we get to start tracking TARDIS models again, and it feels like an absolute age since we last did that. There’s three on display in this episode; the miniature one we see in the palm of a character’s hand when it’s first removed from the Miniscope, a 6-inch model which is placed on the floor, and then the three-foot model that was originally built for The Rescue, which is used for much of the ‘growing’ sequence.
A 7/10.
