Day 172 — June 21st 2021
Frontier in Space Episodes One and Two
Frontier in Space — Episode One
Frontier in Space is the perfect example of my forgetting everything since my last Doctor Who marathon. I can’t remember what I thought about the story, and I can remember next to nothing about it. So let’s go through everything I know about this one;
- It’s got the Ogrons in it.
- The Draconians make their one and only appearance.
- The Master’s involved.
- It ends with a lead in to Planet of the Daleks.
That’s everything I’ve got. I love it when that’s the case because I’m going into the story completely unaffected by my previous thoughts. Sometimes that can have a real impact. If it’s a story I know I loved before I might be desperate to love it again now. Or if it’s one I hated before then I might be keen to re-evaluate so perhaps try too hard to rate it up a little. With a story like this one I’m simply going with gut instincts and my initial reaction to watching these episodes again now.
And my initial reaction is that this one’s a bit boring, innit?
I feel a bit bad saying that because actually there’s a lot going in in this episode. We’ve got spaceships and aliens. There’s three types of monster on display here — the Draconians, the Ogrons and a brief appearance by a Drashieg making a surprisingly quick return to the series after Carnival of Monsters. There’s a shootout, and political machinations. We’ve been plunged back into the future I’ve so enjoyed seeing from Colony in Space and The Mutants — the latter even gets a mention here as being the dying days of the empire we’re now visiting.
And yet in spite off all this, I found myself yawning more than once while the episode played out. It’s just not grabbed me and that’s a bit of a worry, given that Episode One tends to be the highest-rated episode of a serial for me. I’m usually a fan of watching a new world being set up, and the initial mystery that we’re being presented with. Not so here.
It doesn’t help that while the sets have got a bit of flair to them — there’s some different levels for example, which is something I’m always a fan of — they’re very drab and grey. I guess they’re supposed to make the space ship look utilitarian and functional, but that’s not especially interesting to look at. It’s missing the style seen in the likes of the Skybase and the IMC ship over the last few seasons. It doesn’t even have the kind of visual interest the ships had in the surviving episode of The Space Pirates. That’s the other thing this episode reminds me of — there’s a handful of lengthy sequences focusing on the piloting of a spaceship, or contacting other vessels or the Earth authorities. They feel like they go on forever, and I can’t say they did anything to grab my attention.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. There’s some nice model work on display in this one for starters. I made a note early on that the spaceship models have something a bit Gerry Anderson about them, and when a friend pointed out that there may be a reason for that I checked The Complete History to discover that the models were indeed cannibalised from old Supermarionation stock. My favourite model shot is one that we don’t even get to see fully, as it’s only shown on a screen inside the spaceship bridge — the TARDIS materialising in space and heading on a collision course for the ship. It’s a great moment, and looks super effective. I was rather hoping it might feature in the film trims on the Blu-ray so I could see it full screen, but while there’s plenty of interesting TARDIS material on there, I don’t think I spotted this actual shot.
I’ll obviously need to praise the Draconian make up, but I’ll wait and do that under a later episode when there’s a few more of them on display to look at. Suffice to say for now that it was a highlight of this episode.
So not a great start, and a 4/10 from me. Here’s hoping the story can turn itself around over the next few days…
Frontier in Space — Episode Two
Watching this episode I’ve remembered something else about Frontier in Space; a friend tells me it’s home to one of the more dangerous Doctor Who drinking games. You take a shot every time Doctor Who or Jo are put into a prison cell. So far we’ve had two instances in Episode One, and then three more in this episode (four, if you include the recap). I joke but it does become a bit of an annoyance that the whole episode is made up of our regulars being taken to see someone and then returned to the same prison cell over and over and over.
It’s also one of the few sets in this episode which isn’t interesting. I was a bit harsh on the spaceship designs during the last episode, but this one actually does some really nice things with the sets on Earth. The President’s office is nicely designed and I’m very impressed with the large television screen across the back wall. It’s been done with CSO rather than back projection, but it looks decent.
(As a side note this is the first time I’ve realised that the newsreader in this episode is played by Louis Mahoney, who was also in Blink. I don’t think I’d realised that before, but the voice sounded pretty distinctive this time around. I’m also saddened to see while checking the spelling of his surname today that he passed away last year — something I’d missed at the time).
Even the Draconian Embassy is a nice enough design, and I really appreciate how different it — and the exterior location — are from the main presidential buildings. You get a sense of these being two very different places in the same world, and distinctions like that aren’t something the series usually has time for.
I’m a big fan of the location used for the main areas in this episode; the South Bank Centre slap bang in the middle of London. The location looks pretty much identical now almost 50 years later, so it’s not impossible to think that this is really where we’re supposed to be in the 26th century. It’s a gorgeous building and one I’ve been meaning to visit for years. Maybe I’ll have to bump it up the list once it’s a bit easier to travel around again.
One of the things I really like about it is how well it ties in with the Pertwee Era’s vision of the future. This location matches up rather nicely with the tower blocks seen in Day of the Daleks, and I can’t say I was surprised to discover that the stories share Paul Bernard as director. There’s something about this brutalist view of the world which really appeals to me, and I’m glad we get to see so much nice location work in this episode. I’m hoping there’s more to come before the story is through.
While I’m sorry to say that the interior sets don’t especially tie in with the look of the outside, they’re lit really interestingly, and that’s something else which feels like a bit of a rarity in the series. Otherwise boring corridor shots are livened up by some inventive work with shadows, and I wish this had been taken even further.
But while the settings are all nicely done I’m afraid that this episode hasn’t done anything much to capture my attention more than the opening one did. I’m liking the setting and the general themes, I just suspect that I’m a little bit bored by the story, and that’s not something I ever like to say. A 4/10.
