Day 217 — August 5th 2021
Doctor Who and the Pescatons Parts One and Two
Doctor Who and the Pescatons — Part One
With the possible exception of Mission to the Unknown back on February 13th (and even that’s debatable, given that it’s made using a TV script) this is the first day this year in which I’ve not experienced a televised episode of Doctor Who in some form. Instead, I’ve taken a trip down to my local record store to pick up Doctor Who and the Pescatons, an audio Doctor Who story released in 1976 between The Seeds of Death and The Masque of Mandragora.
Does this story count as ‘proper’ Doctor Who? It’s a bit of a contentious question, and I’m not sure I’ve got a very good answer for it. I think it probably doesn’t, but only because any rules that I would use to include it in the canon would also let in some other stories which I definitely don’t think count. Whatever the case, I’m rapidly approaching the end of Elisabeth Sladen’s time in the series, and I’m not ready to say goodbye just yet, so anything which extends her tenure — even by a single day — counts for me.
I’ll tell you what, though, Lis Sladen could have stayed in bed for the amount of time she appears in this episode. She only gets a couple of scenes, and in them she’s very much written as ‘Generic Doctor Who Girl’ serving only to ask Doctor Who what’s going on and to point out the obvious. It’s a good example of the difference between this and the last story — Sladen doesn’t appear until around eleven minutes into either, but here I’ve been counting down to her inclusion, while I barely noticed it in The Seeds of Doom.
The rest of the episode is carried entirely by Tom Baker, who narrates in first person throughout. It’s an unusual format, but I’m not sure I entirely dislike it. Tom’s got such a great voice for audio work, and it’s hard not to be swept up when it sounds like he’s talking directly to you;
Doctor Who: ‘My life is an endless journey across the bounds of space and time. A Time Traveller, drifting amongst the great galaxies of the universe…’
That said, I sort of wish this had been a little more ‘full cast’ in places. As nice as the narration can be, I really enjoy when it’s punctuated by the occasional scene in which Doctor Who and Sarah converse. I wonder if it would feel like a fuller experience if we could hear the conversation with Professor Emerson played out, rather than having it relayed to us by Baker. That might be more an issue with me than with the audio, though, because it’s an issue I’ve had with the few Companion Chronicles I’ve tried in the past, too.
One area in which the narration helps the story is that it allows it to be a bit more visceral than you might expect on screen — although with some of the things the series has given us lately, maybe it’s not that different after all. Take for example this bit of narration, which manages to be genuinely scary;
Doctor Who: ‘All around me, floating up and down rhythmically with the movement of the water, was all that remained of the underwater expeditions
that had preceded me. A scattering of disconnected human bones and skeletons, with gaping sockets where eyes had once been. Eyes that had been staring
out hopelessly, begging for the help that had never come.’
Doctor Who and the Pescatons adds another story to the trend of bringing back 1960s writers and having episodes which feel like a throwback to the past. We’ve had Terry Nation doing a traditional Dalek story in Planet of the Daleks, John Lucarotti (well, sort of) having the TARDIS crew explore a location on their own for a full episode of The Ark in Space, and here Victor Pemberton has dug out the scripts for Fury From the Deep and presented them to the team as a brand new story.
Oh, I joke of course, but the similarities in places are striking. Doctor Who and Sarah arrive on a deserted stretch of beach, where they find mysterious foam, stinging bits of seaweed and hear a chilling heartbeat that shouldn’t be there. Some of Baker’s narration could have been lifted almost entirely from a soundtrack CD to Fury;
Doctor Who: ‘As the light filtered back through the darkness, I caught my first glimpse of the alien force that was slowly curling itself around my entire body. A living weed, clinging to me like the tentacles of a giant deep sea octopus, crushing my bones and preparing to feed off me. It was the same metallic weed that Sarah Jane and I had found on the beach, and which was now glistening in the underwater light, its huge emerald eye penetrating the dark, its tentacles strangling, tugging, dragging me down. I struggled to free myself, but the dazzling tentacles were cutting into my flesh like sharp wire. The phenomena
was all around me. The very blood in my body was being drained away.’
As much as I might complain about his re-use of these elements, I’ll admit that my attention wandered as the play went on and evolved into something different. For me, the most effective sequences were our heroes alone on the deserted beach. I do have to wonder if Pemberton had been watching Terror of the Zygons while writing this, though, and if he had the same frustrations with that story that I did, because after saying I wanted to see more action with the Skarasen swimming up the Thames, we get almost exactly that here!
I think I’m going with a 3/10 for this one. There’s some lovely moments in there, but on the whole I can’t say it’s grabbed my attention. All the same, I can’t imagine how exciting it would have been to have this to listen to on repeat in 1976, at a time when Doctor Who stories were so much more ephemeral. I’m listening via Audible, but I’m almost tempted to track down an original vinyl copy just for that ‘authentic’ experience…
Doctor Who and the Pescatons — Part Two
I was hoping that Elisabeth Sladen might be given a bit more material to work with in this second episode, but if anything she plays even less of a role here! The first eleven minutes of the episode are made up with Doctor Who ‘casting his mind back’ to an earlier adventure in which he visited the Pescaton planet and met their leader — Zor. I wouldn’t mind so much, but it means that the story starts to be come increasingly repetitive as it goes on. Take for example the description he gives of For when telling the story of their first encounter;
Doctor Who: ‘Towering above me was a creature more gigantic that all the rest, with a head that was oval-shaped and too big for its body, all of which was covered with shiny metallic scales. But it was the eyes. I became transfixed by its eyes. They were transparent, clear like glass, like emeralds. I could see right into the very brain of the creature itself as it opened its mouth to speak.’
And then compare it to the narration we get about fifteen minutes later when they discover Zor hidden under London;
Doctor Who: ‘Reports were coming in which described a different, more terrifying creature which was taking refuge in a sewer somewhere beneath the city streets. The description of this gigantic beast, with an oval-shaped head and a body covered with shiny metallic scales, soon confirmed my suspicion that we had located the lifeline of the Pescaton civilisation, their leader, the all powerful Zor.’
There’s a few other examples of the repetition like this across the story (like the description of the defeated Pescatons being given as ‘all that was left was the vertebrae of a large fish,’ at the end of Part One, and ‘all that remained now was the vertebrae of a giant deep sea fish,’ at the end of Part Two), and it’s not hard to suspect that if they spent a little less time repeating themselves then they could fins a bit more room to give Sarah Jane something to do…
I can’t complain about all the narration in this episode, though, because there’s some really nice moments in there which are helped along by Tom Baker’s great voice. I especially love his description of the deserted streets of London, which now sound a bit like they’ve touched down in the middle of 2020;
Doctor Who: ‘After the first wave of meteorite landings, an uneasy calm had settled over the rooftops of London. For centuries, the great capital city had been a thriving, bustling metropolis, the very heart of the nation. But that heart was now as quiet as the grave. Streets were deserted, doors and windows bolted, and the sounds of life curtailed. At dusk, voices were only raised to a whisper. The invader’s name had become become a household word, a name to fear.
Rush hour near Saint Paul’s Cathedral, that glorious dome of a bygone age.
A police constable patrolled his beat on empty pavements. No office workers
rushing to catch buses or tube trains. No traffic jams to congest the streets.
At Billingsgate Fish Market, the nightly gathering of London’s cat population went hungry. In Trafalgar Square, there was no one to feed the pigeons. And
in Piccadilly Circus, snowflakes began to fall and settle. But it was towards
the river that all eyes were turned. The city and its ancient river, now quiet
and waiting. Waiting in fear of what was yet to come. As a bright February
moon flicked in and out of dark clouds, the skipper of a river tug steered his
vessel towards the great Pool of London.’
Baker is the saving grace for this story; I think it would be even flatter without his unique voice recalling the events. During Part One I wondered if adding in more of the full cast elements would help, but when they do that here with the introduction of Bill Mitchell voicing Zor I found it actually took me out of the story a bit. That might be less the fault of bringing in another voice, and more that it seems so strange to have an American-accented monster at this point in the programme’s history! It’s not helped, either, by the terribly cliched nature of Zor’s dialogue, which is exactly how members of the general public think Doctor Who monsters speak, rather than the way they actually do.
If Part One of this story riffed hard on elements of Fury From the Deep, then this one is full of mid-Troughton-Era moments. We get our heroes making their way through a deserted London Underground tunnel (I’m sure some of the dialogue about the power being turned off is very similar), and perhaps most obviously Doctor Who talks a lot about his favourite wind instrument;
Sarah: ‘Doctor! Doctor, what are you doing? This is a fine time to start playing your piccolo.’
Doctor Who: ‘I always play the piccolo when I’m nervous…’
In spite of these slightly whimsical moments, which wouldn’t feel out of place in the comic strips, there’s something oddly dark about the ending of this episode. Having worked out how to destroy the Pescatons, Doctor Who and Sarah set to work with relish, and it’s only when the narration confirms that their home world has been destroyed that you realise our heroes have just — knowingly — committed genocide;
Doctor Who: ‘Suddenly, it was all over. Before my very eyes, the invincible, the all-powerful Zor, completely disintegrated. And with him, the entire species of an evil alien civilisation. The lifeline was broken, the invasion at an end. So too was the planet of Pesca.’
All things considered I think I’m going with a 2/10 on this episode. Doctor Who and the Pescatons has been a decent enough way to extend the Fourth Doctor Who and Sarah Jane’s time together in the TARDIS, but I don’t think I’ll be rushing to hear it again. And I think I’ve come up with an answer to my question of if the story ‘counts’ — it counts about as much as the annual stories do, which this feels quite in tune with. Your mileage may vary, but it’s not for me, I’m afraid.
