Day 262 — September 19th 2021
Creature from the Pit Parts Three and Four
Creature from the Pit — Part Three
I sat down really excited to watch this episode today. One of my favourite things during this marathon is discovering that I really enjoy a story I didn’t give much of a thought to before hand. It’s happened a few times through the year, and Creature from the Pit has been shaping up to be something of an undiscovered gem.
I’m gutted, then, to say that this episode has bored me rigid. I don’t know what’s happened to the story but this is about the most perfect example of a ‘typical Part Three’ it’s possible to have. The whole running time boils down to a load of people mooching around in caves, and in the worst traditions of rubbish Doctor Who stories I don’t care about a single one of them. It’s terribly frustrating because just yesterday I was finding so much to enjoy in this one. The characters, the dialogue, the direction… it was all winning. And then for some reason in this episode it’s come grinding to a halt.
Fingers crossed it’s just a blip. The curse of a Part Three. All the elements are in place for the next episode to go off in a different direction, so I’m hoping that it’ll get better again from here and end on a high.
The thing that you have to talk about with this episode is, of course, the moment when Doctor Who picks up a phallic appendage of the monster and starts to blow into it. It’s not the finest moment of the era, and it’s no wonder that this moment is a punchline to so many jokes.
It’s not only that one moment where the appendage looks somewhat rude, either. Only moments earlier the creature makes its way along a tunnel with it swinging from side to side, and it’s hard not to assume that whoever was in charge of designing the thing must have been taking the piss.
I can’t say that the realisation of the creature is very good across the board. There’s a moment early in this episode where Doctor Who and Organon approach it in a cave and — with the help of some nicely executed CSO — you get a real sense of scale. It feels like the team are emboldened by the relative success of making Kroll the biggest monster ever the year before and they want to replicate that. In that one shot it looks pretty good and you get a genuine sense of scale. On every other occasion, though, it looks a lot like the Ogron testicle monster from Frontier in Space, and the techniques to produce it haven’t improved in the space of five years.
I suspect that’s the other reason that this episode ends up falling a bit flat. A big part of this one is watching as Doctor Who desperately tries to find a way of communicating with the creature, but there’s no real tension in those scenes because you spend them all thinking ‘that looks shit’.
A shame, but I’m dropping right down to a 3/10 for this one.
Creature from the Pit — Part Four
I can appreciate that this story has tried to do something a bit different with the villains. We discover early in this episode that the ‘creature’ in the pit is actually a good guy and that Lady Adrasta has been responsible for his imprisonment and starvation for fifteen years. It’s all very credible, and it feels like a while since we had a ‘just because it’s alien doesn’t make it evil’ message.
They also try to shake up the format in this episode, having Adrasta killed off only a few minutes in, and leaving us to set up another threat to carry us through to the end of the episode. It’s nice to see them trying something different, but I think I preferred it when Adrasta was the baddie — she was interesting to watch and had a great look. I’m not sure I really buy the tension of the incoming star.
It all just feels a bit convenient. They just happen to get Erato out of the pit on the same day that the star was due to collide with the planet, and even though it takes 15 years for the star to reach this world there’s no way of cancelling the attack if the situation changes. Strikes me as a pretty dodgy weapon to use. It doesn’t help that se discover all of this in a single lengthy exposition exchange between Erato and Doctor Who, so it feels like we’re being told the story rather than experiencing it.
I’ll concede that there’s some nice video effects applied to the TARDIS scenes at the end to indicate the stresses they’ve put the ship under, but aside from that even the direction seems to have become a bit flat and lifeless in this final episode. It’s as though the whole story has given up about fifteen minutes from the end and is just trying to pad itself out to fill the running time.
On the plus side there’s more of interest going on here than there was in Part Three, so I’m going to up the score for this episode to a 4/10, but it’s disappointing given the high quality at the start of this story. I still don’t think it deserves the poor reputation it has, but I’m not sure it deserves much in the way of reappraisal either…
