Day 89 — March 30th 2021
The Abominable Snowmen Episodes One and Two
The Abominable Snowmen — Episode One
I wonder how long Victoria has been traveling with Doctor Who and Jamie? It’s a question I pondered a bit during The Tomb of the Cybermen, and I find myself wondering about again here. The opening scene of Tomb absolutely follows on directly from the end of The Evil of the Daleks, with Victoria being shown the TARDIS for the first time. But then… well, she takes everything in her stride quite easily after that, doesn’t she? I know she’d already encountered Daleks and been to Skaro in her first adventure, but she doesn’t bat an eyelid at being on another alien world. It must be quite early on because it’s the first time she’s worn a dress that’s not of her own time.
This episode has raised the question again because there’s some great material of her and Jamie mocking Doctor Who in the TARDIS and they feel like friends. They certainly feel more comfortable than people who’ve only been together for a single trip before this. I’m not usually a fan of lengthy TARDIS scenes, but the one here is a lot of fun, and it shows how well these three work as a team. I particularly enjoy Jamie being annoyed that Doctor Who has been hiding the bagpipes from him! I think Jamie and Victoria taking the piss is my favourite bit, though;
Doctor Who: ‘Come along, help me find the ghanta.’
Victoria: ‘It would help us considerably if we knew what we were looking for.’
Doctor Who: ‘Ghanta!’
Victoria: ‘But what is it?’
Doctor Who: ‘Oh, what is it? You don’t know? Oh, it’s a bell.’
Victoria: ‘Oh, it’s a bell, Jamie!’
Jamie: ‘Oh, a bell! Oh, well now we know what we’re looking for!’
The whole exchange is laced with the same sarcasm Victoria displayed in the last story, and I’m really pleased to see it carrying on here. It has to be said that the main trio have really made this episode for me, so it’s a shame that they get split up so early on. Doctor Who goes off to the monastery on his own, leaving his friends behind in the TARDIS, which feels a bit odd. I don’t think we’ve ever seen that sort of thing happen before, and it feels slightly out of place here, truth be told. I get that he’s trying to keep them out of danger having spotted the footprints outside but… well, this is the man who opened up the Cyberman Tombs last week because he fancied a laugh!
I can’t complain massively, though, because Jamie and Victoria continue to be good fun even when they’re alone together. I love that it’s Victoria who leads the charge in going off to explore, and Jamie’s the slightly timid one lagging behind. I’ve already said that Victoria will very quickly devolve into being a very generic ‘Doctor Who Girl’, so I’m surprised and very pleased to see that my memory is wrong so far, and that at least initially she was given plenty of character and plenty to do. It’s all bravado of course — she changes her tune the second Jamie decides that they can go in the cave after all — but I think that makes it even better.
Outside of the regulars… I’ll admit that I don’t have an awful lot more to say about this one. A decent first episode, but not one that’s blown me away. I’ll be going for a 7/10 and hoping that the trio are brought back together quickly…
The Abominable Snowmen — Episode Two
When we go on holiday, I like to drag my wife to various Doctor Who filming locations. In Paris we walked around the streets for ages on the hunt for the Medusa doors from City of Death. In Dubai we paid someone to drive us an hour out into the desert to the location of San Helios from Planet of the Dead. On a trip to North Wales we had our choice of locations, with The Masque of Mandragora, The Five Doctors and The Abominable Snowmen all within spitting distance of each other.
When you’re actually there it’s easy to appreciate just how beautiful the locations for this story are. It feels like every time we go on location at this stage in the programme’s history I’m saying it looks bigger and better than ever before, and they’ve done it again here.
This episode shows off a bit of the location, but I feel like we need Episode One to really get the scale of it. Either way, what we do see is lovely, and there’s lots of gorgeous photography taken on location which shows it off.
People often complain that it’s not snowy and doesn’t look very much like the Himalayas… but I think that’s nonsense. If you Google pictures of Tibetan monasteries, you get lots of photos which don’t look a million miles away from this at all. And besides, no one said we were right up the mountains!
My main take away from this episode is how slow it is. The whole thing seemed to take so much more than 25 minutes to get through. It’s annoyed me because there’s plenty in here to like, I just wish they’d hurry it up a bit.
So, the positives. The location. I’ve already covered that. The shot of the buried Yeti clambering out of the rubble looks brilliant, and it’s far more effective than when we get to see the Yeti in full view later on in the episode. Padmasambhava has a brilliant speaking voice (both versions). The sets for the monastery are brilliant, and show again how good the BBC is when asked to create something real.
And now, a handful of negatives. The thing is… I remember The Abominable Snowmen as being really creepy, and I’m not getting that this time. The direction in the scene where the Monks capture a Yeti is pretty shambolic. There’s points where I suspected it was going to turn into something quite modern, but it’s more a case of the cameras being a little too close and getting caught up in the action.
The other thing that really threw me in this episode is unique to modern releases of the episode. The final scene has an error in the dialogue, which mean’s Doctor Who’s line ‘You were right about one thing, Victoria’ (slightly different to the line as scripted) is mostly missing from the surviving print of the episode, catching only the last syllable of the sentence. For the Narrated Soundtrack and the copy of this episode on the Lost in Time DVD the line has been repaired using other archive Troughton material.
It’s a noble intention to try and recreate the missing moment, but I find it sticks out like a sore thumb and actually took me out of the narrative. It’s something I’d entirely forgotten about until I heard it again today, and it was so distracting. I don’t think of myself as a particular ‘purist’ when it comes to the presentation of these episodes, but I think for an eventual Blu-Ray release of this episode I’d rather they simply presented it as exists currently.
I’m sad to say this one isn’t grabbing me yet. I’m hoping that the next few episodes will give me the creepy story I remember… 5/10.
