Terence Dudley makes his screenwriting debut with Four to Doomsday, but he’s been around for a while. I’m not just referring to him directing Meglos last season, although it is an odd quirk that Season Nineteen contains no less than two writers who started out as directors the year before. I’m thinking of his credit as producer and regular writer on Doomwatch, a show created by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis that ran during Jon Pertwee’s time playing the Doctor. He’s a veteran writer, sixty-two at the time this aired, and maybe it’s no surprise that his concept of Doctor Who is extremely Hartnell-era. The set-up is pure early ’60s Who: the Doctor is trying to get one of his companions (Tegan) back to Earth, and in failing to do so he lands the TARDIS in a strange environment which much of the first episode is spent exploring. It must be said that the environment isn’t that strange: it’s a spaceship with some aliens and some humans in, just like the one in The Ark, or The Rescue, or quite a lot of other stories I could mention if I happened to have the Paris telephone directory on my person. The First Doctor story it most resembles, though, is The Savages.
Comparing The Savages, a story that is undeservedly obscure, to Four to Doomsday (a story that is deservedly obscure) shows up how badly the latter flubs a series of open goals. Both structure themselves around the central question of whether the villain’s planned society is good enough for the Doctor to allow it to exist. On paper, The Savages is the less morally taxing story in this regard. The Elders’ society depends on them running abhorrent human experiments on a designated underclass, whereas Monarch, the villain of Four to Doomsday, simply believes in a rigid class structure. He also believes that physical bodies are a hindrance and people should upload their consciousness into androids, which is the sort of question philosophical science fiction is designed to get stuck into. He also wants to mine Earth for its mineral wealth, which… look, we’re all reading this on computers or phones, we can’t get too self-righteous about that.
Individually, all of Monarch’s principles are either things that real people believe, or things that you could put up an argument for. Having them all co-exist makes him look inarguably evil. You imagine Dudley started with the classism, realised it wasn’t evil enough, added the android thing, then panicked and decided he should try to drain Earth’s natural resources as well. The result is a massively over-stacked deck. Even viewers at the time, who had yet to see a similar debate play out between the Fifth Doctor and the Cybermen, would have struggled to imagine this gentle, emotional Doctor agreeing with Monarch that humans should be turned into robots. Opposing this kind of soulless mechanisation is part of the series’ pre-existing morality, much as protecting Earth against all external threats is.
Adric, by contrast, is somehow even more annoying than usual, adding incel-level misogyny to his standard list of noisome characteristics.
It’s not clear, incidentally, why Monarch needs to travel to Earth to get his minerals, seeing as the story rests on him being several light years away. Treated differently, this could be a clever twist; the Doctor has arrived unusually early in this story, early enough to stop an invasion of Earth in its planning stages rather than while it’s happening. The problem lies with the one regular Hartnell-era trope Dudley doesn’t reuse, which is separating the TARDIS crew from their ship. Realising that Monarch will be stuck in traffic for a while, Tegan decides to use the TARDIS to reach Earth and warn them, which is absolutely the right solution to this threat. It’s also a solution that would bring the story to a juddering halt, so Tegan has to do it behind the Doctor’s back and make a thoroughgoing hash of it.
This would be a perfectly plausible outcome in literally any other era of the show. Unfortunately, as part of Christopher H Bidmead’s quest to make the TARDIS boring, he depicted Tegan just about managing to pilot it last week. Maybe there just wasn’t enough time to change Dudley’s script and bring it in line with Castrovalva – which was, after all, written after this was – but the characterisation of the regulars is very broad this week. Nyssa, at least, gets some opportunities to show off her cleverness, saving the Doctor with his own sonic screwdriver. Adric, by contrast, is somehow even more annoying than usual, adding incel-level misogyny to his standard list of noisome characteristics. This is yet another instance where Adric is easily won over by the villain, a level of repetition that gives you an even greater appreciation of Christopher Bailey’s subversion of this stock idea in the very next story. In the case of Four to Doomsday, it happens in episode three, at the exact point where the viewer knows all about Monarch’s ideas and is fully aware he’s a wrong ‘un. Adric’s decision to go along with his plan to destroy humanity makes him look absolutely, genocidally evil; at least Turlough only tried to kill the Doctor.
As with his previous directorial credit on the show, The Keeper of Traken, John Black is not up to the task of imbuing this with any kind of atmosphere. Even the first cliffhanger’s implication that Tegan’s sketches have somehow come to life doesn’t register as uncanny or haunting. He also can’t keep his cast on the same page, resulting in perhaps the most wildly variable set of performances we’ve seen. As Monarch, Stratford Johns displays the kind of urbane charm that makes you wish he’d been given a more ambiguous (rather than amphibious) role, but Philip Locke is terrible as Bigon and the usually reliable Janet Fielding hams it up so much in her TARDIS scenes that you start to wonder if she’s been possessed by the Mara ahead of schedule. In his first recorded story, Davison is capable but unexceptional, bar the odd promising flourish. I’m particularly fond of his absolutely exasperated “Oh, good grief!” when he’s told Tegan is trying to pilot the TARDIS. It’s in episode four, by which point I was just as worn out as him.
Next: Kinda (1982)
