Back in the Usenet days of Doctor Who fandom, people used to talk about “frock” versus “gun” episodes of Doctor Who. Some people liked the show for its “frock” elements (camp humour, weird juxtapositions, eccentric characters), some for its “gun” elements (military action, recurring monsters, violent deaths). I was never sure how seriously to take this – although it was proposed by Gareth Roberts, who’s never met a gender binary he didn’t like – especially since my childhood favourite era, the Pertwee years, seems to encompass all of the above. But it does shed some light on the infamous result of the 1982 Doctor Who Magazine readers’ poll, in which the worst story of Season Nineteen was judged to be Kinda, one of the show’s few attempts at purely philosophical science fiction, rejecting action altogether in favour of exploring how an alien society works. The favourite, meanwhile, was Earthshock, a non-stop carnival of macho action featuring old monsters and clips of previous Doctors.
This story is often told nowadays as a kind of cautionary tale, not because Earthshock is considered an unworthy winner but because Kinda is now appreciated as a great story in its own right. And at the risk of reigniting the gun vs frock wars – one side armed with grenade launchers, the other with plastic daffodils – I think that’s the wrong lesson. I have spent more time in this project defending unfairly maligned stories than slaughtering sacred cows, and I hope it stays that way. But I think the same part of the fan brain that thinks Kinda is rubbish because the monster looks fake and nobody gets eaten by it is the same part that thinks Earthshock is a masterpiece, and it’s time to ask: does that lobe get anything right?
It’s not as if Earthshock is devoid of charms, although even when they appear they’re often misread. A lot of people defend Beryl Reid’s performance as a camp element, a reassertion of the series’ frockishness in hard gun territory, and this feels like a hangover from its initial 1982 airing to me. Back then, Reid might have been more famous as one of the last music-hall stars, but these days she’s remembered for The Killing of Sister George and the BBC George Smiley adaptations. Her performances in both of those are of a piece with her character here: believable variations on tough, middle-aged career women. It requires no irony to enjoy. Peter Grimwade’s direction, too, still holds up. It’s famous for its blockbuster-quick cutting, and the pacing still impresses, but it’s not just an editing-room triumph. There’s a great shot early in the second episode where the Doctor and Lieutenant Scott argue about the Cybermen’s vault, and each new figure who enters the frame draws your eye back to that vault.
There is a lot of breathless energy in Grimwade’s direction and Peter Davison’s performance, both of which disguise the fact that this energy is spent running on the spot. By the end of episode one, we know that the Doctor has been falsely accused of a series of murders, which he is unaware were committed by Cybermen. As we go into episode three, the situation is… exactly the same, but they’re different murders and we’re on a spaceship now. There are a lot of shock reveals and big set-pieces here, but surprisingly few of them actually move the story forward. As Elizabeth Sandifer noted, unless you can identify a Cyberman from its head-handles, the celebrated reveal at the end of episode one basically amounts to telling you that the robots in the cave are being controlled by different robots, which is a weirdly pointless twist.
The other problem is that the nameless drone robots the Cybermen are using to… I dunno, hold their reveal back for the cliffhanger? There seems to be no other reason why they’re bothering with them – are actually scarier and more efficient than the Cybermen themselves, despite being nothing more than black leotards and a featureless head. David Banks seems like a lovely guy who did a lot to keep the flame of the show – and particularly the Cybermen – burning during the wilderness years, but his Cyberleader is completely wrong. It is, to be fair, written like that – having spent a lot of the script banging on about Cybermen being a coldly logical, emotionless race, writer Eric Saward then specifies they are motivated by revenge against the Doctor and has their leader strut around saying “Excellent!” and talking about glorious conquest. But Banks doesn’t play against this. If anything, his peacockish, waywardly-accented Cyberleader is actively making the problem worse.
My ideal version of the Cybermen is something like a humanoid virus; they just want to spread and survive, and have no particular feelings about the rightness or wrongness of that. This is an ideal that the show has arguably never managed – although some of Steven Moffat’s Cybermen stories got close – and it would be fair to point out that by the time you get to Revenge of the Cybermen even their co-creator Gerry Davis is writing them as generic evil robots. But if you’re going to rest a monster for seven whole years, it is reasonable to expect them to come back rethought and improved. Judging by Earthshock, the production team thought the only problem with the 1970s Cybermen was their design.
It’s possible for a story to miss the point of its monsters and still work as a story, of course. But Saward actually wants Earthshock to come down to the Doctor and the Cybermen clashing on the value of emotions, and since the Cybermen have no consistent position on that, neither does the Doctor. He makes a speech about emotions being good for looking at sunsets or eating a nice meal, which is absolutely pathetic in the face of, y’know, the massive nuclear bomb the Cybermen are about to wipe out all life on Earth with. And the Doctor agrees that it’s pathetic, even refusing to disagree when the Cyberleader says he’s won the argument. Rather than do anything to defend his position he resolves the plot by shooting all the Cybermen with a big laser gun.
This is dumb enough to make you reassess the main thing Saward’s script gets right, which is the build-up to Adric’s death. Putting aside for a second the cynicism of trying to attain gravitas by killing the one companion nobody liked, this is actually handled quite well. Adric’s arrogance is repositioned as a kind of tragic flaw which is both redeemed – in that he saves humanity – and causes his death. But there seems to be no acknowledgement of the fact that the Doctor fails at his mission more culpably than Adric fails at his. The Doctor is trying to protect his companions and prove the Cybermen’s unemotional militarism wrong. Rather than outwit or humiliate his enemies, he abandons his principles, picks up a gun and – at one low point – repeatedly shoots a prone Cyberman at point-blank range. None of this is played as anything other than a thrilling conclusion. It’s hard to shake the feeling that Saward believes Adric is tragic because he dies and the Doctor is heroic because he kills, and all those pretty words about principles and compassion were just filling space.
Doctor Who has always been a magpie show, and it was inevitable that in the 1980s it would absorb the influence of a slate of Hollywood action movies that seemed obsessed with outdoing each other in a race for the biggest body count. But the purpose of Doctor Who is also to bend existing genres into its universe. This is why the most successful of the 1980s action Whos is Remembrance of the Daleks, which has all the explosive gun battles and army-vs-aliens action you could ask for, but also has the Doctor winning using a plan Arnie or Sly would never consider. Faced with the challenge of writing a macho, violent story with a hero who is neither macho nor violent, Saward effectively gives up. He acknowledges that the Doctor, as he is usually written, has no place in this story. And in all his time working on the show, he never solves this problem. His best script, Revelation of the Daleks, is also the one that comes closest to admitting he’d rather not bother with the character of the Doctor at all.
Earthshock feels like Season Eight Simpsons, or Season Five Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s still good, and certainly everyone enjoyed it at the time. But rewatching it now, the problems that would soon derail the show are all present, and nobody seems minded to sort them out.
Next: Time-flight (1982)
