Doctor Who A-Z #34: The Macra Terror (1967)

I’ve complained, perhaps a little too much, about the difficulties of experiencing missing stories, so let’s raise our glass to BBC Video’s range of animated reconstructions by looking at perhaps the greatest of their works. By all accounts, the titular monsters in The Macra Terror didn’t look good. They don’t even look good in stills, normally the saving grace of a Doctor Who monster that doesn’t move well, and the cast and crew have confirmed it was basically impossible to get them to move. In the 2019 animated reconstruction they’re fabulously horrible, scuttling around with glowing eyes and drooling mandibles. The temptation to improve old Doctor Who stories has been detectable as far back as the original Target novelisations, and the animation teams mostly hold back from it. They’re mostly aiming for a recreation, rather than a remake. But you’d have to be a serious purist to argue that giving the Macra a bit of extra mobility wasn’t the right thing to do.

The animation isn’t just correcting the story’s deficiencies, though. It’s also maximising its strengths, particularly when it comes to allowing space for Dudley Simpson’s excellent, eclectic score. The Macra Terror‘s pre-credits sequence is overlaid with a soothing ambient wash that becomes bitterly ironic once the Doctor turns on his time scanner and sees that his next adventure will involve being menaced by a giant crab. After the opening credits, it switches to a churning, delay-pedal industrial throb before we hear the first of the colony’s maddeningly catchy jingles, designed to persuade everyone present that everything is fine and there are definitely no giant killer crabs on the premises. We’ll get to the weird holiday-camp aspect of this planet in due course, but let’s double back for a second to an element of the show we rarely have cause to talk about – the opening credits.

When John Cura’s archive of pictures from missing episodes was discovered in the 1990s, one of the minor revelations was that this story was the first to feature the Doctor’s face in the opening credits. This is a reflection of how quickly the show has reorganised itself around Troughton’s personality. I’ve argued before that his era, its themes and its take on the Doctor’s character, establishes itself remarkably swiftly. You can’t imagine Hartnell’s Doctor getting an explicit warning that he’s headed into danger, then rushing out enthusiastically to greet it. Episode two offers a further clue as to the new Doctor’s shift in personality, as he rescues his companions from being brainwashed by the base’s sinister Controller. Ben succumbs, but he gets hold of Polly just in time, telling her to only trust her own mind and never, ever obey authority.

It’s a remarkable speech. After three stories that exploited – to wildly differing ends, but still – his comic ability, Troughton started to get to grips with his Doctor’s sincerity in The Moonbase, most notably in his celebrated speech about “some corners of the universe that have bred the most terrible things”. In a better world, Troughton’s speech to Polly here would be as well-remembered and widely quoted as that one. It reminds you that this story was released as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was climbing the charts, and sure enough the Second Doctor’s mop-top haircut is echoed on the bonce of the dissident Madok, encouraging the audience to see that barnet as a badge of justified rebellion.

It’s strange, then, that Ben is the one to succumb to the Controller’s brainwashing. Ben was introduced – by Ian Stuart Black, no less, who also writes this story – as a new kind of companion, an ordinary working-class naval recruit who goes to nightclubs, flirts with girls and does all sorts of things that hadn’t previously been part of Doctor Who‘s world. But then the colony in The Macra Terror is no ordinary dystopia. It styles itself as a place of joy and pleasure, with drum majorettes singing jaunty songs and chirpy jingles reminding citizens to do their work today. It is, in its own way, as heavily influenced by the nascent teenage culture as the Doctor’s haircut. Perhaps if Ben had ended up on The Sun Makers‘s Pluto or The Mutants‘s Solos, he’d have found that kind of dictatorship easier to reject – but The Macra Terror‘s unnamed planet is a hell for leisure, a land where you’ll work yourself to death and believe you’re having fun doing it. Jamie, who fights for what he believes in, can resist this. Ben, who fights for a job and goes out to get drunk afterwards, can’t.

It’s closer to The Happiness Patrol than any of its Season Four stablemates, then, although the claustrophobic tension and well-drawn cast of supporting characters are in line with the best of the stories surrounding it. Particular credit goes to Gertan Klauber as the oily, grinning Ola, quite the campest despot Doctor Who has ever seen (and there’s some serious competition for that title). But really everyone is good because the whole world is well-drawn, and it can even get away with throwing random comic set-pieces like Jamie being mistakenly auditioned for the colony’s dancers into the final episode without killing the tension. The humour feels menacing, and the menace feels humorous; it’s an early draft of the tone Robert Holmes will later revolutionise the series with.

And “revolutionise” is the right word. At the heart of The Macra Terror is nothing less than a challenge to the show’s young audience: are you going to go along with a version of the counterculture that appears bright and jolly, but actually encourages you to work and consume until your planet is uninhabitable? Or are you going to follow the Doctor’s example and think for yourself? That this message probably sailed over the heads of a lot of baby boomers can be measured by the world we live in. But it’s still a message worth repeating, as Russell T Davies did in this story’s belated sequel Gridlock, which echoes Marx by including religion as one of the many things to distract colonists from their pollution-choked existence. A family show from the 1960s playing with these kinds of insurrectionary sentiments is quite the thing to behold – and, thanks to Simpson, a pleasure to hear as well.

Next: The Faceless Ones (1967)

Graham’s Archive – The Macra Terror

Full Doctor Who Archive Here