Doctor Who A-Z #38: The Abominable Snowmen (1967)

Back in the William Hartnell days, Doctor Who managed to get around the world on the wings of audience expectations: people in the early 1960s didn’t mind if a television serial used a soundstage with a painted backdrop to represent an Aztec temple. Even by 1967, though, audiences were starting to demand more realism, so in The Abominable Snowmen director Gerald Blake headed to the mountains to shoot the exterior scenes. Not those ones, though: they’re shot on some grassy Welsh mountains with a rather sub-Himalayan smattering of snow. This matters less now, because at the time of writing all but one of the serial’s six episodes are missing. The version of The Abominable Snowmen I watched was the animated reconstruction from last year, one which adds some extra snow and crags to the outdoor scenes. What it can’t do, because it’s tied to the pacing of the original recordings, is make the titular robot Yeti any faster or scarier.

Slow, waddling and with a silhouette that suggests Miyazaki’s Totoro, these big chonk bois are frankly adorable. There’s a moment where the Doctor partially dismantles a deactivated one, and Jamie is tasked with voicing the audience’s suspicions about how easy that was. In response, the Doctor asks if he’d feel comfortable walking up to one of these things armed with nothing more than a screwdriver, and the Scottish soldier says he definitely wouldn’t. Well, I would. Not even a metal screwdriver, either – I’d offer them a cocktail. The episode three cliffhanger, where a Yeti takes what feels like an age to turn around and notice Victoria, cements the impression that these guys aren’t ready to become series icons just yet. There are, of course, many excellent Doctor Who stories with badly-designed or unscary monsters; nobody seriously thinks The Caves of Androzani is bad because the dragon looks plastic. But Season Five is surely the season which is most focused on monsters, and as such it’s not hard to see why The Web of Fear is better-loved than this. It’s not just the slimmed-down Yeti costumes; under the direction of Douglas Camfield, the script appears to have been put on a ruthless training regimen as well.

The serial’s key twist, which I’ve already alluded to, is that the mythical monsters are actually robots. By this stage, the show is so angled towards science fiction that you’d be surprised if that wasn’t the case. Other ideas pull from more unusual sources. The idea of the Doctor fighting a bodiless intelligence and its drone-like physical servants has appeared precisely once before, crammed in at the end of The Web Planet. There, it was depicted as just another fantastical, eccentric sight on the planet Vortis. The Abominable Snowmen recognises that this idea has greater potential within the show’s more horror-inflected current style. The final episode, in which the possessed Padmasambhava enters into psychic conflict with a terrified Doctor, is genuinely eerie and disturbing – it’s easy to see why the Virgin New Adventures novels of the 1990s explicitly tied this into H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. (That said, a more likely influence is that reliable Doctor Who crib-sheet Nigel Kneale, whose script for Hammer’s The Abominable Snowman is given the Alien/Aliens one-upping treatment in the title of this serial)

Before that chilling climax, we’ve got a plot that’s closer to Haisman and Lincoln’s little-loved later script for The Dominators than some of this serial’s partisans may care to admit. Here, it’s an inexplicably belligerent faction of a nearby Buddhist monastery trying to press their indifferent leadership into battling the Yeti. Haisman and Lincoln’s belief that the 1960s peace movement were primarily opposing self-defence really is one of their most maddeningly pig-ignorant beliefs, and this is written with full awareness that Lincoln later co-wrote The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. Still, this is essentially subtext here, mostly objectionable in the light of that later story. A bigger problem is that the zombie-like Padmasambhava is so obviously creepy that – even if the bodiless Great Intelligence is an unusual threat for this era of the show – it’s no surprise that he’s in on the alien conspiracy in some way. 

Haisman and Lincoln gave Padmasambhava that name not only to wear me out typing it, but also to reference the author of one of the foundational texts of Tibetan Buddhism, The Book of the Dead. This bothered the show’s later producer Barry Letts, a sincere Buddhist, who asked Terrance Dicks to make it clear that it wasn’t the real Padmasambhava in Dicks’s novelisation of the serial. While this, and the expected yellowface, want for sensitivity, it is worth giving The Abominable Snowmen credit for maintaining a link with non-Western civilisations that could easily have vanished along with the pure historicals. The Abominable Snowmen is ultimately an explorer’s tall tale: it doesn’t have much depth, but it delivers the chills, and its exoticism is distinctive and laudable in the middle of a season which will ultimately mark a significant step towards rooting the show in contemporary and near-future Britain.

Next: The Ice Warriors (1967)

Graham’s Archive – The Abominable Snowmen

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