Doctor Who A-Z #58: Colony in Space (1971)

It’s strange that Colony in Space tends to be the forgotten soldier of Season Eight. It is, after all, the story in which the Third Doctor gets to travel to an alien planet for the first time, ending an Earth-based format which a considerable number of fans find hard to warm to. It should be cause for celebration, but compared to the increasingly inventive and colourful adventures the Third Doctor was having on contemporary Earth, Colony in Space is ironically rather mundane. It’s not bad, exactly – the late-period Troughton space stories that caused the show to run away from hard SF settings often weren’t as bad as their initial reception suggested, and neither is this. It’s just not the dazzling reconnection with a universe of possibilities that it ought to be.

The reason why it doesn’t properly take off has to do with a deeper problem with the Pertwee era. Reformatting Doctor Who into a show where the military fights aliens means there’s an ever-shrinking space for ordinary people to get involved in these stories. This is a problem, because ordinary people are a key part of Doctor Who‘s morality. Their mistreatment spurs Doctors into action. Their natural courage and resilience prompts Doctors to invite them onto the TARDIS. In stories like The Ark in Space and The End of the World, the simple fact of their existence is enough to send Doctors into poetic reverie. So far, all the Pertwee years has given us on this front is the odd comedy tramp or yokel who gets menaced by aliens then forgotten about. Even the Doctor’s companions, who have been audience identification figures to a greater or lesser degree over the years, are now drawn from military backgrounds.

Colony in Space initially looks like it’s going to correct this. The Brigadier is reduced to a comic cameo, amusingly stuck investigating all manner of cranks phoning in sightings of the Master. Jo Grant stops being the Doctor’s UNIT-appointed assistant and starts being a companion, meaning Katy Manning gets to play the classic emotional beats of the role – seeing the interior of the TARDIS, stepping onto another planet for the first time. Even more promisingly, the TARDIS lands on a planet that’s almost completely barren except for one beleaguered human colony. Jo forms a friendship with some of the female colonists in much the same the way that Ace and Rose would, and the Third Doctor’s grandiosity is deployed not to solve an alien invasion but to help the colony’s leaders cope with an imminent food shortage. At last, you think, Doctor Who is going to be about ordinary people with real problems again.

Except… for all the promise of this as a set-up, you can’t help but notice that the Doctor has once again made a beeline for the people in charge. At least when this happens on contemporary Earth we can get a certain vicarious thrill from watching him tear strips off bureaucrats and politicians; here, he ends up basically refereeing a fight between community leaders and mining company bosses for half the serial. This being Season Eight, the other half of the serial concerns the Master. While having Pertwee and Delgado face off again unquestionably raises the fun quotient significantly, it’s a shame that the initial promise of Colony in Space – of having this Doctor help normal people survive, rather than help the army blow things up – gets more or less entirely steamrollered by the two Time Lords.

The Master’s entry into the story is a very strange thing. The first scene of Episode One is a cutaway to Gallifrey, where some Time Lords are fretting over the Master attempting to steal a “doomsday weapon” of entirely McGuffinal properties. When I saw this, I was delighted. Clearly, writer Malcolm Hulke – who was the first to figure out the problems with the show’s last format change in The Silurians – has realised that using the Master in every story this year makes it impossible to play him as a surprise threat. Much like Bob Baker and Dave Martin did in the last story, Hulke decided to use this to his story’s advantage, letting the audience know of the Master’s involvement from the very first scene. Except, having theoretically saved himself a lot of time, Hulke then asks us to forget about the Master stealing a galaxy-destroying superbomb and spend three episodes watching a mining dispute instead.

El Sandifer, in her review, suggests Hulke is trying to wrong-foot the audience in quite a clever way here. Mentioning the Master, then showing a mysterious evil mining corporation, is meant to make us think he’s behind the company. The revelation that he isn’t means we can be properly surprised when he turns up as the Adjudicator later on. If that’s what Hulke is going for, it’s a nice idea. Unfortunately I never even considered the Master would be involved with IMC – it’s just not his kind of scheme. Even this Master, so much more controlled and methodical than later variants of the character, is unlikely to want to take over a human colony. Destroy one, yes. Help an alien race invade one, certainly. But actually running it is too much like hard work. We’ve seen the Master embed himself into a corporation in order to assist the Nestene invasion of Earth, but it’s impossible to imagine why he’d want to play a similar long game just to torment a small settlement of pioneers, and sure enough it turns out he’s not doing that.

I’m also not convinced by Dr. Sandifer’s argument that the destruction of the Uxarien civilisation is meant to be a moral judgement on them, specifically their decision to develop the superweapon the Master is trying to steal. The rest of the serial doesn’t portray the Uxariens as villainous, or even corrupt. They’re effectively the slaves of the human colonists, and so we expect the Doctor to side with them, just as he will with another race being oppressed by the Human Empire in exactly one season’s time. But the script can’t work out how it feels about the Uxariens. Even the revelation that they’re psychic and have historically been part of an advanced civilisation only slightly upgrades them from “savage” to “noble savage”. In any case, the idea that the Doctor will allow a civilisation to be destroyed because they developed weapons of mass destruction sits very oddly with his casual acceptance two stories ago of a human bioweapon.

You might point out that the fault there lies with The Mind of Evil, not Colony in Space. If Doctor Who had properly condemned germ warfare on Earth, it wouldn’t have risked charges of inconsistency when it did it in space. This is a valid point, and as the Pertwee years go on, the outer space serials will increasingly re-establish the Doctor as someone who fights for – often revolutionary – change. Both Pertwee and Manning will adjust well to this – Jo’s natural generosity and trusting nature makes her a very likeable interplanetary explorer, and the Third Doctor’s arrogance gets taken down a notch or two when he’s dealing with species more advanced than modern-day humanity. This might be the most forgiving way to view Colony in Space. It’s got the answers the show needs, even if it’s not executing them with enough confidence yet.

Next: The Daemons (1971)

Graham’s Archive – Colony in Space

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