Doctor Who A-Z #63: The Mutants (1972)

Everyone knows The Mutants is a bad story. Ever since it was being filmed, when Jon Pertwee first noticed the similarity between the opening scene and Monty Python‘s “It’s…” man, people have been making fun of it. In Doctor Who Magazine‘s Mighty 200 poll, The Time Monster was the only Third Doctor story that rated lower, and that’s got Sergeant Benton in a nappy. I remember enjoying it as a kid – that’s The Mutants, not Benton in a nappy (although…) – but surely that can be ascribed to childhood naïveté. This is, after all, an allegory about South African apartheid done in the colourful, child-friendly style of mid-Pertwee-era Doctor Who. Surely it can’t possibly be anything other than completely cringeworthy?

You know where this is going, of course. I’m about to say The Mutants is great and you’re all insane.

It’s not, despite my childhood memories, as if I was expecting this. The Mutants is written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who can and will make an absolute hash of plotting a four-part story in the future. Giving them a six-parter seems like an act of wilful self-sabotage, yet The Mutants makes a persuasive case that maybe Baker and Martin’s work is a more natural fit for this length. You still get the breathless rush of ideas that is their trademark, but the increased episode count gives the ideas a chance to breathe, to be fully explored rather than tripping helplessly over each other. Each episode begins with a big twist – the Marshal taking control of Solos, the Mutants being harmless, the appearance of Sondergaard, and so on – which the remainder of the episode then explores in satisfying depth. And just because the key plot reveals are placed early on doesn’t mean the cliffhangers are slacking. The one at the end of episode four – in which the Doctor and Jo are sucked out of a depressurising spaceship as it launches nuclear warheads at a peaceful population – deserves some sort of award for deranged excess.

Padding, the usual Achilles heel of a six-part Doctor Who story, could not be less of an issue here. Most of the other regular pitfalls are nimbly vaulted too. The blue-screen effects – forget the Master, this is the Third Doctor’s most persistent foe – are wisely used to add a psychedelic quality to the more surreal scenes, the location filming has a pleasingly wintry, atmospheric look to it, and Tristram Cary’s music is just as experimental but more tastefully deployed than it was in The Sea Devils. Even the laser beams look like they could hurt someone. Pertwee’s Doctor is still a bit of a patronising cock to Jo, although she does get to gratifyingly bemoan the quality of his dad jokes. Elsewhere, though, his haughtiness is well-deployed, culminating in him furiously accusing the Marshal of “the most brutal and callous series of crimes against a defenceless people it’s ever been my misfortune to encounter!“

Which brings us, then, to the crimes the audience were meant to be reminded of. It’s no secret that Baker and Martin were writing about the situation in South Africa, and it’s similarly well-attested that the native Solonians were meant to be analogous to Black South Africans. Since we mostly remember the Solonians in their black, insect-like mutant form – a truly brilliant monster design from future Oscar-winning costume designer James Acheson – this runs the risk of being grossly insensitive. Yes, the mutants turn out to be nice monsters, but they’re still monsters, and equating Blackness with monstrosity is still playing into a trope with a very long, very racist history.

It would be awful if that’s what the serial did, but it doesn’t. The crucial detail that I’d forgotten is that, at the start of the story, the native Solonians are just as frightened of the mutants as the human colonists are. Rather than race, the mutations can be read as a metaphor for anything – disease, terrorism, the simple fear of change – that might bind an oppressed population to its oppressors. The character of Varan is a case in point. He’s introduced as a proud Solonian warrior, and Baker and Martin give him some smartly pastiched sword-and-sandal movie dialogue to differentiate his mindset from the humans’ more naturalistic speech. Yet the fear of mutants has turned him into a willing accomplice to the Marshal’s ethnic cleansing. 

This would be a remarkably complex characterisation even without the revelation that Varan himself is starting to succumb to mutation. For all his bravado, his colonised mindset prevents him from reaching the apotheosis that the less obviously formidable Ky reaches. As if to underline this, The Mutants also casts a Black actor, a disappointingly rare sight in Doctor Who up to this point, not as an oppressed Solonian but as a human colonist. People often criticise the casting of Rick James (not that one!) on the grounds that a Black actor in a villainous role muddies the metaphor, but to me it only confirms the nuance of The Mutants‘ take on racism. 

To wit, Doctor Who often implies that the discovery of alien life will reduce racism among humans, but only because we’ll have the opportunity to be racist against aliens instead. Revival series episodes like Planet of the Ood will cast Black and Asian actors as oppressors, which is interesting firstly because it allows bigotry to be played by people who have probably experienced it first-hand in their lives. But it’s also interesting because it allows the show to examine racism in a different context, to confirm that, even when racism looks superficially different to how it does on Earth, the power relations that underpin racism remain the same. It’s an examination of structural racism, a common enough phrase in discussions of prejudice nowadays, but a remarkable thing to find in a science fiction serial from the 1970s. It’s time to start taking this serial seriously.

Next: The Time Monster (1972)

Graham’s Archive – The Mutants

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