Doctor Who A-Z #67: Frontier in Space (1973)

I think I love the flour the most. The apparent hijacking of a human ship by alien mercenaries, the one that kick-starts this story and nearly causes a war between solar systems, isn’t a raid on a ship carrying space marines or photon torpedoes or anything like that. It’s an attack on a supply line carrying food, and the most basic ingredient imaginable too. An episode like Boom demonstrates that Doctor Who remains an anti-war, anti-imperialist show in its modern incarnation, but even as early as the 1980s you could tell that it was being written by people for whom war and colonialism were abstract historical issues. The idea that conflict on an unimaginable scale could break out over a ship full of flour is the kind of thing you write when you can remember turning on the wireless for the latest developments on the European front.

The writer, in this case, is Malcolm Hulke, and the contradiction in him which I noted in my review of The Sea Devils holds true. On one level, Frontier in Space is a story by a card-carrying Communist where war is a rich man’s scam and empires are pre-ordained to collapse. On the other, perhaps no other Doctor Who writer has enjoyed writing war stories as much as Hulke. His enthusiasm sugars the pill of his fatalistic worldview. It’s easy to imagine a version of this story where the humans and the alien Draconians are both so maddeningly misguided that you don’t care if war is averted or not, but Hulke avoids that trap. It also sweeps the viewer along despite themselves. Episode four, for instance, sees the Doctor and Jo try and fail to get out of a prison cell for 24 minutes. For once, though, the show eschews the sonic screwdriver and plays this out on a Great Escape level of filing away locks and distracting the guards. It’s still shameless padding, but Hulke’s glee in writing this stuff somehow justifies it.

Indeed, there’s a lot of things in Frontier in Space that work despite their obvious flaws. The final twist is guessed successfully by Jo early on, and the Doctor has to be extra-patronising and dismissive of her in order to get the audience to ignore it. The Draconians are rightly remembered as one of the most well-realised one-off aliens in classic Who – even their Orientalist dress code is the subject of a good role-reversal joke when they muse on the “inscrutability” of humans. Not all of the monsters fare so well, though. It’s anyone’s guess why the Master trusts the Ogrons to carry out a plan built on stealth and subterfuge, and sure enough the big apes reliably screw everything up. There is also an uproarious cameo from a giant carnivore the Ogrons worship, which looks like nothing less than a huge orange scrotum. In his Target novelisation, Hulke changed this to a dinosaur-like creature with mashed-up Ogrons dripping from its jaws. Nice try, Malc, but we saw what we saw.

That said, the Ogron Eater is barely on screen long enough to register, which points to another of the serial’s successes. It is full of material, some of which is just an exuberant anniversary-year carnival of monsters (to coin a phrase): Draconians, Ogrons, Ogron Eaters, cameos from Daleks, Solonian mutants, Drashigs and Silurians. More substantially, it fills in its picture of the Human Empire with unusual depth and plausibility. The Earth President is a rather elegant woman in opera gloves, providing a rare image of female authority in a Malcolm Hulke story. The Empire’s proletariat, who the Doctor meets when he’s briefly imprisoned, are played by a multi-racial cast, meaning that for once this genuinely feels like an Empire drawn from all over the world. There are cameos from an African newsreader whose report implies Chinese colonialism of his home continent (something also hinted at way back in The Chase), and a ranting US senator who seems, if anything, too sane for America’s current ruling party.

And at the heart of it all, there’s Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning and Roger Delgado having a whale of a time. Rewatching Season Ten, I realise that even though the Pertwee era was my childhood favourite, I had internalised some of the fan consensus of the early ’90s. Fandom in that era could grudgingly tolerate some of the grittier early Pertwee stories, but held firm that as his tenure went on the show became increasingly childish, cheap and silly. To an extent, you can see where they’re coming from. The Doctor and the Master’s attempts to outwit each other here feel less like two Olympian gods involved in an endless game of chess, and more like bickering sitcom neighbours. But it’s a good sitcom, and Pertwee and Delgado clearly enjoy the snippy barbs they throw each other’s way.

Looking back at that, it’s an attitude steeped in 1990s geek culture – people would rather have had bad myth-building than great comedy. Had Barry Letts and Roger Sloman’s plan for a final Master story in the next season gone ahead, I suspect that would have been very bad myth-building indeed. But it didn’t happen; Delgado died in a car crash shortly after this, and his Master, at the end of this story, simply slips away. There are many people who think this is a disappointing final bow for the character’s first – and for many, best – incarnation. For all it was forced on the production team by tragic circumstances, though, this disappearing act is fully in character. It’s what Delgado’s Master does best, always managing to escape his inescapable fate – and that seems to be a good summary for this era of Doctor Who as a whole. Even when it’s on a collision course with absolute disaster, somehow it works.

Next: Planet of the Daleks (1973)

Graham’s Archive – Frontier in Space

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