Doctor Who has long been my favorite show, but it’s been a couple of years since I’ve actually watched anything but the newest episodes. Before that, I was making a respectable run at getting through the original series, most of which I haven’t seen for decades. For various reasons, it feels like time to get back into it.
Frontier in Space
Starring Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor.
Companion: Katy Manning as Jo Grant.
Recurring Characters: Roger Delgado as the Master.
Written by Malcolm Hulke. Directed by Paul Bernard. Produced by Barry Letts. Script edited by Terrance Dicks.
Format: 6 episodes, each about 25 minutes long.
Originally Aired: February – March 1973 (episodes 9-15 of Season 10)
Frontier in Space is an notable story for a number of reasons that I’ll get into in a minute, but one of the biggest is that it really functions as the first half of a two-serial epic, which though they came with clear demarkations in terms of story focus, guest cast, directors, locations and so on, are very directly connected. Indeed, Frontier in Space ends with an abrupt cliffhanger, and though its possible to see in hindsight that most of its story threads are actually wrapped up by the end of Episode Six, a first time viewer could be forgiven for thinking that they were going to tune into Frontier in Space Episode Seven the following week, rather than Part One of a new serial.
Spoilers Ahead!
Frontier in Space is a breezy adventure, full of space-opera fun. We get lots of aliens and spaceships and fights with ray guns, all told on a backdrop of some interesting political drama. Someone is fostering tensions between the Earth empire and their old enemies, the Draconians (a new alien race that we’re introduced to)–can the Doctor reveal the truth before it’s too late?
This provides the narrative glue for the show to take us to a wide range of locations, making this one of the farthest reaching stories that I can remember. We start on a cargo ship where some sort of hypnotic sound makes people perceive their greatest fears, then we’re on earth where Jo and the Doctor are held prisoner as spies, then the Doctor is shipped off to a penal colony on the moon, then we’re on the Master’s spaceship as he takes a captive Doctor and Jo to the Draconian planet, then back to earth, and then finally to homeward of the Ogrons. It’s a pretty incredible undertaking for a single serial of Doctor Who, and all things considered the show’s budget and design-work hold up pretty well.
I mean, it’s still Doctor Who–the future-earth exteriors are obviously some dressed up industrial building, and the Ogron world is a quarry–but there is sufficient variety in these settings that you can easily watch and let yourself be carried away in the expansive galaxy that the show is exploring.
The problem with all this is, of course, that the story itself is massively padded. Huge amounts of the serial (like most of the first four episodes) are spent with the Doctor in various states of imprisonment–he’s captured, rescued, captured again, escapes, captured again…it goes on and on. This is probably the most annoying when the Doctor is a prisoner on earth and there are multiple times when he’s broken out, willingly or unwillingly. But the biggest time-waster has got to be when he sent to the penal colony on the moon.
That’s a whole detour that takes up an episode or so and introduces a bunch of characters and points of peril that ultimately don’t have any impact on the story–he doesn’t learn anything, the plot doesn’t move forward, and it all just ends when the Master shows up and takes him away.
But here’s the thing–all this doesn’t bother me that very because, like I said before, the whole thing is so much fun. Sometimes Doctor Who is fun because of the far-out concepts it introduces, but in this case it’s more because of the pulp-inspired, high-stakes adventure that this story is filled with. I mean, the Doctor gets stuck in a prison on the moon–that’s kind of awesome! He has to do multiple spacewalks, including one where he has to figure out how to survive when there is an abrupt course correction. He gets loads of fight scenes with humans, Draconians and Ogrons, and he fights the Master with some sort of makeshift whip. All of this to prevent the galaxy from plunging into a devastating war! And just when you think you’ve seen everything, the Daleks show up!!
Actually, I’m not a big fan of the Daleks, but their appearance makes for a nice surprise here, turning up here somewhere in the midst of the sixth episode. It’s a good payoff for the whole political storyline that the serial has been highlighting–who is behind this effort to plunge earth and Draconia into war? Why, the Daleks of course, just waiting to slip in there and take advantage of their enemy’s weakened states.
Modern viewers might be distracted with how relatively weak the Daleks seem. After all, what do the utterly impervious-to-harm engines of destruction that we’ve had on TV since 2005 care about the puny efforts of human beings to stand in their way? But in general, I prefer the more reasonably-powered Daleks that the classic series tended to give us. They are still a formidable threat, but not so ridiculously over-powered (and quick to multiply) that it becomes implausible that any of their enemies still exist at all.
Anyway, their appearance here holds promise for how the story is going to play out in the follow up, Planet of the Daleks. I plan to rewatch that story next, but in the meantime there is still a lot to say about Frontier in Space.
One of the most notable things, which alluded to way at the start of this post, is the fact that this is very first time that the Daleks and the Master have appeared on TV together.
This is more the sort of thing we are used to with in the modern series, but at the time it was unusual for major Doctor Who bad guys to be in the same story together. It doesn’t amount to much but for fans at the time it must have been pretty exciting.
Of course, even more importantly, that same episode is the last appearance by Roger Delgado as the Master, owing to his untimely death by car accident not much later. Sadly, Frontier in Space is far from his best appearance. He’s as much fun as everything else in the story, but he’s not all that successful at being genuinely menacing. He spends most of the story either negotiating with politicians and administrators, or being frustrated with his Ogron underlings. He doesn’t kill anyone himself and the one time he tries to hypnotise someone (Jo Grant), she spouts nursery rhymes back at him and shrugs it off. He also spends a lot of time deliberately not killing the Doctor, instead issuing vague threats about a worse coming.
Still, Roger Delgado also makes the Master interesting to watch as a personality, and he still remains one of the most intelligently played versions of the character. For my money, only Michelle Gomez surpasses him at being genuinely interesting.
But where the Master is kind of let down by the story, Jo Grant is served very well. She gets to stand up to the Master with the aforementioned nursery rhyme readings, as well as to overcome the effects of the hypnosound which initially paralysed her with fear. She has a lot of lively dialogue with the Doctor, and gets a hilariously epic scene where she has to just keep talking non-stop in order to prevent the Master knowing that the Doctor is escaping. Even though it is pretty goofy, it’s actually one of the few times that we see her doing something that would have come out of her intelligence training.
I also appreciate the Draconians themselves, and the way the whole political story plays out over the serial’s six episodes. Jon Pertwee himself said that the Draconians were his favorite alien, because the actors had the ability to give the characters a lot of expression and personality, owing to the fact that the makeup revealed both their eyes and their mouths. You can’t even call them monsters–these are actually people, just as much as all the totally-human aliens that the show has presented are, and they never do anything particularly monstrous.
It was also neat to see General Williams shift from being openly hostile to the Draconians to realising that he was wrong, and setting his course to righting that wrong. This is the kind of guy that the show has given us a dozen times over who would never change, and up being killed in his ignorance, but here he sets his face to righting that wrong. In spite of the cliffhanger at the end of Episode Six, Frontier in Space ends on a surprisingly upbeat note–war has been avoided not just because everyone who wanted it is dead, but because they’ve come to come to a genuinely deeper understanding of one another.
So yeah, a more tightly plotted story would have been better, but there is still a lot to enjoy here.
Other thoughts:
• A design of the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver debuts here (I’ve read) that got used all the way until it was destroyed in The Visitation some nine seasons hence. The Doctor refers to it at one point as his “ultrasonic screwdriver.”
• When the Ogrons first enter the spaceship, the Doctor basically chucks one of the humans at them so that he can try to get away. The Ogrons are using stun beams, but the Doctor didn’t know that, so dang, dude!
• The cast of the story includes an appearance by Ray Lonnen is “Gardiner,” one of the officers who comes to the cargo ship’s rescue. He’s familiar to me as Willie Caine, aka “Sandbagger One” in the British espionage series The Sandbaggers, which I recently rewatched.
• There are some neat cutaway to TV news that the earth president is watching, which indicate how disrupted life is getting on the planet. One of them shows a hawkish politician calling for war at some sort of rally. It’s a nice but economic touch to help expand the story’s sense of scope.
• The Master is really into the planet earth. He reads The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells, he quotes a poem by Tennyson, and for his reward for helping the Daleks, he asks to be made ruler of the planet earth!
• The episode has a number of bits that reference the past continuity of the series, all of which feel nicely integrated into the story. The point in history that the TARDIS has landed in is put into the context of what Jo experienced in The Mutants. The hypnosound makes Jo experience flashbacks to Carnival of Monsters, The Mutants and The Sea Devils as she faces her greatest fears. And most interestingly, while trying to make the Master think they are just sitting around in their jail cell doing nothing, the Doctor tells Jo about the events of his trial, as seen at the end of The War Games.
• Also, two of the main Ogrons are played by Stephen Thorne and Michael Kilgarriff, who both have major monster-bred in Doctor Who. Thorne was Azal in The Daemons, Omega in The Three Doctors, and Eldrad in The Hand of Fear, while Kilgarriff was the Cyber-Controller in both Tomb of– and Attack of the Cybermen, as well as the titular Robot in Robot.
• Oh, I almost forgot! This goofy looking monster shows up on the Ogron planet, apparently something they worship as a god, while also being terrified of it. It’s big, orange, inflated blob that appears only for a couple of seconds. Apparently, producer Barry Letts was pretty unhappy with it and ordered it to be cut down to appear as minimally as possible.
