The Creature from the Pit [Classic Doctor Who] – Blue Towel Productions

Doctor Who has long been my favorite show, and after a long time of not really watching it very actively, lately I’ve been deliberately working at rewatching all the available episodes of the classic series, and writing up my thoughts on each adventure. But there are a lot of episodes! So it’s taking a while. For extra fun I’m mostly watching them completely out of order.

The Creature from the Pit

Starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor.
Companions:  Lalla Ward as Romana and David Brierley as K9

Written by David Fisher.  Directed by Christopher Barry. Produced by Graham Williams. Script Edited by Douglas Adamsr.

Format:  4 episodes, each about 25 minutes long
Originally Aired:  October – November 1979 (Episodes 9-12 of Season 17)

I have not been looking forward to The Creature from the Pit. In general, I’m not a fan of Season 17 of the show (aside from The City of Death.) Currently, I’m picking my viewing order of these stories randomly–literally by drawing a random number to point me toward the next episode to watch. This time around my first draw led me The Chase, but since I just watched The Space Museum, I decided this couldn’t count. My self-imposed rules are that I won’t watch the same Doctor twice in a row (aside from Tom Baker because there are so many of his that I haven’t got to), and of course The Chase comes directly after The Space Museum. So I drew again and came up with The Sunmakers. I decided this didn’t count either because my last Tom Baker story was Underworld, and where possible, I don’t want the next story I watch of a particular Doctor to be from the same season. So after all that I got The Creature from the Pit. Oh well, if I’m going to do this, I had to get to it eventually.

Spoilers Ahead!

The Creature from the Pit has got some extremely obvious problems. Foremost, and most notoriousy, is the distractingly weird appearance of the titular creature, Erato. Apparently, the fact that part of it resembled a gigantic phallus wasn’t lost on the production team, but various problems and delays meant there was no way to redesign it.

That said, there certainly was no reason to have Tom Baker’s appear to blow on it in an attempt to communicate with the thing. The story is pretty earnest in its depiction of Erato, but with the benefit of hindsight there just is no way to watch the story without marvelling at how some of these scenes made it to screen the way that they did.

Beyond that the story has other issues. It’s overly farcical at times, for instance. There are a humorous moments which work (I like the joke about 74,384,338 being the Doctor’s lucky number, for instance)t but some of the scenes, like the Doctor tricking some guards into letting him knock them out by pretending his nose is itchy, are just silly. Maybe the nadir is the Doctor hanging on for dear life in the pit, only to pull out a book out of his pocket about how to climb Mt. Everest, only to discover it’s written in Tibetan, so he pulls out another book about how to read Tibetan. It’s not that the gag is bad, exactly, it’s just that it’s ridiculous.

And very few of the guest human characters sustain interest for very long. Karela (Adrasta’s advisor), Torvin (the leader of the metal-bandits), the Huntsman who takes over things at the end…they are all fine at best, and nothing more. The exception is Organon, whom Geoffrey Bayldon plays with brightness and energy. He definitely helps to keep things lively.

More seriously, the story’s main villain, Lady Adrasta (Myra Frances) runs out of steam about halfway through the runtime. It’s unfortunate, as the concept of the character–a selfish dictator who goes to evil lengths to maintain power for herself–has as much potential as any Doctor Who villain. And she starts off well, but whatever menace she embodies gets lost as the character just descends into an unhinged woman who screams a lot. When she dies fairly early in the last episode, it’s a relief, and also a nice surprise as it turns out there is still a decent amount of story left.

Which brings us to the other side of this review which is that aside from these things, The Creature from the Pit is surprisingly good. The pace of the story is steady with things consistently moving forward, and a number of interesting developments and twists. The erudite nature of the Creature is a nice subversion of expectations, as well as the last act twist that it has, however justified, threatened the entire existence of Chloris and now just wants to leave.

The direction and overall production, aside from the issues with Erato that I mentioned, are quite strong. The surface scenes on Chloris look great and are almost good enough to sell as believable the awesomely ludicrous idea of “Wolf Weeds” (ambulatory tumbleweeds that hop around on people annoying, but apparently not very dangerously).

There are many individual scenes are well directed and full of good dialogue, mostly from the Doctor. Some favourites include the Doctor saying about his greater success in understanding the mysterious shell than Adrasta’s magician: “Well, to be fair, I did have a couple of gadgets which he probably didn’t, like a teaspoon and an open mind.” Later, about Adrasta’s treatment of the creature, he says, “And did she put the welfare of her struggling people above her own petty power? No. She tipped the ambassador into a pit and threw astrologers at him.”

Organon gets some good ones as well, such as when he introduces himself with the accomplishments: “The future foretold, the past explained, the present…apologized for.”

And Tom Baker himself is great as the Doctor. Aside from a few of the more overtly farcical bits that I mentioned, he pulls off well a script that calls for him to do quite a lot of talking to himself (as he tries to figure out how to relate to Erato). He also slides comfortably between the character’s quirkiness to his more serious side, which is something I haven’t always thought of being one of Baker’s strengths.

So, overall, I still won’t say The Creature from the Pit is excellent or top-tier, but it was way better than was anticipating, and it was quite good at highlighting Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor.

Other Thoughts:

• David Brierley plays the voice of K9 here, something that he only did during this season, starting with this serial (so he appears in three completed stories, plus Shada). I remember him being decidedly not as good as the character’s originator, John Leeson, but in rewatching this now I feel like he’s perfectly fine. K9 has got some pretty epic “shoot ’em up” scenes in this story, which is fun.

Of course, he also goes down under a pile of Wolf Weeds like a total chump, more than once, so there’s that.

• The Doctor claims to have lived through about 130 of a Time Lord’s 90 lives. Presumably this is joke, but given things like the revelation of the Timeless Child, who knows?

• Eileen Way plays Karela. In addition to having a part in Dalek’s Invasion Earth 2150, she was also “Old Mother” back in An Unearthly Child–the very first character in the show to ever die. Here, she survives (even after committing a murder herself!)