09 – Ninth Season – Jon Pertwee

Day of the Daleks

The Daleks are back! Author Terry Nation owned the rights, and he was trying to sell them in the U.S., so they were not authorized in Doctor Who. This resulted in a five-year hiatus. This was a factor many years later as well, as the new Doctor Who series was for a time unable to use them. Fortunately that was resolved in time for them to film Dalek in the Christopher Eccleston Series One.

It does take a while for them to show up, though. Everything starts when a British diplomat is attacked in his study, but then the attacker seems to vanish into thin air. The attacker is part of a group that has guns that make people vanish, so they are from the future. And then they have enemies that look a bit like gorillas. The attacker dropped a device that can take people through time, and the Doctor fixes it up. Then more of those attackers show up and are about to kill the Doctor under the impressions that he is Sir Reginald Styles, the diplomat, when Jo suddenly activates the device and is taken into the future. There is a leader there who seems friendly, but we have learned he is under the thumb of the Daleks.

The first group of attackers are the enemies of the Daleks, and in their history Sir Reginald had arranged a conference at his country house, and then blew up everyone, causing World War III, and then the Daleks swooped in. They plan to kill Styles to prevent this, but the Doctor figures out that it was these very people who blew up the house , killing everyone, and bringing about the very thing they were trying to stop.

Frankly, the Daleks have very little to do here, and could just as easily been replaced by any off-the-rack villain. But it was Pertwee’s first Dalek story, and no doubt people enjoyed seeing the old pepper pots once again.

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The Curse of Peladon

Apparently the Doctor got the TARDIS working again. Or did he? At the end he intimates that the Time Lords may have enabled it for their own purposes. But the Doctor and Jo land on the planet Peladon, where a young king, played by David Troughton, is hosting delegates from the Galactic Federation. These include a delegate from Alpha Centauri, one from Arcturus, and a pair of Ice Warriors from Mars. Troughton is the son of Patrick Troughton, the Second Doctor, and he appeared previously in The War Games, and would appear many years later in the Tenth Doctor story Midnight. The High Priest Hepesh is violently opposed to Peladon joining the Federation, but the chancellor is in favor. Of course he gets killed almost immediately. The Doctor and Jo are taken for delegates from Earth and go along with it.

The main point of the story is that someone is willing to kill people to disrupt the conference and prevent Peladon from joining the Federarion. Hepesh is clearly part of it, But is he acting alone, or in league with someone else? The Doctor immediately suspects the Ice Warriors, but he turns out to wrong. They are completely honorable and honest. At the end the real delegate from Earth arrives and the Doctor and Jo hightail it out of there to avoid questions.

This is unusual in the Pertwee era for being set entirely indoors. The reason was that they had to hold down costs because The Sea Devils went over budget, but it works well for this type of story to be somewhat claustrophobic.

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The Sea Devils

This is the introduction of another deadly foe, at least in part. It is implied that the Sea Devils and the Silurians are related, as the Doctor says he “has met them before”. The Master is imprisoned on an island, which conveniently also houses a navy base. But he has somehow suborned the commander of the base, and is working on a scheme. Meanwhile, three vessels have been sunk in the area recently, and an abandoned fort in the sea, with two maintenance workers, is attacked by what one of them calls Sea Devils. The Doctor manages to convince the Captain of the naval base to send out a sub to investigate, but it gets captured by the creatures. finally the Doctor dives down to investigate, and tries to negotiate a peace between the Sea Devils and the Humans. The story is that they all went into hibernation millions of years ago because of some threatened menace, which the Doctor says never materialized. But while they hibernated, humans arose and now dominate what the Sea Devils believe to be their planet. And this is a good deal like the story of the Silurians.

The Master is trying to ally with them in order to wipe out the human race, largely because the Doctor is fond of humans. Of course, in the end the Master is defeated, and so are the Sea Devils. And of course, the Master makes good his escape at the very end. All in all a standard Pertwee era story of Doctor Who, and the Sea Devils would be back again several times.

This story is also famous for the Jon Pertwee explaining that he had “reversed the polarity of the neutron flow” on a device. This splendid bit of sciencey gobble-de-gook has become legendary from Pertwee’s run.

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The Mutants

When Pertwee’s run began, the Time Lords had taken from him the ability to use the TARDIS, stranding him on Earth. This was good for cost control, but it soon proved to be a problem for telling interesting stories since the whole idea of Doctor Who is about traveling through Time and Space. So by his second season they had to find a work around, and in The Colony In Space they first had the Time Lords send him on a mission. Then in this season, the opening story The Day of the Daleks they had time travel through other technology let the Doctor and Jo go into the future. Then in this story the Doctor is given another task from the Time Lords, to deliver a message, and they make the TARDIS operational for this purpose.

The setting here is a planet Solos, which has native life forms, but it is ruled from an orbiting Skybase run by Earth people called the Overlords, as part of the 30th Century Earth Empire. So that gives you a first taste of what is happening. The Overlords are running everything for their own benefit, and killing a lot of the natives. But the Earth empire is over-stretched and decides to pull out and give the natives independence, when a mad megalomaniac military official arranges to assassinate the Administrator and accelerate the terraforming to make it suitable for Earth people and fatal to the natives. The Doctor is sent with a message for one of the natives, and gets involved. The ending is a bit contrived, but it is not a bad story overall. It is inspired by the colonial issues in South Africa and in decolonizing India.

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The Time Monster

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Ninth Season Reviews

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