13 – Thirteenth Season – Tom Baker

In Tom’s first season, the program was shortened by a few episodes, and included a two-part episode just to keep it from being even shorter. But this was not ideal. They settled on doing 26 episodes per season, done as 5 4-part stories followed by a 6-part story as a big finale. And this pattern prevailed up until the final year of Tom Baker’s run as the Doctor. During the Pertwee years they faced a dilemma because smaller budgets meant doing more 6-part stories to keep costs down since props, costumes, etc. could be amortized over more episodes. But the problem is that many of those Pertwee 6-part stories tended to drag a bit in the middle. As an example. consider The Monster of Peladon where they had the Doctor and Sarah get captured, then escape, then get captured, then escape, just to fill the space. 26 episodes gave them half of the year for the series, which suited the BBC, but you had to have one 6-part story to make the numbers work. Fortunately, the one we got this season was a corker. But if you look at it you can see how they did it. The first two episodes set in Antarctica are a kind of prequel to a 4-parter set in England.

Terror of the Zygons

If you look at the air dates you will notice something interesting. This Thirteenth Season started only a few months after Season Twelve. Apparently the BBC knew they had a hit and wanted more. This starts with something attacking oil rigs in the North Sea off of Scotland, and it leaves bite marks, so it has to be a really big creature. So the Brigadier calls in the Doctor to help investigate. The local Duke is very unfriendly, but is that just the way he is, or is it significant? They discover a signalling device that can call the creature and get it to attack, and Doctor gets it stuck to his hand and has to run for his life. And we are introduced to the shape-shifting Zygons, making their first appearance in this story. Of course, the Duke is lord of Loch Ness, and the creature is the Loch Ness monster. Why the Zygons wanted to destroy oil rigs is not clear, nor is it clear how they plan to conquer the Earth. But it doesn’t matter anyway because the Doctor kills them all and foils their scheme.

At the end, the Doctor plans to take the TARDIS back to London, and offers to give the others a lift, but Only Sarah agrees and the others beg off, clearly distrusting the Doctor’s ability to pilot the TARDIS. And in fact, Harry and the Brigadier will not be regulars after this point, nor will UNIT. From here on it will be the Doctor and Sarah Jane.

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Planet of Evil

The Doctor and Sarah pick up a distress call that takes them to the planet Zeta Minor, on the edge of the universe. There they find a scientific expedition that has been attacked by strange creatures, and now only the Professor in charge of the expedition is left. Then a military expedition comes to follow up on the scientific expedition, and the military leader is the usual blockhead who shoots first and asks question later, and of course it is clear to him that the Doctor and Sarah are the source of the problem and that they have been killing the people. So the Doctor has to work out who the real killer is, and figure out how to bring peace, which ends up being putting back the antimatter that the professor has been attempting to take from the planet. As is frequently the case, the science in this story is laughable, but it is a decent story nonetheless. It is a cross between Forbidden Planet and Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

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Pyramids of Mars

One of the classic stories involves the Egyptian god Sutekh, who like the other Egyptian gods is revealed to actually be part of a race called the Osirans. He has been locked up by Horus for thousands of years in a pyramid on Mars. But when a British archaeologist named Scarman opens the wrong tomb, he is taken over by Sutekh and used to carry out a plan to free him. And this involves energy flows between Scarman’s house on Earth, the pyramid on Mars that has the device keeping Sutekh locked up, and Sutekh’s tomb, which cause the TARDIS to land in the house on Earth. This story has obvious echoes of the Mummy movies, of course, and the stakes are high because Sutekh is much more powerful than the Doctor. But of course the Doctor’s ingenuity plus a little Relativity save the day in the end. Interestingly, the house that they used for exterior shots was at one time Lord Carnarvon’s (of Tutankhamun fame), but at the time of filming was owned by Mick Jagger.

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The Android Invasion

The TARDIS lands in what looks like England, and Sarah remarks how wonderful it is to smell the air just after a rainfall. But the Doctor notices that the ground is bone dry, so there hasn’t been any rainfall for at least a week. Then they get shot at and chased by people in white uniforms, and a UNIT soldier seems to kill himself going over a cliff. Then they go into the village, which is totally deserted, but then people are driven in on the back of a truck, but they are stiff and odd. What we will discover is that all of this is just an elaborate replica, and that we are on an alien planet. The “people” are actually android robot replicas of real people, and the aliens behind this are preparing to invade the Earth. Since this is all about replicas, of course the Doctor and Sarah are duplicated, and then we meet replicas of Sgt. Benton and Harry Sullivan. All in all, a perfectly good average Doctor Who story.

This is a rare non-Dalek story by Terry Nation, and was directed by the previous producer, Barry Letts. And this is the last time we will ever see Sgt. Benton or Harry Sullivan. Nicholas Courtney was unavailable to play Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, so a Colonel Faraday was written in to played by a different actor.

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The Brain of Morbius

This story introduces the Sisterhood of Karn, who then appear in The End of Time, The Night of the Doctor, The Magicians’s Apprentice, and Hell Bent. This story takes place on the planet Karn, where it is clear that the Sisterhood once was involved with the Time Lords, but now consider them to be enemies. The Time Lords have forced the4 TARDIS to land here, and it becomes clear why as the story progresses. An evil renegade Time Lord. guilty of horrible war crimes, had been put to death by the Time Lords, but somehow his brain was recovered by a scientist and kept alive. The scientist Solon is a surgeon, and is creating a Frankenstein-like body out of parts from beings from spaceships he has forced to crash on Karn. The sisterhood, meanwhile, wants to put the Doctor to death. In the end the Doctor challenges Morbius to a mind duel, which he wins, but dies in the process. And during this duel we see faces of previous Doctors (Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton, William Hartnell), and then 8 other faces, intended to be Doctors pre-Hartnell. This was confirmed in The Timeless Children. The Sisterhood decides to revive the Doctor, and all is well.

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The Seeds of Doom

A scientist in Antarctica finds something unusual, and it is revealed to be a seed pod. Given warmth and light, the pod comes to life, send out a tendril to a nearby person, who then becomes a walking plant. The Doctor and Sarah Jane arrive, but so do a couple of agents sent by a wealthy and obsessed plant collector. The Doctor knows the plant, called a Krynoid, sends out its pods in pairs and goes back to the site where the first was found, and does indeed find another. The first pod, having done its job, is not important any longer, but the Doctor knows that the Krynoid/person already there, and the second pod, could mean the end of life on Earth. But the second pod is stolen by the two agents, who cover their tracks by blowing up the Antarctica base, which the Doctor and Sarah barely escape, but this has the useful consequence of blowing up the existing Krynoid/person.

Back in England, the obsessed collector gets the pod and refuses all entreaties that it should be destroyed. Eventually it opens, infects another person, and grows out of control. Finally UNIT has to call in the RAF to use high explosives to blow it up.

This story has an unusually high body count, though no actual gore is shown on screen. But this comes in the middle of Philip Hinchcliffe’s tenure when he was looking for more horror-oriented stories, so we have people strangled by plants, mangled by a composting machine, and of course two of them turned into plant monsters by the pods. As you might imagine, Mary Whitehouse was not a fan of this story. But it is a good story.

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