Typical. You wait ages for a story written by Christopher H. Bidmead to appear on someone’s list of Top 60 Doctor Who stories, and then two turn up at once. Two tales at the end of the spectrum: his first story for the 5th Doctor – and the 5th Doctor’s first story – and his last a couple of years later, as Davo comes to the end of his run. Both times he captures the personality of The Doctor beautifully.
Castrovalva is a story of new beginnings, for the show and it’s lead character, and has that hope and optimism that you get with a bright spring morning. Come Frontios, that hope has evaporated like the morning fog, and we’re left with something dark, grim and dirty. It’s like the Saward Era has just ground everyone down, and it’s nowhere more noticeable than by comparing Bidmead’s two stories.
Frontios tells the story of a colony at the edge of destruction, facing annihilation from a relentless aerial bombardment, lead by the increasingly incapable and unhinged son of its former commander. Yay! It’s a Base Under Siege…!! The enemy turns out to be within, however – or more accurately, beneath. We don’t see enough insectoid monsters in Doctor Who, so the Tractators popping up like giant Space Woodlice is nice. Of course they’re another one of Doctor Who’s Shittest Monsters1, but Ron Jones – to his eternal credit – learns from the mistakes made in Warrior’s of the Deep and keeps them (mostly) in the dark. It works, and The Gravis & co are more impressive for it.
Into this nightmare scenario come The Doctor, Tegan & Turlough. Bidmead’s scripting of The Doctor is on point. He makes him a much more central character to the plot, having him first start offering humanitarian aid (despite knowing he shouldn’t be there he can’t walk away and leave the situation as it is) before getting to work saving the day & sorting the planet out. More than anything though, he gives Davison some cracking dialogue to work with. Davison took some time to work out his portrayal of The Doctor, so even though Castrovalva was made later in the Series 19 run, there’s still a sense of him taking a shot in the dark with how to write him. Come the end of his run he has a much clearer idea of where Davo’s strengths lie, which parts of his own character are going into the role, and so plays to those strengths. As I mentioned in my essay on The Awakening, Davison has a “zero fucks to give” attitude this season, and it marries perfectly with Bidmead’s dialogue here. He’s sardonic and effortlessly sarcastic, playing every line he can for every ounce of dry wit. It’s a joy! It would seem Bidmead is also aware of the relationship that Davison & Janet Fielding have built up: in the scene where The Doctor passes off Tegan as an android (“I got it cheap because the walk’s not quite right. And then there’s the accent, of course…”) the line between art and artist is almost invisible.
There’s not really enough for two companions to do in this story, but Bidmead neatly sidesteps that by introducing Turlough’s race memory and having him slowly descend into madness. Mark Strickson does some excellent eye acting – to the point that you wonder what his portrayal of Gowron from Star Treks Deep Space Nine & The Next Generation would look like. The lighting helps him out her, as it does in the rest of the story; for an era that is often overlit, Frontios takes us back a bit to the Hinchcliffe era. Not just in look but in tone: having the corpses of the colonists power their excavation machines is pretty grim – see the novelisation of this story for exactly how grim Bidmead wanted to make it2.
At heart though Bidmead isn’t a horror writer, he’s a sci-fi writer, and he takes a really interesting idea here & wraps his story around it. The Tractators USP is that they can control gravity and weaponise it – an idea also used in the 1959 novel that the 1997 film Starship Troopers was based on – but Bidmead keeps that as the background to the story, rather than making it the focus. The focus is the colonists, trying to survive, and the leadership battles that come up in that scenario. This allows the story to flourish, the suspension of disbelief remain intact, and the wonderful script to shine. If only this had been the approach to Season 18, we’d probably get on a lot better than we do.
Bidmead wrote Logopolis, Castrovalva & Frontios. I often wonder what he’d call a story he set solely on Earth… Out of the three it’s Frontios that stands up the best: the script is just that little bit better, but to be honest there’s not much in it. It’s easy to overlook a story that sits in a season which has other, bigger talking points: that’s exactly what I did with this one, not choosing to watch it for years because there seemed nothing in it that stood out & made it worth the effort. Once I did, though, I completely changed my mind. And I’m glad I did, cos this story is superb.
COMING TOMORROW: “Indomitable…. Indomitable…!!!”
- Search for the hashtag #DrWhoShittestMonsters on Twitter to see where they came in the list I made last Christmas for an Advent Calendar (See? Told you I love a list…) ↩︎
- https://open.spotify.com/episode/4fKk2BfQP96XaQPhRQ5bK5?si=7507d0e90a564f41 ↩︎
Skies Full of Diamonds 