| SPEARHEAD FROM SPACE by Robert Holmes |
| Story 51 Synopsis: UNIT are tracking a mysterious shower of meteorites. One lands in a field, where poacher Sam Seeley half-inches it. On his way home, he sees a strange blue box appear out of thin air, and a tall white-haired man fall to the ground from inside it. He is taken to a hospital, whilst UNIT get wind of the blue box and post a guard. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart visits the white-haired man in hospital, but is disappointed. The man awakes, and recognises the Brigadier. He says he is the Doctor, which is whom the Brigadier was expecting. Meanwhile, all is not well at Auto Plastics, where Mr Ransome is dismayed to find that on his return from a business trip to America, he is sacked by his partner, Hibbert, and that he has been replaced by a man named Channing. Channing has been tracking the meteorites, and sends someone to the hospital to bring back the Doctor. Escaping, the Doctor reaches the TARDIS, only to be shot. When he recovers, he goes to UNIT HQ, to assist the Brigadier, and his new colleague, Professor Liz Shaw. They have found the fragments of one of the meteorites - the Doctor deduces that all the others have been collected. Channing is a part of the Nestene Consciousness, and the plastic men, Autons, who do the legwork of fetching the meteorites are being also used to replace prominent members of society, so that the Autons can take over. The Doctor and Liz devise a machine to scramble the Nestene creature, and during a desperate attack on the plastics factory, the day is saved. Channing was just a more sophisticated Auton. The Doctor agrees to help UNIT, in exchange for equipment to fix the TARDIS, as the Time Lords have put blocks on his memory to keep him exiled on Earth. |
| Review:- Enter the 1970's! Colour TV hits town, and Doctor Who lands smack down on Earth, just as everyone else is coming to town. The story has much to do, besides actually posing a threat that the Doctor must solve. At the start, the Doctor crash-lands in a TARDIS he cannot steer or repair, and is in a poor state. By the end, he has a base, a plan of action, and friends/colleagues to care for. Not only that, but he is set up for the rest of the season, at least. The Brigadier does his job well, being a link with the old Doctor. He also makes UNIT seem like something worth having, as he manages to portray one of the minority of army characters who present a human dimension. Liz is a bit dull, and as a viewer-sympathy figure, isn't particularly imperilled enough to draw attention. Here, in a rare break with tradition, we have the Doctor himself acting the part of the helpless klutz who always lands in trouble. The attempted kidnap near the end of episode 1 is the clearest example of this. The Autons are pretty scary, whether as simple automatons scouring the countryside, or as mannequins, posing a threat to identity. I want to mention that it would be 9 years before Gary Numan made the album Replicas. The problem with the Nestene is that it has only 1 mouthpiece, Channing, and the only person who acts pertinent questions of alien invaders, i.e. the Doctor, never really gets to chat to Channing, leaving a lack of dimension to quite promising baddies. By and large, though, this is successful at what it sets out to do, and I quite like it. |
| Disclaimer: I've read the book, and seen the video. |