Doctor Who
The Mutants
I don’t
think anyone out there is lauding The
Mutants as an unsung classic, except perhaps those invoking The Daleks by one of its working titles (but
let’s not go there), or possibly those with fond memories of the Target
novelisation (Terrance Dicks at his most spartan, but what a cover!), but I do
feel it’s on the receiving end of more than its fair share of disdain. Sure, it’s
threadbare, slipshod, with some terrible casting decisions, ropey design work
(and effects), and – despite a typically idea-laden script from the Bristol
Boys – unable to sustain its six-episode length. It’s also got Big Nose on
particularly abrasive form. But, in its favour – and it’s a magnificent favour
– it features the one and only Professor Sondergaard. And as we know, or
should, Sondergaard ROCKS!
As with
most Doctor Who stories, documented
to the nines as they are, The Mutants
comes replete with its own set of oft-repeated wisdoms, from how it’s an
allegory for the fall of the British Empire to one on apartheid, to how it
starts off like the average Monty Python
episode, to the legendary, Olivier-like performance of Rick James (he’s shit).
And then there’s Tristram Cary and his Marmite moog (I’m a bit in between
actually, not sold the way I am with Malcolm Clarke’s electronic assault on the
eardrums in The Sea Devils; sometimes
Tristram works, sometimes he gets Cary-ed away and the result is an unpleasantly
atonal wall of noise).
The
attempts at political subtext feel rather quaint now, not helped by the overstated
and silly uniforms and entirely uncommitted performances (it’s mystifying that
this bunch, a corpulent commander leading disinterested assistants, could
subdue a planet full of Solonian warlords for five minutes, let alone 500
years). The Doctor is even required to spell it out in the first couple of
scenes (“Well, Empires rise and fall…
And if this is their idea of a reception,
this one has obviously imploded”). Inadvertently, it also gives the
bastions of the Empire a trace of good graces (they’re pulling out, now they’ve
strip mined the place), so the Marshal is positioned as a bad egg spoiling an
otherwise, if not upstanding, no longer overtly adversarial carton.
But The Mutants definitely has something.
That’s generally an excuse used for not wanting to label something terrible as terrible, and certainly around the midway,
things are looking a bit dicey.
By this
point, we’ve experienced classic lines such as “Die, Overlord Die!”, with James Mellor’s Varan making a highly unconvincing
badass warlord, so much so one could easily imagine Matt Berry playing him for
laughs and proving more fearsome. But one gets used to the unabating clash of
performance styles (or, in James’ case, no style at all) after a while.
Paul
Whitsun-Jones plays the Marshal as both pathetic and spiteful, but he’s never
really intimidating: more plain churlish. Ky (Garrick Hagon – latterly Biggs Darklighter)
is a dashing chap who really ought to have swept Jo off her feet, and as guest heartthrobs
go Hagon makes a good stab of it, when not having to spout guff like “We want freedom and we want it now!” And
then there’s Geoffrey Palmer, bringing effortlessly stuffy cool to – just – the first episode, and George Pravda bringing
George Pravda to scientist Jaeger. There’s also a curious Eastern European
thing going on, what with Pravda’s natural tones and the accent adopted by John
“Lobot” Hollis as Sondergaard (who, simply, ROCKS).
Jaeger: There’s
no proof at all that my atmospheric experiments have anything at all to do with
these mutations.
Bob Baker
and Dave Martin entreat not only against oppression, but also the erosion of
our imperilled environment. The above line is one for the climate change deniers,
although one might perversely get the wrong end of the intended stick and posit
that in the The Mutants the
pollutants do no ultimate damage, merely accelerating a natural process, to an
ultimately positive end.
The Doctor
here is still an activist, though (“Land
and sea alike, all grey. Grey cities linked by grey highways across grey
deserts… Slag, ash, clinker. The fruits of technology, Jo”). And, at times,
given to loony stream-of-consciousness abandon (“The slightest accident in this stage of the proceedings and we’d all
reverse instantly into antimatter. Blasted out to the other side of the
universe, as a flash of electromagnetic radiation. We’d all become unpeople
undoing unthings untogether. Fascinating”: indeed, just ask Omega).
Ky: The disposed, the outcasts, the
terrorists, as the overlords label them.
Being the
‘70s, we could get behind terrorists and see them as justified. Ah, heady days.
What works its retro best in The Mutants
is the psychedelia, though. It doesn’t have the creative flair Michael Ferguson
brought to earlier colour foray The Claws
of Axos, mainly because Chris Barry doesn’t seem to be putting in very much
effort. But some of the ideas can’t help but bleed though into the visuals, mainly
evidenced in the cave scenes and the garish lighting thereabout, all reds and
greens, and the CSO-rendered radioactive chamber (and then there’s the presence
of Sondergaard – did I mention he ROCKS?)
We also have
a suitably New Age plot about metamorphosis, not the rather mundane (but let’s
face it, much more integrally told) metamorphosis of the later Full Circle, but a transformation into a
more evolved life form on every level. This is all about uncapping potentiality,
achieving transcendence. Ethereal glowing and telepathy become second nature (“Go Varan. Go to the place of sleeping. The
place of darkness and night”). Although, admittedly, the story isn’t really
selling the “beauty within” thing, since ugliness is ultimately discarded (so it
is what’s on the surface that
counts?), and shiny, happy-floaty Super-Ky isn’t suddenly above getting his
hands dirty (“Die, Marshal. Let there be
an end to the torture of my people”).
Sondergaard: Strange
things are happening to Solos, Doctor.
And you
have hippy-shaman Professor Sondergaard (who ROCKS), a very groovy, chrome-domed
anthropologist dude who isn’t smart enough to worked out that Solonians have
lifecycles (he needs the Doctor’s help, naturally) but digs beads and has a
winning way with Mutts (he’s a regular pied piper come the third episode, and
has a good line in reverse psychology; “Very
well, I shall go on. And you shall stay as you are now, forever”).
In fact,
he’s a much more engaging doctor than the actual Doctor in The Mutants, who repeatedly calls the Marshal “quite mad” and is really little more than a delivery boy (talking
of which the whole “particle reversal”
obsession of Jaeger, simply because the Doctor mentioned it and anything’s worth
a try, is desperately weak).
The Discontinuity Guide would have you believe Geoffrey
Palmer is the best thing in this (he’s not, Exhibit A being the pre-preceding
paragraph), and that his death in the first episode evidences its overall deficiencies
in quality. But they also let Rick James off the hook with the the excuse that
he’s “given some of the worst lines in Doctor
Who’s history” (he isn’t, he just
can’t act for toffee), so their appraisal is somewhat suspect.
If Barry
had been a touch more engaged, and the escape-and-capture, stir-and-repeat, of
longer stories such as this had been limited, and the casting had been more
judicious, and the music more moderate, and the effects more consistent… No,
I’m not sure The Mutants might have
been a classic, but classic moments do
shine through, and James Acheson’s mutant designs remain iconic (not quite as
much as that Jeff Cummins Target cover, but effective nonetheless). And, of
course, Sondergaard ROCKS!
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.