The Abominable Snowmen Episode Five

The one where Victoria gets hypnotised twice...

Things are finally starting to warm up in this episode as we amble towards the finale. It's a pedestrian serial, but that's no bad thing in my eyes. I like it when a story takes its time to unravel the mystery and peel away the layers, but sadly with The Abominable Snowmen, there aren't really very many layers to peel. We're aware of a threat from an unseen alien force as early as episode 2, but here we are, three episodes later, and we're yet to actually see the thing.

It's a contemplative serial, but sadly doesn't take an awful lot of time to flesh out the characters. A story leading on atmosphere rather than incident would ordinarily place the characters to the fore, but the monks are all pretty interchangeable, except perhaps for the fanatical Khrisong, while Professor Travers gets next to no development after episode 1. Jack Watling was a fine and respected actor, so it's a shame he wasn't given more to do. Nevertheless, he is very good with what he's given, and the scene where he tries to remember what he saw on the mountain is spooky, especially when he describes it as "like a shadow on my mind".

Those furry fiends the Yeti destroy Malcolm Middleton's lovely cloisters set, toppling the (no doubt polystyrene) Buddha statue onto poor old Rinchen. I'm not sure how convincing I'd find all this if I could see it - the wobbly teddy bears knocking over pillars and statues which probably looked as light as feathers. Remembering the obviously polystyrene rocks we see at the start of episode 2, I'm kind of glad I'm spared all that!

Padmasambhava continues to be the most interesting, and best performed, character of the story. You rarely see Wolfe Morris mentioned when fans talk about Doctor Who's finest guest stars, but what he does in this part is nothing short of masterly (excuse the pun). His vocal performance drips with atmosphere, and he portrays the High Lama's conflict perfectly, swinging from the gentle Padmasambhava to the evil Great Intelligence with elan. And in this episode we can finally see what he looks like, the product of some fantastic make-up work by Sylvia James. He looks ancient and decrepit, on the verge of bursting into a cloud of dust after centuries kept alive by the force of the Intelligence.

I found I had great sympathy for Padmasambhava, whose conversation with the Doctor reveals that he's been used for 300 years by this evil force, and yearns for release (death). Morris's voice cracks with emotion, and Patrick Troughton adds to the pathos. It's a lovely little scene between two great actors, up close, their heads almost touching, connecting on a very personal level. I don't want to see the Yeti destroying the cloisters, but I do want to see this little scene!

The possession of Victoria is another spooky addition to proceedings, and although it takes up a little too much time, the whole thing is done well. Victoria only responds to the Doctor's voice, and only ever says the same thing (Deborah Watling didn't have many lines to learn this week!). She's been hypnotised by Padmasambhava into trying to get the Doctor to leave the monastery (again, he has no wish to harm him), and the Doctor manages to get his companion out of the trance by basically hitting the reset button - counter-hypnotising her and taking her back in time to before she was influenced by the Intelligence. It's an interesting device - removing a possession by taking the mind and memory back to before it happened - but I'm not convinced it would work in real life. Plus, the Doctor has essentially deleted a section of Victoria's life!

As the cliffhanger approaches, we learn that the formless entity the Great Intelligence connected with Padmasambhava while he was on the astral plain. This fact is dropped into the story with no explanation as to what astral projection is. This is 1967, when Doctor Who had the courage to introduce big ideas like this and leave them simmering so that the young viewers could look them up in their dictionaries and encyclopedias. These days, they'd be told what astral projection was in garbled and rushed dialogue drowned out by thunderous incidental music, and a few people might just about catch it and decide to Google it. How times change!

I remember after I watched Season 26 back in 1989 - before the internet and emails and search engines and Wikipedia - I was fascinated by the mythologies presented in Battlefield and The Curse of Fenric, and went to my local library to find out more about Arthurian legend and Norse mythology. It enriched my enjoyment and understanding of the stories no end, and then when I got to read the Target novelisations of those stories, expanded upon so richly by Marc Platt and Ian Briggs, it all came together so perfectly. Suddenly, those 99 minutes I'd watched and rewatched over and over again on VHS tape became multi-faceted, multi-layered epics, broader and deeper than your average Hollywood blockbuster. I'll never forget the things Doctor Who has taught me, and I hope that some of the 7 million people watching The Abominable Snowmen episode 5 were taught something new about astral projection too. It's great finding things out for yourself.

Out on the mountainside, a mass of ectoplasm spews out of the cave, growing and expanding as the Great Intelligence homes in on the Earth. Quite why it wants the monastery empty and to itself, I don't know. Quite why the focal point is situated in a cave, and not in Padmasambhava's inner sanctum - where people are forbidden to go - I don't know. And where the robotic Yeti came from, I don't know. But everything's pointing to a grand finale involving a showdown between the Doctor and this formless Great Intelligence. Brrrrr....

First broadcast: October 28th, 1967

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Wolfe Morris. He manages to be reassuring and unsettling within moments!
The Bad: I don't understand the Yeti and their balls. The spheres are vital to the manifestation of the Great Intelligence on Earth, but they're also vital to giving the robots a power source. How can the spheres be both things simultaneously? Where did the spheres come from? What's in them? Who made the robots? Gah!
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: Episode Six...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Episode One; Episode Two; Episode Three; Episode Four; Episode Six

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: http://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/the-abominable-snowmen.html

The Abominable Snowmen soundtrack is available on BBC CD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Abominable-Snowmen-Collection/dp/056347856X.