The Dæmons Episode Four

The one where the Doctor is attacked by Morris dancers...

"Eee-ooo-evaway! Eee-ooo-evaway, Azal!" intones the Master at the top of the episode, causing me to momentarily think I'd accidentally turned on a foreign language dub on the DVD. It's remarkable how the scenes with Roger Delgado in flowing Pagan robes, summoning the Daemon Azal in a cavern beneath the local church, could come straight out of a Dennis Wheatley novel. It's obvious the writers and director were influenced by Terence Fisher's Hammer adaptation of The Devil Rides Out three years previously.

The second coming of Azal causes more earth tremors and freak weather conditions, waking Jo from her unconscious slumber and somehow instilling in her a powerful need to go to the cavern. I'm not clear on why Jo has this sudden compulsion to go to the cavern, because when she was last conscious she was accompanying the Doctor to meet the Brigadier at the heat barrier. So obsessed is she with getting to the cavern that she decides to elude her colleagues downstairs in the bar and climb out of the bedroom window, using one of those Very Convenient Ladders you see about all the time.

She's then engulfed by some Suddenly Evil Ivy and rendered unconscious (again). As with so many things in The Daemons, I'm not sure why the local vegetation suddenly comes alive; it happens at no other point in the story.

Captain Yates discovers Jo's missing, and brands her "a little idiot", which is a bit patronising for saying Jo is his UNIT colleague and a trained operative to boot (remember, she proved herself stronger than he in Terror of the Autons!). Somehow Mike knows Jo's gone to the cavern, despite there being little evidence or suggestion as to why she should. He wants to leave the pub and investigate what's going on, but Olive warns: "You can't, it's too dangerous!", and Benton adds that the Doctor told them to stay in the pub. "Oh all right," concedes Yates, and that's that. All of this makes the UNIT double act out to be rather weak, which seems out of character for saying they flew down to Devil's End on their own initiative.

Later, Olive tells Benton to stay put too: "The Doctor will come... or else he won't, and that's all that can be said." Again, a rather uncharacteristically impotent statement from a woman who, in episode 1, was determined to stop the barrow being opened at all costs. Now her role in the storyline has pretty much played out, she's reduced to handing Benton double whiskies and pouring pots of tea. Mind you, she's a devil with a reticule...

At the heat barrier the Doctor is struggling to make comedy soldier Sergeant Osgood understand the fundamentals of some advanced science. The Doctor is characteristically short-tempered and resorts to scribbling an explanatory diagram on the windshield of his motorbike, which he then promptly drives off so that Osgood can't look at it. No wonder the contraption he builds ends up exploding in his face!

Incidentally, the rather endearing character of Osgood has had a considerable after-life beyond the The Daemons, popping up in both prose and comic strip form. According to Doctor Who's extended fiction, Tom Osgood joined UNIT as a corporal shortly before Spearhead from Space, and soon after the events of The Daemons became engaged to a woman called Becky, who he met at a folk festival! By 1983, in a rather unexpected development, Osgood and Yates had set up a tearoom together near Reading, and by 2001 he was a civilian brought in to help UNIT and the Sixth Doctor with an invasion by the Vvormak. I wonder if actor Alec Linstead gets royalties from all this...?

The Doctor spends pretty much all of this episode trying to get to Devil's End. The scene where he's speeding along country lanes on his motorbike is accompanied by some truly awful jaunty music by Dudley Simpson which acts as a kind of precursor to Paddy Kingsland's ear-scarringly bad score for when Turlough and Ibbotson are in the Brigadier's car in Mawdryn Undead! And when Bert shoots at the Doctor, and our hero has to flee by foot, Jon Pertwee runs like his knees are taped together!

When the Doctor finally reaches the village he is accosted by a band of Morris dancers and tied to the May Pole so that he can be burnt as a witch ("Burn him!" the villagers cry, 18 whole months before The Wicker Man hit British cinemas). I love the ingenuity shown by Benton in using a pistol with a silencer to shoot the lamp and the weathercock to convince the naive villagers that the Doctor is actually a magician called Qui Quae Quod (which are, incidentally, three Latin words for "who"!). Lord Quiquaequod would make a return in yet more extended Doctor Who fiction as an alternate universe Eighth Doctor in a DWM comic strip!

It's also very satisfying when the Doctor uses Bessie's remote control to enhance the illusion, harking right back to the start of episode 1 and giving what was initially a rather throwaway "comedy" scene a much greater reason for being there.

The cliffhanger brings on Azal's third and final appearance, and we get to see him in the flesh (and hair). He grows in size and takes on the classic iconography of the Devil himself, complete with horns and fawn-like hooved limbs (like a very naughty Mr Tumnus). Azal is very, very shouty, and carries on the Season 8 tradition of having monsters in stockings (see: Axons, Primitives and Bok).

Eee-ooo-evaway, Azal!

First broadcast: June 12th, 1971

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The Morris dancer's assault on poor, battered Benton in the Cloven Hoof is a convincingly vicious fight scene topped by a pleasingly light-hearted denouement involving a crystal ball!
The Bad: A few things stick with me, including that Very Convenient Ladder and the Suddenly Evil Ivy.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

"Now listen to me" tally: 13
Neck-rub tally: 5

NEXT TIME: Episode Five...

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

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.com/2014/05/the-dmons.html

The Dæmons is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-D%C3%A6mons-Jon-Pertwee/dp/B006LI50HI