The Mutants Episode Five

The one where the Doctor reverses the poisoning of Solos...

While the effect of Varan tumbling into the void of space was done quite effectively (and I am glad to see the back of him), the realisation of everybody being sucked towards the hole in the wall is done very poorly. There's no attempt to show the rush of air out into the void, no corresponding sound effect, just a bunch of actors tumbling around and pretending to be slightly troubled by the vacuum of space. It's almost embarrassing to watch as they stumble upright back into the Skybase corridor and neatly close the door. For heaven's sake, Skybase should be on major alert!

The episode is almost entirely made up of people being captured, escaping, being recaptured, running, stumbling, and making ridiculous threats. It's the sort of rubbish casual viewers thought Doctor Who was like all the time, with immoderately bad acting, harshly lit space sets and ridiculous clothes. It's the type of Doctor Who that gave the show a bad name, and led to merciless spoofs by comedians like Victoria Wood, Lenny Henry and French and Saunders in the 1980s (I always think The Trial of a Time Lord Parts 1-4 is the pinnacle of this 'public-perception Who', and it's not unlike The Mutants, with its sci-fi sets, feudalistic planet surface, crazy costumes and undisciplined acting).

The fault here is first and foremost with writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin, who have allowed the story to become a silly runaround. The Marshal is a disappointingly two-dimensional barking villain, and while Paul Whitsun-Jones is well-cast as a sneering bully boy, he's better suited to children's TV or pantomime. The Marshal gets people to do what he wants by threatening people's lives - the 'do as I say or Miss Grant dies' school of villainy. Prisoners escape, only to be captured again, which fills time before the story's real finale can kick in next week. A key character is killed, but nobody seems to care for longer than a few seconds (the death of Stubbsy could have been a moment of real pathos for the actor playing Cotton, but seeing as that actor is Rick James, that was never going to happen).

Rick James is actually given quite a lot to say and do here (especially after the demise of Stubbs), against all reason and any capability he's demonstrated. The cliffhanger, where James has to express the horror of the predicament they find themselves in in the refuelling chamber, is a total joke because he delivers it like an overwrought schoolgirl. Rick James was in no way an actor, and was surely employed because of the colour of his skin, or maybe he was a mate of a mate of director Christopher Barry? Either way, it's one of the poorest acting performances in Doctor Who's considerable history, and precisely because it is a black character, the miscasting is particularly unforgivable.

The Doctor is blackmailed into helping Professor Jaeger reverse the poisoning of Solos (nobody will be able to set foot on Solos for centuries, claims Jaeger, after which we see people set foot on Solos just as they did before the rockets struck). George Pravda continues to give an impenetrable performance with an accent as dense as Rick James's acting, and the scenes with the Doctor and Jaeger working on the particle reversal beam are extremely dull. It's interesting that Baker and Martin introduce the concept of anti-matter here though ("un-people un-doing un-things un-together"), something they'd expand upon in their next Doctor Who story, The Three Doctors.

Yes, there's lot of flashes and bangs and pyrotechnics in this episode, but it's all so pointless, because they don't achieve anything. One of the most useful things anybody does in this episode is when Jo Grant summarises the Marshal's despotic plan over the radio to the Investigator's approaching Hyperion ship (I wonder if it's in the same space cruiser class as The Trial of a Time Lord's Hyperion III?). She also gets to show off her escapology skills too, although that amounts to very little.

Down on Solos, Sondergaard manages to summarise episode 4's main revelation about the mutts not being mutations, but a stage of evolution, in readiness for episode 6. I notice that one mutt manages to speak (or grunt), which surprised me. What I don't understand is why Sondergaard wants the mutts to accompany him to the transfer station, and up to Skybase, to find the Doctor. He knows where the Doctor's gone, why does he need to take a bunch of monsters with him?

No, I'm sorry, this entire episode is awful, a waste of everybody's time. It does nothing to move the plot forward (and in some cases actually reverses the plot), and serves only as a way to fill an episode in a story which is obviously too long (as most Pertwee six-parters are). Why couldn't producer Barry Letts have adopted the Philip Hinchcliffe production pattern of a run of four-parters topped off by a six-parter? Stories would be tighter and more focused, but instead we get cheap runarounds like this.

First broadcast: May 6th, 1972

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Katy Manning shines amid the dross.
The Bad: Leaving Rick James aside for once (please, do), Baker and Martin's writing and pacing is awful.
Overall score for episode: ★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

"Now listen to me" tally: 17
Neck-rub tally: 7

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

The Mutants is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Mutants-Jon-Pertwee/dp/B004DNWDYQ