Carnival of Monsters Episode Three

The one where the Drashigs break out of their environment...

Fair play, the Drashigs are a damned good creation, a classic Doctor Who monster in my opinion. They look really monstrous ("horrible things", as Jo says), they have bloody great teeth, six eyes, spikes and scales, and they wriggle along like worms. It's Doctor Who's version of Tremors! And the noise they make! They sound like a mix of a woman screaming from a distance and a slowed-down hippo roar. Wonderful sound design, and to be fair to director Barry Letts, he uses his beloved CSO very effectively, blending the puppetry with the live action well.

The Drashigs - creatures lifted from a satellite of Grundle - are terrifyingly efficient in this episode, basically latching onto the Doctor and Jo's scent and pursuing them everywhere they go, which includes back into the miniscope's innards, and on to the SS Bernice environment. It's bold storytelling from Robert Holmes, and Letts directs with fine pace. The scene where the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to explode the marsh gas and scare off the Drashigs is spectacular, especially for 1973.

The dimensions within the miniscope are a little muddled for me, because if Vorg can put his hand into individual environments, that means there can't be a great many of them inside the machine. You get the impression there should be hundreds or thousands of environments and creatures within, but if each environment is roughly the size of a dolls' house, there can't be more than a dozen. And when you compare the size the Doctor is when he staggers out of the machine at the end of episode 3 with the size of the TARDIS before it expands in episode 2, the idea of scale goes out the window!

The Doctor works out what the miniscope is and tells Jo that he had a key role in having them banned by the Time Lords as an "offence against the dignity of sentient life-forms". They wonder how they can be inside a scope now if they've all been destroyed, but miss the obvious answer that maybe they're inside a scope at a time before they were banned ('cos the TARDIS is a time machine, y'see!). Jo is disgusted by the idea of being a plaything of the "giants", who are watching them via the globesphere for mere entertainment ("They must be evil and horrible!"). This is, of course, Holmes drawing parallels with television viewing generally, and how we demand more and better entertainment via our TV screens (abundantly more relevant in 2019). In a beautiful twist on standard storytelling, the Doctor Who viewer is watching their heroes trapped inside a machine for the amusement of others who are watching them too. The Doctor Who viewer is watching the watchers watching the watched. It's like Gogglebox, but with brains.

The Drashigs' pursuit of the Doctor and Jo is relentless. First they smash their way out of their own environment and into the circuitry of the scope itself, then follow them back into the 1926 environment (I keep wanting to write "zone", like it's The Crystal Maze!). Throughout, the Doctor is testing his resourcefulness to stay one (or several) steps ahead of the monsters. "You never give in, do you Doctor?" states Jo. Well, why the hell would you if you were being chased by those big buggers?!

A few characters display moments of particular dimness in this episode, starting with Jo, whose apprehension of what lateral thinking is makes her out to be somewhat slow (it's amusing that she takes the Doctor's description of lateral thinking very literally!). However, she makes up for it wonderfully when she challenges the looping memories of the SS Bernice crew, who believe she is a stowaway. "How do you know I'm not a passenger?" she insists. "Since none of you can remember more than about 10 minutes ago..." Now that's lateral thinking, Jo, trying to fathom out a mystery by poking at it from a different direction.

Then there's the scheming Kalik, played wonderfully by Michael Wisher, who plots against his brother, President Zarb, with a view to affecting a coup and gaining power himself. He intends to do this by letting the Drashigs escape from the miniscope and wriggle their way to the capital city, causing mayhem, so that Zarb and his cohorts can be blamed and overthrown. What he doesn't seem to understand is that the Drashigs are supposedly unstoppable omnivores. They'll eat their way through anything and anyone. A lot of innocent Inter Minorians will die, and a lot of the capital's infrastructure will be destroyed, in the pursuance of this plot. And if a battlethruster full of 50 men, laden with the "latest armaments", cannot stop a Drashig, what hope have the grey-faced Inter Minorians? Kalik's plot is genocidal!

Mind you, everybody keeps saying the Drashigs are unstoppable, but you try telling that to Major Daly, who fells one with a few swift bursts of his machine gun! Forget the futuristic capabilities of ray guns and laser cannons, all you need is a Browning machine gun!

Also being a bit dim is officer Andrews, who thinks it's a good idea to go down into the hold of the ship and hurl sticks of dynamite at the Drashigs! Erm, don't you think you might blow a bloody great hole in the side of your boat, John?

First broadcast: February 10th, 1973

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The Drashigs come across as a genuinely fearsome monster. Plus, the bit where Orum questions Kalik being called "merciful and compassionate", and Michael Wisher responds, with beautiful timing: "One has twinges."
The Bad: The wigs and false scalps on the Inter Minorians are really beginning to slip now!
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★★☆

"Now listen to me" tally: 21
Neck-rub tally: 13 - The Doctor rubs his neck at 12m 34s as he ponders how to escape the Drashigs.

NEXT TIME: Episode Four...

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

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/carnival-of-monsters.html

The Carnival of Monsters Special Edition is available on BBC DVD as part of the Revisitations 2 box set. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Revisitations-Carnival-Monsters-Resurrection/dp/B004FV4R9A/