Frontier in Space Episode Four

The one where the Master gets the Doctor out of prison...

It's such a nice twist that it's the Master who saves the Doctor from suffocation by pumping oxygen back into the airlock. For the Master wants the Doctor alive and well for his own purposes, yet to be revealed. It is mentioned that the Master has "employers", which is very Season 8. Who's employing him to stir up trouble between Earth and Draconia? And why? And what do his employers want with the Doctor?

The Master struggles at first to get the Doctor out of the penal colony, as the Governor places him into solitary confinement for an entire year as punishment for trying to escape. But the Master manages to bribe the Governor into letting him have the Doctor (I'm surprised he doesn't just hypnotise him), reeling off a string of trumped up felonies, including fraud, tax evasion, assault and battery, stealing a spaceship, failing to tax or insure said spaceship, and finally trespass! What's forgotten amid all this tongue-in-cheekery though is the fact the elderly Professor Dale is left in solitary confinement, presumably for the 12 months he's been sentenced to. And nobody - not least the Doctor - seems to care.

Predictably, the Doctor joins Jo in being locked into a cell aboard the Master's stolen police ship, which is on a course for the home planet of the Ogrons. Don't tell me it's the king of the Ogrons who has been paying the Master to foment war between Earth and Draconia!

On a serious note though, the Sirius IV emblem which adorns the Master's tunic and spaceship gives a wonderfully subtle clue to who's behind all this...

As soon as the Master's back is turned (he's in the middle of reading The War of the Worlds by H G Wells!) the Doctor tells Jo: "The first thing we've got to do is escape!" They've spent most of their time in this story either escaping or being captured, for heaven's sake! The Doctor says he had his sonic screwdriver taken off him at the prison, but luckily he has a steel file wrapped around his boot which he can use to cut his way through the cell bars (he also had this handy gadget in Carnival of Monsters). The sonic screwdriver reappears in the very next story, so the Doctor must have more than one of them aboard the TARDIS.

The Doctor and Jo affect one of their classic escape plans (they're genuinely really good at them!), with the Doctor embellishing the events of his trial and exile in The War Games as he saws through the bars. Once free, he sneaks out of the cell while Jo disguises the fact the Doctor's no longer there by babbling for England in a way that only Jo Grant could!

But why oh why does the Doctor decide to go for a space walk? Jo later says that his plan is to get to the flight deck, but surely there's a much easier and more direct route from the cell bay to the flight deck internally? Like, I dunno... a corridor perhaps? It's blatant padding, and not very convincing padding either, as the wires suspending Jon Pertwee in "space" are all too obvious. And after all that, the Doctor doesn't go to the flight deck at all, he ends up having to rescue Jo after she's slammed in the airlock by the suspicious Master. It's all so pointless! It does allow Roger Delgado a classic line though, when he finds Jo pretending to talk to the Doctor still: "Thank you, Miss Grant, we'll let you know."

After 20 minutes of nothing of any importance happening, the Master's stolen police ship is boarded by the Draconians, who say that now Earth has severed diplomatic relations with Draconia, the Master's ship is in violation of Draconian space. "The penalty is death!" It's rather fitting that the Master's plan starts to unravel as a direct result of his machinations back on Earth. If he hadn't stirred up the red ants and the black ants, leading to a breakdown in communication between the two empires, his little journey from the Moon to the Ogron planet wouldn't have been such a problem!

At the end of the episode, Malcolm Hulke puts a fresh spin on a very, very tired motif and has the Doctor and Jo locked up alongside the Master, but the bearded one has a trick up his sleeve. He activates a distress signal to his allies, the Ogrons, and the rather underwhelming cliffhanger shows the back of an Ogron's head looking at a flashing light on a screen. Despite the lacklustre ending, I love seeing Delgado gently nudge his flashing prop into camera shot as it zooms in on him. Now that's professionalism!

First broadcast: March 17th, 1973

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Katy Manning's babbling Jo Grant is great value for money.
The Bad: The Doctor's space walk is both narratively pointless, and poorly realised.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆

"Now listen to me" tally: 23 - The Doctor tells Jo: "Now listen to me" when he tells her his escape plan.
Neck-rub tally: 13

NEXT TIME: Episode Five...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Episode One; Episode Two; Episode Three; Episode Five; 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/frontier-in-space.html

Frontier in Space is available on BBC DVD as part of the Dalek War box set. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Frontier-Planet-Daleks/dp/B002KSA3T8