Earthshock Part Four

The one where Adric dies...

Peter Grimwade was such a good director. Maybe he wasn't so great with his cast (according to reports from actors), but he knew how to shoot a scene, or set up a shot, to get the best visual impact. It feels like there are lots of Cybermen in Earthshock thanks to his clever camera angles and how he blocks out the scenes. You have Cybermen in the background and foreground, you have others moving past and through scenes, giving the impression of number and might. The Cybermen haven't seemed this numerous since the Troughton era.

Another triumph of this story is Malcolm Clarke's powerful incidental score. He has a beautifully weird underscore, a kind of glassy soundscape which reminds me very much of Jacques Lasry and Francois Baschet's Les Structures Sonores, used as library music in 1965's The Web Planet. Clarke also uses squelchy synths when the Cybermen are on the move, and all of this combined makes the episode feel tense and dangerous. And writer Eric Saward's narrative compounds this danger: the viewer's never quite sure what's going to happen next.

While Tegan totters about the freighter's hold dressed in overalls and wielding a gun (Doctor Who's very own Ellen Ripley in lippy), the Doctor and co are on the bridge learning about the Cyberleader's plans for Earth. His contingency plan is to turn the freighter itself into a bomb and crash it into the Earth, destroying most of the population. However many survive this apocalyptic explosion will be wiped out by a following invasion force of Cybermen. The impact will also serve to destroy a vital interplanetary war council meeting on Earth to combine forces against the Cybermen. "Destroy the conference, destroy the unity," the Doctor says.

Having lost Tegan in the vastness of the freighter hold, Scott and his troops decide to return to the TARDIS, but little do they know two Cybermen await them at the police box, and one manages to get inside. Now, this is monumentally exciting, both for a fan watching anew in 1982, and for a fully aware fan 40 years later. The sight of a Cyberman in the TARDIS is a fanboy's wet dream (just as seeing a police box inside the TARDIS was in Logopolis), and when the second silver giant gets wedged in the closing doors, you can almost hear Saward laughing maniacally as he types the script!

It's breathtakingly exciting stuff, especially as the Cybermen are taken down by laser guns, moaning in agony. The fact Professor Kyle (a pointless character) gets caught in the crossfire barely registers, and it feels a bit like Saward was just trying to find a way to get rid of the character. Kyle didn't deserve a heroic death, there was nothing about her that warranted it. Still, it gives Sarah Sutton an opportunity to practise her emoting.

Back on the bridge, Tegan has been captured and joins the doomsday party. As ever, the Aussie takes nothing lying down, and when the Cyberleader asks who she is, the Doctor tries to cover up by saying "No one of consequence". "Thanks a lot!" Tegan chirps. Later, when she's referred to as "the Earth woman", she spits: "The name is Tegan!"

The scenes between Peter Davison and David Banks's Cyberleader on the bridge are electric, Davison in particular giving a Doctor-defining performance as his vulnerability tussles with the Cybermen's coldhearted remove. Although it seems a slightly odd list of luxuries to present to the Cyberleader, the Doctor tries to get the silver giant to appreciate the scent of a flower, the beauty of a sunset and the taste of a "well-prepared" meal. Then, wonderfully, Banks bats it all away with a devastatingly terse: "These things are irrelevant!" Later, when the Cyberleader fights back with an attack on the Doctor's emotional attachment to Tegan, Davison's breathless turmoil tells you everything about what the Doctor's going through. He's losing control, his friends are in lethal danger, and there seems to be so little he can do. "You do not consider friendship to be a weakness?" quizzes the Cyberleader. "I do not," croaks Davison. Top-flight performance, the best of his era yet.

And then the Cybermen decide to leave, because the freighter's going to leave them very crumpled if they stay on board. While the Cybermen leave via the airlock, the Cyberleader decides to follow progress aboard the TARDIS, and takes the Doctor and Tegan with him. He insists on leaving behind Captain Briggs, first officer Berger... and Adric! In 1982, the scene where the Doctor and Tegan have to say goodbye to Adric probably felt quite routine. It's just under halfway through the episode, and there's plenty of time to save the day.

Looking at the language Grimwade is using in his directorial techniques, it's more obvious to us nowadays what's going to happen. A character says goodbye to another, and that they'll see them again soon, which almost always means that they won't. In 1982, that probably read quite straightforwardly, but 40 years later it has an edge of inevitability. I love how Grimwade shoots Matthew Waterhouse, not in the expected close-up, but in a medium shot which makes Adric look a little lost within the frame. With a background of flashing computer banks, Waterhouse turns to his departing friends and looks just like the little boy lost he is, the innocent, orphaned teenager with the cheeky smile. It's a beautiful shot of Waterhouse, and a heartbreaking parting memory for Tegan and the Doctor.

From here on in, events on the bridge get tense as Adric tries to solve the three logic puzzles to disengage the Cybertechnology from the freighter's controls. If Adric can crack the codes, he can save the Earth. The young Alzarian's mathematical skills may save the day, or they may serve to get him into even deeper trouble. When Adric runs through the closing airlock door to give the code one last try, his fate is sealed. His personal pride gets the better of him, and he ends up trapped and alone aboard a spaceship hurtling inexorably toward destruction. Can the Doctor help him?

In short, no. The Doctor has his own problems aboard the TARDIS, where the Cyberleader has total control over the situation. After Adric manages to disengage two of the three logic puzzles, the freighter slips backwards in time, and the TARDIS follows. It's slipped back 65 million years to be precise, the time when the dinosaurs were inexplicably wiped out "almost overnight". Saward pulls a masterstroke as the viewer realises it's the crashing freighter which exploded on Earth and caused the giant lizards' extinction. But the Doctor probably wasn't expecting one of his friends to be aboard when it happened.

It's all so desperate. You feel like shaking the Doctor and making him save the situation straight away, just like the Third or Fourth Doctors might. It used to feel like the Doctor could do anything, save anyone, with a flick of a switch and a glib remark. But this is the Fifth Doctor, a good man in a universe of bad. A man who feels far less comfortable with the horrors his lifestyle brings. This Doctor is fallible, more human, more truthful.

The scene where the TARDIS crew attack the Cyberleader is magnificent, with Tegan holding the giant back while the Doctor, with such beautiful irony, crumbles Adric's gold-edged star badge into his chest unit. The Cyberleader's demise is protracted and painful - he doesn't die easily - and as he collapses to the floor in howling agony, he's finished off with a few close range shots from his own Cyber gun (love how Banks reaches out, almost pleadingly, to Davison as the Doctor repeatedly shoots him down). It's a distressing scene, because you've got our heroes struggling against the might of a cybernetic monster, as well as the fact the TARDIS console is damaged by misfires from the Cyberleader's weapon (whatever happened to temporal grace?).

The Doctor is powerless to pilot the TARDIS aboard the freighter to pluck Adric away at the last moment. His time and space ship is useless, at the one time he needs it to work perfectly. The tragic inevitability of Adric's fate is sealed. Aboard the freighter, a rogue Cyberman has blown up the controls, removing Adric's chance of solving the final logic puzzle. As the freighter hurtles into the Earth, we get one last, brief shot of the cherubic Matthew Waterhouse, clutching his late brother Varsh's rope belt in wide-eyed resignation. "Now I'll never know if I was right," he says of the solution he thought he had to the third logic puzzle.

And then bam! The ship explodes, and the TARDIS scanner closes its eye on the devastation. Janet Fielding is wonderful in the reaction scene, incredulous, disbelieving, refusing to accept that Adric's gone and that the Doctor could do nothing. The Doctor is stunned into silence, numbed by the fact he's lost his friend. At the time, companions hardly ever died in Doctor Who (and when they did, we barely knew them anyway). But this is Adric, who've we've got to know over the course of two seasons. He was just a kid; he was the audience! How could they kill him off?

It's a very, very well directed sequence, and I must admit that I had a tear in my eye watching it this time around. Watching every Doctor Who episode in order makes the bigger picture more powerful. I've really enjoyed watching Adric's adventures, both with Tom Baker and Peter Davison. He has an arc that gets lost when you watch stories randomly: this boy was saved by the Fourth Doctor, but sidelined by the Fifth once Tegan and Nyssa came along. His story is a sad one, ending with the ultimate tragedy. But Adric definitely dies a hero, trying to save the Earth just as his mentor the Doctor would have done.

The silent end titles are a step too far, over-egging the pudding considerably, probably spoiling it. A slow, sad version of the Doctor Who theme would have been better, but the 90 seconds of silence as the credits roll over Adric's crumbling badge are simply too cheesy, too much. The drama did all the work required, we didn't need to be told how to feel by silent credits.

Earthshock is a stunning action thriller that grips from the very start. It's fast-paced, it's spooky, it's tense, and it's well cast, designed, scored and directed. I could have done without Beryl Reid, but once the Cybermen arrive on the bridge, her involvement becomes minimised. Doctor Who hadn't been this exciting for years. Nobody expected the Cybermen, nobody expected a companion to die. And nobody expected Beryl Reid. It will be hard for Doctor Who to follow this up, but with one story of Season 19 to go, the stakes are high.

First broadcast: March 16th, 1982

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Grimwade's direction returns Adric to his young, innocent, Alzarian state as he meets his final end.
The Bad: Waterhouse slightly spoils the moment the Cyberman shoots the controls by looking like he's expecting it to explode!
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★★★ (story average: 9 out of 10)

NEXT TIME: Time-Flight...

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

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.

Earthshock is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Earthshock-Peter-Davison/dp/B00009PBTQ