"The Mutants" - Episode Six

Doctor Who (1963) - Season Nine
Airdate: May 13, 1972
Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning
Written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin
Produced by Barry Letts
Directed by Christopher Barry

This episode opens with Cotton, Ky, and Jo being held prisoner in the refueling bay. The threat is that when the Investigator's ship refuels, they'll all be killed by exposure to thesium radiation. Ok, that's fine. The trouble is that they escape from this, then get recaptured, and put back again. There is no better example of the tedious redundancy of this story than that.

Except, there is a better example. The Doctor and Sondergaard manage to convince the Investigator of the Marshal's crimes, and the Marshal is completely discredited. But as soon as one of the mutants attacks, the Investigator completely changes position. Apparently, because the mutants are ugly and scary, genocide against them is perfectly acceptable. So the Marshal is completely vindicated and again placed in full charge of SkyBase. He's only defeated because Ky ends up changing into a magical, luminous being. This is apparently the ultimate form of the metamorphosis, but Ky only reaches this form because Sondergaard gives him the magic crystal from Episode Four, while the Marshal was kind enough to provide the thesium radiation that the metamorphosis requires.

The plot logic of all this doesn't even deserve to be called logic. But there is actually just a hint of an interesting point buried beneath all of this crap. Throughout the entire story, just about everyone has assumed that the so-called "mutants" were evil and diseased, just because they were ugly monsters. They're not. This theme of not judging by appearances is pretty thin, even by the standards of a Saturday tea-time space adventure series. But the biggest problem is that it's underdeveloped. It never gets truly hit home.

When I was a kid, I really enjoyed this story, I have to admit. Part of that was because of the scope, which we talked about earlier this week. As poor as this story is, it can spark some pretty incredible stuff in a young person's imagination. Because I loved it so much as a kid, I can't help but look back on it with some degree of fondness. But I can't defend it. It's just crap.

But it didn't have to be crap. We already talked about how the central concept is legitimately interesting and really quite original. That's a good start. The theme of not judging scary monsters by appearances is trite, but workable. A script that focused tightly on those two elements would at least have been in with a decent chance. Instead, we get a ridiculously cartoonish megalomaniac (who finally descends into sheer, raving madness in this episode), plus endlessly repetitive scenes of cardboard characters running from or chasing other cardboard characters. To put it another way, these six episodes have enough plot for eight episodes and enough story for about three. But I'm convinced that there's something here that could have been salvaged.