Woefully over-due, but that's what happens when employment takes a hold. Anyway, catching up ahead of this year's Christmas special...
Terror Of The Zygons was, and still is a well loved serial from the classic era that was for a long time scheduled as the last complete story to be released on DVD (until the recovery of The Enemy Of The World and The Web Of Fear) so it was quite exciting when they were announced for the 50th Anniversary special The Day Of The Doctor that same year. A clever piece of cross marketing perhaps but actually a bit of a let down when the anniversary episode finally aired. The Zygon presence flt somewhat fleeting in a busy narrative. Sure there was the duplicate Queen Elizabeth and Unit's Kate Stewart and Osgood, but the menace and tension wasn't quite there. In fact it was almost entirely booted out by the bubbly comedic nature of the celebrations. All that was about to be put to right when they returned for their own story. Or as the opening sequence of flashbacks put it "Once upon a time... there were three Doctors, two Osgoods and one Peace Treaty"
Indeed, the somewhat overshadowed solution buried within The Day Of The Doctor was a treaty signed by human Kate and Zygon Kate because neither knew which they were thanks to the Dark Archive's memory field.Are you still with me? The point is, 20 million Zygons were allowed to live around the world peacefully disguised as humans thanks to Operation Double, with the understanding that any race is capable of the best and the worst - peaceful and warlike. Unfortunately, it would only take one rogue and the whole thing would breakdown - the Nightmare Scenario. (Cue dramatic and excessively screechy guitar playing from the Doctor, "Amazing Grace" no less!)
On hearing the news from Osgood that the Nightmare Scenario is upon us, the Doctor immediately calls Clara, only to get her voice may explaing that she is probably on the tube or in outer space! 127 missed calls later and she finally hears him calling himself Doctor Disco. She helps a child neighbour home, we learn that his parents have been taken and replaced by the Zygons and Clara walks out and ties her hair back ready for business... There's a continued air of tension as she does so... has she been replaced by a Zygon now? But she turns back to her phone with a light laugh and "Did you just call yourself Doctor Disco?" Phew, she's still our Clara.
The story continues to unfold with the phrase "Truth Or Consequences" continually cropping up like a slogan for the Zygon rebels, but it's also the name of a town in New Mexico, or is there more to it than even that? There is a very grown up feel to this episode, recapturing the tension from the Zygon's first outing and putting an even darker, realistic edge to it for the 21st century. One thing that 1970s Doctor Who could do was take a contemporary matter and turn it into a sci-fi adventure, educational entertainment that reflected the times they were written in. The revived series has never really done that beyond passing comments in contemporary settings, until now. The Zygon Invasion is full of angst reflecting immigration and asylum matters and war in the Middle East with drone attacks. When told the Zygons want a home, the Doctor exclaims "Well you can't have the UK. There's already people there. They'll think you're gonna pinch their benefits". On a more serious, but equally true note, he also points out that the majority of Zygons are happy to live on Earth peacefully and it is just a splinter group that are causing concern, but if you start bombing them then you'll radicalise the lot. The story of the New Mexico town explains how the Brits came, just turned up without jobs or money and without being invited, how they started a few fight and eventually murders began, how they turned out to be Zygons. Meanwhile the head of the splinter group is in Turmezistan, an occupied village where Unit soldiers have surrounded the Zygons in a church because a planned drone strike was aborted when the pilot saw what appeared to be her family. The scariest twist for younger viewers must have come when the Unit soldiers were ordered to open fire on the people coming out of the church, Zygons disguised as the soldiers' parents and children, pleading with them to not shoot because they were real. I found it all very adult natured and extremely off-putting that the soldiers were being ordered to act against their instincts and to fire upon what appeared to be their families. Yet it was the final cliffhanger that drew attention and complaints (more on that later)
Of course, with returning monsters and characters, there were plenty of back references. Kate comments that there was a previous attempted invasion "in the seventies, eighties" which of course reference The Terror Of Tthe Zygons broadcast in 1975 but set in the indeterminate 'near future' of those UNIT centred stories - though this one had the innovated mention of a female Prime Minister which in real terms pins it down to do earlier than 1979 when Margaret Thatcher became the first female PM, not that the writers knew that at the time! The wonderful Osgood returns despite being vaporised by Missy in Death In Heaven because, as the flashback reminded us, there were two Osgoods thanks to the Zygon copy and whichever one we have here is just as big a fangirl of the Doctors as the original, this time sporting Fifth Doctor style question marks on her collars. When the Doctor comments on the she says to him "You used to wear question marks", "I still do" he replies, "I have question mark underpants!" and the levity continues when the Doctor asks for the presidential plane. When reminded that he doesn't like being World President he bats it away by remarking that he likes poncing around in a big plane, then makes a big entrance at the Unit command centre "I'm the president of the world. I'm here to rescue people and generally establish happiness all over the place. The Doctor. Doctor Funkenstein!"
The series 'theme' gets a mention while the Doctor is talking to Osgood. She explains that the two versions of her are equal in their racial interests. As they see it, they are not one human and one Zygon but two people who are both human and Zygon, like a hybrid. The Doctor reflects on it briefly in a painfully she-horned signpost of a moment then moves on.
Something else that has moved on is the Zygon duplicating ability. Originally, the human original was required to be kept in their alcove/pod for the Zygon to retain their form. However, this is no longer the case. As was demonstrated with the drone trike and storming of the church, the Zygons have developed the ability to present themselves as people drawn from the minds of those they are confronting. Despite this, they still use pods to detain their victims and extract knowledge or retain a psychic connection, as Clara finds out when she encounters them and ultimately finds her own... woops, spoiler alert! A flash back reveals that she was indeed replaced by a duplicate after helping the little boy home. The Clara we have been watching suddenly takes on a more menacing edge and introduce herself "Hello Clara. My names Bonny". It seems that Bonny has been doing a very good job of pretending to be Clara and playing dumb as part of a ploy to lure UNIT into an ambush and now Kate is also taken as her double announces that Unit have been neutralised in the US. Bonny confirms that "Unit are neutralised in the UK. More or less" before taking out a rocket launcher at aiming it at the presidential plane with a brief phone call "I'm sorry, Clara's dead. Kate Stewart is dead. The UNIT troops are all dead. Truth or Consequences." and an explosion is heard as the credits appear.
That ending has all sorts of trouble written all over it. I'm reminded of The Dadly Assassin cliffhanger that ended with a freeze frame of the Doctor's head being held under water and Mary Whitehouse's insistence that such an image would stay with young viewers all week and that it is too frightening for them to think that the Doctor is surely dead. But in a more contemporary sense, there had been several aeroplanes falling out of the sky in the past year or so, sometimes without any known reason (assumed terrorist hijack) but one in particular as a direct rocket strike over Ukraine, a Dutch passenger plane presumably mistaken for a fighter plane and allegedly shot down by Russian backed or inspired separatists. The latest incident was in fact some time previous and the matter wasn't really contemporary and there were far more resonant matters addressed elsewhere in the episode.
So ends one of the most adult episode of Doctor Who that I can remember in the modern era. There were dull and drawn out adult stories in the seventies like The Seeds Of Doom, but this one actually had potential to be rather frightening for kids and not in a scary-monsters-are-made-up way, but in a very adults-can-be-really-scary-without-realising-it way. Second viewing a year later didn't seem so bad, but as always, knowing what is coming makes it easier to stomach, even if I had forgotten the details. Couple that with the knowledge that Clara is leaving at some point so maybe she is dead...
No comments:
Post a Comment