“Terror Of The Zygons” (season 13, episodes 1-4. Originally broadcast Aug. 30-Sept. 20, 1975.)
It seems a little strange to suggest that the problem with “Terror Of The Zygons”—a story in which shapeshifting octopoid aliens feed off the milk of a cyborg Loch Ness Monster—is that it’s overly formulaic. But on a show like Doctor Who, where you expect to see some new weird and strange creature every week, the difference between a good story and a great one is whether or not the story surprises you in other ways. And this one takes the easy route, relying on formula and narrative shortcuts when it could have gone for something a little more groundbreaking. There’s nothing wrong with this, exactly, but by design, it’s not challenging in the way great art (or simply more ambitious Doctor Who) is. It’s only meant to be an entertaining diversion.
That’s not to say it’s not enjoyable formula. I certainly liked this one immensely when I was a kid, and for all the same reasons I liked it then, I still think it’s a lot of fun. But watching it again (thanks to the newly released DVD), it’s hard to ignore the faults that weigh it down.
Praise first, then: The cast, for one thing, can hardly be beat. You’ve got two of Doctor Who’s most charismatic leads in Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen as the moody, mercurial Fourth Doctor and plucky journalist Sarah Jane Smith, backed by the always-reliable Nicholas Courtney and Ian Marter as the Brigadier and brave but bumbling Harry Sullivan. There’s a lighthearted Scottish flavor to the story—set at Loch Ness, though filmed in Wales—that lands on the right side of kitsch. (I like to imagine that writer Robert Banks Stewart, a Scot himself, was making a joke about stereotypical perceptions of his people in the opening scene, in which a Scotsman on an oil rig asks for haggis, and in response, the entire structure is destroyed.)
And there’s the Zygons. It’s not difficult to understand why they were remembered well enough to be brought back after a nearly 40-year absence to be the featured alien menace in “The Day Of The Doctor.” Just look at them: Orange and weirdly bulbous and quasi-tentacled, they’re a wonderfully surreal triumph of Doctor Who visual design, stretching the limitations on what you can do on a low budget. They’re not flawless: A close eye will easily pick out things like the fact that their “feet” are just boots spraypainted orange. But, like the Yeti in “The Web Of Fear,” they hit that same sweet spot of scary yet somewhat absurd that makes a classic Doctor Who villain: They might give you nightmares, but won’t make you need counseling.
The action sequences are also in good hands, handled by director Douglas Camfield with his usual aplomb, with two particularly effective scenes: The shock ending of episode one where we see a Zygon for the first time, and the Hitchcockian moment when Harry’s alien duplicate tries to kill Sarah with a pitchfork.
“Terror Of The Zygons” opened the Fourth Doctor’s second season with a return to a story more typical of the Third Doctor. Instead of exploring unknown regions of deep space and the far future as he’d done all through season 12, the Doctor is called back to present-day Britain to investigate a series of deadly wrecks of oceanic oil-rigs with his old comrades the Brigadier and the anti-alien taskforce UNIT. Returning to the old Jon Pertwee stomping grounds wasn’t, I think, meant to be an overt commentary on the previous era. But just as Baker’s debut in “Robot” announced that there was a new style to the show by letting the Fourth Doctor’s unfamiliar presence warp the typical narrative of a Third Doctor story, “Terror Of The Zygons” highlighted the differences between Baker’s Doctor and Pertwee’s simply in how he treats the Brigadier’s request for help.
In one way, it’s no different than before: Told the crisis is vital because it involves oil, the Doctor scoffs patronizingly at what he considers provincial Earther attitudes: “It's about time the people who run this planet of yours realized that to be dependent upon a mineral slime just doesn't make sense.” The Third Doctor would probably have made a similar complaint, but the new guy’s attitude is far more distant, and his statement that he hopes the Brigadier “had a very good reason” for calling him sounds almost like a threat. He doesn’t want to be bothered; he doesn’t live here anymore. Although the Third complained, he stayed on Earth anyway, even after he was free to go anywhere he wanted—for two whole seasons, in fact. He did get to travel the universe quite a bit, but he started and ended his journey in the same place: Earth, working for UNIT. The Fourth Doctor had no such sense of attachment or loyalty, leaving the planet for an extended stretch at the first available opportunity, even though UNIT presumably had just as many extraterrestrial threats to combat as before. The real reason for this change was a behind-the-scenes one: The Third Doctor production team liked doing Earthbound stories, but the new Fourth Doctor crew, Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes, were even more eager to stop doing them and get the show back into space like in the 1960s. But it also helped show how the new Doctor was far less interested in ordinary human concerns than whatever was percolating in his spaceman-Sherlock head. Where the Third Doctor would often argue with people like Huckle, Hibernian Oil’s man in Loch Ness, just to prove his own superiority, the Fourth Doctor can’t be bothered. Until the Brig points out how many have already died, of course—oil companies aren’t worth his time, but he’ll help people.
It’s early in the second episode, when the wounded Harry is kidnapped and brought to meet the Zygon leader, Broton, that the story starts to sag. For one thing, the belligerent and overconfident Broton blabs everything important about the Zygons to Harry almost immediately, for no apparent reason other than that he feels like telling someone. Everything. Their history, their plans, their ability to impersonate humans and, worst of all, that their indestructible secret weapon (what they call the Skarasen and we’d call Nessie) is also their sole source of food. The problem with this is that the audience now knows all kinds of things that the Doctor, Sarah, and the others are in the dark about, leaving not much in the way of surprises and a vague feeling that they should really know all of this already.