Planet of Evil

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081 – Planet of Evil
Doctor Who serial
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The Anti-Man manifests himself.
Cast
Others
Production
Writer Louis Marks
Director David Maloney
Script editor Robert Holmes
Producer Philip Hinchcliffe
Executive producer(s) None
Incidental music composer Dudley Simpson
Production code 4H
Series Season 13
Length 4 episodes, 25 minutes each
Originally broadcast 27 September – 18 October 1975
Chronology
← Preceded by Followed by →
Terror of the Zygons Pyramids of Mars

Planet of Evil is the second serial of the 13th season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was first broadcast in four weekly parts from 27 September to 18 October 1975.

Plot

The TARDIS picks up a distress call and the Doctor and Sarah arrive on the planet Zeta Minor. There they discover that a Morestran geological expedition has fallen prey to an unseen killer and only the leader, Professor Sorenson, remains alive.

A military mission from Morestra has also arrived to investigate. At first they suspect the Doctor and Sarah of responsibility for the deaths of the expedition members, but the culprit is eventually revealed to be a creature from a universe of antimatter, retaliating for the removal by Sorenson of some antimatter samples from around the pit that acts as an interface between the two universes.

The Morestrans take off in their ship, but it is slowly dragged back towards the planet due to the antimatter on board. Sorenson himself becomes infected by antimatter and gradually transforms into antiman, a monster capable of draining the life from others.

The Morestran commander, the increasingly unhinged Salamar, attacks Sorenson with a radiation source, but this only causes him to produce multiple anti-matter versions of Sorenson which soon overrun the ship. The Doctor finds the original Sorenson, takes him back to the planet in the TARDIS and throws both him and his samples into the pit, fulfilling a bargain he earlier made with the anti-matter creature. Sorenson reappears unharmed, and the Doctor returns him to the Morestran ship, which is now freed of the planet's influence.

Continuity

The spin-off novel Zeta Major by Simon Messingham, part of the Past Doctor Adventures line, is a sequel to this story.

In a rare moment, the Doctor uses a blaster against an opponent, contradicting his position made during Pyramids of Mars that he never carries firearms.[original research?]

Production

The plot was deliberately conceived by Philip Hinchcliffe, Robert Holmes and Louis Marks as a mixture of the film Forbidden Planet and the novella The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In addition, Marks had been reading science magazine articles about antimatter, and decided to write a story incorporating the subject. Hinchcliffe, in the first season in which he could commission new material, planned to move away from the "rubber-suited alien" theme, which he felt was clichéd. For this story he proposed having three separate monstrous elements: Sorenson's transformation, the anti-matter monster and finally the planet itself, claimed by Sorenson in episode 1 to be conscious of his group's motives.[1]

Despite the jungle setting of this serial, the shoot was entirely studio bound, and designer Roger Murray-Leach built an intricately detailed jungle set. The BBC was so impressed with it that they kept photographs of it for several years as an example of excellent set design and producer Philip Hinchcliffe recommended that he be nominated for an award for this work.

The original script had Sorenson dying after falling into the pit, but Hinchcliffe ordered that this be changed, as he felt it would too grim an ending for "the little ones"[clarification needed], and because he saw Sorenson as a victim of the planet's influence rather than an evil man in himself.[2] Instead, a scene was added in which Sorenson is released from the pit and cured of his anti-matter contamination.

The most visible reference to Forbidden Planet is the anti-matter monster (Mike Lee Lane), which is sometimes invisible and otherwise is seen as red outlines. It bears a close resemblance to the film's "Creature from the Id". The monster is invisible in the filmed sections of the serial (where a wind machine was used to show its progress), and as outlines in the video sections (created with Colour Separation Overlay).

The ship main cabin set was re-used in the 4th Doctor story The Robots of Death.[citation needed]

Cast notes

This is the final appearance by Michael Wisher in Doctor Who. Prentis Hancock made his third appearance, having previously appeared in Spearhead from Space and Planet of the Daleks. He would later appear in The Ribos Operation. Frederick Jaegar (Professor Sorenson) and Ewen Solon (Vishinsky) both previously appeared in The Savages, in which they played Jano and Chal respectively.

Outside references

The Doctor quotes from Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, and says that he met William Shakespeare once.[3] In the DVD commentary Elisabeth Sladen, in a discussion about Forbidden Planet's influence from Shakespeare's The Tempest, compares Sorenson/Antiman to Caliban. The Doctor also seemingly quotes the last words of Lawrence Oates of the Terra Nova expedition, telling Sarah Jane "I am going (out) and may be some time."[citation needed]

Broadcast and reception

Serial details by episode
Episode Broadcast date Run time Viewers
(in millions)
"Part One" 27 September 1975 (1975-09-27) 24:02 10.4
"Part Two" 4 October 1975 (1975-10-04) 22:30 9.9
"Part Three" 11 October 1975 (1975-10-11) 23:50 9.1
"Part Four" 18 October 1975 (1975-10-18) 23:43 10.1
[4][5][6]

The story was repeated across four consecutive evenings on BBC1 from 5–8 July 1976, with a start time varying between 6:20 pm and 6:35 pm. It was the first story since Spearhead from Space to be repeated in its entirety on BBC TV and the first ever to be stripped across consecutive evenings.[7] The viewing figures were 5.0, 5.0, 4.3 & 3.9 million viewers respectively[8]

Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping wrote of the serial in The Discontinuity Guide (1995), "For an eight year old, this was the most terrifying slice of Who. Now it seems a little ordinary, a simple reworking of classic themes. It is unfortunate that the detailed jungle set is in such sharp contrast to the (cheap) minimalism of the Morestran spaceship."[3] In The Television Companion (1998), David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker described Planet of Evil as "a wonderfully creepy story" with the borrowing of material from Jekyll and Hyde "done with such style and panache that the viewer, far from complaining about a lack of originality, delights in spotting all the familiar sources to which the writer and the production team are paying homage". They praised the jungle set and the performances of Frederick Jaeger and Ewen Solon, but criticised Prentis Hancock's "poor" portrayal of Salamar.[9] In 2010, Patrick Mulkern of Radio Times wrote that the serial "feels original", particularly praising the jungle set and David Maloney's direction, as well as Tom Baker's performance.[10]

Commercial releases

In print

Doctor Who and The Planet of Evil
Doctor Who The Planet of Evil.jpg
Author Terrance Dicks
Cover artist Mike Little
Series Doctor Who book:
Target novelisations
Release number
 47
Publisher Target Books
Publication date
 18 August 1977
ISBN 0-426-11682-8

A novelisation of this serial, written by Terrance Dicks, was published by Target Books in July 1977 as Doctor Who and the Planet of Evil.

VHS and DVD release

Planet of Evil was released on VHS in February 1994. It was released on DVD on 15 October 2007. This serial was also released as part of the Doctor Who DVD Files in Issue 94 on 8 August 2012.

References

  1. ↑ "A Darker Side" documentary on the making of the serial (BBC DVD 1814)
  2. ↑ "A Darker Side"
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/search/0/20?order=asc&q=%22planet+of+evil%22#search
  8. ↑ http://guide.doctorwhonews.net/story.php?story=PlanetofEvil&detail=broadcast
  9. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  10. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

Bibliography

External links

Reviews
Target novelisation
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