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BBC Carnival of Monsters |
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| Episodes | 4 |  |
| Story No# | 66 | |
| Production Code | PPP | |
| Season | 10 | |
| Dates | Jan. 27, 1973 - Feb. 17, 1973 |
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With Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning.
Written by Robert Holmes. Script-edited by Terrance Dicks. Directed and Produced by Barry Letts. |
| Synopsis: The Doctor and Jo land aboard a mysterious cargo liner, trapped inside a portable zoo and caught in an endless repetitive cycle. |
A Review by Harry O'Driscoll 7/9/15
Carnival of Monsters is an odd one. Everybody seems to like it, and I've never heard anyone say a bad word about it. And yet, when people talk about the all-time classics, this is often curiously absent.
What's interesting is that it is very much a small story. It's entirely self-contained, which is rare for the Pertwee era. There isn't much of a sense of jeopardy until the final episode; arguably that's the story's weak point, as the climax with the Drashigs feels very much tacked on. The Doctor has now formally returned to just freely wandering about the universe. It lays it cards on the table right from the start: "Our purpose is to amuse, simply to amuse." On the surface, there is not much to make this stand out.
And yet, it is immensely entertaining in a very unpretentious way. The scenes with Vorg trying to blag his way to the officials' on Inter Minor are marvellous to watch. It's typical of Robert Holmes to make an enemy of bureaucracy. Here the Bureaucrats are petty, self-serving, literally grey-faced and don't understand the concept of entertainment. Brilliant! The distinctive performances and Holmes's knack for dialogue really elevate what is essentially a carnie arguing with a bunch of Jobsworths to being the highlight of the story.
Initially, it's unclear what connects the scenes on Inter Minor to the scenes on the SS Bernice. The first episode teases the audience that something is amiss as a Plesiosaurus suddenly terrorises the ship; the crew re-enacting the same conversations over and over again; mysterious panels that none of the crew can see. Doing what Doctor Who exists for: presenting the audience with something ordinary, and then pull the rug out from under their feet. The first cliffhanger, Vorg's giant hand reaching out to take the TARDIS, is a wonderful moment, tying the two scenes together.
The concept of the Miniscope is genius, and the Doctor and Jo climbing around the circuity is great. I particularly liked it when the Doctor compared it to walking around inside a wrist watch. Quite a few people have picked up on the subtext of it being a television. Literally watching people inside a box for amusement. Holmes makes endless post-modern winks at the audience as Jo is horrified at the idea that people could be watching them entertaining, or when Vorg comments on how so many species look just like humans.
Of course, if we were watching the story from just the perspective of the Doctor and Jo, we'd probably think the people in charge of the Miniscope were completely evil and all powerful. Someone is kidnapping people from different worlds and keeping them as attractions, even manipulating their behaviour for their entertainment. But of course we know that really the person doing that is just a harmless entertainer who doesn't really even understand his own machine.
But then Vorg really is the Doctor. A rogue who makes his own way around the universe and comes up against the establishment. Vorg even believes the Doctor to be exactly like him at first, just to make it clear. And notice how he sells the Miniscope as a carnival of monsters, just like Doctor Who.
There's a sense of scale here, whole worlds existing inside one box (not unlike the TARDIS, another parallel with the Doctor) as the Doctor compares humans in the Miniscope to collecting goldfish. The idea that humans are to other species what animals are to us... but this is debunked when Vorg is clearly just making things up as he goes along.
Incidentally, it gets a lot funnier when you get older and understand more of the jokes. "Give them a hygiene chamber and they store fossil fuel in it." "The generators were built by the old Eternity Perpetual Company. They were designed to last forever; that's why they went bankrupt." I could go on and on. There are so many funny moments here that the passengers' going through the motions eventually becomes almost farcical.
Fundamentally, it is just superb entertainment. Despite being surprisingly intelligent and multi-layered, it's also one of the most accessible Doctor Who stories, in that anyone can dive into this and find something entertaining. Doctor Who can be so tedious when people need to watch it with crib notes. Something like Carnival of Monsters is what the show was always for.
Carnival of Monsters is a clever script that satirises television, zoos, apartheid, decolonization, immigration and officialdom. The brilliance in tackling so many topics within an effective narrative is largely undone by a lack of action and low-quality visual effects. At times, it is more of a play than a television drama and, as such, needs the characters and their words to sparkle throughout. This happens on Inter Minor, showcased by Vorg and the Doctor.
The weakness is the characters on the SS Bernice. The Major and his daughter are feeble caricatures, representing the lost colonial empire at the peak of its powers with subtle references to slavery. We learn little about their background and have no reason to feel sorry for them or care about Clare's romance with Andrews. In Episode 4, we watch them collapse, then return for a goodnight and goodbye scene after they are restored to the Indian Ocean. Yet the episode cuts short the escape of the Drashigs from the scope and Kalik's death, which merited longer screen time. A detour to one of the other environments, such as the Cybermen or Ogrons or a crew member accompanying the Doctor and Jo inside the scope might have added more tension and drama.
The main monsters are rather easily destroyed after Vorg's tales of them eating a battlecruiser. Remember the eradicator did not work on the scope at first. Whilst the Drashig design is good, they are superimposed and never in the same shot as the other characters. Shut your eyes to ignore the visual faults. Listen to the banter of Vorg, the comments of the officials and the Doctor's sharp and witty responses to find one of the most entertaining stories in years.
Nothing Serious, Nothing Political by Jason A. Miller 18/7/26
When I was a kid falling in love with Doctor Who, it was mostly on a surface level. I loved every episode equally; it took me a while to sort out the greats from the Twin Dilemmas. Between 1984 when I discovered the show and 1991 when I moved off to college, I can remember only three stories that I disliked enough to shut off on purpose: Time and the Rani, Time-Flight... and Carnival of Monsters.
Looking back from age 47, I'm trying to remember why I gave up before the end of Episode One, right when Shirna started doing her tap-dance for the Inter Minor officials. I was probably thinking that the show had gotten too silly for words and that I had far more important things to be doing (which, if I was in high school, probably involved staring into space and pining over Kelly Magee, the girl next door).
The problem for a tween is that you need a pretty broad knowledge base to enjoy a story beyond surface level. And on surface, the first three minutes of Carnival of Monsters are ridiculous: grey-faced men speaking in stilted language, grunting extras in ill-fitting grey rubber masks gesticulating wildly. But later in Episode One, when Vorg assures that his only purpose on Inter Minor is to entertain, to amuse, "nothing serious, nothing political", the point becomes clear. Doctor Who is always serious, always political. Way back to the very first serial, when the Doctor helped a tribe of cavemen choose between political leaders, or to the second serial, where he led a pacifist revolt against fascist robots, and especially during the Pertwee era. The insular, xenophobic Inter Minorians are the worst elements of the right wing, and Vorg is about to inadvertently launch a progressive redistribution of wealth.
How could I have known any of that in 1990, when I was a kid in the suburbs, who still thought Ronald Reagan had been a pretty decent President?
Looking at Carnival from an adult lens, it still has flaws, minute-by-minute. The S.S. Bernice characters by necessity of being time-looped repeat an awful lot of dialogue; Jenny McCracken's adorable 1920s flapper hairstyle is doing a lot of heavy lifting, because the actress doesn't get much to do. It's great to see Ian Marter doing good work in a one-dimensional role, but it's still not Harry Sullivan. Jon and Katy are largely alone until Episode Four, their dialogue and action not as dense and as complex as we're used to the past two seasons. Yes, the political satire is good, as are the nods to Doctor Who's limited visual range ("Who's going to pay good credit bars to see a blob in a snowstorm?"), but I'd argue this is nothing particularly groundbreaking.
Writer Robert Holmes had a healthy ability to recycle himself. The Doctor and Jo wandering around the Scope's circuitry for half the story, returns as the Doctor and Peri blundering around inside the conduits of J7 during The Two Doctors. Michael Wisher as Kalik, the most evil of the three Inter Minor speaking roles, goes off on a series of paranoid xenophobic rants, envisioning a grand interplanetary conspiracy against his measly little planet, with Vorg and the Scope the unwitting catalysts that leads him to mount a revolution. We'll see this again with Morgus in The Caves of Androzani, where it's arguably done better, the catalyst not a one-off actor in a funny hat with a prop TV, but the Doctor himself.
There's also a weird dichotomy --- and this will return even more strongly in The Talons of Weng-Chiang --- with Holmes both calling out racist tropes and indulging in them. Vorg observes that he can't tell one Tellurian from another; that's sharp commentary. But then a 1920s' character refers to "Johnny Chinaman", which might have been historically accurate, but it just hangs in the air here on TV in the 2020s, a cringe-y thing to have to endure.
Wisher, of course, is a strong point in this story's favor. This is his third role in the Pertwee era. This was filmed as part of Season 9, meaning he had one big role in each of Pertwee's first three years, and every role is completely different from one another. Incredible range... and his best is definitely yet to come (and I'm not talking about his return in Season 10 as a Dalek voice). Peter Halliday and Terence Lodge stand out as the other two Inter Minor politicos, each written as separate and distinct characters with different speech patterns, the hallmark of a good writer.
However, with Pertwee and Manning separated from the plot for so long, the script is dying for those signature Pertwee "moments of charm" where he tells Jo an improbable anecdote in a prison cell or teaches her some moral lesson. Here, most of the dialogue is purely functional. There are good moments, like Jo's deduction about lateral thinking; it always makes me glad when Jo solves a plot problem and the Doctor smiles ruefully at being one-upped. Jo's useless against the Drashigs, though.
The social commentary definitely helps. Kalik and Orum are a double act. Orum is shocked when Kalik, of all people, preaches mercy and compassion; Kalik responds, "One has twinges". And Kalik, following his wild conspiratorial rants, plans a false-flag operation against his brother the President; he winds up hoist on his own petard, a scheme that feels all too real in the 2020s. The Inter Minorians serve as a Greek chorus on typical Doctor Who tropes. Apart from the obvious satirical element that they're watching Doctor Who on television (Jon Simm does this 45 years later in World Enough and Time), Orum gets some great meta lines, wondering why the Doctor is interrogating his captors. This would be much more effective if the three politicos weren't basically standing all in one spot all serial long...
Episode Four is too leisurely and unconcerned, with the Doctor meeting Vorg and Shirna in what feels like a languid Episode Two sequence. Vorg spends much of the non-action-packed finale telling anecdotes --- I love the bit about magum pods and yarrow seeds (the Doctor replies, "I have seen something similar"), and his National Service reminiscence about serving in "the old 14th Heavy Lasers". Both of those tales prove important, but by all dramaturgical rights they should have come much earlier. And director Barry Letts makes a hash of Kalik's death-by-Drashig scene.
The last word, surprisingly, goes to Major Daly, who remarks "Disappointing ending." Holmes uses the serial-long satire to poke fun of his own script. Of course, he could have just written a stronger ending ...