Directed by David Maloney Script editor Robert Holmes Executive producer(s) None | Written by Louis Marks Produced by Philip Hinchcliffe Incidental music composer Dudley Simpson | |
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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.
Contents
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 the next serial Pyramids of Mars that he never carries firearms.
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.
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", and because he saw Sorenson as a victim of the planet's influence rather than an evil man in himself. 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.
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.
Broadcast and reception
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. The viewing figures were 5.0, 5.0, 4.3 & 3.9 million viewers respectively.
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." 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 also noted that the antimatter monster, depicted only as a shimmering red outline, was "in all but name, the Id monster from the 1956 MGM feature film Forbidden Planet." Howe and Walker also praised the jungle set and the performances of Frederick Jaeger and Ewen Solon, but criticised Prentis Hancock's "poor" portrayal of Salamar.
Ray Dexter's assessment of Planet of Evil also acknowledged the influence of the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, which inspired the writers to include an invisible, murderous monster, as well as elements of Jekyll and Hyde. Reviewing the serial in 1999, literary critic John Kenneth Muir drew attention to similarities between Planet of Evil and Ridley Scott's 1979 film, Alien, in particular the scenario of a spaceship answering a distress call, the crew being gradually killed by a malevolent alien life form, and corpses being ejected into space in metal coffins. Muir hesitated to suggest that Alien was directly influenced by this story, but nevertheless considered it significant that Doctor Who dealt with science fiction themes that became popular later in the 1970s.
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.
In print
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.