DOCTOR WHO, SEASON 17 SERIAL 3:

THE CREATURE FROM THE PIT

Doctor: Fourth (Tom Baker)

Companions: Romana (Lalla Ward), K9

April 2023

Okay yes it does look like a penis. But this story is also really quite good!!

I went into The Creature from the Pit knowing nothing about it except that the monster looks like a penis. And...yeah. Okay. It does look like a penis. They didn’t lie. But I was really extremely pleasantly surprised by the story, overall, and while it’s definitely silly, it’s neither as if Doctor Who is not an extremely silly show by default nor is it as if it doesn’t tell an actual interesting story.

This serial follows on the more comedic note that Season 17 seems to be angling towards, in the vein of City of Death, and it fits remarkably well. In addition to the eponymous creature (which, when it’s not a penis (yall it’s only a penis for like 2 scenes i feel like we talk too much about the penis thing) is a big green blob), a major “creature” of the story is the wolfweeds, which are my new favorite Doctor Who monster. They’re like...they’re like big green tumbleweeds that kill people. And they just...roll at people. They also maybe spin webs? It’s not entirely clear. Let’s please be clear: the wolfweeds have the exact same role in the story that the Chumblies do in Galaxy 4: they’re cute, they don’t look frightening at all—in fact, they’re rather comedic—and the narrative treats them as deadly. And in both cases, it utterly works for me. I unironically love the wolfweeds. So much. They’re so good.

That sort of half-comedic half-dramatic sensibility runs throughout the whole story, from the wolfweeds to the hairy bandits (?) to, yes, the very phallic protrusions of the titular Creature. I promise I’m going to stop talking about how much it looks like a penis now. The comic drama is something that City of Death juggled too, and I think it’s pulled off rather well here also — admittedly, not quite as strongly as City of Death, but that’s okay.

These past few seasons seem to be oddly fond of pseudo-medieval space planet settings. First we had the stone castles and jewels of The Ribos Operation, then the robotic duplicates and fencing duels of The Androids of Tara, and now we have a story that’s half medieval drama, half interplanetary opera. Well, okay, maybe a little bit less than half. But it’s a type of setting that I admittedly am quite fond of, which already gives the story quite a few points in my book.

The story’s main thrust centers around the possession of metal as a macguffin, which for my money is a much better macguffin than lucanol or zeiton-7 or vionesium or whatever the mineral of the week is, because it’s so much more recognizable to our audiences. It’s one thing to say “oh, with my Space Exploitation Miner 9000, I can get ten times the duralinium!” and quite another to say “this woman’s possession of the only mine on the planet gives her a monopoly on metal and vast power.” It’s a strong angle, and I like it quite a bit! It also characterizes the planet as alien quite well from a very early stage: everyone is awed at the fact that K9 is a tin (“not tin!”) dog, for example. It helps that I also really quite like Adrasta as a villain: she’s played very well, and the trick of her accidentally letting things slip that she shouldn’t know in dialogue is possibly the best and most subtle variant of it I’ve seen.

In the last episode, the story takes something of a sudden and hard swerve into a more sci-fi lens. I’m by and large alright with this: it’s certainly a swerve, but it follows on more or less logically from everything we know has happened already, so it performs its function dutifully as a climax. I do really like the storytelling trick of seemingly resolving every problem while still having a significant chunk of runtime left, which is used rather excellently here with the Doctor still going “ahhh but what about The Problems” at the beginning of part 4—it makes you afraid as an audience as to what’s going to happen next.

I like the bandits okay—they’re classic hairy Doctor Who bandits more or less obsessed with wealth (though one of them at least has some knowledge of economic scarcity), and they aren’t offensive to watch. Also, Romana gets a nice scene where she successfully one-ups them. I almost want to critique how much time Romana spends a prisoner here, but she does make several attempts to escape and/or ruin the antagonists’ plans, some of which are successful, and is never reduced to a damsel in distress. The Doctor also gets a pseudo-companion in the form of the astrologer Orgulon, with whom he has a rather lovely repartee—it’s a classic Tom Baker Fourth Doctor role of conversationally running rings around someone, but it’s always fun to see. A last note is the fact that K9’s voice actor was recast for Season 17 only (“he’s got laryngitis”), and so at first his new voice gave me some cognitive dissonance, but by the end of the story I wasn’t really noticing it.

Overall Thoughts:

I like The Creature from the Pit! I like it quite a bit! I could easily see myself revisiting this one, which is something that I don’t know if I’d say about Destiny of the Daleks or its ilk. I don’t think it quite measures up to the comedic and fantastical heights of City of Death, but it does carry on from them quite well. I’d recommend it if you want a nice solid (and silly) all-round Romana (Lalla Ward) and the Doctor adventure, and/or if you’ve already seen City of Death and want more. Don’t watch it if you don’t like Doctor Who to be silly (though if that’s the case, I wonder why you’re watching the classic show?). Next up, we have Nightmare of Eden, which I’m pleased to say I know even less about! Hopefully it’s a good one!