21x3. Frontios
Writer: Christopher Bidmead
Director: Ron Jones
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner
Synopsis: The TARDIS crew encounter a
small group of humans in the far future who are marooned on a planet
called Frontios, where frequent meteor storms and a series of
mysterious deaths threaten the colony's survival. With the TARDIS
itself apparently destroyed, the Doctor discovers that the Tractators -
an insectoid race that once plagued Turlough's home planet - are
responsible for the disappearances and intend to take over the planet.
Review: "Frontios" doesn't quite dot all its Is and cross
all its Ts, but I would nevertheless name it the best serial to date of
the Peter Davison era. Former script editor Christopher Bidmead returns to Doctor Who with
a story that works on the basic level of keeping the audience
entertained while painting a compelling picture of a struggling colony
and supplying Turlough with some solid characterization.
For
starters, Frontios itself is probably the best example of
world-building that
we've seen since Davison took on the role. Not only do the TARDIS crew
find a valuable ally in Chief Science Officer Range, who stands
out for being both intelligent and mostly selfless, but the most
antagonistic character - Chief Orderly Brazen - is refreshingly
complex. A less sophisticated script would likely have made him simply
a scowling autocrat; instead, "Frontios" portrays him and the leaders
he has served, Captain Revere and his successor Plantagenet, as having
resorted to harsh rule as a way of keeping order in a precarious
situation. At the same time, the script does not ask us to agree with
their
decisions. Brazen eventually admits that he was wrong, and the secrecy
probably enabled the Tractators to advance their plans further than if
the colonists had been allowed to investigate and discovered their
presence earlier. In addition to the overt conflict betewen the
Frontios Orderlies and the "Retrogrades," there's a nice small touch
where one of the Orderlies is seen swiping a piece of food, reinforcing
the sense of a society teetering on the verge of chaos. While the
execution doesn't quite transcend the low production values (the
surface scenes never really feel like they're taking place outdoors),
it does at least impart a sense of realism to the characterizations.
Turlough
hasn't played a particularly notable role in any of the serials after
"Enlightenment," in which he finally broke decisively from the Black
Guardian, but "Frontios" gives him a central role in the plot. We learn
that his home planet was once plagued by the Tractators as well, a
revelation that arrives in the form of a hereditary memory that induces
what seems like a trance state as he recalls that his home was once
considered an "infection" thanks to their machinations. I've always
found this trope of inherited memory an intriguing (if implausible)
one, and it's a clever way to let Turlough deliver the key exposition
while keeping him (and the audience) in the dark as to what exactly is
happening at first. The script also tackles his image as one of the
more self-serving companions in the show's history - the Doctor remarks
early on that he's unlikely to risk traveling through an unstable
tunnel, and when Range's daughter Norna tells him that nobody expects
him to face the Tractators directly, he remarks bitterly, "No, of
course they don't. I'm Turlough." He then does in fact re-enter the
underground tunnels, the implication being that he is not entirely
proud of how he's conducted himself in the past and is trying to change.
"Frontios"
does fall short in a couple of aspects. First - and somewhat
surprisingly, given Bidmead's efforts to impart a stronger scientific
background to the series when he served as script editor - there's
never much explanation of how the TARDIS is destroyed with the control
room and other "pieces" of it later recovered underground. I realize
that the TARDIS is fictional technology and that explaining such things
can easily result in just arbitrary technobabble, and if the writers
want to decide that the TARDIS can be shattered into
pieces and then reconstructed so that the Doctor is back to
time-traveling in
the next episode, there's nothing stopping them. But one the strengths
of the "Bidmead era" (Season 18 plus "Castrolvalva) was to make the
pseudoscience sound
believable even if it really isn't. Here, the TARDIS's destruction and
reassembly is just presented matter-of-factly and a little too
conveniently for the plot.
Second,
we get an intriguing but problematic bit of
background when the Doctor says that the events of this serial are
taking place so far in the future that he's reached the limits of
Gallifreyan knowledge, and accordingly he is far more hesitant than
usual about getting involved. On one hand, this would seem to provide
an answer to a question that I've wondered about going all the way back
to when I first reviewed "The Aztecs" - namely, how does the Doctor
distinguish between established history which is not to be altered and
open-ended future in which he feels free to play a role? "Frontios"
suggests that he uses his repository of Time Lord knowledge to
determine either that his actions will not play a major role in history
or that the goal he is pursuing is the one aligned with established
history anyway. But while I could see the appeal of a show about a time
traveler struggling with his own sense of responsibility to act out
what amounts to pre-scripted roles, I'm not sure Doctor Who is
or should be that show. And if we were to attempt to reinterpret his
behavior across twenty-one seasons of television along these lines, I
suspect that it would be difficult to make such an interpretation work
and that it would diminish, rather than enhance, the appeal of the show
and its central character.
Peter Davison is one of the Doctors
that I most enjoy watching, but the scripts he's been given haven't
always been up to par with his performance. Some have just been
mediocre and uninspired, while others have suffered from a mix of
subpar execution, uneven pacing, and plot contrivances that prevents
even the stronger serials from attaining classic status. "Frontios,"
for better or worse, is an example of the latter.
Rating: *** (out of four)
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