Format: DVD
Warts & All: Primords
Quote: Our liver playing us up again this morning, is it, Professor?
Review: Obviously, any portrayal of a fascistic UK that supports reckless fracking is completely far-fetched but other than that and the rather risible Primords this one makes for a cracking end to a great season. What’s striking is that, just as Ambassadors featured the first ever DW car chase, it’s taken this long for the series to explore the notion of a parallel universe.
As with most such stories, the parallels are a bit obvious – these are all the characters you know and love, but, you know, bad. Apart from drill engineer Greg Sutton, who is the same old rugged dependable male chauvinist in all universes. Despite they’re being myriad choices the events taking place in the parallel world follow the same course. There’s still an Inferno drilling project at the same location looking to break through the Earth’s crust and unlock untold energy – energy being a British priority after the Nuton power complex got shut down in The Silurians. And just as that project had its grumpy director and attendant civil servant, so does Project Inferno.
In this case, we have Olaf Pooley as Professor Stahlman, rather excellent and an utterly brilliant foil for the Doctor to go up against, until he has to go all Jekyll and Hyde on us – plus the superlative Christoper Benjamin as Sir Keith Gold, providing something of a rarity in DW – a rather affable civil servant who’s on the sensible side of the argument. Actually, I’m interested to know what his fascist version was like – he’s never seen, because he’s already met with an unfortunate accident at that point. The implication is that he was seeking to stop the project though so I can only conclude he was just as nice and sensible in the nasty world. For all its simplicity, the parallel universe does present tantalising hints of this alternative world, with Big Brother-like posters and a swastikish emblem, and the key regulars – Brigade Leader Lethbridge-Stewart and Section Leader Elisabeth Shaw are terrific, Nick Courtney very clearly enjoying himself behind that eyepatch. Quite difficult to buy an evil Benton, but there you go, can’t have everything.
Ultimately, the parallel universe serves its role admirably – which is to show us the disastrous consequences of the drilling project, to deliver dramatic cost ahead of the Doctor’s efforts to avert the catastrophe. Without it all we would have as an audience would be dire warnings and just as with fracking protest groups nobody pays much attention to them. Seeing the end of the world – familiar characters set to go out in a very inglorious blaze – well, that’s one way to get us all to sit up and take notice. There’s a good deal of action and drama and an especially effective cliffhanger, with countdown and clever cuts as Evil Stahlman (actually not unlike Good Stahlman, but with beady dark glasses) trains a gun on the Doctor and the drillhead is about to blow. And it all ends with a lovely shot of Liz chuckling to herself, with no suggestion that we are never going to see her again. So it’s a parting shot that makes me sad at the same time. And always leaves me wanting to either print the screen and frame it or write a proper Liz farewell story. I know I’ll do one or the other one of these days.
Anyway, I digress. Overall, I think this makes for a rip-roaring adventure yarn. It’s just a shame about those monsters.
