Inferno
1970, Story 54
Starring Jon Pertwee as the Doctor
Caroline John as Liz Shaw
Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
They say that the majority of Doctor Who fans choose their first Doctor as their favorite.
I can’t speak to the statistical validity of that statement but certainly, in my case, it is true. Sometime around 1975 or ’76 the NBC station (Channel 4) in Tucson began broadcasting Doctor Who on Sundays in the late mornings.
My father saw the show first and let me know about it the next week. I started out watching part 2 of Dr. Who and the Silurians and was immediately hooked.
Channel 4, bless their little hearts, apparently didn’t have a clue about what they were showing. Episodes were shown out of order, repeated and skipped. Sometimes, episodes from completely different stories were inserted. It was a mess. Before they gave up, I saw all (or mostly all) of The Silurians, Ambassadors of Death, Inferno, The Curse of Peladon and the Mind of Evil.
Of those original stories that I saw, only Inferno has been released on DVD and it has been my most eagerly anticipated purchase to date.
I was afraid I might be a little predisposed to “go easy” on this story in my review, so I watched it closely, with a critical eye, over several days. (At 7 parts, Inferno was not meant to be watched in one sitting.)
Plot
The Doctor’s exile on Earth continues.
In an effort to try to get the TARDIS operational and escape his Time Lord imposed exile, The Doctor uses his UNIT connections to be assigned as an advisor on a project to drill through the Earth’s outer crust and tap into the pockets of Stahlman’s Gas expected to be buried beneath.
The project director, Professor Stahlman, is particularly obsessed with finding his gas and will tolerate no delay in penetrating the crust, despite numerous misgivings on the part the other staff members and all the warnings from the computers.
A mysterious green ooze starts coming from the drill head and anyone who touches it begins to devolve into murderous, green, hairy primords.
The Doctor is actually using the project’s nuclear power generator to power his experiments. He has removed the console from the TARDIS and attempts to escape the Earth. Instead, he slips sideways in time and arrives at exactly the same place and time, but in a parallel universe.
The Britain in this parallel universe is a fascist “republic” and the counterparts of the Doctor’s UNIT friends are members of the security forces, headed by the sadistic Brigade Leader Lethbridge-Stewart.
Stahlman’s project in this new universe is further advanced, and the parallel Stahlman is just as obsessed with penetration. Could it be because he, too, has been infected by the green ooze?
The Earth’s crust is penetrated and the forces unleashed are both unstoppable and inevitable in their consequences: The Earth will soon fall apart in a ball of expanding gasses.
The only glimmer of hope is if the Doctor can convince the staff at Stahlman’s project to help him get home in time to save the Earth he came from. Before they can do that, the must battle Stahlman and the growing army of Primords.
Analysis
There were big changes for Doctor Who in Pertwee’s first season as the Doctor. The series was being broadcast in color for the first time and that added immensely to the cost. The Doctor’s exile to Earth was the first of the cost-cutting techniques. Basing the stories on Earth meant that fewer sets and special costumes needed to be made. Another cost-cutting technique was making 3 of the season’s 4 stories 7 part adventures.
The 7 part format is a bit long, and in a few places in the story extraneous chases or other bits of filler were added to pad it out to 7 parts. In the case of Inferno, the padding isn’t too bad, but this could easily have been a 6 part story with no loss to the overall narrative or quality.
Pertwee’s Doctor is in particularly fine form in this episode, whether trading barbed retorts with professor Stahlman, racing Bessie or saving the day. The Doctor is at once likable and condescending at the same time – everything that Colin Baker’s Doctor wanted to be and never quite managed.
The supporting cast, especially Liz and Lethbridge-Stewart get an unusual treat in the story, getting to flex their acting a bit and playing their fascist parallel universe selves. Nicholas Courtney is particularly good at playing the Brigade-Leader as a cruel bully who is ultimately a coward at heart.
The other members of the supporting cast are excellent, and Olaf Pooley, whom I’ve never seen before or since, was perfectly cast as the monomaniacal Stahlman.
The parallel universe plot cleverly allows several scenarios to be played out twice, lengthening the story without being too obvious. it also allows the audience to be “surprised” by some of the primords returning at inopportune moments as they may have been killed in one universe, but not the other. The primords also provide a bit of excitement during parts that might have been flagging, although they are never properly understood.
In fact, the primords raise more questions than they answer. The primords appear to be retrogressing into animals, but they seem to have a purpose. On infected, they to attempt to accelerate the penetration of the Earth’s crust. Having established that penetrating the crust will destroy the planet (and themselves), why do they want to do that? What drives them?
The seventh episode is the most protracted. The Doctor returns, knowing that the world will be destroyed, and he cannot convince anyone, not even his old friends Liz and the Brigadier. This means more chases to fill up time and even a temporary coma for the Doctor. I’m particularly disappointed that the Brigadier didn’t just immediately back up the Doctor and force the project to be shut down. I suppose it was still early days in the Doctor and the Brigadier’s friendship.
Inferno is considered a classic and it deserves the title. It has always been in my top 5 and nothing in this viewing has changed my opinion of that.
The DVD
I’m not as pleased at the quality of the DVD. Inferno, like Claws of Axos, had to be reverse standards converted to have color prints for their DVDs. While the BBC used the superior PAL color system for the original recordings and broadcast, they also produced NTSC format copies (which have fewer lines of resolution, but more frames per second) for sale overseas. Several of the original color PAL copies were destroyed, leaving only NTSC color copies to make the DVDs from.
Converting from one standard to another causes the loss of quality and abnormalities in the playback smoothness. Converting it a second time is the kiss of death.
The restoration team has come up with a clever system, using cutting edge technology to interpolate the NTSC’s lower resolution image and recreate the original higher resolution images. At the same time, it uses an algorithm to detect and eliminate the “extra” frames per second that needed to be added to operate in NTSC. The results on Claws of Axos were impressive. (The documentary on the restoration process is on the Claws of Axos DVD set) The results on Inferno are not as impressive, and the DVD quality, although certainly acceptable, is comparable to a VHS copy. It just isn’t as crisp as it ought to be. That’s a minor complaint, though, as the story is easily able to overcome the video quality.
Extras include a making of documentary, with extensive interviews with story editor Terrance Dicks (who seems to have put on a jacket he picked up out of a second-hand store without cleaning it), producer Barry Letts and actors Nicholas Courtney, Caroline John and John Levine (Sgt. Benton). (If I haven’t mentioned it recently, John Levine (or John Anthony Blake as he’s also known) is a really great guy in person.)
There’s a documentary on the UNIT characters (Lethbridge-Stewart, Liz and Sgt. Benton) and a 1970’s BBC visual effects department promo where they make the somewhat fanciful claim that their special effects can hardly be told from the real thing.
Conclusion
Buy this DVD!
My “Buy this DVD” Doctor Who stories from the currently available bunch are: Tomb of the Cybermen, Inferno, The Green Death, Ark in Space, Genesis of the Daleks and Pyramids of Mars
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