Welcome to another installment of Doctor Who Is CLASSIC, my semi-regular series of posts on episodes from the classic era of Doctor Who.
The story for today’s post is a bit of an obvious choice given impact of this classic series episode on the recently concluded new season of Doctor Who.
Today’s post is about the “Pyramids of Mars”.
Before the new season of Doctor Who got underway, Andrea and I were catching up on some randomly selected episodes of the classic series. Purely on a whim, I decided to introduce Andrea to “Pyramids of Mars”.
Not totally a whim. It is one of my favorites episodes of the 4th Doctor era.
Tom Baker fully embraces the alien nature of the Doctor. The story opens with the Doctor in somber reflection and a declaration to Sarah Jane Smith than he just can’t and just won’t run back to Earth to be UNIT’s scientific advisor.
“I am a Time Lord.
I walk in eternity.”
The Doctor and Sarah land in 1911 England on the grounds of what will be in the future UNIT headquarters. They are investigating a psychic projection that got through the TARDIS, an image of malevolent evil.
It seems an expedition to Egypt has uncovered a tomb where Sutekh the Destroyer has been imprisoned in a state of paralysis for centuries. Sutekh is being held in stasis by a beam from the planet Mars. Sutekh’s minions in England (including robot mummies) are working to build a rocket that will imprisoning device on Mars.
Sutekh is just sitting there...
MENACINGLY!!!
The Doctor has a near callous regard for the deaths of individuals but that’s because unlike most humans, he is focused on the bigger picture. If Sutekh is freed, ALL humanity will die.
Sarah Jane doesn’t quite understand the urgency. She’s from 1980* and the world is perfectly fine so Sutekh clearly doesn’t destroy everything.
*Yes, for some reason, episodes made in the 1970’s were not set in the 1970’s but in the not too distant future of 1980.
So the Doctor says let’s pop back to 1980 before we’ve defeated Sutekh.
It’s 1980 and the world is a dead and desolate wasteland.
(Yes, the Doctor does the same thing to convince Ruby in “The Devil’s Chord”.)
Well, the Doctor stops rocket project but Sutekh realizes he’s a got a handy dandy Time Lord who can take care of his little problem on Mars. One painful mind whammy later, the Doctor delivers Sutekh’s minions in the TARDIS to Mars.
Boom goes the alien doohickey and Sutekh is free!
Well, not yet.
The Doctor has two minutes to stop the Destroyer.
(The time it takes for the radio signal from Mars to Earth to actually stop.)
One TARDIS hop back to Earth and the Doctor sets up a portal to hurl Sutekh into the time stream and send farther and farther into the future to the end of time where Sutekh cannot survive!
(Spoiler! He does! See “Empire of Death”.)
“Pyramids of Mars” is a very solid adventure with a seriously creepy vibe (the slowly emaciating state of the human corpse that Sutekh manipulates as a minion is quite disturbing.)
The Doctor and Sarah have a strong rapport in this storyline, demonstrating why Elisabeth Sladen’s time in the TARDIS is so well regarded.
And Tom Baker is fine form at the Doctor, threading the needle of helping humanity while keeping his distance from it.
And Gabriel Woolf as Sutekh is very menacing despite being frozen in paralysis. His voice is cold and positively dripping with doom. (And he’s still got it in 2024.)
A lot of classic era stories can lag a bit due to the requirements to pad out the adventure of four half hour installments (or more) but "Pyramids of Mars" is fairly tight, building tension and menace over it's 4 episodes. I can see why Russell T Davies was so inspired to bring forth Sutehk into the modern era.
In a few weeks, I'll be back with another Doctor Who Is CLASSIC as we look back to the 3rd Doctor and an adventure with a number of firsts: a new enemy, a new friend and a new edition to the canon.
Until next time, as the Doctor would want you to, remember to be good to one another.
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