It's time for another installment of Doctor Who Is CLASSIC where I post about classic era episodes of Doctor Who.
When we were last here, I posted about a story from 1972 called The Curse of Peladon.
The Monster of Peladon
by Brian Hayles
Let's cover a few things that are different from the previous sojourn to Peladon.
1) Katy Manning as Jo Grant has left. The companion now is Elizabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith.
2) This time the Doctor (Jon Pertwee) meant to go to Peladon as opposed to the previous trip where his arrival on the planet was manipulated by the Time Lords.
3) The Doctor overshoots his return by 50 years, the King is dead and his daughter the queen Thalria sits up on the throne.
4) And it's gonna take 6, not 4, installments to get through the shenanigans.
And... I think... that's about it.
Otherwise all the stuff from Curse of Peladon is in play for Monster of Peladon.
50 years on and Peladon is still a medieval planet in a contentious relationship with a galactic federation.
The locals are still spooked by the spirit of Aggredor.
There's still an aged advisor who thinks the young royal needs to be more observant of the "old ways".
Alpha Centauri is still hanging around, constantly in a state of anxiety and panic.
The Doctor is still being accused of crimes he didn't commit even though Alpha Centauri is there to vouch for him.
1) I guess it's a good thing that the Doctor had not regenerated between visits to Peladon. Now THAT would've taken some explaining.
2) It's times like these that one appreciates the genius of Russell T Davies creating psychic paper for the modern series. In the classic series, the Doctor spent so much time in cells and dungeons while people take their sweet time realizing the Doctor is to be trusted. Ironically, I guess it's easier to get that trust by lying to people with psychic paper.
Membership in the federation has not quite been the boon to Peladon that Thalria's father might have hope.
The federation is at war with Galaxy 5 and desperately needs Peladon's vast deposits of trisilicate to fuel their war effort.
The miners are pissed that they are not seeing any benefits from mining shit for the federation and they're frightened that the spirit of Aggredor is picking off the miners one by one for the heresy of working with the federation and using their modern equipment.
It's been 50 years and the halls of the queen's castle are still lit by flaming torches.
What the hell, Peladon?
The Ice Warriors are back but in a twist, they are back to being the bad guys.
OK, not ALL of them but just the bunch in this episode. They've engineered all the chaos on Peladon with the miners to give them an excuse to take over the planet and get the trisilicate for Galaxy 5.
Meanwhile, the Doctor is doing stuff. Mostly mediating between the Queen and the miners as well as between squabbling factions of the miners.
And he gets to sing to Aggredor again. Who's a good monster? You're a good monster! You like being scratched behind your ears? You're a good boy, Agrredor.
The Doctor gets into a couple of fight scenes that Jon Pertwee gets to sit out with an especially dodgy looks nothing like Jon Pertwee stunt double.
And the Doctor dies.
Not for real but Sarah doesn't know that.
(That'll have to wait for Planet of the Spiders which follows this story.)
Basically the Doctor's death gives Jon Pertwee a chance to sleep through most of episode six.
Yeah, The Monster of Peladon was a rough one.
The same terrain covered over 4 episodes in The Curse of Peladon gets re-trod over 6 episodes with not enough significant differences to justify the return trip.
By the time of his 5th season, Jon Pertwee was done. Katy Manning had left, Roger Delgado (The Master) had died and his playmates at UNIT were being sidelined. Pertwee was ready to go and I feel it kind of shows in The Monster of Peladon. Although a lot of that feeling is due to the story being an overextended retread of stuff he had already done.
The Monster of Peladon is not a completely bad story. It would've been better served by a shorter length. 6 episodes requires a LOT of padding.
But it is too derivative of what had been done before.
For the next edition of Doctor Who Is CLASSIC we move up a year to Season 12 with Tom Baker as the Doctor as we venture to the future for The Ark In Space.
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