There's nothing only about being a girl
The Third Doctor returns to Peladon and for pretty much the first three episodes repeats The Curse of Peladon: a new, uncertain monarch Queen Thalira (Nina Thomas), a suspicious old-fashioned Chancellor, and High Priest Ortron (Frank Gatliff) plus the usual political troubles.
Although this time instead of being a Whoed up version of Britain's entry into the EEC a la Curse we have the Miner's strike.
Since Peladon's entry into the Federation, the Miners have been simmering. They're working harder, being asked to use alien - possibly blasphemous - technology and getting paid a pittance.* They're on the brink of revolution with their moderate leader Gebek (Rex Robinson) trying to keep a lid on the more revolutionary and hotheaded Ettis (Ralph Watson.)
A quick note on the Peladon class system: it seems to be based on hair. If you've got red hair with white streaks you seem to be a noble, if you've got badger afros - which is the only way to describe them - you're a Miner. What do the guards have? Perms?
Ortron accuses the Doctor of being a spy and then of being in league with Gebek. The Queen doesn't know and being a woman on Peladon is not taken seriously, despite being Queen. Thankfully Sarah Jane is there to give her a lecture on Women's Liberation, summed up pithily as: "there's nothing only about being a girl". The Doctor meets up with the Aggedor, again. Does something that isn't quite the Venusian lullaby and gets Aggedor onside, again.
Then the Ice Warrior's turn up, having been summoned in a panic by Alpha Centauri, who seems to have spent the last fifty years on Peladon.
I have to say that although Alpha Centauri's physical appearance is a wee bit risible Ysanne Churchman's vocal performance is brilliant. Alpha Centauri has a life of his own. Fussy, frightened, political but in this story a bit braver. It's up there with John Dearth's performance as BOSS in the Green Death as one of the best vocal performances in Doctor Who. Bring back Alpha Centauri I say...OK, maybe not.**
Anyway, things liven up a great deal when the Ice Warrior's, led once more by Alan Bennion. This time as Ice Lord Azaxyr. The arrival of Azaxyr, purporting to be from the Federation but working with mining engineering Eckersley (Donald Gee) to take over Peladon for trisilicate (MacGuffin of the week). Trisilicate is this story's essential mineral. In this case, because the Federation is at war with Galaxy 5 and everyone's technology is dependent on trisilicate. He who controls Peladon, controls trisilicate. He who controls trisilicate, will win the war.
Eckersley, with Azaxyr, has been using 'the spirit of Aggador' to stir up trouble with the Miners by scaring and killing them. They are working with Galaxy 5. Eckersley because, as is revealed in the final episode, he wants to rule the Earth - an unnecessarily grandiose touch really, greed would have been enough of a motive surely - and Azaxyr because he's from a breakaway warmongering Ice Warrior faction.
The next three episodes see lots of people die, often the same actors. Often Terry Walsh.
This is one of the problems with watching a whole Doctor Who stories in one sitting, rather than spread over six weeks. Would I, watching over that time, have noticed that various deaths were the same actors over and over again? Would the endless wandering around polystyrene mine workings and corridors have seemed less interminable? Would Sarah Jane's sadness over the Doctor's alleged death in episode six have seemed quite so annoying as she'd already gone through the upset at the Doctor's supposed death a couple of episodes earlier?
Liz Sladen does these well but if I were a companion of the Doctor after a couple of adventures I'd start to assume the Doctor was alive and well until I saw the corpse. Sarah Jane gives the story real energy when she appears. I have to say Liz Sladen has been a breath of fresh air to the final season of Pertwee, giving the whole programme a bit more oomph. There's a real bite to Sarah Jane, which not many previous companions have had. Although I'd say this was her weakest story so far in terms of what she's asked to do by the script.
Fundamentally this isn't as good a story as Curse of Peladon, although it is more obviously political. It's nice to see as patrician a Doctor as the Third siding with the workers, even if he's a bit anti-revolutionary. It's a shame the most radical of them, Ettis, has to be portrayed as totally insane towards the end like some Peladonian Arthur Scargill (Rupert Murdoch version). Even if the 'Women's Lib' stuff is a bit heavy-handed there's at least an attempt to address the issue.
It also suffers because like Terror of the Autons with Spearhead from Space the sequel shares too many plot points with the original story plus at six episodes it is too long.
Not bad, not great.
And with that, we are almost at the end of the Third Doctor's era. Only Planet of the Spiders to go...but that is a story for another day.
*There also seems to be about eight of them, which becomes a bit obvious in the last couple of episodes where the same actor dies about three times.
**This was written well before Empress of Mars was broadcast so imagine my surprise.
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