The Mutants

I really liked "The Mutants" the first time I saw it. I've since learnt that this was an unacceptable attitude to have, even though few people can really explain what's wrong with the story. It's dated horribly of course, but then so has "The Three Doctors". The acting is also awful, but then "The Mutants" isn't really about performance; more than any other story, it's determinedly "about" the issues Bob and Dave are propelling towards us with sledgehammer subtlety, and sod the means of getting there.

Like all work by the pair, it's intelligently and studiously aware that it's Doctor Who, Jo even commenting in Part 1 that one of the sets is "like a broom cupboard"; later on the Doctor mocks her for using the phrase "timewise", as if this were somehow more acceptable than certain of his own approved vernacular, for example "galactic ticket inspectors" or "TARDIS sniffer-outer". Many years after my fond first acquaintance with "The Mutants" I had the honour of watching it with a friend, and was crushed to find it as dull as he did. Perhaps hard lessons given this slowly are best taken alone.

Yet like "The Claws of Axos" there is far more going on here than a kids TV programme is required to think about; Varan and his people's mutations, the stranded Professor Sondegaard, the Marshall's ambitions of power over Solos, Professor Jaeger's experiments on the planet... the problem is it all looks, sounds and is acted so horribly. Almost every performance is rubbish, with the Marshall just about coming out on top. Although, rarely, he is not a character it is easy to love to hate. Odd, how a racist can be so much more repellant than an Ice Warrior or a Cyberman.

The Marshall is, of course, one of the most despicable villains in Doctor Who; people take that away from him because his story is crap. But I can recall actually getting really, honestly angry with him. Like other Pertwee nasties such as "Walker the Peacemaker" or Mr Chinn, they don't just represent the breed of petty beaurocracy one is actually pissed off with on a day-to-day level, they ARE it. Just as Chinn copies a threat that has been earlier leveled at him and aims it at the Doctor - "it's your head on the block, not mine!", and Walker quotes his national anthem while munching sandwiches, the Marshall chuckles as he works to save his own, spectacularly insignificant, career while he wipes out an entire race of people. That said, there is huge joy to be gained from witnessing the Doctor forcing him to call the Solonians a "disease" in front of the Adjudicator. These are small, petty people. And as we all know, there are plenty enough of those out there in the real world.

There are some fun questions to be raised from watching "The Mutants" though. Why is Geoffrey Palmer wearing a dress? What exactly is "clinker"? Why is Jo dressed in a suit made from Indian Restaurant carpet? And why do people in the future always play chess with bits of copper pipe? Perhaps in making their parables on colonialism, human greed and aesthetic judgment with such brutish methodology, Bob'n'Dave tried to make a point that was completely ill-suited to colourful capture-and-escape Doctor Who. It was a good point, but it wasn't a good way to make it.