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whoreviewswho · 5 months ago

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Your Evil is My Good - Pyramids of Mars, 1975

There are some things, though not many, that the Doctor Who fandom seems to universally agree on. Everybody seems to agree that the Weeping Angels are a great, iconic monster. Everybody seems onboard with the notion that The Caves of Androzani is one of the best stories of all time. Everybody seems to agree that the Hinchcliffe era is one of the most consistently good runs in the whole show. You can probably see where I am going with this. Pyramids of Mars has been forever lauded as one of the all-time great Doctor Who stories, a shining example of a show that appealed to all ages at the peak of its powers.

Like all consensus opinions, there is obviously a clear logic to this. Pyramids of Mars is incredibly memorable and influential. It was, after all, the third serial to be released on the VHS line and it topped the DWM poll for most anticipated DVD release in 2003. Even if it were not so formative and prominent in fan's minds (the amount of times it has been selected for re-release and repeat is remarkable) it would still be one of the most influential and groundbreaking stories of its time. It is hard to challenge the claim that Pyramids of Mars is the single most important story of the Hinchcliffe era. Not the best (there are at least four prior to this that could more readily stake that claim) but, in an aesthetic sense, the pilot episode for the Hinchcliffe era or, at least, the one where everything finally falls into place.

Prior to Pyramids of Mars, Doctor Who had functioned primarily based on the approach pioneered by Verity Lambert and David Whittaker back in the early 1960s. Their vision of Doctor Who was as a programme defined by juxtaposing aesthetics and the storytelling had developed to facilitate that by colliding genres and styles of storytelling. What debuts in Pyramids of Mars is, in hindsight, the inevitable next step which is positioning the established aesthetics and logic of Doctor Who alongside specific pulp genre stories. The difference is the distinction between the Doctor walking amongst a space opera or a western and disrupting their logics and aesthetics and the Doctor walking around within 1971’s Blood of the Mummy’s Tomb and being beholden to its logic and aesthetic.

In the 1990s, Steven Moffat infamously derided the Hinchcliffe era for comprising too largely of derivative pastiches and, while I ultimately agree with him, he is made to look a bit of a fool because of how much the approach does actually work. I like Pyramids of Mars. Of course I do. I'm a Doctor Who fan. This story is a blast to watch and it is the first in a really strong run of pulpy, gothic horror-pastiches that define the Hinchcliffe era in everybody's minds (I stress this is not the beginning of a run in terms of quality, just the start of an aesthetic period that also happens to be very good). This is a messy story but it is a very promising first showing. Pyramids of Mars proves that this model of Doctor Who can work and it lays the groundwork for better stories later down the track. after it to take this aesthetic and run into incredibly interesting places. So, as you have obviously concluded by now, this is not even close to my favourite of the Hinchcliffe era, let alone of all time.

Yes, the production of Pyramids of Mars is spectacular. Probably the single strongest aspect of the Hinchcliffe era is just how good the show was at working within its limitations. None of the stories under his watch look especially naff and Pyramids of Mars is especially luscious. The serial is dripping in tone and atmosphere and I could not begrudge anybody frequenting it for just the mood it puts you in. The sets for the house are great and effortlessly evoke that classic, hammer horror tone of an old, creepy house with creepy old dudes doing creepy *cult* (we can replace that word with *casually stereotypically racist*) stuff. The visual effects are also excellent with particular kudos to that chilling bit where Marcus gets shot. I could watch that one sequence forever.

This is not a script with a wealth of great material for the actors but there is no question that they are all exceptional. Paddy Russell even claimed as much herself, insisting upon finding strong actors to bolster material that she thought was lacking. Michael Sheard brings a lot to Laurence Scarman, the best part in the whole story from an acting perspective, but it is hard to look past Garbriel Woolf as Sutekh for the best guest performance in the serial. What a captivating voice and commanding presence. Tom Baker's performance is often praised for the seriousness and dread he brings to proceedings. He even has some particularly dark and alien moments such as his total detachment from the various deaths around him. In my opinion, however, I find his performance to be distant and disinterested, likely thanks to his frosty relationship with Russell. Luckily, it does serve this material well and offer an alienness to the role but he seems incredibly bored and pissed off every time he is onscreen.

As with this whole season though, Elisabeth Sladen is at the height of her powers and effortlessly wrings buckets of charm out of scripts that, again, serve her terribly. Following season eleven, it feels like nobody working on the show has any interest or even a take on the Sarah Jane that we were introduced to. Everybody who has ever seen this serial praises the scene where the Doctor leaves the events of the story for 1980 at Sarah's request and rightly so because it is a phenomenal sequence and possibly the most effective way to demonstrate how awesomely powerful the villain is in the whole show’s history. It's so good, of course, that Russell T. Davies had the good sense to nick it wholesale for The Devil's Chord. Everything aesthetically about Pyramids of Mars works. This is a great story to just watch and let wash over you.

However, I think that this script is deeply flawed and definitely needed another pass before it could attain true GOAT status in my books. Perhaps that will seem unfair to those who will cry out in defence with the reminder that this story was another late rewrite from Robert Holmes when the original scripts, from one time writer Lewis Griefer, were deemed unworkable. It is somewhat miraculous that this story even got made at all. It’s difficult to say now how much of the finished serial can truly be credited to whom. Greifer, was approached by Holmes, a former colleague, while headhunting new talent. Knowing he had a keen interest in Egyptian mythology, Holmes allegedly pitched the combination of science-fiction and a mummy horror film to him. Greifer’s scripts would have been radically different including the proposed final appearance of UNIT and the Brigadier, a scheme to solve world hunger with plantations on the moon year culminated in the Doctor uniting with Horus and Iris to take on the crocodile looking Seth and stop his plan to replace the grain and destroy the moon. It is from here that the development of the serial becomes very collaborative. Holmes met with Greifer and suggested a number of scaled-back alterations that were more in-line with what Doctor Who was suited to in 1976 as well as taking on suggestions from outgoing producer Barry Letts.

Greifer revised his scripts further to what would be the basic plot of the television version, moving the detecting to Earth with an imprisoned Seth and his rocket-based plans, with the added addition of a fortune hunter seeking the world-saving rice in an ancient Egyptian tomb. Holmes remained unhappy with the scripts and, to make matters worse, Greifer fell ill after delivering a full script for the first episode only. Following his recovery, Greifer then promptly left the UK to take on a job her previously committed to leaving Holmes to do a page one rewrite with the consultation of director Paddy Russell based on what had already been put in motion. With all of this fraught pre-production in mind, I still think this story is an undercooked mess. The first episode is fantastic and I really love the third but there is so much padding in episodes two and four that really drag the whole thing down for me. The entire second episode is just spent cutting between Sutekh killing people and the Doctor setting up a plan to stop him that fails immediately: The foundations of this serial are really strong and it has some great dialogue, characters and moments but the whole thing fails to hold together for me especially in regards to pacing and the real lack of any interesting subtext to sink your teeth into. There is not much to love here that is not aesthetic.

But let's try and dig a little deeper anyway. Broadly speaking, mortality seems to be the theme that connects the various elements of the story. We are first introduced to the Doctor in what is probably my single favourite shot of him in the whole seven years he was in the show. We meet him alone, in silence and brooding in the TARDIS control room. Sarah enters in what will be a coincidentally appropriate Edwardian dress, our first indicator that this story is really all about aesthetics and flavour more than anything else, and we discover that the Doctor is in somewhat of a mid-life crisis, grappling with the uncomfortable realisation that his life is marching on and that he has no real purpose. This is a really well written and performed scene, one of the best the Doctor and Sarah ever had, and probably my favourite of the serial. While the original show on the whole is not know for deftness of characterisation and development, Pyramids of Mars proposes a potentially interesting starting place for the Doctor’s character which is simply to put him in a somewhat depressed mood and unhappy with the prospect of spending his remaining days at U.N.I.T.‘s beck and call. This a Doctor who has lost his sense of purpose and ambition. It is a great idea that could reveal a lot about the Doctor and challenge his character, as we later saw under Moffat's creative direction, but it never goes anywhere here. Pyramids of Mars is a serial about a villain who does have a defined purpose and ambition – to bring death to all of reality. Yet the person best poised to stop him is in a crisis himself about the prospect of that very thing arriving for him. The character-driven story of a wandering hero in a mid-life crisis versus the Lord of Death should simply write itself.

But it doesn't. The Doctor does not walk away from the end of this adventure with a renewed sense of self or really any semblance of change in the morose feelings he expresses in episode one. It would have been perfectly forgivable if his mid-life crisis was something that the production team set-up here and went on to develop over the season but that never happens either. The Doctor is more than happy to assist U.N.I.T. in the very next serial and yet once more before the season wraps up. The elements are all here to ie the themes and character beats together but it never really happens. For example, I would love to confidently read something deeper into the final visual of the house burning down. It is, after all, the Doctor’s defeat of Sutekh that starts the fire and we know from episode one that, later down the track, the manor is going to be rebuilt and repurposed as the U.N.I.T. headquarters.

The thematic implications of this are really nice. Sutekh wants to end everything, leaving "nothing but dust and darkness", but we all know that the manor's destruction is an ultimately necessary consequence to allow for something good to rise up from its ashes. Life always prevails and begins anew. This is a simple enough thematic beat that could have been teased out and made a lot stronger and it could even have been a clear indicator of some character resolution. With the Doctor inadvertently facilitating the conception of U.N.I.T., this whole image could represent his coming to terms with his place in the universe after combatting Sutekh and passionately redefining himself and coming to terms with a now mythic role as a defender of all life in the universe, a champion of change and renewal. It is something almost there in the script but not quite.

The use of Egyptian iconography in this story is very clever. We know that death was an incredibly important aspect of their culture. People's corpses were mummified to preserve them for the afterlife since death was very much believed not to be the end. There is some cool world-building in this story and I really like the idea that Egyptian culture is all founded upon the wars of the Osirans (Osiris being the Egyptian god of the dead and of fertility). Sutekh is directly mentioned as being the inspiration for Set, realised as well as one could expect in his final beastly form, and the whole premise of the story is hinging upon his previous eternal imprisonment at the hands of brother Horus. I love that the bringer of death is punished by having an eternally unlived life. I think that this context is intended to be paralleled with Marcus and Lawrence. The pair are brothers and, for most of the story, the former literally is Sutekh.

Or, in another sense, it might be helpful to take the Doctor’s advice and consider Marcus as already dead. That plays nicely into the broader subtext we are reaching for here of exploring different relationships with death. Lawrence is in denial of his brother’s death since he sees him walking, talking and breathing. The Doctor thinks otherwise, confidently claiming Marcus to be dead already and no longer Lawrence’s brother now that his mind has been overtaken. We should note the Doctor and Sarah’s later scene too where she expresses a lot of sorrow over Lawrence’s death while the Doctor more or less just shrugs, if anything he comes off mildly annoyed, and refuses to deviate from the bigger priority of stopping Sutekh. It is a very memorable and somewhat disturbing scene, the likes of which the modern characterisation of the character never lends itself to. Even the Twelfth Doctor at his most callous was condemned by everybody around him and served his greater character growth. In the case of this moment, it is Sarah who is framed to be in the wrong for imparting human values upon the Doctor which is a potentially interesting notion but not a thread Holmes ever seems interested on pulling on again.

But I’ve digressed. There is potentially something very cool in the parallel between the four brothers but, again, the story is in dire need of another draft to really pull it to the fore. Lawrence is ultimately killed by his brother in quite a genuinely tragic moment since he is such a well performed and written character but the actual implications and significance of the scene beyond just the sheer shock value are ultimately lost on me. Marcus ends up never even knowing he did this, presumably, since he is killed the second he is freed from Sutekh. If Lawrence could be read as a parallel with Horus, or perhaps more closely of Osiris if we are considered the actual Osiris myth, what is this actually supposed to communicate? To depict for us that Sutekh would kill his own brother given the chance, as we know he did? That there is no humanity to appeal to with this villain? I am not sure of the intention but the scene, like this whole story, is almost fantastic.

And then there is the final episode. Every critic of this story before me has already torn this episode to pieces but I will just take it on briefly and note that the whole story just kind of falls apart at this point. The opening scenes with the Doctor and Sutekh are awesome but as soon as we actually get to the titular location, Holmes starts playing for time really hard. The first three episodes are already padded out to the max with extended woodland chases, an awkwardly large number of scenes where the Doctor and Sarah are simply walking to the poacher's shed and the entire character of the poacher himself in episode two who interacts with none of the main cast (save Marcus) and is just killed anyway. None of this blatant stretching of the script bends to breaking point thanks to how strong the production is at capturing the horror tone and aesthetic but the fourth episode is not so lucky. What we have here, for most of the episode, is an extended sequence of the Doctor and Sarah attempting an Egyptian themed escape room. This could have been compelling and some of the puzzles are kind of cool but the presentation is actually quite awful and the whole logic of this situation kind of escapes me. I suppose that Horus set these up to stop Sutekh’s followers from getting into the pyramid but does he just have the same voice as Sutekh? Is that what is going on?

It also does not help the story that this section is all shot on CSO and, aside from some great model work, looks incredibly cheap and bad. The serial takes a really shoddy nosedive but the biggest insult of this whole affair is simply that the whole episode is a colossal waste of time. The Doctor and Sarah accomplish nothing in going to the pyramid and just turn around to go back to the house to save the day with a totally different plan by the end anyway. Neither the characters nor the audience gain anything at all from the whole sequence.

Thus, this is the great conflict I have with Pyramids of Mars because I love watching it. I love the flavour of the story and the clear effort that everybody put in to make it the memorable, entertaining experience. For the most part, I am really sucked in by it. But it is not a masterpiece. In the end, there really isn't very much to say about it at all. This is a serial that feels like watching the tracks being laid when the train's already moving. It makes for a fun journey but the final destination is really shaky. Pyramids of Mars is exceptional in theory just leaves that little bit to be desired.

It is still a cracking story though. After all, this is mid-70s Who we’re talking about.

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