Doctor Who: Terror of the Zygons (1975)

The first story of Tom Baker's second season as the Doctor, this has the feel of something left over from the Jon Pertwee era - it's actually a mildly seminal piece since it leads to the departure of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney), who'd been at least a semi-regular since Patrick Troughton's day. UNIT would pop up in a few more Baker stories and Courtney had a few reprises in later years, but there's no big break-up scene.

It's a Pertwee-style UNIT/earthbound/ancient alien race tale, with the mild gimmick of rationalising the Loch Ness Monster as a cyborg ('the skarasan') under the control of the eponymous Zygons. It opens with the wrecking of an oil-rig off the coast of Scotland and the Doctor sneering at Earth's dependence on 'mineral slime' (though he seems to be suggesting nuclear energy as an alternative) and vaguely ties up by ending with an imperilled energy conference - though this is a yarn rather than a themed story.

As rubber suit monsters go, the Zygons look good, with their suckers, odd posture, salmon-red skins, bulbous fishheads and individual facial features (they can impersonate human beings via clever use of a chromakey effect), not to mention a creepily organic and vaguely obscene technology involving fungoid veined controls and shaggy walls. However, they turn out to be a disappointingly ordinary race of evil alien conqueror bastards - we get the usual arrogant spokesperson (John Woodnutt's Broton) surrounded by a few minions. The Doctor even sneers at the Zygon presumption in conquering Earth with an army of about six - the refugee colonisation fleet due in a couple of centuries isn't actually averted, so the problem might just be stored for future generations.

Baker is settled in (and soon ditches the silly Scots outfit of the first episode) but seems impatient, as if waiting for more fun to come along while going through bits of business from numberless earlier serials. Elisabeth Sladen does well as a slightly more puckish Sarah Jane, teasing the Brigadier about his kilt and poking her tongue out at a solemn alien zombie. Robert Banks Stewart contributes an array of tartan stereotypes (pipe-playing landlord, haggis, heather, etc) and it ends on a joke about meanness as the Doctor and Sarah Jane take the TARDIS ostensibly to London (not where they are in the next story) and the Laird (Woodnutt again) upbraids fellow Scot Lethbridge-Stewart for not cashing in the return halves of their rail tickets.

The skarasen isn't one of the better effects and the last episode terrorising of London is achieved by having Baker and Sladen look amazed from a balcony and laying screaming and monster noises on the soundtrack. At one point, the Brigadier receives a phone call from the Prime Minister and addresses her as 'madam'. Broton, incidentally, is a rare alien overlord who can be defeated by shooting bullets into him.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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