Great creature design can't rescue a poor script and story for this Who adventure...

After the strong moral messages of the past two and a half seasons, Doctor Who really steps up a gear with The Mutants. To the average eye, The Mutants may just be about a gaggle of boggle-eyed overgrown insects and a mad fat controller, but scratch the surface and there’s a lot more to it than this.

In fact, The Mutants is a stark warning about the dangers of both colonialism and apartheid. The Earth government has seen fit to colonise the planet of Solos. However, the Marshal of Skybase, after years of pompous rule, could soon be out of a job, as the Earth Administrator announces that Solos is being given back its independence. Naturally, the Marshal’s none too happy with this, and so goes to ludicrous extremes not only to maintain the status quo, but to make sure that Solos is only habitable for Earthlings. We even see the segregation taking place - the Overlords (Earthlings) and Solonians have separate transmat capsules.

The Marshal - on paper, at least - is a thoroughly nasty piece of work: A racist, dictatorial bully who has no qualms about killing off the mutant inhabitants of Solos - or the Mutts, as he less charitably calls them. Right from the opening sequence in which the Mutant version of Monty Python’s It’s Man is tracked and shot like a dog on a hunt, it’s clear that the Marshal is not only driven by his power-mad ambitions, but by his sheer hatred of anything that conforms to his ideal. He says that he plans to “cleanse” the planet with the aid of his lackey Jaeger’s experiments. And by the sixth episode, he has declared that the Mutts are “Diseased! To be wiped off the face of the planet!”

"The Mutants is a case of Great Ideas: Shame About The Execution"

The Marshal is potentially one of the most dangerous beings to come up against the third Doctor. And yet in practice, he’s not really. And that really sums up why The Mutants isn’t quite as successful as it could be - it’s a case of Great Ideas: Shame About The Execution.

The character of the Marshal really turns out to be a bit of an exaggerated caricature. It’s hard to work out which is more at fault - the script or the acting. Certainly, while some of the dialogue is suitably convincing, a lot of it is just clichéd ranting (“I’m surrounded by incompetents!”; “Doctor! Always The Doctor!”). The Marshal is without doubt villainous in the extreme - look at the lengths he goes to in order to preserve Overlord rule on Solos. He resorts to killing the Administrator and blaming it on his nemesis, Ky. He even kills the real murderer, flop-haired son of Varan (who looks a bit like a cross between a public schoolboy and a gibbon in a cape).

And yet it’s all cartoon villainy. It’s difficult to take the Marshal seriously because everything he does is exaggerated beyond the bounds of reality. Paul Whitsun Jones’ performance doesn’t help matters either, with more ham on display than an annual butchers’ convention. The role needed someone with a lot more gravitas and menace to make the ropey dialogue come alive. In the end, Whitsun Jones doesn’t really do much apart from huff and puff around like a man that’s trying to run the London Marathon while carrying a bag full of lead weights.

"The characters are given so much clichéd pap to say, that it’s impossible to give a damn about their predicaments"

In fact, none of the support acting’s that hot. And again, it’s not really entirely the fault of the actors. The characters are given so much clichéd pap to say, that it’s impossible to give a damn about their predicaments. Jaeger is the stereotyped mad scientist, even drowning the place in phlegm at one point with his outraged spluttering at the Marshal’s incompetence. Varan is the archetypal shouty warrior, complete with girl’s haircut. Ky is the Solonian Wolfie Smith five years early. With his floppy hair and constant shouting, I half expect him to don a beret and shout “Power To The People!” at the top of his voice.

That said, the most infamous performance in The Mutants is poor old Rick James as Cotton. It’s a right hoot. In his favour, James doesn’t look as daft as he did in his similarly poor showing in the Blake’s 7 episode called 'Warlord' (think of a futuristic Gok Wan). But his wooden delivery just fails to convince every time. “We’ll all be done for!” he wails at the end of episode five. Supposedly, he’s meant to be horrified at the prospect of being fried to a crisp by incoming radiation, but James’ acting means that Cotton sounds more like a little boy who’s accidentally opened a full-up washing machine onto the kitchen floor. James does try his best, but unfortunately, it’s probably the weakest performance - although he’s up against some pretty stiff competition. Apart from John Hollis as Sondergaard, only Geoffrey Palmer and Peter Howell convince respectively as the Administrator and the Investigator, and even then, they’re only in the story for one episode each.

Bob Baker and Dave Martin’s script also leaves a lot to be desired in places. While the concept of the story is a bold one, unfortunately, it’s lost in a swamp full of bad lines and corny dialogue. The Doctor even gets some terrible lines such as the nonsense about “Un-people un-doing un-things un-together”. It’s the sort of line that a thick child might say to sound big at primary school, not a wise old Time Lord. Elsewhere, much of the dialogue is given to heavy info-dumping, usually in great big bundles of hard-to-digest plot exposition. It’s all a bit tiresome, and the additional problem is that this is a six-parter, when in reality it ought to have been a tighter four-part story instead.

"Despite the ropey script, The Mutants at least has, for the most part, impressive visuals on its side"

It’s not all bad though. Despite the ropey script, The Mutants at least has, for the most part, impressive visuals on its side. The location filming in particular is very good, and you really get the impression that the action’s taking place on some weird alien planet. Not only do we get the bleak, misty exterior shots, we also get moody interior shots on film too. These scenes are a real triumph, and the lighting is especially worthy of note.

Even the studio scenes are generally well shot by Christopher Barry. The scenes in which Jo and The Doctor visit the Solonian cave are particularly trippy, with slowed-down camera work, bizarre video effects and even weirder sound effects and music. The Mutants themselves are a masterpiece of design. It’s a great hook to make them look scary for kids - there’s something unnerving about those bug-eyed faces and the alien way in which they scuttle around like overgrown locusts. When in actual fact, they’re not the baddies at all, they’re the race to sympathise with. A common feature of the Letts-produced stories is that not all aliens are shown to be bad. They’re occasionally sympathetic creatures, and the Mutants are one of the most successful examples of this breed.

There are still one or two ropey production elements. The end of episode four is really bad. Apparently, exposing the Skybase to space is no worse than battling against a strong blizzard in the depth of winter. And not only that, Varan’s body doesn’t explode into little pieces either - although Mary Whitehouse would have presumably blown her top if it had. The CSO’s a bit poor here, and like one or two other Pertwee adventures, there’s a bit too much reliance on this trick.

"Resembling a young Rod Stewart in Britt Ekland’s nightie, Ky floats around in eye-busting psychedelic colours while talking in a silly ethereal voice that sounds more like the world’s campest evangelist"

Ky’s eventual transformation isn’t much cop either. Resembling a young Rod Stewart in Britt Ekland’s nightie, Ky floats around in eye-busting psychedelic colours while talking in a silly ethereal voice that sounds more like the world’s campest evangelist. Still, at least he blasts the annoying Marshal into nothingness after the portly dictator has been ranting about how he can’t lose.

And for the second story on the trot, we have a musical score that takes avant-garde to extremes. Tristram Cary’s back after his early weird Hartnell scores, but this time the result is way too much hit ’n’ miss. Sometimes the music’s quite effective - the piece that crops up whenever the mysterious box appears is creepily odd. But most of the time, it’s just tune-free bleeps and burbles, like a singing fax machine.

The Mutants, on the whole, just about succeeds thanks to both a worthy central concept and some imaginative visuals from director Christopher Barry. It’s a shame that the script from Bob Baker and Dave Martin was so silly though - cut out the iffy dialogue and info-dumping and we could have had another winner. The end result is a brave stab at getting a worthwhile allegory across, but it’s not one that’s as successful as it could have been.

John Bensalhia limbered up for this mammoth task with a full four-series review of Blake's 7, and writes professionally and recreationally all over the web. Check out his portfolio of work at Wordprofectors.

Check out John's previous Doctor Who review, The Curse Of Peladon