PS Creativity > Reviews > The Classic Series > Terror of the Zygons

This is one of my Doctor Who reviews, written to mark the end of Season 2 of the New Series. In the recent episode School Reunion, the Doctor was reunited with his old companion, Sarah Jane Smith (Elizabeth Sladen). Fandom would be divided by that episode between those who found it a wonderful homage of old Sarah, and those who thought it was a slap in the face to the character and an example of the New Series rubbishing the old. Fortunately many fans were in the former camp, and I very much loved it- the charm of Sarah was overpowering, hopefully winning over a new generation of fans and getting me very emotionally worked up, and it was nice to hear her reminisce on adventures past, like the Mummies, the anti matter monsters, the Daleks and of course that time she saw the Loch Ness Monster……which brings me nicely to this old story.

The Doctor and his companions Sarah Jane Smith and Harry Sullivan arrive in Scotland, summoned by Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart to help UNIT deal with the latest alien threat to planet Earth. Along the coast of Scotland, several oil rigs have been inexplicably destroyed and many lives have been lost and the Doctor suspects that the oil rigs are being attacked by the Loch Ness Monster. As he investigates further, the Doctor comes across the Zygons, an army of chameleonic aliens who have full manipulation of the underwater beast and who are planning to conquer the Earth by using the indestructible monster to wreak havoc and destruction.

Terror of the Zygons, from 1975 is regarded as a classic story- perhaps not a top ten story, but certainly within the top thirty of most Doctor Who fan polls. It’s highly regarded enough to earn major and virtually unanimous respect, and it’s not hard to see why. I have owned Terror of the Zygons on video for seven years now and its appeal has not worn off with me.

Terror of the Zygons was the season opener of Season 13, which currently stands as my favourite season of Doctor Who. As a season it shows Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor on high form, and the infectious chemistry between the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith is at its best. It takes us through six fine stories with a distinctive gothic horror style and competent production with some superb and unconventional directing that emphasises just how unpredictable the stories could be, and the season climaxes with two of my favourite stories- The Brain of Morbius and The Seeds of Doom. To my mind Season 13 could stand alone well and I would love it to be given a repeat run in its entirety today. Well Terror of the Zygons sets the ball rolling very well- written by Robert Banks Stewart, who also wrote the excellent Seeds of Doom; and directed by Douglas Campfield, who given his track record for classics like The Daleks’ Masterplan and Inferno, I personally believe was Doctor Who’s best director, and the combined results are very impressive for what is a basic UNIT thwarts alien threat in four episodes type of plot.

It’s all about setting and atmosphere and through a blend of breathless editing, strong characterisation and brilliant set designs and monster make up, the episode is a success. I’ve said that this episode feels like an episode of Twin Peaks 15 years ahead of its time in its presentation of simple rural life with an undercurrent of horror and superstition that’s truly subversive. The pen of Robert Banks Stewart gives us a very captivating collection of characters that speak for the culture and traditions of this Scottish rural community. I remember as an 11 year old child reading the novelisation of the story and how certain aspects of the community really stayed with me. When the uptight Duke of Forgill warns Mr. Huckle, the head of the oil company that if his workers are caught poaching on his land again, they’ll be shot, it really did convey a gritty realism about the laws of the land and how cavalier the rich land-keepers can be. When the landlord of the local inn, Angus is interviewed by Sarah Jane Smith about the strange goings on, he tells her a long history of local ghost stories and unexplained phenomenon. It was a moment much like the Doctor’s discussion with the Sisterhood of Karn in The Brain of Morbius that at a young age really attracted me towards Doctor Who’s capacity for presenting alluring mythology amidst the sci-fi pulp, and it really conveys how rural small town life has secret wonders and surprises of its own.

Of course it is watching this story on screen that conveys the full splendour of this. The performances really do make the characters feel as though their warmth or alternatively their frostiness has come into the comfort of the living room. What we see on screen really does evoke the simple sense of rural life, and it actually makes me nostalgic for school Geography field trips to Colomendy, where we’d spend a week living in dorms (during which I was actually reading the novelisation of Doctor Who and the Abominable Snowmen), that sense of leaving behind the TV phoneline life for a more quaint one, but with a bit of fog in the air to add to the atmosphere. The incidental music is one of the finest scores the series has ever been blessed with, beautiful and unpredictable flute melodies and various other musical moments that linger long after viewing. As the Doctor and his companions arrive on the green windy hills of Scotland, the music really has that sense of the happiness of travelling with the Doctor and the comfort of homecoming. When we witness the shoreline being washed up with oil rig wreckage and the occasional corpse, the music is appropriately bleak. When Sarah is being told the ghost story by Angus, the music compliments the mystique. There is a sequence where the Doctor and Sarah are trapped in an airtight room by a Zygon and the oxygen is being pumped out, and the Doctor has to hypnotise Sarah into not breathing (a moment that always makes me take an intake of breath myself) and the music gives the hypnosis sequence an otherworldly-ness like a brief but overpowering subversion of reality. The scenes in Forgill castle are complimented well by the echoing music of centuries of age in a quite poignant way- I must say that had Ultravox been around at the time and had they been in the habit of doing music scores for Doctor Who, with their fine ear for compositions like architecture and the ghostly and neo-classical, I doubt even they could have bettered the score here.

But of course the economy of the musical score must be complimented too in the scenes where silence is truly golden. In the moment where Sarah finds her way through a secret entrance onto the Zygon ship and wanders cautiously along the narrow corridors, the hum of the Zygon machinery and the anticipation from automatic doors opening suddenly, awaiting us for an encounter with a Zygon is disquieting enough by itself. In much of the episode, an absence of music works well alongside some very snappy editing, cutting us quickly without a dramatic pause from one scene to the next. At the end of an intriguing scene, the Doctor may make a striking remark on the mystery but the action cuts away to the next scene without letting the Doctor’s words hang in the air, and with no music to emphasise the line. It basically resists the temptation to sensationalise the Doctor’s words, making the dialogue somehow more real and the momentum more fluid, drawing you further into the earthy and unplugged simplicity of the rural setting. It is appropriate really in cutting back on the spectacle and emphasising the more intelligent aspects of the heroes and villains as they work to second guess one another. The Doctor has to go on clues for a longer period than usual as the Zygons work under stealth and the Doctor has to piece together a profile of what he is dealing with. Meanwhile the Zygons are more strictly methodical in their actions than most other alien monsters. Their plan of conquest is in its early stages as yet and so they only do what is necessary, and nothing more for fear of giving themselves away.

The story works in many ways as a homage to some of the earlier monster serials of Doctor Who. It has been common in the series to use aliens and time travel to explain well known myths and legends and phenomenon in a child friendly way (the New Series has done so again in Tooth and Claw and The Satan Pit- two of the finest new episodes, facing the Doctor against both a werewolf and the devil himself). This particular use of Zygons to explain the Loch Ness Monster feels like a nice retread of the Troughton stories The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear which saw the Second Doctor battling against savage robot Yeti that were being controlled by an alien intelligence. This story relies again on the use of devices to control the mythical beast, and making the point that historically the mythical beasts have always been timid and gentile until recently turning violent under the alien influence. It also borrows from those Yeti stories an outback setting in the highlands with a tightly knit community (in the Doctor’s hypnotism scene he actually references his friendship with a Tibetan monk from the Yeti episodes) and even reuses the scenario whereby the Doctor suspects that the UNIT soldiers might have a traitor informer in their midst, given the Zygon’s talent for replicating humans (a shame that more wasn’t done with this paranoia angle). It is nice to have this story as a homage to those old Yeti episodes since both the Yeti adventures were destroyed, sadly. The episode also has something of a wink to the The Sea Devils in its use of an underwater threat attacking oil rigs unprovoked.

The regulars are on top form. Tom Baker gives the usual fine performance as the Doctor in what is only his sixth story in the role. He brings the usual humour here as the conflicting relationship between him and the Brigadier has become a more humoured mocking of the military man. When the soldiers of UNIT are ordered to begin pre-emptively raining bombs at the enemy, the Doctor is no longer preparing a moral lecture to spout from his soap-box, but merely quips sardonically about the explosions of shells- “Sounds like the Brigadier” and then comes the kind of explosive spectacle that is complimented well well by a James Bond-style, smile-raising double entendre line from the Doctor. The scene where the Doctor enters the Duke of Forgill’s empty castle and helps himself to the Duke’s seat and entertains his companions with a mocking imitation of the Duke is one of my favourite moments of the Fourth Doctor’s child-like flippancy. It’s a choice between that as a favourite comedy moment and the “Chop Suey, the galactic emperor” line to the eponymous Time Lord war criminal in The Brain of Morbius. But of course Tom Baker’s performance has always had a wonderful sense of contrast between the funny and the serious, and his ability to really quickly establish the gravitas of the situation. There’s the loudest moment of the Doctor enduring the agony of a long and powerful electric shock as he sabotages the Zygon ship- with his arms outstretched in a crucifix fashion to hint at how he endures the agony to save us all, and his performance makes the agony feel so real. Another scene where the Doctor is being chased over the Scottish moors by the Loch Ness Monster really shows the Doctor's sheer energy and determined survival instinct. But elsewhere the Doctor's performance is wholly sombre- there's a great low key outdoor scene where the Doctor has some of the oil rig wreckage brought to him to look at. He recognises what appear to be bite marks and there's a closeup of his face which shows him clearly deep in thought and mulling the mystery over, and strangely enough it's become for me one of the most memorable visual moments of the story.

Of course the Doctor is nothing without his trusty sidekicks- Sarah, Harry and the Brigadier, and even Sergeant Benton makes his good nature felt. Sarah Jane Smith shows her usual wondrous ability to jump immediately into the spirit of the role and setting with bubbly but mature personality, and various moments show off her brave intrepidness and curiosity as well as her personable journalism savvy. Harry Sullivan had always felt like something of a third wheel between the Doctor and Sarah, and was a rather bumbling and easy to mock character- infact he was very much a caricature, but here in his last outing as a short-lived companion he is rather better scripted and he gets to be more heroic than usual. Harry saves the Doctor's life at one point, and elsewhere he is put to the best use of his talents as a medical doctor as he overlooks autopsy reports on crash victims and shows strong compassion and empathy when he comes across a shivering washed up survivor of the Loch Ness Monster's attack, which really makes him endearing. As ever, the late Ian Marter's performance is faultless as Harry. Then there's the Brigadier in what was his last appearance in the show for a period of eight years as the series moved away from the UNIT setup, only to revisit the Brigadier now and again in the 1980's for nostalgic reasons. It is therefore appropriate that a bit of family ancestral history of the Brigadier is revealed here, as well as how he has the Highlander spirit in his blood- he wears a kilt for the first time in the series and he wears it with pride, and the Brigadier in coming to Scotland really gives the character that sense of returning to his family roots. The Brigadier functions as a figure for the Doctor to mock in good humour, but who is straight laced enough to maintain a sense of authority and respectability that is not demeaned by the mockery.

The Zygons make quite a worthy opponent for the Doctor and UNIT. They are a particularly well designed breed of alien monsters for the show back in 1975, very crustateious with barnacled skin. The Zygon ship itself, apart from being treated to some excellent model footage, has a wonderful and solid interior design shown in fluorescent lighting with lovely dissolves from one ship operation to the next. The walls, levers and consoles having a very fleshy appearance with skin, veins, strings of cartillage and bony structures on the levers, making the ship feel like a cyborg form of life. It is so convincingly done that in a scene where the Doctor commits ship sabotage and actually snaps one of the levers off, I winced as though I was watching someone's arm being broken.

The Zygons themselves are characterised well as being arrogant and boastful and eager to impress, despite the cold speech of their raspy voices. Their history is given as being a refugee race from a planet destroyed in supernova, with their particular ship damaged and stranded on earth for several centuries, during which time the seven of them have survived by impersonating humans with their body-print technology whilst planning to conquer the Earth with their giant pet cyborg- the Loch Ness Monster, otherwise known as the Skarasen, which they have completely at their control- the cyborg itself completely invulnerable even to atomic weapons. This gives them a very strong methodical motivation behind their acts.

There is one particular scene where Sarah unknowingly comes across a Zygon who has managed to impersonate Harry. When she senses that Harry is acting strangely she goes after him and he seeks refuge in a barn. She goes into the barn where he is hiding and he picks up a pitchfork and prepares to kill. To me that scene always has me on the edge of my seat, and it is so delicately directed that it always captures me in a sense of vertigo and remains for me the scariest moment in Doctor Who, even though this isn't quite a full-on horror episode in the way that Inferno, Terror of the Autons, Genesis of the Daleks, Horror of Fang Rock, The Empty Child or The Impossible Planet are. It's a bit like an earlier scene where a Zygon in the form of an armed gatekeeper is on the hills and spots Harry in the distance and trains his scoped gun on him and you know he's going to shoot, but you're not entirely sure when to expect it.

Unfortunately the Zygon plot does have limitations due to the time constraints of only being four episodes long. The above mentioned history of the Zygons is unfortunately forced to take the form of sledge hammered exposition that is spurted out unprompted by the Zygon warlord to his human prisoner barely seconds after they start first talking- still it works somehow. But another problem of the short length of the episode is that it unfortunately means the Doctor's final solution to the Zygons is to arbitrarily eliminate them in a rather cavalier way which doesn't quite sit easy with me.

I think writer Robert Banks Stewart had some funny and unconventional ideas about what kind of hero the Doctor was. In The Seeds of Doom he was an action hero who beat up bad guys left, right and centre. You could call it unDoctorly behaviour perhaps, but I loved it- so desperate, satisfying and exhilarating all the same. Unfortunately I've never felt quite that way about the Doctor's violence towards the Zygons here.

I am not a hardline reactionary fan who objects to the character of the Doctor occasionally resorting to untypical violent methods to save the day- in-fact I'd have a hard time believing he could have survived so long in a savage universe if he didn't shoot first now and again. I can accept the Doctor resorting to violence but under particular conditions that make sure his actions are mitigated. This is all tied in with how strong the plotting is. In stories like Power of the Daleks, Evil of the Daleks and The Brain of Morbius, the plotting is strong enough to create the sense of jeopardy and immediacy to justify the Doctor's violence. In stories like The Invasion of Time, Attack of the Cybermen and Vengeance on Varos, the plotting is weak or non existent, and therefore to see the Doctor behaving in a trigger happy way seems unmitigated and gratuitous as a result because of the lack of plot momentum, and the effect leaves a bad aftertaste.

With Terror of the Zygons, the villains are to my mind established as a smal group of seven aliens who wield power through their control of their pet cyborg, and that they could have easily been imprisoned to neutralise their threat, rather than to have them killed pre-emptively. I suppose because as mentioned above, the story shares plot details with "The Sea Devils". In "The Sea Devils", the monsters used similar methods of marine destruction but the Doctor's response then was to try and negotiate a peaceful resolve to the violence between the Sea Devils and UNIT. Here he is more cavalier towards the threat.

However I reason it out this way. "The Sea Devils", like most of the Jon Pertwee era of the show was more cozy entertainment where deaths were to be treated lightly- UNIT soldiers were voiceless cannon fodder and killed in fantastical ways, and the Doctor's message to the alien threat was often therefore one of peace and forgiveness. He could overlook the deaths so far and still try to negotiate for peace with the enemy, or maintain a chummy repartee with his enemy, the Master, despite him being a mass murderer.

Of course a four part episode of Doctor Who is probably not the best kind of story to have an ongoing moral debate, particularly if it completely works against the action and jeopardy of the story. 1980's Doctor Who stories that preach innapropriately like "Warriors of the Deep" and the individual segments of "Trial of a Timelord" are spirit crushing examples of why such moral stories don't work in a four-parter.

"Terror of the Zygons", despite being a UNIT story and therefore a throwback to the Pertwee era, is far less cozy and the characters we encounter are well drawn and sympathetic characters, and their deaths are therefore emotive and hard-hitting. In this story Zygons actually strangle, shoot and even bring down heavy rocks on their victims, which again makes it hard-hitting and less divorced from realism, even though the camera cuts away.

Season 13 had inherited the more morbid direction of the previous season's The Sontaran Experiment and Genesis of the Daleks, and strangulation was a common form of death in many of the stories of Season 13, used to hard-hitting effect even when the actual bodycount was low, particularly in Pyramids of Mars, The Brain of Morbius and The Seeds of Doom (to me the Season 13 story Planet of Evil stands apart as being a bit too morbid and nasty for my liking). In this regard the story sets up the Zygons who killed such innoffensive people for a vengeful rather than forgiving comeuppance from the Doctor. Added to this is one of the rare occasions in the story where the Doctor engages in physical combat with a Zygon, and where the Zygons shows ferocious brute violence towards the Doctor, showing deadly superior physical strength to humans, which in a way hints that perhaps the Zygons were too physically powerful to be safely incarcerated and that in a way justifies how the Doctor might have made the right choice in destroying them.

If the episode has a weak spot, it is unfortunately the Loch Ness Monster itself, which unfortunately fails to convince through shoddy modelwork and badly matched up blue screen effects. Initially the shots of the Loch Ness Monster are very brief. In the first scene of the monster attacking an oil rig, the beast is unseen, obscured by the waters at night fall and the model shots of the collapsing Oil Rig are explosive enough to convey the human cost. The beast gets gradually more coverage as the episode goes on but manages in its brief appearances to be somewhat terrifying due to choice frameings and strong acting and directing. The final appearance of the Loch Ness Monster however is a dud blue screen effect and completely fails to match up to the studio action. It also seems to sum up how the last episode of the story does loose a certain something of its immediacy and atmosphere when it moves the action out of familiar rural Scotland and into concrete London. The Loch Ness Monster however remains something of a blight on the story, not much worse than a lot of other Doctor Who monsters, but still steals the story's credibility elsewhere as being able to convert non-fans with otherwise decent monsters and sets.

Overall, the story is a most refreshing and enjoyable one which really captures the spirit of rural village life, and carries an atmosphere that really seeps in infectiously. It is not surprising actually that fans have often asked for the New Series to revisit the Zygons for a new story, given that they had character and a design that is scarcely dated. Personally, having seen this and Robert Banks Stewart's excellent "The Seeds of Doom", I would go one further and would ask for Robert Banks Stewart to be called back onto the new series to write one more story, given how well crafted his characters and incidentals were for this story and "The Seeds of Doom".

Ah well, I can dream...

Originally posted by transvamp on July 12th 2006 at 6:10 pm.

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