Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Doctor Who 50th Anniversary: The Mutants





Doctor Who:
The Mutants
By Bob Baker and Dave Martin

“Oh, don't be a fool. If we were saboteurs, that'd be a bomb, and thanks to you we'd all be blown to smithereens by now.”

The Time Lords have sent The Doctor a special package.  They want The Doctor to deliver this package to the person it is intended for.  The problem is the package will only open up for the person it is intended for and The Doctor has no idea who it is.  So The Doctor and Jo have been sent to a skybase orbiting the planet Solos. Solos is a planet where the air is poisonous to humans but not to the inhabitants of the planet.   

On the skybase is the crazy Marshal who wants to kill all the mutants and not let the people of Solos to have their freedom.  The Doctor finds out the package is for Ky who is a rebel and wants freedom for Solos.  He also is friendly with the Mutants and wants to help all his people.  The Doctor and Jo soon get involved with this squabble and are caught in a pickle as the try and escape the poisonous air on Solos and the madman Marshall.


The Mutants is a really terrible story.  It is 6 episodes of total rubbish.  The story is just so long and so boring it feels like it’s taking forever to get through watching it.  The story is just not interesting and it’s just a big jumble mess of getting caught and bad characters walking around attacking things.  Plus there was also the Mutants themselves that look pretty comical itself and don't get me started on the ending when Ky transforms into a higher being and just zaps everything as he looks like Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. It was pretty ridiculous. 


The Marshal is one of the worst characters in Doctor Who.  Loud mouth and shooting his gun all over the place he is just an annoying hateful person who is hardly interesting at all.  In fact you can say that about most of the characters in this story as they all lacked in the interest department and you just didn’t have a connection with them or even cared if they lived or died. 


The only saving grace is that Katy Manning and Jon Pertwee were both pretty good as Jo Grant and The Doctor.  While watching The Mutants I was feeling sorry for these two actors as they had to suffer through this horrible script and try to give some credibility to The Mutants.  On a positive note they both got paid for it so maybe I shouldn’t feel sorry for them that much.


I can go on and on ripping into this story but why bother as this story doesn’t need any more attention than it really needs.  It is a horrible story with bad characters and is quite positively the worst story of the Jon Pertwee era if not all time.
Grade F

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