Doctor Who:
The Monster of Peladon
By Brian Hayles
“Haroon, haroon, haroon.
Haroon, haroon, haroon. Haroon, haroon, haroon. Haroon, haroon, haroon. Haroon.
That's better. You remember me now, don't you, old chap.”
The Doctor brings Sara
Jane to Peladon but he gets the time wrong.
He has arrived 50 years later than when he was last there and King Peladon
is dead and now his daughter Queen Thalira is sitting on the throne and she
seems to have problems of her own. The
miners are feeling exploited by the Government of Peladon since the Federation
is at war with Galaxy 5 and the demand for trisilicate is in high demand the miners feel
they have not been getting any improvements in their way of life.
Ettis gets the miners to
rise up and strike against the Federation and they successfully seize the
armory. Things are getting really out
of hand and Eckersley calls in Federation security force to help quell the
strike and get mining of trisilicate back on track. The Doctor is pretty suspicious of all the
situations going around especially the statue of Aggedor appearing out of thin air.
Plus what has him worried the most is
that the security force showed up awfully fast and now it appears The Ice
Warriors and Eckersley may in fact be working for Galaxy 5.
Until this year The Monster of Peladon was the last time the Ice Warriors were in Doctor Who and in this appearance they were their true villainous selves. Unlike in The Curse of Peladon where the story tricked you and they were actually the good guys in Monster they were part of the plot to get the trisilicate for Galaxy 5 along with the Earth traitor Eckersley. That part of the story was pretty good and was actually the only redeeming part of the story.
Unfortunately The Monster
of Peladon is one of the stories that you can point at as an argument against
six part stories. It is dull, very
boring and to long and filled with lots of capture escape stuff that being
shorter it would have benefitted the story and probably been pretty
decent. If it was a four part story it
would have been a lot better and probably not so dull.
The Monster of Peladon
does have a message that does cause it some redemption as it has a strong woman
rights message to it. It’s pretty
obvious as Sarah tries and gets Queen Thalira to stand up for herself and think
for herself and not let her male councilors make the decisions for her. It was a very good change for the show and
one that was long time coming.
The Monster of Peladon was
the penultimate story for the Third Doctor and unfortunately it wasn’t a very
good one even though it had some good moments in it like The Doctor using the
statue of Aggedor against the Ice Warriors.
But unfortunately that is about it as this story just wasn’t up to
snuff.
Grade C
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