












We return to the Third Doctor to finish his first season with a bang! The Doctor battles nuclear werewolves, evil counterparts, and evil scientists in this classic serial.
Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though. – Kari
The Doctor goes to ANOTHER nuclear facility, this one powering a drill attempting to pierce the earth’s crust so that they can access a mythical magic gas that would provide essentially free energy for the world. (Bull butter.)
Stahlman, the scientist in charge of the project, is the obvious bad guy and is maniacal about getting through the crust ASAP regardless of safety. Hot green goo starts coming up during the drilling; a guy touches it and starts turning greenish-blue and growing hair, like some kind of Dracula in a low-budget foreign film. He kills someone and acts like an animal.
The Doctor tries to get the Tardis console to work with the power from the reactor, and argues with Stahlman when the power is taken away from him, then fixes it on the sly. During his second attempt to use the console it takes him to an alternate universe where the Brigadier DOESN’T have facial hair but an eyepatch and a scar, and where Liz has a dark bob and isn’t a scientist. Also fascists, they are all fascists.
In the evil mirror universe the drilling is further along and they pierce the earth’s core despite the Doctor’s attempts to stop them. This begins a chain reaction of lava or something that will inevitably destroy the world. The Doctor can’t save it but persuades some of the survivors of the Turkish Dracula Disease (which has become the Turkish Werewolf Disease) to help him get back to the other world to save THEM.
He gets back and averts the disaster (barely). Then he tries to use the Tardis console again to escape, but ends up in the garbage dump. WHAT IS DIGNITY
General
Other stories considered as season finale
Project Mohole
Cast and crew interviews
Caroline John/Liz Shaw retrospectives
Jon Pertwee as radio announcer cut scene from British broadcast
Pertwee Intelligence agent meeting Churchill and Ian Fleming
Reviews
When the World Screamed by Arthur Conan Doyle
A look at the Third Doctor’s third episode. An investigation into a failed space rescue takes a turn when the returned astronauts seem to be something quite different than they were before.
How does the Daleks Aren’t Robots team react to it? Find out!
Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though. – Kari
An astronaut is being sent up to retrieve the astronauts of Mars Probe 7, which has been silent for more than 7 months, but the rescuer hears a nasty noise up there and then goes silent himself. Because we are not on our earth, this is an AU.
The Doctor sees it on the TV and goes to help. It turns out it’s a message and a group of people on Earth is replying to the messages; when Briggy sends guys there there’s a huge gunfight and half of UNIT dies.
Eventually we retrieve 3 guys from space, but it turns out they’re radioactive aliens that can kill with a touch and NOT the astronauts. The astronauts are being held hostage by aliens who want their ambassadors back–it turns out that a bunch of crappy humans kidnapped their ambassadors and mindcontrolled said ambassadors into committing crimes for them.
The ringleader is Carrington, a military bad guy who is basically a xenophobe and wants to nuke the aliens, and his dragon, metaphorically, Reegan, is a frighteningly competent asshole helping for the paycheck. Carrington wants to fake an alien attack so that earth’s governments all nuke the aliens, but the Doctor and Liz rescue the aliens and then it ends and YES IT IS ACTUALLY THAT ABRUPT.
Loads of one-hit wonder characters in this one, most of whom don’t really have personalities.
Carrington, Evil Military Guy: He’s basically a caricature, and he’s doing this because the aliens accidentally killed his coworker when he went on an earlier Mars mission. He’s explicitly called out as being mad in the show, and claims that it was his moral duty to nuke the aliens. Sure, Jan, nuke the scary brown I mean blue people who literally came here as ambassadors. You bet.
Reegan, Terrifying Competent Dragon of the Big Bad: This guy was actually pretty spooky. He absolutely does not care about alien life but he also doesn’t care about human life or anything, apparently, other than money. He was almost certainly planning to screw Carrington over and use the Ambassadors to commit robberies, and he’s not even ruffled when he gets caught at the end.
Cornish, Competent Bureaucrat: This guy is just like the bureaucrat in the Silurians except he’s not evil, he doesn’t suck at his job and he’s totally cool under pressure. So basically exactly the opposite of that guy. This guy had a lot of charisma for kind of a thankless part, he did a good job.
Taltalian, AKA Evil Beardo: Bad guy scientist, turns out to be a mook and is then blown up by his own boss.
Lennox, AKA Wormy Scientist: Scientist who tries to care for the Ambassadors as much as he can, even though he’s working for the baddies technically. He tries to help Liz escape, escapes himself and is then horribly murdered by radiation.
There are some other guys, like a reporter who’s got 80s style a few years before the 80s, but I don’t really care about them.
The Ambassadors themselves? They’re not characters, and neither is their alien captain. They are just plot devices. Only for a very little portion of the show are they able to act under their own power and they don’t really talk about how traumatic it’s been to be forced to murder people or anything. There is SO LITTLE RESOLUTION after this show. It’s even more abrupt than the Silurians, who at least got blown up. These people are gonna be super traumatized! They were mind controlled and dazed and zombielike for a long time! They were forced to murder people on a weird planet! They’re gonna need SO MUCH THERAPY.
Also they are tinsel mummies.
General
Novelization
Reviews
Locations
Restoration
Doctor Who Kits carcinogenic
How they reconstructed the episodes for what we see today
UNIT
Episode death count
BTS photos
On this episode of Daleks Aren’t Robots!? we meet another of the Doctor’s famous adversaries, the sympathetic Silurians.
This episode opens us up to such topics as genocide, misinformation during an epidemic, the hazards of nuclear power…and an adorable pet dinosaur.
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Theme: Garage – Monplaisir
Look for us where you get your podcasts!
Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though. – Kari
Two guys in spelunking gear are attacked by Godzilla. It turns out an “atomic research center” is experiencing power losses described as “leaks” and UNIT, including LBS, Liz and the Doctor, are brought in to find out why.
They eventually find out that the Silurians are the culprits–they are lizard people that resemble the Gill Man, native to Earth, that put themselves into suspended animation a long time ago because they believed an asteroid was going to hit earth, and now that they know it didn’t they want to wake up their whole population and take over the earth, as they were legitimately here first.
The Doctor spends most of the episode trying to convince the Silurians not to murder all the humans and trying to convince the humans not to murder all the Silurians.
Unfortunately, the Silurians have an internal power struggle a lot like that of the Sensorites, but it ends in a Silurian murdering the peaceful Silurian leader and releasing a plague on the humans that seems to have a 100% kill rate and an incredibly rapid spread. Literally incredible, as we see a TON of people die and the disease spreads to France and likely the whole world.
The Doctor finds a cure to the “bacteria” that cause the disease but it’s not penicillin or some other antibiotic. Nothing about producing enough of it for everyone quickly enough or distributing it, and apparently UNIT managed to cover all this up SOMEHOW even though a massive number of people in London and elsewhere have DIED, which is absurd.
There’s some power jockeying with the Silurians, they take over the atomic research center, the Doctor manages to scare them all back into hibernating by convincing them the whole area will be irradiated and he expects to come back and study their setup.
Then LBS commits genocide by blowing up the Silurian compound and sealing the door shut. And the Doctor and Liz are sad and I’m confused about why a kids’ show just showed the good guys genociding some lizard people, and sad and angry that we just watched The Sensorites but with a really depressing ending that again, is the GOOD GUYS GENOCIDING SOME PEOPLE with no consequences shown and barely any discussion of the fact that the GOOD GUYS GENOCIDED SOME PEOPLE.
So many characters.
Lots of others we don’t really care about.
General Sources
Contemporary reviews
Fan discussions and analysis
Bessie
BTS pictures and articles on production
Nicolas Courtney Acting
Carey Blyton Composer
Moon Origin theories
Silurian Hypothesis
Silurian Book adaptation Written by Malcolm Hulke
The DAR team travels to the 1970s to see the first serial of the Third Doctor era. With the Doctor now stuck on Earth, do we feel as trapped as the Doctor or as happy as non-body slammed Nixon? Find out.
Daleks Aren’t Robots!? is a podcast in which two Whovian friends take two non-Whovians on a deep dive through the show from the very beginning.
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Theme: Garage – Monplaisir
Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though. – Kari
OUR TEAM
The Doctor:
Liz Shaw:
Lethbridge-Stewart, AKA LBS:
The Tardis:
THE OTHERS
There are a lot of guests in this one.
THE SETTING
THE PRODUCTION