50 Years of Doctor Who: 341 Frontier in Space Episode Four

EPISODE: Frontier in Space: Episode Four
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 341
STORY NUMBER: 067
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 17 March 1973
WRITER: Malcolm Hulke
DIRECTOR: Paul Bernard
SCRIPT EDITOR: Terrance Dicks
PRODUCER: Barry Letts
RATINGS: 7.1 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - Dalek War: Frontier in Space & Planet of the Daleks
EPISODE FORMAT: 625 video

"Defrauding the Sirius 4 Dominion Bank, evasion of planetary income tax. Assault and battery committed upon the person of a Sirius 4 police official. Taking a spaceship without authority and piloting the said spaceship without payment of tax and insurance. Landing the said spaceship on an unauthorised area of Sirius 3. Need I go on?"

The Doctor & Dale are rescued by the newly arrived Master. They are placed in confinement but the Master blackmails the Governor into releasing the Doctor who is imprisoned on the Master's ship with Jo. The Master intends to take them to the Ogron planet. The Doctor escapes using a wire saw and then spacewalks along the outside of the ship, being slung off during a course correction before using his air to direct him back to the ship. The Master detects the Doctor's absence and investigates as the Doctor seizes control of the ship. The Master locks Jo in the airlock, but as the Doctor struggles with him they are boarded & captured by the Draconians. The Doctor says he has information for the Emperor so all three are imprisoned together for the journey to Draconia, which the Doctor has visited before. The Master activates a beacon & summons his Ogron allies.

Hmmmm. The start of the episode, as the Master rescues the Doctor from the moon, and the end, as they're boarded by the Draconians, are fine but the middle with the Doctor & Jo in a cell then escaping and the interminably slow business with the spacewalk is just appalling.

Then there's the moon prison stuff from the previous episode that continues into this one: a little bit of colour for the story, highlighting that the Earth regime keeps political prisoners but that's it, it serves no other function other than to eat up about an episode of time. You could have easily cut most of this episode, no problem, especially as the three most important characters in the story, The Earth President, General Williams & the Draconian Prince don't appear. I'll come back to this in episode six.

We've already criticised Paul Bernard for his directing in episode 1: here we get the most appalling episode end as we close on a shot of the back of an Ogron. However, if memory serves, this is one of those occasions where I think an episode ending had to be moved round during recording.

If you think the interior of the Master's ship is familiar then you're right: it's the cargo freighter from the first two episodes redressed, with the cargo hold where the Tardis lands now incorporating the prisoner's cage with it's yellow rails now resprayed black.

Rather amusingly, given the conflict he's trying to engineer, the Master is reading a copy of HG Wells' War of the Worlds.

Oh look, there's a prop we recognise!

The Doctor's spacesuit helmet was first seen in Pathfinders to Mars: you can see more pictures at The Hello Spaceman Blog. They first appear in Doctor Who in Mission to the Unknown and The Dalek Masterplan worn by the delegate we think is called Beaus at the Daleks' conference.

It'll be back on a different spacesuit in episode 6 and again in the next story. After that they're in The Android Invasion and Face of Evil.

Time to update the "locked up" tally for the story, currently at 9:

10) The Doctor in Solitary Confinement after Escape Attempt
11) Jo, and then the Doctor in the Master's ship
12) Jo locked in airlock
13) The Doctor, Jo & the Master locked up in the Master's ship

and we've still 2 episodes to go!

The Prison Governor is Dennis Bowen who was in the Out of the Unknown episode The Little Black Bag as Dr. Hemingway. Most of the third season of Out of the Unknown is missing but in 1999 over half of this episode was discovered at BBC Scotland and can be seen on the Out of the Unknown DVD Set.

Richard Shaw, who plays trustee Cross, was Lobos in The Space Museum and returns as Lakh in Underworld.

Bill Wilde is the Captain of the Draconian ship. He was in the first season Doomwatch episode as Branston in Train and De-Train which you can see on The Doomwatch DVD. He's also in Smiley's People playing the 'Blue Diamond' Waiter.

There's two Guards from Draconian ship. Bill Matthews, also a Draconian in the next episode. He was previously a Waxworks Visitor/Auton Replicas & soldier in Spearhead in Space, Davis in Doctor Who and the Silurians and a Prison Officer in The Mind of Evil He returns as a Villager in Planet of the Spiders. He's previously been in Quatermass and the Pit as a Sightseer in The Halfmen, a Man in Crowd in The Wild Hunt and a Sightseer in Hob. In Doomwatch he plays a Man in The Islanders. His colleague Andy Devine also appears in the next episode as a Draconian. Many years later Russell T Davies uses him as Barnard Thomas in Queer as Folk and he finds national fame as Shadrach Dingle in Emmerdale Farm.

There's a couple of new Lunar Guards in this episode. I can't find anything else that Lawrence Held has been in but Gary Dean was a Technician in The Ice Warriors, a Kanowa Guard in Enemy of the World, a UNIT Soldier in The Invasion, a u German Soldier in The War Games, a UNIT Soldier in Doctor Who and the Silurians and an Earth Control Guard in The Mutants, He returns as a Spiridon in Planet of the Spiders, a Guard in Pirate Planet, a Medic in Nightmare of Eden, a Passenger in Time Flight and a Pallbearer in Remembrance of the Daleks. In Doomwatch he was a Man in Project Sahara and he's a Hotel Guest in the Fawlty Towers episode Communication Problems.

You have to laugh at the list of charges the Master says the Doctor's been charged with:

GOVERNOR: I'm releasing you into the custody of this Commissioner. He will fly you back to Sirius 4 to stand trial.
DOCTOR: And may I ask what I'm supposed to have done there?
MASTER: Defrauding the Sirius 4 Dominion Bank, evasion of planetary income tax. Assault and battery committed upon the person of a Sirius 4 police official. Taking a spaceship without authority and piloting the said spaceship without payment of tax and insurance. Landing the said spaceship on an unauthorised area of Sirius 3. Need I go on?
DOCTOR: I seem to be quite the master criminal, don't I? You don't mean to say that you really believe all this nonsense, do you, Governor? Whatever credentials that he's shown you are forged.
MASTER: Oh come, Doctor, you know the game's up. Why not admit defeat? You know, this man always works with an accomplice. A girl. I've got her under lock and key in my ship. Well, Doctor, are you coming quietly?

You get the feeling, given that he's posing as a Sirius 4 official with one of their spaceships, that that's just a list of what The Master himself has done on a recent visit there!

Both the Master's top and his Spaceship have a round symbol on it that I think is meant to represent Sirius-4:

However if you look closely the symbol does rather look like something else that's rather familiar......

There's been a number of these symbols used throughout the story on uniforms to represent allegiance to certain Earth bodies. First in episode 1 there's the box, probably representing a container, on the freighter crew's uniforms:

Then there's a red, vaguely Earth continents, symbol used for the space troopers:

The Presidential guards, Earth guards and Newsreader are all wearing a different coloured version of the same geometric circular pattern. Presidential Guards are purple: