Who Reviews Carnival of Monsters by Tony J Fyler

Step right up, says Tony, 

for sights unlike anything you’ve seen before…

Free from his exile on Earth, with his knowledge of time travel restored, the Third Doctor promises to take Jo to Metebelis 3 – annnnnd misses, spectacularly. In a way, this first post-exile story does what it can to reassure viewers that the Third Doctor will actually be just as hopelessly meandering in his adventures as were Doctors one and two, despite our now knowing significantly more about the Time Lords, Gallifrey and the Doctor’s relative status as a runaway. He’s not about to become suddenly competent in his Tardis piloting.

In fact, he sort of is – there’s more precise Tardis work coming up from the Third Doctor than ever marked out his predecessors, but the idea that this is not so is seeded by his utter inability, at least until The Green Death, to find Metebelis 3.

Appearing to land the ship in the bowels of the SS Bernice, it quickly becomes clear that Things Are Not What They Seem, as people’s attitudes change in a finger-snap, as they seem to re-perform different actions, and as, of course, the plesiosaurus arrives to terrorise them all.

Dead giveaway, the plesiosaurus.

To be entirely fair though, Robert Holmes has already rather blown the surprise by the time the plesiosaurus turns up, because he seems intent on giving the viewer both sides of the story – inside and out. The Doctor and Jo have been nabbed by a miniscope belonging to a travelling theatrical, Vorg, and his glittery – and also fairly brainy – assistant Shirna. They’re the only bit of brightness currently on the planet Inter Minor, where a bunch of mirthless bureaucrats are plotting treason and anarchy as a way to effect regime change on their planet. The joy of the difference in scale between the story-threads – the Doctor and Jo in real, imminent peril from the likes of Drashigs, and the bureaucrats plotting their carefully restrained treason at the hands of Kalik (played with a heightened intensity of cunning by Dalek-vocalist and eventually original Davros, Michael Wisher) – is that those on Inter Minor, while dealing with their petty treacheries, are actually doing what we the audience is doing – they’re watching Doctor Who to take a break from their lives.

It’s a format to which Robert Holmes would of course return in The Trial Of A Time Lord – external political drama, internal imminent threat and violence, watched on a screen by the big, powerful people.

As the story develops, and the Doctor and Jo manoeuvre their way about in the wiring of the miniscope, trailing Drashigs as they go, the plot strands crash into each other, and what was small becomes large and deadly, in a way which quickly spirals out of the Inter Minor bureaucrats’ control, the imminent violent threat and the droll political chicanery fight for dominance of the screen, leading ultimately to the destruction of the dangerous Drashigs, the failure of the political plotting, and the return of all the miniscope’s other prisoners to their proper times and places. All of which sounds fairly pedestrian when you simply read it.

Carnival of Monsters is anything but pedestrian. It’s more or less a masterclass in Robert Holmes’ writing style.

On the one hand, he gives just enough detail of the Inter Minorans’ political problems – there are the elite and there are a sub-class, revolting for work-breaks and food and potentially votes and suchlike tomfoolery. It doesn’t take more than a handful of heartbeats and one effective stunt to establish all this, but in just a few broad strokes, he gives us a world of complications, class struggle, and sneering politicos – you could honestly watch Michael Wisher as a kind of proto-Rees-Mogg and he wouldn’t be out of place.

Then he gives us a classic pair of ‘ducking and diving’ side-characters to add an element of plot motion and deep characterisation. As he would go on to do in The Ribos Operation with Garron and Unstoffe, and again in The Mysterious Planet with Glitz and Dibber, in Vorg and Shirna, Holmes gives us characters with a grounded, practical self-interest to power the story along and establish the major and minor scoundrel of the pair to give us light and shade. And then of course, he tosses the Doctor and his companion into scrape after scrape, fighting among the – in this case literal – little people for control of a destiny controlled by the equally literal high-ups, eventually leading to a revolution and the fall of big bad meanies. It sounds like an easy, almost basic formula, but in Holmes’ hands, it sings. It probably shouldn’t, but it does.

Quite apart from which, Holmes gives us shock after shock – the plesiosaurus attacking an early 20^th century ship for one, the sudden arrival in the scope of a giant hand, almost Monty Pythonlike, which plucks away the Tardis for another, the ghastly, still-scary-forty-years-later appearance and sound of the Drashigs, and the several moments when they break through seemingly impervious environments, especially their escape onto Inter Minor – they all help to punctuate what could easily become a mundane story with moments that keep you watching. The pace at which Holmes whips his thrills and chills along also means you’re never allowed to get bored watching Carnival of Monsters – as with the miniscope from which it takes its name, there’s always something to see, something to worry about, something to enjoy.

Ultimately perhaps, that’s the secret to the success of Carnival of Monsters – it fills the screen at every moment, both with the imminent-danger narrative and the more sedate but still threatening political shenanigans outside the scope. And while in later stages  it feels like the wheels should come off the storytelling as there’s almost too much going on, without slackening the pace at all, Holmes keeps all the lines of storytelling relatively clear, so you hang on in there, invested, biting your nails to the quick, hiding behind a cushion when the Drashigs come on, and only relaxing at the very end when all the drama’s done. And the fact that the Doctor and Jo go down among the scope-folk to show us the unfairness of caging living creatures for the amusement of others means you can even read Carnival of Monsters as a treatise on both the likes of Victorian freakshows, and on the wrongness of imprisoning wild animals in circuses and zoos, making them perform for an astonished and fee-paying crowd.

Carnival of Monsters is definitely an off-beat Doctor Who story, especially considering that it follows the likes of The Three Doctors, and comes after a longish dry spell of mostly Earth-bound adventuring. But a solid script from Holmes, some gloriously interesting casting – Michael Wisher as Kalik, Lesllie Dwyer as Vorg, Tenniel Evans as Major Daly and Ian Marter as Lt Andrews to name but a few – and the outstanding work of the modelmakers and sound effect department that combines to make the Drashigs a devastatingly memorable monster of the Pertwee era mean that although it doesn’t exactly ‘fit’ into any era of Doctor Who, you can never ignore or dismiss it as a lesser story. Carnival of Monsters always rewards a re-watch – the concept is clever, the writing is textbook Robert Holmes and the Drashigs live on in the collective memory of Who-fans as an almost quintessential creation of the early seventies.