Review: Doctor Who: The Dark Planet
- cepmurphywrites
- 6 hours ago
- 8 min read
By Matthew Kresal.
Early 1960s Doctor Who is at times an extraordinary thing to behold: a series whose makers were striving for excellence and big ideas in often antiquated studios and with a fraction of the budget they required. It was an approach that dominated the William Hartnell era, producing stores as wide-ranging as the first Dalek serials and the likes of 1965’s The Web Planet. It was also something that perhaps influenced the writers who pitched for the series including Brian Hayles who, before becoming the creator of the Toymaker and the Ice Warriors, pitched a very different and ambitious story to the series in 1965 in the form of The Dark Planet, brought to life nearly a half-century later by Big Finish.
Born in 1930, Hayles creative journey had seen him start out as a sculptor before turning to the teaching profession for income at Greenmore College in Birmingham. Ironically, teaching offered him another creative outlet as his work on student revues and dramatic productions saw him bit by the writing bug. By 1965, Hayles career as a writer in British television was in full swing, contributing to series such as Suspense, Jury Room, and The Wednesday Thriller. In February of that year, having made contact with the Doctor Who production office and script editor Dennis Spooner, Hayles received his first commission for the series for a storyline known as The Dark Planet.
The story initially concerned Earth’s twin planet on the far side of the sun, but Spooner rejected it, the idea being too similar to writer Malcolm Hulke’s recently abandoned serial The Hidden Planet. Based on later research done for the Nothing at the End of the Lane magazine, “the Magazine of Doctor Who Research and Restoration”, it appears Hayles subsequently revised the storyline during March, altering the setting to the planet Numir with beings made either entirely of light or shadow. It was this version that was re-submitted and, ultimately, passed on again by Spooner. Hayles would continue to submit to Spooner and his successor Donald Tosh over the next few months, eventually landing a commission for what would become The Celestial Toymaker. Hayles would ultimately write or co-write six broadcast serials for the series over the following nine years before his death at age 47.
Doctor Who fans would get their first glimpse of Hayles surviving storyline in Nothing at the End of the Lane’s third issue in January 2012. In preparing the issue, editor Richard Bignall contacted Hayles’ son Mark to see what might have survived among his father’s papers. Included in the magazine would be ten different storyline submissions to the series, starting with The Dark Planet and going into the Tom Baker era. The magazine reproduced both Hayles general outline to Spooner as well as the fuller episode breakdown in the issue, including commentary from Doctor Who Magazine writer Martin Wiggins on its themes
By the time the issue had come out, Doctor Who’s unmade serials were finding new life. In 2008, Big Finish Productions began a new range of releases under the banner of Doctor Who – The Lost Stories. Initially focusing on unmade scripts from the era of Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor, the company’s attention soon turned to the unproduced scripts from the other Doctors. A number of Hayles’ unmade serials for the first two Doctors would find life as part of the range, with three consecutive monthly releases beginning in September 2013 with The Dark Planet.
Big Finish regular Matt Fitton took on scripting duties, facing something of a challenge. As Wiggins noted about the storyline in Nothing at the End of the Lane, Hayles had offered little about the respective alien races (to the point of their being only a single named supporting character in the episode breakdown, the Light people’s leader Teelss). While there were plot points and a handful of incidents, Fitton would have to essentially build a fuller world for audio from the scant details Hayles had pitched in 1965.
In listening to the production, the influences on Hayles’ early take on the series become more clear. The alien races built entirely upon being creatures of light and shadow on a dying world (and intriguingly, Hayles’ storyline had the Light people turning into white skinned figures and one of the shadow people into “a black-skinned man” when each died) are high concept, indeed. As Hayles would been revising the storyline in the spring of 1965, The Web Planet by Bill Strutton would have been airing on BBC One with an equally high concept serial set on an alien world of anthropomorphic insects amid a bleak, lunar-esque landscape. Numir, a planet circling a dying star in the early days of the universe with crystal Light people living in a crystal city and shadow people made of rock living largely underground, certainly fits into that same budget-breaking mould.
Which, in turn, might well have played a role in its rejection back in 1965 on purely technical grounds, as the likes of The Web Planet and the later serial The Ark with its invisible Refusians offer a glimpse both of how a production team might have handled bringing them to life and how they might have appeared on-screen. Hayles’ idea might simply have been too much for a production team reeling from the budget overruns of The Web Planet, despite its viewing figures reaching a level the series wouldn’t achieve again until the mid-1970s.
The Web Planet’s influence can be felt in other aspects. There’s the openings of each with companion Vicki’s youth making her aware of vibrations before the elder TARDIS travellers, as well as the lengthy exploration of the planet’s surface that takes up much of the first episode. From there, the pairings off of the four travellers (the Doctor, Ian, Barbara, and Vicki) follow a similar pattern with each ending up on opposing sides of a war. The Doctor ends up in communication with the leader of one side offering assistance, while realizing there is more going on than initially appears. There’s even a mid-serial sci-fi battle sequence that fans can imagine being shot on film and a rather stuffed finale. Hayles clearly wasn’t plagiarizing, but the influence of Strutton’s script and the production is evident throughout.
That is also, unfortunately, not the only thing that The Dark Planet shares in common with The Web Planet. Like that 1965 serial, it paired its high ambition with a less than full plot. The aforementioned first episode largely consists of the character’s wandering around and spouting exposition of the science behind the setting before coming across the first signs of habitation. The remaining five episodes do little to improve the pace with much back and forth between the crystal city, the plain where the TARDIS landed, and eventually the underground home of the shadows with the odd incident or detour to another part of the city. Nor is there quite enough for the four leads to do with each of the companions sidelined for sizeable chunks of the narrative, though this gives the Doctor more of a central role than was sometimes the case in the Hartnell era. As a four part serial, it might have worked better (a fault not uncommon among Classic Who’s longer serials) but at six episodes and a running time of three hours and sixteen minutes on audio, The Dark Planet rivals The Web Planet in the dullness stakes even when listened to an episode at a time.
Which is a shame because The Dark Planet has its moments. Produced at a time before Big Finish had yet to embrace the idea of re-casting roles played by departed cast members, this was presented as an enhanced audiobook with Fitton essentially making a novel out of Hayles’ outline. Fitton’s prose serves it well, with grand descriptions of the crystal city and the Light’s rocket that comes into play at the climax. Fitton also sympathetically builds on the ideas in the storyline, crafting a story about fanaticism across a seemingly unbridgeable divide that breaks out into a war that threatens the entire planet, something that offers up a Cold War allegory on the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction. Fitton also expands the cast, including a daughter for the Light’s leader who befriends Vicki and whose young fanaticism adds to the climax’s danger. While an anachronistic reference is made to a much later serial at one point, Fitton crafted a more than plausible take of what a produced version of The Dark Planet might have been while also (as has been the case with a number of Lost Stories releases) arguably offering a better version, even with the faults in pacing. It is also, in keeping with much of Big Finish’s output, a well-made tale.
The story also benefited from having the then-two surviving cast members of the era reprising their roles. William Russell (Ian) and Maureen O'Brien (Vicki), who had each earlier reprised their roles for the company’s Companion Chronicles range (and, in Russell’s case, earlier Lost Stories), were well versed in the semi-dramatic/semi-narrated format and are definite highlights here. Russell captures the various moods of Hartnell’s Doctor including piqued interest, utter frustration, and crushing disappointment, though his lines as Ian sound less distinct from the Doctor at times (unsurprising, perhaps, given he was 88 at the time of recording). O’Brien, meanwhile, neatly brings the younger, almost naive Vicki superbly to life, which offers an emotional anchor in the final episode, even if her take on Barbara is little more than her narrator voice with a slight inflection.
The supporting cast of John Banks and Charlie Norfolk pull heavy duty as they are each tasked with bringing multiple alien characters to life. Banks duties saw him taking on the opposing Numirian leaders, making them distinct from each other even in the same scene, though his performance as a supporting Light character ventures into over-the-top insanity at one point. Norfolk gets a pair of standout supporting roles as both Vicki’s Light friend Illees and the Light military leader General Steetss, showing off considerable range from high-spirited young girl to the sterner military leader. The sound design and music from Toby Hrycek-Robinson rounds off the production with a soundscape that both brings the world of Numir to life and capturing the often-varying musical sound of the Hartnell era. All brought together under the watchful direction of veteran Lost Stories director Ken Bentley.
Is The Dark Planet a lost classic? By no means. From the storyline and Big Finish’s adaptation, it’s clear how much Hayles would have relied on visuals to carry the serial over stronger characterization and incidents. Something which would have left it to suffer a similar fate to The Web Planet and likely being just as ambitious a production. What we have on audio, while being an extrapolation of what might have been, shows the pros and cons of such an approach. It also leaves The Dark Planet standing as an example of the ambitions of Doctor Who’s earliest years when writers, producers, and directors pushed back against the limits of small budgets and antiquated studio facilities to give birth to an iconic series.
Matthew Kresal is, among other things, the author of the SLP book Our Man on the Hill and short stories in the anthologies AlloAmericana, The Emerald Isles, and The Scottish Anthology.