‘Doctor Who: Frontios’ (1984)

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts (way back in November last year, which feels like an awfully long time ago now)… Looking back at it, ‘Death to the Daleks’ put me off watching any more and when I finally got round to giving something else a go, my DVD player decided not to co-operate. I really should get Britbox I suppose, maybe one day. Anyway…

One new TV later, and a copy of ‘Frontios’ that turned up a couple of days ago, and I was ready to give classic ‘Doctor Who’ another shot. And ‘Frontios’ ended up being a pretty good choice.

An irresistible force draws the TARDIS to the barren surface of Frontios, where in the far future the last surviving humans cower amongst the ruins of their wrecked spacecraft. Under constant threat from lethal meteorite bombardments, few of the doomed colony realise that the ground of Frontios itself opens up and devours the unwary. Not permitted to assist, the Doctor’s attempt to leave is thwarted when the unimaginable occurs, the TARDIS is utterly destroyed.

All the while, burrowing undetected below the planet’s crust, sickening alien parasites prepare a gruesome and final fate for all humanity…

‘Frontios’ is another one of those stories that I haven’t seen in years (possibly not since it was first broadcast, I’m not sure…) and it’s always interesting to revisit these and see if and how they’ve held up in the intervening period. I remember ‘Frontios’ being pretty unsettling, to say the least, as a kid and so it was it nice to watch a story that retained its sense of menace and horror. Older ‘Doctor Who’ stories have a habit of not aging well, in terms of the effects etc, and ‘Frontios’ unfortunately falls foul of a set that was clearly the business back in 1984 but not quite so much today. That to one side though, the story itself strikes a very good balance between creeping tension and outright horror. A world that drags you down beneath it’s surface… That still pushes all sorts of fear inducing buttons, even now, and when you see what lurks beneath that surface…

The Tractators are a strange kind of villain… They don’t look like particularly much of a threat, wobbling along corridors, but when you see Turlough’s reaction to them and the fate of Captain Revere (that is horrible…), you suddenly realise that they’re incredibly dangerous and very much to be feared. Look past the 80’s rubber outfit then and they are… Well, just trying to live really. It’s only the Gravis (Chief Tractator) that has agency and a desire to further the aims of his species. That is more than enough though to make the human/Tractator conflict an urgent one.

And all through this, the Doctor is protesting that he really isn’t allowed to help but… You know where he’s going with that😉 Although I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if he’d been on his own in the TARDIS, without Tegan in particular to change his mind. What was so important that he felt he had to move on…? I don’t know but it doesn’t take too much to change his mind once he’s on the planet and that’s when the Doctor is at his best. I didn’t really see much of Tegan, this time round, but Turlough was on great form I thought; the usual struggle between bravery and self-preservation rounded off with a nice bit of scenery chewing as the race memories surfaced…

Not a bad choice all in all. ‘Frontios’ understandably shows it’s age but still hits its targets and is a very watchable story for it.