DOCTOR WHO:  THE CREATURE FROM THE PIT

commentary by Judy Harris

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#32:  THE CREATURE FROM THE PIT	 (4 Parts)
ORIGINALLY AIRED:  10/27/79 to 11/17/79
WRITTEN BY:  David Fisher	
DIRECTED BY:  Christopher Barry
PRODUCER:  Graham Williams	
SCRIPT EDITOR:  Douglas Adams

This story is weakened considerably by bad special effects in both the Creature of the title, which is a green balloon enhanced by optical glows and in the secondary menace of the wolfweeds, which are rather laughable.

It also has some of the most unconvincing, unscientific sounding explanations in the somewhat hurried ending--particularly the bit about aluminum minimizing gravitational pull. Even if that were so, what about heat? Wouldn't being so close to a neutron star fry everything even remotely close?

On the other hand, we see that rare commodity: a planet ruled by strong women, and there is a delightful performance by Geoffrey Bayldon as a befuddled astrologer.

On the planet Chloris, a cringing prisoner is tossed into a pit.

In the TARDIS, K9 reads to the Doctor from THE TALE OF PETER RABBIT by Beatrix Potter.

Romana has been cleaning out #4 hold and drags some potential rubbish into the control room. This box includes the machine the Doctor built to project himself into hyperspace in THE STONES OF BLOOD (also written by David Fisher), the jawbone of an ass, and a huge ball of string.

This latter has a tag on it, saying, "To the Doctor, a souvenir with love and thanks for all his help with the Minotaur, Theseus and Ariadne." The Doctor tells Romana, "If I hadn't produced that ball of string to find a way out of the labyrinth, they were going to unravel my scarf, the wretches." The Doctor actually met the Minotaur twice before, in the Troughton story THE MIND ROBBER and the Pertwee story THE TIME MONSTER. And he's shortly to meet a close relative in THE HORNS OF NIMON.

Romana also comes across what K9 says in a Mark 3 emergency transceiver--part of the TARDIS which the Doctor never bothered to plug in, because he kept getting calls on it from Gallifrey. Romana plugs it in and it immediately receives a distress call. The TARDIS tilts until Romana switches it off. The TARDIS has landed and the Doctor and Romana set out to explore the lush jungle outside.

The Doctor taps with a spoon on a large fragment of something, which he thinks is a part of a shell, although it looks woven and appears to be semimetallic. The Doctor suspects it is alive and transmitting the distress call the TARDIS picked up. He uses a stethoscope to listen to the fragment, as some wolfweeds creep up on him. These are watermelon shaped pods which roll under their own power and attack him. He calls for Romana as they pin him to the ground.

Some guards arrive, and a Huntsman cracks his whip, calling the wolfweeds off. Karela, commander of the guards, threatens to kill the Doctor for being in the Place of Death but when she catches sight of the TARDIS she changes her mind. She has the Doctor secured in a yoke--a wooden contraption which restrains his head and hands. On the way to the palace of Lady Adrasta, the group are ambushed by some bandits, who kidnap Romana.

At Adrasta's palace, the Doctor asks the guards to scratch his nose and manages to knock both of them out with the yoke. He's just about to escape when Adrasta enters and removes the yoke. She is interested in the Doctor's opinion of the object in the Place of Death and promises to send a troop of guards to rescue Romana.

At the bandits' lair, Torvin gloats over some old metal. He's a Fagin type character, miserly and not too bright. The bandits tie Romana up and vote on whether to kill her, but Romana talks them out of killing her and into untying her. She tricks them into blowing K9's whistle. He arrives, stuns Torvin, and rescues Romana.

The Doctor tells Adrasta the object is an eggshell which is alive and screaming in pain. The sound can't be heard "because it can only be detected on very low frequently wave lengths."

Two of Adrasta's engineers, Doran and Tulland enter. Their task is to discover the function of the object. Doran thinks it's part of an ancient building. Adrasta wants to know why Doran hasn't detected the shell is alive. "Well, to be fair, I did have a couple of gadgets which he probably didn't, like a tea spoon and an open mind," the Doctor points out. For his failure, Doran is condemned to the pit.

The Doctor tries to talk Adrasta into pardoning Doran, but she tosses the unlucky engineer into the pit, where he's attacked by some creature. Romana and K9 arrive. K9 stuns a guard but is overcome by the wolfweeds, who weave a sort of spiderweb around him, preventing him from moving.

The Doctor jumps into the pit, getting a foothold halfway down. He hammers in some pitons--mountain climbers' spikes--and anchors himself with his scarf. He takes a book out of his pocket called EVEREST IN EASY STAGES, but it's in Tibetan. From another pocket he takes a second book called TEACH YOURSELF TIBETAN. Suddenly his scarf gives way and the Doctor falls. Landing unhurt, he finds Doran and a previous victim dead at the bottom of the pit.

K9 and Romana are brought to Adrasta's palace. Because metal is so valuable, Adrasta orders K9 smashed to pieces. Romana agrees to cooperate with Adrasta, telling her about the shell and the TARDIS, if Adrasta spares K9.

In the pit, the Doctor lights a match and sets off to explore. He catches sight of the creature which is a 200-foot green blob with a spongy protuberance that resembles a penis. The Doctor is approached by a man who introduces himself as Organon, "astrologer extraordinary, seer to Princes and Emperors. The future foretold, the past explained, the present apologized for."

Organon was thrown into the pit for making an error in a prophecy--predicting to Adrasta a visitor from beyond the stars. He has been in the pit many moonflows, surviving on scraps of food thrown by serfs to the creature.

Torvin wakes up and urges the bandits to vacate their lair because Romana will surely tell Adrasta about it, and Adrasta will come to seek revenge or to steal their metal. Torvin suggests while the guards are seeking the bandits, the bandits should ransack the palace.

Organon tells the Doctor this pit used to be a mine, which is where he got the lamps providing illumination. Metal is very scarce and precious on Chloris, and Adrasta owns the only mine on the planet, giving her a monopoly of metal; she depends on the shortage of it. Organon also says the creature is the only one of its kind on the planet.

Romana removes the cobwebs from K9; he still can't move. She lifts him, and he stuns some guards, but others grab Romana.

The creature comes after the Doctor and Organon, who chases it away with the flame of a candle. The Doctor thinks its skin looked almost like a cerebral membrane. He and the reluctant Organon set out after the creature. The Doctor wants to know, "What's that creature doing here? Pure brain, a hundred foot across, stuck at the bottom of a pit, oozing about and sitting on people. Not much of a life, is it?"

Adrasta interrogates K9 and discovers the TARDIS can travel in space and time. She realizes she might need the Doctor to operate the TARDIS. Perhaps he didn't die in the fall into the pit. There is an entrance into the pit through the palace. Adrasta plans to take K9 there to kill something very huge. Adrasta, Karela, Romana, K9 and some guards enter the pit.

Just as the Doctor and Organon locate the creature, Adrasta's guards attack it. The Doctor approaches it, saying, "Hello, there" and it flows over him, knocking him to the ground. The creature weaves a shell-like barrier, locking the Doctor in and Organon and the others out.

The Doctor wakes up and lights a match. He scratches the barrier to let Organon know he's alive. The Doctor finds nuggets of pure cadmium and iron ore. He comes across the creature again and tries to communicate with it. It's calmer now and lets the Doctor touch it.

"You're a problem, you know," the Doctor tells it, "You're aware of me and yet you haven't got any eyes. You haven't got a mouth--at least not one that I can see. Come to think of it, you haven't even got a head, so how do we communicate?" The creature draws a design on the rock wall. The Doctor recognizes it as a shield-like decoration he saw on the wall of Adrasta's palace.

The bandits overcome the guard at the palace and start to ransack the place. More guards return, just as the bandits grab the shield-like artifact from the wall, so they beat a hasty retreat into the entrance to the pit.

"If we ever do find your mouth, wherever it is, you've got a lot of explaining to do, my friend" the Doctor says, leaving to find the artifact the creature drew.

Adrasta's party reaches Organon. K9 can't break the creature's barrier. His blaster has weakened it, but the material is self-renewing. The atoms recombine to form an even stronger material. Despite this, the Doctor breaks through the shell and tells Romana she needn't have worried about him because "Time Lords have 90 lives," although he's already gone through "about 130."

Organon is also happy to see the Doctor and asks what sign he was born under. "Crossed computers," the Doctor replies, "It's the symbol of the maternity service on Gallifrey."

In her impatience to kill the creature, Adrasta lets slip it's a Tythonian. The Doctor pulls a mirror out of his coat pocket. Romana, who's holding K9, directs his blaster into the mirror, which deflects it back at the guards.

Overcome by a compulsion they don't understand (and which is never explained), Torvin and Edu carry the creature's artifact into the pit.

The creature--the Tythonian--enters. Adrasta points a knife at the Doctor's throat and orders Romana to have K9 kill the creature. Torvin and Edu arrive, distracting Adrasta, allowing the Doctor to disarm her. Karela escapes to the palace and summons the Huntsman. The bandits put the shield thing on the Tythonian, come to their senses, spot Adrasta and rush out.

While K9 covers Adrasta, the Doctor puts his hand on the shield. Suddenly the Tythonian speaks in the Doctor's voice, explaining he is using the Doctor's larynx. His name is Erato and he's the Tythonian High Ambassador on a trading mission to Chloris. He doesn't eat people; he ingests chlorophyll and mineral salts.

The wolfweeds overpower K9 and Adrasta is free. "If my deductions are correct, the well being of two planets is at stake," the Doctor says. The Doctor has deduced Erato arrived on Chloris 15 years ago to propose a trading agreement between Tythonus--which is rich in metallic ores and minerals--and Chloris--rich in plant life that produces the chlorophyll the Tythonians need. Unfortunately, the first person he met held the metal monopoly. She tipped him into the pit and he's been trapped ever since.

The Huntsman arrives, but the Doctor's explanation sounds so logical, the Huntsman uses the wolfweeds to force Adrasta to touch Erato's communicator. In Adrasta's voice, Erato confirms the Doctor's deductions. The Huntsman incites the wolfweeds to kill Adrasta and Erato eats the weeds, the first solid meal he's had in 15 years. The Doctor arranges to have Erato hauled out of the pit by Adrasta's surviving engineers.

Back at the palace, K9 is fully operational again and informs Romana Tythonians live for up to 40,000 years. The Doctor tells her the shell they found, when complete, is a "blindingly simple space vehicle, complete with photon drive," which was concealed in pieces Erato kept hidden in the pit. The noise the shell was making was a distress beacon.

The Doctor is holding Erato's photon drive hostage until the Tythonian guarantees Chloris' safety and negotiates a treaty with the Huntsman, who is now in charge. The Doctor gives the photon drive to Organon to guard and goes to speak with Erato.

Using Romana's larynx, Erato says Chloris has only 24 hours to live. When their ambassador failed to return, Tythonus set a neutron star on a course to plunge it into the heart of Chloris' sun, which will explode, destroying the whole solar system. K9 explains a neutron star is a collapsed star composed of supercompressed degenerate matter. There's no way to stop it.

Erato can spin up a new ship in 26 ninods, which is 1 hour 7 seconds of Chloris' time. After discovering Erato can produce aluminum, the Doctor explains, "A thin shell of aluminum wrapped around the neutron star will minimize its gravitational pull and we can yank it back out of the sun's field." The TARDIS can exert short bursts of enormous gravitational pull on the star, slowing it up while Erato weaves his eggshell 'round it. Then the star will spin off harmlessly into deep space. Erato agrees to help.

Karela knocks out Organon and steals the photon drive. Romana discovers Organon unconscious and the drive gone.

Karela follows the bandits to their lair and kills Torvin. She has hidden the photon drive. She offers the remaining bandits wealth and power if they support her in taking over Chloris. The Doctor arrives suddenly and tells Karela and the bandits about the sun's imminent explosion. Karela doesn't believe him. The Doctor has K9 destroy the bandits' hoard of metal. For some reason this convinces Karela to give up the photon drive.

Erato communicates via K9. He's completed weaving his spaceship and takes off. In the TARDIS, Romana has picked up the neutron star on band 6. The TARDIS dematerializes and rematerializes in space, again having no trouble from the randomizer. The Doctor activates the gravity tractor beam, which places a terrible strain on the TARDIS.

Erato gets weaving. Just as he finishes, the control circuit blows and the Doctor can't turn off the tractor beam, which is pulling the star toward the TARDIS. The Doctor manages to dematerialize; the star misses the TARDIS, Chloris and its sun. Romana had calculated their chances of success as 74,384,338 to 1 against. The Doctor says 74,384,338 is his lucky number. As recently as THE POWER OF KROLL his lucky number was 7, but who's counting?

On Chloris, Organon consults a crystal ball and foresees the arrival of the TARDIS. It materializes--still able to navigate despite the randomizer--and the Doctor hands over a draft contract for a trading agreement from Erato. He and Romana leave.

Geoffrey Bayldon, who plays Organon, appeared with Jon Pertwee in THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1970) and on Pertwee's TV series WORZEL GUMMIDGE.

Eileen Way, who plays Karela, played Old Mother in the very first DOCTOR WHO story, AN UNEARTHLY CHILD, and the 1966 Peter Cushing film THE DALEKS: INVASION EARTH 2150 A.D.

Edward Kelsey, who plays Edu, played Resur in the Troughton show THE POWER OF THE DALEKS, and a Slave Buyer in the Hartnell story THE ROMANS.

Terry Walsh, who plays Doran, has played a variety of stunt and background roles, including Mensch in THE POWER OF KROLL, Zake in THE SONTARAN EXPERIMENT and a Pikeman in THE MASQUE OF MANDRAGORA, all Tom Baker stories.