Doctor Who fans I will always state that the Third Doctor is my favourite doctor and while I have seen the serial i'm about to review before this is my first time reviewing it. This was a serial that for a long time I never saw in it's entirety until a few years ago and well while I was stuck thinking of what other classic Doctor Who serials I could review this was one of the episodes that sprung into mind and so here is my review of Spearhead From Space.
The plot of the serial is The Autons are trying to take over the world and it's up to UNIT and a newly regenerated Doctor to put a stop to it. This episode had a lot to do not only did it have to introduce a new doctor but also a new companion and a new enemy but it also had to reintroduce Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. So you would understand if the story wasn't that good however I thought that the story was really entertaining but I feel it could have done with at least one more episode just to get things right.
Like i said this serial introduces both Jon Pertwee as The Doctor and Caroline John as Liz Shaw and it also reintroduced Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. Joining them in this serial is Hugh Burden as Channing , Derek Smee as Ransome , John Woodnutt as Hibbert , Neil Wilson as Sam Seeley , Betty Bowden as Meg Seeley , Hamilton Dyce as General Scobie and John Breslin as Captain Munro.
Now this is something that you guys won't know but i've been a fan of Jon Pertwee's since I was a kid because I watched a lot of his other show Worzel Gummidge and so I know that he can act and he is really good in this serial. I'll admit that outside of this serial I haven't Caroline John or Nicholas Courtney in anything outside of Doctor Who but in terms of this serial i'd be interested to see what else they worked on because they were pretty solid in this serial. The guest cast I thought were OK at best altho I got the impression that they didn't know if they show treat the material seriously or not and so while some of them deliver an over the top performance some of them also play it straight.
Now not only did this episode have a lot of characters to introduce but it also had to introduce a new enemy the autons. In this serial I have to say that they are kind of creepy but at the same time they looked fake to me i'm honestly sure that at one point I saw the eye of one of the actors playing one of the autons. That being said tho they look creepy as all hell there's just something about an emotionless face which just looks freaking creepy.
Now in case you couldn't tell by the above pictures this was also the first Doctor Who serial to not only be produced in but also shown in colour. I know that that's something that we take for granted these days but back in the seventies colour TV was still a relatively new thing so it was a big deal for any show to be shown in colour and that right there makes this episode historic because like I said it was the first Doctor Who serial produced in colour.
This is the only serial i've seen with Liz and I can say that I like her she's got the feistiness of Amy but with the brains to back it up. To me she seems like the type of character that will put you down but will do it by saying something smart and I just love that about her and it makes me wonder why they got rid of her after just one series since there appears to be more to her then what we actually saw in this serial.
I can't really talk that much about The Brigadier just because this serial really doesn't show of much of his personality but given that he's present for all of the third doctors run it's bound to shine through in later episodes. Here he seems to be a rather stern character and I hope that we get to see more of his softer side in the later serials just because having a character who's always stern could make them unlikable.
One of the reasons why I think that this serial would have been better with five episodes is that it would have given a chance to flesh out some of the secondary characters. The fact that they didn't do that is an issue when it comes to the character of salesman John Ransome who appears through out the adventure but they don't really give us a reason to care about him nor make him seem a more three dimensional character and so when he does die I felt nothing.
Now what is something to be expected in the Jon Pertwee era is that there is a few action scenes however at least in this serial there is no scenes of Jon fighting someone. The action that we do see in this serial is kind of average all it is is just two guys shooting each other and that's really it but given that if im right this was the first real action sequence on Doctor Who I guess it's good that they started of on a small scale.
There was one scene which actually scared the living he*l out of me when I saw it on the screen and it's the scene where the doctor is almost killed by The Nestene Consciousness. What made this scene so creepy and scary to me is that not only is it shot in extreme closeup just of Jon Pertwee but because of that we get to see alot of the reactions on Jon's face and he looks scared and so if The Doctor is scared then we the audience must be scared as well.
Overall in terms of debut stories this was pretty solid and given that the serial had so much to do it's wonder that it still turns out to be as good as it is but that said the small episode count does mean characters aren't fleshed out that well and it does mean we don't get to see much in terms of personality from our leads and so it gets an 8 out of 10 from me.