#5-b: The Macra Terror Missing Episode Notes

Jamie comes face to face with The Macra...

After a couple serials that benefited from existing episodes, The Macra Terror returns us to the "fully missing" story. Save for a few censor clips (including the particularly memorable Episode 2 cliffhanger) and some brief 8 mm clips, no substantial footage from this serial exists. 

After the success of the animated release of The Power of the Daleks, The Macra Terror was selected as a follow-up.  It was a good choice.  As my review observes, The Macra Terror is an excellent story that, to all appearances, suffered from lackluster production and a particularly poor monster.  This new format affords the animators to fix those problems - which they do.

The Macra themselves are the biggest beneficiaries here.  Censor clips reveal the original Macra to be ludicrously fake, even by standards of the time, and all but immobile.  The animated Macra look good.  They are creepy and genuinely alien, blending the script cues of being like both insects and germs.  They move, sometimes quite quickly, and to good effect in scenes that see the creatures menacing Polly and Jamie.  All told, this may be the one time a Doctor Who story is actively improved by virtue of being missing!

My readers may recall that I had significant issues with the initial animation of Power of the Daleks.  This is from the same animation team... but by the time they tackled The Macra Terror, they appear to have worked out the bugs (along with actually being given enough time to do the job properly).  While there is still the occasional moment whose realization doesn't quite work - such as the Doctor and Polly straining to close a door that security guards are trying to force open - these moments are few in number.  Movement is smoother, faces are more expressive, and the result is a product that is not merely "better than a still reconstruction," but that is actually engrossing in its own right.

My review mentions a couple of minor trims.  I genuinely regret these, particularly as the scene in which the Doctor is cleaned up, only to immediately rumple himself again, significantly parallels the story as a whole.  Still, the omissions are understandable; they were not plot-critical, and were difficult to animate.  If the price of quality is the loss of a brief aside here and there, it is one I can readily accept.  

It wasn't long ago that the prospect of fully-animated releases of missing stories was dismissed as a commercially unviable pipe dream.  To see that dream achieved as well as has been done here, and with such a good overall story at that, is pure pleasure.


Previous Releases:

For those who do not enjoy animation, the story's soundtrack was previously given a quite good BBC Audio release.  Unlike most stories, narrated by companion actors, this story was narrated by Colin Baker (originally recorded for an audio cassette release in the 1990s).  There are a few uninentional sniggers within the narration, some double-entendres slipping through. Still, the typical clarity of the BBC audio combines with the ability of the listener to summon up an atmospheric setting and a scary monster to make this a viable way to enjoy this story.

The story was also reconstructed by Loose Cannon.  Their original version was also their first-ever reconstruction, and the image quality was quite blurry. It was later redone with better audio and crystal-clear images... Though the very clarity of the images reinforced the weakness of the story's visual elements, making the story less effective than the audio release was.


Review Index

#5 (4.27 - 4.30): The Macra Terror.

The Macra... "They're in Control!"

4 episodes. Approx. 97 minutes. Written by: Ian Stuart Black. Directed by: John Davies. Produced by: Innes Lloyd.


THE PLOT

The Doctor and his companions arrive at a human colony in the distant future. The colony appears to by an idyllic place, populated by people who are happy in their work under the guidance of the kindly Pilot (Peter Jeffrey) and the patriarchal Controller (Graham Leaman). But something nasty lurks at the heart of the colony: parasitic monsters feeding off the Colony's dangerous labors. When the Doctor sees the insect-like Macra, he and his friends find themselves prisoners, assigned to "The Danger Gang" - effectively, under sentence of death!


CHARACTERS

The Doctor: A tiny comedy scene, cut from the BBC's otherwise excellent animated release of this story, establishes the Doctor's entire relationship with the Colony.  The Doctor is placed into a machine that cleans his suit and leaves him looking like a proper gentleman... and immediately jumps into another machine to restore his rumpled appearance.  This is basically the whole serial in miniature: The authorities want the Doctor to conform, and he insists on retaining his individuality. 

Despite the struggle, the Doctor remains compassionate in his treatment of the Pilot and the brainwashed Ben. A brief, 8 mm clip from Episode Three shows the softness in the Doctor's face matching that in his voice as he talks to Ben about how hard it is "to struggle against the voices in (his) head." He has far less compassion for Ola (Gertan Klauber), the rigid security chief, but the serial as a whole reinforces the 2nd Doctor's essentially genial nature.

Jamie: The first story in which Jamie registers as something other than a glorified extra. One thing that would come to define Jamie is his sense of humor even in a crisis, which shows itself memorably in Episode Four when he pretends to be a dancer to escape the guards' notice. His dance? "The Highland Fling... because at the end of it, we fling ourselves out the door!" He is protective of both the Doctor and Polly when they are assigned to "The Danger Gang," protesting about giving dangerous jobs to "old men and lassies."

Ben: Jamie's first decent story as a character is also Ben's last good one. Ben is the member of the party who is successfully brainwashed by the Colony's conditioning. He does regain himself temporarily when Polly is attacked by a Macra, putting himself in harm's way to save her. Even then, it's a struggle. At first, he can't even see the Macra, because he has been conditioned to see "nothing evil in the Colony." The brainwashing reasserts after the crisis is clear, but he spends the second half of the story struggling visibly against it. Michael Craze's performance is solid, as he gets to show a more earnest side of Ben, notably when he tries to apologize to Jamie after reporting him to the guards in Episode Four.

Polly: It's her turn to be a glorified extra. Other than getting herself into trouble in Episode Two, which temporarily breaks Ben's conditioning, she basically stands around and provides the Doctor with someone to talk to as he works things out. Anneke Wills still tries, but where Polly has any character at all in this story, it's as a source of useless whimpering... Though the attempt to condition her does provide a good bit early in the serial, in which the Doctor urges her to always question rather than just mindlessly obeying.


THOUGHTS

Doctor Who does 1984, and the results are surprisingly excellent. The cheerful tyranny that is The Colony is expertly portrayed. With the uniform happiness that pervades the populace, the setting is downright eerie long before we see the monsters. This was the last of Ian Stuart Black's three Doctor Who scripts, and his best by a considerable margin. At 4 episodes, it fairly zips along. It establishes a tyrannical society that at the same time appears at a glance to be idyllic, and spends the first two episodes stripping away the facade to show the truth: The tyrants at the heart of The Colony are parasitic monsters - In this case, literally so!

We don't see much of the Macra in The Macra Terror. Which is a good thing, because the Macra themselves are pitiful - and, thanks to some censor clips, can be seen in all their very fake (even by 1960's Who standards) and artificial glory on the Lost in Time DVD set. The oversize, near-immobile Macra were not quite the last straw for the BBC's use of Shawcraft Models - but they certainly sped the way toward the company's dismissal from the BBC payroll, their association with Doctor Who lasting for only one serial after this. Looking at the existing footage, it's not at all hard to see why. The best thing that can be said for the Macra is that we rarely see them when they aren't obscured by gas and shadows.

Fortunately, the human monsters are a lot more effective than the mechanical ones. We see the friendly public faces of tyranny in the well-meaning Pilot and the image of the strong, confident Controller. The Pilot is a decent man, but he is strictly conditioned to obey Control without question. Meanwhile, the end of Episode Two and the start of Episode Three show us the reality behind the Controller's public image: a thin, frail man, seeming frightened and confused as he is used as a puppet by the Colony's true masters.

Though The Macra Terror benefits from an outstanding script, censor clips and telesnaps indicate that the original production was visually weak. Sets are bland and generic, and photographic evidence shows they were badly overlit as well. The ending is limp, with the Macra defeated by flipping a couple of switches, followed by a tacked-on tag (also trimmed, and made even weaker, in the animated release). These issues are balanced out by the strength of the overall story, excellent performances by the regulars, and an above-average guest cast.

Dudley Simpson's score is one of his most effective for the series. Harsh, atonal and machine-like, it creates a jarring atmosphere all on its own, bringing tension to scenes that otherwise would lack it. Of course, the serial is also notable for the introduction of the Troughton title sequence. I love these titles - they vie with the Season 11 Pertwee title sequence for my favorite of the entire series - but I am glad they adjusted the music after the first two episodes. The Hartnell theme, unaltered, simply doesn't mesh well with the Troughton graphics, and the sequence is a much stronger package after the score has been tweaked to match the visuals.

A weak production is trumped by an excellent story, further buoyed by a terrific score. Certainly one of the most ambitious stories of the Troughton era, it's also probably among his best... at least, as long as the monsters are kept off-screen.


Rating: 9/10.

The Macra Terror Missing Episode Notes

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