Doctor Who: Frontier In Space (1973)

Dalek War

The centrepiece of the 10th anniversary season of Doctor Who was the two six-part stories that would later come to be known as the "Dalek War".

The opening salvo of this war comes in the form of the heavily padded Frontier In Space, which sees The Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) and Jo Grant (Katy Manning) drawn into a 25th Century Cold War that is rapidly heating up thanks to the intervention of an unknown third party.

It is 2450, 20 years since the last Earth-Draconian war (which began over a similar misunderstanding to the incident which sparked the Earth-Mimbari War in Babylon 5), and the peace that exists between the mighty empires of Earth and Draconia is being sorely tested by repeated raids on vessels from both sides.

The humans blame the reptilian Draconians and vice versa, but when the TARDIS materialises on an Earth-bound cargo ship, which is subsequently attacked by Ogron mercenaries, The Doctor realises someone else is trying to provoke a war.

Unfortunately, no one believes him because the Ogrons have been using a very sophisticated - too sophisticated for the brutish Ogrons - hypnotic device that makes others see them as "the thing they fear the most".

There's a lot of toing and froing, and even a whole side story where The Doctor is shipped off to a penal colony on the Moon that has no bearing on the main plot one iota, and it isn't until the Master (Roger Delgado) turns up - posing as an emmissary from a Sirius IV, and explains to Jo and The Doctor that he has hired the Ogrons to orchestrate the attacks at the behest of his own employers - that things begin to fall into place.

Yet, despite some great cuts to speed things up, the pace remains laboured and there is no escaping the fact that Frontier In Space could probably have been cut down to a two or three episode story and still delivered the salient plot points.

As well as several very drawn out scenes of people walking from one place to another, Malcolm Hulke's script also suffers from vast tracts of repetition; some of this is possibly for effect e.g. the dynamic of the Draconian Court mirrors that the Earth Government (a warmongering second-in-command egging a more thoughtful ruler towards war), but a lot of facts and exposition could easily have been trimmed without the viewers' understanding of the story suffering.

Despite the climatic appearance of The Master's employers - the daleks - this drawn-out tale can't be saved and the greatest tragedy is the hurried and jumbled exit of the magnificent Roger Delgado in the last episode, recut after his untimely death in a car crash in Turkey.

The array of aliens - Draconians, Ogrons and daleks - and the production values on Frontier In Space are fantastic, with the representatives of the Earth and Draconian Empires sporting some high quality threads.

However, while the Draconians are another potentially fascinating alien species - it's always nice to meet an alien race that isn't out to wipe mankind from the face of the Earth - even with six episodes for Malcolm Hulke to fill they don't really get room to develop.

The ending of Frontier In Space, with a wounded Doctor sending a telepathic message to the Time Lords via the TARDIS, segues into the next story: Planet Of The Daleks, the conclusion of the Dalek War mini-arc.