REVIEW: Pyramids of Mars

Sutekh: badass

When I was growing up with Doctor Who, I used to have a rule of thumb: if it didn't have Daleks or Cybermen in it, it would never be as good as it could be. Sontarans and Zygons got a special pass, but beyond that I would tend to relegate a story to the pile of "good because it's Doctor Who, but not that good." Of course, as I have got older, I've come to recognise that some of the best stories had no traditional monsters in them at all - but even through childlike eyes, I was able to see that Pyramids of Mars was a fantastic serial.

I like to think the Doctor purloined Namin's fez
for later use in his 11th incarnation

Pyramids is firmly set in what has come to be known as the "Hinchcliffe Gothic" era of Who. We've got shifty foreigners, strange goings on in a creepy manor house and Egyptian mummies running wild in the forest. Something's not right, and the Doctor is here to find out what. But what makes Pyramids more than a simple horror yarn is that it manages to present an overarching threat with potentially devastating cosmic consequences in a thoroughly rural setting with a very small cast of characters. This is precisely the kind of story that Doctor Who does at its best: no magical powers, no Doctor Against The Whole Universe, but at the same time a very real menace and a story that bounds along with good humour, other-worldliness and a healthy dose of terror.

Sarah Jane Smith: the Amish years

The Doctor and Sarah Jane are not actually the first characters we see, in what is a rather surprising opening for a Who serial. Instead we have a scene that could have been taken directly out of The Exorcist, with Marcus Scarman uncovering a lost tomb in Egypt. Personally, if I stumbled into a tomb and the wall started glowing red, I might think twice about digging further, but this doesn't seem to put Prof. Scarman off. After he's been blasted with a dose of the green stuff, we cut to a classic "TARDIS in distress" scene with Tom Baker and Liz Sladen doing their best fall-all-over-the-floor acting. Next thing we know, they've landed on Earth at U.N.I.T. HQ but many decades in the past. In its place is a strange manor house, filled with sarcophagi and loud organ music. It turns out that Sutekh, last of the Osirans, is trapped inside the very tomb unearthed by Scarman, who has by now become Sutekh's mind-controlled slave. He, with the aid of some peculiar service robots that look like Egyptian mummies, is trying to free Sutekh by building a missile to destroy the pyramid on Mars which is keeping Sutekh imprisoned.

Osiran Service Robot, codename "Beefcake"

Now, about those mummies. While they do provide a reasonable amount of menace, it has to be said that they do look a bit weird. Why have they got such a big chest? OK, so it's probably the robot's central motor, but if it's meant to look like a walking cadaver, it's not very convincing. It would have been scarier if the robot mummies looked like, well, mummies. Plus, when the Doctor gets Sarah Jane to wrap him up in the bandages of a deceased robot so he can disguise himself, he somehow also acquires one of these giant chests. Still, it does give us the wonderful line "I shall mingle with the mummies, but I shan't linger."

"Oh, you brought the gift of death! You really shouldn't have..."

One other curiosity is the shape of the mummies' faces. They seem to have the same shape as the headgear that Scarman wears shortly before he sends poor Ibrahim Namin off to an untimely death - and us into a sinister cliffhanger. I think that face design bears a passing resemblance to the Ice Warriors' helmets, which is a nice touch if it was deliberate, given that both have apparently originated on Mars. An Ice Warrior would never get his foot stuck in a poacher's trap, however.

Scarman hasn't got much of a tan for spending so long in Cairo

The casting for Pyramids is splendid. Bernard Archard puts in a deliciously evil turn as the Sutekh-controlled Scarman, and Who regular Michael Sheard is a great counterpoint as Scarman's lovable brother Laurence. His childlike glee on entering the TARDIS is wonderful, making his death at the hands of his own brother all the more upsetting. Even those who don't last much beyond the first episode, like Peters Mayock and Copley as Namin and Warlock respectively, light up the screen. Copley's look of sheer terror as he is murdered by the service robot mummy is really blood-curdling. Poacher Ernie Clements (George Tovey, father of Roberta from the Cushing films) has a good few scenes, particularly where he discovers the deflection shield - itself a genius idea, so simple, totally believable and, best of all, cost-free! It's a shame Clements has to die such an ignominious death.

I mean... just... no, I don't know what they were
thinking when they choreographed this

The real star of the show, though, has to be Gabriel Woolf. His Sutekh voice is so perfectly pitched: rich, velvety evil with a hint of mischief underscored by a very serious timbre of dark, deep power. It's a testament to Woolf's abilities that he is able to imbue Sutekh with such great character in spite of barely being able to move and having to wear a head-encasing mask. He projects a threat that makes us really believe Sutekh is as powerful as the Doctor says he is. We've all heard the Doctor go on about how terrible such-and-such a villain is, but they're rarely as convincing in their evilness as Sutekh is.

I find that good.

Pyramids reinforces the now well-established fact in the Who universe, that once the Doctor becomes part of a timeline, he cannot simply leave on the assumption that all will be right in the end. Sarah Jane says that Sutekh can't possibly win because she's from 1980 and the world didn't end in 1911. To prove a point, the Doctor takes her to 1980, as it would be if they don't do anything to stop Sutekh. It's a chilling moment, but very well done.

Thatcher's Britain, apparently

Sarah Jane has a good outing in this story. She gets to wear a slightly less ludicrous outfit that goes with the period (and has a nice reference to Victoria Watling, a Troughton-era companion). She nearly gets strangled - in a close up that, to be honest, goes on for too long - and then manages to get her own back by blowing the mummies and their rocket to smithereens with a box of gelignite and a rifle. Who knew Sarah was such a sharpshooter? I really like the moment when she fires the rifle and, as Sutekh holds back the explosion, she hisses "I know I hit it!" as if it's an insult to her marksmanship. She also acts as a stable, humanising influence throughout the story. Perhaps because the Doctor is facing down a particularly horrific foe, his own alienness is emphasised, leaving Sarah to emote the grief at how people are dying all around them.

Not just a screamer

Pyramids is by no means a perfect story. It's unclear, for example, why Sutekh projects his face into the TARDIS at the beginning, drawing it to 1911 in the first place. Furthermore, once he has regained his freedom, there seems to be no justifiable reason for Sutekh to decide to go through the time corridor to the manor house. If he's free, why doesn't he just destroy Earth from Cairo? Also, if he's as powerful as the Doctor says he is, why does he even need to use the time corridor - surely a demi-god like Sutekh could just transport himself wherever he wanted to go? Then there's the rather silly 'puzzles' that the Doctor and Sarah have to solve in order to reach the heart of the pyramid on Mars. They're pathetically easy, and even the scriptwriters seem to know how much they're cribbing from Death to the Daleks, as Sarah says herself "ooh, this is just like City of the Exxilons!" The final insult is Sutekh's real face. His mask is a thing of beauty, a real work of art for which the design department at the Beeb should be duly proud. His dog head underneath it is just awful. I don't know why, having built up the character to this point, they saw a need to take his mask off - but if they really felt that was necessary, it should have revealed something truly terrifying, not a skinny necked bat-dog-thing.

Woof!

Really, though, these are cosmetic complaints. Pyramids of Mars is one of the very best Doctor Who stories and definitely high in the top ten for the Baker era. With such strong performances from the cast, it hardly ages at all.

That just leaves one, nagging little concern... why, exactly, was there a living human hand underneath Sutekh's bum for all those years of imprisonment?

No wonder he was cross...