On Mar 3, UK Doctor Who fans will finally get to watch Season 7 on Blu-ray. This is one season that fans have been eager to see released as part of Doctor Who: The Collection for a long time. In some ways, it’s very different compared to most other eras of Who. It feels a little bit darker, and the stories feature a surprising mix of grittiness, paranoia, and moral complexity. It’s not just extremely different compared to other Doctor’s eras – it’s extremely different to the very next season, which felt lighter and featured more traditional stories of good versus evil.
Of course, Season 7 stands out because it’s so different. It’s an extremely strong season, despite featuring only four stories, even with a combined total of 25 episodes. The reason for this is that while the opening story “Spearhead from Space” is told in the typical four-part format, the remaining three serials – “Doctor Who and the Silurians”, “The Ambassadors of Death”, and “Inferno” – are seven episodes long each.
This was quite a bold choice for this season. It can be difficult enough to tell a story across six episodes. A seven-part story was rare, and to have three of them in one season was a big risk. While not all three were successful, two of them are perfect examples of the seven-part format.
Turning points
Some seven-parters work because of a clear turning point in the story, something that radically changes things. For example, with the First Doctor serial “The Daleks”, while still a slow-paced story, the serial makes the wise choice of splitting the story into two clear sections.
The first section – comprising the serial’s first four episodes – focuses on the Doctor and his companions trying to escape from the city of the Daleks while suffering from radiation sickness. This section ends with the crew having escaped the city, but realizing that they’ve left a vital piece of the TARDIS behind. The remaining three episodes focuses on the TARDIS crew trying to sneak into the city before the Daleks exterminate all non-Dalek life on Skaro.
“The Silurians” reverses this. The first three episodes builds up to the first full appearance of the Silurians. During this time, the story develops nicely by building a sense of mystery, establishing the characters – especially Dr. Quinn, who’s using the Silurians to gain knowledge and power – and gradually building up the Silurians as a race more complex than most monsters.
The story takes a major turn after episode 3, where we finally see a Silurian for the first time. The remaining four episodes build up the tensions between the Silurians and the humans, each seeing themselves as Earth’s true dominant inhabitants. There’s a gradual sense of escalation throughout these four episodes, especially when a plague spreads across humankind. Because of the key turning point – and the fact that the story is filled with moral complexity and rich, believable characters, both human and non-human – “The Silurians” is a story that never feels slow or padded.
The seven-parter that doesn’t work
The success of “The Silurians” and its use of the seven-part format is highlighted further by the very next story, “The Ambassadors of Death”. In some ways, this story is a great fit for this season. It has paranoia, conspiracies, and of course, it’s told in the seven-part format.
However, it also feels like a good example of when the seven-part format doesn’t quite work. The story has a lot of great moments as well as a few twists and turns. But it also feels padded, with a final twist that should’ve been explored much sooner.
A key reason for this is that the story underwent a lot of rewrites, and the final product lacks cohesion as a result. It’s an entertaining watch, but it’s arguably the one seven-part story this season that doesn’t quite work.
One story inside another
However, while “Ambassadors” doesn’t quite work as a seven-part story, “Inferno” definitely does. In some ways, it takes a similar approach to “The Silurians” and “The Daleks”: two distinct sections, one formed by three parts and the other by four. But while “The Silurians” told those sections sequentially, “Inferno” does something different – it wraps one story around another.
The first two episodes focuses on Project Inferno, an incredibly ambitious drill project that aims to reach the Earth’s core and harness its rich energies. In the process, a green ooze is unleashed, transforming humans into violent monsters.
Long before the drill reaches its destination, the Doctor finally gets the TARDIS console working again. But instead of transporting him to another planet, it takes him to another dimension. One where the drill project is much more advanced, and one where he has no friends or allies to help him prevent apocalyptic disaster.
“Inferno” is an absolutely brilliant story and one of the very best from Jon Pertwee’s run. Having the parallel Earth story in the middle is a perfect use of the seven-part format, especially as we get to see what happens when disaster strikes and the parallel Earth is destroyed. Bringing the Doctor back home in the final episode – and this time, seeing him prevent disaster successfully – is a great way of ending the serial. As I said, it really does feel like one story wrapped around another.
It can be difficult to tell a Doctor Who story with seven episodes, and yet it somehow works for the show’s seventh season. Even with “Ambassadors” – the one story that doesn’t quite use the format successfully – we’re still given an entertaining story, at least.
It wasn’t a format that Doctor Who could use all the time. Indeed, after this season, we mostly saw a mix of four-parters and six-parters. But the seven-part serial is just one more way that Season 7 stands out. And I look forward to watching each of those stories again when they’re finally released on Blu-ray.