purplecat

You can tell it's Leela because she's holding a knife!


From the Doctor Who story Flashback from the 1979 annual.

I have always been rather taken with the idea of a kind of cross between a loin cloth and a tool belt in this story - though if I'm correct in thinking that one of those tools is a saw then it seems kind of risky in many ways. The text says:

"There were quite a few of the folk in the big metal room and they were unclothed except for a harness-like outfit comprising a broad metallic belt from which hung suspended a great variety of tool, some homely and recognisable, like screwdrivers and hammers, and some which by no stretch of the imagination, could he guess their use. There were men and women amongst them, and some children and he noted that even the children wore the belt with tools."

I note that the artist has chosen to clothe the woman present in a little more than just a belt and it's not even entirely clear whether she actually has tools on her belt.

Doctor Who annuals, necessarily constrained to telling very short stories aimed primarily at 10 year olds often written by people who have never seen the show, have a tendency towards the bland and a bit rubbish, occasionally enlivened with stuff that is a bit bonkers. The annuals in the late 1970s went for the bonkers end of the spectrum with enthusiasm which these days makes them far more interesting than many of the others. As a child I recall just being very bemused by both the story-telling and the artwork which seemed to bear relatively little relation to the show I loved.

I recall the above panel clearly. The Doctor has helped a group of apparently very nice men escape from a planet on which they were trapped, only for it to be revealed that once outside the special atmosphere of the planet they revert to psychotic monsters. This panel reveals them in their monstrous state (their psychosis is never actually shown to us, were are simply told they are also psychotic). The Doctor tricks them back down onto the planet by pretending to be stranded and, despite being (allegedly) psychotically evil, they return because of the debt they owe him. They are not happy to find themselves trapped once more and the Doctor (in a detail I missed as a child) weeps as he abandons them.

It's a difficult story. Even as a child I was concerned that the Doctor accepted so easily that these creatures must be evil and I do wonder if its trying to say something about assumptions that to be ugly is the same as to be evil (a message Doctor Who occasionally strays into, much as it also has stories that assert the opposite). Given the Doctor's tears at the end I wonder if the artist also had doubts about the message the story seemed to be conveying.

All that said, it has the merit of not being remotely bland.