TV Club: Doctor Who, Planet Of Giants
Planet Of Giants (season 2, episodes 1-3. Originally aired Oct. 31-Nov. 14, 1964)
Maybe the most interesting thing about this one is what it isnt. As broadcast in 1964, Planet Of Giants is a respectable but not overly exciting artifact of the First Doctor era, talkier and duller than a single-sentence synopsis makes it sound: The TARDIS crew has to stop a murderer and avert an environmental holocaust while trying to survive in a world where theyve been shrunk to one inch high, menaced by ants that now seem as big as wolves. Its not lacking in ambitious ideas but never quite gels together, and a last-minute re-edit that condensed the original third and fourth episodes into one hurt the story more than it helped. (And I hardly need to point out the irony of that in a story about making the characters victims of traumatic miniaturization.) In the end, its something of an offbeat little curiosity, and not much more.
If history had gone a little differently, though, Planet Of Giants could have been a much bigger deal: It was supposed to have been Doctor Whos first trip. As originally planned, after being confronted by his granddaughters teachers Ian and Barbara in An Unearthly Child, the Doctor would have kidnapped them by unexpectedly dematerializing the TARDISonly to botch the takeoff and miniaturize them all. But the script fell through, so 100,000 B.C. went into production instead, followed by the unexpected blockbuster of The Daleks, and the rest was history.
So what? Well, I dont want to make too big a deal out of it, but its interesting to note that unlike about 99.9% of Doctor Who plots, Planet Of Giants doesnt involve time travel at all. Its set in the present day, and gets its science-fictional mojo not by jaunting into the past or the future, but sort of sideways. That physics-gone-crazy, our-magic-technology-is-actually-crazy-dangerous kind of story would become a minor but significant subset of Star Trek episodes, but Doctor Who never really got into it in a big way again, despite the original intentions of its creators. Its implied in the very name of the TARDIS, after all. The acronym describes how the ship travels: through Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. Most Doctor Who shows are about time. Planet Of Giants is one of very few thats about relative dimensions. If it had been produced in 1963 instead of 1964, it might have inspired more stories like it instead of being an anomaly.
Originally published Dec. 9, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.
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