Creature From the Pit is good in places.
Creature From the Pit concerns a Pit. At the bottom of the Pit there lurks a Creature. The Creature spends three episodes being monstrous and (apparently) devouring victims; but in the final instalment it turns out to be a sophisticated alien ambassador. The monster is the real victim and the humans are the real monsters.
It’s not the worst idea I have ever heard. Neither, admittedly, is it the most original.
It’s the kind of thing someone who had never seen Doctor Who might have come up with. There are monsters and villains and cliffhangers. It’s nominally science fiction, but it inhabits a kind of fairy tale Ruritania where guards are endlessly being told to seize people and comedic bandits lurk in the woods. But David Fisher had written several perfectly good Doctor Who scripts (including the explicitly Ruritanian Androids of Tara). One would have thought he had a fairly good idea of how Doctor Who worked. In particular you might have expected him to understand the limitations of Doctor Who’s special effects technology.
I mean, honestly: gigantic alien brains, as huge as buildings?
With tentacles?
That weave metal cocoons around neutron stars?
Have you met the BBC visual effects department?
Creature from the Pit is quite silly. At the end of Episode One the Doctor jumps into The Pit; in Episode Two he is discovered hanging onto the side with one arm. He takes a book out of his pocket. We can’t see the title, so he reads it for us: Everest in Easy Stages: He opens it: “It’s in Tibetan”. Then he pulls another book out of his pocket. This time we can see the cover. Teach Yourself Tibetan.
It’s a bit like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan. Doesn’t Koko in the Mikado open a letter and exclaim “It’s in Japanese!” And it follows a kind of Marx Brothers logic. Remember the scene in Animal Crackers when Chico is going to apprehend the art thieves by questioning everyone in the house next door? “But there is no house next door.” “Then we’re a-gonna build a-one!”
On the other hand, it’s a fine piece of comic acting. Tom Baker has always been fond of delivering very serious lines in a light hearted way: and talking about trivia as if the fate of the universe depended on it. Throughout the scene, he acts as if he really is dangling over a pit with a monster at the bottom of it; he is slightly panicked as he tries to juggle two books with one hand, while hanging on for dear life with the other.
And the Doctor can canonically pull funny things out of his pocket. Remember in Stones of Blood how he just happened to have a lawyers wig when called on to defend himself? (Remember Harpo Marx’s swordfish in Horse Feathers? Baker’s curly hair and idiot grin was sometimes likened to Harpo.) I assume there is a six disc Big Finish boxed set in which the Doctor finds an orphan TARDIS and its chameleon circuit gets jammed in the form of a dimensionally transcendental jacket. Or perhaps the Doctor always nips into the future before an adventure and stocks his pockets with things he is likely to need.
But, but, but: why can’t he understand the text of the book? (Fan-fiction idea: "How the Great Intelligence arranged that Tibetan should be the one language opaque to the Time Lord telepathic translation gift”?) But if he can’t, how can he read the title? And can he really absorb that much information that quickly? And would a book on climbing mountains really help him to get out of a pit?
It’s a sight gag. Something has to happen while the Doctor dangles, and it might as well be this. I wonder if an earlier script had him remark that he learned mountain-climbing from a charming chap named Tenzin Norgay, and Douglas Adams substituted the mountaineering book because it was funnier?
Creature from the Pit contains literally the worst monster ever to appear on Doctor Who: and that is saying a good deal. The Creature is intended to be a giant green brain with tentacles. It looks like, and presumably was, some extras jumping up and down in a large green polythene bag. After this story, tentacles were informally banned from Doctor Who. There is no satisfactory way of not making them ridiculous. Wires? Some sort of sock puppet arrangement? Static props that the actors manipulate themselves? CGI was far in the future, so stop motion would have been the only way to go.
And there is no nice way of saying this: they look like willies. Most Doctor Who websites are surprisingly coy about this point. “The phallic appearance of the creature’s proboscis,” they write. “It resembled a giant phallus.” If you only know the story by reputation, you will be surprised at just how much like a man’s cock it actually looks. The joke is clearly not lost on Tom Baker, who has a lovely time seeing what he can get away with. At the beginning of Episode Three, he tries to communicate with the creature—which doesn’t have a mouth, or ears, or a head. He tries to put the tentacle in his mouth, talk into it, then puts it to his ear as if he were using an old-fashioned telephone. Or, if we are being honest, as if he were fellating it.
But it isn’t really the double entendre which is the problem. The problem is that the Doctor used to be clever. In Planet of Evil and Pyramids of Mars he was almost godlike. And, now here he is, sucking tentacles and climbing out of pits using a phrase book. If the creature’s appendage had looked less like a dick and more like, say, an ear, the scene would be scarcely less absurd.
But here is the thing.
The scene in which Tom Baker sucks alien foreskin is unforgivable; he and Matt Irvine ought to be ashamed of themselves. But what makes it worse is that it comes at the end of a scene which perfectly encapsulates everything which made me fall in love with Doctor Who in the first place. I am not here talking about elusive magic in the nostalgic sense. I am talking about Tom Baker, the benevolent alien, facing down a huge and terrifying monster—and treating it as if it were a terrified child. “I am not going to hurt you…how could I hurt you.” In the same episode, Lalla Ward has essentially to give her lines to a tin-box (the immobile K9) and she can’t do it with any conviction. But we can almost believe that the giant green sleeping bag is a strange alien life form, because, in that moment, Tom Baker seems to. It’s theatre; conceptual art: we respond to the idea, not the execution: that this man, this alien, this, if you insist, Time Lord, is treating a gigantic man-eating brain as if it were a rescue puppy. Other actors have played the Doctor. There were some months in 2011 when I was genuinely in love with Matt Smith. But it is this actor, this persona, and these kinds of scenes that makes Doctor Who such a core part of my identity.
Is Creature from the Pit bad? No: it’s like the proverbial curate’s egg. If the curate’s egg had been as big as a house, fitted with a proton drive and capable of weaving aluminium shells around neutron stars.