Review of Underworld (#96)
DVD Release Date: 06 Jul 10
Original Air Date: 07 – 28 Jan 1978
Doctors/Companions: Four, Leela, K-9
Stars: Tom Baker, Louise Jameson, John Leeson
Preceding Story: The Sun Makers (Four, Leela, K-9)
Succeeding Story: The Invasion of Time (Four, Leela, K-9)

As I went back to my list of un-reviewed stories to determine which ones to use for the rest of this year’s Bad Reputation entries, I couldn’t help but think of others’ comments about the suitability of some of my previous selections. Thus I went searching for a second opinion.

What I found was a Best-to-Worst list on io9 complied in September 2015 by Charlie Jane Anders. Charlie is someone I know of from other SFF circles, and while I don’t agree with all of her rankings (e.g., my previous choice of The Creature from the Pit, which I think is quite bad, only ranks at #162 of 254 entries on the io9 list), I think at least in terms of broad groupings we’re on approximately the same page.

Since it was time to whittle down my Fourth Doctor backlog again, I perused the options and landed immediately on Underworld. Checking against Charlie’s rankings, I was glad to see it near the bottom, at #236 of 254 (right after The Power of Kroll at #235). I was certain no one would challenge my choice of this one as a stinker, but it’s nice to have an external measure as confirmation.

So what makes Underworld so putrid? If I were being generous, I’d say that the story is simply overly ambitious for the technology (and budget) available to the production team. It was filmed during the early days of CSO (Colour Separation Overlay)—actors were filmed against a blue screen, and superimposed on model sets—and the technique has, to say the least, not aged well. But even if you look beyond this version of “wobbly sets syndrome,” the story itself doesn’t quite work for me.

It is, as is made heavy-handedly clear in the last minute or so of the final episode, a retelling of the tale of Jason and the Quest for the Golden Fleece. (As someone not familiar enough with that story to figure out the connection myself, I appreciated the first oblique reference as a way to clue me in. However, the overbearing dialog that followed to hammer the point home really put me off.) Perhaps if I’d realized (remembered) that from the get-go, I’d have found the name of the race of people whom the Doctor and Leela arrived to help (the Minyans, from Minyos) a clever nod rather than another Doctor Who name to roll off my back.

Plenty of other parallels exist, if you know (or care) to look for them, but without that context, there is nothing particularly interesting about the 100,000-year-old crew flying through space to complete their Quest and find the race banks sent out on a previous ship to preserve their race. It’s a common enough SF trope that without that anvil-to-the-head about the inspiration for the story, I didn’t find it remarkable, or even particularly engaging.

What really put me off, though, was (surprise!) the bad science. The eponymous planet is one that has supposedly formed around the lost ship P7E, inside a “spiral nebula” where a brand new planetary system is being born. As the questers’ ship plunges into the nebula, debris accretes to the ship, supposedly burying them alive as the “much larger” ship’s gravitational force pulls in big enough chunks to stall the ship’s engines and trap it under an ever-increasing sphere of material.

I’m not even going to run any numbers to show how absurd it is to think that something the size of a spaceship is massive enough to attract lumps of matter maybe a hundredth its mass to it through gravity. It would only make me madder. Suffice to say, gravity is the weakest of the four basic forces of nature, and that stuff was way more likely to be pulled in by something like a static electric charge.

That was not the only place where I just sat shaking my head at the screen in dismay. At one point I jotted down, “This story despises Newtonian physics. What did Newton ever do you you?” I know this is science fiction (or, some might say, science fantasy), but even the made up stuff has to make some sort of sense. I can get behind a “dimensionally transcendental” TARDIS interior, because that’s completely outside of human experience, and once the idea was introduced, it hasn’t been (at least not significantly) changed—the story remains internally consistent. But when a writer ignores well-established physical principles like gravity, it really pulls me out of the story.

So I suppose if you’re someone who is more familiar with Greek mythology (and less familiar with gravitational physics) than I am, this story might only be mildly off-putting to you because of the early CSO, and possibly some other trope-y aspects of the society of the Underworld. I’m willing to believe that perhaps this one isn’t at the bottom of the barrel for everyone. For me, though, it’s a concept that really underperforms in its execution, and I’ll be burying at the bottom of the vault again for a good long while.