"We have learned to control our past"

As someone who’s never quite got ‘The Curse of Peladon’, the first thing I did on reading the novelisation was pettily pick up on how Hayles seizes on the range of colours available to him now he’s not writing for colour television, detailing Alpha Centauri’s ‘iridescent turquoise body’ (3) and the way he changes colour to reflect his mood (4). That said, this is actually a key part of Hayles’s emphasis on the alienness of the characters - Alpha Centauri is ‘single-footed like a sea anemone’ and ‘strangely beautiful’; Arcturus resembles ‘a robot rather than an alien life-form’ and is seemingly composed of ganglions suspended in fluid (5) - and extends to their attitudes towards each other: Centauri feels ‘an indescribable feeling of unease’ looking upon Arcturus. It’s no surprise that Jo’s initial reaction to the ‘bizarre parade of alien forms’ is to find it ‘all too much’ (6), and that she feels an, admittedly unfortunate, comfort in the company of the Pels because ‘At least this lot look human...’ (7).

    This, of course, is the whole point of Doctor Who and the Curse of Peladon. Hayles is picking up the slack between Malcolm Hulke novelisations and focusing squarely on xenophobia, actually going one step further and implicating the Doctor in the prejudice that Hulke’s stories have been keen to highlight. Where Jo instinctively viewed the Ice Warriors as simply ‘massive and threatening’, the Doctor has a whole preconceived notion of their race to work with as he immediately labels Izlyr and Ssorg prime suspects. Based on ‘When I knew them before’ (8) he knows they are ‘a ruthless and warlike race’ with ‘one aim—conquest’ (9), regardless of how these delegates actually behave.

​    Nicely, there’s never any suggestion that the Doctor might be right. Despite the clues that implicate the Ice Warriors in the murders and attempted murders, the Doctor is undermined from the start by the way Jo is already changing her mind about them, first just to herself (‘Jo wasn’t at all sure that the Doctor was right’) and then by actually challenging him (‘you’re always telling me to look for the good qualities in alien life forms’). The Doctor’s blind assertions are never allowed to appear an understandable mistake and the novelisation ensures he comes off looking bad for it. He can’t even bring himself to apologise, Jo having to do it for him (10).

    This allows the plot to rely on the Pels’ fear of the alien to create all the problems of the story without coming across as patronising or sneering. These are forces for ill that exist within society and need to be guarded against by everyone including the Doctor. In fact, the people of Peladon seemingly could not have been prompted through simple blind fear of anything alien, Hepesh having to stoke superstitious fears that ‘the young king was possessed, invaded by the alien evil’ (11) to prompt a popular uprising, suggesting their instinctively less prejudiced than the Doctor. Indeed, they haven’t ever feel any desire to rise up before despite the alien queen who brought such foreign concepts to Peladon as ‘justice, compassion—and love’ (12) and planted ‘the seeds of change’ in ‘the royal bloodline’ of the planet (13).

    Hepesh himself is less sympathetic. He did hate King Pel’s mother and that short sentence wrapping up his reminisce of her – ‘She was dead now’ – even hints he may have done something about it. There is also a hypocrisy to his manipulation of the people through Aggedor, treating ‘the Royal Beast as though it were a common cur, yet all the time revering its holy image as all-powerful’ (14), and his contortions becomes so complicated that he even confuses himself, at once proclaiming that Aggedor ‘is not the Royal guardian—it is a common animal’ before asserting his control over the very beast he claims to be an alien plant and shouting ‘Aggedor—kill!’ (15).

    What’s more, it turns out he’s simply a fool who’s been easily manipulated by Arcturus (16). All his talk of how the Federation will ‘exploit us for our minerals, enslave us with their machines, corrupt us with their glittering technology’(17) turns out to be not a product of his loyalty to Peladon’s traditions nor of his insight into the difficulties of fair industrial relations between a pseudo-feudal hovel and a technologically empowered interplanetary alliance but just of him crediting the words of one alien over those of some others.

​    Which is a shame. When the Doctor celebrates how ‘Federation technology would mean that cultural and social advances normally taking a thousand years could now be achieved in less than a century’ (18), you can’t help but remember how he told off the big Dæmon for just this kind of thing a few books ago. Hepesh’s fight against modernity could have had a point beyond just ‘a fanatical love of the past’ (19) which sees city life as slavery and civilisation as zombification (20), it could have been about how progress adopted from outside feels much the same as colonisation. Hepesh believes Arcturus’s talk of exploitation and enslavement because it tallies with his sense of what modernity means: ‘The face of this planet will be changed. The past will be swept away! […]  Nothing that I know, or value, will remain’. If the forces of progress view everything he values about Peladon as worthless, they may as well be viewing it as nothing more than a rock with indigenous labour.

    The problem could have been that Hepesh is right to remind everyone that ‘Our roots are in the past’ (21) and it would be wrong to sever Peladon’s future from them. Torbis is actually in accord when he says ‘The past […] had to change, to evolve’ (22) but, in demanding ‘it should happen soon’, he’s rushing it. This makes some sense of Alpha Centauri’s odd pronouncement that ‘We have learned to control our past’ (23) – he means that they have learnt to manage the social and political forces that used to lead to ‘war and violence’ (24). But Peladon has not learnt and is seeking a shortcut to this progress. When King Pel asks ‘How can we raise ourselves from the Dark Ages without help?’ (25), he is in fact revealing that Peladon is not ready to join the planets that form the Federation because it has not yet come to terms with its own past and moved forward by itself.

    Were the story to end with the recognition that Peladon still needed more time before it could join the Federation, this would have paid off the fears expressed by Hepesh and his followers. They would still have been wrong in what they did but their motives would have been a valid counterargument to Torbin and the king. Instead, Hayles just ends up suggesting patriotism makes you more credulous and easier to manipulate with a pack of lies while progress is best achieved simply by putting blind faith in those more technologically advanced than yourselves to haul you down the route of progress.

    So it’s not all good, Doctor Who and the Curse of Peladon. But it’s still a victory for Hulke, especially off the back of his tortured attempts to do something similar in Doctor Who and the Sea-Devils. Modernity might still look unfortunately imperial but Doctor Who is none-the-less firmly on the side of progress, xenophobia and fanatical nostalgia are the clear enemies and even the Doctor has had to confront the hard lesson that alien appearance does not automatically equal monster. This is, if flawed, a nice bit of evidence for the lasting victories won by the Pertwee era just as Doctor Who on TV leaves its visible UNIT trappings behind. The show might return to the pre-Pertwee set-up, and perhaps never more so than in Part One of ‘The Ark in Space’, but its ethical stance won’t.