This is a good one. And that, as you’ll already be expecting if you know anything of the broadcast episodes’ reputation, means we have to talk about ‘Underworld’.

    You see, the TV story is regarded spectacularly poorly (3). It’s particularly notable for its ambitious, here used to mean not-particularly-successful, use of CSO (as the BBC called it; chroma key or green screen to the rest of the world and quite probably even to the BBC now), and that means that your first instinct when I praise the novelisation is most likely that ‘Underworld’, it turns out, is a perfectly good story as long as you can’t see it, which is pretty much the verdict on the broadcast episodes passed by Howe-Stammers-Walker (4). They, and (rhetorical) you, are wrong. The problem with ‘Underworld’ is that, as The Discontinuity Guide generously puts it, it’s ‘dullish’ (5), that, as Rob Shearman rather more pointedly puts it, it ‘feels so very tired’ (6), that, as About Time 4 pinpoints, the script is ‘Ugly, crass and moronic’ (7), and that, as Toby Hadoke concedes, the story isn’t really about very much (8).

    My first instinct when I found myself liking the novelisation was that Dicks must have leant heavily on the first broadcast episode, which I’ve always preferred to the other three, but that also turned out to be wrong. As can be seen from the below Hulkean graph:

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Part One does get a bit of a higher pagecount than the other episodes but, Dicks being Dicks, there’s no massive restructuring of the story’s structure.

    To decipher the success of Doctor Who and the Underworld, it’s necessary to pinpoint why ‘Underworld’ is so very dull and empty. Luckily, that work’s been done for me. In her coverage of ‘Underworld’, El Sandifer identifies the story as an exercise in pointlessness, a rewriting of Jason and the Argonauts with no ambition beyond resembling Jason and the Argonauts. To make matters worse, Jason and the Argonauts is a tale which offers little opportunity for ‘commentary […] on Britain of 1978’ (9). And it’s not, just to double down on this point, gained any relevance by 1980. Dicks, as far as I can see, doesn’t attempt to salvage anything from the retelling of the myth.

    Luckily, there’s more than one idea bubbling away in ‘Underworld’. Neglected though it is by Baker and Martin (nothing new according to Sandifer (10)), ‘Underworld’ also introduces the Minyans as a race who once worshipped the Time Lords as gods and reached their current, wretched state as a result. Here, rekindling the Terrance Dicks of The Planet of Evil, Doctor Who and the Mutants and, more recently, Doctor Who and the Robots of Death, is a story about a now-retreated colonial power and the wreckage left in their wake, something which offers a commentary on post-Second World War Britain regardless of the year (11).

    All of which finally gets us back to the start. Why is Doctor Who and the Underworld a good one? Because Dicks focuses in on the best idea the story has to offer and sharpens it up like no one’s business.

    First up, whilst the Time Lords view their imperial past as a product of ‘the best possible intentions’ (12) and a pure desire to ‘help’ (13), Dicks undermines their self-professed nobility by specifying ‘they decided to play god’, labelling them ‘self-satisfied’ (14) and hinting how vanity led them to adopt the role (15). Come the collapse of their rule, there’s no question that it’s anything but their fault, at best because they were blind to the discontent around them ‘until Minyan mobs surrounded their bases and began killing Time Lords’ (16), at worst because they’d attempted some kind of divide-and-rule policy – hinted at in talk of the ‘two opposing schools of thought’ amongst Minyans (17) – in which they lost ‘a dozen’ Minyans to every one they won over (18).

    The biggest kicker though is the Time Lords’ attitude after their dominion over Minyos has been broken. In the Time Lords own view, they deserve ‘credit’ for the fact ‘there was never any question of revenge’ (19) but their verdict at the time, in the words of ‘the President of the Council’, is a rather less benign pronouncement, stating only that it’s not ‘necessary’ to destroy the Minyans because ‘they will surely destroy themselves’ (20). These sound less like the words of a people with ‘the death of a planet on their consciences’ (21) and more like a people willing that destruction on so as to teach the Minyans a lesson for chucking them out, with ‘a policy of non-intervention’ simply allowing them to cleanse their hands of the whole thing when inevitably their ‘prophecy was very soon fulfilled’ (22).

    Of course, the point of all this is that what happens to the Minyans is all ‘Thanks to the Time Lords’ (23), something even the Gallifreyans come close to acknowledging: ‘they realised that the catastrophe was largely of their own making’ (24). Just to make sure his British readership gets the point, Dicks stresses how the Minyans were ‘Like Man’ (25), putting those readers in the place of the colonised (26). Now, all of this, it must be admitted, is pretty minimal, but getting kids, even fleetingly, to view postcolonial history as the fault of the ex-colonists or getting kids, even fleetingly, to imagine themselves as the colonised gives the story a purpose so lacking in its TV incarnation.

    Once Dicks moves beyond the first quarter of the novelisation, that surer footing he’s given the material from part one starts to pay real dividends. In a way that certainly never chimed with me on TV, the Oracle and the guards of the underworld parallel the Time Lords, with the Trogs the Minyans again under the yoke. Once more, the oppressed, ‘creatures […] despised’ by their oppressors are shown to be products of that oppression: ‘It never occurred to […] the […] Guards that generations of ill-treatment had made the Trogs what they were’ (27). Once more, the tyrant regime is undermined by its complacent sense that its rule is the natural order of things – ‘It had ruled for so long that it was unable to understand that […] it could fail’ (28) – so that, when the population rises against it, it can no longer reassert itself: the ‘Guards had been terrorising slaves for too long [and] lost their taste for real fighting’ (29). The colonialism of the Time Lords and the tyranny of the underworld are one and the same, such that the Doctor’s aside that ‘rational acceptance of defeat wasn’t a characteristic of dictators’ (30) acts not just as an observation on the Oracle’s response to the Minyan incursion but also as a commentary on the Time Lord’s confused statements following their eviction from Minyos.

    Of course, there are limits to how much of a repair job Doctor Who and the Underworld performs. As strong a statement as ‘empire and dictatorship are indistinguishable’ might be in post-war Britain, this firmly remains a story more concerned with the former colonial power than those whose lives it devastated. If, however, we squint hard enough so that only the barest contours of the story remain visible, the story does give the Minyans a little bit of attention. Here, the Minyans of the R1C, with all their Time Lord tech, represent the one in twelve who adopted their overlords’ ways (31), and the Trogs represent the other 92%. This time, rather than turning on each other, they come together to escape tyranny and head off for a new life. Only problem is, the crew of the R1C and the Trogs absolutely don’t come together, Jackson only even rescuing his descendants from an exploding planet at the Doctor’s insistence.

    Then there’s the detail that, if the audience is supposed to know the story of Jason and recognise this as the same (and Chapter 14 suggests Dicks, and Baker and Martin whose script is here faithfully recreate, want to make absolutely sure that the audience does), then is it also to be assumed that Jackson had a longer and trickier journey home ahead of him than he expects, that, on arriving home, he’ll find the regime he expects overthrown and his family assassinated and that, having manipulated Idas, the closest thing to assistance he found among the Trogs, into loving him, Jackson will betray his lover for political ambition, Idas will destroy everything Jackson loves, and Jackson will die, miserable and alone, when a bit of the R1C decays enough to fall off and decapitate him? That was a fine comeuppance for Jason, whose only ever motivation seemed to be political power, the same ambition that saw him betray Medea and so prompt his fall – but what’s Jackson ever done to deserve the same fate?

    Doctor Who may like to give the old empire a bit of a gentle ribbing, but it feels like it's going to be a long old road before it can commit itself to the Minyans’ side.