Doctor Who: Carnival of Monsters

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Carnival of Monsters is the second serial of Doctor Who Season 10, originally broadcast in four episodes from 27 January to 17 February 1973. It was written by Robert Holmes and directed by Barry Letts. It stars Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor, Katy Manning as Jo Grant, Leslie Dwyer as Vorg, and Cheryl Hall as Shirna.

The Doctor and Jo land on the SS Bernice, a 1926 ship stuck in a time loop, and slowly discover they are inside a “miniscope,” a travelling peepshow run by the cheerful Vorg and his partner Shirna on the planet Inter Minor. While stiff officials argue over rules and authority, dangerous Drashigs break loose inside the machine, threatening to burst into the real world.

Episode 1

The TARDIS lands in a wood-panelled lounge aboard the S.S. Bernice, a 1920s liner steaming through the Indian Ocean. The Doctor and Jo meet genial Major Daly, his sharp-eyed daughter Clare, and First Officer Andrews: everyone polite, nobody quite noticing the odd jumps in conversation. A bell rings; a steward knocks; a sea monster surges; then the same bell rings again.

Time seems to “tick back” a few minutes and replay. The Doctor tests the edges of the ship and finds no horizon: fog that behaves like glass. Elsewhere, on the colourless world of Inter Minor, showfolk Vorg and Shirna roll in a gaudy machine and try to charm a clutch of xenophobic officials (Pletrac, Kalik, and Orum) into granting an entertainment licence. Vorg calls his device a “miniscope,” a living peepshow of alien scenes.

The Inter Minor authorities sniff about contagion and morals; Kalik privately sees political opportunity. On the Bernice, Jo spots a sudden, impossible ripple in the air like a fingerprint on glass. The plesiosaur rises, roars, and the deck resets again. The Doctor drops a fork and watches it “reappear” in his hand. They are specimens, he decides, trapped in a loop inside someone’s machine. If so, a door exists. If so, it can be found.

Episode 2

The Doctor pries up a deck grille and drops into pulsing “machinery” that isn’t ship’s plumbing at all. He and Jo squeeze along a service crawl, peering through tiny windows into other scenes: an Ogron boarding party on a brutalist freighter, a swamp where something huge ploughs through reeds. Each tableau stutters, loops, and resets on a fixed beat.

On Inter Minor, Vorg demonstrates to the officials: twist a dial and the “Tellurians” on the liner panic charmingly. Shirna juggles patter while Pletrac frets about permits, and Kalik whispers to Orum about scandal. A power dip flickers the exhibits; the miniscope coughs. Inside, the Doctor and Jo fall out of the crawl into the swamp segment and meet the owners of the roar: Drashigs: vast, blind, scent-hunting worms whose appetite is legend.

The pair sprint for a relay door and tumble into the Ogron segment; blaster fire ricochets; the loop pulls everyone back to start. Jo’s scarf snags, leaving a trace from swamp to crawlspace. The Doctor makes the connection: they are inside the proscribed miniscope he once helped have banned. He must find the “access hatch” while the Drashigs home in on Jo’s scent. Above, Vorg spins the gain to keep the audience amused. The walls begin to sweat.

Episode 3

Kalik sabotages the miniscope’s safeguards to force a “malfunction” that will disgrace the President and clear his path to power. The machine surges. Drashigs break their loop, smash through a thin section of casing, and thrust questing maws into the gallery. Inter Minor’s auto-guards stutter uselessly; Pletrac shrieks about protocols; Shirna drags terrified clerks under benches.

Inside, the Doctor improvises a lure: he lights oily rag smoke, lets the Drashigs follow, and doubles back to the crawl that leads to an interface seam now shivering with raw light. He dives, and drops out of the miniscope onto the exhibition floor. Vorg gapes; the Doctor snaps that this device is illegal and every creature inside must be returned to its proper space-time or die.

Meanwhile Jo, separated in the chaos, is flung back to the S.S. Bernice segment as the loop falters and crewmen finally notice time’s wrongness. On Inter Minor, Kalik whips the crowd, “proves” alien dangers, and prepares to unleash the escaped Drashigs through the building to spark a coup. The Doctor rifles Vorg’s toolkit, rattling off circuits: matter compression, feedback, re-integration. If they can lure the Drashigs back into the scope and seal it, he can purge the system: if it doesn’t explode first.

Episode 4

The Drashigs rampage through corridors, following heat and smell; Kalik steps forward to claim the moment and is swallowed mid-speech. Panic breaks the chamber. The Doctor rigs Vorg’s hand-cranked “feed” into a sonic lure that mimics prey; Shirna cranks like fury while Pletrac hides behind regulations. One by one the Drashigs recoil, pivot, and plunge their heads back into the ragged breach.

The Doctor slams in the repaired compression module; the casing knits; the monsters vanish into their swamp. Now the hard part: free every environment without tearing anything. He sets a recombination loop that will unwind each “miniscope circuit” to its home instant. Inside, Jo watches the Bernice finally run past its snag: the plesiosaur surfaces once, then is gone; time flows like water again. The Doctor throws the master lever. Lights blaze; the scope empties; the cabinet dies with a contented sigh.

On Inter Minor, the coup deflates. Pletrac regains his dignity; Vorg is fined, forgiven, and quickly starts a friendly wager game using the Doctor’s sonic to “improve” the odds. Jo bursts from the TARDIS, breathless and laughing, as the ship stands once more on a real quayside. The Doctor tips goodbyes to Shirna, eyes twinkling, and dematerialises. Somewhere at sea, the S.S. Bernice steams on: unaware it was ever a show.

Themes

Playful, nimble, and ruthlessly inventive, Carnival of Monsters proves that post-exile Doctor Who can be witty as well as weighty. It trades the multidoctor spectacle of The Three Doctors for a sparkling puzzle-box and lands confidently alongside idea-led standouts like Day of the Daleks and Colony in Space.

It isn’t as apocalyptic as Inferno or as folkloric as The Dæmons, nor as operatic as the two-parter epic to come, Frontier in Space/Planet of the Daleks; but in sheer craft (tight structure, brisk pace, and sly satire) it sits in the era’s upper tier. As a showcase for the newly liberated TARDIS, it’s a joyous proof-of-concept for the Third Doctor’s renewed wanderlust.

Link-wise, it sits perfectly between rehabilitation and escalation. Coming straight after The Three Doctors, it’s the first true “freedom flight” of the era, with the Doctor promising Jo a jaunt to Metebelis III. This is a thread that pays off when he finally acquires the blue crystal in The Green Death and meets his fate in Planet of the Spiders.

Its media-and-bureaucracy satire prefigures later Robert Holmes barbs and chimes with the political bite seen in The Ambassadors of Death and The Sun Makers, while its miniaturised peril and layered narratives echo forward to experiments like The Invisible Enemy and, much later, Into the Dalek. By closing its puzzle neatly and stepping back into the cosmos, Carnival of Monsters lightens the season before the heavy diplomacy of Frontier in Space and the jungle war of Planet of the Daleks.

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This is a chapter from Craig Hill’s book “Doctor Who – The Third Doctor”, chronicling every episode featuring the Third Doctor. It is available on Amazon.

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