YMMV / Doctor Who S9 E4 "The Mutants"

• Complete Monster: The Marshal is a petty tyrant who nevertheless stands out through sheer depravity. A ruthless, hot-tempered, trigger-happy colonial overlord, the Marshal reigns over the planet Solos, whose natives are prematurely mutating. Abusing his position, the Marshal treats the natives with contempt, hunting the mutants for sport, as well as regularly gloating how pathetic, disgusting and diseased they are. Upon learning the humans are turning the planet back over to the Solonians, leaving him without his position of power, he arranges the murder of his superior, the only man who knows this, then personally murders his own assassin, framing the innocent dissident Ky. Angered by the Doctor's interference, the Marshal attempts to kill him by sealing him in an cavern, along with Jo, Ky and two of his own soldiers, Stubbs and Cotton, then tries to gas them all. He also leads the slaughter of Varan and his fellow Solonians when they attempt to mount a rebellion, and personally shoots Stubbs In the Back for trying to warn his superiors of his treachery. To ensure his dominion continues, the Marshal attempts to alter Solo's atmosphere, thus wiping out the entire Solonian population in order for it to be repopulated by human colonists with him as their ruler.
• Moral Event Horizon: The Marshal crosses this when he attempts to murder his own soldiers without showing remorse.
• Narm:
  • Everyone, including Jon Pertwee, has compared the ragged, bearded fugitive in the opening scene to the "It's" man from Monty Python's Flying Circus.
  • Ev-er-y - line - spo-ken - by - Cot-ton - e-spe-ci-a-lly - the - cliff-hang-er - at - the - end - of - ep-is-ode - five - it's - like - they - cast - a - tree.
• Padding: This serial is often criticised for being slow and overlong. Many six-parters from the Third Doctor era are cited as stories that would have worked better as four-parters, but this is one of the worst offenders.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Ky is played by a pre-Star Wars Garrick Hagon.
  • Sondergaard is played by another Star Wars alumnus, namely John Hollis, who played Lobot in The Empire Strikes Back (and will also be known to James Bond fans for playing Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the pre-title sequence of For Your Eyes Only).
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Jaeger can come across this way towards the end of the story, due to the writers seeing him as someone purely evil with no redeeming qualities, but the actor and director thinking it'd be more interesting to play him as someone who knew deep down that what he was doing was wrong, but was too weak-willed to do otherwise. To name the two most obvious instances, he shows clear concern for the well-being of Jo, Ky, and Cotton when they're trapped in the refuelling chamber (in the script he was only worried that the Marshal might be needlessly killing valuable hostages), and also gives the Doctor a look that seems to indicate sincere regret when he prepares to terraform Solos, when in the script he did so with no compunctions whatsoever, making it a more clear-cut case of Karmic Death when he was killed by the Doctor's sabotage.

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