GUEST POST When Doctor Who saved us from the gaping inferno

Peter Chambers takes us back to a Doctor Who story from the Jon Pertwee era that warns against being seduced by the prospect of cheap and abundant energy.

Inferno is the final serial of the seventh series of the Doctor Who classic era, broadcast in 1970. The Doctor was played by Jon Pertwee, and his companion Liz Shaw was played by Caroline John. The writer was Don Houghton and script editor Terrance Dicks. 

This was the final serial with Liz Shaw, and the one that Caroline John liked the best. Today we would say that the writers gave the companion some agency. The name Liz Shaw has reoccurred several times in science fiction since. It seems to have made an impression. 

Inferno is two stories in one. One is a parallel worlds story, and the other is an ecological shocker. The latter plot was a standing Dicks theme. Houghton suggested a plot based on the real-life Project Mohole. 

The idea was that a large state-backed project would exploit gas from beneath the Earth’s crust that was “infinitely more powerful” than North Sea gas, which was being introduced at the time. It would turn out that the risk assessment for the project was not complete and it had been sold on an optimistic schedule. 

The parallel worlds plot is said to have been introduced to increase the number of episodes that could be produced for the outlay on scenery. In doing so, it introduced one of the canonical parallel worlds realisations. The logic and grammar are congruent with the IF-THEN-ELSE episode of Person of Interest. Perhaps the young Christopher Nolan liked it? 

The meat of the parallel worlds story is that the other world (timeline) that the Doctor visits is a totalitarian Britain. The Doctor is held without trial by the Brigade-Leader under a 1943 emergency powers act. Section-Leader Shaw advises kindly advises him to confess to being a “political” so he could serve “only two or three years in the camps”. 

Oddly female employees have more formal respect, being addressed by title and surname, rather by first name only. Petra the PA becomes Doctor Williams. In the UK timeline the Brigadier always refers to Dr Shaw as Miss Shaw. Women could face the firing squad equally with men. This prefigures the 1975 TV drama State of Emergency. Society must be protected. Just a few freedoms must be suspended. For now. 

Having a dictatorship means that the Republic Mohole is drilled faster than the one in the United Kingdom – not only trains run on time! Risk assessment is even more cursory. Completion happens days earlier. So does destruction by volcanic activity. 

The Doctor – alone – can escape. Liz has to shoot the Brigade-Leader, killing and dying to save people she would never meet. Once returned, the Doctor will not take no for an answer and successfully argues to have Project Inferno shut down. Maybe go with Net Zero instead? Or super-energised hydrogen? 

Peter Chambers is a Liberal Democrat member from Hampshire.

You can watch Inferno on BBC iPlayer.

Peter Chambers has written a previous guest post about a Doctor Who serial from this era: The Green Death.