Anyhow…
The Doctor is sent on another mission for the Time Lords. At this stage he is basically their bitch and this is a handy plot device but strikes me that the show’s producers were starting to realise the limitations of the Doctor’s Earthbound exiles.
Anyhow, off he pops to a distant planet, basically acting as an over-dressed courier for the Time Lords. And there he finds a bubbling political situation with oppression and uprisings and stuff like that.
The first couple of episodes are a bit heavily laden with political sentiment. Humans have been “Over lording” the planet for ages and mining the crap out if it. Now they’re going to give them some independence as they’ve outlived their usefulness. I guess this is all a pretty clumsy metaphor for British colonialisation over the years.
Then, after a very ill timed political rally, humankind gets a new idea and starts to convert the atmosphere of the planet a bit to make it accessible to humans. This is obviously a bit of a metaphor for landing in foreign climes and making them their own at the expense of the indigenous population. Maybe this one is about the English invasion of Spanish costas…
There is a clever tribal aspect to the locals that I like but again that seems to be pretty weighed down with metaphor – infighting between tribes that could easily unite and overthrow their oppressors.
This is another very good story for Jo and she is very useful. The secondary cast are excellent in this as well - the guards Stubbs and Cotton are very sweet (even if the latter can't actually act), the central bad guy is suitably sinister, his henchman suitably dimwitted. The main revolutionary reminds me of the bloke from Citizen Smith and the mad scientist is thoru
The long and the short of the story is that the planet’s inhabitants, who are turning into the mutants of the title, are not actually mutants, they are in the next stage of their race’s development. It leads to a nice idea of a 2,000 year life cycle broken into four 500 year quarters. While races elevating to a higher level is not a new idea in science fiction this idea of a cycle seems to be unique at least in my experience.
Without a doubt this could have been two episodes shorter. There feels like there’s a lot of padding in the middle and a lot of unnecessary prisoner capture/escape/capture malarkey, which is a shame because in this case it is the main thing that detracts from the overall enjoyment of the story.
While watching this story I became vaguely aware that it has a pretty bad reputation. I’m really not sure why. The only real negative to it is the length but that’s hardly a unique criticism of a 6 part Who story.
Anyway, in short it suffers from padding and being a bit too overladen with hidden meaning (that’s not very well hidden) but those are the only reasons it loses marks.
7/10.