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.With its Scottish setting and guest appearance by the Loch Ness monster (a rather poorly realised puppet standing in for a supposedly remote-controlled alien robot), Terror of the Zygons relates directly to the 1970s outbreak of Nessie monster sightings, a perennial happening since the first twentieth-century sighting in 1933.Although oil rigs feature in the opening of the story, the then-ongoing nationalist political battles over ‘Scotland’s oil’ only feature in passing in early dialogue.Holmes and Hinchcliffe were inspired by loss-of-identity Hollywood B-movies from the 1950s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958).The invading Zygons (giant, orange, embryo-like creatures who made a huge visual impact, but have yet to recur onscreen) are shape-shifters, able to impersonate anyone.Relocating this body-snatching theme to the Scottish Highlands allowed writer Robert Banks Stewart to ally the theme to Scottish myths and legends like that of the Selkie (supernatural creatures able to transform from seals to humans).There was another Scottish connection in the second story of the season.Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Tale of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the 1956 film Forbidden Planet (by way of Shakespeare’s The Tempest) provided the literary and pop-culture inspirations for Planet of Evil.Writer Louis Marks (who’d previously scripted environmental-thriller story Planet of Giants in 1964) adapted Professor Jim Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis (that sees the Earth as a self-regulating organic system) to create a planet that is fundamentally evil.However, this intention is lost in the realisation of the story, which focuses more on Professor Sorenson’s split personality and the were-wolf-horror aspects of the plot than on any abstract notion.An expedition to the planet Zeta Minor finds a mysterious black pool: a gateway to an anti-matter universe.Attempting to harness the power of the anti-matter (a critique of the damage done by mineral exploitation to Earth), the expedition members are either killed or transformed.The monsters, supposedly protecting the planet from the invaders, are invisible and are only seen when struck by weapons fire.The realisation of the creature is like that in Forbidden Planet, while the Shakespearean connection comes from The Tempest.The literary source in the case of Pyramids of Mars was Bram Stoker’s 1903 novel The Jewel of the Seven Stars – about an archaeologist’s attempt to revive an ancient mummy – mixed with a heavy dose of Von Daniken.Just as relevant, and perhaps fresh in the audience’s mind, was the 1972 UK ‘Treasures of Tutankhamun’ exhibition that revived memories of the ‘cursed’ Howard Carter expedition of 1922.Over 1.5 million people visited the British Museum and the display of artefacts was a cultural sensation in the press.In addition, Robert Holmes (who scripted this serial under a pseudonym) was a fan of Hammer movies from 20 years previously (and would have been aware of the Universal mummy movies of the 1930s featuring Boris Karloff).‘Bob liked to rework some of the old themes of Sax Rohmer [Fu Manchu]-type stuff and some of the more gothic pool of material that provided action-adventure stuff,’ admitted Hinchcliffe.Pyramids of Mars drew on the myths of the Egyptian gods and provided a scientific-seeming overlay to make the whole thing science fiction, a regular gambit during the Hinchcliffe period.Set in 1911, the story sees trapped alien God Sutekh manipulate (from his prison on Mars) Egyptologist Marcus Scarman.He instructs Scarman to construct a missile (with his robotic, mummy-like helpers) that can destroy the beacon on Mars that his fellow Osirans used to entrap him centuries ago.The setting allowed the BBC design teams to excel once again with the period-drama trappings of the locations, while the actual pyramid is a rather bland corridors-and-puzzles setup, as last seen in Death to the Daleks
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