I’ve always had a soft spot for Colony in Space.  Malcolm Hulke has always been one of Doctor Who’s most left-wing writers and on one hand this is a serial about a group going out into space to find their ideal life away from the late stage capitalist empire that is Esrth.  Hulke lays the groundwork for how Doctor Who will regularly depict the future from this point forward, catapulting the show properly in terms of alien worlds out of the 1960s.  Every future set serial until the end of Jon Pertwee’s time as the Doctor in particular will attempt this tone for these types of stories.  It’s also the first time Jon Pertwee’s Doctor gets to actually go to space, the first episode being devoted to the sheer joy of getting off Earth (even if he’s on the leash of the Time Lords) and Katy Manning as Jo being frightened of travel.

The conflict of the colonists versus the Interplanetary Mining Corporation is thick with commentary about the current political of the time while the Master’s search for a doomsday weapon in the back half of the serial just adds to the commentary.  So why can’t I rate this higher?  Well Hulke does attempt some allegory on the treatment of indigenous people that leads to an alien race being particularly underdeveloped, they take up the doomsday weapon plot.  It means that there are a couple of messages, largely intersecting and crowding a lot of the serial together, especially with its bookends in particular being quite odd.  That and poor Michael E. Briant, while a director who will return quite a bit, really struggles with the choice of location work.  It’s perhaps the most generic quarry of wetness that could have been chosen and it just drags things down.  Briant tries, and in future serials he’ll even make quarries work, but this one is the example of a great script dragging down quite a bit in execution.  It’s sadly Hulke’s weakest script, but for this to be someone’s weakest that should say something about what their usual quality is.