The Abominable Snowmen

“I think this is one of those instances where discretion is the better part of valour”

Un arc lent (trop lent !) qui malgré ses méchants hyper cute, et une atmosphère tibétaine sympa, ne se contente que d’aligner les clichés les plus fastidieux d’un format déjà usé.  

Le pire, c’est que malgré un Travers somme toute assez attachant, on retrouve un peu les mêmes défauts que The Tomb of the Cybermen, mais étirés en six parties. 

Là aussi le trio central et les valeurs de production sont donc la grâce salvatrice d’un épisode fondamentalement mal foutu. 

Mais si c’est seulement ça qui sauve la saison, alors elle peut vite s’écrouler. 

This is a story with a classic set up. Within moments of The Doctor arriving in a place, he finds two men brutally murdered and is then accused by the locals of committing the crime. Sound familiar? Despite this, there is plenty that sets this story apart from the rest of Doctor Who.

Firstly, Victoria and Jamie have turned out to be a fantastic companion combination. The writers have yet to drop the ball with them. The setting of a Tibetan monastery is interesting and from what I can see, the sets look great. Within the first episode you are introduced to a whole host of interesting characters with credible motives. Stealing the show here is Travers, a man ridiculed in his own country, setting out to prove the existence of the Yeti. Tomney is also a stand out performer in this story, I have to say that the man who plays the abbot is not the best actor in the world, there is never any change in the expressions on his face (though I appreciate that he is playing a man whose mind has been exposed to consistent bouts of amnesia - a difficult role to play).

The Yeti are undoubtedly the most interesting aspect of this story, the first new enemies that we've been introduced to with a high level of impact since the Cybermen. They attain truly 'classic' status. Hilariously Travers mistakes The Doctor for them in his woolly coat.

The locations here are great, mountaintops and prisons. The Great Intelligence is fantastic in this story, I like that throughout the six episode we find out that each villain is being controlled by an even greater villain!

Cough. Cough. Cough. Rather slow and dull. There is the spark of a good idea in here, but it struggles to get out. This serial falls into the camp of being too long. At 4 episodes it would feel a bit snappier.

I have a bit of a funny relationship when it comes to the Yeti. It’s a bit of Doctor Who I sometimes feel I have a blind spot for. ‘Received wisdom’ would have us believe that the Yeti – and their TV stories – are iconic examples of Doctor Who. When The Web of Fear and The Enemy of the World were re-discovered, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say fandom seemed a lot more excited for Web than Enemy (even when we all found out that Enemy is actually rather bloody good). It was the Yeti who got one of the first spin-off Wilderness Years stories – Downtime. A Yeti even made it into The Five Doctors.

But I’ve always been rather non-plussed by them and their stories. That said, I remember devouring Terrance Dicks’ Target novelisation of The Web of Fear in one afternoon, sitting in a camping chair in Greenwich park whilst my brother did something (probably playing) and my uncle and Nan snoozed.

There is part of me that wants to like the Yeti, that wants to understand why everyone raves about The Web of Fear and that wants to understand why they get the ‘top tier’ monster treatment despite only having the same number of full stories as the Mara and Sil.

And so I went into The Abominable Snowmen (The Web of Fear’s older, and yet somehow less loved, brother) with an attitude of finding the positives.

I didn’t do very well.

I’ve occasionally said that Doctor Who’s worst stories, for me, are those that are a bit boring. The most recent examples for me were The Rings of Akhaten and In the Forest of the Night (although both of those deserve a re-watch and re-assessment). The Abominable Snowmen has quite a few chances now and it is, I’m sorry to say, just boring.

Ultimately, part of the problem is that the story is simply too long. There is not six episodes-worth of plot here. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive at the monastery, some Yeti lumber around a bit, Padmasambhava is clearly under the influence, the Monks argue a bit about the strangers and then Jamie smashes some controls and it’s all over. And Deborah Watling’s Dad is in it.

There is an awful lot of back and forth – up and down the mountain; in and out of the cell in the monastery; in and out of the inner sanctum and nothing ever seems to develop fast enough. In fact, at one point I’m sure the Doctor finds out that Padmasambhava is in contact with an alien presence but then goes off to use his tracking equipment and discovers that the source of the power controlling the Yeti is – shock horror – in the inner sanctum where Padmasambhava is! I couldn’t work out why he hadn’t already worked this out after speaking to Padmasambhava who had clearly indicated he was fighting possession by some powerful intelligence.

The Yeti simply don’t work for me. They’re far too cuddly! I don’t feel any menace from them and even in the episode we can actually watch they don’t come across any better than in the still photographs we have to assess them on for most of the story. I do think it’s telling that when the Yeti return, only a couple of stories later, they have been redesigned to be shaggier and scarier suggesting the production team thought similar. I think the fact the Yeti are faceless and silent does them little favour in coming across as scary. Maybe more moving images would help their case – the scene where they attack and destroy the monastery late in the story might be quite impressive – but, ultimately until that day, I can only really judge them on what we have got. I did watch a recon of this story and a valiant attempt to computer animate some Yeti scenes adds a little movement to episodes. Unfortunately, the Yeti look awfully like grey Mr Blobbies and the effect is unintentionally quite comical. I admire the time and effort though.

The lack of music is also, for me, a huge issue. I’ve seen various commentaries on the episode citing this as a positive but I just can’t see it myself. Obviously the silence is compounded by being on audio only meaning there are whole swathes of episodes where it seems very little is happening. Obviously music wouldn’t help this a lot, but in an audio-only situation it certainly detracts further from problems of slow pace and lack of action.

I have also seen suggestions that it adds to the creepiness of the story. Firstly, I don’t find the story creepy in the slightest but, interestingly, the creepiness is – according to a commentary written by Jonathan Morris in the telesnap special released a few years ago by DWM – rooted in the religious overtones of the story. He talks about the echoing monastic corridors and relates it to children having to attend cold, forboding churches around the time this was broadcast and how it might tap into their experience of this.

For me, as a born and raised Christian I have nothing but positive experiences of going to church (and certainly not of cold and draughty buildings – my church (the same one I’ve attended since birth) is a ‘modern’ building and not in the slightest bit creepy). It’s not a creepiness I can associate with. I think the only ‘creepy’ element that works for me is Wolfe Morris as Padmasambhava. He is excellent and certainly, for me, one of the few positives I take away from the story. He is creepy, although I think his ‘possessed’ voice is a bit too much. I think he is far more effective when talking in his ‘normal’ voice and, actually, one of the better cliffhangers is the one where he invites Victoria into his inner sanctum because she has ‘no alternative’.

The Great Intelligence, too, is presented (it is suggested in some commentaries on the story) as a ‘religious’ threat.  I can see where they are coming from and I do find the Intelligence to be an interesting foe (certainly more threatening than the Yeti).  I’m not sure it’s an adversary that needed the extrapolations into the world of Lovecraft that came in the expanded universe and I’m not sure it has enough of an impact when it returns in the modern series but, for this story it is a new type of enemy and credit to Haisman and Lincoln for trying something a little different.

But are there any other positives I can take from the story. Well, yes there are. The regulars are all excellent – even if, particularly in Jamie’s case, they aren’t really given much to do. Troughton is great, as usual, and I particularly like his initial excitement at having arrived near the monastery and the way his joy is undercut by being accused of murder the moment he sets foot inside. I also think this is a pretty good story for Victoria – in amongst the long, drawn out periods of not much happening, she does get some brief spurts of action such as entering the sanctum, being confronted by the chained Yeti at an episode cliffhanger and tricking various monks with her wily ways. Deborah Watling also cites this story as a favourite but is honest enough to admit that’s because of the opportunity to work with her father.

Jack Watling’s Travers is a good guest star and does have some good scenes although the story does tend to send him out to the mountain an awful lot just to watch things happen. What did strike me is how different he is from his performance in The Web of Fear. He really does ‘age’ the character well in that story and here, the ‘young’ Travers does have an energy about him which is absent from the older Travers. It is a lovely moment when he spots the ‘real’ Yeti at the close of the story. I’d be fascinated to see how that was actually presented on screen.

Of the monks, David Spenser’s Thonmi and Norman Jones’s Khrisong are good value. I was especially struck by how Khrisong goes on something of a journey as a character. I had remembered him only from his Episode 2 performance which is all ‘suspicious of the strangers’ and aggressive but actually, as the story progresses he starts to accept that the Doctor may be a force for good and that his approach may be better if he tempers himself a little. I also enjoy David Spenser’s gentle strength as Thonmi. It’s a quiet performance but actually is one that has always stuck with me, even from the one existing episode.

What’s not so good about the monks, of course, is the fact that they are played by exclusively by white actors. In recent times stories such as The Talons of Weng-Chiang have got an awful lot of stick from fandom for ‘yellow-face’ and yet The Abominable Snowmen seems to slip under the radar. It is absolutely full of ‘yellow-face’ and silly accents (particularly from Sapan and Rinchen) which stray dangerously close to the world of ‘velly solly’ and, worst of all, is the clear use of tape to pull back the actors eyes into a more ‘oriental’ look. It’s really clear in some of the telesnaps. I’m not the sort of fan who will go on a crusade to enlighten everyone to the stories racist approach because I feel that loses sight of historical, societal and cultural context and achieves nothing. But it does strike me as a little unfair to Who’s current ‘racist punchbags’ that this story escapes any criticism on this front.

I’m also not a fan of Charles Morgan’s Songtsen. He just feels like a middle-aged European businessman has wandered into the monastery. He reminds me of the men in Planet of the Spiders, particularly Lupton. It was a casting that took me out of the story because, for all the ‘wrongness’ of the yellow face, at least those attempts make the actors look like they fit into the world of the monastery. Songtsen always seems out of place to me.

Historically, this story is supposedly set in 1935. This date is mainly derived from the Doctor’s earlier visit in the 1630s and of course the ’40 years hence’ of The Web of Fear. UNIT dating controversies aside, the actual historical setting of this story could be any time at all. There is very little tying it into the 1930s and even Travers (who causes the dating issues in the first place) could be from any time period on Earth in the early 20th century (or even later frankly). The Fact of Fiction article in DWM makes some interesting points about how, actually, expeditions to discover the Yeti didn’t occur in the real world until much later and, by 1935, the entire concept of the Yeti wouldn’t really have been widely-known. The setting of the monastery and Himalayan mountainside gives this story a relatively timeless atmosphere and really the 1935 dating is unimportant to the story.

With an underwhelming monster, too much toing and froing and a general lack of atmosphere, The Abominable Snowmen is clearly going to remain one of those stories I just don’t get. But, me being me, I will return to it one day (and indeed due to the recommendations various acquaintances I am currently listening to the audiobook version of Terrance Dicks’ novelisation) and hopefully I will find other aspects to enjoy.

This animation helped so much for me to enjoy this story it’s honestly quite a fun one and yetis are too cute the classic version of beep the meep

I honestly don't have much to say on this one, I really just found it pretty boring and meandering. In my opinion, it takes quite the story to need 6 full parts, and this is one of them that could, and probably should have been done with 4.
5/10