One of the few disadvantages the new 'Doctor Who' has is its inability to gradually develop an atmosphere of menace. With only forty-five minutes to tell the story, the setting and characters have to be established quickly, so we can get onto the monsters. Classic 'Who' had no such constraints, of course, and nowhere is this better illustrated than in the opening instalment of 'Inferno'. At a top secret complex somewhere in England, a Government-funded project is underway to seek a new source of energy by breaking through the Earth's crust. 'Sir Keith Gold' ( Christopher Benjamin ) is showing engineer 'Greg Sutton' ( Derek Newark ) around the control centre, while elsewhere a rigger named 'Slocum' ( Walter Randall ) touches a green slime oozing from one of the outlet pipes. When we next see him he has transmogrified into a vicious, green-skinned monster. The Doctor ( Jon Pertwee ) hopes to steal power from the project's reactor to reactivate his TARDIS.
Don Houghton's script combines ideas from several sources - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'When The World Screamed', the film 'Crack In The World' ( 1965 ), and the second issue of Gold Key's 'Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea' comic 'Monsters From The Moho'. The pacing is slower than modern drama, the exposition more detailed, yet this is a good opener to what turned out to be one of the all-time great 'Who' stories. It was directed by the late, great Douglas Camfield, just before he fell ill and had to be replaced at short notice by Barry Letts. It is to the latter's credit that the finished serial looks like the work of one person.
Don Houghton's script combines ideas from several sources - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 'When The World Screamed', the film 'Crack In The World' ( 1965 ), and the second issue of Gold Key's 'Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea' comic 'Monsters From The Moho'. The pacing is slower than modern drama, the exposition more detailed, yet this is a good opener to what turned out to be one of the all-time great 'Who' stories. It was directed by the late, great Douglas Camfield, just before he fell ill and had to be replaced at short notice by Barry Letts. It is to the latter's credit that the finished serial looks like the work of one person.