The Myth Makers by Donald Cotton
16 October - 6 November 1965
Talk about whiplash. From the unremitting grimness of Kembel's jungles to this, I'm most certainly thrown through a loop. I have to imagine contemporary viewers might have scratched their heads at this, too. Where did the Daleks go? It goes without saying, for anyone who has seen it, that The Myth Makers justifies its own existence very quickly. After the first few scenes of a japing Achilles and Hector battling while a bemused TARDIS crew looks on, I glanced over at the credits on the Wiki, sure that this was a Dennis Spooner serial, only to find it was a newcomer at the helm, Donald Cotton. This story truly is reminiscent of The Romans in tone as well as setting, and (dare I say) is the even better of the two.
While in The Romans we met characters (read: pastiches) based on archetypes seen in Roman dramas of the period, our guest cast for The Myth Makers are all already known to us, personages from the works of Homer, and so instead of comic exaggerations we're treated to funny twists on the characters. Odysseus as the ruthless bully, Cassandra as the paranoid priestess, Paris as the whingeing princeling... Each and every one of them is sketched beautifully, and anyone passingly familiar with the source material will spot (and appreciate) that upon viewing.
These characters, and their interactions and feuds with one another, drive a number of humorous scenes where the main cast don't even need to be present, though when they are, it adds another dimension to the story, forcing Homer's characters briefly out of the narrative they're living in. You can tell Hartnell, O'Brien and Purves were all having a lot of fun with it, too. Hartnell always seems to shine in historical stories. I recall that he had trouble engaging with the technobabble that was fed to him for more scifi oriented serials and that he once named The Reign of Terror as his favorite.
Speaking of the main actors, though, we have to talk about Vicki's goodbye. It's easy to draw a parallel with Susan's departure a season before, when Vicki departs the TARDIS team to stay with Troilus in the 2nd millennium BCE. I will say that although Vicki seemed to cotton onto Troilus before I even knew he was in the story, some due care is given to sketch their relationship over the succeeding episodes. It is sudden, but it isn't all bad, and her leaving to found Rome with Troilus and Aeneas is a fun detail when considering her first adventure with the Doctor was The Romans. But the fact that her sudden departure was a result of off-camera drama resulting from friction with new producer John Wiles leaves a bitter taste, one made bittersweet by the fact that it's lovely Vicki we're saying goodbye to. I took a little time to warm up to her fully, such that I was almost shocked when I realized just how very sorry I was that she was leaving. She was such a fun and charming companion; I'll miss her terribly.
The serial comes dangerously close to coming off the rails in the last episode, but doesn't entirely. The hard left turn from comedy to tragedy is a startling one, but one that just about works. I knew going in, but I was still shocked and fascinated by the tone shift. The sack of Troy is almost served better by not being in motion; the viewer's imagination is forced to run wild thinking of what the cunning Greeks are doing to this charming, orderly city where we were joking around the episode before. No one's laughing when Odysseus and his men haul Cassandra away, or when Steven is seemingly mortally wounded. It makes the first three episodes stand out in contrast, and prepares us for what's to come, in a way.
To put a bow on it, The Myth Makers is a surprising and quite wonderful addition to Doctor Who, and certainly one of the best serials we've seen so far. Though I say bow, it's too late to say woe to The Daleks' Master Plan, the first seven episodes of which I will cover next.
(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 31 March 2020.)
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