19th century Lancashire: where the white heat of the Industrial Revolution burns hottest at Samuel Belfrage’s brass mill, a mill plagued by more than its fair share of work-related injuries.
While Thomas Brewster struggles to secure a fair deal for Belfrage’s overworked hands, fellow travellers the Doctor and Evelyn follow the Copper King to Liverpool, there to discover the unexpected truth about Belfrage’s business.
Back in Ackleton, the local MP voices the fears of many when he says that the machines are taking over. He’s more right than he knows…
INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION
The sixth Doctor, Evelyn, and Brewster trilogy comes to a close in the world of 19th century industry, with workers agitating for new workplace rights and giant mechanical robot monsters terrorizing people for their flesh. Eddie Robson’s “Industrial Evolution” blends these two concepts reasonably well, and though the script starts to unravel towards the end, it provides a solid finish for the trilogy and an adequate resolution to this chapter of Brewster’s story.
The pun is wholly unintentional, but I appreciate how this script evolves. Robson has always had a talent for spinning intriguing Doctor Who concepts out of mundane settings, and “Industrial Evolution” follows this pattern, starting with oppressed workers in a period drama and developing from there. There’s good foreshadowing from the start as well: Evelyn wants to stay behind and keep an eye on Brewster for a while, but Brewster thinks the Doctor is manipulating him into doing dirty work – something the Doctor emphatically denies! Of course, the Colin Baker Doctor can get away with those denials, but it won’t be long…
The politics of the story are rather simplistic, but at least it tries to make overtures in that direction. While the Doctor’s head-slapping lecture about how bosses owe their workers a safe working environment – who is this scene directed at? – is incredibly obvious, the script develops into an interesting discussion about nature versus machinery. Unfortunately, this element comes out of nowhere – the house collapsing and transforming into a garden happens without warning and with only a technobabble explanation – but it manages to show the hypocrisy of the Luddites without demonizing them as utter morons, which is nice. The same can’t be said of “The Mark of the Rani,” which this story echoes, though neither story ends particularly well.
“Industrial Evolution” is probably Brewster’s best story since his debut, in which he gets to take center stage, be proactive, and win the day in his own way. John Pickard does good things with the material, making the character sympathetic in spite of himself. The problem, though, is that I don’t really understand the point of the character. His relationship with the Doctor is left frustratingly vague and unexplained, largely due to its inconsistency: the Doctor veers wildly between trusting Brewster and disliking him, and the story ends with the Doctor storming off and abandoning Brewster to history. It seems we’re supposed to question this decision, but I don’t see why: I would have kicked him out of the TARDIS long ago, or abandoned him to Axos at the very least. Evelyn seems to like him, and indeed she also does very well in this story, getting some great scenes on her own after her questionable helplessness in the previous story.
Oddly, the Doctor is largely sidelined, though this isn’t a particular fault of the story. I like how Robson undercuts his setting so sharply: you expect the Doctor to blaze into the factory and uncover years of horrific abuse against the workers, but instead he finds the machines in good working order and the factory rather safe. And when the workers demand shorter hours and more rest, you expect the owner of the factory to cruelly deny their request – but instead Mr. Belfrage (Rory Kinnear) blithely grants it, shrugging his shoulders and stating that it all sounds fair to him. Belfrage is a fantastic character, and Kinnear plays him very well: he’s a Glitz-like rogue, not precisely evil but never exactly trustworthy. That being said, the Doctor seems unusually gullible – there are at least three different occasions where Belfrage exclaims, “Don’t look at me!” regarding something he was directly responsible for.
While I enjoyed Nicholas Briggs’s direction, and the score from Fool Circle Productions was effective, the sound design left much to be desired in one particular area: the self-replicating machines. It’s one thing to record some metal machinery for a sound effect; it’s quite another to reuse that same effect over and over again, layering it dozens of times over a scene, and expecting it to be comprehensible. Overall, though, “Industrial Evolution” is largely a success. Its ending isn’t greatly satisfying, and there’s not enough done with Brewster to make the trilogy entirely worthwhile, but the meat of the story is smart and entertaining, something we’ve come to expect from Robson’s pen.
Recommended.
7/10