There is no such thing as TV Club! THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS TV CLUB! TV CLUB DOES NOT EXIST!
But we’re still going to discuss The Macra Terror!
Watch all four missing episodes in animated form on BBC iPlayer:
Or purchase on DVD and Bluray:
Rate and review below:
I love this story! It is a great use of the false utopia trope. I also think that the animation does a good job of bringing the story to life!
The animation omits the critical makeover bit, though, leaving vital inconsistencies with Polly’s hair in the show…
Another Troughton banger. I have a special relationship with the story because I wrote a little bit about it in my Anarchism Thread (I really should make another post there…)
Orwell but with crabs[1]. I like it. I might like it even more in relation to Gridlock (yesterday’s despots become tomorrow’s bottom feeders… feel free to split the difference).
insert Nineteen Sixty-Nine joke here ↩︎
Watched this for the first time earlier in the year and love it! Just a fun Doctor Who-y take on 1984.
I want the Macra back SO bad and I don’t mean in the Gridlock kinda way…
It’s unfortunately not possible, because there are no Macra! And the BBC has realised this! This was the reason why they made RTD leave originally, as he was trying to brainwash us all into believing such creatures exist in Gridlock.
Absolute banger, some of the best stuff that came out of the Troughton era. 1984 meets Creature Feature. Echoing what others have said, I really want these scheming, cunning Macra to show up in some way again.
…or I would if there were such thing as Macra. Which there are not.
I rewatched parts 1-2 of this yesterday and will finish it today. Fantastic serial, one of my favourite Troughtons. This is where his era kicks off properly and I still hope they recover the original episodes, or at least one of them, some day. It’s not likely, but one can hope. Just because I want to see this beautiful colony world with my own eyes!
I liked the terror but don’t know why someone said to me there’s some crabs in it there’s no such thing as macra it’s just a happy colony RA RA RA and they let them know let them no let them know there happy
The next one for me to rewatch I think - but I really love this! The Macra (if they exist??) are just so brilliant, and are used so well in an Orwell-esque take. Properly unique Doctor Who done so well
A brilliantly dark Orwellian nightmare brought back to life by what I believe to be Doctor Who’s best animation.
The Macra are a genuinely scary foe, the world is dark and oppressive and although the story begins to lose steam towards the end, the first half is a super engaging mystery.
Also, some of the best sound design in Classic Who
9/10
For once, I agree with every single one of your points!
He’s left you Speechless!
This was always a favourite of mine just from the soundtrack all those years ago (yes, the one with Colin narrating).
In recent years I’ve cooled on it and, I’ll be honest, I didn’t warm to the animation very much. I think it lost a bit of the claustrophobia I used to feel listening to the soundtrack.
Troughton, though, is an absolute delight in this story and his Doctor is really coalescing into the ‘innocent’ anarchist with some really dark veins of manipulation.
This is a favourite of mine, but it is possible this is down to the great animated recon.
The evil Wizard of Oz/1984 take with the Macra was well done, and the voice that is used for them is great. Very booming.
The comedy also works for me, but that is always the case with Pat and Frazer.
I just find it a warm blanket of a story.
4.5/5 (9/10) for me.
I have the song Chromophone Band from this story as my phone ringtone 
I popped this one on last night so that I could comment after I’d slept on it.
The Macra Terror has fascinated me for a long time - my first encounter with the Macra, like many of us, was Gridlock. At fifteen, I was already probably a little too old to be religiously watching Doctor Who every week, except this was 2007. Not quite the dizzying heights of Journey’s End but certainly a very popular show. Army of Ghosts/Doomsday I remember being fairly huge, and I don’t recall a lot of bullying related to my Doctor Who fandom. Then, I remember very little of that part of my life anyway, and it cheats, as they say.
I was talking about the Macra. These big, blank-eyed crabs, so thrillingly realized as a menacing presence lurking at the bottom of The Highway, intrigued me. However, as I say, this was 2007. The Eruditorum was still four years out, and that was my real big intro to “Doctor Who fandom”, as opposed to it just being a television show I watched on Saturday afternoons, an oasis of happiness in trickier times. I had no idea The Macra Terror was a Troughton episode, little alone that it was missing. Finding telesnaps was beyond me.
When I finally managed to read up on this episode, I found the concept equally as thrilling. The holiday camp concept drew up images of garish colours, lurid Hi-De-Hi but wrong somehow atmosphere, and of course, the big old crabs. How did they do that, in 1967? Could this ever have been as good as it sounded?
Of course, we’ll never know. Back then, it was probably just about as hard for me to find the existing Classic episodes than it was to find details about the missing ones. Fandom just wasn’t at the same level of loving detail and exacting evocation. TARDIS.guide was barely a twinkle in anybody’s eye. I remained blissfully unaware of Reddit. Even the idea of animations must have seemed so incredibly remote.
Fast forward, then, to 2025 by way of 2019 and, with a little bit of jiggery-pokery (I came first in that, you know) Auntie Beeb delivers the animated version of The Macra Terror to my undeserving, expatriated goblin hands. On the face of it, and at first blush, I loved it. It’s tense, atmospheric, uncanny, with thrilling moments of danger. For my money, the depiction of Ben, brainwashed but in the direction of his worst hierarchical impulses (much is made of the fact that Ben is probably the one member of the TARDIS team at this point who has been to and enjoyed holiday camps [although I think the animation actually undercuts the whole “holiday camp aesthetic” reading of this episode, more on that in a tick] but one other important point that strikes me is that Ben was in the Navy. He’s doubly primed to take orders and slot himself into a hierarchical, patriarchal system primarily based on work and play) is the scariest part of the entire thing, as we watch (well, sort of watch, but again, get to that in a tick) Polly try and escape the person that just previously, she had been most likely to rely on for safety and protection. Having done the “What is going on with the Doctor” moment in Power of the Daleks, and obviously aware there’s only so deep you can mine that well before you lose the central premise of the show (hello Colin, didn’t see you there), that moment is instead given to Ben, and Michael Craze, at least on audio, plays it with remarkably sinister conviction, even if the way he dips into and out of his accent in an attempt to represent the mindwashing is inconsistent at best.
Let’s rip the band-aid off, because I feel I’m beginning to start talking around the subject - the animation is very good. The character models are detailed, the faces manage to convey a rather impressive amount of emotional depth, especially compared to previous efforts (this is a world away from The Tenth Planet’s early South Park imitations) and there is something to be said, absolutely, for taking this opportunity to, rather than remake the thing shot-for-shot, show us what a larger budget might have afforded this serial. The Macra themselves loom horrifically on-screen, to that credit. I was blown away when one of them actually picks up Polly by the leg in episode 2, something that surely could never been have achieved on the screen at the time. They move in a deeply uncanny way, and the way the camera tracks on their glowing eyes in the darkness as they emerge is sublime and atmospheric. If they wanted to modernize with this adaptation, it’s been achieved. Despite the run-time, this could quite easily be condensed into a modern episode of the show. It’s probably why we got Gridlock at all - both of these stories are (not to be insulting), boiler-plate Doctor Who. But we’re talking about The Macra Terror, and some of you may be feeling a but coming. There is, and quite soon, so get your tickets out and hop on the bus with me, because despite my giving this four stars, it missed out on the fifth, and for quite a specific, if maybe spurious reason.
The animation, you see, despite being the closest approximation that we have to this lost story, still feels, ironically, like it’s missing something. All the long shots of the colony, and a lot of the exteriors, don’t scream “holiday camp” to me. The more overt aspects of this line seem sort of lost in the larger muddle, starting to feel like set dressing as opposed to a theme. The jingles don’t have nearly as much focus as I had imagined when thinking of the story, and the controversial decision to not only remove the famed sequence with the makeovers and the “rough-and-tumble” machine as well as the TARDIS crew dancing themselves to escape at the end feels like it harms the ethos of this. There is much less “little-England whimsy” in this than I was expecting, and I think unfortunately, the fault is in that this is animated at all. For me, there has to be some slightly more human element for this to land properly - I need to see real people in this situation so heavily modeled on real history, or else it starts to slip away. Heading Michael Craze menace Polly is always going to be second fiddle to actually seeing the reactions on Anneke Wills’ face. Anything we imagine is always going to be more evocative, with all respect to the amazing talent of the people who put this thing on screen.
Rather than something uncanny, wrong, and heightened, it feels like a rather generic colony under siege with some Orwellian trappings. Even the Macra, unfortunately, suffer. Because, despite the budget allowing us to be shown them in their full “size of a Mini Metro” glory without actually costing as much as one, making them as scary as they were initially supposed to be has the unfortunate side-effect of not really making them scary at all. Each cliffhanger is sort of just a Macra emerging from a fog, or the night, or looming and looking like it might do something. But basically every encounter with them ends up with our heroes sort of just, running away? The more the Macra are deployed, the less they feel like any sort of credible threat. By the fourth episode, where the editing sort of makes it look like the Macra are speaking with the booming RP voice of Control, they become pretty ridiculous and confusing figures.
It’s not that I didn’t like this. I really enjoyed watching it, and I was gripped through most of the first half, even if the second-half starts to fall apart with a lot of wandering through tunnels and talking loudly at one another in rooms. It simply doesn’t quite hold up to the imagined story that I had held for some time. Probably, nothing would. It’s strange, the loving and excited attitude to putting the Macra on-screen so centrally actually undercuts what makes them so sinister. Even Gridlock knew not to overdeploy them, or else it becomes ridiculous. Because really, why isn’t the giant crab just turning people into paste with its claws? Just how intelligent are they? Who was Control? The reveal of the old man menaced at the end of Episode 2 feels like it’s going somewhere, but then it’s sort of abandoned for a chemistry plot. There are a lot of unanswered questions about this story, both diegetic and non, that the animation seems to elide instead of answer, and it left me with something of a sense of frustration.
Much is also made of Pat Troughton’s performance, and again, although vocally it’s obvious that the Second Doctor was a devious yet understated trickster, just watching Matt Smith’s interpretation and how heavily physical it is, leaves me watching this animation and getting the sense of breath on a mirror. A cartoon simply can’t compare to the decisions the actor was making. There’s only ever so much that we can recreate.