Dominic pinpoints his favourite moment in sci fi.
Big milestone in the world of sci fi publishing this week, the iconic SFX magazine celebrates its 250th issue! To celebrate, SFX asked readers to vote for their favourite moment in all of sci fi history. The top 10 is filled with classic set pieces like the chest bursting scene in Alien, and some surprising new-comers like the Hulk’s ‘puny god!’ thrashing from Avengers Assemble. Doctor Who ruled the roost though, with Rose’s departure from Doomsday taking the number 1 spot.
While it’s a moving scene it doesn’t rank among my top 10, but it did get me thinking as to what I would call my favourite sci fi moment. Everyone is affected by television, books, comics and movies differently, but after a lot of deliberation here’s my personal favourite moment in sci fi history…
Tommy Is ‘Cured’ By The Metebelis 3 Crystal.
‘Clever Lupton’
From: Doctor Who, Planet Of The Spiders, episode 4.
I’ll be honest, Planet Of The Spiders isn’t one of the greatest Doctor Who stories. This 6 part story from 1974 is notable as it’s John Pertwee’s final adventure as the Third Doctor, and because the whole of episode 3 is a car chase where you get to see a tramp run over by a hovercraft.
It’s also padded out with lots of to-ing and fro-ing between a monastery and the planet Metebelis 3, which makes the story’s production code ZZZ seem nerdishly appropriate.
However, as with even the worst of Doctor Who stories there’s always something to enjoy. In this case it’s the stupendous performance by John Kane in the role of Tommy, a handyman with learning disabilities who works in a Buddhist meditation centre.
Tommy is an innocent man at the start of the adventure. He enjoys playing games such as eye spy, and collects ‘pretties’ (usually old bits of jewellery) and stores them in a shoe box in his den under the stairs (which is endearingly decorated with floral seed packets stuck to the walls). Tommy is oblivious to the malevolent actions of others in the monastery but can see the good in people like Mike Yates.
Tommy defends the Doctor
John Kane turns in a measured, nuanced delivery as Tommy. With a naive nature and slight slur in his speech, Tommy is targeted by the adventure’s antagonist, Lupton.
All this changes in episode 4 when Tommy stows away the Metebelis 3 crystal with the rest of his pretties. As he sits down to read he places the blue crystal on a stool and it starts to shine so intensely Tommy faints, but when he wakes up his mind has been ‘cured.’
(By the way, I’m cautious to say that the crystal ‘cures’ Tommy without surrounding it in quotation marks, as this would imply that handicapped or mentally disabled people are diseased and need saving. They can of course lead lives as fulfilling and rich as anyone else. This issue is even covered brilliantly later on when Sarah Jane says to Tommy, ‘you’re normal, you’re just like everyone else.’ To which he replies: ‘I certainly hope not.’)
It’s the way Tommy realises his mind has been expanded that really left a deep impression on me when I first watched this story as a kid. He sits down to read a Ladybird book called Going To School and struggles to recite sentences like ‘we say our prayers’, but when he is revived he can skim through the pages in seconds. Watching a grown man joyfully reading ‘we play in the playground, we dance to the music’ is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. (Incidentally, I got reduced to a blubbering wreck watching Kate Winslet learning to read and write for the first time as an adult in The Reader.)
The scene is like a microcosm of Doctor Who itself, just as the companions (and the audience) are shown the wonders of the universe, Tommy is shown by the crystal the splendours that can be found everywhere in day-to-day life. If that isn’t a life affirming tug on the old heart strings, I don’t know what is.
What’s your favourite sci fi moment? Let me know in the comments!
FanDom 