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The Third Doctor and Jo arrive on Skybase One, their TARDIS having been transported there by the Time Lords. They have with them a message box which will only open for an intended recipient – and that is not the Marshal or his entourage – but seems to be for Ky, who has been framed for the murder of the Administrator. Jo and Ky flee to the surface of Solos, which seems to be poisonous to humans during daylight hours, and this affects Jo quite soon. Ky saves her with a stolen oxygen mask. The Doctor learns from the Marshal and his chief scientist Jaeger that they are involved in an experiment using rocket barrages to terraform Solos, making the air breathable to humans, regardless of the cost to indigenous life. They continue to bombard the surface with ever more deadly rockets. Varan by now has discovered the Marshal’s treachery and events make him an outlaw on Skybase. The Doctor makes contact and together they persuade Stubbs and Cotton, the most senior soldiers to the Marshal, that much is wrong on Skybase. He then flees to Solos with Varan, and at the thaesium mine where Ky and Jo are hiding he encounters many Mutts, who are not as hostile as they first appeared. The Doctor passes the message box to Ky, and it opens to reveal ancient tablets and etchings which are written in the language of the Old Ones of the planet. Help in avoiding poisonous gas released by the Marshal is provided by a fugitive human scientist, Sondergaard, who lives in the caves and knows much about Solonian anthropology. Sondergaard explains he tried to inform Earth Control about the Marshal's evil, but he was prevented and forced to flee to the caves, where the radiation seems to have affected him. He interprets the contents of the box as a “lost Solos Book of Genesis”, and the Doctor then calculates a Solonian year to be equivalent to two thousand human years, with natural changes in the population every five hundred years within the cycle. Investigating a more radioactive part of the caves, the Doctor thus deduces the Mutant phase is a natural part of the Solonian racial life-cycle.
Varan has by now become a Mutt himself, the transformation beginning with his hand. He hides this and leads a Solonian attack on the Skybase which results in his death and those of many of his warriors. On Skybase Jo, Ky, Stubbs and Cotton are captured by the Marshal, and Stubbs is killed in a failed escape attempt. The Doctor meanwhile has returned to the Skybase – without Sondergaard, who seems too weak following the radiation contamination. He instead returns to the caves to communicate with the Mutants and explain to them the changes in their metabolisms are natural and not to be feared. The Doctor is now back on Skybase and surmises the Marshal to be mad. It becomes clear that the Earth Government has now dispatched an Investigator to look into the strange events on Solos. The Marshal’s rocket attacks have not terraformed the planet, but they have left a hideous environmental impact and he knows he must clean this up or face problems when the Investigator arrives. Under duress the Doctor uses Jaeger’s technology to conduct a rapid decontamination of the planet’s surface. The Investigator arrives and demands answers, but is given more lies by the Marshal, supported by the Doctor, who fears Jo will be killed if he does not co-operate. Luckily Jo, Ky and Cotton have escaped their detention and arrive in time to help the Investigator see the truth of the situation on Solos and the crimes of the Marshal and Jaeger. The Doctor accuses them of "the most brutal and callous series of crimes against a defenseless people it's ever been my misfortunate to encounter." Sondergaard now reaches the Skybase with some Mutants, one of whom scares the Investigator enough that he accepts the Marshal’s analysis that the creatures should be killed. Ky now begins a process of mutation, but it is accelerated beyond the Mutant phase so that he emerges as a radiant ngel-like super-being. He communicates with thought transference, can float and can move through whole walls. Dispensing justice, Ky eradicates the Marshal. Jaeger has been killed too and the Investigator now makes sense of the situation. Sondergaard and Cotton elect to stay on Solos to see the other Solonians go through the mutation process, while Jo and the Doctor slip away, their mission from the Time Lords complete.
Try not to think of the ragged and incoherent chappie from the opening scenes of Monty Python in the first scene and you won't be in the frame of mind that makes the outfit worn by the Human guards in the next scene appear hilariously funny. Or maybe they will. In hindesight the outfits worn by the militaristic Human colonists of Solos look extremely stupid. But ignore that, ignore the fact that there is too much padding stretching a story that would have worked better as a four parter than six, and look at it a different way. Just as the trigger-happy militarism of U.N.I.T seems to reflect the most notorious and controversial British Army actions in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, this story can be seen as a stark and ironic analogy to Britain’s fading empire. Several of Britain’s African possessions were seeking independence in this period with varying degrees of bloodshed and acrimony. ‘Rhodesia’ for example, was a word that came up in the news a lot in 1972, some few years before it became Zimbabwe. Think of Solos in that sense and you get the picture. The Human ‘overlords’ of Solos express many of the attitudes that the white farmers and administrators of Rhodesia expressed at the time. “Ignorant natives won’t know how to govern themselves” and “We’re the superior race, we SHOULD rule” about sum it up in both cases. As well as the simply greed led attitude of those like the Marshall, who didn’t want to leave because they saw profit in the land still. The Marshall is an example of another post-colonial attitude, too. Anyone who has read Paul Scott’s follow up to his Raj Quartet, “Staying On”, about the white ‘Anglo-Indians’ who stay in post independence India and see their world crumble as the servants become the bosses and they become irrelevant, will understand the Marshall’s horror when he is told that, after being virtually the leader of Solos, his reward back on Earth will be a desk job in ‘administration’. But understanding his character should not be confused with sympathy. His nearest equivalent is the white bigot in Zimbabwe or South Africa who still won’t accept that the black people are his equals. And it has to be said that, whatever mistakes the British empire made in Africa or India or the Far East, it NEVER tried to bombard it's former colonies with climate-changing weapons that would render them uninhabitable to the natives. The science fiction element of the story is a morality tale to empire builders. Don’t DO this when your empire falls. As for the Solonians, they are far from ignorant natives, but they have troubles of their own. The Doctor and the Earthman Sondergaard who has tried to understand them, between them work out that the ‘mutation’ is not a disease and not directly a result of the climate changing. It is their natural state. They change from humanoid to a sort of crustacean. But that is only an intermediate stage, like the chrysalis stage of a butterfly. The Doctor helps Ky to go through the stages quickly and when he reaches his final form the butterfly analogy is not far wrong. Nor is the Wikipedia summary with the description “radiant angel-like super-being.” Here, by the way, we can have a slightly superior snigger at Stargate and remind its fans that we thought of it first. Where the Solonians ‘mutate’ the Ancients ‘Ascend’ but the end result is the same, proving that there is nothing new in science fiction, just new ways of telling the same story. Is it worth saying something at this point about the way the Time
Lords USE The Doctor to do their bidding in these situations? They
seem to be getting just a bit too fond of calling on him when it suits
them, while forcing him to remain in exile on Earth otherwise. Rather
a cruel trick on him.
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