The appeal of the Monoid, that's quite hard to quantify. I think it's because they're
the absolute epitome of a comedy villain. They have a slightly ridiculous appearance,
they walk around telling their plans to each other.
Take them away to the security kitchen.
They've got a security kitchen, they throw flowers menacingly on the floor. It's all
a bit ridiculous. And that's, watching it with sort of an adult knowing eye, you can
enjoy that and think that's great.
Yes, I bet it'll take some time to get the whole of the population down here, so the
sooner you get started the better I should think.
Don't worry, it may not take as long as you think.
But at the same time they are actually quite menacing because they are ruthless. They're
prepared to wipe out the whole of humanity. I mean this is the whole of humanity on the
ship.
What do you mean? Are you up to something?
I think it shows really that you can be ridiculous and scary at the same time and that's in some
ways scarier than just being scary.
We don't see many Doctor Who monsters repeated actually. There's a sort of myth that Doctor
Who is obsessed with its own continuity and there's a great sort of repetition of Daleks,
Cybermen and what not. But actually there's only a few that are repeated more than about
twice. They all tend to be monsters that are undilutedly evil. So they can be just used
again and again as standard, horrible, frightening monsters. And they're also flexible in terms
of purely the design. You know, a Cyberman can go anywhere. It can be in a desert, it
can be in an ice planet, it can be in a spaceship, whatever, whatever, whatever.
They're one-off monsters. They're also by one-off writers. What tends to happen with
the monsters I think is if they return they come back quite quickly and they come back
by their creator. And so if the creators didn't come back then most of the time there's no
real impetus for the monster to come back unless they were phenomenally popular.
So why bring them back? They look like men in suits and that's something that I think
Doctor Who wisely avoids these days is having monsters that patently are a man with a stupid
wig, you know, with a sort of Chewbacca suit and whatnot. They've got stupid voices or
they don't speak. I mean, you know, what's to like?
They're sort of monsters built entirely around a what if you put the eyeball in the mouth.
That's it. That's the whole idea of the Monoids. I remember actually at the time being quite
taken with it and watching it again. It is a striking and strange effect even if their
outfits are a bit baggy and the wigs are sort of odd looking. They don't individually or
as a race have enough character to distinguish them from many other races that only appeared
once on Doctor Who and we've never gone back to that. So I wouldn't rule out anybody turning
up again in a show that's run this long.
Well, I think that the Monoids suffer from a condition that's quite common among Doctor
Who monsters in that they have wonderful torsos and heads, but very ridiculous feet. The Monoids
are sort of these odd splay-footed duck-like creatures from the knees down. It's very hard
to tell whether their knees are their true knees, whether their skin is their true skin
because in the shots that we see of them actually walking around, they waddle. They almost like
have a kind of carapace that goes down to their ankles from beneath which these great
flappy feet protrude and rather like, you know, this may be the same reason why the
Wirren have never come back. Dodgy feet, I think, is the answer there.
The current incarnation of the series does seem to me surprisingly hung up on the William
Hartnell version of Doctor Who. It seems to me that almost all its references go back
that far and I do think that, for instance, the treatment of the Monoids is very like
the treatment of the Ood. You can see what, as it were, a modern take on that type of
story would be like. Since they can do those sort of stories, there's no particular reason
to do this one again.