Doctor Who “The Abominable Snowmen Part 5”

No, Victoria is not going to save the day.

I mean, I knew she wasn’t going to, but I could have hoped a bit.

Alright, the Great Intelligence’s plan is out.  He wants to have a physical body, and he’s been using the body of the Doctor’s old friend Padmasambhava, keeping the old man alive for 300 years.  That means forcing the man to do what the Intelligence wants, and Padmasambhava does get enough of his story out to tell the Doctor what happened.

That comes after Victoria is hypnotized to entreat the Doctor to leave.  Maybe if she reacted to anyone else and didn’t just repeat the same things over and over again, the Intelligence’s plan might have worked.  The Doctor just leaves her to go talk to his buddy and asks Jamie to keep an eye on her.  Jamie does, but he also tries making loud noises to snap her out of it.  That doesn’t work.

Anyway, Padmasambhava was meditating and managed to reach a disembodied intelligence out in space, and it’s that Great Intelligence.  The Doctor can probably stop it if he can find the three points of triangulation that would control the Yetis.  Professor Travers might know, but his mind got messed with for a while there.  The Doctor has two coordinates.  He needs a third.

C’mon.  It’s the monastery.  The past few episodes have had Padmasambhava (working unwilling for the Great Intelligence) and the Abbot (working perhaps more willingly for the Great Intelligence) have been trying to get everyone to leave the monastery.  The monks had to be chased out by the Yetis.  They hypnotized Victoria to try to get the Doctor and Jamie to leave.  The only thing that makes sense for the Doctor is to stick around because obviously leaving is what the bad guy wants.

Granted, the Great Intelligence hasn’t really done anything overtly evil.  OK, a monk died because he didn’t get out of the way of the rampaging Yetis.  Oh, and a Yeti killed Travers’s partner.  And Padmasambhava is clearly suffering.  And the idea that a Buddhist monk could meditate in such a way to contact an alien intelligence beyond the stars is somewhat questionable.

OK, that last one is more of a problematic element for the writers of the episode.

Anyway, the Doctor needs to help his (literally) old friend and keep his current friends alive and well too.  I figure he can do it.  Mostly because this wasn’t the last Doctor Who story.