Carnival of Monsters has a premise that is nicely subversive. It takes the Doctor and his companion, Jo Grant and puts them in a television-like machine and suggest that it is only horrid and evil people who watch them being chased around by monsters!
And in case you didn't get it, that is a perfect description of Doctor Who as a show!
Only once had the show played around like this before in the show's history and it wasn't a subject that, even to this day, hasn't been approached much. In the sixties serial, The Mind Robber, the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arrive in a land where fiction is the normal and they have to face up to the facts that they might be fictional characters but don't know it. Carnival sticks almost to the same story but this time pokes fun at the viewers and the people who actually produced the show. Really, this story could have only come from the hands of author Robert Holmes, a writer who was behind some of the best Doctor Who stories of all time because of his ability to take serious issues and inject them with just the right action and dark humour giving many of his adventures a finally toned edge.

Carnival is a classic example of the story motif that Holmes used in all of his adventures, chaos versus order. A group of rogues fighting the system of stifling bureaucracy. In this case, the rogues are a couple of people who work as freelance carnival acts. They arrive on a planet with the intention of bedazzling the grey faced inhabitants of the planet Inter Minor. They arrive with their Miniscope which, much like a television, allows you to watch different animals in the miniature zoo simply by changing channels. We see that humans, Daleks, Ogrons and Cybermen are on offer in their show.

The Doctor quickly deduces that they aren't in the middle of the Indian ocean, one from the dinosaur and two, the time on the clock tells him it should be night time outside when it is still daylight. What he doesn't know is that he is trapped inside Vorg, the male carnival sideshow's, prized Miniscope. It is a shame then that we already know where he is as we have seen the Miniscope earlier in the story. Had we not seen this then the cliff-hanger to the end of episode one would have been truly mind-boggling with a giant hand reaching inside the ship and pulling the TARDIS out.

But this story makes it even harder to see exactly where the Doctor stands on the subject of chaos and order. As usual, we can believe that yes, he knows that the people on the planet are oppressed and needed someone like Vorg to come along. And you could draw comparisons between the Doctor and Vorg who are both vagabonds with no fixed abodes. But here the Doctor is more friendly to Vorg than he is too the people of Inter Minor. The Doctor takes great pride in telling Jo that he had a hand in banning the use of Miniscope claiming they are a crime against all sentient life. Yet he doesn't seem to get very angry with Vorg for having one.
You can also draw comparisions between the Doctor and Jo and Vorg and his assistant, Shirna. Both The Doctor and Vorg are middle aged men who have young female companions and both use machines that are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. It is nice though that the final thing we see in this story is Shirna smiling as the TARDIS dematerialises, she knows a good trick when she sees one.

But there is one unfortunate plot point that is never even addressed in this story. That is that the Doctor and Jo don't take any side of the functionaries. In fact, I'm not sure that either of them even notice the oppressed people.
That one minor fault aside, Carnival proves to be a cracking adventure coming from the hands of someone like Robert Holmes. All the cast involved make the most of what they have to do and the whole thing comes off well. Even the Drashigs, despite being hand puppets work wonderfully. It is easily one of the best and most memorable of all Jon Pertwee's outings as the Third Doctor!
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