On September 30, 1967 the first of a six part “Dr. Who” story featuring Patrick Troughton as the “Second Doctor” began. The story was entitled “The Abominable Snowman” and would run through November 4, 1967. On February 3, 1968 another six part story featuring the “Second Doctor” premiered and ended on March 9, 1968. Both of these Adventures were connected by a common enemy “The Great Intelligence”. “The Great Intelligence” would return twice more. The first reappearance wasn’t against the Doctor, but his companions. On September 2, 1995 a spinoff entitled “Downtime” was shown on the BBC featuring returning actors recreating the companions they played going back to the “Second Doctor”. It would take another 18 years when on May 18, 2013 Matt Smith as the “Eleventh Doctor” would see “The Great Intelligence” return to the “Whoiverse”. You just can’t destroy a good foe and especially a major member of the “Old Ones”. Within the “Dr. Who” canon “The Great Intelligence” is never seen on screen, but controls people’s minds to accomplish its purpose. “The Abominable Snowman” takes place within a Tibetan monastery in the Himalayas. The Doctor discovers that the monastery’s High Lama is a man named Padmasambhava who like the character in James Hilton’s novel “Lost Horizon” is 300 years old. The High Lama is under the control of the “Intelligence.” According to Padmasambhava he encountered the formless being he calls “The Great Intelligence” on the astral plane and the entity borrowed his form in order to conduct an experiment. Thus he first entered our dimension. Those two “Second Doctor” adventures were both written by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln. One of these two writers used their knowledge of a character from 1838 reworked in 1936 as the basis to create one of the most powerful foes a now 2,000 year old “Time Lord” would ever fight. A knowledge that demonstrates the relationship between literature, movies and television. Just as the scripts obvious relationship to English novelist Hilton’s work about the Utopia “Shangri-la” also a Tibetan monastery in the Himalayas. So who, or what is “The Great Intelligence” and what does it have to do with as diverse a group of writers as Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 to October 7, 1849), Jules Verne (February 8, 1828 to March 24, 1905) and Howard Phillips “H.P.” Lovecraft (August 20, 1890 to March 15, 1937)? The answer begins with a comment made by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart the head of “U.N.I.T.” in one of the six episodes that make up “The Abominable Snowman.” The Brigadier specifically refers to the “The Great Intelligence” by the name “Yog-Sothoth”. Quoting from H.P, Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror”: “Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earths fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.” In that first “Second Doctor” episode the High Lama entered the gate on the astral plane. The character of Yog-Sothoth is part of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos” and appears in “At the Mountains of Madness”. A story which first appeared in “Astounding Stories” from February to April 1936. I read it in a collection of Lovecraft and that one reading lead me to Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne and in turn to remembering the reference made by Lethbridge-Stewart in “Dr. Who”. “At the Mountains of Madness” tells of a disastrous expedition to the Antarctic Continent through the first person narrative of geologist William Dyer who is a professor at Miskatonic University. A name very familiar with fans of Lovecraft’s tales. On the expedition is a graduate student named Danforth who is one of the few people to actually have read the University’s copy of the Necronomicon. A work Lovecraft first created in his 1922 story “The Hound”. The Necronomicon was written by the “Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred and contains the complete account of the “Old Ones”, their history and how to summon them. I am not going into detail of the following stories as some of my readers may want to read them, if so please do it in the same order for your best enjoyment. The expedition discovers an abandoned stone city in the Antarctic built by the “Elder Things” aka: from other Lovecraft stories the “Old Ones”. Danforth starts to reference Poe especially when he and Dryer start hearing a sound within the dark passageways they are wondering within. Danforth mentions that it is not the blowing of the wind as Dyer believes, but a living creature called a “Shoggoth”. Which Danforth believes was first written about in Edgar Allen Poe’s account of a man Poe personally knew named Arthur Gordon Pym. I researched Poe’s writings and discovered “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket” published in July of 1838. The story tells of Pym’s adventures aboard the whaling ship Grampus and then another whaler called the Jane Guy. It is on the second ship that Pym and the crew enter the Antarctic regions which at the time of Poe were completely unexplored. The crew of the Jane Guy discover a tropical island in the Antarctic where they are attacked by natives. While hiding from them Pym and another man named Peters discovers a labyrinth of passages with strange markings on the walls. The two men explore the passages and debate if the markings are natural, or manmade. Finally they are able to escape in a small boat and then the story just stops. Poe starts with a Preface and ends with a Postscript by the books editor. In the postscript the books editor stated the marks on the walls noted by Pym seem to be similar to Arabian and Egyptian letters and hieroglyphs with meanings of “Shaded”, “White”, and “Region to the South”. Enter Jules Verne and a work entitled “Le Sphinx des glaces (The Sphinx of the Ice Fields”) aka: “An Antarctic Mystery” written in 1897. Verne became fascinated with Poe’s story and decided to write the ending answering the questions: What happened to Arthur Gordon Pym and what was the “Region in the South”? The story starts eleven years after the events in Poe’s novel. Verne’s story is told from the perspective of an American named Jeorling on board a ship called the Halbrane. The captain is a Len Guy and there is a direct relationship to the ship Jane Guy. During the voyage a dead body from the Jane Guy is discovered leading the crew of the Halbrane into discovering the truth of what happened in the events of Edgar Allan Poe’s work. The Halbrane enters the Antarctic and discovers the tropical island and eventually this will lead the crew to a giant Sphinx surrounded by a large magnetic force field and the secret of what became of Arthur Gordon Pym. I hope I may have tweaked some interest in reading these three literally works. I found the progression interesting from H.P. Lovecraft to Edgar Allan Poe to Jules Verne and in a roundabout way the BBC’s “Dr. Who”.
Posted on: Fri, 03 Oct 2014 13:00:17 +0000