5 More Doctor Who Monsters Which Shouldn't Have Worked (But Did)
1. Sutekh and the Mummies from Pyramids of Mars (1976)
Interesting, how the last set of monsters that shouldn't have worked clustered around a particular point in the Pertwee era (try saying that five times fast) and this one clusters around a similar point in the Baker era. It also so happens that I'm cheating on this one a bit - the concept of an Egyptian god of death actually being a member of a long-lived alien race works perfectly well on paper. But given the production history for this story, it's amazing that that's what ended up on paper at all. Various sources (the extras on the DVD among them) tell us that Pyramids of Mars by Lewis Greifer started off life as a story set in the British Museum, and while it featured mummies, it also featured the Brigadier and UNIT. These were not the things that made it unworkable, however, so unworkable that script editor Robert Holmes basically rewrote the whole thing. (He did a similar save with The Ark in Space when Hartnell-era writer John Lucarotti proved unable and unwilling to write a script that worked for the show as it was being produced in 1974 - now, there's a pattern emerging.) Holmes took what would've been considered a mediocre story by anyone's standards and turned it into what is arguably one of the best stories of the entire series, with one of the best villains. On a deadline, yet. The man was brilliant. I'm also cheating by lumping Sutekh and his robotic mummies together, too, because taken all in all, they really shouldn't have worked. I mean, robotic mummies? Really? But for a costume that's basically simple (and yet so uncomfortable that Tom Baker refused to put it back on for the studio work on this story after having worn it on location), it works surprisingly well: 
They're relentless; they never tire; and their one objective is to kill you in some painful way. Hell, they're scary even when they kill somebody in an outright silly way, as with this poor guy: 
"Aw, they want to show me how much they lov - ARGH!"And then we get Sutekh himself. His initial appearances in the story are perfectly fine, especially with that beautifully ornate mask in the image above, and Gabriel Woolf's voice acting is so effective that the new series production team asked him to come back and voice the Devil (or whatever the hell it was) in The Impossible Planet. But eventually he's unmasked, and we get this: 