The Florana Speech

Saturday, 28 June 2025

Wednesday, 23 June 1978

I’m about to watch Doctor Who for the very first time tonight. I’ve known of it for years, I think, but I’ve only started to get interested in the last few weeks. My friend Luke and I have been reading his copy of The Doctor Who Monster Book in class instead of solving maths problems, and although I’ve never even seen the show, I know all four Doctors by name, and I can already identify his most formidable enemies — the Zarbi, the Wirrn, someone called Steyr, the Exxilons, the Sensorites and Bellal.

But I’m watching tonight because Luke has told me that there will be Daleks.

We skip the first scene of Terry Walsh staggering through a misty greenish landscape, being shot by an arrow and tumbling into a puddle full of dry ice — it’s a scene apparently too horrific for the nine–year–olds in the [Australian] audience. Instead, we open with a spinning beach umbrella — the Doctor and Sarah are talking about the beach holiday that he has promised her on the planet Florana. “You can’t sink on Florana,” says the Doctor. “The water’s effervescent.”

I won’t get to see the Doctor luring Sarah into the TARDIS with this promised holiday until many years later: Channel 2 in Sydney won’t screen Invasion of the Dinosaurs until 1984, and Malcolm Hulke doesn’t include the scene in his 1976 novelisation. But it’s one of the best final scenes of any Classic Doctor Who story. The Doctor is describing Florana to a reluctant Sarah, who is determined not to board the TARDIS again because of the dangers she’s faced in this story and the previous one. But the Doctor perseveres. “The streams flow with waters that are clearer than the clearest crystal,” he says lyrically, as she laughs and covers her ears, convinced already of her own defeat.

Sarah is the first companion we see lured onto the TARDIS by the promise of wonders, and she’s also the last companion in the classic series to hear the Doctor’s Florana speech. (The Doctor has promised Jo that the air of Metebelis is like a fine wine, but we never get to see that conversation; all of the later companions are dropping out of their lives in some way, except for Harry, who is tricked aboard by the Doctor, and Romana, who is there on a special assignment. Oh, and Mel, whose first trip in the TARDIS occurs offscreen.) But when the show returns in 2005 as the New Series, the Florana Speech is back too — again and again we hear that the companions travel with the Doctor in order to experience wonders. The Florana Speech looms so large in our memories of the Classic Series that we assume that its underlying idea was always a part of the show.

– Why do you do it? Why do you fly off in the box with him? The truth. Please, just this once.

– Because it’s amazing. Because I see wonders.

Of course, Sarah never gets the Florana holiday that the Doctor has promised. (The Doctor also fails to get Amy and Rory there many years later, in a different medium.) Instead, she is captured, drugged and nearly sacrificed by the Exxilons. She is frightened by Bellal, pursued by the Daleks and set to work mining parrinium. Promised wonders, she is confronted by horrors.

It’s obvious why this is. Watching Donna sunning herself by the pool on the planet Midnight is fun for one scene, but we’d much rather watch the Doctor under attack by a group of terrified humans. For us, the sightseeing tour of Argolis only really kicks off once Earth Visitor Loman has been dismembered. And way back in 1965, or AD 64, it’s the arrival of the slave traders that piques our interest, however enjoyable it has been watching Barbara and Ian relaxing post–coitally in Flavius Giscard’s villa. We watch Doctor Who for the monsters, the dangers, the cliffhangers. Maybe Jo is right in Carnival of Monsters. Maybe we are evil and horrible people.

– You know, the thing about a time machine, you can run away all you like and still be home in time for tea. So what do you say? Anywhere. All of time and space, right outside those doors.

So why does Sarah stay with the Doctor? It’s still early days for her, but next year’s adventures will be full of monstrosities: corpses and Nazis; torture, peril and venom. And yet, when Harry, the Brigadier and the Duke of Forgill refuse the Doctor’s offer of a trip home in the TARDIS, Sarah joins him. “Providing we go straight back to London,” she says.

My friend Brendan says it’s because she loves the Doctor. “I worry about you,” she tells him in her second last episode. But can that possibly be enough? Is her character just distorted by the demands of the format, by our desire to watch her undergoing horrors?

– Someone’s got to be the Doctor.

– They’ll kill you.

– Never stopped him.

The New Series answers this question by creating a life for the companions that isn’t just peopled by horrors. It alludes to unseen adventures in which the companion sees wonders — Rose travels to Woman Wept, Martha visits the moon landing three times, Clara gets to snog her favourite Regency novelist. And it can now afford to put wonders on screen — the fish over Sardicktown, the creation of the earth in The Runaway Bride.

But there’s more to it than that. The horrors of Doctor Who are an occasion for heroism, and by confronting them the companions themselves become heroes. “The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life,” says Rose. “You don’t just give up. You don’t just let things happen. You make a stand.”

And perhaps the Classic Series provides this answer as well. Death to the Daleks isn’t much interested in the heroism of its female characters: in the last moments of the story, our eyes are on Galloway, whose cold pragmatism requires him to sacrifice his own life to destroy the Daleks. But perhaps the real hero here is Sarah, whose courage and ingenuity have provided the Space Marines with enough parrinium to save the lives of ten million people. Some things, even fictional things, are more important than a holiday at the beach.

Nathan Bottomley is a Latin teacher living in Sydney with his husband and three small fluffy dogs. He podcasts about Doctor Who on Flight Through Entirety.