mavic_chen

I loved The Power of the Daleks, sadly available on audio only (or BBC photonovel here).I was busily spotting foreshadowings in the first couple of episodes - Lesterson, the scientist who has recovered a crashed Dalek spaceship, is a combination of Henry Van Statten (from the Ninth Doctor story, Dalek) and Davros (from Genesis of the Daleks, not the later inferior versions), and some lines seemed to me to have been lifted direct from here to the later stories.

The suspicion of Ben and Polly as to the credentials of the new man in the Tardis are entirely understandable, particularly given his habit of referring to "the Doctor" in the third person. But confusion of identity is rather a theme in the story anyway: the Doctor is immediately taken by the colonists of Vulcan to be the Examiner from Earth; the Daleks are pretending to be helping the humans (few more chilling lines than the mendacious "I am your servant!" chant which ends episode 2); the humans themselves are so factionalised that nobody seems entirely sure who is on which side.

Robert James as Lesterson was particularly good, undergoing transition from blinkered scientist, to seeing the error of his ways, to breaking down completely. I was also impressed by Pamela Ann Davey as Janley, an actual serious role for a female character. Polly does not appear in epsiode 4 (presumably Anneke Wills was taking the week off? Obviously anticipated since she is kidnapped half way through the previous episode); Ben, irritatingly, keeps wanting to go back to the Tardis and get out of the place. But Patrick Troughton's Doctor, perhaps a little uncertain at first (and hiding behind that annoying habit of playing the recorder) comes into his own pretty quickly, and by the end of the story you know who's Who. 

< The Rescue | The Evil of the Daleks >

The Highlanders is another fourth season story from 1966/67, the last of the great Doctor Who historical stories, coming in sequence immediately after Patrick Troughton's first story, Power of the Daleks. The Second Doctor is still establishing his identity, and spends quite a lot of this in disguise, as a German doctor (Doktor von Wer!) and in drag. Polly thinks he looks rather good as a woman. Indeed, Polly rather excels in this story, using her feminine wiles to manipulate the English lawyer Algernon ffinch; I can't think of another example where she was allowed to be sexy as well as look sexy. Apart from that I have to say I found the plot a bit confused and stagnant, with the Doctor actually arming the rebels to kill their captors which is a bit un-Doctorish. As well as Ben and Polly, of course, the story introduced Jamie who was to stay with the Second Doctor until the bitter end. 

< The Smugglers | The Macra Terror >

The Underwater Menace, from Patrick Troughton's first season in early 1967, is notorious - even the normally upbeat Howe and Walker describe it as "undoubtedly the weakest of the second Doctor's era, if not of the sixties as a whole". Fortunately, in a way, only episode three (out of four) survives, and today's fan can buy the soundtrack with narration by Anneke Wills who played Polly (the story featuring her, Ben and new companion Jamie). This means that we are not subjected to the awful production values and can let our imaginations fill in for the cheap-looking sets. As a sound only production it comes close to succeeding, with the main problems being the baffling ballet of the fish people in episode three (which in fact becomes more rather than less confusing when you actually see it) and the utterly clichéd villain, Professor Zaroff, who actually ends the third episode by declaring that nothing in the world can stop him now. The director, Julia Smith, went on to create EastEnders; this cannot have been a high point of her early career.

It does feature the most extensively featured Irish character in any Doctor Who story, P.G. Stephens' trapped sailor Sean (who is teamed up with Jacko, a trapped Asian sailor played by Paul Anil). As I have previously noted, there is not a lot of competition. It is not fair to say that he has "the least convincing Irish accent in television history", as he has a long acting career both in Ireland and England (playing mainly Irish parts, including a comedy IRA bomber), but he is certainly as wobbly in his acting as any of the rest of the guest cast, especially in the deeply embarrassing scene where he urges the fish people to revolt. 

< An Unearthly Child | The Faceless Ones >

The Moonbase was a four-part series broadcast just before I was born in 1967. It is set entirely on the Moon, at a base from which the world's weather is controlled; the Doctor and his three companions (Ben and Polly from 1966 and eighteenth-century Jamie) arrive in time to avert the conquest of Earth by the Cybermen their second appearance after The Tenth Planet. It's not easy to watch, because episodes 1 and 3 are lost; in the end I played the soundtrack off my Lost In Time DVD while flicking through the BBC photonovel, and then watched episode 2 and 4 directly.

I have to differ with the fannish consensus that this is better than the Cybermen's previous outing. I found the Cybermen more difficult to understand, the plot implausible even making allowances for scientific hand-waving - the base commander ought to have been shot for his attitude to security - and the direction seems to consit of lots of actors standing around waiting to say their next line.

On the other hand, the look of the sets is pretty good; two years before Armstrong and Aldrin, they do a decent lunar landscape and setting. The incidental music is great. And Troughton is brilliant, though Ben is annoying, Jamie comatose for much of the story, and Polly is repeatedly patronised - noticeably the only female character, told to go and make the coffee, told she can't take part in the final attack as it is "men's work". I don't find myself especially mourning the two missing episodes.

< City of Death | The Ark >

The Macra Terror is, again, from the fourth season, immediately following The Moonbase. It sounds absolutely glorious (even if fan lore has it that the evil crustaceans themselves looked rather crap), indeed I almost felt it would have fitted comfortably in to 1980s Who rather than 1960s Who. While the idea of aliens controlling an apparently happy and contented human society did eventually become a cliche, here it was all brand new - I think the only previous Who story to feature the concept was the second episode of The Keys of Marinus (though I haven't checked, and if I'm wrong someone will point it out). The "happy campers" sound exhorting the colonists to enjoyment as well as slave labour is genuinely chilling; I'm not surprised to learn that writer Ian Stuart Black had input into The Prisoner, which started its broadcast run a few months later. And having praised Anneke Wills in the Highlanders, here I'll put a good word in for Michael Craze as Ben, victim of brainwashing by the evil crustacean overlords, whose character transformations are entirely convincing.

Unfortunately I can't say the same for Colin Baker's narration. I don't blame Baker (much) for this. For some reason the narration is entirely in the past tense, rather than in the present tense used by most Doctor Who audio releases; it also curiously fails to set the scene very well - take, for example, the very first lines: "The entrance to the colony was decidely futuristic. A crowd of workers was watching a drum majorette performing to the accompaniment of a band. The whole place had the aura of a holiday camp. Everyone was smiling and enjoying the performance." Not only does it not really convey anything very coherent, it also completely misses the real start of the story as seen by the 1967 viewers, of a man looking on in terror. I think this story would benefit well from re-dubbing with a new narrative script (and possibly a new narrator). This is probably also the moment to praise Anneke Wills for her narration of The Smugglers, and especially Fraser Hines for his of The Highlanders and The Enemy of the World.

< The Highlanders | The Enemy of the World >

The Faceless Ones: Set in July 1966 in London, the established companions subject to brainwashing and written out after the first two episodes, seems a bit familiar? Though in fact the story is a startling contrast with The War Machines in many ways. The most striking difference is that it is much more boring, stretched across six episodes set in Gatwick Airport, which is somehow not as exciting as the Post Office Tower. I have to say that I listened to most of them last Wednesday while on a flight from Kosovo back to Brussels via Ljubljana, not at all sure if I was going to reach my destination, so it struck a bit closer to home than I normally like my Who to do. But really, the Chameleons' predicament makes no sense, the resolution makes no sense, the departure of Ben and Polly makes little sense (though the Doctor gets a nice wistful line as they go) and the plot barely progresses from episode one to episode six. I do wish Pauline Collins had stayed on as potential companion Sam Briggs, rather than the dismal Victoria - that would have been a tension worth watching, as Jamie has already snogged her twice. But it was not to be.

 < The Underwater Menace | Embrace the Darkness >

The last story of Patrick Troughton's first season as the Doctor, and the one voted the Best Ever Doctor Who Story by readers of Dreamwatch in 1993. Only one episode out of seven survives on video, and I haven't seen it (yet).

I have to say that I was very unsatisfied with the plot of this classic story. The Daleks' plan to manipulate the Doctor, and the Doctor's attempts to manipulate Jamie, are both unrealistically convoluted as well as being very out of character. We never find out how the Daleks got photographs of the Second Doctor, whom they otherwise met only on the planet Vulcan, and of Jamie, whom they did not otherwise meet at all (unless you believe the Season 6B theory). (We also know that the first two episodes of Evil of the Daleks are contemporaneous with The War Machines, so the Daleks would have been better off trying to grab the First Doctor who was elsewhere in London at the same time.) When we hit the nineteenth century, Arthur Terrall's presence is not very satisfactorily explained, and the fact that he is a robot is just left hanging (or rather, Ruth is told to take him as far away as possible, as if this will somehow cure him of being mechanical). And it seems difficult to imagine that the Daleks are so bad at keeping track of individual units, however de-personalised they may be, that they simply lose track of the first three humanised Daleks. (The Discontinuity Guide further asks, "Why not just kidnap the Doctor and Jamie? Why does Terrall get Toby to kidnap Jamie? Since Jamie is so essential to Dalek plans, why are the traps set for him so lethal?")

Having said that, the acting is great, and it's clear from the BBC photosnaps that the series looked fantastic (Maxtable's beard!!!!!). It's also a really great idea to return to the Dalek City on Skaro (apparently the first time the Doctor had ever been seen to return to any planet except Earth). And I loved the Victoriana; I especially liked Waterfield's horror-filled explanation, "We had opened the way for them with our experiments. They forced me into the horror of time travel, Doctor" - sounded very HP Lovecraft! And the references to Poe were clear (and even at one point explicit). And Troughton is great, dominating every scene (and this partly accounts for the flagging pace of episode 4 when he was on holiday).

So anyway, more good than bad, but I'm very sorry not to have actually seen any of it. 

< The Power of the Daleks | The Ice Warriors >

I'd thought for some reason that this was another six-parter, and settled down to watch episode four this morning, only to realise to my disappointment that it was all over. Well, having had a rather unsatisfactory run of Second Doctor stories, I am relieved to say that I very much enjoyed this. Certainly falls into the category of Doctor Who that you can safely show non-fans without fear of embarrassment.

I complained that it is sometimes difficult to tell Patrick Troughton apart from the other actors on the audio tapes. There is no problem at all when you are watching the programme; he is at the centre of every scene he is in. And this is not just the natural effect of the director concentrating on the central character: Troughton is simply fascinating to look at - such an expressive face.

The story is of course a classic. The Cybermen - or rather, the Cyber-controller, who is the only one who gets significant airtime, with Peter Hawkins' superbly chilling voicing of the lines - are worthy adversaries, assisted by their human dupes (vaguely foreign and therefore sinister, unlike the spaceship captain who is American and therefore clearly a Good Guy). The Cybermats could very nearly have been awful, but carry it off well. There are certain implausibilities in the set-up - why do the Cybermen limit themselves to a single means of egress after they have been woken, with the revitaliser on the other side of the hatch? Why does the Doctor allow the Cyber-controller to recharge himself? - but you can overlook them in the fun of the ride.

There are some nice little touches as well: Victoria's reaction to the Tardis; the Doctor and Victoria about their families; the Doctor telling Klieg just how insane he is; Toberman cradling his dead mistress. I even quite liked the special effects of the Cybermen doing mind-zinging things - would look very silly now but fitted the 1960s feel of the series.

The DVD has a couple of great extras as well: director Morris Barry's brief introduction to the original video release, excerpts from a panel discussion in 1992 which brought together the surviving actors and crew from the series, and slightly to my surprise but much to my delight a very brief video of the Dalek civil war from the end of the previous series, The Evil of the Daleks.

In summary, this is a DVD well worth getting hold of. 

< Fury From the Deep | Inferno >

This was the second story in the famously monster-rich 1967-68 Season 5 (preceded by "Tomb of the Cybermen", and followed by "The Ice Warriors", "The Enemy of the World", "The Web of Fear", "Fury from the Deep" and "The Wheel in Space"). The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria land in Tibet in roughly the 1930s. The Doctor (in one of those irritating references to otherwise unseen adventures) happens to have the holy bell of the local monastery stashed in the Tardis as the result of a visit several hundred years previously. Much confusion over his and his companions' real intent ensues, especially since a) an English researcher, Professor Travers, is there looking for Yeti and thinks they are there to steal his research, and b) the monks have been attacked by the Yeti (and indeed Travers' colleague is killed by them in practically the first scene). In the meantime, the Great Intelligence controlling the (robotic) Yeti also has an unhealthy influence over the leader of the monastery. All ends in a dramatic confrontation inside the Det-sen monastery. You can get a jolly good impression of it for free from the photonovel on the BBC website (possibly even better than from the soundtrack, narrated by Fraser Hines who played Jamie). NB that one of the two co-authors went on to become one of the co-authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (though when his two colleagues sued Dan Brown for plagiarism in The Da Vinci Code, he stayed wisely silent).

Well, it's OK but it's not great. Troughton as the Doctor is, as always, fantastic (he has a couple of great one-liners - "They came to get their ball back!"), and the other actors give it their best as well. And the sinister beeping of the Yeti control spheres is a noise that will haunt me whenever I hear a mobile phone give off a similar ringtone. But there is a curious sapping of tension from the scenes with the monks - even if some of them are deluded warrior monks. Troughton does a lot of agonised groaning (he was very good at that) to maintain the tension, but he is working against the tide a bit. Jamie astounds everyone by having a couple of good ideas. Victoria, sadly, just screams. And the biggest problem is that it's not readily apparent what the sinister plan of the Great Intelligence actually is. My second least favourite thing in sf is having villains whose means and motivation are not clear (my least favourite is cute anthropomorphic robots, but at least the Yeti do not fall into that category). But if the Great Intelligence takes over one Tibetan monastery - so what? And where do the raw materials for building the Yeti come from, halfway up the Himalayas? Bad news for Det-sen and district if it succeeds, but not clear that this is a potentially world-threatening danger. 

< Timewyrm: Apocalypse | The Web of Fear >

Actually finished listening to this mid-week, but due to pressure of other things have been only slowly catching up with reviews. Four out of six episodes survive, and perhaps I should give it another chance by watching them (I may even spend some time on the BBC's photonovel); I'm afraid I wasn't overwhelmed by the soundtrack, herewith linking narration from Frazer Hines. Troughton's Doctor doesn't seem to own each scene he is in, in the way that Hartnell's did; and especially when listening, his voice and accent are confusingly similar to some of the other characters'. Also he's surprisingly trigger-happy in the end about wiping out the Ice Warriors. And while Victoria just seems to exist to get into trouble and scream in every story she is in, Jamie's main role here is also to get into trouble (gets knocked out at the end of episode one, spends much of the rest of the story paralysed).

Having vented my frustration with the regulars, there were several things about the story that I really did like. First of all, the Ice Warriors themselves. Bernard Bresslaw, plus colleagues, with that sinister, painful, hissing voice. Unlike the human characters, they sem to know exactly what they are up to. While Roy Skelton's voice of the human computer is sadly difficult to understand, I did like the fanatical relationship between the humans (particular Leader Clent) and the computer - early foreshadowing of the Paranoia role-playing game. And the technobabble and had-waving science was pleasingly incomprehensible, thus not getting in the way of enjoying the show.

So, willing to be convinced about this one, but not yet convinced I'm afraid. We are listening to "Fury From The Deep" while driving at the moment. Irritatingly my car stereo doesn't play my MP3 CDs of the two Yeti stories. Are they reasonably easy to convert into ordinary CD format and re-burn? Or should I just listen to them on the computer? 

< The Evil of the Daleks | Fury From the Deep >

---

I was pleasantly surprised, on reviewing my Second Doctor lore as I read the novelisations, to realise that I had not seen any of the four surviving episodes of The Ice Warriors, though I had listened to an audio version with Fraser Hines narrating. So I watched it, and it is a heck of a lot better with the pictures than without; the sense of a really cold environment, with different groups of humans surviving as best they can, and the Ice Warriors themselves all come across really well on the screen. Not surprised to see that this was an early effort of one of DW's more successful directors. Shame about Victoria but you can't have everything.

The Enemy of the World, broadcast in 1967/68, was the only story of the famously monster-filled fifth season not to featuer any, er, monsters. I recently read Ian Marter's novelisation of the story, and watched the one surviving episode (of six - the other stories reviewed here were all four-parters) and was not hugely impressed. But the real thing is better; the plot develops into considerable intricacy, with the confusion of identities between the Doctor and Salamander reflected in the confusion as to which of the other characters are good guys and which are bad guys. I rather fault Marter for missing some of this, and also slashing a dramatic sequence in the Secret Underground Base in the novel. Troughton is great as the evil Salamander, though bizarrely somewhat less good as the Doctor, sending his companions into danger in Hungary while staying safely in Australia himself. The Australian chef is a lovely bit part. Though that same episode also features one of the worst Doctor Who exchanges ever: "Why is the prisoner being kept in the corridor?" "It's easier to guard him here." (Real answer: we forgot to budget for scenery for a cell.) 

(novelisation)

< The Macra Terror | The Myth Makers >

The sequel to The Abominable Snowmen, broadcast only a couple of months later, is in quite a different category. This is truly one of the great Doctor Who stories, and it's very sad that the only surviving episode on video is the first, which is not the best. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive in contemporary (ie 1968) London, to find that the whole city centre is deserted, the Underground closed, corpses covered by sinister webs; it turns out that Professor Travers' souvenirs from his Himalayan adventure of decades before have developed a life of their own, and the Great Intelligence is back and re-mobilising the robotic Yeti to try and Take Over The World.

Even for us folks from the Celtic fringe, London has a particular resonance. I discovered at the age of, I think, 15, that 43p is the amount of money you leave London with, no matter how much you had when you arrived. There are several wonderful scenes of (Scottish) Jamie and a Welsh soldier trying to find their way through the tunnels. And within London the Tube is very special; there s something pretty appalling even in the audio description of the gradual extinguishing of the lights representing Tubes stations not yet overwhelmed by the enemy. I guess the idea of horrors in the Underground has an extra resonance after July last year, though this would have been very far from the makers' minds in 1968. (The Blitz, of course, would have been nearer.)

There's a real peak in the middle of the story. The Doctor is wholly absent from episode #2 (presumably Troughton had the week off), but rather than embarrassedly scramble for continuity as tended to be the case in Hartnell's day, the Doctor's absence is a real source of tension, leading Jamie and Victoria into rash efforts to track him down. When the Doctor does turn up in episode #3, it is in the company of a mysterious colonel, who seems a deeply ambiguous figure - is he what he claims to be, the new commander sent in by the authorities outside the zone affected by the crisis, or is he a tool of the Great Intelligence? Of course, we long-term fans know what the answer is as soon as we hear the colonel's name; but the character portrayed by Nicholas Courtney here is far more interesting than the buffoonish Brigadier of the Pertwee years.

Unfortunately the last two episodes slip back into chasing through tunnels, but the form picks up again for the climax, which sees the Doctor apparently trapped in a sinister mechanism which will drain his mind into the Great Intelligence. Again, we long-term fans know that he may well have a trick up his sleeve, but Jamie and Victoria don't, and dutifully rescue him before he has time to turn the tables on the enemy, which is therefore defeated but not destroyed, leaving room for another story.

< The Abominable Snowmen | Downtime / The Romans >

Perhaps this was not the ideal story with which to introduce my wife to the delights of the Troughton Era. It was not long before she started to mime the evil mutant seaweed, causing me some slight distraction and no doubt alarming passing drivers who saw her doing it. She also developed an animus against Victoria ("She's so wet!") from a very early stage in the plot, and started making "bang bang" gestures at the stereo speakers every time Deborah Watling's voice was heard. The punchline - that the evil mutant seaweed is killed off precisely by Victoria's screaming - made her incoherent with laughter. I do have the DVD of Tomb of the Cybermen with us, but persuading her to watch it may be a tough sell.

However I found it grew on me. There was a lot of padding (helicopters for the sake of helicopters, for instance), and the whole plot would barely have filled 45 minutes of New Who. But it picked up once megolas arrived to sort things out. I've written about dodgy accents in this story before, but even Van Lutyens started sounding more Dutch (or at least less like anything else) as the story went on. And it's a pleasant novelty to have a Who story in which everyone survives.

Victoria's departure - the Victoria/Jamie relationship was an opportunity never taken up by the programme's writers (or, interestingly, by fanfic writers). Jamie clearly fancies her rotten in The Power of the Daleks, and at the end of the first episode of The Ice Warriors he is trying to persuade her to wear the more revealing fashions of the locals (when their conversation is interrupted by the waking monster). But nothing more seems to have ever been made of it. NB that the next two female companions (Zoe and Liz Shaw) were both brainy. Then back to screaming, with Jo Grant.

As Anne said as the title music faded at the end, "So the evil seaweed menace that was threatening to take over the world was defeated by a few loud noises? Not awfully threatening then, was it?" 

(novelisation)

< The Ice Warriors | Tomb of the Cybermen >

The last episode in Patrick Troughton's second season as the Doctor, introducing Wendy Padbury as Zoe, and with the Cybermen back again. It has a mixed reputation among fans (and I have to admit that the astronomy is drastically inaccurate, and the plot, as so often with Cyberman stories, makes no sense at all), but I really liked it. In particular, I loved the atmosphere and appeaarance of the Wheel itself, a space station with a multi-national crew including psycho boss, sensible woman who is really keeping it all going, and the other various roles - including Zoe herself, brought up to be logical and knowledgeable, but with the Doctor and Jamie opening her mind to other possibilities. (The crew also includes one of Doctor Who's rare overtly Irish characters, Sean Flannigan, played by James Mellor, who also plays a non-Irish alien leader in the first episode of The Mutants; while we're on the subject, the mysterious but vital substance bernalium is named after Irish-born scientist J.D. Bernal.) To describe this as a mere remake of The Moonbase does not do it justice at all; it is what The Moonbase should have been.

And Zoe! Certainly now my favourite pre-Sarah Jane Smith companion. Her first exchange with Jamie is quite hilarious. Since four of the six episodes are missing, I listened to the CDs with linking narration by Wendy Padbury, who played Zoe; she does it fine, though I was not as impressed with the scripting as I have been for some of the others. (The two surviving episodes are on the Lost In Time DVD set.) 

< Exploration Earth | The Krotons >

As a season opener, The Dominators really isn't very special. Lots of plot elements and themes which could have been used better, and indeed had been used better in other stories. The citizens of Dulkis themselves are so crap that one almost feels they had the invasion coming to them; but the Dominators are also so useless at maintaining security on a vital military operation, and the robot Quarks so ludicrous, that one doesn't feel they deserve it.

It's difficult to believe that this is from the same authors who brought us the Yeti (and in the case of one of them, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail). The list of missed opportunities is huge, including the failure to convince of the chemistry between the two Dominators themselves. According to the documentary on the Invasion DVD there were huge problems with the scripting process, and one does sense it as the characters run pointlessly from place to place.

There are a couple of interesting points none the less. Arthur Cox is good as Cully the dissident Dulkian. The shapeless Dulkian costumes are not at all flattering to the figure but none the less rather fascinating (also interesting that the writers had little hesitation about killing off the bit-part female characters as ruthlessly as the men). Troughton excels as always despite the thin material. And Wendy Padbury as Zoe - cor!

< The Movie | The Invasion >

---

Audio: Nothing can salvage The Dominators, and Wendy Padbury's narration simply helps us concentrate on the emptiness of the plot; also we miss the visuals which are, I now realise, one of the story's high points. The one good thing is an interview with Padbury at the end.

< The Gunfighters | Colony in Space >

(novelisation)

The Mind Robber features... Oh, let's get it over with. Zoe. Nobody can keep their hands off her. Certainly not the Doctor (see right). Certainly not Jamie. And the first episode ends like this. In the fourth episode she has a catfight with a caped and masked comic book superhero and wins. No wonder today's Guardian lists her as one of the top five companions ever! I have to say that I can't think of a more confident and sexy performance from any of the companions in any other old Who story; Leela, I think, comes closest but that is not very close. (Of course, if we count new Who as well, nobody can hold a candle to John Barrowman.)

And the confidence on her part (and indeed that of the rest of the cast) is remarkable because in fact the story very clearly doesn't make a lot of sense.

The Doctor and companions are trapped in the Land of Fiction by its Master (not that Master but a different cosmic villain of the same name). We have a forest made of words. We have Jamie transformed into a different actor for an episode, to cover up the fact that Frazer Hines contracted chicken pox. We have clockwork soldiers. We have Rapunzel, we have E. Nesbit's Five Children, and best of all we have Lemuel Gulliver, played superbly by Bernard Horsfall (and more on him later). We have glorious moments of Jamie and Zoe becoming fictional, becoming hostile to the Doctor, being nostalgic for their lost homelands (to which of course they will be returned by the end of the season).

But we also have Doctor Who coming close to breaking the fourth wall, not in the overt way of the First Doctor in the Daleks' Master Plan (or the charming Morgus in The Caves of Androzani), but in terms of exploring Story and what it means to be in one. It's fascinating and bizarre and I'll have to re-watch it soon, along with all the DVD extras. And not just because I want to ogle Zoe again.

< Doctor Who - The War Machines | The Deadly Assassin >

The Invasion, from later in that season, leading up to The War Games, is quite a different matter. I've commented already on the brilliant idea of using animations for the two episodes (of the right in total) which are missing. I can bear to listen to an entire series in audio, but to mix audio and video is a different matter. I've tried the fan "reconstructions", but don't find them satisfactory; likewise watching the BBC photonovel combined with listening to the audio. But this format works, although of course once you get back to the live action episodes you realise what you are missing.

Kevin Stoney, as Tobias Vaughn, is a fantastic villain, and every scene with him is great to watch. He is a totally convincing invulnerable sinister scientist oligarch conspiring with the enemies of mankind, and yet achieves a certain measure of redemption at the end. He was, of course, also great as the super-villain mavic_chen in The Dalek Master Plan, though Chen is quite a different character. (And he popped up in I CLAVDIVS as Tiberius' court astrologer, Thrasyllus - who is indeed a historical character.) The story is really about Vaughn's journey as much as about anything else.

Poor Jamie doesn't get to do a lot, apart from canoeing and climbing up the liftshaft, but the other main characters are all great - Troughton as ever brilliant, but also Wendy Padbury as Zoe sparking a very very watchable rapport with Sally Faulkner's Isobel Watkins - and incidentally saving the day and blowing up the Cybermen's fleet with her Mental Powers of Calculation. And of course this is the first UNIT story, with the return of Lethbridge-Stewart (now a Brigadier) and the first appearance of Benton. Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier in particular gets some really good material to work with, a far cry from the cartoonish character of the Pertwee years. Again, the DVD reveals just how much fun the cast were having, especially thanks to the hospitality provided by the Guinness brewery where a lot of the action scenes were filmed.

Some reviewers have expressed bitter disappointment with the Cybermen, either that they don't have enough screen time, or that they don't look good, or (inconsistently) both. I don't completely share those feelings. The Cybermen aren't seen until the end of episode 4, but that's really because we have not been told who is behind the invasion of the story's title. It is a bit unfortunate that much of the action of blowing up spaceships, etc, happens off screen - but of course mediated through that new-fangled radar stuff. I also have the controversial view that the Cybermen redesign is better than the original version - I think supporting evidence is that the new version has survived through to this year.

The only other thing that really annoyed me was the cheery music accompanying the arrival of the soldiers for the final battle (apparently real soldiers from the real army). But the rest of the music is very good, and the whole thing is a jolly good package.

(novelisation)

< The Dominators | The Clockwise Man >

This story was shown to us uncomprehending fans in 1981 as part of the Five Faces of Doctor Who season, along with An Unearthly Child, Carnival of Monsters and Logopolis, one for each Doctor to date. The choice was dictated by the fact that it was then the only surviving four-part Troughton story (Tomb of the Cybermen has since been recovered, thank goodness). Unfortunately, in a season which had palpable hits like The Invasion, The War Games and The Mind Robber, this is one of the misses (see The Dominators and The Space Pirates); which is quite surprising when you consider that the writer was Robert Holmes and the director David Maloney - the same team that was later to produce The Deadly Assassin and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Oh well, one of those occasions aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus, or in this case Homeri. It's difficult to say quite why it doesn't work; the dodgy production values don't help, especially the egg-box monsters with comically spinning heads (apparently, in a Spinal Tap moment, their costumes were made a size too small); but perhaps it fails most notably on the grounds where The Wheel In Space succeeds, that the Gond society just isn't very believable and they look like actors stuck in a futuristic set. There is, however, an amusing Zoe costume malfunction at the start of episode 4 (at about 0:40 in). 

< The Wheel In Space | The Sorcerer's Apprentice >

I had actually tried watching The Seeds of Death once before, years ago, and rather bounced off it. I think if you aren't used to Troughton's style, it's difficult to get into him mid-season; I know that when I started listening to the audios last year I found his performance an acquired taste. But once you have been converted it's a different matter.

Also there are two whacking huge problems with The Seeds of Death which may put off a viewer less inclined to be forgiving. One of them can be described before we get to the plot: it is the costumes. The main monsters, the Ice Warriors are fantastic. But the leader of their expedition force, Slaar, is much shorter and has a less ornate costume which unfortunately means he ends up with a close resemblance to Dark Helmet, the character played by Rick Moranis in the Star Wars spoof Spaceballs. And the humans - at least the men on Earth - fare little better, with bizarre trousers which look like they are fitted with incontinence pads.

The second problem is intimately connected with the plot. The future Earth depends on a technology called T-Mat for transportation of pretty much everything. The T-Mat is controlled from the Moon, but its Earth-based secretariat shares a location with other sensitive facilities such as weather control. But there appears to be no serious effort to keep these areas secure, so that a single Ice Warrior is able to throw the Earthside complex into chaos. And when the necessity of launching Earth's one remaining space rocket becomes apparent, they turn to three complete strangers to form the crew (the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe). I think that was the point where my implausibility circuits overloaded on first watching.

But if you can swallow these two points, there is a lot to like about The Seeds of Death. All the actors are great. The Ice Warriors (apart from Slaar, and even he makes up for his comical appearance by carrying off the part very well) are pretty scary, and their take-over of the moonbase is dramatically well executed. The action is kept up frenetically to the point that most will overlook the implausibilities of the plot. On the DVD commentary for the last episode, Wendy Padbury apologises profusely for visibly giggling while struggling to open a door, but in fact it's barely noticeable even if you know what to look for and even if you tend to be staring at Zoe every time she is in shot.

And there are killer seeds (as in the title) which produce oxygen-destroying fungi. One of them explodes in the Doctor's face, knocking him unconscious for (conveniently) just over an episode. Others produce lots and lots of foam, the like of which had not been seen since Fury from the Deep. Cue lots of Troughton gurning as only he could; I can't think of any other Doctor who actually looked terrified as often as him.

I was fascinated by the list of the main cities served by T-Mat. They are:

 

New York - Berlin
Moscow - Oslo
Toronto - Hamburg
Paris - Ottawa
Zurich - Tokyo
Stockholm - London
Washington - Canberra

It is a fascinating insight into where the writers of the 1960s thought the centres of world trade would be in the not-so-far future. Two cities in Canada, two in Scandinavia, two in Germany; but nowhere in Europe further south than Zurich, only one city in Asia and none in Africa. (Including both New York and Washington is excusable, I think; but having nowhere further south or west in the Americas is not.)

All the human characters are white Europeans, but we do at least have two intelligent women (Zoe and Gia Kelly) one of whom is in a leadership position. I'll just also note that Irish actor Harry Towb plays the doomed lunar base commander in the first episode, but does it with an English accent à la David Tennant. (He appears using his native Norn Iron in Terror of the Autons, and with a peculiar Italian accent as the Brigadier's Sicilian uncle in The Ghosts of N-Space.)

In summary, one of the good ones from Troughton's last season. 

< Doctor Who [the book of the movie] | The Claws of Axos >

The Space Pirates features the TARDIS crew getting caught up in a conflict between pirates and law enforcement in outer space. My biggest problem with it was the accents of two of the key supporting characters: General Nikolai Hermack, played by plummy-voiced Jack May, later briefly famous as Garkbit the waiter in the Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and less briefly as Nelson Gabriel in The Archers, who can't quite decide if he is doing his usual toff or something slightly more foreign; and even worse, Gordon Gostelow's veteran miner Milo Clancey, whose voice wanders all over the southern and western United States with hints of Irish and Antipodean as well. Especially when you have to experience five of the six episodes on audio, and #3 is of particularly bad quality, it is a real distraction from your enjoyment. Having said that, it's not as bad a story as some people say, though it is rather unusual - the Doctor and his friends are more acted upon than acting, and spend a lot of time trapped or locked up while the story continues around them. To judge from the surviving episode, it looked like a half-decent effort, though my long-buried physicist instincts slightly rebelled at the immense violations of celestial mechanics committed by the writer.

< The Romans | Aliens of London / World War Three >

That, of course, is the central problem with this story: it is four hours of screen time, and you really appreciate it best by taking a decent break between each episode, so getting into it is a substantial investment.

I was prepared for a tedious dragging ten-part story with a deus ex machina ending. In fact, it is very good. It looks good for a start, with the various settings and scenery convincingly used. Troughton (especially) and Padbury and Hines really shine, and the guest actors all seemed pretty good to me. (The only one I didn't much care for was the stereotyped Mexican guerilla leader.) The music is not too bad either.

The story is excellent. The first episode gives only the mildest hint of what is to come (British WWI general with hypnotic abilities and a TV screen in his office, soldiers not sure how long they have been where they are) and we gradually build up through a hierarchy of villains - General Smythe, the Security Chief, the War Chief, the War Lord - to the appearance of the Time Lords themselves in episode 10.

The final episode is particularly good, with the War Lord's minions trying to bust him out of the Time Lords' custody, and Jamie and Zoe then trying the same with the Doctor; though he knows, as we do, that he cannot escape. The Doctor's trial echoes his court-martial by General Smythe in the first episode. And the ending, as the Second Doctor spins off into the void forever, must be one of the saddest in the programme's history.

< The Empire of Glass | The Scales of Injustice >

Anneke Wills had already returned to the role of Polly (as well as playing Charley Pollard's mother, Lady Elspeth, in a number of Eighth Doctor Stories). In Resistance, she tells the story of landing with the Second Doctor, Jamie and Ben in France in early 1944, where to her mixed delight and dismay she meets the airman uncle who she never knew. It's a very good Polly story - she is practically the first companion along the lines of Rose / Martha / Donna, coming from and rooted in contemporary England (poor Dodo doesn' really count) and Resistance gives her a bit of New Who treatment, exploring her family background and her relationship with the Doctor. I can forgive a couple of plot holes.