Review: Doctor Who Classic: The War Games

Doctor Who - Season Six, Story Seven - The War Games
Written between 28th October and 11th December 2015.

The Second Doctor's time on the show was filled with lots of Base-Under-Siege stories and repetitions of famous monsters. It was a transitionary period of the show, between the crapshoot serial drama of the Hartnell Era and the more slick adventures of the Pertwee Era. In that time, Two covered a lot of really great science fiction, and so it's only fitting that his era end on this complicated, long and remarkably watchable ten episode adventure which is fun, exciting and originates a remarkable amount of lore about The Doctor's past and people. While a lot of people skip the serial's first nine episodes and focus solely on Troughton's last continuous appearance, I think that's a grave mistake to make, as the rest of the serial has a great deal to offer.

The first appearance of the Time Lords, including
Chancellor Goth.

     The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe appear to land on the Western Front, where a tyrannical General Smythe is not only sending his soldiers to their deaths but is also communicating with some alien force using the 1960s vision of Skype. When The Doctor and some of his new friends attempt to escape and find the TARDIS, they pass through fog and end up in Roman Britain, revealing the true nature of their surroundings - an alien force has trapped large numbers of humans from throughout history on an alien planet set up to mimic their time-zones, planning to create a force of disposable but incredibly capable human soldiers. This plot is the orchestration of a race known as the War Lords, led by a Steve Jobs type known as "The War Lord" and aided by a mustachioed member of the Doctor's own people, the Time Lords, known as The War Chief. Boy, that's a lot of definite articles. The Doctor initially aides an uprising within the zones, and later confronts The War Chief (who is definitely not The Master, despite how cool that would be). Eventually, as he himself is unable to bring everyone home, The Doctor does the unthinkable and calls in the Time Lords. They take him and his companions back to their home planet, wiping his companions' memories of him and sentencing him to both forced regeneration and exile on Earth.
     The first thing you notice about this episode is that the guest cast are at an amazing calibre. Everyone from minor side characters to major villains are acting their socks off here, and it all makes for an extra wonderful send-off for this era. Notable names in the first few episodes are David Savile and Noel Coleman as Lt. Carstairs and General Smythe, respectively. Savile would appear in the program later in its run, while Coleman would go on later to have a memorable role in Red Dwarf. By far the strongest guests are Edward Brayshaw's War Chief (whom I'll discuss later) and The War Lord, delivered in amazing style by Philip Madoc. Madoc's War Lord is a tour-de-force performance, effortlessly quiet and civilised yet burying a deep ruthless anger. He's got the voice of a man confident that everything in creation is following his design, and it's spell-binding.
     The War Chief is a different beast entirely. I mentioned The Master before, and it's hard not to see the resemblance - a renegade Time Lord, used to be friends with The Doctor, now teamed up with an evil race he plans to use and then double-cross, who eventually double cross him instead. Edward Brayshaw doesn't, however, have a lot of The Master's mannerisms - he isn't hammy or particularly affable. Instead, he is a shrewd and fairly pleasant businessman, and the moment he hears of The Doctor's involvement he tries to make bonds and forge alliances. It's a refreshingly enjoyable kind of villain character where you actually end up routing for them to succeed in their scheme to overthrow the greater evil, even if at the end of the day they needed to be thwarted as well.

The War Lord and the War Lord are intriguing, complex villains.

   This episode's place in the show means that a lot of people are quite confused when they come to watch it. It takes eight and a half episodes before it becomes clear that any sort of final peril will actually come upon The Doctor and his companions. This peril comes in the form of the first appearance of The Time Lords, mentioned by name according to this story's idiosyncratic race naming. The name of their planet, Gallifrey, wouldn't be mentioned at all until 1974's The Time Warrior, but this is it's first appearance as well, albeit without the detail lovingly crafted onto it by later seasons. Watching the penultimate episode of this story, I finally understood the fan outrage at The Deadly Assassin; arguably the first time we got a good look at the depths of Gallifreyan politics. That story would humanise them; here, they are mystical, otherworldly beings of almost infinite power. They are a genuinely terrifying force, Gods by another name.
     By far the most memorable thing about this story, however, is the fact that we have to say goodbye. The means of Two's departure are miserable, and the fact we see Jamie and Zoe return to their lives, their memory of The Doctor lost, is simply heartbreaking. I watched six Two serials over the course of Cyberman Month and the two Ice Warriors stories. Over that time I really genuinely came to love these guys and their cute little adventures. I can't imagine just how powerful it would be if you'd spent three years with them. I can't really say I've fully explored The War Games and its many, many charms, but I can say that even as the show careened off into a vaguely uncertain future, this story was a demonstration of just how brilliant Doctor Who really was during those great old days.

Thanks

IN TWO WEEKS: We finally make our return to the Pertwee Era with The Mind of Evil.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Seeds of Death

They don't seem to hiss as much in this one.

Doctor Who - Season Four, Story Five - The Seeds of Death

Written between 16th and 26th October 2015

After the joy of Cyberman Month, I was going to carry on the theme, with December becoming Ice Warriors Month. Seeing as there's so much else going on, and the fact I wanted to review the amazing The War Games, I decided to leave the two colourised Ice Warriors stories for my hopefully rejuvenated run-through of the Pertwee years. So here we are with the penultimate story in this little black and white saga - The Seeds of Death, which follows up the Ice Warrior's initial high-concept Base-Under-Siege story with... a high-concept story using the Base-Under-Siege format. While I'm not exactly surprised at this repetition, there are a few things in this story's favour.

     Far in the future (although how far is unspecified), humanity has abandoned its space program in favour of a global teleportation system (known as T-Mat) organised from a Moonbase (no, not that one). Things are going smoothly until a tiny squadron of Ice Warriors invades said Moonbase, and begin coercing its staff into sending poisonous seed pods down to the surface of the Earth. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arrive before the pods are sent, and head up on mankind's last manned rocket to find out exactly what's going on. The pods create a self-replicating fungus which begins to spread across the Earth's surface, choking people and killing wildlife. Because the fungus is allergic to water, the Ice Warriors attack a weather station, but The Doctor manages to swoop in at the last minute and stop them, saving Earth.
     This story was broadcast in 1969, six months before the Apollo 11 mission had landed man on the moon. This makes the story's vision of the future rather pessimistic, and at the same time brilliant - sharply contrasting the 60s love of space and adventure (and really Doctor Who itself), the story manages to predict what actually ended up happening - we made it to the Moon and stopped. While we didn't stop all space travel - sending unmanned probes to take pictures of the Solar System and even sending one probe outside of the influence of our Sun - there are some interesting parallels with the defunding of NASA, the abandonment of the manned Space Program in the 1970s and a general sense of anticlimax to the Space Race. All before Man had even set off for the moon.
      The Seeds of Death is a Base-Under-Siege story, it's true, although it never really feels like that. There's a genuine sense that the Earth is in danger this time, even if the effectiveness of the Ice Warrior's soapy bath foam is undermined by both how silly it looks (Zoe is visibly giggling her head off in one "tense" scene) and by the Shyamalan-worthy fact that water stops it from working. The Ice Warriors, who can see Earth from their spaceships, decided to invade a planet whose surface area is 70% water and where water literally falls from the sky using a fungus which hates it. There are no words for this level of stupid. As for the setting, I wish they had a window on the Moonbase like in that previous story called The Moonbase - they could have even replicated that set and had some amazing continuity! For a part-time viewer it's hard to really appreciate that they're alone and isolated on the moon - The Ice Warriors was great for this, showing the hardships our characters faced while wandering the harsh ice of a future Britain. This time, the best we got was a fairly fun shot of an Ice Warrior wandering around in open countryside.

The Doctor is, in fact, afraid of suffocation in this scene,
and not simply enjoying a relaxing bubble bath.

      The Ice Warriors in this story are slightly less effective than in their premier, with their numbers having been knocked down to a measly two guys, and their motives being less "complicated struggle to survive" and more "mwhahaha let's conquer the earth for shitz lol." The serial is the first, however, to develop their culture as if they were actually people, establishing an apparent caste system with leaders called "Ice Lords" who are superior to all others and who get to wear an extra special silly hat. As mentioned, the shot of an Ice Warrior wandering around Britain was actually fairly interesting, even if it confused the narrative (when in the timeline of this story was the Earth frozen over?). The problem is, this story could have easily been done with the Cybermen of this era - and it might even have felt more appropriate, with the use of the Cybermen as a fear of technological progress fitting perfectly with this story's themes.
      The Seeds of Death does have something to offer those tired of the Base-Under-Siege format - it's got a fun and rather appropriate prediction about the future of humanity, its Leader/Voice-of-Reason/Traitor characters are all really well-developed for what they are. It does retread a lot of the format's problems and the appearance of the Ice Warriors doesn't really make that much sense thematically, but the story is exciting and pacey and more than makes up for it. The Seeds of Death's pessimism about the future of mankind may have been somewhat warranted, but it certainly made for a good story. 

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: We say goodbye to black and white stories for the moment, with The War Games.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Ice Warriors

Varga and Zondal are ssssslippery customers.

Doctor Who - Season Five, Story Three - The Ice Warriors
Written between the 14th and 15th October 2015.

This article would have been a lot more appropriate, I can now say with hindsight, in the Autumn of 2013, when the Ice Warriors returned to our screens in Series 7's Cold War.  Hindsight adds a lot to these Sixties reviews - especially when watching them in such quick succession. The Ice Warriors gained a place in Who folklore for the first, missing appearance of the titular monsters, who would recur in the show until Season 11. As with the Cybermen stories from last month, the missing episodes in this serial have been animated, although unfortunately this is a lot more Youtube Poop and less Infinite Quest.
     The plot follows yet another Base-Under-Siege format, with our base being Brittanicus Base, the stern leader being a bloke called Clent (insert your own rude innuendoes here), the voice of reason is Miss Garratt and the traitor is Peter Sallis' Penley. (Although he comes back.) Set in a far future where Global Dimming (oh, how I miss you) has caused the Earth to enter an early ice age, the Brittanicus Base exists to do some technical mumbo jumbo with lasers in order to prevent glaciers from rolling over the British landmass. On one of their surveys, they uncover a Martian Spacecraft, and the inhabitants, known only as the Ice Warriors, attempt to uncover their ship and fulfil their mission to conquer Earth.
     The story is written by Bryan Hayles, and like Malcolm Hulke's later stories The Silurians and The Sea Devils, the titular Ice Warriors are, despite being alien and aggressive, people worth talking to instead of simply trying to annihilate. There are times where they don't even feel like the villains of the piece - the emotionless Leader Clent is often in a position of antagonism, and the main threat against our characters is the icebergs fast approaching to consume Europe. It's in this where we find the story's main ideological dichotomy - science versus nature, logic versus emotion. Although many characters in the episode are against "science", their anger comes from the fact that in the background of the serial, there is the implication that by this point, the human race is controlled a centralised computer. It's a brilliant concept that doesn't end up skewing one way or another, with the overall message at the end being that a balance must be achieved between computer logic and human intuition. It's a little similar to the themes behind some of this era's Cybermen stories, except here it actually gets mentioned, discussed and thoroughly explored. For once, the six episode runtime feels entirely deserved.

This is ridiculous, if lovingly created.

     The second and third episodes of this serial have still not been returned to the BBC. The two episodes, which are the first to really show the Ice Warriors moving about and doing things, have themselves entered Who Folklore as "important" missing episodes, even going so far as to get a mention in Mark Gattis' comedy sketch The Kidnappers. The episodes were of course animated for the most recent DVD release, with less than brilliant results. The four other animated serials, animated by Cosgrove Hall and Planet 55 , did their best to recreate the shots from the original episode, retaining the subtlties of the original direction and the characters' real expressions. The animation for The Ice Warriors, on the other hands, done by a company called Qurios Entertainment, flattens the action to a 2D plane and has heavily stylised (and somewhat static) designs for each character. It makes certain parts of the episodes incredibly silly, and loses a lot of the atmosphere that the original director so carefully built up.
     Speaking of, the episode's direction and atmosphere is brilliant, tying into the overall theme quite nicely. The icy wastes are very well-made and they feel genuinely desolate, punctuated by a shrill, unearthly wail. And I'm talking about the deliberate one on the soundtrack, not just the increasingly unbearable screams of Victoria Waterfield, who screams at the slightest provocation. She's an unfortunate reflection of a few of the attitudes of this era, like those I discussed during Cybermen Month. Like those serials, there were a few jaw-drop moments - like Jamie leching over the station staff' short skirts, or Victoria's infinitely quotable reaction of "Oh no, not Africa!"

Aaand roll credits. (I need to stop watching CinemaSins.)

     The Ice Warriors is a tight, witty script with very well-developed ideas. The brief of creating an enemy to replace the Daleks didn't really reach fruition here, and they would be back in the show by 1972 until the present day, while to date the Ice Warriors have only ever made four more appearances. It's a shame that the first appearance of the Ice Warriors actually walking about now exists, in its most complete form, as a dodgy animation by the same people who did the sketches on Tracy Beaker, but it does allow the serial to feel a hell of a lot more complete. The Ice Warriors often does a few things here or there which make you gasp at how they got away with it, but they managed to create a very large-scale story on a very small budget, and create a Doctor Who classic which deserves the name.

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: The Doctor and his companions get trapped in the Land of Fiction, in The Mind Robber.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Invasion (Revisited)

A warm welcome to Nostalgia Filter on this special day! What makes it so special, you ask? Well, if I've got my sums right, this is the 1000th Post on this blog! I'm so grateful to be here writing for you all after six years and countless changes, and I'm also really glad that this anniversary has fallen on a corker of an episode...

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See here for my previous look at this story.

An iconic image, for sure. Which is why it's been reproduced
with every other design since.

Doctor Who - Season Six, Story Three - The Invasion
Written 2/10/15

We've finally reached the end of Cyberman Month, and we end it on a bang - The Invasion is a blistering eight episodes long, and is the home of a number of important Doctor Who firsts. Despite being remembered as the story where the Cybermen march on St. Paul's, the story actually spends half of its 200 minute runtime as a slow-burning conspiracy thriller, the Cybermen not being revealed until the cliffhanger of Episode Four. This is not a bad thing though, as it's this quality which makes it stand out, and which would lead it to have a profound effect on the show come next season.
     Upon landing in 1970s England, The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe discover that their old friend Professor Travers has gone off to America, with Professor Watkins and his niece Isobel taking their place. Watkins has been kidnapped by International Electromatics, a mysterious and powerful company owned by the mysterious Tobias Vaughn. Vaughn is colluding with an alien force in order to rule the world, but when The Doctor and Jamie discover that said alien race is the Cybermen, they realise far sooner than he does that they will simply toss him aside once their invasion begins. With the help of Vaughn and The Doctor's old friend Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, founder of UNIT, The Doctor foils the Cybermen's plot to kill all life on Earth.
     I am of the opinion that the vast majority of the longer stories in the Classic Series could be shortened or broken up into smaller, more compact affairs - this is mainly due to the way I started with the shorter serials in the 80s and how used I am to the way TV is today. The same is true of The Invasion, although I don't think you could scrape more than an episode from its runtime when you really break it down. The first four episodes, in which the Cybermen only appear for a few seconds, works as a standalone story with a cliffhanger at the end, in which two characters get kidnapped, and rescued. Episode Four feels climactic in that way, and this aides the pacing no end. It also unfortunately leaves all the padding to the fifth and sixth episode, meaning that the Cybermen's reveal isn't really capitalised on.

The reveal of the first Cyberman in the story is
arguably better animated.

     And that's true of the Cybermen throughout this story. Their redesign is great, even if it seems a little weird to stick the huge rectangular earmuffs onto the side of the Cybermen's heads. The Cybermen here don't really have their own agency within the story, spending the vast majority of it as footsoldiers for either Vaughn or their Cyber-Planner, an obscure computer brought forward from The Wheel In Space. It's because of this that this doesn't really stand out as a Cyberman story, with the far more interesting (and relevant) villain being Vaughn himself. Played by Kevin Stoney (who last appeared as the traitorous Mavic Chen in The Daleks' Master Plan), Vaughn is a wonderful calculating villain, methodical and intelligent, his only failings being his incredible hubris in thinking he could control the Cybermen and his over-reliance on his underlings to do all the important things for him.

     Seeing as we have been addressing some of the sexism present in these stories, let us now turn to the biggest bit of padding in this story, an attempt at addressing sexism which ends up falling on its arse. Soon after the reveal, photographer Isabel insists that she wants to go and see these Cybermen, wishing to go wandering in the sewers to take photographs of them. This escapade, which Zoe ends up supporting, inevitably goes wrong when a group of Cybermen attack them in the sewers, leading to UNIT having to engage the Cybermen directly. It's a dual blow to the entire purpose of the scene, because ultimately Isabel is made to look a fool when it all goes awry, and Isabel's attempt to point out the Brigadier's sexist attitude doesn't work when the thing she's suggesting is ridiculously dangerous and irresponsible for two lone people to go and do.

     This episode sees the return of The Brigadier, previously a colonel, from The Web of Fear. Since his escapade with The Doctor in the London Underground, he's set up the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, known to us and to Doctor Who history as UNIT. The organisation, with and without its founder, would continue from this point to make appearances even to the present day, with their last appearance being in the Series Nine premier. The first appearance of UNIT shapes the story - The Doctor now has assistance to his endeavors, be they through the use of superior infrastructure or simply through the precise application of military force. This created a whole new dynamic for the show which the Third Doctor would come to rely on almost exclusively in his first few years, with The Doctor and companions both working with and having moral complaints with UNIT and its members.

PACKERRR!!

     Cybermen Month has seen me watch several pieces of animated Doctor Who, and I'll be doing the same thing next week when I review The Ice Warriors. This was, in fact, the first serial to be given this treatment, with episodes 1 and 4 being animated by famous British animation company Cosgrove Hall. It's surprising it took this long for this to have become a thing. The animated episodes are of course not perfect substitution for the original, and it can be argued that there is a lot of detail in the direction lost with the move towards animation. But the animation also allows a lot of the feel of each episode to be set by Cosgrove Hall's expert art design, and it really makes the beginning of the serial that much more tense for it.
     The Invasion is not a story which particularly highlights the Cybermen in terms of their mythology or history, beyond being their earliest chronological appearance within the show's universe. It is, however, an excellent Doctor Who story, a brilliant tense thriller with minimal padding, a really enjoyable villain and a story format which would go on to transform the show and bring it into the world of colour. I hoped with Cybermen week to give a thorough idea of where the Cybermen came from, as well as to go back and learn more about the Troughton years. If I can have anything happen for you, dear reader, as a result of this, it's that you go and see The Invasion. You really won't regret it.

Thanks.

NEXT TUESDAY: We shuffle back a season as we begin looking at stories starring The Ice Warriors.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Wheel In Space

This is the first appearance of the "teardrop" eye design,
which would persist for most future versions.

Doctor Who - Season Five, Story Seven - The Wheel In Space
Written 30/9/15

Last week, I reviewed a story which had been recovered in its entirety, meaning that thanks to animation in The Tenth Planet and The Moonbase, I haven't encountered a single episode that didn't at least move. The Wheel In Space is the single exception to the Cybermen's completeness today, with four of its six episodes consigned to the scrap heap, leaving only telesnaps (essentially screenshots of the episode at different intervals) and audio. In order to watch these lost episodes, fans have compiled these two elements into creating Reconstructions, which mix the audio with a slideshow of telesnaps relevant to the action, and CGI where possible. Given all this effort has gone into making this story watchable here and now, what's the story actually like?
      The Wheel In Space is the final story of Season 5, and it's fitting that in a season where six out of the seven stories all follow the Base-Under-Siege plot structure, The Wheel In Space is not the exception - the difference being that the story plods along for six episodes as opposed to four. This structure seems fairly unnecessary, and the first episode ends up being fairly tedious as Jamie and The Doctor are stuck on a small spacecraft, with The Doctor ending up concussed and Jamie having to fight a "Servo" robot which then doesn't appear in the rest of the story. The following five episodes take The Doctor and Jamie to the titular wheel, a space station above Earth which uses its x-ray laser to deflect asteroids. As it turns out, the Cybermen have used a complicated plan involving exploding a sun in order to sabotage the base, aiming to use it to guide an invasion fleet towards Earth and conquer it. The Doctor manages to fix the laser and destroy the invading ships.
     The script was originally by Cybermen co-creator Kit Pedler from before he left the program and was edited into the six-part format by David Whittaker. Pedler's influence on the script is clear - this is a Base-Under-Siege story, with all the same archetypes as before. There are a few decent roles for women in this story, placing them in particular positions of authority, but there are still several misogynistic moments and when all's said and done the only female character who doesn't die is the new companion, Zoe. It gives the story something of a forgettable feeling, which is a real shame given the season began on such a strong Cyberman story.

Episodes 3 and 6 survive, and they are welcome.

     Zoe is an interesting companion, and her characterisation is very thoroughly explored here. Like the Cybermen she faces, Zoe (apparently) has a problem expressing emotions, going through life very logically. As opposed to Victoria, who left in the previous serial (the show is much quieter now, much less screaming), Zoe is from Earth's future, and thus forms a nice contrast to Jamie's more antiquated outlook on the world. Her intelligence and cunning help The Doctor to discover the threat here, and in later serials would be used to outsmart enemies in ways The Doctor couldn't. She's the saving grace of this serial, often providing some of the scenes with interesting moments that the usual collection of Base-Under-Siege archetypes cannot.
     Watching the recons was a novel experience, and now I've dipped my toes in I'm much more likely to go and watch some of the stories that have missing episodes. I will say that I enjoyed The Wheel In Space - it's Doctor Who, and it's the Cybermen, what's not to love? But a lot of the story did stretch on, and the characters struggled to break outside the archetypes which this story format forced them into. Base-Under-Siege can create a lot of interesting stories if they're actually trying to say or do something beyond the surface of that format - Dalek being the most notable example. The Wheel In Space doesn't live up to the story which began this season, and it would soon be dwarfed by the next Cyberman story, which finally moved from this mold.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Cybermen Month comes to an explosive end with the eight-episode adventure, as 1970s London is struck by The Invasion.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Tomb of the Cybermen (Revisited)

See here for my previous look at this story.

Despite the phallic design, the Cyber Controller adds an
interesting face to the Cybermen.

Doctor Who - Season Five, Story One - The Tomb of the Cybermen
Written between 27th and 28th September 2015

A question often arises when discussing The Tomb of the Cybermen - what makes this story so special? There are some who believe that the story's recovery in 1991 in its entirety was the miraculous reappearance of a bona fide classic, while others say that its reappearance is the only reason why people focus on it, and it's no different to any other Cyberman story from this era. There are elements of truth in both camps, as is often the case, and the reality is somewhere in the middle. It's true that Tomb has a great deal of similarities to the other Base-Under-Siege staples, but it also has a number of moments which raise it to another level.

Kit Pedler's last story had a black astronaut, so this comes
a little out of left-field.

     The Doctor has just picked up Victoria Waterfield, a now orphaned child of a Victorian scientist who fought against the Daleks. The Doctor and Jamie take her on her first trip, and end up landing on the planet Telos, where an expedition is attempting to excavate and find the legendary Tombs of the Cybermen, who at this point in history have been missing for several hundred years. The expedition is backed by the suspicious Klieg, his assistant Kaftan and her hulking slave Toberman. The Doctor is cautious about exploring the Tombs, but eventually leads the group the sleeping Cybermen. Klieg awakens them, revealing that he wishes to use them to rule the Earth. However, the newly awakened Cyber-Controller soon sets about the agenda of restarting Cyber-conversion. Klieg is defeated, and despite the efforts of the Cybermen and their adorable rodent-like servants the Cybermats, Toberman sacrifices himself to shut them away once more,
     The Cybermen here retain their design from The Moonbase, with a few extra additions made to their general lore. The Cybermen's use of refrigeration devices and their second home on Telos went on to become a key part of their mythology, as was the existence of the Cybermats (retired in Revenge and brought back in Closing Time), cute little creatures apparently capable of killing. Their threat here feels a lot more tangible than in the Moonbase, as they're present as a great evil locked away than as an outside invader. The harsh, cold architecture of the Tomb, coupled with the death traps and puzzles, do a lot to beef up the Cyber threat, and their desire to convert people is specifically pushed and discussed as the danger behind them. (Even if we won't see the Conversion process until the 1980s.)
     Most episode guides classify this as a Base-Under-Siege story, and it's not hard to see why. The character archetypes of the tough leader, the voice-of-reason scientist and the traitor are all there, as is the claustrophobia that comes with fighting the Cybermen in such a small, inescapable space. However, I think that there is a major difference - whose base is under siege, here? Usually the Base-Under-Siege story features a group of humans minding their own business before being attacked, and yet this time these explorers have sought the Cybermen out to their base. The Control Rooms of the Snowcap and The Moonbase were fairly mix and match, but the central vestibule in this serial is cramped and metallic and more innately inhospitable than simply bland.

There are some sweet moments with Victoria, and her
screaming isn't grating... yet.

     Of course this is the Sixties, so I have to discuss some of the less favourable aspects of the serial. All of the human villain characters have thick accents and darker skin, even though they are (with the exception of Toberman) played by white actors. Klieg and Kaftan are not exactly trustworthy in their initial appearance, but the episode builds around their villainous nature by having The Doctor be suspicious of them. Toberman was originally meant to be mute and deaf, with his hearing aid being a nod to the Cybermen's origins, but this was left out and so the only black character in the serial is portrayed as a noble, if terrifying, savage. Elsewhere, and both female characters are actually banned by the male exhibition leaders from even entering deep into the Tombs, and there are several similar comments made throughout. Victoria at least fights against a few of these jabs, and her characteristic screaming is actually used as a clever diversion, but it's still jarring to see this in a story supposedly set hundreds of years in our future.
     So, to answer my original question - what makes Tomb so memorable? It's certainly not some narrative masterpiece, and it's not very progressive with its characters, most of whom are either vaguely racist or are taken from previous Base-Under-Siege stories. But the story's setting, mythology, and expert sense of tension helps to sell a setup which without that would be rather menial. It is true that a lot of the focus on this story comes from its status as one of the seven complete Second Doctor stories, and one whose appearance seemed to arrive most miraculously, but that's almost incidental when you actually compare this episode to the stories that came before and after in this era. It doesn't just stand out, it shines. And that's why it's so cherished.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: A serial which now exists as 1/3rd actual episode and 2/3rds static images and dodgy CGI from 2010. It's The Wheel In Space.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Moonbase (Revisited)

See here for my previous look at this story. Although, tbh, I'm not sure I'd actually watched the serial when I wrote that. I literally don't understand where I was coming from.

The Moonbase's DVD replaces the missing episodes with
animation, like last week.

Doctor Who - Season Four, Story Six - The Moonbase
Written between 21st and 23rd September 2015

It is not surprising that a show spanning 26 years of continuous programming through three distinct decades managed to end up following certain archetypes when it came to writing stories. What is surprising about the Second and Third Doctor's era is how often the same one comes up. Yes, I am indeed talking about "Base-Under-Siege", a plot template with the same circumstances and character archetypes which defines many of the stories across Doctor Who - but especially in the Second Doctor's era. Troughton didn't, of course, originate this - The Tenth Planet from last week was one of these stories. But it's more important here because last week, the whole world was being invaded, while this week we're focusing on a small tiny base. On the Moon.
     While attempting to land on Mars, something drags the TARDIS off-course and they end up on Earth's moon in the year 2070. There they enter the Moonbase, staffed by a small scientific team in charge of the Gravitron, a device used in the future to control the Earth's weather. The Doctor and his three companions (Ben and Polly from last week, and Two's favourite companion, Jamie McCrimmon) discover that the base has been inundated with an epidemic, causing staff members to become comatose with black veins. The director, Hobson, is immediately suspicious of The Doctor and his friends - especially when people start going missing. As we see, this is down to the Cybermen, something which The Doctor immediately suspects. Soon the base is being sieged by an Army of Cybermen, intent on using the Gravitron to kill everyone on Earth. Using the help of the remaining crew, The Doctor manages to direct the Gravitron towards the Cybermen and their ships, expelling them from the moon, as Polly and Ben despatch the remaining few with a solvent cocktail.
     This is the fourth story of Troughton's era, but, thanks to the missing episodes, it contains only his third and fourth surviving episodes. Half of The Moonbase is missing and has been for years - this is another DVD release (brought out in 2014) where the remaining episodes have been animated. I really like this selection of stories because it shows both sides of the problem - next week's Tomb of the Cybermen was recovered in its entirety and didn't live up to expectations, but The Wheel In Space the week after contains only two of its six episodes. When I first watched The Moonbase and reviewed it (as can be read in the link at the top of this article) those animations hadn't been done, and I distinctly didn't remember the first episode being gone. I must have started on the second episode, not had a clue what was going on, and judged it from there.

These Cybermen are much more into subterfuge.

     So, what is "Base-Under-Siege"? The Doctor and companions enter a remote, claustrophobic base. It's being run by a small (emphasis on small) team of people who usually follow a set of archetypes. Among others, there's the suspicious and hardline leader, the medic who speaks as the voice of reason, and the plucky one with lots of technical knowledge. People start being picked off when the alien enemies slowly start to pick people off, making their way closer and closer to our heroes and their defences. What story am I describing? It's definitely a description of The Moonbase. It's also a description of dozens of other Doctor Who stories. Dalek is Base Under Siege. Flatline is Base Under Siege. It is ubiquitous. The problem with Troughton's Base Under Siege stories being a lack of variety caused by repetition of the plot and not a lot of budget to separate them from one another.
     The turnaround between the broadcast of The Tenth Planet and filming for The Moonbase was apparently only two weeks. Despite this hasty schedule, the new Cyberman design is both simpler and slightly more effective, and the fact that a hefty accordion has been replaced by a boiler suit with handles means that they were able to create a fairly convincing "army". As I put rather nicely in my previous review, the new design is a trade-off which would go on to define the design of the Cybermen in all later incarnations. The robotic boiler suit men have much less of the humanoid design of their predecessor - their hands are three-fingered pincers, their voices now a harsh electronic buzz that requires subtitles to understand. Although The Doctor does mention their history, it's not immediately obvious that these things are human beings - but when that history is brought up, their inhumanity becomes all the more terrifying.
     Of course, like last week, and like some time to come, there is an air of pronounced sexism which often gets brought up around The Moonbase. Polly is given quite a nice scene where she works out a way of discovering a way to defeat these Cybermen - using a combination of solvents to erode the plastic coating on the Cybermen's chest apparatus. But apart from that, she doesn't get much else to do but scream at the Cybermen, be disbelieved about having seen the Cybermen, and be told by three different people to make coffee. Often there's a counter-argument that The Doctor asking her to make coffee is an attempt to diffuse the tense situation that had arisen amongst the staff of the base. But one thing that is never brought up is the fact that at one point Ben literally says, "Not you Polly, this is Men's work." I suppose it's historical accuracy, however unpleasant it may be.

Two's characterisation takes it's most well-known form here.

     The Moonbase ends up being lot more interesting than I gave it credit for. It doesn't have to spend as much time explaining itself as its predecessor did, and so it gets to add a bit more tension and suspense. The story was meant to capitalise on the new Cybermen, and it did that, while at the same time finally calming Troughton's more clownish tendencies and allowing the more serious side of his character to come out. Despite how we may be able to categorise and scrutinise it, and despite some of the more distasteful idiosyncrasies of its era, The Moonbase is a very enjoyable story for fans of this era.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: The Boy Wonder of the Troughton era, which just happens to be a Cyberman story. Join with us as we defrost The Tomb of the Cybermen.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Tenth Planet

One with Ben at the South Pole.

Doctor Who - Season 4, Story Two - The Tenth Planet
Written between 19th and 20th September 2015

Under William Hartnell's tenure as The Doctor, the show had not only begun, but had also become a national phenomenon. Other shows take a while to get embedded into the public imagination, but under Hartnell the show had risen phenomenally, following the 60s trend of Dalekmania. Behind the scenes, however, several accounts show a man often harder to work with. In 1966, near the start of the show's fourth season, Hartnell's failing health and friction with newer members of the production team led to the suggestion of his leaving the show. In order to do this, writer Gerry Davis created the concept of regeneration, and he incorporated it into a story he'd been writing with his friend Kit Pedler, about a race of cybernetic creatures known as Cybermen...
     The Doctor and his two companions Ben and Polly (both from 1960s England) arrive in the South Pole. There they wander into an underground base led by General Cutler. The base is a scientific station monitoring a rocket launch towards Mars, and the three are immediately treated with suspicion. The rocket starts heading off course, and is ultimately lost, as a planet seems to come within range of Earth - a planet The Doctor identifies as Mondas. Soon the base is invaded by tall, bumbling creatures called Cybermen, who explain their origins as a race of human-like beings forced to replace parts of their bodies with technology. They want to invade Earth, robbing it of enough energy to keep Mondas alive and to kidnap to human population in order to convert them into more of their own kind. Before they can truly get their plan under way, however, Mondas absorbs too much energy, and is destroyed. As the Cybermen lie in ruins, The Doctor, feeling a bit tired, makes his way back to The Tardis and collapses, regenerating into The Second Doctor.

This amazing shot wouldn't be half as effective
if the costume designer had remembered the gloves.

     The previous, premier story of this season, The Savages, was filmed as part of the previous production block, meaning that for Hartnell, he was essentially coming back to the show solely to film his exit. It's been said that this quite frustrated him, even if his health kept continuing to disrupt the show even through the production of this story. At one point Hartnell missed a week of filming due to complications from his arteriosclerosis, and he was hence written out of his own penultimate episode, a lot of his lines being given to the serial's other characters. This means that the third episode, lacking both Doctor and Cybermen, is by far the serial's most boring and tedious, but that actually contributes to the serial's success, as the Doctor's collapse and tired recover foreshadows the (for the time) incredibly surprising regeneration at the end.
     The execution of the original concept of the Cybermen is... well, it's hard to say with a perspective so drowned in hindsight. The explanation of the Cybermen is fantastic - you can really imagine that these beings were once men and women. As with Hartnell's absence in episode 3, blunders sometimes help - the Cybermen's silver gloves weren't ready in time, and so they had to go on without them. The resulting Cybermen, gripping their foes with human hands, look far more body-horror for it. They also, for some people, contribute to the opposite effect. I remember in particular my sister watching The Tenth Planet with me and laughing her head off at them, with their beady eyes and ridiculous sing-song voices. For me, of course, it all works and is a horrifying view into a potential future of the human race. The voices are still funny though.
     Now, for the stuff related to this story's release today. As I mentioned in the prologue to this month, many of the episodes from the black and white days are missing. This provides several interesting and unique challenges in watching the old series, with fans resorting to the use of "recons", facsimiles of the show created using stills, stage directions and the original audio. Luckily, for four stories, their DVD releases have been accompanied by complete animated versions of the missing episodes, using a unique animation style which attempts to as closely as possible match the original shots. Here, the fourth episode of The Tenth Planet is animated, the entire episode (bar the regeneration, thanks to Blue Peter) having been lost. I actually really like it - after the dullness of the third episode, the animated episode has a brilliant element of style and menace which does the Cybermen (and Hartnell) due justice.

Even in animation, Hartnell's final lines carry a great sense of
poignancy.

     There's a brilliant sense of decline in this story which may or may not have been intentional. The Cybermen represent, here, a humanity driven by a desire for survival to a dark, technological fate. They are shadows of their former self. This is a black mirror for the idea of Regeneration in the first place. The Doctor's main aim this episode, interestingly, is simply to wait and allow things to work themselves out, as he knows that the Cybermen will fail. The same was known by Hartnell of himself, and so it stands out as a very definite, very final story for the Doctor who allowed the show to come into being. And I salute him.

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: The Second Doctor is in a base which is under siege. You could say that it's a kind of... "base-under-siege" story. It's The Moonbase.

November is Cybermen Month!

You will become like us....

Hundreds of years ago, Earth was not alone in the sky. Its twin planet, Mondas, contained a race of humans far advanced of their Terran counterparts, and when Mondas was knocked out of its orbit, this race turned to technology in order to survive. They replaced parts of themselves with cybernetic alternatives, until a society arose which enforced their use in the name of survival. The products of this society became known as the Cybermen, beings stripped of all emotions, with only the imperative to survive and proliferate their kind across the galaxy.

      The Cybermen are my favourite Doctor Who villains by a country mile. The first Classic Who episodes I talked about on this blog were Attack of the Cybermen and Earthshock - reviews which I later revisited when my writing style became a little more focused. I've reviewed eight of the ten stories of the original run which feature the Cybermen as one of the main villains, leaving out only their first outing, The Tenth Planet, and 1968's The Wheel In Space. Having recently received the former on DVD, I had the idea to go back to those 60s Cybermen stories and give them another go, this time filling out the gaps.

      Back in the 1970s and 80s, a lot of the black and white episodes were burnt. By the end of the show's run in 1989, the vast majority of the stories I'll be reviewing this November were missing. Thankfully, over time we have recovered lost episodes, and for all but one of these stories, the stories exist in their completion - either in episodes as recorded or in animated reconstructions using the original audio. In four weeks, when I review The Wheel In Space - I'll effectively be attacking my first reconstruction . How exciting!

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: William Hartnell bows out as the Earth is attacked by mysterious, cloth-faced beings... it's The Tenth Planet.

Review: Doctor Who 9.5: The Girl Who Died

We've just rolled upon the hundredth NuWho story - the new series having accomplished in ten years what took the Classic Series sixteen. Not bearing in mind this particular anniversary, we're presented with a welcome return this week of the pseudo-historical, and to Jamie Matheson, whose two scripts for the last season helped Doctor Who to make a triumphant return to form after the horrendous Kill The Moon. The Girl Who Died's publicity ran along two stands - the ridiculous name which brings back memories from Moffat's more arsey period, and the fact that the titular girl is played by Maisie Williams of Game of Thrones fame. Despite the latter being the main thing I was looking forward to, the writing actually held itself up on its own - albeit in the strange, barely recognisable way that only Capaldi's Doctor Who can. Spoilers will follow.

They don't use these swords, btw. It's just to look cool.

     After the ending of some other adventure, The Doctor and Clara end up landing in medieval Scandinavia, and come across a group of warriors calling themselves Vikings. Upon reaching their village, an alien voice appears in the sky, and warriors come down to pick-and-choose the most war-worthy among them. Clara and a girl, Ashildr (Maisie Williams) are accidentally sent up with them, and get to see the blokes mushed into adrenaline for an alien warlord to drink. When Ashildr declares war on the Mire, The Doctor is the only one who can help the town get into shape, with the aliens declaring that they will return in a day's time to kill everyone in the town. After a lot of thought, the Doctor eventually discovers the town's electric eels, and use's them in combination with the Mire's own technology to humiliate the warlord. In the process of saving the town, Ashildr dies, but using Mire technology The Doctor brings her back to life. There's one snag, though - she's now immortal.

     Moffat said that this episode would stretch the definition of a two-parter, and I can see why - next week's episode is written by someone completely different, and seems to be set in Revolutionary France. To be fair, that assessment has been true of a lot of this season, although I get the feeling that the first two two-part stories did so for much more unintentional reasons. Given that Maisie Williams is the only thing holding these two episodes together, I would have thought that she would have been... more impressive? I don't know whether it was her or just certain odd lines given to her, but I never really got any special vibes from her performance beyond the fact that she's a guest star. The fact she ended up being the main focus of the episode's recurring philosophical debate on the nature of Time Travel came with a bit of a whimper.

     The Vikings in the story were fairly anachronistic, although the episode tried to avoid that by getting rid of the horny-helmeted warriors in the first act and focusing on the Norse people as farmers and craftsmen. You could argue, if you're being generous, that this story is a Base-Under-Siege story, but if that's true then the character archetypes weren't all that deep. The main characterisations that we got to see this week were the main duo, and right now I'm really noticing that difference - Classic Who develops the guests of the week, NuWho develops the mains. That unfortunately means that we're not really inclined to care about anyone else than The Doctor and Clara, and if you don't care about them there's not much left to care about. #

GORDON'S ALIVE!!!!

      One of these moments included the beginning/conclusion/mention of a point which Moffat has been bandying about for ages, which is attempting to give an in-plot reference to the reason why Peter Capaldi has played characters in the Doctor Who Universe before. While I was glad that this explanation wasn't given ages of runtime, the explanation here was given very suddenly and quite underwhelmingly - that he picked this face to remind himself of the events of The Fires of Pompeii, that he can always save someone, to make him go and save Ashildr. While it was nice seeing actual continuity with the RTD era, I had perhaps expected something a little more interesting done with it than a retread of "Time Lord Victorious" thinking - especially with the whole "hybrid" arc rearing its head like yesterday's gone-off porridge. 

      Matheson knows what he's doing with these characters, and I enjoyed Twelve and Clara's dynamic this week a lot more than I have the past four weeks. He makes it feel like they're Doctor and companion going on adventures all the time, and they trust each other, and care about each other, like normal. One thing that Matheson is particularly good at is balancing ongoing arcs with his own stories, and developing The Doctor and Clara in a way which is new and fun, but which doesn't make me want to smash the screen. The Girl Who Died did all of that to the tee, and I really enjoyed it - but the fact that it's a two-parter and there are hints that Moffat is planning to drop yet another retcon bomb in the near future is putting me a little on edge. Just a little.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: No, Blackadder, I am the Scarlett Pimpernel! We fast forward seven hundred years to look at The Woman Who Lived.

FTA: Doctor Who Classic: Time and the Rani, The Happiness Patrol and The Greatest Show In The Galaxy

This eighth volume of articles from Celebrate, Regenerate! covers stories from the Seventh Doctor.(See here for more on this project.)

Time and the Rani
(Main article.)

When I first sat down to watch Time and the Rani, I was caught up in the fan opinion that it was one of the worst things this side of the Iraq War, but like my reaction to the Sixth Doctor’s stories, I was pleasantly surprised. So surprised, in fact, that I would go so far as to call Time and the Rani one of my favourite stories of the Seventh Doctor’s era, behind only the wonderful The Happiness Patrol. The reason? Time and the Rani doesn’t just break the So Bad It’s Good barrier in the way that a story like Time-Flight does. It smashes that barrier into bits, and leaves you to try and rebuild it while throwing all it can at you. Time and the Rani is not in any way a story; rather, it is an exhilarating and endlessly entertaining experience that never gets old.
     Sylvester McCoy’s early portrayal of the Seventh Doctor is very different to his later more manipulative persona, but that doesn’t make it worse by default. Instead, it’s fresh, vibrant, and unassumingly mad – it takes the bravado of Colin Baker’s Doctor and channels it into a fluid wit. The Rani, while not as unique in her performance as in her introductory story, still balances the new Doctor perfectly. Her scheme is completely mad and fifty shades of scientifically impossible, but it’s the sheer convoluted lengths to which she goes (kidnapping Albert Einstein, etc.) that make the story what it is.
     Fans lambaste Time and the Rani for being too silly, putting an emphasis on goofy humour over plot, characterisation and common sense. But the rejection of the latter is what makes it unique. Doctor Who’s primary feature is variety, and it’s a simple law of probabilities that a story this silly would pop up sometime. And what do the fans do? They have the guile to complain, to complain about this beautiful, nonsensical thing. Time and the Rani doesn’t try to preoccupy itself with the serious stuff, and instead simply tries to let the audience have fun. And at the end of the day, isn’t that just what Doctor Who is about?

The Happiness Patrol

(Main article.)

Despite trying to not get involved with politics, my kinder friends have called me “a liberal”. This, perhaps, is the catalyst to my incredible enjoyment of The Happiness Patrol, a story which takes a metaphor for Margaret Thatcher’s regime and twists it in a deliciously demented way. Even though the Iron Lady herself was described by Sylvester McCoy as “far more terrifying than any monster the Doctor had encountered”, Sheila Hancock’s Helen A is a portrayal that is both hilarious in its send-up of the former Prime Minister and frightening in the way it represents certain aspects of Conservative policy.

     It could have been awfully dry, but the addition of just a few ounces of absurdism makes The Happiness Patrol into a complete and total classic. Most memorably, The Kandyman is a villain that does exactly what good Doctor Who villains do best – they scare the kids, and make the adults think. On the one hand, it’s been suggested that the sucrose-composed robot was designed as an attack on the indulgence and power of the capitalist system, while others simply regard it as a demonstration of just how insane Helen A is.

    And sometimes the story actually puts you under the regime’s spell. So many detractors tell of how they can’t take the villains seriously: they paint the Tardis pink, walk around with frilly hairdos and drown people in strawberry sauce. That’s the whole point! The Happiness Patrol isn’t just a satire of a specific political regime, it’s also a wider warning about the power of appearance over ideology in politics. Of course you couldn’t take Helen A’s happy clappy approach seriously at first, in the same way that people voted for good old Maggie because she looked better than Jim Callahan. 

     Plus, this is where we really see the peak of the Seventh Doctor’s powers of manipulation. Sure, we’d seen him plot to blow up Skaro in the previous story, but that had been set up back in the Pilot episode; here, the Doctor waltzes onto a planet and deposes a tyrannical regime in a single night. He seems to understand everyone he meets instantly; he talks down the Sniper who’s never had to face a man’s eyes, defeats the Happiness Patrol by showing them a smile and then introduces Helen A to the concept of negative emotions. He is not just a faceless hero, but a character in his own right, and one that is prepared to go to any lengths to defend justice, truth and freedom. 

     The Happiness Patrol isn’t just a silly exercise in 80s camp. It’s one that has a dark political undertone that has a lot to say to both the kids of the era and their parents. It's scary, disturbing, funny, melancholy, and exciting. And it’s my favourite story of the entire Seventh Doctor era.

The Greatest Show In The Galaxy

(Main article.)

The much-mocked BBC Quarry has had to stand in for a whole variety of planets, with varying results. In the McCoy era there was a move away from the bland rocky faces of Destiny of the Daleks and Time and the Rani to what has been referred to as “a high-class quarry.” Segonax, the planet currently being inhabited by the Psychic Circle, does as Enlightenment does and provides a visual treat to go alongside one of the most metaphorically profound scripts in McCoy’s era. The Circus has many guests of many different flavours, and the secret at the heart of its’ core reflects the state of the program at that late time in its existence.

       The Circus, having moved about a bit but now firmly in one spot, is the perfect metaphor for Doctor Who. Desperately reaching out to foreign markets, it tries to attract writers and fans to please their audience, the British public (here lovingly rendered as the Gods of Ragnarok.) The Whiz Kidd represents the core fanbase, with their constant admiration for stories broadcast before their birth (“I’ve never seen the old stuff, but I know it’s not as good as it used to be.”) and how their interaction with the show only caused more problems than it solved. The three who run the circus represent various figures in the show’s production team, all of them desperately trying to pull together a show so they’re not devoured by the public’s disinterest. The Doctor, stepping in and destroying the Gods of Ragnarok (or at least ending their influence), is a profound statement by the show. It is the statement that it is ready to move on and do whatever it wants to do, no matter what the executives say. 

     Of course, the joy of the story comes not only with the various metaphorical readings, but also with the story’s aesthetic, which helps to satisfy the children blissfully ignorant of the serial’s undertones. The clowns and robots in black limousines, skating across a acrid desert; Mags transforming in the arena; Ace being locked in the robot room – this is the stuff of nightmares. The Greatest Show in the Galaxy is intelligent, and manages to say a lot more than other stories can without spoiling it for the kids. And that’s just how we like it.

Thanks.

FTA: Doctor Who Classic: Revelation of the Daleks and Mindwarp

This seventh volume of articles from Celebrate, Regenerate! covers stories from the later Sixth Doctor.(See here for more on this project.)

Revelation of the Daleks
(Main article.)

Even by the standards of Dalek stories, Revelation is just weird. Named after the frankly insane final book of the New Testament, the final story of Season 22 puts the focus on Davros for the first time since Genesis, giving Terry Molloy's version of the character the room to breathe. The result is a performance that invokes the power of the original, and is infinitely more fun and slimy. The same can be said for the rest of the story, which is brave in the way that it celebrates the grotesque parts of human nature. If Genesis of the Daleks was a BBC documentary, then Revelation of the Daleks is Horrible Histories.
      And yet it’s still funny, in a really sick way. Saward manages to perfectly balance a mix of horror, disgust and dark humour, making us reflect upon the less palatable aspects of human nature. Particularly striking is the scene in which Natasha has to kill her father -  a scene where music, lighting and the script come together to create a moment of genuine tragedy. (Made worse, in fact, by the realisation that she shares her name with Saward’s own daughter.)  And then there’re the little things; Jobel’s dismissal of the President’s wife as a foaming nuisance, the guard who picks his nose, Jobel’s death due to injection of embalming fluid.
     Sure, it’s not something that you perhaps want over your Saturday teatime, but the story itself is undoubtedly a work of genius. By sticking the Sixth Doctor and Peri on the outskirts, it gives the impression that the world of Who works fine without them, that there are forces of good and of evil, that this is a living world rather than one that only comes alive whenever the Good Doctor makes an appearance. We get colourful characters like the exceptional Orcini, or the creepy Jobel, or the tragic Tasambeker. Revelation is in itself a revelation, a revelation that a story doesn’t have to be focused on the Doctor to be good as long as the writing is up to scratch. Perhaps no one expected it to be Eric Saward that was delivering this message, but regardless of the writer, Revelation of the Daleks is a story to be celebrated – not just for its quality, but for its creative audacity too.

Mindwarp
(Main article.)

The second part of the Trial of a Timelord season, Mindwarp’s four episodes are characterised not only being very confusing, but for being deliberately. Where its spiritual prequel Vengeance On Varos sought to attack the use of excessive horror in television, Mindwarp takes it one step further by being deliberately manipulative in itself. On its own, its plot and story may make very little sense, but in the context of the Trial arc and considering the Valeyard’s manipulations, it quickly becomes one of the cleverest stories of the season.
     The standout of the cast is BRIAN BLESSED’s first and sadly only appearance in Who. While Blessed can do subtle performances, such as in the lauded I Claudius, I think he simply enjoys the more boisterous roles that he’s famous for. Mindwarp is no exception to this; Blessed gets to scream, shout and monologue, and he provides the story’s best line by far – “"Ok. Today prudence shall be out watchword; tomorrow we will soak the land in blood." He also allows the story to cement its theme of human brutality in all its different forms – the scientifically-driven evil of Dr. Crozier; the physical beast of Dorf; the banal commercialism of the Mentors; the uncontrollable actions of the cave-creature and the blood-thirst of Yrcanos. It’s all about the difference between evil actions committed because one wants to commit them, or as part of their immediate nature, and it asks the audience the simple question: which scenario describes The Doctor’s actions here?
     And, for the first time, Doctor Who uses the Unreliable Narrator trope. It’s actually really interesting to see the way in which the serial lets the Valeyard play to the audience’s expectations; we know now that The Sixth Doctor’s portrayal in the flashback as a heartless torturer was a manipulation of the evidence on the Valeyard’s part, but to an unforgiving public who already disliked the character, this would be perfectly believable. The serial, through the Valeyard’s manipulation, challenges the audiences’ view of the Sixth Doctor, ultimately trying to send him on the road to public acceptance. Not that Mindwarp succeeds in that aim. What it does do, however, is provide a really interesting piece of TV, and a brilliantly tragic end for one of my favourite companions.

Thanks.

FTA: Doctor Who Classic: Attack of the Cybermen, Vengeance on Varos and The Two Doctors

This sixth volume of articles from Celebrate, Regenerate! covers stories from the early Sixth Doctor.(See here for more on this project.)

Attack of the Cybermen
(Main article.)

A lot of my other articles in this book have waxed lyrical about my history when it comes to Who – how I came to the show from old DVDs and repeats and was already versed by the time the New Series came to cement my love. Attack of the Cybermen represented something of a new stage in my appreciation of Who that came about two or three years ago when I decided that this New Series wasn’t keeping me topped up and that I really should go back to my roots in the Classic Series. The first Classic Who DVD that I went out and bought was one that I remembered from when I was a kid – Attack of the Cybermen, a tale that is the epitome of what I love about the series.
      I’ll not beat about the bush and assume, due to all of his hallmarks being present, that we can call this a Saward story. Saward’s multi-strand dynamic allows most of the plot to happen outside of the realm of our two squabbling main characters – at least for the first half of the story. Those squabbling protagonists are somewhat of an acquired taste for many Who fans, often making them dismiss Six’s era completely. Me? I like them, and they’re the highlight of the era – I just really enjoy seeing the two characters bouncing off of one another and I really, really like it when Six’s enjoyable arrogance is counteracted by Peri’s wit. Of course, this doesn’t happen very often… but it’s worth the wait when it does.
      The ineffable Maurice Colburne also gets a chance to really stretch his wings after playing a very supportive role in the previous season’s Resurrection of the Daleks. Lytton is slimy and charming, strong and yet vulnerable – you never quite know where you stand, and that means that Lytton becomes the singular attraction whenever he’s on screen. The Doctor’s final declaration that he had misjudged Lytton, when the characters spent the best part of five seconds together in Ressurection, is a bit silly, but that’s what it’s all about, in the end.
      I know that Attack of the Cybermen is in most quarters considered “bad” but in my experience… there’s just something there, a charm, a flick of the tongue, something that keeps me coming back. Unlike Time and the Rani, which I know is hilarious, the reason why I like Attack so much so far eludes me… but it’s probably a mixture of heady nostalgia, my favourite villains and a Doctor whose performance gets me interested every single time. It’s not perfect, but I don’t think Attack ever really wanted to be.

Vengeance On Varos

(Main article.)

One of my favourite films is 1999’s The Truman Show, and one of the main reasons for that the way that it managed to predict and fully take apart the concept of Reality TV several years before it arrived on our screens. Little did I know that Vengeance On Varos manages exactly the same feat 15 years prior, all the while infusing it with the 80’s trademark satire and horror. Vengeance doesn’t so much attack 80’s TV so much as it brings it to its knees, by not only criticising the creators of video nasties but also the audience willing to watch them.

      The story is famous amongst detractors of Colin Baker’s Doctor for the scene in the second episode where the Varos facility’s guards end up falling into the acid bath. It’s an interesting cultural phenomenon in its own right that some disliked the character so much that they actually remembered the scene to implicate the Sixth Doctor in their deaths. As strange and fascinating as it is, it’s one small scene in a much bigger picture. Every step of the way, video nasties are criticised in a variety of ways, from their purely profit-driven nature (in Sil and his cronies) to the way in which they influenced the market. It was also a jab at the expanding role of the media in politics, to the point where “democracy” is dealt out from the living room.

      The story’s best feature though has got to be Arak and Etta. While their scenes were tacked onto the end of production, they still have a profound effect on the story’s potency, helping to reflect the attitudes of the people of Varos; without them, we would be left with trying to find a compromise between the rebellionist views of Jondar and the madness of the Mentors. They are a direct lifeline to the audience at home, calling out to them to have some standards. And they’re funny, too. 

      The most important thing in Vengeance on Varos is not the gore, or the silliness of people transforming into birds, although that does form part of it. It’s about the way that ideas influence people; and it tries to promote an awareness of those ideas in the viewer. And, as we can see by the controversy it created, it’s an aim that the writers very much succeeded at.

The Two Doctors

(Main article.)

I’m a bit of an anomaly when it comes to your average Who fan. Most fans my age started with the new series in 2005, and explored the Classic Series from there. Well, I didn’t. I started with two stories; a DVD of The Five Doctors, and the VHS of this story, The Two Doctors. In hindsight, this explains a hell of a lot about the areas of the series that I like, as The Two Doctors contains almost everything that I love about the series – expansive continuity, fun monsters, complex villains and political messages that never really know what they’re doing. Oh, and running. Lots of running. 

      Colin Baker is on top form as his arrogant and somewhat abrasive Doctor, but at every stage of the way he shows just how awesome he is. From the waterside recollection of tasty gumblejacks, to his fear that the death of his younger self would destroy the Universe, to the despair at the lengths that his old friend Dastari has gone to gain favour with his own creation. If there’s any story from Season 22 (which I love, if no-one else does) that I would use to introduce someone to the series, it would definitely be this one. Why? A few reasons. For one, it’s got the best use of the Sontarans since their first story, with creator Robert Holmes returning to write for them after their embarrassing use in Season 15’s Invasion of Time. For two, it’s by far the most normal and certainly accessible multi-Doctor story, and it requires pretty much zero knowledge of previous stories; it’s one of the only stories from this era that doesn’t have a lot of continuity.

     And sure, the story doesn’t really fill its runtime, but even the filler scenes (the trip to Seville, especially) only serve to highlight not only how damn beautiful the setting is, but also how fun the series can be when simply walking around in its world. So what if the story’s messages are a bit brutally expressed? This is a world full of intriguing characters – Dastari, the Androgums, the Sontarans, Oscar Botcherby – and it never fails to entertain despite not really doing anything. And in my eyes, any story capable of doing that is worthy of great praise. And a good chuckle or too. 

Thanks.