Overview: Doctor Who Classic: Season 14

I want to marry this TARDIS set.

Doctor Who - Season 14
Written 9/6/13

The last year of Hinchcliffe and Holmes is by far their strongest, providing a series of six stories that pull out all of the stops. It is the year of the gorgeous wooden TARDIS interior (which disappears after this season due to the set warping in storage), of Sarah Jane's departure, of the companionless adventure, and then of Leela, Chris Boucher's impressive and innovative companion idea that sends the show tumbling into a different direction. It was also the season of gore and horror, even more so than its immediate predecessor.

Sarah Jane gets two last decent adventures.

     A combination of grandiose settings and a decent budget mean that aesthetically, the series is on its strongest foot for a couple of decades. Everything from the impressive medieval mock-ups at Port Merion and the multi-layered Panopticon set to the model/greenscreen sandminer and the many streets and sewers around the Fleet River - they're all great. The season's only special-effects failure comes in the form of the Tesh, who are the first of Four's underwhelming baddies and begin a tradition that next season's Invasion of Time will continue with great vigour.
     There was a rather unfortunate pattern in the season's villains, wherin a person or persons were influenced by a great and powerful figure from beyond. Mandragora, Eldrad, The Master, Xoanon, Taren Capel, Magnus Greel - it's a clear pattern, typical perhaps of the era but a tad tiresome on close consecutive viewings, especially as it's a bit difficult to write "maniacal" six different times and have it be fresh every time. For the record, the best of the mad villains were Eldrad and Xoanon, the former being presented in a sympathetic light for the majority of its appearance in the story and the latter have a complex psychological reasoning behind its actions.
     Sarah Jane's departure in The Hand of Fear was a sad event, and it got chance to sink in during the season's unique companionless episode, The Deadly Assassin. Leela's dynamic with The Doctor, while missing the characteristic cuteness of that he had with Sarah Jane, does show a lot of promise and as a character she is certainly more impressive than her "something for the Dads" reputation would lead you to believe. By the end of the season, all memory of Sarah Jane is gone, and while the future is uncertain, there's the hope that Leela's story will see her develop quite well. (Yes and no on that front...)

Leela's introduction to the series is
quite promising.

     Cue the standard bests-and-worsts paragraph. Although it's remarkably difficult, I would pick... The Masque of Mandragora as my favourite story of the season. Yes, some of the other stories are cool - The Deadly Assassin comes in a very close second place as the only story of the season I'd even seen before this runthrough. But Masque has this sense of fun to it all that I find lacking in huge quantities elsewhere. It's all good to hear the legends of Gallifrey or the great quips in Victorian London, but quite fundamentally it's a balance between good characterisation and humour that keeps me coming back. And so on that front, my least favourite story of the season was The Talons of Weng-Chiang, which takes itself far too seriously for its own good and manages to offend 1.6 billion people.
     The Hinchcliffe/Holmes era is a study in contrasts. Extravagent yet realistic. Violent yet morally sound. Comedy duos next to kidnapped teenage girls. While it's heralded as the show's golden era (this season for me especially,) I did feel like there was something missing from the overall picture. The humour of The Deadly Assassin and the political satire that run through it - those relevant little points that make Who meaningful are smothered when you take whole plot references from Hammer Horror classics. The future of the show at this point is strangely uncertain, but there is something that can be assured - it has the chance to just be Doctor Who again.

Thanks.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Talons of Weng-Chiang

Li H'sen Chang would probably be a cool character
if it wasn't a blatant use of Yellow-facing.

Doctor Who - Season 14, Story Six - The Talons of Weng-Chiang
Written 9/6/13

Phillip Hinchcliffe had been given the boot by the BBC in 1977 because of the gore in his era, culminating in a Mary Whitehouse complaint about the drowning cliffhanger in The Deadly Assassin and various other moments. For his last story as Producer, the duo raised the bar and managed to fit in every dark theme they could possibly think of, carrying allusions from all sorts of great British Literature as a last magnificently twisted send-off.
     Which is unfortunate, as one of the things the story is known for outside of the fandom is for just how ridiculously racist it manages to be. The villains are an Asian street-gang in Victorian London, brainwashed into worshipping a mad time-traveller, and who are led by the less stereotypical but equally as offensive Li H'sen Chang, who is played in a fairly transparent yellowface and silly accent by white actor John Bennett. While the various racist remarks made throughout the story can be attributed to the time, and there are some anti-racist sentiments here or there (Chang sarcastically deadpanning, "Of course, I know we all look alike"), the overall tone of Yellow Peril and the fact that The Doctor himself is making jibes in the wrong direction makes for an incredibly uncomfortable experience in some parts.
     If you can manage to look past that part of the serial, then the allusions to other stories make themselves clear. There are heavy, heavy references to Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and the historical atmosphere surrounding those stories - most obviously seen in The Doctor's adoption of a deerstalker and a cape. Unusually for a six-parter, the story is almost entirely free of padding and a lot of the story's time and effort goes into building atmosphere, and building dread around Phantom-of-the-Opera villain Magnus Greel and his twisted cyborg-pupped assistant Mr. Sin as they kidnap underage girls and prostitutes in order to absorb their life essence and keep Greel alive.

Deep Roy under heavy prosthetics as Mr. Sin.

     This week's guest cast are a varied bunch, the most memorable certainly being the exciting duo of Jago and Litefoot, a theatre owner and a pathologist who manage to find their way together and have in spin-off materials become something of a Classic Series Torchwood team. Deep Roy is terrifying as the disturbing Mr. Sin, and despite the horrendous racism of his casting in the role John Bennett does a great job as Li H'sen Chang. I was much less impressed with Magnus Greel, who follows a string of ranting madmen in the Hinchcliffe era, none of which besides maybe Morbius ever really come up to scratch.
     Talons finishes the season and leaves the show in a very different state than to when it arrived. I fail to see the problem that so many people had with the violence in the Saward Era when stories like these in the show's so-called "Golden Years" did far worse with little message to back it up. The story is well made, and on the whole I enjoyed it, but the crippling racism that only reveals itself in hindsight is enough to make me want to avoid this story. Farewell to Hinchcliffe, and on to the Williams years!

Thnaks.

NEXT WEEK: We meet the enemy of an enemy who is not our friend in The Horror of Fang Rock.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Robots of Death

The robot design is gorgeous. They are really wonderful.

Doctor Who - Season 14, Story Five - The Robots of Death
Written 8/6/13 

The Robots of Death begins my push into what is a considerably unfamiliar territory for me in regards to the show, one which will last until the end of Leela's tenure. My expectations were quite high, the story having been worked out as the most popular story when the results of several Gallifrey Base fan polls were averaged earlier this year for their fourth special Timelash section. Did it live up to expectations? Well, I think so. The are an odd few repeated Doctor Who standards that I didn't like, but it was quite captivating when it wanted to be.
     My journey into the unknown was somewhat tempered by this episode's plot, which struck me as rather familiar. I soon realised that this story reminds me of Voyage of the Damned, and the similarity in plot almost certainly has me thinking that RTD was a bit naughty when he wrote that story. A society that runs on angelic-faced mechanoids who rebel due to exterior evil control. I think Robots of Death is a lot cooler in that regard, with awesome POV shots and the strange serial-killer-esque trademarks that they leave behind. Even if the "corpse marker" disks do look a hell of a lot like bike reflectors.
     The episode's guest cast were surprisingly diverse, with two women and two minorities (who are unfortunately consecutive victims of the robots, but at least not the first). There's a certain charm to them all, even if the identity of the main villain is quite hilariously unsubtle. This lack of surprise (mainly due to a process of elimination) follows another of the story's main issues - how often it curtails to Doctor Who stereotype. Hey, The Doctor and Leela arrive just as someone is murdered, I wonder if they'll take the blame. Oh, they do, what a surprise.
     The direction, production and acting all came up to the plate, with the impressive set designs and the iconic design of the Robot masks being most memorable. The flexibility of the Robot mask to display the story's theme of Uncanny Valley and "Robophobia" is shown by the fact that it's used both for the killer Robots and the docile spy robot D84, who ends up being quite cute and saves the day with a heroic sacrifice. It almost made up for the fact that the villain wasn't very well-developed, turning out to be a prior-unheard of background character masquerading on the mining ship for purposes unknown. (Like, if you want a robot revolution, do it at the Robot HQ or something, not on a mining ship in the middle of nowhere).

Leela is cracking on nicely.

     I think what's most impressive here is the world-building, which is some of the most elaborate in Who so far, allowing us an understanding of the culture which creates and lives with these robots through some choice dialogue and a series of minor-cast characterisations which make everything evidence. The idea of robophobia (the nickname of Grimwade's Syndrome, jokingly named after future director/writer Peter Grimwade who complained about doing Robot stories) is very well explored, and for 1977 it's a pretty in-depth examination of the reasons for what we now call the Uncanny Valley effect, in which lack of body language and secondary characteristics makes humans uncomfortable with realistic facsimiles.
     The Robots of Death is not as perfect as I had expected it to be, but of course the expectations of fan reputation are rarely the source of any full excitation. One of my small tiny issues with the Tom Baker era thus far is that any themes are hidden deep behind many layers. Perhaps I am a little stupid, and I need my obvious moral themes spat at me like in The Two Doctors or The Happiness Patrol. The Robots of Death is a fun story and I enjoyed it immensely, though, and nothing that I've come up with to fault it is ever really going to dent that.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: The most racist episode in the Classic Era. I paint my face yellow for The Talons of Weng-Chiang.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Face of Evil

Leela's introduction is written a hell of a lot better
than her exit.

Doctor Who - Season 14, Story Four - The Face of Evil
Written between 6th and 7th June 2013

Science versus faith. Reason triumphing over superstition. Such is the stuff of some of my favourite science fiction, with this week's wonderful story not only providing a fine example but also ushering in the preparations for a new era for the show. It is here we find the intoduction of Louise Jameson's Leela, the character who combined a certain "something for the Dads" appeal with a smashing characterisation, breaking the mold of modern-day Earth girl companions for at least another seven years.
     The story's main concept followed a The Time Machine style story of humanity undergoing divergent evolution, except this time limited to the decendants of a science team who crash-landed ona planet in the far future, separating into the savage society of the Sevateem (the Survey Team) and the ritualistic technocracy of the Tesh (Techs). I think the Sevateem were a little better executed - while groups of "savages" are very often generic in Doctor Who, the story mixed them with elements of a Cargo Cult and their descendance from the science team felt quite clear. The Tesh were considerably less inspiring; their ridiculous dress and bland acting didn't do them any favours, and I think I preferred them as the whispered-about enemy of the Sevateem than what we actually saw.
     Leela is a bit conflicting for me, even though I love the character. In terms of the feminist movement at the time, I think it's a combined step backward and forward. On the one hand she's clearly been deasigned aesthetically to attract the male audience - a scantily clad warrioress running around the place in a leather loincloth. On the other hand, her characterisation is somewhat progressive - a strong and (compared to the rest of her tribe) smart woman who comes from what feels like an equal society (although we once again have Deadly Assassin Disease and Leela is the only woman in the story). There are no subtle hints of romantic tension like we've had since the beginnings of the Pertwee Era - their relationship is purely platonic, Leela curious as to the depth of The Doctor's knowledge (her having been brought up to believe The Doctor to be an evil monster) and he just appearing to be glad to have the company.

Four is quite influential sometimes...

     The story's anti-villain was Xoanon, the ship's computer which was suffering due to multiple personality disorder accidentally caused by the Fourth Doctor some time ago, leading him to take on Four's personality and appearance even as its own sentience fought through. Tom Baker gets to ham it up quite a bit, and calls back to his Rasputin days to express the madness of the machine. The third episode's cliffhanger has the face of Tom Baker on the screen while a child's voice cries out, wondering who it is, and it's a brilliantly chilling cliffhanger that I think would have terrified all the kids. As a device, Xoanon's use as the centre of a new religious cult (which strangely seems to be very similar between the Tesh and the Sevateem) which morphs the purpose of their original mission is not original, but is certainly very well executed for a Saturday tea-time show.
     The Face of Evil shows a marked difference in tone to the previous two seasons. Maybe it's the focus on a well-executed concept rather than focussing on the fun of the runaround with the themes in the background, or maybe it's the loss of the whimsical and comforting face of Sarah Jane. But Doctor Who celebrates change, and change the show The Face of Evil did. A few of the executions of perhaps the Tesh and the spaceship itself were a little shoddy after the convincing jungle setting, but as an overall the story's concepts and its introduction of a quite well-characterised companion make this a certified winner.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: It's Gallifrey Base's favourite story, and I have no idea why. Join me in running away from The Robots of Death.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Deadly Assassin (Revisited)

See here for my previous look at this story.

The Crispy!Master in his first and most subtle appearance.

Doctor Who - Season 14, Story Three - The Deadly Assassin (Revisited)
Written 4/6/13

The Deadly Assassin is bound in my memory to a certain level of uniqueness, standing out from the rest of Season 14 for not just its various casting and setting decisions, but for the levels of inbuilt political commentary and satire that rarely seem to show up in this era. The most detailed (and most well-done) portrayal of Time Lord society is riddled with reflections of 1970s politics, taking issues from both sides of the pond. At the same time, its story is pioneeringly different, taking place for the majority in a virtual reality, and forcing Tom Baker's Doctor to embody his more brutal and animalistic traits.
     Before this point, Time Lords and Gallifrey were held in a great deal of mystique. They first appeared in lofty positions during Two's last story, The War Games, and in the 10th Anniversary story The Three Doctors. To the outrage of many a comtemporary fan (and to my absolute delight), The Deadly Assassin humanises the Time Lords and paints a picture of the unequal, degenerative society that The Doctor was so desperate to get away from. Cardinal Borusa tries to "adjust the truth", the Capitol is filled entirely with white males (probably an unconscious choice on behalf of the producers but what ho) and there are high-ups so deperate for power that they'd work with The Master.
     The story's companion-replacement is the wonderful George Pravda as Castellan Pravda, adding his Czechoslovakian tones to both great comic relief and in enforcing some of the story's political ideas. He heads up a strong (unfortunately all-male) cast that also features Hugh Walters as the young newsreader Runcible, three-time guest actor Bernard Horsfall as misled villain Chancellor Goth and Angus Mackay as the first-seen incarnation of Borusa, one of the more interesting Time Lord recurring characters. All are quite strong, especially Horsfall who relishes his final and lengthiest appearance as the story's villain, joining The Doctor in exploring his own ruthlessness in the Matrix.

George Pravda is great as Castellan Spandrell

     The Matrix sequence, beyond the rest of the episode's satire and political themes, is what should make this story stand out for the everyman. Robert Holmes uses the opportunity to throw everything at us, mixing imagery of clowns, World War II fighter jets, samurai warriors. There are a few scenes where The Doctor attempts to deny the reality that he's fighting in, and that leads to some cool effects. Perhaps a tiny complaint would be that half-way through Part Three when you're watching Tom Baker and Bernard Horsfall play a game of cat and mouse in a Jungle, you get either so engrossed or so bored that you forget that it's Doctor Who at all.
     The Deadly Assassin marks the transition between the era of Sarah-Jane and the beginning of the end of Hinchcliffe's tenure. It was a challenge for the show, its charismatic lead and for the contemporary fanbase, but in this one little story the show was redefined as something with a rich backstory and a grandeur to it. It opened the door for the remaining Gallifrey stories, for references to Gallifrey and the Time Lords throughout the rest of the Classic Series, to the Expanded Universe and Koschei and Theta Sigma. The Deadly Assassin showed us that putting human dramas onto alien cultures, especially ones as revered as the Time Lords, was not a bad thing - and sometimes worked better than looking at them first hand.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: I decide whether Leela is eye-candy or brain-food in The Face of Evil.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Hand of Fear

Sarah is controlled by Eldrad's hand and their gaudy ring.

Doctor Who - Season 14, Story Two - The Hand of Fear
Written 3/6/13

The Hand of Fear has gained its main place in Who lore as the last episode of the Classic Series to feature Sarah-Jane Smith as a continuous companion, and after three and a half seasons her presence has really made itself known. While I never really liked anything specific about Sarah Jane's character, she had very enjoyable chemistry with Tom Baker, and in the two and a half seasons since I started looking at Classic Who again, she and Tom have been the two things I look forward to most with each story. From the perspective of someone whose first experiences with Sarah Jane came from first The Five Doctors and then in NuWho, getting to see her original stories has justified to me why so many people love her.
     The Hand of Fear as a story, however, does not betray its starring feature until the last few minutes. Instead, we're given a sotry in two distinct halves whose tone and atmosphere couldn't be more different. The first, taking up the first two episodes, feels very much like a UNIT hangover and sees a magic stone hand possessing people and causing The Doctor to go running round hospitals and nuclear power stations. The second half is much weirder and much sillier, where the episodes' main concepts spill out like angel hair pasta and it's not very clear what's going on. My cup of tea entirely then.
     The main villain of the story is the memorable Eldrad, and their (I'm going to use neutral pronouns because they're both a woman and a man at different points in the story) abilities make this quite possibly the first story that I think I would have really enjoyed as a child in a "re-enact it in the playground" kind of way. Director Lennie Mayne's odd camera angles add a wonderful sense of mystery to the first half of the story, as we're unsure of what exactly is going on even as Elisabeth Sladen does her best as a possessed Sarah. Later, when Eldrad manifests themselves, they are a remarkably complex villain who despite their ranting and raving is given just the right treatment to make us wonder whether or not they're right.

Eldrad in their female form gives us most of their complexity.

     While some may argue that the final episode on the barren planet of Katria devolves very much into silliness, I think that comes as a light relief to the first few episodes of gripping power-plant action. Not to put those episodes down, though - there are attempts made to evoke the horror of the Nuclear Threat during the Cold War, and it has moments both very effective (the head of the plant calling his wife and saying he loves her when he believes the plant is going into meltdown) and less so (the Government decide to kill the radiation-absorbing creature by firing a Nuclear Bomb at it, because logic.) It's a matter of personal taste, really.
     My apologies if this review has come off as a little rambling, but that's because of its final few minutes. Written by Sladen and Baker themselves, Sarah Jane's departure has the right amount of tragedy, the right amount of love and just the right amount of humour. There's this definite feeling of loss; the unimaginable concept that after all this time, Sarah-Jane's just gone, and she won't come back in any permenant capacity in Doctor Who. It took me back to Elisabeth Sladen's death in 2011 and underlined it painfully. But, despite that, I am still thankful that Sarah Jane's character was there through these past two and a half seasons, and I am looking forward to seeing her beginnings when this run-through ends back at Season 11.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: A slightly less rambley revisitation of The Deadly Assassin.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Masque of Mandragora

The Doctor gets a Salami as a reward.

Doctor Who - Season 14, Story One - The Masque of Mandragora
Written 2/6/13

Season 14 gets off to a very impressive start. All it takes for Doctor Who to get really good is a believable setting that facilitates strong characterisations - in this case, a good old-fashioned historical, mashing alien fireballs with ancient cults and the turbulent world of pre-Enlightenment Italian politics. On every level, Mandragora gets it right as a compelling and exciting Who adventure - one that left me on the edge of my seat with every cliffhanger. With a few nice ideas about religion to bandy about, I really can't fault the story for anything but minor quibbles.
     The Doctor and Sarah, having found the wood-themed Secondary Control Room, are pulled into the Mandragora Helix, an energy realm with a controlling entity. This entity stows its way on the TARDIS and forces them to land in 15th Century Italy, where it uses the local cult of Demnos as a power base in order to manipulate the local royalty in an attempt to prevent The Enlightenment and man's rise to power. As The Doctor is caught between Enlightened Prince Guilliano and his evil uncle the Count, he must find a way to prevent the Mandragora from gaining influence over the entire Earth.
     Season 14 sees the slow beginning of a slide into humour - much more pronounced and painful in Season 17, but at this stage it's a welcome surprise as Tom Baker 's Fourth Doctor outwits his enemies and the audience by always jumping to the unexpected. This shows itself in the resolution to the first clever, where The Doctor manages to use his scarf to halt his own execution. Not only has Baker completely settled into the role, but it appears that by this point he's reached a peak of flexibility where he can pull off pretty much anything.

The new Autumn range from Paco Mandragora.

     The metaphors surrounding the transition into The Enlightenment were handled a little scruffily, especially surrounding the use of astrology. At first I found it a wonderful twist that the astrologer who predicted people's deaths then killed them to boost his credibility, but then it turned into the tale of a man who believed his prophecies to the extent that he could be manipulated by Mandragora. It was a human villainy, and while it wasn't the intricate character studies like those of the past, it was still sufficiently familiar to make him a far more effective villain than a rubber-faced monster.
      The Masque of Madragora gets a hell of a lot right - it combines the fun that Tom Baker was introducing into the role with a great setting (with costumes and a location borrowed from Hollywood) and a great set of performances from the secondary cast. As the first non-Britain Historical since The Gunfighters in '66, Masque uses the politics and ideas of Renaissance Italy to bring the season into a shining new start - and one of the best episodes since I started my look through Four's era.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: I get teary over Elizabeth Sladen as we see Sarah Jane's final continuous story, The Hand of Fear.