Overview: Doctor Who: Season 17

Also known as, "The main actors are bonking Season."

Written 7/10/12

I hated Season 17. Not entirely, not a vicious burning hatred like I feel whenever Ten does that weird "hoyes" thing, but certainly I didn't like it in a way that's a tad odd for me to comprehend. I mean, surely I like bad Doctor Who, so what's the problem when it's as bad as this? Well, it's the type of Bad that's the problem. Because I can't tell whether Douglas Adams was trying or not. Trust me, I love the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but I just couldn't stand the way that this series went at all. The reason why I wanted to do Season 17 before popping back to Season 12 as I had planned to is simply that I wanted to know why JNT made Season 18 the way he did. Season 17 has provided me with more reasons than I really wanted.
     Firstly, the Bidmead issue. While Bidmead's attempts to add more science to the series were ultimately laughable in how far they fell from reality despite using semi-realistic jargon, they are a million miles closer than this season. Even when it comes to things that have been in the series forever, Season 17 has such a weak grasp on reality that it's clear to see why that was the first thing that Bidmead and JNT jumped on in their attempts to "fix" the series. The Daleks aren't robots, life didn't start 400 million years ago (t'was muchas earlier), you can't really eat cholorphyll and for goodness sake, if you keep a bunch of paintings locked up in a dusty cellar, they're gonna get ruined. I don't mind things not being 100% scientifically accurate, but when it gets to the point where it affects the story, you have to draw a line.
     The worst story of the season by far was either The Creature From The Pit or The Horns of Nimon. The first had a decent sci-fi idea that could have been awesome if it came anywhere close to being executed correctly. The latter is absolutely dreadful in a way that's very easy to udnerstand - poorly made, poorly executed, poorly written and fucking poor on every level. I could at least laugh at some of the ridiculous phallic stuff in Creature From The Pit, Horns of Nimon is 100 long minutes of boring as shit story, punctuated by terrible production mistakes and some of the worst line reads in the show's history.

Nimon fucked me over. It was the last straw, and I
had very few straws reserved for Season 17
in the first place.

     The only redeeming story in the season is probably, and I didn't think I'd be saying this down the line, Destiny of the Daleks. It's imbued with a sense of fun that the rest of this series tries to emulate but ends up lacking drastically. All of the weird jokes and bad humour - they just seem to work better here. Romana comes out better because Lalla's got the character right, the Doctor comes out better because I'm not tired of him yet, and despite the shoddy production and weird attacks upon Dalek history, there's never a dull moment. That was this season's biggest failing. Instead of being dull with lots of great ideas, like Season 18, it was dull with a lot of bad ideas, and so many stories left me with no impact whatsoever.

Thanks.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Horns of Nimon

Happy New Year, everyone. 

Soldeed has just read this review. And he's very cross.

Doctor Who - Season 17, Story 5 - The Horns of Nimon
Written 6/10/12. 

I like Bad Doctor Who. I'm a sucker for the bad acting, bad design choices and downright terrible plot holes, and nothing makes me laugh quite like an absolute catastrophe. Time-Flight is a camp classic, Time and the Rani makes me laugh like nothing else and Timelash, well, that's just awesome. So when I heard of this story's horriffic reputation as the shodily made filler for an story that was never produced (Shada), I was looking forward to ending the series on a camp high note of mischeivous fun. What more can a man ask for? A lot more, it would turn out. My responses as I go through Tom's era, however topsy turvey I may be doing it, aren't encouraging, and this story pretty much nearly wiped out any enthusiasm I had for it.
     The best thing in the story is the semi-villain, Soldeed, played by Graham Crowden. He stands as a Minos in a story filled with badly executed references to Greek Mythology, and the campyness with which he plays the role delivers the story's few laugh-out-loud moments. Of course most reviewers would criticise these lines, rightly, as some of the worst deliveries in the program's long history, but for me they came as a few glorious moments of entertainment in 100 minutes of solid tedium, stupidity and disappointing lack of effort. Crowden at least seems to know how bad the serial is, and seems to be hamming it up just so he can get something out of it, and if I was in the position (and I have been in similar positions in the past) I couldn't blame him.
     The story's main influence is Theseus and the Minotaur, the six tributes from Anthea being sent by Minos (Soldeed) through the Labyrynth to feed the Minotaur (The Nimons). I can see where this is coming from, and it would be a decent base for a story if it wasn't so shoddily executed. On the face of it, the story's adaptations to the Doctor Who format could be seen as rather clever - K9 is used as the ball of golden wool to guide the way back through the maze, the maze is constantly changing its dimensions to avoid people escaping; it could have been something quite innovative. But it's acted and directed in such a lacklustre style that doesn't even attempt to provide any sort of tension or excitement... I just got bored. I very rarely get bored by Who, this is a new thing for me.

So much fiddling around in the TARDIS for no
reason in this season...

     If there was a cutting off point between hope and despair for me while watching this story, it came in the third episode. There was a shot that lingered rather unnecessarily upon the back of the Nimon's head, and when the actor reached up, the helmet came half-off. Why was that left in? Why didn't they catch that in the recording and do it again from a different angle? It wasn't even that long a scene! All it amounts to is the fact that obviously the producers on this story didn't actually care. At all. The reason for this is probably that Adams was driving through the story so he could get to his "masterpiece" story Shada - a story that, due to another one of Who's famous strikes, was never made. Nevertheless, it feels like such a bad work ethic - it doesn't matter that this one comes out crap, the next one'll be fine. No, that's not how it works. You need to put effort into every single one of your stories. The Art Department definitely tried their damned hardest every single time, I don't blame them, but I do blame this story's lacklustre acting, directing, music and most of all, the damn script editor for not ironing out the creases.
     I came into Horns of Nimon hoping that it would be bad in the right way for me to get the most out of it, but even on that front it disappointed. It had a few decent ideas that would have worked well, but their executions as well as the overall execution of a poor script meant that this project was doomed from the very beginning. As it stands, this story alone is enough to see why Graham Williams would go on to leave the position of Producer and hand it over to one of the crew, John Nathan Turner, who would go on to make Who more powerful, insightful and at least, when it was bad, more fun than this.

Thanks for nothing, Nimon.

NEXT WEEK: I pick up where I left off with Tennant and look at Girl In The Fireplace.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: Nightmare of Eden

Warning: Do Not Expose To Electricity

Doctor Who - Season 17, Story Four - Nightmare of Eden
Written 2/10/12
"And, uh, as for drugs, well, drugs are bad. You shouldn't do drugs." South Park

I'm not the type to want to do drugs, but I certainly don't intend to stop others using them in a healthy and controlled manner. I don't mind you smoking pot if you smoke it out of my vicinity and you control it to the extent that you're not some drug-addled stoner sitting in cat urine on the streets waiting for your next hit. However, I wasn't too bothered by this very rare occasion in Doctor Who - one that tries to get across a message for the viewing public, in this case that kids, don't do drugs - Drugs are bad. This message very quickly becomes the story's focus and everything else gets a bit messy, but ultimately it's an enjoyable enough bash around and you get some anvils for the kids as a bonus.
     The Doctor and Romana end up on a passenger spacecraft that's collided with a vessel on its way back from a planet filled with rare life called Eden. The leader of a zoological expedition, Tryst, is very keen to share The Doctor's expertise, but in the process the Doc discovers traces of a rare and devastatingly powerful drug known as Vraxoin that has wiped out entire populations. The animals from the study are being kept in a box called a CET that manages to project another dimension within which a chunk of the planet has been dropped. As the hunt for the drug smugglers goes on, the two Time Lords must evade capture as they discover why Tryst is so interested in keeping the monsterous creatures known as the Mandrels alive and well.
     When I watched Nightmare I often found myself drifiting away. It wasn't so much of a boredom but more of a feeling of quiet apathy at how "ok" everything was. The character of Tryst was comfortably well-characterised, the other characters suitably hammy and high-handed. Despite this story's reputation, the story never mentions the effects of more mainstream drugs in our society but instead shows us the effects of Vraxoin - which appear to be a sort of gas-and-air sensation but with negative consequences at the end. From a scientific standpoint it's just a bit weird; the drug can either be synthesised from the extract of a certain type of fungus or it can be left behind by electrocuting Mandrels.

Cos I go' high, cos I go' high, cos I go' high...

     What I've ultimately come away with from Nightmare of Eden is a weird sense that I've just watched something incredibly powerful and intelligent that's littered with Doctor Who's standard chase scenes and humour. There's so much good in here, but there are little niggles that hold it back in certain points. At its heart, Nightmare of Eden is a very good story with a very good idea of what it's doing, and that's characterised by a straightforward, adult aesop surrounded by normal Who fluff. It's just that, well, it's not that obvious.

Thanks.

P.S. Happy Christmas Eve.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Creature From The Pit

Doctor Who - Too Hot For TV!

Warning, NSFW...  

Doctor Who - Season 17, Story Three - The Creature From The Pit
Written 29/9/12

The Whoniverse has had its fair share of dodgy looking monsters. The Blood Line taught us that there's a large vagina that runs through the centre of the earth. Terror of the Vervoids showed us that even plants can resemble human sexual organs. But no story has ever been more phallic in nature than the unfortunately remembered Creature From The Pit, a story whose ideas about wealth and powers will forever be overshadowed by its reputation as that one where Tom Baker kissed an alien's penis.But even ignoring any phallic imagery (or scrotal imagery, for that matter,) how does this story stand up on its own.
     The central concept that David Fisher (the writer of Androids of Tara, a story I adored) is trying to show is of two neighbouring planets, Chloris and Tytholus, one of which is scarce in metal and abundant in plant life, and one which is the opposite. The Chlorians live their lives under the tryanny of Lady Adrasta, who holds a monopoly over the planet's only mine and throws any dissidents down a pit, where an evil creature is said to live. When The Doctor and Romana arrive, they discover that the Creature is in fact a sentient blob called Erato, an ambassador from Tytholus who came to the planet to offer a lucrative trading deal. After Adrasta is foiled, The Doctor ties up loose ends by preventing a Neutron star from colliding with the planet.
     Suffice to say that Dave Fisher wasn't the most scientifically literate guy, and while that shouldn't usually affect a story, it certainly does dampen this one. If your planet isn't rich in heavy metals, then you don't tend to end up becoming a rocky planet - that's just how it works, and you certainly would not have a world where life - which requires little stuff like iron, magnesium and other metalic minerals - is as abundant as it is here. Plus, Tythonians are said to be composed of a big brain covered by a thin membrane, and are said to "eat chlorophyll". Chlorophyll is the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and magnesium based green pigment in plants that allows them to undergo photosynthesis to convert CO2, Water and energy from the sun into simple sugars, which the plant can then use for respiration. I don't really see how consuming Chlorophyll can help you get energy, but whatever. It feels like the concepts, if streamlined, could have had so much more potential, but the fact that the only motivations seemed to be control of the "metal" without actually using metal for anything particularly useful took away any tension.

      Thank goodness for the characters, then. Well. One of them. Myra Frances' Lady Adrastra is a stellar villain, and it's good to see a strong female character like that in Who. She drips hatred and greed, and she's smart enough to get what she wants until the very end, where it is her own deception that undoes her. It was a bad way to go - being teabagged by Mr. Greenballs, but that's the way the cookie crumbles. Romana was a bit of a shame, in that this was Lalla Ward's first filmed story and so the script rather blatantly gives her Mary Tamm's personality without any of the skill or charm. Everyone else was a cardboard cutout, except of course Baker, whose manic energy is getting me down very quickly in the same way that seeing Matt Smith be "quirky" does.

Which Romana are you trying to be?

     Oh, and K9! What happened to you? John Leeson left the series for one reason or another just for Season 17, and the replacement, David Brierly, is a painful substitiute that, while adequate, can't hope to live up to the original. Whenever Leeson's K9 sounded sarcastic, it was almost by accident, it was hinted at. David Brierley doesn't sound like a robot's voice, it sounds like a man sat in a booth somewhere making sarcastic remarks. He's like someone put Adric in a box.
     Creature From The Pit, penis sucking or no penis sucking (something I've never written on this website before and will probably never write again), was incredibly disappointing on all levels, and that's simply because of how ill-thought-out its concepts end up being. The idea of a society being stifled from technological progress by a higher power is an easy one, but here it just flounders and that's really unfortunate.

Thanks.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: City of Death

Stop flirting, you two.

Doctor Who - Season 17, Story Two - City of Death
Written 18/9/12

Isn't Paris a b-e-a-utiful city? Beautiful damsels serenaded through the streets with the language of love, aeriel views of the Champs Elysée from the Eiffel Tower, little cafés and bookshops littered with quirky personalities. In this story, written by Douglas Adams under the name David Agnew (whom we last met as a coverup for the disgraceful Invasion of Time), said quirky personality turns out to be a little more exotic; a little more out there, a little more cyclops-y. City of Death is often lauded as one of the best stories of the entire Baker era, and certainly the only saving grace of this season, but is its reputation deserved, or is it just being a bit prétentieux?
     The Doctor and Romana go on a date to Paris together, where they flirt madly, in a scene that becomes a lot more understandable once you realise that the longing looks between the actors originated in Baker and Ward's real-life relationship. They spend a rather long time wandering randomly around Paris, crossing roads and running down pavements, while vaguely sinister and completely inappropriate music plays behind them. Eventually The Doc takes Romana to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa, and is shocked to find an aristocratic woman wearing a broach capable of high-tech scanning. On their way out, they are shadowed by bumbling undercover British cop Duggan (Tom Chadbon, later to be Merdeen in The Mysterious Planet) who tries to confront them about their possible role in an attempt to rob the Mona Lisa. Two goons come to pick them up, however, revealing the true villain in the charming Count Scarlioni, also known as Scaroth of the Jagaroth, whose experiments in Time Travel turn out to be an attempt to return to the dawn of time and stop his spaceship from blowing up. Realising that the explosion of Scaroth's spaceship was the cause of abiogenesis on Earth, The Doctor pops back to the beginning of life and makes sure that the spaceship still explodes. Scaroth dies, life evolves on Earth and The Doctor and Romana go off for lunch.
     The direction of the episode feels strangely reserved, often more like some kind of documentary film where the cameraman is observing the Baker and Ward in their natural habitat, and the soundman has somehow gotten the documentary audio mixed up and hasn't bothered to tell anyone. I dubbed them "transport scenes" in my first watch, and it felt like a parody of how fiction is supposed to work. Usually, when we see characters moving between different locations, we get the journey inbetween cut out because that's not very interesting. Bah, says City of Death, let's throw in those scenes anyway! What results is a series of long, tedious and incredibly dull scenes which, while naively pursing the Doctor Who maxim of "lots and lots of running," do nothing but stretch out the runtime.

Adrian Glover is deliciously suarve as Scarlioni

     So why, then, is this story so loved? Well, if there's one thing that Adams is good at, it's characters, and the characters in this story are pretty much brilliant. The standout is Count Scarlioni/Scaroth (Julian Glover), whose villain, while not as complex as he could have been, is incredibly witty and erudite to the point where it seems like he knows exactly what you're going to say and why you're going to say it; mainly because most of the time, he does. I personally thought the Scaroth mask was hideously fake, but in his human disguise Scarlioni is one of the most enjoyable villains this side of Count Grendel. Also great is Duggan, whose character is written splendidly and provides both the role of a straight man and the bumbling comic relief, an ordinary foil for the intellectual Time Lord Twosome.
     City of Death is certainly a very good story in the script itself, and for the most part I had a lot of fun watching it, but certain aspects of the direction of the story and in the way that it executed its ideas made it very difficult to love. I'm sure I'd get used to it on repeated watchings, but I have little to no inclination to watch the two lovebirds stroll around Paris for the first episode without anything happening until the last five minutes. I want to love it, I really do, and the performances make it so brilliant. It's like a diamond that's been smeared with mud on the tip. It may still sparkle under the right light, like nothing else you've ever seen, but that doesn't stop it from stinking when you try to handle it.

Thanks.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: Destiny of the Daleks (Revisited)

The Daleks take a course in intution from Davros. They are
unfortunately unable to make any notes.

See here for my previous look at this story.

Doctor Who - Season 17, Story One - Destiny of the Daleks
Written 8/9/12

Terry Nation is one hell of a figure when it comes to Doctor Who. He brought us not only the everlasting Daleks, but also many other stories for the first four Doctors. An equal figure outside of Who is one Douglas Adams, the writer of the widely popular Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and one of the wittiest men in history. Together, they came together to try and start the 1979/80 season with a bang, by reintroducing not only the Daleks, but also their incredibly popular creator, Davros.
     Having fitted a randomiser to escape the Black Guardian, The Doctor is busy fixing a sore K9 when Romana announces that she has regenerated, into the form of the previous story's Princess Astra. (Lalla Ward.) He's not very happy at first, be after she "tries on" several bodies he accepts the Astra body as just right. They find themselves on a rocky planet that The Doctor feels like he's been to before. There, they meet a landing party of the disco-esque Movellans, who reveal that they are on Skaro. The Daleks have been fighting a war with the Movellans using battle computers, and so both sides have become so logical that neither can outwit the other. The Daleks have returned to Skaro to dig up Davros in the hope that he has some answers, but The Doctor gets there first. Davros, when he awakens, takes the power a bit to his head, and sends out suicide daleks to blow up the Movellan ship. The Doctor, luckily, leads a group of Dalek slaves to incapacitate all of the equally homicidal Movellans and blow up the Daleks before they do any harm. The slaves fly away, Davros is cryogenically frozen until next time, and The Doctor and the new Romana pop off of their travels.
      The story's biggest problem is that it takes on the ideas of a very much-loved story (Genesis) and then performs them in a way which, despite being to the best of its ability, inevitably fails to live up to those past glories. The imposingly bland corridors of the Kaled Bunker are now green and purple affairs littered with sugar-glass and lit by what appear to be stage lamps that have been deliberately left in shot. The grand, majestic battlefields between the Kaled and Thal domes are now replaced by a standard BBC Quarry. Davros as played by David Gooderson is no longer the calculating schemer we know and love but now a generic, shouty villain who spends the vast majority of his airtime either being pushed around on a joy-ride by the Doctor. If it was being taken entirely seriously, then we might be able to forgive this - I respect Warriors of the Deep for the fact that it still manages to convey its themes despite its crippling studio problems - but Douglas Adams' additions to the script make it just knowingly self -aware enough to be a problem.
     That isn't, though, to say that the story is without merit. The direction, using the new Steadycam technique, is actually quite impressive and does its best to make a quarry look like a rolling landscape. The concept behind the Daleks and the Movellans' impasse, if one ignores Nation's apparant lapse in memory about the Daleks' organic nature, is actually quite an interesting sci-fi idea and feels similar to the arguments about logic's value from Two's era. There's nothing wrong, fundamentally, with the story's concept, but it's all in the execution. At times, with its winking humour that pokes fun at both Doctor Who and the Daleks, Destiny feels very much like a parody of the series rather than a season opener.

Oh look! Rocks!

     Aside from the whole Davros thing and the fact that only four Dalek models were left (all of which have very recognisable damage marks from previous stories/handling) the other thing this story is famous for is being the story in which Romana II appears. Mary Tamm, who had played Romana as introduced for the previous season's Key To Time arc, declined to continue playing the character, and so they hired Lalla Ward, who had played character Princess Astra in the previous serial. I personally prefer Tamm's Romana, although I've seen a lot more of Romana II than I have of Romana I (six serials to one) so I don't really have an opinion yet. While rather strange and certainly without Watsonian reason, the regeneration scene (written entirely by Adams) is a fun bit of script that covers the changeover nicely.
     Adams' first contribution to Who, and Nation's last, Destiny is a good indicator of the stories that the troubled production of Season 17 had to come. And of course you've heard me go on about troubled productions over and over again, you know I have. But Season 17 was a time of greatness and a time of camp self-awareness that forced the show into reverse gear for the next few years. Destiny of the Daleks could be called So Bad It's Good, but luckily the calibre of Adams' writing means that it just scrapes into an "OK" category. And OK Doctor Who is usually more fun than other programs anyway.

Thanks.

NEXT TIME: Paris gets called a rude name. Monty Python makes a cameo. The Doctor and Romana go on a date.