Review: Doctor Who Classic: Terror of the Autons

For Josh's article on this story, see here.

"The more he avoids the moment, the greater my ultimate
satisfaction." From nerdculturepodcast

Doctor Who - Season 8, Story One - Terror of the Autons
Written 14/9/13

"I am known as The Master. Universally." And so Season Eight begins, the season in which the villain is always The Master in disguise and in which he continually hooks up with alien intelligences just to piss The Doctor off and then saves the day at the last second due to their sudden but inevitable betrayal. Terror of the Autons follows this pattern with very little fuss, allowing Roger Delgado to shine in his premier as the ruthless, inventive and somewhat understated Master, while the villains from last year's premier hitch the ride for a series of sometimes hilarious and always disturbing murders, obviously concocted from the mind of a serial-killer left inside a Toys R Us.
     The Master shows up and steals a Nestene power device from under UNIT's nose, hypnotising his way into a Plastics Factory and assisting the Nestenes in creating a preliminary force to distract Earth's forces prior to a full-on invasion. The Time Lords send a strangely dressed man to warn The Doctor about his old enemy (appropriate, as The Doctor is at the top of a radio telescope at the time) and he follows The Master's evil schemes as much as he can. Bumbling new assistant Jo Grant (replacing Liz Shaw) gets hypnotised along the way, even though she comes good along the way and together Jo and The Doctor follow The Master's scheme to the point where The Doctor is able to convince him that the Nestenes will probably kill him too (cos he looks human and all) and to stop their scheme.
     Whereas the previous lot of Nestenes were all about freaky plastic dupicates and shop-window dummies, these guys are more sadistic and inventive, with serial-killing plastic dwarves, film-spewing daffodils and the stretching-credibility-for-a-cliffhanger telephone wire. While being in the presence of The Master is immediately a constant buzzkill for their presence, they are certainly more intimidating and it's much more believable when we're told that they can control all plastic when they literally do just that. In hindsight one could argue that they were trying to scrape the barrel a little bit on the concept, and a few of the executions do bring this to the light, but all things considered there's enough frightening stuff here to justify their frightening reptuation - the reputation that led to their placement as the villain of the revival's pilot.

I apparently get a starring role in this story...
From docoho

     Ainley was my Master, but the original is rather superb in his way. The character is at this absolute best here, where the execution is at its most fresh. The character outline of being the Moriarty to The Doctor's Holmes works perfectly, and it's especially satisfying to see the dozens of little plots and plans get played off one after the other and to see The Master himself enjoying performing them. He's also fantastically quote-worthy;  "Now, come, come, Doctor. Death is always more frightening when it strikes invisibly."
     The days of gritty realism and visiting a different high-tech research facility every week are definitely over, and Doctor Who begins to stray away from the sci-fi and crime drama influences of the previous season and into something that, while not as painstakingly brilliant as its predecessors, is far more distinctive. Whether I'll still enjoy The Master and his plots another 21 episodes down the I'm not sure, but at this early point in the season it looks as though I'd have a fair chance of enjoying myself.

Thanks.

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Even though my original plan was to carry on and finish Colourised Who, I tried watching Mind of Evil and the slog that is the Pertwee Era and the general vibe of early 70s stopped me dead in my tracks. It's been fun watching Classic Who, but for the meantime, I'm dropping out. Thanks for reading my Classic Who reviews over these past few years, and I'll see you next time.

Overview: Doctor Who Classic: Season Seven

The Brigadier, Three and Liz form a fascinating trio.
From doctorwhotv

Written 24/8/13.

In the past I've often separated my enjoyment of seasons into stories that I enjoy and stories that I, in some badly guided objective sense, think are actually good. Season Seven falls into that latter category, and against a big great heaping set of odds that in later years would have us all ringing the doom bells and foreseeing a complete and utter disaster. The line of Doctor Who "firsts" reads like the Prince of Bavaria's Christmas list - first serial in colour, first to be radically shortened, first to feature the Third Doctor, first to take place entirely on Earth. There are probably some more too, but I'll get to that. Season Seven was produced at a time when the show had decided to take budgetary concerns very seriously, but despite the constriction that being stuck on Earth should give the season, it instead gives it a platform upon which it bases its four exemplary stories.
     Not having to produce alien environments instead opened the series up to human settings, creating a definite style in which we spend the vast majority of our time in scientific research institutes, each being threatened by aliens/precursors and all of whom treat Jon Pertwee's burgeoning Third Doctor with a healthy degree of skepticism. Helping this along is the appearance of UNIT, the signature of the Pertwee Era, headed by Nicolas Courtney's Brigadier and assisting in the hiring of a new companion in the form of Caroline John's Liz. The use of this regular cast of characters in the same locations sweeps away the idea of "The Doctor and companion(s) in the TARDIS" for at least another four years, and instead presents The Doctor as an eccentric man in a very human working environment.
      This would be difficult to work with, if not for the deceptively long serials that occupy this season. Despite actually being the shortest season since the show's inception at that point in time (25 weekly episodes forming four distinct serials), the serials within are all still very long by modern standards, with all but the first lasting a blistering 2 hours and 55 minutes if viewed at once. The downside and the upside is that there's a lot of room for the serials to develop character, atmosphere, themes etc. with the show's relatively slow pace. On the downside, it means that the ideas and events are split up to the point where by the end a lot of the detail is lost on a modern viewer. (I hate to generalise, but my only sample is myself.) On the upside, this development does allow the season to create four very solid sci-fi ideas in a way which is both narratively bold and fundamentally entertaining.

Pertwee's Doctor is a dashing humanitarian hero.
From grufainia

      And those are my only criticisms. It's a personal thing that I think I've talked about before - I'm just a heathen when it comes to old TV, no matter how much Classic Who I've watched. I'm used to the pace of the 80s, where The Happiness Patrol manages to combine brash political statements with absurdist fun and have it sorted within the time it takes to commute to work. It's clear to me that Season Seven is immensely well-constructed, with the level of control that's apparent in the writing making it perhaps feel more professional and slick than it ever made out to be. Season Seven wants to be taken seriously, it wants to do this right and it doesn't have that many resources to do it with. But, a few dodgey Dinosaur props notwithstanding, this season has stood the test of time and remains one of the best, if not the best season of the show from an objective viewpoint. And that's no small accolade.

Thanks.

Review: Voyager 2.14: Alliances

Janeway gets pally with the Trabe, who need to check
their privilege. From Wikia

Star Trek Voyager - Season Two, Episode Fourteen - Alliances
Written 9/8/13

I've been very kind to Voyager over the apst few weeks, sining its praises and wondering what the hell of this negative air was about. And then I reached Alliances, and despite my excitement for yet another tiresome Kazon episode, I really had expected something to happen in the overall plot. In Alliances, Voyager has the opportunity to open up into a level of complexity that its sister DS9 wielded so well - a chance to open up to more stories that were politically relevant, relationships that were politically relevant and analogous to those in the other series but framed in a different way. And, as you can tell my by tone, Voyager squanders this not only thoroughly and completely, but with a strange sort of pride and gusto that left me with a bitter taste in my mouth.
     After another battering from the Kazon, a crew member dies, and several Maquis crewmembers chirp up again about needing to use different tactics. That includes Chakotay, who makes a personal appeal to the Captain that they have to ally themselves with one of the Kazon factions in order to secure themselves and prevent more attacks. Janeway, after some stubbornness, reluctantly agrees - she reaches out to the clan that Seska has allied herself with, while Neelix goes after one I've never heard of. Negotiations fail with Maje Cullah because he's a sexist bastard, while Neelix gets involved in a prison-break held by members of a race called the Trabe. A representative gets very pally with Janeway and reveals that his race used to hold the Kazon in ghettos before they rebelled - but that was a generation ago, and none of those alive now support their persecution. He suggests bringing all of the faction-leaders together for a meeting to discuss peace, but when they do get together, it turns out that the Trabe were being little treacherous shits and were trying to kill all of the Kazon leaders. Janeway gives up on politics and gives a "rousing" speech in which she says that they now have to stick to Federation principles no matter what.
      Alliances, in its concession towards Maquis ideas being used in Voyager's command structure, opens up a little peephole to a well of potential for the series to exploit. Having Maquis crewmembers makes it very easy to imagine a ship structure that straddled the lines between Federation morality and Maquis pragmatism, making allies and enemies in unknown territory and allowing us access then to a whole host of new races and then possibly new main characters as a result. It would be a more realistic scenario by far, and it would deliver a great big dollop of meaty moral ambiguity to a series currently stuck in lazy optimism. I hate the ending of this episode, I actually thoroughly hate it because it's so motherfucking predictable and it ends up painting Janeway in a bad light when just because some murderous assholes fucked up her plan, she's now going to ignore the very real fact that you can't run an efficient judicial hierarchy 70,000 lightyears away from home.

Voyager attempts to ally with Cullah and Seska.
From Trekcore

     That said, I did admire the episode's attempts to try. Seska and Cullah always form a fun double act even if it feels like some kind of weird prime-time soap opera whenever they're on screen. Cullah's sexist bullshit was handled very well, with both Janeway and Seska verbally kicking his ass.The examination of the Trabe's persecution of the Kazon as a reason for their eventual uprising, while trying to fall analogous to the white persection of every other god-damn race on the planet, ended up being a little insulting. I mean, it sorta implied that all persecuted peoples who rebel against their persecutors are naturally violent, evil people. Which is a really quite horrible thing to imply, and it stinks of how little this episode was actually thought out.
     Voyager could have made revolutionary steps in plotting any time it wanted - that's not the issue here, even though I am slightly disappointed that in its early days the show very much felt like a take-off of Next Generation. The issue is that Voyager is so often adept at dangling good things in our faces and then throwing them away - it doesn't seem to know the value of change in its storyline and instead here glorifies the status quo as if it's this holy, wonderous thing instead of the bane of every viewer's existence. This episode was a bit like Merlin in that regard. Maybe that's why I was so angry and bitter at it. I should have to feel angry and bitter at Star Trek - I love Star Trek, but thi episode just pushed too many of the wrong buttons.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Fuck. It's the only non-canon episode in the entire Franchise. We do well not to try and cross Threshold.

Review: Lost 2.11: The Hunting Party

Locke, Sawyer and Jack go hunting Michael.
From Wikia

Lost - Season Two, Episode Eleven - The Hunting Party
Written 13/8/13

In the first season, "All Good Cowboys Have Daddy Issues" was a Jack-centric that allowed the main-plot a little push to get it going. The same is true of The Hunting Party, which introduces us more formally to The Others, whose mysterious appearances will continue to plague the survivors until the veil of mystery is thrown off in Season Three. While the main plot didn't really focus much on Jack's character development (which on the main island has pretty much been replaced with more Love Triangle wranglings), the flashbacks were rather spectacularly done and despite my problems with the character's writing on occasion, Matthew Fox is an excellent actor.
     In his flashback, we see the breakdown of Jack's marriage to wife Sarah. He is becoming ever more distant from his wife due to a workaholic streak which leads him to help a rich foreign patient whose daughter, Gabriella, has brought him to Jack in the belief that he is a miracle worker. Jack grows close to Gabrielle - too close for his father Christian's liking. When Gabriella's father dies, she kisses him as he comforts her, and a grovelling Jack returns to his wife only to find that Sarah was leaving him anyway, tired of never actually seeing him.
     On the Island, and Michael locks Jack and Locke in the Gun Room at gunpoint and runs off. Sawyer comes in and lets them out, joining them on a trek to try and follow Michael and convince him to return. As they follow strange directions, they eventually meet Mr. Friendly, the man who kidnapped Walt. Surrounded by Others, Mr. Friendly chastises them for acting like rude guests and tells them that while Walt and Michael are fine, they must not cross a certain point on the Island, and that defying this request would begin open hostilities between the Others and the Survivors. Elsewhere, Jin and Sun talk about how much of a dick Jin was and he apologises, and Hurley admits to Charlie that he likes Tailie Libby.

Sarah leaves Jack. From Wikia

     The breakdown of Jack's marriage seems a fairly logical conclusion for their two personality types - Jack, a person person who manages to flirt with most of the women he sees and yet has the capacity to be extraordinarily obsessive to the point where it's actually scary, versus Sarah, a woman who was blown away by the extraordinary talent of the doctor who fixed her and suffered from transference as a result. (In which her feelings of gratitude and awe translated into feelings of affection.) The result is a relationship that's nowhere near close to working, and this episode helps to show on and off island why that's the case.
     I get the feeling that The Hunting Party was supposed to be more momentous than it was, but from a characterisation perspective it was a little too bogged down with Jack/Kate/Sawyer drama that I really do find extremely tedious, and when I needed something in the present to counterbalance the turning-a-bit-negative perspective of him in the flashback, I got angry jealous Jack instead. The end result of this episode is knowing very little about The Others, having very little idea about what's going on with Jack and really not knowing what comes next. In a sorta empty way.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Charlie acts like a little shithead in the horrendous Fire + Water.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Ambassadors of Death

An iconic cliffhanger. From Wikimedia

Doctor Who - Season 7, Story Three - The Ambassadors of Death
Written 1/9/13

Doctor Who is known to borrow entire plots and premises from other works, then executing them in such a way that despite the remnant elements of the original, it stands out firmly as its own piece of work. This is true in the later years of the Classic Series and it is clear in the earlier ones, even though to modern viewers the premise of this story may be unique in and of itself. Despite this, The Ambassadors of Death is similar in quality to its Season Seven bedfellows, mixing well-executed high-concept science fiction with Doctor Who's trademark messages, reflecting not only Humanity's avarice but also its capacity for compassion when all the facts are available.
     A space probe has launched off from Mars after having lost radio contact for some time. When the recovery capsule returns, a mysterious group of people go out of their way to hide the occupants, who are alien beings hidden in the astronauts' spacesuits and who are forced to kill and steal for their human masters. The Doctor, immediately suspicious, tries to help find them, fighting along the way the continued efforts of those who have kidnapped the aliens. Eventually he takes the recovery capsule up to the ship, and discovers that the three aliens are the races' ambassadors, and that they are willing to trade the original astronauts for their people. The Doctor gets back to Earth in time to help the Ambassadors free themselves and to save the astronauts and Earth.
     The serial takes its premise from The Quatermass Experiment, a popular British science-fiction serial from 1956 in which astronauts return from a mission only to have been possessed by alien spores. The antagonist of the story (spoiler alert, even if this story is from 1970), General Carrington, seems to be a representative of that story's themes, in which the aliens are hostile for the sole reason that they are different and the protagonist is forced to destroy them before they invade earth. Ambassadors displays this as a sort of mania, instead showing us that in this case, the aliens are perfectly peaceful and that it is man's manipulation of them that has led them to their actions. It's a statement against prejudice, a statement about what good mankind can do to each other.

The aliens' culture is not important here - it is their sheer
alienness which drives the story's themes. From Wikia

     Unlike the season's other seven parters, which wouldn't hurt to shed and episode or two, The Ambassadors of Death earns its runtime and uses it to build us a sense of mystery and intrigue. The continual and seemingly omnipresent machinations of the organisation working against The Doctor and UNIT provide some interesting scenes, as well as a series of well-done battle scenes throughout the story that really don't pull their punches. Like The Invasion last season, there's a sense of the epic and the idea that there are going to be world-wide consequences to what happens here, which is something that the similarly epic The Silurians and Inferno never quite manage to do.
    As is custom on this blog, I've gone about this season in entirely the wrong order, but I'm glad that for now I've been able to appreciate what an astounding season this really is. The other serials in Season Seven had a style that took a while for me to get used to, but The Ambassadors of Death is by far my favourite for the sole reason that it's compelling and comprehensive from the outset, with very little padding at all. It takes a well-loved sci-fi idea and then executes it in a way which spins the message 180 degrees, turning it into a message of peaceful resolution of conflict that sums up in everything it does the messages that Doctor Who is known for, and the spirit that it pioneered so brilliantly in this fantastic season.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Having done all of the other stories in Season 7, I move onto the next season, with the rise of The Master in Terror of the Autons.

Review: Voyager 2.13: Prototype

Why do birds, suddenly appear?
From Wikia

Star Trek Voyager - Season Two, Episode Thirteen - Prototype
Written 9/8/13

This week's episode is one that follows B'elanna Torres, a character who gets quite a fair amount of character development both in the right direction and in some odd ones. There's a lot to work with in her damaged psyche - anger issues, abandonment, obsessiveness, survivor guilt. All make for quite a few juicy episode premises to explore these issues, including this week's odd affair where she, totally implicitly, is kidnapped by the man she loves and is forced to bear a child by him. Except that the man is a robot. Like I said, the symbolism here is odd.
       Voyager finds an android floating through space, which looks like a cross between Kamelion and a shop-window dummy. While its technology is completely alien, B'elanna takes it upon herself to work night and day in order to try and fix it. Eventually she hits a rut and consults The Doctor, who helps her come up with a plasma transplant. When the machine awakens and Voyager returns it to its ship, it kidnaps B'elanna and takes her with it. The robot wants her to undo its creator's failsafe and allow them to reproduce again. Breaking the Prime Directive, she manages to create "new life", but immediately regrets it when she discovers that the robots, and their identical enemies, are the leftovers from a war between two races who called a truce but whose robots continued fighting and killed them in order to carry on. B'elanna destroys the prototype and is saved by Voyager, with B'elanna reeling from having to kill her "child".
     I was getting a lot of weird vibes from the episode's central concept, initially due to the very amourous way in which B'elanna converses with the robot, almost using it as a comforting presence during its inactivity and then sitting in abject awe of it once it awakened. Then, once she had made the prototype and was forced to kill it, I felt that the episode as trying to push for some kind of miscarriage or abortion metaphor that didn't really seem to fit. I'm probably reading too much into things, of course. Neither of these two things are bad - in fact, it's rather interesting. The way that B'elanna, after many years of anger and grief, is able to put that aside in order to have these mother-like instincts is quite fascinating. I do however think that it makes it slightly weird when those instincts are aimed towards robots and not other organic life forms. The idea that she can only confront her feelings on maternity by projecting them onto inorganic beings is for me something quite insulting, because we've seen B'elanna display emotional maturity before.

This scene was really cool. Go Jonathan Frakes!

      I was a little skeptical of the idea that the two alien races would have almost identical automaton soldiers, and that they wouldn't program these robots to never turn on them - the rules of robotics set down by Isaac Assimov are concessions to that. I also fail to believe that the robot in question has been alive for 150 years as he says - given just how vulnerable most ships are in Star Trek, and how much the two sides were bombarding each other, two sides with limited men would wipe themselves out in that time without ado.
     I think Prototype was trying to do a lot of things in a lot of area - on the one hand exploring the ethics of fertility treatments and possibly abortion, and on the other allowing B'elanna to explore her motherly instincts as she is forced to create a new life. The only problem is that it comes off as obsessiveness, more creepy than endearing, because she appears to have basically fallen in love with a robot. Had falling in love with a robot and the ethics surrounding it been the diamond-point focus of the episode, then it might have had something to say, but instead it became tangled in a technobabbley, creepy mess of shop-window-dummy robots and abortion metaphors where the mother stabs the newborn child in the chest with a screwdriver.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Watch your step, guys. I smell bullshit. We see a total waste of an episode in Alliances.

Review: Lost 2.10: The 23rd Psalm

Eko stares down The Monster.
From Wikia

Lost - Season Two, Episode Ten - The 23rd Psalm
Written 12/8/13

Eko is my Shephard; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in good episodes: he leadeth me to enjoy good character development. Yes, finally, this is our Eko centric episode, and while it does progress along Charlie's misguided storyline, it finally shows what Eko has been through to get to this point and what a brilliant character he is. At least to me. Throw in some explanations about some strange things found on the Island and some prep for next week's Event episode, and you got yourself yet another entry on my favourite episodes list.
     In our flashbacks, we find two young brothers in a Nigerian village attacked by a local militia. The older brother is forced to kill a man to save his brother, and is taken off to become a child soldier. He grows up to be Mr. Eko, a drug-lord who intercepts some heroin that needs to be smuggled out of Nigeria. He goes to his younger brother Yemi, now a priest ashamed of his brother's path, and at first asks, and then forces him to let them dress up as priests in order to smuggle the heroin inside some virgin mary statues. Yemi calls the military to their landing strip but is killed in the process, his body bunged aboard the Beechcraft while Eko was forced out, with the authorities now believing him to be a real priest.
     Claire tries to consult Eko about Charlie's "secret religiousness", leading to him finding and revealing the heroin-filled virgin mary statue that Charlie kept from the Beechcraft. Claire feeling betrayed, Eko demands for reasons then unknown to take him to the plane. On their journey to it, they find a corpse that Eko recognises, and Eko has a run-in with the Monster where it just seems to look at him and then run away. When they reach the plane, Eko looks at the body within and it is Yemi. He burns the plane using its own fuel and they head back to camp, where Claire has packed up Charlie's stuff. Elsewhere, Michael communicates summore with Walt on the Swan computer and displays an unhealthy interest in the contents of the gun room.

Eko is sent away to become a Guerilla as a child.
From Wikia

     In my eyes, Eko's is not a story of faith but one of guilt. For the vast majority of Eko's life, he lives in the real world - one in which black and white mixed readily and in which the way to get by was to not make much distinction between them. Hence Eko has never really felt guilty for anything in his life - that is, until, his brother's death, after which his newfound guilt, something he's never had to deal with before, sends him into the guilt-enabling world of Religion and the church. I don't think we ever hear him acknowledge any idea of God moving his actions - it's the spirituality that appeals to him, and the sense of purpose in a life which, while fine for him before that point, had seen his brother killed without a proper burial.
      Mr. Eko is one of my favourite characters in the whole show, and that's a mixture of the love I have for his character arc (in which he slowly learns to forgive himself for his brother's death and accepts that the majority of his original philosophy was right all along) and for the sheer ability of the actor who plays him, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje. This episode had all of that, and while it also had Charlie, who is increasingly becoming a pain in the backside, there's nothing that can mask the awesomeness of Mr. Eko - washed up junkies or no.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: We find out how Jack's life got fucked up as we get to meet the Others en masse.

Overview: Doctor Who: The Tom Baker Era

Baker in one of his numerous publicity shoots.
From hdwallpapers

Written between the 8th and 10th August 2013.

It's a common occurance in the popular culture that surrounds Doctor Who to say that while there have been a whole host of interesting Doctors and personalities, the one that will always stick out in the public consciousness will be Tom Baker. This was ensured by his charm, iconic style and ridiculous longevity with the program, with a tenure whose length gives credence to the claims by Tennant and Smith that if they didn't leave after four years, they'd have to be forced out. All this I knew at the beginning of my topsy turvey runthrough of his era, and while I cannot describe why he was so successful in any particularly innovative terms, I can talk about my experiences with that performance.
      The immediate, striking thing about any T.Baker story is the sheer enthusiasm that he brings to the role in pretty much every story (the exceptions coming a little later on in Season 18, when he was grouchy about leaving.) This enthusiasm translated into scripted word means wit, charm and tomfoolery, but the remarkable thing throughout that is that despite this creeping level of genericness that really does bolt up as his era goes along, there's still a deeper character to his Doctor. I think this reaches its pinacle in Season 16, where his fallibility and personal arrogance at their most apparent, and yet not in any way which makes us stop loving him. That genericness does however mean that he rarely has any "raising power" - he delivers the same enthusiastic and witty performance week-in-week-out, so no matter how enjoyable it may be on a bse level it never factors into a story's overall quality.
     I think the best way to tackle Four's seven-year era will be to differentiate between the three different producers he had. Here goes.

The Doctor and Sarah Jane were a fun combination.
From the BBC.

Phillip Hinchcliffe (and Robert Holmes) - Seasons 12-14

The Hinchcliffe and Holmes era, often proclaimed a Golden Age, was one that I found rather here nor there. While I enjoyed the interconnectivity of the initial six serials layed down by the previous production team, I found that the moment the duo actually started working the stories became all-over rather tedious. The so called "Classics" of this era often left me feeling high and dry, the worst offender being Pyramids of Mars which is just so, so uneventful and hollow of theme that there's nothing really for me to latch on to. The theme of re-appropriating Gothic themes and ideas as well as Hammer Horror plotting did nothing for me - I want innovation and new ideas. By the time Leela arrived I was getting into things, but the horrendous Talons of Weng-Chiang saw everything I didn't like about this era amplified a thousandfold with a dollop of racism left over.
     This era had three companions; Sarah-Jane, Harry and Leela. Harry was a throwback to the UNIT era, and annoyed me for a while, with his openly sexist opinions that never actually changed throughout his time on the series.  Sarah-Jane continued over from the Pertwee era, and I grew attached to her as time went on despite the fact that increasingly, her role was deviating from the strong feminist that we'd been introduced to and into a more traditional and problematic damsel in distress. Her departure in The Hand of Fear was handled with effortless poignancy and it did bring me to tears, I'm happy to say.
    My favourite story of the Hinchcliffe era is The Deadly Assassin from Season 14, with honourable mentions in each season for The Android Invasion and The Sontaran Experiment. These three embodied a sense of fun while still telling a very well-crafted story, especially Assassin, which slickly introduces the entirety of Gallifreyan Society and also has some fun Matrix action which allows for all sorts of interesting imagery. My least favourite story of the era is most definitely The Talons of Weng-Chiang, which is racist, over-long and showcases a bland, shouty villain who goes around killing under-age girls. Fucking unpleasant.

Get away, Casual Rascism! From taliesinttlg

     Despite my ragings, I do think that Hinchcliffe and Holmes were a skilled team of men. A lot of the stories are certainly written in a dramatic style which in any other series would make me really happy. Robert Holmes especially proved time and time again in Who that he could write stories which had fun characters, dark themes and background messages to agree or disagree with. It just feels like none of these talents are on display during this era, where the vast majority of the stories appeal to bland melodrama. I'll never really get why this era is so highly praised, and I still can't take seriously those who claim that Talons is the best story in Doctor Who.

Graham Williams (and Robert Holmes, Anthony Read and Douglas Adams) - Seasons 15-17

A bit different. I can't really think of a single "era" in Who which is more varied across its duration than the Graham Williams years, lurching back and forwards between competency. Season 15 is a bad pick-up from the previous era which lingers for a while and only demonstrates its own themes with stories which suffer from ridiculous budgetary constraints. Season 16 is exceedingly well-done throughout and is in fact my favourite season of Tom Baker. And Season 17, overseen by Douglas Adams as script editor, is my least favourite as its poor attempts at comedy attempt to cover bad writing. I still enjoy this era a hell of a lot more than I do the previous one, though, so there's something to be said for that.
      This era had four companions - Leela, K9 (who differs little between his two incarnations so I won't split them) and the two incarnations of Romana. Leela was an interesting concept and yet another attempt to move away from Damsel In Distress. While I feel that her character was done well initially, the factor of plot convenience meant that she often knew too much or too little, meaning that her character never underwent a smooth development - not helped by her crappy ending, which is the worst companion exit in colourised Who. The two Romanas are both interesting characters, with Mary Tamm's first incarnation being my favourite. Both of them are smart and snarky and don't tend to fall into the "just there to scream and ask questions" mould, even if the writers really failed to write them in a way which didn't do that to them.

Baker's madcap antics didn't help the poor Season 17.
From Wikia

     My favourite story of the era is The Androids of Tara, for reasons which I've already gone on and on about, with the honourable mentions from the other two seasons being the dry satire of The Sun Makers and Destiny of the Daleks. While on average I enjoyed this era more than the previous, it does have much lower lows, and I can confidently say that my least favourite story in the entire Tom Baker era is the pathetic Horns of Nimon, which astounds me not just by the budgetary constraints but how little effort seems to have been put into the script. (With a dishonourable mention to the unbearable Underworld, which I didn't actually manage to finish.)
     I really don't think that the Williams' era had a clear direction - whatever needed to be done to keep the show afloat, I guess. It did suffer from severe budget and production problems in both Seasons 15 and 17, especially with the unfinished Shada and the hubub that preceded it. While the Key To Time arc was a stroke of genius that gave them a run of six brilliant serials all tied together in a neat little bow, it was lightning in a bottle and they didn't do anything to help the lack of consistency that the era, with its constantly changing parameters, really struggled with.

John Nathan Turner (and Christopher Hamilton Bidmead) - Season 18

As you're probably aware if you were on my blog in 2012, my favourite part of Doctor Who as a whole is the JNT era, and Season 18 is a great part of that, even if it's imbued with a sombreness that doesn't fit in well either with the rest of Tom Baker's run or with what would follow. As I already said at the end of that year, Tom's final season felt a little boring in some of the stories because it had the opposite problem to a lot of the stories in the Hinchcliffe Era - the grand ideas and plots were there, but the characterisation wasn't. Add in the fact that the Tardis is loaded with companions and that JNT's main focus was on bringing Peter Davison into the fore, and you get a season with a grouchy lead and stories that suffer slightly because of it. If you want a longer article about this season, look here.

Gotta love these two excited lovebirds.
From Den of Geek

Conclusion

The Tom Baker era was big and varied, held together only by the immense charm (and behind-the-scenes narcissism) of its main star. At times it was big, bold and innovative and in others it was derivative, boring, bland and embarrassing. But it managed to get the balance of the two just right enough to influence a generation of kids and to bring Doctor Who into the public eye as an icon of British culture. For me? It's just that period of the show that everyone really seems to like but that, except for one season and a few other stories, I'm really just not that into. My runthrough of Season 12-16 lasted for about three months of my life, and has been published across six of them. At times I've loved it, other times I've hated it, but it's been a blast and I'm sad to say that I've no more new stories from this era to watch.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Jon Pertwee time, as I go back to finish Season 7 with The Ambassadors of Death.

Overview: Doctor Who Classic: Season 16

Doctor Who - Season 16
Written 7/8/13

It's so tempting for me to go off on a ramble about the Tom Baker era. It's very long, and compared to the Doctors I'm used to there's a bloody lot of it. I have to keep this article contained, however, to the sixteenth season. Not difficult, of course, as Graham Williams' second and much more successful season as producer offers up a lot to talk about in the way that it basically innovated Doctor Who from the ground up. That's probably hyperbole, I'm sure - most of what I say is, so you should be used to that. What I mean by that is a bit more subtle - the idea that a Doctor Who story could effectively throw together humour and horror, the profound and the trivial, the political and the anarchistic. All of this season's stories manage to do that to some degree, and for six stories in a row I think that's fantastic.

A typical Season 16 Tardis scene.
From houseofgeekery

      This season's TARDIS team is a rather unique one. The Doctor and Romana I have this sizzling chemistry and are bounced off of one another exceedingly well, resulting in both having much rounder characters when together than when apart. Romana's pomposity and wit highlights The Doctor's madcap craziness and lack of common sense at times, while his love of the bohemian enlightens her to the wider universe outside of what she learnt stuck on Gallifrey. All of their scenes are just so remarkably well written that the entire season benefits from it, with this continuous relationship developing between the two as they go along, to the point where Romana is more than happy to go off adventuring with The Doctor once their season-long task is finished.
      Not that Romana I is perfect, mind you. She did come fourth on my "Five Favourite Companions" list, and that was only after seeing a single serial of hers. Mary Tamm was only in the role for a year, and it all boiled down to the common perception of Who companions as nothing more than Damsels In Distress. After Jo Grant in the early 70s, an attempt was made by several production teams to create female characters that avoided it - Sarah Jane was a strong feminist, Leela was a proud warrioress, and Romana was The Doctor's intellectual equal (or even superior at times.) The problem with all of them is that a few of the writers didn't really know how to write anything else to provide tension in the story, and so Romana especially ends up kidnapped and screaming on several occasions throughout the season, the most egregious being that cliffhanger in The Power of Kroll. This basically pissed off Mary Tamm to the point where she left the series, which is a damn shame as I loved her version of the character.
      That is, thankfully, my only problem with the season in terms of characterisation. The season was also pretty awesome plot-wise too, with the Key To Time arc being rather wonderfully integrated into things from the outset. It provides a convenient motivation and drive in every story as the couple look for the segment, and yet manages to stay far enough away from things to present us with a brand new society every serial. The Stones of Blood apart, every single story provides us with an interesting alien society and all of the dilemmas that go with them, from Douglas Adams' incredibly literal Pirate Planet to Robert Holmes' squid-infested Delta III. Plus, the budget seems a bit better utilised than Season 15, as everything simply looks more dazzling - and I'm including the Swampies in that.

The completed Key. And Tom Baker.
From cathoderaytube

      My favourite story of the season was The Androids of Tara. Of course I'm going to say that, it's the one I saw before all of the others, it was the one I reviewed back in 2010. In fairness, it is the lightest of the six stories and throws off completely into fantasy territory, which is probably what endeared it so much to me. Of the others, I'd probably pick... you know, I'd actually pick The Power of Kroll, for the audacity of managing to fit a 50 foot squid into a Doctor Who story and making it work. With a race parallel. That's some damn-good writing right there. My least favourite, which on this sole occasion is no great dishonour as the whole season's brilliant, is most likely The Ribos Operation, which despite being brilliantly written by Robert Holmes does I feel lose focus at the end in terms of the plot. (But not the characterisation, which is better than everywhere else. This is hard.)
     The Key To Time arc is fantastic, simply fantastic. Like I think I said at the end of my Armegeddon Factor review (which I should remember because I only wrote it a few hours ago), this is the only Tom Baker season where I like every story without fail. That arrives due to a combination of a genius character dynamic between two very well-written characters, a central arc which gives each story independant motivation while still driving towards a satisfying endpoint, and basic good writing which allowed six independant tales to work their way out of a pre-existing narrative framework. The Key To Time isn't perfect - I'd never be so confident as to say that - but it is my favourite season in the big wide Tom Baker era.
    Talking of that... I'll see you next Monday.

Thanks.

Review: Voyager 2.12: Resistance

Caylem is a charming if crazy old man.
From Wikia

Star Trek Voyager - Season Two, Episode Twelve - Resistance
Written 30/7/13

You know, I think I've been getting some of my signals wrong. I distinctly remember Season Two of Voyager as being completely crap. Like, worst-of-the-worst kind of stuff. I know that there are some truly shocking episodes to come (in about three weeks, in fact), but at the same time there are episodes like these which provide engaging, moving science fiction with awesome characterisations. Its premise wasn't that inspired and I'm sure it's been done better elsewhere, but the arrant professionalism with which it seemed to take its own ideas is what pulled it through to becoming almost outstanding.
     An away team has popped down (in secret) to a planet whose authoritarian government is immediately suspicious of everyone and his cat, and just as the crew get their magic Unobtanium, the government soldiers arrive and stir things up, leaving Janeway seperated and on the run with a crazy old man called Caylem who thinks that she is his dead daughter. As negotations get exceedingly pear-shaped, Caylem helps Janeway to lead a mini-assault by the planet's local resistance movement into the Prison where B'elanna and Tuvok are being held, with Caylem's psychosis being revealed just as he is killed. The crew escape and carry on their way, but Janeway feels sad about the man's death.
     The episode dispenses with the usual "Voyager needs X, goes to find X," scenario within the first five minutes, and thanks to this one small degree of innovation we're left with a much more interesting pisode that pushes Broadway actor Joel Gray into developing the character of Caylem into the episode's centrepiece - a doddery figure whose madness Janeway leaves unchallenged throughout. It says a lot about her that she is happy to maintain his delusion as long as it brings him happiness, especially in his dying moments when she explicitly refers to herself as his daughter in order to comfort him.It shows a Captain whose compassion stretches beyond being nice to her crew and eating lunch with them, and is incredibly strong for her in that regard.

The villainous Mokra, not to be confused with a chocolatey
coffee drink.

     The plot of the episode, as Star Trek Wiki Memory Alpha tells me on the other tab, was inspired by the famous Spanish masterpiece Don Quixote, about an old man who decides to go out doing the daring do and names a random woman as his lady love. The episode doesn't rely too much on it, and on the contrary it embodies it with a uniquely human charm that focuses very much on the stress put upon Caylem - the stress that would lead a man to forget the death of his wife and daughter and to drive so forcefully to bring down those who killed them. Despite how slightly weird and creepy he often is, you can't help but feel for the guy, and he is the most memorable thing about the episode.
     Resistance is a gem in this series that I am somewhat confused about not remembering. I did miss a few episodes when I first watched the second season in syndication, but I don't remember this being one of them. I should have remembered it, as for this point in the series so marred even by my own memory as one of low quality and silliness, this episode is written so profoundly well that I don't have to make excuses for it as I often fo other episodes of this show. It is just a teriffic hour of science fiction and I bloody love it.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: B'elanna gets kidnapped by a robot who wants to start a world war, in Prototype.