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Month: June 2013

Retro-View #13: The Celery’s Fresh, But G’s Wilting

Castrovalva (Story #116, 1981)
Viewed 24 Jun 2013

Doctor/Companion: Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan Jovanka
Stars: Peter Davison, Matthew Waterhouse, Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding
Preceding Story: Logopolis (Four, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan)
Succeeding Story: Four to Doomsday (Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan)

I had high hopes for this story going in. G seems ready to try a new Doctor, and despite the fact that my kids are home on summer break from school, they have plans for how to occupy themselves while the grown-ups are involved with their silly videos.

And it starts out well. The regeneration scene is recapped, and the action continues on right from that point. The guards catch up to our heroes and drag them off. Tegan huffs, “Take your hands off me. This is an official uniform!”, causing G to chuckle and declare “I like her the best.” Finally—someone who shares my fondness for the Mouth On Legs!

G asks some good basic questions, too. “Why did the Master do that?” she wonders when he materializes in middle of the fray, then seems to go running, allowing the Doctor to escape into his own TARDIS, and leaving Adric behind to be rescued. “So he’d still have a good adversary?” Now if she’d take her speculation to the next level, we might make a Fan of her yet…

I’ll admit that I still enjoy the whole regeneration regression part (as the Doctor does impressions of himself) far more than G does; I don’t even bother to pause and explain when he spouts “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” and she doesn’t laugh with me. Then again, maybe she didn’t even hear it. After several moments that I’d expected to get a reaction from her get none, I realize she’s left me.

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Technicolor Triumph

Review of The Mind of Evil (#56)
DVD Release Date: 11 Jun 13
Original Air Date: 30 Jan – 06 Mar 1971
Doctor/Companion: Three, Josephine “Jo” Grant, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning, Nicholas Courtney
Preceding Story: Terror of the Autons (Three, Jo, the Brigadier)
Succeeding Story: The Claws of Axos (Three, Jo, the Brigadier)

Although the BBC archives include all six episodes, The Mind of Evil is unique in that none of them (currently) exists in the original color format. Due to that fact, this serial has never before been released on DVD, making it—until now—the only Pertwee adventure I had yet to see.

Through technical machinations, color information buried in Episodes 2 through 6 could be pulled out and used to re-infuse them with a semblance of their original character. However, Episode 1 had no embedded color, rendering the chroma dot color recovery technique used on the other episodes useless. Instead, some seven thousand keyframes had to be hand colorized by the ridiculously talented (and dedicated!) colorizing artist Stuart Humphryes, better known by his YouTube handle BabelColour.

I’ll get to the story in a moment, but first I want to convey exactly how bloody brilliant BabelColour’s work is. I would put money on it that someone watching this DVD for the first time, never having been told about its history, would never guess it was anything but a cleaned-up original color print—until they got to Episode 2. At this point, the color seems to pulse every couple of seconds—it’s particularly egregious on faces in a couple of spots—and one realizes just how seamless a job BabelColour had done in that first episode. While I wouldn’t wish the horrendously long, painful, probably underpaid hours on him again, I know I’d dearly love to have him colorize all the other episodes (in this serial and others) that have so far only been done with chroma dot. His work is vastly superior.

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Whovian “Badge” of Honor

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A friend and frequent commenter posted about this site on Facebook (via a link to Joe Hill’s Tumblr—in which he’d gotten the result “Stephen King”; funny once you realize who Hill is). It’s an automated engine that takes a sample of your writing and compares it to a bunch of well-known authors based on your word choice and writing style.

Initially, I tried a piece of my fantasy writing (if you’re into that kind of thing, you’re welcome to pop over to that blog, too; it’s called The Dryad Chronicles, and I write there under the pen name Rachelle Wright). Depending on which chunk I chose, I was told I write like Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nabokov, or Ernest Hemingway. Hmmm…

Knowing that my fiction and my blogging are a bit different, though, I thought I’d try submitting one of my posts, just to see what kind of difference it would make. I chose my review of The Name of the Doctor, as it’s most recent. The result could hardly have been more appropriate for a Whovian. Here’s the “I Write Like” badge I got:

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Dialing It Down

Review of The Doctors Revisited – Fifth Doctor

By now you know the drill. It’s time to look back at the Fifth Doctor and his stint piloting the TARDIS. What made him unique?


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2013 BBC

Well, for one thing, at 29 years old, Peter Davison was the youngest actor ever to play the Doctor (a record he held until Matt Smith came along and beat him by two years). For another, he was already fairly well known, not least because he’d spent the previous three years or so as Tristan Farnan on All Creatures Great and Small (I’ll admit it took me quite a while to think of him as “the Doctor” instead of “Tristan” when I started watching pre-Hiatus Who).

Perhaps most importantly, though, he was the first one to go from watching the show every week to playing the lead. He knew what it meant to fans, because he was one of us.

All of these traits informed the way Davison played the Doctor, and helped make him an interesting contrast to the Fourth Doctor. Previously, iconically over-the-top Tom Baker had made the Doctor very alien and unpredictable. Davison’s Doctor had a more steady, “down-to-earth” and human quality. As Janet Fielding, who played Companion Tegan Jovanka, put it, Five was “less self-consciously eccentric.” (Fielding appeared in interview sections along with Davison himself; other Companion actors Sarah Sutton, Matthew Waterhouse, Mark Strickson, and Nicola Bryant; and post-Hiatus cast and production team members Steven Moffat, David Tennant, Marcus Wilson, Noel Clarke, and Hugh Bonneville.)

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Retro-View #12: Melancholy Moment

Logopolis (Story #115, 1981)
Viewed 03 Jun 2013

Doctor/Companion: Four, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan Jovanka
Stars: Tom Baker, Matthew Waterhouse, Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding
Preceding Story: The Keeper of Traken (Four, Adric, Nyssa)
Succeeding Story: Castrovalva (Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan)

It seems to me that by the time Logopolis rolled around, Tom Baker was more than ready to leave his role as the Doctor. He just seemed tired, pensive, and like he simply wasn’t having very much fun any more. Luckily, it fits well with the story, and doesn’t translate into any sort of loss of quality.

G is immediately intrigued by the way the police box and (Master’s) TARDIS merge, and in on alert when Tegan and Auntie Vanessa pull up next to it with their flat. “Ooh dear. And they’re by the box.” Then when the Doctor’s TARDIS turns them all into dimensionally transcendental matryoshka dolls, she catches onto the danger right away. “This is serious. It’s like he’s ingested poison by materializing that guy in there.” She proceeds to make an analogy with holding mirrors up to each other to make an infinite regression, well before the possibility is mentioned on screen. G’s all over it.

The Watcher has her fooled, though. She reads it as all first-time viewers are meant to: a slightly creepy threat. I can’t help but think of it as the precursor to Ten’s departure, though in this case it’s only the Doctor, rather than the whole audience as well, who anticipates what’s to come. We both enjoy this particular conceit, though. When the Doctor tells Adric that “nothing like this has ever happened before,” G declares that “that’s the fun part.”

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