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A Royal Mess

Review of The King’s Demons (#128)
DVD Release Date: 07 Sep 10
Original Air Date: 15 – 16 Mar 1983
Doctors/Companions: Five, Tegan Jovanka, Vislor Turlough
Stars: Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson
Preceding Story: Enlightenment (Five, Tegan, Turlough)
Succeeding Story: The Five Doctors (Five, One, Two, Three, Tegan, Turlough, Susan, the Brigadier, Sarah Jane)

Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate!

Since the holiday happens to fall on a fourth Wednesday, when my regularly scheduled review posts are due, y’all get an extra Christmasy (read: not Christmasy at all) treat with my final planned entry in the Bad Reputation series. (Don’t worry; there will be a new theme for reviews in 2020. Stay tuned for that announcement next week!)

The treat for me is that The King’s Demons, ranked #214 of 254 in io9’s Best-to-Worst list, is only two episodes long. That’s right: if you want to play along at home, you need not even devote a full hour this time. Unfortunately, that’s one of the few positive notes.

In principle, it’s not a bad story. The Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough stumble into medieval England, mere months before King John signs the Magna Carta, only to discover a plot to discredit the king and change the course of history.

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Confession #132: I Don’t Think Capaldi’s Series Are Bad

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As part of a conversation with some friends online the other day, someone mentioned the upcoming series (only three more weeks to wait!) and that they needed to catch up on last series before the new one began. Then the conversation turned to Capaldi and his episodes.

Now regular readers will probably know that I adore Capaldi’s Doctor. So when folks wished for a list of the standalone Capaldi episodes worth watching, I was filled with excitement. Who better than me, I wondered, to provide such a list? But at the same time, it made me sad to think that so many people think his series aren’t worth watching. Sure, every Doctor has to slog through some stinkers, but I just don’t get why so many people think these episodes are that much worse than those of other Doctors.

The biggest issue, of course, is Moffat’s problematic showrunning. Some of Moffat’s ideas (like how his Companions kept being puzzles rather than people) really made my skin crawl. But by that same metric, Matt Smith’s Doctor shouldn’t be considered worth watching. I think the important thing to remember is that every era, every Doctor, has suffered from bad writing—some more so than others, I’ll admit—and that all judgements about quality are down to personal preferences.

That being said, I have compiled my own list of a few episodes from each of Capaldi’s three seasons that I think are worth a watch. I’ve included some notes on each one to give an idea of what it’s about and provide my own heads-up about the biggest pros and cons I remember. (If I’ve missed something major, please leave a comment so I can make the change. It has been a while since I’ve watched any of these…)

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Eldrad Must Get On With It

Review of The Hand of Fear (#87)
DVD Release Date: 10 Aug 09
Original Air Date: 02 – 23 Oct 1976
Doctors/Companions: Four, Sarah Jane Smith
Stars: Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen
Preceding Story: The Masque of Mandragora (Four, Sarah Jane)
Succeeding Story: The Deadly Assassin (Four)

There are many memorable things about The Hand of Fear: the disembodied hand, “Eldrad must live,” Sarah Jane’s outfit, and—of course!—her touching, somewhat precipitous farewell. Unfortunately, plot is not among them.

Perhaps that’s why io9’s Best-to-Worst list ranked it in the bottom 30%, at #187 of 254. While plenty of other stories I’ve reviewed have fared far worse (see, for example, The Monster of Peladon, Terminus, and Timelash), HoF is the lowest-ranked of the Fourth Doctor’s remaining titles on my “to be reviewed” list, so here we are.

It all starts out promisingly enough, with a quarry actually acting as a quarry, for once. The Doctor and Sarah Jane land there accidentally just as some charges are set to detonate, resulting in Sarah Jane being buried. She reaches for a hand held out to her that turns out to be a piece of the remains of an alien being known as Eldrad.

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Confession #131: I Dislike Corporate Cons

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This may be a vast overgeneralization (though, let’s face it, some of the biggest fan opinions are just vastly overgeneralized rants), but I have decided that I really don’t like those big, corporate cons. You know the ones: they bring in a slew of big-name celebrities from a ton of different fandoms and then charge people an arm and a leg for photo ops and autographs. After my first, and so far only, single afternoon of trying one out, I’ve made my mind up: they’re not for me.

I’m pretty sure this judgment makes me a hypocrite somehow. After all, I went to this one for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the ridiculous photo op machine that plays such a large role in making these cons unpalatable to me in the first place. Further, I participate in photo ops and autograph sessions at Gallifrey One all the time (though I’ve never had to wait an hour past the scheduled time slot just for the line to start moving at Gally). So what gives?

The big difference, to my mind, is that after a certain size, the con becomes too big for con-goers to feel like anything more than a number to the organization. At a super local, single fandom con like CONsole Room, it can feel like you know everybody there, at least by sight. Gally is nearly a factor of ten larger than CONsole Room, with an annual attendance just shy of 4000 (which includes staff and guests), yet it’s still every bit as much about hanging out with other fans—friends old or new—as about seeing the guests, whether at photo ops, autograph lines, or panels.

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Worth a Visit

Review of The Space Museum (#15)
DVD Release Date: 06 Jul 10
Original Air Date: 24 Apr – 15 May 1965
Doctors/Companions: One, Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright, Vicki
Stars: William Hartnell, William Russell, Jacqueline Hill, Maureen O’Brien
Preceding Story: The Crusade (One, Ian, Barbara, Vicki)
Succeeding Story: The Chase (One, Ian, Barbara, Vicki, Steven)

As Bad Reputation™ stories go, The Space Museum is not poorly thought of at all. Clocking in at #168 of 254 in io9’s Best-to-Worst ranking, it barely falls into the bottom third. In fact, it’s more than 30 places ahead of the next “stinkiest” entry I’ve had to date—itself another Hartnell adventure.

All that is to say, the Hartnell era is not as unpalatable as some might have you believe. It certainly has its quirks, as a product of its time—sets more suited to a stage than to modern television, one-chance filming that leaves the famous Hartnell line flubs intact, and so on—but especially when one considers how new science fiction television was, it’s actually quite innovative.

The Space Museum makes an excellent case in point. Only the fifteenth storyline of the nascent program’s history, it’s the show’s first real foray into what someday would be dubbed “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.” Our heroes struggle with the mind-bending issue of having seen themselves displayed as exhibits in the Museum in what turns out to be their near future. How can they avoid that fate?

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Confession #130: I Miss the Ninth Doctor

About two weeks ago, Gallifrey One, my convention of choice, announced that their headliner guest for 2020 will be none other than the Ninth Doctor himself, Christopher Eccleston. I hardly know how to begin expressing my utter fangirl delight at this news.

You may recall that Eccleston was might first Doctor. You may also recall that I was bitterly disappointed that he chose not to participate in the 50th anniversary celebrations. Everything I had read for years about him and his time on Doctor Who indicated that he had no interest in engaging formally with the fandom, nor intention to do so.

Then in July 2018, at London Film and Comic Con, he made his first convention appearance.

“Okay,” I told myself, “I guess the press of all his various projects has finally convinced him to attend a few of the big, multi-fandom cons. Too bad I never go to those.” And I shrugged a little sadly. I figured maybe after five or ten years of that, he might consent to come to a Doctor Who convention, and eventually make his way to Gally. I did not see this announcement coming.

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Not the End of the World

Review of The Armageddon Factor (#103)
DVD Release Date: 09 Mar 09
Original Air Date: 20 Jan – 24 Feb 1979
Doctors/Companions: Four, Romana I, K-9
Stars: Tom Baker, Mary Tamm, John Leeson
Preceding Story: The Power of Kroll (Four, Romana I)
Succeeding Story: Destiny of the Daleks (Four, Romana II)

This month marks the fourth of six installments of The Key to Time that has made it onto the Bad Reputation list. The Armageddon Factor is, however, the highest-ranked of those four on io9’s Best-to-Worst list, coming in at #207 of 254, putting it in only the bottom fifth of televised canon.

It had been a good long while since I’d last watched this one, so I’d forgotten a great deal of both the plot and the trappings. For example, it came as a bit of a surprise to discover how much of the story revolved around that last piece of the Key to Time. To be honest, pretty much all I remembered were who the Doctor and Companion were, and that a guest character was wearing a future Companion’s body (or, more correctly, vice versa).

To set the stage for readers who, like me, need either a refresher or an introduction to the adventure, the Doctor and Romana I are in pursuit of the final segment of the Key to Time when they arrive at a pair of twin planets, only one of which is where they expect. Atrios and Zeos are, to our heroes’ surprise, in midst of a nuclear war.

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Confession #129: I’ve Never Read a Target Novelization

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Just shy of two weeks ago, on 29 Aug 2019, the Doctor Who community lost another vital member when Terrance “Uncle Terry” Dicks died. Dicks made an indelible mark on the show as both script editor (particularly alongside producer Barry Letts) and writer during the Second, Third, and Fourth Doctors’ tenures. Later he also wrote several audio adventures for Big Finish.

But many fans know him best as the author of of over sixty Target novelizations of Classic television adventures, spanning six Doctors. I’ve heard many such fans wax poetic over the importance of those books in their young lives. Yet I have never read any of them myself.

Given the fact that I am a text-based lifeform, my lack of experience with Target novelizations may seem odd. After all, for someone who grew up as a voracious reader (and is raising a pair now), a vast supply of related books seems like it ought to be a no-brainer to add to the ol’ To Be Read (TBR) pile. But there are two major factors at play that work against that course of action.

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The Tedium of Peladon

Review of The Monster of Peladon (#73)
DVD Release Date: 04 May 10
Original Air Date: 23 Mar – 27 Apr 1974
Doctors/Companions: Three, Sarah Jane Smith
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Elisabeth Sladen
Preceding Story: Death to the Daleks (Three, Sarah Jane)
Succeeding Story: Planet of the Spiders (Three, Sarah Jane, the Brigadier)

For the last couple of years, as long-time readers may recall, I’ve been introducing my daughters to both modern and Classic Who. During one such spate of enthusiasm, they agreed to watch The Monster of Peladon with me.

I can’t remember now how exactly we landed on that selection. I’m pretty sure it had something to do with the girls wanting to see more Sarah Jane, and being enamored of the idea of hearing her “There’s nothing ‘only’ about being a girl, Your Majesty” speech. And to their credit, they actually enjoyed the adventure—and I didn’t hate it.

But I was not ready to come back to it so soon (relatively speaking). It’s not that it’s actively awful, despite its bottom 5% ranking in io9’s Best-to-Worst list (coming in at #243 of 254); it’s just kind of… boring. Although I should’ve known better, given that it’s a Pertwee-era story, I had forgotten it was six episodes long rather than four. There was some serious resigned sighing when I realized what lay in front of me for my re-watch.

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Confession #128: I Got Caught Up in the Rumor Mill

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The Doctor Who rumor mill has been busy these last couple of weeks. Did Chibnall get fired? Is Jodie leaving? Did Bradley Walsh really “storm off the set, and hasn’t been seen since”?

Our fandom is known for being full of gloom-and-doom—pretty much always. New showrunner? He’ll run it into the ground. New Doctor? Viewers will stay away in droves, and the show will tank. New broadcast schedule? No one watches telly at that time; the show’s done for. It doesn’t matter which showrunner, which lead actor, or which day of the week the show airs—someone’s going to declare that the end is nigh.

The problem with the fandom rumor mill is, one never knows whom to believe. History has shown that official word coming out from the BBC or the production team could either be roughly accurate (that is, accurate in the big details, but with the sharp edges filed off for public consumption), and at other times is utterly insufficient. And in the latter case, certain fans who are, shall we say, friendly with the production team but not directly involved in production can provide a more detailed version of the situation—well after the fact.

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