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Confession #122: I’m Already Impressed

We finally have an air date for the first episode of Series Eleven (07 Oct 2018), which will now go out on Sundays for (I believe) the first time. It’s been a long haul; we’ve known Capaldi was leaving since the end of January last year, and there’s been more than a nine-month gap between new episodes. Further, we’ll have known Jodie was destined to be the next Doctor for nearly fifteen months before we get to see her in action for real.

And yet, we’ve heard precious little about what will—or won’t—be on screen this year. I’m actually pretty impressed.

It has become the norm since the show returned in 2005 for a certain number of details to leak. In fact, whole episodes (e.g., S01E01 Rose, S08E01 Deep Breath) or scripts (much of Series Eight) have made their way to the Internet well before they were slated to air. The Night of the Doctor reportedly had to be released earlier than intended to head off a similar leak and the spoiling of the reveal within.

But episodes and other plot elements aren’t the only details to leak. Casting surprises like last year’s return of John Simm as the Master have also been a victim of loose lips. And because there’s a part of fandom that’s eager for any scrap of news they can get—and loves to share it as soon as they hear—spoilers run rampant in such a way that it’s hard to avoid them if one uses the Internet at all (which is to say, a huge number of fans).

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A Flight I Don’t Fancy

Review of Time-Flight (#122)
DVD Release Date: 02 Mar 10
Original Air Date: 23 – 31 Mar 1982
Doctors/Companions: Five, Nyssa of Traken, Tegan Jovanka
Stars: Peter Davison, Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding
Preceding Story: Earthshock (Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan)
Succeeding Story: Arc of Infinity (Five, Nyssa, Tegan)

One of the things that makes a Bad Reputation story so hard to watch is that there’s almost always the kernel of a good story buried in there somewhere. For Time-Flight, that kernel is surrounded by a villain based on a racist stereotype, an alien consciousness reduced to an overly simplistic good v. bad dichotomy, and a generally mediocre script.

To be frank, I feel like a lot of the Fifth Doctor’s stories are plagued by similar problems. Although he was formative for some of my friends, Five has always ranked kind of in the middle of my list of favorite Doctors; I suppose that’s why. And while his previous entry in these Bad Reputation games was perhaps not as stinky as I’d recalled (ranking only 212 of 254 in io9’s Best-to-Worst list), Time-Flight is in the bottom ten, coming in at #245.

I imagine the pitch for this one was a pretty easy sell. It sounds great on paper: a Concorde plane mysteriously disappears, and when the Doctor and his friends—TARDIS and all—accompany a second Concorde to learn what happened, the crews find themselves at the end of a time corridor 140 million years in Earth’s past. But after that first episode of set-up, things really start to fall apart.

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Confession #121: I Don’t Mind the Wait

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As the first official trailer for the upcoming series gets micro-analyzed and reports roll in that filming for Series Eleven has wrapped, we all continue to twiddle our thumbs waiting for an announcement of the date for the premiere episode. The “wilderness months” (if you will) between seasons are always trying for fans, especially when there’s the promise of a new Doctor to come.

And yet I’m not frothing at the mouth in frustrated anticipation these days.

I can’t tell whether my remarkable indifference—it’s not outright apathy, because I am eager to see Jodie in action—is due to that background feeling of anxiety about how “the first woman Doctor” will be written, a result of the fact that much of my mental energy is being spent on personal/family issues, or merely a side effect of my natural cyclical media interests. Whatever the case (okay, definitely that middle part, so let’s let that one slide), I find myself puzzled when I come across others having reactions I would another year have found to be normal, expected, and shared. I almost don’t recognize myself.

Granted, I don’t participate as thoroughly in internet fandom as I once did, nor have I ever gone looking for spoilers or those breathlessly titled clickbait articles that promise a deep dive into the hidden meaning in every frame of a forty-second spot. I’ll admit that it’s possible that I’ve simply missed something that’s got the rest of fandom abuzz. But my little corner of the internet has been quietly marking time, content to let things come as they will.

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Underperformance

Review of Underworld (#96)
DVD Release Date: 06 Jul 10
Original Air Date: 07 – 28 Jan 1978
Doctors/Companions: Four, Leela, K-9
Stars: Tom Baker, Louise Jameson, John Leeson
Preceding Story: The Sun Makers (Four, Leela, K-9)
Succeeding Story: The Invasion of Time (Four, Leela, K-9)

As I went back to my list of un-reviewed stories to determine which ones to use for the rest of this year’s Bad Reputation entries, I couldn’t help but think of others’ comments about the suitability of some of my previous selections. Thus I went searching for a second opinion.

What I found was a Best-to-Worst list on io9 complied in September 2015 by Charlie Jane Anders. Charlie is someone I know of from other SFF circles, and while I don’t agree with all of her rankings (e.g., my previous choice of The Creature from the Pit, which I think is quite bad, only ranks at #162 of 254 entries on the io9 list), I think at least in terms of broad groupings we’re on approximately the same page.

Since it was time to whittle down my Fourth Doctor backlog again, I perused the options and landed immediately on Underworld. Checking against Charlie’s rankings, I was glad to see it near the bottom, at #236 of 254 (right after The Power of Kroll at #235). I was certain no one would challenge my choice of this one as a stinker, but it’s nice to have an external measure as confirmation.

So what makes Underworld so putrid? If I were being generous, I’d say that the story is simply overly ambitious for the technology (and budget) available to the production team. It was filmed during the early days of CSO (Colour Separation Overlay)—actors were filmed against a blue screen, and superimposed on model sets—and the technique has, to say the least, not aged well. But even if you look beyond this version of “wobbly sets syndrome,” the story itself doesn’t quite work for me.

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Waiting to Exhale

Deep Breath (Series Eight, Ep. 1; 2014)
Viewed 25 Apr 2018

Doctor/Companion: Twelve, Clara Oswald
Stars: Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman
Preceding Story: The Time of the Doctor (Eleven, Clara)
Succeeding Story: Into the Dalek (Twelve, Clara)

The end of the school year and start of our summer break has taken us down several different binge-watching paths. As I mentioned last time, for a while it was the MCU. More recently it’s been other programs. And I’ll be honest—with “Kill the Moon” next up in our Who marathon, I’ve not pushed them too hard to get back to it.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2012 BBC

Before everything went sideways, though, I did manage to get them through the early part of Series Eight. New regenerations always make for interesting viewing, so I thought I’d record their reactions to this “new” Doctor to share here.

Of course he wasn’t new to them, which makes this an odd sort of not-quite-full-circle episode. The Twelve my girls know is actually rather different than the Twelve that first appeared on screen. Not only is his hair far too short here (I love that you can gauge where both Three and Twelve are in their regeneration based on how bouffant their hair is), but he’s still über antisocial (“I don’t think that I’m a hugging person now”). That persona put off a lot of fans at the time, and some of them never warmed to Twelve.

However, I’ve always held that early Twelve is a big hedgehog (prickly on the outside, but soft and tender on the inside). Perhaps having known his later, mellower self made it easier for my girls to agree with my assessment—or devise their own—and accept this awkward, uncomfortable goober as the Doctor. Whatever the case, they took him in stride and most of their comments and reactions were aimed at other characters.

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The Keys to Clime

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Review of The Keys of Marinus (#5)
DVD Release Date: 05 Jan 10
Original Air Date: 11 Apr – 16 May 1964
Doctors/Companions: One, Susan Foreman, Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright
Stars: William Hartnell, Carole Ann Ford, William Russell, Jacqueline Hill
Preceding Story: Marco Polo (One, Susan, Ian, Barbara)
Succeeding Story: The Aztecs (One, Susan, Ian, Barbara)

For the third installment of this series on Stories with a Bad Reputation, we turn to the oft-overlooked, fifth-ever serial The Keys of Marinus. In overall rankings, it doesn’t generally sink all the way to the bottom, but it almost always ends up in the lowest tier, rarely rising into the top half.

I’m sure part of that dismissal is due to the fact that it is, after all, a Hartnell story, and many fans—especially those who grew up on a faster-paced, all-color style of televisual storytelling—struggle to get through stories from this era. Further, it comes between the lost-but-much-revered Marco Polo and The Aztecs, perhaps my favorite First Doctor adventure. It’s hardly fair to ask Keys to compete with them, and yet there we are.

Despite being the neglected middle child, though, Keys has its own brand of charm. It’s a quirky little story that, in its own way, reminds me of the Fourth Doctor series The Key to Time (TKtT) that would come some fifteen years later. It begins with a setup wherein our TARDIS team is tasked with collecting several pieces of a larger whole necessary to save the planet Marinus (here, to restore a worldwide climate of law and order; to restore the balance of the universe, in TKtT), then takes them off to disparate adventures in each episode as they collect the items.

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Nu-View #23: Time Marches On

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The Time of the Doctor (Christmas Special; 2013)
Viewed 24 Apr 2018

Doctor/Companion: Eleven, Clara Oswald
Stars: Matt Smith, Jenna Coleman
Preceding Story: The Day of the Doctor (Eleven, Ten, War, Clara, Kate Stewart)
Succeeding Story: Deep Breath (Twelve, Clara)

I don’t know what others’ families are like, but in ours obsessions come and go in waves. We’ll get all excited about something and dive in head-first, only to get derailed somewhere along the way for one reason or another. Sometimes it’s a scheduling issue that throws us off our groove, or sometimes something else piques our interest and supersedes the current passion-of-the-moment.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2013 BBC

Such is the way of the girls’ run through modern Doctor Who. Once we got on a roll, we were powering through episodes at an incredible rate. With only twenty-one left to get them up-to-date on the entirety of the modern era, we hit one of those bumps in the road. It’s now been more than a month since we last watched Who, having for the time being move on to the MCU.

All this is by way of explanation that my recollections of the girls reactions to this (and the following) episode have already been blurred by time. I have my notes, but they’re spare, and lack of temporal proximity makes them more difficult than usual to interpret. Besides, the girls did more watching than openly reacting. But there are a few key moments in the Eleventh Doctor’s last story that made an impression on them, and therefore on me.

Moffat threw everything but the kitchen sink at us here. There are Daleks, Cybermen, Silence, and the Crack. In fact, there appears to be a message coming through the Crack that no one can interpret. But the Doctor conveniently has something that can help his new “friend” Handles the Cyber-head decode that message: the Seal of the High Council of Gallifrey. “Nicked it off the Master in the Death Zone,” he explains, and the girls bark a laugh. We’ve only recently watched The Five Doctors, and they understand the reference perfectly.

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Powerful Failure

Review of The Power of Kroll (#102)
DVD Release Date: 03 Mar 09
Original Air Date: 23 Dec 1978 – 13 Jan 1979
Doctors/Companions: Four, Romana I
Stars: Tom Baker, Mary Tamm
Preceding Story: The Androids of Tara (Four, Romana I)
Succeeding Story: The Armageddon Factor (Four, Romana I)

It’s been my impression that The Key to Time as a whole is generally considered by fandom to be pretty good stuff. However, The Power of Kroll, the penultimate installment, frequently gets brought up in “worst of” conversations (and truth be told, its immediate successor The Armageddon Factor is often not far behind).

So what makes this story so dodgy? It had been long enough since I’d last seen it that my memory was pretty sparse. Vague impressions of a city-sized plant-monster and the religious fanatics who worshipped it were enough to give me pause, but I girded my metaphorical loins and pressed “Play.”

Within minutes, it was clear that I’d forgotten a great deal indeed. To begin, there was John Leeson in the flesh. (As his metallic canine persona was marooned in the swamp, I can’t help but wonder if his contract required him to appear in a certain number of episodes, and this is how that got fulfilled.) More importantly, there was a “Swampie” butle-ing for the colonizers in the refinery. Oh, and Kroll is meant to be some sort of giant squid, not a plant-monster (I was clearly confusing the creature itself with the vines that would contract during the ritual by which the Doctor, Romana, and gun-runner Rohm-Dutt were to be executed by stretching them on a rack).

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Nu-View #22: Taking Satisfaction

The Angels Take Manhattan (Series 7, Ep 5; 2012)
Viewed 16 Apr 2018

Doctor/Companion: Eleven, Amy Pond, Rory Williams, River Song
Stars: Matt Smith, Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill, Alex Kingston
Preceding Story: The Power of Three (Eleven, Amy, Rory)
Succeeding Story: The Snowmen (Eleven, Clara)

This coming weekend, I get to take my daughters to their first Doctor Who con—in fact, their first con of any sort since becoming fans of the show. As you may recall, the three members of the Paternoster Gang were slated to be the guests of honor, and I was trying to figure out how to give the girls enough background to appreciate said guests.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2012 BBC

Since then, Neve McIntosh (Madame Vastra)—the first of those guests to have been announced, as I recall—has had to cancel, and my kids have blown through so much Doctor Who that they’ve now seen not just one, but every extant episode in which the Paternoster Gang appears. I’m no longer worrying about their excitement for meeting these actors; now it’s a matter of which Doctor do we watch next (and next, and next…).

Not only are we watching lots of episodes together, but it’s also been a ridiculously long time since the Ladies have gotten together to watch anything other than the most recent series (scheduling can be a real bear). And since a commenter suggested it might be fun to read more about what my daughters think about these new-to-them stories, I thought I’d choose a few during which to record their reactions and reboot the NuViews section of the blog in earnest.

At the time I made that decision, we were in the middle of Series 7A. A Companion departure story seemed like a really good one to capture, so when it was time to watch The Angels Take Manhattan, I got out my clipboard and—with the girls’ permission—started taking notes.

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Four-gettable

Review of Four to Doomsday (#117)
DVD Release Date: 06 Jan 09
Original Air Date: 18 – 26 Jan 1982
Doctors/Companions: Five, Adric, Nyssa of Traken, Tegan Jovanka
Stars: Peter Davison, Matthew Waterhouse, Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding
Preceding Story: Castrovalva (Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan)
Succeeding Story: Kinda (Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan)

When I selected Four to Doomsday (4tD) to appear in my series of stories with bad reputations, I suspect I had given it more bad-credit than it deserves. Perhaps it’s because on first viewing I gave the physics of the climactic “Doctor uses a cricket ball to fabulous effect” moment such serious side-eye. Mostly, though, I think 4tD simply flies too far under the radar as a middle-of-the-road installment. It is so unremarkable as to be forgettable.

The Doctor’s first attempt to return Tegan to Heathrow Airport so she can finally start her new job goes (predictably) wrong, and the TARDIS crew lands instead on some sort of spaceship. The technology present is advanced enough to delight the Doctor and Nyssa as they explore. The crew soon find three slightly ominous beings in charge of the strange vessel. They introduce themselves as Monarch, Enlightenment, and Persuasion, and inform the Doctor that they are from the now-destroyed planet Urbanka.

Meanwhile, the TARDIS team also find several people who are obviously from Earth, including an ancient Greek philosopher named Bigon, an Australian Aboriginal man named Kurkutji, one Princess Villagra of the Maya, and an imperial Chinese official named Lin Futu. The circumstances surrounding the presence of these people and their subordinates on a ship filled with (unseen) Urbankan refugees are part of the mystery to be solved.

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