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Brain-twisting Bonbon

Review of The Edge of Destruction (#3)

DVD Release Date: 24 Mar 09
Original Air Date: 08 – 15 Feb 1964
Doctors/Companions: One, Susan Foreman, Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright
Stars: William Hartnell, Carole Ann Ford, William Russell, Jacqueline Hill
Preceding Story: The Daleks (One, Susan, Ian, Barbara)
Succeeding Story: Marco Polo (One, Susan, Ian, Barbara)

The broadcast schedule for the current, new series has disrupted the timing for my usual monthly DVD reviews, but I decided not to let it replace my November edition of the Highs and Lows series entirely. That’s why there’s this bonus Saturday post!

Fortunately for me, the adventure that was already slated for this month is one of the shortest in Classic Who, so rewatching it was not a huge investment in time. Unfortunately, it was a decent investment in brainpower (of which I am in sadly short supply lately).

“The Edge of Destruction” (EoD) comes very very early in the history of the show, preceded only by the pilot adventure (“An Unearthly Child,” which includes the crew’s subsequent trip to “The Cave of Skulls”) and the Doctor’s first-ever encounter with the Daleks (in the eponymously titled story). Viewing it through a lens nearly sixty years of media evolution onwards, it feel surprisingly modern. Sure, it has all the trappings of ’60s Who, feeling more like a stage play than what we would recognize as television today, but it has an almost psycho-drama bent, and keeps the viewer on the back foot almost the whole way through.

Set entirely inside the TARDIS (we’ll ignore the obvious budgetary reasons for that, and pretend it’s just great storytelling), EoD begins with the Doctor, Susan, Ian, and Barbara all getting thrown to the floor and knocked unconscious. As they slowly come to their senses, disoriented and barely recognizing each other, they quickly realize something is amiss. Just what that is—and who is to blame—is much less clear.

The rapid changes in circumstances and in what each person on the TARDIS thinks they know, about both the situation and each other, keeps the viewer almost as confused as the characters. And for someone who is used to a Doctor who cares deeply about their Companions and who is always the cleverest person in the room, the way this early incarnation handles the situation can be unexpected to the point of being off-putting.

But when one remembers that none of these people quite trust each other yet—in fact, the Doctor basically kidnapped Ian and Barbara to prevent them from exposing his secrets—it makes more sense. The Doctor was still getting used to humans (though at this point we were years away from the Doctor admitting he wasn’t one), the humans had just come off of a life-threatening situation they’d gotten into because the Doctor had deceived them for his own selfish ends, and the show as a whole was still finding its bearings.

I think EoD deserves its reputation as one of the “Highs”—it’s #30 on the trusty io9 list—because it really does provide an interestingly convoluted plot line. It may be both short and somewhat pedantic, as these early stories were wont to be (with some questionable science, by current standards), but it’s a snappy and dramatic little story that doesn’t drag on. This little bonbon twists your brain in all the best ways. Give it a go!

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Watch Out for the Kitchen Sink

Review of Flux: Once, Upon Time
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

Regardless of one’s opinion on how the series-long story as a whole is shaping up, one can’t deny that Flux is an ambitious project. And I appreciate the fact that every episode so far has felt like a different beast.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2021 BBC

At the beginning, we had a “meet the new Companion in the midst of an Earth-based crisis” episode. Then we got an alien historical. Now it’s a futuristic mind-f***. Whatever the flavor-of-the-week is, it’s been different than the week before.

I am also impressed, as a fellow storyteller, at how Chibnall has woven so damn many plot threads together. After last week, there were only two from the first episode that still needed to get tied back in, but before we even got back to any of those eight, he introduced a ninth with “Bel’s Story.” And by the end of the episode, not only that thread and one of the two previously pending ones, but also a thread from the previous series had been incorporated into Flux. Now we just have Claire’s story to connect into this mess (and it looks like that will happen next week—but I’m getting ahead of myself).

More than any other Chibnall-penned episode, this one felt like it could’ve been written by Moffat. It was packed with plot points, and switched among the various threads so quickly a viewer could barely get their bearings before needing to change focus. Moffat has often used that method to great effect to keep the audience from noticing plot holes, but there is still so much of this story left to tell that it’s impossible to make a judgement yet about how well it all holds together.

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“War” Is Purgatory

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Review of Flux: War of the Sontarans
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

In the past I have often wished for the modern era to return to the Classic era’s serial storytelling style. It seems that this year I’m getting my wish. And although the pace of Flux is quite different than that of a Classic adventure—somewhat dizzying for Doctor Who, in fact—it feels just about right for the story that’s being told.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2021 BBC

Again I find my recent experience with longer-running storylines to serve me well here. Despite so much information being thrown at us in quick succession (yes, Doctor, I made that face, too), none of it feels extraneous. Rather, it feels like we’re in that end-of-the-first-act period where most of the pieces have been moved into place, and the real maneuvering can now begin.

Last time I mentioned that I’d noticed at least eight disparate plot threads entwining themselves with the Doctor and Yaz. While some of them had already come together last time (Karvanista and Dan, Swarm and Azure), several others were still waiting to be pulled into the tapestry. This time, we almost immediately get most of the rest woven together.

First, the Doctor, Yaz, and Dan all find themselves in the Crimean War, face-to-face with Sontarans instead of Russians. They have just enough time to meet up with Mary Seacole before both Companions are whisked away to other parts of time and space. (As an aside, given that the Crimean War is not a direct part of my country’s history, and the American education system is pretty shit at introducing students to anything but the most basic aspects of US history (from its own biased perspective, at that), I knew nothing of Mary Seacole before this episode. I am, however, pleased to see the show continue to highlight real historical women.)

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An Opinion in Flux

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Review of Flux: The Halloween Apocalypse
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

I’m never quite sure what to expect from a new series—even more so this year, when I haven’t even bothered to watch the trailer. I always go in with cautious optimism, trying to give myself the chance to like (or even love) an episode before the analytical part of my brain catches up and starts picking holes in everything. Sadly, this time around I’m mostly just tired.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2021 BBC

As I mentioned before, I don’t seem to have a lot of enthusiasm to spare these days. What energy I do have for viewing has gone almost exclusively into watching various Korean or Chinese (or occasionally Japanese) dramas, depending on what I can find and what strikes my fancy. Oddly enough, I think that puts me in a better place to watch Flux than I might’ve been otherwise.

The pre-credits sequence is all about the Doctor and Yaz getting themselves out of a seemingly hopeless situation. It’s over-the-top, implausible, and exactly the kind of thing that belongs in Doctor Who. (It’s also rich with fodder for fanfic writers, especially the shippers.) But the audience’s introduction to Karvanista, a member of the doglike Lupari species, is just the first of the eight distinct plot threads I counted.

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The Matrix Rewatched

Review of The Deadly Assassin (#88)

DVD Release Date: 01 Sep 09
Original Air Date: 20 Oct – 30 Nov 1976
Doctors/Companions: Four
Stars: Tom Baker
Preceding Story: The Hand of Fear (Four, Sarah Jane)
Succeeding Story: The Face of Evil (Four, Leela)

With the first episode of Series Thirteen less than a week away, it has occurred to me that the post timing for this Highs and Lows series will need to be adjusted. Although the series’s short run means December’s scheduled entry will not be affected, my review of Episode 4 now conflicts with the November Highs & Lows post. (New episode posts will also supersede two Confessions, but those are lower priority anyway, so I’m not concerned about those.)

Since that post was meant to go live right before the American Thanksgiving holiday, I’ll have to consider carefully how to adjust the posting schedule, but I’m sure something will work out. I can’t let one get lost in the shuffle!

For now, though, we get to revisit one of the Highs, ranked at #13 by Charlie Jane Anders on the io9 list I’ve been referencing for the past several years: The Deadly Assassin.

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Confession #150: I’m Too Burnt Out to Care

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Over this past weekend, the news dropped that Series 13 will begin on 31 Oct 2021. Its six episodes, a story arc titled “Flux,” is reportedly the first single-story season since The Trial of a Time Lord (as opposed to, say, Bad Wolf or the Crack, which—while overarching themes—did not dominate every episode of those series). The series will run through the first weekend of December, leaving only three specials, set to air some time in 2022, to round out Whittaker’s—and Chibnall’s—run on Doctor Who.

This should be an exciting time. In the last month, we’ve had not only this confirmation of air dates, but also the announcement that Russell T. Davies will be back at the helm for Series 14. With that information out in the open, it seems likely that the announcement of the casting for the Fourteenth Doctor may also be in the not-too-distant future.

But I just don’t care.

Sure, when the RTD news broke, I was as agog as any seasoned fan. Whether it’s the best thing to happen to Doctor Who since the last time RTD took over, or a harbinger of the end times depends on who you talk to, I suppose, but there’s no doubt that the news sparked a lot of new discussion. The fan base was, at least for a brief moment, energized by an unexpected turn of events.

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Delta’s Variant

Review of Delta and the Bannermen (#150)

DVD Release Date: 01 Sep 09
Original Air Date: 02 – 16 Nov 1987
Doctors/Companions: Seven, Melanie Bush
Stars: Sylvester McCoy, Bonnie Langford
Preceding Story: Paradise Towers (Seven, Mel)
Succeeding Story: Dragonfire (Seven, Mel, Ace)

Before I sat down to rewatch Delta and the Bannermen for this month’s Highs & Lows installment, I wrote down a short list of what I could remember about it. Aside from a general sense of distaste and the firm knowledge this was one at the Lows end of the scale, there wasn’t much. At the same time, those few notes were surprisingly accurate: try-out for Mel’s replacement; space bees?; Welsh(?) holiday lodgings; space bus.

I’ll admit that I only remembered about the Shangri-La holiday camp (which is not a term commonly used by Americans, at least not where I’m from) when I looked at the DVD cover, but it ended up being perhaps the biggest highlight for me. And though I knew Ray had been a potential new Companion, I’d utterly forgotten that she had that lovely, Welsh lilt (an accent I originally learned thanks to Torchwood).

Both of those details go in my personal “pros” column not least because I’ve been learning Welsh on Duolingo for the last several years (along with a few other languages). Thus, the addition of local color to the story by having a couple of the characters use a few sentences of Welsh with each other (one or two of which I could actually parse) was a particular bonus for me. Sadly, that wasn’t enough to save the overall story.

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Confession #149: I’m Dubious About a February Convention

My kids go back to school this week. Like the vast majority of their classmates, they were ready to be back in the classroom alongside their friends, so they will be in their school building for classes again for the first time in eighteen months (to the day, now that I think of it). In July, I felt pretty good about that decision. They’re old enough to be vaccinated (and have been), and although distance learning worked well for them, reconnecting with their friends over the summer reminded us all how very much they need those social interactions at this age, too.

Now, of course, with the more virulent delta variant raging across the country (with who knows what kind of new variant in its wake), our calculated risk to send our kids back into the school building seems like a greater risk (with fewer available calculations). I think that, with the exception of the students who are as yet too young to qualify for the vaccine, this particular school should have a fairly high vaccination rate. There is also a mask mandate in effect, but students still need to eat at some point, and if this pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that no precautions are perfect. (Which is not to say they should not be taken! I am extremely grateful for the thoughtful planning our school and the district as a whole have put into the new school year, and you can be sure if there were less stringent measures in place, we would not be sending our kids back.)

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Time Well Spent

Review of The Time Monster (#64)

DVD Release Date: 06 Jul 10
Original Air Date: 20 May – 24 Jun 1972
Doctors/Companions: Three, Jo Grant
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning
Preceding Story: The Mutants (Three, Jo)
Succeeding Story: The Three Doctors (Three, Jo, Two, One, the Brigadier)

The fascinating thing about doing a year full of Highs & Lows like this is that the experience highlights just how subjective such labels can be. This month’s entry is a case in point.

While the list I’ve been using from io9 compiled by Charlie Jane Anders ranks The Time Monster as #238 of 254 (leaving it ahead of only 6% of other stories), it is well known to Verity! podcast listeners that Lizbeth Myles ranks it as one of best stories of all time (or, at the very least, in her personal list of favorites). That leaves a wide range of opinion into which to fit my own assessment.

Predictably, I fall somewhere between the two extremes, though closer to Lizbeth’s end of the scale. Perhaps it’s because I’m already a fan of the Pertwee era, and Delgado’s Master in particular, that I didn’t find the “preponderance of fluff” (as Charlie Jane put it) so objectionable. Some of that fluff includes gems like the “time sensor” (which, when we see it face-on, is shaped… perhaps more suggestively than entirely appropriate for a family show) and a device the Doctor constructs out of household items in order to interfere with the Master’s time experiments, the latter of which is one of the few things that consistently stick in my mind about this story.

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Confession #148: I Jumped the Gun

We know now that both Jodie Whittaker and Chris Chibnall are leaving Doctor Who in 2022. Thanks to my posting schedule, the news is nearly two weeks old by now, and I’m sure it’s already been discussed to death in various corners of the internet like Twitter that I no longer inhabit regularly. But I feel I would be remiss if I didn’t address it here at all.

So let me start by saying I seem to have jumped the gun just a bit last month when I posted about not feeling anything in particular about this inevitable change. I was vaguely gratified to discover that I don’t seem to be alone in that. I haven’t really dipped my toe back in the social media waters to find out what others are saying, but in the few places I’ve engaged, I’ve noticed others having a similar lack of reaction.

I’m sure much of it is the fact that we’re all completely burnt out thanks to the various stresses the pandemic has put on us all. A lot of it probably also has to do with the fact that it’s been so long since we last had regular episodes appearing every week. Whatever the case, with that particular ending still well over a year ahead of us, it seems far too soon to be thinking about it too deeply.

Usually this is the point in a regeneration cycle when I’d start thinking about what qualities I’d like the next incarnation of the Doctor to have. This time around, though, I can barely even be bothered to think about it. I suppose the usual things still apply. I’d love a woman of color, but I’d settle for anyone who wasn’t a cisgender white dude. I’m not feeling particularly optimistic that we’ll get something else, but time will tell.

And that’s pretty much the size of it. “Time will tell.” I can’t be bothered to think on it any more than that. Will I have Opinions about whoever is tapped to become the new showrunner, and whoever that person casts as their first Doctor? Undoubtedly. Will I experience that familiar combination of anticipation and dread as the the next Doctor’s first episodes approach? Almost certainly. But can I be arsed to worry about it now? Not hardly.

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