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Spiders, Families, and Other Sticky Topics

Review of Arachnids in the UK
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

This episode is not for arachnophobes. Straight up—if spiders squick you out, skip this one. Do Not Pass “Go,” Do Not Collect $200.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

If you can handle spiders, well… It’s still plenty creepy. There’s something primordial that just gets at one’s brainstem when something is crawling rapidly toward you with purpose, especially when it has many legs. As usual, though, the creatures are just a convenient (or inconvenient, depending on your perspective) backdrop for a deeper story.

This time that story is nominally about the greed and egoism of a man who is such an obvious analog for the current US President that they actually had to use said President’s name in the dialog in order to maintain deniability. The parallel actually made it hard for me to watch whenever that guy was on screen (that and the fact that the actor will forever be Mr. Big to me, though that actually worked relatively well in context).

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Hitting It Out of the Parks

Review of Rosa
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

I’ve managed so far to stay unspoiled for Series Eleven; I don’t even know the names of the next episodes until I start poking around the BBC website looking for details of the current one. So my first inkling of what was coming for episode 3 was its Next Time trailer. It made me nervous.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

I wasn’t nervous because they were going to look at the beginnings of the US Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s—quite the opposite; I love a historical. But it has been the habit in Doctor Who to depict the real events of history as being caused by the Doctor, either through direct action (e.g., The Visitation) or through her influence (e.g., giving words and ideas to Shakespeare or Christie). I didn’t want to see Rosa Parks’s very real, very human bravery be cheapened by implying she wouldn’t have acted as she did without the Doctor arriving on the scene.

I thus spent my first viewing watching with a constant underlying tension, always fearing that some major faux pas lurked around the next page-turn of the script. I shouldn’t have worried, given that Malorie Blackman, the first woman of color ever to write for Doctor Who, was the primary writer for this episode (a fact that escaped me until a subsequent viewing). She hit it out of the park.

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Intellect Over Brute Strength

Review of The Ghost Monument
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

If I hadn’t bought into Whittaker as the Doctor after her first episode, I would have within the opening minutes of this one.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

As part of our cliffhanger resolution, we find the Doctor on the bridge of a ship arguing with its pilot in tones so familiar we don’t even need to hear or comprehend the words fully to get the sense of the conversation in progress: something dire is happening, she’s trying to convince the pilot to take a particular course of action to prevent a tragedy, and he’s wondering where this random person who showed up out of nowhere gets off telling him how to fly his own goddamn ship. It’s such classic Doctor fare as to be cliché. And yet it did my heart a world of good to watch that cliché play out—all the way to her casually stepping out of the wreckage with a witty remark.

Yes. She’s the Doctor.

I suspect winning over the skeptical long-term fans was high on Chibnall’s list of desired outcomes for this episode. He certainly gave it the old college try with such blatant nods to the Classic era as the Doctor’s causal use of Venusian aikido and her exclamation at the end of the episode, “You’ve redecorated!” (even if the following line was a predictable subversion of that trope). I don’t know whether or not he’s succeeding, but so far I’m happy to go along for the ride.

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The Doctor Is In

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Review of The Woman Who Fell to Earth
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

I really wish I could remember the exact moment—I wasn’t taking notes during that first viewing—when one of my daughters felt moved to declare her verdict: “Yep, she’s the Doctor!”


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

I think that, no matter their view on changing up the actor’s gender, that question gets at the crux of what fans have really been especially anxious about for this particular regeneration: would the Doctor still feel like the Doctor? The answer we got after this opening episode of Jodie Whittaker’s first series was, as far as I’m concerned, a resounding “yes.”

It always takes me a while to warm to a new Doctor (the exception being Capaldi, whom I was so ready to love going in that he was the Doctor to me from the moment those attack eyebrows first appeared). Even though I’ve been eagerly anticipating Whittaker for months, it was a tough change even for someone as favorably inclined as me to wrap my head around. But my kiddo is right: she’s the Doctor. She showed us so over and over again throughout the episode as both she and we recognized some parts of herself and not others.

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A Load of Bull

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Review of The Horns of Nimon (#108)
DVD Release Date: 06 Jul 10
Original Air Date: 22 Dec 1979 – 12 Jan 1980
Doctors/Companions: Four, Romana II, K-9
Stars: Tom Baker, Lalla Ward, John Leeson
Preceding Story: Nightmare of Eden (Four, Romana II, K-9)
Succeeding Story: The Leisure Hive (Four, Romana II, K-9)

I tell ya, I really took one for the team this time. On that io9 list I’ve been using for reference, only six stories (out of 254) ranked worse than The Horns of Nimon. It did not earn that ranking for nothing.

On its surface, Nimon is another retelling of a Greek myth (which may or may not be clear to the viewer; more on that below). When you drill down further, it’s… erm… a mess.

Several of the hallmarks of this era of Who are present: the TARDIS unexpectedly arriving on or near a lonely spaceship, K9 being sidelined for most of the adventure, and Romana swanning about in a fabulous outfit. And while the sets, creature design, and even costuming (though is this throw-away character in Part Four wearing the Black Guardian’s feathers?!) are pretty good for 1979, head-bad-guy Soldeed’s overacting is truly epic.

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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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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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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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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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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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