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Intergalactic Man of Mystery

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Review of The Doctors Revisited – Seventh Doctor

In his own way, Seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy was also the “last of the Time Lords,” since it was after his three series on the show that the BBC put it on ~ahem~ indefinite hiatus. As such, he took a lot of blame for Who‘s apparent demise, and many fans never particularly liked him.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2013 BBC

If you’re a regular reader, you’re probably aware that I don’t share that opinion of Seven. I was therefore quite happy to see the Revisited series continue the upbeat, celebratory tone it has maintained through every episode. Instead, it focuses on McCoy’s Doctor as one who brought some mystery back to the character.

Guests on the episode (McCoy himself, Companion actresses Bonnie Langford and Sophie Aldred, and current era behind-the-scenes folk Steven Moffat, Marcus Wilson, Nicholas Briggs, and Tom McRae) agreed that while Seven came across as a clown, there was something “more” lurking underneath it all (much like Two, come to think of it). Especially at the beginning, he had a very vaudevillian veneer, and he loved to confuse his enemies (and occasionally friends) with trickery and sleight of hand. But there was never any doubt that he had a plan to get out of whatever situation he was in, and there was something almost sinister about the secrets he seemed to be keeping. As his series went on, his character continued to gain richness and texture; he got more complex, darker, and lonelier.

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Burn Baby Burn

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Review of Inferno: SE (#54)

DVD Release Date: 11 Jun 13
Original Air Date: 09 May – 20 Jun 1970
Doctor/Companion: Three, Dr. Elizabeth “Liz” Shaw, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Caroline John, Nicholas Courtney
Preceding Story: The Ambassadors of Death (Three, Liz, the Brigadier)
Succeeding Story: Terror of the Autons (Three, Jo, the Brigadier)

It seems strange to me that despite how much I love this serial, I’ve never actually given Inferno a proper review before. I count it among my Top 3 pre-Hiatus favorites and have recommended it often to those who want to try out new-to-them earlier Doctors (as long as they can handle a seven-part serial), so I was thrilled a few months ago to see it pop up on the list of upcoming Special Edition releases.

I was further thrilled when I realized June had seen the release of two stories written by Don Houghton (the other being The Mind of Evil). It’s only as I’ve gotten more deeply entrenched in Whovian culture that I’ve paid attention to such details. (I used to watch television and simply take what I saw on screen as it came, passing judgment in terms of “I do/don’t like this,” but not paying the least attention to writers, directors, and such. Go figure.) But I feel the richer for it; I have a new appreciation for why MoE worked for me, knowing my fondness for Inferno.

So what’s so hot (see what I did there?) about Inferno anyway? Well, for one thing, it throws in a beautiful idea not really seen in Doctor Who up to this point: that of an alternate universe. I love the way we get to see little personality differences between familiar characters and their counterparts in the parallel dimension. The supporting cast is brilliant, not least the stellar (if regrettably named) Olaf Pooley as Professor Stahlman. Despite some pretty “out there” plot developments, the whole cast plays everything straight, and you can’t help believe in their experiences and reactions. If nothing else, the administrative red tape that ties Sir Keith Gold’s hands from doing anything useful to prevent impending disaster adds a sense of (slightly depressing) realism.

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Eighties Incarnate

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Review of The Doctors Revisited – Sixth Doctor

We’ve arrived at our median Doctor, by number the midpoint of his Regenerations to date. If you’re not familiar with “Old Sixie” (as his actor Colin Baker calls him now), you’re in for quite the ride.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2013 BBC

I think more than any other, Six is a break from what we’re used to associating with “the Doctor.” In stark contrast to his immediate predecessor—the mellow, folksy, human one—this Doctor epitomizes the alpha-male aspects of his personalities (brash, show-off, egotistical…). As Moffat (who is joined here by fellow interviewees Marcus Wilson, Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant, Bonnie Langford, Nicholas Briggs, and Dan Starkey) observed, Six cared about being paid attention to and about being listened to, but not about being liked (if you have any doubt, just look at that over-the-top, oh-so-’80s, coat of many colors). He would do what he felt he needed to do and not care one whit about whose feelings he might hurt along the way.

That’s not to say he didn’t care; he was actually quite compassionate. It’s simply that his definitions of right and wrong in a given situation don’t necessarily line up with what his Companion or the audience—humans, in other words—would think.

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Fandom Feels the Love

As we inch ever closer to the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who in November, more and more little nods to this cultural icon and its fans are cropping up. One of my new favorite such instances is the wonderful fan-written ode to the show titled Celebrate Regenerate.

This 300-page book is a multi-part love letter to the entire run of Doctor Who, written by a wide range of fans at the behest of editor Lewis Christian. The idea began in mid-2012, when Christian began soliciting submissions in a thread on the Gallifrey Base forum. Before he knew it, he was getting retweets from the editor of Doctor Who Magazine, writers, actors, and others closely associated with the show. Pieces began pouring in, until he hardly knew what to do with them all.

Nearly a year later, there are articles covering every televised story from An Unearthly Child through The Name of the Doctor; artwork of five decades of Doctors, Companions, and foes (including the cover seen here, by Alejandra Ramírez Giraldo); and special features from interviews to speculative theories to an overview of where else the show has gone, off-screen.

One of the most unique and wonderful attributes of the book is that since contributors could choose which episodes they wanted to discuss, every single article (including three by me) is written from the perspective of someone who loves the story in question. So that one that everyone loves to hate? Guess what—someone else thinks it's the bees knees! Or your guilty pleasure? You're not alone!

Find the relevant page for any one story that you don't care for, and read what the other fans have written. I challenge you to come away without at least once nodding and saying, "well, okay, they've got a point there." And fans are not fools; someone reviewing an oft-reviled tale will acknowledge its flaws while making a persuasive argument that it's actually pretty awesome in its way even so. It is this attitude on every page that makes the collection exactly what it says on the cover: a celebration.

If I've piqued your interest (and hopefully I have), you can get your own copy of Celebrate, Regenerate either as a free PDF download or in paper (at cost, via Lulu) through the official website. It's out today!

 

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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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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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Worth Visiting

Review of The Visitation: SE (#120)

DVD Release Date: 14 May 13
Original Air Date: 15-23 Feb 1982
Doctor/Companion: Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan
Stars: Peter Davison, Matthew Waterhouse, Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding
Preceding Story: Kinda (Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan)
Succeeding Story: Black Orchid (Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan)

I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on why I like this story so much, but it’s high enough on my list that I chose it to show to the Ladies two years ago. Maybe it’s because, crowded as it made the TARDIS, this particular crew really epitomizes Five’s tenure for me.

It’s kind of typical classic fare. The Doctor steers the TARDIS wrong, then his curiosity gets the better of him, then everyone’s in trouble. There’s some lovely character development at the beginning as Teagan and the Doctor get angry with each other and then apologize, and later when Adric complains of feeling useless.

And, of course, there are some wonderful lines. A long-time favorite of mine is the Doctor’s jibe at the Terileptil about his attitude on war, but the one that jumped out at me this time was this conversation between Nyssa and the Doctor:

“So, what are you going to do if we find them?” she asks.
“Oh, twist their arms a bit to let me take them back to their own planet.”
“I hope they have arms to twist.”
“I’ll find something.”

The revelations about the man’s darker nature in the Series Seven finale put this exchange in a new light. Maybe Five isn’t a totally warm, fuzzy, sweet kind of guy after all.

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What’s in a ‘Name’?

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Review of The Name of the Doctor
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

So many conflicting emotions. Parts of this finale were brilliant, and I really wanted to love the whole thing. I’m afraid I’m going to have to admit that I’m turning into something of a curmudgeon, though; this show is not entirely for me anymore.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2013 BBC

I’m betting there are few Moffat fans (perhaps more specifically “River fans”) who didn’t adore this episode. For my part, as someone who has been a Doctor/River denialist rather than a shipper, the otherwise lovely bits of the story were somewhat tarnished by the saccharine (Brits would say “twee,” I suppose) farewell between them.

I’ll admit the way River was used through the rest of the episode was clever, and overall I like her. I’ve just never bought that there was a strong, romantic love between them (at least, not reciprocated by the Doctor), so while I was completely caught up in the “you can see me?” conversation, as it ground inexorably toward a big, wet smoochie, I found myself thinking, “Oh, no. Please don’t. He’s gonna – aw, damn!”

One thing that really gets me about this new, post-Library River (who knew that was even possible?) is the fact that we’re left to conclude that she has literally been haunting him for years. I’m not sure I care for that idea. Makes him rather a jerk to ignore her that whole time, doesn’t it? Is she less “real” – does she “count” less – because she’s in the mainframe, and so it’s OK for him not to think about her feelings at all? Way to respect the person you supposedly love, Doctor.

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Now With More Alien Madness

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Review of The Doctors Revisited – Fourth Doctor

By the fourth month of BBC America’s Doctor-by-Doctor celebrations of the show’s history, we’ve rolled around to the man who many still equate with the role: Tom Baker.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2013 BBC

Perhaps more than any other actor who portrayed him, Tom Baker embodied the Doctor. As the man himself said, “I was Doctor Who. There was no acting involved at all.”

Something about Baker just clicked, and no one before – or arguably since – was ever more perfect for the role. This new Doctor was all about humor – at his own expense, from time to time – to defuse situations and get himself out of trouble. As the narration puts it, “Suddenly a big kid was in charge of the TARDIS.”

Other key changes mentioned in the first section include his alien-ness, his bohemian wardrobe – notably, the ultra-iconic scarf – and his break from UNIT, as he finally swans off for good. Given that Third Doctor Jon Pertwee’s tenure had been almost entirely earthbound, it was a notable change, and allowed for a wider variety of storytelling.

Turning next to the Fourth Doctors Companions, interviewees (who, throughout the whole documentary, included Steven Moffat, David Tennant, Tom Baker, Louise Jameson, John Leeson, Marcus Wilson, Nicholas Briggs, and Neil Gaiman) talked first about Sarah Jane Smith, who had actually come on board with the Third Doctor. Gaiman goes so far as to dub her the “greatest” of all the Companions (and there are plenty of fans out there who would agree). Perhaps what made the chemistry between these two work so well was how they viewed each other as best friends. It made for a wonderful, fun-loving dynamic that could withstand his “difficult” nature unscathed.

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Don’t Wake Me

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

I’ve read (OK, skimmed) a fair number negative reviews for this episode, but I have to say I just can’t relate at all.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2013 BBC

This series more than any other, I’ve observed a vast array of opinions among fans. For any given episode, there seems to be a “best thing since sliced bread” camp and a “disastrous blight besmirching the face of Our Show” camp. Occasionally, there’s a “Weeeeell… It wasn’t awful, but it sure could’ve been better” contingent, too. As best I can tell, the residents of these camps don’t all stay together as they switch campgrounds, either. I’m not sure if it’s really this series, or that I’m a little more connected these days than I used to be that’s responsible for my observation of the effect, but nearly every episode has been divisive to some degree.

I’m all for every fan having (and voicing) their own opinion, and I know no one’s line up exactly with anyone else’s – heck, things would be boring if they did. I like to believe that most times I can wrap my brain around the differences enough to say, “I don’t agree with you, but I can understand why you feel that way.” But this time I just don’t get it.

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