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Revolutionary Television

Review of The Reign of Terror (#8)
DVD Release Date: 12 Feb 13
Original Air Date: 08 Aug – 12 Sep 1964
Doctor/Companion: One, Susan, Ian, Barbara
Stars: William Hartnell, Carole Ann Ford, William Russell, Jacqueline Hill
Preceding Story: The Sensorites (One, Susan, Ian, Barbara)
Succeeding Story: Planet of Giants (One, Susan, Ian, Barbara)

One thing I love about the very earliest Who is that it’s so clearly taking its self-defined role as educational television to heart. When we first meet the Daleks, we learn about magnetism as the Doctor breaks the group out of a cell, and there were several instances, like in The Aztecs, where we learn a bit about historical events and cultures. In fact, it’s not till some time later that the supernatural twists to the historical tales get added.

So when I sat down to watch The Reign of Terror, I kind of knew I was in for another of those “pure historicals,” in which all the events swirling around our heroes are ones that actually occurred in our own past. I have to admit I wasn’t quite prepared for how heavy-handed it would be. My jaw may actually have dropped when Robespierre straight out stated, “If this plot is successful, tomorrow, the 27th of July, 1794, will be a date for history!”

Aside from such blatant attempts at pedagogy, though, there’s actually quite an elaborate bit of intrigue at the heart of the story. Though elements like a burning house and “Madame Guillotine” make the story a little dark at times, the spies, imprisonment, and threats of betrayal at every turn keep the audience on its toes, even if the TARDIS crew is not always quite as careful at they perhaps should be.

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The Start of Something Wonderful

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Review of The Doctors Revisited – First Doctor

In honor of Doctor Who‘s fiftieth anniversary this year (23 November, to be exact), BBC America has committed to running eleven half-hour (including commercials) specials, each one summarizing the era of a different Doctor. There will be one each month, finishing on or near the actual anniversary of first transmission.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2012 BBC

This first month, obviously, we begin with William Hartnell as the First Doctor. Alternating clips of his episodes and interviews with production team members and actors from now and then – including Steven Moffat (current showrunner), Caro Skinner (current producer), Neil Gaiman (writer), David Tennant (Tenth Doctor), John Barrowman (Capt. Jack Harkness), William Russell (Ian Chesterton), and Peter Purves (Steven Taylor) – gives a broad overview of the show’s impact both then and now.

Fans already familiar with Hartnell and his stories will find little-to-nothing new or particularly insightful here. Primarily, this special (and presumably the rest in the series) is aimed at neowhovians – those really only familiar with Doctor Who in its modern incarnation. Much is made of how different Hartnell’s One is from the Doctor we have come to know and love now, almost to the point of un-recognizability. But he set the stage for everything that has come since.

The are three main segments (“Who’s Who,” “TARDIS Team,” and “Famous Foes”), the first of which explores how Hartnell’s Doctor brought a sense of gravitas and mystery to the table, and how this fledgeling show had to establish the rules of time travel, the way time mustn’t be meddled with lightly.

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Unfinished Masterpiece?

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Review of Shada (Unaired)

DVD Release Date: 08 Jan 13
Original Air Date: Slated for the end of Season 17, Jan-Feb 1980
Doctor/Companion: Four, Romana II
Stars: Tom Baker, Lalla Ward
Preceding Story: The Horns of Nimon (Four, Romana II)
Succeeding Story: The Leisure Hive (Four, Romana II)

Here we go. There’s just about nothing better for starting an argument among Long-Term Fans than bringing up the question of the quality (or canonicity) of the “lost classic” Shada. Written by the now-legendary Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker’s Guide fame and sadly interrupted and eventually scrapped due to a labor strike, Shada has gained legendary status among fans. Many seem to believe it would have become one of the best stories of all time, had it actually been completed.

In 1992 the BBC released the existing footage with “linking material” – that is, descriptive narration of the missing bits – by Tom Baker (who, weirdly to me, does it all in first person as the Doctor while dressed in a natty suit), and Shada finally saw the light of day. (It is that version, though remastered for DVD, that is on this disk.) More than a decade later in 2003, it was reworked as an Eighth Doctor adventure and presented as both a webcast (also included here, for access on a PC or Mac) and a Big Finish audio adventure. After another decade, the novelization – written by Gareth Roberts, but based on Adams’ scripts – was released just last year.

So is this serial, “the one that got away” so to speak, all it’s cracked up to be? In my opinion, the answer is a firm “it depends.”

I first saw Shada when I was trying to get a better feel for Eight. I’d seen The Movie, but didn’t want to shell out for a bunch of Big Finish product I’d no way to know whether I’d like, so when I ran across the webcast, I was thrilled. Here I could kill two birds with one stone: more Eight, and see this unfinished story I’d heard so much about. Mostly, I found it a little confusing – whether because I was unfamiliar with the format or due to the script itself, I don’t know.

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The Winter of Our Cautious Optimism

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

I’m not sure there’s much more I could have asked for. (Oh, of course there is. A puppy is always nice, for example…)


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2012 BBC

Seriously, though, I think this is the best Christmas Special in a good long while (the best since Christmas Invasion, in my opinion). No episode is ever absolutely perfect, and I’ll get to the parts that irked me later. Frankly, I wouldn’t be much of a blogger if I couldn’t find something both to love and to hate about any given story, but generally speaking, I have to say I quite enjoyed The Snowmen.

I think a great part of that is because it wasn’t terribly Christmassy. That is, it felt like a “regular” episode (with a bit of extra time for plot development) that just happened to be set at Christmas, much like Nine’s story The Unquiet Dead. Nothing except (here it comes – my first, biggest complaint) the über-sappy, saccharine explanation of “a whole family crying on Christmas Eve” relied on the specific time of year in order to make “sense.”

And, to be honest, it just doesn’t. It’s not like no one else in London has ever – or even in that very year – lost a loved one right at Christmas. It happens to people the world over all the time. Why is this family’s pain special? The simple answer is: it’s not. (No more so than the loss of his most recent Companions is particularly special to the Doctor. But I’ll get to that later.) That fact, combined with the overwrought emotional manipulation that plagues Moffat’s episodes, make the denouement of this part of the story unsatisfactory.

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A Pretty Good Trip

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Review of The Claws of Axos: SE (#57)
DVD Release Date: 13 Nov 12
Original Air Date: 13 Mar – 03 Apr 1971
Doctor/Companion: Three, Josephine “Jo” Grant
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning
Preceding Story: The Mind of Evil (Three, Jo)
Succeeding Story: Colony in Space (Three, Jo)

My reaction to this story has always been pretty much full-on Pigbin Josh: “Ooh arr?” Seriously – this one’s just a bit weird. Psychedelic, even.

To a certain extent, that’s on purpose. It was, after all, made in 1971, and the whole drug-tripping scene was still a Thing (or so I understand). The director and editor had a grand old time messing with the effects to make it all visually striking. And the design is incredibly creative, especially when it comes to the ship, which is both amazingly organic looking and, externally, a bit… anatomical (as Katy Manning (Jo) points out in one of the extras).

The story itself has the usual ups and downs. The basic premise is quite cool, with the alien visitors who may or may not be out to get us all, and a substance that can manipulate energy and thus solve huge problems like world hunger. But the inclusion of the Master feels utterly spurious, even if it does lead to some lovely Delgado moments (his Master is perfectly smarmy) and interesting Doctor/Master dynamics.

Oddly, I think the insults are one of my favorite parts of the whole show. For example, when Mr. Chinn, the government official nominally in charge of the whole operation, phones in to report to the Minister, he asks, “Will you scramble, or shall I, sir?” The reply is a terse, “Just your report, Chinn. I’m sure that will be quite garbled enough.” Makes me laugh every time.

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Now That’s Diplomatic Tension

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Review of The Ambassadors of Death (#53)

DVD Release Date: 10 Oct 12
Original Air Date: 21 Mar – 02 May 1970
Doctor/Companion: Three, Liz Shaw, the Brigadier
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Caroline John, Nicholas Courtney
Preceding Story: Doctor Who and the Silurians (Three, Liz, the Brigadier)
Succeeding Story: Inferno (Three, Liz, the Brigadier)

It’s been a Three-rich environment around here lately, what with taking G through his era and the DVD releases for October and November both starring this particular Doctor. It’s a good thing I quite like him, or I’d be in trouble.

As far as what I’ve seen, Ambassadors is the penultimate story of Three’s tenure. (The final one is The Mind of Evil, which is being painstakingly colorized by the ridiculously talented Stuart Humphryes, aka BabelColour, and is due out on DVD some time next year.) I was plenty surprised, then, when the opening titles kind of stopped halfway through, cut to a short “pre-titles sequence” and then finished the titles. That format was never used again (which explains my surprise), but I thought it was kind of a cool, interesting way to go about it. (It’s also fun to note that this it the first story to use the “sting” into the closing credits.)

Given the way space travel was just getting underway with the Apollo program at the time these were filmed and broadcast, I found it primarily interesting from a historical perspective. As the astronauts had trouble with their Mars Probe 7, I couldn’t help but wonder how far from Apollo 13 (in which a malfunction endangered the lives of three American astronauts) this was produced. The extras (see below) answered that question – Apollo 13 launched the day Episode 4 aired, encountered its famous “problem” three days later, and splashed down safely the day before Episode 5. That had to have made things awfully weird for the viewers.

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A Farewell to Aims*

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Review of The Angels Take Manhattan
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

It all makes sense now. Well, I say “all”… Clearly, some of it is still utter nonsense, but at least one of the things that’s been bugging me all series is finally obviously and satisfactorily resolved, at least in my head. But I’ll get to that.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2012 BBC

Let me start by talking about how this – this – is finally the kind of episode I’ve been looking for all series. At long last, here’s one I can get behind wholeheartedly because there’s so much right with it, I can ignore just about everything that isn’t.

I really liked the gumshoe detective novel feel to the 1938 portion of the episode (aside from “bouncing off 1938” – wtf?), though I didn’t cotton on till the second time through that Mr. Grayle was deliberately feeding the Angels, nor that it wasn’t necessarily Mr. Garner himself typing up the chapter on “The Dying Detective.”

Even better, though, the Angels have gone back to the basics and once again become the kill-you-by-letting-you-live-to-death monsters we fell in love with in Blink. Somehow, the insidious nature of this particular mechanism makes them creepier and more interesting to me than the sheer monster in the dark we saw back in The Time of Angels. It’s made even more horrific by the way both Garner and Rory are confronted with their future selves (loved the age makeup, too!). It’s good to have the “original” Weeping Angels back.

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Viewer, Rate Thyself

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Review of Vengeance on Varos: SE (#138)
DVD Release Date: 11 Sep 12
Original Air Date: 19 – 25 Jan 1985
Doctor/Companion: Six, Perpugilliam “Peri” Brown
Stars: Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant
Preceding Story: Attack of the Cybermen (Six, Peri)
Succeeding Story: The Mark of the Rani (Six, Peri)

Before watching this release, I’d seen Vengeance on Varos twice previously. The first time was when I was just getting started, watching as many pre-Hiatus stories as I could get my hands on, and the second was for my pre-Gally marathon last year. It has always been one of my least favorites.

Trying to give it a fair shake for this review, I did my best to throw all my preconceived notions – and the fiery passion with which I hate the character Sil – out the window. I think I was I was successful; I liked it more this time around.

Once I was able to get beyond (or put a mostly-effective mental block up against) Sil – a native of Thoros Beta, he is of a reptilian race that is sluglike and, at least in the instance of this individual, utterly disgusting to me – I could see there’s actually a pretty good story with some interesting social commentary here.

While the plot device that gets us to Varos in the first place feels utterly contrived (“This is the one problem the TARDIS cannot overcome…”), the twisted society that awaits the Doctor and Peri is thought-provoking. Because it was actually transmitted well before the “reality TV” rage of recent years, Vengeance feels, in retrospect, rather ahead of its time. It taps into the voyeurism and detachment from violence that we all know so well thanks to our own screens today.

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The Weakness of Plot

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

“Uh-oh. It’s Chibnall again.” Despite my more-optimistic-than-any-previous-episode reaction to the next-time trailer for The Power of Three, I couldn’t help wincing a bit and bracing for the worst when I realized it was another entry by one of my all-time least favorite writers. I’m happy to report, though, that I didn’t hate it.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2012 BBC

Granted, after some thought and a subsequent viewing, my initial very positive reaction was somewhat dulled as I realized how many plot holes there were, but somehow I was still mostly able to look beyond the letdown-y bits and have fun with it. Because – let’s face it – I’m a sucker for any reference, however oblique, to the Brigadier.

OK, OK… There were other parts to like, too (Rory in his pants (or “underwear,” for us Americans) was clearly among them). In fact, there was a lot I enjoyed. Especially that first time through, I got swept up in the “romp,” willing until the very end to play along with what I was clearly intended to be getting out of it. There was a silly-fun puzzle with the cubes, another fish-out-of-water interlude with the Doctor trying to take the Slow Path with Amy & Rory, more of Rory’s charming dad Brian, a random reference to an attempted Zygon invasion, and the delightful Kate (Lethbridge-) Stewart.

In other words, all the window-dressing was beautiful.

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A Dimensional Analysis

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Review of Planet of Giants (#9)
DVD Release Date: 11 Sep 12
Original Air Date: 31 Oct – 14 Nov 1964
Doctor/Companion: One, Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright, Susan Foreman
Stars: William Hartnell, William Russell, Jacqueline Hill, Carole Ann Ford
Preceding Story: The Reign of Terror (One, Ian, Barbara, Susan)
Succeeding Story: The Dalek Invasion of Earth (One, Ian, Barbara, Susan)

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this story. It’s not one that shows up on the common Best Of or Worst Of lists, so I didn’t really have much in the way of preconceived notions, but I guess I was prepared to be underwhelmed. It was quite a nice surprise, then, that I found it so engaging.

Let me start with a bit of history. Apparently, the idea that eventually became Planet of Giants – that is, that the crew would be miniaturized, but on present-day Earth – was at one point intended to be the series pilot, rather than An Unearthly Child. Further, it was scripted – and shot – in four parts, but the Head of Serials didn’t like it as a four-parter, and so the final two episodes were edited together into one, which is how it was transmitted (this all becomes particularly relevant when we come to the extras).

As a result, there are pieces that don’t quite make perfect sense, but overall it hangs together quite well, and manages to combine early environmentalism with murder/intrigue and a science fiction twist (since our heroes are roughly the size of “an inch”). I suspect that when it first went out, the audiences would have been pleasantly surprised by the revelation that a mishap on landing had shrunk the TARDIS and all its occupants that way. It plays pretty well, even when you know what’s coming. In retrospect, though, I think it’s better that it got shunted to the second season, so the audience was familiar with the TARDIS’s usual workings before throwing in this new dimension.

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