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Tag: Ace

Doctor Merlin

Review of Battlefield (#152)

DVD Release Date: 29 Jul 20
Original Air Date: 06 – 27 Sep 1989
Doctors/Companions: Seven, Dorothy “Ace” McShane
Stars: Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred
Preceding Story: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (Seven, Ace)
Succeeding Story: Ghost Light (Seven, Ace)

Happy Doctor Who Day! Our show turns 59 today, and though we have to wait another year for any more new episodes—ugh—I’ve got a review for you today. Much like the rest of the Everything Else series, this story is one that I don’t think gets talked about enough.

It’s not like there isn’t a lot of action, or interesting characters and lore to be had in Battlefield. (And how can you not love seeing Jean Marsh back for a third guest role?) I have to admit, though, the thing I remembered most about this adventure before re-watching was the watertank accident in which Sophie Aldred narrowly escaped a potentially fatal situation (the DVD release even has a short extra about it).

However, the main conceit of the adventure may be the part that makes it most memorable overall: at some point in their personal history—though not before now—the Doctor was Merlin, and now Morgaine is back to take her revenge on him. The ensuing mashup of plate-armored knights with both swords and energy weapons pitted against UNIT soldiers, including both the now-retired Brigadier Lethbridge-Steward and the new Brigadier Bambera, makes for bonkers conflicts that couldn’t readily appear anywhere but Doctor Who.

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The Power of Fan Service

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

There was nothing subtle about The Power of the Doctor. It was pure fan service, from start to finish. Some of it we knew about beforehand, and some of it came as a surprise—again and again—but it was blatantly obvious that showrunner Chris Chibnall wanted to check off every single item on his bucket list on the way out.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2022 BBC

For the most part, I was happy to go along for the ride. Only in the final thirty seconds or so did I balk. (Yes, we’ll talk about that more, but under the cut.) It made me want to use my full-on Mom Voice: I’m not upset with you; just disappointed.

But let’s back up for a while, and leave that moment for later. First, let’s talk about the bonkers hour-and-a-half of Jodie Whittaker’s last episode in the lead role. This was Chris Chibnall’s ultimate fanfic moment; he threw in every plot thread and character he could think of (and book), and wrote a huge fix-it fic.

For those who may not be familiar with fanfic (I am only peripherally so, as I don’t read fic myself, though my kids do), the biggest purpose of the genre—as far as I can tell—is to tell the stories with beloved characters that the fan writer really wanted to see/read in the original media property, but was never given. (In other words, all of modern Who is basically fanfic of Classic Who, show-run by Classic fans.) And one sub-genre of fanfic is the “fix-it fic,” in which the fan writer fixes something that they felt was inherently wrong with the original.

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Confession #155: I Am Behind on Casting News

I had hardly finished posting the last casting news when more casting news hit the streets. I’m basically a month behind on the news of David Tennant and Catherine Tate’s return, and Yasmin Finney’s debut in Doctor Who, but since Tennant’s rumored return was a hot topic a few months ago, I figured I go ahead and add my 2¢ anyway.

For the most part, my feelings are the same as they were before we knew Ncuti Gatwa would be the new Doctor: I’ll be excited to see Tennant back for the 60th anniversary, but I don’t want him for more. RTD has been very cagey about the whole thing, as he is wont to do, so I don’t believe we’ve had any solid indications of whether Gatwa will actually be portraying the Whittaker Doctor’s immediate successor (rumors to the contrary are rife). Although I will be extremely disappointed if he’s not, I will wait to see what RTD has up his sleeve with Tennant and Tate before making any final judgements.

The fact that they’ve also announced Finney, a Black trans woman who shot to popularity for her role as Elle in the Netflix adaptation of Alice Oseman’s webcomic Heartstopper, and told us her character’s name is Rose, means that (a) RTD is committed to continuing the trend toward more inclusive casting (which I applaud heartily) and (b) he’s totally trolling us. I am over-the-moon excited to see Finney in Doctor Who, and utterly suspicious about how her character will fit into the overall Whoniverse, because there’s no way we’re going to have any real idea until the show actually airs.

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Work to Do

Review of Survival (#155)

DVD Release Date: 14 Aug 07
Original Air Date: 22 Nov- 06 Dec 1989
Doctors/Companions: Seven, Dorothy “Ace” McShane
Stars: Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred
Preceding Story: The Curse of Fenric (Seven, Ace)
Succeeding Story: The Movie (Eight, Grace)

Everyone I know is feeling the stress of the months-long (and not as useful as we’d like because people keep prioritizing their own convenience over others’ health and lives) pandemic restrictions. We’re fatigued. We’re traumatized. We’re So Done™.

No one will be surprised to hear that when I sat down to re-watch Survival for this month’s Hidden Gems entry, I was feeling less than enthused. So it speaks to the quality of this story that I was far less distracted than anticipated as the familiar events unfolded on screen.

The Doctor and Ace arrive in her hometown of Perivale so she can look up her old friends, but they’re nowhere to be found. As they search town together, Ace and the Doctor realize there’s something more sinister at play than just some angsty teens skipping out on a boring scene. Almost before they know it, they find themselves on another planet, where the Cheetah People hunt human prey and the Master (as usual) has his own nefarious agenda.

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Leave the Light On

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Review of Ghost Light (#153)
DVD Release Date: 07 Jun 05
Original Air Date: 04 – 18 Oct 1989
Doctors/Companions: Seven, Dorothy “Ace” McShane
Stars: Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred
Preceding Story: Battlefield (Seven, Ace, the Brigadier)
Succeeding Story: The Curse of Fenric (Seven, Ace)

Today begins (with a slight delay, since the regular fourth Wednesday slot was co-opted by a review of the latest new episode) this year’s series of regular reviews, focusing on “Hidden Gems” within the televised canon of Classic Doctor Who stories. Because the Seventh Doctor was next up for keeping the proportion of reviewed stories approximately even, we start with a story from the final regular season of the show’s original run, Ghost Light.

This is one of the stories whose ranking I’m fudging. Coming in at #53 of 254 on io9’s Best-to-Worst list—the highest ranking of those I’ll be reviewing this year—Ghost Light is actually still within the first quartile, rather than the second. However, it’s close enough for my purposes, and with a little handwavium, allows me to fit two of the remaining four unreviewed McCoy stories into this year’s theme where I need them.

Many fans speak highly of this episode, so I’m sure there are plenty of folks out there who would agree it’s a “gem,” but why is it not ranked higher, allowing me to claim it as “hidden”? I believe the answer lies simply in the fact that the plot is so complex, even the Doctor can’t follow it. (I mean that quite literally. At one point he declares, “Things are getting out of control. Even I can’t play this many games at once!”) It’s seriously mind-boggling. Admittedly, it had been some time since I’d last seen it, but despite knowing basically what was coming, I’ve never been quite able to keep all the threads of plot straight in my mind.

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Cirque du Docteur

Review of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (#152)
DVD Release Date: 05 Aug 08
Original Air Date: 14 Dec 1988 – 04 Jan 1989
Doctors/Companions: Seven, Ace
Stars: Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred
Preceding Story: Silver Nemesis (Seven, Ace)
Succeeding Story: Battlefield (Seven, Ace, the Brigadier)

Usually in mid- to late February, I post a recap of my entire Gally experience for the year, complete with photos. This year I didn’t have much in the way of shareable pictures, though, and I didn’t want to let February slip away without including a monthly review.

It seemed appropriate, therefore, that I compromise by giving a nod to Gallifrey One 2018 by reviewing a serial that was relevant to the con. Since many of the cast and crew of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (TGSitG) were guests at Gally this year (including Sylvester McCoy [Seventh Doctor], Sophie Aldred [Ace], Jessica Martin [Mags], Dee Sadler [Flowerchild], Adrew Cartmel [script editor], Stephen Wyatt [writer], and Mark Ayers [composer]), it seemed a perfect choice.

I don’t actually remember when I last watched TGSitG, but it has definitely been a number of years—enough so that my perspective on the setting seems to have changed significantly. I am fortunate to live in an area that has a circus school, and I’ve seen the students there perform some amazing feats over the last several years (including my own kids), so something that stuck out like a sore thumb this time around that I seem to have glossed over before is the nature of the “circus skills” the members of the Psychic Circus possess.

Bellboy tells Ace at one point that all the circus members had their own specialities, and that his was creating and repairing the robots that play such a prominent role (they are most of the background performers—clowns who tumble and ride unicycles). Flowerchild’s “skill” was creating kites. What the hell sort of circus has robots and kites? A psychic one, I guess, but it threw me for a loop when it was stated outright that those were the things that allowed those folks to become an integral part of the circus.

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More “Meh” Than Nemesis

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Review of Silver Nemesis (#151)
DVD Release Date: 02 Nov 10
Original Air Date: 23 Nov – 07 Dec 1988
Doctor/Companion: Seven, Ace McShane
Stars: Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred
Preceding Story: The Happiness Patrol (Seven, Ace)
Succeeding Story: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (Seven, Ace)

Marching through our list of under-represented Doctors (in terms of the percentage of their stories I have reviewed in one form or another), we come now to the Seventh Doctor, whose lone encounter with the Cybermen happened to fall on Doctor Who‘s twenty-fifth anniversary.

While the production team—writer Kevin Clarke in particular—made a valiant effort to add a sense of significance to the passage of that particular twenty-five years (1963-1988), the result was perhaps not as compelling as they might have hoped. Making that span the orbital period of an eccentric object (launched, it turns out, by the Doctor himself some 350 years prior) was not altogether a bad idea (presuming it’s orbiting the sun, that would put it beyond Jupiter, but not as far as Saturn, were it in a nearly circular orbit—which admittedly seems unlikely). However, the logical contortions they have to employ in order to make that quarter-century seem consistently historically significant are awkward at best (1913 is called out as “the eve of the First World War”; 1938 “Hitler annexes Austria”; 1963 “Kennedy assassinated”).

As for the Cybermen, they’re not even the eponymous Nemesis; that name actually belongs to a mysterious statue made of validium—”living metal.” Frankly, I found the title to be more about misdirection than double meaning. While one could argue that both statue and Cybermen are silver nemeses, the Cybermen are relegated to a secondary or even tertiary role.

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The Only Show in Town

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Review of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (#155)
DVD Release Date: 14 Aug 12
Original Air Date: 14 Dec 1988 – 04 Jan 1989
Doctor/Companion: Seven, Dorothy “Ace” McShane
Stars: Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred
Preceding Story: Silver Nemesis (Seven, Ace)
Succeeding Story: Battlefield (Seven, Ace, the Brigadier)

Having just come from a killer performance by Circus Juventas, watching Greatest Show was … a tad jarring. I’ve really come to love seeing all the ridiculously amazing things skilled folks can do with flexibility, balance, and trust in their partners, and having that utterly backgrounded for sleight of hand and (oh, dear god) the 1989 version of “rap” patter from the Ringmaster (what does it say about the British view of my country that this particular character had an “American” accent?) threw me off a bit. Once I got past wanting to see a circus and got back to seeing Doctor Who, it went a little better.

Sadly, I wanted to like it more than I did. Perhaps it will grow on me with further viewings (one can hope). Aside from the aforementioned circus angle, I’m not entirely sure why that’s the case, either. I mean it’s got plenty of mystery and suspense – “The Plot Thickens” was practically written across the screen every other scene – and anyone who follows the blog regularly will know I’m a sucker for Seven and Ace.

Ace, of course, is – as always – pitch perfect for me. Her bravado in the face of clowns that clearly creep her out (honestly can’t blame her – ick!) is an endearing part of her character. We know she’s really a tender, mixed-up teen under it all (which is, I believe, a great deal of what the Doctor loves about her), and trying her damnedest to put a brave tough face on it all. Throughout, she’s more obviously attuned to the bad vibes than the Doctor, but that’s part of his schtick at this point, too (as evidenced by one of the closing lines) – Intergalactic Man of Mystery, if you will. His personality in this Regeneration feels quite solid here, as if McCoy really knew by now where he wanted to take the character, and was ready to sink his teeth into that darker persona. Heaven knows I’ve got no complaints about these two leads.

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The Kandy Man Can’t

Review of The Happiness Patrol (#153)
DVD Release Date: 08 May 12
Original Air Date: 02-16 Nov 1988
Doctor/Companion: Seven, Dorothy “Ace” McShane
Stars: Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred
Preceding Story: Remembrance of the Daleks (Seven, Ace)
Succeeding Story: Silver Nemesis (Seven, Ace)

On the one hand, Seven and Ace always make me happy. On the other, Happiness Patrol is, umm… not the best executed story of all time. I’ll admit the premise is interesting enough (a planet where it’s illegal to be unhappy), but wow…

It’s disappointing not least because it actually starts out quite well, with a scene that completely creeped me out, as someone who has herself struggled with clinical depression. There’s enough of a stigma associated with mental illness in our society as it is, but to have even the slightest hints at one of the most common of them (depression) lead to one’s “disappearance”… It’s truly chilling.

Even the poor TARDIS isn’t immune. She ends up painted a “cheerful” shade of pink which actually prevented me from noticing her presence in the background of any of the scenes until I was watching the extras. It’s a nice little touch, though, reminding us that the TARDIS somehow does blend in, even when she doesn’t.

Sadly, the rest of the execution on this one, like so many before, is fettered by its budget. The effects are all-around rather poor, including the bizarre form of the Kandy Man and the pathetic excuse for a go-cart (even a child could have outpaced that thing on foot). And the lighting was atrocious. It’s like they decided that if it wasn’t going to be film noir (reputedly once the intention, or at least hope), then at least they could light it like crap to make it “dark.”

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Nu-View #8: Lucky Number Seven

The Curse of Fenric  (Story #158, 1989)
Viewed 15 May 2012

Doctor/Companion:   Seven, Ace
Stars:  Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred
Preceding Story:  Ghost Light (Seven, Ace)
Succeeding Story:  Survival (Seven, Ace)

The masses have small number of regular readers has spoken! The lucky winner of our who-do-the-Ladies-watch-next contest is Seven. Since we’ve already seen my favorite (Remembrance of the Daleks, Nu-View #6), I decided to go with another one that seems to be generally well-regarded by “the fans” (whatever that means).

Even more exciting than having let the readers decide our viewing material, we’ve got a new addition to the team! Please welcome the newest of the Ladies of WhoFest, L! L is a more recent acquaintance (now friend) of mine, and always acted a bit jealous when I’d talk about WhoFest. Finally, she asked, “how do I get in on this thing?” and here we are.

I’ve known for a while that L is a Whovian, because I could tell her things like the fact that Louise Jameson was a guest at Gally (though I did have to clarify with a “Leela”) and she knew enough to be jealous. It turns out she, much like jE, grew up watching Who, though not religiously. So there’s a lot she’s already seen, and plenty she’s missed. Sadly, jO was unable to join us again, but the rest of us had fun anyway.

After we’d made introductions all ’round, and L was settling in, jE took it upon herself to explain the format: “we make snarky comments while we watch.” What’s not to love? And L seemed to fit right in with the gang. As the story opened, jA noted that even the font used to subtitle the Russian was evocative of the ’80s; jE wondered how, with the boats all of 2 feet apart, the soldiers didn’t notice their “comrades getting eaten”; and L said she liked how they make them Russian by adding eyeliner. I just loved the way that Seven and Ace bluff their way onto the base: “About time, too!” huffs Seven, as the British soldiers finally get around to pointing guns at them to question their presence. It was very “Hounds of Baskerville“- or, y’know… vice versa.

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