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Tag: Bad Reputation

Do Androids Dream of Tin Dogs?

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Review of The Androids of Tara (#101)
DVD Release Date: 01 Mar 09
Original Air Date: 25 Nov – 16 Dec 1978
Doctors/Companions: Four, Romana I, K-9
Stars: Tom Baker, Mary Tamm, John Leeson
Preceding Story: The Stones of Blood (Four, Romana I)
Succeeding Story: The Power of Kroll (Four, Romana I)

When I decided on the next stories for the Bad Reputation™ series that I posted about last week, the four lowest-ranking Fourth Doctor selections in my spreadsheet surprised me. None of them struck me as particularly “bad,” and a couple I’d even go so far as to say I’m fond of.

Adding to the “hmm” factor, the first three of them were from the same season: The Key to Time (TKtT). So what gives?

The best I can figure is that when left to my own devices, I’ve already picked out both some of the very best and some of the very worst stories to talk about, leaving most of the “mid-range” adventures still in the queue. Even so, I don’t think I’d have predicted that The Androids of Tara, the fourth segment of TKtT, would fall in the bottom 15%. Yet in io9’s Best-to-Worst rankings, it came in at #217 of 254.

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Confession #123: I Messed Up

The first thing I have to confess today is that after Gallifrey One, I completely lost track of when I was supposed to be posting. What with my kids’ crazy spring schedule, the thirty-nine inches of snow we got in February that are now trying to melt off within a two-week span, and the siren call of my fiction writing, the blog simply fell off the radar.

It doesn’t help that I hadn’t put anything on my 2019 calendar that hadn’t dripped over from 2018 when I adjusted for my Series Eleven posts. Thus, here we are, a week late and a blog post short.

As I look ahead now, I realize that I’ve quite enjoyed the “Bad Reputation” series, and I’d like to continue it. So let me walk you through my decision-making process, and share what’s to come for the rest of the year.

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Dumpster of Fire

Review of Planet of Fire (#134)
DVD Release Date: 07 Sep 10
Original Air Date: 23 Feb – 02 Mar 1984
Doctors/Companions: Five, Vislor Turlough, Perpugilliam Brown
Stars: Peter Davison, Mark Strickson, Nicola Bryant
Preceding Story: Resurrection of the Daleks (Five, Tegan, Turlough)
Succeeding Story: The Caves of Androzani (Five, Peri)

For some reason, Planet of Fire has always sort of flown under my radar. In the back of my head, it had become “the story where both Mark Strickson and Nicola Bryant were scantily clad for their farewell/introduction, and there were volcanoes or something—oh yeah, and the Master.”

According to received fan wisdom (at least in the form of io9’s Best-to-Worst ranking, which puts PoF at #227 of 254), I can hardly be blamed. Even if I’d forgotten some of the key elements (the Master’s predicament, the final appearance of Kamelion, the revelation of Turlough’s secret past, and where all those intersect on a geologically active planet), there wasn’t much in any of it to endear it to viewers. (The exception, of course, is the aforementioned minimal costuming; I’ve heard at least one person say they learned something about themselves seeing Turlough in those shorts.)

Poor Kamelion stands out as one of the biggest problems. I’m sure the idea of a shape-changing robot sounded exciting to the writers (or JNT? I don’t know who’s responsible for Kamelion) when it was first proposed, but creating a plot that works well for such a character—and then realizing it satisfactorily on screen—appears to have been too difficult a task. (I did, however, once win a round of the Verity! Podcast “In Defense Of” game at Gallifrey One by successfully arguing for 60 seconds that “Kamelion is better than K-9,” using its role in helping to defeat the Master in PoF as one of my talking points.)

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Missing the Point

Review of Meglos (#110)
DVD Release Date: 11 Jan 11
Original Air Date: 27 Sep – 18 Oct 1980
Doctors/Companions: Four, Romana II, K-9
Stars: Tom Baker, Lalla Ward, John Leeson
Preceding Story: The Leisure Hive (Four, Romana II, K-9)
Succeeding Story: Full Circle (Four, Romana II, K-9, Adric)

Who doesn’t love a talking cactus? Or, better yet, a Doctor-shaped talking cactus with spine-covered skin? (If you guessed me, you’d be right.)

As with so many of the stories we’ve explored in this Bad Reputations series, there are some good ideas lurking at the heart of Meglos, but somehow they never come to fruition. The weirdly realized antagonist, its incoherent plan, and the heavy-handed religion-v-science subplot all contribute to an underwhelming product that lands at #200 of 254 on io9’s Best-to-Worst list.

Sometimes a rewatch helps me find something in a story that I hadn’t appreciated before. Usually, I find that my vague recollections only cover the surface of the plot or setting or characterization. To a certain extent that’s again true for Meglos, where Tom Baker’s cactus-y mien overshadowed all other memories such that even the identity of his Companion(s) had been lost to me. Realizing I got not only Jacqueline Hill (though not as Barbara) but also Lalla Ward’s Romana II was thus a delightful re-discovery.

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Marking the Unremarkable

Review of The Rescue (#11)
DVD Release Date: 07 Jul 09
Original Air Date: 02 – 09 Jan 1965
Doctors/Companions: One, Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright, Vicki
Stars: William Hartnell, William Russell, Jacqueline Hill, Maureen O’Brien
Preceding Story: The Dalek Invasion of Earth (One, Susan, Ian, Barbara)
Succeeding Story: The Romans (One, Ian, Barbara, Vicki)

On this fourth Wednesday of December, when another regular blog post is due, we find ourselves in that liminal space between the end of Series 11 and the airing of the New Year’s special, looking for a bit of Who-ey goodness to tide us over. With such awkward placement on the calendar, what better choice for a post than another entry in our Bad Reputations series?

Percentage-wise, it was time to return to the First Doctor, but since there aren’t that many of his stories left that are both (a) still on my un-reviewed list and (b) extant, the selection is pretty minimal. That’s why we ended up with this little two-episode bonbon. While it’s the lowest-rated of my remaining First Doctor options on io9’s Best-to-Worst list, it’s only three quarters of the way to the bottom (#194 of 254).

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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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