Menu Close

Tag: Classic Who

Tranquil Rewatch

1 Comment

Review of Revelation of the Daleks (#142)
DVD Release Date: 06 Jun 06
Original Air Date: 23 – 30 Mar 1985
Doctors/Companions: Six, Perpugilliam “Peri” Brown
Stars: Colin Baker, Nicola Bryant
Preceding Story: Timelash (Six, Peri)
Succeeding Story: The Mysterious Planet (Six, Peri)

Circumstances conspired against me again, and I was in no mood to appreciate even a Hidden Gem like Revelation of the Daleks when I sat down to rewatch it. Although I’ve come to appreciate Ol’ Sixie, he’s still among my least favorite Doctors to watch; I’ve gotten pretty tired of Daleks over the years; and to top it all off, I was fighting off a fever and sore throat.

Nevertheless, as the fog of obligation retreats, and I can reflect on it from the other side of that viewing, I find there are plenty of things to recommend Revelation. On a purely superficial level, for example, we have the Doctor’s coat-of-many-colors covered for most of the first 45-minute episode by a lovely blue cloak.

I’d also forgotten that this was Peri’s introduction to the Daleks. When she sees one roll past, then, she doesn’t immediately warn the Doctor of the danger; she merely calls out with startlement about “some sort of machinery.” To his credit, the Doctor doesn’t chastise her; he merely goes to investigate.

That point, in fact, is probably one of the best parts of the entire adventure, and one that didn’t even register as I was watching (a sure sign that I was not giving it my full attention—or at least not what would’ve been my full attention pre-pandemic). One of the most difficult things about the early parts of Colin Baker’s run is the way the writers had the Doctor and Peri at each other’s throats all the time. One of the reasons I love Mark of the Rani so much (aside from the Rani herself) is that the TARDIS team acts like they actually have affection for each other.

Read more →

A View Through Interesting Times

Review of Planet of the Daleks (#68)
DVD Release Date: 02 Mar 10
Original Air Date: 07 Apr – 12 May 1973
Doctors/Companions: Three, Jo Grant
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning
Preceding Story: Frontier in Space (Three, Jo)
Succeeding Story: The Green Death (Three, Jo, the Brigadier)

A whole lot has changed around the world in the three weeks since my last post went up. Locally, my kids’ school had a teachers’ strike just before COVID-19 really hit our state. By the time classes were ready to resume, the governor had ordered schools closed for two weeks, which leads up to our scheduled spring break. I kind of doubt in-person classes will resume until the fall.

Meanwhile, my family has been self-isolating. Though our introverted tendencies make the change less awkward for us than for some, the added stress of a global pandemic has wreaked havoc on my concentration and my sense of chill. Maybe that’s why a slow-starting story failed to grab me.

I had hoped that I’d enjoy Planet of the Daleks more. After all, it’s meant to be one of the Hidden Treasures, and I know from past experience that I don’t dislike it. But the rewatch primarily felt like a chore.

As I try to separate my general malaise from feelings about the adventure itself, and look at the story as objectively as I possibly can, I believe that the somewhat expository opening episode is the weakest part. It serves primarily as set-up for the following sections, and as such felt like a bit of a slog.

Read more →

Step Into the Mystery

Review of Warriors’ Gate (#113)
DVD Release Date: 05 May 09
Original Air Date: 03 – 24 Jan 1981
Doctors/Companions: Four, Romana II, K-9, Adric
Stars: Tom Baker, Lalla Ward, John Leeson, Matthew Waterhouse
Preceding Story: State of Decay (Four, Romana II, K-9, Adric)
Succeeding Story: The Keeper of Traken (Four, Adric, Nyssa)

One of the things about Classic Who that’s become more obvious in retrospect is how the multi-part serial format allowed for extensive story set-up, leading to a slow build. So begins the final installment in The E-Space Trilogy, the spacetime-bending Warriors’ Gate.

Effectively all of Part One is background, laying the scene for what comes after in the manner that a modern audience expects more to see in a novel than in a TV show. We meet the human crew of a cargo ship stranded in some strange void, reminiscent of The Mind Robber (which I’m set to review in October); the Doctor and his friends soon find themselves there, too. The humans’ navigator is a leonine being, apparently enslaved, who breaks free, enters the TARDIS out of phase with their timeline, and then retreats via a door in a stone arch through an ancient, cobwebby great hall. The Doctor follows.

One could be forgiven for thinking, at this stage, that there’s not much to this story, and that one’s time could be better spent elsewhere. But there are several mysterious situations established here that develop in interesting ways through the rest of the serial. What’s the relationship between the Tharils—those leonine beings valued for being “time sensitive”—and the humans? What’s up with the microcosmic void? Is it really near the boundary of E-Space and N-Space, and why does it seem unstable? And is that ancient hall really as abandoned as it looks?

Read more →

Leave the Light On

4 Comments

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.

Read more →

Theme of the Year: Hidden Gems

2 Comments

Happy New Year, everyone! We made it to 2020!

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been doing reviews of Classic era stories under the Bad Reputation umbrella. That’s been a great deal of fun, and there are still a few stories that I haven’t reviewed that would fit well into that category. But I thought that it would be nice to change things up this year, and go a different direction.

Enter “Hidden Gems”! For 2020, I’ll be reviewing stories that are neither revered nor reviled, the workhorse stories of the second quartile. These adventures don’t show up in the standard “Best of” lists, nor in the “Worst of” ones, but are still generally decent stories. Using the same list from io9 as a reference, I wanted to look at stories that fall in that 25-50% range. With 254 titles from which to choose, that gives me stories ranking #63 to #127 to work with.

I also wanted to continue to keep my distribution of Doctors as even as possible. Using my handy-dandy spreadsheet, I chose order of Doctors by what would maintain the most even proportion of as-yet-unreviewed stories across all seven of them. I let that order take precedence over the 2nd-quartile requirement, so I’m fudging a bit on the Seventh Doctor, and stretching things utterly with the Third, using the stories that fit my criteria most closely within the bounds of those available.

So for those of you who might want to watch along, here’s the schedule for 2020. Reviews will post on the fourth Wednesday of each month.

Hidden Gems
January: Ghost Light (io9 #53) Seventh Doctor
February: Warriors’ Gate (io9 #87) Fourth Doctor
March: Planet of the Daleks (io9 #147) Third Doctor
April: Revelation of the Daleks (io9 #113) Sixth Doctor
May: The Sontaran Experiment (io9 #101) Fourth Doctor
June: The Daleks (io9 #76) First Doctor
July: Mawdryn Undead (io9 #63) Fifth Doctor
August: Survival (io9 #91) Seventh Doctor
September: The Curse of Peladon (io9 #153) Third Doctor
October: The Mind Robber (io9 #99) Second Doctor
November: The Brain of Morbius (io9 #110) Fourth Doctor
December: The Time Meddler (io9 #79) First Doctor
Read more →

A Royal Mess

Review of The King’s Demons (#128)
DVD Release Date: 07 Sep 10
Original Air Date: 15 – 16 Mar 1983
Doctors/Companions: Five, Tegan Jovanka, Vislor Turlough
Stars: Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson
Preceding Story: Enlightenment (Five, Tegan, Turlough)
Succeeding Story: The Five Doctors (Five, One, Two, Three, Tegan, Turlough, Susan, the Brigadier, Sarah Jane)

Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate!

Since the holiday happens to fall on a fourth Wednesday, when my regularly scheduled review posts are due, y’all get an extra Christmasy (read: not Christmasy at all) treat with my final planned entry in the Bad Reputation series. (Don’t worry; there will be a new theme for reviews in 2020. Stay tuned for that announcement next week!)

The treat for me is that The King’s Demons, ranked #214 of 254 in io9’s Best-to-Worst list, is only two episodes long. That’s right: if you want to play along at home, you need not even devote a full hour this time. Unfortunately, that’s one of the few positive notes.

In principle, it’s not a bad story. The Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough stumble into medieval England, mere months before King John signs the Magna Carta, only to discover a plot to discredit the king and change the course of history.

Read more →

Eldrad Must Get On With It

Review of The Hand of Fear (#87)
DVD Release Date: 10 Aug 09
Original Air Date: 02 – 23 Oct 1976
Doctors/Companions: Four, Sarah Jane Smith
Stars: Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen
Preceding Story: The Masque of Mandragora (Four, Sarah Jane)
Succeeding Story: The Deadly Assassin (Four)

There are many memorable things about The Hand of Fear: the disembodied hand, “Eldrad must live,” Sarah Jane’s outfit, and—of course!—her touching, somewhat precipitous farewell. Unfortunately, plot is not among them.

Perhaps that’s why io9’s Best-to-Worst list ranked it in the bottom 30%, at #187 of 254. While plenty of other stories I’ve reviewed have fared far worse (see, for example, The Monster of Peladon, Terminus, and Timelash), HoF is the lowest-ranked of the Fourth Doctor’s remaining titles on my “to be reviewed” list, so here we are.

It all starts out promisingly enough, with a quarry actually acting as a quarry, for once. The Doctor and Sarah Jane land there accidentally just as some charges are set to detonate, resulting in Sarah Jane being buried. She reaches for a hand held out to her that turns out to be a piece of the remains of an alien being known as Eldrad.

Read more →

Worth a Visit

Review of The Space Museum (#15)
DVD Release Date: 06 Jul 10
Original Air Date: 24 Apr – 15 May 1965
Doctors/Companions: One, Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright, Vicki
Stars: William Hartnell, William Russell, Jacqueline Hill, Maureen O’Brien
Preceding Story: The Crusade (One, Ian, Barbara, Vicki)
Succeeding Story: The Chase (One, Ian, Barbara, Vicki, Steven)

As Bad Reputation™ stories go, The Space Museum is not poorly thought of at all. Clocking in at #168 of 254 in io9’s Best-to-Worst ranking, it barely falls into the bottom third. In fact, it’s more than 30 places ahead of the next “stinkiest” entry I’ve had to date—itself another Hartnell adventure.

All that is to say, the Hartnell era is not as unpalatable as some might have you believe. It certainly has its quirks, as a product of its time—sets more suited to a stage than to modern television, one-chance filming that leaves the famous Hartnell line flubs intact, and so on—but especially when one considers how new science fiction television was, it’s actually quite innovative.

The Space Museum makes an excellent case in point. Only the fifteenth storyline of the nascent program’s history, it’s the show’s first real foray into what someday would be dubbed “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.” Our heroes struggle with the mind-bending issue of having seen themselves displayed as exhibits in the Museum in what turns out to be their near future. How can they avoid that fate?

Read more →

Not the End of the World

Review of The Armageddon Factor (#103)
DVD Release Date: 09 Mar 09
Original Air Date: 20 Jan – 24 Feb 1979
Doctors/Companions: Four, Romana I, K-9
Stars: Tom Baker, Mary Tamm, John Leeson
Preceding Story: The Power of Kroll (Four, Romana I)
Succeeding Story: Destiny of the Daleks (Four, Romana II)

This month marks the fourth of six installments of The Key to Time that has made it onto the Bad Reputation list. The Armageddon Factor is, however, the highest-ranked of those four on io9’s Best-to-Worst list, coming in at #207 of 254, putting it in only the bottom fifth of televised canon.

It had been a good long while since I’d last watched this one, so I’d forgotten a great deal of both the plot and the trappings. For example, it came as a bit of a surprise to discover how much of the story revolved around that last piece of the Key to Time. To be honest, pretty much all I remembered were who the Doctor and Companion were, and that a guest character was wearing a future Companion’s body (or, more correctly, vice versa).

To set the stage for readers who, like me, need either a refresher or an introduction to the adventure, the Doctor and Romana I are in pursuit of the final segment of the Key to Time when they arrive at a pair of twin planets, only one of which is where they expect. Atrios and Zeos are, to our heroes’ surprise, in midst of a nuclear war.

Read more →

Confession #129: I’ve Never Read a Target Novelization

2 Comments

Just shy of two weeks ago, on 29 Aug 2019, the Doctor Who community lost another vital member when Terrance “Uncle Terry” Dicks died. Dicks made an indelible mark on the show as both script editor (particularly alongside producer Barry Letts) and writer during the Second, Third, and Fourth Doctors’ tenures. Later he also wrote several audio adventures for Big Finish.

But many fans know him best as the author of of over sixty Target novelizations of Classic television adventures, spanning six Doctors. I’ve heard many such fans wax poetic over the importance of those books in their young lives. Yet I have never read any of them myself.

Given the fact that I am a text-based lifeform, my lack of experience with Target novelizations may seem odd. After all, for someone who grew up as a voracious reader (and is raising a pair now), a vast supply of related books seems like it ought to be a no-brainer to add to the ol’ To Be Read (TBR) pile. But there are two major factors at play that work against that course of action.

Read more →