Menu Close

Tag: Classic Who

A Load of Bull

2 Comments

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.

Read more →

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.

Read more →

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.

Read more →

The Keys to Clime

3 Comments

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.

Read more →

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).

Read more →

Four-gettable

Review of Four to Doomsday (#117)
DVD Release Date: 06 Jan 09
Original Air Date: 18 – 26 Jan 1982
Doctors/Companions: Five, Adric, Nyssa of Traken, Tegan Jovanka
Stars: Peter Davison, Matthew Waterhouse, Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding
Preceding Story: Castrovalva (Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan)
Succeeding Story: Kinda (Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan)

When I selected Four to Doomsday (4tD) to appear in my series of stories with bad reputations, I suspect I had given it more bad-credit than it deserves. Perhaps it’s because on first viewing I gave the physics of the climactic “Doctor uses a cricket ball to fabulous effect” moment such serious side-eye. Mostly, though, I think 4tD simply flies too far under the radar as a middle-of-the-road installment. It is so unremarkable as to be forgettable.

The Doctor’s first attempt to return Tegan to Heathrow Airport so she can finally start her new job goes (predictably) wrong, and the TARDIS crew lands instead on some sort of spaceship. The technology present is advanced enough to delight the Doctor and Nyssa as they explore. The crew soon find three slightly ominous beings in charge of the strange vessel. They introduce themselves as Monarch, Enlightenment, and Persuasion, and inform the Doctor that they are from the now-destroyed planet Urbanka.

Meanwhile, the TARDIS team also find several people who are obviously from Earth, including an ancient Greek philosopher named Bigon, an Australian Aboriginal man named Kurkutji, one Princess Villagra of the Maya, and an imperial Chinese official named Lin Futu. The circumstances surrounding the presence of these people and their subordinates on a ship filled with (unseen) Urbankan refugees are part of the mystery to be solved.

Read more →

It’s the Pits

2 Comments

Review of The Creature from the Pit (#106)
DVD Release Date: 07 Sep 10
Original Air Date: 22 Oct – 17 Nov 1979
Doctors/Companions: Four, Romana II
Stars: Tom Baker, Lalla Ward
Preceding Story: City of Death (Four, Romana II)
Succeeding Story: Nightmare of Eden (Four, Romana II)

Looking over my spreadsheet of Classic stories I have yet to review, I can see that I’ve made some progress over the last seven-plus years. However, there are still a couple of Doctors whose runs are, proportionately speaking, underrepresented. So how do I choose which stories from those eras to review in the coming months?

I decided to go with a theme of Bad Reputations.

It was surprisingly easy to make suitable selections. You see, a person naturally gravitates towards the stories she likes when she has a choice of which ones to talk about. After all, if you have to watch something again to refresh your memory, it’s no surprise the enjoyable ones rise to the top of the list. This far into the game, then, there are going to be a fair number of clunkers left. And since Verity! podcast last week released their interview with Lalla Ward from last November’s LI Who, one of the stories discussed therein—Lalla’s first one on set—seemed a perfect place to start.

The Creature from the Pit (TCftP) has a well-deserved reputation. It is, hard as it tries, a hot mess from start to finish. K-9’s voice is wrong (David Brierley voiced him for this single season instead of John Leeson); the folks on Chloris, the planet where the story is set, have precious little imagination (“We call it ‘the Pit'” and “We call it ‘the Creature'” are among the more scintillating lines of dialog…); and the plot ranges from poorly considered to straight up non-sensical. And all that says nothing of the Creature itself.

Read more →

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.

Read more →

Setting the Standard

4 Comments

Review of The Five Doctors (#129)
DVD Release Date: 05 Aug 08
Original Air Date: 25 Nov 1983
Doctors/Companions: Five, One, Two, Three, Four (cameo), Tegan, Turlough, Susan, the Brigadier, Sarah Jane, Romana II (cameo)
Stars: Peter Davison, Richard Hurndall, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, (Tom Baker), Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson, Carole Ann Ford, Nicholas Courtney, Elisabeth Sladen, (Lalla Ward)
Preceding Story: The King’s Demons (Five, Tegan, Turlough, Kamelion)
Succeeding Story: Warriors of the Deep (Five, Tegan, Turlough)

With tomorrow’s anniversary of the show’s beginnings, I felt now would be an appropriate time to look back at a different celebration of its history. Though this year we mark fifty-four years since the show’s inception, 1983 was merely twenty, and the Powers That Beeb decided they couldn’t let such a large, round number go unnoticed.

Here in the post-fiftieth-anniversary era, we think of that celebration as having pulled out all the stops, but really, it was The Five Doctors that set the standard. And while, like Moffat, JNT didn’t get everyone he wanted to participate, he nonetheless pulled together a remarkable cast, including—in a way—all five incarnations of the Doctor who had appeared up to that point.

While First Doctor William Hartnell had (just barely) managed perform a part in the tenth anniversary story The Three Doctors, he was already eight years dead by the time this next milestone rolled around. Rather than exclude his Doctor entirely, though, JNT simply recast Richard Hurndall in the role, much like David Bradley has taken over the same in the modern era. But much like Eccleston for the fiftieth, Tom Baker could not be convinced to reprise his own Fourth Doctor (reportedly because he thought it was too soon).

Read more →

No Need to Gild the Orchid

2 Comments

Review of Black Orchid (#120)
DVD Release Date: 05 Aug 08
Original Air Date: 01 – 02 Mar 1982
Doctor/Companion: Five, Tegan Jovanka, Nyssa, Adric
Stars: Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, Sarah Sutton, Matthew Waterhouse
Preceding Story: The Visitation (Five, Tegan, Nyssa, Adric)
Succeeding Story: Earthshock (Five, Tegan, Nyssa, Adric)

It’s time to throw a little love the Fifth Doctor’s way, as he is currently the most under-represented (percentage-wise) in my reviews. And, since I was short on time, why not start with a nice, quick two-parter?

Besides its length, the other advantage of delving into Black Orchid is the fact that it is a “pure historical,” one in which there are no science-fictional plot elements (aside from our heroes’ presence outside their own time, and the brief use of the TARDIS to hop between locations). It is, in fact, the first pure historical since the Second Doctor’s second outing in The Highlanders (more than fifteen years prior), and the last to be broadcast on TV to date.

However, some have suggested that new showrunner Chris Chibnall might bring back the pure historical (an idea I wholeheartedly support). Reviewing how such a story can work—and work well—is thus a fine exercise.

Our story begins when the TARDIS brings her crew back to Earth in June of 1925, where strange things are afoot at the Cranleigh family manor. As has often happened, the TARDIS crew walk in at just the right time for a case of mistaken identity to take hold, though this time there’s a twist—not only is the Doctor taken to be the anticipated replacement cricketer, but Nyssa is the spitting image of Charles Cranleigh’s fiancée Ann.

Read more →