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Review of Enlightenment (#127)

DVD Release Date: 08 Jun 21
Original Air Date: 01 – 09 Mar 1983
Doctors/Companions: Five, Tegan Jovanka, Vislor Turlough
Stars: Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson
Preceding Story: Terminus (Five, Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough)
Succeeding Story: The King’s Demons (Five, Tegan, Turlough)

I’ve occasionally heard other fans talk about how much they enjoy Enlightenment, but it’s not one that’s made much of an impression on me before (thus its fate as a member of Everything Else). Maybe I just never consider it, as part of an era I usually find a little dull.

But despite starring the Beige Doctor, and including both a baddie with a bird on his head and one of the more irritating Companions, the plot and the other Companion being awesome—that’s Tegan, one of my personal faves—make it eminently watchable.

Going in, pretty much all I remembered about Enlightenment was the race. I also knew it involved the Black Guardian and the end of Turlough’s interactions with him, but that was as much due to having pulled it out of my Black Guardian boxed set as anything. And though I didn’t write it down in my pre-viewing notes, I had at least a vague impression of Captain Wrack in my mind.

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Welcome to Year Thirteen

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Triskaidekaphobes may not care for the idea that I’m highlighting this as the thirteenth year of the blog, but in my household thirteen is actually one of our favorite numbers. Further, we’ve just ended the Thirteenth Doctor’s era, and I can look forward to meeting Jodie Whittaker herself at Gallifrey One next month. I’d say Year Thirteen is worth celebrating.

This year will, as I’ve hinted before, be the last for the blog. Now that I’ve finally sold some fiction (you can find my first published story here, if you’re interested; I use a pen name), I want to focus more of my time and energy on that kind of writing. There are also several other personal stressors that have ramped up recently, and I simply have less energy to dedicate to blogging.

That’s not to say this year will be lax. I hope to be able to announce my part in that project to which I alluded a couple of years ago. I’ll be reporting on my experiences at Gally as usual, with the bonus of having one of my kiddos with me to provide fresh eyes. And I will finish up my Everything Else series of reviews of the Classic adventures.

Given that there are only five of those left, the blog schedule gets a bit loose around mid-year. But here is the schedule for those final five stories:

  • Jan 25: The Dalek Invasion of Earth
  • Feb 08: Enlightenment
  • Mar 22: The Invasion of Time
  • Apr 26: Frontier in Space
  • May 24: The Pirate Planet
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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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Devils Under the Sea

Review of Warriors of the Deep (#130)

DVD Release Date: 03 Jun 08
Original Air Date: 05 – 13 Jan 1984
Doctors/Companions: Five, Tegan Jovanka, Vislor Turlough
Stars: Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson
Preceding Story: The Five Doctors (Five, Tegan, Turlough)
Succeeding Story: The Awakening (Five, Tegan, Turlough)

One of the unintended benefits of this year’s “Everything Else” themed reviews is that I get to talk about the Sea Devils, who are slated to appear in the next special some time this spring. (My guess is on or around Easter, which is April 17.) In fact, I get to review both of their on-screen appearances, first this month in Warrior of the Deep and then at the end of April (presumably shortly after the aforementioned special) in their debut story The Sea Devils.

Somewhat ironically, while the Sea Devils are the eponymous warriors here, what most people remember about this story (when they bother to remember it at all) is the non-sentient monster of the piece, the Myrka. Before listening to the recent Verity! podcast episode about Warriors, I had forgotten pretty much everything else myself. But the Myrka is actually a relatively small player in the overall story, while humanity’s willingness to annihilate itself, and individual humans’ willingness to exploit each other, are more immediate threats.

Watching Warriors nearly forty years after its broadcast (which makes me feel really old), I get a strange sense both that I completely agree with Tegan’s point that very little has changed in the 100 years since her time (~60 years from now) and that things are quite different. To wit, the last time I watched it, I have a vague recollection of having felt much more sympathetic angst about the destruction of humanity.

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Could’ve Been Worse

Review of Arc of Infinity (#124)

DVD Release Date: 06 Nov 07
Original Air Date: 03 – 12 Jan 1983
Doctors/Companions: Five, Nyssa of Traken, Tegan Jovanka
Stars: Peter Davison, Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding
Preceding Story: Time-Flight (Five, Nyssa, Tegan)
Succeeding Story: Snakedance (Five, Nyssa, Tegan)

The entries for this year’s theme of Highs & Lows end with Arc of Infinity, which is one I never know how to rank. It seems not to have left a strong impression on me one way or the other, aside from the slowly decaying “Doctor” at the end. I guess that makes it more of a personal “Meh” than either a High or a Low.

So I kind of went into my re-watch this time with an open mind. Would it be better than I thought? Worse than I thought? Who knew; I would leave myself open to any possibility.

In the end, I think I came out in roughly the same place as Charlie Jane Anders in her rankings on io9 back in 2015, where she placed Arc of Infinity at #205 of 254 entries, or roughly the 20th percentile. It wasn’t so horrific that I would flinch at the idea of watching it again, but neither did it have much to recommend it.

Primarily, I found that the plot—wherein the Doctor is forcibly recalled to Gallifrey because some as-yet-unidentified extra-dimensional entity has tried to cross dimensions by bonding with the Doctor’s physical form, and the High Council wants to prevent the entity from doing so at any cost—relied so heavily on arcane sci fi elements of Time Lord technology that it was difficult to follow.

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Slipping Subtly Onto a Soapbox

Review of Snakedance (#125)

DVD Release Date: 12 Apr 11
Original Air Date: 18 – 26 Jan 1983
Doctors/Companions: Five, Nyssa of Traken, Tegan Jovanka
Stars: Peter Davison, Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding
Preceding Story: Arc of Infinity (Five, Nyssa, Tegan)
Succeeding Story: Mawdryn Undead (Five, Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough, the Brigadier)

I’m not sure if it’s because I didn’t grow up watching these stories, because I find the Fifth Doctor’s era nearly as beige as his costume, or because of something else, but I don’t really have a strong impression of many of the early-80s stories. So when I popped Snakedance into my machine to watch it again, I really didn’t know whether this month’s adventure was supposed to be a High or a Low.

Happily enough, it didn’t take much run-time for me to decide which end of the scale it occupied (it ranks #57 on io9’s list); I could relax into it and watch without keeping an eye on the clock the way I do with some of the Lows.

We discover early on that poor Tegan is not rid of the evil Mara that invaded her mind nearly a season beforehand (Kinda aired in February 1982). Instead, it is invading her dreams to begin to take control of her. Under its influence, she sets the TARDIS coordinates for Manussa, where the people are celebrating the banishment of the Mara some five hundred years ago. Almost no one believes in the prophecy of the Mara’s return, but thanks to Tegan and her serpentine mental parasite, prophetic events begin to unfold anyway.

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Memories Unlocked

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Review of Mawdryn Undead (#125)

DVD Release Date: 03 Nov 09
Original Air Date: 01 – 09 Feb 1983
Doctors/Companions: Five, Nyssa of Traken, Tegan Jovanka, Vislor Turlough, the Brigadier
Stars: Peter Davison, Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson, Nicholas Courtney
Preceding Story: Snakedance (Five, Nyssa, Tegan)
Succeeding Story: Terminus (Five, Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough)

I’ll be the first to admit that the Fifth Doctor’s era is not at the top of my list of personal favorites. Maybe that’s why so many of them are vague and nebulous in my memory, including Mawdryn Undead. Yet nearly the only thing I clearly remembered about it turned out to be pretty much the last plot detail in the whole story.

As the introductory story for clearly-not-from-Earth schoolboy Turlough, MU might seem like one that would be rather memorable. And while I rarely hear anyone loudly singing its praises, neither does it get regularly ripped on within fandom. Falling at #63 of 254 in the io9 ranking, it just squeaks under the wire into the top quartile. That all puts it solidly in Hidden Gem territory, a not-bad-but-rarely-a-favorite adventure that’s worth revisiting.

When we meet Turlough, he’s being generally mischievous, crashing the Brigadier’s one-of-a-kind car that’s been parked in front of the boarding school where Turlough is a student and the Brigadier has been teaching. He’s immediately unlikable to me, and I can’t even really feel sorry for him when the Black Guardian appears to manipulate him into doing the Guardian’s dirty work.

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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.

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Terminal Boredom

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Review of Terminus (#126)
DVD Release Date: 10 Aug 09
Original Air Date: 15 – 23 Feb 1983
Doctors/Companions: Five, Nyssa, Tegan Jovanka, Vislor Turlough
Stars: Peter Davison, Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson
Preceding Story: Mawdryn Undead (Five, Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough, the Brigadier)
Succeeding Story: Enlightenment (Five, Tegan, Turlough)

Terminus is one of several stories in this Bad Reputation™ series that had made very little impression on me. I had vague recollections of it being Nyssa’s farewell story, and little else. When I pulled out my DVD and looked at the cover I went, “Oh yeah—that furry critter. What was it called?”

Upon further reflection, I remembered a plague ship, Nyssa wearing a short skirt (and later disrobing), and some sort of off-limits space where the critter (for the record, it’s known as the Garm) resided. Anything else—save the presence of the rest of the main cast—was a blur.

As I began re-watching, I realized I wasn’t really going to be able to argue much with this story’s placement in io9’s Best-to-Worst ranking, where it came in at #229 of 254, putting it in the bottom 10%. While there’s nothing overtly bad about it, there’s also precious little that I’d consider good.

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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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