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Really Creepy Soap Bubbles

Review of The Seeds of Death (#48)

DVD Release Date: 12 Jun 12
Original Air Date: 25 Jan – 01 Mar 1969
Doctors/Companions: Two, Jamie McCrimmon, Zoë Heriot
Stars: Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines, Wendy Padbury
Preceding Story: The Krotons (Two, Jamie, Zoë)
Succeeding Story: The Space Pirates (Two, Jamie, Zoë)

When I first decided to finish off the blog with the Everything Else category of reviews, I had The Seeds of Death scheduled for October 2022. However, since we had the delight of Whittaker’s final episode last month, my October review slot ended up being filled by that instead. As I had no desire to shift my entire posting schedule, and didn’t want either to skip Seeds of Death or to move it to the very end, this month you get a bonus review instead of a confession.

It turns out that the timing couldn’t have been better. This past week has been a bit rough for me on a personal level, and so the gentler pacing of a black-and-white era story ended up being exactly what I needed. Even with a high body count, this adventure was well paced enough to feel relatively calm to me.

The Doctor, Jaime, and Zoë arrive on Earth at a time where space exploration has been effectively halted, and transport of both people and goods is accomplished almost exclusively by T-MAT, a high-tech matter transmission system. But there are weaknesses in the system that an enemy can take advantage of, which is how the Ice Warriors end up making a play to take Earth for themselves.

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Two for Six

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Review of The Two Doctors (#140)

DVD Release Date: 29 Jul 20
Original Air Date: 16 Feb – 02 Mar 1985
Doctors/Companions: Six, Two, Perpugilliam Brown, Jamie McCrimmon
Stars: Colin Baker, Patrick Troughton, Nicola Bryant, Frazer Hines
Preceding Story: The Mark of the Rani (Six, Peri)
Succeeding Story: Timelash (Six, Peri)

Robert Holmes is among the most revered writers in Classic Who fandom (and rightfully so, imo), so when I fired up my DVD of The Two Doctors to refresh my memory for this review, I was utterly surprised to see his name in the credits. It’s not that I had remembered this serial as particularly bad, whereas most Holmes titles are distinctly among the good, but rather that I didn’t have a very strong sense of the story at all.

I always make a few notes for myself before a re-watch about what details of the particular adventure I actually recall, and they were pretty thin on the ground this time. Aside from the presence of the eponymous reincarnations—Two serving as support for Six—I remembered the Androgums (though not by name; all I could pull out was the final syllable), the location shooting in Spain, a lepidopterist, and Jaime trapped in some sort of matrix-y space.

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Now With More Terror

Review of The Macra Terror (#34)
DVD Release Date: 12 Nov 19
Original Air Date: 11 Mar – 01 Apr 1967
Doctors/Companions: Two, Jamie McCrimmon, Ben Jackson, Polly Wright
Stars: Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines, Michael Craze, Anneke Wills
Preceding Story: The Moonbase (Two, Jamie, Ben, Polly)
Succeeding Story: The Faceless Ones (Two, Jamie, Ben, Polly)

Welcome to the first DVD review of 2022! Before I get into the actual review, I’d like to talk about themes.

For the past several years, I’ve had an overarching theme of sorts for these monthly reviews (Highs & Lows, Hidden Gems, Bad Reputation…), and so I wanted another such theme for this year. As I looked over my list of remaining stories to review, though, I realized two key things: (1) there are 17 adventures left for me to review from the Classic era (an awkward prime number at best), and (2) there is no real underlying connection among them.

My eventual conclusion was that my theme could be nothing but a catch-all. Like the final room of a museum from a favorite childhood book, I would label them “Everything Else.” And since they don’t fit nicely into a whole number of years, I’ll simply keep going until they run out.

That takes us midway through 2023. I’ve said before that I don’t know how much longer I’m likely to continue blogging here; Confessions of a Neowhovian is getting pretty long in the tooth as it begins its twelfth year. But with Classic stories still to cover through mid-2023, and a 60th anniversary special to come that November, I think I can safely commit to continuing the blog through its 13th year.

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Slave to the Quarks

Review of The Dominators (#44)

DVD Release Date: 11 Jan 11
Original Air Date: 10 Aug – 07 Sep 1968
Doctors/Companions: Two, Jamie McCrimmon, Zoë Heriot
Stars: Patrick Troughton, Fraser Hines, Wendy Padbury
Preceding Story: The Wheel in Space (Two, Jamie, Zoë)
Succeeding Story: The Mind Robber (Two, Jamie, Zoë)

This month I am taking one for the team. I knew this was coming when I decided on this year’s “Highs and Lows” theme, but everything feels a bit different when I’m actually faced with viewing one of the Lows. At least I knew what I was getting into before I started.

Which is not to say that I remembered much of the plot of The Dominators before I began my rewatch. Mostly I remembered that the stumpy little robots called the Quarks were introduced here—reputedly with the ambition of becoming the next Daleks, a new robot to scare the kiddies and delight toy companies with sales. (Their obscurity fifty-odd years later is a testament to how well that went.)

Now that I have seen it again, I… primarily remember the Quarks.

Frankly, I think the root of the problem with this adventure is the same as the problem with the Quarks. The Quarks don’t work because unlike the Daleks, who serve as a fascist allegory, or the Cybermen, who sprang from body horror, they really serve no narrative purpose. They are mindless drones who do the bidding of the eponymous baddies, and unlike Daleks or Cybermen, could easily have been replaced with a simple weapon like some sort of laser borer.

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Faces Old and New

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Review of The Faceless Ones (#35)

DVD Release Date: 20 Oct 20
Original Air Date: 08 Apr – 13 May 1967
Doctors/Companions: Two, Ben Jackson, Polly Wright, Jamie McCrimmon
Stars: Patrick Troughton, Michael Craze, Anneke Wills, Fraser Hines
Preceding Story: The Macra Terror (Two, Ben, Polly, Jamie)
Succeeding Story: The Evil of the Daleks (Two, Jamie, Victoria)

Welcome to the first installment of the new review series Highs & Lows! We’re starting off with a story only recently added to the DVD ranks with an animated reconstruction. The Faceless Ones is a six-part Second Doctor story with only two extant episodes, but the animation team has recreated all six episodes for this late-2020 release. One has the choice to watch the story with the existing episodes (1 and 3) interspersed, or as a fully animated version.

Although it is certainly not the first such reconstruction, the animation here is less to my taste than some of the others. The movement and detailing of the scenes is fine, and certainly didn’t bother me, but I don’t find the character design particularly flattering to the original actors. I kept getting distracted by Jamie’s or the Doctor’s oddly-shaped faces.

Looking beyond the mechanics of the reconstruction to the story itself, though, I find it surprising that its ranking on the io9 list is so low (#244 of 254). Charlie Jane Anders, the list’s author, says that the main premise of The Faceless Ones, in which young people’s forms are being copied as new identities for aliens “isn’t enough of a plot to sustain six episodes.” (She ranks Terror of the Zygons at #84. I guess those two extra episodes were too much.)

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The Most Meta Meta That Ever Meta’ed

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Review of The Mind Robber (#45)

DVD Release Date: 06 Sep 05
Original Air Date: 14 Sep – 12 Oct 1968
Doctors/Companions: Two, Jamie McCrimmon, Zoe Heriot
Stars: Patrick Troughton, Fraser Hines, Wendy Padbury
Preceding Story: The Dominators (Two, Jamie, Zoe)
Succeeding Story: The Invasion (Two, Jamie, Zoe)

When I drew up my schedule for this year’s series of review posts and settled on Hidden Gems as a theme, I was delighted when it rolled back around to the Second Doctor’s turn. Although The Mind Robber may be considered mid-list, I have often used it as one of the better adventures for introducing new viewers to Troughton. There are enough bizarre twists and story conceits to keep it fresh. It also doesn’t hurt that even though there are five episodes, they only total about 99 minutes.

As the Doctor, Jaime, and Zoe watch lava begin to surround the TARDIS (the cliffhanger from the end of The Dominators), the fluid link malfunctions, forcing the Doctor to make a risky flight decision. The crew ends up somewhere outside of time and space, a featureless void that really saves on set costs leaves them wandering lost when someone lures them outside the TARDIS.

Soon our heroes encounter all sorts of odd creatures and people, in surroundings that seem to operate primarily on puzzles and words. Poor Jaime gets turned into a cardboard cutout of himself, his face missing, and the Doctor has to put his face back from puzzle pieces. Of course, he flubs the job, giving Jaime a new face (and conveniently giving an on-screen excuse for replacing Fraser Hines with Hamish Wilson for the episode, while Fraser recovered from chicken pox).

The Doctor soon deduces that they are in some sort of Land of Fiction, which is why one of their new friends (who turns out to be Lemuel Gulliver of Gulliver’s Travels) speaks so oddly: he can only use the words his author has given him. Worse, their foe is trying either to get the Doctor to replace him as the creative force behind the scenes or to trap the TARDIS crew in the words, turning them into characters themselves.

The sheer metatextual irony of fictional characters within a TV show bemoaning the fact that they’re about to be turned into fictional characters in a(n in-universe) written story is simply mind-boggling. It wouldn’t take many more fractal layers of story-within-a-story’ing to really give one a headache.

But it’s also delightful because if you’re a Doctor Who fan (or at least a fan of Troughton’s era), it actually takes a while for it all to sink in. The viewers have immersed ourselves so thoroughly in the show that at first we simply share the Doctor’s horror that he, Jaime, and Zoe might soon lose their free will—their very existence—and become nothing more than ideas in someone else’s story. Only when we pause for a moment does it dawn on us how meta that actually is.

And that, of course, is the beauty of a good story. Blurring the line between the imagination and reality is what keeps us coming back for more. Even when it gets weird.

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The Monsters Behind the Curtain

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Review of The Invasion (#46)
DVD Release Date: 06 Mar 07 (Out of Print)
Original Air Date: 02 Nov – 21 Dec 1968
Doctor/Companion: Two, Jamie McCrimmon, Zoë Heriot
Stars: Patrick Troughton, Fraser Hines, Wendy Padbury
Preceding Story: The Mind Robber (Two, Jamie, Zoë)
Succeeding Story: The Krotons (Two, Jamie, Zoë)

My decision to review The Underwater Menace last time was not in the original plan for the year, but it turns out to have made for a nice segue into this month’s installment in my continuing series. Having just refamiliarized ourselves with the Second Doctor, we can now watch him in action against the Cybermen.

Many fans may be more familiar with Troughton’s clash with this enemy on their native Telos in The Tomb of the Cybermen, but that doesn’t mean this final encounter (of his four) is unworthy of fans’ time. Although it runs twice as long as Tomb, at eight episodes rather than four, there are qualities of the story that, for me at least, make the investment worthwhile.

To be clear, two episodes of The Invasion are still missing from the archives. However, in this release those missing episodes (numbers One and Four) have been animated by Cosgrove Hall, the same studio responsible for Scream of the Shalka. As someone who struggles with audio-only versions (as with the missing episodes of Menace, discussed last time), I really loved these animations. While I don’t know whether director Douglas Camfield left any camera notes nor whether any such notes were consulted in the animated reconstructions, these episodes don’t feel (to my untrained eye) out of place.

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The Stinker Swims

Review of The Underwater Menace (#32)
DVD Release Date: 24 May 16 (Region 1/N.America)
Original Air Date: 14 Jan – 04 Feb 1967
Doctor/Companion: Two, Polly Wright, Ben Jackson, Jamie McCrimmon
Stars: Patrick Troughton, Anneke Wills, Frazer Hines
Preceding Story: The Highlanders (Two, Ben, Polly, Jamie)
Succeeding Story: The Moonbase (Two, Ben, Polly, Jamie)

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending the third iteration of CONsole Room, my local Doctor Who convention. I won’t be posting a full recap on it this year, as I was only there for a few hours each day for the panels I was on, but among the guests were three early Companions: Anneke Wills (Polly Wright), Frazer Hines (Jamie McCrimmon), and Wendy Padbury (Zoë Heriot). All three worked with Patrick Troughton (though Anneke started with William Hartnell), so there are plenty of each of their episodes that are missing.

Interestingly enough, one of the more recently recovered episodes (found in December 2011) was from early in Season Four (Troughton’s first), including Anneke as Polly and Frazer’s second outing as Jamie. It was finally released on DVD here in North America about two weeks ago, a week and a half before CONsole Room. I didn’t manage to find time to watch it until after the con, which is a shame, because then I might have been able to (a) ask the guests some semi-intelligent questions about the story when I saw them on their main stage panel on Saturday and (b) fully appreciate the cosplay of the (highly embarrassed) young lady who got called out to show off her Polly-as-an-Atlanean costume during said panel. Alas, I did not have that much forethought. With mild regret for missed opportunities, then, I sat down to watch the last release of the home video line (barring any further lost episode recoveries).

The Underwater Menace has a reputation as one of the big stinkers. Until now, it’s only been possible to watch one of its four filmed episodes, which in my opinion makes it ridiculously difficult to judge. Even with this release, Episodes One and Four (those still absent from the archives) are terribly difficult to follow, as all we have to go on are the soundtrack and production stills. Thank Prime for closed captioning.

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Over the Moon

Review of The Moonbase (#33)
DVD Release Date: 11 Feb 14
Original Air Date: 11 Feb – 04 Mar 1967
Doctor/Companion: Two, Ben Jackson, Polly Wright, Jamie McCrimmon
Stars: Patrick Troughton, Michael Craze, Anneke Wills, Frazer Hines
Preceding Story: The Underwater Menace (Two, Ben, Polly, Jamie)
Succeeding Story: The Macra Terror (Two, Ben, Polly, Jamie)

I’m rather behind the curve on this one. Not only was the Region 1 release three weeks later than the Region 2 release (as has often been the case), but it also fell on the day before I left for this year’s Gally. So I’m afraid I’m not exactly at the cutting edge here, but perhaps not all of my readers were in a rush anyway.

For completionist fans like me, this isn’t precisely a new release. Though two of the four episodes are still missing, the existing ones have been available for quite some time as part of the Lost in Time box set, so I’ve actually seen half of the serial before. However, the addition of the animated reconstructions makes a big difference.

There’s a great deal to be said for the black and white era when it comes to tone. Something about it transcends the dated effects and lends an extra sense of tension to all the scary bits. To say such episodes are “atmospheric” might be cliché, but it doesn’t make it less true.

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Atmos-Fear-ic

Review of The Web of Fear (#41)

iTunes Release Date: 11 Oct 13
Original Air Date: 03 Feb – 09 Mar 1968
Doctor/Companion: Two, Jamie McCrimmon, Victoria Waterfield
Stars: Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines, Deborah Watling
Preceding Story: The Enemy of the World (Two, Jamie, Victoria)
Succeeding Story: Fury from the Deep (Two, Jamie, Victoria)

The recovery of two back-to-back stories from the sorely underrepresented Troughton era of the show feels almost too good to be true (though them being found together makes a fair amount of sense). Yet here they are, and The Web of Fear starts up where the cliffhanger ending of The Enemy of the World left off.

Episode One isn’t what’s got Who fans’ collective panties in a bunch, though; it’s the only one that had remained in the archives. So although watching the cliffhanger resolution is more meaningful in context, having seen Enemy Episode Six for oneself, what follows is the familiar setup we’ve already seen (that is, if one had bothered to track down a copy). It is, in essence, your basic “our heroes get themselves into a pickle” episode.

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