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Tag: Jo Grant

Draconian Approach

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Review of Frontier in Space (#67)

DVD Release Date: 02 Mar 10
Original Air Date: 24 Feb – 31 Mar 1973
Doctors/Companions: Three, Jo Grant
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning
Preceding Story: Carnival of Monsters (Three, Jo)
Succeeding Story: Planet of the Daleks (Three, Jo)

As I took this penultimate entry in the Everything Else series off the shelf, I realized I remembered almost nothing about it. The cover image gave me some clues (“Oh, yeah—the Draconians” [though I honestly didn’t even remember their name accurately]; “The Master? Ohhhh… Isn’t this Delgado’s last serial?”), but my recollections were so vague that I questioned the things that were jogged loose. A few of those general impressions turned out to have been based in reality, but there was precious little of substance.

Writer Malcolm Hulke is generally considered among the better writers of this era, so when I saw his name on the screen, I had high hopes. Among the things I remembered was that the Draconians were a cool species that I wish we’d seen more of. However, in the end I felt somewhat disappointed. It’s not that the story was bad, by any means. It just wasn’t particularly innovative. (I began to understand how this adventure ended up in Everything Else.)

To begin, there’s a bit of “everything but the kitchen sink” energy in this six-parter. First we get our new supposed antagonists, the “creatively”-named Draconians. When the TARDIS nearly collides with an Earth-ship and the Doctor and Jo are mistaken for Dragons (an equally “creative” epithet), the conflict seems to be between humans and Draconians. By the end of the first episode, though, we realize the Ogrons (introduced in the previous year’s Day of the Daleks, and last seen in cameo in the preceding story) are really to blame. It’s not until we get into the third episode that we discover it is the Master who is behind the Ogrons.

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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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Sink or Swim

Review of The Sea Devils (#62)

DVD Release Date: 03 Jun 08
Original Air Date: 26 Feb – 01 Apr 1972
Doctors/Companions: Three, Jo Grant
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning
Preceding Story: The Curse of Peladon (Three, Jo)
Succeeding Story: The Mutants (Three, Jo)

After last week’s special aired, I knew I was in for a treat when I came back to re-watch this adventure. The potential to compare and contrast the depictions of the Sea Devils in this, their initial outing with their most recent on-screen appearance with Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor felt like a golden opportunity.

And since Delgado is my favorite Master, despite his ubiquity during this era of the show, I enjoy watching what have become his “usual tricks” play out here where they can still take the Doctor by surprise. To wit, his “team up with someone else to destroy humanity in order to upset the Doctor” game.

Because that’s what this story boils down to. The Master has found these “sea devils”—who only gain that moniker from the rantings of traumatized sea fort workman—and decided to manipulate them to his own ends. The Doctor recognizes them as kin to the Silurians, and they give the same account of their reasons for going into hibernation as that other reptilian species. They also [spoilers] come to a similar end, having at one point reached a tentative peace with the humans thanks to the Doctor before the British military makes a first-strike move.

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Time Well Spent

Review of The Time Monster (#64)

DVD Release Date: 06 Jul 10
Original Air Date: 20 May – 24 Jun 1972
Doctors/Companions: Three, Jo Grant
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning
Preceding Story: The Mutants (Three, Jo)
Succeeding Story: The Three Doctors (Three, Jo, Two, One, the Brigadier)

The fascinating thing about doing a year full of Highs & Lows like this is that the experience highlights just how subjective such labels can be. This month’s entry is a case in point.

While the list I’ve been using from io9 compiled by Charlie Jane Anders ranks The Time Monster as #238 of 254 (leaving it ahead of only 6% of other stories), it is well known to Verity! podcast listeners that Lizbeth Myles ranks it as one of best stories of all time (or, at the very least, in her personal list of favorites). That leaves a wide range of opinion into which to fit my own assessment.

Predictably, I fall somewhere between the two extremes, though closer to Lizbeth’s end of the scale. Perhaps it’s because I’m already a fan of the Pertwee era, and Delgado’s Master in particular, that I didn’t find the “preponderance of fluff” (as Charlie Jane put it) so objectionable. Some of that fluff includes gems like the “time sensor” (which, when we see it face-on, is shaped… perhaps more suggestively than entirely appropriate for a family show) and a device the Doctor constructs out of household items in order to interfere with the Master’s time experiments, the latter of which is one of the few things that consistently stick in my mind about this story.

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Blatant and Benign

Review of The Curse of Peladon (#61)

DVD Release Date: 04 May 10
Original Air Date: 29 Jan – 19 Feb 1972
Doctors/Companions: Three, Jo Grant
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning
Preceding Story: Day of the Daleks (Three, Jo, the Brigadier)
Succeeding Story: The Sea Devils (Three, Jo)

As the United Kingdom formalizes its “Brexit” from the European Union, it’s kind of interesting to use this installment in the Hidden Gems series to view things from the other end of the timeline. Back in the early 1970s, Britain was debating whether or not to join the then-European Economic Community in the first place. Doctor Who, never a show to go subtle with its allegorical stories if blatant will do, gave us The Curse of Peladon.

Interestingly enough, the result is actually not terrible. (Contrast this with much of fandom’s opinion of the later Monster of Peladon, which focuses on a miner’s strike, and ranks a full 90 places lower on the io9 list.) Despite some of the expected, rather heavy-handed preaching about how (a) these people aren’t out to get you, they’re here to help and (b) your religious beliefs are all outlandish superstitions, inappropriate in a time of Science and Reason, the story doesn’t feel overly tied to real world politics, at least not at the moment (when there’s a whole different pile of politics to worry us).

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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.

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CONsole Room 2019 Recap

First things first: Welcome to year nine of Confessions of a Neowhovian (~throws confetti~ ~releases “Happy Blog Birthday” balloons~)!

As I look through my posts, I realize that I haven’t reported back regularly to my readers about the happenings at my local con these past few years. I can understand why I’ve done it that way; after the first couple of years, my attendance at CONsole Room has been a bit more casual. I don’t have anything particularly scintillating, like photos with the guests or even my own cosplays, to share.

But although I haven’t ignored it completely, mentioning CONsole Room in passing from time to time, I thought I should be a bit more formal about it this year—especially as CONsole Room has moved from May to January.

As usual, experiencing it as a commuter con colors my perceptions of CONsole Room, as does the added factor of bringing my daughters along. There were plenty of panels and activities that, had I been a “captive audience” for the con, I would gladly have attended, and almost certainly would have enjoyed. Given my personal constraints, though, this year my attendance was limited to Saturday and a single Friday evening panel.

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Metamorphoses

Review of The Green Death: SE (#69)

DVD Release Date: 13 Aug 13
Original Air Date: 19 May – 23 Jun 1973
Doctor/Companion: Three, Josephine “Jo” Grant, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
>Stars: Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning, Nicholas Courtney
Preceding Story: Planet of the Daleks (Three, Jo)
Succeeding Story: The Time Warrior (Three, Sarah Jane)

What is it with green slime that infects the innocently curious on Doctor Who? First Inferno, now this…

Aside from being the finale of the Third Doctor’s fourth series, The Green Death marks the end of his Companion Jo’s time in the TARDIS. You can see when the farewell scene comes, no one really had to do much acting; all the emotion was right there on the surface. It’s so appropriate for this well-loved Companion because, unlike some of them, Jo gets a proper send-off story.

From the beginning of Episode One, we get foreshadowing of her departure. She’s exhibiting a new independence from the Doctor, refusing to go to Metebelis III with him and following her own plan of action instead. Then, when she meets the handsome, young Dr. Jones, she gets off on the wrong foot with him in almost exactly the same way she did with the Doctor. Their relationship is allowed a chance to grow, the romance bloom, over all six episodes (unlike, say, Leela’s utterly shocking, sudden, and perhaps even out-of-character decision to stay behind on Gallifrey to be with Andred when she leaves Four in The Invasion of Time).

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Technicolor Triumph

Review of The Mind of Evil (#56)
DVD Release Date: 11 Jun 13
Original Air Date: 30 Jan – 06 Mar 1971
Doctor/Companion: Three, Josephine “Jo” Grant, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning, Nicholas Courtney
Preceding Story: Terror of the Autons (Three, Jo, the Brigadier)
Succeeding Story: The Claws of Axos (Three, Jo, the Brigadier)

Although the BBC archives include all six episodes, The Mind of Evil is unique in that none of them (currently) exists in the original color format. Due to that fact, this serial has never before been released on DVD, making it—until now—the only Pertwee adventure I had yet to see.

Through technical machinations, color information buried in Episodes 2 through 6 could be pulled out and used to re-infuse them with a semblance of their original character. However, Episode 1 had no embedded color, rendering the chroma dot color recovery technique used on the other episodes useless. Instead, some seven thousand keyframes had to be hand colorized by the ridiculously talented (and dedicated!) colorizing artist Stuart Humphryes, better known by his YouTube handle BabelColour.

I’ll get to the story in a moment, but first I want to convey exactly how bloody brilliant BabelColour’s work is. I would put money on it that someone watching this DVD for the first time, never having been told about its history, would never guess it was anything but a cleaned-up original color print—until they got to Episode 2. At this point, the color seems to pulse every couple of seconds—it’s particularly egregious on faces in a couple of spots—and one realizes just how seamless a job BabelColour had done in that first episode. While I wouldn’t wish the horrendously long, painful, probably underpaid hours on him again, I know I’d dearly love to have him colorize all the other episodes (in this serial and others) that have so far only been done with chroma dot. His work is vastly superior.

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A Pretty Good Trip

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Review of The Claws of Axos: SE (#57)
DVD Release Date: 13 Nov 12
Original Air Date: 13 Mar – 03 Apr 1971
Doctor/Companion: Three, Josephine “Jo” Grant
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning
Preceding Story: The Mind of Evil (Three, Jo)
Succeeding Story: Colony in Space (Three, Jo)

My reaction to this story has always been pretty much full-on Pigbin Josh: “Ooh arr?” Seriously – this one’s just a bit weird. Psychedelic, even.

To a certain extent, that’s on purpose. It was, after all, made in 1971, and the whole drug-tripping scene was still a Thing (or so I understand). The director and editor had a grand old time messing with the effects to make it all visually striking. And the design is incredibly creative, especially when it comes to the ship, which is both amazingly organic looking and, externally, a bit… anatomical (as Katy Manning (Jo) points out in one of the extras).

The story itself has the usual ups and downs. The basic premise is quite cool, with the alien visitors who may or may not be out to get us all, and a substance that can manipulate energy and thus solve huge problems like world hunger. But the inclusion of the Master feels utterly spurious, even if it does lead to some lovely Delgado moments (his Master is perfectly smarmy) and interesting Doctor/Master dynamics.

Oddly, I think the insults are one of my favorite parts of the whole show. For example, when Mr. Chinn, the government official nominally in charge of the whole operation, phones in to report to the Minister, he asks, “Will you scramble, or shall I, sir?” The reply is a terse, “Just your report, Chinn. I’m sure that will be quite garbled enough.” Makes me laugh every time.

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