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Tag: Seven

Doctor Merlin

Review of Battlefield (#152)

DVD Release Date: 29 Jul 20
Original Air Date: 06 – 27 Sep 1989
Doctors/Companions: Seven, Dorothy “Ace” McShane
Stars: Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred
Preceding Story: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (Seven, Ace)
Succeeding Story: Ghost Light (Seven, Ace)

Happy Doctor Who Day! Our show turns 59 today, and though we have to wait another year for any more new episodes—ugh—I’ve got a review for you today. Much like the rest of the Everything Else series, this story is one that I don’t think gets talked about enough.

It’s not like there isn’t a lot of action, or interesting characters and lore to be had in Battlefield. (And how can you not love seeing Jean Marsh back for a third guest role?) I have to admit, though, the thing I remembered most about this adventure before re-watching was the watertank accident in which Sophie Aldred narrowly escaped a potentially fatal situation (the DVD release even has a short extra about it).

However, the main conceit of the adventure may be the part that makes it most memorable overall: at some point in their personal history—though not before now—the Doctor was Merlin, and now Morgaine is back to take her revenge on him. The ensuing mashup of plate-armored knights with both swords and energy weapons pitted against UNIT soldiers, including both the now-retired Brigadier Lethbridge-Steward and the new Brigadier Bambera, makes for bonkers conflicts that couldn’t readily appear anywhere but Doctor Who.

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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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Delta’s Variant

Review of Delta and the Bannermen (#150)

DVD Release Date: 01 Sep 09
Original Air Date: 02 – 16 Nov 1987
Doctors/Companions: Seven, Melanie Bush
Stars: Sylvester McCoy, Bonnie Langford
Preceding Story: Paradise Towers (Seven, Mel)
Succeeding Story: Dragonfire (Seven, Mel, Ace)

Before I sat down to rewatch Delta and the Bannermen for this month’s Highs & Lows installment, I wrote down a short list of what I could remember about it. Aside from a general sense of distaste and the firm knowledge this was one at the Lows end of the scale, there wasn’t much. At the same time, those few notes were surprisingly accurate: try-out for Mel’s replacement; space bees?; Welsh(?) holiday lodgings; space bus.

I’ll admit that I only remembered about the Shangri-La holiday camp (which is not a term commonly used by Americans, at least not where I’m from) when I looked at the DVD cover, but it ended up being perhaps the biggest highlight for me. And though I knew Ray had been a potential new Companion, I’d utterly forgotten that she had that lovely, Welsh lilt (an accent I originally learned thanks to Torchwood).

Both of those details go in my personal “pros” column not least because I’ve been learning Welsh on Duolingo for the last several years (along with a few other languages). Thus, the addition of local color to the story by having a couple of the characters use a few sentences of Welsh with each other (one or two of which I could actually parse) was a particular bonus for me. Sadly, that wasn’t enough to save the overall story.

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Work to Do

Review of Survival (#155)

DVD Release Date: 14 Aug 07
Original Air Date: 22 Nov- 06 Dec 1989
Doctors/Companions: Seven, Dorothy “Ace” McShane
Stars: Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred
Preceding Story: The Curse of Fenric (Seven, Ace)
Succeeding Story: The Movie (Eight, Grace)

Everyone I know is feeling the stress of the months-long (and not as useful as we’d like because people keep prioritizing their own convenience over others’ health and lives) pandemic restrictions. We’re fatigued. We’re traumatized. We’re So Done™.

No one will be surprised to hear that when I sat down to re-watch Survival for this month’s Hidden Gems entry, I was feeling less than enthused. So it speaks to the quality of this story that I was far less distracted than anticipated as the familiar events unfolded on screen.

The Doctor and Ace arrive in her hometown of Perivale so she can look up her old friends, but they’re nowhere to be found. As they search town together, Ace and the Doctor realize there’s something more sinister at play than just some angsty teens skipping out on a boring scene. Almost before they know it, they find themselves on another planet, where the Cheetah People hunt human prey and the Master (as usual) has his own nefarious agenda.

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Leave the Light On

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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.

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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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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.

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More “Meh” Than Nemesis

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Review of Silver Nemesis (#151)
DVD Release Date: 02 Nov 10
Original Air Date: 23 Nov – 07 Dec 1988
Doctor/Companion: Seven, Ace McShane
Stars: Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred
Preceding Story: The Happiness Patrol (Seven, Ace)
Succeeding Story: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (Seven, Ace)

Marching through our list of under-represented Doctors (in terms of the percentage of their stories I have reviewed in one form or another), we come now to the Seventh Doctor, whose lone encounter with the Cybermen happened to fall on Doctor Who‘s twenty-fifth anniversary.

While the production team—writer Kevin Clarke in particular—made a valiant effort to add a sense of significance to the passage of that particular twenty-five years (1963-1988), the result was perhaps not as compelling as they might have hoped. Making that span the orbital period of an eccentric object (launched, it turns out, by the Doctor himself some 350 years prior) was not altogether a bad idea (presuming it’s orbiting the sun, that would put it beyond Jupiter, but not as far as Saturn, were it in a nearly circular orbit—which admittedly seems unlikely). However, the logical contortions they have to employ in order to make that quarter-century seem consistently historically significant are awkward at best (1913 is called out as “the eve of the First World War”; 1938 “Hitler annexes Austria”; 1963 “Kennedy assassinated”).

As for the Cybermen, they’re not even the eponymous Nemesis; that name actually belongs to a mysterious statue made of validium—”living metal.” Frankly, I found the title to be more about misdirection than double meaning. While one could argue that both statue and Cybermen are silver nemeses, the Cybermen are relegated to a secondary or even tertiary role.

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A Future Set in Ash

Review of The Fires of Vulcan (#12)
Big Finish Release Date: September 2000
Doctor/Companion: Seven and Mel
Stars: Sylvester McCoy and Bonnie Langford
Preceding Story: The Apocalypse Element (Six, Evelyn, Romana II)
Succeeding Story: The Shadow of the Scourge (Seven, Ace)

Although I’ve always had a soft spot for Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor (especially when he’s paired with Sophie Aldred’s Ace, my all-time favorite Companion), somehow in my explorations of audio adventures, I’d never sat down with one of his before. I’ve come close, in that I did once track down episodes of Death Comes to Time, a webcast from 2001-02, which had only limited visuals and relied heavily on the audio component to get the story across. As for Big Finish product, though, this was my first.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, especially given that The Fires of Vulcan co-stars Mel, of whom I’ve never been a fan. Although supposedly a bright woman—a computer programmer, no less—she seems to have been reduced on screen to an overly optimistic cheerleader to the Doctor and an epic screamer. I had been told she was much improved on audio, but I still winced a little at the prospect.

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Intergalactic Man of Mystery

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Review of The Doctors Revisited – Seventh Doctor

In his own way, Seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy was also the “last of the Time Lords,” since it was after his three series on the show that the BBC put it on ~ahem~ indefinite hiatus. As such, he took a lot of blame for Who‘s apparent demise, and many fans never particularly liked him.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2013 BBC

If you’re a regular reader, you’re probably aware that I don’t share that opinion of Seven. I was therefore quite happy to see the Revisited series continue the upbeat, celebratory tone it has maintained through every episode. Instead, it focuses on McCoy’s Doctor as one who brought some mystery back to the character.

Guests on the episode (McCoy himself, Companion actresses Bonnie Langford and Sophie Aldred, and current era behind-the-scenes folk Steven Moffat, Marcus Wilson, Nicholas Briggs, and Tom McRae) agreed that while Seven came across as a clown, there was something “more” lurking underneath it all (much like Two, come to think of it). Especially at the beginning, he had a very vaudevillian veneer, and he loved to confuse his enemies (and occasionally friends) with trickery and sleight of hand. But there was never any doubt that he had a plan to get out of whatever situation he was in, and there was something almost sinister about the secrets he seemed to be keeping. As his series went on, his character continued to gain richness and texture; he got more complex, darker, and lonelier.

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