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Tag: the Master

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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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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Everything Changes

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Review of The Timeless Children
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

For better or worse, showrunner Chris Chibnall has left an indelible mark on Doctor Who. Series 12 finale The Timeless Children was packed with canon-expanding details that fans will be arguing about for decades to come.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2020 BBC

Whether you loved it or hated it (there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of in-between in the chatter I’ve seen), there was a lot to wrap our minds around. Did the Doctor see truth or elaborate lies in the Matrix? What is truth? Does it matter?

I choose to believe the Doctor saw the truth. Among other things, it might explain how she really could be the Other of Time Lord mythology. But mostly, I just think it’s a fantastic twist that simultaneously upends everything we thought we knew about the Doctor and ties in a bunch of things that previously made little or no sense.

The quintessential example of canonical inconsistency, of course, is all those faces that showed up when Morbius challenged the Fourth Doctor to look back on his previous lives, and they went back past the Hartnell incarnation. Add to that the question of how many regenerations a Time Lord has, and you get a recipe for confusion.

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Terms and Conditions Apply

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Review of Spyfall: Part 2
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

I really hate it when something I’m enjoying trips at the finish line. If I could just ignore those last few minutes, I think Spyfall would have ended up firmly in my “win” column. As it is, I’m left with an unpleasant taste in my mouth.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2020 BBC

Much like Part 1, this episode was full of callbacks to earlier eras. Many of them left me grinning in glee, like the nods to Blink (“Don’t talk back to the screens. Obviously, I’m a recording and I can’t hear you.”), The Three Doctors (“Contact.” “Contact.” “Old school.” “You’re not the only one who can do classic.”), Logopolis (“It’s cold up here. It’s worse that Jodrell Bank.” “Did I ever apologize for that?” “No.” “Good.”), and even “The Curse of Fatal Death” (“I’ve just had the most infuriating 77 years of my life.”).

Other callbacks were gut-wrenching in all the wrong ways. Though I didn’t recognize it as such at the time, the way RTD chose to write Donna out of the Doctor’s life with a violation of Donna’s personal autonomy by altering her mind without her consent (in fact, as she begs him not to) was extremely problematic. To see a Doctor who has (one would hope) grown and evolved since then, one who occupies a female-presenting body, pull the exact same shit soured me on the entire story.

The Doctor asks neither Noor nor Ada before removing herself from their minds. Noor, at least, doesn’t seem overly concerned in that last second that she has to react. Ada’s protests, however, sound all too familiar. The Doctor may think Ada doesn’t need any outside help to become the amazing part of history she is (that sentiment, at least, is one with which I heartily agree), but taking unilateral action without even trying to bring her around to the Doctor’s point of view is contemptible.

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An Intrigue-ing Start

Review of Spyfall: Part 1
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

I haven’t enjoyed an episode that much in a long time.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2020 BBC

After exactly a year’s absence from our screens, Doctor Who came screaming back with Chibnall’s first two-parter since Series Five. Giving its own special take on another British classic, Spyfall has the Doctor and her “fam” taking on a freaky unknown alien adversary in true James Bond style.

Flitting from location to location, the TARDIS team gets the full Bond film experience, including MI6 gadgets, some infiltration work, data decryption, visiting another agent to get intel, crashing a black tie party, and even a chance for our titular hero to intone, “The name’s Doctor. The Doctor.”

Despite the trappings of spycraft and intrigue, though, it never felt like anything other than Doctor Who (with the possible exception of the first appearance of the aforementioned aliens, when they seriously reminded me of the Suliban from Star Trek: Enterprise). There were so many moments that hinted back to older stories that it made my head spin. At various times I wondered if these new baddies were anything like a whole raft of past ones: the Vocs robots from Robots of Death; the 456 from Torchwood: Children of Earth; the ATMOS device from The Sontaran Stratagem; the Host from Voyage of the Damned; the Cybermen from Army of Ghosts; and particularly the Cybermen from The Invasion (where Daniel Barton looked like a 1:1 correspondent to Invasion‘s Tobias Vaughn).

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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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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.

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