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Tag: Three

Setting the Standard

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Review of The Five Doctors (#129)
DVD Release Date: 05 Aug 08
Original Air Date: 25 Nov 1983
Doctors/Companions: Five, One, Two, Three, Four (cameo), Tegan, Turlough, Susan, the Brigadier, Sarah Jane, Romana II (cameo)
Stars: Peter Davison, Richard Hurndall, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, (Tom Baker), Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson, Carole Ann Ford, Nicholas Courtney, Elisabeth Sladen, (Lalla Ward)
Preceding Story: The King’s Demons (Five, Tegan, Turlough, Kamelion)
Succeeding Story: Warriors of the Deep (Five, Tegan, Turlough)

With tomorrow’s anniversary of the show’s beginnings, I felt now would be an appropriate time to look back at a different celebration of its history. Though this year we mark fifty-four years since the show’s inception, 1983 was merely twenty, and the Powers That Beeb decided they couldn’t let such a large, round number go unnoticed.

Here in the post-fiftieth-anniversary era, we think of that celebration as having pulled out all the stops, but really, it was The Five Doctors that set the standard. And while, like Moffat, JNT didn’t get everyone he wanted to participate, he nonetheless pulled together a remarkable cast, including—in a way—all five incarnations of the Doctor who had appeared up to that point.

While First Doctor William Hartnell had (just barely) managed perform a part in the tenth anniversary story The Three Doctors, he was already eight years dead by the time this next milestone rolled around. Rather than exclude his Doctor entirely, though, JNT simply recast Richard Hurndall in the role, much like David Bradley has taken over the same in the modern era. But much like Eccleston for the fiftieth, Tom Baker could not be convinced to reprise his own Fourth Doctor (reportedly because he thought it was too soon).

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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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Burn Baby Burn

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Review of Inferno: SE (#54)

DVD Release Date: 11 Jun 13
Original Air Date: 09 May – 20 Jun 1970
Doctor/Companion: Three, Dr. Elizabeth “Liz” Shaw, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Caroline John, Nicholas Courtney
Preceding Story: The Ambassadors of Death (Three, Liz, the Brigadier)
Succeeding Story: Terror of the Autons (Three, Jo, the Brigadier)

It seems strange to me that despite how much I love this serial, I’ve never actually given Inferno a proper review before. I count it among my Top 3 pre-Hiatus favorites and have recommended it often to those who want to try out new-to-them earlier Doctors (as long as they can handle a seven-part serial), so I was thrilled a few months ago to see it pop up on the list of upcoming Special Edition releases.

I was further thrilled when I realized June had seen the release of two stories written by Don Houghton (the other being The Mind of Evil). It’s only as I’ve gotten more deeply entrenched in Whovian culture that I’ve paid attention to such details. (I used to watch television and simply take what I saw on screen as it came, passing judgment in terms of “I do/don’t like this,” but not paying the least attention to writers, directors, and such. Go figure.) But I feel the richer for it; I have a new appreciation for why MoE worked for me, knowing my fondness for Inferno.

So what’s so hot (see what I did there?) about Inferno anyway? Well, for one thing, it throws in a beautiful idea not really seen in Doctor Who up to this point: that of an alternate universe. I love the way we get to see little personality differences between familiar characters and their counterparts in the parallel dimension. The supporting cast is brilliant, not least the stellar (if regrettably named) Olaf Pooley as Professor Stahlman. Despite some pretty “out there” plot developments, the whole cast plays everything straight, and you can’t help believe in their experiences and reactions. If nothing else, the administrative red tape that ties Sir Keith Gold’s hands from doing anything useful to prevent impending disaster adds a sense of (slightly depressing) realism.

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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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Down-to-Earth Action

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Review of The Doctors Revisited – Third Doctor

Third month, Third Doctor. (Yes, I’m a bit behind the curve.) For those unfamiliar with Jon Pertwee’s incarnation of the Doctor, there are a few surprises in store.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2012 BBC

I’ve talked before about the changes that accompanied Three’s arrival on the scene. His overall demeanor and situation are among the biggest of those. In contrast to his predecessor, he’s the first “action hero” Doctor, with his Venusian Aikido and love of vehicles that go fast. Further, he’s suddenly stuck on Earth in the ’70s, and has a “day job” as the scientific advisor for UNIT.

Personality-wise, he’s also quite a change from Two. Suddenly less of a clown, he begins this life straight-backed, serious, authoritarian, difficult, and bad-temepered, to quote some of the words used by interviewees (who included Steven Moffat, Caro Skinner, David Tennant, Camille Coduri, Hugh Bonneville, Adam Garcia, Richard Franklin, and John Barrowman). Though he’s forcibly associating closely with humans, I think the Third Doctor is in a way the most distinctly alien yet, based on his interactions with those around him. As Moffat put it, Three sees humans as “a fairly convenient species if you want some tea” or “reasonably competent pets,” but he blatantly “regards himself as hugely superior to them.” That’s pretty much Pertwee’s Doctor in a nutshell.

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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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Retro-View #6: That’s a Wrap

Planet of the Spiders (Story #74, 1974)
Viewed 26 Oct, 01 Nov 2012

Doctor/Companion: Three, Sarah Jane Smith, the Brigadier
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Elisabeth Sladen, Nicholas Courtney
Preceding Story: The Monster of Peladon (Three, Sarah Jane)
Succeeding Story: Robot (Four, Sarah Jane, the Brigadier)

Our first session started out a bit rough. G couldn’t commit to sit down straight through because she needed to pop home briefly to give her dog B some meds at a particular time, and I couldn’t go too late because I needed to vacate the premises at a later particular time. However, we started early enough that we figured a pause after Part 1 for dog-doping would still give us time to finish in one sitting.

How wrong we were.

Poor G got home and discovered B had eaten all the meds in the half hour since she’d left. Luckily, they were of the dietary supplement kind rather than the deadly overdose kind, but we spent the next hour watching Who with a kind of nervous concern at the backs of our minds as we waited for the vet to return her call. It was a weird day.

Things started out well for the Doctor, though. G recognized the om mani padme hum chant, and figured using it as the basis for “black magic” would not go over well with Buddhists. Can’t say that I disagree, but I suppose at the time it seemed as exotic as bubble wrap, so in that sense I can’t get too uptight about it.

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Retro-View #5: A Representative Sample

The Dæmons (Story #59, 1971)
Viewed 15 Oct 2012

Doctor/Companion: Three, Josephine “Jo” Grant, the Brigadier
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning, Nicholas Courtney
Preceding Story: Colony in Space (Three, Jo)
Succeeding Story: Day of the Daleks (Three, Jo, the Brigadier)

As per our scheme, this time we watched something representative of the middle of our current Doctor’s era, in this case meaning it needed to feature the Master and Jo.
Granted, G is an easy audience, but those who hearken to received “fan wisdom” about the quality of any given story will be glad to hear that she quite enjoyed this adventure. No need for name-calling here.

I’m not sure it’s the same things that such fans cite as reasons for The Dæmons‘ “classic” status that tickled G’s fancy, though. For one thing, she’s got no personal history with – and therefore no particular emotional attachment to – any of the regulars. She’s never seen Jo before (“She really is cute. Very pretty”), or the Master (“Isn’t he just the most evil thing you’ve ever seen? He looks like every caricature you’ve ever seen of Mephistopheles”). Even the Brigadier – not to mention the Doctor himself! – were only in one other story she’s seen. As for the rest of UNIT, she’s never seen Yates or Benton, either. So no “jolly romp in a pastoral English village with all our favorite characters larking about” for G. More just simply “this is a good one. I’m glad you picked this one.”

So in that sense, maybe this isn’t going to be everything The Fans had hoped for. Regardless, I think G’s enjoyment of The Dæmons will still be entertaining for others (as long as I can get it all across adequately). Let’s begin, then, at the beginning.

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Now That’s Diplomatic Tension

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Review of The Ambassadors of Death (#53)

DVD Release Date: 10 Oct 12
Original Air Date: 21 Mar – 02 May 1970
Doctor/Companion: Three, Liz Shaw, the Brigadier
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Caroline John, Nicholas Courtney
Preceding Story: Doctor Who and the Silurians (Three, Liz, the Brigadier)
Succeeding Story: Inferno (Three, Liz, the Brigadier)

It’s been a Three-rich environment around here lately, what with taking G through his era and the DVD releases for October and November both starring this particular Doctor. It’s a good thing I quite like him, or I’d be in trouble.

As far as what I’ve seen, Ambassadors is the penultimate story of Three’s tenure. (The final one is The Mind of Evil, which is being painstakingly colorized by the ridiculously talented Stuart Humphryes, aka BabelColour, and is due out on DVD some time next year.) I was plenty surprised, then, when the opening titles kind of stopped halfway through, cut to a short “pre-titles sequence” and then finished the titles. That format was never used again (which explains my surprise), but I thought it was kind of a cool, interesting way to go about it. (It’s also fun to note that this it the first story to use the “sting” into the closing credits.)

Given the way space travel was just getting underway with the Apollo program at the time these were filmed and broadcast, I found it primarily interesting from a historical perspective. As the astronauts had trouble with their Mars Probe 7, I couldn’t help but wonder how far from Apollo 13 (in which a malfunction endangered the lives of three American astronauts) this was produced. The extras (see below) answered that question – Apollo 13 launched the day Episode 4 aired, encountered its famous “problem” three days later, and splashed down safely the day before Episode 5. That had to have made things awfully weird for the viewers.

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Retro-View #4: A New Leading Man

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Spearhead from Space (Story #51, 1970)
Viewed 10 Oct 2012

Doctor/Companion: Three, Dr. Elizabeth “Liz” Shaw, the Brigadier
Stars: Jon Pertwee, Caroline John, Nicholas Courtney
Preceding Story: The War Games (Two, Jamie, Zoë)
Succeeding Story: Doctor Who and the Silurians (Three, Liz, the Brigadier)
Notable Aspects:

  • Three’s first story

Now this was not a reaction I’d anticipated – G is a shipper! She’s convinced that Three fancies Liz. I suppose she might have a point. She’s not far off base when, after the Doctor wiggles his eyebrows at Liz and tells her “That’s Delphon for ‘how do you do?’,” she says, “It’s also wolf for ‘what a babe.'”

Of course, she appears to fancy Three herself (have I mentioned that she’s about a decade older than Pertwee was when these were filmed?). The shower scene prompts her to comment that Three’s is “not a bad body.” By the end of Part 3, G’s praise is effusive: “This is a good one. I just like the new guy a lot. I’m in love.” Perhaps, then, there’s a bit of projection at work in her Three/Liz ship.

She loves the switch to color, and comments on the updated music, too. (Not sure how updated it can be, since Dudley Simpson was also responsible for The War Games – though admittedly there was hardly any incidental music in that particular serial.) The humorous bent of the Doctor-based portions of this adventure are right up G’s alley, as well. Three’s first view of his own face, Liz’s take-no-prisoners attitude toward the Brigadier (Brigadier: Am I interrupting? / Liz: Yes.), the way the Doctor calmly appropriates first an outfit and then a car – all of these result in the gleeful noises I so love to hear. “This is very Monty Python-ish,” she declares as the Part 1 credits roll.

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