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Review of Enlightenment (#127)

DVD Release Date: 08 Jun 21
Original Air Date: 01 – 09 Mar 1983
Doctors/Companions: Five, Tegan Jovanka, Vislor Turlough
Stars: Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson
Preceding Story: Terminus (Five, Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough)
Succeeding Story: The King’s Demons (Five, Tegan, Turlough)

I’ve occasionally heard other fans talk about how much they enjoy Enlightenment, but it’s not one that’s made much of an impression on me before (thus its fate as a member of Everything Else). Maybe I just never consider it, as part of an era I usually find a little dull.

But despite starring the Beige Doctor, and including both a baddie with a bird on his head and one of the more irritating Companions, the plot and the other Companion being awesome—that’s Tegan, one of my personal faves—make it eminently watchable.

Going in, pretty much all I remembered about Enlightenment was the race. I also knew it involved the Black Guardian and the end of Turlough’s interactions with him, but that was as much due to having pulled it out of my Black Guardian boxed set as anything. And though I didn’t write it down in my pre-viewing notes, I had at least a vague impression of Captain Wrack in my mind.

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Devils Under the Sea

Review of Warriors of the Deep (#130)

DVD Release Date: 03 Jun 08
Original Air Date: 05 – 13 Jan 1984
Doctors/Companions: Five, Tegan Jovanka, Vislor Turlough
Stars: Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson
Preceding Story: The Five Doctors (Five, Tegan, Turlough)
Succeeding Story: The Awakening (Five, Tegan, Turlough)

One of the unintended benefits of this year’s “Everything Else” themed reviews is that I get to talk about the Sea Devils, who are slated to appear in the next special some time this spring. (My guess is on or around Easter, which is April 17.) In fact, I get to review both of their on-screen appearances, first this month in Warrior of the Deep and then at the end of April (presumably shortly after the aforementioned special) in their debut story The Sea Devils.

Somewhat ironically, while the Sea Devils are the eponymous warriors here, what most people remember about this story (when they bother to remember it at all) is the non-sentient monster of the piece, the Myrka. Before listening to the recent Verity! podcast episode about Warriors, I had forgotten pretty much everything else myself. But the Myrka is actually a relatively small player in the overall story, while humanity’s willingness to annihilate itself, and individual humans’ willingness to exploit each other, are more immediate threats.

Watching Warriors nearly forty years after its broadcast (which makes me feel really old), I get a strange sense both that I completely agree with Tegan’s point that very little has changed in the 100 years since her time (~60 years from now) and that things are quite different. To wit, the last time I watched it, I have a vague recollection of having felt much more sympathetic angst about the destruction of humanity.

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Memories Unlocked

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Review of Mawdryn Undead (#125)

DVD Release Date: 03 Nov 09
Original Air Date: 01 – 09 Feb 1983
Doctors/Companions: Five, Nyssa of Traken, Tegan Jovanka, Vislor Turlough, the Brigadier
Stars: Peter Davison, Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson, Nicholas Courtney
Preceding Story: Snakedance (Five, Nyssa, Tegan)
Succeeding Story: Terminus (Five, Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough)

I’ll be the first to admit that the Fifth Doctor’s era is not at the top of my list of personal favorites. Maybe that’s why so many of them are vague and nebulous in my memory, including Mawdryn Undead. Yet nearly the only thing I clearly remembered about it turned out to be pretty much the last plot detail in the whole story.

As the introductory story for clearly-not-from-Earth schoolboy Turlough, MU might seem like one that would be rather memorable. And while I rarely hear anyone loudly singing its praises, neither does it get regularly ripped on within fandom. Falling at #63 of 254 in the io9 ranking, it just squeaks under the wire into the top quartile. That all puts it solidly in Hidden Gem territory, a not-bad-but-rarely-a-favorite adventure that’s worth revisiting.

When we meet Turlough, he’s being generally mischievous, crashing the Brigadier’s one-of-a-kind car that’s been parked in front of the boarding school where Turlough is a student and the Brigadier has been teaching. He’s immediately unlikable to me, and I can’t even really feel sorry for him when the Black Guardian appears to manipulate him into doing the Guardian’s dirty work.

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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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Terminal Boredom

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Review of Terminus (#126)
DVD Release Date: 10 Aug 09
Original Air Date: 15 – 23 Feb 1983
Doctors/Companions: Five, Nyssa, Tegan Jovanka, Vislor Turlough
Stars: Peter Davison, Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson
Preceding Story: Mawdryn Undead (Five, Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough, the Brigadier)
Succeeding Story: Enlightenment (Five, Tegan, Turlough)

Terminus is one of several stories in this Bad Reputation™ series that had made very little impression on me. I had vague recollections of it being Nyssa’s farewell story, and little else. When I pulled out my DVD and looked at the cover I went, “Oh yeah—that furry critter. What was it called?”

Upon further reflection, I remembered a plague ship, Nyssa wearing a short skirt (and later disrobing), and some sort of off-limits space where the critter (for the record, it’s known as the Garm) resided. Anything else—save the presence of the rest of the main cast—was a blur.

As I began re-watching, I realized I wasn’t really going to be able to argue much with this story’s placement in io9’s Best-to-Worst ranking, where it came in at #229 of 254, putting it in the bottom 10%. While there’s nothing overtly bad about it, there’s also precious little that I’d consider good.

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Dumpster of Fire

Review of Planet of Fire (#134)
DVD Release Date: 07 Sep 10
Original Air Date: 23 Feb – 02 Mar 1984
Doctors/Companions: Five, Vislor Turlough, Perpugilliam Brown
Stars: Peter Davison, Mark Strickson, Nicola Bryant
Preceding Story: Resurrection of the Daleks (Five, Tegan, Turlough)
Succeeding Story: The Caves of Androzani (Five, Peri)

For some reason, Planet of Fire has always sort of flown under my radar. In the back of my head, it had become “the story where both Mark Strickson and Nicola Bryant were scantily clad for their farewell/introduction, and there were volcanoes or something—oh yeah, and the Master.”

According to received fan wisdom (at least in the form of io9’s Best-to-Worst ranking, which puts PoF at #227 of 254), I can hardly be blamed. Even if I’d forgotten some of the key elements (the Master’s predicament, the final appearance of Kamelion, the revelation of Turlough’s secret past, and where all those intersect on a geologically active planet), there wasn’t much in any of it to endear it to viewers. (The exception, of course, is the aforementioned minimal costuming; I’ve heard at least one person say they learned something about themselves seeing Turlough in those shorts.)

Poor Kamelion stands out as one of the biggest problems. I’m sure the idea of a shape-changing robot sounded exciting to the writers (or JNT? I don’t know who’s responsible for Kamelion) when it was first proposed, but creating a plot that works well for such a character—and then realizing it satisfactorily on screen—appears to have been too difficult a task. (I did, however, once win a round of the Verity! Podcast “In Defense Of” game at Gallifrey One by successfully arguing for 60 seconds that “Kamelion is better than K-9,” using its role in helping to defeat the Master in PoF as one of my talking points.)

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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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Thrown for a Loup

Review of Loups-Garoux (#20)
Big Finish Release Date: May 2001
Doctor/Companion: Five and Turlough
Stars: Peter Davison and Mark Strickson
Preceding Story: Minuet in Hell (Eight, Charley, the Brigadier)
Succeeding Story: Dust Breeding (Seven, Ace)

It’s not often that Doctor Who tackles widely familiar fantastical creatures (e.g., vampires), but when it does, it doesn’t shy from calling out the popular mythos. That’s part of why Loups-Garoux works as well as it does.

For me, it was my tabletop RPG background that clued me in, but those who know French will also have a good idea what they’re in for the first time they look at the title of this adventure. In that sense, there was nothing surprising in the story. For the most part, it rolled out about as I expected: the Doctor and Turlough find themselves embroiled in a crisis among a group of werewolves in and around Rio de Janeiro in 2080.

While the Doctor identifies the werewolves’ condition with a quasi-scientific name, and not everything they do matches with legend, there’s no doubt that these are the traditional werewolves we expect from literature. They are pack animals whose behavior is strongly influenced by the lupine side of their nature, silver harms them, and they are long-lived. For fans of werewolf stories, then, this audio adventure is a win.

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The Beginning of the End

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Review of Resurrection of the Daleks: SE (#133)
DVD Release Date: 12 Jun 12
Original Air Date: 08-15 Feb 1984
Doctor/Companion: Five, Tegan Jovanka, Vislor Turlough
Stars: Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson
Preceding Story: Frontios (Five, Tegan, Turlough)
Succeeding Story: Planet of Fire (Five, Turlough, Peri)

The TARDIS crew unravelled pretty quickly at the end of Five’s tenure. First – here – Tegan bows out, then Turlough immediately thereafter. Having picked up Peri during Turlough’s swan song, Five then completes his last adventure with her. Bam, bam, bam! In quick succession, two Companions and a Doctor were all out; everything was completely changed up by the end of the series.

So in a sense, Resurrection marks the end of an era. Tegan’s been with Five since the beginning, and with this, she’s gone. Change is on the wind (“and not a moment too soon,” if you believe some folks). Of course, as some things change, others stay the same.

First, the Daleks are back. They (and their minions) are more effectively brutal than before – the body count in this story is insanely high; just about everyone dies (including some innocent bystanders), excepting about three baddies and our heroes – but they’re still Daleks, and as such are somewhat predictable. I have to say the new helmets they’ve forced their troopers to wear are good for a laugh, though.

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Nu-View #4: My Job Here’s Not Done

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Resurrection of the Daleks (Story #134, 1984)
Viewed 19 Jul 2011

Doctor/Companion:   Five, Tegan Jovanka, Vislor Turlough
Stars:  Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson
Preceding Story:  Frontios (Five, Tegan, Turlough)
Succeeding Story:  Planet of Fire (Five, Turlough, Peri)
Notable Aspects:

  • departure of Tegan

Having felt that I’d not yet given the Ladies a good feel for Five, I decided to trot out some Daleks (the vote was in favor of them over the Cybermen). I’m not sure I still managed to get across a good feel for his character, as evidenced by some of the general reactions (see below), but at the very least, a good time was had by all.

First impressions were that this one seemed more ’70s than ’80s (aside from costuming). It was also rather Star Trek, what with the crashing around and the doctor in battle, ready to “take the fight to them!” Someone also opined that Turlough looked like a Romulan with a red wig (also apropos because he claims to be on the side of the “good guys,” but we (the Ladies, anyway) never quite trust him…). However, it was really the Doctor and the Daleks that brought the most comments.

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