Review of The Seeds of Death (#48) DVD Release Date: 12 Jun 12 Original Air Date: 25 Jan – 01 Mar 1969 Doctors/Companions: Two, Jamie McCrimmon, Zoë Heriot Stars: Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines, Wendy Padbury Preceding Story: The Krotons (Two, Jamie, Zoë) Succeeding Story: The Space Pirates (Two, Jamie, Zoë)
When I first decided to finish off the blog with the Everything Else category of reviews, I had The Seeds of Deathscheduled for October 2022. However, since we had the delight of Whittaker’s final episode last month, my October review slot ended up being filled by that instead. As I had no desire to shift my entire posting schedule, and didn’t want either to skip Seeds of Death or to move it to the very end, this month you get a bonus review instead of a confession.
It turns out that the timing couldn’t have been better. This past week has been a bit rough for me on a personal level, and so the gentler pacing of a black-and-white era story ended up being exactly what I needed. Even with a high body count, this adventure was well paced enough to feel relatively calm to me.
The Doctor, Jaime, and Zoë arrive on Earth at a time where space exploration has been effectively halted, and transport of both people and goods is accomplished almost exclusively by T-MAT, a high-tech matter transmission system. But there are weaknesses in the system that an enemy can take advantage of, which is how the Ice Warriors end up making a play to take Earth for themselves.
Review of The Two Doctors (#140) DVD Release Date: 29 Jul 20 Original Air Date: 16 Feb – 02 Mar 1985 Doctors/Companions: Six, Two, Perpugilliam Brown, Jamie McCrimmon Stars: Colin Baker, Patrick Troughton, Nicola Bryant, Frazer Hines Preceding Story: The Mark of the Rani (Six, Peri) Succeeding Story: Timelash (Six, Peri)
Robert Holmes is among the most revered writers in Classic Who fandom (and rightfully so, imo), so when I fired up my DVD of The Two Doctors to refresh my memory for this review, I was utterly surprised to see his name in the credits. It’s not that I had remembered this serial as particularly bad, whereas most Holmes titles are distinctly among the good, but rather that I didn’t have a very strong sense of the story at all.
I always make a few notes for myself before a re-watch about what details of the particular adventure I actually recall, and they were pretty thin on the ground this time. Aside from the presence of the eponymous reincarnations—Two serving as support for Six—I remembered the Androgums (though not by name; all I could pull out was the final syllable), the location shooting in Spain, a lepidopterist, and Jaime trapped in some sort of matrix-y space.
Review of The Macra Terror (#34) DVD Release Date: 12 Nov 19 Original Air Date: 11 Mar – 01 Apr 1967 Doctors/Companions: Two, Jamie McCrimmon, Ben Jackson, Polly Wright Stars: Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines, Michael Craze, Anneke Wills Preceding Story: The Moonbase (Two, Jamie, Ben, Polly) Succeeding Story: The Faceless Ones (Two, Jamie, Ben, Polly)
Welcome to the first DVD review of 2022! Before I get into the actual review, I’d like to talk about themes.
For the past several years, I’ve had an overarching theme of sorts for these monthly reviews (Highs & Lows, Hidden Gems, Bad Reputation…), and so I wanted another such theme for this year. As I looked over my list of remaining stories to review, though, I realized two key things: (1) there are 17 adventures left for me to review from the Classic era (an awkward prime number at best), and (2) there is no real underlying connection among them.
My eventual conclusion was that my theme could be nothing but a catch-all. Like the final room of a museum from a favorite childhood book, I would label them “Everything Else.” And since they don’t fit nicely into a whole number of years, I’ll simply keep going until they run out.
That takes us midway through 2023. I’ve said before that I don’t know how much longer I’m likely to continue blogging here; Confessions of a Neowhovian is getting pretty long in the tooth as it begins its twelfth year. But with Classic stories still to cover through mid-2023, and a 60th anniversary special to come that November, I think I can safely commit to continuing the blog through its 13th year.
Review of The Dominators (#44) DVD Release Date: 11 Jan 11 Original Air Date: 10 Aug – 07 Sep 1968 Doctors/Companions: Two, Jamie McCrimmon, Zoë Heriot Stars: Patrick Troughton, Fraser Hines, Wendy Padbury Preceding Story: The Wheel in Space (Two, Jamie, Zoë) Succeeding Story: The Mind Robber (Two, Jamie, Zoë)
This month I am taking one for the team. I knew this was coming when I decided on this year’s “Highs and Lows” theme, but everything feels a bit different when I’m actually faced with viewing one of the Lows. At least I knew what I was getting into before I started.
Which is not to say that I remembered much of the plot of The Dominators before I began my rewatch. Mostly I remembered that the stumpy little robots called the Quarks were introduced here—reputedly with the ambition of becoming the next Daleks, a new robot to scare the kiddies and delight toy companies with sales. (Their obscurity fifty-odd years later is a testament to how well that went.)
Now that I have seen it again, I… primarily remember the Quarks.
Frankly, I think the root of the problem with this adventure is the same as the problem with the Quarks. The Quarks don’t work because unlike the Daleks, who serve as a fascist allegory, or the Cybermen, who sprang from body horror, they really serve no narrative purpose. They are mindless drones who do the bidding of the eponymous baddies, and unlike Daleks or Cybermen, could easily have been replaced with a simple weapon like some sort of laser borer.
Review of The Faceless Ones (#35) DVD Release Date: 20 Oct 20 Original Air Date: 08 Apr – 13 May 1967 Doctors/Companions: Two, Ben Jackson, Polly Wright, Jamie McCrimmon Stars: Patrick Troughton, Michael Craze, Anneke Wills, Fraser Hines Preceding Story: The Macra Terror (Two, Ben, Polly, Jamie) Succeeding Story: The Evil of the Daleks (Two, Jamie, Victoria)
Welcome to the first installment of the new review series Highs & Lows! We’re starting off with a story only recently added to the DVD ranks with an animated reconstruction. The Faceless Ones is a six-part Second Doctor story with only two extant episodes, but the animation team has recreated all six episodes for this late-2020 release. One has the choice to watch the story with the existing episodes (1 and 3) interspersed, or as a fully animated version.
Although it is certainly not the first such reconstruction, the animation here is less to my taste than some of the others. The movement and detailing of the scenes is fine, and certainly didn’t bother me, but I don’t find the character design particularly flattering to the original actors. I kept getting distracted by Jamie’s or the Doctor’s oddly-shaped faces.
Looking beyond the mechanics of the reconstruction to the story itself, though, I find it surprising that its ranking on the io9 list is so low (#244 of 254). Charlie Jane Anders, the list’s author, says that the main premise of The Faceless Ones, in which young people’s forms are being copied as new identities for aliens “isn’t enough of a plot to sustain six episodes.” (She ranks Terror of the Zygons at #84. I guess those two extra episodes were too much.)
Review of The Mind Robber (#45) DVD Release Date: 06 Sep 05 Original Air Date: 14 Sep – 12 Oct 1968 Doctors/Companions: Two, Jamie McCrimmon, Zoe Heriot Stars: Patrick Troughton, Fraser Hines, Wendy Padbury Preceding Story: The Dominators (Two, Jamie, Zoe) Succeeding Story: The Invasion (Two, Jamie, Zoe)
When I drew up my schedule for this year’s series of review posts and settled on Hidden Gems as a theme, I was delighted when it rolled back around to the Second Doctor’s turn. Although The Mind Robber may be considered mid-list, I have often used it as one of the better adventures for introducing new viewers to Troughton. There are enough bizarre twists and story conceits to keep it fresh. It also doesn’t hurt that even though there are five episodes, they only total about 99 minutes.
As the Doctor, Jaime, and Zoe watch lava begin to surround the TARDIS (the cliffhanger from the end of The Dominators), the fluid link malfunctions, forcing the Doctor to make a risky flight decision. The crew ends up somewhere outside of time and space, a featureless void that really saves on set costs leaves them wandering lost when someone lures them outside the TARDIS.
Soon our heroes encounter all sorts of odd creatures and people, in surroundings that seem to operate primarily on puzzles and words. Poor Jaime gets turned into a cardboard cutout of himself, his face missing, and the Doctor has to put his face back from puzzle pieces. Of course, he flubs the job, giving Jaime a new face (and conveniently giving an on-screen excuse for replacing Fraser Hines with Hamish Wilson for the episode, while Fraser recovered from chicken pox).
The Doctor soon deduces that they are in some sort of Land of Fiction, which is why one of their new friends (who turns out to be Lemuel Gulliver of Gulliver’s Travels) speaks so oddly: he can only use the words his author has given him. Worse, their foe is trying either to get the Doctor to replace him as the creative force behind the scenes or to trap the TARDIS crew in the words, turning them into characters themselves.
The sheer metatextual irony of fictional characters within a TV show bemoaning the fact that they’re about to be turned into fictional characters in a(n in-universe) written story is simply mind-boggling. It wouldn’t take many more fractal layers of story-within-a-story’ing to really give one a headache.
But it’s also delightful because if you’re a Doctor Who fan (or at least a fan of Troughton’s era), it actually takes a while for it all to sink in. The viewers have immersed ourselves so thoroughly in the show that at first we simply share the Doctor’s horror that he, Jaime, and Zoe might soon lose their free will—their very existence—and become nothing more than ideas in someone else’s story. Only when we pause for a moment does it dawn on us how meta that actually is.
And that, of course, is the beauty of a good story. Blurring the line between the imagination and reality is what keeps us coming back for more. Even when it gets weird.
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.
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).
Review of Power of the Daleks (#30) DVD Release Date: 24 Jan 17 [Region 1] Original Air Date: 05 Nov – 10 Dec 1966 Doctor/Companion: Two, Ben Jackson, and Polly Wright Stars: Patrick Troughton, Michael Craze, Anneke Wills Preceding Story: The Tenth Planet (Two, Ben, Polly) Succeeding Story: The Highlanders (Two, Ben, Polly, Jamie)
Although we’ve had some brilliant windfalls in recent years in terms of recovered “lost” episodes of Doctor Who, there are plenty that are still missing in their entirety. Perhaps the most famous/famously sought-after is Marco Polo, but Patrick Troughton’s first serial Power of the Daleks is also high on many peoples’ lists.
Perhaps that is the reason that BBC Worldwide took the unusual step of animating all six episodes of Power. While they have previously commissioned animations for missing episodes of stories that are incomplete in the archives, this is (correct me if I’m wrong) the first story to be reconstructed in its entirety with no surviving visual material but a few minutes of clips and stills.
Although the animated reconstruction was released on the BBC Store last November (fifty years to the minute from the original broadcast of its opening episode), a physical version (DVD, rather than digital download or BBC America broadcast) was not made available in the US until late January. Being the obsessive collector I am (and refusing to pay for it twice), I therefore didn’t get to see it until just recently.
The story begins with the first-ever regeneration. As a fan fifty years out, it feels oddly portentous watching that moment, even animated (though I still find the original surviving footage more moving). Troughton’s skill and the lampshading of the wildly radical concept of the lead character’s complete change of not only body but personality through the Companions’ reactions to him paved the way for everything that followed.
Review of The Invasion (#46) DVD Release Date: 06 Mar 07 (Out of Print) Original Air Date: 02 Nov – 21 Dec 1968 Doctor/Companion: Two, Jamie McCrimmon, Zoë Heriot Stars: Patrick Troughton, Fraser Hines, Wendy Padbury Preceding Story: The Mind Robber (Two, Jamie, Zoë) Succeeding Story: The Krotons (Two, Jamie, Zoë)
My decision to review The Underwater Menace last time was not in the original plan for the year, but it turns out to have made for a nice segue into this month’s installment in my continuing series. Having just refamiliarized ourselves with the Second Doctor, we can now watch him in action against the Cybermen.
Many fans may be more familiar with Troughton’s clash with this enemy on their native Telos in The Tomb of the Cybermen, but that doesn’t mean this final encounter (of his four) is unworthy of fans’ time. Although it runs twice as long as Tomb, at eight episodes rather than four, there are qualities of the story that, for me at least, make the investment worthwhile.
To be clear, two episodes of The Invasion are still missing from the archives. However, in this release those missing episodes (numbers One and Four) have been animated by Cosgrove Hall, the same studio responsible for Scream of the Shalka. As someone who struggles with audio-only versions (as with the missing episodes of Menace, discussed last time), I really loved these animations. While I don’t know whether director Douglas Camfield left any camera notes nor whether any such notes were consulted in the animated reconstructions, these episodes don’t feel (to my untrained eye) out of place.
