A fan take on the proposed third Dalek movie. I quite enjoyed watching this trailer. A little bit of fun before I commence the long trawl through the Sixth Doctor’s travels.
On Saturday 5th January 1985, Dr Who was back in its traditional tea-time slot for the first time since Tom Baker hung up his scarf. This may have been a moment of rejoicing, but there’s an immediate difference: the episode is 45-minutes long. The reason for this change is not entirely clear. It is known the BBC wanted to trial other shows to attract an early evening audience and cutting down Dr Who’s scheduled annual transmissions from twenty-six to thirteen achieved that. It begs the question why they bothered to return the show to Saturday night at all. Initially, the series had a big ratings boost and episode one of Attack of the Cybermen saw almost nine million tune in. After that, Colin Baker’s first full season petered out at a respectable, but unexciting average of six-and-a-half. Even more confusing, especially in terms of episode pacing, when sold abroad the series was divided into the usual twenty-five minute episodes, giving foreign broadcasters the option to present the show at its standard length. This means each chapter rises to a mini-climax mid-episode and has to pick up momentum for the ‘second’ climax at the finale. This seems to cause all sorts of problems for the writers and directors who can’t grasp the format appropriately. It’s like boxing with one hand tied behind your back.
There are other problems with this season opener, chiefly the story and the writing. I’ve split this deliberately as there are two distinct issues. Let’s look at the narrative of Attack of the Cybermen. It would be easy to dismiss it as nonsense – because it is – but the real craw in the throat is another attempt by the production team to reinvent Dr Who lore and utilise past stories to develop new adventures and expand the history of existing enemies and / or assistants. We saw this idea nibbling away at Fifth Doctor serials like Warriors of the Deep or Arc of Infinity. Interestingly those two dire examples of the sub-genre also swished the opening curtain on new seasons; maybe it was going to be a trend. Here the Cybermen have colonised Telos, a planet we first saw way back in Season 5 in The Tomb of the Cybermen. Only now the Cyber-presence isn’t one of hibernation, but annihilation. Telos becomes the nerve centre of a befuddling plot to destroy Earth and prevent the destruction of Mondas. The Tenth Planet, the Cyberman debut, took place in 1986 and was apparently Earth’s first encounter with the Cybermen. Nominally, The Invasion takes place after this, but could easily occur before, the date of that and all UNIT adventures is never certain. However, the fundamental problem remains that the Second Doctor informs us Telos is the last resting place of the Cybermen, so the Cyber Controller’s plan can’t take place unless the metal monsters can time travel – and hey presto they can! Just like that! There’s a time vessel tripping back and forth from Telos to, well, somewhere. It needs three people to operate it and a couple of escaped convicts reckon they can pilot it to safety. These two desperados are humans, and are from Earth, so more immediate questions arise. How and when did humans perfect time travel? How come the archaeological team in Tomb of… didn’t know it contained a hibernation centre for Cybermen? Well, okay, two of them did, but you’d think it would be right up there in the galaxy’s history books: Telos, colonised home world of the Cybermen, etc, etc. Wiping Earth from history appals the Doctor, all that time meddling etc, but I was appalled that the Cybermen apparently thought they could do it by redirecting Halley’s Comet; a topical notion but one which, as the serial progressed isn’t pursued. Is the comet still laden with Cyberbombs?
It gets worse. The writers – plural, I’ll explain later – invent an indigenous race for Telos, the Cryons. These interesting humanoids are the opposite of Cybermen, sleek, organic, empathetic and all-female. They are also donned in silver, speak in light whispery girlish mousey voices and can only survive at sub-zero temperatures. The Cybermen of course are bulky, tough, grating, unfeeling mechanoids and they go into suspended animation when temperatures fall below freezing. The idea of opposites attracting, within a sense of how they propel the narrative arc, is excellent. Unfortunately it recalls another great clash of races already explored at some depth in Dr Who: the warlike Daleks and the peace-loving Thals. The Cryons themselves are interesting without ever being brilliant. The facial hair and domelike foreheads makes them resemble the Sensorites [from Season 1] and they move with the strange balletically extravagant demonstrations first attempted by the Fish People in The Underwater Menace [Season 4]. Comedian Faith Brown and Blue Peter television presenter Sarah Greene both play members of the Cryon race, but you wouldn’t know it under the masks, make up and voices. Apparently Koo Stark was offered the lead role, but turned it down once it became clear the audience would never recognise her.
It doesn’t help either that the design of Attack… is seriously flawed. In 2022, I have the benefit of viewing Tomb of… because it had been rediscovered. In 1985 the earlier serial was considered lost, so it’s fair to suggest that designer Marjorie Pratt simply didn’t care too much about the consistent look of the Cybermen’s cryogenic hibernation facility. Yet even in 1985 there were photo stills of the tomb design and the control centre. The ones created for Attack of… simply don’t resemble the earlier versions. They are not even close. In fact the new design seems made solely to allow a series of shocks to permeate episode 2 as demented Cybermen burst from their ‘tombs’ and assault poor Nicola Bryant, whose having a not-so-fun time impersonating Peri. Her character spends the whole adventure in an [admittedly sexy] low cut flimsy lyrca and culottes outfit. Apparently the t-shirt was so tight the costumers had to tape Miss Bryant’s nipples down as they were too prominently displayed. This combo wouldn’t keep anyone warm on sub-zero Telos; Peri ought to freeze to death. I’m digressing, but you can sense my disappointment and my distraction. I kept wondering about the story’s inability to corelate with Dr Who’s established history rather than enjoying it as an adventure in its own right. The point being, if the writers hadn’t tried so slavishly to recreate the half-success of Resurrection of Daleks or the no-success of Arc of Infinity and Warriors of the Deep, by delving into the monster’s history, if they’d tried to create something original – say a Cyber prison planet with an escape plan – they might have met with a more coherent piece.
Which brings me, stumbling, to my second issue which is the writing. Paula Moore is credited with this mess, but according to several testimonies she is a combination of three people: Paula Woolsey, a novice screenwriter; script editor Eric Saward; and Dr Who historian Ian Levine. It isn’t clear who provided which bits of the tale, what is certain is that between them they manufactured a dog’s dinner of a fiction. Levine is an interesting character who was never officially part of the production team. Eric Saward used him as a continuity advisor throughout his tenure as script editor. Levine’s background is as a music producer and record store owner. He merely shared a fan’s love for Dr Who, recording audio transmissions of original episodes and later being responsible for hunting down lost episodes. He was a huge champion of the series. Yet his involvement in advising on series continuity doesn’t appear to have delivered any worthwhile input. If anything, the continuity of the series became more and more contentious thanks to his involvement. It is safe to say Paula Woolsey had an extremely low input into this story, her sole service being to provide a pseudonymous name.
Attack of the Cybermen is peppered with goblets of nostalgia near and distant, but they are crammed into the serial without thought or precision. The Doctor gets his chameleon circuit working and lands back in I.M. Foreman’s scrapyard, 76 Totter’s Lane, exactly where the debut episode started in 1963. There’s no reason for this to occur. There’s lots of familiar Cybermen stuff, including the return of Michael Kilgariff, who originally played the Cyber Controller in Tomb of… He’s put on a lot of weight and his costume is completely different; where is the dome-like brain helmet he sported? Commander Lytton [Maurice Colborne] returns from Resurrection of the Daleks and the Doctor fails to anticipate such, despite spending half an episode pursued by the mercenary’s killer policemen. Although thinking on it, why would he? I am not sure he ever met Lytton in Resurrection… The Doctor has a moment of personal revelation after Lytton’s demise, claiming he’d misjudged the man. Well, no, he hadn’t. Lytton is a killer and a money hungry mercenary to the core. He isn’t helping the Cryons because his conscience tells him to, only his wallet. His whole crew, which includes a nice turn from Brian Glover, are money motivated.
More interesting is Peri’s assertion that the Doctor “never gave him [Lytton] a chance to explain.” This seems the more likely failure in the Sixth Doctor’s make-up which is already increasingly self-centred, irritable and erratic. Coupled with that appalling costume, Colin Baker has his work cut out to draw any sympathy from the audience. He’s certainly virile and violent, happy to torture, fight and kill his opponents, but I’m not sure this sits well with the character. It is a side to the Doctor’s persona we’ve never seen and casts Baker completely against the grain of his predecessors. Like Davison before him, the scripts have a tendency to insist he runs everywhere and gabbles his lines. Thank goodness, his spiky conversations with Peri are entertaining.
[Sample 1: Doctor, vehemently: “Unstable? Unstable? I’m a Time Lord. This is as stable as you’ll find me. I’m a man of passion…” Peri: “And of a very loud voice.”
[Sample 2: Doctor, confused: “I suddenly feel very conspicuous.” Peri: “I’m not surprised in that outfit.”
[Her amusement as the supposed repaired chameleon circuit failed to match a disguise to its surroundings – an armoire, an organ and an elaborate iron gate – mirrored my astonishment.]
The American lass still gives as good as she gets. I really like her. Nicola Bryant is turning gold from sand, even as it slips through her fingers. Director Matthew Robinson can’t quite match the efforts he put in on Resurrection of the Daleks, but he was right to keep the early sewer scenes reminiscent of The Invasion, all shadows and echoes. The reveal of the Cybermen, which would have ended a prospective 25-minute episode 1, is excellently done. Unfortunately, by the time we reach the second part, the plot is becoming hopelessly entangled and all the neat camera tricks in the world can’t save it. Robinson can’t do very much with the silly time vessel escape plan plot, which is never properly explained and takes up a lot of screen time. It seems to have been included merely to show how the two unsympathetic protagonists, Russel and Bates, have been part cyber-engineered. In fact probably the most interesting scenes involve those which demonstrate this process of dehumanisation. We’ve never seen it before and it is quite horrifying. While the Cybermen retain their ruthless streak – crushing Lytton’s hands to a bloody pulp is particularly gorily memorable – they are too easily bested in this adventure, being decapitated, blown up, speared by a sonic lance or shot by bullets.
My overriding impression of Attack of the Cybermen is a lot of explosions and a lot of missed opportunities. For me, it demonstrates the foolhardiness of attempting to reimagine the past; far better in a science fiction show to create the future:
Something quite miraculous happened to Dr Who when Philip Martin wrote Vengeance on Varos. Finally, the show has constructed a story which doesn’t rely on past monsters or the bending of the fictional laws of time to give us something new and exciting. Well, okay, Season 21 did have the classic The Caves of Androzani, but even that felt like a throwback to the earlier Hinchcliffe / Holmes era of Dr Who, fashioned as it was from The Phantom of the Opera. What makes Varos such a great story is its insistence of framing itself as ancient Greek theatre while presenting themes and incidents which whole heartedly address a modern malaise, themes that still resonate in contemporary times. Like the Third Doctor’s all-time classic The Silurians, many of the themes presented in Varos have never gone away. The story should be an essential watch for anyone who believes in the mantra of unrestricted, uncensored web or televisual access and the implications such liberties can have on a democratic society. Vengeance on Varos is a superb Dr Who adventure which deserves repeated viewing despite the occasional forgivable lapse.
Congratulations must go to debut Dr Who writer Philip Martin who excels in conjuring the world of the mining planet Varos, providing several outstanding support characters, a strong narrative drive and dialogue which all the actors can handle and empathise with. Designer Tony Snoaden also deserves plaudits for his pared back, gloomy sets. Varos’ whole existence is based around the extraction of its vital minerals; the population never ventures outside of the complex lest they be too far away from work. They are, to a man and woman, wan and fallow and exist in a series of superbly realised hollow, dull, grey-metal box rooms and passages; the only light comes during a ‘traditional’ execution scene, telling us death is the only joy on this world. Director Ron Jones, who has never been a great director, managers to manipulate his players and the action carefully and with some aplomb. If he goes awry towards the end, it is due primarily to there being no grandstand finish for the adventure; like real life, there is no fulfilling resolution and while the villains are despatched, there is no attempt to blow things up or send planets into black holes or whatever gobbledygook the writers usually dream up. Instead, there is a grounding authenticity to the story, even while it wears its sci-fi credentials on its sleeve.
Vengeance on Varos was commissioned during an uncomfortable era for British censorship, when partisan organisations and politicians focussed on what were termed ‘video nasties’ and the unregulated growth of video hire stores led to a crackdown on films which were considered unsuitable for home viewing. These included some exploitation titles, such as Cannibal Holocaust, but also well-regarded movies like The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Eventually, this crazy time of obsessive censorship came to an end, but it also opened the floodgates to the unrestricted access of the internet, which allows uncensored and non-contextual violent content to be uploaded and viewed, as well as allowing youngsters [and adults] to access unsuitable cinematic releases, swathes of hardcore pornographic material and to deliver snap verdicts on personalities, topics and objects without a filter. Varos addresses this need for the public’s constant immersive satisfaction from its opening scene.
Jason Connery’s Jondar is being tortured. We are not told why, but that doesn’t matter to two representatives of the watching population of Varos. Shut away in their hovel-like home are Arak and Etta, two miners on a rest period. A television screen is fixed on the wall and is on every second of the day. They watch with intense fascination the torture we also witness, sharing asides about how and when Jondar might die. The realisation they are witnessing an actual killing never crosses their mind. This is purely and simply their leisure entertainment and they treat each scene with the disdain, clarity and amusement it deserves. Arak and Etta are a writer’s device, a nominal Greek Chorus, personalising the action we see and reminding us that we are complicit by watching Dr Who as much as they are in watching events unfold on the fictional Varos. Writer Philip Martin clarifies this by including scenes where the supposed authority figure, the Governor, subjects himself to a vote of confidence. Arak and Etta cast their opinion via a simple push button on the wall, a Yes or No vote, much how we swipe a heart, a thumbs up or a sad face to indicate our approval on mobile phones today. Should the Governor lose the vote, he submits to Cell Disintegration, a process which could actually kill him live on T.V. These moments of torture and murder, beamed directly into homes, are exactly the sort of future outcome the moral standard brigades foresaw in video nasties. And indeed when the Islamic State began to transmit live executions on the internet, you do wonder if they had a point. Certainly Arak and Etta have become blasé about the situation. “When did we last see a decent execution?” moans Arak with the same disappointment he shared for the dismal portions of food. “Last week,” chimes Etta. Death really is an everyday occurrence for this oppressed population and the fact it goes hand in hand with democracy hints at the inevitable apex of political popularity: leaders quite literally will fall on their sword to retain power.
Varos ought to be a rich planet. It has huge reserves of Zieton-7, a mineral whose properties aid propulsion, allowing vessels to time travel. The Time Lords discovered its usefulness, although as nobody mentions them here and Peri’s explanation of a time machine falls on deaf ears, I can only assume the mineral is, at this stage in the universe’s life, used purely for creating energy.
[Point of order: this seems to sit at odds with what we learnt from the history of Omega in The Three Doctors. That story informed us time travel was aided through the harnessed power of a collapsed neutron star. Perhaps Zieton-7 is merely a separate component of a time capsule’s engineering. Given that Waterfield and Maxtible, as well as the Daleks, the Sontarans and the original builders of Terminus [see The Evil of the Daleks, The Chase, The Time Warrior and Terminus] seem to have perfected time travel without either Zieton-7 or a collapsed star, you do wonder why the Time Lords should be considered such a powerful galactic race…]
Anyway, the ruler of Varos finds itself in a similar position to the Kings and Queens of Peladon, for Zieton-7 is as valuable to the universe as Trisilicate ore. Various organisations vie for its wealth. For centuries the Galtron Mining Corporation has utilised a trading monopoly and bought Zieton-7 at a huge discount. Its ambassador, the repulsive, maggot like dwarf Sil is attempting to renegotiate an advantageous deal. He has an agent inside Varos’ elite, the Chief Officer, who is the power behind the throne, his position allowing him to effectively usurp the Governor should the ruler make a decision considered disadvantageous to Varos, or rather to the Galtron Mining Corporation. This familiar role reminds us of those Shakespearian tragedies of Othello, Lear, Macbeth and Julius Caesar, where kings cannot rule without looking into the shadows. Modern history still warns us of internal coups and outside imperialism interfering in economies and nations. Indeed, for all his fantastical ugliness Sil seems best to represent the grasping, threatening, blackmailing hand of the British East India Company. The palace coups which toppled many a dictator throughout history are equally well presented, with the military turning on the Governor for their own financial and political gain. The people – Arak and Etta – believe they have a say, a constitutional vote, but it is manipulated against fair judgement and will do nothing to help their entrenched society.
The Doctor drops onto this chaotic world because his TARDIS repairs have been causing all sorts of problems aboard ship. Eventually he goes one step too far and immobilises the time vessel. This seems to send him into a funk. Colin Baker sulks, turning his vibrant, almost manic character into a morose depressive. Bright eyed, bushy tailed Peri hauls him out of his malaise and, freshly invigorated, the Doctor uses the last of the TARDIS’ propulsion power to materialise on Varos. He hopes to purchase a small quantity of Zieton-7. He ends up stopping Jondar’s execution and perfecting a rebellion. I’ve never cared for Colin Baker, but he’s exceptionally good in this adventure, swapping barbs with Sil, the Governor, the Chief Officer and the lunatic scientist Quillam. He panders and patters to Peri, a relationship which retains its edge while having some of the spikes blunted. He encourages the rebels in their plight. While the jury is still out regarding his more ruthless characteristics, the violence he administers here didn’t trouble me as much as it did in the jet-propelled actioner Attack of the Cybermen. This is possibly because the rulers of Varos seem intent of wiping out all opposition by foul means and this includes the Doctor, who ventures into the Punishment Dome and confronts a series of hallucinatory tortures which appear to slaughter him. The cliff-hanger to episode one is certainly a classic, as the Governor personally directs the television transmission, waits for the Doctor’s last breath and cuts the broadcast.
There was, for some, an even bleaker scene, where the Doctor – having induced a coma [see several stories in the Jon Pertwee era] – revives just in time to escape an acid bath. He struggles with the two attendants who both fall into the huge acid vat. Some commentators believe the Doctor shouldn’t behave in this manner, but I watched this scene very closely. The first attendant slips and falls into the acid; on attempting his escape he pulls the second man into the bath. The Doctor hasn’t directly killed either of them. His parting quip, delivered James Bond style, “Forgive me if I don’t join you”, was mildly amusing. It’s no worse than any of Roger Moore’s puns. I will add that Jon Pertwee might have given the moment a touch more earnestness. It’s the kind of incident that cropped up regularly during his tenure. Baker is perhaps a little too flippant with the line, which is why the scene and the sentence draws attention. Having said that, Baker’s Doctor is nothing if not inconsistent, so his suggested mirth at such a point is entirely consistent in its very obtuseness.
The Doctor and Peri discover that Varos was once a prison planet and its rulers are descended from the original officer class. Philip Martin seems to enjoy the historical / political / societal allusions he can draw. That’s no surprise as his Birmingham-set 1970s drama Gangsters covered similar ground. I enjoy the references too. On Varos austerity cuts to the core of the populace while the ruling classes relax in luxury – although to be fair, the Governor’s residence is never seen, so we must take this at Jondar’s word – and create a fascist state in thrall to its own image. As events unfold and the Doctor uncovers the real enemy of the state, the watching audience sides with the Governor. As the Doctor makes an escape, he’s pursued by cannibals [yes, cannibals, no less – the irony!] and defeats the bad guys by trapping them in a corridor laden with waving poisonous plants. These moments, rather like the visually arresting acid bath, the live executions and torture, mock at the opinions of the idealists who decry the same video nasties the story is presenting. Death, Philip Martin is saying, stays all around us. The Governor, finally seeing the error of his ways, puts his own popularity to the test: “A man scared for his life will find solutions to this planet’s problems. Except that the poor unfortunate will find there are no popular solutions.” His plea, and the televised actions of the Doctor, finally bring a sense of justice to the voting population of Varos.
While I’m enjoying Philp Martin’s script and Ron Jones’ bleak presentation, it is worth noting the important, brilliant supporting performances. Martin Jarvis [Governor] is excellent, being stately, diplomatic and empathetic. He’s a veritable Pontius Pilate, attempting to reapportion blame until he can’t avoid decisions, despite recognising the awkward situation he is in: caught between three masters: Varos, the population and the Galton Mining Corporation. In fact, he offers Jondar to the wiles of the world by letting the voters decide the rebel’s fate, a futuristic outcome for Jesus or Barabbas. Jondar is even strung up in a Christlike pose.
Nicola Bryant’s Peri might be a little less punchy than usual, but that doesn’t hurt. Curiously she wears exactly the same uniform as last time out, only in blue not pink. Forbes Collins [Chief Officer] displays the necessary steeliness as the double agent. Stephen Yardley [Arak] and Sheila Reid [Etta] are superb as the humorous, sceptical and downtrodden Chorus; the moment where Etta rejoices in the Doctor’s escape because she likes his funny clothes at least provides justification for the costuming monstrosity of the season. Nicolas Chagrin [Quillam] is ruthless and manic, although he’s a poor man’s Sharez Jek, with his face mask and scar. Even Jason Connery’s Jondar has moments to shine. Sir Sean Connery’s son had made a few steps into the acting realm and this was his breakout role. Soon he’d be on the T.V. regularly as the second actor to play Robin Hood in Robin of Sherwood.
However all the acting plaudits are stolen by Nabil Shaban as the slimy, ugly, scheming Sil, a native of Thoras Beta, an alien in love with money, power and himself. There’s a beautifully telling scene where he preens himself and complements his [horrific] looks. The addition of a blinking translator on his chest reminds us he speaks an alien language, a little detail which adds to the overall clarity and ingenuity of the tale. Unable to survive without water, he’s constantly being sprayed which makes him resemble some gleaming green moving oil slick; he constantly eats – live fish, cannibalism again – and when he speaks it’s in a series of yells and shrieks and bitter jibes. “This is the most wonderful entertainment,” he rasps before a summary execution. He is left alive at the show’s climax, but the power has been pulled from beneath his tail and even his own masters abandon him on Varos.
Some minor points of interest: Vengeance on Varos clearly influenced the movie The Running Man (1987) where Arnold Schwarzenegger’s prison inmate plays out a deadly game of chase on live television. The character of Sil can also be seen replicated in the Star Trek: Next Generation monster the Ferengi, the two character’s mantra of socio-capitalism eclipsing everything else about their makeup. The incidental music score was suitably industrial. The end scene, as Varos’ T.V. screens go dead and Etta asks: “What shall we do now?” still seems to auger tremendously of the modern day. The original title for the serial was to be Domain or Planet of Fear, both of which would be a little more fitting for in the actual story there’s no vengeance exacted on anybody.
A few minor quibbles and few quivering sets can’t disguise the surprisingly strong narrative drive of this serial. I was never a fan of Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor and I’m dreading re-treading the Seventh Doctor’s tenure, so it maybe that Vengeance on Varos is the last five-star adventure I review. We must wait and see. For now, big congratulations and much relief all-round. Colin Baker has a performance and adventure to be proud of in a fantastic slice of socio-political sci-fi:
@chrisno1 do you know of a webpage or handy-dandy graphic that clearly breaks down the classic series into eras by Producer and Head Writer? You've mentioned these personalities and their eras a few times throughout your reviews, but its a bit hard to find past mentions over 10 pages of long posts. I think of the eras by Doctors and their Companions, but these behind the scenes changes are clearly important in defining the eras as well.
I'm enjoying all your Points of Order on the internal mythology of the show as it evolves, I don't know how you're keeping all that straight in your head. I thought I knew a bit about TimeLord society from the Time Meddler, War Games, Brain of Morbius and the Deadly Assassin, but my mind is blown at just how much has been revealed by this Sixth Doctor era and how many times this internal mythology has contradicted itself. I do know in the near future you've got something called the Valeyard to sort out then McCoy's last season also complicates things further.
@chrisno1 In your review of 'Attack' you make an interesting mention of 'super fan' Ian Levine. It's always amusing listening to Eric Saward carping about JNT's choices, including giving Levine an advisory role. However marginal Levine may have been, his preoccupation with nostalgic continuity references probably did this era of stories no favours.
Critics and material I don't need. I haven't changed my act in 53 years.
@caractacus potts I sent you a PM. I don't want to reveal all my secrets until the end !
@Shady Tree Yes, I wasn't aware of Levine until I started this thread. I wonder if his input was stymied by not being a writer. It's also worth noting, and I mention is a couple of times, that traditionally long running TV shows never bothered much about accuracy in continuity of character because nobody had videos, DVD, multiple TV channels, Twitter, the www, etc. The fab base simply wasn't that vocal and widespread. The Target book series only started to get in the swing of it by the mid-seventies and the magazine was seen as something for kids. I just don't think Turner, Saward and Levine and their conspirators genuinely thought people cared to remember. How wrong they were.
At the end of episode one of this extremely thoughtless adventure, Peri exclaims to the Master: “Last time I saw you, you were burned to death!” Damn right he was. So, how did Anthony Ainley’s Time Lord manage to escape his fiery doom on Sarn? [see Planet of Fire.] Writers Pip and Jane Baker don’t bother to tell us. Instead the Master declares: “I’m invincible!” Someone really should have taken a closer look at this script as he clearly means ‘indestructible’. The Master has been defeated so many times he is obviously not invincible. What irks even more, is his unnecessary presence in the story, for there is already a Time Lord villain in place on Earth: Kate O’Mara’s Rani [or The Rani, for some reason]. The Doctor is in awe of the Master’s female equivalent, calling her “a genius” and admiring the smooth, shiny, sleek, sexy interior of her TARDIS with its beautiful circular console and gyroscope column. He even muses, before stopping himself, that if she’d not been exiled from Gallifrey they might, just, maybe… I’ll leave your imaginations to wander, just like his does.
The Master meanwhile should really be heeding lessons from the Rani. He’s always wanted to rule the universe, but can’t even rule a planet: she’s already managed it, so we are told. The problem the Rani has is her experiments on the alien population of Miasimia Goria have turned the indigenous natives into dipsomaniac lunatics. To pacify her subjects, she’s been dropping sporadically into Earth history and committing lobotomies to extract the calming ‘sleep essence’ out of a number of unsuspecting human brains, thus creating lunatics on Earth, who crop up at some vital moments of history.
This is as bizarre a villain’s motivation as we’ve ever had on Dr Who. Coupled with the Master’s intent of altering history by killing off Britain’s Industrial Revolution geniuses, men like George Stephenson – a scheme he already made a royal pickle of over the Magna Carta in The King’s Demons – it’s a wonder the script wasn’t immediately vetoed.
[Point of order: many reference books comment that the appearance of George Stephenson is the first real historical character to appear since The Gunfighters. This is not the case. The Season 4 historical story The Highlanders featured Solicitor Grey, who is named on papers exiling three ship’s worth of Jacobites to foreign lands. It is true, however, that Grey’s personal history is sketchy and the story elaborated hugely on his likely involvement.]
Apparently, script editor Eric Saward hated the screenplay and hated the writers. Maybe he did as little work as he could on it just to show how crap the thing really was. If so, he succeeded; it is bad enough suggesting Luddites were lobotomy cases gone mad, but to then rerun a plot line barely two years old… I mean, honestly, what was John Nathan Turner thinking? Well, apparently, he was determined to employ director Sarah Hellings and she only agreed to come onboard if she could film this screenplay and shoot it on location. She got her wishes and we got this pile of toilet.
Kate O’Mara is very game as the Rani, mocking the Doctor and the Master’s petty feuding [“You’re a well matched pair of pests. You two bring nothing but trouble”]. Other than that she’s saddled with the same load of situational silliness the Master has had to endure for the past few seasons, including an open ended demise, just in case she wants to launch a comeback. Normally I give an extra half mark for a decent leading performance, but while O’Mara is watchable after a witchy, Halloween fashion, nobody else is. The performances are a disaster from top to bottom. Everyone’s packing forced jollity, wickedness, worry or fright into their acting. The romp isn’t even very amusing. The Doctor has the temerity to accuse Peri of being smug, which is a bit rich when all three Time Lords inhabit self-absorbed egotistical behaviour. Kettle, pot and black spring to mind.
Speaking of black, the Master’s wearing that frilly velvety outfit again. He looks plain ridiculous in early nineteenth century England. So too does the Doctor – when doesn’t he? – and also the Rani with her 1980s leather trouser suit and shoulder pads. Peri’s the worst, dolled up like a Disney princess minus her crown. The Ironbridge Gorge Museum is used to good effect, but that alone can’t save the atrocious production values of a slow moving, tensionless and mind-numbingly stagnant encounter. They couldn’t even create a decent ‘mark’ for the Rani; instead we have a ruddy pink rhomboid shape slapped on a victim’s neck. It looks to be coloured in with a felt tip pen. Cheap and nasty spring to mind.
There was one brief early moment of delight when a scarecrow comes to life, staring over a ploughed field missing all the natural twittering birdlife, a sky of rolling clouds bearing down. This had all the creepy foreboding hallmarks of Hammer Pictures. Kate O’Mara herself starred in a couple of those, but she must have wondered why she bothered with this drivel.
[Point of OO7 interest: in the run up to the release of You Only Live Twice United Artists Television produced a one hour documentary titled Welcome to Japan, Mr Bond which showed clips from the first five Bond films. Desmond Llewelyn & Lois Maxwell feature to link the scenes and Kate O’Mara had an unbilled role as Moneypenny’s assistant.]
The Mark of the Rani is another torturous low point for Dr Who:
In Wonder Boys, Katie Holmes attempts to explain to Michael Douglas’ bemused Pulitzer Prize winning author why his latest novel is unsuccessful. “It’s, well, it’s so boring!” she eventually tells him. Robert Holmes, who wrote excellently for Dr Who for so long, has also performed the same feat with The Two Doctors; this is possibly the dullest adventure I’ve watched since some of Patrick Troughton’s Season 6 efforts when lumbering Quarks and Krotons and Ice Warriors were shovelled before us.
Poor Pat is back for more of the same. This time a couple of Sontarans stagger around until they are poisoned by coronic acid. It’s fair to say their death agonies were unpleasant. A tick for the make-up people, but the costume department did nothing for the masks and uniforms. These Sontarans look inorganic, as if the actors are wearing a papier mâché head. Worse, these popular monsters are killed off well before the climax. Even worse, it is obvious from about half-way that their purpose to the story was a big fat zero. The Two Doctors clearly earmarks a producer pandering to a perceived audience need. Robert Holmes’ story doesn’t need the Sontarans and it doesn’t need the Second Doctor either. Nor did it need to locate itself in Andalusia. If it wasn’t for the half-decent production values and a sequence of some humour between Patrick Troughton and John Stratton, there’d be nothing to recommend this adventure at all.
There’s a huge problem with The Two Doctors which cannot be adequately explained: its continuity. John Nathan Turner was often lauded for bringing back enemies and clarifying the permanency of past storylines. But he really doesn’t. Under his production cycle the Silurians, the Sea Devils, the Master, the Daleks, the Cybermen, even the Time Lords’ past have been messed about with to the point any established time-line has become a cat’s cradle of facts and cross-purpose. Now, even the Doctor has become ripe for deconstruction! While there is a conceivable window of opportunity between Fury from the Deep and The Wheel in Space when the Doctor and Jamie could have an adventure on their own, it could not feature the Sixth Doctor without him remembering it. So, when Colin Baker begins to investigate the abandoned space laboratory, Camera, he should know exactly what is happening every single step of the way. Yet he doesn’t. This is a gigantic plot hole which even a small child vaguely familiar with the premise of Dr Who would figure out. The fact it is never addressed, unlike in both celebration stories where past incarnations are brought together by the Time Lords who hauling them out of the time stream. One assumes when they return to the original stream, the adventure is conveniently ‘erased’ [see Season 23, to come]. Here, Doctor Two is not hauled from the time stream, but specifically employed by the Time Lords, like Jon Pertwee’s Doctor Three, so this unresolved issue becomes a burden to the adventure as a whole and, for this viewer, reduces any impact to nought.
There are other problems attached to the telling. The serial begins in black and white before fading to colour as we witness Doctor Two and Jamie arguing in the TARDIS control room. While Frazer Hines amazingly appears barely to have aged, Patrick Troughton clearly has. They at least should have dyed his grey hair black, for crying out loud. The quibblesome twosome enjoy some banter as they journey to the Camera Space Laboratory, a place the Doctor visited at its inauguration [probably prior to us joining the Doctor’s adventures]. The space station is in the Third Zone of galaxies and the forty scientists working there are some of the system’s finest minds, including Dastari the universe’s leading biogeneticist. This is all very well, except during these opening scenes Doctor Two informs us that he’s visiting at the request of the Time Lords who occasionally use him as an outside agent. This, Doctor Two explains, is a condition of his freedom: because he’s been exiled from their society the Time Lords can deny ever sending him. This statement makes utter nonsense of everything we’ve learnt about the Doctor in the previous twenty one years. William Hartnell referred to himself as an exile certainly; the suggestion is he has been forced away from his then unnamed home planet. In early scenes of The Savages [Season 3] he does appear to be carrying out a planetary survey, but it isn’t clear if he’s specifically doing this under instructions. Hartnell’s tenure was notable for him frequently stating he could never return to his home world.
There’s more… The term Time Lord wasn’t even used until The War Games [Season 6] and during that adventure the Doctor is horrified at the possibility of returning to his home world. He makes every effort to escape. Here, the Time Lords have attached a teleport control to the TARDIS console to direct him to the Camera Laboratory. The Doctor continues to discuss the debilitating effects of time travel experiments with a bored looking Dastari [actor Laurence Payne must have been as uninterested as I was]. Apparently Kartz and Reimer’s experiments have resulted in time ripples of .4 on the Bocca Scale. While monitoring time, the Gallifreyans picked up the ripples and have sent Doctor Two to investigate. Later on Doctor Six explains the ripple will cause a fracture in the time continuum that will end everything in a few centuries. Peri laughs at him; if it’s so far off, why bother worrying? It’s a bit how some climate-change deniers approach environmentalist arguments. This facet of the plot, having been dropped dramatically into the narrative, is equally dramatically never mentioned again.
Still more… Back to the opening ten minutes. Jamie has suddenly developed a knowledge of the Doctor’s race and history which he never had before: in The War Games, the Doctor explains to the Scot exactly who he is and who the Time Lords are. So how come Jamie’s familiar with them all now?
Back to the story, then… Dastari and the other thirty-nine scientists, none of whom we see, use Androgums as servants. These humanoid gourmands eat anything, including rats and human flesh. Shockeye, a master chef of the most unpleasant and unhygienic kind, wants to grill Jamie for dinner. Doctor Two fends him off with a cucumber. Dastari has taken a female Androgum, Chessene, [Jacqueline Pearce, who acts as if she’s still playing the evil Servalan in Blake’s 7] and technologically augmented her into a scientific genius. She’s also developed a power craze and an ego the size of the Camera space station. Despite the augmentation, her true nature continues to assert itself; she remains ruthless and cannibalistic. There is a brilliant scene where she licks the Doctor’s spilt blood from her hand. A little more of this gruesome detail would have benefitted the story tremendously.
As it stands most of the gory stuff is played for laughs. John Stratton’s Shockeye is a horrid invention, all warts and spit and cleavers. His obsession with food is both amusing and distracting. He simply can’t be taken seriously as a villain’s accomplice. Eventually, after Doctor Two is infected with Androgum blood and begins to take on aspects of the race’s behaviours, the two team up like Laurel and Hardy, or Becket’s Vladimir and Estragon, a pair of hobos out to lunch consuming the whole menu at a fancy restaurant including a dozen bottles of wine. These scenes of comedy lighten the bleak atmosphere, but it feels misplaced, coming towards the climax of the adventure. It isn’t explained how Doctor Two recovers from his infection or why Doctor Six also begins to exhibit Androgum tendencies, after all, his blood hasn’t been affected. Adding to the general sense of an adventure not knowing whether to shock or amuse, Oscar, the kindly butterfly-loving maître d’ who initially assists the Doctor in Andalusia, is murdered in cold blood by a belligerent Shockeye during a moment of restaurant rage. Robert Holmes’ script is at its very worst here, playing the scene for comic value and utilising inappropriate quotes from Hamlet. Director Peter Moffatt, who hasn’t got a hold on the action at all, doesn’t help by ensuring over-acting all round.
Colin Baker is appalling in this adventure, even worse than he was in The Twin Dilemma. He’s a liberal pain in the arse. At one point, Jamie mutters to Peri: “I think your Doctor’s worse than mine.” You ain’t wrong, mate! The Doctor’s demeanour and attitude are devoid of all empathy. He blames Peri for everything, considers her foolish despite her coming up with all the best ideas, dislikes his former self and is far too self-righteous to be appealing. Baker prances around like a demented peacock and generally over emphasises his dialogue and actions to the point he’s virtually a caricature of his own making. Absurd. I feel for Nicola Bryant who has to contend with such egotistical grandstanding. She’s not helped by having to share lines with Jamie, who does very little. The current TARDIS twosome come off best when they are crawling around the space laboratory’s service ducts, a sequence that recalls Doctor Three’s time exploring the circuit board of a Time Scope in Carnival of Monsters [Season 10]. Otherwise, their petty bickering just adds to the boredom.
There is a plot. Somewhere. Dastari is the only biogeneticist in the universe who can isolate the symbiotic nuclei of a Time Lord. He’s developed a siralanomode machine to locate and extract this gene. The nuclei gives Time Lords the molecular stability to travel through time. A time module – such as a TARDIS – is fitted with a briode nebuliser and once this is primed by a Time Lord’s symbiotic nuclei, confusingly referred to as the Rassilon Imprimatur, it will be safe for anyone to use. This is quite obviously rubbish. I’ve rewatched Dr Who from Episode 1, Season 1, and from quite early on it was possible for other races to time travel: the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Vardans, the Minyans, the Black and White Guardians, the Tharils, even humans, have all achieved the impossible. Indeed, quite why the Sontaran Stike is so hooked on discovering the secret of time travel when his race already possessed it is a mystery unresolved [see The Time Warrior]. Chessene wants the power of time travel so she can conquer the universe. Yep, same old, same old…
The adventure is torturously slow moving. There’s too much scientific jargon being battered about and none of it makes any sense, either historically or logically. The tension stems mostly on Shockeye’s attempts to eat humans. Andalusia is sparkling, but you sense they didn’t need to go there at all. Replacing the usual running up and down corridors with people running up and down dusty alleys in Seville feels like a waste. At least in City of Death, Paris was fundamental to the plot. Seville could easily be Swansea for what it’s worth. It must have been a nice holiday for everyone, I suppose.
The Two Doctors does look pretty, and at times also pretty nasty, which is the intention, but production values can’t lift this one above the ordinary while the lacklustre interpretation or reinterpretation of accepted Dr Who history is hopelessly baffling.
The Mark of the Rani introduced George Stephenson as a character into the Dr Who Universe. Glen McCoy’s Timelash repeats the feat by introducing H.G. Wells, in the form of a young man named Herbert. It isn’t revealed exactly who he is until the end of the adventure, but, really, who cares? for Timelash is such an inconsequential story it barely registers on the Richter Scale of achievements.
The TARDIS is caught in a time tunnel and lands on Karfel, a planet the Third Doctor and Jo Grant once visited. Referring to an untelevised adventure makes a change from messing with accepted Dr Who history, but it’s a cheeky shortcut and allows the Doctor to be immediately familiar with his surroundings; so there’s no time spent exploring the planet and its people. Instead the Doctor and Peri spend most of the opening twenty five minutes being flung about the TARDIS control room trying to escape said time tunnel. The Doctor is particularly unpleasant to Peri in this one and Nicola Bryant, despite doing the best she can to remain bushy tailed, is mistreated by everyone she meets and spends most of the story tied up or incarcerated or under threat. Once again, a villain takes a romantic fancy too her and he too is another ugly mug.
The Borad is a mutant scientist who has become Karfel’s dictator. He’s created a punishment machine known as the Timelash which sends dissenters into the time tunnel, where they vanish forever. [They are actually dispatched to Earth c.1179, so you do wonder what happened to them.] The Borad wants to annihilate the whole Karfel race, which seems a bit extreme even for a demented scientist. While he’s going about it and Peri’s all tied up, Herbert is garnering data for his future novels; references are made to The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr Moreau, War of the Worlds and most obviously The Time Machine. There’s even a peculiar reference to the origin of the legend of Loch Ness – odd as the Doctor knows Nessie was a Zygon Skarasen [see Terror of the Zygons].
The adventure passes amiably by. After Jacqueline Pearce’s appearance in The Two Doctors, it’s now Paul Darrow’s turn. He played opposite her in Blake’s 7 as the surly rebel leader Avon. Here, he mercilessly sends-up his role as Tekker, the Borad’s stooge, and is a delightful distraction from all the other inexplicable and unexplainable nonsense going on.
When I watched this, I wondered why, given John Nathan Turner’s seeming obsession with bringing back past monsters, he didn’t have the TARDIS land on Peladon and make the Borad an Ice Warrior. It might have been fun to see Peladon in the far future, ruled by a lunatic Martian dictator, but retaining its caves and legends and Aggedors. Ah, well, I suppose we can all dream:
lands on Karfel, a planet the Third Doctor and Jo Grant once visited. Referring to an untelevised adventure makes a change from messing with accepted Dr Who history
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I'm confused by this bit? if it was not an actual episode of the Third Doctor era, is it a reference to one of the tie-in novels, or an abandoned script, or this a complete all-new retcon specifically assigning the past adventure the Third and Jo?
At time of transmission, the Third Doctor and Jo Grant's visit to Karfel was completely unknown. It was created purely for the purposes of this adventure. The Doctor recognises the planet's culture. There is a mural portrait of his third incarnation on a wall, hidden behind panelling in the council control centre. Peri recognises a portrait of Jo inside a Karfelan locket - one assumes she must have seen Jo's picture in the Doctor Who Family Photo Album hidden somewhere in the TARDIS. I'm guessing. Maybe she got curious after meeting Jamie and said: "Hey, Doc, how many of you were there before I came along?" I can't imagine the Sixth Doctor having the patience to dig out a photo album though! Anyway, it is fairly obvious whatever initially happened on Karfel did occur, we just have not witnessed it or heard of it.
The Third Doctor and Jo could have visited Karfel between any adventures of the 8th and 9th Seasons only if the Time Lords sent them [as they did to Peladon and Solos] or in the 10th Season between Carnival of Monsters and Frontier in Space, or Planet of the Daleks and The Green Death. I think Carnival... was specifically mentioned as Jo's first proper trip in the functioning TARDIS.
In 1996, author Paul Leonard wrote the Virgin Missing Adventures novel #27 Speed of Flight. In it, Jo is set up with Mike Yates on a blind date; but she protests she's supposed to be going to Karfel with the Doctor. An adventure in space and time ensues, but not on Karfel. This story however does specifically take place after Planet of the Daleks and before The Green Death. However, in terms of television's Classic Dr Who, it still doesn't exist except through the eye of Timelash.
Closer to home is the 2010 The Sarah Jane Adventures story Death of the Doctor, where Jo Grant recounts her visit to Karfel: "The Doctor took me to this planet once called Karfel. And they had a leisure garden. And the plants could sing."
Make of all this what you will.
As I said, and referencing my earlier notes about 'continuity advisor' Ian Levine, whose contributions to continuity are as good as nil, surely it would have been easier to send the Sixth Doctor back to Peladon?
Revelation of the Daleks is another of those divisive Dr Who adventures. John Kenneth Muir, Christopher Bahn, Stuart Galbraith and Mark Harrison don’t like it, whereas writers for The Discontinuity Guide, Radio Times,The Television Companion and Doctor Who: The Complete Guide do. I lean towards the latter.
It is a gruesome, violent little number, for sure, but it looks impressive and it has a plethora of unusual characters whose motivations intersect, correlate and inhabit a creepingly hideous landscape which could only be possible in a program as structurally fluid as Dr Who. For once, while the story is a sequel of sorts – as are all but one of the serials for Season 22 – it doesn’t attempt to tell us anything we didn’t know about a monster’s past. Instead, Revelation… adds to the Dalek legacy rather than stealing, altering or simply ignoring the past. There are certainly nods to previous adventures, not always Dalek related, as well as other outside sources, but this allows Eric Saward’s script to breathe a little more, unrestricted by the necessity to incorporate a tonnage of Dalek / Doctor / Davros lore. It’s refreshing in fact that the narrative concentrates more on the peripheral characters than the Doctor and Peri. For some, this is to the story’s detriment. Speaking as a Sixth Doctor ‘non-believer’ this enthuses me. The less I see of him the better.
The TARDIS two-some barely feature in the first episode, spending their whole time swapping barbed comments about each other as they stumble through the snowy landscape of the planet Necros. The Doctor is at his most disagreeable. Peri really should have jumped ship when visiting Andalusia because he never seems happy to have her around, the ungrateful clown. To be fair to Colin Baker, he’s not given the dialogue to make his Doctor any more pleasant. Writer after writer panders to a developing misanthropy. This sits badly with what we know of the Doctor’s history. While even Jon Pertwee’s incarnation considered humans fairly inane and particularly warlike, he was rarely so obviously insulting or insensitive, certainly never to his female companions. Let’s leave the warring pair with a polite nod to reconciliation in adversity and concentrate on whatever else is happening.
The Doctor wants to visit the Tranquil Repose Mortuary where an old acquaintance, the renowned Professor Stengos, has been interred. The T.R.M. cryogenically freezes its clients when they contract incurable diseases. They are held in suspended animation until a cure is discovered, at which point they are resuscitated and healed. The President of the Galaxy [we are not told which galaxy] is also due to be interred and preparations are afoot for his arrival. He isn’t a great President, overseeing a galaxy-wide famine.
However, something is amiss in this funereal world. Rumours abound that clients never leave the T.R.M. and two sceptics have infiltrated the facility with a plan to investigate and destroy. Unknown to almost all, in the crypt of the T.R.M. is a vast laboratory where the so-called Great Healer instead of healing is creating high protein foods from the store of human bodies. This has tantalising glimpses of Richard Fleischer’s classic 70s sci-fi Soylent Green and is exactly the sort of horrific premise beloved of the Philip Hinchcliffe era of Dr Who. Even more unwelcome to all is the revelation [ha!] that the Great Healer is Davros, genius of the Daleks, a man whose broken shell has been reduced to nothing more than a head on a box in a glass booth with a clutch of wires attached. Memories of The Brain of Morbius abound. Davros survived the explosion of his prison ship by using an escape pod. He has offered the [unnamed] company running the Tranquil Repose Mortuary the rights to distribute the food protein, but neglected to tell them how he’s made it. The company director, Kara, has thrown the whole financial resource of the T.R.M. behind Davros’ experiments, but has subsequently become suspicious. The madman has been developing Daleks in his laboratory, essentially for his personal bodyguard. However, unlike many previous adventures the humans we see here are well aware of both the Daleks and Davros because his trial and imprisonment made news across the galaxies. Kara rightly believes she has been deceived and recruits the assassin Orcini to kill the Great Healer. Orcini is a Knight of the Grand Order of Oberon; he comes accompanied by his uncouth squire Bostok and these two make a fine Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, although they fight real not imaginary enemies. Meanwhile, the two sceptics have infiltrated the Great Healer’s lab and discovered Prof Stengos, his body self-mutating into Dalek form. This is an exceptionally powerful scene which would have climaxed episode 1 back in the days of twenty-five minute runtimes.
Back above ground, two mortuary assistants, Takis and Lilt, have revolution plans of their own. This Chas n Dave pairing have running verbal battles with the Chief Embalmer, Jobel, and his lovelorn assistant, Tasambeker. Davros, unknown to all, monitors the communications systems and is aware of every move everybody makes. This allows him to expose Jobel as a sexual predator, blackmail Tasambeker, uncover the plot against him and guide the Doctor towards a final confrontation. What it can’t do is shut out the annoying radio D.J. who uses a live feed to update the cryogenically frozen clients with the latest news, lest they awake after a few hundred years unaware of universal progress. Comedian Alexi Sayle enjoys himself in a daft role. The rock n roll laser gun was a hoot.
Davros’ White Daleks are very striking, being bigger and standing out against the slate greys of the T.R.M. and its ancient catacombs. These Daleks are true devotees of their creator. Hints of a new Dalek Civil War abound, this one between Skaro’s Daleks and Davros’ renegades. There seems to be a temporary truce between Daleks and other races, brought about one assumes by the devastating effects of the Movellan virus. However, there is still a Dalek Supreme and he dispatches a saucer shaped space ship full of original, smaller, grey Daleks to recapture their creator so he can be tried for crimes against the Dalek race. It appears even the Daleks, over centuries of time, have developed a sense of justice beyond ‘Exterminate!” A pity Colin Baker’s Doctor doesn’t make mention of this, as it was one of his predecessors who so astutely predicted it.
[Point of Dalek order 1: the Sixth Doctor isn’t recognised by the Daleks and it isn’t entirely clear why. Davros has learnt of Time Lord regeneration; this is the third version of the Doctor he’s encountered. The Daleks themselves have recognised the Second Doctor as an enemy in both The Power of… and The Evil of… as well as Resurrection of… I assumed this was through some sophisticated D.N.A. scanning – after all, what’s that sucker for? – but it appears not; apparently the Sixth Doctor’s image does not compute. Maybe it was his lack of sartorial elegance which foxed them…
[Point of Dalek order 2: This adventure clearly takes place after Resurrection… and because of the technology on show, it must be set many thousands of years in the future. There’s a confusing line from the D.J. about how the 1960s music he plays is only three generations old. Clearly he’s getting his generations confused with his eons, epochs or millenniums, or perhaps we’re in another of these alternate universes which no one dare whisper about, or maybe he accidentally took a trip on the Dalek time corridor before the Doctor blew it up…
[Point of Dalek order 3: both Davros and a Dalek are seen to levitate. Apparently this wasn’t a 1980s innovation. At the end of episode 1 of The Chase [Season 2], the Dalek which emerges from the sand is supposably levitating. I never noticed this and I’m not entirely sure why it would be levitating out of a sand dune, but this is what my research tells me. I don’t like levitating Daleks. They just look silly.]
The adventure has much to recommend it, mostly in the substories Saward has invented for his cast. The unrequited love of Tasambeker, Natasha’s hunt for her father, the drunken Grigory attempting to redeem himself, the scheming Kara and her secretary Vogel, the revolution angle, the civil war angle, the master-servant relationship of Orcini and Bostok and their Shakespearian tragedy of a life. Supplied with realistically assertive or enigmatic dialogue, depending on circumstance and personality, the actors really come alive. Clive Swift is probably the best of the bunch, his creepy, lecherous turn as Jobel going against his usual casting. He also has the best line, judging Colin Baker’s Doctor with a single dismissive sentence: “It would take a mansion to bury an ego as big as yours.” Well said!
Of the rest, Jenny Tomasin’s Tasambeker is worryingly chastened. Eleanor Bron impresses as Kara, as does Hugh Walters’ ingratiatingly slimy Vogel. William Gaunt’s Orcini [yes, it really is Richard Barratt from The Champions] is blessed with a noble streak matched by his almost pre-Baldrick squire in John Ogwen’s Bostok. The scary cameo from Alec Lindstead as the mutant Prof Stengos will certainly stay with me for a while, as will the glass Dalek and the view through the casing of a vibrating screaming mutant.
It is the most traditional Dr Who characters who disappoint: the rebels and the revolutionaries and the chief villain. Terry Molloy is much better than he was in Resurrection… but they mangled a lot of his dialogue while his head is stuck in that box. The others simply don’t cut a decent swathe, which is disappointing. Even the Doctor and Peri feel subdued unless they are arguing the proverbial toss. The second forty-five minutes has an urgency and drive which doesn’t quite gel with the mystery and sense of impending doom invited by the first. We’re almost asked to watch two contrasting serials. Almost, but not quite. Once the usual run-around begins though it’s all hands to guns, knives, hypodermics, grenades and bombs and let’s kill and explode things, mostly Dalek things.
Despite a rather rudimentary finale, director Graeme Harper ensures Season 22 ends on something of a high. The look of the adventure is first class and credit must go to Alan Spalding’s splendidly austere production designs, John Walker’s photography [especially the location footage which jumps around various parks in wintery Hampshire] Roger Limb’s creepy music, Dorka Nieradzik’s effective make-up or masks and Pat Godfrey’s understated costumes. Two asides of note. First, this is the last time Dr Who would be shot on film when outside locations were used; no jarring transitions anymore, although the quality of modern equipment had made these less obvious over time. Second, Peter Howell’s arrangement of the theme tune made its final appearance and would be replaced from the next season.
I’d never watched Revelation of the Daleks prior to this run-through and I was genuinely impressed and surprised. There’s a lot to love here:
Former script editor Terrance **** is on record as stating that Colin Baker “didn’t stand a chance in that outfit.” He’s not far wrong. Quite what Colin Baker was expecting to wear when he took on the role is not on record, but I’ll bet it wasn’t a costume that made him look like a demented harlequin. What possessed the Dr Who team to come up with such an appalling mode of dress isn’t clear. There’s some suggestion it’s the ‘sum of all his parts’ – I think somebody was colour blind, or maybe just blind. And the problem doesn’t solely rest with the costume, bad as it is, for Baker taps into a broad maniacal persona for his portrayal. Unlike his predecessors, who after shaky and ambiguous beginnings developed a strong sense of personal character, Baker has remained scatty and contradictory. He has no solid platform to build his version of the Doctor upon. Instead he takes each line, each scene individually and on its own merits. This makes him bafflingly inconsistent, frequently petulant when he should be kind, light-hearted when he should be serious, angry when he should be studious. It is true Baker may be directed like this or there may have been a request from the top for a more abrasive Doctor to chime with a more violent series of stories, yet the result is a chaotic leading man who fails to draw sympathy or understanding.
I blame the script editor [Eric Saward] who is responsible for the overall evenness and tone of a series as it develops. Saward had been John Nathan Turner’s right-hand man for some time [since Peter Davison came on board] and while occasionally his individual work shows brilliance [e.g. Earthshock, Revelation of the Daleks] in general the standard of Seasons 19, 20, 21 & 22 is mired in mediocrity. While there may sometimes be strange casting decisions or a failure of the design team to blame, a script editor’s concerns are character, place and consistency and Saward simply doesn’t provide it. The hectoring tone Baker assumes first took root in Peter Davison’s arbitrary reactions to Adric. It is fully fledged by Season 22 and Baker, taking his lead from the top, seems to enjoy the character’s self-confessed egotism. The unfortunate outcome is the lack of a conciliatory heart. This Doctor simply isn’t very amiable. His bullish, overbearing and downright discourteous nature does not win him friends. In polite society, he’d be termed a boor and swiftly taken to Coventry.
Baker’s displays do not endear him to his fellow performers either. Poor Nicola Bryant, who started so brilliantly, seems swamped by the oppressive atmosphere of the Sixth Doctor’s TARDIS and has been reduced to nothing more than a verbal punchbag. She used to give it back, but the writers [or Saward] have stopped bothering. In The Two Doctors Bryant is clearly seen to mouth the word “Arsehole” at Baker after one of his ‘quips’ and you can hardly blame her. The other cast members are, almost to an adventure, attempting to match Baker’s over-the-top flamboyance or else they quail from it. Only in Vengeance on Varos and Revelation of the Daleks do the actors provide the support the stories require. This failure can be aimed at the ‘guest star’ policy, which actually means dragging a sagging actor out of the gutter of his / her career for a brief cameo-style turn. My memory of this time is that I barely registered who these actors were. The theory they might add outside interest to a story and bring new, curious viewers to the show doesn’t hold water. Nor does the idea they might add some professionalism to proceedings as that’s the responsibility of the producer, the director, the backroom teams and the lead, recurring actors. It’s very hard to detect that professionalism on display here.
Overall, the quality of the stories in Season 22, like those which came in all of Davison’s era, are swamped by inconsistency of tone, character and design. Two good serials separated by a host of generally poor ones has become the standard fare of most Dr Who banquets. The menu offered is the same: returning favourites overbaked, a few unusual and often unsuccessful side dishes, the Master for a sour dessert and all washed down by a healthy bottle of time meddling. The cutlery and tableware can’t support the ambition and the service is piecemeal at best.
While I can search out reasons for the relative failure of recent seasons, and be generous in my reward for the stories which are good, it must be said that these repetitive failures can only be orchestrated from the top. John Nathan Turner’s era feels as if it’s been a year too long already. No producer has lasted more than five seasons and Turner has had his fistful. The good ground work he laid in Tom Baker’s swansong year has evaporated. Instead of creating well-structured, workable stories, he and his team seem to be seeking out talking points. It’s all ‘let’s bring back the cybermen / sea devils / Omega’ or ‘let’s guest star Ingrid Pitt, guys from Blake’s 7 or sitcoms’. This situation reached its apex here with the Master returning after clearly and cleverly being killed off in Planet of Fire and the Second Doctor cropping up in the laborious The Two Doctors, a yawn-fest devoid of interest and featuring an episode and a Doctor too many.
The ratings for the season were not that bad, peaking at 9 million, flatlining around the 6.5 mark. But the hierarchy at the BBC wanted more. It is a fair criticism to make that the BBC didn’t provide Dr Who with the resources, both financial and in expertise. The show became a bargain basement production which relied on goodwill and cheap labour. So older, bored guests stars out for a quick pay day and younger inexperienced ones looking for a chance to shine and failing, are employed in front of the camera, while the same tired technicians wallow behind it. Dr Who needed a revamp. It needed a fresh producer, a fresh script editor and fresh injection of money. It was still a show to be proud of [just] and serials like Vengeance on Varos demonstrate how good it can be when the jigsaw puzzle fits. It’s worth applauding a show prepared to take risks and upping the violent content feels justified given the unremittingly nasty storylines, but too often there is no filter for the unsavoury action and this only adds to the sense of creating the talking point without leading the conversation.
Amongst it all, Doctor Who himself feels a little lost. Soon, he would be completely missing with a season cancelled to cut costs and a less than appreciative fan base wondering if he’d ever return.
Filling an extended gap between Dr Who seasons, Eric Saward wrote this six-part adventure for the BBC Radio 4 children’s show Pirate Radio. It’s the first Dr Who radio play, predating the longer Jon Pertwee episodes which I reviewed earlier [The Paradise of Death & The Ghosts of N-Space]. This story has a heavy dose of humour and some mature dialogue, for instance it opens with Colin Baker’s Doctor suffering a hangover after drinking Voxnic with Peri during a night on the town on Zaurak Minor.
The TARDIS materialises on the strange survey ship Vipod Moor, huge in size and monitored by a split personality computer. A raging Maston, a creature from the earliest eons of the universe, attacks travellers, raising the Doctor’s suspicions that someone is interfering in the space / time continuum. The TARDIS twosome become separated. Peri falls in with galactic cops chasing art thieves and the Doctor learns that some dangerous time travel experiments are taking place. According to this story, the Vipod Moor was responsible for the Big Bang, which contradicts both science and the Season 20 story Terminus. It seems remiss of Eric Saward to ignore the same stories he worked on a script editor, but there you go. Even the Doctor expresses the belief the computer’s dastardly plot is mindboggling preposterous. Valentine Dyall [the ex-Black Guardian] is the cannibalistic captain who has an appetite for all things Peri. He sadly died two weeks after completing the recordings.
A distraction, if nothing else.
If you want to listen to it, there’s a full copy on:
Michael Grade, Director General of the BBC, put Dr Who on a hiatus in 1985, effectively cancelling the show. The reason given was the corporation wanted to find money to launch their new prime time soap opera East Enders. This show would initially occupy the same scheduling slots [weekdays on Monday and Wednesday] as Dr Who had recently done. Given the success of East Enders, you do feel it was a fairly astute decision. However, given the success of the later rebooted Dr Who, you could also say if the Corporation had handled its key sci-fi show better, things might not have been so dire.
Prior to the ‘cancellation’ producer John Nathan Turner had commissioned several scripts for the next production cycle. While there is a host of information regarding the cancelled season on the usual websites, I’ve chosen the Wikipedia entry as it has the most robust background detail. The serials we may have seen are:
THE NIGHTMARE FAIR
Writer: Graham Williams (the former producer)
Director: Matthew Robinson
IMO: I love the title. The story would feature the return of the Celestial Toymaker. Bringing back the Toymaker, who was a good villain in a terrible adventure does not fill me with any joy. In May 1989, The Nightmare Fair became the first Target novelisation to not be based on a transmitted Dr Who adventure. This subsequently opened the floodgates for a multitude of spin-off novels featuring all the Doctor’s incarnations, most of his companions and some we’ve never met before. Whether you consider this a good or bad thing depends on the kind of love you have for Dr Who, I suppose.
THE ULTIMATE EVIL
Writer: Wally K. Daley
Director: unassigned
IMO: Not much data on this story. It was to be set on an Earth colony planet which has developed a civilised tranquil society. The countries of Tranquela and Ameliora have been at peace for decades until the arms dealer Dwarf Mordant spies an opportunity to make war and money. The Doctor must intervene to save the planet from descending into war.
MISSION TO MAGNUS
Writer: Philip Martin
Director: Ron Jones (possible)
IMO: In Vengeance on Varos, Sil became a great addition to the ranks of Dr Who villainy. He returns here in league with the Ice Warriors. If you’ve read my post on Timelash, you’ll know I considered the Ice Warriors ripe for return, so it was fun to read I wasn’t alone. The scenario for the story is good, but sounds Peladon-lite. It is located on an alien planet beset by trading difficulties. Another renegade Time Lord, Anzor, is mixed up in the planet’s affairs, but doesn’t realise Sil is double crossing him and the ruling Madamme by selling minerals to the Ice Warriors, who will use his influence to seize power.
YELLOW FEVER AND HOW TO CURE IT
Writer: Robert Holmes
Director: Graeme Harper (possibly)
IMO: Set in Singapore and featuring the Autons, the Rani, the Master and the Brigadier. This sounds like one of John Nathan Turner’s wishful thinking ideas with far too many enemies in one pie. It was only at the outline stage when cancelled. Apparently Holmes rewrote it for the Trial of a Time Lord season, but despite deleting the Master, the story was eventually dumped.
THE HOLLOWS OF TIME
Writer: Christopher H. Bidmead
Director: Matthew Robinson
IMO: A great title. This would have featured the Tractators. These creatures were rubbish in Frontios and they’d be rubbish again. Apparently Nester would be replaced by the Great Tractator. I have images of a huge slug sitting on a pile of rocks, a la the Great One in her web in Planet of the Spiders. The Master was written in, impersonating Professor Stream [another anagram]. I am so glad this didn’t get made.
THE CHILDREN OF JANUARY
Writer: Michael Feeney Callan
Director: Bob Gabriel (possibly)
IMO: Very few details. A confusing story of revolution on a desert planet ruled by the fascist dictator Z’ros.
Two other stories that frequently crop up in online searches are Paradise 5 and Leviathan.
Paradise 5 was written by Philip J. Hammond and was eventually slated for inclusion in the commissioned Trial of a Time Lord Season 23, but was passed over in favour of Terror of the Vervoids.
Leviathan was never near the commissioning stage, but Brian Finch’s revolution tale set on a man-made space ship so enormous and inhabited by so many people it has developed its own ecosystem and historical culture had fascinating possibilities. [Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, anyone?]
Amongst many other failed pitches for Season 23 were several more ideas by author Philip Martin as well as actor David Banks, switching from playing the Cyber Leader to writing about him.
Big Finish audio productions has made cast recordings of many of these stories. I haven’t listened to them. Like Target’s official-unofficial novelisations, I don’t consider any of these stories to be canon.
Dr Who was back after an eighteen-month hiatus, starting a season in the autumn for the first time since the days of Tom Baker. The then director of the BBC, Michael Grade, had temporarily cancelled the show in 1985, using the money saved to help build the extensive sets required for the new soap opera East Enders. It’s return was not, in my memory, very eagerly awaited. Indeed, Season 23 is a complete new experience for me. I never watched it at the time, it’s never been repeated and I never hired the DVDs. I also haven’t read very much about it, as the post-Davison years are my least favourite eras of Dr Who.
The season was presented as a fourteen week epic story The Trial of a Time Lord. Our hero, the Doctor, is hauled before a Time Lord court and forced to stand trial for ‘conduct unbecoming of a Time Lord and breaking the First Law of Time.’ There is a sense of déjà vu about that. The Doctor has already stood trial for these crimes in The War Games [see Season 6]. This is a well-documented event. While it may not have been familiar to the casual viewer, it is certainly a storyline most fans were aware of. Fans would also be aware that the Time Lords punished the Doctor by banishing him to Earth, subsequently forgave him following the Omega Affair, have repeatedly used his expertise to carry out Time Lord business, loaned him to the White Guardian and called on his services to defeat a rogue President Borossa. The Doctor himself has saved Gallifrey three times from potential disaster, briefly assumed the role of President and as recently as a few adventures back prevented some disastrous time travel experiments specifically on the orders of the Time Lords. So exactly why are they so keen to put him on trial again? For me, the Dr Who legend is falling apart at the seams. Whatever intent John Nathan Turner – who inexplicably remained at the helm of the show – and his script editor Eric Saward – also unbelievably still in situ – had is blown out of the water by the indecency with which they have trodden all over Dr Who’s past. I agree that in a long running series some stories are likely to be remade or updated, but that doesn’t ignore an established list of facts about your main character. By 1986, the first Dr Who videos were being sold, the magazine was still popular and the Target novelisations were abundant. There were guides to the show written by people like Jean Marc Lofficer and fanzines sent through the post. Information regarding Dr Who was pre-online rampant and for the team at the top to believe they could get away with such a blatant steal is an insult to the fan base. Worse, the opening four episodes of The Trial of a Time Lord saga are an insult to the general viewing public at large.
Written by Robert Holmes as The Mysterious Planet, the season begins with a fantastic motion-controlled camera shot which eases its way along the length of an enormous space ship Star Wars style. A blue tractor beam shoots from the hull. The TARDIS materialises inside it and is sucked remorselessly towards the aperture where it disappears. The hull closes. The action is accompanied by a tolling bell, a repeated theme used by composer Dominic Glyn. This thirty second sequence cost the [for the time] astronomical sum of £8000. We never see the outside of the space ship again.
Unfortunately, one feels some of the money may have been better spent on the interior of the ship. This has to be one of the most disappointing sets I’ve ever seen for Dr Who. The space ship is massive, yet the Doctor lands in a tiny lobby, opens a set of weeny doors and walks straight into a darkened courthouse which looks about as spectacular as a primary school classroom. He sits in the dock on a grey leather office chair, the kind of thing you could buy at IKEA or Habitat, which is quite apt given some of the dialogue we encounter later on in the show. Here the Doctor is confronted by Michael Jayston’s Valeyard, who launches into a series of accusations, all of which the Doctor refutes. Lynda Bellingham’s Inquisitor keeps a rickety lid on proceedings. The Valeyard wishes to use escapades of the Doctor’s Sixth incarnation to prove he has broken Gallifreyan Law and specifically states he will use adventures from the recent past and future.
I laughed.
If the Valeyard is demonstrating the Doctor’s future interference, he obviously must have been found not guilty at the current trial. Someone hasn’t thought this premise through very cleverly! Meanwhile, the Doctor, like me, wonders where Peri has gone. There’s a suggestion Time Lords suffer amnesia when pulled from the timestream, which is neat and explains [possibly] why all those Doctors were able to meet up in the celebration editions without prior knowledge. It doesn’t explain Doctor Two’s or Jamie’s sudden appearance in The Two Doctors though, or why Doctor Six is suffering amnesia when he hasn’t been pulled from the timestream – his whole TARDIS has been kidnapped while in flight. Only he emerges from it, so he is alone. No Peri. No anybody.
The Valeyard presses on and within a few minutes, the Doctor has blithely accepted his fate as the accused and begins to make sarcastic comments about the proceedings, some of which are valid, most of which are not. At various points through the first evidential story the action cuts away and returns us to the courtroom. Even as early as episode two, I began to find this distracting. It doesn’t help that two of the cliff hanger endings take place in the courtroom as the Valeyard threatens the Doctor with execution.
There is an adventure happening, shown to us by the Valeyard. Unfortunately it is roundly and obviously garbage. It really is. I’ll tip a hat to Tony Selby as the opportunistic rapscallion Glitz, who is searching for an unnamed ‘black box’, and leave it at that.
Well, no, I won’t, but it’s a fair summation of one of the most dire and ridiculous examples of Dr Who I’ve ever watched. The story begins with some intrigue on a planet called Ravalox, which has been devastated by a fireball. Obviously not, as there is thick vegetation, a breathable atmosphere and signs of civilisation. These ruins turn out to be those of Marble Arch underground station, which is a decent idea but one stolen from Beneath the Planet of the Apes. In fact, the whole story is a convoluted rip off from the 1970 classic, including underground lairs, an Armageddon bomb and a strange cult of worship to the Immortal One. This ‘living god’ turns out to be Drathro, a servo robot who resembles the Giant Robot [see Robot, Season 12] and has been upholding the wishes of three Andromeda Sleepers, all long dead, who travelled to Ravalox centuries ago attempting to hide from the Time Lords. The Sleepers, we learn have harnessed so-called Black Light Energy which enabled the teleportation of Earth and its whole solar system to a completely different point in the galaxy.
I laughed again.
I won’t even comment on this highly improbably notion. Even for science fiction it’s rubbish. The universe is always full of matter. You can’t just remove something and put it elsewhere, like picking up a tea cup. Physically, there would be nowhere to put it without destroying something else. So a good idea is completely under-minded by another hopelessly unstable premise.
[Point of order: keep reading, the story of the Andromeda Sleepers gets a substantial reinterpretation later on in the season.]
Anything more? Peri is back, more subdued than normal. The sets are worse than ordinary. Tom Chadbon returns. The Drathro Robot and its lair are out of proportion. There’s a tribe of primitives roaming the forests led by Joan Sims, who acts as if she’s swapped Carry On movies for repertory panto: “Which way? – This way! – Am I surrounded by fools? – We go forward!” As the adventure progresses it simply dive bombs, getting worse and worse and failing to entertain on any level. When the last survivors of Earth explain they are guided by the laws written in the sacred book Moby Dick, well…
I laughed.
Not a funny laugh, not one which showed appreciation of humour, but one of disdain and derision. A man in a cut-out balaclava then explains that they call the planet “UK Habitat.”
Now, I was all done laughing.
Anything good?
No.
Quite possibly, other than Glitz and that opening space station sequence, the worst thing I’ve seen for a long time. Oh wait, that was The Twin Dilemma. Well, The Mysterious Planet runs it a very close second:
The Doctor continues to wreak havoc at his own trial, refusing to take proceedings seriously and insulting both the Valeyard and the Inquisitor. This is a very unruly court. Mystifying to me is how arbitrary Time Lord justice is. It has been mentioned several times that the Doctor is suffering a temporary amnesia; in which case, how can he adequately defend himself? He should be given an appropriate medical examination, checking his full faculties, before being placed in the dock. The Doctor isn’t simply claiming he has amnesia, the court knows he’s suffering from it, so they all know it’s an unfair trial. Case dismissed, I reckon. And it still hasn’t been explained why the Time Lords need a space ship to travel around the universe when they have time travel machines…
Philip Martin was responsible for the excellent Vengeance on Varos, which cleverly interwove traditional Greek theatre into a commentary on violent societies. Here, he goes for a vaguer than vague and rather vulgar pastiche of The Island of Dr Moreau and, frankly f***s it up. But he’s not alone. The director Ron Jones makes a complete hash of the story, injecting exactly zero tension until the very last scene, and failing to control any of the cast who are across the board witless and prone to egotistical overacting: when Colin Baker’s Doctor states “I am putting my own interests first” I said to myself: “He’s finally noticed!” Brian Blessed is among the cast, and while he’s usually watchable, seeing him compete with Colin Baker for the most O.T.T. performance is cringeworthy and very, very hard to view. Poor Nicola Bryant gets caught between the terrible two-some, that’s when she isn’t impersonating servant girls or being bullied by man-dogs.
Also culpable is script editor Eric Saward, who wrote all the courtroom nonsense, scenes which incessantly disturb the flow of the story, making not only the court, but the Doctor and the audience uncertain whether what they are watching is real or fabricated. Saward wasn’t getting on with producer John Nathan Turner and the lack of a happy heart really shows. Budgets were squeezed to nought and the costumes, sets, effects and make up are just dire. There’s almost nothing worth watching here. I simply don’t know what to write about.
The Doctor and Peri land on Thorus-Beta, home of capitalist ogres the Mentors, aliens like Sil [from Vengeance on Varos] and his superior Kiv. They’ve employed a top scientist, Crozier, to conduct cell transfer experiments in the hope Kiv’s expanding brain can be rehoused in a bigger skull. Only Crozier’s operation doesn’t transplant the matter, it transposes the essence of the brain, essentially prolonging Kiv’s life to infinity as it can thus be transposed over and over. The Time Lords do not like this – it would make the Mentors even longer-lived beings than them! At the end of episode 8, Peri has had her head shaved and Kiv’s essence transferred into her brain, rendering her life extinct. Nicola Bryant’s sudden evil transformation is the best five minutes of the whole serial and you just wish they could have focussed more on this angle – and kept Peri alive – and a little less on the courtroom stuff and the disgusting Mentors. Nabil Shaban [returning from Varos] and Christopher Ryan [from The Young Ones] spar excellently as the two Mentors.
Meanwhile, the Doctor is insistent the trial visuals are untrue reflections; the Inquisitor replies that the Matrix can’t lie. But we know that isn’t correct: it was tampered with by the Master in The Deadly Assassin and by Omega in Arc of Infinity. It’s even more disconcerting that we learn the Doctor was hauled out of the time stream to attend his trial at precisely the moment he was hurrying [or not, on this ‘evidence’] to rescue Peri. He also asks, quite rightly, why nobody’s enquired what happened to the box of tricks Glitz stole from Ravalox. Good question that, although frankly I just want to know what the hell is happening in Mindwarp. The few paragraphs here are, quite honestly, all I could glean from this viewing. I was hopelessly confused and constantly distracted by some of the very worst performances, situations and sequences I have ever witnessed on Dr Who. And to think I just wrote that about The Mysterious Planet.
Luckily Nabil Shaban, Christopher Ryan and Nicola Bryant manage to prevent this serial dipping into half-mark territory, but by golly it’s a close-run thing:
Terror of the Vervoids is a vast improvement on the previous two sections of the season-long epic The Trial of A Time Lord. Taking as its basis the traditional whodunit, the Doctor and his cheeky new assistant Mel find themselves investigating a murder on an intergalactic recreational space cruiser, Hyperion III. The screenplay by Pip and Jane Baker reimagines scenarios familiar from Agatha Christie as passenger after passenger is killed off and every remaining individual has a potential motive, is hiding a secret or comes under suspicion through unusual behaviour. There’s a neat scene where Honor Blackman’s Professor Lasky is seen reading Murder of the Orient Express, which sums up the authorial intent here. In Dr Who terms, the whodunit has been utilised before, most effectively in The Robots of Death – a serial this resembles, with its opulent interiors and bickering passengers – but also in other adventures such as Nightmare of Eden [which also used a luxury space cruise for its setting] and Horror of Fang Rock. Additionally, the format allows Colin Baker’s Doctor to do more than his usual run-around. This time, he has to ask questions, receive answers and make deductions; this in turn allows other characters the space and time to shine. There’s a genuine sense of a cast acting together in this serial. Director Chris Clough cleverly held back the last episode’s scripts from the actors so they were not to know who the culprit was, making their confusion and eventual realisations more believable.
The story also revisits a theme from Fury from the Deep and The Seeds of Doom, two stories where plant life assumes animal characteristics and begins to fight back. Here the creatures are Vervoids, a genetically engineered mutant species who decide all animal life must be made extinct. That’s quite a ****-up in the genetic engineering lab then. The Vervoids aren’t very interesting and are not aided by being another alien in a long and growing list of ‘worst ever monster designs.’ They are extremely difficult to describe, but a cross between a bi-pedal triffid, female genitalia and the Weed from Bill and Ben sums them up nicely. They are worse than appalling. Better envisaged is Prof Lasky’s sickly assistant, who’s being kept in isolation because she has become infected with the Vervoid strain; her mutant appearance is truly horrifying. Mel’s scream is well deserved.
We do need to talk about Melanie Bush. The Doctor’s trial has taken a breather, allowing him to process the death of Peri. He’s been granted access to the Matrix to prepare his defence and has chosen to pick an adventure from his future.
[Point of order 1: if the Doctor is viewing his future in the Matrix, then the Matrix must know he wasn’t sentenced to death at this trial. If the Matrix is actually predicting only a possible future scenario, then what is the legal point of using it? We know Time Lords can only see so far in the future – this was highlighted in Frontios – so their ability to control universal events of time and space are quite clearly not fit for purpose.
[Point of order 2: if the Doctor is using a future adventure of his own, why restrict himself to his current incarnation? Also, if he has viewed his own future, won’t that mean that by definition, he already knows the outcome of the adventure on Hyperion III? This might explain why he appears so laid back for most of the serial.
[Point of order 3: in the opening episode of The Mysterious Planet, the Valeyard explained he would use past and future adventures to demonstrate the Doctor’s guilt; yet he has only used past evidence; it is the Doctor himself who uses the future evidence.
[Point of order 4: Gallifreyan justice stinks. The Doctor continues to insist the Matrix is being tampered with and nobody even investigates the possibility. He claims to have viewed his evidence before presenting it, but hasn’t made any notes or records on what occurred, so his complaints are conjecture. Having wiped out the mutant Vervoid race, the Doctor is accused of genocide – I’m not sure a defendant can have the charges against him altered mid-trial – which is completely hypocritical of the Time Lords, who destroyed the Great Vampires [see State of Decay] and even sent the Doctor to destroy the original Dalek embryos. Anyway, given the Vervoids were an engineered lifeform which would not have existed prior to scientific ingenuity and whose chief characteristic is the annihilation of all animal life forms, including Time Lords, you wonder whether this time the Doctor might just have done the universe a favour and got poor Prof Lasky off the hook.]
So, he’s paired up with young red-head Mel, who comes from Pease Pottage, Surrey, is a fitness fanatic, has a eidetic memory and does a fairly decent impression of amateur sleuthing. There have been quite a lot of complaints about Bonnie Langford’s interpretation of Mel, but she’s rather good here, seeming to be more proactive than Peri and better able to cope with the Doctor’s thick edges. She’s got him exercising for starters. Quite how well she’ll progress remains to be seen.
Colin Baker reins himself in a little too, and about time. I do need to point out that my viewing of this adventure was from a very poor online copy which ran at only three-quarter speed. This had the effect of slowing down Baker’s speech. Amazingly, his Doctor comes across so much better when he’s less manic and controls his annunciations. The difference is tremendous; Baker becomes stately, calm and reassuring, which he hasn’t done for… well, which he hasn’t done.
The adventure is assuredly designed by Dinah Baker. The costumes for the alien Mogarians are sleek and sinister. The performances are keen, although nobody particularly shines. It’s great to see Honor Blackman out-acting everybody as Prof Lasky. The special effects are better than usual and even a reproduction of a black hole is above passable.
It’s worth noting that there was originally a super climax to episode nine which we don’t get: Hyperion III has been hijacked and is being piloted into the black hole, the crazed hijacker at the helm – and cut, or should have been. Apparently in post-production, John Nathan Turner decided all cliff-hangers for the season should finish with a close up of Colin Baker’s face [I hadn’t noticed this, but when I read of it, I immediately realised it was so] and he reedited the climax and effectively killed all the tension from the scene.
Terror of the Vervoids is entertaining in an old-fashioned manner, even though it is set in the distant future. It’s a shame the monsters are so pitiful. The reimagining of a detective show was great fun until the Vervoids burst out of their gigantic seed pods. Disappointing, then:
Peri has had her head shaved and Kiv’s essence transferred into her brain, rendering her life extinct.
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I did not realise Peri came to such a nasty end, thats a real turn in the tone of the show. In the 21st century series almost all the companions have tragic outros, especially the Moffat ones, but I'd thought the classic episodes were more innocent.
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chris also said:
It’s great to see Honor Blackman out-acting everybody as Prof Lasky.
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and I also did not realise Honor Blackman was in a Doctor Who episode! Thats a major attraction for this audience! I might have to watch this one even if it is a lesser-loved Second Baker episode. I may have missed it over the last ten pages of epic-length reviews, but have there been any other Bond-actors appearing in these episodes? (John Cleese I know played an art critic)
Your reviews have caught up with where I am now (First story of season 24), I’m interested in learning why Colin Baker didn’t have a regeneration scene!
I think you’ve overrated season 23 😂 the acting from most participants is of a standard so poor that my old drama teacher at school would have given up and gone home. Bonnie Langford is so excruciatingly amateurish that I’m finding it difficult to watch.
I believe there is an episode in the McCoy era where he goes back to the time of the original episode, I hope it doesn’t disappoint as it sounds a good plot.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
@caractacus potts I have attempted to highlight Bond veterans as I go. John Cleese was in City of Death which also featured Julian Glover and Catherine Schell. Bond connections got less and less as the show continued. Peri's demise is a disappointing one all-round. [see a couple of entries further o for the final revelation...]
@CoolHandBond It's hard to call re: the acting. I try to be as honest and reflective as I can. I just watched that McCoy episode you mention, so wait a week or so and the review will be up.
Currently I've reached the end of season 25, so the epic marathon only has five more adventures and a couple of 'interludes' to go. Wading through these post-Davison era Dr Who adventures feels like reading Benson's Bond continuation novels. Bad ideas heading south fast.
It’s impossible to sum up the machinations of the final instalment of the monumental Dr Who story The Trial of a Time Lord. It would take pages. Suffice to say by way of explanation, the show’s producer John Nathan Turner was given permission for episode 2 [or 14, if you like] to overrun by five minutes as the action could not be edited down without removing key aspects of the plot. I say ‘key aspects’ as if there’s something important going on here. There really isn’t.
The Ultimate Foe has its supporters, which is nice I suppose, but the story simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. There are too many overlapping and overinvolved storylines for the writers to effectively explain, so they don’t bother. Chief among them is the revelation that the Valeyard is in fact the Doctor himself, a distillation of the dark side of the Doctor’s nature, somewhere between his twelfth and thirteenth incarnations, who’s all out to take control over his remaining lives. So, the writers have basically turned the heroic Doctor into evil incarnate and given him one of his adversaries recurring motives as his own. The Master of course constantly attempted to extend his existence beyond the thirteen life cycles of a Time Lord.
[Point of Time Lord order: can a Time Lord actually do this? The Valeyard must be the same kind of astral projection we saw in the Watcher during Logopolis or Cho’Jee in Planet of the Spiders. Both these apparitions melded into the next generation of their Time Lord persona, so if the Valeyard, as a projection, has already lived twelve life cycles, how can he ‘kill’ the Sixth Doctor and inherit six life cycles he’s already lived.]
Speaking of the Master, it turns out he too is in on the plot. Having infiltrated the Matrix, he first appears to want to save the Doctor, but later reveals his true colours and is using the trial as an elaborate cover for his own plan to depose the Time Lord High Council. This last section of the story occurs entirely off-screen. Amazingly, nobody at the trial recognises the Master or even appears to know who he is; yet this is the most notorious and evil Time Lord in history. There seems no need to introduce the Master into proceedings. It’s an easy get out for Pip and Jane Baker, who rewrote the final serial under some duress.
Robert Holmes had died while writing this two-parter and script writer Eric Saward finished the treatment. The original episode would have featured the Doctor fighting the Valeyard – or himself, as it were – in the Matrix and at the climax the two antagonists were to be plunged into the space / time continuum locked in battle. Producer John Nathan Turner hated the idea, particularly as the bleak, Sherlock Holmes style cliff hanger would give BBC Director General Michael Grade an easy excuse to cancel the show. Turner ordered changes, Saward refused, lawyers got involved and with one week to go and Robert Holmes’ part one script well advanced in pre-production, a new episode 2 script was commissioned and changes made to Holmes’ original first. Tagged on as it is and packed full of unnecessary extrapolation, the second episode dips badly from the intriguing first.
Briefly, the Doctor uncovers the Matrix flaws at his trial. He’s aided in this by the Master, who explains that the mysterious Andromeda Sleepers had stolen the Matrix secrets and hid them in a box which they in turn hid on Earth. This is the box Glitz obtained on Ravalox and which was never explained at the time. He is secretly in league with the Master, although he’s not party to the revolution plans which the Master must have been planning for some time. The Time Lord’s had used something called a magnetron to draw the Earth and its constellation billions of miles across space and prevent the recovery of the Matrix black box. How this fooled the Andromedans isn’t clear as there are three of them ‘sleeping’ on Earth, so one assumes they had the means to contact their own race at some point.
While we’re about it, who exactly are / were the Andromedans? We never find out. Never saw them. Yet they were powerful enough to enter the Matrix – which apparently can only be accessed using the Great Key – except here people seem to have access to it almost by free will. At one point, Melanie Bush just grabs the Great Key off the Keeper’s shawl and makes a run for it.
And since we’re talking Matrix secrets, why do the Time Lords drag a whole solar system across space when, as is well documented, they have the power to place Earth in a time loop or simply eradicate it from existence [see The Invasion of Time and The War Games.] This is where the whole narrative of the trial and the stories featured within it fall apart; there simply isn’t any logic in anyone’s actions and reactions and yet again the audience, who in the main are fairly knowledgeable, can see that. Those with a good understanding of Dr Who lore are scratching their heads and wondering why an established continuity suddenly needs to be so fractured.
During the court scenes, Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor delivers a searing indictment of the Time Lords, who he quite correctly blames for the [almost] extinction of all life on planet Earth: “In all my travelling throughout the universe I have battled against evil, against power mad conspirators. I should have stayed here. The oldest civilisation in the universe: decadent, degenerate, and rotten to the core. Power mad conspirators, Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen, they’re still in the nursery compared to us. Ten million years of absolute power. That’s what it takes to be really corrupt.”
A great speech, but a little late to endear him to this viewer. Baker shines brighter in The Ultimate Foe and the scenes in the Matrix, which have a Kafkaesque quality, are very good. Geoffrey Hughes’ prattling Mr Popplewick, the Valeyard appearing and disappearing like a demented sprite and the quicksand finale to episode 1. However, these can’t disguise the frenzied nature of the writing, which is all over the place, unfocussed and unintelligible. There’s a lot of pretentious quoting as well, Shakespeare and Dickens get a substantial look in. Director Chris Clough continues on from Terror of the Vervoids, but he’s fighting a losing a battle. When the supposedly dead Valeyard reappears at the adventure’s end, now in the guise of the Keeper, I didn’t hold my breath; I exited the room in disgust.
the Valeyard is in fact the Doctor himself, a distillation of the dark side of the Doctor’s nature, somewhere between his twelfth and thirteenth incarnations, who’s all out to take control over his remaining lives.
good gawd my head hurts! I knew there was something in this story that further complicated the Regenerations, but i've never been able to understand what its supposed to mean within the story, let alone how it therefor messes up established continuity. It think youve explained it as clear as you can, and certainly the last minute behind the scenes rewrites suggest not that much care was taken anyway, we shouldnt expect it to make sense.
for the audience and the creative team, the future was not yet known, even if TimeLords are privy. But thirty odd years later we do know: the twelfth and thirteenth incarnations would be Capaldi and Whittaker. But when we finally got to this regeneration, I don't remember any Valeyard interrupting the sequence. Capaldi regenerated into Whitaker and that's it.
however Stephen Moffat did complicate things by adding a previously unknown incarnation, "the War Doctor", as played by John Hurt in one episode only. Retroactively inserted between McGann and Eccleston (this works because we never saw the regeneration that produced Ecclestons Doctor, and Nine had some serious PTSD type issues). So that retcon should place the Valeyard between Smith and Capaldi, which was also a straightforward regeneration. And I think Moffat also claimed a failed regeneration somewhere during the Tennant era counts, so thatd place the Valeyard between Tennant and Smith, also a straightforward regeneration. Theres really no place for the Valeyard in the sequence as presented.
Maybe we just shouldnt take future incarnations of the Doctor seriously? maybe Colin Bakers actions successfully altered the timeline so the Valeyard never came to be, or any one of the infinite other times the Doctor (and others) have interfered in the spacetime continuum.
Well, given the Valeyard isn't a regeneration per se, he's a 'mirror' of the Doctor, an astral projection if you like, he can effectively fit in anywhere you like. Indeed, we already saw one for the Doctor at the end of Logopolis. However, the Master clearly states in The Ultimate Foe that the Valeyard is such a projection and comes between the twelfth and thirteenth Doctors because that is the last opportunity he will have to gain more regenerations - well, it isn't, even the Master has been able to gain more after his thirteenth life expired [see The Keeper of Traken and / or The Five Doctors]. If the Valyard has managed to transfer his astral projected life essence into the body of the Matrix Keeper, one assumes he has now obtained all the Keeper's remaining lives. But that surely means we now have two Doctors, one roaming the universe and one the Keeper of the Matrix.
ah OK, I didn't get that, and still don't really understand what that means, but don't worry. Could be a side effect of a regeneration under stress, I suppose.
as to which regeneration, I think the convention of numbering the Doctors by actor is only amongst us fans. I don't think any characters within the show ever specify one as the Fourth Doctor or another as the Twelfth. Moffat was able to exploit that by inserting a previously unseen Doctor between McGann and Eccleston, and we still dont see the regeneration that produced Eccleston so there couldve theoretically been yet another in between as yet unrevealed. And I dont think we actually saw the Troughton>Pertwee regeneration or the Second Baker>McCoy regenerations either, did we?. Then there were all those faces before Hartnell in Brain of Morbius, so really Twelfth and Thirteenth could have been any of them.
speaking of which have you seen the American made TV movie yet? we most definitely see the McCoy>McCann regeneration, and its very much American style!
Season 23 is, in my opinion, the worst Classic Dr Who season in history [so far…]. Compared to some of the seasons which have come before, this is a witless and weary extravagance which demonstrates the problems the show was encountering. The producer and script editor are short of ideas. There is an incessant insistence on revisiting, reinventing and destabilising the show’s past and its characters. There’s very little of original interest here. The major problem with the season is the overarching trial format which relies too much on an audience’s long memory. It doesn’t help either that the writers were not informed of the courtroom scenario while they were writing their contributions, which gives the impression the stories are not related to each other. In theory, according the Valeyard, they are not, but as the Doctor exposes the Valeyard’s ruse it is quite obvious they are related. Script editor Eric Saward, who wrote all the courtroom scenes for Mindwarp and Terror of the Vervoids as well as some of the finale, has had to force the individual serials to work together. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle missing the framing pieces and it shows.
Things are not helped by a succession of dreadful performances, including a terrible turn from Colin Baker in Mindwarp. That serial featured the death of Peri. As a TARDIS companion of some standing, her demise seems shovelled carelessly into the narrative and, while it might have worked if Mindwarp had been a decent adventure; it falls completely flat through a lack of emotional and physical tension. The later suggestion this was only a falsehood from the Matrix and that Peri was saved and married Brian Blessed’s Yrancos – the most unlikely of romances Dr Who has ever proposed – feels like a trumped-up happy ending. Nicola Bryant was particularly upset, and hardly surprising as her short turn as an evil Mentor is one of her best moments.
I can’t fathom why Bonnie Langford was recruited to the show. Perhaps she was cheap. She doesn’t lack enthusiasm. Never given a ‘recruitment story’ makes her character somewhat unusual, but in these early stories Mel’s technical know-how seems at odds with her late 20th Century interest in health and fitness and fashions. She seems more capable of cheering up the Doctor than Peri was, but it wouldn’t take much. Colin Baker never quite sheds his grumpy side, even if he’s a little less obnoxious to his companions. Nonetheless, the writers seem to delight in making him incorrigible, discourteous and unsympathetic to everyone else, particularly in those courtroom scenes; Baker plays up to it whenever he can.
The production values across the board are fairly cruddy. Only some of those Hyperion III interiors and the Victorian-looking Matrix sets are any good. Monsters? Bad. Costumes? Bad. Effects? Passable.
Having viewed Season 23 for the very first time, I am shocked by the low standard attained here. Individual stories are tackling some very adult and challenging material, surrounding genocide, genetics, death, justice and sacrifice, but they have been presented and interpreted in such a manner as to seem childish and trite. Dr Who has never shirked from difficult themes, but it’s rarely showed them such disrespect. Apparently, John Nathan Turner was asked to submit the scripts for vetting prior to filming and the verdict he received from Jonathon Powell, Head of Serials, was that they were unfit for production; however with no time to commission replacements and preproduction in hand, we got what was unfit.
A final word on Colin Baker. I don’t like his Doctor. I’ve outlined many reasons in the eleven reviews above. He notoriously refused to film a regeneration scene, so he doesn’t get one. At the end of Season 23 it was expected he’d return, but given the scarcity of quality I’d say he got a lucky break. He’s very popular on the Dr Who convention circuit and his enthusiasm for the show is welcome. It’s a great pity, I feel, he wasn’t given strong direction, incisive scripts and a decent costume to match his more robust, warts-and-all attempt at portraying the Time Lord. Ultimately what might have been startlingly different has only ended up being startling and that’s not a good thing.
Oops, forgot the pics.
Colin Baker looking almost chilled...
Nicola Bryant looking lovely...
And again...
That picture's got nothing to do with Dr Who. I was feeling mischievous...
A need a short break, then I'll return with the fun that is Sylvester McCoy !!!
In anticipation of a resumption tomorrow, the titles for the Seventh Doctor's era. I'm not a big fan of the logo, but the tune is great and the graphics excellent:
Dr Who was really on the skids after the critical mauling given to Colin Baker’s reign, and in particular The Trial of a Time Lord experiment, which even under laboratory conditions would have gone horribly wrong. To say it was lucky to hold onto a fourteen week slot in the schedules would be underselling it. However, the powers that be at the BBC handed the show a poisoned chalice by continuing to employ the person at the very head of the lab team: producer John Nathan Turner. Now, while I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead – Turner had many personal issues, including a chronic alcohol problem – the BBC bigwigs, having witnessed the long and uninterrupted decline of a once landmark show, surely must have twigged that failure begins at the top. If a business had suffered the kind of fall in quality and return Dr Who was suffering, the Managing Director would be replaced. Research indicates that Turner was considered by Michael Grade, the BBC’s Director General, as a disruptive employee, one too big [and expensive?] to dismiss, but unsuitable [and underqualified?] for a transfer to a prestige production. Apparently several times Turner requested a sideways move, but was refused. By this moment in his tenure, he also felt a deep personal responsibility to Dr Who, considering the top guns were aiming for the show’s death, and argued strenuously for the program’s continuation. He got his wish, but his hands became metaphorically tied by budget restraints and a general malaise from on high about the show, which Grade in particular saw as an embarrassment. So, Turner, as producer and overseer, the man ultimately responsible for hiring and firing, budget allocation, style, tone, promotion, the honest visible value of the product, clung on to his hallowed throne, an immoveable, intransigent and incompetent kingmaker. Devoid of fresh ideas and at war with most of his production team, Turner set about his own ‘Night of the Long Knives’ and virtually removed anybody within the production team responsible for the last couple of seasons. Only a few backroom staff and writers stayed on. The fact these had not recently covered themselves in much glory did not bode well for the success of Season 24.
One of the decisions taken out of Turner’s hands was the removal of Colin Baker. It still isn’t entirely clear why this was seen as necessary. It wasn’t only Baker who was at fault through most of his brief showing, there was an equal paucity of quality elsewhere. The poor man was shouldered with the dullest run of serials imaginable. He and Nicola Bryant stumbled gamely from one disaster to the next with barely a decent screenplay or a talented director to enthuse them. It is no surprise Baker went for pomposity and grandiose, stylised acting when he’s being given substandard scripts to work with. However, gone he was to be. A request was made for Baker to film a final adventure, at the end of which he would regenerate; he insisted on a return only if allowed a full season’s farewell. No, was the answer. So, gone then. Bye. Bye, Baker.
Which leads to the problem, how do you explain the Doctor’s new face? As it turns out, this wasn’t such a difficult problem. The new season kicks off with a precredit sequence – unusual in itself, I can only think of the opening of Castrovalva where this occurred – during which the TARDIS is seen to be under attack. There is an explosion. In the control room, the Doctor and Mel are seen tumbling to the floor. They lie motionless, heads and faces down. As we watch, a mysterious light emanates from the Sixth Doctor’s features and miraculously the light morphs into Sylvester McCoy.
Okay. It’s a rubbish regeneration. It lacks any of the pained nuances of age, battle and sacrifice that made the changes we saw for Doctors One, Three, Four and Five so affecting. It most resembles the finale of Doctor Two, who disappeared without the audience knowing what was to come; more importantly the Third Doctor appeared without any thirty second facial preview. That regeneration was at least explained. Here, the Doctor suffers nothing more than a bump on the head. Maybe it was all that carrot juice Mel made him drink or the constant miles on the exercise bike. The poor old fella might have had a heart attack; after all he is 953 years old – a fact we learn in episode three. Perhaps even more disappointing than the cause of the regeneration is the moment itself. No flashbacks, no ethereal light show, no words, just a quick blur of colour and a fade to McCoy’s features. It’s a distinctly inauspicious start. And Time and the Rani is an inauspicious debut. It has an exceedingly low reputation among fans – Dr Who Magazine’s 2014 poll saw it ranked the third worst serial ever – which probably stems more from the opening precredit regeneration than the serial itself, which isn’t as bad as all that. It isn’t very good either.
First things first. John Nathan Turner’s clear-out resulted in a new script editor, Andrew Cartmel, a twenty-four year old with a degree in screenwriting but no previous experience of working in television. He immediately clashed with writers Pip and Jane Baker. It’s unclear who is mostly responsible for the plot and the dialogue of this grim enterprise, but it’s safe to say that between them the three have concocted a mess of a story which re-treads all the mistakes made in the last two seasons. Another returning villain. Another attempt to interfere with time. Another plot to kidnap / kill important scientists / people, inexplicably many of them from Earth. Another planet destroying super-scheme. Another silly, uninspired monster. These faults override the good stuff which is on display, of which there is plenty.
The special effects are several steps up from anything seen on Dr Who before. Utilising Computer Generated Images for the first time, we see laser bolts, explosions, sparkly cobweb guns and the Rani’s curious balloon-like ‘death bubbles’. There is also a fresh and zippy credit sequence, although the scribbled ‘Doctor’ above a stamped ‘Who’ looks terrible. I don’t enjoy Keff McCulloch’s incidental music. It interferes with every scene. The Tetraps are a strange monster race of bat-like creatures who never resemble a bat, by which I mean they didn’t fly and we only saw them hanging upside down at the very end of the adventure. Instead, they lumber about firing ‘cobweb’ guns and despite having 360º vision, everyone manages to creep up on them or avoid their gaze. Hopeless. They look like a Garm with four eyes. The rest of the costumes leave something to be desired. The inhabitants of the planet Lakertya are almost indescribable. They have greenish, yellowed skin, strange cuticles on their cheeks, and weird hair. They run like ostriches. Head bobbing, arms by their sides. Just plain odd.
Time and the Rani features only the second opportunity for the Doctor to visit a world entirely populated by alien beings. The first was way back in Season 2’s The Web Planet when the Doctor encountered the tittering ant-like Zarbi. It’s not a good idea for Dr Who to visit totally alien environments. There’s a lack of connection between the audience and the characters we are supposed to have sympathy for. The Lakertyans are peace loving lotus eaters, much like the Dulkins in The Dominators [Season 6]. It was easy for the evil Rani to overrun them with her allies the Tetraps. Like the Master before her [in The Ultimate Foe], she appears to have escaped her TARDIS and the rapidly growing dinosaur inside it; writers Pip and Jane Baker who penned this and The Ultimate Foe, don’t even bother to mention the climax of The Mark of the Rani, an oversight I’m interested in only because there is so little else to comment on.
Geoffrey Powell’s production designs are reasonably good. There was a very impressive entrance to the Rani’s fortress, but you wonder why she had to be so elaborate. The Lakertyans, what is left of them, seem to live underground in splendour because their planet is basically a Somerset quarry. It gets very boringly repetitive to have the cast constantly running around the rocky landscape with nowhere to go. I did enjoy those ‘death bubbles’. They were well-realised, effective and quite frightening. I even felt for Bonnie Langford’s Mel when she inadvertently got trapped in one. The scene where the Doctor almost sets off another was rather good, recalling a similar moment in Genesis of the Daleks. Sadly, Mel becomes the receptacle for capture and explanation. She appears to have lost all of her gumption between Doctors and has taken up ear-piercing screaming as a pastime instead of yoga.
Mel is at her best when she isn’t Bonnie Langford. Kate O’Mara returns as Time Lord villainess the Rani and, while the Doctor is confused following his regeneration, she disguises herself as Mel and persuades him to help mend her time manipulator. Given the real Mel was a dab hand at manipulating the Sixth Doctor, this makes perfect sense, except the Rani has no idea who Mel is, so wouldn’t be able to impersonate her effectively. The ruse relies entirely on the Doctor’s confusion, which doesn’t last long enough to make the doppelganger idea either important or worthwhile. Kate O’Mara’s okay, just like she was in her debut, but her character is only a Master with breasts and an unsightly mole on her nose. She’s even stealing the Master’s crazy universe conquering plans. This one involves an enormous brain and harnessing ‘strange matter’. I didn’t care and I don’t think O’Mara did either. When she announces “I’ve had enough of this drivel” you have to wonder if she’s ad libbing.
The saving grace of the story is Sylvester McCoy. Early on, his Doctor is suitably befuddled and his natural comic timing helps to fast solidify the character. There is a mite too much larking about and falling over during the opening episode, but once he settles into the role, there is much pleasure to be had in his small, slight, thoughtful persona. The scene where he tries on a number of inappropriate outfits was suitably comic, but didn’t do a disservice to his interpretation. Admiring his impersonation of Napoleon was fun, insinuating the inner intellectual megalomania all the Doctor’s possess. As usual there are a few nods to Doctor’s past: Pertwee’s frilly shirts, Tom Baker’s hat and scarf and Troughton’s big woolly overcoat. McCoy’s heroic nature is tested too and he overcomes the villainess with some dexterity, although I’d abandoned any hope of understanding what was going on by then. McCoy most resembles Patrick Troughton’s hobo, I feel, but he doesn’t follow the bumbling, casual nature of his forbear. He has a hidden depth which he carries through tiny mannerisms and wickedly astute asides.
“You speak as if you admire the Rani,” says the Lakertyan collaborator Beyus.
“Admiration? No. Fascination.” McCoy’s almost obsequious reply delves deeper into his relationship to the Rani than the whole of the adventure put together, studded as it is with hints of their past lives on Gallifrey [they are the same age, attended university together and both fled in stolen TARDISes]. Later on, when the Doctor realises the Rani needs his brain as well as a myriad of the universe’s great and good to fulfil her plan, McCoy stares for a long second at an empty life-pod labelled ‘Doctor’ before ever so astutely raising his eyebrows, a tiny action which displays his inner intrigue in a far more revealing manner than any of Colin Baker’s long winded and inane verbal rantings.
Being slightly older than his nearest forebears, McCoy cuts a less robust figure and I rather like that. He doesn’t need to have might on his side to assert his authority; this I sense is a Doctor who will be a wily challenge for his enemies and rivals, emotionally and intellectually stimulating as well as a thorn in their [and our?] sides. He isn’t as immediately confrontational to the audience either, which in a way the previous three Doctors all were – Tom Baker’s bug-eyed, scatter headedness; Davison’s youthful inappropriate confidence; Colin Baker’s arrogant pettiness – instead McCoy cajoles and weaves his way under our [and his opponent’s] skins with an amusing set of physical mannerisms and verbal tics, none of which overwhelm the portrayal.
Sylvester McCoy has massive potential. Time and the Rani sadly doesn’t exploit it:
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Interlude 10
DALEKS VS MECHONS
A fan take on the proposed third Dalek movie. I quite enjoyed watching this trailer. A little bit of fun before I commence the long trawl through the Sixth Doctor’s travels.
The Sixth Doctor's titles.
Not the revamped disco version we hear in Season 23, which frankly is an abomination.
My reviews will commence tomorrow. Hold your tongues.
The Sixth Doctor - Colin Baker
Season Twenty Two
ATTACK OF THE CYBERMEN
On Saturday 5th January 1985, Dr Who was back in its traditional tea-time slot for the first time since Tom Baker hung up his scarf. This may have been a moment of rejoicing, but there’s an immediate difference: the episode is 45-minutes long. The reason for this change is not entirely clear. It is known the BBC wanted to trial other shows to attract an early evening audience and cutting down Dr Who’s scheduled annual transmissions from twenty-six to thirteen achieved that. It begs the question why they bothered to return the show to Saturday night at all. Initially, the series had a big ratings boost and episode one of Attack of the Cybermen saw almost nine million tune in. After that, Colin Baker’s first full season petered out at a respectable, but unexciting average of six-and-a-half. Even more confusing, especially in terms of episode pacing, when sold abroad the series was divided into the usual twenty-five minute episodes, giving foreign broadcasters the option to present the show at its standard length. This means each chapter rises to a mini-climax mid-episode and has to pick up momentum for the ‘second’ climax at the finale. This seems to cause all sorts of problems for the writers and directors who can’t grasp the format appropriately. It’s like boxing with one hand tied behind your back.
There are other problems with this season opener, chiefly the story and the writing. I’ve split this deliberately as there are two distinct issues. Let’s look at the narrative of Attack of the Cybermen. It would be easy to dismiss it as nonsense – because it is – but the real craw in the throat is another attempt by the production team to reinvent Dr Who lore and utilise past stories to develop new adventures and expand the history of existing enemies and / or assistants. We saw this idea nibbling away at Fifth Doctor serials like Warriors of the Deep or Arc of Infinity. Interestingly those two dire examples of the sub-genre also swished the opening curtain on new seasons; maybe it was going to be a trend. Here the Cybermen have colonised Telos, a planet we first saw way back in Season 5 in The Tomb of the Cybermen. Only now the Cyber-presence isn’t one of hibernation, but annihilation. Telos becomes the nerve centre of a befuddling plot to destroy Earth and prevent the destruction of Mondas. The Tenth Planet, the Cyberman debut, took place in 1986 and was apparently Earth’s first encounter with the Cybermen. Nominally, The Invasion takes place after this, but could easily occur before, the date of that and all UNIT adventures is never certain. However, the fundamental problem remains that the Second Doctor informs us Telos is the last resting place of the Cybermen, so the Cyber Controller’s plan can’t take place unless the metal monsters can time travel – and hey presto they can! Just like that! There’s a time vessel tripping back and forth from Telos to, well, somewhere. It needs three people to operate it and a couple of escaped convicts reckon they can pilot it to safety. These two desperados are humans, and are from Earth, so more immediate questions arise. How and when did humans perfect time travel? How come the archaeological team in Tomb of… didn’t know it contained a hibernation centre for Cybermen? Well, okay, two of them did, but you’d think it would be right up there in the galaxy’s history books: Telos, colonised home world of the Cybermen, etc, etc. Wiping Earth from history appals the Doctor, all that time meddling etc, but I was appalled that the Cybermen apparently thought they could do it by redirecting Halley’s Comet; a topical notion but one which, as the serial progressed isn’t pursued. Is the comet still laden with Cyberbombs?
It gets worse. The writers – plural, I’ll explain later – invent an indigenous race for Telos, the Cryons. These interesting humanoids are the opposite of Cybermen, sleek, organic, empathetic and all-female. They are also donned in silver, speak in light whispery girlish mousey voices and can only survive at sub-zero temperatures. The Cybermen of course are bulky, tough, grating, unfeeling mechanoids and they go into suspended animation when temperatures fall below freezing. The idea of opposites attracting, within a sense of how they propel the narrative arc, is excellent. Unfortunately it recalls another great clash of races already explored at some depth in Dr Who: the warlike Daleks and the peace-loving Thals. The Cryons themselves are interesting without ever being brilliant. The facial hair and domelike foreheads makes them resemble the Sensorites [from Season 1] and they move with the strange balletically extravagant demonstrations first attempted by the Fish People in The Underwater Menace [Season 4]. Comedian Faith Brown and Blue Peter television presenter Sarah Greene both play members of the Cryon race, but you wouldn’t know it under the masks, make up and voices. Apparently Koo Stark was offered the lead role, but turned it down once it became clear the audience would never recognise her.
It doesn’t help either that the design of Attack… is seriously flawed. In 2022, I have the benefit of viewing Tomb of… because it had been rediscovered. In 1985 the earlier serial was considered lost, so it’s fair to suggest that designer Marjorie Pratt simply didn’t care too much about the consistent look of the Cybermen’s cryogenic hibernation facility. Yet even in 1985 there were photo stills of the tomb design and the control centre. The ones created for Attack of… simply don’t resemble the earlier versions. They are not even close. In fact the new design seems made solely to allow a series of shocks to permeate episode 2 as demented Cybermen burst from their ‘tombs’ and assault poor Nicola Bryant, whose having a not-so-fun time impersonating Peri. Her character spends the whole adventure in an [admittedly sexy] low cut flimsy lyrca and culottes outfit. Apparently the t-shirt was so tight the costumers had to tape Miss Bryant’s nipples down as they were too prominently displayed. This combo wouldn’t keep anyone warm on sub-zero Telos; Peri ought to freeze to death. I’m digressing, but you can sense my disappointment and my distraction. I kept wondering about the story’s inability to corelate with Dr Who’s established history rather than enjoying it as an adventure in its own right. The point being, if the writers hadn’t tried so slavishly to recreate the half-success of Resurrection of Daleks or the no-success of Arc of Infinity and Warriors of the Deep, by delving into the monster’s history, if they’d tried to create something original – say a Cyber prison planet with an escape plan – they might have met with a more coherent piece.
Which brings me, stumbling, to my second issue which is the writing. Paula Moore is credited with this mess, but according to several testimonies she is a combination of three people: Paula Woolsey, a novice screenwriter; script editor Eric Saward; and Dr Who historian Ian Levine. It isn’t clear who provided which bits of the tale, what is certain is that between them they manufactured a dog’s dinner of a fiction. Levine is an interesting character who was never officially part of the production team. Eric Saward used him as a continuity advisor throughout his tenure as script editor. Levine’s background is as a music producer and record store owner. He merely shared a fan’s love for Dr Who, recording audio transmissions of original episodes and later being responsible for hunting down lost episodes. He was a huge champion of the series. Yet his involvement in advising on series continuity doesn’t appear to have delivered any worthwhile input. If anything, the continuity of the series became more and more contentious thanks to his involvement. It is safe to say Paula Woolsey had an extremely low input into this story, her sole service being to provide a pseudonymous name.
Attack of the Cybermen is peppered with goblets of nostalgia near and distant, but they are crammed into the serial without thought or precision. The Doctor gets his chameleon circuit working and lands back in I.M. Foreman’s scrapyard, 76 Totter’s Lane, exactly where the debut episode started in 1963. There’s no reason for this to occur. There’s lots of familiar Cybermen stuff, including the return of Michael Kilgariff, who originally played the Cyber Controller in Tomb of… He’s put on a lot of weight and his costume is completely different; where is the dome-like brain helmet he sported? Commander Lytton [Maurice Colborne] returns from Resurrection of the Daleks and the Doctor fails to anticipate such, despite spending half an episode pursued by the mercenary’s killer policemen. Although thinking on it, why would he? I am not sure he ever met Lytton in Resurrection… The Doctor has a moment of personal revelation after Lytton’s demise, claiming he’d misjudged the man. Well, no, he hadn’t. Lytton is a killer and a money hungry mercenary to the core. He isn’t helping the Cryons because his conscience tells him to, only his wallet. His whole crew, which includes a nice turn from Brian Glover, are money motivated.
More interesting is Peri’s assertion that the Doctor “never gave him [Lytton] a chance to explain.” This seems the more likely failure in the Sixth Doctor’s make-up which is already increasingly self-centred, irritable and erratic. Coupled with that appalling costume, Colin Baker has his work cut out to draw any sympathy from the audience. He’s certainly virile and violent, happy to torture, fight and kill his opponents, but I’m not sure this sits well with the character. It is a side to the Doctor’s persona we’ve never seen and casts Baker completely against the grain of his predecessors. Like Davison before him, the scripts have a tendency to insist he runs everywhere and gabbles his lines. Thank goodness, his spiky conversations with Peri are entertaining.
[Sample 1: Doctor, vehemently: “Unstable? Unstable? I’m a Time Lord. This is as stable as you’ll find me. I’m a man of passion…” Peri: “And of a very loud voice.”
[Sample 2: Doctor, confused: “I suddenly feel very conspicuous.” Peri: “I’m not surprised in that outfit.”
[Her amusement as the supposed repaired chameleon circuit failed to match a disguise to its surroundings – an armoire, an organ and an elaborate iron gate – mirrored my astonishment.]
The American lass still gives as good as she gets. I really like her. Nicola Bryant is turning gold from sand, even as it slips through her fingers. Director Matthew Robinson can’t quite match the efforts he put in on Resurrection of the Daleks, but he was right to keep the early sewer scenes reminiscent of The Invasion, all shadows and echoes. The reveal of the Cybermen, which would have ended a prospective 25-minute episode 1, is excellently done. Unfortunately, by the time we reach the second part, the plot is becoming hopelessly entangled and all the neat camera tricks in the world can’t save it. Robinson can’t do very much with the silly time vessel escape plan plot, which is never properly explained and takes up a lot of screen time. It seems to have been included merely to show how the two unsympathetic protagonists, Russel and Bates, have been part cyber-engineered. In fact probably the most interesting scenes involve those which demonstrate this process of dehumanisation. We’ve never seen it before and it is quite horrifying. While the Cybermen retain their ruthless streak – crushing Lytton’s hands to a bloody pulp is particularly gorily memorable – they are too easily bested in this adventure, being decapitated, blown up, speared by a sonic lance or shot by bullets.
My overriding impression of Attack of the Cybermen is a lot of explosions and a lot of missed opportunities. For me, it demonstrates the foolhardiness of attempting to reimagine the past; far better in a science fiction show to create the future:
2 from 5.
The Sixth Doctor - Colin Baker
Season Twenty Two
VENGEANCE ON VAROS
Something quite miraculous happened to Dr Who when Philip Martin wrote Vengeance on Varos. Finally, the show has constructed a story which doesn’t rely on past monsters or the bending of the fictional laws of time to give us something new and exciting. Well, okay, Season 21 did have the classic The Caves of Androzani, but even that felt like a throwback to the earlier Hinchcliffe / Holmes era of Dr Who, fashioned as it was from The Phantom of the Opera. What makes Varos such a great story is its insistence of framing itself as ancient Greek theatre while presenting themes and incidents which whole heartedly address a modern malaise, themes that still resonate in contemporary times. Like the Third Doctor’s all-time classic The Silurians, many of the themes presented in Varos have never gone away. The story should be an essential watch for anyone who believes in the mantra of unrestricted, uncensored web or televisual access and the implications such liberties can have on a democratic society. Vengeance on Varos is a superb Dr Who adventure which deserves repeated viewing despite the occasional forgivable lapse.
Congratulations must go to debut Dr Who writer Philip Martin who excels in conjuring the world of the mining planet Varos, providing several outstanding support characters, a strong narrative drive and dialogue which all the actors can handle and empathise with. Designer Tony Snoaden also deserves plaudits for his pared back, gloomy sets. Varos’ whole existence is based around the extraction of its vital minerals; the population never ventures outside of the complex lest they be too far away from work. They are, to a man and woman, wan and fallow and exist in a series of superbly realised hollow, dull, grey-metal box rooms and passages; the only light comes during a ‘traditional’ execution scene, telling us death is the only joy on this world. Director Ron Jones, who has never been a great director, managers to manipulate his players and the action carefully and with some aplomb. If he goes awry towards the end, it is due primarily to there being no grandstand finish for the adventure; like real life, there is no fulfilling resolution and while the villains are despatched, there is no attempt to blow things up or send planets into black holes or whatever gobbledygook the writers usually dream up. Instead, there is a grounding authenticity to the story, even while it wears its sci-fi credentials on its sleeve.
Vengeance on Varos was commissioned during an uncomfortable era for British censorship, when partisan organisations and politicians focussed on what were termed ‘video nasties’ and the unregulated growth of video hire stores led to a crackdown on films which were considered unsuitable for home viewing. These included some exploitation titles, such as Cannibal Holocaust, but also well-regarded movies like The Exorcist and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Eventually, this crazy time of obsessive censorship came to an end, but it also opened the floodgates to the unrestricted access of the internet, which allows uncensored and non-contextual violent content to be uploaded and viewed, as well as allowing youngsters [and adults] to access unsuitable cinematic releases, swathes of hardcore pornographic material and to deliver snap verdicts on personalities, topics and objects without a filter. Varos addresses this need for the public’s constant immersive satisfaction from its opening scene.
Jason Connery’s Jondar is being tortured. We are not told why, but that doesn’t matter to two representatives of the watching population of Varos. Shut away in their hovel-like home are Arak and Etta, two miners on a rest period. A television screen is fixed on the wall and is on every second of the day. They watch with intense fascination the torture we also witness, sharing asides about how and when Jondar might die. The realisation they are witnessing an actual killing never crosses their mind. This is purely and simply their leisure entertainment and they treat each scene with the disdain, clarity and amusement it deserves. Arak and Etta are a writer’s device, a nominal Greek Chorus, personalising the action we see and reminding us that we are complicit by watching Dr Who as much as they are in watching events unfold on the fictional Varos. Writer Philip Martin clarifies this by including scenes where the supposed authority figure, the Governor, subjects himself to a vote of confidence. Arak and Etta cast their opinion via a simple push button on the wall, a Yes or No vote, much how we swipe a heart, a thumbs up or a sad face to indicate our approval on mobile phones today. Should the Governor lose the vote, he submits to Cell Disintegration, a process which could actually kill him live on T.V. These moments of torture and murder, beamed directly into homes, are exactly the sort of future outcome the moral standard brigades foresaw in video nasties. And indeed when the Islamic State began to transmit live executions on the internet, you do wonder if they had a point. Certainly Arak and Etta have become blasé about the situation. “When did we last see a decent execution?” moans Arak with the same disappointment he shared for the dismal portions of food. “Last week,” chimes Etta. Death really is an everyday occurrence for this oppressed population and the fact it goes hand in hand with democracy hints at the inevitable apex of political popularity: leaders quite literally will fall on their sword to retain power.
Varos ought to be a rich planet. It has huge reserves of Zieton-7, a mineral whose properties aid propulsion, allowing vessels to time travel. The Time Lords discovered its usefulness, although as nobody mentions them here and Peri’s explanation of a time machine falls on deaf ears, I can only assume the mineral is, at this stage in the universe’s life, used purely for creating energy.
[Point of order: this seems to sit at odds with what we learnt from the history of Omega in The Three Doctors. That story informed us time travel was aided through the harnessed power of a collapsed neutron star. Perhaps Zieton-7 is merely a separate component of a time capsule’s engineering. Given that Waterfield and Maxtible, as well as the Daleks, the Sontarans and the original builders of Terminus [see The Evil of the Daleks, The Chase, The Time Warrior and Terminus] seem to have perfected time travel without either Zieton-7 or a collapsed star, you do wonder why the Time Lords should be considered such a powerful galactic race…]
Anyway, the ruler of Varos finds itself in a similar position to the Kings and Queens of Peladon, for Zieton-7 is as valuable to the universe as Trisilicate ore. Various organisations vie for its wealth. For centuries the Galtron Mining Corporation has utilised a trading monopoly and bought Zieton-7 at a huge discount. Its ambassador, the repulsive, maggot like dwarf Sil is attempting to renegotiate an advantageous deal. He has an agent inside Varos’ elite, the Chief Officer, who is the power behind the throne, his position allowing him to effectively usurp the Governor should the ruler make a decision considered disadvantageous to Varos, or rather to the Galtron Mining Corporation. This familiar role reminds us of those Shakespearian tragedies of Othello, Lear, Macbeth and Julius Caesar, where kings cannot rule without looking into the shadows. Modern history still warns us of internal coups and outside imperialism interfering in economies and nations. Indeed, for all his fantastical ugliness Sil seems best to represent the grasping, threatening, blackmailing hand of the British East India Company. The palace coups which toppled many a dictator throughout history are equally well presented, with the military turning on the Governor for their own financial and political gain. The people – Arak and Etta – believe they have a say, a constitutional vote, but it is manipulated against fair judgement and will do nothing to help their entrenched society.
The Doctor drops onto this chaotic world because his TARDIS repairs have been causing all sorts of problems aboard ship. Eventually he goes one step too far and immobilises the time vessel. This seems to send him into a funk. Colin Baker sulks, turning his vibrant, almost manic character into a morose depressive. Bright eyed, bushy tailed Peri hauls him out of his malaise and, freshly invigorated, the Doctor uses the last of the TARDIS’ propulsion power to materialise on Varos. He hopes to purchase a small quantity of Zieton-7. He ends up stopping Jondar’s execution and perfecting a rebellion. I’ve never cared for Colin Baker, but he’s exceptionally good in this adventure, swapping barbs with Sil, the Governor, the Chief Officer and the lunatic scientist Quillam. He panders and patters to Peri, a relationship which retains its edge while having some of the spikes blunted. He encourages the rebels in their plight. While the jury is still out regarding his more ruthless characteristics, the violence he administers here didn’t trouble me as much as it did in the jet-propelled actioner Attack of the Cybermen. This is possibly because the rulers of Varos seem intent of wiping out all opposition by foul means and this includes the Doctor, who ventures into the Punishment Dome and confronts a series of hallucinatory tortures which appear to slaughter him. The cliff-hanger to episode one is certainly a classic, as the Governor personally directs the television transmission, waits for the Doctor’s last breath and cuts the broadcast.
There was, for some, an even bleaker scene, where the Doctor – having induced a coma [see several stories in the Jon Pertwee era] – revives just in time to escape an acid bath. He struggles with the two attendants who both fall into the huge acid vat. Some commentators believe the Doctor shouldn’t behave in this manner, but I watched this scene very closely. The first attendant slips and falls into the acid; on attempting his escape he pulls the second man into the bath. The Doctor hasn’t directly killed either of them. His parting quip, delivered James Bond style, “Forgive me if I don’t join you”, was mildly amusing. It’s no worse than any of Roger Moore’s puns. I will add that Jon Pertwee might have given the moment a touch more earnestness. It’s the kind of incident that cropped up regularly during his tenure. Baker is perhaps a little too flippant with the line, which is why the scene and the sentence draws attention. Having said that, Baker’s Doctor is nothing if not inconsistent, so his suggested mirth at such a point is entirely consistent in its very obtuseness.
The Doctor and Peri discover that Varos was once a prison planet and its rulers are descended from the original officer class. Philip Martin seems to enjoy the historical / political / societal allusions he can draw. That’s no surprise as his Birmingham-set 1970s drama Gangsters covered similar ground. I enjoy the references too. On Varos austerity cuts to the core of the populace while the ruling classes relax in luxury – although to be fair, the Governor’s residence is never seen, so we must take this at Jondar’s word – and create a fascist state in thrall to its own image. As events unfold and the Doctor uncovers the real enemy of the state, the watching audience sides with the Governor. As the Doctor makes an escape, he’s pursued by cannibals [yes, cannibals, no less – the irony!] and defeats the bad guys by trapping them in a corridor laden with waving poisonous plants. These moments, rather like the visually arresting acid bath, the live executions and torture, mock at the opinions of the idealists who decry the same video nasties the story is presenting. Death, Philip Martin is saying, stays all around us. The Governor, finally seeing the error of his ways, puts his own popularity to the test: “A man scared for his life will find solutions to this planet’s problems. Except that the poor unfortunate will find there are no popular solutions.” His plea, and the televised actions of the Doctor, finally bring a sense of justice to the voting population of Varos.
While I’m enjoying Philp Martin’s script and Ron Jones’ bleak presentation, it is worth noting the important, brilliant supporting performances. Martin Jarvis [Governor] is excellent, being stately, diplomatic and empathetic. He’s a veritable Pontius Pilate, attempting to reapportion blame until he can’t avoid decisions, despite recognising the awkward situation he is in: caught between three masters: Varos, the population and the Galton Mining Corporation. In fact, he offers Jondar to the wiles of the world by letting the voters decide the rebel’s fate, a futuristic outcome for Jesus or Barabbas. Jondar is even strung up in a Christlike pose.
Nicola Bryant’s Peri might be a little less punchy than usual, but that doesn’t hurt. Curiously she wears exactly the same uniform as last time out, only in blue not pink. Forbes Collins [Chief Officer] displays the necessary steeliness as the double agent. Stephen Yardley [Arak] and Sheila Reid [Etta] are superb as the humorous, sceptical and downtrodden Chorus; the moment where Etta rejoices in the Doctor’s escape because she likes his funny clothes at least provides justification for the costuming monstrosity of the season. Nicolas Chagrin [Quillam] is ruthless and manic, although he’s a poor man’s Sharez Jek, with his face mask and scar. Even Jason Connery’s Jondar has moments to shine. Sir Sean Connery’s son had made a few steps into the acting realm and this was his breakout role. Soon he’d be on the T.V. regularly as the second actor to play Robin Hood in Robin of Sherwood.
However all the acting plaudits are stolen by Nabil Shaban as the slimy, ugly, scheming Sil, a native of Thoras Beta, an alien in love with money, power and himself. There’s a beautifully telling scene where he preens himself and complements his [horrific] looks. The addition of a blinking translator on his chest reminds us he speaks an alien language, a little detail which adds to the overall clarity and ingenuity of the tale. Unable to survive without water, he’s constantly being sprayed which makes him resemble some gleaming green moving oil slick; he constantly eats – live fish, cannibalism again – and when he speaks it’s in a series of yells and shrieks and bitter jibes. “This is the most wonderful entertainment,” he rasps before a summary execution. He is left alive at the show’s climax, but the power has been pulled from beneath his tail and even his own masters abandon him on Varos.
Some minor points of interest: Vengeance on Varos clearly influenced the movie The Running Man (1987) where Arnold Schwarzenegger’s prison inmate plays out a deadly game of chase on live television. The character of Sil can also be seen replicated in the Star Trek: Next Generation monster the Ferengi, the two character’s mantra of socio-capitalism eclipsing everything else about their makeup. The incidental music score was suitably industrial. The end scene, as Varos’ T.V. screens go dead and Etta asks: “What shall we do now?” still seems to auger tremendously of the modern day. The original title for the serial was to be Domain or Planet of Fear, both of which would be a little more fitting for in the actual story there’s no vengeance exacted on anybody.
A few minor quibbles and few quivering sets can’t disguise the surprisingly strong narrative drive of this serial. I was never a fan of Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor and I’m dreading re-treading the Seventh Doctor’s tenure, so it maybe that Vengeance on Varos is the last five-star adventure I review. We must wait and see. For now, big congratulations and much relief all-round. Colin Baker has a performance and adventure to be proud of in a fantastic slice of socio-political sci-fi:
5 from 5.
@chrisno1 do you know of a webpage or handy-dandy graphic that clearly breaks down the classic series into eras by Producer and Head Writer? You've mentioned these personalities and their eras a few times throughout your reviews, but its a bit hard to find past mentions over 10 pages of long posts. I think of the eras by Doctors and their Companions, but these behind the scenes changes are clearly important in defining the eras as well.
I'm enjoying all your Points of Order on the internal mythology of the show as it evolves, I don't know how you're keeping all that straight in your head. I thought I knew a bit about TimeLord society from the Time Meddler, War Games, Brain of Morbius and the Deadly Assassin, but my mind is blown at just how much has been revealed by this Sixth Doctor era and how many times this internal mythology has contradicted itself. I do know in the near future you've got something called the Valeyard to sort out then McCoy's last season also complicates things further.
@chrisno1 In your review of 'Attack' you make an interesting mention of 'super fan' Ian Levine. It's always amusing listening to Eric Saward carping about JNT's choices, including giving Levine an advisory role. However marginal Levine may have been, his preoccupation with nostalgic continuity references probably did this era of stories no favours.
@caractacus potts I sent you a PM. I don't want to reveal all my secrets until the end !
@Shady Tree Yes, I wasn't aware of Levine until I started this thread. I wonder if his input was stymied by not being a writer. It's also worth noting, and I mention is a couple of times, that traditionally long running TV shows never bothered much about accuracy in continuity of character because nobody had videos, DVD, multiple TV channels, Twitter, the www, etc. The fab base simply wasn't that vocal and widespread. The Target book series only started to get in the swing of it by the mid-seventies and the magazine was seen as something for kids. I just don't think Turner, Saward and Levine and their conspirators genuinely thought people cared to remember. How wrong they were.
The Sixth Doctor - Colin Baker
Season Twenty Two
THE MARK OF THE RANI
At the end of episode one of this extremely thoughtless adventure, Peri exclaims to the Master: “Last time I saw you, you were burned to death!” Damn right he was. So, how did Anthony Ainley’s Time Lord manage to escape his fiery doom on Sarn? [see Planet of Fire.] Writers Pip and Jane Baker don’t bother to tell us. Instead the Master declares: “I’m invincible!” Someone really should have taken a closer look at this script as he clearly means ‘indestructible’. The Master has been defeated so many times he is obviously not invincible. What irks even more, is his unnecessary presence in the story, for there is already a Time Lord villain in place on Earth: Kate O’Mara’s Rani [or The Rani, for some reason]. The Doctor is in awe of the Master’s female equivalent, calling her “a genius” and admiring the smooth, shiny, sleek, sexy interior of her TARDIS with its beautiful circular console and gyroscope column. He even muses, before stopping himself, that if she’d not been exiled from Gallifrey they might, just, maybe… I’ll leave your imaginations to wander, just like his does.
The Master meanwhile should really be heeding lessons from the Rani. He’s always wanted to rule the universe, but can’t even rule a planet: she’s already managed it, so we are told. The problem the Rani has is her experiments on the alien population of Miasimia Goria have turned the indigenous natives into dipsomaniac lunatics. To pacify her subjects, she’s been dropping sporadically into Earth history and committing lobotomies to extract the calming ‘sleep essence’ out of a number of unsuspecting human brains, thus creating lunatics on Earth, who crop up at some vital moments of history.
This is as bizarre a villain’s motivation as we’ve ever had on Dr Who. Coupled with the Master’s intent of altering history by killing off Britain’s Industrial Revolution geniuses, men like George Stephenson – a scheme he already made a royal pickle of over the Magna Carta in The King’s Demons – it’s a wonder the script wasn’t immediately vetoed.
[Point of order: many reference books comment that the appearance of George Stephenson is the first real historical character to appear since The Gunfighters. This is not the case. The Season 4 historical story The Highlanders featured Solicitor Grey, who is named on papers exiling three ship’s worth of Jacobites to foreign lands. It is true, however, that Grey’s personal history is sketchy and the story elaborated hugely on his likely involvement.]
Apparently, script editor Eric Saward hated the screenplay and hated the writers. Maybe he did as little work as he could on it just to show how crap the thing really was. If so, he succeeded; it is bad enough suggesting Luddites were lobotomy cases gone mad, but to then rerun a plot line barely two years old… I mean, honestly, what was John Nathan Turner thinking? Well, apparently, he was determined to employ director Sarah Hellings and she only agreed to come onboard if she could film this screenplay and shoot it on location. She got her wishes and we got this pile of toilet.
Kate O’Mara is very game as the Rani, mocking the Doctor and the Master’s petty feuding [“You’re a well matched pair of pests. You two bring nothing but trouble”]. Other than that she’s saddled with the same load of situational silliness the Master has had to endure for the past few seasons, including an open ended demise, just in case she wants to launch a comeback. Normally I give an extra half mark for a decent leading performance, but while O’Mara is watchable after a witchy, Halloween fashion, nobody else is. The performances are a disaster from top to bottom. Everyone’s packing forced jollity, wickedness, worry or fright into their acting. The romp isn’t even very amusing. The Doctor has the temerity to accuse Peri of being smug, which is a bit rich when all three Time Lords inhabit self-absorbed egotistical behaviour. Kettle, pot and black spring to mind.
Speaking of black, the Master’s wearing that frilly velvety outfit again. He looks plain ridiculous in early nineteenth century England. So too does the Doctor – when doesn’t he? – and also the Rani with her 1980s leather trouser suit and shoulder pads. Peri’s the worst, dolled up like a Disney princess minus her crown. The Ironbridge Gorge Museum is used to good effect, but that alone can’t save the atrocious production values of a slow moving, tensionless and mind-numbingly stagnant encounter. They couldn’t even create a decent ‘mark’ for the Rani; instead we have a ruddy pink rhomboid shape slapped on a victim’s neck. It looks to be coloured in with a felt tip pen. Cheap and nasty spring to mind.
There was one brief early moment of delight when a scarecrow comes to life, staring over a ploughed field missing all the natural twittering birdlife, a sky of rolling clouds bearing down. This had all the creepy foreboding hallmarks of Hammer Pictures. Kate O’Mara herself starred in a couple of those, but she must have wondered why she bothered with this drivel.
[Point of OO7 interest: in the run up to the release of You Only Live Twice United Artists Television produced a one hour documentary titled Welcome to Japan, Mr Bond which showed clips from the first five Bond films. Desmond Llewelyn & Lois Maxwell feature to link the scenes and Kate O’Mara had an unbilled role as Moneypenny’s assistant.]
The Mark of the Rani is another torturous low point for Dr Who:
1 from 5.
The Sixth Doctor - Colin Baker
Season Twenty Two
THE TWO DOCTORS
In Wonder Boys, Katie Holmes attempts to explain to Michael Douglas’ bemused Pulitzer Prize winning author why his latest novel is unsuccessful. “It’s, well, it’s so boring!” she eventually tells him. Robert Holmes, who wrote excellently for Dr Who for so long, has also performed the same feat with The Two Doctors; this is possibly the dullest adventure I’ve watched since some of Patrick Troughton’s Season 6 efforts when lumbering Quarks and Krotons and Ice Warriors were shovelled before us.
Poor Pat is back for more of the same. This time a couple of Sontarans stagger around until they are poisoned by coronic acid. It’s fair to say their death agonies were unpleasant. A tick for the make-up people, but the costume department did nothing for the masks and uniforms. These Sontarans look inorganic, as if the actors are wearing a papier mâché head. Worse, these popular monsters are killed off well before the climax. Even worse, it is obvious from about half-way that their purpose to the story was a big fat zero. The Two Doctors clearly earmarks a producer pandering to a perceived audience need. Robert Holmes’ story doesn’t need the Sontarans and it doesn’t need the Second Doctor either. Nor did it need to locate itself in Andalusia. If it wasn’t for the half-decent production values and a sequence of some humour between Patrick Troughton and John Stratton, there’d be nothing to recommend this adventure at all.
There’s a huge problem with The Two Doctors which cannot be adequately explained: its continuity. John Nathan Turner was often lauded for bringing back enemies and clarifying the permanency of past storylines. But he really doesn’t. Under his production cycle the Silurians, the Sea Devils, the Master, the Daleks, the Cybermen, even the Time Lords’ past have been messed about with to the point any established time-line has become a cat’s cradle of facts and cross-purpose. Now, even the Doctor has become ripe for deconstruction! While there is a conceivable window of opportunity between Fury from the Deep and The Wheel in Space when the Doctor and Jamie could have an adventure on their own, it could not feature the Sixth Doctor without him remembering it. So, when Colin Baker begins to investigate the abandoned space laboratory, Camera, he should know exactly what is happening every single step of the way. Yet he doesn’t. This is a gigantic plot hole which even a small child vaguely familiar with the premise of Dr Who would figure out. The fact it is never addressed, unlike in both celebration stories where past incarnations are brought together by the Time Lords who hauling them out of the time stream. One assumes when they return to the original stream, the adventure is conveniently ‘erased’ [see Season 23, to come]. Here, Doctor Two is not hauled from the time stream, but specifically employed by the Time Lords, like Jon Pertwee’s Doctor Three, so this unresolved issue becomes a burden to the adventure as a whole and, for this viewer, reduces any impact to nought.
There are other problems attached to the telling. The serial begins in black and white before fading to colour as we witness Doctor Two and Jamie arguing in the TARDIS control room. While Frazer Hines amazingly appears barely to have aged, Patrick Troughton clearly has. They at least should have dyed his grey hair black, for crying out loud. The quibblesome twosome enjoy some banter as they journey to the Camera Space Laboratory, a place the Doctor visited at its inauguration [probably prior to us joining the Doctor’s adventures]. The space station is in the Third Zone of galaxies and the forty scientists working there are some of the system’s finest minds, including Dastari the universe’s leading biogeneticist. This is all very well, except during these opening scenes Doctor Two informs us that he’s visiting at the request of the Time Lords who occasionally use him as an outside agent. This, Doctor Two explains, is a condition of his freedom: because he’s been exiled from their society the Time Lords can deny ever sending him. This statement makes utter nonsense of everything we’ve learnt about the Doctor in the previous twenty one years. William Hartnell referred to himself as an exile certainly; the suggestion is he has been forced away from his then unnamed home planet. In early scenes of The Savages [Season 3] he does appear to be carrying out a planetary survey, but it isn’t clear if he’s specifically doing this under instructions. Hartnell’s tenure was notable for him frequently stating he could never return to his home world.
There’s more… The term Time Lord wasn’t even used until The War Games [Season 6] and during that adventure the Doctor is horrified at the possibility of returning to his home world. He makes every effort to escape. Here, the Time Lords have attached a teleport control to the TARDIS console to direct him to the Camera Laboratory. The Doctor continues to discuss the debilitating effects of time travel experiments with a bored looking Dastari [actor Laurence Payne must have been as uninterested as I was]. Apparently Kartz and Reimer’s experiments have resulted in time ripples of .4 on the Bocca Scale. While monitoring time, the Gallifreyans picked up the ripples and have sent Doctor Two to investigate. Later on Doctor Six explains the ripple will cause a fracture in the time continuum that will end everything in a few centuries. Peri laughs at him; if it’s so far off, why bother worrying? It’s a bit how some climate-change deniers approach environmentalist arguments. This facet of the plot, having been dropped dramatically into the narrative, is equally dramatically never mentioned again.
Still more… Back to the opening ten minutes. Jamie has suddenly developed a knowledge of the Doctor’s race and history which he never had before: in The War Games, the Doctor explains to the Scot exactly who he is and who the Time Lords are. So how come Jamie’s familiar with them all now?
Back to the story, then… Dastari and the other thirty-nine scientists, none of whom we see, use Androgums as servants. These humanoid gourmands eat anything, including rats and human flesh. Shockeye, a master chef of the most unpleasant and unhygienic kind, wants to grill Jamie for dinner. Doctor Two fends him off with a cucumber. Dastari has taken a female Androgum, Chessene, [Jacqueline Pearce, who acts as if she’s still playing the evil Servalan in Blake’s 7] and technologically augmented her into a scientific genius. She’s also developed a power craze and an ego the size of the Camera space station. Despite the augmentation, her true nature continues to assert itself; she remains ruthless and cannibalistic. There is a brilliant scene where she licks the Doctor’s spilt blood from her hand. A little more of this gruesome detail would have benefitted the story tremendously.
As it stands most of the gory stuff is played for laughs. John Stratton’s Shockeye is a horrid invention, all warts and spit and cleavers. His obsession with food is both amusing and distracting. He simply can’t be taken seriously as a villain’s accomplice. Eventually, after Doctor Two is infected with Androgum blood and begins to take on aspects of the race’s behaviours, the two team up like Laurel and Hardy, or Becket’s Vladimir and Estragon, a pair of hobos out to lunch consuming the whole menu at a fancy restaurant including a dozen bottles of wine. These scenes of comedy lighten the bleak atmosphere, but it feels misplaced, coming towards the climax of the adventure. It isn’t explained how Doctor Two recovers from his infection or why Doctor Six also begins to exhibit Androgum tendencies, after all, his blood hasn’t been affected. Adding to the general sense of an adventure not knowing whether to shock or amuse, Oscar, the kindly butterfly-loving maître d’ who initially assists the Doctor in Andalusia, is murdered in cold blood by a belligerent Shockeye during a moment of restaurant rage. Robert Holmes’ script is at its very worst here, playing the scene for comic value and utilising inappropriate quotes from Hamlet. Director Peter Moffatt, who hasn’t got a hold on the action at all, doesn’t help by ensuring over-acting all round.
Colin Baker is appalling in this adventure, even worse than he was in The Twin Dilemma. He’s a liberal pain in the arse. At one point, Jamie mutters to Peri: “I think your Doctor’s worse than mine.” You ain’t wrong, mate! The Doctor’s demeanour and attitude are devoid of all empathy. He blames Peri for everything, considers her foolish despite her coming up with all the best ideas, dislikes his former self and is far too self-righteous to be appealing. Baker prances around like a demented peacock and generally over emphasises his dialogue and actions to the point he’s virtually a caricature of his own making. Absurd. I feel for Nicola Bryant who has to contend with such egotistical grandstanding. She’s not helped by having to share lines with Jamie, who does very little. The current TARDIS twosome come off best when they are crawling around the space laboratory’s service ducts, a sequence that recalls Doctor Three’s time exploring the circuit board of a Time Scope in Carnival of Monsters [Season 10]. Otherwise, their petty bickering just adds to the boredom.
There is a plot. Somewhere. Dastari is the only biogeneticist in the universe who can isolate the symbiotic nuclei of a Time Lord. He’s developed a siralanomode machine to locate and extract this gene. The nuclei gives Time Lords the molecular stability to travel through time. A time module – such as a TARDIS – is fitted with a briode nebuliser and once this is primed by a Time Lord’s symbiotic nuclei, confusingly referred to as the Rassilon Imprimatur, it will be safe for anyone to use. This is quite obviously rubbish. I’ve rewatched Dr Who from Episode 1, Season 1, and from quite early on it was possible for other races to time travel: the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Vardans, the Minyans, the Black and White Guardians, the Tharils, even humans, have all achieved the impossible. Indeed, quite why the Sontaran Stike is so hooked on discovering the secret of time travel when his race already possessed it is a mystery unresolved [see The Time Warrior]. Chessene wants the power of time travel so she can conquer the universe. Yep, same old, same old…
The adventure is torturously slow moving. There’s too much scientific jargon being battered about and none of it makes any sense, either historically or logically. The tension stems mostly on Shockeye’s attempts to eat humans. Andalusia is sparkling, but you sense they didn’t need to go there at all. Replacing the usual running up and down corridors with people running up and down dusty alleys in Seville feels like a waste. At least in City of Death, Paris was fundamental to the plot. Seville could easily be Swansea for what it’s worth. It must have been a nice holiday for everyone, I suppose.
The Two Doctors does look pretty, and at times also pretty nasty, which is the intention, but production values can’t lift this one above the ordinary while the lacklustre interpretation or reinterpretation of accepted Dr Who history is hopelessly baffling.
Tediously feeble:
2 from 5.
The Sixth Doctor - Colin Baker
Season Twenty Two
TIMELASH
The Mark of the Rani introduced George Stephenson as a character into the Dr Who Universe. Glen McCoy’s Timelash repeats the feat by introducing H.G. Wells, in the form of a young man named Herbert. It isn’t revealed exactly who he is until the end of the adventure, but, really, who cares? for Timelash is such an inconsequential story it barely registers on the Richter Scale of achievements.
The TARDIS is caught in a time tunnel and lands on Karfel, a planet the Third Doctor and Jo Grant once visited. Referring to an untelevised adventure makes a change from messing with accepted Dr Who history, but it’s a cheeky shortcut and allows the Doctor to be immediately familiar with his surroundings; so there’s no time spent exploring the planet and its people. Instead the Doctor and Peri spend most of the opening twenty five minutes being flung about the TARDIS control room trying to escape said time tunnel. The Doctor is particularly unpleasant to Peri in this one and Nicola Bryant, despite doing the best she can to remain bushy tailed, is mistreated by everyone she meets and spends most of the story tied up or incarcerated or under threat. Once again, a villain takes a romantic fancy too her and he too is another ugly mug.
The Borad is a mutant scientist who has become Karfel’s dictator. He’s created a punishment machine known as the Timelash which sends dissenters into the time tunnel, where they vanish forever. [They are actually dispatched to Earth c.1179, so you do wonder what happened to them.] The Borad wants to annihilate the whole Karfel race, which seems a bit extreme even for a demented scientist. While he’s going about it and Peri’s all tied up, Herbert is garnering data for his future novels; references are made to The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr Moreau, War of the Worlds and most obviously The Time Machine. There’s even a peculiar reference to the origin of the legend of Loch Ness – odd as the Doctor knows Nessie was a Zygon Skarasen [see Terror of the Zygons].
The adventure passes amiably by. After Jacqueline Pearce’s appearance in The Two Doctors, it’s now Paul Darrow’s turn. He played opposite her in Blake’s 7 as the surly rebel leader Avon. Here, he mercilessly sends-up his role as Tekker, the Borad’s stooge, and is a delightful distraction from all the other inexplicable and unexplainable nonsense going on.
When I watched this, I wondered why, given John Nathan Turner’s seeming obsession with bringing back past monsters, he didn’t have the TARDIS land on Peladon and make the Borad an Ice Warrior. It might have been fun to see Peladon in the far future, ruled by a lunatic Martian dictator, but retaining its caves and legends and Aggedors. Ah, well, I suppose we can all dream:
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chrisno1 said:
lands on Karfel, a planet the Third Doctor and Jo Grant once visited. Referring to an untelevised adventure makes a change from messing with accepted Dr Who history
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I'm confused by this bit? if it was not an actual episode of the Third Doctor era, is it a reference to one of the tie-in novels, or an abandoned script, or this a complete all-new retcon specifically assigning the past adventure the Third and Jo?
Well, it is confusing. It wasn't, but it is.
At time of transmission, the Third Doctor and Jo Grant's visit to Karfel was completely unknown. It was created purely for the purposes of this adventure. The Doctor recognises the planet's culture. There is a mural portrait of his third incarnation on a wall, hidden behind panelling in the council control centre. Peri recognises a portrait of Jo inside a Karfelan locket - one assumes she must have seen Jo's picture in the Doctor Who Family Photo Album hidden somewhere in the TARDIS. I'm guessing. Maybe she got curious after meeting Jamie and said: "Hey, Doc, how many of you were there before I came along?" I can't imagine the Sixth Doctor having the patience to dig out a photo album though! Anyway, it is fairly obvious whatever initially happened on Karfel did occur, we just have not witnessed it or heard of it.
The Third Doctor and Jo could have visited Karfel between any adventures of the 8th and 9th Seasons only if the Time Lords sent them [as they did to Peladon and Solos] or in the 10th Season between Carnival of Monsters and Frontier in Space, or Planet of the Daleks and The Green Death. I think Carnival... was specifically mentioned as Jo's first proper trip in the functioning TARDIS.
In 1996, author Paul Leonard wrote the Virgin Missing Adventures novel #27 Speed of Flight. In it, Jo is set up with Mike Yates on a blind date; but she protests she's supposed to be going to Karfel with the Doctor. An adventure in space and time ensues, but not on Karfel. This story however does specifically take place after Planet of the Daleks and before The Green Death. However, in terms of television's Classic Dr Who, it still doesn't exist except through the eye of Timelash.
Closer to home is the 2010 The Sarah Jane Adventures story Death of the Doctor, where Jo Grant recounts her visit to Karfel: "The Doctor took me to this planet once called Karfel. And they had a leisure garden. And the plants could sing."
Make of all this what you will.
As I said, and referencing my earlier notes about 'continuity advisor' Ian Levine, whose contributions to continuity are as good as nil, surely it would have been easier to send the Sixth Doctor back to Peladon?
The Sixth Doctor - Colin Baker
Season Twenty Two
REVELATION OF THE DALEKS
Revelation of the Daleks is another of those divisive Dr Who adventures. John Kenneth Muir, Christopher Bahn, Stuart Galbraith and Mark Harrison don’t like it, whereas writers for The Discontinuity Guide, Radio Times, The Television Companion and Doctor Who: The Complete Guide do. I lean towards the latter.
It is a gruesome, violent little number, for sure, but it looks impressive and it has a plethora of unusual characters whose motivations intersect, correlate and inhabit a creepingly hideous landscape which could only be possible in a program as structurally fluid as Dr Who. For once, while the story is a sequel of sorts – as are all but one of the serials for Season 22 – it doesn’t attempt to tell us anything we didn’t know about a monster’s past. Instead, Revelation… adds to the Dalek legacy rather than stealing, altering or simply ignoring the past. There are certainly nods to previous adventures, not always Dalek related, as well as other outside sources, but this allows Eric Saward’s script to breathe a little more, unrestricted by the necessity to incorporate a tonnage of Dalek / Doctor / Davros lore. It’s refreshing in fact that the narrative concentrates more on the peripheral characters than the Doctor and Peri. For some, this is to the story’s detriment. Speaking as a Sixth Doctor ‘non-believer’ this enthuses me. The less I see of him the better.
The TARDIS two-some barely feature in the first episode, spending their whole time swapping barbed comments about each other as they stumble through the snowy landscape of the planet Necros. The Doctor is at his most disagreeable. Peri really should have jumped ship when visiting Andalusia because he never seems happy to have her around, the ungrateful clown. To be fair to Colin Baker, he’s not given the dialogue to make his Doctor any more pleasant. Writer after writer panders to a developing misanthropy. This sits badly with what we know of the Doctor’s history. While even Jon Pertwee’s incarnation considered humans fairly inane and particularly warlike, he was rarely so obviously insulting or insensitive, certainly never to his female companions. Let’s leave the warring pair with a polite nod to reconciliation in adversity and concentrate on whatever else is happening.
The Doctor wants to visit the Tranquil Repose Mortuary where an old acquaintance, the renowned Professor Stengos, has been interred. The T.R.M. cryogenically freezes its clients when they contract incurable diseases. They are held in suspended animation until a cure is discovered, at which point they are resuscitated and healed. The President of the Galaxy [we are not told which galaxy] is also due to be interred and preparations are afoot for his arrival. He isn’t a great President, overseeing a galaxy-wide famine.
However, something is amiss in this funereal world. Rumours abound that clients never leave the T.R.M. and two sceptics have infiltrated the facility with a plan to investigate and destroy. Unknown to almost all, in the crypt of the T.R.M. is a vast laboratory where the so-called Great Healer instead of healing is creating high protein foods from the store of human bodies. This has tantalising glimpses of Richard Fleischer’s classic 70s sci-fi Soylent Green and is exactly the sort of horrific premise beloved of the Philip Hinchcliffe era of Dr Who. Even more unwelcome to all is the revelation [ha!] that the Great Healer is Davros, genius of the Daleks, a man whose broken shell has been reduced to nothing more than a head on a box in a glass booth with a clutch of wires attached. Memories of The Brain of Morbius abound. Davros survived the explosion of his prison ship by using an escape pod. He has offered the [unnamed] company running the Tranquil Repose Mortuary the rights to distribute the food protein, but neglected to tell them how he’s made it. The company director, Kara, has thrown the whole financial resource of the T.R.M. behind Davros’ experiments, but has subsequently become suspicious. The madman has been developing Daleks in his laboratory, essentially for his personal bodyguard. However, unlike many previous adventures the humans we see here are well aware of both the Daleks and Davros because his trial and imprisonment made news across the galaxies. Kara rightly believes she has been deceived and recruits the assassin Orcini to kill the Great Healer. Orcini is a Knight of the Grand Order of Oberon; he comes accompanied by his uncouth squire Bostok and these two make a fine Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, although they fight real not imaginary enemies. Meanwhile, the two sceptics have infiltrated the Great Healer’s lab and discovered Prof Stengos, his body self-mutating into Dalek form. This is an exceptionally powerful scene which would have climaxed episode 1 back in the days of twenty-five minute runtimes.
Back above ground, two mortuary assistants, Takis and Lilt, have revolution plans of their own. This Chas n Dave pairing have running verbal battles with the Chief Embalmer, Jobel, and his lovelorn assistant, Tasambeker. Davros, unknown to all, monitors the communications systems and is aware of every move everybody makes. This allows him to expose Jobel as a sexual predator, blackmail Tasambeker, uncover the plot against him and guide the Doctor towards a final confrontation. What it can’t do is shut out the annoying radio D.J. who uses a live feed to update the cryogenically frozen clients with the latest news, lest they awake after a few hundred years unaware of universal progress. Comedian Alexi Sayle enjoys himself in a daft role. The rock n roll laser gun was a hoot.
Davros’ White Daleks are very striking, being bigger and standing out against the slate greys of the T.R.M. and its ancient catacombs. These Daleks are true devotees of their creator. Hints of a new Dalek Civil War abound, this one between Skaro’s Daleks and Davros’ renegades. There seems to be a temporary truce between Daleks and other races, brought about one assumes by the devastating effects of the Movellan virus. However, there is still a Dalek Supreme and he dispatches a saucer shaped space ship full of original, smaller, grey Daleks to recapture their creator so he can be tried for crimes against the Dalek race. It appears even the Daleks, over centuries of time, have developed a sense of justice beyond ‘Exterminate!” A pity Colin Baker’s Doctor doesn’t make mention of this, as it was one of his predecessors who so astutely predicted it.
[Point of Dalek order 1: the Sixth Doctor isn’t recognised by the Daleks and it isn’t entirely clear why. Davros has learnt of Time Lord regeneration; this is the third version of the Doctor he’s encountered. The Daleks themselves have recognised the Second Doctor as an enemy in both The Power of… and The Evil of… as well as Resurrection of… I assumed this was through some sophisticated D.N.A. scanning – after all, what’s that sucker for? – but it appears not; apparently the Sixth Doctor’s image does not compute. Maybe it was his lack of sartorial elegance which foxed them…
[Point of Dalek order 2: This adventure clearly takes place after Resurrection… and because of the technology on show, it must be set many thousands of years in the future. There’s a confusing line from the D.J. about how the 1960s music he plays is only three generations old. Clearly he’s getting his generations confused with his eons, epochs or millenniums, or perhaps we’re in another of these alternate universes which no one dare whisper about, or maybe he accidentally took a trip on the Dalek time corridor before the Doctor blew it up…
[Point of Dalek order 3: both Davros and a Dalek are seen to levitate. Apparently this wasn’t a 1980s innovation. At the end of episode 1 of The Chase [Season 2], the Dalek which emerges from the sand is supposably levitating. I never noticed this and I’m not entirely sure why it would be levitating out of a sand dune, but this is what my research tells me. I don’t like levitating Daleks. They just look silly.]
The adventure has much to recommend it, mostly in the substories Saward has invented for his cast. The unrequited love of Tasambeker, Natasha’s hunt for her father, the drunken Grigory attempting to redeem himself, the scheming Kara and her secretary Vogel, the revolution angle, the civil war angle, the master-servant relationship of Orcini and Bostok and their Shakespearian tragedy of a life. Supplied with realistically assertive or enigmatic dialogue, depending on circumstance and personality, the actors really come alive. Clive Swift is probably the best of the bunch, his creepy, lecherous turn as Jobel going against his usual casting. He also has the best line, judging Colin Baker’s Doctor with a single dismissive sentence: “It would take a mansion to bury an ego as big as yours.” Well said!
Of the rest, Jenny Tomasin’s Tasambeker is worryingly chastened. Eleanor Bron impresses as Kara, as does Hugh Walters’ ingratiatingly slimy Vogel. William Gaunt’s Orcini [yes, it really is Richard Barratt from The Champions] is blessed with a noble streak matched by his almost pre-Baldrick squire in John Ogwen’s Bostok. The scary cameo from Alec Lindstead as the mutant Prof Stengos will certainly stay with me for a while, as will the glass Dalek and the view through the casing of a vibrating screaming mutant.
It is the most traditional Dr Who characters who disappoint: the rebels and the revolutionaries and the chief villain. Terry Molloy is much better than he was in Resurrection… but they mangled a lot of his dialogue while his head is stuck in that box. The others simply don’t cut a decent swathe, which is disappointing. Even the Doctor and Peri feel subdued unless they are arguing the proverbial toss. The second forty-five minutes has an urgency and drive which doesn’t quite gel with the mystery and sense of impending doom invited by the first. We’re almost asked to watch two contrasting serials. Almost, but not quite. Once the usual run-around begins though it’s all hands to guns, knives, hypodermics, grenades and bombs and let’s kill and explode things, mostly Dalek things.
Despite a rather rudimentary finale, director Graeme Harper ensures Season 22 ends on something of a high. The look of the adventure is first class and credit must go to Alan Spalding’s splendidly austere production designs, John Walker’s photography [especially the location footage which jumps around various parks in wintery Hampshire] Roger Limb’s creepy music, Dorka Nieradzik’s effective make-up or masks and Pat Godfrey’s understated costumes. Two asides of note. First, this is the last time Dr Who would be shot on film when outside locations were used; no jarring transitions anymore, although the quality of modern equipment had made these less obvious over time. Second, Peter Howell’s arrangement of the theme tune made its final appearance and would be replaced from the next season.
I’d never watched Revelation of the Daleks prior to this run-through and I was genuinely impressed and surprised. There’s a lot to love here:
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The Sixth Doctor - Colin Baker
Season Twenty Two
Summary
Former script editor Terrance **** is on record as stating that Colin Baker “didn’t stand a chance in that outfit.” He’s not far wrong. Quite what Colin Baker was expecting to wear when he took on the role is not on record, but I’ll bet it wasn’t a costume that made him look like a demented harlequin. What possessed the Dr Who team to come up with such an appalling mode of dress isn’t clear. There’s some suggestion it’s the ‘sum of all his parts’ – I think somebody was colour blind, or maybe just blind. And the problem doesn’t solely rest with the costume, bad as it is, for Baker taps into a broad maniacal persona for his portrayal. Unlike his predecessors, who after shaky and ambiguous beginnings developed a strong sense of personal character, Baker has remained scatty and contradictory. He has no solid platform to build his version of the Doctor upon. Instead he takes each line, each scene individually and on its own merits. This makes him bafflingly inconsistent, frequently petulant when he should be kind, light-hearted when he should be serious, angry when he should be studious. It is true Baker may be directed like this or there may have been a request from the top for a more abrasive Doctor to chime with a more violent series of stories, yet the result is a chaotic leading man who fails to draw sympathy or understanding.
I blame the script editor [Eric Saward] who is responsible for the overall evenness and tone of a series as it develops. Saward had been John Nathan Turner’s right-hand man for some time [since Peter Davison came on board] and while occasionally his individual work shows brilliance [e.g. Earthshock, Revelation of the Daleks] in general the standard of Seasons 19, 20, 21 & 22 is mired in mediocrity. While there may sometimes be strange casting decisions or a failure of the design team to blame, a script editor’s concerns are character, place and consistency and Saward simply doesn’t provide it. The hectoring tone Baker assumes first took root in Peter Davison’s arbitrary reactions to Adric. It is fully fledged by Season 22 and Baker, taking his lead from the top, seems to enjoy the character’s self-confessed egotism. The unfortunate outcome is the lack of a conciliatory heart. This Doctor simply isn’t very amiable. His bullish, overbearing and downright discourteous nature does not win him friends. In polite society, he’d be termed a boor and swiftly taken to Coventry.
Baker’s displays do not endear him to his fellow performers either. Poor Nicola Bryant, who started so brilliantly, seems swamped by the oppressive atmosphere of the Sixth Doctor’s TARDIS and has been reduced to nothing more than a verbal punchbag. She used to give it back, but the writers [or Saward] have stopped bothering. In The Two Doctors Bryant is clearly seen to mouth the word “Arsehole” at Baker after one of his ‘quips’ and you can hardly blame her. The other cast members are, almost to an adventure, attempting to match Baker’s over-the-top flamboyance or else they quail from it. Only in Vengeance on Varos and Revelation of the Daleks do the actors provide the support the stories require. This failure can be aimed at the ‘guest star’ policy, which actually means dragging a sagging actor out of the gutter of his / her career for a brief cameo-style turn. My memory of this time is that I barely registered who these actors were. The theory they might add outside interest to a story and bring new, curious viewers to the show doesn’t hold water. Nor does the idea they might add some professionalism to proceedings as that’s the responsibility of the producer, the director, the backroom teams and the lead, recurring actors. It’s very hard to detect that professionalism on display here.
Overall, the quality of the stories in Season 22, like those which came in all of Davison’s era, are swamped by inconsistency of tone, character and design. Two good serials separated by a host of generally poor ones has become the standard fare of most Dr Who banquets. The menu offered is the same: returning favourites overbaked, a few unusual and often unsuccessful side dishes, the Master for a sour dessert and all washed down by a healthy bottle of time meddling. The cutlery and tableware can’t support the ambition and the service is piecemeal at best.
While I can search out reasons for the relative failure of recent seasons, and be generous in my reward for the stories which are good, it must be said that these repetitive failures can only be orchestrated from the top. John Nathan Turner’s era feels as if it’s been a year too long already. No producer has lasted more than five seasons and Turner has had his fistful. The good ground work he laid in Tom Baker’s swansong year has evaporated. Instead of creating well-structured, workable stories, he and his team seem to be seeking out talking points. It’s all ‘let’s bring back the cybermen / sea devils / Omega’ or ‘let’s guest star Ingrid Pitt, guys from Blake’s 7 or sitcoms’. This situation reached its apex here with the Master returning after clearly and cleverly being killed off in Planet of Fire and the Second Doctor cropping up in the laborious The Two Doctors, a yawn-fest devoid of interest and featuring an episode and a Doctor too many.
The ratings for the season were not that bad, peaking at 9 million, flatlining around the 6.5 mark. But the hierarchy at the BBC wanted more. It is a fair criticism to make that the BBC didn’t provide Dr Who with the resources, both financial and in expertise. The show became a bargain basement production which relied on goodwill and cheap labour. So older, bored guests stars out for a quick pay day and younger inexperienced ones looking for a chance to shine and failing, are employed in front of the camera, while the same tired technicians wallow behind it. Dr Who needed a revamp. It needed a fresh producer, a fresh script editor and fresh injection of money. It was still a show to be proud of [just] and serials like Vengeance on Varos demonstrate how good it can be when the jigsaw puzzle fits. It’s worth applauding a show prepared to take risks and upping the violent content feels justified given the unremittingly nasty storylines, but too often there is no filter for the unsavoury action and this only adds to the sense of creating the talking point without leading the conversation.
Amongst it all, Doctor Who himself feels a little lost. Soon, he would be completely missing with a season cancelled to cut costs and a less than appreciative fan base wondering if he’d ever return.
Interlude 11
SLIPBACK (1985)
Filling an extended gap between Dr Who seasons, Eric Saward wrote this six-part adventure for the BBC Radio 4 children’s show Pirate Radio. It’s the first Dr Who radio play, predating the longer Jon Pertwee episodes which I reviewed earlier [The Paradise of Death & The Ghosts of N-Space]. This story has a heavy dose of humour and some mature dialogue, for instance it opens with Colin Baker’s Doctor suffering a hangover after drinking Voxnic with Peri during a night on the town on Zaurak Minor.
The TARDIS materialises on the strange survey ship Vipod Moor, huge in size and monitored by a split personality computer. A raging Maston, a creature from the earliest eons of the universe, attacks travellers, raising the Doctor’s suspicions that someone is interfering in the space / time continuum. The TARDIS twosome become separated. Peri falls in with galactic cops chasing art thieves and the Doctor learns that some dangerous time travel experiments are taking place. According to this story, the Vipod Moor was responsible for the Big Bang, which contradicts both science and the Season 20 story Terminus. It seems remiss of Eric Saward to ignore the same stories he worked on a script editor, but there you go. Even the Doctor expresses the belief the computer’s dastardly plot is mindboggling preposterous. Valentine Dyall [the ex-Black Guardian] is the cannibalistic captain who has an appetite for all things Peri. He sadly died two weeks after completing the recordings.
A distraction, if nothing else.
If you want to listen to it, there’s a full copy on:
(1) Doctor Who - Slipback (1985) [Full-Cast Radio Drama] - YouTube
There’s also a full reproduction of the script on:
Doctor Who Slipback : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Personally, I don't consider this canon, although I am given to understand some fans do.
Interlude 12
PROPOSED SEASON 23 (1986)
Michael Grade, Director General of the BBC, put Dr Who on a hiatus in 1985, effectively cancelling the show. The reason given was the corporation wanted to find money to launch their new prime time soap opera East Enders. This show would initially occupy the same scheduling slots [weekdays on Monday and Wednesday] as Dr Who had recently done. Given the success of East Enders, you do feel it was a fairly astute decision. However, given the success of the later rebooted Dr Who, you could also say if the Corporation had handled its key sci-fi show better, things might not have been so dire.
Prior to the ‘cancellation’ producer John Nathan Turner had commissioned several scripts for the next production cycle. While there is a host of information regarding the cancelled season on the usual websites, I’ve chosen the Wikipedia entry as it has the most robust background detail. The serials we may have seen are:
THE NIGHTMARE FAIR
Writer: Graham Williams (the former producer)
Director: Matthew Robinson
IMO: I love the title. The story would feature the return of the Celestial Toymaker. Bringing back the Toymaker, who was a good villain in a terrible adventure does not fill me with any joy. In May 1989, The Nightmare Fair became the first Target novelisation to not be based on a transmitted Dr Who adventure. This subsequently opened the floodgates for a multitude of spin-off novels featuring all the Doctor’s incarnations, most of his companions and some we’ve never met before. Whether you consider this a good or bad thing depends on the kind of love you have for Dr Who, I suppose.
THE ULTIMATE EVIL
Writer: Wally K. Daley
Director: unassigned
IMO: Not much data on this story. It was to be set on an Earth colony planet which has developed a civilised tranquil society. The countries of Tranquela and Ameliora have been at peace for decades until the arms dealer Dwarf Mordant spies an opportunity to make war and money. The Doctor must intervene to save the planet from descending into war.
MISSION TO MAGNUS
Writer: Philip Martin
Director: Ron Jones (possible)
IMO: In Vengeance on Varos, Sil became a great addition to the ranks of Dr Who villainy. He returns here in league with the Ice Warriors. If you’ve read my post on Timelash, you’ll know I considered the Ice Warriors ripe for return, so it was fun to read I wasn’t alone. The scenario for the story is good, but sounds Peladon-lite. It is located on an alien planet beset by trading difficulties. Another renegade Time Lord, Anzor, is mixed up in the planet’s affairs, but doesn’t realise Sil is double crossing him and the ruling Madamme by selling minerals to the Ice Warriors, who will use his influence to seize power.
YELLOW FEVER AND HOW TO CURE IT
Writer: Robert Holmes
Director: Graeme Harper (possibly)
IMO: Set in Singapore and featuring the Autons, the Rani, the Master and the Brigadier. This sounds like one of John Nathan Turner’s wishful thinking ideas with far too many enemies in one pie. It was only at the outline stage when cancelled. Apparently Holmes rewrote it for the Trial of a Time Lord season, but despite deleting the Master, the story was eventually dumped.
THE HOLLOWS OF TIME
Writer: Christopher H. Bidmead
Director: Matthew Robinson
IMO: A great title. This would have featured the Tractators. These creatures were rubbish in Frontios and they’d be rubbish again. Apparently Nester would be replaced by the Great Tractator. I have images of a huge slug sitting on a pile of rocks, a la the Great One in her web in Planet of the Spiders. The Master was written in, impersonating Professor Stream [another anagram]. I am so glad this didn’t get made.
THE CHILDREN OF JANUARY
Writer: Michael Feeney Callan
Director: Bob Gabriel (possibly)
IMO: Very few details. A confusing story of revolution on a desert planet ruled by the fascist dictator Z’ros.
Two other stories that frequently crop up in online searches are Paradise 5 and Leviathan.
Paradise 5 was written by Philip J. Hammond and was eventually slated for inclusion in the commissioned Trial of a Time Lord Season 23, but was passed over in favour of Terror of the Vervoids.
Leviathan was never near the commissioning stage, but Brian Finch’s revolution tale set on a man-made space ship so enormous and inhabited by so many people it has developed its own ecosystem and historical culture had fascinating possibilities. [Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, anyone?]
Amongst many other failed pitches for Season 23 were several more ideas by author Philip Martin as well as actor David Banks, switching from playing the Cyber Leader to writing about him.
Big Finish audio productions has made cast recordings of many of these stories. I haven’t listened to them. Like Target’s official-unofficial novelisations, I don’t consider any of these stories to be canon.
The Sixth Doctor - Colin Baker
Season Twenty-Three
THE TRIAL OF A TIME LORD
Episodes 1 – 4
THE MYSTERIOUS PLANET
Dr Who was back after an eighteen-month hiatus, starting a season in the autumn for the first time since the days of Tom Baker. The then director of the BBC, Michael Grade, had temporarily cancelled the show in 1985, using the money saved to help build the extensive sets required for the new soap opera East Enders. It’s return was not, in my memory, very eagerly awaited. Indeed, Season 23 is a complete new experience for me. I never watched it at the time, it’s never been repeated and I never hired the DVDs. I also haven’t read very much about it, as the post-Davison years are my least favourite eras of Dr Who.
The season was presented as a fourteen week epic story The Trial of a Time Lord. Our hero, the Doctor, is hauled before a Time Lord court and forced to stand trial for ‘conduct unbecoming of a Time Lord and breaking the First Law of Time.’ There is a sense of déjà vu about that. The Doctor has already stood trial for these crimes in The War Games [see Season 6]. This is a well-documented event. While it may not have been familiar to the casual viewer, it is certainly a storyline most fans were aware of. Fans would also be aware that the Time Lords punished the Doctor by banishing him to Earth, subsequently forgave him following the Omega Affair, have repeatedly used his expertise to carry out Time Lord business, loaned him to the White Guardian and called on his services to defeat a rogue President Borossa. The Doctor himself has saved Gallifrey three times from potential disaster, briefly assumed the role of President and as recently as a few adventures back prevented some disastrous time travel experiments specifically on the orders of the Time Lords. So exactly why are they so keen to put him on trial again? For me, the Dr Who legend is falling apart at the seams. Whatever intent John Nathan Turner – who inexplicably remained at the helm of the show – and his script editor Eric Saward – also unbelievably still in situ – had is blown out of the water by the indecency with which they have trodden all over Dr Who’s past. I agree that in a long running series some stories are likely to be remade or updated, but that doesn’t ignore an established list of facts about your main character. By 1986, the first Dr Who videos were being sold, the magazine was still popular and the Target novelisations were abundant. There were guides to the show written by people like Jean Marc Lofficer and fanzines sent through the post. Information regarding Dr Who was pre-online rampant and for the team at the top to believe they could get away with such a blatant steal is an insult to the fan base. Worse, the opening four episodes of The Trial of a Time Lord saga are an insult to the general viewing public at large.
Written by Robert Holmes as The Mysterious Planet, the season begins with a fantastic motion-controlled camera shot which eases its way along the length of an enormous space ship Star Wars style. A blue tractor beam shoots from the hull. The TARDIS materialises inside it and is sucked remorselessly towards the aperture where it disappears. The hull closes. The action is accompanied by a tolling bell, a repeated theme used by composer Dominic Glyn. This thirty second sequence cost the [for the time] astronomical sum of £8000. We never see the outside of the space ship again.
Unfortunately, one feels some of the money may have been better spent on the interior of the ship. This has to be one of the most disappointing sets I’ve ever seen for Dr Who. The space ship is massive, yet the Doctor lands in a tiny lobby, opens a set of weeny doors and walks straight into a darkened courthouse which looks about as spectacular as a primary school classroom. He sits in the dock on a grey leather office chair, the kind of thing you could buy at IKEA or Habitat, which is quite apt given some of the dialogue we encounter later on in the show. Here the Doctor is confronted by Michael Jayston’s Valeyard, who launches into a series of accusations, all of which the Doctor refutes. Lynda Bellingham’s Inquisitor keeps a rickety lid on proceedings. The Valeyard wishes to use escapades of the Doctor’s Sixth incarnation to prove he has broken Gallifreyan Law and specifically states he will use adventures from the recent past and future.
I laughed.
If the Valeyard is demonstrating the Doctor’s future interference, he obviously must have been found not guilty at the current trial. Someone hasn’t thought this premise through very cleverly! Meanwhile, the Doctor, like me, wonders where Peri has gone. There’s a suggestion Time Lords suffer amnesia when pulled from the timestream, which is neat and explains [possibly] why all those Doctors were able to meet up in the celebration editions without prior knowledge. It doesn’t explain Doctor Two’s or Jamie’s sudden appearance in The Two Doctors though, or why Doctor Six is suffering amnesia when he hasn’t been pulled from the timestream – his whole TARDIS has been kidnapped while in flight. Only he emerges from it, so he is alone. No Peri. No anybody.
The Valeyard presses on and within a few minutes, the Doctor has blithely accepted his fate as the accused and begins to make sarcastic comments about the proceedings, some of which are valid, most of which are not. At various points through the first evidential story the action cuts away and returns us to the courtroom. Even as early as episode two, I began to find this distracting. It doesn’t help that two of the cliff hanger endings take place in the courtroom as the Valeyard threatens the Doctor with execution.
There is an adventure happening, shown to us by the Valeyard. Unfortunately it is roundly and obviously garbage. It really is. I’ll tip a hat to Tony Selby as the opportunistic rapscallion Glitz, who is searching for an unnamed ‘black box’, and leave it at that.
Well, no, I won’t, but it’s a fair summation of one of the most dire and ridiculous examples of Dr Who I’ve ever watched. The story begins with some intrigue on a planet called Ravalox, which has been devastated by a fireball. Obviously not, as there is thick vegetation, a breathable atmosphere and signs of civilisation. These ruins turn out to be those of Marble Arch underground station, which is a decent idea but one stolen from Beneath the Planet of the Apes. In fact, the whole story is a convoluted rip off from the 1970 classic, including underground lairs, an Armageddon bomb and a strange cult of worship to the Immortal One. This ‘living god’ turns out to be Drathro, a servo robot who resembles the Giant Robot [see Robot, Season 12] and has been upholding the wishes of three Andromeda Sleepers, all long dead, who travelled to Ravalox centuries ago attempting to hide from the Time Lords. The Sleepers, we learn have harnessed so-called Black Light Energy which enabled the teleportation of Earth and its whole solar system to a completely different point in the galaxy.
I laughed again.
I won’t even comment on this highly improbably notion. Even for science fiction it’s rubbish. The universe is always full of matter. You can’t just remove something and put it elsewhere, like picking up a tea cup. Physically, there would be nowhere to put it without destroying something else. So a good idea is completely under-minded by another hopelessly unstable premise.
[Point of order: keep reading, the story of the Andromeda Sleepers gets a substantial reinterpretation later on in the season.]
Anything more? Peri is back, more subdued than normal. The sets are worse than ordinary. Tom Chadbon returns. The Drathro Robot and its lair are out of proportion. There’s a tribe of primitives roaming the forests led by Joan Sims, who acts as if she’s swapped Carry On movies for repertory panto: “Which way? – This way! – Am I surrounded by fools? – We go forward!” As the adventure progresses it simply dive bombs, getting worse and worse and failing to entertain on any level. When the last survivors of Earth explain they are guided by the laws written in the sacred book Moby Dick, well…
I laughed.
Not a funny laugh, not one which showed appreciation of humour, but one of disdain and derision. A man in a cut-out balaclava then explains that they call the planet “UK Habitat.”
Now, I was all done laughing.
Anything good?
No.
Quite possibly, other than Glitz and that opening space station sequence, the worst thing I’ve seen for a long time. Oh wait, that was The Twin Dilemma. Well, The Mysterious Planet runs it a very close second:
½ from 5.
The Sixth Doctor - Colin Baker
Season Twenty-Three
THE TRIAL OF A TIME LORD
Episodes 5 – 8
MINDWARP
The Doctor continues to wreak havoc at his own trial, refusing to take proceedings seriously and insulting both the Valeyard and the Inquisitor. This is a very unruly court. Mystifying to me is how arbitrary Time Lord justice is. It has been mentioned several times that the Doctor is suffering a temporary amnesia; in which case, how can he adequately defend himself? He should be given an appropriate medical examination, checking his full faculties, before being placed in the dock. The Doctor isn’t simply claiming he has amnesia, the court knows he’s suffering from it, so they all know it’s an unfair trial. Case dismissed, I reckon. And it still hasn’t been explained why the Time Lords need a space ship to travel around the universe when they have time travel machines…
Philip Martin was responsible for the excellent Vengeance on Varos, which cleverly interwove traditional Greek theatre into a commentary on violent societies. Here, he goes for a vaguer than vague and rather vulgar pastiche of The Island of Dr Moreau and, frankly f***s it up. But he’s not alone. The director Ron Jones makes a complete hash of the story, injecting exactly zero tension until the very last scene, and failing to control any of the cast who are across the board witless and prone to egotistical overacting: when Colin Baker’s Doctor states “I am putting my own interests first” I said to myself: “He’s finally noticed!” Brian Blessed is among the cast, and while he’s usually watchable, seeing him compete with Colin Baker for the most O.T.T. performance is cringeworthy and very, very hard to view. Poor Nicola Bryant gets caught between the terrible two-some, that’s when she isn’t impersonating servant girls or being bullied by man-dogs.
Also culpable is script editor Eric Saward, who wrote all the courtroom nonsense, scenes which incessantly disturb the flow of the story, making not only the court, but the Doctor and the audience uncertain whether what they are watching is real or fabricated. Saward wasn’t getting on with producer John Nathan Turner and the lack of a happy heart really shows. Budgets were squeezed to nought and the costumes, sets, effects and make up are just dire. There’s almost nothing worth watching here. I simply don’t know what to write about.
The Doctor and Peri land on Thorus-Beta, home of capitalist ogres the Mentors, aliens like Sil [from Vengeance on Varos] and his superior Kiv. They’ve employed a top scientist, Crozier, to conduct cell transfer experiments in the hope Kiv’s expanding brain can be rehoused in a bigger skull. Only Crozier’s operation doesn’t transplant the matter, it transposes the essence of the brain, essentially prolonging Kiv’s life to infinity as it can thus be transposed over and over. The Time Lords do not like this – it would make the Mentors even longer-lived beings than them! At the end of episode 8, Peri has had her head shaved and Kiv’s essence transferred into her brain, rendering her life extinct. Nicola Bryant’s sudden evil transformation is the best five minutes of the whole serial and you just wish they could have focussed more on this angle – and kept Peri alive – and a little less on the courtroom stuff and the disgusting Mentors. Nabil Shaban [returning from Varos] and Christopher Ryan [from The Young Ones] spar excellently as the two Mentors.
Meanwhile, the Doctor is insistent the trial visuals are untrue reflections; the Inquisitor replies that the Matrix can’t lie. But we know that isn’t correct: it was tampered with by the Master in The Deadly Assassin and by Omega in Arc of Infinity. It’s even more disconcerting that we learn the Doctor was hauled out of the time stream to attend his trial at precisely the moment he was hurrying [or not, on this ‘evidence’] to rescue Peri. He also asks, quite rightly, why nobody’s enquired what happened to the box of tricks Glitz stole from Ravalox. Good question that, although frankly I just want to know what the hell is happening in Mindwarp. The few paragraphs here are, quite honestly, all I could glean from this viewing. I was hopelessly confused and constantly distracted by some of the very worst performances, situations and sequences I have ever witnessed on Dr Who. And to think I just wrote that about The Mysterious Planet.
Luckily Nabil Shaban, Christopher Ryan and Nicola Bryant manage to prevent this serial dipping into half-mark territory, but by golly it’s a close-run thing:
1 from 5.
The Sixth Doctor - Colin Baker
Season Twenty Three
THE TRIAL OF A TIME LORD
Episodes 9 – 12
TERROR OF THE VERVOIDS
Terror of the Vervoids is a vast improvement on the previous two sections of the season-long epic The Trial of A Time Lord. Taking as its basis the traditional whodunit, the Doctor and his cheeky new assistant Mel find themselves investigating a murder on an intergalactic recreational space cruiser, Hyperion III. The screenplay by Pip and Jane Baker reimagines scenarios familiar from Agatha Christie as passenger after passenger is killed off and every remaining individual has a potential motive, is hiding a secret or comes under suspicion through unusual behaviour. There’s a neat scene where Honor Blackman’s Professor Lasky is seen reading Murder of the Orient Express, which sums up the authorial intent here. In Dr Who terms, the whodunit has been utilised before, most effectively in The Robots of Death – a serial this resembles, with its opulent interiors and bickering passengers – but also in other adventures such as Nightmare of Eden [which also used a luxury space cruise for its setting] and Horror of Fang Rock. Additionally, the format allows Colin Baker’s Doctor to do more than his usual run-around. This time, he has to ask questions, receive answers and make deductions; this in turn allows other characters the space and time to shine. There’s a genuine sense of a cast acting together in this serial. Director Chris Clough cleverly held back the last episode’s scripts from the actors so they were not to know who the culprit was, making their confusion and eventual realisations more believable.
The story also revisits a theme from Fury from the Deep and The Seeds of Doom, two stories where plant life assumes animal characteristics and begins to fight back. Here the creatures are Vervoids, a genetically engineered mutant species who decide all animal life must be made extinct. That’s quite a ****-up in the genetic engineering lab then. The Vervoids aren’t very interesting and are not aided by being another alien in a long and growing list of ‘worst ever monster designs.’ They are extremely difficult to describe, but a cross between a bi-pedal triffid, female genitalia and the Weed from Bill and Ben sums them up nicely. They are worse than appalling. Better envisaged is Prof Lasky’s sickly assistant, who’s being kept in isolation because she has become infected with the Vervoid strain; her mutant appearance is truly horrifying. Mel’s scream is well deserved.
We do need to talk about Melanie Bush. The Doctor’s trial has taken a breather, allowing him to process the death of Peri. He’s been granted access to the Matrix to prepare his defence and has chosen to pick an adventure from his future.
[Point of order 1: if the Doctor is viewing his future in the Matrix, then the Matrix must know he wasn’t sentenced to death at this trial. If the Matrix is actually predicting only a possible future scenario, then what is the legal point of using it? We know Time Lords can only see so far in the future – this was highlighted in Frontios – so their ability to control universal events of time and space are quite clearly not fit for purpose.
[Point of order 2: if the Doctor is using a future adventure of his own, why restrict himself to his current incarnation? Also, if he has viewed his own future, won’t that mean that by definition, he already knows the outcome of the adventure on Hyperion III? This might explain why he appears so laid back for most of the serial.
[Point of order 3: in the opening episode of The Mysterious Planet, the Valeyard explained he would use past and future adventures to demonstrate the Doctor’s guilt; yet he has only used past evidence; it is the Doctor himself who uses the future evidence.
[Point of order 4: Gallifreyan justice stinks. The Doctor continues to insist the Matrix is being tampered with and nobody even investigates the possibility. He claims to have viewed his evidence before presenting it, but hasn’t made any notes or records on what occurred, so his complaints are conjecture. Having wiped out the mutant Vervoid race, the Doctor is accused of genocide – I’m not sure a defendant can have the charges against him altered mid-trial – which is completely hypocritical of the Time Lords, who destroyed the Great Vampires [see State of Decay] and even sent the Doctor to destroy the original Dalek embryos. Anyway, given the Vervoids were an engineered lifeform which would not have existed prior to scientific ingenuity and whose chief characteristic is the annihilation of all animal life forms, including Time Lords, you wonder whether this time the Doctor might just have done the universe a favour and got poor Prof Lasky off the hook.]
So, he’s paired up with young red-head Mel, who comes from Pease Pottage, Surrey, is a fitness fanatic, has a eidetic memory and does a fairly decent impression of amateur sleuthing. There have been quite a lot of complaints about Bonnie Langford’s interpretation of Mel, but she’s rather good here, seeming to be more proactive than Peri and better able to cope with the Doctor’s thick edges. She’s got him exercising for starters. Quite how well she’ll progress remains to be seen.
Colin Baker reins himself in a little too, and about time. I do need to point out that my viewing of this adventure was from a very poor online copy which ran at only three-quarter speed. This had the effect of slowing down Baker’s speech. Amazingly, his Doctor comes across so much better when he’s less manic and controls his annunciations. The difference is tremendous; Baker becomes stately, calm and reassuring, which he hasn’t done for… well, which he hasn’t done.
The adventure is assuredly designed by Dinah Baker. The costumes for the alien Mogarians are sleek and sinister. The performances are keen, although nobody particularly shines. It’s great to see Honor Blackman out-acting everybody as Prof Lasky. The special effects are better than usual and even a reproduction of a black hole is above passable.
It’s worth noting that there was originally a super climax to episode nine which we don’t get: Hyperion III has been hijacked and is being piloted into the black hole, the crazed hijacker at the helm – and cut, or should have been. Apparently in post-production, John Nathan Turner decided all cliff-hangers for the season should finish with a close up of Colin Baker’s face [I hadn’t noticed this, but when I read of it, I immediately realised it was so] and he reedited the climax and effectively killed all the tension from the scene.
Terror of the Vervoids is entertaining in an old-fashioned manner, even though it is set in the distant future. It’s a shame the monsters are so pitiful. The reimagining of a detective show was great fun until the Vervoids burst out of their gigantic seed pods. Disappointing, then:
3 from 5.
chris said:
Peri has had her head shaved and Kiv’s essence transferred into her brain, rendering her life extinct.
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I did not realise Peri came to such a nasty end, thats a real turn in the tone of the show. In the 21st century series almost all the companions have tragic outros, especially the Moffat ones, but I'd thought the classic episodes were more innocent.
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chris also said:
It’s great to see Honor Blackman out-acting everybody as Prof Lasky.
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and I also did not realise Honor Blackman was in a Doctor Who episode! Thats a major attraction for this audience! I might have to watch this one even if it is a lesser-loved Second Baker episode. I may have missed it over the last ten pages of epic-length reviews, but have there been any other Bond-actors appearing in these episodes? (John Cleese I know played an art critic)
Your reviews have caught up with where I am now (First story of season 24), I’m interested in learning why Colin Baker didn’t have a regeneration scene!
I think you’ve overrated season 23 😂 the acting from most participants is of a standard so poor that my old drama teacher at school would have given up and gone home. Bonnie Langford is so excruciatingly amateurish that I’m finding it difficult to watch.
I believe there is an episode in the McCoy era where he goes back to the time of the original episode, I hope it doesn’t disappoint as it sounds a good plot.
@caractacus potts I have attempted to highlight Bond veterans as I go. John Cleese was in City of Death which also featured Julian Glover and Catherine Schell. Bond connections got less and less as the show continued. Peri's demise is a disappointing one all-round. [see a couple of entries further o for the final revelation...]
@CoolHandBond It's hard to call re: the acting. I try to be as honest and reflective as I can. I just watched that McCoy episode you mention, so wait a week or so and the review will be up.
Currently I've reached the end of season 25, so the epic marathon only has five more adventures and a couple of 'interludes' to go. Wading through these post-Davison era Dr Who adventures feels like reading Benson's Bond continuation novels. Bad ideas heading south fast.
The Sixth Doctor - Colin Baker
Season Twenty Three
THE TRIAL OF A TIME LORD
Episodes 13 – 14
THE ULTIMATE FOE
It’s impossible to sum up the machinations of the final instalment of the monumental Dr Who story The Trial of a Time Lord. It would take pages. Suffice to say by way of explanation, the show’s producer John Nathan Turner was given permission for episode 2 [or 14, if you like] to overrun by five minutes as the action could not be edited down without removing key aspects of the plot. I say ‘key aspects’ as if there’s something important going on here. There really isn’t.
The Ultimate Foe has its supporters, which is nice I suppose, but the story simply doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. There are too many overlapping and overinvolved storylines for the writers to effectively explain, so they don’t bother. Chief among them is the revelation that the Valeyard is in fact the Doctor himself, a distillation of the dark side of the Doctor’s nature, somewhere between his twelfth and thirteenth incarnations, who’s all out to take control over his remaining lives. So, the writers have basically turned the heroic Doctor into evil incarnate and given him one of his adversaries recurring motives as his own. The Master of course constantly attempted to extend his existence beyond the thirteen life cycles of a Time Lord.
[Point of Time Lord order: can a Time Lord actually do this? The Valeyard must be the same kind of astral projection we saw in the Watcher during Logopolis or Cho’Jee in Planet of the Spiders. Both these apparitions melded into the next generation of their Time Lord persona, so if the Valeyard, as a projection, has already lived twelve life cycles, how can he ‘kill’ the Sixth Doctor and inherit six life cycles he’s already lived.]
Speaking of the Master, it turns out he too is in on the plot. Having infiltrated the Matrix, he first appears to want to save the Doctor, but later reveals his true colours and is using the trial as an elaborate cover for his own plan to depose the Time Lord High Council. This last section of the story occurs entirely off-screen. Amazingly, nobody at the trial recognises the Master or even appears to know who he is; yet this is the most notorious and evil Time Lord in history. There seems no need to introduce the Master into proceedings. It’s an easy get out for Pip and Jane Baker, who rewrote the final serial under some duress.
Robert Holmes had died while writing this two-parter and script writer Eric Saward finished the treatment. The original episode would have featured the Doctor fighting the Valeyard – or himself, as it were – in the Matrix and at the climax the two antagonists were to be plunged into the space / time continuum locked in battle. Producer John Nathan Turner hated the idea, particularly as the bleak, Sherlock Holmes style cliff hanger would give BBC Director General Michael Grade an easy excuse to cancel the show. Turner ordered changes, Saward refused, lawyers got involved and with one week to go and Robert Holmes’ part one script well advanced in pre-production, a new episode 2 script was commissioned and changes made to Holmes’ original first. Tagged on as it is and packed full of unnecessary extrapolation, the second episode dips badly from the intriguing first.
Briefly, the Doctor uncovers the Matrix flaws at his trial. He’s aided in this by the Master, who explains that the mysterious Andromeda Sleepers had stolen the Matrix secrets and hid them in a box which they in turn hid on Earth. This is the box Glitz obtained on Ravalox and which was never explained at the time. He is secretly in league with the Master, although he’s not party to the revolution plans which the Master must have been planning for some time. The Time Lord’s had used something called a magnetron to draw the Earth and its constellation billions of miles across space and prevent the recovery of the Matrix black box. How this fooled the Andromedans isn’t clear as there are three of them ‘sleeping’ on Earth, so one assumes they had the means to contact their own race at some point.
While we’re about it, who exactly are / were the Andromedans? We never find out. Never saw them. Yet they were powerful enough to enter the Matrix – which apparently can only be accessed using the Great Key – except here people seem to have access to it almost by free will. At one point, Melanie Bush just grabs the Great Key off the Keeper’s shawl and makes a run for it.
And since we’re talking Matrix secrets, why do the Time Lords drag a whole solar system across space when, as is well documented, they have the power to place Earth in a time loop or simply eradicate it from existence [see The Invasion of Time and The War Games.] This is where the whole narrative of the trial and the stories featured within it fall apart; there simply isn’t any logic in anyone’s actions and reactions and yet again the audience, who in the main are fairly knowledgeable, can see that. Those with a good understanding of Dr Who lore are scratching their heads and wondering why an established continuity suddenly needs to be so fractured.
During the court scenes, Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor delivers a searing indictment of the Time Lords, who he quite correctly blames for the [almost] extinction of all life on planet Earth: “In all my travelling throughout the universe I have battled against evil, against power mad conspirators. I should have stayed here. The oldest civilisation in the universe: decadent, degenerate, and rotten to the core. Power mad conspirators, Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen, they’re still in the nursery compared to us. Ten million years of absolute power. That’s what it takes to be really corrupt.”
A great speech, but a little late to endear him to this viewer. Baker shines brighter in The Ultimate Foe and the scenes in the Matrix, which have a Kafkaesque quality, are very good. Geoffrey Hughes’ prattling Mr Popplewick, the Valeyard appearing and disappearing like a demented sprite and the quicksand finale to episode 1. However, these can’t disguise the frenzied nature of the writing, which is all over the place, unfocussed and unintelligible. There’s a lot of pretentious quoting as well, Shakespeare and Dickens get a substantial look in. Director Chris Clough continues on from Terror of the Vervoids, but he’s fighting a losing a battle. When the supposedly dead Valeyard reappears at the adventure’s end, now in the guise of the Keeper, I didn’t hold my breath; I exited the room in disgust.
After all that, really?
2 from 5
chris said:
the Valeyard is in fact the Doctor himself, a distillation of the dark side of the Doctor’s nature, somewhere between his twelfth and thirteenth incarnations, who’s all out to take control over his remaining lives.
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good gawd my head hurts! I knew there was something in this story that further complicated the Regenerations, but i've never been able to understand what its supposed to mean within the story, let alone how it therefor messes up established continuity. It think youve explained it as clear as you can, and certainly the last minute behind the scenes rewrites suggest not that much care was taken anyway, we shouldnt expect it to make sense.
for the audience and the creative team, the future was not yet known, even if TimeLords are privy. But thirty odd years later we do know: the twelfth and thirteenth incarnations would be Capaldi and Whittaker. But when we finally got to this regeneration, I don't remember any Valeyard interrupting the sequence. Capaldi regenerated into Whitaker and that's it.
however Stephen Moffat did complicate things by adding a previously unknown incarnation, "the War Doctor", as played by John Hurt in one episode only. Retroactively inserted between McGann and Eccleston (this works because we never saw the regeneration that produced Ecclestons Doctor, and Nine had some serious PTSD type issues). So that retcon should place the Valeyard between Smith and Capaldi, which was also a straightforward regeneration. And I think Moffat also claimed a failed regeneration somewhere during the Tennant era counts, so thatd place the Valeyard between Tennant and Smith, also a straightforward regeneration. Theres really no place for the Valeyard in the sequence as presented.
Maybe we just shouldnt take future incarnations of the Doctor seriously? maybe Colin Bakers actions successfully altered the timeline so the Valeyard never came to be, or any one of the infinite other times the Doctor (and others) have interfered in the spacetime continuum.
Well, given the Valeyard isn't a regeneration per se, he's a 'mirror' of the Doctor, an astral projection if you like, he can effectively fit in anywhere you like. Indeed, we already saw one for the Doctor at the end of Logopolis. However, the Master clearly states in The Ultimate Foe that the Valeyard is such a projection and comes between the twelfth and thirteenth Doctors because that is the last opportunity he will have to gain more regenerations - well, it isn't, even the Master has been able to gain more after his thirteenth life expired [see The Keeper of Traken and / or The Five Doctors]. If the Valyard has managed to transfer his astral projected life essence into the body of the Matrix Keeper, one assumes he has now obtained all the Keeper's remaining lives. But that surely means we now have two Doctors, one roaming the universe and one the Keeper of the Matrix.
I give up.
chris said:
the Valeyard isn't a regeneration per se, he's a 'mirror' of the Doctor, an astral projection if you like
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ah OK, I didn't get that, and still don't really understand what that means, but don't worry. Could be a side effect of a regeneration under stress, I suppose.
as to which regeneration, I think the convention of numbering the Doctors by actor is only amongst us fans. I don't think any characters within the show ever specify one as the Fourth Doctor or another as the Twelfth. Moffat was able to exploit that by inserting a previously unseen Doctor between McGann and Eccleston, and we still dont see the regeneration that produced Eccleston so there couldve theoretically been yet another in between as yet unrevealed. And I dont think we actually saw the Troughton>Pertwee regeneration or the Second Baker>McCoy regenerations either, did we?. Then there were all those faces before Hartnell in Brain of Morbius, so really Twelfth and Thirteenth could have been any of them.
speaking of which have you seen the American made TV movie yet? we most definitely see the McCoy>McCann regeneration, and its very much American style!
The Sixth Doctor - Colin Baker
Season Twenty Three
Summary
Season 23 is, in my opinion, the worst Classic Dr Who season in history [so far…]. Compared to some of the seasons which have come before, this is a witless and weary extravagance which demonstrates the problems the show was encountering. The producer and script editor are short of ideas. There is an incessant insistence on revisiting, reinventing and destabilising the show’s past and its characters. There’s very little of original interest here. The major problem with the season is the overarching trial format which relies too much on an audience’s long memory. It doesn’t help either that the writers were not informed of the courtroom scenario while they were writing their contributions, which gives the impression the stories are not related to each other. In theory, according the Valeyard, they are not, but as the Doctor exposes the Valeyard’s ruse it is quite obvious they are related. Script editor Eric Saward, who wrote all the courtroom scenes for Mindwarp and Terror of the Vervoids as well as some of the finale, has had to force the individual serials to work together. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle missing the framing pieces and it shows.
Things are not helped by a succession of dreadful performances, including a terrible turn from Colin Baker in Mindwarp. That serial featured the death of Peri. As a TARDIS companion of some standing, her demise seems shovelled carelessly into the narrative and, while it might have worked if Mindwarp had been a decent adventure; it falls completely flat through a lack of emotional and physical tension. The later suggestion this was only a falsehood from the Matrix and that Peri was saved and married Brian Blessed’s Yrancos – the most unlikely of romances Dr Who has ever proposed – feels like a trumped-up happy ending. Nicola Bryant was particularly upset, and hardly surprising as her short turn as an evil Mentor is one of her best moments.
I can’t fathom why Bonnie Langford was recruited to the show. Perhaps she was cheap. She doesn’t lack enthusiasm. Never given a ‘recruitment story’ makes her character somewhat unusual, but in these early stories Mel’s technical know-how seems at odds with her late 20th Century interest in health and fitness and fashions. She seems more capable of cheering up the Doctor than Peri was, but it wouldn’t take much. Colin Baker never quite sheds his grumpy side, even if he’s a little less obnoxious to his companions. Nonetheless, the writers seem to delight in making him incorrigible, discourteous and unsympathetic to everyone else, particularly in those courtroom scenes; Baker plays up to it whenever he can.
The production values across the board are fairly cruddy. Only some of those Hyperion III interiors and the Victorian-looking Matrix sets are any good. Monsters? Bad. Costumes? Bad. Effects? Passable.
Having viewed Season 23 for the very first time, I am shocked by the low standard attained here. Individual stories are tackling some very adult and challenging material, surrounding genocide, genetics, death, justice and sacrifice, but they have been presented and interpreted in such a manner as to seem childish and trite. Dr Who has never shirked from difficult themes, but it’s rarely showed them such disrespect. Apparently, John Nathan Turner was asked to submit the scripts for vetting prior to filming and the verdict he received from Jonathon Powell, Head of Serials, was that they were unfit for production; however with no time to commission replacements and preproduction in hand, we got what was unfit.
A final word on Colin Baker. I don’t like his Doctor. I’ve outlined many reasons in the eleven reviews above. He notoriously refused to film a regeneration scene, so he doesn’t get one. At the end of Season 23 it was expected he’d return, but given the scarcity of quality I’d say he got a lucky break. He’s very popular on the Dr Who convention circuit and his enthusiasm for the show is welcome. It’s a great pity, I feel, he wasn’t given strong direction, incisive scripts and a decent costume to match his more robust, warts-and-all attempt at portraying the Time Lord. Ultimately what might have been startlingly different has only ended up being startling and that’s not a good thing.
Oops, forgot the pics.
Colin Baker looking almost chilled...
Nicola Bryant looking lovely...
And again...
That picture's got nothing to do with Dr Who. I was feeling mischievous...
A need a short break, then I'll return with the fun that is Sylvester McCoy !!!
In anticipation of a resumption tomorrow, the titles for the Seventh Doctor's era. I'm not a big fan of the logo, but the tune is great and the graphics excellent:
The Seventh Doctor - Sylvester McCoy
Season Twenty Four
TIME AND THE RANI
Dr Who was really on the skids after the critical mauling given to Colin Baker’s reign, and in particular The Trial of a Time Lord experiment, which even under laboratory conditions would have gone horribly wrong. To say it was lucky to hold onto a fourteen week slot in the schedules would be underselling it. However, the powers that be at the BBC handed the show a poisoned chalice by continuing to employ the person at the very head of the lab team: producer John Nathan Turner. Now, while I don’t wish to speak ill of the dead – Turner had many personal issues, including a chronic alcohol problem – the BBC bigwigs, having witnessed the long and uninterrupted decline of a once landmark show, surely must have twigged that failure begins at the top. If a business had suffered the kind of fall in quality and return Dr Who was suffering, the Managing Director would be replaced. Research indicates that Turner was considered by Michael Grade, the BBC’s Director General, as a disruptive employee, one too big [and expensive?] to dismiss, but unsuitable [and underqualified?] for a transfer to a prestige production. Apparently several times Turner requested a sideways move, but was refused. By this moment in his tenure, he also felt a deep personal responsibility to Dr Who, considering the top guns were aiming for the show’s death, and argued strenuously for the program’s continuation. He got his wish, but his hands became metaphorically tied by budget restraints and a general malaise from on high about the show, which Grade in particular saw as an embarrassment. So, Turner, as producer and overseer, the man ultimately responsible for hiring and firing, budget allocation, style, tone, promotion, the honest visible value of the product, clung on to his hallowed throne, an immoveable, intransigent and incompetent kingmaker. Devoid of fresh ideas and at war with most of his production team, Turner set about his own ‘Night of the Long Knives’ and virtually removed anybody within the production team responsible for the last couple of seasons. Only a few backroom staff and writers stayed on. The fact these had not recently covered themselves in much glory did not bode well for the success of Season 24.
One of the decisions taken out of Turner’s hands was the removal of Colin Baker. It still isn’t entirely clear why this was seen as necessary. It wasn’t only Baker who was at fault through most of his brief showing, there was an equal paucity of quality elsewhere. The poor man was shouldered with the dullest run of serials imaginable. He and Nicola Bryant stumbled gamely from one disaster to the next with barely a decent screenplay or a talented director to enthuse them. It is no surprise Baker went for pomposity and grandiose, stylised acting when he’s being given substandard scripts to work with. However, gone he was to be. A request was made for Baker to film a final adventure, at the end of which he would regenerate; he insisted on a return only if allowed a full season’s farewell. No, was the answer. So, gone then. Bye. Bye, Baker.
Which leads to the problem, how do you explain the Doctor’s new face? As it turns out, this wasn’t such a difficult problem. The new season kicks off with a precredit sequence – unusual in itself, I can only think of the opening of Castrovalva where this occurred – during which the TARDIS is seen to be under attack. There is an explosion. In the control room, the Doctor and Mel are seen tumbling to the floor. They lie motionless, heads and faces down. As we watch, a mysterious light emanates from the Sixth Doctor’s features and miraculously the light morphs into Sylvester McCoy.
Okay. It’s a rubbish regeneration. It lacks any of the pained nuances of age, battle and sacrifice that made the changes we saw for Doctors One, Three, Four and Five so affecting. It most resembles the finale of Doctor Two, who disappeared without the audience knowing what was to come; more importantly the Third Doctor appeared without any thirty second facial preview. That regeneration was at least explained. Here, the Doctor suffers nothing more than a bump on the head. Maybe it was all that carrot juice Mel made him drink or the constant miles on the exercise bike. The poor old fella might have had a heart attack; after all he is 953 years old – a fact we learn in episode three. Perhaps even more disappointing than the cause of the regeneration is the moment itself. No flashbacks, no ethereal light show, no words, just a quick blur of colour and a fade to McCoy’s features. It’s a distinctly inauspicious start. And Time and the Rani is an inauspicious debut. It has an exceedingly low reputation among fans – Dr Who Magazine’s 2014 poll saw it ranked the third worst serial ever – which probably stems more from the opening precredit regeneration than the serial itself, which isn’t as bad as all that. It isn’t very good either.
First things first. John Nathan Turner’s clear-out resulted in a new script editor, Andrew Cartmel, a twenty-four year old with a degree in screenwriting but no previous experience of working in television. He immediately clashed with writers Pip and Jane Baker. It’s unclear who is mostly responsible for the plot and the dialogue of this grim enterprise, but it’s safe to say that between them the three have concocted a mess of a story which re-treads all the mistakes made in the last two seasons. Another returning villain. Another attempt to interfere with time. Another plot to kidnap / kill important scientists / people, inexplicably many of them from Earth. Another planet destroying super-scheme. Another silly, uninspired monster. These faults override the good stuff which is on display, of which there is plenty.
The special effects are several steps up from anything seen on Dr Who before. Utilising Computer Generated Images for the first time, we see laser bolts, explosions, sparkly cobweb guns and the Rani’s curious balloon-like ‘death bubbles’. There is also a fresh and zippy credit sequence, although the scribbled ‘Doctor’ above a stamped ‘Who’ looks terrible. I don’t enjoy Keff McCulloch’s incidental music. It interferes with every scene. The Tetraps are a strange monster race of bat-like creatures who never resemble a bat, by which I mean they didn’t fly and we only saw them hanging upside down at the very end of the adventure. Instead, they lumber about firing ‘cobweb’ guns and despite having 360º vision, everyone manages to creep up on them or avoid their gaze. Hopeless. They look like a Garm with four eyes. The rest of the costumes leave something to be desired. The inhabitants of the planet Lakertya are almost indescribable. They have greenish, yellowed skin, strange cuticles on their cheeks, and weird hair. They run like ostriches. Head bobbing, arms by their sides. Just plain odd.
Time and the Rani features only the second opportunity for the Doctor to visit a world entirely populated by alien beings. The first was way back in Season 2’s The Web Planet when the Doctor encountered the tittering ant-like Zarbi. It’s not a good idea for Dr Who to visit totally alien environments. There’s a lack of connection between the audience and the characters we are supposed to have sympathy for. The Lakertyans are peace loving lotus eaters, much like the Dulkins in The Dominators [Season 6]. It was easy for the evil Rani to overrun them with her allies the Tetraps. Like the Master before her [in The Ultimate Foe], she appears to have escaped her TARDIS and the rapidly growing dinosaur inside it; writers Pip and Jane Baker who penned this and The Ultimate Foe, don’t even bother to mention the climax of The Mark of the Rani, an oversight I’m interested in only because there is so little else to comment on.
Geoffrey Powell’s production designs are reasonably good. There was a very impressive entrance to the Rani’s fortress, but you wonder why she had to be so elaborate. The Lakertyans, what is left of them, seem to live underground in splendour because their planet is basically a Somerset quarry. It gets very boringly repetitive to have the cast constantly running around the rocky landscape with nowhere to go. I did enjoy those ‘death bubbles’. They were well-realised, effective and quite frightening. I even felt for Bonnie Langford’s Mel when she inadvertently got trapped in one. The scene where the Doctor almost sets off another was rather good, recalling a similar moment in Genesis of the Daleks. Sadly, Mel becomes the receptacle for capture and explanation. She appears to have lost all of her gumption between Doctors and has taken up ear-piercing screaming as a pastime instead of yoga.
Mel is at her best when she isn’t Bonnie Langford. Kate O’Mara returns as Time Lord villainess the Rani and, while the Doctor is confused following his regeneration, she disguises herself as Mel and persuades him to help mend her time manipulator. Given the real Mel was a dab hand at manipulating the Sixth Doctor, this makes perfect sense, except the Rani has no idea who Mel is, so wouldn’t be able to impersonate her effectively. The ruse relies entirely on the Doctor’s confusion, which doesn’t last long enough to make the doppelganger idea either important or worthwhile. Kate O’Mara’s okay, just like she was in her debut, but her character is only a Master with breasts and an unsightly mole on her nose. She’s even stealing the Master’s crazy universe conquering plans. This one involves an enormous brain and harnessing ‘strange matter’. I didn’t care and I don’t think O’Mara did either. When she announces “I’ve had enough of this drivel” you have to wonder if she’s ad libbing.
The saving grace of the story is Sylvester McCoy. Early on, his Doctor is suitably befuddled and his natural comic timing helps to fast solidify the character. There is a mite too much larking about and falling over during the opening episode, but once he settles into the role, there is much pleasure to be had in his small, slight, thoughtful persona. The scene where he tries on a number of inappropriate outfits was suitably comic, but didn’t do a disservice to his interpretation. Admiring his impersonation of Napoleon was fun, insinuating the inner intellectual megalomania all the Doctor’s possess. As usual there are a few nods to Doctor’s past: Pertwee’s frilly shirts, Tom Baker’s hat and scarf and Troughton’s big woolly overcoat. McCoy’s heroic nature is tested too and he overcomes the villainess with some dexterity, although I’d abandoned any hope of understanding what was going on by then. McCoy most resembles Patrick Troughton’s hobo, I feel, but he doesn’t follow the bumbling, casual nature of his forbear. He has a hidden depth which he carries through tiny mannerisms and wickedly astute asides.
“You speak as if you admire the Rani,” says the Lakertyan collaborator Beyus.
“Admiration? No. Fascination.” McCoy’s almost obsequious reply delves deeper into his relationship to the Rani than the whole of the adventure put together, studded as it is with hints of their past lives on Gallifrey [they are the same age, attended university together and both fled in stolen TARDISes]. Later on, when the Doctor realises the Rani needs his brain as well as a myriad of the universe’s great and good to fulfil her plan, McCoy stares for a long second at an empty life-pod labelled ‘Doctor’ before ever so astutely raising his eyebrows, a tiny action which displays his inner intrigue in a far more revealing manner than any of Colin Baker’s long winded and inane verbal rantings.
Being slightly older than his nearest forebears, McCoy cuts a less robust figure and I rather like that. He doesn’t need to have might on his side to assert his authority; this I sense is a Doctor who will be a wily challenge for his enemies and rivals, emotionally and intellectually stimulating as well as a thorn in their [and our?] sides. He isn’t as immediately confrontational to the audience either, which in a way the previous three Doctors all were – Tom Baker’s bug-eyed, scatter headedness; Davison’s youthful inappropriate confidence; Colin Baker’s arrogant pettiness – instead McCoy cajoles and weaves his way under our [and his opponent’s] skins with an amusing set of physical mannerisms and verbal tics, none of which overwhelm the portrayal.
Sylvester McCoy has massive potential. Time and the Rani sadly doesn’t exploit it:
2 from 5.
I was wondering why there was no proper regeneration scene - now I know, thanks @chrisno1