Review

Planet of the Daleks

Taron : “In our legends there is a being, a figure from another planet who came to Skaro when the Thals were in their greatest peril. In something called a TARDIS. He had three companions.”

Story Code: C10.4.
Production Code: SSS.
Story Number: 68.
Countdown week: ??…

A sequel of sorts to The Daleks, is more of a re-make really. Not the greatest Dalek story really.

Rating: 2/5

Review

The End of Time, Part One, Children in Need scene

The Doctor: Try and make an Ood laugh…

Review and BBC YouTube of the scene after the jump…

It begins…

In the tradition of The Five Doctors, Dimensions in Time, Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death, Born Again, Time Crash, a scene from The Next Doctor, there is now this scene broadcast on Children in Need night.

Viewed soon after broadcast of The Waters of Mars, the change in tone from that previous installment is noticeable, though the Doctor does acknowledge he has been summoned.

In the interim he has “had a bit of fun” “saw the phosphorus carousel”, “saved a planet”, “named a galaxy Alison”, and married Queen Bess (and something more is cheekily suggested) apparently. There is an undercurrent to the “fun” as the Doctor has been avoiding this meeting with Ood Sigma, dreading it. After the TARDIS lock gag, the uneasy mood of hilarity continues as the Doctor wanders through the snow, hat, shades and hula chain.

However the mood quickly darkens as the Doctor meets the Ood Elder, shares the “bad dreams” and the Doctor proclaims “that man is dead”. So it seems like a bridging 3 minutes from Christmas mince-pie-munching and relaxing into something more doom-laden…

Scene star rating:**** (out of a possible five)
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(Donate to Children in Need here: Pudsey link)

(The Waters of Mars still on iplayer)

Review

The Waters of Mars

The Doctor: For a long time I thought I was just a survivor but I’m not, I’m a winner, that’s who I am.

Episode star rating:*****(out of a possible five)

It begins cheerily enough, with a beaming Doctor walking out of the TARDIS sporting a spacesuit onto “The Red Planet!” Next, a “funny robot” (of the type found in films such as Silent Running or The Black Hole. Films which don’t end cheerily.) The robot brings the Doctor to Bowie Base One and the rest of the cast.

In certain types of DW story, everyone dies at the end. In this one, it’s in the first ten minutes – it’s spelled out that everyone will die at the end of the story. A logical extension of the Sci-Fi trope of (in certain situations) “You can’t change the past” – everything is the “past” to a Lord of Time. Adelaide Brooke is in the mould of the Classic Season 5 Base-Under-Siege commander – stubborn and authoritative. As the Base is Sieged by the water-monsters, the monsters provide a plot and some excellent scenes, but the real drama features Adelaide and the Doctor.

One completely unexpected scene is when the frothy The Stolen Earth is brought into this grim tale – with the poetic image of the Dalek gazing at Adelaide then sailing into space. As the Doctor recounts why history must happen, he describes this as a “consolation” to Adelaide. She doesn’t accept history’s path. “Everything I do just makes it happen” – the Doctor reflects on his recent adventures such as Pompeii. There are so many extraordinary scenes and turnarounds in the plot – stunning scenes as the Doctor walks glumly away, the shuttle explodes…

The plot backflips as the Doctor returns to the base raging “It’s taken me all these years to realise: the laws of time are mine – and they will obey me” (surely an intended echo by the writers of a certain other Time Lord saying “…and you will obey me!”) More extraordinary scenes: Adelaide actively fights against the Doctor’s new plan setting off a nuclear countdown, the robot facilitates a spectacular escape from a mushroom cloud on Mars.

So to the final scenes, as he tells Adelaide “I’ve done this sort of thing before, in small ways, saved some little people, but never someone as important as you, oh, I’m good”. Tennant’s delivery of those last few words not cheekily boastful this time, rather with a cold aloofness. Adelaide questions whether this “Time Lord Victorious” is right. “That’s for me to decide.” (Plot threads about the character of the Doctor started in The Runaway Bride picked up again. He needs a companion to stop him sometimes.) Tennant’s chilling exchange with Adelaide ends with his cheery demeanour raised up again over the cold steel, and the sonic screwdriver of all things is used to underscore his arrogance. “Is there nothing you can’t do?” “Not anymore.”

As Adelaide tries to right the path of history behind closed doors, the Doctor sees the gunflash and realises what he has done. Then, the most extraordinary scene. “I’ve gone too far”. Like Banquo’s Ghost at the feast, an Ood appears in the distance to haunt the Doctor – and Tennant gets to exercise his Shakespeare acting skills. “Is this it? My death? Is it TIME?” The Ood vanishes (reminiscent of the Watcher in Logopolis). As the Cloister Bell sounds (again, like Logopolis), the Doctor starts up the TARDIS and mouths one word – “No”.

An astonishing story.

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(The Waters of Mars iplayer)

Review

Frontier in Space review

The Master: Nobody could be more devoted to the cause of peace than I! As a commissioner of Earth’s Interplanetary Police, I have devoted my life to the cause of law and order; And law and order can only exist in a time of peace.
The Doctor: Are you feeling alright, old chap?

Story Code: C10.3.
Production Code: QQQ.
Story Number: 67.
Countdown week: 21…

For the first three episodes of the six, this is very much a standard Doctor Who escape, captured, repeat runaround. However, Delgado’s appearance as the Master brightens things up. Other pluses are the costume and production design and especially the location work, with great use of existing “futuristic” buildings to add atmospheric colour to the planets of this Space Opera.

It’s all very stylish, with the elegant Draconians contrasting with the more brutish Ogrons, but the story could have done with more substantial content to fill the six episodes. There is a clever misdirection early on when Jo queries the Doctor on the possibilty of another returning foe, and the reveal at the end is great.

Rating: 3/5

Carnival of Monsters

Vorg: Our purpose is to amuse, simply to amuse… Nothing serious, nothing political.

Story Code: C10.2.
Production Code: PPP.
Story Number: 66.
Countdown week: 22…

Robert Holmes “Doctor Who’s greatest ever scriptwriter” (as he is usually described, probably accurately) – after a couple of interesting Troughton stories, his four Pertwee stories are when Holmes really began to shine. In between the duo of stories that introduced the iconic Autons and the story that introduced the iconic Sontarans is this gem.

Occuring after the Earth-bound Third Doctor has been given free reign of the TARDIS by the Time Lords (all of space, past and future), it’s curious that it’s a Hartnell-era-esque “sideways” step.

With a flannelling older gent and a glam assistant (and Vorg and his assistant too) it precedes Moffat’s fascination with postmodern winks to Doctor-Who-as-telly, and does it as cleverly as any of those Nu-Who scripts.

As I said, a gem.

Rating: 5/5

Review

The Three Doctors

Third Doctor: Jo, it’s all quite simple – I am he and he is me!
Jo Grant: And we are all together, goo goo g’joob?
Second and Third Doctors: What?

Story Code: C10.1.
Production Code: RRR.
Story Number: 65.
Countdown week: 23…

Well, this story is all a lot of fun isn’t it?

It’s sad that Hartnell didn’t get more of a look in, but great that all three actors could be brought together onscreen. The villain of the piece was intriguing enough to become part of the Who mythos for years to come. The Gel Guards and the CSO are slightly wobbly, but perhaps add to the charm.

It started a tradition of “The x Doctors” (where x is a varying number) and it’s one of the best of this tradition (with Nu-Who’s Time Crash being of the same tradition even if it doesn’t share the title format.)

Rating: 4/5

The Waters of Mars airdate was revealed by Tennant on GMTV this morning, with a new preview clip from the story…

7pm, Sunday, 15 November 2009 – The Waters of Mars.

Barry Letts (Doctor Who’s producer from 1969 to 1974 and executive producer for Season 18) passed away earlier this month.

As the blog is about to start reviewing Season 10, part of his era as producer, tomorrow, it seems an appropriate time today to acknowledge the many contributions of his era to the mythos of the show: the Master, UNIT, the word “regeneration”, the starting of the tradition of more-than-one Doctor stories, and much more.

Review

The repeat of The Evil of the Daleks

The Doctor: I am not a student of human nature. I am a professor of a far wider academy of which human nature is merely a part.

Story Code: C5.8. (The original broadcast is C4.9.)
Production Code: n/a (The original broadcast is LL.)
Story Number: n/a (The original broadcast is number 36.)
Countdown week: 24…

Okay, so as discussed The Web of Fear made the top 25 of the 2009 DWM survey of 200 stories, as did two other mainly-junked Troughton stories – Power of the Daleks, and this story The Evil of the Daleks (which of those three ranked highest at number 18.)

When I say “this story”, that isn’t quite correct, as this review will be of the repeat of The Evil of the Daleks, the subtle and very very small difference being there is some narration over the opening scene of Episode 1 to reflect the cliffhanger of the previously broadcast story, The Wheel in Space.

This is The Keys of Marinus done right.

What I mean by that is, that story is a sequence of different mini-stories each in a different setting, and is not-quite-but-almost-awful, while this one can be viewed as a sequence of three mini-stories, and it’s utterly brilliant. 6 or 7 part DW stories can often be a slog, but this one zips along from the Swinging Sixties (Ep 1) to Victorian Gothic (Eps 2 to 5) and alien planet Skaro (Eps 6 and 7), encapsulating the whole DW philosophy of present, past and future adventures in one story.

Going back to the idea of this being a review of the repeat of The Evil of the Daleks, the main significance of this repeat is if it is watched straight after The Wheel in Space (which ends with Zoe watching this story). Victoria is a guest star in this Dalek story really, and only becomes a companion proper at the end, and Zoe watching the adventure on the TARDIS telly provides a strange sort of feedback loop to the season (if Zoe was to continue she would eventually reach her own initial story, the one after Victoria leaves.)

Talking of companions, this story is remarkable for the paces that the Doctor puts Jamie through, in a foreshadowing of the companion manipulations of the “Dark Doctor” of Seasons 25 and 26. Most of the time, the Doctor seems to be one step ahead of everyone in this story, including the viewer. At various points, it feels like a run-through of other eras-to-come, including the Victorian Gothic of early Tom Baker. The Daleks and their “Human Factor” is certainly an influence on a particular Dalek story of the Nu-Who era (which doesn’t have the simple elegance of the original idea here.)

Like many stories of this era, not much exists in the BBC Archives – the telesnaps, the audio soundtrack of course (like all DW stories thanks to fans audiotaping their tellies), which is available as a BBC Audio CD, and there is Episode 2 on the Lost in Time BBC DVD. For Episodes 1 and 3 and 4 there exists this fascinating fan-recon on YouTube which I enjoyed (and which I feel okay about linking to as it will hopefully inspire people to buy Lost in Time and the BBC Audio CD for the rest of the story.)

Rating: 5/5

Review

The Wheel in Space

The Doctor: Logic, my dear Zoe, merely enables one to be wrong with authority.

Story Code: C5.7.
Production Code: SS.
Story Number: 43.
Countdown week: 25…

The Cybermen always have crap plans, don’t they?

Well, not always, just most of the time, and not so much crap plans as bizarrely convoluted schemes – maybe they are actually brilliant plans but often the viewer has trouble piecing together what exactly is going on. I’m thinking of the time the Cybes hid in a space freighter while remote-controlling an explosive device that had been inexplicably buried alongside Dino-bones (Earthshock) and the time they built a Steampunk version of some Manga (The Next Doctor), and of course this very story The Wheel in Space.

Leaving aside the floating egg-pods and the intent to deplete, using nibbling Cybermats, the Wheel-station of a certain material (thus tempting the Wheel-crew to, oh I dunno), there is a certain style to the whole thing, with more groovy Future-Sixties outfits like The Ice Warriors (a few stories ago) featured.

In a really great Doctor Who season, this is quite a good story (though one plus is that a couple of the six episodes exist in the BBC Archives which is more than the season’s norm.) The spacewalk with meteors is an enjoyable spectacle even if it too doesn’t make sense, and another notable feature is new-recruit Zoe being treated to a repeat of a Dalek story on the TARDIS telly…

Rating: 3/5