Doctor Who: The Mind Robber

Serial Title: The Mind Robber

Series: 6

Episodes: 5

Doctor: Patrick Troughton

Companions: Jamie McCrimmon (Frazer Hines), Zoe Heriot (Wendy Padbury)

SPOILER WARNING: This serial is absolutely worth seeing unspoiled. If you have not seen it, go see it- it's on Netflix instant, for one- before reading. Seriously, you owe it to yourself to see this for yourself before you know what to expect. DO IT.

Synopsis:

As the volcano on Dulkis errupts, the TARDIS crew are forced to use the emergency escape switch to compensate for a breakdown in the ship, something that the Doctor is loathe to do. The escape switch deposits them somewhere outside of time and space, and as the Doctor works to repair the ship, the white void beyond the doors entices Jamie and Zoe in turn, calling them out into the white void, where strange robots and a surreal altered state await them.

The Doctor barely manages to get them back inside, and tries to return the ship to space-time... but it splits apart, shattering like a pane of glass, and the travelers are left to fall through a black void, clinging to the TARDIS console...

They land separately in a strange land of tall bluffs. The Doctor is forced to complete a series of riddles, the last one of which- a just-reunited Jamie’s face being erased- he fails, resulting in a complete change of the lad’s features. Eventually, the two locate Zoe, and then meet up with Gulliver. Of Gulliver’s Travels. Who only speaks in lines from the book. They are also chased by clockwork soldiers (New Series “Girl in the Fireplace” meets Babes in Toyland). They discover that the tall and oddly shaped bluffs that dot the landscape like a forest are actually letters and words, 20 feet tall- it’s as if they’re walking the pages of a 3-dimensional book.

A unicorn attacks from nowhere, but the Doctor is able to halt its fearsome charge with a firm belief that it isn’t real- at which point, it becomes unreal, just a cardboard cutout. He also manages to fix Jamie’s face when confronted with the same puzzle a second time.

The group enters a labyrinth, and Zoe and the Doctor encounter a Minotaur which they defeat as they did the unicorn, while Jamie, pursued by the soldiers, climbs a long, blonde rope that turns out to be the hair of Rapunzel. From inside the castle, he watches a ticker-tape/teletype device spell out a battle between the Doctor and the Medusa in which he lops off her head. The encounter does occur, but the Doctor, finding a sword suddenly by his side, uses a mirror to defeat Medusa as Perseus did. The teletype machine prints out a failure message.

The Doctor and Zoe escape the labyrinth and encounter the Karkus, a comic book character from the year 2000. The Doctor cannot defeat him in the same way that he did the unicorn and minotaur, because he is unfamiliar with the character and thus doesn’t have the same bedrock certainty that the Karkus isn’t actually real (though he does accidentally dispel Karkus’ anti-molecular ray disintegrator by instinctively commenting that such technology couldn’t exist). Zoe does know the character, and defeats him with Judo, earning his loyalty. The group ascend to the castle and meet up with Jamie, but are captured by the same white robots from the void before, which lead them to the Master (no relation to the Time Lord arch-nemesis of the Doctor), who reveals this to be the Land of Fiction, where fictional characters are real. The teletype machine records his writings- if he can write the actions a person is going to take (by successfully predicting them), then they are in essence acting out his fiction, making them characters whose actions he wrote- and converting them from thinking beings into fictional characters under his control. He then writes that Jamie and Zoe become trapped inside a giant book, and his robots force them to become so trapped, rendering them fiction.

The Master explains to the Doctor that an otherwordly intelligence that cannot take form in our reality run and inhabit this land, but they need a human quality- imagination- to keep it alive. The Master was once a human author from the 20^th century, abducted to serve as the hub of this fictional realm. But he is growing old, and the aliens need a replacement brain. They have chosen the Doctor.

The Doctor is hooked into the main computer, but turns the tables and the two have a duel of wits, summoning various fictional characters to do battle. The Doctor manages to use this distraction to cause Zoe and Jamie to be physically freed, in contradiction to what the Master wrote, thus freeing them mentally. They trick the white robots, who shoot up the place, destroying the machinery that runs the land. This releases the Master from the aliens' thrall (he is presumably returned to the time and place he was abducted from) and as they run through the black void that the Land of Fiction has become, the group finds themselves back on the TARDIS, in flight, as if nothing had ever happened.

Review:

Our 50^th Blog! Woo-hoo! And I can’t think of a more deserving serial- I didn’t plan it this way, but heck, talk about a special event!!! Holy Cow! This serial is made of awesome... and made of crazy! It starts with a bang where Dominators left off, giving us the amazing TARDIS-covered-in-lava, the dangerous emergency escape unit that takes the TARDIS out of space and time, the deadly white void (Zoe and Jamie are with the Prophets!) and then... the total mindscrew ending... and that’s all just within the first episode!

Indeed the first part of this story is incredibly David Lynch-ish; surreal and almost frightening, in a way- from Zoe and Jamie suddenly appearing in pure white outfits, zoned-out looks on their faces, waving the Doctor forward with two hands while Zoe screams eerily- though the onscreen Zoe never opens her mouth (trust me, it's twice as freaky as you’re picturing) to the awesome and rare model shot of the TARDIS exterior in flight suddenly shattering into panels (this whole shot being an effects bonanza at the time), leading to the surreal sight of Zoe and Jamie clinging to the console, falling through the void, as the Doctor himself spirals along through the void, falling into mist... truly surreal, disturbing and cool at the same time, and an ambitious and perfectly-achieved set of effects... wow. (And, errr... made a little more ‘wow’ by the very... errrr... fan-service way that Zoe is draped over the console in that scene. I’ll say no more on the subject. Just... yikes!) (Note from Sarah: I think it's funny how we've probably seen tons worse than that, but for some reason it being in Doctor Who and in the 60's makes it more shocking for some reason!)

Making this even more insane is the fact that this first episode was written as filler (to replace the stricken sixth episode of The Dominators)- the awesome robots were borrowed from another TV show, the episode takes place in a void to avoid having to build new sets, etc. It was designed to be as cheap as possible... and yet was the most mind-bending, surreal, creepy, and effective of all! (Seriously, it’s on DVD- GO SEE THIS SERIAL!!! This is the biggest Troughton must-see of all!) Presumably, in the original 4-episode script, the flipping of the escape switch led directly to the TARDIS bursting apart and the Doctor appearing in the forest of words (a very cool concept with an excellent design). Like The Space Museum, the first episode does feel somewhat stand-alone and separate from the plot of the remaining episodes... but happens to be the best, moodiest, most atmospheric, creepy-cool one of the lot! Due to this ‘stretching,’ the serials were also shorter (the last part being the shortest Who episode of all time at 18 minutes!), which helped the pacing to stay sharp.

As a quick aside not particular to this episode... were the TARDIS walls so expensive that it was impossible to build a set extension? In The Wheel In Space, the chest Zoe stowed away on was in front of a brick extension of the TARDIS wall, placed just beyond where the set ended. Likewise, the walls in many locations here for the first episode (admittedly justified by the episode’s nonexistent budget) are also in front of very cheap, paltry ‘roundel’-studded backgrounds that look nothing like the TARDIS walls. Is there something preventing them from just redressing the console room or shooting at alternate angles to use the background they already had? Why repeated cheap-outs on TARDIS walls? WHY?!?!

The remainder of the episodes are surreal but not nearly so bizarre as the first, if that makes any sense- random and odd like a children’s show is, not like a surrealist film... with a few notable exceptions; especially when Jamie is shot in the forehead by a redcoat and turns instantaneously into a cardboard cutout. This leads to one of the strangest covering-for-an-actor-absences in the entire series to date (though in this case, unlike Hartnell’s usual gratuitous and obvious vacation-allowances, this was due to a case of chicken pox)- when the cardboard cutout becomes faceless, the Doctor selects the wrong face pieces, and another actor plays Jamie for an episode. It is positively surreal to see another not-Jamie, with the same costume and same voice (he does a fantastic impression of the voice and mannerisms!) wandering around as Jamie for the episode (NFS: I thought that Jamie really did a voiceover?). Like many other things in this review, words can’t accurately describe the strangeness of this event- it’s jarring and unnerving, and is both so patently absurd, and so logical within the story itself, that it both calls attention to itself AND works- which it would not have done were it not for the incredibly strong performance of Hamish Wilson as Jamie. 

Aside from this, a brief and cute encounter with Rapunzel, and locating the control room, Jamie doesn’t have much to do in this story. Likewise, Zoe has little to do- save for a random inexplicable freakout that causes the guards to be alerted... and a surprising and rare hand-to-hand fight! This woman is shown to be quite capable of defending herself (far more than the Doctor!) using judo flips and the like- quite a departure from the female companion norm. She also dons a glittering silver catsuit that is at first laugh-out-loud hilarious, and then, clinging onto that console... well... errr... better. (NFS: Better? How do you mean that?) Still, brief moments aside, she and Jamie have most of their action in the first episode, being compelled to run out into the void (and generating one very amusing moment where Zoe breaks Jamie out of his Scottland-trance with a good old-fashioned slap to the face) and then being controlled into eerie siren-figures there. They spend the majority of the story’s remainder just following the Doctor meekly around- save for a nice comedic moment when Zoe deduces that the Doctor’s ignorance is responsible for Jamie’s altered face- which is fine; this is a puzzle and battle-of-wits story; those are always best when the Doctor is the focus. As the preceding paragraph indicates, both characters have plenty of great gags and individual moments, but not a real character focus or arc; that’s the Doctor’s province in this one, and it works well- filtering the audience through his reality, in which even his companions might not be real. It individualizes the experience by placing it through his eyes, and making those our eyes as well- the only way to really experience such a trippy and reality-questioning episode... personally.

This story is full of brilliant concepts, too- chief of which, the concept that if actions can be written from you, and you act in that way, you become fiction, because you are performing the actions of a fictional scenario. Thus, if the writer can predict your actions, he can take control of you. It reminds me of a conceptual cousin to the speak-before-you, speak-in-sync-with-you, speak-in-your-place creature from the New Who episode 'Midnight.'  

This story also incorporates a comic book character- a nice touch, not ignoring that aspect of fiction- and makes him from a comic strip in the future (which is also great- fiction from all of human history shouldn't be limited to solely what we know today). It’s a brilliant little idea, and a great gag, as the Doctor- able to dispel various threats from Medusa to a unicorn to a minotaur by simply being convicted that they aren’t real- flees in terror from a superhero comic he’s never read... because he isn’t familiar with the work, he DOESN’T know that it’s not real, at least not more than conceptually, and thus can’t thwart it! A similarly great moment at first seems to confuse 'statements aloud' with 'belief'- stopping the charging unicorn in its tracks by having Jamie and Zoe shout out loud that it wasn’t real... but then revealing that it was the Doctor’s belief in the creature's unreality that did it, and Jamie and Zoe’s frantic panic was beginning to give him doubts- so he had them shout their (not truly believed) disbelief in order to re-enforce his own skepticism. Brilliant AND hilarious!

Likewise, the Doctor and the Master’s duel of fictional characters was hilariously childish and brilliant at the same time- the same kind of game of imagination and one-upmanship that you can observe in the imaginary play of children everywhere. And come on... didn’t the Lancelot trump card make you want to cheer?

The story itself is not much to speak of- like its conceptual cousin, The Celestial Toymaker, it’s a ‘get to the end of the maze’ tale, more of a showcase for various encounters than a plot line- but it works well, and is entertaining. The ending is a bit abrupt, and the “button pushing/shoot the console” seems like an anticlimactic and overly simplistic solution to such a surreal and complex scenario... but the bookending and surreal run-through-a-black-void followed by the TARDIS flying back together again seems somehow an appropriate ending... with added coolness points for the next episode, Episode 1 of 'The Invasion,' being a lost episode rendered in 2D animation by the BBC, meaning we get the scene repeat in Disney-style animation. Way cool.

As far as the non-regulars for this serial... Gulliver was a fun cypher; mysterious at first, and then an impressive (for work on the part of the writers) and fun character that only speaks in lines from his book. (Has anyone ever fact-checked to ensure that all of these lines were truly taken from the text of Gulliver’s Travels?) Regardless, it’s a neat gag that works well, and his inability to see the robots, casually giving away the TARDIS crew’s positions in his ignorance, is chilling and spooky.

Rapunzel is a hoot, so passively accepting of her hair being used as a ladder, so used to it, that she doesn’t mind or care- always searching with doe-eyed innocence and hopefulness for a prince, and offering strangers the use of her hair. She’s a lot of fun to watch. Karkus, the Superhero, is an odd duck, looking more like a masked Luchador than anything- whether that’s supposed to be a costume, or a low-budget attempt to portray a man built like the Incredible Hulk, I can’t say- but though he’s a gag character, and a bit of a dues-ex-machina, he’s done as a tongue-in-cheek character, so he works. The Doctor gets another great gag or two in the battle with him- failing miserably in a Judo throw (clearly not yet a master of Venusian karate- perhaps the Time Lords gave him that skill to help him fend for himself during his Earth Exile later on?) and accidentally eliminating his weapon from existence simply by pointing out that the sci-fi gadget doesn’t make any scientific sense- unintentional weaponized skepticism, and an ironic commentary on Who’s typically ‘way out there’ science.

Medusa’s stop-motion effects are cool, if primitive- the budget of the show makes me wonder if this is stock footage from another show, or original footage. Regardless, Medusa is as tense, creepy, and effective a threat as any (unlike the minotaur, who falls flat, and the Unicorn, who is freaky, and works well as an adrenaline charge, but doesn’t have much innate menace)- truly feeling like a first-generation Weeping Angel... perhaps a ret-con to establish the Weeping Angels as breakouts from the realm of fiction would help to explain their almost-magical powers?

On a number of miscellaneous notes:

-Was that the Kaiju Barugon as the Minotaur?

-The Medusa scene with the eyes closed and a stony hand reaching out really felt like a prefiguring of New Who’s Blink. I dig the parallel.

-The slow reveal of the windup soldiers- boxed marching feet, strange lit hat- made them seem really cool- until you saw the whole thing. One of Fraiser Hines (Jamie)’s cousins was a mechanical soldier.

-The Doctor Who wiki points out that Blackbeard and Cyrano- and, in the Doctor Who universe, Medusa- were real people; perhaps they were converted into their fictional counterparts just the way that Zoe and Jamie were?

-The use of cardboard cutouts was interesting and unusual here. I feel like it didn’t QUITE work, and felt a little cheap; but it also sort of felt like it fit, too. (NFS: So in other words, your emotional side liked it but your intellectual side thought it was weird.)

-The bookcases in the final chapter, within the Master’s realm, are apparently quite obvious flat images. I am embarrassed to say I missed this, but my wife didn’t. (NFS: She's a smart cookie)

-An obvious solution that the Doctor missed as he was tied into the central brain with the robots advancing on him- “And then the Master triumphed!” It doesn’t touch on him, and leaves the Master with two choices- stop his Robots, or succeed- at the cost of rendering himself fiction and under the Doctor’s control anyway. Yes, a clever wordsmith could render an addendum to the triumph under which he could achieve his current goals and still not be considered a ‘triumph’- adding on a “...by taking over the universe” clause which would be proved false immediately despite capturing the Doctor, invalidating the initial ‘Master triumphed’ clause... but, to quote the glaringly obvious loophole left to bring back Ming the Merciless at the end of the final Flash Gordon serial (Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe) should they ever make another one (which they didn’t)- “There’s only one way out, and he’ll be too panicked to think of it!”- followed by a large boom.  (And yes, that was an entirely gratuitous and pointless aside thrown in on the very weak justification of it being black and white fiction in a similar vein to Karkus’ presumed space-adventurer-superhero status.)

Great moments:

The whole show is one big great moment- from the awesome lava burial to the freaky white-void sequence (and its frightening Stepford Jamie and Zoe) to the shocking TARDIS breakup and fall through the void to exciting menaces from the Medusa and Horse to the surrealist Jamie cardboard cutouts and replacement scenes to the hilarious Rupunzel and Karkus bits... The ending with the professor- when the mystery was no longer present and weird things weren’t happening as much- was about the only part of the serial that DOESN’T qualify as a great moment. Seriously, this one was jam backed from top to bottom with awesome. Artistic, exciting, funny, surreal, creepy, brilliant, imaginative... just plain incredible.

 

Rating:

Well, like the Dominators, there’ll be no reconstruction rating on this one, as it was all video. In fact, it’s the first we watched on official DVD- via Netflix- and though the quality wasn’t as high as we’d hoped (we were clearly spoiled by Tomb of the Cybermen’s crystal clarity), it was decent for all but the blown-out final episode, and a very refreshing change.

The stellar Mind Robber gets an unquestionable 5 out of 5 Bickering Dominators, and a place on my list of personal favorites alongside Keys of Marinus, Aztecs, Faceless Ones, Enemy of the World, Dalek Master Plan, Myth Makers, Celestial Toymaker, Time Meddler, and a number of others- a sterling Troughton work, full of spooky imagery, intriguing concepts, and very funny gags. (Note from Future Andrew: The first one I bought, and 18 seasons in, still my very favorite!) I can only hope the rest of the season continues on this well (though fan reputation says it doesn’t.) Only one way to find out...

Doctor Who: The Dominators

Serial Title: The Dominators

Series: 6

Episodes: 5

Doctor: Patrick Troughton

Companions: Jamie McCrimmon (Frazer Hines), Zoe Heriot (Wendy Padbury)

Synopsis:

Oh, heck. Knew we’d get to this one eventually. Have I already declared a Galaxy 4 for the Second Doctor? If not, this is it. Hang tight, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. The plus side for you, dear reader, is that a brief synopsis may not expose you to the true horrors of dullness on Dulkis, the planet of hippies. (Oh, and Troughton still has some great comic relief; unlike Galaxy 4, this serial at least has a few redeeming factors.)

On the aptly named world of Dulkis, a spacecraft belonging to the Dominators lands, and destroys a boring cruise ship full of uninteresting people, whose leader, Cully, survives. The fact that this was a ship of spoiled rich folk obscures the fact that we will soon discover: that this is an entire boring PLANET full of uninteresting people. The Dominators, Navigator Rago (The Leader) and Probationer Toba (The Upstart) arrive with their robotic servants, the Quarks (the would-be Dalek replacements now that Terry Nation took his ball to go play in America). SPOILER ALERT: They didn’t catch on.

The Doctor and co. land as well. The Doctor knows that Dulkis is peaceful (a polite silver-lining notation about the planet whose natives DO NOTHING EVER) and sets up for a nice holiday- before hearing the explosion of Cully’s craft. Investigating, they stumble upon an old war museum with functional weapons, the only remaining specimens on Dulkis. They meet Educator Balan and his students, Kando and Teel, all of whom are boring. They exposit that the island was a nuclear test site, and as soon as the enlightened Dulcians (Note from Sarah: Shouldn't it be the 'Dulkians'?:) set off the first nuclear bomb and saw its destruction they forswore all war forever (making this officially more of a fairy tale than the forthcoming serial featuring Rapunzel) and the island is irradiated (but they built a museum on it that no one could visit for some reason???) and the unshielded Doctor and co should be dying, but they’re not, because the Dominators vacuumed up all of the radiation for fuel (because radiation works like that). In fact, they only landed because they detected the radiation and thought the whole planet was like that. Idiots. (By which I mean the Dulcians. Because no matter what the Dominators may do stupidly, the Dulcians are simply dumber by default). This research station, built to monitor the radiation (that's the kind of place you’d take students, right? Into an irradiated outpost to monitor nuclear fallout? Okay, I’ve got to stop heckling or I’ll never make it past this paragraph...) detected the sudden loss of radiation, but dismissed it as an instrumentation failure. Idiots.

Cully stumbles in and warns everyone, and the Doctor and Jamie go to check things out, quickly captured aboard the Dominator ship. (Toba wants to kill them but Rago overrules him). They are believed to be average Dulcians, and tested for intelligence and suitability as slaves. The Doctor and Jamie imitate Dulcians (I.e. They act like not-particularly-bright children) and are dismissed as rubes- meanwhile, learning the Dominator plan. The Dominators plan to irradiate the mantle of the planet and then cause a massive volcanic eruption, irradiating the entire planet- at which time, they’ll carve it up for fuel for their fleet (in a plan clearly stolen by the Slitheen in the New Series). This is an innovative plan. It would also be doing the galaxy a favor, by committing genocide against every last member of the Dulcians. Unfortunately, the Doctor decides that he must intervene.

Cully and Zoe take a Flash-Gordon-Rocket back to the capital city to warn everyone, but fail to convince Director Senex (Cully's father) and the council of the danger. The council sits and debates and resolves like the plot of the Star Wars prequels- boringly and uselessly.

The Doctor and Jamie are led to the war museum, where the Doctor bluffs the Dominators into believing that there is a second class of intelligent Dulcian (Too obvious...) who created the weapons of war seen there, that lord over the less intelligent working class (of which he and Jamie are supposedly members). The Dominators buy into this (Toba wants to kill them but Rago overrules him). They set off to look for these intelligent Dulcians (Come on, there’s no subtlety to this joke...).

The Doctor and Jamie head for Useless Central to appear before the council as Zoe and Cully return to the survey station/museum, while the Dominators locate the teacher and student trio. Clearly going by Dominator standards only, they find these to be the mythical ‘Clever ones.’  They also spot Zoe and Cully. Toba wants to kill them, but Rago... isn’t here. The Quarks (SPOILER ALERT: They suck.) begin to raze the place, when... Rago arrives and overrides him. (Rago is obsessed with saving the Quarks' power, and Toba is obsessed with shooting anything that moves. If you handed the guy a mirror he would shoot himself after the first blink). Zoe and Cully are captured while digging themselves out of the rubble. (NFS: I thought the Quarks were rather darling.)

The idiot council will not listen to Jamie and the Doctor, and are quite relieved that the Dominators just want to drill in the planet’s crust. They give their tacit approval (not that they could do anything to stop the Dominators). These people WANT their genocide to happen, Doctor! Who are you to stand in their way? Please, reconsider- don’t interfere!

Zoe, Cully, plus the teacher/student trio are being tested as slaves (a role the Quarks used to fill and now must be replaced in as they are being turned into front-line soldiers instead), hauling rubble from the museum about. Jamie and the Doctor return as Cully sneaks into the museum and grabs the still-functioning laser gun (powered by Dues Ex Machina tablets, no doubt. At least it was Checkov’s Gun-ed twice), but totally wusses out of using it, depriving us of even one admirable Dulcian. Jamie finds his way in as the Doctor is captured, takes the gun, and blasts some Quarks. Toba giddily identifies a threat and overrides Rago’s override. The Quarks (SPOILER ALERT: I know the Daleks, and you sirs, are no Daleks! ...Well, the ones from Victory of the Daleks, maybe...) demolish what’s left of the building and we are ‘treated’ to WAY too much of skirt-wearing Cully as he and Jamie climb down the ladder to an emergency shelter beneath. (NFS: Wait...wait...Cully is wearing a skirt???)

The building is utterly and redundantly re-demolished. Because Toba wanted to kill them but Rago overruled him, and then Toba did it anyway, the two begin to bicker, each threatening to report the other to whatever unfortunate commander oversees this gaggle of slightly-less-idoits-than-the-Dulcians. The Doctor informs them about the council of idiots, and the Dominators invade.  (Toba wants to kill them but Rago tragically overrules him). They seize the council... while Jamie and Cully escape the shelter and begin destroying Quarks (SPOILER ALERT: It’s not hard because they’re wimps). The Dominators return. Toba wants to find the ones attacking them but Rago overrules him (wait, Toba is the SMART one?!?!) and tells them to focus on the drilling.

They drill and prepare to drop an atomic explosive into the mantle. The escaped Doctor and co. tunnel sideways from the underground shelter to intersect the tunnel, and the Doctor catches the radioactive ‘seed device’ as it falls past him (OFFSCREEN, bloody dang it!!! Cheap BBC!!!!) The four downward-pressing rocket engines intended to trigger the eruption are still in place, but without the atomic explosive, it will just cause a normal volcanic eruption.

The Doctor cannot defuse the atomic device, but does the next best thing- sneaking it into the Dominator ship on the back of a Quark. The Dominators lift off and leave to avoid the forthcoming explosion, unaware they’ll be its source, and explode in mid-air. The Dulcians are sadly left to live out their lives in peace, having survived. Ah, well, they can’t ALL be happy endings.

Review:

The Dominators, or Planet of the Dull Stupid Idiots, as I prefer to call it, continues the proud tradition of Galaxy 4 by opening the season with the weakest possible sci-fi story about plodding conquerors. The inhabitants of the aptly named Dulkis could be upstaged by dishwater, as they’re duller than it. They're half-speed half-wits who converse with the breakneck pacing of the Enterprise flying over the exterior of V’ger. They’re the geniuses who built and detonated an atomic bomb just to prove how dangerous building an atomic bomb would be, then promptly banned all nuclear research for peaceful purposes and built a museum to war on the irradiated island they had just rendered uninhabitable and unvisitable. Their assumptions are illogical (something is presented to you by someone, thus it is a fact and true, and there is no point in trying to ascertain why... they claim repeatedly that there is no curiosity on Dulkis, and yet there is common debate on the cause of a phenomenon or event... which doesn’t gel at all), their personalities bland beyond all reason, and their clothes... oh, their clothes...! 


The women at least have something semi-decent by 60s sci-fi standards, a goofy little leotard jumpsuit thing, at first. Then Zoe dresses native in a two-tone contrasting dress in which the waistline and the bustline are the same line, looking absurd. And the men... the men do not come anywhere close to having dignity in an apron/dress that may have been aiming for a toga but hits squarely in the center of ‘beefy man wearing his wife’s clothing because he’s a nut.’ (NFS: Oh...so Cully WAS wearing a skirt...see I thought you just mistyped and were talking about Jamie...)They are so cringe-worthy that description does not do them justice- hopefully upon posting, Sarah will have a picture to demonstrate the true depths to which this costuming falls. The worst irony? This serial had the working title during writing of “The Beautiful People.”

NO.

And then there are the mooks out to get them- the flying-saucer-traveling Dominators (I think the Xillians in Godzilla vs. Monster Zero and especially Godzilla: Final Wars stole their look)- a pair of dark-dressing, hoop shouldered idiots with their robotic ‘Quarks’- deadly servant/soldier robots. The Quarks are short, box-bodied, with spherical heads projecting cones in each direction- they have R2-D2 fold-out arms from the center of their chests (you know, like that blue plate he uses to open the escape pod hatch?) and a very unique voice (which veers close to Mechanoid/Cyberman territory in being indecipherable but stops just short)- their uniqueness is one of the only two good things about this miserable train wreck. (From what I’ve read, they were intended to be a replacement for the Daleks, since Terry Nation was still playing hardball in his “I want the Daleks for ME!!!” phase and it looked like they were gone from Doctor Who for good- see 'Wheel In Space' and 'Evil of the Daleks.' Regardless... new Daleks these ain’t.) Ironic, though, that the Dominators needed slaves so that they could free up the Quarks for warfare... the Quarks are rather inept warriors- more like remote-controlled guns- and they seemed to have no capacity or manipulators for performing manual labor or other slave duties. I’d think slaves trained as soldiers and issued Quark guns would be a far more effective arrangement than sending these slow-moving, poorly-reacting tin-pots to war. Same result for the episode, but a much greater tactical advantage- make your (smarter) slaves do the fighting, and leave the Quarks shoeless and self-replicating in the food-preparation units at home, where they belong! :-)

The Dominators themselves, though, are... just... irritating!!!! Thugs, conquerors, slavers, bullies... the usual, all fine and good. But they behave entirely irrationally- an insubordinate pyromaniac and a way-too-patient superior. This is an average episode in this serial.

(Three people approach)

Toba: Quark, destroy!

Rago: Why did you do that?

Toba: They may have been a threat!

Rago: They were no threat! Destroy nothing! We need slaves and must conserve power!

(A spaceship is spotted)

Toba: Quark, destroy!

Rago: Why did you do that? Destroy nothing! We must conserve power!

(They cross the rise and see a building)

Toba: Quark, destroy!!!

Rago: Why did you do that? Do not destroy anything- we MUST conserve power!

(Someone moves within the building)

Toba: Quark, destroy!

Rago: Dude! What did I JUST tell you?!

This goes on ridiculously far, over and over and over again to the point where the second Dominator feels like a particularly stubborn 2-year-old. Then, the natives fight back, destroying a Quark with laser weaponry...

Toba: Return fire!

Rago: What are you doing?!

Toba: We are under attack! We must defend ourselves!

Rago: I have had just about enough of you! I told you we needed to conserve power! Cease this defiance or I shall kill you!!!

(Another Quark is crushed by a boulder)

Toba: Quarks, defend me!

Rago: You fool! You try my patience- I told you to conserve power! Stop or you shall be doomed!!!

So, once a legitimate threat presents itself... one that warrants destroying... THEN the infinite patience of the superior for his repeatedly wasting-shots-on-nothing subordinate runs out, and he’s chewed out for defending against legitimate military attacks??? What the...?!?!?!?! How these guys ever conquered multiple galaxies (seriously, they need to lay off the galaxy-spanning empires here; they begin to strain credibility in their one-shot-ness.)

Meanwhile, Zoe is stripped of all interesting characteristics here- showing some braininess, but otherwise reduced instantly to a Dodo/Susan/Victoria clone with none of the potential shown in her previous appearance... it’s like all her emotional issues were just resolved between serials, and now she’s just one of the crew. A waste. (NFS: Heyy...I thought you LIKED Victoria. :-D (NFA: This is me from a year ago, when I was still annoyed by her behavior in The Abominable Snowmen!))

Her companion for the episode, Cully, the council-leader’s son, was at least interesting... but felt out of place, like a character from a British 90s comedy sketch inserted into a 60s sci-fi show. He didn’t ring true, and while he served as an avatar for audience exasperation with his plodding, moron, nitwit, pacifist, useless, imbecilic people... he didn’t feel all that real or likable either, despite being more useful. And his ladies’ skirt flashed us his hairy thighs WAY too many times- for someone wearing a dress more revealing than Jamie’s kilt, they had him climbing things WAY too often- we DIDN’T NEED TO SEE THAT, THANK YOU!!!! (NFS: Reading that bit about hairy thighs' may have just made me snort-laugh.)  (The actor, Arthur Cox, made a grand return into Doctor Who with the Matt Smith introduction “The Eleventh Hour,” where he portrayed the comatose man with a dog whose form Prisoner Zero appropriates.) (NFS: And now that you remember him from 11th Hour...you can watch The Dominators and take a gander at his hair thighs...you're welcome.)

The only breaths of fresh air in this miserable heap of nonsense are the Doctor and Jamie, the other of the only two good things in this serial. The Doctor’s 'playing dumb' bits, and Jamie’s gung-ho Rambo attitude are fun and refreshing- both have excellent roles in a decidedly UN-excellent story. Even the capsule-rewiring has some good moments, albeit silly ones. And the moment where Jamie takes out a Quark with his laser canon is a cheer-out-loud moment... for someone in the story doing something useful and actually TAKING ACTION for once, if nothing else. Oh, and the Sonic Screwdriver’s second use- this one establishing it as a multi-purpose device, and as an awesome cutting tool for concrete, verily rocks. In fact, Patrick Troughton requested a screening of this serial at his birthday party, shortly before his death in March of 1987. Some cruel jokes could be made about this choice relating to senility near the end of his life, but the truth is that even amongst a miserable excuse for a story, Troughton is quite good- childlike and innocent, dashing and heroic- I wouldn’t call it his best work ever, but of the surviving works, it is a good showcase for him.

This story represents the epitome of the Doctor Who cliché of the planet represented by quarries. There is, admittedly, some nice location work (all doubled for the Doctor, hearkening back to that good old ever-so-exciting first location work in Reign of Terror), but it also becomes a little bland after a while. Strange that it’s no longer so exciting as it once was...

In this serial, even the cliffhangers have problems. The second episode cliffhanger features an attack on the building that Zoe and the leader’s son are in, as debris cascades from the ceiling... except the shot holds long enough for you to clearly see them both standing there unharmed for a good ten seconds before it finally fades to black. And they end on a collapsing building that we saw the principles escape from in the VERY NEXT EPISODE. What were they thinking???? 


As with most elements of this episode... it’s clear that they weren’t. Likeiwse, idiotic elements and decisions abound- from the unable-to-shut-up councilor who was just begging for death (we weren’t sad to see him go), to the only council in the galaxy more ineffective and useless than the planet Krypton’s. Faced with invasion, they postulate that they have three options: Fight back, hide, or surrender. The assessment rendered within 10 seconds? We refuse to fight, we have nowhere to hide, and surrender could be painful. Thus, we can do nothing; no options exist. That is all the thought they give the matter, then sit around waiting for the Dominators to kick down their door. Idiots. 

Meanwhile, the Dominators cheat- they have a little tally-counter of lit Quark silhouettes (pretty cool actually) that goes out when each Quark is destroyed. Yet at the end, when only two or three should be left, more appear like magic- surrounding Jamie and Cully three on one side and three on another! They appear out of nowhere! Even at the drill-site at the end, two are ordered away by the Dominator and three are at his side when he orders the attack. And apparently, they could only afford to blow up one, because when one has been downed by a boulder and two walk over to investigate, then Jamie throws an explosive, the shot instantly cuts to the previous shot of another Quark being destroyed- on a completely different landscape and all by itself. Either the explosive was powerful enough to level the canyon they were standing in and vaporize the other two attending Quarks entirely (whilst still leaving debris from the wounded one that the explosion originated on), or they were just being plain cheap (NFS: There's another word for it...it's the word of they didn't have enough money and thought blowing up quarks wasn't exactly the best way to use what little they had. That word.). The cut was seamless, but once the explosion clears, everything has clearly changed. For shame, cheapos! It’s your season premiere! Live a little! Planet of the Giants was the biggest spend-fest ever, and it looked INCREDIBLE! Even The Smugglers had decent sets and extras! What is it with the Season-Openers that take place off of Earth (Galaxy 4 and this shlock-fest... though to be fair, Tomb of the Cybermen took place off of Earth too, and it was pretty good...) being SO blasted lousy??? Well, with the third Doctor’s forthcoming Earth exile and the UNIT years, we have to wait until The Ribos Operation, in Season 16, to find out if the trend continues! But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Even the climactic tunneling-and-catching-the-dropped-explosive, the thrilling finale... happens offscreen. ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? THEY COULDN’T AFFORD A ‘HOLE DUG IN THE GROUND’ SET?!?!?!?! Yeah, sure, some shots of the Doctor running are a bit exciting, and the Dominator’s final line is a good one, but... that’s it? (And you expect me to believe that tiny explosion would’ve irradiated the entire mantle???)

This, then, is our reward for the hump? Our first sight of video??? THIS?!?!?! What a disappointment. This is Galaxy 4 II. It joins the ranks of the Sensorites, Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve (except for that end scene), and Galaxy 4 as the lowest of the low, and certainly the worst of Troughton’s repertoire. And with a season of Troughton left to go, I’m calling it as his worst here and now- I don’t see it getting any worse than this. It’s not physically possible. Indeed, this serial was reduced from 6 parts to 5 out of concern that the content wouldn’t hold up for 6. Considering some of the long, meandering 6-parters that have been given full runs in the past, this is saying something- to quote Jonathan Winters' character from ‘It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,’ it’s “...like it was extra special stupid, or something.” It’s a complete tragedy that until the relatively recent discovery of Tomb of the Cybermen, this was the first completely intact Troughton serial in existence, and thus many people’s introduction to his era.

Poor people.

Great moments:

The Doctor playing dumb in his testing. The sniper shot and exploding Quark. And yeah, the death of the Dominators, shouting “Obey!” See? Even the most wretched of serials are not bereft of great moments (well, okay, except for Galaxy 4)- that’s why we love this show!

Rating:

Between the Dulkis Dullards and the absurd costumes, this piece of garbage rates 0 out of 5 Bickering Dominators (what, did you think I’d go with Quarks?). That’s right! 0! Nothing! Nada! Zip! Worthless and bereft of any value! YOU LOSE!!! GOOD DAY, SIR!!!!

Series 5 Overview

Opening with a bang via Tomb of the Cybermen, this season is quite possibly the worst of the worst when it comes to episodes lost, existing almost entirely in fragmentary form. The ending ‘hump’ is nearly impossible to muscle through even for the most dedicated and fanatical of reviewers... which I am... and it’s hard to review the merits and pitfalls of the season divorced from that- an overview of the season as it would have aired originally requires a level of objectivity and forgetfulness that I simply can’t muster- so I may be unfairly hard on this series simply due to its ravaging in the archives and incomplete status.

That said, this is a strong series in who history, introducing icons such as the Yeti and the Ice Warriors, giving the Cybermen their rise to prominence as main adversaries to replace the Daleks, giving us the first direct sequel, immortalizing the tradition of female companions being screamers... Jamie is along for the entire season, continuing his marathon run, and Victoria for most of it. And while stories trend towards the exact same plot repeatedly (a remote base of humans besieged by alien invaders), it also contained some great and unique things- Enemy of the World’s dual role and unique villain, the Yeti and their unfathomable master, the creepy horror of Fury From The Deep... overall, it was both a good year for the Doctor, and the cementing of a cliché that stuck around far too long.

Of 40 individual episodes, 21 are missing- just over half, though it feels like far more. This will hardly go down in legend as the best series of Doctor Who... but it had its moments, and would have held its own, I think, had more of it survived.

For this season, the 2nd Doctor's catchphrase was more or less a slightly panicked "Oh, no!" The Doctor was a bit panicky-seeming at times because he kept ending up in situations out of his league, with circumstances out of control... or he attempted to fix things, but didn't get it quite right and made things worse. He was funny and fallible, not the perfect god-like Titan of the new series, a legend built unto himself, but one man trying to make a difference and sometimes bungling it. Just like last series, this encapsulates the character of the Second Doctor, and why we love him, perfectly.

Doctor Who: The Wheel in Space

Serial Title: The Wheel in Space


Series: 5
Episodes: 6
Doctor: Patrick Troughton
Companions: Jamie McCrimmon (Frazer Hines), Zoe Heriot (Wendy Padbury)


Synopsis:


The TARDIS is perhaps as despondent as Jamie at the departure of Victoria, and those cursed fluid links (for reals this time, not just an excuse to go and explore Skarro) overheat, boiling poisonous mercury fumes into the air. The Doctor and Jamie are forced to evacuate, yanking the crucial Time Vector Generator on their way out- reducing the TARDIS' ability to access the alternate dimension that is its interior, and rendering it on the inside what it is on the outside- an ordinary police box. Wow! Talk about your slam-bang opening!


Searching for replacement mercury, the Doctor and Jamie explore the seemingly abandoned spaceship, The Silver Carrier, that they’ve materialized in- but the Doctor soon gets into a battle with an inexplicably hostile (no, there’s honestly never any explanation given) porter robot, and in defeating it, is also knocked out cold. Jamie discovers nothing but a strange pair of large white spheres before rushing back to the unconscious Doctor’s side.

Meanwhile, on the Wheel, a human space station out on the frontier used as the spatial equivalent of an airport Traffic Control Tower, the derelict ship is detected. Like the unusually high number of meteor bombardments of late, it’s bound directly for the Wheel. Jarvis Bennet, the commander, prepares to blast it out of existence with the primary laser to prevent a deadly collision rather than risking a rendezvous to bring the potentially erratic unmanned ship under control. He is also distracted by sudden, strange drops in pressure in compartments around the outer hull that just as suddenly repair themselves.


At the last moment, Jamie uses the Time Vector Generator to signal the Wheel like a beacon, and the destruction of the ship is averted... but perhaps it shouldn't have been, as the two large white pods that Jamie discovered earlier open shortly after the rescue party departs, revealing... a pair of Cybermen! Hey, they cheated again! This isn’t called 'Wheel of the Cybermen,' or even the slightly clunkier 'Wheel in Space of the Cybermen!' This would’ve been a great Moonbase-esque surprise... if the Fury from the Deep copy we viewed hadn’t had a vintage “Next Week” spoiler-filled trailer attached to the end. Ah, well. Speaking of being extremely similar to the Moonbase, let’s get back to the plot...

On the station, the unconscious Doctor is taken to sick bay, and Jamie meets Zoe Herriot, the para-psychology librarian (I’ve heard of specialized fields of work, but that’s ridiculous! Has psychology grown large enough in the vague “Near Future” [What, AGAIN?!??! Dates, give me DATES, TIME TRAVEL SHOW!!!!] 21st century that it requires its own library?) as well as her boss, Doctor Gemma Corwyn. Bennet is suspicious of the new arrivals, believing them to be potential saboteurs. He probably also refuses to shut off the gas-flow, but we are not shown this on-screen.

Unfortunately, Jamie confirms his suspicions by BECOMING a saboteur, sabotaging the main laser just before it can destroy the derelict Silver Carrier, not having time to explain about the TARDIS. The Doctor awakens into an arrest, and is none too pleased- but the Wheel staff have already moved on to deal with another incoming meteor shower, this time having no functional laser to repel it. And they’ll have even less laser once the Cybermats (who tunneled through the hull and resealed it behind them, accounting for the mysterious pressure drops earlier) finish consuming the backup bernalium rods that power it. Once that is complete, the only other source of Bernalium in the area will be the Silver Carrier, brought onto the Wheel like a Trojan horse (Wheelian-horse?)- yes, the entire ongoing meteor crisis has been engineered by the Cybermen to force the Wheel to take aboard the seemingly abandoned spaceship and facilitate their conquest, which they will then use as a stepping-stone to invade Earth.

Crewmen start to die from Cybermat attacks, but Bennet (who is mentally deteriorating from the stress) refuses to acknowledge the danger or believe in the existence of the creatures, or, presumably, to shut off the gas-flow. (Seriously, the guy is a carbon-copy of Robson.) Anyhow- two crew members are dispatched to the Silver Carrier for Bernalium, and quickly fall under Cyber-hypnosis. They sabotage Wheel communications, and bring over a series of crates, containing “Bernalium,” the quotation marks being my clever little way of implying what you’d already guessed (so why am I drawing this out so long?)- they contain Cybermen instead.


The Doctor and Co. manage to destroy the Cybermats with a sonic wave, but the Cybermen are unhindered, repairing the laser (to destroy their own incoming meteorites, as they want to keep the station intact now that they’ve taken it) and preparing to guide in an invasion fleet. Jamie and Zoe spacewalk over to the Silver Carrier to retrieve the Time Vector Generator, while the Cybermen pick off the Wheel crew one by one, including Gemma. Bennet dies in a blaze of ineffective glory, and the Cybermen seem to have won- until the Doctor uses the Time Vector Generator to increase the power of the main laser and blasts the Cyber-invasion ship to atoms with it, ending the invasion threat. The incoming Cyberman platoon is blown out into space, and the few remaining Cybermen are destroyed.


In the aftermath, the Doctor and Jamie return to the TARDIS with the needed mercury, and leave- with a stowaway aboard. Librarian Zoe wants to expand her horizons. While the Doctor is glad to have another companion aboard, he first seeks to warn her of the potential dangers, by way of a re-run of Evil of the Daleks. Zoe, undeterred, wishes to stay.


Review:

The Wheel In Space is an odd duck. It's forgettable yet brilliant. Cliched yet compelling. It's a study in contradictions, divided right down the middle.


The opening is brilliant. The fluid link is an excellent callback to "The Daleks." The folding-in TARDIS. The disabled ship with a killer robot servant (prefiguring Girl In The Fireplace quite nicely). The Doctor and Jamie trapped aboard a ship about to be destroyed as a derelict. The Doctor unconscious and Jamie having to make a rash decision to protect the TARDIS. Fantastic stuff! And then...


It becomes 'The Moonbase' again. Cliched Cybermen-taking-over-a-distant-outpost, complete with a visually stunning (some truly awesome looking special effects) Cybermen-army-walking-in-a-hostile-environment shots before they are repulsed away into space at the end. Plus, an overly cliched paranoid commander. While he's not another 'Gaston/Zentos/Tor' (that role's reserved for upstart second-in-commands), he's a character that's become the epitome of 'stock character' on Doctor Who- last seen in THE VERY PRECEEDING SERIAL, Fury from the Deep. He's Robson, with shades of Bragen (Power of the Daleks) Leader Clent (Ice Warriors), and even a tinge of Moonbase and Macra Terror's commanders, as well. The unreasonable, paranoid commander is becoming overdone quickly enough, but to use him two serials in a row, in a plot derivative of the last major Cybermen story? That this tale was a quickly-drafted replacement (for an intended Cyberman/Dalek war, the likes of which we wouldn't see until the New Series' "Doomsday," kiboshed by Terry Nation's ongoing Daleks-pouting) is rather obvious... and yet the first half is so GOOD- tense and exciting and engaging! It's hard to judge this one. Let's look at the particulars...

Like...who is this guy? Exactly.

The characters, I found to be largely forgettable. The commander is an incompetent paranoid, the counselor/second-in-command a competent and likable character who sacrifices herself, the rest of the bridge crew forgettable, and the remainder of the Wheel staff idiotic.


It’s the Cybermen who thrive here- from creepy visual moments (ranging from their emergence to their repulsion into space), to a great showdown with the Doctor (and its cheer-out-loud conclusion)... the Cyber-controller has a cool, creepy look despite having that “Bzzta grffa nzzt dzzt tzzt” indecipherably buzzy Cyberman voice from previous series- thankfully, the walkabout models have a voice more similar to the Daleks than anything... while the Tenth Planet original Cybermen voice is still missed, this one is still a vast improvement, rendering the Cybermen largely comprehensible.

This is also the introduction of Zoe... she seems to have inherited the mannerisms of Dodo (and somewhat of Susan as well), as they behave remarkably similarly- the character hook of a cold computer, a walking database of facts who want to come into contact with her human emotions (an arc exploited to great success with Commander Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation, among others), is an interesting one- I look forward to seeing how it plays out. However, like the Vulcans from the series Enterprise, various android foes, and even the Cybermen themselves, Zoe shows a lot of emotion from a supposed 'cold computer'- curiosity, arrogance, impatience, smugness, etc.- that the analysis of her as an unfeeling computer seems artificial and arbitrary. As with most sci-fi shows, emotion is associated with positive emotions- happiness, cheerfulness, etc.- and social behavior, rather than actual emotion; if you don’t behave with happiness or interact socially without stiffness, sci-fi will label you “emotionless” as a stand-in for “Not showcasing the emotions that I prefer people to display around me.” Anyhow... as I said, I look forward to seeing her development as a companion.

(Note from Andrew, 3 months later: In retrospect, I see I was wrong about Zoe’s character. She was poorly described as 'all brains, no emotion' in this serial, which set up my expectations incorrectly. Instead, the character of Zoe is, as I understand it, all brains but no maturity. Like a child, she is very impulse-driven and naive, simply doing what she wants to do or thinks would be fun without considering the consequences- very intelligent, but lacking in ‘real world smarts’ to a degree that puts her on the same level as an 8-year-old. Based on this, her portrayal past this initial source is good, and fairly consistent- even amusing- giving the Doctor a very parental role even more so than the witty-and-canny-but-ignorant-of-technology-and-alien-societies Jamie. However, I did not come to understand this for another 3 or 4 serials... so you will see my mounting frustration and annoyance with Zoe’s portrayal failing to live up to the premise- "intelligent but unemotional, wanting to become more human despite being initially robot-like" as I understood it in this serial... only in retrospect and hindsight, as of ‘The Krotons,’ do I finally come to understand her character. Thus, if you watch these serials with this understanding, you will likely find her far less frustrating than I describe in subsequent blogs.)

Jamie is good in this serial- very human, if a bit technologically inconsistent in his understanding (sometimes knowing more than he should, other times being completely ignorant). He’s placed into difficult situations, forced to improvise, and makes some rash and foolish choices, but only out of good will. He also gives the Doctor his John Smith pseudonym for the first time, though it doesn’t have the origin you’d suspect it would... regardless, Jamie is at his most human and most 'real' to date in this serial- flawed, but trying hard to do the right thing, and very likable.


The Doctor... well, save for an awesome showdown with the Cybermen, and what may or may not be an excellent fight with a hostile service droid (curse you, lost episodes!!!), he doesn’t have all that much to do. There’s also an Hartnel-style actor-takes-a-vacation disability for the Doctor in this one- if only they could be a bit less obvious.


Cybermats are back- goofy looking, but deadly effective nonetheless... perhaps more fearsome to the characters than to us, but pretty effective where they’re used. Is this their swan song? I hope so... (Note from Andrew, one year later: Actually, now a-days, I have quite a fondness for the little buggers, and cheered their re-introduction in the New Series' "Closing Time." However, this is their swan song for about 7 years. And I really must stop crossing my own time-stream in this blog...!)

The space walk scenes are pretty cool- sure, they’re clearly hanging from wires in gravity... but hey, they’re trying. The Cyber-beams continue to have tracking issues as they move from forehead to forehead, but also look cool. The smoke used to give atmosphere to the space scenes is pretty cool, lending the effects shots a class beyond their means. The only real effects failure... save for the truly bizarre, seizure-inducing repulsion at the end (which itself follows the so-eerie-and-cool-we’ll-ignore-that-it’s-ridiculous Moonbase-ripoff spacewalking scene) is the meteors... described as 'meteorites of all shapes and sizes', they are all spherical, of roughly the same size, spin rapidly, and move uniformly. Uhhh... oops.


Effects failures and character issues aside, this story is a cause for celebration- it’s the end of ‘The Hump’ and the final episode of Series 5- Series 6 begins a nice, straight stretch of pure, beautifully varied, gloriously mobile VIDEO episodes... if you discount the Invasion’s missing parts (due to the official animated reconstructions), then only one serial with missing episodes remains from here on out. The sense of accomplishment and euphoric relief, having conquered this hump and emerging into episode 6 of this serial, the first of a new video dynasty, after the seemingly-eternal reign of the reconstructions, cannot be overstated, or even adequately conveyed, to anyone that hasn’t experienced it for themselves... my friends, we have conquered the mountains, and the valley lies before us at last! Hurrah!!! After nearly 10 straight hours of still images, we have Troughton in motion before us!

The reconstruction, meanwhile (episodes 3 and 6 survive... I’d rather have had 1 and 6- from the TARDIS collapse to the robot battle, an intact Episode 1 would have been SO awesome) was decent- we went with a youtube fan version (having come to distrust the mishmash our Hard Drive collection offered us completely by now) that had relatively sharp photos and a few video bits (Troughton stories are great for this- between repeated FX shots, and lipless villains like Cybermen, the Great-Intelligence-behind-a-curtain, etc., there is a lot of footage that can be played over existing audio and look like it belongs there... and this one went the extra step and mirrored a Cyberman-conversing-with-hypnotised-victim shot, making it still look different from the repeat when the shot was re-seen in the Episode 6 video, a nice above-and-beyond-the-call-of-duty touch that, as an editor, I greatly appreciated), and most significantly, narration by the actress who played Zoe. We’ve found that we prefer the narration versions to captions by a long shot, and this one didn’t disappoint- maybe not as stunning as some of the Loose Canon works of the past, but nonetheless, as a note to go out on, it was one of the better Troughton reconstructions we’ve seen.

Jamie, CLEARLY wearing Luke Skywalker's
flight suit from the Empire Strikes Back

So, while the cliched and frustrating stock second half does much to tarnish the good impression left by the originality and suspense of the first half, I’d say that the character of Zoe- with myriad possibilities to be explored- and incredibly strong showing for Jamie, and some cool, atmospheric and stylish visuals tip the balance to positive on this one in the end despite a weaker showing for the Doctor... and most other characters as well. It wasn’t the best of the best, but it was cool and slick, and I liked it. (That’s what she... never mind.)

Great moments:
The whole first chapter- the TARDIS folding in on itself, the trapped-ship drama, etc. - plus the Cybermen spacewalking at the end, and the spacesuit bit.


Rating:

Like who is this guy even....??? Exactly.

Overall Rating for this story is 3.5 out of 5 Elec- no, make that Instant Plasitc-Encased Cybermats – this story had more positive points vs. negative than nearly any I can remember- Weak Doctor vs. Strong Jamie, intriguing Zoe vs. annoying commander, clichéd story end vs. unique story beginning, forgettable characters vs. cool atmospheric visuals... it was a real back-and-forth with SO MANY good elements, and so many bad... in the end, it ends up on the positive side of the scale.


The reconstruction gets 5 out of 5 Instant Plastic-Encased Cybermats for the little touches- like that mirrored shot- that were clearly put in to keep it fresh. As a ‘final’ (save for one more late in the season), it was a refreshing labor of love. And unlike the more technically ambitious Web of Fear reconstruction referenced recently, it’s smooth and polished, emphasizing the story instead of distracting from it- making its simpler approach far more effective, despite a lack of digital manipulation or compositing flair.