Delta and the Bannermen

Actually, I may have gone a step too far.

For this story, I am grateful to have seen the 1950's episode of The Supersizers. Holiday camps are things that generally unknown to Americans and having the basic outline of how they developed known helps a bit in establishing the setting. One thing that I specifically watched out for was to see if Burton was a former military man and it turned out that he is so score one there. As for the story itself, I've been pleasantly surprised as I'm now halfway through the dreaded Season 24 and it hasn't been the slog or dreck that fan wisdom suggested that it would be.

Plot Summary
A woman named Delta is under attack along with her soldiers. She is the queen of a race known as the Chimeron and her people are being massacred by a man named Gavrok and his soldiers, the Bannermen. Her men are cut down but she manages to flee aboard one of the Bannermen's ships. She is pursued to a space port on a nearby planet. At this spaceport, the Doctor and Mel have arrived and won a trip to 1959 Disneyland with a group of alien tourists. Mel rides the bus but the Doctor opts to follow behind in the TARDIS. Delta lands her ship and gets aboard the bus just before it takes off.

On Earth, two American agents are traveling in Wales and have been instructed to observe a satellite in orbit. This same satellite accidently collides with the touring bus as it approaches Earth. The Doctor manages to save the bus from crashing using the TARDIS but is forced to land just outside a holiday camp called Shangri-La in south Wales. The Doctor and the driver Murray begin to repair the bus but the power crystal will need to be regrown for a day before they can leave. The group then registers to stay the night at the holiday camp, where they are warmly received by the camp director, Major Burton.

Delta is roomed with Mel but she is cold and paranoid towards her. She closely guards a crystalline orb brought along from the battle. She does begin to soften when she attracts the attention of Billy, the young maintenance man of the camp. The Doctor also makes friends with Ray, a young woman very taken with Billy, but whose affections are not reciprocated.

The group attends a welcoming dance where Billy makes his affections for Delta known. Ray is upset by this and runs off. The Doctor goes after her and offers some comfort as she cries in the laundry. They are interrupted by a bounty hunter sneaking in and signaling Gavrok of Delta's location. The Doctor accidently gives away that they are listening and the bounty hunter prepares to kill them both. Gavrok however, once he has locked on to the bounty hunter's location, sends an ionizing pulse that kills the bounty hunter, saving him paying the reward money. Both the Doctor and Ray are knocked out by the blast.

Delta and Mel head back to their room where the crystalline orb hatches, producing a green infant. Billy, attracted by the noise of Mel's shock, enters and Delta explains to both of them that she is queen and the last survivor of her people. Billy takes it in stride while Mel falls asleep. Billy offers to take Delta and the baby out for a ride away and she agrees.

The Doctor and Ray come to and realize that though the bounty hunter is dead, the Bannermen will be arriving shortly. The Doctor wakes Mel and has her warn Murray. Murray begins to assemble all the offworlders to reboard the bus. The Doctor and Ray go to Major Burton and explain to him that he needs to evacuate the camp. Burton scoffs but becomes convinced when the Doctor allows him to enter the TARDIS. He then arranges for all his staff to leave on a separate bus, although he stays behind to watch the camp.

Worried at Delta's disappearance, the Doctor and Ray take her scooter around the countryside looking for Delta and Billy. While they are gone, the staff evacuates and Murray replaces the power crystal in the space bus. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Ray find Billy and Delta and warn them of the Bannermen's approach. The group immediately heads back to the camp.

The Bannerman warship lands and the group take the two American agents prisoner, leaving two soldiers to guard them. They approach the camp and destroy the space bus as it begins to take off. Mel is the only survivor as she opted to stay behind and travel with the Doctor in the TARDIS. Mel tries to claim that Delta was killed but Gavrok sees the approaching bikes and orders his men to fire on them. The party flees and Gavrok is about to kill Mel when Burton intervenes suggesting she be used as hostage. Gavrok orders Burton and Mel tied up to be used as bait.

Delta detects the call of bees who summon her to safety. They head to a local beekeeper who offers them shelter. The Doctor turns around and heads back under a flag of truce. He offers Gavrok a chance to surrender and face justice but Gavrok laughs him off. The Doctor unties Mel and Burton but the Bannermen turn their weapons on the Doctor. However, Gavrok elects to let the Doctor, Mel and Burton go and instead fires a flare into the air. The flare signals the two soldiers guarding the Americans. They bind the Americans and move to the road where they fire a tracking dart into the motorcycle. Aware of the tracking dart, the Doctor ducks into a local field and attaches the tracker to a goat.

While the guards are away, Ray manages to free the Americans and takes them back to the bee farm. The Doctor also takes his charges back there once free of the tracker. They are pursued by the two guards, but the princess, having progressed to the next stage in her growth, sees them and sends out a warning cry. The cry inflicts pain on the Bannermen so they begin to retreat, although Delta manages to gun one down as they flee.

Before leaving the camp, Gavrok sets up a booby trap around the TARDIS. The Bannermen follow the tracker to the field where Gavrok is less than pleased to find he has been tricked. The surviving soldier returns and informs Gavrok of their location and they head to the farm.

Aware of the impending attack, the Doctor sets up a trap and then has the entire party head back to the holiday camp. While setting up the trap, Billy steals some of the princess’s food and begins to drink it himself, to transform himself into a Chimeron.

Gavrok and his men attack, but find the farm deserted. They follow a trail left by the Doctor into the barn where old jars of honey drop on them. The honey attracts the local bees who attack the Bannermen, driving them further from the farmhouse.

Back at the camp, the Doctor spies the booby trapped TARDIS and elects to set up another trap for the Bannermen. He rigs the camp loudspeaker to amplify a signal and works with Billy to set up an additional speaker on the roof.

When the Bannermen attack, he gives a signal and Delta instructs the princess to give her warning cry. The cry is amplified all over the camp causing the Bannermen to collapse in pain. Gavrok collapses backwards into the range of the TARDIS booby trap and is killed by his own device. Ray and the two Americans come out of hiding and tie up the stunned Bannermen. They are then loaded onto their own ship for transport back for trial.

Delta, the princess and Billy, now partially transformed into a Chimeron, board the ship and leave for their new home. Billy leaves his motorcycle with Ray and the Doctor hands over the fallen satellite to the two Americans. With the booby trap discharged by Gavrok, Mel and the Doctor leave in the TARDIS just as another group of tourists arrive.

Analysis

I think the best way to describe this story would be fun silliness. The story is completely off the wall and the alien costuming is bizarre but it is entertaining and the characters are mostly fairly enjoyable. Still, that does not excuse some bizarre choices and some downright painful acting.

The Doctor is good in this story and has a nice balance of comedy and figuring out what is going on. He doesn't have the all-knowing presence that he does in later stories but with only three episodes to play with, he doesn't do much bumbling about. His give away with the bounty hunter at the end of Episode One is probably the worst he gets of it. After that, it's a good bit of run around. The closest he gets with the run around is his direct confrontation with Gavrok at the end of Episode Two. It's probably closer to a poker read in that he is gambling that Gavrok sees the value in leaving him alive rather than just killing him outright and that does pay off. It's actually amusing to a degree given that Gavrok is painted so one-note that a key plot point revolves around him acting with a level of intelligence so far not yet seen.

Mel got a bit of short shrift in this story. Aside from making acquaintances with Delta, she does nearly nothing in this story. She is a by-stander and hostage through most of it much like Major Burton. But Burton has bravado and he also stands up to Gavrok, suggesting that they are more valuable alive while Mel just sits there and spits at him.

The real companion work is done by Ray who is very enjoyable as a character. Having read about this story ahead of time, I was expecting a harder edge to her and was quite surprised as her softness. I also found that I greatly enjoyed her accent, but that's just personal preference. But she was spunky and resourceful, two things that Mel was not, although Mel did retain her fairly positive tone throughout. But it just felt like Ray was much more reliable. This is somewhat understandable as the decision had been made to get rid of Mel and Ray was one of the two options. The production team ended up going with Ace (see next story: Dragonfire) but I think the volume of Ray in this story is directly tied to the potential of her being the next companion. I don't know how they would have written out Mel though if Ray had been the next companion. Perhaps she would have stayed behind to help Major Burton run the camp.

I must speak well of the use of location in this story. The cinematography is quite 80's but I like the use of an actual holiday camp and outdoor shooting as it gave the story a much more expansive look. They also went minimalist on the effects shots for the space ships and the guns but in neither case would I call that a bad thing. The mind filled in the gaps quite well and it reduced the cheap effect look that this story could have had if there were more attempted.

If there is one thing I have trouble with regarding effects and costuming it is the design of the Chimeron people. In the initial battle, Delta stands out as human looking while she is surrounded by what look like green army men. This continuing of the green, reptilian man form is continued throughout to Delta's daughter and Billy once he begins to transform but even there it is inconsistent. In the baby stage it is painfully obvious that it is just a baby with it's face smudged green in a green dinosaur suit. Later, as her daughter grows, the costuming gets a bit better as she magically assumes a white smock dress, but her face waffles between being painted green or not. I understand that they wanted to ensure the alienness, especially as the Bannermen are not particularly alien looking, but this was an odd choice as it was a lot of work and young children are not going to cooperate much when it comes to makeup application. Something a little simpler would probably have been better, especially it would have made the child more consistent with Delta, who has almost no alien characteristics at all.

I am hit or miss with the Bannermen themselves. Gavrok wasn't bad but he is very one-note evil. I did enjoy the fact that they don't bother with a backstory. Gavrok and the Bannermen are there to destroy the Chimerons and that is it. No tempering of explanation. Just bad guys committing genocide. I also enjoyed the fact that the Bannermen were somewhat competent soldiers, although once on Earth they seemed to develop Stormtrooper aim. All that being said, it was a little disappointing that they were defeated so easily. Gavrok more or less does the Disney villain death, being taken out by his own trap and the rest of the Bannermen just falling to pieces once their leader was dead. It makes their defeat a bit unsatisfying.

There were some significant sour notes when it came to the acting. Delta is a bit stiff throughout the story. It works well enough in the first couple of episodes where she is on her guard, but when she is interacting with Billy, she keeps that same stiffness and it becomes just a bad portrayal. Billy himself is also pretty bad. He falls for Delta more or less because the script tells him to and he goes further and further to the extreme in his devotion to her while maintaining a performance that is as bland and stiff as a board. He and Delta have zero chemistry and the fortunately few scenes they have together are just dreck.

But, the worst aspect for me was the two Americans. Their accents were so broad and over the top that it was painful to listen to. The commander’s accent from Tomb of the Cybermen was better than that. Worse was the fact that they actually were Americans. They must have had some awful advice from the director. As if their accents weren’t bad enough, Weismuller was dressed like Yogi Berra during his managerial days as if to emphasize further that he was American. I have the impression that these two were supposed to be a bumbling comedy duo, but their shtick was so broad and over the top that I found zero humor in anything they did and it was all I could do not to cringe in pain.

One bit of positivity, I rather enjoyed the music for this story. Keff McCulloch gets slagged for his musical choices in other stories and probably rightly so. But I rather enjoyed the feel of it in this story and didn't even mind that it was dialed up to eleven in a few places, especially the chase scenes.

If you keep in mind that this is a romp-y bit of fun, this story can be enjoyed. I can and did enjoy it for the most part. But the bad acting is hard to ignore and the quick ending for the Bannermen give the story a bit of an anti-climatic feel. The somewhat heavy handed nature comparing Delta and the Chimerons to bees is also a bit of a drawback, but I understand that kids might not have picked up on anything quite the subtle. Still, it's not a bad story nor is it poorly done. It wouldn't be my first Seventh Doctor choice, but for a quick run with the Doctor, it is perfectly serviceable.

Overall personal score: 2 out of 5