How is it where ever I go in the universe there are always people like you pointing guns or phasers or blasters... now don't do anything hasty, it's just a flying visit. Take me to your leader.
The Horns of Nimon was the unintentional end to Season 17 when Shada ended up being cancelled due to a technician strike. It has a reputation of being a prime representative of the Douglas Adams era with a lot of jokes but also a lot of unintentional silliness. The acting is said to be very over-the-top as well but with everyone doing it, it supposedly makes the whole thing feel like a farce. I'm nervous when it comes to farces so we shall see.
Plot Summary
A dilapidated warship from the Skonna Empire is carrying a group of youths from the plant Aneth. Desiring to make good time as this was to be the last tribute ship, the co-pilot overloads the engines, blowing them out and killing the pilot. The ship stalls in space and creates a gravity well.
On the TARDIS, the Doctor is attempting to make repairs but has taken a number of systems off-line, including the dematerialization circuit. It gets caught in the gravity well and crashes into the warship. The Doctor extends the shields to create an air tunnel through which he, Romana and K-9 pass through.
They find a set of high energy crystals along with the Aneth youth. The Doctor sends K-9 back to the TARDIS to assess the repairs needed while he and Romana continue. They are detected by the co-pilot, who takes them to the bridge when they offer to help repair the engines before they are sucked into a singularity.
On the planet Skonna, the leader, Soldeed, is overseeing the preparations for the arrival of the youth, who are tribute to be sacrificed to the Nimon, a powerful Minotaur creature living at the center of the city. Upon receiving word of the warship's disappearance, Soldeed ventures into the Nimon's lair to inform him where he is most displeased. He sends Soldeed out with instructions to fulfill the tribute one way or the other.
Romana and the Doctor manage to jury rig something using some spare equipment from the TARDIS. They supply power and tell the co-pilot to ready the ship but not to start until the Doctor has moved the TARDIS onboard the ship. But the co-pilot starts the ship before the Doctor is ready and leaves the TARDIS in the gravity well. The Doctor activates the visualizer and sees a small planet being dragged into the gravity well. The Doctor puts the TARDIS into a spin and uses the momentum of the incoming planetoid to slingshot the TARDIS out of the gravity well.
The co-pilot locks Romana away with the other tributes when she tries to take control of the ship. In with the tributes, she learns that their leader, Seth, has been selected to defeat the Nimon and free Aneth from tribute. Seth however confides in Romana that he was just a traveler and has no plan. It was simply a backstory to feed to the tributaries to give them hope.
The ship arrives on Skonna and when two of the high energy crystals are shown to be missing, the co-pilot tries to claim that he used them to repair the engines. Soldeed immediately sees through the lie, condemns the co-pilot to death and pushes him into the Nimon's maze. Soldeed then pushes both the tributes and Romana into the maze as well, convinced that this will finally fulfill the bargain and the Nimon will bestow them with the technology to rebuild their empire.
After making some repairs, the Doctor steers the TARDIS to Skonna and then lands in the central plaza. He is arrested and brought before Soldeed. The Doctor shows off his technological knowledge but with the reveal that he is connected to Romana, Soldeed orders him taken to the Nimon as well. The Doctor briefly escapes his guard but is recaptured and put into the maze. Once in, he attempts to leave markers to follow back, but the markers disappear and the walls both appear and disappear in random order.
The tributes find the Nimon's lair and find both a desiccated body as well as previous tributes stored in hibernation. Romana realizes that the Nimon feeds on the energy of the tributes and keeps them in hibernation until he has completely used up each one. The co-pilot jumps out with his gun, hoping to fool the Nimon that he was ordered to escort them into the maze. The Nimon, drawn by the noise, sees through this and kills the co-pilot.
The Doctor enters and distracts the Nimon, allowing Romana, Seth and another tribute, Teka, to escape into the tunnels. The remaining five tributes however are too scared to move and the Nimon sets them in hibernation while taking the power crystals they had brought.
The Doctor and his party sneak back into the lab and observe the Nimon powering his equipment. He inflates the black hole that the Skonnan ship and the TARDIS were trapped in and brings in a capsule containing two other Nimon. The Doctor realizes that the Nimon have exhausted the planet they are currently occupying and are colonizing other planets under the guise of bringing a technological revolution.
When the Nimon leave, the Doctor and his group work to see if they can reverse the flow. He summons K-9 from the TARDIS but K-9 is captured and damaged by Soldeed. Soldeed intends to take K-9 apart to see how he works but stops when he sees the Nimon's temple become activated. Convinced that Skonna's new age is about to begin, he enters the maze to converse with the Nimon.
The Doctor experiments with the controls and manages to reverse the direction of the capsule. However, Romana was in the capsule and was transported back with it. The Doctor attempts to bring it back but Soldeed interrupts and damages the equipment with a blast from his staff. He then threatens to kill the Doctor for interfering with the Nimon's plans but Seth stuns Soldeed. He then works to repair the damage done by Soldeed.
Romana emerges from the capsule and finds herself on the planet Crinoth. She is pursued by other Nimon but they are stunned by Sezom, the last survivor of Crinoth and who held a position similar to Soldeed. Having seen how the Nimon consume the resources of the planet without fulfilling their promises, he works only to spare others from the Nimon. He has modified his staff with a mineral to amplify it's power to a level that will actually stun the Nimon. He helps Romana get back to the capsule, overcome the Nimon guards and climb into it, awaiting it's recall by the Doctor.
While the Doctor is repairing the machine, Soldeed awakens and runs off. Seth and Teka run after him but become separated in the maze. Teka is captured by Soldeed who turns her over to the Nimon, though he is shocked to see three take her. Seth returns to the Doctor just as he has finished the repairs.
Meanwhile, the captain of the guard, Sorak, experiments on K-9 trying to figure out how he works. K-9 is reanimated and after shocking Sorak, enters the maze to fulfill the Doctor's call.
The Nimon reenter the control room capturing the Doctor. The Nimon reactivate the device pulling the capsule with Romana to them. Sezom was killed in his defense of the capsule. The Nimon attack Romana and Seth as he reenters the room. Romana gives him the mineral from Crinoth and he places it in the staff. He stuns two of the Nimon while a third is taken down by K-9.
The Doctor and K-9 set about running the calculations to reverse the pull of the black hole while Seth and Romana go to rescue Teka. They find her in suspended animation along with the other Anothians. They start to revive her when Soldeed attacks them. He has gone mad in his refusal to accept that the Nimon deceived him. He runs to the power room and jams the overload switch before Seth shoots him down. With the switch jammed, they have no choice but to flee.
With everyone revived, they are joined by the Doctor and K-9 and K-9 leads them out of the maze. The Nimon also revive and chase after them. The Doctor's group emerges from the maze and orders everyone to take cover as the whole complex explodes, taking the three Nimon with it.
With Soldeed dead, Sorak takes over and sends the Anothians back in a spare ship with Seth in command. The Doctor, Romana and K-9 reenter the TARDIS to continue their repairs and as they take off, they observe a distant explosion. The Nimon trapped on Crinoth had tried to convert the planet to energy to reopen the portal to Skonna but with the receiver destroyed, it backfired and destroyed Crinoth with them still on it. The group then leaves the system to pursue adventures elsewhere.
Analysis
The Horns of Nimon is very similar to Underworld in that you have a potentially interesting story with a science fiction spin on a Greek myth, only to have it undone by production values and poor acting. I think The Horns of Nimon did it better than Underworld but it's still a case of looking at what could have been versus what is actually there.
One of the most frustrating things is that the potential of this story shines through. The tale of the Minotaur is a wonderfully dark story and a number of the people in this story do a good job of playing the tale straight, giving it a slightly creepy edge. That even works with the Douglas Adams style one-liners that intercut the story, giving it a gallows humor edge. But there are three characters that take all that potential and squander it. If a minor character is off, that can be overlooked, but in this case it's the Doctor and Soldeed that throw the tone off and never get it back on track.
By Season 17, it's obvious that Tom Baker has decided that the Doctor should be light-hearted and funny. He adds a serious tone here and there when required but he still feels that this is a show for children and that if the Doctor doesn't show fear, the kids won't be scared either. This can work in stories like Nightmare of Eden but the Doctor usually has to be balanced out by some gravitas on the other side. Here, the actor playing Soldeed has dialed it up to eleven in the idea that this story is a complete farce. Tom Baker either goes along with that or decides that he will not be upstaged by anyone and also dials it way up so that his performance is just as over-the-top and silly. He controls it better than Soldeed but when contrasted with the tone of everything else, it just doesn't fly.
I would love to know what the actor playing Soldeed was either thinking or got in terms of direction because his performance is absolutely terrible. You might think the character was already completely crazy or stoned out of his gourd based on the way he reacts to everyone around him. There is no moment of quiet or dialing it back. It's just up at eleven all the time. He has a moment when with the Doctor towards the end of Episode Two where he comes back a touch but that moment is so fleeting. Then you have his final scene in Episode Four where goes another notch up and the performance is almost painful to watch. Having already seen as crazy, trying to go extra crazy just makes the performance go to pieces.
The third character who is a bit of a loss is Teka. As a minor character that is mostly just an annoyance. She does absolutely nothing other than talk incessantly how Seth is going to be this great hero and save them all. Even when tasked to do something she ends up doing effectively nothing. I don't mind a bit of play up about the hero but a little balance would have been nice. Heck, showing her competent at anything other that verbally fellating Seth would have been an improvement.
Now that we've addressed the bad, let's hit the good. Romana is excellent in this story. She is competent, daring and even gets a few sharp barbs in here and there. The Doctor does very little in this story other than get himself captured and repair the Nimon's equipment. Romana is the one running about, trying to keep the Anothians alive and free. It is she that brings back the weapon to hold off the Nimon when they rise up. She also seems to actually care about the people around her. The Doctor seems to only care about Romana until the end of things.
Seth was pretty good too. In many ways, he was a less cocky version of Adric. I wouldn't be surprised if the interaction Seth had with Romana and the Doctor broached the idea of having a teenage boy as a companion. Unlike Adric, he is grounded in the limits of his abilities, clearly worried about not being able to perform what has been set before him. Yet he doesn't whine about it. He confides in Romana and puts Teka off a lot, but you don't see him curling up in a corner going "woe is me" as we so often have in fake heroes. Instead, he works as best he can and does step up when forced to do so. It actually makes for a nice arc for him.
Probably the best performance in the whole story lasted only five minutes and that was Sezom. He is in the same role as Soldeed but unlike that over-the-top performance, Sezom is reflective and quiet. He says more in a quiet look of despondence than Soldeed does with any of his ravings. Sezom's story is more tragic as well given that his planet was not interested in conquest but instead looked for peace and knowledge. His compromise of allowing a small evil (the tributes) led only to great evil rather than the peace and comfort that they wanted. It's an excellent performance and wonderfully underplayed. I'm glad that it was with Romana as well, who played off that well rather than going for an easy joke as the Doctor might have.
I like the idea of the Nimon a bit more than their execution. A minotaur race that act like locusts but that have real technological abilities is interesting. I even thought the costumes weren't that bad though the constant need for the actors to walk on tip-toe to simulate a hoof was probably jarring. What I didn't like about them was the constant arm movement. It was always like they were doing a free expression dance while simply walking around. I also would have liked some padding on arms. The loincloth covered the legs well enough, but the arms looked so skinny compared to the head and torso that it drew me out of the story. It was much easier to see it as a man in a costume rather than a creature. Padding would have added the illusion of musculature which also would have made the Nimon just that much more threatening.
I also enjoyed the sets for the most part. The clanking grates outside the maze were not good, but within the maze and the lab itself, I thought they did a good job. I could easily imagine that the hibernation chamber was recycled from The Ark in Space set while the computer equipment was probably gotten off some salvage yard. Both gave extra touches of realism when the budget would probably not have allowed that. I also appreciated the dim lighting. It hid what would have been imperfections in the set and costume and added an air of creepiness that might have otherwise been lost.
One small thing that was a bit odd was the pacing. The story had a slow start with a lot of hijinks in Episode One. It moved fairly steady after that, though it did slow down a bit in Episode Three. Then you have things all over the map in Episode Four. Many plot elements are stuffed in giving it a very crammed feeling, yet at the same time, there is a long segment of the Doctor's party following K-9 down various corridors with the Nimon doing the same. It kills several minutes that could have been used elsewhere. You then have a very hasty summary where three different storylines are summarily ended in a TARDIS coda that feels tacked on. It's very odd pacing with fast and slow elements throughout the whole story.
As stated earlier, this story is more of a reflection of what could have been. It has a number of good elements and even having dark or silly humor here and there are not a problem. The problems come from the contrast in performances and the up and down pacing. It's not quite the same but it's easy to see how the second attempt at this story in the form of The God Complex worked much better if only due to a consistent tone throughout. This story is not bad to sit through but there are going to be several roll your eye moments. If you can set those aside, it can be enjoyed just fine, but I doubt I will make much of an effort to come back to this one.
Overall personal score: 2 out of 5
Showing posts with label Romana II. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Romana II. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
Thursday, August 24, 2017
The Leisure Hive
Arrest the scarf then.
The Leisure Hive is the first story of the Christopher H. Bidmede era and if there is any story that defines his era, this may be it. David Fisher wrote this story in the vein of the silly Douglas Adams overseen Season 17, going so far as to envision the Foamasi as Jersey Shore style villains. Bidmede came in and slashed nearly all the comedy out of the story and reworked as much scientific techno-babble as he could. He also cut anything out that he saw as story padding. As such, this story has episodes almost as short as The Mind Robber and that includes reprises that last for 1-2 minutes. But does this slash and burn style help or hurt the overall story?
Plot Summary
The Doctor and Romana relax on Brighton Beach when K-9 short circuits himself by chasing a beach ball into the water. Romana takes him back to the Doctor and requests to go to a place with legitimate entertainment: the planet Argolis, which was turned into a recreation planet after a devastating nuclear war.
On Argolis, the chairman of the board, Morix, is trying to get additional investment from his human banker Brock. Brock is unwilling to invest himself but has an offer to buy the planet outright from the reptilian race, the Foamasi, with whom the Argolans had their nuclear war. Morix refuses to sell but dies before negotiations can continue further. Morix's wife, Mena, takes over as chairman and plans to revitalize their facilities by using anti-aging techniques developed using their expertise in tachyonics with an Earth scientist named Hardin.
The Doctor and Romana arrive on Argolis as Mena's son Pangol is giving a demonstration of their experiments in tachyonics. A member of the audience is curious and he is invited in to test it but something goes wrong and he is mortally injured. The Doctor rushes forward to help but is pulled away by a guard who mistakes him for Hardin. He and Romana are taken to Mena who suspects them of being spies (as they have no identification) and orders their arrest.
The Doctor and Romana run back to the main hall unaware that a group of Foamasi have infiltrated the hive. Romana gets back to the TARDIS but the Doctor is drawn to the Tachyonics machine where he appears to be pulled apart. Romana yells for him, alerting the guards. The Doctor emerges having used his sonic screwdriver to escape, but still revealing that it was an illusion by the machine. When brought before Mena, the Doctor and Romana reveal that they are very familiar with tachyonics and Hardin, who has just arrived, is eager for assistance, not wanting to reveal to Mena that he falsified his data and hasn't made the experiment work right yet.
Even with their help Hardin thinks about confessing the whole thing but his financial backer, Stimson, compels him to try and make it work. Stimson goes to talk to Brock in his quarters but finds them empty. He does however find a human mask and suit in the closet. Panicked, Stimson runs away into the main hall where he is strangled with the Doctor's scarf.
The Doctor, Romana and Mena all review the layout and plans for the rejuvenation techniques but encounter technical problems due to Foamasi sabotage. Mena briefly collapses due to accelerated aging brought on by the fallout of the war, but she recovers. The Doctor goes to look for the source of the sabotage while Romana goes to assist Hardin. The Doctor enters the main hall and finds his scarf around Stimson's neck. He is arrested by the guards and brought before Mena for trial. As none but circumstantial evidence can be found, Pangol suggests trial by test. Mena scoffs at this but changes her mind when Hardin and Romana enter stating that they've made the process work but only require one more test.
The Doctor is put into the tachyon machine while Hardin transfers the information from his lab. Romana goes back to the lab and discovers that their experiment reverted itself in a bad way. She runs back to stop it but Hardin has already begun the process. They stop in the middle but the Doctor emerges having turned into an old man. Pangol has the Doctor and Romana placed under house arrest and confines them to an empty suite.
Pangol does a little investigating and determines that Hardin faked his results. Mina confronts Hardin and he admits to fudging the final results but that he and Romana did make the process work. He requests and is given leave by Mina to have access to the lab to continue working. She does deny his request to have Romana assist him. Hardin however sneaks into their quarters and frees the Doctor and Romana to determine what went wrong.
With guests leaving rapidly, Brock brings up the Foamasi offer once again. Mina is still hesitant but agrees to look at the offer. Pangol suspects forgery as the documents are not issued by the government and the Foamasi government owns everything. Brock demurs, suggesting that a form of private enterprise still functions. Pangol becomes incensed and informs Brock that he is not actually a biological child of Mina (the Argolans having become sterile after the war) but a clone produced by the generator. Showing off a view of the generator, he sees the Doctor sneaking around and alerts the guards.
The Doctor, Hardin and Romana had snuck into the generator room to investigate what went wrong. Romana snuck in while the Doctor and Hardin took care of the guards. They are forced to flee when Pangol enters with his troop. He observes someone in the generator and activates it, turning the aging up to 10,000 years. However the generator is empty as a Foamasi had pulled Romana out before Pangol activated the machine.
The Foamasi takes Romana back to the lab with the Doctor and Hardin. It speaks with the Doctor and the whole group heads to the conference room. Pangol has returned to the conference room where Brock is still trying to get Mina to sign the papers. As the Doctor and his group enter, Brock panics at the sight of the Foamasi. The Foamasi grabs Brock and pulls off his mask to reveal that Brock is actually another Foamasi in disguise.
The original Foamasi reveals himself as a government agent while the fake Brock and his associate were representatives of a crime family attempting to gain control of Argolis to use it as a base of operations. The agent arrests the two and takes them to his shuttle with the intention of taking them back to the home planet for trial.
Pangol, now having whipped himself in to a frenzy with Mina's impending death, refuses to let the Foamasi go and orders the shuttle destroyed when it attempts to take off without clearance. He then sets up the tachyon generator to create a clone army of himself, prepared to go to war with the Foamasi and any other system that would oppose him.
While Pangol is setting this up, the Doctor, Romana and Hardin try to figure out how to both stop Pangol and fix the generator. The Doctor takes the randomizer out of the TARDIS and sneaks into the generator to counteract the previous sabotage. Romana realizes what the Doctor has done and tries to stop it but Pangol enters the generator and begins to make his clones. The clones, masked, step out and take her away. Once they are down the corridor, the clones take off their masks to reveal a rejuvenated Doctor. Since he had been in the machine, his essence was replicated while taking on Pangol's outfit. However, the clones are unstable and they disappear, except for the original Doctor.
Hardin discovers Mina passed out and dying in the conference room. He picks her up and decides to try and put her in the generator as a desperation attempt to keep her alive. Pangol sees what he is doing and runs into the generator after Hardin places her in and the door closes behind them. The Doctor arrives, noting that he left the generator in regeneration mode and it begins to work on both of them. The Doctor smashes the controls and a youthful Mina emerges holding Pangol, who has been reduced to a baby.
Mina vows to raise Pangol correctly this time and asks to contact the Foamasi to avoid another war. The Foamasi agent emerges, noting that the destroyed shuttle was launched by the fake Brock before the agent could board in an escape attempt. The two go to discuss arrangements between their two planets while Hardin looks after Pangol. The Doctor and Romana slip away in the TARDIS with the Doctor dismissing the threats of the Black Guardian and refusing to reinstall the randomizer.
Analysis
Despite some flaws, I rather like this story, although I can't say that much of that credit goes to either David Fisher or Christopher Bidmede. The plotline, for the most part, is fairly good but I think it is the overall atmosphere and tone that really help sell it and credit there must be given to Lovett Bickford. I also think they got a rather good cast for this story as nearly everyone sells themselves in a very believable way.
This story kicks off the season of entropy and nowhere is that better exemplified in the form of the Doctor. The producers actually got somewhat lucky in that Tom Baker had a bad case of illness in the period between seasons and came back looking rather badly. It ties in rather nicely with the way things worked out for this whole season and even beyond that, you can tell that he's pulling in his A-game. After running with just about whatever he wanted in Season 17, Tom Baker is heavily clamped down and it suits him. He presents himself in a serious manner and that adds a level of gravitas that might have been lost given the changes that were made. It also adds a bit more punch in the few and far between instances of comedy. If Bidmede made one major error, it was in cutting out the comedy completely. A few jokes sprinkled here and there (such as the scarf line) would have lightened things a touch and made the story much more palatable to regular viewers.
Romana gets a nice little arc and some good scenes here and there, although I feel like she had more scenes cut for time. Hardin always seems so insistent in working with Romana that you can't help but think they might have had a couple of more scenes showing their interaction while the Doctor did his own thing. But even with those scenes absent, it's nice to see Romana in full scientist mode and especially nice to see her being consulted as the scientific mind rather than the Doctor, freeing him for more intrigue. I do think her K-9 short circuiting reaction was a bit over the top, especially in contrast to how blasé she was when talking to the Doctor while carrying him back to the TARDIS. Still, a strong performance that I enjoyed.
Mina was the standout among the secondary characters. It's actually something of a shame that she had to spend a good portion of two and a half episodes acting like she's dying (which was well acted) because her performance when fully lucid is excellent. She's a hard driven yet compassionate woman, trying to die with dignity and grace. She does fall a bit flat in the final scene where she comes out of the generator. The whole scene is very rushed and both her and the Foamasi representative sound like they are doing a quick run through rather than a proper performance. You have to wonder if the union was threatening to cut the lights in five minutes when they filmed that scene.
I rather liked the Foamasi and I also liked the slight mystery angle where you have two criminals trying to get a deal while being pursued by a government agent. That was the better story and I rather wish that it had been drawn out just a bit longer rather than indulge in the whole bit with Pangol. I liked the design of the Foamasi and the fear that they seemed to inspire in Mina as well as the rage in Pangol. I thought they worked well as the primary villain in the first three episodes.
But then we come to Pangol and the oddity that is Episode Four. Pangol, through the first three episodes, has been shown to be arrogant and chafing for leadership. But in Episode Four, he goes totally off the rails into full totalitarian mode. With the plot revolving around finding about the Foamasi sabotage and their plans to take control of the planet, Pangol's sudden declaration of himself as the next Alexander the Great and the creation of a clone army is just a complete and total surprise.
What's more, the whole thing is a giant fizzle as it is resolved in less than fifteen minutes of show time. They are clones of the Doctor but you get the impression that even if they had been clones of Pangol they wouldn't have lasted long either. So the whole deviation is an exercise in futility. All it does is allow the Doctor to be made back to his normal self and that could easily have been done as a tie in with trying to revive Mina as the groundwork was laid for Hardin's age reversal experiments. Pangol could easily have been left as the skeptic that we've seen in many different stories only to be shocked at the end. I think it was just a very clumsy deviation.
It also might not have been that good but a better stretch would have been trying to save Mina as well as a temporary escape by the criminal Foamasi, destroying part of Hardin's work and adding that much more tension to trying to save Mina. You could have also added that the rapid aging and instability of the original tachyon experiment was causing the Doctor to become weak and die, thus the race becomes to save both him and Mina, which would actually unite Hardin, Romana and Pangol. The Foamasi agent could also contribute as it would be something of an interplanetary incident if it was known that Foamasi criminals acted in ways that led to the death of the Argolan leader. What's more, the interaction between the agent and Pangol would have formed a more natural bridge of the two planets looking to create a stable peace and comradery rather than the patch job that was shown in the last minute of the show.
There was some interesting and arty direction in this story. There was also some very shoddy direction so it's an odd mix there. Any time the story went into noir, especially with close ups and shadows, it looked really good and intense. There are also some very nice long shots from the exterior into the hive itself which I enjoyed. But then there were also other shots where there was too much lighting, giving a harsh appearance to everything. There was also the very bad blue screen of the Doctor and Romana retreating to the TARDIS in Episode One as they passed through the racquetball court. I think Barry Letts would have chided them for that shot.
The other significant problem is editing. Bidmede clearly went through and slashed everything he could that was not part of the bare bones story. That led to a number of transitions where you could just feel that more had been discussed and shot but that we weren't privy to it. In a story like this, because it was so straight-forward, that's less of an issue; but when a man who is supposed to be interested in emphasizing the science can't explain what this magic box is actually doing or why it's doing things wrong, I would say that you can take an extra minute or so to explain it. They could have had even more time by cutting back on the reprise time as well so the slash and burn that was done actually created confusion rather than effectively streamlining the story.
I got rather harsh towards the end but there is still a lot to like in this story. It's just frustrating when you see a story that could have been the stand out story of the season be reduced to a middling state. I think it also says a lot for Christopher Bidmede's approach that the story that I found the best of his season was the story that was leftover from the Philip Hinchcliff/Graham Williams transition days (State of Decay). But I do like this story a bit more than some fans and I could easily watch it again. Even the stupidity that is Episode Four has a bit of entertainment and gives enough of a run around to keep you engaged. Not a horrible start to the JNT era but less than it could have been.
Overall personal score: 3.5 out of 5
The Leisure Hive is the first story of the Christopher H. Bidmede era and if there is any story that defines his era, this may be it. David Fisher wrote this story in the vein of the silly Douglas Adams overseen Season 17, going so far as to envision the Foamasi as Jersey Shore style villains. Bidmede came in and slashed nearly all the comedy out of the story and reworked as much scientific techno-babble as he could. He also cut anything out that he saw as story padding. As such, this story has episodes almost as short as The Mind Robber and that includes reprises that last for 1-2 minutes. But does this slash and burn style help or hurt the overall story?
Plot Summary
The Doctor and Romana relax on Brighton Beach when K-9 short circuits himself by chasing a beach ball into the water. Romana takes him back to the Doctor and requests to go to a place with legitimate entertainment: the planet Argolis, which was turned into a recreation planet after a devastating nuclear war.
On Argolis, the chairman of the board, Morix, is trying to get additional investment from his human banker Brock. Brock is unwilling to invest himself but has an offer to buy the planet outright from the reptilian race, the Foamasi, with whom the Argolans had their nuclear war. Morix refuses to sell but dies before negotiations can continue further. Morix's wife, Mena, takes over as chairman and plans to revitalize their facilities by using anti-aging techniques developed using their expertise in tachyonics with an Earth scientist named Hardin.
The Doctor and Romana arrive on Argolis as Mena's son Pangol is giving a demonstration of their experiments in tachyonics. A member of the audience is curious and he is invited in to test it but something goes wrong and he is mortally injured. The Doctor rushes forward to help but is pulled away by a guard who mistakes him for Hardin. He and Romana are taken to Mena who suspects them of being spies (as they have no identification) and orders their arrest.
The Doctor and Romana run back to the main hall unaware that a group of Foamasi have infiltrated the hive. Romana gets back to the TARDIS but the Doctor is drawn to the Tachyonics machine where he appears to be pulled apart. Romana yells for him, alerting the guards. The Doctor emerges having used his sonic screwdriver to escape, but still revealing that it was an illusion by the machine. When brought before Mena, the Doctor and Romana reveal that they are very familiar with tachyonics and Hardin, who has just arrived, is eager for assistance, not wanting to reveal to Mena that he falsified his data and hasn't made the experiment work right yet.
Even with their help Hardin thinks about confessing the whole thing but his financial backer, Stimson, compels him to try and make it work. Stimson goes to talk to Brock in his quarters but finds them empty. He does however find a human mask and suit in the closet. Panicked, Stimson runs away into the main hall where he is strangled with the Doctor's scarf.
The Doctor, Romana and Mena all review the layout and plans for the rejuvenation techniques but encounter technical problems due to Foamasi sabotage. Mena briefly collapses due to accelerated aging brought on by the fallout of the war, but she recovers. The Doctor goes to look for the source of the sabotage while Romana goes to assist Hardin. The Doctor enters the main hall and finds his scarf around Stimson's neck. He is arrested by the guards and brought before Mena for trial. As none but circumstantial evidence can be found, Pangol suggests trial by test. Mena scoffs at this but changes her mind when Hardin and Romana enter stating that they've made the process work but only require one more test.
The Doctor is put into the tachyon machine while Hardin transfers the information from his lab. Romana goes back to the lab and discovers that their experiment reverted itself in a bad way. She runs back to stop it but Hardin has already begun the process. They stop in the middle but the Doctor emerges having turned into an old man. Pangol has the Doctor and Romana placed under house arrest and confines them to an empty suite.
Pangol does a little investigating and determines that Hardin faked his results. Mina confronts Hardin and he admits to fudging the final results but that he and Romana did make the process work. He requests and is given leave by Mina to have access to the lab to continue working. She does deny his request to have Romana assist him. Hardin however sneaks into their quarters and frees the Doctor and Romana to determine what went wrong.
With guests leaving rapidly, Brock brings up the Foamasi offer once again. Mina is still hesitant but agrees to look at the offer. Pangol suspects forgery as the documents are not issued by the government and the Foamasi government owns everything. Brock demurs, suggesting that a form of private enterprise still functions. Pangol becomes incensed and informs Brock that he is not actually a biological child of Mina (the Argolans having become sterile after the war) but a clone produced by the generator. Showing off a view of the generator, he sees the Doctor sneaking around and alerts the guards.
The Doctor, Hardin and Romana had snuck into the generator room to investigate what went wrong. Romana snuck in while the Doctor and Hardin took care of the guards. They are forced to flee when Pangol enters with his troop. He observes someone in the generator and activates it, turning the aging up to 10,000 years. However the generator is empty as a Foamasi had pulled Romana out before Pangol activated the machine.
The Foamasi takes Romana back to the lab with the Doctor and Hardin. It speaks with the Doctor and the whole group heads to the conference room. Pangol has returned to the conference room where Brock is still trying to get Mina to sign the papers. As the Doctor and his group enter, Brock panics at the sight of the Foamasi. The Foamasi grabs Brock and pulls off his mask to reveal that Brock is actually another Foamasi in disguise.
The original Foamasi reveals himself as a government agent while the fake Brock and his associate were representatives of a crime family attempting to gain control of Argolis to use it as a base of operations. The agent arrests the two and takes them to his shuttle with the intention of taking them back to the home planet for trial.
Pangol, now having whipped himself in to a frenzy with Mina's impending death, refuses to let the Foamasi go and orders the shuttle destroyed when it attempts to take off without clearance. He then sets up the tachyon generator to create a clone army of himself, prepared to go to war with the Foamasi and any other system that would oppose him.
While Pangol is setting this up, the Doctor, Romana and Hardin try to figure out how to both stop Pangol and fix the generator. The Doctor takes the randomizer out of the TARDIS and sneaks into the generator to counteract the previous sabotage. Romana realizes what the Doctor has done and tries to stop it but Pangol enters the generator and begins to make his clones. The clones, masked, step out and take her away. Once they are down the corridor, the clones take off their masks to reveal a rejuvenated Doctor. Since he had been in the machine, his essence was replicated while taking on Pangol's outfit. However, the clones are unstable and they disappear, except for the original Doctor.
Hardin discovers Mina passed out and dying in the conference room. He picks her up and decides to try and put her in the generator as a desperation attempt to keep her alive. Pangol sees what he is doing and runs into the generator after Hardin places her in and the door closes behind them. The Doctor arrives, noting that he left the generator in regeneration mode and it begins to work on both of them. The Doctor smashes the controls and a youthful Mina emerges holding Pangol, who has been reduced to a baby.
Mina vows to raise Pangol correctly this time and asks to contact the Foamasi to avoid another war. The Foamasi agent emerges, noting that the destroyed shuttle was launched by the fake Brock before the agent could board in an escape attempt. The two go to discuss arrangements between their two planets while Hardin looks after Pangol. The Doctor and Romana slip away in the TARDIS with the Doctor dismissing the threats of the Black Guardian and refusing to reinstall the randomizer.
Analysis
Despite some flaws, I rather like this story, although I can't say that much of that credit goes to either David Fisher or Christopher Bidmede. The plotline, for the most part, is fairly good but I think it is the overall atmosphere and tone that really help sell it and credit there must be given to Lovett Bickford. I also think they got a rather good cast for this story as nearly everyone sells themselves in a very believable way.
This story kicks off the season of entropy and nowhere is that better exemplified in the form of the Doctor. The producers actually got somewhat lucky in that Tom Baker had a bad case of illness in the period between seasons and came back looking rather badly. It ties in rather nicely with the way things worked out for this whole season and even beyond that, you can tell that he's pulling in his A-game. After running with just about whatever he wanted in Season 17, Tom Baker is heavily clamped down and it suits him. He presents himself in a serious manner and that adds a level of gravitas that might have been lost given the changes that were made. It also adds a bit more punch in the few and far between instances of comedy. If Bidmede made one major error, it was in cutting out the comedy completely. A few jokes sprinkled here and there (such as the scarf line) would have lightened things a touch and made the story much more palatable to regular viewers.
Romana gets a nice little arc and some good scenes here and there, although I feel like she had more scenes cut for time. Hardin always seems so insistent in working with Romana that you can't help but think they might have had a couple of more scenes showing their interaction while the Doctor did his own thing. But even with those scenes absent, it's nice to see Romana in full scientist mode and especially nice to see her being consulted as the scientific mind rather than the Doctor, freeing him for more intrigue. I do think her K-9 short circuiting reaction was a bit over the top, especially in contrast to how blasé she was when talking to the Doctor while carrying him back to the TARDIS. Still, a strong performance that I enjoyed.
Mina was the standout among the secondary characters. It's actually something of a shame that she had to spend a good portion of two and a half episodes acting like she's dying (which was well acted) because her performance when fully lucid is excellent. She's a hard driven yet compassionate woman, trying to die with dignity and grace. She does fall a bit flat in the final scene where she comes out of the generator. The whole scene is very rushed and both her and the Foamasi representative sound like they are doing a quick run through rather than a proper performance. You have to wonder if the union was threatening to cut the lights in five minutes when they filmed that scene.
I rather liked the Foamasi and I also liked the slight mystery angle where you have two criminals trying to get a deal while being pursued by a government agent. That was the better story and I rather wish that it had been drawn out just a bit longer rather than indulge in the whole bit with Pangol. I liked the design of the Foamasi and the fear that they seemed to inspire in Mina as well as the rage in Pangol. I thought they worked well as the primary villain in the first three episodes.
But then we come to Pangol and the oddity that is Episode Four. Pangol, through the first three episodes, has been shown to be arrogant and chafing for leadership. But in Episode Four, he goes totally off the rails into full totalitarian mode. With the plot revolving around finding about the Foamasi sabotage and their plans to take control of the planet, Pangol's sudden declaration of himself as the next Alexander the Great and the creation of a clone army is just a complete and total surprise.
What's more, the whole thing is a giant fizzle as it is resolved in less than fifteen minutes of show time. They are clones of the Doctor but you get the impression that even if they had been clones of Pangol they wouldn't have lasted long either. So the whole deviation is an exercise in futility. All it does is allow the Doctor to be made back to his normal self and that could easily have been done as a tie in with trying to revive Mina as the groundwork was laid for Hardin's age reversal experiments. Pangol could easily have been left as the skeptic that we've seen in many different stories only to be shocked at the end. I think it was just a very clumsy deviation.
It also might not have been that good but a better stretch would have been trying to save Mina as well as a temporary escape by the criminal Foamasi, destroying part of Hardin's work and adding that much more tension to trying to save Mina. You could have also added that the rapid aging and instability of the original tachyon experiment was causing the Doctor to become weak and die, thus the race becomes to save both him and Mina, which would actually unite Hardin, Romana and Pangol. The Foamasi agent could also contribute as it would be something of an interplanetary incident if it was known that Foamasi criminals acted in ways that led to the death of the Argolan leader. What's more, the interaction between the agent and Pangol would have formed a more natural bridge of the two planets looking to create a stable peace and comradery rather than the patch job that was shown in the last minute of the show.
There was some interesting and arty direction in this story. There was also some very shoddy direction so it's an odd mix there. Any time the story went into noir, especially with close ups and shadows, it looked really good and intense. There are also some very nice long shots from the exterior into the hive itself which I enjoyed. But then there were also other shots where there was too much lighting, giving a harsh appearance to everything. There was also the very bad blue screen of the Doctor and Romana retreating to the TARDIS in Episode One as they passed through the racquetball court. I think Barry Letts would have chided them for that shot.
The other significant problem is editing. Bidmede clearly went through and slashed everything he could that was not part of the bare bones story. That led to a number of transitions where you could just feel that more had been discussed and shot but that we weren't privy to it. In a story like this, because it was so straight-forward, that's less of an issue; but when a man who is supposed to be interested in emphasizing the science can't explain what this magic box is actually doing or why it's doing things wrong, I would say that you can take an extra minute or so to explain it. They could have had even more time by cutting back on the reprise time as well so the slash and burn that was done actually created confusion rather than effectively streamlining the story.
I got rather harsh towards the end but there is still a lot to like in this story. It's just frustrating when you see a story that could have been the stand out story of the season be reduced to a middling state. I think it also says a lot for Christopher Bidmede's approach that the story that I found the best of his season was the story that was leftover from the Philip Hinchcliff/Graham Williams transition days (State of Decay). But I do like this story a bit more than some fans and I could easily watch it again. Even the stupidity that is Episode Four has a bit of entertainment and gives enough of a run around to keep you engaged. Not a horrible start to the JNT era but less than it could have been.
Overall personal score: 3.5 out of 5
Tuesday, April 11, 2017
The Creature From The Pit
Adrasta: We call it "The Pit"
Doctor: Ah, you have such a way with words.
I've heard very little about this story other than the creature is supposed to be one of the casualties of the lowering of the budget. I've also heard that one of the by-products of this shortfall is that one of the results of this is that a certain portion of the creature ends up looking a bit "naughty" and that the mind can get rather dirty with this one. I know it's not generally regarded well but at the same time, it's not openly derided the way some others are, so I'm curious to see how this one falls.
Plot Summary
Romana is cleaning out some of the storage areas of the TARDIS and comes across a distress beacon receiver. The Doctor had removed it as it was used by the Time Lords to summon him back too often for his taste. Romana reinstalls it and the TARDIS lurches forward and lands in the middle of a jungle.
They step out to explore and come across a living, metallic structure. The Doctor determines that it is the source of the distress signal and that it is likely the shell of an egg. While examining it, the Doctor is attacked by rolling plants called wolfweeds. They are called off but the Doctor and Romana are taken captive by the caravan escorting Karela, minister to Lady Adrasta, the ruler of the land.
While in route to Adrasta's palace, they are ambushed by bandits who steal several metal objects and take Romana captive. Karela orders the caravan onward while the huntsman sends the wolfweeds out to track the bandits. The bandits take Romana back to their lair where they have a vote on whether to kill her or not. Romana however imposes her will on the bandits, making them untie her and summoning K-9 with a dog whistle. K-9 arrives stuns the head bandit, Torvin. Romana then leaves with K-9 while the others watch her go.
The Doctor and the caravan arrive at the palace where Adrasta welcomes the Doctor. She hears his theories about the structure and then introduces him to two of her own scientists, Tollund and Doran. Interrogating the Doctor about his thoughts, she then turns on Doran for not reaching conclusions like the Doctor. She orders him arrested and then the whole group heads into the jungle.
They arrive at a pit and Doran is thrown in where he is attacked by a glowing creature. Adrasta threatens to throw the Doctor in if he does not tell her everything he knows. Before he can answer, Romana and K-9 appear. Adrasta orders a guard to seize her but K-9 stuns him, causing him to fall into the pit. The wolfweeds attack K-9. He destroys a couple of them but they swarm him, rendering him inert. Another guard seizes Romana and she becomes Adrasta's new bargaining chip. Caught in the situation, the Doctor grabs the bucket rope and leaps down into the pit.
The Doctor grabs a ledge just below the surface, intending to climb out once Adrasta has left. Adrasta seizes Romana and orders her and K-9 to be taken back to the palace. She then kicks dirt into the pit which gets in the Doctor's eyes. He loses his balance and falls into the pit. At the bottom, he finds Doran and the guard who was stunned by K-9 dead. The Doctor then explores the tunnels, seeing a glowing green tendril extend down one passage.
The Doctor is grabbed and hushed by a man named Organon who leads him back to his cave. Organon reveals that he was an astrologer who made a prediction that Adrasta didn't like. He managed to avoid the creature and has hidden himself away. The conversation between the two attracts the attention of the creature and it sticks a tendril in the cave. Organon and the Doctor press themselves against a wall and Organon holds a candle under the tendril and the creature retreats from the flame. Curious, the Doctor follows.
Back at the palace, Adrasta interrogates Romana about both the egg shell and the TARDIS. Upon learning about the TARDIS, she plans to take it and make herself more powerful. Romana convinces Adrasta that K-9 is the only one who can operate the TARDIS and she is the only one who can control K-9, making themselves useful to her. Romana cleans K-9 and tries to use him to escape, managing to stun several guards. However, another guard seizes Romana and threatens to kill her unless K-9 stops.
With the potential power of the TARDIS in her grasp, Adrasta decides to destroy the creature in the pit as it will no longer be needed. Adrasta has had a heavily secured door put into the palace that connects it to the mine where the creature lives. Romana, under guard, goes first along with K-9, while she and Karela bring up the rear.
In the cave, the Doctor and Organon find the creature and the Doctor goes up to try and communicate with it. The creature extends a tendril, nearly smothering the Doctor. Two of Adrasta's guards rush in, startling the creature and it knocks the guards back, along with Organon, through the tunnel opening and seals it with a strange material.
The Doctor gets up and follows the creature, finding it hiding in a further recess. He attempts to communicate with it and show that he is friendly. The creature seems to accept the Doctor and also tries to communicate by drawing a picture of a piece of metal with a symbol similar to one hanging in Adrasta's throne room. He also sees the symbol on bits of metal left behind by the creature. He promises to try and get the object from Adrasta's throne room and slips back up the tunnel.
The thieves become convinced that with Romana's depature, Adrasta will be sending out her guard to find them. Torvin suggests they raid Adrasta's palace for metal since most of the guards are out. They do find most guards gone, but they are down in the mines, not looking for the bandits. They kill two guards and raid the throne room of metal, including the object the creature wanted, which has now started to glow. An alarm is sounded and more guards come, causing the bandits to retreat into the mines.
Adrasta comes upon Organon and her two guards trying to open the passage. She orders K-9 to shoot through the barrier. He fires on the blockage but is unable to cut through as the material regenerates itself when damaged. They ponder how to break through when the Doctor knocks the barrier down with an easy push, owing to the creature letting him go. Adrasta immediately seizes him and orders guards down the passage to find the creature.
In the tunnels, the bandits examine their haul. Torvin is especially drawn to the large object which is starting to glow once more. It glows stronger and he and another bandit named Edu become entranced. They pick the disk up and carry it through the mines towards the creature.
The guards return, having been unable to find the creature. She prepares to send them back and is intent on having K-9 kill the creature. To conserve power, Romana has picked up K-9, allowing him to recharge. The Doctor slips out a shiny pieces of metal he took from the creature's cave and orders K-9 to shoot. K-9's laser reflects off the metal, knocking out a guard. He shoots down two others, leaving Adrasta alone. The creature then comes down the passage, seeming to be in a fury. She grabs a knife and holds it to the Doctor's neck, ordering Romana to have K-9 shoot it.
Before Romana can react, Torvin and Edu arrive, carrying the glowing disk, which they give to the creature. Distracted, the Doctor disarms Adrasta and then approaches the creature. By touching the disk, the creature can communicate using the holder's voice. It reveals that it's name is Erato and it came to Cloros fifteen years ago as an ambassador for the Typhonians, offering to trade metal for chlorophyll, which the Typhonians feed upon. Adrasta trapped Erato into the pit to keep her monopoly on metal.
Adrasta denies the story but her guards don't believe her. They force her hand on the plate and Erato confirms the story using Adrasta's voice. Angered, the head of the guard sics the wolfweeds on Adrasta. Erato then lurches forward and eats the wolfweeds, it's first real meal in fifteen years, but also crushes Adrasta in the process. The Doctor orders the head of the guard to get the engineers and hoist Erato out of the pit.
Back at the palace, the Doctor reveals to Romana that he suspects Erato of concealing something and has stolen the drive system of his ship to ensure his cooperation. Erato comes to the palace and confirms that because of his distress call, his people have assumed that Cloros has declared war. In response, they have launched a neutron star at the sun of Cloros that will destroy the it and the planet. The Doctor discovers that Erato can weave aluminum with it's body, as that is how it intends to rebuild his ship and the Doctor convinces Erato to help move the neutron star on a different path.
The Doctor goes to recover the photon drive, which he left with Organon, but finds Organon knocked out and the drive stolen. The drive was stolen by Torvin and his men to ensure their wealth. However, Torvin is killed by Karela and she moves to take over the band, having hidden the drive. The Doctor arrives and has K-9 destroy the collected metal. With the wealth gone, Karela give the drive back.
With Erato's ship rebuilt, the Doctor, Romana and K-9 follow it out to the neutron star in the TARDIS. The Doctor extends a gravity field around the star while Erato weaves an aluminum shell around it. The shell allows the Doctor's gravity field to get proper conductance on the star to move it, but the console fuses and the gravity beam pulls the star directly at the TARDIS. The Doctor dematerializes, disengaging the beam and the neutron star heads away from the Clorosian sun.
Erato continues back to Typhon and the Doctor returns to Cloros with a full trade treaty. He gives it to the head guardsman who has become the new administrator with Organon as his advisor. The Doctor and Romana then disappear in the TARDIS.
Analysis
I think disappointing is the best way to describe this story. Episode One kicks off with a high joke density, some nice repartee between the Doctor, Romana and other characters, and also some nice camera work. Unfortunately, it goes downhill from there. The budget limitations start to show and the script loses it's comedic edge. The acting also starts to decline, especially from Adrasta, who goes from having a villainous edge to just beyond over-the-top. This does not even factor in the complete and totally random filler that is Episode Four.
Both the Doctor and Romana aren't too bad in this, although the heavy hand of Douglas Adams is very evident, especially in Episode One where there are a lot of puny jokes being tossed back and forth between them. But those jokes go away pretty much after the Doctor hops into the pit. Instead you get the Doctor being a bit silly with Organon, although they do have a nice play between them and then a few jokes between him and Romana in Episode Four when they are reunited. But nothing really stands out in between that. This story is clearly meant to be a comedy, but the comedy seems to go away after Episode One and what is left doesn't elicit much laughter.
Organon is an unfortunate waste of a character. I looked up the actor and found out that he had actually been offered the role of the Doctor at one point and I think he would have made a decent one. Organon keeps up a bit of the comedy and he has a nice relationship with the Doctor. In fact, I think you could easily have made a buddy story involving the two of them and it probably would have been more entertaining than this story. It's such a shame that after about halfway through Episode Two, Organon is sidelined and is nothing more than a random interjection here and there.
Adrasta is also such a terrible waste of a villain. She starts off well and while she is just a hair shy of mustache twirling, she is still enjoyable as a villain up until Episode Three. After that, she loses her wit and starts becoming just bossy and angry. It all really falls apart at the Episode Three cliffhanger where she goes wayyyyyy over the top in her hysterical screaming about Erato going to kill her, for which is actually right. But why is the fate of the villain given to the cliffhanger? That makes no sense as we would actually want the villain to be in peril and eventually defeated.
But for all the problems of the first three episodes, they do make a somewhat passible story. I get can get by some of the bad acting and shoddy effects (including those that have slight sexual overtones) because there are good moments and it runs fairly smoothly in terms of pacing and character development. Where the poop really hits the fan is in Episode Four which is nothing but nearly twenty minutes of nonsensical filler.
As poor a turn as she took at the end of Episode Three, Adrasta was clearly an engaging villain. However, she is killed off in the first five minutes of Episode Four leaving nearly a full episode where a random peril has to be raised. Thus we are given the new problem of Erato's people deciding to destroy the planet and a runaround to repair Erato's ship so the problem can be dealt with. This is the sort of extra conflict that would have popped up in the First Doctor era, but there it would have placed in a six-part story where extra conflict would have been needed. Here, it's blatantly bad padding.
What makes this padding even worse is how little sense it makes. Erato's ship has been sending a distress signal for fifteen years. So rather than investigate it, his people automatically assume that war has been declared? What's more, how does Erato know this? He either senses it or has been in contact with his people and found they have launched an unstoppable attack. That's rather stupid given that one of their own people is still on the planet. They are needless condemning one of their own to death over a distress signal.
Even worse is the nature of attack. Erato states that they are running out of food on Typhon. So why are they launching an attack that will completely destroy the planet which has more food than they could want? If they believe that Cloros has declared war, why not send an invasion fleet. They know that without metal the Clorosians have no advanced technology and could be beaten easily in a fight. They could have conquered and colonized the planet without much of a second thought, getting revenge and assuring themselves of abundant food. Instead, they are going to burn the lot? Even within the story this makes no sense.
Even the Doctor and Romana's attempts at banter in Episode Four fall flat. While they came off as playful and easy in Episode One, they seem forced and out of place in Episode Four. It's like they are trying to return the story to a proper comedy but know it's a hopeless cause. In a way, their banter makes things worse because playing it straight would have at least added to the dramatic tension (miniscule as it was).
In so many ways, this story was such a let down. I think I could have actually forgiven it some if it had been bad from the start. But you are given some real potential in Episode One and even into Episode Two with fairly interesting characters, decent atmosphere and some proper wit between the Doctor, Romana and the rest of the cast. But it goes downhill so fast and then to have the turd that is Episode Four to round it out just leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Episode One would be interesting to watch it isolation as it makes for an interesting set up and is worth a look at. But I would not recommend the rest of the story to anyone. It's just not good and such a follow on disappointment.
Overall personal score: 1 out of 5
Doctor: Ah, you have such a way with words.
I've heard very little about this story other than the creature is supposed to be one of the casualties of the lowering of the budget. I've also heard that one of the by-products of this shortfall is that one of the results of this is that a certain portion of the creature ends up looking a bit "naughty" and that the mind can get rather dirty with this one. I know it's not generally regarded well but at the same time, it's not openly derided the way some others are, so I'm curious to see how this one falls.
Plot Summary
Romana is cleaning out some of the storage areas of the TARDIS and comes across a distress beacon receiver. The Doctor had removed it as it was used by the Time Lords to summon him back too often for his taste. Romana reinstalls it and the TARDIS lurches forward and lands in the middle of a jungle.
They step out to explore and come across a living, metallic structure. The Doctor determines that it is the source of the distress signal and that it is likely the shell of an egg. While examining it, the Doctor is attacked by rolling plants called wolfweeds. They are called off but the Doctor and Romana are taken captive by the caravan escorting Karela, minister to Lady Adrasta, the ruler of the land.
While in route to Adrasta's palace, they are ambushed by bandits who steal several metal objects and take Romana captive. Karela orders the caravan onward while the huntsman sends the wolfweeds out to track the bandits. The bandits take Romana back to their lair where they have a vote on whether to kill her or not. Romana however imposes her will on the bandits, making them untie her and summoning K-9 with a dog whistle. K-9 arrives stuns the head bandit, Torvin. Romana then leaves with K-9 while the others watch her go.
The Doctor and the caravan arrive at the palace where Adrasta welcomes the Doctor. She hears his theories about the structure and then introduces him to two of her own scientists, Tollund and Doran. Interrogating the Doctor about his thoughts, she then turns on Doran for not reaching conclusions like the Doctor. She orders him arrested and then the whole group heads into the jungle.
They arrive at a pit and Doran is thrown in where he is attacked by a glowing creature. Adrasta threatens to throw the Doctor in if he does not tell her everything he knows. Before he can answer, Romana and K-9 appear. Adrasta orders a guard to seize her but K-9 stuns him, causing him to fall into the pit. The wolfweeds attack K-9. He destroys a couple of them but they swarm him, rendering him inert. Another guard seizes Romana and she becomes Adrasta's new bargaining chip. Caught in the situation, the Doctor grabs the bucket rope and leaps down into the pit.
The Doctor grabs a ledge just below the surface, intending to climb out once Adrasta has left. Adrasta seizes Romana and orders her and K-9 to be taken back to the palace. She then kicks dirt into the pit which gets in the Doctor's eyes. He loses his balance and falls into the pit. At the bottom, he finds Doran and the guard who was stunned by K-9 dead. The Doctor then explores the tunnels, seeing a glowing green tendril extend down one passage.
The Doctor is grabbed and hushed by a man named Organon who leads him back to his cave. Organon reveals that he was an astrologer who made a prediction that Adrasta didn't like. He managed to avoid the creature and has hidden himself away. The conversation between the two attracts the attention of the creature and it sticks a tendril in the cave. Organon and the Doctor press themselves against a wall and Organon holds a candle under the tendril and the creature retreats from the flame. Curious, the Doctor follows.
Back at the palace, Adrasta interrogates Romana about both the egg shell and the TARDIS. Upon learning about the TARDIS, she plans to take it and make herself more powerful. Romana convinces Adrasta that K-9 is the only one who can operate the TARDIS and she is the only one who can control K-9, making themselves useful to her. Romana cleans K-9 and tries to use him to escape, managing to stun several guards. However, another guard seizes Romana and threatens to kill her unless K-9 stops.
With the potential power of the TARDIS in her grasp, Adrasta decides to destroy the creature in the pit as it will no longer be needed. Adrasta has had a heavily secured door put into the palace that connects it to the mine where the creature lives. Romana, under guard, goes first along with K-9, while she and Karela bring up the rear.
In the cave, the Doctor and Organon find the creature and the Doctor goes up to try and communicate with it. The creature extends a tendril, nearly smothering the Doctor. Two of Adrasta's guards rush in, startling the creature and it knocks the guards back, along with Organon, through the tunnel opening and seals it with a strange material.
The Doctor gets up and follows the creature, finding it hiding in a further recess. He attempts to communicate with it and show that he is friendly. The creature seems to accept the Doctor and also tries to communicate by drawing a picture of a piece of metal with a symbol similar to one hanging in Adrasta's throne room. He also sees the symbol on bits of metal left behind by the creature. He promises to try and get the object from Adrasta's throne room and slips back up the tunnel.
The thieves become convinced that with Romana's depature, Adrasta will be sending out her guard to find them. Torvin suggests they raid Adrasta's palace for metal since most of the guards are out. They do find most guards gone, but they are down in the mines, not looking for the bandits. They kill two guards and raid the throne room of metal, including the object the creature wanted, which has now started to glow. An alarm is sounded and more guards come, causing the bandits to retreat into the mines.
Adrasta comes upon Organon and her two guards trying to open the passage. She orders K-9 to shoot through the barrier. He fires on the blockage but is unable to cut through as the material regenerates itself when damaged. They ponder how to break through when the Doctor knocks the barrier down with an easy push, owing to the creature letting him go. Adrasta immediately seizes him and orders guards down the passage to find the creature.
In the tunnels, the bandits examine their haul. Torvin is especially drawn to the large object which is starting to glow once more. It glows stronger and he and another bandit named Edu become entranced. They pick the disk up and carry it through the mines towards the creature.
The guards return, having been unable to find the creature. She prepares to send them back and is intent on having K-9 kill the creature. To conserve power, Romana has picked up K-9, allowing him to recharge. The Doctor slips out a shiny pieces of metal he took from the creature's cave and orders K-9 to shoot. K-9's laser reflects off the metal, knocking out a guard. He shoots down two others, leaving Adrasta alone. The creature then comes down the passage, seeming to be in a fury. She grabs a knife and holds it to the Doctor's neck, ordering Romana to have K-9 shoot it.
Before Romana can react, Torvin and Edu arrive, carrying the glowing disk, which they give to the creature. Distracted, the Doctor disarms Adrasta and then approaches the creature. By touching the disk, the creature can communicate using the holder's voice. It reveals that it's name is Erato and it came to Cloros fifteen years ago as an ambassador for the Typhonians, offering to trade metal for chlorophyll, which the Typhonians feed upon. Adrasta trapped Erato into the pit to keep her monopoly on metal.
Adrasta denies the story but her guards don't believe her. They force her hand on the plate and Erato confirms the story using Adrasta's voice. Angered, the head of the guard sics the wolfweeds on Adrasta. Erato then lurches forward and eats the wolfweeds, it's first real meal in fifteen years, but also crushes Adrasta in the process. The Doctor orders the head of the guard to get the engineers and hoist Erato out of the pit.
Back at the palace, the Doctor reveals to Romana that he suspects Erato of concealing something and has stolen the drive system of his ship to ensure his cooperation. Erato comes to the palace and confirms that because of his distress call, his people have assumed that Cloros has declared war. In response, they have launched a neutron star at the sun of Cloros that will destroy the it and the planet. The Doctor discovers that Erato can weave aluminum with it's body, as that is how it intends to rebuild his ship and the Doctor convinces Erato to help move the neutron star on a different path.
The Doctor goes to recover the photon drive, which he left with Organon, but finds Organon knocked out and the drive stolen. The drive was stolen by Torvin and his men to ensure their wealth. However, Torvin is killed by Karela and she moves to take over the band, having hidden the drive. The Doctor arrives and has K-9 destroy the collected metal. With the wealth gone, Karela give the drive back.
With Erato's ship rebuilt, the Doctor, Romana and K-9 follow it out to the neutron star in the TARDIS. The Doctor extends a gravity field around the star while Erato weaves an aluminum shell around it. The shell allows the Doctor's gravity field to get proper conductance on the star to move it, but the console fuses and the gravity beam pulls the star directly at the TARDIS. The Doctor dematerializes, disengaging the beam and the neutron star heads away from the Clorosian sun.
Erato continues back to Typhon and the Doctor returns to Cloros with a full trade treaty. He gives it to the head guardsman who has become the new administrator with Organon as his advisor. The Doctor and Romana then disappear in the TARDIS.
Analysis
I think disappointing is the best way to describe this story. Episode One kicks off with a high joke density, some nice repartee between the Doctor, Romana and other characters, and also some nice camera work. Unfortunately, it goes downhill from there. The budget limitations start to show and the script loses it's comedic edge. The acting also starts to decline, especially from Adrasta, who goes from having a villainous edge to just beyond over-the-top. This does not even factor in the complete and totally random filler that is Episode Four.
Both the Doctor and Romana aren't too bad in this, although the heavy hand of Douglas Adams is very evident, especially in Episode One where there are a lot of puny jokes being tossed back and forth between them. But those jokes go away pretty much after the Doctor hops into the pit. Instead you get the Doctor being a bit silly with Organon, although they do have a nice play between them and then a few jokes between him and Romana in Episode Four when they are reunited. But nothing really stands out in between that. This story is clearly meant to be a comedy, but the comedy seems to go away after Episode One and what is left doesn't elicit much laughter.
Organon is an unfortunate waste of a character. I looked up the actor and found out that he had actually been offered the role of the Doctor at one point and I think he would have made a decent one. Organon keeps up a bit of the comedy and he has a nice relationship with the Doctor. In fact, I think you could easily have made a buddy story involving the two of them and it probably would have been more entertaining than this story. It's such a shame that after about halfway through Episode Two, Organon is sidelined and is nothing more than a random interjection here and there.
Adrasta is also such a terrible waste of a villain. She starts off well and while she is just a hair shy of mustache twirling, she is still enjoyable as a villain up until Episode Three. After that, she loses her wit and starts becoming just bossy and angry. It all really falls apart at the Episode Three cliffhanger where she goes wayyyyyy over the top in her hysterical screaming about Erato going to kill her, for which is actually right. But why is the fate of the villain given to the cliffhanger? That makes no sense as we would actually want the villain to be in peril and eventually defeated.
But for all the problems of the first three episodes, they do make a somewhat passible story. I get can get by some of the bad acting and shoddy effects (including those that have slight sexual overtones) because there are good moments and it runs fairly smoothly in terms of pacing and character development. Where the poop really hits the fan is in Episode Four which is nothing but nearly twenty minutes of nonsensical filler.
As poor a turn as she took at the end of Episode Three, Adrasta was clearly an engaging villain. However, she is killed off in the first five minutes of Episode Four leaving nearly a full episode where a random peril has to be raised. Thus we are given the new problem of Erato's people deciding to destroy the planet and a runaround to repair Erato's ship so the problem can be dealt with. This is the sort of extra conflict that would have popped up in the First Doctor era, but there it would have placed in a six-part story where extra conflict would have been needed. Here, it's blatantly bad padding.
What makes this padding even worse is how little sense it makes. Erato's ship has been sending a distress signal for fifteen years. So rather than investigate it, his people automatically assume that war has been declared? What's more, how does Erato know this? He either senses it or has been in contact with his people and found they have launched an unstoppable attack. That's rather stupid given that one of their own people is still on the planet. They are needless condemning one of their own to death over a distress signal.
Even worse is the nature of attack. Erato states that they are running out of food on Typhon. So why are they launching an attack that will completely destroy the planet which has more food than they could want? If they believe that Cloros has declared war, why not send an invasion fleet. They know that without metal the Clorosians have no advanced technology and could be beaten easily in a fight. They could have conquered and colonized the planet without much of a second thought, getting revenge and assuring themselves of abundant food. Instead, they are going to burn the lot? Even within the story this makes no sense.
Even the Doctor and Romana's attempts at banter in Episode Four fall flat. While they came off as playful and easy in Episode One, they seem forced and out of place in Episode Four. It's like they are trying to return the story to a proper comedy but know it's a hopeless cause. In a way, their banter makes things worse because playing it straight would have at least added to the dramatic tension (miniscule as it was).
In so many ways, this story was such a let down. I think I could have actually forgiven it some if it had been bad from the start. But you are given some real potential in Episode One and even into Episode Two with fairly interesting characters, decent atmosphere and some proper wit between the Doctor, Romana and the rest of the cast. But it goes downhill so fast and then to have the turd that is Episode Four to round it out just leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Episode One would be interesting to watch it isolation as it makes for an interesting set up and is worth a look at. But I would not recommend the rest of the story to anyone. It's just not good and such a follow on disappointment.
Overall personal score: 1 out of 5
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
Warriors' Gate
It's like talking with a Cheshire Cat.
Now the conclusion of the E-space trilogy and the departure of Romana and K-9. I've heard mixed things about this one and I think it is generally regarded as the weakest of the trilogy. All I really know about it is that involves time-sensitive lion-men so I'm coming into this one as a fairly blank slate.
Plot Summary
An Earth ship is attempting to go into warp drive. It is carrying a group of sedated humanoid lions called Tharls aboard and using one of the Tharls, named Biroc, as it's unwilling navigator. The ship is damaged an stuck in a neutral space between E- and N-space. Biroc appears to pass out and the captain, Rorvik, orders him taken below. Biroc comes to and shakes off his custodians, running out into a white void.
On the TARDIS, the Doctor and Romana debate about how to get back to N-space while Adric listens quietly. The Doctor suggests just pushing random buttons to see if anything will happen, though Romana restrains him. Adric however, does push a random button and the TARDIS flies off. Their flight is intercepted by Biroc, who appears out of phase. His appearance also opens the TARDIS to time winds which damage K-9.
Biroc guides the TARDIS to the null space and then leaves, although giving a warning about the people they will soon meet. Seeing K-9 damaged, the Doctor has Romana start to repair him while the Doctor leaves the TARDIS to follow Biroc. The Doctor and Romana also note that they are in a bridge of space between E- and N-space.
The TARDIS shows up on the scanner of the human ship. Already thinking of leaving to find Biroc rather than attempting to wake another Tharl and potentially killing others (and cutting into their profits), Rorvik and two others leave the ship to investigate the TARDIS. They find it and attempt to gain entrance.
The Doctor follows Biroc through the void to a small castle gate. Inside is an old hall, covered in dust and cobwebs. Biroc finds a mirror and passes through it. The Doctor enters and starts looking around. As he does so, one of the suits of armor comes to life and lifts its sword to attack him. The Doctor dodges it but the armor continues to pursue him, soon joined by a second.
To determine if Rorvik and his crew are friendly or not, Romana leaves the TARDIS but gives Adric warning to wait for her signal. She converses with Rorvik, who becomes suspicious that she might be a time sensitive person and invites her back to his ship to examine the damage. Romana sends gives a signal for Adric to be cautious and wait in the TARDIS and then goes off with them.
Adric however, does not obey and instead waits a few minutes and then decides to head off looking for her and the Doctor with K-9. K-9 is still damaged and they soon get lost in the void. Adric gets an idea to help K-9, removing one of his ears to help him triangulate better. It helps K-9 but Adric becomes lost himself.
The Doctor manages to corner himself in such a way that the two robotic suits of armor damage themselves. He opens up their circuits and begins to interrogate them. They are Gundan warrior robots, designed to guard the gate. They lose power before they can elaborate leaving the Doctor frustrated. However, K-9 arrives at the gate and the Doctor decides to hook him up to give a temporary power boost to the robots.
On Rorvik's ship, he grabs Romana and hooks her up to the navigation unit. She is unable to provide complete navigation but she does give enough for the castle gate to show up on the scanner as a physical location. Rorvik decides to head out to investigate with most of the crew. He orders two crew members to bring out one of the Tharls to be woken up on his return.
Rorvik and his men arrive at the gate just as the Doctor is getting information about there being three gates and they all being one. They threaten him to reveal more but are distracted by one of the robots suddenly getting up and passing through the gate. The Doctor grabs K-9 and dodges through the fortress. At risk of being cornered again, he leaves K-9 and passes through the gate, leaving Rorvik and his crew alone with K-9.
The two remaining crewmen on Rorvik's ship pull out one of the Tharls but against orders, try to revive him. They end up electrocuting him instead and leave the body for someone else. However, the Tharl is not dead. He gets up and makes his way to the bridge where he finds Romana bound to the navigation chair. He loosens the straps but has to hide before undoing them completely as the two crewmen left behind enter.
The two men debate what to do with her and are startled by her opening her eyes and asking questions. They leave her on the bridge as Rorvik calls them over the radio to ready a piece of heavy equipment called the M-Z for transport. Romana then slips out of her loosened bonds and hides under a tarp in the equipment bay.
Rorvik and his men fire at the mirror gate but their weapons bounce back at them. Rorvik sends three men back to the ship while he radios to prep the M-Z. K-9 follows, attempting to get new masters but he is unceremoniously tossed out of the ship when he attempts to enter.
While the door is open, Adric slips in and hides under the same tarp as Romana. The tarp covers the M-Z, which is rolled out of the ship. However, it is left while the engineer, Lane, looks over the damaged warp drive. Romana and Adric slip out and look at the ship, discovering it is made of dwarf-star alloy. K-9 rolls up shrieking about the mass contraction of the null space. His warning alerts the crew and Romana is recaptured though Adric and K-9 run escape.
Romana is taken back inside the ship while the rest of the crew push the M-Z to the gate. Inside the ship, the loose Tharl, named Lazlo, emerges and knocks out Romana's guard. He takes her and they vanish to the gate and pass through it. They emerge in the upper balcony, watching Rorvik and his men.
After passing through the gate, the Doctor meets Biroc who appears to be waiting for him. Biroc informs him that although K-9 will be repaired, only organic matter may pass through the gate. The Doctor follows Biroc through a series of gardens until the both reemerge in the fortress at an earlier time. The Tharls are feasting about the table while being served by human slaves.
The Doctor realizes that the Tharls were the slave masters who ruled a great empire and built the Gundans. He also notes they show as little compassion for their slaves as did the human crew who has now enslaved the Tharls. The dinner is interrupted by a squad of Gundans who break in and attack the party. Romana, sensing danger, runs down to the Doctor. The Doctor is then instantly transported back to the present where Rorvik and his men surround the Doctor and Romana at the table.
Rorvik demands to know the secret of the mirror, believing it to be the way out, and refuses to believe that it can only be accessed by the Tharls or other time sensitives. K-9 Enters and warns the Doctor of the null space collapsing on itself. The Doctor is confused but Romana tells him that Rorvik's ship is made of dwarf star alloy, making it a matter sink in the void.
K-9 attempts to pass through the mirror but loses power. The Doctor runs toward him and Rorvik, frustrated at the lack of answers, prepares to shoot him. Through the mirror, the Doctor sees Biroc, admitting that the Tharls were wrong in their enslavement of others. He now plans to change the future.
Before Rorvik can fire, Adric appears from behind the M-Z device, threatening to fire it. The Doctor runs up and mans the controls, ordering Romana and Adric out while carrying K-9. He follows shortly after and all four reenter the TARDIS. Rorvik starts to pursue but decides not to bother. He fires the M-X at the mirror but the blast rebounds, destroying the device. Rorvik, becoming unhinged, leads his men back to the ship.
Once on the ship, Rorvik turns the ship so that it's engines point toward the fortress. He intends to create a back blow from the engines and try to shatter the mirror that way. The Doctor sees this on the scanner and heads out to stop him, fearing the rebound will destroy everything in the void. Romana comes with him to help.
Rorvik observes the Doctor and Romana entering the outer hull of the ship and goes after them. He also orders his men to wake the remaining Tharls. As Rorvik exits the ship, Biroc and Lazlo are hiding near it. Biroc follows while Lazlo enters the ship. Rorvik catches up to the Doctor and stops him from creating a power drain on the engine. Romana starts the process but Rorvik knocks her aside and stops the drain. Biroc appears beside them and tells the two Time Lords that they should do nothing. He takes their hands and the trio disappears as Rorvik gloats.
Inside the ship, the two low levels who tried to reanimate Lazlo, Sagan and Aldo, beg off and Royce tries to reanimate the Tharls. He electrocutes three of them and is preparing a fourth when Lazlo comes up behind him. Royce attacks him but Lazlo overpowers him, electrocuting him with a severed cable. Lazlo then begins to wake the other Tharls.
Biroc, Romana and the Doctor appear outside the TARDIS. The Doctor enters but Romana refuses, electing to stay in E-space with the Tharls rather than return to Gallifrey. The Doctor gives her K-9, telling her to fix him. The Doctor dematerializes in the TARDIS while Biroc, Romana and K-9 enter the fortress and pass through the mirror.
The human ship discharges it's engines but the blast rebounds off the mirror. Much of the fortress is destroyed along with the human ship. However, out of the wrecked hull, the reanimated Tharls emerge and pass through the mirror. The TARDIS briefly materializes in the Tharl's garden before disappearing again and returning to N-space. Romana and K-9 watch and the walk way with Biroc, promising to help him pass through time and free his remaining enslaved people.
Analysis
I think it is safe to say that Warriors' Gate is weird. In many ways, it reminds me of The Curse of Fenric in that there is more story here but that there wasn't enough time to put it down. Unlike Fenric though, I doubt any of that extra material was ever filmed.
First I must praise both the direction and conception of the story. The direction was very well done and you felt instantly in good hands with the opening tracking shot leading from the sleeping Tharls to the bridge. There were a lot of good camera shots and interesting points of view throughout the story. The conception was also quite good as the whiteness of the void gave it a surrealistic feel. Yet at the same time, there was a feeling of being grounded in reality with the realism of the crew and even the Tharl's abandoned fortress. The gardens were also bathed in surrealism, keeping the watcher heavily off-balance as to what was really going on. So from a visual point of view, this story is excellent.
I also enjoyed the acting for the most part as well. The Doctor had a bit of a minimal role in this one and was off on his own quite a lot. In many ways, this was Romana's story and she did very well. Her confidence was well on display and she held her own very well against the human crew, who also acted fairly well although with a caveat or two.
Adric was also pretty good, being used lightly and mostly for comic relief. Contrasting earlier Adric stories with later ones, the key for him is in limiting his screen time. He should always be a junior companion, with a stronger character taking the main companion role. The problems arose when he was elevated to senior companion in the Fifth Doctor era and tried to hold his own against Tegan and Nyssa. It was in this overexposure that his character flaws, as well as the limits of Matthew Waterhouse's acting, rose to the surface and made him unlikeable.
Rorvik dominates among the crew and he does fairly well, especially as his mania to escape grows. He does lose it in his final gloat scene. That was over-the-top and poorly acted in contrast to his excellent earlier performance. It leaves an unfortunate bad aftertaste.
The rest of the crew is also pretty good, although fairly unremarkable. I got the feeling that there might have been a bit more backstory with Sagan and Aldo as these two were clearly designed to be a comic relief team in the Robert Holmes double act vein. However, they don't do much other than look disinterested in Rorvik's orders and bow out whenever it comes to doing anything that might inflict actual harm on anyone. Their repugnance as electrocuting Lazlo is shown and you can see that humanitarian side when they beg off attempting another revival. But without time or development, they just sort of are there and you don't feel that bad for them after they are blown up with the rest of the ship.
So you have good acting and good visuals. The problems with this story arise in the storytelling. I can handle weird just fine, Kinda being a prime example of an excellent but off-the-wall story. Warriors' Gate however suffers from a lack of focus. Surreal and odd is fine, if it is held in a tight focus or gives something that allows the audience to grab on to at the end to try and make a measure of sense of it. The Mind Robber would probably be a good example of surrealism explained.
However, in this story, the focus shifts all over the place. There are sidebars with minor characters and the main thrust of the Tharl's story is split between the more standard adventures with Romana and the highly surrealistic adventures with the Doctor. I think the ultimate problem is time. There is more to the story and that was cut out of it. I'd be curious if the cuts were made from the original run or if additional cuts had to be made because of the Romana leaving inclusion. Either way, the fall of the Tharls, their enslavement and the source of their power are never really resolved. Nor is it ever really addressed as to how the return of the Tharls to their gardens allows the TARDIS to pass through the gate and back into N-space. It just leaves you hanging and that leaves a bit of a bad aftertaste with the story.
I also wish Romana had been given a bit more time in her leaving. It was hinted at with her reluctance to return to Gallifrey at the end of Meglos and it returned here in Episode One where she expresses disdain at the idea. So her leaving is not out of the blue. However, it is so rushed that it just feels almost backhanded. I know that they were up against the clock but I would have liked a moment between the two Time Lords in the Tharl gardens. It would have also could have provided a better explanation as to how the Doctor and Adric got to N-space through some action of Biroc's or the like. Of course, the episode was running long so that was essentially impossible, but I think it would have made for a more palatable end.
Overall, I'm torn. The story looked good and was well acted. But the pacing got too fast at the end and the story had too many holes and loose threads. It is enjoyable enough and I would not call it bad, but there is not enough to compel me to actively seek this one out to watch again. But for the visuals and portrayals, I'll easily sit through it and find enjoyment in that.
Overall personal score: 3 out of 5
Now the conclusion of the E-space trilogy and the departure of Romana and K-9. I've heard mixed things about this one and I think it is generally regarded as the weakest of the trilogy. All I really know about it is that involves time-sensitive lion-men so I'm coming into this one as a fairly blank slate.
Plot Summary
An Earth ship is attempting to go into warp drive. It is carrying a group of sedated humanoid lions called Tharls aboard and using one of the Tharls, named Biroc, as it's unwilling navigator. The ship is damaged an stuck in a neutral space between E- and N-space. Biroc appears to pass out and the captain, Rorvik, orders him taken below. Biroc comes to and shakes off his custodians, running out into a white void.
On the TARDIS, the Doctor and Romana debate about how to get back to N-space while Adric listens quietly. The Doctor suggests just pushing random buttons to see if anything will happen, though Romana restrains him. Adric however, does push a random button and the TARDIS flies off. Their flight is intercepted by Biroc, who appears out of phase. His appearance also opens the TARDIS to time winds which damage K-9.
Biroc guides the TARDIS to the null space and then leaves, although giving a warning about the people they will soon meet. Seeing K-9 damaged, the Doctor has Romana start to repair him while the Doctor leaves the TARDIS to follow Biroc. The Doctor and Romana also note that they are in a bridge of space between E- and N-space.
The TARDIS shows up on the scanner of the human ship. Already thinking of leaving to find Biroc rather than attempting to wake another Tharl and potentially killing others (and cutting into their profits), Rorvik and two others leave the ship to investigate the TARDIS. They find it and attempt to gain entrance.
The Doctor follows Biroc through the void to a small castle gate. Inside is an old hall, covered in dust and cobwebs. Biroc finds a mirror and passes through it. The Doctor enters and starts looking around. As he does so, one of the suits of armor comes to life and lifts its sword to attack him. The Doctor dodges it but the armor continues to pursue him, soon joined by a second.
To determine if Rorvik and his crew are friendly or not, Romana leaves the TARDIS but gives Adric warning to wait for her signal. She converses with Rorvik, who becomes suspicious that she might be a time sensitive person and invites her back to his ship to examine the damage. Romana sends gives a signal for Adric to be cautious and wait in the TARDIS and then goes off with them.
Adric however, does not obey and instead waits a few minutes and then decides to head off looking for her and the Doctor with K-9. K-9 is still damaged and they soon get lost in the void. Adric gets an idea to help K-9, removing one of his ears to help him triangulate better. It helps K-9 but Adric becomes lost himself.
The Doctor manages to corner himself in such a way that the two robotic suits of armor damage themselves. He opens up their circuits and begins to interrogate them. They are Gundan warrior robots, designed to guard the gate. They lose power before they can elaborate leaving the Doctor frustrated. However, K-9 arrives at the gate and the Doctor decides to hook him up to give a temporary power boost to the robots.
On Rorvik's ship, he grabs Romana and hooks her up to the navigation unit. She is unable to provide complete navigation but she does give enough for the castle gate to show up on the scanner as a physical location. Rorvik decides to head out to investigate with most of the crew. He orders two crew members to bring out one of the Tharls to be woken up on his return.
Rorvik and his men arrive at the gate just as the Doctor is getting information about there being three gates and they all being one. They threaten him to reveal more but are distracted by one of the robots suddenly getting up and passing through the gate. The Doctor grabs K-9 and dodges through the fortress. At risk of being cornered again, he leaves K-9 and passes through the gate, leaving Rorvik and his crew alone with K-9.
The two remaining crewmen on Rorvik's ship pull out one of the Tharls but against orders, try to revive him. They end up electrocuting him instead and leave the body for someone else. However, the Tharl is not dead. He gets up and makes his way to the bridge where he finds Romana bound to the navigation chair. He loosens the straps but has to hide before undoing them completely as the two crewmen left behind enter.
The two men debate what to do with her and are startled by her opening her eyes and asking questions. They leave her on the bridge as Rorvik calls them over the radio to ready a piece of heavy equipment called the M-Z for transport. Romana then slips out of her loosened bonds and hides under a tarp in the equipment bay.
Rorvik and his men fire at the mirror gate but their weapons bounce back at them. Rorvik sends three men back to the ship while he radios to prep the M-Z. K-9 follows, attempting to get new masters but he is unceremoniously tossed out of the ship when he attempts to enter.
While the door is open, Adric slips in and hides under the same tarp as Romana. The tarp covers the M-Z, which is rolled out of the ship. However, it is left while the engineer, Lane, looks over the damaged warp drive. Romana and Adric slip out and look at the ship, discovering it is made of dwarf-star alloy. K-9 rolls up shrieking about the mass contraction of the null space. His warning alerts the crew and Romana is recaptured though Adric and K-9 run escape.
Romana is taken back inside the ship while the rest of the crew push the M-Z to the gate. Inside the ship, the loose Tharl, named Lazlo, emerges and knocks out Romana's guard. He takes her and they vanish to the gate and pass through it. They emerge in the upper balcony, watching Rorvik and his men.
After passing through the gate, the Doctor meets Biroc who appears to be waiting for him. Biroc informs him that although K-9 will be repaired, only organic matter may pass through the gate. The Doctor follows Biroc through a series of gardens until the both reemerge in the fortress at an earlier time. The Tharls are feasting about the table while being served by human slaves.
The Doctor realizes that the Tharls were the slave masters who ruled a great empire and built the Gundans. He also notes they show as little compassion for their slaves as did the human crew who has now enslaved the Tharls. The dinner is interrupted by a squad of Gundans who break in and attack the party. Romana, sensing danger, runs down to the Doctor. The Doctor is then instantly transported back to the present where Rorvik and his men surround the Doctor and Romana at the table.
Rorvik demands to know the secret of the mirror, believing it to be the way out, and refuses to believe that it can only be accessed by the Tharls or other time sensitives. K-9 Enters and warns the Doctor of the null space collapsing on itself. The Doctor is confused but Romana tells him that Rorvik's ship is made of dwarf star alloy, making it a matter sink in the void.
K-9 attempts to pass through the mirror but loses power. The Doctor runs toward him and Rorvik, frustrated at the lack of answers, prepares to shoot him. Through the mirror, the Doctor sees Biroc, admitting that the Tharls were wrong in their enslavement of others. He now plans to change the future.
Before Rorvik can fire, Adric appears from behind the M-Z device, threatening to fire it. The Doctor runs up and mans the controls, ordering Romana and Adric out while carrying K-9. He follows shortly after and all four reenter the TARDIS. Rorvik starts to pursue but decides not to bother. He fires the M-X at the mirror but the blast rebounds, destroying the device. Rorvik, becoming unhinged, leads his men back to the ship.
Once on the ship, Rorvik turns the ship so that it's engines point toward the fortress. He intends to create a back blow from the engines and try to shatter the mirror that way. The Doctor sees this on the scanner and heads out to stop him, fearing the rebound will destroy everything in the void. Romana comes with him to help.
Rorvik observes the Doctor and Romana entering the outer hull of the ship and goes after them. He also orders his men to wake the remaining Tharls. As Rorvik exits the ship, Biroc and Lazlo are hiding near it. Biroc follows while Lazlo enters the ship. Rorvik catches up to the Doctor and stops him from creating a power drain on the engine. Romana starts the process but Rorvik knocks her aside and stops the drain. Biroc appears beside them and tells the two Time Lords that they should do nothing. He takes their hands and the trio disappears as Rorvik gloats.
Inside the ship, the two low levels who tried to reanimate Lazlo, Sagan and Aldo, beg off and Royce tries to reanimate the Tharls. He electrocutes three of them and is preparing a fourth when Lazlo comes up behind him. Royce attacks him but Lazlo overpowers him, electrocuting him with a severed cable. Lazlo then begins to wake the other Tharls.
Biroc, Romana and the Doctor appear outside the TARDIS. The Doctor enters but Romana refuses, electing to stay in E-space with the Tharls rather than return to Gallifrey. The Doctor gives her K-9, telling her to fix him. The Doctor dematerializes in the TARDIS while Biroc, Romana and K-9 enter the fortress and pass through the mirror.
The human ship discharges it's engines but the blast rebounds off the mirror. Much of the fortress is destroyed along with the human ship. However, out of the wrecked hull, the reanimated Tharls emerge and pass through the mirror. The TARDIS briefly materializes in the Tharl's garden before disappearing again and returning to N-space. Romana and K-9 watch and the walk way with Biroc, promising to help him pass through time and free his remaining enslaved people.
Analysis
I think it is safe to say that Warriors' Gate is weird. In many ways, it reminds me of The Curse of Fenric in that there is more story here but that there wasn't enough time to put it down. Unlike Fenric though, I doubt any of that extra material was ever filmed.
First I must praise both the direction and conception of the story. The direction was very well done and you felt instantly in good hands with the opening tracking shot leading from the sleeping Tharls to the bridge. There were a lot of good camera shots and interesting points of view throughout the story. The conception was also quite good as the whiteness of the void gave it a surrealistic feel. Yet at the same time, there was a feeling of being grounded in reality with the realism of the crew and even the Tharl's abandoned fortress. The gardens were also bathed in surrealism, keeping the watcher heavily off-balance as to what was really going on. So from a visual point of view, this story is excellent.
I also enjoyed the acting for the most part as well. The Doctor had a bit of a minimal role in this one and was off on his own quite a lot. In many ways, this was Romana's story and she did very well. Her confidence was well on display and she held her own very well against the human crew, who also acted fairly well although with a caveat or two.
Adric was also pretty good, being used lightly and mostly for comic relief. Contrasting earlier Adric stories with later ones, the key for him is in limiting his screen time. He should always be a junior companion, with a stronger character taking the main companion role. The problems arose when he was elevated to senior companion in the Fifth Doctor era and tried to hold his own against Tegan and Nyssa. It was in this overexposure that his character flaws, as well as the limits of Matthew Waterhouse's acting, rose to the surface and made him unlikeable.
Rorvik dominates among the crew and he does fairly well, especially as his mania to escape grows. He does lose it in his final gloat scene. That was over-the-top and poorly acted in contrast to his excellent earlier performance. It leaves an unfortunate bad aftertaste.
The rest of the crew is also pretty good, although fairly unremarkable. I got the feeling that there might have been a bit more backstory with Sagan and Aldo as these two were clearly designed to be a comic relief team in the Robert Holmes double act vein. However, they don't do much other than look disinterested in Rorvik's orders and bow out whenever it comes to doing anything that might inflict actual harm on anyone. Their repugnance as electrocuting Lazlo is shown and you can see that humanitarian side when they beg off attempting another revival. But without time or development, they just sort of are there and you don't feel that bad for them after they are blown up with the rest of the ship.
So you have good acting and good visuals. The problems with this story arise in the storytelling. I can handle weird just fine, Kinda being a prime example of an excellent but off-the-wall story. Warriors' Gate however suffers from a lack of focus. Surreal and odd is fine, if it is held in a tight focus or gives something that allows the audience to grab on to at the end to try and make a measure of sense of it. The Mind Robber would probably be a good example of surrealism explained.
However, in this story, the focus shifts all over the place. There are sidebars with minor characters and the main thrust of the Tharl's story is split between the more standard adventures with Romana and the highly surrealistic adventures with the Doctor. I think the ultimate problem is time. There is more to the story and that was cut out of it. I'd be curious if the cuts were made from the original run or if additional cuts had to be made because of the Romana leaving inclusion. Either way, the fall of the Tharls, their enslavement and the source of their power are never really resolved. Nor is it ever really addressed as to how the return of the Tharls to their gardens allows the TARDIS to pass through the gate and back into N-space. It just leaves you hanging and that leaves a bit of a bad aftertaste with the story.
I also wish Romana had been given a bit more time in her leaving. It was hinted at with her reluctance to return to Gallifrey at the end of Meglos and it returned here in Episode One where she expresses disdain at the idea. So her leaving is not out of the blue. However, it is so rushed that it just feels almost backhanded. I know that they were up against the clock but I would have liked a moment between the two Time Lords in the Tharl gardens. It would have also could have provided a better explanation as to how the Doctor and Adric got to N-space through some action of Biroc's or the like. Of course, the episode was running long so that was essentially impossible, but I think it would have made for a more palatable end.
Overall, I'm torn. The story looked good and was well acted. But the pacing got too fast at the end and the story had too many holes and loose threads. It is enjoyable enough and I would not call it bad, but there is not enough to compel me to actively seek this one out to watch again. But for the visuals and portrayals, I'll easily sit through it and find enjoyment in that.
Overall personal score: 3 out of 5
Friday, January 27, 2017
State of Decay
There's nothing worse than a peasant with indigestion.
State of Decay is the second part of the E-space trilogy and also a holdover story. Terrance Dicks originally wrote this story back for the Philip Hinchcliff era but it got put on the shelf because it would have gone on around the same time as a BBC production of Count Dracula and that would have been too much vampire at one time. The one thing I don't know is if Terrance Dicks was brought back to rework the script or if Christopher Bidmead just took the script as submitted and reworked it with his own twists. Bidmead certainly would have added all the references to E-space so he may have just done the whole thing himself.
Plot Summary
The Doctor and Romana land on an Earth-like planet, hoping to find help in getting out of E-space and back into N-space. The planet they land on has only one village surrounding a large tower in which are "the Three Who Rule": the king, Zargo, the queen, Camilla and the councilor Aukon. The Doctor and Romana explore the town which appears to be medieval in style. However after they leave, the headman of the village, Ivo, alerts others using a radio communicator.
K-9 is left on the TARDIS to do some calculations and discovers that Adric has stowed away. While he cautions him, Adric convinces K-9 to let him out of the TARDIS to explore on his own. He also comes to the village and is taken in by Ivo and his wife, Marta, as their son was recently taken by the Three Who Rule to serve in the tower.
The Doctor and Romana walk out of town, hoping to find other settlements but are taken by a group of rebels, who oppose the Three. They are taken to their lair where they have been trying to figure out how to work some antiquated technology they found. The Doctor and Romana look it over and manage to get it working. The computer is a primitive one and came from a cargo ship that left Earth but was pulled into E-space through a CVE. The computer lists three crew members and pulls up their pictures. One of the rebels was once a guard of the tower and recognizes their faces as the Three.
Concerned, the Doctor and Romana leave the rebels and head back towards the village. They are unaware that one of the guards in town reported their presence to the Three. Aukon dispatches a cloud of bats to find the Doctor and Romana. The cloud discovers the two walking towards the village and one bites the Doctor. The cloud engulfs them as they hunker down but lifts and flies back to the tower. As they do, a squad of guards finds the Doctor and Romana and takes them to the tower.
In the tower, the Doctor and Romana are greeted by the king and queen. They are welcoming but become increasingly nervous by the Doctor and Romana's intelligence and their knowledge of the old spacecraft. The Queen becomes somewhat entranced when Romana cuts her finger on a broken glass, but manages to break her gaze.
Outside the tower Aukon enters the meeting house, having detected a third alien intelligence when scanning for the Doctor and Romana. He orders the patrons to line up, including Adric. He quickly zeros on Adric, who also gives himself away with a questioning and slightly defiant attitude. Aukon takes the boy back to the tower.
The king and queen are summoned by Aukon, leaving the Doctor and Romana alone in the throne room. Aukon has hypnotized Adric and informs the others that the time of the great awakening is at hand. The king and queen are pleased but still hesitant about the Doctor and Romana.
The Doctor theorizes that the tower is actually the old space ship and he searches around and finds an access passage below the thrones. They enter it and find old control mechanisms. Descending further, they find hibernation chambers with the other crew but all have been drained of fluid. The tanks, normally full of fuel, are instead filled with blood.
The Doctor and Romana enter the base of the tower to find a large cave with Aukon waiting for them, having been alerted by the king and queen of the Doctor and Romana's escape. He tells them of a great awakening and how they will be part of the Great One's plans. Aukon attempts to hypnotize the Doctor but he resists and closes his eyes. Though he resists, the king and queen return and the two are taken captive. They are also informed of Adric being taken, though they were unaware that Adric had snuck aboard the TARDIS.
Back at the rebel lair, one of the rebels, Tarak, decides to go and help the Doctor, having been a tower guard. He goes alone as no one will aid him. He sneaks in and knocks out one of the guards, stealing his uniform. He watches as Romana and the Doctor are led into a chamber to await being offered to the Great One while the Three sleep.
In the cell, the Doctor recalls a Gallifreian legend of a great war between the Time Lords and a race of great vampires. The Time Lords prevailed but one escaped and remains in hiding. The story triggers Romana's memory that she ran across an old order of Rassilon's in the archives to install a book of records in all Type 40 TARDISes. As they talk, Tarak breaks in, knocking out the guards and freeing them. They prepare to head back to the TARDIS but Romana remembers Adric. Tarak suggests the boy might be held in the keep. They decide that Tarak and Romana will rescue Adric while the Doctor heads back to the TARDIS to find Rassilon's record book.
Ivo meets the remaining rebels in their lair. He informs them that the Three are planning a great ceremony and this is the time that he will lead the village against them. He urges the rebels to aid them, but Kalmar defers, still believing that the time is not right. Ivo tells him that he will attack anyway.
In the TARDIS, the Doctor and K-9 search the TARDIS mainframe but find nothing. The Doctor then remembers there are old data tapes and discovers the records among them. The records validate the story he heard and that one vampire did escape the Time Lords. He also learns that the only way to kill the vampire is to totally destroy it's heart, which the Time Lords did by crafting ships that fired steel bolts into their hearts.
Romana and Tarak head down to the keep where Zargo and Camilla are sleeping. They find Adric but in trying to wake him, they wake the other two. They attack Romana and Tarak. Tarak tries to fight them off but Zargo kills him in the fight. Camilla, angry at the loss of live blood, turns and attacks Romana and Adric. Romana tries to run but Zargo grabs her. Aukon however stops them, insisting that Adric will become one of them and Romana is to be sacrificed to the Great One. The two are taken to the throne room and bound.
The Doctor decides that he needs help and rematerializes the TARDIS in the rebel's lair. Using the scanner that he and Kalmar fixes, the Doctor shows them the Great Vampire sleeping beneath the tower. Ivo is summoned and the Doctor makes a plan where the people will storm the tower with K-9. They will take out the guards while the Three are busy with the ceremony. That will give the Doctor time to put his own plan into action.
In the tower, Romana appeals to Adric to help her. He defers, stating that as they have lost, he doesn't see what good it does to be on the losing side. He appeals to Aukon that as he will be joining them, he shouldn't be bound. Aukon agrees and allows him out of his bonds. The Three then take Romana and Adric down to the crypt.
As the ceremony begins, the townspeople storm the tower with K-9 stunning guards as well. They take the throne room and the Doctor heads into the service areas again, ordering the townsfolk to take care of the remaining guards and then evacuating the tower when K-9 gives the signal. The Doctor finds three different control rooms but two of the three are completely out of power. The third however does have a little battery power left and the Doctor initiates a launch. K-9 orders evacuation while the Doctor heads down to the crypt.
The ceremony is interrupted by the launch of the spaceship. Adric tries to attack the Three and free Romana, but he is slapped aside. The Great Vampire begins to emerge from it's tomb as the ship takes off. The ship climbs into the atmosphere and then U-turns back to it's launching point. The spire of the ship buries itself into the tomb of the Great Vampire, piercing it's heart and killing it.
The Doctor enters to rescue Romana and Adric and the Three try to attack him. However, without the Great Vampire, they lose their power and decay into dust. The villagers enter prepared to fight but find the battle over. They thank the Doctor and Kalmar asks the Doctor for help with the technology. He conducts some minor repairs but tells them to work it out on their own, which would allow them to flourish as their own technological civilization. He, Romana, Adric and K-9 then leave in the TARDIS.
Analysis
I really enjoyed this one. You can trust Terrance Dicks to craft a good, straight-forward story and the return to gothic horror is a nice interlude from the heavy hand of science that Christopher Bidmead can sometimes use. Yet, science is still used and the vampires explained away without invoking the normal religious tropes that would have gone against the show's format.
Both the Doctor and Romana are quite good in this. The Doctor is serious and does not take the threat lightly but he also cracks quips here and there, putting the vampires off their game slightly with his seeming whimsy. Romana is very active in this one and there is a seriousness to her as well that is occasionally absent in some of the lighter fare. Given when this was originally planned to run, I would assume that Terrance Dicks originally wrote the companion as Leela and I think a degree of that direct action was retained in Romana's character, which suits her.
Adric was pretty good in this as well, but I think that is also because he was largely absent from the story. Again, going back to when this was originally written, Adric probably took the role that was originally written for Ivo's son. There are a few references to him after the opening scene where he was taken but he seems mostly to have been dropped other than as a motivator for Ivo to finally rebel. But if he was supposed to be in the position that Adric was, the scenes that remained make a lot more sense. Still, the limited use of Adric allows him to focus better which improves his acting. It also helps that as the Doctor and Romana are still getting to know him, his apparent betrayal of them is much more believable, even if his efforts to help were effectively useless in the end.
The Three were pretty good, although they could get a touch over the top at times, especially Aukon. He had a quite creepy vibe to him but his near-religious frenzy regarding the Great Vampire was a bit much at times. I think Camilla got into the vampire spirit best as I got a lot of classic vampire movie vibe from her performances, especially when she was giving into the blood frenzy. I think that if the music had been a bit different, this would have been really scary for kids and it still might have for all I know.
I was also amused that the Three have positions that are actually inverse of their own standing. They were styled as Zargo the king, Camilla the queen and Aukon the chamberlain. However, it is Aukon that is in communion with the Great Vampire and seems to have the most actual power. Camilla likewise is clearly stronger and more given over to her vampiric powers than either of them. Zargo is more like a weak king who is led by the nose by the other two, though he too does display a measure of ferocity when given over to the vampiric lusts.
The Great Vampire is an interesting idea, though not great in execution. There is a model shot of him on the scanner that looks pretty bad and then you only see his hand emerging from the ground before the spire of the ship pierces him. That was probably a good thing as I doubt they could have made him look that good and they probably wanted to avoid a situation like The Dæmons where the antagonist just looked bad. Still, it did make for a bit of an anticlimax in how easily he was dispatched, which in turn destroyed the Three so easily.
The sets and costumes looked quite good. It is very difficult to fault the BBC on anything that looks period and this one is no exception. About the only bad moment was the climax as the model of the spaceship flying to its apex did look very much like a model and superimposing of the Great Vampire in the crypt through green screen also looked rather fake. But those are small nits to pick in an otherwise well done story. As good as it looked, I wish the whole thing could have been done on film instead of just the outside scenes as that would have added a whole new level to the gothic horror element.
One thing I will appreciate is how much Christopher Bidmead restrained his hand in reworking this story. Obviously he had to add the stuff about E-space and the scenes with Adric, presumably dropping other scenes as well to make room. But in all of this, he did not give over to his natural desires to impose science everywhere. He did toss the beginnings of a small argument about the nature of science between Kalmar and one of the other rebels just as the Doctor arrives in the TARDIS early in Episode Four, but aside from that, he left the gothic horror as it was. Granted, he was probably mollified enough by the use of technology but given the potential mystical origins for the Vampire race and their war with the Time Lords, I'm still impressed that he didn't muck with that. I think with too much change, the essence of this story would have been lost and I appreciate leaving it with the air of unknown and mystery.
I can always tell when I genuinely enjoyed a story as I usually have trouble doing a full write up of it. It's always much easier to write about things that don't work and how they could have been fixed rather than just stating that a story works well for these reasons. This was not a perfect story as I did have some small problems with it, but the overall structure, the acting and the production made it a highly enjoyable story. I could easily watch this one again without complaint.
Overall personal score: 4.5 out of 5
State of Decay is the second part of the E-space trilogy and also a holdover story. Terrance Dicks originally wrote this story back for the Philip Hinchcliff era but it got put on the shelf because it would have gone on around the same time as a BBC production of Count Dracula and that would have been too much vampire at one time. The one thing I don't know is if Terrance Dicks was brought back to rework the script or if Christopher Bidmead just took the script as submitted and reworked it with his own twists. Bidmead certainly would have added all the references to E-space so he may have just done the whole thing himself.
Plot Summary
The Doctor and Romana land on an Earth-like planet, hoping to find help in getting out of E-space and back into N-space. The planet they land on has only one village surrounding a large tower in which are "the Three Who Rule": the king, Zargo, the queen, Camilla and the councilor Aukon. The Doctor and Romana explore the town which appears to be medieval in style. However after they leave, the headman of the village, Ivo, alerts others using a radio communicator.
K-9 is left on the TARDIS to do some calculations and discovers that Adric has stowed away. While he cautions him, Adric convinces K-9 to let him out of the TARDIS to explore on his own. He also comes to the village and is taken in by Ivo and his wife, Marta, as their son was recently taken by the Three Who Rule to serve in the tower.
The Doctor and Romana walk out of town, hoping to find other settlements but are taken by a group of rebels, who oppose the Three. They are taken to their lair where they have been trying to figure out how to work some antiquated technology they found. The Doctor and Romana look it over and manage to get it working. The computer is a primitive one and came from a cargo ship that left Earth but was pulled into E-space through a CVE. The computer lists three crew members and pulls up their pictures. One of the rebels was once a guard of the tower and recognizes their faces as the Three.
Concerned, the Doctor and Romana leave the rebels and head back towards the village. They are unaware that one of the guards in town reported their presence to the Three. Aukon dispatches a cloud of bats to find the Doctor and Romana. The cloud discovers the two walking towards the village and one bites the Doctor. The cloud engulfs them as they hunker down but lifts and flies back to the tower. As they do, a squad of guards finds the Doctor and Romana and takes them to the tower.
In the tower, the Doctor and Romana are greeted by the king and queen. They are welcoming but become increasingly nervous by the Doctor and Romana's intelligence and their knowledge of the old spacecraft. The Queen becomes somewhat entranced when Romana cuts her finger on a broken glass, but manages to break her gaze.
Outside the tower Aukon enters the meeting house, having detected a third alien intelligence when scanning for the Doctor and Romana. He orders the patrons to line up, including Adric. He quickly zeros on Adric, who also gives himself away with a questioning and slightly defiant attitude. Aukon takes the boy back to the tower.
The king and queen are summoned by Aukon, leaving the Doctor and Romana alone in the throne room. Aukon has hypnotized Adric and informs the others that the time of the great awakening is at hand. The king and queen are pleased but still hesitant about the Doctor and Romana.
The Doctor theorizes that the tower is actually the old space ship and he searches around and finds an access passage below the thrones. They enter it and find old control mechanisms. Descending further, they find hibernation chambers with the other crew but all have been drained of fluid. The tanks, normally full of fuel, are instead filled with blood.
The Doctor and Romana enter the base of the tower to find a large cave with Aukon waiting for them, having been alerted by the king and queen of the Doctor and Romana's escape. He tells them of a great awakening and how they will be part of the Great One's plans. Aukon attempts to hypnotize the Doctor but he resists and closes his eyes. Though he resists, the king and queen return and the two are taken captive. They are also informed of Adric being taken, though they were unaware that Adric had snuck aboard the TARDIS.
Back at the rebel lair, one of the rebels, Tarak, decides to go and help the Doctor, having been a tower guard. He goes alone as no one will aid him. He sneaks in and knocks out one of the guards, stealing his uniform. He watches as Romana and the Doctor are led into a chamber to await being offered to the Great One while the Three sleep.
In the cell, the Doctor recalls a Gallifreian legend of a great war between the Time Lords and a race of great vampires. The Time Lords prevailed but one escaped and remains in hiding. The story triggers Romana's memory that she ran across an old order of Rassilon's in the archives to install a book of records in all Type 40 TARDISes. As they talk, Tarak breaks in, knocking out the guards and freeing them. They prepare to head back to the TARDIS but Romana remembers Adric. Tarak suggests the boy might be held in the keep. They decide that Tarak and Romana will rescue Adric while the Doctor heads back to the TARDIS to find Rassilon's record book.
Ivo meets the remaining rebels in their lair. He informs them that the Three are planning a great ceremony and this is the time that he will lead the village against them. He urges the rebels to aid them, but Kalmar defers, still believing that the time is not right. Ivo tells him that he will attack anyway.
In the TARDIS, the Doctor and K-9 search the TARDIS mainframe but find nothing. The Doctor then remembers there are old data tapes and discovers the records among them. The records validate the story he heard and that one vampire did escape the Time Lords. He also learns that the only way to kill the vampire is to totally destroy it's heart, which the Time Lords did by crafting ships that fired steel bolts into their hearts.
Romana and Tarak head down to the keep where Zargo and Camilla are sleeping. They find Adric but in trying to wake him, they wake the other two. They attack Romana and Tarak. Tarak tries to fight them off but Zargo kills him in the fight. Camilla, angry at the loss of live blood, turns and attacks Romana and Adric. Romana tries to run but Zargo grabs her. Aukon however stops them, insisting that Adric will become one of them and Romana is to be sacrificed to the Great One. The two are taken to the throne room and bound.
The Doctor decides that he needs help and rematerializes the TARDIS in the rebel's lair. Using the scanner that he and Kalmar fixes, the Doctor shows them the Great Vampire sleeping beneath the tower. Ivo is summoned and the Doctor makes a plan where the people will storm the tower with K-9. They will take out the guards while the Three are busy with the ceremony. That will give the Doctor time to put his own plan into action.
In the tower, Romana appeals to Adric to help her. He defers, stating that as they have lost, he doesn't see what good it does to be on the losing side. He appeals to Aukon that as he will be joining them, he shouldn't be bound. Aukon agrees and allows him out of his bonds. The Three then take Romana and Adric down to the crypt.
As the ceremony begins, the townspeople storm the tower with K-9 stunning guards as well. They take the throne room and the Doctor heads into the service areas again, ordering the townsfolk to take care of the remaining guards and then evacuating the tower when K-9 gives the signal. The Doctor finds three different control rooms but two of the three are completely out of power. The third however does have a little battery power left and the Doctor initiates a launch. K-9 orders evacuation while the Doctor heads down to the crypt.
The ceremony is interrupted by the launch of the spaceship. Adric tries to attack the Three and free Romana, but he is slapped aside. The Great Vampire begins to emerge from it's tomb as the ship takes off. The ship climbs into the atmosphere and then U-turns back to it's launching point. The spire of the ship buries itself into the tomb of the Great Vampire, piercing it's heart and killing it.
The Doctor enters to rescue Romana and Adric and the Three try to attack him. However, without the Great Vampire, they lose their power and decay into dust. The villagers enter prepared to fight but find the battle over. They thank the Doctor and Kalmar asks the Doctor for help with the technology. He conducts some minor repairs but tells them to work it out on their own, which would allow them to flourish as their own technological civilization. He, Romana, Adric and K-9 then leave in the TARDIS.
Analysis
I really enjoyed this one. You can trust Terrance Dicks to craft a good, straight-forward story and the return to gothic horror is a nice interlude from the heavy hand of science that Christopher Bidmead can sometimes use. Yet, science is still used and the vampires explained away without invoking the normal religious tropes that would have gone against the show's format.
Both the Doctor and Romana are quite good in this. The Doctor is serious and does not take the threat lightly but he also cracks quips here and there, putting the vampires off their game slightly with his seeming whimsy. Romana is very active in this one and there is a seriousness to her as well that is occasionally absent in some of the lighter fare. Given when this was originally planned to run, I would assume that Terrance Dicks originally wrote the companion as Leela and I think a degree of that direct action was retained in Romana's character, which suits her.
Adric was pretty good in this as well, but I think that is also because he was largely absent from the story. Again, going back to when this was originally written, Adric probably took the role that was originally written for Ivo's son. There are a few references to him after the opening scene where he was taken but he seems mostly to have been dropped other than as a motivator for Ivo to finally rebel. But if he was supposed to be in the position that Adric was, the scenes that remained make a lot more sense. Still, the limited use of Adric allows him to focus better which improves his acting. It also helps that as the Doctor and Romana are still getting to know him, his apparent betrayal of them is much more believable, even if his efforts to help were effectively useless in the end.
The Three were pretty good, although they could get a touch over the top at times, especially Aukon. He had a quite creepy vibe to him but his near-religious frenzy regarding the Great Vampire was a bit much at times. I think Camilla got into the vampire spirit best as I got a lot of classic vampire movie vibe from her performances, especially when she was giving into the blood frenzy. I think that if the music had been a bit different, this would have been really scary for kids and it still might have for all I know.
I was also amused that the Three have positions that are actually inverse of their own standing. They were styled as Zargo the king, Camilla the queen and Aukon the chamberlain. However, it is Aukon that is in communion with the Great Vampire and seems to have the most actual power. Camilla likewise is clearly stronger and more given over to her vampiric powers than either of them. Zargo is more like a weak king who is led by the nose by the other two, though he too does display a measure of ferocity when given over to the vampiric lusts.
The Great Vampire is an interesting idea, though not great in execution. There is a model shot of him on the scanner that looks pretty bad and then you only see his hand emerging from the ground before the spire of the ship pierces him. That was probably a good thing as I doubt they could have made him look that good and they probably wanted to avoid a situation like The Dæmons where the antagonist just looked bad. Still, it did make for a bit of an anticlimax in how easily he was dispatched, which in turn destroyed the Three so easily.
The sets and costumes looked quite good. It is very difficult to fault the BBC on anything that looks period and this one is no exception. About the only bad moment was the climax as the model of the spaceship flying to its apex did look very much like a model and superimposing of the Great Vampire in the crypt through green screen also looked rather fake. But those are small nits to pick in an otherwise well done story. As good as it looked, I wish the whole thing could have been done on film instead of just the outside scenes as that would have added a whole new level to the gothic horror element.
One thing I will appreciate is how much Christopher Bidmead restrained his hand in reworking this story. Obviously he had to add the stuff about E-space and the scenes with Adric, presumably dropping other scenes as well to make room. But in all of this, he did not give over to his natural desires to impose science everywhere. He did toss the beginnings of a small argument about the nature of science between Kalmar and one of the other rebels just as the Doctor arrives in the TARDIS early in Episode Four, but aside from that, he left the gothic horror as it was. Granted, he was probably mollified enough by the use of technology but given the potential mystical origins for the Vampire race and their war with the Time Lords, I'm still impressed that he didn't muck with that. I think with too much change, the essence of this story would have been lost and I appreciate leaving it with the air of unknown and mystery.
I can always tell when I genuinely enjoyed a story as I usually have trouble doing a full write up of it. It's always much easier to write about things that don't work and how they could have been fixed rather than just stating that a story works well for these reasons. This was not a perfect story as I did have some small problems with it, but the overall structure, the acting and the production made it a highly enjoyable story. I could easily watch this one again without complaint.
Overall personal score: 4.5 out of 5
Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Destiny of the Daleks
If you're supposed to be the superior race of the universe, why don't you try climbing after us.
Growing up, I have fairly solid recollections of three Doctor Who stories: Masque of Mandragora, The Face of Evil, and The Invasion of Time. However, I have a vague recollection of another story and I think it might be Destiny of the Daleks so I'm curious to see if I was right. I'm also curious to see if this story is as bad as it's reputation suggests as it is generally regarded as the worst of all the classic Dalek stories.
Plot Summary
Romana regenerates into a form similar to Princess Astra, although she tries a couple of other styles before settling on it. The Doctor is meanwhile tinkering with K-9 and accidentally faults his voicebox, giving him a robotic version of laryngitis. Using the randomizer to avoid the Black Guardian, they land on an unknown planet in the middle of a rocky ruin.
Noting high levels of radiation, they take anti-radiation pills and leave to explore. While exploring the ruins, they observe a group of humanoids performing a quick burial, piling the body with stones. They also observe a space ship landing and then burying itself part way into the ground. They attempt to approach it, but it fires at them and drives them into one of the buildings for shelter.
In the building, an earthquake occurs and the Doctor ends up trapped under a column. Romana heads back to the TARDIS to get K-9 to help lift the beam but the same earthquake dislodged stones, blocking the entrance to the TARDIS. While she is gone, the Doctor is captured by a squad from the spaceship who are called Movellans. They take him back to their ship where they reveal that they are on the planet Skaro.
Romana returns to find the Doctor gone. She is startled by the appearance of a humanoid and backing away from him, she falls into the lower level. Her fall alerts the Daleks who break through a section and take her prisoner. The human who startled her observes this and is shortly afterward captured by the Movellans. His name is Tyssan and he was a prisoner of the Daleks who escaped. He tells the Doctor and the Movellans of the Daleks capture of Romana and that they are drilling for something, using captured humanoids to clear away the debris as they do.
Romana is interrogated by the Daleks and once she is found to not be an agent against the Daleks, she is sent into the tunnels to work. Feeling the effects of radiation exposure, she is weakened but informed by other prisoners that the only way out is death. Romana continues to work for a while and then stops her hearts, putting herself in suspended animation, simulating death. When the work cycle is finished, the Daleks order other prisoners to take her to the surface and bury her.
The Doctor, Tyssan, Commander Sharrel and two other Movellans enter the tunnel to find out what the Daleks are up to and to rescue Romana. Their presence alerts the Daleks who investigate. This clears the control room and the Doctor examines their plans, deducing that the Daleks are digging to find the old Kaled science bunker. The Doctor also realizes that the Daleks are unaware of an old service shaft leading to the level below the bunker. He and the Movellans leave to make for the shaft. The Daleks discover one of the Movellan guards left behind to guard and shoots him down, but the rest of the party escapes.
They discover Romana's grave on the surface but she has already emerged from it and rejoins the Doctor. The group heads down the service shaft and enters the fourth level where they find the preserved body of Davros, which the Doctor had suspected they were looking for. As the Daleks begin to drill in, a cave in buries one Movellan while leaving Commander Sharrel on the other side. Davros begins to reanimate and calls out for the Daleks, attracting the attention of the Doctor, Romana and Tyssan. With the Daleks about to drill in, the Doctor pushes Davros down the hallway to a room where a window to the surface has been exposed. He sends Romana and Tyssan out to the Movellan spacecraft while he stays with Davros.
Romana and Tyssan make their way through the country, trying to avoid Dalek patrols. They spot one Dalek and separate with Tyssan trying to attract the Dalek's attention. The Dalek fires towards him, but this action attracts the attention of the Movellans who destroy the Dalek with a long range cannon. Romana then makes her way to the ship. Inside, she informs the Movellans that the Doctor is in trouble but notices that they already have a feed of Davros and that the Movellan who was buried in the cave in is alive and working like normal. They stun Romana, knocking her out.
The Doctor sees the Daleks approaching but holds them off with a blasting explosive he picked up, saying that he will kill Davros. The Daleks leave but return with the humanoids they had used in the mines and begin killing them. The Doctor orders them to stop and agrees to turn over Davros if the people are allowed to go free and if he is given a one minute head start. Davros agrees and the prisoners are sent out. The Doctor attaches the bomb to Davros' chair, threatening to blow it up remotely and then leaves via the window. Davros orders the Daleks to remove the bomb and as he leaves the room the Doctor detonates it, destroying the two Daleks holding it but leaving Davros alive.
The Doctor is found by Tyssan who had just sent the released prisoners into hiding. They are captured by a Dalek patrol but the Dalek is destroyed by a Movellan guard. The guard tries to take the Doctor prisoner but he manages to short circuit it as he has realized the Movellans are androids.
With the failure to capture the Doctor, the Movellans place Romana in an isolation tube in the open with an incendiary device. The Doctor observes Romana in the tube and approaches it alone, telling Tyssan to stay in hiding. As he crouches near the tube, the Movellan's knock him out and take both him and Romana back into the ship, having elected not to waste the bomb on Romana with the Doctor captured. Tyssan then runs back to where the other prisoners are hiding.
The Doctor wakes on the Movellan ship where they explain that they are caught in a stalemate with the Dalek fleet. The Doctor demonstrates with Romana and a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors how their and the Dalek's slavery to logic has produced the stalemate. The Movellans decide to take the Doctor with them to reprogram their computers to fight the Daleks. The Doctor reasons this is why the Daleks have awakened Davros as well.
Commander Sharrel dispatches one of his men to set up the bomb that will ignite the Skaroan atmosphere and destroy the Daleks with the man to stay behind to ensure detonation manually. He goes and sets up the bomb but is disarmed and reprogrammed by Tyssan and the other prisoners who get the drop on him. They do the same for another Movellan sent to investigate. Using the two as cover, the prisoners storm the ship and deactivate all the Movellans except for Commander Sharrel who slips away.
The Doctor leaves the prisoners and Romana to rework the Movellan ship while he goes after Davros. On his way he observes a number of Daleks equipped with detonation charges heading towards the Movellan ship. He slips in to the Dalek base and confronts Davros who is planning to sacrifice those Daleks to destroy the Movellans as a Dalek transport ship is coming to pick him up. One Dalek is left behind to guard Davros and it takes the Doctor prisoner.
After finishing repairs to the ship, Romana notices that Commander Sharrel is missing just as the Daleks arrive. She races out of the ship while several other prisoners come out and hold back the Daleks using the Movellan weapons. Romana gets free but the prisoners are pushed back into the Movellan ship. Romana finds a damaged Sharrel and manages to stop him from detonating the bomb. She then pulls off his power pack and leaves the powerless body as she takes the bomb away.
The Doctor takes his hat and props in on the Dalek guard's eyestalk. The Dalek begins firing indiscriminately until it runs into a wall and explodes. The Doctor then wrestles with Davros but gives way deliberately, letting him fall forward on the button that sets off the explosives on the Daleks. The Daleks explode before they can circle the Movellan ship, leaving it undamaged.
The Doctor takes Davros to the Movellan ship and places him in cryogenic stasis while Tyssan programs the Movellan ship to rendezvous with an Earth transport to take Davros away for trial against all civilized races. Before the ship can take off, the Doctor and Romana dash out and return to the TARDIS where they depart Skaro.
Analysis
This wasn't as bad as I was expecting. In many ways, it's actually a decent story, one of the more engaging ones that Terry Nation put together. Admittedly, Douglas Adams rewrote a good portion of it and most of the stuff that I didn't care for was blatantly Douglas Adams' additions. But there were other problems that took this down from a good story to a more middling story.
The Doctor is good in this one but rather dark. He is witty and snappy and it works very well. But he also has a few quips that are rather needling and play up the Daleks as fools. He also goes so far as to detonate the bomb he set up, which could have easily killed Davros had he not removed it. Granted, the Doctor was probably assuming that the first thing Davros would do would be to remove the bomb, but it is still much closer to murder than we've seen the Doctor do in quite awhile. It just seems a bit out of character for him to go that far without an open provocation.
I like Romana in this too. I think from an overall perspective, I prefer the first Romana, but in this instance, the new Romana works well with the Doctor. She is not a damsel and her wearing a feminine version of the Doctor's outfit really suits her as she works very much as the Doctor's counterpart in this story. I especially like her taking the onus on herself to escape from the Dalek's mines by faking her own death. It didn't muck about in terms of time and she didn't spend any time pining about waiting for someone to rescue her. She saw how to do it and in a way that wouldn't cause anyone else to be harmed and just did it.
I did not really care for the joke generation. That and the scene with K-9 (a prep for introducing the new voice of K-9 in The Creature From the Pit) we're very obviously written by Douglas Adams and don't quite work for me. What bothers me is not the multiple bodies she goes through while regenerating (presumably as she has a measure of control over the changes before settling on a final form) but just in the fact that it wasn't that funny. Even if it had been funny, it would have been out of place given the dark and somewhat grim nature of this story. It's one thing to crack a joke to break tension in a dark story, but a scene like this belongs in an overt comedy story and it just doesn't work relative to the rest of the story.
One of the best things about this story is the camera work. Obviously anything on film look better than stuff on tape. But they also used a steady cam which gave such a smooth and sharp picture in the action scenes. On top of that, the director chose some excellent angles to film the Daleks, giving them the illusion of seeming to loom over the others. It made the Daleks seem much more menacing than you might have otherwise thought. It was really good work and enjoyable to watch, regardless of what was going on in the actual story.
Outside of the good points and the small flaws noted earlier, there are probably four points where the story falls short. First is Davros. Michael Wisher was not available so another actor was brought in. Unfortunately, the Davros mask from Genesis of the Daleks was the only one available and it was both falling apart and didn't fit the new actor very well. So it looks odd in any type of close up. He also sounds off. For people watching with four years separating the two appearances of Davros, they probably wouldn't have noticed, but when watched close you notice the voice changes and the total lack of subtlety. Davros is ranting from the start. Even in the moment between Davros and the Doctor in Episode Four where they try to talk as scientists, attempting to recreate the scene in Genesis, Davros is still going off half-cocked and sounds completely insane. It takes all the menace out of him that was there the first time around where his cold calculation was what really scared you.
Second is the production values. No way about it, the Daleks look bad. They are run down, their heads wobble when they spin and you could actually see the Dalek operators walking the Daleks toward the Movellan ship because they couldn't roll across the sand in the quarry. You can also see studio lights acting as the side lighting. There are also a couple of moments where the camera should have cut away but instead caught small mistakes like Davros bumping into the wall when driving away with the Daleks in Episode Three. The budget was being stretched and it unfortunately showed.
Third is the shift of the Daleks to robots. I'm sure any and all references to the Daleks being robots is a Douglas Adams change as Terry Nation would never have made that mistake. It is something impossible to reconcile and goes against everything ever known about the Daleks. Davros' whole point was to create the superior organic being. The idea of the Daleks being robots only would have insulted him. Having the Daleks be slaves to logic is fine but they were never nor should ever be considered as robots. It's a dumb change that could have easily been worked around.
Fourth is how the Movellans were done as androids. The design of the Movellans is very Seventies but that's fine. What doesn't quite work is how the Movellans were taken down. Rather than needing to fight them and blow parts of them off, they simply have belt clip power cells taken off and that seems overly weak. When they go down, it is also like they are in a slow motion dance which just looks weird. Half the time you don't even know what has happened, they just start dancing. The only instance where a fight seems real is when Romana breaks off Sharrel's arm and you see the wires coming out of it. Even then, Sharrel dances about until she rips off the power pack. It just looks silly and reduces what could have been a good idea in the Movellans to something ineffective.
There are other instances where the story gets a bit silly, most notably when the Doctor destroys a Dalek by putting his hat on the eyestalk. If there was anything that made the Daleks look pathetic, it was that. There is a story that Terry Nation deliberately didn't include K-9 (and Douglas Adams explained his absence) because he didn't want the robot dog to show up the Daleks. I'm not sure the Daleks could have been more shown up than they were at the end.
I think what makes all of this most frustrating is that there was so much good that was going for the story for about two and a half episodes. The production values and the problems with Davros were still minimal and the story ripped along and kept you engaged. But as soon as the Movellans' true motives came through and the Doctor and Romana had to work against them, all these other problems came to the fore and just dragged the story down.
That said, it is still an entertaining story and it keeps you engaged. At no point can I actively remember looking at the time and wondering when the story was going to be over because I was done with it. It worked fairly well, it just had a number of problems, many of which could have been fixed with a little more time, effort and focus on the heart of the story. But it does have those flaws and to give it anything better than a middling score would be asking to overlook too much.
Overall personal score: 2.5 out of 5
Growing up, I have fairly solid recollections of three Doctor Who stories: Masque of Mandragora, The Face of Evil, and The Invasion of Time. However, I have a vague recollection of another story and I think it might be Destiny of the Daleks so I'm curious to see if I was right. I'm also curious to see if this story is as bad as it's reputation suggests as it is generally regarded as the worst of all the classic Dalek stories.
Plot Summary
Romana regenerates into a form similar to Princess Astra, although she tries a couple of other styles before settling on it. The Doctor is meanwhile tinkering with K-9 and accidentally faults his voicebox, giving him a robotic version of laryngitis. Using the randomizer to avoid the Black Guardian, they land on an unknown planet in the middle of a rocky ruin.
Noting high levels of radiation, they take anti-radiation pills and leave to explore. While exploring the ruins, they observe a group of humanoids performing a quick burial, piling the body with stones. They also observe a space ship landing and then burying itself part way into the ground. They attempt to approach it, but it fires at them and drives them into one of the buildings for shelter.
In the building, an earthquake occurs and the Doctor ends up trapped under a column. Romana heads back to the TARDIS to get K-9 to help lift the beam but the same earthquake dislodged stones, blocking the entrance to the TARDIS. While she is gone, the Doctor is captured by a squad from the spaceship who are called Movellans. They take him back to their ship where they reveal that they are on the planet Skaro.
Romana returns to find the Doctor gone. She is startled by the appearance of a humanoid and backing away from him, she falls into the lower level. Her fall alerts the Daleks who break through a section and take her prisoner. The human who startled her observes this and is shortly afterward captured by the Movellans. His name is Tyssan and he was a prisoner of the Daleks who escaped. He tells the Doctor and the Movellans of the Daleks capture of Romana and that they are drilling for something, using captured humanoids to clear away the debris as they do.
Romana is interrogated by the Daleks and once she is found to not be an agent against the Daleks, she is sent into the tunnels to work. Feeling the effects of radiation exposure, she is weakened but informed by other prisoners that the only way out is death. Romana continues to work for a while and then stops her hearts, putting herself in suspended animation, simulating death. When the work cycle is finished, the Daleks order other prisoners to take her to the surface and bury her.
The Doctor, Tyssan, Commander Sharrel and two other Movellans enter the tunnel to find out what the Daleks are up to and to rescue Romana. Their presence alerts the Daleks who investigate. This clears the control room and the Doctor examines their plans, deducing that the Daleks are digging to find the old Kaled science bunker. The Doctor also realizes that the Daleks are unaware of an old service shaft leading to the level below the bunker. He and the Movellans leave to make for the shaft. The Daleks discover one of the Movellan guards left behind to guard and shoots him down, but the rest of the party escapes.
They discover Romana's grave on the surface but she has already emerged from it and rejoins the Doctor. The group heads down the service shaft and enters the fourth level where they find the preserved body of Davros, which the Doctor had suspected they were looking for. As the Daleks begin to drill in, a cave in buries one Movellan while leaving Commander Sharrel on the other side. Davros begins to reanimate and calls out for the Daleks, attracting the attention of the Doctor, Romana and Tyssan. With the Daleks about to drill in, the Doctor pushes Davros down the hallway to a room where a window to the surface has been exposed. He sends Romana and Tyssan out to the Movellan spacecraft while he stays with Davros.
Romana and Tyssan make their way through the country, trying to avoid Dalek patrols. They spot one Dalek and separate with Tyssan trying to attract the Dalek's attention. The Dalek fires towards him, but this action attracts the attention of the Movellans who destroy the Dalek with a long range cannon. Romana then makes her way to the ship. Inside, she informs the Movellans that the Doctor is in trouble but notices that they already have a feed of Davros and that the Movellan who was buried in the cave in is alive and working like normal. They stun Romana, knocking her out.
The Doctor sees the Daleks approaching but holds them off with a blasting explosive he picked up, saying that he will kill Davros. The Daleks leave but return with the humanoids they had used in the mines and begin killing them. The Doctor orders them to stop and agrees to turn over Davros if the people are allowed to go free and if he is given a one minute head start. Davros agrees and the prisoners are sent out. The Doctor attaches the bomb to Davros' chair, threatening to blow it up remotely and then leaves via the window. Davros orders the Daleks to remove the bomb and as he leaves the room the Doctor detonates it, destroying the two Daleks holding it but leaving Davros alive.
The Doctor is found by Tyssan who had just sent the released prisoners into hiding. They are captured by a Dalek patrol but the Dalek is destroyed by a Movellan guard. The guard tries to take the Doctor prisoner but he manages to short circuit it as he has realized the Movellans are androids.
With the failure to capture the Doctor, the Movellans place Romana in an isolation tube in the open with an incendiary device. The Doctor observes Romana in the tube and approaches it alone, telling Tyssan to stay in hiding. As he crouches near the tube, the Movellan's knock him out and take both him and Romana back into the ship, having elected not to waste the bomb on Romana with the Doctor captured. Tyssan then runs back to where the other prisoners are hiding.
The Doctor wakes on the Movellan ship where they explain that they are caught in a stalemate with the Dalek fleet. The Doctor demonstrates with Romana and a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors how their and the Dalek's slavery to logic has produced the stalemate. The Movellans decide to take the Doctor with them to reprogram their computers to fight the Daleks. The Doctor reasons this is why the Daleks have awakened Davros as well.
Commander Sharrel dispatches one of his men to set up the bomb that will ignite the Skaroan atmosphere and destroy the Daleks with the man to stay behind to ensure detonation manually. He goes and sets up the bomb but is disarmed and reprogrammed by Tyssan and the other prisoners who get the drop on him. They do the same for another Movellan sent to investigate. Using the two as cover, the prisoners storm the ship and deactivate all the Movellans except for Commander Sharrel who slips away.
The Doctor leaves the prisoners and Romana to rework the Movellan ship while he goes after Davros. On his way he observes a number of Daleks equipped with detonation charges heading towards the Movellan ship. He slips in to the Dalek base and confronts Davros who is planning to sacrifice those Daleks to destroy the Movellans as a Dalek transport ship is coming to pick him up. One Dalek is left behind to guard Davros and it takes the Doctor prisoner.
After finishing repairs to the ship, Romana notices that Commander Sharrel is missing just as the Daleks arrive. She races out of the ship while several other prisoners come out and hold back the Daleks using the Movellan weapons. Romana gets free but the prisoners are pushed back into the Movellan ship. Romana finds a damaged Sharrel and manages to stop him from detonating the bomb. She then pulls off his power pack and leaves the powerless body as she takes the bomb away.
The Doctor takes his hat and props in on the Dalek guard's eyestalk. The Dalek begins firing indiscriminately until it runs into a wall and explodes. The Doctor then wrestles with Davros but gives way deliberately, letting him fall forward on the button that sets off the explosives on the Daleks. The Daleks explode before they can circle the Movellan ship, leaving it undamaged.
The Doctor takes Davros to the Movellan ship and places him in cryogenic stasis while Tyssan programs the Movellan ship to rendezvous with an Earth transport to take Davros away for trial against all civilized races. Before the ship can take off, the Doctor and Romana dash out and return to the TARDIS where they depart Skaro.
Analysis
This wasn't as bad as I was expecting. In many ways, it's actually a decent story, one of the more engaging ones that Terry Nation put together. Admittedly, Douglas Adams rewrote a good portion of it and most of the stuff that I didn't care for was blatantly Douglas Adams' additions. But there were other problems that took this down from a good story to a more middling story.
The Doctor is good in this one but rather dark. He is witty and snappy and it works very well. But he also has a few quips that are rather needling and play up the Daleks as fools. He also goes so far as to detonate the bomb he set up, which could have easily killed Davros had he not removed it. Granted, the Doctor was probably assuming that the first thing Davros would do would be to remove the bomb, but it is still much closer to murder than we've seen the Doctor do in quite awhile. It just seems a bit out of character for him to go that far without an open provocation.
I like Romana in this too. I think from an overall perspective, I prefer the first Romana, but in this instance, the new Romana works well with the Doctor. She is not a damsel and her wearing a feminine version of the Doctor's outfit really suits her as she works very much as the Doctor's counterpart in this story. I especially like her taking the onus on herself to escape from the Dalek's mines by faking her own death. It didn't muck about in terms of time and she didn't spend any time pining about waiting for someone to rescue her. She saw how to do it and in a way that wouldn't cause anyone else to be harmed and just did it.
I did not really care for the joke generation. That and the scene with K-9 (a prep for introducing the new voice of K-9 in The Creature From the Pit) we're very obviously written by Douglas Adams and don't quite work for me. What bothers me is not the multiple bodies she goes through while regenerating (presumably as she has a measure of control over the changes before settling on a final form) but just in the fact that it wasn't that funny. Even if it had been funny, it would have been out of place given the dark and somewhat grim nature of this story. It's one thing to crack a joke to break tension in a dark story, but a scene like this belongs in an overt comedy story and it just doesn't work relative to the rest of the story.
One of the best things about this story is the camera work. Obviously anything on film look better than stuff on tape. But they also used a steady cam which gave such a smooth and sharp picture in the action scenes. On top of that, the director chose some excellent angles to film the Daleks, giving them the illusion of seeming to loom over the others. It made the Daleks seem much more menacing than you might have otherwise thought. It was really good work and enjoyable to watch, regardless of what was going on in the actual story.
Outside of the good points and the small flaws noted earlier, there are probably four points where the story falls short. First is Davros. Michael Wisher was not available so another actor was brought in. Unfortunately, the Davros mask from Genesis of the Daleks was the only one available and it was both falling apart and didn't fit the new actor very well. So it looks odd in any type of close up. He also sounds off. For people watching with four years separating the two appearances of Davros, they probably wouldn't have noticed, but when watched close you notice the voice changes and the total lack of subtlety. Davros is ranting from the start. Even in the moment between Davros and the Doctor in Episode Four where they try to talk as scientists, attempting to recreate the scene in Genesis, Davros is still going off half-cocked and sounds completely insane. It takes all the menace out of him that was there the first time around where his cold calculation was what really scared you.
Second is the production values. No way about it, the Daleks look bad. They are run down, their heads wobble when they spin and you could actually see the Dalek operators walking the Daleks toward the Movellan ship because they couldn't roll across the sand in the quarry. You can also see studio lights acting as the side lighting. There are also a couple of moments where the camera should have cut away but instead caught small mistakes like Davros bumping into the wall when driving away with the Daleks in Episode Three. The budget was being stretched and it unfortunately showed.
Third is the shift of the Daleks to robots. I'm sure any and all references to the Daleks being robots is a Douglas Adams change as Terry Nation would never have made that mistake. It is something impossible to reconcile and goes against everything ever known about the Daleks. Davros' whole point was to create the superior organic being. The idea of the Daleks being robots only would have insulted him. Having the Daleks be slaves to logic is fine but they were never nor should ever be considered as robots. It's a dumb change that could have easily been worked around.
Fourth is how the Movellans were done as androids. The design of the Movellans is very Seventies but that's fine. What doesn't quite work is how the Movellans were taken down. Rather than needing to fight them and blow parts of them off, they simply have belt clip power cells taken off and that seems overly weak. When they go down, it is also like they are in a slow motion dance which just looks weird. Half the time you don't even know what has happened, they just start dancing. The only instance where a fight seems real is when Romana breaks off Sharrel's arm and you see the wires coming out of it. Even then, Sharrel dances about until she rips off the power pack. It just looks silly and reduces what could have been a good idea in the Movellans to something ineffective.
There are other instances where the story gets a bit silly, most notably when the Doctor destroys a Dalek by putting his hat on the eyestalk. If there was anything that made the Daleks look pathetic, it was that. There is a story that Terry Nation deliberately didn't include K-9 (and Douglas Adams explained his absence) because he didn't want the robot dog to show up the Daleks. I'm not sure the Daleks could have been more shown up than they were at the end.
I think what makes all of this most frustrating is that there was so much good that was going for the story for about two and a half episodes. The production values and the problems with Davros were still minimal and the story ripped along and kept you engaged. But as soon as the Movellans' true motives came through and the Doctor and Romana had to work against them, all these other problems came to the fore and just dragged the story down.
That said, it is still an entertaining story and it keeps you engaged. At no point can I actively remember looking at the time and wondering when the story was going to be over because I was done with it. It worked fairly well, it just had a number of problems, many of which could have been fixed with a little more time, effort and focus on the heart of the story. But it does have those flaws and to give it anything better than a middling score would be asking to overlook too much.
Overall personal score: 2.5 out of 5
Friday, October 28, 2016
Full Circle
It has come full circle.
Part one of the E-Space trilogy and the introduction of Adric. I've heard good things about this, including the idea that Adric's introduction was also his best story. I can't speak to that, although I will admit that in the Adric stories I have seen, his acting is usually a bit subpar. Of course, he also has Nyssa who usually has less personality than a block of wood, to offset him, but that's a discussion for another time. Anyway, on to the story.
Plot Summary
The Doctor and Romana are returning to Gallifrey although Romana is unhappy about it. The TARDIS is suddenly caught in a bit of turbulence although no damage occurs. When it appears they have landed on Gallifrey, they find themselves on a totally different planet, the planet Alzarius. The Doctor and Romana begin to examine the TARDIS to figure out why they didn't materialize on Gallifrey.
Nearby a group of people are residing by a river. A small group of youths sneak from the underbrush and steal several river fruit that the people have gathered. Some of them give chase to the youths but they elude them and the youths gather in a nearby cave. They celebrate their theft, teasing Adric, the younger brother of Varsh, about his dreams of leaving in the starliner and his continual wearing of a badge for mathematical excellence he earned before leaving the society. Angered by this teasing, Adric vows to raid fruit by himself.
As Adric approaches the camp, the river and surrounded marsh begin to bubble and release large quantities of mist. First Decider Draith declares that mistfall is approaching and that everyone must follow established procedures. The people gather up their belongings and head back to a space craft where the other deciders and a scientist named Dexeter had been examining the river fruit, which have become infected with strange eggs.
Draith sees Adric stealing fruit and gives chase to him. Adric runs but trips, injuring his knee. Draith tries to grab him but Adric throws him off and Draith hits his head, stunning him. Draith begins to sink into the marsh. Adric tries to pull him out but an unseen force pulls harder and Draith is sucked into the river.
Injured and in shock, Adric stumbles away and discovers the TARDIS. He bangs on the doors and when Romana opens them, he collapses inside. She and the Doctor take him to a bed where Adric speaks of mistfall not being a legend as he had been told by his brother but true. The Doctor, beginning to suspect what has happened, heads out with K-9 to observe the mist. As he does so, a group of creatures begin to rise out of the water. The Doctor orders K-9 to follow the creatures while he heads off to investigate elsewhere.
Adric, fully healed from his injury, heads back to the cave where his brother and friends are. Romana has given him a homing device to find the TARDIS again should he need to. The others decide to hide in the TARDIS as they are locked out of the starliner. Adric feebly tries to stop them but fails. They enter the TARDIS as Romana had left the doors open and try to take control. Adric distracts his brother and Romana gets the drop on Tylos, although she returns his knife after holding it against his own throat as a measure of good faith. Their quarrels are put aside though when the Marshmen lift the TARDIS and drag it to the cave the youths were hiding in.
The Doctor discovers the starliner and enters using his sonic screwdriver. He is unaware that a Marshchild that he smiled at earlier is following him out of curiosity. Once inside, the Marshchild becomes agitated and scared. It attracts the attention of the people who threaten it. The Doctor also discovers it and tries to calm it down. However, the people in the ship knock the Doctor out and net the Marshchild. Both are taken before the Deciders. Second Decider Nefred has been promoted to First Decider and he and Decider Garif have asked a citizen named Login, who is also the father of one of the outliers (Kerea), to be the new Third Decider.
The Deciders elect to hold the Doctor while the Marshchild is given to Dexeter for examination. The Doctor is allowed to see Dexeter's work. The Marshchild has been put under anesthetic, allowing Dexeter to take tissue samples. The Doctor decries Dexeter's methods but does find the information interesting. He discloses to the Deciders that the marsh gasses aren't toxic, much to Login's surprise. Nefred admits that some lies are told to the people for their own protection. Login takes the Doctor aside and offers to help him get back to the TARDIS if he will help him find his daughter. The Doctor agrees.
The TARDIS is placed in a cave by the Marshmen who attempt to break in. K-9 enters the cave to observe but one of the Marshmen knocks his head off with a club. Romana and the outliers wait inside until they hear the thumping stop. Opening the door, she sees the Marshmen retreating from the cave as the river fruit have begun to burst open with spiders hatching from eggs. The outliers panic and run back into the TARDIS. Varsh closes the door, trapping Romana outside. Adric tries to open the door but accidently starts the TARDIS on coordinates preprogramed by Romana. Romana sees the TARDIS disappear. She tries to fend off the spiders with a riverfruit but it bursts open and a spider falls on to her face and bites her. She stumbles and passes out.
The TARDIS materializes inside the starliner just as the Doctor and Login were preparing to leave. The outliers exit and Login is delighted to see Kerea again. The Doctor grabs Adric and the two go back into the TARDIS to return to the cave. The other three are arrested and taken before the Deciders. The Doctor and Adric return to the cave and collect Romana and K-9's body (his head having been taken by the Marshmen as a new club). Romana is infected with a psychotropic toxin. She does not remember the Doctor but now has a mental link with the Marshmen.
The three return to the starliner and the Doctor heads back to see the Deciders while Adric waits with Romana. The Deciders have elected to give Dexeter permission to conduct experiments on the Marshchild and he prepares to slice into it's skull while awake. The Doctor, observing over a viewscreen, shouts at him to stop but Dexeter ignores him. As the blade bites, Romana gives a scream of pain and the Marshchild bursts from it's restraints. It kills Dexeter and begins to smash the lab. It sees the Doctor on the screen and remembers him as a friend. It tries to grab him but smashes through the screen and electrocutes itself.
Furious at their actions, the Doctor points out that they could have left at any time as the ship is ready. Login is stunned by this but Nefred admits that although the ship is ready, they don't know how to fly it. This surprises the Doctor and he heads up to the lab to check on a theory. Before he can validate it, Adric finds him and tells him that Romana has gone. They head back to the TARDIS to look for her but figure that she has left. Romana has snuck below to the emergency hatches and opens them to allow the Marshmen in. The Marshmen begin to attack the people and the ship.
The Deciders attempt to herd the people into secure locations within the ship while the Doctor is attacked by a Marshmen using K-9's head as a club. He disarms that Marshman but others come. They stop when Romana appears, acting like one of them. The Doctor manages to appeal to a small part of her old self by motioning towards the TARDIS, which distracts both her and them. He then heads back to the lab to develop a serum to cure Romana. The Deciders waffle on whether to try and take off but the Marshmen breach the book room and begin to attack. One smashes Nefred on the head and the other two Deciders carry him out. They find a new safe room where Nefred reveals to the other two that they cannot go back to their home planet because they were never from there to begin with. He dies shortly afterwards.
The Marshmen break into the lab just as the Doctor finishes developing the serum. Attempting to fend them off, he discovers that they cannot adapt to the atmosphere when large volumes of oxygen are released into it. Adric, Varsh and Kerea grab oxygen tanks and drive the Mashmen back. Romana, having followed them, collapses due to the atmospheric change and the Doctor gives her the serum. He then continues his studies of the cell structure of the Marshmen with Kerea helping him.
Adric and Varsh drive the Marshmen further away but their oxygen tanks begin to run out. Adric runs back to the lab to grab more while Varsh holds his ground. The Doctor goes with him and also finds Decider Login. He tells Login to flood the ship with oxygen as that will drive the Marshmen away. He does so, but before it takes effect, Varsh is overrun by the Marshmen. Adric tries to pull him out of the room and behind a closing door but he is unable and Varsh is killed. The Marshmen begin to flee out the emergency exits and they are resealed once they are gone.
In the aftermath, with Romana recovered, the Doctor informs Login and Garif that they are actually descendants of the Marshmen. The Marshmen evolved from the river fruit spiders and when the starliner crashed, a group of Marshmen got aboard. Cut off from their fellows and in a different atmosphere, they evolved into their current form, a secret contained within the files only given to the First Decider. The Doctor shows them how to launch the ship as Login and Garif have decided that they should leave as that is what they have been preparing for.
The Doctor and Romana return to the TARDIS with a repaired K-9. The Doctor discovers a new optical circuit that Adric had stolen and given to the Doctor. He installs it to see the starliner lift off. He also tells Romana that they passed through a CVE and are trapped in E-space, an area with a negative spacial dimension. They take off in an attempt to find another CVE that will allow them to return to normal space. They also are unaware that after returning the optical circuit, Adric stayed aboard.
Analysis
Taken as a whole, this is a good story. It does have some unfortunate flaws that keep it from being great, but it definitely better than average. I will admit that I think it was built up a little too much in my mind by some of the things I had heard about it and that left me a little underwhelmed.
The Doctor is very good in this. The Doctor is rather dour in Season 18 stories, in keeping with the mood of the season, but here that mood lifts a bit and you can see some of that old childish spirit come back. You can also see some of the outrage come back in his fury with both Dexeter and his methods as well as the Deciders for their deliberate deceptions. He is quite enjoyable and the only downside is how little he is actually seen, especially in Episode One.
The Deciders were all also very good. George Baker gets special attention as Decider Login since he is the most well known actor and had the largest part. But Draith and Nefred were also quite good. It is never explicitly stated, but there is a bit of a suggestion that Draith might be Adric and Varth's father. That gives his death scene a bit more poignancy and doubles the overall tragedy of Adric given that both his father and brother were dragged out of his hand to their deaths. Nefred was also quite good as a man who clearly had the weight of hard secrets on his shoulders. He was excellent at portraying a man who might be doing the wrong thing but always trying for the good of the society as a whole and I appreciate that level of performance.
Still, it is hard not to give great praise to George Baker as Decider Login. He was quite well done as a practical man thrust into leadership. He also functions very well as a pseudo-companion with his ignorance of the situation having just been promoted. He asks the questions that you would not expect from Romana and Adric is not around to ask. He didn't have to give a great deal of emotional range but he played off Tom Baker very well and the two made an excellent team.
The direction in this story was also excellent and made up for what could have been several deficiencies. It's always nice to see a story on film so there is a plus there. The filming of the Marshmen was always done with a bit of shadow in the right areas and it made them much more believable and scary. About the only part that didn't work were some of the close up shots of the Marshchild. Those were hard to avoid but it was much easier to see the edges of the mask in those cases. The spiders were another scene where the direction and film style made up for what could have been a very cheesy effect. The spiders were puppets and that couldn't be avoided. But the direction was such that they gave a real vibe and it would be easy to get creeped out by them if you have a genuine hang up about spiders.
The overall story was pretty good too. There was a nice bit of action, but the overall mystery of what the colonists actually were is what drove the story. I suspected that the people would be related to the Marshmen but I wasn't convinced enough that I was constantly interested in seeing what came next. You can't get a much better driver to a story than that. The dialogue was fairly whit-y and managed to avoid long expositional scenes. Even moments where Login (and the audience) was being brought up to speed, the dialogue flowed naturally and not in a grand info dump or "lets repeat things we already know" way. I thought it a well written and well paced story.
All that being said, the outliers nearly bring this story to a crashing halt. If there is a major drawback to this story, it is them. The actor who plays Varsh isn't too bad, but the other three are near dreadful. I had heard that some consider this Adric's best story and it might be from a character point of view, but it certainly not from the standpoint of his acting ability. Overall, I think Kerea was the worst, followed shortly by Tylos and then Adric. All three of them are stiff and remind me of school play acting. There are pauses in dialogue with no natural lead ins, emotional jumps from nowhere and yet they all still come across as boring.
The scene where they attempt to take over the TARDIS is particularly bad as they never can seem to get a handle on how to play it. It doesn't help that Romana, who isn't great in this story, still runs rings about them in acting ability. When she holds the knife on Tylos, you can see her express her meaning and menace in only how she moves and how she uses her eyes. Tylos meanwhile tries to express his fear but is so clearly overmatched that it just wastes her efforts in this scene. It's a real waste of a good effort by Romana and that is a shame.
Another moment in this story that underwhelmed me was Varsh's death. I had heard about it before, including his scream for Adric and I was expecting a bit more out of the scene. It plays fairly well but I had imagined Varsh screaming for Adric as the Marshmen actually attacked him in more of a plaintive wail rather than a yell down a hall to hurry and help him. His yell there made his near silence as he is dragged beneath the closing door a bit anti-climatic. I think it would have played better if he had screamed as he was pulled from Adric's grasp. I also think the scene played a bit odd in how fast he died. After losing his grip. Adric immediately jumps up and turns the wheel to open the door. We find the Marshmen gone and Varsh's body lying there. It happened so fast that it loses it's effect because it is less believable. If Adric had had more trouble opening the door or Varsh had been dragged down a shaft where they would have had to find him later, that would have given it more effect. Some of this is my own hang up because the imagination played it differently that what actually happened, but it does feel like a lost opportunity. Having Kerea come in with a very wooden giving of Varsh's belt to Adric as a memorium didn't help the situation either.
Overall, I think the good fairly outweighs the bad on this one. It is not excellent, though it had that potential. But it is still good enough to go back and watch again. I think it would be even better if you didn't have the specter of Adric as a companion lingering over the story, but that's a minor quibble. I don't know if I would expressly seek this one out to watch again, but I certainly wouldn't mind if someone else put it on.
Overall personal score: 3.5 out of 5
Part one of the E-Space trilogy and the introduction of Adric. I've heard good things about this, including the idea that Adric's introduction was also his best story. I can't speak to that, although I will admit that in the Adric stories I have seen, his acting is usually a bit subpar. Of course, he also has Nyssa who usually has less personality than a block of wood, to offset him, but that's a discussion for another time. Anyway, on to the story.
Plot Summary
The Doctor and Romana are returning to Gallifrey although Romana is unhappy about it. The TARDIS is suddenly caught in a bit of turbulence although no damage occurs. When it appears they have landed on Gallifrey, they find themselves on a totally different planet, the planet Alzarius. The Doctor and Romana begin to examine the TARDIS to figure out why they didn't materialize on Gallifrey.
Nearby a group of people are residing by a river. A small group of youths sneak from the underbrush and steal several river fruit that the people have gathered. Some of them give chase to the youths but they elude them and the youths gather in a nearby cave. They celebrate their theft, teasing Adric, the younger brother of Varsh, about his dreams of leaving in the starliner and his continual wearing of a badge for mathematical excellence he earned before leaving the society. Angered by this teasing, Adric vows to raid fruit by himself.
As Adric approaches the camp, the river and surrounded marsh begin to bubble and release large quantities of mist. First Decider Draith declares that mistfall is approaching and that everyone must follow established procedures. The people gather up their belongings and head back to a space craft where the other deciders and a scientist named Dexeter had been examining the river fruit, which have become infected with strange eggs.
Draith sees Adric stealing fruit and gives chase to him. Adric runs but trips, injuring his knee. Draith tries to grab him but Adric throws him off and Draith hits his head, stunning him. Draith begins to sink into the marsh. Adric tries to pull him out but an unseen force pulls harder and Draith is sucked into the river.
Injured and in shock, Adric stumbles away and discovers the TARDIS. He bangs on the doors and when Romana opens them, he collapses inside. She and the Doctor take him to a bed where Adric speaks of mistfall not being a legend as he had been told by his brother but true. The Doctor, beginning to suspect what has happened, heads out with K-9 to observe the mist. As he does so, a group of creatures begin to rise out of the water. The Doctor orders K-9 to follow the creatures while he heads off to investigate elsewhere.
Adric, fully healed from his injury, heads back to the cave where his brother and friends are. Romana has given him a homing device to find the TARDIS again should he need to. The others decide to hide in the TARDIS as they are locked out of the starliner. Adric feebly tries to stop them but fails. They enter the TARDIS as Romana had left the doors open and try to take control. Adric distracts his brother and Romana gets the drop on Tylos, although she returns his knife after holding it against his own throat as a measure of good faith. Their quarrels are put aside though when the Marshmen lift the TARDIS and drag it to the cave the youths were hiding in.
The Doctor discovers the starliner and enters using his sonic screwdriver. He is unaware that a Marshchild that he smiled at earlier is following him out of curiosity. Once inside, the Marshchild becomes agitated and scared. It attracts the attention of the people who threaten it. The Doctor also discovers it and tries to calm it down. However, the people in the ship knock the Doctor out and net the Marshchild. Both are taken before the Deciders. Second Decider Nefred has been promoted to First Decider and he and Decider Garif have asked a citizen named Login, who is also the father of one of the outliers (Kerea), to be the new Third Decider.
The Deciders elect to hold the Doctor while the Marshchild is given to Dexeter for examination. The Doctor is allowed to see Dexeter's work. The Marshchild has been put under anesthetic, allowing Dexeter to take tissue samples. The Doctor decries Dexeter's methods but does find the information interesting. He discloses to the Deciders that the marsh gasses aren't toxic, much to Login's surprise. Nefred admits that some lies are told to the people for their own protection. Login takes the Doctor aside and offers to help him get back to the TARDIS if he will help him find his daughter. The Doctor agrees.
The TARDIS is placed in a cave by the Marshmen who attempt to break in. K-9 enters the cave to observe but one of the Marshmen knocks his head off with a club. Romana and the outliers wait inside until they hear the thumping stop. Opening the door, she sees the Marshmen retreating from the cave as the river fruit have begun to burst open with spiders hatching from eggs. The outliers panic and run back into the TARDIS. Varsh closes the door, trapping Romana outside. Adric tries to open the door but accidently starts the TARDIS on coordinates preprogramed by Romana. Romana sees the TARDIS disappear. She tries to fend off the spiders with a riverfruit but it bursts open and a spider falls on to her face and bites her. She stumbles and passes out.
The TARDIS materializes inside the starliner just as the Doctor and Login were preparing to leave. The outliers exit and Login is delighted to see Kerea again. The Doctor grabs Adric and the two go back into the TARDIS to return to the cave. The other three are arrested and taken before the Deciders. The Doctor and Adric return to the cave and collect Romana and K-9's body (his head having been taken by the Marshmen as a new club). Romana is infected with a psychotropic toxin. She does not remember the Doctor but now has a mental link with the Marshmen.
The three return to the starliner and the Doctor heads back to see the Deciders while Adric waits with Romana. The Deciders have elected to give Dexeter permission to conduct experiments on the Marshchild and he prepares to slice into it's skull while awake. The Doctor, observing over a viewscreen, shouts at him to stop but Dexeter ignores him. As the blade bites, Romana gives a scream of pain and the Marshchild bursts from it's restraints. It kills Dexeter and begins to smash the lab. It sees the Doctor on the screen and remembers him as a friend. It tries to grab him but smashes through the screen and electrocutes itself.
Furious at their actions, the Doctor points out that they could have left at any time as the ship is ready. Login is stunned by this but Nefred admits that although the ship is ready, they don't know how to fly it. This surprises the Doctor and he heads up to the lab to check on a theory. Before he can validate it, Adric finds him and tells him that Romana has gone. They head back to the TARDIS to look for her but figure that she has left. Romana has snuck below to the emergency hatches and opens them to allow the Marshmen in. The Marshmen begin to attack the people and the ship.
The Deciders attempt to herd the people into secure locations within the ship while the Doctor is attacked by a Marshmen using K-9's head as a club. He disarms that Marshman but others come. They stop when Romana appears, acting like one of them. The Doctor manages to appeal to a small part of her old self by motioning towards the TARDIS, which distracts both her and them. He then heads back to the lab to develop a serum to cure Romana. The Deciders waffle on whether to try and take off but the Marshmen breach the book room and begin to attack. One smashes Nefred on the head and the other two Deciders carry him out. They find a new safe room where Nefred reveals to the other two that they cannot go back to their home planet because they were never from there to begin with. He dies shortly afterwards.
The Marshmen break into the lab just as the Doctor finishes developing the serum. Attempting to fend them off, he discovers that they cannot adapt to the atmosphere when large volumes of oxygen are released into it. Adric, Varsh and Kerea grab oxygen tanks and drive the Mashmen back. Romana, having followed them, collapses due to the atmospheric change and the Doctor gives her the serum. He then continues his studies of the cell structure of the Marshmen with Kerea helping him.
Adric and Varsh drive the Marshmen further away but their oxygen tanks begin to run out. Adric runs back to the lab to grab more while Varsh holds his ground. The Doctor goes with him and also finds Decider Login. He tells Login to flood the ship with oxygen as that will drive the Marshmen away. He does so, but before it takes effect, Varsh is overrun by the Marshmen. Adric tries to pull him out of the room and behind a closing door but he is unable and Varsh is killed. The Marshmen begin to flee out the emergency exits and they are resealed once they are gone.
In the aftermath, with Romana recovered, the Doctor informs Login and Garif that they are actually descendants of the Marshmen. The Marshmen evolved from the river fruit spiders and when the starliner crashed, a group of Marshmen got aboard. Cut off from their fellows and in a different atmosphere, they evolved into their current form, a secret contained within the files only given to the First Decider. The Doctor shows them how to launch the ship as Login and Garif have decided that they should leave as that is what they have been preparing for.
The Doctor and Romana return to the TARDIS with a repaired K-9. The Doctor discovers a new optical circuit that Adric had stolen and given to the Doctor. He installs it to see the starliner lift off. He also tells Romana that they passed through a CVE and are trapped in E-space, an area with a negative spacial dimension. They take off in an attempt to find another CVE that will allow them to return to normal space. They also are unaware that after returning the optical circuit, Adric stayed aboard.
Analysis
Taken as a whole, this is a good story. It does have some unfortunate flaws that keep it from being great, but it definitely better than average. I will admit that I think it was built up a little too much in my mind by some of the things I had heard about it and that left me a little underwhelmed.
The Doctor is very good in this. The Doctor is rather dour in Season 18 stories, in keeping with the mood of the season, but here that mood lifts a bit and you can see some of that old childish spirit come back. You can also see some of the outrage come back in his fury with both Dexeter and his methods as well as the Deciders for their deliberate deceptions. He is quite enjoyable and the only downside is how little he is actually seen, especially in Episode One.
The Deciders were all also very good. George Baker gets special attention as Decider Login since he is the most well known actor and had the largest part. But Draith and Nefred were also quite good. It is never explicitly stated, but there is a bit of a suggestion that Draith might be Adric and Varth's father. That gives his death scene a bit more poignancy and doubles the overall tragedy of Adric given that both his father and brother were dragged out of his hand to their deaths. Nefred was also quite good as a man who clearly had the weight of hard secrets on his shoulders. He was excellent at portraying a man who might be doing the wrong thing but always trying for the good of the society as a whole and I appreciate that level of performance.
Still, it is hard not to give great praise to George Baker as Decider Login. He was quite well done as a practical man thrust into leadership. He also functions very well as a pseudo-companion with his ignorance of the situation having just been promoted. He asks the questions that you would not expect from Romana and Adric is not around to ask. He didn't have to give a great deal of emotional range but he played off Tom Baker very well and the two made an excellent team.
The direction in this story was also excellent and made up for what could have been several deficiencies. It's always nice to see a story on film so there is a plus there. The filming of the Marshmen was always done with a bit of shadow in the right areas and it made them much more believable and scary. About the only part that didn't work were some of the close up shots of the Marshchild. Those were hard to avoid but it was much easier to see the edges of the mask in those cases. The spiders were another scene where the direction and film style made up for what could have been a very cheesy effect. The spiders were puppets and that couldn't be avoided. But the direction was such that they gave a real vibe and it would be easy to get creeped out by them if you have a genuine hang up about spiders.
The overall story was pretty good too. There was a nice bit of action, but the overall mystery of what the colonists actually were is what drove the story. I suspected that the people would be related to the Marshmen but I wasn't convinced enough that I was constantly interested in seeing what came next. You can't get a much better driver to a story than that. The dialogue was fairly whit-y and managed to avoid long expositional scenes. Even moments where Login (and the audience) was being brought up to speed, the dialogue flowed naturally and not in a grand info dump or "lets repeat things we already know" way. I thought it a well written and well paced story.
All that being said, the outliers nearly bring this story to a crashing halt. If there is a major drawback to this story, it is them. The actor who plays Varsh isn't too bad, but the other three are near dreadful. I had heard that some consider this Adric's best story and it might be from a character point of view, but it certainly not from the standpoint of his acting ability. Overall, I think Kerea was the worst, followed shortly by Tylos and then Adric. All three of them are stiff and remind me of school play acting. There are pauses in dialogue with no natural lead ins, emotional jumps from nowhere and yet they all still come across as boring.
The scene where they attempt to take over the TARDIS is particularly bad as they never can seem to get a handle on how to play it. It doesn't help that Romana, who isn't great in this story, still runs rings about them in acting ability. When she holds the knife on Tylos, you can see her express her meaning and menace in only how she moves and how she uses her eyes. Tylos meanwhile tries to express his fear but is so clearly overmatched that it just wastes her efforts in this scene. It's a real waste of a good effort by Romana and that is a shame.
Another moment in this story that underwhelmed me was Varsh's death. I had heard about it before, including his scream for Adric and I was expecting a bit more out of the scene. It plays fairly well but I had imagined Varsh screaming for Adric as the Marshmen actually attacked him in more of a plaintive wail rather than a yell down a hall to hurry and help him. His yell there made his near silence as he is dragged beneath the closing door a bit anti-climatic. I think it would have played better if he had screamed as he was pulled from Adric's grasp. I also think the scene played a bit odd in how fast he died. After losing his grip. Adric immediately jumps up and turns the wheel to open the door. We find the Marshmen gone and Varsh's body lying there. It happened so fast that it loses it's effect because it is less believable. If Adric had had more trouble opening the door or Varsh had been dragged down a shaft where they would have had to find him later, that would have given it more effect. Some of this is my own hang up because the imagination played it differently that what actually happened, but it does feel like a lost opportunity. Having Kerea come in with a very wooden giving of Varsh's belt to Adric as a memorium didn't help the situation either.
Overall, I think the good fairly outweighs the bad on this one. It is not excellent, though it had that potential. But it is still good enough to go back and watch again. I think it would be even better if you didn't have the specter of Adric as a companion lingering over the story, but that's a minor quibble. I don't know if I would expressly seek this one out to watch again, but I certainly wouldn't mind if someone else put it on.
Overall personal score: 3.5 out of 5
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