The Dæmons

Top of the Class Jo. Top of the class.

The Daemons closed out the season of the Master with a dive into the supernatural. This story is both hailed by the folks that made it as the prototypical Third Doctor story but also is somewhat overlooked by fandom. Whenever people talk about the Third Doctor era, there a number of stories that come up as either good or great as well as a few that are derided as terrible. This one almost never makes it into either list so unlike some other stories, I went into this one with only the vaguest of impressions about it.

Plot Summary

The Doctor is working on Bessie and lightly chastising Jo for indulging in supernatural thought while she talks of the "Age of Aquarius." Captain Yates comes to collect Jo as a television program they wanted to watch is about to come on. The Doctor becomes concerned when he learns it is about something in the town of Devil's End and comes with them.

On TV, a reporter interviews Professor Horner, an archeologist who is digging in a local mound called the Devil's Hump. He intends to open it at midnight as that will coincide with the pagan festival of Beltane. The report is interrupted by a local woman, Ms. Hawthorne, a white witch who believes that opening the mound will unleash great evil. She believes this already afoot as a local man died the previous night of a heart attack she believes was induced by fear. The BBC crew shoos her off.

Her fears are partially validated as windy presence manifests itself and a local constable picks up a rock to brain her with it. However, she utters an incantation and the wind dies down with the constable coming to his senses. She heads over to see the vicar. She tries to see the old vicar but the assistant vicar reminds her that he recently left. The new vicar shows up, revealed to be the Master. He downplays her fears and even tries to hypnotize her into believing that everything is fine, but she is able to shake him off and leaves in a huff.

The Doctor is growing worried about the confluence of events and, taking Jo, drives towards Devil's End in Bessie. However the same windy presence blows the signs around, getting the Doctor and Jo lost. They arrive at a nearby pub to ask for directions shortly before midnight. They receive them, but one of the patrons slips out and informs the Master of the Doctor's presence. The Master then orders the man to gather the group and they begin a ritual to awaken Azal.

The Doctor and Jo are forced to continue the last bit on foot and they arrive at the mound just as Professor Horner opens the mound. The opening triggers an earthquake and the tunnel into the mound partially collapses due to a cave in and a huge blast of icy air hits the Doctor and Professor Horner. Jo and the camera crew dig them out to find that Professor Horner has been frozen to death and that the Doctor is also heavily frozen, but still alive.

The Master ends his ritual, having seen the statue of a gargoyle in the crypt come to life. He dismisses those involved in the ritual and waits for the appearance of Azal.

Yates and Benton, having seen the cave in on television, attempt to get in contact with authorities but have very little luck. They finally hear from Jo who calls them after having seen the Doctor off to a warm bed to recover. The two procure the Brigadier's private helicopter and fly to Devil's End. While in the air, they observe large hoof prints as if made by a creature nearly 30 ft tall.

Benton and Yates arrive and are met by Jo. Yates follows Jo to check on the Doctor but Benton leaves to investigate the hoof prints. While out, he hears cries for help and heads into the church to find Ms. Hawthorne tied up and stored in a box. He frees her but they are forced to head into the crypt to hide from her abductor, one of the Master's acolytes. They are discovered by this man and Benton attacks him. During the fight, Benton accidently steps on a painted stone in the floor and he is overcome with psychic energy. The man orders Ms. Hawthorne to help him out of the church. Once outside, they are seen by some giant creature. Benton and Ms. Hawthorne run off but the man fires his gun at it. The creature in turn burns him with a searing blast of heat.

The heat blast finishes the unfreezing of the Doctor and he jolts awake. He comes downstairs and tends to Benton, having just been brought in by Ms. Hawthorne. Ms. Hawthorne tells them that they were attacked by the Devil. The Doctor, although having been in agreement with Ms. Hawthorne prior to this, scoffs at this, though he is less dismissive of the idea of a large horned creature attacking their captor. He also discovers that Master has placed himself in the role of the Vicar. The owner of the pub slips out and calls the Master to inform him of the Doctor's discovery.

Outside the town a wall of heat goes up to create a dome around the town. The Brigadier, having learned of the situation as well as Benton and Yates' use of his helicopter, arrives outside of town to see a motorist stranded when his van caught fire. He observes the heat dome and tries to find another route but all avenues to the town are cut off by this dome. He radios Yates, informing him of being trapped outside. Yates also informs the Brigadier that the Master is behind these events.

The Doctor and Jo head back up to the mound. Entering the chamber, they discover spaceship characteristics. But before the Doctor can explain, they are attacked by the gargoyle that had gone missing from the crypt. The Doctor fends him with a piece of iron that the gargoyle (named Bok) thinks is enchanted. He flees despite the Master urging him on telepathically.

The Doctor and Jo return to the pub where he explains to Jo, Yates, Benton and Ms. Hawthorne that the creature they have seen is not the Devil but an alien from the planet Dæmos who landed 100,000 years ago and set forth experiments to aid the humans in defeating the Neanderthals. Echoes of memory of this creature are reflected by the use of the horns of power associated with many ancient gods. The Doctor also explains that the large blasts of heat and cold are caused by the alien increasing and decreasing his mass and size when interacting with humanity.

The Brigadier radios through informing those in the pub that town is encased in a heat dome ten miles wide and one mile tall. He is preparing to attempt to blast through, but the Doctor dissuades him and instead offers to come to the edge and tell his men how to build a machine to create a hole in the dome. Jo comes with him while the other three wait at the pub.

The Master is informed of the Doctor's actions and he dispatches one of his acolytes to take care of him. Meanwhile the Master attempts to sway first the sexton and then the town as a whole to come to his side. They are skeptical and he begins to lose them but he summons Bok who vaporizes the sexton. The other townsfolk then submit to the Master.

The Master's acolyte steals the UNIT helicopter. Yates attempts to stop him but is knocked down. Yates then grabs a motorcycle and heads out after him, warning the Doctor of the helicopter's approach. The helicopter dives after the Doctor and Jo in Bessie, attempting to either kill them outright or drive them into the heat barrier. The Doctor drives towards the barrier at full speed, luring the helicopter after him. He then turns sharply just in front of the barrier. The helicopter fails to turn in time and crashes into the barrier. Jo is thrown from Bessie in the turn and the Doctor orders Yates to take her back to the pub in Bessie to recover from her concussion while he talks the UNIT men through the build. Yates returns with Jo and the town doctor sedates her as the concussion is causing her to talk and thrash in a semi-lucid state.

The Master returns to the crypt and summons Azal a second time, triggering an intense blast of heat through the town along with a small earthquake. Azal notes the Master is different from the humans but warns him that he is on the verge of destroying humanity as a failed experiment. He tells the Master that he wants to see the other member of his race and that he would only tolerate being summoned one more time. The Master agrees, but muses to himself afterward that he must have the full sect with him, believing that that will allow him to control Azal.

The heat blast rouses Jo who slips out into the town. Yates, coming up to check on her, finds her missing and goes after her. She slips into the crypt where Yates discovers her. However before they can leave, someone comes down and they are forced to hide in the shadows.

The Master orders another town member to kill the Doctor and he tries to shoot him as he rides back from helping UNIT on the motorcycle Yates took originally. However, he misses and the Doctor ducks into the woods on foot. Knowing that the Doctor will be coming back to the town, the Master orders the villagers to put on the May Day festival, acting as lookouts for the Doctor.

The Doctor arrives and when he attempts to pass through the dancers, he is grabbed and tied to the maypole. The dance leader accuses the Doctor of being a witch and the build a pyre around the maypole to burn him. Another dancer bursts into the pub and attacks Sargent Benton who was getting ready to help the Doctor, but Ms. Hawthorne knocks him out with a blow to the head. She then runs out, declaring the Doctor to be a great wizard.

As a demonstration of his power, the Doctor causes a lamp to burst and a weathervane to spin around. This throws the villagers, despite the fact that it is the result of Benton shooting the objects with a silenced pistol. The head dancer still tries to light the pyre but the Doctor summons Bessie using his remote control, although claiming to be calling it by a familiar spirit. Bessie runs into the head man and Benton pins him down with his gun. Ms. Hawthorne then unties the Doctor. The Doctor in turn, comes clean with the people, demonstrating that nothing is by magic but only through science, turning the people against the Master.

In the crypt, the Master reunites with the full sect and summons Azal one more time. Jo rushes out of the shadows to try and stop him, but she is too late and Azal emerges once more. The Master has Jo taken away to be offered as a sacrifice while Yates is stunned, tied up and tossed out of the crypt. But Yates comes to and runs out to warn the Doctor about Jo. The people want to run in to help, but Bok appears, forcing everyone to stay back. The head dancer runs forward to be with the Master, but Bok kills him.

The Doctor radios the Brigadier and the Brigadier orders his sergeant to start the machine. It creates a hole in the dome, allowing the trucks to drive through. It also disrupts Azal's power and both he and Bok begin to thrash about. However, the machine overheats once through the dome and blows up. Knowing that it is no longer available as a weapon, the Doctor runs past the still disoriented Bok and into the crypt. Bok recovers, preventing anyone else from entering. As the Brigadier arrives, he and the other UNIT soldiers begin to fire on Bok, but with no effect.

In the crypt, the Doctor arrives to stop the sacrifice of Jo. Azal admits he has to decide whether to grant someone power over humanity or to chuck the whole thing by destroying humanity. He is impressed by the Doctor and his pleas for humanity and prepares to give the Doctor his power, but the Doctor refuses. Azal is stunned by this and the Master steps in, requesting the power instead, as he had asked several times previously. Azal agrees and decides to destroy the Doctor for refusing his gift. However, Jo steps in front of the Doctor, telling Azal to kill her instead. This creates a logical feedback loop for Azal and his power begins to rebound on himself. The whole group flees the crypt as the feedback causes Azal and the whole church to be destroyed. With Azal's power gone, Bok reverts to an inanimate stone gargoyle and Azal's ship in the burial mound also explodes.

Once outside, UNIT arrests the Master and takes him away under guard. The people, including the Doctor and Jo, celebrate with a maypole dance, although the Brigadier and Yates retreat to the pub for a pint.

Analysis

I can't say that enjoyed this one that much. It wasn't overtly bad but there also wasn't anything that really grabbed me either. I think it was about as standard a Third Doctor story as you could imagine which limped to a rather bored conclusion. The production team apparently speaks of how this story is signature of the Third Doctor era. To test this, I decided to put together a list of some of the most common tropes that run across the board of the Third Doctor era and check each one off as they came up. The overall results were rather impressive.

Third Doctor era checklist:

An alien race is threatening Earth...........................check
A powerful computer is part of the scheme The Master is involved.......................................check
The Doctor is condescending to his assistant.................check
Hypnosis is used.............................................check
UNIT is involved.............................................check
The Brigadier tries to shoot something/blow it up............check
There is a peace conference The Doctor drives Bessie.....................................check
The Doctor drives another vehicle besides Bessie.............check
The Doctor is knocked out for part of an episode.............check
The Doctor is imprisoned/captured............................check
The assistant is captured/imprisoned.........................check
A person speaks information while unconscious................check
The Doctor builds a special gadget...........................check
The Doctor says "reverse the polarity".......................check
The Doctor fights in hand to hand combat The Doctor uses science/wits to get out of a situation.......check
The Time Lords give the Doctor a mission The Doctor either eats/drinks or talks of food...............check
Color Separation Overlay is used.............................check

I'm not going to say that hitting all of these tropes is either good or bad, but I think it does validate the production team's claim. It also underscores the sense of blandness that this story gave off.

I think one of the things that hit me the most was how much I didn't care about any of the performances. I won't say that any of them were bad, but it didn't feel like there was any real passion behind any of them. I would also say that it didn't help that I openly didn't like the way many of the characters were acting. The Doctor was overly smug and condescending to Jo in this. The scene where she agrees with the Doctor about the Brigadier's penchant for violence and the Doctor verbally slapping her was particularly rude. There is also an odd disconnect between the Doctor's words and actions in this story. He is very smug about science over magic, but never really explains the science that Azal is using. He races to Devil's End expecting trouble and chastises people for not listening to Ms. Hawthorne, but he also puts down Ms. Hawthorne for basing all her beliefs on magic, despite being nominally correct, given the people can't understand Azal's science yet.

Jo wasn't great either in this story. Granted, being put down by the Doctor all the time didn't help, but she mostly stood around. The few times she did try to get involved, she got knocked out or captured. Still, her performance was consistent which is better than some others. Any fault with her lies in the script.

Likewise, the Master was okay but he seemed like the wrong villain for this story. Delving into the realm of magic just didn't seem right for the Master. I got the impression that Roger Delgado was also a bit unsure of his role her as well. He played with the same relish as always, but there wasn't much conspiracy for him here and the normal subterfuge of the Master was squandered. Even his pseudonym was so obvious, the Doctor knew it was the Master without even seeing him until the very end.

The main secondary characters were all fairly non-descript. Yates and Benton were fine as was the Brigadier, but they didn't have anything outside their normal duties. None of the townsfolk were particularly memorable, although I didn't feel they did poorly either. Ms. Hawthorne I found a bit annoying, but I think that was just her voice. There was nothing in her character or it's portrayal that I found problematic, I just didn't care for her voice and it's cadence.

I had some problems with the dæmons as well. Bok wasn't bad, although I kept wanted to reach through the screen to push his tongue back into his mouth. But as a henchman, he worked fairly well. My problem was more with Azal. His costume and design were ok for the most part, although I think the makeup for his face wasn't great. It looked a bit too painted rather than the menacing they were going for. But my problem was more in his voice portrayal. There is no subtlety in it. It is just loud and echo-y with an almost over-the-top malice in it. If Azal is supposed to be this imparter of knowledge, why isn't there any level of understanding in his voice. Even when he wants to hear the Doctor out, he just shouts and sounds angry. Nor is ever explained as to how as a logical being, Azal is supposed to be held, controlled or impressed by the shedding of blood whether chicken or Jo's. Azal just seemed like a rather poorly though out and poorly portrayed villain.

Perhaps most frustrating is how the story began and it's descent to it's end. In the first episode, there is some interesting set up and tension as the Doctor races to the town while mystical forces seem to conspire against them. The Master is there in his wily and manipulative ways to also add to the tension. The next two episodes are also interesting as they raise the stakes and create barriers for the heroes. There are also some fun little action sequences, although they don't put Yates or Benton in the best light. Still, by this point I was thinking the story was a decent middle of the road story and could be convinced that it might be worthy of a higher rank if things picked up in the last two episodes.

But they didn't. Things officially went down the tubes when the dancers came on the screen. I actually liked the dancers themselves, but the Doctor was captured so easily without a fight and the townsfolk seemed so disinterested. Making matters worse, the resolution to free the Doctor just felt like a total farce. There was never any real threat of danger and the townsfolk are convinced by a such a simple trick. It doesn't help that Benton, who hadn't been shown to be able to hit the broad side of a barn, is now an expert marksman with a silencer so efficient, that no one hears the hiss or sees any bit of muzzle flash. I also find it hard to believe that there wouldn't be a resounding bit of noise by shooting the weathercock that might have triggered their suspicions. If Benton had somehow had the Doctor's sonic screwdriver, that would have made a lot more sense. It also would have validated what he was saying after he was freed about how something that appeared to be magic was actually advanced science in action.

The overall ending was also a big letdown. Azal's motivations and orientation of his actions are never particularly clear but then to have everything go to pot because Jo offered herself just makes no sense. His power was set in a feedback loop of illogic because of self-sacrifice? What's more, there is no other failsafe out of that? Humans have been willing to be self-sacrificing for a long time. Azal should have been well aware of this phenomena and had some sort of guard against it. Instead, he blows up because it's time for the story to end. It is woefully unsatisfying and the joke about the Doctor recapturing the Master when he tries to steal Bessie is just another odd bit that took all the seriousness out of this story that it alluded to in the first couple of episodes. I just found it overly disappointing.

There are some nice visuals in this one and the stunts are pretty good. That's about all I can really say on the positive side. I just didn't find anything to really like about this story and a whole lot to underscore my disappointment with it. It probably would be a fun little story for younger kids, although they might be a bit freaked out by a thirty-foot devil, but unless you've got a nostalgia bent for this one, I can't see any reason to revisit it. Not horribly awful, but not worth spending time on either.

Overall personal score: 1.5 out of 5

The Doctor Who Movie

WHO AM I?

I'm going to go out and say that it doesn't bode well for a story when I take active steps to avoid watching it. One of my major weaknesses when it comes to television and movies is over-the-top melodramatic acting and you don't pack much more of that than into 1990's Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Attempting to watch something like Hercules, Xena, or even Buffy the Vampire Slayer makes me feel physically ill. I have found that even going back to old episodes of The X-Files makes me pause as some of these episodes are no where near as good as I remembered them. But opportunity presented itself again and I thought it only fair to give the Eighth Doctor his moment on the state other than Night of the Doctor. Would it be as bad as I feared or was I overreacting?

Plot Summary

The Doctor recounts how the Master was captured and tried for crimes by the Daleks on Skaro. The Seventh Doctor agrees to come and collect his remains and bring them back to Gallifrey. However while in transit, the Master is able to coalesce his essence into a plasmatic snake and escapes from his box. He sabotages the TARDIS and the Doctor makes an emergency landing in San Francisco on the evening of December 30, 1999.

The TARDIS materializes in front of a young man named Chang Lee who was engaged in a gang shootout. The Doctor emerges from the TARDIS and is shot by several members of the rival gang before they flee the scene. The Doctor observes the Master essence oozing out of the TARDIS keyhole and tries to warn Lee but passes out. Lee waits as an ambulance arrives and goes with the Doctor to the hosipital, pretending to be a friend of his.

The Doctor is taken to surgery where the bullets are removed but the doctors mistake his dual heartbeat for being in fibrillation and call in the cardiologist, Dr. Grace Holloway who had been attending the opera with her boyfriend. They begin surgery but the procedure punctures the Doctor's second heart and he dies on the operating table.

The Doctor is wheeled to the morgue where an autopsy is planned for the morning. In the storage unit, the Doctor regenerates into the Eighth Doctor, the process delayed by the anesthetic applied during the surgery. He breaks out of the unit and wanders to a part of the hospital closed off due to a ruptured ceiling pipe, fighting to regain his memories from his post-regeneration crisis.

Chang Lee is informed of the Doctor's death and is given his things. He states that he will inform the Doctor's next of kin but Grace gets suspicious of him. When confronted, Lee bolts out of the hospital with the Doctor's sonic screwdriver and TARDIS key.

The Master's essence slips into the jacket of the ambulance driver and later that night, it slips out again and lodges itself in the body of the driver. He rises in the morning, aware that the Doctor has regenerated and after killing the driver's wife, sets off to the hospital to find him.

Grace is informed of the Doctor's escape but when she raises it to the hospital director, he destroys the X-ray showing the double heart, which all the doctors had assumed was a double exposure. Angered by the director's actions, Grace resigns. As she leaves, she is confronted by the Doctor in his confused state. She initially doesn't believe him but upon seeing him remove the medical device that broke off from the failed procedure, she takes him back to her house.

The Master arrives at the hospital where he learns of all that happened. Learning that the Doctor's things were taken by Lee, he drives back to the TARDIS. Lee enters the TARDIS using the key and the Master confronts him inside. He tricks Lee into thinking that he is the wronged party and that the Doctor stole his body. He breaks into the Doctor's stash of gold dust (for fighting Cybermen) and offers it to him as reward for helping him.

The two men enter the cloister room and the Master uses Lee's human eye to open the Eye of Harmony, the source of power for the TARDIS. He uses the eye to observe the Doctor's new body and tap into his senses, learning of the Doctor's plans.

The Doctor recovers his memories while with Grace but also becomes aware of the Master opening the Eye of Harmony. Grace believes him mad when he begins to talk of the TARDIS and the Master's plans and runs away from him. The Doctor demonstrates that the opening of the Eye is altering the molecular structure of the planet and that he must get to the science center where they are debuting a new atomic clock.

Grace calls for an ambulance to take the Doctor to a psychiatric hospital and the Master and Lee arrive in one. Then end up caught in traffic and in the lull, the Doctor realizes the EMT is actually the Master. He attacks Grace, spewing slime on her hand but the Doctor beats him off using a fire extinguisher. The two commandeer a police motorcycle to go around the traffic. The Master and Lee pursue, using the ambulance siren to go around traffic.

Both parties arrive at the science center and the Doctor and Grace sneak up to the clock where the Doctor takes the atomic power cell. Seeing the Master and Lee looking for them, they pull the fire alarm and drive away in the confusion.

The arrive at the TARDIS and the Doctor enters using the spare key hidden up top. They close the Eye of Harmony but discover the power drained from the TARDIS and they cannot change the effects of the Eye being opened without operating it. The Doctor slips the atomic power source into the TARDIS and begins to hotwire it. However Grace, her mind taken over by the Master's slime attack, knocks out the Doctor to stop him.

The Doctor is tied up and secured to a position to allow the Master to absorb his remaining regenerations. The Doctor convinces Lee that the Master is lying but when he tries to stop the Master, the Master breaks his neck. He then removes Grace's possession and forces the Eye of Harmony back open using her eye.

The Master begins to absorb the remaining regenerations and the Doctor yells to the recovering Grace to remember. She runs back to the console and manages to jump the power back to the TARDIS. The TARDIS lifts off and enters a temporal orbit, reversing the absorption of the Doctor's regenerations.

Grace heads back to the cloister room and partially frees the Doctor, but the Master comes up on her and throws her off ledge, killing her. The Doctor manages to free himself from his remaining restraints and battles the Master around the Eye of Harmony. He manages to knock the Master off balance so that he falls into the Eye of Harmony.

The Doctor pulls Grace and Lee's bodies away but a temporal discharge emits from the Eye of Harmony just before it closes and brings both Grace and Lee back to life. The Doctor lands TARDIS outside Grace's home just as midnight hits. Lee returns the Doctor's things, including the sonic screwdriver but the Doctor tells him to keep the gold dust. Delighted, Lee leaves.

The Doctor invites Grace to travel with him but she declines, suggesting the Doctor stay here with her instead. He also declines although not without some reluctance. He then takes off, the TARDIS disappearing into the night.

Analysis

The movie was both as bad and better than I was expecting. Some areas were just as I feared they would be, but other areas I found surprisingly good. I was also surprised at how my own personal opinions didn't quite jive with certain aspects of fan opinion.

First the Doctor. I was rather disappointed in how the Seventh Doctor was portrayed in this story. Some fans complain that the Seventh Doctor is a bit too omniscient in the stories of his era but if that was a concern for the writers here, they went way overboard. The Seventh Doctor is a bit too dottering and easily deceived. It is very strange to see him being surprised by the Master and his death at the hand of blatantly incompetent physicians is unsatisfying.

The Eighth Doctor was pretty good, especially once he started to get over his regeneration crisis. I didn't like the big "Who am I" moment as that was just over the top and rather forced. But once he began to recover, I enjoyed his performance with it's nice blend of underplay and seriousness. I can understand why the Big Finish plays with the Eighth Doctor became so popular and I certainly would not have objected to seeing more of his Doctor.

The Master is generally derided by fans for an over-the-top hammy performance but I have to disagree there. Granted, his "I always dress for the occasion" line is pretty bad, but it's also meant to be funny in that painful 90's homosexual way (see Will & Grace). Problems with his voice acting in later scenes I can't really chalk up to Eric Roberts as he was clearly being overdubbed to sound more bestial, which I didn't quite get. I also didn't get the eye thing, although I'm guessing that was supposed to be a residual effect of reforming his essence into a snake. Still on the whole, I wouldn't call his performance any more campy than that of the Anthony Ainley Master. If anything, his lack of mustache twirling laughter felt less campy, even if he was clearly adding a gay dynamic that Ainley would never of dreamed of.

Grace did fairly well as a companion, although I'm not sure the writing did her any favors. Her dialogue resorted to cliché a number of times and she was very inconsistently written. She is a great cardiovascular surgeon but doesn't both to check the X-rays just because someone tells her they are double exposed. She believes the Doctor is crazy, becomes convinced that he's ok and then goes back to believing him to be crazy after inviting him into her home. Then she decides that he is her special man right out of nowhere. She also shows complete ignorance of non-medical science at one point but makes an observation about transcendental physics upon entering the TARDIS.

Daphne Ashbrook does a pretty good job with Grace. I think you can see an obvious Dana Scully influence with her, but she is portrayed much softer and with a stronger sense of humor and femininity. She does go a great deal with her eyes and had the show been picked up with Grace as a series regular, I think there would have been a few memes made with her eyes in full bug out mode. But I liked her portrayal, even if her lines weren't that great.

Chang Lee is the first major flaw in this story. He is both inconsistent in his character portrayal (fault of the writers) and his acting is very weak in my opinion. He is initially shown as a gang banger, complete with a gun, yet he stays behind to ensure the Doctor gets proper medical care? That makes no sense as any character of this type would have simply run off into the night. Likewise he buy into the Master with no proof other than his own greed. He stays consistent to the Master throughout the Master letting his mask slip and then turns on a dime over a simple conversation. That the Master kills him almost immediately afterward just demonstrates that his character needed to be removed for dramatic purposes.

The acting of Chang Lee is rather deadpan. He doesn't seem to demonstrate much emotion and when he does, it is very quick and strong and then off again quickly, like a faucet. It comes across as very insincere and not at all believable. Of the four principle characters, his was clearly the weakest.

The secondary cast was also a bit weak. Nearly all of them gave somewhat stilted performances that just didn't grab you as believable. There were odd halts in line delivery, odd and over-the-top facial reactions, and weird quirks that I think were supposed to be in lieu of character personality. Some you can just dismiss, but others, such as the motorcycle police officer, really punted the viewer out of the story. I get that that scene was supposed to be played for comedy, but a cop acting that ineptly took the scene from comedy to outright farce.

Which leads us to the tone problem of the movie. Unlike the classic series, there is very little in the story that is intended as scary. The Master snake and the killing of the wife are probably the only moments that drift near that territory. The rest is meant to be a bit more action-drama with comedy sprinkled in to relieve tension. The problem is that the comedy is way too over the top. It doesn't relieve tension, it dispels it all together. We are also left confused as to whether we should take any of this story seriously or treat it with the same attitude we might a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

A good example of this is when the Doctor and Grace reach the TARDIS. There is drama because they are racing against the clock, but they cut it with a light scene involving finding the spare TARDIS key and that works fine. Then, just as you are awaiting the "bigger on the inside" moment, a random police motorcycle comes barreling through with the brakes having failed on the bike. The motorcycle dives into the TARDIS, you hear it fade Doppler-style and then race back out the TARDIS. It totally kills the mood of the scene in a WTF! moment. This is such a shame because the Doctor and Grace had been building their scenes together well. I actually laughed out loud when she and the Doctor made a sly small penis joke, which was well underplayed. But to have things like that cut with heavy slapstick just ruins the slow build of mood.

Another major flaw of the movie for me was the cinematography. This is very, very 90's and could easily be passed off as episode of Buffy. There are action scenes where the footage seems to speed up slightly, just to get through it. There are odd jump cuts and random slow motion cuts in the action scenes. There are also dramatic flashes of light, whether through lightening or just a random strobe effect to add to the scene. All of it is just so strange and works so hard to create a sense of action. Yet at the same time, the footage is shot with such a crispness that it makes the scenes and sets look cheap. It is very heavily influenced by American television and especially the pulp sci-fi action shows of the time and it just makes it look awful.

Then there is the fan controversies. This story was working overtime to try and placate the old Doctor Who fans with cute references and throwbacks, but at the same time, it totally missed the boat and created things for fans to froth at the mouth over. The Dalek execution of the Master makes no sense and certainly the Daleks would never have consented to return the Master's remains to Gallifrey. It also doesn't help that the Daleks (you can't see them) don't even sound like Daleks in their cries of "Exterminate!" So you start off on the wrong foot.

The two other big moments are the Doctor kissing Grace and the Doctor being half-human. I don't have any real issue with either. The Doctor kisses Grace while coming out of his post-regeneration crisis so I don't imagine the producers would have made that a truly regular thing. What's more, I don't have a problem with the Doctor being a sexual being. He's been married four times in the show's run and the whole series started off with him as a grandfather so clearly the man has seen action before. I only get bothered when things get overblown like with the Tenth Doctor pining over Rose. That is where I want to just shut things down and be done with it.

I also don't have any problem with the Doctor being half-human. He clearly has an affinity towards Earth and to give him a familiar connection is a fair pretense for this. I personally have a feeling that many of the fans who object to this idea are deep into the backstory espoused by Lungbarrow and decry anything that might go against that. While this was hinted at in the unfulfilled Cartmel Master Plan, none of that was ever filled in within the context of the show itself so I see no inconsistency in pushing the envelope in the Doctor's backstory.

My only confusion is whether the key to opening the Eye of Harmony being a human eye was set up by the Doctor or not. Because if it wasn't, that's a very odd security feature for the Time Lord's to have set up. But if the Doctor set it up, it is understandable since no other Time Lord would be able to override that feature without bringing a human aboard. So it's more a case of head cannon being required.

While the subject of the Eye of Harmony, I have to say that I didn't really care for the new TARDIS design. The medieval castle look just didn't quite work for me in the cloister room as it reminded me too much of the pretend TARDIS sets in The Invasion of Time. I preferred the small intimate garden cloister room seen in Logopolis. I also thought the main console room was too large. I get that it was supposed to be living quarters as well and I did enjoy the ceiling celestial viewer, but even that was a bit washed out due to the size of the room. I just think a smaller, more intimate setting would have felt better. Again, to me it smacked of Buffy and trying to get that 90's faux gothic look.

In the end, I'd have to say that the movie wasn't as bad overall as I was expecting. I'm not going to call it good, but it has good aspects to it. Most of those being directly tied to the performances of the Doctor and Grace. Still, it would be foolish to acknowledge the debt that the new series owes to the movie as it laid out fully what can be done and what should be avoided when the series relaunched with Rose. It has it's importance and should be recognized for it. But that also doesn't mean that I'm going to go out of my way to watch it again. I've seen it once and I can get the context when other people talk about it, but I didn't enjoy it enough to warrant revisiting it anytime in the near future.

Overall personal score: 2 out of 5

Link: Night of the Doctor

Dragonfire

You don't know what a relief it is for me to have such a stimulating philosophical discussion.

The story that introduces Ace and dismisses Mel. I have been intrigued about this story as it has popped up a lot recently. Probably the most interesting discussion was an argument between two people as to whether it was the worst story of Season 24 or not. The argument there being that Time and the Rani had the good sense to know it was bad and that it had to be made in such a time crunch whereas Dragonfire had neither excuse. As I've never seen anything of this story apart from the scene of the Doctor dangling from his umbrella referenced in The Name of the Doctor, I'm going in to this one with a fairly open mind.

Plot Summary

The Doctor and Mel travel to Iceworld, a layover station for interstellar travel. Stopping in to the local restaurant, they run into Sabalom Glizt, last seen in The Ultimate Foe. Glitz has just sold his crew to the head of the station, Mr. Kane, and is working on a new scheme. However, he restrained by the authorities and ordered to refund the money he was paid for a shoddy product delivery. Having lost the money he was paid in a game of cards, the authorities seize his ship, giving him 72 hours to repay what he owes.

Glitz asks the Doctor’s help as he has recently won a treasure map in another game of cards to a treasure located on Iceworld. At the mention of the treasure map, the waitress, a girl named Ace, pipes in and asks to come along, being familiar with Glitz already. The Doctor, his curiosity piqued by the legend of a dragon, agrees to help Glitz. Glitz however, demands the girls not come along. Ace fumes and returns to work. Mel agrees to stay behind.

Unknown to Glitz, he was allowed to win the map and it contains a tracking device put in my Mr. Kane. He purchased Glitz’s crew and is building an army of mercenaries that are placed in cryo-freeze. His deputy, Belazs, suggests that she might take Glizt’s ship but Kane reminds her of her obligation to him and gives and order to destroy the ship. However, Belazs later countermands that order while Kane is undergoing a freezing treatment.

Ace, still miffed at being left behind, pours a milkshake on a customer when the customer objects to the quality of the milkshake. She is immediately fired and Mel, who had tried to stick up for her, is thrown out as well. They return to Ace’s quarters where Mel learns that Ace is from Earth but was transported to Iceworld in a timestorm. Ace has also developed a more concentrated version of nitro-glycerin she calls Nitro-9. She takes Mel out to show its effects on an ice jam that the local authorities have yet to respond to.

Ace sets up to bottles of the Nitro-9 in front of the jam and blows it apart. As her action was unauthorized though, Belazs has her arrested and brought to Kane. Kane, impressed by her explosive work, offers her a chance to come work for him in a Faustian bargain. Mel urges Ace not to do it and Ace responds by slapping the marking coin away and threatening everyone with being blown up via her explosive. She and Mel run into the caves where they see a dragon-like creature approaching. The creature shoots a laser from it's eyes and the two women run off in the opposite direction.

Glitz and the Doctor progress steadily through Iceworld using the map. They pass various markers but become separated at one point. The Doctor, looking for Glitz off a ledge, attempts to climb down but loses his grip and slips down his umbrella, risking falling into the depths below. Glitz finds him hanging and helps him off by pulling him on to the narrow ledge below. Frustrated at his inability to find the treasure, Glitz offers the map to the Doctor in exchange for helping him to take back his ship. The Doctor reluctantly agrees.

The Doctor distracts the guard on Glitz's ship with a discussion on philosophy while Glitz sneaks aboard. However, Belazs is there waiting for him, having heard his conversation with the Doctor over the bugged map. She prepares to kill him but the Doctor comes aboard, distracting her enough for Glitz to knock the gun out of her hand. The two flee the ship, taking her gun with them. They end up running into the same creature Mel and Ace ran into and it too fires a bolt at them. They had back through a door which the creature cuts through. Glitz aims to shoot it, but the Doctor slaps the gun away from him, refusing to kill it. The creature then turns away and leaves them alone.

Kane, hearing of Glitz's attempt to leave, revives several members of his old crew and set them off to kill him. The zombified crew run into Ace and Mel, who are looking for the Doctor and Glitz. They run from them but Mel slips on the ice and hits her head on a set of stairs. Ace pulls the groggy Mel under the stairs to hide and the pursuing men pass them. The two women pause for a breather with Ace revealing that her real name is Dorothy.

Belazs, convinced by the Doctor during their conversation on Glitz's ship that Kane will never allow her to leave, convinces a fellow servant, Officer Kracauer, to try and kill Kane. Kracauer, using information given by Belazs, sneaks into Kane's chamber while he is in his freezing pod. Kracauer raises the overall temperature to above freezing. Kane emerges from his pod, agitated and unable to breathe. He sees the ice statue of his partner Xana melting and he attacks and kills Kracauer. He lowers the temperature of the room and begins to stabilize. He emerges from his chamber and kills Belazs for her treachery.

The Doctor and Glitz run into Mel and Ace in the corridors where they are attacked by one of Glitz's old crewmembers. The creature emerges and kills the crewman before he can kill them. They follow the creature down to the singing crystal room which is in fact a computerized archive. The creature activates the computer and the computer reveals that Kane is a criminal who was exiled to Iceworld for his crimes. He had an accomplice, Xana, who was killed in the final battle that captured Kane, hence his devotion to her statue. The Doctor realizes that the treasure is actually contained within the creature, which is something Kane cannot approach due to the heat it generates. The creature opens it's head, revealing a computer powered by the Dragonfire crystal, a powerful energy source.

Kane overhears them due to the bugged map and orders two of his guards to go kill the creature and bring back it's head. He also orders the rest of his guards to chase off the visitors to Iceworld and herd them on to Glitz's ship, the Nosfaratu.

The Doctor and the creature head deeper into the ice computer to consult a set of star charts while Glitz heads back to his ship to collect some explosives. Mel and Ace wait by the computer. Glitz is caught up in the rush of people driven out of Iceworld but is unable to get aboard his ship before it is sealed off. He watches as the ship takes off and then explodes.

The Doctor and the creature consult star charts but the charts are out of date and the Doctor decides to head back to the TARDIS. He and the creature are separated by the two guards looking for the creature. They ignore the Doctor and he heads back to collect Ace and Mel. Together they enter the TARDIS and the Doctor is further confused when his own star charts don't match the information given. The trio heads back to find the creature but Ace heads back to her own quarters to collect more Nitro-9. There she is captured by Kane.

Glitz heads back down and reunites with the Doctor. They discover that Ace is missing and that the creature has been killed by the guards, but they in turn were killed when the Dragonfire crystal discharged after they cut off the creature's head. They remove the crystal and hear Kane speaking to them over the speakers to bring the crystal where he will exchange Ace for it.

They meet Kane in his lair and make the exchange. Kane uses the Dragonfire crystal to supply power to the colony which is actually a spacecraft in disguise. He launches the ship and flies back to his home planet. However, the Doctor discloses that his home planet isn't there anymore. Their sun went supernova two thousand years ago. Kane, refusing to believe that his revenge will be unfulfilled, opens the shield window where he is caught in a blast of unfiltered sunlight, vaporizing him.

Glitz takes over the ship which he renames the Nosfaratu 2. Mel decides to leave the Doctor and instead travel around with Glitz, keeping him in line. She also suggests that the Doctor take Ace as a new companion. The Doctor offers and Ace readily agrees.

Analysis

I'm not going to lie, this story is deserving of the terrible reputation it has. The story had some potential in it's initial set up and even through the first couple of episodes, I could see some small good bits. But it all came crashing down in the end into a terrible hot mess.

There was some small amount of good. We had Ace introduced, although she wasn't that good in this story, but other writers did better with her so we'll give this story a little prop there. I did enjoy the Seventh Doctor in this story. He had some bad moments too, but his performance was still mostly enjoyable so he gets a small boost there. I enjoyed the performance of Belasz, who was fairly conniving as a secondary antagonist. Her performance was enjoyable. I will also give this story credit for at least giving all the information. In a number of Seventh Doctor stories, there are obvious cuts made that leave you confused as to what is going on. Here, you get the full story, shoddy as it may be, so there is nothing left unanswered and that is a point in this story's favor.

Unfortunately, that is where the good things end. Nearly everything else in this story is just bad. The scene wasn't bad, but it was a bit overlit so that instead of that icy, crystalline feel you get from Superman's Fortress of Solitude, you get a glassy or plastic-y feel to everything. It also didn't help that Sylvester McCoy was the only actor who seemed to be treating the set as if it were actually made of ice. You would see him pretend to slip and use his umbrella to steady himself in a way that was trying to sell the set. However, no one else did the same thing, so whatever illusion he was trying to foster went away quickly.

The acting performances of nearly everyone were pretty bad. Glitz was his usual roguish self, but without someone to play off of, he becomes a lot less charming and more of a dumb con-man. He was also given some pretty terrible expositional dialogue that the actor just couldn't make work. Instead of being fun comic relief, he was just a dumb bore.

Mel was also pretty bad. She was her usual perky self, which wasn't bad per se, but she had absolutely nothing to do and what little dialogue she was given was flat and uninteresting. Ace likewise was also rather badly written. It was very clear that she was written by someone who thinks they might know what teenagers sound and act like rather than someone who actually knows. Her performance wasn't horrendous, but it was all over the map in terms of emotions and attitude.

Her worst moment was when she was being held by Kane in exchange for the Dragonfire crystal. Here she begged for the Doctor to give in to Kane's demands as she was afraid to die. This is contrast not only to the fighter Ace we know in later stories, but also to the Ace we saw at the end of Episode One. There she stood up to Kane and fought back with perhaps false bravado, but still a form of bravado. The character we were shown in the earlier part of the story, would not have begged for her life and cowered in fear when threatened.

Kane himself wasn't overly terrible, but he was very one-dimensional. He also seemed rather incompetent as the story progressed. He enslaves others to build his army, but is nearly thwarted at several different occasions, mostly by his own henchmen. His only really good scene is when he kills Belasz and even there, I'd chalk that up to her performance rather than his as it was pretty obvious to what is coming. I would compare him to Rupert Everett's performance as Dr. Claw in the terrible Inspector Gadget movie. It is just that one-note.

Tone was a big problem for this story. The story couldn't fully decide if it was going to be a comedy or an action/horror story. Bits like the Doctor slipping around, Ace dumping a milkshake on her boss' head and the philosophy discussion with one of the Iceworld guards are clearly meant as comedy pieces. However, there are violent action scenes interspersed throughout: the fighting with the creature, Kane's freeze death touch and Kane's Raiders of the Lost Ark melting death. If that wasn't whiplash enough, you have the very odd cut scenes of the little girl in Episode Three where she is strolling around Iceworld acting like it's her plaything while death and destruction reign around. The acting of her mother is actually worse as supposedly Kane's men are killing everyone around and she stops Glitz at one point to mildly ask if he has seen her daughter, like she has been playing hide-and-seek too long. It is just a terrible performance and another indication that both the writer and director had no idea what tone they were supposed to use.

While on the subject of the child, I cannot figure out what the point of her was. She was used as the object that got Ace fired in Episode One as it was her mother that complained about the milkshakes. Fine. She randomly comes back in Episode Three and hides from Kane's men. Also fine, the producers could justify this by not even wanting to allude to the idea that a child died in the explosion of the Nosfaratu. But why keep cutting back to her throughout the rest of Episode Three? She could have been shown emerging from hiding after everything was over and it would have been a simple happy ending. Instead, she wanders through the corridors, almost getting shot by Kane's guard, finds her way into Kane's lair and puts her teddy to bed in Kane's freezing chamber; all for absolutely no point. Her wandering had no payoff except to cut into the run time and cut away from the main action. I can only think that she was someone's daughter who really wanted to be shown in the show because there is no other point that I can think of to having her in the story.

Another fault of this story was it's very haphazard use of metaphor. Ace being lifted from Perivale to Iceworld via a time storm and her own proper name of Dorothy is a not so subtle reference to The Wizard of Oz. Likewise, with a villain named Kane, his slaves take his frozen brand or "mark of Cain" if you prefer. Some small bits of metaphor are okay but generally it is nice to have a point behind it. The mark of Cain is fine although a bit over the top since it was pretty obvious Kane is the bad guy. The Wizard of Oz stuff though doesn't make a lot of sense though. Not only is it a pointless metaphor that doesn't really go anywhere, but it also creates a dumb situation of how Ace got to Iceworld in the first place. One that later writers went to try and explain and failed even then (in my opinion).

My final rant on this story is with Mel's leaving scene. I doubt that Ian Briggs was allowed to write that final scene, especially as there was a bit of internal debate on whether Ace or Ray from Delta and the Bannermen was going to succeed Mel as companion when the script was likely submitted. Andrew Cartmel was officially on as script editor, but given the rush of Season 24 and the significance of changing companions, I suspect that John Nathan Turner actually wrote this scene and boy does it show. Mel is given absolutely no reason to leave. They are not back on Earth and Mel has shown no inclination that she is tired of traveling with the Doctor. What's more, there is no hint that she has any chemistry or desire to interact with Glitz, either in this story or back in The Trial of a Timelord: The Ultimate Foe. She drops the idea of leaving like there was some monumental moment that occurred but nothing happened. It was the lamest excuse of writing out a companion that I've ever seen. Leela deciding to stay with Andred might be the dumbest companion departure, but at least there was a fig leaf of a romance that we apparently never saw. This was just Mel up and decided that it was time that she and the Doctor parted ways and that Ace should take her place. Ace coming along was fine but there was no reason the Doctor couldn't travel with both of them. Her leaving was not necessary.

The playing out of the scene was also pretty bad. Mel drops her bomb about leaving and that apparently flusters the Doctor to the point of nearly having a regeneration crisis. He babbles incoherently, flustered by Mel leaving and doesn't cotton on to the idea to ask Ace until Mel nearly kicks him in the butt. Then you have Ace's acting which is probably her worst portrayal of an eager teenager throughout the story. The Doctor recovers it a bit with his three rules bit but her reaction doesn't play right. It just made the last five minutes of the story absolutely painful to watch.

I'm sorely tempted to give this a score of 0. Nearly everything about it was terrible and whatever good in the story was displayed in Episodes One and Two, was washed completely away by the end of Episode Three. But I don't think I can go quite that harsh. Still, this is going to be near the bottom of my list. It is shoddily produced, poorly acting and badly written. What's more, unlike Time and the Rani, this was the last story of the season so there should have been time to do a little clean up here and there to make it at least marginally more palatable. I can't imagine voluntarily watching this one again and would not recommend it to anyone else to watch.

Overall personal score: 0.5 out of 5

The Savages

They are men. Human beings like you and me; although it appears at the moment you are behaving in a rather subhuman fashion.

The Savages is a story you don't hear about much which is rather surprising given that it is Steven's departure story. Some of that stems from it being all recon and probably also that with much of Steven's performances lost, he is viewed as a lesser companion among some groups of fans. I happen to enjoy Steven and was rather curious about this somewhat overlooked story.

Plot Summary

The Doctor lands on a planet set in the far future. He heads out to take some scientific readings while Steven and Dodo wait outside the TARDIS. The Doctor is observed by men dressed in skins and armed with spears and clubs. They make to attack him but retreat when soldiers with laser guns appear. The soldiers welcome the Doctor, informing him that his movements have been tracked by the city elders and they wish to welcome him. The Doctor agrees to go with him and one of the soldiers named Exorse is sent to collect Steven and Dodo.

Steven, growing worried, scouts for the Doctor but is called back by Dodo screaming that she saw a savage man. The men reappear and hurl spears at them but Steven and Dodo take cover behind the TARDIS. The savages retreat when Exorse appears and takes the pair to the city.

At the city, the elders proclaim the Doctor an honorary elder and wish to discuss science with him. They are surprised at the arrival of Steven and Dodo as they had not expected companions, but they are given gifts and taken to another part of the city to enjoy refreshment. The Doctor sits with the elders and inquires about their source of energy, to which the elders both boast but are also vague about.

Meanwhile, city soldiers head out on patrols. The savages, observing from hidden locations, send messengers to warn their people to hide. One of the messengers is a woman named Nanina. She is captured by Exorse and taken back to the city where she is given over to a group of scientists. The scientists release a different savage whom they have just finished with and take Nanina down to the lab. The released savage, exhausted and dazed, walks slowly to the exit.

Steven and Dodo are escorted around the city but Dodo becomes suspicious as their two guides, Avon and Flower, take pains to ensure Dodo cannot see anything they do not want her to see. She sneaks a peek out a window and observes Exorse leading Nanina in to the city. Seeing him emerge from a room later, she manages to sneak away from the group and explore on her own. While walking down a passage, she runs into the savage just released from the lab. He ignores her and shuffles out through a door that leads outside the city. Outside, he is collected by the savage leaders.

The scientists place Nanina in a machine and begin to extract energy from her. Dodo, hearing Nanina's screams, makes her way into the lab to observe. She is grabbed and dragged into an adjoining chamber by the assistants who mistake her for another savage to be processed. Dodo however, fights back, threatening to destroy the equipment.

Steven, Avon and Flower finally notice that Dodo has gone missing and go to look for her. They interrupt the Doctor and elders to tell them but the Doctor dismisses their concerns as he trusts Dodo to take care of herself. The elders order guards to assist with the search. The guard believes that she may have gone down a restricted corridor. He prepares to go after her and threatens Steven that he is not go down the corridor either.

Dodo's actions arouse the awareness of the chief scientist Senta. He learns that she is not a savage and one of the Doctor's companions. He pulls her aside as the guard enters. The guard takes her back to Steven while Senta ends the extraction of Nanina. Nanina is then taken by the guards and released outside the city.

Dodo is taken back to Steven and the two of them are taken back to the Doctor. A guard then comes and arrests Avon and Flower for their negligence. The Doctor finishes his conversation with the elders and offers to show them some of his charts on time travel. He takes Steven and Dodo with him and heads back to the TARDIS. The chief elder, Jano, worried about what Dodo saw and suspects, orders the guard captain Edal to follow them.

The group heads back towards the TARDIS where the Doctor confirms to Dodo that he suspects something foul afoot as well. They find the man Dodo ran into earlier lying on the ground. The Doctor sends Steven and Dodo back to the TARDIS for medicine while he attends to him. Edal comes across them and tries to drive the man away. The Doctor resists and decries the practices used by the citizen of the city. Edal, worried about the Doctor's attitude, takes him back to the city under force.

Steven and Dodo return and give the man two capsules that help reenergize him. However, they are soon surrounded by other savages who mean to kill them. The man they helped protests, proclaiming them friends. He also tells them of how the Doctor was taken away when he stood for him. Steven and Dodo try to convince the savages to help them rescue the Doctor, but they protest, fearing how they are overmatched.

In the city, Jano tries to convince the Doctor of the good of their method but the Doctor still decries it and vows to fight them. Jano orders the Doctor taken to the lab where he is forcibly placed into the extraction machine. Senta begins to transfer energy from the Doctor into their vats. The operation successful, the Doctor is pulled out and sent to a cell to recover. Jano then states that he will take all the Doctor's vitality, not wanting to risk anyone else. He also orders Edal to find and bring back the Doctor's companions for similar treatment.

The savage leader Chal takes Steven and Dodo into a cave which is their refuge to escape the guards, whom they have learned are pursuing them. The guard Exorse learns of their location and follows them into the cave. Chal takes Steven and Dodo down a passage, hoping to discourage Exorse in his pursuit. Exorse cows the remaining savages in the cave and one reveals which passage the companions went down and he follows them.

The passage ends in a dead end and Chal gives themselves up as lost. Steven however, learns from Chal that the light guns may be vulnerable to reflection. He takes the jeweled mirror that Dodo was given and orders the other two to lie down. As Exorse approaches, he activates the light gun. As he does so, Steven lifts the mirror and the light shines back, freezing Exorse. Steven picks the gun up and pushes Exorse back to the main chamber, suspended in his own beam. The savages look with wonder on Steven turning the tables on the guard.

With the gun in his possession, Steven asks for help to get into the city. Chal agrees to lead them to the door the savages are expelled from after extraction. Steven also orders that no harm come to Exorse unless he tries to escape. A savage named Tor, drunk on the victory, ignores this and attacks Exorse. He wounds him but his blow is defected by Nanina who insists they listen to Steven. She then tends to Exorse's wound and he is softened by her kindness and humanity.

After dismissing the assistants Senta places Jano in the receiving chamber. He switches it on and transfers the Doctor's vitality into Jano. Jano emerges after the procedure, talking and acting like the Doctor for several moments before attempting to reassert his own mind. He tells Senta that the procedure was hard on him and needs rest. Senta agrees and leaves Jano alone in the lab with orders not to be disturbed.

Steven surprises a the guard at the city door and knocks him out when the light gun hits him in the eyes. Chal agrees to wait outside while Steven and Dodo enter the city to find the Doctor. Their entrance is monitored by Edal who orders the Doctor be placed at the end of the passage for them to find. Their transmissions are also monitored by Jano. Upon finding the Doctor, they attempt to lead him out of the city, but the Doctor merely shuffles about like a zombie. Edal orders the doors closed and the passageway flooded with gas. The gas renders the light guns inert and the group begins to choke on the gas.

Edal orders them to drop their guns and Dodo complies. Steven refuses and Jano, under the influence of the Doctor's mind, opens the door behind them. Dodo takes the Doctor out while the sudden rush of air, clears the passage of the gas, allowing Steven to fire his gun at Edal and his men. Steven retreats out through the door and Jano closes the door.

Edal prepares to go after the group and Jano declares that he will lead the patrol. He orders one set of guards to head to the TARDIS while the others head towards the caves. Steven and Dodo meet up with Chal and Chal and Dodo take the Doctor back to the caves. Steven stays behind to delay the patrol. He fires at the patrol from the undergrowth, scattering the guards and retreating steadily. Once Jano has a shot on Steven but declines to take it, his mind still struggling against the Doctor's.

Chal, Dodo and the Doctor arrive at the caves just as Tor is preparing to fight Nanina over the life of Exorse. Steven arrives with the guards directly behind him. They see Jano leading the patrol and Steven makes an effort to take him down. Suddenly the Doctor speaks, ordering Steven not to harm Jano. Steven complies and the group retreats in to the cave. Jano's patrol then breaks off the attack, but Jano stays behind.

The Doctor slowly begins to come around. He states that they cannot leave and leave the savages in their current state. He proposes to destroy the transference machine with help from inside the city. As darkness approaches, Jano enters the cave, just as the Doctor had told them he would. Jano, in taking the Doctor's vitality all to himself, has absorbed thoughts and grown a conscious. He agrees that they must change their ways and offers to help destroy the transference machine.

While Jano is talking, Exorse manages to free himself and flees into the jungle. Nanina follows and begs him not to betray them. She also points out that he owes her his life. Exorse acknowledges this but continues to the city.

Edal returns to the city and informs Senta of what happened. Senta believes Jano may have absorbed some of the Doctor's ideas and tells him and the other elders of the transference. Edal declares martial law and takes command. Exorse enters and informs them that he was captured but escaped. He also tells them that Jano was around but does not reveal Jano's plan. Edal is suspicious and orders Exorse taken away to be interrogated later.

Jano returns to the city with the Doctor and his companions as well as some of the savages posing as his prisoners. He denounces Edal and his attempt at seizing power and orders his arrest. Senta and the elders side with Jano and Edal is taken away. Once out of the room, Jano attempts to convince Senta to dismantle the transference machine. Senta is taken back by this and refuses. Jano then releases his "prisoners" and the group falls upon the machine and destroys it.

The guards burst in with Edal back in command and enraged at Jano's treason he prepares to shoot him. Steven however anticipates this and shoots Edal down instead. As the smoke clears from the destruction of the machine, Jano and Chal agree that they must have a neutral mediator to help both sides accept the other. They ask the Doctor to stay but he refuses. Chal then declares that Steven is the man they will accept. Jano, already in Steven's debt agrees. Steven protests but the Doctor insists that he is prepared to accept the challenges offered.

Steven agrees and after saying goodbye to the Doctor and a tearful Dodo, heads up to the main chamber to meet with both sides. Dodo asks if they will see him again and the Doctor offers a hope given the nature of their travels. He and Dodo then depart in the TARDIS.

Analysis

I must say that I was quite surprised by how much I liked this story. Generally when a story is generally overlooked by fans, you expect it to be more of the middling variety; something that doesn't sway people much one way or the other. Instead, I found this to be a very engaging and well acted story. There was tension as well as good action that actually translated fairly well to an audio only format and I'm sure looked pretty good on screen.

I must first praise the acting, especially of the Doctor. In the first episode and a half, he is very subtle. It would be easy to think him impressed and awed by the fawning attention he is getting. But there is a note in his voice indicating that he is well aware that something rotten is going on. He is certainly much more aware than Steven who is easily taken in by the wonders of the city. But the Doctor's best moments are his stands first again Edal and then Jano in defiance of their practices. It is an excellent denouncement of what they are doing. and very engaging. The Doctor has less to do in the following two episodes but what he does do is both well acted and entertaining. He is the Doctor who is in full command of the situation and he lets you know it.

Steven and Dodo do well here as well. Steven is a little off character in the first episode as he is normally not that trusting but he comes around as the proper man of action. Dodo is also engaging as she finally gets some proper spunk in her investigating as well as proper action sequences both with Steven and in helping the Doctor. She also has a nice emotional reaction in Steven's departure as someone clearly losing a good friend.

Most of the guest cast was pretty good. I especially enjoyed Jano both in his noble, yet barbaric mind but even more so when channeling the Doctor at the end of Episode Three. I found his impression to be quite impressive and I can imagine the bit of joking there was on set in his performance. The others were pretty good too, although I didn't really care for Tor. He seemed a bit too stereotypical young hothead and I didn't really buy his performance. There was no subtlety to it and his scenes mostly went nowhere except to create false tension that wasn't really needed.

Something else that is somewhat interesting is the carryover in production from the original title. It is fairly well known that the working title of this story was The White Savages, giving the impression that if that moniker is left off, the natural inclination toward savages is to imagine someone of non-Caucasian stock. More intelligent minds prevailed and the story was retitled. However it is interesting to note that all of the important players among the city dwellers are blacked up. Jano is the darkest but other characters are definitely wearing darker foundation than their natural skin tone. About the only ones who aren't are Avon, Flower, and Exorse. I am not sure if this was some sort of social commentary or if it was an expression of natural racism. In the end, it didn't bother me and if I hadn't been aware of the working title, I might not have paid much attention to it. Of course, the lack of moving pictures also helps to overlook it. If it were more visible, it might have stuck out more and perhaps affected my enjoyment of the story but I cannot say at this time.

One of the things that I found myself imagining with this story while watching it is that while the Doctor recovers from his vitality extraction, he loses a measure of his life to the machine. The First Doctor only lasts for an additional three stories before regenerating at the end of The Tenth Planet. I've not seen The Smugglers yet but in both The War Machines and The Tenth Planet, the First Doctor is clearly beginning to ail. Behinds the scenes, it is well known that the producer Innes Lloyd was actively working to both sideline and potentially replace William Hartnell. He gets a bit of a reprieve in both The Gunfighters and here, but throwing in a plot element about having part of your life sapped away to be playing in Lloyd's mind as another potential way of getting rid of Hartnell.

Unfortunately I can't speak to the production values too much for this story given that we can't see it. But the costuming and set design that we can see looks fairly decent. The helmets and light guns are a bit odd but that's pretty well par for the course in any 1960's Sci-Fi story. At the very least, nothing looked so odd or out of place that it distracted from the overall story.

One thing I do remember being brought up in a discussion of this story that I listened to was why the city dwellers didn't domesticate the savages and create less work for themselves. I think the answer is two-fold to that question. First, as anyone who works with animals will tell you, a wild animal will have more vitality and vigor than a domesticated one. This is even more true with animals that are not naturally domesticated and attempting to keep a group of humans locked away would probably diminish their overall vitality beyond what was needed. The Doctor and his companions would have been exceptions to this (and they were planning to keep them prisoner) but only because they got such a high yield of vitality from the Doctor and presumably would have from Steven and Dodo.

The second reason is actually alluded to in the story. While the people of the city had an idea of what was going on, they were clearly discouraged from discussing it and kept in the dark about the full nature of the procedures. This is demonstrated in Avon and Flower's evasiveness in answering Dodo's questions as well as trying to shield her from evidence of the truth. How much harder would it be to keep the people fully in the dark if a large farm of caged humans were kept nearby. What's more, continuous exposure to the savages would have risked exposing that they were not that different from the city dwellers and a genuine risk of savage rights activists might have appeared. Keeping the savages at a distance and letting them loom over as a threat to those who would go outside the city allowed the elders to maintain the fiction of their intellectual and cultural superiority over the masses as well as continue to encourage the idea that an armed state was necessary for defense.

On the whole, I enjoyed this one. I think it fair to say that I enjoyed it enough that I think I could sit through it again as a reconstruction and enjoy it. Obviously I'd prefer to see it fully realized and if it does manage to come back, I'd be happy to sit through it a second time. There are a couple of niggles outside of the limitations of it being a recon that knocked it down a touch but on the whole, this was a good one and unfortunately overlooked.

Overall personal score: 4 out of 5

The Twin Dilemma

I am the Doctor, whether you like it or not.

In just about every episode list that Doctor Who fans put together, three stories consistently sit at the bottom: Time-Flight, The Twin Dilemma and Time and the Rani. The Twin Dilemma is additionally exacerbated given that it is the immediate follow up to The Caves of Androzani, a story that is usually put near the top of most lists. So, taking that all into account, is this story as bad as it's reputation suggests?

Plot Summary

The Doctor, having just regenerated, prepares for a new adventure. Peri, unfamiliar with regeneration is skeptical and is wary of the new version of the Doctor. As he decides on a new outfit, the Doctor begins to go through crisis. He has mental lapses where wild emotion takes control. This blows up in a fit of paranoia where, believing that she is an evil fairy, the Doctor attacks and tries to strangle Peri. She manages to throw him off and when he wakes up to what he has done, decides that he must live as a hermit for a while, setting course for the asteroid Titan 3.

Meanwhile two mathematically gifted twins, Romulus and Remus Sylveste, are attending to their lessons, having been left alone for the evening by their parents. They are visited by an old man named Professor Edgeworth who uses a patch to hypnotize them and transports them to an alien spacecraft. Edgeworth has the boys locked in a room and contacts his employer, Mestor a giant slug, who orders them to head to the base on Titan 3.

The boy's father, Professor Sylveste, returns early and finds the boys gone. He also discovers a trace element in the floor and alerts the authorities that the boys have been kidnapped. The authorities launch an immediate search and one patrol ship discovers the freighter the boys are on. They are immediately alerted as the freighter was reported destroyed earlier that year and then jumps into warp drive, despite not being equipped with that capability.

The fighter squadron follows the freighter. When the freighter lands on Titan 3, the boys are taken the base. Mestor contacts Edgeworth and orders the boys to work. He also orders Edgeworth to destroy the pursuing fighters. Edgeworth does so though the squad leader, Lt. Lang, survives the crash. Disturbed by the loss of the squadron, the ministry on Earth orders any further pursuit called off.

The Doctor and Peri find Lang and bring him into the TARDIS. The Doctor chastises Peri for wanting to leave before they found him. Peri angrily rebuffs the Doctor for his own posturing. The noise of the argument brings Lang to his senses and he pulls a gun on the Doctor, believing him to be reason his squadron was destroyed. Peri pleads with Lang, who then collapses again. The Doctor takes away his gun and orders Peri to hide the power cell. At her urging, he reluctantly begins to tend to the man to save his life.

Professor Edgeworth sets the twins to a new set of calculations while he also sets his crew about to inspect the ship and the base. He updates Mestor on their progress as well and is ordered to come back to Jocanda once the ship is repaired. The twins balk at their assignments, but Mestor, who is telepathic, enters their minds and threatens their lives if they do not work.

Having tended to Lt. Lang's life, the Doctor and Peri leave the TARDIS and proceed to the hidden base. They discover a service passage and enter. In the corridors, the Doctor has a regeneration fit and the noise and his subsequent inaction attracts the attention of the Jacondans sent to make repairs. They take the Doctor and Peri back to Edgeworth in the main control room, where Edgeworth has just finished a cycle of cellular reconstruction in a side machine.

The Doctor recognizes Edgeworth as Azmael, the former ruler of Jocanda whom he befriended as the Fourth Doctor. Edgeworth does not recognize the Doctor but believes him and elects to merely leave him prisoner on Titan 3. This angers Noma, Edgeworth's second-in-command and he silently triggers the self destruct system for the base. Edgeworth, the twins and the Jocandans teleport to their ship, having locked the Doctor in and scrambled the teleporter.

The Doctor begins to try and figure the combination for the lock when Peri discovers the self destruct mechanism. The Doctor then changes plans and reconfigures the cellular reconstructor to act as a time teleporter which will carry them back to the TARDIS. He sends Peri first and then attempts to time his own jump to arrive at the same time as her.

On the TARDIS, Lt. Lang wakes and finds his gun. He realizes the power pack is missing and goes to find it. He enters the wardrobe and selects a new shirt to replace his damaged one. In the pocket of this new shirt, he finds the power pack. Fully armed, he attempts to figure out how to leave the TARDIS when Peri materializes near the console. She ignores him and turns on the scanner to see the base explode. The Doctor materializes moments later, telling her that he mistimed his jump due to the watch he was using being broken.

The two finally notice Lt. Lang and they bring him up to speed on the situation. He reluctantly agrees to work with them to rescue the twins. The Doctor then takes the TARDIS to Jaconda and is shocked to find the once green world a wasteland. Seeing petrified slime trails, the Doctor realizes that the planet has been taken over by a race of humanoid slugs that were thought to only be part of Jacondan legend.

Reverting into a fit, the Doctor argues against going to the palace to rescue the twins but Lt. Lang forces the Doctor to go. He lands in the basement and the group begins to sneak about, the Doctor pointing out carvings that relay the legend of the slug invasion. The Doctor figures that one of the slug eggs must have survived the great purge many years ago and the slugs grew in force until they could take over. Confirming this theory, two slugs pass by. The group manages to avoid being seen but Lang accidently steps in the slime trail and is stuck, forcing him to try and cut himself out.

Edgeworth and his group land on Jaconda where he sets the twins to work on his plan to bring two outer planets into orbit around Jaconda to act as greenhouses to continuously supply food to Jaconda. Mestor comes down to check on them and attempt to show that his aims are benevolent. Mestor reluctantly agrees to give the twins a full day to work and will refrain from telepathically monitoring Edgeworth. Edgeworth is left alone with the boys and a Jacondan named Drak who is sympathetic to Edgeworth.

Lang manages to cut himself free, but the Doctor goes on ahead of them, still in his regeneration fit. Lang and Peri are discovered by Jacondan guards. Lang is knocked out but Peri is taken to Mestor. Meanwhile the Doctor discovers Edgeworth's lab and attacks him. Drak manages to pull him off and the fit passes. Edgeworth tells the Doctor his plan for moving the planets when a revived Lang burst in, telling the Doctor of Peri's capture. The Doctor, moves to go rescue her but is restrained by Lang and Edgeworth so as to not expose them.

Mestor elects not to kill Peri but does probe her mind and sends his guards to Edgeworth's lab. The guards arrest the Doctor and take him to Mestor, although they miss Lang. In the throne room, the Doctor offers his services to help move the planets based on his experience. Mestor is suspicious but agrees, sending the Doctor and Peri back to the lab.

In the lab, the twins finish their calculations but the Doctor points out a flaw in the plan. As the planets are of lower mass, moving them closer to the sun will eventually cause their orbits to degrade and plunge into the sun. Edgeworth agrees, kicking himself for not seeing this flaw. The Doctor asks to see the hatchery to try and determine what Mestor's real plan is. The eggs seem odd to him and they only respond when heat is applied. He realizes that Mestor's plan is to have the two outer planets plunge into the sun with the resulting plasma explosion destroying Jaconda and sending the now heat bathed eggs across the universe to hatch and infect other worlds.

The Doctor orders the twins to erase their calculations, keeping the knowledge in their heads alone. He orders Lang to take the twins and Peri back to the TARDIS while he and Edgeworth take on Mestor. The Doctor tells Drak to go with Lang but finds Drak dead, Mestor having burned out his mind using him to monitor them. The two groups head out in separate directions, the Doctor taking two vials of chemicals with him.

Lang's group wanders the tunnels looking for the TARDIS. As they approach, the run into Noma and two other guards, sent by Mestor. The twins jump in front, knowing that Mestor needs them alive. The Jacondan hesitation allows Lang to shoot the two guards. Noma gets a shot off and wounds Lang, but he is able to return fire and shoot the gun from Noma's hand. Peri and the twins pick up the dropped guns and hold Noma prisoner.

The Doctor and Edgeworth head to the throne room and the Doctor throws one of his vials at Mestor. Mestor activates a force field to protect himself. He then threatens to take over the Doctor's mind but the Doctor mocks him and invites him. However, instead of the Doctor, Mestor transfers his mind to Edgeworth. Edgeworth fights him and tells the Doctor to destroy Mestor's original body. The Doctor throws his second vial of chemicals, melting Mestor's body. Mestor and Edgeworth continue to fight mentally but the strain is too much and Edgeworth collapses. Unable to retreat to his own body, Mestor's consciousness is ejected from Edgeworth's body and he dissipates, causing all the controlled Jacondans to be released to their normal selves. Edgeworth dies in the Doctor's arms, having used all his regenerations prior to this body.

The Doctor returns to the TARDIS and offers to take the twins back to Earth. Lang elects to stay and become the new Master of Jaconda. Peri wishes him well but the Doctor dismisses him. As they leave in the TARDIS, Peri asks if the Doctor is having another fit to be so rude. The Doctor states that his mind has stabilized and that she is going to have to accept his new brusquer, alien personality.

Analysis

While The Twin Dilemma is not the horrible dreck it is occasionally made out to be, it is not by any means good. The story itself isn't too bad, and there is some potential both in the overall plan and the introduction of the Doctor, but it falls apart in so many other ways that those overwhelm the good aspects of the story.

The limited amount of good things in this story are pretty much the story concept, some of the language structure of the script and the performance of Edgeworth. I did enjoy him throughout the story as he begins with a quiet sinisterness; someone who does not want to harm but will if the situation is necessary. He evolves into a more sympathetic character, having compassion but also still understanding that hard choices must be made. I did enjoy his performance, although his death scene was a bit hokey.

That hokey-ness is just one of the myriad of flaws this story has. You would think that a story that has the Doctor attempting to strangle a companion could only improve from that point, but the story actually gets worse in later episodes. I thought the Doctor's fits were over the top acting but that he was somewhat restrained when operating in his "normal" mode in the beginning. His pomposity was actually somewhat amusing as you adjusted to it. But even his non-fit moments started to take on a silly over-the-top-ness as the story progressed. It then all came to a crashing end in the final scene.

There are certain stories that have been described by fans as moments where the show was overly arrogant in that fans would just accept anything put out by the producers. The final scene of the Doctor talking to Peri is probably one of the worst moments. The Doctor doesn't look directly at the camera like he does at the end of The Caves of Androzani but his telling of Peri that she has no choice and must just accept him is a jab in the eye at the people who watched the show. Even worse is that there is total tone confusion in the scene. As the Doctor speaks, the music goes full minor, giving a dark edge to the scene, almost like a villain making a threat to a hostage. But then he smiles slightly and Peri responds like she just got the joke and that throws further confusion in to the scene. Is she going Stockholm Syndrome? Is this some sort of private joke between them? The scene just doesn't make any sense in what it is trying to accomplish other than to tell people to shut up and not whine about the new Doctor. It is just highly off-putting.

The acting outside of the Doctor and Edgeworth is a real mixed bag. Mestor, although limited by his costume, does a fairly good job. He comes across as fairly sinister and has a real Jabba the Hut angle going, although I think he seems more competent than Jabba. Lang was okay, although not overly memorable. Noma, likewise, did a decent job as the lackey, although I wouldn't call anything about his performance overly distinguishing. The twins were not good, although I didn't think they were as bad as fans say. They seemed like prototypical child actors, limited in scope and emotion, thus coming across as fairly bland. I wouldn't call their performance bad, just boring. As children, that earns them a bit of a pass in my book where as you would be harder on a similar performance from an adult.

Unquestionably, the worst acting comes from Peri. She never, ever, loses the whiney wibble in her voice and she seems genuinely stunted in her emotional range while trying to maintain the American accent. The script takes her all over the place, going from confused, to defiant, to back to submissive. The worst moment is the cliffhanger to Episode Two where she thinks the Doctor has been blown up. She scrunches up her face like she is about to cry but it comes across as so fake looking. I think I have seen better acting in high school dramas for that emotion. It is just absolutely terrible. Her only good moments come when she is standing up and fighting with the Doctor, calling him out on his crap. But she then either retreats too quickly into diminutive status or presses too hard and maintains the anger when it is not required that the overall effect of that momentary good bit is lost in the overplaying of the whole.

The set design wasn't bad, albeit very 1980's and I actually thought the Jacondans didn't look too bad. They had a more real look that you might expect for painting the face of an actor silver. Not the best alien ever seen on the show but far from the worst. Mestor on the other hand was terrible. The slugs in general weren't very good as there should have been a better attempt at making them look like they are slithering rather than shuffling. But Mestor himself was so limited by the terribleness of his mask. The worst part was the large plastic eyes that never moved. So much acting happens in the eyes and to have a creature that is supposed to be this sinister and cunning just stare half cross-eyed whenever being addressed. The costume would have been better served to eliminate any traces of eyes in the front and pretend that his eyes were on the stalks protruding from his head like slugs actually do. That would have made him slightly more unnerving to look at and emphasized his alien-ness. It also doesn't help that after visiting with the twins in Episode Three, you can see several Jacondan extras helping Mestor up the stairs by grabbing his arms. It either is a breaking of the illusion by the acting needing help just to get off the set, or it weakens Mestor's credibility as a villain as he cannot even leave a room without help.

Overall, I can't say that I enjoyed this story. I was feeling open-minded about this story at first and thought that it might be able to overcome some of it's limitations in the beginning. In the first episode and a half, I thought that maybe that fans were a little harsh on this story and that something could be salvaged by it, perhaps able to shoot for something in the 2 to 2.5 range. But it just continued to decline and by the end, I was just glad to be done with it. A decent story attempt but bad acting, mediocre direction, and inconsistency in production drug it down to the depths. Again, I will say that it is not a total loss or that it is dreck of the caliber of Dimensions in Time, but I can't think of any good reason why someone would want to watch this story for a second time. Definitely a poor start for the Sixth Doctor and an awful chaser to the prior story.

Overall personal score: 0.5 out of 5

Kinda

You will agree to be me, sooner or later, this side of Magnus or the other.

Kinda is another one of those stories that seems to leave fandom fairly divided. The story is fairly deep and somewhat surrealistic, not something that is going to immediately appeal to kids, hence it's divided reputation. Limitations to the set design and props budget also drag this story down in the eyes of some fans. I however am always up for a good bit of surrealism so let's see what we can make of this one.

Plot Summary

The Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa and Adric land on the planet Deva Loka following Nyssa's fainting spell. The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to set up a delta wave generator and puts Nyssa to sleep for 48 hours. While she sleeps, the others walk through the jungle and come across a set of crystalline wind chimes. Adric wanders off the Doctor follows but Tegan stays by the chimes, the music having a hypnotic effect on her, lulling her to sleep.

Adric and the Doctor find a mobile exo-suit which Adric accidentally activates. The suit escorts them to an outpost where they are taken in by a military expedition. The expedition is led by Sanders, an old military man. The security chief is Hindle and the scientist is a woman named Todd. Three other people came on the expedition but have disappeared, one of whom left the suit that escorted them there.

Sanders and Todd take the Doctor and Adric in and inform them both of their mission (scouting for possible colonization) and the concerns for the missing crew members. Hindle, growing increasingly erratic as the mission progresses, is deeply distrustful of the newcomers. Todd shows the Doctor two of the locals (the Kinda) that they have taken hostage. The Kinda never speak and live a primitive lifestyle, but they are decorated with the image of the double helix, suggesting a less primitive mind than initial impressions give.

Tegan, still entranced in the jungle, goes into her own mind where she becomes lost in darkness with shadow images questioning reality. She is confronted by a young man with a snake tattoo who pushes his mind on hers, going so far as to create an identical Tegan and posing the question as to which Tegan is real and which is his creation.

Hindle calls Todd and the Doctor back to the main hall but becomes enraged after they leave, smashing most of her lab. He becomes mesmerized by the two Kinda hostages when he views them in a mirror and releases them from their cell. Sanders leaves to go on patrol and leaves Hindle in charge over the objections of Todd. After Sanders leaves, Hindle arrests the three of them, pulling a gun on them as well as arming the two Kinda. He places them in the holding cell overnight.

In the jungle, an old blind woman named Panna is waiting with a young girl. Unlike the other Kinda, she speaks and expresses the danger of the non-Kinda (referred to as the "not-we"). One young man named Aris, who had been spying the expedition as his brother was taken as a hostage, comes to the old woman who warns him to stay away and be patient. He leaves as the sound of Sanders' exo-suit approaches. As he enters the clearing, the young girl gives Sanders a wooden box. He hesitantly accepts it and opens it.

Back in the habitat, Hindle allows the prisoners to come out to see if they will join him. He declares that the trees are going against them and that they will have to sterilize at a radius of 50 miles using fire and acid. The Doctor tries to talk Hindle down but as he is clearly unhinged but Hindle refuses to listen. Adric says that he will help Hindle and he is allowed to stay and work while the Doctor and Todd are returned to the cell.

In Tegan's mind, she continues to struggle with her identity. The young man plays with her some more and then disappears, as she loses herself in the dark. Frightened, Tegan calls out and agrees to the young man's demands. He reappears and shakes her hand. As he does so, the image of the snake on his arm crosses over to hers. She wakes up in the jungle with the image of the snake on her arm. She wanders around the site until Aris appears. He too becomes mesmerized by the chimes and Tegan surprises him. She speaks to him, telling him that she can give him the power to rescue his brother. He accepts and she takes his hand, allowing the snake to pass from her arm to his.

In the control room, Adric palms a set of key cards from Hindle's desk. He attempts to pass them to the Doctor, but is spotted by Hindle. All are taken out of the cage to watch as Adric is punished for theft. Sanders then returns, catching Hindle off guard. As Sanders enters, he is not his normal self. He is much happier and looser. He gives Hindle the same wooden box and tells him to open it. Hindle refuses and further unnerved by this, he locks Sanders up along with the Doctor and Todd. Over the video, he orders the Doctor to open the box.

At first the box seems to contain nothing other than a spring joke. However, both Todd and the Doctor feel a surge of energy. It drains power from the base and opens the cage. They both have a vision of the Kinda and the old woman Panna beckoning them to her cave. Taking advantage of the loss of power and Hindle's location in the main control room, Todd and the Doctor flee into the jungle, Sanders being left behind in a trance.

As the power comes back, Hindle becomes even more concerned about the outside world. He orders that explosives be set up around the base to prevent anyone from attacking as they and all of them will be blown up. Sanders gleefully helps, having been taken out of his normal mind by the powers of the box. Adric tries to object and even leave but he is kept in place by the Kinda guards.

The Doctor and Todd wander through the jungle until they come upon the Kinda. They make friendly with a jester to show they are friendly, which pleases the Kinda. However, Aris comes upon them and orders their capture and death. The Kinda are taken back as no man has the power of speech. The Kinda become convinced that Aris is the fulfillment of a prophecy saying that a man would be given a voice when the "not we" arrive. The girl who helped Panna doesn't believe it and takes the Doctor and Todd to Panna's cave.

Arriving at the cave, Panna takes Todd in but is confused by the Doctor being able to receive the vision as well. She refers to him as an idiot and brings him inside as well. Before she can begin her ritual, Aris and the other Kinda arrive. The girl joins them after opening her mind and being overcome by the power of Aris' thought. Aris then leaves, planning to destroy the base and the "not we".

The Doctor notes the snake marking on Aris' arm and Panna states that it is the sign of the Mara, a legend the Doctor is familiar with. Panna begins a vision for the Doctor and Todd where they see clocks ticking down and violence beginning to consume the Kinda, leading to their destruction. They emerge from the vision to find that Panna is dead. However, the girl returns and takes Panna's staff and beckons them on, having become the new repository for Panna's consciousness.

The group makes their way towards the base but pass near the wind chimes to find Tegan, still asleep. They wake her and discern that the Mara seems to have fully passed out of her. She reluctantly tells them of her dreams, including a hazy vision of when she was fully possessed by the Mara. Using her story, they confirm that the Mara has entered and is in full control of Aris.

In the base, Hindle, Sanders, and Adric continue to build a model city. Adric becomes more and more agitated with their behavior and manages to slip away. Sanders follows but as he is also witless, he makes no effort to stop him and returns to Hindle. Adric slips in to the exo-suit and leaves the base.

Aris leads the Kinda outside the base and has them build a box similar to the exo-suit out of wood. As Adric emerges, the Kinda move to engage it, but unfamiliar with fighting, they run away when Adric panics and engages the weapons system. Aris' box is damaged and he runs into the jungle. Adric is unable to stop the exo-suit but the Doctor manages to pull him before he injures himself or others. The young girl, Karuna, gathers the scattered Kinda while the Doctor, Todd, Adric and Tegan enter the base.

The Doctor and Todd confront Hindle while Adric and Tegan wait in the bay, Adric agitated at his inability to disarm the explosives. The Doctor and Todd try to calm Hindle down by complimenting his new city but he is wise to their attempts to take the detonator. He admits that he is able to control the two captive Kinda through a mirror which they believe had trapped their souls. The Doctor makes a grab for the detonator, which knocks down part of the model city but also destroys the mirror.

Angry at the partial destruction of the city, Hindle threatens to activate the explosives when Todd discovers the box given by the Kinda. She tricks Hindle into opening it and the psychic power within knocks him out but also drives the madness from his mind. The Doctor disarms the explosives and the two captive Kinda flee outside to the rest of their people.

The mirror gives the Doctor an idea and Adric shows the Doctor to a storage bay filled with solar collector panels. He gives the panels to the Kinda and has them lure Aris into the middle of a circle of them. Once in the circle, the Kinda flip the panels and they become a circle of mirrors. The Mara, unable to look at itself thrashes and leaves Aris' body. Two Kinda pull his body from the circle while the Doctor closes the gap. The Mara snake inflates, trying to find a way out of the circle but cannot. Unable to look at itself, it loses power and disappears back into the realm of thought.

Karuna restores sanity to Hindle and Sanders and Todd prepares a final report noting that the planet is unsuitable for colonization, although Sanders makes noises about retiring here. The Doctor, Adric and Tegan head back to the TARDIS where Nyssa has just woken. The group then departs, filling Nyssa in on their adventure.

Analysis

There are two general categories of Doctor Who stories, whether you like that particular story or not: ones that you can pop in at any time and enjoy and ones that you have to be in a specific mood for. Kinda might be the extreme example of a story that you have to be in the right mood for. This is a deep story with a lot of the plot and development left to the audience to figure out. I like that, but I can see how someone would decide that they are not in the mood for that at any particular point.

There were two movies that popped into my head while I was watching this story. Tegan's surrealistic dreams reminded me a great deal of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead with the absurdism and yet sinister surrealism. The scene of the circle of mirrors driving the snake out of Aris struck me strongly of the knight of the mirrors scene in the movie version of Man of La Mancha where Don Quixote is forced to confront the reality of who he actually is by viewing himself in a circle of mirrors. As I enjoy both of those movies, I didn't see a detriment to either comparison.

Overall, this story is quite good. It is well acted for the most part while the story is complex but doesn't feel the need the lead you by the nose. If I were more versed in Eastern philosophy and mysticism, I would probably understand a bit more of the story, but I enjoyed it well enough even without it.

The women were the real stars of this story. Todd worked very well as the Doctor's pseudo-companion, to the point that I think many would have been happy if she had come along and Tegan and Adric got left behind. Todd is inquisitive as a companion should be, but she has a strong independent streak. She also has an instantly good rapport with the Doctor, to the point that they trust and interact well with each other in a very short span of time. In many ways, Todd was channeling the stronger companions of the Fourth Doctor era as she seemed a nice blend of the spunkiness of Sarah Jane and the intelligence and logic of Romana.

I also really enjoyed Panna. She was direct and had a "I'm too old to take your s***" vibe. I loved the fact that not only did she constantly call the Doctor and idiot, but she didn't even allow him to go into his jokes about being an idiot. The first time she did, I couldn't help but think of the Twelfth Doctor's speech near the end of Death in Heaven where he confesses that he is an idiot in a box.

This was also a decent story for Tegan, although only in the first two episodes. Attempting to find logic and devolving into a panicked state actually made sense in her nightmare. I also thought she played well off the trickster form of the Mara who had a bit of a King Joffery vibe going on, although in much more psychological way. I also enjoyed possessed Tegan as it gave her a few scenes of sinister fun. Her chucking apples at Aris was also a fun bit of Biblical parallel given her femininity and the snake symbolism.

Unfortunately, Tegan's good run comes to an end once the Mara enters Aris. She gets a good little nap in Episode Three and then is back to her normal self in Four. I think she is attempting to express shame, though not really knowing why but her interaction with the Doctor still seems rather odd. Her scenes with Adric in the dome are also pretty bad but Adric bears more of the blame for the quality of those scenes.

The expedition men are pretty good as well. Sanders is old school colonel at first like you would expect in some Agatha Christie movie. Then he turns on a dime to a playful child who enjoys building castles out of boxes. Hindle is also quite good. He edges close to the line of overdoing the performance of a madman at a few points but he dials it back now and again. There is an interesting inconsistence in his performance as well. When threatened, he goes into hysterical shrieking about how everyone (including the trees) is against him. But in a secure moment, he lapses into a child-like state about how they are going to fix everything. It feels more genuine because you can't predict what form the madness is going to take. One of the best moments, both in performance and because of how it expresses the situation, is when the castle is knocked over and one of the paper men is torn. Hindle is broken up and when Todd suggests they can fix it, Hindle shrieks about how you can't fix people. It sums up the whole moment in one quick scene.

Unfortunately, like many of the Fifth Doctor stories, a strong pseudo-companion and good guest cast means that the regular companions are once again shown to be terrible. Tegan does a bit better but her interaction with Adric brings her back to the annoying level of whininess that we have seen in prior stories. Nyssa is non-descript as Christopher Bailey wrote the script without knowing that she would be a companion. So she is conveniently left in the TARDIS for the whole story. That you don't miss her speaks volumes of the typical contributions of her character.

Adric is also not in a good state in this one. He doesn't listen to the Doctor and despite earning the confidence of the Doctor to be left behind, does nothing with it. He contributes nothing in his plan to gain Hindle's confidence and ends up spending all that time just trying to escape himself. When he does finally succeed, the Doctor is forced to rescue him before he kills someone and harms himself in the process. The worst moment though is waiting in the bay with Tegan. Adric whines like a spoiled child about being left behind and lashes out at Tegan. I'm actually surprised that Tegan doesn't slap him silly for his arrogance and blame-shifting.
I like the overall story. I like an enemy that is more abstract and less corporeal. I don't quite get why the Kinda would have the wind chime area given that the Mara could manifest in those unprepared by the powers of the chimes. Perhaps it was a prison set up for the Mara and only when outsiders came in was there a risk of escape for the Mara. But regardless, an enemy working from within to destroy innocence strictly as a means to manifest evil is an interesting concept for a story.

It is also interesting to juxtapose the imagery of the Mara attempting to drive Tegan man into accepting it and then the madness manifested in it's possession of Aris with Hindle's genuine madness through mental overtaxing. Despite the Mara being the enemy, Hindle always seems to be more of the threat as his madness is inherently both self-destructive and uncontrollable. It is a pure representation of chaos while the Mara is an agent of chaos but still bound by the limits of the vessel in which it operates. When Aris leads the Kinda, there is an implied threat but the actions of Aris are shown to be incompetent and the Kinda desert him when their own innocence is threatened by something they don't understand. Although threatening, the Mara seems weak and the battle against the Mara is more for the saving of Aris and potentially others like him rather than for the society of the Kinda as is implied in Episode Three.

Now, on the subject of the Mara, that ties in to one of the limitations of this story: the effects. The setting of the story isn't bad nor are the costumes, but there does seem to be some problem with the atmosphere. It is very hard to shake the feeling that all of this is taking place in a studio and I'm not sure if it's the set design or the lighting or what, but there are moments where you are taken out by something that doesn't seem right. There is also a very 1980's look to everyone that I'm sure is difficult to avoid, but it still looks a bit off.

But the worst offender from an effects standpoint is the final manifestation of the Mara. The Mara emerges from Aris and the team does a decent job with a rubber snake to give it a real and thrashing look. However, the snake continues to grow and it looks like the inflated balloon that it is. There are flashes and quick cuts that help, but it still is pretty obvious that the Mara is closely related to an inflatable streamer seen outside a used car lot. I'm sure they were attempting to make the Mara scary but even if the effects are good, there is a logical flaw. If the Mara is towering over the Kinda mirrors, how is it still managing to look at itself? At that size and height, it should have been able to break eye contact with the mirrors and break out of the circle. The story and effect would work much better if a smaller snake (perhaps like a python) were thrashing about but still contained within the height of the mirrors. I can handle less than stellar effects but this was just a point that didn't seem to make sense from a logic point of view.

Taking the story as a whole, this was quite good. Again, I can understand why some might not care for it and I also would have to say that I would need to be in more of a thinking mood rather than a more mindless mood to enjoy it. But I did enjoy it this time around and I see no reason why I wouldn't continue to enjoy it a second time around. It's not a perfect story, but it is nice to get a real thinker of a story now and again. I'm sure on a second pass I would get even more out of it knowing what little things to look for.

Overall personal score: 4.5 out of 5