The Ice Warriors — Blogging Doctor Who

The First Doctor would
have told them to
speak up!

There’s a temptation to call “The Ice Warriors,” which is padded out at six episodes, “glacial” (there, I’ve done it). Trimmed down to five episodes it might have been better. Maybe even four. The main problem is that the “ice warriors” don’t make particularly good villains. I’m not even certain what their objective was in the story (and wouldn’t that objective change, given that an unspecified number of years had passed?).

But first, some background. The Tardis materializes on its side, leaving the Doctor and his companions to scramble awkwardly out the door. You would think the thing would have some sort of automatic adjustment for upright (in relation to local conditions) and stable (though the plot device of the Tardis landing somewhere that couldn’t support it had been used before and would be used again). They’ve arrived somewhere in Britain, but mistake it for Tibet (the location of the previous—and lost—adventure) as the Earth has entered a new ice age.

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The Tomb of the Cybermen — Blogging Doctor Who

A tomb? Don't you need
to be dead for one
of those?

At the end of “The Moonbase,” the Doctor expresses his wish that he not deal with the Cybermen again for a very long time. Had the BBC actually released the reconstructed “Underwater Menace,” there would have been a small break between “The Moonbase” and “The Tomb of the Cybermen.” Ironically, just after I finished watching “The Tomb of the Cybermen,” Amazon sent me an e-mail that “The Underwater Menace” was available for pre-order, but although they list a price, they don’t have a release date for it. I think we’ve heard this one before. So, instead, “The Tomb of the Cybermen” is the third of a sequence of Cybermen stories. The next serial I blog about will not have Cybermen in it (it’s an easy promise; I’ve already started watching “The Ice Warriors,” nothing’s showing up on my shelves that will make me say, “gotta watch this first”).

Our first encounter with the Cybermen was set in 1986, although it was a 1986 in which technology hadn’t much progressed beyond 1966. Then, we jumped forward to the only slightly more advanced time 2070, and everyone has assumed that the that the Cybermen were wiped out more than a century before with the destruction of Mondas. Now we’re at some unspecified future time when it is again believed that the Cybermen were wiped out years before. We’ve got a group that going to find their tombs. They have landed in the dorkiest-looking spaceship imaginable. On the other hand, we get a group shot of captain and crew, and I have to wonder if Captain Hopper chose his crew for looks, but I’ll get to that later. He clearly didn’t choose his spaceship for looks.

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The Moonbase — Blogging Doctor Who

Cybermen on the moon!

When I decided to watch through all the surviving Doctor Who serials in order, I had just filled out my collection with the last three releases: one partial reconstruction and two complete finds. This meant that I couldn’t call this a Doctor Who rewatch, since there were three serials I hadn’t seen yet, the first of which was “The Moonbase.” Two of the four episodes survive, so the other two (the first and third) are animated reconstructions. I was perfectly fine with the reconstructions on “The Reign of Terror” and “The Tenth Planet” (they grew on me), so I was fine with the reconstruction of “The Moonbase.”

By the end, I was thinking that were they to offer fully reconstructed episodes (where fan-recorded audio is all that remains), my reaction would be that of Fry in Futurama: “shut up and take my money!” This, apparently, is not to be. Two Trouton episodes survive of an earlier serial, “The Underwater Menace,” but plans to reconstruct the other two episodes were scrapped. Listen up, BBC: you’re spoiling my dreams of watching a reconstructed version of “The Dalek Master Plan,” which is better than not watching it at all.

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The Tenth Planet — Blogging Doctor Who

Resistance is useless!

I’m going to miss William Hartnell, but at least his send-off was on par with “The Daleks” and not with “The Gunfighters.” As the First Doctor’s final story, we meet the #2 baddies of Doctor Who, the Cybermen. But first a few quibbles.

The serial is called “The Tenth Planet” because, at the time, Pluto was viewed as the ninth planet. The problem came up later that there were plenty of other things that were as much as planet as Pluto is, so we either demote Pluto or decided that a lot of other things are planets. A bigger point is that there is no way that Mondas, the home world of the Cybermen, could have formed as a twin planet to Earth. No, you can’t have two planets sharing the same orbit.

To make things worse, even a “twin” planet to Earth, that is one with the same composition and mass certainly wouldn’t have the same landmasses. Sure, the absolute equivalence of Earth and Mondas does create a plot bit where the planet is initially dismissed as some sort of bizarre reflection of Earth, but let’s not strain our credulity too far.

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The War Machines — Blogging Doctor Who

Conquer the earth
with those?

Honestly, I think the best parts of “The War Machines” are the nifty serial-specific titles and that we get rid of Dodo (and in that case, somewhat unceremoniously). The rest of it, well, it’s a bit of a mess. Let’s be blunt: for an evil computer bent on domination, WOTAN is a bit of an idiot. This is going to include Spoilers (though to what degree I can spoil something forty-nine years after its initial broadcast is unclear; by the way, in Hamlet, the prince dies in the end, as do lots of other characters).

Ironically, the idea of linking up the world’s computers sounds a lot less like science fiction than it did in 1966, considering that when I created this document, the application I use, Byword, opened a new document in iCloud, which has servers in North Carolina. I then moved the document (as I titled it) onto my local drive. Three years before ARPANET, Doctor Who is proposing linking up the world’s computers. The computers actually in the initial ARPANET cluster were somewhat more research oriented than the ones proposed by Doctor Who. Not the White House, Cape Kennedy, or the Royal Navy, but UCLA, UCSB, Stanford, and the University of Utah. No British computers (ARPANET was a US-government project), and certainly no WOTAN.

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The Gunfighters — Blogging Doctor Who

What scarier than being
between a Dalek and a
Cyberman?
Having to watch this story.

I knew this one was coming and coming soon. I’m going to bet that just about any fan of the classic Doctor Who series would, if they could change history and get a serial back but they had to give up a serial we currently had, would happily trade “The Gunfighters.” Yet, with all that, it doesn’t stick in my mind as my least favorite Doctor Who serial. There is something I like less and dread rewatching more.

That (perhaps surprisingly) won’t come up for a long time. The serial in question (and I’m going to be coy and not reveal its name prematurely) fails in one respect where “The Gunfighters” succeeds. “The Gunfighters” has a coherent plot. It’s not a terribly interesting plot, but characters stay in character throughout the whole thing. How grateful we must be for small virtues.

There’s no point in talking about the virtues of the serial, since its sins loom too large. First and foremost is that damn song, “The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon,” which is dull and distracting at its introduction, and only serves to get more irritating. Worse, in addition to the voice-over, we also get to hear various characters sing it. It is the only song available in Tombstone? No wonder people are so ready to shoot someone dead.

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The Ark — Blogging Doctor Who

We're putting everyone
on an ark in space.

I want to like “The Ark” more than I did, but I don’t. It’s an inventive concept that really doesn’t get explored much in Doctor Who: what if you could see the results of your actions, long after they happened? Finally, in the twenty-third story, they do exactly that. The four episodes of “The Ark” break into a pair of mini stories. It might have been more effective if they had filmed it as four episodes, then put another story between the second and third episodes.

Even so, things are not as good as they should be. As often happens in science fiction, they fudge the physics and get the biology spectacularly wrong. Guess what: there are undoubtably many strains of the cold virus to which I have no natural immunity, since there really isn’t any such thing. It’s sort of a standard trope in science fiction that were we not occasionally suffering from the common cold, it would manifest in a more virulent fashion. I don’t buy it.

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The Time Meddler — Blogging Doctor Who

A space helmet for a cow?

The “Time Meddler” was something new in Doctor Who. Dennis Spooner previously gave us a series of historicals, in which the only science-fictional element was the appearance of the Doctor and his companions. The episodes with science-fictional elements were set on other planets or in the far future, and not in Earth’s past.. In the seventeenth Doctor Who serial, Dennis Spooner successfully merges the two elements and gives us the pseudohistorical. The Doctor and his companions go back to 1066 and meet another time traveler.

The serial is important also for being the first time, other than Susan, that we encounter someone from the Doctor’s (then-unnamed) home planet. The Meddling Monk is the series first adversarial Time Lord. It’s a spry little story too, kept to a manageable four episodes with plenty of surprises. We also get the humor in that Steven is aware that they have traveled in space (since they’re clearly no longer on Mechanus), but he’s unwilling to admit that they’ve traveled in time, especially as they keep encountering anachronistic items.

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The Chase — Blogging Doctor Who

Cue the chase music.

There are two or three good episodes in “The Chase.” Unfortunately, the entire serial is six episodes long. Further, it is the most episodic of serials, splitting into four stories, the middle two of which are farce. It was the script editor’s job to tell Terry Nation that a farcical Dalek story wouldn’t do at all. It’s a little early to reduce the Daleks to comic villains. But that’s exactly what they did.

The first and last stories are actually pretty good. Just one question though: is the Space/Time Visualizer Earth technology? It’s got the names of the planets in our system listed—in English—along the bottom. Does this mean that the Moroks of “The Space Museum” conquered Earth at some point? Are humans part of the subjugated population of the Morok Empire? After some cute bits (Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address; Shakespeare admitting the Falstaff is a parody of Sir John Oldcastle, agreeing to write The Merry Wives of Windsor, and rejecting the story of Prince Hamlet of Denmark) we find that Daleks have figured out that the Doctor and his companions are time travelers and they have created their own space/time travel device.

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The Space Museum — Blogging Doctor Who

Trespassers will
be displayed. 

“The Space Museum” does a nice exploration of one of the possibilities of time travel. What happens if you get there, somewhat out of phase with yourself, so that you get there before you arrive? This is the initial mystery that confronts the Tardis crew, and they find that they actually can’t react with anything, nor can anyone see or hear them. (If that’s the case, and they leave no tracks, how can they even stand on ground, and not walk above or into things?) In any case, they find—to their horror—at the end of the first episode that they are on exhibit in the museum.

We were told, way back in “The Aztecs,” that history cannot be changed. If it’s already happened, it’s already happened, and it could be disastrous to try to change things. In “The Space Museum” the characters are faced with the problem that they’ve seen the future, and they desperately need to change it. I guess the rule becomes that history cannot be changed, unless it absolutely have to.

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The Web Planet — Blogging Doctor Who

They could have used the
insecticide from "Planet of Giants"

Did the cast and crew who worked on this Doctor Who serial ever get together to reminisce about the time that someone slipped hallucinogens into the beverages? This is one freaky story that goes on for way too long. “The Web Planet” isn’t the worst Doctor Who story ever (I can think of those that are worse), but it certainly qualifies as the weirdest.

Where do we even begin? The weird bug costumes? The decision to shoot a variety of scenes through a big smudge (to indicate the thin atmosphere of the planet Vortis)? The bizarre stylized performances of the actors wearing the weird bug costumes?

Then there’s the matter of the Doctor’s ring. In this story, it has practically magic powers and he’s unwilling to part with it, but didn’t he trade it away for the outfit of a government official during “The Reign of Terror”?

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The Romans — Blogging Doctor Who

This time, Barbara is
the one who needs to be
rescued.

“The Romans” is a bit of a romp, which is surprising when you think that it involves Barbara and Ian being abducted into slavery and Vicki killing a man. Is she a ancestor of Leela? Clearly if she had gotten the drop on Koquillion, she would have finished him off, even if the Tardis had never landed there. The signs of terror were just an act.

You would think that the Tardis has some sort of safety to prevent it from landing halfway over a ravine. For that matter, given that the Tardis really isn’t there (after all, it contains more space than would fit into the exterior form of a Tardis), why would it be affected by outside gravity? They clearly move through areas without gravity without being affected. But the fall of the Tardis isn’t anything more than a surprise (at the end of “The Rescue”) and an inconvenience. Soon, the four are in an appropriated Roman villa with the owners and all their servants conveniently absent.

Roman country villas weren’t just vacation homes for the Roman aristocracy, somewhere to get away from the heat, noise, and political intrigue of Rome. They were working farms and often the source of power in a region. To leave a home completely unattended would have been unthinkable, since it would leave the place vulnerable to someone walking in and taking it over (just the way the Doctor and his companions did). Who was keeping the crops tended? Who was taking care of the animals? And who was keeping wanderers from just taking the place over?

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The Rescue — Blogging Doctor Who

Will they be rescuing the
bug-faced guy from the
scary blonde woman?

It’s short and a piece of fluff, but it’s pretty good fluff. They could have called it “The Vicki Show,” since its whole purpose is to introduce the new companion (and Susan substitute) Vicki. Vicki gets a lot of screen time, but she’s engaging and less whiny than Susan.

The Doctor runs the gamut in this one. He’s napping at the beginning (perhaps the attempts of the Daleks to convert him into a Roboman took something out of him) and is asleep when they reach the planet, but then they actually used Hartnell in a fight scene, which is a big surprise as I know his health issues had an impact on the show from the beginning.

Something about a rock Ian hands to him lets him know that the planet is Dido, one that he had visited before (this is, I think, the first alien planet that had a prior visit; dialog in earlier episodes referred to various periods of Earth’s history). You would kinda expect that some random rock would be, well, rock, but okay.[1]

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The Dalek Invasion of Earth — Blogging Doctor Who

"We will view the
Tate Modern, and then
exterminate. Exterminate!"

Let me give away my conclusion right at the beginning. “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” is the very best of the first nine surviving Doctor Who stories.[1] As I scan my list of upcoming First Doctor stories, it’s hard to think if this story ever gets beat in the First Doctor’s tenure.[2] Its opening scene in a roboman (as later identified) pitches himself into a river (also later noted as a typical ending for a roboman) is exceeded only when (Spoiler Alert but it’s in the title) a Dalek emerges from those same waters. They never establish what the Dalek was doing under the waters of the Thames, but it’s not like you can go and ask a Dalek that sort of thing.

“Excuse me, Mr. Dalek, but just what were you doing right now on the bottom of the Thames?”

“You will be exterminated! Exterminate! Exterminate!” Daleks are lousy conversationalists. Don’t bother inviting them to tea.

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Planet of Giants – Blogging Doctor Who

No such scene occurs

Miniaturization plots—ones in which the characters are greatly reduced in size—never really divert me, since they raise so many questions, but that’s the sort of plot we get in “Planet of Giants.” Beyond the question of how the air interacts with the (presumably) shrunken atoms of our heroes, there’s also the question of the missing mass. If the Doctor, Susan, Barbara, and Ian were shrunk, where did their mass go? And clearly, Ian weighed less than he normally did, since Forester was able to pick up the matchbox with Ian inside and carry it, despite having what would otherwise be this dense object (one inch high, but about 160 pounds in weight) inside it.

The script makes it clear that the characters have lost mass. There are repeated references to how light they are. But, if that’s the case, Ian’s brain is about the size of a mouse, and there probably isn’t room for any real sort of thought (maybe the reduction in brain size accounts for everyone failing to realize that Barbara has touched the poison). There is the other side of the miniaturization plot. Either you’re an inch high and 160 pounds (and thus made of smaller atoms, whatever they might be) or you’re only a few ounces, which means that most of you has simply vanished.

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The Reign of Terror — Blogging Doctor Who

They should have
made that his new
outfit

I think it’s a very British thing that in “Reign of Terror” all sympathy, except a small part in episode 5, is directed toward the aristocrats. Oh, those poor, poor French nobles, harassed and dispossessed by the filthy rabble. The early British histories of the French Revolution were written from the perspective that an aristocracy was a Good Thing, mainly because the authors were beneficiaries of just that social order. And so, the revolutionaries get depicted as venal, corrupt, and bloodthirsty, as opposed to those poor nobles who were venal, corrupt, and bloodthirsty.

Historically, we pretty much get a one-sided portrait of era. Late in the story, we find that one of the counterrevolutionaries is himself only of bourgeois birth, as if that mattered. In the period just prior to the Revolution, the well-to-do but not noble were eagerly marrying into the nobility, particularly the impoverished nobility, as in the case of the Marquis de Sade. Sade’s in-laws, the Montreuils, were accused of having monarchist sympathies (which they almost certainly did) in part because they had married into the Sade family. Sade had become a proponent of the Revolution, and was even one of the last prisoners of the Bastille. At Citizen Sade, he defended his in-laws, making the (almost certainly false) claim that his in-laws were staunch believers in a republic, and had only allowed a member of the despised nobility into their family because he shared their views.

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The Sensorites — Blogging Doctor Who

I think that's the bad guy

The episode starts off with a recap of their adventures since "An Unearthly Child.” Did they find that viewers who had missed the first few stories needed an update? The sequence concludes with the Doctor telling about another adventure, which initially seems to be told as something that he expects Barbara and Ian to remember, but then Susan chimes in that it was before they landed in twentieth-century London. It has the feel of a save by Carole Ann Ford, and then William Hartnell recovers nicely.

There are a lot of flubbed lines in this story, but Hartnell is not the main culprit, for a change. The actors playing the Sensorites seem to be particularly prone to flubbed lines. Maybe the heavy makeup confused them.

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The Aztecs — Blogging Doctor Who

Don't trust the guy who
overdoes the lip liner.

I still can’t believe that this was the episode chosen to represent the William Hartnell episodes for The Doctors Revisited. Yes, it’s notable for being the earliest surviving historical adventure (until a complete copy of “Marco Polo” turns up somewhere). Like “Marco Polo,” “The Aztecs” was written by John Lucarotti (and it is the only one of his three stories that survives). I’m giving away my final assessment, but the story seems curiously flat after “The Keys of Marinus.”

The episode is notable for the Doctor’s insistence that history cannot be changed, something the series has played with in recent episodes (if you don’t know the outcome, you can’t know if you’re changing anything). Here, Barbara knows that the Aztecs are still practicing human sacrifice when the Spaniards encounter them, yet tries to change this, over the Doctor’s objections.

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The Keys of Marinus — Blogging Doctor Who

Who's the bad guy?

The Keys of Marinus shows that Terry Nation can write a script without those pepperpots. The Daleks had, to a degree, the feeling of a set of episodes tied together (first the petrified forest, then the Daleks, instead of bringing the Daleks out early as might be done today). The Keys of Marinus does this to an even greater degree, since the episodes form four different stories. It’s a clever idea and it keeps the interest up.

Throughout the serial, you could play a drinking game of “will Hartnell flub his line?” I didn’t keep count, but it seemed that he misspoke two or three times and episode. We’re in the fifth story and Hartnell’s health problems are affecting his acting. He vanishes for two stories (supposedly going off to accomplish something, but when we catch up with him, he hasn’t really done anything), and when he returns for the final two episodes, he seems a bit more rested.

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The Edge of Destruction — Blogging Doctor Who

If “The Daleks” was padded by an episode or two, so is “The Edge of Destruction,” the third Doctor Who story. “The Edge of Destruction” is only two episodes long, so that’s pretty much padding from end to end.[1]

The episode is the show’s first bottle episode, using only the Tardis interiors and the regular cast. And the cast is acting strangely. At the end of the previous serial, as they escaped Skaro, there’s a flash and they all fall to the floor. This happens repeatedly in “The Edge of Destruction.” When they wake, their memories are faulty, they act aggressively toward each other, and generally bicker.

This time, the Doctor isn’t the only one behaving badly, as Ian attempts a little recreational choking, and Susan threatens both Ian and Barbara with scissors. The Doctor is the most unsubtle poisoner ever, telling everyone that he’s giving them “a little nightcap to help us all sleep better,” so it’s no terrible surprise that Ian figures out he’s trying to drug them with a sedative.[2]

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