Doctor Who: Survival - A quest to watch all 588 classic episodes in under 4 months

Not exterminated

2006-11-28T12:44:00.000Z

Okay, I've been appalling at updating this blog at all lately, but rumours of its untimely extermination are almost entirely untrue - saw 'The Age of Steel', 'The Impossible Planet' and 'The Satan Pit' after my last post, before work commitments meant I missed the remaining episodes of the new series, very regrettably. I did, though, manage to get the first two volumes from Wellington central library on DVD and so caught up with 'Tooth and Claw' and (at last!) 'The Christmas Invasion', both of which I thought were great, 9 ratings. Might actually write about them sometime soon-ish... We'll see. Thanks to all posters for the comments, and who lnows I may even find something more to add here in the forthcoming epoch ofthe time-space continuum...!

'Rise of the Cybermen'

2006-08-10T22:25:00.000+01:00

9/10

'The Girl In The Fireplace'

2006-08-03T22:38:00.000+01:00

9/10

'School Reunion'

2006-07-27T22:20:00.001+01:00

Brief score-only posts here still at this point...
9/10

'Tooth and Claw'

2006-07-20T11:19:00.000+01:00

Missed, due to circumstances beyond my control and to my intense frustration!

'New Earth'

2006-07-13T22:47:00.000+01:00

New Doctor Who Series 2

He’s back – and it’s about time. No, I mean it: I’m watching in New Zealand, which means the new series has arrived on screens here just as it finished in the UK – so it’s a whole year since I last saw brand new Doctor Who. Yes, I know there was ‘The Christmas Invasion’. No, I didn’t see it: being otherwise engaged on Christmas Day, coupled with the failure of our VCR to record, meant I missed out – and then I contrived to miss it again when it finally got shown here a week ago (only six and a half months late), so until now my entire experience of the Tenth Doctor has been confined to “Oouhhrr… new teeth. Odd,” and “Barcelona!”, at the end of ‘The Parting of the Ways’ twelve long months ago.

No longer, though; now, I’ve at last seen the Doctor’s latest incarnation in action – and he’s marvellous. David Tennant seems so natural in the role it’s hard to conceive I hadn’t seen him in it before, which I guess is a mixture of his performance, the subconscious knowledge that I was watching his second adventure not his first, and the fact that it’s already been a year since his debut onscreen, plus a couple of months before that since he was named as Christopher Eccleston’s successor – whose own tenure from announcement to regeneration lasted only a year and a half, making the Tenth already seem as much ‘The’ Doctor as the Ninth. Given the brevity of that stint, it’s also logical that Eccleston hadn’t established himself to the extent that a long-term fan, accustomed to these changes, would be disoriented initially in the way that one would have been after say Jon Pertwee or Tom Baker’s reigns, which were lengthy enough almost to erase memories of their predecessors.

All that being said, Tennant’s performance as a whole is spot on – wide-eyed, effervescent, vivacious – and he achieves the transition effortlessly. Unfortunately, some of the material he has to work with is less than brilliant, the character being suddenly shoehorned into periodic outbursts of extreme emotions that all seem forced. These certainly existed in the last series too, but never quite overstepped the boundaries; here, though, isn’t allowed to merely show anger or excitement, he must be Angry or Excited. It’s as if those worst moments from last time have been picked out as ideals rather than borderlines, and used as the basis for Emotional Scenes 101 wherein they are extrapolated and multiplied to unfortunate effect. It’s the Ninth Doctor’s “I am TALKING!” to the Nestene Consciousness in ‘Rose’ – abrupt, but not jarring, and Eccleston has the authority to carry it off – but squared and cubed to form the Tenth’s outbursts against the Rose-stealing Cassandra and the ethically dubious cat-people nurses, which come across more self-righteous than righteous anger. Thus too the ending, where in ‘The Doctor Dances’ we had the corny yet exuberant "Just this once, everybody lives!", here the Doctor drifts around 'doctoring' everyone in sight while radiating such happy-clappy peace and love vibes it would make a Hare Krishna sick. I hate to criticise this - he looks so radiant with joy it's like kicking a puppy in front of Francis of Assisi - but even for someone with as high a capacity for touchy-feely as myself this was too, well, wishy-washy. The trick with the disinfecting lifts was neat, but why di the laying-on of hands cause the myriad diseases to immediately evaporate? Why did the 'lab rat' humans, after a lifetime in cocoons, look (disfiguring pustules aside) so normal? Has Russell T. Davies never seen The Matrix? Okay, they shuffle around like zombies, but otherwise they seem remarkably human - which would stretch credibility if the story was set now, let alone five billion years in the future when 'normal' ought to be unrecognisable to start with. The plot likewise skips just as blithely over the conumdrum of how some are developing speech as do the nurses, whose characters are also underexplored - particularly the sympathetic companion to the Face of Boe, who threatens to be interesting before the second half ignores her. The Face of Boe himself also ends up with surprisingly little to do except allude to an ongoing story arc in a fairly unsubtle manner before vanishing, although this does allow the Doctor the line of the night: "That is enigmatic - that is, that is textbook enigmatic,"!

It's surprising to see Boe and his fellow 'The Emd of the World' alumnus Cassandra reappear; regrettably the Last Human's ability to psychically transfer herself into different bodies means Zoe Wanamaker's delightfully catty performance is reduced to a cameo, and Billie Piper spends most of the story not playing Rose as such - which isn't good when that character has been such an integral part of the new Who's success. On the other hand, she does a great job filtering Cassandra's vocal style and mannerisms through Rose's body, and I can't complain about said body being the focus of much of the transformation... It's a sexy, vampy, bitchy performance - or, I should say, "bit rich-y", as one amusing instance of dialogue cross-cutting would have it. To think, though - all those fans who got hot under the collar about their chaste hero's Eighth-incarnation snogs with Dr. Grace Holloway must be blowing gaskets now, what with the end of the last series (though the kiss with Rose did have a higher purpose) and the latest bout of interspecial tonsil hockey on display here. Anyway, all Cassandra's body-hopping is quite fun, giving Mr. Tennant a chance to camp it up outrageously when the Doctor briefly holds her consciousness, and when she effectively dies in her own arms it is almost affecting in an episode that in general just tries too hard.

I will applaud the producers for effort: the interior special effects are mostly very good, in common with the high standard of the last series. It seems silly to gripe when in this department it clearly blows classic Doctor Who out of any tyoe of water you care to mention, and maybe I'm spoiled by photorealistic movie CGI, but BBC budgets are evdently still a little stretched by exterior effects work - the city backdrop and buzzing aircars stuck out in a way that (to compare with the 'worst' from last time, as above) only Rose swinging from an airship above the Blitz did in the previous series. Still, they're not used to creating alien planets in new Who yet - maybe a good old-fashioned gravel pit is in oder? Mind you, landing on a world that is 'New Earth' is a bit of a cop-out there - although the Doctor's riff on Newnewnewnewnewnew New York" and him being the "New New Doctor" was utterly and infectiously (as it were) charming.

Lots of potential evident then as we get the second new series rolling, but an opening instalment a long way short of greatness - I'll be expecting much better from the episodes to come...!

6/10

Still no updates sorry

2006-03-17T23:29:00.000Z

Err, yes. Somehow haven't found time since move to New Zealand to add any updates, but sometime soon... sometime...

"So where's the rest gone?"

2006-01-03T21:55:00.000Z

...I hear you cry! Yes, I know I haven't updated this recently - I found I was spending so much time writing about the stories I was cutting great chunks out of the available time I had to actually watch them in...! Figuring that it was silly to watch 100 minutes and then take another 20 or 25 (a whole extra episode's worth) to blog my review, I decided to let things slide here for a bit and concentrate on actually watching the episodes. More reviews will be coming soon, or as soon as I can find time to type them up around moving to New Zealand in sixteen days' time!!

By the way, I'm proud to report that I made it - my 'Survival' bid was a success, reaching that very story in the early hours of Christmas Eve following a heroic effort that involved watching everything from 'The Trial of a Time Lord' onwards in a single gargantuan session broken only by an inadvertent catnap on the sofa during 'The Curse of Fenric'. Finishing 'Survival' at 6:45am on December 24th, I promptly went on to watch the 8th Doctor movie before discovering that I couldn't find tapes or the DVDs of the new series anywhere; deciding that I'd completed my mission within the original spirit of the quest, I went home for Christmas and promptly missed 'The Christmas Invasion' while in London due to my family eating our festive dinner in the evening. Got back to parents' in south Wales after a few days in Norfolk to find that video had failed to record, so missed out again! Now back in Aber, have just started watching the 2005 series again (two episodes so far) courtesy of Tony's DVD and will watch the 10th Doctor's debut after this!

'Terror of the Zygons'

2005-12-08T02:18:00.000Z

TERROR OF THE ZYGONS
4 episodes

Marvellous - a strong return to form after the disappointing end to the last series. Once the initial novelty of Tom Baker in a tam o'shanter has worn off, the atmosphere of the Scottish setting is maintained through some great scenery, interesting locals, neat touches (the stag's head bugging device is cool) and wonderful incidental music. Ian Marter shines in his last regular appearance as Harry, turning in a surprisingly intense performance as Sullivan's Zygon double, with the shot of him half-hidden in the barn, one eye staring menacingly up into the camera as he stalks Sarah being particularly memorable. Lis Sladen is as good as usual, showing again here how well she does 'frightened', and the character is as curious and resourceful as ever when exploring the Duke of Forgill's castle. John Woodnutt turns in an excellent triple performance as (briefly) the Duke, the Duke's impersonation by the Zygon Broton, and Broton in his true form. The latter seems to have put some thought into the idea of conquering the Earth, and remains unflappable even in the face of the Doctor's matchless jibe (brilliantly poking fun at the series' own limitations) "Isn't it a bit large for just about the six of you?" - surely one of Doctor Who's greatest ever lines... Even evoking momentary sympathy when he points out that his race can never go home, Broton's death seems almost tawdry as he is shot down by the Brigadier - who at long last has his wish fulfilled to meet an alien menace that isn't impervious to bullets! In UNIT's last proper appearance, Lethbridge-Stewart gets to reclaim a good deal of his old authority, and is as ever backed up capably by Benton; the latter's "Why are you whispering?" exchange with the Doctor after he rescues him and Sarah from the decompression chamber is lovely, as is the Doctor's inducement of a trance in his companion and himself to protect them from its effects.

The design wotk is excellent: the rubbery, suckered Zygon skin makes for great costumes, and their spaceship's correspondingly fleshy controls match up very effectively. The model work of it taking off and in flight is amongst the best I've witnessed to date in the series. Alas the infamous Skarasen lets the side down, being waaaay less than convincing - although the scene where it almost tramples the Doctor on the moor is surprisingly effective. I maintain that the crucial mistake the designers always make with creatures like that is that they make the eyes, though small on the model, too big relative to the scaled-up size of the beast - therefore you get a giant monster that instead of beady reptilian eyes has large and hence cute ones - it's like a huge scaly cyborg puppy, which naturally isn't all that nasty looking! Fortunately the Skarasen's shortcomings were evidently clear to the director, who wisely kept it off camera as much as possible although he was unable to do much about the laughable shot of it rising from the Thames to terrorise London. Fortunately too the best Who is almost benefited by such cheesily bad effects, and the fact the largely blameless beastie is allowed to return happily to Loch Ness at the end is really rather nice of the Doctor and the writers!

8/10

Episodes watched: 297
Episodes still to watch: 425

'Revenge of the Cybermen'

2005-10-21T21:37:00.000+01:00

REVENGE OF THE CYBERMEN
4 episodes

Oh dear. After the grandeur of the last adventure, this one brings us back down to Earth with a squelchy bump. Not literally to Earth, mind you - in a neat cost-saving scheme, we see 'The Ark In Space''s marvellous sets reused as the Nerva Beacon, the same (in story) place at a different stage of its history. The crew include Ronald Leigh-Hunt's Commander Stevenson, who comes across rather similar to his Radnor in 'The Seeds of Death' - which, I discovered today in the midst of watching 'Revenge of the Cybermen', I watched just twelve days after the actor's death at the age of 88 - and William Marlowe's likeable Lester; the latter's interesting fact is that he previously appeared as Mailer with the Master in 'The Mind of Evil' and subsequently married Roger Delgado's widow Kismet, who herself provided spider voices in 'Planet of the Spiders'. They also have in their midst a traitor in the form of Jeremy Wilkin's Kellmann, who thanks to the title's massive giveaway is to no-one's surprise revealed to be working for the Doctor's old enemies the Cybermen. It's a little more surprising when later on he's revealed to be a triple-agent working for the inhabitants of the nearby tiny world of Voga, but this is cancelled out by it being correspondingly harder to care by that stage. The Cybermen are coming to destroy Voga, the 'Planet of Gold', as (despite this never having been hinted at before) the metal is their one weakness and the planet is hence a rather large thorn in their collective side. The Vogans are unfortunately such a dull bunch it is hard to care whether they live or die despite the above-average quality of the actors playing the principals. The most arresting feature of their decor is the prominent Celtic-knot-esque design of the circular logo that appears everywhere on Voga, but which is (later) famously known throughout the Whoniverse as the Seal of Rassilon, father figure of the Time Lords - more fun can be had speculating exactly how the Vogans come to be using said design as well as the Gallifreyans (not to mention wondering at which point they'll demolish Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass) than actually watching this story, truth be told...
The singular achievement of the race, who are confined below the surface on a world that seems to be no more than a large comet, is to apparently maintain air and gravity despite the odds astronomical physics would suggest against such circumstances being likely. Ah well, they're still better than the Cybermen, who are uncharacteristically emotional, use Cybermats that need to be hugged to the neck to attack effectively and have as their leader a posing fool who struts across the room with hands on hips in the heat of debate with the Doctor at one point... and, amusingly, whose 'earmuffs' and 'handle' headpiece are distinctively black rather than silver, which has the unfortunate effect of making him look like the Cyber poster boy for Grecian 2000. Actually, scratch that - despite Voga being so ridden with gold they make jewellery, home furnishings and decorations, and even guns out of it, the Cybermen nevertheless launch an attack on the planet (evocatively filmed in Wookey Hole caves, where I had the willies scared out of me on a school outing aged ten) and effortlessly mow down the Vogan soldiers - evidently the formidable natural defences against the Cybermen availed to them have dulled the Vogans' wits to the extent that they didn't think to make their actual bullets out of gold too; a minor but strategically ill-advised oversight... Still, they've got a big rocket to launch in defence - which, comically, is stunt-doubled by a Saturn V in NASA stock footage... Meanwhile, there is a plan to crash the whole beacon into Voga, with a rolling drum of landscape brilliantly standing in for the surface terrain whizzing by the windows.

Feel I can't leave this review without touching on The Discontinuity Guide's expose of a sizeable plot hole - after Sarah is infected by a Cybermat, the Doctor transmats her to expel the toxin from her system as it 'can only transport human tissue' - which leads to the interesting quibble of why it doesn't leave people as naked as the day they were born and totally mangle a travelling Cyberman. Well, sort of interesting. Ah, sod it, I've had enough - I'm outta here.

5/10

Episodes watched: 293
Episodes still to watch: 429

'Genesis of the Daleks'

2005-10-20T23:23:00.000+01:00

GENESIS OF THE DALEKS
6 episodes

So here we have it - one of the towering high-water-marks in Doctor Who history, and to be truthful something of a bittersweet moment for me. Having worked my way in order from the beginning to the middle of the programme's epic run, uncovering many hidden gems along the way, this is the very last of the acknowledged top-tier true 'greats' of Who that I've never ever seen: I've already watched 'Pyramids of Mars', 'The Talons of Weng-Chiang', 'City of Death' and 'The Caves of Androzani' in years past, which are probably the only serials of comparable standing that come chronologically after this, so after today there are no more treasures of such magnitude to be unearthed.

I'm glad to say that 'Genesis of the Daleks' is every bit a good as they say it is. A startling reimagining of the monsters' making, their real-life creator Terry Nation drags his most famous spawn out of the rut that they and he had got into in their last few stories in the grandest of style. From the shockingly powerful opening shots of Thal soldiers being mowed down in slow-motion, this is Doctor Who at its bleakest and grimmest. The nightmare that the Doctor and friends walk into on Skaro is epitomised by the Nazi-like figures of Nyder and his Kaled troops (even the relatively appealing General Ravon is played by future ''Allo 'Allo' Lieutenant Gruber Guy Siner), while even the Thals, previously seen as friendly and pacifistic, enter into the horrors of war with gusto. Peter Miles' Nyder is excellent - as fanatical and ruthless as his superior, he is the public face of the growing atrocity that is his master's work, and his duplicitous efforts to root out opposition amongst the Kaleds are particularly nasty. The Kaleds in general aren't too nice either, with their ethnic cleansing policy that sees the scarred and malformed Mutos banished into the wildnerness of no-man's-land.

And then there's Davros. Ruthless, malevolent, mad and utterly evil, Davros is perhaps THE iconic villain of the Who canon. He looks fantastically twisted and deformed, with blind eyes superceded by the electronic third one in the middle of his forehead, a single withered arm, and trapped in his wheelchair whose design echoes his later creations. Michael Wisher's performance is nothing short of superb; considering the limitations imposed by mask, wheelchair and the character's infirmity, he does an excpetional job with little more than his voice alone, and when that voice has in previous stories been used for the Daleks themselves it makes sense that it is chilling, bitter and powerful, without ever slipping into caricature. Davros comes across in this story as someone almost on the far side of madness, who cannot be reasoned with by the Doctor in a way that even the Master, say, could be - this is vividly portrayed in the fantastic scene where the Doctor compares the Daleks to releasing a virus that would wipe out all life in the cosmos, and instead of realising his wrong Davros contemplates this idea and decides that he would indeed do that for the ultimate power it would grant him, his feeble fingers clutching and smashing an imaginary phial of the plague. It is an electifying moment.

The actual Daleks arrive late in the day - naturally, since this is the tale of their creation and what led to it - but new, sleek and gleaming, they are very effective when they do. Exterminating the Thals and Kaleds with equal disdain on their creator's insane orders, it is only when they wipe out Davros' remaining loyal henchmen, even Nyder, that he realises the magnitude of his achievement and folly - he has made them to accept the survival of no other race, and so in the end they even turn mercilessly on him.

It's not perfect, of course - there is a notorious diversion involving giant mutant (and unconvincing) clams attempting to snack on Harry that is pretty needless in its entirety, Sarah's cliffhanger fall from a rocket gantry is awesome until its cheap cop-out resolution, and both of the two warring factions seem to pop in and out of the other's citadels with alarming ease considering they've been waging a war of attrition and espionage for a thousand years, apparently practically on each other's doorsteps. Still, these small quibbles are trifling when laid against the general excellence on display, and perhaps the most iconic scene in Who history - the Doctor's legendary "have I the right?" quandary over whether he can justifiably destroy the Dalek race at the moment of their birth, sparing millions from suffering but unwilling to prevent the positive side-effects that would occur along the way and unwilling to commit genocide. Whatever the arguments for and against, this is Doctor Who at its best.

And, as I say, the last that I will have the priviledge of experiencing as a myth turning into actuality before my eyes. Forty-two years after the programme began, twenty-plus years of having it as part of my consciousness, sixteen years after it was taken off the air, eight years since I became a born-again Whovian, started to hear about these great adventures of the past and began to watch them with a novice's enthusiasm, and fifty days and two hundred and eighty-nine episodes into this quest, the last of the giants has fallen. There are no more of the truly exalted, fabled stories that I have yet to witness, no more epochal achievements of writing, directing and acting that have yet to lay bare their riches in front of me - none that still survive, anyway. It is a great day, but a sad day. On I go...

9.5/10

Episodes watched: 289
Episodes still to watch: 433

Four complete stories in one day - a new record, if not actually the most episodes watched!

'The Sontaran Experiment'

2005-10-20T17:30:00.002+01:00

THE SONTARAN EXPERIMENT
2 episodes

A real oddity, this - the first two-parter for many years (and last for many more), 'The Sontaran Experiment' is so lean and efficient it in some ways makes a mockery of the adventures that take two, three or more times as long to get their story told. Shot, uniquely, entirely on location in Dartmoor using outside-broadcast videotape, the serial's look bridges the divide between traditional studio video and location film footage; the locations are excellently used and terrifically atmospheric. In a sense, this sequence of stories is a nod to the programme's early years, presented as a linked chain of adventures that follow on directly one from another, and it is a nice throwback to find that the end of 'The Ark In Space' segues straight into this new story. The group of human settlers look convincingly ragged and hunted, with Glyn Jones' (writer some years earlier of 'The Space Museum', peculiarly enough) South African accent lending a nice multi-national touch. The patrolling robot even looks properly threatening, and the loathesome Sontaran Styre makes for a great baddie... shame the title so gives the game away, much to the writers' understandable displeasure. It's another nice touch that Sarah mistakes him for Linx, the Sontaran of 'The Time Warrior', and Kevin Lindsay indeed makes a welcome return inside the costume - although the two are not in fact identical like she says they are. Styre's horrible experiments are some of the nastiest things yet seen (or referred to) in Doctor Who, and his equally nasty comeuppance is greatly satisfying! It's a pity the Sontarans don't return to the programme after this, I have to say, as I'm rather fond of the potato-headed brutes actually...!

A swift but highly enjoyable diversion, then - but in context of this season, it's an appetiser for the huge main course to follow...

7.5/10

Episodes watched: 283
Episodes still to watch: 439

'The Ark In Space'

2005-10-20T14:30:00.000+01:00

THE ARK IN SPACE
4 episodes

Wow. I'd forgotten this was so good - a claustrophobic exercise in body horror that succeeds on every level. That we find ourselves aboard a space station in the far future immediately distances this new era from the largely Earth-bound previous one, and the opening episode is spectacular in a very understated way: featuring no-one bar the regulars for the first time since 'Inside the Spaceship' eleven years earlier, it brilliantly establishes the setting, where a hive-like space station carries the hibernating survivors of humanity in an eerily clinical, silent solitude. The rapport between the Doctor and Harry is great, and Lis Sladen shows how well she plays fear when her character nearly gets suffocated. The contemporary viewing public must have realised something was up, as well - the second episode subsequently pulled in the highest viewing figures the series had ever recorded, its 13.6 million finally topping the mark set almost exactly a decade earlier by part 1 of (of all things) 'The Web Planet'... Once the other characters start to wake up things get moving nicely, and are an interestingly mixed bunch - the cool, calm Vira manages to thaw slightly by the end, the doomed Noah transforms compellingly into a green mutant alien creature, Rogin is engaging and makes a poignantly cheerful sacrifice at the end to save the Doctor and his compatriots, while the Wirrn make for impressive and threatening monsters. The sets are tremendous, cold, clean and evocative of the damaged future world they represent, and the modelwork is decent - although not as good as the replacement CGI shots of the station that are viewable on the DVD and which I checked out afterwards! The plot spools out very nicely through the four episodes; again in contrast to the end of the Pertwee era, this is a fine example of how a bloated six-parter with not enough to say is trounced by a sharp four-parter where the action needs to come thicker and faster. Tom Baker's Doctor is excellent; you'd swear he'd been in the role for years so easily does he acclimatise, effortlessly combining the best of his predecessors (wise, playful, action-man) into a unique new package. Roll on the next story...

9/10

Episodes watched: 281
Episodes still to watch: 441

'Robot'

2005-10-20T11:53:00.000+01:00

ROBOT
4 episodes

Well, here we are. The era of the most popular and longest-reigning Doctor of them all is upon us, with seven years' worth of Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor stretching out ahead of me - fortunately full of a great number of the programme's finest moments, by all accounts!

This first adventure for the new incarnation gets the Baker years underway with what is essentially a throwback to his predecessor's style of story. Having got the regeneration (the first onscreen since 1966) out of the way, we are treated to an extremely idiosyncratic new Doctor - dressing up in an assortment of bizarre costumes before settling on the familiar scarf, hat'n'coat ensemble, spouting random gibberish, and performing a hilarious skipping routine with Harry Sullivan that was possibly the funniest thing I've seen in the series yet. That around him things are much as usual - Sarah, the bemused Brigadier, Benton, the contemporary (well, you never could be quite sure with UNIT stories...) setting - serves to nicely highlight the difference in the new incarnation's character, and Tom Baker makes for an immediately engaging presence. Storywise, this is fairly standard fare, but full marks for the costumiers at least for lifting the titular giant robot above what could have been a shocking piece of design into something quite special; yes, it looks like a kid's cartoon of a robot, but it does look like a robot and not a man in a suit, which is definitely worthy of praise. Michael Kilgarrif's performance lends real pathos to the creature, as it veers between the destructive impulses it is being given and something like genuine compassion for Sarah - it's also a timely promotion of the actor back to his 'Tomb of the Cybermen' status after being reduced to Second Ogron in 'Frontier In Space'... The supporting cast are a mixed bag, with Patricia Maynard's appropriately icy Miss Winters (nice use of neo-Nazi imagery, too...) totally outshining her nothing deputy Jellicoe, while Edward Burnham's Professor Kettlewell is such an archetypal mad professor it's bonkers - while he's very good, the character is shoehorned into an abrupt 'heel turn' where he suddenly becomes one of the bad guys almost needlessly and not entirely convincingly.

Talking of not entirely convincing - I can't not mention the silly CSO finale, where it's decided the big robot isn't threatening enough so they make him grow to King Kong proportions via some rather poor CSO work, at which point he was never going to avoid picking up a screaming Sarah like a doll in his hand... that's actually like a doll too, not just a size contrast unfortunately. Nice use of the model tank in the foreground to semi-disguise the differential there, though. And, of course, this story is notable for introducing us to Dr. Harry Sullivan, UNIT medic who slips into shot as if he's been unobtrusively wandering in the background for years and unexpectedly (in context) ends up as a new travelling companion for the Doctor and Sarah. Looking ahead, I realise now that I've clearly seen some of Harry's stories before, yet until Locus reminded me of him a week or two back I'd totally forgotten his existence and was convinced there were no male companions save Adric after Jamie. Whoops... Whereas '70s Doctor Who almost exclusively had a single female companion for the Doctor at any given time, we get a different dynamic for a while here, and it's a refreshing change - Sullivan makes for a likeable Ian Chesterton-style figure, whose presence manages to shake up the established TARDIS crew pattern, which isn't a bad thing, and Ian Marter (already a veteran of 'Carnival of Monsters' is excellent in the role.

Not a great story, but then it doesn't try too hard to be one and thus succeeds quite well on its own merits; plus. at four episodes it doesn't outstay its welcome and all in all fares rather bettet than the last couple of serials... I look forward to seeing where things go next...

7/10

Episodes watched: 277
Episodes still to watch: 445

'Planet of the Spiders'

2005-10-19T23:55:00.001+01:00

PLANET OF THE SPIDERS
6 episodes

Oh crikey... what a way to go. The Third Doctor's last story is as tedious as the previous adventure, with six more episodes of padding and largely dull action. Yes, the spiders look good, but they are also more interesting than most of the human characters, which is not so good. There is an pointless chase of epic proportions in episode 2, to allow Jon Pertwee to indulge his passion for vehicular antics one last time, where the Doctor goes all James Bond and pursues the spider-possessed Lupton in the 'Whomobile', a gyrocopter and a hovercraft, the sheer effort of which is more than slightly undermined by the villain teleporting to safety seemingly on a whim. We get the belated swansong of Mike Yates, returning after his ignominious departure in 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs', but unless I dropped off and missed something he appears to have vanished two-thirds of the way in with a complete absence of fanfare. Admittedly I was very tired, but the last four episodes followed a pattern broadly incorporating twenty minutes' viewing followed by half an hour's inadvertant snoozing, an attempt at rewinding to the last thing I remembered only to doze off again for a moment and accidentally go back forty-five minutes, watching some more as I didn't recognise it, then hitting another familiar patch and realising I'd obviously missed some earlier without even noticing, and finally fast-forwarding to my actual drop-off point and attempting to watch another episode or so - the whole blurring together in a horrifying CSO-clogged switchback ride that seemed never-ending on at least two occasions. On the plus side, there is a nice update on the progress of Jo and Cliff's Amazon adventure when the blue crystal arrives back at UNIT HQ at the beginning of the story, so setting up the Doctor's fateful return to Metebelis 3. Good use is made of K'Anpo and/or Cho-Je (the latter delicately portrayed by Kevin Lindsay in a performance astonishingly removed from his previous Sontaran role), with a rare confronting of the issues raised by the Doctor's continuous curiosity with and interference in temporal affairs. There is, significantly, the first description of Time Lord 'regeneration' - and ultimately the real thing, with an emotional goodbye from the Third Doctor to Sarah Jane and the Brigadier as Jon Pertwee's features blur and are replaced by those of Tom Baker.

Looks like the show's in safe hands, anyway...

4.5/10

Episodes watched: 273
Episodes still to watch: 449

'The Monster of Peladon'

2005-10-17T18:08:00.000+01:00

THE MONSTER OF PELADON
6 episodes

I actually watched this 'properly', i.e. an episode at a time, over the course of a couple of days. More by accident than design, but probably for the best - this is so dull, I suspect getting through a series of episodes at once could have been difficult at best... Featuring many of the same elements as its prequel, this is essentially 'The Curse of Peladon Redux' - some posts are held by different people but doing essentially the same things as their predecessors, while the topical issue-of-the-month is the then-contemporary miners' strikes that feed into the plot as a lot of stupidly badger-haired miners standing around in tunnels arguing. While it is fun to have back Alpha Centauri and a glimpse of Aggedor, the Ice Warriors hold back to so late in the day that I'd forgotten about their presence... ironically creating a nice surprise that I wouldn't have had if the adventure had gone faster, and forcing the previously antagonistic Peladonian factions to cooperate against the new threat, but not alleviating the tedium that has reached terminal inertia by this point. It is disappointing to see the Martians' characters reverting more to stereotypical baddies, even if it is made clear that these ones are a breakaway group unrepresentative of their race. Eckersley is the only interesting support player, driven seemingly just by financial gain rather than despotic mania - except in one ill-advised speech where he temporarily wants to be master of the galaxy - and played with a kind of laid-back insouciance by Donald Gee. Queen Thalira is endearingly wide-eyed and innocent but more than a little wet, for which she gets a highly unsubtle Women's Lib lecture from Sarah. Speaking of whom, was it really necessary to have her believe the Doctor is dead twice in one adventure, especially considering what's coming up?? I guess I should mention that a good portion of the plot hinges on the unlikely factor of the Peladon mines - that's mines - apparently having not only central heating but air conditioning, but frankly I've lost heart by this stage...

4.5/10

Episodes watched: 267
Episodes still to watch: 455

'Death to the Daleks'

2005-10-15T23:06:00.000+01:00

DEATH TO THE DALEKS
4 episodes

Well, as Locus pointed out to me a while ago, it's pretty much the quintessential middle-of-the-road Doctor Whostory - 'Death to the Daleks' is four 25-minute episodes long, features the combination of a 1970s Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, a couple of wobbly sets and costumes, some polystyrene modelwork, plenty of mist and fog, a quarry doubling as an alien planet, lots of corridors, lots of tunnels with an oo-nasty lurking in them... and, of course, the series' defining monsters the Daleks. You could show it to anyone and they'd be able to tick most of the boxes for what is commonly understood to constitute Doctor Who.

Alas, while a little better than the prior two, this is the third and final disappointing Daleks story out of three for the Third Doctor, with nothing much to say about it bar the above. The beginning is marvellously sppoky, with the TARDIS losing every vestige of power and the Doctor disappearing into the fog leaving Sarah alone to fight off an assailant inside what should be a safe place; unfortunately I could never look at the cloaked Exxilons without thinking of Star Wars' Tusken Raiders, rather undermining the drama even while they were having a big voodoo ceremony to sacrifice Sarah... The later involvement of the Exxilon Bellal is welcome, as he makes a likeable and interesting surrogate companion for the Doctor for the latter parts of the story, although their progress through the city's puzzles seems rather too easy considering - but in fairness this is meant to be the case, it turns out. Likewise, the 'cliffhanger' of episode 3 of the Doctor spotting a TILED FLOOR (gasp) is so insignificant I had to rewind to check I hadn't missed anything... but again in fairness this was apparently not meant to be the original cliffhanger! Otherwise, the Daleks have had a nice spruce-up but are a little irrelevant, although their menace in some ways seems greater for being a small party terrorising a backwater mining plant rather than plotting galactic domination etc. It is edifying to see how ineffectual they are once stripped of the ability to exterminate anyone, and scary to see how quickly they develop new, non-energy weapons as substitutes - and laugh-out-loud funny to witness them using a small model TARDIS as target practice! The scene where one, consumed with distress at perceived 'failure', self-destructs, is simultaneously also funny yet quite shocking too. Otherwise, the mechanical "root" that defends the city and its environs is an interesting idea that doesn't receive enough screentime; looking like a cross between a hoover and a giant Red Dwarf Scutter, it nevertheless makes for an impressive Watcher-in-the-Water-style monster in its devastating waterhole-side attack on the Daleks; of the supporting cast, all are bland with the exception of the wily veteran Galloway, who while perhaps a touch loose with his morals is nevertheless personable enough to not be truly unpleasant.

6/10

Episodes watched: 261
Episodes still to watch: 461

'Invasion of the Dinosaurs'

2005-10-15T18:27:00.001+01:00

INVASION OF THE DINOSAURS
6 episodes

Oooh dear... this is infamously meant to be one of the all-time worst Who adventures, as evidenced by the fact that it was the very last complete story to be released on video a mere two years ago - a full twenty years after the first! Actually, I'd watched the first episode then and been rather impressed; admittedly, its black-and-white status (the 157th and last episode to exist as such) helps, but the empty, abandoned streets of London are genuinely eerie and bleak, the mystery suspenseful, and the sole attack from an extinct reptile (a pterodactyl) legitimately frightening when it smashes the car window.

That I realised a little later in the viewing that I had in fact watched the full six-part story a couple of years back, but apparently blanked-out my memory of the latter five parts, speaks volumes about the rest of the serial... Hmmm - maybe that's a bit unfair: it's still far better than you might expect, but drags a lot despite the interesting plot ideas. Ironically, it's the dinosaurs themselves that most contribute to the negative vibe... While the herbivores look okay, particularly the apatosaur and stegosaur (the Triceratops is a little dorky), albeit a trifle stationary, it is far easier to spectacularly stuff up the appearance of a tyrannosaur - and so they do. Despite being specifically named as a Tyrannosaurus Rex the beast blatantly has an excessive three fingers on each hand, which any ten-year-old could have corrected the makers on, and its beady-eyed, squashy-nosed, slack-jawed oafish face is hopelessly unintimidating. The effect is not helped by the pudgy, upright (and slightly lopsided) body and "RRRAAAWWWWOOOORRR" voice, while the poor creature is so static it fails to even lumber threateningly.

Ah well - the rest of the plot is pretty good, really: the Doctor and Sarah's initial befuddlement as to what is going on, culminating in their arrest as 'looters', is excellent, and it isn't until the comforting form of the Brigadier turns up that they and we feel a measure of 'safety'. Of course, not even the rest of the military can be trusted - John Bennett's cold, heavy-lidded General Finch makes for a fascinating 'villain', as does Noel Johnson's Government minister Grover since he seems to honestly believe he is in the right in wanting to roll the Earth back in time to a 'Golden Age' despite the fact this would wipe out billions of people. It is a shame Martin Jarvis' Butler has little to do, although the actor's presence here means his illustrious Doctor Who career involves... (cue fanfare) 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs' and 'The Web Planet'. Eeeuchh... The device of Sarah being on a 'spaceship' seemingly headed for a distant New World is very clever and quite shocking in its denouement, and the behaviour of the some of the others 'on board' is brutal in terms of how willing they are to recondition or dispose of those who might be destabilising influences... Meanwhile, the ever-redoubtable Sgt. Benton proves himself yet again, standing up to the bad guys and allowing the Doctor to incapacitate him and escape; and, of course, the revelation is Captain Yates, whose exposure as another of the traitors is shocking for someone so much part of the 'UNIT family'. Again, he seems to really believe in the eco-message Grover and the others are touting (very different to that in 'The Green Death'), and the Brigadier's effort to enable the disgraced Yates to take a dignified 'extended leave' at the end - compared with Finch's court martial - is fitting and touching. Jon Pertwee does well throughout, even when confronted by wall-to-wall awful CSO and rubber dinosaurs, and despite some reviewers' negative impression of it I found the extended chase sequence where the Doctor dodges the military through the woods of Hampstead Heath to be extremely tense and gripping - not to mention inclusive of some neat trickery on the Doctor's part! Of course Nicholas Courtney is as reliable as ever, and gets in my opinion one of the Brigadier's best ever scenes in his High Noon showdown with Finch, the two pulling up in Land Rovers either side of the Doctor in a deserted back street and the Brigadier refusing to back down in his attempt to rescue his friend.

All in all, this isn't a bad little story at all - just a shame they had to put the lousy dinosaurs in...

6.5/10

Episodes watched: 257
Episodes still to watch: 465

'The Time Warrior'

2005-10-14T20:33:00.001+01:00

THE TIME WARRIOR
4 episodes

Slightly inconsequential but enormous fun, this story served as the introduction to Season 12, new companion Sarah Jane Smith, the Sontarans, the first 'time tunnel' opening credits sequence and a new Doctor Who logo, the diamond-shaped one that went on to be perhaps the series' most famous - although the one it replaced after four years was later resurrected for the 1996 Eighth Doctor movie and has since fronted the entire BBC range of Who products for the first eight Doctors!

A pseudo-historical, this adventure features a faintly slapdash medieval setting, into which numerous top British scientists are drawn from the present day by the activites of Linx, a stranded Sontaran warrior. The Doctor's decision to trace the missing scientists in the TARDIS inadvertently involves the journalist Sarah Jane Smith, whose investigative instincts first lead her to pose as her aunt, the noted virologist Lavinia Smith, and then to poke around in the blue police box that subsequently whisks her off to the Middle Ages... Elisabeth Sladen makes an immediate impression as Sarah, being as endearing as Jo but with a much more pronounced intelligent, independent streak that soon sees her leading raids single-handed and the like! Her initial refusal to accept that she has been swept hundreds of years into the past is entirely understandable and highly enjoyable, as she struggles to persuade the bemused locals to snap out of their 12th century mannerisms, and the fact that for a long time she distrusts the Doctor is an original twist not seen since the very beginnings of the programme.

The chief joy of 'The Time Warrior' lies in its magnificent and hilarious dialogue. The bulk may not be strictly accurate to the period, but it has a meatily authentic-feeling cut and thrust to it that renders such considerations irrelevant. The repartee between Linx and medieval warlord Irongron is especially fantastic, as the two jockey for position in their fractious but mutually beneficial relationship - a classic example of the famous 'Robert Holmes double-act'. It is fascinating to see the interplay between them, two warriors from very different backgrounds yet almost equal face-to-face; although Irongron's attempts to intimidate the Sontaran fall flat and on one occasion result in a humiliating buffeting at Linx's hands, he continues to poke fun at his "toad-faced" accomplice. Irongron in truth gets almost all the best lines in the serial, although his dimwitted subordinate Bloodaxe's awed tribute "Yours is truly a towering intellect" - delivered apparently without irony - runs him close... These two form a subsidiary double-act that is also well-written and almost affectionate. The other supporting characters are also fleshed out nicely, from the myopic but admirably resilient Professor Rubeish to the kitchen servant Meg, and we get another appearance from Star Wars' Boba Fett, Jeremy Bulloch, as Hal the archer and one from EastEnders' Dot Cotton, June Brown, as the resourceful Lady Eleanor.

What is perhaps the most interesting is the depiction of Linx the Sontaran. The costume and makeup are fantastic, the squat, solid alien looking tremendously threatening both in and out of his tradmark helmet. Far from being the stock megalomaniac villain, he harbours no globe-straddling desires or delusions of grandeur - he is merely a soldier, who just wants to get back to the frontlines of his interminable war as soon as possible. We get quite a lot of backstory to fill us in on the legendary, millennia-spanning Sontaran/Rutan conflict (which was never to be seen directly on screen) and a sense of Linx's contempt for the primitive world he finds himself stranded on - plus, of course, the first-ever naming of the Doctor's home planet 'Gallifrey', where slightly surprisingly the title of the Time Lords' homeworld is slipped nonchalantly into the conversation as if it had been known all along...!

8/10

Episodes watched: 251
Episodes still to watch: 471

'The Green Death'

2005-10-13T23:59:00.004+01:00

THE GREEN DEATH
6 episodes

Yes, it's 'the one with the maggots'... Perhaps more than any other individual Doctor Who adventure, 'The Green Death' is branded on the British collective consciousness - thanks to its memorably grotesque transformation of the humble maggot into a giant crawling eco-menace. That the maggots themselves do not glow green as many might remember (it's just the poisonous sludge that spawned them), and are in some ways only an adjunct to the main plot, seems to be irrelevant: for good or for bad they've gone down in history. The realisation of said beasties is pretty impressive, the use of rats' skulls in the models to provide their teeth being a particularly nice touch - although why one leaps for the throat of its unfortunate victim while the others are content to merely wriggle menacingly remains a mystery. Better still is the 'green death' itself, the virulent glowing patches that spread over the skin of those unlucky enough to catch it, which provides an eye-catchingly horrible demise for several minor characters and a scare for Professor Clifford Jones. Stewart Bevan's portrayal of the idealistic young academic is excellent, with his then real-life relationship with Katy Manning perhaps contributing to the obvious onscreen chemistry between Cliff and Jo Grant that builds convincingly through the six episodes to its inevitable conclusion, the pair both so wide-eyed and heart-on-their-sleeve-wearing they were obviously meant for each other...

In many ways this is Jo's story - we've seen her grow up so much over the three years she's been with the Doctor, and from the moment she accidentally destroys the professor's experiment on their first meeting, just like she did on her first encounter with the Doctor, a new relationship is clearly beginning to take shape in her life. The Doctor's initial distress when this becomes clear to him is obvious, and his clumsy attempts at near-sabotage understandable, before he eventually reconciles himself to losing another steadfast companion once he has come to trust Cliff to take care of Jo in his place - and again the warmth of the real-life fondness between Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning shines through. This is never clearer than in the tender and moving closing scenes, some of the finest in Who history, where the Doctor presents her with an engagement gift of the blue crystal from Metebelis 3 and in effect 'gives her away'; the quiet, resigned manner in which he then downs his drink and slips away alone from the impromptu party starting up sticks long in the memory, and the closing shot of Bessie disappearing across a starlit horizon is a perfect, elegiac finale.

That I've got this far through the review without covering the actual plot as such is indicative of the unusual stremgth of this subplot, if you can call it that. The main theme, inspired by producer and co-writer Barry Letts' real ecological worries, is atypically overt for Doctor Who, and testament to the amount of political issues it was possible to slip in under the cover of being a 'children's show'. Global Chemicals, the progenitors of the toxic waste that causes the contagious green death and mutates the maggots into outsized monstrosities, are a none-too-subtle allegory for the perils of globalisation and unchecked big business coupled with environmental thoughtlessness. The ultimate villain, BOSS, is another 'mad computer', but scores many points higher than WOTAN, say, thanks to being extremely charismatic, rather funny (humming Wagner and eulogising instead of getting on with its plan) and ultimately not without pathos. Its 'slave' Stevens also gets some sympathy, as he is shown to experience something like remorse or compassion on more than one occasion, and his final sacrifice to stay with the expiring computer while the plant blows up around them is amazingly affecting. The supporting cast chop and change a little too often to empathise with properly (partly through necessity thanks to illness), with the exception of the luckless Bert, but play their parts well enough - and although this story is oft-criticised for stereotyping the Welsh, I don't think it's over the top and the Welsh actors fit their roles appropriately. UNIT get a great showing for the first time in a while thanks to the welcome return of the Brigadier - who is shown to be intelligent, authoratitive yet sympathetic to the aims of the 'Nut Hutch' group and dignified even when being batted down by the Prime Minister - plus the ever-reliable Sgt. Benton, and a cracking undercover turn from Captain Yates. Incidentally, Mike Yates' reluctant yet genuine congratulations at the end to Jo and Cliff are one of the great aspects about those closing scenes - after all, it was hinted many times that he might be the one to get together with Jo yet this never transpired.

The effects are one area where this story loses points, although not through lack of trying - while the explosions are as reliable as ever, and the detonations of the mines and the factory are absolutely first-rate and very realistic, in contrast the heavy use of CSO lets down the scenes where the Doctor and Jo 'punt' through a maggot-infested tunnel and infamously where the Doctor drives Bessie through the maggot-covered slagheaps to rescue Cliff and Jo and later with Benton throwing fungus from the back to kill off the maggots. Despite this, they are still enjoyably cheesy, and the majority of the 'underground' scenes are very well done and convincingly atmospheric, while the large amount of location footage shot in Wales gives a sheen of realism to much of the goings-on... even if they had to stage some 'outdoor' shots of the Brigadier and UNIT men in the studio afterwards to fill in a gap or three! Jon Pertwee excels, again, with his legendary comic turns as first a milkman (to get into the chemical works) and then a cleaning lady (to help get out again) showing what a talented character actor he was; his 'Venusian aikido' - as opposed to the frequently-demonstrated 'Venusian karate' - scene is also terrific and forms a centrepiece to an excellent action sequence with Stevens' goons. His scenes with Stevens and BOSS are also very effective, and then of course there's that ending sequence. Plus, we also get to see the Doctor reach Metebelis 3, the famed 'blue planet' he was trying to land on in 'Carnival of Monsters'; apart from being a significant moment in his relationship with Jo, as she insists on following her heart to Wales rather than seeking adventure with him, and from being rather different to what he expected - the Doctor receives a hilariously hostile reception, with weapons and detritus bouncing off the TARDIS as it dematerialises - this is also a foreshadowing of the events that will wrap up the Third Doctor's tenure in one series' time...

Excellent use of the whole six episodes, relatively unusual for this format, with great location work, a deeper than average subtext and one of the most emotional finishes of any serial lift this into the realms of top-drawer Who.

9/10

Episodes watched: 247
Episodes still to watch: 475

'Planet of the Daleks'

2005-10-13T19:40:00.000+01:00

PLANET OF THE DALEKS
6 episodes

Err, nothing much to say really. It wasn't nearly as bad as I'd been led to expect, but it didn't actually tie up the threads left dangling from the last story and so there wasn't much to distinguish it from any other generic Dalek story; indeed it has been much noted that this adventure is in many respects a straight rewrite of the original Daleks serial from ten years earlier - the Doctor helps the Thals (finally making their return) infiltrate the Daleks' base, where they are plotting to release a deadly substance to wipe out the other life on the planet, there are strange and deadly forests, lakes and cave tunnels, the Doctor's companion falls ill and is healed by a member of the indigenous population, someone hides in a Dalek casing, etc... Rarely actually boring but never gripping, the highlight is the nicely-done realisation of the invisible Spiridon Wester - a shame this effect wasn't used more instead of having the Spiridons walking around covered in big purple fur coats all the time. Lowlights include the horrendously studio-bound jungle scenes, which like the 'plain of stones' contrast badly with brief location footage shot for the scene at the ice pools, and the Doctor and Jo's apparent memory lapses which enable them to totally forget why they came to this planet for long enough to be surprised by the presence of Daleks! In between the two extremes, I'm merely indifferent towards the Doctor's cheap white bedroom storage unit that has arrived in the console room, seemingly from a stopoff at IKEA...

The Daleks are better than in 'Day of the Daleks', I'll say that, and their voices are much improved through the talents of Michael Wisher (him again) and Roy Skelton - and the Dalek Supreme (a refurbished prop from the 1960s Dalek Invasion Earth - 2150AD films) looks quite cool with his 'torch' eyestalk and big 'ear' lights, even if these lights are woefully out of synch with his voice! Otherwise, short-lived Thal Marat, from the black-and-white episode 3, is played by Hilary Minster who went on to be General von Klinkerhoffen in 'Allo 'Allo and Bernard Horsfall (Taron) was a Time Lord at the Doctor's trial and was Gulliver in 'The Mind Robber' before that, but there's little else of note here except that Jo gets asked to stay behind at the end after a terse and shoehorned-in 'romantic' subplot - a taste, if you will, of what is to come...

6/10

Episodes watched: 241
Episodes still to watch: 481

After all that, I am now pretty much exactly one third of my way through the surviving Doctor Who television canon!!

'Frontier In Space'

2005-10-13T12:34:00.000+01:00

FRONTIER IN SPACE
6 episodes

Gosh - didn't see this one coming: a full-scale space opera, in which the Doctor and Jo blunder into the midst of smouldering conflict between the neighbouring 26th century galactic empires of Earth and Draconia, where war two decades earlier has been followed by a peace that has now been threatened by the simmering tension created by each empire's cargo ships being attacked by the other's battle cruisers. Or have they been? We quickly discover that all is not as it seems - Earthmen see Draconians attacking them and vice versa, but the Doctor and Jo see Ogrons, the brutish, simian mercenary race seen before in 'Day of the Daleks'; clearly a third party is seeking to play the two great empires off against each other in a mutually destructive war, and so, since the simple-minded apes are incapable of formulating such a plan, who is responsible? The TARDIS is stolen by the Ogrons and its crew seized and locked up - a state of affairs that is played out almost constantly throughout the six episodes - and soon find themselves confronted by the President of Earth and her military leader General Williams. The parallels that play out are clever and intriguing - both Earth and Draconia have moderate leaders struggling to control their hotheaded war leaders, and ultimately the two form a strong alliance to take on the villain of the piece. That this is revealed in episode 3 to be the Master was for once a twist I didn't see coming, and Roger Delgado shines in his last performance in the role before his tragic and untimely death in Turkey the following June. His sympathising with Jo about listening to the Doctor's reminiscences is wonderful, as is his straight-faced assertion that "no-one is more committed to peace than I", among many fabulous moments. Jo herself really comes of age here in a way, standing up to the Master on more than one occasion - the scene where she bravely resists and frustrates his attempt to hypnotise her is a standout, and shows how far she's come since she easily fell victim to him in 'Terror of the Autons'.

The Draconians, meanwhile, have a fantastic look and are given a depth to their personalities and society; their evolution from 'villains' to noble allies is convincing, and part of a wider attention to detail that creates a convincing future (except maybe for Earth command being at the South Bank Centre) and fleshes out the supporting characters very well. The visit to the Emperor on Draconia helps paint this story onto a grand canvas that is also enlivened by the many treks back anf forth across the spacelanes, the Doctor's imprisonment on the moon, his excellently-rendered (despite the wires) spacewalks, and the final trip to the planet of the Ogrons. Here we get the biggest twist of all, as the Master is revealed to be in league with no less an evil than the Daleks themselves - an unprecedented alliance of the Doctor's two greatest foes that we sadly only get to glimpse briefly. That this seems temporarily to demote the Master to subsidiary villain is disappointing, but ameliorated by one final great scene for Delgado as he follows a radio conversation with the Daleks with the dark threat that "we'll see who rules the galaxy" and mocks their voices and calls them 'stupid tin boxes'!! The end sequence is unfortunately marred by its severe editing and Delgado doesn't get a satisfactory final scene - thanks to the spectacularly unconvincing modelwork that created a big orange blob as the Ogrons' 'god' figure monster, necessitating it being almost completely excised from the final cut and leaving that side-story almost unexplored and the closing moments of the story confused.

What is audacious, though, is the way the end doesn't really resolve anything and instead dovetails into the next story to create in effect one big twelve-part adventure. I thought this was a very refreshing change - shame that the coming story isn't meant to be too hot... Shame too that the excellent Draconians never appeared in Doctor Who again, and of course that the Ogron planet appeared to be yet another quarry! One more thing of note is the vastly overqualified players in some hidden roles - Stephen Thorne suffers a demotion from main adversary as Azal in 'The Daemons' and Omega in 'The Three Doctors' to 'First Ogron' here, whilst 'Second Ogron' is likewise performed by former (and future) Cyberman Controller Michael Kilgarrif from 'The Tomb of the Cybermen'; meanwhile the Daleks are voiced by Michael Wisher, who has by this point already turned up in 'The Ambassadors of Death', 'Terror of the Autons' and 'Carnival of Monsters' as well as being a future Davros!!

8.5/10

Episodes watched: 235
Episodes still to watch: 487

'Carnival of Monsters'

2005-10-12T20:07:00.000+01:00

CARNIVAL OF MONSTERS
4 episodes

Two episodes last thing last night, one at lunchtime and one this evening - almost felt like I was watching 'properly' one part at a time! I've always had a sneaky fondness for 'Carnival of Monster' without knowing which story it was, as way back in the day (probably around 1990 when I was ten or eleven) it became the only one of the many Target novelisations I ever read, despite my library having a fair number of mostly Terrance Dicks books from the series. All I could remember was that it featured a ship on an ocean, aboard which the Doctor witnessed the crew and passengers stuck in an endlessly repeating time loop - which, Locus has assured me intermittently over the years as I tend to forget again after he tells me, was the very story that I have now finally seen! I realised this part way through the first episode, after the Doctor and Jo finds themselves on board said ship with a plesiosaur periodically appearing outside and terrorising the occupants; what is clever is that the surrounding scenes on the planet of Inter Minor, with its delightfully grey and bureaucratic inhabitants and the colourful showman Vorg and his cynical assistant Shirna, are presented as completely separate from the other half of the story - it is only later that we realise that the Doctor and Jo are miniturised inside Vorgs 'miniscope' machine, with all the attendant dangers.

This is one of those occasional Who adventures that is quick, fun and really of no consequence whatsoever, but in its knowing allegorising of the relationship between television and its viewers, excellent characterisation (typical of Robert Holmes stories) and novel setting, it is immensely enjoyable. The support cast all get their own distinctive personalities, the shenanigans our heroes get up to with the timelooped unfortunates aboard ship are clever and funny, with Jo getting increasingly exasperated of the cyclical series of events she is forced to work around time after time. The Drashigs are monsters from the 'cheesy but good' school, tearing through the miniscope's systems and ultimately out into the external world - it always bugs me, though, that their strange name sounds like it should be something else backwards but obviously isn't so... but it is a clear anagram of 'dishrag' for whatever that's worth...! The one peculiarity is the plight of the Inter Minor subordinate race, the Functionaries: early on, there seems to be a subplot regarding their oppression and bid for equality or whatever it is they want to achieve, yet this somehow peters out along the way and is never addressed. Considering the Doctor's perpetual desire to right wrongs and stand up for the underdog, it is in its own way a surprising twist in the tale that he apparently doesn't ever become aware of the situation.

All in all, though: silly, disposable, but terrific!

8/10

Episodes watched: 229
Episodes still to watch: 493

'The Three Doctors'

2005-10-11T23:28:00.000+01:00

THE THREE DOCTORS
4 episodes

It was Doctor Who's tenth season, and for the first (but not the last) time in the series' history the production team decided that an anniversary special was in order, a celebration of the programme's past that would uniquely include all three personifications of the lead role. Alas, First Doctor William Hartnell was too unwell and infirm to appear in a major part, but in his final work as an actor managed to record several scenes to camera that could be shown on the TARDIS scanner or the Time Lords' screen as if he were talking to the other protagonists. I for one am glad he was able to appear, if only briefly, as the lasting popularity of Doctor Who was and is in no small way thanks to his iconic portrayal of the Doctor that dominated the series' earliest years - and if Hartnell's illness is all too apparent in his brief moments on screen, in the midst of a largely subdued performance it is still a delight to see flashes of the old fire breaking through one last time.

It is strange to see both the First and Second Doctors in colour for the first time, but otherwise both the previous occupiers of the TARDIS seem to fit naturally into their characters once more - and since Patrick Troughton is the one who interacts directly with the incumbent Doctor Jon Pertwee, we get to see the pair strike sparks off each other in a highly entertaining fashion. The "dandy and the clown", in their predecessor's words, form a conflicting yet very effective double-act - which is tested to the limit by the power of the adversary who arises for the occasion. Omega, one of the oldest and greatest of their race, whose daring stellar manipulation at the dawn of history turned a star into a black hole that gave the fledgling Time Lords the power to explore time and space, was lost in the moment of his triumph... into, it turns out, a universe of antimatter beyond the black hole in which he maintains a domain and indeed existence only through the strength of his own will. Now, he plans to return to the real universe and extract his revenge on his people, who to his mind betrayed and abandoned him.

Such a potentially excellent plot is to an extent wasted, as to be honest the slightly lax standards seemingly afforded by this being an anniversary romp mean that nothing much actually happens. The inclusion of the Brigadier and Sergeant Benton makes for some fun scenes when they are bafflingly presented with their 'old' Doctor and the interior of the TARDIS, but they don't have a lot to do that couldn't be done equally well by any one-off character. The other supporting cast are just to make up the numbers, with the Gell Guards unconvincing monsters (although they look much more effective in the matching tunnels in Omega's domain), and the latter two Doctors suffer fractionally from having their differing characters stereotyped - there was after all much more to Troughton's Doctor than just the 'clown', but not so much on display here. The Tme Lords don't come off very well either, in their first proper appearance since 'The War Games', with their particularly dire opening scene sticking in the memory through being both lumpenly expositionary and horribly wooden. Omega though is a marvellous villain, teetering on the edge of insanity after aeons virtually alone, and the difference between his actuality and the Third Doctor's description of him as one of his people's "greatest heroes" is understandable but still shocking. His appearance is great, with the massive metallic mask obscuring his head - for good reason, it turns out, as in one of the best scenes the Doctors discover that beneath the costume no trace of the physical Omega remains. Shame that for all his power he was brought down by the Second Doctor's recorder being the one object of matter in his antimatter universe, and that he couldn't conjure a world that looked like something other than a quarry...

6/10

Episodes watched: 225
Episodes still to watch: 497

'The Time Monster' episodes II - VI

2005-10-10T23:31:00.000+01:00

THE TIME MONSTER continued

Erm, yes. Not quite sure what to make of that. Wasn't quite the total car crash I was expecting, just a bit loopy really. The overlong sequences in Cambridgeshire feature some entirely irrelevant chunks like the whole thing with UNIT and the medieval knight/Roundheads/V1 rocket, given that they play no further part in the story and the Doctor manages to leave in the TARDIS from the place where the convoy is struck - although the apocalyptic scenes following the V1's impact are actually superb. There is almost relentless technobabble, and a load of nonsense 'science' such as Ruth altering some properties of the time machine experiment by "turning the circuit upside down" and the Doctor's wholly barmy contraption made out of a wine bottle, forks, corks and a mug; again, though, the latter is partially redeemed by his delightful explanation that they used to build them in school to jam each other's time experiments! The Kronos creature is abject - passable when blazingly overexposed in its first appearance but still clearly a man in a white jumpsuit flapping his arms about, and later laughable when hanging from wires and whizzing around Atlantis like a demented seagull. Then there are several random elements, like Bessie's dodgy 'superdrive' and the worryingly phallic timefield detector device; Stuart being aged by some unspecified side-effect of the experiments, which still more inexplicably undoes itself shortly afterwards for no particular reason; the luckless Sgt. Benton, dragged along by the Brigadier just before he could go off-duty, successfully sees through the Master's impersonation of Lethbridge-Stewart (a great fun scene) but falls for "the oldest trick of the book" and gets regressed to a toddler - enabling him to finish the story with no clothes on, to the great amusement of his colleagues...

I should probably mention the headspinning scenes where the Doctor manages to materialise his TARDIS both inside and around the Master's one, but the whole sequence is also rendered ultimately irrelevant by the fact that the supposedly tense period when the Doctor is ejected irrevocably into the time-space vortex goes completely flat after Jo retrieves him with no effort whatsoever. The Atlantean scenes, when the story finally arrives there, are actually an improvement on the preceding action and hold together comparatively coherently compared to most of the earlier sequences that had seemed to chase their own tails in search of a point. The plot resolves itself into an average runaround that is augmented nicely by the Master's seduction of Galleia and failure to win over Dalios like the Doctor then does, and the labyrinth scenes are nicely shot although adversely affected by the useless Minotaur, which is so bemused by the Doctor's matador antics it crashes through a wall that just happens to reveal the crystal being sought, destroying all suspense that might have built up. Nice to see future Darth Vader Dave Prowse as the beast, though, neatly presaging his future role by having his head entirely covered up and not giving him a word to say... The Doctor's little story to Jo in the dungeon is lovely, although perhaps not lovely enough to grind the plot to a halt for five minutes to tell it, and Dalios' death moments later seems remarkably apropos of nothing very much. By the way, is there any point at all to the characters of Krasis or Hippias? Admittedly the latter glories in perhaps the worst hairdo I've ever seen, but still... I did like the scene in the two TARDISes, where the Master (Roger Delgado as reliable as ever) successfully calls the Doctor's bluff on destroying them both with a 'time ram' to save the universe - only to be confounded by Jo grabbing the controls herself; the subsequent scene with the female Kronos gives a better sense of the creature's power than any that had gone before, and reinforces the Doctor's humanitarian side when he rescues the Master from eternal torment at the hands of the Chronovore.

All in all, not a total washout then - but perilously close to it at stages. There is a magic moment to cherish at about the 1hr 11mins mark where the Doctor, seated in Bessie, ought to say "Do buck up, Brigadier" - but it comes out very similar yet infinitely ruder...! Oh, and this adventure features the third and final explanation for the destruction (maybe) of Atlantis, only a year after the last and all three within five years. It's possible to resolve all three into a single continuity, but it's tricky...

5/10

Episodes watched: 221
Episodes still to watch: 501

'The Time Monster' episode 1

2005-10-10T11:45:00.000+01:00

THE TIME MONSTER
6 episodes

Gulp. Consensus of opinion says that this story is frighteningly bad, so I'm not looking forward to the rest of it with undisguised glee I have to say... Still, I didn't think there was much wrong with the first episode, although the Master is revealed far too instantaneously and his Greek accent drifts in and out and then disappears altogether after a minute or two. There is a fun relationship between Ruth Ingram and Stuart Hyde featuring a kind of fractious affection, and the time experiments these three are carrying out seem quite compelling. Presumably all the wild and wacky crapness happens in the remaining five episodes...?!

Episodes watched: 216
Episodes still to watch: 506

'The Mutants'

2005-10-09T23:03:00.000+01:00

THE MUTANTS
6 episodes

Well, it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd been led to expect. The plot, a thinly-veiled dig at the perils of colonialism and apartheid coupled with some interesting bioevolutionary speculation, is strong enough, and although I gather some of the acting is widely held up as the worst on offer in Doctor Who history I didn't find it particularly objectionable. Indeed, I thought Rick James' role as a steadfast and ultimately rewarded guard character was a rare sympathetic central part for a black man in the Who canon - although all things considered I'd say naming him 'Cotton' was a little thoughtless. The rest of the cast are serviceable enough, although it is a shame the always reliable Geoffrey Palmer's Administrator gets killed off within the first episode - the actor's second nasty exit in as many appearances, following 'The Silurians'. Most memorable is definitely Paul Whitsun-Jones' OTT portrayal of the fat, loathsome Marshal, whose desire to retain his priviledged position and terraform Solos as 'New Earth' is the engine of the plot. John Hollis' Sondergaard is excellent and distinctive, and it is a shame we don't meet him until relatively late in proceedings; furthermore, he contributes to the amazing melting pot of accents also featuring Cotton's Caribbean and the Germanic scientist Jaeger. Also worthy of mention is the slightly bonkers Solonian, Varan, who tends to talk about himself in the third person (presumably to demonstrate his primitive status, although this doesn't afflict Ky, say) and whose hairdo, sartorial elegance and overall sublety are startlingly reminiscent of Freddie Mercury circa 'Bohemian Rhapsody'...

What really makes this story something of a trial are its length - four episodes might have served it better than six - plus a slightly less than committed turn from Jon Pertwee, who manages to set the tone with an outstanding fluff in his first scene: "I'm not allowed to open it; I couldn't even if I wanted to... No, I'm not meant to; I couldn't open it even if I wanted to," that caused me to rewind to check I hadn't imagined it, and some peculiar stylistic choices - e.g. the Doctor and Sondergaard wandering around the 'dark' caves worrying their blazing torches might burn out is ludicrous in view of the fact that the entire system is lit like a particularly gaudy discotheque, with odd green and red spotlights overlaying pink floodlighting, and the CSO-heavy scene there where Jo stumbles into the radiation chamber is so trippy it gave me a headache. Similarly, while the arthropod-like Mutant stages of the Solosian's life cycle are quite well-realised, Ky's final transformation into a floating, rainbow-hued spare member of Abba is a little too much frankly. The cliffhanger sequence where Varan is sucked into space through the Skybase's hull is weird, too, as despite the beautiful background nebula the attention is soon diverted by the others just waiting out the initial pressure drop and then walking off with barely a struggle. Such oversights are a shame given that the Overlords' costumes are good, the transporter effects are quite decent, the model work with Skybase orbiting Solos like the Death Star isn't bad either, and scenes like the opening one and indeed all the others on the surface of Solos are a treat - the swirling mist, skeletal vegetation and low camera angles create an excellent alien environment.

Tell you what's weirdest, though - I fell asleep twice during episode 1 and consequently took twice as long as I should have to get to the end of it, and so had been watching for about seventy-five minutes when about halfway through part 2 the plot elements of planet, orbiting base, power-mad Marshal, mutants, changing the atmosphere etc. fell into place and I realised that I've actually watched this story before!! Discovered afterwards the video came out in 40th anniversary year, 2003, so presumably Locus bought it then - considering it's only a year or two since that viewing, the fact that I had totally forgotten I'd seen it and took an hour and a quarter to remember is possibly some sort of inarguable verdict on the whole adventure...

6/10

Episodes watched: 215
Episodes still to watch: 507

'The Sea Devils'

2005-10-08T23:23:00.000+01:00

THE SEA DEVILS
6 episodes

I liked 'The Sea Devils' a lot; it's big, flashy and expensive and there's very little to denigrate, but oddly the many good points never seem to add up to something truly great - it's simply so rock solid it almost defies reviewing in either positive or negative terms. The Doctor/Master characters and relationship are fabulouly portrayed: Jon Pertwee gets to show off his action-man persona more than ever, hopping in and out of a diving bell and piloting a speedboat and jetski-type mini speeder with great aplomb - I was nearly overcome with anticipatory glee when I saw the Master take off on one of the latter with a second waiting conveniently on the shoreline! The Master, after his recent dalliances with interplanetary machinations and black magic, is back to his customary position of forging an uneasy alliance with an 'alien menace' and teaming up with the Doctor when his plans go a little awry. Despite all their antagonism, the strange mutual respect between the two is shown up well in their entertaining swordfight, where the Doctor hands his adversary his blade back, and in their absorbed collaboration on the Master's machine - even if the Doctor has his own motives - and in their joint escape from the doomed underwater base at the end. That they can make such a good team when necessary is partially explained by the Doctor finally admitting that they were once good friends in their youth. There are a series of great Master moments: when we see him glued to The Clangers and imitating their whistling 'speech', followed by his tongue-in-cheek comment that they are a "rather interesting extraterrestrial lifeform", it is so unexpected that I was rolling; the moment where his frustration boils over and he abandons hypnotising a guard for a vicious blow to the neck; and of course his cheery, sardonic wave from the hovercraft as he makes good his escape at the very end.

The Sea Devils, as they are so nicknamed early on, never get an official monicker within the story, just like their cousins the 'Silurians' - who, in a neat addressing of his own error, get a mention in Malcolm Hulke's script when the Doctor suggests they should be more accurately known as Eocenes. Sadly neither period of Earth's history is actually appropriate for having fostered large reptilians parallel with early apes, but hey... The aquatic versions have a different look, partly lizard, a touch of bat, a smidgeon of pig and a whole lot of springer spaniel if I'm being honest. The long neck and high head are effective, although the lower bodies look a little too human and their netting clothes a bit silly and unnecessary. That, like their relatives, they have a senior claim to Earth and face the choice of conflict or coexistence with humanity again features strongly in the plot, and it is a shame that all sides descend into a state of ultimate antagonism and distrust and the Sea Devils all have to be destroyed. The reptiles do deserve special mentiom for their often spectacular demises, with some impressive flips, twirls and various crash-and-burn landings on being shot by the Navy - who totally replace the absent UNIT in this story, the real Navy having lent hardware and manpower to make the serial look as realistic as possible. The sheer weight of ships and explosives is impressive, although the large number of minor characters who drop in and out is hard to follow when you're as tired as I was while watching this. There are three supporting roles of note, though: Colonel Trenchard, the Master's jailor, conspirator and an enthusiastic golfer, who dies protecting his prisoner to the last; Captain Hart, who fills the Brigadier's role well, overcoming his inital scepticism to ally himself strongly with the Doctor; and the latecoming, pompous, overbearing, dimwitted, cowardly civil servant Walker, who alienates everyone he comes across, treats the female 3rd Officer Blythe as a tealady and fortifies himself mid-crisis with the likes of toast and marmalade in order to come up with the none-more-crass idea of nuking the South Coast in order to destroy the perceived threat of the reptile race. Nice to know the real world could never be so crazy, eh?

7.5/10

Episodes watched: 209
Episodes still to watch: 513

'The Curse of Peladon'

2005-10-08T00:36:00.000+01:00

THE CURSE OF PELADON
4 episodes

200 episodes down, only 500+ to go...! I have to say, I've long had a strange half-forgotten affection for 'The Curse of Peladon' ever since I listened to the cassette of Jon Pertwee's reading of the tale about seven years back - despite remembering very little of it! Essentially a political allegory (about Britain's entry to the Common Market) crossed with a haunted house mystery, this is a thoughtful rather than overtly exciting story, and none the worse for it. Straight away it is refreshing to see the Doctor and Jo end up on an alien planet, and the theme of the quasi-medieval Peladon society teetering on the cusp of being dragged into civilisation via inclusion in the Galactic Federation (very Star Trek) is interestingly played out. The relationship between the tentatively forward-looking King Peladon (David Troughton, son of former Doctor Patrick, then-flatmate of future Doctor Colin Baker, and veteran of 'The War Games') and his violently traditionalist High Priest Hepesh is nicely written, and its variations form the thread through the serial. That the lonely, indecisive, misled yet moral King is finally confronted with Hepesh's death, where the priest shows his actions were born out of his misguided desire to protect his world, allows at the last the former to shake off some of his shackles and the latter to regain his dignity.

The assorted collection of aliens is a rare delight, from the tentacled blob Arcturus in its mobile life-support system to the endearingly girly, six footed hermaphrodite Alpha Centauri - whose marvellous pillar-shaped costume has one huge eye that actually blinks... Actually, those two are the entirety of the new creatures on display, notwithstanding the okay Aggedor beast - isn't a collection of just four planets' delegates (including Earth's Delegate Leader) a bit on the small side for a galactic summit meeting?!? This fact notwithstanding, the appearance of the Martian delegation is fascinating: a unique instance of an old enemy of the Doctor's being totally rehabilitated within the series. That the Ice Warriors have left their savage, warlike past behind them and adopted a peaceful civilisation based on a code of honour and nobility, is a very pleasant surprise and a real turnup for the books in Doctor Who, where 'bad' races tend to stay that way. The way the story plays on the Doctor's understandable distrust of them after his earlier experiences to obfuscate the real villains of the piece is very clever, and his subsequent alliance with them quite heartwarming.

Further to this, the scenery is suitably gloomy and claustrophobic, there is a nice romantic subplot between the King and Jo - who does a good job pleading for the Doctor's life, navigating high ledges in high winds in high heels, keeping the delegates on the same page and not upsetting the Doctor's activities too often - that threatens to end in her staying behind, and crucially the aliens' distinct personalities are all well defined: particularly amusing are the scenes where Izlyr turns aside from the hysterically babbling Alpha Centauri to confess to Jo that despite its faults he finds himself longing for the company of the treacherous Arcturus, and where Centauri, now the only delegate remaining not from Mars, acquiesces to a unanimous vote when flanked by the intimidating brace of Ice Warriors! The Doctor gets lots of good stuff to do throughout, effortlessly impersonating an important official (again), combating Hepesh's machinations, exposing the murky 'myth' of Aggedor through his pacification of the actual animal, and has an excellent pit fight with the King's champion, the speechless Grun, that is conducted in a compelling near-silence and further emphasises Pertwee's willingness to do virtually any stuntwork possible... My only quibble is why someone doesn't just show Peladon the 'secret' tunnels beneath the city at some point to prove the Doctor's case - after all, half the cast have traipsed up and down them with such regularity there's no reason why the King couldn't be led around a corner or two to have them pointed out, which makes the Doctor's meek acceptance of punishment mystifying in the circumstances. Ah well, can't have everything...

7.5/10

Episodes watched: 203
Episodes still to watch: 519

'Day of the Daleks'

2005-10-07T15:52:00.000+01:00

DAY OF THE DALEKS
4 episodes

Reasonably solid little story that has several good elements, by far the least effective of which is the Daleks themselves. You can tell that they were added to the original scripts, which did not originally feature them, as their part is largely confined to the background and they do not have a proactive role until the final few minutes of the serial. Considering these most iconic of monsters were 'killed off' in their last appearance a long four and a half years earlier (after all their previous stories had been crammed into the series' first three and a half years), what should have been an epochal reintroduction - in colour too, no less - is marred by the title, as ever, flagging this up, any remaining suspense being destroyed by their cropping up randomly fifteen minutes in for about two seconds, and the fact that their voices are terrible - far too human without any of the metallic alien menace that characterising their most terrifying moments.

Otherwise, this is a solid serial. The main theme concerning the problems of time travel and the paradoxes that can result from it is handled very well, with the lovely revelation that the guerrilas' sterling efforts to prevent their awful future world coming into being actually cause it! The location work and sets are good too, and UNIT get to be a bit more serious and military after the cosy 'family' feel of the last season. The Doctor is marvellous, disapproving yet sympathetic to the various human elements, and enjoying his fine wine and cheese so much he at one point casually sends an assailant flying with one hand before taking another sip and putting his glass down to complete the job...! Nice too to get a glimpse of his two predecessors on the Daleks' mind analyser screen. Full marks for effort, too, for his valiant attempt at escaping his captors on a motorised tricycle, although minus quite a few for the execution of this plan!

The subsidiary monsters the Ogrons look impressive (uncannily reminiscent of the Uruk-hai from the Lord of the Rings films) and the fact that the Daleks are actually the masters of earth two hundred years in the future is unsettling in as much as it presents them as that world's ruling 'establishment' rather than just would-be conquerors following another harebrained masterplan. The Controller is a seemingly uninteresting creation whose icy personality thaws late on as his trials and motivations are revealed, and his 'redemption' at the end is a fine sequence. Anat is well served storywise for a supporting female lead; shame that so many of the other minor characters (e.g. the sympathetic/undercover prison chief) crop up only for a scene or two before disappearing back into the ether. What, for example, is the deal with the Controller's glacial female assistant(s), whose odd, stilted behaviour is never followed up on or explained...? Also, the big worry plotwise is that after all the talk about time paradoxes and the like, the Doctor happily goes along with the plan to dispense with the Daleks without ever appearing to consider the further huge paradox that would be created by destroying the 'bad' future - so the guerrilas wouldn't have needed to come back to their past, therefore they wouldn't have prevented this future, therefore they would still have come back from that future to 'prevent' the world war by killing off Sir Reginald Styles, therefore they would still be the unwitting instigators of that war, therefore creating the preexisting paradox, so we have paradoxes squared by this point! Lastly, regardless of all that, whatever happened to the Doctor and Jo meeting up with their past selves as dictated by them meeting their future selves at the start of the story? Looks like that element got completely forgotten along the way...

6/10

Episodes watched: 199
Episodes still to watch: 523

'The Daemons'

2005-10-07T01:26:00.000+01:00

THE DAEMONS
5 episodes

Wow. Now this I loved... The first part was probably my favourite single episode to date in this odyssey - a cracking, expensive-looking thunderstorm to begin with, with added intrigue to get the plot rolling, the Doctor being a know-it-all and setting up the remote-control plot element that won't come into play until much later, the wonderfully atmospheric setting of Devil's End, the barrow, the TV presenter, the marvellous Professor Horner who is equally dismissive of the 'white witch' Miss Hawthorne and of the television crew, science and sorcery starting to clash and mingle, and the Master being far more darkly, satanically evil than he has ever been...

What's great is that after this top-notch start, the quality rarely slips. While it is a shame the Professor is so short-lived, Miss Hawthorne's character is given room to grow through the rest of the five parts (a strangely effective length for this story), and her interactions with Benton are amusing - even the normally amiable Sergeant gets irritated with her at one point. It's nice to see Benton and Yates in civvies, too, and neat that they get so involved in the rugby game they forget to switch over for the broadcast from the barrow and belatedly do so in time to witness Jo with the frozen Doctor, and switch the plot up a gear as a result. It's also nice to see the Brigadier getting a social life briefly, as well, which delays his arrival to the effect that he spends most of the serial on the outside looking in as it were, which gives a different arena for some of the story to unfold at. The 'heat barrier' that keeps Lethbridge Stewart and his team outside the village is very well realised, and there is some great action - notably the exciting helicopter chase where one of the Master's henchmen pursues Bessie from the air, and the production team borrow, with stupendous audacity, a piece of actual James Bond footage to show the chopper blowing up!!

The Doctor, recently offered a glimpse of freedom but now confined to Earth again, is understandably even more intolerant than usual of inferior intellects, which perhaps allows us a glimpse of a different Doctor from the usual of late - enigmatic and knowing. The Master has his best outing yet, with some tremendous, powerful cavern scenes conducting his black mass 'dressed for the occasion' (I was reminded of his outfit in the Eighth Doctor movie) and circled by black-robed acolytes; having given up on persuading the Doctor to collaborate in his schemes, he seems just to want to destroy him here and even attempts to sacrifice Jo to the Daemon (singular) of the title. I thought this was supposed to be the year that returned Who to a family-friendly style after the grittier Season 7...? Blimey... The Bok gargoyle creature is effective enough, and the production team do a great job of keeping Azal off the screen for as long as possible to prevent the mystique being ruined by too much bluescreening - and in the event those CSO (Colour Separation Overlay) shots are pretty well done, too. We also get the hapless Sergeant Osgood, who in a fine slapstick moment gets a faceful of soot when his complex device goes bang in a welter of technobabble, Jon Pertwee's Doctor whizzing around on a motorcycle and warring with Miss Hawthorne over the relative merits of science and magic, the world's most sinister Morris dancers, some crack sharpshooting from Benton, the stupid notion of Jo and Yates successfully 'hiding' behind what is essentially a small ornamental railing, the former having a charming sacrificial robe procured for her, a throwaway second explanation for the sinking of Atlantis that I nearly missed, and a vein of richly comic moments and in-jokes like the Doctor's "wig" incident and the scene where Jo dismisses the Brigadier's plans to blast his way through the heat barrier, only to be chastised by the Doctor so hypocritically it's hilarious. The denouement, while superficially ludicrously emotive and short on substance, is better viewed in the sense that while Jo's offer to die in the Doctor's stead did not directly destroy Azal, the 'irrational' nature of her sudden interjection confused and distracted the Daemon long enough for him to lose control of the power he was channeling and so be torn apart by it. And the exploding church is such a contentious idea it's fantastic...

I gather post-viewing that this is a serial that was lionised prior to its 1993 video release and then widely vilified in the subsequent reevaluation. Personally, I found it's one of those stories that just pushes my buttons, and I loved it! Oh yes - and it also contains the Brigadier's most preposterous yet famous order: the immortal "Chap with wings... five rounds rapid!"

10/10

Episodes watched: 195
Episodes still to watch: 527

'Colony In Space'

2005-10-06T16:46:00.000+01:00

COLONY IN SPACE
6 episodes

I enjoyed this much more than I'd expected, considering I'd heard it was something of a turkey beforehand... I think one reason is that I'm a sucker for any plot that throws a whole load of factions into the mix, as this serial does - the Doctor and Jo; the colonists; the fictional 'second colony' represented by Norton (a rare on-screen outing for voice artiste supreme Roy Skelton), who is actually an IMC mole; the main bulk of IMC personnel; Caldwell, the IMC man who is sympathetic to the 'good' factions; the Primitives, all three varieties of them; the Adjudicator, who turns out to be the Master. I love stories that force a great number of different factions into one situation to coexist or war as they see fit... Nice that the Master was held back until episode 4, giving the rest of the characters time to develop, although this was admittedly foreshadowed by the very first scene - in which we get to see Time Lords being manipulative gits for the first time! Good to see the Third Doctor finally get to stretch his legs briefly, as the TARDIS is temporarily allowed (in fact, compelled) to leave Earth to foil the Master's plot to get his hands on a doomsday weapon that is apparently some kind of stellar manipulator. There are some interesting leadership issues amongst the colonists, between the idealistic Ashe and more pragmatic Winton, a few questions about the morality of the differing factions as regards possessing the planet, and lots of gun battles that have altered little even though this is meant to be 500 years in the future... Funny, almost self-referential plotting where we discover the giant lizards are actually meant to be naff projections in the story and not just in appearance! And, of course, the first alien world this Doctor gets to explore looks remarkably like a clay pit... Still, the aliens were convincingly 'different', and I rather liked their Bayeux Tapestry-style transparent frieze depicting their history. Perhaps the most arresting thing was the sudden, shocking despatch of all the colonists en masse as their ship blows up in the final part - I honestly didn't see the scene coming where they had somehow all survived to have another gunfight with the IMC men, and although this momentarily seemed to cheapen the prior effect this was unexpectedly wrenched back the other way when it was revealed that Ashe had sacrificed himself in order that his colony might survive.

Surprisingly strong for a story that had such bad advance notices!

7/10

Episodes watched: 190
Episodes still to watch: 532

'The Claws of Axos'

2005-10-05T19:48:00.000+01:00

THE CLAWS OF AXOS
4 episodes

Struggled to get through this one as well - started last night, watched a bit more before going out to work, another bit on my lunch break and finally finished it this evening! Not the most riveting of adventures, which although it clearly had a clever plot was undermined by some of the visuals. I know that pointing out Doctor Who sometmes had its scripting overreach its budgetary constraints is pretty much redundant criticism, but I still found the well-realised, freakily bug-eyed, golden alien Axons contrasted rather too much with their nondescript 'tentacled lump' monster forms - even if the physical variance is undouubtedly part of the point of the story, i.e. don't always go on friendly first appearances. Talking of which, it's nice to see the ever-watchable Master again, and while it rehashes the same plot of him collaborating with this month's alien menace to overthrow the human race, it comes with the nice twist that they've already turned on him before we even get into the story!

There are numererous good points to flag up, I must say; it's just that once more the whole thing didn't hang together enough to command my attention (and wakefulness) for more than an episode or so at a time. The Axons are clearly powerful, with their ability to shape-shift, clone Filer and drain the Earth of its resources, and with the firepower they possess in the running battle with UNIT troops. These action scenes are well-done, particularly where (despite the risible blue backgrounds that look nothing like the sky in alternate shots) Yates and Benton manage to outfox their adveraries by detonating a Land Rover!! The external views of Axos are good, with the pod half buried and surrounded by its own localised snowstorm, although the interior is a little too hallucinogenic for my liking. The support is variable - forgettable except for the self-important Chinn, whose head is so far up his own backside he could watch his stomach working but whose desire to contain the axonite turns out to be right for the wrong reasons, and the likeably loose-cannon Filer, uber-'70s hair and all, who gets to run around like a regular and have a superbly-shot fight with his own double, the existence of whom seems to be entirely pointless except to allow said punch-up to occur...

And then there's the Master. Compulsive viewing whenever he's on screen, the black-tunic-wearing, ruthless yet charming Time Lord is a joy. Seeing the Master and the Doctor again working together, to trick the Axons (or Axos, given that 'they' are a gestalt entity) and escape Earth, is marvellous for the second story in a row, and coupled with the fact that the latter has been more and more irritable, rude and arrogant these last few stories, reinforces the view of them as alike, contemporaries and equals. It is here that this adventure suddenly becomes great as the Doctor turns his back on his friends - the gap between Doctor and Master visibly shrinks while that between the pair and the humans seems to grow, as the Doctor points out that after all "we are both Time Lords". I genuinely couldn't see how he was going to resolve things at that point. Even though it was only a front, I love that the Doctor admits at the end that if he had had the chance to follow the escape route he would have taken it!

6.5/10

Episodes watched: 184
Episodes still to watch: 538

A monstrous 26 episodes behind schedule now, what with one thing and another. Days off coming up, though, so will have to see I can start to bridge the gap...

'The Mind of Evil' episodes IV - VI

2005-10-04T11:45:00.000+01:00

THE MIND OF EVIL continued

Clever premise - machine that removes 'evil impulses' from criminals brains to leave them paragons of virtue but with an apparent mental age of about eight. Machine turns out to be alien 'mind parasite' that feeds off negative thoughts and kills by confronting victims with their greatest fear. How it actually drowns a man through the power of suggestion alone baffles me, though. Still, it's been brought to Earth by the Master, who hasn't learnt from his experience with the Nestenes and thinks he can control it - but can't, and has to resort to asking the Doctor for help despite wanting to destroy him. That the Doctor's scorn and ridicule are presented, most surreally, as the Master's own worst fear is compelling explanation for some of the latter's behaviour over the series' history! Good direction - things like the inmates rattling their bars whenever the machine is active, and making the inanimate object seem actively malevolent. Great pitched gun battle at Dover Castle 'prison' locations, with UNIT soldiers cutting down their adversaries at wince-inducingly point-blank range. Nice Trojan Horse disguise for the Brigadier. Slight overcomplication with the peace conference/missile plot, but needed something to make it stretch the duration I guess. Interesting to see prominent Chinese characters, when hitherto non-Caucasians have been a rarity. Lovely to see Doctor and Master working together, so effectively and committedly that for a minute or two they seem more like old friends that bitter enemies, and you see how their two personalities are really flip sides of the same coin.

Good stuf, but never truly attention-grabbing enough to stop me falling asleep for more than an episode or two at a time! Got invited round to friends' for dinner and stuff this evening too, so really struggled to finish this one...

7/10

Episodes watched: 180
Episodes still to watch: 542

'The Mind of Evil' episodes I - III

2005-10-03T11:58:00.000+01:00

THE MIND OF EVIL
6 episodes

Good so far, without being terrifically exciting. Had to break off for Monday night Doctor Who roleplay, and only managed one more afterwards before getting too tired. I get the feeling that my reviews may degenerate slightly hereabouts as I'm invariably knackered when watching, which creates the twofold problem that I'm falling further and further behind schedule due to being unable to sit through six episodes a day, plus I can't be bothered doing a proper write-up afterwards!

Episodes watched: 177
Episodes still to watch: 545

'Terror of the Autons' episodes II - IV

2005-10-02T19:22:00.000+01:00

TERROR OF THE AUTONS continued

Or 'Lack of the Autons' to be honest - whatever this story might have meant for the future of Doctor Who, by no stretch of the imagination is it really an Auton story. Undoubtedly, it is an effective vehicle to introduce the Doctor's eternal nemesis the Master, charming new companion Jo Grant, and solidify the UNIT 'family' with Captain Mike Yates filling the rather large ranking gap between Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart and Sergeant Benton. The Doctor's early description of Jo as a "ham-fisted bun vendor" is so inexplicably worded and hilarious it never fails to make me laugh when I think of it, but from this inauspicious start Miss Grant quickly establishes herself as a useful sidekick for the Doctor. The introduction of another Time Lord character means the enemy is for once on something of an equal footing with the Doctor, and in a way it is a shame this is diluted by his opening story being shared with the returning threat of the Nestene Consciousness. I can see why 'living' armchairs, telephone cables and Auton policemen would have been more than averagely unnerving for the young fans of the time, but the psychological horror of the expressionless mannequins roaming the countryside in their debut appearance is lost due to their infrequent sightings this time round - although those giant costume heads are quite freaky. There is one great moment where an Auton takes an enormous plunge down a quarry side, only to rise to its feet and doggedly begin to ascend again, but all in all this seemed to fall between stools too much for my liking - and the Master gives in far too easily at the end!

6/10

Episodes watched: 174
Episodes still to watch: 548

'Terror of the Autons' episode I

2005-10-02T01:15:00.000+01:00

TERROR OF THE AUTONS
4 episodes

Finally - after all this time I've finally seen an episode of Doctor Who featuring Roger Delgado's original incarnation of the Master. What was surprising was the distinctly underwhelming nature of his entrance - the Master merely materialises his TARDIS and walks into a scene near the beginning of the episode, introduces himself, and that's it - no build-up, no intrigue, no suspense, no nothing. Maybe they didn't realise what a big deal they were going to have on their hands... Delgado's performance is marvellous - restrained, civil, polite, persuasive, without ever turning into maniacal caricature as one might expect of a 'super-villain'. Of the titular Autons, there is no sign, which was also slightly surprisinng, so I look forward to seeing where they turn up!

Episodes watched: 171
Episodes still to watch: 551

Oh dear - only one episode tonight, as I was again distracted by an old friend visiting town and went out for the evening instead!

'Inferno'

2005-10-01T02:35:00.000+01:00

INFERNO
7 episodes

Wow - how have I never heard about this story before now? Things start auspiciously, with special title/writer/episode number inserts mirroring those of 'The Ice Warriors', but with the earlier serial's background icefields replaced by erupting volcanoes and oozing lava flows. The basic plot is compelling enough, with the Doctor, Liz and UNIT facing doom in a facility where the obsessed Professor Stahlman is boring his way through the Earth's crust to tap the vast energies beneath as an unlimited power source for the country - but a primordial slime is oozing from the machinery and turning those is touches into unthinking savages who can infect others with the same taint with only a touch; and the plant's computer indicates the process is dangerously flawed, but Stahlman is insistent upon faster and faster drilling. The performances are all top-notch, from Olaf Pooley's increasingly unhinged monomaniac Stahlman to Christopher Benjamin's well-meaning but helpless Sir Keith Gold, and especially Derek Newark (caveman Za all the way back in 'An Unearthly Child') as engineer Greg Sutton, who from the first finds himself fiercely antagonistic to Stahlman but engaged in a touching romantic subplot with his assistant Petra. The industrial locations, like the last story's, are excellent, and the Doctor gets to spend the spare moments when he isn't occupied in slanging matches with Stahlman tinkering with the TARDIS console using a borrowed nuclear power supply.

Then, the whole adventure gets tipped on its head. This last, apparently shallow side-story seems to be serving only to remind us that the Doctor is on Earth under sufferance and is still trying to get away again - but then he actually does and it totally surprised me. Slipping 'sideways' onto a parallel-universe Earth, he finds that everything is superficially the same except that he is in a totalitarian Britain where a republic came into being thirty years before and his associates, while physically recognisable, have become very different to their 'real-world' counterparts. Plus, the drilling operation is much closer to finally cracking the crust and unleashing the uncontainable power of the mantle layer beneath, and one thing unchanged is that this universe's Stahlman (or Stahlmann) still won't listen to reason since he too has been infected by the green goo and has only a little while before he reverts to bestial primitivism.

As well a completely refreshing the tale and giving it new impetus into the middle section of the seven episodes, this flipside world is an ingenious way of providing the Doctor with something to struggle against without throwing another 'invasion of the week' storyline at him: not only are the Primord creatures largely peripheral to the plot, but the green gunge is never followed-up or explained, and there are no alien enemies in sight - so what better way to subvert expectations and provide a unique slant on the Doctor's relationships with his friends than to make them the enemies? The decision to use the regular support cast in parallel roles where they become the Doctor's adversaries is inspired, as he suddenly finds he can no lomger trust those who were closest to him and really has to think on his feet to outwit them, escape this version of Earth and prevent the 'real' one being ravaged by the volcanic forces that will erupt from the mantle if the crust is breached by Stahlman's machine. We get a terrific chase in cars (Bessie also having been transported across), where Jon Pertwee really gets to show off his daredevil stunt driving skills, and across the oil refinery location's rooftops where the Doctor also has to deal with a loose Primord. His flight is ended when he makes the mistake of trying to communicate with this world's Liz Shaw, only to find that here she is a hard-bitten military type who wastes no time hustling him into captivity. Caroline John shines in the alternative role, with a noble streak appearing later through the tough exterior, and she is matched by John Levene's thuggish version of Benton in a performance far removed from the amiable Sergeant in the normal UNIT. Both, however, are outdone by Nicholas Courtney's jawdropping transformation into the moustache-less, eyepatch-wearing, sadistic Brigade Leader Lethbridge Stewat. The character's brutality and coldheartedness are brilliantly shown in the likes of the interrogation scenes with Shaw where the Doctor is really put through the mill (surely uncomfortable viewing for the younger Who fans), and when the action intermittently reverts to the 'real world' the familiar performances of Courtney and the rest seem shockingly different in comparison. The Brigade Leader's undesirable traits as mentioned are finally revealed as fronts for an inherent cowardice that is harshly shown up as the apocalypse overwhelms the parallel Earth, whereas most of the others find a kind of redemption in the face of approaching doom. Admittedly Stahlman, though equally looking different, retains most of his single-minded obsessiveness, but Section Leader Shaw's humanity breaks out in the end, and it is in the still-sympathetic version of Greg Sutton that the Doctor finds his ally and ice-maiden Petra finds her hero before catastrophe seemingly overwhelms them all. The Doctor, though, manages to escape in the nick of time and avert a similar fate for his real-world companions, and at the end of everything tries to get away again using the TARDIS console - but fails, is deposited on a nearby rubbish tip and sheepishly reconciles with the Brigadier to the laughter of Liz Shaw, in a nice final appearance for her in the series.

I was told beforehand it was going to be good, but I didn't expect it to be that good! Didn't start watching until 11:30 at night, but sat through seven episodes straight without a hint of falling asleep. Engrossing and marvellous.

10/10

Episodes watched: 170
Episodes still to watch: 552

'The Ambassadors of Death'

2005-09-30T13:48:00.000+01:00

THE AMBASSADORS OF DEATH
7 episodes

Or, 'The Ambassadors...' whooosh - BOINGGG '...OF DEATH' as the opening credits would have it, in a unique version where the title sequence grinds to a halt each time to reshow the cliffhanger, before kicking back in for the story title, writer and episode number... of which there are a lot, but in fairness the leisurely pace of this story rarely equates to a drop in interest. There is a slightly surreal fading in and out of monochrome depending on whether the colour footage still exists for a given episode or scene, but this detracts surprisingly little from the presentation. That there are no clear-cut villains means there are an atypically high number of shades of grey (no pun intended) characterwise: the 'alien menace' are merely trying to retrieve their missing ambassadors, General Carrington is heroically misguided, Taltalion a pawn of Reegan, Quinlan an adjunct of those two, Reegan trying to exploit the existing situation for financial gain... Even the 'good guy' scientist Cornish seems as if he may suddenly turn on the Doctor and friends for substantial periods, without this ever actually happening - possibly from his early friction with the Doctor (although this is mostly the irascible Doctor's fault), and possibly this is just the aura that Ronald Allen gives off, considering his superb turn in 'The Dominators'. That the Doctor allows General Carrington to leave with dignity intact at the end, saying he "understands" his actions as they arose from his prior experiences on Mars, speaks volumes about the shading of motives and actions present here. Reegan fills the 'evil' role the most, manipulating his colleagues, the 'ambassadors' and the Doctor and Liz, and killing off opponents, but possesses an undeniable roguish charisma that makes him oddly likeable. When he is trying to thwart the Doctor's space mission and safe return, the sequence of him clambering on the huge industrial rigs of Space Centre is among the best location work yet seen in the series, with some superb camerawork in the 'puddle reflection' shot that enables us to follow his progress upwards without shifting the viewpoint. The spacecraft model shots are likewise the highest-quality seen to date, the alien mothership's surreal backdrops are used sparingly, which keeps their efficacy high, and the fact that the aliens themselves are never named, almost totally kept under wraps and largely sidelined means they are far more effective - the faceless, silent spacesuits are more spookily unnerving than any conventional 'monster' makeup and constume would have been. They are obviously incredibly powerful and can kill with a touch, but it is clear that they do so only because they are being controlled and not through their own volition.

One thing I also really liked was the weirdly wonderful incidental music, where violent action scenes with the aliens and gun battles are soundtracked by ethereal, atmospheric sweeps of melody in an inexplicably effective manner. Lastly, the use of the John Wakefield character to literally narrate the action onscreen is a brilliant device, as not only does he look and sound like a quintessential '70s TV presenter, but his 'telecast' pieces to camera are a very clever way of providing plot exposition bluntly but without seeming forced. That he is played by Michael Wisher means that, as Geoffrey Beevers crops up as a UNIT private, we have both a future Davros and future Master in this story!

7.5/10

Episodes watched: 163
Episodes still to watch: 559

Actually watched the first four episodes last night, but was so tired by that stage I couldn't be bothered to post an entry here then - hence this is one overarching view rather than two half ones!

'Doctor Who and the Silurians' episodes II - VII

2005-09-28T22:20:00.000+01:00

DOCTOR WHO AND THE SILURIANS continued

He's not called Doctor Who, and they're not Silurians - the production gaffe that enabled this story to go out under the kind of hack title normally reserved for Target novelisations is on a par only with the shoddy paleontological chronology that infects the plot like the Silurian's germ warfare infects commuters. But, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised: the story kept up the pace and interest very nicely considering the large number of episodes involved, not least thanks to the vivid characterisation - Dr. Quinn (despite his surprisingly early exit), Dr. Lawrence, Major Baker, Masters, the Young and Old Silurians... All have distinct personalities established, and the length of the story means that they all have time to play out their own mini stories without this seeming forced or rushed. There is an interesting morality play at work here: more than almost any other occasion I can think of, the villains are presented in shades of grey rather than being outright evil or insane, the two stock shorthands for 'bad person' in Doctor Who. The Old Silurian's touching connection with the Doctor seems to offer hope of peaceful coexistence before he is violently usurped, while even the Young Silurian, whose bratty attitude, adolescent voice and exaggerated movements bring to mind nothing so much as Harry Enfield's Kevin the Teenager, grows up a little at the very end as he decides to sacrifice his own hibernation to save his species.

The notion of the 'alien' race not only being from Earth but in some ways having a greater claim to it than the human race is explored nicely, with the conflicting views of those who wish to coexist with them and those who wish to blow them off the planet staying within their established characters, e.g. Miss Dawson's fire-and-brimstone hard line after her beloved (?) Dr. Quinn has been killed. Geoffrey Palmer's likeably flexible civil servant/politician Masters proves pivotal to the plot, as he first juggles the conflicting requests of those around him and then forgets to quarantine himself and returns to London, unwittingly spreading the virus/bacteria and dying himself. These scenes are fantastic, with the Brigadier frantically manning every phone he can reach intercut with a white-coated Doctor testing antidote adter antidote and with a sickening Masters weaving his way around London, with his fellows from Marylebone and elsewhere collapsing in the streets. The makeup for those 'infected' is great and helps bring a grotesque touch to the sudden proliferation and to individual deaths such as Lawrence's particularly tortured one. We alse see the Doctor and the Brigadier have their relationship pushed to the limit, with a great deal of mutual distrust culminating in the famous ending where the Brigadier detonates the Silurian's caves hideout to the Doctor's abject horror and disgust. That this takes place againsgt the backdrop of a 'comedy' scene with the Doctor giving the debuting Bessie a novel jumpstart only strengthens the impact and reinforces the theory that not all 'evils' are there just to be destroyed utterly by the Doctor and chums at the end of the last episode - the ending on display here is surely one of the bleakest of all Whos.

The directorial skill thus shown is also evident elsewhere - the unfortunate dinosaur model is used only fleetingly in bluescreen-style back-projection inserts (a first) after its initial appearance, while the merely average Silurian costumes are kept in subterranean gloom for the most part. The first view of the wounded Silurian surfacing against the sun is just ravishingly gorgeous, and the use of tripartite 'monster's-eye-view' camera shots in episodes 2 and 3 is a great touch. The Doctor, usually so elegant and dapper, is clad in a white T-shirt in the final episode, which besides being unsettling, combined with his expressed sentiments helps make him seem sufficiently 'different' for the Brigadier to doubt his motives. As I mentioned, the chronology is way off, though - Quinn's map showing the continents 200 million years ago depicts a world only half as old as the Silurian Period itself (that dating would have made them Triassics, give or take, I believe), while the reptiles' talk of apes would, if applied to proto-hominids, make them far far more recent than this again. Oh well - the rest of their science is up the spout too, since they (and Liz) believe that the Van Allen belts (Earth's magnetic field, if I'm correct, not part of the atmosphere) keep out UV rays rather than the ozone layer. Still, you can't have everything.

His name's still The Doctor, though...

8/10

Episodes watched: 156
Episodes still to watch: 566

'Doctor Who and the Silurians' episode I

2005-09-27T23:38:00.000+01:00

DOCTOR WHO AND THE SILURIANS
7 episodes

Bloody hell - there had only been six stories with seven or more episodes in the series' history to this point, but now there's three in a row! They'd better be good...

First reports say... interesting. This looked like being a trial to begin with: after a slow start, with not a huge amount happening, memories of the slick, expensive-looking 'Spearhead From Space' are instantly wiped out by a rubber prop dinosaur. But, after this it really begins to reel you in to the extent that you forget it ever seemed inferior. Tried three times to get through episode 2, but after falling asleep twice decided I'd be better off trying again tomorrow!

The characters are all well-drawn, with future Porridge stalwart Fulton Mackay's surprisingly pleasant and likeable Dr. Quinn (not the medicine woman) stealing the show in the early going, plus we get a pre-Blake's 7 Paul Darrow as Captain Hawkins, who has recently turned up in several guest roles in Little Britain. Which is of course narrated by the Fourth Doctor...

Anyway, I look forward to seeing what comes next...

Episodes watched: 150
Episodes still to watch: 572

'Spearhead From Space' episodes III - IV

2005-09-27T20:51:00.000+01:00

SPEARHEAD FROM SPACE continued

Hey, that was good... Slick presentation, great new Doctor, a good, sympathetic role for the Brigadier and an able new companion, plus an all-time great Doctor Who moment as the Auton shop window dummies come to life and silently slaughter their way down the High Streets of the UK! The rubber Nestene monster was a bit crap in comparison to the superbly-realised Auton mannequins (I love those guns built into their hands) and 'facsimiles', but even the appearance of that was made tolerable thanks to some first-class gurning from Jon Pertwee. The number of people shot in the back by Autons was quite worryingly high, from Ransome's vaporisation to frantic shoppers, which I thought was surprisingly full-on. The Doctor, once he has shamefacedly stopped trying to escape the planet and turned his full attention to vanquishing the alien threat, is at the forefront of the action, bravely entering the Auto Plastics factory and constructing a device to thwart the Nestenes, with Pertwee turning in a performance full of charm, wit and authority.

I want to go and watch 'Rose' now, just to see the Autons and the Nestene Consciousness in action again! Still, not long to wait until 'Terror of the Autons'...!

8/10

Episodes watched: 149
Episodes still to watch: 573

'Spearhead From Space' episodes I - II

2005-09-26T23:05:00.000+01:00

SPEARHEAD FROM SPACE
4 episodes

Oooh - colour! Suddenly, Doctor Who takes a great leap forward - new Doctor, new decade, new titles, new theme arrangement, the first story after the Doctor has finally been given a background and a context, the first story with a wholesale changeover for the core cast - and it's all in full glorious colour for the first time. Immediately, 'The War Games' seems a very long time ago... Incidentally, it's also the first non-'The...' story I've seen since 'Planet of Giants' eighteen days ago!!

Other than the totally fresh feel all the above gives the start of 'Spearhead From Space', the most noticeable thing is how fantastically glossy and 'expensive' it looks - this was the rarest of things, a Doctor Who episode shot entirely (out of necessity) on film and on location, so it automatically looks bigger and better than those shot on sets using videotape. It all helps reinforce the notion that you're watching something of a new dawn for the programme. Otherwise, the most surprising thing about part 1 is how much it holds back from rushing into the plot, or indeed introducing us to the new incarnation of the Doctor. Jon Pertwee's debut in the role sees him spend almost all of his early scenes either unconscious or otherwise less than talkative, firstly following his regeneration and secondly after he is shot (!) by a UNIT soldier. Consequently his doctors and a sceptical Brigadier learn very little about this mysterious figure and we surprisingly learn very little about his characterisation until this first half has all but elapsed. There is a rather grown-up atmosphere to proceedings, too - from the slicker look (the Brigadier's press conference at the beginning has an almost documentary feel) to a more mature 'companion' in Liz Shaw, plus we get blood on the cracked windscreen when a UNIT soldier crashes his Jeep early on, and the Autons are extremely creepy, with waxy skin, hollow eyes and stilted movements. There is humour too, though - the Doctor's antics in hospital with his shoes, the shower and his stolen outfit and 'borrowed' car, for instance. All in all, Pertwee shines as the new incumbent, while he is matched by an excellent Nicholas Courtney, slipping effortlessly back into the role of the Brigadier, and there is a promising start for Caroline John as Liz Shaw plus excellent support turns from Hugh Burden's Channing (staring eyes, looks like he's listening to the voices in his head), John Woodnutt's Hibbert (deeply conflicted) Neil Wilson's Seeley (shifty West Country yokel in Essex) and more.

Looking forward to the adventure proper in the remaining two episodes!

Episodes watched: 147
Episodes still to watch: 575

Damn - so much effort to catch up, and then I only watch one episode yesterday and two today, my worst sequence yet... Nine behind again!

'The War Games' episode X

2005-09-26T00:24:00.000+01:00

THE WAR GAMES continued

And so it ends - 'The War Games', the Patrick Troughton era, the Sixties era, Doctor Who in black-and-white... The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe manage to gain the TARDIS and make their bid for freedom, but despite the Doctor's most valiant efforts to dodge the dubious justice of his people, they are drawn inexorably to his home planet. The Doctor does a good job here of setting out the truisms which are to become widely accepted facts - the Time Lords forbid intervention in temporal affairs, preferring to sit outside these matters and only observe, while he found this far too restrictive when there are so very many worlds and times to explore, so long ago he just stole away... He notes later that the Time Lords "like making speeches", too; the difference between his endless restlessness and their inert, impassive bureaucracy becomes very clear during this episode, and you could in many ways call it a neat template of the years to come. Watching these stories in order, though, it is easy to almost put out of your mind all thar came after and accept it as if it were new; and, although these programmes were made long before anyone ever thought in 'story arcs', it is extraordinary to suddenly find so much information coming out of the woodwork as if it had been waiting there, carefully buried, to be found all along, sfter holding out for six years of almost totally opaque mystery up to this point.

The War Lord is on trial, and despite his flat refusal to acknowledge the authority of the Time Lords' court and a spirited defence, and even the intervention of his fetish-suited guards and an escape bid using the Doctor's TARDIS, he is found guilty of heinous crimes against those he took out of time and those he would have used them against, and he is dematerialised and himself removed from history as if he had never existed. The Time Lords then turn their attention to the Doctor, who mounts his own impassioned defence of his action in defending innocents against the likes of the Quarks, Yeti, Ice Warriors, Cybermen and Daleks (all of whom we glimpse in action) and indicts the Time Lords for their own lack of action where he believes it is needed. The Time Lord quality of self-righteousness is much in evidence as neither side is willing to change its views, and eventually, following a last-ditch attempt by Jamie and Victoria to spring him from captivity, the Time Lords sentence the Doctor to exile on his frequent destination Earth in the 20th century, without the use of his TARDIS - and in a new body with a new face. For his companions there is only a return to their old lives at the moment they left them, their memories of their adventures gone - so we see Zoe return to the Wheel and Jamie to the Highlands, and there is a real sadness is not only their goodbyes but in seeing all their growth and change in their travels with the Doctor undone, especially Jamie after his never-to-be-equalled three-year stint in the TARDIS. Amusingly, the Doctor rejects all the new visages the Time Lords offer him; their patience runs out, and the last we see of the Second Doctor is him spinning off into a void, his features contorting; no matter how much he may fight it, he is about to change once again...

As I say, watching all the episodes in order you really get the feeling like you're 'discovering' things without being aware of the future history of the programme, and for a second time I found it a wrench to say goodbye to a Doctor who I had come to take for granted. After all these years, it's been great to finally familiarise myself with Patrick Troughton's Doctor, the funny, energetic, wildly anarchic prototype of so much that would define the character in decades to come. I only ever saw him play his famous recorder once, though...

9/10

Episodes watched: 145
Episodes still to watch: 577

'The War Games' episodes IV - IX

2005-09-25T03:05:00.000+01:00

THE WAR GAMES continued

Phew - this is a long haul, but I'm really enjoying it. The knowledge that you're working up to a pivotal moment in Who history means that the leisurely pace the story is taking in getting there doesn't feel tiresome. It would admittedly be an understatement to say that there are repetitive elements, with the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe getting caught in an almost endless cycle of capture and recapture, and there are a huge number of firefights, brawls and other skirmishes - but then, these are war games, after all. Our heroes manage to infiltrate the alien base from where the games are being manipulated and we find out all the combatants in the various zones have been lifted wholesale from their own times and placed here, brainwashed, to eliminate each other until only the elite are left to form an unbeatable fighting force to use in galactic conquest. The truly creepy scarred German general von Weich turns up again as a Confederate general, whose use of his monocle to focus his hypnotic suggestions is really unnerving, and and there is later on a glimpse of Patrick Troughton's son David as a nervous private holding him prisoner immediately before von Weich thankfully suffers an abrupt demise. Likewiase does the nasty 'British' general Smythe, as Jamie leads a band of control-resistant freedom fighters from the various zones to form a resistance base at the 1917 chateau, and despite the best efforts of the aliens back at the command centre to rout them out.

During this we get to see a lot more of the War Chief and the Security Chief, the two main controllers of the experiments, who delightfully happen to hate each other. The former, with magnificently sculpted facial hair, is a joy as he schemes with a seemingly-duplicitous Doctor to take sole control of the project, and it is revealed that he is the first person we've seen since the Meddling Monk who is of the same race as the Doctor. The powerplay between the Chiefs is highly enjoyable, although the Security Chief has a bizarre, slightly-Germanic accent and delivery reminiscent of Von Smallhausen in 'Allo 'Allo at his most pompous... The shifting dynamic between the two is thrown into sharp relief, however, by the arrival of their superior and ultimate commander the War Lord. A brilliant performance by Philip Madic (making a swift return after 'The Krotons'); what might have been expected to be a raving dictator is portrayed as a quiet, unassuming figure, whose pronouncements only seem more emphatic for being so softly delivered. The fued between the War Chief and Security Chief ultimately results in the latter's death at the hands of the former when the resistance - comedy Mexican and all - storm the base sector via the SIDRAT (silly name!) travel devices, the Doctor's easy use of which makes him rather uncomfortable to explain. Oddly, these seem to have replaced conventional control panels with fridge magnets. It is a real shock to see the War Lord suddenly snap and order the execution of the War Chief for his devious actions - maybe it's just the odd magnifying spectacles, but there is momentarily a bug-eyed lunacy floating dangerously close to the urbane surface.

Meanwhile, the Doctor is finally forced to admit he cannot resolve the plight of all the displaced fighters. We discover the seminal truth that the Doctor is of a race of people known as the Time Lords, but exactly who are they and what is it about them that is worrying the Doctor so much? He summons them only with the greatest reluctance; Troughton's portrayal of the Doctor's total terror at the thought of running into his own kind is tremendous from here on in. He promptly flees in a SIDRAT for the safety of his TARDIS - and the nebulous power of the approaching figures is wonderfully conveyed by the airborne throbbing sound that follows, and the War Lord's almost-awed, foreboding "They're coming...". The cliffhanger is superb, as the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe stumble as if through treacle towards their ship, the Doctor desperately reaching in slow-motion for the keyhole, and at the very last his fingers slip from the key...

Episodes watched: 144
Episodes still to watch: 578

'The War Games' episodes I - III

2005-09-23T23:47:00.000+01:00

THE WAR GAMES
10 episodes

Well, here we are already at the end of the Troughton era, with a real epic to finish with. At ten episodes, 'The War Games' will be my longest complete story yet, and in the whole history of Doctor Who only 'The Daleks' Masterplan' and 'The Trial of a Time Lord' are longer.

The TARDIS lands in a truly dicey bit of human history, a front-line British trench in the First World War. Through the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe getting captured by first the British and then the German forces we learn that not all is as it seems, as both generals are acting rather strangely, possess some anachronistic communications devices and seem to exert an almost hypnotic influence over their subordinates, none of whom can remember exactly where they came from or how long they've been here. We also learn that the Doctor's sonic screwdriver can actually unscrew and screw screws...! Most of this opening run takes place in the British trench or at their general's chateau, and the settings and the various soldiers' manners are so extraordinarily evocative of the peerless Blackadder Goes Forth you almost feel like you're watching Blackadder, George, Darling and Melchett at times, which not only helps demonstrate what a good job both series did of recreating that world, but how close the latter's comedy strayed to genuine drama.

So well are these early scenes done, it is almost regrettable that this is not a genuine Doctor Who historical, these alas done away with after 'The Highlanders'. There is actually a reminder of that earlier story, with Jamie constantly aggravated by his would-be captors to the extent that he even teams up with an enemy from his own time, a lost Redcoat, to fight their way out of military prison. (Incidentally, Patrick Troughton has one of his best moments as the Doctor bluffs his way into the same place as a 'War Office inspector' through sheer force of bluster that would have done the First Doctor proud.) 'The War Games' does a superb job both in terms of effects and direction: the muddy trench underfoot where the TARDIS lands, the barrage of gunfire that erupts when the TARDIS crew try to leave the trench, the enormously evocative dawn scenes when the firing squad are setting up, ready to execute the Doctor - which leads to a fantastic cliffhanger for the end of part 1. Part 2's is almost as good, as with the aid of a sympathetic Lieutenant Carstairs and field ambulance driver Lady Jennifer Buckingham they manage to escape, and to their surprise pass through the encircling mist into a totally different bit of country where they face a force of oncoming Roman legionaries! Scurrying back to the '1917 zone' they discover that this place is divided into a whole host of adjacent but discrete time zones where different wars are going on, and manage to get separated in the American Civil War zone when Carstairs holds back to draw off some of the 'indigenous' combatants, and the Doctor and Zoe investigate something strangely analogous to a TARDIS that promptly disappears. Meanwhile, somewhere else altogether, we are treated to the surreal sight of the opposing generals conferring in a futuristic-looking war room as to how they are going to manoeuvre their respective forces next to best test the other's resolve. Curiouser and curiouser - I look forward to seeing what happens next!

Episodes watched: 138
Episodes still to watch: 584

Marvellous - only ten episodes today, but I have finally caught up with my quota... i.e. if before I started I had worked out where I'd be after 23 days at a rate of six episodes a day, I'd have located my progress at this point as being episode 3 of 'The War Games', which is precisely where I have got to!! Onwards and upwards, then...!

'The Space Pirates'

2005-09-23T17:55:00.000+01:00

THE SPACE PIRATES
6 episodes: 1 surviving

I have to say, slightly contrary to what I said at the end of the last entry, from what I hear this is perhaps the only story other than 'The Underwater Menace' where I'm quite glad there isn't more surviving! The model work of spaceships etc. is particularly good for the era, even if set against oddly blank backgrounds, but really nothing much happens and takes ages to not happen too. And that's only one-sixth of the serial! The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe don't even get a look in until thirteen minutes have elapsed, and proceed to spend the rest of the episode sitting in a small capsule (part of some fragmented space beacon) slowly running out of oxygen, while the rest of the cast talk boringly to each other in not-terribly-good American accents. I'm actually hoping that General Hermack wasn't supposed to sound American, because if he was then that was the worst accent in history... The one good thing is Gordon Gostelow as Milo Clancey, an iconoclastic spacefaring loner (sound familiar?) who has more personality than the rest of the support cast put together, gets an amusing introduction where he is interrupted relentlessly while trying to just eat a boiled egg, and shows an admirably total lack of respect for Hermack and his ilk. Nothing else to see here, move along please...

4/10

Episodes watched: 135
Episodes still to watch: 587

'The Seeds of Death'

2005-09-23T17:14:00.000+01:00

THE SEEDS OF DEATH
6 episodes

Strangely compelling stuff, which without ever breaking out into true greatness drags surprisingly little considering its length. We get a substantial setup sequence to introduce the setting, the concept of T-mat and all the supporting characters, although the identity of the villains is kept in the dark until the end of the first episode by clever use of shooting their point of view instead of letting them into the frame. The TARDIS crew take a full eight minutes to arrive, turning up in a space museum (not that one) that houses amongst other things the TARDIS astral map prop from 'The Web of Fear' (shudder) and the Dominators' drill. Funny the Doctor doesn't seem to recognise them...

The Ice Warriors, as they are revealed to be, make impressive monsters again and cement their status in the upper echelons of Doctor Who bad guys, with their leader Slaar being almost unspeakably sadistic in his treatment of Fewsham throughout and in his desire to kill the Doctor by T-matting him into space instead of just having him shot. The seeds of the title are really quite impressive, with absolutely mountains of foam pouring out from them and smothering the landscape. There are some odd plot elements, like the fact that Radnor and co. happily send the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe to the moon in a rocket despite having only just met them and knowing nothing about their trustworthiness or suitabiility to fly, and that the three are sent up without so much as a spacesuit let alone any training! Then there is the fact that the seeds' gas kills by cutting off people's oxygen supply and the characters worry that releasing this into the atmosphere could harm the entire world's population, yet we have already seen that only a person who has a seed explode right in their face will suffocate while those behind them will just cough and splutter for a minute. Then there is the glaring error that presumably arose because the makers were all used to thinking in Fahrenheit back in the day, where we see the Ice Warriors incapacitated by the moonbase's temperature being turned up to a blisteringly hot 60 degrees Centigrade, which would surely have killed the humans present as well... Then, Zoe knows Ice Warrior Slaar's name despite having no way of doing so. And then there's that glowing-lights panel on the wall of the moonbase - although it creates very cool silhouettes of people throughout, does it actually have any other reason to be there besides this??

Still, it is easy to criticise, so I'll try not to pick out any more! There is some good model work, with the takeoff and landing of the moon rockets especially impressive. The T-mats are a nice new concept to introduce into the Whoniverse, and the Ice Warriors make good use of them to spread their killer gas and fungus all over the globe. Radnor, Miss Kelly and Eldred make a good treble-act down on Earth, although I was often distracted by Ronald Leigh-Hunt's uncanny resemblance of Bill Pertwee (brother of the future Third Doctor Jon, and Dad's Army stalwart as ARP Warden Hodges) and Philip Ray's odd facial similarity to Davros!! The unwilling traitor Fewsham is also an interesting role, as he alternates between helping and hindering the Ice Warriors in the moonbase at the risk and ultimate cost of his life. Talking of which: you get so used to Who villains using the kiddie-friendly, somewhat bowlderised expression of "destroying" someone every time they mean to dispatch them gruesomely, it was genuinely chilling to hear Slaar simply state "Kill him" when Fewsham's aiding of the humans is uncovered.

The Doctor is, despite the code of his (still unnamed) people, at his most proactive here, as he wastes no time in wading into the conflict with every intention of righting the perceived wrong and helping out the humans. It is quite surprising to see him rig up a makeshift weapon and kill (sorry, destroy) Ice Warriors, as later especially you get used to his pacifistic stance. Regardless, it is another excellent turn from Patrick Troughton, and with only a single episode plus one complete story left to come I can't help wishing we had so many more of his Doctor's serials still available to enjoy today. At least he made the effort to come back for the Three, Five and Two Doctors adventures in later years!

7.5/10

Episodes watched: 134
Episodes still to watch: 588

'The Krotons'

2005-09-23T10:28:00.000+01:00

THE KROTONS
4 episodes

Ah. This was a bit of a comedown. I know I was operating on less than three hours' sleep (snatched after 'The Invasion' this morning), but I think staying awake through the whole of 'The Krotons' might have been a trial anyway... As with 'The Dominators', I came in not knowing the first thing about this serial - which, I'm beginning to realise, probably means that a story isn't going to be much cop since logically if it has a great deal to recommend it I'd have heard about it already, no?

Anyway, it's not as if 'The Krotons' is a bad story: it was the first from perhaps the programme's most successful writer Robert Holmes, features a fine turn from Philip Madoc as one of the Gonds, Eelek, has one cool cliffhanger where the Doctor is menaced by a serpentine metal probe with a glowing 'eye' at its front like those in the recent War of the Worlds film, and doesn't do anything particularly objectionable at any stage. It's just that it's so average it almost hurts - the story just sort of washed over me without ever once threatening to grab my enthusiasm. Admittedly I fell asleep for half an hour a little way into part 2 and had to stop and go back to where I'd dropped off, but even allowing for that it seemed to drag out far more than would appear to be theoretically feasible for a mere four-parter. The titular Krotons are, like the Dominators, only two in number, and are a kind of chunky sub-Quark type of robot whose most notable feature is that one of them is apparently from Birmingham. The Gonds that they have apparently been oppressing for thousands of years are too boring a bunch to waste further wordage on at this point, sorry.

Was going to give this a middle-of-the-road 5-ish, but in light of the fact that absolutely nothing interesting happened at any point I feel I must mark it down, sorry. Plus, I can never think of it without thinking of those little crunchy bits of toasted bread you get in soup...

4/10

Episodes watched: 128
Episodes still to watch: 594

Ten episodes today - back to just four behind schedule now!

'The Invasion'

2005-09-22T08:34:00.000+01:00

THE INVASION
8 episodes: 6 remaining.

Lying awake with flu-like shivering last night, feeling ill and unable to drop off, head alternately full of depressed thoughts and big dreams, I finally got fed up at about half past five and came downstairs to see if I could get through all six remaining episodes of 'The Invasion' on no sleep...Three hours and only a few momentary dozes later (plus a twenty-minute interlude where I did conk out and had to rewind the tape), I seem to have made it. Good, polished if unremarkable Doctor Who that benefits enormously from a great bit of Bond-style villainy courtesy of Kevin Stoney as Tobias Vaughan, all suave menace and twitching rage, complete with a demi-psychotic henchman in Packer. His finest moment is perhaps the scene where he calmly taunts the distressed Professor Watkins to kill him, placing his gun in the other man's hand - only for it to become evident that Vaughan's body has already been Cyberised! Stoney's appearance seems appropriate, as he had already turned in an acclaimed performance as Mavic Chen in 'The Daleks' Masterplan' and here effectively reprises the role as a misguided megalomaniac who foolishly attempts to ally himself with a race of implaceble alien monsters. That in this case these are the Cybermen is interestingly held back right until the end of Episode 4 - halfway through the story - and hence Vaughan rather than the Cybermen is the main threat for much of the narrative. Curiously, while as in 'The Wheel In Space' they are largely reduced to the role of generic bad guys, the Cybermen don't seem to suffer from this in the same way as they had in their last outing; partly this is because Vaughan takes on a great deal of the evildoing workload and partly because they look so damn cool regardless - their costumes have had yet another overhaul to create perhaps the absolute 'classic' look, with the big 'earmuffs' and five-fingered gloves and an overall more powerful appearance. The scenes where they loom, gleaming out of the darkness of the sewers are superb, and despite obvious plagiarism of the Daleks' 22nd-century sightseeing trip (I swear I spotted the Albert Memorial again) the iconic shots of them descending the steps of St. Paul's and swarming through London are great too.

In a similar vein to 'The War Machines' acting as a First Doctor 'dummy run' for the Earth-based early years of the Third's tenure, so 'The Invasion' does the same for the Second Doctor. This is the first appearance of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT) under that name, with Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart returning from 'The Web of Fear' now promoted to his familiar rank of Brigadier. We also see future UNIT regular Corporal Benton, who I couldn't help but notice sounds remarkably like Alan Partridge... That the Brig can command squads of soldiers into immediate action and fire off Russian missiles into space (in a nice bit of international cooperation) means the good guys have some seriously heavy-duty backup this time out, and it is also nice to see the Doctor establishing a friendship outside his TARDIS companions. A good touch, too, is the use of Nicholas Courtney to narrate the linking sequences to cover the gaps left by the missing episodes 1 and 4.

Some good use of location filming and a particularly satisfying mass firefight in the final part help make the serial look a bit more expensive than usual - although the incidental music for the UNIT men arriving to get shot was implausibly jaunty, considering, and I think it was more than a little irresponsible of the soldiers to allow the two civilian girls into their front ranks for the battle... And it's a shame that they obviously only had three stock clips of missile silos manoeuvering into position, made clear through the trio being used in the same sequence on no fewer than three separate occasions! The regulars get to do their bit, Patrick Troughton's Doctor especially excelling in his scenes with Vaughan. One thing that's bugging me, though - when Zoe isn't doing anything (i.e. looking straight ahead with face at rest), she appears to be all huge eyelashes, button nose, cheeks and lips to such a great extent she unavoidably reminds me of a Thunderbirds puppet. Strange but true... Anyway, quibbles like this aside, 'The Invasion' is good, solid fun.

7/10

Episodes watched: 124
Episodes still to watch: 598

The earliest completion of my daily quota on any day yet - and there's now less than 600 episodes left to watch!!

'The Mind Robber'

2005-09-21T23:59:00.000+01:00

THE MIND ROBBER
5 episodes

Now, this is my kind of story. Mysterious, fantastical, whimsical, freaky... It covers the same sort of bases as 'The Celestial Toymaker' but has the great advantage of being available to watch in its entirety, Season 6 having been spared the worst ravages that so denuded its two predeessors of surviving footage. The first episode was tacked on at the eleventh hour due to the scripts of 'The Dominators' being edited down from six to five episodes, bumping this adventure up to the same length, and for the first time since 'Inside the Spaceship' we see what the Doctor Who production team can do with no budget for sets or additional cast but a whole heap of imagination - here, creating a featureless white void that is a suitably surreal entry to the Land of Fiction. Contrary to what I thought about the end of the last story, the shenanigans with the lava were not just to allow a funny closing gag, but actively tie into the start of this adventure and lead to the TARDIS being stranded outside of time and space in this bizarre 'other' place. After 'escaping' the void, the crew are threatened by further strange images before the TARDIS blows up, leaving Jamie and Zoe (took a good minute to remember her name there...) spinning off into blackness atop the console. They emerge somewhere else altogether, in a forest of giant letter 'trees' and encounter all sorts of odd folk, from Lemuel Gulliver (who in an incredibly clever bit of scriptwriting only speaks using lines that he was given in Gulliver's Travels) to Rapunzel, Medusa, a unicorn, a Minotaur, an unnerving bunch of man-sized toy soldiers and a comical cartoon superhero known as Karkus. The strange but strictly-adhered to laws of this land means nothing is quite what it seems, only existing in some parody of life as defined in the fiction each character has sprung from. Throwing everything at the tale and seeing most of it stick, the writing and direction are excellent - and even the fact that Frazer Hines came down with chicken-pox for a couple of episodes didn't so much derail as escalate the weird brilliance, as Jamie's face is twice rearranged on a life-size cardboard cutout by the Doctor to explain his temporary morphing into a different appearance!

I have to say, I got a brief shock when the lord of this domain was named as 'The Master' - but then realised that it couldn't be that one as he hadn't been invented yet. Still, it gave an interesting frisson to each mention of his name, up to the point where the malevolent dictator was revealed as a really quite avuncular puppet of a greater Master Brain. Weird and wonderful ending, too, as the whole dimension blows up, the TARDIS spirals back together again, and the credits roll with no further explanation at all! Marvellous.

9/10

Episodes watched: 118
Episodes still to watch: 604

That's more like it - ten episodes today, and I'm only eight behind my schedule now with two days off coming up!!

'The Dominators'

2005-09-21T21:17:00.000+01:00

THE DOMINATORS
5 episodes

Looked forward to this story as I had no idea whatsoever of its content before I put the video in, so had the pleasurable sense of taking a step into the unknown! This is a bit different from the norm - the series' first five-parter, if I'm not mistaken, featuring an alien invasion of another planet by precisely two (2) aliens... To be fair, the aliens in question, the self-proclaimed Dominators (of "the Ten Galaxies", no less) take advantage of theie lack of numbers by being individually quite interesting, with the frequent dissent and tension within the ranks being one of the main recurring plot features. I kind of regret the fact the programme never revisited this people, as their overlords are made out to be extremely powerful, yet their lasting impact on the Whoniverse seems to have been relegated to a mere footnote.

Alas, the people they are invading, the Dulcians, are a pretty dull bunch whose pacifism in the face of even overwhelming aggression is laudable but frankly a bit stupid, with only the get-up-and-go attitude of Cully really standing out from the blandness. The opening is in some ways the best bit, with the shocking move of introducing us to a group of four characters, of whom three are promptly massacred just as we're getting to know them. It's a full five minutes before the TARDIS lands, with a neat tie-in line to link back to the between-seasons repeat of 'The Evil of the Daleks'. We have the pleasure of meeting a new race of robots, the Quarks, who although a bit too cute and, well, square to be truly terrifying nevertheless have a neat design with foldaway arms, and pack an impressive amount of firepower as evidenced by the hugely spectacular destruction of Cully's ship. Otherwise, the best bit is seeing Jamie and Cully running around blowing up Quarks with homemade explosives. The end is great too, with the Doctor gazing rapt at an oncoming lava flow until Jamie points out the mildly hazardous nature of this to him, at which point Patrick Troughton's facial expression does an instant about turn and with an "Oh, my word!" the credits roll!

6/10

Episodes watched: 113
Episodes still to watch: 609

'The Wheel In Space'

2005-09-21T00:55:00.000+01:00

THE WHEEL IN SPACE
6 episodes: 2 surviving

Apart from the fact it's meant to be a great story, it occured to me while naming this post that it's a shame I don't get to write about 'Fury From The Deep' as that not only featured the first ever appearance of the Doctor's legendary sonic screwdriver, but also would have been the first non-'The...' title since 'An Unearthly Child', 'Inside The Spaceship' and 'Planet of Giants' from the early days of the programme. Random trivia there...

Not much to report, except that this marks a return appearance for the Cybermen. The fact that a small space station is at threat makes it a bit different from the prior locations they've been involved in, but the sections of story available (parts 3 and 6) are so fragmented that it's hard to get any sense of drama or menace from the occasion. To be honest, there isn't enough uniquely 'Cybermen' in the plot to make it seem worthwhile including them in many ways. The monsters have had another facelift, this time replacing the heavily-rimmed circular eyeholes of their early models with the classic 'keyhole'-style design with the 'tears' at the outer lower corners. The Cybermats similarly look a bit better compared with 'The Tomb of the Cybermen'.

Otherwise, the supporting cast aren't much to write home about, and the most interesting thing is that the Doctor first uses the pseudonym 'John Smith', thanks to Jamie. The only other thing I can comment on is that apparently Victoria departed the TARDIS at the end of the last adventure (there goes another one, again without me seeing it) and is promptly been replaced by the Wheel's librarian and astrophysicist Zoe Heriot, who becomes the latest stowaway at the end of the adventure. In a very neat touch, the Doctor decides to give her a taste of what dangers may lie ahead of her by using a device to show her his mental images of their last Dalek adventure, utilising actual clips from 'The Evil of the Daleks' - which apparently at the time led nicely into a real-life repeat of said serial, in a first for the programme!

5/10

Episodes watched: 108
Episodes still to watch: 614

Bit better today - managed to get seven episodes in this evening, eventually, and have completed Season 5 in not much over two days!

'The Web of Fear'

2005-09-20T23:14:00.000+01:00

THE WEB OF FEAR
6 episodes: 1 surviving

And again we have but one of six episodes left to judge this adventure on, just like its predecessor 'The Enemy of the World' and the story it is a sequel to, 'The Abominable Snowmen'. This time, the Yeti turn up in the London Underground, armed with web-spraying guns incongruously enough. There is an early appearance for UNIT soldiers, later to become a regular feature especially in the Third Doctor's era under the command of the Brigadier. Here, pre-promotion, the then Colonel Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart makes his debut appearance - Nicholas Courtney's character was to become the longest-serving in the entire programme, appearing at intervals over 21 years up to the Seventh Doctor's 'Battlefield' in the final season, with further appearances in original audio adventures since then - although here he is unseen as this is not until the missing third episode. There are a couple of other interesting characters: the TV reporter Harold Chorley who is bizarrely reminiscent of Adrian Edmondson, and a welcome reappearance for Professor Travers, thirty years after he brought a Yeti back from Tibet and now with voice and cantankerous attitude redolent of an elderly Churchill... The sets are amazing, an incredibly realistic and magnificently spooky recreation of London Underground tunnels, and there is a great cliffhanger with the soldiers blowing up a tunnel without realising the Doctor has gone down it. And then there's five further episodes, none of which can be seen, just like all six of the next serial 'Fury From the Deep', which is reputed to be one of the greatest 1960s Doctor Whos... grrr...

8/10

Episodes watched: 106
Episodes still to watch: 616

'The Enemy of the World'

2005-09-20T22:04:00.000+01:00

THE ENEMY OF THE WORLD
6 episodes: 1 remaining

Great dual performance for Patrick Troughton here doubling as Mexican would-be dictator of Earth, Salamander; with little more than an altered outfit and hairdo to differentiate him from the Doctor he succeeds in making himself practically unrecognisable through accent and expression alone. The Chef is one of the most humorous characters yet to crop up, wandering off out in the middle of preparing dinner and being for no obvious reason almost suicidally pessimistic. I get the feeling that the sets budget may have been an issue seeing as the character Denes is kept prisoner in a corridor, for crying out loud... As ever, wanted to see more, but alas only one lonely episode out of six survives, once again.

6/10

Episodes watched: 105
Episodes still to watch: 617

'The Ice Warriors' episodes IV - VI

2005-09-20T20:11:00.000+01:00

THE ICE WARRIORS continued

Very pleased to report that this finished as strongly as it started. The Ice Warriors are an excellent addition to the legion of Doctor Who monsters, with an extremely impressive reptilian-Viking appearance and sibilant whispering voices. The snowbound scenery continues to be ravishing, the various cave-in etc. effects are pulled off with panache and there's even a plausible-looking bear attack on the Penley and Jamie. Peter Sallis's redoubtable Penley and Peter Barkworth's pressured Clent are two of the best and most understated supporting performances I've seen yet, and their antagonistic/complementary character stories play off each other extremely well up to and including a grumpily touching reconciliation. It is also fun to see Clent's assistant Miss Garrett turn into his 'enforcer' later on! The subtext of not letting humanity be subsumed by dependence on machines is well played out as well, especially as the Base comes under siege from both the encroaching glaciers and the Ice Warriors, with the all-knowing computer unable to make a decision that will guarantee their safety and Clent consequently unable to make a choice of action. Even Victoria's propensity to scream and wail at the slightest provocation is at one point turned into a tool by the enterprising Doctor in the Ice Warriors' ship... Excellent all round.

9/10

Episodes watched: 104
Episodes still to watch: 618

'The Ice Warriors' episode I

2005-09-19T19:29:00.000+01:00

THE ICE WARRIORS
6 episodes: 4 remaining

Well, it is a shame that not all of this story remains, but at least there's enough to get your teeth into here, for a change. It was only rediscovered in relatively recent years, as well. Only managed to fit the first episode in because rest of evening was taken up by regular weekly fantasy roleplaying session run by Locus and set in the universe of, yes, Doctor Who...! This story shows the structure starting to develop that would later become the norm, of beginning with the situation into which the TARDIS and its passengers are to arrive, before only introducing them to it a couple of minutes later. Cool opening titles, with 'THE ICE WARRIORS' and 'ONE' (rather than 'Episode 1') blurring in and out of focus against a snowfield background.

The scenery is magnificent, showcasing fabulous wintry snowscapes, with an excellent avalanche pulled off just minutes in. The team of scientists trying to hold back the march of the glaciers have an interesting leader in the shape of the hobbling Clent, and a relatively young Peter Sallis turns in a fine performance as Penley. There are some fun interplays between the supporting chatacters out in the icefields, and the monster they turn up gets just enough of a glimpse of screen time to whet the appetite for the next episode - or at least for the final three... Excellent funny sequence, too, where Jamie tries to encourage Victoria that she would look good in the skintight outfits worn by the Britannicus Base's female staff, and gets slapped down pretty brusquely for his troubles!

Episodes watched: 101
Episodes still to watch: 621

'The Abominable Snowmen'

2005-09-19T13:52:00.000+01:00

THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMEN
6 episodes: 1 surviving

Only one episode is left from this serial, but it brings up the big 100 mark in my quest! Not bad going for nineteen days' worth, if I say so myself... Again, it's a great pity so little remains of this adventure - I imagine I'll be saying that a lot over the next few days... There is a great isolated Tibetan setting, good supporting cast in the shape of Professor Travers (Jack Watling, Deborah's father) and the various residents of the monastery, and a compelling villain in the bodiless form of what is later revealed to be the Great Intelligence. The Yeti look good too, although perhaps a trifle too cuddly, considering...!

7/10

Episodes watched: 100
Episodes still to watch: 622

'The Tomb of the Cybermen'

2005-09-18T23:57:00.000+01:00

THE TOMB OF THE CYBERMEN
4 episodes

Incredibly, this is the only complete serial remaining from the fourteen in the first two seasons of the Second Doctor's era, and was itself only rediscovered in Hong Kong in 1992. Fortunately, given its priviledged status, the story is something of an acknowledged classic. The opener for Doctor Who's Season 5, it begins with a neat little recap of the nature of the TARDIS and what the Doctor is doing in it, and progresses to some great location shots... in a quarry, to be sure, but with great steep-angle views up and down the slopes as a group of future archaeologists blast their way into the long-buried tomb of the Cybermen, thought extinct for centuries. The arriving Doctor helps them gain access and, through the machinations of a rogue element in the shape of the expedition's funder Krieg and his partner Kaftan, the Cybermen hibernating within are released from their frozen sleep. For the first time we get to meet the Cyberman Controller, and their little 'pet' metallic beasties the Cybermats. The sets are wonderful, with some cool, almost Art Deco bas-relief Cybermen depicted on the tomb walls, the Controller is imposing and powerful, and for two episodes at least the atmosphere of mystery, intrigue and menace are maintained. Unfortunately things unravel a bit towards the end, as the Cybermen just come out of their cocoons, go back in again, come out again and don't do very much before they return again, backwards, and seal themselves back in. Bit of an opportunity wasted, one might suggest. Deborah Watling as Victoria is a bit hit and miss here, as well, though it's another fine performance from Patrick Troughton. Despite its flaws, still very enjoyable.

7/10

Episodes watched: 99
Episodes still to watch: 623

Oh dear, only four episodes today and have slipped back again to 9 behind schedule, as was distracted by Locus and Pip returning home with many tales to be told and photos to be looked through... Cake turned out nice though, and I'm within an ace of my episode tally reaching triple figures!

'The Evil of the Daleks'

2005-09-17T23:54:00.000+01:00

THE EVIL OF THE DALEKS
7 episodes: 1 surviving

Another great shame, as this is reputed to be a very strong story. Intended to 'kill off' the Daleks for at least the immediate future, the story jumps from the present day to Victorian times, then makes a return to the Daleks' home planet Skaro in the future for the grand finale, where Dalek civil war breaks out and they are seemingly destroyed once and for all. Alas, all that is left is episode 2, where the Doctor and Jamie get transported to the nineteenth century and run into the Daleks, who are very well depicted, sounding extremely callous and cunning. They also meet the interesting supporting players Maxtible and Waterfield, who are experimenting with time travel - and, unusually, make a stab at establishing a plausible-sounding explanation to describe it. The latter's daughter Victoria becomes the latest addition to the TARDIS crew at the end of part 7; I'm beginning to realise now why I've never had much of a handle on many of these early companions, as not only did they change rapidly but much of their adventures are missing, and there were a Vicki and a Victoria in quick succession for heaven's sake!

7.5/10

Episodes watched: 95
Episodes still to watch: 627

Only three episodes today - have lost a lot of my spare time to the unusual activity of baking a cake, since my newly-engaged friends are returning home tomorrow and I thought it would be nice to welcome them back with a memento of the special occasion...!

'The Faceless Ones'

2005-09-17T22:57:00.000+01:00

THE FACELESS ONES
6 episodes: 2 surviving

I really enjoyed what there was of this - shame it isn't very much, with only episodes 1 and 3 surviving out of six. That's two more than the previous story 'The Macra Terror' has remaining, which means I'll never get to see more of the giant crabs than was present in a brief 'Lost In Time' DVD clip, more's the pity. No, really. 'The Faceless Ones' has an intriguing Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style premise and some neat use of contemporary locations, only the seond time (after 'The War Machines') that the series had returned to the then present day since 'An Unearthly Child'. Of course, with many later stories set in contemporary times the impact of this is dulled now, but at the time I guess it must have seemed quite radical.

In fact, the day is meant to be exactly the same as that on which 'The War Machines' takes place, which implies that the Second Doctor was running around at Gatwick while the First was in central London... and still neither one thought to look in on Ian and Barbara... And hence, Ben and Polly decide to head off back to their own lives at the end, I gather. In the immortal words of Victor Meldrew, I don't believe it - it felt like I'd barely seen these two, yet that's two more companions gone. Looking at the listings, there's a good reason: after their debut serial, only eight episodes survive from the pair's joint tenure, which isn't exactly a good way to get used to them. These two episodes are good ones; I liked the airport setting and the way the mystery was unfolding, but it's just that it's a little hard to follow the continuity when they're spread out like this. But I wanted to see the others, which is surely a good sign - unlike 'The Underwater Menace', say. Good performance from Troughton, too, with the new Doctor beginning to feel like the definite article rather than a substitute. This is incidentally strengthened by an innovation that would come to be a hallmark of the programme - we get to see the incumbent Doctor's face floating amidst a redesigned opening title sequence, which had debuted in the previous story but can ironically in 'The Faceless Ones' be seen for the first time!

7/10

Episodes watched: 94
Episodes still to watch: 628

'The Moonbase'

2005-09-16T23:01:00.000+01:00

THE MOONBASE
4 episodes: 2 surviving

Aren't there a lot of stories beginning with 'The'? The alphabetical list that pops up every time I start naming a post is getting enormous now...

Often held up as a straight rewrite of 'The Tenth Planet', this has enough going for it to stand scrutiny on its own merits. True, the claustrophic, isolated setting - here on the Moon instead of the Antarctic - is similar, as is the Cyber force trying to gain control of it, Polly making coffee etc., but the setting works well and the Cybermen here are very impressive. Much more metal than before, the cloth suits gone, and with less restrictive outfits and weaponry, they seem more threatening - and this is greatly helped by the new voices, the singsong intonation replaced with a flat metallic monotone that truly suits them. As the first and third episodes are missing, filled in by audio soundtracks on the DVD, it is slightly hard to get into the action; but there is plenty to enjoy, with a couple of interesting supporting characters in the shape of Hobson and Benoit, good use of the Cyber-controlled humans, clever strategy by the Cybermen and a strong performance from Patrick Troughton as the Doctor tries to look after his companions, foil the Cybermen's efforts and prevent Hobson from throwing him off the Moon!

7/10

Episodes watched: 92
Episodes still to watch: 630

'The Underwater Menace'

2005-09-16T20:52:00.000+01:00

THE UNDERWATER MENACE
4 episodes: 1 surviving

On reflection, it's possibly just as well there's only one part left of this story, as I can't help but think four would have been rather heavy going... Some great sets (the temple especially) and exotic costumes) are undone by a truly over the top mad scientist Zaroff ("Nothing in ze vorld can stop me now!!") and some rubbish scripting that gives Polly nothing to do except scream a lot and act helpless. The Fish People (this is Atlantis, by the way) look pretty silly and apparently haven't really got anything to do either, but do at least get an endearingly stupid 'underwater' showcase with the actors 'swimming' on wires... Reading up on the missing episodes, the Doctor destroys the fabled land by flooding it at the end. As it is an infamous Doctor Who factoid that Atlantis is destroyed no less than three separate ways over the course of the programme's history, I look forward to witnessing the others in the next few months!

4/10

Episodes watched: 90
Episodes still to watch: 632

Missing II - Season 4

2005-09-16T19:06:00.000+01:00

Things really fragment for a while after this. The last stretch of the Hartnell era is symbolic of what is to come: 'The Gunfighters' intact, then 'The Savages' missing; 'The War Machines' intact, then 'The Smugglers' missing. Following 'The Tenth Planet', the start of the Patrick Troughton era is devastated by the archive purges, with both his first two stories completely missing - 'The Power of the Daleks' in which the Second Doctor has his first run-in with his greatest enemies, and 'The Highlanders' where he gains another travelling companion in the shape of Battle of Culloden survivor Jamie McCrimmon. Only a few 8mm clips exist from the former on the 'Lost In Time' DVD, and then it's on to episode 3 of 'The Underwater Menace', 2 and 4 of 'The Moonbase', before the entirely absent 'The Macra Terror', 1 & 3 of 'The Faceless Ones' and just episode 2 of the seven-part season closer 'The Evil of the Daleks'. All in all, just six episodes survive from the Second Doctor's 35 in season 4.

'The Tenth Planet'

2005-09-16T17:58:00.000+01:00

THE TENTH PLANET
4 episodes: 3 surviving

Or, the famous debut story of the Cybermen and the last of the First Doctor's era. I effectively watched four episodes, but as the last was a 'recon' technically only three. Of all the partial Doctor Who adventures left this is the only serial where a single missing episode would complete the story, and maybe for this reason the lost fourth part of 'The Tenth Planet' is held in almost mythical regard - although from the audio soundtrack and reconstruction using still photos and scant seconds of film, despite its significance in the canon it seems not to actually have been that great in comparison with the rest of the serial. The strength of the story lies more in its first three episodes: the superb snowbound landscape scenes at the South Pole; the appearance of the Cybermen; the terrible backstory given by the silver giants to their present state; the mini-dramas in the space capsule, its offscreen demise lent poignancy by this only being conveyed by a silent white video screen; the second capsule with the son onboard of the General at the Pole, caught between military action and paternal concern. The last part is a little formulaic as the goodies find the baddies' weakness and exploit it, then Mondas blows up. Exactly how it was 'draining energy' from the Earth is never satisfactorily explained, nor how its continents look the same after millions of years apart, nor how the whole planet has been piloted across the Solar System (shame the Daleks of 'The Dalek Invasion of Earth' didn't talk to them - could have saved them a whole lot of bother), but I guess in the long run these can be glossed over. The Cyberman Krang (was this the only time they had names?) has a bizarre sing-song intonation that sounds remarkably like the Dalek Supreme a few stories back - this is explained when the credits come up and you realise that both voices were provided by Roy Skelton, a multi-time Who voice artist/walk-on part man, who also famously voiced the non-humans in kids' classic Rainbow... which also explains why both sound quite a lot like Zippy... The credits are marvellous, actually: they have another unique look for this story, with blurring rows of numbers flickering into cast and crew names; there is a kind of fittingly stark beauty to it. The cliffhanger at the end of the third episode also deserves praise, with the tense countdown sequence for the Z-bomb rocket reaching zero in perfect time to segue straight into the credits.

One more thing this story does do well is the rare feat of making it feel like a worldwide catastrophe: the use of foreign astronauts and scientists and the Geneva HQ help to spread the reach of the drama beyond the Home Counties, as cliche would so often have it, and make it almost feel like you're watching a film for stretches. In a way, this effect is helped by the fact that the regulars don't have an enormous amount to do, with the Doctor worst affected. Ironically, the real-life illness of William Hartnell caused him to miss his own final intact episode, but this reinforces the on-camera deterioration of the Doctor, who has complained that his old body is "wearing a bit thin". He then spends much of the final part imprisoned on the Cybership with Polly, and when Ben releases them he staggers to the TARDIS, collapses to the floor and is suffused with a bright white light. His face blurs and changes, and a momentous moment in Doctor Who history has taken place - the first regeneration.

8/10

Episodes watched: 89
Episodes still to watch: 633

'The War Machines'

2005-09-15T23:50:00.000+01:00

THE WAR MACHINES
4 episodes

How strange, again. For the first time, I'd forgotten to read up on a missing serial before continuing onto the next surviving one - in this case, 'The Savages' that fell between this and 'The Gunfighters' - so I was surprised from the off as Steven did not make an appearance: it seems that he too had departed the TARDIS at the end of the previous adventure, which is a shame as Peter Purves put in a string of fine performances. Then, I thought I'd accidentally put a UNIT years story into the VCR by mistake - basically, 'The War Machines' uncannily preempts the early-1970s style of Doctor Who in all but the presence of the First Doctor instead of the Third. Set in contemporary London, the Doctor is immediately seen as a kind of quasi-Establishment figure who wanders in and straightaway has the ear of scientists, Government ministers and the like - totally at odds with his prior depiction as an mysterious interplanetary loner. This is infamously the one story where the Doctor is referred to as 'Doctor Who' onscreen, several times by the supercomputer WOTAN and also by the machine's creator Professor Brett - I have to say that it's always a pet hate of mine when he's called that, in print, comment or in the credits of the new series, as the original series at least had started crediting him as 'The Doctor' from his fifth incarnation onwards.

Anyway, the plot is that WOTAN takes on a life of its own and tries to take over the world for machines. It achieves sentience late one evening, brainwashes its first victims minutes later and instructs them to find suitable sites in central London to secretly construct war machines, has a warehouse with full assembly line up and running by about 2am (so secret, the components all come in packing cases with the WOTAN 'W' logo on them) and is rolling out the machines by morning. Quite the schedule!! That these fearsome creations subsequently spend little time actually causing havoc, and more time looking for stacks of boxes to crash through impressively, is neither here nor there... The spirit of the Swinging Sixties is alive and well in Polly and Ben, who between them keep the plot moving after the disappearance of Dodo halfway through: she is hypnotised by WOTAN and turns rather creepy until cured by the Doctor, who then packs her off to the country for a couple of days' rest - and we never see her again!! At the end Polly and Ben tell the Doctor she has decided to stay in London - I said before that these comapnions were dropping like flies, didn't I? This was surely the most ignominious departure for a companion ever, though, I'm certain... The two then inadvertently stow away aboard the TARDIS and we have two new companions.

Oh, did I forget to say what happened in the plot? Well, the Doctor basically spends the whole story striding around ordering people about, and in the end this works as with the aid of some soldiers and an electromagnetic field he captures and reprogrammes a War Machine, somehow gets it to the top of the (then brand new) Post Office tower where WOTAN is located, and uses it to destroy the computer. That's it. Incidentally, I couldn't help thinking it was a bit rude of him not to drop in on Ian and Barbara to see how they'd been getting on for the last year or so since they returned from their interstellar wandering. Still, there we are...

5.5/10

Episodes watched: 86
Episodes still to watch: 636

A massive 20 episodes covered today, so I've managed to slash my defecit to a mere 4 behind the six-a-day schedule now!

'The Gunfighters'

2005-09-15T21:26:00.000+01:00

THE GUNFIGHTERS
4 episodes

How bizarre. This was hardly like watching Doctor Who at all: rather, there was a nicely-staged reenactment of the days leading up to the famed Gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona in October 1881, which just happened to have the Doctor, Steven and Dodo wandering in and out of the action at intervals. The supporting players essentially took centre stage for most of the adventure, with particularly memorable incarnations of Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp having the most to do. The simple issue of the "Doc" being there on "holiday" causes a case of mistaken identity that ensures the TARDIS crew's entanglement in the rest of the story, but by and large events just play themselves out around them. There is a fairly high humour quotient, the Doctor has a tooth extracted and keeps finding people giving him guns, Dodo and Steven get to bash away at the piano and sing in the Last Chance Saloon, Steven remembers to use his Wild West accent at least half the time, two of the Thunderbirds voices turn up in person, the 'Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon' is sung at the beginning and end of each episode and at intervals inbetween to summarise the plot, and half the cast winds up shot dead. The recreation of a whole Western town set on Doctor Who budget is mighty impressive...sorry, very impressive, as well. This story has traditionally either been slated or adored by viewers and critics; clearly, I fall nearer the latter camp!

8/10

Episodes watched: 82
Episodes still to watch: 640

'The Celestial Toymaker'

2005-09-15T18:32:00.000+01:00

THE CELESTIAL TOYMAKER
4 episodes: 1 surviving

Of all the Doctor Who stories lost in the mists of time, this is perhaps the one that I most regret not being able to see. The premise appeals to my twisted psyche, I guess: the TARDIS lands in a fantasy domain constructed by the evil, immortal being the Toymaker, and its crew have to play a series of deadly 'games' against him and his seemingly playful but fiendish underlings in order to try and secure their freedom. It is one of the most out-and-out 'fantasy' stories the series produced and I have heard many good things about it over the years - and, I have to confess, until I started this mission I had believed it entirely lost. It was therefore with great delight that I discovered the final episode still exists, although having read the plot details of the others I am even more intrigued as to what I missed... I'm sure my rating would have been even higher had the whole story survived. What remains is brilliant, a mix of cunning childishness and sugar-coated brutality in the games that is ingenious. The Toymaker remains one of the most fascinating and best-portrayed Who villains, with a classic, universally-acclaimed performance from Michael Gough. Besides the absence of three-quarters of this serial, the greater shame is that we have been doubly cheated - he was due to reprise the role in 'The Nightmare Fair', a story proposed to open the cancelled Season 23 that was jettisoned when the series took its one-year hiatus in the mid-'80s. At least we got to see him a bit later in the four Batman films...

8/10

Episodes watched: 78
Episodes still to watch: 644

'The Ark'

2005-09-15T15:37:00.000+01:00

THE ARK
4 episodes

Didn't seem like much at first, but slowly built into something pretty good. There is another new companion (they're going through them like nobody's business at the moment), Dorothea 'Dodo' Chaplet, acquired at the end of the previous, missing story 'The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve' - a reputedly outstanding historical that gave William Hartnell an acclaimed dual role as both the Doctor and the sinister Abbot of Amboise, and is regarded in many quarters as the best ever Doctor Who story. Alas, it is long since lost to us, but I must definitely get around to listening to the audio CD of that one sometime... Like the story, I wasn't impressed with Dodo at first - in fact, she was downright irritating in her opening scenes to the point where if I didn't actually wish upon her the same fate as her namesake, I at least wanted to give her a pretty good slap... but, she grew on me too by the end.

This time the TARDIS lands upon a giant spaceship in the far future, carrying the last departees from Earth shortly before it was due to be consumed by the death of the sun, on a 700-year voyage to colonise a the planet Refusis. The fact that, while most of the human and animal populations have been miniaturised, the Guardians are keeping some animals in 'wild' environments allows for some spectacular jungle set design (including an actual Indian elephant!) and for Dodo to mistakenly believe they are at Whipsnade animal park... She is bothered by a recurring sniffle, that while no more than an inconvenience for her turns out to be fatal to the spacefarers, who have (like Steven) long since lost their immunity to such things as these were cured generations ago. Exactly how long ago is a matter for conjecture: though the general implication from comments made by characters is several miilion years, the Doctor estimates "ten thousand" as if it were a massively long time - and common sense would say around five billion years as that is the likely actual time scale until the sun expands into a red giant. Thinking about it, that is exactly what the new series of Who did stipulate in 'The End of the World'... Anyway, the first two episodes revolve around the TARDIS travellers being put on trial for their bringing the disease, then being allowed to help find a cure. This accomplished, they return to the TARDIS and depart in a very neat false finish - as moments later they reappear on the same spot to find that almost the whole voyage has elapsed and the Guardians' descendants have been overthrown and forced into subjugation by their formerly peaceful (and slightly Wookiie-like) Monoid servants. When they reach the planet the companions are finally split up - surely a record wait for this to happen - and the Doctor is in the first group to land on the new planet. There are some clever shenanigans involving the native Refusians being invisible and helping the humans, while Monoid civil war decimates much of the oppressors' population, and in the end everyone agrees to coexist in peace and the TARDIS' occupants go on their way... again.

7/10

Episodes watched: 77
Episodes still to watch: 645

11 episodes today so far - already my best yet...

'The Daleks' Masterplan'

2005-09-15T12:56:00.000+01:00

THE DALEKS' MASTERPLAN
12 episodes: 3 surviving

As expected, this is very hard to rate - the three surviving episodes are numbers 2, 5 and 10 out of 12, so more than in any other case you really are just dipping in and out of the story at almost unconnected points. The DVD contains a tiny amount of off-air 8mm footage from this adventure's missing sequences, plus from those in 'The Reign of Terror', from 'Galaxy 4' (well, ten seconds of the Doctor at the TARDIS console with Vicki cutting Steven's hair in the background) and Vicki's swansong 'The Myth Makers' - plus some later adventures. Thus we get to see the peerless children's TV presenter from when I was little Brian Cant, of Playschool and Bric-a-Brac fame - here being exterminated by Daleks in the jungle in part 1! We also see the moments up to Katarina's shocking self-sacrifice in part 4, having missed almost all of her brief tenure - a watershed moment in the programme's history as it proved that a companion could die. Regrettably, there is nothing from the infamous part 7 Christmas episode 'The Feast of Steven', which ended with the Doctor delivering the legendary "...a happy Christmas to all of you at home!" line direct to camera...

It must be said that there is a special frisson attached to the second part, 'Day of Armageddon': this was the very last 'lost' episode of Doctor Who to be rediscovered to the present, brought to light as recently as January last year when it was returned by a former BBC engineer according to Outpost Gallifrey, reducing the number of still-missing episodes to a mere 108... In it, we get to see the traitorous Guardian of the Solar System, Mavic Chen, conspiring with the Daleks to create an ultimate weapon, the Time Destructor, and the Doctor making off with its crucial 'taranium core' after masquerading as a delegate at a galactic conference featuring many weird and wonderful alien creatures. We can also see after nearly forty years the debut appearance of Nicholas Courtney, who would later play the series' longest-running supporting character the Brigadier; here he is a different kind of soldier, Space Security Services agent Bret Vyon, who before the start of part 5 is alas killed by interim 'companion' Sara Kingdom - who subsequently admits he was her brother. Sara is played by Jean Marsh, almost unrecognisable from her earlier role as Princess Joanna in 'The Crusade', and apparently fills the vacancy created by Katarina's demise until the very end of the story where she too meets an untimely end. Not the jolliest of adventures, this one. Still, there is a neat trick where the Doctor, Sara and Peter are accidentally teleported to a distant planet along with the intended participants in the experiment, two white mice in a cage that instantly made me think of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Of course, they are immediately followed and surrounded by the Daleks - but instead of finding out what happened next we jump straight to part 10 in ancient Egypt. The Meddling Monk has turned up again and gets captured by Mavic Chen and the Daleks along with Sara and Steven, effectively saving his own life by telling the Daleks they can use the other two as hostages. The sets are magnificent as the Doctor arranges to swap the three for the taranium core at the Great Pyramid and a band of Egyptian warriors launch an attack on the Daleks - and the Doctor and friends escape in the TARDIS after he has stolen the 'directional unit' from the Monk's own ship, condemning the meddler's TARDIS to roam randomly without it. And that's it - no more is to be seen unless we get very lucky sometime in the future...

7/10

Episodes watched: 73
Episodes still to watch: 649

Ten whole per cent of the way through my 'Survival' bid!!

Missing

2005-09-15T10:37:00.000+01:00

Oh. This is the point where things start to fragment, at least as far as viewing the adventures of the Doctor and his companions as an ongoing saga is concerned, as from the start of the third season the 1970s purges really take chunks out of the archive. No sooner have I enjoyed watching the new combination of Vicki and Steven in 'The Time Meddler' than I discover that that was the only time I'll get to do so. The next story 'Galaxy 4' becomes only the second (after 'Marco Polo') to be completely absent; this is followed by the single-episode 'Mission To The Unknown' (or 'Dalek Cutaway' as it's also peculiarly known), a preview to the upcoming 'Daleks' Masterplan' that uniquely didn't feature the Doctor or any regulars and which is also now missing. Then there is 'The Myth Makers', also lost and apparently one of the least-documented Whos in terms of surviving clips, photos, etc. - and it turns out that Vicki remains in ancient Troy at the end of it, after only nine adventures on board the TARDIS. Shame, I liked her too. Ah well, it seems I have a new stowaway, Greek handmaiden Katarina, to look forward to.

On, then, with the twelve-episode epic 'The Daleks' Masterplan', the longest single story Doctor Who would ever run (discounting the essentially four-stories-in-one 'Trial of a Time Lord') - but, again, it has been gutted by those tape destructions and only three episodes survive. Back to the 'Lost In Time' DVD I go...

'The Time Meddler'

2005-09-15T08:48:00.000+01:00

THE TIME MEDDLER
4 episodes

Well, this was a pleasant surprise indeed... I'd seen this story before, a while back now, but didn't remember it particularly well - and clearly I'd been underrating it as it doesn't put a foot wrong. The atmosphere of Saxon Northumbria in 1066 just before the Viking and Norman invasions is terrifically rendered through some good location work and fine (monastery, cliff, forest) sets. The story is deftly scripted and intriguing, with the mystery of the 'Monk' and how incongruous modern artifacts are lying around in the 11th century allowed to spiral towards the conclusion, and perfectly paced, with the disparate elements - Monk, Doctor, Vicki and Steven, Saxons and Vikings - not all coming together until the final reel. The Monk, with his deliciously anachronistic wristwatch, gramophone, toaster, binoculars, wallchart (with tick-boxes for each stage of his dastardly scheme) and atomic cannon, is wonderfully played by Peter Butterworth with a wicked sense of humour - he seems much more troublesome than actually evil, and you almost sympathise with him by the end, as so many people come and go at his previously isolated monastery hideout he might as well install a revolving door, frankly. This is the first time in the series thst we meet one of the Doctor's own (unnamed as yet) people with another TARDIS, and it is a delight to witness the verbal sparring in the final third as a mischievous Monk and inquisitorial Doctor finally lock horns. William Hartnell turns in another fine performance, particularly enjoyable in the sequence where the Doctor has his stick jammed into the Monk's back to make him believe he has a gun! He exacts fitting yet not punitive retribution upon the Monk by removing the 'dimensional control' from the latter's TARDIS, rendering the interior tiny and the meddler stranded in 1066. Vicki and new stowaway companion Steven hold their end up well, with Peter Purves' effortlessly charismatic performance instantly endearing the latter to the viewer as he is first sceptical of the whole time travel phenomenon before later getting into the spirit of charging around the countryside from one danger to the next. The Saxons get some nice group interaction, and while the Vikings have less to do on the whole, there is the charming saving grace that one of them is played, entirely inappropriately, by someone named Norman.

All told, an unexpected gem.

10/10

Episodes watched: 70
Episodes still to watch: 652

Four down before breakfast! Day off today, so should be able to catch up with the schedule a bit...

'The Chase' episodes III - VI

2005-09-14T20:10:00.000+01:00

THE CHASE continued

You know, this story is tripe... but tripe of the highest order. Ludicrously enjoyable, despite the fact that the plot essentially consists of the Daleks chasing the TARDIS to a different location every episode or so, everyone charging around and falling over the locals, then the TARDIS crew running away again. Thus we get a memorable scene on top of the Empire State Building when the TARDIS manages to actually get back to contemporary Earth (1965), and first its occupants then minutes later the Daleks wreak havoc with the sanity of an Alabama hick - played very amusingly by Peter Purves, who will turn up later in the adventure as space pilot Steven Taylor. Then we hop to the Marie Celeste, whose occupants are to a man scared overboard by the Daleks... well, that's one mystery solved, anyway! A swift detour via a 'haunted house' (that unbeknown to the characters is a funfair attraction) later, we have Frankenstein's Monster and Dracula fighting the Daleks, before both timeships rendezvous on the jungle planet Mechanus. Our heroes dodge deadly sentient fungoid things and a robot duplicate of the Doctor made by the Daleks to "infiltrate and kill", in the Daleks' words - almost as good a catchphrase as the Dalek troops' ecstatic "Advance and attack! Attack and destroy! Destroy and rejoice!"...! By good fortune they escape to the Mechanoid city high up in the clouds - only to find themselves imprisoned yet again. These robots turn out to be as heavily armed as the Daleks themselves, and while the crew and new ally Steven escape the city and ultimately destroy it utterly, the two bands of metal monsters engage in a truly spectacular conflict, all lurching camera angles and billowing clouds of smoke and explosions - brilliant!

Clear, finally, of danger and in possession of the Dalek's abandoned time machine, Ian and Barbara suddenly realise that they have in their hands at last a way to go home. The resulting exchange with the Doctor brings back all of his old intractability, the old man flatly refusing to help them work the machine, citing its inherent danger. Really, you see he's got fond of them in his own way... In the end, he relents, and the send-off turns out to be all the more affecting as we don't even get to see the goodbyes - instead Ian and Barbara emerge from the ship in 1965 London and, in a glorious bittersweet mash-up of still photographs we see them joyfully larking around back in their own place and time, darting amongst the pigeons and lions in Trafalgar Square, jumping on a bus and so on. Our last glimpse of the pair sees them pondering how on Earth to explain their two-year absence, which recedes into the picture on the Time-Space Visulaiser as the Doctor and Vicki pilot the TARDIS - now devoid of its original trio of 'companions' - off towards more adventure...

7/10

Episodes watched: 66
Episodes still to watch: 656

Only four episodes today, so I'm now a record 18 behind schedule... must do better tomorrow!

'The Chase' episodes I - II

2005-09-13T23:50:00.000+01:00

THE CHASE
6 episodes

Another good premise here, with the return of the Daleks; this time, they decide that the Doctor has made himself their enemy and so they construct a time machine to track him down and, well, exterminate him. The order to go and do this is given by the Dalek commander and promptly echoed in different voices by his team, which gives the lovely effect of the Daleks intoning "TARDIS...TARDIS...TARDIS" and "Annihilate...Annihilate...Annihilate" in five-part harmony. Meanwhile, the Doctor has got working his souvenir from the Space Museum, a 'Time-Space Visualise', which the travellers use to peek at moments in history - so we get fun glimpses of Lincoln at Gettysburg, Shakespeare in Queen Elizabeth's court and, in a unique acknowedgement of contemporary pop culture, the Beatles performing on BBC1! Then they see the Daleks plotting to get them...

There is a nice separation sequence involving the extreme climate of the planet they've landed on, Aridius, which the Daleks subsequently follow them to. The Mire Beast that attacks Ian and Vicki, and later Barbara, looks good in an octopussy way and the Aridians are adequate. Classic moments involve the Doctor claiming "I have the directional sense of a homing pigeon" and Ian and Vicki pausing in their subterranean fleeing to verbally abuse each other. The four finally combine to distract the Dalek guard away from the TARDIS and make their escape, only for the Daleks to pursue them through eternity...

Will carry on with the rest tomorrow!

Six episodes today - ah well, at least I got the quota in... Am discovering the routine is increasingly taking over my life: I find that I start to get twitchy whenever my free time is spent doing anything other than watching old Doctor Who...!

Episodes watched: 62
Episodes still to watch: 660

'The Space Museum'

2005-09-13T22:20:00.000+01:00

THE SPACE MUSEUM
4 episodes

Hard to rate this one, as it starts very strongly but finishes a little weakly. The decidedly odd first episode sees the travellers land on an alien planet deserted except for a huge museum full of artefacts from throughout the cosmos - but, they realise, somehow ahead of their actual arrival time due to the TARDIS "jumping a time track". Having had a glimpse of their own future, the four of them lined up motionless in a glass case, they then spend the rest of the story trying to avoid this fate. The rub is that of course every action or inaction their progress involves may be leading them either farther from or nearer to their destiny, but they have no way of telling which. Both the premise and the way this uncertainty is constantly played out are excellent, with the anxious and frustrated characters finding their tempers boiling over frequently. Even the inevitable separation and capture are given an amusing twist when the Doctor escapes his captors, the (friendly) Xeron rebels, by hiding inside an exhibit: an empty Dalek casing, then having a little fun imitating its voice - then thirty seconds later running right into a patrol of armed Morok guards. The idea of the Doctor subverting the Morok Governor's interrogation device by feeding it random mental images is also great, as is his being subjected to the first two stages of 'preparation' for being an exhibit in the museum, from which Ian ultimately rescues him. Alas, the rest of the story falls a bit flat; despite Vicki's stirring the Xerons to revolution against the occupiers, they still come off rather bland (even though one of them is the future Boba Fett!), and the Moroks don't fare much better. But I'll give credit where it's due and score this well for the initial imagination at least.

There is one more thing, though - isn't all this trying to change the future the very thing the Doctor has cautioned against before now every time he's prevented his companions from interfering in 'established' history? The future is just the same as the past as far as the overall record is concerned: it only depends on what point you're viewing it from, surely...?! Ah well - it's not like the rule is ever properly enforced, really. After all, every time the TARDIS lands and the crew interact with anyone or anything else they're changing history in small ways, let alone when they actively set out to thwart the Daleks etc., where presumably 'history' would be very different without their actions. At heart, it is one of the great unanswered questions of Doctor Who: what absolute record of time does the Doctor have access to in order to determine what he can and cannot change? Just seems a bit silly to have it effectively the focal point of this story, all things considered...

7/10

Episodes watched: 60
Episodes still to watch: 662

On a random but associated note, I'm extremely pleased to report that my housemates and longtime friends Pip and Locus just rang me from on holiday in Vienna, to tell me that they've just got engaged!! That was 9:30 central European time, so as far as I can tell I was just about to start this serial at the time...!

'The Crusade'

2005-09-12T22:41:00.000+01:00

THE CRUSADE
4 episodes: 2 surviving

For what was there, this was a very strong story - literate, almost Shakespearian in its way with dialogue, a vividly depicted setting, unusually adult and violent at times and fair in its portrayal of the Christian/Saracen sides in the Crusades of the 12th century. Unfortunately the two surviving episodes are 1 and 3, which makes watching the story very bitty even though the other two parts are present on the DVD in audio format, and I found it hard to get into the story as much a I would undoubtedly have done otherwise. The 'Lost In Time' 3-DVD set that the story appears on is a real treasure trove of assorted early episodes whose parent stories no longer exist in their entirities - it's due to get a fair number of runs in the PS2 player over the next few weeks... A highlight are in-character prologue, links and afterword from William Russell on the DVD, which are great fun. Storywise, the highlight is the superb exchange at the end of part 3 between Julian Glover's King Richard (the Lionheart) and Jean Marsh's Princess Joanna, with the two really tearing strips off each other. It's a great shame you can't see what comes afterward.

What makes this story strangely evocative is that until not so long ago only one episode was thought to still be extant - but the unearthing of a print of part 1, 'The Lion', in New Zealand in 1998 brought the number to two and is the second most recent discovery of a missing Doctor Who episode to date. It felt quite odd (in a good way) to be watching 25 minutes of footage that theoretically did not exist when I was first reintroduced to Who a few years ago! Shame there's still 108 lost episodes that will probably never be seen again...

8/10

Episodes watched: 56
Episodes still to watch: 666...ooooh!

Damn, only a 2-episode day today. Back to being 16 behind again...

'The Web Planet'

2005-09-12T00:37:00.000+01:00

THE WEB PLANET
6 episodes

Ten episodes in a day. Boo-yah. Only 12 behind schedule now...

Very, very weird one, this. The picture quality is the worst I've experienced yet: very 'over-exposed', with pale colours such as faces and the survival jackets worn by the Doctor and Ian glowing white, and since the early segments involve wandering around a kind of desert the effect is to render one almost snowblind such is the glare. The 'glowing' patches also streak and smudge (lens filters, I gather) and everything echoes, which didn't help my equilibrium much either. The companions are drawn to a strange (and I use the word advisedly) planet, explore, get separated, and run into the indigenous fauna - Zarbi, which are man-size ants, and Menoptra, which are man-size butterflies. Although the costumes are inherently laughable, after a short while you get so used to the whole look you just accept it totally and don't notice this. Funny. As an experiment in presenting a very alien environment it is brave and works quite well, particularly as the Zarbi offer no concessions to 'human' behaviour patterns and are entirely insectile, communicating in bleeps like a child's impersonation of a ray gun. This does start to hurt the ears after a few episodes, though. The Menoptra are more humanoid and have a habit of lapsing into flowery philosophical dialogue, though they constantly maintain a bee-like swaying, jigging dance-type movement - this, coupled with their furred stripy bodies, regrettably creates an effect like watching the Fimbles on acid. Apparently the Zarbi are the servants/guards of an unknown evil entity known only as the Animus, which had invaded the planet some time earlier, and now sits at the centre of its dark web spreading chaos and decay. Or something. It's all very surreal indeed. The Zarbi use bizarre 'larval guns' - essentially, a woodlouse crossed with a tank - against the Menoptra, and when the different species confront each other they skirmish in a big insecty dance and then hit each other with sticks. Ian falls down a big hole. The Doctor and Vicky are captured and placated by having a sort of gold stethoscope placed on their shoulders that renders them catatonic while it is on. The latter suffers this approximately every five minutes for the rest of the story, every time she looks like getting a little frisky. Barbara is off somewhere else with some friendly Menoptra, who are trying to contact their reinforcement force to launch an invasion agaunst the Animus. As they have no decent weapons, their strategy appears to be launch a mass suicidal charge and hope. The Animus talks to the Doctor every time he is released from the stethoscope, by lowering a large plastic cylinder above his head, which makes him look like he is having his hair dried in a hairdresser's. He buys time by sort of helping her plans, inadvertently putting said Menoptra backups in danger. To do this he brings out a cool 'astral map' machine from the TARDIS to locate the reinforcements. After he has finished using it as a map, he uses it later as a power source to reverse the effect of the stethoscope and hijack a Zarbi. Then it gets used as something else, but I can't remember what any more. Then a plot device to destroy the Animus (some kind of isotope) gets hidden inside it. Then it is used as a coffee maker. Okay, I lied about the last one.

Anyway, I make it to halfway a littled frazzled but relatively unscathed, then go out with old friend (mentioned before) and her boyfriend and play pool for a bit. I return eager to get through the second video tape of this story. Unfortunately things go downhill badly from there. The Menoptera, sorry, Menoptra, plus some backup, have a rumble with the Zarbi mostly involving shouting at them loudly, and get trounced. Ian, plus Menoptra accompaniment, encounters underground a bunch of mutant woodlice worm things. They bounce instead of walking. Apparently they are the Optra (Optera?), degenerate descendants of the Menoptra. Their leader sounds just like Trade Federation leader Nute Gunray from the Star Wars prequels. They agree to ally with Ian's gang and head off towards the Centre (the Crater of Needles, I believe), where the evil Animus is. Then part five happens and I nearly fall asleep three times. It is the most ennui-inducing episode I have seen yet - every character stands around talking, then wanders along for a bit and talks some more. Even the Zarbi manage to look bored. One of the Optra commits suicide on the way - I can see its point of view. At least the aforementioned borrowing of a Zarbi via stethoscope occurs, and Vicki adopts it and gives it a nickname. The Doctor controls it mentally using the power of the One Ring upon his finger... hang on, I didn't mean it quite like that... The final part starts, and the whole shebang has blurred (literally) into a freakish hallucinatory ballet, with various huge insect creatures bobbing and weaving around each other mostly in interminable discussion. The Doctor and Vicki arrive at the Centre, and find the Animus. It is a giant tenticly jellyfish spider thing. It glows brightly and makes them go all funny again. They fall over, Vicki realising she has forgotten the plot device. The Animus rants (very calmly) something about galactic conquest, I think. Barbara and co. find the plot device in the astral map and turn up. The jellyfish rants at them in a civil fashion too, then they go all funny as well. Then it collapses and dies for no obvious reason. Ian and his party struggle in, and haven't achieved anything. The four travellers say goodbye and return to the TARDIS, which leaves. The insects get together in a sort of happy arthropod jamboree and pontificate some more for a full minute afterwards, before the programme ends. For the first time, there is no link into the next adventure. The most interesting thing is that the end credits pop up instead of scrolling. Aaaaargh. Undoubtedly ambitious, but just wall-to-wall bananas.

4/10

Episodes watched: 54
Episodes still to watch: 668

'The Romans'

2005-09-11T09:50:00.000+01:00

THE ROMANS
4 episodes

Woooo, early start today, and one serial knocked off before work. That's more like it!

As anybody who has ever commented on Who will have pointed out, this is the 'funny one'. It is, it's true - this story has more overt humour than any other Doctor Who adventure I've seen, but that isn't the be all and end all of it. There is a stab or two at historical accuracy - although nothing too serious: Nero was younger than he is presented, had banned the execution of defeated gladiators, and probably wasn't even there to start the Great Fire of Rome. Then again, he's much funnier as a total buffoon... There is darkness here - assassination, kidnap, slavery, gladiatorial combat, poisoning, plotting and Nero's cavalier attitude to the lives of his servants and soldiers. But, on the other hand, the central cast get to play dress-up again; we have a tipsy Ian and Barbara lolling about in a Roman villa, where they send each other off to look for the fridge; Barbara accidentally clocking Ian when they are attacked; the Doctor duffing up his would-be assassin; a boozed-up and randy Caesar Nero chasing Barbara around the corridors of his palace, where she repeatedly just fails to run into the Doctor and Vicki; the Doctor pulling an 'Emperor's New Clothes' with his non-existent lyre playing then claiming to Vicki he gave the idea to Hans Christian Anderson; the Doctor's punning riff to Nero when he knows that the Caesar wants to throw him to the lions; his denial that he was respsonisble for giving Nero the idea for the fire etc. etc. Huge fun, the more effective because it disguises a serious story - the last shot of Nero is of him maniacally cackling as he plays the lyre with flames all around him and Rome burns to the ground.

9/10

Episodes watched: 48
Episodes still to watch: 674

Numerology

2005-09-11T00:06:00.000+01:00

Hmmm. It appears I may be mistaken in my episode count - Tony seems to think that (excluding the new series) 709 is the total ever episode count including 108 missing ones, and Doctor Who Magazine's Time Team listened to these to make up the count.

If true, then I have to either:

rejoice, because I therefore only have 600-odd episodes to watch in total under the terms of my 'Survival' bid, or

cry, because I have to go back and listen to all of 'Marco Polo' and part of 'The Reign of Terror' if I'm sticking as closely as possible to the ethos of this thing.

Anyone know the correct numbers for the surviving (watchable) episodes, then? Anyone reading this at all? No? Ah well... Could just look it up on the net, but I think I'll remain happily in the dark for a while longer yet...

'The Rescue'

2005-09-10T23:38:00.000+01:00

THE RESCUE
2 episodes

A short oddity, designed basically as a vehicle to introduce new companion Vicki. We see from the start that the Doctor is greatly missing his granddaughter Susan, and happenstance dictates that two episodes later he has a ready-made replacement. Nice little adventure, again, set on a sparsely-inhabited planet named, improbably enough, Dido. There is an excellent introductory performance by Maureen O'Brien as Vicki, adequate effects, a cherishably crap 'sand monster' and a neat twist in the tail. Another plus is a strong performance from William Hartnell, depicting the Doctor's loss in the surprisingly emotive opening sequence, and later as he takes Vicki in hand with grandfatherly charm and eloquence.

6.5/10

Episodes watched: 44
Episodes still to watch: 678

A two-episode day as I was busy working, then another old friend arrived in town for the weekendv - now running 16 behind schedule...aaaargh!!

'The Dalek Invasion of Earth'

2005-09-09T22:04:00.000+01:00

THE DALEK INVASION OF EARTH
6 episodes

In comparison with its surrounding adventures, and indeed with most of Doctor Who, this is an epic, an astoundingly involving and well made story. The Doctor's greatest enemies make their first of many returns to the programme, in what remains a classic. That it brought the terror of the Daleks from outer space practically to the viewers' doorsteps was an audacious move in 1964, and the idea of the monsters terrorising a recognisably contemporary London (albeit two centuries in the future) must have had an amazing effect on the public then. This is, after all, the story that led to that iconic shot of the Daleks lined up on Westminster Bridge in front of the Houses of Parliament, and in the course of the story we get to see them gliding along the bridge, observing from the Albert Memorial and gathering in Trafalgar Square with a sort of casual menace. Lovely little touches abound - the placing of Dalek marks on various monuments and the frequent, unnerving VETOED signs make the occupation seem that much more thorough, and the 'It is forbidden to dump bodies into the river' notice where the TARDIS lands under a Thames bridge speaks volumes about the state of the country/planet following the Daleks' germ warfare.

Of course, the central plot device - the Daleks are planning to drill down to the Earth's core, remove it and replace it with a giant propulsion unit - is pure bunkum, but the surrounding details are so well crafted it scarcely matters...I'll ignore the flying saucer and the Slyther in this respect! The sets are very good (the bridge, the warehouses, the tunnels) and supporting characters like the two women who sell out Barbara and Jenny for food, Dortmun, Tyler and the like are well-drawn. The oft-mentioned use of Nazi ideology in Dalek comments and actions makes the efforts of the resistance groups more resonant somehow, and the character of David Campbell is nicely transitioned from just another freedom fighter to someone the Doctor could entrust his granddaughter to. This is exemplified by the scene where Campbell interrupts Susan's culinary preparations with a fresh fish and some play-fighting that ends in a brief kiss - abruptly curtailed when the Doctor appears. The old man's knowing line about "something cooking" says everything necessary to demonstrate his awareness that Susan is growing up and needs real roots, and from here on he is resigned towards letting her go.

There are a bevy of great moments, too - the Dalek rising from the river for the episode 1 cliffhanger, the squadron of Daleks rolling out of their ship, the Doctor's high-concept escape from their prison cell, or the high-angle shot of people fleeing from the mines, tossing the beaten Daleks aside as they go. The final scene where the Doctor shuts Susan out of the TARDIS, knowing she could never choose between him and David, is heart-wrenching stuff - as is his farewell to her over the speakers, promising to come back and check up on her someday. Great stuff.

9/10

Episodes watched: 42
Episodes still to watch: 680

Can I just say that the number of episodes still to go is terrifying, considering I seem to have watched rather a lot of 'Doctor Who' lately...?! Housemate Tony's amazed how much I've watched in the last week, but that's not even been the bare minimum necessary - the problem is, this set of six felt like a small marathon, yet that is the number I need to get through every single day in order to complete the lot by the end of December. I'm already 12 behind schedule, based on that rate!

'Planet of Giants'

2005-09-08T23:49:00.000+01:00

PLANET OF GIANTS
3 episodes

Extremely fun little adventure. The Doctor, trying to manoeuvre the TARDIS back to 1960s London, makes a miscalculation and the ship's doors come open in flight. The resulting increase in "space pressure" causes the four of them to be shrunk to an inch high - something they discover after wandering through the cracks in a garden path home to suddenly gigantic ants, earthworms, burnt matches and packets of night-scented stock! The sets and props are really quite brilliant considering the budget, with special praise going to the moving fly and the laboratory sink set. The plot - eco-awareness driven, unusually - rattles along, in part thanks to the pre-transmission editing of parts three and four down into a single episode, and while the adventure leaves no lasting impact on the travellers or the show as a whole, it must be one of the most enoyable to whack into the VCR for 70-odd minutes!

7.5/10

Episodes watched: 36
Episodes still to watch: 686

'The Reign of Terror'

2005-09-07T23:44:00.000+01:00

THE REIGN OF TERROR
6 episodes: 4 surviving

Thoroughly enjoyed this full-blooded historical romp through Revolutionary France. It is a great shame that episodes 4 and 5 no longer exist, as I was engrossed at the halfway point and no amount of linking narration from Carole Ann Ford with fuzzy clips and still images can recompense for missing out on the crucial 50-minute cranking-up of the action, leaving the final part somewhat high and dry. The 'look' and quality of the surviving footage also varied greatly from shot to shot, as if it had been cobbled together from various sources.

Nevertheless, this was another great period yarn, with an atypically high correlation with the actual nastiness of its setting: the revolutionary soldiers are vicious, taking sadisitc glee in shooting their captives in the first episode, and the roadworks overseer has an equally ruthless quality to him. The cells are dim and dirty, there is deceit and betrayal, and even Robespierre gets shot (in the jaw, off-screen) to the accompaniment of more laughter. There are well-realised characters like the grimly comical gaoler and British double-agent Stirling, and again it is a shame that we cannot see more development of the likes of Jules Renan and Jean; the character Leon 'disappears' before he can do anything intetresting while Robespierre himself barely gets a look-in. No less a figure than Napoleon Bonaparte crops up, but also gets less screen time than would perhaps be desirable - although it should be mentioned that, like Robespierre's, the diminutive Corsican's involvement in the scenario is historically inaccurate.

As per the norm, the central charcters get split up and imprisoned, leaving the Doctor to do the legwork necessary to get them all out again on a route not headed to Madame Guillotine. William Hartnell really gets a chance to shine, the Doctor masquerading as a 'Regional Officer of the Provinces' in a truly fabulous outfit complete with enormous feathered hat! Manipulating everyone as he goes, as far as possible, he eventually secures his companions' safety, and all retire to the TARDIS for a elegaic fade-out against a background of stars to bring Season One to a close.

7.5/10

Episodes watched: 33
Episodes still to watch: 689

'The Sensorites'

2005-09-07T19:26:00.000+01:00

THE SENSORITES
6 episodes

An usual 'monster' story, this, in that the aliens are portrayed with an unusual degree of depth and sympathy, and the monsters turn out to be humans after all - albeit ones inadvertently driven mad by the aliens!

The early sequences on board Maitland's spaceship are very well done, with an atmosphere of sinister intrigue built up around the unseen-as-yet Sensorites and what their powers may be. When we get to see the creatures, they are surprisingly well-rendered; the domed heads, lidless eyes and mouthless faces capture an 'alien' quality far better than other man-in-a-suit creations managed ten or twenty years later. That they are (mostly) essentially friendly comes as a bit of a shock after some earlier species(!), and in fact seem pathetically vulnerable to loud noises and darkness. The fact that without their various badges of office they all look the same is later exploited nicely as a major plot device - like in 'The Aztecs', there is an interesting powerplay going on between the different factions.

The scenes set on the SebseSphere wisely do not stretch the budget too much by sticking to a small number of locations, and the sequences with the travellers guiding each other physically and mentally through the aqueducts are built well towards the climax - which alas fails to appear, as the story just seems to end without any excitement at all. Otherwise, a diverting tale given an unlikely amount of balance in its portrayal of the alien/human relationships - and I should mention that the departing shot of Maitland's ship disappearing into the distance of space is flat-out lovely.

7/10

Episodes watched: 29
Episodes still to watch: 693

'The Aztecs'

2005-09-06T18:51:00.000+01:00

THE AZTECS
4 episodes

Cracking little historical story, this - the earliest it is still possible to view. It benefits from fine costume and sets, as period drama has always been a strong suit of the BBC's, certainly ahead of futuristic sci-fi... The supporting players get some strong characterisation, with the powerplay between High Priests Autloc and Tlotoxl (the latter deliciously essayed by John Ringham) particularly fascinating. The message of not tampering with established history is reinforced strongly via the Doctor's berating of Barbara when she first decides to stop the Aztecs' human sacrifice, and indeed the end is somewhat downbeat as the traditional - yet doomed - practices go on unhindered. The roles the regulars slip into are a refreshing change from the norm and each get to drive sections of the plot forward, with Barbara acting the part of goddess, Ian a warrior, Susan a handmaiden - while the Doctor gets to enjoy a touchingly brief romance with Aztec lady Cameca. Special commendation to the scene where the Doctor casually slips mention of his fiancee into the conversation, totally off-hand, leading Ian to respond "I see... your what??" with a priceless double-take! All in all, very enjoyable.

This is the firat story in Survival I've watched on DVD format, and the difference in picture quality is remarkable compared with the poor state of the previous couple of stories - crisp, clear and devoid of fuzz and static. There is also on the DVD an interesting extra feature that covers the amazingly complex clean-up process necessary to restore these episodes to their original glory - quite the transformation...

8/10

Episodes watched: 23
Episodes still to watch: 699

'The Keys of Marinus'

2005-09-05T00:45:00.000+01:00

THE KEYS OF MARINUS
6 episodes

Has taken a while to watch this - two old friends, including my first ever girlfriend from 7/8 years ago, have been in town for a long weekend so I've been busy catching up with them instead of continuing my quest! Had to have three separate sessions to cobble together a complete viewing; this actually didn't affect the story badly as it is one highly episodic in nature, so the different episodes are fairly self-contained anyway.

An average story, coming off the back of several strong ones. The missing fourth adventure, 'Marco Polo', is also reputed to have been a classic of the 'historical' type - might have to try listening to the CD containing the soundtrack, all that survives of this adventure. 'Marinus' slots in after this, and while it has some interesting scenarios and villains (the visually effective but underutilised Voords) they never have enough room in the crowded story to go anywhere much. Highlights are the Doctor's joyful Sherlock Holmes moments when he is piecing together the events that lead to Ian's framing, the comedy 'blip' noises when the characters use their 'travel dials' to move instantly from one place to another, and the surprisingly full-on scenes where the trapper Vasor tries to force himself on Barbara. Lowlights are the ice mountain sequences when the pace grinds to a halt while Susan tries and fails to convey suspense while inching across a temporary bridge slung across a chasm, ooh, feet across. Why the travellers, having priorly ganged up on Vasor, didn't take their travel dials back from him then beats me entirely - they could have just zapped themselves away from the ice soldiers as soon as they'd defrosted the key, rather than suffer the tiresome 'chase' sequences out of the mountain and back to the trapper's hut again. And for Arbitan's demise and the explosive climax to take place largely off-screen dents the impact of the finale considerably. Ah well...

6/10

Episodes watched: 19
Episodes still to watch: 703

'Inside the Spaceship'

2005-09-03T09:52:00.000+01:00

INSIDE THE SPACESHIP
2 episodes

Or 'The Edge of Destruction', as it's known on the video case - see, my theory that I would be following those titles has fallen down already... Like the last two stories, this is the on-screen title of the first episode (the second is 'The Brink of Disaster'), but I'm going to err towards the more encompassing alternative 'Inside the Spaceship'.

Whatever you call it, this little oddity is possibly the strangest story Doctor Who would ever produce. A late addition to the schedule after the producers were only given a definite green light for the first thirteen episodes, this was made to use up the remaining two weekly slots left after the previous stories' combined 11. With no appreciable budget remaining, this 'filler' adventure is set, yes, inside the TARDIS for its entirety. Starting with a huge explosion that rocks the ship and sends its occupants sprawling, we see them come round in various states of health and lucidity. It swiftly becomes apparent that none of them have a clue what's going on, and for pretty much the whole adventure neither do we. White lights, blackouts, electric shocks and melting clocks; it's plain disturbing from pillar to post. The TARDIS doors open and close by themselves, random images float up on the scanner screen, every light on the fault locator seems to have activated, and the ship seems to be spiralling towards some unknowable doom. The characters turn on each other, with the Doctor driving a wedge between the original occupants and the 'newcomers' - his verbal attack on Barbara causes her to finally snap back at him in a classic exchange. Most distressing and memorable, of course, is Susan going psychotic with a pair of scissors - more than any of the others, her behaviour borders on the weird almost throughout.

Full of neat touches - the Dali-esque clocks, the little bags that water is dispensed in by the food machine, and highly inventive, this adventure relies ultimtely on the performances of its four core cast members, the only characters present in the whole story. All of them are stretched, particularly Carole Ann Ford as Susan, but again it is William Hartnell's Doctor that grabs the most attention. Despite some misfiring delivery here and there, he flits from anger and distrust to sudden humility then straight into Machiavellian mischief in enchanting fashion, before reverting to antagonism and finally genuine charm at the end. I'm still not entirely sure what was going on; after my single previous viewing several years ago, I was convinced the TARDIS was trying to protect its inhabitants in a very cryptic fashion, but the fault indicator itself was at fault hence its inability to show where the problem lay - yet that never specifically happened, apparently...!? It seems the Fast Return switch getting stuck meant they were rushing back to the dawn of the solar system they were in, with the latent external energies threatening to tear the ship apart - and everything else arose from that.

Whatever - however you break it down, this is barmy, baffling, extraordinary and magnificent. It's a shame necessity didn't force the producers to make anything so far-out again!

9.5/10

Episodes watched: 13
Episodes still to watch: 709

Falling behind my proposed rate already - but expected that this weekend as I've got old friends visiting town so was always going to have to fit Survival in around other commitments there...

'The Daleks' episodes V - VII

2005-09-02T21:00:00.000+01:00

THE DALEKS continued

Rest of adventure was good as well; despite warnings that part 6 is deathly dull, I found the slow progress through the cave passages strangely gripping - admittedly more than I might have done during a seven-episode marathon if I'd watched them all at once! The final clash with the Daleks played out well, and the goodbyes at the end were touching as poor Ganatus is obviously struggling with his feelings for Barbara and vive versa, while the Doctor jokes that he'll pop back and visit the Thals' grandchildren to see how they're coming along.

7.5/10

Episodes watched: 11
Episodes still to watch: 711

'The Daleks' episodes I - IV

2005-09-01T23:30:00.000+01:00

THE DALEKS
7 episodes

'The Daleks' - or 'The Mutants': see the last post for a note on the trouble with naming stories at this initial stage. Either way, the Doctor's greatest enemies were also the very first we were to meet; I've never seen this, the first Dalek story, so it should be good to catch their debut appearance.

I like the way the early stories flow into the next without so much as a pause for the travellers to get their breath back! No sooner have they escaped the cavemen than they are touching down on Skaro. Fun hi-jinks with the food replicator machine; it seems we get a relatively high incidence of detailing what the different TARDIS components actually do at this time, with the Geiger counter, fault detector, fluid links etc. The Doctor comes over all Machiavellian on us again, such is his desire to visit the alien city - well, it is visually a lot more impressive than the lacklustre prehistoric locale last time out. His scheming is rather endearing this time, actually, even if it is presumably going to put the group in mortal danger again... The city is well realised inside, too. And there we have it - our first ever sink-plunger cliffhanger!

We get the Daleks in their full glory in Episode 2, plus some more-humanoid aliens in their rivals the Thals. Ian gets a mini-extermination where only temporary paralysis of the legs is suffered - evidently the Daleks decided to get tougher after this... Episodes 3 and 4 are full of fun escape shenanigans, especially the comedy moment where Ian hijacks a Dalek and tries to pull of an authentic impersonation through the voicebox. Good use of what were presumably limited sets. And we get some proper exterminating going on! A discussion about the creatures' mutated origins finally ensues, and just when it looks like things might wrap up neatly at the end of part 4, the travellers have to turn around and head back to the Dalek city once more...

Might leave the last three episodes for tomorrow - at least I'll have managed eight today, so that'll be a solid start if nothing else...!

Episodes watched: 8
Episodes still to watch: 714

'An Unearthly Child'

2005-09-01T17:04:00.000+01:00

AN UNEARTHLY CHILD
4 episodes

So, let's begin at the beginning: 'An Unearthly Child', or '100,000 BC', or 'The Tribe of Gum'. The problem with early Doctor Who is that the individual episodes within each story were given their own on-screen titles; in this case they are respectively 'An Unearthly Child', 'The Cave of Skulls', 'The Forest of Fear' and 'The Firemaker'. Sometimes the story is known by the first episode title, sometimes by a different overall title assigned during production, so assigning an 'official' moniker to some early stories is problematic as these differ depending on which reference source you use. I have my own preferences, which will probably largely tally with what is written on the video case - therefore, while many refer to the first Doctor Who story as '100,000 BC' I'm sticking to my favoured 'An Unearthly Child' for this post's heading.

Right, let's actually begin... Good little story to get the show up and running. The first, set-up episode is excellent in establishing the very different character of young Susan 'Foreman' to her school peers, and bravely introduces the mysterious Doctor as more of an anti-hero than straightforward leading man - the latter role more conventionally filled by Ian Chesterton, whose clashes with the Doctor start from the off. Throughout the tale the clever script and William Hartnell's glint-in-the-eye performance make this "Doctor Who" by turns obstinate, arrogant, manipulative, argumentative, aloof, contrite then near-murderously confrontational - not necessarily qualities one would expect of a cultural icon whose sway has so far extended over 40 years, and it instantly makes him a fascinating figure.
There are flaws, mostly after the '100,000 BC' part of the action kicks in in part 2. Despite their primitive existence as barely-evolved apes, the cavemen seem remarkably chatty and wax philosophical at the drop of a bone, and the second episode drags on for what seems like one endless scene while the Stone Age politicking goes round in circles. After the central characters' first escape, the normally capable Barbara falls over a warthog carcass and wails like a baby, instantly alerting their pursuers; however, her later attempts at communing with the savages are sweet and redeem her. The last episode is strong, with the foursome's predicament unresolved until the last moments, and we get a good punch-up between Kal and Za to boot. Little details are there too, like the TARDIS' chameleon circuit (unnamed thus far) malfunctioning, causing it to 'stick' in the form of a London police box - now as legendary an icon as its owner.

7.5/10

Episodes watched: 4
Episodes still to watch: 718

Still a little unnerved by Susan's scary glee at sticking a human skull on a fiery brand so that flames lick from its eye sockets - nice little prelude to her meltdown coming up in a couple of stories' time. One down then, umpteen more to go! If I can watch about eight episodes or two stories a day, then I should be able to wrap this up in a mere three months. Just noticed the next story has 7 episodes... feeling a bit intimidated already...

Launching my 'Survival' bid

2005-09-01T15:18:00.000+01:00

So here's the deal. I am a born-again Whovian and not ashamed of this fact. I watched the original series of Doctor Who in its last days, and enjoyed it briefly until the programme was brutally axed from the BBC schedules when I was only ten years old. I missed it, a little, and then I forgot about it by and large. Oh, of course there was the 1993 Comic Relief monstrosity - sorry, special, 'Dimensions In Time', but that was a mere few minutes of Eastenders-crossed, mixed-Doctor mayhem in a large barren void before the abortive revival that was Paul McGann's sole Eighth Doctor outing, 1996's 'Doctor Who' a.k.a. The Movie. That aired on my seventeenth birthday, and I eagerly watched and hoped for more, but alas it never came.

The next year I came to university in Aberystwyth and immediately became part of a small group of close friends. One of these, let us call him Locus, was a massive fan of Doctor Who, and through continued exposure to his passion for everything Whovian and select viewing of old episodes (I started with 'Battlefield'; make of that what you will) I was born again in my appreciation for this fine old British institution. Eight years on, and I find myself still living with Locus, as well as another friend from those days who I shall call Pip, who has furthermore been with Locus in a more-than-friendly way for two years now - plus another Whovian, called for the sake of argument Tony. In this conducive atmosphere for sampling the delights of vintage Who, I have watched numerous stories over the years (we have been sharing a house for the last three of which) when Locus has popped one into the video player, or, with the new release programme on the modern format, DVD player.

But, here's the thing. I still haven't actually watched that many. All this time with all those videos at my fingertips, and I've viewed no more than a sample of them over the years, really. I've never seen the original Daleks story, nor the classic 'Genesis of the Daleks' or many other early appearances, although I've watched 'Revelation...', 'Resurrection...' and 'Remembrance of the Daleks'. I've never watched Roger Delgado's original Master in action. I've barely glimpsed Patrick Troughton's Second Doctor. On the other hand, with the recent viewing of 'Dragonfire' I've now watched every one of Sylvester McCoy's Seventh Doctor stories except for 'The Happiness Patrol' - he was 'my' Doctor when I was growing up, after all. The problem is, the group of us are finally breaking the bonds, upping sticks, moving out and leaving town at the end of this year, and I realised suddenly recently that I'll likely never get such a good chance to educate myself properly in the ways of Who.

On that note I decided that now, with four months left with Locus and his collection, would be the ideal opportunity to use up all my free time by watching every single episode of Doctor Who, in order, from the start, in as little time as is realistically possible. It's my plan to set off from the first story, November 1963's 'An Unearthly Child', and make my bid for 'Survival', as it were. I was partly inspired in this by the regular column 'The Time Team' in Locus and Tony's Doctor Who Magazine collections, where a hardy four-person squad has been doing the same thing at monthly intervals for the last six years - and they're barely over halfway yet! Foolishly attempting to ape their efforts in a vastly inferior time-frame seems like a challenge only the very idiotic would take on... so idiot am I, it would appear. If I'm still capable of sentient activity after the 709 original episodes, I'll tackle the 13 added this year in the long-awaited and rather wonderful new series starring Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor. By the way, as great tranches of the First and (especially) Second Doctors' adventures were purged from the archives in BBC tape-junking activites of the '70s, I'm not including them in the episode count - but many if not all are also available to me in audio format courtesy of Locus' CD collection, so if I'm feeling particularly hardcore I may chuck those in as well...