This is another pleasantly charming episode that doesn't happen to be particularly memorable, but is fun while it lasts. What's perhaps most striking about
Eye of the Gorgon is how much it feels at times like a synthesis of Tom Baker-era
Who and children's television -- but that synthesis never feels that awkward.
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Luke and Clyde are accosted by some unfriendly nuns. (Eye of
the Gorgon Part One) ©BBC |
The
Who bits are the basic setup of the main plotline. There's a sense of following in the footsteps of Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes, as we're introduced to an ancient alien artifact that has ties to ancient Earth history, and Greek mythology in particular. Much like those '70s stories used mythology and older stories and had them inspired by something alien and dangerous, writer Phil Ford does the same thing here, with the Gorgons (not the
Quark villains
189) being aliens who want to come to Earth and colonize the place via humanity -- although it's not clear why it's taken them three thousand years to get to this point. (The plot seems to want us to conclude it's because the talisman was lost, but this is never actually stated.) Mixed in with this we get sinister nuns protecting the Gorgon while it prepares to take over the world (although full marks for making the nuns actually under the thrall of the Gorgon and not actually intrinsically evil), and an old abbey with secret passages. (Actually, it's not a million miles away from
The Abominable Snowmen, either -- and look, the Yeti get a namecheck in part two.) If they'd decided to actually go full bore on the scarier aspects of this setup, they'd have had a pretty scary episode. But this is kids' TV (as opposed to
Doctor Who, which often gets lumped with children's television but is actually designed for a family audience), so they can't go that far.
And because this is targeted towards children, we get some elements that would be decidedly out of place in
Doctor Who. Maria's mother Chrissie is really rather awful by way of being completely self-absorbed and oblivious to the larger world (to be clear, this is obviously a character point, and Juliet Cowan does a good job with what she's given) -- she doesn't consider what moving into her ex-husband's new house for a few days will do to her daughter, and she wanders around Sarah Jane's property looking for Maria, rather than just calling her. (This comes after the last story, where she was convinced that she was the common element to all the weird things happening since Maria met Sarah Jane.) And the petrification of Maria's dad in the part one cliffhanger does feel more tilted towards younger viewers than older.
But that doesn't detract from this story in any way. As I said, if there's a problem with
Eye of the Gorgon, it's that it's rather unmemorable. It's fun while it lasts (and Phyllida Law gives a great performance as the Alzheimer's-afflicted Mrs. Nelson-Stanley -- incidentally, I think this is the first mention of Sontarans in the BBC Wales stuff), and the Gorgon is a nice idea, but it's not scary enough or striking enough to stay in the memory. Still, that's not the worst of sins by any means, and it's nice to have a
Who idea like this, even if they pull their punches a bit.
189 I assume there are about six people who understood that reference. To everyone else, my apologies; carry on.