November 21: The Two Doctors Part One

Putting the opening moments in black and white is a nice touch, as we see not the sixth Doctor and Peri but rather the second Doctor and Jamie.  They both appear to have aged since the last time we saw them, though -- Troughton's hair in particular appears to have gone silver since 1983.  There's also something deeply weird about listening to Troughton casually talk about the Time Lords to Jamie (and the suggestion that this is during season 5, as the Doctor's dropped off Victoria somewhere, makes it doubly strange -- note how Jamie has no idea who the Time Lords are in The War Games¹³⁹).  The second Doctor's conversations with Dastari don't really help with this feeling of strangeness either.  There's also the rather unpleasant speech from the Doctor after he learns about Dastari's augmentation experiments with Chessene, where he outright states that it's wrong for people to go beyond where they're "supposed" to be: "She's still an Androgum.  You can't change nature. ... You give a monkey control of its environment, it'll fill the world with bananas," the Doctor insists with a close-minded attitude, bordering on racist ("Oh really, Doctor.  I expected something more progressive from you," Dastari replies).  There's also some stuff between Chessene and Shockeye along the same lines, but as neither is supposed to be a terribly sympathetic character, it doesn't have the same distasteful feel as when the Doctor spouts such things.

There also seems to be some commentary from writer Robert Holmes about how we treat meat animals, with Shockeye treating the humans (well, Tellurians -- this is a Robert Holmes script) in much the same way -- interested more in how they taste than in what their feelings might be about it.

But after a certain point this episode feels like it's just spinning its wheels.  The sixth Doctor and Peri investigate Space Station Camera after it's been attacked by Sontarans and spend their time outwitting the computer, which wants them dead as part of a defense mechanism, while Chessene, Shockeye, and the Sontarans set up camp near Seville -- yes, the show's filming abroad again (for what would be the last time in 23 years -- there are no more major overseas film shoots until 2008¹⁴⁰).  The long shot reveal of the Sontarans in Spain is a bit undramatic (particularly as all we saw was a hand when they captured the second Doctor), but to be fair, we did know it was Sontarans when that station technician saw their ships coming in.  The Spanish bits look nice, but they also feel rather undramatic at this point -- after the assault on the station, everything is setup, with little payoff.  But as this is a three-part story, I suppose they can afford to take their time.  And it is a decent cliffhanger -- the Doctor gassed by the station while Peri is attacked by some beast lurking in the station's infrastructure...







¹³⁹ You might be able to get around some of these problems if you assume that it's actually the Time Lords from Colin Baker's era who've fished back through his timeline and pulled the second Doctor out of his timestream, using him as a representative (they can't really use the current incarnation, as he's sort of the President of the High Council at the moment); this would explain why it's the sixth Doctor (rather than any of the intervening incarnations) who feels the second Doctor being attacked (in what appears to be a new event, rather than as part of his personal history).  This might also explain why the second Doctor isn't immediately alarmed when he sees that there's been Time Lord interference with his TARDIS, and why the Time Lords don't just bring him back to Gallifrey.  Then you just have to postulate some sort of mindwipe afterwards as to why Jamie subsequently doesn't know anything about the Time Lords.
     Alternatively, you can postulate that Troughton had adventures after The War Games, where he went on a number of secret missions for the Time Lords before his exile actually began -- this is the so-called "Season 6B theory".  That does lead to wondering why Colin Baker is affected though (does he feel bad every time a previous incarnation gets knocked out or is made to suffer?), if it's Troughton's Time Lords that are getting him involved with Space Station Camera.  (And it should be noted that, other than the general problem of trying to find spots during Troughton's run to put these adventures and why he occasionally looks older, there's not really any on-screen evidence to support the season 6B theory.)
¹⁴⁰ Well, except for the TV Movie, which was shot in Vancouver -- but that wasn't really abroad for them, was it?

November 20: The Mark of the Rani Part Two

Oh look, it's one of those cliffhanger resolutions where they insert scenes, so that the last-minute rescue of the Doctor doesn't look completely implausible...

The first half of part two is a bit more interesting because it's less about the Master and the Rani (though they do show up from time to time to cause havoc) and more about the Doctor's interactions with George Stephenson (who, in case you didn't know, was a pioneer of locomotive design and thus can be considered one of the architects of the Industrial Revolution).  These are on the whole quite entertaining, lending a charm to the story and also making it seem less Time Lord-centric.  (Although George's son Robert is nowhere in sight.)

The Rani and the Master in the Rani's TARDIS. (The Mark of the
Rani Part Two) ©BBC

But, somewhat inevitably, we return to the machinations of the Master and the Rani (who's now fully on board with the Master's plan of taking over all the Industrial Revolution geniuses (all conveniently coming to a meeting in Killingworth) and thus ruling the world, somehow), which means it's time to talk about That Tree, the one that used to be Stephenson's assistant Luke Ward until he stepped on one of the Rani's landmines.

To be completely honest, I don't mind the design of it that much.  When it's just standing there being a tree, it actually looks reasonably convincing.  No, the problem is when it tries to protect Peri by bending a huge branch down in a weird hug, at which point it becomes very clear that it's just a guy in a weird suit -- no effort is made to think about how a tree might plausibly react (look, just go with this for a minute) if it were trying to save someone from danger.  It doesn't fall over or shed any branches or quickly grow some branches to enclose Peri (it's an alien tree, it could maybe happen); no, it just bends a rubber arm down to awkwardly embrace Nicola Bryant.  Still, that's probably the most objectionable moment on display here (well, that and the awful baby T. rex in the Rani's TARDIS at the end), so I guess that's something -- certainly the two villagers-turned-into-trees holding up Colin Baker look decent enough.

But the tree minefield section takes up a decent chunk of the running time for part two, and it's endemic of the larger problem with The Mark of the Rani -- they're using history as a backdrop for Time Lord shenanigans, rather than as an interesting place in its own right (so, rather like The King's Demons then).  It's fortunate that those shenanigans are reasonably entertaining -- the Rani in particular shines as someone who only barely tolerates the feud between the Master and the Doctor, and only then because the Master has the neurochemical she's been harvesting.  And, pleasingly, the Doctor snaps into focus in the presence of these other two Time Lords, becoming the moral center of the show in a way that hasn't really happened for the sixth Doctor yet.  There's little beyond this, which does make The Mark of the Rani a bit unsatisfying, but at least it's fun enough while it lasts.

(This story's Nicola Bryant in-joke: "All these mines look the same to me."  Not bad for only spending something like two minutes in those mines.)

November 19: The Mark of the Rani Part One

It's a very picturesque opening -- lots of long lingering shots of an early-19th century coal-mining village, underscored by pastoral music as filtered through an '80s synthesizer.  But soon we see some of the miners acting like jerks: the result of some sort of sinister process that's left a red mark on the miners' necks.  It seems we're going to get Doctor Who's take on the Luddite riots.

Except not really, because it turns out that the Master is back.  No explanation is given as to how he survived the events on Sarn -- allegedly writers Pip and Jane Baker included one, but Eric Saward cut it, in a fit of pique over the return of the Master yet again (can you tell he's starting to get frustrated with this job?).  There's also no explanation as to why he's pretending to be a scarecrow out in the middle of nowhere...

Of course, the presence of the Master ends up distorting the entire story around him.  We're no longer interested in what's going on in Killingworth; we want to know what the Master's up to.  But this time, it seems he's not the only Time Lord around.  We're also introduced to a renegade Time Lord called the Rani, who appears to be an amoral scientist, extracting a chemical from humanity for her own purposes -- the violent behavior is an "unfortunate side effect".  The Rani, played with great superiority by Kate O'Mara, is clearly meant to be neither explicitly "good" nor "evil", but rather a scientist with no compassion or morality.  It's a nice little twist on the sort of characters we normally get on the show.

However, if the Master was distorting things before, now that we've got the Rani involved, events truly get bent out of shape.  The entire episode becomes little more than a backdrop to their arguments, and while the squabbling is certainly entertaining (particularly the Rani's comments on the Master: "You're unbalanced; no wonder the Doctor always outwits you", and "What's he up to now?  It'll be something devious and overcomplicated.  He'd get dizzy if he tried to walk in a straight line" being two highlights), it does unbalance things.  And so it really doesn't help when the Doctor is also introduced and all three start sniping at each other.

And of course, this is our first Pip and Jane Baker script, which means there are lots of examples of florid dialogue to join in with at home (the favorite probably being "Fortuitous would be a more apposite epithet!").  Pip and Jane clearly love language, but it does make a lot of the dialogue very unnatural-sounding (and that's before it gets put through a broad Geordie accent for all the locals).  But, contrasting this, their characterization is very good, and the Doctor is probably the most like the traditional Doctor -- which is to say, not deliberately alien -- he's been this incarnation (although the joke about a "hyperactive Peri" does seem a particularly sixth Doctorish thing to say).  This does make this story a lot more fun to watch, and it helps set him apart from the Rani and the Master.  (That said -- and it's definitely not Pip & Jane's fault -- who thought it would be a good idea to make the sixth Doctor's signature verbal trait to repeat a word three times at increasing volumes?)

There are some good moments here and there (the stuff with Lord Ravensworth is quite nice -- and you can see, as the Doctor takes off his coat and puts on a dirty one (around the 30 minute mark), the cats that have been added to the coat's lining for each completed sixth Doctor story), and the arguing is rather entertaining, but so far, the interaction of the three Time Lords swamps everything else in this story.

November 18: Vengeance on Varos Part Two

So this is another fairly brutal story, but unlike, say, Resurrection of the Daleks, there's a point to the brutality, as it's illustrating writer Philip Martin's two ideas -- the more generic SF idea of "what would happen if a prison planet developed along prison lines" and the more pointed "what if we extrapolated from Western culture's increasing desire for violent entertainment to its natural conclusion".  Obviously the nature of this story means that it's not going to appeal to everyone, but at least you can see what Martin is getting at.

Of course, one of the problems that arises is that this is a story with the sixth Doctor, who the production team has decided needs to be obviously Not Like Us.  And so scenes like the infamous "acid bath" one, near the beginning of part two, end up coming across as harsher than they otherwise would have done.  What we actually get is the Doctor struggling with a guard to not fall into the acid bath as his fellow guard (who fell in earlier) pulls his compatriot in.  What people remember is the callous, James Bond-like quip after ("You'll forgive me if I don't join you"), and that ends up coloring their memories of the scene.  (And curiously, no one seems to comment on the later scene with the deadly tentacles, which the Doctor rigs to kill Quillam and the Chief Officer -- a life-or-death situation, certainly, but the Doctor is more overtly violent there than in the acid bath scene.)

The other problem is that, since Eric Saward took over the script editing post, the stories have become increasingly more vicious -- partly because Saward is interested in telling war stories, but also because he seems to be interested in exploring the idea of a moral Doctor in an amoral universe.  Saward's conclusions tend to be somewhat cynical (see things like Warriors of the Deep, where the moral Doctor is ultimately unable to prevent any of the bloodshed), but at least with the fifth Doctor there was a moral figure people could latch on to.  But now we have the sixth Doctor, who's less traditionally moral (I wouldn't go so far as to call him amoral, but it is the case that some of the fifth Doctor's niceties have gone -- the core is the same, but the veneer is different), and who is therefore going to react somewhat differently from before.  What this means is that we're going to get a string of mercenary stories full of amoral characters, and so Vengeance on Varos is going to end up looking a lot like the surrounding tales, which means that in the audience's eyes it's all of the same cloth.¹³⁸

The Governor negotiates new mining terms with Sil.
(Vengeance on Varos Part Two) ©BBC

This is a shame, because Vengeance on Varos really does have a point.  The exploration of the idea of violence-as-entertainment, while not always totally successful, still makes enough of an impact to consider what's going on.  After all, that's the entire point of having Arak and Etta, the viewing couple who don't interact with anyone else, in this story.  This is the couple who seem inured to the violence, treating it purely as entertainment rather than considering that these are real people.  ("Maybe he isn't fully dead," Etta states while watching the Doctor on their screen.  "Then he soon will be," Arak replies with obvious relish.  "Here comes the acid bath.")  They explore this idea as fully as they can (this is Doctor Who, after all, not The Etta and Arak Show, which means they still have to follow the Doctor around), but it's still not quite as satisfying as you'd want.

The actual meat of the episode is more of the same: running around corridors (incidentally, Nicola Bryant's in-joke was in part one: "All these corridors look the same to me"), avoiding capture and nasty deaths, combined with some facial scarring from Quillam (less successful in all regards, it must be said, than Sharaz Jek was) and an odd subplot about turning Peri and Areta, Jondar's wife, into half-human, half-animal creatures.  There's also a revolution by the end, with the ruling guard elite having been essentially deposed, with a new democracy in its place -- and fair prices for its zeiton-7 ore, much to Sil's displeasure.  (And a nice ending scene too: "We're free," Etta says wondrously.  "...What shall we do?" Arak asks.  "Dunno," Etta replies.)

But it's the exploration of violent media that's ultimately the main point of Vengeance on Varos.  It doesn't really have a solution for any of the issues it brings up, but it is at least thinking about them.  Of course, it has to do this by showing violent content, which means this is an easier story to admire than to actually enjoy.  But it works more than it doesn't, and it gives us an environment for the sixth Doctor to really rail against.  It's certainly a better showing for this Doctor than Attack of the Cybermen was.  It's not for everyone, but it's not meant to be.  And at least it's trying to say something new and different, even if it's not packaged in a nice palatable way -- but this ultimately means that, as these concerns continue to be relevant today, Vengeance on Varos is the sixth Doctor story that's probably improved the most with age.







¹³⁸ There's actually another reason for the public perception of season 22 as being excessively violent, but we'll discuss the 18-Month Suspension and the unfortunate timing of its announcement, matched with the comments of then-BBC1 Controller Michael Grade, under The Two Doctors.

November 17: Vengeance on Varos Part One

Standard and special edition DVDs

Hey, it's Sean Connery's son Jason, shirtless and being tortured, apparently for the pleasure of a captive audience.  No, not us at home (although that too), but instead for the inhabitants of Varos.  We get a look at one viewing couple as they calmly watch this while commenting on the quality of the food and their patriotic duties.  Interestingly, some fifteen years before the genre really took off, Doctor Who is tackling reality television.  Well, it's actually tackling the idea of a population increasingly inured to violence, but even if no one was consciously thinking about it at the time, the reality TV parallels are hard to avoid.

It's also interesting how long it takes the Doctor and Peri to get involved in the action -- it's halfway through part one before they arrive on Varos.  Before that they're stuck in the TARDIS (with Peri in a blue version of her Attack of the Cybermen outfit), right as the power fails -- the TARDIS is out of zeiton-7, a very rare element that the TARDIS needs to work properly.  Interestingly, though, the Doctor chooses to deal with this problem by giving in to it, rather than trying to come up with a solution -- he seems resigned to spending the rest of his life adrift in the TARDIS.  "It's all right for you," he tells Peri.  "You've only got one life.  You'll age here in the TARDIS and then die.  Me, I shall go on regenerating until all my lives are spent."  It's an attitude that you can't imagine any other Doctor adopting, but it doesn't seem out of character for the sixth Doctor.

Peri and the Doctor arrive on Varos. (Vengeance on Varos
Part One) ©BBC

But yes, it takes half the episode for the Doctor and Peri to arrive, and while they're floating around in the TARDIS we're learning about conditions on Varos.  It's not a pleasant planet, to put it mildly, and the populace is ruled with an iron fist.  But the bright spot (for the viewers, if not for the Varosians) is the character of Sil -- easily one of the standout characters of the Colin Baker era.  The idea of a profit-obsessed character hasn't really shown up on the show yet, but the fact that it does in the form of a green reptilian slug is rather wonderful -- and Nabil Shaban does a knock-out job of playing this character to the hilt.  (And I really like Sil's laugh.)  Even though Sil is the villain of the piece (well, the most obvious villain in a story that seems to be filled with them), his presence really does light up the screen.  And they've got Martin Jarvis in as the Governor, to act as Sil's foil while submitting himself to repeated referendums regarding his decisions (with deadly rays if the "No"s have it), which leads to a dignified actor constantly on the verge of death thanks to the people, but still able to try and negotiate with Sil over the price of zeiton-7.

The second half is less interesting, just because there's a lot of running around the Punishment Dome corridors (to the tune of higher audience appreciation figures, though -- a somewhat pointed joke), but the cliffhanger is excellent, as the Doctor appears to die from imagined dehydration.  But that's not the actual cliffhanger: instead, we cut to the gallery, directing the Doctor's death.  "Close-up on death throes, please. ... And cut it... now."  It's a really nice twist on the cliffhanger, showing how these things are cynically provided for entertainment.

November 16: Attack of the Cybermen Part Two

Ah.  I guess it can be.

Well, no, that's not fair.  Part two isn't particularly good, and the problems start early, but it's not a train wreck -- certainly nowhere near how The Twin Dilemma turned out.  The main concern with Attack of the Cybermen essentially boils down to two points: 1) is this a story that requires people to know about twenty-year-old Cyberman stories that no one's seen since their initial broadcast, or are those just added details? and 2) does it matter that nothing we see physically resembles those early stories?  (There's also the related point of, "Should we care that part one appears to have had little bearing on anything we see in part two beyond moving characters into the right places?", but this ultimately has less of a bearing on the story's success than you might think.)

That first point is probably the main sticking one.  Attack of the Cybermen is explicitly a sequel to both The Tomb of the Cybermen and The Tenth Planet, but the more you think about it the less important it is that you have a detailed knowledge of those stories -- all the important points are covered in the (admittedly excruciating) info-dump speech in the TARDIS, as Lytton watches the Doctor explain those stories to Peri and Griffiths (the Brian Glover henchman) -- Russell (the Terry Molloy one) having apparently actually been killed by a Cyber-blow to the shoulder at the end of part one (um...), and thus not around to be explained at.  And really, other than establishing that Telos has tombs left over from The Tomb of the Cybermen, all you really need to know is that Mondas swanned in to Earth's neighborhood and got itself destroyed for its troubles in 1986 (so next year, since this is 1985), and that the Cybermen want their newly-acquired time ship to change history by sending Halley's Comet into Earth before Mondas gets there.  (Er, which denies Mondas a place to get the energy it desperately needs in the first place... if you do remember The Tenth Planet, you'll note that Mondas blew up because it really needed energy but ended up absorbing too much from Earth, not because of anything Earth did.)  So even if you do recall those stories (either because you saw them the first time around or maybe you read the Target novelizations), that doesn't give you an advantage over anyone else.

The Doctor and Flast are locked in a storeroom. (Attack of
the Cybermen Part Two) ©BBC

In fact, because of the second point, it might even make things worse.  No effort is made to make the tombs look remotely like they did in the last appearance (not even a token effort like putting that distinctive Cyberman stencil up anywhere) and all the Cybermen we see are obviously Earthshock-style ones rather than Tomb-style -- even those explicitly emerging from the tombs for the first time in forever.  Not only that, but Attack of the Cybermen retcons the origin of the tombs themselves, turning them into a refrigerated city (by a race called the Cryons) that the Cybermen subsequently co-opted.  Anyone watching because of their love of the earlier stories might therefore be understandably underwhelmed by this.

But this is all essentially fan complaining, rather than addressing the central point: is the story itself any good?  The answer is somewhat mixed.  The worst problem with this story is that it seems very generic; there's no real reason for this to have been set up as a sequel in the first place, and the potentially interesting plotline of diverting Halley's Comet into Earth is brought up briefly and then discarded in favor of watching Cybermen and Cryons run around the tombs -- we certainly don't see any evidence of the Cybermen putting this plan into motion.  There's also the wasted inclusion of Bates and Stratton, a storyline which looks like it might be going somewhere (for most of this tale, in fact) but then patently doesn't, leaving the audience wondering what the point was.  The Cryons are probably the best part, and while it was a good move to cast women in all the roles, they don't end up being the most dynamic of characters.  The Lytton subplot about how he was really working for them also feels tacked on, and while seeing Lytton half-cybernized is a very good move, ultimately little is done with this, other than to make the Doctor feel bad about things.  ("Didn't go very well, did it?" he notes at the end).

Let's be fair; trying to make a sequel to an old story isn't the worst of sins, and you can see, sort of, why the author(s?)¹³⁷ thought it was worth doing.  However, they've tried to also come up with a more general action story that more casual viewers can enjoy, and the result falls between two stools; too many things changed to please the old-school fans, too generic to interest the new ones.  It doesn't help that Attack of the Cybermen too often feels like it's just spinning its wheels.  If they'd maintained the atmosphere of part one they might have gotten away with it, but while it's not the disaster you may have heard, there's not ultimately any real reason to care about anything that happens here.







¹³⁷ The authorship of Attack of the Cybermen is the most contested credit of any Doctor Who story -- to the point where I'm not sure anyone genuinely knows for sure who did what.  What seems to be clear is that while Eric Saward was originally going to write this story, John Nathan-Turner told him he couldn't write this as well as Revelation of the Daleks (as that would be a third of the entire season -- something the BBC frowned upon script editors doing at that time), so Saward got an old former girlfriend, Paula Woolsey, to do it up for him (under the pen name Paula Moore).  This is where things get confused, however; Saward suggests that Woolsey did a decent amount, rewritten by him as script editor, while then-continuity advisor Ian Levine says that he and Saward wrote it up and that Woolsey didn't contribute anything more than her name.  (What is known is that Woolsey subsequently submitted two more story lines to the production office, so it seems unlikely that her name was her only contribution.)  The truth is likely somewhere in between, but it seems we'll never know for certain.

November 15: Attack of the Cybermen Part One

A new season, with a new Doctor (basically), new length (all the episodes this season are going to be 45 minutes long -- partly because the BBC doesn't really make 30 minute dramas anymore), and the name of the story in all capital letters (for, as it turns out, the only story from 1980-1986 (aka the Sid Sutton "star field" titles)).  Such thrills!

Attack of the Cybermen takes a lot of flak from fandom, but from this episode it's honestly hard to see why, as there are a lot of good moments throughout this first episode.  Although Colin Baker still seems much more brusque than Peter Davison was, his portrayal has been moderated with more subtle moments and a more even temperament.  Or maybe it's just that there's less squabbling between him and Peri.  Either way, it's a positive change, and watching him try to repair the TARDIS is also rather fun.  This also leads to a running gag regarding the TARDIS's appearance, as it first changes into an ornamental cabinet of some sort and then a pipe organ.  It's a fun little bit, particularly as the Doctor is increasingly exasperated at these failed attempts to blend into the surroundings.  There's also a little in-joke as the TARDIS materializes in 76 Totter's Lane -- the location of the very first episode of Doctor Who -- and since this isn't dwelt on in any manner it's considerably more effective than some of the other, more labored continuity references we've gotten recently.  I also rather like the (unseen) fight between the Doctor and the fake policeman, which suggests that this Doctor is willing to get his hands dirty but isn't too overtly violent.  It's another nice way of distancing Colin Baker's Doctor from Peter Davison's without taking things too far.

And while the Doctor and Peri are investigating a distress signal somewhere on 1985 Earth, we get another returning character in the form of Lytton, the Dalek Task Force commander who survived Resurrection of the Daleks.  It seems he's turned to robbing banks and has put together a gang to help him with the next heist -- a gang that includes Brian Glover and Terry Molloy (the former a well-known actor -- you may have seen him in Alien³ -- and the latter the man who played Davros in Resurrection of the Daleks).  Except what Lytton's actually doing is meeting up with the Cybermen, who have a secret base in the sewers of London.  And (chinplates painted silver instead of being clear aside), this might be the first time the Cybermen have remained the same between stories.¹³⁶  Well, except for the "stealth" Cybermen who are painted matte black, roaming the sewers and killing off trespassers.  Interestingly, though, we get some nice shots of people being converted into Cybermen (as well as a few on Telos (which is officially the whole planet now) who appear to be half-converted -- Bates and Stratton look like they have Cyber-arms) -- an idea that hasn't really been explored since The Tomb of the Cybermen.  Rather less successful, though, is the appearance of the Cyber Controller on Telos (also last seen in The Tomb of the Cybermen), the helmet of which looks frankly stupid (yes, I know they were trying to imitate the Tomb design, but with the addition of the Cyber-earmuffs the end result is terrible) and (sorry to get personal here, but) the body of whom is noticeably, ah, larger than last time.  And if we're discussing outfits, why on Earth, as About Time points out, has Peri decided to wear a tight pink Lycra (spandex) top?

Really, this episode has been quite entertaining the whole way through, with some really nice moments (including our first occurrence of Nicola Bryant's running joke, "These _____ all look the same to me" ("tunnels" in this case)) and a decent storyline (what we know of it).  It's got some solid acting and some fine direction.  So why is everyone so down on this story?  Part two can't be that bad, can it?







¹³⁶ Earthshock and Five Doctors Cybermen differ in the boots they're wearing, so if you want to count that as being the same (or the painted chinplates here as being different), then fair enough.