Lots of old Doctor Who!

[mmcirvin]

Sam got a lot of DVDs:

The Invasion

This Patrick Troughton-era story is a recent DVD release; episodes one and four of eight are still missing, but have been reconstructed with animation over the surviving soundtrack. It works well enough for the purpose, though it's nothing but a substitute; the animation is really limited (done with Flash, I think) but the episodes in question don't have a lot of action in them anyway.

Like a lot of early Doctor Who serials, The Invasion feels padded--we don't get our first glimpse of a Cyberman until the cliffhanger of episode four. Still, it's worth seeing for Kevin Stoney's amusing performance as a megalomaniac industrialist in league with the Cybermen (coincidentally, Mr. Stoney died when we were halfway through watching this), and for the first appearance of UNIT. You can also imagine lots of femslash subtext between Zoe and her temporary sidekick Isobel, if you are so inclined.

Inferno

Especially in his early appearances, Jon Pertwee decided to play the Doctor as a very, very serious character, and this is a very, very serious serial that actually becomes outright grim and leaden. It's seven episodes long, and it all starts to sort of run together after a while. I can also see what people say about the character of Liz Shaw being badly treated--the Doctor behaves in an absurdly sexist manner, condescending all the time to this woman who was probably one of his most competent companions, and people don't really call him on it.

The grimness of Inferno actually seems to have made it something of a fan favorite, but it's hard to reconcile with the fact that a major subplot involves guys turning into green werewolves on contact with goop from the interior of the earth. Still, it's kind of fun when the Doctor accidentally ends up in Doctor Who's version of the evil Mirror Universe for a couple of episodes, and they get to kill everybody.

The Androids of Tara

After Inferno, this entertaining bit of fluff went down like cotton candy, though admittedly it's one of the weaker Tom Baker-era stories. The Fourth Doctor, the First Romana, and K9 find their segment of the Key to Time almost immediately, but then have to bluff and mug their way through a Prisoner of Zenda pastiche on a very silly planet with pseudo-medieval culture, electric swords and android duplicates. Mary Tamm wears gorgeous outfits and rides a horsie. Sam dearly loved this one as a little girl.

The Pirate Planet

Ahh, now that's more like it!

This story was famously written by Douglas Adams (though it sounds like the story editor tweaked it a lot), and you can tell. This is another one from the Key to Time season, involving a planet that dismantles other planets for mineral wealth (though they don't really explain how this can keep the inhabitants rich without some sort of interstellar trade, which doesn't seem to be happening). The place is run by a bellowing cyborg pirate who regularly kills his minions with a robot parrot. There are also a bunch of strange chanting psychic gestalt-mind people. The reason all this is happening turns out to be really convoluted. The Doctor is at his goofiest.

There's a lot about it that doesn't make any sense on prolonged analysis, but, you know, it's Doctor Who. But after a slow-ish start in the first episode, it ends up absolutely crammed with cool, crazy ideas, basically the kind of thing I wish Doctor Who did all the time. I somehow missed seeing this until now, but I think it's already become one of my favorite classic Who serials.

Our DVD player vomited on contact with this disc, so we watched it on Sam's computer. I'm not sure what the problem was.

Comments

[jwgh]

How about that cliffhanger in 'The Pirate Planet', huh?

[whl.livejournal.com]

Watching Inferno is what made my observe that if you didn't put an English actor in a rubber suit to play a monster, they all seem to throw one shoulder up higher than the other, lurch around, and generally play Richard III.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The one that makes me laugh is the villain in The Aztecs—we're supposed to be in ancient Mesoamerica and here's this guy obviously Richard the Thirding all over the screen. Between that, and the charming fact that William Hartnell is the one classic Doctor who gets to use his raw sexuality as a weapon, it's pretty peculiar—not bad, though.

[aderack.livejournal.com]

Fun thing about The Invasion: it was originally scripted as a six-parter, then was chopped down to four because Terence Dicks didn't think it had enough story to fill so many episodes. Then another four-parter, that was supposed to come afterward, fell through, forcing them to spread the story across eight episodes. Thus the weird device with the completely different enemy base that looks exactly the same, and all of the episode-long goose chases.

To make it more amazing, the episodes took so long to shoot that they didn't have time or budget to film a bunch of the important scenes in the second half of the story. So really dramatic, interesting things will happen off-camera, and be explained with a line. "Oh, we rescued him with a helicopter, and there was a shoot-out. You should've been there!"

So after seven episodes of plodding capture-escape, capture-escape, plot dead end, capture escape, the story is resolved so quickly that it's difficult to follow what just happened.

Oh well. At least the animation is atmospheric. I like the way, given the limitations, they focused on interesting angles and compositions instead of trying for a kind of action that they couldn't achieve. All things considered, my only real complaint is that Troughton looks far more dour than he sounds. Based on his voice, I keep imagining his familiarly droll expressions and mannerisms, while his animation model stands still and squints.

One of the things I like best about Inferno is its structure. You get an introduction episode, then a four-episode serial set in Eyepatch World, then a two-parter back here, dealing with the results of that adventure. In the middle are a few flash-sidewayses, whenever the Doctor is knocked unconscious or whatever, to give us a chance to catch up on what everyone else is up to just about when we're starting to wonder, keeping the pace trucking right along.

Both Inferno and The Silurians use their length really well, I think, as an opportunity to do something a little more interesting -- which stands in contrast not just to The Invasion or many of the six-parters throughout the 1970s, but to a heck of a lot of the four-parters, where the problem seems to be figuring out how to pad out a stock idea (a planet... of human-aliens... whose fleaspeck culture is exactly like feudal Europe... which has a political problem... held in place by one rotten individual (Curse of Peladon? Monster of Peladon? Half of the Key to Time season? Most of the Big Finish audios?)) to fill a month of airtime.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Reading the Outpost Gallifrey reviews of these serials makes me realize that my tastes are really not those of Outpost Gallifrey reviewers. They generally have the highest praise for Inferno, and The Pirate Planet seems to actively offend a lot of them, as if Douglas Adams' intentional wackiness were born of disrespect for the show and for the genre.

I don't know. I don't primarily discriminate on the basis of tone--I like The Dalek Invasion of Earth a lot, and that's remarkably dark, whereas the supposedly humorous stuff in Revelation of the Daleks I find unbearably grating. But with this combination of serials it seems to go the other way.

The few old Doctor Who stories that please me the very most have a certain intellectually cracktastic quality--I suppose it's what a type of fanfic reader looks for, except with forbidden Kirk/Spock romance replaced with completely insane use of my favorite scientific tropes. Logopolis and Ghost Light are firmly in that category; The Pirate Planet ends up there in its third and fourth episodes.

The new series hasn't really gone there yet; its joys are different--its very best stories are virtuosic tales like The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances or Blink, where a large part of the attraction is watching the well-oiled plot machine click along, in a way the old show never really managed. I guess RTD himself actually comes closest to the old crazy appeal in his better stories like End of the World and Gridlock, but playing with the intellectual content is not really what he's interested in there.

[aderack.livejournal.com]

Have you seen City of Death? I guess anything Douglas Adams wrote probably can be classed as "intellectually cracktastic". That and Pirate Planet make fun bookends, though. Whereas Pirate Planet is often simply bonkers, City of Death is more characterized by its all-encompassing drollness.

Regarding Inferno, I think it's actually that dissonance between its Very Serious tone and the downright weirdness of the whole premise (Eyepatch World plus Green Werewolves -- sounds like a Russel T Davies laundry list in the making). It all helps to create a sort of dreamy creepyness at times. It's almost like Eyepatch World is a four-episode-long nightmare, that, when the Doctor returns to Earth 1, then turns out to be real! I guess I'm just really sensitive to the sinisterly surreal.

The sideways scuttling, terrified expressions, and weird radiophonic noises of the half-transformed Primords -- especially in the film segments, way up on top of the industrial forest -- is profoundly disturbing to me. It's the kind of thing that would have traumatized me if I'd seen it when I was young.

As you sort of note, it's curious the writers and script editors most responsible for the intellectual zaniness are usually so derided amongst fandom. It's great that the famous Douglas Adams was involved with the show, but why couldn't he have taken it seriously? Seriously, Bidmead, what the hell was that all about? And Cartmel, you pretentious piece of wank, you think you're better than us?

The best I can tell, the things that fans really respond to are bases under siege, where people spend whole episodes trying to figure out how to unlock doors.

You know that Cartmel is supposed to be involved with Torchwood 3? I wonder if this is sort of a back door to getting involved with the parent series again. That seems be why most people work on Torchwood.

[aderack.livejournal.com]

The scene that sticks in the head (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSJMF7HG0sc).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

City of Death is another one I keep missing the chance to see! I'll rectify that someday.

Large chunks of my classic Doctor Who viewing come from the very last syndication run on NHPTV in the years around the turn of the millennium, and for some reason I missed most of the 1970s serials during that run. So my Fourth Doctor familiarity has been spotty and filled in with video releases.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...so not only have I not seen City of Death, I haven't even seen The Deadly Assassin or Genesis of the Daleks, which I am given to understand are fairly pivotal.

(I might have a hard time judging Genesis fairly given that I've seen most of Davros's subsequent appearances, which seemed to take all of the menace out of the Daleks.)

[jwgh]

City of Death is great. You have to ignore the fact the Douglas Adams plundered bits of the plot for use in one of the Dirk Gently books, but that isn't too hard for me. The DVD has some interesting extras that describe how it came to be in its final form.

I haven't seen 'The Deadly Assassin' and it doesn't seem to be out on DVD yet. (I guess deadly is the best kind of assassin?) I've seen 'Genesis of the Daleks' but for some reason the novelization is what sticks in my mind, probably because I read it many many times when I was at an impressionable age.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

They didn't call the official parody "The Curse of Fatal Death" for nothing.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

..."The Deadly Assassin" seems to have been the serial in which the modern concept of the Time Lord civilization on Gallifrey was mostly introduced; later serials like "The Trial of a Time Lord" and even "The Sound of Drums" were drawing on that material.

[aderack.livejournal.com]

I actually quite like Deadly Assassin -- which I didn't expect, in that it's such a fan favorite. Yeah, it's where Bob Holmes... kind of did his major retcon of the Time Lords, fully transforming them from the impassive gods of The War Games to a chad of dusty, petty bureaucrats. (Is that the proper grouping term?) And then there's the bizarre reintroduction of the Master, and... just, all of this stuff which he just changed around at whim. Yet it works! There are a bunch of really strange and interesting moments in there.

And he invents the Matrix, about twenty-five years early.

[aderack.livejournal.com]

"The Sound of Drums" actually tries to smooth over a bit of the visual conflict at least, by putting the young Master in the robes of the War Games Time Lords (retconning them as acolyte robes), while the elder Time Lords wear the crusty old collars. I like the way Davies does this kind of thing where it fits in.

[aderack.livejournal.com]

Though City of Death is the only one Adams really wrote himself, he pretty much rewrote all of season 17 (as script editors tended to do, back then) in his own style. The result is some really dreadful by-the-numbers serials, elevated by irreverent and strange dialog. The Horns of Nimon should be one of the best examples of the worst of 1970s Doctor who, yet it's got such a twinkle in its eye.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...as for modern spinoffs, I actually think The Sarah Jane Adventures is a lot better than Torchwood. (Who'd have thought they would get another, better shot at "K9 and Company"?) I sometimes watch it with Sam.

I think that making the show kid-friendly is a better constraint to have than making it the opposite of kid-friendly.

[aderack.livejournal.com]

Torchwood 2 has, so far, mostly been a huge improvement over the first series. Even so, definitely yes. The last few episodes of Sarah Jane are amongst the best New Who stuff yet. Nice to see Sci-Fi getting jealous of BBCA and giving it a chance. Alongside... Battlestar Galactica. There's a crossover audience.

You hear that they're filming 24 more episodes of Sarah Jane this year? That's actually two series, that they're just stockpiling before the whole production team shift business.

Windex la!

[timchuma.livejournal.com]

Try glass cleaner on the DVD and wipe straight across. I have had DVDs straight from the case that had problems that I have got to work this way.