Doctor Who Story 045: The Mind Robber

STORY 045 : THE MIND ROBBER

A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Lose...

Isn't that a beautiful sight? I think it's the most beautiful sight in the history of Doctor Who. It comes at the end of Episode One of The Mind Robber, which I believe is one of the most inventive and surreal episodes in the entire history of Doctor Who (classic and NuWho), certainly the most surreal out of the five-part story. The story itself is quite clever, inventive, and unique of the entire run of the show, and The Mind Robber is if nothing else, the most surreal Doctor Who stories to come down the pipe in a long time.  I think I'm being too subtle: The Mind Robber may be the weirdest Doctor Who story ever, and certainly Episode One is the single most bizarre episode the series has ever had.   In short, The Mind Robber is just flat-out weird, but it's in its inventiveness, particularly in how it managed to incorporate production problems, that oddly lift The Mind Robber to being one of the trippiest stories in the Who canon.

Having barely escaped Dulkis, the Doctor (Patrick Troughton), and his Companions Jamie (Frazer Hines) and Zoe (Wendy Padbury) are taken out of reality itself.  They are being menaced by some unknown force that tempts them outside into nothingness.  Episode One culminates into the unthinkable: the TARDIS is destroyed, and the passengers scattered: the Doctor whisked away while a horrified Jamie and Zoe hold on to dear life to the TARDIS console.

After that, the group is separated.  The world they are in is a bizarre world, one filled with wordplay and puns.  A stranger comes across the Doctor, speaking curious phrases.  A group of children then harass the Doctor, at one point asking him what can one make out of a sword.  The Doctor figures,"S-W-O-R-D, you can make WORDS", and the children instantly cheer and out comes a dictionary.

However, not all is going so well.  As part of this mysterious world, Jamie's face has been altered to be a puzzle.  The Doctor attempts to put it together but gets it wrong, coming up with a new Jamie (Hamish Wilson).  The Doctor and Jamie II continue searching for Zoe, who had fallen after entering a castle.  To get her out, the Doctor and Jamie are presented a riddle of sorts.  They come up to the same door Zoe had walked across, but find that it's painted.

A puzzled Jamie asks how this is possible.  "When is a door not a door?" he says.  The Doctor quickly figures...a door is not a door when it's a-jar, and instantly we see Zoe is trapped within a jar, but is equally confused to find Jamie II rather than her Jamie.  This world, they discover, is one where words are literally all around them: they are trapped within a forest of proverbs (a literal Book of Proverbs, so to speak).

Eventually, the Doctor, Zoe, and Jamies II and I (the Doctor getting another crack at putting him together and getting it right) find that this world with characters like Gulliver (Bernard Horsfall), Rapunzel (Christine Pirie) and toy soldiers is ruled over by The Master of The Land of Fiction (Emrys Jones).  He is a writer from Earth who was spirited away to this world, where he has continued to create.  However, he won't last forever, and believes the Doctor will make a perfect replacement.  The Doctor refuses, and Jamie and Zoe binds them in a book...literally.

Using his wits, some characters of his own, including one from Zoe's youth, the comic strip character the Karkus (Christopher Robbie), the Doctor is able to overwhelm the computer, free the writer, and we end The Mind Robber with the TARDIS restored but unsure of whether everyone would be.

As I rewatched The Mind Robber, I was continuously amazed at not just how well the story holds up or even at how clever and creative it was (although I was by all that).  What really impressed me was that The Mind Robber's production crew managed to incorporate every difficulty they faced and seamless place it in the story.

Gratuitous Shot...

The first problem The Mind Robber faced was the addition of a fifth episode.  The previous story was intended to have six episodes, but it was becoming so muddled and boring that a whole episode was cut.  That left a gap that had to be filled in.  Derrick Sherwin, the script editor, was basically forced to put an episode together at the last minute, but given the overall weird nature of The Mind Robber, the viewer never notices that Episode One was never part of the overall serial.

The inclusion of a fifth episode also forced the production crew to keep things as low-cost as possible.  Again, The Mind Robber accomplishes great work: the bizarre goings-on, coupled with great acting by the three principals (and great screaming from Padbury) heightens the weirdness and surrealism of Episode One.  The culmination of that episode is seeing the TARDIS broken up and the crew holding on for dear life, and everything building up to this shocking cliffhanger (one of the best in Who's history) flows brilliantly from what came before.

Once we get into Peter Ling's story proper, it becomes a witty satire of the difficulties of continuously writing stories and commentary on how literary creations, once off the page, do literally take on a life of their own.  As I stated earlier, The Mind Robber has a great deal of wit with the use of puns and fictional characters and continuous bits of wit and whimsy (such as having a forest made out of letters). 

However, Ling has to be given enormous credit in how he is able to tie in all the unexplained weirdness into a logical story.  Almost every part of The Mind Robber works and makes sense, even when it might not have.

One of the best things to help The Mind Robber is when Frazer Hines was suddenly taken with chickenpox and forced to withdraw for a week.  How could one explain Jamie's disappearance from an episode when it had been written months earlier to include him?  Characters disappearing from Doctor Who was nothing new (whenever one of the cast was scheduled to take a holiday they had simply been written out of that particular episode) but in this case, Jamie HAD to be involved. 

Ling and director David Maloney (who was making his Who directing debut but would go on to helm other stories, among them some that are considered the best of the series) came up with another great idea.  Since this mysterious universe was one of puzzles and puns, why not have Jamie disintegrate and the Doctor forced to put him together again?  This concept not only blended in brilliantly but allowed for a quick recasting of Jamie without interrupting the flow.

Hamish Wilson obviously did not look or sound like Frazer Hines, but the story works so well, and Wilson is so good, that we soon forget that while we're not watching the traditional Jamie we are watching THE Jamie.  In fact, when Hines returns in Episode Three, it did make me sad to see Jamie II go.  I wonder what would have happened if Wilson had been allowed to stay on, not permanently in the role of Jamie, but at least for one or two more episodes.  No disrespect to Hines, but Wilson did a marvelous job filling in, and it seems almost a shame to see him go. 

It is understandable that Hines would return as soon as he was well, but Wilson was brilliant in his one episode to where we were not bothered or even took great notice that the regular Jamie wasn't there.  As far as the viewer was concerned, given the bizarre nature of The Mind Robber, for all intents and purposes Jamie was very much with us. 

Troughton and Padbury are equally in fine form, the Doctor mixing his trademark humor with moments of calm and fear.  As far as Padbury, her Zoe is bright but now we are allowed moments where she is genuinely frightened, and also she does have one of the best screams of a Who Girl, especially in this scene...

It's Iconic...

Jones' performance of The Master (not to be confused with the Time Lord known as The Master...he comes much later) was in turn comic and menacing, but appropriately so.  We saw that he wasn't evil, but as much trapped in the machine as its owner. 

Side note: has anyone else gotten the sense that The Mind Robber had elements which would later appear in The Matrix (the idea of a giant machine controlling people's minds for domination)?  Just a thought.

The special effects don't look dated and are actually still a bit frightening, in particular when Medusa comes to life in Episode Three.  Her snakes and her coming towards Zoe and the Doctor is still remarkably effective and beautifully shot, as are the scenes in Episode One when we see all the weird happenings to Zoe and Jamie.

One might have noticed I wrote that almost every part of The Mind Robber works, but some things, if one thinks about them logically, don't make sense.  For example, how could this Master of the Land possibly know about a cartoon strip written long after his time (unless the computer controlling him fed him information from all time)?  Also, the actual source of the writer's control was very vague and its idea of using the writer and the Doctor's mind to conquer Earth seemed almost to be put there to give a touch of science-fiction to a story that didn't need it.  The Computer seems almost shoehorned in to give a reason for the mayhem.

Now, while I found the Karkus a bit exaggerated (with the inexplicable German accent not helping matters), I never felt the story dragged and didn't notice that the episodes were growing shorter (Episode Five clocks in at 18 minutes, the shortest in Doctor Who's history...would that Closing Time have been as short or shorter, but I digress).  The overall story flows so well that I never noticed issues of length, and the cliffhanger into the next story similarly flows so well that it does want us to know what happens next.

Padbury has expressed discontent over the fight sequence between her and the Karkus, and while it's not the best fight scene I've seen it hardly is as bad as Padbury believes.

Finally, a little issue I had with The Master is that the habit of his voice shifting from pleasant to harsh is far too reminiscent of The Abominable Snowmen: how Padmasambhava (the disguise for the Great Intelligence) similarly shifted from kindly to evil at the turn of a dime.  I doubt it was intentional, but it is similar.

Minus those little bits,  The Mind Robber is one of the wittiest Doctor Who stories, one that delved into the surreal possibilities of a show that was not bound to a particular time or place (or even reality itself).  It was a great experiment that succeeded, but which alas they rarely if ever went back to.  The series post-Mind Robber has pretty much stayed in science-fiction with occasional jabs at historic or history-based stories.  I don't think it has gone and dealt with the fantasy elements the show lends itself too.  All more the pity, as even now the possibilities that The Mind Robber explored and accomplished are not being explored.  Still, fortunately for us The Mind Robber still exists in its entirety, so some great things did survive.       

This would be the perfect time and place to mark the best end to a Doctor Who review...

10/10

Next Story: The Invasion

The Real Man on the Moon

1930-2012

In Day of the Moon Part 2 (Day of the Moon), the defeat of the Silence was greatly due to the world's attention being focused on the lunar landing.  Today at Gallifrey Exile, we pay tribute to the first man to ever walk on the Moon: Neil Armstrong.

Armstrong can truly be called a hero because he did not seek fame or fortune, and even when it came to him, he kept true to himself.  It is highly unlikely that Armstrong would ever have agreed to appear in Transformers: Dark of the Moon (unlike his more bon vivant Apollo 11 companion Buzz Aldrin) where the latter legitimized the bizarre plot of the film. 

Instead, Armstrong kept to himself, rarely granting interviews and continuing to work and live away from the spotlight.  He managed a remarkable feat, and I don't mean being the first human to ever walk on the Moon.  Armstrong remained famous throughout his entire life, but never yielded to fame.  He kept his privacy.  He never felt the need to share his views on the world or things outside of it.

The curious thing is that Americans universally respected his right to stay in the shadows.  If the moon landing had happened today, one would imagine the constant barrage of the paparazzi would be around him.  His every move would be chronicled: what he ate, what he wore, what he thought, whom he slept with.

Today, people both important and not willingly present themselves for the world to 'marvel' at (although I hold people merely laugh at them).  Ryan Lochte won gold and silver medals in London, and now has got it into his water-soaked head that he can be an actor and fashion designer.  I imagine he will force his attention on the world for some time, even though the world (and in particular the United States) really doesn't care about Mr. Lochte.  We don't even need to go over the sad story of both the Kardashian/Jenner clan and those who are 'fans' of vapid people who have done nothing to earn their notoriety save for allowing cameras to capture every moment (public and private) for others to see.

All those who have received fame for vulgarity and foolish behavior provide a clean porn for the rest of us: they get their jollies from seeing people humiliate themselves for our entertainment.

That was not the case with Neil Armstrong.  He kept his clothes on, and kept to himself.  Once he finished his job, he went home.  He was no Charles Foster Kane, reclusively hiding in his own Xanadu.  Armstrong just had a proper perspective on life: there is more to life than making history.  We should take this as Armstrong's final example: once we have accomplished a great thing, be it winning a gold medal or the lottery or discovering a new cure, one should say, 'Thank you for your kind words and applause, but I've got a life outside the spotlight and I'm going back to it.'

Of course, he accomplished a great thing for himself and for his country, but Armstrong always kept his dignity, and Americans responded by according him all due respect while moving on with the country's business.  Both the nation and the man were content to be consigned to history books.

Doctor Who is about a man who travels through time and space.  Neil Armstrong is a man who has travelled through space, who walked on the moon, and who, once returned to Earth, kept himself there both physically and mentally.  Now, Neil Armstrong is free to touch the stars once more.

Respectfully dimming the Eye of Harmony to a true icon: Neil Armstrong.   

In Memoriam

Doctor Who Story 044: The Dominators

STORY 044: THE DOMINATORS

A Bit Quarky For Our Tastes...

One must never, ever, try to write a Doctor Who story with merchandising in mind.  The sad saga of the Cybermen comes to mind.  Now, the Cybermen on their own work quite well, but almost always whenever their 'pets'/marketing prop the Cybermats pop up, in particular in such stories as Revenge of the Cybermen or Closing Time, it looks cheap and idiotic (and in the case of the latter, having the story partially take place in a toy shop makes it all the more obscene).  The Dominators, likewise, faces similar issues.  On greater inspection, The Dominators has some potential good ideas behind it.  If only it weren't for those damn Quarks...

The Doctor (Patrick Troughton) and his Companions Jamie (Frazer Hines) and straight from the previous story The Wheel in Space, Zoe Hariot (Wendy Padbury), arrive on the planet Dulkis.  This world, the Doctor insists, will make for a nice holiday.  It's a peaceful planet where war has been outlawed and all their weapons are in a museum on an island.  The island they've landed on was the location of a nuclear test, and students are taken there every year as a warning against the evils of war. 

Of course, this being Doctor Who (pre-River Song) Dulkis obviously is not a the planet the Doctor cracks it up to be.  There is a great mystery involving the island: as the site of the nuclear test it should be highly radioactive, but when the TARDIS crew, the annual scientific Dulcian crew and renegade Dulcians arrive, they are astounded to find there is none.  What could be the cause of radioactivity suddenly disappearing?

The answer is pretty obvious: they are the titled Dominators, Conquerors of Ten Galaxies, who now have their eyes set on Dulkis, or rather, this island.  The radioactivity and thin crust of the island is perfect for their nefarious scheme.  First, we've got to get through a great deal of plot exposition.

First, we learn that the Dulcians are now complete pacifists and would not take arms or fight under any circumstances.  Second, they have great pride in their lack of curiosity.  Only the Director's son Cully (Arthur Cox) shows any curiosity or imagination.  In fact, it was his scheme to ferry people for secret expeditions to the island that brought about the discovery of the Dominators and their robots, the Quarks.  Third, being pacifists the Dulcian leadership simply does not know how to handle the growing crisis (which they've spent at least three out of the five episodes refusing to even consider possible because they haven't seen the Dominators or Quarks).  Fourth, we know that the Dominators are the ones taking the radioactivity as part of a refueling to help their fleet conquer yet another galaxy.

While they think of using the Dulcians as slave labor, they find that they are remarkably passive and weak, so they decide to destroy their world.  With Jamie and Cully leading attacks on the Quarks, the Doctor finds a way to neutralize them and save Dulkis.  Unfortunately, his method involves creating volcanic eruptions, and the TARDIS and its crew are right down the lava's route...

As I stated, The Dominators has some good ideas kicking around it, primarily the conflict that should occur when a pacifist society comes upon an aggressive force.  In Episode Three the Director of Emergencies, Tensa (Brian Cant) makes a good point: there are three choices the Dulcians can take.  THey can fight, they can submit, or they can flee.  IF this concept had been explored, The Dominators might have been saved. 

The story by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln (under the pseudonym of Norman Ashby) could have been taken in the direction of what happens in and to a society that is so passive that it no longer can fight; the pseudonym was adopted after script editor Derrick Sherwin and producer Peter Bryant made one too many changes to The Dominators for Haisman and Lincoln's liking.  We can't judge how good or bad their original concept for The Dominators was.  We can only judge what we have, and as such we have some really bad results of too many people interfering.    

However, this idea of the pacifists taking a stand is something we've seen before.  Curiously, this was explored in of all places Skaro, the world of the Daleks.  Like the Dulcians, the Thals were a remarkably peaceful people, but in The Daleks, at least by the end they actually found that their pacifism was in itself the main weapon against them and that they had to fight if they wished to survive.  The Dulcians, on the other hand, were so pathetic both in their response to the crisis and in their inability to think of a way out that one almost thinks the Dominators would be doing them a favor.  The Dulcians in short don't seem to mind that they are either the Dominators' prisoners or slaves.  They really don't have any real reactions to it.

It might be because they have learned to accept facts as the truth (the Dominators are taking over, it's a fact, it must be the truth) but since they have no imagination about the worlds outside their own or for their own survival one wonders why anyone (audience included) should care that they have been overtaken?

As a side note, while the Dulcians were being used to move rocks around, I kept wondering why they didn't simply chuck those rocks at the inept Quarks and run away?  It's not like the Quarks were in any position to run after them, and those rocks could have simply knocked them out.  Silly Dulcians...

Conversely, the Dominators themselves (of which we see only two) act as if they managed to conquer ten galaxies merely by stomping about and boring their subjects into submission.  Navigator Rago (Ronald Allen) and Probationer Toba (Kenneth Ives) spend all five episodes fighting with each other (Toba always destroying things, Rago telling him he's stupid for doing such things and going on about the importance of drilling) that one wonders exactly why the Dominators would send these two morons to lead the conquest of Dulkis.

Going on this topic, one wonders just how stupid the Dominators are.  Apparently, their intense study of the planet only focused on that one island on Dulkis.  Apparently, they were unaware that there was a whole other part full of people that were so docile they were useless as slaves.  One would have thought it might have been a good idea to conquer the capital and, once whatever opposition was suppressed, move on to take the radioactivity.  That, however, was not the Dominator way.  The Dominator way was to basically ignore the fact that beyond the island was an entire civilization that might, in theory, cause them problems. 

These Dominators really are incredibly stupid.

Not as stupid as the Quarks.  If the Dulcians are the pale versions of the Thals, the Quarks are the low-rent version of the Daleks.   Everything about them is stupid: their voices (supplied by Sheila Grant) make them curiously both sometimes unintelligible and sound like someone is forcing a little girl to speak into a voice modulator.  Their method of recharging is apparently is to give themselves hugs.  Whenever their arms go out to destroy something, you think how odd that one arm is higher than the other.  You also wonder how they manage to keep their balance.

You can't make a menace out of something cuddly, and the Quarks are if nothing else almost cute.  The fact that The Dominators tries so hard to make them dangerous makes them even more endearing.  Thoroughly useless and stupid as monsters, but endearing nonetheless. 

The Dominators is almost doomed from the beginning because Episode One gives so much exposionary dialogue delivered in an unrealistic manner that one never focuses on the story it's trying to tell.  Instead, we're crammed with so much backstory by the characters telling each other things they should already know (but which is being told for our benefit) that it all rings false.  After that, one is waiting to see which of the three groups (the Dominators, the Dulcians, or the Quarks) will be the most inept. 

If all that weren't enough to doom The Dominators, Martin Baugh's costumes brought the whole project down into being a sheer disaster.  The costumes for the Dulcians looked like something Benny Hill would have rejected as too silly.  Especially awful was Cully's outfit, which looked like a little girl's poor attempt at taking her mother's curtains and making a dress out of it.  Poor Cully was running around in a curtain, trying to defeat these cuddly creatures.

As if to show the Dominators themselves to be the mirror opposites of the Dulcians, they stomp about with these ENORMOUS shoulder pads that would have made Joan Crawford jealous, and these trousers that seemed to be made out of paper-mache.  The whole thing was embarrassing and only leads to unintentional laughter. 

One thing that The Dominators touches on is that the Dulcians have "great brains and two hearts".  Granted, the idea that The Doctor and the Time Lords also have two hearts wasn't established when The Dominators was released, but given that the binary coronary system is now established canon, it leaves us with an intriguing question...

Are the Dulcians distant relations to the Time Lords?  Both are suppose to be great brains, and both have two hearts.  Is it mere coincidence that both civilizations eventually became atrophied?   This is something that might be explored in fan-fiction, but it is a curious thing, no?

Morris Barry did one of the worst directing jobs on Doctor Who, with the Dominators being one-note and the Dulcians likewise showing no evolution or interest.  Everyone looked like they were bored with The Dominators, not believing a moment of it. 

The Dominators have villains that weren't interesting, monsters that were more laughable than menacing,  beings who proved hopelessly inept at any action pro or con, and at five episodes it was about two too long.  The original idea was to make this another six episode story, but fortunately there was a snap decision to cut it down by one.  Even with the oddly-numbered amount of episodes The Dominators is too long and if not one of the worst Second Doctor stories, perhaps one of the worst Doctor Who stories, period. 

In short, the only thing The Dominators will ever dominate is the Worst-Of Doctor Who Lists.

Damn Stupid Things...

2/10

Next Story: The Mind Robber

Doctor Who Story 041: The Web of Fear

STORY 041: THE WEB OF FEAR

Fear Factor...

I have long wondered whether the two stories featuring the Yeti (The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear) are worth mourning.  If you don't count their cameo in The Five Doctors, we have a monster who was popular enough for a return engagement but which have no complete stories in existence.  We do have some pluses with The Web of Fear, in particular the first appearance of then-Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart, who would go on to be a vital part of the Doctor Who mythos.  Judging from Episode One of The Web of Fear (the only one known to exist), I think it is probably a better story than the first Yeti one, although at six episodes maybe an episode too long.

It's been thirty years since the events of The Abominable Snowmen, and Professor Travers (Jack Watling) is now a little soft in the head.  He knows that the Yeti he's brought with him is now alive again, but he cannot convince anyone of this.  Meanwhile, the Doctor and his Companions Victoria Waterfield (Deborah Watling) and Jamie McCrimmon (Frazer Hines) are having troubles of their own.  After barely having survived an attempt to kill them by Salamander from the previous story The Enemy of the World, they again barely escape being trapped within a mysterious web.  They do manage to land on Earth, and eventually find they are in the London Underground (which is not a political movement). 

There is evil afoot: the city is eerily silent and bodies are encased in a mysterious web. 

Meanwhile, Professor Travers and his daughter Anne (Tina Packer) are working, somewhat reluctantly, with the Army to stop this growing menace.  Victoria, Jamie, and the Doctor wonder about wire being laid out on the subway tracks, and they split up: the Companions following the soldiers laying down the wires, the Doctor in the other direction.  Soon, a familiar and frightening beeping grows.  Episode One ends with Victoria and Jamie captured (thanks to Victoria's Victorian screaming at coming across cobwebs) and the Doctor apparently getting some kind of jolt from explosives that the Yeti had sprayed with their web-making device.

The rest of the six-part story involves the Great Intelligence making a comeback.  All this murder and mayhem was all a trap to capture the Doctor for a most nefarious plan.  He would capture the Doctor and use his brilliant mind to take over the known universes.  The G.I. even has a little help from a mysterious traitor (who is really one of the soldiers being possessed by the Great Intelligence).  However, the Doctor is able to defeat, albeit not completely, the G.I. and his Yeti buddies thanks to the help of one Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart...

In the great scheme of things, I think having a six-part story on the heels of not one, not two, but THREE six-part stories (The Enemy of the World and the stories immediately preceding it, The Ice Warriors and The Abominable Snowmen) might have simply been too much to ask of audiences.  I have never believed that The Abominable Snowmen warranted such a long story, and while I think The Ice Warriors and The Enemy of the World might have done better at such a punishing length that's still a bit iffy.  There are certain factors to consider.

For example, The Ice Warriors introduced one of the better villains/monsters of Doctor Who, and The Enemy of the World had both political intrigue and a great turn by Patrick Troughton.  The Web of Fear only has the Yeti, who granted appear better and more menacing here than in their debut (in other words, they don't appear cute and cuddly like last time) are still not one of the better monsters in the canon.

From the vantage point of someone who has only seen the surviving episode, I think it has quite a few things going for it.  First, it has a great dramatic reappearance of both the Yeti and the Professor, so we know almost from the start that something wicked this way comes.

On that point, I think it might have been better if we had expanded on having the Yeti brought back to life rather than just jump in.  One might think I was talking out of both sides of my mouth: complaining about the story's length while asking that one aspect be expanded.  No, that's not what I'm saying.  Rather, I'm saying that in that individual episode the mystery of whether or not Travers was really crazy could have been worked out better (even though logically we know he isn't). 

It might be in the intrigue of who is the 'traitor' that we might have cut down. 

Second, we are allowed a darker story.  I was genuinely surprised at how menacing, even violent the opening scene with the Yeti was.  It is a high credit to Douglas Camfield (one of the better Who directors over its long and illustrious pre-River Song history) that he build up such quietly intense scenes with an economy of lighting, music (using selections from Bela Bartok's The Miraculous Mandolin just like they were used in The Enemy of the World). 

Third, we have the introduction of the character who would be best known as the Brig.  Sadly, Nicholas Courtney's first appearance as his soon-to-become fabled character is lost save for the audio, but it must have been a sign of how successful his character was that he was brought back in the future story The Invasion, and then continue growing and growing until he was basically a co-star, in particular during the Pertwee era.

Allow me a small digression.  Here is where the genius of the classic Who trumps the NuWho.  Certain characters, like Professor Travers and in particular Colonel, later Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, were allowed to grow and given time to build up a fan base.  They were eased into the general thread (no pun intended) of Doctor Who.  This isn't the case with NuWho.  You have characters like Captain Jack Harkness almost given Icon Status in the DEBUTS! 

The nadir of this is of course, with my bete noir, one River Song.  In her first story, Forest of the Dead Parts 1 & 2 (Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead), we are all but told that she will become a GIGANTIC part of the Doctor Who mythos. 

Steven Moffat afterwards appeared obsessed with including her in as many stories as he could, and worse, making HER the center of the story or whole series/season.  Things started revolving around her, not around the Doctor.  He was becoming a supporting character in his own show, having to cede control to a character who could only say, "Hello, Sweetie," and "Spoilers."  When we find that River Song herself is Time Lord-like (or thanks to having been conceived in the TARDIS, had Time Lord DNA--as idiotic an idea as ever to come from the mind of a supposed adult), right down to being able to regenerate, it became clear to me that River Song was being hammered into being this triumphant and vital Doctor Who character with whom the show simply could not survive.

When she regenerated in the two-part story I call River's Secret Parts 1 & 2 (A Good Man Goes to War/Let's Kill Hitler), I believe future generations will say that was the moment River Song (formerly known as Doctor Who) officially jumped the shark.  It was becoming more about River than it was about the Doctor, and when a small character now takes center stage over the title character, then it all but is over. 

Sorry about the digression, but it came to me the difference between a character that started out small and grew naturally in importance to where he becomes synonymous with Doctor Who and another that from the start was declared a work of genius despite all evidence to the contrary. 

Now, where was I?

The Web of Fear has some flaws overall.  The red herring of the cowardly journalist being the traitor I think is too easy to dismiss (although I give co-writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln for the wit in Episode Six, where the Doctor is appalled at the idea of being part of a television series) and Jack Watling's twittering, tottering old man might today be a touch over-the-top.  Finally, one might wonder how he is The GREAT INTELLIGENCE if he keeps using the Yeti to work his nefarious scheme.

On the whole, while I don't think the story could have supported a circa three-hour running time (very few stories could), The Web of Fear is a marked improvement over their previous adventure.  Curiously, the door was always left open for a return, given that the Doctor didn't destroy him in the end.

Could the Yeti rise once more?     

Going further into this Doctor Who retrospective, the following story, Fury from the Deep, has no complete surviving episodes, and the one after that, The Wheel In Space, is incomplete.  However, that one also has a debut, this time of the Second Doctor's final companion, one Zoe Hariot.

Remember that face on the left.
You'll be seeing it again.

7/10

Next Story: The Wheel in Space       

Doctor Who Story 040: The Enemy of the World

STORY 040: THE ENEMY OF THE WORLD

The Lost World...

The Enemy of the World is a curious entry in the Doctor Who canon, certainly in the 2nd Doctor era.  This six-part story (of which only Episode 3 survives) doesn't have any alien monsters and doesn't have the Doctor or his Companions being attacked by outside forces.  Rather, it is all about political intrigue, and a chance to give Patrick Troughton a chance to show his extraordinary range as an actor.  This above everything else is what elevates The Enemy of the World, even in its incomplete status, as one Troughton's finest hours on Doctor Who.

The Doctor and his Companions, Jamie (Frazer Hines) and Victoria (Deborah Watling) have arrived on Earth, Australia to be exact.  There, they soon get swept up in the machinations of those attempting to stop Salamander (Troughton again) from taking over the world.  Salamander, to the world, is a benevolent figure: he has helped alleviate so much world famine he's been hailed as 'The Shopkeeper of the World'.  In truth, he is determined to rule the world.  Various world leaders who oppose Salamander have mysteriously died and been replaced by Salamander loyalists.

The Doctor is recruited, somewhat unwillingly, to impersonate Salamander to help expose him.  The chief architect of this plan is Giles Kent (Bill Kerr), who has survived to oppose Salamander but now is disgraced and exiled.  Eventually, we learn that the reason Salamander has come to the rescue in ecological crises is because he caused said ecological crises (a bit of a Munchhausen Syndrome), and he is defeated.  

David Whitaker's script is curiously one of the few six-part stories that, given the plot, could actually hold up over such a large story.  This is primarily because the story involves all those political twists and turns that make for great drama.  On the whole, I think The Enemy of the World might have lagged by Episode Five but given that other six-part stories past and future would definitely feel sluggish it is actually a positive turn.

In the surviving episode, Barry Letts' direction kept things moving quickly but not overwhelming the audience.  We not only have the menace and danger with schemes to assassinate high-ranking officials like Denes (George Pravda), Kent's last remaining ally in power or the actual killing of the weak-willed Salamander stooge Fedorin (David Nettheim), but also allows for moments of comedy.  The laughs come from the gruff Griffin the Chef (Reg Lye), who seems resigned to not have his cooking ever appreciated or having anyone (especially the inept Victoria) ever turning out a good meal.

In Episode Three, we have not only good acting and action, but a line so beautiful and brilliant that it might as well be the Doctor's philosophy of life and the foolishness of war.  In Kent's trailer just outside the border, two thugs ransack the place in part due to the search for Salamander's doppelganger.  The Doctor looks around in sadness at the results of their actions.

People spend all their time making nice things and other people come along and break them.

I don't think few other lines so brilliantly capture the Doctor's worldview.  Moreover, as an alien being himself we can see how an outside view of how humans can be so destructive is instructive as to how truth can be presented.   The Doctor speaks the truth: great energy is spent in creating things of beauty, and in a brief moment others with nefarious motives can come along to destroy them.

There are the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan.  They were created from the mountains and seen as a beautiful expression of faith, created over months if not years straight from the rocks.  In comes the Taliban, and in seconds the Buddhas were gone (although they are being reconstructed).

Then there is the fabled Amber Room.  The gold-laden salon of the Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg, Russia disappeared during the chaos of the Second World War, never to be seen again.

History sadly is littered by people who have destroyed great buildings and artwork and literature, from Savonarola's Bonfire of the Vanities in medieval Florence to the Nazi book-burning.  The Doctor was so right...people spend all their time making nice things and other people come along and break them.

Here is where The Enemy of the World really excels.  It is in Troughton's dual performances of Salamander and the Doctor.  In the only surviving episode, when we see Troughton, we can easily forget that it is the same actor.  Troughton's inflection and body movements as the Doctor is so different from his turn as Salamander that it becomes a master class in acting.

Granted, I understand Salamander is suppose to be Mexican, and as someone of Mexican descent I never got the impression he was Hispanic, not even with the make-up work.  Truth be told, it was never an issue.  I figured given his accent he was vaguely European, I figured Spaniard or even Hungarian, but never Latin.  One might have a better idea if other episodes are ever discovered, but on the whole I didn't think anything of it. 

In short, Troughton gives the best performance he's ever given on Doctor Who, primarily because he is allowed to play evil, and he never overdoes it in the evil department.  He's never hammy or over-the-top, but quietly menacing.

The Enemy of the World is a strong story that sadly we don't have.  It looks interesting and has both a strong pace and even little bit of humor that lifts some of the heaviness of the plot.  I still can't get away from the Doctor's line in Episode Three.

   
There's more than poetry in his turn of phrase...


7/10

Next Story: The Web of Fear

The House of Werewolf

STORY 173: TOOTH & CLAW

It's another history trip for The Doctor (David Tennant) and his Companion Rose Tyler (Billie Piper).  Oddly, while we are back to where we were the last time we encountered the Victorian Age, we have a few difference in Tooth & Claw which almost make us forget we've been this way before in The Unquiet Dead.  One: we arrive in Scotland rather than Wales.  Two: the Victorian we meet is not  Charles Dickens, but the Big Cheese herself.  Ladies and Gentlemen, Her Majesty Queen Victoria, Empress of India.  We get some monks, some werewolves, and some points of logic not addressed.

A group of monks arrive at a grand house.  They declare they wish to take the estate, and are natrually refused.  With that, they go all kung-fu Avatar: The Last Airbender on them and take it by force.  Meanwhile, the Doctor lands in what he thinks is 1979 (Vietnam, Margaret Thatcher, punk), but it really 1879.  We are near Balmoral, and the Doctor and Rose encounter Queen Victoria (Pauline Collins).  She has been diverted from her train and now must travel by carriage.  Where do they all end up in?

The owner of the estate, Sir Robert MacLeish (Derreck Riddel), has been coerced into helping these meddlesome monks to help with their nefarious scheme.  We quickly learn about the legend of a werewolf in these Scottish Highlands, and what the monks want: the throne and its occupant itself.  As is the case in Doctor Who, the Doctor and the Companion are split: Rose finds herself trapped with Lady Isobel (Michelle Duncan) and the staff (talk about Upstairs, Downstairs), while the Doctor is with Her Majesty, Sir Robert, and the Queen's guard, Captain Reynolds (James Sives).  The actual werewolf, kept within the cellar, is unleashed.  However, while the Doctor and Sir Robert go after the wolf, Her Majesty is more than capable of looking after herself.

Tooth & Claw then becomes a race from the werewolf, where Her Majesty must be protected, lest the Werewolf take a royal bite and create a new Empire of the Wolf.

Allow me to stop here to wonder what exactly writer Russell T Davies' obsession with wolves is.  Wasn't all last season about Bad Wolf, and now we get another wolf-based story?  Just a thought.

Of course, it isn't just Her Majesty that must be protected, but what she carries.  It is a very special object: the Kor-I-Noor Diamond, which Victoria's late husband Prince Albert had continously cut down.  The Doctor now realizes that all this was not a trap to ensnare Victoria, but really a trap within a trap: it was to capture the werewolf.  It's off again to Sir Robert's late father's laboratory in the attic.

Sir Robert atones for his treason by sacrificing himself to the werewolf to gain time for the Doctor.  That telescope he at first dismissed he now realizes was really a way of magnifying moonlight, and with that and the Kor-I-Noor, the werewolf is stopped and destroyed at the monster's request.

The Queen does not leave uninjured: she gains a mysterious scratch (the Doctor believing it came from the wolf, Her Majesty insisting it was a splinter from the door when the wolf broke in).  Victoria knights Sir Doctor of the Tardis and Dame Rose of Powell Estates, but then banishes them because, among other things, she is not amused.  However, after the chaos of the night previous (and after some speculation from the Doctor and Rose that the current House of Windsor are all werewolves--poor Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge so unaware...), Her Majesty decides to create a new institute to prepare and study extraterrestrial menaces, and names it after the home where all this took place...

TORCHWOOD.

If we go by the thought that Tooth & Claw was nothing more than a way to set up a Torchwood spin-off, then we would declare it a failure.  Fortunately, while I think Tooth & Claw was created in part to set up this mythology surrounding the Torchwood Institute and/or Captain Jack Harkness from Series One, I also think it was Davies' efforts to tell a good gothic story.  For the most part, it works.

One has to compliment Collins' Queen Victoria.  She isn't the dour, grim, dare I say, 'Victorian' person she could have been played as.  Instead, Collins plays her as an enthusiastic follower of ghost stories, at one point telling Sir Robert, "Tell us of monsters," with girlish but royally restraint glee.  Collins makes a return to Doctor Who, having been Samantha in the Second Doctor story The Faceless Ones, and if one compares her performances both in The Faceless Ones (what we have that exists) and Tooth & Claw we see Collins to be an actress of great range and talent. 

In a sadly smaller role, Riddell's Sir Robert was excellent as the conflicted but ultimately noble man.  It's a sad thing in Doctor Who: there is a penchant for killing off good, even great characters (Sir Robert, Sara Kingdom in The Daleks' Master Plan,  Lynda in Bad Wolf Parts 1 & 2,  Rita in The God Complex) but not only keeping absolutely lousy/useless characters alive but worse, making them COMPANIONS (Katarina, Adric, Rory "Pond", and the nadir of horrible characters, River Song)!  Yes, both Katarina and Adric were killed (there is debate as to whether Rory or River have "technically" been killed) but while Sara, Lynda, definitely Rita and maybe Sir Robert would all have made better Companions, I can say that Riddell's performance was quite good.

My issues with Tooth & Claw are less with the performances than they are with the points of logic in the story.  How did Sir Robert's father and Prince Albert know that the werewolf would eventually strike at the Queen at Torchwood?  How did they both know to have Her Majesty helpfully bring along the Kor-I-Noor with her (given that the diamond did not come to the Queen's possession until 1850, a mere twenty-nines years before the events in Tooth & Claw)?

I digress to say that the actual diamond used in Tooth & Claw looked quite fake and again, slightly historically inaccurate: it wasn't just this big rock laying about but located in a brooch Her Majesty wore.  Yes, little technicalities, but still...

Albert died in 1861.  I just wondered why Queen Victoria, still in mourning for her beloved Albert, would continue cutting the Kor-I-Noor down almost twenty years later. 

The biggest point of logic in Tooth & Claw comes from the hemophilia angle.  The story strongly suggests that Victoria later become a werewolf because in 1879 (when she was sixty years old) because of a scratch she receieved from the werewolf.

Allow me another digression; at this point all I can hear is Monty Python & The Holy Grail: "it's just a scratch". 

This, the Doctor theorizes, is how hemophilia spread among the various royal houses of Europe after Victoria & Albert's progeny married into them.  HOWEVER, if we go by that, wouldn't it stand to reason that they were infected by bites from this 60-year-old broad running all over Europe taking bites out of her own children and not by blood line due to their birth mother?

I don't buy that bit of logic that the hemophilia spread around the Houses of Bourbon, Hohenzollern or Romanov were a result of an old lady crossing the English Channel to howl at her descendants.  Furthermore, having watched and rewatched Tooth & Claw (even going so far as to go into slow motion), I saw no visual proof that the wolf actually laid a claw on Her Majesty, bringing the entire premise of the hemophilia angle down.

Finally, the entire subplot of getting Queen Victoria to say "We are not amused" was becoming tiresome and silly.  Moreover, there is no actual proof that Her Majesty actually said, "we are not amused."  The story I had heard was that she had seen a parody of herself and replied with royal understatement her displeasure.  However, there is nothing recorded that proves she actually uttered those immortal (and given some future Doctor Who stories from later in this season, amazing precient) words.  Given all the mayhem and chaos erupting in one night, all the focus on "we are not amused" was wasting time. 

I digress to wonder why, just after seeing Sir Richard devoured by the werewolf, Rose would have the wits to get a badly shaken Queen Empress to say such a silly phrase in order to win a bet. 

A few other things that bring Tooth & Claw down at the second viewing.  While Euros Lyn should be congratulated for keeping the pace brisk I thought there were a tad too many point-of-view shots from the werewolf's perspective.  I wondered where all the monks went after the wolf was defeated (and defeated in a way that didn't strike me as good--clever perhaps but also perhaps a bit too easy), and the entire Matrix-like opening made me wonder exactly where these Brethren of the Wolf were from (Britain or Japan).   There was a suggestion that these monks had turned from worship of God to that of the Wolf, but no real time for a follow-up.

Again, I wonder if having the old standard of four-part half-hour stories a la classic Doctor Who would have allowed for greater exploration. 

Ultimately, Russell T Davies crafted a good, but not great gothic horror story in Tooth & Claw.   It had good elements of the spooky house and the werewolf as dangerous rather than hunky (wonder whatever I am referring to),

but Queen Victoria didn't have a large role in the story that one would imagine could have done more with her.  I also did wonder about those points of logic that didn't make sense to me, and the idea that this is the genesis of the Captain Jack Cult and the Torchwood Fixation that I simply have been unable to get into also push Tooth & Claw down.  Still, not a bad episode, but not among the greats...    

She was very much amused...

6/10

Next Story: School Reunion

Doctor Who Story 038: The Abominable Snowmen

STORY 038:

THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMEN

Melted Snowmen...

Curiously, The Abominable Snowmen at times appears to both take things extremely seriously and not take things seriously at all.  On the one hand, you have a great deal of Buddhist mysticism wrapped up in a science-fiction show, with rather esoteric things as astrol planes and hidden mystics.  On the other hand, the title characters are not really monstrous-looking, but almost cuddly.  Granted, they can appear at times quite menacing when up close, but when we see them march up and down in unison, they end up looking rather cute.  There are some wonderful things in The Abominable Snowmen (in particular the art direction), and the one episode remaining has an intriguing set-up.  However, here is another case of whether six episodes were necessary to tell this story.

As close to a wrap-up as one can give considering only Episode 2 out of six survives, we have this.  The Doctor (Patrick Troughton) and his Companions Jamie (Frazer Hines) and Victoria (Deborah Watling) have arrived in Tibet, where the Doctor expects a warm greeting from the monks at the nearby Buddhist monastery, in particular because he is bringing back an ancient holy relic that he has kept for safekeeping (exactly safekeeping for what, I'm not sure).  Instead, the monks believe they are responsible for making the Yeti (or Abominable Snowmen) into aggressive beings rather than the shy monsters they normally are.

There's evil at work, and the monks, along with Professor Henry Travers (Jack Watling) believe the trio are a danger.  Eventually, we learn that the Yeti we've been seeing are not the same Yeti we all know and love.  Rather, they are actually robots being controlled by who and why.  Things get even weirder when the Doctor learns that Padmasambhava, the old monk whom he was friends with is still very much alive despite it being a good two to three hundred years since last he visited.

Padmasambhava, along with the Yeti, are being controlled by an entity called The Great Intelligence, an alien which wants a living form to conquer the universes.  The Doctor manages to defeat the Great Intelligence by destroying the spheres that control the various Yeti, and his very old friend is finally able to die at last.  With the Ghanta returned and the Yeti/Great Intelligence defeated, the Doctor and his Companions leave.

As I stated earlier, The Abominable Snowmen has some beautiful art direction which captures the beauty of Buddhist art as well as making the sets look like an ancient monastery deep within the Tibetan mountains.  In the surviving episode, we can see the great care that was taken to make such an exotic locale believable, even beautiful.  The inner sanctum where Padmasambhava resides is spectacularly captured (as are some of the costumes ranging from the Doctor's fur coat to the monk's robes).

It's unfortunate that writers Mervin Haisman and Henry Lincoln didn't take the same care with the actual story.  Don't get me wrong: there are some brilliant ideas in The Abominable Snowmen (such as the shifting of Padmasambhava's voice from benevolent and sweet to malevolent and angry when speaking of the Doctor), and good moments of humor (as when the Doctor warns Victoria away from Jamie because "he has an idea").  My issue with The Abominable Snowmen is that it is built on things that don't quite hold together if one is not Buddhist.

For example, the Great Intelligence is able to capture Padmasambhava when the latter is travelling in an astral plane.  I'm not against Buddhists or their beliefs, but I don't accept people can travel outside their bodies only to be captured by evil entities.  It's almost like getting the plot for Insidious, which works in a horror film, not so much in science-fiction.  Further, after three hundred years tinkering with machines for his army, the best he could come up with are those cuddly little things?

The Ghanta, this object of mystery, appears to be a MacGuffin, that object that appears important but is really an excuse to get the ball rolling.  I think it would have been a good idea if the Ghanta were somehow highly important to the Great Intelligence and his plans, or even to Travers.

Finally, in what I consider a flaw to The Abominable Snowmen (besides the rather cuddly, roly-poly monsters...not unlike Craig Owens) is that six episodes simply appears too long to keep the mystery going.  Very rarely have I found such a long story to keep up interest.  There have been a few (mostly the Dalek stories) but whenever we face some sort of alien that asks us to continue for such a long period of time, we feel a certain drag.  I don't know whether The Abominable Snowmen would have kept my interest, but I am leaning towards "no".

Again, this isn't to say that director Garald Blake didn't have good things within it.  The performances were all quite good, from David Spenser's innocent and devout monk Thomni to Norman Jones' belligerent Krihsong.  I wasn't too thrilled with Jack Watling's Professor Travers, thinking he was a bit too tough and not a particularly bright scientist.  However, given that we have only one episode out of six I can't say whether it would have gotten better or worse.

On the whole, the surviving episode of The Abominable Snowmen creates a strong atmosphere and does leave you curious as to what happens next.  However, I don't know if the final payoff would have resulted in nirvana. 
 

Keeping the Faith for a Full Restoration.

5/10

Next Story: The Ice Warriors