doctor who – Page 27 – Movement Point

Doctor Who Project: Galaxy 4

August 4, 2023May 2, 2013 by Chris Baer

My dear young man, this isn’t a joyride! This is a scientific expedition.

Season breaks in Doctor Who give the writers a chance to step off of the teaser treadmill, as most stories end with a glimpse of the next story to come. So instead of catapulting the Doctor, Vicki, and Steven immediately into yet another perilous setting, the season three opener, “Galaxy 4” (Story Production Code T), by William Emms, starts with a tranquil scene. Vicki is cutting Steven’s hair—in the TARDIS control room, of course—while the Doctor putters around the console, handling what would appear to be another normal materialization. The overarching sense is that this form of time and space travel has become commonplace for the two companions, in an “If it’s Tuesday, it must be Skaro” sort of way.

Once the TARDIS doors open on an apparently lifeless planet, though, the action picks up with a pleasant pace and doesn’t stop for four episodes. No elaborate and detailed exposition here, as our travellers are captured and removed from the TARDIS and then captured again in record speed. After the rather plodding plot presentation in “The Time Meddler,” a bit of immediate action is not unwelcome.

Vicki christens their first captors, squat, apparently vision-less, dome-headed robots, as Chumblies. She’s frankly enamored of them and anthropomorphizes them. Who can blame her? Relative to the Daleks and the Mechanoids, we have soft, rounded robots, albeit with death rays. But then again, Vicki did have a pet Sand Monster before Susan killed it in cold blood, so her cute-meter might need some adjusting.

The Drahvin, emotionless female warriors, quickly replace the Chumblies as the villains in the piece, “rescuing” the Doctor and his companions from the robots. A space conflict between the Drahvin and the Rill, who control the Chumblies, resulted in both parties crashing on this unnamed planet, which will, according to the Rill, explode in “fourteen dawns.” Maaga, the leader of the Drahvin, does not trust the “disgusting” Rill, claiming that they shot her down and killed one of her soldiers, so she holds Vicki as a de facto hostage to force the Doctor to verify the claims. It turns out the Rill were wrong—the planet does not have fourteen dawns left. It has two.

Doctor Who Project: The Time Meddler

August 5, 2023February 7, 2013 by Chris Baer

What do you think it is, a space helmet for a cow?

To end Doctor Who‘s first season, the producers pulled out all the stops in a historical tour de force with a large cast and elaborate costumes aplenty. The second season finale proves equally remarkable, but not for any creatures or effects or epic tales. Rather, Dennis Spooner’s “The Time Meddler” (Story Production Code S) marks the first story where none of the original three companions are present, and we also finally begin to understand something of the Doctor’s backstory. For he is not alone. There’s another time traveller out there, from the same place as the Doctor, with his own TARDIS, a Mark IV, no less. He’s only known in the story as the Monk, but the Doctor knows him as…a Time Meddler.

Of these two remarkable aspects, perhaps the former is the more important, because the show has the confidence to move forward with the Doctor as the central character. Previously, Ian and Barbara played, if not equal roles to the Doctor’s, at least counterbalancing roles, serving as wise and careful adults who keep events from getting out of hand (mostly). They were the literal and figurative teachers supporting the show’s nominal educational mission. The success of “The Time Meddler” is to present a Doctor Who story that is fundamentally about the Doctor and the mythology surrounding him, and it succeeds quite well, arguably the best story of the second season.

“The Time Meddler” could not have been produced earlier in the show’s run, for it relies heavily on the notions of time travel that prior episodes, particularly the historicals, have established. Both the Doctor’s strong reluctance to alter history (“The Aztecs“) and his inadvertent and significant participation in its creation (“100,000 BC“, “The Romans“) inform “The Time Meddler,” as the Doctor must confront one of his own kind who revels in changing history, “disgusting” behavior according to the Doctor. The faults of the Doctor’s TARDIS, elaborated over the course of two seasons, play a role in the story, for the Monk has a far better one that actually works. Even the intentional anachronisms—the Monk makes breakfast with a toaster and electric frying pan in an 11th Century monastery, for instance—play against the established structure of the historical stories, where every last feathered headdress and torn jerkin is properly reproduced by the BBC’s prop department. This is, at last, a time travel story in historical clothing.

While the story does feature the far-too-typical splitting of the party (the Doctor is separated from Vicki and Steven for three of the four episodes) and the inevitable inaccessibility of the TARDIS (underwater thanks to the tides), the Doctor finally has a reason to intervene in events in a historical story beyond the mere desire to escape: he must preserve the timeline. This imperative gives the story a narrative weight that prior historical stories lacked.

And indeed, how could anyone not be mesmerized by a story that hinges on preventing the Norman Conquest of Britain in 1066 by sinking a Viking fleet using an atomic cannon mounted on a Northumbrian cliff…

Letter from a Time Traveller: Royal Mail to Issue Doctor Who Stamps

August 5, 2023December 27, 2012 by Chris Baer

Though it might be a poor use of a time machine, if given the keys to the TARDIS, I think I’d jump to March, 2013, to grab the Royal Mail’s planned Doctor Who stamps. As reported by the BBC, each of the eleven Doctors will receive a first class stamp, with various enemies on second class stamps. There’s also to be a first class stamp of the TARDIS itself.

The backgrounds for the stamps of the eleven Doctors draw from the opening titles sequences of their respective seasons and utilize the contemporaneous Doctor Who logo as well. As is typical, William Hartnell comes out looking classy as ever. (Poor Sylvester McCoy—that background does him few favors).

I’ll definitely be picking up a few sets of these when they arrive, though I do confess to a bit of curmudgeonly disappointment that the second class enemies are all drawn from the new series. Ood and Weeping Angels before the Ice Warriors and Daemons?

(Image via Royal Mail)

A Fresh Console for Christmas: New TARDIS Interior Revealed

August 6, 2023December 19, 2012 by Chris Baer

The BBC has unveiled our first glimpse at Doctor Who‘s revamped TARDIS control room, and it takes us away from the prior steampunk monstrosity back to a far more traditional look:

While I understood the prior control room as emphasizing the immense size of the TARDIS (and also providing lots of space for interesting camera angles and character positioning), this new look harkens back to consoles from earlier days with a more personal scale. The prior console took time to walk around, and the TARDIS felt like a ship rather than, well, a time machine. This is cozy without being cramped, and the lines are modern and eclectic at the same time.

Though it’s hard to tell from the photo, stairs seem to extend down behind Matt Smith, suggesting a lower deck where the Doctor can fiddle with the TARDIS to his hearts’ content. There are plenty of knobs and levers as well—the TARDIS should never have a touch-screen bridge along the lines of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The hexagonal motif in the walls also calls back to earlier incarnations of our favorite time machine.

A very promising new look here. Now let’s hope that the stories Moffat and crew tell in it are worthy of the revamp, because the first part of the most recent season left more than a bit to be desired.

(Image via BBC)

Doctor Who Project: The Chase

August 6, 2023November 15, 2012 by Chris Baer

Barbara, could I, ah, have your cardigan?

Terry Nation and his Daleks return to Doctor Who in “The Chase” (Story Production Code R), with their own time machine, ready to pursue our heroes through time and space with one aim: to exterminate. The possibilities are endless, the potential locales and eras limitless. And we wind up on a desert planet populated by fish people. And also on Earth three times. And then on a jungle planet with hungry fungi and truculent robots. By the end of the story, one mourns not so much for the departure of Barbara and Ian as for what could have been.

Much like an earlier Nation effort, “The Keys of Marinus,” “The Chase” bounces around from place to place, episode to episode, and as a result, far too much screen time is devoted to establishing the when and what of where the Doctor and his companions have arrived. This influx of exposition overwhelms any sense of anxiety about the Daleks who pursue them just minutes behind in the time and space vortex. And, of course, the intrepid travellers must conspire to get themselves separated from one another in each and every episode. That takes effort, drawing away from any depth of plot.

The action, such as it is, starts on the heels of “The Space Museum,” with the Doctor tuning in various moments in history on the Time-Space Visualizer he insisted on liberating from that eponymous institution. The Time-Space Visualizer is curiously heliocentric, with the names of the solar system’s planets around it, and indeed the entire story resounds with references to the Doctor as human, though likely an unintentional rather than prescriptive description. Shakespeare makes his first appearance in Doctor Who on the Visualizer, and the United States is referenced for the first time as well, as Ian requests a peek at Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address.

But then, in a fortuitous bit of channel surfing, the Daleks appear, chanting “TARDIS, TARDIS, TARDIS!” as they roll one after the other into their own time machine, ready to chase the Doctor and chums through time and space as revenge for the foiled invasion of Earth. They don’t seem overly concerned about the Doctor’s seeming destruction of their species on Skaro way back when, just the whole Earth thing. Because turning the Earth into a hollow spaceship to fly it around the galaxy was totally going to work.

Of course, our time travellers can’t just leave, because the party is split up on the desert planet Aridius, adding yet another lazy planet name to the Doctor Who canon. The fishy Aridians, whose planet was once water covered and who live in fear of octopus-like Mire Beasts, don’t seem at all surprised by the sudden appearance of the Doctor or the Daleks, who threaten to destroy the Aridian civilization if the Doctor and his companions are not handed over.

Thankfully, a Mire Beast breaks through a wall and eats an Aridian, allowing Vicki, Barbara, and the Doctor to escape and meet up with Ian, who has passed out from the first of two head-beatings in this story.

You Got Your Back to the Future in My Doctor Who

August 6, 2023September 1, 2012 by Chris Baer

Why, yes, indeed, that is Matt Smith, the Eleventh Doctor, getting out of Marty McFly’s DeLorean, or at least a close approximation thereof (one notes the lack of a flux capacitor).

Jill Pantozzi at TheMarySue.com captured this shot (and more!) of the cast alighting from DeLoreans at the recent premier of Season Seven of Doctor Who (well, actually, Season Thirty-three if you’re counting properly, Season Thirty-four if you count the Eighth Doctor’s TV movie, which may or may not be proper). Season Seven kicks off today in the UK and in the US.

This mash-up of Doctor Who with Back to the Future comes not too long after Matt Smith was spotted with an Omnitool from Mass Effect strapped to his wrist at San Diego Comic Con this summer. The Doctor certainly gets around, no matter what style time machine he uses.