rewatching – Page 17 – Movement Point

Doctor Who Project: The Ambassadors of Death

July 24, 2023November 10, 2016 by Chris Baer

What about reducing the g’s by mixing K and M3?

What if they held an invasion and nobody came? With “The Ambassadors of Death” (Series Production Code CCC), series regular writer David Whitaker provides an engaging answer to the recent profusion of alien invasion plots in Doctor Who by neatly subverting all expectations of how an alien invasion story should play out.

Comparisons between “The Ambassadors of Death” and its immediate predecessor, “Doctor Who and the Silurians,” cannot be avoided. We have aliens, to be sure, and the threat of invasion from beyond (or below) gets bandied about, but this time, the aliens actually do come in peace. While Malcolm Hulke toyed around with the idea in his story, Whitaker comes right out and finally says what the series has been suggesting for some time now: the real monsters are human beings and their foibles.

To Whitaker’s immense credit, and in keeping with the series’ long-standing tradition of concealing the monster as long as possible, the viewer doesn’t quite know what humans and which foibles are at fault until nearly the finish of the seven episode story. A tangled set of interwoven conspiracies develops around the mystery of the missing astronauts from Mars Probe Seven, and the cast of players seems immense at first. Will it be the bureaucratic pride of the civil servant, the simple greed of a cunning con man, the unbridled Promethean lust for knowledge of the foreign scientist? We’ve seen them all before. Instead, we find at the core of this story a sad tale of misplaced morality coupled to the human destructive impulse. All summed up with a swagger stick.

Doctor Who Project: Spearhead from Space

July 26, 2023September 8, 2016 by Chris Baer

My dear fellow, how nice to see you again.

Absence, they say, makes the heart grow fonder. Or hearts, perhaps, in the case of Doctor Who.

Six months elapsed from the end of Season Six to the beginning of Season Seven, making Jon Pertwee’s debut story as the Third Doctor, “Spearhead from Space” (Story Production Code AAA) by series regular Robert Holmes, a long awaited reunion for viewers indeed. And what a change they found when they tuned in. A new Doctor and the use of color footage, to be sure, plus a new companion in Caroline John’s Liz Shaw, but also a vigorous sense of confidence in the storytelling that manifests itself in a four episode story filled with fast pacing and dynamic directing by Derek Martinus. Never did the camera zoom in on people in various stages of horror quite so often as in this story. Shame the Doctor spends the first two episodes in bed, though.

And the cause of this extreme terror? A plastics factory run by aliens has been turning out plastic automatons, none of which are quite as terrifying as their usual line of work, plastic dolls. The establishing scenes in the factory, with conveyor belts lines with disembodied plastic baby heads, must surely count as some of the most disturbing in the series’ history.

The intended monsters in the story, the Autons, derive their menace from their nearness to human beings, humanoid without quite being human due to the slight angularity of facial features and the overall blankness in the visage. The effect harkens to the original, Mondasian Cybermen, whose obvious similarity to human beings causes a degree of ontological dread that the later versions simply lack. The Autons function quite similarly to Cybermen as well, lacking any affect or individuality and obeying the orders of a centralized hierarchy. And wouldn’t you know it, they want to conquer the Earth, too, only while wearing blue coveralls and cravats.

Doctor Who Project: Patrick Troughton Retrospective

July 24, 2023July 19, 2016 by Chris Baer

In many ways, Patrick Troughton is both the “missing” Doctor and the most important Doctor of them all.

When Patrick Troughton took over the role from William Hartnell in the famous dissolve shot at the end of “The Tenth Planet,” he proved that Doctor Who as a concept could last beyond the tenure of a single Doctor. A failure of the audience to embrace this change in actors—indeed, this change in the very nature of the character itself, from wizened curmudgeon to puckish raconteur—would have ended the series for all time. It is to Troughton’s credit that he succeeded quite resoundingly, becoming the Second Doctor, not the Final Doctor.

And yet, he’s nearly unknown to modern viewers of Doctor Who, perhaps remembered for his pipe flute and iconic showdown with the Cybermen on Telos but not recognized as the Doctor who fully advocated aggressive intervention when necessary to fight evil in all its guises, who allowed people to underestimate him (to their own chagrin and, often, peril), who managed to combine slapstick with seriousness. He’s merely that “other” black-and-white era Doctor, the one without the scarf or the car or the celery stick. It’s a status worth changing.

Doctor Who Project: The War Games

July 24, 2023July 4, 2016 by Chris Baer

I had every right to leave.

Doctor Who begins here. Or, perhaps more accurately, the Doctor begins here.

If “The Tomb of the Cybermen” provides the essential formula for what has come to be understood as a “proper” Doctor Who story, then Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke’s ten episode opus, “The War Games,” (Story Production Code ZZ) establishes the character of the Doctor for all time to come. For here, we learn that the Doctor is a Time Lord, and a renegade at that, on the run in a stolen TARDIS.

The Doctor’s people had been hinted at, if not named, back in Dennis Spooner’s “The Time Meddler,” with the Meddling Monk possessing a TARDIS of his own, and a sense of their prevailing ethos of non-interference comes through via the Monk’s counter-example. The Doctor expresses utter shock, on a moral level, not merely at the intended effects of the Monk’s mucking about with history but even more so at the very thought of any direct, intentional interference at all. “The War Games” explains why the Doctor feels that way, even as he is hoist upon his own interfering petard in the end.

The notion of the Doctor being called to task for his own interference could have been a story all its own; instead, Dicks and Hulke brilliantly weave the Doctor’s growing sense of dread at re-encountering the Time Lords throughout another story about the human propensity for war, with the Time Lords only appearing in the very final episode of the story and the season. It’s a reveal more powerful than any Dalek surfacing from the Thames or Cyberman punching through plastic, because this time, we don’t know if the Doctor will win.

Doctor Who Project: The Space Pirates

August 30, 2022June 2, 2016 by Chris Baer

Jumping galactic gobstoppers!

It’s sadly fitting that the last of Doctor Who‘s “missing episodes” stories happens to be one of its most visually ambitious to date. Robert Holmes’s “The Space Pirates” (Story Production Code YY) features extensive model work, with three well-differentiated types of spaceships on display both inside and out, not to mention an underground mining complex and a series of exploding space beacons. And of its six episodes, only one is known to exist.

That one episode, Episode Two, features nine model-centric telecine inserts according to the shooting script, quite on the high side, and it’s just as well we have all these shots of spaceship models drifting against a starless, all-black background, because the story itself, much like Holmes’ debut story, “The Krotons,” lacks the same degree of ambition. It’s not a bad story per se, but it doesn’t feel very much like a Doctor Who story, because, as has been the case for much of this season, the Doctor and his companions are not the most important characters.

Oh, the Doctor saves the day, of course, and it’s likely that many lives would have been lost had the TARDIS not materialized at random inside Space Beacon Alpha Four just when the eponymous pirates arrived to plunder it for its valuable argonite ore, but we don’t even see our time travelling heroes until more than ten minutes have elapsed, by which time the viewer has met a good half-dozen speaking characters, all of whom are engaged in prodigious info dumps on a scale not seen since “The Daleks’ Master Plan.” Even the Doctor’s coat of many objects cannot save Patrick Troughton from playing second fiddle to the only actor in the show to have ever challenged William Hartnell for fluffing lines: Gordon Gostelow as Milo Clancey. Think erratic Forty-niner miner with a muddled Wild West accent who somehow owns a decrepit interstellar ore freighter and you’re on the right track.

Doctor Who Project: The Seeds of Death

October 14, 2023May 1, 2016 by Chris Baer

Use the air conditioning!

Some wag must have put a classified ad into the Intergalactic Times, offering up one planet, sold as-is, slightly used and with annoying inhabitants who need to be exterminated, because Earth gets invaded quite often during Patrick Troughton’s tenure on Doctor Who. Season Six alone features three stories using the invasion of Earth as a plot device: “The Mind Robber,” “The Invasion,” and Brian Hayles’ sophomore effort with his Ice Warriors, “The Seeds of Death” (Story Production Code XX). To his credit, Brian Hayles creates, again, an interesting take on human culture and civilization, but he falls prey to the continued flattening of Doctor Who monster motives.

In our first encounter with the reptilian Martians, their leader, Varga, wants to get his ship, and his crew, back to Mars after centuries buried under a glacier. Though ruthless, Varga shows at least suggestions of character and cunning, with some hint of honor and duty in his otherwise sibilant menace. The leader of the Ice Warriors in “The Seeds of Death,” Slaar, comes across as nothing more than petulant and impulsive, killing a human key to his scheme and then throwing a hissy (sorry!) fit when, as is inevitable, the Doctor outwits his invasion plans.

Still, for a while, Slaar’s plans work quite well, as they hinge upon an isolated base (on the moon, of course) that contains the technological linchpin required for continued human survival. Rather than the Gravitron that the Cybermen sought as a prelude to invasion in “The Moonbase,” here the wonder technology is the Travelmat Relay, or T-Mat, for short. Using the moon as a relay station, T-Mat allows for near instant dematerialization and rematerialization between any two T-Mat cubicles on Earth. This transit technology has supplanted all other forms of travel, including space flight and ground vehicles, such that there’s (almost) no way to send help to the moon. With the lunar T-Mat relay knocked out of operation, human society begins to collapse, as all foodstuffs and medical supplies move via T-Mat. Eventually, a weakened Earth would be ripe for invasion.

But that’s not the plan. Instead, the Ice Warriors intend to send foam-filled fungal seeds to a few cold cities in the hopes that the foolish humans will open the T-Mat cubicles out of curiosity and let the fungal spores escape. Sadly, that actually works, too…