Mawdryn Undead

With its timey-wimey plot and almost total absence of violent death this could be a script by Steven Moffat although it would have to happen at twice the speed; be part of a hideously long drawn out story arc and see Turlough revealed as Tegan's son to make it truly Moffatesque. Oh and the sonic screwdriver would have to do something important somewhere.

As it is this is a JNT, Grimwade and Davison story so we're stuck with a more simple tale drawing on the complexity of time travel, the curse of immortality and the Brigadier's nervous breakdown.

This story is, of course, responsible for the whole UNIT dating debate. How can the Brigadier be teaching in a school in 1977 when all the hints of previous stories featuring UNIT & the Brig suggests they all happened in the 70s and 80s. A timey-wimey conundrum all of its own. This however is not the time or place for a discussion of that issue. Let us just carry on as if nothing has happened.

It is, of course, a wild coincidence that the Doctor should land at a public school where not only is one of their pupils a mysterious - and possibly alien - student but that at the same school the Doctor's old chum Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart is teaching mathematics. Part of this - the Turlough part - seems to be the Black Guardian's doing. The Brig's appearance does just seem to be a coincidence, which the Black Guardian overlooked.

This is the first of the 'Black Guardian' trilogy, which sees Valentine Dyall return. He's got a great voice, like Gieguld gargling with gravel and is suitably grumpy looking. However, the Guardian's tendency to go for dead birds as hats does make him slightly less difficult to take seriously. The Black Guardian appears to be trying to wreak his revenge on the Doctor and rounds up Turlough to do his dirty work. Guardian's cannot be seen to act directly so Turlough, upon the promise of being freed from Earth promises to kill the Doctor.

I like Turlough. He's a breath of fresh air as a companion: cowardly, devious, sneaky but with a smart intelligence and low animal cunning. He's played pretty well by Mark Strickson to, even if he does look a little old to be at school still. There's a mystery to Turlough that time will - hopefully - clear up (look it's a story arc...whoop!)

It is also wonderful to see Nicholas Courtney again after some time. His Brigadier is as much a part of Doctor Who as the TARDIS itself and it is nice to see him meet up with another Doctor, even if one of the Brigs doesn't quite remember. I reckon they should re-title this story The Two Brigadiers. Splendid chaps, both of them. Courtney gets to show a slightly more pained side of the Brigadier, which helps add an extra dimension to the character.

The villains of the piece are a gang of aliens, led by Mawdryn (played by one of my favourite Doctor Who guest stars David Collings.)

They stole a device from Gallifrey that they hoped would give them the power of regeneration. It has done, but without stability, and their fate seems to be to regenerate, degenerate, die and regenerate once more. Forever. Trapped on a ship going nowhere for eternity. An intergalactic gang of Flying Dutchmen. It's a fate worse than death and as a result, these aliens don't want the Earth, the galaxy or the universe under their power they just want to die and considering their form seems to include having throbbing spaghetti stuck firmly on their heads perhaps that isn't surprising.

Nyssa and Tegan aren't given a great deal to do in this story, except a lot of hanging about and fretting. They do get aged and then youthed. O and Nyssa, continuing a clothes related theme that seems to run through this season, is now in another new, more revealing outfit than the last.

I suppose this is natural when one of the main sub-plots in this story is the introduction of Turlough, which means that we're back to having three companions clogging up the TARDIS again, which is too many. This problem is made worse when one of them has a large back story to deal with. Turlough's deal with the Black Guardian is going to make him a difficult companion to write for full-stop. After all, if his raison d'etre is to kill the Doctor how do you prevent him from doing so if he's always with the Doctor.

Anyway the question will be is TARDIS big enough for four?

Whilst the story is a rather gentle one it is quite a good one. There's food for thought, a new interesting companion, the Brigadier's return - twice - and it is nice for the enemy to be fighting for something so 'ordinary' as the right to die.

Snakedance

Snakedance follows on from Kinda. The Mara, apparently destroyed by a circle of mirrors, has been tucked away in the back of Tegan's mind waiting for the right opportunity to return. When the Doctor finds that the TARDIS has arrived where it is not supposed to be and that this place turns out to be Manussa, former capital world of the Sumaran Empire alarm bells start to go off.

Unfortunately, Nyssa and the Doctor let Tegan slip through their fingers and all hell starts to break loose. Hell might be too strong a word for it for although the tension remains high throughout Snakedance and we know that the threat is real enough it is surprisingly uncynical and bloodless for an Eric Saward era Doctor Who story. Nobody actually dies, even though you constantly suspect they might do.

It has that same fable/fairy tale feel that Kinda has, unsurprisingly since it was written by the same writer, Christopher Bailey. Bailey's take on Doctor Who is very un-Doctor Who and I'm almost tempted to say perfectly suits Peter Davison's Doctor whose gentle, more philosophical Doctor works better with the material.

This has a great cast and some great performances. I suppose the most talked about is Martin Clunes's turn as Lon. This was apparently his first-ever television work and footage of him in that ridiculous outfit he wears in Episode Four haunts him to this day. He is excellent. The right combination of boredom, brattishness and arrogance. Lon's relationship with his mother, Tanha (Collete O'Neill) is well-played too. Unusually for Doctor Who it feels like a real relationship, even if the indulgent mother-spoilt son is something of a cliche in theory. They're bored, privileged and waiting for a rather tedious sounding old man to die. You could see Snakedance as a sort of anti-Hamlet. With Lon as Hamlet; Tanha as Gertrude and John Carson's Ambril as an archaeologically addicted Polonius. John Carson is excellent in the part.

Jonathan Morris as Chela, Brian Miller as Dugdale & Preston Lockwood as Dojjon all do excellent jobs in minor-ish roles. I particularly love Preston Lockwood in this. He just looks perfect for the part and has one of the most British actor-ish of names, which I adore. But I'm strange that way.

Sarah Sutton has much less to do in this story as the focus is on Janet Fielding as Tegan. Sutton has finally changed her outfit, for no really obvious reason except that JNT seemed determined to get the female assistants into fewer clothes with each week that passed by.

Janet Fielding does a sterling job pre-and post-Mara. She's pretty disturbing once she's been taken over by the Mara and the scenes where she taunts Dugdale border of the genuinely disturbing.

Peter Davison is excellent. It's often commented that this is one of the few stories where people react to the Doctor as if he's a babbling madman, which is probably how he'd be dealt with for real each time he arrived on a planet predicting the downfall of civilization. The issue for the Doctor is that he knows what's happening but in this story, he can't prove anything until it is almost too late to stop. The Doctor specializes in close-run things but this is perhaps the closest run thing of them all. Only the Doctor's determination not to be tempted by the Mara brings things to a halt, even as the Mara tries desperately to bring him out of his 'still point'.

So Snakedance is well-worth watching. I must praise the design of the story, even the jail cell looks interesting. There are some boring looking corridors but really this wouldn't be 1980s Doctor Who without some dull corridors to walk, run and get captured in.

This and Kinda were two of my favourite ever Doctor Who stories re-watching them hasn't changed my mind. They're very different from most Doctor Who but I like that so I recommend you give them a watch as and when you get the chance.

Arc of Infinity

Welcome to Season Twenty. We kick off with Arc of Infinity or the jogger's guide to Amsterdam.

Our villain is Omega played by Ian Collier, rather than Stephen Thorne. Whilst Thorne was expected to do much more shouty than Collier I think Thorne's vocal performance was much stronger. This version of Omega is over-designed and a little fussy. And to be honest whilst they are clearly trying to make Omega less black and white villain I think you end up feeling less sorry for him in this story. His fate is a tragic one and it has driven him insane and messianic but in this, he just feels like a bog-standard psycho of the week.

And talking of disappointments what the hell happened to Gallifrey? It's turned into a slightly out of date nightclub, complete with tasteful cream sofas scattered about ts corridors. It takes ten million years of absolute power to develop such great interior design skills. It's pretty unimpressive, particular when the costumes look so different. It's as if two totally different civilisations are at work. One does the interior design, one makes the clothes and never the twain shall meet.

The filming in Amsterdam is also mildly disappointing. It suffers from the Paris problem of The City of Death. No one can film inside anything so most of the sequences are exteriors and what you effectively create is a dash around the sites outside filming. So as Tom and Lalla spend huge chunks of time dashing across the roads of Paris so Peter, Janet, and Sarah do a lot of running around Amsterdam. There is no additional atmosphere to be gained from being in Amsterdam, even if the script makes a feeble attempt to justify the location through some gobbledygook about being below sea level and the use the hydrogen in water as a power source but you might as well have filmed it in Birmingham, which also has a lot of canals, for all the Amsterdamness that the location filming brings. I mean playing 'Tulips from Amsterdam' does not a feeling of Dutchness create.

Then there's the Ergon: "one of Omega's less effective creations". There's an almost good costume struggling to get out of what looks a bit like a walking chicken carcass. Again it suffers from the classic Doctor Who monster problem of waddle, which just makes it so obvious that we're looking at a man in a costume.

Finally, add a discussion about some energy link thing called 'The Arc of Infinity' which makes very little sense and this story starts to look a little poor. However that's not totally fair. It does move along at a fair old lick with a strong first episode laying down all the relevant plot points.

Sarah Sutton gets to be the Fifth Doctor's only companion for a short while and she - and Nyssa - thrive as a result. The Fifth Doctor and Nyssa work really well together. If they'd stayed like that I think we'd talk about one of the great Doctor-Companion match-ups but Tegan returns from her short exile in this via a series of incredible coincidences too silly to outline her. Tegan looks very different on her return with a short hair cut and a new costume. Now I have to admit to having fond memories of Tegan in that costume but it is totally impractical in reality and whilst it isn't quite as unsubtle as some of Nicola Bryant's costumes were to be it does have 'one for the Dads' sewn into it.

There's some good support from some of the guest stars, particularly Michael Gough's Hedin (another friend of the Doctor's whose gone bad); Paul Jerricho's cold-hearted, jobsworth Castellan and Colin Baker as Commander Maxil. Colin Baker does a good job of Maxil making him unlikeable but understandle. It's obviously taken on slightly more importance as Colin is to become the Sixth Doctor but ignoring the history I reckon Colin would make a damn fine villain (like Tom Baker) if given the chance.

In the end, this isn't a great story. There is a great Omega story to be told somewhere, but this isn't it. File it under 'Could Do Better'.

Time-Flight

Ah...Time-Flight. This would be an average Big Finish story. Unfortunately, it is supposed to be a prime time BBC television programme and this is an attempt to do too much for too little money. Like The Web Planet but worse.

The minute someone walked through the door with a script involving time-traveling Concordes; Earth 145 million years ago and Plasmatons, the script editor should have escorted them politely out of the building. If the Script Editor didn't do it, the Producer should have. The ambition far, far runs ahead of what early Eighties Doctor Who budgets can achieve.

Take the Plasmatons. They don't feature much (thankfully) but when they do the 'bloke in a costumeness' is so obvious it destroys any genuine threat they might carry. They waddle. Badly. They are very ugly ducklings indeed.

Then there is the bizarre cuckoo-spit effect and the terrible - and some of it is embarrassingly shoddy - model work. The sheer ridiculousness of having access to the real Concorde and then producing two of the most modelly looking model Concordes is hard to bear. The difference between the 'realness' of the scenes shot at Heathrow and the in-studio primeval Earth's artificiality is glaring.

Now let us talk about the Master. I've already talked - often - about how dumb the Master seems to be on occasions. In this story, you have to ask yourself what the hell does he think he's doing. Why is he disguised as some bizarre Chinese magician? He's not planning this operation around the Doctor's appearance and none of the kidnapped Concorde passengers or crew have ever come across him before so why is he pretending to be Kalid? Is it for a bet or just for shits and giggles? Does he feel that a plan isn't a plan without getting drezzed for the occasion? It's just pointless complication above and beyond the call of fiendish duty. You almost want to grab the deluded renegade Time Lord around the throat and ask him a number of serious questions about his motivation, method, and means. Antony Ainley does a fine job in a pretty thankless role, although the whiff of ham is never far away, which is one of the reasons I generally prefer Delgado's take on The Master but there is something genuinely creepy about the Ainley Masters laugh, which is almost his catchphrase.

I'm not convinced by much of the acting in this either. With the exception of Nigel Stock's Professor Hayter and Richard Easton's Captain Stapley most of the guest performances are about as convincing as the sets.

The regulars all do pretty well. They don't let the story's limitations push them into hammery. I do think Sarah Sutton's Nyssa - who gets a bit more to do in this story - is the Fifth Doctor's best companion even if she has limitations of her own. However, I retain a teenage fondness for Janet Fielding as Tegan, who in a twist gets dumped at Heathrow at the end of this story. As she's been demanding the Doctor return her there for so long this shouldn't come as much of a surprise but it all seems pretty perfunctory. Not Dodo perfunctory, just generally perfunctory.

I like the idea of the Xeraphin though: a gestalt race at war with itself following the Master's arrival. It isn't entirely clear why the Master feels repairing his TARDIS by using the Xeraphin as a power source is a good idea but the events of the Doctor's Wife hints at the TARDIS being powered by some kind of intelligent multi-dimensional...thing. So perhaps he's just replacing one being with another. Who knows.

So we end Peter Davison's first season with this whimper. Davison has done a sterling job since taking over from Tom. I like his Doctor so far, even if the cricket gear is as silly in its own way as Colin Baker's coat of many colours. There's a kind of flustered nobility about him, which I like and a touch of doubt in his own abilities and solutions.

This isn't a great story. It is pretty rotten in parts. It is definitely the weakest of a reasonably good season but a polite smattering of applause for parts of it and a general realization that the failures are more about being under-resourced and over-ambitious than anything else.

Earthshock

I have said before in this blog that I have been interested to see which stories survive a repeated viewing unscathed. I found Tomb of the Cybermen a much less impressive story this time around so I wondered whether Earthshock's status as something of a Classic would stand up. This is a story I adored on its broadcast but as JNT infamously said: "The memory cheats".

But this is a delight. Sometimes despite itself. Let's take the often commented upon casting of Beryl Reid as the grumpy, no-nonsense space freighter Captain Briggs. It shouldn't work. It's such an off-beam casting choice but somehow it does and in doing so is one of the most adorable guest star performances in Doctor Who history. Interestingly Briggs's pilot-navigator-engineer is also a woman over the age of 30, Berger (June Bland). Both of them seem to take great delight in mocking the over-zealous jobsworth and Cyber spy Ringway (Alec Sabin) who is a bloke.

The sight of Beryl Reid firing a laser at advancing Cybermen makes me want to cheer.

This is the first appearance of the Cybermen in Doctor Who since Revenge of the Cybermen back in Tom Baker's first season and their sudden appearance Terry Nation stylee at the cliffhanger to Episode One is brilliant. JNT turned down a Radio Times cover in order to keep that a surprise for which we should be grateful.

Being the Cybermen they've been redesigned for their reappearance and look pretty good except - alas - for the Moon Boots. You've heard me whine about the feet of Doctor Who monsters often enough but this one is a bit annoying, especially as we see lots of Moon Booted Cybermen marching towards our screens at the end of Episode Three. However, the tone of this story makes the Cybermen seem genuinely nasty.

This is the first outing for David Banks as The Cyberleader. He would go on to play the Cyberleader - or his replacements - a number of times and took the role seriously enough to write a book about the Cybermen and to try and get their story to make some kind of sense. I used to love that commitment (and he was very nice when I queued up to get his autograph the *cough* four times I saw the Doctor Who Stage Play).

Banks' Cybermen do not have the sing-song electronic voices of old (or New Series) Cybermen and for a race that is supposed to have eliminated emotions they do a lot of emoting. Eventually, Banks' Cyberleader would be the monster with catchphrases: most notably a triumphant 'Excellent!' often accompanied by the slamming of fist into hand. In this, his first run out it doesn't matter too much and they make more interesting monsters when the Doctor can take them on in debate.

There's some nice support from James Warwick as Scott, the military officer (moustache a necessity) who gets to be suitably heroic. Clare Clifford as Kyle gets to run around a lot in an unfetching outfit before becoming one of the first of Eric Saward's 'nice person to kill off unnecessarily in the end for no particularly good reason'. I think Saward thinks this adds a touch of realistic cynicism to the proceedings and it might be fine if this story wasn't going to end with a far more important death. So Kyle's death is thrown away, drowned in the pathos of Adric's passing.

The moment has come. I come to bury Adric. I have been somewhat down on Matthew Waterhouse's acting skills since Peter Davison took over and even in this, his swansong, there are moments that lack conviction but I don't entirely think that's his fault. Waterhouse was going from child actor to grown-up that's a tough journey for anyone and asking him to play a major part in a popular BBC programme might have been too much to ask.

However we can't complain too much as he gets one of the best departures - if that's the right word for what happens to poor old Adric - of any companion. Doctor Who companions don't die. The Doctor always pulls something out of the hat to save them. This time he doesn't and Adric dies. He dies alone - the boy standing on the burning deck - on the bridge proving that when he said he was tired of being an outsider it wasn't hyperbole, he was an outsider.

The Doctor's desperate attempts to save him and horrified reaction when he realizes that he can't is well-played by Peter Davison. Davison is excellent throughout this story and his Doctor has grown on me a lot since Castrovalva. He's so understated.

So perhaps the memory doesn't always cheat after all.

Black Orchid

I'm not quite sure what to make of that. A two-parter, a historical and no galactic threat to fight against. Just the Doctor getting involved in a story of domestic secrets in a posh house in the 1920s.

It's charming but as inconsequential as a gentle summer's breeze.

There's fun for all the regulars: Janet Fielding gets to dress up and Charleston, Matthew Waterhouse gets to eat and Peter Davison gets to pretend to play cricket. Most importantly Sarah Sutton gets to play two parts: Nyssa and her double Ann Talbot, which is nice. Sutton does it nicely, although it isn't that great a stretch really. I wish when we met coincidental doubles like this someone would go to the effort of asking for a different accent. Nyssa is from Traken, Ann is posh English. So despite being seperated by billions of miles they not only look like each other but sound identical. But I'm picking at that thread again and should beware lest I pull the whole jumper apart.

I'm aware that would spoil the conceit of the two of them getting dressed up in the same fancy dress outfits and poor old George Cranleigh getting confused at the end but at least with Troughton, they went down the different accent route in The Enemy of the World.

But whilst I'm battling the bees in my bonnet can I just ask when the TARDIS became an open house for and all sundry to pop in and take a spin. It happened with Richard Mace in The Visitation and in this story Sir Robert Muir and Sargeant Markham get a spin. I wouldn't mind so much but they seem to take it all for granted. And let's not mention Constable Cumming's reaction, which is little more than mild surprise.

In all honesty, this is a nice little break. The villain of the piece isn't evil, he's broken and sometimes you can't mend people. His death seems unnecessary really and a little forced. As if he must be punished or the children of England may start strangling their servants. Gareth Milne as George Hadleigh does a limited but effective job.

I do like the Doctor and team staying for the funeral though. It is an unusual touch. Even if Tegan's excitement about getting to keep the fancy dress costumes seems a tad out of place.

As do most of the guest stars who don't get asked to do too much exotic stuff: Moray Watson as Sir Robert Muir and Michael Cochrane as Lord Cranleigh do their aristocratic thang and Barbara Murray gets to be devious and posh, although the more I think of it the more the way she gets away with her involvement in things without punishment is an irritant.

I like Peter Davison in this. His delivery of the line "Brazil...where the nuts come from" is perfectly delivered.

So Black Orchid is OK. It isn't a story I have strong feelings about one way or another.

The Visitation

The Visitation is a pretty good story even if - as someone on my Twitter feed pointed out - it has certain similarities to The Time Warrior with a character from Eric Saward's radio writing thrown in.

It starts strongly building up tension before killing off everyone we've met so far. In New Doctor Who they'd have all been bumped off in the pre-credit sequence. This almost feels New Whoish, perhaps it is the younger Doctor. You can certainly see the same story with David Tennant.

Saward deals well with the multiplicity of companions: knocking them unconscious, splitting them off to do various different jobs and taking over their minds. However, whilst Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton deal with what they are asked to do pretty well I'm afraid Matthew Waterhouse is starting to look out of depth. There does seem to be a limited lifespan for the three companions. It makes the stories too messy to plot effectively and the constant bickering is already becoming tedious. There's a Eastenders like grumpiness to pretty much everyone that doesn't quite fit Doctor Who (at least in my opinion).

This is Peter Davison's fourth story and I'm quite enjoying the change from Tom Baker. His Doctor's clearly less certain and less forthright. He tries to convince and help, even when he's being frustrated. As I mentioned earlier you can see the seeds of the New Doctor Who Doctors in his performance.

Mention should be made of Michael Melia's convincing turn as 'Terileptil Leader'. The costume is slightly restrictive and it definitely is of the 'obvious bloke in a costume' type. However the face is impressively designed and they would be one of my favorite aliens if it weren't for the hands, which are too stiff and too obviously gloves. I blame the director Peter Moffatt for that. It's a schoolboy error in Doctor Who: like focusing on the traditional weak point of a Doctor Who monster costume - the feet. Other than that Moffatt does a reasonable job even if the story does lack any real sense of urgency.

However, Melia rises above the stiffness of the costume and gives quite a nice vocal performance. The Terileptil Leader has a certain brisk, cold intelligence plus obvious menace. These are a ruthless race. Willing to wipe out humanity in order to settle three of them plus some androids in the place. Pretty spacious for three of them.

I also liked Michael Robbins as Richard Mace. Mace is an out of work actor whose become a highwayman since the plague shut London's theatres. Mace feels real in a story without much in the way of supporting parts except a gang of rent-a-peasants and a very bored horse.

I enjoyed it even if it is a gentle little story lacking much in the way of genuine tension, although the death of the Terileptil leader is disgustingly gruesome really for the timeslot. The funny thing is as I've been writing this review I've realized that even though I found it fun I'm less impressed with the direction in retrospect.

If it had the same power as the first five or ten minutes of the first episode then this story would be an absolute classic but alas it doesn't.