Right, well, what can I say about the Christmas two-parter?

Along with many others I have commented in the past about Russell T. Davies’ series endings, and how he’s seemed to rope in extra characters for sheer sentimentality, and not because they actually do anything to benefit the plot, and how there is a tendency for an ending where someone suddenly comes up with the idea with ten minutes to go, and the baddies manage to be defeated, and Doctor Who saves the universe again.

And having heard Jack Harkness, Martha Jones, Sarah Jane Smith, Rose Tyler, Jackie Tyler and Donna Noble were all due to feature in the final episodes, I had dire feelings of characters being shoe-horned in for sentimental reasons at the expense of the plot. And probably bloody Davros coming back too.

I had no objection to Wilfred Mott featuring as the Doctor’s companion; partly because I’ve enjoyed him as a character, and he brings a different dimension to the Doctor’s adventures — someone who at least thinks he’s older than the Doctor — and partly ‘cos, well, it’s Bernard, and you’ve gotta love Bernard, haven’t you?

The rest of this review may contain significant plot spoilers, so if you haven’t already seen it, you may wish to look away now…

Episode one saw the reintroduction of the Master, who was revitalised through some big secret ceremony by the cult who had supported him; his wife tried to spoil the ceremony and managed to put a bit of a spanner in the works, but basically the Master was back, and although he had gone blond and kept flashing into a skeletal figure and back again, was enormously hungry, and seemingly only had a matter of time until that body fell apart (and not for the first time), he was back.

Gloriously, full-on Master, now with extra insanity. John Simm’s portrayal of the Master — particularly over these two episodes — should be seen as definitive. The main problem with the Master in the old series (irrespective of how well Delgado or Ainley played the role) is that he was never properly fleshed out: you knew he was a contemporary of the Doctor’s, but never what had made him into the Master. With the backstory that started to be introduced in The Sound of Drums, the Master was becoming a much more rounded character, but still as marvellously megalomaniacal as before.

I wasn’t entirely sure about the crackling electricity bolts he could fire out of his hands, mind you. I always thought he was supposed to be a Time Lord, not a Sith Lord…

The Doctor’s and the Master’s destinies always seem somehow to be intertwined: to some extent they appear to define themselves as standing against the other, and the Doctor’s obvious admiration for the genius and general non-homicidal bits of the Master is obvious.

Also, it is worth noting that the Doctor and the Master don’t appear to have names, even when other Time Lords refer to them; this seems suggestive that the Doctor and the Master are something more than just individual Time Lords; they are almost a Time Lord archetype, some sort of primal Time Lord force personified, perhaps. Hints of the Cartmel Masterplan leaking through, after all this time?

But it can’t be ignored that Part One took quite a long time to build; that the Naismiths seemed to be being built up to be quite a sinister oligarch-and-daughter pairing who could pose a threat in future only to be dismissed once he’s served his purpose in the plot, and that the spiky-headed aliens again seemed to be there more as a useful plot device than for any real reason of their own.

But if my main problem with Part One was the slow build, there was certainly enough to keep you occupied while you waited for things to actually happen: some little amusements with June Whitfield reflecting on her past as a provocative young minx — and rather suggesting that it was only the ‘young’ bit which had changed; the whole bit where Wilf was using Fogeyscope (his collection of pensioner mates) to track down the Doctor, and of course the Master.

The Immortality Gate was originally designed to convey immortality on Abigail Naismith, but what Naismith Senior didn’t seem to be aware of was that it was not set to work on the individual within the field but on a planetary setting (bit of a miss this, how could he have worked out it could be used to convey immortality but not on who?). And of course, he got the Master to fix it, which meant that it didn’t do exactly what he’d wanted.

Instead, everyone on earth got turned into the Master, which meant no doubt that John Simm had to get dressed up in a lot of different sets of clothes for filming, as there’s presumably a limit to what you can do effectively with CGI (I wonder if he got paid at six billion times his normal rate, given that he theoretically appeared six billion times?).

So, with the Earth full of Masters (not so much clones, as they seemed to be willing to defer to the original Master — more of a Queen Bee affair?) there was only Donna Noble, Wilfred Mott, the Doctor, and a pair of aliens left to somehow try to resist the Master’s plan.

And that was the end of Episode one, although we knew the Time Lords would feature in the second…

If Episode One had been mostly building to the point where there was an Earthful of Masters, Episode Two was about the Time Lords seeking to return from inside the time-lock where they had been placed by the Doctor, along with the Daleks and others, at the height of the Time War. They had seeded a way to communicate with the Master because it was they who had planted the sound of drums in his head as a child.

So the Master was calling the Time Lords back (normally, you’d think a good thing, but the Doctor explained that the Time Lords from the time of the Time War weren’t Time Lords as he would prefer to remember them, suggesting that they were ruthless and warlike, and they had to be stopped — and he would take a life if necessary to stop them.

The Final Showdown — the Doctor caught in the middle between the Master and the Time Lords and knowing his final act could be to kill one of them — Dalton’s Time Lord President, or Simm’s Master. In the end though, he found himself unable to shoot either and got the Master to dive out of the way to shoot his machine, breaking the Master template on all other earth-beings by destroying the machine, rather than the Master.

Despite having turned him into their tool, and messing up pretty much his entire life by implanting him with the sound of drums, it turned out that now he was a bit messed up and insane, the Time Lord Council didn’t want anything to do with him, which made him a little cross. He then returned the favour to the Doctor — after all this time, were they finally coming to understand one another — and got the Doctor to dive out of the way so he could electrozap the Time Lord president.

Little aside about President Dalton here: the Doctor referred to him as Rassilon at one point, which would seem to suggest that he is an ancient and powerful mysterious figure from very early in Time Lord history (who was immortal, but seemingly sleeping in a stone form when encountered in The Five Doctors). It’s interesting that he was brought back as when encountered before he always had a certain menace about him, so if anyone could lead the Time Lords into a bloody war which would change them, I’d imagine he would be the chap. But with the Doctor being the other standing against him, and previously against Omega, it’s a bit more Cartmel Masterplan leaking out of the time lock…

With a zapped Pres, and a broken machine, the Time Lords didn’t return, and Gallifrey didn’t land on earth, so everyone was saved. Not entirely sure where the Master went, mind you. Was he just “dead”, did he follow the Time Lords into the time-lock, or did everyone just forget about him? Never mind, I’m sure he’ll tell us next time (hint: please get John Simm to agree to take on the role at least once every two or three years).

The only problem was Wilf. Going back into Naismith’s lab to rescue the Doctor, he ended up rescuing someone else at the expense of trapping himself inside a containment area. And when all the baddies were gone, he knocked on the wall to ask the Doctor to let him out. He knocked … four times.

So in order to save Wilf, the Doctor had to go and let Wilf out and wait in the containment area while the nuclear loop — or whatever it was called — blew up and fired a big lot of radioactivity into his body. Thus the David Tennant era was to end.

But it didn’t end right there: first he had time to pop along and visit various characters he’d encountered before: Jack Harkness — who he set up with Midshipman Frame from Voyage of the Damned — Martha Jones, who was by now married to Mickey Smith and fighting as a mercenary against the Sontarans (presumably for the Rutans? — also no idea whether this was supposed to be in Mickey’s parallel world or the ‘real’ one), called in to see Donna Noble finally get married, met the grand-daughter of the woman he was going to marry in Family of Blood, and finally bumped into Rose Tyler, three months before he first met her in Eccleston guise.

Then he turned into Matt Smith.

So we had a good ten to twenty minutes of extra free sentimentality, the loss of which would not have damaged the story in any way. However, and I have to give full credit to Russell for doing this, unlike Journey’s End where characters seemed shoe-horned in for the final encounter, he kept them out of the main thread of the story, so they didn’t interfere, and certainly didn’t damage the story. They were just there so the Tennant Doctor could say goodbye in his own way.

And I don’t think anyone good begrudge the Doctor a few goodbyes first. In my mind, this is the best series finale yet: there was no sleight-of-hand about the ending — we knew about the Master, we knew about the Master’s machine, we knew about the Master’s jedi electricity bolts — and the whole thing was nicely sewn together (and combined with fine performances from the cast).

If that is to be the last Russell ever writes for Who, or Tennant ever appears in, they can feel very proud of the way they’ve bowed out. But maybe a Three or Five Doctors style reunion would be interesting at some point…

So Moffatt and Smith have a lot to live up to when they appear in Spring. But the taster of their series that I saw has already left me wanting more. And so it goes:

Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!

The new Doctor Who adventures are at a much higher level than most of the previous adventures. Okay, in some respects this is only natural — technological advances between Patrick Troughton’s tenure and David Tennant’s mean special effects and costumes are so much better that it’s not even fair to make a comparison, but in some other key areas — characterisation, plot, dialogue and so on — it’s perfectly fair to make the comparison.

Look at the way Russell has handled various story arcs, for example — the Bad Wolf motif running through the first series — and you’ll see the clues in retrospect. They were there, but we didn’t pick up on ‘em all first time round. Yes, the denoument to the Master’s story was a bit deux ex machina (planet helps Doctor develop enormous psychic powers) but the backstory given to the villains of the piece is far, far better than it ever used to be.

The Master is no longer just a pantomime villain who happens to be a rogue timelord: he actually has a history, a reason for developing the way he did. I am very much a fan of old-style Doctor Who, but all too often a particular baddie was just churned out without a sufficiently good reason as to why they were there.

Let’s not forget that the original Doctor Who series weren’t all storming successes: for every story with the brooding atmosphere of The Horror of Fang Rock, you’d have something a lot less credible, such as The Invasion Of Time; let’s not forget that while people (including myself) have criticised the new episodes for being at times formulaic and with a tendency for the Doctor to hit uponn the right idea at just that specific point in time necessary, the old Doctors were just as bad.

After all, how many of the classic Doctor Who serials fell into that “base under siege” sort of a story? Loads of the buggers. This didn’t stop good examples of the genre — The Moonbase and The Horror of Fang Rock, for example — being seen as classics. For each original and particularly well-crafted story you can think of for one Doctor, you can probably point to another which was a bit of a stinker… (Pertwee – The Green Death vs Carnival of Monsters, for example).

So it’s unfair and an example of the rose-tinted glasses stuff to think that Doctor Who in the past is something that has ever been let down by the new version, which has taken a lot more time over continuity and actually seems to care about the Doctor Who universe hanging together as a coherent whole rather than just reimagining it between one serial and the next.

And — thank Rassilon — we’ve not had to put up with more than a token appearance of a comedy robot dog.

Russell has taken the script writing of Doctor Who up to a new, particularly exacting high standard. He doesn’t always live up to that target level which he sets himself — and other writers — but he has done Doctor Who a great service by setting that standard there. So thank you, Russell. I may be critical from time to time, but that is only because you have set the standard at such a high level.

David Tennant will also be leaving Doctor Who this winter: having reinvented the role in his own particular image more than any Doctor since the Baker/Davison era (although Eccleston’s part in the revival cannot be overlooked either). I can’t say I’ll be sad to see the end of “allonsy” although despite my initial misgivings (“David bluddy Tennant? who the hell’s he? Oh, that’s him? I can’t imagine him being any good…”) he has proven to be one of the best ever Doctors, bringing real emotion and pathos to the role instead of just furiously muggin his way through the latest script.

Indeed, for the new generation, he will probably define Doctor Who in the way that Tom Baker did for a previous one…

Whether or not he’s the best Doctor to date I’ll leave aside — this is more a question of age and personal preference than some definable ‘best’ — but in my opinion what he has done is provide the highest quality acting seen in Doctor Who to date.

Like Russell, he too has ramped up the popularity of Doctor Who, and I think that the role of Doctor Who is now very much seen as a heavy, important role, as opposed to some minor kids show, which is certainly the impression given in the mid-80s. The whole thing seems more serious; it’s a lot less frivolous; and it actually delivers some quality programming.

I just wanted to put on record my thanks to them for all the good work they’ve done, and to wish them both all the best in the future. Of course, if I don’t like the christmas finale, I’ll still feel entirely free to attempt to tear it to shreds…

…and then next year I can cast my critical eye over Stephen Moffatt and Matt Smith!

William Hartnell

1. An Unearthly Child (Season 1: 1963)
2. The Daleks (Season 1: 1963-4)
3. The Edge of Destruction (Season 1: 1964)
4. The Aztecs (Season 1: 1964)
5. The Dalek Invasion of Earth (Season 2: 1964)
6. The Rescue (Season 2: 1965)
7. The Romans (Season 2: 1965)
8. The Web Planet (Season 2: 1965)
9. The Time Meddler (Season 2: 1965)
10. The War Machines (Season 3: 1966)
11. Lost In Time Disc 1 (Covers incomplete serials/clips from 1964-1966)

Patrick Troughton

1. Lost In Time Discs 2 & 3 (incomplete serials/clips from 1966-1969)
2. The Tomb of the Cybermen (Season 5: 1967)
3. The Mind Robber (Season 6: 1968)
4. The Invasion (Season 6: 1968)
5. The Seeds of Death (Season 6: 1969)
6. The War Games (Season 6: 1969)

Jon Pertwee

1. Spearhead from Space (Season 7: 1970)
2. Doctor Who and the Silurians (Season 7: 1970)
3. Inferno (Season 7: 1970)
4. The Claws of Axos (Season 8: 1971)
5. The Sea Devils (Season 9:1972)
6. The Three Doctors (Season 10: 1972-3)
7. Carnival of Monsters (Season 10: 1973)
8. The Green Death (Season 10: 1973)
9. The Time Warrior (Season 11: 1973-4)

Tom Baker

1. Robot (Season 12: 1974-5)
2. The Ark In Space (Season 12: 1975)
3. The Sontaran Experiment (Season 12: 1975)
4. Genesis of the Daleks (Season 12: 1975)
5. Planet of Evil (Season 13: 1975)
6. Pyramids of Mars (Season 13: 1975)
7. The Brain of Morbius (Season 13: 1976)
8. The Hand of Fear (Season 14: 1976)
9. The Deadly Assassin (Season 14: 1976)
10. The Robots of Death (Season 14: 1977)
11. The Talons of Weng-Chiang (Season 14: 1977)
12. The Horror of Fang Rock (Season 15: 1977)
13. The Invisible Enemy (Season 15: 1977
14. The Invasion of Time (Season 15: 1978)
15. Destiny of the Daleks (Season 17: 1979)
16. City of Death (Season 17: 1979)
17. The Leisure Hive (Season 18: 1980)
18. Full Circle (Season 18: 1980)
19. State of Decay (Season 18: 1980)
20. Warriors Gate (Season 18: 1981)
21. The Keeper of Traken (Season 18: 1981)
22. Logopolis (Season 18: 1981)

Peter Davison

1. Castrovalva (Season 19: 1982)
2. Four to Doomsday (Season 19: 1982)
3. The Visitation (Season 19: 1982)
4. Black Orchid (Season 19: 1982)
5. Earthshock (Season 19: 1982)
6. Time-Flight (Season 19: 1982)
7. Arc of Infinity (Season 20: 1983)
8. Mawdryn Undead (Season 20: 1983)
9. Terminus (Season 20: 1983)
10. Enlightenment (Season 20: 1983)
11. The Five Doctors (Season 20: 1983)
12. Warriors of the Deep (Season 21: 1984)
13. Resurrection of the Daleks (Season 21: 1984)
14. The Caves of Androzani (Season 21: 1984)

Colin Baker

1. The Mark of the Rani (Season 22: 1985)
2. The Two Doctors (Season 22: 1985)
3. Timelash (Season 22: 1985)
4. Revelation of the Daleks (Season 22: 1985)
5. Trial of a Timelord: The Mysterious Planet (Season 23: 1986)
6. Trial of a Timelord: Mindwarp (Season 23: 1986)
7. Trial of a Timelord: Terror of the Vervoids (Season 23: 1986)
8. Trial of a Timelord: The Ultimate Foe (Season 23: 1986)

Sylvester McCoy

1. Remembrance of the Daleks (Season 25: 1988)
2. Battlefield (Season 26: 1989)
3. Ghost Light (Season 26: 1989)
4. The Curse of Fenric (Season 26: 1989)
5. Survival (Season 26: 1989)

Paul McGann

1. Doctor Who The Movie (1996)

Christopher Ecclestone

1. Rose, The End of the World, The Unquiet Dead (Series 1 Volume 1: 2005)
2. Aliens of London, World War Three, Dalek (Series 1 Volume 2: 2005)
3. The Long Game, Father’s Day, The Empty Child, The Doctor Dances (Series 1 Volume 3: 2005)
4. Boom Town, Bad Wolf, The Parting of the Ways (Series 1 Volume 4: 2005)

David Tennant

1. The Christmas Invasion, New Earth (Series 2 Volume 1: 2005, 2006)
2. Tooth And Claw, School Reunion, The Girl in the Fireplace (Series 2 Volume 2: 2006)
3. Rise of the Cybermen, The Age of Steel, The Idiot’s Lantern (Series 2 Volume 3: 2006)
4. The Impossible Planet, The Satan Pit, Love & Monsters (Series 2 Volume 4: 2006)
5. Fear Hear, Army of Ghosts, Doomsday (Series 2 Volume 5: 2006)
6. Doctor Who, The Complete Third Series (6 DVD set) (Series 3: 2006, 2007)
7. Doctor Who, The Complete Fourth Series (6 DVD set) (Series 4: 2007, 2008)

By my reckoning, I still need the Key To Time boxed set (as that’s a limited edition, I’m probably buggered unless they bring it out again), Vengeance on Varos, Delta and the Bannermen, The Keys of Marinus, The Dalek War (not released until next month – 2 DVD set), Image of the Fendahl, The Twin Dilemma and Attack of the Cybermen to bring me up to date with all of the DVDs released so far.

And that’s really quite an impressive set. And then after that, there’s a maximum of 45 more DVDs that could be released (based on intact serials not yet released). Geektastic!

Dating back to 1983, the The Black Guardian Trilogy has just been released on DVD. It features three stories from the Peter Davison era of Doctor Who, including the companions Tegan, Nyssa and of course Turlough.

For me, Peter Davison was my childhood Doctor Who as I remember it: I was too young to properly appreciate the Tom Baker era (although later, and with repeats I did come, like so many others to install him as my favourite) and so for me Peter Davison was the benchmark against which all of the other Doctors were compared, much like David Tennant will be the benchmark for many of today’s kids.

I think one of the things that particularly worked during the Davison-era Who was his companions: Tegan, Adric, Nyssa, Turlough were all interesting characters who bounced off one another well, although I personally couldn’t be doing with Peri.

The Black Guardian trilogy opens with Mawdryn Undead, in which the TARDIS gets stuck on a starliner, and the Doctor needs to use the ship’s transmat beam to head down to earth, leaving Tegan and Nyssa on the TARDIS while he sorts it out. He beams down and encounters an old mate — Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, now teaching at a school, as well as Turlough, a slightly odd and not entirely well-behaved pupil at the school.

Oddly enough, the Brigadier can’t remember the Doctor at all … but does remember encountering a Tegan Jovanka six years earlier, in 1977. The Doctor and the Brigadier have to try to piece together the Brig’s missing memory in order to get back to Nyssa and Tegan, and while Turlough goes with them to ‘help’, in reality he has been contacted by the Black Guardian and ordered to kill the Doctor.

It’s an enjoyable story — I’ve always been a great fan of the Brigadier, and his appearance in both 1977 version and 1983 versions together is rather integral to the plot. Valentine Dyall, with his very distinctive voice is excellent as the Black Guardian, and it’s always nice to have a companion that you don’t entirely trust…

There’s also some interesting extras on the DVD including an interview with the Brigadier (not Nicholas Courtney the actor, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, the character) which is a little different and quite an interesting retrospective, although it does rather remind you of the disappointment that then-Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart’s first screen appearance (in the Troughton plus Yeti serial The Web of Fear) is one of the serials butchered and deleted by the BBC.

After Mawdryn Undead, we have Terminus, where after the TARDIS is sabotaged by Turlough on the instructions of the Black Guardian, it is forced to make on an emergency landing on a ship that docks with a deserted space station. Only it turns out that the station isn’t quite as deserted as they had first thought…

…it is in fact a plague ship where the inhabitants have a leprosy-like disease and are basically left to die, although it is purported that some can be cured. The TARDIS crew have to somehow find their way off the ship without being infected, only to encounter the station guards — the Vanir — who don’t want to let potential sources of infection leave.

But there are further questions to be answered — how come the space station Terminus is at the exact centre of the universe? Has Nyssa contracted Lazar’s Disease? And who, or what, is the Garm?

While the stakes seem considerably higher in this one — as opposed to simply the Doctor’s life, it turns out that indeed the future of the entire universe rests upon the actions of the Doctor — it is also less polished and possibly a little more disjointed than Mawdryn Undead (although this can possibly be explained by the production problems which are detailed if you view the title with the information text on).

Terminus is however notable for being the last story to feature Sarah Sutton’s character Nyssa of Traken, whom I had always liked as a companion (although not as much as the Brigadier, who unfortunately does not feature in either Terminus or the final Black Guardian story Enlightenment).

Enlightenment returns to the highs of Mawdryn Undead although it is a very different story. While Mawdryn Undead is a contemporary story (set mostly in 1977 and 1983), and Terminus very much a ‘future’ story, Enlightenment has a touch of period drama to it, even though it too is set in the future.

The Doctor and his companions find themselves on an Edwardian sailing ship, taking part in an interplanetary race against other period ships — including a pirate ship captained by Captain Wrack (who you might recognise as Nurse Gladys Emanuel from Open All Hours). The ships officers are beings from outside of time called the Eternals who refer to everyone else as Ephemerals.

The race is to be the first to reach The Enlighteners and gain enlightenment as their prize, with the pirate Buccaneer resorting to various underhand methods to ensure that they win (although this does expose a minor plot hole — it appears that the Buccaneer is by far the fastest ship, easily capable of outstripping all the others — so one does wonder why the need for sabotage…!).

Turlough’s character gets the opportunity to develop a little more as he chafes under the yoke of the Black Guardian — who isn’t exactly pleased that the Doctor is still alive — and instead of looking to obey the Black Guardian tends to spend his time looking for a way to escape from his service. The mood of this story is excellent, and in particular the sets and costumes need a great degree of credit, adding a considerable amount of authenticity to the episode.

You also get to see Peter Davison replace the stick of celery pinned to his lapel for a fresher one, but I’d have to describe that as a quirky little ‘touch’ rather than any sort of significant plot element.

The three stories hang together very well, with the best two setting up and finishing off the story, and while in contrast Terminus is not up to the same high standard, it’s not a bad story as such (some great costumes in there as well). If you’ve been away from Doctor Who for a while, or you’ve not seen any of the old-era Doctor Who, this boxed set might be an ideal jumping-in point…

Basically, it allows you to choose from a series of clips, intros, pictures and sounds from David Tennant era Doctor Who and combine them as you wish (allowing multiple samplings of the same clip, sampling only some parts of a particular clip and so on) to form a 30-second long Doctor Who Trailer. It’s the sort of thing that is fun for all the family. Just make sure you’ve had your turn before the kids get started otherwise you will find yourself unable to prevent yourself from interfering.

Stephen Lang’s version is more of a homage to the show itself, featuring clips from many different episodes and although he described it as a rather humble effort, I quite enjoyed watching it. I took a slightly different tack, focussing on one particular episode, but whether or not you like my version, the key thing to remember is that it really is remarkably easy to put together something like this.

The BBC really have done a grand job with the Doctor Who Trailer Maker, and I’d urge you to wander over and have a play… (although to achieve the perfect viral, they’d need to allow you to at least download as a video so you can share it, although embedding would be even better).

Now of all the actors who have played Doctor Who on the telly, the one who is my least favourite is Colin Baker. Generally, Colin and Sylvester McCoy are the ones named when people name their least favourite actor for Doctor Who, which is possibly a little unfair on them, because this is the time at which the series was starting to head downhill somewhat, whether in terms of budgets, or in terms of being increasingly ignored and sidelined, so it’s not a surprise that this era is not generally well thought of.

And I actually happened to like Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor: I thought he played the character well, and it’s a shame he didn’t get the chance to explore more of the Cartmel Masterplan as the series was cancelled.

However, I never did take to Colin Baker. Or Peri. Which is why for me this is my least favourite Doctor Who era (everyone has to have a least favourite after all). But despite that, there were still some very good serials and creations in this time. The Two Doctors, featuring the Colin Baker and Patrick Troughton Doctors, as well as Peri and Jamie as companions, and of course the Sontarans, is one such.

The Rani, another renegade timelord to add to The Doctor, The Master, and the lesser known Meddling Monk, Morbius and the War Chief who have appeared in the series. So that made me interested in picking up this particular 2-part serial (from the one season prior to Dr. Who’s rebirth where each episode was 45 minutes) to see what the character was like, particularly as I had missed this one first time around…

The Mark Of The Rani is set at the time of the Industrial Revolution in England — specifically in Killingworth, near Newcastle, where the Rani, working more or less in cohorts with the Master, are, in what probably won’t come as a great surprise, are up to no good.

The action starts really with a bunch of Northerners being violent and incoherent, battling with each other and smashing up machinery seemingly for no good reason. Other than the machinery bit, those of you wanting to express your prejudices about Northerners could suggest that it’s a bit like the Bigg Market on a Saturday night…

The tension is well structured: in the first ten minutes of the episode you get a few suspicions that one or more of the villagers aren’t quite right somehow, although the hints of the Master in the first ten minutes (Anthony Ainley’s overheard laugh, for example) are unveiled possibly a little early when The Master appears less than fifteen minutes into the first episode.

There’s also a lovely moment where Peri is concerned:

…and that dog looks more than ready to bitePeri

…only for the camera to cut to a big black dog lying on the floor, panting slightly, seeming perfectly happy, content, and above all, placid. Oh well, you can’t have everything. And there’s the fact that the Master’s tissue compression weapon looks remarkably phallic. But to counter, you’ve got a bit of authenticity as the Doctor meets Lord Ravensworth (a land-owning family very involved in mining in the North East — indeed, in the first house I owned, I had to pay an annual £2 rent to Ravensworth Estates).

What is quite remarkable, watching Dr Who from the 1980s, is that the plot, the effects and the acting are all far better than you’d probably expect, given that the series was dropped only a couple of years later.

The dialogue, particularly that given to the Rani, can be delightful. At one point she is monitoring the Master and comments to herself…

What’s he up to? Probably something devious and over-complicated. He’d get dizzy if he tried to walk in a straight line…The Rani

The story isn’t perfect (there’s a moment with the Doctor on an out of control trolley which would more have suited Laurel and Hardy), but it’s not bad at all, and the historical setting is simply excellent — although this may have been helped somewhat by the filming at Blists Hill, an open air Victorian museum.

While not a great Doctor Who, this was certainly a good one, and probably — after the Two Doctors — the best in the sixth Doctor’s reign. To my mind at least, these two stand out from the rest of Colin Baker’s as examples of what could have been for the Sixth Doctor.

Sadly, the trials and tribulations of Doctor Who — and the Trial of a Time Lord — were not to come close to matching up to this level…

Originally, when I started reading it — the first issue I can remember reading is issue 316, featuring the Judge Dredd story “The Stupid Gun”, which I think would have been around May 1983 — 2000 AD was very much a comic. A sci-fi comic yes, with stories. That was always the key thing about 2000AD: your Beano, or your Whizzer and Chips, would have comic strips whre the kids would pull one over on teacher, or Dennis would have fun with Cedric the Softy, but 2000AD had stories.

Stories where characters developed: where they were human (or possibly android, or alien), but they were not two dimensional. They had frailties. Not many, admittedly, but some. And the stories were multi-part stories which would build over a number of weeks, and stories where while the good guy would still usually win in the end, it wasn’t without pain, and suffering, and loss.

But over the years, the comic has changed. It’s grown up even more: it’s no longer really a comic which would be suitable for an eight year old child. There can be a bit of swearing in it: the gunsharks Sinister and Dexter have been to unload a shite or two; there’s been nudity (if not exactly graphic), and darker themes are explored in more detail: tyranny, fascism, torture.

The comic — then and now — has frequently been satirical, poking fun of the world of today with city blocks named after figures in the news at the time — Derek Hatton block being one I remember — and satirising some of the political issues of the day. Increasingly, as the comic has grown up with its’ readers, they’ve got more clever about the way they do this: the action stories now have better characterisation and, in most cases, a plot that hangs together well in a particular story arc, rather than just being a series of vaguely interconnected small episodes.

But still, the early days of the comic have a lot to offer, particularly for those who haven’t encountered it before. Issues 61 through to 85 (April to October 1978) featured the first Judge Dredd ‘epic’, running for 25 episodes, introducing a whole swathe of iconic characters, and yet being drawn by only two artists: Mike McMahon and Brian Bolland. I was never particularly a fan of McMahon, at least not for Dredd. This is a little odd, as he’s produced some classic images for it, but he has a drawing style which I suppose I would describe as ‘scratchy’ which I don’t think works as well for Dredd (however, his ‘woodcut’ style work for Sláine — wow!).

However, for whatever reason, I think McMahon’s art does suit this Dredd adventure, as Judge Dredd, along with a rag bag of companions, make their way across the radiation blasted desert that makes up the interior of the United States (apart from mega cities on the east and west coasts) with an attempt to reach Mega City Two with the vaccine to the 2 T Fru T plague which is killing everyone there…

Obviously, they encounter various hazards on the way, one of the key ones of which for 2000AD was a team of lawyers, as the Judge Dredd epic featured the infamous ‘Burger Wars’ episodes between descendants of McDonalds and Burger King restaurants (see the ’100 lb Judge Burger’ cover above) and also a couple of episodes featuring living alka seltzer tablets, the Jolly Green giant, and a mad scientist who looked suspiciously like KFC’s Colonel Sanders. Not surprisingly, these episodes were cut from any reprints of this story (which doesn’t actually hamper the plot in any way — rather suggesting that they were only included for comic relief in the first place), and so the only way you’d get to read them is by getting your hands on the original comics…

But it wasn’t just Judge Dredd (and us fans don’t talk about that film, okay: they kept the title, and half a dozen character names, and ruined pretty much everything else) that featured in 2000AD: there were a number of other great — and yes, iconic — stories featured at this time. Possibly not as terribly clever as today’s 2000AD, but still way ahead of their time.

Between issues 61 to 85, we’d encounter Dan Dare (starting out on Nightmare Planet, but also having fun elsewhere), we’d encounter what remained of the Harlem Heroes (an ‘aeroball’ team not at all based on the Harlem Globetrotters, no sir, guv, no not at all) playing a more vicious and dangerous game in the strip Inferno; we’d find strange aliens trying to take over the world in Colony Earth; we’d meet men activated by compu-puncture hyperpower — MACH’s zero, one and two.

Following immediately on from Colony Earth was a story where Earthmen (and indeed one woman — quite a strong character even) attempted to colonise Death Planet (you’d think they’d take a hint when they heard the name, wouldn’t you?) — but you’d have to take the time to stop to look at the featured adverts, where David Wilkie would tell you how to improve your swimming (“and wear arena swimwear”), or you could collect your own Star Wars rub down transfer sets from Shreddies, or even the official toys of the film — before jumping into one of the one-off short stories which have been known as Tharg’s Future Shocks.

Tharg, you see — or to give him his correct title, Tharg the Mighty — is 2000AD’s alien editor from the planet Quaxxann around Betelgeuse. Some people have speculated this is really just a cover for human editors but of course these people are all grexnix nonscrots who are certainly no Squaxx dek Thargo and may even end up getting a Rigellian Hotshot. Oh yes, and Tharg does have a tendency to use Quaxxann slag from time to time, as well as a penchant for eating polystrene cups.

At this time the robot with a lisp, Walter the Wobot “Fwiend Of Dwedd” was also featured as a more obviously humorous strip: usually only taking up one page of the comic per week as opposed to the 5-7 pages most other strips got. This sort of time also saw the introduction of two of my own personal favourites from 2000AD — Sam Slade, Robo-Hunter (“that’s S-L-A-Y-E-D to you”) arrived in prog 76, and Strontium Dog followed 10 issues later in prog 86 when Starlord was merged into 2000AD.

One of the features of 2000AD was that for quite some time, it was available for sale not just on Earth, but also elsewhere in the solar system, where they all seemed to use the currency ‘g’, which I believe stood for ‘galactic groats’. However, it’s perhaps worth noting that those of us who were here on Earth buying 2000AD seemed to be expected to financially support the rest of the galaxy — when the price in the UK went up between 9p in issue 82 to 10p in issue 85, the prices on Mercury, Venus, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, Saturn, Neptune and Pluto remained the same (as indeed did the prices in South Africa, Malaysia, New Zealand and Australia).

I don’t know whether Tharg the Mighty ever explained why 2000AD wasn’t available for sale on Jupiter or Uranus — whether it was trade restrictions, import taxes, or even whether the inhabitants had upset Tharg somehow — but if he did, I certainly can’t remember why. I can’t remember exactly when 2000AD stopped including the prices on other planets on the cover, but I’m fairly certain it went on until 1984 or 1985 at least…

An enjoyable little trip down memory lane: 2000AD now is definitely more adult than 2000AD then (you’d not see the sex olympics in Mega City one back then), but it has grown up with us. As well as the ability to throw in the occasional swear, the stories have become more sophisticated, and possibly darker (the recent ‘Cradlegrave’ being particularly dark and creepy), but that doesnn’t mean there isn’t place for a nice simple fun action story from time to time — a place at the 2000AD table has even been found for the ‘relic’ Bill Savage to kill those dirty Volgs…

It’s also worth pointing out that these comics aren’t actually mine; I borrowed these Cursed Earth ones off someone years and years and years ago, and I’ve got no idea where said person is, or what he’s doing. If he happens to read this, and wants his comics back, get in touch. Otherwise I’ll continue to provide a good home for them…

John Barrowman didn’t seem happy about the move:

Cutting the new series of Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood to five shows from 13 felt like “we were being punished”, its star John Barrowman has said.BBC News: Torchwood cut ‘like punishment’

…and I can very much understand what he was saying. I missed the first few episodes of Torchwood series one (really didn’t think a Captain Jack spinoff would work) but from the moment I jumped into the Small Worlds episode I was hooked. It was like Doctor Who, Jim, but not as we know it. This was adult Doctor Who. Adult sci-fi drama. Much of it definitely not suitable for family viewing. It was top-notch, first-rate, cracking stuff.

So losing eight episodes of it felt like the viewers were being punished too: not just the cast.

However, the switch to every night for five nights and one single long story line: that most definitely did work. It made the show that much more intense — and with a plot which had you shuffling over to sit down next to out and out paranoia in the first place, it most definitely worked.

The story was grim. An overpowering, overwhelming alien force called the 456 (because of the frequency they broadcast on) turn up and make their demands of earth. They’ve been here once before, making similar demands, and Captain Jack was involved then too. Anyone wishing to read on beyond this point may be aware that there will be spoilers: so if you’ve not seen it, you might wish to look away now…

And of course, what the aliens wanted was 10% of the world’s human children. Handed over where they would be used almost as bio-grafts on to the aliens, so that these children would be trapped within the aliens’ bodies, producing some chemical which the aliens would get high on. 10% of the world’s children to be handed over, just like that, otherwise they’d wipe out the planet.

Last time they’d been here, it had just been 12 children that Jack Harkness had helped to hand over to the aliens: and they’d gone away for 40 years. Now they were back, wanting more “tribute”. And the government felt it necessary to silence Jack and anyone else who knew about it…

I’m not going to run through the plot much more, other than to say that the first four episodes were searingly brilliant; atmospheric, punchy, fast, tense, great sci-fi stuff. We got introduced to Jack’s daughter (now looking older than him) and his young grandson; we saw Jack blown up and then entombed in liquid concrete — which led to him spending most of an episode in the nudey, as Steve Pugh noticed. Darn. Why does that sort of thing never happen to Gwen Cooper?

Unfortunately, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that Russell T Davies doesn’t do endings very well. Which is a shame, because he’s bloody brilliant at building stuff up: but the endings always feel a little rushed. Admittedly, we had possibly the most explosive piece of bureacratic dialogue I’ve heard in some time:

Give me a requisition 31!Peter Capaldi as John Frobisher

Obviously, when you find out what a requisition 31 entails, particularly in John Frobisher’s case, it changes the mood somewhat, but even so, this part of the story was extremely well done.

But then we get to the bits I’m not so sure about. There’s the the sacrifice of Captain Jack’s grandson. Precisely because the daughter was wary of him in episode one, you just knew that he was going to very badly let her down some way or other before the end of the series. I’m still undecided as to whether this was cliched and carried out clunkingly or whether the sacrifice was deliberately foreshadowed in the earlier episodes to try and make it more poignant when it occurred. Either way, it didn’t work. I never really believed that Jack Harkness actually felt the grief and sadness about his grandson: about Ianto, yes, but not the grandson: Captain Jack is simply too shallow for long term emotional attachments.

I’m possibly being a little picky in saying that the child’s head biografted onto the alien looked like some spare prop left over from the Toclafane — that’s actually fine if it was (after all, these things have to be made within a budget), but if it wasn’t, they ought to have put more effort into making it look more different.

And there’s Ianto. Did they forget what to do with him? Marching him into a room to try and shoot through a reinforced container? Why? Particularly when you know Jack is indestructible and Ianto isn’t. Had they just decided they wanted him out of the way by episode five, because there really was no good reason at all for him to go rushing in with Jack…

Oh, and while we’re on plot holes, if the aliens turned up once before in 1965, and after abducting them, discovered that they could use the children to provide chemical stimulants, why the hell did they want to abduct them in the first place in 1965? How could they have known that the kids would provide a drug for them? (Although I was quite happy to let this drop for the sake of the story, since I’m being critical, I’ll mention it).

The strongest part of episode 5 was probably Gwen and Rhys trying to keep the children safe: if you ignore the hammy to video ‘world-is-endings’ sequence from Gwen, anyway. The Bridget Spears sequences were also good (although I did guess what she was up to), and for the most part it was again another top quality episode. It’s just that the one little bit where it went wrong was pretty damn important.

There’s only a certain amount of times Russell can write the “how can we possibly defeat this alien? It’s so much stronger than us, oh, I know I’ve had an idea, yes, that works, the alien has gone, the end” without it looking shite. And that’s once.

The way in which to defeat the alien needed to be worked out — possibly surreptitiously tested — over a greater period of time. The idea that these ideas just “pop” into the head of the right person at the right moment and miraculously work first time (with twenty minutes to go in the final episode, you know an idea someone comes up with will work) seems to be RTD’s idea of an ending, but to me it’s the same deus ex machina time after time: this particular example nearly being as bad as the magic psychic Doctor force that defeated the Master at the end of Series 3…

Which really is a bloody shame because the rest of the episode, and the rest of the series, were of extremely high quality. I’m still hoping for a series four — and the sooner the better — but I hope by then Russell will let someone else have a go at the ending.

Doctor Who — Planet of the Dead

I think Russell T. Davies has made the correct decision to step down from Doctor Who at the end of these specials, as his vision of Doctor Who is starting to look somewhat stale. Firstly, you’ve got these new aliens, which look a bit like people, only with heads like flies.

Yes, they are vaguely insectoid, only otherwise completely humanoid in appearance, with four limbs and no wings. Not quite as bad as the Myrka from the original run, which was basically a pantomime horse painted green to look like a sea monster, but with about the same thought as to the creature’s biology.

Next you have the bus. Now the bus was damaged in transit, which necessitated some script changes [the rest of this contains some minor spoilers, so if you've not seen 'em, you may not wish to read on]. These were presumably the ‘clamps’ used at the end to transport them home again. These were a bit shit — after all, if they were still fully functional, why couldn’t the fly-people have used them to power their ship? However, I don’t wish to be too critical of this: obviously they had to come up with something to compensate for the fact that the bus was knackered. It was still a plot weakness, but one that I feel would be a little unfair to blame on the writers.

The big red bus motif was in itself quite interesting, although the sole ‘gentleman thief’ (or in this case ‘lady thief’) has been done to death somewhat. It’s a bit Entrapment, a bit Tomb Raider, a bit not particularly original…

And then we come to the monsters. I can only presume that the writers had seen the film Pitch Black, as the aliens were like this, only they came out in the day time. It was a “romp”, fair enough, but it was a patchwork romp, made out of different bits of other films and programmes.

Certainly not great. Other Doctor Who ‘romps’ — the Unicorn and the Wasp for example — have been funnier, and they have been more original. It was just a tired rehash. Although it’s fair to say that Michelle Ryan looked fairly slinky in that outfit, and was [nods to @stephenlang] certainly an improvement on the likes of Bonnie Langford.

So I’ve not been that impressed with the last few Doctor Whos. And yet I’m still looking forward to The Waters of Mars, although somewhat less so now that I understand it features Ood Sigma…

Red Dwarf — Back To Earth

And then there’s Red Dwarf, where the dwarfers make it back to earth at last. Or do they?

Well, by half-way through the second episode, I no longer cared. Part of the problem with Red Dwarf was that the original run went on too long, leading to various problems. First was the re-introduction of Kochanski in series VII, which didn’t work (particularly seeing as this was supposed to be the love of Lister’s life and he didn’t seem to notice that Clare Grogan had been replaced by Chloë Annett). Next was the return of the original Red Dwarf, complete with crew, in series VIII, which worked to a point, but relegated the ‘Dwarfers’ to a minor command role which limited their scope for adventure somewhat.

This meant that to start ‘Back to Earth’, you had to scrape away a lot of that crap — Kochanski was now dead, for example, and start again. You also had a more significant problem. The cast had suddenly got older. Okay, for them it probably wasn’t that sudden: I’m sure that the actors have aged at the same rate as the rest of us since 1999, only as ten years had passed since we’d last seen the dwarfers, they were obviously a bit wrinklier than remembered.

And then there’s the whole self-referential “realising that they are fictional”, and meeting up with Craig Charles playing whoever-the-hell-it-is in Coronation Street. What in the name of blue fuck was going on here? Is it actually possible to jump the shark in a way that is any bigger than this?

There’s the whole squid thing. As soon as I saw squid, I thought of the Despair Squid from Back to Reality and was somewhat surprised that the dwarfers didn’t make more of a reference to it. Of course, this is because them not realising that it could be similar was essential to the plot. Not that calling it a ‘plot’ helps in any way.

There were some was a redeeming decent moments — the way in which Rimmer deals with the hologram Katerina Bartikovsky who is set on replacing and deleting him may seem throwaway, but therein lies the beauty of it.

But other than Chris Barrie’s facial mugging as Arnold Rimmer, and the rapport/dialogue between the dwarfers, there really wasn’t much else to say about it.

Doug Naylor has stated in an interview with Dave that he would like to make another series, but that “we would have to wait and see” how good or bad the reaction to “Back to Earth” was.Wikipedia: Red Dwarf

Well Doug, if you want my opinion, it’s time to call it a day, unless you can somehow un-write series VII and VIII, and the 3 ‘special’ episodes. The dwarfers have become a joke, and not in a good way.

As a long-time Red Dwarf and Doctor Who fan, I have to admit to great disappointment in the two of them over the Easter weekend (which in turn is disappointing). I expected better. I know the writers are capable of better. Maybe it’s time for them to turn to new subject material.

In a way, this is maybe why Blackadder, Father Ted and Fawlty Towers are so highly thought of: they all went out on a high, before anything started to get stale. This leads me to have conflicting thoughts over The IT Crowd: I want to see more of it, but I don’t want to see it go the way of so many other comedies which petered out badly in the end…

For an added bonus, true Dr. Who geeks can play ‘spot the serial’.

Spotted on B3TA (warning: may — indeed frequently attempts to — cause offense).