8/8/08There's honestly no way I can discuss this episode without spoiling it, so if you haven't seen it and want to be surprised, I'd skip this until then.
I remember liking Earthshock far more than I did when I watched it again today. I think my memory was attributing certain story elements to another story. I'm not sure which one...maybe Remembrance of the Daleks. Anyway, I was kind of bored for a lot of this, and I think that...well, I'm getting ahead of myself.
Let's start at the beginning. The Doctor lands on Earth in the year 2526 outside of a cave. Long story short, there's a bomb in the cave and they've got to find out how it got there. They trace the signal to a freighter that is headed to earth with a bunch of cargo, which turns out to be thousands of Cybermen in silos. Doctor Who goodness ensues.
Now, first off, I want to address the new updated appearance of the Cybermen. They've got a more streamlined helmet, they've got a suit that looks like it's made from crinkled tin foil, and you can see their mouth moving. In short, I think this is a BIG step back from the way they looked the last time we saw them, which was in Revenge of the Cybermen. In that story, they had a sort of rubberized suit that you could easily believe was flexible metal. Not here. Here it looks like something from a Michael Jackson video. John Nathan Turner, the producer, wanted to bring the effects and designs into the 1980s, and maybe he did, but I think he did so at the expense of the look of the Cybermen. I read and hear that this look is well loved and favored, but not by me.
Next, I want to address the Adric issue. The kid was incredibly annoying, and I'd grown to seriously dislike him as a character. Matthew Waterhouse seems like a fine guy, and in interviews on this dvd, he comes across as likable enough. So I know it was just the writing. Young precocious geniuses are never well received. It's sort of a shame that rather than grow his character they just killed him off, but maybe it was for the best. I mean, he clearly wasn't an actor. Still, even though I think it was for the best, it's unfortunate for him.
If you are going to watch this story and have the opportunity to watch it on DVD, make sure that before you select the play feature, you go to special features and choose the CGI option. This episode had some particularly dated effects that have been updated with brilliant CGI for this release, but you have to select it from the special features menu first, or you will just get the dated original special effects. The most notable is the way that this episode ended:
Adric is on the freighter plummeting to the earth, but what we see is a little model on a string, just sitting against a black background. This is supposed to be the freighter in space. Then we see Adric looking through the viewscreen of the ship at the earth. That's all it is, is just a big earth. Then we cut back to the exterior model shot, and it blows up.
On the new CGI version, we see a breathtaking CGI earth that looks remarkably real, and then we see the freighter literally speeding into the atmosphere. It ignites and begins to leave a trail of fire behind it. The eart gets bigger and bigger, then we can make out hills and mountains rushing toward the screen, then we actually see the moment of impact as the freighter hits the earth, and the screen flashes to white before we cut back to the footage of the reactions of the Doctor and crew. MUCH more effective, much more moving. I know they didn't have technology such as this back then, so it's fantastic that such effort has been put into it now.
My last point of discussion is that the Doctor kills the Cyber-leader with said Cyber-leader's own gun. Now, there is a lot of discussion over the violence in Doctor Who over the years. I think it was pretty harmless and innocent. We rarely saw blood and even more infrequently did we see the consequences of death. The violence in Doctor Who has always been to establish consequences, set plots up, and move the story along. It's never been particularly gruesome or gratuitous. Now, having said that, I don't at all like the idea of the Doctor using a gun. He's been very much against guns at different points throughout the show. Peter Davison's Doctor in particular seems to have a large dislike for them. So that's why I have a problem with him taking the Cyber-leader's gun and shooting him in the chest with two bursts at point blank range....then shooting him two more times, and then as the Cyber-leader lays on the ground, dying, shoots him twice for a third time.
Overkill.
It's a nitpick, I will grant that, but I just think that they took it a little too far. When the Doctor becomes Rambo, I think we've taken things a bit too far from the origins and the intentions of the original show. Again, I have no problem with violence, nor do I have a problem with the Doctor doing violence, but not with a gun. Do something more creative. He takes Adric's Maths Badge, which contains gold, and crams it into the chest piece of the Cyber-leader before he takes the gun. This would have been enough for me. The Cybermen cannot stand gold, so just let that interfere with his life systems and kill him that way. Don't get your Ak-47 out, Doctor. Don't go A-Team on the monster of the week.
But outside of that, it's a decent episode. It's not as good as I remembered thinking it was, but it's still not bad. It's got some good sets and it was directed with a lot of style, utilizing many more cuts than Doctor Who episodes had ever used before. Think Michael Bay but a decade early.
I'm giving Earthshock a 6/10.
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