118: Four to Doomsday

8/6/08

118: Four to Doomsday


Peter Davison’s second story finds him trying to take Tegan back to Heathrow airport but instead ending up on a ship in space that is heading to earth. We encounter three frog-like aliens who are named Monarch, Persuasion, and Enlightenment. Also aboard the ship are samples of humans from earth that date back to 32000 BC and span many levels of time.

Again, this is a solid science fiction story that really captured my attention. I did see some of the twists in the story coming, but not enough for it to take away any of my enjoyment. There was a device used at the end by the Doctor that was pretty ridiculous, though, so when people hold up the classic series as being so intellectually superior, I must challenge them on it. Okay, here’s what happened. The doctor tried to jump through about 50 yards of deep space toward the TARDIS while attached to the ship by a line of rope. The rope gets disconnected and the Doctor is left floating in space, unmoving, halfway between the TARDIS and the large frog alien’s ship. He reaches into his pocket and takes out a cricket ball, throws it at the large ship, bounces it off the hull, and catches it when it returns to him. The momentum of catching the ball carries him the rest of the way to the TARDIS floating in space. It was worth a groan, especially factoring in the terrible 1981 special effects.

Another thing that I didn’t like about this episode was Adric. This kid gets on my nerves like I never would have imagined. He nearly gets the entire crew of heroes killed because he won’t listen to the Doctor. No wonder he’d be dead in a few stories. He’s intolerable.

But the solid and compelling science fiction ideas presented in this episode are very thought provoking, and in this day and age, very timely. It deals with putting the memories and personality of a person into a computer chip so that they may live forever in a cloned or mechanical host body. This theme was similarly presented in the series 4 two parter “Silence in the Library” in which River Song is put into a computer as data. 27 years in between the two episodes, but the idea remains the same.

*Sonic Shenanigans: the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to reverse the magnetic field of hovering video cameras.

I rate this episode a 6.5 out of 10.