Catching Up

It's been a while. In the couple of years that have transpired between the last post and this post, a lot has happened in my personal life, and for a while there, Doctor Who was not particularly important to me. Things have finally settled down, though, and I've picked the show back up. I've seen the first season and a half of Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor, with the second part of his Series Six set to air shortly, and I really love it. Matt Smith is charismatic, a fantastic actor, and has really made the role his own. I'll probably have a lot more to say about that later, and I guess first I should decide if I want to keep his blog as a classic Doctor Who theme or if I am going to branch out into the new iteration as well. I guess there's no reason to limit myself to just the classic series, and I might as well cover both. Why not some book reviews as well? I think that sounds pretty good, come to think of it.

In the last few days, I've watched several of Pertwee's Third Doctor stories. I started with the Claws of Axos, then moved on to The Green Death. After that, I decided to watch Pertwee's final season in order, so I watched The Time Warrior, the Invasion of the Dinosaurs, and am planning to conclude it all with Death to the Daleks and The Planet of the Spiders. Rather than pick things back up where I left off with Sylvester McCoy, I'll be blogging my thoughts on those Third Doctor stories. McCoy's stuff was like pulling teeth there, and I am not really in a hurry to get back to that stuff any time soon. Most of this Pertwee stuff consists of stories I've never seen, and I may even go back to the start of his run and begin there. Well, who knows, we'll see. I would love to blog about the new Matt Smith stuff, too, so this may just end up being random and all over the place, but if that's how I'm watching it then what's wrong with that? On that note, I'm off to watch some more WHO.

149 - Paradise Towers

8/12/09

What a mess this is! I am not liking the direction this season is going in at all. Well, we start off with the Doctor and Mel materializing the TARDIS at a place called Paradise Towers, apparently for a good swim in their awesome pool. Well, Paradise Towers is a huge building that is run down and dilapidated, and I guess the inhabitants are trapped inside it. There's two rival gangs called the Kangs (rhymes with gangs, clever), and some dude called Zex who pops up every now and then and tries to be a hero. You know what, I can't even struggle to capitulate the plot of this. It was dreadful, and I want my time back. The production was even worse than the last one, and the story took such incredibly painful lapses in logic and asks the viewer to shut their brain off to the extent that the story is totally mush. I really, really didn't care for this one. It set out to tell a story that promoted unity and examined the state of society in 1987, during the height of 80s excess and decadence, but I think it pretty largely failed, due to incompetent storytelling and very childish devices. If you want to be a children's show that doesn't challenge, do that. If you want to be a cutting edge socially aware drama, do that. But the two can't really mix and please both audiences.

2/10

148 - Time And the Rani

8/9/09

If you are paying attention to the dates, you will see that it has been almost a year since I last posted on this blog. I didn't intend for it to take so long, but when I last tried to watch the first Sylvester McCoy story, it was so terrible that it put me off for a very long time.

Seriously, this is a very bad story. I mean, it's cool that we get to see the Rani again, and I like Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor, but this is not Doctor Who! This is some sort of base, cheap children's entertainment, not my beloved Doctor. You can tell money is not what it was from the very beginning, even though there is a cool new computer animated opening sequence. Colin Baker, wisely, refused to film a regeneration scene, and so they did a crap job of putting a blond wig on McCoy and filming him quickly and shakily, and from there, it's all downhill. The plot is thin and corny. The Rani is trying to use the minds of some of the universe's most powerful thinkers to create a time device (I think) and a bunch of locals on this planet get caught up in it. But honestly, I thought the whole thing was tedious, hard to follow, and laughably juvenile, something that Doctor Who never was. There is a difference between family friendly and childish, and what we have here just seems childish.

*shudder*

Well, my hopes are not high. This is not a good way to start a season, but we'll see if it gets any better. My rating is...

3/10

The 6th Doctor: A Look Back

9/3/08

Colin Baker's tenure as the Doctor was perhaps the most tumultuous of the entire 40 plus year history of the show. He was hired at a time that I consider to be part of the Golden Age of Doctor who, from around 1974 to 1984. Those ten years saw Doctor Who become an international phenomenon, led largely by Tom Baker and a host of stories that weren't afraid to go too scary and too creepy. Peter Davison continued this, and his stories fit well with Tom Baker's era, though he played it differently.

But Colin Baker's era...it's a bit difficult for me to describe. I no longer felt like the Doctor was a man I would follow anywhere, like he was a traveling detective or an intergalactic explorer full of wide eyed innocence. Colin Baker played him with an edge. He played him finicky, and at times even mean, and almost always rude. He was a lot harder to like, really. The tone of the stories became darker, and whereas the previous Doctor Who entries had always skirted the edge of giving kids nightmares, I found these stories not really appropriate for kids at all, more often than not. In Vengeance on Varos, two men die by falling into a vat of acid. The Doctor looks down at them, and coldly says "you'll forgive me if I don't join you." Then he turns and walks away. This was a more cynical Doctor for a more cynical time. And I think it's also a reflection of where the world was at that point in time.

It's not Colin Baker's fault. He's a wonderful actor, and was just trying to do something different than his predecessor. He wildly succeeded, and he really gave the role his all. He has been quoted as saying that if he hadn't been fired, he may have surpassed Tom Baker's 7 years in the TARDIS. Who knows what changes would have occurred had he been allowed to stay on? But it was all said and done, in my opinion, this was the beginning of the end for Doctor Who. It would take a few more years to die completely, but it all started here.

I've spoken previously of how Michael Grade, the head of the BBC during this time, was adamantly against Doctor Who, finding it to be a waste of time and money. But was the downfall of Doctor Who all his fault? No, I don't think so. John Nathan Turner didn't really want to be doing this anymore, and he was not allowed to leave. Therefore, his heart and soul weren't in it, and if the producer isn't giving his all, your show is not going to succeed. I think as a result of this, the writing suffered as well. Eric Saward, who had been script editor since the Davison years and who was also one of my favorite writers, quit in 1986, frustrated that he and John Nathan Turner couldn't see eye to eye on the direction of the show.

But Colin Baker would definitely get a chance to shine on. While he refused a regeneration scene for the introduction of McCoy's 7th Doctor, he still had a lot of affection for the role of the Doctor, and has supported it in conventions, video appearances such as "The Colin Baker Years" and even did a sort of generic Doctor Who imitation series called "The Stranger" which was released over 6 videos in the 1990s, featuring himself as the Stranger, Nicola Bryant (companion Peri Brown) as Miss Brown, and Michael Wisher (Davros) as the baddie, not to mention several other connections to Doctor Who. He also was able to return to the role of the Doctor via the Big Finish audio adventures, of which he has done many.

I find myself fondly remembering the first Colin Baker season, and I think that this is where he was really able to shine. It was brief, but he definitely made the role his own. He's a remarkable actor, and thankfully, has had many opportunities to do justice to the role in recent years. He's not my favorite, but you know what? When the obstacles he faced are considered, one cannot deny that he triumphed in the long run.

147: Trial of a Timelord - The Ultimate Foe

9/3/08

I can't discuss this story properly without spoilers, so be aware that this entry will contain many, as it is the final part of the Trial of a Timelord season.

So the Doctor has been accused now of genocide, and we find out that the Valeyard is really the evil part of the Doctor given physical form. Don't ask me how.

Mel is pulled from the future (or past, I'm not sure) to testify in the Doctor's favor. It all makes my head hurt.

There's a lot of metaphysical stuff that reminds me of Kinda and Snakedance, so you know that I'm not really enjoying myself when I reference those two stories. Basically, the Doctor goes INTO the Matrix, the all knowing system that records all of reality. Here he encounters many illusions, but he is able to manipulate them because they aren't real.

The Doctor outwits the Valeyard with the involvement of the Master, and when it's all said and done, he saves the day and is cleared of all charges. And guess what? He's also asked to be the President. Really? Oh, and also, Peri is not only alive and well, but she is married to Yrcanos now back on Thoros-Beta! So off he goes into his TARDIS with Mel, into another adventure, and into history, Colin Baker never to return to Doctor Who on television.

The main thing I have a problem with is Peri. How is it she is still alive? How did it happen? Did the Timelords erase the events and re-write them? If they did, that's far worse than anything the Doctor ever did to land himself on trail. Did they wipe her memory? Here's an earth girl, light years from home, married to a warrior king she only just met. She has to feel pretty abandoned.
And rightfully she should. I think it's a ridiculously lazy ending for the character that I had grown to love and who had become one of my favorite companions. Plus, why didn't the Doctor try to set things right with her? It's enough to give any companion second thoughts about taking a trip in the TARDIS.

I give the Ultimate Foe a 3/10.

As for the whole Trial of a Timelord, I can't believe how disappointed I was by the whole thing. I started off very much in love with the idea, but it quickly left me cold. I give the whole season long arc a 5/10.

It left me so discouraged in Doctor Who that I have decided to take a week or two off from the show. This is definitely not the high point of the classic show.

146: Trial of a Timelord - Terror of the Vervoids

9/3/08

The Doctor, still on trial and trying to come to grips with what he found out in the previous story, is shown a tale by the Valeyard not from his past but from his future. We see the Doctor on an intergalactic liner named the Hyperion III with a new companion, Mel. Mel is a tiny little exercise freak who has enough energy to fuel the afforementioned intergalactic liner just on enthusiasm and pep alone. But you can't do this! you can't make me care for a new companion when I've just been through the wringer with the last one.

What follows is basically a story about killer plants. They walk around and look fairly humanoid (and fairly phallic too) and kill some folks, and they must be stopped.

I can tell that my tone in this and the previous entry has become pretty cynical. I just do not at all care for the turn of events that things have taken, and I find it to be a huge departure from what I tend to think of in a Doctor Who story. But then again, maybe that was the whole point.

I give this story a 4/10.

145: Trial of a Timelord - Mindwarp

9/3/08

Ho boy. Where to begin. So the plot for this one is that the Doctor is still on trial, and the Valeyard, his prosecutor, shows the court another story from the Doctor's past where the Doctor and Peri end up on the planet Thoros-Beta, the home planet of the creepy little freak Sil, who was seen in Vengeance on Varos. There's a scientist doing experiments on the natives as well as working on switching brains into different bodies to prolong life...some strange stuff that the Doctor needs to put a stop to. Along the way, they encounter some rebels and a huge man named King Yrcanos, played by Brian Blessed, who I loved as Robin Hood's dad in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and who can also been seen in similar shows to Doctor Who like Blake's 7 and Space 1999. But I digress.
The plot of this episode is so secondary to the emotions that I have for it that I don't even feel the need to explain it any further. Suffice it to say that something very bad and very wrong happens in this episode that really soured my mood on this whole Trial of A Timelord story.

SPOILERS AHEAD.







They killed Peri! Not really killed her as such, but she had a brain that was not her own placed inside of her newly shaved head and everything she ceased to be was destroyed with her old brain. Now, there is a coda to this story that pops up in a couple of stories, but it's ridiculous. I left this story feeling totally abandoned by the writers of this show. It was just mean! But I'll address this more in the post for the final part of this story.

As for my rating? Not impressed, and I found this story to have a decidedly mean streak to it. I give it a 4/10.