The Chase

The Daleks are back.

Armed with a time machine of their own, the Daleks are on a singular mission to hunt down the Doctor and the TARDIS crew and assassinate them following their interferance with the invasion of Earth. This is where the dynamic between the Doctor and his arch foes changes to become what it will be known as for the rest of the series, when the Daleks will forever know his name and be obsessed with killing him. But they will also fear him, and later on will even endow him with a name in their own folklore: Ka Faraq Gatri, or, Bringer of Darkness. Imagine if you will from the Daleks' point of view: this stranger has stopped and entire invasion force, and now a crack sqaud of Daleks will be sent after him to exterminate him once and for all.

And of course, they'll fail.

I couldn't help but feel that this story was maybe two episodes too long. The TARDIS is pursued across time and space by the Dalek ship, landing on the planet Aridius (a planet that has obviously changed its name as it was once covered by vast oceans and was anything but arid), then the top of the Empire State Building (which allowed me to merge it with a viewing of Sex and the City - I watch it between episodes when things get slow), the deck of the Marie Celeste, a haunted house, and then the planet Mechanus. Okay, it's a chase. The Daleks are chasing the Doctor. I get it. But it's a pretty thin premise, with all these short stops thrown in for the sheer novelty of it. The dialogue between the regulars is not the best, although they have the whole family atmosphere going on at the very start, with Ian reading some book in the living quarters, Barbara hard at work making a dress for Vicki, the Doctor tinkering with something he liberated from the museum on Xeros, and Vicki wandering the ship bored. As the story progresses there are some weak interchanges, and some pretty bad slips in the visual effects department including Daleks on sets where they are not supposed to be, studio ceilings visible over the top of the TARDIS console room walls, and boom mics and studio cameras lurking in the jungle on Mechanus. And then there are the supporting cast in episode 6 - the Mechanoids and their captive human, astronaut Steven Taylor. The Mechanoids were soon paired off as the new mortal enemies of the Daleks, and the two species would have wars across the galaxies in comic strip adventures. They're cooler than the Thals. And as for Mr Taylor and his panda, Hi-Fi.. well... wait and see.

At the end of the adventure though, it's goodbye for Ian and Barbara. They've had enough and they take an opportunity to go home. The Doctor is outraged, citing reasons of terrible risk involved with their desires, but the real truth is he has grown attached to them since they came on board the TARDIS. Susan has left him, and now the last of his original crew are going too. I'd be annoyed if I was being left with custody of Vicki as well. Maybe they should get someone new on board, some hunky guy to be a bit of eye candy but also make him a bit like Ian, have him challenge the Doctor on occasion but still make him his own man, someone maybe from the future who doesn't need everything explained to him.

Hey.. where'd that Steven Taylor guy get to...

NEXT EPISODE : THE TIME MEDDLER

UPDATED 9 OCTOBER 2005: I showed the edited highlights of The Chase to my friend Jay yesterday. I had warned him that this is one of the worst examples of production values, with sound bleeding from scene to scene and all sorts of visual bloopers like strings on bats, Daleks where there should be no Daleks, BBC studio cameras and boom mics visible here and there, flubs of dialogue, and the awful kaleidoscope outer space scenes with the TARDIS in flight. Jay was apalled and kept whimpering "Why, Sean? Why?". I look at it as a great opportunity for the restoration team to clean up some of those effects, maybe tidy up some sound issues, really get their teeth into a project. We shall see one day.

The Space Museum

The TARDIS jumps a time track and arrives on the planet Xeros, but as the machine has not yet synced with real time the travellers are in effect wandering the planet in their own future. Yes, another drab planet covered in sand, but on this planet there is a touist attraction: a space museum run my the Moroks, who are an agressive apparantly all-male race with very bad hair. The oppressed Xerons are nothing more than children, all in mod-ish black, with an extra set of eyebrows and odd high-top sneakers (and led by Tor, played by Jeremy Bulloch, who would go on to great things as Boba Fett in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi). The Morok museum is a testament to all the Moroks have achieved, but to their great dismay the TARDIS crew discover that they are to become exhibits in the museum and see themselves in glass display cases. Having glimpsed their future, the Doctor, Vicki, Ian and Barbara have to try and do everything possible to change it, contrary to what the Doctor insisted could not be achieved back in The Aztecs.

Most of the story takes place within the museum, so as I said last time, there are a lot of corridors for the cast to wander around in. Most of the exhibits are just bits of machinery or rusted out space ships, but there is an interesting specimen in the form of a Dalek. I'm not sure if this is to say that the Daleks have died out by this time in the series, or if we are supposed to believe that the Moroks were capable of conquering them. If it's the latter, I don't buy it; the Moroks, or at least the ones running the museum, are not very good at their jobs and can't even keep a heap of noisy teenage boys under control, I can't see them winning a war against the Daleks. Unless only the stupid Moroks got sent to Xeros.

How does our crew fare? Well of course they win. The Doctor toys with a truth machine under interrogation. Ian beats up some gaurds. Barbara drags a half-dead Xeron boy around when the museum is fumigated. And Vicki surprises us all by knowing how to raid an armoury and start a revolution. She's spunky, that girl, even totes a gun herself. And of course, the future can be changed if one is forwarned of it, which goes against the dogma of the last few adventures in history.

And then it turns out that the Daleks are not dead and gone. They're back, and this time it's personal...

NEXT EPISODE : THE CHASE

The Crusades

Fresh from their adventures on Vortis, the TARDIS crew arrive in a forest filled with English knights and Saracens. It is the time of the crusades, and Barbara is taken captive by the nasty El Akir. The Doctor and Vicki are caught up in intregue between King Richard the Lionheart and his sister, Joanna, and Ian is knighted.

Another fun historical story, but this one is a bit different from others as it has some big names in the cast: Julian Glover and Jean Marsh. Now I'm not sure if any episodes previous to this had "guest stars" so to speak, but these two I recognize for not only their great performances in this story but from their future works as well both in Doctor Who and other programs; Glover played General Veers in The Empire Strikes Back, and Jean Marsh would be a regular on the program Upstairs, Downstairs. The interactions between the Doctor and these characters are played out perfectly, but when Joanna confronts her brother over his plans to use her to make peace with the Saracens the heat is really turned up like it has never been before on the show.

The Crusades is another victim of the BBC vault purge, and only episodes 1 and 3 exist. They were released on VHS along with the next adventure, The Space Museum, but the missing episodes were supplemented by having William Russell reprise his role as Ian Chesterton several years after leaving the TARDIS and give a recap of what happened during those moments. The VHS release was also accompanied by a CD with the audios for episodes 2 and 4, but a complete CD with narration by William Russell is due from the BBC Radio Collection sometime later this year. Last year the Lost in Time DVD box set was released with the two complete episodes and the audio tracks as well; episode 1, The Lion, was recovered in January 1999 but there was extensive damage to the print which was cleaned up significantly for the DVD.

And now back to VHS, for the story that made corridor running the official Olympic sport of Doctor Who...

NEXT EPISODE : THE SPACE MUSEUM

The Eleventh Tiger

So it's China again for our time travellers, but in 1865. The TARDIS arrives in an old temple, but somehow everyone there already knows Ian and he is attacked and has the crap kicked out of him by an angry mob of locals. The Doctor is challenged to a deul by a young martial arts student, and an ancient otherworldy evil begins to seep into the Chinese countryside in an attempt to be reborn and invade the planet. Or something.

I didn't like this book. I've had this off-and-on like with David A.McIntee's work; sometimes he can be tremendously accurate on history and his stories just flow across the paper, and other times I wonder how I finished the book (as was the case with his first Doctor Who novel, White Darkness). For starters, rather than use the gap between The Web Planet and The Crusades, McIntee decided that this story would go best after The Romans despite that story's immediate lead into the events of the planet Vortis. Then comes the presence of Vicki; she's not used to any great length in the story, so maybe it should have been set before she was picked up on Dido and her presence removed entirely. The Doctor is protrayed well, although his karate-master skills are a bit of a laugh when he takes on the impetuous Jiang. And as for Ian and Barbara... who knew they were in love? I suppose it's something that we all should have seen coming (as we will in Face of the Enemy when they return as a married couple) but it's going to be a bit of a contrast going from this back to the TV series.

And then there's the actual enemy here. I didn't get a real sense of exactly who they were fighting. Some outer space guy in the body of a Chinese abbot, but with memories from the First Emperor of China. Wierd. I kept waiting for it to make sense, but either I was not concentrating or it was just tremendously vague when it came to the bad guy. There was a rather interesting climactic battle akin to something I saw in one of those Lara Croft movies (McIntee himself is a big video game freak by his own admission) but it did nothing to save the story, just added to the general confusion. And then they went back to the TARDIS it seems, and life returned to normal.

Bah.

NEXT EPISODE : THE CRUSADES

The Web Planet

I'm going to start off with a ringing endorsement of this one - I love The Web Planet. Up until this point the TARDIS has gone to some very interesting places, the crew have been put through some insane ordeals, they've met the Daleks twice, and one of the regular cast has left and been replaced. Now come 6 of the most imaginative and well-visualized episodes of this black and white era.
After leaving Roman times, tha TARDIS is snared by some force that the Doctor cannot counteract, and the ship lands on a desolate planet with a thin atmosphere and no vegetation. Ian wonders if they are on the moon, but it is later revealed that they are on the planet Vortis, where the dominant life forms are all insects grown to human proportions. The Zarbi are massive ant-like creatures that have become militant and do the bidding of the mysterious Animus. The Menoperta are beautiful butterfly-like creatures with wings and can actually fly (yes, some of the wires can be seen as the actors cavort about the brilliant sets but there's no such thing as perfect in1965). And underground live the Optera, a simpler version of their flying cousins. In short, the Doctor, Barbara, Ian and Vicki are the only humans in the cast, the rest are all costumed. Oh to have seen this in colour! Not only are the natives of Vortis the most alien to date, but the planet itself is a new experience for the show with it's thin atmosphere and the odd flaring that accompanies it when light reaches the surface (this effect is achieved by smearing Vaseline on the camera lens, and it works wonderfully).
Vortis has been invaded, the Menoperta repelled by the once-peaceful Zarbi. A mysterious web of thick growth has begun to creep across the planet, and at its centre sits the Animus, waiting for the final assault by the Menoperta. The TARDIS crew arrive when the Menoperta are set to make one final desperate gamble to reclaim their planet from the dark power that drove them away, and the crew are split up; Barbara is taken prisoner and becomes part of a slave worker party of captured Menoptera (their wings are brutally torn from their bodies by the Zarbi when they are captured). Ian and the Menoptera leader Vrestin fall in with the subterranean Optera. And the Doctor and Vicki are forced to work for the Animus to detect the massing army of Menoperta, which results in a very clever battle at the end of episode 4, with Barbara inadvertantly caught in the clash of the Zarbi army and the Menoperta spearhead.
Faults? A couple, but they are all visual ones, such as a Zarbi running headlong into a camera. The wires on the Menoptera actors. The cast getting too close to the well-painted backdrop vista of Vortis and casting a shadow across it from time to time. Minor stuff. The adventure required so much special attention to detail that it reportedly blew the budget for the season and writer Bill Strutton was banned from ever writing for the show again (which if you ask me was damn stupid - script editor Dennis Spooner should have taken better care of some of these details).
Rumour has it that The Web Planet is up for the extreme DVD makeover this year, which would be nothing short of fantastic. To be able to see this adventure in sharp detail would be great, and maybe the Restoration Team could get rid of those wires on the Menoptera. And then there's the final moments of episode 6; there is some issue with a the rights to a particular piece of music over the closing credits. The end of my VHS version has some jarring computer-generated closing titles as opposed to the normal scrolling credits of the regular series and the final seconds of the show are clipped to accomodate the rights issue. Either the issue has been resolved or the Restoration Team are going to work some kind of miracle and make it so we can see the episode properly with it's promise of the next episode being The Lion, the first of 4 episodes collectively known as The Crusades.
But we're not going there just yet. It's time to read a new novel.

NEXT EPISODE : THE ELEVENTH TIGER

The Romans

First, a correction: Dennis Spooner wrote The Romans, not Donald Cotton as I said in my previous post. Donald Cotton did, however, provide a wildly humorous novelization of the script in the form of a Target paperback novelization in 1987.

So. Regardless of one's take on the events of Byzantium!, we join the TARDIS crew roughly a month into their stay at a villa north of Rome. It seems they have lucked out and found the place uninhabited, with its owner off on a military campaign. The Doctor and Vicki set out to visit the city of Rome itself but Barbara and Ian wind up there as well after being attacked, kidnapped, and sold as slaves. The Doctor is once again mistaken for someone else, this time an elderly lyre player on his way to meet Nero himself. Vicki hangs with the palace poisoner and Barbara ends up on the personal staff of the Empress, but not after Nero takes fancy to her and puts her life in danger from his wife's rage (yes, twice now for Barbara with the dirty older men). The show is very much played as a comedy, with three of the TARDIS crew in the Imperial Palace and all passing within meters of each other from time to time but never meeting. After a stint rowing in the bowels of a ship, Ian is drafted into being a gladiator, and although he's no Russell Crowe there is some impressive fight choreography this time around - a far cry from Ian's duel with Ixta back in The Aztecs.

I loved The Romans. Again, purely historical, and so much fun. You can see the regular cast thoroughly enjoying themselves the whole time, especially William Hartnell as the Doctor, brawling with an assassin, making a fool of Nero in front of the whole court, and in the end providing Nero with the idea to set Rome ablaze to clear the ground for a new city of his design. Though I also love the heavy science fiction tales that will become the norm for the show in its later years, I love the spirit of these adventures in the 1960's where the entire production takes on this feeling of comfort and plain old fun, and if the vieweer gets it, all the better. I can't wait to see this one cleaned up and put on DVD one day.

As episode 4 ends, a new adventure begins to unfold. It seems that the TARDIS had been caught by some force and is slowly being dragged down...

NEXT EPISODE : THE WEB PLANET

Byzantium!

So here we are again with another novel adventure inserted into the existing series. As mentioned before, The Rescue ended with the TARDIS toppling off a hillside, setting the scene for the 4 episode story The Romans, a historical comedy by Donald Cotton. Keith Topping, however, decided that there was more story to be told in the year AD 64, and has set his novel, Byzantium!, between those televised moments.

The TARDIS does indeed fall down a slope, and after the crew have picked themselves up and reassured newcomer Vicki that this isn't always how the day begins, they emerge to explore. They are outside of the Imperial city, Byzantium, where Romans rule and everyone else resents them for it. The TARDIS crew get separated as is the call of these adventures, and the TARDIS gets picked up as a curio by some rich people and taken away. Political upheaval surrounds the crew, as does the usual variety of murder, intregue and kidnapping, and they all at one point believe themselves to be alone, that their companions are dead, and they will have to live the rest of their lives in this time period.

Byzantium! has an interesting opening in that the story actually begins in 1970's London in a museum where a young boy named John Alaydon Ganatus Chesterton and his mother, Barbara, meet a woman at the British Museum in front of an exhibit of Roman-era atrefacts. Yes, Barabara and Ian will one day leave the Doctor and get married and give their son the names of two of their Thal friends. And their adventures with the Doctor will always come back to them even long after they have parted company with him. And it's nice to know that this little bit of future history such as it were is going to surface again, but not for a while.

And as a concept, Byzantium! works very well, and at the end of the story it leads to where we will rejoin the televised adventures. The conclusion is not exactly seamless, and has been (I feel) deliberately left open for more adventures in the Roman era with the TARDIS just slightly out of reach of the travellers. But for now, they're on the road to recovering their time machine.

NEXT EPISODE : THE ROMANS

The Rescue

Still down to three crew members, the TARDIS lands on the planet Dido. The previous visitors to Dido were not so lucky as to land and actually crashed, and only two of the original crew have survived and are awaiting a rescue ship from Earth. Barbara and Ian meet the murderous Koquillion, apparantly a native of the planet, who tries to blow Ian and the Doctor up in a cave and throws Barbara off a cliff. Koquillion is also terrorizing the crash survivors, Bennet and a young orphan girl named Vicki, but they are riding out his wrath as they wait for rescue. And Koquillion ain't pretty - he's the epitome of nasty with his tusks, spines and claws.

With Susan so recently departed, the Doctor bonds almost instantly with Vicki, although his cajoling old man ways charm her where they would frustrate Susan as she was a lot smarter than Vicki appears to be. Vicki is from the far future of Earth, around the 25th century, and is immediately skeptical of Ian and Barbara's claims to be from 1963, but once she is inside the TARDIS she understands they are telling the truth and accepts the Doctor's offer to travel with them.

There's not much to really say about this one. It's the second two-part adventure in the history of the series, and there would not be another one until The Sontaran Experiment in 1975. It's short, but it moves along; the combined length of the episodes is roughly the same as the standalone episodes of the new series, so it can serve as an indicator of how Doctor Who can tell a short story just as easily as it can a longer one (stay tuned, there is a 12 episode adventure coming up in season 3).

The VHS copy I have is edited so the final moments of The Rescue are missing. The TARDIS lands on a hillside, but after a few moments it wobbles and falls down into a ravine. Poor Vicki should have stayed on Dido...

NEXT EPISODE : BYZANTIUM!

Venusian Lullaby

This is not a televised episode.

Back in the early days of the 90's after the classic series (we have to call it that now because of the new series with Christopher Eccleston that starts on CBC on April 5) ended, Virgin Publishing got a license from the BBC to make all new Doctor Who adventures. The initial run started with the ongoing adventures of the (then) current Doctor and his companion, Ace, but it was just a matter of time before writers would get a chance to go back in time and create new adventures for the Doctors and companions of the past. The first Doctor enjoyed five new tales, branded "The Missing Adventures", and Venusian Lullaby, byPaul Leonard, is one of the best. If we were going to examine every one of these adventures I would have already mentioned The Sorcerer's Apprentice by Christopher Bulis, which was actually set between the televised adeventures Marco Polo and The Keys of Marinus. The problem is the sheer amount of time that would take me, and I feel that some of the novels in that series didn't really do much to expand on the characters that we already knew and maybe loved; they were just books for the sake of themselves. I have chosen to mention stories that expand on an interesting point of Doctor Who lore, or go in an interesting new direction, such as the Telos novellas that served as prequels to the series.

In Venusian Lullaby it's just the Doctor, Barbara, and Ian now, and the dynamic on board the TARDIS has changed somehow. Without Susan around, the Doctor is a bit pensive, a bit withdrawan and Ian and Barbara feel they must tread lightly around him in case they set him off on some wild fit and he tries to take them back home again, which is really what they do want, but just not on those terms. Instead, the TARDIS takes them to Venus, billions of years in the past when it was inhabited, and somewhere the Doctor and Susan have been before, which ends the theory that the TARDIS cannot go back to the same place twice. The Venusians welcome the Doctor back and accept his new companions, and invite them to a funeral where they must eat the brains of the deceased to remember them properly. As for the Venusians themselves they are more alien-looking than anything else so far, with hoofs, tenatcles and many eyes on stalks. The cover illustration that depicts them is a bit frightening and might set any gynaecologist off in a fit. And amongst all this alien-ness, there is a plot afoot to relocate the Venusian people to Earth to ensure their survival, but it is a plot that will also ensure that the human race never evolves.

This is how I like to see these Doctor Who novels done when they are being inserted between existing stories from the past. The early years of the show did not have a huge technological presence in the stories; science was still being explored, computers were not a dominating feature of any adventure. Venusian Lullaby feels like one of those stories that could be visualized along the lines of the 60's production values with a painted landscape behind the actors and the odd shadow of a boom-mic on the floor (which is something more easily spotted on the DVDs I have noticed). Other adventures dropped into the midst of the formative years of the series tend to reek of present day influences, like a lot of technobabble, insanely huge spaceships, sex, those things, but it's nice to see the past treated with respect and the traditions of the day preserved.

NEXT EPISODE : THE RESCUE

The Dalek Invasion of Earth

They're back! The Daleks! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! Season two goes in all guns blazing with the return of the mutant race from Skaro, but this time they're on Earth, they've conquered us, and they are tearing the planet apart. The Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan come into conflict with their old foes sometime after the year 2164, and are almost immediately separated in the ruins of London. The girls fall in with a resistance group planning bold yet ultimately suicidal attacks against the Daleks, while Ian and the Doctor are taken captive. Everyone makes their separate ways to Bedfordshire, where the Daleks have created a vast mine in their efforts to get at the Earth's core, and the final battle between humans and Daleks is set.

Some changed were made to the Dalek design for this episode; their bases were made taller to afford them better movement and a more indimidating presence. For some reason the voice processing was changed from the metallic reverberations in their first appearance to what now sounds like men holding their noses off to the side of the set, and the sound of a Dalek gun firing has also changed from a noise like metal being torn apart to a sinister hiss. But they're still Daleks, and tehre is plenty of exterminating to go around. And there are so many of them! Previously there were only four Daleks built for studio work but now we have six in one shot; five regular versions and one made over in all black. The Black Dalek, or the Dalek Supreme as it would later become known, made its first appearance in episode 3, Day of Reckoning.

Unlike any previous adventure, The Dalek Invasion of Earth has a lot of scenes recorded on location, including a particularly chilling sequence with Barbara and some resistance fighters crossing Dalek-occupied London through deserted streets and past famous landmarks. Anyone who has seen 28 Days Later will recognize Westminster Bridge, although this time the Daleks are crossing it in force, not hoardes of crazed zombies. There is an undead element in the story in the form of the Robomen; human beings processed to obey the Daleks and more or less becoming Daleks themselves in all but form. Bit slow though.

And then there's Susan. Yes, I know, it's time for the usual moaning about her. But she did okay. So okay that she fell in love with a handsome young man who was willing to offer her exactly what she has been after for a long time know: a single place and time to call her own. But it's not a choice she gets to make for herself; seeing that she has options now, the Doctor locks her out of the TARDIS and leaves her behind with her new man, knowing she would never willingly leave her grandfather while she felt he still needed her. Susan does not fly into a rage nor does she scream; she accepts her new life and goes off with David to help rebuild the planet once the Daleks have been beaten.

Lastly, a word on the format. BRILLIANT. I love the efforts of the Restoration Team. This story is one of the few that has received the full deluxe treatment on DVD so far, complete with completely remastered picture, better sound, and an option to choose newly-created CGI effects over the original wobbly pie plate spaceships that were giggled at even in 1964. I took the enhanced option, and why not. It's not like the integrity of the episodes are at stake here; if anything, Doctor Who challenged its viewers to use their imaginations and see past some of the weaker special effects, and the Restoration Team have done just that and given us a real treat with their visuals of Dalek saucers hovering in the skies above the smoking ruins of London. Unlike the controversial DVD release of the Star Wars trilogy last year, there is an option to either move with the times or enjoy some sweet nostalgia. Either way, it's the Daleks, so who cares.

NEXT EPISODE : VENUSIAN LULLABY

Planet of Giants

The doors of the TARDIS open while the ship is till in flight, setting off alarms and creating panic amongst the crew. The Doctor does not know exactly why it happened, but Susan knows that the most dangerous moments of their flight are just at the point of materialization. When the travellers emerge from the ship, they find that they have indeed been affected, and they are now roughly one inch tall. The TARDIS lands in between the stones of a garden path outside a cottage where an ambitious industrialist is financing a project to create DN-6, a lethal pesticide which kills indiscriminately. And if it can kill anything else that lives in the garden, then it could also be deadly to four time travellers.

Barbara comes into contact with the pesticide in the middle of this three part story, but tries to keep her contamination a secret either to keep her companions from worrying about her, or maybe she's just afraid of being told what an idiot she is for being careless. Still, it's a solid performance from Jaqueline Hill even if her 1964 hairstyle takes up more screen than her face. And what does she put in it? My sister watched part of episode 2 with me and noticed that when touched, Barbara's hair doesn't move.

There are two interesting points to the story; the first being the reasons why the TARDIS would materialize in miniature form at all. The ship does, after all, travel through the relative dimension of time, so who is to say that its other dimensions are not fluid while it is in transit? The space/time vortex that the TARDIS travels in is often referred to as a mysterious realm where ordinarly laws of physics do not apply, but in a physical sense it might require a lot less energy to transport a smaller object through time than it would a full sized police box. The other interesting point is the story's statement on ecology. In the beginning, Doctor Who was aimed primarily at children and when it was not focussed on historical adventures it would dip into the educational side; in this case the pesticide DN-6 was wiping out not only pests but other insects and life forms that are essential to the environment. Witness the dead earthworms, dead ants and the magnificent animatronic housefly (critics of the show's special effects should see this as an example of what can be achieved even on a limited budget).

And on the production side of things, this would be the only 3 part adventure until 1987. The script was originally much longer and reportedly was shot in its entirety as a 4 part adventure before being trimmed down to it's present length. No word has ever come on the status of that footage, but should it ever come to light it would be fantastic as a special DVD release with an alternate extended movie format version included in the package, such as with the 1989 adventure The Curse of Fenric.

Day saved again and all that by the end of episode 3. Season two has started well enough, but what's a second season without a little of the magic that made the first a smash...

NEXT EPISODE : THE DALEK INVASION OF EARTH

The Reign of Terror

The season finale opens with the Doctor attempting to return Barbara and Ian to Earth again, and he succeeds to an extent. The TARDIS lands not in England, but in France of 1794, during the bloody and violent French Revolution. The country is paralysed with fear, and all traitors are rounded up and decapitated on the guillotine in Paris. Swept up in history once more, the Doctor's companions become prisoners and are sentenced to death, and the Doctor masquerades as a high ranking official in his efforts to rescue them. Barabara and Susan narrowly escape death on the guillotine by being rescued by sympathizers, and Ian is entrusted with a message to be delivered to English spy James Sterling. The Doctor is not the only one masquerading, though, and enemies are everywhere, and he is taken to meet Robespierre, the Tyrant of France. And waiting somewhere outside the sphere of events in Paris is Napoleon Bonaparte, ready to take his place in history and rule the country.

As with Marco Polo and The Aztecs, the Doctor and company are once more players in history, although this time Barbara finds it amusing to see how the French attempt to stop Napoleon from ascending to power; a far cry from her belief that the past can be changed. The Doctor throws himself into the role of an imposing Regional Governor, although on the road to Paris resorts to clocking the watchman of a road crew over the head with a shovel. Ian is Ian as usual, and Susan copes very well with events for a change, only getting alarmed by the rats in her prison cell.

The Reign of Terror is a 6 part story, but due to the aforementioned clearing of the BBC archives, episodes 4 and 5 are missing. I didn't have an audio version of the missing episodes available to me but the missing material is abridged on the VHS release of the adventure. Carole Ann Ford (Susan) provides liking narration against a backdrop of recovered clips, dialogue samples an still images. Unfortunately, the Doctor's meeting with Robespierre in episode 4, The Tyrant of France , is missing, and we are deprived of the spectacle of the Doctor confronting one of history's most notorious figures. The adventure is a lot of fun to watch, the period detail amazing for the limited resources that the BBC had to operate with at the time. At the end of the adventure, William Hartnell provides a voice over set against a backdrop of stars; the Doctor says that their destiny is out amongst them, and they should go and find it.

NEXT EPISODE : PLANET OF GIANTS

The Sensorites

The story opens on board the TARDIS, picking up from the last few moments of The Aztecs. There is an awkward moment of dialogue between the crew of the ship wherein Ian praises the marvels of the TARDIS and a quick recap of the previous adventures follows. It all seems a bit forced to have everyone stopping to reflect, but by this time Doctor Who had been on the air for 24 weeks, which is already longer than a normal television season these days. Here we were with characters who had been through several levels of hell without much of a break in between adventures, their lives threatened at almost every step. And there were still 12 weeks of programming to go before the season ended.

This is also the first story to take place partly in a space ship. The ship is held captive in orbit around the Sense Sphere, home of the mysterious Sensorites, who all resemble short old men with black eyes, white hair, and round floppy feet. The Sensorites are another xenophobic race, suspicious of vistors from other worlds, and to protect themselves they have prevented the Earth ship from leaving orbit by controlling the minds of its human crew. Unable to control the Doctor and his party, they steal the lock from the TARDIS to prevent them from being able to leave in it. This is the first time the TARDIS is directly attacked, and one of the few times it is actually shown to be vulnerable. And, it is now the third time the travellers have been denied access to it. They become uneasy allies with the Sensorites, helped by the fact that Susan appears to be a latent telepath and they can communicate with her directly. On the Sense Sphere the travellers become embroiled in not only a mystery that will determine the fate of the Sensorite race, but a political scheme that may well result in their deaths.

Barbara sits two episodes out, marooned on the orbiting Earth ship, and Susan suddenly decides to be a grown up and doesn't scream at all, but adopts an air of arrogance at her newfound powers - to such an extent that she challenges the Doctor's decisions. Yes, I am still gnashing my teeth about this character. I would like to surmise that Susan's inconsistencies would be a result of her alien past conflicting with her emerging human side due to her time on Earth at Coal Hill School, but somehow I doubt it was thought out to that extent. Susan serves not only as a foil for the Doctor so he can have someone to relate to, but she's really just there to keep younger viewers interested, giving them someone to identify with in the series. The Doctor, after all, can be very harsh and mean when his temper is stirred, and Ian and Barbara... well they're teachers, no child is going to spend Saturday afternoon cheering for characters who respresent their mortal enemies from Monday to Friday. And I don't mean to down Carole Ann Ford's performances as Susan - she was doing her best with what she was given to work with - but I just think that Susan was not the best thought-out character, swinging from maturity and aloofness one episode and reduced to a cringing whiner the next. In later novels (published well after the original series' final air-date in 1989) authors would get the chance to revisit Susan and shed some light on her character - the two novellas that I reviewed as prequels to the series are fine examples - but for the time being, she is a bit of a weak link. What are we going to do with her?

NEXT EPISODE : THE REIGN OF TERROR

The Aztecs

Have you ever wanted to change history?

Every science fiction venture involving time travel always runs up against this wall where characters are in a position to alter the past based on their own perspective from the future. All fine and dandy to want that, but the logic always remains that if you are from the future, and you change intentionally change something in the past, like slipping back and giving yourself the winning lotto numbers for a big draw, your own future will change, including your present. You'll end up winning buckets of money, be rich, have no reason to go back in time to provide yourself with the winning numbers, and thus not go back, you'll never get the numbers, you won't win, and you'll end up right where you were before. Mainstream films like Back to the Future loved tinkering with the past just for fun without seriously examinging the logic of past timelines. To their credit, the writers of the Star Trek : Voyager episode "A Year In Hell" actually did handle this properly, and every small attemept that was made to alter time changed everything in the future of that episode.

Here we have Barbara and Susan emerging from the TARDIS into a tomb of an Aztec priest in Mexico sometime before the arrival of Cortez. Barbara finds a way out into the temple and is mistaken as the reincarnation of the Aztec priest Yetaxa. The rest of the travellers follow her out, but the tomb is not deisgned to allow re-entry and they are trapped outside, away from the TARDIS. The Doctor insists that Barbara continue to play her role as Yetaxa to allow him time to figure out how to get back to the TARDIS, but Barbara takes it upon herself to attempt to alter the Aztec way of life by forbidding human sacrifice. Her initial attempt backfires and incurs the suspicions and wrath of Tlotoxl, the high priest of sacrifice (which is understandable as Barbara is trying to take away his job), and the travellers are split up; Susan is packed off to a seminary where she raises a stink by refusing to marry a man chosen for her, the Doctor is shuffled off to a garden to sit with other old people and after some mild flirting manages to get engaged to the lady Cameca, and Ian is sent to train with the Aztec army but comes up against some stiff competition from the warrior Ixta, who would gladly kill Ian given the chance.

Last time I railed on Susan for her freaking out sessions and I am happy to say that here she only gets hysterical once when she cries out in alarm at the human sacrifcice. Barbara really holds her own as the imposter god, speaking with formality to the high priests of the temple. For a science teacher Ian really knows how to fight and renders Ixta unconscious in their first bout, and despite being drugged puts up a good struggle the second time they clash as well. But it is the Doctor who shows the most shocking changes this episode, consoling Barbara after scolding her for her attempts to change things as if he himself may have tried once and failed as well. He really pours on the charm with Cameca as well, shamelessly flirting with her to gain information about how the tomb was built in his attempts to get back to the TARDIS.

This adventure was given the deluxe treatment when it was released on DVD, and thus is the best quality episode I have watched so far in this chronological sequence. Extensive restoration work was done on all four episodes to clean up the frames, enhance the soundtrack, and reproduce the "video-look" of the original episode. To compare the quailty of the DVD with the old muddy messy grainy VHS version is to compare night to day, and I can't wait for more of the old black and whites like this to get the same treatment. Full techincal details of how The Aztecs was restored can be found at http://www.restoration-team.co.uk/ along with details of their other Doctor Who projects. I didn't bother to listen to the commentary on this one yet; maybe at some future time I will go back and listen, but as the blog title suggests, I do have a mission here, and it is time to press on....


NEXT EPISODE : THE SENSORITES

The Keys of Marinus

The TARDIS materializes on a beach made of sharp glass surrounded by an ocean of acid. Welcome to Marinus, a planet where violence and agression has been outlawed for thousands of years through use of a machine called the Conscience. But there will always be usurpers, and a race of men called the Voord have found a way to resist the power of the machine and now seek to control it themselves and enslave the people of Marinus to their will. To stop this, the five micro keys to the machine have been removed and hidden in secret places around the planet, and having deprived them of access to the TARDIS (two adventures in a row for that plot device now) a man named Arbitan sends the Doctor, Ian, Susan and Barbara off to find the keys for him so the machine can be reactivated and the Voord stopped.

So here we go on another epic, a 6 part adventures this time. Through use of travel devices disguised as wrist watches our crew journey to an idyllic city where all is not as it seems, a jungle where time is moving too fast, an icy mountain complete with a grubby trapper with lusty ambitions towards Barbara, and the city of Millennius where Ian is wrongfully accused of murder. For the time the series was made this was a very ambitious adventure, involving a large cast, even drafting the characters of Altos and Sabetha in episode 2 as temporary companions. And the different settings required would make many demands on the props and sets departments. Terry Nation provided the script, and elements of his previous story, The Daleks, can be spotted in episode 2 with a bunch of disembodied brains in glass cases.

The companions are all working well together, growing closer every episode, with the Doctor immediately leaping to defend Ian from the charge of murder in episode 5. The Doctor is absent from episodes 3 and 4 of the advnture as William Hartnell was on vacation or asleep or something, and we see the Doctor trusting Ian and Barbara to take Susan with him on their adventures to recover two of the keys while he journeys ahead to locate the final one. Or maybe he was hoping they would lose Susan somewhere, because I am starting to wish they would. For an alien with the same roots as the Doctor one would expect Susan to be a bit more together than she is; after all, Ian and Barbara should have bee reduced to gibbering wrecks by now from what they've been through. Susan has travelled with the Doctor for some time now and freaks out at least once every episode:

episode 1 - The Sea of Death : freaks out and needs a hug after her shoe falls into a pool of acid
episode 2 - The Velvet Web : goes all loopy wierd over a silk dress
episode 3 - The Screaming Jungle : freaks out because a vine touches her
episode 4 - The Snows of Terror : freaks out and needs a hug after seeing some frozen dead men yet marveloussly recomposes herself to crawl across a brittle bridge made of ice stalagtites to get away from them
episode 5 - Senetence of Death : doesn't do any freaking out and is part of a mob who swarm a guy as he tries to flee court
episode 6 - The Keys of Marinus : freaks out and needs big hugs after being held at gunpoint

Okay blame the times I suppose. As the series progresses the roles of the companions will change somewhat and thankfully the girls will get a bit more backbone and even arm themselves on occasion (or in the case of some, as a matter of routine). But for now here we are stuck with this girl who seems to trip and hurt her ankle every time things are going well and has to be carried or pampered or consoled. It's too much. Marry her off and leave her behind somewhere.

NEXT EPISODE : THE AZTECS