Carnival of Monsters
Despite being back in service, the TARDIS is working along her usual lines and takes the Doctor and Jo not to the planet Metebelis 3 but to a ship in the Indian Ocean. A ship menaced out of nowhere by a pleisiosaur. A ship where the passengers and crew forget everything that has happened to them in a 10 minute period and go back into a loop. And a ship where a giant hand reaches out and plucks the TARDIS from its landing place. The ship is part of a mobile exhibiton inside a Miniscope, a banned device that has come into the posession of a pair of Lurman entertainers trying to bring joy to the people of Inter Minor. Also on display inside this machine are Ogrons, Cybermen, and a fierce breed of caterpillar monsters called Drashigs. The Doctor and Jo spend a lot of their time clambering through the circuits trying to escape, while on the outside of the machine, political intregue has the Miniscope and the Lurmans being used as devices to potentially unseat the planet's government. The Lurmans are the first aliens allowed to land on Inter Minor, and if the Miniscope containment systems fail, there will soon be many many more arriving...
All the elements are here to make for a classic Robert Holmes script, most notably the double acts aside from the Doctor and Jo; the Lurmans, Vorg and Shirna, and the scheming slightly moronic Inter Minor officials Orum and Kalik. The Drashigs are a good new monster for the universe of Doctor Who, right down to their alarming shriek/howl. There is also the start of a bit of mythology here with the establishment of Inter Minor as part of a star system that has never met humans before and refers to them as "Tellurians"; the same galaxy will be revisited in Holmes' 1985 script The Two Doctors.
After hitting the palatial Gerard Square to get moustraps and McFood, Jay and I dove into Carnival of Monsters to enjoy the Doctor's first trip away from Earth with his restored freedom. It is good to note that the Doctor does not show any signs of rust from his long period of exile, and Jo is quite adept to travel in the TARDIS even after only going to a handful of destinations during her time with the Doctor.
The effects of this episode left us giggling a bit; the inside of the Miniscope was made up with what the budget would allow it seems, and it's the same small area just shot from different angles every time. After a while it became very easy to predict the things that the Doctor and Jo were about to climb over, duck under, and slide down. And what they couldn't build, they used yellow CSO effects to simulate. The marsh location used for the Drashig planet is something never done in Doctor Who at this point in its history, and the pyrotechnics of the Doctor igniting pockets of marsh gas to drive the Drashigs off are realized very well. The big stumbling point, and point of much sniggering, was the makeup for the people of Inter Minor. The functionaries were all given masks that didn't quite fit, and the skin underneath was not coloured to blend in so the skin of the actors could be seen easily. As for Kalik and his contemporaries, they are all made up grey faced but somehow the make up artists kept forgetting to go right to the edges of their eyes and mouths. Also, their bald head pieces wrinkled in places, and if one of the actors moved his forehead too much they could come free.
There's also this fight scene, if one can call it, between the Doctor and one of the officers of the ship. There is some gentlemanly reference to Queensbury rules before the slugfest gets going, and the Doctor manages to best his opponant (who is played by Ian Marter, who will return in a more famous role in two seasons' time) with a gut shot that makes the man actually fall down. I can but quote Jay on this one to sum it up: "What was that?" I'll tell you what it was: the Doctor being violent again! No other Doctor in the show's history has been so keen to raise his fists and slug it out as the third Doctor; one day I am going to make a proper tally of how many people he knocks down or renders unconscious.
For now, though, the Doctor is free to roam once more. And very soon he will find himself embroiled in more intregue in Earth's future, and on the cusp of a war between two empires...
NEXT EPISODE : THE FRONTIER IN SPACE
All the elements are here to make for a classic Robert Holmes script, most notably the double acts aside from the Doctor and Jo; the Lurmans, Vorg and Shirna, and the scheming slightly moronic Inter Minor officials Orum and Kalik. The Drashigs are a good new monster for the universe of Doctor Who, right down to their alarming shriek/howl. There is also the start of a bit of mythology here with the establishment of Inter Minor as part of a star system that has never met humans before and refers to them as "Tellurians"; the same galaxy will be revisited in Holmes' 1985 script The Two Doctors.
After hitting the palatial Gerard Square to get moustraps and McFood, Jay and I dove into Carnival of Monsters to enjoy the Doctor's first trip away from Earth with his restored freedom. It is good to note that the Doctor does not show any signs of rust from his long period of exile, and Jo is quite adept to travel in the TARDIS even after only going to a handful of destinations during her time with the Doctor.
The effects of this episode left us giggling a bit; the inside of the Miniscope was made up with what the budget would allow it seems, and it's the same small area just shot from different angles every time. After a while it became very easy to predict the things that the Doctor and Jo were about to climb over, duck under, and slide down. And what they couldn't build, they used yellow CSO effects to simulate. The marsh location used for the Drashig planet is something never done in Doctor Who at this point in its history, and the pyrotechnics of the Doctor igniting pockets of marsh gas to drive the Drashigs off are realized very well. The big stumbling point, and point of much sniggering, was the makeup for the people of Inter Minor. The functionaries were all given masks that didn't quite fit, and the skin underneath was not coloured to blend in so the skin of the actors could be seen easily. As for Kalik and his contemporaries, they are all made up grey faced but somehow the make up artists kept forgetting to go right to the edges of their eyes and mouths. Also, their bald head pieces wrinkled in places, and if one of the actors moved his forehead too much they could come free.
There's also this fight scene, if one can call it, between the Doctor and one of the officers of the ship. There is some gentlemanly reference to Queensbury rules before the slugfest gets going, and the Doctor manages to best his opponant (who is played by Ian Marter, who will return in a more famous role in two seasons' time) with a gut shot that makes the man actually fall down. I can but quote Jay on this one to sum it up: "What was that?" I'll tell you what it was: the Doctor being violent again! No other Doctor in the show's history has been so keen to raise his fists and slug it out as the third Doctor; one day I am going to make a proper tally of how many people he knocks down or renders unconscious.
For now, though, the Doctor is free to roam once more. And very soon he will find himself embroiled in more intregue in Earth's future, and on the cusp of a war between two empires...
NEXT EPISODE : THE FRONTIER IN SPACE
Labels: Jo Grant, The 3rd Doctor
posted by Sean Hoover @ 9:04 PM
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