The Face of Evil
The TARDIS brings the Doctor to a strange alien jungle inhabited by invisible monsters that are terrorizing a small tribe called the Sevateem. One of their warriors, a girl named Leela, has been cast out for speaking against their god, Xoanon, and when she meets the Doctor she recognizes him as "the evil one". The rest of her tribe also react to him the same way but Leela helps the Doctor escape, showing him a massive carved effigy of his own face in a mountainside. The Doctor suspects that he has been to this planet before, but he also suspects that there is more to what's going on than meets the eye. The Sevateem are in posession of advanced scientific artefacts and their high priest, Neeva, is talking to his supposed god over a two way radio which has the Doctor's voice. The Doctor suspects that the answers lie with the Sevateem's sworn enemies, the Tesh, and with Leela he goes to their base of operations, an abandoned spaceship beyond the tribe's reach. The Doctor has indeed been there before and remembers linking with the computer system to keep it from collapsing, but the computer achieved sentience with its own mind exisiting side by side with a copy of the Doctor's personality matrix, driving it mad. The computer, Xoanon, has been keeping the two factions of humans apart and influencing them separately for generations as an experiment in eugenics, but now that the Doctor has arrived it plans to wipe everything out, to destroy and be free...
Interesting story and an interesting twist to have the entire Sevateem-Tesh struggle run by their mutual god. And the whole regression of the Sevateem, generations of descendants from a lost survey team sent out from a spaceship while the technicians stayed behind to work on their ship, was done logically, although one has to wonder how long that had been going on; it takes a long time to forget things and have them become legend. The same can be said for the Tesh, who live in the drab white hallways of the space ship and are armed with laser weapons but are not at all familiar with how any of the onboard computer systems work. Except for the particle analysis machine they strap Leela into.
Visually The Face of Evil does that same irritating leap back and forth between the television studio and the film studio, sometimes within the same sequence of scenes. The adventure has no location component at all, but the film sequences make it feel like they went outside for them. The jungle doesn't look like it actually could support life; as with the jungle in Planet of Evil this one looks dead or decayed with nothing resembling foliage anywhere.
Leela becomes the new companion to the Doctor at the end of part four, pushing into the TARDIS and accidentally setting it off into flight. The Doctor doesn't really seem to want her as a companion, her primitive ways a bit too much for him and her ignorance of so much could be a hurdle, but he's stuck with her now. Leela is pretty much a savage, preferring to knife anything that she can't understand, and asking a lot of questions of the Doctor. She is quick to learn from him, though, and holds him in not quite godlike esteem like Katarina did the first Doctor, but knows that he has powers and she can learn from him and become a better person. And like much of her tribe she runs around in skins, close to naked. Apparantly this is a big deal, especially if you're a dad in the UK and the show comes on after the football scores. I think they shiuld have just asked Neeva to put some proper pants on; I didn't like seeing the sides of his ass cheeks that much. And the Sevateem seemed like a fairly smelly lot; Leela was the only woman we saw until a split second shot later on, and it was interesting to note that she had access to shaving supplies and the men did not. Funny that.
NEXT EPISODE : THE ROBOTS OF DEATH
Interesting story and an interesting twist to have the entire Sevateem-Tesh struggle run by their mutual god. And the whole regression of the Sevateem, generations of descendants from a lost survey team sent out from a spaceship while the technicians stayed behind to work on their ship, was done logically, although one has to wonder how long that had been going on; it takes a long time to forget things and have them become legend. The same can be said for the Tesh, who live in the drab white hallways of the space ship and are armed with laser weapons but are not at all familiar with how any of the onboard computer systems work. Except for the particle analysis machine they strap Leela into.
Visually The Face of Evil does that same irritating leap back and forth between the television studio and the film studio, sometimes within the same sequence of scenes. The adventure has no location component at all, but the film sequences make it feel like they went outside for them. The jungle doesn't look like it actually could support life; as with the jungle in Planet of Evil this one looks dead or decayed with nothing resembling foliage anywhere.
Leela becomes the new companion to the Doctor at the end of part four, pushing into the TARDIS and accidentally setting it off into flight. The Doctor doesn't really seem to want her as a companion, her primitive ways a bit too much for him and her ignorance of so much could be a hurdle, but he's stuck with her now. Leela is pretty much a savage, preferring to knife anything that she can't understand, and asking a lot of questions of the Doctor. She is quick to learn from him, though, and holds him in not quite godlike esteem like Katarina did the first Doctor, but knows that he has powers and she can learn from him and become a better person. And like much of her tribe she runs around in skins, close to naked. Apparantly this is a big deal, especially if you're a dad in the UK and the show comes on after the football scores. I think they shiuld have just asked Neeva to put some proper pants on; I didn't like seeing the sides of his ass cheeks that much. And the Sevateem seemed like a fairly smelly lot; Leela was the only woman we saw until a split second shot later on, and it was interesting to note that she had access to shaving supplies and the men did not. Funny that.
NEXT EPISODE : THE ROBOTS OF DEATH
Labels: Leela, The 4th Doctor
posted by Sean Hoover @ 12:36 PM
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