The Androids of Tara

The search for the fourth segment of the Key takes the Doctor and Romana to the planet of Tara, which appears to be right out of a mideval idyll, complete with princes, dukes, a princess locked in a cell, swordsmen, horses... and androids. Romana recovers the segment fairly easily on her own while the Doctor goes fishing and K9 sulks in the TARDIS, but she falls into the clutches of Grendl of Gracht, a man obessed with becoming king. Prince Reinhart of Tara is next in line for the throne and Grendl attempts to thwart that by kidnapping the prince, only to have the Doctor put an andoid prince on the throne instead. To make matters even more confusing, Romana is a dead ringer for the princess Strella. And dead is what everyone will be if Grendl gets his way ...

I watched this with Jay. Can you tell? What started out as enjoying the show and maybe making the odd crack about lame production values has now evolved (or devolved) into us running our own commentary through the whole adventure. And to be fair, we did enjoy a bit of the commentary on the DVD, listening to a (probably) drunk Tom Baker lusting after the obviously embarassed Mary Tamm, and asking who's that and who's that as people appear on the screen. "Is that Stuart Fell?". I'm sure some of the other names he mentioned were either porn directors of names he'd pulled out of the phone directory. Jay spotted Henry from Punky Brewster in a crowd scene. Really.

Tara has some interesting characters. Swordsman Farrah is too pretty, all blonde and lithe. Madama Lamia is a fantastic evil womam, doing Grendl's bidding and making him androids when he demands it. Pity that she and every woman on Tara have some infatuation with scuplting their hair across their foreheads and cheeks. "Is that the Mara?" Jay asked. Romana does her bit for the fashion conscious by dressing in something that everyone on Tara is wearing that year. And she even got K9 to agree with her. And NOBODY else was dressed like that. At all. What would Vivian Westwood say?

Grendl struck us both as a bit of a pervert, like he'd enjoy striking people in the face with a certain part of his anatomy. And that nose. "Is that Cyrano de Bergerac?" I asked. He has a requisite henchman named Till who looks like he should live under a bridge somewhere. "He's hot," Jay said. I hope he was kidding.

Oh right, K9 was in this too, wasn't he. Good dog. Came when called for. Shot an android. Blew out a couple walls. Yay dog.

The location work done for the show was just incredible, using forests and streams and an interesting little building that was a mishmash of Olde Englande style archetecture with a distinct Japanese influence on the inside. And some big castle too, which I've seen somewhere before. On a postcard, I think.

For The Androids of Tara there seems to be less of a sense of urgency about the whole Key to Time issue, made more obvious by the Doctor's decision to stop and rest and go fishing and have some fun with the locals, even if that fun is initially under duress. And we laughed along where we were supposed to, for the most part. And then it was over.

"Is that it?" Jay asked.

NEXT EPISODE : THE POWER OF KROLL

The Shadow of Weng Chiang

The TARDIS is drawn to another part of Earth by the tracer. The Doctor and Romana are suspicious about two segments being on the same planet and plan to investigate carefully, and then are swept up in the flood of events in Shanghai of 1937. The opium trade is still alive and well and Japan is threatening to invade, and the Tong of the Black Scorpion, lead by a young woman who recognizes the Doctor, are acting with their own agenda and using the mystical Dragon Paths to move across space at their whims.

Yep, you read it right, the Tong of the Black Scorpion. If the title wasn't enough of a giveaway, this is David A McIntee's own sequel to the gothic horror Tom Baker tale The Talons of Weng Chiang, complete with a plot of pluck Magnus Greel out of time before his zygma beam takes him back to Victorian times, and the vicious Mr Sin hacking and slicing his way through everyone around him. Shadow has a lot more violence in it than Talons, most of it being executed by Sin in the last quarter of the tale. I found all the hinting about Sin's presence to be a bit unnecessary; he's on the cover of the book, we know he's in it, why shroud him in secrecy for so long before he actually emerges? I often complain about Dalek stories with the word "Dalek" in the title for waiting until the end of episode one to show one of them; if you're going to blantantly show off your baddies, then waiting for a cliffhanger moment to reveal them isn't so much of a cliffhanger anymore, just an "It's about time," moment. If you follow? Do you?

A lot of fans have said that they want more adventures with the fourth Doctor, Romana and K9, and most figured they would be tacked onto the end of their regular run as the Key To Time series seemed like a pretty sealed set of adventures. Clever of McIntee to "interrupt" the series right in the middle with this tale, then, and for him to make it still fit in with the continuity. He does a bit of his own speculation into the nature of the Key itself and why the tracer would pick up a stream of chronon radiation and mistake it for an actual segment, which makes sense (as far as the series and its continuity goes). What does not make sense, though, is Romana singing in a nightclub as a cover. Being a fan of Star Wars like McIntee I am sure this idea came from one of the old Star Wars comics (#77 I think) where Princess Leia finds herself on stage doing a torch number quite by accident, and even in that instance I thought it was a bad idea. Or maybe McIntee heard Mary Tamm sing at a cabaret at a convention once. Maybe. Anyways, not my favourite part. Nor was my favourite part the inevitible showdown between Mr Sin and K9, but maybe McIntee figured a long confrontation between these two would be predictible.

McIntee loves his history, that much can be seen when reading the full body of his work as he takes the Doctor to China in not just this novel but the previously blogged Eleventh Tiger, to Haiti in White Darkness and to modern day Los Angeles in The King of Terror. It's obvious the man has travelled and wants to inject all of his own observations into his work, and for me sometimes it works, other times it sounds so different that my mind still goes back to the BBC studio versions of the world... which is where this blog is going now...

NEXT EPISODE : THE ANDROIDS OF TARA