Lords of the Storm

The Doctor and Turlough arrive on the planet Raghi where members of its lower social caste are falling ill, some dying, others vanishing mysteriously. Investigation of this points to the nearby moon orbiting the gas giant Indra - where a Sontaran force are preparing an elaborate and deadly trap in what will be pivotal victory over the Rutans.

Lords of the Storm was published in 1995, the first science fiction attempt by until-then historical writer David A McIntee, and I remembered enjoying it so much that I have just read it again, some 12 years later, and realized why I liked it so much. This book is fun. Pure unadulterated fun. It's got a solid plot, it's got the Doctor and Turlough working together as a proper team, which is something we never got to see in the televised series, and it's got an actual confrontation between the Rutan and the Sontarans.

The Sontarans only appear in Doctor Who a grand total of four times yet they are as often mentioned in favourite monster polls as the Daleks or the Cybermen. What they've got going for them is an established sense of culture; as a species totally devoted to war against one enemy for eternity, they would appear to be singleminded and hollow, but McIntee has taken the hints of Sontaran life offered on television and expanded upon them to create a full picture of why the Sontarans do what they do, even going as far as to explain why some of them look different than others, and why some have more fingers than others (because blaming it all on the BBC proper and costume people is kinda silly). There are too many of them to list, but there are references to previous Sontaran stories aplenty, and a few hints at others to come including a spin-off movie called Shakedown which could be a sort of sequel to this one.

McIntee does not stop at the Sontarans; he goes deeper into the psyche of the Rutans and their culture, but also takes time to touch on the mythology of the Tzun; an alien race he created for his seventh Doctor novel, First Frontier. It takes some sheer talent to pull all these threads togther to make a tapestry like this, but he does it. I remember after reading his first few attempts at Doctor Who - and I believe I said as much when reviewing The Face of the Enemy - that I did not enjoy the way he wrote, but when I read this... yowzers. The back cover blurb says he likes to play the Star Wars video game called X Wing as research, and he has captured not only the spirit of the game, but even bits of the movies themselves with his incredible space battle sequences.

I like the Doctor and Turlough as a team. Just the guys, travelling around together. Tegan's departure is still relatively recent at this point so the two of them have a bit of an awkwardness about them now they're without her, but it works. One can almost hear Davison and Strickson in their respective roles as the Doctor and Turlough, he's got them down so well. And there is even a mention of Kamelion, the Master's old shape-shifting robot, as a reminder that he's still somewhere in the TARDIS after The King's Demons.

Let's look at multiculturalism in Doctor Who for a moment. Raghi is not a colony like others before it; instead of being founded by corporations, the efforts to terraform and move to the planet were all privately funded by the colony's predominantly Hindi population - something else I can tell McIntee dove right into researching as he has nailed that as well. And this is not done by making the people of Raghi seem elitist or insular; it is just the way the colony came to be. After all, why should space only be developed by rich white men? Bravo, I say.

I'm glad I read this again. I really am. I would go so far as to say this book is pretty much perfect, and that's a huge heap of praise no matter where it comes from.

NEXT EPISODE : PHANTASMAGORIA

Resurrection of the Daleks

The TARDIS is snared in a time corridor and dragged to a derelict warehouse on Earth. The corridor is actually part of a Dalek trap, but while they are chasing the Doctor around they are also raiding a prison ship in space to free Davros, hoping he will help them recover from their humiliating loss to the Movellans in their latest war. The Daleks were so decimated by a virus that the Movellans used against them that they have bolstered their numbers with humanoid troops - duplicates of beings they have captured before. And with the Doctor in their power, they have a nasty mission for the duplicate they want to make from him.

Very atmospheric this one; from the opening shots of the rundown and abandoned docklands of 1984 London (area which now house trendy condos and businesses and are used as backdrops to fist fights in Bridget Jones movies) to the broken down neglected space station where Davros is serving his time, there is menace in every shadow and a creepy atmospheric score. The Dalek ship, by contrast, is brightly lit and very white, and looks a lot like some pagoda interior in Japan.

How do the Daleks fare? They're desperate after their loss, they're teetering on the edge of extinction, but after what happened to him before, Davros is no fool and knows they'll turn on him again so he plays for time, quietly gaining control over those around him and building a secret army. His is a bit of a ranter this time around, too, but I suppose 90 years of "mind numbing boredom" in a block of ice might do that to a guy. This time around he is played by Terry Molloy, his mask redesigned once again for a new actor, but it's just not the same. Molloy goes on to be the longest serving Davros (three times on television and in several Big Finish audios) and his performance does mellow over time, but nothing is going to come close to Michael Wisher's original grating nasty voiced Kaled scientist.

The cast of this one are apparantly well known actors in the UK, but neither Jay nor myself really regonized anyone. The truth is as the Daleks had not been in the series since Tom Baker's time, producer John Nathan-Turner wanted their return to be a star studded cast, and apparantly this was achieved. I guess. The return of the Daleks, though, is balanced against it being the final adventure for Tegan as played by Janet Fielding; her departure scene is handled quite well and her reasons for leaving are made very clear, and the Doctor even tries to stop her from going, eventually equating her choice with his own decision to leave Gallifrey. Oh yeah, speaking of Gallifrey there is this bit about using the Doctor's duplicate to go back there and assassinate the High Council of Time Lords; being a very insular society it's not as if they have drawn attention to themselves, so it's more likely that it's really the Doctor's fault for picking fights with the Daleks and having them track him back to his home eventually. It's a plot point that doesn't really go much farther - although the duplication process that the Doctor is put through allows for some nifty montage of past Doctors and companions, bringing up faces from years ago - it will be of great importance in the show's future, say in 2005; 21 years after this episode was broadcast.

At Jay's request we did something different this time: we watched the DVD with commentary running. Peter Davison and Janet Fielding are joined by director Matthew Robinson to pretty much talk through the show (something that Jay and I think we'd be good at, so we want to win a contest or something and be guest commentators) and make fun of not only themselves but pretty much everyone else in the cast, including poor Mark Strickon as Turlough who doesn't really do a lot except look over his shoulder and get his face all shiny. There's this bit where the comments are all disclaimed too, where everyone says that they are proud of the work they did and they do enjoy it; Jay has visions of whoever is producing the commentary running out of the booth and telling them to smarten up. Hm. I think I actually have had to go back and reaffirm my own enjoyment of the show once or twice here.

I like Doctor Who, I really do.

So Tegan is gone and it's just the Doctor and Turlough now. Theirs is a Doctor/companion friendship that was never really explained properly, given that Turlough originally came along to kill the Doctor at the Black Guardian's behest, and then out of nowhere changed his mind about going home. With his past never really alluded to at this point outside of encounters with Tractators, Turlough would be one of the most enigmatic companions to serve on board the TARDIS as the next televised episode would be his last as well. In the years since then, though, there have been several other adventures set after Tegan's departure with just the Doctor and Turlough together, so let's take a side step and look at those and see how the guys get along without a girl on board...

NEXT EPISODE : LORDS OF THE STORM

Frontios / Excelis Dawns

The TARDIS drifts into the far future where one of the last colonies of humans have taken shelter after Earth's final destruction. The planet is Frontios, the life is hard, and the dangers are everywhere. Meteorites constantly rain down on the colony as the humans struggle to stay alive, but when the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough arrive they discover that the conony's enemies are not in the sky above them, but are operating beneath the soil of the planet.

The first time I saw Fontios it was was November 1984 at a convention called WHO Fest in Buffalo. I was totally floored by the existence of such gatherings (it was a surprise trip my parents took me on) and I was still trying to take in the presence of Jon Pertwee at the autograph table let alone the viewing room where I came across brand new episodes I had never seen before, plus old classics I had heard of but not seen. Frontios will always have that little something extra to it in the nostalgia department.

The story is well written by former script editor Chrisopher H Bidmead, and once again he takes us into one of his favourite plot devices: the destruction of the TARDIS. He's already tried to drown it and then blow it up in his previous scripts, so having it actually explode (or in this case get ripped apart) is not exactly out of his league. And the Doctor is remarkably calm about it when it happens, or maybe he suspected all along seeing as it was a gravity beam that dragged the TARDIS down to the planet in the first place. Bidmead had another script out there once called Penacasta but it never made it to screen (note also that Bidmead always names his scripts after the name of the planet they take place on) so how the TARDIS would have been wrecked in that is anyone's guess. Also interesting to note : Bidmead is the writer who gave us the now infamous cloister bell, the tolling of which signals wild catastrophe.

All this trivia is not lost on Jay. Pity him having to sit there and listen to me yatter away, though. Maybe we need to drink while we watch the show.

So the peoples of Frontios fall into two distinct groups: the humans, led by the youthful Plantagenet ("He's kinda hot," Jay observed. He's right.) who only got the job as leader because his late father was leader before him - hurrah for patriarchy - and the subterran Tractators, who draw their gravity power from the Gravis. "Big bugs," Jay said. Again, he's right. The Tractators are kind of woodlouse things - not exactly slugs but certainly like nothing we have ever seen on Doctor Who until this point - the closest similarity would be to the Wirrn in The Ark in Space. The Tractators are by nature parasitic, plundering planets and infesting others, and somewhere in the past they invaded Turlough's as-yet-unnamed home, which triggers a race memory in him and allows Mark Strickson to go all sketchy and foam at the mouth. He's got some fantastic mad eyes and a very expressive face, but in the green glow of the phospher lamps and with dribble runing down his chin he's just plain scary crazy man. Tegan doesn't go mad on us, but we do get to see up her skirt in part 4 and her outfit is new. Again. I just realized, too, that the woman never wore pants through the whole show, aside from those bad overalls in Earthshock. And if that skort counts from Arc of Infinity onwards.

The reason I bring the Big Finish audio Excelis Dawns into the mix here is at one point in part 4 of Frontios the Doctor and Tegan leave the planet briefly and return again to pick up Turlough, and this audio is made to take place within that gap in the adventure. The TARDIS lands on the planet Arteris and the Doctor meets the warlord Greyvorn (played by Anthony Stewart Head). Greyvorn is on a quest to recover a lost relic from a tribe of flesh eating jungle dwelling zombies, and he is accompanied by a nun and a pain in the ass Time Lady called Iris Wildthyme. Iris is a character developed during the years when Doctor Who was off the air, spanning both the Big Finish audios and the BBC Books range and encountering the Doctor in various incarnations here and there. She's loud, her TARDIS is stuck in the form of a double decker bus, she drinks and she smokes, and she's got a hell of a crush on the Doctor, who would rather she just go away. And the real fun part is she is played by none other than Katy Manning, who was Jo Grant during the Jon Pertwee days.

Excelis Rising is actually the first in a four adventure cycle which sees the Doctor return to Arteris a few more times in future incarnations, the irony being as he makes his departure this time the Doctor states that he never wants to come back to this planet again. If they're all like this one, though, maybe it's a good idea if he doesn't; the plot gets silly, it doesn't really go anywhere; it's more a vehicle to get Iris onto audio and sell three more plays. Oh I did buy them, don't be mistaken.

So the Doctor has his adventure off to the side, goes and finds the TARDIS where he has left Tegan waiting for days now (Janet Fielding is not in this; until last year she refused to touch the audio projects) and probably gets an earful, then they go back to Frontios to get Turlough.

And then just as it seems it's over, the TARDIS encounters some turbulence which leads right into the next story.

NEXT EPISODE : RESURRECTION OF THE DALEKS

The King of Terror

The King of Terror is a novel I read quite some time ago and I just don't have the time to read it again for this. It's Jay's fault I'm sure. But when I did read it when first published back in 2000 I do remember enjoying it immensely due to several factors:

- the inclusion of the Brigaider and UNIT in Los Angeles, set in roughly the same year it was written, and the Brigadier's novel way of tracking down the Doctor through the newspapers

- the Brigadier's reaction of mild disappointment when he realizes that it's the fifth Doctor, and his revelation that he has at this point in time met nine incarnations

- Tegan's friction-induced romance including one of those classic "he slaps her, she slaps him, they kiss" moments, plus Tegan's barely passable computer skills from 1981 making the internet of 2000 a real challenge for her

- Turlough being tortured

- the Doctor's easy manner when talking to the Brigadier, referencing their time in Devil's End (The Daemons) as the events of The Awakening parallel it somewhat

- the suggestion that it has taken the Doctor a month to return Will Chandler to 1643, the implication being that he was an impromptu companion for a while

Of course The King of Terror was written long after the "classic" series was concluded in 1989 and sixteen years after the episodes it is set between, but it actually has that seamless join to the series as a whole. That, of course, is the fine art of retro continuity done properly, when you could actually accept the story as belonging there through its use of proper continuity to previous episodes and even a few sly hints about the future.

Oh the plot of this story? Alien invasion. The usual.

NEXT EPISODE(S): FRONTIOS / EXCELIS DAWNS

The Awakening

A trip to the village of Little Hodcombe to visit Tegan's grandfather lands the TARDIS crew in peril. Local nobleman Sir George Hutchinson has started a re-enactment of the British Civil War, but the mayhem it causes reactivates a dormant alien mind that came to the village in 1643 when the fighting was at its worst. The Doctor recognizes the alien presence as the Malus, a being that came from the planet Hakol to pave the way for invasion, an invasion that may no longer be on the cards in 1984, but the Malus is still alive and kicking.

For a two part story, The Awakening really gets a lot achieved, largely due to the last minute rewrites from all accounts. The story is still credited to Eric Pringle but by and large the script was reworked extensively by script editor Eric Saward when the delivered manuscript turned out to be far too long for the alloted budget. A lot of credit for this one also goes to the direction, the opening scene setting this story way beyond the limpness that was Warriors of the Deep. The period costumes are as always well done, and the small village setting evokes Devesham from The Android Invasion. There's also a bit of nifty continuity thrown in linking this story to Saward's own script, The Visitation, two seasons past, when the Doctor recognizes a chunk of tinclavic mined by Terileptils on Raaga. And there's something about the way the TARDIS console room is shot this time that makes it seem different, almost larger.

This is one of the few times in the classic series that we are introduced to the concept of family in the companions. So far we've only really met the Doctor's granddaughter, Sara Kingdom's brother (who she killed herself - feel the love!), heard of Jo's uncle who got her the job at UNIT, heard of Sarah's aunt Lavinia (who we met in... ughh I can't even name that spin off again), heard Leela's father die a terrible off-screen death, saw Adric's brother die, saw Nyssa's father murdered, and Tegan's own Aunt Vanessa hit the skids when she met the Master. "And don't forget Tegan's cousin," Jay reminded me as we went over this list of family. Tegan's got a lot of family in the show it seems. "Tegan Tegan Tegan!" Jay muttered in his best Jan Brady voice. Tegan's grandfather does a bit better and lives, although he is locked up with Turlough. Despite being locked up as was his fate in the previous two part story, Turlough gets to do quite a lot. There's even some interesting companion potential in schoolteacher Jane Hampden and the bewildered Will Chandler who managed to get brought into the future from 1643 through the Malus' power. The far reaching effects of Tegan's travels with the Doctor are never really discussed with her grandfather; in fact the poor man hardly gets to say much at all yet somehow he feels important to the goings on. Aside from being the reason why the Doctor brought them there in the first place.


The Awakening is one of the fortunate adevntures that is hard to fault. It doesn't have any sagging plot holes, although at the end it does seem to finish in a bit of a cop-out way. And okay the face of the Malus busting through the church wall does look a little unrealistic, but to the naysayers I ask them when was the last time they saw a huge face come through a church wall. Anyone?

I didn't think so.

There's interesting news about the possible content of the DVD release of The Awakening when they get around to doing it; in addition to bloopers involving horses demolishing archways, there's a full deleted scene involving Kamelion that was dropped from the original broadcast for time reasons, so depending on the quality of the scene, we may get to see it reinserted into the story or at the very least tacked on the extras section of the disc. Won't that be special and a half?

NEXT EPISODE : THE KING OF TERROR

Warriors of the Deep

The TARDIS lands on an undersea base in 2084 at the height of international nuclear tensions. The travellers are imediately suspected of espionage when they are discovered but there are larger issues at play: the Silurians have re-emerged and together with an elite group of Sea Devils they plan to launch the missiles in the base's armoury and trigger a holocaust that will wipe out humanity and leave the planet free for its original inhabitants to take over.

Jay joined me for this one again, and I warned him from the outset that the Silurians here were not the same noble race that we first met in the Jon Pertwee era. The costumes were nothing like the originals, the voices were wrong, the entire manner of the reptiles was just not there; in the Pertwee days the Silurians moved a lot more fluidly and used their third eye to project their mental powers. The Sea Devils fare no better this time around, the actors being instructed to lumber around the sets when we all saw them running up the beach and storming a naval base in their debut years ago. The Sea Devil design stays the same, relatively; you can see that the costumes are made so the head is a hat just like in the old days, giving them some great height advantage. Their costume has gone from blue netting to a samauri-like armour. And the voices are pretty much the same although Sauvix, the leader of the group, whispers his lines and has traded the ability to open and close his mouth for blinking his eyes. I guess the props department could only work so much magic back then.

The design of the sea base itself was done quite well, the sterile white corridors shot from enough different angles that the base got a real feeling of size to it, larger rooms reconfigured on the set with what was probably relative ease, and one set in particular in the reactor coolant area with a raised gantry and water below - handy for beign knocked into for a cliffhanger. Jay noticed how when underwater Peter Davison looks as old as he does now, which is interesting; I suppose if we chucked him in the water at his present age he'd probably look older than Joan Rivers. Which really isn't hard considering how much work she's had done.

Warriors has a pretty large cast; as well as the three regulars - the Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough - there are the three Silurians, the attack group of Sea Devils, the pantomime horse monster the Myrka (oh man what a sight that thing was), and then the military personnel of the sea base itself. Of course, in this era the whole purpose of a large cast was to kill everyone over the course of a few weeks, so when the dust - or, in this case, the toxic gas - settled only the Doctor and his friends were left alive. And then people were shocked at criticism about the show being violent. I for one do not find death in Doctor Who to be handed out like candy at Hallowe'en; if a character is killed off it generally is to prove a point and not just for the shock value (or in the case of Ingrid Pitt as Doctor Solow for the comic relief).

"There should have been another way," the Doctor says at the end of part four. I heartily agree; a bit more care could have been taken to make the monsters a bit more credible, or at least make their costumes stay together so when they fell over their bums didnt split open. And poor Bulic could have used a costume a bit less tight across his crotch; they say it pays to advertise but all this really did was give Jay and I something else to laugh at. Did the man not have any underwear that day? Oh yeah and we saw Tegan's bra strap.

NEXT EPISODE : THE AWAKENING

The Five Doctors

An unknown force reaches out across time and space and kidnaps the Doctor from his previous time streams and dumps them on Gallifrey's darkest secret: the Death Zone. The fifth Doctor follows with Tegan and Turlough and joins with his first, second and third selves along with Susan, Sarah Jane Smith and the Brigadier to discover the identity of their kidnapper and stop him - if they can.

I wouldn't go so far as to call this Doctor Who at its finest, but certainly at its most nostalgic. The script is a delightful romp through the series' past, bringing not only previous Doctor and companions into the mix but also some old enemies like the Master, the Cybermen, the Daleks, and the Yeti. And there's that nice cameo of K9 with Sarah Jane before she is abducted, keeping their own little bit of continuity alive after the not-so-hot K9 and Company almost two years previous.

"Funny how they made the "beware of dog" sign in K9 font," Jay mused as we watched it.

The version of The Five Doctors that we watched was the special DVD release edit, which was not designed to replace the original (so the packaging says) but to offer an enhanced version of it, along with a remastered 5:1 soundtrack and all the extra bits of edited material chucked back in for good measure - most of the new footage being Peter Davison as the Doctor staggering about the new TARDIS console room and falling down a great deal. And some pretty sad moments with Turlough and Susan locked in the TARDIS waiting for the Cybermen to blow them up (although Turlough looks like he's going to ask Susan to make a man of him before he dies). The one bit of footage that is always welcome though is the rescued bit from Shada, the unfinished Tom Baker adventure with Lalla Ward, as neither could be part of the special episode. (Actually, Tom Baker reportedly declined as he did not want to play second fiddle to any of the other Doctors, and as he and Lalla Ward were divorced by then it's doubtful they would be working together).

So Jay and I watched the new footage. I pointed out what was new as I have seen two different edits of the show before this one, with really bad effects and a mono soundtrack to boot. In fact, I still have the original UK version on laserdisc, it's the second release on VHS that was double-packed for value with The King's Demons that I not longer have. Bad me, I replaced the original. In some ways I wish I had not, for while it's cool to have all this extra stuff put back in, it was obviously taken out for a reason as not much of it adds to the plot but tends to slow things down a bit. There's a longer shot of President Borusa (yes, we go back to Gallifrey again but while Borusa has regenerated *again* the Castellan is still the same ... Thalia has been replaced by Flavia and the rest of the High Council are dead from venturing into the Death Zone to contact the Doctors) but it does nothing for the show.... in fact, when I told Jay it was one of the bits that was put back in he just stared and then went "...why?"

The pairings of the Doctors and their respective companions are very good, though. The first Doctor is reunited with Susan after her departure in The Dalek Invasion of Earth although it is not clear where this takes place in his own continuity (and as William Hartnell is dead the role is passed to Richard Hurndall, who does an incredible job, really). Funny, though, Susan doesn't seem resentful at the way the Doctor left her on Earth, and even though she is no longer a young girl, he immediately talks to her as if she had not aged a day. She even manages to sprain her ankle for old times sake. The second Doctor is joined by the Brigadier sometime after the Brigadier's retirement, but during what some revisionists (including script writer Terrance Dicks) refer to as season 6B, where the second Doctor is employed as an agent of the Time Lords before his exile to Earth and thus is travelling alone and can remember that Jamie and Zoe were returned to their own places in space and time. The Third Doctor is paired with Sarah Jane, obviously sometime during his final season as he recognizes her, but she is expecting his successor. And for those who watched School Reunion last year, Sarah isn't harbouring any resntment at being left behind on Earth. Not yet anyways. As the story develops Tegan spends a lot of time with the first Doctor, which makes for some interesting dynamics between two strong characters. And additional to cameos by K9, Jamie and Zoe, Liz Shaw and Mike Yates appear together, even if they did not meet during the classic series (they missed each other by a season, although novels that have been written after have them sharing scenes).

So we have a fun celebration of the series which was broadcast just days after the show's 20th anniversary. It was not considered to be part of either the 20th or 21st seasons as it was shown a couple months before season 21 began (much like the Christmas specials of the new series) and it never gets mentioned by anyone again so who knows if the adventure itself in canon, really, but who cares. It's Doctor Who. Shut up and enjoy. Funny, though, Jay and I just talk through the whole thing...

NEXT EPISODE : WARRIORS OF THE DEEP