Battlefield

The TARDIS is drawn to Earth in the mid 90's by a strange signal that is causing widespread radio interferance through the Carbury area. Upon arrival, the Doctor and Ace encounter a UNIT missile convoy that has run off the road, and opposing parties of warring knights in armour - armed with laser weapons and grenades. The Doctor's presence brings Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart out of retirement, but also draws the sorceress Morgaine in her quest to posess the mythical sword Excalibur and lead the war against King Arthur. The Doctor realizes that the knights and Morgaine have come through from another dimension where the Arthurian legend and its players are very much real people, and their presence here now jeopardizes the safety of the planet, for Morgaine has brought with her the Destroyer, the Eater of Worlds.

A good start to season 26, although compared to the rest of the scripts that would make up the final televised season of the classic era it is pretty simple and straightforward, and full of things blowing up. Oh yes, there are fights galore in this one, a reminder of the days when the UNIT action was performed by the stunt crew HAVOC, although here the action is not as limited by the size of the studios; the location work beside a lake and the surrounding forest is perfect for this scale of combat. Too bad the sword fighting isn't top notch - Jay and I were perplexed that for a production company where mideval action should be their forte, the BBC and its actors really lack the finesse to fight with swords.

It's good to see the Brigadier back with the Doctor, and for the first time he meets the seventh incarnation. The Brig is older now; as his own continuity goes this is set after the sixth Doctor audio The Spectre of Lanyon Moor, but that audio manages to blow the gaffe about the Brigadier's marriage to Doris, the girlfriend alluded to in 1973's Planet of the Spiders. Doris is a nice lady, and obviously wealthy as there was no way the Brigadier could have afforded the huge house they live in off his UNIT pension and whatever he made as a teacher at Brendan School. UNIT has moved on over the years as well and the new head honcho is Brigadier Winnifred Bambera (whose presence on the UNIT roster was retconned in the novelized version of Downtime), pulling UNIT out of the days past where women were either ditzy spy-wannabes like Jo Grant or they simply answered the phone and made coffee like Corporal Bell. Bambera's quick move from tough military woman to love interest of blond hunk knight general Ancelyn is a little hard to swallow though. Jay and I both thought she looked like a man. Maybe Ancelyn did too, he is kinda pretty.

The Doctor undergoes a bit of a character change here. In the previous season there were hints at his darker nature, but here he is really going new places. His costume has changed for starters; the jacket is now dark brown, the bandana around his hat and his scarf are darker colours as well. But there's this air about him now that wasn't there before. It doesn't exactly fly when Sylvester McCoy takes it too far and snarls through his teeth at times, but you forget about that when everyone starts to call the Doctor by another name: Merlin. Given that a lot of the cast have come from some parallel dimension, it is quite possible that the Doctor settled down for a time as Arthur's magic advisor, much like he did when exiled by the Time Lords and landed in the company of UNIT in the early 70's. The fact that Morgaine defeated him by sealing him in an ice cave, though, is a bit unsettling.

Battlefield has a lot of other interesting things going for it. Notice that in the beginning of episode 1 the TARDIS console room is deliberately shot in the dark to hide the fact that the walls are not there. The set was only going to be used once for the whole season - much as how it was only used for The Greatest Show in the Galaxy previously - and reportedly the walls were starting to wear a bit thin, so rather than rebuild it there were some hasty bits of wall thrown together (they actually look like curtains) and circles cut out, the then the lights dimmed to hide the fine details. Ace looks different too with her hair grown a bit longer and her clothes a bit more mature than before, and this time there is no mention of her backstory; there is just too much going on in the script to throw more of her into it, but this is the only time this season that it happens. The Destroyer is a pretty good monster although he salivates way too much. He's played by Marek Anton, who will appear later in the season as a Russian soldier. In interviews Anton says that they were sunning themselves on the beach between takes on that story and producer John Nathan-Turner noticed his physique and offered him the part of the Destroyer. Yeah. Casting couch. And they said it was all an ugly rumour.

So one down, three to go and we're done the longest stretch of the show. Not that I am excited about this - Jay and I are left wondering what we'll do in a few weeks when we're out of episodes, although the next season of the current show is about to start so we will talk about that. Not on here, though; not yet.

NEXT EPISODE : GHOST LIGHT

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy

An advertising satellite tempts the Doctor into visiting the planet Segonax, where the Psychic Circus - the self-proclaimed Greatest Show in the Galaxy - if holding its talent festival. Ace doesn't want to go; she thinks clowns are creepy. They join other travellers making their way across the planet to see the revels, and at the same time some of the founding members of the circus are trying to escape from some unseen force and dying in the process. Far from a happy family atmosphere, the circus is now shrouded in menace with robot clowns doing the bidding of the crazed Chief Clown, and the Ringmaster sending act after act into the centre ring to meet their deaths when they fail to perform. The Doctor detects an ancient evil lurking in the shadows and knows me has to stop it before he and Ace are thrust into the spotlight, and towards their deaths.

Brilliant. Clowns have always been a source of fear and terror in fiction, made up faces lerring away and insane laughter punctuating unspeakable acts. Like, hello Joker? Hello any serial killer in a cheap slasher film. And now, hello nasty robot clowns. Of course they were never meant to be evil; they were built by the talented and gentle Bellboy, whose joy at performing for people has been eroded away. Bellboy is not the only one, though; Flowerchild dies trying to make her escape, and Deadbeat loses his mind. The rest of the circus alumni have fallen under the thrall of the dark power that has consumed the circus, and they are barely clinging to their own lives. They see the likes of vistors such as the grunting Nord, the irritating Whizzkid, and the pretentious windbag Captain Cook as fodder for the ring, to keep the powers that be at bay for just a bit longer, until the next act can be sent in. And the next. And the next.

Captain Cook is a fantastic character. He's very much the spirit of the old British Empire, looking down on everything in a jaded seen-it-all-before kind of way, and travelling with his own companion, the mysterious and beautiful Mags, who has her own secrets. The Captain is no fool, though; he's a survivor and a coward, shopping the Doctor to the killer robot driver of the hippie bus, and then ultimately betraying Mags in the ring just to save himself.

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy has some fantastic stylistic touches to it which are not entirely planned; just as the series was about to be recorded asbestos was found in the studios and had to be removed, which threw all of the BBC television centre into a tailspin. Talk shows were broadcast from the lobby and a lot of television programs were simply stopped in production. Doctor Who, however, was not stopped, for doing so would have meant the whole script for Show would have been scrapped, and instead its studio component was recorded entirely inside a circus tent set up in the television centre car park. This results in a different feel to the TARDIS interior with the lighting being more direct as opposed to overhead, and the camera movements somewaht differently handled as the Doctor and Ace investigate the intruding ad satellite. Shooting a show set in a tent actually inside a tent only adds to the effectiveness of the rest of the production, even if it's obvious that there is not a lot of floor space to deal with which results in some odd close-up shots here and there - shots which are actually handled quite well and give the show an almost artsy look. The location work is nothing to shout about at first, with Segonax presented as a quarry, but when the first long shot of the Psychic Circus is presented with a ringed planet hanging in the sky overhead it is actually quite striking. Topping the whole thing off is a rather brilliant score by Mark Ayres, including atmopsheric calliope music for the circus scenes and some fun little cues here and there such as the sample of the series theme when the Doctor and Ace arrive on the planet.

Could it have been improved? Well... who's to say if improved is the right way to look at it but the introduction rap done by Ricco Ross as the ringmaster dates the program somewhat, even if it does serve as a different way to start a show. Jay and I had a bit of a giggle at some of the interior scenes; it seems that even in tents there are corridors to run down, but they're done cleverly, the fabric of the walls billowing in the wake of all those clowns charging about hunting for Ace when she tries to escape. There's also this bit of continuity that you only know if you're looking for it; Ace finds one of Flowerchild's earrings in the sand near the bus and attaches it to her jacket with the other badges she has there, but as production for the season was done out of order, the earring was already there on her jacket in the previous episode, Silver Nemesis. Still, no-one is going to re-shoot the whole thing for the sake of one earring, and it actually does become a plot piece.

This is actually one of Sylvester McCoy's best performances, with the Doctor slowly realizing what's going on and going into his confrontation with the controlling powers behind the circus knowing that he might not survive. Still, as he goes through a long repertoire of magic acts to entertain the powers, he keeps looking at his watch, knowing that Ace is coming with something to help him win the fight. The Doctor has slowly changed in the two seasons so far, his character going from happy-go-lucky to more brooding, and in the next, and final, season he would become even darker still, with his own set of agendas that could rival those of his enemies.

After the schlock that was season twenty four, the series has started to revive itself and the writers have come together to build their vision of where the Doctor should go next. Unfortunately, though, the dice have already been thrown in the background and the series is on its way out; producer John Nathan-Turner wants out and he's been told that if he leaves the show will be cancelled. It's debatable if anyone else knew this at the time; interviews with writers and the script editor certainly don't seem to indicate that they knew their ship was sinking and they went ahead planning the twenty-sixth season, which would be one of the best of the classic series, garnering all sorts of critical praise from those who were still watching it.

And that's next.

NEXT EPISODE : BATTLEFIELD

Silver Nemesis

In the year 1988, a comet called Nemesis draws ever closer to the Earth in a decaying orbit. The Doctor knows all about it; he originally launched it into space from Earth in the year 1638 to keep it safe from the power-mad Lady Peinforte; for inside is a statue made of a living silver metal fashioned in her image. Using black magic, Lady Peinforte travels forward in time to 1988 to reclaim the statue, but its legend has attracted a group of neo-Nazis and an advance party of Cybermen; all three determined to have the power of the Nemeis for themselves, and to destroy the Doctor and Ace.

It sounds better than it actually turned out.

The approach of the comet makes from page news of a tabloid that Ace is seen reading in a garden, but when the comet actually makes planetfall there's no-one there to see it; the police arrive after the fact, the area isn't cordoned off, there's no media, and if as the script claims the crash site is outside Lady Peinforte's country home and just a few yards from Windsor Castle, why was no-one evacuated? There's tourists and everyone wandering about as if everything is fine, and the Doctor and Ace even have a chance encounter with the Queen so lax is the security there.

Speaking of tourists, why the Cybermen? They contribute absolutely nothing to the story, except to fall victim to one of the Doctor's little games to draw them out so he could wipe them out with some old Gallifreyan technology... exactly how he "nailed the Daleks" as Ace puts it. Sure they have a fantastically loud gun battle with the neo-Nazis which manages to fail to attract the attention of the military with its supposed proximity to Windsor Castle, but come on surely the Cybermen deserve a little better than this. And lo their whole vulnerability to gold is back, like an old cliche, and now just touching it kills them (Lady Peinforte shoots arrows at them with gold heads) whereas before the fifth Doctor had to absolutely grind gold into the Cyberleader in Earthshock and the results were not as immediate. The Cybermen we're seeing in the late days of the classic series are nowhere near the quality of the ones we saw in the 60's, but thankfully when they returned in 2006 all was not lost.

The clever bit I do like, though, is the whole idea of the statue itself. It is fashiond out of a living metal, as I already said, called Valedium, which was supposed to be the ultimate defence for Gallifrey. None of it should ever have left the planet, according to the Doctor, but I think we can all guess who was responsible for that. My continuity-obsessed mind wonders if maybe we're going to hear about this stuff again when the new series mentions the Time War again.

Jay and I watched this together, but it was a "special" version released on VHS with previously cut material restored to the edit, but in a pretty sloppy way without the music being redone to cover the edits. And Jay pinged this little gaffe right away: in the early moments of episode one a neo-Nazi somewhere in South America manages to plot the landing point of the comet, but the actual co-ordinates are way off given that Windsor is close to the Greenwich meridian. Boo, I say. And for the sake of nostalgia, since this is the 25th anniversary story, the comet's landing date is 23 November 1988. November in England looks fantastic; everything green and verdant almost as if it was the height of summer. I realize even an effects powerhouse like the BBC can't change the weather, so why even bother with the whole 23 November thing?

Included with the "special" version of the story is a behind the scenes special made for PBS about the making of the serial, full of all sorts of technical wonder and humourous moments with the cast and crew. We're wondering if this little gem will make it to the DVD release whenever that happens, or if they'll just go ahead and shoot an all new feature. The special has a lot of moments where we can get comment from then-producer, the late John Nathan-Turner, the man everyone wants to blame for the decline in the quality of the series. It's easy to blame the dead, but when JN-T is there on camera saying that the ultimate responsibility for everything the show ends with him, then I think it's warranted. Silver Nemesis is complete and utter crap; it's not well thought out, it's boring and thankfully it's only three episodes long. Even the cover of the VHS is terrible, totally out of whack with the the rest of the series, which is why I used the cover from the Target novelization.

I'm done.

NEXT EPISODE : THE GREATEST SHOW IN THE GALAXY