Doctor Who Viewed Anew

Bloodheat

2008-09-16T12:58:00.001-07:00

The TARDIS is attacked by an unknown force and Benny is ejected from the craft into the vortex. The Doctor and Ace lose the TARDIS in a tar pit, finding themselves on a parallel Earth where the last remnants of humanity have survived a deadly plague and are pitted in a desperate battle for survival against the resurrected Silurian race. It's an alternative reality, and not only has the war against the reptilian race turned Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart into a hard and ruthless man, but it has claimed the Doctor as a casualty years ago.

Bloodheat begins a 5-novel cycle of alternate reality, and it starts it off with the extreme of actually going to a parallel Earth (which until the time it was published had only been done in Inferno but has since popped up as a theme in the 2006 season of the new series) and seeing the contrasts between what we consider as is and what could have been. Things all go wrong for humanity when the third Doctor is unable to escape the Silurian base and work on an antidote to their bacterial weapon, and in the days of the war that follows the Doctor is killed as a prisoner. UNIT is unable to stop the Silurians and Sea Devils as they emerge from hibernation and the Earth is overrun. When the seventh Doctor eventually crosses paths with the Brigadier and Liz Shaw, they are suspicious of him, never entirely trusting him to be who he says he is. And it's not just the Doctor who has to deal with the rejection of people he knows as friends; in this reality, Ace's friend Manisha has not been the victim of a racist attack on her home (as described in the novelization of Remembrance of the Daleks and more vividly in her soliloqy in Ghost Light) but the circumstances of their friendship are not the same this time.

Benny has the more interesting perspective when it comes to dealing with the Silurians, and when she is captured by them and used as an experimental subject they too notice it: she has no race fear of them. When pot-holing scientists from the Wenley Moor underground project first encountered the reptile species they were driven mad with fear and reduced to gibbering maniacs scribbling pictures on walls, but by Benny's day, the Silurians were an integrated species that shared the planet with humanity and contributed to its defence against the Daleks during one of their many wars. It doesn't exactly make her a sympathizer, but she does go out of her way to stop a nuke aimed at the Silurians' capital city in Africa.

And the Silurians despite everything that has happened are not portrayed as total monsters without an ethical code; they're doing what any of us would do if our homes were overrun by pests and exterminating the lot of them to make it liveable again. Granted, humans do rank a bit higher than cockroaches - or so one might hope - but the principle is the same. And there are those in the Silurian hierarchy who would once have seen humanity die out who tire of the war as well and realize that maybe there could have been another way.

Style-wise it's a good solid tale, it starts the alternate universe cycle off quite well. The Silurians had not been seen or heard from since Warriors of the Deep when this was published, and it was good to see them treated with a bit more respect. I don't have the time to go back and look at all of the stories of the alternate universe cycle, but if anyone reading wants to check them out they were, in this order: The Dimension Riders, The Left Handed Hummingbird, Conundrum and No Future.

But I am going to look at how the cycle ends, because it's kind of brilliant.

NEXT EPISODE : NO FUTURE

Iceberg

2008-09-03T11:45:00.000-07:00

The Doctor takes a side-trip away from the TARDIS on board a life-boat within the time machine; it outwardly resembles a Chinese version of the London Polive Box the rest of the ship is modelled on. Leaving Ace and Bernice, the Doctor arrives on Earth in 2006 just as a team called FLIPback is working at averting a reversal of the Earth's magnetic field in Antarctica. Nearby is the pleasure cruise ship SS Elysium. And even closer, under the ice, are the Cybermen.

Loved it. LOVED it.

It's a different kind of take on the Cybermen this time, and despite the action taking palce in Antarctica and the family tradition of military service in the Cutler family, this one actually owes more to The Invasion than it does to The Tenth Planet. Chronologically, Invasion would have been the first real Cyberman attack on Earth as it was contemporary to when it was broadcast - the late 60's - whereas Planet was placed in the future (at the time) in 1986. But hold up - wouldn't the Cybermen on Mondas have been recognized? And how would Cybermen have made it to Earth ahead of the planet? And the vast differences in technology (despite the passage of time on television) are a bit jarring as well.

David Banks explains it all. At least, in his words. There's never been a deep look into the Cybermen and their origins in the classic series; they came from Mondas, Mondas went boom, they took over Telos, they started to die out, and then the Doctor wiped out what was left with the Nemesis statue. David Banks, however, having played a Cyberleader on television in every one of their appearances from 1982 to 1988, wanted to get into the heads of the Cybermen more than he already did, and he began to draft his own history of the Cybermen in a book called, simply, Cybermen. Iceberg, his only contribution to the New Adventures range (and the one with the most gratuitious use of the word "fuck"), takes his theories on Cyber-evolution and Cyber-proliferation and winds them into the threads left dangling from the two 60s invasion stories, with brief revisits to each of them from the points of view of simple citizens at the time. And then he takes a Cyberman survival unit that escaped Zoe's deadly rocket strike, drops them under the Antarctic ice, and then brings in the Doctor without companions to deal with them.

Yes, Iceberg was actually written to run parallel with another novel, Birthright, where Ace and Benny are stranded with a dead TARDIS and have to reconclie some of their own differences plus Ace's lingering distrust of the Doctor. But that's about all that I can say about that one; the actual story escapes me. The Doctor always needs someone along for the ride, though, so enter one Ruby Duvall, journalist, along on board the cruise ship to report on the work of the FLIPback team. Ruby's not a bad one to have along; she's plucky, she's smart, she knows how to pull her t shirt down to cover her bum (so the book says) and she's the first companion in any continuity to visit the loo.

And speaking of innovation - the concept of the Jade Pagoda as a sort of half-TARDIS for the Doctor to leave in when he pleases is an interesting one. It must be a character quirk of his, though, as nothing on Gallifrey resembles anything vaguely Japanese. It only comes up again one more time in this series before the idea is forgotten in the mists.

I never really found any flaw with Iceberg. It was enjoyable right through to the end. It drew a lot of fire for the swearing, most of it from fanboys (yes, the term includes girls too) who actually thought it made the series too adult. This from an audience largely in their 20s and early 30s by this time. I was 22 myself when it was published and I found it refreshing to be treated like an adult. But, hey, I was never one to sit around at fanclub executive meetings and giggle when someone said something naughty - I think one time when I did show up someone took exception to my Madonna Blond Ambition World Tour t shirt because she was cleverly naked on it.

But what do I know. I just liked Iceberg.

NEXT EPISODE : BLOODHEAT

Deceit / Lucifer Rising

2008-09-01T02:51:00.000-07:00

Ace is back, and she's not happy. After serving a few years with Spacefleet and being part of the Dalek war that was brewing in the pages of Love and War, she's a battle-hardened war vet, and her unit is being shipped off to the planet Arcadia to sniff out more Daleks. The Doctor and Bernice are also headed to Arcadia for reasons of their own, and to everyone's surprise there are no Daleks to be found there, but there is one Abslom Daak, a mercenary also simply known as "Dalek Killer"...

That's a brief gloss-over of the high points. I don't remember a lot of details, as usual. I'm really just including the review of Deceit as a continuity point, with Ace finally making her anticipated comeback. In relative terms she was away from the Doctor and Benny for almost 5 years, so the story would tell us, but her absence from the printed page was something less than one year given Virgin's publishing schedule at the time. But the Ace that returns to the TARDIS this time is not the same one everyone voted as fan favourite; she's meaner, she's got little respect for the Doctor after what went down on Heaven that made her leave in the first place, and she isn't too keen on Benny either. Her choice to rejoin the TARDIS is questionable at best.

The other character worth mentioning is Abslom Daak, a creation of the comic strips from Doctor Who Monthly back in the 70's. He's a total wild card, uncontrollable, all he wants to do is kill Daleks. His exact motivation is probably out of revenge or something; exactly what his motives are remain unclear at best because author Peter Davrill-Evans simply can't write for him. or for Ace. Or for Doctor Who, effectively.

Now I can see why something as mediocre as The Pit made it to print. Actually I have two theories: the first is Darvill-Evans was too wrapped up in his own book to care about the quality of the one coming just before it. The second theory is he was very aware that his book was substandard and he deliberately put one in front that was worse so blunt the impact. Either way... Deceit is far from a glowing example of what can be done.

Lucifer Rising, however, is much better. Or at least I remember it to be so. The bonds between the TARDIS crew start to come together again, slowly, as they join a group of workers from IMC (think back to 1971's Colony in Space) on the planet Lucifer to first solve the mystery of who or what killed Paula Engado, and then confront the bigger issues beind IMC's interest in the planet.

Again, memory shorts out at fine details, but much better characters, much tighter pacing, much more credible motivation. The first joint effort of Andy Lane and Jim Mortimore is indeed a good one, and puts some quality back into the line that (to be fair) wasn't entirely missing from the last two novels, but was certainly decreased.

So rather than waste time with half-assed reviews starting with "I don't remember," (which is sounding more and more like Tom Baker commenting on the VHS compilation of The Tom Baker Years) I'm going to leap ahead a bit here and just pick up the high points where the series breaks new ground or goes back to revisit some old events... or just stories I remember better...

NEXT EPISODE : ICEBERG

The Highest Science / The Pit

2008-07-30T09:43:00.000-07:00

The TARDIS is drawn to the planet Sakkrat by a large temporal fluctuation, and the Doctor and Bernice discover that it has hijacked a group of invading Chelonians, a group of drug addicted teenage music fans and an entire commuter train. While investigating, the truth of the planet comes out, that its original inhabitants were destroyed by their own creation: the Highest Science.

That's about all I remember of the basic plot. I read it just as long ago as I read Transit and it didn't leave as much of a mark in my mind. I remember that the story follows some pretty traditional patterns, with the Doctor being caught up with the baddies (in this case the xenophobic giant-turtle-people, the Chelonians)and Bernice stuck with the drugged up kids, who even get her to partake of their poison of pleasure : Bubbleshake. And the poor commuters on the train, they just want to go home. Bubbleshake is one of those drug drinks that triggers memory loss in the user, so for her second adventure with the Doctor, Bernice is once more not exactly herself.

Author Gareth Roberts has a distinct writing style all his own, and one I did not immediately enjoy. I can't remember exactly why, maybe because the contrast with Transit was so harsh; we go from gritty and nasty "cyberpunk" to a more comedic way to telling a story. Robert's style would not be lost during the days of Douglas Adams as script editor in the Tom Baker era, and in fact three of his later efforts would be missing adventures that take place in exactly that timeline (I didn't review them, no). Roberts later went on to write episodes of Coronation Street and co-write the pilot episode of spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures with Russell T. Davies.

As for The Pit... there's not a lot to say aside from it's terrible. It's awful. The plot is so vague and thin on the ground that I can hardly remember any of it aside from what was written on the back of the book. But I remember thinking that I was not enjoying it at all, from the presence of a supposedly menacing Time Lord from ancient Gallirey right to some weak reference to UNIT. Not inspirational stuff by any means, and author Neil Penswick gets the dubious award of First Crap Novel of the New Adventures Range.

Everything had been going so well until this one came along. Series editor Peter Darvill-Evans had been doing such a good job, and then this. What was he thinking?

Oh right, he was too busy writing his own novel for the series. It's next.

NEXT EPISODES : DECEIT and LUCIFER RISING

Transit

2008-07-29T14:20:00.000-07:00

Just as they get their new friendship going, the Doctor and Benny are separated from each other and from the TARDIS in a freak accident in the King's Cross station of the Sol Transit System, somewhere in Earth's future. Benny is blown down the stunnel to a far distant stop across the solar system leaving the Doctor to search for her amid an Earth culture reeling from a recent war against the Ice Warriors. But the true nature of the accident is not random; something is chewing its way through the system, destroying everything in its path; something that has possessed Benny and recognizes the Doctor for the threat he poses to its plans.

This is a brilliant novel. BRILLIANT. Author Ben Aaronovitch previously brought us the cracking script for Remembrance of the Daleks and has summonned even more creative energy to describe an Earth of the future down to such detail that you can smell it on the page. And I am not just talking the people he has populated the story with - even the mysterious Kadiatu Lehtbridge-Stewart - but the whole culture of Earth and the effects technology have had upon human society. I'll put it this way: when the novel actually comes with a glossary you know you're dealing with something different, and when the terms within are not just a collection of glib phrases but an actual lexicon of a future society ... fantastic.

The first time I read Transit I was... well, I was younger and really was aching for escape. The future vision created in the book is not the stuff of utopia - far from it - but it's alive, it's energetic, it's so different and still so the same. Is this a groundbreaking novel? For the series, I would say yes. The term "cyberpunk" got bandied around quite a bit when the book was being reviewed back then (1992 ... "back then"... oh hell...) and it met with the usual kind of decrying of fan snobs who said it was nothing like cyberpunk - but there's always going to be the elitists in any movement who want to be more radical than anyone around them. Is Transit radical? It's certainly different, with its unabashed commentary on sexuality in the future (the joyboys, and the small child prostitute with condoms tied into her dreadlocks by her mother), its insane level of violence (with one character even named Verhoeven after the director of the ultra-violent, and perhaps somewhat inspirational in this sense, movie Total Recall) and for the first use of the word fuck in a Doctor Who novel.

Yes. The f-word! OH MY GOD THE F-WORD. If the DWIN executive ninnies of the time weren't already all squirrelly about the vanilla sexuality in Timewyrm : Genesys you can imagine what this did to them. There was still that element of fandom that refused to grow up, and refused to let the series grow up in case it forced them to, but there it is, right there on page 41: Maybe time travels fucks with your mind, thought Benny. Of course this just opened the floodgates and the dreaded f-word would just fly out of every mouth in the series, until it got to a point a few years later where the word was dumbed down to the less harmful "cruk". Yeah, gee, I wonder what THAT means? Give me strength.

Transit set into motion a new movement of future history in Doctor Who where the new authors would go to play from time to time - most notably Kate Orman and Craig Hinton. Yes, there would still be alien places, and there would be adevntures back in history, but the future would look a bit different now. And so would Doctor Who.

NEXT EPISODES : THE HIGHEST SCIENCE and THE PIT (a double bill because I promised Jay we'd be ready for the 8th Doctor by autumn...)

Love and War

2008-07-28T03:24:00.000-07:00

It's the 51st century and the Doctor and Ace come to the planet Heaven. They are there just to relax while the Doctor looks for a book, but soon it becomes evident that the Doctor has some other agenda and Ace is once more a pawn in his plans. While she becomes involved with a Traveller named Jan, then Doctor crosses paths with one Professor Bernice Summerfield who is on Heaven for an archaeology dig, until she and her group are threatened by the monstrous Hoothi, and eventually by the plans of the Doctor himself.

Paul Cornell is back with one of the most intricate looks into the future that the series has had so far. Heaven is a massive cultural melting pot of different species, most notably though it is a refuge where Humans and Draconians exist together in peace sometime after a Dalek war, but the threat of attracting the attention of the Sontarans remains. And the Silurians have come out of hiding and also live alongside Humans, having taken on the new name of Earth Reptiles. And the Hoothi have plans for all of them.

Odd name, yes, but it's not actually Cornell's own. The species name is borrowed from one line from The Brain of Morbius way back in the Tom Baker era, when Maren says "Even the silent gas dirigibles of the Hoothi I felt in my bones while still a million miles distant,". Cornell, being a fan himself, has taken that one line and fashioned his whole story around it. Just who are the Hoothi? The best way to sum them up is intergalactic fungus that spreads through spores, and they're ready to invade, with Heaven being their first stop to conquest.

In dealing with them, the Doctor pushes Ace too far, and she finally leaves him in a rage, her life having been subject to his whims and under his control for too long. Ace has grown far beyond the 16 year-old girl she was when she met him in Dragonfire, and she can see what he has done to her and to others he has met along the way.

Assuming the role of new companion is Bernice Summerfield, a professor of archaeology from Heidelberg Unversity on Earth who prefers to go by "Benny". The first companion of many who does not appear on televised episode, Benny is older than Ace (late 30s is the best guess) and more mature, but still with parental issues of her own (mother killed in the Dalek war, father missing, presumed dead)and a bit of wariness around the Doctor after seeing what being with him has done to Ace.

At the time of the book's printing, Ace had been the sole companion for 6 years, and her departure was felt through fandom the same as any others who had been with the Doctor for a long time. There was a lot of complaining, and there was also the usual amount of "Thank god she's gone," from fans with nothing better to do than criticize everything about Doctor Who and not enjoy any of it (the Fat-Assed Anti-Fans as they are known). Myself I was annoyed that she was leaving, as the whole Doctor-Ace team had been one of the most successful in the series, right along with the fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, and the fifth Doctor and Tegan, and with the show off the air for 5 years at this point letting Ace go seemed like another admission that there would never been any more episodes made. But change is good; and although Virgin Publishing were not allowed to regenerate the Doctor, they changed the companions and made good choices doing it. I would eventually grow to really enjoy Benny's wry comments in the TARDIS, and she would become a fan favourite in her own right and earn not only her own spin-off series of novels and audios (the latter with Big Finish) but eventually the character would be cast to appear in some of Big Finish's Doctor Who range as well, alongside Sylvester McCoy and Sophia Aldred in their roles.

But before we get there, we have some more ground to cover.

NEXT EPISODE : TRANSIT

Nightshade

2008-07-27T02:45:00.000-07:00

I've been trying for weeks to get something to say about this one, because Mark Gattiss is a fantastic writer, and really knows his Dotor Who. But do I remember this book? Vaguely, at best.

What I do remember is English countryside in the 60's, and a retired TV star from a show called Professor Nightshade, and an alien invasion. A deep space monitoring station not unlike Jodrell Bank. The Doctor acting all defeatist and gloomy - the first time we see him really start to dip into his own inner pool of misery.

And then there's Ace. Falls in love, sort of, and then chooses to leave. But the Doctor won't let her go; he still needs her. And the rift between them starts to form, and it's not going to take much more before Ace has enough...

Ah well. Maybe reviewing all of these is a mistake if I do not remember everything. Just hit the high notes, maybe?

NEXT EPISODE : LOVE AND WAR

Cat's Cradle

2008-06-17T11:29:00.001-07:00

Following the example set before with The Timewyrm, the second "series" of novels in the new range were all united under the collective title of Cat's Cradle, but the three novels under its umbrella were much less connected on a story-to-story basis. The linking theme was something that was alluded to in Timewyrm : Apocalypse with the basic functions of the TARDIS starting to break down; the scanner not responding and then the doors, and Ace mentioning having seen an animal on board the ship. Cat's Cradle goes into a new territory where something catastrophic happens to the ship, and the Doctor and Ace are forced to exist without it for a while.

Cat's Cradle : Time's Crucible

The TARDIS comes under attack by an unknown force that actually penetrates the ship's outer hull, the psychic shock of the invasion causing the Doctor great pain. His attempts to move the ship and expel the invader result in its destruction, and Ace comes to on her own in the wasteland of a ruined city where the laws of physics are up for grabs and a small silver cat turns up. Ace is without the Doctor, but she is not alone; a group of time travellers from Gallifrey's early days of experimentation are drawn into the World City as well, and all come under attack from the malevolant Process, the creature that attacked and destroyed the TARDIS. And, by all accounts, the creature that killed the Doctor.

This book is phenomenal in its scope, creating a hideous twisted nightmare world where time is running sideways across three distinct zones where everyone exists at a different point in their own history. The Process enslaves the travellers and attempts to destroy Ace, meanwhile back on ancient Gallifrey an upstart called Rassilon and his followers challenge the rule of the Pythia with their ambition to become Time Lords. It's not often we are afforded a glimpse into Gallifrey's past beyond the odd mention of "the Dark Times", but here we are shown the people of the planet unsure of the newcomers, the Time Lords, fresh from their failures on Minyos. And the Pythia will have none of it; it's her world and if she can't have it, she'll curse it and leave the Time Lords a barren race.

Absolutely great. I loved it.

Cat's Cradle : Warhead

With the TARDIS reclaimed, the Doctor and Ace come to earth in the near future where industry and capitralism have ruined the planet. The air stinks, natural resources are dwindling, social decay is spreading in the form of supersition born on the streets of the inner cities, and a powerful elite make a bid to preserve themselves and leave the planet to die. The TARDIS is out of commision after its ordeal, and the Doctor and Ace travel the world by conventional means, spearated at times by oceans, to combat their enemies and to assemble a weapon that the Doctor can use to stop the madness. And in the midst of it all are thrust two unsuspecting lynchpins to the Doctor's plan; a young boy named Vincent who has some terrifying powers, and an angry young woman named Justine who brims with unbridled anger.

This is the first of the really graphic and pretty much disturbing adventures Virgin would put out in the series. Written by the television series's scipt editor, Andrew Cartmel, we get to see the Doctor recede back into the shroud of mystery, pulling even more strings than before to manipulate events. Ace has become tougher, and sees herself as an agent of the Doctor's plans, trusting him implicitly. Awful things happen to Ace in this one; she is routinely beaten up and meanced but she carrys on with her mission to help the Doctor. If there was ever going to be a theatrical film of Doctor Who during this yawning gap of the years between television series, this should have been it.

Cat's Cradle : Witch Mark

The final and I found to be the weakest of the three novels. Exact details of course evade me, which is a bad way to write a review, but I remember unicorns, and some link between Welsh folktales and aliens. Maybe the unicorns were the aliens, and the horn was an extension of their brains. Something like that. Some real sloppy mention on UNIT in the final pages. The damaged TARDIS storyline is finally wound up as well, but again, sloppy.

Now that the series had been established in print the novels would not be as bound together by theme from this point. There would still be a "future history" arc, an "alternate universe" arc and a few others, but the novel series would proceed under the watchful eye of series editor Peter Darvill-Evans for the next while, even including his own contribution to the stories which would turn out to be... well, you'll see.

NEXT EPISODE : NIGHTSHADE

The Timewyrm

2008-05-25T10:30:00.000-07:00

"Full length science fiction novels; stories too broad and too deep for the small screen. Produced with the approval of BBC Television, the New Adventures takes the TARDIS into previously unexplored realms of space and time,"

You have to really imagine what a thrill it was to hold a copy of the first New Adventures novel in my hands, knowing that although the series had been off the air for about a year, it was about to go entirely new places. And I was going along quite willingly. It's not as if the Doctor's adventures had never been on printed page before; without those old Target novelizations when I was growing up I daresay I wouldn't have been able to enjoy the series as much as I did, carrying the adventures beyond the TV screen and in some cases replacing the missing on-screen episodes entirely. But whereas the Target books only novelized adventures we had already seen (or as I say, not seen) on 144 pages or less, the Virgin books were not bound by any regular length and would all run over 200 pages each, some of them with very small text. The rules were simple: do not go against the spirit of the show, do not regenerate the Doctor, do not lose the fan base. And so it began, with a four-story cycle that would define the success of the novel range to come.

Timewyrm : Genesys

A pre-recorded message from the fourth Doctor sends the seventh Doctor and Ace to Earth on the trail of a creature from Gallifrey's myths and legends: the Timewyrm. A creature able to slide through the vortex unchallenged, she could wreak untold havoc throughout space and time. When they do track the creature down, she is masquerading as the goddess Ishtar in ancient Mesopotamia, and the Doctor and Ace meet the epic hero Gilgamesh in his quest to rid the land of her.

We star out very well with Genesys, even if it is penned by Terry Nation's chief ass-kisser John Peel. The Doctor and Ace come across well on the page even after an absence of a year from our screens, and the tone of the novel sets it apart from everything that came before: the Timewyrm is downright vicious, the city of Urak is dirty and Peel is no afraid to tell us how it looks and smells. And then there's the sex. It's not like there's humping going on all around but the slave girls in the palace are described as going topless and Ace catches the eye of Gilgamesh. Someone in the UK capitalized on this and wrote a big scary story in The Sun which managed to get over here to North America and precipitated one of the biggest farces in the history of organized fandom: the high and mighty self-righteous then-executive of the Doctor Who Information Network decided to take it upon themselves to put an insert into their fanzine, Enlightenment, warning the parents of members about the content of these books. I was 20 at the time, and can only imagine if I had been part of DWIN and that came through the letterbox. Idiots. And it wasn't even that bad. What it was, was good. A good start to the series, and even a good book in its own right.

Timewyrm : Exodus

Following the Timewrym's trail, the Doctor and Ace arrive in 1951 England, but in a version of time where the Nazi regime won World War II and had conquered Britain with ease. The Doctor and Ace travel further back in time to infiltrate the Nazi ranks themselves and see where things went wrong and find the sentience of the Timewyrm itself trapped inside the mind of Adolf Hitler, and the War Lords at work behind the scenes giving the Germans the edge to win the war.

Exodus does some good old fashioned storytelling, and who else better to do it than Terrance Dicks; script editor, writer, and novelist for years. I am one of the many who have been critical of Dicks' writing skills when it comes to a lack of description, and oft accused him of just photcopying the scripts from the televised series and throwing "he said" and "she said" after the lines, but here I find there's something good going on, something much better than any of those Target novelizations he put together. Exodus is amazing. Dicks should get it right easily, though, seeing as the War Lords are his own creation from the Patrick Troughton finale The War Games, and they're up to their old tricks in World War II. And it's the first time Dicks writes for the seventh Doctor and Ace, their televised episodes being novelized by the original script authors, and he gets them bang on.

Timewyrm : Apocalypse

The pursuit of the Timewyrm takes the TARDIS farther into the future than ever, right to the end of time and space to the planet Kirith. The Doctor can't detect the Timewyrm but he knows she is there, and in searching for her he'll discover the end of everything is about to come about, and it may be his fault.

Nigel Robinson, former editor for the Target line, steps up with the shortest novel in the Timewyrm series, which was supposedly a rejected script he had put together for the televised series. As Genesys featured a cameo of the fourth Doctor in hologram form, the seventh Doctor comes across his second self for a little chat, and even Polly is referenced for Ace's benefit. Apocalypse keeps it simple this time, with the Timewyrm hardly featuring in events until close to the end, which sets up for the big showdown.

Timewyrm : Revelation

The Timewyrm is ready for the Doctor and sets trap after trap for him, as well as for Ace, bringing a childhood bully into the play to kill her before she even met the Doctor. The stakes are high for both of them, and if the Timewyrm wins, she'll be free to destroy all of creation for her amusement.

New writer Paul Cornell closes the cycle with his book, and it's a brilliant read. Everything gets tied off nicely, but the road to the conclusion is a grim one with the Doctor and Ace separated, beaten, humiliated, almost destroyed. Yes, that Timewyrm is a bitch and a half.

So you'll have spotted that these are not as in-depth as they could be. I simply haven't got time to read them all over again. Some of these novels left better impressions than others, usually because they really pushed the envelope and went somewhere new and did something different with the characters that could never been done on television. As the books would go on, the elements of the supposed "Cartmel master plan" would start to emerge as they might have on television, but in this medium they wouldn't be bound by budget or censors, which was the first real admission that the fans of the series had grown up and needed something more to enjoy the Doctor with. Even at this early point with only four novels on the store shelves, it was obvious that Doctor Who was not going to be back for a long time, if ever, and certainly it would not be able to return in the usual format.

NEXT EPISODE : CAT'S CRADLE

Survival

2008-05-12T18:57:00.000-07:00

The Doctor takes Ace back to Perivale after she idly wonders what her old friends are up to. Far from status quo for the sleepy suburb of London, it appears that Ace's friends are all missing, and the town is being overrun by stray cats. The Doctor realizes that the disappearances are actually abductions, and young people are being transported to the planet of the Cheetah People to be hunted and eaten. This, though, is the least of the Doctor's worries; the Master has turned up on the Cheetah Planet and contrary to his claims of being able to control the animals there, he himself is falling under the planet's thrall...

And that is the finaly story of a 26 year run on television. It's not the most original or complicated plot, but the real strength of Survival stems from first time writer Rona Munro's fantastic script and some really solid direction. It's shot entirely on location, with just the right amount of special effects to make the Planet of the Cheetah People appear a tad more exotic than the quarry it was shot in. The Cheetah People costumes are pretty much what one would expect; actors in fur suits but the faces and heads are worthy of Cats. (Remember Invasion of the Cat People? Those feline anatagonists were linked to these ones in that novel as being a different branch of evolution, and it would come up again in 2006 and 2007 in New Earth and Gridlock respectively).

Being set in Perivale, Survival gets another kick at the mythology that is Ace's backstory, this time bringing her back together with her old chums Ange, Shreela and Midge. The boorish self-defence instructor Sgt. Patterson recognizes Ace and refer to the police having ler her off with a warning for some bit of mischief or another; it's hard to believe that a warning is all she would have gotten for burning down Gabriel Chase as was revealed in Ghost Light, so she's obviously been in trouble outside of that incident. Her friends are surprised to see her, but she is not immediately keen to tell them where she's been. Survival is actually the first story to really devle into the effects travelling with the Doctor can have on the companions' lives; Patterson admonishes Ace for leaving and having her worried mother list her as a missing person. This would start the ball rolling for the return of the series in 2005 and how companions Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and Donna Noble would deal with worried families when they themselves went missing.

Anthony Ainley makes his final appearance as the Master. Trapped on the Cheetah planet he is in danger of becoming an animal himself, with his eyes mutating to cat-like irises and his teeth beginning to grow into fangs; all brought about by his midn link with the animals there. Being a Time Lord, though, he resists the change and fights it, maintaining his dignity and even a sense of style as always. But the desire for revenge against the Doctor does not help keep the powers at bay, and the process begins to speed up and make him more feral as the story progresses. Not having met this incarnation of the Doctor before, he is wary of him, perhaps sensing there is more to this incarnation than there has been in the others.

As for the Doctor, he manages to figure out what is going on relatively quick, as is the norm with him this season. He grasps the danger posed to Ace by her growing bond with one of the Cheetah People, Karra (played by Lisa Bowerman who would soon return as the voice of companion Bernice Summerfield in the Big Finish audio range). And as he walks off into the sunset with Ace at the end, he has a fantastic soliloqy that was dropped in to wrap up the series and leave it open for its return... one day.

Had the series carried on for another season plans had been made to write Ace out halfway through and send her off to Gallifrey to inject new life into the Time Lord society. The Doctor would have continued to walk on the darker side of his nature, with the production team aiming to re-establish some mystery around the character and make him less a victim of his own circumstances. Elements of this "master plan" eventually did begin to surface in the stories that followed; Virgin Publishing, under contract from the BBC, began to publish all-new Doctor Who fiction under the banner of "The New Adventures" in 1991, taking the Doctor and Ace to places they had never been before, and places we could only dream of seeing them go. Virgin's new steps would eventually give rise to Big Finish and their success, and eventually the show would return in 2005, but not until after a lot of changes...

NEXT EPISODE : TIMEWYRM

The Curse of Fenric

2008-05-07T01:29:00.000-07:00

The Doctor and Ace arrive at a top secret naval base in 1943, but while they come in through the front foor and bluff their way into the confidence of the genius Dr Judson, a group of Russian commandos have arrived on the beach with a mission of their own. The area is steeped in mystery, all of it coming from old Viking rune stones in the cellar of the local church, St Jude's. But there is an evil rising from the sea, and a lethal poison has been seeping out of the ground. And before the day is over, the opposing military factions will be battling ancient monsters from the future, and the Doctor will be confronted by a nameless evil intent on destroying him and the world.

From the very first minute, The Curse of Fenric establishes a fantastic air of mysery and fear through a combination of atmospheric incidental music, rolling fog across the sea and an underwater shot of a sunken Viking ship. And from then on it's go go go. The production never stops throwing new elements at the viewers through a dialogue-heavy script with a good balance of action to words, and some of the best moments ever for the seventh Doctor and Ace as a team. The production is also packed with incredible characters aside from the regulars, starting with the Russians led by Captain Sorin, and moving to the British soldiers under the command of Millington (note a very young Christien Ainholt from Relic Hunter as private Perkins), the incredible Kathleen Dudman. and carrying right through to the civilian characters such as Dr Judson, the stuffy Miss Hardaker and her two charges Jean and Phyllis, and reverand Wainwright. And then come the Haemovores; hideous bloodsucking monsters that the Doctor says are what humans will evolve into towards the end of their time on Earth as the pollution of industry ruins the world.

Fenric adds another layer to the whole backstory of Ace, not by delving back into her past again but with her coming into direct conflict with the Doctor when she realizes that he is starting to play games on the side wherever they go and she's starting to feel like one of his pawns. And when the people around them start to die, she lashes out at him and makes him explain what he's doing, and why.

And what is he doing? Fighting evil, pure and simple. But not just something evil, an evil that has no name, although Commander Millington has created a bit of mythology around it and named it Fenric. But Fenric and the Doctor go back a long way to what one might assume is the Doctor's first incarnation where Fenric failed to solve a puzzle the Doctor had made for it and was thus imprisoned like a genie in a bottle. But over time Fenric has made plans and spread its influence, quietly playing its own game and using agents of its own as pawns to set it free. And now there's hell to pay.

Excellent. Brilliant. Fantastic. Not flawless, mind you; there are a few science fiction cliches in there that we could do without, and the Haemovore masks could have looked a bit better (yes I know, BBC budget and all that). Easily the high point of the season, almost tied with Ghost Light.

BBC Video released an extended version of the show on VHS back in the early 90's by dropping additional footage back into place and then re-scoring the whole adventure with a new soundtrack, resulting in some freakishly long episodes. On the DVD release, the original broadcast versions are presented on one of the discs in the set, and the second disc holds yet another remix of the material, this time in a feature length movie format. The material is edited again and the music is done again, but the end result is something that could be on par with the feature-length Christmas episodes we have been enjoying with the new series. I just hope they don't get it in their heads to start doing this with every episode; the old VHS titles at the very beginning were made into feature length shows and it wasn't as much fun to watch. This time it works quite well; Jay and I enjoyed it a few weeks ago. Actually, I think he requested we watch the movie version.

And that's the second last classic adventure done. One more to go.

NEXT EPISODE : SURVIVAL

Ghost Light

2008-04-27T16:54:00.001-07:00

Ace doesn't like haunted houses. Imagine her reaction when the Doctor takes her to an old Victorian mansion in 1883, on a dark night when the Reverand Earnest Matthews has arrived to give Josiah Samuel Smith a good talking-to about his support of Darwin's theories of evolution. But there is more to it than that; in a house shrouded in darkness there is a stone spaceship in the cellar where a creature named Light is asleep, and on the floors above the halls are stalked by the explorer Redvers Fenn-Cooper, his mind snapped by something he has seen on his travels. The Doctor realizes that there is something evil and alien at work in the house, and Ace realizes that this is no ordinary house - it is the same house in her home town of Perivale that frightened her so much as child in 1983...

Ghost Light has the distinction of being the one story that gets almost the same reaction from anyone who watches it: nobody quite understands what's going on. I'll admit when I first saw it in 1990 I had no idea where the story was going or what was supposed to be happening. My friend Brian watched it with me back then and despite seeing it a few times afterwards he still has the same reaction, which is to look at me after episode 3 and go "Huh?". The big joke to this day is to say they will explian everything is episode 4, but there is no such thing. Writer Marc Platt could have done with an extra episode to get all his points across, although to me part of the magic of the script is that it does everything it wants to do in 3 episodes, even if we don't exactly get it.

Here's how Jay and I saw it when we watched it: Light came to to Earth in his spaceship, but for whatever reason ended up hibernating. His original mission was to study life on the planet and create a comprehensive catalogue, but as soon as he has got everything down, life on Earth began to evolve. The survey creature assisting him broke free of its bonds while Light was asleep and became Josiah Samuel Smith, invading the house known as Gabriel Chase in Perivale and taking over the people who lived there. The Control creature in the spaceship was imprisoned and kept in the basement while Josiah went about establishing himself, even going so far as to plot an assassination of Queen Victoria (timeline note here: this is 4 years after the events in the 2006 episode Tooth and Claw). Along come the Doctor and Ace, and after he realizes what's going on, the Doctor awakens Light to sort out the mess, but things get even tricker at that point.

Ghost Light has so much going for it. All the confusion aside it is a beautiful production set entirely inside the mansion, all done in studio as a sharp contrast to the extensive location work in ther est of the stories of season 26. The BBC do this sort of thing so well, right down to the period costumes on the creepy night time maids of the house. The set itself is huge, with the main hall dominated by the central staircase, and the hallways filled with all manner of creatures stuffed and put on display. All those critics of Doctor Who who go on about bad production values and wobbly sets need to take a look at this one and take back their comments.

Character wise, we are given even more insight into Ace's backstory as she is forced to confront the source of the evil that would terrify her as a child, and as she faces the consequences of her actions after the fact. The Doctor risks their friendship by taking her back to this place, but his interest is piqued, and there are more revelaing moments about him, most notably how he admits to hating unrequited love. Exactly what happened to make him say that is never revealed, but it's out there now.

The DVD release of Ghost Light comes with a fantastic supplemental piece where the cast and crew are all interviewed years later and all of them go through the same pains to say how they enjoyed themselves on the production, and how great it was to have some of the biggest names in British television in the same studio, and how, in the end, they had no idea what they were doing on set. There's no sense of that in the final production, though; everyone performs with such conviction that it feels like we the audience are not paying close enough attention. That is a risk as well; let your attention wander during this one and you'll be wondering what you missed.

NEXT EPISODE : THE CURSE OF FENRIC

Battlefield

2008-03-24T05:51:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-17T14:59:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-02T03:20:00.000-08:00

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

The Happiness Patrol

2008-02-25T01:35:00.000-08:00

Acting on what he calls "disturbing rumours", the Doctor takes Ace to Terra Alpha; an Earth colony in the future. Alpha is governed by Helen A., a strict woman who wants only one thing from her people: for them to be happy. And to keep them happy, she has had smily faces painted everywhere, cheerful music piped out from speakers everywhere, free candy for everyone. And if that doesn't make the people happy, the Happiness Patrol will find them, and make them disappear for the good of everyone else.

Doctor Who dips back into the surreal here, to an extreme length. We all know a political system like that could never really work, so writer Graeme Curry is calling for not just a suspension of the viewer's disbelief but a total incarceration and exile of it for the story's three episode length. Maybe it's possible to accept Helen A's megalomania and the cowardice of her whipped husband Joseph C (some say this is a Margaret Thatcher comment, and perhaps it is), and the fanatical Patrol members Priscilla P and Daisy K, but along comes the Kandy Man, which is exactly what the name suggests: a villain made of candy. Something to upset the makers of Basset's Allsorts.

The colonists of the planet are not the only ones under threat from Helen A's programme of happiness through terror; humanoid rat-creatures that used to live in the sugar fields have been driven out of their native habitat and forced to scrounge in the underground pipe network beneath Alpha's capital (and like so many other planets in the Who universe, only) city. The colonists call them the vermin, a typical colonist slant towards indiginous life that gets in the way of progress, but they are an intelligent species aware of their plight and desperate to find a way out. When the Doctor meets them, he realizes they are on the brink of starvation, and as such extinction as well.

Even though this is only Ace's third adventure it's easy to see how well she is going to go over with such a totalitarian regime. Her black jacket with all its badges raises the ire of the Patrol, as does her refusal to smile, sing or dance. It's a given that Ace would rebel against any authority, but when she encounters it to this extreme she almost goes out of her way to court the danger. And yes, she has more explosives with her and blows up Helen A's vicious pet Fifi when it corners her in the pipes.

Jay and I enjoyed this one on the weekend, and as he had not seen it before we were not as verbose as usual. There were the usual comments when we found something silly or puzzling, like the way the Kandy Man's eyes were constantly spinning, or why he kept his lemonade in a wine bottle. There are a few actors in Patrol who we had seen before - one in Caves of Androzani and another from Frontios - which made Jay ponder why they recycled actors instead of finding new talent. And we wondered why go to the trouble of making the TARDIS pink for one episode, or, indeed, how the paint stuck.

My usual complaint with studio bound stories like this is I never get the feeling of it actually being a city, or a large one come to that. Sure they've rearranged it and shot from different angles and darkened the shadows to make the night time setting more menacing, but if you look too closely you recognize the background and become too aware of the studio limitations (something they just manged to avoid in Paradise Towers). The answer is probably to not look too close, as with all things.

Back in 1990 I first saw this on YTV when they had the rights to Doctor Who in Canada. Littered with commercials, sound levels shot to hell and shown out of sequence it didn't make much of an impression with me at the time. It doesn't help when you've got an adventure that has already been trimmed to fit into a shorter format that it gets sliced a bit more to make room for the ads. The novelization of the story came along within a couple of years and as was the fashion at the time it expanded greatly on what the writer really wanted to achieve. Who knows how much of what was presented in text actually made it to being recorded, and therefore might end up on a DVD release. A friend of mine said at the time that The Happiness Patrol would never be released on VHS due to its use of the Kandy Man and there would be lawsuits from Bassett's as it resembled their mascot, Bertie, but it happened, so the DVD is not an impossibility. The schedule for 2008 releases looks a bit packed for now so it is unlikely we'd see it in the near future, but despite it's slightly oddball status, it would be a good one to put out.

NEXT EPISODE : SILVER NEMESIS

Remembrance of the Daleks

2008-02-17T23:48:00.000-08:00

It's November 1963 and the army are on patrol in Shoreditch around Coal Hill School and a junkyard at 76 Totters Lane. The Doctor and Ace arrive and find two different Dalek factions lurking in central London, both after the same thing: the Hand of Omega. During his stay on Earth with Susan, the Doctor had intended to bury the Hand on Earth and use it as bait but when Ian and Barbara pushed into the TARDIS he was forced to leave before completing the job. The Hand of Omega is what it implies: a tool used by Omega to craete the black hole that became the centre of the Eye of Harmony, and it will give the Daleks the power that the Time Lords have. But the Imperial Daleks, under the command of their Emperor, have to overcome the Renegade Dalek army which has enlisted the aid of local facists. And that means all out war.

Welcome back to Doctor Who.

Now I know a lot of people will get mad at me for saying it, but THIS is what the show is about. It's about the Doctor, the alien man with an agenda, who has had enough of the evil he finds in the universe and is going to do something about it. And the trusting companion, who believes in him totally, and even though this is their first full adventure together now that Mel has left (she never would have survived this one) one gets the feeling that a lot of time has already passed just from watching them together. There are of course moments where Ace's questions to the Doctor sound more like she's interviewing him from cue cards, but on the whole they've got it stitched up between them.

Word is Terry Nation did not like what writer Ben Aaronovitch did with the Daleks. I can't imagine what his beef was; they're at their most innovative here, with the Black Dalek's renegade army laying clever plans to use a small child's mind as a battle computer, and the Imperial Daleks evolving beyond their usual means and creating a super weapon in the form of the Special Weapons Dalek which is just an engine of destruction. I got annoyed at Ace's little soliloqy about the cause of the Dalek conflict though; she saw the fight as a parable of racial intolerance until it is revealed that Davros has become the Emperor Dalek and the Renegades are the last remnants of the Dalek race who would not follow him.

The commentary on racism continues with the xenophobia displayed by the character Mike, an army sergeant, who takes a shine to Ace, and she does to him until she realizes not only is he inadvertanly selling everyone out to the Renegade Daleks but he's the same racist scum she has always hated. The reasons for that aspect of Ace's character would come out later on in the television series but the novelization of the story illustates it beautifully; Ace had a best friend named Manisha who was from a Pakistani family, and racist white kids firebombed her home. And to further reference the novelization, there is some internal strife amongst the Imperial Daleks who view the special weapons unit as an abomination to their own purity.

So now with a companion who is more real than several of her predecessors who never really evolved beyond their character summaries, we also have a Doctor who is dramatically different from any of his previous selves. Sylvester McCoy has said he wanted to draw on characteristics of the previous Doctors but none of them ever had the same air of danger and menace about them as his Doctor would. The Doctor has deliberately drawn the Daleks to Earth and put it in danger, he engages in deceit to keep the humans involved out of harm's way, he gives Ace a superweapon by having the Hand of Omega imbibe her aluminum baseball bat with destructive energies (which she uses with great skill against a Dalek in episode two), and when it comes down to crunch time, he allows the Daleks homeworld to be obliterated without a qualm, precipitating what would eventually be known as the Time War and putting his own people in jeopardy.

Visually too this story is top notch. The Daleks are all rebuilt to look sturdier although Jay didn't like them; they're obviously pulled from a plastic mould as opposed to built in smaller bits. The Black Dalek, though, is made in the old way and is slightly bigger than the others. The Renegades are coloured in the traditional grey and black scheme and the Imperials have adopted the white and gold first seen in Revelation of the Daleks. A lot of the story is shot on location in the streets of London, including an incredible firefight between Dalek factions that apparantly set off alarms. The Daleks have new ray gun effects, and the mothership seen hovering over Earth maintains basic elements of the Dalek battle cruiser from Resurrection, and the shuttle... wow! As an outer space effect it looks pretty bad, but when they land the full scale version in the playground at Coal Hill School it is almost flawlessly done. The Emperor is more mobile than it was in Evil of the Daleks; now it is more like the Emperor Dalek of the 1960's comic strip versions with a bulbous head and no "arms", rolling along on a standard Dalek base.

I could go on at great great length about Remembrance of the Daleks. When I saw it back when I was 17 years old I was so fascinated by it I started seeing elements of it in my dreams, and eventually wrote a massive 150 plus page story for one of my classes where the fallout of Skaro's destruction forced the Imperial Daleks to adopt a plan devised by the Renegades (before they were deemed as such) involving their duplicates from Resurrection of the Daleks. I told Jay about it while we were watching this one and he seemed interested; maybe I'll dig it up and include it in my ideas here as I did with Offworld Vegas.

As a matter of fact, I think I will.

NEXT EPISODE : THE HAPPINESS PATROL

Dragonfire

2008-02-03T05:08:00.000-08:00

The Doctor and Mel arrive at the space colony of Iceworld, on the planet Svartos, where they encounter Sabalom Glitz in a bit of a cash crunch. Having sold his crew off and in debt for a delivery of rotten fruit, he is contemplating searching for the fabled Dragon's Treasure as a means to regain his fortunes. Glitz is unaware that he is being played by Kane, a notoroius criminal who can only survive in extreme cold temperatures. Mel befreinds a waitress named Ace and together they join the Doctor and Glitz in the ice catacombs beneath Iceworld, dodging Kane's deep-frozen mercenaries, and the Dragon itself as it protects its treasure...

Dragonfire is by far the best story of the 24th season. The mood is set right away from the opening moments of episode one when Kane's newest recruits are brought in to be frozen in the gloomy control centre. Again, as with Time and the Rani and Paradise Towers the sets are built on a large scale and there is a lot of overhead work done, with action happening on more than one level at a time. The ice catacombs, though, aren't really that well realized; anyone looking close enough will see that it's not even solid stuff, it's guaze or taffeta or something stretched out ceiling to floor. The colony feels like a proper spaceport comeplete with aliens of all shapes and sizes hanging out at the milkshake bar (shades of the Mos Eisly cantina from Star Wars) including a long Argolin last sen in The Leisure Hive.

When Jay and I watched this he had forgotten that Glitz was back, and often pondered aloud why they had brought him back. True, he could have been anyone but when you're dealing with a 3 episode story it cuts down on a lot of trust-gaining if you go off looking for treasure with someone you already know. Also, the story is rich in new characters already: Kane and his fixation on revenge all brought on by his broken heart - oh and he can kill people with the touch of his freezing cold hand; Belascz disillusioned at how Kane's previous affection for her has faded; and Ace, the plucky streetwise waitress from Earth who arrived on Iceworld as a result of a freak time storm. Glitz gets some better treatment this time around, although he does still speak in mad fluting ways.. and his musical cues from The Mysterious Planet are used again for his scenes.

The real triumph of this episode though is the Doctor. Sometimes the clown, still the mysterious friend, he has finally come into his character this time, with good chemistry between himself and all the other characters.

Oh there's a dragon. Sort of. It's a biomechanoid. Looks like the BBC's attempt at Alien just more rubbery. Initially it's a monster to be feared, but the truth of its existence reveals it to be not as hostile as originally believed. In the end, it too becomes a sympathetic character to be mourned when it meets its end, right along with Kane who would rather die than face eternity alone.

Mel. The screaming. THE SCREAMING. You can see at the climax of episode one when she and Ace come face to face with the dragon how pained Sophie Aldred (Ace) looks at having this shrilling right in her ear. The other climax to episode one, with the Doctor stupidly allowing himself to dangle over a sheer drop by the end of his umbrella, is just stupid. And how the hell did he and Glitz get down without getting killed?

Where was I going here... oh right. Mel. Out of nowhere, she decides to leave. A sudden impulse takes her and she decides to leave the Doctor and run off adventuring with Glitz. The Doctor is hurt and sulks initially but then wishes her well. After all if Glitz sold his crew off just for doing their job she'd be up on the block pretty quick after one scream. But the companion transition happens right away; at Mel's suggestion the Doctor offers Ace a place on board the TARDIS rather than take her back to her boring life on Earth. And Ace literally jumps at it, forming what will be remembered as one of the most dynamic Doctor-companion teams in the history of the show right along with the fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith, the second Doctor and Jamie, and these days the tenth Doctor and Rose.

So after starting on a pretty lame note the series regains some of its footing and the fan base would start to rebuild. The production team would start doing new things with the Doctor and Ace for the 25th anniversary season, starting with pitting the new duo against classic enemies...

NEXT EPISODE : REMEMBRANCE OF THE DALEKS

Red

2008-02-02T05:52:00.000-08:00

The TARDIS suffers a telepathic attack, bringing the Doctor and Mel to a controlled colony where all the inhabitants of the Needle are monitored by a system called White Noise. The system is breaking down, though, and something is driving the inhabitants to kill ... something Red. Every colonist in the Needle has been fitted with a chip that inhibits violent actions, but over time the chips have deprived the colonists of the ability to feel anything. White Noise needs to stop the killings in keeping with its function, but something Red has other plans...

Every utopian setup has something wrong with it, although the problems with the Needle are all there for anyone to see: the building itself is for all intents alive, and White Noise acts like a god using chips to curtail the violent impulses of the people who live there, and when they experience a thought outside the parameters of White Noise's functions, the computer edits them out. The Doctor, of course, won't stand for it, and when he is fitted with a chip against his will he is able to resist White Noise's intrusions but he becomes linked to Red and witnesses the killings first hand. Red, in turn, is able to see into the Doctor's mind and comes up with more creative ways to kill.

The whole identity of Red is a bit unclear for the longest time; is it a collective manifestation of everyone's repression? Is it a telepathic alien? It is a rogue computer virus? Whatever Red is, it knows what it is doing and speaks through its agents as it kills, chanting the word red over and over as it throttles the life out of whoever is nearby. And seeing as only White Noise identifies the behaviour as "red-lining", it is obviously somehow part of this process.

Melanie falls in with people who have left The Needle; people who realized that surrendering their control of themselves to White Noise was a mistake, but they are all still chipped and vulnerable to the influences of Red. Their recreational escape from the otherwise dull reality is a drug called "slow" which places them out of synch with time around them, slowing everything down to their perception and leaving them vulnerable to attack.

I'm going to have to admit though that as clever as some of it sounds, I fell asleep through this one. A lot. Maybe it was a bad week. Or maybe it just wasn't that gripping. I do remember enjoying bits that I was awake for, but the rest... I think I'll need to go back and see.

Later.

NEXT EPISODE : DRAGONFIRE

Flip Flop

2008-01-31T11:40:00.000-08:00

The Doctor and Mel arrive on the planet Puxatornee not once, but twice at separate intervals some thirty years apart. Both times upon their arrival they discover that they are already wanted persons, either as dissidents undermining the rule of the slug-like uber polite Slithergees, or as Slithergee agents attempting to spy on the human population. In both threads of time, the Doctor and Mel are forced to travel in the TARDIS and assist in altering time for the betterment of the planet's human population, and in both threads the Doctor warns that changing the future can have unforseen consequences...

Flip Flop is actually pretty brilliant storytelling; it is a 4 episode story that has no defined beginning or end and more or less puts the Doctor and Mel into a loop of time as they try to free themselves from the goings on of Puxatornee. As their own understanding of the events around them unfolds they begin to realize that they are now in a race against time themselves to get off the planet before their alternate selves arrive in their own TARDIS.

I really picked the wrong days to try and listen to this audio, though; working nights you really need to have all your brain cells firing when concentration is required and I just kept dropping off and having to go back and listen to sections again. Flip Flop, like many of the other stories inserted into the background of season 24, maintains some elements of the televised episodes of the time; there's no real feel of a threat to the Doctor and Mel and the villains of the piece are hardly scary at all. The Slithergees are a bit of an absurdity, humbly requesting sanctuary on one of Puxatornee's moons and then gradually insinuating themselves into the power roles of the colony's government through political correctness. And the hint of nuclear war. And when the humans are in power and struggling to deal with the fallout of exactly that war, they are desperate and ugly, convinced that going back in time to stop the war is what they need to do, even though it may well land them under Slithergee control again.

This is actually the sort of thing I could see the new televised series trying to achieve; it's a clever premise, it's handled well and even if the Doctor seems to be a bit too calm throughout the show, he is still very much on form where his defence of the web of time is concerned. Mel is as always Mel, with more clever dialogue and still no screaming. I'm actually going to miss her. Or this new version of her.

NEXT EPISODE : RED

The Fires of Vulcan

2008-01-29T10:40:00.000-08:00

An archaeological expedition recovers the TARDIS from the ruins of Pompeii in present day Earth. UNIT investigators are called in to identify the object. Hundreds of years in the past, the Doctor and Melanie visit the city during its final days. The Doctor knows well enough about the discovery in the future; it's something he has been trying to avoid for the longest time but now he has arrived at what he believes will be his last adventure. Melanie refuses to accept the Doctor's defeatist attitude and strikes out on her own to try and change the future, but as events progress and the travellers become more enmeshed in the past, it looks as if they will not escape the eruption of Vesuvius and will indeed die with Pompeii.

Here's an interesting twist on the whole "changing the past" thing. The Doctor knows he can't do it. He's told his companions often enough that they cannot do it, and on occasion has warned them that if they become part of history he will not be able to protect them from it. What happens, though, when he realizes that his own number might be up? Do the rules change for a Time Lord, or does he accept his fate and just wait for the end? After all he has the power to change it. And then there's Melanie to consider as well; does he doom her along with himself or does he try to at least save her life?

Fate and destiny. There's that old argument again that was thrust upon my OAC English class when we were reading Hamlet. Do we have power to change things? Or is it true what Jaye says in an episode of the inspired yet short-lived Wonderfalls, "We're all fate's bitch. Bend over for destiny,"

Against this struggle with the inevitible also comes the story of the Doctor and Melanie's visit to Pompeii. Their own fate is in question, but what about the people who live there? True to fashion they meet people and become involved in their lives, people who see the smouldering volcano next door as a chimney for Vulcan's furnaces where he works at his forge. They don't know what's coming, and history forbids the Doctor and Mel from saying anything, even if it means their own lives are at risk. Classic Doctor dilemma. In the face of this disaster, though, one wonders why he doesn't just leave and escape fate, absolve himself of the guilt of not being able to save anyone else this time. He thinks it's futile, that somehow he will just end up back here, and the TARDIS will be found later as it always has been. Sylvester McCoy goes a bit darker in this one, broody and moody, which I'm not a big fan of. He can't do defeated without sounding ... well... melodramatic.

The new series of Doctor Who due to start in April sees the tenth Doctor and his companion Donna in Pompeii as well; I'm not sure if they are there for the eruption but it's a pretty safe bet that they are. Why else would they go there? So will their adventure negate this one, will it overwrite and ignore The Fires of Vulcan? Or will it be adapted from this one, throwing continuity out the window and recycling key plot elements once more as was the case with Jubilee ? We'll find that out in April or May 2008.

Meanwhile...

NEXT EPISODE : FLIP-FLOP

Delta and the Bannermen

2008-01-28T13:52:00.000-08:00

Delta, the Queen of the Chimerons and the last of her people, is on the run. Her planet has been invaded by Gavrok and his mercenary army of Bannermen, her people slaughtered. Custodian of the future of her species, Delta disguises herself as a tourist amongst the Navarino party going to Disneyland on Earth in 1959 on a Nostalgia Trips Bus. The Doctor and Melanie are also along for the ride, having won their places on the trip as the 10,000,000,000th customers at a galactic toll port, but a freak accident lands the tour group at a holiday camp in Wales. The Bannermen raiding party is not far behind, bringing danger to an otherwise dull part of the world.

See how well a premise can start up and then just go right into the crapper? If you dig sci fi farce along the lines of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, then the trend of absurdities on season 24 would be sort of up your alley, if, indeed, it was on par. Sadly it's not.

Now Delta not without its relative strengths; it's actually quite innovative and shot almost entirely on location (the exceptions being a brief scene inside the TARDIS and a few other simple sets) in a pleasant setting. It also has the first vocal incidental music score since The Gunfighters back in 1966, along with some re-imagined classic rock and roll tracks and similar inspired music. And the props people got the whole thing pretty good, kitting the cast out in retro 50's attire. But period looks have never been a problem for any arm of the BBC.

Where this one suffers, is, as I have said before, the realization of an alien tour group coming to earth in disguise. Clever, yes. Well executed? No. It just feels too... happy. And not engaging enough. I remember watching it for the first time back in 1987 and enjoying it because it was new, but then thinking I would never actually show this episode to someone as as elling point for the series. I did, however, show it to Jay yesterday and we did what we usually do and discussed the merits of the show (usually when we see a hot guy, and in this case we agree that young mechanic Billy is the eye candy of the piece) and a few of the detracting elements like mis-placed moments of musical score, the odd camera angle that did not make sense, and obvious gaffes like Sylvester McCoy clearly seen wearing his glasses as he drives a motorbike across a field. And even some downright funny bits where Gavrok kicks Mel to the ground.

For a 3 episode story, Delta has a pretty big cast, and some of them being very big names in British television. So I am told, anyways. Ken Dodd as the toll collector. Don Henderson as Gavrok. American actor Stubby Kaye as a bumbling American intelligence agent. And then there's this absolute gem of a character, the sensitive and lovely Ray, played by Sara Griffiths. I remember being really annoyed at the end of the show when Ray did not leave in the TARDIS with Mel and the Doctor; she would have been a great addition to the series as a period character. But no.

The show concludes on a happy note, with "Happy Days Are Here Again" playing as the TARDIS dematerializes (and the mysterious old Goronwy character winking leaving us to wonder just who this guy is - a Time Lord? The White Guardian? Just a really nice old guy who has strangers into his home for a cup of tea and a chat?). Happy days were not next, though, as the next episode in the televised series would be a bit more grim. But Big Finish have thrown a few new tales into the mix as well, with a few nasties out there for the Doctor and Melanie to face...

NEXT EPISODE : THE FIRES OF VULCAN

Bang Bang A Boom!

2008-01-27T02:05:00.001-08:00

The Doctor and Mel arrive on Dark Space 8, a once famous and bustling space station now a semi-forgotten corner of the galaxy. In a case of mistaken identity, the Doctor assumes the guise of the station's new Commander just as the Galactic Song Contest is about to begin on board. The contestants are from all over the galaxy, including worlds who are currently attending a peace conference on another station. But the politics of the peace conference are alive and well at the competition, and someone is going to become a murderer.

Another comedy. You can tell from the get go as the chief medical officer makes a melodramatic log entry with orchestral fanfare in the background. The obvious satirical target here is Star Trek : Deep Space Nine but it feels more like Babylon 5 as we get to know more of the characters and their political relations with each other. The Doctor steps in easily to cover for the real commander, who was murdered in his shuttle, and Melanie takes the guise of his pilot. The characters come fast and furious, most notable being Angvia, the psuedo-Viking songstress with designs on the Doctor ("The universe can vait! I am a voman!") and flash-in-the-pan Earth pop sensation Nicky Newman who seeks solace with Mel because she is nonplussed at his stardom. Throw in a gaseous gestalt entity and a nervous gerbil-like Pakhar, along with the station's floundering medical officer ("I feel so.. helpless,") and there's the main players in the drama.

Although season 24 was on the whole played for a lot of laughs and without very heavy undertones, Big Finish's audios of the time seem to raise the bar on the humour a bit through more clever writing than what we were actually given in 1987. Not that the season was totally totally wrong, but there was a lot of room for improvement in production and even in the regular cast's performances (which get better with each Big Finish, as though they were reinventing their characters). I find myself liking McCoy's amiable chap seventh Doctor a lot more than some of his moodier and brooding sides that are to come when presented this way. He does quite well opposite Patricia Quinn (Magenta from Rocky Horror Picture Show) in their scenes together, and they're a marked contrast (style-wise) from when they worked together in the 1987 season finale, Dragonfire. It's always fun when someone famous is part of the show, isn't it?

I don't really have much else to say. It was fun. It was not the best but it never tried to be. As soon as you get anything written by Gareth Roberts it's a given it's not going to be the most serious script ever penned, but it will be interesting.

NEXT EPISODE : DELTA AND THE BANNERMEN

Paradise Towers

2008-01-26T20:02:00.000-08:00

The Doctor and Mel head for Paradise Towers, a massive apartment block known for its architectural vision and flawless design. When the TARDIS arrives, though, the complex has deteriorated into a slum under seige from within. The residents prey upon each other, all-girl street gangs roam the corridors and deface the walls with graffitti, the caretakers have formed a totalitarian regime, and the automated cleaning machines have embarked on a killing rampage.

On a lot of levels Paradise Towers is sheer brilliance. Hay sat in on this episode with me and we both remarked that the direction was markedly different from other Doctor Who episodes, resulting in very effective use of the episode's large two-storey main set. As with any of the series' classic adventures, there's always a consciousness about money and there's only so much that can be done, but the gloomy hallways of the Towers are made very astmospheric though use of clever lighting and rearranging. If you look close enough you start to spot the same bits of graffiti here and there, but usually there's too much actually going on across the screen to stop and do that.

There's no real indicators if the Towers are in space somewhere or on a planet. Nobody goes outside, it's very claustrophobic. The sky outside does appear to be blue. The population is made up of a group of weary and mean caretakers whose spirits have been broken by their regimented lifestyles. They're supposed to be looking after the place, but their automated cleaning machines are taking matters into their own hands. Uh, claws. The Doctor realizes this right away when he is their prisoner, but they take a turn for the worst and start planning his execution. The residents of the Towers are made up of primarily old people, mostly old ladies. We get to meet them through Melanie when she is separated from the Doctor, and their first instinct is to start feeding her (and she needs it - but damn there goes her health consciousness right out the window pretty quick) so they can fatten her up and eat her. Melanie then falls in with a muscleguy named Pex (another extra right from the JN-T casting couch, Jay and I reckon) who is here on some agenda on his own - which turns out to be dodging the draft. And the final little group are the Kangs - teenage girls gone wild and playing a game of tag in the corridors and broken up into three separate colour camps: red, blue and yellow. Oh, primary colours, I just got that now. The last yellow Kang is no more by the time the Doctor and Mel arrive, and the Doctor spends most of his time with the red Kangs and their leaders Fire Escape and Bin Liner (yes, names are everything).

Jay and I weren't sure if there was some kind of message in the subtext of the show. Is this some critique of subsidized housing? An examination of the stupidity of trying to work while governed by a rule book? (Take that CUPW!) Is it a comment on how society breaks down and tribal warfare begins when people are forced to exist together in small spaces with depleting resources? Sure people are dying, the residents are turning into cannibals and something really nasty is lurking in the basement screaming that it is hungry, but that's all pretty simple stuff isn't it?

It's good to keep in mind that this is the second proper televised adventure with the seventh Doctor and Melanie, and it feels as if a bit of time has gone by. There's some friendly teasing between the two of them now, and the Doctor is starting to come into his own. He's started to carry an umbrella around with him now, and his tendancy to muddle up proverbial sayings that was so painfully established in Time and the Rani has been thankfully dropped. Problem is, since they're getting along so well and everything is cheerful, their relationship is a bit boring. There's no sexual chemistry between them (not that there ever was between any of the Doctors and companions until recent times) so we're left with two friends on their merry way through the galaxy in a police box. It's simplistic, I suppose, but neither of them has much going on beneath the surface here.

And then there's the screaming. Melanie. Screaming. Screaming. Melanie. My ears.

The incidental music is pretty good, some of it done as to keep in pace with the actions of the characters on the screen, whether they be walking, flinching from something that happens in front of them, or even turning their head slightly. Paradise Towers only really suffers because of the dialogue. The potential for this to be more gripping is all around. Maybe it also needs more blood. It might even need some swearing. But it could be really really scary right up until we find out what's really down in the basement of the building. Oh and the robotic cleaner in the pool could have drowned Melanie. Or Pex. Or, as Jay and I would have appreciated, Pex could have taken off his shirt (although some of those muscles are padding we suspect).

When this one comes out on DVD I'm going to be right there to get it from the UK. I do not know when this is going to be, though. But as I have said before, my region-free DVD player downgrades the image a bit and turns tacky bright sharp cheap video image into something a little more like film quality; it adds entirely new levels to the way some of the all-video episodes look, and I think Towers could look quite good that way.

I'll let you know.

NEXT EPISODE : BANG BANG A BOOM!

The Rani Reaps The Whirlwind

2008-01-25T02:40:00.001-08:00

After her failed experiment on Lakertya, the Rani is taken prisoner by her own Tetrap servants and put to work. The project she in charged with is a simple one: create a perpetual food source for the Tetraps. And that food is blood. The Rani is not alone: she finds herself with other prisoners of the Tetraps and forges a shaky alliance with them to escape, but is it going to be that simple? And does the Rani have a shred of concern for her fellow captives?

The premise sounds interesting, doesn't it? Pity the finished project isn't all it could have been. This is by no means a Big Finish calibre production; the actors do not sound very convinced of their roles (aside from Kate O'Mara as the Rani, 13 years after Time and the Rani was broadcast) and the incidental music... well it didn't even sound like bad porno music, it just sounded bad. And the cues were all a bit pointless. Still, it's interesting to see that Urak, the Rani's henchamn Tetrap, has quickly ascended the ranks and is the leader of the species now. Bagging a Time Lord and bringing back a TARDIS must have pushed him up a few notches.

The script for Whirlwind was written by Pip and Jane Baker, and for some reason they decided it was important to have the Tetraps randomly abduct a jock who is high on himself, a friend of his who is high on E, and a girl on her high horse about still being a virgin. Why? Just so they could bring illicit drug use that much closer to Doctor Who? Or just so they could include the word "hymen" in the script? NOBODY says "hymen" when they are trying to get into a girl's pants. Good god.

I think we could have lived without this one. Nice try and all, but was this a story that had to be told? The answer here is no. Thankfully it was just an hour long and in the end the Rani shows a slight bit of compassion for her fellow captors, then off she goes swearing revenge on Urak and his people. And they still haven't gotten around to telling that one.

And hopefully they won't.

NEXT EPISODE : PARADISE TOWERS

Unregenerate!

2008-01-23T15:11:00.001-08:00

The Doctor's been locked up in an asylum, the walls of which echo with the screams and cries of the other patients around him. The TARDIS returns to Earth without him, and Melanie realizes that her friend is in trouble but beyond her reach. Meanwhile, the powers in charge of the asylum are making deals with people on Earth to collect them the day before they die and siphon off their memories to preserve them - but towards what ultimate end?

I have to admit, this one went a totally different direction from where I thought it was headed. Melanie has to survive without the Doctor for over half of the story, and when she does find him there's not much left of his mind to engage. The staff of the institute are aware that he is a Time Lord, and that he has recently regenerated, and at times it feels as if the persona that is the seventh Doctor is being wiped out and the sixth (or someone else) is trying to emerge. There' a certain amount of disharmony amongst the staff as well; Klyst (played by Jennie Lyndon - her first role in Doctor Who was on the big screen with Peter Cushing as the Doctor) is starting to feel a certain amount of responsibility for the people they are inadvertantly harming with their work, Louis shows compassion for them as soon as he recruits them but abandons it when they are collected, and Rigan just wants everyone to follow orders, and heaven help whoever disobeys. Add the latest human recruit, Johannes, to the mix and a strange alien named Shokhra in the next cel, and the place is brimming with well defined characters. And let's not overlook Mel's defacto companion for the episode, the Cabbie; he adjusts to the situation quickly and forms a protective interest in her, but not quite a romantic one.

And let me say: when the truth about what's going on in the institute came out, I was really surprised.

If this actually was the second adventure with the seventh Doctor, it's debatable if it would have flown on television. For starters the effects of the show might have been too much; the institute is linked to a facility in space on an asteroid (shades of the tenth Doctor's predicament in 2007's Smith and Jones). But there's the sudden absence of the seventh Doctor; with the audience still in a bit of shock after the regeneration it wouldn't be too wise to remove the character and drive him nuts. Still, this is all retcon and the rules are different.

The joy of retcon is anyone can get in on it. Big Finish does it for as many aspects of Doctor Who as they can (including Sarah Jane Smith, the Daleks, Cybermen, UNIT and Professor Bernice Summerfield), Magic Bullet got a piece with the Kaldor City adventures, and BBV are in on it as well, going beyond the bounds here and there, including their own sequel to the seventh Doctor's debut story...

NEXT EPISODE : THE RANI REAPS THE WHIRLWIND

Time and the Rani

2008-01-22T18:24:00.000-08:00

The TARDIS is shot down over the planet Lakertya and crash lands. Mel is left inside for dead but the Doctor is dragged out by the Rani and one of her Tetrap henchmen. The Doctor regenerates while unconscious, the sixth Doctor's larger features giving way to a smaller successor, and leaves the Doctor at the mercy of the Rani. While Mel is rescued by one of the native Lakertyans, Ikona, and learns of the Rani's suppression of the planet for her experiments, the Doctor is duped into helping her through trickery, but the Rani requires him further as a componant of an experiment that will give her control over time.

So that's it. Sixth Doctor gone. The regeneration happens right before the titles roll - the first time Doctor Who has ever started this way - and then we're hit with a new opening sequence (the starfield sequence that started with Tom Baker's face back in The Leisure Hive finally replaced) and a new arrangement of the theme song (which sounds like it's being played through a kazoo). And the regeneration itself is done in a very clever way; so clever, in fact, you might even think that Colin Baker was there for it, but he wasn't. Nope. Sylvester McCoy in a wig, concealed by special effects. The story was actually written with regeneration in mind, but it was hoped that Colin Baker would return for one last story and be killed off in the end, which he rightfully refused to do (there's even commentary about this back in the novel Synethspiens - gotta love retcon!) When the new seventh Doctor does make his actual entrance/recovery a few minutes later, he's still confused by his regeneration, although not on the edge of death/lunacy as has been the case in previous tales. The new Doctor has a faint Scottish burr to his voice, and he seems to be picking up on the second Doctor's tendancy to clown around and be goofy.

Jay was back in on it with me for this one, which was nice since honestly, there's not much joy in watching this one alone. The series was in terrible trouble at this point in its history; seen as a joke within the BBC itself and the ratings sagging all around despite Bonnie Langford brought in midway through the previous season to make it a more family-oriented show. The solution in the minds of the BBC brass was to facelift the whole thing, and Colin Baker had to go. The script was still written with him in mind, and it still sounds like him in places, which makes for an interesting bit of regeneration theory; the last vestiges of his previous self still there, not ready to go yet.

I don't really know why this one feels so forced and so bad. All the elements are there. New look. Kate O'Mara as the Rani playing it up impersonating Bonnie Langford's Melanie. More guest stars including Mark Greenstreet (a real hottie although his costume totally eliminates any of his attributes) Wanda Ventham, and Donald Pickering (both appeared in The Faceless Ones back in 1967). New monsters in the form of the bat-like Tetraps. Pretty cool special effects.

But then there's the script by Pip and Jane Baker. Some of ther performances are less than their best. The direction needed help. And then there was the screaming.... oh the SCREAMING. There's a moment where Melanie just stands there and screams. Doesn't run. Doesn't fight. SCREAMS. And when she is finally saved she doesn't exactly make haste to run away from what's scaring her so much. And why does the Doctor go through every costume worn by his previous selves before arriving at his own new look - that questionable question mark vest.

I think Jay and I agreed with the Rani at the start of episode 1 where she says "This is idiotic!". Yeah she's supoosed to be speaking to the Doctor but maybe she's gotten a look at the script a few pages ahead.

Now that I've had some extra time to enjoy the sixth Doctor, though, I find myself more resentful than usual towards this episode. I really feel cheated as a fan. At least with Spiral Scratch we got some set-up as to why the Doctor was regenerating in the first place; he can take a lot of abuse but if the Rani's attack on the TARDIS was enough to trigger a regeneration, it should have absolutely killed Mel. And if it has been me and the TARDIS was crashing in my script, I'd have the inside of the sucker in flames for a change, bash it up a bit.

In the end, the new Doctor promises Mel "Oh I'll grown on you,", which sounds like more of producer John Nathan-Turner's indirect commentary to the fans, much akin to "I am the Doctor, whether you like it or not!" back at the end of The Twin Dilemma, which feels like a lifetime ago now.

The combination of the seventh Doctor and Melanie went on to be one of the less-favoured duos of the series, but thankfully Big Finish have worked their magic on this era as well as the previous season to bring out some new adventures for them and give them a bit more to do, some more intelligent dialogue in keeping with the audience's expectations.

Let's see.

NEXT EPISODE : UNREGENERATE!

Spiral Scratch

2008-01-21T13:37:00.000-08:00

A visit to the Doctor's friend Professor Rummas on his library-world, Carsus, brings the Doctor and Melanie face to face with the grim image of Rummas' murder - and the Doctor's. Somehow the time lines have become damaged, and various Doctors and Melanies from different universes are crossing paths on the same mission: to solve the mystery of the Lamprey family before reality unravells all around them.

I hate multiple universe stories. Hate em hate em hate em. That is, if they're not done right. That old "alternate universe" clause gets bandied around far too much in science fiction for my liking, and although the Doctor only legitimately goes to such places twice in the televised series (maybe three times, we're still not sold on the events of Battlefield taking place anywhere but on this Earth), the phrase comes up to dismiss continuity errors and sloppy research by writers.

So Gary Russell wants to write about the multiverse. And you know what, he does okay. His plot threads never get away from him, the ideas are not too challenging to follow, and despite the fact that events are whipsawing all across time and space - indeed, some events are revistied several times from the perspective of different Doctors - it never gets confusing to the extent that the reader wants to throw the book away in disgust.

When I say multiple Doctors, though, we're not talking the whole set of six showing up, but different universe versions of the same - the sixth - Doctor. Essentially they're all the same, the most different one being the one all dressed in black with a horrid scar down his face, but he's not akin to the Valeyard, he's just the Doctor in black. And the same can be said of the different versions of Melanie, including a version of her from Earth where Rome's empire never fell, and a hybrid human-Silurian Mel. All different, and all the same. There are even glimpses of Peri, Evelyn, and Frobisher at times. No Grant, though.

Do I buy into the Lampreys being a real monster threat? Sort of. From how they are described I am more reminded of the Fendahleen than anything, but I have just looked up a picture of a lamprey on wikipedia and I am reminded of how creepy those things really are. Okay, I buy it. They're bad. And intelligent as well as ugly.

Remember back when I was doing Synthespiens and I said how I loathed writers who decided they would write THE last story before a pivotal event in the series' history? This is one of those books. This is meant to be THE final adventure for the sixth Doctor. And this time I do not mind. Owing to certain foolish decisions at the BBC back in 1986 we were cheated out of a final story for the sixth Doctor; there was no closure, no noble end, nothing. Just a cop-out. The last time we saw the Doctor in this incarnation on our screens was when he and Melanie left the Time Lord space station after the Doctor's trial was finished. The sixth Doctor never got fleshed out properly; we never really got to know him until years later when writers were allowed to go back and give him more adventures and new companions. Doctor Who is not one of those series where the phrase "too little too late" applies; I'll admit that I was never keen on the sixth Doctor before simply because I never got to see enough of him, and what I did see I did not enjoy. Well, my opinion changed over the years, and now that I have come to the end of his run (at least for now) I can say that I will miss him. Thanks to the efforts of the writers for BBC Books, Virgin Books and Big Finish, this Doctor has been allowed to ascend to a more noble stature than he was previously granted, which makes his departure from the televised series all the more irritating and sad.

NEXT EPISODE : TIME AND THE RANI

The Wishing Beast and The Vanity Box

2008-01-12T07:20:00.001-08:00

A mysterious signal brings the TARDIS to a secluded region of space where the Doctor and Mel meet a pair of old ladies living in a small cottage. The ladies are sisters, one half mad, and they both greet Mel as a heroic traveller in space and time, promising her a meeting with the Wishing Beast, who will grant her her greatest desire. The Doctor is rightfully suspicious and discovers a presence on the world is trying to make contact but is being stifled from breaking through. The warning that is sent out is dire, but surely two harmless old ladies can't be the cause of such dismay?

Oh yes they can. Both posessed by powers that cannot be fully grasped, they lure travellers to their domain and treat them like heroes, only to feed them to the Wishing Beast and leave them as non-corporeal entities. But the agony of the lost souls never ends there, as the essence of the travellers is peeled away layer by layer by the Beast as it returns to feed on them time and again.

Creepy. Old people always get a bum deal in sci fi; they're almost always posessed by some evil force, or they're older than old and seething with evil power. Or they're just plain evil. Sure there's the odd one who is a benevolant type, but the baddies far outnumber them, especially when it's a pair of old ladies living on their own (there's more of that to come in Paradise Towers). Is it cliche? Not exactly. Sucking up the remaining essence of the disembodied with a vacuum... that might be. And then there's the true nature of the Beast itself; there's enough hints dropped about who it could be across the whole story that the blind and the deaf could see and hear it coming.

The Wishing Beast is played out across three episodes, leaving one single episode as another one-off adventure, The Vanity Box.

Box picks up right where Beast ends, with the Doctor and Mel arriving in the swinging 60s looking for somewhere fabulous and finding miracle time restoring makeover magic in the backstreets of London. Or somewhere in England. Maybe it was Manchester. But there's a new salon in town, with a new man running things, and people are coming out of it with years knocked off them.

Unlike the previous 3-part and 1-part combo, I.D. and Urgent Calls, both stories here are linked together not just by mere reference but by actual progression of events, with the very French sounding Mr Coiffure (there's a shock) the salon owner unwittingly acting as the agent of an alien entity. The Doctor mixes with the locals who sound like classic 1960s characters from Coronation Street, and then for the third time in the series he does drag.

At this point, Big Finish have not produced any further adventures for the sixth Doctor and Melanie Bush, and as an interesting end to the episode, Melanie makes a wish that her travels with the Doctor could continue on indefinitely. Whether this was intentional or not remains to be seen, but once more there is this feeling that Big Finish are quietly tidying up their own continuity as if they're moving on. I've still not heard if their license is being renewed for these adventures or not, but in time we shall see.

NEXT EPISODE : SPIRAL SCRATCH

Thicker Than Water

2008-01-10T15:20:00.001-08:00

On a whim, the Doctor decides to take Mel to visit his old friend and former companion, Evelyn Smythe. Happily married to her old flame Justice Rossiter, Evelyn is now an influential figure in the political theatre on the planet Vilag during its reconstruction after the Killoran invasion. Protests to destroy all machinery and devices left from the war are now the hot topic, the loudest voice being Evelyn's new stepdaughter, Sophia. The day the Doctor and Mel arrive violence breaks out, and Vilag is once more on the brink of destruction, this time from within, with Evelyn caught in the middle.

Evelyn, as you may have noticed by now, never had a farewell scene or story. Clever Big Finish; they've given her a happy ending of sorts here with her new life with Rossiter, complete with a flashback to when she actually did leave the Doctor. Her departure hurts him, you can tell by the tone his voice takes when she says she is going to stay with Rossiter, but by an interesting switch of circumstance when the Doctor and Mel come face to face with Evelyn there's an awkward pause and even a slight bit of tension between the two companions. Why Evelyn should feel anything about the Doctor having a new companion travelling with him is hard to say, considering she did leave him. If anyone should be upset, it should be the Doctor at having been so casually discarded.

Political situations on Vilag have not gotten any better after the invasion; all three nations are now united as one but the internal strife over what to do with the Killoran remnants is causing friction on all levels. And somewhere in there, someone has their own agenda just to suit themself. Where the temptation would be to have a second invasion attempt seeing as this is a sequel, thankfully it is not the case; the struggle of the world to put itself back together and carry on is far more interesting, especially with an old "friend" like Evelyn enmeshed in it.

I liked this one. A lot. I liked it a lot better than a novel called Instruments of Darkness, a BBC novel by Gary Russell which also features the first meeting between Evelyn and Mel, but under very different circumstances. All I really enjoyed about Instruments was the Doctor's rant early in the adventure when chided by Mel to return a "borrowed" Volkswagen beetle (the writers trying so hard to be trendy back then - the eighth Doctor actually had one as a sad replacement attempt for Bessie); he insists that Grant would let him keep the car (the last time we hear that name to date) and then muses that Evelyn would as well, and would make him a chocolate cake while she was at it.

What else did I like? The story just felt more real, and the whole feel of Vilag was recreated through the characters who survived the invasion, and the mention of those who were not so fortunate like the lovestruck couple the Doctor and Evelyn befriended on their first adventure there. It's also got a bit of a harder edge to it with the abduction of Evelyn and Mel, and Mel getting smacked around a bit (and you might not think she deserves it, as she is being better written in audio than she was on television, but just wait... you won't like her after a few season 24 episodes), and the terrible truth of what's going on behind the scenes on Vilag. And to close off the whole Evelyn storyline, she receives a surprise visit by the seventh Doctor with some news from her past and his future to share. Clever, though; with no definitive final Evelyn story, Big Finish can go back and pair her with the sixth Doctor as long as they continue producing episodes on CD.

So there's not much more time left for the sixth Doctor and Melanie. Change is coming. Just a few more adventures.

NEXT EPISODES : THE WISHING BEAST and THE VANITY BOX

Catch - 1782

2008-01-09T11:15:00.000-08:00

A simple visit to Mel's uncle John goes awry when Melanie is flung backwards in time to 1781. Her coming into contact with a prototype metal causes the TARDIS telepathic circuits to react, but once the Doctor finds her in 1782 events have already moved ahead at an alarming pace. The amnesiac Mel has been kept in a locked room and watched over by her ancestor Henry Hallum, and now he is determined to keep her under his care, even going so far as to marry her and trap her in her own family's past.

I already said simple, didn't I? It is just that. No aliens, no invasions, no end of the world dilemmas, just a back in time story. The whole bit about Melanie getting caught up in her own past starts to get a little too Day of the Daleks for me though; this debate about just that concept has been a lively one between myself and my friend Greg for the last few weeks, and I am still not convinced that people altering their own pasts can escape the paradox they find themselves in. But it's all down to point of view, apparantly.

Note the difference in Mel's reaction to being stranded in this adventure, as opposed to her previous marooned status in The Juggernauts. The effect of travelling through time without the protection of the TARDIS leaves her confused and frightened and without most of her memory, but she retains enough of it to know that without the Doctor coming to get her, she is stuck. She later laments about wasting six months of her life in 1782, which is odd since she lost three months on Lethe waiting for the Doctor to show up there and wasn't too bothered. Maybe the love interest of Geoff on Lethe was enough to keep her optimistic. That or Davros was a nicer man than Hallum.

Hallum's not exactly a bad man; when Mel is found in his home it is mere months after his own wife, Jane, has passed (the ancestor where Mel gets her middle name, it would seem) and he feels duty bound to protect her and see her back to health as he was powerless to help his own wife get better. But we all know how rebounds work, so when the Doctor shows up with uncle John in tow, Hallum is far from pleased. His housekeeper, Mrs McGregor, would be pleased to see Mel leave, though as she has her widowed eyes set on the master of the house herself.

So back into space and time for the Doctor and Melanie. And now they've visited Melanie's family, why not drop in on an old friend of the Doctor's next?

NEXT EPISODE : THICKER THAN WATER

The Juggernauts

2008-01-07T00:51:00.003-08:00

Separated during an attack on a deep space cruiser, Melanie and the Doctor eventually find themselves on the colony world Lethe. Melanie's escape pod brings her into the company of Professor Vaso, himself a crash survivor, and some three months later the Doctor arrives - on a mission from the Daleks. Vaso is in fact Davros, escaped from his Dalek captors and now attempting to carve himself a new niche to continue his experiments, but the Daleks see his newest project as a threat to them: a breed of machines called the Juggernauts, but the Doctor knows them as the Mechanoids...

Is it just me or is this concept of Davros trying to get into big business starting to wear a bit thin? It was great in Revelation of the Daleks when he was bleeding Kara's factories dry on Necros, and then the Big Finish audio Davros took the whole concept even farther (even if it was meant to take place earlier) but now... I can't help but feel it's been done enough. Davros is indeed a cutthroat individual, having sold out everyone in his past to get what he wanted, even the entire Kaled race (Nyder would have gotten his eventually if you ask me), but he's never going to be perfect in a three piece business suit. Exterminating the shareholders as a means to succeed seems a bit heavy-handed even for him, more an act of desperation than a well thought out move.

The real shocker in this whole adventure is Melanie. Well, once you get past the Doctor co-operating with the Daleks. Mel has a lot more guts here than ever before, even going so far as to (gasp!) kiss a boy! Yes, Mel in involved in an office romance. And why not - she's been marooned for three months with no sign of the Doctor but makes sure that it's known she'll be off with him again the minute he shows up. And when he does there's no recrimination, no rebuke, just relief to see him again and joy at the idea of resuming their travels together. I can almost liken it to Zoe's relationship with her boss in The Indestructible Man - the computer geek finding happiness.

They said The Juggernauts was a gritty tale, and to an extent it is, but it's not as extreme as it could have been. Davros' improvements to the Mechanoids are of course gross and scary but nothing he hasn't done before. His intent is to create an army of perfect Dalek-killing machines and purge the universe of his creations to start from scratch, but are these oversized tennis balls really the instrument of their destruction? I'm not sure how many people really bought into that scheme back in 1965 when the Daleks ran into the Mechanoids in the final episodes of The Chase, but there was enough of a battle sequence to make people ignore their disbelief and enjoy the carnage. There's a good old fashioned clash in here again but it's just noise, really. Shoot. Dalek scream. Mechanoid jibberish. Boom. More shooting. Repeat.

I have had this CD in my collection for two years, waiting for the blog to roll around this far to enjoy it. Maybe there was too much pressure on it from me to be something it's clearly not, which is to say a good Dalek story. It's more the continuing saga of Davros where the Daleks play a less and less significant part. In episode four Davros says that after centuries have gone by he can no longer be held responsible for the Daleks, and I am starting to agree. Once upon a time as far as the televised episodes went there was no having one without the other, but after a while it's good to have them part ways. The news that Davros is returning to the new series next year to face tenth Doctor David Tennant (and companions galore in a season finale/series pause to end all) is interesting, and I am wondering what the angle is going to be. Still a Dalek master, or is he working on other things now?

Let Davros go. Let him and the Daleks part ways; stop throwing them back together when the result is always going to be the same.

NEXT EPISODE : CATCH-1782

The One Doctor

2008-01-07T00:51:00.001-08:00

At the vulgar end of time, the Doctor and Mel come to the planet Generios to answer a distress call. When they arrive, though, they discover a pair of cons masquerading as the Doctor and companion, after having saved the planet from a staged invasion. But when a real threat arrives and demands the three great treasures of the Generios system, the cons crumble and become unwilling companions to the genuine articles as they scour the system for the treasures. Hilarity ensues.

Yes, it's a comedy.

Okay so it's not a bad comedy. It's pretty funny actually, played totally for laughs and giving Colin Baker and Bonnie Langford some great material together as the Doctor and Mel. Their relationship carries on much as it did on screen back in The Trial of a Time Lord, perhaps a bit less saccharine laced; and they really sound like they are enjoying working together on CD despite their very short on-screen acquaintance. Bonnie Langford seems to have relaxed in the role, as if there's no pressure on her to save the show now with her star power. And.... she doesn't scream! She threatens to at one point, but thankfully it never happens.

Since it's not to be taken seriously it's hard not to enjoy Melanie's struggle to assemble the Shelves of Infinity (which anyone who has ever grappled with an IKEA Billy system will appreciate), or the Doctor's arrival in a Weakest Link inspired game show where the contestants have to stump a supercomputer under the watchful eye of an Anne Robinson-esque hostess. The imposters, Banto Zane and Sally Anne, split off and accompany Mel and the Doctor respectively on their tasks once they realize the truth of matters; as far as they were concerned the Doctor was just the stuff of legend, and they never expected the real thing to come along.

The One Doctor fits in snugly with the established tone of the televised series at the end of The Trial of a Time Lord, even if it is a bit more clever than some moments in Terror of the Vervoids and almost all the scripts in the show's 24th season, but it's that same bubbly hey-we're-just-kidding tone that started driving people away. Thankfully this trend is coming to a screeching halt (at least I've heard it is) with the next story...

NEXT EPISODE : THE JUGGERNAUTS

Millennial Rites

2008-01-07T00:50:00.000-08:00

It's 1999 and the Doctor and Melanie are in London in time for the festivities of New Years Eve. Melanie looks up some old friends while the Doctor gets in touch with some people from his own past, and both paths lead to the same place: a plan to run a computer program that will over-write reality and allow a brooding sentience a foothold into the world.

Again, another novel I read a long time ago when it first came out in 1995, and I mention it here as more of a continuity piece than a stellar piece of plot and writing. Rites was the first story in the series to take place on New Years Eve between 1999 and 2000, playing on the growing concerns the media had for the future of the world when all the computers hit 01/01/00 (and obviously nothing happened), and since that time Millennium Shock and the first TV movie on FOX also have been set on the same evening - and none of their events coincide despite the fact that two tales take place in the same city. Ah continuity. How can this series have none when it counts? That aside though, Rites fits into the tapestry of what was, at the time, a loose arc of future-current history in the series' fledgling new adventures range as published by Virgin press, and draws on previous tales to bring characters together in its narrative. Anne Travers, menaced by the Yeti in The Web of Fear is now a Dame, and after the events at New World University in Downtime is petrified if another incursion by the Great Intelligence. Her parinoia is joined by that of Ashely Chapel, now a millionaire but in the past an associate of Tobias Vaughan during his bid to sell out Earth to the Cybermen. They have the best of intentions, as the Doctor cannot always be there to save them, but despite his warnings their plan unleashes an even worse fate where his own dark nature begins to seep through in the form of the Valeyard.

To me, Rites is more of a piece of the puzzle than it is a stellar bit of writing on its own. I don't remember buying into the alternate-world scenario very much while I was reading it, where Melanie is transformed into Melaphyre and is an authority figure. Even with that freaky Bride of Frankenstein hairdo on the cover, I don't really think Mel was ever leadership material. Still, once it's all back to normal things slot back into place; Mel and the Doctor heading back to parts unknown but the Doctor's fate already known to the readers (this was at the time the only novel written to fill the gap between Trial of a Time Lord and Time and the Rani, but now there is substantially more material in various media to extend their time together).

I promise I'll read it again more thoroughly; at best I just skimmed it trying to reignite my old thoughts. And if I have something better to say, I'll be back to edit.

Meanwhile...

NEXT EPISODE : THE ONE DOCTOR

Business Unusual

2007-11-29T23:34:00.001-08:00

The Doctor arrives in Brighton in 1989 and discovers that Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart has disappeared - perhaps been abducted - while investigating the insanely low-priced video game console manufactured by a company called SeneNet. Knowing that the Brigadier would not go comparison shopping without very good reason, the Doctor begins a search and rescue mission for his friend, braving the dangers of SeneNet's security, and coming face to face with the person he has been desperately attempting to avoid for years now: a computer programmer called Melanie Bush.

The plot's pretty thin on the ground here, and SeneNet turns out to be the Nestenes again making another bid to conquer Earth for their own purposes. The hallmark of a Nestene invasion plot has never been complexity; find plastic, inhabit it, invade, kill. Oh yeah, defeated by the Doctor, forgot that part.

So here she is now. Mel. Last seen at the end of The Trial of a Time Lord, the Doctor returned her to the future point in time where she was pulled from and then went out of his way to stay away from her and delay the inevitible as long as possible. In this case the inevitible is progressing down the road to his possible future of becoming the Valeyard. Another inevitiblity might be going deaf from the screaming. The Doctor has hidden behind Grant, Frobisher and Evelyn to avoid this point in time, and his attempts to keep Mel from getting involved with him only serve to egg her on to do just the opposite.

Melanie Bush is, of course, one of the least favourite companions of all time; I'm sure a lot of fans rolled their eyes at the intro story before realizing that in print, no one can hear you scream. This is the sort of thing author Gary Russell likes to do when he writes a novel; take the unfinished plot threads and try to tie them back together, eben going as far as to make sure the sixth Doctor gets some time with the Brigadier, although the latter has now already done so in The Specrte of Lanyon Moor. The Brig's continuity with Brendan school is observed as well, although if memory serves (I haven't read this book since it was published in 1997) he has not gotten married to Doris yet, which would actually put Business Unusual before Spectre. Ah continuity. I would have to read it again to be totally sure. And draw myself a continuity map...

Mawdryn Undead
The Five Doctors
The King of Terror
Downtime
Business Unusual
The Spectre of Lanyon Moor
Battlefield

Yes I'm dipping into the future there.

Ah well. So the Doctor has met Melanie Bush at last and we start moving ahead back towards the televised series. It's been forever since Jay and I sat down and watched an episode together. Soon we shall... soon...

NEXT EPISODE : MILLENIAL RITES

100

2007-11-21T22:46:00.001-08:00

Here's an interesting little diddy. In another experiment, Big Finish gathered four writers and took a one-episode script from each, all with the theme of 100, and celebrated their 100th Doctor Who release with the compilation called 100.

They're all good. Who said the short format couldn't work for Doctor Who? The seeds of the idea were already planted with tales like Urgent Calls tacked onto 3-episode stories as standalone episodes, so why not a collection of them? We go from 101 BC to the days of Mozart, ahead to modern times, and then across time and space in the final chapter.

My favourite? 101 BC is a contender as it is worked as a comedy, even though there is the grave matter of the Doctor's first real conflict with Evelyn over the ethics of attempting to change history. Why the Doctor didn't lay it on the line as he had to with Barbara in The Aztecs I'll never know. But I think my real fave was My Own Private Wolfgang, a tale of the future of Mozart (and I am not just saying that because author Robert Shearman commented on my thoughts on Jubilee). Bedtime Story I enjoyed as well, a tale of a family curse being handed down generation after generation (and incidentally the third time a Doctor Who story has had the same name as a track from Madonna's Bedtime Story album; the other two being Survival and Human Nature) but when it came to The 100 Days of the Doctor by Paul Cornell I couldn't help but feel it was a bit gratuitous in its leaps about through the Doctor's time stream, havig the sixth Doctor comment on his past and future selves, although the wistfulness he has about Erimem leaves me wondering what fate has in store for her (for at the time of writing this review, she has yet to have her final moment).

Also to be mentioned at the time of writing this, there are no further adventures with the sixth Doctor and Evelyn Smythe. Evelyn has not left the Doctor yet, although we know that eventually she must, to make way for a successor, one the Doctor is destined to meet no matter how hard he tries to avoid it...

NEXT EPISODE : BUSINESS UNUSUAL

The Nowhere Place

2007-11-12T04:38:00.000-08:00

It's 2197; Earth's empire is expanding and the military are on a heightened state of alert, and suspicion. At the edge of human space, a carrier group begins to experience breakdowns amongst the crew, the affected members claiming to hear a bell. The Doctor and Evelyn hear the bell in the TARDIS and track it to the carrier, and a doorway set into its hull that predates all known Earth history. The bell sounds, the door opens, and more people are lured through into... nowhere.

Okay things are looking up. The last two audios were not up to snuff as far as I was concerned, for different reasons each time. The Nowhere Place may not be a perfect remedy, but it is a step in the right direction, with a mysterious unknown steeped in the surreal threatening everyone and ultimately everything with destruction. Much more like the Doctor Who we know.

The constantly diminishing cast is made up of the regulars of the series plus the crew of the carrier, the most memorable being the increasingly frantic Oswin, unable to save her ship or her crew she continues to yell out orders even if there are fewer people to obey them every time the door opens. How she actually made it in the military is a mystery if her reactions to the unknown and stress are like this. Her solutions to some problems like the Doctor and Evelyn and just about anyone who she hasn't got time to deal with in the immediate time is to literally put them on ice and freeze them until she has time to deal. Not that it happens, of course, but it would make for an interesting plot device somewhere in a future adventure.

The Nowhere Place does its fair share of jumping about in time, taking the Doctor back to a train in the past where an idle doodle on a scrap of paper could change the future of the human race - a future someone has a vested interest in aborting if they can. How it unfolds, mind you, gets a bit tricky. Are we to believe that there have been infinite races developing on Earth over time and heading for the stars, but not leaving any evidence of their civilzations behind? Silurians? Hello?

Ah well. There's that air of creepiness about this one that doesn't go away - not as chilling as others have been in the past, mind you. Certainly I enjoyed it more than the previous two tales.

Let's have some more.

NEXT EPISODE : 100

Pier Pressure

2007-11-09T00:37:00.000-08:00

It's Brighton in 1936 and the Doctor brings Evelyn to the seaside holiday town for a break from their adventures. Too late for chicken in a basket at the local pub, the Doctor is in time to meet local performer Max Miller and learn about the strange goings-on of the pier and a supposed curse that sours the town. Knowing that all is never as it seems, the Doctor discovers a supposed long dead performer named Professor Talbot is in tune with a presence that seethes beneath the pier - an alien presence of pure evil that wants to kill. And kill. And kill.

Or something like that.

Maybe I listen to too many of these things in too close proximity these days but I find that as with Medicinal Purposes this one isn't quite as good as others. I didn't really get the funny musical cues, and some of the dialogue seemed like it was going on far too long. As if it were just filling up time. And the threat... well it wasn't really threatening. Talbot as an agent of evil is hard to swallow, especially when he feels he can switch sides as he pleases and not suffer any fallout. And so he talks to himself in two voices. Big deal. Tegan doing it in Snakedance was scarier.

Cute references to The Nightmare Fair, though, with the Doctor declining a trip to Blackpool based on his last visit there. And entirely coincidental, right when I was listening to this, the spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures was featuring a storyline about a tragic fall from a seaside pier.

Please let the next one be better.

NEXT EPISODE : THE NOWHERE PLACE

Medicinal Purposes

2007-11-05T12:29:00.000-08:00

It's 1827, it's Edinburgh, and there's blood in the streets. When the Doctor and Evelyn realize where they are, the Doctor wants to meet the infamous duo of Burke and Hare, who snatched bodies and robbed graves and aided progress in medical science. But nobody knows who Burke is. And a certain Dr Robert Knox is taking a much greater interest in what's going on that he should.

So back we go into history with this one. I've actually had it sitting on the shelf waiting to be enjoyed for the better part of two years now. Yes, I'm a bit of a freak that way, waiting until it came along in the cycle to listen to it rather than leap ahead. I'm sure at times Jay only tolerates my observations where continuity are concerned; he'd gladly go ahead and take in disjointed adventures left and right. Not me, though.

Was it worth the wait, then? I suppose so. Historical characters are all around here, even Daft Jamie, played by current tenth Doctor David Tennant. But honestly? I didn't get a great sense of the threat here. Okay Knox is an interesting character and a threatening adversary, but I never really got him as a proper menace to the Doctor. Or to anyone, really. There'sa moment or two when you think he may be more than he seems, erhaps even an old enemy back for another go, but no. He's kinda boring really.

The whole thing is kinda boring, really. It's dialogue-heavy, but that's not the issue as there have been others with a lot more chat than implied action (and seeing as it's an audio we're not getting a whole lot more unless we make finger puppets for ourselves) but somehow... it just didn't work for me here. Maybe I listen to too many of these. But hey one clunker after so many god ones, that's not so bad...

NEXT EPISODE : PIER PRESSURE

Arrangements for War

2007-11-03T06:42:00.000-07:00

After escaping from the Forge, the relationship between the Doctor and Evelyn is strained. Evelyn cannot understand the Doctor's casual acceptance of Cassie's death and feels she needs some time to be on her own to come to terms with it. The Doctor takes them to Vilag, where an arranged marriage between two warring kingdoms will bring about a truce that will repel an alien invasion in the future, but the presence of the TARDIS travellers moves events in a different direction. Embroiled even further than they ever have been before, the Doctor and Evelyn struggle to save a planet from destruction.

Hm. Arranged marriages always have the same thing going for them: neither party involved is really into the idea, especially when they're doing it for political reasons. Where's the love? What's the point without it? Can ones love of ones people really make someone sideline their own life? Princess Krizstyna doesn't want to do it - she wants to marry Reid, a lowly infantry trooper - but she's going to go through with it for the greater good, no matter how many pieces her heart breaks into. That is, until Evelyn tells her that love is worth fighting for, right around the same time the Doctor bumps into young Reid and tells him the same thing. And then things get tricky.

The Doctor becomes the Princess's advisor, and Evelyn becomes a political consultant for the third party state that is hosting the wedding while falling in (love?) with Governor Rossiter. Separated over the course of a month, the Doctor and Evelyn keep track of each other when they spot the other in the media in their new roles - a far cry from the peace and quiet the Doctor had promised Evelyn. Mind you, Evelyn doesn't seem to be too upset about getting involved despite her earlier complaints. It's only when things start to crumble and the war begins to brew again that she wants back out, even going so far as to leap off a speeding train to avoid extradition to a hostile state. The Doctor gets himself on the bad side of a sadistic security guard and gets kicked around once or twice for it. And all the time neither can reveal why the war must cease, for warning the fighting nations about the impending invasion (and it does come) is one of those revealing the future clauses that we usually see only in historical adventures on Earth.

Good cast. Good dialogue. Good things going BOOM in episode four. Is being plunged into a war the best medicine for the rift between the Doctor and Evelyn? Seems to work, and Evelyn gets herself an offer she barely refuses to stay behind and marry Rossiter. But is she ready to stop travelling with the Doctor yet? Time will tell.

NEXT EPISODE : MEDICINAL PURPOSES

Project Lazarus : parts 1 and 2

2007-11-03T06:41:00.001-07:00

The Doctor finally has a breakthrough with the Twilight virus, and true to his word sets the TARDIS on course to collect young Cassie and hopefully cure her. The ship overshoots and comes to land some months later after Cassie has been forced to once more go on the run from Nimrod, the chief enforcer of the Forge. All is not as it seems, though, and Cassie has become another pawn in the Forge's game to collect alien technology and capture visting species for their own ends. And doesn't the Doctor just happen to be an alien.

Why only episodes 1 and 2? Because the story moves very fast at this point, so fast that the segment concerning the sixth Doctor and Evelyn is resolved by the end of the second episode, leaving the two time travellers somewhat estranged from each other ater the horrors of the Forge. The other two episodes feature the seventh Doctor, and they will be covered later.

This story is very much about the Forge and its evils, and with two Doctors making an appearance at separate instances they are more like guest stars. The Forge have moved on from the Twillight virus and have embarked on the Lazarus project, named for the man who would not die - which is in fact a planned study of the Doctor's ability to regenerate. By forcing him to do so they want to discover the process and use it to imbibe soldiers with immortality in effect, so they set about electrocuting the Doctor. Ah torture. And man can Colin Baker wail when he needs to sell the pain.

The parallels between the Forge and the new series, Torchwood, can't be missed, although it is unlikely one affected or influenced the creation of the other. As far as suspension of disbelief goes, so long as there is UNIT there would be a secret more sinister counterpart organization somewhere, skimming off their secrets and trying to use them to their own advantage. The Forge has something that the Torchwood team do not: they act with no sense of morals and thus killing anyone in their way is not a problem.

The Doctor and Evelyn get out with their lives, but Cassie does not, and the Doctor's almost casual acceptance of her death throws Evelyn into a fit of resentment, making her wonder if maybe it's time to end this association and go home...

NEXT EPISODE : ARRANGEMENTS FOR WAR

Doctor Who and the Pirates!

2007-11-03T06:39:00.000-07:00

ARRRRRRRRRR! Ahoy mates! Gather round for a tale of spirited adventures on the high seas! The Doctor and Evelyn arrive on the good ship Sea Eagle just as she is raided and plundered by the feared Red Jasper - the scourge of the seven seas! Jasper is on the hunt for the fabled Ruby Islands where unimaginable treasure awaits, and he doesn't care who has to walk the plank for him to get his hooks on the map. It's a classic tale of rattling cutlasses, high drama, daring escapes, cannonballs, land hooooooo! and .... a musical number?

Hysterical! The odd time Big Finish will play a scene for laughs here and there but The Pirates is total pantomime bliss for the ears. The tale unfolds as Evelyn, eventually joined by the Doctor, returns to see a struggling student of hers and tells a tale of the adventures that ensue once the TARDIS materializes below decks on the Sea Eagle. There seems little point to Evelyn doing this at first, as the story doesn't affect or involve her student, but eventually the logic is there, and I am not going to ruin it with a spoiler.

So there I sat at the Laundry Express at the corner of Davisville Avenue and Yonge Street listening to this as my whites tumbled about in sudsy bliss, and I was in stitches, particularly at the opening of episode three when the Doctor breaks into song. Yes, it's almost Pirates of Penzance but with a Gallifreyan slant, and Evelyn's horror at the Doctor warming his vocal chords is just fantastic. Pure fan bliss!

And there's no underlying theme to delve into here. There is no moral of the story. There is, like I said, a simple point to why the story is told like this, but aside from that it's a story for its own sake, just to be listened to and enjoyed and laughed with. Oh clever clever clever.

NEXT EPISODE : PROJECT LAZARUS - Episodes 1 and 2

Jubilee

2007-11-03T06:38:00.000-07:00

It's the year 2003 and the glorious English Empire is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the day they defeated the Daleks. Aided by the Doctor and Evelyn, the English people wiped out the Dalek invasion fleet and used the technology they captured to take the world. And today, in 2003, they are going to celebrate their victory in style and execute the last Dalek survivor from the war.

Brutal. Who would ever feel sorry for a Dalek? As fans we have a love - hate relationship with them; delighted when they return and loving to hate them, but here it's different. The last Dalek is brutally punished and tortured but its human captors, its outer casing smashed and dented, its weapon removed. Defenceless and in agony, the last Dalek is ready to die, but the arrival of the Doctor sends it towards the edge of a complete mental breakdown. In desperation it forges a bond with Evelyn Smythe, refusing to kill her when it has a chance because after all the years of conditioning it can't handle having a choice again.

The people of the English Empire have become a brutal, obsessed race. They have trivialized the Dalek threat with all manner of Dalek themed merchandise in their stores, movies about the Daleks where the Doctor reduces them to quivering wrecks. And they are obsessed with killing the last one to such an extent that without the hatred, they would no longer have an identity.

The Doctor knows that the timeline is wrong, and somehow the TARDIS managed to materialize in both 1903 and 2003 and place both him and Evelyn in a time paradox. At times the differential threatens to overcome him, and he can just hold it back. Almost. But he sees the choice the people of Earth have made and how their evil has replaced that of the Daleks; the Daleks, after all, were engineered to hate, to conquer, to enslave... they had no choice. Humanity did, and it became the biger monster, with crowds gathered and screaming "Exterminate!" on the Jubilee day.

This is actually powerful stuff. Who knew that a story with only one Dalek in it could be one of the best Dalek tales out there. And to have Colin Baker's sixth Doctor (who is fast becoming one of my favourites) as the star.... close to perfection.

What is not perfect is how in 2005 the new production crew decided to get writer Rob Shearman to pretty much self-plagirize his story and re-tell it as Dalek. Skip ahead to the entry and see for yourself how similar the tales are. Here's where the new series starts raping the old, or at least having their way with the non-canon tales brought out by Big Finish, which to me smacks of disrespect. And it happens more than once.

But enough. Time for sme adventure on the high seas...

NEXT EPISODE : DOCTOR WHO AND THE PIRATES!

Downtime

2007-10-31T14:09:00.001-07:00

Years after leaving the Doctor, Victoria Waterfield is drawn back to the Det-Sen Monastary in Tibet where she encounters a dark presence from the past. In 1995 she becomes the vice-chancellor of New World Univeristy, set up using the money her father left behind. New World follows the Det-Sen principles of learning and meditation, but to achieve their goals they require a missing locus. Journalist Sarah Jane Smith is hired to investigate on behalf of New World but when her path of investigation points towards retired Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, she realizes that something more sinister is at work, something that could put the whole world at the mercy of the Great Intelligence. And without the Doctor, they are on their own.

Downtime has the interesting distinction of being the series' only "retcon" piece; retcon being short for retroactive continuity. Originally it was made as a video production by ReelTime pictures using characters that were not copyrighted to the BBC, but shortly after it was officially embraced as lore with a novelized and greatly expanded edition in the Virgin Missing Adventures range. The expanded version featured the second Doctor for a few pages, and the third towards the end, and K9 appeared with Sarah (he does not in the video but it is obvious that Sarah is communicating with him) as well as the inclusion of UNIT personnel Brigadier Chricton (who was a colonel in the opening minutes of The Five Doctors) and a colonel Bambera, who would feature in the seventh Doctor adventure Battlefield.

Having been posessed by the Intelligence twice already has made Victoria an easy target for its powers, so its hold over her is so firm that we're not really seeing "our" Victoria for the better part of the adventure. (I often wonder if Janet Fielding could be convinced to be Tegan again to look at her life after the Mara). Victoria and Sarah share a few scenes without actually realizing that they have the Doctor as a common link; that bond is reserved for Sarah's eventual reuniting with the Brigadier, who at this point is still teaching at Brendan school some years after the events depicted in Mawdryn Undead. There's also a new character to add to the mix: Kate Lehtbridge-Stewart, the Brigadier's daughter from his failed first marriage. Kate hasn't spoken to her father in years - so long that he doesn't know he has a grandson, but she becomes a target of harassment by the New World university student body - the Chillies (short for Children) - when they connect her to the Brigadier, and the Brigadier to the last locus that binds the Great Intelligence to Earth. Acting as the de-facto chorgeous of the piece is New World's resident DJ, played by John Leeson (original voice of K9), who broadcasts daily from the school until he realizes that his program is nothing more than propaganda. And in the last little bit of star casting is Jack Watling as Professor Travers once more, kept alive as a puppet of the Intelligence until it can escape its bonds.

And yes, there are Yeti again. Lots and lots of Yeti. Okay well in the video there are just three but in the book there are a lot more. They've been redesigned again, probably due to budgetary reasons, and are smaller than before, and for some reason their fur is auburn now, not grey. And that's not just because they're in colour at last.

As it was the first video in a while, of course Jay and I reconvened to watch it, with a supplemtary viewing of the surviving episodes of The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear to provide a refresher on the backstory. Our opinion? Not as scary as the 60's episodes, and slightly melodramatic. The parade of companions was fun, and the subtle references here and there to the Doctor were clever, even with the Brigadier believeing he was encountering a regenerated Doctor at one point. Some of the acting is pretty wooden and the production values although different from the actual BBC episodes in style were still a bit.... limp. Everything was done on location, and as a result the sound in some places is just awful.

To put it into a fan's perspective, by the time this came out we hadn't had any substantial new Doctor Who on television since 1989. True there was a Children In Need special in 1993, but it was far too quick to really mean anything (the review of that is coming, but we're still a ways off) and the FOX movie I have referenced before was still two years away. This was as close as we got to new Doctor Who on screen, and in its context it really is something quite special to see the companions left behind carrying on the Doctor's work for him and keeping Earth safe, and having that bond between them that only adventures in time and space can make. The Doctor touches lives and changes them, and also leaves something of himself behind when he goes; the sense of duty to protect and defend. Downtime may not be brilliant on its own, but as a part of something bigger, it's a brilliant piece of the tapestry that is Earth's future history (or at least at the time it was... years later anything 90s is very much the past). Even without the Doctor in the show it is firmly anchored to other adventures, including an upcoming novel called Millenial Rites.

So that's the break over. While Earth has been saved again, the Doctor and Evelyn have been busy doing the same thing, and running into an old enemy in the process...

NEXT EPISODE : JUBILEE

Real Time

2007-10-29T09:26:00.001-07:00

Cybermen. The mere mention of them sends the Doctor to the planet Chronos where a temporal wave has decimated an archaeological expedition. With Evelyn in tow he realizes that the Cybermen are indeed active on the planet, as well as a new breed of Cyberman made flesh by a nanovirus. The Cybermen have conquered the Earth in the past a result of a temporal anomoly, and unless the Doctor can figure out how to restore the timeline, both Human and Cybermen face extinction.

Real Time marked a real turning point for Doctor Who; originally it was not a Big Finish audio release but designed exclusively as a flash-animated webcast on the official BBC website. Until this point the series had covered all mediums except for the webcast, and here it was at last. There was something more to it though; this was the first BBC-commissioned Doctor Who production since the ill-fated eighth Doctor premiere movie shown on FOX television in 1996. The BBC were showing signs of taking Doctor Who seriously again, even if it was starting out small and relatively inexpensive, and the reaction from fans spurred two further webcasts before the series finally came back on the air in 2005.

As for the story itself, it's pretty simple, not very complicated, and could have been done without the Cybermen. It doesn't do much for their history, seeing as the Cybermen here are temporal anomolies. Their voice processing is kept on par with the last few television appearances they made, which is at odds with their sound in The Gathering and The Reaping. And this is the first time a Cyberman is made to sound distinctly male or female; their conversion process at this point is sloppy and only half-arsed, with only so many spare parts handy to turn humans into Cybermen. Evelyn comes close to breaking through Cyber conditioning and by asking the Cybermen questions, and then narrowly escapes being converted into one herself.

As the cover illustration shows, the Doctor undergoes a bit of a modification in appearance, with his wildly coloured coat being replaced by a blue one that would have been better suited to the blue outfits of Necros back in Revelation of the Daleks. The blue attire sticks around for a while after this point (insofar as clothing matters much in an audio) and it's probably more of a comment on Evelyn's presence with her being able to talk to him and even provide him with some guidance in their travels.

Now it's time for a break from the audios. This long stretch of Colin Baker audio material is cool but there's something to be said for the visual side of things in Doctor Who. There is still a lot of material to go before Colin Baker's sixth Doctor makes his exit, mind you, in audio and novel form, but here's a video to use as a halfway point. It's not Doctor Who per se, but it takes place within the Doctor's universe and although he is not in it, his presence is felt not only thematically, but in the presence of the other cast members - the companions he has left behind...

NEXT EPISODE : DOWNTIME

The Sandman

2007-10-29T09:25:00.000-07:00

The Galyari are a race of reptilian bipeds on a constant journey across the stars to find a new home. Once warlike conquerers they have been reduced to nomads, their home a cluster of starships known as the Clutch. This fall in stature is the work of one being: an entity called the Sandman, who stalks the Galyari and kills their young, tearing away their skins and adding them to his own patchwork cloak. When the Doctor and Evelyn arrive in the midst of the Clutch, Evelyn comes to a shocking realization: the Doctor is the Sandman, and he's not sorry.

The Doctor as the monster. This is something that has been referenced before amongst other aliens he has defeated - most notably the Daleks - but here in The Sandman we get the other side of the story. The Galyari believe he is immortal, having encountered him repeatedly over the years and he has not changed (hinting that while the Doctor was travelling alone between companions he was keeping an eye on this species). Such is their fear of him they cannot even look at him. All of this comes as a shock to Evelyn, especially the sudden change of personality that overcomes the Doctor when he arrives with the Galyari; he is more like his post-regeneration self with Peri - condescending, rude, threatening, and very very loud. It isn't the same venom he evokes for Daleks or Cybermen or even, in certain circumstances, the Time Lords; it's not so much disgust as it is an act to terrify and keep them in check.

We all know the Doctor isn't that kind of monster. Wiping out Dalek fleets is one thing, but systematically murdering the Galyari children we all know is not his cup of tea; in fact when he learns that there have been recent killings he falters a bit before resuming his facade. Something else is at work within the Clutch, capitalizing on the Doctor's reputation and striking fear into the Galyari like no-one else can.

Recognize any of the voices in this one? Anneke Wills, Polly from the Hartnell and Troughton years, makes a return as one of the Galyari, her voice altered by the hi tech of Big Finish to be hostile and furious, a big difference from the skilled and gentle receptionist that we know her to play.

I liked it a lot. It's not all nasty and grit; there's this bit with the Doctor playing with the Galyari command chair that smacks of Dr Evil of the Austin Powers films, even if the sight of their Sandman at leisure is just as frightening to the Galyari as him killing their young. But in the end, there's some healing between the Doctor and the Galyari; he is a good guy after all, once they have seen the error of their ways.

NEXT EPISODE : REAL TIME

Project Twilight

2007-10-29T09:24:00.000-07:00

Stopping in London for a spot of fine dining, the Doctor and Evelyn encounter a backstreet illegal casino and brothel run by gangsters - gangsters who turn out to be vampires. Unlike their classical counterparts, these vampires are bred in a laboratory known as the Forge, and they have escaped only to be hunted by the ruthless Nimrod. The leader of the vampires, Amelia, claims to be searching for a cure for the twilight virus which infected them, but Nimrod's mission is to destroy the runaways before they cause mass destruction, and anything that gets in his way is disposable, even the Doctor and Evelyn...

This one in parts almost smacks of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with its violence and grit, although Nimrod is no blonde from Sunnydale by any stretch. He's big. He's mean. He's armed to the teeth with hi tech vampire hunting equipment including protective body armour made of polycarbide - a substance the Doctor knows as the outer casing of a Dalek. The resources of the Forge stretch beyond conventional science and into alien technology gathered in the wake of invasion attempts. The whole tone of the tale is very dark, very gritty - a lot of the usual light moments between the Doctor and Evelyn are toned down in favour of more grim dialogue, with Evelyn taking one of the casino girls, Cassie, under her wing. There's an intersting moment where the Doctor quietly sings himself an old Galifreyan song:

Zagreus sits inside your head

Zagreus lives among the dead

Zagreus sees you in your bed

And eats you when you're sleeping

At the moment this means nothing, but further down the road it will be crucial, moreso to the Doctor's eighth self. The release order of the Big Finish audios though, had Project Twilight coming out very close to Zagreus; the way I am looking at the episodes here puts them literally years apart, and the reference will be lost in all liklihood. Or maybe not. f it's the year 2009 and I am still doing this blog, check the posts for the Zagreus listing and peek ahead - it's okay.

Encountering vampires raises the Doctor's usual ire about destroying them, as the Time Lords are sworn to do so, but he finds himelf torn as the vampires are not the spawn of the Great Vampires. Doesn't mean their intentions are pure, though.

As the slaughter of the vampires begins their true intentions come to light, but not before Cassie is infected by the twilight virus. Evelyn's motherly interest in Cassie causes her gret pain, and the girl is saved and taken to Sweden to hide out while the Doctor works on a cure for the virus, something he knows will take time. Cassie leaves tha TARDIS to await the Doctor's return, setting the series up for a sequel somewhere down the line, but not for a while.

NEXT EPISODE : THE SANDMAN

Bloodtide

2007-10-29T09:23:00.000-07:00

Milions of years in the past, a Silurian scientist is exiled from his community for unethical experiments. As the Earth is ravaged by rapidly dropping temperatures, he and his creations are left to die. Millions of years later, the Doctor and Evelyn arrive on the Galapagos Islands and encounter none other than Charles Darwin and the crew of The Beagle on the expedition that will give Darwin his insights into his theories of evolution. The small colony also on the island have been experiencing some trouble, though; it seems that some of the residents have been driven mad, and claim to have sighted monsters in the caves nearby...

At LAST. After the sham that was Warriors of the Deep it is a great relief to see the Silurians treated with some respect. And to have them pitted against the sixth Doctor himself - wonderful. And dear Evelyn - she's getting a real treat as a companion, meeting all the classic monsters right away.

The pairing of a Silurian story with Charles Darwin is a fantastic idea given that the whole Silurian story from the start followed the entire evolutionary argument, even if humankind's ancestors were slightly differently portrayed. Artistic license, one supposes. And we get a proper explaination of what the Myrka is; even though we don't actually see it in this episode, it comes across as more credible in audio than it did staggering around the sets of SeaBase 1 back in 1984. I question the whole suspension of disbelief when it comes to Darwin not mentioning his encounter with the Silurians, though; he'd be reporting on giant tortoises and all manner of strange birds and plants, but how he'd leave giant reptile people out of the equation just because the Doctor says so is hard to swallow.

How do our Silurians stack up against their predecessors? They're more akin to the Silurians of 1970 with their voices and with their general disposition. There is dissent amongst their ranks about how to handle the humans that have now claimed the Earth as their own, but in an unoriginal moment they decide that maybe a plague is the best way to wipe them out. Ho hum. I seem to remember that not working once before, although they admittedly had modern antibiotics to work with at that time. An epidemic in the 1800's would have a much different outcome. And as always now that an old monster has been brought back for the audio, now comes the burning question of when they will return to the screen in the new series. Ice Warriors first, though!

NEXT EPISODE : PROJECT TWILIGHT

The Apocalypse Element

2007-10-28T23:32:00.000-07:00

The first temporal conference has attracted delegates from every major temporal engineering race, with delegates from Gallifrey attending as well. The Doctor's arrival with Evelyn spurs suspicion amongst the other races present, but suspicion is relaced with outright fear when the Daleks arrive with an agenda of their own. Having held Romana prisoner for years, the Daleks aim not only to destroy the conference but plunder the time technologies of the attending races before they set the galaxy on fire with the Apocalypse Element...

Oh yes. Finally, Colin Baker gets a Dalek story to be excited about - and with Lalla Ward returning as Romana, the President of the High Council of Time Lords. This is the first time Lalla ward returns to the role and it's like she's never been gone; it's still very much in her to be Romana. And she's almost a perfect match for the sixth Doctor, both of them clever and blunt, neither one suffering fools gladly. It's good to have her back, and she'll be back again. She even does well with Evelyn, who gets her offical seal as a new companion, the rite of passage being an encounter with the Daleks (at least, in my mind it should be). Actually, who never met the Daleks ... Dodo, Liz Shaw, Leela, K9 (although rumour has it that changes in 2008), Adric, Erimem, and maybe one or two still to come. Before anyone says Nyssa, she met them through Big Finish's adventures.

Also among the cast is Vansell, a crafty Time Lord who will feature prominently in the heirarchy of Gallifrey in further adventures. The action moves fast, there are hoardes of Daleks and firefights galore (turn down the volume on your headphones if you're listening to it on an iPod or a WalkMan!), and then comes the unthinkable: the Daleks invade Gallifrey.

Gallifrey's invulnerability has only really been compromised once before, in The Invasion of Time, when the Doctor appeared to sell the Time Lords out to the Vardans, and in the new series Gallifrey is long gone as a result of the Time war against the Daleks. Gallifrey does not so much fall as it is penetrated by a small force of Daleks, but it's enough to cause mayhem and a lot of death. And more shooting. And more things going BOOM. The real purpose to their invasion, though, is not to conquer so much as it is to aid their other aims, and the resolution sets the stage for Big Finish's first proper spin-off project, Dalek Empire.

No-one really wins this one. The Daleks get what they want. Oh sure the day is saved, but there's the dark menace of the Daleks and their new empire right on Gallifrey's doorstep, and so many dead in the wake of the disaster. But Romana pledges to be vigilant, and the Doctor knows she is good as her word. And he'll meet her again, in a while.

NEXT EPISODE : BLOODTIDE

The Spectre of Lanyon Moor

2007-10-28T01:45:00.000-07:00

The Doctor and Evelyn return to present-day Earth and encounter an amateur archaeological dig on the moors. The moors are an old place, supposedly haunted by a vile spectre, small and evil, but the legends are enough to have attracted the attention of UNIT, and one Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart (semi-retired) is on site to keep an eye on developments. The Doctor realizes that the powers gathering on the moor are not so much ancient as they are alien, and an evil presence abandoned centuries ago is about to awake and exact its revenge.

There's a certain formula to adventures like this: local legend, lingering powers from aliens who visited a long time ago, annoyed locals, opinionated scientists, people making deals with the darkness to gain power. Yeah, it sounds a lot like The Daemons doesn't it? Yes, they were even aware of that when they wrote the script, with the Doctor and the Brigadier making reference to knowing all about buried spaceships.

Oh right, it's the first time the sixth Doctor meets the Brigadier. The reunion is quick, the Brigadier has seen new Doctors so often he's always on the lookout for the newest face, or the newest companion. As far as chronology goes, The Spectre of Lanyon Moor would be a bit farther into the future, after the seventh Doctor episode Battlefield but probably prior to the fifth Doctor novel The King of Terror. Seeing as the Brigadier was never on screen during the sixth Doctor's short tenure, there has always been this mad clambering to write the official first encounter between them, which has resulted in this episode plus two novels: The Shadow in the Glass and Business Unusual. For my own purposes here I am going to accept Spectre as the real tale of their first encounter, totally ignore Shadow and deal with Business a little later, as it serves a dual purpose.

Is our Spectre scary? He is. A creature capabale of manipulating a psionic field in his sleep can't be a good thing. And it's pissed at being left behind on Earth by its brother. The locals mostly fear it and keep away, aside from the few it makes its deals with - most notedly a local busybody with her pack of dogs. By now of course we all know these deals are never what they seem, and we just get to watch as characters slide down the slope to their own demise. Or in this case, listen.

Interesting observation: Colin Baker obviously had a cold when he recorded this, a fact that is so obvious that it gets written into the script rather than glossed over or ignored (like Jon Pertwee's tattoos).

That's all.

NEXT EPISODE : THE APOCALYPSE ELEMENT

The Marian Conspiracy

2007-10-27T09:23:00.000-07:00

Tracking down a nexus point where time threatens to skew off its normal course, the Doctor meets one Dr. Evelyn Smythe - a history professor specializing in the Tudor period. Evelyn claims to be the descendant of one of Elizabeth the First's trusted aides, but the Doctor has no recollection of the ancestor she names. With Evelyn's very existance threatened by the divergance in history, the Doctor takes her back in time to the court of Queen Mary, while Elizabeth languishes under house arrest, only to discover a plot of kill Mary and put Elizabeth on the throne - a plot that will not only wipe Evelyn out of time but rewrite history.

As a story The Marian Conspiracy doesn't actually break any new ground for Doctor Who; we've been back in time on loads of occasions and seen plans to change history thwarted left and right, the Doctor has rubbed shoulders with royalty and saved the day and the companions have caused a stir with their modern ways and bizarre dress sense. All those ingredients are here, so we are treated to a traditional historical Docor Who adventure devoid of lurking alien hoardes or sly renegade Time Lords.

So what makes it exceptional?

Evelyn Smythe.

Ever since the start the Doctor has surrounded himself with the younger set when it came to companions; I daresay that nobody who stepped through the doors of that old police box on a regular basis was a day over 25 (although one must point out that the seventh Doctor would travel with a more mature set in the forms of thirtysomething Bernice Summerfield and fortysomething Roz Forrester). Evelyn, however, is somewhere in her fifties, a career woman who knits in her spare time, and has a particular addiction to chocolate. She's smart, she's well respected, and she's almost a motherly figure for the Doctor. Their interplay does not follow the usual "What's going on Doctor?" question sessions, and it is even more easily avoided when placing Evelyn in an adventure where she already knows a lot of about the time period, even if she almost gets herself killed for an innocent act of spoken treason. The obvious parellels between Evelyn and history teacher Barbara Wright are all there, although Barbara specialized in the Aztecs as opposed to Evelyn's fascination with the Tudors, and Barbara's usual student set was some years younger than Evelyn's. The new companion's of sly humour when dealing with the Doctor almost evokes some of Peri's more clever attempts at breaking the ice, but they do not set off the usual firestorm of yelling that they might have before; has the Doctor mellowed even more, or has his separation from Peri made him more sensitive to the way humans behave? Or is he, in fact, nostalgic about Barbara in some way?

I found myself enjoying this adventure a bit more than I did the first time I listened to it many years ago, and I credit that to having at the time just finished watching The Tudors and having more or less been given a crash course in the years just before The Marian Conspiracy takes place. Of course there is so slim muscled King Henry at this point, and we are just privy to the schemes and plans of his daughter, but it's a fun look at history regardless.

And Evelyn is saved. The show goes on. The Doctor promises her a trip to the Galapagos Islands. And they get there. Eventually.

NEXT EPISODE : THE SPECTRE OF LANYON MOOR

I.D. and Urgent Calls

2007-10-27T02:01:00.000-07:00

Information is valuable in the future; so valuable that there is a black market in stolen and recovered data, and people are prepared to kill to protect their claims. The Doctor arrives on a planet where hulking Scandroids patrol the wrecking yards in search of any scraps of data they can salvage from old computer systems, but one of the droids comes across more than anyone bargained for in the form of an invasive virus that not only spreads through the Scandroids, but can also spread to humans with hardware upgrades to their brains. And in the far future, that could mean everybody.

I.D. is actually only a three part adventure, and it benefits from that shorter length by being more tightly directed, the plot cleared of a lot of backstory that might or might not add to the overall picture. Colin Baker is, as always, magnificent in his ongoing portrayal of the Doctor, once again with no regular companions at his side. The cast of characters he does come into contact with are the usual mix of skeptics, crooks, and victims, all forced to exist together under a condition of seige, plus the usual mad scientist perpetuating himself through a computer system. And the Scandroids, just these big wandering things, information forklifts if they're anything. Cool voices though. Cool voices don't make the story stand out though; it's okay but nothing I'm going to run around telling everyone they must hear.

As part of an experiment at Big Finish (they're really into those as you've seen) I.D. comes paired with a single episode adventure called Urban Myths, where a young woman's phone connects her to the Doctor seemingly by accident at first but more and more by design as the days go by. The young woman, Lauren, becomes a temporary companion even if she never actually meets the Doctor in person, but he saves her life, she bails him out of jail, and along it goes. This story is best suited to a shorter format, as a sustained 90 minute adventure of nothing but telephone conversations would really get stale, and by the end I found myself getting tired of it as it was. But it was different, which is something Doctor Who always has the scope to be. My beef with it though is Lauren's attachment to the Doctor as their adventure carries on; she starts having these notions of going on holiday together and meeting and being friends much like a lot of lonely people on chat lines do with other voices they hear in times of need (usually those are late at night when single people are at their neediest). The Doctor is strangely sympathetic to her and lets her down easily, as opposed to the sort of cut and dry response he might normally give. Perhaps travelling alone is softening him?

Now the last thing to say is about the "bonus" material. I didn't listen to any of it, not really, but my question is: does anyone? If you're going to slap a bonus interview onto a Big Finish disc, make it with someone we actually want to hear from. Interview Colin Baker on how he feels he's been able to expand on the role! Ask him how he feels some of these stories would have translated to television! Ask him what he had for breakfast! Stupid.

NEXT EPISODE : THE MARIAN CONSPIRACY

The Holy Terror

2007-10-27T01:32:00.000-07:00

The TARDIS brings the Doctor and Frobisher to a forboding castle during a time of religious upheaval. The living god, the king, has commited the ultimate heracy and has died. His wife is deposed as a false goddess, and his first son put on the throne much to the distaste of his bastard half brother. The ligitimate heir does not want the throne, he knows he is no god, and is prepared to die when he cannot produce a miracle to satisfy his people, but what could be more miraclulous than the sudden arrival of a large blue box and a big talking bird? Now embroiled in the ascention rituals, the Doctor and Frobisher are not only at the mercy of scheming would-be royals, but of an evil force growing deep beneath the castle itself.

HYSTERICAL. It is rare that Doctor Who is played strictly for laughs, and maybe The Holy Terror is not exclusively a comedy, but here is a script that made me laugh out loud while listening to it. The first time I ever heard it was in 2002 on board a plane coming home from California; I was tired and giddy and sniggering to myself the whole way back to Toronto - attracting nervous looks from fellow passengers who may have suspected I was going to blow up my shoes. When I listened to it again recently, same result. Without the plane. I was on a subway and people ignore each other on there.

Anyways. The resignation to their fate shown by the royal family actually borders on boredom; the queen languishes in the dungeon at the mercy of the new queen who is entitled to beat her predecessor to a bloody pulp, and the new king just wants to be loved. The bastard son proudly admits to having an evil agenda, more or less because he has nothing else to do with his time but be evil. Frobisher laps up the attention of the adoring public, assuming the mantle of a god and attempting to stop the killings of the previous royals despite the scribe's warning that tradition is to be observed, and what has happened before will certainly happen again. The Doctor suspects that this may not be exclusively about the regular purging of the royals but of the deeper menace growing beyond sight - a child kept in the dark for years with no knowledge of speech or love, yet immensely powerful and dangerous.

Side by side with The Maltese Penguin this episode starts to feel as if it were one of the comic strips from the late 80's where Frobisher and the Doctor made their monthly appearances, as if the audio series is taking a side route somewhere just to experiment with the wackiness of the dynamic between a Time Lord and his Whifferdill buddy. Big Finish have to date not brought Frobisher back to the range, but he did go on for some time in the comic strip being there with the sixth Doctor and Peri, and eventually parting ways with the seventh Doctor after foiling a plot by rogue Ice Warriors to freeze a tropical paradise planet solid. The comic strips had their own wicked way with continuity from time to time, as one can see.

But for the sake of the audios, let's assume that the Doctor and Frobisher did part ways eventually, leaving the Doctor on his own again for a time; on his own in the face of a deadly new threat...

NEXT EPISODE : I.D.

The Maltese Penguin

2007-10-25T12:57:00.000-07:00

A gorgeous dame looking for help. A mystery to be solved. A private eye who looks looks like a penguin who could use the work. And a traveller in time and space called the Doctor. All in a night's work.

The Maltese Penguin is another Big Finish freebie made available to subscribers, and this time we get to meet Frobisher, another of the sixth Doctor's non-television companions. Frobisher first made his appearance in the comics of Doctor Who Magazine, where it was a lot easier to realize a shape-shifting companion who chose the guise of an emperor penguin as a body than it would be on television (in the late 80s it would have been hard for anyone, but imagine the BBC's version... oh no...). It was only a matter of time before Frobisher made the jump to the Big Finish range, complete with put-on New York accent, much the same as future companion Bernice Summerfield will move from the pages of the New Adventures into audio.

Penguin joins Frobisher's story after he has been separated from the Doctor for some time; there's no real introduction made but most people in fandom who are buying the Big Finish discs will know Frobisher already, but to the uninitaited, he is one of a species known as a Whifferdill, and they can change shape at a whim. The Doctor arrives to offer Frobisher a chance to rejoin him in the TARDIS, but Frobisher remains firm that he needs a break, although he adopts the Doctor's form when going undercover to investigate the mystery he is hired for. At first it feels like New York and Frobisher has been dropped back in time as a semi-famous gumshoe, but when the characters do not show surprise that he's a penguin, and the boss of the city turns out to be a giant bullfrog, we ain't in NYC no more.

It's a comedy. How could it not be. Colin Baker gets to put on his own over-the-top Bronx accent when Frobisher imitates the Doctor's form, and you can tell it was played strictly for laughs, right down to the lonely saxaphone rendering of the Doctor Who theme (at least it sort of sounds like it).

And it's not a one-off for Frobisher. He's got another adventure.

NEXT EPISODE : THE HOLY TERROR

Excelis Rising

2007-10-23T18:02:00.000-07:00

Long after his first visit to Arteris, the Doctor returns. The TARDIS delivers him to a museum in the city at the foot of Mount Excelis just as someone attempts to steal a religious artefact known as "the Relic". Knowing that this can only mean trouble, the Doctor becomes involved in the investigation, but finds a familiar face on the scene - one he thought died during his last visit. Greyvorn, now wearing the guise of Maupassant, is very much alive, and still schemes to get his hands on the Relic for his own purposes.

So here we are again on Arteris, without Iris along for the ride this time. This is Big Finish's first attempt at their own multi-Doctor umbrella theme, aside from the loosely-bound Dalek Empire adventures that encompass all Doctors from the fifth to the eighth.

Does the Excelis experiment stand up? It certainly does. Anthony Stewart Head delivers a very calm performance as Maupassant with hints of Greyvorn seething under the surface, but with the personality of the Mother Superior bound to him as a result of his first encounter with the Relic, he wants to be free. She herself does not emerge with the same prominence as before.

Again, the sixth Doctor on his own, and it's all good. You can feel how comfortable Colin Baker is with this role, able to play off anyone he is paired with. As more of these solo trips pile up it's easy to question the need for a companion with this Doctor; he's far more independent, not as lonley as others, quite content to do what needs to be done and get out at the end. Sure he got along with Peri, as he will with future companions, but the sixth Doctor could go either way.

No sooner have I said this, though, than we will join the Doctor with a new companion; perhaps the most unusual one to date...

NEXT EPISODE : THE MALTESE PENGUIN

Her Final Flight

2007-10-20T19:37:00.001-07:00

The TARDIS crash lands and when the Doctor recovers consciousness he is amazed to find himself with Peri once more. Years after she was left on Thoros Beta with Yrcanos, Peri is on her own and stranded on the same planet as the Doctor. The TARDIS is taken by the local inhabitants and worshipped as a god; the impact of the crash has cracked the ship's outer plasmic shell and the temporal energies inside are bleeding out, healing the wounds of some and bringing horrible death to others who get too close. As the population is ravaged by the spilling energies, the Doctor realizes that his only choice is to finish the TARDIS off and save everyone from destruction, and in the end condemning himself to life on one planet for the rest of his days.

Her Final Flight is another of those freebie CDs that Big Finish give to subscribers, as was the case with Cryptobiosis several entries back. Once more the production team picked the pair of Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant to reprise their roles and the result is pretty good, even if we are told that several years have passed since their characters parted ways halfway through The Trial of a Time Lord. And the result of this reunion? Peri has let go of whatever anger and rage she might have had for the Doctor, seeing as she never saw him as "himself" again, her last impressions of the Doctor being that he turned on her and left her to die on Sil's home planet. Odd that; I'd be royally peeved. To put it mildly.

The cast around them argue back and forth over the TARDIS's god status, while a mysterious Agent employs a third party to observe everything the Doctor does, arousing the cusiosity of the listener as to how much of this is real, and how much of it is just a sham to get the Doctor to destroy the TARDIS. Hallucinations? An implant in the Doctor's head to make him think he's in the company of an old friend, to push him towards killing another? Intertesting.

As it's a special release the adventure runs only half the length of a regular CD, but I never got the feeling of being rushed or of being cheated out of a logical plot progression for the sake of saving time and money. No, it holds together quite well, and in the end makes sense. As much sense as any adventure does, that is.

NEXT EPISODE : EXCELIS RISING

The Wormery

2007-10-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

Alone once more and reflective again, the Doctor arrives at Bianca's; a watering hole for lost souls, broken hearts, and trans-temporal aliens, although as far as anyone knows the speakeasy is located in a backstreet in Berlin. And just as the Doctor finds himself somewhere where he can be alone, in comes the boozy brassy Time Lady herself, Iris Wildthyme, convinced that she is hearing voices when she gets loaded. Bianca's is not what it seems, though, and Bianca herself has more secrets than anyone can guess at - and all is revealed on a series of recorded tapes from that last fateful night at the club...

If there was ever a proper foil for Iris Wildthyme, it would have to be Colin Baker's sixth Doctor. Unlike Peter Davison's fifth Doctor, this one is not patient with Iris and her obsessive ways and spares none of her feelings putting her straight - something Iris reads as playing even harder to get and thus she tries harder. Despite the danger around them within the club, and the strange voices that Iris is hearing, the two play off each other magnificently. Katy Mannings' gravelly protrayal of Iris is a delight, especially when she's bombed, or singing on stage in Bianca's place, or even going nose to nose with the heavily-accented and mysterious Bianca herself.

This is exactly the sort of thing that Doctor Who needs every now and again - the Doctor on his own and having a guest star companion for an adventure, just to keep things fresh and interesting. It's a shame that there were no future encounters between the Doctor and Iris in the Big Finish universe (although the range is still going on, so who can say), and she makes a few appearances in BBC novels with the third and eighth Doctors, but I am not sure how well her loud ways would go off against the more brooding seventh Doctor.

At the end, everyone goes their separate ways, even a mysterious stranger with the audio tapes, and the sixth Doctor continues on his solitary way... for now.

NEXT EPISODE : HER FINAL FLIGHT

Killing Ground

2007-10-14T11:36:00.001-07:00

The Doctor takes Grant back to his home planet of Agora to find that the Cybermen have taken over and are using the planet as a breeding ground for new stock. The Doctor's reputation precedes him, though, and the Overseers of the colony are ready, and he is captured and put in a cell to await the arrival of the Cybermen on their next visit. Grant joins up with a rebel faction, but on a world where the leaders have embraced the life that the Cybermen offer, is there much hope of success?

Another tale by Steve Lyons, Killing Ground follows the adventures of the Doctor and Grant for the last time in print. This isn't Grant's final chapter, mind you, as he appears in some short fiction and a comic I believe, but as far as the printed adventures brought by Virgin's Missing Adventures range, this is it for the duo. I never got a feeling of a close bond between the two, although I'll admit I don't remember a great deal of this novel (it was published in 1996), but I will maintain that the Doctor is best left to have a female companion in a one-to-one situation. Remember the fourth Doctor travelling alone with Adric? We sat there waiting for someone new to come along. The only time it really ever worked was with the second Doctor and Jamie. Grant's not a bad companion per se, just not one of the best. Good try, though, for the first companion outside of the televised series.

Why am I dwelling on this point? Because I can't remember much else. I do recall that the tale didn't do a great deal for the furthering of the Cyber-race and I was disappointed that there were not a lot of them in it, nor were they in it a great deal to start with. There are references to the expanded universe of the Cybermen as envisioned by David Banks, the man who played the Cyberleaders in four televised adventures and then who penned the ArcHives tales of the Cybermen, so some strings of non-canon material are drawn into the framework of the novel series (which themselves are not exactly regarded as canon but the fact that they were okayed brings them a lot closer than other material out there).

Let's move on.

NEXT EPISODE : THE WORMERY

Time of Your Life

2007-09-23T05:23:00.000-07:00

Somewhere else, across space and time, the Doctor has gone into hiding on the planet Torrok. Haunted by the events of his trial and the revelations of his future, he has taken a time out from his travels with the express intention of avoiding meeting Melanie Bush as long as possible to give himself time to recover. His rest is cut short by interferance by the Time Lords themselves, and the Doctor is propelled into a head on conflict with the local broadcasting firms, who are showing some incredibly violent television to a population who are unable to see anything beyond their televisions.

So here we have another of those famed sci-fi cliches about how bad television is and what a prophet of doom it is and how everyone who watches television will be turned into sheep in the future. Sci-fi writers love this kind of thing, and in Doctor Who it has already been touched on in Vengeance on Varos as well as referenced in previous novelized adventures (and in the future adventures would be a pivotal plot factor in the episodes Bad Wolf and The Parting of the Ways). Problem with doing it this way is the Doctor is again being shown on television as a contestant in a game that will see him victorious or dead; he's done this on Varos already, and Leela several novels back was also subjected to such rigours. And it all smacks of the Stephen King novella turned Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Running Man.

Did all this repetition put me off, though? Not really, no, because Steve Lyons is no stranger to Doctor Who, and at the time of this novel's publication he had put out a few adventures already and laced them with humour, character intregue, and fantastic dialogue. I will readily admit that no Lyons novels exactly leap into my head as examples of now Doctor Who should be done, but at the same time I don't cringe at his name the same way I do at the likes of Peter Darvill-Evans, Neil Penswick, and Mike Perry and Robert Tucker. And sometimes Pip and Jane Baker.

Lyons gets the honour, though, of creating the first ever non-televised character for the series. Yes, by now reading this blong in a linear progression a reader would be acquainted with the likes of Jeremy Fitzoliver (sometimes with the third Doctor) and more recently Erimem (with the fifth Doctor), and there are plenty more to come, but the first ever character to be officially sanctioned by the BBC is one Grant Markham - a computer programmer geek fanboy. Grant has some of Melanie's background in computers but I am relieved to say that he does not have the whining irritating factor of Adric, nor is he shifty like Turlough was originally. Grant joins the Doctor at the end of the sory but only appears one more time in print, with his departure story not even part of the Missing Adventures range. Open ended, some might say, but in a future book, Instruments of Darkness, he is mentioned in passing, proof that he made a lasting impression on the Doctor.

Unfortunately, he doesn't get a chance to make one with the readers.

NEXT EPISODE : KILLING GROUND

He Jests At Scars

2007-09-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

The Doctor has been destroyed. The Valeyard has won and is free to roam and plunder time and space in the TARDIS. At his side is companion Ellie Martin, a bewlidered young woman dumbfounded by the callousness and cruelty she sees him inflict. But the Valeyard's freedom has come at a terrible price; he alters history at a whim and sets in motion chains of events that shatter the web of time. Mel is sent by the remaining Time Lords to try to appeal to whatever shreds of the Doctor's character that may remain, but with reality collapsing all around them, is it too late?

Another of Big Finish's Unbound series, He Jests at Scars goes farther than previous installations and looks at the Universe without the Doctor. Michael Jayston reprises his role as the malevolant Valeyard with Bonnie Langford carrying on as Mel, but a more hardened Mel who has been changed by all she has seen. She's more determined, the's angrier, she's reconclied herself to the fact that she may have to kill, and best of all, she doesn't scream (imagine that din through headphones - no thanks). As far as the collapse of reality goes, Mel herself becomes a temporal anomaly here; she was only at the Doctor's trial as a result of being brought back in time, and with the Doctor gone, he will never meet her - a circumstance the Valeyard goes out of his way to ensure.

As a replacement companion, Ellie Martin is not exactly a good match for the Valeyard; she doesn't really get the implications of what is going on util it's far too late, despite the fact that she is witness to her terrorizing ways and she herslef is put in direct danger for him to achieve his goals. The actual character of Ellie Martin was originally created for Big Finish's spin off audio series Sarah Jane Smith - and you can guess who the star of that one is.

It can only be assumed, then, that the Valeyard managed to do away with everyone who was witness to the Doctor's trial; the Inquisitor, the Keeper of the Matrix, the jury, Glitz, the Master and even the pair of twit guards who ran out the door at the first sign of trouble. It can also be assumed that Mel was protected from the carnage as she was within the Matrix, and she was pulled out by the Time Lords to help them fight the monster they had created. Typical, as the Doctor would say.

But of course it didn't really end like that. As I said before, it ended with the Doctor and Mel leaving in the TARDIS and presumeably he was off to return her to her proper place in space and time - to his future - and then carry on. And carry on he does, even if the adventures in print and audio are not officially regarded as canon. Luckily the guardians of the series who kept the books and audios coming are still a bit driving force behind the new televised adventures and they keep in mind what was done during those lean years where there were no new episodes on television. The further adventures of the sixth Doctor during this span are by far the most interesting of any range, as there is potential all over for him to go anywhere and meet anyone. Colin Baker went on record when he took the role as wanting to remain in the role of the Doctor for longer than namesake Tom Baker's seven years, and with all the material produced by Big Finish, Virgin Publishing, and BBC Books there is at least enough published material to seem as if he achieved it.

The televised series would return 9 months later with a new Doctor, Colin Baker being released from the role early (which is French for he was fired), but as far as this blog is concerned he's still got a long way to go...

NEXT EPISODE : THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE

The Trial of a Time Lord - episodes 13 and 14 : The Ultimate Foe

2007-09-09T04:45:00.000-07:00

The trial is coming to its end. With the destruction of the entire Vervoid race now hanging over him, the Doctor must fight for his life, but cannot produce any witnesses to attest to his versions of events and back up his claims that the Matrix has been altered. Help arrives in the most unexpected form : Glitz and Mel are yanked from their time streams and delivered to the trial space station - by the Master! The Valeyard bridles at the presence of the Doctor's old foe, but with the testimony of Gltiz a lot of things become clear; Earth was moved across the galaxy and renamed Ravalox by the High Council of Time Lords themselves in an attempt to hide Gallifreyan secrets that had been skimmed out of the Matrix by Drathro's masters. The arrival of the Doctor and Peri threatened to break the scandal and the trial, along with altered evidence, cooked up to cover the truth, and the Valeyard was installed as court prosecutor with the Doctor's remaining regenerations as his reward for success. The Valeyard flees into the Matrix, pursued by the Doctor and Glitz, and a battle of wits ensues, with the survival of the Doctor and the Time Lord society itself at stake.

The real big revelation here is the true identity of the Valeyard. He's the Doctor. He is the future version of the Doctor, a distillation of all the Doctor's darker thoughts and nature, a possibility that could emerge somewhere between his twelfth and thirteenth (and final) incarnation. Bound by the Doctor's moral impulses to serve the greater good the Valeyard is powerless to emerge until the shady machinations of the High Council allow him the possibility of escape. The Doctor is, in effect, fighting himself, and the battleground of the Matrix proves to be full of traps and tricks as seen during the fourth Doctor's battle against Chancellor Goth in The Deadly Assassin.

So what's the Master's deal in all this? He's Glitz's boss, and had originally sent Glitz and Dibber to Ravalox to retrieve the secrets held by Drathro for his own means. The Master's plan stretches further though; with his arrival and the revelation about the fate of Earth, the High Council of Time Lords is deposed by an outraged public, and he sees this as an opportunity to seize power for himself. His revelations go farther, though, to include the fate of Peri: she is not dead, as was seen on the screens, but lived, and became Yrcanos's queen (although one would imagine she's going to have a bone to pick with the Doctor for leaving her behind if their paths ever cross again).

We know that the Valeyard cannot win; and when the Doctor emerges victorious he dodges an offer of the presidency and takes off with Mel in the TARDIS. This was the last time the sixth Doctor would appear in the regular series, although logically he cannot go on with Mel seeing as she is from his future. We do not see him return her to where she belongs, so as far as anyone knows there's this big temporal paradox out there, although in the years since the combined efforts of Virgin Publishing, Big Finish and BBC Books have made the most of this and created the further adventures of the sixth Doctor, giving him a massive amount of material in the end (ironic for the second shortest-lived TV incarnation of the Doctor). Of course, I'm going to talk about some of this material.

But before I do, another trip back to the Doctor Who Unbound range and a look of what might have been if the Valeyard had indeed won his case against the Doctor and become free...

NEXT EPISODE : ...HE JESTS AT SCARS

The Trial of a Time Lord - episodes 9 to 12 : Terror of the Vervoids

2007-09-07T09:20:00.001-07:00

Still reeling from the shock of Peri's death on Thoros Beta, the Doctor uses the Matrix to gather evidence for his defence. The Doctor looks to the future, to a time when he is travelling with a new companion named Melanie, and they answer a distress call on a luxury spaceliner headed from the planet Mogar to Earth. The call has been faked, though, and the commanding officer, Commodore Travers, is less than pleased to see the Doctor on his ship as their paths have apparantly crossed before. Also on board the ship are members of the Mogarian race, as well as the eminent agronimist Sarah Laskey and her team of researchers. As the flight is underway, the passengers and crew being to diasppear, murdered by forces unknown, until the ship is overrun with the planet-creatures known as Vervoids. The Vervoids are a result of experiments by Laskey, who has plans to use the race to perform menial tasks on Earth, but they have become self aware and view all mammalian life as a threat to them. As the bodies begin to pile up on a compost heap, the Doctor is forced to take drastic action and wipe out all the Vervoids before they reach Earth - committing an act of genocide...

There's a lot to be said about what goes on in these four episodes, even if they're not the best of the season. For starters there is the Doctor's growing conviction that the evidence is being tampered with at its source - confirmed by sequences he reviewed in priavte now being at odds with what the jury and the Inquisitor see in the trial room. The Valeyard is all smug about it and says that the Matrix cannot lie, and it's a dead cert now that he's somehow behind it. By now the sniping across the courtroom is getting a bit tiresome - every few minutes the action is interrupted, including one pointless demonstration where a sequence is rewound to show a poisoning victim.

Melanie Bush, the new assistant, is played by Bonnie Langford, and she's always smiling, and always bouncy, and a health freak, and she has this squeaky voice ... and the most shrill scream EVER in the history of the series. Personally... I don't like her. Too perky. I have this urge to backhand the TV when she starts the screaming. Oh the SCREAMING. Why do we need this? WHY? And why is the Doctor so whipped in her presence? Stupid stupid stupid.

The Vervoids. Hostile plant people. Not like the Krynoid, though; they have a pack mentality and a highly developed sense of self-awareness and parinoia. And poison thorns. They're not realized the best - they're obviously just dude in rubber suits with thick leaves glued on, but it's hard to do it convincingly on any budget. Their genocide doesn't exactly leave a yawning gap in an evolutionary sequence, but they're still a species, and they're all gone now, and it's all the Doctor's fault, so whether he's simply a meddler or not, he's now a mass murderer.

The Time Lords. Interesting how they sit there all judgemental about the Doctor saving Earth from extinction at the hands )leaves?) of the Vervoids yet these are the same people who two regenerations ago sent the Doctor to do just that very thing to the Daleks. (Although the Dalek thing has now been retconned in light of the new series - see future blogs about any Dalek story from 2005 and onward).

So at the end of it the Doctor almost proves his point, that he is needed where he goes and he helps when asked - and he almost is home free until the truth of how he deals with the Vervoids comes to light. Foolish if you ask me. Like he's played right into the Valeyard's hands.

NEXT EPISODE : THE ULTIMATE FOE

The Trial of a Time Lord - episodes 5 to 8 : Mindwarp

2007-09-05T20:54:00.000-07:00

The Valeyard's evidence against the Doctor continues with a viewing of the adventure the Doctor was engaged in before being lifted out of time and to the space station's courtroom. The Doctor and Peri arrive on Thoros Beta to confront arms dealers supplying weapons to lesser races, and they find the beastly Sil and his people, the Mentors, in control. Other work is going on in the caves of the Mentors' home, though; the brilliant surgeon Crozier is working on a means to prolong the life of Sil's boss, Kiv, and dabbling in brain implants on the side. The Doctor is subjected to a mind altering device and sides with the Mentors, leaving Peri to fight for survival alongside the barbarian king, Yrcanos, and the slaves from Thoros Alpha, and providing the Valeyard with even more ammunition against the Doctor.

This is good fun Doctor Who, with plenty of running around in corridors to keep us all amused. The script is delivered by Philip Martin, the writer who created Sil for Vengeance on Varos and planned to bring him back with Mission to Magnus (no elements of which were cannibalized for this script, by the way, so it's not a reworking of shelved material), and although we have switched writers, the linking sequences in the courtroom are still maintained the same (I detect the work of script editor Eric Saward here). The Inquisitor shows a bit of stress at having to intervene in the sparring between the Doctor and the Valeyard; the Valeyard hammers home his evidence by playing up the danger that Peri, and all companions before her, faces, and sets out to crucify the Doctor for his sudden switch in allegiances. The Doctor, while suffering from memory loss due to his abrupt removal from time, denies that he would do such a thing, although the evidence being presented via the Matrix suggests otherwise. Peri is abandoned, captured, tortured, courted by the insanely over the top Yrcanos as played by acting legend Brian Blessed, and then, tragically, killed.

Yes. Peri dies on the Matrix screen, her life snuffed out with a callous disregard. The Doctor is devastated by this. Fans all knew it was coming back in 1986 when the show returned to the screens and the news of Nicola Bryant's departure was overshadowed by the name of the actress who would replace her. But we all knew she was going to die, and when it finally happened it still came as a numbing shock. Companions do not die on a regular basis, although the last few seasons were peppered with deaths such as Adric, Kamelion, and Nyssa's near death from lazar disease; prior to these events, the last time a companion died was Sara Kingdom in episode 12 of The Dalek Master Plan in 1966. Fan reaction to Peri's death was mixed, although I remember showing it to my friends Lori Newman and Samantha Allen back in high school and they were delighted to see her go. When Jay and I watched it recently ... well there were no tears or anything - let's not get crazy now - but it was an understood that the death of a companion was a severe blow to the Doctor. Like, imagine losing your best friend.

Other performances of note include Nabil Shaban reprising his role as Sil, although in a slightly modified costume, and Christopher Ryan as Kiv. What's really going on over on Thoros Beta though - what's the deal with all those bodyguards with the huge - and I mean HUGE muscles? More recruits from the JNT casting machine no doubt, right Jay? Everyone else on set is eclipsed by some of those biceps, although Colin Baker's gut manages to cast quite a shadow all on its own. And while we're going on about visuals, check out the early attempts at Paintbox in these episodes with the white cliffs of Dover painted a bright blue and the oceans done in neon pink; every now and again though the process fails and tints Colin Baker's hair pink and both lead actors' faces blue. But that could be the glare, right?

Reeling from Peri's death, the Doctor begins to realize that there is more to this supposed trial than appears on the surface, and fuelled by rage and pain, he is determined to find out what it is.

NEXT EPISODE : TERROR OF THE VERVOIDS

The Trial of a Time Lord - episodes 1 to 4 : The Mysterious Planet

2007-09-04T12:19:00.000-07:00

The TARDIS is yanked out of time and space, and the Doctor emerges into a courtroom on a massive space station. With a jury of distinguished Time Lords as witness, and the Inquistitor overseeing, the Doctor is accused of meddling in the affairs of other planets but the court prosecutor, the Valeyard. The Doctor tries to dodge the trial by using his status as Lord President of Gallifrey but he is informed by the Inquisitor that in his absence from his post, he has been deposed. Still confused from being pulled through the vortex, and without Peri at his side, the Doctor watches as his journey to the planet Ravalox is presented as evidence; a robot master oversees a small human population of the planet - which is revealed to be Earth following a devastating solar flare - while a small band of humans live on the surface above. Enter the unscrupulous Sabalom Glitz and his associate Dibber; mercenaries here on a mission of their own, although their presence results in a crisis endangering not only Ravalox, but untold millions across the galaxy.

The parallel between the plight of the series at the time and the Doctor's own plight is not a secret; Doctor Who had been off the air since the conclusion of Revelation of the Daleks and its return some 18 months later was looked upon as the show's last chance to redeem itself and regain momentum. The entire umbrella theme of the Trial would run the entire twenty-third season, all 14 episodes (half the regular length of the series) and would feature a new villain (the Valeyard), a new, if somewhat weak, version of the main theme song, a new companion, and an overweight leading man now barely being contained by his multicoloured costume. There would also be no more use of film on location shoots, and the entire show was recorded on video, somewhat cheapening the overall look of the production.

The first four episodes are collectively known as The Mysterious Planet, penned by series veteran Robert Holmes, and it comes with everything one would expect from him: comedy double act, cracking dialogue between the characters, and a good rapport between the series regulars - which came as a relief to fans who tired of seeing the Doctor and Peri snipe at each other. The revelation that Ravalox is actually Earth and that it is in the wrong part of the galaxy comes as a huge blow to Peri; this is the first time she comes face to face with the mortality of her home planet. The death of the planet itself has been hinted at before; in The Ark Earth is seen being burned to a cinder by the sun, and more recently a solar flare drove mankind away from the planet as documented in The Ark in Space. How this latest destruction of Earth scenario fits into that continuity remains to be seen, although there are theories. Is Nerva Beacon in orbit over Ravalox right now? Is there a Sontaran lurking elsewhere on the planet? Actually, geographically the location is not far off from where the Doctor claimed to have arrived in The Sontaran Experiment ; he claimed the transmat circle was near Trafalgar Square, and in The Mysterious Planet the Doctor and Peri come to discover the abandoned ruin of Marble Arch station in the London Underground (realized a bit better than the stations in The Web of Fear).

How about that cast. Glitz and Dibber are not just there by chance; they've been sent for something specific and they already know about Ravalox's true identity. Katryca, the Queen of the Free, wants her people to live without fear of Drathro, the robot that runs the underworld and terrorizes his workforce. Merdeen, one of Drathro's henchmen, knows that there are free people on the surface and secretly allows Drathro's slaves to escape, and he sees the Doctor's arrival as just the help he needs to free everyone. Sitting in the courtroom, the Inquisitor is pretty impartial to the hearing although one can detect her Time Lord sensibilities being offended by the accusations against the Doctor; she keeps both the Doctor and the Valeyard in check though. As for the Valeyard, exactly who this oily dark character is remains to be seen; his contempt for the Doctor is onbious as he suggests that the Doctor face a capital punishment for his crimes if found guilty, contending that the Doctor's previous trial in The War Games dealt him far too lenient a sentence (the Valeyard is obviously not a revisionist, as the Doctor's supposed limbo and employ as an agent of the Time Lords prior to his exile would not be a lenient sentence at all).

The case against the Doctor seems flimsy, though, even to a casual observer, and it's obvious even without knowing that there are 10 more episodes of this to come that there is something else going on. Jay and I of course knew this so we chatted aimiably through the whole thing, remarking at how nice it was to see the Doctor and Peri actually talking for a change, even if Peri had made some sad fashion choices. We both agreed that Dibber is hotter than Glitz, and both look like they were hanging out in some gay bar when they were hired for the job. There has been much criticism that Drathro and his L1 robot cohort look like Capsela robots at worst and Transformers at best, but the sheer size of them against the BBC budget would make it hard to build them convincingly.

Anyways. There's more to come.

NEXT EPISODE : THE TRIAL OF A TIME LORD - MINDWARP

The Year of the Pig

2007-08-16T09:46:00.001-07:00

The Doctor and Peri are on holiday, taking a well deserved rest for a change, but their rest is soon interrupted by the strange goings-on at the seaside hotel they have chosen. Peri receives a mystery thank you gift hours prior to her saving a man's life in the sea - a man who turns out to be a French inspector on the trail of an elusive quarry. Within the hotel sits Toby the Sapient Pig - a well-dressed porcine chap watching his old film reels and dreaming of the past, while ordering lunch and snacks on a rotating basis. And what would celebrity be without the enthusiastic fan Miss Baltitude stalking the corridors of the hotel hoping for a glimpse of her hero? Toby's life is in danger, and very soon the Doctor and Peri are also at risk, but before they can save Toby, they have to figure out who the real threat is.

The Year of the Pig is an interesting title, probably chosen seeing as it's release did coincide with the Chinese New Year becoming that of the pig. Toby himself is an interesting character, being an actual pig cpabale of speech and reason - based in part on the real theatrical character Toby the Sapient Pig who was an exhibit in the ninteenth century. Played by Paul Brooke he sounds like the original Winnie the Pooh, or even Kaa the snake from The Jungle Book ... or someone's kindly grandfather telling stories of when he was a boy. Maureen O'Brien - yes, Vicki herself from the 60s - plays the doting Miss Baltitute, a very creepy kind of obsessed groupie who ingratiates herself into Toby's inner circle when his nurse goes off to help the Doctor look for the threats to Toby's life.

Notes elsewhere online place this tale further back in continuity between Timelash and Revelation of the Daleks, perhaps owing to it's 2 part format as was the case with The Reaping, but the interplay between Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant as the Doctor and Peri is more in keeping with later adventures where their relationship is less rocky (which is either the Doctor finally settling down after his regeneration or Peri easing up on the comments that set him off). There is also the question of the version of the opening theme used for the adventure - the version that debuted in the season 23 epic Trial of a Time Lord.

And that's next...

NEXT EPISODE : THE TRIAL OF A TIME LORD - THE MYSTERIOUS PLANET

I, Davros - Guilt

2007-08-04T05:49:00.000-07:00

Now crippled and barely held alive by a life support system of his own design, Davros has risen to levels of power and influence his mother could never dream of. At first targeted for abduction and execution by the Thals, and then rescued by a crack Kaled squad led by an amitious lieutenant named Nyder, Davros forms the elite scientific corps and demands total control of all resources and personnel. His plans for the children of Skaro are met with opposition from the Supremo and the Kaled council of twelve, and thus his first coup is staged - exterminating those who oppose him and carrying him forward on the tide to take his place in Kaled - and universal - history.

Thus ends the final chapter of I, Davros, bringing us within months of the events witnessed in Genesis of the Daleks. The unholy alliance of Davros and Nyder is formed, with Peter Miles reprising his role of over 30 years ago as if it was yesterday, and the Kaled military elite sweep into power with no-one to stop them. There is indeed no going back for the Kaled people, all their new infants are being mutated in the womb through mandatory injections and then placed in the incubation chambers to await the next phase of their lives. Davros no longer sees them as the children of Skaro but as his own, revisiting the oft-alluded-to notion of his "parenthood" despite his inability to be a father in his deformed condition.

There's not much more to say about this; I've gone on and on about how great the epic tale is, how much fun it was to see Davros emerge as the ruthless man we know him to be, and now to see the final link to his first appearance in the televised series - that of his association with Nyder - is just perfection.

I will say one thing though ... we are left hanging. This started as a trial, and there is no closing scene with the Daleks delivering any kind of verdict on Davros. Where does he go from here? We know he makes a return in the future in both audio and on television, but the essential step to those appearances is still missing. Maybe there is more story to tell?

NEXT EPISODE : THE YEAR OF THE PIG

The Reaping

2007-08-02T12:27:00.000-07:00

While visiting a lunar history archive, Peri discovers that a childhood friend's father has passed away, and she begs the Doctor to take her to the funeral in Baltimore. Their arrival on Earth in 1984 is not the happy homecoming Peri had hoped for; her mother, Janine Foster, has split with Peri's stepfather Howard over Peri's disappearance on Lanzarote, and a lingering anger between mother and daughter remains. The Doctor undertakes an investigation into the dead man's past and discovers that he had come into contact with the Cybermen in another of their attempts to repopulate their species before they vanish from the universe, and the graves of the recently departed may contain a threat to the future of humanity...

I was a bit thrown by the decision to make The Reaping as a 2-part story instead of a 4-parter as was the arrangement for the previous discs following Revelation of the Daleks, but it made for good storytelling regardless, building to one big climax point as opposed to breaking the story up into smaller ones. The strength of the adventure lies not in the pace, though, but in the tension created from Peri's sudden return to her normal life after no explaination of her absence - indeed, her mother thought she was dead as did her friends. There's a fun flashback at the start of the adventure to Lanzarote the morning of Peri's fateful meeting with the Doctor and Turlough; Nicola Bryant manages to perk up her voice a bit and sound like the teenager she was back then. And speaking of voices, Peri's mother, Janine, is played by the incredible Claudia Christian who sci fi geeks will know best as Ivanova from Babylon 5.

This play is the prequel to the earlier-reviewed The Gathering, wherein the fifth Doctor meets Tegan again in Australia. The surviving members of The Reaping appear in it as well, bringing a Cyber-conversion unit with them as spoils of the adventure, as it promises to cure cancer if used properly. I'm not a huge fan of the intertwining storyline when it operates like this; a similar experiment was done with the novels Blood Harvest and Goth Opera in theVirgin Books range and it worked okay, there was always the problem, though, of keeping continuity straight. I'll say this much though; I don't like the ending.

NEXT EPISODE : I, DAVROS - GUILT

I, Davros - Corruption

2007-08-02T12:05:00.000-07:00

As the war against the Thals rages on, the Kaled people retreat underneath a massive dome that covers what is left of the city. With the help of his mother, Davros continues to gain influence and notoriety to the point where he is the subject of an attempted kidnap by Thal soldiers. Davros' focus has gone beyond the creation of weapons, though, and all his energies are put into the survival of the Kaled people, a fact that stays his execution long enough to warrant as escape. But Davros' life is about to change - a rogue Thal shell will alter his life forever and make him into the man the Doctor will encounter time and again in the future.

The Big Finish team once again deliver a fine chapter in the life of Davros, evoking a creeping air of desperation as the war against the Thals drags on longer and longer, and bigger weapons are brought into play. Resources are starting to dwindle, and the heightened parinoia amongst the Kaleds results in an even deeper divide between Davros' surviving family members. Davros' own egotism will cause him to turn on a close ally, recreating events alluded to in Davros, not so very long ago.

The thing about this adventure series is you don't actually miss the Daleks. There is a requisite exchange between Davros and a Dalek at the start and finish of the CD as a reminder that Davros is on trial, but after that it's right into the war on Skaro where extinction is the price of pride. Just as with Spare Parts and the origins of the Cybermen, the story of survival on Skaro is fascinating and definitely warrants the length of examination across 4 CDs, building towards the climax that will lead into Genesis of the Daleks.

But before we go there...

NEXT EPISODE : THE REAPING

Cryptobiosis

2007-07-25T16:48:00.000-07:00

En route from Madagascar to New Orleans, the Lankester is making good time as always. The Doctor and Peri are on board, the Doctor having promised Peri a soothing calm sea voyage as a treat, but he did not bank on a murder on board, and the weapon a knife made of something that looks like coral. First suspects, then recruited as allies, the Doctor and Peri investigate and discover that the Lankester is carrying a cargo of a different sort, if one can indeed refer to a lady locked up in a cabin as cargo, and if it's considered normal for her to have a second set of eyelids specially suited for seeing underwater...

Yup, there be mermaids! And kidnapped ones at that. But this isn't Disney's Litte Mermaid by any stretch, and when the other mer-people come looking for their kin it's not pretty. It's not much of a surprise by the time it's revealed that we're dealing with mermaids, but the possibilities that are raised before then are entertainting; are we dealing with Sea Devils? Or is this some of the fish people escaped from Zaroff's Atlantis? And whoever they are, is the Doctor going to allow them to be exploited by their kidnapper?

Cryptobiosis is another of those special CD releases that Big Finish gave away with their subscription services, and even though it's a freebie they put as much effort and enthusiasm into it as they would have a full priced play. Colin Baker and Nocila Bryant deliver another stellar performance as out time travelling duo, reminding us yet *again* of what a raw deal it was that their time together on the show - indeed, Colin Baker's time in total - was so brief when they had potential to do so much more. Ah well.. lament lament lament. The Doctor always said we can't change the past but with every good piece of material that comes along we can at least make it seem not so bad in hindsight.

NEXT EPISODE : I, DAVROS - CORRUPTION

I, Davros - Purity

2007-07-23T09:02:00.000-07:00

Davros is turning 30 now, and he's desperate to get out of the Kaled military and into the scientific corps where he knows he will be able to do more for the war effort. Depiste his mother's connections he finds it harder and harder to break out of the ranks until he takes a mission into Thal territory to prove himself, and he makes discoveries that will lead him farther down the path to the creation of the Daleks.

Again, the story of Davros is told with fantastic detail, Terry Molloy taking over now from the younger version of Davros, Rory Jennings. The war with the Thals is progressing and driving the Kaleds into more desperate measures to win, with a vocal anti-war faction demanding the hostilities stop and armistace be declared before Skaro is rendered incapable of supporting life. Davros discovers, though, that life is still flourishing in the wastelands, although it is life drastically and horrifically altered by the effects of chemical weapons and radiation; the Mutos, genetically wounded from both sides, scavenge a living, and the agressive Varga plants seen stalking the jungles of Kembel in The Dalek Master Plan are also evolving despite the radiation around them. Spurred on with these discoveries, Davros also realizes that the Kaleds and Thals are genetically different, despite similar outward appearances, but there was a time when they lived in harmony as depicted by heiroglyphs on old ruins. And on those heiroglyphs are inscriptions describing the lives of the ancient Dals as men became gods... or became Dal-ek.

The Kaled nation is slowly collapsing under the strain of the war with the Thals; those who wish for an end to the war are labelled as pacifists and then traitors, and Davros' own sister becomes a political liability when her role in the military comes into conflict with her desires for peace. The futility of the war drives Davros to look beyond the weapons they will fight the war with and to consider the effects that the survivors will have to deal with once it is finished, although his views are not immediately appreciated.

Brilliant. A fantastic chronicle of the fall of the race that will give rise to the Daleks; the momentum is still running high on this series and there are still two episodes of it left to enjoy... but for now, back to the Doctor...

NEXT EPISODE : CRYPTOBIOSIS

Synthespians

2007-07-22T12:48:00.000-07:00

In the 101st century, Reef Station exists to receive broadcasts from the 20th century and redistribute them to the audiences of the future. Such is the demand that 80's retro nostalgia is everything, and the society has become dependent on television for not just entertainment, but for its ways of life. The Doctor and Peri find it amusing and astounding at first, until the Doctor discovers that the business empire that controls virtually everything has been infiltrated by the Nestene Consciousness, and the plastic surgery of the rich and famous is taking on a whole new, and deadly, meaning.

Reef Station One comes off as more of a theme park than a broadcast centre; it's vast enough to encompass all sorts of environments such as Los Angeles of the 1980s as well as London of the 1960s to name just two, but the layout is never explained properly. Is this a round space station, almost a planet? Or is this a big sprawling disc? The zones are all sectioned off with massive concrete barriers as a means of keeping the people separated, and passage between zones is limited to a priveledged few - mostly soap stars. Mind you, everyone on Reef Station seems to have been a star at some point; Peri falls in with spoiled rich girl Claudia and her hunky soap star friend Marc and experiences the good life while the Doctor goes about things the usual way being pursued by police, shot at by Autons, confronted by megalomaniac businessmen... that stuff.

Do I buy the whole idea that society could start to function this way? That the 80s lifestyle could re-emerge? As someone who lived through that me-obsessed decade I really hope not. Author Craig Hinton must have enjoyed it, though; he's grabbed every bit of nostalgia he could remember right down to neon colours, big teased hair and reruns of Miami Vice. The parallels between what the people of the 101st century are watching and what the people of the 80s produced are unmistakeable, right down to a certain science fiction show called Professor X. And note there is an interesting comment about an actor who rightly refused to return to a series just so he could be killed off in the firet episode. Trust me, this will mean something soon.

The Autons of Hinton's novel are pretty much on par with the ones who menaced Earth during Jon Pertwee's days, expanding their influence farther and inhabiting all manner of plastic items so when the day comes to slaughter the human population they can attack from all sides. When that day does come, though, the sequences that describe the attacks are somewhat vague and fall a bit flat, almost as if Hinton got a bit too carried away throwing scene after scene after scene onto the page and meaning to come back and work on them, but never finding the time. The Autons do not just manifest as shop window dummies this time; in the TV studios sit the inactive forms of Sythespians - synthetic thespains - who are used in crowd scenes. And then there's the interesting take on plastic surgery; that bit's clever, even calling the process Skin Deep. You can guess the results.

I have maybe one big issue with this book. It comes at the very end. A Time Lord named Vansell (his name will matter more in the future) watches the Doctor's activities on Reef Station One and gives the order for the Doctor to be brought in and put on trial. Utter crap. Yes, there is an episode called Trial of a Time Lord coming - it would be a massive tale taking up all of season 23 - but Craig Hinton has decided that his story will be the last one before that episode by creating a continuity lead in. I really hate it when authors get above themselves and do this sort of thing.; it shows a total lack of respect for anyone else who might be coming along later with a story to tell. Of course it's easy to ignore what is written and plunge ahead and make all sorts of continuity arguments. It's even easier to just tear out pages or use White-Out.

NEXT EPISODE : I, DAVROS - PURITY

I, Davros - Innocence

2007-07-21T03:47:00.000-07:00

Davros is on trial. Betrayed by Takis on Necros, Davros is dragged back to Skaro by the Daleks, but it is not a trial for his life; the Daleks admit that they need him, although their programming does not undertand why. Dalek campaigns are failing, their empire is in retreat. Davros realizes his own errors in the creation of the Daleks all those years ago and begins to tell his story, going back to being a child as the war with the Thals began to dramatically change the face of Skaro.

They say that as well as similarity in title, I, Davros has some parallels to I, Claudius - but not having read that I am not sure of the validity of the claim. But if that story encompassed a flashback to the protagonist's early days and chronicled his rise to fame and power, then similar they are. For those who would like to think that Davros started his life as an innocent, though, he did not. The first time we meet the young Davros he is swimming in what would become The Lake of Mutations (the same one Ian and Barbara would lead a band of Thals across centuries later) and he is already calmly, coldly, observing the small creatures that are now living there. Davros' family is of some prominence within Kaled society; his mother an ambitious politician, his father a decorated war hero, although the mother's ambition is eroding her marriage and the war hero is in some doubt as he was not granted an honourable death on the battlefield. Davros also has a sister, but the girl is undervalued and written off to being in the Kaled army while Davros is groomed for greatness in the scientific corps. The enemy is not necessarily the Thals without, but the people within, as family will turn on itself and lines will be drawn between brother and sister, between mother and child, and between husband and wife.

Fascinating, as Davros himself would say. All those elements of Skaro's past are here just as they were alluded to in previous Doctor Who episodes before the war with the Thals reduced Skaro to the radioactive wasteland visited time and again by the Doctor and company. The Kaleds are rich in resources and culture at this point; there is still a measure of comfort in the quality of living, and there is no dome overhead to protect from the attacks of the Thals. Davros is already a lost cause, his mind switched off to emotion and totally devoted to observation and knowledge, and it is just a matter of time before he embarks down the path that will lead him to create the Daleks. His own first blood is drawn in the name of science, and much to the approval of his mother, who sees it as a first step towards his greatness.

I have no beefs with this tale at all. None. I listened with sheer joy and not for the first time remarked at not only the ingenuity of the people at Big Finish but also to their love of Doctor Who; going back to examine the genesis of one of the series' most complicated villains and not straying from what has already been established. There is even a clever reference to the forefathers of the Kaleds being known as Dals - something which was mentioned once in 1964 and then never again; until now it has been a continuity blooper but it has been resolved - retconned, as the case may be. The four volume series also gives some insight into what happened to Davros after his capture in the final moments of Revelation of the Daleks and his reappearance in the series a few seasons later. It was actually an effort to not press on into the second volume and see what happened next before going back to reading Doctor Who, but I did it.

NEXT EPISODE : SYNTHESPIANS

Blue Box

2007-07-20T21:09:00.000-07:00

An alien device has fallen to Earth and been split into several pieces, scattered across the planet and in the hands of collectors of the rare and unusual. To avoid a possible invasion, the Doctor has tracked down all but one piece, and it rests in the hands of an ambitious and clever woman known throughout the world of computer hackers as someone you just do not screw with; to cross her is to cut your own throat. A game of hide and seek through the phone lines and credit card history ensues as the Doctor, Peri and their friends try to outwit thier adversary and stop an invasion before it begins.

For anyone who was using the internet before it was even known as such, this book is going to be a heck of a flashback to dialling up and logging on, and old operating systems and protocols. I am not one of those people, but I saw Whiz Kids and War Games (the Matthew Broderick movie) and some people I knew in high school were using the Glitterboard BBS so I have a slight grasp of what this is all about. Kate Orman and Jon Blum, however, know all the ins and outs of this sort of deal (or they're HUGE geeks... and writing Doctor Who novels tends to support the latter) and they go to insane lengths to illustrate it. The big question I am left asking, though, is this: why? This is the Doctor we're talking about. He cheerfully disarms all the traps that Sarah Swan lays for him and anyone else attempting to attack her relam of cyberspace, and throws her into an enraged tailspin every time he does it. He's obviously better at this than she is, but for some reason he goes all covert ops this time around, dressing in a black suit and opreating independently from Peri for a while, leaving her to feel abandoned and start to question whether she wants to stay with him anymore.

Depiste not understanding all the technical side of the story I still found it to be remarkably tense, as if I were reading a murder mystery. I still kept wondering why the Doctor just didn't use the TARDIS more rather than have to cleverly circumvent internet security and cameras. The threat that the alien technology respresents is something that could ultimately harm the TARDIS systems, mind you, but it would be easier than the circus of renting cars and ditching them at airports and using a million credit cards along the way. I also found myself not liking Swan very much for her cold superiority. The other supporting characters all do well, and the bond between Bob Salmon (he apparantly met the Doctor in a previous incarnation - the fourth from what I can gather) gets a little under Peri's skin, especially given how she has been sidelined at the outset.

This is not the first book written by Orman and Blum, and like my thoughts on David A. McIntee I find their work either as a team or individually to be hit and miss with me; I feel at times that they don't always get the Doctor right, depending on the incarnation they are writing for. Orman started off writing for the seventh Doctor with The Left Handed Hummingbird and in subsequent novels I found some of his darker, shadier aspects materializing in the other Doctors; in this instance it's how the sixth Doctor turns Peri into an agent for his goals and sticks to the shadows for a bit. Not an entirely bad technique, but sometimes just not quite ... right.... for lack of a better word.

So before I plunge on with the next book, I'm going to go somewhere different; still in the Doctor Who universe but a part without the Doctor, but still a part where his presence can be felt.

NEXT EPISODE : I, DAVROS - INNOCENCE

...ish

2007-07-20T16:40:00.000-07:00

Somewhere out there is a planet full of lexicographers, all brought together by their shared love of language to assemble the ultimate dictionary, an entity simply known as Book. When the Doctor and Peri arrive, they find the leading expert on language dead, apparantly having taken her own life. The Doctor investigates, and Peri falls in with a young man named Warren, whose own love of language goes beyond mere appreciation, but touches the search for the omniverbum, or one word that expresses everything. Such a word would be thousands of syllables long, enough to drive even the most sophistocated computer mad... ish.

The sheer magic of ...ish is the story only just takes itself seriously enough to not become a joke. Here we have an entire planet of academics all expounding their love of language, of words, of expression, so such an extent that it sounds as if Douglas Adams had a hand in the writing himself. Even the Doctor does go on a great deal, evoking Robin Williams from Dead Poets Society and the need to express and speak and to sculpt meaning out of speech. Peri doesn't get it; her field is botany, after all, but on a planet where language and words are valued above all else there's the odd botanical phrase that will come in handy for paying a bar tab. Pity she's having lunch with their own version of the unibomber. Yes, Warren is not all he seems to be and delights in introducing chaos - something that can be disasterous in a finely balanced system such as Book's. Book is pretty much a slave to the lexicographers as far as Warren can see, although Book was created specifically to be the lexicon and does not appear to be in any way abused or oppressed.

I found myself laughing a lot at this one. And it's not a comdey per se, but it's damn funny when it wants to be, especially in instances where the Doctor is pressed into guest speaking before an assembly and finishes his presentation with a joke, the final line of which means nothing to us, the listeners, but to the people in the crowd it is the funniest thing they have ever heard. Colin Baker's delivery is such that you can almost see this one happening as if it were on TV.

So, two audios done, how's about a book next.

NEXT EPISODE : BLUE BOX

Whispers of Terror

2007-07-20T02:22:00.000-07:00

The Doctor and Peri arrive at a museum where all the exhibits are sound archives; speeches, songs, soundbytes - it is all housed here. But this particular museum has recently become haunted by a creature that can exist as a soundwave, hiding in any sound with the power to kill. The museum itself is soundproof, but an impending broadcast of a significant political endorsement speech will not only give a murderer undeserved publicity, but will give the sound creature the chance to escape and replicate itself across the world.

Very very clever, the creature made of pure sound becoming a new take on the evil disembodied intelligence type that the Doctor has encountered before. Clever too how the menace is almost immediately contained in episode one, only to be set loose once more by a maniac's bent political desires. There's nothing terribly complex about this story, and once the Doctor realizes the true nature of the sound creature it all moves along at a good pace, with the ultimate revelation of the identity of a killer not coming as a suprise, but at least coming along when expected.

As far as production sequence goes, Whispers of Terror was the first Big Finish audio to feature the sixth Doctor and Peri, and the difference between the squabbling duo of season 22 and these two friends is like night and day; the relationship has warmed considerably between the two characters and you can sense Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant really enjoying being back in the saddle. Bryant spent most of season 22 stuttering and whining Peri's lines, gaining a bit of confidence in Slipback, and now... she's a new woman. She actually sounds like her old self from the stretch of episode with Peter Davison as the Doctor; one might just say that it took her this long to get used to the Doctor and be sure of her relationship with him, if one was a revisionist.

The supporting cast do quite well, although as I indicated above it's not exactly rocket science to figure out what's going on and who did it. Then again, I have heard this particular story something like 3 times now over the years.

NEXT EPISODE : ...ISH

Slipback

2007-07-17T03:58:00.000-07:00

After a particularly boozy evening, the Doctor wakes up in the TARDIS with a voice in his head calling to him. He and Peri follow the voice to a ship in deep space where crewmen go missing and all that is left of them are their boots, the ship's computer is developing a split personality, and the captain is turning his body into a breeding ground for a terrible disease which he will unleash on his crew for not obeying his will.

The whole thing sounds like a Douglas Adams story at first glance, doesn't it? Slipback was actually written by Eric Saward for broadcast on Radio4 in 1986, so even after the hiatus of the televised series was announced there was still new Doctor Who to be had. The show was broadcast in six episodes of ten minutes each, with Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant in their regular roles as the Doctor and Peri, and it was indeed good fun to listen to. Doctor Who is not often played for laughs, and this is not exactly a roaring comedy, but it is a humourous tale made a bit more palatable for a children's audience while still being entertaining for older listeners. One only need listen to the ditzy and obviously blonde voice of the ship's computer - well, one of the voices anyways - to get either a smirk on their face or an eye roll. And Valentine Dyall, the Black Guardian himself, is fantastic as Slarn, the vindictive ship's capatian bent on getting his way or infecting the crew with a deadly disease.

Nothing is perfect, though, and there's a plot issue that is a bit of a sticking point; there is reference made to the Big Bang in this one, and it's cause, which is yet another version from what has been theorized in Castrovalva and Terminus - and neither of those agree either. Is this just an author's refusal to work within established "history" of the show, or some deeper thread about a greater scale of uncertainty surrounding the event itself, with theory after theory being postulated and none being exactly right? I just wish it could be sorted out, like Atlantis.

The ability of the series to be easily adapted to a radio format would prove to be instrumental in the show's survival in the future; there had already been the LP version of The Pescatons with Tom Baker and Elisabeth Sladen but this was different, and its success would be remembered years later when Big Finish would begin their own licensed range of plays to bridge the gaps between seasons and expand on the tenure of the eighth Doctor between his appearance in 1996 and the arrival of the ninth Doctor when the series returned to TV in 2005.

NEXT EPISODE : WHISPERS OF TERROR

The Nightmare Fair / The Ultimate Evil / Mission to Magnus

2007-07-16T21:23:00.000-07:00

I have decided to encapsulate all three of these stories together for this entry seeing as they respresent an entire season that was lost to the hiatus of the series in 1985. I have heard of three other adventures that were supposed to be produced in this lost series as well - Penacasta, Made in Singapore, and Attack of the Daleks - but nobody came forward to novelize the scripts when these three were put out by Target books back in 1989 and 1990. Back then Doctor Who novels popped out once a month, usually adapatations by Terrance Dicks based on the televised scripts, and these three were the first of the non-televised ones. The bigger bonus with some of these titles that came later in the line was that they were penned by the same authors who produced the scripts; sometimes this was a tremendous boon to the range to have some fresh voices, and in other cases it showed just how some writers can write incredible dialogue for screen but be absolutely abysmal at prose and narrative.

First up is The Nightmare Fair, seeing the Doctor and Peri enjoying a trip to Blackpool as promised and coming up against the Celestial Toymaker trying his hand at subverting Earth through videogames and amusement park attractions.

BRILLIANT. Graham Williams nails this one perfectly and it is a crying shame that this never made it to the screen. Not only would we have had some magnificent location filming at Blackpool but the confrontation between the Doctor and the Toymaker (who is oddly referred to as The Mandarin ) would have been a classic. It comes across perfectly on the page, you can almost hear Colin Baker bellowing and Michael Gough (yes, he was signed to reprise the role!) with his calm tones which would drive the Doctor even more nuts. And not only would this one have featured the return of the Toymaker, but the sonic screwdriver was to make a return as well.

Somewhere online there is an audio version of this one with different actors playing the Doctor and Peri but trying very hard to sound like them. It's no Big Finish, but they themselves have said that they will never adapt anything that was originally planned for the TV series, so if you can't get a hold of a copy of this book, downloading the play might be the next best thing.

Next up is The Ultimate Evil, penned by Wally K Daly. Here we find the TARDIS taking the Doctor and Peri to the planet Tranquela for a vacation and to visit some old friends of the Doctor's, but they find things not very peaceful at all. An arms dealer called the Dwarf Mordent has set up shop in orbit and has managed to project violent mood swings onto the planet below, causing the people to attack and kill each other and fostering an atmosphere of parinoia.

This one was a bit more cerebral, but by no means unenjoyable. The only thing I was edgy about was how so many elements of this script - a diminutative nasty selling weapons - would be lifted into a script for the 1986 season. The Dwarf Mordent just struck me as a bit of a coward, hiding up in his planetoid and stirring people up. I suppose that was the point, though, but these moral messages seem less effective when they are so obvious.

Last of this little trio is Mission to Magnus, which turned out to be the most disappointing of the bunch. And it shouldn't have been. Why? Because the Ice Warriors came back in it at bloody bloody last. We were cheated out of a fifth Ice Warrior story! That still bothers me to this day, moreso since we have yet to see them back in the new series. As far as the story goes, Sil (from the previous season's Vengeance on Varos) is on the planet Magnus doing deals with the predominantly female population (shades of the Drahvins) and their leader, Rana. But Sil is secretly selling the Magnusians out to the Ice Warriors, who have plans to freeze the planet to make it a new home for themselves. To add to this mix there is a Time Lord named Anzor on the scene, one who used to bully the Doctor during their days at the Academy and who still terrifys him to this day.

I wanted this one to be my favourite. I really did. But something about it didn't do it for me. I'm not keen on Philip Martin's prose style, and honestly I'm not keen on Sil either. So much more could have been said and done in this book, although at the time there were page maximums to observe - this was just 122 pages long. And I don't think Philip Martin was the man to bring back the Ice Warriors; these ones in Magnus are far from the noble Martians previously seen in the series; they could have been anyone. And as producer John Nathan-Turner was so keen to make things flashy and grand they probably would have been painted neon green.

Details are sketchy about what the other three adventures for this skipped season would have been, but Penacasta would see the Doctor dealing with another attack on the TARDIS which would possibly destroy it (after all this was written by Christopher H Bidmead). Made in Singapore was reportedly going to be another Auton invasion story but this time they would be in cahoots with the Rani and the Master (although as the Master turned on the Nestenes at the end of Terror of the Autons it seems a bit unlikely he'd team with them again). And Attack of the Daleks was supposedly going to be a season finale in which Peri was either killed or turned into a Dalek and then killed. Something like that.

The whole hiatus episode really did the show a lot more harm than good; an 18 month delay in episodes would these days just result in automatic cancellation because no-one would remember to be watching when it came back on. The same was partly true of when Doctor Who did return, but it did manage to hang on for three more seasons after. Not to worry, there is an abundance of material to fill the gap between the seasons, besides these stories here.

So let's see some more.

NEXT EPISODE : SLIPBACK

Revelation of the Daleks

2007-07-15T19:23:00.000-07:00

Upon hearing of a friend's death, the Doctor takes Peri to the planet Necros to investigate. Necros is home to Tranquil Repose; a cryogenic suspension facility for the insanely rich who have been preserved at the moment of death, waiting for the day when their ailments can be cured, but Davros has arrived as well and has raided the vaults to use the sleepers as genetic material for a new race of Daleks. Davros is performing double duty though; not only is he duping the workers of Tranquil Repose, he is also extorting money from a businesswoman named Kara after providing her company with a new protein product to sell to the developing planets of the galaxy, and guess where the meat is coming from ...

Okay this is my favourite of the season, hands down. I remember at first when I saw it being marginally annoyed at how little the Daleks were actually in it, even if they were now dramatically restyled in white armour with gold accents, but the truth is this really isn't a Dalek story in the traditional sense. This is a Davros story, and an incredible one to boot. Script writer Eric Saward freely admits that he was not happy with the end product of his Resurrection of the Daleks the season before, and he sets out to do them justice, even if he hardly has them in it at all. After all, the armies of Daleks out there are decimated from the war with the Movellans, so Davros is starting from scratch again and he's not making the same mistake that saw the Daleks try to kill him the first time. And where better to find genetic material than in bodies that people have more or less given up for dead? The really clever thing here is how Davros took the themes shown here - corporations, stocks, finacial power - and developed them in such a way (hurrah for retcon!) that both that audio and this televised adventure flow together almost seamlessly. Hurrah for Davros, you may say, but without Revelation there wouldn't have been the foundation for that brilliant script. And, just in case you have not heard, this is a particularly violent one, complete with painful exterminations, a brutal interrogation and beating, legs shot off, a hand shot off ... it's all here. But none of it is ever gratuitous. Heavens no.

The cast is magic. The interplay between the vain Jobel and the pathetically doting Tasambeker is a joy to behold, right up until the bit where one rejects the other so badly that there is a graphic stabbing with a syringe full of embalming fluid. There's the DJ, who comes off as a bit goofy, but he's here in the role of the choregus, a little narration here and there as he plays requests for the cryogenically suspended, much to the displeasure of Davros. Kara and Vogel, the mogul and her assistant, are a riot in their office paradise - snobs to the core when it comes to hiring the noble Orcini and his dirty squire Bostock to bump Davros off and gain control of the food supplies for the whole agalxy, even if they're not really clued in to where it comes from. Then again, Kara is an agressive businesswomen, she would probably just shrug and keep on selling food made from the dead so long as she made a profit. In amongst all these gems are the Doctor and Peri, who feel more like they are guest starring in their own series than anything else, but their sometimes rocky friendship had changed over the season and we see the Doctor being a bit warmer towards her. Peri always ribbed the fifth Doctor and had him just shrug it off, so her teasing of the sixth just lands her in arguments as he is prone to sarcastic remarks of his own, but by now those instances are fewer and fewer, and Peri's voice has a lot more confidence to it. And her hairstyle has changed for the better too.

The DVD release of Revelation of the Daleks comes with extras like any other, but what stands out to me is the new CGI effects option; some of the effects in the original were just plain poor, with lasers hitting their target victims to no effect (blame the extras too if you will but there's only so much one can fix), and laser beams staying in one place when the muzzle of the issuing weapons wavers by a few centimeters. Those original effects can be enjoyed as always but the enhancements take them away, as well as give the Daleks different weapons fire that looks fluroescent, for lack of a better term. And thanks to the effects as well, we get to see a Dalek fly on screen in an episode made two years before the *real* first time it happened in Remembrance of the Daleks. Ah magic.

One thing that is not changed, though, is the final line of the adventure. The season would have ended with the Doctor saying to Peri: "I'll take you to Blackpool!" when she requested they go somewhere fun. This would lead to the planned season twenty three premiere The Nightmare Fair, but before it was broadcast it was announced that Doctor Who was going on hiatus for 18 months, and those scripts that were ready were shelved, and the word "Blackpool" was cut. It was a long 18 months full of uncertainty for the show's future, but the gap left makes it a good place for Big Finish to place some adventures with the sixth Doctor and Peri, as well as three of the novels from the "missing season" and the first Doctor Who play on Radio 4. Yes, that time was a bit dismal, but now, as always, the show has gone on.

NEXT EPISODES : THE NIGHTMARE FAIR / THE ULTIMATE EVIL / MISSION TO MAGNUS

Timelash

2007-07-14T03:54:00.000-07:00

The Doctor and Peri are caught in a time corridor running out of the planet Karfel. The tunnel is part of a device called the Timelash, a unique device of execution that throws political enemies down the vortex into exile on other planets. When the TARDIS materializes on Karfel, Peri is taken prisoner to co-opt the Doctor into assisting the retrieval of an amulet that was lost down the Timelash along with a noblewoman of the governing council. The ruler of Karfel, the Borad, is having a hard time quelling a rebellion that is growing against him, but with the arrival of the Doctor, and more importantly of Peri, he sees the solution he has been waiting for, although for Peri it could be the start of a whole new set of problems.

Oh boy. Every season of Doctor Who has one story that is not as good as the rest, one that the majority of viewers will not feel as excited about. Timelash is not that story. For this season, that story was Attack of the Cybermen. Timelash isn't just "not as good" it's downright bad. Like horrible bad. Like CRAP bad.

How bad? It's visual effects are bad, starting with the Doctor and Peri strapping themselves to the TARDIS concole to navigate the Timelash. It's writing is bad, with dialogue that the actors seem to have trouble delivering, although to his credit, Colin Baker does a very good job apeing William Hartnell. The acting is bad, none of the characters are particularly memorable, Vena tends to look across the room from people when she speaks to them so you might think she is blind, Tekker (played by Paul Darrow) is just over the top as the Borad's bum-kissing Maylin, and the guy playing H.G. Wells (no joke, and no reason for it) just irritates.

The Borad doesn't really stack up very well as a baddie. He does all sorts of bad things like divert energy from hospitals for his own private projects, he kidnaps Peri and leaves her at the mercy of monsters living down cave tunnels, he shoots people with a device that accelerates their age until they collapse as a heap of old bones, and he deliverately provokes war with the snake-like Bandrils who share the star system with Karfel. His motivation? Look at the cover of the DVD. Half man, half monster. You'd be pissed too. To his credit, though, he has a fantastic voice - deep and mellow and menacing, and a booming laugh.

There's even a fun bit of continuity here; the third Doctor apparantly visited Karfel in the past, making such an impression that there was a mosaic of him painted on the wall (and then covered up) and the daughter of someone he met while there holds a locket with a picture of Jo Grant inside it. And Peri knows Jo to see her picture, suggesting she may have met her, or the Doctor's been showing the holiday snaps again.

There was too much to really not enjoy about Timelash. It reeks of a serial made towards the end of the season with the money running out, otherwise some more time and care would have been taken with the direction to at least salvage that much. I'm not sure why it's on DVD when so many better shows could be put out with fantastic extras, but my friend Mike suggested that it might be better to get some of the clunkers out of the way rather than saving them for last, which is what happened with the VHS range and they had to take 11 so-so titles and sell them in an unrelated box set. With Timelash on DVD, the last hold out for this season is the premiere itself, Attack of the Cybermen, the plan apparantly being to start selling complete seasons in boxes. I am going to get Timelash on DVD mind you - for the sake of completing my set. I'll give the extras package a chance, it could be redeeming, or maybe there will be a blunt and cutting commentary track to listen to. Or maybe Jay and I will just record our own.

NEXT EPISODE : REVELATION OF THE DALEKS

Davros

2007-07-13T21:59:00.000-07:00

Mega-conglomerate company TAI is known as the most agressive corporation in the known galaxies, controlling virtually every avenue of commerce and producing all manner of consumer goods. With Peri away on a botany seminar, the Doctor takes the time to investigate claims that TAI is engaged in shady business dealings, and finds instead that they now employ Davros on their technical products division. As the galaxy expands TAI aims to stay ahead of the demand for new products and with Davros on board they feel that they have the edge over the competition. The Doctor does not for one moment believe that Davros has any intentions of helping and becomes an employee of TAI himself to keep an eye on him, buy are his suspicions warranted, or has Davros indeed turned over a new leaf?

This is an incredible story. Second in the villains series this story not only picks up where Resurrection of the Daleks left off but also flashes back into the past before Davros began his work at creating the Daleks, back to when he was a normal man, an ambitious scientist on a planet being ravaged by war. Davros does not immediately understand the circumstances he finds himself in; he is 90 years out of his time and light years away from Skaro where industry was always geared towards war, so the concepts of stock markets, commodities and volatile futures are new to him. But there is one constant he recognizes: the power that comes from controlling everything. Aided by the naive Lorraine Baynes (played by Wendy Padbury - our own Zoe!) Davros explores the new world around him and relalizes that he doesn't need a Dalek army to reign over this galaxy - he can get rich and buy it.

The interplay between the Doctor and Davros is fantastic, evoking the chemistry of Tom Baker's fourth Doctor and Michael Wisher's original Davros and expanding it further; you can feel that Colin Baker and Terry Molloy thoroughly enjoyed their roles as the Doctor and Davros, and the dialogue between them is superb. Nothing irritates Davros more than a clown, and he uses his leverage to convince his employers that the Doctor is a menace, and as nothing irks the Doctor more than abused authority, he strives to frustrate Davros even further. The pairing of the sixth Doctor and Davros is inspired here, and it is fitting that Colin Baker be given an incredible script like this to work with given how his Doctor was never given enough material to really develop and become a favourite while on television. If this sort of tale has been available back then, it's possible Colin Baker would have been allowed a much longer run as the Doctor.

The big question of Davros is this: can the most twisted scientist ever, the creator of the Daleks, change his ways and serve the greater good? The flashbacks to his time before being confined to his life support systems show him to be a man capable of emotion, a man like any other who wants the war on his world to end, so is it a stretch to believe he would regain that compassion and use his brilliance to ease the problem of famine on developing worlds, and create new tools to make the work of colonists and terraformers easier? Or is the Doctor right, and is Davros merely biding his time and waiting for the right opportunity to embark on a new reign of terror? We all know Davros just wouldn't be Davros without a death toll somewhere behind him. But hey he wouldn't have to work too hard to justify killing; if something gets in his way, he gets rid of it - lest we forget that he sold out the entire Kaled race to the Thals in the last days of the war to ensure that the Daleks would go on.

There has always been this big movement to go back to Daleks stories without Davros to do all the speaking for them; indeed with such a powerful central figure the Daleks fade away to mere set decorations. But rather than remove Davros, author Lance Parkin has taken away the Daleks and let the Davros character run away with itself. And the result is incredible. And the sheer length of the story is incredible as well: two 75 minute episodes, which makes the adventure longer than a six episode televised adventure. Brilliant.

Absolutely brilliant.

NEXT EPISODE : TIMELASH

The Two Doctors

2007-07-13T13:25:00.001-07:00

At the behest of the High Council of Time Lords, the second Doctor and Jamie go to a space station in the Third Zone. The Doctor runs afoul of his old friend, Dastari, with the demands of the Time Lords, and the station is attacked by a shock force of Sontarans. The sixth Doctor feels a time slip and with Peri comes to the station to investigate, and they find Jamie left behind with the dead, and the Doctor abducted to be part of an obscene experiment that will grant the Sontarans and the bloodthirsty Androgums mastery over time.

Right from the opening moments where the Doctor and Jamie are shown in black and white with an older version of the TARDIS console, you can feel this is going to be a fun adventure. With Robert Holmes holding the pen there is no reason why it wouldn't; the dialogue is witty and quick, the plot makes sense, and it's a treat to have it encompass three 45-minute episodes. There hadn't been a story over the approximate 90 minute length since The Armageddon Factor (the cancelled Shada doesn't count), and this fits the bill perfectly as an epic.

The story moves from the devastated space station to an area of 1985 Spain just outside of Seville, with some beautiful location footage that looks hotter than hell in DVD quality. There's no real reason that the episode had to take place there aside from John Nathan-Turner's established routine of shooting in a foreign location once per season (although in the years to come, there would be no more of this), but Holme's script is easily adaptable so the setting isn't important; it's the characters you want to watch. Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines step right back into the roles they left behind as if they haven't been away, the obvious signs of ageing hard to conceal but we're used to overlooking wobbly set walls and boom mics, so why not ignore some wrinkles and grey hair? And the current TARDIS crew of Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant interact with them beautifully. Who else have we got... the scheming Chessene (played with style by Jacqueline Pearce) and her bloodthirsty Androgum buddy Shockeye bring both meance and comedy to the story. Then there's Dastari, a brilliant scientist reduced to the assistant of his own creation. I just wish he didn't look like he was wearing an Elton John cast-off costume. There are only two Sontarans in the story; their presence is almost incidental and they're hardly the best the Sontaran officer corps has to offer by comparison to previous characters such as Linx or Styre. And check out the brilliant Oscar and Anita - hapless humans who get caught up in the intregue as only Robert Holmes can create. Holmes also goes a step further and refers to humans as Tellurians, a term first used in Carnival of Monsters, giving us a clue as to where this adventure is starting from and also suggesting that Inter Minor from the 1973 story may be part of the Third Zone itself.

Jay and I had a good share of laughs over this one, enjoying it thoroughly. We lamented Jamie's loss of youth. We chortled at Peri's near-misses with her cleavage threatening to whack her in the face as she runs away from Shockeye. And we loved the innuendos of Shockeye's obsession with cooking Jamie; the chef's lust for him verges on the sexual.

The story was originally penned under the title The Androgum Inheritance, which I personally would have preferred; at this point it hadn't even been two full years since The Five Doctors was aired, and this whole numerical Doctor title thing starts to look a bit b-movie after a while (although this is the season for it; Attack of the Cybermen was done under the working title Cold War). This would also be Patrick Troughton's last on screen appearance as the Doctor before his death, but he proves himself to be right on his game as the Doctor, even spluttering "Oh my giddy aunt! Oh crumbs!" in the face of certain death while strapped down to an operating table.

Other notes of interest include the discussions about Time Lords posessing a symbiotic nuclei which would aid them in travelling through the time vortex in a TARDIS, and the fact that the Doctor is operating on behalf of the Time Lords before they put him on trial in The War Games. Yes, that's a bit of a tricky one; the script indicates that the Doctor and Jamie have left Victoria somewhere to learn graphology for a while, but the revisionists like to think that this could be another season 6b story with the Doctor in limbo and being allowed out to work on behalf of the Time Lords for a while. This would certainly explain how he came to be on his own in The Five Doctors, but not why Jamie is with him this time. Not easily, anyways.

So let's take a break from the TV episodes again and have an audio, one of the best in the range if you ask me...

NEXT EPISODE : DAVROS

The Mark of the Rani

2007-07-12T19:13:00.000-07:00

Mysteriously drawn off course, the TARDIS lands the Doctor and Peri in England during the Industrial Revolution. In this troubled time when machinery is taking jobs away from miners and poverty looms, the Doctor finds himself pitted not only against the Master, but another renegade Time Lord, the Rani, who has her own agenda for experimentation on the people of Earth. The stakes are raised even higher when the Master's plans go beyond his quest for revenge and move to changing history itself and making Earth the centre of his own private empire.

Better. The season takes a promising upward turn with this episode, introducing the Rani as played by Kate O'Mara. Unlike the Master or the Meddling Monk she has no real axe to grind with the Doctor; she is on Earth to experiment on the humans and could do without either of her fellow renegades getting in her way. Her alliance with the Master only comes under duress as he holds the results of her experiments hostage, until he convinces her that Earth would make an ideal power base and the humans perfect slaves. The Rani already rules over a planet called Miasimia Goria, and figures she could use another. The Master's presence, however, is never really explained in full; last time we saw him in Planet of Fire he was burning to death in the flames of the numismiton furnace. But he's back. And he ain't happy. He's got a big time grudge against the Doctor as always but now it's personal with Peri as well. There's the difference between Anthony Ainley as the Master and Roger Delgado's original version; no matter how things went he always treated Jo Grant with a certain measure of respect, but then again, she never watched him burn to death either.

Plot wise we're looking at a pretty solid script, even if some of the dialogue sounds a bit flowery.

Writers Pip and Jane Baker are new to the series with this one, and they obviously have a love of language, although it materializes in some corny lines like the Master advising the Luddites to "Hold hard,". As this is a historical adventure there is a man of some significance in the script: George Stephenson, the man who would design and buil a steam locomotive named The Rocket. The Doctor is of course delighted to rub shoulders with an inventor, and the Master is delighted at the opportunity to enslave such a mind to his own cause. The Rani isn't interested in the humans to the same extent; her mission is to extract chemicals from the brain that allow rest and sleep, and operating during violent eras in history is perfect cover.

Jay sat in on this one with me once more, and we were delighted with the cast of extras, especially the nice triceps of one of the Rani's assistants. And young Luke, assistant to Stephenson, was pretty easy on the eyes as well. The episode has a lot of visual appeal what with the extensive location shooting at the UK's version of Black Creek Pioneer Village... complete with a sign advertising the tea shop which no-one got out of the shot in time. One would have thought the Restoration Team would have done something about that. The DVD release doesn't feature any enhancements to the program material itself - although that bit where the Doctor drops his tracking device down the mine could have been done better - but it is a great sharp image we get of the inside of the Rani's TARDIS, which is custom made to feel like a chamber one steps down into as opposed to the bright console room that the Doctor uses.

Now I have a question though. The Doctor chose to leave Gallifrey and got raked over the coals, forced to regenerate, and exiled for the sin of stopping bad things from happening to good people. The Rani, on the other hand, caused trouble on Gallifrey and was sent away, and has carried on more or less the same, and there's no trial for her, no rebuke. Much the same for the Master; if they're that bad why don't the Time Lords just sort them? They can do it. They even went so far themselves as to try and get the Doctor to attempt to wipe out the Daleks, so what's so hard about reining in two more renegades? Of course, there's no real answer to this one; it just wouldn't make for good story if everyone could be sorted out so easily.

But speaking of Time Lords and control, here comes the next story...

NEXT EPISODE : THE TWO DOCTORS

Vengeance on Varos

2007-07-11T12:57:00.000-07:00

The TARDIS stalls in mid flight, a situation caused by the deterioration of the transitional elements of the time rotor. Only zeiton-7 ore can be used to repair them, and the Doctor and Peri go to the planet Varos to get some. Trouble is, Varos is a former prison colony now seeking independence and its every resource is being controlled by the Galatron Mining Corporation, headed by the vile Sil. To keep the empoverished colonists in line, the Punishment Dome has been set up, the images of torture and execution being broadcast into every home as a lesson to those who would rebel. And guess where the TARDIS chooses to land...

There's no glossing over the fact that this is the most deliberately violent Doctor Who adventure ever, but for some reason it never seems to be that bad. True there is the image of a shirtless Jason Connery as Jondar being lasered to death as torture, and there are cannibals, but a lot of the torture in the Punishment Dome is imaginary; illusions that trick the mind into thinking the body is dying such as the sun-bleached desert illusion that the Doctor faces (which even leaves the Varosians watching feeling parched). Violence and torture are things Varosians come to accept as routine, even getting the chance to vote for their Governor to be lashed by a cell disintigration ray when his policies are not to the liking of the people. (Imagine how fast we'd go through Prime Ministers if we had that here). The state of terror that exists on Varos is such that the citizens are encouraged to spy on each other, even driving a wedge between husbands and wives.

Lording over it all with the ruling class of the planet is Sil, a diminutative sadistic creature from the planet Thoros Beta. The DVD cover above shows him in his glory; he's a slug. Although he looks like dog poo. The legless actor Nabil Shaban brings him to insane life, though, throwing himself into the role and cackling insanely as he watches people suffer, and throwing tantrums when things do not go his way. Producer John Nathan-Turner wanted to cast the most malignant creature ever with this one, but once again all the hype didn't quite live up to it and Sil is more a comical character than he is a credible monster. I remember back in 1985 when I was in grade 8 and I was reading the synopsis of the story in a zine, and the description I saw made me imagine ravers partying in the streets watching executions on screens overhead, not the tired worn out depressed mining couple, Arak and Etta, slumped in front of their screen in their living room, forced to watch hours of the torture. Either vision would work for this, I suppose.

Jay and I watched this together, although I'll admit we talked through most of it, making light of Peri's impractical outfit for the adventure (low cut top and shorts... riiight, that's just what you want to wear for space exploration) for the most part. For the show's broadcast on North American TV, the 45 minute episodes were halved down to 23 minutes to fit into a 30 minute time slot, resulting in some not-so-cliffhangers, some of which I remembered and pointed out as they came along. Jay would just shake his had and say "Are you kidding? What's suspenseful about that?"

Is there any suspense in Vengeance on Varos? Its claustrophobic setting certainly loaned itself to enough shadows for things to hide in, but in the end it just turned into corridor after corridor and mericore effects here and there. If it was supposed to be a comment on how much violence was on TV at the time, I'm not sure if the argument was made properly. It came along at roughly the same time as The Running Man, so some parallels can be drawn between the two, with heroic characters being thrown into the meat grinders of the Punishment Dome to keep the rest in line.

Oh well.

NEXT EPISODE : THE MARK OF THE RANI

Attack of the Cybermen

2007-07-10T18:40:00.000-07:00

A distress call brings the Doctor and Peri to London in 1985. The Doctor expects to find a stranded alien but instead encounters Commander Lytton, one of the surviving Dalek duplicates who escaped the year before. Lytton appears to be working for the Cybermen who have established a forward base in the city sewers, but their plans reach beyond just converting the odd hapless human; the Cybermen are preparing to leave Telos and use Halleys Comet to strike the Earth and avert the destruction of Mondas, altering history for all time.

So it's a prequel to The Tenth Planet and at the same time a sequel to Tomb of the Cybermen, complete with an updated version of the CyberController directing things from Telos. They say they even went back to the same quarry where they shot Tomb but who can say for sure; one heap of sand and rock looks pretty much the same as the next. Thing is, though, Mondas was the primary home of the Cybermen as we heard in Spare Parts, and when it was destroyed they Cybermen retreated to Telos to re-establish themselves; Attack is also the story of the Cryons, a race of humanoids (primarily females) who were there first, who built the refridgerated cities that the Cybermen invaded and used as their tombs. Virtually extinct, the Cryons still engage the Cybermen in guerilla warfare, doing what they can to stop them in their plans. The Doctor spends a great deal of time locked up with what appears to be their leader, a Cryon named Flast, who has accepted that they have lost the war against the Cybermen but they must do what they can to keep Earth safe.

These Cybermen just reek of desperation, and not without cause, seeing as they are dwindling in numbers and this is a final gamble to preserve their species. Being logical machines though they seem to have overlooked Blinovitch and the reasons why their plan wouldn't work anyways, but they're going to try with the aid of a stolen time ship and the captured TARDIS. The Cybercontroller is played again by Michael Kilgarrif, even if the years seem to have given him a bit of a full-figured look, unique amongst the Cyber ranks. And he has a different kind of helmet design, although the transparent dome where his brain should be visible is covered over with silver probably to keep the censors happy.

As the season premiere, Attack of the Cybermen sets the tone for everything to come, starting with the new 45 minute episode format, which effectively reduced the season length from 22 weeks to 16. What it also did was demonstrate the new levels of violence that the production crew decided to introduce, starting with Cybermen chopping people down, people being shot, Cybermen being blown apart or their heads knocked off, people being half-converted into Cybermen, a Cryon being thrown out into a warm corridor to boil and die, and the brutal crushing of Lytton's hands. Yeah, it's all here, I ain't kidding. Lytton even becomes a sympathetic character now; as the fifth Doctor predicted, the Dalek conditioning of the duplicates began to wear off and Lytton is free of it, but he's still in the end a mercenary for hire. Just one who knows that the Cybermen should be stopped.

Did I like it? I found that it came close to going too far. But in other respects it didn't go far enough. I would have liked to have seen different Cyberman models sharing the screen; it's not gone unnoticed how their appearance changes slightly with each appearance, which is something one can easily attribute to the constant upgrading of their forces, so why not have some more classic-looking Cybermen on Telos and keep the new Earthshock-model on Earth as they are obviously the newer breed trying to save the old? I mean hey if we can do it in a comic strip (which is still some time away at this point) why not on TV?

NEXT EPISODE : VENGEANCE ON VAROS

The Twin Dilemma

2007-07-09T18:14:00.000-07:00

The Doctor has regenerated, and the man how at the helm of the TARDIS is by no means the same as the man Peri has called Doctor for so long. Prone to fits of rage and even violence he goes to another extreme of self imposed exile and stumbles across a plan to kidnap a pair of child geniuses and perpetuate a race of obscene monsters across space.

See what I did there? I made it sound better than it actually was. Because it's crap as far as a debut story for a new Doctor. For some reason the production team decided that the new Doctor, now played by Colin Baker, should be made to act totally opposite to Peter Davison's "nice guy" of the previous three seasons, and now we have a stranger who is moody, sarcastic, and so unsettled that he tries to kill Peri at one point. He can't even put together a proper fashion statement - the costume that is created for the sixth Doctor is just apalling to look at, especially under the harsh lights of the BBC studios.

As for the story... yeah. Jay and I sat there slack jawed at how horrible the two actors cast as the Sylvest twins performed. Casting must have just decided that oh well any twins will do. They could have hired the twins from Degrassi Junior High and made it work better. Unconvincing delivery of their lines coupled with Auton-like blank faces have made these two twits the worst characters ever in the series - and that's saying something because even the actors in The Gunfighters were trying. So these two twins are mathematical geniuses - shades of Adric just without the charisma - and they have been kidnapped by a rogue Time Lord the Doctor recognizes as Azmael (who we have never ever heard of before). But Azmael has troubles of his own; he is master of a world called Jaconda, which is a garden paradise, but it has been invaded by giant slugs that have lain dormant under the surface for milennia. The leader of the slugs, Mestor, has a plan that will supposedly create a new supply of food for the Jacondan people and for his own gastropod offspring, but the Doctor realizes it is not the benevolant scheme Azmael has been led to believe.

Or something like that.

I feel for Colin Baker, being instructed to trun one of the most beloved television characters of all time into... this. It's no wonder ratings started to flag when this gem concluded season 21, which up until this point was innovative and new, and you could still feel that someone cared about the show. I remember my dad and I watched it and he left the room saying "This is a very different Doctor Who,"

Ain't that the truth.

NEXT EPISODE : ATTACK OF THE CYBERMEN

The Caves of Androzani

2007-07-06T20:32:00.001-07:00

The TARDIS brings the Doctor and Peri to Androzani Minor. The planet is nothing special to look at but under the surface a war is raging between the military forces of Androzani Major and the android army of Sharaz Jek. Minor has the distinction of being the main source of an anti-ageing chemical called spectrox, and Jek is holding the supply ransom unless his demands are met. Caught in the middle once again, the Doctor and Peri face death on all sides, although this time they're not going to get away as easy as in the past.

Yes, we're back to the televised adventures once more. AT it's original broadcast Caves followed directly after Planet of Fire, with no suggestion of any time having passed by Peri's clothes still being the same. Now the gap has been split wide and a second companion has come and gone (but obviously there is not going to be any mention of her here), but it seems to work here; Peri emerges from the TARDIS engaged in some playful teasing with the Doctor as if they have been friends for a while, but Nicola Bryant's performance is a bit less than spectacular with Peri stuttering and whining here and there (something she never did in the audios). The Doctor, good natured fellow that he is, is either oblivious to her teasing or just lets it slide.

Caves of Androzani is one of those nearest-to-perfect adventures we ever saw in the classic series, the only real flaws being visual ones such as the roll and bounce Peri does when falling off a ledge (to be seen to be fully appreciated; Jay and I watched it three times before we moved on) and some unconvincing monster costume (I still say it looks like it's wearing a cape and its floppy fingertips are reminiscent of Admiral Ackbar). Everything else, though, shines. Robert Holmes penned one of the tightest most enertaining scripts of his career with the show complete with his usual set of double acts (The Doctor/Peri, Morgus/Timmin, Stotz/Krelper, Chellack/Salateen) and grim moments of meance underscored by the atmospheric music, the vast sets that were the caves, and directing unlike anything before including the slow dissolve between scenes. And at the centre of it all is the brooding meance of Sharaz Jek; a brilliant mind gone mad, disfigured and isolated from his peers, wanting justice with a big side of revenge.

This is also the end of the road for the fifth Doctor. As with Logopolis there is a flashback sequence of sorts as the Doctor "dies", with specially shot footage of the Doctor's companions urging him to survive and carry on (Adric, Nyssa, Tegan, Turlough, and Kamelion, but no Erimem of course), and then flash of light, *boom*... we have a new Doctor.

NEXT EPISODE : THE TWIN DILEMMA