The Invasion of Time

The Doctor has come home to Gallifrey, and he's pissed. After a meeting with strange alien beings who guarantee him complete power over the Time Lords, the Doctor goes home to claim his right as president of the High Council of Time Lords. Leela does not know why the Doctor has changed so dramatically, shouting and bullying his fellow Time Lords. K9 is in on it but he's not saying. After the Doctor becomes President he then turns on his own people, selling them out to the warlike Vardans in their quest for power and dominion over all space and now time itself. But the Vardans are just a foil, and lurking in the background are the nefarious Sontarans.

More Time Lord continuity in this one, with the Doctor reopening a technical loophole he used to escape immediate execution back during The Deadly Assassin. Borusa has undergone a regeneration it seems, and the Capitol of Gallifrey has seen some slight redecorating, making for some very tight corridors. The guards' uniforms have been preserved, as have the high-collared robes of office for the rest of the Time Lords. And there's a Time Lady in this one, the only one seen so far in the entire series. Gallifrey's outer wilderness is also explored when Leela is banished from the citadel and makes contact with the outcast Time Lords who have chosen to live off the land as opposed to carrying on in the safety of their contained world; people after the Doctor's own hearts.

The story itself is a good one, with the Doctor acting out a massive subterfuge in order to gain the confidence of the Vardans and then move against them. But like so many other six part stories, the final two episodes are almost a new story in themselves with the Sontarans arriving to take advantage of the situation on Gallifrey. A chase through the TARDIS ensues with the slimy Time Lord Castellan Kelner helping the Sontarans. Unlike previous trips through the inside of the ship, the TARDIS interior this time is made up of a lot of Victorian brickwork with the roundelled walls ending at the console room. The console room itself feels smaller, the lighting coming from the side now instead of from above; not sure if this was intentional or not, but the long shadows on the console room walls make for an interesting effect. The different lighting also makes K9's casing look more metallic than before.

This is also the last adventure for Leela and this model of K9. Leela takes her thing for passive-agressive men even farther and takes Time Lord guard captain Andred as her husband (and I get this feeling he was not consulted), and K9 chooses to stay with her to look after her (like she needs it). The Doctor looks a bit put out by this despite his initial reservations about her as a companion, but all is not lost; he has another model he has secretly constructed in a box just waiting to be used. The season ends with the Doctor grinning into the camera, heading off into the unknown. Is he going to be lonely? The gap between the seasons leaves a lot of room for authors to play with the Doctor and K9 on their own before returning them to the TV series continuity. So far no-one has done this, but anything is possible.

NEXT EPISODE : THE RIBOS OPERATION

Underworld

Even Time Lords screw up. In their history, the Time Lords attempted to raise the people of the planet Minyos to a higher state, and the Minyans welcomed them as gods. And then the Minyans rebelled, kicked the Time Lords out and blew their planet to bits with weapons they developed. The Time Lords settled on Gallifrey and swore to never interfere again, and the survivors of the Minyan race went off in search of their lost colony ship, the P7E and the race bank cylinders it carried. The Doctor, Leela and K9 encounter a Minyan ship on its fabled Quest, and together they discover the P7E at the heart of a newly-formed planet. The systems of the ship have gone mad over the milennia and created a personality with god-like delusions; the Oracle, as it is called, rules over the guards who in turn terrorize and oppress the Trogs, their slave class.

Uh. Okay, the good thoughts first. Time Lord history lesson good. Oh yes. Some more insight into the Doctor's people is always interesting, finally justifying the non-intervention policy that saw the Doctor exiled to Earth in The War Games.

AWFUL effects. Was there no budget for this thing? All the caves of the planet are CSO effects. All the extras hired as Trogs are awful. The supporting cast are bad too. Even the regulars aren't given enough to really make them stand out. Mind you, Louise Jameson does carry a guy, even if he is a skinny one with dirty feet. Good thing it is all done as a CSO though; K9 would never make it through real tunnels.

Every now and again a brilliant series can go wrong. This is one of those times. Rack it up with previous clunkers like The Gunfighters and Day of the Daleks. Still, the comforting thing here is it's been a long time since the show produced anything this terrible. I think that if there was some way to swing a deal with the cosmic powers that be and we could trade four existing episodes in for four of the missing ones from the 60's, Underworld would be the first ones up on the block.

I've got to show this one to Jay. I'll update this listing when I have.

NEXT EPISODE : THE INVASION OF TIME

The Sunmakers

The Doctor, Leela, and K9 arrive on Pluto and find that it is no longer a barren cold rock at the edge of the solar system, but it is warm and teeming with life. The entire human population of Earth has been moved and effectively enslaved to the all-powerful Company, and now they toil away under six articifial suns for mere pittance pay. To make it worse, the humans are suppressed with chemicals in the air to break their will, and they are taxed on everything imaginable as the Company attempts to recover its investment. The TARDIS crew fall in with the underground movement and set about starting a revolution against the Company and its evil paymaster, the Collector.

This one was fun. The satirical look at taxes and big business kept me giggling through the entire four episodes, especially the antics of the Collector's immediate underling, Gatherer Hade, as he attempts to get chummy with the Doctor and discover what his mission is on Pluto. The Doctor has no mission, of course, not until he discovers the scale of the oppression, and then he's right in there with the people to help them out. Leela gets off some good lines throughout, one of the best being her comment about seeing the place ankle deep in blood before she dies, but we get another glimpse into the reverence she holds for the Doctor when she proudly announces that he is a Time Lord.

The Collector is a new kind of alien villain for the show; cold and unfeeling, focussed only on his profit margins. His diminutative size coupled with his confinement to his wheelchair evokes thoughts of Davros, but without the megalomania. He just makes money. For the Company. And that is all. He doesn't even seem that content, putting some truth behind the saying that money can't buy happiness. The slightest dip in productivity upsets him, but not into a rage, more along the lines of a child who isn't getting his way.

Sunmakers has some interesting production values with a lot of gloomy dreary tunnels (I suspect it was the Underground in parts) and some very sterile white corridors on location. The studio sets for the Gatherer's and Collector's offices are interestingly realized with grand furniture in the foreground and simple black backdrops evoking a surrealist/minimalist.... thing. I liked it though.

I liked the whole thing. Where's this DVD? It would be a great addition to the 2006 release lineup.

NEXT EPISODE : UNDERWORLD

Image of the Fendahl

A research project that will revolutionize archaeology is being conducted in an old priory house in a haunted wood. The Time Scanner, as it is called, is capable to producing a complete image of an object pulled through time, but the process is highly dangerous and unstable, dragging the TARDIS off course and bringing the Doctor and Leela onto the scene. The Doctor discovers the object of the time scans - a skull that supposedly predates the existence of homo sapeins on Earth, but had actually come from offworld and bears the awesome power of a group entity called the Fendahl. The Fendahl can only be complete with the presence of a priestess and 12 leech-like Fendhaleen, and all can be assembled using a local black magic coven and one of the scientists as raw material. The Fendahl is an entity from the myths of the Time Lords themselves, a vampire like collective that will if unchecked suck the life force out of the planet itself (supposedly it did this to Mars before coming to Earth)and then move on, leaving it as a husk.

First thing to note is after his last minute addition to the cast, K9 is sidelined for the adventure, supposedly suffering from some kind of breakdown. Either that or the script couldn't be reworked fast enough to accomodate him. Take a guess at that. Leela causes a stir as usual running around with a knife and dressed in her skins in "modern" times. She also gets a bit wierd, though, first threatening to kill scientist Adam Colby and then giving him a good luck kiss on the cheek mere scenes later. Some speculate that maybe Leela has some sort of thing for passive-agressive men, which could explain why she's with the Doctor.

Cast notes of interest are Wanda Ventham making her second of three appearances in the series, and Geoffrey Hinsliff who may be better remembered as drunken/gambling/obsessed and eventaully dead (I think) cabbie Don Brennan from Coronation Street.

Let us speak of the glorious visual effects of the Fendhaleen as they slither and slide down the hallways of the Fetch priory. Or of the incredible makeup job that was done to transform Wanda Ventham into the priestess.

Wait. On second thought let's not go there.

It's interesting to note how the demise of civilzation on Mars is blamed on the Fendahl, but no-one actually says "Ice Warriors". Which would have been interesting. Unless the Ice Warriors were already hibernating when the Fendahl arrived and it just wiped out whatever else was left. Maybe. The poor Ice Warriors are always getting a bum deal.

NEXT EPISODE : THE SUNMAKERS

The Invisible Enemy

A space-borne virus attacks a shuttle crew and sends them to Titan to prepare a hive for its spawning. The TARDIS is also attacked and the Doctor in infected, becoming a carrier for the nucleus of the swarm itself. Leela takes the Doctor to a medical facility to be treated by Professer Marius and the virus spreads among the staff, forcing the Doctor and Leela to be cloned and injected into the Doctor's own brain to destroy the nucleus. The virus escapes and enlarges itself to human proportions and plans to spawn and take over the galaxy, but with the aid of Marius's robot dog, K9, the Doctor and Leela destroy the breeding tanks on Titan.

The first thing that comes to mind for anyone who has seen this one is the absolutely awful awful design of the nucleus creature itself. While lodged in the Doctor's head it was pretty shapeless but out in the macro world it looks.... ugh. Big shrimp with claws is pretty close to the truth. The people infected by the virus undergo a scary metamorphosis, growing spiky white hair and their faces erupting with welts that look suspiciously like bubble wrap. Wait... it was bubble wrap.

The journey into the Doctor's head by the cloned versions of himself and Leela is very Incredible Journey, all realized with the cunning skills of the BBC's CSO department. Watching it made the inside of my head itch.

And then there's K9. A hit with the kids, a nightmare for the effects department. A robot dog with a sarcastic edge to him, he was the show's reaction to the success of R2D2 and C3P0 in Star Wars the year before. And in a way he's a good addition to the TARDIS crew, but a bit of a convenience factor since he's the second companion to pack a weapon as a matter of routine. Yes, K9 is armed with a laser under his nose. Of course the nature of K9s design means he's not going to be very good on uneven surfaces, but hey that's the magic of the BBC, they can make anything fly. Do I like K9? Yes. And the news that he is returning along with Sarah Jane Smith in the new series episode School Reunion is good, especially from a continuity point of view.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Back to the series.

NEXT EPISODE : IMAGE OF THE FENDAHL

The Horror of Fang Rock

Lost on the way to Brighton at the turn of the century, the TARDIS brings the Doctor and Leela to an isolated lighthouse where something has just fallen from the sky. The old lighthouse keeper, Ruben, knows the story of the Beast of Fang Rock and sets about terrifying junior keeper, Vince, while ribbing the other keeper, Ben, about the risks associated with electrical generators. But whatever has fallen from the sky has an affinity for electrical power and heads for the lighthouse, killing Ben and trapping the Doctor and Leela with the terrified survivors of the crew and a wrecked ship. The creature stalking them is a Rutan scout, marooned on Earth and waiting for a pickup by its mothership. And in the meantime it's mission to to clear the area and kill anything that threatens its survival.

So we finally get to meet the fierce Rutans that have been fighting the Sontarans across space for so long. and they're... well.. nasty, yes, but not exactly impressive. Green blob with tentacles. "What is THAT?" Jay demanded when we watched the DVD of the adventure, pointing to a bad CSO of a green blob clinging to the outside of the lighthouse. The lighthouse is done proprly as a set, but the backgrounds leave a lot to be desired, and the shipwreck at the end of episode 1 needs a bit of work... I'm actually surprised that the restoration team didn't change it.

Some good characters in this one. Poor Vince, frightened by Leela's casual shcuking off of her wet clothes. Poor Adelaide, going hysterical and screaming and getting slapped across the face by Leela (we watched that bit twice). And those scheming "gentlemen" Skinsale and Lord Palmerdale too entwined in their own personal drama to take the Rutan meance seriously until its far too late and people are dying. The Doctor, of course, is perfect, telling this person off, comforting this person, and relying on Leela to keep her cool and help him out. The Rutan, as an adversary, is a sneaky one, and its powers of transmutation make it a force to be reckoned with. And it's a cocky thing, denying that its species' retreat from the Sontarans is anything but a strategic withdrawal.

The thing I find at odds with the whole story is how at the end, despite there being a whole lighthouse full of dead bodies behind them and Leela's eyes changed colour from brown to blue after a near-blinding, our heros jovially leave with a bit of poetry recited as the TARDIS dematerializes. Um. Okay so the Doctor is used to violence and death, and Leela is a warrior, but come on... you're dead, let's party? That's my only bone of conention with this one - otherwise it's a gripping horror story.

NEXT EPISODE : THE INVISIBLE ENEMY

Drift

The Doctor takes Leela to America for her to meet the natives, but they arrive far too late and instead get lost in a terrible snow storm. Out in the snow, though, is something that spooks the local wildlife and is interfering with the Doctor's ability to locate the TARDIS after leaving it. An elite military force is out in the blizzard looking for the Stormcore, an experimental type of weapon that can control the weather. The Doctor uses his UNIT credentials to insinuate himself into the midst of the group and suspects that there is something else going on out in the blizzard, something that could be alive and intelligent. The storm effectively cuts off a small village from the rest of the area and creates ice monsters that are capable of killing, and will kill everyone unless the Doctor can solve the mystery of what is driving the Stormcore.

Or something like that. Again, it was a while ago that I read this book but it was in the dead of winter and it seemed to have a special resonance with me as I sat reading by the window with snow everywhere. It's actually been coming down off and on today as I was flipping through the book to jog my memory, and I found that it evoked a sense of isolation much like how I felt as a child at my grandmother's cottage at Lake St Peter when the snow would come down so heavy we couldn't see past the front verandah. Everyone likes a good ghost story, but this book is proof that they don't all have to take place in haunted houses.

The White Shadow military group are not exactly as harmonoius as the UNIT organization, but we can blame it on their upbringing (they are, after all, Americans). Leela is teamed up with the psychic native American Kristal, finding that she is the only person she can relate to. The Doctor does his best to keep control of the situation but I sometimes found myself wondering if this was the right material for this Doctor; a certain darkness works its way through the story and I often find that these types of tales are more along the lines of what the seventh Doctor evolved into when his character moved from the screen to page. Only minor though. The relationship between the Doctor and Leela does not receive the same amount of comment that is has in previous novels; perhaps author Simon A. Forward felt that Chris Boucher was the man to dig that deep; he would just get on with telling his story.

NEXT EPISODE : THE HORROR OF FANG ROCK

Eye of Heaven

The Doctor and Leela. Something about an expedition to Easter Island. People knocked out. Journeys on boats. Leela riding a whale. Some other crap.

Why do I choose to review this one this way? Cause it doesn't deserve any better. Any book that has to be presented in flashes back and forward cannot be taken seriously. I mean it reads as if someone dropped the manuscript on the floor on the way to the copier but just jammed it all back together and said it was meant to be that way.

Jim Mortimore should have done better. And he has done better; his first entries into Doctor Who were stellar tales in the Virgin New Adventures line with the seventh Doctor and his companions, but along came something called Parasite, which had some interesting insight into how the Founding Families of the Kaldor City society came to lose their power, but that book was finished off very suddenly when Mortimore decided that he could just tie off his Doctor Who book and write a Star Trek novel instead. It appears he wanted to do something artsy for his return. Jim, if you want to do art, use a paintbrush and leave Doctor Who alone.

NEXT EPISODE : DRIFT

The Talons of Weng Chiang

The Doctor takes Leela to Victorian London to show her how her anscestors used to amuse themselves; in short, he is taking her to the theatre. Their arrival however, is marred by the presence of a sinsister illusionist, the great Li H'Sen Chang and his murederous dummy/cyborg Mr Sin. Chang and Sin are in league with a Chinese criminal organization known as the Tong of the Black Scorpion, the followers of which worship the god Weng-Chiang. With the help of the local theatre owner and an eminent pathologist the Doctor discovers that Weng-Chiang is in fact Magnus Greel, a war criminal who fled from justice in the far future using his zygma beam experiments which left him scarred and disfigured.

GAAAHHHHHH I say. That's a sound of pleasure. This has to be one of the best 6 part adventures ever, neither suffering from any slowing of pace nor from the dreaded 2 episode plot switch syndrome. Where does the credit lay? With absolutely everyone involved at every level - it's absolutely one of the best, most atmospheric tales ever made for the show. There's extensive location work down in a Victorian theatre and in the cobbled streets of old London, and even the sewer locations where giant rats run amok are convincing... except for that one bit, Jay will point out. And the giant rat that we see attacking the Doctor and Leela at the end of part 1 leaves a bit to be desired. But that's about where it ends for the bad stuff.

The Doctor looks every inch the Scotland Yard inspector that he is mistaken for by Henry Gordon Jago, the Palace Theatre proprietor, and Jago himself is a fantastic creation for the show, presented perfectly on page and on screen. At the opposite end of Jago's businessman character is Professor Litefoot, every inch a gentleman and only too flattered to have the Doctor allowing him to assist. Leela is a true fish out of water this time, unfamiliar as it is with most mod cons but absoultely perplexed by the trappings of Victorian society such as smoking pipes, table manners, and tea. Ah but she gets to fight some bad Chinese and she does it well.

Yes, the Chinese. As I have mentioned in past entries it's like Doctor Who has always had some kind of axe to grind with the Chinese, citing them as the chief reasons why there would be a third world war in several episodes in the Pertwee era, almost as often as they poked fun at civil servants. Here though we have a Chinese mob in black running through the streets of Victorian London dumping dead cabbies bodies into the sewers, throwing axes at people, and invading homes in the name of their god. But is it racist to go this far? The folks over at DWIN published a fascinating article on the racist perceptions around the adventure, documenting how the censors at TV Ontario in Canada felt that it would be disrespectful to the local Chinese communities and subsequently did not air the epsiodes. The first time I saw this one was on Buffalo's Channel 17 WNED, and they had no qualms. In 1990 when I was working on the zine Chameleon Circuit with the fan club I was part of I called national broadcaster YTV to ask them if they had any reservations about broadcasting the episodes and was answered with a puzzled "What...?"... which is either to say they had no idea what they were showing (which is likely considering their routine screwups when airing the episodes in order) or they didn't think it would be a problem (which was more linked to ignorance of the programme rather than actually watching it and making a decision). Still, I never heard any massive outcry on either of those occasions so it's probably more a case of TVO not wanting to risk it, being publically funded and all that. And when the adventure hit the DVD release schedule, there were no mobs of angry Chinese Canadians protesting outside Worlds Biggest Bookstore, or demanding a boycott of Amazon for selling it online. Personally I found the jabs made during the Pertwee era would be more offensive as they were set in present day, as opposed to a historical adventure which may have embellished a few concepts just for the sake of entertainment. When Jay and I watched it we were not left clutching the pearls and saying how politically incorrect it was for a Victorian police constable to refer to them as yellow and for Litefoot to say he was dealing with "a pair of inscrutable Chinks" in his morgue for the pure and simple reason that back then there was a lot of ignorance towards any race by white folks. It would be interesting to see a Doctor Who set in the deep south of the States during the days of slavery and see how that was handled and if the dreaded n-word would rear its head in the script.

So. Production wise it's a solid show. Script's fantastic, peppered with the wit that only script writer Robert Holmes could create and only Tom Baker could deliver. Characters great. And Mr Sin - creepy! Nothing says fun like being stalked by a killer midget. Especially if it's Deep Roy in there (who went on to be all the Oompa-Loompas in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). "He scares me," Jay said, tucking his feet up on the couch. But funny thing he kept saying his name.. "Deep Roy .... Deep Roy..."

Wait a sec that sounds like a porn name for a famous bottom. But what do I know.

NEXT EPISODE : EYE OF HEAVEN

Match of the Day

The Doctor and Leela arrive on a world where the rules are simple. Sort of. Everyone is a killer, and you can challenge anyone to a duel to the death. And no-one can decline, otherwise it is against the law. Leela creates a stir and then becomes a celebrity when she fights a man but refuses to kill him when she has clearly defeated him. The Doctor becomes her agent while investigating the fate of another agent and his star client, who is on the run, and Leela finds herself in danger from all sides as the powers that be attempt to have her kill ... or be killed.

The society that worships and praises combat was hinted at in Chris Boucher's earlier Last Man Running and as with Corpse Marker takes the Doctor and Leela into the midst of it. Funny thing is the planet itself is never named. The paralells between this place and Kaldor City are there, although there are no robots here, just the odd assassin android, and there are some filthy rich people operating behind the scenes making things go the way they want them. It gets a bit tedious though with the Doctor's constant assertations that this is a "sick" society. He's never been that judgemental before. Leela is perplexed by the bloodlust that is exhibited left and right; as a warrior she only kills when her life is in danger, or to protect someone else. Being forced to kill goes against everything she learned as a warrior, and certainly everything the Doctor has taught her.

I was left feeling though that the whole drama of Match of the Day was a big runaround, like Boucher got so caught up in his own world that the actual story lacked something. It wasn't boring or anything, and the writing style was well thought out but... I suppose the big letdown was the climax. All that for... well, effectively, nothing.

Booooo I say.

NEXT EPISODE : THE TALONS OF WENG CHIANG

Psi-Ence Fiction

The TARDIS is drawn to the woods near the University of West Essex, and the Doctor discovers that the multiverse is frayed at this location due to some experiments in psi-power. Leela senses some gathering darkness around the university, and in the supposedly haunted woods where a young woman was found brutally murdered years earlier.

Yeah. Haunted woods. Students. Bottled water.

Screw it I don't remember this one very well at all. Mustn't have made that big an impression.

NEXT EPISODE : MATCH OF THE DAY

Corpse Marker

The TARDIS brings the Doctor and Leela to Kaldor City at the heart of a society they visited before: this is where the human population is surrounded by servant robots, and the Company controls all the wealth. Almost everyone in Kaldor City works for the company, and among those people now live Uvanov, Toos and Poul, the survivors of a classified incident on board a sandminer years ago. Just as they are trying to get on with their lives, and have been for years, the Doctor and Leela return just as more robot killings begin, although this time the robots have evolved beyond the Dum, Voc, and SuperVoc designations; they have been made to resemble humans, which will make a killer robot that much more difficult to detect...

YES yes yes! This is what I wanted to see for years. Chris Boucher himself has returned to one of his best stories to flesh out the backstory and give us a bit more on Kaldor City, it's robots, and the Founding Families that bankrupted themselves starting the whole thing, and it's just brilliant. I remember when this one came out my friend Jamie was in the UK and I begged and threatened him to bring me a copy back. The development of the relationship between the Doctor and Leela is put into thebackground for this one as the story demands us to focus on the survivors of Robots of Death and see how the return of the Doctor affects them. Uvanov sees Leela first and almost goes into a fit of hysterics, believing that someone is setting him up and trying to drive him mad, and when he encounters the Doctor he is outright hostile and suspicious... which one really can't blame him for. Poul's relapse into his brokendown state is triggered perfectly, and Toos... well she'd rather just be left to her new successes as a storm mine captain.

Boucher's Kaldor City echoes the setup of Coruscant from the latest three Star Wars films, complete with soaring towers, metal walkways and even a run-down unused old section where you just know bad things are happening. The people who live there are for the most part easygoing where robots are concerned, treating them like the tools they are, but some of the younger set have developed some odd fashion sense exhibited by some who dress like robots, and even a young girl who imitates a robot's walk. Beyond the trappings of the killer robots there are probably other things going on there as well, an entire world that would be fascinating to explore, but this really is the last time Doctor Who goes here, at least for now.

But where Doctor Who doesn't go, others do, and the people at Magic Bullet Productions do just that with their own series of tales set in Kaldor City, called, surprise, Kaldor City. I haven't been able to get my hands on any of these yet so I have no idea what they're about aside from the blurbs on the website. I hear some people say they're crap simply because they didn't like the hat that Fiona was wearing at a DWIN meeting almost a hundred years ago (okay it did look like a bird but I digress), but I'm still curious myself. The joy of them being not linked to the continuing Doctor Who continuity means I can get them anytime I want and enjoy them later, if they're good.



NEXT EPISODE : PSI-ENCE FICTION

Last Man Running

As their travels continue, the Doctor and Leela's relationship begins to show signs of strain when her warrior instincts to attack anything start to get on his nerves. Arriving on what looks like a peaceful planet, the Doctor decides to talk a walk and get his headspace back, locking Leela in the TARDIS, only to discover that the planet is not as peaceful as it seems and in fact is teeming with savage life forms. Leela's warrior skills come in very handy on the planet and she rescues not only the Doctor but the members of an investigation sqaud who are hunting a rogue weapons technologist. As every predator is killed by Leela, more arrive to challenge her skills, and the Doctor theorizes that they are being deliberately sent out to do this. The Doctor is right and finds an underground complex where clones are made left and right with the sole purpose to fight and kill in a society where public combat and duels to the death are the norm.

Chris Boucher knows his Leela. Having provided her first two scripts for televsion he now begins to delve a bit deeper into her psyche and how her involvement with the Doctor is affecting her development, and vice versa. The Doctor wasn't planning to have her with him as we all saw in the closing moments of The Face of Evil but he is not the kind of man to just dump her, and realizes that he is now responsible for her and must endure her presence in his life. The resolve to educate her starts to come out here, and a slightly different Pygmalion begins to happen over the next few books.

I know I'm not writing a lot about these ones; I read this almost 8 years ago and don't remember as much as I would like to, but as far as character continuity goes, it's right in stride, developing the Doctor-companion relationship a bit further than was seen on television. The teething pains fo getting used to each other was never fully explored in the televised adventures, and Boucher does a good job of illustrating them without rewriting any established mythology.

NEXT EPISODE : CORPSE MARKER

The Robots of Death

Somewhere far off exists a society where all the menial work is done by robots, and humans more or less sit back and watch it all happen. Mineral wealth is gathered by storm mines which drive across desert worlds and refine the ores they catch in airborne particles, and a minimal crew of humans lounges about while the robots monitor the systems. The Doctor and Leela arrive just as one of the humans is found dead, apparantly strangled. Naturally suspicion falls on the time travellers, but as the death toll mounts it becomes obvious that the real culprits are not humans (or Time Lord) but the robots themselves; one of the crew has gone mad and started reprogramming the robots to kills.

Simple plotline, and one of the most atmospheric adventures ever. There is nowhere to run, and no help to call once the robots begin their killing spree. The robots themselves are fantastic; they have sculpted heads like statues and move with an almost eerie precision as they walk. Their voices are calm and polite at all times, even when they're getting their hands around someone's throat. And the shots were just packed with them wandering about on their missions; one could easily believe that the BBC did a mass-hire for the episode and got 20 extras in for the day. A lot of imagination went into the design of the robots and indeed the entire social structure of the society they serve, with Commander Uvanov openly taunting members of his crew who were once part of powerful families who have gone bankrupt and their next generation have to work alongside the real people. The society has a few other problems as well, the chief amongst them being people suffering mental breakdowns after working with robots for so long and developing "robophobia". And those who regard the robots as mere tools can only stand there in shock as they are killed, or, like Pilot Toos, beg pathetically for their lives.

Jay and I enjoyed this one together, and we couldn't help but snigger at some of the more elaborate face painting jobs done on the human occupants of the sandminer. We were particularly amused by the character of dask, who seemed like he would love to follow up some of his lines with "By the way, I'm so pretty," as he lounged about like a cat. We noticed a few breakdowns with the visual effects as well, such as the CSO screen on the command deck obliterating half of the faces of the robots in front of it where they fell into shadow, and some interesting overlap effects where corridors were magically made longer than the sets allowed for.

The Doctor has of course seen almost everything, so none of this phases him, but for Leela on her first adventure away from her home world and thrust into this odd society with what she considers "creepy mechanical men" she does quite well. Even if you can't knife a robot. But she is adept to helping Toos with an injured arm, and when one of the other crew, Pool, starts to succumb to robophobia she handles him quite well.

I remember when I first watched The Robots of Death I was in grade 6. Or something. The show grabbed my imagination and made me wonder if the robots would ever be back. Sadly the BBC never returned the Doctor to that part of space, but many years later a set of audios along the lines of the Big Finish adventures came along under the title of Kaldor City, named after the city where the all-powerful Company runs practically everything. I haven't heard any of these audios myself but the lineup of actors involved looks impressive, with the original Commander Uvanov reprising his role. Sometime after the discs came out, script writer Chris Boucher began to deliver a series of novels that expanded on the relationship between the Doctor and Leela, starting with a return to Kaldor City.

Which is coming up soon.

NEXT EPISODE : LAST MAN RUNNING

The Face of Evil

The TARDIS brings the Doctor to a strange alien jungle inhabited by invisible monsters that are terrorizing a small tribe called the Sevateem. One of their warriors, a girl named Leela, has been cast out for speaking against their god, Xoanon, and when she meets the Doctor she recognizes him as "the evil one". The rest of her tribe also react to him the same way but Leela helps the Doctor escape, showing him a massive carved effigy of his own face in a mountainside. The Doctor suspects that he has been to this planet before, but he also suspects that there is more to what's going on than meets the eye. The Sevateem are in posession of advanced scientific artefacts and their high priest, Neeva, is talking to his supposed god over a two way radio which has the Doctor's voice. The Doctor suspects that the answers lie with the Sevateem's sworn enemies, the Tesh, and with Leela he goes to their base of operations, an abandoned spaceship beyond the tribe's reach. The Doctor has indeed been there before and remembers linking with the computer system to keep it from collapsing, but the computer achieved sentience with its own mind exisiting side by side with a copy of the Doctor's personality matrix, driving it mad. The computer, Xoanon, has been keeping the two factions of humans apart and influencing them separately for generations as an experiment in eugenics, but now that the Doctor has arrived it plans to wipe everything out, to destroy and be free...

Interesting story and an interesting twist to have the entire Sevateem-Tesh struggle run by their mutual god. And the whole regression of the Sevateem, generations of descendants from a lost survey team sent out from a spaceship while the technicians stayed behind to work on their ship, was done logically, although one has to wonder how long that had been going on; it takes a long time to forget things and have them become legend. The same can be said for the Tesh, who live in the drab white hallways of the space ship and are armed with laser weapons but are not at all familiar with how any of the onboard computer systems work. Except for the particle analysis machine they strap Leela into.

Visually The Face of Evil does that same irritating leap back and forth between the television studio and the film studio, sometimes within the same sequence of scenes. The adventure has no location component at all, but the film sequences make it feel like they went outside for them. The jungle doesn't look like it actually could support life; as with the jungle in Planet of Evil this one looks dead or decayed with nothing resembling foliage anywhere.

Leela becomes the new companion to the Doctor at the end of part four, pushing into the TARDIS and accidentally setting it off into flight. The Doctor doesn't really seem to want her as a companion, her primitive ways a bit too much for him and her ignorance of so much could be a hurdle, but he's stuck with her now. Leela is pretty much a savage, preferring to knife anything that she can't understand, and asking a lot of questions of the Doctor. She is quick to learn from him, though, and holds him in not quite godlike esteem like Katarina did the first Doctor, but knows that he has powers and she can learn from him and become a better person. And like much of her tribe she runs around in skins, close to naked. Apparantly this is a big deal, especially if you're a dad in the UK and the show comes on after the football scores. I think they shiuld have just asked Neeva to put some proper pants on; I didn't like seeing the sides of his ass cheeks that much. And the Sevateem seemed like a fairly smelly lot; Leela was the only woman we saw until a split second shot later on, and it was interesting to note that she had access to shaving supplies and the men did not. Funny that.

NEXT EPISODE : THE ROBOTS OF DEATH