Bloodheat

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

Warriors of the Deep

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT EPISODE : THE AWAKENING

The Sea Devils

The Doctor and Jo pay a visit to the Master at the high security prison that has become his home. Located on an island, it is the perfect escape-proof facility, with a naval base as a neighbour across the quay. A series of mysterious sinkings prompts the Doctor to assist the navy with their investigations, and it is revealed that the Master has coerced the prison warden to assist him in contacting the Sea Devils, underwater cousins of the Silurians, who are behind the attacks. The Master seeks to ignite a war between the Sea Devils and the humans, but just as the Doctor tries to broker peace once more, the navy attacks and drives the Sea Devils further down the road to war. Once again, there can be no peace between the two races, and the end result is another massive loss of reptilian life.

As the title suggests, a lot of this adventure happens in and around the sea, and with the co-operation of the Royal Navy this ambitious plan was realized. A lot of stock footage was provided of course, but there is extensive location work on a naval base and on a ship equipped with a diving bell. In a show of what was high tech for it's day, a hovercraft is also used to aid Jo's escape from the base, and her return with armed reinforcements to counter a Sea Devil incursion. Why the Royal Navy had two sea-doos standing by is a bit of a mystery but they provided a good high speed chase for the Doctor and the Master.

The idea of the Silurians having undersea counterparts is an interesting one, seeing as most alien menaces have one look, one species, one mode of dress, and everything else that is homogenized. The Sea Devils are designed to appear aquatic as opposed to the land-based look of the Silurians, complete with impressive fins on their heads (which were actually made as hats to make them appear that much taller) and some funky mesh wear. Only the chief Sea Devil actually speaks, in tones that one would expect from a giant reptile, the others just scream when they are shot or blown up. We don't get much of a look at their technology though; with the adventure being 6 episodes long and including so much location work it's possible there wasn't time or budget to build something for just a couple episodes, for the Sea Devil threat is not brought forward until the end of episode 4.

Prior to then, the plot is more concerned with the Doctor and the Master crossing swords (literally at the climax of episode 2) and the bluster and bull of Trenchard trying to keep the goings on at his prison a secret. Trenchard gets replaced as the annoying man in authority by a private parliamentary secretary, who does nothing more than demand food and give orders, and just to make you hate him more, there's a close up of his mouth while he's eating. In Claws of Axos we were treated to the wheedling Chin as government representative, and now this, which makes me wonder if the Doctor Who production crew had some big axe to grind with the British government at the time.

I keep saying this more and more, but I really want this one on DVD sometime soon. It's a classic Jon Pertwee adventure, even if it does suffer from what the late producer John Nathan-Turner said was the problem with 6 episode stories, being that the plot develops in such a way that it feels like a 4 episode story with another 2 thrown on for the heck of it. 3 of Jon Pertwee's 5 seasons follow the format brewing here: 2 adventures of 4 episodes, and 3 epic 6 episode stories, which efectively reduces the amount of scripts to 5 per season, as opposed to the 13 we enjoyed in the 2005 season.

So next up, 6 more episodes. With the Master escaped and on the loose, he's going to pop up again sometime soon.

But not just yet.

NEXT EPISODE : THE MUTANTS