The Five Doctors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT EPISODE : WARRIORS OF THE DEEP

The Dalek Invasion of Earth

They're back! The Daleks! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! Season two goes in all guns blazing with the return of the mutant race from Skaro, but this time they're on Earth, they've conquered us, and they are tearing the planet apart. The Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan come into conflict with their old foes sometime after the year 2164, and are almost immediately separated in the ruins of London. The girls fall in with a resistance group planning bold yet ultimately suicidal attacks against the Daleks, while Ian and the Doctor are taken captive. Everyone makes their separate ways to Bedfordshire, where the Daleks have created a vast mine in their efforts to get at the Earth's core, and the final battle between humans and Daleks is set.

Some changed were made to the Dalek design for this episode; their bases were made taller to afford them better movement and a more indimidating presence. For some reason the voice processing was changed from the metallic reverberations in their first appearance to what now sounds like men holding their noses off to the side of the set, and the sound of a Dalek gun firing has also changed from a noise like metal being torn apart to a sinister hiss. But they're still Daleks, and tehre is plenty of exterminating to go around. And there are so many of them! Previously there were only four Daleks built for studio work but now we have six in one shot; five regular versions and one made over in all black. The Black Dalek, or the Dalek Supreme as it would later become known, made its first appearance in episode 3, Day of Reckoning.

Unlike any previous adventure, The Dalek Invasion of Earth has a lot of scenes recorded on location, including a particularly chilling sequence with Barbara and some resistance fighters crossing Dalek-occupied London through deserted streets and past famous landmarks. Anyone who has seen 28 Days Later will recognize Westminster Bridge, although this time the Daleks are crossing it in force, not hoardes of crazed zombies. There is an undead element in the story in the form of the Robomen; human beings processed to obey the Daleks and more or less becoming Daleks themselves in all but form. Bit slow though.

And then there's Susan. Yes, I know, it's time for the usual moaning about her. But she did okay. So okay that she fell in love with a handsome young man who was willing to offer her exactly what she has been after for a long time know: a single place and time to call her own. But it's not a choice she gets to make for herself; seeing that she has options now, the Doctor locks her out of the TARDIS and leaves her behind with her new man, knowing she would never willingly leave her grandfather while she felt he still needed her. Susan does not fly into a rage nor does she scream; she accepts her new life and goes off with David to help rebuild the planet once the Daleks have been beaten.

Lastly, a word on the format. BRILLIANT. I love the efforts of the Restoration Team. This story is one of the few that has received the full deluxe treatment on DVD so far, complete with completely remastered picture, better sound, and an option to choose newly-created CGI effects over the original wobbly pie plate spaceships that were giggled at even in 1964. I took the enhanced option, and why not. It's not like the integrity of the episodes are at stake here; if anything, Doctor Who challenged its viewers to use their imaginations and see past some of the weaker special effects, and the Restoration Team have done just that and given us a real treat with their visuals of Dalek saucers hovering in the skies above the smoking ruins of London. Unlike the controversial DVD release of the Star Wars trilogy last year, there is an option to either move with the times or enjoy some sweet nostalgia. Either way, it's the Daleks, so who cares.

NEXT EPISODE : VENUSIAN LULLABY

Planet of Giants

The doors of the TARDIS open while the ship is till in flight, setting off alarms and creating panic amongst the crew. The Doctor does not know exactly why it happened, but Susan knows that the most dangerous moments of their flight are just at the point of materialization. When the travellers emerge from the ship, they find that they have indeed been affected, and they are now roughly one inch tall. The TARDIS lands in between the stones of a garden path outside a cottage where an ambitious industrialist is financing a project to create DN-6, a lethal pesticide which kills indiscriminately. And if it can kill anything else that lives in the garden, then it could also be deadly to four time travellers.

Barbara comes into contact with the pesticide in the middle of this three part story, but tries to keep her contamination a secret either to keep her companions from worrying about her, or maybe she's just afraid of being told what an idiot she is for being careless. Still, it's a solid performance from Jaqueline Hill even if her 1964 hairstyle takes up more screen than her face. And what does she put in it? My sister watched part of episode 2 with me and noticed that when touched, Barbara's hair doesn't move.

There are two interesting points to the story; the first being the reasons why the TARDIS would materialize in miniature form at all. The ship does, after all, travel through the relative dimension of time, so who is to say that its other dimensions are not fluid while it is in transit? The space/time vortex that the TARDIS travels in is often referred to as a mysterious realm where ordinarly laws of physics do not apply, but in a physical sense it might require a lot less energy to transport a smaller object through time than it would a full sized police box. The other interesting point is the story's statement on ecology. In the beginning, Doctor Who was aimed primarily at children and when it was not focussed on historical adventures it would dip into the educational side; in this case the pesticide DN-6 was wiping out not only pests but other insects and life forms that are essential to the environment. Witness the dead earthworms, dead ants and the magnificent animatronic housefly (critics of the show's special effects should see this as an example of what can be achieved even on a limited budget).

And on the production side of things, this would be the only 3 part adventure until 1987. The script was originally much longer and reportedly was shot in its entirety as a 4 part adventure before being trimmed down to it's present length. No word has ever come on the status of that footage, but should it ever come to light it would be fantastic as a special DVD release with an alternate extended movie format version included in the package, such as with the 1989 adventure The Curse of Fenric.

Day saved again and all that by the end of episode 3. Season two has started well enough, but what's a second season without a little of the magic that made the first a smash...

NEXT EPISODE : THE DALEK INVASION OF EARTH

The Reign of Terror

The season finale opens with the Doctor attempting to return Barbara and Ian to Earth again, and he succeeds to an extent. The TARDIS lands not in England, but in France of 1794, during the bloody and violent French Revolution. The country is paralysed with fear, and all traitors are rounded up and decapitated on the guillotine in Paris. Swept up in history once more, the Doctor's companions become prisoners and are sentenced to death, and the Doctor masquerades as a high ranking official in his efforts to rescue them. Barabara and Susan narrowly escape death on the guillotine by being rescued by sympathizers, and Ian is entrusted with a message to be delivered to English spy James Sterling. The Doctor is not the only one masquerading, though, and enemies are everywhere, and he is taken to meet Robespierre, the Tyrant of France. And waiting somewhere outside the sphere of events in Paris is Napoleon Bonaparte, ready to take his place in history and rule the country.

As with Marco Polo and The Aztecs, the Doctor and company are once more players in history, although this time Barbara finds it amusing to see how the French attempt to stop Napoleon from ascending to power; a far cry from her belief that the past can be changed. The Doctor throws himself into the role of an imposing Regional Governor, although on the road to Paris resorts to clocking the watchman of a road crew over the head with a shovel. Ian is Ian as usual, and Susan copes very well with events for a change, only getting alarmed by the rats in her prison cell.

The Reign of Terror is a 6 part story, but due to the aforementioned clearing of the BBC archives, episodes 4 and 5 are missing. I didn't have an audio version of the missing episodes available to me but the missing material is abridged on the VHS release of the adventure. Carole Ann Ford (Susan) provides liking narration against a backdrop of recovered clips, dialogue samples an still images. Unfortunately, the Doctor's meeting with Robespierre in episode 4, The Tyrant of France , is missing, and we are deprived of the spectacle of the Doctor confronting one of history's most notorious figures. The adventure is a lot of fun to watch, the period detail amazing for the limited resources that the BBC had to operate with at the time. At the end of the adventure, William Hartnell provides a voice over set against a backdrop of stars; the Doctor says that their destiny is out amongst them, and they should go and find it.

NEXT EPISODE : PLANET OF GIANTS

The Sensorites

The story opens on board the TARDIS, picking up from the last few moments of The Aztecs. There is an awkward moment of dialogue between the crew of the ship wherein Ian praises the marvels of the TARDIS and a quick recap of the previous adventures follows. It all seems a bit forced to have everyone stopping to reflect, but by this time Doctor Who had been on the air for 24 weeks, which is already longer than a normal television season these days. Here we were with characters who had been through several levels of hell without much of a break in between adventures, their lives threatened at almost every step. And there were still 12 weeks of programming to go before the season ended.

This is also the first story to take place partly in a space ship. The ship is held captive in orbit around the Sense Sphere, home of the mysterious Sensorites, who all resemble short old men with black eyes, white hair, and round floppy feet. The Sensorites are another xenophobic race, suspicious of vistors from other worlds, and to protect themselves they have prevented the Earth ship from leaving orbit by controlling the minds of its human crew. Unable to control the Doctor and his party, they steal the lock from the TARDIS to prevent them from being able to leave in it. This is the first time the TARDIS is directly attacked, and one of the few times it is actually shown to be vulnerable. And, it is now the third time the travellers have been denied access to it. They become uneasy allies with the Sensorites, helped by the fact that Susan appears to be a latent telepath and they can communicate with her directly. On the Sense Sphere the travellers become embroiled in not only a mystery that will determine the fate of the Sensorite race, but a political scheme that may well result in their deaths.

Barbara sits two episodes out, marooned on the orbiting Earth ship, and Susan suddenly decides to be a grown up and doesn't scream at all, but adopts an air of arrogance at her newfound powers - to such an extent that she challenges the Doctor's decisions. Yes, I am still gnashing my teeth about this character. I would like to surmise that Susan's inconsistencies would be a result of her alien past conflicting with her emerging human side due to her time on Earth at Coal Hill School, but somehow I doubt it was thought out to that extent. Susan serves not only as a foil for the Doctor so he can have someone to relate to, but she's really just there to keep younger viewers interested, giving them someone to identify with in the series. The Doctor, after all, can be very harsh and mean when his temper is stirred, and Ian and Barbara... well they're teachers, no child is going to spend Saturday afternoon cheering for characters who respresent their mortal enemies from Monday to Friday. And I don't mean to down Carole Ann Ford's performances as Susan - she was doing her best with what she was given to work with - but I just think that Susan was not the best thought-out character, swinging from maturity and aloofness one episode and reduced to a cringing whiner the next. In later novels (published well after the original series' final air-date in 1989) authors would get the chance to revisit Susan and shed some light on her character - the two novellas that I reviewed as prequels to the series are fine examples - but for the time being, she is a bit of a weak link. What are we going to do with her?

NEXT EPISODE : THE REIGN OF TERROR

The Aztecs

Have you ever wanted to change history?

Every science fiction venture involving time travel always runs up against this wall where characters are in a position to alter the past based on their own perspective from the future. All fine and dandy to want that, but the logic always remains that if you are from the future, and you change intentionally change something in the past, like slipping back and giving yourself the winning lotto numbers for a big draw, your own future will change, including your present. You'll end up winning buckets of money, be rich, have no reason to go back in time to provide yourself with the winning numbers, and thus not go back, you'll never get the numbers, you won't win, and you'll end up right where you were before. Mainstream films like Back to the Future loved tinkering with the past just for fun without seriously examinging the logic of past timelines. To their credit, the writers of the Star Trek : Voyager episode "A Year In Hell" actually did handle this properly, and every small attemept that was made to alter time changed everything in the future of that episode.

Here we have Barbara and Susan emerging from the TARDIS into a tomb of an Aztec priest in Mexico sometime before the arrival of Cortez. Barbara finds a way out into the temple and is mistaken as the reincarnation of the Aztec priest Yetaxa. The rest of the travellers follow her out, but the tomb is not deisgned to allow re-entry and they are trapped outside, away from the TARDIS. The Doctor insists that Barbara continue to play her role as Yetaxa to allow him time to figure out how to get back to the TARDIS, but Barbara takes it upon herself to attempt to alter the Aztec way of life by forbidding human sacrifice. Her initial attempt backfires and incurs the suspicions and wrath of Tlotoxl, the high priest of sacrifice (which is understandable as Barbara is trying to take away his job), and the travellers are split up; Susan is packed off to a seminary where she raises a stink by refusing to marry a man chosen for her, the Doctor is shuffled off to a garden to sit with other old people and after some mild flirting manages to get engaged to the lady Cameca, and Ian is sent to train with the Aztec army but comes up against some stiff competition from the warrior Ixta, who would gladly kill Ian given the chance.

Last time I railed on Susan for her freaking out sessions and I am happy to say that here she only gets hysterical once when she cries out in alarm at the human sacrifcice. Barbara really holds her own as the imposter god, speaking with formality to the high priests of the temple. For a science teacher Ian really knows how to fight and renders Ixta unconscious in their first bout, and despite being drugged puts up a good struggle the second time they clash as well. But it is the Doctor who shows the most shocking changes this episode, consoling Barbara after scolding her for her attempts to change things as if he himself may have tried once and failed as well. He really pours on the charm with Cameca as well, shamelessly flirting with her to gain information about how the tomb was built in his attempts to get back to the TARDIS.

This adventure was given the deluxe treatment when it was released on DVD, and thus is the best quality episode I have watched so far in this chronological sequence. Extensive restoration work was done on all four episodes to clean up the frames, enhance the soundtrack, and reproduce the "video-look" of the original episode. To compare the quailty of the DVD with the old muddy messy grainy VHS version is to compare night to day, and I can't wait for more of the old black and whites like this to get the same treatment. Full techincal details of how The Aztecs was restored can be found at http://www.restoration-team.co.uk/ along with details of their other Doctor Who projects. I didn't bother to listen to the commentary on this one yet; maybe at some future time I will go back and listen, but as the blog title suggests, I do have a mission here, and it is time to press on....


NEXT EPISODE : THE SENSORITES

The Keys of Marinus

The TARDIS materializes on a beach made of sharp glass surrounded by an ocean of acid. Welcome to Marinus, a planet where violence and agression has been outlawed for thousands of years through use of a machine called the Conscience. But there will always be usurpers, and a race of men called the Voord have found a way to resist the power of the machine and now seek to control it themselves and enslave the people of Marinus to their will. To stop this, the five micro keys to the machine have been removed and hidden in secret places around the planet, and having deprived them of access to the TARDIS (two adventures in a row for that plot device now) a man named Arbitan sends the Doctor, Ian, Susan and Barbara off to find the keys for him so the machine can be reactivated and the Voord stopped.

So here we go on another epic, a 6 part adventures this time. Through use of travel devices disguised as wrist watches our crew journey to an idyllic city where all is not as it seems, a jungle where time is moving too fast, an icy mountain complete with a grubby trapper with lusty ambitions towards Barbara, and the city of Millennius where Ian is wrongfully accused of murder. For the time the series was made this was a very ambitious adventure, involving a large cast, even drafting the characters of Altos and Sabetha in episode 2 as temporary companions. And the different settings required would make many demands on the props and sets departments. Terry Nation provided the script, and elements of his previous story, The Daleks, can be spotted in episode 2 with a bunch of disembodied brains in glass cases.

The companions are all working well together, growing closer every episode, with the Doctor immediately leaping to defend Ian from the charge of murder in episode 5. The Doctor is absent from episodes 3 and 4 of the advnture as William Hartnell was on vacation or asleep or something, and we see the Doctor trusting Ian and Barbara to take Susan with him on their adventures to recover two of the keys while he journeys ahead to locate the final one. Or maybe he was hoping they would lose Susan somewhere, because I am starting to wish they would. For an alien with the same roots as the Doctor one would expect Susan to be a bit more together than she is; after all, Ian and Barbara should have bee reduced to gibbering wrecks by now from what they've been through. Susan has travelled with the Doctor for some time now and freaks out at least once every episode:

episode 1 - The Sea of Death : freaks out and needs a hug after her shoe falls into a pool of acid
episode 2 - The Velvet Web : goes all loopy wierd over a silk dress
episode 3 - The Screaming Jungle : freaks out because a vine touches her
episode 4 - The Snows of Terror : freaks out and needs a hug after seeing some frozen dead men yet marveloussly recomposes herself to crawl across a brittle bridge made of ice stalagtites to get away from them
episode 5 - Senetence of Death : doesn't do any freaking out and is part of a mob who swarm a guy as he tries to flee court
episode 6 - The Keys of Marinus : freaks out and needs big hugs after being held at gunpoint

Okay blame the times I suppose. As the series progresses the roles of the companions will change somewhat and thankfully the girls will get a bit more backbone and even arm themselves on occasion (or in the case of some, as a matter of routine). But for now here we are stuck with this girl who seems to trip and hurt her ankle every time things are going well and has to be carried or pampered or consoled. It's too much. Marry her off and leave her behind somewhere.

NEXT EPISODE : THE AZTECS

Marco Polo

If there is one story that sits at the top of the list for most anxiously awaited for rediscovery, it would be all 7 episodes of Marco Polo.

Following immediately from their claustrophobic experience in the TARDIS, the travellers find themselves on an icy mountain slope somewhere on Earth. Barbara and Ian speculate that it could be the Andes or the Alps, but Susan correctly guesses that they are in the Himalayas, on the roof of the world. The previous adventure still haunts the travellers, though, and the Doctor reveals that one of the TARDIS power circuits had burned out and left the ship stranded without power. They are rescued by the Venetian merchant Marco Polo and his companions, who are en route to Peking to pay visit to Kublai Khan in China of 1289.

My thoughts on this adventure are going to be handled a bit differently as I did not actually see the episodes. In the mid 1970s, the BBC made a decision to systematically purge its archive of programme recordings that they felt were no longer useful for broadcast and could not be re-sold on foreign markets. Many episodes of Doctor Who were lost in this clearing of house, the 7 episodes comprising Marco Polo amongst them. Over time film copies of the lost episodes were returned to the archive by collectors and overseas television stations, and while some stories returned intact, others returned incomplete. Marco Polo did not return in any fashion, and is still (hopefully) out there awaiting rediscovery. Or some greedy so-and-so has it and is hoarding it for himself and is really annoying millions of people across the world, putting him on par with George W Bush these days. But I digress. The sound recordings for all the "missing" episodes were preserved and have been released on CD over the years, with guest narration (in this case it is by William Russell, who played Ian Chesterton in the series) to fill in the blanks and keep the story running, so while I can't watch the complete series I can still enjoy it either listening in my car, or on a train, or on the bike at the gym. It is on the success of these releases and a few radio plays in the 1980s and 1990s that Big Finish would build their library of audio only adventures (see my first blog for their details and website) and keep Doctor Who going.

It is only when I try and explain the missing episodes situation to people that I realize how hard it is to be a Doctor Who fan. If it's not enduring the sneering of fans of other shows about the lack of flashy special effects and low budget sets, then it's the sheer lack of availability of the entire series. Right now there are 108 episodes of the show missing, some of them respresenting pivotal moments in the show's history, and damn if it isn't frustrating to try and enjoy something that isn't all there. Star Trek fans will never know the frustration seeing as that franchise has been syndicated left right and centre and just refuses to go away, so in the end they may just get bored with their show (god knows I got bored with it a long time ago) while we Whovians sit and wait and hope for more to turn up. My friend Jamie would laugh and say "Those episodes were lost for a reason!" but that's just him refusing to allow me my fun. *sigh*

Even in audio form, though, Marco Polo is compelling. This is the first historical adventure of the series, a theme which will continue for years, where the only elements of science fiction are the travellers and the TARDIS itself. With the ship broken down our regulars are made allies of Marco Polo, but he intends to give the TARDIS to Kublai Khan as a gift in hopeful exchange for his release from the Khan's services. The Doctor must not only scheme to get his ship back and get everyone away to safety, but must also be wary of the treacherous Tegana, a warlord emissary on an anything but peaceful mission to Peking. Tegana manages to cast suspicion on the travellers, prompting Polo to confiscate the key to the ship lest the Doctor finish his repairs and escape with his friends. The journey to Peking is a long one across the Gobi desert and into China, and over 7 weeks of original broadcast the viewer would actually get the sense of the TARDIS crew being along for the ride for a long time, and not just parking for a few hours, sorting out a local alien invasion and then going again. Unlike my complaint against an episode of The Daleks, this long trek does not suffer from any dull moments; the dialogue between the characters is alive and witty, and the tension surrounding the attempts to escape with the TARDIS palpable even without a visual presence. I really really wish I could have seen this one, even if my imagination conjures up much more extravangant settings and effects than the BBC could have managed back in 1963. But mine is certainly not a unique request. I have had the opporunity to speak with a delightful Scottish lady named Jessie MacAuley, who actually remembered this episode, and she told me it was very good, so I have at least one sort-of review from someone who saw it with her own eyes. Who knows, maybe one day I will get to see it myself.

NEXT EPISODE : THE KEYS OF MARINUS

The Edge of Destruction

They say you never really get to know a person until you've gone to hell with them. Or something like that. Imagine if you will you're stuck in an elevator with strangers, or people you may only slightly know, and what kind of frictions might develop as you await rescue. Now take it a step farther and remove the possibility of rescue, that you are helpless, that there are forces working against you that are going to kill you. And then you want someone to blame. Add sharks and you've got Open Water, which followed the same formula, dumping two unfortunate divers in the middle of shark-infested waters. Replace the ocean with a suddenly stranded TARDIS, and that's The Edge of Destruction.

As series continuity goes, the evnts of the previous episodes have taken place over a very short period of time; it's doubtful that anyone actually got any sleep until being held captive by the Daleks on Skaro and coming close to dying of radiation sickness. Ian and Barbara want to go home; they are scared and have lives they must return to. As soon as it becomes apparant that there is something wrong with the TARDIS, the Doctor immediately suspects they are actually attempting to sabotage the ship to blackmail him into taking them back to Earth. The entire crew start to feel the creeping parinoia of being trapped inside the dying time machine, perhaps wondering if something from outside has broken in and is now stalking the corridors. The Doctor reacts with outright hostility and prepares to take the extreme measure of throwing Barbara and Ian off the ship into the void outside, which would certainly kill them. It is only when it becomes obvious that the TARDIS itself is trying to communicate with the crew to alert them to the danger they are facing that the Doctor relents and must make amends to the two teachers. Susan herself beings to suspect Barbara and Ian until she rationalizes that there are other factors at play, but the Doctor remains adamant until almost the last minute.

This is where the friction between the Doctor and his two newest companions starts to wane. The Doctor himself says to Barbara "As we learn about each other, so we learn about ourselves," which would indicate that he realizes his own faults and begins to see the value in the others around him. After dealing with such extreme situations one after another the crew are beginning to get used to each others ways of coping with stress and realizing that as a group they do work well together in a crisis, almost like a family.

The Edge of Destruction is a 2 part adventure, with standalone titles of Edge of Destruction and The Brink of Disaster. In the final moments of the second episode, Susan and Barabara go outside onto a snowy landscape and find a giant footprint in the snow, something Susan speculates must have been made by a giant...

NEXT EPISODE : MARCO POLO

The Daleks

This is the story that really brought Doctor Who into the national spotlight, introducting some of the most famous TV monsters of all times, the title villains: the Daleks. Even my own 7 year old nephew is not immune to their allure, and can often be heard muttering "Exterminate!" at any who get in his way (although Parker's plans for universal domination may be somewhat different from those of the Daleks).

The travellers emerge from the TARDIS into a petrified jungle. The trees have turned to stone, the soil barren and dead. A mysterious city lies at the edge of the forest, and the Doctor contrives to explore it despite the protests of his companions. Susan is used to her grandfather's whims of exploring and goes along with him, her own scientific curiosity aroused. Ian and Barbara, having just escaped the barbarism of the Tribe of Gum, now have to come to terms with the fact that they are not only out of their normal time, but now on an alien world as well. When they reach the city, they separate to explore, and first Barbara, then the others, are captured by the Daleks. It is revealed that the Daleks are one of the last two surviving races on Skaro; the other being the Thal people. Both races were engaged in a horrible nuclear war which reduced the planet to ashes generations ago, and to survive the Daleks have retired into mobile casings that house what is left of their bodies. The machines are also powered by static electricity, and as such they cannot move off the metal floors of their city. Not yet. (full details of Dalek design, and lots of images at http://www.daleklinks.co.uk/ ) Our regular cast eventually meet the Thas as well, but the Thals are not the monsters that the Daleks are; indeed, they are perfect humanoids, their mutation process having come full circle. Unlike the agressive Daleks the Thals are not keen to start another war, but the Doctor convinces them that without asserting themselves and attacking the Daleks they will all be destroyed by them sooner or later.

Still the anti-hero, the Doctor can be seen manipulating events to get his own way. He even goes as far as to sabotage the TARDIS as an excuse to explore the city and look for a means to repair, which leads them right into trouble. And when the question of reigniting the conflict between the Daleks and the Thals comes up he sees no reason why the Thals should not be made into an army at his disposal, despite the objections Ian has. A dying Dalek later begs the Doctor for help, or the whole race is doomed, and he coldly stands by and lets it die, saying that even if he did want to help the Daleks, he doesn't know how.

The Daleks. Magnificent monsters. The design of the Daleks does not do much to intimidate these days, and the first thing people can say is how silly they are for not being able to go up stairs. In this day and age of CGI monsters that can melt through walls or climb across ceilings, there isn't exactly much to fear from a small tank that can't go off a flat surface. But the Daleks don't have to run around and shoot everyone; they've already destroyed their world with a neutron bomb once, and they survived, so if letting off another one to wipe out the Thals is what it takes, so be it. They are cruel. They are totally hostile, rabidly xenophobic; traits that almost make them as bad as certain humans in our own history, which is really the fear that they inspire; they're not as alien as all that when they are, in effect, us, to an extreme degree. Terry Nation, who wrote the 7 episode script, went on record once saying that he had modelled the Daleks on the Nazi SS (although in an interview in the early days of the Dalek phenomenon he simply shrugged and said that he needed a villain for his script and poof there they were) and the parallels cannot be missed, right down to the well-known battle shriek of "EXTERMINATE!".

The adventure is made up of 7 standard length episodes, their titles being: The Dead Planet, The Survivors, The Escape, The Ambush, The Expedition, The Ordeal, and The Rescue. My only beef with stories this length, especially in this era of the show, is sometime you can see where things could have been picked up a bit, some bits removed, and maybe even an entire episode's worth of material trimmed to tighten it up. I maintain that episode 6, The Ordeal has more to do with how painfully slow Barbara and Ian's Thal raiding party moves through a cave system trying to find a back way into the Dalek city to attack it; it is an ordeal for the viewer to sit there and watch Ian, then Ganatus, Kristas, Barbara and Antodus all take turns jumping over a chasm, and when inevitably someone slips, you can't help but think "It's about time..." I had a guest viewer for this one; my friend Mark was visiting for the weekend and as usual with him made a lot of heavy sighs and barely-stifled sniggers as we watched the black and white serial. I can't actually spell his reaction out (it involves a wet raspberry sound) but do take comfort in the fact that Parker was here yesterday, and actually said "Exterminate Uncle Mark!" and avenged the Daleks for his criticism.

And once all is done, and the Daleks are defeated, the TARDIS leaves Skaro. The Doctor sets the controls and the ship takes off. All is normal, until there is a thunderous explosion, everyyone is thrown to the floor, and the lights in the console room go out...

NEXT EPISODE : THE EDGE OF DESTRUCTION

An Unearthly Child

So this is where it all really started.

Susan Foreman is an interesting pupil at Coal Hill School, and as with any other school the faculty begin to notice and talk. History teacher Barbara Wright and science teacher Ian Chesterton decide to follow Susan home after school, and arrive at an old junkyard at 76 Totters Lane. Instead of finding Susan up to no good they encounter an old man and a police telephone box, and when they believe Susan is being held captive inside the box they force their way past him and into the box, which is actually the TARDIS. Bigger on the inside than the outside, this is obviously something not of this Earth.

This is the first time we see the Doctor, and he is not the stuff of which heros are made. Grumpy, irritible and selfish, he does not want anything to do with Ian and Barbara but realizes that the cover he and Susan have both been living under is now effectively blown. The only option if he is to let the teachers out of the ship is to leave Earth, a prospect Susan does not wish to face as she has grown attached to the planet during their time there. Rather than release them, the Doctor activates the ship and sends them all hurtling back into the era of the cave men, where a desperate tribe is without fire and will do anything to get it. Captured by the tribe and treated as pawns in a political game between oppsing would-be leaders, the TARDIS crew must not only make fire for them, but try and survive.

For the Doctor and Susan this is not exactly a new turn of events as they have been travelling for quite some time. Barbara and Ian, however, are contemporary people not used to having spears waved at them and dirty unkempt (and probbaly smelly) cavepeople threating them with death. Barbara cracks relatively early in a fit of hysteria when lost in the jungle; Ian dutifully gets her to pull herself together and challenges the Doctor on all his calls about escape. The Doctor just wants out; he has seen enough and wants to get away. Ian and Barbara however are more compassionate and react to the distress of a wounded caveman, and Susan with them. Also assuming the role of the alpha male in a time of crisis, Ian tells one of the cavemen in a surprising show of character that the Doctor is their leader, perhaps recognizing that the Doctor has the knowledge that will get him and Barbara back to 1963. When the time travellers do escape, though, the TARDIS does not take them to London of 1963 but to a strange mist shrouded forest somewhere else. The Doctor cannot control the ship it seems, and without precise navigational information fed into the computers at the time of departure, there is no way to direct its course. But the navigation is not the only thing on the blink; the radiation meter reads normal, but as soon as no-one is looking at it, the dial clicks back into place and the needle points to the danger reading. The world outside is poison.

The format of the series at this time was one episode per week, approximately 23 minutes in length. Adventures were spead over a few weeks, and An Unearthly Child was made of four parts in total. Each episode was also individually titled, but collectively given a working name; in this case the serial was known also as 100,000 BC and The Tribe of Gum. The individual episode titles were: An Unearthly Child, The Cave of Skulls, The Forest of Fear, and The Firemaker.

How does it stand up as a debut? To look back at it now, obviously it is not as sharp visually as other shows. The black and white picture quality immediately screams of an era so far gone that younger viewers will think there is something wrong with their television set. My own copy is a prerecorded VHS tape from CBS Fox video, and it's not the cleanest out there. Digital resoration is progressing in leaps and bounds, though, and eventually when this adventure is put onto DVD it will be improved immeasureably. Visuals aside, though, An Unearthly Child starts the series off with a bang, introducing us to the key players who will be our guides to strange new worlds in the weeks and, eventually, years to come. Episode four provides not only closure to the adventure but sets us up for the next week's serial, where the Doctor and companions will meet the creatures that will propel the show into the public eye and guarantee its success.

NEXT EPISODE : THE DALEKS

Time and Relative

The difference one immediately notices about Time and Relative is that it is told in first person narraitve, which is rare for a Doctor Who adventure. Obviously being a television series we are always going to be on the outside looking in without so much as an episode told with first person narraitve in voice-over form or anything, so to actually read one is a bit of a trip. And to make things even more interesting, it is told by the Doctor's granddaughter, the mysterious Susan Foreman.

Picture it: London, late March 1963. A 15 year old girl goes to school just like any other, but she knows things about the world that a normal 15 year old would not. And while she excels at some topics in her classes she is abominably bad at others, questioning the answers, arguing with her teachers, getting her facts wrong. And when she goes home at night, she goes to a junkyard at 76 Totters Lane in Shoreditch where there is nothing but, well, junk, and a blue London police box she refers to as "the Box". And that's where she and her mysterious grandfather live. The Ship has disguised itself to blend in with London of the era, and unbeknownst to the people of the time, two aliens are living amongst them.

This examination of the Doctor and Susan's activities in the months before the series began is a fascinating adventure. As with Frayed it is also best to be enjoyed after having seen some, if not all, of the televised series and having some questions answered. Not so much in the grand scale of the first three episodes of Star Wars but more the mystery and subtleties of Twin Peaks : Fire Walk With Me. Ahh prequels, gotta love em.

Susan and her school chums go about their daily lives at Coal Hill School, Susan being a bit of an outcast for her "unearthly" qualities and bonding with others who are also on the fringe of the school's culture; a girl who gets into trouble for fighting, and an awkward boy in the ROTC. Like normal kids they face a bully, spy on teachers at the pictures (an interesting cameo by Barabara Wright and Ian Chesterton, who will become very important to Susan very soon) and enjoy the lifestyle of London in the swigning sixties. It's just that it's almost April and it hasn't stopped snowing, and the whole world is feeling a distinct chill. In a world so recently threatened by the Cuban Missile Crisis, Russia is blaming the Americans, and the Americans are blaming the Russians, but the Cold is something entirely different that will soon turn snowmen into killers and hold central London in a frigid deathlock.

The Doctor is hardly in this story as a character, but his presence is everywhere. Susan feels a distance from him that every other companion in his life is bound to feel as well, and she is constantly aware of her own alien-ness that separates her from those around her. The Doctor is aloof, tending to observe the goings on around him more than take part or interfere, concerned that any action taken by him or Susan will alert their people (nameless at this point, and will remain so until The War Games in 1969) and bring down their wrath. Susan is also alert to the agents from Home finding them, but her exposure to the humans has made her much more sympathic to their plight and compels her to help them.

What's interesting to note is that for a few days as this story progresses, kiler snowmen stalk the streets, even attacking school children in a playground, and it does not alter anything in the society around it. By the time we rejoin the student of Coal Hill School in November of 1963 (or tomorrow, as the blog goes) everything will be normal, there will be no mention of it. Come on, you say, that's got to have made someone notice, someone would mention it, the school would be closed (just like Sunnydale High in Buffy the Vampire Slayer loses at least one student a week in a gory way yet is never roped off with yellow tape or closed down) but this is the way of Doctor Who. There are stranger things about to happen in the series, and it does nothing to change the world; the Doctor himself will remark in 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks that humans are very keen to ignore these sorts of things rather than try to understand them.

So. Day saved. The Doctor pulls it off (of course) and Susan goes back to school eventually. Spring is about to come at last. All in 115 pages. God bless the well written novella; I sat in my chair mesmerized by this for most of the day, and I sometimes wish there were other tales of the Doctor and Susan to enjoy before they start wandering again.

But it will soon be November. John F Kennedy will be assassinated in the street, and on the other side of the Atlantic, two school teachers will notice something strange about one of their students at last...

NEXT EPISODE : AN UNEARTHLY CHILD

Frayed

So this is how it starts. Sort of.

The first entry is not actually part of the televised series at all but a novella published by Telos Publishing in 2003. Telos got into the business of publishing Doctor Who novellas when the BBC was still keen to hand out licenses for such things, but after a short run of 14 books the license was not renewed and an interesting new foray into Doctor Who was cut tragically short. I and many others like me feel that this was, well, a stupid move, seeing as the BBC's own novel series has started to get a bit dry in places, with a different book being cranked out every month by pretty much the same authors all working under a guideline set down for them. Okay, Telos, like Big Finish, also have guidelines to follow like no regenerating the Doctor, no making the companions into gun toting vigilantes, not making the Daleks gay, and essential things that would really clash with the series, but in reading the Telos books you get a sense of a whole new style of storytelling that Doctor Who hasn't had before.

Novellas, as it is widely known, are short, which means that the Doctor and company would probably already be immersed in an adventure on page 1 and the readers would follow along what would hopefully be a fast-paced yet coherant story. I've got my copy of Frayed by Tara Samms sitting right here beside me, and once I finish this little preamble I'm diving in, and my thoughts will come in another day or so.

Where does Frayed fit into the Whoniverse? There are those who will scream that it doesn't, and that there is only the televised series and any effort to integrate the TV series with the stories from any other medium is crazy, insane, herecy! Screw that, especially when it comes to this story. Frayed takes place before the televised series actually begins, with the Doctor and his granddaughter Susan travelling together in the TARDIS to other worlds. Being pre-series, the TARDIS still has a functioning chameleon circuit and thus does not look like a London police box from 1960's Earth; it can change its shape and blend in with its surroundings. There was a long debate over what the series would be like without the old blue box, so here's a chance to see, in print anyways.

So. The Doctor. Susan. Another planet, sometime before they arrive on Earth in 1963 and set the events of the actual series in motion. Going into this one I am wondering how well Tara Samms is going to capture the dynamic of the Doctor and Susan, will she do it justice, am I going to enjoy this peek into their lives before that fateful day when Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright will follow Susan home and have their lives changed forever?

I'll tell you in a couple days. Frayed is 134 pages long, I have nothing else to do for a while except my school work, this shouldn't take long.