Enlightenment

The White Guardian sends the TARDIS crew to a yacht race in space where a race known as Eternals are competing for the prize of Enlightenment. For the Eternals this is the key to ending their ongoing boredom as they are effectively immortal creatures who dwell outside of time, and their only source of entertainment and pleasure comes from the minds of lessler, more finite beings, those they call Ephemerals. Even the Time Lords are not resistant to the mind reading power of the Eternals and the Doctor must stay on his guard. Tegan also finds herself the centre of attention of one of the Eternals, and Turlough discovers that yet another is in collusion with the Black Guardian, much like himself.

Enlightenment is a pretty simple tale really and a tidy conclusion to this trilogy with the Black Guardian using Turlough as his puppet. I myself wasn't finding mich joy in the whole premise as it was very loosely held together, but at least they got the original actors who played the Guardians back in the Key to Time days to reprise their roles. Even with dead birds on their heads. In space, no-one can hear your stylist scream.

Check out Tegan's fancy dress in part three. And all that hair she suddenly had. Hooray for wigs! And hooray for boobies, as the saying goes; both Tegan and Captain Wrack get to show off a lot of cleaveage. Not that anyone notices. Where's Mr Mariner's cleavage shot? Show me a hot guy with his shirt off in Doctor Who please!

Effects wise... they did their best. It's not easy to build model boats at the best of times (inside or outside of a bottle) but to make them fly through space as well is a real challenge. Turlough falling overboard and being scooped by a net, not well done at all.

Black Guardian defeated. Turlough's one of the good guys after all, even if he is a greedy coward at heart. This ought to be interesting.

NEXT EPISODE : THE KING'S DEMONS

Terminus

Turlough's attempts to sabotage the TARDIS at the behest of the Black Guardian result in an emergency landing on a leper ship. The Doctor and Nyssa encounter a pair of pirates on board who have mistaken it for something else, and the ship docks at Terminus, a vast space station at the centre of the known universe. Nyssa contracts the Lazar disease and is sent for treatment by the sinsiter Vanir, the slave labourers who operate the station, and the Doctor realizes that Terminus is at the centre of the universe because in a way, it created it. And it could also destroy it too.

The first time I watched this one I actually had the flu, so the delerium of a high fever I was suffering at the time seemed to go quite well with the sickly atmosphere of Terminus itself. The moaning of the diseased lepers was more akin to a zombie film, as was their ragged shuffling through the corridors of their ships. And for the love of god why those awful skulls everywhere? When you go to a hospital you might hope to see more cheerful motifs, not a death's head grinning at you everywhere you look. Still, if anyone has ever been to the nuclear medicine wing of Sunnybrook hospital they would tell you that big signs that say THE JOY OF LIFE are not the most comforting either. The sets of Terminus are drab and a half, with the inner works of the station being nothing more than scaffold with plastic stretched across it, and not a lot of light. "I think they ran out of money," Jay opined from his end of the couch when we watched it together on Sunday night. Still, the show has some atmosphere to it, even though it is probably by accident. Or imagined by viewers with a fever.

We made some technical comments this time, noting how there were some interesting angles used in the shooting, but none of them for any real reason. There was a low angle shot that looked quite promising until someones boots walked right up to it and stood there. Nyssa sits amongst the dying Lazars in one scene and rather than cut to a different shot the sequences dissolve into each other, but the effect is might be trying for, to show Nyssa alone and afraid, is lost as the directing style is not sustained. The best has to be, though, a hasty attempt towards the end of part two when a Vanir walks under a stairway that Peter Davison is standing on; we can see his shoes but then a small square of stairway is superimposed over it to cover it up. It took me something like 18 years to notice this, and when I showed it to Jay we just has to laugh. Cause crying isn't allowed in Doctor Who.

Costumes have long been an issue on the show when it comes to practicality and design. In this case the fishbowl helmets worn by Kari and Olvir are neither practical or stylish. I suppose they needed big helmets to hold in their hairstyles. As pirates they are pretty sad; they are routinely overpowered, they wear bad clothes and one shot drains the powerpack of one of their guns. The Vanir are really no better with their fibreglass body armour which I suppose is designed to make them look more muscular, but it really draws more attention to the fact that it is just held on with elastics. And then there's the Garm, a massive St Bernard-ish creature wearing what looks like a leftover Kraag outfit from Shada (well, the original realization of Shada at any rate; I'll explain later). I am not going to comment on the Garm. Words fail me. They don't fail Jay, though. "Sean what is that?" he asked, gesturing with a Timbit.

Turlough's role as an agent of evil is not exactly played up much as he spends the bulk of the show crawling around inside air ducting with Tegan. Air ducting that is all shot on film, I might add. Jay figures they didn't have a small enough studio video camera to shoot it properly. I will assume he is right; I am not technical minded usually. But their forced confinement together softens Tegan a bit, although her distrust of Turlough is by no means unjustified - he's working for the BLACK GUARDIAN for goddess' sake. It also helps make a bit more of a bond between them because soon the TARDIS family is gonna be one short.

It's the end of the road for Nyssa. Some might have figured/hoped she was going to die of Lazar disease, but when she herself is cured of it and realizes there is a better way she decides to use her bioengineering skills (which we are reminded of in the first part of the adventure) to help the Lazars and the Vanir. The incidental music folks at the radiophonic workshop recreate her theme from Keeper of Traken for her departure scene (outdoing themselves this time since they evoked Adric's theme from Full Circle in part one when Turlough is given the dead boy's room) and it is here where we see Nyssa at her most emotional, hugging Tegan as she says goodbye. At least she got a new outfit this episode, even if it was a burlap sack to cover up the lingerie she was running around in the rest of the adventure. Nothing like going out with a bang.

NEXT EPISODE : ENLIGHTENMENT

Mawdryn Undead

The TARDIS narrowly avoids collision with a ship in a fixed temporal orbit and then becomes trapped on board. The Doctor's efforts to free his ship lead him to Earth in 1983 where he meets his old friend, Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart, who is now teaching maths at an all-boys school. One of the Brigadier's students, a young man named Turlough, has been coerced by the Black Guardian to kill the Doctor in revenge for denying him the Key to Time, and although Turlough does not want to commit the act, he feels that to save his own life he must. Tegan and Nyssa end up in 1977 and encounter a younger Brigadier, as well as the mutilated alien Mawdyrn, whose misguided experiments in biology turned him and his associates on the ship into "undead" entities fated to circle the galaxy forever, unless they can use the Doctor's Time Lord powers to save themselves.

Okay so here's another one of those "chaos theory" time travel episodes where the actions of the Doctor and his companions in the past greatly influence the future. As with most scripts for the series the Doctor and his companions are split up, but in this instance the Doctor is in 1983 with Turlough and the Brigadier, and Nyssa and Tegan are in 1977 with Mawdryn... and the Brigadier as well. Both sets of characters work in their own timelines, contributing to the overall picture with the Doctor in 1983 piecing together what happened to his companions in the past.

Note that at this time the Brigadier hasn't been seen in the series since Terror of the Zygons, and what better way to bring him back into things than by using him twice as much. The flashback sequence in part two was a real treat for viewers at its original broadcast, offering younger viewers (such as myself at the time) the first glimpse of the Yeti and the Cybermen from The Invasion. And the Brigadier has not changed, even if the Doctor has, aside from leaving UNIT and taking up teaching maths. Out of character, you suggest? Maybe. After all this was hardly the kind of adventure one needed UNIT for, but the Brigadier is not the type of character to leave something he obviously loves doing; indeed, one would have thought that the Brigadier looked upon retirement - and even death - as nothing short of desertion of duty. Still, in the years that have followed this episode a lot of writers have had a bash at the Brigadier's personal continuity, and those adventures will be examined as well in this blog as they come along.

Turlough joins the TARDIS crew this adventure but he is a departure as a male companion. With Adric's death still relatively recent Turlough is a sharp contrast; devious, manipulative and untrustworthy, secretly being guided by the Black Guardian. Why the Black Guardian has waited this long to exact revenge on the Doctor and why he has chosen someone like Turlough to be his instrument are both very good questions; the Guardian says he must not be seen to act in his own revenge, which makes one wonder exactly who else is out there watching the Guardians and ensuring that they play fair. Turlough obviously isn't going to try and kill the Doctor. For starters Tegan does not trust him, and the Brigadier is always around in one way or another. The Doctor might even know what Turlough is up to, casting a suspicious glance at the control cube the Guardian uses to communiate with Turlough as if he knows what it is. And it's a plot thread that is not immediately resolved, carrying on into the next adventure.

And somewhere in all this there's Mawdryn and his undead friends, scientists who tried to turn themselves into Time Lords and give themselves a regeneration cycle with stolen Gallifreyan equipment. What they got, however, was a sentence to spend eternity as half-rotted mutants with their brains hanging out of their skulls like so much Big League Chew gum. And it's not their fault, they maintain; oh no, this is a Time Lord curse, even if no-one from Gallifrey made them hook themselves up to the machines. But they're keen enough to hook the Doctor up to it and suck away his remaining regenerations to cure themselves.

Oh and Nyssa wears a new outfit; her fourth in the entire series.

NEXT EPISODE : TERMINUS

The Armageddon Factor

The quest for the sixth and final piece of the Key to Time takes the Doctor, Romana and K9 to the warring twin worlds of Atrios and Zeos. Atrios has been brought to its knees by overwhelming opposition and the fanatical Marshal will stop at nothing to rally his people to fight back from their seemingly doomed position. When the TARDIS crew arrive, the Princess Astra has been kidnapped by what are first assumed to be Zeon agents, but a third party is revealed lurking between both worlds; the sinister Shadow. Where the Doctor has been sent on the quest by the White Guardian, the Shadow is in the employ of the Black Guardian and has been sitting waiting for the Doctor to arrive. The Doctor may have collected the first five segments already, but the Shadow seems to know where the sixth and final piece is, and its secret is somehow linked to Astra, the sixth princess of the sixth royal house of the sixth dynasty of Atrios...

Whereas The Power of Kroll had very little mention of the Key to Time until almost the very end, The Armageddon Factor, the six part season finale, is concerned with nothing but finding the final piece. Almost all of the key players in the tale have something to do with it, and the showdown that everyone knew was coming to posess it starts in earnest in episode three when the Doctor and the Shadow meet face to ... well... skull. With a nylon over the mouth. And how is the Shadow as a foe? He kidnaps and terrorizes Astra. He plunges two worlds into war just to keep a death toll running. The captures and tortures Romana. He captures K9 and places the robot under his control, turning him against the Doctor. Yeah, he's bad.

Jay and I undertook this viewing together, although we didn't have as much to say this time as we have before. I was almost passing out from being up late the night before and Jay was actually engrossed in the adventure, but after a short break for the plight dining of the Gerard Square McDonald's, the commentary track was back in full force. Neither of us was particularly enamoured with Romana's white version of an Elvira dress, although we were amused at how she forced open a door to a transmat relay despite being unable to do so a couple scenes before. And then she overpowered the Atrian surgeon, Merak. K9 was smug as usual, which we will allow him after his traumatic experience of being lured into a recycling furnace by a glowing projection that looked like the Canadian Film Board logo. And we loved the Doctor's manic performance in this one, with him taunting the Shadow, mocking the Marshal, going power mad for a moment with the completed Key to Time before him, and finally telling the Black Guardian where to go.

As with most six part stories we are once again faced with a story within a story, with the war between Atrios and Zeos falling into the background eventually, but there is no definite split as with previous stories where the first four episodes were one plot and the final two were something else; The Armageddon Factor evolves its way along, never feeling slow or draggy, but with the introduction of another rogue Time Lord, Drax, in episode five, things do suffer a bit where pacing is concerned. Some of the sets suffer a bit from lack of funding, probably from the money running out towards the end of the season. Jay and I had to laugh at the tape-drive computers of the Atrian war room, and the circuit boards pulled from Speak N Spells stapled to the walls of the Zeon computer room (which are reminiscent of records hammered into the wall at a dump called The Happy Tap, but that's different, the blandness of the Zeon corridors and even the layer of dust on top of the time rotor in the TARDIS. And on the subject of the TARDIS, the continuity people need to be fired; in the previous episode the police box prop had the white light flashing on the roof when it materialized, but in this one it was the spinning blue lamp again, making me wonder if maybe they had a TARDIS for studio and a different one for location.

Once the whole Key to Time plot is resolved, though, the Doctor and Romana are left facing a greater threat than before: the wrath of the Black Guardian. The Doctor has been threatened before but this time he takes things a bit more seriously and fits the console with a device that will randomly select destination co-ordinates and effectively keep him on the run from the Black Guardian for a while. When the next season would commence, the randomizer would be working its magic and throwing the Doctor and Romana headlong into danger.

But before going there, how's about a piece of fan fiction?

Good.

NEXT EPISODE : IT'S IN THE BLOOD