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Movies, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[July 28, 1968] Once Upon A Time, Or Maybe Twice… (Yellow Submarine)

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By Jessica Holmes

Yellow Submarine is a weird film. Directed by George Dunning and produced by Al Brodax and King Features, the latest Beatles movie is a bit different from the previous live-action offerings. For one, it’s animated, and for two… the Beatles are barely even in it. I mean, they’re in it as characters, and in person in a very brief cameo at the end, but the four themselves don’t actually voice their animated counterparts. I’m sure they’re busy smoking whatever the hell made them come up with Revolution No. 9. But that’s not the weird bit.

The weird bit is the content of this film.

Think ‘Alice In Wonderland’ if Alice sampled a rather more special kind of mushroom.

It's All In The Mind, Y'Know

Strip back all the surrealism and Yellow Submarine is a pretty straightforward adventure. The idyllic realm of Pepperland comes under attack from an army of Blue Meanies, prompting one of the inhabitants, Old Fred, to go and find help. He goes off, recruits the Beatles, then they journey back together through various locales so they can defeat the Blue Meanies through the power of music. Cue awkward live-action cameo, roll credits.

But of course, we’re not really watching this for the plot, are we?

Yellow Submarine is like a dream. As such, it operates on dream logic. Old Fred (Lance Percival) stalks a depressed Ringo (Paul Angelis) through the streets of Liverpool in a flying submarine. Ringo’s house is bigger on the inside, and has doors that open onto many different locations. John Lennon (John Clive) is Frankenstein’s Monster. George Harrison (also Paul Angelis) can manipulate reality with his mind. Paul (Geoff Hughes)… Paul’s actually pretty normal.

Their journeys take them to the Sea of Time, where they age backwards, forwards, and back again, then to the Sea of Science, where… nothing happens. Really, nothing. There’s a decent tune in this section (‘Only A Northern Song’) but it doesn’t even have any much video to go with it. It’s just soundwaves accompanied by pictures of the group. It’s an out of place sequence in a film of out of place sequences.

The weirdness immediately starts back up as the submarine sails into the Sea of Monsters, where they encounter creatures that Hieronymous Bosch would be proud of. There’s the purple elephant thing which is so ugly they bully it until it cries. There’s a pair of Kinky Boots. There’s some stuff I have no name for, and creepiest of all, a vacuum monster that goes around sucking up all the other creatures.

Ringo accidentally ejects himself from the submarine, and the others have to rescue him by deploying the submarine’s cavalry company. There’s a button for everything. Unfortunately for them, the vacuum monster immediately slurps them up, before slurping up all the other monsters, then the actual backdrop of the film, and finally itself, leaving the submarine stranded in an endless white void. They are…nowhere.

But they aren’t alone. Enter Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. (Dick Emery) a peculiar little nowhere man who speaks entirely in rhyme. He offers them a hand with their engine, and in return,Ringo, feeling sorry for the little guy’s loneliness, invites him to join them aboard the submarine.

They don’t get far before breaking down again in the foothills of the headlands, and the submarine (with Old Fred still aboard) flies off without them when they get out to fix it. So they might as well squeeze a song in. The ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ sequence isn’t exactly plot heavy (it’s mostly just rotoscoped imagery of dancing girls) and really doesn’t have a thing to do with what’s going on, but it’s undeniably gorgeous to look at.

From there the group follows a trail of pepper to the Sea of Holes, an infinite white void filled with black holes. Three dimensional space works a little differently here. It’s as the laws of physics had been written by M.C. Escher.

Jeremy gets himself captured by a Blue Meanie, and the group eventually find a hole to the Sea of Green, and find themselves at last in Pepperland… which is decidedly lacking in green of late.

The Blue Meanies hate colour, and music, and life itself, so they’ve taken it upon themselves to cure Pepperland of these ailments.

The Beatles revive the mayor of Pepperland with a snippet of song, restoring him to life and colour, and reunite with the submarine and Old Fred. The old mayor comments that the Beatles bear an uncanny resemblance to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and theorises that if they were to disguise themselves, they might rally the people to rebel against the Meanies.

And cue the music! I think you can guess what song they start with. The Meanies hate it, of course, but the tune brings life back to Pepperland. The group even manage to find and revive the real Lonely Hearts Club Band, teaming up with them to take the fight to the meanies. Oh, and Ringo rescues Jeremy.

Faced with the combined power of the Beatles and the Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Meanies turn and flee, despite their Chief’s exhortations. Jeremy transforms the Chief Meanie with the power of rhymes, and John extends the hand of friendship to the band’s defeated foes. The Meanies accept, and everyone joins in for a final dance party. All’s well that ends well, and here come the end credits.

But first, we must indulge the real Beatles in a clumsy cameo. The absolute flurry of puns and wordplay that are present in practically every line of Yellow Submarine are no less present here, and no less painful. With newer and bluer Meanies being spotted in the vicinity of the theatre, the Beatles sing us out.

Not Quite Right

So, sounds like a cheerful, colourful, fun little romp, right? Wrong. This film is unsettling.

And it starts barely a couple of minutes in with the arrival of the Blue Meanies.

Good grief, the Blue Meanies.

It’s not just their concept that’s creepy. Sure, sure, a villain that hates everything good and nice and is relentlessly negative. We’ve seen all that. But they are deeply unnerving to look at with their too-wide yellow grins. The Chief Meanie (also Paul Angelis…poor man, give his vocal cords a break!) is by far the creepiest. I have to give a nod to Angelis and his vocal talents for creating such a nightmare. He goes from a sickly sweet sing-song tone to irate shrieking at the drop of a hat. It gets my skin crawling.

As if the Chief Meanie wasn’t bad enough on his own, there’s his Dreadful Flying Glove to think about. It’s…well, it’s a glove. A giant, angry-looking, sentient glove that chases people across Pepperland. Sounds ridiculous? Sure. But it's a rather dreadful looking thing.

Outside of Pepperland, the seas offer plenty of discomforts. There’s obviously the Sea of Monsters with its various grotesques, but I found ‘nowhere’ to be quite creepy too. Just the idea of being alone in an infinite white void with nothing but my own thoughts for company… it gives me the shivers. I am perhaps just projecting, but I would hazard a guess that a fair few people share my feelings.

You’re not even safe from the surreal and uncanny on dry land, as Liverpool is no less peculiar. There’s an art shift in the Liverpool sequence, where the people are not drawn, but composited in from highly processed photographs and film stock. The colours are minimal, and most living things are completely static. Those that are not static are trapped in short loops of actions as the submarine passes them by. We even see someone perched on the ledge of the uppermost window of a tall building, as if about to leap. Towards the end of the sequence, there are hundreds of people on rooftops. All this, to the tune of ‘Eleanor Rigby’. It’s painting a depressing picture of the home-town of the Beatles, to say the least.

Then you’ve got Ringo’s house, and I do not like that place. He keeps a Monster around, sure, and that’s a bit off-putting, but there’s something more subtle about the place that unnerves me a lot more. It does not feel like a place where people belong. There’s a long hallway with dozens of identical doors, each opening onto a different locale entirely—even onto oncoming trains. It’s vast, and quiet, and you could get lost for hours or even days, and I don’t think anybody would be coming to find you. It’s that sort of place. There’s a palpable absence of humanity.

I searched around for the right word to describe what this film actually made me feel. ‘Unsettled’ feels too vague. It just means that I feel different from my normal emotional state. ‘Scared’ is over the top. It’s not scary. And ‘creeped out’ is too simple. It’s not all creepy. Some parts are beautiful. I think my response ultimately comes down to the atmosphere of the film. And that atmosphere is one of loneliness.

Ah, Look At All The Lonely People

There is something about this film that positively oozes an atmosphere of isolation and loneliness. Even in colourful Pepperland at the start of the film, though there are crowds of people, they’re almost entirely static and lifeless. The Mayor is at least animated enough to play the violin, but even then he’s more interested in that than in fending off the Blue Meanies or trying to escape from them. There’s precious little humanity to be found here. I think something was wrong with Pepperland long before the Blue Meanies ever showed up.

Of course, once they do, what little semblance of life there is soon goes away.

The Liverpool section, as with all the musical sections of the film, is essentially a music video for the song ‘Eleanor Rigby’, and it’s as lonely and depressing an image of the city as I have ever seen. That’s the thing with big cities—everyone lives on top of one another, but you don’t really know each other, and so you even feel alone in a crowd of people who all feel exactly the same way. ‘Look at all the lonely people’, indeed.

Ringo even says so himself.

Liverpool can be a lonely place on a Saturday night, and this is only Thursday morning.

And he would know a thing or two about loneliness, living in his cavernous house, under the same roof as his bandmates and yet with the four of them isolated from one another.

Starting to notice a pattern?

In the Sea of Monsters, the vacuum monster eventually finds itself completely alone. And so it consumes its own body. In Nowhere, Jeremy has lived his whole life by himself. Though he seems initially content with his way of life, when the Beatles are about to leave him behind, he breaks down sobbing. He’s utterly pitiful, and utterly alone.

Everyone in this film… is lonely. Scratch the surface of the colourful surrealism and catchy tunes and you’ll find a deeply melancholy undercurrent to the whole thing.

How could it fail to rub off on the audience?

Final Thoughts

Heinz Edelmann’s art direction is stunning. The extraordinary psychedelic presentation is really the key to making this film work. It’s bright, beautiful, and occasionally frightening. There’s bold, bright pop art style elements (think Warhol), but also grotesque creatures that would fit well within the pages of a medieval bestiary, or perhaps in a Dali. I’m sure the unique visual style will make this a hit with anyone with an appreciation for psychedelic art—or psychoactive substances.

Music-wise, what can I say? It’s the Beatles. If you like the Beatles (which I do), you’ll like the music. There’s a nice selection of tracks from their previous albums, and also a couple of new songs. I say new, but I’m pretty sure they’re unused tracks from previous albums. The B-sides’ B-side. Still, even if ‘All Together Now’ is not their strongest offering, it’s definitely catchy.

The band’s music might be what people are coming to this film to hear, but let’s not forget the rest of the soundtrack. ‘Fifth Beatle’ George Martin’s score is lush and romantic, tying the film together with dreamy orchestral interludes.

Finally, here’s a miscellany of thoughts about Yellow Submarine I had that don’t really relate to anything else:

The live action bit at the end is really weird. And I don’t mean surrealist weird, I mean ‘deeply awkward and filled me with a sense of vicarious embarrassment’ weird. It’s probably there to fulfill contractual obligations, but they could have at least tried to act less awkward than a group of unprepared teenagers giving a school presentation. I suppose it was at least appreciated by those people who lose their minds at the very sight of the Beatles.

As for the animated version of the group, I thought the voice actors did a very good impression of them. It’s just a shame that they all sounded bored out of their skulls throughout the whole film.

You’d have thought the jokes might have coaxed some life out of them. There’s enough of them. A veritable smorgasbord of agonisingly painful wordplay. Particularly excruciating highlights include:

“I can’t help it. I’m a born lever-puller.”

And:

“Are you blueish? You don’t look blueish.”

Oh, and of course the Rimsky-Korsakov/Guy Lombardo joke which took me far too much effort to understand, and when I did, it still wasn’t actually funny.

I could go on, but I shan’t. I'm not a cruel woman.

Lousy jokes aside, this is a movie I’m glad to have seen. I wasn’t sure if I liked it at first, but once I stopped trying to make sense of things and just went along for the ride, my appreciation of the film went right up.

This strange, beautiful film will surely be a hit with all the lonely people. Sure, it’s often melancholy and alienating. But it also offers hope.

In the end, how do the Beatles win? Not with combat prowess, but good old peace, love and rock n’ roll. Even the Blue Meanies benefit from hearing the band’s message. They just needed to abandon their relentless negativity and accept what was freely offered. Thanks to the Beatles, Pepperland is livelier than ever.

To defeat the forces of misery and loneliness… all you need is love.

(Four stars out of five)




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TV

[June 4, 1968] (Doctor Who: The Wheel In Space [Part Two])

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By Jessica Holmes

Here we are at the end of another serial and another series of Doctor Who. For sure, it’s had its ups and downs, but does the series end on a high note? Let’s look at the ending of Doctor Who: The Wheel In Space.

EPISODE FOUR

With the astronauts mind controlled, the next stage of the Cybermen’s operation can go ahead. Inadvertently helping them is Jarvis, whose reluctance to listen to reason has turned into pathological denial. Even when confronted with incontrovertible evidence of the threat, he simply refuses to see it. This comes in handy when the Cybermen try to Trojan-horse their way aboard the Wheel in a crate of bernalium.

When things immediately start going very badly aboard the Wheel he sinks into a catatonic state and ceases to have any bearing on the plot, leaving it to Corwyn to pick up the slack. She has the good sense to listen to the Doctor when he suggests putting up a force-field around the operations room to protect it from the Cybermen.

The Cybermen waste little time killing some of the crew and mind-controlling others. They take over the workshop and see to it that the engineers restore the laser to full working order, before ordering one of them to go up to the operations room, infiltrate it, and wreck the outbound communications equipment—killing himself in the process.

Zoe, meanwhile, realises that the meteorite storm will hit them sooner than anticipated, reporting to Corwyn in her usual matter-of-fact manner. Corwyn questions her on her seeming coldness, but it seems it’s really just a case of a miscommunication. Zoe was trained to prioritise the cold hard facts of a situation over her emotional reaction to it. For space exploration it makes perfect sense. You want someone who can work the problem, not someone who runs around like a headless chicken the moment things go wrong.

There’s a parallel being drawn here between Zoe, who has had the emotions trained out of her, and the Cybermen, who have had theirs programmed out. Unfortunately the serial doesn’t really do anything with it. As of the end of the serial, her rationality has been neither a help nor a hindrance. It’s just a trait that people around her are treating as inherently bad. So, she’s a little different. So what?

Upon learning that the astronauts have brought a cache of bernalium back to the Wheel, the Doctor is quick to realise that the Cybermen are on board the station. It’s too late for the chaps down in the workshop, but as for the others the Doctor gets everyone to make small shields to wear on the back of the neck. They’ll block the mind control waves.

I’m not entirely clear on why they had to go and check that yes, the Cybermen did indeed come aboard in the bernalium crate, but the Doctor and Jamie head down to the cargo bay all the same. They find the false-bottomed crate the Cybermen smuggled themselves in. And then they hear the heavy footsteps of an approaching Cyberman…

EPISODE FIVE

The handy thing about not being able to move their necks is that this generation of Cybermen are really easy to sneak past. The Doctor and Jamie do just that. They get back to the operations room to discover that the meteorite storm is heading for them a lot faster than previously anticipated.

Fortunately, the Cybermen are kindly supervising the effort to repair the laser. By this point the Doctor is pretty sure that the Cybermen are after something more than destroying the Wheel, but can’t figure out what.

Zoe starts fretting over her lack of ability to think on her feet, feeling rather useless. Her training emphasised rote memorisation of facts and figures over developing critical problem-solving skills; another Cybermen parallel, and this one feels deserved. This whole time, the Cybermen we see on screen haven’t actually been coming up with their own plans. They aren’t programmed for that. A Cyber-Planner has been feeding them instructions.

This is a pretty interesting facet of the Cybermen, this emphasis on conformity and following orders. They don’t seem capable of creative thought. In a way it serves as a strength, enabling them to cooperate without butting heads over differing opinions or succumbing to infighting. On the other hand, it’s probably also their greatest weakness, and the thing that lets the Doctor defeat them time and time again. It’s pretty troubling to think that apparently back on Earth, young minds are being trained to behave in this way. What kind of society does Zoe come from?

The Doctor has an idea for stopping the Cybermen, but he needs the Time Vector Generator, which he seems to have dropped at some point. Jamie is going to have to go back to the rocket ship with Zoe in order to fetch it. I don’t know, has he tried having a rummage through the lost and found?

With the laser back in working order, the Cybermen have no further need for the station’s crew. Well, except for a stooge, whom they order to poison the ship’s oxygen supply. However, Corwyn happens to be in the right place at the right time to overhear them, and she uses the video comms to warn the Doctor. Sadly for Corwyn, the Cybermen catch her, and the Doctor gets a front-row seat to her death.

EPISODE SIX

Despite the kids still being out in the vacuum of space, the Wheel goes ahead and starts blasting away the incoming asteroids. The Doctor is of course horrified, but as one of the crew points out, he’s the one who sent Jamie out there. Luckily, they only hit the space rocks and not our favourite Scot.

The Doctor informs the crew about Corwyn and warns them to swap to the backup oxygen supply, thwarting the Cybermen’s plans.

Oh, and Jarvis is dead. He decided to go walkabout and walked right into a Cyberman.

With their plot gone to pot, the Cybermen realise that someone on the station must have advance knowledge of their methods, and start investigating the personnel on board the station. They soon know the source of their difficulties: the Doctor. They need to deal with him.

But they’ll need to lure him out first. They have a mind-controlled minion give the operations room a call. He claims that he’s managed to trap the Cybermen in the workshop and is heading up to the operations room. This will give the Doctor the opening he needs to fetch the spare radio components from storage so as to repair the Wheel’s outgoing communications.

Yes, the plots in this serial are rather convoluted, aren’t they?

Jamie and Zoe overhear this from the control room of the wheel, which for some reason is still receiving communications from the Cyber Planner. Don’t they know you should turn off your appliances before heading out? Going to have an electrical fire if you’re not careful.

However, the Doctor is a smart cookie, noticing the stooge’s monotone delivery and dead-behind-the-eyes expression, and warns the others to grab him when he gets to the forcefield and put a shield on him. At least someone’s paying attention.

The Doctor makes it down to the storage room all right, and finds some convenient mercury for the TARDIS before grabbing some equipment for his plan. He had better hurry. Another ship has appeared: a massive Cyberman invasion ship carrying a fleet of smaller vessels.

Jamie and Zoe return to the Wheel, coming across Corwyn’s body on their way back to the operations room.

The Doctor gets in contact with the crew, very relieved to see that Jamie is alive and well. Mostly because he likes Jamie, but also because Jamie has the TVG and the Doctor really needs it right now.

While Jamie heads down to meet the Doctor, the Cybermen pay a visit to their old friend.

The Doctor greets his guests quite civilly, and over the course of the conversation pieces together the entirety of the Cybermen’s plan.

Are you ready? Here we go.

Step One: Commandeer a rocket ship, set it adrift, use it to deliver cybermats to the Wheel, wait while they destroy the Wheel’s laser and bernalium supply. Get lucky when Jamie wrecks the laser for you.

Step Two: Blow up a distant star to create a tsunami of asteroids, despite the fact that space is definitely far, far too big for this to actually work. (If you have the technology to blow up a star, why in the world are you bothering with all this other faff?)

Step Three: Assume that rather than evacuate, the crew of the wheel will recklessly board your rocketship to look for bernalium to repair their laser.

Step Four: Smuggle yourselves on board in a crate, then hypnotise some crew to repair the laser so that the Wheel doesn’t actually get destroyed.

Step Five: Hypnotise one guy into destroying the Wheel’s outbound communications. He did it in a pretty haphazard way, so you’re lucky that the inbound comms still work.

Step Six: Kill the crew via a method that is quite easily averted by switching to the supplementary oxygen supply.

All this, so that the incoming invasion fleet can follow the radio signals from Earth, without which they can’t enter Earth’s atmosphere for…reasons. You mean to tell me that these supposedly ‘superior’ beings somehow have the ability to blow up distant stars but can’t calculate their own orbital trajectories and re-entry angles? We have people on Earth right now who can do that by hand!

So yes, this excessively convoluted plan serves more or less to turn the Wheel into a big signpost so the invasion fleet doesn't get lost.

Still, Troughton is really great in this scene. I love when he gets to come face to face with a villain. He has this air of being scared but trying very hard not to show it, with a slightly trickster-ish undercurrent of having a card hidden up his sleeve. The scripts may disappoint me, but Troughton never does.

And the Doctor does indeed have a trick up his sleeve, as he invites the Cybermen to destroy him…only to activate a trap. The first Cyberman steps right into an energy field, electrocuting it. The other stays back, but cannot get near the Doctor, and so leaves to await reinforcements. It’s the best bit of the serial.

Jamie then arrives with the TVG, and the Doctor can finally save the day. He plugs it into the ship’s laser in order to amplify the beam from the TVG, while Jamie goes to head off the incoming army of Cybermen approaching the cargo bay. He subdues the one Cyberman still on board with quick-set plastic, but the others are attempting to breach the cargo bay doors.

The Doctor finishes augmenting the laser, which fires on the Cybermen’s ship, blasting it to smithereens. As for the invading Cybermen, the crew of the Wheel activate a forcefield, repelling them from the cargo bay doors and out into the void.

I wonder how long they can survive out there?

Another enemy defeated, the Doctor and Jamie head back to the TARDIS, but they have a stowaway. Zoe wants to go with them. However, the last teenage girl the Doctor took with him ended up traumatised from her experiences. Is Zoe sure she can handle it?

To test her, the Doctor plugs himself into a device that displays his memories on a screen. He decides to start by showing her the Daleks…


Final Thoughts

Dear, dear, dear. This is not the ending I hoped for for this episode, nor for the current series as a whole. It’s proved to be a prime example of the mortal sins that have plagued this serial: it is badly paced, uninspired, and frankly boring. It doesn’t even use the Cybermen to their full potential, instead flattening them down into generic alien invaders. So, two stars for this one.

Zoe has some potential as a companion, I think. It might be interesting to have a girl around who can keep up with the Doctor’s wits. I like her, at any rate.

Perhaps after a little break the team behind Doctor Who will be able to come up with some fresh stories, but if they can’t, then I have real worries about the longevity of the programme. Doctor Who has a unique opportunity to be potentially unending—as long as there are always new stories to tell.




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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[May 12, 1968] Slow And Steady… (Doctor Who: The Wheel In Space [Part One])

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By Jessica Holmes

We approach the end of another series of Doctor Who, and it’s been a bit of a rough one, hasn’t it? Other than the occasional standout, I feel that I’ve ended up finding every other story terribly repetitive. As I began to watch the last serial of the current run, I had hope that my faith in the series would be rewarded. After all, when Doctor Who is good, it’s really, really good, and this latest serial was scripted by David Whittaker (who wrote The Enemy Of The World, possibly my favourite story) based on a story by Kit Pedler (who is to the Cybermen as Terry Nation was to the Daleks). With a writing duo like that, things looked very promising for the serial. Was my faith rewarded? Let’s mull it over as I give you a quick rundown of The Wheel In Space.


EPISODE ONE

With Jamie still a bit sulky over Victoria’s exit from the TARDIS, things go from bad to worse for the lad as the time machine breaks down, leaving him and the Doctor stranded. To be on the safe side until he can get the TARDIS working again, the Doctor removes the doohickey that makes it appear bigger on the inside, the Time Vector Generator. The pair then split to search the rocketship for any crew or mercury for the TARDIS’ battery. They spend the better part of the episode doing this, with a break for lunch. That’s just what the kids want to watch: a couple of blokes operating a vending machine. The scene of them actually obtaining lunch is about as interesting as it sounds, but they do have a nice little discussion on how they think Victoria is getting on back on Earth.

They’re unable to find any mercury for the TARDIS, although the one place they haven’t searched is the rocketship’s control room. Unbeknownst to them, there is a countdown timer in there. But counting down to what? Out of ideas, and having at least confirmed that they’re safe for now, Jamie settles down for a nap.

Yes, it seems the ship is abandoned, drifting aimlessly…just like this serial.

There is however a robot making the rounds, and while the Doctor and Jamie are in the crew cabin, it seals shut their section of the ship.

This serial has slower pacing than 2001 (at least from what I've read), and that’s saying something.

With only a couple minutes left in the episode, something resembling action finally happens. The countdown in the control room hits zero. The ship lurches as it releases a number of silver spheres into space. The jolt  wakes Jamie up and knocks the Doctor over, resulting in a nasty crack on the head. A dazed Doctor uses the Time Vector Generator to unseal the door (it apparently works sort of like a high powered laser beam) and Jamie helps him escape the robot and run back to the cabin, again employing the TVG to see the robot off.

They’re safe for now, but the Doctor passes out from his injury.

Meanwhile, the crew of a nearby space station have discovered the drifting rocket ship. This is the Wheel, so called because it looks a bit like a wagon wheel from above. It’s an Earth vessel, observing deep space phenomena and warning spacecraft of potential hazards. They attempt to get in contact, and as they do so, something hits their outer hull. They don’t realise it yet, but it’s the silver spheres from the rocket ship.

Unable to hail the rocket on the radio, the crew of the Wheel are faced with a choice: should they leave the ship be, or blow it up on the off-chance that its autopilot is still active and may drive it into the station?

EPISODE TWO

Fortunately for the Doctor and Jamie, they have the Time Vector Generator, which Jamie flashes out the porthole in an attempt to get the attention of the space station. The Wheel detects the unusual signal, and sends some men over to investigate the rocket, soon finding the Doctor and Jamie and bringing them back to the Wheel.

Now we’re all together, let’s go over the crew of the Wheel. We’ve got Jarvis Bennett (Michael Turner), the station’s controller, who is quite high-strung and prone to stressing out. There’s also Dr. Gemma Corwyn (Anne Ridler), the medic and resident voice of reason, and the astrophysicist-librarian-maths-genius-wunderkind Zoe Heriot (Wendy Padbury). Filling out the cast are a few more or less interchangeable crewmembers of various nationalities portrayed with varying degrees of sensitivity.

Corwyn gives the Doctor and Jamie a thorough medical examination, finding that Jamie is perfectly fine but the Doctor, unsurprisingly, has a concussion.

With how long he’s been unconscious I’m surprised it’s not worse than that.

While the Doctor recovers, Zoe shows Jamie around the Wheeel, and the two don’t exactly hit it off. She laughs at his kilt, and he threatens her with a spanking. She seems quite delighted by the prospect. Make of that what you will.

For her part, though she likes him well enough, Corwyn is suspicious of Jamie’s story. He’s not exactly a good liar. Case in point: when asked, he told her that the Doctor’s name is ‘John Smith’, a name that is somehow conspicuously generic.  Corwyn and Bennett start to suspect that the Doctor and Jamie might be saboteurs. There has been growing opposition to the space program back on Earth.

Zoe and Jamie arrive at the Wheel’s control room just as Bennett is about to go ahead with blowing up the rocketship. Uh-oh, the TARDIS!

Meanwhile aboard said rocketship, the timer begins to count up. There’s something strange in the room, a couple of large…eggs? They begin to glow, and humanoid shapes become visible inside. They stir, and a silver-gloved hand punches its way out of the shell.

Could it be… the Cybermen?

EPISODE THREE

Wanting to delay the destruction of the rocket for obvious reasons, Jamie grabs some conveniently located spray-on quick-set plastic and sabotages the Wheel’s laser-gun. Bennett catches him in the act. Jamie couldn’t have picked a worse time to disable the gun.

Why? Because…well…because of a load of absolute poppycock, even by the lax standards of the programme. A star in the Hercules Cluster is about to go nova, and the radiation flux will fling asteroids and any other space flotsam right at the Wheel.

Science fiction writers, I’ve noticed, often have difficulties with understanding just how big space is. The cluster in question, formally designated Messier 13, is twenty-two thousand light-years away. Assuming the Wheel is situated at the edge of the solar system (its precise location isn’t made explicit, but given its stated purpose as an early warning system, observatory and halfway house for spacecraft heading into deep space, I think that makes the most sense), any nova in Messier 13 would pose about as much threat to it as farting ant in the Sahara.

I’m nit-picking, but only because I’m bored.

Because they don’t have enough problems already, some stowaways have weaseled their way aboard the station. Cybermats! One of the crew encounters one. Thinking it’s some sort of space bug, he hides it in a cupboard. While left to its own devices, it goes ahead and tucks into the entire ship’s stock of the material needed to repair the laser.

Meanwhile, the Cybermen are preparing the next phase of their plan. It seems that (somehow) they triggered the nova, and another that occurred the previous week. They are trying to lure the crew of the Wheel to board their rocket in search of more material with which to repair the laser. Pity they didn’t wake up earlier, they could have saved themselves a bit of bother.

The star in Messier 13 goes nova. As tempted as I am to go off on a tangent about the speed of light, I shall restrain myself and take off my insufferable know-it-all hat.

Zoe cheerfully informs the others of the danger they’re in. She’s not quite as good at tact as she is at reciting facts and figures. ‘All brain and no heart’, as one of the men describes her. Seems a little harsh if you ask me.

One of the hapless crew runs afoul of a swarm of cybermats. He doesn’t appear to have twigged that these things are about the size of a football. Just punt them! He encases one of them in quick-set plastic, but the others overwhelm and kill him in a spectacle of truly glorious over-acting. Poor fellow, choked to death on all that scenery he chewed.

Corwyn finds his body, though by then the cybermats have fled. She presents the encased cybermat to the Doctor, who x-rays it and discovers the true nature of the threat to the station.

Alas, it’s too late. A pair of men from the Wheel have already arrived on the rocket. They immediately run into the Cybermen, who swiftly bring them under the influence of a mind-control ray. Their first command? To take the Cybermen to the Wheel.

Final Thoughts

Doctor Who is a teatime show, but I almost nodded off a couple of times while watching the first couple of episodes. I’m genuinely surprised by this, given the track record of the writers and how much I usually enjoy the Cybermen. There’s just so much padding! The whole thing drags terribly, turning any potential for suspense into a slog.

The Cybermen themselves have had another design update. They're mostly the same as their previous appearance, but have now got a little notch at the corner of each eye that looks a bit like a teardrop, as well as a notch at the bottom of the mouth slit. I don't know, i think the entirely utilitarian, featureless design of the previous iterations was creepier. The mouth notch just looks a bit awkward.

Will the later half of the serial improve on things? Perhaps, now that the antagonists have deigned to show up.

We will have to wait and see.




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[April 22, 1968] Bored Of The Rigs (Doctor Who: Fury From The Deep [Part 2])

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By Jessica Holmes

I am poorly, I am tired, and to add insult to injury, I had to review this dreary serial. I’m going to chug some cough syrup, and then we’ll take a look at the latter half of the latest Doctor Who serial, Fury From The Deep.

EPISODE FOUR

As the seaweed of doom continues to take down gas rigs, Victoria starts fretting. She’s starting to get sick of constantly getting dragged into dangerous situations. This is going to come up a lot over the latter half of the serial, and to be honest the scenes get a bit repetitive. It’s basically the same thing over and over: Victoria says she’s scared all the time, Jamie asks if she’s happy, she says she doesn’t know. It never goes any deeper or takes a different angle. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Meanwhile, Harris continues to search for his wife, and finds Robson alone on the beach. When asked where Maggie is, Robson cryptically assures Harris that he’ll find her soon. If you were expecting anything interesting to happen after the walking-into-the-sea incident, you will be sorely disappointed. Maggie Harris doesn’t show up again for the rest of the serial except for a very brief appearance at the end. Her involvement in the story dissolves like so much seafoam.

Speaking of characters disappearing from the story, Van Lutyens also makes an abrupt exit after going down into the impeller shaft to check for a blockage. Something pulls him into the foam, and he vanishes, never to be seen again. We’re later told that he isn’t dead, but his part in the story is cut short.

However, the moment he leaves, someone else shows up, because this story has found itself short one Outside Authority Figure. The new Outside Authority Figure is Robson’s boss, Megan Jones (Margaret John). I do rather like her, she’s quite no-nonsense but willing to listen to people. That said, Harris’ story of aggressive parasitic seaweed is a bit hard to swallow, so she authorises him to send out some helicopters to survey the rigs to verify his story.

While she’s discussing matters with Harris, the Doctor and Jamie are down in the impeller shaft looking for Van Lutyens, leaving Victoria alone with Oak and Quill. It may surprise you to know that she promptly gets kidnapped. I know. I’m shocked. Jamie finds her soon enough, and he fusses over her in a way that I find quite sweet.

The helicopter pilots sent by Jones to survey the rigs report back that the unresponsive sites are covered in seaweed. Harris’ proposed solution is to evacuate the remaining rigs and then reduce the whole complex to rubble.

As if summoned by the talk of potential harm to his precious rigs, Robson shows up to yell at everyone for even thinking about it, then storms off again just as abruptly. Having seen his odd behaviour for herself, Jones is now willing to entertain the Doctor’s theory that he’s being controlled somehow. He doesn’t believe that the weed itself is intelligent; rather it’s a plant simply doing what plants do: growing. However, it does have the ability to parasitise sentient beings who will then work in the best interests of the weed. It’s not explained very well, but I think this is what is happening. There is a kind of fungus that does a similar thing to ants.

Another rig falls to the weed, and now it’s the base’s turn to fall. There’s foam coming up the pipeline, and the weed is trying to break through. As the Doctor says, the battle of the giants has begun.

Wait.

What in the world is that even supposed to mean?

EPISODE FIVE

Luckily for Robson and his life’s work, the Doctor doesn’t believe that simply blowing up the rigs will be sufficient to destroy the weed. However, he does have another thought. Remembering how earlier Victoria came under attack in the oxygen stores by a man in a gas mask (to be honest I had forgotten that detail but in fairness to me I’m sick), the Doctor theorises that pure oxygen is toxic to the weed. They have a way to stop it!

Or rather, they did have a way to stop it. Having overheard the Doctor quite loudly explain his theory, Oak and Quill nip the oxygen problem in the bud by stealing all the canisters. Well, we can’t make it too easy for the Doctor. It’s only the fifth episode.

With Robson in his quarters under surveillance (for now) and Van Lutyens nowhere to be found, the Doctor realises that there must be some other agent of the weed present on the base. Fearing discovery, Oak and Quill immediately make a break for it. Jamie catches Quill, however. He feels quite pleased with himself, but the Doctor isn’t sure it’s the old McCrimmon punch that did the trick. Before he gets a chance to elaborate, the Chief Engineer calls everyone back to the impeller room. The weed is trying to break out.

Speaking of breaking out, Robson is no longer in his quarters, having subdued his guard with the power of his bad breath. Everyone’s too transfixed by the weed to notice him sneaking in the back of the impeller room and absconding with Victoria when nobody’s looking. Poor Victoria. Someone needs to get her some self defence lessons.

Robson boards a helicopter with Victoria, and eventually the Doctor realises his ward is missing. It doesn’t take him long to work out that she’s with Robson, and thanks to the base’s surveillance it’s not hard to find Robson’s helicopter and hail him on the radio. Victoria is once again a bargaining chip. If the Doctor offers himself up to the weed, Robson will let her go.

Taking another helicopter, the Doctor and Jamie head out to the rig complex, where they find one of the towers covered in a particularly large amount of foam. This is the nerve centre of the weed. Within the tower is even more foam and a rather sudded-up Robson.

I’m sorry, is that meant to be scary? It just looks like he’s been messing around in a bubble bath. Move over, Daleks. Doctor Who has a new recurring enemy: Fairy Liquid!

EPISODE SIX

As is typical for Doctor Who, the baddie of the month wants the Doctor’s assistance in its evil plan for matter to conquer mind. The Doctor protests that such a thing is against the laws of nature, but I can think of a few kinds of other ‘vegetable matter’ that have some very interesting effects on the mind.

Luckily for everyone present (except poor me, and my eardrums) Victoria has got an impressively loud set of vocal cords. The piercing sound of her screams is sufficient to incapacitate Robson, giving them the opportunity to escape.

Unfortunately, the Doctor can’t seem to flag down the pilot of the helicopter he arrived in, so rather than waiting a couple of minutes he settles for the next best thing: taking Robson’s chopper for a whirl.

The Doctor does not know how to fly a helicopter, but try telling him that.

Did you know that helicopters can do a loop-de-loop?

I do now.

This is quite a drawn out sequence. Clearly it cost the BBC quite a bit to hire the helicopter and stunt pilot and they were damned if they were going to leave a single second of footage on the cutting room floor.

By some stroke of fortune he makes it back to the base and lands the helicopter safely. However, the base is running out of time, and there’s still no way to defeat the weed. Or is there?

On their way back to Harris and Jones, the trio pass the medical centre, where they learn that Quill has made a full recovery from his weed problem. But what killed it off? Victoria, of course. Specifically, the fact that she screams at a specific frequency that is apparently deadly to the weed.

If they can harness the sound of Victoria’s screams, they can use her as a sort of sonic weapon. Well, her propensity for wailing like a banshee had to come in useful eventually. I’m sure she used to be good for more than just screaming and getting captured, but there you go. That’s Victoria in a nutshell: the one who screams a lot.

I do find it quite a pity. She had so much potential but lately she has been written as little more than the archetypal damsel in distress. It’s a waste of a perfectly good character, and I find it disappointingly regressive. It is possible, I believe, for a female character to be gentle and feminine without her primary role in the story being to give the men something to rescue from danger.

Daft as it is, the Doctor’s plan works, Victoria’s amplified screams echoing down the pipeline and destroying the weed at the source. With the nerve centre destroyed, everyone who was controlled by the weed returns to normal. Maggie’s fine, Robson’s fine, and even though he remains offscreen, Van Lutyens is tickety-boo too.

All’s well that ends well. Or is it? In an unusual turn of events, the Doctor sticks around for the denoument, joining everyone for a meal at the Harris’ house. It’s not him who is reluctant to leave, however; it’s Victoria. Tired of being thrust from one dangerous situation into another, Victoria has finally had enough, and she wants to stay in one place. The Harrises are happy to have her to stay for as long as she likes, but of course staying in one place isn’t really the Doctor’s style. He did promise her father that he’d keep Victoria safe, and now he has an opportunity to actually follow through on that promise. Jamie is concerned for her being alone in a time that isn’t her own, but it’s not like there’s anyone left for her back in the 1860s.

The Doctor and Jamie bid farewell the following morning, and I will say this for the episode: it offers a satisfying companion departure, which is not a given for Doctor Who. Remember when Dodo literally just vanished offscreen mid-serial and went home without as much as a toodle-oo?

The Doctor’s a little sad to see her go, but poor Jamie really struggles with Victoria’s decision to leave. I always did suspect that he might have had a soft spot for sweet Victoria.

Final Thoughts

I suppose it is quite interesting that immediately after facing an enemy of pure consciousness, the Doctor’s next fight is against an enemy with no consciousness of its own except that which it steals from others. Unfortunately, the weed feels nowhere near as menacing as the GI. It does have its moments from time to time (like with Oak and Quill), but much of the time the story asks the audience to try being scared of…foam.

Other than a mildly interesting villain concept and a surprisingly well-done companion departure, this story is the television equivalent of a lettuce sandwich. It’s flavourless, unsatisfying, and so dull. It is yet another base under siege, and not a very good one.

And what is there left to say about the base under siege plot that has not been said already? It’s formulaic, repetitive, has a tendency to go round in circles, and it’s repetitive. At the risk of repetition…I’ll leave it there.

2.5 out of 5 stars for Fury From The Deep.




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[March 31st, 1968] Boredom From The Deep (Doctor Who: Fury From The Deep [Part One])

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By Jessica Holmes

There’s nothing…wrong with this latest serial of Doctor Who, per se. The acting’s pretty standard, nothing terribly stupid or offensive has happened, but it’s committed just about the worst sin a piece of media can do. It’s DULL.

But I’ll try to wring a moderately diverting review out of it anyway.

Let’s take a look at Doctor Who: Fury From The Deep, a serial by Victor Pemberton.

EPISODE ONE

The TARDIS arrives (yet again) in England, and it’s not long before the crew find themselves in the custody of the staff of a gas refinery. The boss around here is a man called Robson (Victor Maddern), and his blood pressure is constantly so high I think his head might actually explode.

His second in command, a nice bloke called Frank Harris (Roy Spencer), is apologetic for Robson’s terseness. The refinery controls a number of offshore natural gas rigs, and they’ve just lost contact with one of them. What’s more, there’s a funny noise coming from inside the gas pipe, but Robson won’t let them turn off the gas flow to check inside.

The base briefly regains contact with the rig, who assure them that all is well, but there’s something about their reassurances that doesn’t feel right.

Harris tries to raise his concerns about the pipeline to Robson, but finds that his research files seem to have gone walkabout. Thinking that he left them at home, he asks his wife, Maggie (June Murphy), to check in his office. She finds a bit more than she bargained for. The folder is there all right, but so is a stash of weed.

Seaweed, that is.

The seaweed pricks her hand, so she throws it away. However, there is more to this seaweed than it seems at first glance. It’s starting to glow, and she’s starting to feel quite peculiar…

Meanwhile, Robson throws the travellers into a prison cell, from which they promptly escape. Jamie exits through a ventilation grille with some difficulty, and Victoria takes the more pragmatic option of picking the lock with her hairpin.

Of course, traditionally the Scots DON'T wear anything under the kilt. Make of that what you will.I see London, I see France…

And guess which of them the Doctor is reluctant to take with him as he goes to the impeller room (where they pump the gas) to investigate the pipe problem?

I’m just saying, Victoria would be perfectly capable of looking at pipes. She’s from the industrial revolution. They were obsessed with gas and pipes and the like. Just look at the hats everyone was wearing.

Robson’s general bullishness hasn’t gone unnoticed, earning him a bit of a telling off from an overseer, the Dutch Van Lutyens (John Abineri). From his perspective, the problem with the gas is rather Robson-shaped.

Having been left behind while the boys go and look at some tubes, Victoria ends up in the right place at the right time to spot a shady figure opening some gas canisters in a storage room. Unfortunately for her, she then gets locked inside, and seafoam begins to pour in through the vent.

So now not only was she excluded from the investigation of the impeller room, she has been relegated to damsel in distress.

Again.

EPISODE TWO

Luckily for Victoria, the men come to her rescue in the nick of time, finding the room flooded with poisonous gas. She babbles something about seeing a creature in the foam, but there’s no sign of it now.

The other resident damsel, Maggie Harris, takes a turn for the worse, so her husband puts her to bed and goes to find her a doctor. I will say they are actually very sweet together, it’s clear they adore one another.

While he’s gone, a pair of maintenance workers arrive at the house, Mr Oak and Mr Quill (John Gill and Bill Burridge), who remind me of Abbott and Costello but rather less funny. Maggie allows them inside, not noticing their uncanny behaviour or the seaweed growing from their skin.

Other than the seaweed, they’re perfectly normal looking human beings. And that’s why it is quite impressive to me that they are perhaps the most viscerally unnerving characters ever to appear in Doctor Who.

Prosthetics and death rays are all well and good, but this is something else. With their mouths open wider than seems physically possible, eyes unblinking and bulging, the pair are absolutely grotesque as they begin to emit noxious gas, choking her into unconsciousness. It made my skin crawl. They’re straddling the line between human and inhuman, and there’s something about that that is scarier than any alien monster.

Even if I didn’t care much for the rest of the story, this one scene is excellent.

Harris arrives back with the Doctor and company in tow, discovering Maggie passed out on the floor and the house swimming in gas. There is no sign of the maintenance workers. They let the gas out through the window, and Harris explains to the Doctor about the seaweed incident. The Doctor theorises that whoever put the seaweed in the file meant for Harris to touch it and suffer the ill effects. And it looks like they’ve tried again, as Victoria finds some seaweed lying in the middle of the floor. Warning everyone not to touch it, the Doctor collects it for further testing.

Meanwhile, Robson continues to be stubborn about refusing to stop the gas flow, to the ever increasing frustration of Van Lutyens.

Taking matters into his own hands, Van Lutyens comes up with his own theory of where the blockage in the pipes must be, and asks the Chief Engineer (Hubert Rees) to go with him to sort it. However, though Robson is not an easy bloke to like, he is regarded as being genuinely good at his job, and the Chief Engineer is reluctant to take any action without getting Robson’s approval.

So that’s what they go to get, and Robson continues to be frustratingly stubborn, even though by this point the impeller has broken down and they’ve lost contact with another rig. And yet, the thudding from inside the pipes seems to be getting louder…

EPISODE THREE

Before departing the Harris’ house, the Doctor tells Harris that he should get his wife to the medical centre for supervision. She’ll probably be all right, but just in case.

The Doctor runs various tests on the seaweed, finding that it appears to feed on natural gas and excrete a toxic gas. And it’s very much alive. Well, yes. It’s a living organism. What you mean is that it is conscious and also mobile.

They find an illustration in an old book of a sea monster that bears a strong resemblance to the creature Victoria saw in the vent. Hoping to find out more, they venture back to the Harris’ quarters, breaking in when it appears that there is nobody home. To their shock, they find the house full to the brim of seafoam and tendrils, from which they have a difficult escape through the skylight.

Harris reports back to Robson, who has remembered that the Doctor and company are meant to be prisoners, and isn’t very happy that Harris has let them out of his sight. The impeller starts up again and almost immediately breaks down, putting an end to their argument, and sparking a bit of a tantrum from Robson. Increasingly concerned about Robson’s erratic behaviour, Van Lutyens urges Harris to take over.

They decide to confront Robson together, and he does not take it well. He has a right little strop and storms off to his room, where Mr Oak locks him inside. The room starts to flood with gas, and Robson bursts out just as Harris comes to check on him, yelling something about a creature as he runs off. Harris spots a seaweed-ish creature in the vent, but it’s gone by the time he tries to show Van Lutyens.

The Doctor reports his findings about the seaweed to Harris, who is very concerned to think that his wife might have been exposed to some unknown parasitic organism. He’s even more disturbed when he learns that despite having arranged for a medic to bring his wife to the medical centre, nobody has come to collect her yet. She’s still at home. The home which is now completely consumed in seafoam.

So where is Maggie?

She’s gone to the seaside, as one does when one feels under the weather. And who should be with her but Robson? Something has come over them both, and they don’t seem to be in their right minds. After all, wouldn’t you be at least a little concerned if you saw a woman walk into the sea?

Final Thoughts

So, we’re halfway through Fury From The Deep, and so far my reaction is a resounding ‘eh’. Like I said, there’s not really anything wrong with it. I like the characters well enough, they’re decent, I’m even picking up a little bit of a Lovecraft influence which is usually fun. And yet it’s just not doing anything for me. Why?

Perhaps ‘seaweed’ just doesn’t really work as a villain. Maybe it’s that the slowly building plot of something being wrong with the gas pipeline is just TOO slow to build. Perhaps it is that the conflict between Robson and Van Lutyens is just going around in circles until the third episode, where the status quo finally changes.

There’s not that much to look at thematically. The theme of ‘the leader is too arrogant for his own good and will doom everyone else because of that’ turns up in half the stories in Doctor Who, so there’s not much new territory being explored in that regard. We might be heading towards some environmental message, but no hint of it has popped up so far. That’s just speculation on my part. Ultimately, I just don’t find the story very interesting.

Let’s hope that things start to pick up from here.




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[March 10, 1968] The Best Laid Plans (Doctor Who: The Web Of Fear [Part 2])

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By Jessica Holmes

The latest serial of Doctor Who tempers the base-under-siege formula with an infusion of ‘whodunnit’, but is this a fresh take on the format or are the mystery elements just a red herring? Let’s take a look at the latter half of The Web Of Fear.

EPISODE FOUR

The episode kicks off with a Yeti attack, with the beast absconding with Professor Travers and leaving Anne unconscious on the floor.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and company pursue Chorley in the hopes of preventing him from getting to the TARDIS, but there’s no sign of him in the tunnels. In fact, thanks to the rapidly encroaching fungus it’s completely impossible to get to the TARDIS. Wherever Chorley is, he’s not there.

They return to the base to find the aftermath of Travers’ kidnapping, and the Doctor wonders why the Yeti didn’t just kill him. Unless, of course, the Great Intelligence needed him for something.

With the situation growing more dire by the minute, the Colonel decides to lead an expedition over the surface to reach the TARDIS, load it onto a trolley, and send it back through the tunnels.

It does not go well.

The below-ground half of the mission immediately goes down the drain, with two men (Staff Sgt. Arnolds [Jack Woolgar] and another bloke whose name I failed to write down) dying in the attempt to send a trolley through a web-infested tunnel.

As for the surface, it’s a total bloodbath. Well, web-bath. The Colonel takes a couple dozen men up there, and a few action-packed scenes later, he’s the only one to make it back alive, empty-handed.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Anne get to work on trying to find a way to control the Yeti. However, two of the Yeti control figurines go missing, and the Doctor works out that the Yeti are using them as homing devices.

What’s more, the Doctor collected a sample of the fungus earlier, but it seems to have mysteriously vanished—and the last person who laid hands on it was Evans.

Needing additional supplies in order to build a remote control for the Yeti-sphere, the Doctor persuades the Colonel’s subordinate, Captain Knight, to accompany him to the surface so he can pop to the shops.

This also does not go well.

As it turns out, Knight (unbeknownst to him) has one of the missing Yeti figurines, and the monsters find the pair in a matter of minutes. Knight is no match for a couple of Yeti, and promptly gets himself killed. The Doctor only survives because (I can only guess) the Great Intelligence calls them off at the last second. It seems the Great Intelligence’s plans for the Doctor are a little more sophisticated than simple murder.

The Colonel stumbles back to the base not long after the Doctor, and finds that he has the other missing figurine in his pocket. No wonder the surface mission went so badly.

The Doctor realises that the Yeti could be still homing in on the Colonel as they speak, but before the Colonel can destroy the figurine, the door bursts open.

In walk a pair of Yeti…and who should be with them but Professor Travers?

That’s an excellent twist, and had me eagerly anticipating the next episode.

EPISODE FIVE

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that Travers hasn’t suddenly turned out to be a secret evil mastermind. The bad news is that he’s being possessed by the Great Intelligence.

And the Great Intelligence has plans for the Doctor. It’s not particularly cross about the Doctor defeating it in Tibet. However, the Doctor caught his attention there, and the Great Intelligence is fascinated by the Doctor’s mind. So fascinated, it wants it for its own.

The process of stealing his mind won’t kill the Doctor, but it will more or less turn his brain into soup, and who knows what the GI might be getting up to while the Doctor is re-learning how to stand on two feet and eat solid food.

While the Doctor mulls over whether or not to give himself up, the Intelligence takes Victoria captive. Poor girl needs to take some self-defence lessons. She must be sick of being used as a bargaining chip every week.

As tempting as the offer is, the Doctor would rather take an option that doesn’t involve everyone being killed or his mind turning into mush.

While he works with Anne to try and get the control unit working, Jamie and the Colonel sneak out of the base to try and find where the Yeti have taken Victoria and Travers.

Evans puts his brain cell to work investigating the potential mole situation, and comes to the conclusion that it must be Jamie or the Colonel. And what does he do with this information? Holds them at gunpoint then crumples like a wet paper bag when the pair more or less roll their eyes and walk away. I can like a character who is smart but not brave. I can like a character who is brave but not smart. I have great difficulty liking a character who is neither.

Elsewhere in the Underground, the Intelligence is nice enough to let Travers have his mind back for the time being and Victoria catches him up on what he’s missed. He also discovers that Staff Sgt. Arnold still lives, and sends him to bring word of their location back to the Doctor. You may wonder why he doesn’t just go with him, but apparently the Yeti would notice. I mean, the Yeti didn’t notice him carrying on a full conversation with a third party, so maybe he needn’t have worried.

And if they did notice, so what? It’s not as if they can run very fast.

The Doctor and Anne manage to get their control sphere working, as well as a couple of remote controls, one of them voice activated. They find themselves a lone Yeti and swap out its control sphere for their own. Nice, now they can use the Intelligence’s own weapon against it!

However, they’re running out of time. The Intelligence gave the Doctor twenty minutes to hand himself over…but the fungus isn’t as patient.

EPISODE SIX

The Doctor and Anne, reasoning that they don’t know who they can trust, decide to conceal their feat of controlling a Yeti, and send theirs away. They’ll use it when the time is right. They reunite with the rest of the group, surprised to find that Arnold is alive. Everyone’s here except Evans, and that’s pretty dangerous if one of you is in league with the Intelligence. Sure enough, the Yeti surround them moments later.

Now would be a good time for Evans to find his courage and mount a rescue, but he has a Slinky where his spine should be. His cowardice doesn’t save him from being captured, however.

With some help from the Colonel, Arnold slips away from the Yeti as the group travel to the Intelligence’s base in hopes of finding help. Along the way, he discovers another unexpected survivor—the irritating journalist, Chorley.

The Doctor tells Jamie about his plan to control the Yeti, though he does have a little problem: he’s not sure which Yeti is his. Jamie will just have to get lucky. Failing that, he’ll have to run really fast, because he’s going to slip away from the group and try and find that Yeti.

These Yeti aren’t very observant, are they? Can’t even do a headcount before moving on to the next location.

They take the Doctor a little ahead of the group, which handily gives him the opportunity to freeze the Yeti escorting him and tamper with the device that will be used to scoop his brain out. And, for plot reasons, to avoid anyone else finding this out.

As for Jamie’s attempt to find the Doctor’s Yeti, it doesn’t go well. And he doesn’t even get a chance to run away.

It looks like the Doctor is going to lose his mind.

With everyone gathered in the Intelligence’s base, we finally find out who the mole is, courtesy of Chorley. It’s not him. It’s Arnold.

Who ever would have guessed?

Me. Actually no, I tell a lie. Before Arnold turned up alive I was half expecting it to be Anne.

…It made sense in my head. I’m a Holmes but not a Sherlock.

Much to Jamie’s consternation, the Doctor willingly puts on a silly hat (or mind-stealing helmet, potato po-tah-to) and sits inside the Intelligence’s device. It looks like a glass pyramid. The Intelligence likes its pyramids, doesn’t it?

What happens next illustrates the importance of communication. The Doctor has a plan, you see. He’s tinkered with the mind-stealing device so that rather than losing his mind, the process will be reversed, stealing the Intelligence’s mind and neutralising it for good.

But Jamie, suddenly faced with the responsibility of raising a 400-year-old baby, doesn’t know that, and panics. He still has the voice control device, so he yells into it, hoping that one of the many Yeti gathered in the room will obey him.

As luck would have it, one does. And as much as the Doctor tries to resist being rescued, eventually Jamie drags him out of the pyramid. Said pyramid then short-circuits and explodes, leaving the Intelligence without a connection to Earth, and the Doctor very put out.

Well, at least the Intelligence is gone…for now. And his puppet, Arnold, is dead. He seems to have been deep fried, but the Doctor suspects he’s been dead for quite some time; likely since before he even arrived.

How grim.

The Doctor makes an abrupt departure as Chorley starts to take an interest in him, promptly getting himself and his companions lost in the now fungus-free tunnels. They’d better work out where the TARDIS is soon…or the trains might beat them to it!

Final Thoughts

So, that was The Web Of Fear. It’s a good solid serial, well-paced with a decent cast of characters. That said, some of the characters were definitely more fun to watch than others.

Most of the soldiers were completely uninteresting which doesn’t really matter because they were more or less Yeti-fodder. Still, I might have cared a bit more whenever any of them died if any of them had much personality. Evans and Chorley are both too irritating for their own good, and I was actually hoping they’d end up on the wrong end of a Yeti, but alas we can’t always get what we want.

Anne’s great though, I hope she pops up again, like her father. The Colonel was pretty cool too, I like his ‘get stuff done’ attitude. I wouldn’t mind seeing him again.

As for the Intelligence, I have a thought or two. It’s got no body, could be thousands of years old, can control people’s minds, and we don’t know where he came from. And yet I don’t think it’s scary enough. The Yeti are just too cuddly for me to take them, and by extension the Intelligence, as a serious threat. Maybe the Intelligence should start a cult, get itself some servants that aren’t eminently huggable.

The mystery made an otherwise quite standard plot a little more interesting, though I’m not sure Arnold being the mole is a particularly satisfying conclusion. He’s not much of a character. In fact, I didn’t think to mention him when covering the first half of this serial because he was such a non-entity. He wasn’t even nefarious, no motivation of his own, just a meat puppet for the Intelligence. That’s just not as much fun as a willing accomplice.

Assuming the trio don’t get splatted by a train, I look forward to seeing what adventures are in store next time on Doctor Who.




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[February 18, 1968] Yet(i) Again, London Is Under Attack (Doctor Who: The Web Of Fear [Part One])

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By Jessica Holmes

After a cracking serial last month with a really fresh story format, we’re getting another ‘base under siege’ plot in Doctor Who. Will The Web Of Fear turn out to be the same old yarn, or have Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln found a way to put a new spin on the format?

EPISODE ONE

You might recall that the last episode of Doctor Who ended with the TARDIS leaning on its side and the occupants clinging on for dear life. It provides a nice little high-action start to the episode, as Jamie manages to climb to the TARDIS door controls and save the group. Out of one perilous situation, the Doctor immediately wants to go and look for another adventure.

Sometimes I think he must enjoy being in imminent danger of a horrible death.

Well, he doesn’t have to go far. The TARDIS stops, but it hasn’t landed. It’s caught in something. Something like a web.

It turns out we are back on Earth in (roughly?) the modern day. Remember Professor Travers (Jack Watling) from The Abominable Snowmen? He’s back, but rather a lot older, and in quite a bit of trouble. He managed to recover a Yeti along with their control equipment and brought it back to London. Rather than keep it safe, he went and sold it to a wealthy collector, yet carried on tinkering with the control sphere. As you can imagine, this has backfired big-time, and he can’t persuade the collector to give it up. The ridiculously-stereotypical Silverstein (whose personality can be summed up with the words ‘greedy’, ‘rich’ and ‘stubborn’) soon ends up on the wrong side of his prized Yeti, and by the next scene, London is in a sorry state indeed.

The Yeti are taking over, spreading a mysterious weblike fungus through the Underground. Trying to hold back the onslaught are our main cast of side characters. We’ve got resident ‘Yeti Experts’, Professor Travers and his daughter Anne (Tina Packer), a handful of soldiers trying to hold out against the Yeti threat, and an absolutely infuriatingly irritating journalist reporting on the situation, Harold Chorley (Jon Rollason).

The TARDIS breaks free of the webbing and lands in the Underground, the group soon finding that the street level entrances are closed off.

Trapped on the London Underground. That sounds like my personal Hell.


The cinematography in this serial is rather good I must say. Some interesting angles and dramatic lighting. Makes things a lot more visually interesting.

Victoria and Jamie soon get caught by a couple of patrolling soldiers, but the Doctor evades capture by being conveniently off-camera.

The kids soon get to meet everyone hunkered down at the base, and Anne quickly establishes herself as my favourite new character. I just have a real soft spot for smart women who know how to handle condescending men.

Oblivious to the full details of the situation, Victoria and Jamie think that they’re protecting the Doctor when they insist that they were alone in the tunnel. However, what they don’t know is that the soldiers have a plan for halting the advance of the Yeti. They’re going to collapse the tunnel, and the kids have just given them the all clear.

The Doctor could not have picked a worse time to start poking around the explosives stockpile.

EPISODE TWO

The charges go off with more of a whimper than a bang, to the soldiers’ surprise. What they don’t know is that the Yeti have covered the explosives in webbing, containing the explosion. Thinking that the Doctor may have tampered with the charges, finding the Doctor becomes a high priority. But he’s nowhere to be found. At all. In this entire episode. I think he must have gone on his holidays.

Travers gets to introduce his daughter to Jamie and Victoria, and Anne finds their time travel story a bit hard to believe. She later confesses to her father that she’s a bit suspicious of the Doctor, finding his arrival a tad convenient. She’s not the only one. Chorley is starting to take an interest in the Doctor as well.


Don't you just hate it when you can't get a guy to take a hint and leave you alone?

While searching the tunnels for the Doctor, Jamie makes the acquaintance of a singing driver, Evans (Derek Politt), who is very Welsh. I know they call it the land of song but there’s a time and a place. He’s the sole survivor of a Yeti attack, and tells Jamie he saw one of the Yeti carrying a pyramid. Evans joins Jamie on his journey through the tunnels, but before they run into the Doctor, a Yeti runs into them.

The pair find themselves hemmed in by a Yeti and a wall of advancing… soap bubbles? Of all the ways to make a special effect for spreading web or fungus, soap bubbles would not be the method I’d go for. It doesn’t really look anything like the fungus covering the rest of the tunnels. Still, it would be funny if the Yetis’ web-shooting gun was actually just a water pistol filled with washing-up liquid.


Now, webs that help Yetis can feel soft as your face with miiild greeeen…Faaairy Liiiquiiiid!

EPISODE THREE

Shooting the pyramid does nothing to stop the advance of the soap suds or the Yeti (there must be at least one more out there, methinks), so the pair flee into a side tunnel.

Victoria strikes out on her own to find the Doctor, and soon enough finds him in the company of a new arrival to the Underground: Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney). What a posh name that is.

Lethbridge-Stewart is here to take over leadership of the little group of soldiers. He has the right paperwork and everything. Still, with the circle line fully consumed by the fungus, the soldiers are a little suspicious of where he came from.

As for Jamie and his Welsh friend, they split up once Evans sees an opportunity to escape. He returns not long later, partly because he felt a bit guilty about abandoning everyone else, but mostly because the street access turned out to be locked.

Once everyone (sans Jamie) is gathered together, Lethbridge-Stewart gives a briefing full of information I’m pretty sure the soldiers should already know given that they’ve been watching this whole situation unfold. Still, he seems an authoritative chap who knows what he’s doing. I already like him better than Chorley, who keeps butting into everything, won’t shut up about finding an escape route, and is getting on my last nerve.

Realising that the Yeti keep cocooning any explosives the soldiers place before they get a chance to set them off, the Doctor suggests putting the explosives on a moving trolley. The Colonel approves of the idea, and it begins to look like the situation might turn to their side.

Then Victoria and Anne realise that one of the Yeti control figurines is missing.

And someone is using it right now, to send a Yeti into the explosives store and web the place up. How very convenient that they should choose to do that at this precise moment… unless it’s not a coincidence. Finding the missing figurine in the weapons store, the Doctor realises that someone in the group must have put it there, and that person is in league with the Great Intelligence.

This base-under-siege is turning into a bit of a whodunnit! That’s refreshing.

Chorley seems oddly horrified when Victoria tells him of the Doctor’s intentions to blow the tunnel, and he’s a little too interested in the Doctor’s TARDIS. He leaves in a hurry once the Doctor shows up, and the Doctor is instantly suspicious—especially when he realises the journalist has locked the door behind him.

I don’t know, I think that Chorley seems a bit too obvious a suspect. I think he's just a coward who wants to use the TARDIS to escape.

They aren’t trapped for long, as Jamie finally emerges from the labyrinth of tunnels to let them out. Good timing!

A scream from another room brings Anne and Travers running to discover one of the soldiers, Weams, dead and all webbed up. A Yeti figurine lies beside him on the floor… and the real thing is looming over them, ready to strike!


What a wonderful facial expression. He looks like one of those Greek tragedy masks.

Final Thoughts

So, we’re halfway through The Web Of Fear and so far it’s fine, I suppose. It's a pretty good serial but nothing that has me forgetting to take notes because I’m so engrossed in the story. It is cool to see Travers again! I appreciate the continuity here. I was a bit surprised to see the Great Intelligence returning so soon, but it’s an interesting villain, so who am I to complain?

I have to applaud the crew for the set design in this serial, with particular regards to the Tube station set. You can practically smell the old dust and stale sweat. I kept half expecting a train to come through at any moment. The resemblance to the actual Underground is uncanny—so much so that I’m not the only one who thought they’d filmed on location. I did do some digging to double check, but it is definitely just a set. Well done, crew.

It’s too early to tell if this serial will do anything very interesting with the base-under-siege format, but the mystery elements of the plot are quite promising.

We’ve also got a decent roster of supporting characters, with Anne being a bit of a favourite for me.

The Colonel’s not yet had enough screen-time for me to draw any conclusions about him, but I hate Chorley so much I just want him to go get lost in a long dark tunnel. Of which there are many, many, MANY in the Underground.

Still, at least his existence isn't an insult to an entire group of people.

Certainly, Evans could not be more Welsh if they called him 'Cymru Llandudno of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychrwyrndroblllantysiliogogogoch', and it's not an entirely flattering depiction. The singing habit is quite endearing but he’s not exactly bright and definitely not brave. Basically the same old insults the English have been tarring the Welsh with for centuries.

But Silverstein… wow. The depiction of Evans is unflattering but the short scene featuring Silverstein is just absurdly bad. The writers cannot have been oblivious to what they were doing there. They could have just made him a stubborn rich bloke, but they just had to go all in on the antisemitic caricature. It’s very disappointing to see.

I know it’s possible to worry too much about what other people might think about your writing, but maybe some writers could stand to worry about it a little more.




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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[January 28th, 1968] Double Trouble (Doctor Who: The Enemy Of The World [Part Two])

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The latest edition of KGJ is up!

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By Jessica Holmes

The year is 2018, disasters are running rampant, and there’s a dictatorial Doctor doppelganger at the centre of it all. The first half of this serial was excellent, but does the second half follow through? Let’s have a look at the last few episodes of The Enemy Of The World.

EPISODE FOUR

After the failed attempt to rescue Denes, Astrid flees back to Australia, where she meets back up with Kent and the Doctor. Fariah soon arrives unexpectedly, and offers her assistance to their cause. Her loathing of him, which was barely concealed in the first half of the serial, is now on full display. Whatever Salamander did to her, it must have been pretty awful.

In order to rescue his friends (who Fariah says will have been brought to Salamander’s base) the Doctor finally agrees to Kent’s plan to impersonate Salamander. However, there’s a catch. If the Doctor wants Kent’s help rescuing his companions, he’ll have to do more than just impersonate Salamander—he’ll have to kill him. The Doctor is vehemently opposed, of course. Kent, on the other hand, might be a little too eager. However, they don’t get to argue the ethics of the business for long.

Salamander’s deputy, Benik (Milton Johns), has been watching their movements, and is about to launch a raid. He doesn’t plan on taking prisoners. Benik very quickly establishes himself as a deeply unpleasant little man who enjoys his modicum of power far too much, using it to indulge some rather sadistic impulses.

Not everyone makes a clean getaway from Benik's troops. A soldier shoots Fariah as she tries to escape, and Benik, nasty little creep that he is, tries interrogating her as she lies dying. To her credit, Fariah goes out with real style. She refuses to tell him anything, and gets a fantastic line of dialogue:

“I can only die once… and someone’s beaten you to it.”

To punctuate her point she uses the last of her strength to slap him. Oh, why did they have to kill her off so soon? She was cool, clever, and was starting to take control of her own story—are we only allowed one female character with those traits per serial?

It’s a crying shame, but an excellent death scene.

At Salamander’s base, a smug Benik reports back to the man himself. A little unnecessary bloodshed doesn't bother Salamander, but it makes security chief Bruce uneasy.

Later on, it's revealed that the base's records room conceals the entrance to a hidden underground complex. What's Salamander hiding? About two dozen people who haven't seen the sun in five years. Salamander's been really smart about the whole deal. Not only are the captives kept secret from the outside world, they don't even realise they're captives! They believe the surface of the Earth to have been devastated by an ongoing nuclear war. Salamander goes to the surface to scavenge supplies, even though the radiation is (supposedly) slowly killing him. How brave of him.

They’re not just waiting out the storm, though. They’re trying to bring it to an end. How? By engineering natural disasters to bring down the aggressors.

Now that’s what I call an underground resistance.

I apologise.

In all seriousness, the captives are blissfully unaware that they’re killing innocent people, and are just grateful to be alive. Well, most of them. One of the youngest of the group, Colin (Adam Verney) is…how do I put this nicely? Whiny.  Every time he pops up he’s just banging on about wanting to go to the surface like a little brat who wants to go to Disneyland.

To be fair, he has been down here since he was a teenager. So has his friend Mary (who exists mostly to give Colin someone to moan and complain to. I suppose two cool female side characters was the limit!), but she doesn't whinge nearly as much.

Back at the surface, the Doctor has regrouped with the surviving conspirators at Kent’s cabin, and he is ready for his close-up. With a generous heaping of bronzer and a bit of a comb, he’s the spitting image of Salamander, but first he’ll have to deal with an unexpected visitor…

I’m not keen on the whole brownface-and-stereotypical-accent aspect of Salamander, even though I do like him as a villain. It’s bordering on caricature, serving as a distraction from Troughton’s otherwise very good performance.

EPISODE FIVE

The unexpected guest turns out to be Bruce, who has noticed their arrival at the cabin (wow, Kent and company are terrible at espionage), and would like to hear them out. He also brings them the news of Fariah’s demise. Though initially reluctant to trust one another (to put it mildly), the Doctor manages to calm everyone down and win Bruce over. He agrees to let Bruce accompany him on his infiltration mission, leaving Kent and Astrid behind.

Down in the secret bunker, the captives are unloading food.  One of them, Swann (Christopher Burgess) finds something troubling stuck to one of the boxes. It’s a scrap of newspaper, something about a holiday liner sinking. But why would there be holiday liners in the middle of a nuclear war? Realising something is amiss, Swann immediately confronts Salamander in his private quarters.

Caught in the lie, Salamander has no choice but to dig himself deeper. He ‘admits’ that the war is over, but the people left behind on the surface are evil mutants ravaged by radiation. It’s still too dangerous. As for the disasters, Salamander tells Swann that they’ve been targeting the mutated surface-dwellers. They’re unfit to live, it’s a mercy if anything. It’s a familiar fascist talking point, and Swann doesn’t buy it.

There’s actually a couple of cases in this serial of minor characters questioning authority. Earlier, when Benik was giving orders to shoot to kill, the leader of the soldiers was uneasy—but ultimately passed down the order, and it got Fariah killed. Here, Swann pushes back against Salamander’s genocidal rhetoric. He insists on seeing the surface for himself. Who knows how many lives that might have saved?

Starting to panic a little, Salamander tells Swann to inform the others that they’re taking a trip to the surface. Of course, Colin whines that he doesn’t get to go.

On the upper floors of the base, Jamie and Victoria awake to find themselves in unfamiliar surroundings and in unwelcome company. The slimeball Benik has come to interrogate them, and he is going to enjoy himself. I cannot overstate the sheer creepiness of Benik. Salamander might be a supervillain, but Benik is the one who makes my skin crawl.

It’s lucky for them that the Doctor and Bruce arrive to dismiss Benik. Of course, they don’t know that, and start screaming at him for killing Denes and kidnapping them. When ‘Salamander’ informs them that their ally Fariah is dead, Victoria snaps. The Doctor finally breaks character to dive under the table and pathetically (and quite hilariously) wail at her not to hit him.

Meanwhile, Benik has a strop at the guards for not letting him know that Salamander was on his way. This comes as news to the guards, who haven’t seen him leave the records room. Uh oh.

Outside, Astrid and Kent start to get a bit impatient. Rather than wait for the Doctor and Bruce to come back, Kent plays dead, then Astrid runs off, leading the guard away—and leaving Kent unattended. Wait,they only had to deal with one guard? Astrid could have taken him in a fight any day.

Still, the trick is pretty clever, faking Kent’s assassination by sniper with a broken window and some ketchup.

As Astrid leads the guard on a merry chase, however, she comes upon something unexpected. It’s Swann, abandoned and bleeding. Salamander left him for dead.

EPISODE SIX

Back at the base, the Doctor keeps up his ruse, which leads to him discovering that the base’s provisions are far more than enough for the number of people stationed here. There must be other people hidden on the base.

Not as many as there were yesterday, sadly. Swann only lives long enough to learn from Astrid that there was never any war, and to tell her to rescue the other captives. His death scene isn’t as good as Fariah’s. No swan-song for Swann.

Following his guidance, Astrid finds her way into the tunnels and discovers the secret bunker for herself. The inhabitants are just as surprised to see her as she is to see them, and a little hostile. After all, they’re frightened. Colin calms them down (pretty much the only useful thing he does), and Astrid proves that Salamander has been lying about the surface radiation. The machine he was using to measure the radiation is a fraud. Furious, the captives start clamouring to come to the surface. They’d like a few words with their 'saviour'.

As Salamander, the Doctor gives orders for Jamie and Victoria to be released and escorted to the perimeter of the base. Things are likely to get more dangerous, and he’d rather they were out of harm’s way.

As for Kent, he successfully makes it into the base and sneaks into the records room, where he confronts his enemy at long last. Rather than just getting on with it and shooting Salamander where he stands, Kent milks the moment. Locked outside the room, Benik and Bruce can only watch the situation unfold via a security camera.

Even at gunpoint, Salamander continues to taunt Kent. He tells him he’ll never get out alive, but Kent reveals a little secret: he knows about the tunnels under the base. And furthermore, he knows about the cache of explosives stored down there, so he can stop anyone following him.

It’s then that the Doctor drops his ruse, thanking him for this new information. The dumbfounded Kent then finds himself face to face with Astrid, and she’s not at all happy to see him him. Kent didn’t just know about the tunnel and the secret lab—he helped set it up. Like the pied piper, he led all those people down there in the first place. At some point, Kent and Salamander had a spat, and went their separate ways. Kent’s enmity with Salamander isn’t based on moral principle, it’s professional rivalry. He's not saving the world from Salamander, he's trying to take his place.

Well, he was, but now all he can do is flee into the labyrinthine tunnel network.

With the secret beneath the base revealed, Benik tries to make a run for it. Bruce promptly places him under arrest. Well, he certainly deserves it, but it’s not as cathartic a comeuppance as I would have liked.

As Kent flees through the tunnels, he encounters Salamander again, but this time it’s the real McCoy. In an attempt to save his own skin, he proposes to Salamander that they team back up again. However, Salamander only keeps assets that are useful to him, and Kent certainly isn’t. Salamander shoots him, but Kent gets his own back. Before dying, he manages to set off the explosives, rocking the base and collapsing the tunnel on both of them… Or so it appears.

At the TARDIS, Jamie is very relieved to see a familiar face show up, but little does he know that it doesn’t belong to the Doctor. It’s a very battered and quite badly hurt Salamander. The Doctor’s done such a good job impersonating him, why not have a go himself? However, it seems he can’t pull off the accent, so he wisely keeps his mouth shut. However, Jamie soon realises that something is amiss, and the real Doctor turns up in the nick of time to set things straight.

Finally coming face to face with his double, Salamander attacks the Doctor. It’s a pretty well done effect, though it’s only brief so we don’t get time to properly scrutinise it. In the fight, Salamander activates the dematerialisation switch—but the TARDIS doors are still wide open!

The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria hang on for dear life as the TARDIS lurches onto its side, but Salamander isn’t so lucky. Losing his grip, Salamander is flung out of the TARDIS, plummeting through time and space…perhaps forever.

Final Thoughts

What a treat this serial turned out to be! The plot was fun, well-paced, and a welcome change from the usual alien monsters. There’s nothing wrong with a bug-eyed alien but it makes a nice change to have a good strong human villain.

It’s a strong cast of characters all around, actually, from the love-to-hate Salamander to the strong and capable Astrid. And they’re played very well, dodgy accents aside. For the most part. Colin’s a bit overwrought, but he’s not a big part of the story so it’s not really a problem for me.

I like my television to be progressive, and this serial is in a bit of a weird limbo in that regard. On the one hand, Fariah’s a smart, determined black woman who isn’t reduced to a stereotype (unlike Toberman in Tomb Of The Cybermen) and gets a bit of independence, though it doesn’t last long. Still, an improvement. And you’ve got Astrid, who is awesome. On the other hand, there’s Salamander and his exaggerated accent. Oh, and Mary, who has about as much personality as a bunch of wet tissue paper. So there’s still room for improvement, but it’s encouraging!

I will say that the ending feels a bit rushed, which is a chronic problem in Doctor Who. I would have at least liked to see Astrid retrieving the captives. Still, the confrontation between Salamander and the Doctor at the very end? Excellent. I don’t know how well the effects would have held up if the scene had lasted longer (shooting body doubles from behind only works up to a certain point), but they were very good for the brief time they were shown.

On the whole, I think this might be my new favourite serial. I hope the next is just as good!

4.75 out of 5 stars for The Enemy Of The World.




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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[January 8, 1968] Seeing Double…Again (Doctor Who: The Enemy Of The World [Part 1])

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By Jessica Holmes

Happy New Year, everyone! We’re off to a cracking start this year with a spy thriller that really gives Patrick Troughton the chance to show off his (very good) acting chops and (very questionable) dialect skills. Let’s get stuck into Doctor Who: The Enemy Of The World.

EPISODE ONE

After all the cold weather of the last few episodes, a trip to the sunny seaside in the year 2018 is just the sort of thing the Doctor and his companions need. However, the Doctor’s refreshing dip in the briny is cut short when a gang of assassins try to fill him up with lead.

Fleeing into the sand dunes, the gang are almost cornered when the assassins’ boss shows up with a helicopter—but fortunately, she’s here to rescue them. It seems there has been a case of mistaken identity.

It’s a jolly exciting first few minutes, that’s for sure.

Their saviour Astrid (Mary Peach) takes the group to her bungalow, where she turns on the charm. The Doctor very much enjoys her attentions until she asks him if he wouldn’t mind doing her a favour. One that will very likely get him killed. She wants to introduce him to her boss, Giles Kent (Bill Kerr)… as soon as they get away from the assassins still in hot pursuit, leaving a dead assassin in Astrid’s living room and an exploded helicopter in her back garden.

See, it appears that the Doctor has a doppelganger. Again. Last time this happened (St. Barthomew's Eve), it was a French bishop, but this time it’s a Mexican would-be dictator by the name of Ramón Salamander.

The Doctor’s uncanny resemblance to Salamander (other than the questionable accent, brown-face and neat hairdo) could be an incredible boon to those who wish to bring Salamander down. But would that be a good thing? To all appearances, Salamander is an absolute godsend, having invented a technology to capture sunlight and use it to aid crop growth in disaster-stricken areas. It also happens that he has an uncanny ability to predict when and where these disasters will strike, and is always the first to offer aid.

It all seems a bit too good to be true for Kent, but the Doctor isn’t entirely convinced. Maybe they shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth? Then again, this horse might be Trojan.

Powerful men have a habit of dropping dead around Salamander, with his cronies taking their places. Kent claims that Salamander ruined his career when he got too close to the truth, but it could all just be sour grapes. There’s only one way to know for sure. The Doctor must become Ramón Salamander, and break into his research station to find out the truth about his plans for the world.

With a few weeks to practice, he could pull it off, though he’s still not sure he’s even willing to try it.

But Kent won’t give him a few weeks to practice, or even a few minutes to think. Thanks to a call from him, the head of United Zone security, Donald Bruce (Colin Douglas) is on the way. If he sees the Doctor out-of-character, he’ll put him under arrest for impersonating Salamander.

The only way out is to put on a flawless performance.

The Doctor hastily changes into some smarter clothes and gives his hair a brush while the others stall Bruce, who understandably has questions about the dead man in Astrid’s living room. It’s not exactly easy to explain away, but fortunately the Doctor doesn’t miss his cue, emerging in character as Ramón Salamander.

It is so weird.

EPISODE TWO

The Doctor finds himself very much thrown in at the deep end as Bruce demands an explanation for his presence here. But who is Bruce to demand explanations of the great Ramón Salamander? Nobody! And so he refuses to explain himself—and the ruse works.

The Doctor is still unconvinced he’s even aiding the right side, but Jamie encourages him to go along with things. I think he’s enjoying this.

Jamie, Victoria and Astrid rocket over to the Central European Zone to begin infiltration. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Kent go to observe Salamander’s research station from a cabin just outside the restricted area.

As for the real Salamander, he is warning the leader of the Central European Zone, Denes (George Pravda), about an impending eruption in a long dormant volcanic area in Hungary. I don’t think any volcanoes in Hungary have actually erupted for hundreds of thousands of years, but Salamander insists he knows all about volcanoes, so who am I to disagree?

However, Denes (by the way it’s pronounced ‘Denesh’) is doubtful about the risk.

Meanwhile, Astrid manages to plant a bomb on Salamander’s balcony, providing Jamie the opportunity to turn up at the right time to ‘save’ Salamander. A grateful Salamander offers Jamie a job with his household guard, and Jamie even manages to finagle a job in the kitchens for Victoria.

It turns out that Denes is in league with Astrid, and knows that Salamander is probably going to try and replace him with a more loyal stooge. He just can’t think of a reason that the most likely candidate, Fedorin (David Nettheim), should betray him.

Well, aside from petty ambition, it looks like Salamander is very talented at finding ways to motivate people. He finds incriminating information, then holds it against them as insurance. Whether the incriminating information is true or not is irrelevant, it looks real and that’s all that matters. Fedorin reluctantly agrees to Salamander’s plan to remove Denes from power, and right on cue…

BOOM! A whole mountain range erupts in a glorious montage of stock footage, to the undisguised awe of Salamander and the dismay of all others present.

Well, doesn’t that seem a little convenient?

It certainly seems so to Denes, who storms in and accuses Salamander of somehow causing this disaster. Because this is Doctor Who and Salamander is very obviously the baddie, he’s probably right… but you must admit that this is quite an eccentric accusation.

And it makes it very easy for Salamander to discredit Denes. He demands Bruce (who has just arrived) to arrest him, and Bruce complies. With the United Zone security forces at Salamander’s beck and call, why bother with all the manipulation? He could just seize power by force at this point. Seems like he’s just making more work for himself. Or perhaps he needs the hero-worship as much as he wants the power that comes with it.

EPISODE THREE

Though Denes is out of power and in handcuffs, that still isn’t enough for Salamander, who orders Federin to finish Denes off with a vial of poison. I think Salamander could stand to learn a thing or two about the art of subtlety.

Then again, when you’re powerful enough you can get away with this sort of thing.

While working in the kitchens under a comically dour chef, Victoria makes the acquaintance of Salamander’s food taster, Fariah (Carmen Munroe). Fariah is a less than willing employee of Salamander, but the exact nature of his hold on her is unclear. Nevertheless, she seems to hold quite a bit of soft power in his household, able to vouch for Jamie when a guard gets a little too suspicious of him. She warns Victoria that Salamander is bad news, and that she should get well away from him as fast as she can.

The Doctor and Kent, meanwhile, have learned of the disaster in Europe and are wondering how Salamander could have predicted it…or caused it. Kent has a theory. A suspicious amount of funding went into Salamander’s research station, far more than should have been required for its stated purpose of solar energy storage. However, when he tried to prove that there was something dodgy about how Salamander was handling the funds, the proof mysteriously vanished, replaced with falsified documents.

Having learned of Denes’ arrest, Astrid starts putting plans into place to attempt a rescue, pretending to be a messenger in order to do so. However, when no message actually arrives for him, Salamander gets suspicious as to what this stranger is doing in the presidential palace, and orders his guards to follow her.

Meanwhile, Fedorin gets an opportunity to poison Denes’ food, but finds himself unable to follow through. Salamander is of course very understanding when Fedorin returns to him, full poison vial in hand. He even offers him a drink… poisoned with the very toxin that Fedorin was supposed to deliver to Denes.

Well, if Fedorin didn’t see it coming, that’s on him.

At 11 on the dot, Jamie creates a distraction, but Astrid’s side of the plan goes awry. Not only does she fail to help Denes escape, he gets a bullet in the back. Then there’s a very abrupt cut to a new scene, with Jamie and Victoria captured and Astrid nowhere in sight. It feels like the scene was cut about a minute too early, which is odd for what is otherwise a very well paced serial.

Once the guards haul the pair away, Bruce finally gets a chance to ask Salamander what he was doing in Australia…which of course is news to Salamander. And the penny drops for the pair of them. Someone is impersonating him.

And we know Who.

Final Thoughts

Oh, this is an excellent start. Really excellent. It is very refreshing to have a different flavour of plot for once. No aliens (other than the Doctor), no bug-eyed monsters, just some intrigue and a fun spy plot. It might be a tad complicated in places, but I think kids are smart enough to keep up.

Troughton’s great as the Doctor, but he also makes a fantastic villain. Ramón Salamander has flair, panache, and a genuine sense of menace. In fact, he wouldn’t be out of place in a James Bond film. The one thing I don’t care for is the brownface and that absurd accent. Troughton is more than capable of distinguishing Salamander as an entirely different character to the Doctor without the assistance of such things. It’s not just the voice, he carries himself in a new way, emotes differently, his entire essence is just completely altered from when he’s playing the Doctor. I was genuinely impressed, and I really look forward to seeing how the two characters interact in the future.




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Science Fiction/Fantasy, TV

[December 18, 1967] God Out Of The Machine (Doctor Who: The Ice Warriors [Part 2])

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By Jessica Holmes

Another year draws to a close, and so does this serial. Let’s take a closer look at the ending of The Ice Warriors.

EPISODE FOUR

As the Ice Warriors train their cannon on Victoria, I have to wonder: how do they do anything with those great big digger-game claws of theirs?

While I’m pondering this, the Ice Warriors decide that Victoria is more useful as live bait than dead meat, and refrain from killing her. At the Doctor’s urging, Victoria makes a run for it, with an Ice Warrior in…  lukewarm pursuit.

Waddling like people from a Fisher Price set.

Desiring to find out what kind of reactor the Ice Warrior ship has (as Victoria had no idea what she was looking at), the Doctor decides to go have a look for himself, taking a vial of ammonium sulphide with him for protection.


The Doctor invents a new drinking game: take a shot every time Victoria gets captured.

I enjoy how blasé he is about the idea of getting deliberately captured. After the billionth time being taken captive by the baddie of the week, it probably gets a bit dull. Still, at least he probably has his recorder to keep him amused.

Meanwhile, Victoria continues to run from the Ice Warrior. Perhaps she would move faster if she wasted less oxygen screaming her lungs out. It’s not doing her much good, and it’s not making the already unstable glacier any safer.

Not for the Ice Warrior, anyway. Just as it catches up to her, a well-timed avalanche buries the pair of them, killing the Warrior and trapping Victoria.

Jamie meanwhile starts to recover from his injury, but to his distress discovers that the alien weapon has left him paralysed from the waist down. Penley and Storr, concerned for the lad, debate how best to help him. Storr has the bright idea of befriending the aliens and asking for their help—‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ and all that. Well, I can’t fault a chap for wanting to see the best in people. Even when those people are eight feet tall and have a violent streak.


Nice pants.

Storr heads out onto the ice with Penley chasing after him, and both find something unexpected. Storr finds Victoria, and Penley finds the Doctor. Upon learning from Victoria that the aliens want to destroy the scientists’ base, Storr is even more eager to make their acquaintance.

Unfortunately, the Ice Warriors do not share his eagerness to work together. Already angry with Victoria for running away and costing him one of his warriors, Varga sees no use for Storr, and kills him before he even gets a chance to ask about some help for Jamie. Not that Varga would have given it.

To amend my previous statement: I can’t fault a man for being trusting, but I can fault him for trying to conspire to blow up a load of people because he doesn’t like them.

And it looks like Victoria is back at square one. I think of plot threads like this as a walk around the block. It might look like you’re going places and doing things, but you just end up back where you started with sore feet.

Meanwhile, the Doctor has a look at Jamie, and assures him that he will regain the use of his legs—as long as he gets some proper medical care and supervision. A reluctant Penley agrees to take Jamie back to the base while the Doctor goes ahead to meet with the Warriors.

Things get off to a rocky start on that front. The Ice Warriors are good enough to open the exterior airlock at the Doctor’s knock, but then seal him inside, demanding to know who he is… under threat of explosive decompression!

EPISODE FIVE

In true Doctor fashion, he gets out of the situation by giving the Ice Warriors an absolute non-answer. He’s a ‘scientist’.

I wouldn't count that as a valid response, but apparently it's good enough for the Ice Warriors, who let him in.

Meanwhile, Penley and Jamie run into trouble as they traverse the wilderness, as they hear the not-so-distant howl of wolves…before coming face to face with a bear.

Awwww.

Oh, I mean ‘oh no, how scary!’

Luckily, Penley manages to stun it.

The Ice Warriors start asking the Doctor tricky questions, beginning to realise that he’s not really here to offer help, but to spy, and confiscate his communication device.. The Doctor warns them that sooner or later the base will have to use the Ioniser, whatever the consequences. Back at base, Clent takes his meaning. But what if the Ioniser makes the alien ship blow up? The contamination could be disastrous. But if he doesn’t use the ioniser, the glacier will advance and Europe will be consumed by ice.

Unsure of what to do, he puts the question to the computer. And the computer doesn’t know. Being purely logical, it’s risk-averse, and tells him to wait for more information. Realising the computer is no help, Clent decides to… uh… do as it says and wait around.

I thought he was gearing up for a big impressive leadership moment, but it looks like he was just being pompous.

Threatening to kill Victoria, the Ice Warriors start asking what the base’s power source is. Though she protests not to tell them, the Doctor says they’ll find what they need at the base.

These Ice Warriors are extremely accepting of evasive answers, aren’t they?

Satisfied, the Ice Warriors immediately begin planning to attack the base, to which Victoria protests ‘you can’t be so inhuman!’

Gee, what gave it away, Victoria? Was it the hissing, the scales, or the fact they’re literally from Mars?

Penley and Jamie make it to the base, where Clent is not exactly pleased to see his ex-colleague. The dynamic between Clent and Penley is actually my favourite part of this entire serial. There’s a real sense of mutual resentment, betrayal, and a heaping helping of bitterness.

They’re like a couple of divorcees.

It doesn’t take long before they’re at each others’ throats, and a heated argument quickly devolves into a scuffle, resulting in Penley and Jamie getting stunned and locked away in a recovery room.

Honestly, the human dynamics in this serial are more interesting to me than the alien threat. It’s a while since we’ve had a serial without any aliens or robots or whatnot. Perhaps we could do with a few more from time to time?

The Ice Warriors prepare to assault the base, and Victoria’s incessant wailing for once comes in useful, providing a cover for the Doctor to whisper his plan to her.

Of course, it doesn’t really help that she keeps halting her sobs to whisper back to him.

Somehow, their guard doesn’t notice.

The Doctor’s plan more or less consists of throwing his vial of ammonium sulphide at the floor and hoping the alien likes it less than he and Victoria will. See, ammonium sulphide is better known…as a stink-bomb. Because it stinks.

Also it’s highly flammable, corrosive, and toxic.

Probably not the best thing to be dropping in a confined space.

Silly ideas like this are what happen if you get all your escape tactics from the Beano.

He who smelt it dealt it.

EPISODE SIX

The Ice Warriors fire on the base, but show restraint, offering Clent the opportunity to surrender. Clent, of course, is defiant, but not stupid. Not in this circumstance, anyway. He offers to speak with Varga, promising no traps or conditions.

Unaware that the Doctor and Victoria are on the cusp of escaping, Varga agrees, taking his remaining warriors with him.

Clent’s command begins to slip, however, as I’m not the only one frustrated with his lack of direct action and insistence on obeying the computer. One of the scientists even tries to destroy it, though it doesn’t go well for him. Not about to give up, he tries to attack the Ice Warriors when they arrive, resulting in a swift death. Alas, poor guy-whose-name-I-didn’t-pay-attention-to.

Varga demands the base’s mercury isotopes. One problem. The base doesn’t have mercury isotopes. Varga decides to power down the reactor (and with it, the Ioniser) and take a look for himself.  Clent continues to impotently protest, but given that he’s about as much use to Varga as a chocolate teapot, it’s only Varga’s mercy keeping him alive right now. He’d better stop testing him.

As for the Doctor, he’s doing mischief as usual, tampering with the Warriors’ sonic cannon to make it resonate with water more. He assumes (and I’d love to know what made him come to this conclusion) that the Ice Warriors have a higher water content in their bodies. He reckons that it should knock the Warriors out and give the humans a nasty headache.

Or it might kill them.

Penley has his own idea for dealing with the Ice Warriors, turning up the heating to the point that it becomes very uncomfortable for them, and the Doctor risks using the cannon. The Ice Warriors certainly don’t enjoy that. Oddly enough, they remain conscious, while the humans are knocked out.

And yet the aliens still retreat, with the humans entirely at their mercy.

Am I just tired, or does this not make sense?

The Doctor and Victoria hurry back to the base, finding the inhabitants unconscious but otherwise unharmed by the look of it. Meanwhile, Varga and his crew return to their ship.

The scientists start powering the ioniser back up again, but Clent is fearful of using it on what he now knows (thanks to the Doctor) is the alien ship’s ion reactor.

The computer of course tells him not to do it. It’s time for a human to make a decision around here—but Clent isn’t up to the task, nor is his second-in-command, who is even more fanatically devoted to the computer than he is.

If you listen closely, you can hear the writer screaming at you that overreliance on technology is bad.

You might have noticed I haven’t mentioned Victoria in a while. That’s because she simply disappears from the plot after she and the Doctor leave the ship.

With Clent going to pieces, Penley takes over, coolly directing the scientists to increase the Ioniser to full strength. When questioned about the possibility of the Ice Warriors breaking free of the ice, he simply replies that at full power, the Ioniser can melt rock.

Not realising that their number is up, the Ice Warriors frantically try to find a little bit of power for their ship to take off. It looks like they might manage it as their control panels start to light up…and then to their horror they realise that it’s not power that’s making them do that. It’s heat.

A small explosion spares them a terribly drawn-out death by roasting, which would be rather dark for teatime television.

With the scientists very relieved to find that Penley’s risk paid off and that they’re not dead, Clent admits a grudging respect for him. It looks like they might reconcile their differences after all.

Not that the Doctor will be around to see it. In typical fashion, he and Jamie (now back on his own two feet) slink off to the TARDIS while everyone else is distracted, off to the next adventure.

Final Thoughts

So, that was The Ice Warriors! Is it just another ‘base-under-siege’ plot or is it something more? Hmm… yes and no. It certainly has ambitions to be something more.

I’ll start with the Ice Warriors themselves.

They were fine, but there’s nothing about them that I can extrapolate into a philosophical ramble. They’re just quite standard and not especially interesting. As I said, the humans in this are a lot more interesting, particularly Penley and Clent—especially when you put them in a room together. The actors have great chemistry, and I have no doubt the characters have a long and storied past.

As I said, they are just like a divorced couple.

Now, onto something a bit meatier.

It’s ever so subtle, but there’s a recurring theme of overreliance on computers for decision-making being a bad thing. Subtle… as a sonic cannon to the face.

“We trust the computer. It is our strength and our guide.”

You might forget they’re talking about a machine and not a deity.

Technological reliance and religious fanaticism, in this future, seem one and the same. That’s a pretty interesting notion, and I see where the writer is coming from. There’s a definite decline in mainstream religion these days, but that’s not to say that people are turning away from belief itself– quite the opposite, really. They’re just turning to other avenues in their search for an elusive higher power. Who’s to say that one day we won’t make our own?

Ultimately, it’s a Humanist fable. Nothing magically changed to enable the resolution of the plot. The dilemma presented didn’t suddenly offer a simple solution. The humans survived through faith in themselves—not in a Deus Ex Machina.

3.75 stars out of 5.




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