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The Randomiser: State of Decay
Jun. 27th, 2019 08:57 pmI had been vaguely scorning the new shiny all-singing all-dancing Blu-Ray box sets of classic Doctor Who seasons as an unnecessary expense until a chance remark on Radio Free Skaro drew to my attention the all import less shelf space required aspect of the whole endeavour. By this point I had missed the opportunity to get Season 12, but I now have the season 18 and season 19 box sets and have donated the now redundant DVDs to charity.
All this is preamble to the fact that when State of Decay popped out of the Randomiser it was an opportunity to open up the season 18 box set and discover that we did not, apparently, have a functioning Blu-ray player. However Tame Layman was quite excited by the prospect of digitally remastered Tom Baker and so half an hour and much downloading of software later we watched it. It must be said I didn't really observe a noticeable difference over non-remastered Tom Baker, but Tame Layman was very impressed by the whole thing and he cares a lot more about the HD viewing experience than I so I am assuming that they are, indeed, vastly superior.
I was oddly disappointed by the story though. Despite being late Tom Baker, it is obviously harking back to the Hinchcliffe gothic horror days with its story of a medieval society and its vampiric overlords. More than that, it belongs to a category of Doctor Who story, also typical of a lot of Tom Baker where there is a slow reveal of an SF backstory, and these usually strike me as quite imaginative and clever where somehow in State of Decay it either seems rather obvious (that the three who rule are the original crew of the Hydra) or overly complex (all the stuff about Time Lord wars and Emergency orders), I think it doesn't help that the latter is delivered primarily through info dumps.
That said there is a confidence in the performances of the regular cast, perhaps because of the familiarity of the story style perhaps because of the romance between Tom Baker and Lalla Ward, that makes their interaction very engaging. Adric, in his second story, is considerably less irritating that he can sometimes be, despite already displaying his tendency to get fooled by the bad guys. As ever, the BBC costume department is clearly much happier dressing everyone in vaguely historic costumes than in trying to think up something futuristic making this (with Keeper of Traken) one of the better looking stories of the season. The lighting and sets manage to be broodingly atmospheric. In short, in a show that had been struggling with a shrinking budget and the resulting drop in production quality, State of Decay, feels like a return not only to the story style, but to the production quality of previous years.
What this leaves is a story that is undeniably better acted, better directed and better looking than much that surrounds it, but in looking back towards former glory seems to have more of the form of those stories than their heart.
All this is preamble to the fact that when State of Decay popped out of the Randomiser it was an opportunity to open up the season 18 box set and discover that we did not, apparently, have a functioning Blu-ray player. However Tame Layman was quite excited by the prospect of digitally remastered Tom Baker and so half an hour and much downloading of software later we watched it. It must be said I didn't really observe a noticeable difference over non-remastered Tom Baker, but Tame Layman was very impressed by the whole thing and he cares a lot more about the HD viewing experience than I so I am assuming that they are, indeed, vastly superior.
I was oddly disappointed by the story though. Despite being late Tom Baker, it is obviously harking back to the Hinchcliffe gothic horror days with its story of a medieval society and its vampiric overlords. More than that, it belongs to a category of Doctor Who story, also typical of a lot of Tom Baker where there is a slow reveal of an SF backstory, and these usually strike me as quite imaginative and clever where somehow in State of Decay it either seems rather obvious (that the three who rule are the original crew of the Hydra) or overly complex (all the stuff about Time Lord wars and Emergency orders), I think it doesn't help that the latter is delivered primarily through info dumps.
That said there is a confidence in the performances of the regular cast, perhaps because of the familiarity of the story style perhaps because of the romance between Tom Baker and Lalla Ward, that makes their interaction very engaging. Adric, in his second story, is considerably less irritating that he can sometimes be, despite already displaying his tendency to get fooled by the bad guys. As ever, the BBC costume department is clearly much happier dressing everyone in vaguely historic costumes than in trying to think up something futuristic making this (with Keeper of Traken) one of the better looking stories of the season. The lighting and sets manage to be broodingly atmospheric. In short, in a show that had been struggling with a shrinking budget and the resulting drop in production quality, State of Decay, feels like a return not only to the story style, but to the production quality of previous years.
What this leaves is a story that is undeniably better acted, better directed and better looking than much that surrounds it, but in looking back towards former glory seems to have more of the form of those stories than their heart.