The Randomizer: The Ultimate Foe
Sep. 28th, 2012 02:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purplecatHell's Teeth that was terrible!
Mostly, when classic Who is bad, it is just kind of dull. The pace is slow; the story is repetitive; and the actors look bored. The Ultimate Foe is almost the direct opposite of that kind of bad. It is bad in a frenetic, brash, showy, shouty fashion.
It isn't helped by an exceedingly troubled production history, nor the fact that it is, really, only the close of a longer story. The Ultimate Foe forms the final two episodes of A Trial of a Time Lord, in which the Doctor is put on trial by the time lords. This acts as a framing device for three fairly standard four episode affairs and then the whole is rounded off by The Ultimate Foe, so the story essentially starts as we move into the trial's climax. Secondly, the first episode of The Ultimate Foe was co-written by Robert Holmes with Eric Saward (then script editor). Holmes sadly died before the episode was complete. Saward fell out with the show's producer and left in high dudgeon taking with him the second episode. Pip and Jane Baker (sort of the Chris Chibnall's of the 1980s) were drafted in to write a new second episode based on the first episode alone with no idea of what the original intended ending had been. With that background, The Ultimate Foe is almost a triumph... but still, very, very bad.
In the immediate aftermath of A Trial of a Time Lord, there was a tendency to proclaim episode 1 of The Ultimate Foe as Robert Holmes' final masterpiece, ruined by the ham-fisted incompetence of the Bakers. Watching the two episodes, a quarter of a century later, it is hard to think particularly highly of either. However, I am somewhat impressed that the Bakers managed to craft some kind of coherent conclusion to the massive car crash of seemingly random shiny that they had to work with.
Some of the things that go wrong. Despite television's fondness for courtroom drama, they are difficult things to pull off well relying, as they do, on a lot of talking and relatively little action. The Ultimate Foe starts with a lot of talking in which the Doctor pontificates a lot and does himself no favours with either the courtroom or the audience. The Master turns up, and it says much that Anthony Ainley's performance here appears restrained. Mel, the companion, is summoned and I take back every single word I ever said in defence of Bonnie Langford as an actress. Then, in an ill-advised move, events move to the virtual reality matrix. The problem with the matrix, and with virtual reality based plots in general, is that the absence of a clear rhyme or reason to events is rarely a surrealist masterpiece and often just an incoherent mess (guess which we have here). There is a great deal of grandiloquence. A lot of scenery is chewed. Long scenes of exposition are relieved only by scenes in which people run around in imaginary settings to little effect. It is over-lit (as, to be fair, is 90% of 1980s Doctor Who). The best thing about it is the fact it stops after two episodes when the Doctor is suddenly let off the (actually pretty serious and entirely justified) charges against him because he's saved the courtroom from some technobabble.
I tried to list some good points, but even these come out damning. Tony Selby, as "loveable rogue" Sabalom Glitz, works hard to undercut the general pomposity of everything but in the end, the character is too much of an afterthought and he fails. The idea of the Valeyard as an evil version of the Doctor "caught between his twelth and thirteenth regenerations" (whatever that means) isn't an automatically bad idea. But the story already has one arch-nemisis for the Doctor in it (the Master) and two simply makes it crowded. It doesn't help that his plan is convoluted, and doesn't really make sense even within the technobabble of the show itself. In terms of dress and behaviour the Valeyard is difficult to distinguish from the Master so, really, what is the point? The character has re-appeared once or twice in spin-off fiction but sufficiently rarely that it's clear that people find it difficult to work with the concept. Lynda Bellingham carries off her part as the Inquisator with enough grace, dignity and humanity to make her performance pretty much the highlight of the episode. But it isn't good when your star turn is coming from the Mum in the Oxo adverts.
At the end of the day, The Ultimate Foe, is a poorly thought out mess. Avoid!
Mostly, when classic Who is bad, it is just kind of dull. The pace is slow; the story is repetitive; and the actors look bored. The Ultimate Foe is almost the direct opposite of that kind of bad. It is bad in a frenetic, brash, showy, shouty fashion.
It isn't helped by an exceedingly troubled production history, nor the fact that it is, really, only the close of a longer story. The Ultimate Foe forms the final two episodes of A Trial of a Time Lord, in which the Doctor is put on trial by the time lords. This acts as a framing device for three fairly standard four episode affairs and then the whole is rounded off by The Ultimate Foe, so the story essentially starts as we move into the trial's climax. Secondly, the first episode of The Ultimate Foe was co-written by Robert Holmes with Eric Saward (then script editor). Holmes sadly died before the episode was complete. Saward fell out with the show's producer and left in high dudgeon taking with him the second episode. Pip and Jane Baker (sort of the Chris Chibnall's of the 1980s) were drafted in to write a new second episode based on the first episode alone with no idea of what the original intended ending had been. With that background, The Ultimate Foe is almost a triumph... but still, very, very bad.
In the immediate aftermath of A Trial of a Time Lord, there was a tendency to proclaim episode 1 of The Ultimate Foe as Robert Holmes' final masterpiece, ruined by the ham-fisted incompetence of the Bakers. Watching the two episodes, a quarter of a century later, it is hard to think particularly highly of either. However, I am somewhat impressed that the Bakers managed to craft some kind of coherent conclusion to the massive car crash of seemingly random shiny that they had to work with.
Some of the things that go wrong. Despite television's fondness for courtroom drama, they are difficult things to pull off well relying, as they do, on a lot of talking and relatively little action. The Ultimate Foe starts with a lot of talking in which the Doctor pontificates a lot and does himself no favours with either the courtroom or the audience. The Master turns up, and it says much that Anthony Ainley's performance here appears restrained. Mel, the companion, is summoned and I take back every single word I ever said in defence of Bonnie Langford as an actress. Then, in an ill-advised move, events move to the virtual reality matrix. The problem with the matrix, and with virtual reality based plots in general, is that the absence of a clear rhyme or reason to events is rarely a surrealist masterpiece and often just an incoherent mess (guess which we have here). There is a great deal of grandiloquence. A lot of scenery is chewed. Long scenes of exposition are relieved only by scenes in which people run around in imaginary settings to little effect. It is over-lit (as, to be fair, is 90% of 1980s Doctor Who). The best thing about it is the fact it stops after two episodes when the Doctor is suddenly let off the (actually pretty serious and entirely justified) charges against him because he's saved the courtroom from some technobabble.
I tried to list some good points, but even these come out damning. Tony Selby, as "loveable rogue" Sabalom Glitz, works hard to undercut the general pomposity of everything but in the end, the character is too much of an afterthought and he fails. The idea of the Valeyard as an evil version of the Doctor "caught between his twelth and thirteenth regenerations" (whatever that means) isn't an automatically bad idea. But the story already has one arch-nemisis for the Doctor in it (the Master) and two simply makes it crowded. It doesn't help that his plan is convoluted, and doesn't really make sense even within the technobabble of the show itself. In terms of dress and behaviour the Valeyard is difficult to distinguish from the Master so, really, what is the point? The character has re-appeared once or twice in spin-off fiction but sufficiently rarely that it's clear that people find it difficult to work with the concept. Lynda Bellingham carries off her part as the Inquisator with enough grace, dignity and humanity to make her performance pretty much the highlight of the episode. But it isn't good when your star turn is coming from the Mum in the Oxo adverts.
At the end of the day, The Ultimate Foe, is a poorly thought out mess. Avoid!