This was probably my favourite story of the series so far. Like Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror it forms a good solid mid-season story. It didn't deliver the fannish highs of Fugitive of the Judoon or Spyfall but its story had, I don't know, a better shape to it and felt more like a thing in its own right and less like a delivery mechanism for an arc plot.

( Spoilers under the cut )

I have a suspicion Praxeus may not age well on repeat viewing, and I doubt it will ever be topping series 12 polls, but I was happy.

The Teenager really like Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror, certainly far more than any other thirteenth Doctor episode. I'm not sure I entirely share her enthusiasm. In many ways the most notable thing about the episode is that it doesn't really get anything wrong. It doesn't deliver the high of Spyfall but there's also a lot less to criticise.

( Spoilers )

So, yeah, I would rate this as an absolutely solid-to-good early-to-mid-season episode that did everything required of it without fuss and without (big) mistakes. I'm not under-rating that as an achievement since Doctor Who has an illustrious 50+ year history showing just how hard that can be, but I wasn't that excited by it either.

This is the last of the now traditional season opening trio of one contemporary, one alien/future, one historical. Many NuWho series tend to switch things up at this point, though I'm not sure what we've seen so far has the consistency to identify a change of pace, theme or mood if it happens, but we shall see.

I am very fond of the Lord of the Rings movies (bear with me, I have a point), but I have a strong suspicion that the movies I am very fond of are not the movies that Peter Jackson made, but something with similar visuals and acting choices but which hew closer to the books.

I have a similar feeling about Spyfall. I liked it a lot, but I suspect the Doctor Who story I like is not actually the one that Chibnall made.

( Spoilers under the Cut )

It has been remarked in several places that Doctor Who seems a lot more confident this season. I have the same feeling as well, but I'm not sure its true. The show did some very daring stories last season so I wouldn't describe it as lacking confidence. What this season does seem to be serving up, which we didn't see a lot of last season, is spectacle and set-pieces that seem to be designed, at least in part, because they are either crowd- or fan-pleasing and ideally both. Series 11 was frequently quite serious about what it was trying to do. Series 12 seems to have decided to have a bit more fun.

I was a little disappointed that Mawdryn Undead was the final randomiser instalment. It's hardly one of the classics of Doctor Who - on the other hand it isn't Time and the Rani either.

I don't think I'd actually seen it since broadcast when I didn't like it much put off by a number of factors including the general unlikeability of any character who isn't the Doctor, Nyssa, Tegan or the Brigadier; some of the narrative leaps and assumptions; and discomfort over the physical deformity of Mawdryn and later the infected Nyssa and Tegan.

Rewatching it, there is a lot of interesting stuff going on in Mawdryn Undead. It lacks a central villain: the Black Guardian is mostly off-stage and Mawdryn may be an antagonist but is hardly a villain. Its interest is in setting up mysteries and conundrums and then tying the solutions together. In this it is mostly successful in spite of the fact it is juggling the introduction of not only a new companion but an experimental one; the return of the Black Guardian; and an appearance of the Brigadier in a role intended for Ian Chesterton. Where it fails is in missing conversations: Turlough is quite clearly not a schoolboy from the 20th Century UK and its pretty clear the Doctor is aware of the fact, but its not clear if this has actually been discussed with Turlough or not and this leads to a strange ambiguity in their interactions that is mostly unsatisfying. Similarly a good chunk of the plot revolves around Nyssa and Tegan's assumption that Mawdryn's injured form is actually the Doctor and while this is plausible (they find Mawdryn where they were expecting the Doctor to be) it still seems a bit of a stretch.

The Black Guardian is clearly making stuff up as he goes along, claiming everything is going according to plan every time Turlough abjectly fails to kill the Doctor. I mean, possibly it is all his plan, but it seems more likely that he's just bluffing, but actually in this case it kind of works. It makes the Black Guardian seem rather petty but then, as Tame Layman observed, the idea that the Black Guardian would be remotely interested in the Doctor basically means he's rather petty (at least in the grand cosmic sweep of anthropomorphic personifications of universe spanning abstract concepts).

There's some nice work going on in the sets too. My teenage self was unaware of the conspicuous luxury of Mawdryn's spaceship but it was obvious on viewing despite also obviously being a set built on a BBC budget of tuppence. Less immediately obvious is the contrast between the 1977 Brigadier's pristine and neat cottage and the 1983 Brigadier's more lived in version - something that is highlighted in the novelisation but which I don't think I'd have spotted if I hadn't been primed to look for it.

Mawdryn Undead should be praised for taking a large number of disparate ideas and concepts and tying them together into a pretty satisfying and coherent story. The lack of a clear and present villain, however, makes it seem a little sedate however, and the while it does manage to pull everything together it can't quite manage to disguise the somewhat random and disparate nature of its core concepts. An interesting place to end the randomiser.

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Of course, the question is what next? We're currently watching The Macra Terror which has been animated since we watched it on the randomiser. I've also recalled that we never watched The Faceless Ones for reasons that were not entirely clear to me, so I may watch that while B. is away. And of course there are all the Doctor Who stories that we didn't watch as part of the randomiser and which therefore were excluded on the basis of the "nothing watched in the last five years" rule (this is mostly, therefore, our favourite stories). After that B. has expressed an interest in rewatching NuWho from the start. I've already blogged about most of those stories twice so I'm not sure I'll have much to say on a third rewatch, but maybe I can think of a some kind of format that will shake it up a little. We shall see.

I watched The Time Warrior not so long ago when sir_guinglain of this parish, was guest speaker at an Oxford WhoSoc showing in honour of his book on the subject. Which said book is, by coincidence, now next on my "to read" pile.

Third Doctor stories generally have a certain solidity of construction and production value which makes most of them still pretty watchable in 2019. The Time Warrior is no exception. It felt more modest to me than many Pertwee stories, though it is hard to pin-point precisely why - perhaps the focus on history rather than military shenanigans, and an antagonist who has no particular interest in invading Earth - but I also feel it benefits from that modesty with an emphasis on characters and interactions rather than pyrotechnics (though the Doctor does get the opportunity for a fair amount of swash and buckle, nevertheless).

It is Sarah's first story and she is introduced in full-on straw-feminist mode initially. However once the writers have got over the need to establish that she won't make tea (and hence is indisputably a feminist), she is served well by the plot, acting independently and forming her own plans. The funny thing is that Jo would have been just as believable in this role and it surprises me that the production team seem so unaware of Jo's strengths as a character (just as it suprises me that they felt Liz Shaw "didn't work").

I'm in two minds about the use of Shakespearean turns of phrase in the historical parts of the story. It definitely contributes to a feel of a story set in the past, but it is also verges perilously close to cod medieval at times.

The characterisation is one of the stronger parts of the story. Although most of the characters are drawn in broad strokes (not unusual for Doctor Who), the story sets them up well-enough that their interactions are believable - particularly those between Sontaran Lynx, Robber-Baron-wannable Irongron and his henchman Bloodaxe. However, our favourite character was the short-sighted Professor Rubeish pottering endlessly curious and almost entirely undaunted around Irongron's dungeon and stepping up to help when required. The Time Warrior isn't a comedy but it is laced with humour which serves it well.

It is perhaps easy to overlook The Time Warrior amidst the UNIT stories of invasion and peril, but its smaller scale and fun characters make it well worth watching.

The Day of the Daleks is one of the few classic who stories to actually attempt to do something with time travel, beyond using it as a device to get the Tardis crew to the start of the adventure.

( I'm going to allude to spoilers, so be warned. )

I feel vaguely that I like this story better than it deserves. It is decidedly slow in places with a lot of sitting around waiting for things to happen. Neither the Doctor, nor Jo, really get to shine though there are some nice moments. But it's a story that has a classic SF feel. It utilises the Daleks well as background villains who are reacting to events rather than pursuing some devilish plan and has a pretty decent set of supporting characters who avoid overly simplistic categorisation into good and bad. It's trying to do something a bit different while still being distinctively Doctor Who.

I 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.

The Dalek Invasion of Earth was much better than I had expected though I'm not quite sure why it was I expecting it to be a disappointment. It's one of those stories that feels like it was heavily influenced by people's experiences in World War 2. The scenes set in ruined London, with the resistance holed up in the tunnels listening to Dalek propaganda on the Radio have a sense of grounded reality to them that Doctor Who (particularly the Doctor Who of the sixties) rarely attains. In general, as well, the whole story looks like money has been spent on it (which I assume, as the much anticipated return of the Daleks, it had), with a large cast, loads of extras, and several action sequences which all helps.

It's also a pretty fast moving story (for the time, obv). I'd somehow thought it was longer than 6 episodes which may have helped my relief that events kept moving. Even when it slows down - a lot of the journey from London to Bedfordshire - it keeps the viewers interest with some excellent character moments, particularly the Doctor's group as it adapts itself around the growing romance between David and Susan (not too in your face, but much better handled and foreshadowed than many companion romances). That said, Susan still gets pretty short shrift, once again in a role that seems to mostly involve panicking and spraining her ankle. Vicki is so much better than this that one does wonder if the production team felt that some mistakes had been made with the character.

I was more moved than I had expected to be by the Doctor's decision to leave Susan behind, particularly the moments before he enters the Tardis as he stands their clutching her broken shoe.

Of course this was later remade as the Dalek Invasion Earth 2150 movie starring Bernard Cribbins. It was odd to see some scenes replayed almost exactly - and the resemblance between the two Dortmuns was uncanny. I wasn't sorry to use to lose the comedy sequences in the Dalek flying saucer, however. While the movie has a glossy technicolour exuberance, I think I may have liked this more measured and sombre version better.

It has become moderately fashionable to criticise Eric Saward stories and, indeed, they exhibit a number of features that seem questionable when viewed from the general sweep of Doctor Who history: they tend to be graphically violent, feature plot lines that resolve in pointless deaths, are more interested in their supporting cast than the Doctor and his companions, and show a disturbing fondness for ruthless space mercenaries being ruthless. On the other hand, one can argue that they are also Doctor Who's first attempts to at high octane action stories. I'm sort of in two minds about that last claim since I think a lot of the UNIT era was reaching for the same thing just in the context of the 1970s rather than the 1980s but it's certainly true that Saward's stories tend to involve ambitious action set-pieces and their large supporting casts tend to be in service to a sweeping vision of squads of soldiers caught up in various kinds of war with a clear intention to both provide action-filled excitement and depict the horrors of war and the reality of violence.

When we watched Earthshock I thought it had an exceptionally good first episode and went downhill after that. I think there is lots to be said for the first episode of Resurrection of the Daleks (as shown, so 45 minutes) and while the second episode isn't as strong as the first, it actually remains pretty solid. You do need to allow for Saward's quirks - the effects of the poison gas deployed by the Daleks to take over the space station are unnecessarily unpleasant and this isn't a story many people get out of alive. That said the deaths of the supporting cast mostly are not pointless, as they edge the story closer to the final solution where Stein manages to blow up the space station. Even poor old Chloe Ashcroft's somewhat pointless death of her, frankly, somewhat pointless character Professor Laird is at least in service of a traditional Doctor Who capture-escape sequence. The Doctor and companions are also somewhat sidelined- the interesting action is happening on the space station and the Doctor doesn't even get there until the start of episode 2, promptly gets captured and then, in a moment that is not his finest hour by any means, decides he needs to kill Davros (as Tame Layman pointed out, this wasn't a good plan, or at least not if he was going to wimp out of it once he actually got there).

However, from the perspective of a 1980s take on a base-under-siege story Resurrection of the Daleks works pretty well. The story's characters mostly are not as unpleasant and nihilistic as they can be in Saward's work. I was genuinely rooting for the small group of survivors creeping around trying to get to the self-destruct console. Lytton's increasing frustration with the way the Daleks are bowing to Davros' whims is well-drawn and the factionalism and politics within the Dalek forces are an interesting (and at this point novel) twist - though it is odd that, after a story in which the Daleks repeatedly over-rule Lytton's advice to get away from the space station as quickly as possible because Davros is so important to them, they more or less turn around and say "stuff Davros, someone go hill him".

One can't help feeling that if Saward's sense of humour had not been quite so dark and his outlook at little less nihilistic (or at least his seeming tendency to get bored of characters and bump them off had been a bit better controlled) then his reputation would have survived the test of time better. Doctor Who needs its exciting action tales with fights and explosions as well as its more gentle and whimsical fare and when Saward was on form he was better at delivering this kind of thing than anyone else writing for Doctor Who in the early 1980s.

It occurred to me, as I was watching this, that we have a surprising number of Dalek stories left to view. I went and counted and a full quarter of the remaining stories (including this one) are Dalek stories. I guess we'll see if they get spread out or cluster.

At any rate, when viewing The Daleks' Masterplan there was a certain amount of confusion about which Dalek-Chase-Story-Starring-Peter-Purves Tame layman had already seen. I thought it was probably this one. He remembered some of this (so I think I was correct) but he also got confused on several occasions while watching with the other Dalek-Chase-Story-Starring-Peter-Purves.

Famously (for a value of famously that means "among certain Doctor Who fans") Peter Purves, who has a comedy role in one episode of The Chase, so impressed the production team that they brought him back two weeks later to become a companion. I can only think that it was his personality not his performance that impressed them because Morton Dill (from Alabama) is really not a great performance, even if you forgive the fake American accent. Steven Taylor, on the other hand, is pretty watchable from the get go. It is a shame that after the first 5 minutes of the next story his toy panda mascot is never mentioned again, because we became quite attached to it.

The Chase does not have a great reputation and its easy to see why. The format, in which The Daleks pursue the Tardis through time and space encountering the crew in a variety of locations, feels like an attempt to get out of any kind of detailed plotting in favour of a few set pieces. The Daleks, while not as reduced to comedy villains as some fan commentary had led me to expect, are a bit on the comical (utilising several different chants the effect of which is not to make them seem more chilling) and useless side (getting beaten up by a robot Frankenstein at one point). However having gone into this with low expectations I found it perfectly watchable. I'm not as big a fan of Ian and Barbara as many people are, but I do like Vicki, who has a number of nice moments here and who's relationship with the first Doctor is charming and so I was quite happy to watch this Tardis team just having vaguely random short adventures in time and space. Some of the sequences were more forgettable than others but the chase format, while hackneyed, at least kept things moving along.

There is a sequence where the Daleks construct a robot version of the Doctor in order to "infiltrate and kill". We were very interested by the places in which the duplicate was played by William Hartnell and where he was played by Edmund Warwick. This was obviously not determined only by when both characters had to be in shot at the same time, so presumably also depended upon some of the almost "as live" production which meant Hartnell was somewhere else in the studio at that point.

The final two episodes introduce the Mechanoids who, allegedly, were at one point intended as a recurring monster. It was interesting to contrast them with The Daleks. They are clearly more unwieldy, seeming to move more awkwardly around the set. One of the paradoxes of the Daleks is that they work in spite of (or perhaps because of) the sink plunger. The Mechanoids had little arm like things that while less ridiculous in principle, looked a lot sillier in practice. Mostly the Mechanoids served to highlight the mysterious genius of the Dalek design - they did have a very pretty city though.

This is definitely not a story I would recommend trying to view in one sitting, but as a series of 25 minute episodes spread out over a period of time, it is surprisingly entertaining. You have to let it roll over you as slightly mindless entertainment, but it manages not to be dull, has its moments of charm, and is saved by its variety of setting and plot.