purplecat

I enjoyed this hugely, but as with Space Babies, I've no idea what the general public will have made of it.

( Spoilers under the Cut )

Honestly, when it comes to Doctor Who, I'm usually all about the plot, but sometimes something is just its own thing with its own logic and somehow still manages to be Doctor Who and The Devil's Chord (for me) was one of those things.

I really wanted to like Legend of the Sea Devils, the Doctor Who Easter Special. Marmalade Sparrow, who is largely unimpressed by Chibnall Who, expressed some doubts at the concept of spending an hour watching it but relented after I said "but pirates" a few times.

( If only but pirates were enough... )

All that said, I think I liked this more than many. It was mostly fun and it looked good. It functioned just fine as a run-around. Part of the problem in fact, is that for one of a handful of stories we're getting this year and something billed as a "special", I'd have liked a bit more than a run-around. Mind you, thinking about it, it's also better than Planet of the Dead, so I suppose it's the best Easter Special the show has ever given us and on those terms a success.

It was fun. Spoilers follow.

Given I thought the New Year episode, Revolution of the Daleks, was only fine and "passes the time well enough", this was a definite step up. It was fun, exciting and reasonably well-paced albeit rushed towards the end.

All that said, I thought the two standalone episodes, War of the Sontarans and Village of the Angels were much the strongest of the series. Most of the rest of the story felt like too many ideas crammed into too small a space which may, of course, have been a result of shortening the series because of Covid. Chibnall has form in long-running story telling so, unlike some of the story's other faults, I'm more willing to ascribe this to the shortening of the story than inate flaws. But while the multiple threads kept everything moving, I think, overall, they were confusing. I mean, I've spent a lot of the past couple of weeks carefully not thinking too hard about the finale because I'm pretty sure it doesn't make much sense and has plot holes you could drive several double-decker buses through. Chibnall's mostly not too bad on the plot hole front so I suspect having to cut material is the culprit here.

Some of the story's other flaws are ones we've seen before: a tendency for people to spend a lot of time standing around telling each other things - Once, Upon Time, which I think of as the info-dump episode, particularly felt like it suffered from this; and a tendency for things to be set up as significant and then not utilised - whatever was going on with Azure before Swarm "rescued" her.

Some of the other problems its hard to call. Di seemed oddly under-utilised, the reasons for her kidnapping were obscure, and we were only told about her discoveries in the passenger we never saw her make them. Similarly it wasn't entirely clear what the Grand Serpent was about or how his activities on 20th century Earth fitted with his meeting with Vinder. For the big guest star of the season, Vinder was a lot less interesting than Bel.

Everyone seems to love Dan. I thought the first episode tried way too hard to make him likeable (really? he volunteers at a food bank, and moonlights as a tour guide to show of his enthusiasm for his home city, and has a disabled almost girlfriend he treats perfectly, and is good with children, he even has a dog (sort of)). I thought he was better after The Halloween Apocalypse but for at least the first half of that episode at least he felt more like a walking list of virtues than an actual character.

Carvanista was a triumph though - almost quintessential Doctor Who from the innate silliness of the concept through to the slightly dodgy costume.

So I liked it. I wish it had had two or three more episodes to allow the arc plot to breathe. I shall even rewatch it some time soon to see if my suspicion that most of the final episode doesn't make sense is true or not.

Tame Layman vetoed The Faceless Ones when we did the Randomiser for reasons that remain obscure to me. I had vaguely planned to revisit the question once we got to the end but by that point the animation had been announced so it seemed better to wait.

I had mentally class The Faceless Ones as a "weird early Troughton" which placed it in the same category as The Underwater Menace and The Macra Terror but actually this is a very different beast. It is much closer in feel to the more realistic Avengers-like atmosphere of The War Machines. Much is made of the Gatwick setting - at least in the first episode which we watched live-action and Tame Layman was impressed enough to comment on the location work. While later episodes do seem to spend an awful lot of time with people sitting outside the Chameleon Tours office, it's only in retrospect that that becomes obvious and, at least viewed an episode at a time, the story progresses at a reasonable pace.

I was genuinely amazed and impressed at the shots of an airplane landing inside a spaceship. I mean, I've no idea what this would have looked like with 1960s model-work but the animation looked great and really added to the feel of ambitious scale to the story. Tame Layman really enjoyed the way the story unfolded. Again, in retrospect, there's quite a lot of running around to no great purpose, but there are several clever ideas along the way, particularly in the later episodes, and its nice to have a resolution in which the antagonists are sent away with slapped wrists rather than being destroyed.

I was a bit disappointed in Pauline Collins' Samantha Briggs. As a character being tried out as a potential companion she ultimately seemed rather superfluous to the action. I'd expected her to be more obviously proactive somehow. However the story did effortlessly pass the Bechdel test partly as a result though, in fact, there are no less than three other one-off female characters in the story, which is more than can be said for many 1960s episodes.

I'm a little surprised this story isn't spoken of more often and more highly in Doctor Who circles. Obviously the fact only two episodes exist mitigates against it, but its a lot of fun as well as being an interesting look at the kind of story the early Troughton years were trying to tell, and the show's initial attempts at telling contemporary tales, before it got side-tracked into endless bases under siege.

The Haunting of Villa Diodati seems to have received a hugely positive reception in my corner of fandom which makes me feel extra curmudgeonly right now. It's not that I disliked it, but I'd rate several stories this series higher than this.

( More under the cut )

The Haunting of Villa Diodati is fine, good even. There's nothing here that I think is bad or particularly objectionable but, honestly, I think I'd have liked it better if it had been more self-contained.

When I reviewed Spyfall I said I had enjoyed it very much but wasn't convinced the story I enjoyed was actually the one transmitted. There was lots about Fugitive of the Judoon that I enjoyed but I'm not sure I'd even describe the scaffolding it hung off as a story - I mean yes, there was a beginning, a middle and an end but the beats didn't really fall where you would expect and frankly most of what was happening here was clearly middle of a different story altogether.

( Spoilers under the cut )

Given series 11 was supposed to be old monster free in order to welcome in new viewers, series 12 is a bit of a whiplash change of direction. I can't help wondering what casual viewers who were drawn into the show by series 11 made of Fugitive of the Judoon - it relies on a lot more than just a knowledge of series 11 and a bit of cultural osmosis to follow, or at least to really derive enjoyment from, I would have thought.

Orphan 55 is interesting, at least in so far as my particular corner of the Whoniverse seems to be equally divided between people who loved it, people who hated it and people who were kind of `meh' about it. I'm in the `meh' camp which is possibly the least interesting place to be.

( More Under the Cut )

Weirdly, despite thinking this is probably the weakest Thirteenth Doctor story (maybe? I dunno, I wasn't all that taken with The Ghost Monument either), overall I'm still enjoying series 12 more than series 11.

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.