Ten Statements About....DOCTOR WHO STORY ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-ONE: WARRIORS OF THE DEEP (1984)

"Yep...all fall down go boom I guess."

“The Myrka is a creature of the inkiest depths - or was until the Silurians tinkered with its biology. Anyway, it has little tolerance to light and hopefully none at all to ultraviolet rays.”
“Can you be sure?"
“No, Tegan. Perhaps you should ask it nicely to go away?”

1) There is a certain elegance to connecting the Silurians and the Sea Devils, making them akin to distant cousins.  Granted, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when you think about it in the context of the series for any length of time, but for the story it does.

2) Oh, God...go away, stupid pantomime horse Myrka.  Just...go away.

3) ...and you know, the Myrka would just be another crappy monster design if it wasn’t proving how ‘indestructible’ it is by stomping around on literal styrofoam sets.  There are moments where we actually see the rubble caused by this stupidity wobbling and curling under its foot.  It undercuts the veracity of a serial whose quality is already shuddering like a top.

"RAAAR--I's a Monstah!"

4) It’s nice to see that in 2094 all military personnel worship Michael Jackson and wear vinyl outfits with piping ala’ the video for ‘Thriller’.  No wait...no it isn’t!

5) I see that John Nathan-Turner's obsession with name stars has prompted him to ressurect Ingrid Pitt.  As if seeing this legendary Scream Queen all chunky and slathered in make-up wasn’t enough, we have to see her kung-fuing the Myrka.  And that moment may encapsulate everything that was wrong in the JNT era.

6) And speaking of Ingrid Pitt’s Dr, Solow, the whole subplot involving this conspiracy to turn Martin Neil’s Maddox into a pawn for ‘the opposition’ designed to sabotage the whole operation seems decidedly out of place.  Hell, it seems there primarily to add to the morbidity that Eric Saward confuses for being adult.

7) We get that ‘adult’ means gruesomeness and death to this era of Doctor Who....but don’t you think every. single. cast member dying save for our heroes a bit much?

"I figured I'd act all cowardly and resist
your every suggestion...sound good?"

"8) On one hand, I like the samurai-like armor of the Sea Devils--even if the necks list to one side.  On the other, giving the Silurians what amounts to a wrestler’s singlet and a perpetually surprised expression does not work a’tall.

9) You can kind of see how Turlough is not going to be the greatest of companions.  He’s not one for action and tends to contradict everyone around him.  To be honest, I see no advantage to having him tagging along.

10) What was the point of the ‘what have you been eating?’ gag?  Because it’s not, like, funny or anything.

Overall...a pretty low point for the series, and arguably the lowest point in the Peter Davison era.

Ten Statements About....DOCTOR WHO STORY ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-TWO: EARTHSHOCK (1982)

"Is he looking at me--don't look--is he?"

“Emotions have their uses.” 
“They restrict and curtail the intellect and logic of the mind.” 
“They also enhance life! When did you last have the pleasure of smelling a flower, watching a sunset, eating a well-prepared meal?"
“These things are irrelevant.” 
“For some people, small, beautiful events is what life is all about!"

1) While this serial is supposedly script edited by Anthony Root, it’s actually the first script edited by Eric Saward, and it pretty much sets the tone for his tenure as a whole.  In writing this script, Saward creates a template for what he’s looking to do with the series--the shocking violence, the high body count, the way the story seems to split into two unrelated mini-stories, the obsession with the Doctor and/or companions shooting guns, the unhealthy Tegan love, the sometimes bizarre snatches of dialogue (a sample of which is quoted above), etc.

2) I think this version of the Cybermen is one of the better, if not the best version.  The use of flight suits, the strange plexiglass chin guard that reminds us that there is something human in these creatures, the hints of circuitry underneath that chest respirator...all contribute to give these Cybermen a visually engaging appeal.

3) Given that this is Adric’s swan song, it’s not surprising that Matthew Waterhouse is given the most chances to act and, you know, do something other than throw in with the enemy and eat.  And sometimes it kinda, sorta works in rare moments. Granted....

"I'm afraid one of us has to die in a needlessly
pointless way....and it won't be me."

4) ...given Adric is very front and center and Saward’s love of Tegan results in her going all Signourney-Weaver-In-Aliens cosplay, Nyssa is once again reduced to effectively sitting in the TARDIS and worrying over everyone else alongside Clare Clifford’s Professor Kyle.  And sadly, even after the TARDIS crew is reduced to two companions, this is frequently Nyssa’s only contribution.

5) Beryl Reid being cast, highly inappropriately, as the hard-nosed ship captain Briggs, is the beginning of John Nathan-Turner’s obsession with casting big name stars (for England) in Doctor Who.  And in this case it thoroughly fails, as Briggs is about as hard nosed as a kitten on a catnip overdose.

6) The efforts to create a tighter continuity from episode to episode is in overdrive here.  Not only do we get a reminder of last serial, there are direct references to the E Space trilogy as well as a montage in Episode Two that tries to put the various Cybermen appearances in some sort of historical timeline.

7) Wow....yet another serial this season with a cliffhanger where the Doctor gets threatened with execution.  Who would have guessed?

No, we're not using triple exposure to deceive you
into thinking there are hundreds of us...why?" 

8) This is the second time in three serials that the villain uses androids to disguise their true intentions--and ironically these androids are way more effective than the stupid playing card android that served the Terrileptils in 'The Visitation', and fit easily into what The Doctor said about beauty in that previous tale.

9) Hope you liked the abrupt, fairly pointless and gratuitous death of Professor Kyle, because there’s more--loads more--of the same in the coming seasons.

10) While the death of Adric was shocking in its way, the silent ending of the credits running over his broken Badge For Mathematical Excellence is a tad over the top.

Overall...a portent of things to come, this is a messy and ill-conceived serial best remembered for its last few moments and not the ‘just go with it’ nature of the segments preceding it.

Ten Statements About....DOCTOR WHO STORY ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN: CASTROVALVA (1982)

Doctor In A Box!

“That's the trouble with regeneration: you never quite know what you're going to get.”

1) And here we formally begin the Peter Davison era with this final leg of the introduction of the Master--and it’s indicative of the Davison era in how it feels like two separate stories welded together, seems to be truly stretched out and features some moments where the TARDIS Crew seems...ineffectual.  And yet there are large swatches of the serial that works and works well.

2) This is, of course, Davison’s first full serial as the Doctor and let’s give him credit--he gives it his all, especially during the first half’s failing regeneration.  I appreciate how Davison works hard to give all the shout-outs to previous Doctors some weight even when it’s obvious they were shoehorned in as a game of Husker-Du.  He’s going to struggle throughout his three years to find out what his Doctor is like (something that’s not entirely his fault), but even here there are glimmers of what could make him unique.

3) Maybe it’s because Adric is more or less credibly out of the picture (although he’s in the picture in another sense), but this serial actually, you know, gives Nyssa a lot to do.  Even though Davison assigns to Tegan the role of ‘Administrator,’ Nyssa pretty much is in control of things.  She’s the one who keeps the team together, she’s the one who figures things out, and she’s the one that’s key in doing lots of the science-y stuff.  Granted, after this she falls asleep for a serial, and...well, not all that much after that.  As someone who (like Davison) felt Nyssa was the best of the three companions, it’s a little heartening.

4) Look, I get that the Nathan Turner conception of the Master is that he’s always in disguise manipulating things from behind the scenes...but Ye Gods, how come no one figures out which one of the Castrovalvas is him?  Putting powder in your hair and stooping over does not make an effective disguise.

"You're not fooling me, Anthony.  You look like an old
queen."

5) Of the two parts, I vastly prefer the first part, where our companion corps have to work out how to stop falling into (what will become) the sun.  There’s a definite sense of urgency and pace that seems to dissipate once they reach Castrovalva.  That being said, I do very much appreciate how Bidmead is able to make the first half significant to the second, setting up factors that will dominate once everyone gets to the titular area.

6) Watching it now, I’m sort of puzzled by all that’s made of how sinister Derek Waring’s Shardovan is in the third and part of the fourth chapter.  It’s almost as if they want him to be a red herring, but they try too hard, from dressing him in black unlike the other Castrovalvans, having him look on in an enigmatic way, at one point interposing himself between the escaping crew and pretty much glaring, etc.  If the intent was to throw us off the scent of the Master, it fails because it’s trying too hard....

7) But then, this might be why the serial seems so disjointed throughout; in trying to establish how different the first Doctor he has complete stewardship of is, Nathan Turner seems to overcompensate...which is weird, given how so much of Nathan Turner’s last Baker season was built on simply good stories and not on the deck-chair-changing exercises.  But then, last season was story edited by this story’s writer, Christopher H. Bidmead, while this season (and so many others after it) was edited by...grumblemutter...Eric Saward.

You will learn much of my dislike of Mr. Eric Saward and his dumb-ass Buster Brown haircut in the coming months.

8) I do like the design of Castrovalva, which--like the serial--was inspired by Bidmead’s interest in M.C. Escher.  I like the way he furthermore extrapolates on Escher’s design asesthetic to create a trap for The Doctor.  However, the effectiveness of 1982 special effects does blunt the impact of the trap being sprung at the end of the third chapter.

There are some who would say being trapped in an abstract
web was the best use of Matthew Waterhouse's time...

9) I have to be honest--I’m still a little hazy as to the nature of the Castrovalvans.  If we accept what the Master says about them as gospel (and I see no reason why we shouldn’t, given that The Doctor and Nyssa pretty much confirm the fact), then the Castrovalvans’ ultimate fate doesn’t quite make sense.  It makes for cool visuals, but...no sense.

10)  Even this early in the Ainley Master’s career, the man is beginning to degrade into the cackling goofball that he becomes toward the end of the classic era.  There’s some moments in particular, like when he’s gloating about creating traps within traps, where he seems to get too pantomime-y and disrupts what Nathan Turner is trying to do with his quieter, more human Doctor.

Overall...even though it has its shaky moments, this is still a good serial, and a decent ending to the ‘Return of The Master’ trilogy.

But enjoy this good story while you can, because a lot of what follows....ugh.

Ten Statements About....DOCTOR WHO STORY ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN: LOGOPOLIS (1980)

Now that he's established, this Master gets to
being truly, seriously scary....

“Logopolis is not the universe."
“But it is. Logopolis is the keystone. If you destroy Logopolis, you unravel the whole causal nexus.”

1) There is no doubt, right from the first part of this serial, that Janet Fielding’s Tegan Jovanka is going dominate the companion screen time....and given the abrasiveness and bossiness of the character (it’s not for nothing that at one point during her tenure she’s referred to as ‘a mouth on legs’), this does not bode well for the tenure of incoming Doctor Peter Davision.

2) And the fact that Nathan Turner has fallen in love with Tegan results in his impulse add of Sarah Sutton’s Nyssa becoming inconsequential.  Nyssa just appears out of nowhere in the second part of the story, and seems to be there solely so The Master can have someone to use that weird arm-controlling device in part three.  Admittedly, there is an attempt to bind her together thematically with the other companions when her planet is destroyed (a moment where Sutton shines), but the fact that she’s there Just Because is glaring.

3) Christopher H. Bidmead’s script is typical in its hard science concepts, especially when it comes to Logopolis itself.  The moment the TARDIS lands on this planet and we start to unravel the mystery and purpose behind it, the serial never lets up.  And Bidmead trusts us enough as an audience to grasp these principles without talking down or stopping everything to explain what’s going on.  That allows for the story to flow evenly and allow us to concentrate on the characters and what’s happening to them.

"Free at last, free at last!"

4) This is the first full serial that reveals Anthony Ainley’s Master to the world, and man is he pretty damn scary!  Even though he’s saddled with that odd outfit with the black frock coat and ornate silver collar that made me refer to it as ‘the gay pirate’ uniform, Ainley creates a very malevolent and--more importantly--opportunistic figure who thinks nothing of taking advantage of a serious situation he caused by accident to blackmail the entire universe.

5) I have to wonder why Bidmead allows the whole sequence concerning the nesting Tardisi, as it really doesn’t pay off much save for watching Tegan wander around and around the Tardis looking for an exit.  This is something we’ll see a number of times throughout the Peter Davison series, where there seems to be two separate and unconnected acts that run through the serial.

6) The Watcher...I am of two minds about this aspect of the story.  It’s certainly a fairly shaky justification for a regeneration, and the Watcher is an even shakier device for it to happen.  That being said, I give both Bidmead and Nathan-Turner credit for trying to make the whole regeneration epic.  It doesn’t work (the Davison-to-Colin-Baker regeneration works a whole lot better, primarily because the moment is treated as more intimate), but at least it’s there.

7) Maybe it’s because he’s finally getting his pass out of the series, but Tom Baker is surprisingly subdued and effective in the serial.  There’s a sense of him being aware of his own impending doom (the way he keeps trying to pass off Adric and, later, the girls, off on others seems to emphasize this) and trying hard to keep it together.  Plus he shows absolute contempt for the Master.  There’s that moment at the end of episode where the Master offers his hand to cement an alliance; Baker looks away before shaking his enemy’s hand that speaks volumes about his distaste for the deal.

"Mark my words...one of you is going to have to go..."

8) John Fraser’s performance as The Monitor is rather intriguing.  There’s a certain sense of, well, modest immodesty to his actions, and the way he rarely speaks in anything other than  conversational tones makes the few moments when he does lose his self-control all the more effective...especially the moment where we learn the true secret of Logopolis.

9) Maybe it’s because the series had been under the influence of Baker for several years, or maybe it’s because of the inexperience of two of the main actors involved in the serial--namely Matthew Waterhouse and Janet Fielding--there’s a level of pantomiminess that serves to make the flow of the serial out of kilter.  The broadness of the reactions in Fielding’s case are particularly jarring.

10) I appreciate the use of the Pharos Project; it dovetails nicely with Bidmead’s mathematics theme, I assume it allowed the budget to stretch so that this serial looks a little cooler than it could have...but I think that the final part is a little too full of everybody running around the grounds, all hunched over in the hopes of not being seen.  This, coupled with the whole ‘nesting Tardisii’ things give the serial a sense of being overinflated.

Overall...Yes, it’s flawed.  Yes, it could be more tightly plotted.  Yes, it suffers from companion-itis.  But it’s got a wonderful nugget of a premise that is very hard science fiction with some excellent performances by Baker and Ainley.  This is absolutely essential viewing.

Ten Statements About....DOCTOR WHO STORY ONE HUNDRED AND TEN: THE LEISURE HIVE (1980)

...and after getting super-old, the Doctor will
try to convince people he's an elk...

1) This is the first serial produced by John Nathan-Turner, who will guide the series until the classic version of the show is put on permanent hiatus in 1990....and boy, does he do whatever he can to differentiate it from the Graham Williams episodes.  The new starfield credits, the new music score, the use of 1980's-style  (i.e. clunky and primitive) CGI, the darker outfit for the Doctor...everything amounts to Nathan-Turner shouting 'We t'ain't your father's Who!'.  And to be fair, the new look does serve to convince us that we've come out of the children's pantomine that the Williams/Adams season had become.

2) ...which isn't to say that the show is without flaws.  The serial is so in love with its new CGI-based optical effects department that it devotes big ol' sequences that go on forever to moments that show off their prowess.  One shot of a starcraft docking is shown in its entirety roughly four times, and another shot of a model of the titular building on a CGI generated background (complete with too-bright sun beating down) seems to be repeated every time director Lovett Bickford runs out of ideas.  And this--along with other moments where Bickford indulges in arty shots like the 360 degree pan of Brighton Beach--slows the pacing of the serial down tremendously.

3) I also wonder if the serial wouldn't have benefited from David Haig not chewing his scenery so vigorously as Pangol.  Haig is so sneerily over the top that there's no doubt that he's the villain, and that distracts from the Mafia-manque story that the serial is supposed to be about...and given how Pangol's story arc results in a particularly bad CGI sequence that goes on for so long we can lovingly appreciate the level of crapitude, maybe it's better his story was minimized a bit.

"Look!  CGI!  It's DA FUUUUTUUUURE!"

4) Pangol's craziness also detract from the whole backstory of the Argolins.  There are these weird hints at what they're all about and their biology--apparently they're plant beings (it's never explicitly stated) whose age is measured by the number of berries or seed-pods on the top of their head.  There's a number of interesting things about Argolin society that is sorta kicked aside for Pangol making nasty references to Greeks, ranting around and overall trying to be Better Than You.

5) I can almost buy the Fomasi.  In tight close up they can actually be a bit unnerving.  Even when I see them in full figure and notice the big cinch-sack like collar, I can suspend disbelief juuuust enough to let the serial flow on.  But I cannot buy the way the villainous Fomasi hide from detection for the bulk of the story....they simply cannot slip into those disguises so easily given their generous form.

6) Here's something that made all of us who weathered the panto silliness of the Graham Williams era happy....this story is based on the admittedly fictitious science of 'tacyonics,' but it's a fictitious science that is both plausible and based on a bit of science fact.  Throughout this first season and part of the next, we're going to see some pretty hardcore science fiction concepts--this season ends with a truly amazing story that's tied in to some pretty heady ideas about psychics and mathematics--and it's really refreshing after what we just endured.

"Raahr!  I's a fluffy monsta!"

7) I'm not quite sure, but there's some weird elements in the serial that seems to have been left on the floor.  There's these frequent hints that there's some form of mutual attraction between Adrienne Courri's Mena and Nigel Lambert's Hardin, yet outside of some quotes, there's nothing concrete we can hang this supposition on.  There's the whole concept of the Fomasi criminal underground.  Plus there are other things that are mentioned, allowed to take its bowed, and never brought up again.  It's kind of frustrating.

8)  Thank God that Lalla Ward is wearing something distinct and flattering to her in that Edwardian bathing outfit with the big ol' hat.  But then, the costuming overall is very clever in a minimalist way, allowing us to get a sense of each character with only the way a garment falls on them.

9) I rather liked the way the story sees the Doctor transformed (something we'll see again in the very next serial).  It shows one of the strengths of the early phase of The Nathan-Turner Years--namely, these serials for the first season and change look for ways to actively challenged and hinder the Doctor.  Seeing this doctor struggle with age and his failing brain cells, seeing him express frustration at being slower intellectually is something the viewer hasn't seen before.  We'll see this a lot in these early Nathan-Turner tales until the arrival of Script Editor Eric Seward screws it all up.

10) You'll notice how the serial quickly, and pretty much gleefully, disposes of K-9 and the Randomizer within the story.  This could be looked upon as Nathan-Turner rushing to convince us that This Is Not Your Father's Who....or if could be the very first indications of Nathan-Turner's pettiness, which we'll see in abundance once he and Seward are a team.

Overall...even with its wonky pacing and weak storytelling choices, this is a decent serial that provides something of a 'mission statement' for this first leg of John Nathan-Turner's era--an era that will sour fairly soon, but right now is bright with promise.