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Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 194: The Enemy of the World, Episode Two

Dear diary,

There's a lovely line early on in this episode which, to some extent, sums up why I think I'm enjoying it. Asked to help in the fight against Salamander, the Doctor muses that there are two very clear sides, but goes on to wonder which one is the force for good, and which is the force for evil. He then further questions wether it's his place to get involved in events.

I think I'm loving the fact that things aren't quite so black-and-white in this tale as they have been lately. This is the first time we've had a story without a real, definable 'monster' since The Underwater Menace, and even that had fish people bobbing about. Much as I'm loving the series at this stage, and enjoying the parade of Yeti (Jetty? No, Yeti.), Cybermen, Ice Warriors, and Daleks, it is nice to have a story a bit like this, and it can't help but put me in mind somewhat of the Hartnell era of the programme - where enemies could be just as human as you or I.

There's obvious parallels to be made with The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve, what with our lead actor inhabiting two roles for this story, and once again it works surprisingly well. There came a point toward the end of today's episode where I thought about the fact we'd not had that much Troughton in this one, except that we had, just not in his usual form. Quite a lot of scorn can be poured onto the accent being used here (Indeed, while Graham loves this story above all others, he admitted that he enjoyed it a lot more once he'd gotten past the voice), but I really enjoy it! I've spent today quoting 'Allo Bruce! What are you doing here, eh?' at Ellie every time she enters the room. It hasn't gone down well.

It's nice to see that the voice being somewhat comical doesn't take away from the character though. During The Massacre I praised the way that such a cruel character being played by the man we usually associate with safety in the programme really helped to make him stand out as a bad guy, and the same is true here. As is typical of late, it's the brilliant dialogue that is key, really helping to sell the threat that Salamander poses - we get plenty of brief references to the way that he has control over people (there's a lovely moment when he's referred to as a sorcerer, but it's done via the Mexican word. It's not until some scenes later that we find out the true meaning of it, and from the man himself), and the fact that he always gets what he wants. I also have to praise the line that tells us Salamander talks to many people. But some, only once. It's beautifully crafted, and really helps to amp up the fact that we should fear this double of our usually comical Doctor.

It makes his actions at the end of the tale, in which he plots to replace one of his people with another and explains that there will be a 'suspicious death' all the more powerful. There's even suggestions that Salamander himself is responsible for the volcanic eruption here (which would tie in nicely with the description of 'sorcerer', though I'm sure there's a non-magic explanation on the way). He's an arch-manipulator, and by the time the closing credits kick in, we're not left in any doubt as to which is the side of good, and which is the side the Doctor and his friends need to be fighting against.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 193: The Enemy of the World, Episode One

Dear diary,

Shortly before Christmas of last year, my friend Graham embarked on a similar quest to the one that I’m now on – watching all of Doctor Who in order. Whereas I’m doing it at a real snail’s pace of one episode a day, Graham went for the opposite way of doing things, and watched them all as quickly as he possibly could. There was a point where he went through the entirety of Leela’s stay in the TARDIS and the Key to Time in the space of about three days. That’ll take me months to go through. Months!

It did, however, lead to a fun situation where every time I saw Graham, I’d get to ask which story he was up to, and then quiz him for his thoughts (though a fan of the series, there were large chunks he’d not seen before the marathon). One day in particular we got together and before I could even ask what story he was watching, he announced that he’d got a new favourite tale. I knew he’d been on something mid-Season-Four when we’d last spoke, so I went for the obvious one: The Tomb of the Cybermen. Nope, that was good, but it wasn’t it. Fair enough. Evil of the Daleks? Another no. Web of Fear? Blank looks every time. No, Graham explained, his new favourite story was The Enemy of the World.

My disbelief wasn’t because I’d heard bad things about this story, it was mostly just from the fact that, well, I* hadn’t really heard anything about it. It’s that one story from the Fifth Season where they don’t do ‘Base Under Siege’, and Troughton plays a Mexican bad guy. That’s pretty much all I could tell you. The sad fact is that The Enemy of the World is one of those stories that people just forget about. Even now, it’s sat at about number 188 in our poll – not bad (and just out of the bottom 50), but not really all that great, either.

Incidentally, I checked with Graham again this week – he’s finished the marathon now, including Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures - and The Enemy of the World is still his favourite story. He puts part of the success down to the fact that it’s very different to what came around it, and part down to the fact that they get Jamie into a tight black outfit.

So I didn’t really know what to make of this one. Graham’s absolute love for it seemed to be a good sign, while fandom’s complete apathy towards it didn’t bode all that well. Thankfully, I’ve found myself agreeing far more with Graham than with fandom (he’ll be glad to hear that – I think he’s been on tenterhooks waiting to see what I thought), I absolutely loved today’s episode.

It probably doesn’t hurt that we’ve arrived in some slightly sunnier climes: there’s a moment when the Doctor jokes that he and his companions have been away for a while suggesting that they’ve been ‘on ice’. Terribly apt, considering our last sixteen episodes have all taken place in or around very cold places! The soundtrack opens with us being told of the TARDIS’ arrival on a beach, amongst ‘golden, sun-kissed sand dunes’. How nice! Listening to it as I walked to the shops on a nice sunny afternoon probably helped a little, too.

We get a nice few minutes of the Doctor and his friends playing about on the beach (it’s in his suggestion that Jamie should go look for some buckets and spades that you can really see where Matt Smith has taken his inspiration from this incarnation – there’s a real child-like glee to being here), but then it’s right down to business. By the time we hit the eight minute mark, our TARDIS team has been chased down the beach by hovercraft-driving gunmen, and spirited off over the ocean in a helicopter! By the time that they’d reached Astrid’s house and were again set upon by gunmen, I was fairly sure that we’d be somewhere around the end of the episode… but there’s still another ten minutes to go! You certainly can’t accuse this episode of padding things out, and I’m not sure I can remember the last time that we had such an action packed twenty-five minutes in the series.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this episode also marks the first involvement that Barry Letts has with Doctor Who, coming in as director for the story. It’s quite fitting that his first instalment to the series involves an action-packed chase with hovercrafts and helicopters (both of which will become staples in the series under Letts’ producership, but which make their first appearances here). I spent a while listening to these scenes thankful that this episode didn’t exist in the archives, because it all sounded pretty good and there was no way that the visuals would live up to the same standard… but then the telesnaps make the scene look just as epic as I’d hoped. My only complaint, I think, is that the beach doesn’t look quite as lovely and sunny as described.

You’ll probably have picked up by now on the fact that I’m babbling a bit. It tends to happen when I’ve really enjoyed a story and my notes become full of nice things to say. I’ve not even touched on the story (I’m sure there’ll be plenty of time to do that in the next few days) or the guest characters, but I run the risk of just babbling on for the rest of the entry in praise of things.

It’s led to something of a deliberation over what I’d be rating this episode. My first thought, immediately after the episode ended was a solid ‘9/10’, but then I started thinking: there was nothing I could fault with the episode, and I had really loved it. Surely that deserved top marks? The problem I had was that it took so long for me to give a perfect score, and this would be the third in the space of a month. You know what, though? I’ve enjoyed Innes Lloyd’s era so much, that it’s the perfect way to start of his final story as producer, and since I really can’t fault this one…

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 192: The Ice Warriors, Episode Six

Dear diary,

Long-term readers of The 50 Year Diary will know that I like to keep a track on the Doctor's development of the Sonic Screwdriver. Every now and then, you get a moment in a story which - with hindsight - could be leading the the creation of our favourite Time Lord get-out tool. We've seen the Doctor using sound waves to open locks before now via his recorder, but today is the moment that I think he starts putting two and two together, and gets to work on the sonic.

There's a lovely moment when the Doctor is trying to disrupt the Ice Warrior's weapon so that he can turn it on them. Sat on the floor, coated in cables, the Doctor tries to explain his plan to Victoria - 'The gun seems to work on the basis that sound waves produce reverbs in the objects in their path'. Obviously, this is a pretty good description of what the Sonic Screwdriver does at its most basic level (I'm still thinking of it more as a handy lock-picking device than the all-purpose tool we get in the more recent adventures), and I'd not be surprised if it's thinking about the Ice Warrior's weapon that starts the Doctor really thinking about creating his trusty friend.

In A Christmas Carol, the Doctor tells Kazran that he stayed in his bedroom inventing a new type of screwdriver, and we know from the Series Six DVDs that the Doctor has a number of adventures while his companions are sleeping. I'd not be surprised if he's going to be spending the next few nights shut in his TARDIS bedroom developing said screwdriver. I've not seen Fury From the Deep (where we'll be seeing the device for the first time), but I'm hoping that it's going to tie in nicely.

Anyway! Episode Six provides me with one last chance to praise how heartless these Ice Warrior chaps can be. My notes are full of scribbles about the way their acting ('surrender, or I will blow up your base') and the way they interact with the 'good guys' in the story. 'You'll live to regret this', one is told, to which he replies, coldly, 'At least I will live to regret it'. Perhaps my favourite moment has to be Vaaga establishing which members of the base's crew he needs to keep around to successfully free his ship. 'What are your qualifications for existence?' he asks Clent. I might adopt that question for people I come into contact with!

I've also not really mentioned the simply fantastic guest performances that we've had across these last six episodes. I did initially worry that I'd not be able to look at Perter Sallis in the part of Penley without picturing Wallace and Gromit (in the event, though there's the occasional line where Wallace's tones are instantly recognisable, I found myself thinking much more of Last of the Summer Wine), but he turns in a brilliant appearance. Equally, Peter Barkworth gives us one of the programme's finest performances, and it's especially evident here in the final moments of the episode.

One other thing that I've not mentioned, but I've been meaning to for a while, if the relationship between Jamie and Victoria. We all know that Jamie is completely smitten for her (indeed, he sets off to rescue her from fates unknown in The Evil of the Daleks having only seen one picture of her that he thinks is beautiful), but I'm wondering now… does Victoria have a romantic soft-spot for the highlander, too?

'There is a vague risk that it will kill everybody. Clent and Penley included…' the Doctor admits to her as he prepares the sonic weapon for its first attack. 'AND JAMIE?!?' Victoria replies (in a moment that put me instantly in mind of Watling's cameo from Dimensions in Time), obviously desperately worried for the boy. The pair of them have spent most of The Ice Warriors desperate to get back to or save each other, and they seem to be more focussed on their fellow companion than on the Doctor.

Maybe it's simply that they know the Doctor well enough to know he'll take care of himself - especially in this tale where he's more commanding than we've seen from this incarnation before. It's reasonable to argue that they could have something of an older brother/younger sister relationship, and they both feel a strong sense to care for each other. Or it's possible that there's love in the air. What do we think? Are Jamie and Victoria an item?

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 191: The Ice Warriors, Episode Five

Dear diary,

It has to be said that the design of this story is really 1960s in some places. It's evident right through the look of the Ice Warriors' ship, from the little TV screens in the walls to the large circle motifs that are dotted all around. It must have been in fashion when they left Mars.

Perhaps even more obviously, though, you've got the costumes of the base personnel. They're some of the most 'out-there' costumes that we've had in the series so far, and they're certainly not dull! In my mind, the bits that show up as white here are probably all different garish colours (probably denoting rank. For some reason in my mind, Clent's outfit is a bright blue and the female technicians are all orange), with those black patterns stretched across them. I'm assuming it's so that when they're out on the glacier, amongst the snow, they can be easily spotted. Well, that's my reasoning for it, anyway.

I'm also impressed by the headsets they wear when operating the computer - strange visor-like things which come up and over the head, forming a kind of 'shield' in front of their eyes. It's a typically 1960s science-fiction idea (although it's not been stated on screen wether they display data to the wearer, or if they just act as a shield, possibly to negate the effects of staring at this 'advanced' computer for so long each day), but it doesn't seem to sour of place in a world where we have things on the horizon such as Google GLΛSS. If anything, they just look like an oddly stylish version of that same invention!

One of the things that I'm finding myself really enjoying in this story (actually, it's probably the thing that I'm enjoying the most, currently) is just how much Patrick Troughton has become the Doctor that I think of as the second Doctor. His character has been there right since his very first episode, but we've watched it develop and evolve since his run-in with the Daleks on Vulcan. Here, there's a priceless moment as he enters the Ice Warriors' ship, having been let out of their air lock for satisfactorily answering questions. 'Thank you very much. Very civil of you,' he says, striding into the ship, before he looks up at the sheer size of an Ice Warrior, and turns to hurriedly leave with an 'Oh my lord!'

Equally, there's something about the idea of the Doctor using a stink bomb in an attempt to escape from the ship that feels so right for this incarnation. it put me in mind of the Tenth Doctor's escape from a Pyrovile through the use of a little yellow water pistol, and I think there's a very clear through-line between these two events. Here, it feels like the kind of thing I can see the Doctor doing in one of the TV Comic stories, with a finger pointed toward the top of the panel as he explains that the stink bomb may well be deadly to an alien.

Oh, and also, how cosy does it look when the Doctor (in his over-sized furry coat) gives a big cuddle to Victoria (in her little cloak with the fur collar)? You just want to cuddle up with them and enjoy the sensation!

a 

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Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 190: The Ice Warriors, Episode Four

Dear diary,

I’ve just realised that I’ve not done my cheer for alternative ways of doing the titles in this story! It’s been a little while since we had something a bit different from the norm, and I guess that, technically, I should have been titling the last few entries as ‘The 50 Year Diary, Day XX, The Ice Warriors, ONE’. While I quite enjoy it when we have occasional different looks to the episode titles, it really doesn’t look right for the programme. Maybe it’s because I got so used to the standard look during the Hartnell era?

Something that I have mentioned already for this story is just how great the Ice Warriors themselves look, but having an actual moving episode to watch them in makes it worth mentioning again. They’re fantastic, aren’t they? I’ve never noticed before all the little movements they make of their heads when speaking, but it really does add something to the characters. Equally, I’d never spotted how flexible their arms are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know how weird that sounds, but I think I’ve become so used to the action figure of the Ice Warriors that I’d assumed their arms were made of a kind of hard carapace like their body armour. In many ways, I'd never realised just how lizard-like they are in this story. I've always thought of the creatures as being a type of lizard (it's the scales, and the hissing voice which seems to suggest a forked tongue) but I'd never realised that they were actually played as such.

It’s also worth noting just how well the direction here is serving them. There’s lots of tight close-ups on the faces, which really allows us a good look at the make up design (though it does also reveal that the lips don’t look quite right when the creatures are talking, sadly). We also get a lot of close ups on the armour itself, which shows that off rather nicely, too. I think I quite liked Derek Martinus’ direction of The Tenth Planet, too, so perhaps it shouldn’t come as any great surprise to me to see him doing well here.

One thing about the Ice Warriors that I have to confess I’m less than impressed by is (what I’ve called in my notes) ‘Big Head Warrior’. The Ice Warrior with the especially large head is an image I know from images taken during this story’s recording, and it’s never looked quite right to me. I’d always assumed that there must be a reason in-story that this one particular Warrior had such a different outfit… but I don’t think there is one. Certainly, I’ve not noticed any reason being mentioned.

It's not the only thing from The Ice Warriors that I know quite well from the photos of the story. I've previously mentioned the images of the Ice Warrior towering over Victoria in the store room, but here we've got a scene which was captured perhaps one of the most iconic photographs from this era of the programme - Victoria being chased through the ice cave by the (Big Head) Ice Warrior. I'm still stunned that the DVD cover to the story doesn't have the image on there (though it is still a gorgeous design - one of the best that the range has ever had, I think.)

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 189: The Ice Warriors, Episode Three

Dear diary,

There’s something quite nice about how ruthless these Ice Warriors seem to be. Creating a trap for the base personnel, we’re told that if they come looking for Victoria, the Ice Warriors can destroy them. If they don’t come looking for her, then they can deduce that there aren’t enough humans to pose a resistance to their plans.

Only… what is their plan? I think I’ve missed something here. Ice Warrior A (I love their voices, but it’s almost impossible to pick out individual names with the quality of the soundtrack on this recon) is found frozen in the glacier, having been trapped there since the last ice age. He resolves to find and thaw out the rest of his kind, as their ship crashed there. He kidnaps Victoria and forces her to show him how he was revived.

They then take the technology, locate his comrades, and wakes them up… so that they can build a trap for the humans. I think I must have missed a line of dialogue somewhere, where we find out what this lot have against us.

And yet, it doesn't really matter. Much as I'm not entirely sure what's actually going on, and as much as the two missing instalments have dented my early enthusiasm for the story, I'm still enjoying it. I think it's fair to say that this is the first time that I've really appreciated just how much animating the missing parts of the story will be of a benefit to the tale - hopefully they'll help bridge this period of the story better than the recon has.

Yes, I'm sorry to say that today still hasn't endeared me to the ides of the recon. To begin with, I tried to listen to it as though it were just a soundtrack (I placed the macbook nearby while I did the washing up, so I could sort of see the story playing out of the corner of my eye, but I was really just listening to it), the problem with this, though, is that without the linking narration, half the time I just didn't have a clue what was happening when the dialogue wasn't around to fill the void. In the end, I resorted to actually watching it again, but by then I'd already given up a bit.

It seems to be that - as ever - it's Patrick Troughton that's carrying me through this one. As usual, he's been given plenty of great dialogue to speak ('He's a scientist and a bit inclined to have his head in the cloud. You know the type…' he says of Penley. 'I certainly do!' comes the reply from our favourite time-travelling Scot). There's another moment when the Doctor makes a big deal out of the importance of being passed a pencil, which left me grinning like a loon.

It's not just confined to the Doctor, either. I don't know if it's just me, but it really does seem over the last few series, there's been a real increase in how much of the dialogue I'm jotting down in my notes. Highlights from today include a discussion of humanity and its reliance on machinery ('Robotised Human. Fully extinct.') and the description that Clent doesn't need personnel - he needs a mirror.

Still, I'm glad to be moving back into actual moving episodes again tomorrow. I think doing these two episodes as reckons may have hindered my enjoyment somewhat, so I'm hoping Episodes Four through Six can really revive the promise that the first did. If nothing else, I'm keen to re-watch this story at some point in the future with the animated episodes - so it must be doing something right…

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 188: The Ice Warriors, Episode Two

Dear diary,

Oh, I agonised over how best to experience this episode. Earlier in the year, I picked up all the narrated soundtracks in bulk – most of them are available from the AudioGo website as (extremely reasonably priced!) downloads. The couple that I couldn’t get as downloads were collected together as part of ‘The Lost TV Episodes’ collection Volume 5. At the time, The Ice Warriors was scheduled for release on DVD in around April time, so I didn’t bother picking up the soundtrack for that one.

And then… I completely forgot about it! The DVD release date was shifted back to later in the year, and I didn’t even think to pick up the soundtrack. Today, then, when it came to scrolling through my iTunes looking for the episode, I was thoroughly confused before I realised what I’d done. A search online told me that The Ice Warriors is one of the few soundtracks that you can’t pick up via a legal download, and it’s only available on CD. Panic!

For a while, I seriously considered using the recon from the VHS. I’d ripped it to a disc when copying my video anyway, so it was already sat in the DVD drive of the Mac. The problem? It condensed both Episode Two and Episode Three into the space of about 20 minutes. I know I cheated by skipping Episode Four of The Highlanders in favour of the Target reading, but it felt like a step too far to actually put the two episodes together here – after all, the whole idea of The 50 Year Diary was to do one episode a day, every day.

Thankfully, a panicked request on Facebook revealed that a friend had a copy of the Loose Cannon reconstruction for these two episodes, and since he lived close, I was welcome to pop round and borrow it. My thoughts on recons have been pretty clear throughout the course of this marathon – loved the one for Marco Polo, but by the time I’d reach3ed the Crusade, I couldn’t bear the thought of them. I’ve come to the conclusion that I much prefer the soundtracks. Still, needs must and all that!

Now, let’s get this out of the way first, and then I can talk about the episode itself: I’ve not changed my mind on the recons. There’s plenty in this one that looks pretty good (the moving snow on scenes outside was a lovely touch, for example), but I find that my mind wanders just that little bit too much when I’m watching them. I’ll be using a recon for tomorrow’s episode again, but I think I’ll be sticking to the soundtracks for the rest of this season’s missing parts.

As for the episode itself, I think it was a bit of a comedown from yesterday’s instalment. I don’t know how much of my more muted reaction came from being put off by the recon, or how much was a result of my expectations being raised by my enjoyment of the first episode, but it just didn’t strike a chord with me in the same way.

It does have to be said, though, that the design of the Ice Warrior is gorgeous. It’s no wonder that they didn’t alter them radically when bringing them back to the series this year, because they’ve pretty much got it spot on right from the word ‘go’. There’s some shots of the creature in here which I’m fairly certain were taken from The Seeds of Death, but there’s also still images that show how great they’ve always looked. The voices, too, are fantastic from the very start, wit that great hissing sound to them. The images of the Warrior towering over Victoria in the storeroom are ones that really embedded themselves in my mind as a teenager when I first saw them, so I'm glad to see that their height really is effective in the story, too. It’s also nice to see a creature that’s remained so similar across all these years.

The Seeds of Death is the only ‘classic’ Ice Warrior story that I’ve ever seen, and that was a good few years ago. It was surprising to me, then, when Cold War made such a reference to the creatures being a kind of Cyborg, with a fully mechanical ‘suit’ of armour. I’m thrilled to see that, actually, it’s always been a part of the creatures, right back to this story. Yesterday, the Doctor mused that there was some kind of electrical apparatus frozen in the ice with the Warrior, and today he tells the scientists ‘'This headpiece is no warrior's tin hat! It's a highly developed space helmet!’

I’m also really enjoying that, for at least a little while, the Ice Warrior isn’t the main danger to the Doctor, or the crew of this story’s base-under-siege. The threat comes from the idea that there could be a kind of alien spaceship buried somewhere in the glacier, and that the Ioniser could accidentally ignite its fuel supplies, causing one almighty explosion. I’m hoping that this strand of the story won’t be forgotten as the story progresses (especially now that more Warriors have been located), though I’m fairly willing to bet that using the Ioniser against either the Warriors or the ship will end up forming a vital part of the tale’s resolution…

I’m really looking forward to the release of this one on DVD – I think there’s a very good story in here, and I look forward to a chance of watching it without the distraction of the recon…

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 187: The Ice Warriors, Episode One

Dear diary,

In what’s probably a historic moment, this is the last time that I’ll need to dust off an old VHS tape to enjoy a story, since The Ice Warriors won’t be released for another couple of months on DVD (Technically, I did the ‘dusting off’ weeks ago. I copied the VHS over to a disc, since I don’t have a TV in Cardiff – let alone a VHS player!). The biggest shame about this is that I won’t be able to see episodes two and three recreated with animation, but the DVD range has been good to me with timings this year, so I can’t really complain.

The Ice Warriors is another of those stories that I don’t really know all that much about. I can probably deduce the villains of the piece from the title alone, but that’s about all I’ve got. Oh, and that they find one of those titular creatures frozen in the ice. There you go, that’s the extent of my knowledge. That’s a good thing, though! I came to The Abominable Snowmen knowing how highly some fans rated it, knowing about the monastery, and the Yeti, and the Intelligence. I think knowing so much how I was meant to enjoy it ruined the story a little for me. I loved this episode, though! I mean, really loved it. I don’t know what I was expecting (and that’s the point, really) but this wasn’t it.

The first thing that really struck me… it’s an age before the TARDIS turns up, isn’t it? Before that, we’ve got plenty of establishing shots of the ice (with appropriately un-nerving music accompanying. It’s almost like they’re making up for the lack of it in the last story), a good look at the set up of the control room, complete with exposition to bring us up to speed, and the discovery of the ‘warrior’ in the ice. It’s not often that we spend quite so long in a story’s setting before the Doctor arrives.

When he does turn up, though, they don’t waste time. We’ve got the TARDIS turning up on its side (it’s almost strange that we’ve managed to make it to mid-Season Five before this happens), and a chance for Troughton and Hines to really engage with some great physical comedy. The Doctor stands on Jamie’s head, and then Jamie kneels on the Doctors hand. It’s an opportunity for some more close-ups of Troughton pulling faces, but here it’s being used light-heartedly as opposed to for the effect of terror yesterday. It’s almost like the programme is reassuring us that the Doctor is all right.

And isn’t he just?! Within seconds of entering the control room of the base, he’s following its leader around, repeating the numbers as they’re read from the machines. The Doctor’s worked it out in no time ('In two minutes thirty-eight seconds, you're going to have an almighty explosion!’), and then taking control of the situation, giving orders to the workers in an attempt to save them all. Clent – the base’s leader – is of course left to stand around shouting after the Doctor, telling him he cant do this, or mustn’t do that. It’s a role we’ve had present in this type of story since The Tenth Planet, but it feels so right when this attitude directed at the Second Doctor.

Over the course of this season, we really are seeing Troughton’s Doctor evolving even further into the man that we know from the later stories. He’s almost entirely dispensed with his bumbling routine once inside the base, as the stakes are too high – it’s right down to action. His charm still shines through, though, when the commander still won’t believe his calculations, and the Doctor suggests they run it through the computer to check. ‘2 minutes, 37 seconds’, the machine calculates, to which the Doctor replies, ‘Ah. I was a second out. We can’t all be perfect…’

While I’m on the subject of the Doctor, he looks just right in that big furry coat, doesn’t he? I didn’t really get a chance to look at it properly in the surviving episode of The Abominable Snowmen, but I really like it here. No wonder it’s so synonymous with this incarnation. How come we’ve not had the action figure with coat, yet?

I’m really pleased by my reaction to this one, and I’m hoping the story can hold my attention throughout – it could be one of those wonderful treats, where a story I don’t really know much about turns out to be fantastic!

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 186: The Abominable Snowmen, Episode Six

Dear diary,

This final episode of the story has made me even more convinced that my new timeline for the Great Intelligence might just work. There's a point where we're told Padmasambhava had slaved for around 200 years to build the robot Yeti and 'all the other wonderful machines'. Yeah, yeah, I know it's meant to be referring to the Control Spheres and the little Yeti playing pieces, but in my mind now, he also build a machine that allowed the Great Intelligence to possess the snow, thus setting him off on his course to London and Doctor Simeon. What do you mean 'grasping at straws'?

Sadly, though, trying to fit the Great Intelligence's appearances together in a coherent timeline has been the thing I've enjoyed most about The Abominable Snowmen. It's a real shame, but I just couldn't seem to get into it. I think - and I've said this about the story before - that it's one which would fare better with me if I could actually watch it. The tele snaps give the impression of it looking very dark and mysterious, with some wide open locations (they look nice enough in the surviving episode) and some interesting performances.

In other ways, the story is almost designed for audio, with the beeping spheres, the dark ominous voices and it's digetic soundtrack. There's a lot in there which you can very easily imagine Big Finish doing in a release, and they're experts at making Doctor Who for an audio medium.

This final episode, especially, is ripe for listening to through headphones (and probably the perfect example of why so many people think the series would work best on autumn evenings, when the nights have drawn in and there's leaves blowing around outside). The final confrontation between the Doctor and Padmasambhava is extremely effective, as the Doctor warns his companions to trust him, before heading out of the room, and almost immediately issuing a bloodcurdling scream.

It's rare that we see the Doctor in such a situation - he's not always one step ahead of the game, but he is the one who usually comes up with a plan and reassures us that everything is going to be all right. In the same way that the TARDIS is automatically our 'safe' place at the start and end of each tale (even the Doctor uses it here, when trying to convince Victoria that she's safe), the Doctor is the man who makes things all right. With the exemption of that early-Season-Three period in which he seemed to lose at the end of every story, the Doctor is the one that you can feel safe with. To hear him in such pain and terror… that's chilling.

And yet, in spite of several really brilliant moments like this in the final episode, and throughout the story, The Abominable Snowmen just hasn't really grabbed me. Throughout, people have mused to me that it's a favourite of theirs, but the one thing that seems to come up time and time again is that The Web of Fear does the Yeti story better. I'm hoping I'll think so too in a few weeks time…

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 185: The Abominable Snowmen, Episode Five

Dear diary,

The more I look at the tele snaps for this story, the more I think the Yeti look brilliant. They just do! There's a shot early on in this episode where three of the beasts make their way across the courtyard of the monastery, and it just looks brilliant. What with the Cybermen in the last story and the Ice Warriors coming up in the next one, there's certainly a lot of tall monsters around in this season.

I'm also finding that I like the idea of the Yeti being controlled by the small models more and more, too. Though I've never seen The Abominable Snowmen before, I have seen Downtime more than once (for my sins, though I still think it would have been great adapted into a Sarah Jane Adventures story - imagine Yeti stomping their way up Bannerman Road!), and I'd never quite understood the point of the little wooden Yeti that's so key to the plot there.

Actually, there's quite a lot about Downtime that's confused me over the years, and I think that might be one of the resins I've never really managed to get my head around the Great Intelligence. For some reason, my mind goes all over the place in Downtime, and gets confused about Victoria looking for her dead father in Det Sen Monastery, where she encounters the long-dead Travers (who's played by Watling's real-life dad… see how I manage to confuse myself?), and then there's some stuff about the Yeti invasion of London, which is still to come for me in the marathon…

As if that wasn't bad enough, I'm still struggling to tie up the Great Intelligence we see here with the one from The Snowmen, The Bells of St. John, and The Name of the Doctor. Piecing together what I've gotten from this story and what I vaguely recall from the last series of Who, this is what I think the Intelligence's timeline is like. Anyone care to point me in the right direction? I've made a bit of a guess in relation to how the Intelligence came to Earth, so bear with me…

1) The Great Intelligence is a formless entity that floats around the stars. It may or may not be (depending on how you class the books) a being left over from a previous universe. While it's very intelligent, it longs to have a physical form.

2) While it's floating around, wondering how to gain a physical body, he encounters Padmasamabhava's mind on the Astral Plane, somewhere around the 17th Century. Using the monk's mind, he is drawn to Earth but cannot materialise. He intends to replace humanity with Ice People (that's his plan in The Snowmen, I think…), and so possesses some snow in the Himalayas, and directed it to London (Britain is a great empire at this point - you want to take over the world? London is a good place to start…).

3) The snow is then made into a snowman by the young Simeon, who grows up under the Intelligences guidance. The Doctor manages to defeat the Intelligence, dropping a big hint about the London Underground (while also seeming to not realise who the Intelligence is) and then muses that it will learn to live without a host body.

4) Upon defeat, the Intelligence draws back to the Astral Plane, where he's still in contact with Padmasamabhava, and has kept the monk alive for centuries. He starts work on a new plan which will allow him to take the form of a load of foam. Y'know, just 'cos. He then builds robot Yeti to protect his pyramids - the means through which his new form can enter the world.

Now, I've not seen The Web of Fear yet, but I think I can more-or-less guess where things go from here (broadly speaking, anyway). I don't want to make some massive assumptions and look like a complete fool if I'm wrong, though, so we'll pick this timeline up in a couple of weeks when the Intelligence makes a comeback. It's taking some thinking, but I'm pretty sure I've got it worked out nicely, now, and it makes sense!

The problem is, while I quite like the grand idea of it (and if things go the way I think during The Web of Fear, there's suddenly more justification for the Great Intelligence committing suicide to destroy the Doctor at the end of the most recent series), I'm still just not all that involved in The Abominable Snowmen as a whole. Ho hum, one more episode to go, and I'm expecting lots of Yeti action, so that could be good!

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 183: The Abominable Snowmen, Episode Three

Dear diary,

Somewhere in my mass of notes for The Tomb of the Cybermen, I made a remark that it was a slight twist on the base-under-siege format, as the 'heroes' and the 'villains' were both inside the base, and it was more about trying to stop them from getting to a certain part of the base, or using a certain type of equipment. When the first episode of this tale told us that the Yeti had been getting more aggressive and heading closer and closer to the monastery, I thought we were in for a more run-of-the-mill adventure, with the bad guys attacking the base.

So the presence here of the Yeti being controlled from within the monastery is a welcome surprise. As I said yesterday, I know who is behind it all, but not how he operates, and I didn't realise he was going to be actively inside the building. It does make me wonder quite why the Great Intelligence would be brining the Yeti closer and closer to the place he (or, at least, his mouthpiece) is hiding in, though…

I'm also trying to piece together the Great Intelligence's timeline. In The Snowmen (How did I not figure out the surprise appearance until well into the episode - given that title?), the Doctor comments that the Intelligence will learn to operate without a physical form. This was in the late Victorian period - thirty or forty years before this tale is set. I thought, what with the disembodied voice and all, that we'd be seeing just that: the Great Intelligence working without a body. Don't get me wrong, I didn't actually expect it to match up perfectly with a story made forty-odd years later, but I did think that these event would have been taken into account when writing that Christmas special.

As it is… I'm not completely sure. It feels like a massive step backwards for the Intelligence. Yes, the robot Yeti are quite impressive and the control spheres are pretty cool, but they're nowhere near as advanced as the sentient snow he'd been using decades ago. Is it just because he's weak? Equally, were told here that the Intelligence will finally be able to gain physical form, and end its wanderings in space… I know it could have been floating around the stars ever since the Doctor destroyed it's previous host body, but the wording here imp lies a long period of not having any kind of physical form.

These things would probably bother me less if I hadn't seen the Christmas episode so recently (well, last Christmas), and they're only minor niggles for now. I'm also very aware that I'm only half way through The Abominable Snowmen at this point, and things may tie up neater towards the end. Hopefully.

I'm not all about complaining today, though, because Victoria's being given plenty to do again! Hooray! She's been a bit of a yo-yo so far, flitting between simply being there to scream ('Jamiiiiieeeeee!') and being a good companion - for much of today's episode she's firmly in the latter camp. 'Aren't you a little bit curious?' she asks when trying to find her way to the inner sanctum, and she's later warned off being too inquisitive. When she finds out that the Doctor and Jamie have gone off to hunt a Yeti, she's really not pleased to be left behind. We're a far cry from the feeble prisoner of the Daleks we had a couple of stories ago, and I'm very pleased to see that she does have potential…

a 

a  a

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 182: The Abominable Snowmen, Episode Two

Dear diary,

As much as I've been enjoying listening to the soundtracks over the last couple of months (it's become a way of life, and having an episode on during my walk home each day has become something of a routine), it really does help when there's an actual, surviving episode to go on. I think I was rather spoiled by having all of The Tomb of the Cybermen to watch, so it felt like a bit of a step backwards to have little to base yesterday's episode on than tele snaps and location photos.

I've found myself far more drawn to this episode of the story than I did yesterday. In part, it's possibly because there's a bit more going on today than we had yesterday, but it doesn't hurt that if we do encounter a less interesting part of the story, it's got some lovely direction to fall back on. This is Gerald Blake's first time directing on Doctor Who (and he won't be back until The Invasion of Time!), but he's off to a great start, really injecting the story with some atmosphere.

The dark corridors of the monastery really are the perfect setting for a Doctor Who tale, and the rest of the building holds up in its design, too. There's a section of narration on the soundtrack to Episode One where Frazer Hines describes the Doctor looking up at a large statue of a Buddah, and I vaguely pictured something of a manageable size… but there really is a massive statue at the back of one set!

Equally, the location footage looks great. The story gets a lot of stick for using the mountains of North Wales as a stand in for the Himalayas and while, no, it doesn't quite work, I'm ready to admit that it gives it a good shot, and it certainly looks impressive enough anyway. I seem to say this a lot as the shoe continues to broaden out into more varied (and lengthier) location shooting, but it really does have a feel of being completely unlike any other place we've seen before in the series. Mind you, doesn't Victoria say something about footprints in the snow in the first episode?

And then you've got the Yeti themselves. Often called out for being quite cute (which, yes, they are) they still come across as pretty impressive here. The cliffhanger reprise gives us a chance to see one of them lumbering into the cave towards Jamie and Victoria, and it looks as good as I could have hoped it might from picturing it yesterday. Admittedly, they look a little less imposing when they stand around outside the monastery and watch their friend be trapped, but they still look quite good. It's a pity that we've never had that action figure of them - I'd snap one up.

The Yeti's spheres are pretty impressive, too, perhaps even more so than the creatures themselves. We get to see a couple of instances of them moving here without any apparent outside help, and it works well both times. I'm not sure if it's more impressive to see that it actually can move through the thick mud (K9 would wince at the idea!) or the shot of it rolling along the edge of the Buddah statue, at some speed. I'm guessing the story would see more of this going on in the later (missing) episodes, so I'm glad we get to see at least a few brief snippets of it happening in the part that survives: at least it shows me that they could do it well!

Because I've been a fan for several years, I'm more than well aware that the omnipresent voice echoing through the inner sanctum of the monastery is that of the Great Intelligence, but it doesn't take anything away from it - it genuinely is quite imposing. 'Do not be afraid,' it booms at one point, when it's hard to be anything else! Having just gone through the most recent series of Doctor Who, I keep expecting Richard E Gran't face to appear in the smoke from the candles at some point. Maybe as an anniversary treat, they could have him re-dub all of the Great Intelligence's lines?

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 181: The Abominable Snowmen, Episode One

Dear diary,

I think it's more than fair to say that whatever had to follow The Tomb of the Cybermen for me was going to have a tough job to keep me impressed, and I'm sorry to say that the first episode of The Abominable Snowmen has left me rather flat. To tell the truth, I think it really is as simple as me being disappointed that it isn't another episode of Tomb, because there's plenty here that would be right up my street in any other circumstance.

There's two areas of the story's setting that should particularly appeal to me. The fact that it all takes place in-and-around a remote monastery in the Himalayan mountains means that I've got an instant hook - take a Google Image search of these monasteries, there's some beautiful examples of them. They're just the right setting for a Doctor Who story, and especially suited to a base under siege tale - there's no one else for miles and miles around. I'm listening to today's episode on audio, so I've been picturing a desolate mountainside shrouded in snow and fog, though I fear tomorrow's episode may not tie in with that, if the location photos are anything to go by!

Quite aside from the location of the story, it's set in a period of history that really interests me - that late 1920s/early 1930s period where there were still areas of the Earth, to be explored. Oh, don't get me wrong, I know that we've still not been into the very depths of some rain forests, or to the peaks of every mountain, and the bottom of the sea leaves us with a vast area to explore, but this period in time is the dying days of the stereotypical 'explorer' image, when you can still sail out to sea and discover a new island which a satellite would have located in seconds today.

Then there's the idea of hinting for the Yeti. I've never really known where I stand on the idea of the Abominable Snowman. I don't think I believe in its existence, or if I do then I think it's probably just a type of rare monkey, and nowhere near as mystical as people think. But I love the idea of those early 20th century explorers going out to look for the creature, and the suggestion that the Doctor is from a newspaper, and there to sabotage the mission for a 'cheap headline' is great - and very in keeping with the era.

We've also got an opening scene that I really should absolutely love - it takes time to show us the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria all hanging around in the TARDIS and having fun together. It feels like an age since we've been able to spend some time inside the ship with our regular cast (I have to admit that I didn't really notice it fading out, but I think The Chase was probably the last time that we really had anything quite like this. Possibly I could cite the opening to The Moonbase where they joke about the Doctor over-shooting Mars).

It's not all fun and games, though, and there's plenty of drama to be found once the Doctor is inside the monastery and being held prisoner by the monks. It's always of interest when the Doctor is separated from his friends and left alone with no allies, and in a setting quite unlike any we've had in the series before, it's always nice to have something new. Jamie and Victoria's exploration of the Yeti cave isn't of as much interest to me, though, and I'm sorry to say I zoned out a little during this (Victoria's screaming soon snapped me back to attention, though!).

Here's hoping that the chance to watch tomorrow's episode will allow me to pull this story out from the previous one's shadow, and set me on a better course for the rest of the tale…

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 180: The Tomb of the Cybermen, Episode Four

Dear diary,

It seems strange, standing at this end of the story and looking back, that I ever considered it may not hold up. I’d worried that having found a fondness for other stories which I’d never really considered before, The Tomb of the Cybermen - ostensibly my ‘favourite’ Doctor Who tale - and suddenly find it underwhelming. Almost ten years of it being my favourite could be washed away in these four days.

What’s actually happened is quite the opposite – I’ve completely rediscovered my love for the story as though seeing it again for the very first time. It possibly helps that this is the first time since The War Machines, way back at the end of Season Three, that I’ve actually had a full story to watch. It could help that I’m already looking more favourably on this one than some of the stories I’ve never seen but haven’t heard great things about. Or it could be that, quite simply, The Tomb of the Cybermen is one of the all-time greats. Certainly, I’ve met a number of people over the years who have either cited it as their favourite, too, or at least considered that it’s a good contender for a favourite story to have.

Right the way through, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by just how much I’ve been loving this one – by the time Episode One had finished, any worries I had were gone, and I was left just enjoying things. Each episode has given me something new to love, and the fourth is no exception to this – I’d always thought of Toberman’s partial-conversion into Cyberman as having no real merit, but it works really well and is key to the story. His fight with the Cybercontroller here is much better than any of the fights in the last episode, and the final shot of him, staring down against the Controller as they each push on opposite sides of the door is fantastic. Are they just planning to leave the body there, though? I realise it must be a pretty long trip back to Earth, but surely they must be able to take him home? At least throw a sheet over the corpse or something!

I’ve focussed so much in this story on the developing relationship between the Doctor and Victoria (though it feels like they’ve been travelling for a while now. The About Time series speculates that there could be unseen adventures between her entrance to the TARDIS in Episode One and the arrival on Telos – and there’s plenty in the story which I think can support that), but I’ve barely mentioned Jamie’s role in events.

It’s far from being a secret that I love the pairing of the Doctor and his Highland friend, and there’s so much of a spark between them in this story that I can’t let it pass without mention. The ‘hand holding’ in Episode One is always singled out for praise, but brilliant as it is, there’s a number of other moments in The Tomb of the Cybermen that I think showcase the pair better. Episode Three sees the Doctor making a pun about the Cybermat’s metal brains being overloaded (‘You could say they’ve had a total metal breakdown’) and Jamie's reaction to his terrible pun. Today we get Jamie tying the door of the revitaliser machine, before the Cybercontroller breaks through the door (‘Jamie, remind me to give you a lesson in tying knots sometimes…’), and his realisation of what’s happened to Toberman: the boy is learning from his travels.

Something that often gets talked about in this story is the death of a Cyberman here, where the chest unit bubbles as foam rises up and overflows. It’s cited as an example of Doctor Who going too far and being too violent, and I can almost see that. It’s certainly more horrific than we might usually get at this time. For me, though, what made it scary was the way the Cyberman grabs at his chest throughout, almost as though trying to force his circuitry back inside. That’s the really gruesome part, but it works. Equally, there’s a scene where Jamie fires a gun point blank into a Cyberman’s face as it climbs from the hatch. Smoke comes pouring out of the mouth as it stumbles back down into the tomb. It’s a striking image.

For a long, long time, The Tomb of the Cybermen was the fabled ‘Holy Grail’ of missing Doctor Who tales, and the general consensus is that when it showed up in 1992, it wasn’t as good as everyone hoped it might be. For me, though, it’s damn near perfect, and I’m pleased to say that it’s still coming out top for me.

I’m hoping that it might be a good sign – I’ve been slightly dreading Season Five. It’s mostly missing, and it relies heavily on the Base-Under-Siege and Monster-of-the-Week formats, I’d been fearing that I might find it repetitive. Hopefully, though, if things continue to live up to the quality of The Tomb of the Cybermen, we could be on to a real winner…

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 179: The Tomb of the Cybermen, Episode Three

Dear diary,

Simply because The Tomb of the Cybermen was my first exposure to the creatures, I’ve always thought of these as being the ‘default’ model. It’s this design that I think of when people talk about Cybermen, and the style of speaking here is the one I most readily associate with them, too. It’s pleasing, then, to be enjoying them so much again now. There’s something about the voices especially that really is creepier than we’ve had before (as much as I loved the ones in The Tenth Planet), and it helps that some of their dialogue is so blunt.

Yesterday’s episode ends with the Cybercontroller telling the archaeological party ‘You belong to us. You will be like us’, and there’s a moment here when Jamie tells a Cyberman that he’s a human – he’s not the same as them, and the reply is simply ‘You will be’. The idea of being converted into a Cyberman has been present ever since their first appearance, but this is the first time it’s really being played as a threat. In The Tenth Planet, it’s almost an offer, but here it’s a terrifying experience, and something that you really don’t want to happen. In promoting Nightmare in Silver, Neil Gaiman commented that he’d been watching the 1960s stories and wanted to make the Cybermen scary again – it’s hard not to see what he means about the terror.

This episode, perhaps more than any we’ve had for a while, relies on a number of big special effects. I remember back during The Ark, I commented that the effects were just being dropped in easily, wheres before they’d have been the showpiece for the entire 25 minutes. Here, they’re just part of the routine, and the programme thinks nothing of showing the effect of a Cyber-gun against a wall (the awesome power of which lends weight to the cliff-hanger, when the same gun is fired in the Doctor’s direction).

Perhaps the biggest effects surprise for me, though, is the Cybermats. I have to admit, as much as I love The Tomb of the Cybermen, I’ve never been all that fond of the Cybermen’s pets. I’ve seen this story several times over the years, but in mind mind the Cybermats didn’t work and looked rubbish… but they’re great! I’d not remembered that the tails wag, which really helps to sell the effect, and I was surprised just how similar this version is to the ones who appear in Closing Time - I’d not seen this story since that one aired.

Just because I love the story doesn’t mean I’m completely blind to some of its faults, though. While there’s plenty of great effects in here, and the Cybermen get used in a way that makes them look great (there’s a show of one trying to hold the hatch to their tomb open, and you really get a sense of the strength involved), I’m willing to admit that it doesn’t all work. Just like the previous two episode of this story, I’ve written absolutely loads of notes, but this time around there are several about things that aren’t great.

There’s a fight early on between the archaeologists and the Cybermen which becomes a bit of a muddle, and it’s home to the shot of Toberman being hurled through the air by a Cyberman. It’s a lovely idea, but sadly the kirby wires are just far too visible, which somewhat lessens the effect. Similarly, a later shot of the Cybermen stumbling around in the aftermath of some smoke bombs doesn’t look all that spectacular.

All of that can be forgotten, though, because this episode is home to one of my favourite scenes in all of Doctor Who, when the Doctor and Victoria share a conversation in the dead of night, as everyone sleeps huddled in corners of the tomb’s lobby. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve not been all that impressed with Victoria so far on the whole, but these few minutes, shot in close-ups of Patrick Troughton and Deborah Watling as they just get the chance to act together really sells me on her. It’s a beautiful moment, and another one of those scenes that shows emotion didn’t creep in with the advent of 21st century Doctor Who.

I hate quoting long passages from the episode when I’m writing about them, but the Doctor’s words about remembering his lost family are so emotive, that I just have to post them again here;

Oh yes, I can when I want to. And that's the point, really.
I have to really want to, to bring them back in front of my eyes. The
rest of the time they… they sleep in my mind and I forget. And so will
you. Oh yes, you will. You'll find there's so much else to think about.
To remember. Our lives are different to anybody else's. That's the
exciting thing, that nobody in the universe can do what we're doing.

I’d not be surprised if that’s another one of those moments that really sold me on the idea of Patrick Troughton as being the Doctor – it’s simply wonderful

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 178: The Tomb of the Cybermen, Episode Two

Dear diary,

I can distinctly recall purchasing The Tomb of the Cybermen on DVD for the very first time. I'd been something of a Doctor Who fan since the autumn of 2003, but only dipping in and out, picking up one or two titles on VHS from the library as and when I felt compelled to. Then, one day in the summer of 2004, in what was then the BBC Shop in Norwich, I purchased my first two Doctor Who DVDs. There was this one, and Resurrection of the Daleks. None of the stories I'd rented had featured either of the programme's top two monsters, so I thought that it would be a pretty good place to start.

And you know what? I loved them. I'm sure I'll talk more about Resurrection next year sometime, when we reach the right placement for the tale, but I can recall just being blown away by Tomb, right from the off.

Looking at this episode today, and viewing it for the first time in the context of all the stories that have gone before it, I don't think it's impossible to see just why this one is so loved by fans. In several ways, it's the perfect representation of the Second Doctor's era, and I think it's fair to say that Troughton is on the absolute top of his game. Everything his Doctor does so well is showcased in these 24 minutes, from letting slip that he knows more than people realise ('Your colleague has very strong hands,' he tells Kaftan, shortly after they discover that the fuel pumps on the rocket have been tampered with. He continues: 'Enough to do a great deal of damage if let loose in the wrong place…'), to subtly controlling the room (switching levers to make sure that the hatch to the tomb will open), and making quips when the bad guys get it wrong.

There's something about his look here, too - the way his hair sits, and the way his costume looks underneath his recently-added cape - that just screams 'Second Doctor' to me. The Tomb of the Cybermen was recorded at the very end of Doctor Who's fourth production block, and it's clear that by this stage, both Troughton and the programme makers have settled on exactly what this new version of the character should be. Placed in the surroundings of such a fantastic story, it's no wonder that I took the Second Doctor to heart and made him my favourite.

That said, you do have to wonder why the Doctor does some of the things that he does in this story. During The Evil of the Daleks, I mentioned that we were seeing the first real attempts of the Doctor to manipulate the people around him (the First Doctor did this too, especially in the early days, but this is the first time we see him doing it with just the right word or action here or there, as opposed to actively misleading people into doing what he wants, as we see in stories like The Daleks), and he seems to be doing the same kind of thing here… but then almost instantly wishing that he hadn't.

In yesterday's episode, he discovers that the Cybermen are buried somewhere inside this cliff-face, and that the archaeological team can't get the door open… so he shows them how to get in. They then can't figure out how to get the machinery working… so he gives them the answer, before adding that they really shouldn't. Today, he helps them open the hatch, before spending plenty of time talking about it being a bad idea, and hoping that nothing will go wrong. Is he just a bit confused? Maybe it's the low temperatures?

It's good to see Victoria being given a bit more of a personality here, too. There's a moment early on when the Cybermen's gun trap fires and she lets out a little scream, but after that she's a much more assertive person than we've seen before. When the professor advises the women to stay behind, she actively tells him that she's coming along wether he likes it or not, and she's not afraid to step in and deal with Kaftan once the Doctor has highlighted her as a threat, even going as far as to hold the woman at gunpoint. This is much more like it, and I think I can go along with a version of Victoria that behaves more like this.

Elsewhere, I feel as though I need to praise the set design a little bit more today. The design of the tombs is simply stunning, and one of my favourite sets from Doctor Who's long history. You should have heard my cry of joy when the design cropped up again for Nightmare in Silver a couple of months ago. Everything about the tomb itself, especially the scale - which I think is best captured by an on-set photograph of director Morris Barry stood in front of the construction - is simply gorgeous, and I love it.

Back in 2005, with the programme back on TV and my friends suddenly deciding to take an interest, they asked to watch one of the old ones so they could see what it was like. Of course I plumped for showing them this! It’s my favourite story. Having sat through half the first episode with one friend complaining about the lack of colour (I shouldn't have been surprised - a few years earlier he'd walked out of a cinema screening of Van Helsing, because the first few minutes are black and white) and the other about the slow pace, I skipped ahead to show them the final few scenes of this episode, with the Cybermen being unfrozen from their winter sleep.

And they couldn't stop laughing. They thought it was hilarious. I was mortified - one of my favourite moments of Doctor Who and my friends couldn't stop talking about how rubbish it looked. I've always secretly thought that they were wrong (I say secretly, I tell them they're wrong, every time I visit home), but you know what? Watching it again now in the context of all these other episodes? I know they're wrong! Because it does look bloody fantastic!

The ice 'melting' from the tomb, the blurry shapes moving around inside before splitting open the casing and climbing down the ladders at the sides… it is a great moment, and it's an example of the show pulling off an effect pretty well. I'll admit, I don't like the way they start to break out of the tomb, and then are instantly frozen again (complete with a thick layer of ice - get your money's worth from the visual effects department) only to re-emerge, but everything else here is great. There's not all that many Cybermen, but when they're swarming around the cave it looks like masses of them. It's a great bit of directing from Barry.

Although, I will concede that the About Time book for this era is right - it would seem that the Cybercontroller has spent the last five centuries squatting in a cupboard. Ah.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 177: The Tomb of the Cybermen, Episode One

Dear diary,

This is it! This is the big one! For the best part of the last decade, I've always cited The Tomb of the Cybermen as being my absolute favourite TV Doctor Who story. I credit this serial with making the Cybermen my favourite monsters, and Patrick Troughton my favourite Doctor. It's almost the template I have in mind for what Doctor Who is supposed to be. The bad thing about all this is that I've been dreading hitting it in The 50 Year Diary. It's always been my favourite when I'm comparing it to odd stories here and there, but how's it going to stand up in context? What am I going to make of it, now that I've discovered other gems like The War Machines and The Macra Terror? Essentially, is The Tomb of the Cybermen going to turn out to be really a little bit rubbish?

Thankfully, the answer to that question is no. Of course it's not going to all fall apart now that I've watched 160-something other episodes that immediately preceded it. The Tomb of the Cybermen is my favourite story for a reason, and it's holding its own very nicely here. You'll forgive me if I'm a little more forgiving of the story than I might otherwise be, but there's not an awful lot that needs to be overlooked - the full-body versions of the Cyberman image don't look half as good as the head-and-shoulders version that we're all far more familiar with, it's true, and it seems silly that there's a table and chairs waiting handily in the lobby to their tomb, yes. But you know what? Everything else here is fantastic, so I don't care!

I think it's probably telling that I've written more notes about this episode than I think I have about any other in the marathon so far. I usually get about six episodes on a single sheet of paper, but I've used a side and a half for this one. There's just so much that I wanted to note down, and so much that I could talk about that it felt silly not to. It probably helps that this is the first full Troughton story that I'll be able to watch (indeed, it's the only full Troughton story from his first two seasons in the role), which means that there's little visual things I can pick up on more than I've been able to lately.

So where to start? The introduction of a new companion has often been used as a way to reintroduce the concept of Doctor Who to an audience who may be joining for the first time, and it's strange to note that this is the first time that the re-establishment happens in the first story of the season - we pan into the image of the Police Box, and then cut to inside (the first time we've seen it since The Moonbase, which feels like an absolute age ago), where the Doctor explains that it's his home, and has been for some time. Victoria is then introduced to the concept of time travel, and the idea that they can travel anywhere in time and space. The aspect of not being able to control where they go gets glossed over on this occasion, though Jamie does ask the Doctor for a smooth landing.

It's another one of those moments that shows how much the Doctor and Jamie have become best friends since they first met, and even aside from the argument they had during the last story, they really are becoming inseparable. There's little wonder that they travel together until someone else forces them apart - I imagine the pair would still be out there somewhere if they could be. Troughton and Hines simply bounce from each other, from the way the hold hands (and then quickly stop) as they enter the tomb, to the Doctor's tease that the Highlander's skirt is a bit short. It makes this phase of the programme so much fun, and I really can't get enough of the pair.

Victoria, it has to be said, still isn't really giving me much to love, though. Deborah Watling is doing a good job, and again it has to be said how beautiful she looks as she stands in the TARDIS at the beginning, but the character is a bit of a generic Doctor Who girl. She wanders into the Cybermen's 'revitalising' machine, where the bad guy locks her in, and then she's flustered when she gets out. There's a moan to the Doctor about wanting to just leave, and a constant feeling of unease. I get that it's her very first TARDIS trip, but this is the side of the character we saw plenty of in The Evil of the Daleks, and the fact that I can't remember much about what else she does in my favourite story probably speaks absolute volumes.

Although I've only got tele-snaps to compare it to for the most part of the last season, this story seems to be set on a far vaster scale than I'm used to from the series. I seem to find myself saying this a lot every time we get to a surviving episode (it was true of The War Machines, and The Faceless Ones, and the tele-snaps for The Smugglers made it look pretty large scale, too), but we really are on a new level here. There's a shot early on as we look down past Toberman's legs to the rest of the archeological expedition below, and it makes the place look so grand that it almost throws you. It does have to be said that I'm not sure it always works as an alien world (there's another shot which makes it look like a group of people inappropriately dressed for a day that the beach), but it sets the story apart and really gives the start of the new season a glossy feel.

I could just go on and on about this episode and all the things that are right with it, but I'd start to bore you before too long, and there's another three episodes to fill with praise yet, so I think I'll call it a day here. Suffice to say that my favourite story hasn't let me down, and I'm tremendously pleased by that.

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 176: The Evil of the Daleks, Episode Seven

Dear diary,

I spent a fair bit of time during The Faceless Ones talking about the way Samantha Briggs was being set up as a companion, with a proper back story that served to show off all the aspects of her character – she was plucky, inquisitive, unafraid to dive right in to potential danger (she’d come all the way down from Liverpool, too, you know) and there was a real connection between her and Jamie. She was so very clearly the new companion… right up until the end of the story, at which point she wasn’t.

I’ve then spent plenty of time in this story actively waiting for the chance to show Victoria being signposted as the companion… but she isn’t, until the latter half of today’s episode – six after she was introduced. Victoria has come across as just a bit of a damsel in distress, and although much of the story has revolved around her (or, at least, around Jamie’s attempts to rescue her), she hasn’t really made much of an impact on me. Certainly, I couldn’t tell you very much about her character at all, whereas Sam Briggs was fully rounded by the time she kissed our highlander goodbye.

It’s surprising, then, that her being accepted onto the TARDIS as the new companion carries as much weight as it does. I’d forgotten that her father died during the course of this story, so his sacrifice to save the Doctor came as a pleasant surprise, and it was very movingly done. ‘You’ve just saved my life,’ the Doctor tells him. ‘It’s a good life to save,’ Waterfield replies, before asking the Doctor to look after Victoria for him. Jamie later muses that they can’t just leave Victoria (alone on Skaro, with her father and her best friend dead? I should think not!) and the Doctor confirms that she’s leaving with them. It’s a lovely moment, and oddly emotional, considering my lack of attachment to her up to now.

It’s odd to think that this is it (barring the odd cameo) for the Daleks until quite some way into the Third Doctor's era. They'll be absent from the series for the next five years, and absent from The 50 Year Diary for the next five months, rather fittingly returning for me just around the time of Doctor Who's 50th Anniversary. It was at this point Terry Nation started to really look at selling the Daleks as their own series, and this is probably the more logical placement for Daleks: The Destroyers to sit, but it felt like 'the final end' was a good point to leave the creatures on for now.

I wonder, though, what it would have been like if the Daleks hadn't turned up again to face off against Jon Pertwee? It's definitely true to say that without them, the programme wouldn't have gotten out of the First Season (possibly not even that first 13-episode commission), but by this point in time, it really has picked up it's own following, and losing the Daleks here and now possibly shows that they're not really needed for Doctor Who any more. Imagine a world in which the return of the Daleks, those pepper pot creatures from the 1960s were being revived for the new series as a slightly more obscure monster, in the same way the Macra and the Ice Warriors have been in recent years!

On the whole, I'm sad to say, The Evil of the Daleks hasn't been the barn-storming end to the Fourth Season that I was hoping for. The story's reputation within fandom has always been very high, but it really hasn't delivered for me. Lots of very nice moments, but it's felt like the Daleks leaving the series with more of a whimper than a bang, a real shame. I'm almost tempted to read the Target novel at the end of Series Five (when this serial was repeated on television) to see if I can improve my opinion on it - worth doing?

Aside from that, and The Highlanders, Season Four has been very strong. I've really loved it. I worries so much about these 'middle' seasons of the 1960s, since there was just so much missing, but it wasn't until after I'd finished with today's episode that I realised - we've not had a complete story all season! THat's about to be changed, with the release of The Tenth Planet and The Moonbase with animated episodes, but for me, every single story has been supplemented with the soundtracks. I think it's a testament to the season that it's managed to make such a great impression with so little visual material to go on.

But forget all that! We move onwards, and into Season Five! Not only that, it's my first complete Troughton story, and it's the classic tale I've always considered my favourite Doctor Who story. Little bit excited? You bet I am!

a

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 175: The Evil of the Daleks, Episode Six

Dear diary,

It’s very clear that we’ve got Roy Skelton on Dalek duties in this episode, isn’t it? At times, it sounds like Zippy’s gotten hold of a ring modulator! If anything, it actively helps to story – as if these child-like Daleks weren’t already unnerving enough, they’re speaking in the voice of a beloved children’s character. Fantastic stuff.

That whole opening scene, with the Daleks continuing to play their games with the Doctor, is absolutely brilliant, taking the great ending to the last episode and taking it even further. There’s something very unusual about the way that the Daleks slowly drawl the Doctor’s words back at him (though we get ‘Traaaaiiiiinnnn’ and ‘Dizzzzyyyyy’, I’m a little sorry that they didn’t attempt to copy ‘Roundabout’. I’ll have to make up for it by saying the word in a Dalek voice to myself for the rest of the day. Or to strangers on the street. Why not? Roundaboooouuuttttt…). The scene seems to keep getting creepier and creepier, until it’s drawn to a close when the Daleks ominously state ‘we must go now’. It’s said in a way that wouldn’t be out of place coming from a spooky child in a horror film, and really works.

I was starting to think that’s I’d never have a nice word to say about The Evil of the Daleks, so I’m really leased to find that things are more to my taste now. I was hoping that the shift over to Skaro would be a turning point for the story, and it seems that it has more or less coincided with this, so I’m happy. And it’s the first time that we’ve seen the Doctor travel back to an alien planet we’ve already been to! We’ve seen him return places before (He’d been to Dido in The Rescue, for example), but this is the first time that we’ve seen both of the trips to the planet (Hm? You what? Oh, all right then. Yeah yeah, we visited Kembel on two separate occasions in The Daleks' Master Plan. I'll give you that one, but as that was all part of one big adventure - spread across several different stories! - I'm discounting it. This is the first time we've seen him return to an alien planet in a completely different context.)

Years of being a Doctor Who fan means that I know full well how the sets look for this episode, with the stark black and white angles, and the Dalek Emperor sat in the corner, plugged into the city (the narration on the soundtrack nicely describes it as sitting at the centre of its ‘web’), but I can’t help picturing the stark, metal corridors of the original Dalek story – without the visuals to this episode, my mind has automatically gone back to what I consider to be the ‘default’ design.

There’s something quite brilliant about the Doctor facing up to the Dalek Emperor, who towers over him. He’s cool and confident, musing that he’d always wondered if the pair would ever meet. It put me instantly in mind of a similar scene, in which the Ninth Doctor steps out of the TARDIS and confronts another Dalek Emperor. In another similarity between this and The Parting of the Ways, the Doctor seems to issue spoilers for us, when he tells the Emperor that he’ll have a revolution on his hands pretty soon, once the new ‘humanised’ Daleks start to ask questions.

The main issue I have with all of this - and the reveal that while the Doctor thought he was isolating this ‘Human Factor’, he was actually helping to discover a ‘Dalek Factor’ – is that I’m not sure I care. Much as I love Alpha, Beta, and Omega, I’ve said before that I wasn’t really paying too much attention to the experiments that the Doctor was being forced to do, so it doesn’t feel like some massive shock revelation here. I’m hoping that won’t matter too much as we move into the final episode, which I already know is the much fabled ‘Final End’ of the Daleks (at least during the 1960s).

a

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 174: The Evil of the Daleks, Episode Five

Dear diary,

My favourite Beatles Album (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band) was released in June 1967, while The Evil of the Daleks was being broadcast (between Episodes Two and Three, to be precise), and watching through the series in order, it's easy to draw some comparisons between the evolution of both the band, and Doctor Who's greatest foes. Although it's not as black and white as I'm about to paint it, I've always thought of the Beatles as being split into their early, very '1960s' stuff, and their later more abstract music.

Similarly, The Daleks have evolved since their earliest days in the series, and I think it's fair to say that they can be divided into the early stuff where they're just 'evil' pepper pots, who come along and invade/kill/shout a lot - essentially, every William Hartnell Dalek story. Or to put it another way, every Dalek story that Terry Nation had a real hand in - and the later Daleks who are more experimental: the two Whittaker stories.

They've not really had a massive presence in this story so far, and I don't think I'd have missed them had they not arrived until this episode in the narrative. Now that the story is shifting its focus back onto them, though, we're given that more abstract kind of Dalek scene that Whittaker is so good at - the episode closes on three Daleks playing a game. It sounds so simple, but it would have been unthinkable for the series to do something like this two years ago. Even the 'comedy' Daleks in The Chase ultimately get restored to shouting 'exterminate!' a lot and chase the Doctor and his companions.

This is the kind of cliffhanger that I've been waiting for from this story - one which takes the Daleks and does something interesting with them. Even when Power of the Daleks was left to show us a group of Daleks amassing an army, they did it on such a scale as to make a real impact. Cliffhangers like the one we had yesterday (two Daleks approach Jamie! Oh no!) just don't pack a punch any more, whereas this kind of thing is fantastic.

I think it's fair to say that the store has a whole has turned around a bit for me today - certainly I've been far more receptive to it. It helps that after several episodes in which we watch people move from 'A' to 'B' to 'C' and back again, things seem to be reaching a kind of point now. The idea of identifying the 'Human Factor' was introduced back in Episode Two, but it feels like so long since then that it had almost become irrelevant in my mind (Of course, it's the whole point of everything that has happened in Episodes Three, Four, and Five, but to my disconnected mind, I couldn't care less).

It might just be because I'm feeling more generous towards the episode, but I've picked up on a lot more sparkling dialogue today than in the rest of the story - it's the first time that I've written quite this many notes for a few days' There's obviously Troughton's speech about being a professor of a wide academy (of which human nature is merely a part), which has seeped into being one of those quotes you often see associated with the Doctor. There's also his discussion about the human emotions and how useful they can be, and his sheer delight when the Daleks push him around the room on a spiny chair. It's another thing I just can't imaging Hartnell's Doctor doing: for all his giggling and light-hearted moments, I can't imagine him being pushed around on a chair by a group of Daleks. Something about that image doesn't seem right in the way that picturing Troughton doing it does.

Perhaps my favourite dialogue from today's episode comes from the Doctor and Jamie's argument. I praised the earlier one they had in which the Doctor tricked Jamie into doing what he needed, but that one was partly play acting, at least on the Doctor's part. Today's argument is real, and you can tell from the way it's played. It's much lower-key than the earlier example, and it feels far more real. In many ways, it's reminiscent of the final scene of The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve, and there's a number of beats in both those arguments that are the same.

I didn't know that the Doctor and Jamie ever had a discussion like this - I always thought they spent all three years together as the absolute best of friends, with never a cross word between them, so it's brilliant to see that there's more to their relationship than all that, and to know that Jamie is capable of being fleshed out in such a way. 'Look, I'm telling you this - we're done, you and me. You're too callous for me,' Jamie tells his friend, and it ties in nicely with my thoughts about the Doctor being seen to manipulate his friend earlier in the story. As always, it's a little thing, but it really works.

I'm hoping that the goodwill I've built up over this episode is a good sign, and with another two to go I may yet figure out why this story is held in such high regard. It's good to know that we're three characters shorter now, as I have to confess I was starting to get a bit lost as to who was who. Now that we've got Daleks acting very differently, and the story seemingly headed somewhere, things are looking up…

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 173: The Evil of the Daleks, Episode Four

Dear diary,

How do you type that noise you make when you suck air in through your teeth? I’m genuinely not sure how to type this one today. All I’ve got written in my notes is ‘Jamie fights Kemel for the first five minutes’. After that, there just wasn’t really anything else that I felt compelled to write about. I’m so disappointed – this was supposed to be the great one! The big send off for the Daleks!

I think the thing that annoyed me the most was the cliffhanger. I spent every episode of The Power of the Daleks absolutely singing the praises of the episode endings. Every singe one felt new and fresh, taking the Daleks and making them scary in a way completely unlike anything we’d ever seen from them. Today’s cliffhanger involves Jamie reaching a door, while two Daleks trundle up behind him, guns at the ready.

At the end of Doctor Who’s fourth year, this just doesn’t hold up as a Dalek cliffhanger. We’ve seen them approaching people ready to kill in various forms ever since the fifth episode - and there we only see the plunger and Barbara from the Daleks point-of-view. Take away the thrill of not knowing what this strange thing could be, it’s still framed more interestingly than this one, at least judging from the tele snaps.

I think I was just expecting there to me a bit more to The Evil of the Daleks. Now, I’m not completely in the Dark, I know that at some stage the action will switch to Skaro, and we get a big destruction of the pepperpots, with (so I hear) pretty good integration of model work and studio footage – not that I can actually see it…. I know we’ve got a huge Dalek Emperor on the way, and I can only assume that this is what sets this story on such a high pedestal. It’s just that… I thought from reputation that we’d be getting a brilliant story from start to finish. Ah well, you can’t win them all, I guess.

I’ve always been more intrigued by the proposed notion of a Daleks vs Cybermen story from the 1960s. I know we eventually got one during the Tenth Doctor’s era, but there’s something about the idea of the 1960s versions of these creatures dueling it out that really appeals to me, and I can’t help but feel that I’d be enjoying it more than I currently am this one. I don’t think it’s helping that I know The Tomb of the Cybermen is coming up, and I’ve always thought of it as my favourite Doctor Who story, so this one just feels like a bit of an obstacle in my way!

Hm? Sorry? What do you mean you can feel a tenuous link on the way? I don’t know what you’re talking about.

…Knowing that this story was on the way, with its big old Dalek Emperor, I decided to pick up my (slightly battered) copy of The Dalek Chronicles on my last trip home. It’s a 1994 Doctor Who Magazine special, which reprints all of the Dalek comic strips from TV Century 21, in order from the start. I managed to grab a copy on Ebay years and years ago, but I’ve never actually read it. Always meant to, just don’t think I ever found the time. I’ve been reading it in chunks alongside this story, and I’m somewhat dismayed to find that I’m enjoying it more than The Evil of the Daleks.

I’d imagine that a number of people reading The 50 Year Diary will have at least a vague idea of what these comics are, but for the uninitiated: Tv Century 21 was a comic produced in the 1960s, and for 104 issues they ran a single-page comic titled The Daleks. It told the story of the Dalek’s creation on Skaro – there’s no Davros, but they’re still created by a scientist, and there’s still a great big war – and then follows them as they spread out across the stars. They fight the Mechanoids a bit, too. The final strip in the series ends with the Emperor Dalek declaring that the Daleks will conquer Earth, which leads quite neatly into the second of the Peter Cushing Dalek films, and tellingly, the later strips see the design of the creatures morph to look more like their movie counterparts.

I think it’s probably fair to say that it’s not any great literary feat, and it doesn’t stand up to a great deal of scrutiny, but taken at face value as a weekly adventure strip featuring the Daleks, it’s really rather good. It has the feel of a comic strip from The Eagle (perhaps unsurprisingly, as the first artist on the strip, Richard E Jennings, had contributed to The Eagle for a long time, and Eric Eden who filled in for a few issues in the middle of the run had worked on Dan Dare), full of that wonderful breed of what we tend to call ‘retro futurism’ these days. The design of the Daleks’ city is fantastic, and there’s plenty of little touches to the strip that can’t help to make me smile.

Quite early on in the story, only about five or six issues in, a spacecraft lands on Skaro for the first time, and the Daleks plot to capture it. The thing that I enjoy about it is the way they hide themselves to prepare their attack: the emperor orders the Magnetic Sand to be switched on, and it covers the city in a perfect disguise. It’s the kind of fantastic futuristic thing that you’d expect to find in a children’s ‘space’ comic of the age, as is the invention of things like the ‘Astrodalek’ later on in the story (A Dalek with his eyestalk plugged into the end of an enormous telescope), and the Daleks’ flying Hover Discs, which have become quite iconic withing Doctor Who - there’s even a new Dalek toy set available now that comes with one.

The strip is mostly written by David Whittaker, but it’s far more traditional than some of the things he tries with the Daleks on TV. That doesn’t mean that things are rendered to being dull, though, as it has a kind of simplistic charm to the story. Whittaker even still takes old favourite ideas from Terry Nation and does something new and different with them – there’s a wonderful moment on the planet Alvega with some living plants (haven’t seen any of those in a while!). While it could be reduced to being a rubbish retread of the kind of things we’ve seen in stories from The Keys Of Marinus, to The Chase and The Daleks’ Master Plan, Whittaker depicts the plants as plotting against the Daleks, and there’s a fantastic panel at the end of one strip where the plants have worked their way inside a Dalek’s casing and grown out, bursting out from every seam. It’s a bizarre image, and it looks stunning. Pleasingly, it’s given plenty of room to breathe.

The first three strips, and a few from later in the run (once Ron Turner had taken over art duties for the latter half of the run, a style which, sadly, down’t appeal to me half as much as the earlier one does), have recently been reprinted in the Doctor Who Magazine Dalek spacial, reprinted from the original art which makes them look gorgeous – certainly much better than the versions in my 19-year-old version! Here’s hoping that they’ll see a full reprint in the near future, because the series as a whole is certainly worth a read, if only to see an alternate (and much more 1950s/60s sci fi) version of the Daleks’ early years…

I think I’ll be giving the strip as a whole an 8/10 – wish I could say the same for The Evil of the Daleks!

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 172: The Evil of the Daleks, Episode Three

Dear diary,

Oh dear. I think I've taken the same kind of issue with this story that I did back with The Highlanders - I've decided early on that I'm simply not impressed and now that's all my mind can focus on. Things are even worse here, though, because I'm going in with the pre-defined notion of this being a real classic that can do no wrong…

Whereas actually it's just a bit of a plodding bore that can do no… well… anything, really. Seriously, we're almost 75 minutes into The Evil of the Daleks, and very little has happened. The TARDIS is stolen. The Doctor and Jamie are kidnapped and taken back to 1866. Turns out the Daleks are there, and they want the Doctor to perform experiments on his young friend. Oh, and now there's a Turkish man in a fez and a series of elaborate traps for Jamie to get through so that the Doctor can actually undertake these steps.

Really, though? Really? This story was voted top 18 in the last big fandom poll? (I've yet to see how it's faring in our own large-scale poll of Doctor Who episodes, so I don't know if it's retaining its position, or if it's following its previous form and slipping down the table.)

Oh, all right. It's not all bad. Certainly, it's not reached the point where I'm dreading the throughout of having to go on and start looking for an alternative way of finishing the story (Hello, The Highlanders, again). I think the only thing that's keeping me going at this stage is the promise that things are going to get better. I don't often seem to agree with received fan wisdom, but they can't have been this wrong for so long, surely? The Evil of the Daleks is going to become fantastic any minute now, yeah?

There's one or two little pockets of things peppered throughout the story that are keeping my interest up, and today's thing of interest has to be Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines. Again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I've praised them to the high heavens plenty over the course of Season Four, but they really are something special, aren't they? Today, we get to watch (hear) them having a blazing row, and it's enough to make the ones the earliest Doctor used to have with Barbara look like a minor play fight.

And then, it's all revealed to be a part of the Doctor's plan - a way of tricking his companion into taking part in the experiment, so that they have a chance further down the line. People often single the Seventh Doctor out as the arch manipulator, but this is a perfect example of it being used much earlier on in the programme's run. I've commented before that this incarnation is very good at dropping the right word or the right action at just the right moment to get the results he wants, but it's never used better than this.

Aside from that scene, which comes fairly late on in the episode, I'm afraid that things just aren't grabbing me. I was going to be rating this one a little lower than I have, but that scene alone is so good that it deserves to bring the score up just a little bit…

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 171: The Evil of the Daleks, Episode Two

Dear diary,

I've often thought that if (when) I ever got my hands on a time machine, I'd quite like to visit Victorian England. Couldn't tell you why it's the top of my list, but I've always been fascinated by it. Even at school, the Victorian era was one of my favourites in history lessons. In many ways, I've always thought of Doctor Who being particularly suited to the era, too, and it seems many other's agree with me - several parts of the most recent season have been set there, and it's not been uncommon for the Doctor to visit in the past.

It's odd, then, to think that this episode marks the first time that we've actually seen this era in the series (yes, yes, pedants, the scene on the Marie Celeste during The Chase is technically set in Victorian times, but it was way out at sea, and might as well have been set in any generic past if it wasn't for the joke at the end, so I'm disqualifying it), almost five years in. Oh, and it's done beautifully. It's said a lot, but the BBC design department really do make a stunning job of this period, and this episode is no exception. Maxtible's drawing room has to be the crowning achievement, as it looks simply brilliant, and it's nice to have an episode from the story surviving so that we can really appreciate it.

Speaking of which, it's bloody lovely to see a Dalek again! We've had them in the series quite recently to welcome the new Doctor to the series, and I watched The Destroyers not all that long ago, but thanks to the gaps in the archives (and the lack of production of The Destroyers…) this is the first time I've actually seen a Dalek on screen, moving and everything, since The Daleks' Master Plan, and that feels like a lifetime ago. Technically, it was for the Doctor.

It's nice to see that the Daleks here are the same kind of manipulative ones seen in Power of the Daleks, and the cruel, terrifying version that we had in Master Plan, too. Yesterday's episode ended rather nicely with a Dalek screaming at Kennedy to identify himself (though it wasn't as good a cliffhanger as they had pretty consistently in their last tale), and then the resolution to that ending today? The Dalek exterminates him as soon as we're done with the reprise. Then it disappears, and Waterfield has something of a breakdown as he realises he'll have to dispose of the body. The Daleks really are at their best when their callous, and Whittaker knows exactly how to use them in the right way.

All that said, I'm sorry to say that the story still isn't really capturing me. I've seen this episode before (a long, long, time ago on a bored Sunday-afternoon viewing of the Lost in Time collection), and remembered it being pretty good, but this time around it still feels as if I'm waiting for things to get going. As ever, there's a lot to like, but it just don't seem to be doing very much. Maybe I'm being put off by the fact that people say it's one of the stone-cold 'classics' of Doctor Who, and my expectations are just set a little bit too high?

We do get our first introduction of Victoria in this episode though, as a captive of the Daleks, who seem obsessed with her weight. They're holding her prisoner as leverage with Waterfield, so that he'll help capture the Doctor and force him to conduct some experiments on Jamie. I complained yesterday that the plan to get the Doctor to the antiques shop was a bit round the houses… but now it makes even less sense! Surely it would have been quicker to knock the Doctor and Jamie out at Gatwick, transport them to 1886, tie Jamie up in the lab and force the Doctor to get to work under Dalek guard? Why all the messing about?

Victoria herself comes across as less obviously a companion as Sam Briggs did in the last story (heck, even Mollie seems to be a more likely candidate to step aboard the TARDIS at this point!), but it does have to be said that Debbie Watling does look beautiful in her first scenes. I've not seen much of Victoria's tenure outside of The Tomb of the Cybermen (as Deborah herself says on one of the DVD special features about this era - there's nothing left of there time on the show, really), so I'm hoping she'll blossom once she's out from under the Daleks' watchful eye-stalks.

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 170: The Evil of the Daleks, Episode One

Dear diary,

In the early 1990s, The Evil of the Daleks was voted the best Doctor Who story ever by the readers of DWB. It had dropped a little in estimations by the time Doctor Who Magazine ran a similar poll five years later, coming in at number nine in the list, and in the 2009 Mighty 200 poll, it slipped even further, to number 18. Indeed, in Doctor Who Online’s very own 50th Anniversary Poll, it’s currently sitting at number 25! Despite this decline in opinion, it still has to be said that Evil has something of a reputation amongst Doctor Who fans as being pretty darn good.

It's perhaps surprising, then, that this first episode comes across as being just a bit of filler material. The impression I got from the opening to the episode is that the Doctor and Jamie were supposed to see the TARDIS heading off on the back of a truck (at the end of the last episode, the Doctor had already deduced that it had gone, and now they actively see it), and then Bob Hall is planted in one of the hangars to put the pair off the scent. He's then followed, and is knocked unconscious for it - his being followed is clearly not a part of the plan (Kennedy even plans to beat the Doctor and Jamie over the head to make sure that they don't discover anything). It then transpires that the pair were intended to come here, because there's a pack of matches planted to lead them on to the coffee bar. So why knock out Hall? It leads to his fleeing the city, and is surely a waste of a valuable ally?

Once the Doctor and Jamie have made it to the coffee shop (where contemporary music helps to set the scene, though it's a shame to know that the Beatles' Paperback Writer had to be removed from the soundtrack), they're met by Perry. Perry has been sent by Waterfield (who also sent kennedy to plant the matches and, I'm guessing, Hall to start the whole thing rolling) to ask the Doctor to come to the antiques shop at 10pm. Why the overly-complex plan? Surely seeing the TARDIS being carted away - and then being asked by Hall at Gatwick to head to the antiques shop if they want to see the police box again - would be enough to get them there?

The whole thing is an exercise in delaying the pair until the story is ready for them. I don't know if the story was intended to be a six-parter which was then extended out to seven (in the same way as The Mind Robber being given an extra episode late in the day) or if it was just needed to get things set up ready for the main tale, but either way, it's odd.

That's not to say that it's a bad thing, mind. There's plenty to like about this episode, not least the fact that we get to spend some more time in the company of Troughton and Hines again. I'd not realised that such a large part of the story kept them in the 1960s (I'd always assumed that they stumbled into the Victorian era pretty quickly once the story got started), but it's odd just how well they really do fit in here. Whereas in The War Machines, at the end of last season, the sight of William Hartnell climbing out of a cab was unusual, it doesn't feel at all out of place to see (or, at least, hear) Troughton doing so. Considering how much time Ian and Barbara spent wishing the TARDIS would land in the 1960s, it turns up there an awful lot these days (I make it The Massacre of St Bartholemew's Eve, The War Machines, now here, and there's a couple more trips to this period in the next couple of seasons).

Not only that, but the ship keeps returning to the city on the same day! In the fantastic History of the Universe in 100 Objects book from last year, there's a line describing the 20th of July 1966 as being the day that WOTAN launched his War Machines, the Chameleons returned hundreds of missing people to Gatwick airport, and the Daleks were at large in their time-travelling antiques shop. Surely that sentence really sums up just why this era of the show is so fantastic?

Despite all the running around, and knowing vaguely what's going on, which runs the risk of lessening the tension (It's a shame, for example, to know that the Daleks are going to be a part of the story - of course they're in the title - because it takes away some of the tension of Waterfield arguing with his 'unseen masters'), there is enough here to hook me in to the tale. I don't know, for example, what the Daleks need from the man. Or why they've stolen the TARDIS (the Daleks have time travel, so it can't be that… are they just trying to capture the Doctor's attention?), or what the time-travelling antiques shop has to do with anything, and I'm keen to move on and find out, so I guess that's the story doing something right!

But to come in the top 25 Doctor Who stories ever…? I think it's got a way to go, yet…

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 169: The Faceless Ones, Episode Six

Dear diary,

The bad news: although Ben and Polly do actually turn up to say goodbye to the Doctor, it comes as a scene at the very end of the episode, following five-and-three-quarter episodes in which they're barely mentioned. With Dodo, it almost feels less of a shame, because she's only been there for a few stories, but with these two… Ben and Polly have been a part of the programme for around a year, they've been present at the very first regeneration, they've encountered Daleks and Cybermen and all manner of monsters in-between… and then they just sort of vanish. A real, real shame. Much as I love the Lloyd era of Doctor Who, and as much as I'm willing to sing its praises from the highest of the rooftops, this feels like a massive mis-step.

The good news: when they do show their faces to say goodbye, it's absolutely fantastic. It's the programme judging a departure absolutely right - had this come at the end of a story that really showcased the pair (as many of their adventures have) then it could be put down as one of the best ever leaving scenes. It's filled with emotion, as Polly tearfully makes her goodbyes, and Ben is ecstatic at the thought of being back in his own time - and even on the same day (what are the chances?). The whole thing feels very real, so it's a shame it's undermined by the seeming lack of care for the duo in the rest of this story.

It's the Doctor, I think, who really sells the moment to me though. I commented the other day that this incarnation seems to give an air of always being one step ahead of the game, and you get the impression that he's known since the moment they arrived at Gatwick that this may be a parting of the ways for his little group. Maybe that's why he's been so keen to accept others under his wing throughout the story - to get used to the idea of not having Ben and Polly around? For the Second Doctor, they really are a part of life. 'The thing is,' Polly tells the Doctor, 'this is our world…', and he sadly agrees with her: 'Yes, you're right. You're lucky. I never got back to mine…'. It's another lovely little hint at the Doctor's past, and it fits beautifully into the scene here.

He goes on to tell Ben that he can re-join his ship and become an Admiral, and that Polly can look after him. Thing is, in my mind, that's just not what happens. It's too nice, too neat. Real life just doesn't work like that. I've always had a future in mind for Ben and Polly, and making my way through their stories just cements it in my mind: of course the pair plan to be together, and I imagine that they agree to a date in the Inferno club (where else?) for a few days time. Polly never shows, though, instead sending a note to say that she can't - her family will never approve.

The don't see much of each other for the next twenty years, as they go about their separate lives, and eventually each of them settles down and marries someone else. I'd like to think that they do meet up on the night that Mondas approaches Earth in 1986 (there's a short story about it in one of the short Trips books), but they never end up together in my head. They always regret it, though. Bittersweet, perhaps, but that's always the way I've imagined life after the Doctor for this pair. It's a far cry from orphanages in India…

I wonder if I'd feel more forgiving towards the absence of these two from most of the story is Sam had opted to stay on with the Doctor and Jamie at the end? The offer is there, but she turns it down. She even asks Jamie if he might stay a little longer with her, but he's too close to the Doctor to abandon him, now. Much as I think the accent might get on my nerves in the long run, I'd enjoy Sam sticking with the pair for a little longer - the TARDIS has been stolen, after all, so they're going to be in the area for a while at least…

The story itself is perfectly good in this final episode, too, managing to be both epic in scale (this is probably the only time you're going to see me describe a car park at Gatwick as being 'epic in scale', but it is for Doctor Who at this point!), and intimate too as the Doctor makes his negotiations with the Chameleons. If anything, though, I think the thing I'm going to miss most is the narration using the phrase 'Raw-State Chameleon' every few minutes…

On the whole, I have enjoyed The Faceless Ones, but my interest in the story (and the way things hang together) has been on a bit of a downward trend across the six episodes. The latter half certainly wasn't as strong as the start of the tale - and it felt in places as though concepts and characters were simply abandoned when the writers got bored with them. Even Sam, who was such an obvious companion for a while, ends up being somewhat relegated in the last two episodes. A four-part version would, I think, have been fantastic. And now, we're onto a seven-parter! The first since Marco Polo, and the longest story (I'm discounting Daleks' Master Plan because, as I argued lots at the time, it's really lots of little stories) we've had since then, too. But it's the Daleks, who I've grown to love, so it's all to play for…

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 168: The Faceless Ones, Episode Five

Dear diary,

I think that since The Faceless Ones lost its firm grip on my attention and interest in yesterday’s episode, it’s fighting an up-hill battle to keep me invested in events. The biggest problem, I think, is that we’ve now not seen Ben or Polly for three whole episodes (and technically, we’ve not actually seen Polly since Episode One), and they leave in the next one! Dodo’s abrupt departure half-way through The War Machines is often hailed as one of the worst ways for a Doctor Who companion to leave the series, but at least her part in the story s over, and she was sent off for a break in the country! Ben and Polly were both kidnapped… and that’s sort of it!

I have a feeling that the odd way their final adventure is being handled is rather turning me off from the story. Every time the Doctor gets into a scrape with one of his stand in companions (we’ve now got Sam, Jean, and the real nurse Pinto fulfilling the role to varying capacities), I’m left wondering about where Ben and Polly are. I’m not sure they even get their token name-check in today’s episode, but grouped in with the now-captured Jamie as being one of the Doctor’s missing friends.

It’s a shame that I’m having my opinion of the story so coloured by this, because there’s still an awful lot to love here. You can take it as read that Troughton is on fine form (I really enjoyed his first scene pretending to be one of the Chameleons, and using the opportunity to gather more information about them), and he’s just as brilliant when he’s interrogating Meadows, too. It’s also becoming just as common for Jamie to be fab, too, and that’s true of this episode. His investigation of the satellite is great – he’s really becoming a proper Doctor Who companion now.

It also means that he gets to take in some of the great dialogue which is still (for the mots part) on offer in this story. ‘You seem to know a lot about it, Inspector,’ Jamie muses as he’s told the truth of what’s happening to the Chameleon Tours flights, and learns of the intelligence of the Chameleon’s leader, the Director. ‘Of course I do, Jamie,’ comes the reply, ‘I am the Director…’. It’s a ‘twist’ that anyone can see coming, but Jamie’s innocence means that we can completely buy his surprise at the situation.

Perhaps my favourite line in the episode – possibly, in the whole story – is the description given of the Doctor: ‘He is not of this Earth or this century. He has traveled through time and space. His knowledge is even greater than ours…’. It’s a great description (and very much in the vein of the speeches we’ll hear more of in the 21st century incarnation of the programme), and it’s a brilliant reminder that we still don’t really know all that much about him at this stage in the show’s life.

Much as I've loved the Gatwick airport setting to the story so far, I'm hoping that the shift through the clouds to the Chameleon's sattelite may help to give the final episode a boost before the story bows out. My biggest hope, though? I'm hoping Ben and Polly actually turn up again to say goodbye to the Doctor! If they end up going the way of Dodo, with Sam telling the Doctor that they send their goodbyes, I may scream!

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 167: The Faceless Ones, Episode Four

Dear diary,

It's a shame, considering the amount of praise I had for the way this story was treating Jamie as a companion from history in the first two episodes, that there's several moments in today's entry that left me thinking more about how out of place something felt than simply enjoying the story. Indeed, on one occasion, I spent so long wondering about where Jamie got his passport from that I actively zoned out from the audio for a few minutes, and had to skip back. It's pleasing that we get an explanation for this later on in the episode (indeed, there's a scene which seems to exist in part simply to explain away how the Highlander has made it this far into his journey).

Still, though, it felt really out of place when Frazer Hines' narration talks of Jamie noticing Sam's airline ticket sticking out of her top pocket, then sneaks it away from her. I could argue that he's spent so much time watching the Chameleon Tours checking-in desk that he's figured out you need a ticket to travel, but it still felt out of place at the time. And then he's managed to make his way through the airport (a few episodes back, it was being painted as a vast alien landscape in his eyes), on to a plane, and then he knows where to run when he's feeling the need to be air sick. It all just felt a bit too jarring for the character, and I think I'd have been able to buy it better had Ben been the one filling this role.

Ben, and Polly, though, are still absent from the story! It's strange, considering that it's their final outing in the TARDIS, that we've not had two episodes in a row to feature neither of them. I'm assuming that they'll be back tomorrow to round off the story, but it's an odd decision all the same. Still, I think the saddest thing is that I'm not especially missing them. I don't mean that to sound negative - I'm sure anyone who's been following The 50 Year Diary over the last six weeks or so will have noticed how much I love the pair, but Sam and Jamie are fulfilling the companion roles more than amply, so there's no time to mourn our swinging sixties teens.

You may be able to detect that I'm slightly more puke-warm towards this episode of The Faceless Ones that I have been to any of the others so far. I think, unfortunately, that we're suffering a bit from the return of the six parter. There's lots to love in this one, and my notes are full with notes on great dialogue, as is usual for Season Four ('Ah, you're still thinking in Earth terms…' / 'And I intend to keep on doing so!'), but I think things may just be dragging a little in the middle. We get a great revelation here that the Commandant's secretary (?) has been phoning all the airports that Chameleon Tours fly to (and there's a great line slipped in about how much that will have cost - it's a little thing but it helps to make it all the more real), and she reports that the flights never arrive. Other airports have their passengers collected, taken away… and that's it.

It would be a great moment for the story, with some proof to the Commandant that there really is something shady being done right under his nose, in the heart of his beloved airport, but it comes after we've seen a plane full of holidaymakers suddenly vanish without a trace. Had we watched this scene yesterday, just before we witness the plane empty in a matter of seconds, it may have had more of an impact. As it is, the whole thing falls a bit flat.

I'm not even sure that the survival of the episode would have helped greatly. The main set-piece here is the transformation of the aeroplane into a spaceship, which is described on the soundtrack as 'hovering above the clouds, the huge wings fold in…'. Looking at the tele-snaps (there's two for this moment), I can't tell if it would have looked quite good or a bit ropey. Sadly, I have a feeling it might have been the latter - it almost looks a bit animated in the pictures. Still, in my mind, it looked awesome as the wings folded in, so perhaps it's a good thing we can't watch it?

Oh, and one last thing - if I can keep track of the 'arc' involving the First Doctor's relationship with history, then I can keep track of the Second Doctor's 'arc' towards developing a Sonic Screwdriver. We've had scenes in The Power of the Daleks, in which he (tries) to open a lock by finding the right frequency on his recorder (and that's a point, we've not seen it in a while. I knew they phased it out, but I expected to notice!), and now we've got him using a regular screwdriver to open the lock on a cupboard. Another season from now, he'll put two-and-two together…

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 166: The Faceless Ones, Episode Three

Dear Diary,

There’s an episode of Adam Adamant Lives! (sadly, the only one from the first series that’s missing from the archives), in which a train mysteriously vanishes, only to later re-appear pulling into Waterloo station… full of skeletons! It’s a scene that a number of people believe to be from Doctor Who (Indeed, I used to work with a chap who swore blind that it was a Jon Pertwee story), possibly because it’s such a bizarre image.

I’ve said it a couple of times since Innes Lloyd took over the producer’s chair – quite often in stories written by Ian Stuart Black – but much of the stuff in this episode really could have come from an episode of Adam Adamant Lives!, The Avengers, or whatever. There’s no aliens on display (even if they are present), and much of the story hinges around the Doctor finally managing to convince the powers-that-be there’s genuinely something wrong at Gatwick airport.

The final shot, in which we see a plane filled with excited young tourists suddenly left empty is fantastic – and very reminiscent of the kind of striking image that you’d find in action/adventure serials of this period. The only real Doctor Who twist is that we’ve been told these planes are going up higher than expected – right the way into space. As I’ve said before: this may not really be Doctor Who, but I love it.

One of the things that works the best is the Doctor himself being placed into the format of a 1960s adventure serial. All I seem to do lately is sing the praises of Patrick Troughton, but once again he proves why he simply is the Doctor as he tries to convince the Commandant and the Inspector that there’s more going on here than they may care to believe. He demonstrates a kind of cooling gun on a man he suspects to be an alien duplicate, before going on to muse to the man that he’s sure he’s seen him before – he must have a double!

I spoke a lot in the First Doctor’s era about Hartnell’s transformation from crotchety old man to the person we think of as being the Doctor, and I think that The Faceless Ones might be the best example of Troughton becoming the person we think of as being the Second Doctor. All through his stories so far, he’s perfectly played the quiet Doctor, coming across as being innocent and child like (and it’s not all an act, I don’t think), while really standing back and keeping an eye on events. It’s obvious in The Underwater Menace, as he stops the spear from hitting a girl, and stirs up a conversation with Zaroff to try and uncover the professor’s true intentions. It’s even more present here, as he joyfully revels in being one step ahead of the aliens for the most part. The Doctor’s really enjoying this.

Watching television last night, an advert came on for the DVD release of a film starring Pauline Collins. and I pointed her out to Ellie as ‘the companion in the story I’m currently watching’. And that’s accurate! If we can count Kylie Minogue, and David Morrisey as companions in the 2009 specials, then we surely have to count Sam (she’s from Liverpool, you know) as being one, too.

It’s strange, coming after an episode in which I’ve been praising just how well the Second Doctor interacts with Ben and Jamie (and usually Polly, when she’s not been kidnapped), that our two most experienced companions are totally dispensed with in this episode, and replaced with a new girl. With the benefit of 40-something year’s hindsight, I know Pauline Collins isn’t going to be stepping aboard the TARDIS in a few day’s time, but it’s clearly the way the character is being written here.

She’s introduced as an intelligent, plucky young girl, she’s got a character quirk (did I mention that she’s from Liverpool? It was brought up three times in as many minutes in yesterday’s episode, so I thought I’d better say something about it), the Doctor groups her in with Jamie at one point when speaking, and there’s no mention of any family outside of her brother, who’s disappeared (that’s why she’s down from Liverpool). It’s interesting, at least to me, to have a potential companion being introduced with such a thick accent, less than 18 months after Dodo’s was shifted around the country before being phased out.

If anything, at this stage, the accent makes it even more obvious that Sam is to be our new time traveller, as having some kind of ‘quirk’ is a bit of a pre-requisite for a companion at this stage. Since taking over, Lloyd and Davis has introduced Ben (the ‘East-ender’), Polly (the ‘posh girl’) and Jamie (the ‘Scottish lad from the past’). In the next story we’ll be adding Victoria to our list (the ‘Victorian girl’). Still obvious as it may seem, I’m ever so glad we won’t be getting Sam full-time – that voice could grate after a while…

a 

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 165: The Faceless Ones, Episode Two

Dear diary,

I think this might be the first time that it's really clear just why the Doctor and Jamie travel together for such a long time. They're so brilliant together! Even while they're on the run from the authorities, trying to solve a murder, and having to work out what's happened to their friend, they really seem to be enjoying the adventure. At times, 1960s Doctor Who can feel like simply heading from one terrifying ordeal to the next (just a few weeks ago, Ben and Polly had to endure fighting the Cybermen one day before heading right off to do battle with the Daleks - no time for a rest in between!), so it's lovely to see a Doctor and companion having a great time together.

It also gives us the opportunity to see them really sparking off each other, and the friendship between Troughton and Hines shows through wonderfully, too. There's plenty of fun moments here - hiding behind the newspapers is great, and Hines' narration on the soundtrack, when he explains that not only is Jamie's paper foreign, but also upside down, had me laugh out loud. Even Ben manages to get in on the fun, while the trio hold a private meeting in a photo booth. Thankfully, there's a tele snap of them pulling funny faces at the camera when they get caught huddled in the machine.

We're seeing Jamie being used to good effect as a historical character, too. It's often said (more by fans than anyone, but still) that a companion drawn from history wouldn't work in the show today, as you can't latch onto them in the same way you can a character from the present day. Here, though, it works brilliantly. We've already had Jamie's fear of the 'flying metal beasties' in yesterday's episode, and here we get a full minute of ambient airport noise, as Jamie looks around the huge concourse, trying to make sense of it all. It's perfectly simple to latch onto: if you've ever been a child, lost in a busy supermarket, confused by all the hustle and bustle around you, then you're able to sympathise with Jamie here. It takes the world of Gatwick airport (as I mused yesterday, it was already a place not many of the viewers would have been in 1967), and makes it just as alien as Vulcan, or Atlantis.

I worried, when Polly 'changed', that it may lack a bit of impact. The Macra Terror used the idea of a companion being taken over to the wrong side so well, and I feared that this would fall flat coming so soon after that one. Thankfully, though, it's been fantastic, and it's different enough in tone to the last story that it doesn't feel as rehashed as I thought it might. The crowning moment has to be when Ben opens the packing crate and finds the real Polly shut inside it, unresponsive. Yesterday, I mentioned that the Doctor and Jamie finding nothing but paper cups in the crate was a good moment, but here it gets turned on its head and used as a terrifying image. We don't often see the companions in a state like this…

There's plenty of other things in my notes for today that I could pick up on, but I think I'll stick with just one for now. The Doctor making his escape from the Commandant's office is a scene that you'd never see on Doctor Who these days, as our hero stands in the middle of an airport, holding a suspicious item, and declares 'one step nearer, and I'll blow you all to smithereens!'

a 0

Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 164: The Faceless Ones, Episode One

Dear diary,

This may feel like an odd place to bring it up, but I've been dreading the Pertwee era. Even though he was my first Doctor (well, my first BBC, Doctor. Peter Cushing was the first Doctor I ever actually watched), I've always considered him my least favourite, and his era isn't one that I recall enjoying all that much. There's several reasons why, which we'll get to later in the year.

The reason I mention it here is that one of the things I've always thought I didn't like about that early 1970s period of the programme was that it was set on contemporary Earth. I seem to recall that I was just never all that keen on the idea. It's a good thing, perhaps, that at the moment, these contemporary Earth stories are doing very well with me. The War Machines was my highest-rated First Doctor story, and The Faceless Ones is off to a good start in this episode.

It might help that, as I've said before, I really do love the look and the feel of the 1960s. Seeing things from this era thrown up onto screen is great fun for me, and that's probably affecting how much I'm enjoying things. Add to that the fact that this is still a very new kind of story for Doctor Who to tell, and I think you're onto a winner. Hopefully, the magic will hold out long enough for me to reappraise the Third Doctor's time on the planet when it comes…

As I watched this episode, I was met with the nagging sense that I'd seen it before at some point. I'm wondering if I might have watched it on the Lost in Time DVD in the past, possibly following on from my first viewing of The Moonbase. Certainly, I'd seen the arrival of the TARDIS on the runway before now (though I don't think I'd appreciated before just how vast in scale it is!), and I'm sure I've watched the Doctor and Jamie battling with the officials about their passports. Equally, when the Commandant asked to see inside the packing crate at the Chameleon Tours hangar, I vaguely knew that there'd be plastic cups in there.

This has turned into another case of appreciating things far more when they're being seen in order, though. As I've said above, the scale to this episode really is vast, from the opening shots of aeroplanes coming in to land, to the high shot of the TARDIS materialising and the policeman chasing our regulars, there's a sense of scale to things here that we've not had an awful lot of in the programme. Plus, it's all filmed at Gatwick airport! In 1967, this isn't a place that many viewers will have been to, and that probably added to all the magic just that little bit.

We're given plenty of opportunity to look at it, as well. They're really getting their money's worth out of the location. The first three minutes of the episode are (mostly) the Doctor and his friends being chased to some high-tempo music and acoustic airport noise. All this brevity is then cut through when Polly witnesses a murder, and the Doctor's got a mystery to solve.

It doesn't stop the fast tempo of the episode, though, or the amount of humour that's involved. Jamie's initial description of an aeroplane as being a 'flying beastie' is brilliant, and even more so when Polly tells them what she's just seen, and Jamie wonders if one of the 'beasties' could be the murderer. We also get plenty of comedy (at least to start with) from the Commandant, as he tries to clear the obstruction to the runway ('What was it? It was a police box!?!'). It's a scene that I can perfectly imagine Nick Courtney playing as the Brigadier, which is perhaps another good sign for that era?

It's great fun watching the Doctor and Jamie argue about their passports while trying to convince people that there really has been a murder, and then the pair continue to delight as they head off to the hangar once more to search for the body. Troughton looks just right in a Sherlock Homes role, as he studies the surroundings with his magnifying glass.

As I watched the episode, Ellie was sat next to me (though not paying attention - she was getting on with some work on her laptop). The thing that did rouse her interest was the first shot of the burnt arm as it appears from behind a doorway. It has to be said that it's pretty effective, and works just as well when it's repeated later on, peeking out from under a cloak as the creature is led away to the airport's sick bay.

The shot of the two men carrying the creature up the escalators is nice (again showing the scale of the room, though perhaps more through unusual framing than anything else…), though it would have been nice to see a different angle on the scene. I'd more or less worked out that the cliffhanger would be that we'd see the face of the creature up-close, so it was a pleasant surprise to find that I was wrong. The hood of the cloak comes down, we see the back of the creature's head - just as burnt and painful looking as the arm… and then the credits kick in! We're left to wonder just what it might be. Brilliant stuff.

8/10