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

Day 500: The Invasion of Time, Episode Six

Dear diary,

At the press launch for Doctor Who Series Seven last year, Steven Moffat said of this episode:

”I thought that day, ‘Some day! Somehow, I will do what I can to get into television and do that properly!’”

It’s not hard to see where he’s coming from, really. One of the things most people know about The Invasion of Time is that it features a sequence of Sontarans chasing the Doctor and his friends deep into the corridors of the TARDIS. Sadly, industrial action meant that it needed to be filmed out on location and… well… it doesn’t really work, does it? I think we’re back to that same argument I made about Gallifrey during 8The Deadly Assassin* - I want to see something grand! To some extent, I think I could forgive this sequence if it were filmed in a castle, or some swanky modern art gallery, but having it filmed in an abandoned hospital just robs it of… hm.

I think Emma summed it up nicely when she asked if this was supposed to be the inside of the TARDIS or if they’d landed somewhere and she’d missed it. Pressed for comment on the design, she was reluctant to give one. In theory, I love the idea of the TARDIS having a number of rooms which all look the same, and it’s quite a fun gag (the first time), but I just feel let down by the whole thing. We used to get brief glimpses into the rest of the Doctor’s ship right back in the early days - visions of strange uncomfortable beds and food machines - but this is the first time we’ve ever been this far beyond that regular console room, and it’s just an abandoned building! And not even a particularly interesting one!

The fact that so much of this episode is reduced to the chase (and I use even that term loosely - it’s more of a pacy stroll) simply leaves me uninterested by much of the proceedings. Things slightly liven up when one of the Doctor pursuers is trapped by a man-size plant… but then he’s released from the threat a few minutes later seemingly without any harm. It never feels like there’s all that much of a threat to either the Doctor or the Sontarans, and the weapon which saves the day - the De-Mat gun - is build mostly-off screen, and then rendered useless after a shot has been fired.

But, oh, let’s be honest, it’s not really the Sontranas or the TARDIS or the Great key that I’m supposed to focus on today, it’s the departure of my favourite Savage. I’ve really loved having Leela - and Louise Jameson - in the series over the last few stories, and I’m genuinely going to miss her. She’s been note-perfect since the moment she arrived in the story, right up to this final goodbye with her friend. Emma claims to have seen it coming a mile off - picking up on the subtext between the pair - which is more than I can claim to have done. Certainly, both Lousie and Christopher Tranchell (as Andred) have been slipping in little moments between the characters, but Em has been more adept at spotting them than I have.

It’s going to be a shame to carry on now, without Leela aboard the TARDIS, but it’s Doctor Who shifting into a new form once again, and there’s very few things as exciting as that…

And while I’m here… I try to avoid getting too sentimental or nostalgic in The 50 Year Diary, but… well… it’s Day 500! Five-Hundred! Five-zero-zero! I’m genuinely, completely, flabbergasted that I’ve made it this far. I’ve said it before, but I genuinely did think that I’d have grown bored of the whole experiment - be it the pace, or the stories, or… well… anything, really, by about the time The Sensorites came along. And now here we are! Almost eighteen months on from the start, and an episode of Doctor Who every day richer. How brilliant.

I’m closer to the end than I am to the start, now, but I’m still really loving it all. Doctor Who really is the most wonderful, barmy, bizarre programme in the world, and I’ve loved watching it evolve and change as I’ve made my way through. And here we are, about to embark on a whole new adventure again, with a new companion, and a new quest as Doctor Who enters its first ever conscious season-spanning arc. Frankly, I can’t wait to see what the next few hundred days hold in store for me!

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

Day 499: The Invasion of Time, Episode Five

Dear diary,

Something strange happened during today’s episode. About halfway through, I turned to Emma and said aloud ‘I’d forgotten how much I really love the Sontarans’. It’s only strange because, looking back at what I’ve said on their previous two appearances in the programme, I’m not sure that’s actually all that true. I was full of praise for Kevin Lindsay’s Lynx during Episode One of The Time Warrior, but after that I was far more preoccupied with enjoying the lovely setting, meeting Sarah Jane, and realising that Jon Pertwee wasn’t all that bad. By the time The Sontaran Experiment rolled around, I barely mentioned the titular creature at all! I think what I really meant, in realising how much I loved the Sontarans, is realising how much I love a good comedy Sontaran.

I see a lot of complaints around the internet (and a lot of love, too, it has to be said) for the character of Strax - the Sontaran-turned-nurse-turned-butler who crops up in several of the Eleventh Doctor’s adventures. People seem to think that having a funny Sontaran character around really ruins the effect of the creatures as a whole (it doesn’t - if played right then it can serve to make a very nice contrast when some more vicious, cold-heated clones arrive to do battle. Oh, what I’d give to see a Sontaran story set in Victorian London, with Strax sneaking among the other Sontarans to sabotage their plan - they’d never notice: they all look the same!), but I think that ‘comedy’ in the Sontrans has always been a part of it.

That’s never more true than here in The Invasion of Time, though I suspect that they’re not really supposed to be funny here. There’s just something about the way that they move through the corridors of the Citadel that really makes me smile (and, of course, we get to see more of their graceful movement tomorrow, when one tries to jump over a sun lounger), and the - let’s be honest - ridiculous attempt at doing the voice just helps to add to the humour. But it’s not all unintentional. We’re told that these Sontarans are a part of the ‘Sontraran Special Space Service’ (in my head, it’s the Seventh Section of said service), and the Doctor comments that it’s a bit of a mouthful. Even the way that the cowing Castellan Kelner acts around his latest set of masters is inherently amusing.

Yet none of this takes away from their impact, really, because you can’t underestimate the effect of having four Sontarans on screen at the same time. It seems strange to think of it now, but this is the first time we’ve had more than one on screen (yes, yes, I know that technically there were two in The Sontaran Experiment, but since one was on a screen and there was only one of the present…), and it’s the most that we’ll see in one place for the entirety of the ‘classic’ era. Even though the helmets don’t look quite as good as they did the last time we saw them, there;s no denying that it does look rather imposing to have so many of them around. And then we get to watch one of them smash up the controls of Gallifrey’s defences on location! This is the kind of thing that I was longing for during The Sun Makers - it’s a very real looking set of equipment, so it looks all the more effective when we see someone attack them!

A few years ago, I was responsible for writing segments of the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space Role Playing Game. One of my jobs was to write background text for various aliens and creatures, to help add some colour to the various statistics needed to play the game. I was assigned various monsters - the Sontarans among them. We had to stick fairly closely to the televised material when creating our write ups, but we were allowed to embellish and add little things as we went along, subject to approval from those in charge! My comment about the ‘Great Sontaran Art’ renaissance was removed, but I did get to explain away the very tall Sontarans from The Two Doctors by claiming that all members of the Scientific core were unusually tall, and I got to retroactively make The Invasion of Time into a part of the Time War:

”The Sontaran War Council was furious at being denied entry to the Time War, which had started between the Time Lords and the Daleks. Locked out of the war, it became invisible to the Sontaran Race, who were considered no more than brutes. The War Council set about devising their own plan: if they could not join the already waging Time War, then they would start one of their own…”

I used the opportunity to make the whole Kartz-Reimer plot of The Two Doctors a precursor to this story, and went on to say that following their defeat at the hands of two incarnations of the Doctor, they decided to try something particularly daring, and invade Gallifrey…

”Using a ‘lesser’ race, and the Doctor himself, they forced their way onto Gallifrey, planning to steal the secrets of the Eye of Harmony – the heart of the Time Lord civilisation and the core of their power. The Sontarans planned to destroy the Eye and bring chaos to the Universe by unleashing the raw power of the Vortex upon it. The Doctor ultimately defeated them with the use of a de-mat gun, which wiped the Sontarans on Gallifrey out of time itself.

The Time Lords closely monitored any time travel technology that did make it into the war with the Rutans, and events were locked as they happened, to prevent the Sontaran race from altering history and causing havoc with the Universe.”

Now, clearly, the Sontrans in this story make no mention of the Eye of Harmony, but hey, who can blame me for wanting to devise a Sontaran battle strategy! It’s telling, also, that they come to Gallifrey looking for the Doctor. They’re not like Cybermen or Daleks, pretending to be emotionless killing machines. They’re the kind of creatures who would want to find the man responsible for their previous defeat, and make him pay for it! It’s making little connections between stories like this that I really enjoy about the universe of Doctor Who, and it means that I’m enjoying the events of this episode on a slightly different level to some of the others… 

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

Day 498: The Invasion of Time, Episode Four

Dear diary,

I’ve been so looking forward to this one. Oh, I can’t begin to tell you. I’ve been excited - partly - for Emma’s reaction to the Sontarans turning up in the closing moments, and also for The Doctor’s reaction to their arrival. Heck, if I’m honest, I’ve just been excited by the prospect of them arriving on the scene. If there’s one thing that people know about The Invasion of Time, it’s that the story takes a sudden twist in the closing moments of Episode Four, as Sontarans invade Gallifrey! Now, I knew the shot of them on the stairs, overlooking the great hall, I knew there was the moment of the leader raising his… stick, I guess? I knew that it was the first time you see more than one solitary potato making up the invasion force…

But I didn’t know they were revealed in a shot of the Doctor… looking to his left. How rubbish is that? In my head, there was much frivolity over the defeat of the Vardans, the Doctor and Leela ready to depart in the TARDIS as is usual for the end of a story, before BANG! An entire wall is blown apart and four Sontaran troopers come marching out of the smoke, standing proud atop the steps, as they declare Gallifrey to be under their control. In fact, in my head, that’s still how they invade. So there.

When the moment came, I turned to Emma’s reaction. ‘Where did they come from?’ she mused, but there wasn’t a huge glimmer of interest in there. I think she’d been somewhat let down by the story when the shimmering Vardans suddenly reveal themselves to be… some rather bland humanoids in dull uniforms. After that, her attention had certainly started to wane. I think when our favourite potato heads turned up, it simply felt like the reveal we should have had fifteen minutes earlier. Here’s hoping that the warrior race are used well in the next couple of episodes to make up for it.

One of the nice things about being back at ‘home’ while watching this story is that my **Doctor Who Magazine* collection is all to hand. Issue 290 is a ‘Fourth Doctor Special’, in which a number of key Doctor Who writers (including Lance Parkin, Alan Barnes, and Steven Moffat) give their own analysis of various Tom Baker seasons. Reading through them in the last few days has been really interesting (though I’m saving the entries on Seasons Sixteen, Seventeen, and Eighteen until I reach them myself), and I’m especially struck by the article on Season Fifteen, written by Gareth Roberts.

He describes The Invasion of Time as “probably the best story of the season”, and goes on to make some rather nice points about the story, which I hadn’t really considered before:

” [*The Invasion of Time *is] the only story I can think of where the Doctor is motivated, alongside his altruism, by a deep-seated personal desire - not to take a holiday on the peaceful planet Whatnot, but to get revenge. To engineer the biggest schadenfreude he ever could get. To go back to school more or less, pretend to sell out to the Vardans, and then save all his peers and his elders and say; “clever old me planned it all along…” The appearance of the Sontarans at the end of Part Four is not only shocking and thrilling, it’s also a restatement of the series’ most basic theme - people who plan ahead (your Daleks, your Master) always come unstuck.”

It’s in reading this description that I realised - this would be a really nice regeneration story. I’ve always been a fan of the idea that when the Doctor goes too far, that’s when the time is right for him to be reborn as a new man. It’s a theme played with during the Tenth Doctor’s demise, and would work rather well here, too. The Doctor has been very clever in this story. He’s stage-managed the whole thing up to this point, and then, suddenly, he’s taken by surprise. He’s not got every last detail planned out to a tee. He’s not considered that opening a hole in Gallifrey’s defences would allow someone to come through and invade. It’s that kind of instance which then marks the right time for him to go.

Here, at the end of Baker’s fourth season, I’m still really enjoying him in the role. Right now, it still feels like a reasonable amount of time for him to stay in the role. I don’t know how I’m going to be feeling in another three seasons time, but it has to be said - this could have been a great way for him to go.

Roberts also goes on to discuss the idea that this story serves to examine the Doctor’s relationships with his current companions, especially highlighting the idea that Leela is the only one who believes in the Doctor’s ‘essential goodness’, even after the Doctor has been so brutal to her, cast her into the wilds outside the Citadel, and apparently gone over to the wrong side. It’s this which succeeds more than anything else in the story for me - I love the way that Leela refuses to give up on her friend, and it makes for some of the most powerful drama on display. Once again, and fittingly for her last story, it’s Louise Jameson who really sells this to me, and it’s another one of those instances where I tell you just how good her performances in this programme have been. The closer we get to the end of her time, the more saddened I am to be losing such a true talent from the series. 

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

Day 496: The Invasion of Time, Episode Two

Dear diary,

I’ve been musing again today about the style of Gallifrey. When we last visited the planet, in The Deadly Assassin, I went on at some length about the way that I personally imagined the planet to look, before concluding that while I liked the design we get on screen, it really was just any old planet, as opposed to being the majestic home world of the Time Lords. Today, I put the question to Emma - what did she make of the fabled Shining World of the Seven Systems?

I think her opinion could be neatly divined from her description of it looking like a child’s bedroom. There’s lots of bright colours about on Gallifrey this time which weren’t there during the presidential assassination. They’ve added plastic chairs in various colours, and they carry their ancient relics around atop inflatable plastic cushions in a bright red hue. Emma seemed to feel the same way that I had - it just wasn’t what she’d expected to see from Gallifrey. Personally, I don’t think I’m all that fond of these new additions to the Citadel, either. They’ve gone for ‘futuristic’ designs in the furniture, but that just means that it’s dated all the more. I won’t say that it makes it look incredibly 1970s (indeed, I’d say in places it looks to be more 1990s than anything), but it certainly doesn’t leave you with the impression that I think they were aiming for!

It’s all the colours which caused me a problem with this story… during The Name of the Doctor. There’s a sequence from this episode (the Doctor walking down a corridor) which was used to represent the Great Intelligence, and later Clara, making their way through the Doctor’s time stream. Because of the big, green, wall in the background, I always think it looks like they’ve forgotten to green-screen the background in behind our digitally-added characters! It’s something that I simply cannot un-see now, and it does somewhat turn my opinion even more against the design!

Elsewhere, the Doctor is still acting incredibly out of character - ordering the removal of Leela from the Citadel, to be thrown out into the wilds. I’m guessing that it’s to protect her from the invasion he’s allowed to happen, but I’m not entirely sure yet. Part of the beauty here is that I can’t tell if the Doctor is faking all of this for some greater reason, or if he’s genuinely been possessed by something. He’s been taken over so often in the last couple of years, that I wouldn’t rule it out entirely. That haunting cliffhanger, where he laughs in that way only Tom Baker can, only adds to my suspicions that he’s perhaps not entirely himself at the moment.

It’s also helped by the fact that it has gone on for so long now. Usually, the Doctor might be out of character for a little bit of an episode, and even then if he’s faking it, there’s usually a wink or a nod to his companion (and the audience). Here’s he’s kept up the charade for a third of the story, and that’s making me very unsettled. There’s a number of little hints and tips towards Borusa that seem to imply that he’s waiting for the room to be properly sealed off before he can talk openly, and that makes me think even more that our mysterious alien invaders might be inside his mind, controlling some of his actions. 

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

Day 495: The Invasion of Time, Episode One

Dear diary,

Ah, The Invasion of Time. It’s another one of those stories which isn’t very well liked, and its faults are all too known in fandom, even before you sit down to watch it. I’ve never seen this one, but I know the basic plot, I know the twist at the end of part four, and I know how it ends. I think that’s going to mean that I’m a bit non-plussed by the story, and that I’m just going to be going through the motions. What I really need is to be able to watch it without any of that prior knowledge about the quality or the plot. It needs to be seen through the eyes of someone completely in the dark to actually stand a chance of it being received well.

Thankfully, I’m on holiday with Emma this week. Not a massive holiday anywhere sunny or hot (mores the pity), just a simple trip back home to look after the animals while the family is away (they’ve gone somewhere hot. Boo). Six nights away, six episode of Gallifrey-based Doctor Who to watch, and one partner who doesn’t have a clue what’s to come. Surely that’s the perfect test for The Invasion of Time?

Emma was fairly silent throughout the episode itself. She usually has a fair bit to comment on (often it’s how much she’s enjoying - or not - the dress sense of the companion), but today didn’t really prompt much of that from her. Instead, she waited until the closing credits were rolling before admitting that she was simply confused by this one. To be fair, she’s not the only one. I knew that the story involved the Doctor returning to Gallifrey to assume presidency of the Time Lords, and yet the episode moves at such a pace, and sees him (seemingly) acting so out of character that you’re really not sure what to think.

That’s not to say that I’ve not enjoyed it, though. As ever, there’s some sparkling dialogue between the regulars, and for the first time it really feels like K9 is a part of the team. We’ve had scenes of him playing chess with the Doctor before now, but it now feels… I don’t know. Different somehow, but in a good way. I laughed heartily at K9 telling Leela to shut up (‘engage silent mode, mistress!’), and also his description of swimming as ‘being fully submerged in H2O.’

I think for now that it’s just got an awful lot to set up very quickly. I’m hoping that now we’re in this position, with the Doctor given all the things he needs to rule Gallifrey, we can settle down a bit and get more in to the story. Although I know the basic outline of the story, I’m not really sure what fills up these first four episodes.

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

Day 494: Underworld, Episode Four

Dear diary,

Confession time: I’ve never actually sat through an entire Star Wars movie. I know, I know, that’s something tantamount to blasphemy within the sci-fi world… but I’ve never really thought of myself as a science fiction fan. I love Doctor Who, in all its many varied forms. I’ll happily sit and watch other bits of sci-fi, or fantasy, but I’ve never been one for really delving into them. I’ve simply never had all that much of an interest. The only time that this wasn’t quite true was during 2005, when people were gearing up for the release of the final Star Wars. I can’t remember where I saw it, but there was a short feature about the way in which the film had been largely shot against green-screen, and speculating that this was the way all films would be made in the future - who needed to spend time building the scenery when you can simply add it in later, making changes as you go. The thought of that absolutely captivated me (although these days, I’m not so fond of the idea), and I love that there’s a clear ancestor to that kind of production here in Underworld.

It’s fitting, in a way, because this serial was in production when the first of the Star Wars films reached the UK. I’ve spent some time tonight catching up with the special features on the DVD of this story, and Anthony Read confirms that he went - along with Graham Williams and Tom Baker - to see a preview screening of this soon-to-be-seminal film. There’s some discussion on the effect the film had towards the models’ budget for this serial (and I still think that the spaceship shots are one of the very best bits of the entire story), and I think it’s also telling with the way that the series is moving in this latter-half of the Baker years. It’s becoming more ‘spacey’: we’re going to be spending a lot more time away from Earth in the next few seasons (and I think I’m right in saying that this incarnation of the Doctor won’t be venturing into Earth’s history again for the rest of his tenure), and we’ve even got a cute robot sidekick along for the ride.

While I’m briefly touching on the subject, I do have to praise the special features on this DVD. The Doctor Who range as a whole has been ridiculously well-served over the last 15 years or so, and I think it’s fair to say that no other series - archive or not - has been given the love, care, and attention that this one has. By the standards of some discs in the range, this release is positively stripped-down, but what we do get is fascinating. There’s a thirty minute documentary about the production of the serial, looking at the parallels with the tale of Jason and the Argonauts before moving on to the actual in-studio problems, and then there’s an additional 20 minutes or so of narrated footage from the various studio days. It gives a brilliant insight into the way this programme was put together, and really highlights how hard everyone worked to even get the story to screen in the first place.

So how’s it fared on the whole? This was ranked in Doctor Who Online’s story poll last year as being the worst story of the 1970s - and by quite some margin. Well… I’m pleased to say that I’ve not actually found that to be the case for me. I’ve been updating my friend Nick on this fact as I’ve moved along and, bless him, he’s tried to understand. I think the biggest problem for me is that the story has simply fallen a bit flat. I’ve already spoken at length about the face that the plot isn’t really anything new or interesting, but the expectation of the story being terrible has had a negative effect on it. I’ve not found it to be as bad as everyone says, but it’s hardy one of the best either. It’s sort of stuck in a purgatory, and its average score of exactly 6/10 across the four episodes puts it just about right. Slightly above average in places, but not breaking out that much.

Indeed, from the 1970s, I’ve rated four stories lower than this one (The Sontaran Experiment, Revenge of the Cybermen, The Android Invasion, and Image of the Fendahl) and several others have come in with the same average score - including that supposed classic The Deadly Assassin! That’ll probably duffel a few feathers!

I’m glad that I’ve enjoyed the story more than people usually do, and there’s something nice about knowing that I’ve liked it more than several stories that I’ve already been through. It leaves me with a sense that there’s always things to enjoy within Doctor Who - even when they’re supposed to have very few redeeming features at all…

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

Day 493: Underworld, Episode Three

Dear diary,

Whenever I buy a new issue of Doctor Who Magazine, I have a strict way of reading it. An order that I always take. Well, I say ‘strict’. Effectively, I turn to the ‘Production Notes’ section, read that first, and then read the rest of the issue in any old random order that I want. It’s been this way for as long as I can remember, and I can tell you why that is: I love the way Russell T Davies writes his column. And Steven Moffat after him. It’s not about grabbing little bits of production information for me, it’s about enjoying two story-tellers tell a story. There’s been so many of the columns now (well over 100), and they don’t all stick in my mind. There’s one or two, though, that for some reason I always remember.

There’s one, for example, from early 2008, which is very pertinent to the watching of this story here and now. In it, Russell finds a VHS copy of Underworld in the back of a cupboard, in the middle of the night, and decides to pop it in for a watch. He admits that he’s seen it twice before, and didn’t care for it on either occasion. But then, as Cardiff Bay wake up around him (much as it has done for me this morning - I’ve got a busy day ahead so I’m watching this episode at an ungodly hour), he finds himself changing his mind…

“We’re way past Part One now! The script has moments of elegance: ‘The Tree at the End of the World is guarded by Invisible Dragons.’ There’s a Blackpool joke. There’s a pacifier ray, which makes Leela smile like a baby! There’s a villainous, arch supercomputer which actually sounds both villainous and arch in the right quantities. Better still, the villainous, arch supercomputer then realises, a second before death, how very wrong she has been. It’s actually rather moving. And, d’you know what? Sometimes, just sometimes, you can see these CSO shots as they were meant to be. The odd fleeting image has some depth, and shadow, and promise. The potential of Underworld is still there, buried under the tape”

He goes on to wonder about the design of the decedents in the story, too, deciding that if you mentally block out the ‘nose’ from the gold helmet design, then they’re actually not bad creatures. There’s definitely something alien and different about them. Mostly, I’m just surprised to find that the design of the helmet (or… mask? head?) only surfaces at this point of the story - almost three-quarters of the way through! You’d think they’d want to get their money’s worth out of the costumes, but they’ve hidden them under a black hood for the majority of the tale!

Russell picks out a number of things to enjoy about this story, and he’s right with all of them. The design isn’t all that bad, and the nose does somewhat throw it off. All that talk about invisible dragons is lovely (and leads to the Doctor being more ‘Doctory’ than I’ve seen in a while, when he sets off to find them), and whereas Russell says that some of the CSO shots work, sometimes, I’m willing to say that for me, they mostly work! Maybe I’m metally blocking out the worst offenders (the ‘falling’ sequence, for example, but then that would have been of a similar quality wether they had regular sets to hand or not), but I’m not having any problems with them.

My main issue with this one is still that it’s ‘generic science fiction’. It’s a story which feels familiar because we had a variation on it only a season ago (Doctor and friends head into a mythical temple which turns out to be a lost space vessel with a faulty computer), and no one is really giving it anything more than a basic performance. The guest cast are plodding through the script, Tom is over-doing things in an attempt to make up for other failings, and Leela has a sudden lust for revolution following her recent trip to Pluto. I still maintain that there’s a lot to be enjoyed in ‘Underworld’, and it’s still far from being deserving of the ridiculously low score it’s often saddled with… but it’s certainly one of the weaker stories, there’s no denying it. 

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

492: Underworld, Episode Two

Dear diary,

I know how this works. You lot. You’ll laugh, you’ll point. You’ll hunt me down with knives and pitchforks. You’ll revoke my Who card and make me surrender my DVD collection. But you know what? I’m going to say it anyway: Underworld isn’t that bad. And on top of that… the CSO actually kind of works.

Oh, believe me, I’m as stunned as you are. I was really dreading making it out of the ship today and into the the green-screen tunnels. It just seemed like such a bad idea. There’s several places where - no - it really doesn’t work: moments when characters are able to walk in front of things that they shouldn’t be able to, or when the smoke starts to fill the cavern at the end of the episode (although points for trying…), but equally there’s a lot of places where it looked good enough to me.

It’s worth bearing in mind that I’m saying this after a single episode of CSO shenanigans. By the time I’ve finished the next two episodes, I’ll probably have grown somewhat sick of it. I think the biggest shame is that while this world well enough to tell the story, it can’t ever compete with being out in real caves on location somewhere. It just lacks the kind of depth that you get when they film in locations like those used for The Mutants. This seems even more of a pressing shame coming right after The Sun Makers: a story in which to corridors and tunnels looked especially nice for being proper locations.

The other thing that seems to be happening - and especially in Tom Baker’s case - is that people are compensating for the fact it’s being shot so much on CSO by over-acting. When the Doctor and Leela first step out into the cave system, we get a few shots of him as things are explained. It’s all pretty standard stuff for a Doctor Who episode, and it’s the kind of thing that Baker could usually rattle off in his sleep.

He’s really going for it, though, and delivering a version of the Doctor that I’ve not seen him give before. He’s more ‘boggly’ than ever before. In some ways, it reminds me of that bit in the Whose Doctor Who documentary, where he describes Jon Pertwee as being like a big lightbulb. Playing up for the cameras. It’s not needed in this instance, though, and it sticks out more than any of the CSO backgrounds are.

The other issue I’m having is that… I don’t really care. Yesterday’s episode gave us a lot of sci-fi nonsense with dying civilisations, and pacifier rays, and rede banks, but as soon as we switch today to some men in hoods banging on about sacrifice, I just really thought very clearly ‘I don’t care’. It doesn’t feel rooted in reality: it’s just the kind of thing you could find in any old sci-fi. That’s not a fault particularly of Underworld (indeed, several Doctor Who episodes fall into the same trap), but it is a let down. I’m starting to wonder if the story’s poor reputation may actually be deserved - in the past I’ve only ever heard people say it’s rubbish because of the CSO effect… I’ve never actually heard anyone talk about the story…

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

Day 490: The Sun Makers, Episode Four

Dear diary,

People often mourn the loss of the ‘Pure Historical’ format from the programme’s style after about Season Four (one of two exemptions not withstanding), but I think it’s a style which lives on throughout several other tales. Take this story, for instance. Sure, it’s set in the far future of Pluto, and the ‘big bad’ turns out to be a kind of alien squiddy creature (although you never actually see him in anything other than human form), but really it’s a story about oppression and revolution. You could take much of what we see in these four episodes and only apply a few small changes to set it at any point in Earth’s history. You don’t see anything that looks alien, and aside from references to other planets, it really could be set anywhere.

I think I quite like that. Over time I’ve found myself enjoying the appearances of monsters in Doctor Who, but I rather like having these stories come along every so often which don’t really conform to the usual ‘man in a rubber suit’ style. It seems to be the direction in which the series is heading, too. During Season Thirteen (to pick a random, recent example) monsters were the flavour of the day. Be it Zygons, or Sutekh and his Mummies, the Kraals, the Anti-matter creature… monsters were undoubtably a focus of the series. But then compare that to Season Fifteen so far. In The Horror of Fang Rock, The Invisible Enemy and Image of the Fendahl, the monster doesn’t turn up until at least the end of that third Episode. Oh, its presence is felt throughout the story up to that point - we might even get the odd glimpse of it - but it isn’t remotely the focus of the tale. In this story, it never even arrives. It’s an interesting change of pace, and one which I think I’m rather enjoying.

Especially when it means that we get villains and creatures like the Collector in this story. I’ve held off mentioning him up to now, simply because I didn’t know what to say about him. At times, he’s reminded me of Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory (both in mannerisms and speech patterns), but mostly I think I’m just a bit… put off by him. I mean that in a good way - I find him a little bit revolting, and it’s almost difficult to watch his scenes without a sense of just being uncomfortable.

Henry Woolf gives a wonderful performance, and he’s quite unlike anything else we’ve seen in the programme before. You can see - during their confrontation in this episode - that Tom Baker raises his game in order to go toe-to-toe with the man. It feels like some time since a guest has had such an effect on our Time Lord, and that’s always a good thing to see happening. Indeed, I think the only thing I’ve found to be a let down about the Collector is that his motorised transport doesn’t quite work. As the head of ‘the Company’, I’d expect him to have the latest model of wheels… but even K9 can get around more efficiently!

On the whole, The Sun Makers has been a really pleasant surprise. I entered into the story really not knowing what to expect, and my opinion has shifted a little bit all over the place in the last few days. I’ve ended up thinking that it’s something of a success. Does everything work perfectly? Well, no. But then, that’s always the case with Doctor Who. That’s the case with life in general, probably! A nice surprise in the middle of the season, though. And tomorrow I move onto Underworld: another tale I know very little about… but I’m well aware that it’s not regarded at the best the series has ever produced…

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

Day 489: The Sun Makers, Episode Three

Dear diary,

I’m finding The Sun Makers to be a bit of an odd one, truth be told. Not in a bad way, simply in the sense that it seems to be getting a good deal better as it goes along. In my entry for Episode One, I complained that the direction wasn’t quite as interesting as I’d like it to be, and that you don’t get a real sense of the location when we’re out on the rooftops because there’s no model shots to help us along. Today, though, it’s like they’ve taken all that criticism on board!

The cliffhanger reprise has that lovely shot as the camera pans around the corner where Leela and her comrades are hiding, and you get to see the real length of the corridor behind her. I can’t say that I really picked up on just how nice this moment is, but I’m glad that I’ve noticed it today because the rest of that scene goes on to give us some really - really - nice shots. Use of selective focus when looking at K9 (there’s one moment when we get a real close up on his ‘nose’, and another where we watch his tail dip) and on Leela as she lies wounded on the floor feel almost filmic in nature, and they’re really rather great. It helps that they’re being shot on film, and that’s always a sure-fire winner with me.

We’ve then even got a shot of the city as a model! It’s hardly the best model that Doctor Who has ever given us (indeed, it’s far from the best model this decade), but it does help to give a scale to the world we’re inhabiting. There’s something oddly retro about it - that sense of ‘this is what the future will look like as decreed in the 1950s and 1960s - with all the skyscrapers and connecting beams, and I rather like that. I’m wondering now if there might have been a shot of this during that first episode that I simply missed, because it seems strange to build the model and then only show it at this late stage.

The only thing I am coming away from the episode feeling a little down-hearted at is some of the sets. Now that I seem to have ‘switched on’ to the direction being used here (it’s not as though they saw the work in the early episodes and then changed the way it was done, because it would have all been filmed in one big ‘block’, although I suppose they could have changed between locations), I’m really loving the use of the various locations. They give the underworld of the city a real industrial feel, and I completely believe that this world exists under those enormous tower blocks. I love the concrete tunnels as much as I love the sterile while corridors way overhead, and I love the sense of realism that it gives the story.

But then you enter sets like the control room above the steamer, or the correction centre. They’re all bloody peach! They don’t look like the kinds of technology that I expect to find in this world at all. I grew up on a farm, though it had long ceased operating as one by the time I was born. Right at the back of the main yard there’s an enormous barn. The roof has half caved in, and it’s reached a point now where the structure is so covered with Ivy that you can’t see a single inch of the brickwork below. Truth be told, it looks a bit like a Krynoid looming over the other outbuildings.

When I was young, I used to be fascinated by this place. It was a forbidden world of adventure and exploration. I wasn’t allowed in because of the roof being in such a precarious state (frankly, I’m surprised it’s still holding up now in places. I imagine that’s the work of the ivy), but I could peer through the cracks in the big, metal doors. It was full of old decommissioned farm machinery. Great big vats, three or four meters tall. Bits of equipment that had stood in this place for ten, twenty, even fifty years in some cases. By the time I was a teenager and old enough to decide that of course I was going in, I realised that if you worked your way around the back, there was a great big opening in the wall. Finally, I made it in there to look at all this stuff up close.

I know what you’re thinking - I’m supposed to be talking to you about The Sun Makers. But I am! Because all this equipment is exactly what I expect to find in this ‘control centre’. Rusting, and ancient. Crumbling away in places. You’ve got plenty of dials and readouts in this one, but they feel false. They’re too comically overrides and made out of numerous pastel colours. I want real dials. Little readouts behind panels of glass (cracked, of course), and little switches and levers to control all the operations. In short, I want this area to look as out-dated and industrial as the rest of the city does. It’s the only thing which is taking me right out of the story.

By contrast, the more I see it, the more I love the Gatherer’s office. It’s an odd kind of corridor that leads you in (something like a rib-cage, but it works!), and the whole thing feels like a set… but that’s just right for it. It’s supposed to feel different to the rest of the city. I also can’t help but like the hideout of the rebels deep down in the under city. It’s very stripped down and minimal, but those ‘pipes’ which lead up and out look fantastic, and I can really believe that they connect to the locations we’ve seen above. I don’t think that we’re going to be seeing many (if any) new locations in the final episode, but I’m hoping that if we do, they’ll be falling into the category of things I love rather than the things that feel like they’re letting me down.

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

Day 488: The Sunmakers, Episode Two

Dear diary,

I don’t know if I was simply having a bad day when watching Episode One of this story, but I’ve found this episode far more agreeable. Lots of the things that I was complaining about before either don’t seem to bother me so much now, or are simply better. The direction, for example, is much better here than it was during the first part, and there’s some lovely shots both down in the tunnels as the Doctor heads back to the under city, and when Leela and her new party of revolutionaries are making their way through the long, white tunnels upstairs.

Leela herself is yet another highlight. Anyone who follows The 50 Year Diary on a regular basis will be more than aware how much I’ve come to love the character over the last month or so, and she’s as brilliant here as she ever is. It’s another one of those instances where both the character and the actress really come together to create something… well… something perfect. Every choice Louise Jameson makes with her performance is fantastic - just watch here as she tells one of the rebels that they have have no pride, or courage, or manhood, and tell me that it isn’t one of the best performances a companion has ever given in Doctor Who.

Leela is simply brilliant in herself, though. She doesn’t even see the Doctor in this episode - they don’t once share the screen - but you never feel like she’s left running around as a spare part. She actively goes looking for her friend, and in the process starts to build up supporters for a revolution. I can only assume that this plot thread is going to keep building in the next half of the story, and we’ll have a rill-scale revolt on our hands by the end of Part Four.

Even K9 is acting as a great part of it, being sent to stun the gourd and giving Leela and Cordo a chance to proceed with their plans. By the time that the little robot pooch was removed from the programme during Season Eighteen, people often claim that he’d become too much of a useful tool, eliminating any really danger or tension in a lot of instances. I think I can see that already beginning here, but it’s still fresh and news, so I really enjoy it. We’ve never had a companion like Leela before - one who would be so willing to head off armed with a knife and a robot dog - and seeing them paired up like this is simply fun.

That said… oh my God K9 is loud! I don’t know if it’s a peculiar side effect of the types of tunnels they’re filming in this week, but I can’t say that I noticed his motors quite so obviously during The Invisible Enemy! It makes it sound really rather strange when he trundles up to the guard, and his mechanics are drowned out by the incidental music! The Doctor spent some time in the last story upgrading the dog’s systems - let’s hope he’s aiming to make him quieter! If I’m honest, I’m not entirely sure how K9 was able to sneak up on the guard like that! 

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

Day 487: The Sunmakers, Episode One

Dear diary,

Every so often I seem to tell you how this is ‘another one of those stories’ that I know very little about, and every time I’m convinced that it’s the last one I don’t know very much about. I genuinely do find myself surprised when another one comes up, especially on a day like today - when I’m expecting to pop in the DVD of Underworld only to remember that this tale exists before I reach that one! When it comes to The Sunmakers, I know it’s set on Pluto… I know that it’s a story about a population crippled under the weight of enormous taxation… I presume there’s something about people making suns in there? Basically - oh look! it’s ‘another one of those stories’.

It’s also one of those episodes that Emma has joined me for. She’s dipped in and out occasionally and seems to enjoy touching in on the Doctor’s adventures from time to time. In todays episode, she’s very taken with Leela, not keen on K9 by any stretch of the imagination, and somewhat indifferent to the rest of the story (although she likes the Gatherer’s hat).

For me… well… I’m not really sure yet. The Sunmakers is odd in that - I believe - there’s no monsters or anything like that in there. This isn’t a case of ‘mysterious deaths with a green slug arriving in the last third’, and as such I’m sort of left wondering when things are really going to get moving. Much of today’s episode is incredibly ‘talky’, and spent setting up the world into which we’ve found ourselves. It’s really the locations of the story which work the best for me - being so striking and different as to really make an impact. They’re cold, and grey, and utilitarian. They’re bleak, and large, and the kind of shapes (and sizes) you just don’t find in a BBC tv studio.

Sadly, they’re being shot in a particularly bland way. These settings call for the strange direction of George Spenton-Foster, or even the keen filmic eye of Douglas Camfield. That never-ending round corridor, with the concrete pattern built into the walls could look so dynamic and interesting, but it comes across as simply flat. Maybe that’s the point - this is supposed to be a crippled and cloudless society after all - but it feels like a real missed opportunity.

I’m also longing for the kind of model shots which were used to such good effect during The Robots of Death - cleverly masking in a shot with a model to give the scene some scale. When we watch the Doctor and Leela look out from the roof of a building ‘thousands’ of meters high, You want an impression of that size. Instead - again - it’s just flat. Even some shots slightly from below, looking up to them, would help to sell the idea that bit better for me.

Mostly, though, I think I’m interested to see how they use K9 in the plot. I rather liked him during The Invisible Enemy (and despite the Doctor’s assertion at the end of yesterday’s episode, I like that here he’s very much Leela’s pet again), but this is the first chance we’ve really got to see him being integral to a story away from his origins. I love that he’s setting out on his own to explore (even if he is followed by CCTV and leads thee ‘baddies’ to the Doctor), and I can’t wait to see where he goes from here…