Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: Eddie Robson

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download)

Release Date: September 2017

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

"The Doctor's adventures in time and space are over. The Time Lords have recalled him to Gallifrey – but what he faces on his home planet is worse than any trial. Following the disappearance of President Borusa, the High Council condemned him to the highest office - and he can't evade his responsibilities a nanosecond longer...

So all hail the Lord High President! All hail President Doctor!

Rassilon save him. This time, there's really no escape."

Some stories and ideas fit some specific Doctors perfectly. Imagine The Curse of Fenric with the Sixth Doctor for example, or The Rescue with the Tenth: it just doesn't quite gel. Here with Time in Office though, we have the perfect marriage of incarnation and scenario, and full credit to Alan Barnes for suggesting it. You can just about picture the Fourth Doctor doing the job of President and purposely sending it up. The Sixth would be all bluster and indignation, but he would secretly enjoy the comfy seats and pomp more than he cares to admit. The Fifth though? So polite and unable to run away from a job he knows he will hate? It's the best fit.

Eddie Robson knows this, and writes for the Fifth Doctor especially well, and Time in Office is a perfect testimony to that fact. Throw in Leela and Tegan, too, and you've got a recipe for success, and thankfully 'a success' is undoubtedly what the finished product ends up being.

The Doctor's TARDIS is intercepted on the way to Frontios and before long our hero is in front of cameras, unable to escape, and being forced into office very much against his will. Leela is on hand to try and smooth things over, and Tegan is being held prisoner before being offered a position she cannot refuse.

There is something truly wonderful about seeing the Doctor, and more specifically this Doctor, run through diplomatic hoops. The trouble is, the Doctor is not without a past, and this comes to the fore in Part Two especially, which is genuinely funny and smart. The pairing of the Fifth Doctor and Leela (and indeed Peter Davison with Louise Jameson) works really well, and the addition of Tegan (and Janet Fielding) in the mix is the icing on the cake. It's easy to forget sometimes just how good the acting from the regulars is; we're so used to hearing or seeing their performances that it's easy to become blasé about it. Likewise, it's easy to forget at times just how much better served the regulars can be by Big Finish, but this blows those memory lapses out of the water and reminds you time and again just how good they all are.

Fielding especially gets to shine throughout the play with some brilliant comedy that suits both her character and the tone of the story down to a tee, whilst Robson writes to Davison's strengths with practised ease. The only thing which never really works in the play is Tegan’s love of adventure, seeing as we know she leaves soon after this play due to not enjoying things anymore.  That’s always the major problem with Big Finish plays though: they only fit to some extent and often you need wriggle room to make to really work.

Ignore that though. Nearly every facet of this play has an air of confidence and polish about it, from the script (with fan jokes about the number of regenerations a Time Lord can have to knowing comments about how male-centric Gallifrey is (a thread which ran through Doom Coalition to good effect, too)) to the performances to the direction. Indeed, the direction and performances feel the tightest we have had for a while now, and full praise must go to Helen Goldwyn for that.

Perhaps that says a lot though? Perhaps it shows that a shake-up in production team and format works wonders and gives the main range a much-needed kick and breath of fresh air?

Compare this play to nearly all the others this year and it stands out for being pleasingly different and pleasantly fresh-feeling. The story of an element coming to a dusty but well-meaning entity and shaking things up by being different feels symbolic of this play's position in the wider Big Finish pantheon right now.

Yes, this is a play which is for fans only really and takes in a lot of continuity points here and there, and yes, this is a play which still runs with the 4x4 format, albeit it with a new glance. But it's also a play which re-invigorates that format, plays with continuity in a fun and cheeky way, and actually uses the past to good purpose.

This isn't a play which says "oh, go on, let's put the Fifth Doctor with Leela" with no thought beyond. This is a story which does that because it fits perfectly and doesn't feel shoe-horned in by committee like nearly all of the Locum Doctors scripts a while ago did.

In some ways, this makes it all the more frustrating as there isn't really any excuse why it isn't this imaginative and fun every month. There are times when it feels as if the monthly/main range just rests on its laurels a little, and a play like this only shows that up.  A bit more imagination, a bit more daring do, a shake-up of the format... perhaps the future will see this happen and the now tired trilogy formula will get the injection of energy and verve it so desperately needs.

For now though, let us celebrate this Doctor's time in office and not feel too sad that it wasn't longer still.

+  ORDER this CD via Amazon.co.uk!

Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: Nicholas Briggs

RRP: £10.99 (CD) / £8.99 (Download)

Release Date: August 2015

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

“The Doctor reveals to Leela that they’re heading for the planet Telos. And K9 has new masters...

On Telos, in the past, the Second Doctor and Jamie are exploring the ‘tomb of the Cybermen’.

Meanwhile, the Cyber-Controller and Cyber-Planner consolidate their plans. Spare parts from Krelos are being used to construct a mighty Cyber army. The Doctor must be captured.

Out of control, the TARDIS tumbles down a chasm and the Doctor and Leela find themselves caught up in full-scale planetary invasion.”

There is a school of thought that says that big is better, and you can see that in work here: an adventure with the Cybermen! Ah, but let’s go one further: bring in an old companion! But we can do more: make it a sequel to a past adventure! Brilliant. But: no, let’s go further: we can set it during the past adventure! And let’s not just do any old story, no! Let’s set it during a much-loved classic: The Tomb of the Cybermen!

On paper, it probably sells: the Fourth Doctor and Leela meeting Jamie on Telos is a scenario which is going to get a certain type of fan tingling with anticipation, and it’s no great leap to put both Nicholas Briggs and David Richardson in that category seeing as they’ve gone ahead and made this tale.

It’s not the first time that this approach has been taken. We had The Five Companions by Eddie Robson taking place within another story, and it worked really well: it was a neat fit that took advantage of a period within the existing story when it could logically have taken place without too great a pinch of salt.  So, we have previous, and a successful example at that.  You can see why they felt confident enough to go down that road again.  Indeed, we’ve had mixed-up Doctor/Companion tales very recently, too, and sequels to popular stories in the past time and again.  How does it fare here, though?

First things first: the ‘fit’ between new tale and old tale is pretty sloppy, and I’m being generous here.  We get Frazer Hines doing his Troughton impression to try and help gel things, but… well, it sounds good in small doses, but often it just sounds like Frazer Hines pretending to be Patrick Troughton, so the effect is not as seamless as everyone seems to think it is if the Extras to this play are anything to go by.  The fit in with the plot of Tomb itself can conceivably work I suppose, but only at a push and certainly not as smoothly as Robson managed before.  This feels far more like someone desperately trying to squeeze something in than something that clicks; like someone pushing the incorrect part of the jigsaw into the wrong hole. You can make it fit, but it’s a clumsy mess.

Second up: Jamie in a Fourth Doctor story. Now, Jamie seems to continually bump into the ‘wrong’ Doctor whilst facing the Cybermen, so this feels less novel and more old and worn than it should do.  Sadly, again it’s a clumsy fit.  Quite simply, there is no need whatsoever for this tale to take place during Tomb beyond it being set on Telos, which it could be at any time.  It’s been done purely to try and shift CDs and with no regard to the story itself.  We’re looking at quantity over quality with regards to elements here.

Thirdly, the story. Again, it’s pretty poor. Cybermen are nasty to K-9, things happen, technobabble, reset, the end.  It’s dull at best, predictable at worst, and sadly as jaded and boring as the inclusion of Jamie and the notion of setting it within another story.  I understand that Big Finish tend to keep things as they are and the risks are normally minimal and then repeated– the four-by-four format was successful once and so we have it once a year now; a Northern companion worked well, so they’ve been aping Lucie Miller ever since; the false-departure for Charley worked well, so let’s do it again (and again and again…) with Hex! Heck, even the covers tend to stick to a type nowadays and take few risks– but this is about as boring an execution of old tricks that we’ve seen.

We need more, especially after a story in which nothing much happens whatsoever, but what we get here, though it has more incident than Krelos, shows less flair or innovation.  Not a good sign.

More than anything else, this feels like a huge disappointment after how strong this series of The Fourth Doctor Adventures has been.  We’ve had sparks and new things, and then… this.  A story so keen on continuity, it forgets to do anything interesting whatsoever. I really wish Big Finish would stop doing this; it’s utterly without point, and I can’t see who it appeals to.  Certainly not this listener.  I’m only giving it two out of ten because the Cybermen voices are at least pretty good. That’s overly kind of me, though.

 “You will be like us,” say the Cybermen. If that entails being anything like this play, then that is a threat indeed.

Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: Nicholas Briggs

RRP: £10.99 (CD) / £8.99 (Download)

Release Date: July 2015

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

“There are dark skies on Krelos… and something gigantic is descending.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Leela set off for some fishing in the mountain pools of Krelos. K9 has interfaced with the TARDIS and has reactivated the architectural configuration from the days of the Doctor’s second incarnation. In passing, the Doctor notes it could do with a good clean. And there’s a familiar piece of material snagged on the console.

Far up the mountain, an aged explorer is in trouble. Will the Doctor and Leela be able to save him and his planet? And what is it that K9 has discovered in the TARDIS?”

The Doctor gets up to an awful lot of things when we’re not looking.  We know this from various sources: the Doctor himself, glimpses of downtime in stories such as Midnight, The Romans, Army of Ghosts and Turn Left (it all goes to pot there, but to start with at least, Donna and the Doctor are just having fun exploring an alien market), companions reciting stories not seen on screen (Rose in Boom Town, for example), and the nagging sense that it can’t all be continual peril for the Doctor and his friends, or you wouldn’t go travelling, would you? There are definitely times when the Doctor and his entourage take a break and simply have a good time.

Why, then, have we not seen this in full before? The argument will no doubt be that if nothing much happens, then it’s not going to be the most exciting of tales, but as if that were a gauntlet thrown on the table, Big Finish have decided to try and prove us wrong and The Fate of Krelos is the result.

What happens in this story, then? Well, Leela and the Doctor wander around the TARDIS for a bit and decide to go fishing whilst K-9 is on the blink. They meet the locals and have a jolly.  And that’s it.

It’s a strange tale in that the format actively fights against the story being told.  We need a cliffhanger midway through the tale, one at the end, and a healthy dose of leading-into-the-final-play-this-series-style plot for Return to Telos to work properly. Because Nicholas Briggs, the story’s author, wants to tell a tale where the Doctor and Leela just relax instead of rush around, there is an inherent wrestle between these necessities and Briggs’s desires. So, K-9 is not how he should be but everyone ignores it uncharacteristically because that would kickstart a story.  Likewise, we get a truly horrendous and cringeworthy bit of info-dumping early on where Leela learns about Jamie purely so that she will know who he is come the final play this series. It’s a scene that exists purely to push things forward and stands out all the more than it usually would, such is the lax pace and absence of event surrounding it all.

Things suddenly whirl into action right at the end, again because it is needed by the demands of both Doctor Who as a series and The Fate of Krelos’s position in the running order of this season of adventures. Maybe placed somewhere else other than the penultimate adventure, a tale like this one could have worked, but as it is, we have what would struggle to fit a standard twenty-three-minute-long episode stretched beyond breaking point.

In spite of all this though,I cannot help but admire Briggs for giving this a shot in the first place. Does it work? Not really, but as a one-off experiment, it is at least worthy of merit. The use of Michael Cochrane in the guest cast is a nice touch, too, giving The Fourth Doctor Adventures a sense of continuity with its past (he was brilliant as Colonel Spindleton in the first series) in much the same way that repeated appearances of Bernard Horsfall and his ilk used to do on screen.

Telos beckons now, so hopefully this is but a blip in what has been the best series of adventures for the Fourth Doctor from Big Finish so far. At least Leela knows who Jamie is now… 

Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: John Dorney

RRP: £10.99 (CD) / £8.99 (Download)

Release Date: March 2015

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

“The Asteroid - notorious hideaway of the piratical Rocket Men. Hewn out of rock, surrounded by force-fields and hidden in the depths of the Fairhead Cluster, their base is undetectable, unescapable and impregnable.

In need of allies, the Master has arranged to meet with Shandar, King of the Rocket Men. But the mercenaries have captured themselves a very special prisoner - his oldest enemy, the Doctor.

What cunning scheme is the Doctor planning? How does it connect with Shandar's new robotic pet? And just what has happened to Leela? The Master will have to work the answers out if he wants to leave the asteroid... alive…"

***

The Rocket Men were arguably one of the greatest successes to come from The Companion Chronicles.  Nasty, beautifully 1960s-ish in their style and approach, and the central antagonists in two of the range’s best and best-loved releases, it was perhaps only a matter of time before they made the transition to another range and another Doctor.  Whether this needed to happen is another question altogether, but happen it has and John Dorney’s Requiem for the Rocket Men is the result.

The third story in this series of Fourth Doctor Adventures, it carries on the tradition set down so far this year by being perfect for the two-episode format and the regular cast.  Leela, K-9 and the Doctor alike are all served well by Dorney’s script and scenarios, and the addition of the Master turns out to be a really smart move, showing the Rocket Men to be smaller players than they perceive themselves to be and remnants of an era that has past them by.  Indeed, one of the cleverest things about this play is how they reflect the change in Doctor, and era they’re aiming for, by making the titular Rocket Men feel very… retro now; outdated and outpaced in this new world of robot dogs and rival Time Lords and female savages.  It’s no wonder they need the Master to give them a hand, and no wonder he treats them with such patronizing contempt.

Just as Dorney subverts his own creations, so he also plays with the traditional Master/Doctor set up by having the Master stumble into one of the Doctor’s plans and adventures rather than the other way around which is the norm.  It could be a gimmick in the wrong hands or so post-modern it hurts, but here in Dorney’s capable hands it’s a lot of fun and never once feels out of place in the story being told.

Another good thing is the fact it isn’t slavishly trying to recreate the Fourth Doctor’s era, something else in common with the plays so far this series. (Speaking of changes, the pedants in us will probably be interested to note that the font on the back of the CD has changed for this release, the sort of heinous crime that usually generates half a dozen protests on the forums and threat of a boycott or alternative cover. Let’s hope they didn’t look at the spines for the first series of Early Adventures, eh?)

I’ve noted before that I have found this quest for authenticity to be a foolish one; one which has stunted the growth of the series or stories, so I am glad to see it gone at last.  It also makes the ability to mix ‘traditional’ stories with character development less of a messy fit.  We get more depth of character for the Master in this story than we ever had on screen during Doctor Who’s original run, and Leela gets to grow stronger and braver here than she was ever allowed to.  One of The Fourth Doctor Adventures’s strengths is the interplay between the Doctor and Leela, far wittier and cosier than we ever saw on screen, and the final scenes of this play give us a warmth and pleasure and— dare I say it? — closure we were robbed of in Invasion of Time.  It’s nice to see that addressed here.

It’s hard to fully judge the story in its own right as it leads directly and explicitly onto Death Match, next month’s release in this series (which isn’t a spoiler as such as it was advertised by Big Finish themselves in publicity for the series, though I will admit that I missed it somehow, which made the ending far more surprising than it perhaps should have been!) but in its own right it’s another damn good play from John Dorney and another good release for this series.  I hope next month proves to be every bit as strong.

Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: Scott Handcock & David Llewellyn

RRP: £14.99 (CD) / £12.99 (Download)

Release Date: February 2015

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

“Times change…

Romana is approaching her final term of office, and hopes to leave her world in a state of peace and harmony. Narvin is concerned about the implementation of a controversial Precog programme, one that seeks to predict the Time Lords’ future. Ace is an operative for the Celestial Intervention Agency, having learned the art of interference from one of the best…  

And somewhere, across the stars, an ancient force is stirring: one of the Time Lords’ greatest heroes is returning to our universe. But he may also prove to be their greatest threat.

When the history of Earth is threatened, and an ancient conspiracy reaches the heart of Time Lord government, can even Romana’s closest allies truly be trusted?

Time will tell… but by then, it may already be too late.”

***

Gallifrey.  Ah, Gallifrey.  Much like the planet itself, this is a series that stubbornly refuses to actually die despite us being told it has gone for good: it’s the Hex of the Doctor Who spin-off world.  Series 3 was the end, but then came all the others, years after, and that was definitely the end of it all, and then came this play, with a series announced to follow in 2016.  For a dead series, that’s quite some staying power.  I know of series alive and well that would kill for that longevity and dogged determination for survival.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though.  Let us instead look to Intervention Earth, this year’s entry for the series.  Set several years (lifetimes, even) after one of the many conclusions to Gallifrey, this four-part story takes place on Gallifrey itself and features the third incarnation of Romana, Ace and Narvin trying to thwart ne’er-do-wells from bringing Time Lord despot Omega back from the universe of anti-matter and into ‘our’ world.

For the most part, this serves as a really good reboot for the series, giving us a good flavour of the treachery, political bickering, Gallifrey mythology writ large, and action that the series large dealt in with spades.  True, the politics here are slim and largely centred around Narvin wanting more respect in his profession and, true, the treachery is more pantomime villainy than grand betrayal, but it’s a good flavour for aspects we know well.

We’ve had two performances prior to this from Juliet Landau as Romana III and she continues well here, giving us a blend of the haughtiness and confidence of Mary Tamm crossed with the acidic wit and blistering intelligence of Lalla Ward, with her own, reserved and timid but calculated cool.  I am certainly keen to see where she takes the character next, if afforded the opportunity to by Big Finish.

Sophie Aldred here is in her all-grown-up Ace-guise, an agent of the CIA and unsure as to when and how she arrived in that position.  Big Finish have rather flip-flopped around with Ace over the years, initially changing her fate from that which was always planned for her in Season 27 (and indeed changing much of what was planned for Season 27 at all when making that season year later, or at least what purported to be that season at any rate), and then showing us in UNIT: Dominion that, actually, she did end up on Gallifrey after all.  We’ve had whispers that all this is to come since, and now here we are, with Ace a fully-fledged CIA agent, the best of the best by all accounts.  As a glimpse of what’s to come, it’s interesting, I’m just fearful that the journey leading to it will take another six-or-so years whilst Ace’s direction is steered in various directions once again.

Of the guest cast, Stephen Thorne is marvellous as Omega, delivering his lines with a punch and authenticity, as if he only recorded The Three Doctors a couple of weeks ago, but he is sorely underused.  The same can be said of Gyles Brandreth, who puts in a great performance as Rexx and, for me at least, was the star of the show.

As for the script and play itself, it is clear that writers Scott Handcock and David Llewellyn are having fun with it all, but things fall apart in the final episode.  For a start, Omega’s great plan isn’t half as clever or unexpected as the writers seem to think it is, and having the cast repeatedly tell us how clever the plan is doesn’t endear me towards it any further.  Instead, it just makes the regulars look fairly silly, as traitors can be spotted a mile off, the twists likewise.  Where it really scores an own goal is at the very end, which will completely alienate anyone not familiar with the series’ past, thus totally blowing the notion of it being a jumping-on point for new listeners out of the water.  To put it mildly, it’s frustrating.  To be stronger on it, it’s an incredibly bad move.

Added to this is a sound mix which isn’t up to usual standards, with dialogue often sounding muffled and hidden, a fair distance away from Big Finish’s usual high standards.  The music was fine but not the best, going for bombast over any real mood enhancing, but worse than that is that it is overwhelming in the mix, rendering some lines very hard to pick out.

So, it’s not all glowing for Intervention Earth by any stretch.  The ending suggests more to come, though whether this will be what we see come 2016 and the new series of Gallifrey is a mystery at the time of writing this.  Perhaps like Ace’s fate we’ll be waiting a while longer.  I’ll certainly be listening, but hope that some of the flaws from this escapade are gone by the time the future unfolds.  Gallifrey falls no more: let’s just hope it lives up to the glory days of the past.

Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: Justin Richards

RRP: £10.99 (CD) / £8.99 (Download)

Release Date: February 2015

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

“Cut off from the TARDIS, the Doctor and Leela find themselves stranded on a small island.  But they are not alone.  It is 1907, and members of the Caversham Society have gathered on the hundredth anniversary of the death of Mannering Caversham, the greatest Magic Lanternist who ever lived.

But Caversham was also a supernaturalist who claimed to have conjured up a demon from the depths of hell. As people start to die, the Doctor begins to wonder if Caversham’s story might have more than a grain of truth in it. Can the Doctor and Leela discover what really happened to Caversham a century ago?  And if they do, will they live to tell the tale..?”

***

Audio can be a tricky medium to get right.  Often cited as a very visual medium despite the absence of picture, it conjures up images through sound and description alone, uninhibited by budget limitations and limited only by the mind.  That’s not to say that it comes without problems: lack of visuals means a more descriptive approach to storytelling at times, and that in turn can be problematic, leading to dialogue which sounds very unnatural (“Oh! Look! That green door is half-open with a broken handle! How strange!”)

Credit where credit is due, Big Finish is usually very good at avoiding this sort of thing.  Big Finish is also very brave with what it tries to do with its plays, and on paper, a play about lanterns casting shadows and the danger that entails seems an odd beast for audio, but Justin Richards has given it his best shot here all the same.

The first episode of The Darkness of Glass is easily the strongest, setting up an isolated group of illusionists and enthusiasts in a house with the Doctor and Leela whilst the rain falls down, the wind batters all, and there’s something wicked in the glass.  It loses points for explicitly drawing parallels with Fang Rock by having Leela nod to it in such a way you can almost hear her winking to the imaginary camera, but that’s a minor point in an otherwise near-flawless opening.  Richards has a gift for distinctive voices, which is never more apparent than it is here, and Nicholas Briggs’s direction helps milk the tension for all its worth.

Sadly, it undoes a lot of this in Part Two, or more specifically, with the finale.  I mentioned at the start that audio can sometimes fall into the trap of being unnaturally over-descriptive, and to some extent it can probably never escape that, but here it felt so much so that I found myself increasingly disappointed that the resolution wasn’t so reliant upon people telling us exactly what is going on with various props, though I appreciate also that doing that in sound alone would have been impossible.

Maybe, though, that suggests that it wasn’t the best story, or ending at least, to be committed to sound.  I don’t know for sure as the first episode is so very strong, but it took this listener out of the moment at least, which was a shame.

There is a lot to celebrate still though.  The setting, though familiar, is fun and executed well, and the cast is universally good.  (The extras for this release show Baker and Briggs to be especially playful and happy throughout proceedings, and that certainly seeps through into the finished product.)

A special mention should definitely go to Jamie Robertson, whose soundtrack is brilliantly evocative of the original Fourth Doctor/Leela era and perfectly suited to the script, too.  One thing which Big Finish really excel at with these plays is music that fits like a glove, so often done that it is overlooked a lot of the time, so I hope flagging it up here goes some way to rectify this on my part.

Another thing I want to highlight here is how much better the two-part format is fitting the Fourth Doctor this year.  Pacing, story and plot this series all fit well in a way they never have done before now, as if someone at Big Finish has sat down and worked out how to really make this Doctor fit in with the format they’ve given him, rather than giving him a format and trying to make it fit as has been the feeling previously.  It marks a big leap forward in quality for the series and is the first time I have been genuinely excited to hear what happens next month on month.  

Though not perfect, The Darkness of Glass is a fun and interesting play nonetheless and I am certainly of the mindset now, perhaps for the very first time, that the Fourth Doctor Adventures not only can carry on as strong as this, but hopefully will carry on as strong as this.

It may have taken a while, but the Fourth Doctor finally feels at home at Big Finish, and that’s something worth celebrating. 

Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: Nicholas Briggs

RRP: £10.99 (CD) / £8.99 (Download)

Release Date: January 2015

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online 

“Planet E9874 supports a developing civilisation known as the Tarl. The peaceful, technologically advanced Locoyuns are helping the Tarl develop rudimentary technology. What could be more innocent than that?

When the Doctor, Leela and K9 arrive, they find the delicate balance in the relationship between the two cultures reaching an unexpected crisis point. The spears are flying and the threat of all-out war is in the air.

The Doctor must use all his guile to tread a careful path with Tarl leader Ergu, while Leela and K9 discover an ancient power of unimaginable strength which threatens to tear the minds out of its victims.” 

***

Here we go then: another series of adventures for the Fourth Doctor, another old enemy returning to face our foe.  It’s fair to say that I have not been too taken with much of the Fourth Doctor Adventures range thus far, finding it to be the wrong format for this incarnation, as I noted in my review of The Philip Hinchcliffe Box Set.  There have been some good stories and some that really stand out, but for the most part they have merely plodded along for me, doing their best to not stir things and playing things ever so safely, and a lot of them have failed to make much of an impression.

I went into The Exxilons with a certain reluctance: another story in which the Fourth Doctor uncharacteristically encounters something from his past and has to defeat it whilst tiptoeing through a peppered field of continuity references.  John Leeson, Tom Baker and Louise Jameson would all be on fine form (they forever are) but the script would probably just… plod and do little for me.  Each to their own, I realized, but there we were: my expectations were set low.

I realize that complaining about traditional formats is going to make my next declaration of “imagine my surprise, then, when I really enjoyed it!” seem all the more clichéd, predictable and a tad hypocritical, but nonetheless the two episodes of Exxilon fun wowed me in a way that hasn’t happened for quite some time in this range.

Nicholas Briggs is a self-confessed big fan of Death to the Daleks, as his praise for it on the official BBC DVD and in the pages of Doctor Who Magazine will attest to, and quite right he is, too: it’s a marvellous story with a lot to recommend, plus a cliffhanger so utterly absurd that I never fail to burst into laughter when the end of Part Three approaches and the camera dramatically zooms in on some rather incongruous patterned tiling.  I mention Briggs’s love of that story as he has clearly given the Exxilons and their culture a lot of thought before writing this script: it shows in every playful nod to our first encounter with this alien race, every continuity-enhancing titbit concerning the Exxilon City, and oozes through in the Carey Blyton-esque musical score and original sound effects which enrich the atmosphere.  Briggs has managed to skilfully take points from Death which I never considered worthy of addressing, and has given them importance and development, in a way which actually enhances things rather than feel spurious or done for the sake of it.  This is a good case of actually using past stories to a purposeful and good effect, and for once the two-episode format of it really fits the story well and suits the team of K-9, Leela and the Fourth Doctor like a glove.

The story is simple enough but well told: our heroes land on a planet where the Exxilons are present and up to things disturbing the local natives who are unsettled by their presence.  Throw in some murder, maniacal dedication to The Cause, and subtle parallels between the Exxilon presence here and the Daleks’ in Death, and you’ve got enough meat to chew upon for the next hour.

The only minor niggle here is the presence of Hugh Ross in the guest cast: he is brilliant in the role and does it well, but is so associated now with Counter-Measures that it is hard to shake off Sir Toby from the mind’s eye whenever he speaks.  It’s unfair for me to criticize that aspect of the play, really, but here I am.

By the time the play ended, I was won over by it all and smiling at how much I had enjoyed it.  The CD extras show us Tom in a rather reflective and almost sad mood at times, which is notable all the more after such a joyful listen, but it had me rushing over to my DVD collection and grabbing Death to watch afterwards, which is about as good a sign for a play of this ilk as you can get, really.

Do I want more returning to the past time and again as has been the case more often than not with this range? No.  Done well as it is here and you get something good, but it’s all too easy to do it cack-handedly and the range could do with fewer nods and more of an individual identity (as well as a move away from two-episode stories, but that’s a moan for another day).  The trouble with these continual callbacks is that it slowly— slowly but oh-so-surely— squeezes the Universe(s) in which the Doctor travels, making it feel smaller and less spontaneous, which is a pity.  The magic of Doctor Who is its boundlessness, and the moment every third story involves meeting people or enemies or creatures from the past, the moment boundaries appear and that magic starts to ebb away.

Still, it doesn’t stop The Exxilons from being a lot of fun, from proving my fears wrong, and from being a strong start to this series of Fourth Doctor Adventures. 

Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Writer: Philip Hinchcliffe, adapted by Marc Platt

RRP: £8.99 (CD) / £6.99 (Download)

Release Date: September 2014

Reviewed by: Nick Mellish for Doctor Who Online

Review Posted: 12th September 2014

“Philip Hinchcliffe, acclaimed producer of Doctor Who (1975-77) returns to tell new stories for the Fourth Doctor and Leela.

"The starting point was there were a few basic ideas that were kicking around for another series, had we made it," says Philip. "I thought this project would be fun to be involved with, and I've tried to and tell stories that are in the same spirit as the ones Robert Holmes and I were telling."

The Ghosts of Gralstead (Six episodes)

The Doctor and Leela return to Victorian London, in the year 1860.

At St Clarence’s Hospital, respected surgeon Sir Edward Scrivener requires the bodies of the dead… At Doctor McDivett’s Exhibition of Living Wonders and Curiosities, miracles are afoot… And in Gralstead House, the ghost will walk again. Mordrega has come to Earth…

The Devil's Armada (Four episodes)

The TARDIS lands in Sissenden Village in the sixteenth century. Catholic priests are hunted, so-called witches are drowned in the ducking stool, and in the shadows the Vituperon are watching… and waiting…”

***

Nostalgia.  It’s a funny old thing, one which can disappoint and satisfy in equal measure, and one which seems very much Big Finish’s buzz word right now.

“Come! Let us journey back to the sixties!” they cried when giving us their new Early Adventures range (and, as discussed in my review of Domain of the Voord, fail to deliver that which they claimed they were going to be delivering).  This cry was also echoed when the Fourth Doctor joined the Big Finish fold: finally, we were going to get some true-to-television Fourth Doctor action, was the implication, with some of the more straight-laced fans sighing in relief at this news and frowning upon the Nest Cottage trilogy for having a Fourth Doctor that felt older and not the incarnation he used to be. (Presumably they don’t mind the fact the Fourth Doctor changed wildly from story to story on screen anyway.) I rather loved the Nest Cottage releases, giving us what essentially felt like a Fourth Doctor set in a future beyond his tenure on television– an afterlife for past regenerations, perhaps? Where was the First Doctor’s garden as glimpsed in The Three- and Five Doctors? Do past incarnations just spend all day running around in mist in the time-stream as glimpsed in The Name of the Doctor? Or do they, as hinted in Nest Cottage and indeed on screen with the mysterious Curator, have a life of their own with their own adventures, continuing but perhaps discreet and sneaky this time around? I kind of like that idea; that once gone, there is a fragment out there that carries on.  In the world(s) of Doctor Who, why not?

I was apparently in a minority it would appear though, as people cheered for Big Finish’s intent to return to TV and were very kind towards The Fourth Doctor Adventures’s first series.  I think it is fair to say though that I was less impressed with what we got.  Whilst nothing was outright bad at all, it felt very conservative at times: this was a series that could go anywhere at all in time and space, and we had painstaking attempts to fit it in with events seen in The Talons of Weng-Chiang, a return to Nerva, and a series so keen on aping an era that it forgot a lot of the time to have a dash of colour and enjoyment along the way, too.

That has improved increasingly as the series has run on, but at times I still wish for something a bit... more.  We glimpsed it with The Foe from the Future, which managed to balance nostalgia and something new and exciting well, and stories such as The Crooked Man have been as strong as the strongest of other Big Finish releases, but they have definitely missed a certain something for me, and I think that’s the time-free quality that the main range sometimes has.  Though set in the past, it strides into the new, and more often than not, this is something The Fourth Doctor Adventures has avoided doing.

I think you can imagine then that I was not exactly cheering with joy when hearing about this box set.  I like Philip Hinchcliffe’s era on screen, and I think that Hinchcliffe himself is always an articulate, interesting and thoughtful interviewee, but this harkening back to nostalgia again, couple with a sense of underwhelmement (a new word I’ve coined) with The Lost Valley, Hinchcliffe’s own audio play as used in The Fourth Doctor Box Set, did not endear me to this idea, but what we have here in the Philip HInchcliffe Presents set is exactly what I have been yearning for: something new and enjoyable, whilst looking to the past as well.  If nothing else, it simply confirms to me that what the Fourth Doctor needs is to join the Main Range fold, as hour-long stories are simply not cutting it for him.  At six- and four episodes apiece, the stories in this box set have ample room to breathe, and give us two of the most enjoyable Big Finish outings for Doctor number Four to date.

We kick things off with The Ghosts of Gralstead, a Victorian adventure with bodysnatching, spooky goings on in the entertainment business, a god-like enemy from the future flung into the past, and a pleasing mixture of classes that tells its own story... no, no, come back! I swear I’m not just repeating the plot of Talons, this is its own thing... sort of.

Yes, much like Foe, this has its roots firmly in Weng-Chiang’s territory, to the extent where Jago and Litefoot are nodded to mere moments into the play and some of the lines are almost taken wholesale from Robert Holmes’s scripts: playful homage or blatant cribbing? You choose.  Ghosts is another little sibling to Talons, just as Foe was, but, just like Foe, it manages to push beyond these trappings by simply being a really good story in its own right.  You can see the fingerprints, but the overall story merits more attention than that.

In the CD Extras, Hinchcliffe freely says that him and Robert Holmes had few if any ideas for what they would have done together had they stayed on for one more season, but that an adventure yarn with explorers and the enjoyable mash-up of Victoriana and Doctor Who would have appealed, and the story he has given Marc Platt to adapt shows that perfect synthesis of old statesman and new writer.  It gels together amazingly well, and applause must go to Platt as well as the cast, which is incredible throughout.  Perhaps most impressive to me was Emerald O’Hanrahan as Clementine Scrivener, who gets comparably little to do, but manages to fill that role with a life and zest all of its own.  Louise Jameson is wonderful, finding new things to do with a role she’s been playing on-and-off for absolutely years now, and Tom Baker is also on fine form here, giving us a performance that at the end of Part Four has rarely, to my eyes (or, rather, ears) been bettered.

Truly, there’s not a duff note throughout the tale with regards to performance.  The story itself though sadly ends with a whimper rather than a bang after six episodes of adventure: a real pity, but perhaps the only real sour note for me in Ghosts.

What Ghosts is, though, is very much what fans often distill Hinchcliffe’s era as being: Leela! The Victorians! Spookiness! Fog! Colourful background characters! It’s safe to say that Talons looms large and has a lot to answer for in this regard.

Hinchcliffe’s era was much more than this though, and The Devil’s Armada goes some way to addressing this.  Taking a leaf out of the good book Mandragora, this story flings us into history and mixes alien goings on with real-life events.  Again, like Mandragora we have superstitious religious hyperbole on display here and what purports to be a god as a foe, so again, I think it is fair to say that the fingerprints are very much on display.

And again, it’s a damn good play in its own right, with cast and script both strong and solid, and this time consistent, with an ending that is every bit as good as the rest of it.  In may ways a sequel to Marc Platt’s First Doctor Companion Chronicle The Flames of Cadiz, Armada flips that tale on its head by telling events from the English viewpoint as the Spanish Armada amass, ready to take on Queen and Country as religious persecution and witch-hunting reaches fever pitch on shore.  The play never once shies away from the brutality of such persecution, and characters that try to redeem themselves are never quite saved due to the severity of their actions beforehand.  Even characters with shades of grey are more determinedly black or white due to circumstance, which makes for a refreshing change.

Things aren’t perfect in this play.  The central threat is essentially Azal or the creature down in the Satan Pit all over again, which rather dulls things, but it’s made up for with a guest cast that boasts Beth Chalmers (whom I adore, even if they did rather piss away poor Raine), Nigel Carrington and Jamie Newall all being... well, brilliant.  I struggle to find an accurate description other than that.

Across these two plays, we have some of the finest guest performances Big Finish have given us for a while.  The same goes for the plays.  Nostalgic? Yes, but not in a way that is cloying, which has been the real problem with the Fourth Doctor’s Big Finish adventures so far.  I see that the box this set comes in has the number one printed upon its spine, giving me home that there is more to come.  Certainly, I’d love to see more Fourth Doctor releases of this quality and consistency, and if that means a shift to box sets and longer plays rather than monthly releases, then sign me up.

You want to see Tom Baker in his element once again? Go for the box sets and skip the main range.  The best is here.

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… 

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

Day 485: Image of the Fendahl, Episode Three

Dear diary,

I feel a little bit silly in admitting it… but I genuinely don’t have a clue what’s happening in this story. I mean, I understand that there’s a scientific research station set up in an old house to investigate this mysterious skull, and I get that the skull is really alien, and is drawing power in an attempt to live again… but I’m not sure what’s actually happening.

When the giant worm creature appears round the corner at the end of the episode… Is that a Fendahl? Where did it come from? Did the skull grow into that thing when it had absorbed 100 hours worth of energy (I’m guessing that it’s drawing this energy from the time fissure)? Or did the group of people in the catacombs manage to summon this creature up somehow? Did Thea turn into it? Or Max? Or one of the others? I just don’t know what’s going on.

Part of this comes back to the problem that I described yesterday - I’m struggling to follow the direction of the story. I can’t tell if the Doctor and friends being rooted to the spot by the sight of this creature is happening at the same time as the clock reaching 100 downstairs. There’s a point earlier on in the episode where we witness a conversation in the TARDIS between the Doctor and Leela, switch back to the Priory to see a van of people unload, then return to the TARDIS to find Leela out cold on the floor. Why? Was she asleep? Unconscious? Did I miss a bit? I’m not sure what was happening there, so it’s cast doubt on my ability to follow the plot in the cliffhanger.

I’m hoping that everything becomes clear in the the final episode, because I’m really rather keen to enjoy this story more than I am. There’s so much great dialogue for the Doctor and Leela to share (I expected nothing less of a script by Chris Boucher) - a particular highlight has to be the savage freeing the Doctor from the Fedahl’s grip early in the episode, and them both rousing on the floor and asking in unison if the other is all right. I wondered how I’d feel about the fact that so many Big Finish adventures for the pair have been set in the gap between their two seasons in the last couple of years - but these two have obviously been travelling together for a very long time. There’s something rather nice about that.

There’s also the fact that we’ve not got an actual monster to focus our attention on. I never really thought of myself as being one of those kids who loses interest in a Doctor Who story when there wasn’t something big, green, and slimy to keep me invested, but it’s felt like this story has been lacking one up until now - I’m really keen to see what George Spenton-Foster does with the creature, because it’s a really nice design, and I’m sure that his artistic - if tricky - direction could make it look stunning… 

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

Day 483: Image of the Fendahl, Episode One

Dear diary,

I’m terribly sorry, but I think I’ve gotten lost somewhere along the line while working my way through Doctor Who for this marathon. You see, this is clearly a Philip Hinchcliffe story from Season Thirteen/Fourteen, and not part of the same programme that’s now shifted tone to things like The Invisible Enemy. I commented during Horror of Fang Rock that it always took a bit of time for a new production team to establish themselves, so I’m not really expecting Graham Williams to set a tone for the programme until the next season rolls around, but The Invisible Enemy felt like much more a template for what’s to come than this episode has, if anything, this felt like going back a step.

That’s not a complaint, mind, because there’s an awful lot about it to like. Opening with a shot of the skull is immediately striking, and certainly means that my interest is being grabbed right from the start. That we go on to have sets of big country houses (something the show always does very well), and plenty of shooting at night means that I’m kept rooted to the screen right the way through. This has been one of those strange episodes where it’s felt as though it’s going on for an absolute age, while also managing to be over before you know it. That’s always a sure sign that I’m too caught up in events to pay attention to anything else.

This is another one of those stories which I really know very little about. I knew it was set in a location called Fetch Priory. I knew there was a skull. I know there’s a kind of… worm creature turning up at some point. The DVD disc also informs me that there’s a character painted gold at some point. That’s all I’ve got! Everything else is completely uncharted territory, and that’s always an exciting prospect.

Something to note, though… we seem to have reached a shift in the way that Tom Baker approaches the role. It’s been creeping up for a while now (mostly since they resumed to start filming this season - with The Invisible Enemy forming the first story of the ‘block’), but we’re definitely seeing him approach it differently to the way he did for his first three years in the role. There’s a couple of ways of looking at this, and I think it comes down to a combination of the two.

The first way of explaining it is to simply reference Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor. In Series Five, the writers script a generic ‘Doctor’, and Smith then applies his own unique performance to that character, giving us a new incarnation of the Time Lord. By the time we get to Series Six (and, to a lesser extent, the latter episodes on Series Five), writers have seen enough of Matt’s performance to start writing the character as ‘The Eleventh Doctor’. Suddenly, it doesn’t feel as natural anymore - all the quirky moments are now scripted, so they lose something in the translation to the screen. It feels a bit like that’s happening here, too. It feels entirely natural that this Doctor would hold court with a field of cows, and it did make me laugh, but it also feels more forced than I’m used to.

The second way of explaining it returns to my thoughts of the Tom Baker years comprising three distinct ‘eras’. I’ve described them as being largely divided by the producers in charge, and that seems to apply to Baker’s approach to the role, too. He’s playing everything up that bit more now. He is the Doctor. He’s settled and confident enough in the role by now that he can pretty much do whatever he liked. Several tales do the rounds of this period of the programme’s history, where Baker would offer his suggestions, and if they were turned down he’d just go ahead and do it anyway. You can feel that confidence in his performance during this episode, and it’s not always a good thing.

That might just be me having an off day, mind. The Doctor and Leela haven’t really gotten caught up in the story yet (they’ve only met a single character - who also hasn’t intersected with the main guest cast), so I’m perhaps focussing on the pair more than I usually would. They’re being given the freedom to roam more than I’m used to of late. Maybe once they’re inside the house and fighting this month’s menace, Baker will settle down again? 

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

Day 482: The Invisible Enemy, Episode Four

Dear diary,

Today’s episode is something of an odd affair… because it seems to be everything that people think Doctor Who is like, and quite unlike anything I’ve grown used to in the series over the last few seasons. As Doctor Who fans, we’ve all encountered those same old jokes about the programme’s ‘classic’ run. The sets wobbled! The Daleks couldn’t get up stairs! The monsters were rubbish! The companions simply stood around and screamed! Ignoring these comments is something you simply learn to do when faced with them, and I think you’ve truly graduated to a certain type of person when you choose to not bother correcting people, but simply smile and nod (while, of course, knowing that they’re completely wrong and quite possibly an idiot).

And yet, everything in this episode seems determined to back up many of the well-worn cliché´s. Leela doesn’t have to stand around screaming, but it’s set in a stereotypical ‘space’ set, the guest cast run around with silly face make-up on, the monster is less-than-impressive, and there’s a few effects that simply don’t work. We’re even back to the old-style TARDIS console room from this story onwards, but it’s not given anything near the space it used to have, and seems to look tatty and cramped already - just a few weeks after it returned to the programme at the start of this story.

I don’t think we’ve had any other single episode which so fulfils the idea of ‘that’s what Doctor Who is like’, and I’m not sure if that’s because this is just a very… typical episode. There’s nothing very surprising or new in here (unlike yesterday’s episode which at least had the good grace to do CSO effects better than usual, or Episode One which really highlighted just how good the model work in the show can be), it’s just a lot of running around, fighting a rubbish monster. You just know that this is the episode people will have tuned in to purely by chance, and then not bothered to return the following week (which can only mean that tomorrow’s episode must be an absolute blinder - it’s typical for something like that to happen!)

I’ve always found it somewhat strange that Doctor Who does develop all these stereotypes of what it’s like, when they’re really not right at all. I’ve mentioned above that people always talk of the ‘screaming’ companions from the old days, but we’ve still not really hit that. Oh, sure, you get it now and then - but it’s always used to great effect. It makes an impact because you’re not used to seeing the Doctor’s friends that scared. I know that by the time we hit Mel it’s likely to have become more prominent, but it’s really not true of any companion from the fourteen years of the show I’ve already watched through.

This idea of ‘stereotypical’ Doctor Who has always been around, though. Watching the ‘Tomorrow’s Times’ feature (a summery of contemporary press reaction to the series) on the DVD for The Face of Evil a few weeks ago, I was surprised by a comment made by one reporter during Romana’s time on the programme:

“No matter what time the stories are set in, or what new girl is chosen to be the Doctor’s accomplice, one thing remains constant. The girls are always half-naked. And they are always being chased.”

It just didn’t ring true to me. Janet Fielding often tells the story that she was made very aware of the fact she was on screen to keep the dads watching, but really only Leela up to this point could fulfil the ‘half-naked’ description. Jo Grant liked to wear her mini-skirts, but still! It feels especially odd coming late in the Tom Baker era, because I’ve never really thought of either incarnation of Romana as being particularly under-dressed.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that there’s a commonly held perception of what Doctor Who is like. There was a time when it’s what people thought all Doctor Who was like, whereas these days it’s shifted to be what the old series was like, before they had the money, and the computers, and that David Tennant. Often, this perception is completely wrong, or at least only formed from half-truths. Sometimes, though, you get an episode like The Invisible Enemy Episode Four, which just seems to be exactly what outsiders expect the series to be like… and that leaves me a bit cold! 

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

Day 481: The Invisible Enemy, Episode Three

Dear diary,

I genuinely love it when Doctor Who can still really surprise me. I’ve watched an episode every single day for well over a year now, and I’ve watched as the programme’s style has developed from a police box in a junk yard, via Moonbases and Ice Ages, through the Doctor’s exile on Earth and back out into the stars. I’ve watched as it makes progressive leaps forward with effects work - improving the model shots and monster costumes as they go. But because I’ve got a fairly good overview of the show’s history from even before starting on this journey, there’s various things that I expect to find. I know that Season Fifteen is hit by money troubles, and I know that one of the complaints often levelled against it is that it looks so cheap. I also know from bitter experience through the Pertwee years that CSO effects tend to not be so great on the budget Doctor Who can give to them.

So imagine how much I sit and smile to myself (genuinely, a big, broad smile right across my face, sat alone in a room watching a 30-something-year-old piece of television really do something that leaves me not only a little bit impressed, but actually floored by the effects. I’m talking about the vast use of CSO during this episode to help give a kind of scale to the Doctor’s brain. He and Leela make their way down various neural pathways (I’ll ignore the various science anomalies this causes!) in shots CSO’d onto (presumably) models… and it looks really good. Someone told me recently that I should be weary of the effects in this one - I’ll come to that in a minute - but I’m really impressed by this. Mostly, I’m in awe of the way it works around their hair, as that’s usually a tricky area (Heck, the last story showed that up whenever the Doctor stood in the lamp room in the lighthouse).

Of course, this being Doctor Who, there has to be something along to snap you out of it before you have a chance to get too involved with how good things are looking. There’s several instances in this episode where things don’t quite work out as well as I’d like them to, and coming in an episode that’s been impressing me so much, they tend to stick out more than they otherwise might. There’s obviously the shrimp creature - this is the focus of most warnings about the story - but I think I’ll come to that tomorrow. I can’t really bare to think about it too much right now, and I’ve got a whole 25-or-so minutes in its company to look forward to yet.

For me, the biggest let down is K9’s gun. It should be great - not only does this new companion (not that he is one yet) have that ‘cute robot’ element that became so popular in the late 70s, but he’s got a weapon in his nose. He can team up with the warrior Leela and hold a battle in the corridor of the hospital to give the Doctor more time. It should be impressive when he blasts a chunk out of the wall to give them a barrier to shield themselves with… but you can clearly see where the set is supposed to break away before they’ve even decided what to do with it. Then you’ve got him being possessed by the virus and having to attack his new friend… but his gun completely misses and Leela drops to the floor much too early anyway. It just sort of feels a bit botched, and really takes away from the whole drama for me.

This particular episode isn’t much helped by a fault on the DVD, which causes the end scenes to skip about a little bit - I’d forgotten about this error, and it did leave me a bit confused for a moment while I tried to piece together exactly what had happened. Going back and watching it again didn’t really make it much clearer, though, so maybe it would have been a bit of a shame in any case. So yes - I think The Invisible Enemy is one of those frustrating stories that gets so much very very right, but then an equal amount very, very wrong. The final episode could end up being the decider for me, and with a giant shrimp about to burst out of the cloning chamber, I’m not holding out much hope…

…Actually… While I’m thinking about it. They’ve got a cloning chamber. They’re all worrying that Leela and K9 won’t be able to hold off their attackers for very long. Just clone them! We’ve already got one clone Leela running around inside the Doctor’s skull, so clone another ten of her to fight in the corridor! And assuming you can clone a robot dog, get a whole army of K9’s out there to help defend yourselves, too! I thought it was a bit odd in yesterday’s episode when Marinus claims that there’s no real use in cloning - but even if they do only have a lifespan of ten minutes or so, they’d come in handy as an extra line of defence during this situation, surely?

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

Day 480: The Invisible Enemy, Episode Two

Dear diary,

This episode has brought me closer to what I’ve always imagined The Invisible Enemy to be like… but it’s not half as bad as I was expecting. The design of the Bi-Al Foundation is just as tacky and rubbish as I was expecting it to be, but that kind of works for it. It suits the setting, and I think the fact that I’m still being pleasantly surprised by the story is helping me to over-look things which I’d normally find off-putting.

And, of course, we’ve finally got the first appearance of K9! It’s funny, looking at this story, thinking that he may have only appeared in this one single tale, and never again. It doesn’t feel right, somehow - possibly because I know what a big part of Doctor Who lore he’s destined to become over the next thirty-odd years. I’ve always found him to be a bit divisive among fandom - you seem to think he’s either one of the best ideas from this period of the programme’s history, or the worst. I don’t have enough knowledge of his appearances over the next few seasons to really give an opinion yet, though, so I’m keen to see how I find his addition to the TARDIS crew.

For now, though, I’m really rather liking him. It seems somewhat fitting that his very first line in the show is ‘Affirmative, Master’, considering it’s the phrase that will come to be most associated with him. It’s also great to see him being paired off with Leela so early on, considering that this particular model of the dog will be departing with he at the end of the season. I wonder if he’s going to be the perfect addition to Leela’s character to see us through the next few stories, watching her evolve before leaving? She’s very much left to her own devices here, with the Doctor spending large chunks of the episode in a self-induced coma, but as ever she’s on fine form. I’m not even going to bother drawing attention to the things I’ve enjoyed from her today - just take it as read that I’ve loved every minute she’s spent on the screen!

As for the story itself… I have to confess that I don’t really know why I’m enjoying it so much. I really just can’t get my head around it! There’s not an awful lot to it (today’s episode essentially consists of the Doctor being taken to hospital, and creating a clone while Leela fights off some standard-issue ‘men with guns’ in the corridor), but I’m really caught up in the events. I think I’m slightly put off by the fact that all this feels simply like build up to the main event: I’ve known for years that this is the story in which the Doctor and his companion get injected into his brain (although I didn’t realise that it was clones of the pair who underwent this process - I’ve spent years wondering how the Doctor was able to be shrub and placed in his own body…), and so everything that’s happened up to now has been almost filler to me.

I’m hoping, now, that following the clones inside the Doctor’s head means that we get yet another change of setting. The fact that Episodes One and Two seem to be set in such vastly different locations has really helped to make the whole story feel a bit more interesting than it really has any right to be, and if we’re switching somewhere new again for Episode Three, then it may help to stop the boredom from setting in. Otherwise, The Invisible Enemy could be in danger of becoming just a generic ‘space’ yarn…

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

Day 479: The Invisible Enemy, Episode One

Dear diary,

Thing I’ve always thought I’d known about The Invisible Enemy Number One - It’s K9’s debut! Hooray! Obviously, it’s a story in which he’s completely central to the plot.

Thing I’ve always thought I’d known about The Invisible Enemy Number Two - It’s set in a fairly bland-looking white sterile, typically ‘space’ environment for the most part, with an excursion into the Doctor’s brain, just to break things up a bit.

Thing I’ve always thought I’d known about The Invisible Enemy Number Three - It’s not very good, by most accounts.

Based on this first episode alone, I seem to have been wrong on all three of those counts. For a start, K9 doesn’t even turn up in this episode. I assume he’ll be along later on in the story. This does slightly make me worry, mind. Like Jamie or Nyssa, K9 was made a companion after work had begun on the story. It’s not a tale written specifically to introduce him. I worry, though, that since he’s not in at least a quarter of the story, he may turn up, trundle around a bit, then hop aboard the TARDIS all fairly arbitrarily. I’ll hold back on that thought for now, and muse on that some more once he’s actually arrived on the scene.

That’s the only downside to being wrong about this story, though, because what we’re given here in these first 25 minutes is far more interesting than I was expecting. This was one of those stories which I entered into with a slightly bored feeling. I try to keep an open mind when entering into any new story during this marathon, but I’ve spent years hearing that this is… well… not the best story every produced. Plenty of images from the recording leave me with that worry, too, as it seems to be something of a let down in the set-design department - lots of plain, boring, space design, and lacking in the style or charm of something like Nerva.

What we get here is very different - it’s still fairly typical as ‘futuristic’ designs go, but it’s nicely lit and feels quite lived in. There’s something almost Pertwee-esque about the space ship at the beginning, and I’m rather taken with the whole thing. And then we’ve got those model shots.

I’ve learned since watching that this story had a higher budget for the model work than any story before it - and that really shows on screen. From the shots of the spaceship in the asteroid field, to being ensnared by the… whatever-it-is in space, coming in to land, and then watching the ship defend into the moon… Yeah, this is some very impressive work. I’ve been full of praise for Doctor Who’s model work for ages, now, but it’s always lovely when something can come along to really make you sit up and take notice. I said during The Robots of Death that they’d need to start upping their game to keep me noticing these things, and it looks like they’ve really done that!

The other thing that I need to praise during every story is the character of Leela. Are you sick of hearing it yet? I’m sorry, but she’s brilliant! Even here, in her fifth story, she’s still very true to the original concept - and that really impresses me. Watching her learn to write is fun enough, but it’s bringing in that hunter sense, that she simply knows something is wrong, which really works for me. She’s only around for the rest of the season, so you’ll not have to hear me bang on about her for too much longer - she really is the best thing about the programme at the moment, though, and I’m glad that they’re setting her in some really great stories. 

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

Day 478: Horror of Fang Rock, Episode Four

Dear diary,

There’s something really quite unsettling about just how carefree the Doctor and Leela appear as they make their way back to the TARDIS here. Considering that they’ve just finished an adventure in which everyone else in the story dies. That’s not me being over dramatic, either, everyone dies. All the guest cast. The alien. Even other members of the alien’s race - who only turn up in the last half of this final episode - all get slaughtered. It’s a very bloodthirsty story… and it really works all the better for it. In many ways, this is a hugely brave choice for an opening serial: not just because it’s a fairly downbeat way of introducing the new run, but because we’re supposed to be at the dawn of a new era for Doctor Who, with a new producer who has been specifically asked to tone down the violence. Oh.

All of this is just my way of darting around simply saying again how much I’ve enjoyed this story. It’s not perfect, though I’d struggle to pick out any specific things that I’ve failed to enjoy, and I dare say that one of the biggest strengths and the biggest weaknesses of the tale is just how much it feels like something from the last season. It’s everything that Season Fourteen did well, being done very well, but I’ve come to expect that from the programme now. I want to see something new, and watch the TARDIS start to venture out and tread new ground in the universe.

Mostly, I think I’m just pleased to see that my opinion on the story as a whole has changed since the last time I watched it. That’s one of the funny things that I find with Doctor Who (and I’m hoping other people get this too, and it’s not just be being a little odd!) - there’s so much of it, I sort of lose track sometimes about which ones I like and which ones I don’t. Just recently, I was talking to a friend about one of the Hartnell stories and telling them how I had a strange urge to watch it again because I’d enjoyed it so much the first time around. He then proceeded to point out that - actually - I’d rated that one fairly low, and hadn’t found all that much to love in there.

It’s one of the best things about Doctor Who, too. I genuinely think that I could pop in An Unearthly Child the day after I finish this marathon and do it all again: one episode a day, every singe day, writing down my thoughts and scoring out of ten every time… and you’d end up with different ratings to what I’ve given it in this run though. Part of that will be because I know what to expect, so maybe I’ll be rating fairly (or, conversely, I could be rating harsher!), but some will simply be down to the way I feel on the day and seeing the story with a different frame of mind.

I think that may be why Doctor Who never seems to get old for me. 

Manufacturer: Big Finish Productions

Written By: Nicholas Briggs

RRP: £10.99 (CD) / £8.99 (Download)

Release Date: April 2014

Reviewed by: Matthew Davis for Doctor Who Online

Review Posted: 23rd April 2014

The TARDIS lands in the cargo hold of luxury space cruiser the Moray Rose. The crew and passengers are missing. The agents of Inter-Galaxy Insurance are determined to find out what’s happened and the shadowy Interplanetary Police Inspector Efendi is showing a very particular interest.

Caught up in all this, the Doctor and Leela find themselves facing a horde of metal mantis-like aliens. But throughout it all, Leela is haunted by terrible nightmares and the dawning realization that everything she knows about her life is a lie.

* * *
The Master, that dastardly arch nemesis of our favourite Time Lord returns in the latest release of Season Three of The Fourth Doctor Adventures. 

The Evil One is essentially and unashamedly an elaborate revenge tale. Using the companion as his weapon to kill The Doctor is a believable course of action for The Master, and it develops at a rather cracking pace. Supporting characters are introduced and discarded rather quickly, but the focus always remains on the brain washed Leela hunting The Doctor.

A considerable atmosphere of foreboding is introduced very early on as Leela is plagued by strange dreams, false memories and hallucinations. It pays off in a clever little cliff-hanger that pays homage to Leela’s first television story The Face of Evil. Prior knowledge of that story is not necessarily required to listen to The Evil One, but it certainly makes a lot of the references more enjoyable.

The great revelation of this story is the exploration of some of Leela’s past.

The final scene between The Doctor and Leela is beautifully written and played to perfection by the leads. Tom Baker and Louise Jameson really do cement their Doctor/Companion relationship with this scene. The joy of their reunion since the start of The Fourth Doctor Adventures is watching how gradually the writers are opening up the character’s relationship and here Briggs really expands it with wonderful results.

Geoffrey Beevers is a deliciously evil as The Master, refining his very silky interpretation of the character with each of his Big Finish appearances. His Master is very well suited to Baker’s Doctor, just as Delgado was to Pertwee and Ainley to Davison.

The supporting cast is made up of Gareth Armstrong as Arthley and Blake’s 7's very own Michael Keating as Calvert. Arthley is a thinly sketched character whereas Calvert has much more to do and has some excellent scenes with Tom Baker.

The Evil One is a great little story from Nicholas Briggs whose excellent script and tight direction make this a very enjoyable and surprisingly moving story.

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

Day 477: Horror of Fang Rock, Episode Three

Dear diary,

“The 50 Year Diary Day 477… or ‘How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Fang Rock”…

I don’t know if it’s just be being a Doctor Who fan, but I’m constantly on the edge of my seat in anticipation of disappointment at the moment. Right from the start of this story, I’ve been waiting for it all to go wrong. For the story to come crashing down around me, and to open one of these entries by bemoaning the fact that it had all seemed so promising. Actually, I think I can tell you exactly what the problem is - I discovered that the Hinchcliffe era of Who was my highest-rated on average, so there’s a voice in the back of my mind that tells me everything has to suddenly turn disastrous.

But it’s not happening! Well, not yet, anyway. Once again today, I’ve found myself completely riveted by the events unfolding on Fang Rock, and I almost don’t want to write this entry: I just want to stick on the next episode and see how it all ends. I think the story is helped by the fact that I was expecting a simple runaround. The Doctor and friends are trapped in a lighthouse with a glowing alien blob. Oh no! What we’re actually getting is a tightly-executed lesson in building tension and really hooking in a viewer. We know what the threat in the story is - we’ve had point-of-view shots since the first episode, and we’ve now seen shots of the creature on a few separate occasions - but it still doesn’t feel as though we’re really confronting the monster. Dragging out the tension, and the games being played with the creature, is making this story feel a little unnerving, and claustrophobic - and that’s exactly what Terrance Dicks wants.

All this confined threat is only ramped up by the fact that this is such a bloodthirsty story. We’d lost one of the lighthouse men shortly into the First episode, and now we’ve not only lost Reuben, but discovered that he’s been dead for a while, and it’s a walking corpse we’ve seen wandering around acting strange. It’s not a particularly uncommon theme in this type of literature - a dead person being possessed to continue on in some mission - but what makes me uncomfortable about this particular example is the way the Doctor announces it: finding the man’s body and simply commenting that he’s in a state of rigamortis, and has been dead for some time. I think it’s because it suddenly makes it very real that this man is dead - usually n Doctor Who, we move on too quickly from the dead bodies for things like this to be an issue.

We’ve also lost Lord Palmerdale now, which isn’t a great surprise. The man was too thoroughly vile to live past the end of this story. I’m starting to wonder if any of our characters are going to make it out alive, though. Adelaide is starting to grate on me and become ruder and ruder to the people we care about (in this case, the Doctor, Leela, and VInce), while we’re getting more and more hints about Skinsale’s dark deeds. I can’t decide if I want to know the information that would ruin the man, or if I’d prefer to leave it unsaid. My current guess is that maybe - only maybe - Vince could make it out alive. The legend of the beast says that two of the three keepers died, while the other lost his mind… and Vince is the only one of the trio left alive at this point…

Despite all this darkness, there’s an awful lot of humour to be found in the story still. Palmerdale was a key source of laughs in yesterday’s episode, but much of that is gone for the final minutes of his life here. Instead, it’s Leela who once again lights up the screen for me. I love her slapping Adelaide (I think I may ever have cheered a little…), and her assertion to the Doctor that she’s only a savage being met by his response - ‘come along, savage!’ I think it’s moments like these which may save this story from becoming completely overtaken by the darkness…