Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 515: The Androids of Tara, Episode Three
Dear diary,
Sometimes, often during ‘Episode Three’, Doctor Who stories have to resort to padding things out a little bit, just to stretch the story over to the next week. I think today must feature one of the most blatant examples of this that I can remember in the series for a very long time. Romana has come back in to contact with the Key segment again, and soon manages to escape the castle on horseback. She meets up with the Doctor, and they flee together… only for her to be recaptured and returned to the castle mere minutes later. This is the one thing which took me out of the story a little bit here, because Romana’s escape seems to have only been useful for the sake of giving us a cliffhanger into the next episode!
Still, that’s a relatively minor quibble in the grand scheme of things, and I have to admit that I’ve really enjoyed today’s episode again. Despite The Pirate Planet being the story of this season written by the ‘comedy’ writer, I’m finding the humour in David Fisher’s two scripts much more in my own taste than anything that Adams gave us. I commented on it to some extent during The Stones of Blood, but I’m really noticing it in this story - and especially in today’s episode. It’s filled with amusing mounts, chief among them possibly the Doctor emerging into an ambush for the second time simply to call the Count a liar for promising not to attack! There’s also the Doctor’s comments on the way they always want you to go alone when you’re walking into a trap, and his musing that it would have been ‘fun’ to hear whatever reason Lamia may have cooked up to explain her arriving so early for their planned meeting: I’m enjoying lots of the little lines like these.
It’s also having an unexpected side effect in that I’m really enjoying Tom Baker in this story. I’ve complained a few times over the last season-and-a-half or so that Baker is getting somewhat too big for his boots in the role, not taking things as seriously as he perhaps should, and sending other things up way beyond what’s probably acceptable. Here, though, he seems to be pitching his performance just right, and it’s the most I’ve enjoyed watching him since around Season Thirteen, I think. Even when he’s going for the comedic moments (like the aforementioned ‘liar’ incident), I’m simply laughing along with the story - it’s all really working for me. Maybe it’s simply the tone of the script, which makes it feel as though Baker’s antics fit in easier?
Then we’ve got a few moments of him attempting a more serious stance, too. It was during Planet of Evil that Baker really sold himself to me as a dramatic actor, and I think there’s small shades of that performance here. I don’t think we’ve ever had him quite as powerful and imposing as he was there, but a few of his comments towards the count at the start of today’s episode seem to be brimming under with the kind of rage I’d expect to see from David Tennant’s performances in the same role. I love that I’m finding things to enjoy in his performance again, because it feels as though I’ve been giving him a lot of criticism of late.
