Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day Ninety-Six: Horse of Destruction (The Myth Makers, Episode Four)
Dear diary,
Can we please have a petition to change this episode's title back to Is there a Doctor in the Horse?, as Donald Cotton originally suggested? I'm willing to mount quite an aggressive campaign in favour of this.
Do you know, I'd completely forgotten about Katarina. I knew that this was Vicki's final episode. I knew that Katarina existed. And yet I'd not managed to put two and two together to remember that she was actually going to turn up in this story.
It's odd, considering how much time I spent yesterday praising the amount of care and attention given to the departure of companions in these early days, to then be confronted with a new addition to the TARDIS who simply turns up in the last episode, and doesn't even play a vital role until the very last scene! If anything, she feels like a temporary stop-gap companion, but that's possibly because I've always known her to be just that - but there'll be plenty of time to discuss Katarina's companion status during the next story, I'm sure.
Elsewhere, the departure of Vicki is still handled magnificently, right until the end. As I've said, I know that this is Vicki's last episode, but when we hear the TARDIS dematerialise, having seen the Doctor and Vicki venture inside it towards the end… it threw me. I wondered if I'd understood the terms of Vicki's departure wrongly for all these years, and that we might be getting what you might call a Time-Flight situation developing.
But when we cut from that to Trolius injured out on the plains, calling for his newfound love as the city burns before him, and Vicki appears to him, having opted to remain behind so that he wouldn't think she'd misled him… Oh, of course it's well handled. It's actually incredibly moving in a way that I wasn't expecting it to be, and the appearance of Trolius' cousin serves to suggest that there's a real future for Vicki here, in the same way that David's outstretched hand and Ian and Barbara laughing on a bus did for them.
Elsewhere, this is quite a dark episode, especially following the humour that I'd grown used to from the last few day's entries to the diary. The latter half of the episode basically consists of the city burning while the Trojans are massacred by the Greeks. Having experienced this entire story via the narrated soundtrack, I had grown used to the feel of listening to Doctor Who as audio again, and there's not much left to the imagination in this way.
It's perhaps another reason to be pleased that I'm experiencing the story in this way - there's a moment when Peter Purves' narration describes the Greeks opening the gates of the city, and a whole army flooding in to win the war. On screen, I can imagine this being a few extras running in, swords aloft. In my mind, it could almost look like a scene from Lord of the Rings. I do usually picture things as looking more-or-less the way I think they would have done on screen (that's the result of moving through the series at this pace and in this way!), but the sound design here is too good to not suggest more.
On the whole, The Myth Makers has been an odd one. It's moved from something that didn't really appeal to me, to being funny, dramatic and moving to varying degrees throughout it's last three parts. This is the first time in the marathon that I've encountered one of those stories that I really know little about - aside from the departure of Vicki - and so it's a very interesting time for me.
Hopefully, that'll be continuing into the next story. While I know it's the single longest story from the 1960s, features the Daleks and has a Christmas episode hovering around in the middle, I don't really know all that much about The Daleks' Master Plan. And so we move into what I'm likely to be calling Dalek Fortnight…
Next Episode: The Nightmare Begins
Next Episode: The Nightmare Begins 
