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.
