Review [DW]: “The King’s Demons”

20×6. The King’s Demons
Writer: Terence Dudley
Director: Tony Virgo
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner

Synopsis: The TARDIS arrives in 13th century England, where the crew are initially mistaken as demons and the Master is using a robot named Kamelion to impersonate King John and prevent the signature of the Magna Carta, so as to undermine the future of British democracy and further his plans for universal domination.

Review: Perhaps the most telling statement about “The King’s Demons” is that I can barely think of anything to say about it as a reviewer. About the only points worth comment, I’d say, are that (1) Turlough’s somewhat contrary nature is reinforced by the fact that he still dislikes Earth and is less than pleased to end up there again; (2) the crew get mistaken as demons because they appear to possess supernatural powers to a 13th century mind; and (3) the Fifth Doctor continues to be fallible when it comes to keeping his companions safe (in this case it’s Turlough who spends a while locked up before the Doctor and Tegan find an opportunity to do anything about it). Past that…well, it’s not exactly bad, but it’s hardly anything we haven’t seen before: once again, we have the standard-issue BBC medieval period piece (of which I’ve never been a fan), once again one of the TARDIS crew is captured and endangered, and once again the Master is trying to take over the universe. (And, as others have pointed out, surely undermining British democracy – to which the Magna Carta was not that important in the first place – could be but a tiny sliver of what he’d have to do if that’s really his goal.) The addition of Kamelion to the TARDIS crew has potential, but sadly it would end up largely wasted.

While the new Doctor Who series has found success with shorter stories, the two-parters in the original series have yet to produce anything close to a classic, and I think the problem is that they stick to the slower pace and style typical of the longer serials. The result is not so much a more efficient brand of storytelling as simply a slighter one, with the script managing to do little beyond check off the necessary boxes to get to the end.

Rating: ** (out of four)

Review [DW]: “Enlightenment”

20×5. Enlightenment
Writer: Barbara Clegg
Director: Fiona Cumming
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner

Synopsis: The White Guardian warns the Doctor of a strange race taking place between several groups of “Eternals” seeking a prize known as the Enlightenment, while the Black Guardian continues to pressure Turlough and plot to kill the Doctor.

Review: Most of the Davison era has been either in the average-to-pretty-good range or has fallen under the umbrella of “creative but flawed.” Unfortunately, “Enlightenment” proves to be the latest example of the latter. In theory, the concept of the Eternals has some promise: they are powerful immortal beings who sense something empty about their existence, they seem to welcome danger if only to break up the monotony (since they don’t actually die but are just “transferred”), and they find themselves drawn to mortals (or “Ephemerals,” as they put it) despite being unable to understand us. But only the Edwardian crew come across with the right air of aloofness and the appropriately detached reactions to the TARDIS crew and the humans on board their ship. Their main rival, Captain Wrack, is a Cackling Villain stereotype who really doesn’t belong here.

The first two episodes, before Wrack becomes more central to the proceedings, are strong enough, with what seems like an effective mystery for first-time viewers – at first, the Doctor and his companions seem to be on Earth, with the reason for the human crew’s lapses in memory left unclear, building to the revelation that they are actually in space. Turlough also continues to add an element of unpredictability through a more amoral character than we’re used to seeing from companions. Although the story charts his increasing resistance to the Black Guardian, culminating in his refusal to kill the Doctor at the end, he is in fact willing to betray the human crew by revealing their discontent to the Eternals. It’s less clear whether his attempt to ingratiate himself to Wrack by claiming that he simply wants to be on the winning side is entirely an act or if he is in fact trying to keep his options open, and the script probably should have made this clearer.

As for the Guardians, it’s perhaps for the best that they did not, to the best of my memory, make another appearance in the original series after this. They were acceptable enough as background plot devices for the Key to Time trilogy, and introducing a companion who’s initially been strong-armed into the role of would-be assassin was clever. But they tend to come across as slightly hokey in this installment, and between them and the inconsistent portrayal of the Eternals, this is not a high point for portrayal of alien superbeings on Doctor Who.

Rating: *** (out of four)

Review [DW]: “Terminus”

20×4. Terminus
Writer: Steve Gallagher
Director: Mary Ridge
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner

Synopsis: Turlough’s attempted sabotage at the Black Guardian’s behest results in the TARDIS materializing on a shuttle bound for Terminus, a spacecraft where victims of Lazar’s disease are watched over by slave laborers with little apparent hope for a cure. Meanwhile, a malfunction on Terminus could result in a catastrophic explosion if the Doctor doesn’t find a way to stop it.

Review: “Terminus” plays like some sort of Mad-Lib that got mistaken for a screenwriting assignment – “Compose a 90-minute television serial using the following: potentially interesting ideas, half-baked development of said ideas, drawn-out scenes of people wandering around and chasing each other on a spaceship, and a threat to the entire universe.”

If there’s one thing that distinguishes “Terminus,” it’s perhaps the rather grim situation that the Doctor and his companions are forced to confront. Neither the Lazar victims (who suffer from a disease that resembles leprosy) nor the enslaved caretakers left at the mercy of a greedy corporation seem to have much hope of anything changing for the better. The Lazar victims are mostly just waiting to die, placing little faith in the promise of a cure, and the slaves don’t supply them with any real reason to think otherwise and are dependent on hydromel supplies from the company for their own survival. The cure itself is administered by the Garm, a strange creature that initially seems as though it may be a threat, but in fact has been doing its best to cure the plague victims and is perfectly capable of communicating with the other characters. Even at the end of the serial, it’s not as if everything is resolved perfectly. In fact, the reason Nyssa decides to stay behind is that she correctly perceives that it will take a lot of work to get Terminus running as well as it could and should, and she wants to be a part of that effort.

This is somewhat darker material than typical Doctor Who fare, and while it makes for a more challenging setup, it leaves some pretty glaring questions unanswered. In general, I found it hard to understand how this situation arose in the first place. Where did the Garm come from and who put it in charge of administering the cure? If the cure actually works more often than not, why does one of the slaves tell Nyssa that nobody ever comes back from meeting the Garm – has it been secretly arranging to transport them off the ship? Then there’s the issue of the entire universe being threatened. Apparently Terminus used to be a time-ship, and the pilot time-jumped the ship forward just after dumping fuel that resulted in a massive explosion, with the explosion itself becoming the Big Bang – and now a similar explosion is impending if the Doctor can’t stop it, causing another Big Bang and wiping out the current universe. I won’t bother quibbling with the science here, but this is presented in an oddly perfunctory manner. If you’re not only going to reveal the origin of the universe but threaten its complete destruction within the space of 90 minutes, you ought to build up to it convincingly, not relegate it to a subplot in between scenes of people running around and hiding in air vents.

The beginnings of a good story are present in “Terminus,” but too many aspects of the premise are left unexplained, and none of the guest characters emerge as particularly interesting or compelling. As has been the case in a number of serials since the show adopted a new style under John Nathan-Turner in Season 18, it feels like the script is taking on too many things at once and ultimately doing justice to none of them.

Other notes:

– Tegan and Turlough do in fact spend the majority of the serial running around and hiding in air vents, to the point that the Doctor doesn’t even realize until close to the end that they’d left the TARDIS at all.

– That said, their conflict at the beginning – where Turlough proves himself capable of lying and manipulating to cover his tracks – is one of the more interesting scenes. Although Turlough clearly doesn’t want to go through with killing the Doctor, he’s definitely more self-centered and less moral than your typical companion. While this obviously makes him less likeable, it does introduce an effective element of unpredictability into the series.

– I commented in my review of “Mawdryn Undead” that it was unclear whether the other characters realized that Turlough is an alien, but it’s evident from the dialogue that they’re aware of it at this point.

Rating: ** (out of four)

Review [DW]: “Mawdryn Undead”

20×3. Mawdryn Undead
Writer: Peter Grimwade
Director: Peter Moffatt
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner

Synopsis: While the Black Guardian attempts to manipulate the alien schoolboy-impostor Turlough into killing the Doctor, the TARDIS crew become embroiled in a crisis involving two separate time periods, a group of alien criminals whose theft of Gallifreyan technology has backfired and left them in a state of eternal mutation, and retired Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, now teaching mathematics at a local school and initially unable to remember the Doctor.

Review: “Mawdryn Undead” is probably the best serial yet of the Davison era, weaving together a labyrinthine but logical time travel plot with the right mix of suspense, solid characterization, and occasional humor. While it has its missteps, this is a story that proves sufficiently engaging that most viewers will enjoy the ride even though it takes a few questionable turns.

The Brigadier is back for the first time since “Terror of the Zygons,” and while it’s a bit unusual to see him outside of a UNIT story, Doctor Who could certainly do worse than to drop in on his post-military career. He may no longer be commanding a clandestine international organization, but his intelligence and take-charge manner are on display in both timelines, and the Doctor is clearly pleased to see him, greeting him with an exuberant, “Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart!” Giving him partial amnesia could have backfired, if only because it’s such a worn-out plot device in fiction. Here, however, it works for a couple of reasons: (1) it doesn’t linger for very long, with the Doctor helping him recover his memories shortly after encountering him at the school; and (2) it ties into the serial’s twisting plot, with his younger and older selves accidentally crossing paths towards the end and thus presumably inducing his younger self’s memory loss due to shock.

“Mawdryn Undead” also manages to work without a clear villain driving most of the story – the Black Guardian shows up, but that’s as much a pretext for introducing Turlough as anything else. Instead, what we have are competing priorities and viewpoints. Mawdryn and his colleagues on the ship are not trying to regain the power they once had, or acquire a mutation-free form of immortality, or exploit Earth – rather, they want to be allowed to die a natural death. Their methods are certainly manipulative and dishonest at times, but for the most part, they don’t deliberately set out to harm anyone else. Turlough, meanwhile, is introduced as an intelligent but somewhat amoral character: he’s self-centered, certainly, and initially willing to kill the Doctor if it will get him off of Earth (which he claims to hate), but he starts to have second thoughts when he realizes that the Black Guardian was lying when he claimed that the Doctor was some sort of evil and dangerous person. And the Brigadier, for that matter, made his mark as an ally of the Doctor who isn’t always on the same page with him, and we see some of tht here too. His younger self rather chauvinistically suggests that the “girls” (Nyssa and Tegan) let him handle things, at which they rightly bristle, and one gets the sense that he is among the more traditionally-minded, disciplinarian teachers at the school. There is, however, one scene in which he threatens Mawdryn that seems a bit over the top – maybe it was a bluff, but even so, it felt like it might have been thrown in to create context for Mawdryn’s subsequent expository dialogue. Tegan and Nyssa, meanwhile, are at first unsure whether to believe Mawdryn’s ruse of pretending to be the Doctor’s latest regeneration after a supposed transmat capsule accident, not realizing that they have traveled back to 1977.

A story like “Mawdryn Undead” is naturally going to play a bit fast and loose with science, and ironically the final episode offers clear examples of both the right way and the wrong way to do this. It turns out that the only way to free Mawdryn and his colleagues from their state of immortal mutation is for the Doctor to interface with the equipment on their ship in a way that will use up his remaining eight regenerations. He actually refuses at first, agreeing only after it emerges that Tegan and Nyssa have somehow been “infected” by the condition that afflicts Mawdryn and the others and now cannot leave the ship. All this is probably about 1% “sci” and 99% “fi,” and the script never acknowledges the fact that, with Tegan and Nyssa in the equation, the procedure ought to cost the Doctor ten regenerations (which he doesn’t have) rather than eight. And yet it works because it requires the Doctor to make a meaningful choice and demonstrate just how much he is willing to sacrifice, and for whom. The one aspect of this that could have been improved would have been to elaborate on exactly why the Doctor refuses until Tegan and Nyssa are endangered. I can think of several reasons why he might – their dishonest and deceptive methods, the fact that their own crimes are what caused their predicament, a general distrust of anyone who tries to manipulate nature to achieve immortality – but it’s never spelled out, and for a character who does tend to be relatively selfless, it could have used some explanation.

While I wouldn’t have expected the serial to end with the Doctor actually losing the ability to regenerate, the script gets him out of this predicament with a bit of a cheat. After a series of near-misses between the two Brigadiers, they wind up in the control room together just as the procedure is about to take place. The older Brigadier, despite having been warned by the Doctor that they must prevent this from happening, reaches out to touch the h nd of his bewildered younger self, causing some sort of energy discharge that “shorts out the time differential” and cures Mawdryn and the others without the Doctor having to lose any regenerations. What had been a character-driven narrative in which the Doctor’s choice is the critical turning point becomes a technobabble-driven narrative in which the Doctor’s choice is rendered irrelevant by what amounts to dumb luck.

I object to this partly there has been an awful lot of this kind of plotting in recent serials, such as Nyssa just happening to be the spitting image of a human woman in the 1920s in “Black Orchid,” the Cybermen’s technology accidentally causing a ship to travel 65 million years back in time in “Earthshock,” pretty much the entire plot of “Time-Flight,” and the labored justification for the use of Amsterdam as Omega’s headquarters in “Arc of Infinity.” But perhaps more to the point, there could have been a much better (and still character-driven) ending even within the confines of this concept. If the two Brigadiers meeting really would have this effect, why not have the Doctor and/or Mawdryn deduce this and then let the Brigadier make the tough choice, accepting that he’ll suffer six years of partial amnesia in order to spare his friend an even greater sacrifice? I do think the Brigadier would do this, especially since he would know that he’ll eventually recover, and it would preserve what I did like about the ending, which was how it tied the Brigadier’s memory loss into the other intersections of the two timelines.

Other notes:

– Tegan seems the most skeptical of Mawdryn’s claim to be the Doctor, whereas Nyssa and the younger Brigadier are more open to the possibility. Perhaps they’re just more used to thinking outside the box given their past experiences (Nyssa as an alien who left her homeworld and the Brigadier as a UNIT veteran)?

– I’m not a believer in assisted suicide, and at times I was a bit uncomfortable as I wondered if the script meant to draw any parallels to that issue. On the other hand, Mawdryn and his colleagues have what might be considered the exact opposite of a terminal illness (since they can’t die), and ended up in this condition because they *weren’t* willing to let nature take its course.

– One thing that was left unclear to me was whether anyone – the Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa, or the Brigadier – became aware at any point that Turlough is an alien. He clearly demonstrates more knowledge of the technology at work than a British teenager would logically have, but it’s never addressed in the dialogue.

Rating: *** (out of four)

Review [DW]: “Snakedance”

20×2. Snakedance
Writer: Christopher Bailey
Director: Fiona Cumming
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner

Synopsis: The Mara, having maintained a hidden presence within Tegan’s mind, begins to take control of her again, diverting the TARDIS to its original homeworld of Manussa, where it plans to use the legendary Great Crystal to effect its return. The Doctor and Nyssa have to contend not only with the Mara’s manipulations but with the skepticism of the local populace, many of whom now regard the Mara as a myth and are preparing a festival celebrating the story of its banishment.

Review: If “Kinda” straddled the line between science fiction and fantasy, “Snakedance” pretty much leaps across it. While there are traces of conventional Doctor Who pseudoscience (the Doctor invents a gadget to try to block the Mara from interacting with Tegan, and there’s a line positing the importance of the Great Crystal’s molecular structure), the Mara’s plan is essentially the performance of a magic ritual. The Mara itself also gets more of a backstory, having been created out of the negative emotions of a group of people who made an ill-advised attempt to harness the Great Crystal’s power hundreds of years ago. The Doctor defeats the Mara at the end not by using any sort of technology, but by finding the “still point” within himself and countering the negative psychic energy of the Mara, as advised by the Manussan ascetic Dojjen. This ending, incidentally, transformed a story that seemed like it might be out of place on Doctor Who into one that might *only* work on Doctor Who. The meeting with Dojjen, in which he and the Doctor communicate telepathically, is the most memorable scene in the serial, but the idea of the protagonist suddenly being able to understand all this and find his or her “still point” when there are just minutes left might seem like a stretch on most television shows. When the protagonist is the Doctor, however, I actually have no trouble buying into this idea.

Manussa doesn’t rank among the most interesting alien societies that we’ve seen on Doctor Who, but I did appreciate that the Doctor’s confict with the locals arises not because they mistakenly think he’s behind whatever evil scheme is under way, but because they don’t believe there’s an evil scheme at all. The Mara is apparently now regarded by the Manussan establishment as a myth, and those who still believe in it are seen as crackpots: Dojjen has been exiled, and the Doctor is seen more as a disruptive nuisance than anything else when he tries to warn everyone what’s happening. The Mara is able to operate partly by appealing to the vanity of Ambril, Manussa’s Director of Historical Research who sniffs at the Doctor’s lack of academic credentials and who is persuaded to retrieve the Great Crystal with the promise of getting credit for an archaeological discovery.

While the Davison era had yet to produce an absolute clunker (though “Time-Flight” perhaps came close), it’s hovered mostly in the average-to-pretty good range so far. “Snakedance” does take some chances by venturing further into mysticism and the supernatural than is typical for Doctor Who, but it also just barely gets away with it, and neither the underlying concepts nor the details of plot and characterization are strong enough to make it a top-notch serial.

Rating: *** (out of four)

Review [DW]: “Arc of Infinity”

20×1. Arc of Infinity
Writer: Johnny Byrne
Director: Ron Jones
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner

Synopsis: The insane Time Lord Omega plots his return to Gallifrey, setting up a power center underneath Amsterdam and using stolen bio-data on the Doctor to engineer the creation of a matter-based body that could exist in our universe. The Time Lords attempt to execute the Doctor to prevent Omega’s return, but Omega and his co-conspirator, the High Councillor Hedin, interfere, while Omega holds Tegan – who came to Amsterdam to meet her cousin – as a hostage to manipulate the Doctor.

Review: I’m starting to think that “less is more” might be a wise rule regarding visits to Gallifrey. While the Time Lords featured in two classic serials, “The War Games” and “The Deadly Assassin,” the former left their appearance until the very end and the latter was set up partly to illustrate that, despite the Time Lords’ power, Gallifrey could be just as corrupt and regressive as many of the other declining, aristocratic regimes seen on other alien worlds. But in “The Three Doctors,” “The Invasion of Time,” and now “Arc of Infinity,” the creative team have sometimes seemed to struggle with the sheer scope of any narrative involving such a powerful civilization.

For starters, there’s simply too much contrived plotting here. The reason for Omega using Amsterdam as a sort of headquarters is strained at best (it has something to do with the city’s below-sea-level location and some quirk of the Arc of Infinity, itself a purely fictitious concept), and Tegan apparently stumbles into the midst of this purely by coincidence. The science fiction elements underpinning the conspiracy on Gallifrey are only marginally better developed. There’s some pseudoscience invoked to explain how Omega is attempting to form a “bond” to the Doctor, why the Time Lords think killing the Doctor might be the only way to stop it, and how Omega and Hedin interrupt the execution while making it appear as if the Doctor has died. But it doesn’t amount to much more than a fancy way to say “because the script said so.” Meanwhile, a character is murdered at the very beginning without anyone acknowledging it until the third episode, when a line of dialogue implies that everyone knows that he’s dead. But didn’t anyone even notice him missing before that, and shouldn’t that have prompted an investigation of its own by the time the Doctor’s TARDIS is recalled to Gallifrey?

What makes this especially disappointing is that there actually could have been an interesting story here about conflict within Gallifrey’s political establishment. Some amount of contrived plotting is perhaps inevitable in a story dealing with hyperintelligent aliens and a being trying to cross over from an “antimatter universe,” and I’d be happy to just accept the premise for what it is if the characters’ reactions, and the decisions they face, were interesting and understandable. But Borusa, Thalia, and the Castellan rarely strike a pose other than cold, bureaucratic aloofness, and the Council is surprisingly slow to accept that there is a traitor within their ranks – surely they should be aware of their vulnerability after the events of the last two Gallifrey serials. Meanwhile, Hedin and Damon are introduced as friends of the Doctor even though we’ve never seen either of them before, while the Doctor’s actual allies from past Gallifrey serials are absent. Even if none of the previous actors and actresses were available, why couldn’t the producers just do what they did with Borusa in this serial and use regeneration as the pretext for recasting a second Time Lord character as well, such as Spandrell or Engin from “The Deadly Assassin”? Or why not at least show a stronger sense of regret or guilt from Borusa himself, who must feel something for his former pupil even if he thinks he can’t let it influence him as President? Instead we’re left trying to feel invested in the decisions and motivations of characters whom we mostly haven’t seen before and who don’t show much personality.

I don’t want to sound too negative about this serial, because the script does seem to engage with these issues at some level. While the fine points could have been better, the general sense of Gallifrey as a society not to be envied for its power is still present. Clearly all is not well when the Time Lords’ power can be manipulated from within to the point of threatening such a catastrophe that their leaders feel justified in executing an innocent man as a method of preventing it. Commander Maxil (played, interestingly enough, by Colin Baker) is the sort of hard-nosed authoritarian who flourishes in this sort of environment; as the Doctor points out, he may just be following orders, but he seems to find a bit of relish in them. The tragic aspect of Omega’s character also comes across more effectively here than it did in “The Three Doctors.” Hedin’s motivation for his betrayal – that Omega deserves to return to Gallifrey – nicely avoids simplistic villainy (though it would have been good to learn more about how he came into contact with Omega and decided on this course of action). Omega was originally trapped in the antimatter universe by accident and, as far as we can tell, had done nothing reckless or unethical leading up to this. It’s clear that the Doctor would have preferred to try to help Omega – just as he also would have preferred in “The Three Doctors” – if Omega weren’t so dangerously egocentric and unhinged.

A show like Doctor Who has a fine line to walk. Since the concepts in play often have little basis in realistic science and the main character is far more experienced and intelligent than anyone in the audience, we need to know what’s at stake for the characters – both literally and psychologically – even when we (and the writers) don’t entirely understand what they’re talking about. In other words, contrivances can be excused as long as the story isn’t primarily *about* the contrivances (or else you end up with another “Time-Flight”). “Arc of Infinity” gets part of the way there, but ultimately the guest cast isn’t strong enough to carry it through its more strained moments.

Other Notes:

– The absence of past Gallifrey characters is especially noticeable given that Leela is mentioned at one point. Again, I don’t know whether any consideration was given to having Louise Jamieson and/or Chris Tranchell (who played Andred in “Invasion of Time”) make a guest apperance, but it reinforces the sense that the writers are inventing new personal history for the Doctor rather than building on what we already know.

– I’m just as confused about why Tegan was left behind at the end of “Time-Flight” as I was at, well, the end of “Time-Flight.” The Doctor and Nyssa aren’t talking about going back for her when we catch up with them, but then she rejoins the crew after announcing that she’s lost her flight attendant job. So her only options are working as a flight attendant or going on an extended and frequently dangerous trip through space and time?

Rating: **1/2 (out of four)

Review [Doctor Who]: “Time-Flight”

19×7. Time-Flight
Writer: Peter Grimwade
Director: Ron Jones
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner

Synopsis: The TARDIS diverts to Heathrow Airport after encountering a spacetime anomaly, discovering that the Master has kidnapped the crew and passengers of a Concorde back to prehistoric Earth, where he is attempting to use the nucleus of an alien race known as the Xeraphim to power his TARDIS.

Review: I’ve long contended that fantasy and science fiction narratives usually need a set of rules. Since such narratives operate outside the boundaries of the real world, we need to have some sense of what exactly can and can’t happen if we’re meant to understand what’s at stake and feel invested in the characters’ choices. The biggest problem with “Time-Flight” is that it doesn’t have a clear set of rules, just a set of vague concepts about the Master’s TARDIS and the unruly collective consciousness of the Xeraphim. Once we arrive in the prehistoric Earth setting, the dialogue becomes bogged down in discussions of telepathic manifestations, quantum whatchamacallits, and temporal thingamajiggies while characters appear, disappear, and generally jump through random hoops.

Plot contrivances can be tolerable if at the service of some interesting character development or subtext, but characterization is fairly weak here as well. At one point I thought that we were getting glimpses of the fallible Doctor that has sometimes surfaced since Davison took on the role, in that he’s unable to keep Professor Hayter from being absorbed by the Xeraphim and later seems to have given up on freeing the Xeraphim. In fact he has a trick up his sleeve that involves somehow “intercepting” the Master’s TARDIS and sending it to the Xeraphim’s home planet where the Xeraphim might conceivably escape, but this is all accomplished through more of the borderline-incomprehensible pseudoscience. Later, Tegan is left behind at Heathrow in a scene so perfunctory that I honestly wasn’t sure what to make of it. Does the Doctor think she’s decided on her own to stay? Is he just avoiding the airport authorities and planning to come back for her later? I’m not sure, and certainly the departure of a companion deserves a better explanation than what we get here. As for the rest of the characters, only Captain Stapley and his crew made much of an impression – they’re able to wrap their minds around what’s happening and improvise ways to disrupt the Master’s plans. Professor Hayter rarely strikes a note other than aloof arrogance, and the Master himself spends the first two episodes in disguise as some sort of sorcerer and then abruptly drops the act, with no real reason supplied for why he gave up on it or why he was doing it in the first place.

“Time Flight” is not entirely without its merits. It does address the crew’s lingering grief over Adric’s death, with the Doctor insisting that he will not use time travel to undo what has happened even as he joins Tegan and Nyssa in mourning their lost companion. And the first episode carries some nostalgic value in showing the Doctor working with the British authorities to solve a problem, even invoking his UNIT credentials to get himself out of trouble. Arguably the most interesting as a concept is the Xeraphim’s collective intelligence, which isn’t actually their natural state but rather the form in which they were forced to preserve themselves. It is possible for individual personalities to emerge from the collective, and at the same time, the Master is able to disrupt the balance between Xeraphim of different moral orientations. Unfortunately, this is only briefly explored, and in general the script is more occupied with arbitrary plot machinations than with characters, ideas, or even any effective suspense.

Rating: ** (out of four)

Review [Doctor Who]: “Earthshock”

19×6. Earthshock
Writer: Eric Saward
Director: Peter Grimwade
Script Editor: Antony Root
Producer: John Nathan-Turner

Synopsis: The TARDIS materializes in an underground cavern on 26th-century Earth, where a military team are searching for members of an archaeological expedition that came under unexplained attack. The Doctor disarms a bomb in the cavern and traces it to a freighter where a group of Cybermen are planning to sabotage an interplanetary conference on Earth where several species are likely to agree on a pact to fight the Cybermen. In light of the bomb’s failure, the Cybermen attempt to crash the freighter into Earth and cause a catastrophe that would likely wipe out humanity.

Review: “Earthshock” may be remembered primarily for Adric’s death, but it also deserves a mention for rehabilitating the Cybermen as a genuine threat after their last appearance in the disappointing “Revenge of the Cybermen.” While the purely emotionless Cybermen that we first met back in “The Tenth Planet” may be gone for good, this serial does at least portray them as more detached from emotion than humans or most of the other villains-of-the-week that we’ve seen on Doctor Who. What makes them most intimidating is that while they may not feel compassion or friendship themselves, they have clearly come to understand what these things mean for others and are more than willing to manipulate their enemies’ emotions. In one scene, they are accused of being deliberately cruel and their leader responds, chillingly, that they are in fact testing human emotional responses. The Cyberleader also explains that they are targeting the interplanetary conference partly for the psychological impact that it will have when their enemies’ leaders are killed. They may not be quite as emotionless as they claim to be (the Cyberleader seems to have a grudge against the Doctor, among other things), but the script successfully gives them an identity and viewpoint that differentiates them from Daleks, Ice Warriors, Sontarans, or any other prominent enemy.

As for Adric, both the script by Eric Saward and Matthew Waterhouse’s performance should be commended for not trying to soften the sharper edges of his personality in his swan song, instead letting him exit as the flawed but likeable person that he is. As the serial begins, Adric is actually asking to return to E-Space to rejoin his own people, feeling that he is too much of an “outsider” among the TARDIS crew. The Doctor initially responds somewhat dismissively, simply stating that returning to E-Space is too dangerous, but it’s clear that Nyssa and Tegan are actually partly on Adric’s side, and the Doctor does later concede that he could be more patient with Adric. All the same, Adric can, in fact, be annoying, immature, and whiny at times, and the script doesn’t shy away from that, such as when he insists that the Doctor explain his plan even when they are all scrambling to keep the Cybermen at bay. His death scene appropriately reflects his multifaceted personality. At once intellectually-driven, self-absorbed, and willing to risk his life for others, he had nearly completed a logic puzzle that would have let him unlock the ship’s controls when a Cyberman destroys the console. “Now I’ll never know if I was right,” he laments as he steels himself for the fatal impact and clutches his lost brother’s belt.

While “Earthshock” is an important entry in the Who canon, I wouldn’t quite call it a classic one. For starters, there are a few plot or character points that don’t make much sense or feel contrived. The ship happening to travel 65 million years back in time to cause the extinction of the dinosaurs feels like the script trying too hard to be clever, and the justification for it – that the Cybermen’s device somehow accidentally caused it – strains suspension of disbelief about as far as it can go. Ringway, the collaborator who betrays the freighter to the Cybermen, never has his motivations explained, and meanwhile Nyssa stays in the TARDIS for the entire second half of the serial and is so slow to accept that something may be going wrong outside that I started to wonder if she was under some sort of mind control. Finally, the leaders of 26th-century Earth are meeting with other species to form an alliance against the Cybermen, and yet Lieutenant Scott’s military squadron and the freighter crew don’t even seem to have heard of them – only the Doctor knows who they are when they emerge from hiding on the freighter.

Adric’s death also contributes to a sense of the Doctor’s real fallibility, which can be a good thing, except that the serial ends so abruptly that we’re not sure how this turn of events has actually affected him and his companions beyond the immediate shock and grief. It’s worth noting that he is pretty thoroughly outmaneuvered by the Cybermen in Episode 4, even to the point of having to let the Cyberleader board the TARDIS. And what are we to make of the fact that he shoots the Cyberleader twice after he’s seemingly gained the upper hand by attacking him with the gold badge? Are we meant to see this as a more violent turn in his character? Did he see some sign that the Cyberleader was still about to try to kill him or one of the companions and thus feel compelled to fire in self-defense? Again, I’m not sure, because neither he nor Tegan nor Nyssa really have anything to say about it. I was left with the same uncomfortable feeling as I had at the end of “The Brain of Morbius” – not only had I seen the Doctor resort to more violence than usual, but I wasn’t sure if the creative team even realized what they were doing.

“Earthshock” is certainly flawed, and it suffers a bit from the action-heavy style of the third and fourth episodes that can’t help but look hokey by contemporary standards. But it has enough positive points for me to give it a recommendation, and the creative team deserve credit for a genuinely tragic ending even if they don’t fully address its implications.

Other notes:

– The theme of the more emotion-driven approach of the protagonists vs. the detached frigidity of the Cybermen is reinforced in the scene where the Doctor, having failed to disarm the bomb on Earth via logic, announces that he’ll try “blind instinct” next.

– This is nitpicking, but the script probably shouldn’t have had the Doctor use the term “spatial coordinates” to explain that the freighter was still on course for Earth after traveling back in time. Given that the Earth is in motion around the Sun, the Sun is in motion around the center of the Milky Way, and the galaxies are in motion within the universe, it seems literally impossible for Earth to have been in the same place 65 million years ago as it would be in the 26th-century timeline.

Rating: *** (out of four)

Review [Doctor Who]: "Black Orchid"

19×5. Black Orchid
Writer: Terence Dudley
Director: Ron Jones
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner

Synopsis: The Doctor is mistaken for an expected guest at the home of the 1920s upper-class Cranleigh family, where what seems like a light-hearted cricket match and costume ball gives way to a murder mystery with the Doctor as a suspect. The culprit turns out to be George Cranleigh, a former explorer who had his tongue cut out and has since gone insane, kept hidden in the family’s home under the cover story of having gone missing. Nyssa, whose appearance is near-identical to that of Ann, George’s former fiancee who is now engaged to his brother Charles, finds herself in danger when George gets loose.

Review: “Black Orchid” is an odd little serial that has its appealing elements but relies a little too much on “because-the-writers-said-so” plotting for me to give it a full recommendation. It’s the first two-part serial since “The Sontaran Experiment,” and much of the first episode is spent in a light-hearted “TARDIS crew on vacation” mode, but then it steps into more serious territory and raises questions that it never completely answers.

Seeing the main cast in a more relaxed setting is a welcome change of pace, especially with a larger-than-average TARDIS crew. Tegan, who has typically been the most easily intimidated by the dangers that they encounter, has nevertheless decided that she’d like to continue traveling with them for a while and clearly enjoys the party at the Cranleighs’ house. Meanwhile, Nyssa shows herself to have a playful side when she agrees to wear the same costume as Ann and keep everyone guessing as to who’s who. The Fifth Doctor continues to emerge as a more relatably human incarnation than his predecessor, proving himself to be a skilled cricketeer and revealing that he had wanted to drive a train car as a boy. (It’s actually a little strange to hear the Doctor refer to childhood – I don’t recall seeing children in any of the Gallifrey serials, and it doesn’t seem like the Time Lord aging process works the same way as that of humans.)

Underneath all the mirth, however, is a story of an upper-class family that has prioritized keeping up appearances, even to the point of keeping George as a virtual prisoner in their own home. When the initial murder victim is discovered, Lady Cranleigh asks that it be kept quiet until the party is over, and later she allows the Doctor to be blamed for the killings in the assumption that he’ll eventually be cleared. What exactly do the Doctor and his companions think about all this? It’s not entirely clear, because a considerable portion of the second episode is occupied with the Doctor getting arrested and eventually winning over the skeptical police by showing them the interior of the TARDIS. The Doctor initially agrees to keep quiet about the first death until the police arrive, but if he recognises the social customs that prompt Lady Cranleigh to behave as she does, he never really says anything about it.

At a more basic level, the serial employs two rather blatant contrivances to set these events in motion. One is the near-perfect resemblance between Ann and Nyssa, which is apparently meant to be nothing more than a coincidence. Maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree given that Doctor Who has so many humanoid aliens in the first place, but this feels like a stretch given that Nyssa is not only unrelated to Ann but is not even human — it seems incredibly unlikely that this would “just happen,” much less in a situation where people also “just happened” to be expecting an unnamed “Doctor” right when the Doctor turns up. The other is the nature of George’s mental illness — whatever it might be. I say that because the serial tells us nothing other than that he’s insane. Okay, fine, but plenty of people suffer from mental illness, even severe mental illness, but still don’t just randomly murder somebody the way George does. Does he have PTSD? Is he delusional? Psychotic?

All this culminates in a somewhat ham-handed ending, where Charles convinces George to let Nyssa go and moves to embrace his brother, but George recoils or flinches and falls off the roof to his death. Perhaps this could have been convincing if we understood more about George’s mental illness or what sort of relationship Charles has had with his brother, but without that background, it feels like the script forcing an abrupt tragic ending rather than letting the story and characters develop naturally. There’s a brief epilogue in which we see that the TARDIS crew have stayed on to attend George’s funeral – as has Ann. Is she still planning to marry Charles? Again, the script is simply silent.

While I wouldn’t argue that “Black Orchid” should have been four episodes, I might say that three would have been more suitable – the extra time might have allowed for more substantial development of the guest characters and a clearer understanding of George’s behavior. As things stand, it has a promising setup but doesn’t fully deliver on its potential.

Rating: **1/2 (out of four)

Review [Doctor Who]: "The Visitation"

19×4. The Visitation
Writer: Eric Saward
Director: Peter Grimwade
Script Editor: Antony Root
Producer: John Nathan-Turner

Synopsis: The TARDIS materializes in England in 1666, where Terileptils have established themselves in a small village, using control bracelets and an android that resembles the Grim Reaper to manipulate the residents for their own purposes. As escaped criminals from a violent society, they plan to wipe out Earth’s population and claim its resources as their own.

Review: “The Visitation” is perhaps most noteworthy for further exploring the contentiousness, inexperience, and occasional mistakes of this TARDIS crew. Davison’s Doctor is proving to be a bit irritable at times and sometimes struggles to control the situation – he is forced to leave Adric and Tegan behind at one point when menaced by the Tereleptils’ android, and the final fight with the Tereleptils results in the Great Fire of London breaking out. While the Tereleptils are certainly dangerous and had to be stopped, it’s also clear that they come from a pretty brutal culture, and the Doctor and Nyssa both show noticeable regret at their rather gruesome demise (they are trapped in the fire). Meanwhile, Adric is noticeably frustrated when he feels as if he can’t contribute much and gets himself captured. On the other hand, the Doctor’s light-hearted reaction when someone points out that they’re partly responsible for the fire seems inappropriate – not that I expected him to intervene, but a more sober “we can’t change history” response would have been more appropriate. Still, this is a solid entry that makes good use of the setting, and Richard Mace – the thief who gets reluctantly drafted into helping the Doctor -proves to be an entertaining guest character.

Rating: *** (out of four)