Menu Close

Month: September 2013

Revival of the Fittest

Review of The Ice Warriors (#39)
DVD Release Date: 10 Sep 13
Original Air Date: 11 Nov – 16 Dec 1967
Doctor/Companion: Two, Jamie McCrimmon, Victoria Waterfield
Stars: Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines, Deborah Watling
Preceding Story: The Abominable Snowmen (Two, Jamie, Victoria)
Succeeding Story: The Enemy of the World (Two, Jamie, Victoria)

For some reason, Troughton’s second season (Season 5, by the original count) was into cold climes. Starting things off with the cryogenic Tomb of the Cybermen, it proceeded on to Tibet and The Abominable Snowmen before landing the TARDIS crew in the glacier-covered future wasteland of The Ice Warriors.

Regardless of the seeming repetition of setting, I was glad to see another Troughton story I hadn’t had the privilege of watching before. Even when you’ve read a blow-by-blow plot synopsis, seeing it on the screen in front of you is a different kettle of fish. Besides, how can anyone resist any performance involving that infamous cosmic hobo?

As with many early stories, one has to take this one with a largish grain of salt. Not only are the Ice Warriors’ creature costumes ridiculously unconvincing (its the rubber mouths that don’t move in sync with the actors’ jaws that really does it), but the science is sorely outdated. The idea that extreme deforestation (not that the script calls it that) would lead to less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might have been a believable hypothesis at the time, but these days we’re seeing the opposite effect. So the very premise comes across as extremely retro-futuristic.

Read more →

Confession #43: I Love/Hate the Ten/Rose Ship

2 Comments

There’s one thing that can divide a fandom faster than the Vashta Nerada can skeletonize a human: shipping. And the Dallas Cowboys (or Man U) of Who fandom ships—the one you either love or love to hate—is the Tenth Doctor and Rose. Let me break down the two camps, in terms of very broad generalizations (we’re talking horoscope broad, so obviously, YMMV).

On the one side, you have hardcore Ten/Rose shippers. They see Ten and Rose as an OTP (or “one true pairing”)—the ultimate ship that cannot be sunk, no matter what else is written before, after, for, or about the couple. As far as I can tell, some of these shippers go so far as to deny that any story that doesn’t involve Ten and Rose is innately inferior, and thereby beneath their notice, or at least a questionable use of their time.

On the other, you have Ten/Rose shipper-haters. These fans actively hate the Ten/Rose ship, and in many cases even extend that distaste to fans who do ship it. Further, a fair number of these anti-shippers believe that the Doctor does not (or should not) ever be in a romantic relationship of any sort. A non-negligible subset of these fans seem to think very little of the post-Hiatus show is worth their time.

And here I sit in the middle.

Read more →

Keeping the Flame Alive

2 Comments

Review of The Doctors Revisited – Eighth Doctor

In any rundown of all the Doctors, Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor always seems to get the short end of the stick. The same is true here, as the eighth installment of Revisited is about a two-thirds the length of any of the previous episodes. Further, McGann himself is conspicuous in his absence, the only surviving Doctor actor to date not to appear in his own retrospective.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2013 BBC

Granted, since the series seems to be sticking tightly to televised stories—an oversight, in my opinion, since alternative media like audio adventures are where Eight really comes into his own—we can hardly have expected a long homage to a Doctor who only had 70 minutes on screen. Even bringing in Sylvester McCoy to discuss the regeneration barely padded things out.

However, Companion actors Daphne Ashbrook and Yee Jee Tso (who appeared in interview snippets, along with Steven Moffat, Marcus Wilson, and Nicholas Briggs) make a valiant effort to express to the audience why McGann’s Doctor, and The Movie as a whole, should be of interest to those (presumably primarily “new series” fans) who are as yet unfamiliar with them. Their fondness not only for McGann and the rest of the cast but also for the entirety of the story is clearly evident.

Focusing as always on the positive aspects of McGann’s run, rather than its admitted flaws, Revisited emphasizes the ways in which The Movie bridges the gap between pre- and post-Hiatus eras (as I’ve mentioned a couple of times before). For one thing, it involves a “proper handover,” as Moffat puts it, with an actual regeneration scene between the Seventh and Eighth Doctors, and McGann provides us with a persona recognizable as the Doctor because he uses quick wits to further his ends rather than brute force. Further, it introduced the idea that the Doctor might actually have a romantic side, with the at-the-time controversial first on-screen kiss.

Read more →

Confession #42: I’d Like More Science in My Science Fiction

Warning: Didactic astrophysicist ahead

Fifty years ago, when Doctor Who first hit the airwaves, it was designed to be an educational show, with some fun storytelling to make it more interesting. That’s why Ian and Barbara—science and history teachers, respectively—were slated to be the Doctor’s Companions.

Admittedly, those “teachable moments” were awfully heavy-handed at first (take, for example, the scene where the Doctor outsmarts the Daleks’ lock mechanism in The Daleks, or the emphasis on the date of Robespierre’s downfall in The Reign of Terror). One has to admit, though, that they tried hard to make the stories make some sort of sense, from a scientific standpoint.

Fast forward to the modern era, and scientific realism seems to have been largely thrown out the window. As long as you can utter some technical-sounding gobbledy-gook (or timey-wimey-ness, for that matter), you’re good to go. Yes, I know that to “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” makes no sense, either, but somehow I feel like writers these days aren’t trying even as hard as that.

Read more →