TV Club: Doctor Who, “Earthshock”

“Earthshock” (season 19, episodes 19-22. Originally aired March 8-16, 1982)

“Don’t look now, but there’s one man too many in this room, and I think it’s you.” –Groucho Marx

We’re joining Doctor Who this week towards the tail end of Peter Davison’s first season as the Fifth Doctor. If you’ve been following along with my previous TV Club writeups, the main cast here is the same as in Davison’s debut, “Castrovalva”: The youthful but fatherly Doctor, irritable air hostess Tegan (Janet Fielding), passive science wiz Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), and boy genius Adric (Matthew Waterhouse). There is plenty to like in “Earthshock,” led by the always-engaging Davison’s performance and tension-building direction by Peter Grimwade that draws out the best of the adventure-story aspects of Eric Saward’s script. There’s plenty also that doesn’t work, some rooted in Saward’s script, some systemic things that the series as a whole struggled with at the time—a superficial focus on nostalgia and shock, poor characterizations, and slack plotting. “Earthshock” was notable at the time for the surprise return of the implacable robotic Cybermen, who had been mainstay villains during the Patrick Troughton years but had only made one other appearance after 1968, in 1975′s underwhelming “Revenge of the Cybermen.” But the major reason why “Earthshock” has such a major place in the history of Who today is a surprise disappearance: The death of Adric.

Originally published Sept. 4, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

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