TV Club: Doctor Who, “Genesis Of The Daleks”

“Genesis Of The Daleks” (season 12, episodes 11-16. Originally aired March 8-April 12, 1975)

If you have to boil down to one single factor why “Genesis Of The Daleks” is so deeply influential on the later history of Doctor Who, it wouldn’t be the one implied in the title. Sure, this is the story that gave the Doctor’s most persistent enemies an origin. But what was more important was that with the introduction of Davros, their insane creator, the Daleks were finally given a face.

This had always been a problem with the Daleks. Despite their ongoing popularity, distinctive design, and iconic status as the original Doctor Who monster, it was hard to make effective characters out of creatures that had been designed on purpose to have so little individuality. Although they weren’t robots, it was easy to forget that distinction since every Dalek looked alike—a mechanistic melange of an insect and an armored tank, with only the occasional color variation to mark those of different rank. And they all had the same hostile and aggressive personality, which they could only express by shouting and shooting at things. None even had individual names. The whole point of a Dalek is that it’s a fascist, conformist bully that wants to eliminate anything that isn’t a Dalek. It’s the Nazi ideology taken to its logical extreme.

Originally published April 15, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, “The Curse of Peladon”

“The Curse Of Peladon” (season 9, episodes 5-8. Originally aired Jan. 29-Feb. 19, 1972)

It’s hard to see it if you’re watching Doctor Who out of chronological order like we’re doing in this TV Club series, but “The Curse Of Peladon” was an unusually old-fashioned sort of story for where the series was in 1972, even while it also pointed toward Doctor Who’s future. The heart of the issue comes up as soon as the Doctor makes his appearance: The TARDIS lands on a remote planet and he and his companion get out, having no idea where they are, and immediately get embroiled in an adventure. But what’s weird about that, right? That describes the opening five minutes of almost every Doctor Who story since the very beginning. It’s been the basic format of the show since 1963, and it’s still true today. Ah, but—it wasn’t true in 1972. Because for a couple of years, the Doctor wasn’t a wanderer through time and space, but a convicted criminal sentenced by his people to exile on Earth, where he served as the reluctant employee of a military organization whose job description didn’t involve randomly popping around to anywhere more than 50 miles away from London.

There was a good reason why that had happened. Two years before, when Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor was replaced by Jon Pertwee’s Third, Doctor Who also made the biggest stylistic shift in its history, making a radical change in format to regain declining viewership and compete with the smart, sophisticated sci-fi shows of the era like Star Trek, The Avengers, and The Prisoner. The show became slicker and smarter itself, most importantly by boosting the sophistication of its writing, with a concerted effort at political and social relevance and a distinct sense that Doctor Who was trying hard not to be seen as just a children’s show anymore. It was a necessary move, and it worked on both the popularity and artistic fronts: Ratings went up, the show wasn’t cancelled, and as a group, season seven’s four stories are easily among the finest Doctor Who ever did.

Originally published April 1, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, “The Seeds Of Death”

“The Seeds Of Death” (season 6, episodes 23-28. Originally aired Jan. 25-March 1, 1969)

As much as I like “The Seeds Of Death” as pure entertainment, I’m not sure there’s all that much to say about the story on a deeper level, because that’s really its biggest flaw: It’s kind of a low-budget late-‘60s British TV version of a Michael Bay movie, geared to deliver thrills and spectacle but not particularly interested in whether the story being told actually means anything beyond “bad guys threaten good guys, who defeat bad guys.”

That was kind of a problem with the Second Doctor era in general, which was far less wide-ranging in the kinds of stories it told than First Doctor-era Doctor Who, coming to rely on alien-invasion plots to the point where there’s a widely used shorthand phrase in Who fandom to cover this period’s signature subgenre: the “base under siege” story, in which an isolated outpost of humans is menaced by some monster or monster from beyond. It’s a classic format not unique to this show by any means—it’s also the driver of Alien, Night Of The Living Dead, and Assault On Precinct 13, to give three of my favorite examples—but the Troughton era came to rely on it as its bread-and-butter, overusing it to the point of exhaustion. And while “The Seeds Of Death” is intriguingly forward-thinking in a couple of respects, ultimately it feels like it settled for less than it could have achieved. The series as a whole wasn’t quite so unambitious—we’ve already looked at two other stories from season six, “The Mind Robber” and “The War Games,” both of which were more complex and rewarding than this one. But I think that the superficial emphasis on thrills and chills in “Seeds Of Death” was, unfortunately, more typical of this era, and maybe indicative of why the series came close to cancellation during this season, before the drastic overhaul in season seven that brought in the Third Doctor.

Originally published March 18, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, “The Time Meddler”

“The Time Meddler” (season 2, episodes 36-39. Originally aired, 1965)

Season finales were not the kind of big events in 1965 that they are today, but the appearance of another rogue time traveler—and one who was not only from the Doctor’s own planet, but a sort of anti-Doctor in his own right—must have been a huge revelation for viewers back then. Before the War Chief, before the Master, before the Time Lords or Gallifrey had even been named, the Monk was our first glimpse at someone from the Doctor’s home. And it’s it’s important to keep in mind that the Monk does appear before any of that other baggage was attached, because he’s best understood as a mirror-inversion not of the Doctor we know now, but the First Doctor specifically—not a cosmic wizard who can feel the pulse of the universe, but a sly, troublemaking old man who always has a few tricks up his sleeve.

Before that, all we knew about Time Lords was a dyspeptic old man and his spacey-genius granddaughter—and even Susan had left the show earlier in the season, seven stories and 26 half-hour episodes previously in “The Dalek Invasion Of Earth.” Her place in the TARDIS crew had been filled by a character who was, on paper at least, nearly identical: Vicki, a young orphan girl who had survived a spaceship crash and was rescued by the Doctor and Susan’s former teachers Ian and Barbara in the appropriately titled story “The Rescue.” Once on board the TARDIS, she allowed the four-person dynamic set up in “An Unearthly Child” to continue mostly unchanged—she had a grandfather/granddaughter relationship with the Doctor, and a teacher/student one with Ian and Barbara. I haven’t seen much of the Vicki episodes besides “Time Meddler,” but she strikes me as more than just a replacement of Susan but an improvement on her, largely because Maureen O’Brien is a much more engaging and lively actress. Her scene with the Doctor at the start of the first episode here is warmer and more endearing than, say, the similar Doctor-Susan scene in “Dalek Invasion,” and she’s a far more effective conversational foil for Steven than I think Carole Ann Ford would ever have been.

Originally published March 4, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, “The Curse of Fenric”

“The Curse Of Fenric” (season 26, episodes 8-11; originally aired 10/25-11/15/1989)

“The Curse Of Fenric,” like many Doctor Who stories, is about a battle to stop an impending apocalypse. It was also close to an apocalypse for Doctor Who in real life: This was the second-to-last story the series aired before its cancellation. And that was a real shame—because while “The Curse Of Fenric” isn’t brilliant or even much above average, it does represent a huge improvement over the embarrassing mess of the Sixth Doctor’s seasons 22 and 23, and one which provided a clear direction for the current revival.

“Curse Of Fenric” also shows how Doctor Who’s greatest strength, its ability to reinvent itself, wasn’t limited to a change in lead actor, but was driven by behind-the-scenes changes in production staff—in this case, by the addition of the classic-era series’ final script editor, Andrew Cartmel. Cartmel and Sylvester McCoy, who played the Seventh Doctor, came on board at the same time, in the wake of a catastrophic meltdown that had resulted in, among other things, previous star Colin Baker getting fired. Their first season, led off by “Time And The Rani,” wasn’t much of an improvement, but Cartmel and McCoy both pushed for changes and received, by their third and final season, a pretty solid reinvention anchored by a new take on the Seventh Doctor—the comic buffoonery of “Time And The Rani” was downplayed, with McCoy now portraying a slightly bumbling but ultimately wise and mysterious near-mystical figure who acted as surrogate father to his spirited but troubled companion Ace (Sophie Aldred).

Originally published Feb. 19, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club, Doctor Who: “Vengeance On Varos”

“Vengeance On Varos” (season 22, episodes 3-4; originally aired Jan. 19-26, 1985)

Well, I’ll say this for a start: “Vengeance On Varos” is better than “The Twin Dilemma.” Which is almost the faintest praise you can give a Doctor Who serial, considering how embarrassingly bad “Twin Dilemma” is. (It’s also more entertaining than stabbing yourself in the hand with a fork.) “Vengeance On Varos” has the dubious merit of being the best show from season 22. That doesn’t make it a good show, and at one point in my notes, I stopped trying to keep up with the plot points and just wrote in all caps, “GRIM SLOG.” But it does succeed better than anything else from this period of the show in making use of the otherwise awful, awful, awful concept of the Sixth Doctor by sticking him in a world suffused in the spirit of early-1980s punk nihilism, offering up a dark, cynical parody of the whole concept of Doctor Who itself.

One thing that’s been endlessly fascinating to me in going back through all these vintage Doctor Whos is the way the program constantly changed to reflect the popular culture around it, and especially the popular trends in sci-fi. If that meant Doctor Who was almost always more of a trend-chaser than trendsetter, it’s also a major reason it lasted for 26 years. And that goes a long way toward explaining the otherwise mystifying decision to make the Sixth Doctor such a repellent character and his adventures so dank, grim, and depressing. Because look at what else was going on: Terry Gilliam’s brilliant but horrifyingly bleak Kafkaesque satire Brazil was just about to be released; his previous movie was the comparatively lighthearted Time Bandits, which ended (spoiler for a 31-year-old story) with the boy hero’s parents killed just so Gilliam could close with a nasty, shocking, macabre joke. And in Repo Man, 2000 AD, Heavy Metal, The Running Man, The Terminator, Max Headroom, and the grimy spaceship setting of Alien—seemingly everywhere in science fiction except in Steven Spielberg movies—life was harsh, cities were falling apart and burning, and the message was that the future was going to be worse than what we had now.

Originally published Feb. 5, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Was ‘Bridesmaids’ deserving of Oscar nod?

Did “Bridesmaids” get left behind at Oscar’s Best Picture altar? Or are the raunchy comedy’s two nominations already more than it deserves?

Some early buzz suggested that Kristen Wiig’s R-rated wedding-disaster hit was a contender for the Academy Awards’ top prize, especially now that the field is open to more than just five films. That didn’t happen, but “Bridesmaids” did score a supporting-actress nod for Melissa McCarthy, who played the endearingly obnoxious and sexually voracious Megan, and an original screenplay nomination for writers Wiig and Annie Mumolo.

Best Picture was always going to be a long shot. The fact is that the Oscars have never been kind to comedies, as a look at recent years makes clear. Of the nine movies nominated for Best Picture this year, only Woody Allen’s “Midnight In Paris” is considered a comedy, and of the 10 nominations in 2010 and 2011, only the animated movies “Toy Story 3″ and “Up” qualify.

Originally published Jan. 24, 2012 on MSNBC.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club, Doctor Who: Mawdryn Undead

“Mawdryn Undead” (season 20, episodes 9-12. Originally aired Feb. 1-9, 1983)

“Mawdryn Undead” tries to do a lot. Too much, really. It’s ambitiously overstuffed with plot ideas: The nostalgic return of an old co-star, a retelling of the Flying Dutchman myth with a Doctor Who twist, a nonchronological story structure split between two timelines, the return of a well-known old villain, and most importantly the introduction of a new companion, Turlough, who joins the Doctor with orders to kill him. But while there’s a lot of moments to enjoy here, that’s too much to work into a single story. And to be fair, “Mawdryn” is not meant to be a single story, but the first part of a larger arc, with a fairly self-contained story intertwined with material that spins into the subsequent episodes. The problem is that the parts meant to be self-contained to this story wind up feeling thinly resolved and rushed, while the part that’s by far the most compelling—Turlough’s dilemma—isn’t actually resolved at all, by design.

And that’s only a problem if you’re not planning to watch the rest of Season 20 of Doctor Who the way you would probably watch, say, 2011′s Series Seven—in broadcast order from start to finish. It’s commonplace now to give audiences a season-long arc that draws you back for every episode. In 1983, though, it was a fairly big change for Doctor Who, which is a big reason that all three of the Fifth Doctor stories I’ve covered so far for TV Club were from Peter Davison’s first season in the role: They’re much easier to look at as individual stories.

Of course, in some ways Doctor Who was far more invested in the idea of ongoing storylines than was typical for its time—other than soap operas and one-off miniseries like V or Shogun, it’s hard to think of another show so insistent on its viewers returning four or six or even 12 weeks in a row to see how the story ended. But most Doctor Who serials are more or less self-contained: Given some basic knowledge about the concept of the show and who was in the cast at the time, you could pick up a DVD from almost anywhere during its first couple of decades and not feel hopelessly lost, and also be assured that the story you’re watching will come to a definitive conclusion. If you want to continue on past “Brain of Morbius” or “The Mind Robber,” you can, but you don’t have to. There had been an experiment with a season-long storyline in 1978 with the six-part quest for the Key To Time, but in practice it was loosely organized enough that a viewer could drop in anytime and pick up what was happening.

Originally published Jan. 22, 2012 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club Doctor Who: 24: City of Death

“City Of Death” (season 17, episodes 5-8. Originally aired Sept. 29-Oct. 20, 1979)

Today’s stop on our nonchronological journey through Doctor Who brings us to somewhere close to the end of the second major period of the Fourth Doctor era. The most obvious way to mark changes in the series over the years is simply by which actor is playing the main character, but Baker’s seven years in the role, longer than anyone else, spans three distinct periods, more or less. There were always many other forces helping to shape Who, whether that was external ones like the 1960s Dalek craze or competition from shows like The Avengers and Batman, or internal ones like the changes in creative vision brought in whenever a new producer or script editor took over. I’ve already covered two serials from Baker’s first period (“The Brain of Morbius” and “The Talons of Weng-Chiang”), when horror-friendly Phillip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes were the creative leads behind-the-scenes. (Baker’s debut, “Robot,” is really more of a holdover from the Third Doctor creative team of Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks.) The third section begins in Baker’s last season, with the ascendancy of producer John Nathan-Turner, who would steer the ship like a slow-motion car crash through nine years and four Doctors, before flying his metaphorical “Mission Accomplished” banner with the series’ cancellation in 1989.

Originally published Jan. 8 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

The Future Sounds of Yesterday: A Sequence of Synthesizers in Science Fiction

Music and technology have always gone hand in hand—and the explosive flowering of music as an art form in the last century is also the story of the explosive growth of technology. Indeed, people have recognized the potential of computers to revolutionize music since before there even were computers. In 1842, writing about the theoretical uses of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, computer-science progenitor Ada Lovelace enthused that once the fundamentals of harmony and musical composition were properly understood, “the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” (And there’s something wondrous about a woman at the dawn of the Victorian Age dreaming of something now commonplace with electronic groups such as Daft Punk.) Like computing itself, electronic music began as the arcane province of technology specialists and slowly became a truly democratic force that put the power to change the world—or at least soundtrack it—in the hands of everyone. And because cutting-edge technology is particularly good at sounding alien and futuristic, it’s meshed perfectly with science fiction as a subject matter. Below is a brief history of the ways those three elements—the music, the tech, and the SF themes—have intersected and influenced each other, in various media, over time.

Originally published Jan. 3 in Clarkesworld Magazine. Read the complete article.