TV Club: Doctor Who, The Silurians

“Doctor Who And The Silurians” (season 7, episodes 5-11; originally aired 1/31-3/14/1970)

Jumping from “The War Games” to “The Silurians” is one of the smallest leaps forward in time we’ve made in this feature so far, with the two stories separated by only a single serial, “Spearhead From Space.” But although they were made less than a year apart, and by many of the same people, the differences between them make Doctor Who feel like it’s almost a completely new series.

A big part of that, of course, is the switch to color from black-and-white, and the increased use of on-location filming in places like Marylebone Station in London that brought a new realism to Doctor Who’s visual presentation. But there was also, as I noted in my “Spearhead From Space” writeup, a very conscious mandate for season seven to tell stories that were more morally complex than earlier years, and that would keep the attention of both adult audiences as well as the kids. Season-opener “Spearhead From Space” laid the groundwork for this, but most of its energy went to establishing the fact of the Doctor’s new Earthbound exile after his “War Games” trial, and introducing the new triad of main characters (the Brigadier, Liz Shaw, and the Third Doctor), who would work together to defend Earth from alien invasion and other sci-fi threats. The Doctor himself had not been terribly active in “Spearhead From Space” either, spending half the story in a hospital bed, which was another way of giving the setting and supporting characters more screentime. “The Silurians” picked up those loose threads, putting the Doctor firmly back at center stage in a story that resisted being broken down into simple divisions of good versus evil. Although it’s three episodes longer than “Spearhead From Space,” “The Silurians” keeps a snappy pace throughout thanks to Malcolm Hulke’s well-plotted script.

Originally published Dec. 18 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, The War Games, episodes 6-10

“The War Games,” episodes 6-10 (season 6, episodes 40-44. Originally aired May 24-June 21, 1969)

It’s tempting to skip ahead and dive right into the final episode of “The War Games,” since it casts the longest shadow over Doctor Who‘s future evolution. The War Lords may be in all 10 episodes of the story, but they never return to the series, and the Time Lords do—even now when they’re all dead or missing, the Doctor’s guilt and loneliness over their absence is a crucial element of his character. And just in the interest of keeping this relatively short, I’m not going to spend a lot of time on episodes six through nine, even though there’s a lot of interest happening in that penultimate section of the serial, as the long arc of the War Zones story enters its final phase.

In a way, “War Games” recapitulates in miniature Doctor Who‘s development over its first six seasons—beginning by dropping the Doctor and his companions into (what appears to be, but isn’t really) a horrifyingly real and deadly historical story before slowly shifting into more familiarly strange and psychedelic sci-fi territory. And since that’s actually where the Doctor is more comfortable, it ‘s maybe not surprising that his actions against the War Zones’ alien masters grow bolder and more effective as things progress. In fact, the major tension in the story during this section isn’t really about whether the Doctor will win, even though there are a few times he appears to be in deadly peril or imminent defeat. It’s about the growing dissension in the ranks of the villains, as the distrust between the Security Chief and War Chief boils over and the renegade Time Lord turns out to have different objectives than his alien allies. (This feeds into the “is he really the Master?” question, which I’ll get into a little later.)

Originally published Dec. 4 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, The War Games, episodes 1-5

“The War Games,” episodes 1-5 (season 6, episodes 35-39; originally aired 4/19-5/17/1969)

At the end of the 1960s, Doctor Who was in the throes of its second major crisis, and so by extension was the Doctor himself. After three years, Patrick Troughton had decided he wanted to try other things, which meant that for the second time, the show would need to figure out how to get along without its lead actor. That in itself wasn’t such a devastating problem, since William Hartnell’s departure in “The Tenth Planet” had led to Doctor Who’s uniquely freeing solution to the problem of change, the concept that the Doctor periodically regenerates into a wholly new body with a new personality. The problem was that this time, the show itself was on the rocks. Ratings were way down—from 12 million for “The Dalek Invasion Of Earth” to 3.5 million for the least-watched episode of “The War Games,” episode eight—and there was general agreement that something major had to change, beyond even another regeneration, if Doctor Who was going to survive.

“The War Games”—the last appearance of the Second Doctor as the lead character of the show—was not meant as the story that would solve Who’s problems, or even set up that solution. Just the opposite. By the time Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke wrote the script, the producers had already figured out how to reinvent the series: The Third Doctor would be exiled to Earth starting with season seven’s “Spearhead From Space,” which would allow the show to use familiar modern-day settings to a) bring in greater relevance and sophistication to the storylines, and b) be made more cheaply. And the necessary groundwork for the Doctor joining UNIT had been laid down in “The Invasion” earlier in season six. So “The War Games” didn’t have to worry about any of that—instead, its focus is on capping off the Second Doctor era itself, and ending his story in such a way that justified the radical changes of the next season. To that end, Dicks and Hulke confronted the Doctor with a situation that was a dark mirror of his own habit of interfering in the natural course of history, and what’s more, was too much for him to handle. The Doctor fails, and he’s forced to face the consequences of his failure when he’s caught and put on trial by the Time Lords, the people he’s been running away from since before the series began.

Originally published Nov. 20, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, The Dalek Invasion of Earth

“The Dalek Invasion Of Earth” (season 2, episodes 4-9. Originally aired Nov. 21-Dec. 26, 1964)

When it comes to its importance to Doctor Who, “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” is way up there among the most influential serials in its history. Commissioned almost immediately after the surprise smash hit of the Daleks’ debut the year before, “Dalek Invasion” put Who in the ratings top 10 for the first time, and helped stoke the fires of 1960s Dalekmania into a full-fledged craze. (Seriously, it was a big thing—not as big as Beatlemania, but a genuine pop-culture phenomenon.) It’s also hugely important to the show’s ongoing narrative—in their first story, the Daleks were implacably evil but still small-time, not even able to travel outside their home city. “Dalek Invasion” repositioned them as Doctor Who’s first and greatest intergalactic threat—and prompted a response in kind from its title character. With a bigger budget than ever before, “Dalek Invasion” boasted the series’ first extensive use of on-location filming, allowing real London landmarks to give the Daleks’ takeover an uncanny realism and an epic feel. And it marked another milestone first: The departure of a companion. The original companion, in fact—the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan, which set a precedent for how the series would work cast changes into the storyline.

Originally published Nov. 6, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, Kinda

“Kinda” (season 19, episodes 9-12; originally aired Feb. 1-9, 1982)

The typical Doctor Who villain is a physical, recognizable threat. You immediately know that the Daleks are dangerous and evil because they’ve got guns welded into their midsections and they’re eager to use them. Nobody expects a Dalek to conquer by winning over its enemies psychologically. “Kinda” takes a different tack: Though there’s a monster, a giant snake called the Mara, in this story evil comes from within more than without. The greatest dangers “Kinda” presents are internal ones that exploit the hidden weaknesses and flaws of the characters. It does this via two plot threads which are at times so divergent that they seem like completely unrelated stories, but which do work together as part of a larger parable. The first, centered around Tegan and the Kinda tribe, weaves Buddhist-inspired ideas about struggle against one’s own self and repressed negativity into a story about an innocent Eden-like paradise threatened by the corruption of knowledge. The second is an anti-colonialist, Heart Of Darkness-style jungle-horror story about arrogant civilized people who come to conquer a primitive world which is bigger and wilder than they can comprehend, and which instead absorbs and destroys them. In the end it’s too muddled and oblique to be entirely successful, and its poor use of the main characters leaves the story badly unfocused, but “Kinda” is an interesting experiment in something a little more psychological than usual. The story has grown on me the more I think about it, which is both good and bad—good because there’s more here to appreciate than is immediately apparent, bad because the story doesn’t really gel on the most basic level of entertainment. And I’m not really sure that it really works on that deeper level either, just that it’s thought-provoking.

Originally published Oct. 30, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, The Talons of Weng-Chiang

“The Talons of Weng-Chiang” (season 14, episodes 21-27. Originally aired Feb. 27- April 2, 1977)

Victorian London has such a longstanding appeal as a fictional setting that it’s a little surprising that Doctor Who dropped in on the era only once, in 1966′s “Evil of the Daleks,” before taking a full-fledged romp through the city of gaslights and horse-drawn coaches in season 14′s “Talons of Weng-Chiang.” But the delay turned out to be a good thing, because there’s no era of Who better suited for a Victorian tale than the horror-tinged, homage-happy sci-fi gothic period of the early Fourth Doctor years. Just as Alan Moore did in the comics with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, “Talons” gleefully pillages the vast storehouse of Victorian adventure fiction to create a dark, moody synthesis of its own. It’s suffused with atmospheric details, and is one of the best serials the show ever did. If it wasn’t for the uncomfortably racist aspects of the story, it’d be close to perfection.

It’s also a long story at six episodes, so I’ll just briefly run through the basics of the plot, to lay the groundwork for the rest of my thoughts about the story: The Doctor and his companion Leela arrive in fogbound London as tourists, intending to take in a show at the Palace Theater, but wind up instead tracking down a serial killer who’s connected to a mysteriously powerful Chinese magician, Li H’sen Chang, and his sinister ventriloquist’s dummy Mr. Sin. Assisting them are a couple of affably naive Victorian gentlemen, the raffish theater owner Henry Gordon Jago and the serious but soft-spoken coroner Dr. Litefoot. The killer is pretending to be Weng-Chiang, the so-called “Chinese god of abundance,” and his powers seem to include the ability to create gigantic carnivorous rats, to grant Chang the ability to hypnotize people, and to give Mr. Sin the ability to move and think on his own. But these are all tricks: The killer is not Weng-Chiang but a fugitive Icelandic war criminal from the far future named Magnus Greel, whose escape in an experimental time machine left him horrifyingly disfigured and in constant need of fresh victims to replenish his failing DNA. Greel is only pretending to be Chinese because he happened to land there when he fled from his own time, a masquerade that is kept up largely as a means of ensuring the loyalty of Li H’Sen Chang, who worships him as a deity come to Earth. Greel and Chang are in London in search of his missing time machine, which turns out to be (in a bit of slightly undercooked narrative convenience) a family heirloom of Litefoot’s. And it’s become dangerously unstable, so if Greel does find it and try to use it, he might blow up most of London.

Originally published Oct. 23, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Party on! The five best wild guys in film

Bartender, another round, and make it a double! In Oct. 28′s “The Rum Diary,” Johnny Depp returns to the role of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson — or his alter ego, Paul Kemp. That’s great news for fans of Depp’s wild-eyed performance in the 1998 cult classic “Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.”

For the infamously brilliant but unhinged Thompson, covering news and consuming booze and pills went hand-in-hand, and hallucinations of giant bats were an everyday job hazard. His fictionalized persona is one of the great loose-cannon characters in film and literary history.

Here are five guys from the movies who could tie one on with Thompson and live to tell the tale.

Originally published Oct. 21, 2011 on MSNBC.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, Terror of the Autons

“Terror Of The Autons” (season 8, episodes 1-4. Originally aired Jan. 2-23, 1971)

It’s a law of storytelling physics, at least for the kind of serial adventure story that is Doctor Who: For every hero, there is an equal and opposite villain. Not just the run-of-the-mill bad guys who take a number and line up for a single-episode smackdown, but a true nemesis, someone who presents a genuine challenge to the hero’s abilities and also to the fundamental question of who he is. All good hero/villain pairings do this to some extent, but the emergence of a nemesis relationship is something special, even epic, and when it’s done well it resonates throughout the entire series. You know what I mean: Holmes and Moriarty. Batman and the Joker. The great rivalries.

In Doctor Who’s case, you could make a pretty good argument that prior to our Mystery Guest Villain’s debut in 1971′s “Terror Of The Autons,” the Doctor already had a perfectly serviceable epic nemesis in the Daleks. He’d clashed with them repeatedly since the beginning of the series, and the things they stood for—fear, oppression, stagnation, conformity—helped define what the Doctor stands against. Obviously, that relationship is still important, even crucial for the series today. But there was always something missing, because the Daleks are perhaps too diametrically opposed to the Doctor. The differences are starkly apparent, but the commonalities aren’t. That’s what Moriarty has over the Daleks: He’s equal and opposite, a man with the skills and temperament of Sherlock Holmes who represents the ways Holmes could have gone wrong. The other problem with the Daleks is that by the time of “Terror,” they’d grown overexposed by repeated return engagements, and had in fact been effectively killed off four seasons earlier in “Evil Of The Daleks.” So the field was open for a new nemesis.

Originally published Oct. 16, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

Take two! Movie remakes we love — and hate: The Thing

Yes, the prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 movie “The Thing” is coming out this week. Carpenter’s movie itself was a remake of a 1951 film, Howard Hawks’ “The Thing From Another World.” And for my money, it’s the best remake out there, of any film, ever.

Carpenter’s classic follows a group of scientists at an isolated polar base who stumble across an alien frozen in the ice — and when they wake it up, it’s not exactly friendly. “Thing From Another World” is a fine film on its own merits, still thrilling and creepy half a century later. But 1950s special-effects couldn’t possibly do justice to the novella’s villain, a frighteningly unstoppable shape-changing monster. Carpenter, along with obsessive effects wizard Rob Bottin, had the tools and the imagination to get it right. Kurt Russell makes a perfect grizzled, distrusting hero for a story about not knowing who to trust. Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack is wonderfully icy and subtle. And unlike a lot of horror movies, “The Thing” never falls prey to making the characters behave stupidly just to get a cheap shock — it’s remarkably well-crafted, delivering big as a gut-level scarefest and a psychological thriller.

Part of a group-written roundup originally published Oct. 11, 2011 on MSNBC.com. Read the complete article.

TV Club: Doctor Who, “The Invasion” (Episodes 5-8)

“The Invasion” (season 6, episodes 15-19; originally aired Nov. 2-Dec. 21, 1968)

There is a void at the heart of “The Invasion” that wasn’t completely apparent to me while watching the first half of the story last week. I’m talking about the story’s marquee villains, of course: The Cybermen, who are absent for basically the entire first four episodes of this particularly epic-length serial, turn out in the second half to be a squadron of robot MacGuffins, and not actually the story’s real antagonists. As I should have realized (especially since I’ve seen the story a couple of times before, though not for several years), “The Invasion” is really a story about Tobias Vaughn, the man who arrogantly and hubristically makes a devil’s bargain with a force he ultimately cannot control—and on the other side of the coin, it’s a groundwork-laying introduction to the UNIT era. With only minor rewriting, the Cybermen could have been replaced by any number of invading alien forces—in fact, that’s basically what happens in the next UNIT story, “Spearhead From Space.”

Alfred Hitchcock, you might remember, coined the term “MacGuffin” to refer to an element in a story that catalyzes the characters into action but isn’t necessarily an active part of the plot itself. Usually, it’s an object, like the letters of transit in Casablanca. But the Cybermen are so reactive in this story that I think they qualify as well.

The reason I forgot how little “The Invasion” is about the Cybermen, of course, is that what little screen time they do get includes several of the most iconic moments they have in the whole of Doctor Who. They have their moments here, but they are literally just moments—brief scenes that became part of the visual lore of the Cybermen across the show’s history. Some of these were themselves callbacks to earlier appearances—the awakened Cyberman bursting out of its metal container evokes a similar scene in “Tomb Of The Cybermen,” as does the moment when one of them grabs Jamie’s ankle as he climbs up from the sewer tunnels.

Originally published Oct. 9, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.