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.

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.

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.