Review: Doctor Who Classic: The War Games

Doctor Who - Season Six, Story Seven - The War Games
Written between 28th October and 11th December 2015.

The Second Doctor's time on the show was filled with lots of Base-Under-Siege stories and repetitions of famous monsters. It was a transitionary period of the show, between the crapshoot serial drama of the Hartnell Era and the more slick adventures of the Pertwee Era. In that time, Two covered a lot of really great science fiction, and so it's only fitting that his era end on this complicated, long and remarkably watchable ten episode adventure which is fun, exciting and originates a remarkable amount of lore about The Doctor's past and people. While a lot of people skip the serial's first nine episodes and focus solely on Troughton's last continuous appearance, I think that's a grave mistake to make, as the rest of the serial has a great deal to offer.

The first appearance of the Time Lords, including
Chancellor Goth.

     The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe appear to land on the Western Front, where a tyrannical General Smythe is not only sending his soldiers to their deaths but is also communicating with some alien force using the 1960s vision of Skype. When The Doctor and some of his new friends attempt to escape and find the TARDIS, they pass through fog and end up in Roman Britain, revealing the true nature of their surroundings - an alien force has trapped large numbers of humans from throughout history on an alien planet set up to mimic their time-zones, planning to create a force of disposable but incredibly capable human soldiers. This plot is the orchestration of a race known as the War Lords, led by a Steve Jobs type known as "The War Lord" and aided by a mustachioed member of the Doctor's own people, the Time Lords, known as The War Chief. Boy, that's a lot of definite articles. The Doctor initially aides an uprising within the zones, and later confronts The War Chief (who is definitely not The Master, despite how cool that would be). Eventually, as he himself is unable to bring everyone home, The Doctor does the unthinkable and calls in the Time Lords. They take him and his companions back to their home planet, wiping his companions' memories of him and sentencing him to both forced regeneration and exile on Earth.
     The first thing you notice about this episode is that the guest cast are at an amazing calibre. Everyone from minor side characters to major villains are acting their socks off here, and it all makes for an extra wonderful send-off for this era. Notable names in the first few episodes are David Savile and Noel Coleman as Lt. Carstairs and General Smythe, respectively. Savile would appear in the program later in its run, while Coleman would go on later to have a memorable role in Red Dwarf. By far the strongest guests are Edward Brayshaw's War Chief (whom I'll discuss later) and The War Lord, delivered in amazing style by Philip Madoc. Madoc's War Lord is a tour-de-force performance, effortlessly quiet and civilised yet burying a deep ruthless anger. He's got the voice of a man confident that everything in creation is following his design, and it's spell-binding.
     The War Chief is a different beast entirely. I mentioned The Master before, and it's hard not to see the resemblance - a renegade Time Lord, used to be friends with The Doctor, now teamed up with an evil race he plans to use and then double-cross, who eventually double cross him instead. Edward Brayshaw doesn't, however, have a lot of The Master's mannerisms - he isn't hammy or particularly affable. Instead, he is a shrewd and fairly pleasant businessman, and the moment he hears of The Doctor's involvement he tries to make bonds and forge alliances. It's a refreshingly enjoyable kind of villain character where you actually end up routing for them to succeed in their scheme to overthrow the greater evil, even if at the end of the day they needed to be thwarted as well.

The War Lord and the War Lord are intriguing, complex villains.

   This episode's place in the show means that a lot of people are quite confused when they come to watch it. It takes eight and a half episodes before it becomes clear that any sort of final peril will actually come upon The Doctor and his companions. This peril comes in the form of the first appearance of The Time Lords, mentioned by name according to this story's idiosyncratic race naming. The name of their planet, Gallifrey, wouldn't be mentioned at all until 1974's The Time Warrior, but this is it's first appearance as well, albeit without the detail lovingly crafted onto it by later seasons. Watching the penultimate episode of this story, I finally understood the fan outrage at The Deadly Assassin; arguably the first time we got a good look at the depths of Gallifreyan politics. That story would humanise them; here, they are mystical, otherworldly beings of almost infinite power. They are a genuinely terrifying force, Gods by another name.
     By far the most memorable thing about this story, however, is the fact that we have to say goodbye. The means of Two's departure are miserable, and the fact we see Jamie and Zoe return to their lives, their memory of The Doctor lost, is simply heartbreaking. I watched six Two serials over the course of Cyberman Month and the two Ice Warriors stories. Over that time I really genuinely came to love these guys and their cute little adventures. I can't imagine just how powerful it would be if you'd spent three years with them. I can't really say I've fully explored The War Games and its many, many charms, but I can say that even as the show careened off into a vaguely uncertain future, this story was a demonstration of just how brilliant Doctor Who really was during those great old days.

Thanks

IN TWO WEEKS: We finally make our return to the Pertwee Era with The Mind of Evil.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Seeds of Death

They don't seem to hiss as much in this one.

Doctor Who - Season Four, Story Five - The Seeds of Death

Written between 16th and 26th October 2015

After the joy of Cyberman Month, I was going to carry on the theme, with December becoming Ice Warriors Month. Seeing as there's so much else going on, and the fact I wanted to review the amazing The War Games, I decided to leave the two colourised Ice Warriors stories for my hopefully rejuvenated run-through of the Pertwee years. So here we are with the penultimate story in this little black and white saga - The Seeds of Death, which follows up the Ice Warrior's initial high-concept Base-Under-Siege story with... a high-concept story using the Base-Under-Siege format. While I'm not exactly surprised at this repetition, there are a few things in this story's favour.

     Far in the future (although how far is unspecified), humanity has abandoned its space program in favour of a global teleportation system (known as T-Mat) organised from a Moonbase (no, not that one). Things are going smoothly until a tiny squadron of Ice Warriors invades said Moonbase, and begin coercing its staff into sending poisonous seed pods down to the surface of the Earth. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arrive before the pods are sent, and head up on mankind's last manned rocket to find out exactly what's going on. The pods create a self-replicating fungus which begins to spread across the Earth's surface, choking people and killing wildlife. Because the fungus is allergic to water, the Ice Warriors attack a weather station, but The Doctor manages to swoop in at the last minute and stop them, saving Earth.
     This story was broadcast in 1969, six months before the Apollo 11 mission had landed man on the moon. This makes the story's vision of the future rather pessimistic, and at the same time brilliant - sharply contrasting the 60s love of space and adventure (and really Doctor Who itself), the story manages to predict what actually ended up happening - we made it to the Moon and stopped. While we didn't stop all space travel - sending unmanned probes to take pictures of the Solar System and even sending one probe outside of the influence of our Sun - there are some interesting parallels with the defunding of NASA, the abandonment of the manned Space Program in the 1970s and a general sense of anticlimax to the Space Race. All before Man had even set off for the moon.
      The Seeds of Death is a Base-Under-Siege story, it's true, although it never really feels like that. There's a genuine sense that the Earth is in danger this time, even if the effectiveness of the Ice Warrior's soapy bath foam is undermined by both how silly it looks (Zoe is visibly giggling her head off in one "tense" scene) and by the Shyamalan-worthy fact that water stops it from working. The Ice Warriors, who can see Earth from their spaceships, decided to invade a planet whose surface area is 70% water and where water literally falls from the sky using a fungus which hates it. There are no words for this level of stupid. As for the setting, I wish they had a window on the Moonbase like in that previous story called The Moonbase - they could have even replicated that set and had some amazing continuity! For a part-time viewer it's hard to really appreciate that they're alone and isolated on the moon - The Ice Warriors was great for this, showing the hardships our characters faced while wandering the harsh ice of a future Britain. This time, the best we got was a fairly fun shot of an Ice Warrior wandering around in open countryside.

The Doctor is, in fact, afraid of suffocation in this scene,
and not simply enjoying a relaxing bubble bath.

      The Ice Warriors in this story are slightly less effective than in their premier, with their numbers having been knocked down to a measly two guys, and their motives being less "complicated struggle to survive" and more "mwhahaha let's conquer the earth for shitz lol." The serial is the first, however, to develop their culture as if they were actually people, establishing an apparent caste system with leaders called "Ice Lords" who are superior to all others and who get to wear an extra special silly hat. As mentioned, the shot of an Ice Warrior wandering around Britain was actually fairly interesting, even if it confused the narrative (when in the timeline of this story was the Earth frozen over?). The problem is, this story could have easily been done with the Cybermen of this era - and it might even have felt more appropriate, with the use of the Cybermen as a fear of technological progress fitting perfectly with this story's themes.
      The Seeds of Death does have something to offer those tired of the Base-Under-Siege format - it's got a fun and rather appropriate prediction about the future of humanity, its Leader/Voice-of-Reason/Traitor characters are all really well-developed for what they are. It does retread a lot of the format's problems and the appearance of the Ice Warriors doesn't really make that much sense thematically, but the story is exciting and pacey and more than makes up for it. The Seeds of Death's pessimism about the future of mankind may have been somewhat warranted, but it certainly made for a good story. 

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: We say goodbye to black and white stories for the moment, with The War Games.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Ice Warriors

Varga and Zondal are ssssslippery customers.

Doctor Who - Season Five, Story Three - The Ice Warriors
Written between the 14th and 15th October 2015.

This article would have been a lot more appropriate, I can now say with hindsight, in the Autumn of 2013, when the Ice Warriors returned to our screens in Series 7's Cold War.  Hindsight adds a lot to these Sixties reviews - especially when watching them in such quick succession. The Ice Warriors gained a place in Who folklore for the first, missing appearance of the titular monsters, who would recur in the show until Season 11. As with the Cybermen stories from last month, the missing episodes in this serial have been animated, although unfortunately this is a lot more Youtube Poop and less Infinite Quest.
     The plot follows yet another Base-Under-Siege format, with our base being Brittanicus Base, the stern leader being a bloke called Clent (insert your own rude innuendoes here), the voice of reason is Miss Garratt and the traitor is Peter Sallis' Penley. (Although he comes back.) Set in a far future where Global Dimming (oh, how I miss you) has caused the Earth to enter an early ice age, the Brittanicus Base exists to do some technical mumbo jumbo with lasers in order to prevent glaciers from rolling over the British landmass. On one of their surveys, they uncover a Martian Spacecraft, and the inhabitants, known only as the Ice Warriors, attempt to uncover their ship and fulfil their mission to conquer Earth.
     The story is written by Bryan Hayles, and like Malcolm Hulke's later stories The Silurians and The Sea Devils, the titular Ice Warriors are, despite being alien and aggressive, people worth talking to instead of simply trying to annihilate. There are times where they don't even feel like the villains of the piece - the emotionless Leader Clent is often in a position of antagonism, and the main threat against our characters is the icebergs fast approaching to consume Europe. It's in this where we find the story's main ideological dichotomy - science versus nature, logic versus emotion. Although many characters in the episode are against "science", their anger comes from the fact that in the background of the serial, there is the implication that by this point, the human race is controlled a centralised computer. It's a brilliant concept that doesn't end up skewing one way or another, with the overall message at the end being that a balance must be achieved between computer logic and human intuition. It's a little similar to the themes behind some of this era's Cybermen stories, except here it actually gets mentioned, discussed and thoroughly explored. For once, the six episode runtime feels entirely deserved.

This is ridiculous, if lovingly created.

     The second and third episodes of this serial have still not been returned to the BBC. The two episodes, which are the first to really show the Ice Warriors moving about and doing things, have themselves entered Who Folklore as "important" missing episodes, even going so far as to get a mention in Mark Gattis' comedy sketch The Kidnappers. The episodes were of course animated for the most recent DVD release, with less than brilliant results. The four other animated serials, animated by Cosgrove Hall and Planet 55 , did their best to recreate the shots from the original episode, retaining the subtlties of the original direction and the characters' real expressions. The animation for The Ice Warriors, on the other hands, done by a company called Qurios Entertainment, flattens the action to a 2D plane and has heavily stylised (and somewhat static) designs for each character. It makes certain parts of the episodes incredibly silly, and loses a lot of the atmosphere that the original director so carefully built up.
     Speaking of, the episode's direction and atmosphere is brilliant, tying into the overall theme quite nicely. The icy wastes are very well-made and they feel genuinely desolate, punctuated by a shrill, unearthly wail. And I'm talking about the deliberate one on the soundtrack, not just the increasingly unbearable screams of Victoria Waterfield, who screams at the slightest provocation. She's an unfortunate reflection of a few of the attitudes of this era, like those I discussed during Cybermen Month. Like those serials, there were a few jaw-drop moments - like Jamie leching over the station staff' short skirts, or Victoria's infinitely quotable reaction of "Oh no, not Africa!"

Aaand roll credits. (I need to stop watching CinemaSins.)

     The Ice Warriors is a tight, witty script with very well-developed ideas. The brief of creating an enemy to replace the Daleks didn't really reach fruition here, and they would be back in the show by 1972 until the present day, while to date the Ice Warriors have only ever made four more appearances. It's a shame that the first appearance of the Ice Warriors actually walking about now exists, in its most complete form, as a dodgy animation by the same people who did the sketches on Tracy Beaker, but it does allow the serial to feel a hell of a lot more complete. The Ice Warriors often does a few things here or there which make you gasp at how they got away with it, but they managed to create a very large-scale story on a very small budget, and create a Doctor Who classic which deserves the name.

Thanks

NEXT WEEK: The Doctor and his companions get trapped in the Land of Fiction, in The Mind Robber.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Invasion (Revisited)

A warm welcome to Nostalgia Filter on this special day! What makes it so special, you ask? Well, if I've got my sums right, this is the 1000th Post on this blog! I'm so grateful to be here writing for you all after six years and countless changes, and I'm also really glad that this anniversary has fallen on a corker of an episode...

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See here for my previous look at this story.

An iconic image, for sure. Which is why it's been reproduced
with every other design since.

Doctor Who - Season Six, Story Three - The Invasion
Written 2/10/15

We've finally reached the end of Cyberman Month, and we end it on a bang - The Invasion is a blistering eight episodes long, and is the home of a number of important Doctor Who firsts. Despite being remembered as the story where the Cybermen march on St. Paul's, the story actually spends half of its 200 minute runtime as a slow-burning conspiracy thriller, the Cybermen not being revealed until the cliffhanger of Episode Four. This is not a bad thing though, as it's this quality which makes it stand out, and which would lead it to have a profound effect on the show come next season.
     Upon landing in 1970s England, The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe discover that their old friend Professor Travers has gone off to America, with Professor Watkins and his niece Isobel taking their place. Watkins has been kidnapped by International Electromatics, a mysterious and powerful company owned by the mysterious Tobias Vaughn. Vaughn is colluding with an alien force in order to rule the world, but when The Doctor and Jamie discover that said alien race is the Cybermen, they realise far sooner than he does that they will simply toss him aside once their invasion begins. With the help of Vaughn and The Doctor's old friend Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, founder of UNIT, The Doctor foils the Cybermen's plot to kill all life on Earth.
     I am of the opinion that the vast majority of the longer stories in the Classic Series could be shortened or broken up into smaller, more compact affairs - this is mainly due to the way I started with the shorter serials in the 80s and how used I am to the way TV is today. The same is true of The Invasion, although I don't think you could scrape more than an episode from its runtime when you really break it down. The first four episodes, in which the Cybermen only appear for a few seconds, works as a standalone story with a cliffhanger at the end, in which two characters get kidnapped, and rescued. Episode Four feels climactic in that way, and this aides the pacing no end. It also unfortunately leaves all the padding to the fifth and sixth episode, meaning that the Cybermen's reveal isn't really capitalised on.

The reveal of the first Cyberman in the story is
arguably better animated.

     And that's true of the Cybermen throughout this story. Their redesign is great, even if it seems a little weird to stick the huge rectangular earmuffs onto the side of the Cybermen's heads. The Cybermen here don't really have their own agency within the story, spending the vast majority of it as footsoldiers for either Vaughn or their Cyber-Planner, an obscure computer brought forward from The Wheel In Space. It's because of this that this doesn't really stand out as a Cyberman story, with the far more interesting (and relevant) villain being Vaughn himself. Played by Kevin Stoney (who last appeared as the traitorous Mavic Chen in The Daleks' Master Plan), Vaughn is a wonderful calculating villain, methodical and intelligent, his only failings being his incredible hubris in thinking he could control the Cybermen and his over-reliance on his underlings to do all the important things for him.

     Seeing as we have been addressing some of the sexism present in these stories, let us now turn to the biggest bit of padding in this story, an attempt at addressing sexism which ends up falling on its arse. Soon after the reveal, photographer Isabel insists that she wants to go and see these Cybermen, wishing to go wandering in the sewers to take photographs of them. This escapade, which Zoe ends up supporting, inevitably goes wrong when a group of Cybermen attack them in the sewers, leading to UNIT having to engage the Cybermen directly. It's a dual blow to the entire purpose of the scene, because ultimately Isabel is made to look a fool when it all goes awry, and Isabel's attempt to point out the Brigadier's sexist attitude doesn't work when the thing she's suggesting is ridiculously dangerous and irresponsible for two lone people to go and do.

     This episode sees the return of The Brigadier, previously a colonel, from The Web of Fear. Since his escapade with The Doctor in the London Underground, he's set up the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, known to us and to Doctor Who history as UNIT. The organisation, with and without its founder, would continue from this point to make appearances even to the present day, with their last appearance being in the Series Nine premier. The first appearance of UNIT shapes the story - The Doctor now has assistance to his endeavors, be they through the use of superior infrastructure or simply through the precise application of military force. This created a whole new dynamic for the show which the Third Doctor would come to rely on almost exclusively in his first few years, with The Doctor and companions both working with and having moral complaints with UNIT and its members.

PACKERRR!!

     Cybermen Month has seen me watch several pieces of animated Doctor Who, and I'll be doing the same thing next week when I review The Ice Warriors. This was, in fact, the first serial to be given this treatment, with episodes 1 and 4 being animated by famous British animation company Cosgrove Hall. It's surprising it took this long for this to have become a thing. The animated episodes are of course not perfect substitution for the original, and it can be argued that there is a lot of detail in the direction lost with the move towards animation. But the animation also allows a lot of the feel of each episode to be set by Cosgrove Hall's expert art design, and it really makes the beginning of the serial that much more tense for it.
     The Invasion is not a story which particularly highlights the Cybermen in terms of their mythology or history, beyond being their earliest chronological appearance within the show's universe. It is, however, an excellent Doctor Who story, a brilliant tense thriller with minimal padding, a really enjoyable villain and a story format which would go on to transform the show and bring it into the world of colour. I hoped with Cybermen week to give a thorough idea of where the Cybermen came from, as well as to go back and learn more about the Troughton years. If I can have anything happen for you, dear reader, as a result of this, it's that you go and see The Invasion. You really won't regret it.

Thanks.

NEXT TUESDAY: We shuffle back a season as we begin looking at stories starring The Ice Warriors.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Wheel In Space

This is the first appearance of the "teardrop" eye design,
which would persist for most future versions.

Doctor Who - Season Five, Story Seven - The Wheel In Space
Written 30/9/15

Last week, I reviewed a story which had been recovered in its entirety, meaning that thanks to animation in The Tenth Planet and The Moonbase, I haven't encountered a single episode that didn't at least move. The Wheel In Space is the single exception to the Cybermen's completeness today, with four of its six episodes consigned to the scrap heap, leaving only telesnaps (essentially screenshots of the episode at different intervals) and audio. In order to watch these lost episodes, fans have compiled these two elements into creating Reconstructions, which mix the audio with a slideshow of telesnaps relevant to the action, and CGI where possible. Given all this effort has gone into making this story watchable here and now, what's the story actually like?
      The Wheel In Space is the final story of Season 5, and it's fitting that in a season where six out of the seven stories all follow the Base-Under-Siege plot structure, The Wheel In Space is not the exception - the difference being that the story plods along for six episodes as opposed to four. This structure seems fairly unnecessary, and the first episode ends up being fairly tedious as Jamie and The Doctor are stuck on a small spacecraft, with The Doctor ending up concussed and Jamie having to fight a "Servo" robot which then doesn't appear in the rest of the story. The following five episodes take The Doctor and Jamie to the titular wheel, a space station above Earth which uses its x-ray laser to deflect asteroids. As it turns out, the Cybermen have used a complicated plan involving exploding a sun in order to sabotage the base, aiming to use it to guide an invasion fleet towards Earth and conquer it. The Doctor manages to fix the laser and destroy the invading ships.
     The script was originally by Cybermen co-creator Kit Pedler from before he left the program and was edited into the six-part format by David Whittaker. Pedler's influence on the script is clear - this is a Base-Under-Siege story, with all the same archetypes as before. There are a few decent roles for women in this story, placing them in particular positions of authority, but there are still several misogynistic moments and when all's said and done the only female character who doesn't die is the new companion, Zoe. It gives the story something of a forgettable feeling, which is a real shame given the season began on such a strong Cyberman story.

Episodes 3 and 6 survive, and they are welcome.

     Zoe is an interesting companion, and her characterisation is very thoroughly explored here. Like the Cybermen she faces, Zoe (apparently) has a problem expressing emotions, going through life very logically. As opposed to Victoria, who left in the previous serial (the show is much quieter now, much less screaming), Zoe is from Earth's future, and thus forms a nice contrast to Jamie's more antiquated outlook on the world. Her intelligence and cunning help The Doctor to discover the threat here, and in later serials would be used to outsmart enemies in ways The Doctor couldn't. She's the saving grace of this serial, often providing some of the scenes with interesting moments that the usual collection of Base-Under-Siege archetypes cannot.
     Watching the recons was a novel experience, and now I've dipped my toes in I'm much more likely to go and watch some of the stories that have missing episodes. I will say that I enjoyed The Wheel In Space - it's Doctor Who, and it's the Cybermen, what's not to love? But a lot of the story did stretch on, and the characters struggled to break outside the archetypes which this story format forced them into. Base-Under-Siege can create a lot of interesting stories if they're actually trying to say or do something beyond the surface of that format - Dalek being the most notable example. The Wheel In Space doesn't live up to the story which began this season, and it would soon be dwarfed by the next Cyberman story, which finally moved from this mold.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: Cybermen Month comes to an explosive end with the eight-episode adventure, as 1970s London is struck by The Invasion.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Tomb of the Cybermen (Revisited)

See here for my previous look at this story.

Despite the phallic design, the Cyber Controller adds an
interesting face to the Cybermen.

Doctor Who - Season Five, Story One - The Tomb of the Cybermen
Written between 27th and 28th September 2015

A question often arises when discussing The Tomb of the Cybermen - what makes this story so special? There are some who believe that the story's recovery in 1991 in its entirety was the miraculous reappearance of a bona fide classic, while others say that its reappearance is the only reason why people focus on it, and it's no different to any other Cyberman story from this era. There are elements of truth in both camps, as is often the case, and the reality is somewhere in the middle. It's true that Tomb has a great deal of similarities to the other Base-Under-Siege staples, but it also has a number of moments which raise it to another level.

Kit Pedler's last story had a black astronaut, so this comes
a little out of left-field.

     The Doctor has just picked up Victoria Waterfield, a now orphaned child of a Victorian scientist who fought against the Daleks. The Doctor and Jamie take her on her first trip, and end up landing on the planet Telos, where an expedition is attempting to excavate and find the legendary Tombs of the Cybermen, who at this point in history have been missing for several hundred years. The expedition is backed by the suspicious Klieg, his assistant Kaftan and her hulking slave Toberman. The Doctor is cautious about exploring the Tombs, but eventually leads the group the sleeping Cybermen. Klieg awakens them, revealing that he wishes to use them to rule the Earth. However, the newly awakened Cyber-Controller soon sets about the agenda of restarting Cyber-conversion. Klieg is defeated, and despite the efforts of the Cybermen and their adorable rodent-like servants the Cybermats, Toberman sacrifices himself to shut them away once more,
     The Cybermen here retain their design from The Moonbase, with a few extra additions made to their general lore. The Cybermen's use of refrigeration devices and their second home on Telos went on to become a key part of their mythology, as was the existence of the Cybermats (retired in Revenge and brought back in Closing Time), cute little creatures apparently capable of killing. Their threat here feels a lot more tangible than in the Moonbase, as they're present as a great evil locked away than as an outside invader. The harsh, cold architecture of the Tomb, coupled with the death traps and puzzles, do a lot to beef up the Cyber threat, and their desire to convert people is specifically pushed and discussed as the danger behind them. (Even if we won't see the Conversion process until the 1980s.)
     Most episode guides classify this as a Base-Under-Siege story, and it's not hard to see why. The character archetypes of the tough leader, the voice-of-reason scientist and the traitor are all there, as is the claustrophobia that comes with fighting the Cybermen in such a small, inescapable space. However, I think that there is a major difference - whose base is under siege, here? Usually the Base-Under-Siege story features a group of humans minding their own business before being attacked, and yet this time these explorers have sought the Cybermen out to their base. The Control Rooms of the Snowcap and The Moonbase were fairly mix and match, but the central vestibule in this serial is cramped and metallic and more innately inhospitable than simply bland.

There are some sweet moments with Victoria, and her
screaming isn't grating... yet.

     Of course this is the Sixties, so I have to discuss some of the less favourable aspects of the serial. All of the human villain characters have thick accents and darker skin, even though they are (with the exception of Toberman) played by white actors. Klieg and Kaftan are not exactly trustworthy in their initial appearance, but the episode builds around their villainous nature by having The Doctor be suspicious of them. Toberman was originally meant to be mute and deaf, with his hearing aid being a nod to the Cybermen's origins, but this was left out and so the only black character in the serial is portrayed as a noble, if terrifying, savage. Elsewhere, and both female characters are actually banned by the male exhibition leaders from even entering deep into the Tombs, and there are several similar comments made throughout. Victoria at least fights against a few of these jabs, and her characteristic screaming is actually used as a clever diversion, but it's still jarring to see this in a story supposedly set hundreds of years in our future.
     So, to answer my original question - what makes Tomb so memorable? It's certainly not some narrative masterpiece, and it's not very progressive with its characters, most of whom are either vaguely racist or are taken from previous Base-Under-Siege stories. But the story's setting, mythology, and expert sense of tension helps to sell a setup which without that would be rather menial. It is true that a lot of the focus on this story comes from its status as one of the seven complete Second Doctor stories, and one whose appearance seemed to arrive most miraculously, but that's almost incidental when you actually compare this episode to the stories that came before and after in this era. It doesn't just stand out, it shines. And that's why it's so cherished.

Thanks.

NEXT WEEK: A serial which now exists as 1/3rd actual episode and 2/3rds static images and dodgy CGI from 2010. It's The Wheel In Space.

Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Moonbase (Revisited)

See here for my previous look at this story. Although, tbh, I'm not sure I'd actually watched the serial when I wrote that. I literally don't understand where I was coming from.

The Moonbase's DVD replaces the missing episodes with
animation, like last week.

Doctor Who - Season Four, Story Six - The Moonbase
Written between 21st and 23rd September 2015

It is not surprising that a show spanning 26 years of continuous programming through three distinct decades managed to end up following certain archetypes when it came to writing stories. What is surprising about the Second and Third Doctor's era is how often the same one comes up. Yes, I am indeed talking about "Base-Under-Siege", a plot template with the same circumstances and character archetypes which defines many of the stories across Doctor Who - but especially in the Second Doctor's era. Troughton didn't, of course, originate this - The Tenth Planet from last week was one of these stories. But it's more important here because last week, the whole world was being invaded, while this week we're focusing on a small tiny base. On the Moon.
     While attempting to land on Mars, something drags the TARDIS off-course and they end up on Earth's moon in the year 2070. There they enter the Moonbase, staffed by a small scientific team in charge of the Gravitron, a device used in the future to control the Earth's weather. The Doctor and his three companions (Ben and Polly from last week, and Two's favourite companion, Jamie McCrimmon) discover that the base has been inundated with an epidemic, causing staff members to become comatose with black veins. The director, Hobson, is immediately suspicious of The Doctor and his friends - especially when people start going missing. As we see, this is down to the Cybermen, something which The Doctor immediately suspects. Soon the base is being sieged by an Army of Cybermen, intent on using the Gravitron to kill everyone on Earth. Using the help of the remaining crew, The Doctor manages to direct the Gravitron towards the Cybermen and their ships, expelling them from the moon, as Polly and Ben despatch the remaining few with a solvent cocktail.
     This is the fourth story of Troughton's era, but, thanks to the missing episodes, it contains only his third and fourth surviving episodes. Half of The Moonbase is missing and has been for years - this is another DVD release (brought out in 2014) where the remaining episodes have been animated. I really like this selection of stories because it shows both sides of the problem - next week's Tomb of the Cybermen was recovered in its entirety and didn't live up to expectations, but The Wheel In Space the week after contains only two of its six episodes. When I first watched The Moonbase and reviewed it (as can be read in the link at the top of this article) those animations hadn't been done, and I distinctly didn't remember the first episode being gone. I must have started on the second episode, not had a clue what was going on, and judged it from there.

These Cybermen are much more into subterfuge.

     So, what is "Base-Under-Siege"? The Doctor and companions enter a remote, claustrophobic base. It's being run by a small (emphasis on small) team of people who usually follow a set of archetypes. Among others, there's the suspicious and hardline leader, the medic who speaks as the voice of reason, and the plucky one with lots of technical knowledge. People start being picked off when the alien enemies slowly start to pick people off, making their way closer and closer to our heroes and their defences. What story am I describing? It's definitely a description of The Moonbase. It's also a description of dozens of other Doctor Who stories. Dalek is Base Under Siege. Flatline is Base Under Siege. It is ubiquitous. The problem with Troughton's Base Under Siege stories being a lack of variety caused by repetition of the plot and not a lot of budget to separate them from one another.
     The turnaround between the broadcast of The Tenth Planet and filming for The Moonbase was apparently only two weeks. Despite this hasty schedule, the new Cyberman design is both simpler and slightly more effective, and the fact that a hefty accordion has been replaced by a boiler suit with handles means that they were able to create a fairly convincing "army". As I put rather nicely in my previous review, the new design is a trade-off which would go on to define the design of the Cybermen in all later incarnations. The robotic boiler suit men have much less of the humanoid design of their predecessor - their hands are three-fingered pincers, their voices now a harsh electronic buzz that requires subtitles to understand. Although The Doctor does mention their history, it's not immediately obvious that these things are human beings - but when that history is brought up, their inhumanity becomes all the more terrifying.
     Of course, like last week, and like some time to come, there is an air of pronounced sexism which often gets brought up around The Moonbase. Polly is given quite a nice scene where she works out a way of discovering a way to defeat these Cybermen - using a combination of solvents to erode the plastic coating on the Cybermen's chest apparatus. But apart from that, she doesn't get much else to do but scream at the Cybermen, be disbelieved about having seen the Cybermen, and be told by three different people to make coffee. Often there's a counter-argument that The Doctor asking her to make coffee is an attempt to diffuse the tense situation that had arisen amongst the staff of the base. But one thing that is never brought up is the fact that at one point Ben literally says, "Not you Polly, this is Men's work." I suppose it's historical accuracy, however unpleasant it may be.

Two's characterisation takes it's most well-known form here.

     The Moonbase ends up being lot more interesting than I gave it credit for. It doesn't have to spend as much time explaining itself as its predecessor did, and so it gets to add a bit more tension and suspense. The story was meant to capitalise on the new Cybermen, and it did that, while at the same time finally calming Troughton's more clownish tendencies and allowing the more serious side of his character to come out. Despite how we may be able to categorise and scrutinise it, and despite some of the more distasteful idiosyncrasies of its era, The Moonbase is a very enjoyable story for fans of this era.

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NEXT WEEK: The Boy Wonder of the Troughton era, which just happens to be a Cyberman story. Join with us as we defrost The Tomb of the Cybermen.

FTA: Doctor Who Classic: Edge of Destruction, Galaxy Four and Tomb of the Cybermen

When I was involved in Lewis Christian's amazing fan-created book Celebrate, Regenerate, I submitted 29 articles, a whopping 25 of which got published within the beautiful, non-profit book. Unfortunately, very soon after the book was published on Lulu, Christian's website was taken over and the book disappeared from Lulu altogether. Since the book, both digital and physical, is effectively out of print, I thought I'd publish all of the articles that I have stored away in my archives, staggered across the weeks (due to the sheer amount of text involved.) I hope you enjoy them, and I hope that through this, the spirit of Celebrate, Regenerate lives on. I'll also be including "See More" links to where I've previously written a full review of that story, and images to break up the text. Enjoy. :D

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The Edge of Destruction (Extra words)
By Andrew Smith

Doctor Who proves to be incredibly divisive as early as its third story. Granted, The Edge of Destruction’s rather odd plot and performance does mean that it doesn’t attract a lot of followers, but at heart it’s the finale to a 13-episode long arc that cements the personalities of our initial TARDIS team as well as introducing us to the concept of a sentient time machine. Its slightly stage-play like construction allows us a wonderful amount of tension compared with the speed of its production, and the solution is a wonderfully unassuming joke that relieves the tension of the instalment with incredible ease. The Edge of Destruction, despite the way it was cobbled together on an almost absent budget, is a masterpiece that perfectly caps the series’ opening arc and ensured the success of the series for years to come. (See more.)

Galaxy Four
By Andrew Smith

Perhaps I'm not an expert here. My first interaction with Galaxy Four came just after I'd started looking into the Classic Series, when I bought the Titan Books publishing of the serial's script. The idea of the Chumblies fascinated me; the first time in my experience where there had been a deliberate dissonance between the idea that the most alien looking ones were the baddies. I was fascinated by the commanding female presence in the Drahvins, held my breath as Steven Taylor suffocated in the air lock, and felt slightly sad when the Drahvins were left to die on the exploding planet. Imagine my disappointment, then, when I learnt for the first time about the great burnings, and that the story had been entirely destroyed.
     Until the very recent discovery of the third episode, this was something of a Ghost story, one which had very little record at all post-transmission. It wasn't alone, of course, but it wasn't exactly a high-profile loss. People were more concerned with William Hartnell's last episode, or Troughton's first story. The Highlanders, The Macra Terror, The Web of Fear. Why should anyone care about a little old story with Amazonian aliens and cute little robots, when so much of Doctor Who's most important moments are completely missing? Well, for a very good reason. What's left of Galaxy Four is a decent little story, and one that packs a lot of great sci-fi ideas into an interesting premise. For a bit.
     Ok, the elephant in the room time. Galaxy Four is a tiny bit tedious in its way, and for the experienced viewer who knows the ins and outs of TV, this is pretty much the equivalent of watching an episode of Merlin where they try to spring the surprise that Morgana is evil. But for me as a child, reading this wonderful old script... everything was fresh, everything was new. Suddenly the black and white era wasn't this impenetrable fog, but this exciting and wonderful series of stories that were just as good as the stuff I was used to. Galaxy Four was the story that let me go one step further to becoming a Doctor Who fan, and for that I am truly grateful.

Tomb of the Cybermen

By Andrew Smith

The story of Tomb of the Cybermen and it’s history in Who fandom is the result of a long saga that began and ended many years before I was even born, but it never stopped me from appreciating the story in new light. At the end of the day, when we look at Tomb, we have to wonder why exactly it’s so special. After all, it’s a fairly standard story of that era. It takes character roles from previous Cyberman stories, with the confident expedition leader, the nervous guy on the edge, and the base under siege story is almost endemic. So what makes it so… so memorable? 

     Aside from the story’s size, which is the perfect configuration for most Classic Who fans, the story is also famous for having been fully recovered after the great burnings of the 1970s. As well as large swathes of Doctor Who, shows like Dad’s Army and nearly Monty Python had their master tapes burnt. For years, even after the program ended, people lamented the fate of Tomb of the Cybermen, oft remembered for the scenes in the second episode in which the Cybermen awaken from their sleep. And then, when all hope was lost, the entire story was recovered in 1992 from a Chinese TV station. Despite sharing a lot of the Second Doctor’s era’s tropes, the story feels more modern and the four-part structure means that it might as well be a Pertwee story someone lost the colour spots for.

     The Cybermen were always one of my favourite monsters because of the fact that they weren’t fundamentally malicious in nature. Modern media often feels the need to distinguish goodies and baddies, right and wrong, the compassionate and the evil. As a child, I loved the fact that the Cybermen were the product of a society, not unlike ours, whose desperation to survive turned them into a force of evil. The fear that they provoke is not from their appearance, nor their voice, but their motives. “You will become like us.” This story takes the more conceptual Cybermen from their first story and compacts it into a more public-friendly form, creating the monster that would go on to become the Daleks’ main competition as the series’ most well known monster.

     There’s been a lot of backlash to Tomb of the Cybermen’s popularity over the years, as you’d expect. The (human) villains are all minorities, the only black man is a mute who sacrifices himself at the end to save the day, and the only reason anything happens is because The Doctor is a bit too nosy. But people are able to ignore that with Tomb of the Cybermen in a way that other stories don’t manage. And that’s simply because Tomb, if you ignore all of the rascism, is a very well crafted Who story that takes the Cybermen and shoves them into a better, scarier new direction. It’s got Cybermen, Cybercontrollers, Cybermats and even a Cyber-manakin, and if I wanted to introduce a Not-We to my favourite monster, this would be the story I’d choose. (See more.)

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Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Invasion

1969. The Invasion is a powerful story, and it's also a long one - it's eight episodes and 200 minutes leave plenty of time for the slow-burning thriller to mature. While one would think that this length could bore viewers, Invasion manages to keep one's attention for all three and a half hours....
     Tobias Vaughn is the head of International Electromatics, which controls all of the world's electronic goods. He and his secret police control areas of housing and have sites all over the world. When The Doctor arrives, with Jamie and Zoe in tow, they seek out their old friend Proffessor Travers, to help them fix some of the TARDIS' circuits. Instead, his collague Professor Watkins has moved in in Travers' absense - but now even he has gone missing. As The Doctor and Jamie explore IE and their plot to control the world, they also meet UNIT, led by the Doctor's friend The Brigadier (who would later star in episodes with UNIT until the show's final series in 1989). By the half-way point in the story, it is revealed that Vaughn's allies are a very early form of the Cybermen.
     The most interesting thing in this episode is definitely Tobias Vaughn. Kevin Stoney does a wonderful job in creating Vaugn's silent megalomania, and his overall sense of authority from the word go. The tone of the story is also quite dark, despite there not being many particularly dark things in it.

     Like The Moonbase, two episodes of The Invasion are missing - Episodes 1 and 4. However, an extra slice of budget for animator group Cosgrove Hall (who had created non-canon Scream of the Shalka and later went on to broadcast the canon Infinity Quest) meant that they, using photographs and sound recordings, were able to recreate the lost episodes. And they fit rather well; in some places I think they work rather better than the filmed episodes, with much more of a dark tone and feel.
     So, to sum up, The Invasion is a triumph. Well written, well directed by Douglas Camfield, and it's a tense, slow-burning sci-fi thriller that is well-worth the time and money spent on it.

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Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Moonbase

1967. It's hard to review stories where half of the episodes are missing, and its hard to critisise the black and white stories based on their aesthetics. These are the difficulties I face, as I listen/watch The Moonbase, the second Cyberman story from far back in 1967.
      As I said in my review of Tomb, The Tenth Planet was important in Doctor Who history for two reasons; it introduced the concept of Regeneration, and it introduced the Cybermen. As the most common recurring monster of Troughton's era, the Cybermen returned in this serial. It needed to reintroduce the concept while spicing up the monsters.
     For the story, the Cybermen were given a robotic makeover (pictured) as well as new voices and a new aim. (It's explained in bonus material from around 1988 that these are a different subspecies of Cyberman than in The Tenth Planet.) I find that while these Cybermen lose one type of fear from their counterparts (in that they are less human, and therefore they are less easy to envisage as the next stage of humanity,) but they do have their own fear - an eerie emotionless face and voice.
     The story is basic, and more-or-less a rerun of The Tenth Planet - The Cybermen attack the Doctor, his companions and a specialist team while cooped up in a base. In this case, that base is the Gravitron Weather Controller, or the titular moonbase. The base has been affected by a virus that is strangely selective, and when the Doctor arrives, he soon finds that an old enemy are involved... (The Cybermen, obviously.)
     Only the second and fourth episodes remain, leaving me to have to listen to the audio recordings of the first and third. While it doesn't make up for the loss of picture, I can certainly get a slim idea of what's going on. It doesn't feel right to criticise the story. But the truth is that it is dull, repetitive and doesn't make use of any of the concepts with any skill.

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Review: Doctor Who Classic: The Tomb of the Cybermen

1967. Tomb of the Cybermen is one of the classic stories in the early history of Doctor Who, making the most of the low budget and making something that's interesting, compelling and sometimes a little genuinely scary. The Beeb wanted another Cyber story to follow up on the success of The Moonbase (which I might review later), which had repopularised them after their debut in The Tenth Planet. These ruthless, emotionless creatures were a real hit with fans, second to the Daleks, and Tomb was in fact the strongest story ever featuring them.
     It's around 2486 AD. An expedition of archeologists arrive on the Cybermen's second planet, Telos, after their 200 year sleep. They discover a pair of electro-wired doors with the Cyber symbol. The Doctor and his companions Jamie and Victoria arrive and help out the exhibition. as they explore the inside, it is realised that some members of the expedition have ulterior motives...
      Everyone acts brilliantly (With the exception of a black slave and a very ambitious American), and are very well characterised. Everything is more or less believable, and when the Cybermen do appear, they aren't too bothered with revenge, and come off more logical and efficient than in later stories. The story also acts as a first adventure for companion Victoria Waterfield, and while some of the acting is a little hyperbolic, her times and trends are well demonstrated without it infringing upon the stroy's progress.
     This story is responsible for many aspects of the Cybermen's fame: Cybermats, The Cybercontroller, Cryogenics, and the chilling catchphrase, "YOU WILL BECOME LIKE US."

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