Format: DVD
Warts & All: Army Of Three!
Quote: Vain to the point of arrogance. A trifle obstinate, perhaps. But basically a good man.
Review: You know, if the production team had wheeled out three Daleks and not tried to pretend they were an army, that would have worked brilliantly. Three Daleks should add up to an unstoppable force. It’s the fact that they tried that makes episode four look so sad. But the effort to fill in with CGI is a waste of time and money, in my humble, and in any case that final part has bigger problems in the form of what Steven Moffat might call timey-wimey explainy-wainy.
It’s a decent temporal paradox scenario, but there had to be a better way of structuring it so that we (and by ‘we’ I mean even the kiddiwinks some of us might have been when we first saw it) understood it all (it’s not that complicated) with more show and far less tell. It’s also a bit like Groundhog Day Of The Daleks in that it suffers a tad from over-familiarity – not sure whether it was one of those that got repeated a lot once upon a time, but I do feel like I may have seen it too often. Parts of it seem to lollop and trudge along like a troupe of Ogrons chasing the Doctor on a bulbous-tyred tricycle. And there’s one bit that always irks me more than the exposition and that’s when the Doctor runs out of Alderley House, casually blasts an Ogron with a disintegrator gun, hops in a Land Rover with a machine-gun mounted in the back, leaves the Brigadier to face the remaining Ogrons all by himself, and drives straight off to the railway bridge in a Land Rover without a machine gun mounted in the back.
As you can see, there’s rather too much that’s amiss with that little sequence. In spite of these and other problems (a list which would include strangely lethargic Dalek voices, an Ogron who just doesn’t bother to act and Aubrey Woods as the Controller, who is trying to act, but whose performance has if anything gotten worse since I noticed the terrible similarity with that other notorious shiny-faced despot, David Cameron, Jo being mind-bogglingly naive and gullible, even by the Grant standard) it manages to be more fun than it should. There’s something in it that appeals to the childhood fan in me, I suppose, a taste of the UNIT/Monster war games I played in my head as a nipper. (The novelisation included a map, a terrific visual aid for young minds setting the stage for the battle.) The Ogrons (aside from that one bad egg) are great. Plus time-travelling guerrillas – loads of potential, whichever way you spell them.
The Doctor availing himself of the contents of Styles’ wine-cellar and being amusingly aristocratic and hyper-hypocritical, as we have come to expect. (The above quote is the Doctor’s opinion of Sir Reginald Styles and it makes me laugh because it’s just the sort of attribution of traits to someone else from an individual utterly blind to his own that you can encounter every day on the internet, only usually less funny. I’m not sure writer, Louis Marks, is aware how funny he’s being.) There’s a genuine tension to the world events, with yet another crucial peace conference – something that, with a tweak, ought really to have been tied back to Mind Of Evil. But that’s just a tiny dab of missing continuity glue in a story where I’m won over more by separate pieces than the whole. There are a lot of winning ingredients in what amounts to a time paradox tale that, far from being cleverly constructed, feels like one the Blue Peter team made earlier.
The end result is, in some respects, exemplary Doctor Who in illustrating the extent to which a story can be A Bit Rubbish™ and yet still be everything Doctor Who should be
