Format: DVD

Warts & All: Singular smoke column

Quote: Three of them. I didn’t know when I was well off.

Review: Maybe it’s just me, but if I had a tenth anniversary coming up I would not be looking to Bob Baker & Dave Martin to script it for me. But the pair actually do a decent job here, crafting something that hangs together pretty well, celebrates the series’ past and builds on the mythology of the Time Lords first introduced only a few years earlier.

It’s dished up with generous helpings of humour, quality sparkle to the dialogue – especially, but not limited to, between Doctors Two and Three, with Pertwee and Troughton in tip-top form and pitching the Doctor-Doctor relationship perfectly between confrontation and camaraderie. Lovely stuff – and on initial broadcast this would’ve been my first ever introduction to the previous Doctors. There’s a side-dish of a touch of sadness because Doctor One’s role is necessarily limited by Hartnell’s ill health at the time. The in-story explanation – energy drain – is passable enough but it’s impossible to overlook how much the actor has aged in the years since he departed the show, confined there on the TARDIS screen.

Still, the overriding mood is upbeat – as you’d expect at a party – and appropriately, for a Doctor Who party, with plenty of dramatic punch. After a relatively quiet and unassuming beginning, we’re bombarded with outlandish events and sights – the gelguards are bizarre orange blobby things and we’re treated to the reverse of Pertwee’s Yeti in Tooting Bec principle, with ordinary terrestrial objects (Bessie, the Brigadier’s computer, the Doctor’s lab bench etc) transported to an alien landscape. All right the landscape is only about as alien as the last quarry or clay pit we saw, but the incongruity supplements the action in commanding our attention and ensuring that this epic encounter with a Time Lord legend is memorable.

The epicness is somewhat tempered by budgetary constraints, with a feeble wispy column of smoke to represent the power of a mighty singularity at the heart of a black hole and one has to wonder at the imagination behind Omega’s mask when, cursed or blessed as he is with the power of creating anything he wishes from thought alone, all this Time Lord God can come up with is a maze of bubblewrap corridors and a couple of chairs. Omega himself, the Wizard Of Oz of this scenario, is nicely realised with a lovely mask design and the SHOUTY stentorian tones of Stephen Thorne last heard belting out of the throat of the Daemon, Azal. Full of overwraught emotion, he’s convincingly mad and it’s entertaining to watch Troughton’s Doc wind him up with questions about his flute. And yes, it’s all resolved a teeny bit conveniently with the recorder, but in fairness that solution is built reasonably neatly into the story without completely advertising it as something that will prove important later. Honestly, the only notable letdowns for me are the tedious slow-mo wrestling match with Omega’s pet gargoyle (wouldn’t that have been so much more entertaining if he’d pitted it against the exquisitely flappable second Doctor?) and the prolonged goodbyes as everyone steps through the smoke column to go home. Always the price of an anniversary special – too many characters, too many farewells.

This one’s just shy of overcrowded, with Mr Ollis being the principal spare limb. No mention (that I can recall) of where Captain Yates is, but he’s not missed and the Brig and Benton have a fair share of the action and great lines. An enjoyable slice of birthday cake. With an unusual orangey gel centre.

Format: DVD

Warts & All: Big Bird!

Quote: A dream. Really, Doctor, you’ll be consulting the entrails of a sheep next.

Review: Atlantis sinks. We get that. Unfortunately, on the three occasions Doctor Who has dealt with this, the only time it’s worked well is when it was mentioned in passing. That was in The Dæmons. And the way this starts off with very dramatic prophetic dreams of doom, you’d think this could be a natural sequel.

But no. Despite this occurring only one season later, it has nothing to do with Dæmons. When you learn that Barry Letts had a hand in the writing, it’s even more remarkable that they’d overlook that spot of continuity, but hey, you know how easy it is to overlook tiny details when your room is a mess. This is interested in Atlantis, Greek myth, Time, Buddhism and being comedic, but it somehow fails to pull all those things together into a satisfying whole. After the melodramatic start, it does itself no favours by having the Doctor, fixated on finding the Master, somewhat dismissive of some project called Transition Of Matter Through Interstitial Time (TOMTIT) and utterly failing to think that possibly the Master could be involved. In a time experiment in 20th century Britain where the Master is known to be at large. Duh! And things kind of descend into farce from there, with what feels like a combination of the pantomime of which later eras were accused and ‘comedy’ more in keeping with Graham Williams’ tenure on the show.

Much of it is at least as cringeworthy as any cheap special effect, the likes of Benton in a nappy and sped-up shots of the Doctor’s car only lacking the music to lend it the full ‘Bessie Hill’ effect. Which is not quite as embarrassing as the acting efforts of some of the cast when asked to mime being stuck in slow-mo or when young tech, Stuart, is confronted with his accelerated decrepitude. Some of the ideas are good: the notion of gaps between time as a space inhabited by powerful and extremely dangerous creatures is a fascinating one, for instance, but when one of those god-like beings flaps about as a panto-birdman on wires all illusions of great possibilities are shattered. The use of TOMTIT (oooer, matron, tomtitter ye not) as a kind of time scoop, planting threats from history in UNIT’s path is okay, but the Master’s choices are odd – a mounted knight with a lance is crappy opposition to a vehicular convoy and a bunch of Civil War roundheads manage to engage modern army troops in a combat which really should have been much more one-sided.

The Doodlebug is the only smart move, but at one point it seems to imply the Master is controlling when it nosedives, only then for some farmer to reveal it came down exactly in the same spot a Doodlebug struck in the war. UNIT, including the Brig, are peripherally involved at best, used to ship the TARDIS and then spending much of the rest of the story caught in a time rift or whatever. Action shifts relatively late in proceedings to ancient Atlantis, where there is some fun to be had watching Delgado romance Queen Galleia (Ingrid Pitt), but the panto aspect is even further reinforced here, not helped by a Minotaur about as fearsome as Rentaghost’s Dobbin. The main elements of merit, for me, come in the form of the ideas played with between the two TARDISes – Time Ram (no, nothing to do with sheep) and the nested TARDISes (used again later in Logopolis) and Kronos works considerably better as a giant woman’s face in the CSO sky than it ever does as a man in a bird costume. Jo-Jo Grant disappears a bit in the CSO at one point, oops, and her decision to force the TARDISes into collision feels like a repeat of her self-sacrifice which destroys Azal in the Dæmons.

So ultimately I’m left with a sense of a confused mess of a handful of original ideas served up with a lack of originality and a hint of Carry On Third Doctor. TOMTIT? Translation Of Mythical Tropes Into Tripe.

Format: DVD

Warts & All: Cotton

Quote: We’d all become unpeople undoing unthings untogether.

Review: Back when I first acquired this on DVD, I was wary of watching it because I remembered it being an ordeal when I last saw it, but a gentleman known to many as Ian Potter assured me it would be better if rationed to one episode at a time. Limited exposure, like thesium radiation. And he was right. And since that’s how I’ve been approaching most of this rewatchathon it worked this time too. Kind of goes without saying, there are ropey elements – besides Cotton scene-stealing for all the wrong reasons, there’s a fine selection of other bad acting on display, such as Ky (I wonder if the writers were being really clever and knew Ky was Cornish for dog – dog, mutt, see what they did there?) being not great throughout and with another ‘special’ award going to warrior-chief, Varan, when he discovers the traces of mutation in his hand, and a painfully awful explosive decompression scene when the Marshall shoots a great big hole in Skybase. The actors writhe around on the floor like beached eels while I cringe on the sofa and try to distract myself by checking my phone for texts, tweets or anything.

However, the story plays to its strengths far better than Claws Of Axos, making a fair amount of mileage from its themes of colonialism and racial segregation and the big sci-fi concept of a metamorphic cycle linked to a long planetary orbit. And in some respects it beats Claws on its own ground, with the notions of our perceptions of physical appearance versus nature, the insectoid stage of the mutants (a nice design) being monsters who are revealed to be just frightened – and persecuted – people. They’re suitably monstrous, but you feel an appropriate pang of sympathy when one is gunned mercilessly down by the Marshall towards the end. Design work in general is pretty solid, with a reasonably well-realised Skybase interior and that aspect is only really let down at the end with the big rainbow-fairy-glow-angel into which Ky transforms, which has always struck me – and still does – as the most rubbishy Star Trekkish alien Doctor Who has ever produced.

Overall, the six-parter is very colourful and although never quite reaches the psychedelic heights of Claws there’s hints of similar in the CSO cave scenes where the Doctor and Professor Sondergaard fight their way to the heart of the radiation. There are elements of to-and-fro to spin things out to the full six parts and some odd decisions presumably to serve the same purpose: the Marshall’s troops mount a full-scale search for the Doctor and he slips past them in the mist when it would have been way easier just to stakeout the transfer base since that’s the only access point to Skybase.

Needless to say he gets captured anyway later. D’oh. Paul Whitsun-Jones is an effectively odious Marshall, clinging to colonial power over a planet that Earth’s empire is ready to relinquish, John Hollis invests some interest and personality in the character of Sondergaard, who would otherwise just be a cipher there to clue the Doctor in on missing pieces of the puzzle. (It’s a bit odd when the Doctor first sees him and refers to the figure in the anti-rad suit as something like “whatever it is” when it’s clearly a man in an anti-radiation suit.) But in another story, with more material, Sondergaard could be a more interesting character – and is rare in Doctor Who circles in that he’s a professor who survives past the end of the story.

The awesome Geoffrey Palmer pops up early on and meets with a more sudden end than he got in The Silurians. And, of course, there’s a government official – the Investigator – from Earth because it doesn’t matter what century we’re in, you can’t go for many Pertwee stories without one. The Cotton-Stubbs dynamic wants to be one of those classic character double-acts that Bob Holmes was famous for. It’s not.

But my favourite comedy moment is at the very beginning when the old bearded man staggers through the mist right up to the camera and you expect him to pant breathlessly and announce the one word, “It’s…” before the opening titles roll. And, all in all, “It’s…” better than you (probably) think.

Format: DVD

Warts & All: Obviously fake Master mask!

Quote: (The Master watching The Clangers) It seems to be a rather interesting extra-terrestrial life form.

Review: Who knew you could so transform a UNIT story simply by switching out the Army for the Royal Navy? It may amount to a surface change, but it works because what we have here strikes as a bit of a refreshing departure from the era standard. Stunts and explosions and a hovercraft, plus an entirely gratuitous speedboat chase to allow Pertwee to chalk up another vehicle on his CV are de rigeur ingredients for the period, of course, as is the annoying and particularly oafish man from the ministry (a Parliamentary Private Secretary who thoroughly deserves any obnoxiousness the Doctor chooses to send his way), so it’s honestly startling how different this seems. Add in the highly idiosyncratic electronic score and you have a six-parter that feels unique, even if it actually treads some similar water. On previous viewings I’ve been mixed about that music, but this occasion I embraced it fully. It’s not easy on the ear, but that’s the point – and it lends an alienness to the simplest of actions playing out on screen.

There’s more quirk present in the vehicles used by the prison guards where the Master is kept incarcerated – they drive around in odd Citroens with the doors removed. As odd a choice of transportation as the Morris Minor preferred by the UNIT force in Terror Of The Autons. Odder, perhaps. And for once, use of stock military footage segues in fairly nicely without standing out like a sore thumb, investing some of the larger scale action a degree of authenticity and credibility, rather than jolting you out of the story at a crucial time as has sometimes been the case in past DW tales. The Sea Devils aren’t on screen a heck of a lot during the six episodes and since they are being enlisted and used by the Master here there are none of the moral divisions alluded to among their Silurian cave-dwelling cousins, but they are a terrific design, complete with their string vests – a favourite fashion choice with submarine crews in Gerry Anderson’s UFO too – and their lamp guns, highly memorable and they’re creatures that really lodged in my childhood imagination. Not least courtesy of their very famous iconic entrance, en masse (well, half a dozen of them), rising from the waves and wading ashore to attack the naval base.

Delgado is superlative, fully living up to his title of the Master and Pertwee clearly relishes fencing with him, both verbally and with swords. Jo Grant is, well, Jo Grant, but she is allowed a few moments of intrepidness in this. Captain Hart is no Brigadier – who could be? – but he’s a dependable sort and it’s welcome to have an officer who – like the Brig at the beginning – has to go some way in coming to terms with combating menaces he has a hard time believing.

Prison governor, Trenchard, is at times almost as intolerably oafish as many a Who civil servant, but there’s some sympathy reserved for the man in the end as he meets with his predictable fate. Great use of location and film, both aboard the naval vessel, around the naval base, beaches, sea fort, and prison, all of which helps expand the sense of scale and painting the illusion that the threat to the world is much greater than the six or so Sea Devils they (probably) had available. Much more convincing than the army of Daleks and Ogrons in Day Of The Daleks.

Nicely judged pacey episodes punctuated by good cliffhangers, a pace only slightly undermined by lengthy recaps at the beginnings of at least two parts. And I realise I’ve picked hardly any holes in it and that may be some childhood bias creeping in, but while I can’t pretend it’s perfect (the model sub, for example, is pretty decent although looks a bit dodgy when shooting out through the underwater force field and the contrivance to keep UNIT out of it is a touch too obvious, but what the hell) I honestly enjoyed this from start to finish.

So having said that it feels like a departure in some ways, I’d also say it was an exemplar of so much of what I love about the era of the show. The series is riding along on the crest of a wave at this point.

Format: DVD

Warts & All: Mini Beast

Quote: Lochleda partha menin klatch. Aroun! Aroun! Aroun!

Review: Tensions mount as the sovereign state of Peladon decides whether it is IN or OUT of the Galactic Federation. On the one side, progress. On the other, deep rooted fear, superstition and paranoia, as well as a conspiracy of lies and deception. Also, use of a monster to terrorise the IN campaign and ensure this emerging world stays firmly in the dark ages. Aside from the unfortunately less-than-fearsome stature of Mighty Aggedor, the royal Beast Of Peladon – I tend to imagine Ian Holm’s Napoleon from the Time Bandits adding him to his list of great little people from history – there is a lot to love about Curse.

The lines of conflict are drawn quite heavily, with no real doubt as to which side is in the right, but the very simplistic political ‘debate’ is wonderfully coloured and muddied with a spot of conspiracy and murder, with the Doctor’s own prejudices leading us along in what is perhaps the most appealing aspect of the mystery. What a master stroke to serve up the Ice Warriors (among my favourite monsters) in this scenario, some few years after their last appearance, and have them present as major diplomatic players within a federation of aliens. The universe-building is a by-product of this move but it was more than enough to excite my childhood imagination, with races such as the Draconians (yet to appear in the series) eventually belonging to the same Galactic Federation introduced here. Meanwhile, we’re also given two other minor alien races which, while not exactly groundbreaking in the creative stakes, are interesting and entertaining additions to the Doctor Who playground. Oddly named after their respective planetary systems of origins, we have Alpha Centauri, hermaphrodite hexapod squeakily voiced by Ysanne Churchman, and Arcturus, one of a number of brain-in-a-tank types seen in the series, with allusions to a longstanding history of conflict with the Ice Warriors. There’s recourse to stereotype with Grun, King’s champion, big muscular mute, strong and silent, and on the show’s track record to date it’s actually something of a departure that he’s not black. King Peladon is lent due nobility in a nice performance from David Troughton, torn between his emotions as a young man and his duty as a monarch. Jo’s affections for him are just about believable, although she seems a bit fickle and flighty, given that before she was whisked here in the TARDIS she was ‘dolled up for a night on the town with Mike Yates’.

Pertwee’s Doctor is rather in his element here, it’s only surprising he doesn’t engage in more swashbuckling other than the reasonably well-staged arena pit fight. I think this is the first time I paid enough attention to the closing credits to discover that the real Earth delegate was called Amazonia, which is, er, interesting and I can’t help be fascinated by the scene immediately after the final cut as the delegates assess the full consequences of having had some imposter interfere with official negotiations of the planet’s entry into the Federation. But hey, could be worse, dudes, Earth could have sent a distant descendant of Boris Johnson as their foreign minister. Duplicitous Arcturus plays his hand – or little extending probe anyway – a bit too early, in order to generate the Episode 3 cliffhanger and the final part feels like it could have used more material to fill it out some.

Hepesh the High Priest marshalls some guards but they’re a bit of an anti-climax in the threat and menace department. Justice, in the end, is served up by Aggedor, the Beast that Hepesh has used for his own ends and that’s a sufficiently neat finish, but it is in those final scenes in the throne room that Aggedor’s height really shows him up and lets him down. The fact is, he’s quite cute even before the Doctor hypnotises him and all but adopts him as a pet. Cuddly Aggedors should’ve been all the rage. But it’s enjoyable, engaging and brisk and contributes way more riches to the Doctor Who universe than is contained in its mere four parts.

It’s a veritable trisilicate mine for Doctor Who writers as well as being a fun watch.

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

Format: DVD

Warts & All: Black Hat On A String!

Quote: Fancy a dance, Brigadier? It’s kind of you, Captain Yates. I think I’d rather have a pint.

Review: After Colony In Space appeared to break the show free from its earthbound shackles, we’re firmly back on Terra for this one, but this manages to not feel like a standard UNIT story. Much of UNIT, along with the Brigadier, are fenced out while the village is locked in an early Under The Dome scenario, and those personnel – Yates and Benton – who do make it in are in civvies. It’s Doctor Who meets Dennis Wheatley and explores the boundaries of that old Arthur C Clarke quote, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’

It’s occult versus science and, just as Doctor Who should, comes down firmly on the side of science, with conservation of energy observed in Azal’s growing and shrinking, white witch and believer, Olive Hawthorne, thoroughly complicit in the use of trickery during the rescue of the Doctor and even offering up a pseudoscientific psychokinetic justification for the ritualistic mumbo jumbo that accompanies spells and general Dæmon summoning. Which, by the way, I recall in the novelisation included the Master reciting ‘Mary had a little lamb’ backwards and I’m sorry to say I listened closely while watching and am still not sure if he does that in the TV show. If so, awesome. Because a) it underlines the point that he could be spouting any nonsense and b) it’s hilarious.

Delgado is clearly enjoying himself immensely and there’s something special about the idea of the Master assuming the role of village vicar. A rational existentialist vicar, no less. We could almost have done with an extra episode just seeing him minister to his flock over cups of tea, perhaps the odd sermon from the pulpit. But no, as The Mind Robber proved, five episodes is the ideal length for a by and large perfect Doctor Who adventure. And this is very nearly that. Honestly, if the production team hadn’t thought to drag somebody’s black fur hat across a graveyard in the wonderfully atmospheric opening storm scene was somebody’s black fur hat, I would struggle to find things to criticise. And even then they might’ve gotten away with it if they hadn’t advertised the fact so much in the extras.

But it’s such a tribbling, sorry, trifling little detail really and if anything my chief grumble ought to be about the weak ending – with the mighty Azal short-circuited by Jo’s act of self-sacrifice. This tremendously powerful being who has presided over the human race, been here for a hundred thousand years, with his practically telepathic insights with regard to the Master and the Doctor, has never encountered self-sacrifice? Come off it, chum. But sod it, because everything preceding is such tremendous fun. The Wheatley elements never get as creepy as the Wicker Man, but with scenes like the opening of the barrow and the Doctor being accosted by Morris Men it captures some of the spirit while retaining its Who roots and lightly seasoning itself with helicopter and motorcycle chases, explosions and, by story’s end, some traditional UNIT lots-of-shooting-to-no-effect action. Olive Hawthorne is the only stand-out character in the village and I was thinking she could do with a story of her own, without realising Paul Magrs had done one for the charity anthology A Target For Tommy (way to go, Paul, I especially look forward to reading that tale).

Both Azal and Bok, the gargoyle, are reasonably well realised within the show’s technical and budget limitations and the fx in general are pretty solid for the era. Given the sheer number of quiet English villages troubled by ancient and/or alien darknesses in Doctor Who, this does well to stand as proudly as it does.

A fitting finale for the Master’s season. Magic.

Format: DVD

Warts & All: Trundlesome Robot With Big Rubber Claws

Quote: Jim’ll fix it

Review: People will say there’s something wrong with me, but I really quite like Colony In Space. A couple of sleepless nights resulted in me watching it through a little faster than planned, what with finding myself wide awake at 3 a.m. at one point,, filling the time with the final two episodes in a row and it singularly failed to send me back to sleep. Filling time, to be fair, is what the adventure does quite a bit, with tables being turned between the different factions with enough frequency it invests proceedings with a kind of perpetual motion. Albeit slightly repetitive.

I don’t doubt my very favourable memories of the Target novelisation colour my perceptions here – when the Doctor is sampling some film on the ‘entertainment’ console I’m calling to mind the brilliant depiction of an overcrowded Earth in Hulke’s prose more than I’m drawn in by what’s on screen. Still, Hulke spins a decent four-parter into six by transposing familiar Western fare onto an alien planet (only a bit less alien to those of us who live down the tracks from the St Austell clay pits where it was filmed), with peaceful colonists (ranchers) being driven off their land by a big mining corporation (greedy prospectors), while bartering and/or running into trouble with the indigenous savages (Injuns). Where the story scores mostly for me is in its SF element, with the Primitives turning out to be the descendants of an advanced civilisation, reduced to totemic worship of a Doomsday Weapon.

The aliens are very alien, with three distinct ‘castes’ and certainly the b/w photos of their mutated faces in the old Doctor Who Monster Book used to give me nightmares as a kid. The shrivelled-baby in the high chair is less convincing now, but really it’s not that badly realised and the idea is sufficiently creepy to outweight production limitations. As the leader of the aliens, he is a bit fickle though – he insists the Law must be obeyed and Jo and the Doctor be executed for trespass, even though Jo was brought to his City against her will, lets them go but warns them not to return on pain of death, then is easily persuaded to destroy his own City – and people! – to prevent the Weapon falling into the wrong hands. Despite being able to make things – like the Master’s gun – disappear at will. The IMC plot is very Scooby-Doo, fake projected giant iguanas and a rubber-clawed robot that we’re expected to believe made terrible scratch marks everywhere. But never mind, my bigger issues with this come in the gun battles, staged in a room with the interior dimensions of a barn, with automatic firearms and shooters sighting along barrels – and missing everything. Even so, on the rare occasions they hit something it’s usually a colonist or an IMC guard and lots of people die in this one. But you could be forgiven for not realising the bodies are stacking up. Would it have killed them (ahem) to have included a graveside scene or two to drive home the cost? There’s a line about tending to the wounded, but that’s it. Even the Doctor shows something of a colonialist disregard for the poor Primitives who bite the dust. And even Ashe’s sacrifice is made much more of in the novelisation than it is here. It’s that inconsequentiality of the violence and death that is more frustrating for me than the woeful marksmanship of the combatants.

Questions arise too over the Master’s role as the Adjudicator – fair enough that he’d adopt this guise as a means of finding out more about the planet, but why side with IMC – surely he’d gain more co-operation from the more easily manipulated colonists – who have in any case been there longer and are more likely to know the lay of the ancient ruins etc? There’s also a ridiculous cliffhanger where he decides that Jo and the Doctor are to fall victim to ‘stray bullets’ apparently solely because 25 minutes has elapsed and we’re due an episode end. The Doctor displays a remarkable gift for identifying planets from just looking at them and a frankly weird moment where he appears to actually consider the Master’s offer of joint rule over the universe. But despite all that – and probably more – I find myself quite enjoying it all. You’ve got Bernard Kay and John Ringham in there, familiar supporting cast faces from previous Who, you’ve got Gail from Corrie and Tony Caunter who was somebody in Eastenders, Delgado continuing to deliver evil with charm and the chemistry inherent in that Master-Doctor rivalry is always a pleasure to watch. And it offers a refreshing break from the Earthbound adventures surrounding it.

Ultimately though, I’m obliged to conclude that the TV episodes are so married in my mind to the novelisation that on some level I know what I’m watching is shorthand for a richer and fuller story that never quite made it to the screen. Mostly enjoyable.

Format: DVD

Warts & All: Missing Background!

Quote: Oh, I suppose you can take the normal precautions against nuclear blast, like, er, sticky tape on the windows and that sort of thing.

Review: Flaws of Axos, more like. A psychedelic palette, some general bizarreness and a choppy sort of pace make this more watchable than it deserves. It strikes me as a case of the writers having a really nice idea and then forgetting to include it in the finished script. Okay, it is in there, but the twist on which the entire thing turns is blown within the first 30 seconds. Surely if you’re having a bunch of ostensibly beautiful golden aliens coming in peace like a lot of aureate hippies wouldn’t it have been better to have the audience hoodwinked too and hold back on your writhing orange tentacle monsters until later? Not only does it not bother to deceive us, the con the Axons try to pull on humanity is rubbish. Listen, mate, we’ve got this miracle stuff, works absolute wonders, and all we want in return is a bit of fuel. The Doctor sees through it right away – but still lets humanity get on with negotiating an inter-species trade deal that he knows is dead dodgy. With such dumbness on display and a thoroughly unbaited and blunted hook, it’s tough to feel totally engaged in proceedings but the story (aside from some oddly laboured scenes with a ridiculous tramp who talks like a Wurzel) does crack along like a particularly colourful comic-strip.

There’s a laudable inventiveness in the design department and the interior of Axos, while short of actually credible because of all the foam rubber puppet-claws (some actors behind the scenes must have had fun groping most of the cast with those), is exceedingly alien and I love the rather leech-like ship that breathes. The HAVOC action versus the Axons is typical UNIT fare and the betentacled monsters are pretty gruesome and scary, especially unpleasant I imagine if you’re sitting down to a spag bol at tea-time. Production-wise, the stand-out flaw – the major wart, as it were – has to be the flat grey backdrop used for episode four’s sequences of Benton and Yates in a Land Rover. It’s like they used CSO but didn’t bother to put any actual background in at all. There’s also a pesky bit of flare on the giant alien eye as it bobs about and causes a bit of bother with the CSO. Stuff that would amount to tiny niggles in an immersive and engaging adventure, but here magnified because of the story’s failings.

Delgado continues to be supreme as the Master and once again we see the Doctor being perfectly horrible towards the man from the ministry, although in this case you do feel Chinn deserves it. But you also get the feeling the show has a bit of a fixation with civil service bureaucrats and ministers at this point. And again there’s a focus on the energy situation, with the UK apparently operating a highly centralised power grid – all through one complex.

Filer from the CIA is a nice addition in that he hints of the international effort to track down the Master, but he is bargain-basement American and his delirious monologue when in hospital is some of the worst exposition ever. Hats off and salutes to the Brigadier, who is particularly great when facing the Master, and I will say the villain’s change of allegiance in this is better handled and more convincing than his eleventh hour switch of sides in Terror Of The Autons.

Overall a bit of a technilurid fairground ride, but like the poor guy flailing inside the orange blob suit on the reactor floor, you can’t help thinking there’s something better in there struggling to get out.

Format: DVD

Warts & All: Big Rubber Dragon Suit!

Quote: You’re too delicate for intelligence work, Benton. You’d better go and lie down.

Review: Following the crash-bang-wallop pace of Terror Of The Autons we might expect things to slow down a bit with a six-parter, but to its credit Mind Of Evil also rattles along quite nicely. Penned by Don Houghton of Inferno fame, this also takes a fairly stock SF recipe and mixes up something reasonably exciting out of the standard ingredients.

In this case it’s a mind-sucking parasite that is rendered more interesting by virtue of its application: as a potentially humane alternative to capital punishment. It’s a great notion and it’s only a shame that aspect isn’t explored more, but of course such intriguing moral explorations have to take second place the broader Bond-style plot to derail a world peace conference and plunge the globe into World War Three. There’s a degree of confusion over the parasite’s abilities as one man falls victim to an illusory drowning and seems to have water found in his lungs. I mean, huh, how’d that happen? And I laughed when someone says it’s only about 47% full – just the idea of accurately measuring quantities of evil. But although the machine that houses the creature just looks like a Blue Peter home-made Dalek, its effects are generally and quite genuinely terrifying. The first time we see the Doctor imagining himself to be burning alive is horrific without being gory enough to put you off your tea.

It’s only a bit unfortunate that three cliffhanger endings are, but for a difference in specific illusions, exactly the same. Much of it looks pretty big budget for the BBC, with big action clashes between UNIT troops and the Master’s small army of ex-cons, the hijacking of a nerve-gas missile convoy (wait, didn’t they have a convoy hijack in Ambassadors?) and a battle at Stangmoor Prison (location filming at an old castle makes for a terrific setting) which all adds to the James Bond feel of the adventure. Plus some pretty nice model work for the big explosion at the end – always important, that.

The story makes a good effort at investing the potential international crisis an international feel, with the early spy stuff involving a US delegate, the rather intriguing character of Captain Chin Lee, who has been recruited by the Master, and the Chinese delegate with whom the Doctor gets to show off his language/dialect skills. It would’ve been nice, I think, to drop back in on the conference in some way towards the end, to remind us what is at stake as the Master prepares to launch the missile. The regulars are great, with some wry gems of exchanges between Lethbridge-Stewart and Benton, for example. Delgado is supreme and it’s quite something to see Pertwee’s unflappable Doctor so completely shaken by his experience with the parasite. Not to mention, the great reversal when the Master is confronted by the giant scary Pertwee doing the evil laugh. Brilliant! Among the supporting cast, we also have the very familiar presences of Neil McCarthy and the quietly awesome Michael Sheard and a suitable lead thug performance from William Marlowe.

The to-and-fro power struggles within the prison do at times feel like padding, but even if this isn’t quite six episodes’ worth of story, it fills its runtime pretty well. Perhaps not rated as a classic – I’ve no idea how it’s rated by others, to be honest! – because it lacks obvious monsters, although in concept the parasite is one of the scariest and more powerful things the Doctor has encountered.

Solid adventure entertainment and lots to enjoy, I’m inclined to applaud it for its impression of scale and blockbuster on a budget ambition.