Format: DVD
Warts & All: Fearsome Orange Balloon Monster!
Quote: Anyway, they put me under one of these mind probes things, you see, and tried to get me to tell them where I was going. So, I said I was on my way to meet a giant rabbit, a pink elephant and a purple horse with yellow spots.
Review: A game for you: if you ever watch this in one sitting, make sure to have a drink every time the Doctor and/or Jo is put in a cell. At an episode a day it doesn’t quite work because you easily sober up between incarcerations. But I at least made a game of counting the imprisonments and I think they got up to 13 before story’s end. At heart this is a great story, two great space superpowers being played off against the other by a mysterious third party, but it could have been better told. There’s more apprehending of escaped prisoners than there is apprehension about an intergalactic war. Hulke does a decent job of showing us the various sides in this interstellar Cold War, but the contrivance required to deliver the Doctor to the different places he needs to be – as well as to pad it out to meet the six-episode runtime – is as visible as the strings keeping the Doctor afloat in his spacewalks. The action may be laboured at times – and a spacewalk to affect repairs in episode six slows things up just when we ought to be racing towards a climax. But it scores major points in the universe-building stakes as this was another story that excited my childhood imagination with its elements more than its events.
The Draconians are an awesome addition to the DW universe, the alien masks being fabulous creations and the costume design and dialogue hinting sufficiently of an actual culture. We have another few allusions to the Doctor’s past, with a prior visit to Draconia and a story of a very strange peace conference (which surely needs to be televised, just to see if the aliens described can be taken at all seriously). Where the Martian Empire or the Arcturans or Centauri were in all this I don’t know, but between this and Peladon there was no doubt in my mind that all of these intelligent races shared the same universe and had some kind of political relations, even though I had no idea what political relations were at the tender age of six. Obviously the Martians stayed well out of this one. And a wise decision too, but it’s good to see the Ogrons stomping around and using a neat hypno device to disguise themselves as humans or ‘Dragons’ as the situation required. (Although I have to wonder why every time the Ogrons show up the Doctor turns into a gunslinger.) Unfortunately, because we’ve only ever seen the Ogrons in the employ of the Daleks, the minor speculation about who they might be working for is pretty poor as a bit of deflection and I can’t imagine many viewers were that surprised to see the Daleks turn up at the end. Although maybe the Master’s presence helped preserve that twist, as it’s not until quite late that he reveals that he too is employed by others.
Delgado is supreme, as usual, and you can easily believe he is behind it all, machinating away. Here, his appearance is tinged with sadness as we know it is his last one – and it’s an ignominious sort of departure as he shoots the Doctor and then seems to disappear amongst a lot of fleeing Ogrons. Not the climactic confrontation his Moriarty deserved with the Doctor’s Holmes. The model work, worth mentioning because we get to see a lot of it for long periods, is pretty damned good for its day and the Master’s borrowed police ship is an especially nice design. The weaponry deployed by the spaceships seems rather lame and primitive for space opera fare, with even Draconian battlecruisers limited to missiles when we’re much more accustomed to seeing powerful beams blasting all over the shop. And the re-use of sets for the bridges of different ships is a bit too obvious.
Finally, the monster on the Ogron planet – which has the Ogrons so terrified that they worship the thing – is perhaps one of the worst realisations of anything ever in the show’s history. It’s only glimpsed atop a ridge, thankfully, but the brief glimpse is nowhere near brief enough. The actors all deserve medals for keeping straight faces while faced with such a monstrosity. There are some notable performances worth mentioning – I like the Earth President, the Draconian Prince and John Woodnutt (semi-regular guest star) as the Draconian Emperor, while General Williams is a little too wooden to properly sell us on his change of heart – when he realises his past error that provoked the previous war between Earth and Draconia.
Nevertheless, in nature if not in portrayal, it is a very characteristic Hulke feature. One of those moments better handled in novelisation form, with a bit more substance in the prose than we are presented here on screen. Ultimately, watched today it excites the imagination more than it captures the attention. Which is probably just as well, with all the capturing going on in the story.
