Timestamp: Ninth Series Summary

March 23, 2016May 16, 2018 Michael Falkner18 Comments

Doctor Who: Ninth Series Summary

The difference between the Eighth and Ninth Series is night and day.

Where the Eighth got bogged down in the series-long Master arc, this series got back to telling relevant and moving stories. The Master even returned in The Sea Devils and The Time Monster, which both still used the same trope of the Master trying to take over the world with power he can’t control, and they were still better than the majority of the Eighth Series because they felt fresh.

The feather in the cap for this set was The Mutants, which nearly broke my rating scale with how dense and symbolic it was. If there was a low point for me, it was The Time Monster, and not because it wasn’t good but because it wasn’t as good for me.

This also marked a major return to space/time travel for the Doctor, despite the fact that his TARDIS is still locked out, and it really shows how much of a critical component it is in the Doctor Who formula. Having that power, despite being limited by the Time Lords who are still using the Doctor as a puppet, seems to lift a burden from the Doctor’s shoulders. He’s high-spirited again, and even though he’s still arrogant and rude, he’s less rude to those around him. Whether that’s because he’s grown to respect Jo, the Brigadier, and the UNIT team, or just because he enjoys his slackened leash, it’s made these stories much more enjoyable.

Meanwhile, I still don’t like the Time Lords. They obviously get off on yanking the Doctor around by that leash, and have no problem with the hypocrisy of sending him off to meddle in affairs of space and time so they don’t get their hands dirty. You know, despite the fact that they punished the Doctor for doing exactly what he’s doing at this point with their blessing.

Contrast that with Jo, who has become absolutely fantastic as a companion now that she and the Doctor can (in a limited fashion) travel in space and time. Her fear has been replaced with bravery, and her horizons have been broadened by getting off the planet and seeing how humanity evolves. Series Eight Jo has climbed the ranks of my favorite companions.

This series is the highest rated (so far) in the Timestamps Project, and the closest contender is Fifth Series at a 4.1. I really hope things keep climbing, even if there is so little room to do so.

Day of the Daleks – 5
The Curse of Peladon – 5
The Sea Devils – 5
The Mutants – 5
The Time Monster – 4

Series Nine Average Rating: 4.8/5

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: The Three Doctors

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

Timestamp #64: The Time Monster

March 16, 2016May 16, 2018 Michael Falkner16 Comments

Doctor Who: The Time Monster
(6 episodes, s09e21-e26, 1972)

Timestamp 064 The Time Monster

The Doctor has some weird dreams.

Foreshadowing events to come over the next three hours, he has a nightmare about the Master and trident-shaped crystal, which is (1) a bit on the nose symbolically since it comes from Atlantis, and (2) exactly what the Master happens to be holding in his guise of a science professor. Of course, this is the third time Doctor Who has tapped on the Atlantis mythos, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

The Doctor is concerned about his nightmare, and he tells the Brigadier (who has been laying low since the Daleks waged gorilla on guerilla warfare) to alert UNIT to be on the lookout for the Master. The Brigadier does so sarcastically, and then reminds the Doctor that UNIT is obligated to attend the demonstration of TOMTIT – a project that demonstrates Transmission of Matter Through Interstitial Time and the Master’s desire to spell something silly – but since the Doctor and Jo are waiting for the Master to strike and Captain Yates has the duty, poor Sergeant Benton is ordered to cancel his leave and join the Brigadier at the Newton Institute.

What the Doctor doesn’t realize is that leave is one of the most precious commodities in the world to an enlisted man. I’m not saying that he should watch his back from this point forward, but maybe he should start carrying a rear-view mirror everywhere he goes.

Instead of requisitioning a rear-view mirror, the Doctor builds a time sensor – a TARDIS “sniffer-outer” – that starts going ballistic when the TOMTIT scientists start a rehearsal of the experiment. That Master gets angry that the team started early, but Dr. Ruth Ingram points out that the experiment overloaded its circuits during the teleportation, and the Master determines that the crystal is drawing energy from outside time itself. He decides to skip the traditional post-demonstration wine-and-dine when he sees UNIT arrive for the show.

The Doctor and Jo track the source of the temporal readings in Bessie, which now has a Super Pursuit Mode sans absurd transforming sentient Trans-Am, and we also start seeing the depths of the Doctor’s obsession with Venus. He has programmed the time sensor to read in Venusian miles, requiring a conversion table for each calculation. The sensor spikes as the Master, cleverly disguised in a radiation suit, begins the experiment which turns out to be a front to summon a being called Kronos.

The experiment creates bubbles of time dilation, and when the Doctor arrives, he is slowed down and Jo is frozen. Stuart, the research assistant, has aged sixty years due to radiation exposure as his own personal temporal reference has been accelerated. Dr. Ingram – call her Ruth – mentions Professor Thascalos, and the Doctor’s mastery of Greek uncovers the Master’s identity. The Brigadier orders support troops, the Doctor’s TARDIS, and an evacuation of non-essential personnel from the Institute, and the Doctor investigates the crystal at the heart of TOMTIT. Kronos is a fearsome member of the Chronovore race who live outside of and eat time, and the mythology is an interpretation of actual events. The crystal is the same one that summoned Kronos to Atlantis thousands of years ago, and the rest of it is located in the Vault of Poseidon, deep in the legendary city thousands of years in the past.

The Master’s TARDIS is disguised as a computer in the laboratory, and to get to it, he tricks Benton into leaving the laboratory. Benton sees through the ruse, but gets knocked out upon ambushing the Master. The Master summons an Atlantean priest named Krasis, and the priest possesses a holy seal that contains the secret of summoning Kronos. With all the keys in place, the Master summons Kronos. The mighty creature eats the institute’s director as Stuart de-ages and the Brigadier, Benton, and Ruth get trapped by the temporal field. Kronos proves to be uncontrollable, and the Master returns it to the crystal.

The Doctor makes a temporal jamming device, but it doesn’t last long. As Captain Yates and UNIT arrive, the Master summons opposition from the past in the form of a medieval knight, a squad of Roundheads, and a V1 bomb. The V1 takes out the convoy but everyone is okay, and as Ruth, Stuart, and Benton go to the lab to take on the Master, the Doctor and Jo take to the TARDIS.

The TARDIS has a new desktop – the wash basin roundels are a nice touch – and the Doctor develops a plan to materialize his TARDIS inside the Master’s TARDIS. This concept of a TARDIS inside a TARDIS boggles the mind, but it’s possible. Really tricky, but possible. If the calculations aren’t precise, a time ram will occur that will annihilate both of them.

Jo’s bravery and spunk motivate the Doctor, and the TARDIS lands. The two are linked as the Master’s TARDIS appears to materialize inside the Doctor’s. When he leaves, his TARDIS is inside the Master’s. They leave the Master’s and emerge into the Doctor’s. They are both inside each other, creating a time loop.

When the UNIT troops arrive – Krasis’s temporal ignorance is a fantastic alarm system – and the Master extends a time field to prevent them from interfering. The duo take off for Atlantis, and since the TARDISes are linked, the Doctor and Jo go with him. Meanwhile, Ruth, Stuart, and Benton are trapped in the lab, and they work to deactivate the time field and rescue the Brigadier’s squad. The plan backfires, and Benton gets turned into a baby.

After a sequence that helps develop the franchise’s basis for the TARDIS’s telepathy and language interpretation skills, the Doctor is forced to leave his TARDIS to confront the Master. The Master summons Kronos, which eats the Doctor (setting him adrift in the time vortex) before returning to the crystal. The Master then ejects the Doctor’s TARDIS into the time vortex. After the turbulence, Jo comes to and hears several whispers from the Doctor, but a single, strong voice comes through clearly via the TARDIS. The TARDIS and the Doctor work with Jo to rescue the Time Lord before setting course for Atlantis.

In the legendary lost city, King Dalios holds court, and rabble-rouser Hippias wishes for a return to the glory during the era of Kronos. Dalios attempts to dissuade them, but the Master interrupts him with a grand entry and claims to be an envoy of the gods. When Krasis claims to have seen Kronos, Dalios takes him and the Master into private conference. The Doctor arrives shortly thereafter, and Krasis attempts to kill him but Hippias intervenes. The Doctor and Jo are taken to Dalios instead.

The Master is dismissed after failing to place Dalios under his thrall, and he’s surprised to see the Doctor alive. The Doctor and “Jo Jo Grant” meet with Dalios, and the king sends Jo to meet with his queen, Galleia. Later on, Galleia meets with the Master, who offers him the crystal. Jo attempts to inform the king and the Doctor, but she is turned away. She pursues Hippias, who is tasked with retrieving the crystal for Galleia, but is captured by Krasis and locked in with the crystal’s guardian, the Minotaur.

The Doctor finds out about Jo and goes after her. Hippias tries to save Jo, but the Minotaur kills him, and the Doctor does his best olé by bullfighting the guardian into a wall. As the wall crumbles, the crystal chamber is exposed, and Krasis takes the Doctor and Jo to see the king. Unfortunately, the king has been deposed thanks to Galleia and replaced by the Master. He imprisons the Doctor and Jo, and after the Doctor relates a tale about the blackest day of his life. Behind his home on a mountain was a hermit (a monk, but not The Monk) who spent half his life under a tree. The hermit listened to the Doctor’s woes, and then pointed to a flower, which presented the Doctor a new perspective on life. Afterward, Dalios is imprisoned in the same cell, shares his vision of the Doctor saving Atlantis, and then dies.

Later on, Galleia addresses Atlantis and presents the Master as king, and he offers to summon Kronos. The Doctor reveals to Galleia that Dalios is dead, and she turns on the Master. Kronos is summoned and the Master orders it to destroy Atlantis. The Master escapes with the crystal, but Jo pursues him into his TARDIS. The Doctor chases after them in his TARDIS and threatens the Master with a time ram. The Master calls the Doctor’s bluff, and Jo initiates the time ram, catapulting both TARDISes into a featureless place. They are greeted by Kronos, who was released when the TARDISes collided. She grants the Doctor and Jo a reward for their assistance, and they ask to be returned home. She intends to keep the Master in torment and punishment, but the Doctor asks for leniency. Of course, the Master takes the opportunity to escape.

With the universe saved once again, the Doctor and Jo return to Cambridge as the time field is released and the TOMTIT device explodes. Everything is back to normal, the Brigadier acts as comic relief, and Benton returns to adult form in his vintage birthday suit.

The Doctor might really want to consider that rear view mirror.

This was a pretty good serial, but not quite up to the bar set by the rest of the season. It was certainly fun, but it’s kind of hard to follow The Mutants.

I appreciated that the writers hung a lampshade on the TOMTIT acronym: Almost every time it was mentioned, one of the companions would do a double take, and it’s understandable. The device looks nothing like a small bird or a biplane, and between this and the rather unfortunate shape of the time sensor, I think the creative team was having some fun with this one.

I also liked the symmetry of the Master and the Doctor simultaneously working the overload problem in separate locations. These frenemies (hey, the word’s been around since the 1950s) are really not that different if you strip away their motivations, and if the Master could get over his self-sabotaging need to have his plans overpower him, he’d be nearly unstoppable. I also liked how the Master didn’t engage the TARDIS’s chameleon circuit when he traveled to Atlantis. It added to the shock and awe of seeing a foreign object materialize from thin air.

I enjoyed the humor behind the Doctor showing up the Brigadier and his disdain of Bessie with the car’s super drive. I also liked seeing Dave “Darth Vader” Prowse in something other than Star Wars.

Overall, this was a great story that was perhaps a bit long, and even judged on its own merits is the weakest part of an otherwise spectacular season.

Rating: 4/5 – “Would you care for a jelly baby?”

UP NEXT – Ninth Series Summary

Timestamp #63: The Mutants

March 9, 2016May 16, 2018 Michael Falkner6 Comments

Doctor Who: The Mutants
(6 episodes, s09e15-e20, 1972)

Timestamp 063 The Mutants

This is one dense story with a lot to unpack. Unlike a parcel where you can cut the tape, root through all the packing peanut filler, and find the gem at the bottom, everything in this box feels important.

The Doctor gets an assignment from the Time Lords, and he’s oddly excited about it. Yes, it means that he gets to travel somewhere in the (pre-programmed) TARDIS, but isn’t he still being a puppet? This assignment makes the Doctor a courier with a message coded to one person, and the Jo accompanies him as they dematerialize for a broom closet in the future. This future contains three classes of beings: The Overlords who rule from the safety of the Skybase, the Solonians who live on the ruined planet Solos, and the mutants, Solonians who have transformed into a monster-form and are better known to the Overlords who hunt them as “mutts”.

The disparity between the classes is evident from the very beginning, right down to the separate (but equal) teleportation platforms for the delegates that are arriving for a conference. The Overlords, who hail from the empire of Earth, have decided that after exploiting and industrializing Solos to near death, it is better for the dying empire to graciously grant the Solonians their indepedence. This plan isn’t without its detractors, as the Marshal (the Skybase’s commander) is in favor of destroying the native Solonians (and whatever causes their mutations) and terraforming their world for the empire.

Before the conference, the Marshal discusses matters with a Solonian named Varan and offers him a token of appreciation that should be kept safe, which Varan bestows upon his son. Elsewhere, one of the Solonians transforms and is killed before the Doctor and Jo, who are then taken into custody. The conference itself goes swimmingly for all of a minute before the empire’s administrator delivers a condescending speech, prompting the Solonians start protesting for their freedom. As the Solonians grow more and more irritated, Varan’s son fiddles with the token and it goes off, killing the imperial administrator with a poison dart. Ky, the Solonian leader, runs from the guards, takes Jo hostage, and teleports down to the Solonian surface.

The downside to the planet’s surface, courtesy of the Marshal’s experiments, is the poisonous mists that dominate the day hours. Solonians are immune to those gas clouds, but humans cannot survive long. Knowing this, the Marshal uses the Doctor’s compassion for Jo to solicit the Time Lord’s help in exchange for stepping up the search for Jo and Ky. The Marshal also takes the opportunity to wrap up loose threads by killing Varan’s son with a poison dart and framing Ky for the administrator’s assassination. Varan escapes with the truth in hand, but the Marshal declares him a mutt and order his execution. Meanwhile, Ky saves Jo’s life by attacking a guard, stealing his mask, and escorting her to a nearby cave. Ky rocks Jo’s world by showing her how humans from Earth have turned into a swarm of devouring locusts that leave ruined worlds in their wake. Her expression betrays the culture shock as she realizes just how terrible her own people can be.

The Doctor attempts to open the message box, which he realized was meant for Ky when the Solonian rushed by earlier, using particle reversal. The Skybase’s lead scientist, Jaeger, realizes that the same technology could be used to clean up the planet’s atmosphere. This technique is better in Jaeger’s eyes than the previous option, which would use rockets to scrub the atmosphere at the cost of planetary genocide. Meanwhile, the Doctor exposes the Marshal’s deception with Varan to officer Stubbs, and the Marshal convinces officer Cotton to lie about Jo’s whereabouts. The hero and the villain are left at an empasse, but Cotton’s conscience forces him to comes clean after consulting with his roommate Stubbs.

Knowing that the Marshal is hiding the truth about Jo, the Doctor runs an experiment on particle reversal that deliberately blows the power grid so he can sneak down to Solos. Similarly, Stubbs helps Varan escape during the outage, and Varan captures the Doctor after mistaking him for an Overlord. Once on the surface, the Doctor disables Varan with his Vensuian Aikido skills and makes him promise as a warrior that he will take the Doctor to Ky. The Doctor and Varan find Ky in the caves after he and Jo were pushed deeper into the cave system by the mutants. The mutants are driven off, but Jo has moved further into the caves to a chamber filled with light. She collapses, but is rescued by a figure in a protective suit. Meanwhile, Ky opens the message box and finds a set of stone tablets with ancient writing on them, but the language is part of the culture destroyed by the Overlords.

Seemingly ignorant to their recent treachery, the Marshal sends Stubbs and Cotton to the surface after Varan and the Doctor. He leads the team, intending to deploy gas bombs in the caves and smoke out the Doctor. While searching for the Doctor, Stubbs and Cotton confirm the Marshal’s suspicions about their earlier actions, and he seals them in with explosives that collapse the cave entrances. The group is saved from the gas by the mysterious figure in the protective suit.

The man in the suit is Professor Sondergaard, an Overlord scientist long thought dead, who turned on them because of how the Overlords treated the Solonians. The professor and the Doctor stay behind in the caves to decipher the tablets, which turn out to be a Solonian calendar, as Stubbs, Cotton, Jo, and Ky make their way out of the mountain. The group of companions are ambushed by Varan’s warriors and taken hostage, and the Doctor and Sondergaard explore the radioactive chamber of lights, in which they find a large crystal.

The Marshal returns to the Skybase and gets word that an Earth Investigator is en route. Meanwhile, Varan’s group takes Jo’s group to the Skybase so they can destroy it, and the Doctor returns to the Skybase to analyze the crystal after theorizing that the mutations are actually a normal part of the Solonian lifecycle. The Marshal detects Varan’s intrusion and sends guards to intercept. The Solonian warriors are all killed, and the Marshal shoots Varan and the bulkhead, which breaches and sends Varan into space. Jo and her cohort escape the hull breach and are taken into custody, subject to execution by the Marshal, as Jaeger launches his rockets. Luckily, they malfunction and only poison the surface instead of ionizing the atmosphere. This leaves particle reversal as the only option, which forces the Marshal back to the planet to find the Doctor. The Doctor avoids the guards and teleports back up to the Skybase, but is ambushed by the Marshal. With Jo’s life at stake, the Doctor is pressed into helping Jaeger. Jo feigns illness and ambushes the guards, securing their freedom long enough to relay the situation to the incoming inspector’s ship, but Stubbs dies as the Marshal captures them once again.

On the surface, Sondergaard returns to the cave and is rescued from one of the guards by the mutants. The professor explains the genetic discovery, and the mutants agree to help find the Doctor. On the Skybase, the Doctor begins the particle reversal on the planet, which undoes the damage from the rockets, but the Marshal uses Jo as collateral as a threat to finish the job. Just then, the investigator arrives, and Jo is taken to the other hostages (Cotton and Ky) in the refueling room, which will become radioactive when the ship begins refueling. They narrowly escape through the refueling boom as the investigator conducts an inquiry of the Marshal’s actions.

When Jo, Ky, and Cotton arrive, the tables turn as the Doctor tricks the Marshal into exposing his bigotry. Sondergaard arrives to testify as a mutant beams up to the station. The mutant’s presence prompts the Investigator to release the guards and fight the intruders, and the Doctor takes advantage of the chaos to analyze the crystal. The Marshal confines Jo, Sondergaard, Cotton, and Ky to the refueling chamber, but Sondergaard uses the crystal and the radiation to accelerate Ky’s evolution. Ky ascends to a higher form, then makes his way through the station to the laboratory just as the particle reversal machine overloads and explodes. Ky kills the Marshal, thanks the Doctor, and leaves.

In the aftermath, Sondergaard and Cotton remain to study the Solonians, and Cotton gets promoted to station commander. The Doctor and Jo make excuses and depart for the TARDIS, prompting another “doctor who” groaner as the credits roll.

I summarized (yes, summarized) all of that just to make sense of it. As the TARDIS vwooorp-ed away, I had to sit back and really think about what I had just watched over the previous three hours. For me, it was almost like I was back to analyzing Farscape again because on the surface, this is a typical good guy/bad guy monster tale, and that surface story has a twist with the monsters not serving the villain’s agenda. But there was more. It called to me. I knew that I had to look deeper.

This was a very dense story, and I loved pretty much all of it. There was plenty of action and intrigue – again, the frosting on the surface – but it also had delicious thematic layers that made it one of the most on-point stories I have seen so far with allegories about racism, segregation, environmentalism, over-industrialization, corruption, tyranny, economics, politics, and probably a handful of other topics that I still haven’t figured out, and all it is wrapped up in a neat presentation with a bow on top.

Quite honestly, it was like a handful of classic Star Trek episodes turned up to eleven, but it wasn’t messy or tangled. I settled on a mid-range 4 rating, and you know what happens with that when I add a drop of my patent-pending optimism.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: The Time Monster

Timestamp #62: The Sea Devils

March 2, 2016May 16, 2018 Michael Falkner14 Comments

Doctor Who: The Sea Devils
(6 episodes, s09e09-e14, 1972)

Timestamp 062 The Sea Devils

The Master returns to Doctor Who, scheming and plotting from his island prison cell. The Doctor and Jo pay him a visit, and the Master claims to be rehabilitated, but he refuses to reveal where he parked his TARDIS, so the Doctor is skeptical.

Adding to the Doctor’s uneasy feeling is a recent rash of ship sinkings in the area and Colonel Trenchard, the very odd prison warden who (unbeknownst to the Doctor) is working with the Master to defeat some unknown enemy agents. The Doctor goes to the nearby naval base and enlists the help of the base commander. He and Jo head to the nearby sea fort to investigate, but are stranded as the Sea Devils destroy their boat. The Sea Devils give chase inside the fort, where the Doctor and Jo find a single half-mad survivor before calling for help and escaping.

According to the Doctor, these Sea Devils are related to the Silurians: They are adapted to living underwater, and they share the same motivations as their cave-dwelling cousins.

Trenchard sets the Master free, and he goes to the naval base in the guise of a Navy commander. He steals some sonar equipment, assaults a Chief Petty Officer, and escapes after being spotted by Jo. When the Doctor and Jo return to the prison, the Master is back in his cell as if nothing ever happened. The Doctor sends Jo to inform UNIT as the Master escapes and a random swordfight breaks out. Trenchard arrests the Doctor, and the Master explains his evil plan to take over the world with the Sea Devils.

Meanwhile, the Sea Devils take over a rather spacious submarine. Who knows why at this point, but they do.

The Doctor escapes with Jo’s help and they run for the beach, but are soon trapped among the Master, the colonel’s troops, a minefield, and a Sea Devil summoned by the Master. The Master’s plan goes south as the fearful soldiers attack the Sea Devil, the Sea Devil kills the soldiers, the Doctor and Jo run for the minefield, the Sea Devil enters the minefield, the Doctor triggers a mine to scare the Sea Devil back to the ocean, the colonel questions the Master about the creature who slaughtered his men, and the Master sends a handful of them to attack the prison and kill Trenchard.

Take a moment here to breathe as the secret service Sea Devils take their luxury submarine somewhere. Who knows where are this point, but they do.

The Doctor and Jo go back to the naval base, and the Doctor takes a diving bell to the foundation of the sea fort to investigate. The Sea Devils abduct him and take him to their leader, with whom the Doctor almost brokers peace, but is interrupted by the arrival the Master. Further complicating matters are Parliamentary Private Secretary Walker, a sexist, pompous, arrogant ass who arrives to “solve” the missing ship problem with his depth charges.

The Doctor escapes from the sea devils, rescues the submarine crew, and they all break free from the underwater base in a moment of okay, sure that had me setting aside my background in undersea warfare. At least they wrapped up the dangling plot thread about that stolen sub. Not to be dissuaded, the Master and the Sea Devils take over the naval base, and the Master tries to convince the Doctor to help him revive all of the Sea Devils around the world. The Doctor sabotages the machine, which incapacitates the Sea Devils so the sailors can escape. The Doctor fixes the “mistake” just as the sailors stage an assault to retake the island, but the Master runs with the machine and the Doctor gives chase. They end up back in the waiting fins of the Sea Devils, who are now tired of all of these Time Lord shenanigans. The Doctor sabotages the machine by reversing the polarity of the neutron flow (huzzah!), which creates a bomb that the Master unknowingly activates. The Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to open the cell, and he and the Master escape. The Sea Devil base explodes, but the Master works his mental magic to escape in a hovercraft.

All of that in six episodes, which normally poses a problem for me, but this story was so well paced that it didn’t matter. Each thirty-minute block just flew by.

Despite the pace, there were a couple of down notes. First, the third episode must have been a bit short since they repeated the whole swordfight from the previous episode. It wouldn’t have been a problem if I wasn’t watching these in rapid succession, but when the episodes are back-to-back, long repeated story points shred the pacing. Second, it’s becoming standard operating procedure for the Master that his eyes are too big for his metaphorical stomach. His plans always double back on him, usually because he’s trying to wield too much power. Don’t get me wrong, it makes sense with the megalomaniacal bag full of cats that is the Master, but it’s become predictable. Especially after an entire season of stories with that common thread.

On the plus side: First, the writers did their homework with all of the naval trappings. Even though the submarine was the standard Hollywood-style hotel underwater, it was still okay with me in practice. Second, Roger Delgado is deliciously evil and melodramatic in this serial, and while Series Eight was decent with his portrayals, for some reason this serial really worked for me. Last, I loved how the Doctor used the sonic screwdriver as a tool to navigate the minefield, set off one of the charges to scare the Sea Devil, and escape from a jail cell. The prop also has a totally ’70s sci-fi vibe, and I adore it.

This fast-paced and fairly tightly written serial shook out to a high 4 when I was done, and I have no problem rounding that up.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: The Mutants

Timestamp #61: The Curse of Peladon

February 24, 2016May 16, 2018 Michael Falkner16 Comments

Doctor Who: The Curse of Peladon
(4 episodes, s09e05-e08, 1972)

Timestamp 061 The Curse of Peladon

This was a surprising hit for me, and it’s mostly due to Princess Jo Grant.

The King of Peladon wants to join the Galactic Federation, but one of his advisors, the High Priest Hepesh, believes that an ancient curse is trying to stop this assault on their culture’s sanctity. The king’s other advisor, Chancellor Torbis, is killed by the embodiment of that curse, a creature called the Aggedor. This nearly derails the conference that is scheduled to happen now-ish since the delegates are afraid of conflict, which sounds an awful lot like another Federation we know, but they agree to wait for the delegate from Earth to arrive.

Enter The Doctor. The previously immobile TARDIS (conveniently) arrives on a cliff with the Doctor and Jo, who are out for a little spin around time and space before Jo goes on a date with Mike Yates. There’s one small problem, however, since the stormy cliffs of Peladon are not the UNIT base. In a decent bit of model work, the TARDIS goes over a cliff, (conveniently) trapping our heroes, and they begin to climb toward the citadel on the rocks above them.

When the pair arrive, they assume the role of the Earth delegation, and meet the other members of the quorum: The high-pitched Alpha Centauri delegate, the impressively operated shrunken-head-in-a-jar Arcutran delegate, and a pair of Ice Warriors.

Wait. Ice Warriors?!

There’s a nice moment of empowerment for Jo where she becomes a princess to avoid execution – only men of rank and women of noble lineage may enter the throne room – and she grabs that role and runs. Meanwhile, the Doctor saves all of the delegates from a crushing fate after a statue falls with a little help from the king’s mute champion Grun and his friend gravity. Grun is a pawn in the plot to derail the king’s vision, and Hepesh is engineering it by working the whole curse angle. But who is the mastermind? It must be the Ice Warriors, right?

Well, actually, no. And that’s the beauty of this story.

The Doctor believes that the bad guys are the Ice Warriors. He’s run into them twice before, and they’ve been formidable foes each time. This go-round, there’s even circumstantial evidence pointing toward their complicity after the Arcturan delegate’s life support pod is sabotaged, but they claim to have given up war in favor of peace and self-defense. After a bout in the Thunderdome with Grun, the Doctor believes the Ice Warriors when they save him from being shot by the Arcturan, who was working with Hepesh all along. If Peladon fails to join the Federation, Hepesh can rule the planet (even through a figurehead like the king) and sell the valuable mineral rights to Arcturus.

The Doctor locates and hypnotizes the Aggedor with a spinning mirror and a lullaby, and then leads it to the throne room to expose the reality of the curse to the king. The throne room is occupied by Hepesh and his loyal soldiers who have just staged a coup, but the Aggedor attacks the man who kept it captive, and the threat is defeated.

Jo comes clean to the king about her lineage and refuses his offer to be his consort. Jo and the Doctor hightail it off Peladon when the real Earth delegate arrives (bearing humorous gifts of a “Doctor who?” gag), and the Doctor realizes just how convenient is was that they arrived in the right spot at the right time to stop this exact plot.

Time Lords, man. Puppet-string-pulling, meddling-in-time-and-space-without-leaving-their-ivory-tower Time Lords.

I can’t say much more on this one. I liked seeing David Troughton again, especially in a bigger role than either The War Games or The Enemy of the World offered him. I also adored Jo in this story, as she has become a better companion with the re-introduction of traveling in the TARDIS. She really carried this serial.

I also really loved that the Ice Warriors weren’t the bad guys. It’s a good misdirection, and one that wouldn’t work with a higher profile baddie like the Cybermen or the Daleks.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: The Sea Devils

Timestamp #60: Day of the Daleks

February 17, 2016May 16, 2018 Michael Falkner12 Comments

Doctor Who: Day of the Daleks
(4 episodes, s09e01-e04, 1972)

Timestamp 060 Day of the Daleks

The Daleks are back, and they seem to have recovered from the Second Doctor’s confrontation with the Emperor Dalek so long ago.

I really loved this story because of how it is framed. What starts as a simple UNIT investigation of a diplomat being stalked by strange ghost-like guerrillas ends up being much deeper than many of the stories from the last set.

Sir Reginald gets attacked by a strange human warrior with a gun who vanishes without a trace, almost like a ghost. Another guerrilla appears from thin air and is instantly attacked by an ape-like creature in an act of gorilla on guerrilla warfare. (Okay, that was a bit insensitive.) And then, as if we needed more conflict, the Daleks enter the stage, and even though they aren’t front and center in this story, they’re still menacing and sinister because they’re pulling all of the strings on all of these puppets.

All of this before we even get to the time travel, and I was riveted.

And then the creative team turned this exploration of the human condition up to eleven.

After spending a night at Sir Reginald’s house (and raiding his extensive wine cellar), the Doctor and Jo are attacked by the guerrillas and held hostage. Jo escapes and is inadvertently transported to the future. She innocently tells the Controller where to find the Doctor, and the Controller sends a team of Ogrons (the ape-like creatures) to kill the guerrillas. The guerrillas escape, the Doctor gives chase, a Dalek chases all of them, and the Doctor and the rebels end up in the future. After a series of political ping-pong events, the Doctor ends up in the care of the Controller, gets the down-low on what happened to the planet, and eventually sways the Controller’s attitudes on the peril of humanity and his role in a lineage of “Quislings“.

As events come together like a jigsaw puzzle, the Doctor discovers that these events are a predestination paradox started by one of the rebel guerrillas setting a Dalekanium bomb in an attempt to stop the future of enslavement and death from coming to pass. At that point, my jaw dropped.

This. Is. Doctor Who.

It’s hard to find highlights here because the whole story shines so brightly: I loved how the Doctor was so much more civil with the Brigadier than in past interactions, including their building trust and synergy (“do tell the Marines”); I adored the (hopefully budding) relationship between Sgt Benton and Jo; I enjoyed watching Jo finally expanding her horizons and learning to be a worthy companion for this Doctor.

The Doctor is still working on the TARDIS, and his new-found civility extends to Jo as he frankly tells her that he doesn’t want to be an intergalactic puppet for the Time Lords and their High Council. He’s moving beyond his childish temper tantrums and taking action with what appears to be a new sense of purpose. Ironically, it was the Time Lords who provided it by allowing the Doctor and Jo to travel in the TARDIS once again.

The quick (almost non-sequitur) time loop a the beginning was fascinating, especially since the recent incarnations of the Doctor are very cautious about crossing their own timelines. This thread is never mentioned again in the story and left me wondering why it was important.

On the downside for this serial, the Doctor uses a gun to kill an Ogron. Sure it was self-defense, but it was also way out of character.

I also questioned the role of the Ogrons. I mean, yes, they make great hired muscle, but isn’t it uncharacteristic for the xenophobic Daleks to even consider working with them? Or is this more of a “use them then lose them” plan like the alliance in The Daleks’ Master Plan? Speaking of the Daleks, they discovered the secret of time travel for this story, but hadn’t they done this before?

On the new sound for the Dalek death rays, I don’t like it.

Finally, swinging back to the good things, it was nice to see that The Daleks don’t recognize the Doctor’s new face. They know that he has changed appearance before and use a mind analysis machine to determine if he is indeed the Doctor, but it took an extra step to establish that logic. Thank goodness.

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: The Curse of Peladon

Timestamp: Eighth Series Summary

February 10, 2016May 16, 2018 Michael Falkner6 Comments

Doctor Who: Eighth Series Summary

It’s not looking good for the Third Doctor. Series Seven started on a major high, and even though it slipped as the stories rolled on, it ended up finishing with a strong 3.8 score. Series Eight also started strong, but it fell fast and finally ended up third from the bottom in my rankings, only beating the Third and Sixth Series.

The strongest serial was Terror of the Autons, which brought back the Autons and Nestene Consciousness, a villain with strong but untapped potential, and introduced a strong nemesis in the Master. It also started a loose series-long arc in the Doctor battling the Master, who kind of stood in for his frustrations against his own people. Sadly, the stories got progressively weaker, and the battle with the Master (whose role in each story was essentially the same) wasn’t enough to hold them. That’s not Roger Delgado’s fault by any means, as he has been fantastically evil in the role. I think the writers started to depend too much on that element and less on a good plot to support it.

As I’ve noted in previous reviews, the Doctor is beginning to parallel James Bond in his arrogant attitude and physicality. He is rude, considers himself above everyone around him, and is prone to assault people more and more. The Third Doctor has taken the grumpiness and arrogance of the First Doctor and melded it with his frustration at being locked in one place and time against his will. He’s not a nice man.

As a result, I’m still not sold on his relationship with the Brigadier. Sure, the Doctor is saving the world on a routine basis, but he’s consistently condescending and rude toward the Brigadier, and I don’t know how a man who lives and breathes in an environment that depends on a certain degree of respect for people can tolerate such blatant disrespect.

I do have a degree of sympathy for the Doctor’s situation because the Time Lords are far more arrogant and abusive. They exiled the Doctor as punishment for meddling in time and space, yet they call on him (sometimes without his knowledge) to solve their problems. They know that he’s bitter, and they build and capitalize on it. If his exile is supposed to be teaching him how to be a better Time Lord, I don’t know how it’s supposed to work when they’re constantly making him more and more angry toward them.

And yet, despite how much he claims to the contrary, the Doctor is more like his people than he realizes. It’s quite the dynamic.

Terror of the Autons – 5
The Mind of Evil – 4
The Claws of Axos – 3
Colony in Space – 3
The Dæmons – 2

Series Eight Average Rating: 3.4/5

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: Day of the Daleks

Timestamp #59: The Dæmons

February 3, 2016May 16, 2018 Michael Falkner13 Comments

Doctor Who: The Dæmons
(5 episodes, s08e21-e25, 1971)

Timestamp 059 The Dæmons

It was a dark and stormy night, almost the setting for a Doctor Who Halloween Special, but aired in early summer.

Professor Horner and his team are excavating a site called Devil’s Hump, and they are surrounded by a series of events that are like magic. The local village witch, Olive Hawthorne, comes out to protest but is ignored, so she returns home and goes to visit the vicar, a new man named Mr. Magister, who is really the Master. Also, she’s immune to his hypnotic powers, unlike everyone else in the town.

Turns out, the Master is attempting to summon a demon. Well, a race of demons. Well, really an alien race that looks like demons that are kind of like scientists that run experiments on civilizations. They’ve been on the planet for 100,000 years, and when the experiments are deemed successful, they spark a technological revolution. When the experiments fail, you get Atlantis.

Anyway, this serial is an exercise in Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The Dæmons have been around for so long that they’ve been worked into our mythology, and when they appear/disappear, it requires a conversion between energy and matter. That energy release when they shrink resulted in a shield dome being constructed around the village. The Doctor helps UNIT cut a hole in it so they can keep the gargoyle Bok busy while the Doctor attends to the larger Dæmon named Azal. The Master and the Doctor negotiate with Azal as to who will serve it best, and it sides with the Master. Jo offers to sacrifice herself to prevent Azal from killing the Doctor, and that somehow short circuits Azal’s brain. Azal explodes, the Master is finally captured by UNIT, the Doctor and Jo dance around the maypole, la fin.

It was an interesting idea, but it felt poorly executed, and I think a lot of that is because of the sensitivity at the time regarding demons and the supernatural on the BBC. This story could be done now and not feel so awkward or ham-fisted, but I think the prevailing culture crippled the story’s potential.

There were some good points, like the realistic special effects (the helicopter shot, originally sourced from From Russia with Love, and the church explosion) and the continuing thread of the Master biting off more than he can chew, but then there were also some really bad points, such as the resolution. The threat was stopped by accident, and if Jo hadn’t been there, the Doctor would have failed to stop the Master from taking over the world. Similarly, the Master was captured by Sgt Benton’s good timing.

This story also has a few potential links to the future of Doctor Who. First, Bok is apparently made of stone. Are the Dæmons precursors or ancestors to the Weeping Angels? Second, the UNIT sergeant who builds the force field defeating contraption is named Osgood. Is he related to the current personal assistant at UNIT who saved the world? Both of them are scientists and they both wear thick-rimmed glasses.

The Master offered the villagers anything they wanted for the price of their servitude, and I heard echoes of Needful Things.

Finally, UNIT needs to stop shooting things. It hardly ever works.

Rating: 2/5 – “Mm? What’s that, my boy?”

UP NEXT – Series Eight Summary

Timestamp #58: Colony in Space

January 27, 2016May 16, 2018 Michael Falkner7 Comments

Doctor Who: Colony in Space
(6 episodes, s08e15-e20, 1971)

Timestamp 058 Colony in Space

I really don’t like the Time Lords.

The Master is still mucking about in space and time, and the Time Lords reinstate the Doctor’s mobility to stop the next evil scheme. The Master has stolen the plans for a Doomsday Weapon, and only the Doctor can stop him from acquiring and using the device.

The TARDIS spontaneously dematerializes with the Doctor and Jo inside and travels to the planet Uxarieus, where a colony of humans has been established, but the colonists don’t trust the government back on Earth. In this future, the Earth government is a repressive bureaucracy that thrives on red tape. Meanwhile, the Interplanetary Mining Corporation (IMC) is trying to jump the colony’s claim and mine the planet for duralinium, which is needed on Earth. Since the colonists get in the way, the IMC is trying to scare them off. They call for an adjudicator to settle the issue, and it so happens that they send the Master.

And that’s the weak frame for the rest of the plot.

The story follows that there once was a powerful race of beings on the planet, but they developed the Doomsday Weapon – a device with the power to destroy a star – and then squirreled it away because nobody really needs that much power. The weapon’s presence led to the decline of the society, and they regressed to being primitives that hide in caves. When the Guardian, who leads the remnants of the ancient civilization, hears the tale of the Master and the Doctor, he destroys the weapon and his people to save the universe.

On the upside to this story, Jo visits the TARDIS, gets her “bigger on the inside” moment, and rapidly learns what it means to be a Doctor’s companion. From the story perspective, it was good to see that the writers didn’t rest on the trope of everyone in the party of evil completely believing in the thing that is evil: Caldwell was a great foil for the captain’s plans.

I also thought that the model work was great in this story, and I loved the IMC ship exterior.

Now, the list of negatives. First, the Time Lords, who are just playing games with the Doctor at this point. They reinstate his mobility to serve their needs because… what, they can’t simply pull the Master back by themselves? They can’t meddle in affairs of time and space, but they can send the Doctor, who they exiled as punishment for meddling in time and space?

No wonder he’s bitter about the exile. I would be too if they kept being hypocritical about everything.

The effects with the TARDIS were rather shoddy, from the *poof* materialization/dematerialization (it used to fade in and out) to the remnants of the Troughton-era control room (the roundel wallpaper was okay for the low-res black and white days, but with higher production values, the set deserves better).

This Doctor is a lot more physical, which is fine, but he’s a lot more prone to assaulting people. He uses his Venusian karate/aikido again here multiple times, and while the self-defense argument is on the table, he’s far more aggressive than his predecessors (and the successors with which I’m familiar). It feels like they’re trying to bring in the Bond fans, which almost matches up with the debut of Roger Moore in the famous role. I see a lot of similarities in Roger Moore’s Bond and Jon Pertwee’s Doctor.

Overall, a weak framing story, but a decent showdown with the Doctor, the Master, and a not-quite-dead-yet race of superior intelligence.

Rating: 3/5 – “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: The Dæmons

Culture on My Mind – Review: Star Wars Smuggler’s Bounty Resistance Box – January 2016

January 22, 2016June 23, 2025 Michael FalknerLeave a comment

Culture on My Mind
Review: Star Wars Smuggler’s Bounty Resistance Box – January 2016
January 22, 2016

The Force is still strong with this subscription box.

After the success of the First Order box from Funko’s Star Wars subscription box service, it was a no-brainer for me to upgrade from the month-to-month to a full year subscription. This time around, the service was still capitalizing on the global success of The Force Awakens, but they shifted gears from the bad guys to the Resistance.

The box’s form factor is the same as the First Order box, including durability and the treasure chest layout. The UPS driver who serves my route left this one out in the intermittent Georgia winter rain, and even though the box was damp, the contents were unharmed.

Similar to the last box, the top tray for this go-round contained a patch and a pin. The plastic envelopes were both opened on one side due to what looks like a production issue, and as a result the pin was bouncing around in the box. Since the box is well compartmentalized and the pin is quite durable, nothing was damaged.

The patch is embroidered with BB-8, the adorable little hero droid from the new movie and the focus of the marketing for this box. When my wife saw it, she beamed, so I know that it’s a winner in our house. The pin is of Poe Dameron, the hot shot star pilot of the Resistance, although at first it kind of looked like Jessika Pava, the female X-Wing pilot from the film. One can dream, right?

Under the platform that housed the pin and patch was a navy blue Funko t-shirt. This time, it was a movie-themed shirt focused on the heroes of the Resistance. In my opinion, it is much more attractive than the simple figure shirts from the last box, although I would have liked to see Rey more front and center. Regardless, it is still a nice shirt design. Based on what I’ve been able to find so far, it seems that every box is the same this time, so there are no shirt variations or chase figures.

The big ticket items this time were one exclusive Funko Pop figure and a Funko Home ceramic mug. The figure is of Chewbacca with his bowcaster, and while I have never really been impressed with the figures of the Wookiee before, this one really caught my attention. It’s actually furry, and that somehow makes it adorable.

The ceramic mug is modeled after the protocol droid C-3PO, right down to the detail of his red arm as the mug’s handle. It seems like a sturdy, wide 12-ounce mug, but it is hand wash only and not microwave safe. Those two criteria are killers in my house, so I’m not quite sure what I plan to do with this item.

In the end, remember that the promise made by Funko is that this $25 box will contain $50 worth of merchandise without any filler. By my estimation, Funko has once again delivered on their promises of value and content. The figure is about $10 in stores, and the t-shirt is in the $15-25 ballpark depending on the vendor. The pin and patch are around the $5 price point each, so the real wild card this time is the mug. Most of the comparable mugs online go for about $10, which places this box in the $45-55 range. All of that without any mini-comics or postcards.

The next box, which is due to arrive in mid-March, is centered on the cantina from A New Hope, and the spotlighted character is Greedo. The order window closes in early March. If you’re on the fence, I recommend the $25 “pirate” plan, but if you really want these kind of items with a Star Wars flair, I fully endorse the annual “smuggler” plan.

Culture on My Mind is inspired by the weekly Can’t Let It Go segment on the NPR Politics Podcast where each host brings one thing to the table that they just can’t stop thinking about.

For more creativity with a critical eye, visit Creative Criticality.

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