Who Review: The Mind Robber

(I debated not having a quote here and instead posting that image. You know which one. Common sense won out.)

Jamie: Come on, back to the TARDIS.
Zoe: Is that the right way?
Jamie: Of course it's the right way. No it could be... erm...
Zoe: We're lost, aren't we.
Jamie: No, I wouldn't say that. We're just er... well...um... [beat] You want to know something?
Zoe: What?
Jamie: I think we're lost.

Way way back in my Tomb of the Cybermen review, I mentioned that Patrick Troughton was magical. I'm going to expound on that just a little bit here, since this is the most fantasy-oriented story ever, so this may come off as a bit of a love letter to the Second Doctor.

First, though, let me set the stage. Way back in 1964, they had to fill out a few weeks of schedule-time with some nonsense set inside the TARDIS and featuring only the regulars. The result was The Edge of Destruction, arguably the worst and most boring 50 minutes the program spat out until the 1980s. 42 serials later, they find themselves in the same situation: The Dominators, arguably the second-worst thing the program spat out until the 1980s, needed to be curtailed from 6 to 5 episodes. In order to keep the schecule intact, the next serial needed an extra episode of padding, and it needed a budget of practically nothing.

The result is The Mind Robber, episode one, which puts the TARDIS crew in a big white set with some stock robots and a few stock backdrops to represent Scotland and Zoe's city (note how we don't get Gallifrey for the Doctor; we instead get inverted images of his companions). This is more important than most people really want to think about; going straight to the Land of Fiction would have made things jar a great deal worse.

Now after the Doctor makes a great deal of fuss about NOT! LEAVINK! ZER TARDIS! (sorry, but with Zer Karkus coming up later, I couldn't resist), his companions think they'll be just fine wandering off anyway. And then they do just that, even when the Doctor's yelling at Jamie, who really, really should know better by now.

Do me a favor. Read the rest of this paragraph and then watch about two minutes of the clip from The Evil of the Daleks, episode 2. By this point, Waterfield and Maxtible have spent about five minutes talking about "...them" until finally a Dalek bursts through the door. Watch Troughton. Watch the way he acts throughout this scene, and especially watch the way he turns around as the Dalek enters.

All of the other Doctors can do concern, and most of them can do worry. Troughton was the only one of the bunch who could actually do fear, and he does it again here in episode one of The Mind Robber. And why not? The TARDIS is being invaded by a malevolent force "about which we know nothing!" This happens a lot more in the 70s, but in 1968, The Web Planet notwithstanding, this sort of thing doesn't really happen. So he's afraid, and he sells it perfectly.

Nevertheless, his companions do a very silly thing and get themselves into trouble, which leads to a genuinely creepy moment at the 13:50 mark. We get negative images of Jamie and Zoe, grinning and beckoning... and over this, we hear the real Zoe scream. When Troughton begs them to "go in[to the TARDIS] before it's too late," again, we have real fear. Again, companions got hypnotized all the time in the 70s, but not nearly so much in the 60s.

Episode One is genuinely creepy and surreal. It doesn't rely on grotesque monsters jumping out and going "boo!" at you, and there aren't any "how did they do that?" moments (cf. The Deadly Assassin and The Daleks respectively). And then to top it all off, in the episode's closing moments, the Doctor apparently succumbs to a psychic assault and the TARIS explodes.

...and then we get that shot. You know the one.

This one.

But anyway, it's an exercise in disaster management, and it works. It sets the tone for the next four weeks and ensures that we'll stay interested. If, of course, we weren't used to regular TARDIS-abuse and hypnosis from later stories.

And the exercise in disaster-management continues in the next episode. If this story isn't famous for that shot, then it's famous for being the one where someone else has a go at playing Jamie for a week because Frazer Hines got chicken pox. Their solution - Jamie loses his face and the Doctor gives him the wrong one - is brilliant. Rarely does the Doctor make a mistake this drastic when the safety of his companions is at risk.

We're introduced to the villian, who appears to be supremely evil (and 70s viewers would be forgiven for thinking he was the Master), and we also meet Gulliver, a man who can only quote Gulliver's Travels and yet the Doctor is eager to keep talking to him.

And lo! The use of the word "companions" to describe the Doctor's, er, companions.

The Doctor and his companions reunite, and here he learns that the TARDIS broke up. Just imagine Tom Baker trying to say "The TARDIS broke up?!"

So they're in a land of fiction, and they can defeat monsters by acknowledging that the monsters don't exist. We get a unicorn, a minotaur, Medusa, and... Zer Karkus, a 21st-Century superhero. Later on, Star Trek is going to make a living out of the "Godel, Escher, T'pran of the Ninth Vulcan Dynasty" approach, but let the record show that this is different. Zer Karkus is another piece of Earth fiction, he's just one that we haven't heard of yet (and still haven't even though he's from 2000... just keep walking). And this is important, because the Doctor's not the all-powerful boggly-eyed scarf-wearing jelly-baby-eating lunatic he'll be in a decade, which means that, like his companions, he needs to face something he can't not believe in. The upshot of this is a girl in a skintight jumpsuit gets to grapple with a man in a body-stocking. Or to put it another way, Zoe gets to beat up her childhood hero.

Really, this is a fantastic setup, truly out of left field for the show, and it's only the ending that trips up at all. But then, the entire series format pretty much lends itself to that. It's time for the obligatory nod to Buffy: In the 90s, Joss Whedon turned "cramming the season finale full of stuff" into an art form, but here the end just comes too quickly. Then again, how often is a Doctor Who serial let down by its ending? Let's take a look at the usual fan-favorites:

The Talons of Weng-Chiang: has pretty much everything in its setup you could ever ask for. Maloney directing a Holmes script in Victorian London while the Doctor plays at being Sherlock Holmes and the companion wins a wet t-shirt contest? Sign me up! That doesn't change the fact that the ending is a mess.

The Caves of Androzani: doesn't count. Holmes' entire brief was "kill the Doctor," so everything in that story builds up to the end. Besides, (almost) everybody dies.

Pyramids of Mars: if it weren't for Star Trek Voyager, the merciless technobabble employed here would probably be forgiven.

Genesis of the Daleks: wherein the Doctor changes his mind more times than Two-Face.

City of Death: "Duggan! That might have been the most important punch in all of history!" It only works because it's funny.

So what we see is that, more often than not, the ending of a Doctor Who story basically consists of "put the toys back in the box as quickly and cleanly as possible," and even then that's not what we get here. The villain is in fact a tired old writer wired up to a machine that demands entertainment from him, and who doesn't want the Doctor to die, but rather to take over so he can finally get some rest. Yes, the Master Brain eventually has other plans, but that's because we can't have a story without somebody who's actually bad. The Mind Robber surely has to be one of the best Doctor Who serials ever. Unique, surprisingly well-paced, and of course, because the Doctor's Patrick Troughton and the director's David Maloney, you can't fault the acting.

10 out of 10.

Who Review: Revelation of the Daleks

"Did you ever tell them that they were eating their own relatives?"
"Certainly not! That would create what I believe is called 'consumer resistance!'"

If there's one thing more polarizing about Classic Who than the entire reign of JN-T, it's Colin Baker's Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. Thankfully, it spends half of this particular serial under a cape that's slightly less of a sartorial disaster.

The plot is never more complex (well, see Trial of a Timelord if you must, but at least this one makes sense) than it is here. At the Galaxy's greatest funeral parlor, one massively socially awkward student has the hots for Teacher. Meanwhile Laurel & Hardy manage security for the establishment, which also provides foodstuff for several nearby starving planets, thanks to the ministrations of the Great Healer. Unfortunately, his business partner, Kara, doesn't like him and hires a disgraced Knight Templar to kill him. Besides, it turns out that Soylent Green is people, and the Great Healer is... Davros. Or rather, Davros' head in a jar. Or rather a robotic mockup of Davros' head in a jar. Also a pair of young people (one of whom is "a doctor, not a magician") are trying to find one of the pair's father's corpse. They find some brains in tanks, and later some murderous pepperpots, but in between they stumble across possibly the most grisly thing the show ever did; they find the corpse all right, partially mutated and stuck inside a transparent Dalek shell. And, oh yes, begging them to kill him.

Oh and it's got the Doctor in it. He spends an entire episode walking into the trap (and remember that in this season, the episodes are 45 minutes long and there are only two of them per serial) that Davros set for him. Because in addition to turning bodies into food, Davros is also turning them into Daleks and wants to gloat at the Doctor a bit.

The bounty hunter gets the drop on the mech-head, but then the real Davros shows up. He can hover, sort of, and blast lightning out of his hand. Well, before it gets shot off, that is. "No 'arm in trying," indeed. The bounty hunter loses a leg as well, Kara shows up and gets killed, as does a DJ who spent his life playing rock and roll at the dead. In case you couldn't tell, the script was written by someone who clearly loves Robert Holmes but can't quite write like him. The double-acts are Holmesian enough, but the violence really isn't.

Frankly, there's so much wrong with this entire premise that you wonder what right it has to call itself Doctor Who. When I discuss Trial more next week, I'll come back to this, but it's a point that deserves to be made here: Colin Baker's tenure might as well have been a different show. If you didn't hold it to the same standards as That Thing That Patrick Troughton Used To Be On, and if it weren't full of continuity references to the same, then it might actually have been well-remembered. Revelation's greatest strengths - the black humor and the prevalence of violence, mutations and bounty hunters - are frankly not right for Doctor Who.

However, my all-time favorite Pertwee serial is Doctor Who and the Silurians, which, with its overt political subtext and no mention of the TARDIS, is hardly That Thing That Patrick Troughton Used To Be On either. So the fact that Revelation of the Daleks misses the mark by a considerable margin isn't actually as bad as you might think. It's unfortunate, and coincidence most certainly does not imply causation, but Colin Baker's best ever serial is the one that he has the smallest role in. Writer Eric Saward apparently under-wrote Orcini (the bounty hunter) and Davros (for once) to show Baker how it should be done. This officially is the smartest thing Saward ever did, and that includes killing Adric.

Doctor Who is a program that thrives on change. Not all change is good. This is the paradox at the heart of the JN-T era, and especially Colin Baker's tumultuous stint. Revelation of the Daleks is a bit like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in that it's darker and edgier than the franchise's usual fare, and non-fans might like it more for the exact same reason that diehard fans tend to hate it. Still, this is hands-down the best Colin Baker serial. On a scale of 0 to The Mind Robber, it probably rates no higher than a (generous) 6, but on a scale of 0 to Revelation of the Daleks, no other story from Season 22 ranks even that high. It's decently-paced, the dialogue is unusually good, the Daleks can (sort of) hover, and Colin Baker gets what is as far as I'm concerned his best moment early in episode 1; when a mutant grabs Peri's abandoned sandwich, she screams and asks what that was. "Would you like me to find out?" Colin asks. He's wearing his wizard cape to underline the effect; he's just as much a stranger to this environment as his companion, but he's willing and able to investigate. Any other Doctor ever would have said either "It's probably nothing" or "trouble," followed by a silly grin. Not so with Colin: "I've got the power to discover what this thing is," he's saying, "but I'll only use it if you want me to." More of this, earlier, might have made all the difference.


This week's word I'm surprised the spellcheck recognized: "Technicolour."

Back in The Villiage Again

Ah, the return to college from a summer break. When you see your old friends, and the terrible decisions they've made regarding facial hair. When you see the moronic neighbor you had to deal with last year and pretend those were "good times." When you shake your head in wonder at the administration's latest inane construction job (they ripped out the front steps to the library!) You get the picture.

Oh, and the alcohol. And the sex. Dear God, I know you two are happy to see each other, but the loud-but-not-loud-enough techno music blasting over the moans are not fooling anyone. Neither, incidentally, are the moans.

Also, since this is the start of my senior year, I realized that 75% of the students here are young upstart posers who will be here long after I'm gone (and come to think of it, about half my class will probably have to take an extra semester too). I wonder how I made the transition from wide-eyed youngster to grouchy old man in such little time. Things that helped this summer: the Blago trial, which once again made me ashamed to have grown up in Illinois, and me finally listening to Abbey Road and thus realizing, finally, how awesome the Beatles were. This has only reinforced my contempt for all my classmates who wear Nirvana shirts.

Oh, and the food. Because it just wouldn't be college without eating rejects from the nearest one-star restaurant.

Merry Senior Year, everyone.

Super Mario Galaxy 2

So I beat SMG2 yesterday, by which I mean, I saw the credits. Not only is the ending cutscene less impressive than the epic mindscrew that was the first game's ending, but the boss fight was horribly anticlimactic. The level to get to Bowser was satisfyingly frustrating, but Bowser himself was easy. The Bowser Jr. boss fights were more varied and difficult... in fact, SMG2 generally had better boss fights except for the Bowser ones. Beating SMG1 left me with a sense of accomplishment. SMG2 was more a case of "that's it?"

Crossing Guards: A Rant

It's time for a random post about crossing guards. Or more accurately, the people in the neon jackets who hang out in intersections to direct traffic because apparently the same people too dumb to realize what a red light means will figure out what a person gesticulating in a neon jacket means.

What kind of insane faithlessness in humanity coupled with a power trip is necessary to don the neon jacket of power, get out in the middle of a busy intersection filled with angry motorists, and boss them around?

How many of these deluded souls get run over every year?

And, and this is a question I ask myself every time I get tailgated while already going more than 10 miles over the speed limit, how badly do we need more of them? Or would we be better served if they urged the motorists to run over the idiot who starts across the crosswalk with two seconds left on the clock?

Because, man, those people should get everything that's coming to them.

What I'd like is a world without rules. I believe there's some superhighway somewhere in Europe which is dangerous as hell, and they've removed all the safety signs - or was it an intersection? All the stoplights at a dangerous intersection, maybe that was it. The accident rate dramatically declined. I propose we do something similar. Rip out all the stoplights and fire all the crossing-guards - oh wait, it's a depression, we can't be seen to fire anyone.

But I think it would still send the right message. In real life, that crossing-guard is at most 200 pounds of flesh and bone, and that car could mutilate them beyond recognition if it so chose to ignore the feeble authority of a raised hand.

I am not advocating violence. I do not advocate violence as a general rule. But I want you to step back and think about the illusion of safety that these crossing-guards and stoplights generate.