Top Whatever Who Lists

Recap: my top five:
The Mind Robber, Carnival of Monsters, City of Death, Remembrance of the Daleks, "Blink." No actual listing for you; these are in chronological order because I'm too much of a coward to actually pick my number one all time favorite. Though I will say that Rememberance is barely clinging to that spot, and Talons may very well take it away by the time I get around to doing the respective reviews (my complaints about Talons essentially being, "it's too long and the rat is rubbish").

Doctor Who Magazine's 2009 list:
1. THE CAVES OF ANDROZANI (1984) starring PETER DAVISON
2. BLINK (2007) starring DAVID TENNANT
3. GENESIS OF THE DALEKS (1975) starring TOM BAKER
4. THE TALONS OF WENG-CHIANG (1977) starring TOM BAKER
5. THE EMPTY CHILD (2005) starring CHRISTOPHER ECCLESTON
6. HUMAN NATURE (2007) starring DAVID TENNANT
7. PYRAMIDS OF MARS (1975) starring TOM BAKER
8. CITY OF DEATH (1979) starring TOM BAKER
9. THE ROBOTS OF DEATH (1977) starring TOM BAKER
10. BAD WOLF (2005) starring CHRISTOPHER ECCLESTON

I can see arguments for all these except "Bad Wolf." Come on, if you're that obsessed with getting a second Eccleston on there, make it "Dalek!"

And the 2003 Outpost Gallifrey 40th anniversary top 5 (because that's all I remember):
1. Talons of Weng-Chiang
2. Caves of Androzani
3. Pyramids of Mars
4. Genesis of the Daleks
5. City of Death

Obviously, I think the 2009 poll is just a tad skewed towards the new series... let's see, in 2009, there were 30 seasons, and four of them were from the new series. Yup, that sounds like 40% to me. Okay, let's take out seasons 3-5, since they largely don't exist anymore, and also carve out 22-24, since they're so bad. This leaves us with 24 seasons, four of which are from the new series. That's 16% of the whole show snagging 40% of the spots.

I'd also be willing to bet that Caves got a boost to the number-one spot when there's no other classic Doctor aside from Tom Baker on that entire list solely on the basis of "Time Crash." Now, there's no denying that it's an absolutely awesome serial, I just think it's a bit... well, shall we say, odd, that only one classic serial ever stands a chance of beating the One True Time Lord. (Maybe all the anti-Tom fans rally behind that one because they know it's the only non-Tom story capable of reaching the number one spot.) I vaguely recall the Outpost Gallifrey poll had stories like Inferno and The Evil of the Daleks (which doesn't even freaking exist anymore) in the top 15, which would seem to indicate that the reference pools may have shrunk...

...or it could be that OG and DWM cater to different chunks of the fandom. Whatever.

"It'll Do Because It's Doctor Who:" The Danger of Branding

There's a theory, one that's admittedly hard to disprove, that says you can draw conclusions about branding. For example, cult shows had better not try to swim on FOX.

...well that's not the point I was trying to make. Fortunately, that theory can be disproved by such notable shows as...

...dammit.

Well, anyway:

People think something is worth their time and money because they know that that something is good. Is it a CD with the words AC/DC on it? No? Okay, AC(lightning-slash)DC? Okay, there we go. Yeah, that CD is probably full of overdriven guitars playing three chords while the singer praises rock and roll. Or women. Well, "praise" might not be the right word, but you get the point.

That film starts with the words "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away?" I guarantee you that at some point someone will whip out a glowing laser-sword. Also someone will say "I have a bad feeling about this."

A television show that starts with a syncopated bass line and a "oo-ee-oo" theme tune? Well, it's probably about a man with 13 lives gallivanting around space and time, probably with a young woman along to get captured and tied up every twenty minutes. If the credits don't include a phone box tumbling through a vortex, chances are the effects are going to be pretty shoddy, too.

Well, yes, nobody can disagree with me on these points, because everything I've said thus far is objective. I didn't say "AC/DC is the greatest band evar!!!" and I didn't say "Star Wars is stupid, overrated, and only for the drooling morons who want space adventures but can't get past Doctor Who's bad effects." (No, of course not. Star Wars is stupid, overrated, and only for the drooling morons who want space adventures but can't get past Star Trek's bad effects, while Nu Who is stupid, overrated, and only for the drooling morons who want space adventures but can't get past Classic Who's bad effects.)

That stuff in parentheses was a joke. But here's the thing! People think that. They may or may not have a good reason to think that. Certainly, nobody whose only experience with Doctor Who was, say Seasons 22-24, or whose only exposure to Star Wars is Attack of the Clones is going to think that either thing was ever very good.

Then there are the people who will stick with something that's obviously bad and defend it to the death simply because it's got the name of something they like on it. Let It Be isn't a bad album, they'll say. That's impossible! The Beatles didn't make bad albums.

There are probably people out there who will sit through repeated showings of The Godfather Part III just because it's got The Godfather in its title. I just want you to think about that. There are people like that out there.

...and they're allowed to vote.

The title of this post comes from the attitude taken towards Doctor Who by its own producer in the late 70s. People love this show. They eat it up. It's not for any specific reason; it just is. And that is precisely the point, Brigadier. That is precisely the point.

If you love something, be it a TV show or a band or a film series or a book, for the love of all that is holy cast a critical eye over it every once and again (unless this something you love is your significant other, for They Can Do No Harm). If the quality declines, say so! Don't eagerly lap it up just because it's got the same title as your favorite film, just a different roman numeral at the end!

There's a reason fanboys have a bad name, aside from the fact that they have no lives outside the object of their worship. They cannot look at something and acknowledge that it's bad. Even Doctor Who is only a partial subversion these days, because everyone "knows" that Seasons 22-24 were horrible, but still nobody wants to look that closely at the flaws of, say The Caves of Androzani! Are we honestly unable to look at our favorite things through the eyes of someone else?

Yes, as fans we are allowed to forgive certain things more easily (say, Doctor Who and the Silurians). But for the love of all that's holy, never, ever ever ever ever ever ever tell a non-fan that they just don't "get" it. Nothing will turn them off a cult thing faster than obnoxious and willfully blind fan-worship.

Who Review: The Androids of Tara

If swallowing The Trial of a Time Lord all in one go taught me anything, it's that swallowing an entire seasonal arc all in one go is a terrible thing to do. So I'm going to split up my Key to Time reviews over the next few months, and then do a review of the season as a whole around Christmas.

I'm starting with The Androids of Tara, which is the 4th of 6 stories this season, for two reasons. One, it's the one story from this season that fulfils that magical double criteria of not being written by the same author as one of my top five stories, and also actually being pretty good.* Two, it's the one story from that season that I actually have with me here at college as opposed to back at home.

*Blah blah David Fischer, blah blah "The Gamble With Time" blah blah. If Fischer actually wrote a considerable portion of City of Death, it would have his name on it. (Amusingly, the other contribution that Ben Aaronovitch, author of Remembrance of the Daleks, made to the show was Battlefield, the serial that killed Classic Who stone dead.)

And actually I should bring up a bit of backstory here. Not about the Key to Time season as a whole, because then I'd have to start griping about that a good three months before I intend to, but rather about this story. Seems another script fell through, and David Fischer was asked to bash something together, presumably because he happened to be handing in his scripts for The Stones of Blood right around then and was the only writer within the producer's line of sight. (This sounds harsh, but wait until I get to something else Fischer wrote.) Ironically, the serial that Fischer bashed together at the last minute (and, yes, plundered the plot from The Prisoner of Zenda outright) is a whole lot better than The Stones of Blood, the one he supposedly spent some time working on.

Now for those of you who have seen The Prisoner of Zenda, you can all sing along as I summarize the plot for the rest of us: Count Grendel has designs on the throne of Tara. To that end, he's kidnapped the Princess Strella, second in line to the throne, and the Prince Reynhardt, first in line. The plan is to crown the Prince, have him marry the Princess, kill the Prince, marry the Princess, kill the Princess, and then become King. Strella refuses to cooperate, so Grendel kidnaps Romana, who looks just like her, and when she refuses to cooperate, he has an android duplicate of Strella built instead. We the audience don't know about the duplicate (though we know that androids exist, since the Doctor's rigged one up to look like the Prince), so the cliffhanger to episode 2 is hereby the second-best* cliffhanger of the season: at the (fake) Prince's coronation, Strella shows up and pledges her loyalty. Suddenly the Doctor brains her with a sceptre. The audience gets a week to wonder whether he killed Romana or Strella, only to come back the next week and find out that it was actually an android duplicate.

*I actually did type "best" and then remembered The Pirate Planet, episode 3.

Then Grendel tries it again by mocking up a fake Romana to ambush the Doctor. The real Romana briefly escapes, only to be recaptured (filler, more than anything else), the Doctor and Grendel have a swordfight that's fairly limp until they move out of the videotaped studio footage and into the filmed location footage... and then it becomes the greatest sci-fi swordfight until The Empire Strikes Back. The Doctor trounces Grendel, who leaps from his own battlement and swims away. The Prince and the Princess presumably marry and live happily ever after; all we get is a bit of comedy as we realize that K-9 got stuck on a boat.

Oh, and Romana found the Key segment in the first five minutes of the adventure (while the Doctor was out fishing), because the author realized what a stupid plot device the Key was.

The best line of the serial is, of course, "Would you mind not standing on my chest? My hat's on fire." Watch it yourself to see how well that line makes sense.

Frankly, as the swordfight and the laser "bolts" demonstrate, this is the first time Doctor Who tries to do Star Wars. Yeah, they'll keep doing it for forever, but as I implied earlier, the swordfight here beats the one in that movie. No, really. The planet Tara is another vaguely medieval world, so the BBC costume department gets to strut its stuff while the Alien Makeup department/person/thing doesn't get a check this month. ...aside from that pathetic monster that menaces Romana right after she finds the Key segment, but that's probably an android made so Grendel can impress damsels in distress. At least, that's the story I'm going with.

Final score: 8/10. The requisite Graham Williams Comedy Moments don't really detract from the story too much. Grendel is of course the best villain of the season... in fact, behind Count Scarlioni, he's the best villain of the entire Graham Williams run. And then there's that swordfight, in which (apparently) Tom Baker actually does all his own stunts (please remember that the man was 45 at the time and started his run on the show by breaking his collarbone). Frankly, if you can't see this story's awesomeness past the horribly fake monster who only gets about a minute of screentime, then this isn't the show for you anyway.

Head, Meet Wall

...

Okay, I...

...y'know what? It's just...

...well...

...

F*** it. There are no words to describe how terrible this is.

the famous and the fallen

So yesterday was the 30th anniversary of John Bonham's death, and tomorrow is the 24th anniversary of Cliff Burton's death, and if you don't know who these people were, go away. Never ever be in a band. If you're clueless enough not to have heard of these people, each definitely one of the best players of their respective instruments, there is no place for you in the music world.

The (New) Top Ten Iron Maiden Songs

For the original list, go here. I've updated my tastes.

10. Fear of the Dark
9. The Wicker Man
8. 2 Minutes to Midnight
7. Wasted Years
6. Die With Your Boots On
5. The Number of the Beast
4. No More Lies
3. Phantom of the Opera
2. Revelations
1. Hallowed be Thy Name

So yeah, Die With Your Boots On and No More Lies got added to the list, while The Trooper and Aces High fell off, and Wasted Years jumped a few spots while The Wicker Man did the exact opposite. So my tastes change. Big surprise.

Who Review: The Seeds of Death

Oh, Karma, you terrible, terrible thing. Here I go off ranting and raving about the Doctor not using lethal force against his enemies, and then you drop this in my lap. Byaaaahaarhrhrhghhghahghaaghaghghhrarhhrgha.

The plot: Ice Warriors take over the T-mat base on the moon (think a cheaper version, if such a thing is possible, of Star Trek's transporter) and use it to T-mat the titular seeds to Earth. Once there, the seeds create oxygen-eating foam that threatens to engulf the Earth, until the Doctor makes it rain and then goes on a rampage, slaughtering the Ice Warriors with powerful lamps.

Since the rest of the review is going to savage this story, let's get the good things out of the way now. There's no faulting the acting, because this is Patrick Troughton we're talking about, and Troughton putting in a bad performance is about as likely as the Earth suddenly deciding to shape itself like a banana instead of a sphere. The direction is largely competent, and the show's makers clearly had a lot of fun with their foam machine. None of the effects come across as horribly bad, though the "zoom in, lock off the camera while the actor leaves the T-mat alcove, zoom out" approach to the T-mat effect gets old the second time they use it. The script does a decent job of letting us know how much trouble the Doctor's going to be in once he finally gets to the moon. Um... it's refreshing, especially coming to this right after reviewing Genesis of the Daleks, to see the Doctor unfazed about killing his enemies (but see below...)

But, er, the pacing. Yes yes, each episode details a different phase of the operation, and yes, episode four is always going to suffer because Troughton's on vacation. The problem is, there's still some terrible padding. Are we supposed to feel sympathy for Fewsham, the technician who cooperates with the Ice Warriors out of fear for his life? Should we care about the interactions between Commander Radnor, Miss Kelly, and whats-his-face rocketman?

I said some stuff near the end of my Frontier in Space review about watchability, and the fact that this review is two days late should tell you just how watchable it is. The Ice Warriors are boring! They move slowly, they talk slowly, they kill slowly, and they conquer planets slowly. The pantomime music doesn't do the story any favors, either. One of the things that sold me on the Davison Renaissance was JN-T's opposition to the mindset of "It'll do because it's Doctor Who." Moreso than anything Graham Williams produced, I might hold up this serial as the best evidence of that mindset. It's got Troughton, it's got monsters, it's got corridors to run up and down. But that's about it. "Come for the Doctor, stay for the story" works when there's a story. But the seeds aren't even introduced until the 3rd cliffhanger.

And then there's the Doctor's actions at the end. There are only three serials between this one and Doctor Who and the Silurians, but the difference is striking. An alien virus-thing threatens to wipe out all life on Earth in both cases, but in one the Doctor is willing to negotiate and in the other he's not. Is it because the Silurians are indigenous to Earth? (Answer: yes. Duh.)

Prior to Eric Saward's stint as the script editor, this is probably the only time the Doctor shoots a sentient being! It's played so painfully straight, even though the Doctor says that Mars is a dead world and implies that these may be the very last Ice Warriors in the Universe. All right, I'm all for the Doctor making hard moral choices, but this just looks like an excuse for the Doctor to run up and down corridors with something that's as close to a gun as it ever gets before the 80s. If he's going to kill, he should use his superior intellect to do it. Hell, the "wires scene" from Genesis had less problems - I'd be the first person to protest if, after Sarah said he should kill the Daleks, the Doctor whipped out a pistol and charged in there. A childrens' hero holding a gun, zappy thing, ultrapowerful lamp, whatever... it just doesn't work.

Now let me be clear. I'm in no way suggesting that the Doctor shouldn't use lethal force when the situation demands it. If he wants to lure the Ice Warriors into a room where the UV lamps are set up, and zap them there, that works, and I'm fine with it. But taking up arms and going after the monsters is something he should really leave to the Brigadier. It's so out of character for him that they were recently able to craft an entire plot around the Doctor very reluctantly firing a gun, once.

Okay, enough of that. This more than any other story I've reviewed to date would probably be better if it were shorter. Yes, 4-parters weren't the norm until the 70s, blah blah blah... give the story a 4/10 and move on. It's too slow, and even worse, it starts the overused trend of the "alien invasion bridgehead" that will become all too common over the next 5 years.

...and the spellcheck doesn't recognize "show's." Uh-huh.

music rant #9,000

(with sincere apologies to George Harrison)

I look at the charts and my spirit starts dying
While my iPod gently weeps
For I know that somewhere a rock god is crying
Still my iPod gently weeps

I don't know why-y-y
They would release this
Why can't they cease this noise?
I don't know why-y-y
You went and bought this
You should have fought this noise

Yup, I know those lyrics are crap. That's why I'm never going to record it and try to foist it on an unsuspecting public that doesn't know better. Because I believe in quality control.

See, television understands quality control. Terrible shows get cancelled. Awesome shows get put in horrible timeslots, shown out of order, and cancelled. Once-great shows get cancelled and then resurrected two decades later with better effects (hey, Star Trek and Doctor Who have something in common after all). Other shows become zombies that must be chainsawed to death sooner rather than later, but that's another topic. The point is, television by and large understands quality control.

But the music industry? Unfortunately, John Lennon was wrong, and all you need in angst. Not musical ability, no. Just a bone to pick with someone. Or a desire to sleep with girls. Imagine if you actually had to pay for studio time, instead of just downloading Garage Band or some such. Imagine if you actually had to pay for albums. Would people really buy this crap?

Sadly, one only needs to look at the charts to see that yes, people are buying crap.

Ugh.

Who Review: Genesis of the Daleks

Yup, I lied about Seeds of Death being next, mostly because I'm still not done with it. So here goes with a Tom Baker classic, a story that generally makes the top 5 list.

The plot in a nutshell: The Doctor is tasked by the Time Lords to interfere in the Daleks' creation. No, really. The same people who killed his second incarnation and exiled him for three years for interfering now want him to interfere. Whatever, roll with it, the Doctor ends up in something that looks an awful lot like a BBC Quarry undergoing something that looks an awful lot like World War Two, except everyone is evil. You have the Nazi Kaleds in their dome versus the Nazi Thals in theirs, and the barbaric Mutos who live out in the wastelands and hate everyone. Into this mix comes Stephen Hawking, I mean Davros, who has created a Mark Three Travel Machine to house the Kaleds' mutated forms. Because evolution works that way. The Doctor realizes that the M3TM looks an awful lot like a Dalek... which also happens to be an anagram of "Kaled."

Meanwhile, Sarah gets captured by the Thals, who, really, are no better than the Kaleds. This is an awesome reversal of the normal standard, where one group of people are the designated good guys who will help the Doctor defeat the bad guys. Here that group is the Mutos, who seem generally unpleasant until about the halfway point.

Doctor Strangelove, I mean Davros, is a magnificent bastard who nukes his own city when the Kaled leaders try to stop him. Then he exterminates a bunch of scientists who disagree with him, only to be exterminated at the end by his own creations. The Doctor accomplishes zilch beyond trapping the Daleks inside their bunker (like it'll take them more than a day, tops, to get out), and goes swanning off, mumbling something about how the Daleks might ultimately be a force for good.

Elsewhere in this blog, you've already heard the critique for the prosecution, that the Doctor's a flip-flopping bleeding-heart who can't do what is necessary for the good of the Universe. And now, the critique for the defense:

That Dalek hatchery blows up, and yet the Daleks still come back in four more classic Who serials. So even if the Doctor had demonstrated resolve and blown it up the first time, he still wouldn't have eliminated the Dalek threat.

All right, here's a different sort of prosecution: given that this is the last good Dalek serial for more than a decade, the Daleks should have been exterminated here.

Defense: never going to happen. Even with Bob "Death to the Daleks" Holmes as script editor, the monsters were too popular to kill off. Besides, you're using hindsight to attack a serial for the faults of later serials.

The Doctor drops those wires the first time because he honestly believes that a negotiated solution is viable. Fine. That works; he really doesn't want to be the one who kills a bunch of Daleks. This is perfectly in keeping with his character. We could have done without the proselytizing, but now we're just being picky.

Speaking of being picky, what about that land-mine scene in the first episode. Pointless filler or comedy gold?

Prosecution: we already know this is a violent world, what with the slo-mo squad death at the very start of the episode. Then they found a body and got shelled. We get it already. The land-mine scene has no tension and is really just there to take up space.

Defense: One, Tom Baker's deadpan delivery of "Harry, I'm standing on a landmine" is pure comedy gold. Yes, it lacks tension, and yes, it is filler, but it's still a damn sight better than what we normally expect from Terry Nation (see half of Planet of the Daleks).

Bottom line: 9/10. Bravo to Peter Miles for sneaking his Iron Cross on the set (most of the time) to really drive the Nazi imagery home. Bravo to Michael Wisher for making Davros such a legendary villain. Bravo to David Maloney for actually turning the lights down in some scenes, for the slo-mo violence at the beginning and the freeze-frame cliffhanger when Sarah falls off the rocket gantry (the resolution, not so much). It's a great story with a couple of flaws that keep it off my Top Five list, but it is a great story nonetheless.

What Should Have Been Their Last Album

You know the zombie band. They've been making albums for 20 years and haven't been good for ten. There was one album that they should have stopped with, but for some reason they didn't. Frankly every band every falls into this category, and to prove it, I'll start with...

The Beatles - Abbey Road (1969)

What we'll miss: "Let It Be," "Get Back."

Okay this is a no-brainer. The Beatles started working on Let It Be, abandoned it, made Abbey Road, and then came back to Let It Be. They should have just, er, let it be.


Metallica - Master of Puppets (1986)

What we'll miss: "One," "Enter Sandman," that live album with the orchestra.

If Metallica's studio output was limited to their first three albums, they'd be legends today. Hell, if they'd all died in that bus crash, their place in the music pantheon would be assured, because we all know dead artists are better. (Just so we're clear on this, I don't wish anyone dead.) Instead, they slogged on, sold out, and helped saturate the 90s with crappy music. Puppets is the logical exit point for this band. They'd been progressing steadily for their first three albums, and they hit their high water-mark here.


Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here (1975)

What we'll miss: "Comfortably Numb*," "Hey You," maybe "High Hopes."

This is probably the most contentious one on the list, because The Wall is so very famous. Unfortunately, the best part about The Wall was the live act, because without it, the album is just a 2-hour whinge. Wish You Were Here is a tribute to their former bandmate and better days in general, starting off with a lyrical nod to "Remember a Day" and concluding with a musical nod to "See Emily Play," two of their early songs. What better way to ride out? *We'd actually still have "Comfortably Numb," it would just be a David Gilmour solo song with different lyrics.


AC/DC - Back in Black (1980)

What we'd miss - "For Those About to Rock (We Salute You)," "Thunderstruck."

Somewhere, surely, there's an alternate universe where this band decided to honor Bon Scott's memory by finishing the album they'd just started writing when he died, and then called it a day. This is the second-biggest-selling album of all time! You're never going to top that.


Iron Maiden - Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988)

What we'd miss - "Fear of the Dark."

See, they'd re-form in 2000 for Brave New World et seq. But Maiden without Adrian Smith isn't very good, and Maiden without Bruce is IMINO - Iron Maiden In Name Only.


Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti (1975)

What we'd miss: "Achilles Last Stand," "Nobody's Fault but Mine," "Fool in the Rain."

Do I even have to explain this one?

My Side is the Side of Love, Hope, and Nuclear Wessels

Post #200!

So apparently the Doctor Who tellymovie is coming to our shores sometime in the next year. Which means, hilariously, that the Who Review gets to bash the only canonical 90s instalment of the show. (Yes, I could bash away now, having already seen it on YouTube, but I like listening to commentaries and so on before rendering a judgment. That goes completely contrary to my "judge it from a non-fan's perspective" stance that I paid lip service to in my Silurians review, but hey, sometimes you just have to make exceptions.)

Also on the Who Review horizon: The Seeds of Death (probably Wednesday or thereabouts), and then perhaps a Third Doctor story. Either that or The Androids of Tara, simply because I want to watch that one again, but I kind of want to do all the Key to Time serials together.

After a bit of self-indulgent archive trawling, I found a review for Revelation of the Daleks that I wrote back when I was a wide-eyed idealist who pulled his punches. I'm going to leave them as two separate reviews and probably link them to each other at some point.

Now that that's out of the way, a word to the video game industry. STOP WITH THE FIRST-PERSON PLATFORMING! First-person mode is for one thing and one thing only - shooting. That is it.

And finally a word to the internet: stop being slow, and stop with the ads that you can't skip or get off the screen. Nobody likes those.

Oh, have I mentioned that Iron Maiden's The Final Frontier is awesome? I got it one week ago today and am now starting my 22nd listening.

"If you kill him you will be just like him:" The Doctor, the Daleks, and the Ethical Standard

In much the same way that I prefaced my review of Doctor Who and the Silurians with a rant about the UNIT era, consider this a preface to three upcoming Who Reviews - Planet, Genesis, and Remembrance of the Daleks.

But first let's skip ahead to the new series for a moment. One of the things I love about Nu Who is that, like Deep Space Nine, Buffy and Angel, every action has consequences. In "Bad Wolf," for example, we see the Doctor confronted by the consequences of his previous interference in a way that hasn't been done well since... The Ark. In the next episode, "Parting of the Ways," he has to make an awful choice for all the Humans on planet Earth: Die as a Human, or live as a Dalek. Actually, that's just the way he phrases it, but the real dilemma is something else entirely. As far as he knows, he can wipe out every Dalek left in existence here and now, at the cost of his own life and that of everyone on Earth... or he can stand by, let them conquer the Earth, and then move over into the next star system and do it all again. The choice he actually faces is "save the next victims by sacrificing people you can't save anyway," and in that case, anybody with an iota of common sense on Earth should be screaming at the Doctor to press that button.

He doesn't. He decides to stand back and let his most terrible enemies have their way with the Universe. Happily, he pays for that decision with his life a few minutes later.

Fast-forward to Season 29, where the Doctor shows Dalek Caan mercy at the end of "Evolution of the Daleks." Just to bring you up to speed, Dalek Caan is the last surviving member of the Cult of Skaro, who by this point have...

-invented whole new ways of killing people

-unleashed an entire flood of Daleks on modern-day London, leading directly to the Doctor losing Rose in a parallel Universe

-kidnapped people from Depression-era New York and mutated them into barely-intelligent slaves

-violated untold numbers of corpses to turn them into Human-Dalek hybrids

-done the same to a living human being

-murdered a respected community leader

-committed genocide against the aforementioned hybrids.

The Doctor's response to all of this is that he's not going to let two species die today. I'm still waiting for someone to ask him if he's found the "something good" in the Daleks that Four promised all those years ago.

Ultimately, the Doctor pays for this mistake as well. Caan activates an Emergency Temporal Shift, winds up in the middle of the Time War, and saves Davros so he can threaten everyone at the end of the next season. Blah blah Caan's elaborate gambit blah blah redeemed... bull. Caan never wanted redemption - his last act as a sane being was to rescue perhaps the most evil individual in the history of the Universe. He went insane and subsequently saw the evil of the Daleks, and so arranged to manipulate the Doctor into wiping them all out, again. Davros would never have escape the Time War if Caan hadn't rescued him, if the Doctor hadn't shown Caan mercy (remember, "Evolution of the Daleks" is the one where Time Lord DNA can travel down wires; if the Doctor wanted, he could have offed Caan with his screwdriver). The delicious payoff for all this is that the Doctor must say good-bye to Rose a second time (and leave her with his more "unstable" self, hilariously) and then wipe Donna's mind. Ouch. Oh, and all the Daleks are dead anyway. Except those three that somehow survived, because of course they always survive.

Anyway, in the new series, we can see that every time the Doctor hesitates in the face of evil, he loses big. (Hey, wait! I figured out what the good of the Daleks is! They're the ones who arrange for the big alliance to trap the Doctor in the Pandorica, which leads to Amy's parents and Rory being restored to life. Guess that cancels out every planet destroyed, every person exterminated, etc.)

Okay, let's go way back now. In Planet of the Daleks, Terry Nation makes a big deal of the story's Aesop, that courage means being afraid, but doing what you have to do anyway. The story concerns "the largest Dalek force ever assembled," which turns out to be laughably small because a) Terry Nation can't do math, and b) the task force is played by toy Daleks. At the end of the story, the Doctor drowns the task force in insta-freeze, apparently killing them. Nobody bats an eye over this.

In Genesis of the Daleks, the Doctor is ordered by the Time Lords to do one of three things to the Daleks in their infancy: he can avert their creation entirely, he can alter their creation to make them less violent, or he can at the very least find some sort of weakness and report back. He winds up having an open-mic session with Davros where he compares the Daleks to a disease. He comes away from this discussion utterly disgusted with what Davros has done. Throughout the first five episodes of this story, he's crusading for the Dalek project - hilariously euphemized as the "Mark III Travel Machine" - to be shut down. Then, episode 6 rolls around. There are already at least three Daleks out of the tank (there are probably more than that, but three is all they had, so three is all you see on the screen with one or two exceptions near the end). The Doctor has seen these Daleks in action; they cut down a bunch of Thals recently. Hell, the Doctor's reaction in that same serial to the destruction of the Kaled city is "I sent Harry and Sarah there," not "you've just murdered an entire civilization." But then it comes time for The Wires Scene. You know the one: the Doctor's got the two wires. Connect them together, the Dalek hatchery goes up. He wonders if he has the right, but Sarah (rightly) points out that he can't seriously doubt that. Nevertheless, the Doctor insists that if he kills the Daleks in their infancy, he'll be no better than them.

...now, what's actually going on here is that the Doctor's perfectly fine with the idea of someone else nuking the xenophobic fascists; he just doesn't want the burden of doing it himself. When someone shows up and tells him that Davros is going to accede to their demands, the Doctor's delighted. As if he seriously thinks that Davros can see reason, given what he said in the previous episode in that "the tiny pressure of my finger" speech. And what happens right after that speech? The Doctor threatens to kill Davros if Davros doesn't shut down the Dalek production line (like he really would).

Anyway, after everything goes to hell, the Doctor comes back to the wires, but again he gets someone else to do his dirty work for him. In this case it's a Dalek who conveniently rolls into the wires. Note that we already have Daleks out and and about; this isn't xenocide, it's basically the same as the flash-freezing of that army back in Planet of the Daleks. Still, the Doctor hems and haws a lot about doing it himself, and finally blows them up by proxy.

Surely killing in self-defense is not nearly as bad as killing for the sheer hell of it. The Doctor was essentially tasked with doing the former, while the Daleks do the latter. The argument the Doctor makes - "If I kill, I will be just as bad as them" - doesn't hold water. What's really at stake here is whether the hero of a family TV show can singlehandedly wipe out a bunch of enemies. If he can, then he should do it. If he can't, then that scene should never have been written.

Lastly, we have Remembrance of the Daleks. The Daleks are tearassing around England in 1963, and the Doctor must stop them. He has no margin of error here; the Daleks could wreck all of history by exterminating the wrong person. On top of that, his plot is very nearly co-opted by some non-alien fascists. There's one low-key scene in the diner where the Doctor contemplates about how "every decision creates ripples." This is during a lull in the fighting; the Doctor has a moment here to steel his resolve and move forward with his plan, and that's exactly what he does. There's no wait-let's-not-let's-find-another-way-wait-that-didn't-work-okay-let's-go-back-to-plan-A here. It's "Here, Davros, here's a bomb. Go do something stupid with it." Watching them back-to-back, Remembrance is nearly a refutation of Genesis. In the earlier serial, the threat was largely distant; we know that no matter what, it's going to be a while before the Daleks ever threaten anyone we care about other than the Doctor and company. In Remembrance, they're here on Earth. There's no time for theorizing about any possible good they might create. Someone must get them off the planet with as little fuss and as few bodies as possible, and Seven does precisely that.

Now, then, what about the Time War? Those who don't like Remembrance claim that the destruction of Skaro was the first act of that war, and that the destruction of Gallifrey between seasons 26 and 27 was comeuppance for Seven's rashness. But does the Time War start in Genesis or in Remembrance? Does it start because the Time Lords tried to alter the course of Dalek history entirely, and their agent just royally fouled it up, or does it start because one person finally took a stand, drew the line, and held the Daleks accountable for their evil? Clearly, Genesis was a pre-emptive strike from the Dalek perspective; frankly, it's the more logical candidate, because it means that the Daleks and the Time Lords have always been at war. RTD even subscribed to this theory in an article in DWM at one point. But the destruction of Skaro? That was caused because some idiot the Renegade Daleks don't even like tried to steal a Time Lord artifact. If Davros had left well enough alone, Skaro wouldn't have done the big firework.

The point I'm getting at here is that evil must be fought. Three and Seven certainly got that. Four understood, even though he was apparently unwilling to act on it himself. Nine and Ten I'm not sure ever got it - to the point where Ten condemns his half-human clone for saving the day!

Yes, killing is wrong. Still, given the choice between killing an evil person and letting an innocent die, I'd have a much easier time living with the evil person's death on my conscience.

Who Review: The Trial of a Time Lord

If you are questioning its veracity, is there any point in continuing with the Matrix?
-The Inquisitor

Oh God make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop...

Starting with the most obvious question and going from there: who thought we'd want 12 weeks of people in stupid hats watching Doctor Who and commenting about how violent it is, followed by 2 weeks of confusion and technobabble? Who thought it would be a good idea to use the Trial as a framing device? Who thought the charges could stick at all given what the Time Lords made the Doctor do in his 3rd and 4th incarnations? Who thought it would be a good idea to derail the only good story this year by making our brains do cartwheels as we try to keep track of what's real and what's not?

The Valeyard: HOW? WHAT?

(Here's a completely unrelated question: how come we're still viewing the 13-life limit in The Deadly Assassin as legitimate even though the very existence of Colin Baker's Doctor doesn't gel with the number of men in wigs we see in The Brain of Morbius? If we take that serial's evidence as the truth, Tom Baker is actually Doctor #12, the Watcher is the distillation between the 12th and 13th incarnations, and Colin is #14...)

Anyway, the Valeyard is a distillation of all the Doctor's evil. Let's take stock. (I'll revert back to the "official" numbering system now.) 7 (McCoy) is going to be dark and manipulative, and he's going to blow up a planet that, according to one section of the fandom, does somehow not richly deserve it. 8 is going to nuke Gallifrey. 10 is going to commit genocide against the Racnoss. There's clearly a lot of evil to come from the Doctors between 6 and 13... and yet, apparently, the Valeyard seems ready to wipe them all out of existence. This leaves 1, who once tried to brain a caveman with a rock; 2, who bonked someone's head against a table to prove they had a headache; 3, who, um... could have been less sentimental towards the Master; 4, whose greatest "evil" act was arguably one of omission (but Genesis of the Daleks is another can of worms); and 5, who seems to always drop into war zones and manages to save very few people. Yeeeeeeeah, planet-killers, assassins and revolutionaries these guys really aren't.

Whatever. I don't claim to know how evil really works, especially not in Who-science. The Valeyard's identity was kept vague because the producer didn't want to shoehorn Michael Jayston back into the series once Doctor Number Thirteen finally rolls around... which brings up two points.

1) Nu Who has referenced this serial about as many times as it has the TV movie. That is to say, none at all. This is a show where the Macra, whose debut serial no longer exist, get to be the monsters again blah blah blah even the Nu Who producers don't really like this one.

2) Ten regenerated twice (yes, the fake-out in "The Stolen Earth" counts as a regenration). Matt Smith may be the Eleventh Doctor, but he only has one regeneration left. Can you understand why I'm annoyed that the Dream Lord didn't turn out to be the Valeyard in "Amy's Choice?"

Okay, back on course again... Let's look at the Valeyard's plan. He makes a deal with the High Council to steal the rest of the Doctor's lives. In exchange, he must cover up the Ravalox affair. So naturally, his very first piece of evidence is... an adventure on Ravalox! Brilliant! (Don't get me started about introducing Glitz and his mission to recover the Time Lords' secrets, and then ignoring all that for two months before finally returning to it.)

Later it turns out that the Valeyard is plotting to blow up the jury. Remember that expensive space-station shot at the beginning of the story? This isn't Gallifrey (which begs the question of how the hell they can enter the Matrix - through a freakin' doorway of all things!) All the Valeyard's "megabyte modem" will do is kill a bunch of jurors. Yay! Has he learned nothing about his peoples' power since his second life? (Obviously not, since he would also remember being, to borrow a phrase, a fat idealist with no dress-sense who manages to defeat his own evil future self.)

Oh, at since it happens primarily in his episodes: how did Robert "Master of Dialogue" Holmes ever think we'd accept the Doctor referring to his prosecutor as the Brickyard, the Scrapyard, the Junkyard, the Knacker's Yard, etc, as being worthy of television?

The Doctor's five-minute trial at the end of The War Games meant something. He was on trial for interfering, and he defended himself by saying that evil had to be fought. The judges agreed with him and sent him to Earth to continue doing just that. The series was fundamentally changed, not only because of the Earth-based format of the next three years, but also because now we actually knew a tiny bit about the culture the Doctor ran away from. Trial does no such thing. It ends the exact same way The Deadly Assassin, The Invasion of Time, Arc of Infinity and The Five Doctors ends, with the Doctor refusing the Presidency, jumping off into the TARDIS, and going on more adventures. Frankly, every time we spend more than a few minutes with the Time Lords, the series takes a few more knocks. Getting rid of them was a smart move by RTD.

Overall, Trial gets a score of 3/10. If the Controller of the BBC didn't have it in for the show, the sensible thing to do would have been to fire the entire production team and start again. Instead, one scapegoat quit, another got fired, the show's last great writer died, but the man who so desperately needed to go was made to stick around for another three years.

Who Review: The Ultimate Foe

What a way to go. All in all he wasn't a bad old codger.
-Glitz

Was that mean of me? Okay, here's a better one.

Unless we are prepared to sacrifice our lives for the good of all, then evil and anarchy will suceed. The rule of law must prevail!
-The Doctor

Let's start by saying it could have been worse. I can't believe I'm saying this, but it could have been worse because they could have used Robert Holmes' ending, in which the Doctor and the Valeyard fell down a time-tunnel or some such, and the season ended on a cliffhanger. Never mind all the grief that idea gets for being a perfect setup for Grade to axe the show - anyone who saw Timelash knows that the production team simply can't make a good time-tunnel.

So the Master turns up to ruin everyone's day and explain that the Valeyard is a distillation of the Doctor's evil - somehow - and the Valeyard runs away into the Matrix - somehow - and then there's some filler that's actually more or less watchable. The Master plots to kill the Valeyard and possibly the Doctor too, the Valeyard plots to kill pretty much everyone, and the Doctor dives back on his own time-stream, saves Peri, and flips Time and its Lords the bird despite him being supposedly British and that therefore being the wrong expression:

No, sadly. Despite the fact that the plot more or less sorta-kinda holds up (and ignoring the Valeyard's backstory or lack thereof, his plan to kill everyone is either brilliant or stupid), the story ends with some jiggery-pokery, some blatant disregard for characterization (Glitz, who swallowed a thesaurus at the beginning of The Mysterious Planet, suddenly has to ask the Master what a word means), and a stupid twist ending.

On its own, The Ultimate Foe gets a 3/10. There are plots within plots, but none of them hold together under any scrutiny, and the ending is terrible. Tune in next time for me taking potshots at the Trial story as a whole.

The Final Frontier

It's a fun experiment to try to compare Maiden's output as a sextet to their classic 80s days. Brave New World is pretty obviously analagous to The Number of the Beast, in that they both get to showcase the improved range of a newly returned/joined Bruce "greatest singer alive" Dickinson. Dance of Death is pretty much the Piece of Mind of the 2000 albums, in that it's uneven, having some awful filler (though none of it comes close to "Quest for Fire"). Like the 1983 album, it gets better on repeated listenings, and despite all the crap it gets for being a victim of the loudness war, you actually can hear the 3 distinct guitars in a way you can't on Brave New World. A Matter of Life and Death is, well, it depends on whether you like Somewhere in Time or No Prayer for the Dying more, because it's the other one.

I'm tempted to say that The Final Frontier is the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son of the re-Bruce era. It's better than its immediate predecessor, but that's like saying that Revenge of the Sith is better than Attack of the Clones. It's more progressive than its immediate predecessor, too, and since AMoLaD was plodding and by-the-numbers, that's not a bad thing.

Okay, here's how the songs break down.

"Satellite 15... The Final Frontier" (Smith/Harris). What are you guys, Megadeth? (Actually, given the thrashy rhythms coming soon...) This song is a mashup of at least three separate and frankly unlinkable riffs, kind of like the Medley at the end of Abbey Road, and that comparison becomes truly apt when you remember Steve Harris' threats that this might just be the last Maiden album. The first riff, that bass thing with all the effects, is really cool and doesn't sound like Maiden at all (no, that's not an oxymoron), but the vocals in "Satellite 15" aren't really inspiring. "The Final Frontier" is a little bit better, but it sounds like Bruce double-tracked his vocals and didn't quite nail the second take. As a result, he sounds a bit hoarse (this is going to be a recurring problem on a few songs throughout the album, by the way).

"El Dorado" begins the way a song should end, essentially with what should have been a crashing final chord to "The Final Frontier." The song shows off the fact that, my previous comment notwithstanding, Bruce still does have the chops. The vocals go from the low growls in the verses to the middle (for Bruce) pre-choruses, and the high screams of the chorus. Strangely, he seems weakest in that middle range - otherwise, you might almost mistake this track for an outtake made somewhere between Seventh Son and No Prayer. Having Bruce (and Adrian Smith) on board to help write the song certainly helped ensure that even the high parts were in his range. That said, it is hard not to listen to the gallop here and not hear "Barracuda." More palm-muting would have made it better. And check out the rhythm guitar part in the pre-chorus!

"Mother of Mercy." It's by Smith and Harris (Steve Harris co-wrote every track on the album, so I'm just going to take his co-authorship as read from here on in). At just over 5 minutes, it doesn't overstay its welcome. Bruce actually holds notes for a while at a few points here. That's about all the positive things I can say about this song. It's not a bad song, it has its moments, but it's not anything special either. It's bland but sung well, and it doesn't overstay its welcome.

"Coming Home" is next. We're back to the "Children of the Damned" model for a quasi-ballad here. If there's a song that reminds me of AMoLaD, though, this is it during the loud parts. It's a Smith/Harris/Dickinson composition with a fairly decent riff, but the chorus leaves something to be desired.

"The Alchemist" sounds like a throwback to "Twilight Zone" even though Harris' co-writers here, Bruce and Janick, weren't in the band when that song was written. It's a distinct improvement over both the previous song and a sign that things are looking up, but we can also hear Bruce nearly stumbling over some of the faster lines. The pre-chours has not one but rising key changes - did Harris learn nothing from "Aces High?"

"Isle of Avalon" doesn't seem to last nine minutes. The first time I listened to it, I could tell that this was one of the standout tracks on the album. It's by Smith/Harris and at one point, perhaps in keeping with the space theme, sounds like the BGM in the original StarCraft. So... yeah.

"Starblind." Ho boy. I mentioned before that the timing on the intro is just... strange. Someone missed a beat somewhere. It's on that just-out-of-the-vocalist's-comfortable-range mark that works with some bands (see in particular, Pink Floyd's "Time" and, I'll throw them a bone here, the not-horrible Nirvana songs). The problem is, when Bruce does it, he just sounds hoarse. Now, at some point after his first three albums with the band, he learned to stay in tune (no, seriously, listen to "22 Acacia Avenue" or "2 Minutes to Midnight" closely enough and you can hear him lose it) much more consistently. But when the song's written that high, he starts to waver again. His name is on the credits for this one, so unlike, say, "Aces High," it's not a case of Steve Harris giving him something that's simply way to high. Adrian Smith's name is in the credits too, which might explain why various riffs here sound like 80s throwbacks. That's not a bad thing - God knows I'll take an 80s throwback over a 90s one any day.

Next up is a Gers/Harris composition called "The Talisman." For arguably the first time since "Ancient Mariner," Maiden's habit of bringing a kind of Medieval - see especially "Hallowed be Thy Name," the best song ever - feel to their songs really helps sell the story. The problem here is that this song has two separate intros - it has to stop at about 49 seconds in and change time signatures. The song finally starts almost two and a half minutes in, and it's got that second-most-famous Maiden fallback, the 3-3-2 beat. Ironically (since neither Dickinson nor Smith had a hand in writing this), this is the song that most reminds me of Bruce's horribly underrated solo album, Accident of Birth. Even still, it's a catchier, more-rock-than-metal take. Eventually the verse falls into a i-iii-vii-vi pattern - so another callback, but with a decent enough twist. The sign-out at the very end of the album reminds me explicitly of the sign-out from "Only the Good Die Young." Despite the fact that there are some interesting chord choices here and a nice deviation from the usual straight-up minor scale in the solo, this isn't exactly one of my favorite tracks on the album.

"The Man Who Would Be King" is Dave Murray's only songwriting contribution to the album, and it starts out reminding me of "Ghost of the Navigator," which isn't a bad way to start. The synths are actually noticeable here, but of course that's not a bad thing. The drums at around the 2 minute mark remind me of Metallica's "And Justice For All," oddly. This song is very comfortably in Bruce's range, but as always since rejoining the band, he's reluctant to hold notes for very long - at least until we get to the chorus, where he does briefly channel his 28-years-younger self ("running loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow").

"When the Wild Wind Blows" is an exercise in building on a theme. It starts out peaceful enough and turns into a full-on march just before the 3-minute mark. The theme itself never changes in all this time - and because they keep adding new elements, or arranging it just a little differently, that's fine. It does change just when it starts to get dull - anyone who says this song is too long has no patience. It's a fantastic close to a much better album than anyone should expect from a band this old.

It's going to be a toss-up based on your personal preference whether this is better than Brave New World or not. I think I'll leave it at that, though I'll pause on my way out to mention that the title is the weakest thing about the album - I mean, honestly, who wants to be reminded of the worst Star Trek film ever while listening to this?

The Final Frontier: first thoughts

No song really stands out as the top of the heap after the first listen, though a number of songs flow very nicely into each other. Odd, that long after the vinyl record has died, Maiden actually pay attention to the running order of their album beyond the obligatory "longest song goes at the end." It's an improvement over A Matter of Life and Death and isn't comped to hell like Dance of Death is.

On the minus side, Bruce clearly isn't getting any younger and on some tracks, especially the very first one, he sounds like he's in trouble. Elsewhere he's on form, sounding pretty much like he did on Brave New World. Which was ten years ago. So well done.

On the other minus side, Maiden have decided to get technical now for some reason. Yes, they've thrown out goofy time signatures before, in the intros to "The Number of the Beast" and "Brighter than a Thousand Suns," but there are a few tracks on here where it sounds like somebody's signalling Bruce when to start singing, and his reaction time is slow. I'm looking especially at you, "Starblind."

But let's not forget that this is a solid record from a metal stalwart who have been relevant since 1982 (and arguably two years earlier than that). Nothing made me wretch, which is more than I can say for most modern music. So good on 'em. More in-depth review to follow.

Who Review: Terror of the Vervoids

This is a situation that requires tact and finesse. Fortunately, I am blessed with both.
-The Doctor

It may come as a surprise to anyone who knows anything about this story (well, other than the bit about the what the monsters look like) that the script iself is not as big a failing as everyone thinks it is. Yes, it's got plot holes so big you could pilot the Hyperion III through them and dialogue so dense the black hole couldn't compress it any further, but, basically, the script is a rehash of The Robots of Death with vegetables instead of robots and a few extra bad guys. We know that studio-bound murder mysteries can work. The problem with Terror of the Vervoids is that nobody is on the same page, and with that, we take you to the plot.

The trial has been in recess while the Doctor copes with Peri's death. (And incidentally, we get a glimpse of that very rare creature: Subdued Colin Baker.) When it resumes, the Doctor begins presenting his evidence. He decides to present an adventure from his own future, his defense being "I will get better." Apparently this is acceptable under Time Lord law. This is less preposterous than it seems, since Article XVII allows murder suspects to run for President and in doing so delay punishment for their crimes, and Article VII, as we learn at the end of this story, forbids genocide without exception (which begs the question of just what the Time Lords wanted the Doctor to accomplish in Genesis of the Daleks, but I digress).

So he intercepts a distress call from a passenger ship and goes to help. Since I put Remembrance of the Daleks as one of the best five stories of all time, you know I can't complain about the music too much but... good God, the music in that TARDIS scene compelled me to stop watching and listen to the Beatles for a few minutes before continuing.

And here we get introduced to the cast of characters, "one of whom," the Doctor tells us, "will be come a murderer." We have Janet, the put-upon stewardess. We have two aliens who can't breathe oxygen, and so wear black facemasks. We have Professor Lasky and her associates, Doland and Bruchner. We have the chief of security, Rudge, who will tell you at the slightest provocation that this is his last flight before retirement, so you know he's not going to live. There's Hallett, who pretends not to know another passenger, Kimber, even though that man clearly recognizes him (I had flashbacks to season one of Mad Men watching that scene).

Oh, there's also Commodore Tonker Travers, who actually knows the Doctor from a previous adventure and gives him a long enough leash to do all the hero-y things he has to do. So yay. There's one thing in this serial's favor: it does not rehash the tired old formula of "there's a murder, blame the guy nobody knows" that permeated pretty much every other Tom Baker story.

...and lastly there are the Vervoids themselves. I'd post a picture of them here, but frankly the internet is full of images of things that look an awful lot like them. Their appearance is the most obvious sign that something, somewhere, has gone horribly horribly wrong.

But before that, let's just take a look at the starship. The designers here have the same problem that the designers for Star Trek XI had, in that no part of the ship looks anything like any other part. The gaudy passenger lounge looks like it belongs outside the Doctor's courtroom, not on the same ship as the black-and-silver bridge and the Alien-esque cargo hold.

Hold up, wait, stop there for just a second. I want to point this out. I think the cargo hold wins the Best Set of the Season award, I really do. It beats out even the magic paintbox pink sea in the previous story. Again, its competition is largely crap, consisting of a terrible courtroom, an overlit tunnel, an unconvincing hut, an overlit lab, and some caves with strobe lights in their ceilings. This is precisely what I mean about nobody being on the same page, though. There's a great set, and the script does have moments of brilliance, but the rest of the design, from the tracksuits to the Vervoids, is insane and the script has moments of sheer lunacy. The script's faults you can chalk up to... er, Saward had pretty much jumped ship by this point, so the usual scapegoat is out. Hell, in some respects, this story stands as proof that however badly he screwed up on occasion, he did a very important job that nobody else seemed able to fill at the time.

Back to the plot. The Doctor's jazzercizing compaion, Mel, chats up a redshirt - sorry, wrong series - Guy Who's Clearly Not Going To Be Around For Very Long (hereafter abbreviated GWCNGTBAFVL). He agrees to show her around the cargo bay where some odd pods are being kept - and promptly gets electrocuted in a hilariously over-the-top scene. Mel screams.

Fortunately, Doctor Fashion Disaster is on the case! Unfortunately, there's a whole bunch of backstabbing going on among the other crew - including one hilarious scene where one scientist is clearly all set to burn some papers and thereby destroy all records of their research, because, y'know, computers don't do anything in the future. Also the security chief is in league with the aliens and they try to take over the ship in order to pad the plot out for a little bit longer. This ends with them getting killed, but meanwhile the Genital Monsters are going around killing people. Eventually the Doctor gasses them all, but not before Mel gets in a few more screams.

At the very end, the Valeyard declares the the Doctor is guilty of committing genocide against the Vervoids. The Doctor says he had no choice, that the Vervoids would have wiped out all life on Earth. My question: where was that resolve when he was still Scarfman, holding those two wires together but apparently unable to wipe out something that he himself had compared to a disease not half an hour previously? It's at this point that the Doctor, McGann not withstanding, because Mr. No-Second-Chances. In his next incarnation, he's going to wipe out Skaro and go toe-to-toe with a god or two. (Then he's going to preach about not fighting like animals in his final episode, but I digress.) But it's here that the us-or-them mentality finally acknowledges itself for the first time, really, since Patrick Troughton told us that there were some corners of the Universe that have bred the most terrible things, things that must be fought.

Anyway, Gallifreyan law frowns rather heavily on this sort of thing, which is weird seeing as they once asked Scarfman to commit genocide against the Daleks. You'd think the Doctor would be aware of this law - notice he never says that this part of the evidence was tampered with. If he was trying to find evidence somewhere in his time-stream that he got involved at someone else's request, why not look at the entire UNIT era? Why not haul the Brigadier in as a character witness? Why would he show the court the one instance of him actually wiping out an enemy threat once and for all?

Final score for Terror of the Vervoids is 2/10. It's the definitive proof that a) the trial format was a stupid, stupid idea, and b) having Saward as a script editor is better than having no script editor at all.

The Best Doctor Who Stories Ever*

*that still exist.

These are not necessarily the most iconic stories of all time, although one does grace Ye Olde Toppe Five Liste. These are, simply, what I think of when I think of the best Doctor Who serials or episodes of all time. All of them, obviously, have gotten/will get 10/10s on their individual reviews.

The Mind Robber
Carnival of Monsters
City of Death
Remembrance of the Daleks
"Blink"

Honorable mentions (9/10):
The Time Meddler
Frontier in Space
The Time Warrior
Genesis of the Daleks
Pyramids of Mars
The Robots of Death
The Talons of Weng-Chiang
The Caves of Androzani
"The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances"
"The Waters of Mars"

The question you're probably asking is "Hold up, Genesis, Pyramids, Talons and Caves are all top-five fan-favorites, and you put them behind Remembrance?" Yes I did. Remembrance of the Daleks is a surprise return to form for the series. More importantly, those other four stories all have flaws that fans are only too happy to overlook (giant rat, for example).

For the sake of an argument, here's why Remembrance gets a 10/10 despite the silly music, while Genesis, an acknowledged classic, does not. Aside from the hilarious giant clams, the biggest problem with Genesis is...

...if I were the Ninth Doctor, I'd go back to 1981 and grease the railing on the Pharos telescope! Seriously, the Doctor's told to go back and murder the Daleks at birth. He's all up for this until it's time for him to touch two wires together to wipe out something that he himself referred to as a "disease" about 20 minutes previously. Now he suddenly goes off about how he wouldn't kill a child even though he knows that child will grow up to be the ultimate evil, and then at the end he handwaves the entire thing by saying that something good will eventually come of the Daleks.

Well, they sure did a good job wiping out that awful race of sanctimonious bureaucrats, so I'll give them that. Anyway, when it's his turn, Seven doesn't have any of this nonsense. Bam, goodbye Skaro. Seven's got two warring Dalek factions going at it on Earth itself, and yet he manages to keep the body count nice and low and wipe every last stinking Dalek out of the sky. On top of that, I don't remember Sarah Jane beating up a Dalek with a baseball bat!

"Have I the right" indeed. Have you the right to condemn literally billions of people to agony, slavery and death, Doctor?

Who Review: The Robots of Death

Please do not throw hands at me.
-D84, delivering the greatest line ever spoken by a robot

So I lied when I said that Terror of the Vervoids was going to be the next Who Review. I meant it when I said it, and then I started watching Terror of the Vervoids, and two things struck me. 1) I desperately needed to watch something that didn't keep cutting away to a trial, and 2) this story is essentially a cheaper, crappier, and more unintentionally hilarious remake of The Robots of Death. Murder mystery set in a closed environment? Check. Many, many characters who all look alike? Check. Absurd costumes? Check. So here's a good story for comparison.

The plot concerns a mining tank somewhere in the far future, long after everyone remembers Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, but apparently also long after everyone's forgotten the movie adaptation of I, Robot. Everyone's also apparently also forgotten Titanic, so that's a plus. Nevertheless, the first episode features a conversation about a massage robot who accidentally ripped someone's arm off. Naturally, such a thing could never happen today, so when bodies start piling up, it's obviously not the robots' fault. The important crewmembers are: Commander Uvanov, whose confidential file holds a dark secret; Zilda, whose brother died on Uvanov's watch (that's his dark secret); Dask, who's in charge of fixing the robots and therefore couldn't possibly be the villain; Poul, who's actually an undercover agent placed on the miner by the company that makes the robots (so Alien* in no way copied any element of this story's plot); D84, Poul's robot partner, who shouldn't be able to speak but is; and Toos, whose primary contribution to the story is to get captured and scream. You know, all the things the Doctor's companion normally does, but can't because she's a savage warrior-girl who can stick up for herself, thank you very much.

*I can go on about the relationship between Doctor Who and Alien all day. In addition to this story, there's The Ark in Space, not to mention the fact that Ridley Scott was supposed to be the production designer for The Daleks. No, really. Oh, and then there's Terror of the Vervoids, but you'll have to wait until Friday for more on that.

The Doctor shows up and gets accused for the murders. He says it can't be him, maybe it's the robots. Nobody believes him, including Poul... the guy who is on the mission to make sure the robots don't go insane and kill people. Zilda finds out Uvanov's secret and has just enought time to call him out on something in a broadcast to the entire ship before she too is killed. But none of this matters because halfway through episode two we see somebody with black-and-white pants giving the killer robots orders... and sure enough, Dask is the only one with black-and-white pants.

Poul goes crazy with robophobia (good employee screening, that Weyland-Yutani), so it's up to the Doctor, Leela, and D84 to save the day, because God knows that in a crisis, you want a robot whose most memorable line is "please do not throw hands at me" at your side than a couple of useless humans. I'm not being sarcastic here - that line is awesome, so go watch it for yourself to find out how it comes up.

It turns out that Dask is actually Taren Capel, a robot liberator... who jacks into their innocent, nearly child-like minds and transforms them into killers. Good job. Near the end of the story, he inexplicably dresses himself up as a robot, complete with facepaint. His downfall eventually comes when the Doctor floods a room with helium, making Dask's voice go all squeaky so the robots don't recognize him.

On a more positive note, this is Leela's second story, and she's given a fair amount to do here. Leela, for those of you who don't know, is a warrior-girl from a far-future human colony gone horribly wrong. As a result, she's the most proactive and violent companion ever. As cute as the Four/Sarah relationship was, it's Leela who actually reawakens the Doctor's interest in humanity. Note his tendency to get more detached throughout Season 13, especially in Pyramids of Mars. As the Doctor takes Leela on a tour of human history, trying to teach her about her people's past, he also reconnects with our species. This serial is Leela's first time out of her element, and just to make things more unnerving for her, she can't read the robots' body language. Given that the next story - The Talons of Weng-Chiang - is basically Sherlock Holmes meets the Phantom of the Opera, and this one's essentially an Agatha Christie story with robots, it's surprising that Leela actually gets stuff to do as a character. She's arguably never more important to the plot than she is in her first three appearances. And since I've gotten through an entire paragraph without mentioning her outfit, I deserve a cookie.

The design here is passable as well, even though the mining tank is obviously a model and some of the costumes border on the clownish. The robots are all obviously men in suits, but that's okay because the one time they tried something else, we got Kameleon, who never really worked. There's a clever effects shot of one part of the ship that was created by putting a painted glass slide in front of the camera to make the set look bigger than it is; you're going to see that technique in everything from the TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to Star Wars. (It's probably not the first use of it, but it's worth pointing out.) As far as the script goes, we have the silliest ending in quite some time - it's not a deus ex machina, but the logic of robots not being able to visually identify Dask doesn't quite hold up. The red herring about Uvanov more-or-less works, but the more one thinks about Poul's role and subplot, the less it makes sense. The story also thankfully doesn't waste our time with any of the cannon fodder, only giving us a few scenes with the whole crew before people start dying and instead focusing on the characters who are going to be with us for the duration.

The Robots of Death gets a 9/10. As Tom Baker's time on the show goes on, the instances where he can be bothered to throw in a great performance get fewer and further between, but he's on decent form here. Louise Jameson and Gregory de Polnay (D84) are the real stars here.

...and as a side note, the name "Taren Capel" is a play on the name "Karel Capek," the playwright who coined the word "robot." He did so in a play called "Rossum's Universal Robots." This means that Doctor Who is not the only show I'm going to be reviewing that referenced this person...

Who Review: Mindwarp

Ycarnos: His name is Dorf, and you are scum!
The Doctor: Actually, I am known as "The Doctor."

Conventional wisdom holds that Mindwarp is one of the only truly watchable bits of the Colin Baker era, and, as was the case with Doctor Who and the Silurians, that's a very fannish viewpoint. On paper, it's better than anything else featuring the Sixth Doctor, including Revelation of the Daleks... but since I already said that that story is the best of his era, you know how this is going to end.

This is for all intents and purposes parts 5-8 of Trial of a Time Lord, to the extent that the on-screen credits call it precisely that and the DVD packaging calls this particular serial (deep breath please) The Trial of a Time Lord Parts 5-8: Mindwarp. Unlike The Mysterious Planet, this serial fully embraces the trial format, and we're left wondering whether scenes like the Doctor torturing Peri for information actually happened. Unfortunately this is a double-edged sword, because by the end of this serial it's abundantly clear that whoever is narrating this show is lying to us. Or use the Doctor's words, "the events happened, but not as we've seen them."

The story opens with the Doctor and Peri arriving on Thoros Beta, which is the home of Sil, who is a short funny capitalist whom we all have a hard time taking seriously - kind of like the Ferengi in Star Trek. Speaking of, this story also shows off some new Paintbox effects that will keep Doctor Who from looking that bad once Trek returns in 1987. They run across a werewolf-thing, who is chained up, and a crab-thing that isn't. Since Colin Baker is the Doctor, that crab-thing is going down.

It turns out that the crab-thing was one of Crozier's experiments. Crozier is a mad scientist hell-bent on putting people's brains into other bodies and staring intently at the camera all throughout the first episode. In fact, it looks like it takes Patrick Ryecart three and a half episodes to realize he's being out-hammed by Colin Baker and Brian Blessed, which may explain why he promptly starts chewing the scenery in episode 4, er, 8. Anyway, he's concerned that the crab-thing had become violent again even after his experiments, which may indicate that they aren't as successful as he thinks. That's bad for him, because he's tasked with placing the brain of Sil's boss, Kiv, into a new body before Kiv dies, and Kiv practically does nothing but threaten everyone with grisly fates if Crozier fails. This is bad news for the Doctor, because after he gets captured and subjected to Crozier's mind-probe, he starts working for the bad guys for two episodes. (Or does he?)

Crozier's other experiment is King Yrcanos, played by Brian Blessed. He and Peri escape with a seriously giddy Doctor and plot revenge. This leads to the aforementioned epic ham-off. This scene needs to be seen to be believed, but here are a few screenshots:


The Doctor betrays them all a few moments later and helps Crozier put Kiv's brain into a new body, albeit one with the same evolutionary dead-end as the original, and which is so bloody stupid I doubt anyone unfamiliar with this story will believe me: Kiv's brain is getting to be too large for his head.

...no, seriously.

Anyway, it turns out that the werewolf-thing from earlier is Dorf, Yrcanos's war buddy. From here it devolves into the usual capture-escape-run-around-in-tunnels formula that pretty much defines Doctor Who, except that the Doctor's still acting all evil. The interruptions back to the trial here are actually warranted, since we haven't seen the Doctor act quite this badly, even when he's pretended to be evil in the past.

Oh wait, yes we have! Remember when he actually strangled Peri in The Twin Dilemma? That's okay, I wiped it from my memory too, so you won't be getting a screenshot of that.

Still, the trial format works better here, because the Inquisitor and even the Doctor are just as puzzled over the Doctor's behavior as the viewer is. Unfortunately, so was Colin Baker. As he'll tell you twice on the DVD, once on the commentary and once in the "making of" documentary, he had no idea how to play the scene where he chains Peri up on the beach while the tide comes in. If we take the story at face value, then it eventually emerges that he was just faking at being evil, but Colin decided to play it as though it was all a fabrication made up by the Valeyard. (The third option, that he was brainwashed by Crozier's mind probe, was thankfully abandoned since there's really no way to snap him out of that.)

After two episodes of running around tunnels (but oh, what dark, strobe-lit and effective tunnels they are), the plot takes a dark turn as Crozier decides to dump Kiv's brain in Peri's body. The Doctor races to stop him, but is whisked off by the Time Lords to be tried for interfering. Then the Time Lords promptly stick Ycarnos and his army in a time-bubble so that their attack will come at the right moment, whatever that means.

Just read those last two sentences again and ask yourself if Eric Saward was doing his job at all this season.

Why in the hell does it take mystical interference to kill off a companion? (Answer: actually it doesn't. Kiv is in Peri's body before the Time Lords trap Ycarnos, which would suggest that Crozier can perform a delicate and brand-new operation flawlessly in a very short amount of time. ...which is an even more bizarre plot point.)

Meanwhile, the Doctor is shocked to learn of Peri's demise, and promises he'll get to the bottom of this. You know, after he clears his name, finds out what Glitz was after on Ravalox, finds out why Ravalox was moved in the first place...

Special mention goes to Nicola Bryant, for finally getting a chance to really (over)act once Kiv takes over Peri's body.

Number of "____yard" jokes: 1
Number of interruptions: 11, but as I said, these are more forgivable than the ones in the previous story.

The final score for this serial is 5 out of 10. It is not an average story; the story itself is excellent and with some better direction and the trial aspect dropped, it could have been the best Colin Baker serial. Hell, if the entire season had been written like this, the whole thing would have been watchable. But the first two minutes of episode 6 thoroughly demonstrate that Ron Jones was out of his depth when it came to choreographing action sequences, and we're left with too many unanswered questions about what was and wasn't real. The entire thing is put together and holds the audience's interest much better than The Mysterious Planet, but is let down by some terrible directing and the number of plot threads left hanging. Disappointed fanboys can perhaps find solace in another screencap from the Baker-Blessed Ham-Off:

And speaking of being left hanging, this is probably it for the Who Review until we get to Terror of the Vervoids on Friday.

Who Review: Doctor Who and the Silurians

Now, Doctor, do you still maintain these creatures are not hostile?
-The Brigadier, after hearing of Dr. Quinn's murder

I need to preface this review with a couple of statements.

1) I already did an essay on what a terrible idea it is for a show like Doctor Who to suddenly develop the need to press the reset button. You can find it here.

2) In general, the stories that get the lowest ratings are the ones that were terribly conceived from the outset. The ones with the middling ratings will be good ideas that fell apart in the execution stage, and the best ones are the ones where both the idea people and the actors/directors/set designers etc are all firing on all cylinders. Therefore, the starting point for this review should be: was it ever a good idea to do a 7-part Cold War parable set on present-day Earth, knowing that the reset button needed to be thumped at the end? The answer, sadly, is "no."

3) The author, Malcolm Hulke, was a Communist. Anyone who reads this blog knows my political views, and I just want to say that I'm not knocking points off because of that. Virtually none of the story's flaws are Hulke's fault. Doctor Who and the Silurians is actually one of my favorite stories. The problem is, it doesn't quite work as Doctor Who.

4) You can tell how much of a Doctor Who fan someone is by how much they like this story. That's because on the one hand it is a really good story... but on the other hand it's slow, it's long, the music is... distinctive, and it's got a few other flaws. Fans can wave the usual objections aside; I can do that, but the average viewer won't. The final score will reflect that.

Now that that's out of the way...

The story begins with the new Doctor pottering around with his new car, Bessie. This is going to replace the TARDIS as his favored mode of transportation for most of the Third Doctor's life, and here he uses it to get to Wenley Moor, which is where the action takes place this month. He's summoned to go to the atomic research center there, and only really takes an interest when he learns of the nearby caves. And what caves they are. Frankly, the regular caves - not the Silurians' base - are better than those in The Caves of Androzani, all of which seem to have flat floors for some reason.

But back to this story. Nyder, I mean, Peter Miles, playing not-Nyder-at-all, Dr. Lawrence, explains that he is in charge of a cyclotron, or particle accelerator, so they can provide "cheap, safe atomic energy" for everyone. Unfortunately, there's some equipment problems, perhaps due to sabotage, and also some mental breakdowns among the staff. We also meet Major Baker, the chief of security and chief proponent of the sabotage theory, and Dr. Quinn, who's the chief scientist and who apparently thrives on a constant diet of happy-pills. The Brigadier suggests the Doctor starts by looking around, so naturally he dives headfirst into the caves after Dr. Quinn cheerfully informs him that someone died in an accident down there.

He runs into a dinosaur and returns to the research center. Baker suggests the Scooby-Doo paradigm, that someone has rigged up a fake monster to scare people away from their sabotage issues. A second expedition is mounted, where Baker sees what he thinks is a saboteur and shoots him. He is then savaged by the guardosaur, which in reality means that he needs to lie down for about half an hour, and then he's perfectly fine.

Meanwhile, Liz has investigated the mental breakdowns. The Doctor believes that "some kind of fear" has thrown one victim's mind "back millions of years." There are also some records missing - Quinn, two scenes before revealing that he's in on the plot, suggests that there's some sort of coverup going on. It's eventually revealed that something is living in the caves, and Quinn is cooperating with them because he wants their knowledge. They're cooperating with him because they need the power from the cyclotron. They task him with retrieving the individual that Baker shot at.

This leads to a rather impressive manhunt as UNIT searches for the "creature." Quinn recovers him and is killed for his trouble. The Doctor meets the creature and asks "Are you a Silurian?"

It turns out that the creatures are relics of Earth's past. They hid underground in cryogenic freezers when they thought an incoming comet would destroy the planet. Instead, the comet became the moon (this serial was broadcast after the moon landing, but probably written before it, so I'll give the scientific inaccuracy a pass) and the freezer units malfunctioned. They're only now waking up, they're using the cyclotron to wake up more of them, and they're using the guardosaur to... er, scare people off. And on top of that, their very psychic presence is enough to drive humans crazy.

This is a fantastic idea. No, that doesn't do it justice. This is one of the best ideas the show's ever had. Humans no longer have an innate claim to the planet; the Silurians were here first. The Doctor and the Brig spend a lot more time going head-to-head in this serial than they ever will again. Turning into a Cold War parable wasn't necessarily a bad idea, except for the fact that the reset button needed to be pressed. That fact, plus the dreadful padding in Episodes 6 and 7, hurts the story.

Then there's the characterization. One second, Baker's coming up with the (mostly correct) theory that the guardosaur is there to scare off anyone investigating the saboteurs; the next, he's charging headlong into the fray like another mindless grunt. The Silurians drive humans crazy in the first two episodes, but apparently lose this ability after that. Oh, and despite the fact that he knows they're native to Earth, the Doctor refers to one of them as "an alien life-form."

Baker escapes from the sickbay and gets himself captured by the Silurians, threatening to derail the Doctor's plan for peace. The Doctor is able to convince one of the Silurians to come around to his way of thinking, but, this being a Hulke script, that Silurian is killed shortly thereafter. Eventually they infect Baker with a plague and turn him loose. The plague kills him, Lawrence, and Geoffrey Palmer before the Doctor can find a cure. Still, the Silurians turn up again and kidnap the Doctor, killing Avon from Blake's 7 in the process. He agrees to re-wire the cyclotron for them so they can wake up the rest of their species, but he sabotages it at the last second. Then the Brigadier gets orders to collapse the caves and commit genocide (or is it xenocide)? He follows these orders, leaving the Doctor aghast at what's happened.

This story is too long. There are good budgetary reasons for commissioning long serials; the sets can be re-used for longer, fewer sets need to be built every year, etc. The problem is that the stories then have to be padded out. The other problem is that it has to end, which means the Silurian threat must be eliminated. What I'm getting at is that the story was ill-conceived to begin with. "Dinosaur men want their planet back" is a fantastic idea - the problem is, it can't work satisfactorily in the context of the show, because we're required to accept the Doctor working with a man who has committed genocide after this. There are smaller problems, like Dr. Quinn is far too happy and Dr. Lawrence is far too high-strung from the beginning.

I love Doctor Who and the Silurians, I honestly do. Every significant character gets to voice a particular viewpoint, and as I've already said, the central idea is great. Despite the horrible constraints imposed on the serial - that it must be seven episodes long and end with the restoration of status quo - it manages to be both a comic-book adventure in a cave and a serious mature look at the nature of distrust and conflict. As I've said, the faults aren't Hulke's fault, and my reviews tend to focus more on the writing than anything else (I've gotten this far without mentioning the Silurians' notoriously wobbly heads). If this story were a tight four-parter that didn't end with a regular character commiting genocide, I could award it ten out of ten without a second thought. If this were a seven-part miniseries with "Doctor John Smith" and "The Unified Intelligence Network," as opposed to part of Doctor Who, it would probably get an 8 or a 9. But that's not what we have, and the story we have deserves a 7.

This is just my opinion. It's something nice and different, and frankly the series could have done with more stories like it. It's second only to The Evil of the Daleks as far as extra-long stories goes. But people who go out of their way to praise this story beyond the brilliance of the "dinosaur men want their planet back" idea generally try to completely divorce it from the stories around it... which brings me back to yesterday's point about the twin evils of thumping the reset button and setting the show on modern-day Earth in the first place. If you make allowances for those mistakes, then yes, Doctor Who and the Silurians can have a 9/10. The problem is, making allowances is a very fannish thing to do, and one of the things I'm trying to do in my reviews is examine which stories are the most suitable for introducing people to the show. This, though it is, again, a favorite of mine, is not one of those stories.

The (UNIT Era and the) Reset Button: Worst Idea Ever

This entire essay was going to come at the start of my forthcoming Doctor Who and the Silurians review, as a means of explaining why I'm going to give one of my all-time favorite stories a less-than-exemplary score. So consider this either an addendum or a preface to that essay.

The simple fact of the matter is that there's no way the first three stories Barry Letts produced (i.e, the seven-parters in season 7) can possibly occupy the same continuity. Inferno cops the same plot as Doctor Who and the Silurians; that is, an underground science project awakens an ancient evil and threatens life as we know it. And yet, nobody comments on the similarities. Britain loses a massive power complex at the end of Silurians, and yet The Ambassadors of Death features manned missions to Mars. Surely, getting the taxpayer's power back on is more important than gallivanting about in space? (Then again, the guy in charge of the Mars missions turns out to be a nutjob...)

The culprit is the notorious "reset button," which stipulates that status quo is God, and that every serial must end with the main characters completely unchanged and the world back to normal. See Star Trek Voyager for, well, 120 episodes of this. And of course the reason Doctor Who needs to employ this so often is that the series was stuck on present-day Earth due to budget constraints. We break out of this a little bit when we get to Season 8 and have a recurring threat in the character of the Master, and The Green Death, Invasion of the Dinosaurs, and Planet of the Spiders form a loose trilogy. But for the most part there's no continuity between serials. The Doctor, the Brig, Jo, Mike and Benton are all still alive and that's about it.

When we go to other planets, we know we can see sweeping changes. When we're in the future, we can overthrow tyrannical governments even on Earth. But in the present day, all we can do is fight off aliens and government conspirators, but don't expect anyone to comment on it, ever. Things reach an absolute low in The Sea Devils, which takes the second-greatest idea from this era (dinosaur-men want their planet back) and squanders it so that the first-greatest idea (the Master, like you needed to be told) can escape from prison and return to his wicked ways. We already know, given how obtusely the reset button was smashed at the end of Silurians, that the sea devils aren't sticking around past this serial. Meanwhile, the reset button gets pushed on the Master's story; he's on the loose again.

In light of this, it's somewhat appalling that they even decided to have a UNIT era at all. The show was popular enough to justify its continued existence, but now epic stories in far-off places where important characters just might die get replaced with "ho-hum, Earth's being invaded again." This, just as much as some atrocious pacing, is what really hurts the Third Doctor's era like nobody's business. The highest-rated stories you're going to see from me - Carnival of Monsters and Frontier in Space - don't take place on Earth at all. The sense of danger and excitement are back. On the other hand, you can get dull polemics like the Peladon stories. Oops.

To borrow a statement from a different show, the problem in a nutshell with the UNIT era is this: "The good guys are always stalwart and true, the bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats, and we always defeat them and save the day." And the audience knows it. Look, I have no problem with Our Heroes winning all the time. That doesn't mean that we can't see some real consequences of their victories from time to time - hell, look at how in the new series, the Doctor's victory in "The Long Game" ends up being entirely pyrrhic and sets in motion the events of "Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways."

And ultimately, therein lies the problem with Doctor Who and the Silurians. It's a perfect way around the more obvious flaw inherent in the UNIT format, that you're stuck with "alien invasion" or "mad scientist." At the same time, though, it's a concept that can't be done justice within the confines of the "we must always win" guidelines. Define "winning" in this case, because what happens at the end of that story sure isn't that.

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