When the news broke that Elisabeth Sladen died, the third thing that crossed my mind was, "I should do a review of one of the serials that best highlight her rapport with Tom Baker."
The first thing that crossed my mind, incidentally, was "What?" and the second thing was "Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!"
Anyway, my first thought for highlighting the Baker-Sladen dynamic, which I maintain was the best ever in the entire history of the show, was Pyramids of Mars. Since I misplaced that DVD, you get Planet of Evil instead.
Which is good, in a way, because if you're a new-Who fan, and you've done a tiny bit of research on the old series, you probably know exactly two things about Planet of Evil.
1) the plot is ripped straight from Forbidden Planet, and
2) the planet set is the greatest set the show ever made. (Too bad the other sets all suck in comparison.)
Strangely enough, the script and the sets tend to be the things I focus on in my reviews - hell, I'm going to keep The Caves of Androzani from getting a perfect 10 because its "caves" all have flat floors - and yet, because those two things are what everyone else already knows, this gives me the perfect chance to actually look at the interaction between Baker and Sladen. Which is exactly what I wanted to do in the first place.
So the episode begins on the titular planet, which does in fact look like an alien world. It's so good, it kind of looks like the zerg-infected areas of Starcraft II. Professor Sorenson won't be persuaded to leave his work just because night is coming, so his co-worker leaves without him. The co-worker travels from a television studio to a film set, where we get the full effect of the awesome set design, and then he and another person die fighting an invisible monster, which is no more convincing than it was in "Vincent and the Doctor." Some things never change.
Let me just interrupt here and say something that might go over the heads of younger viewers, or people who never saw Monty Python, or whatever. Part of the reason the planet set looks so damn good is because they shot it on film. That's not because film magically hid the wobbliness of it or whatever, but rather because in 70s British TV, film was used when they needed to go on location, and videotape was used in the studio. So going to a film studio and shooting the planet set on film made everyone who could tell the difference between film and videotape (and really, that should be everyone under 50) briefly think that they actually shot the planet stuff on location.
Okay, after two "gruesome" deaths, we get to the Doctor and Sarah. By the end of Season 12 (Tom Baker's first season), Lis Sladen wanted out of her contract because the character seemed to have regressed. The producers agreed about the regression, but not about letting her go, and instead to their credit focused on the Sarah-Doctor relationship. No, Rose/Ten shippers, not like that.
Their first scene is a great example of what I'm talking about. Sarah's confident enough in her relationship with the Doctor to jokingly berate him for being unable to get her home. The Doctor's actually on the defensive about his inability to fly the TARDIS - showing any sort of vulnerability is pretty much anathema to Tom Baker's Doctor, so the fact that he does it here demonstrates either how much Baker and Sladen were able to get along, or else how much the Fourth actually cares about Sarah's opinion.
Here's another thing: shortly after arriving on the planet, the Doctor finds "a hand tool of some sort." Sarah deduces that they must be humanoid because "they've got hands." This never happens on the new series, and it rarely happens on the old series. On the one hand, Sarah Jane Smith the character is stating the obvious because the writers know they don't have the budget to do a non-humanoid monster (well...) On the other hand, Lis Sladen sells us on the notion that Sarah's an incredibly insightful character who has had (offscreen) adventures with the Doctor involving people who don't have hands. It's touches like this that bring the magic.
A spaceship arrives, carrying a crew led by a young idiot who has no idea what he's doing, while the second-in-command is a white-haired old guy who does know what he's doing but pretty much stays in the background. Draw your own conclusions about unintentional parallels to certain US Presidents and Vice-Presidents.
Anyway, the crew gets slaughtered one by one while the Doctor gets accused of doing the slaughtering, and really it's just Forbidden Planet with Doctor Who trappings. The only major difference is that the "for science" guy doesn't get it at the end. There's really not a lot of point in going over the plot in detail.
In Genesis of the Daleks, Sarah Jane was reduced to nearly being radiation-poisoned and tortured to make the Doctor give up information. In this story, her biggest near-death experience is when she's almost flushed out an airlock - and the Doctor is right alongside her. This was the start of Sladen's third year in the role, and it's at about this point that it stops being "The Doctor and a companion" and starts being "Four-and-Sarah." It's even more evident in a specific scene in the next serial, the aforementioned Pyramids of Mars, when the two of them enter a room, notice the villain, and turn and exit as one.
It's still the Doctor's show; with Tom Baker settling into his role, it's impossible for it not to be. But by establishing such a strong rapport with Baker (and by using her own not-inconsiderable acting chops), Sladen was able to grab a decent section of the spotlight herself. With the benefit of hindsight, Rose is going to be "the Doctor's first serious love interest," Ace is going to be "that girl who blew things up," and Romana is going to be "the one who was in book-smarts what the Doctor was in experience." But Sarah Jane Smith will always be Sarah Jane Smith. No glib summary will suffice.
On the strength of the set and the Baker-Sladen tag-team alone, Planet of Evil gets an 8 out of 10.
Next review: The Masque of Mandragora.
No comments:
Post a Comment