022 The Massacre

Started 29-Jul-2018

We watched a CGI 'Sims' style animation of ep1-3 and a LC recon of ep4

This is political/religious intrigue involving virtually unknown historical characters and virtually uninspiring invented ones played out by actors in silly wigs and cod 16th century costumes. The plot is proddies vs the mics and it ends in inevitable mass slaughter.

If you care about French history in the 1500's then wa-hey. If you don't then this must seem pretty boring. I wish more had been made of the Doctor's meeting with Preslin.
The Who Lore earthquake in ep4 is something that should be studied carefully by all DW fans. It is so unfortunate that this bit is missing from the archive. It's close to Hartnell's best moments as the Doctor.

For some reason The Gunfighters is often cited as the catalyst of UK ratings crisis that beset the later half of Series 3 in 1966. The FACTS say that The Massacre dropped from 8 mill in the opening episode then 6.0, 5.9 and 5.8. (The Ark climbed back to 7's, Toymaker was 7's and 8's, and Gunfighters 6's, followed by the summer eps in the 4's and 5's)



ABM Rating 2.75/4.00 
LJM Rating 2.90/5.00
 SPJ Rating 5.00/10.00  

No. 16 (out of 22)

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021 The Daleks Masterplan

Started 22-Jul-2018

We watched:
ep1 LC recon
ep2 BBC DVD
ep3, 4 LC recon
ep5 BBC DVD
ep6 LC recon
ep7 web animation
ep8-9 LC recon
ep10 BBC DVD
ep11-12 LC recon

This is an epic obviously.

This is very easy to watch and fun to come back to. The length is not an issue.

The plot in this is 'maguffin based' (full Em of Taranium anyone?) and goes around the steal it, try to get it back, fail, try again, succeed, lose it again roundabout in a way that's obvious to anyone over 10 years old. What makes the story bearable is the strength of the characters and the performances.


What's new to DW in this is the high camp, arch villian... mostly Mavic Chen but not exclusively.


Previously, the bad guys in DW were Tlotoxl or Richard the Lionheart or Robospierre or Tegana or Bennett/Koquillon or The Animus or Lobos (very straight sometimes with more and less shades of grey) or Daleks, Voord, Sand/Mire/Slyther Beast (just black 'evil'). Maybe Maaga started to buck the rut some but Mavic Chen as played by Kevin Stoney is arm waving and operatic and consumed of his own ego and obviously dies at the suckers of the Daleks in the last ep so you know the story will end soon.

There is a significant history of such arch villians in DW: Taren Capel, Magnus Greel, Xoanon, Neeva, Eldrad, The Master (and that's just from series 14) There are decades of them.
But it starts here...

This is a phenotypical DW story that actually presages a way for DW to develop. A major achievement.
Somewhere in the middle of that 1966 arrived.
In truly paradoxical fashion, 1966 is both a bad year for DW and the best ever. It manages to slide into failure and guarantee immortality.

ABM Rating 3.50/4.00 
LJM Rating 4.25/5.00
SPJ Rating 7.00/10.00 

No. 3 (out of 21)

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020 The Mythmakers

Started 19 July

This is a difficult one to watch.

The source material (the siege of Troy approx 1180 BCE, or more precisely Homer's Iliad) is not (completely) unfamiliar but the intention is.

This is a comedy in the classical Greek sense. Aristotle defined this as "a representation of laughable people and involves some kind of blunder or ugliness which does not cause pain or disaster". Also this makes more sense when you consider that classical Greek literature consists of three main types: comedy, tragedy and Satyrism.

Many of the 'jokes' stem from the Doctor being mistaken for Zeus, Vicki as Cressida and Steven just as a "Greek".

It is *not* a pastische Carry On style of comedy.There are no 'wee' or 'bum' jokes. It's more like drama-edy than The Three Stooges....


So it's difficult to understand for a modern audience for that reason.

It's also not well known, completely missing, with a rare novelization and was not well repeated or distributed around the world.

It should have no chance.

We watched a mix of SIMS style animation (ep1) and LC stills recon. It was hard going.

It's very talky and there's lot of characters. Possibly the first mistake of the production was that many of the characters require the audience to be familiar with the various ancient characters: Menelaeus, Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Hector, Priam, Paris, Cassandra etc, etc. Without a classical education this is near  impossible barrier right there.

What action there is seems to be sword-fights.

The best bits are when the regulars are involved. Unfortunately there are extended portions where they don't feature and these are hard to appreciate.

Bring on the Daleks Masterplan!!!

ABM Rating 2.20/4.00 
LJM Rating 3.50/5.00
 SPJ Rating 3.50/10.00 

Peak Ranking No. 17 (out of 20)





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019 Mission to the Unknown

Started (and finished) 17 July.

There's a quite good animated version of this on Youtube.


There must be a generation of people to whom this must be like Star Wars 10 years early.

It's pure, hoary, Terry Nation space opera.

The way the script seems to mix up 'Galaxy' and 'Solar System' is possibly a stylistic problem,. I don't like it but I recognise that most viewers would not object.

The crass militarism of Cory, Garvey and Lowery is reminiscent of a familiar trope in 50's war movies (like a John Wayne or Gary Cooper movie...) People used to lap that up. There are modern antecedents of course.. JCVD and Rambo. They not real smart. They never were.

The Dalek war council is where this soars. It's the stuff that makes little boys squee. Obviously these days it looks kinda poor quality but the low budget and the passing of time haven't completely obscured the original effectiveness of this.

A gem but a cloudy one.

And with that, Verity was gone. Her contribution to Doctor Who was more than massive or huge. It was fundamental.

ABM Rating 3.00/4.00
LJM Rating 4.25/5 4.00/5.00

SPJ Rating 6.00/10.00

Peak Ranking No. 5 (out of 19)



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018 Galaxy 4

Started 15 July.

The long dark night of telesnaps begins....

Series 3 kicks off in September 1965 with this one. This series is probably one of the most challenged and challenging. Here are the facts: there were 3 producers (Lambert, Wiles, Lloyd), 2 story editors (Tosh, Davis), about 6 companions (depending on who gets counted), the longest ever serial, shortest ever (not a) serial, the greatest ever number of episodes, the second most missing episodes. (All this makes Verity's two years look even better IMHO.)

Ratings were still high but by the end of the series this could no longer be relied on. The figures show a fall of about half during "The Gunfighters". Average of the 10 episodes before and the 10 episodes after shows this.

It's often cited that Wiliam Hartnell's declining health was what lead to his replacement approximately a year after this serial but I think that the production office instability and plunging ratings look like equally important reasons. We'll see...

We watched a fairly distorted LC recon of Galaxy 4 recovered from an old VHS tape. (Apart from the recovered episode 3 of course.)

This story is a strange mixture of progressive and traditional.

The voice of the Rills sounds quite old fashioned and makes me not like them at all. The Drahvins are really dumb and seem incredibly childish. Credibility is not won with a modern audience by either of these features. And the Chumblies get sooo boring really quickly.

The basic story is an inversion of the Beauty and the Beast idea. But the Drahvins are slight and unengaging as characters. The main character Maaga is cynical and harsh in tone. That's the 'beauty'. The Rills are slightly pompous but otherwise kinda reasonable. That's the 'beast'. The added notion of the exploding planet is testing credibility also. (Think for a minute.... why is it exploding? What is causing it? Doesn't look like it's exploding...)

The story makes little sense.

I think the Drahvins' guns get reused in Genesis of the Daleks....(Thal guards in part 3...)

I've always thought of this as a dense, hard to understand missing episode story. I was unsure if I ever actually got it. Actually it's not that great...

ABM Rating 2.00/4.00
LJM Rating 0.75/5.00
SPJ Rating 2.00/10.00

Peak Ranking No. 18 (out of 18)

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017 The Time Meddler

Started 11 July

This is very good.

Great premise, well shot and directed, excellent performances from the regulars.

But it's slow, studio bound and has some problems.

The Viking attack on the village and its apparent effect on Edith is not very nice at all (or appalling if you're not bending over backwards to make excuses...).

Plus the village population does not seem very realistically balanced. (Few women and no children... ?)

There's a strange scene in ep2 when Vicki and Steven come across the old fashioned gramophone in the monastery. They're both meant to be from the far future yet they have no curious questions or qualms about finding a 7 minutes a side 78 rpm lo-fi gramophone "set" to simulate absent chanting monks.

The monk's fry up breakfast is a bit anachronistic. The snuff sniffing is too. It's definitely snuff. It's not....er, cocaine or amyl nitrate... is it?


Fuddy duddy old fashioned funny "Dad" performance from Peter Butterworth as the Meddling Monk is great but outta date by even 60's standards. Maybe 1965 was too early for a way out cool hippie monk but it would have worked just as well IMHO.

What's new here is the idea of combining historical setting with a sci fi plot. It is a template for some excellent DW's in the future (The Masque of Mandragora, The Visitation, The Eaters of Light to name just 3). What's weird is the number of years it takes to follow up on this concept. (i.e. The Time Warrior in 1973)


I reckon this could be remade as quite a good movie. You'd change a few things to update it but to see a well directed modern version of this would be a delight.

And so the end of Series 2 is reached. This only ever had meaning in the UK since the serials were shown in Australia and elsewhere as 'Sales Blocks' (I should look these up again and find out what was grouped with what) and repeats and out of order showing was commonplace. Likely Time Meddler was grouped with a set that sold less well and this accounts for its initial unavailability in the first 1978 archive audit. Series 3 was never grouped together wholly. A large chunk is missing from overseas viewings since Masterplan is not included.

UK ratings were well off the peak of Web Planet back in Feb 65 (avg 12.5 million) since this went out in July. Superficially the ratings had seemed to tail off since Crusade in March but this would likely have been viewed as normal since approach of summer meant longer daylight hours and less viewers generally.


ABM Rating 3.5/4
SPJ Rating 7.5/10 
LJM Rating 4.5/5

Peak Ranking No. 1 (out of 17)

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016 The Executioners

AKA The Chase
Started 08 July

Much less impressive than I remember. Is it the marathon watch in order thing?

Hmmm.

Overall this seems under rehearsed and in parts almost made up on the spot.

The atmosphere veers between ridiculous parody and trying to be serious. This is the first DW serial that seems less than a serious attempt. It's a salutory lesson that the late 70's and 80's sometimes ignores and thankfully the modern show has not yet broached.
Perhaps the cast and production team are tiring? Some renewal is just around the corner which the long arc of DW history shows is actually necessary.

There are some good bits: the Mechanoids, the TSV 'skit' in ep 1, Peter Purves as Steven Taylor.
There are some awful bits too: the sand beast, the Aridian costumes, the Empire State Building 'skit', the script in ep4, everything in ep5, the 'Daleks at home' dialogue.

The pace is reasonably good. The regulars ' performances are convincing.

It's not THE worst but there is a silly series of silly mistakes.


ABM Rating 2.25/4.00

LJM Rating 2.50/5.00
SPJ Rating 4.50/10.00 

Peak Ranking No. 12 (out of 16)

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Mid series 2 Progress Report

As of Saturday 7-Jul-2018...

Marathon 69 days

Eps completed 71 
(end of The Space Museum)

Eps to go 769

So far it's been creaky B&W with the occasional missing ep.

But from here there's 86 more missing eps in 182 till the end of The War Games. That's the hard facts. 18 are nicely animated.
(T/A, Vp7, Yp1, DDp4, EEp1-6, 2Hp1, 2Hp3, LLp7, OOp2, OOp3, QQp3, VVp1, VVp4)
(If you know what this means, then you're a nerd :-p)

Some of those missing eps are The Smugglers and The Space Pirates, but some are Fury From the Deep and The Macra Terror.

Stay strong.

015 The Space Museum

Started 4-Jul-2018

If this were a one parter (or even a 2 parter) it would be so much better. It just runs out of steam in part 2 and 'foofs' along till the end of 4.

The effects load in ep 1 is immense for 1965 technology. There's the live video inlay of the exhibits that Vicki's hand passes through and the footprints that appear and the unsmashing glass of water.

The Xerons and Moroks are overacted and the rebels versus the standard overlords plot was probably banal even then.
Richard Shaw is unconvincing as 'Governor' Lobos. The dialogue he has to deliver is execrable. The microphone he uses for his communicator is the same as used in the city of Millennius (The Keys of Marinus)!!!!
Peter Craze and Jeremy Bulloch put in two fairly lame efforts as leading Xerons also.
Jeremy Bulloch (Boba Fett in the Empire Strikes Back) and Peter Diamond (stunt guy in every James Bond, Batman, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, list is as long as your street) makes this cast notable at least.

There's no likeable or relatable characters in this. I think that at least contributes to the dullness.

I guess the "truth chair" sequence in part 2 is funny.

ABM Rating 2.00/4.00
LJM Rating 1.00/5.00
SPJ Rating 5.00/10.00 

Peak Ranking No. 14 (out of 15)

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