This has aged horribly.
It is clearly a prototype UNIT story. It is the first story wholly set in 'the present day'. There is a different feel to this story. It's modern and eschews established convention.
It seems decidedly odd to see William Hartnell's Doctor acting as 'Scientific Adviser" and getting all 'matey' with establishment types like Summers and the 'minister'. If this was Pertwee you'd believe it. Verity Lambert would have stopped this happening, I reckon.
While Prof Brett, Col. Green and Sir Reginald are very conservative characters, Ben and Polly are cheeky and irreverent in a way that looks starkly new. I cannot imagine Ian and Barbara talking like they do.
But the Inferno /hottest night spot in town seems twee.
The concept of hooking up computers across the world (about a dozen of 'em) by telephone is presented as "wowee". This seems laughably naive in 2018.
The way WOTAN takes over people in ep1 is staged like a primitive religious ceremony. One thing that maybe hasn't changed so much is the fear of the 'big', sneaky technology. You can still read/see news stories today about how computers are gonna take over the world soon (or something like it.) The premise of the War Machines story plays on this primordial notion.
The guff about computers 'thinking' is obviously wrong. What computer technology allows people to do is the same evil but more efficiently and comprehensively. If the script of The War Machines had realised this it might have been 20 times better as a story.
The script mistake of WOTAN referring to "Doctor Who" is disappointing but it's hardly the worst aspect of this.
From somewhere in the middle of ep2 this goes seriously off the rails in drama terms. The characters are very underdeveloped and seem horribly cliched, especially the soldiers and the other goodies. The way Brett and Krimpton seem to stare upward into the middle distance and soliloquise about what the nasty computer is gonna do is very strange. Who exactly are they meant to be telling this stuff? Is it computer instructions? Greek chorus? Or narration? It does not work.
Several ludicrous things happen in the plot e.g the 'dosser' (who takes taxis and has brand new shoes... huh?) is attacked and presumably murdered late at night by the War Machine workers and yet the Summers and the Doctor casually read about it in the newspaper the **next** morning. Nah.... that's Silver Nemesis silly.
There's a lot of visual flourishes in this which are impressive: The war machines on film on location in city streets is the obvious, repeated one. The machines are a bit limited to crashing through piles of boxes but the director manages to make it look exciting... somehow. This kind of thing is destined for repetition on DW but here it is very style over substance.
This story is a bold, fresh, new style in DW. It's the start of 'the yeti on the loo' monsters. It's the start of modern contemporary DW stories (which they're still doing in 2017.) Give it another year and this idea will become Web of Fear and Fury from the Deep. But this early prototype is a bit lame looking 52 years on.
ABM Rating 2.05/4.00
LJM Rating 3.00/5.00
SPJ Rating 5.00/10.00
No. 18 (out of 27)
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SPJ 5.0
ReplyDeleteLJM 3.0