096 Underworld

 Started 4-Aug

Steam punk Bananas in Pyjamas, yesterday...

We watched the DVD transcribed xvid files. One episode at a time. That is genuinely as much as anyone can take at any one time.


Some DW's can be greedily yummed up 2 eps at a time. Some are a chore. This is like eating manure with bits of broken glass in it.

It's boring.
It's badly written.
It's badly directed.
It's boring.
It's badly acted.
It has 3 of the most unexciting episode cliffhangers ever. (There are mid episode ABCtv version season 22 "timing cut" cliffhangers which are better than these 3...and they're random)
Did I mention it's boring?
The bit with guards running (including a stumble) being repeated over and over.

The P7E planet (referred to in draft scripts as Hadis, luckily not called this on screen) is a very unbelievable idea. It should be hot, liquid magma not boring self illuminated CSO 'caves'.... 

How long have the trog slaves been eating (processed) rock?

The minor character Tala has precisely 3 lines in eps 2 and 3.

In p2....
TALA: Captain, the fuel's going.

TALA: Captain, the fuel's gone.

In p3...

TALA: Who was he?


And all these in p4 !!!
TALA: Captain.

TALA: We've enough to get away, but it'll be a slow journey.

TALA: Five, four, three, two, one.

TALA: Drive running.

TALA: I'm trying.

TALA: There is no more.

TALA: We don't have enough power to reach escape velocity.

TALA: Four sevenths light.


And Tala's lines are not even the shortest role or the most underwritten. Try Naia or Idmon. This indicates, apart from anything else, why this is boring.


What is the Oracle? Why? Where did it come from?

The plot is all holes. There's two whole episodes of run up a corridor/cave, get captured, escape, run up a corridor, repeat.

And did I say it was boring?

Short guide to symbolic naming in Underworld (this is the only thing that's any fun in this)

• Ankh is the Eqyptian Goddess of Fertility
• Lakh is the Indian number 100 000.
• The Oracle = the Delphic Oracle, aka the Pythia which gave prophecies only on the seventh day of each month, seven being the number most associated with Apollo.
• P7E = Persephone
• R1C = Argo-sey, (a sort of nick name for the journey of the Argo, as in Odys-sey....)
• Minyans = Minoans
• Jackson = Jason (played by James Maxwell a noted Manchester theatre director (so wasted in this))
• Herrick = Heracles (played by third husband of Diana Dors (he called her Madame Tits and Lips) his life was tragedy heaped upon outrage (the biopic movie is still waiting to be made however and it will be a humdinger!) (so wasted in this))
• Orfe = Orpheus (played by prolific tv and film actor Jonathan Newth, he's the blind Doctor in Day of the Triffids (1981)  (so wasted in this))
• Tala = Atalanta or Talaus (played by Imogen Bickford-Smith who is immortal as Mr Johnson's smuggled girfriend in the Fawlty Towers ep. about Psychiatrists ("Mr Fawlty.. he get ladder to see in room to see girl...") curiously another almost non-speaking part (even so she is wasted in this))
• Rask = nineteenth-century Danish philologist Ramus Rask (played by James Marcus who was a Droog in A Clockwork Orange (1971) (so wasted in this))
• Tarn = nineteenth-century French poet Pauline Tarn (played by prolific film and tv actor Godfrey James (so wasted in this))
• Klimt = early twentieth-century Austrian painter Gustav Klimt (played by DW bit part regular Jay Neill (so wasted in this))
• Clashing Rocks = Symplegades, also called the Clashing (or Cyanean) Rocks. These were large boulders situated along the Bosphorus which haphazardly smashed into one another, destroying any ship which was caught in-between
• Idmon = In Greek mythology, Idmon (in Ancient Greek, means "having knowledge of") was an Argonaut seer. Idmon foresaw his own death in the Argonaut expedition, but joined anyway. (played by noted film bit part actor Jimmy Gardner (he was 53 when he appeared in Underworld... no way!)) (so wasted in this)
•  Idas = In Greek mythology a Messenian prince. He was one of the Argonauts, a participant in the hunt for the Calydonian Boar and contender with the gods. Idas was described as keen and spirited (played by Norman Tipton who is famous for TV ads in the UK  (so wasted in this))
•  Naia = popular name given to 12000yo human skeleton discovered in Yucatan in 2007 (so not actually a 1977 idea!!) (played by Stacey Tendeter who was famous for appearing in Francois Truffaut's Two English Girls (1971)) (so wasted in this...)

In it's favour is the UK ratings which were strong. (8.9, 9.1, 8.9 and 11.7 million viewers for each respective episode...best serial average for Series 15 and the single highest episode rating of Series 15.)
The episode running times are very short. 22m36s, 21m27s, 22m21s, 22m53s. Three of those are in the bottom 50 running times for DW eps. Lots of other serials have one quite short episode. The average running time of 22m24s is the 4th lowest in DW history.)

Here's the bottom 10

Rank	Title	Serial avg running time minutes
1	The Mind Robber	21m24s
2	Meglos	21m42s
3	The Leisure Hive	21m42s
4	Underworld	22m24s
5	The Krotons	22m36s
6	The Power of Kroll	22m48s
7	The Space Museum	22m54s
8	Full Circle	23m12s
9	The Invisible Enemy	23m18s
10	The Wheel In Space	23m24s

A low score and an alarming downward plunge.

1978 has arrived. Series 15 has two very awful serials so far. What of the last six-parter?





ABM Rating 0.75/4.00
LJM Rating 0.75/5.00
SPJ Rating 3.90/10   

No. 94 (out of 96) (equal lowest rank with Invisible Enemy)(Celestial Toymaker is still worse.)

Link to Cumulative Rankings


Rankings Scoreboard


http://www.pagefillers.com/dwrg/underwo.htm
accessed 8-8-2019

 "Whatever blows can be sucked!" by Hugh Sturgess 12/9/12

Oh, come on! The Doctor actually said that?! It's so brazen it's practically a single entendre.

Anyway, onto the story. It's awful. Absolutely dire. I watched this hoping to enjoy it on some level, but it's impossible. My mind feels hollow. Warriors of the Deep and its ilk at least are engagingly bad; Underworld flatlines almost instantly, but, like a zombie, lurches along at that (I guess appropriately) subterranean level of tedium for the rest of the four trudging episodes.

At this point in Season Fourteen, The Robots of Death was being shown. My God, how the mighty are fallen! This isn't even the worst story of Season Fifteen, when one remembers The Invisible Enemy (also by Bob Baker and David Martin) and The Invasion of Time. Ladies and gentlemen, that is a reign of evil. True, Season Fifteen was made under horrendous financial pressure: inflation was above 20%, economic growth was sluggish and Underworld suffered as a result. But what's present here is a dearth of imagination, not money. In fact, you won't hear any mention of the CSO caves after this paragraph. To be honest, they're not bad. Characters even cast shadows on them! Their main problems are the resulting lack of atmosphere and the occasional doubling up of backdrops, which makes it impossible to work out the geography of the story. But if you're watching Underworld for the effects, you're doing it wrong.

Underworld both sucks and blows for one basic reason that has nothing to do with filthy lucre: it's boring. Like the Quest itself, it goes on and on, without remembering why. The audience endures endless, dreary scenes filled with charmless, wooden characters. The boredom infects everything: the acting is boring, the plot is boring, the design is boring, the direction is boring. Music is nearly absent, and when it isn't it's some of Dudley Simpson's work that makes you agree with JNT's decision to get rid of him come Season Eighteen. There's a good story buried in here somewhere: the Golden Fleece is a timeless story first told over two-thousand years ago and still told today. Underworld is timeless, in that it drags so much that time seems to stand still.

Even in moments where there is plot, it's still boring. The flatness of the whole enterprise sucks whatever draw-factor the story has out of it. The fault isn't just the direction, but its responsibility is huge. Norman Stewart had no training as a director before this story, but got promoted because he found a way to afford the spaceship set. Very commendable, but that makes him more to blame for this sucking nexus of anti-excitement than just his director's credit would suggest. However, there remains the hideous thought that Graham Williams considered this a success, since he hired Stewart to make The Power of Kroll next year, despite the man protesting that he wasn't fit to be a director.

Stewart can't be blamed for the quality of the script, but what he's done is make a poor story poorer. He has no idea about editing multi-camera video into a coherent whole, so the actors are delivering their lines in a vacuum. The set-up is entirely static, interspersed with occasional cuts for no reason; the cut to the Doctor's "physics is about facts" homily in Part Two is amateurish, and the nearby scene in which Herrick leaves a marker and goes on a reconnoitre is so poorly shot it's actually incomprehensible. Set-pieces are drained of drama and in the battle scenes the players mill about aimlessly without any urgency: the examples are endless, but the cliffhanger to Part Three and its resolution are pretty good ones; later in the story, Leela shoots one guard and the other just stands there for the rest of the scene as though invisible. Odd shots are repeated, usually of people running along cave tunnels (the three white-clad guards running along, and one of them half-slipping, is a favourite).

The acting is atrocious. The characters listlessly deliver their lines in a stately monotone. The crew of the R1C is plain beyond imagination, with James Maxwell taking every opportunity to underwhelm and Alan Lake providing the obligatory hot-headed idiot to spice up the wall-to-wall cardboard, but the most prominent offender is Tom Baker. He stalks through this story like a somnambulist, and seems to be in a permanent bad mood. He looks bored and his performance doesn't even qualify as phoning it in. Witness his terribly-acted shock and delivery of "2,000 megatons!!!", or the crap handling of the aforementioned "physics is about facts" dialogue. The Doctor is just a crushing bore in this story, with even the lighter moments flapping around aimlessly, and his less-than-hilarious schtick (the "makes a noise and shushes Leela" thing in particular) goes over like a lead balloon. He doesn't even bother putting emphasis into his dialogue, though that's something shared by everyone in the story. Half the cast constantly deliver their lines in a restrained murmur, while the other half (the villains) shout everything.

There's an exciting story lurking somewhere in the basic outline. This is the story of a hundred-thousand-year quest to the edge of the universe and to the centre of a planet, and yet nothing of any interest is found there. Every millisecond is predictable. There are the human slaves... who live under the evil guards... who answer to a priestly caste... who conduct sacrifices and worship a megalomaniac computer... Zzz... The Trogs and the guards are losers who don't do anything. I didn't actively wish them harm, but it never occurred to me that they presented a genuine threat to even the R1C crew on their own. They might be a nuisance, but that's it. The Doctor even points out the limpness of the "the Oracle is a mad computer" cliche! The main character has passed judgement on the story. Case closed.

And then K9 declares the story's conceit - Jason and the Argonauts in space - to be essentially crap. "What do you think K9?" "Negative." This review writes itself.

The entire story is a nested series of disappointments. The Minyans have spent a thousand centuries searching... for some canisters of DNA; 100,000 years of reproduction in a high-radiation environment has turned the inhabitants of the P7E into drippy losers with characters so thin and unmemorable that Jackson and his troupe become almost charismatic; the guards have a cool costume (I'm a-frightened of masks, so a masked villain is always a plus), but underneath that they're fat security guards who shout things like "Treachery! Heresy!" and, about three minutes into Part Four, one leaves a pause before speaking that is so long that it makes him look like a complete dolt, courtesy of Norman Stewart's shithouse dubbing.

They're also dumb as dogshit: the two running the fumigation don't realise that the gas has been pumped into their own control room, even as their minions cough and fall over. They have advance warning of the Doctor, Leela and Bland Young Native entering the P7E, but they are somehow still surprised and overwhelmed, despite facing only one armed opponent. Then the Seers take off their hoods and things look up for a moment. OK, they look like steampunk Bananas in Pajamas, or man-sized dildos designed by Satan, but I like them. They're crazy, but in a classic Doctor Who sort of way. They look like robots, though they clearly have emotions and speak as though they have been "enhanced" by the Oracle - but they turn out to be dolts as well. Even the Oracle is stupid: handing out planet-cracking "grenades" that even you can't deactivate is a bad move on every level.

(Though, that said, I liked that little hopeless reproach from the Seer just before they all get blown up: "Why not?" "You made it so." That's a man who's realised he's invested blind faith in a god that's frankly rubbish, that is.)

A observation: the Seers' sacrifice (yes, it's another Graham Williams story with a ridiculously complicated sacrifice in it) is called "the Question of the Sword", as - symbolically - the question of how and when we will meet our deaths is hanging over all of us, which weirdly reminded me of the Silence. "Silence will fall when the Question is asked." And the Minyans used to worship the Time Lords as gods...

The Graham Williams house style is "lots of ideas, shame about the execution". Sometimes, the Williams era produces something awesome - City of Death, The Ribos Operation, etc. - but more often you'll lament its inability to get its concepts on screen. The Pirate Planet is botched by "comedy" acting and drippy characters, while The Invasion of Time, written in a hurry, has plenty of ideas with huge potential, just squandered by crap on every level. Underworld is different. I'm not sure there ARE lots of ideas here. The classic Bob Baker and Dave Martin idea-explosion is absent. What we have here: shield guns, pacifiers, the civilisation inside a planet... Yeah, not much.

Then there is the Unique Selling Point: this may come as a shock to you, but SOME REVIEWERS have found a lot of similarities between Underworld and the myth of Jason and the Argonauts. No, seriously. Anthony Read gave Baker and Martin this idea, I believe, and he'd use it himself with the minotaur in The Horns of Nimon. ...But why? Like The Horns of Nimon, Underworld transcribes the myth to outer space in a suitably lame fashion, having ripped out anything of any worth or weight first. The crew of the R1C aren't heroic adventurers and pioneers (the Argonauts, let's remember, were sort of a cross between the Dirty Dozen and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen), they're pen-pushing careerists. The Golden Fleece becomes DNA canisters. And replacing the dragons protecting it with crackling lines of electricity is so crass it's almost insulting.

The story copies the myth, step-by-step, with clunking SF literalism, and is so pleased with itself that it insists on constantly pointing out the translation with smug self-satisfaction. There isn't the slightest effort to make this all seem magical or mythic; it seems to be enough that it's a copy of Jason and the Argonauts, rather than something of similar power. This needed to be more operatic. This needed to be more epic. But the show didn't have enough money for that, and anyway the Williams era does not do operatic and it does not do epic. Fantasy is meant to make stories bigger, not smaller.

I've used the word "boring" a lot, but that's because that was my overwhelming response. Underworld simply bores from beginning to end. Even the first episode, which other reviews have judged to be either goodish or at least tolerable, sapped my will to live right from the start. Terms such as "entertainment", "excitement" and "adventure" simply did not exist for me in those 100 crawling minutes. Truly terrible. To raise my spirits, I think I may watch a comparatively towering titan of quality, like The Unicorn and the Wasp or Timelash, perhaps.