135 The Caves of Androzani

 Started 8-Feb

We watched the 2010 DVD on a big screen, all in one go.

The editing, the shots, the imaginaion of the sequence in p1 where Jek does his work to create the Peri/Doctor android set. These look fab. Less fab is the cave sets and the Magma Creature but that's due to budget.

The crossfade between scenes is used frequently to change scenes. Structurally it's a copy of Star Wars except they use a cross wipe rather than a cross fade.

Jek is a very operatic character, Morgus is kind of inner dialogue/talk to the audience at several points. This is new in DW. It confronts more than it should.

Characters have motivation and depth. The story is all fighting but with tactics and reasoning and purpose.

There are pairs of characters.... Chellack and Salateen, Morgus and Timmin, Stotz and Krelper, Jek is the exception but he interacts with most of them at one point or another.

Key is the on studio floor direction of Graeme Harper. He gets the camera operators, the props people, the studio managers and the actors working the shots and making the "movie". The result is fantastic. To think this was made by the same office that did Warriors is head shaking.

Ratings and reception were nothing exceptional at the time. This was ruined by cuts in Australia.

The violence trend in DW in gathering pace: in this nearly every character uses a machine gun and there are torture and cynical physical abuse scenes as well. These can serve to heighten drama but crucially here they don't substitute for it.

New no.2

And we're looking toward the most egregious fall in scores between stories ever.

Gold to sh*t in one step.. coming up.

ABM Rating 3.89/4.00
LJM Rating 4.50/5.00
SPJ Rating 9.81/10   

No. 2 (out of 135)

Link to Cumulative Rankings

Rankings Scoreboard


http://www.pagefillers.com/dwrg/cave2.htm

The Elements of Style -- and Substance by Jason A. Miller 10/12/03
There are two kinds of Androzani bashers, I think. There's The Discontinuity Guide, which labels this story "a triumph of style over substance". I think that's meant to be an insult, even though it sounds more like something incomprehensible out of the Doctor Who Handbooks. Unusual, since so much of The Discontinuity Guide is a reaction against the Handbook people ethos.
The second kind of Androzani basher is from the school of thought that there isn't all that much substance here, period. The story's seen as a rip-off of "Phantom of the Opera", or, better, of The Talons of Weng-Chiang (by the same author, even). This bit is defensible -- compare Magnus Greel's unmasking with Sharaz Jek's. They're virtually identical, even down to what we see underneath. Also bafflingly, this story has been called a rewrite of The Power of Kroll so many times that I think people are starting to take it on faith. Where did that come from? I first saw it in a Matt Jones list in DWM. You've got a gun-runner and a double-dealing authority figure, but that's about it. Maybe Androzani is a rip-off of The Seeds of Doom, too? There's no emotional punch in Kroll. It's not fair to compare the two, especially to try and make Kroll look good in comparison.
Style first. This story is certainly a triumph of style. It's Graeme Harper's direction, obviously, pulling all sorts of nifty tricks out of the bag that DW didn't use often enough. There's the frequent use of dissolves, and matches. So many times we enter a scene on a character's disembodied head, whether it's Davison's musings on what Spectrox could possibly be, or Sharaz Jek's laughing maniacally.
The visual look is best appreciated when compared to the next story produced, The Twin Dilemma. Both stories have similar sets -- caves, craggy knobs, rooms made from off-white flats with windows overlooking purple skies. Which story has the glossier look? Androzani even recycles wholesale all the costumes from Warriors of the Deep and makes it look new.
The score is edgier than usual. We learned from Doctor Who that use of percussion on the soundtrack doesn't necessarily add to a story -- witness those silly Casio-inspired handclap effects accompanying the Daleks of Remembrance. But here, it's the military cadence behind the execution scenes in Part One which fits so well. There's even the use of symbolism, in the rattlesnake hiss that accompanies Sharaz Jek, the way a cawing crow on "The Simpsons" tells us we're back at the nuclear power plant.
Other things Harper does that just never got done, before or since:

• Characters look at the camera! Morgus delivers asides to the camera. Chellak, when briefing his aide Salateen, doesn't look at Salateen, he looks at the camera.
• When Chellak appears in Morgus's office as a hologram, Morgus walks around the hologram! How glorious is that? Best of all, we get an over-the-shoulder camera angle -- from over the hologram's shoulder!

There are not one, but two, seminal cliffhangers here. The first is all Harper, I think. How many Doctor Who episodes ended on the word "Fire!", or on, "Kill them!"? Probably one in every three. At the end of Part One here, the episode doesn't end on the order to fire. It actually ends on the bullets! Speaking of subversion of expectation, there's another great one in Part One. How many times did the Doctor escape a villain by hiding in plain sight? Here, the Doctor and Peri both try to hide from the army... by standing behind the same crate! This time, the army's not fooled.
So, all that style, it's a triumph over substance, right? No, because there's substance, too. This is a Robert Holmes story, people. True, you could take all the elements of a Holmes script and run them through a Markov chainer: there's the cast of six characters; the frequent use of invented continuity references to make the palette seem larger; there's the double-act and the double- double cross. Yes, that's here too. The name "Professor Jackij" is mentioned so often you wonder if the guy didn't flunk Holmes out of medical school back in the '50s. Holmes creates this deliciously fatal poison, symptom by symptom, and even gives us the cure: the milk of the Queen Bat. Who even know that bats gave milk?
But for all the old elements, Holmes writes so much that is new, here. This is a stronger, more physical Fifth Doctor than we've seen before. He shoves Salateen, who'd up to that point been busy laughing over the Doctor and Peri's fate. Salateen stops laughing. Later, the Doctor breaks out of shackles bare-handed. But the Doctor is so innocent too (as opposed to naive, as he's frequently called in fandom). He takes the time to apologize to Peri for getting her into this. He memorably pleads, "I am telling the truth. I keep telling the truth! Why is it no-one believes me?".
And then there's the other great cliffhanger, the one to Part Three. Lots of Part Threes end on villainous rants. How many Part Threes end on the hero's rant? Tom Baker only wishes he had gotten to act out this cliffhanger.
There are other characters in Androzani, too, and their dialogue never gets enough credit. Listen to what Morgus and the President discuss; this is fascinating political bantering that grows with Doctor Who's target age group. In fact, pretty much anything Morgus says while in his office could be printed and sold as one of those inspirational leadership books that spun out of control on the bestseller lists a few years ago. "Morgus's 19 Keys to Eternal Youth". Or "Normington on Elevator Shafts". As the right-wingers say, his philosophy truly represents a paradigm shift. You could make a lot of money, Dick Cheney, running Halliburton like the Sirius Conglomerate. And you'd still have the President in your pocket.
Jek is great, too, with angrily poetic dialogue. "Scalded near to death." "The mouth of a prattling jackanapes." His diatribes about Morgus, delivered with such precision timing that you could wind your watch to them, are full of enough oaths and curses and insults that you figure the poor schlimazl had to have been fluent in Yiddish, too. His revenge is so methodically carried out that you almost have to get up and cheer when he finally outlives his man.
And there's no scene in The Power of Kroll that comes remotely close to that.