The Underwater Menace

It's 1970 and the TARDIS lands on an island in the Mediterranean Sea. The Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie head out to explore and are all captured and taken far underground to the lost world of Atlantis. The people here are an ancient culture who worship the fish goddess Amdo, and resident scientist from the world above, Zaroff, has added to their standard of living by genetically altering some Atlantians into hybrid Fish People to harvest underwater bounty to feed the kingdom.  But Zaroff's ambition does not end there; he has promised to raise Atlantis above the waves once more, but his plans may have dire consequences for the rest of the world...

Oh dear, as the Doctor would say. This one isn't very good. Plot wise it runs out of gas by the middle of episode two when Zaroff reveals his grand plans for Atlantis, leaving the rest of the screen time to a lot of running away and being captured and running away again. And if the lack of plot isn't enough to make this a less than thrilling episode, the fact that the script had to be reworked by splitting the lines of the companions up to accommodate Jamie's presence might do it as well. The Doctor goes in disguise again and doesn't seem to have a full handle on his character until he's face to face with Zaroff and his insanity, and then the second Doctor finally comes into his own and squares off against the evil.

Um. Yeah.

Notable notes though have to go to the design team for coming up with the Fish People costumes. I woul
dn't go so far as to call them... good. No. I wouldn't. But to their credit the actual underwater sequences were shot well, in slow motion with no strings visible on the actors as they "swim". Other scenes were shot in a tank at Ealing studios in water which by all accounts was nothing you would actually want to swim in, but they did it anyway.

And in other costume mentions, Polly's temple girl disguise was a heap of old clamshell ashtrays sewn into a vague dress form; it looks uncomfortable and in interviews later Anneke Wills confirms that it was murder wearing it. But hey, all is not lost: check out the black wetsuits on Ben and Jamie. Fraser Hines says he's been told it looked sexy but he doesn't see it. He's not seen Madonna's Human Nature music video I reckon.

I remember when I first read the novelization of the story (and I remember
buying it at the long gone Dragon Lady comic shop on Queen West in Toronto) I thought it all felt a little simple and vague, but when I got hold of the audio versions from BBC Radio Collection and saw the (at the time) only existing episode I was pretty much convinced. Recently though episode 2 was discovered and released on DVD with episode 3 and telesnap versions of the other two episodes for a rather lacklustre experience. I found the novelty of having never seen episode 2 before not really enough to make me all enthusiastic, although there was always the climax of episode 3 with Zaroff screaming "Nothing in the world can stop me now!" as a redeeming moment of sorts.

Honestly, though, if Mystery Science Theatre 3000 ever riffed on a Doctor Who episode, this would be the one.

NEXT EPISODE: THE MOONBASE

The Highlanders

It's 1746 and the TARDIS brings the Doctor, Ben and Polly to Culloden, Scotland, as the British forces have routed the forces of Prince Charlie and are in pursuit. The time travellers are captured by a band of Scots, among them a young piper named Jamie McCrimmon, but they in turn are captured by the British and taken to Inverness. Polly and a girl named Kirsty evade capture but face perilous odds if they are to rescue their friends from death or expulsion.

The Doctor is still a bit erratic following his regeneration as Patrick Troughton is still moulding him into the character he will play for the next three years, and as such he is still trying out a few different angles. The recorder he used previously in Power of the Daleks is still on hand but this time it thankfully doesn't supplement actual speech as it did before (and I have to remind myself that as far as the viewing public was concerned, that all just happened last week, whereas I have enjoyed five supplementary adventures between the stories) but he does show this interest in hats. This too, shall fall by the wayside. It's not like the Doctor didn't have hats before, and he shall again, but it was / will be something that he just wears, not makes a big deal about. Well, not until Matt Smith and his moronic fetish for a fez. But there's another second Doctor trait which shows up here: his penchant for disguises. In The Highlanders he disguises himself as an old beggar and then later on as an old woman, lending not just a bit of comedy to some scenes but a bit of cleverness to his character, blending in where he must. He goes so far as to adopt a rough German accent and passes himself off as a medical doctor, even if his methods of diagnosis for a headache include hitting someone on the head.

There's still more change in the air with this episode, the Doctor being the biggest, but there is the matter of content: The Highlanders is the last purely historical episode of the series until sometime in 1982. Moving away from the historical adventures is in keeping with the more science heavier edge the series was starting to take on, and any other forays into the past would have some element of that to it, be it alien invasions or more meddling as in The Time Meddler. 

And then there's the TARDIS family itself; it's just been the three of them since Dodo's abrupt departure in The War Machines but the character of Jamie as played by Fraser Hines resonated so well with the audience that he was made a regular and added to the crew at the end of the fourth episode. The decision was made after Jamie's original farewell scene was shot and the hasty rewrite was re-shot but his presence, although ultimately to become the longest serving of all companions (and that's before Big Finish would recruit him for their line of audios), would complicate things for the writers for the next few episodes. Not only were rewrites of the next stories required to accomodate this new character but there was also the same danger as with Katarina joining the TARDIS crew: a historical figure might not grasp the nuances of time travel (let alone modern speech) and be a burden to write for. They managed to find a way though, probably because Jamie's "modern" world was only 200 years before the series' contemporary production era and he would arguably have a lot more experience with things like doors and keys. And more importantly, whereas Katarina, had she stayed, would require protection by Steven and the Doctor, Jamie is a brawler and could look after himself  - and his companions - in the face of danger. But the "crowded TARDIS" syndrome would mean there would not be enough material to go around and character development might slow down somewhat with lines being doled out to actors without them actually meaning anything to them.

I first came across this adventure in the form of a Target novel back in the mid 80s when the line was being reinvigorated by older episodes adapted for page by the original writers, so in this case I read the novel version by Gerry Davis. I remember being tremendously taken by the story as I was not entirely familiar with these early days of the series given they were not all available to watch on TV, and when I finished it I could say I knew where this Jamie guy came from now. Davis paid a lot of attention to detail to recreate the tale in print, and to this day there are still no episodes of it around to watch, so imagination is going to fill in all the blanks until one day they are found (rumours suggest they have been they are just not ready to let us have them yet). Meanwhile, though, the BBC Radio Collection have released the audio of the story, even if the sound quality is a bit poor. Better than nothing at all, one would think.

Maybe one day.

NEXT EPISODE: THE UNDERWATER MENACE

Lost and Found

It's 1948 and the TARDIS has landed in post-war London as life is attempting to get back to normal. People are out and about once more, and flagship department store Henrik's is back in business like nothing has happened. Polly remembers going there as a child with her mother and losing her favourite teddy bear. Ben remembers looking for terrible things with his mates in the bomb craters. The Doctor starts having conversations with tins of baked beans. And then Polly realizes that they have arrived on the same day she lost her bear - and she's about to meet her past.

Lots of interesting notions in Lost and Found , and given that this is one of the Short Trips line from Big Finish there is not much time to let something pan out before the next concept is brought in. At 37 minutes though it is only 5 minutes shorter than an episode of the current TV series, which makes the pacing a bit more understandable. But in among the Doctor's chats with baked beans (there's more to it than that) and Ben being sarcastic, we're given more about Polly's backstory once more. This time we're told of her childhood, of a more innocent and young Polly who lost her teddy bear one day while out shopping with mummy, and her impressions of the world around her. There's not time to delve into her dreams of the future, though; the pace of the story demands a re-focus on other issues like the Doctor's odd conversations and hidden aliens who can stop time.

The thing about Short Trips when reviewed on their own is there is not as much to say about them as the longer episodes - not without going through the plot line by line - so the blog post is also a short one. But there is this to point out, and it's just an Easter egg of sorts: Henrik's department store will be a feature in the new series, starting with the episode Rose in the 2005 season. Then will dawn an era where the companion backstory gets a lot more fleshing out than ever before, and the new companions will seem that much more real. So far Polly has received a fair bit of attention in this respect, as have previous companions through either Big Finish or the three publishers producing their tales, although I would say Dodo Chaplet certainly got the most surprising reveals. With Polly, there is nothing extraordinary in her past, just blonde debutante adventures in the posh parts of London.

Are we ever going to get a Ben backstory episode?

NEXT EPISODE: THE HIGHLANDERS

Wonderland

It’s January in San Francisco of 1967 and the summer of love is somewhere out there. All the free spirits of the free world are converging on the Haight-Ashbury district to listen to music, to enjoy free love, and to take as many drugs as they can get their hands on. The Doctor, Polly and Ben arrive and meet a girl named Summer who is looking for her lost lover, and almost immediately the Doctor begins to experience visions from his past which are obviously messages – but is there a connection? A new hallucinogenic called Blue Moonbeams might just be it.

Wonderland is another of the short lived Telos novella range, and despite being only 93 pages long it packs more of a punch than the much longer Dying in the Sun which takes place a year earlier and just a few hundred miles away. It’s a different California vision; no glamour of Hollywood, just the commune lifestyle of the long haired hippies of the time (and probably all the associated b.o. that comes with it). Wonderland does not paint an entirely rosy picture of the time either; while for the most part the people arriving to take part in the celebrations are there to enjoy themselves and make a stand against the way the world is turning, there are also those who seek to benefit from the gathering in their own ways – the worst being the odious drug dealer known as the Goblin and a local party-throwing pusher named Mathilda. I’ve not been to San Francisco for a long time but when I was there last in 2002 the summer of love was very over, but just the way this all came together makes me believe that author Mark Chadbourn either was there or he’s just brilliant at evoking the era. My closest comparison would be to the community feeling of Kensington Market back in hometown Toronto.

I am still astounded that this much was packed into such a short tale. It may be because the narrative is told from Summer’s point of view as she tries to make sense of the Doctor, Ben and Polly and what they are doing there at the time. All she wants is to find Denny, her boyfriend, and she is frustrated at the Doctor’s nonchalant attitude about her plight, while his companions are more sympathetic. The Doctor is painted as a bit less of a clown than he is normally portrayed to be; he only seems to want to help Summer when it is going to be a direct benefit to his investigations, and at times he comes off as a bit sinister. Polly and Ben are themselves, but they understand that this is how the Doctor operates and back him up much to Summer’s outrage. The whole tone of their relationship is just a bit darker, with the companions accepting that the Doctor, sometimes, has his own agenda and they just follow where he leads. I enjoyed this new mysterious take on the second Doctor a great deal.

Once more I find myself annoyed that such brilliant work as what was done at Telos came to such a quick end at a mere 15 titles, but on the other hand at least I have them all. Sometimes a little nugget of change thrown in with the rest of the series continuity shows how versatile something like Doctor Who is to jump not only between media but also to have not-so-light moments for otherwise light characters. This is not to say that Telos were unique in this approach, but their edgier way of doing it just makes it seem all the better.

NEXT EPISODE: LOST AND FOUND

Invasion of the Cat-People

The TARDIS is drawn to Earth by a mysterious call which impacts all the members of the crew, but moreso Polly. They arrive to find a ghost-hunting expedition in an English manor house in 1994, and it gets more interesting when the leader of the group is found to be one of a species of tremendously long-lived aliens who have been stranded on Earth for 40,000 years. There are still others of her species on Earth, and where one of their calls has reached the Doctor and Polly, another had brought a group of vicious Cat-People who have a mission of their own, and it isn’t a nice one.

Huh. Cat-People. I think the cover illustration says it all. They are directly related to a species called the Cheetah People from the 1989 season (series) finale Survival, so when the book was originally printed they were somewhat fresh in the minds of fans and could be accepted as villains. Mind you, doing it this way, we’ve already dealt with alien sharks too, so credibility is being stretched somewhat. And things are not as cut and dry with the Cat-People either; they are subject to internal power struggles in their all-female ranks with the ambitious litter-runt, Lotuss, scheming to overthrow her mother the Queen Aysha. Female ambition at its best, although what else would one expect from cats? If they were male characters they’d be likened to Starscream and Megatron.

And they’re not the only aliens about; there are also the Euterpians, and they, too, have their own issues with maintaining their hierarchy. Over the millennia they have been on Earth they have gone their separate ways, and by 1994 they are desperate to get away despite having influenced aspects of Earth culture to perpetuate themselves. Mr Dent and Mrs Wilding have come to terms with living on Earth, but Thorsunn, Tim and Godwanna want to get away and will resort to whatever means they can to do so. Whereas Thorsunn has recruited the Cat-People, Tim’s slippery manipulation of Polly gets him a lot closer to his endgame faster, even if she resists him from time to time and has to be brought under his sway once more. But that's easily done; he just has to hum to her, as his species have the power to make things happen or grow or simply come into being through the sound of their songs.

Yes, more is revealed about Polly here, and it pretty much keeps in line with other prose produced for this period of the show (although Cat-People was written first, I have read it in this order as there’s more of a feel of the TARDIS crew being together for a while). We’re not really given a likeable picture of her sometime, I find; spoiled, pampered, society girl oblivious to the world around her. Her job with Professor Brett looks like an act of rebellion against her family who would rather her do anything other than work in such a menial role. It gives Ben’s nickname of her, “Duchess”, a bit more cred the more we see of this past of hers, but in travelling in the TARDIS she is growing beyond her past by leaps and bounds. But now add to it an affinity for the psionic powers which Tim and his people use. It all makes Ben a bit superfluous this episode doesn’t it? He’s with the Doctor for most of the tale and they end up going on some mad (and not exactly necessary) back to Arabia 20,000 years in history – an excursion which doesn’t really get anyone anywhere, least of all closer to the resolution of the plot. And all that jealousy Polly feels when anyone shows an interest in Ben doesn’t seem to really be reciprocated; Ben’s suspicion of Tim’s attention to Polly is more out of her general safety than it is his feelings towards her (if any). In moments when they are together, though, they do come off as the old married couple, highlighted by their bemusement with 1994 culture and dining at places like McDonalds (and Ben remarks that the food tastes like cardboard – libel, anyone?).

By the time I was finished reading this one (for the second time – the first was actually *in* 1994) I was left wondering where the editor was when this was being done. Author Gary Russell is no slouch when it comes to writing for Doctor Who and he’s one of the driving forces behind Big Finish these days so he knows what needs to be done, but here I just felt like the story wandered away too often in cases such as the aforementioned trip to the past and the McDonald’s lunch part. And the inclusion of the Cat-People themselves made me wonder who the real alien threat was – them or the other ones? There was just a feeling of things being too crowded in that respect; it has been managed before but either Russell wasn’t up to handling two sets of aliens or whoever was editing the range at the time didn’t give him enough direction on how to do it and maybe, maybe, the advice to drop one and focus on the other. And if it had been me, I would have said drop the Cat-People and focus on the others.

NEXT EPISODE: WONDERLAND

Dying in the Sun

It's 1947 and Hollywood is as glamorous and glitzy as ever. Star Light Pictures, an upstart production company, it taking the town by storm with rumours that its new feature - a film called Dying in the Sun - is a special effects tour de force the likes of which have never been seen before. The Doctor is in town with Ben and Polly, and his investigations into the death of an old friend eventually lead him back to Star Light Pictures. No-one can really be bothered though; the LAPD don't seem very interested in the Doctor's theories and would rather chase the son of one of their own as the culprit. And with a new movie being the talk of the town, all eyes are on the celebrities and stars around the project, because everyone is so beautiful and perfect. Too perfect.

Hum. The first thing I have to ask is when did the Doctor meet this Holly wood director old friend who is now dead? He's only just regenerated and has been with Polly and Ben the whole time and they don't remember him, so it must have been somewhere in his earlier incarnation. I don't really see the first Doctor as the hanging in Hollywood type, but seeing as Jon De Burgh Miller got a lot of things wrong with this book this is just one more to add to the list.

I think my biggest complaint to sum up the experience of reading Dying in the Sun is the vagueness of the whole thing. He's probably not been to Los Angeles ever, that much is certain from reading the narrative - this could be any city with streets. Granted the LA of 1947 was not the LA of today (I've not been there either so I am guessing and probably accurately) but a little research goes a long way. Oh he made sure to make it a crowded city as there are a lot of crowds in the book, but they're all lumped together as "shocked diners" or celebrities or stars or (my favourite) police or cops, and sometimes the latter example happens from line to line on the same page.

The people are not really made out well here. This De Sande guy who is running Star Light doesn't come across as dangerous or bad at all. Okay his motivation is clear to him as he is under the sway of aliens he and a lot of other people drank, but he never made me feel like he was a real threat. Same could be said of the rest of the people working with him. Except for a group of robed guys who are actually rotting corpses who aren't even that scary because they're possessed by the same aliens everyone else drank. Police Captain Wallis is a bit of a mystery but he's obviously in cahoots, so much that he is busy hunting his troublemaker adopted son, Chate, for the murder of the Doctor's friend. And Chate has a crush on a washed out movie starlet named Maria who is making a hell of a comeback thanks to the aliens.

The aliens, right. They're called Selyoids and you can drink them and they become part of you and somehow alter everyone's perception of you making you sexier and radiant. It's like real life airbrushing. In this sense they enter a symbiotic relationship with the host but they bliss the host out like drugs of a sort. They want to be a part of the human race, and they've started by infiltrating the film industry as a means to access the public. And in enough numbers you don't need to drink them to be influenced, and the best way to reach a wider audience is to do it through the movies.

Polly drinks from the Kool Aid and becomes one of the instant celebrities, with the voices of the aliens inside her telling her she's pretty and better than everyone else and deserves star treatment and she pulls a right stunt dissing the Doctor and Ben in front of everyone at a gala. Oh yes this is another novel telling us how pretty Polly is with yet more people falling over her and telling her she has star potential. No mention by her of her modelling moments back in London, even if they're about 18 years in the future. And all Ben seems to want to do for the first half of the book is sleep.

Here's an interesting one though - the TARDIS isn't in the story. It's not even mentioned. And it's not like it absolutely has to be, but it's just odd that it doesn't come up once so we have no idea how long the Doctor and company have been there, and where the TARDIS is. The Doctor mentions to someone that he "found himself in Los Angeles" which could mean either the TARDIS landed there, or it's somewhere else in America and they are travelling without it for a bit. I think that's really the only good thing I found out of this one: the potential for there to be more happening on either side of it, and hopefully it's better adventures than this one.

NEXT EPISODE: INVASION OF THE CAT PEOPLE

The Murder Game

In the year 2136 the Doctor receives a mysterious mayday call directed at the TARDIS. The message does not say who it is from but only that he is needed, so along with Polly and Ben the Doctor arrives at the disused Hotel Galaxian where a host of people are there to play a murder mystery game. Hoping to make contact with the message's sender, the Doctor joins in but soon things become too real with an actual murder and then another for them to solve. But the Doctor suspects there is more going on, and his suspicions are confirmed with the arrival of a savage alien race known as the Selachians, and they are not there to play games.

So despite it being a Steve Lyons novel, whose work I usually enjoy, I was not really as taken with this one as I wanted to be. Maybe because I don't like murder mystery games to start with, or maybe because the players here are a pretty unlikely sort who all seem to want to be elsewhere (which begs the question why be on the station in the first place) and to top it they're all kinda cliche'd characters at that. This applies to our main cast as well; they don't feel as real as they should for some reason. At this point, though, Ben and Polly are still coming to terms with the Doctor's regeneration so they might still be a bit guarded around him but they're openly saying they trust him and are his best friends.There is even a bit of development for Polly and Ben's relationship, with hints about their future descendants tossed in which the Doctor is quick to shush up. Oh and Polly was, apparently, a model in London before she became a secretary for Professor Brett. Imagine that - a model and then a secretary, although this kind of life doesn't exactly stick with the posh image of her pre-TARDIS life alluded to in Steven Cole's Ten Little Aliens (although this one was published first). Ben gets knocked out a couple times, although the truth is if you get hit hard enough to lose consciousness your brain would turn to goo, so more than once in one novel would have Ben with as many brain bleeds as professional boxer. And one of the vapid female players of the game takes to Ben and makes Polly jealous, although every time it happens there's this internal dialogue Polly has about what right she has to be jealous.

The era the novel is set in is a bit of a strange choice. The back of the book says it's 2146 but once I started reading I saw it was 2136 so for a while I thought there was going to be some 10 year time jump in the plotline, but it turned out to be a typo. Still, whichever year it is, it's worth noting that the Daleks would / will invade Earth around 2158; it may have been 1964 television production values but The Dalek Invasion of Earth didn't seem to be on the same wavelength as this book where futuristic notions like orbiting hotels are concerned. Colony worlds maybe - there's a sly reference to a planet called Terra Alpha which will feature in a seventh Doctor adventure but again, placement seems odd as those events were purportedly some centuries in Earth's future.

The only thing I can think of is that the book was either written in hurry or a "safe" way; BBC Books had only just started making their own novels and their mandate was to pick up from the Virgin Publishing books but in a less graphic way, which meant the violence and sex was cut right down for the first few, and as a whole the series started getting this "dumbed-down" feel to it. The Murder Game was one of the first in the new line and could have been a hasty self edit re-write of something that was going to be submitted to Virgin until their license went away.

Lyons attempts to so something every Doctor Who writer dreams of, though: create a legacy monster to rival the Daleks. The Selachians are very similar to the Daleks in many ways; physically they are not powerful creatures if they are removed from their native marine environments, so they have created fearsome shark-like exosuits to carry them places they cannot go. They are merciless monsters but they differ from the Daleks in that they try to make deals with other races who they deem beneath them but save the contempt until they are on the offensive. The Selachians have gone as far as to create luxurious areas in their space cruiser for business dealings to put prospective clients at ease, and they have enough aesthetic sense to realize that Polly is attractive and can be used as their PR agent, which is great because he she was a model and a secretary, right?

Was this supposed to be a comedy?

Despite being a bit too over the top for me as villains, the Selachians impressed the BBC Books folks enough to return for another novel sometime later, but also made the jump into audio with Big Finish a couple times. In this outing, though, I'm not sure how that happened. At least it won't be for a while.

NEXT EPISODE: DYING IN THE SUN