Format: DVD

Warts & All: Primords

Quote: Our liver playing us up again this morning, is it, Professor?

Review: Obviously, any portrayal of a fascistic UK that supports reckless fracking is completely far-fetched but other than that and the rather risible Primords this one makes for a cracking end to a great season. What’s striking is that, just as Ambassadors featured the first ever DW car chase, it’s taken this long for the series to explore the notion of a parallel universe.

As with most such stories, the parallels are a bit obvious – these are all the characters you know and love, but, you know, bad. Apart from drill engineer Greg Sutton, who is the same old rugged dependable male chauvinist in all universes. Despite they’re being myriad choices the events taking place in the parallel world follow the same course. There’s still an Inferno drilling project at the same location looking to break through the Earth’s crust and unlock untold energy – energy being a British priority after the Nuton power complex got shut down in The Silurians. And just as that project had its grumpy director and attendant civil servant, so does Project Inferno.

In this case, we have Olaf Pooley as Professor Stahlman, rather excellent and an utterly brilliant foil for the Doctor to go up against, until he has to go all Jekyll and Hyde on us – plus the superlative Christoper Benjamin as Sir Keith Gold, providing something of a rarity in DW – a rather affable civil servant who’s on the sensible side of the argument. Actually, I’m interested to know what his fascist version was like – he’s never seen, because he’s already met with an unfortunate accident at that point. The implication is that he was seeking to stop the project though so I can only conclude he was just as nice and sensible in the nasty world. For all its simplicity, the parallel universe does present tantalising hints of this alternative world, with Big Brother-like posters and a swastikish emblem, and the key regulars – Brigade Leader Lethbridge-Stewart and Section Leader Elisabeth Shaw are terrific, Nick Courtney very clearly enjoying himself behind that eyepatch. Quite difficult to buy an evil Benton, but there you go, can’t have everything.

Ultimately, the parallel universe serves its role admirably – which is to show us the disastrous consequences of the drilling project, to deliver dramatic cost ahead of the Doctor’s efforts to avert the catastrophe. Without it all we would have as an audience would be dire warnings and just as with fracking protest groups nobody pays much attention to them. Seeing the end of the world – familiar characters set to go out in a very inglorious blaze – well, that’s one way to get us all to sit up and take notice. There’s a good deal of action and drama and an especially effective cliffhanger, with countdown and clever cuts as Evil Stahlman (actually not unlike Good Stahlman, but with beady dark glasses) trains a gun on the Doctor and the drillhead is about to blow. And it all ends with a lovely shot of Liz chuckling to herself, with no suggestion that we are never going to see her again. So it’s a parting shot that makes me sad at the same time. And always leaves me wanting to either print the screen and frame it or write a proper Liz farewell story. I know I’ll do one or the other one of these days.

Anyway, I digress. Overall, I think this makes for a rip-roaring adventure yarn. It’s just a shame about those monsters.

Format: DVD

Warts & All: You Only Die Twice. Maybe Thrice.

Quote: “It’s all right. I won’t hurt you.”

Review: Wow, it’s kind of odd singing the praises right now of anything that ends with someone who has fought for a given outcome then simply walks away, but this remains one of my all-time favourite DW stories. And that’s in spite of a host of imperfections and – on this occasion – having some stretch of the rewatch spoiled by a mood so thoroughly depressed by real world events going on around me. It takes a lot to ruin a good old bit of classic Doctor Who for me, but conversely it takes a heck of a lot to shake me from my convictions when it’s a story I’ve loved for so long. Ambassadors is, in a sense, a bit before my time, but it does contain my earliest ever DW memory – that of haunting space-suited figures marching along in slow-motion. As a result, my affection for this is pretty deep-seated, although I am fully aware of its faults. What lets it down most in the visual stakes is some hammy fight sequences and (certainly when watched at an episode a day) being able to spot the same guys die more than once. Oops.

Ah well, as with Silurians, it defies the format imposed upon it somewhat, managing to come up with an interesting variation on alien invasion – the aliens are peaceful, but are exploited by a misguided and vengeful general hoping to turn the world against them. John Abinieri is great as General Carrington, lending great sympathy (“It’s my moral duty.”) to a role that always puts me in mind of General Williams in Malcolm Hulke’s later Frontier In Space.

There are a number of other guest roles that invest this one a lot of appeal: Cyril Shaps (last seen in Tomb Of The Cybermen) as a professor Liz Shaw recognises from her Cambridge days, Ronald Allen (of Crossroads!) as Ralph Cornish and the mighty Michael Wisher provides some soft-spoken David Attenborough style commentary as the news reporter on site. Some aspects of the adventure make no sense – for example, the baddies build devices to communicate with and control the alien Ambassadors, but they’re shown to only transmit simple instructions and yet they manage to pull off robberies and the like using them. It’s like trying to control sentient beings with an early programming language like LOGO. And one of the mercenaries is busted out of prison, as though he’s a key member of Carrington’s force – and he has a presence about him to suggest he’s a major player among the bad guys – but he’s never seen again, replaced it seems by the character of Reegan. Who is almost but not quite on a par with Scorby in the Seeds Of Doom: ie. a nasty piece of work who you actually almost but not quite like.

There are contrivances and convolutions to draw out the adventure to a full seven episodes, with multiple inventive attempts on the Doctor’s life and at times the pace lags, but the action sequences give it a bit of a small screen blockbuster feel and the unique cliffhanger reprise within a title sequence break injects an added sting of drama and excitement into proceedings.

The mystery surrounding the missing astronauts and the faceless visors of the figures striding around in their spacesuits really sells the menace and personally I would have preferred never to have seen what the aliens looked like under those helmets. Pertwee is fab as is Courtney’s Brigadier, but for me Liz steals the show somewhat in her scenes – even involving herself in a slice of the action, with the help of a stuntman. The quote above is from her, when she is grabbed by one of the thugs holding her prisoner and it’s an absolute gem of a moment. What firmly cements this as something special though is that ending. It’s beautifully understated – and brave. Not least because the Doctor is handing over actual peace negotiations to humans who, quite recently, blew up some caves housing another alien race. Quatermass meets Bond meets The Avengers.

Quite the cocktail and somewhat messily shaken and stirred, but downed one glass at a time it hits the spot.

Format: DVD

Warts & All: Big Rubber Dinosaur

Quote: That’s typical of the military mind, isn’t it? Present them with a new problem and they start shooting at it.

Review: What a beautifully constructed sci-fi morality tale. Finally, an alien race who have a valid claim on the Earth, because they’re not aliens and are the world’s original owners. Humans are the squatters, although it’s not their fault they evolved. Well, some of them anyway. Peaceful co-existence with the Silurians would be disaster, of course. You’d have millions of lizards coming up from underground, stealing all our jobs and the planet’s overcrowded as it is. But you can’t blame the Doctor for trying. Belligerence, primitive fears and narrow-minded bigotry plagues both sides and the reasoned voices are few.

The many arguments pit military against science, friends against each other, everybody against bureaucracy and science against biological warfare. And the story understands the reality: most such situations end hopelessly. It’s more than the Doctor’s bitter disappointment we feel on that closing note.

It’s all wonderfully played with a cast that includes Paul Darrow as a UNIT Captain, Fulton Mackay as Dr Quinn, not the medicine woman but rather a duplicitous scientist who wants to exploit the Silurians for the knowledge they can give him, and Peter (Nyder) Miles as Dr Lawrence, the officious and overwrought director of the research facility. The sniping between him and the UNIT contingent, especially the Doctor, is better than any shooting war. And he even has a curious moment of butting heads against a minor employee who seems particularly possessive over his phone. Magic. Then Geoffrey Palmer shows up as Masters, government secretary, permanent or otherwise. Bonus! His character is one of the more reasonable government officials we get to see in the Pertwee era. Amusing when he decides his course of action will be to wait on further reports and ultimately tragic when he goes on to be the carrier of an engineered plague, delivering one of the most horrific and terrifying scenarios in all Doctor Who, to my mind.

It’s Survivors territory, is what it is and gives a chilling sense of very real people keeling over and dying in the streets of London. The tension in the lab as the Doctor and Liz battle to fight a cure is easily a match for the guns and grenades action that the UNIT era is more famous for. Pertwee and Caroline John are an absolute delight here and Courtney blazes as the Brigadier. And even though ultimately he is the one who bombs the shit out of the Silurians we understand why. Everyone’s views and motives are clear and we get them, irrespective of whether we agree with them or condone their actions.

The dinosaur looks rubbish, but DW has never had a great track record with larger monsters and this is not a story about monsters. This is all about the promise and potential and the frequent shortfall and capacity for horrors/atrocities within ourselves.

Absolutely bloody brilliant.

Format: DVD

Warts & All: Rubber Tentacle Wrestling!

Quote: Shoes!

Review: After a short break, Doctor Who returns – in colour! It’s funny now we take such things for granted and I know our family wouldn’t have noticed the change since we only had a B&W telly in our house for years. Still, it was something to experience the shift in the context of my Who rewatchathon and beyond the addition of colour it’s a different show.

It feels like an Avengers episode, with plastic mannequins in overalls prowling the woods in search of pink plastic glow globes and strange shiny faced people up to no good at a plastics factory. Pertwee makes his mark as the new Doctor, even though – or maybe because – he’s supposed to be all out of sorts and disoriented post-regeneration. It creates some nice comic touches to bridge the transformation from Troughton. There’s no Steed and Mrs Peel vibe but Caroline John as Liz Shaw is an instant hit (with me anyway) and she’s shown cracking on with the science bit while the Doctor’s still searching for his shoes and his lost marbles. And when they do meet they get to share a few nice moments as (near) intellectual equals, creating an enjoyable science club dynamic with the Brigadier on the sidelines.

In some respects it’s a fairly run of the mill invasion story, the battle with Autons at the factory almost a reenactment of one with the Cybermen in Invasion, but the plastics element and the nature of the Nestenes lend it a distinctive quirkiness about it. With it all condensed into four parts it also feels like there’s a lot going on. There are oddities: the Autons’ motives for attempted kidnap of the Doctor are tenuous and who the hell would want to go see an exhibit of civil servants at Madame Tussauds? But it’s all delivered with flair and panache and it’s not shy about dishing out the scares and genuine horror along with the action. Besides the obvious hall of fame shop window mannequin rampage, Hugh Burden is memorably creepy as Channing, ably assisted by Who semi-regular John Woodnutt, and it’s even a pleasant surprise to spot dependable Prentis Hancock as a reporter.

The standard Autons are a formidable and unstoppable enemy, I do hope they’ll return. All in all, this is a new era setting out its stall right out of the gate, establishing UNIT’s credentials and promoting the Brigadier to key series regular. And much as it seems a shame to have the Doctor stranded on one planet in one time, instead of being able to freely travel anywhere between Cardiff and London, this remains my favourite new Doctor intro story.