Cartmel/McCoy is my favorite era of Doctor Who. The final season in particular is amazingly good but i love all of it, even the bad episodes (the only one i don’t like is Dragonfire)
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But Dragonfire has that great cliffhanger!
(I like dragonfire more every time I see it. It doesn’t work but it is good at not working)
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That cliffhanger is incredible
Really great example of the Cartmel era’s rushed, slapdash production (a more positive example being the way that Ghost Light had to be cut to fit 3 episodes, thus turning it into a fascinating fever dream) (or for a very bad example, Sophie Aldred nearly biting it during Battlefield’s production due to a set malfunction)
I think the problem with the rest of the story for me is that it’s just kinda boring. Like, it’s definitely better on an objective level than Time and the Rani, but i enjoy that one more for what a bonkers, kaleidoscopic train wreck it is.
It does have that fucking rad death scene for the villain that’s like a budget Raiders of the Lost Ark face melt
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Battlefield has some great stuff going on but it could use a re-edit in a lot of places.
Started rewatching Remembrance of the Daleks and knew what my new pic had to be.
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Have you seen the DVD special edition? It has a re-edit, in fact, that puts all the scenes back in script order. And boy howdy, does it makes more sense!
I already liked the story, but most of my reservations are eliminated with this version. The only things I’d change now are things that are too late to change, like the costume and prop design.
Neat! I will definitely check it out, if I can find it.
Someone spout classic Doctor Who serials at me and I will explain in detail why they are good or not.
Enlightenment this is easily the best episode from 5th doctor era
It is! For so many reasons! It’s hard to begin a diatribe, as one reason is as good as the next.
Let’s start with a factoid. This is, to date, the only televised Doctor Who story both written and directed by women. Chew on that for a second, and many of its other surprising diversions from Saward Era Standard make a hell of a lot of sense.
But yes, there’s the unabashed theatricality. There’s the moody lighting, for one of the only times in all of Davison’s run. There’s the focus on characters and their motivations. There aren’t many out-and-out villains in this; even the clearly not-great entities (like that crazy/awesome/terrifying pirate lady) have their positive points, and even the less-awful characters are less than wholly good. There’s the way the bored old Eternals view even the Guardians’ struggle as unimaginably petty and dull.
As this is the culmination of Turlough’s introduction, it of course gives him a ton to do, which is welcome. I’d say that Strickson is one of the last companions most people would remember, yet he’s always so fascinating to watch. Whether he’s subtly pulling focus from Davison or frothing at the mouth and screaming about Tractators,
Strickson knows how to work a camera. He really feels like a 1960s companion delivered to an unwelcome era. That the decade he landed in is so fraught for interesting companions makes it all the more bizarre that people overlook him. It’s him and Ace! There’s nobody else!
But, yeah. The script works on a poetic level that you don’t see too often in classic Who. Or new Who, for that matter. The closest parallels would have to be Survival, with all its feminist fantasy/lesbian overtones, and the Buddhist psychedelia of Kinda. Everything in here is a metaphor of some sort, to the point where you start wondering if the metaphors are themselves metaphors, or if what’s actually physically happening in the story is anything like the point of the exercise. Even if you just let all of that sit as background while you watch Mark Strickson leap over railings and play sub to a giant pirate lady with an eyeball floor, it gives the story such a rich texture. It really makes a better impression of the show than the surrounding era deserves.
I’d say that Enlightenment and Kinda both would fit much more easily into the Cartmel era than the grime-and-sweat Saward one. They’re good anyway, but here they stick out all the more compared to what’s around them.
So, yeah. This is indeed easily the best Davison-era serial. And it tops a very small shortlist of stories that you could use to make his tenure actually seem interesting.
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This is a great writeup! I agree with every part (especially comparisons to Kinda, one of the other highpoints of the era)
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Thank you. Yeah, you know, I had to come back to Kinda recently. I didn’t fully appreciate it the first time around, years back when I was pushing through all of the stories, and the dissonance between the boredom I’d felt at the time and the way that people spoke of it made me feel all the more resistant to revisiting it, all the while acknowledging that I probably missed something at the time.
I’m glad I did. I think, quite unfairly, the flood-lit staginess put me right off and made it hard to distinguish from the likes of Four to Doomsday (which I quite like, actually, in that Hartnell/Season 24 way). And, yeah, the whole era should have been more like this.
I should draw up an artsiness scale for Doctor Who stories.
Have you seen the DVD version with the CGI snake?
It’s actually really well-done, and doesn’t stand out. Unlike the original, which for all its charm very much draws attention to itself.
when i was watching the whole classic series through i think Davison’s run was my least favorite. I wanted to like him but the writing and production was so godawful during those years that he rarely got the chance to tease out a defining performance; he always felt so un defined, except by the show getting ahead of itself during the 80s and going Quirk First. So like, people always think of “cricket guy” and “celery lapel” which are just meaningless affectations. Compare Tom Baker, who had the scarf and jellybabies and uhhh, being Tom Baker, but was also just an unmistakable take on the role and felt like he was bending the show around him. That’s the kind of Doctor i want.
In the better written, better directed episodes (Enlightenment, Androzani, Kinda, Snakedance, hell even bits of Castrovalva), though, he really shined. In Androzani, in particular, he gets to say some genuinely witty, good, Doctor-ass lines (thanks, Robert Holmes) and is distinctly more dry and subtle than any adjacent Doctor actors would have been with the same bits. i think i just expected more from his tenure because of how amazing the JNT/80s Doctor Who started – T-Bakes’ last season is one of my favorites in the whole show (someone talk about Warrior’s Gate next).
Also, Fivey had just the worst companions, though other than Matthew Waterhouse it’s not the fault of the actors – they’re mostly just written to bicker and get in trouble and whine at the Doctor and are a real drag. Nyssa and Turlough had potential but even with them i mostly just remember “TRACTATORS!!” and a whole lot of yelling stuff like “what?! Doctor!!!” at bad cliffhangers. “Oh no! He sabotaged this base for no reason, then jumped over a railing and DROWNED INSTANTLY” (the actual worst cliffhanger in the whole show)
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Yeah, and I think that’s exactly the kind of danger that Moffat went into during the first half of his era. Luckily he figured out what the hell he could do with himself around the time that Capaldi was cast.
It’s a shame that the production was such a mess in the early '80s, as, miscast as he probably was, Davison clearly was a good actor and you can tell that he gave it his all. It’s just that it’s so rare that everyone was on the same page that his understated performance is easily plowed over.
Funny thing about Adric, I actually really like him alongside Tom Baker. When Davison comes along, though, Waterhouse just goes into full-on adolescent snit.
You’ve managed to name most of the good Davison stories, yes. Though I have more of a fondness for Castrovalva than you’re showing (mostly cuz it’s gorgeous), and honestly, for all its problems, I’d stick Mawdryn in there as well. I mean, I hate elements of it (spaghetti brains), but it’s absolutely one of the most _interesting _stories of the time. I think if you were to sculpt a season out of just those six stories, you’d be onto something mostly neat.
Something about Androzani, that you begin to hint at: I don’t think it should be as good as it is. I think there are only two real reasons why the serial works as well as it does:
- Grame Harper
- The actors, and their decisions
I’m on the record as no big fan of Bob Holmes, though he has his moments. I don’t know that Androzani really is one of them, though it’s hard to separate the script from the production. It’s one of the last few things that Holmes wrote, and on paper it seems like Holmes spinning his wheels, churning out one more piece of manufactured pulp filled with the same Holmesian archetypes spouting the same snappy limes.
But, something happened here. Harper took this more seriously than any director since Dougie Camfield (and probably more than even he did). Or, at least since Paul Joyce. (Guess who ghost-directed hunks of Warrior’s Gate.) He made every scene, every shot dynamic. He got in there on the floor to make sure it all worked, and had energy. He got the lighting right, the camera angles. He paced shots to the millisecond. He gave the actors space to do their thing. He came up with all kinds of clever ideas on his feet, like Davison’s delayed regeneration…
… (and the way his actual regeneration was stylized).
Then, the thing that you hint at, the acting. Whereas Tom or Jon or anyone else would chew on Holmes’s banter, there are some fascinating decisions going on with the cast as a whole. The villains choose to play large and theatrical, often directly to the camera. This was an accident of production that Harper adored, so he went with it. To contrast, Davison dials it way down. He gets to be wry and cynical, which his Doctor has more than earned by this point, and honestly should have been showing much earlier, but he buries it.
It’s like the Zaroff thing. Pat Troughton became the Doctor who we know, who went on to inspire most subsequent performances, in the middle of The Underwater Menace. To that point, Troughton was having a ball, hamming up the part. Wigs, whistles, pratfalls – all of that would continue in some form, but he realized in the course of shooting one particular scene that there’s no way he could compete for the camera with Joseph Furst’s Zaroff. So, he underplayed. He barely did anything at all. And that became his Doctor, from then on.
(Seriously, doesn’t this read almost exactly like a scene from Androzani?)
That’s kind of what’s happening here. The villains get to be overwhelming and camp, and to fill the screen, allowing Davison’s Doctor to be this hard, determined little walnut at the center, holding it together, his perpetually mild exterior now hiding a growing rage and determination that shows all the stronger for how little he allows it to show.
When people talk about Androzani as Davison’s defining performance, the one that came way too late into his run, this is what they’re seeing. And I don’t know that it’s really due to any brilliance on Holmes’s end, except inasmuch as he delivered a structurally competent script (a hard find in those days) with witty, yet what in another production might be absurdly melodramatic, dialogue.
Here, let the bad guys consciously milk the melodrama. Drain it out, so you can see how fucking serious the Doctor is. He’s in another world from these people. And that’s what makes it special.
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ok real quick, what’s that Davison clip filmed on? i love the way the flashes of light linger on it and ive been wondering what the medium is for years
I like Androzani for all the above-mentioned reasons but I find the not-Phantom of the Opera being gross and rapey to Peri too much to want to watch it again.
Interiors were usually (and in this case) shot on 2" quad videotape up until season 23, at which point they switched to 1" tape. You can see the abrupt drop in definition for those last four seasons of the show. Also up until that season all exteriors tended to be shot on 16mm film. There are exceptions to everything, of course. Spearhead was all 16mm, and looks lovely for it. The Sontaran Experiment was all OB video, and it at least looks consistently OK.
More than the recording format, the glow is probably due to the ancient and finnicky video cameras the BBC still used in the early '80s, with their bulbs and everything.
My real question: what was Snake doing on Androzani Major?
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Yeah, that’s not good. I mean, it happens in basically Every Single story she’s in, until eventually she’s basically mind-raped to death. Which, appalling as it is, the show then doesn’t even have the guts to stick with and see through the consequences.
She’s basically torn apart bodily in both stories by Philip Martin, so, you know, fuck him. I can’t watch either of his serials.
He also wrote a story for Big Finish, in which Charley Pollard is force-impregnated with alien insect spawn, her abdomen distended like an oversized beach ball, and… what the fucking hell is wrong with that man? I just can’t deal with him.
But, also, what’s with Bob Holmes and his Phantom-likes? Magnus Greel, Sharez Jek (presumably named in part after Jekyll, because Holmes is so subtle); even Crispy Master, from The Deadly Assassin.
Regarding The Sun Makers: among other charming traits, Bob Holmes doesn’t like to pay his taxes. (Well, at least it’s about something.)
I need to admit, this is one of a few stories I’ve never bothered to go back and watch again. For the longest time I kept mixing it up with its neighbor Underworld, which impressed me more of the two due to its weird all-Chromakey production. People regularly cite The Sunmakers as a quiet classic, but between my not being that impressed with Holmes in general, being totally non-plussed with the serial’s production, being totally bored the first time through it, and being unduly irritated with yet another suggestion of Holmes’s unsavory conservative bent, I’m lacking in a certain motivation here.
I do, however, have a copy on my hard drive. Do I do this, just to make sure I’m talking from an informed position, or do I give myself a break? Decisions, decisoins.
I guess it’s been nagging me ever since those pictures started coming in from Pluto. Hmm.
Sorry, another thought:
I’ve often wondered what might have been different, had Mac Hulke not gotten angry and stormed off after season 11, and had he quite rightly have taken the script editor position instead of Bob Holmes.
Hulke, of course, being the actual communist party member who wrote all of the stories about indigenous rights and anti-colonialism, anti-industry.
He’s the one who created the Time Lords, that Bob Holmes later twisted into what they became.
Instead of the super creative ultra-leftie intellectual, the future of the show wound up being shaped by a conservative, racist, classist bore who wrote half-plagiarized sensationalist pulp filled with snappy dialogue. And who people in turn idolize as one of The Great TV Writers, for some reason. Instead of the guy who actually was great, who by all rights should have had the job instead.
Ah well. The Deadly Assassin is pretty awesome, anyway.
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