Bob Holmes’s dialogue is extremely snappy and memorable, and an episode like Ribos Operation lives on its dialogue (which thankfully was absent any of the racist conservative traits one typically associates with his stories)
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Yes. I mean, clearly it’s a big carry-away for many people. It’s a hard balance, interrogating a thing that tends to get away without much question, without dismissing or diminishing what tangible good there is to see there.
I tend to say fuck it; open the discussion wide, and let people lick their scratches. At least the topic is out there.
You know what, though, I have trouble with Ribos inasmuch as, pithy dialogue aside, it’s a prime example of Feudal Europe World, which is probably my least favorite mode of planetary travel. Because of course, yes, any planet we visit is going to be filled with creatures that look exactly like humans, living a society exactly like 12th century Europe, armor, swords, society, and all. And there’s such a point to doing this kind of story when you’re traveling around in a time machine.
I felt validated when, a few years after I started to develop and actively grouse about this observation, RTD spoke in an interview about one of his earliest stipulations for new Who: no tabards. He talked about how he couldn’t stand when they landed on an alien planet and it was just medieval humans talking about the lord in yon castle. I can’t find the interview now; it’s out there somewhere.
Season 16 alone contains three of these fuckers, out of six stories. I can do with Peladon, from seasons 9-11, because those stories have real things to talk about. Something like Ribos stretches my patience, though, just in its formulation.
And that’s kind of the thing with Bob Holmes. With him, big, bold ideas are scant. He always grabs the most convenient narrative container to hand, and then just fills it with his ongoing Holmes Stew, riffing to amuse himself like my fucking dad. This is part of why Deadly Assassin stands out so strongly to me, inasmuch as it expresses such a rich, developed artistic vision, which is a big break from the kind of noodly craftmanship that makes up the bulk of his output, genial as it might often be.
And Ribos strikes me as that: genial pulp stew from a man unchallenged, served in the closest bowl available. Even if the chicken is particularly tender, this… isn’t what I’m looking for from art, you know. I don’t look for comfort and familiarity and reassurance and well-honed masterly craft. I look to be challenged, broadened, lifted. I want to come away better, not more smug with my existing lot.
I’m surely being unfair; see the first few paragraphs above. I guess this is another for the pile, alongside The Sun Makers. Which again, at least is about something dear to Holmes’s heart, so… that’s something.
Regarding the Key to Time, there’s also a structural weirdness. It seems self-evident that the original intention was for the so-called white guardian to really be the black guardian – which is why he’s sending the Doctor on this quest in the first place, and why he presents himself as so ostentatiously benevolent. You know, Satan. Yet the final scenes of the season bungle this reading, with the black guardian ineptly disguising himself as the nice man we met before. Surely the point of the whole exercise is that the Doctor had been misled by chaos, only to realize it in the very end and to make amends?
Ah well. It was a confused time, production-wise.
Incidentally, the way this discussion usually goes in Doctor Who fan circles:
- Someone calls me out for suggesting that Holmes is racist
- I point out Talons
- Yes but Yes but Yes but: Chang was written kind of sympathetically, and there weren’t any good Chinese actors to cast in a British lead role in 1977
- I respond fuck you, and also, hi: http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Yellow_Fever_and_How_to_Cure_It_(TV_story)
Incidentally, that Yellow Fever and How to Cure It would have been produced so soon after Androzani may reflect well on my notion that Androzani’s positive qualities may not have much to do with the script in and of itself.
Incidentally, now that Douglas Adams’ recently uncovered Krikketmen treatment is being adapted into a novel that isn’t Life, The Universe and Everything, and Tom Baker has now thrown himself wholeheartedly into audioland, I wonder if Dr. Who Meets Scratchman will ever get a Big Finish adaptation.
Apropos of Douglas Adams, I adore City of Death and the plot and dialog feel very much of a piece with his other work, but I wonder how much of it was written by Dennis Fisher and Graham Williams.
I had kind of always attributed the majority to Adams but now I don’t know.
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Fisher wrote the original script, but it needed to be rewritten to change the setting to Paris among other things, and rewrites by others (because Fisher wasn’t available to perform them) for production purposes got the David Agnew credit. So Williams sat perennial procrastinator Adams down and worked through a rewrite, with the help of lots of booze. In Adams’s own words, “he took me back to his place, locked me in his study and hosed me down with whisky and black coffee for a few days, and there was the script.” (Thanks Phil Sandifer for giving me this story originally and thanks Wikipedia for reminding me of the details just now.)
So if i had to guess, it is 90% a Douglas Adams original and Fisher/Williams got credit for the original draft/Adams-herding, respectively.
Anyone else here ride for The Pirate Planet? I feel like the production gets in the way of that one, but what a great script. (Whole Key to Time season rules, imo, even the worse parts.)
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Oh yeah. The Pirate Planet is brimming with great ideas.
That’s one that could benefit from a big finish version, I reckon
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I still quote lines of The Pirate Planet because that script was brimming with good jokes. All of the sky demon oaths that the Captain made were great and it is fun to improvise new ones in dnd games.
(Phil Sandifer, like all doctor who fans and writers is 50% bad takes 50% good takes)
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The pirate captain is such a fun character and i enjoy how much the actor hams it up, but i wish the turnaround in the last part was sold a bit better. It was a really great idea for the time and for that kind of show to have the over-the-top villain turn out to be a tragic figure but you have to read between the lines a bit to pick up on that aspect.
I give Sandifer a little bit more credit than that, among other things for being on the right side of the Talons of Weng-Chiang issue than most fans are (to tie into earlier ITT discussion of that story: i really don’t have time for it because of how ugly the racism is). It’s cool that he’s used his platform as a reasonably well-known Doctor Who fan to boost up obscure writers he likes, and Eruditorum Press is probably one of the best “geek culture” blogs out there as a result. Also, TARDIS Eruditorum is fantastic and along with Adventures With the Wife in Space was a perfect accompaniment to watching the whole classic show (because i didn’t personally know anyone else stupid enough to go through it with me).
All that said, yeah, he has some questionable opinions especially about the new series. I’m mostly not a Moffat hater but i would never ever go to bat for him as much as Sandifer does, and his high opinion of Peter Harness’s episodes is kinda baffling. Like, you could argue that Harness has some good ideas for stories, but they just flat-out don’t work for Doctor Who.
Also if you listen to any podcasts Sandifer is on, he’s a mostly likable midwestern nerd, but he’s prone to interrupting and talking over people to an extent i find hella exasperating.
If I was aware of our current anime club setup 5 years ago, I would definitely have gone through all of doctor who with sb folks when I was doing my big watch
(I found both phil sandifer and adventures with the wife in space after I finished my watch-through at the time, which was 4th doctor through 7th doctor in chronological order, occasional smatterings of earlier doctors when appropriate)
Talons of Weng Chiang is iconically Robert Holmes in that there are parts that just work because he could write the hell out of some dialogue but the ugly unbearable racism makes the whole thing impossible to watch.
Actually if we wanted to togethertube our way through doctors 1-3 at some point in the future (the only ones I don’t have completion on) I’d be into setting that up.
I include myself in the 50% bad takes category of doctor who fan. but to clarify, I mean that his bad takes aren’t the same as anyone else’s bad takes. Every doctor who fan has idiosyncratic opinions and the show has been around enough to accomodate all of those at the same time.
edit: the entirety of sixth doctor’s run would’ve been doctor who club after dark
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Regarding Harness.
So we know that Doctor Who’s cosmology is different from ours. There, the Moon was (according to 1970s theory) an adopted planetoid… which was, in fact, an egg.
Bizarre thing is, Kill the Moon actually fits classic Who’s jump-the-gun science, that Chibnall said “duh” and perpetuated 40 years later. More than fits it; it makes sense of it.
In the Who timeline, where I guess Earth formed around a (coincidentally egg-laden) Racnoss ship, Gaia (early pre-Earth) must never have collided with Theia (another rocky planet in our orbit, that shattered on collision), as seems to have happened in our world.
What this seems to imply, then, is that n the Who timeline Theia must have remained in Gaia’s solar orbit, somewhere far enough back that the two never collided.
Which is to say, the fuckery in Kill the Moon just happens to be consistent with the Silurian recounting of events, which in turn makes Mondas plausible.
Thanks to Peter Harness, somehow a mountain of awful and/or outdated science balances out to plausible consistency.
All praise the Egg.
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You probably can answer this by comparing it to Fisher’s other scripts (Creature from the Pit, stones of Blood, Androids of Tara) which… are so slight as barely to exist, their best parts probably written by others. I’d be surprised if more than a broad premise survived from his script.
Yeah, Pirate Planet may be my favorite thing Adams ever wrote.
And it features Robotnik from the SatAM cartoon.
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Man, season 7 is a trip.
I love it, save for Liz Shaw’s agency diminishing as the season wore on.
Well, except for her evil parallel universe doppelganger, and I wonder if that was influenced by star trek
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Yeah, that element sucks. And they were only too glad to ditch her, to replace with a defenseless airhead, when she got pregnant. She’s easily the best thing in Spearhead, though.
Star Trek aired later in the UK, its first season beginning less than a year before Pertwee’s first began. I don’t know for sure when “Mirror, Mirror” aired, or even if the BBC ran the episodes in order, but originally it was from season 2.
It’s not implausible that it was an influence, but it seems more like independent evolution.
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The wacky part about team-watching Hartnell and Troughton, of course, is that big hunks just aren’t there. Often, the best parts.
The animations help a ton. Often I have trouble with the recons, and do better with narrated soundtracks.
Apparently, Britbox is commissioning the Restoration Team to do official high-quality recons, of the like of Web of Fear 3, for every single missing episode, so they can fill in all their blanks. So that’s interesting.
But, yeah. There’s so much good stuff in that first 11 years. I’d venture to say the best of classic Who is in those first 11 years, and in the final two. It’s the other 13 years in the middle where the ideas kind of run dry, so far as I’m concerned.
(I’m so glad that Enemy of the World is returned, as even as audio-only I thought it was easily one of the best-ever Doctor Who serials… yet I had no idea how much better it would get.)
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http://doctorwhogeneral.wikia.com/wiki/Kate_Bush
http://doctorwhogeneral.wikia.com/wiki/The_Line,_The_Cross_and_The_Curve
Kate Bush is a British singer, songwriter and performer. She is a godess and started universe. She is notable for writing the creation story The Ninth Wave. Despite being completely unrelated to Doctor Who, she is still canon.
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Years ago me and a couple friends kicked around filming all of the missing episodes in a tiny apartment with minimal props. We probably should have done that.
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The best part of Death to the Daleks is the sad/comic music every time a dalek comes into frame
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