The sixth Doctor era begins with this four part story. Now as I mentioned before, the prior story to this one was voted the best Doctor Who story of all time back in 2009. It is therefore unfortunate that this one was voted the all time worst! What a spectacular disaster that is! You have the very best story followed by the very worst! And the strange thing is that this one is also in the same season of the show. Usually a regeneration would take place at the end of a season acting as a cliffhanger for next year but this time the decision was taken to begin the era of the sixth Doctor with a single story tagged on at the end of season 21 in order that the new Doctor could establish himself. Normally I would think this was an awful idea but I think it works really well here for reasons I will go into later.
I don't think the story is the worst one ever. I mean its not great. But I've definitely seen worse. The basic plot is that two child geniuses are kidnapped from their planet in order that they can assist a giant slug in his ambition to manipulate the orbit of planets in order to cause a huge explosion that will scatter his seed through space. Sounds pretty vile actually!
One of the problems come from the casting of the twins. They are bloody awful actors and its rather unfortunate that they give the characters if Romulus and Remus to two actors who can't pronounce their Rs. Also most of the sets look pretty shabby too. I'm guessing that because this is the last story of the season that the budget must have been running pretty low by this point.
But that's all the boring stuff anyway. The real interesting part comes from the new Doctor. A complete change from his previous self, this Doctor is rude, loud and pretty unpleasant. He also suffers the worst examples of regeneration trauma of any Doctor including nearly strangling Peri to death! All this is good stuff as we are faced with a Doctor who is completely unpredictable. Now for the bad stuff...the costume. Poor Colin Baker wanted to wear something like a black suit and has gone on record as saying that actually what he described as his ideal costume was what Christopher Eccleston ended up wearing as the ninth Doctor. However the producer John Nathan Turner wanted the costume to reflect a Doctor with incredibly bad taste and they at least succeeded in that! Unfortunately it had the side effect of turning the Doctor into a bit of a joke. It's just pretty stupid and we end up with the Doctor in a clown costume!
Thinking about it, what would have been a pretty good idea would be if they had put Colin in that costume for this story only. This would have reflected the Doctors poor state of mind as he had only just regenerated and would have been a wonderful trick to play on the audience with the story ending with a sort of "of course he isn't going to wear that ridiculous costume for his whole tenure, here's his real costume!"
The story ends with the Doctor still acting pretty brash but claiming that his personality has settled down and therefore this is the Doctor we are now stuck with. This is what I like about the fact this story was placed at the end of the season. The Doctor's final line to Peri could pretty much be him addressing the audience when he claims "I am the Doctor, whether you like it or not" Brilliant! And Colin Baker is an awesome Doctor who unfortunately got awfully mistreated by the show, more to come on that subject I'm guessing!
No comments:
Post a Comment