Relative Dates: 23rd January 2013 - 17th February 2013
The Masque Of Mandragora
This one always fails to make an impression with me and viewing it this time was no exception. I really don't understand as I must have seen it about four times but I can't really think what happens!
The Doctor shows Sarah Jane into the secondary control room in the TARDIS which is pretty cool. It's all wood panelled with a much small console in the centre of the room. I'm not really sure why they did this. The secondary control room would last for a few stories before the Doctor returns to the main control room.
Meanwhile the Doctor inadvertantly allows some energy from the Mandragora Helix to enter the TARDIS and then accidentally lets it loose on Earth. Or is it Earth? I can't even remember that! I think it is actually. I think it's somewhere in Italy..possibly.
Tom Baker has some fun moments in this one. As he is wondering innocently along a path munching on an apple, he is stopped by some soldiers on horse back. The head soldier threatens the Doctor by pointing his sword at him and demands to know who the Doctor is. As the Doctor searches through his pockets, you can see he is struggling to do so and keep hold of his apple so he pokes the apple on to the end of the sword that is being used to threaten him. Brilliant!
The Hand Of Fear
The real highlight of the story though comes at the very end so I may as well skip straight to that. Apparantly Tom Baker and Elizabeth Sladen weren't particularly happy with the leaving scene so they rewrote part of it themselves. I'm not sure how true that it is though.
The Doctor receives a message from the Time Lords telling him that he must return to Gallifrey. He cannot take Sarah to Gallifrey as she is a human and therefore not allowed. So he has no alternative but to drop her back on Earth.
It's clear that both characters are gutted to be leaving each other and Sarah's line of "Don't forget me" always chokes me up.
The Doctor:- "Until we meet again Sarah."
The Deadly Assassin
For a start, the Doctor has no companion in this story! It has become the norm for the Doctor to either pick up his new companion in the same story that the previous one leaves or in the very next story. However here we have the Doctor on Gallifrey on his own. There is a story that Tom Baker decided he didn't need a companion but the production team argued against this claiming that the Doctor needed someone to speak to and couldn't just talk to himself all the time. Apparantly Tom's suggested compromise was that the Doctor would have a talking cabbage on his sholdour...luckily they didn't go for this idea!
For the first time we get a story completely set on the Doctor’s home planet of Gallifrey. We had had brief glimpses of the planet in the past but never a whole story set there.
In anticipation of the president of the Time Lords announcing his successor the Time Lords all gather in their ceremonial robes. I’d love one of the head dress things they wear...does that sound gay?...yeah it sounds a little gay.
The president is assassinated and the Doctor is framed for the crime. In his attempts to uncover the real culprit he comes face to face with a very old enemy..the Master!
The previous actor to play the Master, Roger Delgado had died in a tragic car accident many years before and as such the Master had been written out of the series. His reintroduction in this story is fantastic. The Master was always a suave charmer but now he is essentially a rotting corpse having reached the very end of his regeneration cycle and therefore this is one of his last ditch attempts at extending his life.
Speaking of regeneration cycles, this is the story that introduced the idea that a Time Lord could regenerate 12 times and therefore had 13 bodies. I guess at the time they didn’t worry to much about the long term future of the show with Tom Baker only being the fourth Doctor (unless you believe those lying flashbacks in The Brain Of Morbius!). But now we are approaching our 12th Doctor with Peter Capaldi...or maybe even our 13th if John Hurt turns out to be the real 8th Doctor!
The guy who plays the Master in this story is brilliant. He has a super creepy voice which is certainly required as he can’t do much acting with his face as it is covered up with a mask. Also the makup on his hands makes me shudder whenever I look at it. His fingers look like they have all the veins exposed and I can’t help but think how sore they must be! Eugh!
Much of the middle part of the story takes place in the matrix. The matrix is where Time Lords store all the knowledge from deceased Time Lords and can be entered in the form of an artificial environment. It’s here that the Doctor does battle with the Master henchman, Chancellor Goth. As Goth is controlling the matrix he ends up doing some pretty creepy things to unnerve the Doctor. One example being when the Doctor wipes away some sand on the ground to discover a mirrored floor with a clown looking back at him laughing! Why are clowns so damn creepy??
The Face Of Evil
I was really looking forward to this one. It introduces the new companion, Leela and the funny thing is I had already seen every single story that Leela is in except her very first one!
Unfortunately maybe I was looking forward to it just a little too much but it seemed like such a disappointment which is a real shame because some of the ideas in the story are excellent. For one of the only times we actually get to see some of the consequences of the Doctor’s actions.
Upon arriving on the planet, the Doctor is believed to be the “evil one” and the tribes people fear him. This leads to a great cliffhanger when the Doctor is introduced to the face of the evil which has been carved into a mountain and it’s his face!
Can't remember much more really. This one needs watching again!
The Robots Of Death
A murder mystery with a huge spoiler in the title! However the story is far from spoilt as the real mystery is who is controlling the robots...which is also sort of obvious but never mind it's still brilliant!
The TARDIS lands in a sand miner in the future where the crew are living in luxurious surroundings whilst their robots do most of the work. Unfortunately one of the crew members is secretly a fanatical robot supporter and is setting about tampering with the robots in order that they will go on a murderous rampage! Of course it wouldn't be Doctor Who muder mystery if the Doctor and his companions weren't made the prime suspects immediately upon their arrival!
This was the very first Tom Baker story that I ever saw. I had it on VHS probably around 1997 or 1998 and I watched it loads. It starts with an absolutely amazing explanation by the Doctor as to how the TARDIS can be bigger on the inside. It would take to long to go into here but suffice to say that when he had finished his explanation I couldn't help but think the reasoning was logically sound. I also remember being startled at how different the console room looked in the TARDIS as at this point they were still in the secondary control room with its smaller central console and wooden panels. It just all looked so different.
The robots in the story are pretty creepy with their blank expressions. The red eyes are displayed when they are about to kill someone (that should be a bit of a giveaway really) and as they advance on their victim speaking in their calm tones it proper creeps me out.
This is also a pretty good second story for Leela as she gets some interesting things to do, especially when she first meets one of the robots D84 who can mysteriously speak despite the fact that the D class robots are meant to be dumb. She gets some snappy lines to deliver and is definetly shown to be a girl not to be messed with. Somebody please take that knife away from her!
The Talons Of Weng-Chiang
Another six part story to round the season off and this is an absolute belter!
Another six part story to round the season off and this is an absolute belter!
It had a good reputation that I was aware of before I watched it and therefore after my first viewing I was left a bit disappointed as my hopes had been raised way to high. But now that is out of the way I adore the story every time I watch it. If nothing else this story gave us one of the greatest duos over in Jago and Litefoot. Henry Gordon Jago is a bombastic manager of the local theatre and Professor George Litefoot is the local pathologist who both get drawn together by the Doctor's investigations and as a result form a last friendship. In fact the characters were so popular that the actors who played them way back in 1977 are still playing them now in the spin off audio adventures "investigators of infernal incidents"
Leela gets to dress up in something other than her leather bikini as she dons the dress of a Victorian lady. There are some great scenes that she shares with Litefoot where, not understanding the customs of a dignified society, she picks up large lumps of meat with her bare hands when dining with the professor. Not wishing to embarrass her, the professor joins in and eats in the same manner which just goes to show what a nice man he is.
Speaking of dressing differently, this has got to be one of the very few Tom Baker stories where he doesn't wear his trademark scarf! Instead he wears a deerstalker in an obvious attempt to resemble Sherlock Holmes.
This is such a great story that I was willing to look over it two faults. One is a very unconvincing giant rat which looks more cuddly than menacing and the other is the casual racism of the show. One of the main villains is meant to be from China and instead of employing an actor with the appropriate ethnicity they instead employed an English actor and made his eyes "slanty". Couldn't get away with that these days! Still at least it wasn't like some of the first Doctor stories where actors were blacked up!
I was now about halfway through the fourth Doctor era and going strong! Come back soon for my penultimate retrospective blog entry where I cover Season 15. Then I will need one more entry detailing the first story of Season 16, The Ribos Operation, and then I will FINALLY be up to date!
Leela gets to dress up in something other than her leather bikini as she dons the dress of a Victorian lady. There are some great scenes that she shares with Litefoot where, not understanding the customs of a dignified society, she picks up large lumps of meat with her bare hands when dining with the professor. Not wishing to embarrass her, the professor joins in and eats in the same manner which just goes to show what a nice man he is.
Speaking of dressing differently, this has got to be one of the very few Tom Baker stories where he doesn't wear his trademark scarf! Instead he wears a deerstalker in an obvious attempt to resemble Sherlock Holmes.
This is such a great story that I was willing to look over it two faults. One is a very unconvincing giant rat which looks more cuddly than menacing and the other is the casual racism of the show. One of the main villains is meant to be from China and instead of employing an actor with the appropriate ethnicity they instead employed an English actor and made his eyes "slanty". Couldn't get away with that these days! Still at least it wasn't like some of the first Doctor stories where actors were blacked up!
I was now about halfway through the fourth Doctor era and going strong! Come back soon for my penultimate retrospective blog entry where I cover Season 15. Then I will need one more entry detailing the first story of Season 16, The Ribos Operation, and then I will FINALLY be up to date!
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