Relative Dates: 17th October 2012 - 11th November 2012
So here I was in the tenth year of Doctor Who. It felt like quite the milestone. But I don't have time to dwell on that now, I need to get cracking with this blog in order that I can catch up with where I was when I finally started writing it. My head hurts from thinking about that sentence alone.
The Three Doctors
All three Doctors in one story! How exciting!
Unfortunately as with the later Five Doctors we find that the name of the story is a little bit of a lie. Don't get me wrong, it's true that all three Doctors are in it, but William Hartnell's role is greatly reduced as we very ill at the time and therefore he simply acts as an adviser from the TARDIS monitor. Patrick Troughton plays a substantial part however.
Pretty much every scene with the second and third Doctors interacting is brilliant. Their characters are so different that they tend to squabble quite a bit which is pretty funny when you think that the Doctor is effectively arguing with himself!
I also like how Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee kept up this relationship in real life. They were actually very good friends but whenever they appeared together on interview shows or conventions they kept up the pretence of two people who simply rubbed each other up the wrong way. This was further exacerbated by the fact that Jon Pertwee was a stickler for the script. He would made sure he got every line exactly right. Patrick on the other hand would deliver a rough approximation of the line which would often throw Jon off.
It's also nice to see the Brigadier and Benton have some scenes with the second Doctor again, a call back to the Invasion and The Web of Fear. Plus the Brigadier gets his first sight of the inside of the TARDIS!
The villain of the story is a pretty iconic one (and I don't use that term loosely like the BBC seem to be doing at the moment "look at this iconic poster/trailer/actor!!". It's Omega. The Time Lord who created the black hole giving the Time Lords the power needed to travel through time. He's fantastic!
His ravings through the story get more and more extreme and yet you can't help feel sorry for him, having been trapped for so long in the world of anti matter with only the creatures he can summon from his own mind as company.
At the end of the story we also see the Time Lords finally forgive the Doctor and give him back his knowledge of how to pilot the TARDIS. The Doctor's exile was finally over. But it seems now he was pretty settled on Earth as he still made sure to return there often and still had his laboratory at UNIT headquarters to see to.
Carnival Of Monsters
I love love love love Carnival Of Monsters!! If I had to introduce someone to the third Doctor era by choosing one story to show them then this would be a strong contender. I like Inferno just as much but that is 7 episodes and this is only 4 so I would hope it would be easier to tempt someone into sitting down and watching it with me.
It has one of those themes that I love where the TARDIS lands somewhere that seems perfectly normal (in this case a ship in the middle of the Indian Ocean) but which we soon come to realise is not quite as it seems. Here we see the crew repeating the same actions over and over again as they are repeatedly attacked by a huge sea creature. Each time they completely forget who the Doctor and Jo are and inevitably end up locking them away as stowaways. The Doctor identifies the vessel as the SS Bernice, a ship which mysteriously disappeared during a voyage across the Indian Ocean.
When a huge hand reaches down to pick up the TARDIS, the Doctor realises that all of this is going on inside a miniscope where creatures have been shrunk and imprisoned as a form of amusement for people to observe.
The miniscope is the property of Vorg, pictured above, and the action nicely swaps back and forth between the plight of the Doctor and Jo trapped in the machine to the plight of Vorg who is having problems of his own being accepted by the coldly political aliens he is trying to entertain.
As if this was all fantastic enough, we then have the plotting of these aliens to allow the deadly creatures to escape the machine in order to overthrow their current leader by blaming him for allowing people like Vorg to visit their planet.
The idea of the miniscope from this story was re-used in the brilliant Doctor Who Live that I was fortunate to attend at Liverpool. This time the scope was being controlled by Vorgenson (an ancestor of Vorg from this story, possibly his son, I can't quite remember)
Honestly this story is brilliant, give it a go if you want to watch any third Doctor story!
Frontier In Space
The basic idea of this story is that Humans and Draconians have a peace treaty that the Master is trying to break by convincing each party that the other one is attacking their ships.. I can't quite remember why he is doing it, probably so that he can achieve the mutual destruction of the two races.
This is a good story because it moves around a lot, from a human space ship to Earth, then on to a prison on the moon.
The Draconians are a brilliantly conceived alien too. Their make up is excellent which is something you can say about many of the "monsters" in this period of the shows history. I say "monsters" as you can't really refer to the Draconians as that as they are not the bad guys. Sure they are attacking humans but that is only because they believe the humans to be attacking them. It's always good when you can see both points of view.
The story ends with the shocking arrival of the Daleks! A link to the next story.
One sad point however is that this story marks Roger Delgado's last appearance as the Master before his tragic death in a car accident in Turkey. For me, Delgado is the ultimate Master. He plays both the charming side and menacing side of the character beautifully.
From one particular documentary I saw that was a look back at his life, it was clear that Roger was an amazing man and incredibly nice. It seems a cliche to say that these people who play absolute bastards are incredibly nice in real life but it seems this time it was true. It's a testament to how great the guy was that some of his friends actually have to choke back the tears when talking about him today 40 years after his death.
Planet Of The Daleks
In which the Daleks are attempting to discover the secret of invisibility from the Spirodons. It seems the Daleks' schemes get more and more bizarre as the years go by. Unfortunately Terry Nation was already running out of ideas for his creations and resorts to repeating some of the old ideas from his previous stories. It is cool to see the Thals again at least.
One interesting point about this story is that for such a long time episode 3 only existed in black and white as the original colour copy had been junked. This black and white copy was a copy of the previous colour version (I think. I may be getting this completely wrong) and some clever sod discovered that by inspecting the dots that the black and white pictures were made up of then the information could be extracted to identify what colours everything should be and as such the episode could be re-colourised! It's like magic!
Not much more I have to say about this one unfortunately. I think Jo has some romantic moments with one of the Thals who ends up asking her to stay with him. She turns him down however. Which is a relief because I love Jo and don't want to see her leave. Her time was coming to an end however.
Pretty crap this one I'm afraid. Not a patch on Day Of The Daleks.
The Green Death
or "the one with the giant maggots" as this story is sometimes known by.
Instead of delving into the story there are just two aspects I want to focus on.
First of all this was Jo Grant's last episode and her leaving scene is heart breaking. Throughout the story she has been working closely with the young Professor Clifford Jones and it soon becomes clear that they are falling for one another. As such at the end of the story when Prof. Jones proposes and offers to take her up the Amazon (not a euphemism!) then it seems quite natural for it to happen. Other companions would leave for love but it would quite often seem rushed and unbelievable but not here. Also as a 6 episode story shown one episode a week then the public would have seen these two characters together for just over a month so this makes it all the more real.
Jo shares a few brief words with the Doctor before joining the rest of her celebrations. We then see the Doctor quietly toast Jo before slipping out of the room. He doesn't like goodbyes. And as he drove away into the night, alone in his little yellow car, I did shed a few tears.
The second thing I wanted to touch on was this was the story that nearly ended the quest! Not because it was a bad story, far from it, it's excellent. Let me share with you the story:
So Skyfall had just come out so I decided to go to see it with my mates Matt and Hannah. The showing we were going to see was on at 8 o'clock and I managed to watch about half of Episode 2 of The Green Death before I had to leave for the cinema. I knew I'd be home before midnight to finish it off so all was well. Now...far be it from me to pass the blame on to anyone else (seriously Matt! Can you be on time for once in your life!!!!!) but when Hannah got us to the cinema the 8 o'clock showing had just filled up but there was another one on at 9 so we got tickets for that one. The problem being that that meant I was very unlikely to be home before midnight.
The panic was small at first. I was with people and didn't want to seem like I was making a big deal out of this but soon I could feel the hysteria gripping me. Aside from demanding Hannah drive me home there was very little I could do. As we whiled away the next hour perusing the various arcade machines in the bowling alley next door to the cinema I managed to sneak off and desperately started searching YouTube. Thankfully some kind soul had uploaded the whole story so I was able to watch it then. Hiding in the quietest corner I could find. Disaster had been averted
And that was that! A complete decade of Doctor Who was complete!
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