As I said in my previous post I watche State of Decay the other day.
Not bad, very cliched and a bit predictable, but it is a vampire story for Doctor Who.
Adric is marginally less annoying in this adventure and Lalla Ward looks pretty good when she’s all dressed up to be sacrificed.
I just read the review in Doctor Who Magazine and the critic was quite disparaging about this adventure. I disagree slightly, although they do have a point when they say that each adventure in this trilogy involves a stranded spaceship.
Apparently this is because this was written years before for inclusion in an earlier season of Tom Baker’s Doctor, but was not made because th BBC felt that it might detract from a Dracula series they did at the same time.
Overall I’m enjoying this box set. Only Warriors’ Gate to go.
This is the first time I’ve seen this happen, normally we in the UK seem to lag behind the US on release dates. I seem to have to wait forever to get the BSG box sets for example.
I think this set is worth the wait, I watched Warriors’ Gate yesterday and quite enjoyed it.
[SPOILER] It wasn’t bad overall, but the baddies were a bit of a joke. The Captain had no command presence at all and seemed very weak. His crew worked at various levels from bored to incompetent. It’s a wonder they managed to enslave the Tharils at all.
Good bits included:
The Tharils, an excellent race who have not re-appeared in the Whoverse, but should as they could be used as both villains and victims depending upon when they are encountered.
The touching scene when Romana leaves as she doesn’t want to go back to Gallifrey and stays to help liberate the Tharils and build TARDISs (what is the plural of TARDIS anyway?) for them.
Adric also seemed less annoying, maybe I’m getting more tolerant as I age. [/SPOILER]
I’m not a big fan of the trilogy. Full Circle I thought was boring from beginning to end. I don’t find it to be offensive or anything, but there’s just nothing there that holds my interest. State of Decay is more to my taste, but still a bit slow. I really liked the way they used Adric in this one and agree with the poster that wrote that Adric made the Fourth Doctor a good companion. It was only after Tom Baker left that the character began to grate on people’s nerves.
Warrior’s Gate, however, is just superb. Good actors, very good sets, great direction, mind blowing ideas, fantastic set-pieces and one of the best companion partings in the show. I love the banality of the evil and cruelty of the human crew as I love how bored they all are, something that the show should focus on much more often. The visuals tooare really inventive in this one, there’s a successful attempt to create a visual language that mirrors and emphasizes both the moral, mental and physical decay of the human crew and the moral void they inhabit. The captain is one of the very few believable madmen in Doctor Who history and his final cry of “I’m finally getting something done” is more convincing of his sickness than any lengthy monologue. To top it all off, Romana’s goodbye, as confirmed by other posters, is awesome.
I’d vote for Kinda as one of the best Who serials ever! Its sequel, Snakedance, is no slouch either. In fact, while I agree with your assessment of Earthshock, I find Time-Flight and Ark of Infinity to be two of the worst stories of Davison’s tenure. The latter is just boring and flaccid, with ridiculously bad dialogue emphasized by the drab set design. Any tension the story may develop is squandered in long, meandering shots of the city of Amsterdam. If there’s anything worthy there is that Nyssa’s finally given a chance to do something and she acquits herself remarkably well; a detail that’s more than off-set by the unpardonable rescuing of Tegan, whose character always annoyed me to no end. Time-Flight is just too silly by half (whom exactly was it the Master intended to fool with that ridiculous disguise if he was all alone in the cave?).
I love historical episodes as a rule, so The Black Orchid I was always going to be a bit biased in its favor, but really, the whole thing’s just charming! The stakes are refreshingly limited in scale, the Doctor finally gets a chance to play cricket, the crew dances and eats and has fun and the whole thing is over almost before it’s started. Four to Doomsday’s low status has always mystified me as well. I find the story reminds me a lot of Hartnell era serials, what with the cultural festivals and all. I think it’s a very fun, unpretentious story with a few great visuals and like it quite a lot.
The Kandyman serial’s called The Happiness Patrol. Unlike those Fifth Doctor serials I defended above I fully understand why this one is so disliked: everything looks incredibly cheap (McCoy’s greatest problem, his first season notwithstanding, wasn’t poor writing, it was the much too small budget); there are a couple a acting blunders impressive even for the show (one of them by McCoy himself) and the sensibilities of the story really are a bit unusual. However, I still like it a lot: the Kandyman is a great and creepy villain; the TARDIS gets painted pink; the scene near the very end in which Helen A finally breaks down is pretty powerful and moving; there’s the whole Margaret Thatcher / gay rights commentary going on and there are some nice, rather unusual characters. The Doctor is really impressive in this one, setting out to topple Helen A’s regime in just one night and achieving that goal while also having one of my favorite scenes in all the show, the one in which he disarms and humiliates a couple thugs ready to assassinate the protesters with only righteous indignation and words.
Sorry for the hijack, I felt I needed to defend those stories.
