Category: Episode by Episode
Doctor Who episode 512: City of Death – Part Three (13/10/1979)
Again, this is mostly exposition rather than action. Again, when the exposition is done this wittily and this well, it barely matters (although I still wonder what the eight-year-olds in the audience made of it). If any of the main performances were sub-par, this wouldn’t work as well. But Julian Glover is excellent, doing his best Olivier Richard III as he confronts the Doctor in 1505; being the perfect host to Romana in 1979. Like Kevin Stoney’s classic villains, Scaroth is willing to play along with the jokes providing he’s getting what he wants, but kills without hesitation when the joke wears thin. Tancredi’s, ‘You can write, can’t you?’ and Scarlioni’s twinkling smile as the Professor is aged to death are brilliantly horrid.
Doctor Who episode 511: City of Death – Part Two (6/10/1979)
I love how this episode is nearly all exposition, but it’s more entertaining than all the running around quarries in Destiny of the Daleks. While the Count and Countess act like they’re in Hustle and explain their clever plan to pinch the Mona Lisa, the Doctor gets locked in a cellar but still manages to learn about the Count’s time experiments and uncovers six copies of Leonardo’s masterpiece before he escapes. It’s then a short hop back to the Renaissance for another twist cliffhanger (I like these a lot better than the normal “Dr Who is about to be exterminated!” ones). Last time it was “The Count is a monster!” this time it’s “The Count is a time traveller!”
Doctor Who episode 510: City of Death – Part One (29/9/1979)
When I’ve come up to one of the all-time classics as I’m watching the series through episode by episode it’s always obvious how the great stories aren’t flukes, but the show in whichever form it’s currently in getting everything it’s currently doing right. Genesis of the Daleks was veteran Terry Nation’s third script in as many years, heavily reworked by the script editor and shot by an experienced director. The Brain of Morbius and The Talons of Weng-Chiang: similar stories. And City of Death is similar again: David Fisher’s fourth script, reworked by Douglas Adams, and directed by Michael Hayes. It is serendipitous that this is also the one chosen for the show’s first overseas filming, but it’s no accident that this works.
Doctor Who episode 509: Destiny of the Daleks – Episode Four (22/9/1979) on
I’ve found this one of the most frustrating stories in this pilgrimage. It’s got a level of competence and polish that continues the upward trajectory of Season 16, and the script, I imagine thanks to Douglas Adams’ builds, is more straightforwardly fun than anything Terry Nation’s contributed since the 1960s. I like that it doesn’t just replay the greatest hits from Genesis of the Daleks, but subverts them (the Doctor refusing to entertain Davros’ delusions, or to engage with him intellectually; the Daleks deferring to Davros rather than conspiring against him; the “beautiful people” turning out to be as bad as the Daleks, in a way Genesis toyed with).
Doctor Who episode 508: Destiny of the Daleks – Episode Three (15/9/1979)
Both Philip Hinchcliffe and Graham Williams preferred to invent new baddies rather than rely on old ones, and Davros is the first monster/villain to debut during Tom Baker’s run to get a return appearance. Fittingly, it’s in one of those “Hitler resurrected” type stories beloved of pretty much all 1970s telefantasy, where it turns out he’s been frozen in the bunker for years only to rise again to wreak vengeance.
Doctor Who episode 507: Destiny of the Daleks – Episode Two (8/9/1979)
This, inexorably, is becoming the show I remember from my childhood. It’s started to look like Peter Davison Doctor Who – the pretty, desolate location filming; the interiors a mix of brightly-lit white spaceships and gloomy, cluttered dark ones. I get a frisson from this that I’ve not really noticed before. And this is even starting to sound like 1980s Doctor Who. The Daleks’ slave worker Veldan says things like, ‘They keep their captives in a prison ship in space. Once you’re there, your life expectancy tends to be on the short side’ and ‘Anyone attempting to escape and the Daleks kill five of those remaining. Escape plans are not as popular as they were.’ Perhaps it’s the pervasive influence of Blake’s 7, or maybe it’s just a coincidence, but this is like Eric Saward dialogue.
Doctor Who episode 506: Destiny of the Daleks – Episode One (1/9/1979)
Where’s Romana? Where’s K9’s voice? What happened to Anthony Read? By all accounts, the making of Season 16 was an ordeal behind the scenes, even if a lot less of the turmoil was obvious on screen. But the turnover of regular cast and production crew, and various stories of Tom Baker’s increasingly demanding behaviour suggests the show wasn’t necessarily the happiest place to work at the end of 1978. Once again, then, Graham Williams has to start a season with problems to solve (even if, as this was made third, these are largely in-story fixes for things that had already been sorted).
Doctor Who episode 505: The Armageddon Factor – Part Six (24/2/1979)
Douglas Adams, who reworked the conclusion to the story, and the season, immediately spots that the Doctor, when presented with ultimate power, must reject it, otherwise he stops being 100% rebel Time Lord and becomes an authority figure. The way this riffs on ideas raised in Part Five (where the Shadow dismissed the Doctor’s interest in the irrelevant side-show of the Atrios/Zeos War), with the Doctor rejecting the idea of sacrificing one life for the universe, is perfect. Having Astra be the sixth segment is a great idea; having the Doctor decide her life is more important than the Guardians’ endless cosmic to-and-fro is sublime.
Doctor Who episode 504: The Armageddon Factor – Part Five (17/2/1979)
And now, a very special episode of Doctor Who: the one broadcast on the day I was born. It’s not, to be brutally honest, one of the classics. It’s not even the best episode of The Armageddon Factor. After two episodes on Atrios and two on Zeos, this moves the focus to the Shadow planet but largely puts off anything that might be construed as a climax until next time. Romana gets captured and tortured, and the Doctor is shunted into a bizarre side plot that, even more bizarrely, casually answers the first question: Doctor who?
Doctor Who episode 503: The Armageddon Factor – Part Four (10/2/1979)
I love it when the title of something makes it into dialogue (best of all is ‘I must have scared THE LIVING DAYLIGHTS out of her’). Here, it turns out that ‘the Armageddon factor’ is mutually-assured destruction, and there’s a sort of vague theme that the nuclear war between Atrios and Zeos is a reflection of the cosmic Armageddon factor between the Black and White Guardians. Certainly, this episode focuses more on that conflict and the power of the Key of Time than any since The Ribos Operation – Part One.
Next Time... 