There’s a thing that Tom Baker does as the Doctor where suddenly the flippancy stops and he snarls the lines, low and furious, to suggest that behind the façade of facetious eccentricity there’s a serious intelligence. It crops up most notably in The Pirate Planet – ‘You ask me to appreciate it?’ – and often in Big Finish, but the first obvious example is in this episode, where the line ‘Get back! Didn’t you learn anything?’ is practically spat in a Morestran crewman’s face.

Continue reading →

25 episodes into the Tom Baker years and we finally get to see the fourth Doctor inside the TARDIS (still beating Pertwee’s 39-episode wait, unless you agree it’s the flock-wallpaper desktop theme in The Ambassadors of Death). He plays it like an attentive chef, skipping round the console and peering at different buttons, coaxing the Ship to its destination as if piloting it is more an art than a science. Elsewhere, Baker plays this very oddly – he’s quite relaxed with Sarah Jane, but when he meets the Morestran crew he goes wide eyed, standing in the background boggling a lot which means he’s the centre of attention even when he’s not. Or maybe he’s just seen what Prentis Hancock is doing on the next set.

Continue reading →

It’s hardly wall-to-wall action, instead the episode has a steady-as-she-goes pace that brings in the serial to a satisfactory climax. The front half builds the tension as UNIT wait for the Zygons to make their move – having escaped Loch Ness the ship (and the Skarasen) are heading south. Meanwhile, the Doctor manages to get the truth out of Broton: the Zygon refugee fleet is on its way to Earth, and before it arrives Broton’s crew plan to take over the planet and Zygorform it with human slave labour.

Continue reading →

This one, I think, tends to be a little bit undervalued in comparison to some of the other Philip Hinchliffe masterpieces. It lacks the conscious significance of Genesis of the Daleks or The Deadly Assassin, or the Hammer Gothic flair of Pyramids of Mars. And none of those has the reputation of the Skarasen to contend with. But it’s the most solidly constructed and brilliantly executed fourth Doctor serial to date. The third episode has no sag, and twists the story in a direction we probably didn’t see coming – it’s not often the cliffhanger involves the baddies flying away.

Continue reading →

The Zygons are properly unveiled and they’re very impressive: the decision to build out the heads but leave the actor’s eyes and mouth largely visible makes it easier to distinguish them as characters rather than a whole host of rubbery aliens like the Silurians or Sea Devils (whose MO, shapeshifting aside, the Zygons have appropriated). But beyond the costumes, there’s a concerted effort by all departments to make them a coherent design, from the sets, which reflect the suckers on the costumes, through the props, which look like the products of the same culture, and even the voices, which sound phlegmy – moist and sticky as the Zygons generally seem to be. It’s a shame the exterior of their ship looks too smooth and metal – otherwise this is as good as Axos.

Continue reading →

‘Wullie, can you no send over a few haggis?’ D’ye ken if we’re in Scotland? I love how Robert Banks Stewart, a Scottish writer, embraces the cliches, reminding everybody that his namesake Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart is of Scottish heritage. Also, how token Sassenach Sarah, who initially treats this all as a bit of colourful regional fluff, is constantly shown up for being so patronising, culminating in a lovely moment when she puts on a Scotch accent to answer the phone and has the smile wiped off her face when she learns Harry has been shot.

Continue reading →

The big problem with serials that don’t have a strong central idea or story, that are ‘just a bunch of stuff that happened’, is that they’re entirely dependent on that stuff being consistently well done to distract from the absence of anything more substantial. This is a case in point. Some of the individual set pieces aren’t bad, but a lot of them aren’t good, and none of them adds up to anything approaching a coherent story.

Continue reading →

The trouble with Revenge of the Cybermen is it’s not entirely clear what’s at stake or why we should care. The base under siege promised in Part One never materialised – by the end of Part Three Nerva has been abandoned to the Cybermen. The CyberLeader talks of building an invincible new CyberArmy (presumably armed with CyberBombs) but the Doctor kicks the legs out from under this idea, mocking it and the Cybermen so effectively that it’s hard for us to see them as a credible threat (possibly Tom Baker letting his boredom with the script come through too clearly). Then there are the two equally dull factions of Vogans, whose squabbles are so presented in such an abstract way that it’s impossible to choose between them. Their dialogue is atrocious. Even Kevin Stoney can’t save lines like line, ‘Has Vorus in the madness of his vanity brought down the vengeance of the Cybermen upon us again?’

Continue reading →

The Star Trek comparisons continue as the solution to Sarah Jane’s poisoning is to teleport her down to Voga, eliminating the venom from her bloodstream in the process. It’s a dramatic, pacy way to top an episode that never recaptures the urgency of these opening minutes.

Continue reading →

When I think of 1970s British SF TV (Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, spacey Tomorrow People) this is exactly the kind of production I picture: clearly inspired by Star Trek, but made on videotape rather than film, with lots of greyish spacecraft interiors interspersed with occasional film sequences and aliens declaiming grandiloquently at each other. The Pertwee years didn’t have much quite like Revenge of the Cybermen, partly as a result of the Earthbound format and partly because the space stories were often Bob Baker and Dave Martin weirdness. But I think the Tom Baker years are going to look and feel increasingly like this.

Continue reading →