classic who: The robots of death

This is frequently considered one of the best eps of all time. I don't know about that, but it's not bad, and the robots, though generally idiotic and easy to confuse, have a really awesome design that is now in action figure form. I might need to get them.

Anyway.

The Doctor and Leela wash up on a ship that's out mining sandstorms in search of riches. Miners again. ::sigh:: The crew of the ship are a mix of high-class and low-class from some planet where that's really important, but it can be evened out by bringing home enough lucanol (which sounds like an expensive medicine). Except that their whole society is dependent on robots, and there's many more of them then there are people. The robots apparently have enough of a reputation for harm that one of the crew members mentions that he heard of one ripping a dude's arm off once, but it's considered an urban legend... until people start turning up dead.

Then there's a bit of the ol' The There Were None while the Doctor and Leela get blamed for the crimes and talk their way into solving them. Like you do. It seems that one of the robots that's supposed to be a basic and mute labor drone has been modified to be much more intelligent and to figure out what's up with threats on the home world of a robot revolution-- started by a sceintist who was raised by robots and doesn't like people, and is thought to be aboard. Several more people are murdered while the survivors alternately believe and disbelieve the Doctor, and eventually the engines get sabotaged; they have to cut power so they can not explode, which makes them sink, which forces them to ask the Doctor for help. Once that's sorted, they start looking for the cause of the robot malfunctions and find that they're being reprogrammed with a giant glitter-pen syringe to the brain. (they call it a laser of some sort)

It's revealed that the engineer is actually the terrorist they're looking for, and they start looking for ways to shut him down.

They manage to get all the robots except the crazy ones and the helpful one shut down, and the Doctor builds a machine to bust up the rest while he gives Leela the task of releasing helium gas to change Taran's voice so the robots won't recognize him. He's offed by his own reprogrammed robots, and D84, the helpful one, triggers the Doctor's device, which offs the rest, and all of a sudden, everything's fixed.

Notes:

I have trouble remembering the Doctor in this episode. I mean, he was there, but it was mostly miners fighting with eachother and cool-looking robots getting reprogrammed and killing people.

Leela's kind of boring so far, and not terribly useful on a ship. I miss Sarah Jane.

Miners, ugh. I'm getting so tired of miner politics. It's like the fallback when they can't think of anything more interesting.

There's a lot about this ep that are mirrored in Voyage of the Damned. It doesn't' really make it more interesting, but it's nice to see continuity over such a long stretch of time.

And then it just ends. The old eps seem to have issues with the idea of ending a show...

classic who: the deadly assassin

As if there's really any other form of assassin.

So! We finally got the next ep working, and settled in for a good old romp through the Whoniverse... except this one's weird. Sarah Jane's just gone, and he's been called back home with a vision of the President being assassinated as if he's the one doing it, and it's just the Doctor, talking to himself because he has no Companion for four episodes. And really, alot of the third episode could have been gone and it would have been the same story, to whit:

As soon as the Doctor is back on Gallifrey, he's taken prisoner, which he immediately breaks out ofand quickly gets framed-- while trying to stop the assassination, he gets caught up in it and goes wonky, and starts thinking he's in the vision (or something?), and then he's arrested again, and tortured for a bit. Turns out he was aiming for the real killer down amongst the High Council, and set up to take the fall.

Chancellor Goth (who isn't wearing nearly enough eyeliner for that name, and seems to be the only one comfortable in the roll and the clothes), starts a trial, and the Doctor calls on paperwork to get himself entered into the running for the presidency, which buys him time in the trial. He manages to convince Spandrell that he isn't the assassin, despite the evidence, and they turn up various suspiscious clues: The gun's sight was off, so there's no way he could have fired the actual death shot, the person running the camera that should have recorded it is missing, and when he's founf, he's compressed a la the master, the last reels are stollen, there's no record of the Master, and the Doctor's record has been tampered with. And then they hit on the fact that the vision the Doctor had can only be explained by being the result of the Matrix-- the shared memories of thousands of dead Gallifreyans that work together in a computer to predict the future-- rerouted to him so that he'd come play patsy and it wouldn't be recorded.

So the Doctor goes into the Matrix to get the Master, who's all gross and buggy-eyed and somewhat like Mum-Ra now that he's come to the end of his regeneration cycle and is holding himself together and alive by force of will alone, and that's when there's a whole episode of the Doctor stuck in Vietnam. ::sigh:: It's like getting captured and escapingand getting captured again, except there's no Companion to talk it through with, and escaping is replaced with the Doctor sliding down quarry walls. Repeatedly.

Eventually, he stops the one coming after him, and it's Goth! ::dun dun DUN:: He manages to make it out of the Matrix just in time, but Goth is still tied in when the Master tries to kill the Doctor, and he gets the worst of it. The Doctor traces the Matrix connection back to the catacombs, where they find the Master dead, and Goth not there enough to answer their questions, only enough to say that he brought the Master back and couldn't stop him from taking over. And he has a doomsday plan, but he doesn't say what it is before he dies.

Back in the offices, they tell Borusa waht happened, and he tells them a better story that will keep the faith in the Time Lords whole, and orders that the bodies be altered and so on to make the story fit. But the Doctor still wants to know waht the Master had planned, and why it mattered if his patsy was President, The only thing different than being any other Time Lord is access to the symbols of office, which the Doctor realizes are old relics of the sort of power that would let the Master regenerate all over again, and destroy Gallifrey and the Time Lords in the process.

Oh, and, you know, the Master's not dead.

So there's a whole one-on-one where the Master is releasing the Eye of Harmony that's the source of all Gallifrey's power (which has apparently been forgotten by this point), and the Doctor's stopping him. It ends with half the Citadel collapsed, but the world intact, and the Master down a fissure. Spandrell and Engin see the Doctor off, and witness the Master disappearing into time without trying to stop him, and that sort of spoiled the ending for me.

So here's a picture of the Doctor looking shifty in the 'seldom worn ceremonial robes' that they always seem to be wearing:

What I take away from this story are the following details:

- From the beginning, the Doctor was considered a renegade, but Borusa (an old teacher at the Academy) probably likes him anyway.

- Time Lords are, as a whole, pretty dumb. They don't know where their power comes from, they aren't the top of the technological totem pole anymore, and they live for ages and never do anything with it. Also, they're divided into assholes and doddering old men.

- There aren't any Time Ladies at all in this story, which seems odd.

- The Citadel is something like Superman's Fortress of Solitude and something like the Tok'ra crystal bases, and something like a melted freezy-pop.

- The Doctor wears long johns.

- I miss the presence of a Companion, and I'm glad this is the only one without one.

- Goddess above and below, I'm sick of the Master.

classic who: the hand of fear

And then we move on to The Hand of Fear. This one is Sarah Jane's last episode, and she gets to go out being herself-- or, at least, the mcguffin she frequently is.

They land back on Earth in a quarry (which is actually being a quarry, so that's two shots if you're playing the drinking game we made up and I haven't written about yet), just in time to be very nearly squashed in a rockslide created by blasting they don't pay enough attention to get out of the way of. The Doctor lands on top of the rubble, and they find him first, and they go looking for Sarah Jane and find her trapped under some massive bits of styrofoam, passed out and concussed, and holding onto a big stone hand. Which, of course, takes over her mind. ::sigh::

When they leave her alone in the hospital, she wakes up and steals the hand from the lab, sealing it up in Tupperware to keep it fresh, and uses the ring she found on it to blast her way into a nuclear power plant that may or may not be the same one in Inferno (in my head, it totally is, and it's just not a very nice place to work). She locks herself in the reactor, and the stone hand starts to come back to life. The radiation is critical, and the hand is controlling people all over the place, trying to get more of it. The Doctor manages to get Sarah Jane out, but she doesn't remember being taken over, and the hand has absorbed so much of the radiation that she isn't contaminated at all. Which is convenient.

Eventually, when the core implodes instead of explodes and the hand isn't stopped, the RAF tries to nuke the place, which I would think is pretty obviously not going to work, but maybe they're way dumber without UNIT to explain things to them. I miss the Brig. Anyway, the nukes only make the transformation complete, and Eldrad walks out of the reactor-- and is a chick, since the regeneration imprinted on Sarah Jane, the first person to touch the hand and the ring. The Doctor decides to try diplomacy (finally), and they talk Eldrad down from a massive attack on everything with the promise of taking her home, which they do, but it has to be now, millions of years after she / he was exiled and executed, so they can't mess with history. Eldrad leads them to the frozen-over capital and starts turning machines back on with the intention of rebuilding the world that was destroyed... and walks right into a trap, where a spear full of acid slams into her chest and starts cracking her crystaline structure.

The Doctor and Sarah Jane take her down to a regeneration chamber past a void and through various other traps. She's amazingly good at remaining manequin-stiff as the Doctor hauls her around, and she must not weight much (though if she's really silicon like quartz, she should way most of a ton) because he's hauling her around all over the place. They make it to the chamber just in time, and Eldrad is reborn as his true self, a big pointy man-thing with a crystal beard and a habit of extreme overacting. And he's a lunatic. He was the one who killed the planet, and his continuing punishment is to have a world where everyone chose to die instead of risking that he'd come back, even far in the future, and killed themselves. Jeeze. The Doctor and Sarah jane have to escape his crazy to get home, and they toss him down the needless chasm to do so.

And then Sarah Jane has to leave. She's complaing about always getting chased and mind-controlled and tricked and manipulated, and pretends to want to go home, and stomps off to get all her stuff together (which turns out to be a stuffed owl, two ugly jackets, a teeny tiny suitcase, a potted plant and a tennis racket)-- and while she's gone, the Doctor gets the Call home to Gallifrey. Humans aren't allowed there, and he has to leave her. So he drops her off where he thinks she lives, and she gets off with the sort of cheerfulness of someone who thinks she'll get to go back soon, and he leaves her. For thirty-five years. And I was very sad. The last few episodes, he called her his best friend, and he was so deflated-sounding when he told her she couldn't go with him, and she didn't really seem to know what it meant...

And so ends the Sarah Jane Years. She gets an abortive spinoff in the early 80s, and she gets to come back for the Five Doctors in a bit, and she's still around the expanded universe, but there's no more Sarah Jane Smith in the series until School Reunion in Nu Who, and the Sarah Jane Adventures after that. I'll miss her. Even with her really awful outfits and her sometimes hopeless ankle-twisting, she was sharp and clever and smart enough to keep up with the Doctor, and they were a good team.

classic who: the masque of mandragora

Man, my scifi intake has really suffered since I stopped being unemployed / ran out of all the stuff I'd previously cued up for watching / had my Netflix cancelled for non-ability to pay. But we've gotten back on track with the Classic Who, and I, for one, am much greatful. I love this watching-through of the history-- I grew up with the show, but we moved around alot and lived all over the place, and it was never consistent. Even when I watched it every day on PBS when we were back in the states and didn't have cable yet, sometimes they didn't show episodes together, even when they showed lots in a row. I mean, really. What's that all about?

So here we have the Masque of Mandragora, Sarah-Jane's second-to-last story. It starts out with them wandering around the massive interior, full of hallways that all look the same, and doors that lead to greenscreens, and they come across the Old Console, which is delightfully steampunky and wood-crafted. They find that they're being swept into a power vortex that's semisentient-- the Mandragora Helix (pronounced man-DRA-gora, not man-dra-GORA as might be assumed). There's a ball of energy that buzzes the Tardis, and the Doctor literally swings Sarah Jane out of the way in a delightful show of how little she is, then they evacuate the weird.

The Doctor lands in Renaissance Italy, drawn in by some weirdness (as per usual), and they immediately stumble upon a Plot. Sarah Jane is kidnapped (also as per usual), and the Doctor is waylaid trying to save her-- so Sarah Jane is taken to be a fortold sacrifice to Demnos, an ancient god worshipped by a secret cult that was thought to be long gone, because she was found at the right place at the right time, and meanwhile, the Doctor is taken to the Prince and his court, and the uncle and Hieronymous the Creepy-Bearded Advisor sentance him to death as a traitor. Because there's civil unrest, you see, though that doesn't really matter all that much. Also, there's the Helix Fragment, flying around and turning people into blue jello.

They send the Doctor to the block, but he escapes with the help of shi clever scarf, and hides in the catacombs under the city, where he finds and rescues Sarah Jane just before she's to be killed (I guess they couldn't see all that well in their fancy roman masks), and just in time to miss the Helix Fragment arriving and creating a link between it's home-self and the cult. Or, more specifically, with Hieronymous-- annother of his prophesies fulfilled, since he was sure he'd get unlimited power.

The Doctor and Sarah are captured and think they're going back to the block, but are taken to the Prince (Guiliano) instead, and he's willing to listen to reason and isn't happy that his uncle won't. He's decided to have a party for his succession, and Frederico, the uncle, isn't happy about it. He wants a horoscope that declares Guiliano's death, with the death following before the morning, and Hieronymous isn't too into that-- he's got a cult to lead and a massive extradimensional power to unleash.

From here, it gets even busier. They go back to the catacombs and Sarah is taken hostage again, hypnotized and told that the Doctor is an evil sorcerer that needs to be destroyed with this poison needle they give her, and she's left for them to find. She almost does it, but the Doctor snaps her out of it just in time for them all to get thrown into prison. The Doctor talks Frederico into letting him show them what's going on, which results in Frederico getting pretty suddenly offed by Force lightning, after they witness Hieronymous becoming all glowy with Helix energy. He announces that their attack will happen tomorrow, when Mandragora swallows the moon and changes history; the guards switch allegiance and everyone is freed, and Guiliano takes over, deciding to keep the party on, since cancelling it would look like he can't control his own people.

The Doctor comes up with a clever plan involving a metal breastplate and alot of wire, and sneaks into the temple where there's apparently not even one guard to stop him from setting stuff up over the course of hours. When things go to crap, the Doctor tricks the cult into grounding out all it's energy, and then there's nothing left to cause trouble.

This one... it alternated between kind of dull when it was all palace intrigue, and needlessly complicated when that intrigue bumped into the plot, and I wasn't terribly fond of it. It wasn't bad, but it was confusing, and it felt just a little off... the Doctor's still being kind of a jerk, and the plot points all came too quickly to make much sense. There's been much better historicals. And it all seemed kind of contrived in a way that left me without much opinion of the story one way or another. It's not a great way to start a season, and I liked the last ep better.

classic who: the brain of morbius and the seeds of doom

We've finished another season of Classic Who, and somewhere halfway through the next one, SarahJane will move on and Leela will show up. All I know about Leela is that she marries a Time Lord-- in the Ten Doctors comic, she's got something like fourteen kids and is very old, but still a warrior.

Anyway, we started with The Brain of Morbius! Which was not so crazy as it seemed. Actually, it was kind of like watching Dark Shadows-- alot of standing around in Gothic settings, talking about one thing and meaning another. So the Tardis lands on a stromy planet that has a ship graveyard and a bunch of headless bodies on it, and though the Doctor is feeling cranky and thinks it's the Time Lords using him as their errand boy again, and is determined to not do anything at all, just to spite them, Sarah Jane immediately finds a body and they're in trouble. The rest is alot of back-and-forth between Solon, a semi-criminal follower of the worst mad Time Lord ever (the Mobius of the title) who's trying to build a body to bring his master back, and the Sisterhood, a group who look like the ones in The Fires of Pompei, and worship a holy flame that produces an elixir of life. Their flame has been dying down, and they're almost out of the elixir, which means they're almost out of eternal life, and things get tense when they start to think that the Time Lords are trying to steal it from them. They don't like Solon, and he doesn't like them, but with the Doctor and Sarah Jane going back and forth and the two sides having cross purposes, they start to work against eachother. Meanwhile, Solon builds his monster, though he had to give up the idea of using the Doctor's head for it. I don't think Morbius's massive glowing and pulsing brain would fit into it anyway.

Sarah Jane gets to be pretty resourceful in parts, though for a big chunk near the end, she's been blinded and blunders around getting into trouble, too. But she saves the Doctor, who gets to bea tricked and manipulated alot this story, and that's fun. The Doctor, meanwhile, does alot of solo running around trying to restore sarah Jane's eyes, which is both proof that his own safety comes after that of his companions, and that the companions are his weakness-- Solon sends him to the Sisterhood to get her fixed, but it's a lie that's supposed to get him killed and out of the way. And this is the only time so far that the Doctor has outright tried to kill someone: he makes a poison glass and lets it get to Solon.

The monster is creepy and neat and cheezy all at once, and I think it'd make an excellent action figure if they start making classic monsters. Morbius is megalomaniacal and whiny, and doesn't really do much because of brain damage; first he's trapped in a jar, then he's dropped on the floor, and it's probably true that he was already mad.

Overall, the story is a direct ripoff of Frankenstein, if it was set on a remote planet in the vecinity of Gallifrey and if the monster was being built to hold the brain of a crazy ex-cult-leader. Not bad, but a little confusing needlessly, and not as original as some.

And then we had Seeds of Doom, which was kind of like two related three-parters. The Doctor and Sarah Jane go to the antarctic (without the Tardis for some crazy and unexplained reason) to help some scientists with a weird new plant they've found, and wind up trapped by weather in a research station, which is always fun plotwise (like the Ice episode in X-Files). Side note: in this half, Sarah Jane wears cute little bright yellow overalls, which are entirely useless against and arctic blizzard, and a fur coat alot like the one Donna wore in the Planet of the Ood. The Doctor wears what he always wears, and I love that temperatures never seem to bother him. It's another of those little touches that remind us that he only looks human-- though in these classic episodes, he eats pretty frequently, as opposed to the new ones, where he doesn't much, and usually avoids eating all together.

Anyway. The scientists have found this weird pod about the size of a softball, and it's germinated in the warmth and taken over one of the crew, turning him into the broccoli from Garth Merengie's Dark Place. And then into a blobby green mansized creature that starts sabotaging things and killing people. back in England, a leak in the Ministry of Environment (I wonder why they aren't working with Unit here?) tells a manic and extremist plant collector / plant rights activist / lunatic about the new plant, and he pays alot of money to get his best mercenary there to get the plant for him, ignoring that it's an alien creature that eats animal-things (instead of the usual animal-thing eating plant-things).

The first half ends with the plant-dude blowing everything up, but not before the mercenaries get the second pod back to the crazy collector dude. Sarah gets to change into a different weird seventies outfit that looks like it has too much pattern and too many hems in it, and then they're off to find who took the other pod. He's encouraging it to take someone over, and tries to give it Sarah Jane, but the Doctor saves her, and leaves it to take over someone else. Side note again: the Doctor is very angry and yelly, like he's channeling Six over here, and punches alot of people rather than building clever machines or something.

So the scientist is taken over and the baddie feeds it and nurtures it into the full-size Krinoid. There's an old lady who is what I want to be when I grow up: a little batty and silly and vague, but cherrfully serving as a spy and loveing every minute of it. She gets information to Sarah, and then takes her message back to the Ministry, which brings in Unit. There's no Brig (I miss the Brig), but there's some other dude from Unit who can't pronounce the word "fire", and they show up and start attacking the estate-sized monster with the vaguest laser cannon ever. To no avail.

After alot of being trapped inside the estate, alot of plants coming to life and trying to strangle them, alot of running down halls and escaping monster tentacles, and several attempts to wood-chipper the Doctor and turn him into com-pos-t for the garden, eventually the massive creature is killed by fighter jets.

The monster is mostly dumb, but when it gets up to estate-size, there's a pretty nifty shot where it looks like c'thulu humping a mannor house that looks pretty cool. I couldn't immedaitely see how it was done, so that adds a little reality to it, you know?

The story was neat, but I'm not sure how I feel about four being angry and violent; that's not his thing, usually, and it bugs me. The monster was an actual threat, and it's one of the few times when the Doctor couldn't fix things-- it took the big guns of Unit to get anything done. And it sure was a big bang to end the season on. Literally.

classic who: the pyramids of mars and the android invasion

This week, we took a lazy day and watched two episodes. The first was Pyramids of Mars, which finds Sarah Jane playing in the wardrobe and wearing Vickie's dress, which is convenient, as the Tardis crashlands in the early 1900s, just after an eminent English archaeologist uncovers and untouched Egyptian tomb that turns out to be full of badness, rather than mummies.

The contents of the tomb have been sent home, and a moderately racist but not terrible Egyptian is taking care of it all, waiting for his return-- and praying to the slightly crap-looking sarcophogi. Turns out he's a loyal worshipper of Sutek / Set (which makes me think of the sumb first-season villain from Stargate, because that's what they've done to Egyptian myth in my brain), and he's working to un-trap him from his 7000 years of prison that the Osirian aliens put him under. Because he's not a god, he's an alien war criminal.

So the Doctor has to stop him. There's much creeping around in and out of windows, the Doctor gets help from the archaeologist's brother, there are really pretty neat robot-mummies, and there's a plot to bomb Mars and get the pyrimidal preison deactivated. At one point, the Doctor poses as a mummy and sneaks explosives into the rocket the mummies are building, and Sarah Jane turns out to be a sharp shooter-- even after she's been captured and used against the Doctor. Eventually, the Doctor has to face Sutek on his own, and winds up under the evil influence to save Sarah Jane, but when they reach Mars, all is well because Sutek, though powerful enough to control people in England from Egypt, has trouble concentrating on two mind-control victims at once, and lets the Doctor go, thinking his robomummies have killed him. 

The Doctor prevails, of course, though trickery and misdirection, and all is well.

And it's a good episode. There's almost no backing up at the beginning of the next episode, and there's a minimum of getting caught / breaking out / getting caught again. The story is tight and makes sense as much as Classic Who ever does, and in the end, there isn't alot of that weird morally ambiguous feeling it sometimes leaves you with. 

Then, on to The Android Invasion.

Sarah and Four land on earth, but something weird is going on, with all the townsfolk acting like pod people, and all the money being newly minted and none of the phones working. Turns out they're all androids. Through various runnings around and splittings up, sarah Jane loses the Tardis, the Doctor figures out that things are wonky and why, Sarah Jane gets duplicated and sent to trap the Doctor, they're foiled, Sarah twists her ankle, and both barely escape the end of the simulation before the aliens take off-- because, you see, none of it is real. These aliens that look like Sontarans with really blobby heads and tricerotops noses are building a perfect simulation to test out how best to conquer earth, now that they've ruined their own planet, and they have a lost human astronaut to help them-- a guy who feels he's been betrayed by the humans who never came to look for him, and who's been in contact with earth for months, telling them his daring and made up story. The aliens told him they'll live in peace, but in reality, they're just going to infect everyone with a virus they're trying to test on a captured Sarah Jane.

She, of course, totally randomly uses the water to conduct electricity to escape instead of drinking it (which is great, because she both gets to be techy and gets to note be poisoned in the cliffhanger, which is what I was expecting), and doesn't even know about the virus. 

There's running around on the ship and on the real earth, where key people, including Harry, Benton and Not!TheBrig have been replaced by duplicates already, and they have to exit the ship the way the robots do, which leaves more duplicates of them-- though Sarah's is killed by just knocking it over. I got confused as to who was a robot and who wasn't in the last part, because isntad of acting like emotionless doids, they're acting like their real confused selves, but in the end, the Doctor reprograms his own duplicate offscreen and uses it to stop the baddies and the invasion never comes. 

Yay earth!

This one was good, too, but there's the introduction of the idea that Sarah Jane wants to go home and that the Doctor keeps having to find reasons why she can't, and that makes me sad. Sarah's my fav so far except for Rose, and it'll be rough watching her go. But the story was pretty well-paced and except for that one part when I had no idea who was who, made as much sense as a show full of doppelgangers can. And it was entertaining. I like when Classic Who is in space; that's where it seems to belong.

classic who: planet of evil

It seems the Evil is not really all that Evil. This is another mining episode-- 30,000 years in the future, the Sun is running out of power and on a world at the very edge of explored space, several galaxies away from Earth, they find these colorchanging crystals that happen to be the vagues antimatter ever, and six pounds of it will power the sun for centuries, making the planet basically inexhaustable.

The Tardis goes off course a little, and materializes here, and of course, the locals think they're spies, that they're responsible for the deaths of everyone (one at a time, because there's only the one dessicated corpse in the prop vault), and that they're trying to ruin everything. Much talking ensues, and I kept losing interest-- this is one of the episodes that has long recaps and alot of escaping and recapturing, which we haven't had to deal with in a while. 

Sarah Jane is particularly feisty and doesn't have to twist her ankle at all, but also doesn't get to do anything much but stand around with people in silly uniforms holding onto her arms. The Doctor is extra weird, but what's really strange is how... intense and non-silly he is. Like a flash forward to Six or something. The Captain is a jerk whose name sounds like Saladbar, the second in command keeps going along with him entirely and then disagreeing at the last second, and really there isn't much for anyone to do but yell and not agree with eachother. Oh, and there's a monster made of antienergy that's the actual killer-- and doesn't get enough of the story to matter. It is, however, a great use of the weird way blue screen makes things semi-see-through. And there's the scientist who was the last survivor of the survey team, the one who came up with the plan to steal the antimatter, who keeps drinking it and turns into a werewolf.

So, yeah, not that great.

In the end, the Doctor figures out that all the antimatter has to go back to the planet (that looks like a meatball) or it'll never let them leave, and he runs around risking his life to do that. He frees the scientist and makes him think he came up with a better plan while he's confused enough to be open to it, and they all live happily ever after. Or something.

classic who: revenge of the cybermen

Revenge for what? I don't know. This is the first time I've seen the silver beasties since we started out Grand Classic Who Project. I think there was something about them having been enemies of the buddha-faced aliens of the Golden Asteroid, so maybe that's what for...

So, anyway, having been freed by the Cheesy Time Ring, the crew lands back on the Space Station Nerva, where all this started ages ago in the future with the bug-monsters. This time, they've gone back in time to an earlier point, also in the future, where the station is highly populated by non-frozen people, because these people are all dead of a plague before freezing had been invented. Except, as the Doctor discovers almost immediately, it's not a plague so much as a biological weapon. So, of course, Sarah-Jane gets infected almost immediately. Hey, remember when she was a feisty feminist? Anyway, the Doctor has to get around all the bickering and paranoia to try to save her, because there's only a few minutes before she's dead. 

It just so happens that there's this mysterious asteroid that's actually a hollow world called Voga, full of the afore mentioned Buddha-faced aliens. The humans have been down and set up a transmat array, and the Doctor thinks he can widget it so that it'll filter the poison out of her before she's kaput, but parts are missing and he has to stay behind to do it manually, which means that Sarah-Jane and Harry wind up stuck on Voga while the Doctor is stuck on Nerva. There's a great moment when the Doctor gets blinded by a short, and there's such dispair that he's run out of time and she's going to die, and then when his vision clears and he sees that she's safe, it becomes such joy. That's why I like me some Tom Baker so much. And also really one of the main reasons I like David Tennant so much-- wild emotional swings conveyed without words and in minimal amounts of time. The Doctor is bigger than life, so it's appropriate that his emotions are, too.

So down on Voga, there's a miners-vs-thinkers social struggle going on, because it's always about miners. Head miner wants to sell off the gold that the whole place is made of of make his people rich, while head thinker, who has lovely long bouncy hair, wants to remain locked away from the world / universe because of past damage done to their people. Sarah-Jane and Harry are captured by miners on a ludicrously small train, and hauled into the middle of this arguement. And the Vogans know that the Cybermen are monitoring them.

Even though gold is toxic to the Cybermen, and they'd already lost a war with the Vogans previously. But we won't think about that too much.

Miner-man questions SJ and H and lets it be known that there were supposed to be only 4 survivors, and none of those 4 were these two. And we figure out that it's the Station the Cybermen want, to continue their guff with the gold-plated buddha-faced enemies they couldn't defeat before. This makes it a three-way musutal self-destruction: moners against thinkers against Cybermen, and the humans in the middle going 'wha? huh? Cyberwhatnow?' and the Doctor trying to keep the sides from killing eachother. There's a big bomb from the miners that is getting loaded into a rocket and sets a clock ticking.

Sarah-Jane and Harry get into trouble, and there's much running from guns and slogging through mines. The Cybermen dock and the Doctor is stot down-- only that's totally just the cliffhanger, and it's eimmeidately revealed that it's a stun ray. He wakes up with the last two humans and three big bombs strapped to them. The Cybermen want to send them down to the center of Voga, then to blow them up, and the aster-world with them, scattering gold dust all through this region of space and making their ship malfunction... no, wait, ending the war with them victorious. Yeah.

More slogging through both real and set-built caves, much mud, several film-stocks, lots of pretending it's not as cold as it is, everyone moving around in different directions, and then they're suddenly all together again. Except the Doctor's still all a-bombed. And Srah-Jane's now captured on the Station, having gone back trying to warn the Doctor wbout the rocket. 

Side note: this invasion is, like, six cybermen. One of them is a little chubby, and one has a really nice kaboose. All are not terribly mechanical in voice or action or logic, and I guess I've been spoiled by images of millions of seven-foot-tall cybers, but six normal-sized ones mostly look dumb.

Anyway, onward. Cybermen have beamed down (??) and are slaughtering the Vogans, regardless of class. Some of them are taken out by brave sacrifice and their own cyber-bomb, allowing the Doctor to continue on with his attempts to stop the coming war. Which he dould be really good at by now. But the explosion allowed the Doctor time to disarm the bombs, and now everything's peachy, though Sarah-Jane didn't know that when they ordered a detonation and she tried to stop them, getting herself tossed asside and then tied up. The Cybermen notice the lack of explodedness, and decide to use the Station as a massive bomb, and commence loading it with explosives. By this time, the rocket is ready, but the Doctor goes all fair and loyal and asks for 15 minutes to rescue Sarah-Jane and try to stop the asplody. Which I loved. Very dramatic, and the loyalty was just great. When he gets there and does save her, there's this great moment when she has to remind him that it's a good thing that he saved her, and he looks sweetly embarased and chucks her on the shoulder because they aren't allowed to hug on what's still basically a kid's show.

So they fail to stop the Cybermen, and get tied up again. The rocket is launched. The Doctor gets the thing under his control, and there's drama as he steers them through a gravity asist to freedom. They tell the Vogans to send the rocket ofter the Cybermen, and they do-- and then it's over. Because that's how these things work. 

The Tardis catches up with them, and they all board and head out. And that's the end of that. They've gotten a telegram from teh Brig that says he needs them urgently, and so they head on back.

Asside from the fact that blowing up the gold doesn't make any sense, it was a fun, fast-paced story, and there weren't any lags or boring parts. It was four eps, and we watched them all together, so it kind of reads like a fun movie-- lots of action, not too much running through corridors and getting thrown back in jail, multiple plotlines that come together in the end, and the usual suffen ending that I've come to know and tolerate. I've missed the Brig, though, so I'm glad we'll be getting back to Earth to spend a little time with his gruff disbelief and short temper. I believe this is the last of Harry... and I'm kind of alright with that. He wasn't bad, but his habit of calling everyone 'old girl' and 'old chum' got to be a bit much, and he never really came in much use, though he at least seemed to enjoy himself.

classic who: genesis of the daleks

Back from winter hiatus and starting in slowly! We missed a month of Classic Who, but we're back with the place all Daleks come from.

Which turns out to be pretty bland and grey and more than a little Nazi-ish. See, there's this war between the Kaleds and the Thals (who we met on that weird planet with the spitting plants), and it's been going on for centuries, using up resources and becoming more hopeless and more prinitive as it goes. The Doctor is dumped there with Sarah Jane and Harry by the Timelords who are being all pompous and imperial and telling him he needs to stop the Daleks before they happen, one way or the other. They're immediately gassed and separated, and, of course, wind up on different sides of the battle, with the Doctor and Harry helping the Thals and trying to find a way to stop Davros and Sarah-Jane taken as a POW and put to work with a mutant who might be cute except for his desperate need of a bath, who goes all sweet on her because she's pretty and he's tired of destroying anything beautiful.

There's running about, being captured and escaping, political struggles, and the usual arguement between science as a weapon and science as a tool for betterment, and the Doctor eventually gets the scientists to believe that Davros and his need to weaponize things is a bad idea. 

There were neat things here:

- the Daleks were originally invented because the Kaleds realized that they were mutating (because of the war?) and their ultimate form would need a sort of encounter suit to continue existing-- but Davros took it to the next level and 'purified' the test subjects into the Daleks we all know and hide from, free of pity and full of raging and unstoppable belief in their own superiority.

- the Doctor is faced with the necessity of offing all the Daleks while they're still being formed-- mass alien infanticide-- and he can't do it. He's paralyzed in Tom Baker's tensest moment yet by the horror of being such a destroyer. And, having watched the new series religiously, I know it won't be the last time.

- Davros makes the daleks pitiless... and then they figure out that he's flawed and too swayed by emotion and turn on him in one of those ironies that are so great on TV.

- Sarah Jane's Muto friend is sweet, always putting her safety before his, and being very brave for the people he's only just met, even when it means going against his own people, and against the resistence the Doctor drums up along the way (I just hope he gets together with the cute pixie-girl that led the resistence; that's be a sweet and openminded way to rebuild the civilization after the Daleks are distroyed-- this time).

The cheese-factor was low, and it was fun seeing Sarah-Jane climb scaffolding like a monkey and encourage the Doctor to be ruthless. Overall, a good serial, though a little slow in the beginning, and needing a coat of paint in some color other than grey on both sides.

classic who: ark in space

Let me just say that two adventures in, this is a pretty good season.

Ark in Space picks up where Robot left off, with the Tardis landing after abandoning the poor Brigadier without so much as a goodbye. And they land on a space station.

By walking through three rooms and a really neat hallway, they surmise that they're on a station meant to hold the remains of humanity after some global disaster-- they're all in cryo, waiting to be revived 5,000 years after they went under. Only it's been at least 10,000 years, and there's something weird and green and slimy lurking about the place. So, as the designated Ankle-Twister, Sarah-Jane gets herself in trouble and spends most of the first episode or two unconscious, first from oxygen deprivation, which almost gets Harry, too, but doesn't do much against the Doctor (I love when he doesn't act human)-- then gets transmatted away and put in cryo by a computer glitch that assumes she's one of the ones that are supposed to have already been there. So they have to find her, and then find out what to do about her.

Looking for a revival kit of some sort, they find the mummified husk of a giant bug, and then Vira, cheif medical officer, is awakened by the computer and tells them what's going on-- and they tell her what's gone wrong.

So Sarah's saved, and wearing something other than that horrible purple dress in the previous episode, and they have to go up against the bug-slugs, which are the larval stage of the big husk they found-- and which reach the adult stage by taking over human bodies, and who plan to use the sleeping remains of humanity to do just that. The Doctor has to save the few people who've already awoken, himself and his companions, and do it in such a way that the rest of humanity is safe, too. Luckily, the commander of the mission, though taken over by the bugs and fully transformed, remembers that his human self was in love with Vira, and leads the bugs atray when he realizes he can't get her to come across and stay with him, eating the people they were supposed to protect.

A great story, The sum-ups at the beginning of each episode only went back a few seconds instead of whole minutes, and action happened right after getting off the tardis-- good signs of a solid plot with alot to say. The Doctor widgets with the wiring, Sarah Jane travels through very small conduits because she's the only one who can, Harry gets to learn a little of futuristic medicine, and all the conversations are dense and engaging and useful to the plot. And, again, the Doctor shines in caring about the fate of his companions as much as he cares about the fate of humanity, and his fondness for Ms Smith makes him utterly charming, while his disregard for Harry so far makes him amusing.

At the end, Sarah Jane puts on the first of what I know will be a long succession of ugly raincoats, and they head down to the surface to check things out before the colonists come back down.

classic who: robot

First Doctor Four story! And he's running, right off the bat, sometimes literally. I always liked Four. He's so cheerfully unconcerned with the possibility of total annihilation of himself, and swings between overly interested in events and concerned with the fate of humanity, to jolly and joking with monsters and their makers while still gathering information and getting things set up.

So there's this robot, see? It's been killing people and stealing things with no regard for human life, so they figure it must be inhuman-- and track down a robot-maker whose plans have been revived in the form of a 7-something foot tall silver bit of coolness that I want an action figure of so bad. Well, Sarah-Jane tracks it down and finds Ms Winters, the villain, who demonstrates that the Robot couldn't have killed anyone by ordering it to kill Sara-Jane. And that's the first cliffhanger.

Of course it doesn't; it's got the Azimov Laws that prevent it from harming people. But it gets fond of Sarah-Jane because she wants to understand it and treat it like a thinking creature, and as the plot develops and it realizes it has been killing people by taking out the 'threats to humanity' they've been sending it after, including the crazy scientist who did build it after all, it decides to kill all people-- except Sarah-Jane.

The Doctor, of course, has been leading UNIT around, trying to track it down and save Ms Smith, and mostly proves what and excellent new Doctor he is while SJS handles the nitty gritty of the plot-- but it's no less interesting for all that.

Over all, I really enjoyed Robot. Four is amazingly interesting to watch, even when he isn't doing much of anything, and I just love that the very first story he's in, he's the same wonderful lunatic as he was in the much later ones that I've seen. And Tom Baker never forgets that the Doctor is fond of both the Earth and it's people, and especially fond of Sarah-Jane. The story is compact, without much running around and getting captured again, which, as we know by now, is the mark of added-in scenes to extend the story. And it all makes sense. All the characters have reasons for being what they are.

And at the end, Sarah-Jane and Dr Harry Sullivan head off with the Doctor on off-world adventures, and the Brig looks sad in a 'I never get to go in the Tardis' way and says something about waiting around. Poor Brig.

This leads directly into the next story: Ark In Space.