The Sensorites

Although a lot of fans hate The Sensorites, claiming it is a sleep-inducing plodder, I absolutely love it. It is one of those stories that I will defend whatever critics say.

The Sensorites has an element of nostalgia for me. The novelization was among the first Doctor Who books that I read at the age of nine. Like most I read, it was in the beautiful WH Allen hardback edition, borrowed from the local library. What is more I read it during my first holiday in France. I remember sitting outside my parents' caravan in the sunshine of Brittany, reading about the City Administrator's treachery, about Ian getting poisoned and the Doctor being given a stylish black cloak as a reward. It was all very charming stuff and I thoroughly enjoyed it then. Watching the DVD twenty-two years later, I still love this story.

Part of why I like this story is because it is very gentle. The story is about 'alien monsters' but they turn out to be relatively friendly. There is only one onscreen death and the villains are treated with mercy at the end. This contrasts with the morbid sadism of the Hinchliffe era and the pointless violence of the Saward era. The story is also quite radical for its time in that it has humans as the villains.

The most common complaint against The Sensorites is its slow pace. This is a charge that could be levelled against most Hartnell stories. Perhaps this is more noticeable with this serial because of its low level of violence. Another complaint is the round feet of the Sensorites themselves. I don't get this complaint at all; the point of the round feet is that they are not human. I think the Sensorite costumes are very effective.

Being one of the few fans of Susan, I particularly like the way this story, unlike the others of Season 1, makes good use of the character. She is given impressive telepathic powers, reflecting her ethereal alien quality and for once, she gets to stand up to her grandfather. It is sad that other writers could not do more with Susan. Notable also, is Susan's delightful line about her planet having a sky like a burnt orange and silver leaves on the trees. That line was used so hauntingly in the New Series.

The Sensorites should be regarded as one of the most creative and interesting stories of the Hartnell era.

Dr Who and the Daleks Cadet Sweet Cigarettes

Sweet cigarettes were one of those things that my mother disapproved of. She thought they encouraged smoking. I always enjoyed them when I got the chance to eat them, but it was a guilty pleasure. I vaguely remember the days when sweet cigarette packets contained a picture card, though this was a dying genre. Cool kids in the 80s ate Milky Ways and Smarties, not sweet cigarettes.

In 1964 Cadet Sweet Cigarettes issued a set of picture cards which told a rather epic story entitled 'Dr Who and the Daleks.' This was not, as its title might suggest, an adaptation of the second Doctor Who serial, but was in fact an original story involving the Daleks (with their egg-headed Emperor) and the Voord.

Some of the artwork on these cards is really beautiful. There are some very impressive space battles and some lovely Sci-Fi landscapes. The Voord look far more impressive in this story than they do in The Keys of Marinus. However, Dr Who bears little resemblance to William Hartnell. We could speculate that this is an unknown incarnation of the Doctor, but there is enough superficial resemblance to Hartnell to suggest that the artist has just done a bad job with the likeness. The Doctor's facial appearance actually varies from one picture to another, showing a terrible lack of consistency.

The prose text that accompanies the pictures is written in surprisingly bad grammar. It comes across like a story written by a nine-year old. Yet the epic scale of this story and its puzzling relation to continuity make it rather fascinating. There is no sign of the TARDIS and the Doctor is seen wearing a spacesuit for much of it. The Doctor is far more physically active than the Hartnell Doctor, which suggests this might be a younger version of the First Doctor. The Doctor Who- Complete Adventures website argues that this is a pre-Unearthly Child story in which the Doctor is on a mission for the Time Lords (perhaps with a Time Ring). If the Doctor's memories of this incident were erased, this would account for his later ignorance of Daleks and Voord.

Part of the story involves Earth in the future. It also features Marinus. This creates a problem if we embrace the claim of The World Shapers strip, that Marinus is the same planet as Mondas and the Voord are proto-Cybermen. We could always resolve this with the usual solution that the Marinus here is a 'New Marinus.'

The last surprise that the story leaves us with is the Doctor making peace with the Dalek Emperor and sharing a victory toast with the Daleks. This is quite disconcerting given that the Daleks are generally seen as the Doctor's deadliest enemies.

Image credits: Hello, I'm the Doctor

Battlefield, by Marc Platt (Target novelisation)

When Battlefield was on television, a lot of my friends at school were watching it. They urged me to watch it, but back then I had no interest in Doctor Who. A year later, I suddenly developed an interest in Doctor Who. Hence, three years after the serial had screened, I read the Target novel without having seen the original. I really enjoyed this book. Despite the fantasy plot, it felt much more realistic and gritty than other Target novels I had read.

The Seventh Doctor run of Target novels featured quite a few that had a much deeper level of literary sophistication. While Battlefield is less experimental than Ian Briggs' Curse of Fenric novelisation, it's prose is very rich. The moment of Lt. Laval's death in particular is beautifully described. Battlefield is a much more straightforward retelling of the original story than Curse of Fenric, yet it still adds considerable richness to the narrative.

The big problem with the Battlefield serial was that it had too many characters. None of them really got the treatment they deserved. The great strength of the novelisation is that Marc Platt was able to add a depth of characterisation to them that was very much lacking in the original. The portrayal of Professor Warmsley, for instance is infinitely better than what we saw in the serial. Mordred becomes a bit more than just a mummy's boy.

The novelisation also treats us to a few glimpses of the strange Thirteen World realm of Morgaine. We also get to see the Merlin incarnation of the Doctor. I particularly like the way the Doctor sees his doom as Merlin as an inescapable fate than he can delay, but never avoid.

On the whole, the novelisation does a much better job than the well-meant but lacklustre serial. Battlefield was one of the brightest ideas in Doctor Who, but one of the most disappointingly executed ones.

Dr Who and the Great Old Ones

This has to be the best ever Target novel cover art. I remember seeing this paperback in a shop when I was nine years old. I was quite disturbed by it and decided I definitely didn't want to read that novel.

It is such a shame that this does not actually depict a scene in Spearhead from Space. The idea of some colossal eldritch space monstrosity threatening the Earth is so much cooler than anything in that serial. It reminds me a little bit of the Fendahl Predator in the 8th Doctor novel The Taking of Planet 5.

The Angels Take Manhattan

Amy is gone. At last; I don't know why they took so long about it. Amy was possibly the worst companion since Adric. A flirt with zero characterization, who can do anything that lazy writers need her to do. I don't get the people who think she looked attractive; she was far too skinny and waif-like to be pretty, not to mention those vacant stares.

In order to prepare us for the delight of Amy's exit, we are served up one of the worst stories that Moffat has ever given us. The Angels Take Manhattan is an horrible, thoughtless mess. It's a story that takes no time to generate a believable plot that makes any sense, and which attempts to bombard us with a sentimental emotional overload wrapped in Murray-Gold. We also get a return appearance from Moffat's Mary Sue, River Song, who only serves to get in the way of the presumed objective of giving Amy and Rory a good send off, not that I care. We get some moments of emotional drama with River, but these fall utterly flat because her character is too thin and undeveloped for them to stand on.

Moffat has a particular obsession with plots involving the mechanics of time travel, a trope horribly described as 'timey-wimey.' Such plots seldom make any sense and here this kind of story fails abysmally. The Doctor tells us that once they have read what will happen to them (he assumes the paperback is gospel truth and not fiction or an elaboration), it cannot be rewritten. That is in itself a great idea. I have always liked the Hartnell-era idea that time cannot be rewritten. But has not everything Moffat given us before attempted to make us believe that time can be altered at will? It is as though he has realized the dead end that 'time-wimey' plotting leads us to and made an half-hearted attempt too late to put the breaks on.

Weeping Angels were a delightfully scary idea. Unfortunately, they are an idea that gets old quickly. Hence, this story tries an whole load of new ideas with the Weeping Angels which fail to show any of the original power of the concept. The Angel babies were a little too silly and lacked the power of the proper Angels to terrify. The Angel Statue of Liberty was simply daft, as so many reviews have pointed out. Weeping Angels are great as a silent, unseen killer, but the idea of the Angels creating a battery farm of displaced humans just doesen't have the same impact. Do the displaced humans spend the rest of their lives in an hotel room? Do the Angels provide room service?

I'm just dreading what the next Christmas special will bring.

Paradise Towers

The first time I watched Paradise Towers, I found it extremely enjoyable. I was sucked into this surreal and fascinating world. Yet with each viewing of this serial, I am ever more conscious of it's faults.

Paradise Towers has a lot going for it. It offers a fascinating nightmare world based on the mundane reality of British housing blocks. It has a very clever and witty script that plays with language in a way not seen in any other Doctor Who story. It makes a fairly effective use of Mel and after the difficulties of Time and the Rani, we see Sylvester McCoy really settle into the role and make the Seventh Doctor his own. Watching him with the Kangs, we see a Doctor who is cool in a way the previous Doctors could never be.

Yet Paradise Towers is let down by a number of problems. The score is too loud and fails to fit the mood of the story. The sets are very well designed, but they are far too brightly lit, a common failing in 80s Doctor Who. While the Kangs are very enjoyable, they are quite obviously middle class drama school graduates.

The Chief Caretaker is a brilliantly conceived character. He is inspired by the very British phenomena of the overzealous council official who 'thinks he's Hitler.' Richard Briers performance does not quite do the character justice. While he has some glorious moments together with McCoy, most of the time he overplays the role and sends it up just a little too much.

One definite problem is that the world of Paradise Towers does not really make sense. The ages of the actors do not fit, we are given no explanation of why nobody ever leaves, we have no idea where the characters get their clothes or food or just generally how the whole society of the Towers works. This is not a problem in a story like Greatest Show in the Galaxy, where everything in the story is left mysterious. The problem with Paradise Towers is that we are given an awful lot of information about this society, but it still makes no sense.

Paradise Towers is not the highlight of the McCoy years and it is not even as good as Delta and the Bannermen, the story that followed it. Yet it was an important milestone in treading out a different path for the program. This serial was a bold experiment that offered a new and fresh avenue for Doctor Who.

The Power of Three

For just a few moments, I actually wondered if Kate was the Big Finish character Elizabeth Klein.


The Power of Three has a few clever ideas and I actually wondered for the first ten minutes if this might turn out to be a good story. I really liked the way this episode deconstructed previous Earth-set stories. When Sarah Jane Smith got involved in an Earth-set story, she would drop everything and help out the Doctor. Here the adventure has started, the Doctor has showed up and Rory is getting ready to go to work. I also liked the way the characters were expecting the cubes to turn out to be an alien invasion and were left waiting and waiting for something to happen. It would probably have been a more interesting story if the cubes had actually turned out to be a marketing gimmick or a a clever work of concept art (a Doctor Who story without aliens? It has been done before!). Unfortunately, the expected happens and the cubes start glowing and doing evil things. That is the point at which the story starts to drag. For every good idea in this story, there are at least two bad ones.

It's a bit difficult to see Amy and Rory as a good example of normal life. Amy has had a traumatic childhood, a history of psychiatric treatment and has become a successful model after working as a kissogram. Rory comes close to being normal, except we know he has spent a thousand years guarding a box in the guise of a Roman Centurion and was also an Auton replicant. How do you relate to characters like that? A couple of episodes ago, Rory and Amy were about to go through a messy divorce. Now they are playing the average happy British family. Rory's dad seems a completely different character to the person we met in his first appearance. He is not so much a character as somebody who is there to deliver comic lines.

The introduction of Kate Stewart as leader of UNIT does not get enough time to do it justice. Kate comes across as rather colourless and uninteresting. She is very quick to point out that her position has nothing to do with her father. Does anybody really believe that? Nepotism is not cool. Bringing up the Brigadier, I really hate all the sentimentalizing of the Brigadier. Nicholas Courtney was a great actor, but it is getting a bit tedious. The Brigadier was actually best as a bully and an antagonist of the Doctor. Turning him into a pseudo-companion or a comic sidekick was just wrong.

The alien menace turned out to be a terror from the mythology of Gallifrey. We had the terrible vampires and Yssgaroth and the Hoothi fungus that can animate the dead. It turns out that they are also terrified of some old bald guy with wrinkly skin. Time Lords scare very easily.

Proving that the story has too much going on and not enough time (though they oddly manage to throw in a bit of historical romping with Henry VIII), the Doctor saves the day by waving around his sonic screwdriver. This is the kind of reset button plotting that we became so used to under RT Davies and which we have never quite got away from under Moffat.

This was yet another disappointment of an episode.

Death Comes to Time

Death Comes to Time was a webcast made by the BBC in 2001, with an impressive cast of voice actors, most notably Stephen Fry and Anthony Head. It featured the Seventh Doctor, a surprising choice as it was made after the McGann TV movie.

This webcast is a colossal, epic drama that occurs on an overwhelmingly cosmic scale. Yet it is not epic in the silly over the top way of the new series' season finales. This story has a beautiful poetic feel. With it's orchestral classical score, a far cry from the sentimentality of Murray-Gold, Death Comes to Time feels very much like a Wagnerian opera. It is furthermore, a story that touches on religious and philosophical themes.

The story opens with a voiceover that is reminiscent of Bagpuss. It tells a fairy tale about a land of giants; an allusion to the Time Lords. This very much sets the tone of Death Comes to Time; it is more of a fantasy story than a science fiction story. You only need to watch this to realise just how shallow Moffat's notion of what the word 'fairy tale' means.

The big mistake of the TV Movie was to include too many of the shallow trappings of the show's past- the Master, regeneration, the Eye of Harmony. It assumed that the viewer would be interested to know that Time Lords regenerate and that they come from the planet Gallifrey. In contrast, Death Comes to Time does not tell us what Time Lords are, but shows us. We are introduced to the concept gradually through analogies like the beautiful parable about the painter and his painting.

Granted, Death Comes to Time gives us a radical revision of what Time Lords are. They are no longer a society of old men, but a race of gods who wield terrible power. Gallifrey is not even mentioned (though no doubt the three faces in the Temple of the Fourth are supposed to be Rassilon, Omega and the Other), but rather the Time Lords are wanderers in the fourth dimension. Fascinatingly, the idea of the TARDIS is deconstructed. The Doctor insists that his TARDIS contains no technology at all. It is rather portrayed more as a manifestation of some magic power that Time Lords possess. When the Doctor revokes the Minister's TARDIS, it is impossible not to be reminded of Gandalf breaking the staff of Saruman.

Death Comes to Time is often out of character with much of the history of the show. It is bizarre to think that the Doctor possesses the power to kill by thinking. Yet, we the idea of the Time Lords as gods can be found within parts of the Doctor Who mythos such as The War Games. For all that this story departs from continuity, the Doctor Who mythos is big enough to embrace a story like this; and it is a story that is made with passion and conviction.

This story is rarely accepted as a part of true Doctor Who continuity on account of how it departs from other stories. Yet there are many divergent and conflicting threads within Doctor Who. I'm sure that most of the discrepancies can be explained away. While Ace does not become a Time Lord in the New Adventures, this Ace appears to be older. It could be a Post-Lungbarrow Ace. It has been argued that if the Master or the Rani could kill by thinking like the Time Lords here can, they would have done so. Perhaps they had not yet mastered that power?

What are we to make of the Doctor's death? As is the golden rule in fantasy and science fiction. if there is no body, you can expect the character to return. Perhaps the Doctor does not really die? If you hate the TV Movie, you could see it as an alternative regeneration into the McGann Doctor, one that happens offscreen. Or if you hate everything in the New Series, you could use Death Comes to Time as a reason to exclude the RT Davies and Moffat era from your personal canon.

It is a shame how little the BBC Wales series has drawn from Death Comes to Time, as this is Doctor Who done well.

Scream of the Shalka

Scream of the Shalka was an animated webcast put out by the BBC in 2003. It featured a new Doctor voiced by Richard E Grant. For a while there was talk of a new series being launched with this Doctor.

I like the Gothic look of this Doctor, though I find it frustrating that they decided to give him a generic Victorian look. This is disappointing because it does not set him apart from the McGann Doctor. In personality, the Shalka Doctor most closely resembles Pertwee, though he is loaded with a massive dose of angst and guilt. This was not an original move, as both the New Adventures and the BBC EDAs had been full of angst, with the Doctor variously feeling guilt over manipulating Ace, blowing up Skaro or blowing up Gallifrey. On the whole, this Doctor comes across as just a bit too angry to be likable. Paul Cornell's script gives him a lot of humour, but Grant plays it so straight (like Pertwee) and so he comes across as an humourless man trying to be funny. Of course, it's unfair to judge this Doctor by this one performance. Most of the Doctors have taken a few stories to completely get into their role. Sylvester McCoy's Doctor evolved massively during his time on the show. Scream of the Shalka offers us a faint glimpse of what might have been.

The animation for this story is very nicely drawn, but the movements of the characters are not terribly fluid. One could probably enjoy a series of such animations had it ever been made. The real problem with the story is its traditionalism. There is too much effort made in trying to come up with all of the elements of Pertwee-era Doctor Who; the Doctor arguing with the military, an alien invasion, the Master and the Doctor not wanting to kill.

The only really clever idea this story has is the robotic version of the Master in the TARDIS. The idea of the Doctor keeping the Master as a kind of mascot or buddy is quite inspired and deals with the difficulty of taking seriously a Delgado-style Master in a 21st century story.


RT Davies has made it quite clear that Scream of the Shalka is not considered to be canon and that the 9th Doctor is Christopher Eccleston. If you are a fan who loves the Shalka Doctor, you can probably find a few clever ways to incorporate this story into the Doctor Who mythos. Lance Parkin includes this story in his AHistory guide to Doctor Who continuity by suggesting that this might be a future Doctor after the 9th Doctor. His Gallifrey Chronicles novel famously stated that there are three versions of the ninth Doctor, a meta-textual reference to this story, Curse of Fatal Death and Eccleston. In his discussion of Gallifreyan history, Parkin provides another potential solution as to how there could be more than one 9th Doctor. Attempting to tie together the War of Heaven in the BBC novels and the Last Great Time War of the new series, Parkin argues that the Eccleston Doctor could be a regeneration of the Grandfather Paradox version of the 8th Doctor in The Ancestor Cell. This is an interesting theory and raises the question of what happened to the proper version of the 8th Doctor. Perhaps he could have regenerated into the Richard Grant Doctor? It would be disconcerting, however, to think that there could be two Doctors at the same time.

A Town Called Mercy

As I said in my review of Curse of the Black Spot, the problem with pseudo-historicals is that there are essentially only two plots- a good alien is interfering with history or a bad alien is interfering with history. In A Town Called Mercy, we get two aliens who are both good, bad and ugly.

When we meet Kahler-Jex and find out he is a nice alien, it is a certain fact that he will turn out to be not as nice as he seems. We are also well aware that the cyborg alien will turn out to be more than just a brutal killer. I actually found myself reminded of the DWM story The Star Beast, in which the cute and cuddly alien, Beep the Meep turns out to be a wanted war criminal. That was actually a much more interesting story than this.

This story was just boring. It was flat and predictable, especially the very Star Trekl Next Generation debate about whether to hand over an unrepentant mass murderer to save a town full of innocent people. The whole thing was horribly sentimentalised with Issac's death and the horrible Murray-Gold music.

The resolution was terrible too. Kahler-Jex kills himself, thus removing any need for the Doctor to actually come up with a solution to the dilemma. Wouldn't life be so much easier if all the bad people just killed themselves? That is the worst kind of lazy writing.

Once again, we get racial issues swept under the carpet with the presence of a black preacher ministering to an otherwise white town. I am also irritated by Amy wearing a miniskirt. Does she not realize the hostility she is likely to attract when dressed like that in the 19th century? But then as JNT would do, Moffat has Amy wear a uniform in every episode no matter what the circumstances.

Give me The Gunfighters over this any day. The Gunfighters was actually about the historical events and circumstances, while still having fun with western cliches. This story just uses the western setting as a themepark backdrop to a banal science fiction story.