New Earth

Chapter The 140th, which is reassuringly familiar.

Plot:

The newly regenerated tenth Doctor takes Rose on another trip to the year 5-billion+ era, following a message received on the psychic paper from the dying Face of Boe. After the events of The End of the World, another planet has been colonised to become New Earth. They land there, near the city of New New York, and visit a hospital run by Cat nuns. Meanwhile, their sparring partner from that previous story Lady Cassandra - the last 'pure' human, who's prolonged her life with unnatural amounts of cosmetic surgery until she is just a flap of skin and a brain - traces the TARDIS travellers, with help from a cloned assistant, Chip, and her metallic spiders. She kidnaps Rose and transplants her brain contents into Rose's using a psycho-graft, then rejoins the Doctor operating Rose's body. The Doctor's suspicions have been aroused by the Cat nun's medicine, which is centuries ahead of its time. They break in to the 'intensive care' area to find it contains cell after cell, thousands of humans being grown to be a lab rats, infected with every disease in existence. Cassandra-Rose reveals herself and tries to blackmail the cats not to reveal the grim edifice their success is built upon, but inadvertently releases all the lab rat humans, who swarm the hospital, killing everyone they touch. The Doctor manages to mix up a miracle cure and save everyone, slightly hindered by Cassandra body-swapping into him, back into Rose and even into one of the infected people at one point. The crisis over, Chip willingly lets Cassandra take his body, but it is rapidly dying; Cassandra accepts her fate, and the Doctor takes her to her last fond memory, where she dies as Cassandra-Chip, in the arms of her younger self.

Context:

The family is going through one of those phases, which happen occasionally , where they are just not interested in Doctor Who; no matter whether it's ancient or modern, regardless of Doctor or monster. Even though it was a David Tennant one, and he's very popular in our house, I could not tempt them to watch with me. So, I viewed this one on my own from the DVD (haven't invested in up-scaled blu-rays of the early new series episodes as yet, but may when they're cheaper).  

First time round:

I watched this live on its BBC1 broadcast in 2006, while also taping it onto a blank VHS tape for future re-watching. Talk about one foot in the past (and I will talk a bit more about how New Earth has one foot in its - more recent - past in due course). As a viewing experience, this had more in common with how I consumed the later 1980s stories, like The Curse of Fenric (more on that later too), than how I viewed the majority of the 21st century Doctor Who episodes. The year 2006 superficially doesn't feel that long ago to me, but New Earth came before the launch of the BBC iplayer, and before our purchase of a recorder with a hard-drive, both of which revolutionised the way television was watched. I still dutifully save each new episode to a folder on the PVR, only deleting them once I've bought a Blu-ray copy much later, but it's more out of habit than anything else: the episodes are available all year round to stream at the touch of a button.

Thinking more about those times, I realise just how long ago 2006 was - we'd only recently got broadband. We'd moved in to a new place late in 2005 (we being just the Better Half and me, no kids yet at that point), taking the opportunity to set up a more 21st century internet package. We'd only been in that place for a matter of weeks when we celebrated our first Christmas there, and watched the first ever Doctor Who Christmas special of my lifetime (The Christmas Invasion). I remember after the broadcast in the evening playing the interactive Doctor Who game Attack of the Graske, revelling in my new bandwidth. This means that the 2006 run was the first ever series I watched after leaving the dusty relics of the dial-up era behind. The ability to watch streamed content without buffering, as well as creating the circumstances where something like the iplayer would thrive, also allowed me an unimpeded watch of the "Tardisode" that went online in the run up to New Earth. These were an experiment: one short online teaser scene per story, and they were pretty unremarkable. I only remember the first few, so I may have stopped watching them altogether later on.

Reaction:

I remember at the time it was fairly obvious, and I believe it has since been put on record, that the idea for having a Christmas story at the end of 2005 was a relatively hasty addition, and had come about after the series had been mapped out. The original plan was for the first two episodes of new series 2 to therefore be a contemporary Earth invasion story with Jackie and Mickey appearing, followed by a trip to the year five point five slash apple slash whatever, to see lots of fun aliens. In other words, an exact re-run of the way the 2005 series began. You can even see the point where the 15-minutes of Christmas-themed material have been grafted on to the front of the Sycorax invasion story, after that point it ceases to be particularly Christmassy at all, and reverts to what presumably would have been the plot had it been shown at Easter. The effect this has, as was certainly intended, is to reassure with the familiar while the audience gets used to the new bloke playing the Doctor. It was lucky that they hadn't just planned the one story dwelling on the recent past, as there had been a few months elapsed since Christmas before the new series started, so any doubters - or those that might have missed the Christmas show - still got their reassurance.  It might though have pushed a bit too much responsibility onto the shoulders of New Earth - in many ways it is a slight and comic creation, a palate cleanser to sit between more dramatic or exciting episodes rather than a big explosive season opener.

This era of Who loves picking up on threads on previous shows, anyway. New Earth is only the twelfth story since the return, but it's by no means the first sequel: Boom Town continues the Slitheen tale of Aliens of London / World War Three, and Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways picks up from the the plot of The Long Game. The rationale for each of these first two 2005 sequels were different: in the latter it was writer and showrunner Russell T Davies trying to deepen the events depicted and add more of a sense of scale by constructing a lightweight mythology as a framework around the series. He does that a little bit here too, with the Face of Boe's inclusion just to set up a slightly portentous prophecy which will pay off the following year. Boe doesn't even deliver the prophecy here, just talks about it, which does make the whole plot thread seem a bit of a con. Though I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel a little frisson hearing dialogue like "It's said he'll talk to a wanderer, to the man without a home - the lonely God". But that wasn't the main reason for doing the New Earth story; it was more like the reason for Boom Town. The production team wanted to work with a particular actor and character again as they have more potential to exploit. In that case it was Annette Badland as Margaret Slitheen, in this it is Zoë Wanamaker as the Lady Cassandra.

This is very much Cassandra's show, but interestingly Wanamaker's hardly in it, though her performance informs the whole story - this is because of one of the more contentious aspects of New Earth: the 'body swap' humour. It's not true body swapping, of course, it's only one way - though having Wanamaker in the CGI skin frame playing the Doctor or Rose might have been fun, it would have been effects heavy, and the production team clearly want to get rid of the need for that expensive CGI as soon as possible. So, the stars of the show get to ham it up and show us their comic chops as Cassandra zaps into them throughout. I can see why it put some fans' teeth on edge, but generally, it's perfectly good, well played and doesn't in any way deflect from the drama of the piece. In places, it's laugh out loud funny ("I'm a chav!"), and you'd have to be very stony-hearted not to at least smile at Billie Piper as Cassandra as Rose doing her Eliza Doolittle cockney. Tennant is not quite so successful playing Cassandra to my mind, but he still has great timing as the Doctor. After Cassandra-Rose snogs him (another contentious moment), when he adds quietly "Yep, still got it", it's another laugh out loud moment for me.

If one sits down to watch this expecting it to be a serious, sombre piece about a horror scenario in a hospital, one is going to be disappointed, but did it ever even pretend to be thus? In another echo of Boom Town, the main Sci-fi mystery plot is just window dressing. It's broad and conceptually simple (not quite high concept, but close to it) and over very quickly. Like many other great writers, Davies does not care for withholding information from the audience; clearly, he believes the true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. The intrigue about what the Cat nuns are up to lasts for - what - five minutes? - then the real dramatic question, teased out in a wonderful moment with sympathetic cat Novice Hame's justifications, is how they can live with themselves. I remember some people online hating the ending of this plot with the Doctor mixing up a cocktail of drugs which then get sprayed onto the infected humans using the lift disinfecting mechanism. Like many other great writers, Davies finds endings hard, and this was better than the endings from his Doctor Who scripts in 2005, which sailed close to deus ex machina territory - in that he'd seeded the separate elements (including the lift, used earlier in the story as a gag) much better. It doesn't really matter, though, as it isn't the real ending.

The real ending, like the story, is all about Cassandra, and it is one of the finest moments of the series up to that point.The older Cassandra, in Chip's body, has accepted that her life must come to an end, and is brought back to a moment we've witnessed earlier, when Cassandra is a lady of a certain age, just at the point in her life where things became "such hard work". This circular but emotionally charged time travel trick is reminiscent of La Jetée (an inspiration for the film Twelve Monkeys), particularly with the little hint that in the future Cassandra models Chip on her "favourite pattern", i.e. the last person in her life who was genuinely nice to her. Wanamaker and Sean Gallagher as Chip both play it perfectly, with generosity  - and intensity - from Tennant and Piper playing the still, silent observers. Once you see that this scene is the main point of the narrative for its author, then all the other campy, rompy fun can be taken as just that, and overall the story can be seen as a winner on its own terms.

Connectivity: 

Both New Earth and Terminus take place in medical institutions harbouring a dark secret; both take the maybe tasteless approach of using a group of unwell people as a 'monster' in the story, who shamble around like zombies after fearful characters who flee so as to avoid getting infected. In both stories, everyone ends up being cured in the end. New Earth has cat people, Terminus has a dog man.

Deeper Thoughts:

Not not-not-not-not-not not-not-not-not-not not-not anything to do with New Earth: BFI Showman and Curse of Fenric screenings, November 23rd 2019. The concept of this blog is to watch the stories in a random order. So, whenever a new box set comes out, and there is a tie-in BFI screening, I use a chance factor to decide whether I will blog a story from the set or not, and if so which one. When the season 26 set was announced earlier in the year, I'd already just watched and blogged The Curse of Fenric, and previously had covered Battlefield and Ghost Light; this meant only one story from the set remained, the finale, Survival. I flipped a coin, heads meaning I'd blog Survival; but, it came up tails. The recent BFI event was worth writing about, though, and I didn't want to wait until another Sylvester McCoy story came up as that might be months. As New Earth didn't spark off any deeper thoughts, it may as well go here. It is a little bit apt too, as many people during the course of the day in NFT1 did cite the theory that aspects of the final few Sylvester McCoy stories (introducing a more capable companion who became more the focus of the plots, filming on council estate tower blocks) gave rise to the style of the series when it returned in the 21st Century.

Chris Chapman, centre of stage

A growing band of fan friends is regularly attending these events, but when I arrived after getting an eye-wateringly early train up to the Big Smoke for a Saturday, it was only to meet one to begin with: Chris. He and I were the only two who could get there early enough to watch a late addition to the BFI's Saturday schedule: a screening of Showman, the feature length documentary on 1980s Doctor Who producer John-Nathan Turner. It was less packed than normal, probably mostly to do with the early hour, but maybe also the more niche aspect of the piece. The audience did though contain a number of people interviewed, including Peter Davison. An introduction came from director Chris Chapman, who explained that they has only intended at first to do a 50-60 minute film, but  were gathering so much good material that they lobbied for additional budget to take it up to the 80-90 minute mark, and were given the go ahead. It's definitely a worthy investment: a great albeit tragic narrative arc, and some very affecting sequences.

"Dick!!!"

There was only the briefest gap in between the end of Showman and the start of The Curse of Fenric, so we hastily sought out the rest of that growing band of fan friends in the throng: David, Trevor. Dave, Tim and Alan joined me and Chris for the main attraction. Things started with Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy doing their customary quiz, where any audience member that thinks they know the answer to the fiendish trivia questions has to "Shout for Dick" and Fiddy comes to them with roving microphone and prize. After asking the audience to practise shouting "Dick" at the top of their lungs, Justin joked that it was appropriate as it was close to panto season, only for a large group behind us to shout back "Oh No it isn't!". I love Doctor Who fans.  This quiz was notable as for the first time ever - despite usually knowing most of the answers - I actually shouted for Dick. I already have the new Series 4 box set, but I couldn't sit by while person after person got the director of Survival wrong (it's Alan Wareing, by the way). It didn't make any difference, as Dick took his microphone to someone else no matter how loud I shouted, and someone else got the prize I didn't care about, and the kudos that I did. Never mind.

L to R: Johnson, Briggs, Fiddy 

In advance of the screening, Justin spoke to writer Ian Briggs. Following on as it did from the Showman screening, the interview's first question was inevitably about John Nathan-Turner. Briggs had spent quite a bit of time with him - they were the two that stayed in the hotel longer, as they weren't needed immediately on location - and confirmed he was as 'larger than life' as he appeared in the interviews of the documentary, and the loss when he died in 2002 was heartbreaking: "Those who knew him really really miss him; [Doctor Who] survived because of him". Briggs also talked about how spoiled he'd been getting to work on Who as his first TV job, and how it compared unfavourably to his later gigs on shows such as Casualty and The Bill, where the show was not writer-led and writers weren't encouraged to think big and put all their hearts into a script. He talked about how much he enjoyed creating the character of Ace, and how - once he'd written the character's debut story Dragonfire, and the final decision was made to keep her on as a regular - he'd written a brief character outline for future writers, and added a note to script editor Andrew Cartmel reading "It feels like I'm giving up my only child - please look after her". I'd never seen Ian Briggs interviewed before, and he came over as passionate and thoughtful.

L to R: Fiddy, Ayres

What was then shown was a spruced up version of the 2003 extended feature-length omnibus Fenric. My more detailed feelings about the story are here. Of the added scenes, one thing that stood out was in the scene about thought experiment The Prisoner's Dilemma; this version extends the doctor's line as broadcast by five words as highlighted: "Based on a false premise, don't you think, like all zero sum games". Now, The Prisoner's Dilemma isn't a zero sum game, that's the whole point of it; so, it's irritating (probably only to me, mind) that a mistake avoided in the original has been reintroduced in the newer version. Watching with an audience usually highlights more comedy than you notice when watching alone, but even with that boost the sombre Fenric doesn't have them rolling in the aisles. The only big (and probably unintentional) laughs were for all Janet Henfrey's lines as Miss Hardaker. I hadn't seen it as quite as 'large' a performance before, and it did seem a little unfair, but I'm glad people got their yucks where they could! Mark Ayres was interviewed by Dick once the story finished, and went into the history of the various special edition versions of the story. Far too much material was shot than could be used, and the eventual broadcast version was cut and rearranged mercilessly. Ayres - who as the composer of the show worked closely with director Nick Mallet and knew his original planned edit - had the idea in the early 1990s of making a VHS omnibus version which reinstated the material and put everything back into script order. John Nathan-Turner, who worked on the VHS range at the time, wasn't sold on the idea, and the half-way house episodic and slightly extended version was the result. Finally, in 2003, the DVD version was made, which fulfilled the original intention. MArk said that he resisted the temptation to "do a George Lucas" and, apart from upscaling it to HD, has only made two or three minor adjustments.

As is usual, there followed a compendium of clips from the box set's Value Added Material, and it all looks great: the marvellous trailer in full, and excerpts from Behind The Sofa, the Writer's Room and the Fenric Making Of. Best of all was the edit of all the funniest bits from the archive studio and location footage. Similar snippets were assembled for previous box set previews at the BFI, and it would be nice to have these selections available on the discs as well as the longer, full archive footage extras. The big Q&A with Ace actor Sophie Aldred and script editor Andrew Cartmel followed. They were both as engaged and informative as you'd expect, with Justin and the audience's questions covering a wide range of topics. They were also asked about Nathan-Turner. Cartmel said that "John took a chance on people - sometimes it went wildly right, sometimes it went wildly wrong"; Sophie said that he was instinctive, but that his instincts were usually on the money. Cartmel added that John had something of a love hate thing going with Doctor Who: he had been offered other things, but turned them down, perhaps because he couldn't give up his "mini-Walt Disney empire". He would sit in his office, not able to stop himself reading bitchy fanzines, even though it was making him miserable. The BBC never cared about Doctor Who, which meant they could get away with much (like Fenric's soviet communism over Christianity sedition, which an audience member highlighted), but it also led them to think that nobody else cared either. According to Sophie, Sylvester McCoy is still really surprised meeting people that like his Doctor.

L to R: Cartmel, Aldred, Johnson 

Sophie talked of her wonderful on screen chemistry with Sylv ("Funny that, as I can't stand him!" she joked at first), and put it down to them being similar: neither had gone to drama school, they both had the same political leanings, had both done the Working Men's Club circuit early in their career, and even shared the same birthday. She commended his enormous generosity as the leading man, in letting her be the focus of stories. This allowed the character to flourish to the point where she became the template for the companion in the new series, and was big enough to have had her own spin off show (someone suggested this in the room and it got a long round of applause). There were quite a few anecdotes about the making of Fenric: Sophie thought it was a gift for her, as she got to do everything: fall in love, seduce a soldier, be rude, fighting, running... She even got to do her own stunts, including diving into the water at the end. The lines the two vampire girls had about it being warm in the water were cruelly funny as "Lulworth Cove is the coldest place in the world". Both Cartmel and Aldred had experienced JNT's stunt casting of people they'd never heard of but whom John worshipped (Stubby Kaye and Dolores Gray were the names mentioned) but both agreed Nicholas Parsons was fantastic in the role of Fenric's haunted vicar. After one take of Ace climbing over the roof onto the side of the church that focused a bit too much on her derriere, there was a call of "Cut!" followed by JNT saying "Merry Christmas VT.

There was so many other goodies that I haven't got time to cover in detail. For example, towards the end, Sophie talked about recently meeting Russell T Davies, how she'd been hesitant to contact him at first but he'd replied to her message within a few minutes with "Squeeee!". When they'd met, he'd wanted to hear all about... John Nathan-Turner. That brought the event full circle. Previous BFI events have sometimes turned into a collective appreciation of one person - Patrick Troughton at The Power of the Daleks, say, or Douglas Adams at Shada - this one was closest to that for JNT, and it's about time he got some love, quite frankly. The screening was rounded off with a couple of trailers (including the new Jodie Whittaker one) followed by the customary cocktails in the BFI bar afterwards. On Doctor Who's 56th anniversary, it was nice to raise a glass and think about JNT, and everything he did for Doctor Who.

In Summary:

New Earth is great, Showman is great, The Curse of Fenric is great; it's almost Christmas, and all is happy (at least until Friday 13th December, anyway).

Terminus

Chapter The 139th, concerns Terminus, definition - noun: the end of the line.

Plot:

The Doctor has welcomed Turlough aboard the TARDIS, not knowing that this new young companion is a somewhat unwilling agent of the Black Guardian tasked with assassinating the Time Lord. Only Tegan suspects Turlough, but no one listens to her as she's always moaning about something. Anyway, Turlough's attempts at time machine sabotage cause the TARDIS to lock on to a nearby craft, which is decorated with pictures of skulls everywhere, so obviously must be a safe haven. Nyssa's room is nearest to the ensuing cosmic disturbance, so she escapes into the craft and the others follow her, getting split up as is the fashion. The Doctor and Nyssa meet up with a couple of space pirates, a raiding party whose (space)ship-mates have abandoned them, as it turns out they've raided a plague (space)ship - ferrying victims of space leprosy to a space station called Terminus. In Space.

Nyssa has caught the disease (somehow), and gets taken off by guards called the Vanir. The others follow. Once there, they aren't really in any jeopardy, except for some minor league bullying from the Vanir, as everyone - even a giant glowing red-eyed man-dog called the Garm - actually does want to help cure the people that arrive there. It also turns out that Terminus is at the exact centre of the universe (!) and its engines firing were responsible for the big bang because of some timey-warping (!!). The Black Guardian tricks Turlough into another act of sabotage which starts the Terminus engines again, threatening to destroy the universe, and everything comes to a crescendo with the giant dog-man pushing a lever back to its off position (!!!). Tegan and Turlough spend 90% of the story crawling around in air ducts, by the way, with the former only emerging at the end to be told by Nyssa that she's leaving the TARDIS, and is sticking around to help run Terminus. Tegan gives her a big hug, thereby offering her arms to an ex-leper. Arms to an ex-leper? No? No... I'll see myself out.

Context:

When Terminus came up next on the randomiser, I groaned inwardly. It's one of those stories I never find too appealing for a rewatch. A tired and tatty reputation proceeds it, but being stuck in the middle of a loose trilogy of stories, and writing out a companion, it can't be skipped; so, it tends to be watched only out of a stubborn and gruelling sense of duty. Watched alone without the bookends of the far more fun stories either side (Mawdryn Undead before, and Enlightenment after) is particularly hard. Poor Terminus. If Nyssa didn't leave in this story, I don't know if anyone would ever watch it all, as it's got naff all to do with the 'Black Guardian trilogy' really, as a friend of mine once observed (see below). My unfavourable feeling going in may have been subconsciously broadcast to my viewing mates, as all the children (boys of 13 and 10, girl of 7) bailed after episode 1, never to return. I watched the remainder of the story from the DVD, an episode a night, on my own. It does get a bit better as it goes along. (I watched without the enhanced CGI, by the way, because - to be honest - I'd completely forgotten until after I'd seen the episodes and was exploring the disc that there were any replacement CGI effects for Terminus).

First time round:

I did catch this on its BBC1 broadcast in February 1983, but don't remember anything significant about that viewing. I wasn't madly in love with Nyssa like some of my peers at that time, so neither her leaving, nor the sight of her in a camisole and petticoat, meant much to me. I remember more about the VHS release, which came out approximately ten years later. This was during my second year at university in Durham, when I'd gravitated towards a group of like-minded (or at least tolerant and slightly nostalgic) individuals who would watch Doctor Who with me. I bought the tape in Volume One in Worthing, my usual supplier of the time, and watched it at home before term started. Then, a month or so later, as I remember it, a few of us visited a group of friends' student digs in Neville's Cross on a Sunday, and watched my tapes of the whole of the Black Guardian trilogy back to back. God, we knew how to live back then. David, long-term fan friend mentioned many times before on this blog, was there, as was Kev B, another friend from his year group. They both must have been visiting for the weekend as they had left Durham the previous year. l remember having a discussion on the day with David about whether it was still worth watching a terrestrial repeat of Doctor Who if you already have it on video  - they were showing old Whos on BBC2 on Friday evenings, but it was something like Genesis of the Daleks or Caves of Androzani on at the time, which I had on tape, so I didn't bother watching; David, on the other hand, thought that any Doctor Who being shown 'live', as it were, was exciting and I should support it. Three-quarters of the way through watching Terminus, Kev B spluttered in frustration "This has got nothing to do with all the Black Guardian stuff". And he was right.

Reaction:

The author of Terminus, Steven Gallagher, is a pretty good writer, and one of only a handful of classic series Doctor Who writers who made a big name for themselves with significant work away from the show (novels and TV series, in his case). His previous script, Warrior's Gate, certainly had some problems during its production, but on the page it sings. So, why's Terminus such a mess? It too had a cursed production, where it seemed everything that could possibly go wrong did, but there's major issues with the script too. No production, however swish, could save it. Just to take one example, consider the mysterious company Terminus Inc. that runs this healthcare institution. As we find out later, the cure they offer does work, although it's hit and miss. So, why does nobody ever return? Why do people keep paying them, if their reputation is so bad (as pretty much every character confirms - it's not just the pirate Olvir's bias). Olvir says that the company continues operating, and nobody complains, because having a relative with the disease is too shameful for anyone to make a fuss. Do we buy that? If someone with enough money or clout paid for someone with the disease to be cured, and they disappeared without a trace, surely they would investigate? How likely is it that only un-rich or un-influential people are affected by Lazar disease?

Well, maybe it is possible, as Lazar disease doesn't seem to be one of those dull diseases that follows logic or anything; instead it claims only the person in the cast whose contract was coming to an end, leaving lots of other people unaffected who had as much or more contact with infected people or atmosphere. It also strikes insanely rapidly, which makes one wonder how anyone could survive an intergalactic trip once they came down with it. Let it also not be forgot that one of the symptoms is to take one's clothes off, wander around in one's undies for a bit, then don some medieval peasant rags. It is indubitably an unusual and interesting disease.

The Garm's motivations at least make sense, but he is woefully badly realised. This era (and pretty much all of classic Doctor Who, to be honest) has its fair share of monster creation being fumbled on the journey from script to screen, but they're not always so damaging to the intent of the story. The Garm as he finally appeared looks like a cuddly big teddy bear. He looks friendly, which of course - he is! He's supposed to look terrifying, so that when we find out later that he's friendly, it's a surprise twist. A key part of the story is fatally undermined, plus, you know, the Garm looks embarrassing throughout too - everyone's a loser. Gallagher's gone on record saying that the original script had the Garm remain unseen, just a pair of glowing eyes in the darkness; that would definitely have worked better, but would have been hard to realise in the studio, and eventually the whole costume would have had to be revealed as the Garm has to help save the day at the end.

Without the terrifying version of the Garm as originally intended, Terminus doesn't even have a pretend antagonist. That's not necessarily a fault, though; I think it's one of the story's few strengths is that Nyssa stirs up a quiet and small revolution amongst characters that aren't big and bad and evil, but just normal - if slightly desperate - people; it suits her character, and it's refreshing that the stakes don't always have to be high. Other positives: Bor is a good character, and nicely played by Peter Benson. And Liza Goddard trying her hardest to make her hard-bitten space pirate character believable, despite everything around her, from her costume and make-up outwards, working against that, is a triumph of determination.

Connectivity: 

Not very much links the black-and-white historical The Reign of Terror to the 1980s space adventure that is Terminus. All I can think of is that their respective first episodes both have a lot of wandering around exploring, with only a couple of guest characters appearing, then the rest of the cast - and the plot - turns up from episode two onwards.

Deeper Thoughts:

Vanessa Feltz's Grandmother. There's clearly much that is risible in Terminus, but a moment that  - though it is indeed silly - had never much registered previously, was part of an early scene. Peter Davison rushes into a room to see the door on the far side rapidly closing, so throws a chair with almost supernatural accuracy into the gap, stopping the door from slamming shut altogether. British TV whimsy-merchant Harry Hill and his writing team must have been tickled by this when researching material for an appearance of Peter Davison on Hill's Alien Fun Capsule programme last year. The result was a game / sketch called Chair Jam in which Peter and the other guests compete to best recreate this historic television event. The clip is online here and it's a lot of fun. If you haven't seen it, a note of caution before you click on that link: you won't be able to see that moment of Terminus the same way ever again. Now, I know that often gets said, but this time I think it's true: every time I watch Terminus from now on (which probably won't be that often, but you never know) the chair moment is going to stick out, and I'm going to think of Harry Hill.

This is a phenomenon of which I'm very familiar: there are lots of moments or lines of dialogue in films or TV shows that have become stuck in my mind by association with something else. Normally, it's experienced the other way round, though; rather than be reminded of something when watching a show, I'm reminded of the show when doing something else. This normally then elicits a quote in recognition, at least in our house. I don't know if 'normal' people do this. A couple of examples: whenever the Better Half or I are involved in any risky or thankless endeavour, one will say to the other "It won't work, will it, Ted?" and the other will reply "No, but we have to try" - this is based on the exchange between Ted and Dougal in the series two Father Ted episode Tentacles of Doom.  When there's no food in the house, and we need to do a big supermarket run, it is consistently known as a 'lentils and wallpaper' shop, after the shopping list Neil starts to write when they need "everything" in The Young Ones episode Flood. There's loads of others too - the semiotic thickness of our day-to-day dialogue is such that, were we not allowed our meta-textual references, it would probably get a lot quieter in our house.

There are obviously lots of Doctor Who instances too, some of which I've mentioned in the blog before. Whenever someone says anything patently obvious in our house, they receive an impression of Mr. Sneed in The Unquiet Dead: "The whole blummin' world can see that!". At least once a day throughout our summer holiday this year, someone sitting at the poolside but not getting in would be told by someone in the pool "You shouldah come intah the wartah wiv us, then we'dah bin tuggevah", parroting what is, I think we can all agree, the finest line of dialogue in The Curse of Fenric. Whenever, there's a discussion about 'fire' or 'leaders' it won't be long before "There were leaders before there was fire; fire will kill us all in the end" makes its entrance (Old Mother's dialogue from An Unearthly Child, done in an exaggerated impression of Eileen Way's delivery).

I'm going out on a limb here a bit, but I think that Doctor Who fans understand this behaviour; a particular Doctor Who fan - Russell T Davies - wrote about it. In an exchange between Lance and Henry in episode six of his 2015 series Cucumber, Lance tells how he once read an article by Vanessa Feltz about her grandmother doing the washing-up, always with the water too hot to the touch. This is also how Lance likes to do the washing up, so: "Every time I wash up, I think of Vanessa Feltz's grandmother. Isn't that ridiculous? Every single day of my life, just for a second, I think of Vanessa Feltz's grandmother. Cos she's in there, she's stuck - she's this tiny little fact that won't go away". Like all good bits of dramatic observation, this made me feel understood, and part of something wider. Since then, all our little family catchphrases and the regular events that invoke them have become known as Vanessa Feltz's Grandmother moments. The only drawback with this is the cognitive pile up: when it's cold and someone wants the fire put on I am reminded of Old Mother's portentous pronouncements in An Unearthly Child which reminds me of Lance and Henry in Cucumber which reminds me of Vanessa Feltz's grandmother. It's a wonder I get anything done!

In Summary:

If Terminus didn't exist, there would be no Chair Jam, and Chair Jam's quite funny; so, that's in its favour.

The Reign of Terror

Chapter The 138th, the 138th Chapter Spectacular.

Plot:

The original TARDIS team, Doctor 1, Ian, Barbara and Susan, find themselves in post-revolutionary France, a couple of days walk - on pretty revolutionary exterior film, no less - from Paris. Unfortunately, the first thing they stumble upon is a safe house for royalists fleeing the country. Before too long, the place is surrounded by soldiers, Susan and the two teachers are captured and taken off to the capital for a date with Madame Guillotine, and the Doctor is left unconscious in the building, which has been set on fire. Luckily, he gets rescued by a boy he befriended earlier, and makes his way to Paris, being sidetracked briefly on the way by being press-ganged onto a road digging party. After failing to escape from the Conciergerie Prison, Susan and Barbara are rescued when their tumbrel heading towards execution is attacked by a couple more royalist supporters, Jules et Jean. They are taken to Jean's place where Barbara takes a shine to Leon Colbert, another conspirator. Ian meanwhile has shared a cell with a dying man, who with his last breath gives Ian a message to pass on to a spy from England called James Stirling. He escapes the jail to track this spy down, but asking too many questions at a local inn, he ends up getting attacked by Jules et Jean, and dragged off to Jean's place too.

Meanwhile, the Doctor has disguised himself as a Regional Officer of the Provinces to inveigle his way into the Conciergerie, but once there he gets caught up with Lemaitre, the official in charge of the prison, who takes him to meet Robespierre. A couple of twists and double-crosses later, the TARDIS travellers find out who Stirling really is, and he gets them to do him a favour undertaking a mission to spy on Robespierre's deputy Paul Barrass, who has a secret meeting with the young Napoleon Bonaparte. Robespierre is overthrown in a coup, and the TARDIS travellers make their way back to the TARDIS and depart.

Context:

Before the broadcast of The Happiness Patrol, one of the final classic Doctor Who stories in Sylvester McCoy's penultimate year, there was a rumour going around that it's final episode was going to be animated. It wasn't true, needless to say; but, it wasn't too believable either. At the time, it seemed very unlikely that a conventional BBC1 show would dip in and out of animation in such an avant-garde manner. In the many years since then, though, we have somehow come to the point where it's the default expected for those few stories from the show's early years where there are a few episodes missing from the archives, but which are mostly intact. The very first of these came out in 2006, which used animation to plug the two episode-long gaps in Patrick Troughton Cyberman story The Invasion. At the time, many fans myself included wondered how BBC Worldwide could afford it, and perhaps they couldn't quite as it would be another seven years before the next part-animated story was released, and that was The Reign of Terror. There were a handful more done in those last couple of years of the regular DVD range: The Tenth Planet, The Ice Warriors and The Moonbase. Lately there have been a few animations of wholly missing stories (The Power of the Daleks and The Macra Terror so far, with more planned). Every animation to date with the exception of The Reign of Terror has been of a monster story; monsters are presumably easier to animate, and certainly easier to animate interestingly than 18th century French persons. The therefore somewhat unusual and experimental Reign of Terror DVD was popped on, and I watched it on my lonesome an episode a night during the evenings of one week.

First time round:

Twenty years before the DVD release of Reign, 1980s Doctor Who producer John-Nathan Turner came to the end of his employment doing special releases for the Doctor Who VHS range. One of many ideas he had introduced to allow greater access to the archive was the release of some of those stories with gaps. Instead of episode long animations synced to the surviving audio, the gaps on video tape would be covered by an actor from the story giving a brief synopsis of the missing material to camera. The Reign of Terror was originally planned for release in the 30th anniversary year, with the actor that played Susan, Carole Ann Ford, having been recorded summarising the missing episodes 4 and 5. For reasons unknown, though, it was shelved, unlike everything else for which Nathan-Turner had assembled footage.

It wasn't released until 2003, ten years later than planned. It was the very last release of the VHS range, in a box set with some other odds and sods. I bought it in the MVC on London Bridge during lunchtime, on the day it was released. I may have been lucky to get it too; it was a limited edition, and my memory is that it was hard to find and lots of other fans reported online that they'd missed out (possibly because - DVDs being the big thing by then - VHS tapes were only expected to sell to raving lunatic completists like what I am, and it was probably therefore a little too limited compared to demand). I would have then taken the train home to Brighton and watched it that evening, and been confused as to who the hell was who when all the script's to-ing and fro-ing, double-crosses and traitors, and suspicion falling on different people in turn, was condensed into 5 minutes of brisk chat. 

Reaction:

I've written recently about how Doctor Who can do beginnings better than endings; I'd never thought about how well - or not - it does middles. The Reign of Terror's episodes 1 to 3 and 6 have some nice moments, but they feel quite episodic: escapes, comedy characters, walking, ooh Napoleon! But nothing ties them together. The missing episodes 4 and 5 develop the mystery of who's on who's side, and reveal in each of the two episode endings who is the bad guy, and who's the good guy. You can't skip all that, or skim over it as John Nathan-Turner 's VHS version did, and not be left with a pile of unconnected bits rather than one story. With the episodes reinstated using animation, it holds together as one story, but whether it's a particularly coherent story, that's a different matter. It's probably a bad sign if parts 4 and 5 of 6 are where most of the plot is, and the beginning and end of a story isn't contributing very much.

Let's start with episode 1. It's mostly exploration, taking it's time to let the regulars uncover where and when they are, and for the complications to arise. That's all well and good, and it's fun to spend time in their company (Ian talking the Doctor down from his mood of high dudgeon with the offer of a drink is a lovely moment). The episode's undermined though, by none of the principal guest characters appearing in it. They all enter in the next episode, or later. This is a problem in a spy story where the major dramatic question is who is the 'mole' in both camps: someone has been informing on the royalist sympathisers, and someone else is an English spy. Introducing the suspects earlier, instead of other characters who are only seen in this first part, would have allowed the mystery and tension to play out longer, and therefore mean more by the end. All the action of the story takes place in Paris, and by parking the Doctor and Co. so far out, writer Dennis Spooner stretches out his narrative at the expense of its focus: there's lots of 'shoe leather', scenes in the next couple of episodes of the Doctor, walking to the capital, and getting into scrapes which again don't have anything to do with the plot except to add colour.

Meanwhile, the others are trapped in jail cells for most of episodes 2 and 3. Ian goes one better - he's trapped on film (in pre-recorded inserts, as actor William Russell was on holiday for the studio days). The intrigue gets started then, with a cryptic deathbed message being passed on, but there's not much room for it to develop amongst all the other 'business'. It's difficult to ascertain how this would have gone over to those watching on its contemporary broadcast: it was very much an experiment in how much humour could be introduced into a story, with The Reign of Terror going further than any serial had in that first year of Doctor Who's life. The comedy jailer is okay, as he runs through the remainder of the narrative, having a purpose as an obstacle to our heroes. The scene with the Doctor getting the better of the road works overseer - despite some lovely Stan Laurel-esque physicality from Hartnell - is pure padding. Even the scene of the Doctor larking about in a gentleman's outfitters doesn't really go anywhere - the shopkeeper later turns him in to the authorities for disguising himself, and the authorities don't do anything about it. Meanwhile, Barbara and Susan have nothing to do at all, and Susan's character is very badly served: she would rather not try and escape because there might be rat in the cell, so she'll just wait to be guillotined instead? Really?! This isn't the telepathic future child that Carole Ann Ford signed up to play, and it is obvious why she left a couple of stories later.

An oddly shot action sequence where Barbara and Susan are rescued by another couple of significant characters (who are only being introduced half way through the story) takes us to the animated section. This is where the plot gets interesting, including the wonderfully tense sequence of the TARDIS women forced out of hiding to consult an untrustworthy physician. The animation helps one to follow the action better than an audio recording or summary would, but it isn't perfect. The character designs from some angles are very impressive; from others, they are unrecognisable as the actor in question - sometimes switching multiple times in one scene. Ian's likeness is particularly bad, very fleetingly looking anything like him. All the character models also have very prominent teeth: I don't know what's so off-putting about that, but it was all I could concentrate on for the first few minutes of episode 4, until I got used to it. I suppose you do see people's teeth when they act in real life, but I'm definitely not so consciously aware of it. The other major problem is that there are flurries of rapid edit points. Sometimes, a scene of something dull like someone being offered a chair and sitting down cuts six or seven times in a second. It's distracting and - needless to say - not representative of the stately pace of the episodes on either side of the animation.

The animation ends with all the mystery of the story resolved, and so there isn't much to do in the final episode, when we're back to live action. The final episode is off by itself like a one-act play of Ian and Barbara playing at being spies, tying up the staff of an inn and taking their place to watch a secret - and not historically verified  - meeting between Barrass and a young Napoleon. It's mildly diverting, I guess, but nothing really to do with the plot of the previous few episodes. Robespierre gets deposed, which is presented in a historically accurate way, but that feels like the finale to a different story, and one we haven't been watching at all, so ends up feeling a bit ho-hum. Then, it's over, with only an echoey voice-over from The Doctor over a starscape to give the ending faux gravitas (it was the end of the first ever season of Who, so I forgive them for indulging a little bit).

Connectivity: 

Both The Reign of Terror and The Bells of Saint John have most of their action take place in European capital. New episodes of both stories debuted in 2013 (when the animated middle episodes were released on DVD). That's pretty much it.

Deeper Thoughts:

2019: the year of new old Who. It's been more than 14 years since Doctor Who returned to our screens, but they've only managed to make 11 series in that time. As with everything to do with the show, there were lots of online rumours and conspiracy theories flying around whenever there were fewer than the expected number of episodes planned for a particular year, but the reason seems obvious: Doctor Who costs too much money to make every single year. 2009 and 2012 had only a handful of stories shown, but they still maintained a presence in the TV landscape, as significant things happened (the bowing out of long-running regulars in both cases). It wasn't until 2016 that new Who had it's first proper 'gap year', and 2019 is only the second time it's pulled this cost-conscious trick. In each case, there was a single festive special shown as a consolation prize. 2016 also had 'Class', a spin-off show that most thought was woeful, so it probably provided little consolation to adventure-starved fans; 2019 has had not a sausage since Resolution finished airing on the very first day of the year. Even the recent Children in Need segment, as sweet and affecting as it was, was just a personal appearance by the show's stars not any 'in character' drama.
    

Luckily, though, this year has seen a lot of new old Who. Unlike the deprived 2016, the emergence of the Blu-ray range has meant a regular delivery of classic adventures on shiny disc again in 2019. This isn't just repeats either. The online trailers for these sets have developed as time's gone on, with some of the latest ones including in-character appearances by classic series companions, continuing their stories in a vaguely canonical way. Katy Manning and Stewart Bevan got to play Mr. and Mrs. Jo Jones once more, having a rematch with some giant maggots in the trailer for the season 10 set, and - best of all - the recent trailer for the forthcoming season 26 set, which writer-director Pete McTighe discusses in detail in the current Doctor Who Magazine, which features Sophie Aldred as a grown-up Ace, in charge of a charitable organisation (in line with a reference in an episode of spin-off show The Sarah-Jane Adventures). It's really rather lovely and worth seeking out. For something a bit longer, the recent season 23 box set (The Trial of a Time Lord) re-edits one of the four sub-stories, Terror of the Vervoids, removing the trial bits and making it stand-alone, plus adding some cut material and new CGI. It's a breath of fresh air, and like coming to the story anew, working much better when the action isn't being halted to go back to the trial room every five minutes. The edit goes further than just removing the framing, though, and reshapes the material losing what the Blu-ray producers presumably thought were rubbish moments and lines from the original. It's an interesting experiment.

Another interesting experiment,and probably the most remarkable new old Who this year was the recreation of missing one-episode William Hartnell era story Mission to the Unknown. Students, graduates and staff from the University of Central Lancashire remade the episode as a media project, utilising the techniques and technology of 1965, when the story was first made. It was a great choice, as -compared to the rest of the missing stories - it is short, relatively self-contained and - crucially - doesn't feature the Doctor. It was an odd intermission in the usual TARDIS adventurers, instead featuring a three-man spaceship crew, crash-landed on a planet where the Daleks are plotting. If you haven't watched it yet, I highly recommend seeking it out on youtube. Another 1960s story recreation, building on the early work done on such releases as The Reign of Terror DVD, was the fully animated Patrick Troughton story The Macra Terror which was released in March. Two further Troughton stories, The Faceless Ones and Fury From the Deep, are being worked on now for release next year.

The online rumours and conspiracy theories carry on, and the latest (wishful?) thinking is that we're going to get a surprise Jodie Whittaker 2019 Christmas special announced any day now. Even if we don't, though, 2019 has had an embarrassment of riches.

In Summary:

Without the middle, it's a bit muddling. With the middle, it's only really middling.

The Bells of Saint John

Chapter The 137th, which features the world wide web of fear.

Plot:

Eyes down for Steven Moffat bingo: the Doctor is hiding out away from society (playing at being a monk in 1207), but gets brought back from his self-imposed exile to solve something timey-wimey (someone's able to call the TARDIS phone, even though she's in a different era); he joins up with a new female companion who has some cosmic significance of which she is unaware (he's met versions of her twice previously, but both of them died); the bad guys utilise an everyday object / concept (wi-fi) for their own ends, and victims of their evil trot out a catchphrase ("I don't know where I am") when they die; a childhood image is twisted into an object of fear (an illustration from the dust cover of an old book comes alive and stalks Clara), but it's really misunderstood technology (a walking wi-fi base station); Doctor and companion get involved in the adventure with lashings of quippy dialogue and innuendo; the Doctor and villain (Miss Kizlet) have a confrontation where the Doctor grandstands about how he's going to stop their plan; he then resolves everything with a solution that's clever but a bit pat (using the disguised base-station against Kizlet). The Doctor asks the companion to travel with him, but he's not letting on about the ulterior motive of wanting to uncover the mystery of them. Plus, if you include the online prequel for the story, there's even a bit where the Doctor meets the companion as a child before embroiling himself in their life later on as an adult. House!

Context:

I didn't find an opportunity to watch this with the family over the recent half term, so watched it on my own one evening the week after, from the appropriate disc of the series 7 Blu-ray box set.

First time round:

Easter weekend 2013; if I remember rightly, we had our friends Alex and Rachel (mentioned many times previously on this blog) staying; there were a few glasses of wine drunk, and the story was watched (likely a few hours after broadcast to allow time to put our youngsters to bed first). I watched the episode again the following day, as I couldn't really recall much. This was not down to the wine this time, but instead is an apt summary of The Bells of Saint John - it doesn't leave much of a lasting impression.

Reaction:

As you can tell from the plot synopsis above, I feel this story is very much a Steven Moffat script by numbers; that doesn't however mean it isn't good or worthwhile necessarily. After a couple of years running the show, he and the production team around him have got efficient at delivering this kind of action-packed series curtain-raiser. It has some nice moments. In fact, it's pretty much all nice moments. There's the bravura sequence early on where the Doctor and Clara - helped by some subtly disguised edit points - step from an exterior scene into the TARDIS control room, then double back out through its doors again, finding themselves on board a rapidly descending aeroplane  - all in what looks at first glance to be one continuous shot. This is then topped off with a rather lovely rapid-fire introduction of the character to Clara - and to some new audience members at home no doubt - as he says "I'm the Doctor. I'm an alien from outer space. I'm a thousand years old, I've got two hearts and I can't fly a plane!"

Then there's the beginning sequence, where a lone vlogger's 'youtube video' explains the chilling concept - if you are tempted to use a free Wi-fi connection labelled with some odd symbols, it will steal your soul - interspersed with lots of users worldwide dropping like flies as they succumb. The episode was, according to interviews at the time, an attempt to do an urban thriller in the Doctor Who format, but the set up is instead pure urban horror. This is typified by the sequence where Clara's mouse pointer hovers over the strange symbols long enough for the audience to chant inwardly "Don't click it, don't click it", but of course she does. Not far in, through, the episode loses all pretence that the bad guys need someone to have used their cursed Wi-fi connection, or that the victim is being excessively punished for their transgression. Suddenly, they can control anyone who's even walked past a piece of technology. This is much more like an urban thriller with a seemingly all powerful unseen conspiracy to be defeated, but it doesn't fit very well with the opening section at all. Both succeed in their own way, though, and first time of watching, you glide right past any anomalies.

Celia Imrie is excellent as Miss Kizlet, giving a veritable masterclass in how to pitch a Who villain perfectly; the sequence where the morally outraged Doctor has a conversation with her through the medium of random bystanders, taken over to become mouthpieces for her words, is another stand-out moment. The surprise ending, which leaves all the baddies returned to their mental state when they first were ensnared gives Imrie the chance to do a different bit of acting, which is hauntingly shocking. One also has to acknowledge the chutzpah of the bit with the Doctor riding his motorbike up the side of The Shard ("Did you even hear the word 'anti-grav'?") to confront Kizlet towards the end, which is made all the sweeter by being accompanied by one of the best of Murray Gold's cues from this era (called, prosaically, 'Up the Shard'). Another suitably scary moment - apt for urban thriller or horror alike - is the 'Spoonhead' reveal, where a character's head rotates 180 degrees to reveal a shiny concave surface which then starts sucking the life out of people - it's a triumph of effects work, as well as being an interesting idea and visual.

There's lots of nice dialogue and gags: "Did you just hack me?" "Because you changed your mind?" "I hope I did"; "When you say mobile phone, why do you point at that blue box?" "Because it's a surprisingly accurate description"; "I invented the quadricycle!"; plus, the Doctor's mission statement: "I can't tell the future, I just work there" and Clara's suspicion that the TARDIS is a "snogging booth". Then there's the episode's title, where the whole monk sequence appears to been inserted just so that Moffat can pull the wool over our eyes about what the title of the story might mean (spoiler - it doesn't really mean anything!). As well as that, there is a sprinkling of enjoyable continuity kisses - a book written by Amelia Williams (née Pond), Jammie Dodgers, the Big Bad revealed at the end to be an old friend (well, enemy), doubly underlined when UNIT make an appearance to mop up at the end. These are pointless, probably, but not dwelt on long enough to be alienating for the unaware.

So, with all of that going for it, why is the sum not as much as the component parts, and why does it all seem so thin and ephemeral? It might be because it is so the beginning of a new run of stories: it's precision-tooled to tease the audience, but not to provide any closure. Maybe Moffat had pulled the same trick too many times before to diminishing returns. Was I curious about who Clara really was, and how she can have lived and died as separate entities in other times? No. I'd been through similar wondering recently about Amy, and it turned out the answers weren't as interesting as the questions. The same is also true of what the Great Intelligence is up to. I can't really care when watching The Bells of Saint John, as I know I'm not seeing the whole picture yet. The story is simply not self-contained enough.

Connectivity: 

The Bells of Saint John, like The Face of Evil, was shown as a launch story after a mid-season break. It is also the third story in a row covered for the blog that features the introduction of a new female companion.

Deeper Thoughts:

Doctor Who's Mid-life crisis. When Doctor Who reached the age of twenty in 1983, there was a standard yearly run of episodes, each of which to a lesser or greater extent looked back, taking something from Doctor Who's past; this was then followed after a bit of a break by a one-off feature length special (The Five Doctors) reuniting some of the actors who'd previously starred as the Doctor with the current version, in a celebratory story. For the 30th and 40th anniversaries, the show was off the air. The next big birthday bash was when Doctor who became officially middle-aged, turning 50 in 2013. Curiously, the pattern was much the same: a run of stories starting with The Bells of Saint John which individually, and taken together as an arc, were mostly fixated on the history of the show. In both instances, there was a one-off feature length special with the return of old Doctors following a little time after; in 2013, it was The Day of the Doctor. Curiously, in both 1983 and 2013 the special proved massively popular, but the run of stories preceding it... not so much.

As someone who is fast approaching his own 50th anniversary (still a few more years off, yes, but too few) I can understand why. You're allowed to dwell on the past as a one-off on the actual day; stringing out the nostalgia for the whole year, however, is rarely entertaining for anyone else. The 2013 launch story is already part 3 of a lengthy set-up of the mystery of Clara (with previous appearances by Jenna Coleman in Asylum of the Daleks and The Snowmen the previous year), so even the new companion doesn't feel that new. The episode also includes an old enemy from the 1960s, The Great Intelligence, who'd also been featured in The Snowmen. The Ice Warriors return in a later story, which nobody had really been crying out for, Moffat going on record as saying he wasn't keen, but had his arm twisted by the writer of that story Mark Gatiss. The Cybermen come back later on too, and then The Great Intelligence features again. There's an episode delving deep into the mysteries of the one constant in the history of the show, the TARDIS (but why?), plus the return of old friends Vastra, Jenny and Strax.

Only Neil Cross's two scripts for the 2013 run are nostalgia free, mostly - Hide does keep name-checking the planet Metebelis 3 which featured regularly in the later Jon Pertwee stories (though they end up pronouncing it wrong, undermining the callback somewhat). So, the only wholly original story in the series is The Rings of bloody Akhatan, and the less said about that better. The series ends with an orgy of continuity with Clara breezing through the back catalogue, visiting every Doctor and era, with loads of clips and cameos. It is the equivalent of a maudlin drunk in the early hours after their birthday party droning on about all the great times they had when they were young. God knows, I've been there, so I know: it doesn't last forever, and you can move on from it. This happens with Doctor Who - periodically it binges on the good 'ol days, but then periodically it cleanses itself of the excess nostalgia. The most recent series shown last year was an extreme detox, containing no elements at all from the previous 50+ years of Who; but this itself seemed artificial, like a middle-aged man donning Lycra and doing triathlons every weekend, pretending to be young again with no baggage. It will be interesting to see the reaction against that in the next batch of episodes, and see how much of the old stuff is featured when the (soon come?) new series begins.

In Summary:

Not uninspired, but somewhat uninspiring.