Victory of the Daleks

Chapter the 254th, which teaches us that nothing good was ever described as a "new paradigm".

Plot:

The last remaining Dalek ship falls back through time after a previous altercation with the Doctor, to Earth in the early 1940s. The Daleks have a Progenitor DNA device that will help rebuild their species, but because of their impurity, having been created from the cells of the Emperor Dalek / Davros / humans (whichever of the many various groups of final remaining Daleks these are), the device will not recognise them as true members of the species. There are probably many plans they could hatch to address this problem, but they decide the best thing to do is to help the allies win WW2. They create a robot professor with fake human memories called Bracewell who pretends to have invented the Daleks as helper machines dubbed "Ironsides". This is so that Winston Churchill will tell his old friend the Doctor about it, the Doctor will arrive (with Amy Pond in tow) to warn everyone that the Daleks are evil and must be planning something, and will inadvertently identify them by name. This indeed comes to pass, and a recording of his identification is used to fire up the Progenitor. The Doctor materialises the TARDIS on the Dalek spaceship and witnesses the creation of the new Daleks. To destroy the humans, the Daleks force all the lights on during an air raid. But, using the future technical knowledge of Bracewell, the British air force - very rapidly - installs space-proof bubbles around Spitfire planes and they fly up and attack the Dalek ship, turning the lights back off again. The new - fat, hunchbacked, colourful - Daleks destroy the old impure ones, and activate a planet-destroying bomb within Bracewell so they can escape (funny they didn't do that earlier, rather than muck about with the lights). The Doctor returns to Earth and cannot diffuse the bomb, but Amy has the idea to appeal to Bracewell's pretend humanity, and that makes the countdown to destruction cease (somehow).

Context:

Watched one dull weekend afternoon with all the children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10) from the new series 5 box-set Blu-ray disc (the sound seemed a little off, and I'm worried that I missed a recall many years ago). The middle child throughout expressed his enthusiasm, as he really likes this one (unlike his Dad who was harrumphing all the way through at one thing or another, but we'll get to that anon). 

First Time Round:

Most people have probably forgotten this, but the first experience I had of this story was of a single line of dialogue. An audio file of Matt Smith's line reading of what turned out to be some key dialogue "I am the Doctor, and you are the Daleks" leaked to the online forums many months before the story aired, and before any of Matt Smith's work in his stories had been seen. Nobody knew exactly how he'd perform the role, and this was the earliest clue. As anyone with experience of such things would have anticipated, fans' extrapolations from this smidge of evidence went big, broad and deep. It was the best of lines, it was the worst of lines; he was going to be a disaster, he was going to be marvellous, etc, etc. Much later, on the evening of Saturday 14th April 2010, I was visiting the flat of old friend Phil, mentioned many times before on this blog, to meet his new partner (and later Better Half) for the first time. All of us being fans, our idea had been that we would watch Doctor Who together before dinner, but my bus over to his place was delayed, so I ended up watching Victory of the Daleks the following day at home. I'm glad at that, as I was so disappointed with the episode on first watch it might have put a downer on the evening.

Reaction:

Is it better to be bored or disappointed? It's one of those age-old questions with no right answer. A story - or indeed any piece of art or craft - can fail by playing it safe and ending up dull, or being over-ambitious and ending up embarrassing. Which is the lesser experience for the viewer may be just a matter of taste, but I've always thought it was better to shoot for the moon and miss than keep one's sights low. Until now, maybe. The last story covered on the blog The Web Planet - which in its own special way manages to be both dull and embarrassing - is clearly on paper a very challenging spectacle to realise for the time in which it was made. The story structure supporting the spectacle is coherent, though, and aligned to those visual aims: imagine a planet of insects, and the insects are at war. Simple. There's a difference though, at least I think, between failing to realise an ambitious script, and squandering the potential of a good scenario with an incoherent script. Victory of the Daleks asks its dramatic question "What would happen if the Daleks took part in World War Two?" in a 'celebrity historical' featuring Winston Churchill (expertly brought to life by Ian McNeice). That is a set-up with a great deal of potential. It's not over-ambitious either; WW2 and Daleks are both things that Doctor Who has a lot of experience at doing well previously. The script becomes ruinously ambitious by trying to do so many disparate things within that set-up in 45 minutes, none of them getting the time to be properly explored or even - in some cases - covered sufficiently to be baseline plausible.

The story starts intriguingly by side-stepping what might be the viewer's expectation: the Daleks are fighting on the allied side. As they have been Nazi analogues throughout their history, it might have been more obvious to have the Daleks fighting against Churchill and Co. The Doctor and Winston Churchill versus Adolf Hitler and the Daleks - how would good prevail? It's a sitting target and it's sitting right there - why not go for it?! Okay, maybe it's a bit too obvious. So, the intriguing and less obvious - but probably less exciting - option is chosen instead, and the Daleks are pretending to be good. It's not exactly an original idea, as it is openly and playfully plagiarised from a 1960s Doctor Who story The Power of the Daleks. There's even an in-joke highlighting it with the Daleks saying "I am your soldier" instead of "I am your servant". Cribbing from a story as good and as well remembered as Power is a bit risky, but the earlier story showed that focusing on the Daleks using their wiles and gradually taking over a situation can be winning. The problem is that Victory of the Daleks doesn't explore it for any length of time. At roughly the 12 minute point, it leaves the plot behind, a means to an end just to get the Doctor to identify the Daleks. For that purpose, though, it doesn't make any sense as the Dalek's gambit. In Power, they had no, erm, power, so they couldn't exterminate everyone. The Daleks in Victory have no such limitation, so why don't they just threaten to kill Churchill to make the Doctor do what they want? In Power, the unarmed Daleks look relatively benign; in Victory, Churchill knows full well they are capable of vaporising German aircraft, so why doesn't he listen to his old friend the Doctor when he's pointing out the dangers?

Almost a third of the way into the story, and everything so far has been a gimmick, a little callback fun for long-term fans and the chance to see Daleks painted camouflage green (which is admittedly pretty cool). The next third is mostly set on the Dalek spaceship. There's a nice Matt Smith moment where he bluffs the Daleks that a Jammie Dodger biscuit is really a detonator, but it can't take away from the deathly surrounding exposition that forms the rest of this sequence. The convoluted backstory of Daleks (that aren't quite Daleks any more) creating new Daleks (that are) is not interesting to even long-term fans. Why can't the Daleks just turn up wanting to explode or enslave things anymore, and spare us all this tedium? A new type of Daleks is created, which I'll get to criticising in a moment (everybody else has over the years, so I don't see why I should hold back). Before that, there's a moment that's stupid with two o's - the Daleks have turned all the lights on to allow for the devastation of humans (why bother, though, when they have a bomb that can explode the planet?), but luckily - based on some blueprints that the robot Bracewell created (why would the Daleks program him with knowledge that could be used against them?) - Churchill's team are able to make Spitfires and their pilots capable of operating in space in special protective bubbles. From an idea on paper to working space-Spitfires in the time it takes the Doctor to have a brief conversation with the Daleks. It's ludicrous. Our boys bravely battle against the Dalek ship, and knock out the transmitter keeping the lights on, so the Daleks use their bomb anyway. It's pointless, but people get to see a WW2 dogfight in space (which I didn't think was cool, as it seemed to be playing on war years patriotism just for some cheap thrills).

We're now approximately 30 minutes in to a 45 minute episode. The final section is Amy stopping Bracewell from exploding using the power of love (yuck!) and then some drawn out resolution scenes. Bill Patterson as Bracewell is good, but the material he's given is poor. Writer Mark Gatiss maybe had to rush the screenplay, as it is not up to his normal standard. Perhaps, though, all the material described thus far was merely window dressing, as the point of the story is really just to introduce a new look (plus, if one is cynical, some new merchandising opportunities) for the Daleks. If the new designs weren't an unmitigated disaster, this might be a justification. Alas, they are awful, hardly anybody liked them, and they rarely appeared again after this series. They're too big - one of the joys of Daleks is their not looking quite big enough for an operator, and these look big enough for two. They have a weird hunchback - the older designs have the upper section and base section aligned in a fluid way. They all have job titles (the Strategist, the Drone, and, erm, a few others I already can't remember) - Daleks shouldn't have anything as dull as job titles, so these were wisely never mentioned again. They lose all the detailing of their immediate predecessors like rivets and panels, and go instead for smooth blocks of colour - this would be good if it didn't look like they were made of such cheap plastic. And they don't do anything. They kill only their own kind, and then they run away. All told, the so-called 'new paradigm' Daleks and the story as a whole are two of the biggest disappointments of Doctor Who's long history. They could have done Churchill and the Doctor versus Nazi Daleks, and everyone would probably have been happy. Maybe sometimes it is better to keep things simple.  

Connectivity:

Both Victory of the Daleks and The Web Planet start from a lead-in set up in the previous episode. There's also maybe the faintest echoes of World War 2, specifically D-Day, in some of the action of The Web Planet related to the Menoptera invasion plans.

Deeper Thoughts:

They keep killing, and it's snoozy. The one positive thing I found with Victory of the Daleks at the time was that the Daleks got away at the end, rather than all being destroyed as had happened every time they appeared in the new series previously. The Doctor's a bit sad about it in the story, but I was relieved. It meant that they could return the next time without as much convoluted explanation. The question I posed above, "Why can't the Daleks just turn up wanting to explode or enslave things anymore, and spare us all this tedium?" could do with a little deeper thought to answer it. Apart from in their first appearance, when they weren't expected to appear in any further stories, and in The Evil of the Daleks, which was intended to write them out of the show forever, the classic era Daleks didn't get wiped off the face of the universe at the end of their every story. The small group of them that been threatening whichever planet, colony or home counties mansion would be destroyed, yes, but there were always more out there; sometimes this was explicitly stated, sometimes implicitly hinted. When the series came back, this all changed because showrunner Russell T Davies believed he had an issue to overcome. He felt that the Daleks - after years of no appearances on telly except in chocolate biscuit commercials - had become objects of fun, or even ridicule. They were the butt of jokes about sink plungers and not being able to go up stairs, and such.

To rectify this, Davies commissioned a story for their reintroduction (2005's Dalek), where just one is shown to be a plausible threat to the world. It was very effective, too. By the end of the first season of the relaunched show, when they come back en masse, things hit a dramatic peak; as Billie Piper's Rose says "We could hardly stop one" and now there are thousands. As part of the overarching mythology Davies weaves into his first year as showrunner, the Daleks are also the old opponents of the Time Lords in the Great Time War, both races having wiped each other out; because, of course, who else was it going to be? So, they're all powerful to the extent that even one survivor could wreak havoc, and they were all supposedly destroyed long ago. But they are also the most popular and recognisable foe the Doctor has, so they have to return periodically, and when they return - because of the nature of a good versus evil narrative - the Doctor has to defeat them. One side effect of this was pointed out by the showrunner that followed Davies, Steven Moffat: the Daleks become paradoxically the most defeated of all Doctor Who villains. The other side effect, though, is that there has to be precious story time given over to how they returned from annihilation this time. In those early years after the Daleks' reintroduction, this generally followed the same pattern (as seen in Victory of the Daleks), one or a small group (the Emperor Dalek, members of the Cult of Skaro, etc.) inexplicably escaped the previous purge by "falling back through time", and they rebuild the race using cloning or a previously unmentioned device (the Genesis Ark, the Progenitor).

It's easy to see why all the Davies Dalek stories after that first one are two-parters; by the time you've explained how they returned, and then explained how they're being got rid of again, you haven't got much time for any story in between. Moffat seems less enamoured of the Skaro pepperpots than his predecessor: they stop returning every year regularly, they stop being the de facto villains for every series finale, they usually get one episode for their tales rather than two. And, because enough time has passed since the show introduced the Time War mythology, nobody feels any longer that they have to ensure the threat of the Daleks is removed at the end. There's no reason ever given why the colourful new paradigm Daleks created at the end of Victory don't regroup, come back and destroy the planet Earth a little while later. This is probably more in keeping with what had come before in the series, though, than the more detailed explanations felt required by Davies. The other two contenders for the 'Most defeated villain' award in Doctor Who, the Cybermen and the Master, also fell at different times into similar patterns of implausible destruction and rebirth, story after story. The various different groups of Cybermen encountered in the 1960s were all the last vestiges of a once mighty race, every single one of them; the explanation given in the show was... none, they just didn't mention why or how this came to be. In the 1980s, the Master got killed off at the end of every story, only to turn up again fine the next time; the explanation given in the show was... none, they just made a running joke out of it. Maybe plausibility isn't that important a quality for Doctor Who. Which is lucky for Victory of the Daleks in particular.

In Summary:

If I wanted a shoddily written adventure story designed to launch a range of toys, then I'd pick He-Man and the Masters of the Universe over this.

The Web Planet

Chapter the 253rd, Doctor Who waited a year for a story with giant ants and then two came along in quick succession....

Plot: 

The TARDIS is dragged down to the planet Vortis, and cannot dematerialise. The Doctor and Ian go out to investigate. Barbara and Vicki, impacted by odd forces seeming to emanate from the planet, follow them out separately. The TARDIS travellers eventually find themselves split up with different factions of the creatures on the planet. Barbara is with the Menoptera (giant butterfly people). Generations earlier, when their planet was a verdant paradise, a force they call the Animus (giant spider) arrived, polluted the water and made the ground barren, turned the Zarbi (giant ant creatures) from benign cattle into aggressive assailants, and also attracted various heavenly bodies towards the planet. Most of the Menoptera escaped to one of these nearby planetoids, and planned how to win back their home. An advance party has recently landed and most were captured; Barbara joins up with them and helps them escape from a chain gang bringing to the Animus raw materials to build its Carsinome (giant web). Ian meets up with the only one of the advanced Menoptera party who's still free and the two of them find Optera (giant weird caterpillar-ish things, but they don't look like much of anything really). These are descendants of the Menoptera that stayed behind who adapted to life underground. The Doctor and Vicki are mainly with the Animus, with the creature believing that it can harness the Doctor's intelligence for universal domination; they do manage to get away briefly and meet up with the Menoptera to plan an attack on the Animus. Eventually, everyone works toegther to destroy it with the Menoptera scientists' doomsday device, the Isop-tope. The TARDIS is freed and the travellers leave, the planet starts to return to normal, and every insect lives happily ever after together. 

Context:

As ever with my lifetime's collecting of Doctor Who stories on tape and shiny disc, I had the Blu-ray box set of season 2 - William Hartnell and the show's second year, originally broadcast 1964 / 65 - on pre-order, and received it on its day of release in December 2022. Though it's a big ol' season (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more on that), I'd already blogged every one of the stories bar two. As usual, I introduced a random factor as to whether I should blog a story at all (it came up 'Yes') and which it should be. So, paenitemus The Romans, it looks like you'll be the last of season 2 to be blogged. The Web Planet it was. I watched from said Blu-ray version, an episode an evening with a break in the middle for one day, over a week of January 2023. People occasionally came into the living room and commented, but nobody sat down to watch. The Better Half asked what the name of the giant wasp people was. When I pointed out that they were butterflies, she asked me how I knew this, as they looked more like wasps to her. I realised she was right - the bodies are striped, and the wings transparent. Nowhere in the dialogue does any character compare them to butterflies, and the order of insects hymenoptera, from where the creature name seems to be derived, includes wasps but not butterflies, who are in the order lepidoptera. Why has Doctor Who fiction and non-fiction since then convinced itself that they are modelled on butterflies instead of the wasps they most resemble?!

First Time Round:

Like the last story blogged at the end of 2022, The Web Planet was one I first saw on VHS in the early days of the releases. That last blogged story The Robots of Death came out in the 1980s: from 1986 to 1989, Doctor Who tapes at affordable prices appeared on the market in fits and starts. If you were lucky enough as I was to be able to find them and buy them all as they came out, you would have had a dozen titles by the end of the 1980s. That was a veritable collection in itself, but any fan of the time knew there were hundreds more stories that could yet be released. From 1990, the releases finally became regular, with pairs of tapes coming out every couple of months. Things were taken a little bit more seriously: stories no longer had their intermediate credits edited out, and specially commissioned artwork covers replaced the photos that had been used up to that point. BBC Enterprises (as they then were called) went way back into the back catalogue: most of the releases in 1990 came from the early black-and-white years of the show. The Web Planet was one of the final pair released in September of the year. As with all stories of six or more parts back then, the story was released in two boxes that had to be purchased together - the innovation of double tape boxes did not come in until the following year. I bought the tapes from W.H. Smiths in Worthing, and took them home and watched the story in full on the same day. It has a reputation for being a snooze-fest, but I don't think I knew that at the time, and didn't feel it once I'd watched the episodes - I was too busy staring in wonder at Who history.

Reaction: 

The Web Planet is still to date the only Doctor Who story with a guest cast comprising of wholly non-humanoid characters. The only people who look anything like humans in the story are the regular cast, with everyone else in an outre costume and make-up job. It has never been attempted in the series again. Why might this be? There's one likely reason from a production point of view, and another from a narrative point of view. The production reason is that it's a very expensive thing to do well. It's hard to perceive now, so much time has gone by and it looks so dated, but The Web Planet was one of the bigger budget shows of its time, and every creative department is pushing the boat out in a way they couldn't do every week. If one considers that in the next futuristic, space-based episodes two stories after this (The Space Museum) making an actor look alien was reduced down to dressing them in a single-coloured uniform and sticking on some bushy fake eyebrows, the Zarbi story is clearly one that busted the budget. A lot of work has gone into making the landscape and creatures of Vortis as other-worldly as possible: the distinctive soundscape created for the planet including echoing dialogue plus stock music by Les Structures Sonores, the Vaseline-smeared camera lens to produce atmospheric blur, the choreographed ways the Menoptera move, and the consistent way they speak (them not being able to manage Ian and Barbara's names and it coming out as "Heron" and "Arbara" is a nice detail).

The Optera and Animus are not as successfully realised as the Zarbi, Menoptera or Larvae Guns (these last are rather fun grub-like creations played by people laying flat on a wheeled platform and pushing themselves around), but they still have their moments. The cliffhanger where a prong extends from the wall of the Animus's lair and sprays the Doctor and Vicki with web is great. As well as the distinctive imagery of the planet Vortis and its inhabitants, there's little bits and bobs of TARDIS lore too. The Atmospheric Density Jackets (the Doctor's advanced take on spacesuits) are instantly recognisable, and there's some nice hints about the powers of the Doctor's jewelled ring. The fantastic worlds of the story have been thoroughly thought out. Even in Doctor Who's later radio and animation one-offs, though, when budget would have been less of a concern, it never attempted anything as fantastic as The Web Planet. So, maybe it's more to do with the narrative reason. This is that, for an audience watching, too much that's alien can be, well, alienating. Doctor Who, though, is about exploring the unknown, particularly in this early era. So, there's clearly a balance to be struck. There needs to be some grounding of the exploration to make it relevant as a piece of drama for its intended audience. When he was planning the first year of the restarted Doctor Who in the 2000s, Russell T Davies put together a pitch document that included the phrase “If the Zogs on planet Zog are having trouble with the Zog-monster [...] who gives a toss?” It feels a bit close to home where this story is concerned: if the Menoptera on Vortis are having trouble with the Animus, why should we care?

There's a couple of ways the writer can try to make people give a toss. One is to lean in to the genre and how its associated story beats will impact the protagonists. The four regulars do all take part in an adventure story with a few fights and escapes. Like most of director Richard Martin's work for Doctor Who, the film work captures this adventuring in an exciting and fluid way (there's some beautifully balletic moments of Menoptera flying on Kirby wires shot at Ealing), but in the TV studio things are much more clunky as Martin struggles to work within the constraints. Nonetheless, one is carried through the action for the most part, despite the story's reputation for having many longueurs. It would have worked out fine for a four episode story, but for six, it's not enough. Another way the writer could have made the action hit home is through some allegorical resonance. It's not enough just to have ants versus butterflies, but there is a theory that the ants represent conformity and maybe even communism, and the butterflies stand for freedom of thought and politics. This would however only power a narrative through, ooh, the length of a haiku, maybe. It was a fairly hackneyed metaphor even in the mid-1960s, and the script doesn't do anything with it. In summary then: if you're going to have the Doctor and friends visit somewhere really weird, keep it relatively short or think of some way it can be relevant to the people watching.

Having said this, it must be pointed out that the story was wildly successful when it went out. It initially captured and then more or less sustained a phenomenal size of audience (the number of people watching the first episode would not be bettered for a decade). Though not anywhere near as popular as the Daleks, the creatures from this story did have multiple items of their own merchandise, and the story was one of the first three selected to become a tie-in novelisation. The imagery clearly had an impact. There's some nice interplay between the regulars early on too, particularly in the scenes between Ian and the Doctor, the former annoyed that the latter has melted his old school tie to test the corrosiveness of a pool on Vortis. There's also a good scene between Barbara and Vicki, where the cultural differences of the different periods they originate from are explored. More of this might have also helped offset the alien nature of the surrounding material, but everyone soon gets split up. Some dramatic moments for the insectoid characters manage to cut through the surrounding costumes: a Menoptera sad that their wings have been cut off and they'll never fly again, the matter of fact death of the female Optera, stoically staying still in a torrent of acid to block it from reaching the rest of the party. Martin Jarvis appears at a very early stage of his career in the role of Menoptera military leader Hilio, and he's wonderful. His slightly sneering delivery ("Codeword?") is a joy.

There are some other moments that don't work so well: the Doctor betrays part of the Menoptera's plan to buy time to fight the Animus, and elsewhere they work out that he must have done this. When they finally meet him, though, it's all smiles and nobody says a things about it. When Barbara arrives at the Temple of Light, she waxes lyrical about how beautiful it is, but it is just a quite tatty set. The characterisation that actor Ian Thompson chooses for the main Optera Hetra is... questionable. To my ear, he seems to be doing a Mexican bandit accent. The youngest child (girl of 10) came into the living room at one moment when the Optera were on screen and said the voice sounded like Robin the caveman from the BBC comedy Ghosts. Maybe it was primitive that they were going for, but it's a bit disconcerting (even before one sees them hopping about the place). It also took me out of the action when one of the Menoptera describes the Optera as being "like slugs". Somehow, creatures that look like (but aren't called) butterflies, ants and spiders shouldn't know of slugs, and even if they did shouldn't call them that, but should call them Gastropoda or similar. A more significant issue is that the Animus repeatedly threatens the Doctor with death, but then repeatedly doesn't follow through; this undermines the central threat. It's almost as if it knows that there are six weeks of action that need to be filled. Perhaps some or all of these issues wouldn't be so apparent if I'd watched the story an episode a week as it originally went out (I tried this experiment with another 1960s Who story recently), but I didn't have time: it's taken me the best part of a month to get through watching and posting about the story as it is. On balance, though, I'd say the story's reputation for making time pass slowly is definitely exaggerated.

Connectivity: 

Both The Web Planet and The Robots of Death feature a relatively new female companion in their first TARDIS trip to an alien planet (though both of them had been picked up off-Earth). Aspects of both stories were referenced in the first Russell T Davies showrunner period of new series Doctor Who (the Host are a homage to the robots from Robots of Death, and the Isop Galaxy turns out to be the Face of Boe's home, as well as the Animus's). In both stories, a group of alien characters have been conceived in more extensive detail than usual, from the look and feel to how they'll move and speak.

Deeper Thoughts:

Animus-ity! Doctor Who: The Collection - Season 2 Blu-ray box set overview . I didn't get to the BFI event last year that tied in to this set's release (they showed The Time Meddler), but thought it was worthwhile doing a quick review of the contents here. The limited edition sets seem lately to be available longer before selling out, and - perhaps a reason why they're available longer - sets are rapidly coming out as more affordable standard releases after the initial release too. As such, my feelings about the set may be useful to any potential purchaser reading this who might be wavering. After having reminisced in the First Time Round section above about amassing 12 Doctor Who video tapes in the 1980s and feeling that definitely constituted a collection, I note that this is the 12th Blu-ray box set release. The shelf space required for them all to be lined up in broadcast order is growing, and these 12 boxes represent almost half of the classic era. It would be exactly half if the usual three sets had been released last year instead of two, as I grumbled about in the last blog post. I realised how ungrateful I was being as I dug into the contents of these discs more, though: this series comprises a mighty 39 episodes, substantially more than on any set released before this one (seasons of Doctor Who were longer in the 1960s) and almost three times as many episodes as some of the sets that have come out (for later seasons in the classic era starring Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy).

Every one of the existing episodes has never looked or sounded better. The restoration work is nothing short of astounding, and watching these stories is like seeing them brand new for the first time (probably better than that, in fact, as someone with the most expensive 1960s TV equipment would never have watched the episodes in such clarity). They have never been more complete either, the two missing episodes of The Crusade being represented by photo reconstructions married to the existing audio, and a 12-second gap in The Time Meddler cleverly filled. The stories themselves are a great selection, a second series allowing producer Verity Lambert and her collaborators to try new things (like experimenting with more comedy in The Romans, doing a pseudo-Shakespearean number with The Crusade, pushing the production boundaries with The Web Planet, and pushing the story boundaries with The Time Meddler) and be more expansive in the action (Doctor Who's first extensive location filming took place for the two Dalek stories in this run, and there's a lot of great celluloid sequences filmed in Ealing studios deployed in other stories too). Perhaps because of the number of episodes to fit onto nine discs, the additional material is a little less extensive than on other sets. The age of the material precludes much in the way of archive (it's a minor miracle that as many episodes survive, let alone extra bits) but a few trailers and continuity excerpts are included, as is a sketch featuring a Dalek from the Wayne and Shuster show, a somewhat obscure comedy series of the time. Apart from that, it's mainly newer items, either created especially for the Blu-ray set or ported over from the DVD releases of these stories.

David Whittaker, subject of "Looking for David"

This second run of Doctor Who was the first to see changes of the show's regular cast, and Matthew Sweet continues his series of "In Conversation" pieces with in-depth interviews with one of the regulars who left (William Russell, who played Ian Chesterton) and one who joined (Maureen O' Brien, who played Vicki). Sweet's gentle but probing style and thorough research are both on display as ever; Russell is in his late 90s, so it would be wrong to expect (and we don't get) detailed answers drawing upon old memories, but his affection for Doctor Who, and the people he worked with on it, shines through. O'Brien's interview goes wider and into more depth, taking in a lot more of her life and career beyond Who, including her Catholic upbringing (which seems to have cast a long shadow) and her perfectionism; it's nonetheless a happy chat with lots of laughter. There's three other new documentaries: a solid story by story season overview with talking head interviews with some of the people involved, a fun featurette on 1960s collectibles presented by an infectiously enthusiastic Emily Cook (the first of a series that will definitely take in the 70s and 80s, and maybe even beyond), and finally Looking For David, the centerpiece of this collection. Looking for David is a genuinely investigative work looking at the life and career of the first Doctor Who script editor, and writer of many episodes, David Whittaker. Directed by Chris Chapman and presented by Toby Hadoke, with a lot of input from Simon Guerrier who is working on a biography of Whittaker, this is another in the occasional set of "Looking For..." docos that have appeared on other Blu-ray sets, and is - in my opinion at least - the best so far. What makes it great is that, unlike the previous entries in this strand, Whittaker is not a blank. Becuase of his key role in the early days of Doctor Who, we fans think we know a reasonable amount about him, but as the documentary progresses, revealing more and more, we realise what we had known was very little after all. It's almost worth the price of the set alone.

One of the "Behind the Sofa" companion groupings

Another extra on the discs that's not exactly new, but not as archive as season 2, is a recording of a Doctor Who convention panel from 1985 featuring Carole Ann Ford (Susan), Jacqueline Hill (Barbara), plus actors that joined Doctor Who in season 3, Adrienne Hill (Katarina, and no relation to her predecessor, I don't think) and Michael Craze (Ben). As three out of the four are sadly no longer with us, and passed on in the 1990s before they did too many interviews, they perhaps didn't get as extended an exposure within organised fandom that they would have had later; as such, this is an invaluable historic document. Everyone is very forthcoming - including being somewhat critical of the 1985 version of Doctor Who, particularly of the outfits that Nicola Bryant was made to wear - and there's some great moments. Another fabulous feature is split across six of the nine stories: Behind The Sofa. Reacting to clips of season 2 stories are three groups of companion actors: season 2 stars Ford, O'Brien and Peter Purves (who joined at the end of the run as Steven); a duo of Sylvester McCoy co-stars from Doctor Who in the late 1980s, Bonnie Langford and Sophie Aldred; and Wendy Padbury (who appeared with Patrick Troughton later in the 1960s) with Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton (who came in at the end of Tom Baker's tenure and carried on with Peter Davison) - this last one seems like an arbitrary grouping, but from the way they interact they are clearly old pals from the convention circuit. Each of the three groups is great to watch, but it's Langford (watching for the first time ever, she claims, any Doctor Who story not featuring her good self) that delivers the most, and forms a great double-act with Aldred ("You say Fraggle Rock, I say testicles" is a great pull-out quote from them). There's a few amusing moments when the 1960s group are all agreeing how well designed something is, and the action cuts to one or both of the other groups dissolving into giggles at how rubbish they think the same thing looks. And both are right, somehow. In summary, then: the biggest set of episodes yet on Blu-ray, without perhaps the biggest set of new extras, but that's made up for by the big personalities involved. It's definitely worth picking up a copy.

In Summary:

If it were four episodes long, it would probably be thought of as a classic. But it's not.