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Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

9 Comments

  1. BatmanAoD
    May 4, 2011 @ 3:40 pm

    Is there somewhere we can watch a clip of Troughton delivering the "they must be fought" line?

    Reply

  2. Elizabeth Sandifer
    May 4, 2011 @ 5:22 pm

    The only clip I can find of YouTube of it is the entirety of the episode, which is surely a copyright violation and so I won't link it.

    On the other hand, if you, from that description, went and found it and looked at about minute 3:25 or so, I surely couldn't stop you.

    Reply

  3. inkdestroyedmybrush
    May 5, 2011 @ 8:31 am

    It is very interesting to read the blog and try our very best to step back into those years and forget reading the Target novels out of order so that we can really see the progression of the program.

    It reminds me that we also sometimes get it wrong, as we're stuck in to our own linear timeline of discovery. So many people on gallifreybase were praising Matt for getting the Doctor "down" by the time the did his angels episode, not realizing that he had shot those scenes before the 11th hour. Sometimes we THINK we've got it, but there are clearly plenty of stopgap measures that were done to keep the show into production, measures that to us look like either boneheaded or brilliant decisions….

    Reply

  4. landru
    May 9, 2011 @ 9:37 am

    At this time, just as we start this monster era, the space race is heating up (including not just the two super powers, so the idea of the international Moon station isn't that absurd.)

    The beginning of this monster good/evil era of the show seems in contrast to the world going mad outside the door. I look forward to reading about that.

    Reply

  5. landru
    May 9, 2011 @ 9:39 am

    Oh, and can Polly get me some more coffee, please? She really saved my day …

    Reply

  6. Seeing_I
    August 10, 2011 @ 9:45 am

    One thing I love about this story is that, for all their reduction to a more generic, robotic uniform (and this was surely done for practical reasons as much as a desire to "normalize" them), they are still creepy as hell. The scenes where they are in their ship, with light patterns playing on their faces, is unaccountably bizarre and uncanny to me. And those VOICES…

    Reply

  7. William Whyte
    December 2, 2011 @ 12:49 pm

    I just finished watching this for the first time. I'd add to the discussion of Polly that she and the Doctor are the only ones dressed primarily in black in an otherwise light-coloured set of costumes, so she affects the visuals of a scene very much the same way as Troughton does. This is another case, like Power of the Daleks, where she's a Doctor-surrogate. The team keep coming close to doing something interesting with Polly but never quite make it.

    Reply

  8. William Silvia
    January 10, 2015 @ 6:57 pm

    Reply

  9. William Silvia
    January 10, 2015 @ 7:05 pm

    After watching this episode and coming back to your commentary, I am surprised that you didn't mention by biggest complaint with this episode: Ben and Polly in episodes 1 and 2 or, to rephrase the problem, the size of the main cast. While in the era of "let's all split up and each have a unique story with the locals" three companions worked perfectly fine for two years and there would be a mixture of successes and failures with recurring casts of this size throughout the 70s and early 80s, the fact is that the base under siege is ill-suited to such a large TARDIS crew. After the line you mention, Ben all but disappears from the plot for over an episode. I spent the better part of Episode 2 wondering if Ben had taken sick after Jamie, until all of a sudden the plot remembered him. Polly is arguably worse served by these two episodes, apparently functional for nothing other than to scream at moments when it was dramatic but entirely unhelpful, and then to fail to scream at the very moment that it would be helpful. All of this in an episode in which the new guy spends much of the story in one room and thereby manages to completely avoiding crowding the others out. Thankfully, the scene in which Polly formulates a plan and she conspires with Ben to make it more functional marks an upturn in their role in the episode.

    Reply

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