This Continues To Not Be A Review Blog
But equally, this continues to be a really effective way of handling a need for Tuesday content. God, what am I going to do after next week when I’m out of Last War in Albion to run? (Write more Last War in Albion, probably. The five entries I’m running now were some of the most fun I’ve had writing in the last year.)
Spearhead From Space: Fun, and with some great images, but a story we’ve largely allowed the VHS/DVD/omnibus versions of to replace the episodic structure. Watched as episodes one notices that the new Doctor doesn’t “debut” as such until well past the halfway mark, leaving Nicholas Courtney to hold down the fort. And only the mannequin scene provides us the Autons we know and love. A well-shot and reasonably fun story, but little more. 7/10
The Silurians: By most accounts a mispaced buildup with a fantastic final episode, it is in fact a subtle and lively buildup with a disaster of a final episode the implications of which have to be ignored because otherwise the Doctor becomes the willing employee of the casually genocidal. But this is splitting hairs – either way, it doesn’t quite work despite the good bits. 6/10
Ambassadors of Death: Whitaker and Hulke are both fantastic writers, and there’s more Whitaker in this story than people give it credit for. Unique among the UNIT stories in that it’s fundamentally hopeful and based on a sense of wonder, the thing the series most loses in this season and, really, the Pertwee era at large. A myriad of wonderful visual images, and John Abineri and Ronald Allen anchor it with two of the best guest performances the series ever had. A few decisions jar in relation to the rest of the series, but on their own merits hold up fine. (The bread van and the teleporting) Unlike any other Pertwee story – marvelous. 9/10.
Inferno: Not a bad story, but simply not the classic it’s believed to be. The parallel universe sequence is one of the most hackneyed ways of extending a story imaginable, and it amounts to the “we’re running out of ideas, let’s give all the actors different parts” runaround most series do midway through their third season. To see the Pertwee era doing it in its fourth story is an ill omen. With the added indignity that once back from the parallel universe in a blur of narrative momentum Pertwee has to spend most of the last episode modeling his death pose. Yes, Courtney and John are fabulous, but can anyone actually identify how the parallel universe plot impacts the resolution at all? I’d like it more if everyone else would agree to like it less. In reality, fairly average. 5/10
Terror of the Autons: The series is pulling itself apart at the seams as it tries to decide if it’s a gaudy, glam rock spectacle or a serious-minded action adventure show. But in the course of that comes this, a story where the contrasts between the two approaches end up balancing perfectly to produce something quite remarkable.…