Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Survival Part One

Survival is the final story of Doctor Who's 26th season. It is also the very last story of the original TV series of Doctor Who, with the show then being off the air for four years.

As I have looked back over the Sylvester McCoy era for my reviews it has increasingly puzzled me why the BBC decided to stop making the series after Survival - the stories have not been bad (far from it, even if they did not manage to get Paul Darrow to guest star in any of them) and the viewing figures for season 26 showed an increasing trend, from 3,100,000 for part one of Battlefield at the start of the season to 5,000,000 for this story at the end. Of course those figures are only for mannys, the number of cats watching remains unknown.

Survival stars Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace, and it was written by Rona Munro. I have not watched Survival before, so let's pounce on it to see what it is like, and find out if the solution to the riddle of why Doctor Who was cancelled lies within...

It's a cat! What a great way to start! The cat chases a manny and he gets disappeared. This is an unexpected level of gritty realism to begin the story with, of the sort we have not seen in Doctor Who for a while - probably not since Caves of Androzani.

The TARDIS appears in the same street. Ace starts moaning about how it is a Sunday and there is nothing good on the TV. While nowadays this could appear as a self-reflexive meta-commentary based on the fact that Doctor Who is itself being shown on Sunday evenings, lol, at the time it was made (and set) this was biting social commentary - the Thatcher government had passed a law making it illegal to show any good TV programmes on Sundays, so that the best thing about Sunday television in the late 1980s was the theme tunes.

The Doctor asks Ace "what's so terrible about Perivale" and Ace's answer is that "nothing ever happens here." If this is true then we could be in for a very boring story, but I doubt it since we have already seen a cat! In fact the next scene also features a cat. There is a bad manny who shoos the cat out of her garden. Boo!

For a moment I thought she might be the baddy but in the next scene we see a cat watching some other mannys. It is in contact with the Master who has glowing eyes (a bit like a cat's!) and he is in shadow with his voice disguised so I don't think we are supposed to know it's him yet, but it is definitely Anthony Ainley, last seen as the Master in Colin Baker's final story Trial of a Time Lord.

Subtle.

The Doctor and Ace go to "the youth club" looking for Ace's old friends (who may include Keiller from Gold among them, I don't know), but instead in the youth club are some mannys in a self-defence class, including "Sarge" who is their leader and who goes on about "survival of the fittest." Clang!

Ace asks Sarge where her friends are and he recognises her as a Perivale local. Ace gets a clue from Sarge that mannys have been going missing. The Doctor sees the Master's cat and that means the Master can see the Doctor.

The Doctor is more intrigued by the cat (naturally enough!) than the missing mannys and he goes into a shop where he meets Hale and Pace filming a sketch. They are also talking about the "law of the jungle" and "survival of the fittest" so the title is getting dropped left, right and centre here.

The Doctor wants to buy cat noms (proving once again that he is the greatest hero in the universe!) and Hale (or is it Pace?) tells a story about a lion - it isn't very funny, but it does foreshadow an upcoming plot development by reminding us that mannys are also cat noms.

Things get very serious when it turns out that something has nomed Hale and Pace's pet Tiger. Oh noes! Cats are not noms! Shit just got real.

Ace meets a manny she knows and can get some more exposition from in exchange for 10p. The Doctor says

"When is a cat not a cat? When it builds its own cat flap."

I don't know whether or not to classify this as the Doctor getting a saying wrong for the first time since season 24, since this is so radically different from the original door/ajar/a jar saying. Also cats build their own cat flaps all the time, it's just that they get mannys to do the actual W-word.

The Master and his cat disappear another manny. We don't know why they are doing this yet, I have to presume for the moment that it is for the lols.

The Doctor puts some of the cat noms out in the street but the wrong cat comes to nom it (silly Doctor). Meanwhile Ace finds the right cat by mistaik, although she doesn't know it is the Master's cat because it only makes a sinister face for the benefit of the viewers at home.

The cat runs away and a catmanny on a horsey appears in front of Ace and chases her.

A doggy has come to nom the cat noms the Doctor put out (silly doggy) but before the Doctor can shoo it away he hears Ace shouting for him. Ace cleverly hides inside a climbing frame where the horsey can't get at her, although she then tries to run away which is not so clever and she gets chased and disappeared, so that when the Doctor arrives she is already gone.

Ace appears on an alien planet, which we can tell because the sky is pink. She sees some cats noming the manny from the start of the episode, thus paying off the foreshadowing from Hale and Pace's scene. Then the catmanny on the horsey starts chasing Ace again.

The Doctor finally gets the right cat to nom the noms, but before he can pounce on it, Sarge pounces on him. Despite Sarge having been built up as a dangerous manny earlier, the Doctor swiftly turns the tables on him and gets away to chase the cat.

The catmanny is about to pounce upon Ace when it suddenly decides to chase after the second disappeared manny from earlier instead. Lol, cats are like that - we pay attention to you when we want to, not when you want us to!

The catmanny takes the manny away on its horsey, then Ace sees one of her missing friends Shreela. Shreela takes her to where Midge and Derek are hiding from cats, as though they are mouses.

The Doctor is about to catch the cat again when it disappears an makes him and Sarge disappear too. They appear on the planet and see a catmanny. In fact there is a whole clowder of catmannys, and they surround the Doctor and Sarge.

They herd the Doctor to a tent. He goes in and sees the Master who says

"Why Doctor, what an unexpected pleasure."

and I think this is supposed to be a surprise reveal for the cliffhanger, but it is not. His eyes glow like a cat's, and the Doctor makes a confused face because he knows the Master is not a cat - this mystery is the real cliffhanger.

This is the most amazing episode of Doctor Who evar - it is full of cats!

In fact it is so good I that am going to go on and review part two right now.

Part Two

Sarge tries to run away but the catmannys all pounce on him and play with him while the Master and the Doctor talk. The Doctor steals a horsey and he and Sarge ride away on it.

Ace finds out things from her friends about the catmannys so that she can fight them. I was forgetting for a moment that Ace is supposed to be a goody (albeit a psychopathic pyromaniac goody) so in theory we should be on her side not the catmannys'. Ace sets a trap for a catmanny but it spots the trap and breaks it with its cat claws.

Ace is confused about her trap not working. Like many mannys have done before her, she has underestimated their cat intelligence, lol.

The Doctor tells Sarge that they are "on the planet of the Cheetah People."

Back on Earth a cat sees a milkmanny delivering milk and looks at him as if he is noms (or possibly just the milk he is delivering?) and, while we don't see him get disappeared, we know by now that this is definitely going to happen.

Ace sets another trap but this time catches the Doctor and Sarge in it instead of a Cheetah People. The Doctor tells them he thinks the planet is going to blow up soon, and then he takes them through the middle of the Cheetah People, who don't pounce on them to nom them because they are sleepy and have already had noms. This is well-observed authentic cat behaviour from the scriptwriter, I am enjoying the heightened level of realism we're seeing in this story.

The milkmanny from earlier appears (having clearly been teleported to the planet by a cat off-screen since we last saw him) and starts running around and shouting, waking up the Cheetah People and making them grumpy. This kicks off a big fight between the mannys and the Cheetah People - the Doctor tries to say there will be no battle here but nobody pays any attention to him this time. Everybody gets separated in the confusion, and some of the Cheetah People start pouncing on each other to make things even more fun.

The Doctor and the Master confront each other again and the Doctor starts to get some exposition:

"This planet's alive. The animals are part of the planet. When they fight each other, they trigger explosions. They hasten the planet's destruction."

The Master needs the Doctor's help - cats can bring mannys here but cannot send them back, so the Master needs the Doctor's help to escape. This 'only going one way' business makes good scientific sense according to the Second Cat Law of Thermodynamics, which states that socks can become cats but cats don't become socks.

The Master says that if they stay there too long

"We shall become animals."

and he shows off his cat eyes and teeth. This sounds great! Except that the planet will also blow up which is, I admit, a bit of a downside. The cats start singing and the Master joins in. The Doctor leaves the Master with a sad look, as though disappointed he is not becoming a cat yet.

Ace makes friends with a Cheetah who likes her badges. The Doctor finds them and he warns Ace that her new friend is still dangerous and might nom her...

"Or worse."
"What's worse?"
"Let's just say they are dangerously attractive."

So even the Doctor admits that cats are handsome, lol.

Sarge tries to take charge of the other mannys and he drops the story title again. (It really is most unusual for it to feature in on-screen dialogue so frequently, I'd almost say it is a deliberate subversion of the tendency to slip the title into the script exactly once.) But when the Doctor and Ace find them they are fighting among themselves.

Midge has begun turning into a cat. He runs away and the Master captures him and uses him to teleport back to Earth. The Doctor sees this and realises that he has figured out that once the mannys begin to change they can do this (the reverse of what the Cheetah People can do) and so escape. This means that the Doctor and the mannys still on the planet will be able to escape too, but only when one of them starts to turn into a cat as well.

Sarge starts to argue about who this will be, but then we see that it is Ace who has cat eyes now.

Part one ended with the Master showing his cat eyes, and now Ace has them, so the Doctor is the only main character not to have begun changing into a cat. But I think I can see where this plot is going (because I too have cat eyes. Actually I know where this is going because I saw the Doctor with cat eyes on the DVD box - so much for hiding spoilers!) and there is only one episode left.

I can't wait until another time to watch part three, I'm going to carry on my review... now!

Part Three

Ace goes running off to play with her new friend who calls her "sister." This involves them running in slow motion, which they both seem to enjoy, and it does look like great fun. The Doctor follows them at normal speed, so should have no difficulty in catching them up.

The Master is back on Earth and tries to turn himself back into a manny... er, I mean a Time Lord possessing the body of a Trakenite.

Ace's cat friend is called Karra. Disappointingly she claims she is not a cat, although she does look a lot like one so it is an understandable mistaik to maik. But now she knows Karra is not a cat, Ace's loyalty is torn between her and the Doctor, although not enough to stop her from going on a horsey ride with Karra to look for a ded manny to nom.

The Doctor arrives and says

"Ace, come back. Come home."

and Ace's cat eyes go away. This is a great scene, and Sophie Aldred is good at conveying Ace's inner conflict with her facial expressions alone.

The Doctor is worried that if Ace takes them back to Earth she may "become like the Cheetah people forever." This sounds like a win-win situation to me, but Ace is not sure. Of course I am already a cat, so turning into a cat forever holds no scares for me. Maybe that is how the Maker of Cats turns socks into cats?

Ace takes them all back home to Earth, arriving just outside the TARDIS. Shreela and Derek are happy to be home in Perivale and grateful to the Doctor and Ace, but Sarge has learned nothing from his experiences on the planet and is still just as much of a dick as he was back in his first scene.

Ace thinks they can now leave in the TARDIS but the Doctor is still worried about the Master. And well he might be, as the Master has killed a cat! Oh noes!
The Doctor thinks the Master is motivated by "malice" and "survival" (clang!). Ace's cat eyes come back and Squeak (who is a little manny and not a mouse, despite the name) says she is a

"Bad cat man."

Midge has gone all cool looking, which I presume is the next stage of his transformation into a cat, and he goes into the youth club's self-defence class who have been leaderless without Sarge. Midge takes over the class by dropping the story title like Sarge used to. Sarge comes in and when the Doctor and Ace arrive in the next scene they find him going

The Master says Midge is his "hunting dog." Oh it's ON now! It's one thing to turn mannys into cats, but quite another to turn them into doggys.

With the self-defence class as his henchmannys, the Master sets a trap for the Doctor. Ace goes to fight them but the Doctor knows that her fighting would make her change "forever" so he goes in Ace's place. He and Midge ride motorbikes directly at each other and then they explode.

For some reason seeing this makes me think "However, he has chosen a very obvious piece of cover."

The Doctor disappears and the Master sets his henchmannys on Ace. Karra appears to help her, but also to tempt Ace to fight and become a cat. She chases the henchmannys away. The Master tries to hypno-eyes Karra, to which she ripostes

"Do you bleed?"

Karra may say she is not a cat but I think she is really great anyway. But then the Master stabs her and runs away loling.

Ace runs to Karra and finds she has turned into a manny. Oh noes! This explains why she said she wasn't a cat, and also it means she doesn't have nine lives so she dies. Ace is sad, and so am I, mew.

The Doctor catches the Master trying to break into his TARDIS and confronts him. The Master claims he can control the power of the Cheetah People's planet, and he pounces on the Doctor and teleports them both to the planet, which has nearly blown up like the Genesis planet at the end of Star Trek 3 Search for Spock.

They fight, and as the Doctor is about to win we see that he, finally, has cat eyes. This is what we've all been waiting for, the payoff of the whole story - the Doctor turning into a cat!

But the Doctor stops fighting, and allows the Master to win, while pleading with him

"If we fight like animals, we'll die like animals!"

The Master tries to hit the Doctor with a big bone (which is a dog's weapon if you ask me) and there is a flash and the Doctor is back on Earth again where his melodramatic speech sounds out of place - a commentary on how the Doctor will never be at home in the everyday land of Suburbia.

A manny comes and complains about cats at him, which reminds us that not all baddys can be defeated by not fighting them.

The Doctor comes and takes his hat and umbrella back from Ace, who had thought he was ded, thus trolling her one last time. Ace has turned back into a manny, but says she will always remember how great it was to be a cat. The Doctor says

"Where to now, Ace?"
"Home."
"Home?"
"The TARDIS."

So Ace has fully accepted that the TARDIS, not Perivale, is her true home, which confirms what we saw earlier when she unconsciously teleported them all to the TARDIS. This completes Ace's story arc and emotional journey as she finds and accepts a place she belongs.

The Doctor and Ace walk off together, and the Doctor gives a final speech...

"There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the seas asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice. Somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace, we've got work to do!"

So now we have solved the mystery of why the BBC stopped making Doctor Who after Survival. The answer is that they had made the greatest story of all time, and so had to stop now in the knowledge that they would never better it.

It is not simply the presence of cats that makes Survival so purrfect - we saw when they brought the series back in 2005 that Russell "The" Davies tried to improve his rubbish stories New Earth and Gridlock by including catmannys - you need a great story to begin with.

And Survival is a great story. The reason it gets away with dropping the title as often as it does is because it underlines the strong theme of the story, which is that "survival of the fittest" means the best survive, and cats survive, therefore cats are best. All cats know this already, naturally, but it is nice to have a three-part story made to remind mannys of the fact.

Plus Survival reintroduces the Master for the first time in the Sylvester McCoy era of Doctor Who, and he fits the story perfectly - of all Doctor Who's many baddys, only the Master is clever enough to be a worthy adversary for the Doctor in his final story, but stupid enough to get himself stuck on the planet of the Cheetah People in the first place.

But let's be honest here - the main reason Survival is so great is because it is the nearest we'll ever come to having a cat as the Doctor. That one scene where the Doctor gets cat eyes makes it all worthwhile. Of course it'll never happen again - imagine the backlash on the internets from mannys if it did! I suppose we are lucky the internets weren't around in 1989, so all they could do then was write angry letters to Doctor Who Magazine - not that the magazine printed any of them, there was a cover-up.

Speaking of DWM...

Back in Doctor Who Magazine #250, the Doctor's speech in the final scene of Survival was nominated as the second best moment evar in a list of "10 more moments when you know you're watching the greatest television series ever made..." and, this time, I think they got it right.

It is great to see the Sylvester McCoy era of Doctor Who go out on an all-time high (I know he came back for Dimensions in Time and the TV Movie, but they aren't part of the original series so I'm allowed to not count them, mew). Although it had some shaky moments, such as Richard Briers overacting at the end of Paradise Towers, or the missed opportunities of Silver Nemesis, this era is one of the best of all of Doctor Who, with only one really bad story letting the side down. On the other paw we have seen classics such as the fabulous Time and the Rani, the thought-provoking and politically controversial Happiness Patrol, and the triumphant final send off for Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT that was Battlefield, and these terrific hits more than make up for the few misses.

Survival completes the so-called "Cartmel Masterplan" story arc which began back in Dragonfire when Ace was introduced as the Companion, and where the thematic direction for the McCoy era was chosen from out of the alternatives presented by season 24. This bold new direction saw the Doctor become a darker, more devious character, which we can see evidence of in Survival when, even at the very end there, he was testing Ace to see if she had any cat left in her by saying "we've got W-word to do."

Although it is maybe worth remembering that, back in part one, he couldn't even get a cat to nom cat noms. So much for the "Cosmic Manipulator."

Doctor Who Night 2018: Minotaurs

Here we see a manny who loves his job. It's the Master, as played by Roger Delgado in his penultimate appearance in Doctor Who.

It would be hard to argue that The Time Monster is one of the best stories of Jon Pertwee's era, but it is easily one of the most fun. From the Doctor speeding up the film to make his car go faster, to the delightful scenes of the Doctor and the Master confronting and one-upping each other from their respective TARDISes. From the Doctor's trippy dream sequence in the very first scene, to the 'this-SFX-isn't-very-good-but-let's-use-it-anyway' approach to the manifestations of Kronos.

There's also a curiously smutty undercurrent to this story. From the Master's evident enjoyment at saying

"Come, Kronos, come!" 

(on more than one occasion), to the Doctor's "time sensor" gadget looking a bit rude, to the ending where Sgt Benton is in the nude, lol.

And there's also a cat! What a great story.

Our loose theme for this year's Doctor Who Night was "minotaurs." The other story we watched was The Horns of Nimon, a lesser story from season 17 that is mainly notable for the Co-Pilot saying

"Weakling scum!"

four times over the course of two episodes before he gets killed off...

Not really of course. It is mainly notable for the character of Soldeed, as played by Graham Crowden. Following a story where Roger Delgado played the baddy was never going to be easy, but he rises to the challenge and gives one of the most over-the-top performances in all of Doctor Who.

Crowden took on Tom Baker in his own show and was determined to out-ham him... or die trying. Judge for yourselves how well that turned out.

A Cat Sits on the Eternal Throne

I have been playing a great new game with the (sadly rather generic) name Eternal. It is a lot like Magic: the Gathering except it is made to play on computers from the very beginning, and so if you are playing on a computer - which you have to be, since Eternal is a computer game - it plays much better than Magic.

When I first started I expected I would be mostly playing the single-player story mode and puzzles (which are great fun by the way - some of them are easy but some of them are so hard that I had to get Professor Cat to help me), because I had bad experiences playing Magic Duels against trolls who would do their best to abuse the timer rules to make games not fun for me. But the mannys who play Eternal on the internets seem to be, for the most part, friendly and happy to say "hello" and "thanks for the game" and sometimes even "nice play!" So you will often find me playing in the Casual mode where playing a fun, friendly game is more important than winning.

Sadly Eternal is not purrfect yet - there are not enough cat cards in the game to make a cat army deck (like I did in Magic: the Gathering) so instead my best deck is full of dinosaurs! Magic has been around a long time though, while Eternal is still a young game and growing. My biggest hope for the game in the future is that they put in more cats.

Here is my current Dinosaurs! deck list, which is a lot of fun (especially when Adaptive Predator shows up) although it probably needs some more refinement:

4 Initiate of the Sands
2 Savage Skybrood
4 Seek Power
2 Equivocate
4 Second Sight
4 Static Bolt
2 Twinning Ritual
3 Auralian Merchant
4 Pteriax Hatchling
2 Ancient Lore
4 Avisaur Patriarch
2 Clutchmate
4 Nesting Avisaur
3 Twinbrood Sauropod
1 Adaptive Predator
3 Predatory Carnosaur
6 Time Sigil
3 Amber Monument
4 Primal Sigil
2 Clan Standard
3 Cobalt Waystone
1 Crest of Wisdom
4 Elysian Banner
4 Seat of Wisdom

And in the market:

1 Twilight Hunt
1 Dispel
1 Xenan Obelisk
1 Twinbrood Sauropod
1 Predatory Carnosaur

Columbo: Candidate for Crime

As good as The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder was, there is one TV Detective series that was even better. It is of course Columbo, the TV Detective we all need, and one of the greatest American TV series of all time.

Candidate For Crime is an episode from the third season in 1973, so 45 years ago, but relevant right now since it is set on the eve of an election, and here the murderer is a candidate for the US Senate - although it seems to me that the days are now long gone when a would-be Senator had to keep his affair a secret for fear of its public exposure finishing his career.

1973 saw the American Vice President resign due to corruption charges, and the President investigated over Watergategate, so they were no strangers to the concept of a criminal politician, but I bet nobody living in those long gone, innocent times could even begin to imagine the sorts of things that those seeking election to high office get away with nowadays!

Jackie "Perry White" Cooper plays an almost archetypal Columbo murderer who does a highly enjoyable turn as he gets increasingly exasperated by the trolling from Columbo, most particularly when he changes his expression in a moment, switching from the mask he wears in public - and when being forced to tolerate Columbo's presence - to show what he is really feeling as soon as he's alone.

As always for the murderers who consider themselves superior to the police lieutenant, he underestimates Columbo until it is too late and this, combined with his unsympathetic two-faced demeanour, makes his eventual comeuppance all the more satisfying for us watching.

The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder

The Mind of Mr. J. G. Reeder is one of the finest TV Detective series evar. Dating from 1969-71, two seasons were made, one either side of Hugh Burden's memorable appearance as Channing in Spearhead from Space. Burden plays the title character, a mild-mannered, seemingly absent-minded civil servant, who is of course far sharper than he appears. Possessing a "criminal mind" (as is pointed out by or to him in most episodes), Reeder can out-think even the smartest and most dangerous criminals to be found in 1920s London.

Being made in the 1970s and set in the 1920s means there are several episodes that... how can I put it... wouldn't get made that way today, if at all. This includes one instance of Indian characters not played by Indians, and two with 'Yellow Peril' Chinese - the latter including a stage magician character with a 'vanishing lady' trick that could easily have been an inspiration for Li H'sen Chang, and David "Monkey" Collings in yellowface - although, unlike with John Bennett, it is only his character who dons yellowface within the story. The same can not be said for other characters, including the aforementioned stage magician.

Aside from Mr. Reeder, the other main character is his boss Sir Jason Toovey, Director of Public Prosecutions, played by Willoughby Goddard. He is a wonderful comic foil to Burden's Reeder and lights up every scene he appears in, and conveys that Sir Jason is not quite the 'buffoon with a clever underling' that a superficial reading of the character might indicate, and for all that his alternating between blustering at Reeder and sucking up to the aristocracy (his two main character traits) make him seem like a character out of a P. G. Wodehouse story.

Other recurring characters of note are Reeder's Scottish housekeeper Mrs. Houchin (Mona Bruce), whose attempts to feed Reeder with disgusting-sounding meaty meals force him to constantly have to improvise reasons for not eating them, and Miss Bellman (Virginia Stride in season one, then the sadly not as good Gillian Lewis in season two), Reeder's hopeless love interest - hopeless in the sense that it is made obvious to the viewers that each is equally in love with the other, but they are too uptight and restrained by the etiquette of their class and time to act upon it.

The plots are inventive, with little sign of the format becoming stale by the end of the run. There was only one really bad episode, in which John "Bilbo Baggins" Le Mesurier was wasted as a guest star with an implausible death trap in his house, randomly, and which Reeder and Miss Bellman only escape from through chance, not from Reeder's intelligence. At the other extreme, the best episode of the series, titled Sheer Melodrama, sees Reeder tell Miss Bellman that he prefers melodramatic plays to so-called 'realism' at the theatre due to the melodrama plots being more realistic - which is then borne out by the sequence of decidedly unlikely and melodramatic events that then befalls them both.

Out of 16 episodes, only two exist in colour (both from the second season, so I don't know if the first season was originally made in colour or not), and I guess we are lucky that they exist at all.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric Part Four

Fenric is revealed to be an old enemy of the Doctor's who has not been in the TV series before, like Lady Peinforte, the gods of Ragnarok, or Morgaine. There's been a lot of these turning up recently, I presume because the writers couldn't be bothered doing origin stories. Fenric says

"You left me in the shadow dimensions, trapped for 17 centuries. But now I've found a body again, and the preparations are complete."

then he disappears himself.

Millington orders his henchmanny to shoot the Doctor, Ace and Captain Sorin, but they get rescued by the Russian soldiers and the British and Russian soldiers start fighting each other again.

Millington goes back to his Nazi office where he still has his chess set despite the orders he gave - in this very room - back in part two to have them burnt. He is raving, which Cthulhu says is because he has lost all of his sanity points from summoning Fenric.

Fenric teams up with the vampires and the monsters and gets them to summon their leader to be his chief henchmonster, then he tells Millington a little more of his backstory with the Doctor:

"For 17 centuries I was trapped in the shadow dimensions because of him. He pulled bones from the desert sands and carved them into chess pieces. He challenged me to solve his puzzle. I failed."

The Doctor and Ace try to steal Millington's chess set but he has left it booby-trapped and it blows up the office. Fenric tells his new henchmonster to kill all the mannys by blowing up the entire world with Millington's poison bombs. This causes Millington's henchmanny to team up with Captain Sorin against Fenric and the monsters.

More mannys get turned into vampires, expect for Mrs Dudman and the tiny manny, because they are named characters and therefore immune. The Doctor takes Mrs Dudman's chess set, which was also saved from being burnt. It's lucky the manny in charge of burning all the chess sets wasn't as good at his job as Perkins was at smashing all the radios.

Fenric has a smiley face, he is happy because his plan is working and all the spare mannys that the plot doesn't need any more are being killed off.

The Doctor sets up his chess puzzle as Ace helps Mrs Dudman and Audrey to escape in a car. Fenric orders his henchmonster to kill off the rest of the vampires and monsters, which is lucky because they were about to catch Ace. Then he goes to play chess with the Doctor.

"Where is the game, Time Lord?"
"You couldn't resist it, could you? The game of traps. The contest as before: one move. Find the winning move, spring the trap on me, if you can."

Millington gets shot by Vershinin (the last of the Russians left except for Captain Sorin). Ace sees that the surviving British and Russian soldiers have teamed up (even though she was also there when they teamed up with Captain Sorin earlier) and this gives her the idea of how to solve the Doctor's chess puzzle.

Captain Sorin tries to shoot Fenric, but Fenric reveals that he can't because he is also one of the "wolves of Fenric," like all the mannys in this story are. Ace goes in and tells Fenric the solution to the puzzle, making exactly the same mistaik she made when she told Dr Judson about the computer program in part two. The Doctor comes in and says "ACE!" in the style of a Big NO! (not to be confused with a Big Bad I Said No!) because he just knows she's been unbelievably stupid again.
Do you think that when Ace said "am I so stupid?" and the Doctor replied "no, that's not it," he was just being polite?

Fenric, who is now possessing Captain Sorin so that his accent makes it much harder to understand the exposition, explains that Audrey the tiny manny will grow up to become Ace's mother, making Ace a wolf of Fenric too.

I think Fenric has made a foolish mistaik in having wolves, he should have had cats instead since cats are best. Also, if his henchmonster is about to poison the world then won't Audrey, who lives on the world, also get poisoned before becoming Ace's mother?

Ace tries to use her faith in the Doctor to defeat the henchmonster when Fenric orders it to kill them, so the Doctor does his best Blake impression to manipulate her:

"I knew she carried the evil inside her. Do you think I'd have chosen a social misfit if I hadn't known? She couldn't even pass her chemistry exams at school, and yet she manages to create a time storm in her bedroom? I saw your hand in it from the very beginning. She's an emotional cripple."

Like the best bluffs, there's a lot of truth in that. Also we get a very fast explanation that Fenric was the one moving the chess pieces in between scenes back in Silver Nemesis (which did not make sense at the time, so I suspect this was retconned in to this story after somebody pointed this out), and was also responsible for the "time storm" that teleported Ace to Iceworld to be in Dragonfire (this is less likely to be a retcon, but it still sounds like something they made up to fit after the fact, rather than having been planned all along).

With Ace's "psychic force" broken, the henchmonster kills Fenric and itself, just like the Doctor and we knew it would. Ace wants to have a sulk for being the only one who didn't see what the Doctor's plan was, but the Doctor knows things always blow up at this point in the story so he has to rescue her. Ace still has a sulk.

"Couldn't even pass a chemistry exam?"
"I'd have done anything not to hurt you, but I had to save you from Fenric's evil curse. Your faith in me was holding the haemovore back."
"You said I was an emotional cripple! A social misfit!"
"I had to make you lose your belief in me."
"Full marks for teenage psychology."
"It's not true, believe me."

It is true really, lol.

They go to the beach and talk some more about Audrey being Ace's mother, but a lot of this is too hard to hear over the incidental music, which has obviously lost too many sanity points over the course of the story because it just goes mad at the end here.

Ace jumps in the water. Wolf of Fenric or not, she's definitely no cat.

The Curse of Fenric has its flaws, yes, mainly in the shape of some plot holes that we can only overlook because the rest of it is so good, with some of the best special effects, monster design and guest character actors of the Sylvester McCoy era of Doctor Who - Dinsdale Landen (purr) and Nicholas Parsons especially, the latter evidently only got killed off before the final episode to give the others a chance. Plus it contains one of the best cliffhangers of all time.

But before I declare The Curse of Fenric to be the best story of the McCoy era overall, I have one story still to watch - the very final one of the original series, and it is one I have never seen before, so I have no idea what it is like.

Stay tuned!

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric Part Three

Millington orders his henchmanny to "radio for reinforcements" and the henchmanny reminds him that he just ordered for all the radios to be destroyed. Millington says

"What?"

although in the comic version it was more like

Millington runs into the room where Perkins has just finished breaking all the radios and he makes an 'oh noes' face, lol.

The Doctor says the vampires aren't vampires but rather "haemovores" (to avoid copyright infringement, especially after Nicholas Parsons just mentioned Dracula) and claims they are what mannys will evolve into in the future. Oh noes, not more evolution nonsense, didn't we have enough of that in the previous story?

Nicholas Parsons questions how the Doctor can know the future, which shows that he is clever and perceptive. I hope he becomes the new Companion and doesn't get killed off before the end of the episode, but he is worried the not-vampires-but-they-are-really will come back to nom him like thet said they would.

The monsters attack the Russian soldiers who run away. One of them points out that "vampires don't exist" and he's right. But "haemovores" do - the writer's got you bang to rights there, random soldier manny!

Millington and Dr Judson argue because Millington is a cultist who wants "all the dark powers of Fenric" while Dr Judson is just a manny who likes computers. Meanwhile, now back at the church, the Doctor sets Nicholas Parsons to look in his old books for clues - this really is getting to be a proper Call of Cthulhu adventure now, no wonder Cthulhu likes it so much.

Ace finds the pot and puts it in her bag for later, then the monsters attack the church.

There is quite a lengthy action scene as Ace tries to get away. Two of the monsters are about to nom her but she is rescued by Captain Sorin and his soldiers. The monsters get back up again when shot with bullets but the Doctor realises they can be held off by having faith, which "creates a psychic barrier" and makes Cthulhu grumpy. Well, grumpier than usual.

Captain Sorin uses his faith in the Revolution to escape from the church, while the rest try to get out through the secret tunnel. The Doctor sees Ace has the pot along with all her explosives, and tells her "that's the oriental treasure we've been looking for."

Captain Sorin gets back to the rest of his soldiers on the beach and says "there's a storm coming," which might be one bit of ominous foreshadowing too many, to be honest.

Millington and his soldiers capture the Doctor, Ace and Nicholas Parsons and steal the pot and books from them. Captain Sorin allows himself to get captured too, after warning his mannys about Millington's trap.

Ace finally gets fed up not knowing the plot, and gets angry at the Doctor so he will tell her (and us) what's going on, and not before time.

"You know what's going on, don't you?"
"Yes."
"You always know, you just can't be bothered to tell anyone. It's like it's some kind of game, and only you know the rules. You knew all about that inscription being a computer program, but you didn't tell me. You know all about that old bottle, and you're not telling me. Am I so stupid?"
"No, that's not it."
"Why then? I want to know."
"Evil! Evil since the dawn of time!"
"What do you mean?"
"Will you stop asking me these questions?"
"Tell me!"
"The dawn of time, the beginning of all beginnings. Two forces only: good and evil. Then chaos. Time is born, matter, space. The universe cries out like a newborn. The forces shatter as the universe explodes outwards. Only echoes remain, and yet somehow, somehow the evil force survives. An intelligence. Pure evil!"

The Doctor speaks his lines quickly, as if he is only telling us reluctantly and is hoping we won't be able to keep up with him. But we cats have a secret weapon for use in such situations - the paws button.

"That's Fenric?"
"No, that's just Millington's name for it. Evil has no name. Trapped inside a flask like a genie in a bottle."
"Can we stop it?"
"We need to get that flask."
"We can release Captain Sorin to help us. I can distract the guard."
"How?"
"Professor, I'm not a little girl."

I'm not sure what that last line has to do with anything. Maybe Ace just decided to point it out apropos of nothing?

There follows one of the most confusing scenes evar in Doctor Who as Ace distracts the guard by talking absolute nonsense at him.

"There's a wind whipping up. I can feel it through my clothes. Is there a storm coming?"
"I wasn't expecting one."
"The question is, is he making all the right moves or only going through the motions?"
"What are you doing here?"
"You have to move faster than that if you want to keep up with me. Faster than light."
"Faster than the second hand on a watch?"

The guard even joins in after a while. Cthulhu's theory is that they have both lost sanity points and this is the inexorable result. Ace continues:

"Much faster. We're not even moving yet. Hardly cruising speed. Sometimes I move so fast, I don't exist any more."
"What can you see?"
"Undercurrents, bringing things to the surface. I can't stay."
"You promised."

Er... when?

"I can't."

Thankfully that's the last of that bit, as the Doctor and Captain Sorin have by now escaped.

Nicholas Parsons tries to hold off the vampires and the monsters and he succeeds for a bit before they persuade him that, all preceding evidence to the contrary, he doesn't believe after all and so they can nom him.

Dinsdale Landen hasn't done much so far this episode because Dr Judson is still with the Ultima Machine, which has spent all of part three running the computer program. Now it electrics him and he goes

The Doctor comes in and Millington tells him

"The time is now. The chains of Fenric are shattered. The gods have lost the final battle. The dead men's ship has slipped its moorings, and the great ash itself trembles to its roots. Fenric!"

His summoning ritual is complete. In a single moment Dinsdale Landen makes up for his previous underutilisation by standing up. His eyes glow green and he says

"We play the contest again, Time Lord."

Well it took us a while to get here, and the journey may have been a touch bumpy along the way, but it was worth it - this moment, which the entire story has been building towards, is genuinely one of Doctor Who's best cliffhangers. Evar.

Suddenly, at the point at which we might reasonably expect the plot's mysteries to start being unravelled, Fenric's use of the words "Time Lord" adds a whole extra layer.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric Part Two

The soldiers decide to take the Doctor and Ace to Captain Sorin.

Dr Judson reads more of the translation and in the church basement new runes appear, as if they are making up their ominous foreshadowing as they are going along.

The Doctor teams up with Captain Sorin so they are let go.

Dr Judson is now in the church basement where he sees the new runes, and Commander Millington tells him to use their computer to translate them, since they are too new for Nicholas Parsons to already have a translation prepared earlier. The Doctor and Ace then go into the basement and see the new runes.

"Ace, come here and look at that. What do you notice?"
"This one's a slightly different alphabet to the rest."
"Yes?"
"And, well, it uses fewer characters."
"And?"
"And, that means it's older than the rest."
"And?"
"And, er, I don't know."
"And it wasn't here this morning."

Then Commander Millington captures them.

Nicholas Parsons makes a speech in which he hesitates and repeats himself a lot. I don't know if he was deviating from the subject as well, but as there is nobody there to listen to his speech (except us viewers), I think it indicates that he is going mad. Have I mentioned yet that this is one of Cthulhu's favourite Doctor Who stories?

There is a brief scene of padding where the British and Russian soldiers have a fight on the beach. Scenes of them fighting on landing grounds, fields, streets and hills were presumably cut for time.

Commander Millington takes the Doctor and Ace into his secret lab where they are making poison to drop on the Nazis. Then he takes the Doctor to see their computer, "the Ultima Machine," where they have hidden some poison for when the Russian soldiers come to steal it.

The two mannys who went swimming back in part one talk to an old manny, who says

"You will burn in the everlasting fires of hell, you wicked, evil girls! You have black hearts. There's no love in heaven or Earth for you - nothing for you but pitiless damnation for the rest of your lives. Think on it."

which seems a bit harsh to me, but then I'm only a cat.

Commander Millington demonstrates his poison by poisoning some birdys, which upset my friend Mr Purple Cat, and the Doctor wasn't impressed either. As if having a Nazi office wasn't a big enough clue, we know Millington is definitely a baddy now. He gives the Doctor the exposition about how it will win the war against Russia, who they are not actually at war with.

This scene was nominated as the 20th best evar moment in the series back in Doctor Who Magazine #242, a flawed list that curiously omits to include any scenes from Timelash, and, while they made a good case, I can't help but wonder... if the Ultima Machine is programmed to self-destruct when it translates the word "love," they had better hope that they don't end up translating any Nazi codes or Viking runes that contain the word "love" before the Russians steal it. Symbolism is all very well, but it can only let you get away with so much...

A special effect knocks down a bit of wall so that some mannys find a pot. They ignore it, so it tries glowing green for a bit to get their attention, but it doesn't manage to succeed... yet.

The two mannys go swimming again and get disappeared by a camera transition.

Millington orders his henchmanny to burn all the chess sets he can find. This sounds a bit mad, but then again he did have a set in his office earlier so the henchmanny ought to find at least one. Except that this scene takes place in his office, and the henchmanny leaves without finding a chess set to burn.

Dr Judson translates the new runes, which by this stage are clearly just trying to ominously foreshadow as hard as they possibly can.

The two mannys have been turned into vampires, and they lure a soldier into the water where some monsters grab him.

Ace speaks to Dr Judson and tells him that the runes are a computer program (without using that exact term, so presumably she already used it earlier in the round). This makes him very excited and Ace very pleased with herself.

"And the half-time score: Perivale 600,000,000; rest of the universe nil."

she says, although I don't think we can simply take her word for it as Nicholas Parsons is usually in charge of keeping the score.

The two vampires go in and menace the old manny from earlier in a really over-dramatic, stereotypical vampire way. However it is still quite effectively scary. In the following scene the Doctor and Ace find her body and, because this isn't part one, don't immediately get framed for her murder.

The vampires next meet Nicholas Parsons who quite reasonably points out that "vampires are just superstition," but that doesn't stop them from menacing him until he gets rescued by the Doctor and Ace.

It turns out that Ace did the wrong thing in smugly helping Dr Judson, and so the Doctor and Nicholas Parsons rush to try and stop him from running the program on the Ultima Machine.

It's time for a lot of monsters to rise up out of the sea, but surprisingly this isn't the cliffhanger. It was good enough for The Sea Devils and Full Circle, but not here.

The Doctor, Nicholas Parsons and Ace run into the room to try to stop the computer which is already running the program, and it cannot be stopped. Millington says

"You're too late Doctor!"

and we get a proper crash-zoom to the Doctor's face to end upon.

It is tough to judge this episode in isolation - it is great at building up atmosphere, but the plot has yet to come together fully, with the Doctor, Ace and other characters still seemingly going from location to location as required to hit the necessary plot beats to let the story come out a bit at a time.

We're halfway through now though, and I have hope and faith that it will all start to come together in the next part. (Also I've seen this story before, so I know it does.)