Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Ghost Light Part Three

The alien is revealed to be a fabulous, shiny manny, a bit like Ky from The Mutants only he is golden and called Light. Ace thinks he is "an angel stupid."

The Doctor explains

"That's just its shape here on Earth. It's called Light, and it's come to survey life here. And while it slept, the survey got out of control."

Control says

"Control is me."

to which the Doctor replies

"And the survey is Josiah."

although that makes no sense. Josiah tries to get one of his servants to shoot Light, but Light pewpewpews her first, which annoys the Doctor.

In the next scene the Doctor is trying to explain what is going on - not to us, but to Light. Ace asks

"How does Light move so fast?"

"He travels at the speed of thought."

Lol, this is an amusing line of the Doctor's that plays with our expectations, although it does not actually answer Ace's question or, indeed, make any sense.

Control wants to be free from Light. He does not like her either, but seems to need her for something, although I do not expect we are likely to find out what. While it is still hard to make out most of what Control is saying, she wants to be "a ladylike" and decides to run away. The Doctor and Light fight some kind of mental contest that causes the Doctor to make a face.

It is not clear who wins this battle of wills, but Light disappears for now so it was probably the Doctor.

Ace gets frightened by all the stuffed animals. While stuffed animals are not normally scary, the scene is shot with a red filter and shakycam that, accompanied by the animal noises, make this an effective scary scene that we all enjoyed. It gets even better when the lighting and noise metamorphose into the light and sound of one of those manny emergency vehicles, which is clearly tied into the part of Ace's backstory with the haunted house that has not been revealed to us yet. This is probably the best bit of foreshadowing in the whole story, although the competition is not strong.

Control meets Redvers and then she changes costume. The Doctor comes in and Control jumps through the window like Hitler escaping from Danger 5. The Doctor finds out that Redvers wants to shoot Queen Victoria "the Crowned Saxe-Coburg", which is a sudden and unexpected turn to the plot. Redvers invites the Doctor to join him.

Josiah sends Gwendoline to kill Ace. They are having a fight when Control climbs back in the window, distracting Gwendoline so that Ace can lock her in a room, which she later escapes from using an axe.

Nimrod finds that Light is far from armless.

"I wanted to see how it works... so I dismantled it."

Inspector Mackenzie is unlucky enough to come in and speak to Light next and he gets hypno-eyesed or pewpewpewed or some such thing.

Gwendoline attacks Ace again. The Doctor and Redvers come in and the Doctor picks up Gwendoline's locket and shows what's inside to Gwendoline. In a less busy story this could have been a good moment, somewhat akin to when Crayford removes his eyepatch in The Android Invasion, but there are a lot of subplots in Ghost Light, too many for a three-part story perhaps, so this does not have room to have the desired impact upon us in the audience.

Apart from Gwendoline, who is left having a cry, and Light, who the script requires to not be present yet, the characters all go to another dinner scene. The Doctor says

"Who was it that said Earthmen never invite their ancestors round to dinner?"

indicating that The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy exists within the Doctor Who universe in some form. The Doctor shows the locket to "Lady" Mrs Pritchard and she leaves the room.

Lady Pritchard and Gwendoline are reunited just in time for Light to come in and turn them into statues. So much for that subplot.

The plot about assassinating Queen Victoria, which appeared out of nowhere earlier this episode, now takes over as Redvers changes his mind about taking Josiah with him and instead he wants to take Control, who just wants to have noms "out to dinner" instead of killing the queen.

Control takes the invitation and then, for no good reason except that it is required to set up the next bit, threatens to burn the house down. Ace says

"No, Control, don't do it! Please don't do it, that's what I did!"

completing the reveal of her backstory. Control only burns the invitation, concluding the 'assassinating Queen Victoria' plot.

Light appears in time for the next subplot. By this point it is clear that in each scene he is glowing a bit less. Light threatens to turn everything on Earth into noms, like he has already done with Inspector Mackenzie "the cream of Scotland Yard." That is a terrible joke, and one which appears to have warped the entire plot around it in order to set it up. It was not worth it, mew.

However we do now get a great scene as the Doctor defeats Light by talking to him, tricking him by saying that his catalogue of all life doesn't contain fictional animals, and then pointing out that everything changes and that his survey was a pointless waste of time from the very beginning. A bit like certain subplots I could mention, mew.

Everybody who is left goes down to the basement to try to stop Light's spaceship from blowing up the planet. Josiah tries to capture Ace, but he is defeated... somehow. Oh, I don't know. The story isn't trying any more so why should I? Josiah gets captured by Control and then Control, Redvers and Nimrod take over the spaceship and do... something... so the explosion will instead provide power to the spaceship.

Just when I thought my patience for this story was completely exhausted we get another really good bit - the Doctor and Ace leave, and instead of there being special effects for the spaceship taking off, it just vanishes in between shots.

The Doctor and Ace go back up and see Light blow himself up. So now Ace understands what happened here in the future when she burned the house down. The Doctor asks her if she regrets doing that, and she replies

"I wish I'd blown it up instead."

The Doctor's final line shows that he now understands that when he first met Ace she was a psychopathic pyromaniac and that, instead of her coming to terms with her troubled adolescence and the guilt she feels for her past actions, gaining closure and developing as a person through confronting her inner demons made manifest in the form of the inhabitants of Gabriel Chase, Ace is still a psychopathic pyromaniac.

"Wicked!"

Ghost Light doesn't make sense.

Too many things happen for no reason, or at least for reasons that are not made clear to us viewers. Here are a few of the questions I have:
Who is Josiah Smith? Who is Control? Why don't they get on with each other? What does Reverend Matthews want? How does Josiah turn him into a monkey (and, just as importantly, why)? How does Gwendoline know the way to the zoo? Why is it important that we know that she knows the way to the zoo? What made Ace think that breaking the light in the basement wall would help her escape from the husks? Did the character of Inspector Mackenzie exist for any reason other than a bad joke? What was Redvers and Josiah's plan to shoot the queen beyond 'go to Buckingham Palace and shoot the queen'? Why hasn't Light heard of evolution before now - is it because it didn't exist until Darwin invented it? Does the writer even know what evolution is? Who thought it was a good idea to have the incidental music cover up multiple important lines of expository dialogue? What the fuck happened at the end there? And most importantly of all: Did the script editor spend his time putting in little quips and references instead of actually editing the script?

It is unusual for a Doctor Who story to end with quite so many questions unanswered. I am left feeling that it should probably have either had less subplots or else been longer. As with cats, longer is usually better.

And yet somehow, in spite of this, Ghost Light succeeds.

It succeeds in much the same way as Sapphire & Steel succeeded, by having it not matter that it doesn't make sense. The atmosphere created in Gabriel Chase house - the single location for the whole of the story, just like in all the best Sapphire & Steel assignments - combined with the performances of the actors, is enough to make Ghost Light enjoyable with only the impression of a sensible plot being conveyed by the occasional line of exposition, hinting to us at what is going on while at the same time reassuring us that the characters know what they're talking about. At least, for the most part.

At the centre of it all stands Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor, the lynchpin of the show whom the other characters with all their many subplots revolve around. He holds it together with a fine display of acting throughout, from his trolling of Reverend Matthews in part one through to his trolling of Light in part three. His reassuring presence papers over the holes in the plot - if the Doctor isn't concerned about it, neither should we be. We know there is peril when the Doctor is worried, and we know everything is fine when he acts like it is so.

Almost buried under all the other guest characters and their subplots is the character-driven plot of Ace being purposefully brought back to a haunted house to face and overcome her fears - even if the character development she undergoes as a result is undone at the end by the need for her to quip. This is a very different type of plot from what we are used to in Doctor Who, it seems like it is starting to take the series in a different direction and has a modern feel - it would not be out of place in the new series, and may likely even have influenced writers such as Russell "The" Davies or Steven "Mechanical Digger" Moffat.

This is why Ace is the audience identification figure. We are the naughty cats who will set fire to Doctor Who in the future, and now we wish we'd blown it up instead. This metaphor may have gotten away from me.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Ghost Light Part Two

Where were we? Oh yes, I remember...

Nimrod wakes up and saves Ace by waving a light at the husks until one of them breaks it, and then Ace sets about them with a stick (a Hand of Omega-powered baseball bat being unavailable). The Doctor wants to go and help Ace but Josiah's servants point guns at him to stop him.

For some reason Ace decides to break the fancy lights in the wall, and Nimrod tries and fails to stop her. This sets off an alarm that distracts the servants, allowing the Doctor to capture Josiah by pretending his radiation detector is a gun.

The Doctor and Josiah go down to the basement. Ace says

"Doctor, where have you been?"

and he replies

"Where haven't I been?"

There is something "hibernating inside" the light. The Doctor makes an unsuccessful attempt to repair the damage Ace did, while Josiah gets a gun of his own and he knows the Doctor and Ace do not really have a gun. He makes the Doctor help him repair the damage, but they taunt him until he makes a mistaik and they can steal his gun. Then the prisoner, "Control" from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, comes out of her cell and chases them all back to the lift.

Control says a lot of things here, but it is very hard to understand any of it. Josiah is "evolving again" and Mrs Pritchard takes him away, leaving the Doctor and Ace free. There is then a scene of padding where Josiah wakes up Reverend Matthews in order to turn him into a monkey. This is evolution in the Terry Nation or Threshold mis-use of the word - no wonder Reverend Matthews was so annoyed.

The Doctor decides he now wants to know more of Ace's backstory, but she decides to have important sleeps instead.

The Doctor wakes up policemanny Inspector Mackenzie who has been having sleeps in a drawer for two years - impressive even by cat standards. It turns out this was because he was hypno-eyesed by Josiah, which explains it.

The Doctor has sorted the lift to allow Control to escape from the basement. They have done a deal off-screen, so as to keep what is going on on-screen as incomprehensible as possible. But then we finally get some explanation from the Doctor as to what is going on:

"Josiah Samuel Smith and Control are frightened of it. Redvers Fenn-Cooper saw it and lost his mind. Nimrod, he worships it."

"Let there be light?"

A lesser Companion might ask the Doctor to explain further, but Ace knows it is more important to make quips. Truly she is the first modern Doctor Who Companion.

"It's asleep down there in its spaceship and Josiah doesn't want it awoken."

Control wakes up the hibernating alien. The Doctor moves the clock forward so the mannys will all think it is time for night. Ace and Inspector Mackenzie find Josiah, Mrs Pritchard (who the Inspector recognises is Lady Pritchard, the real owner of the house) and Gwendoline all having sleeps, sitting up in their chairs, waiting for night. They wake up and capture Ace and Inspector Mackenzie, and there is a new Josiah who is younger and more evolved - it is a bit like when the Doctor regenerates, except that the old Josiah remains as another husk.

The episode has been building steadily towards a climactic scene. Everybody assembles in the main hall as the lift comes up. First Control comes out, and then Josiah tries to stop the alien coming out after her but he gets electriced instead.

The Doctor shouts "Light!" and a bright light shines out of the lift. The episode ends with it being reflected in the Doctor's face, keeping us in suspense as to who the alien is or what it looks like.

Starcat and Scary Cat are experts at watching confusing TV programmes, and found this much easier than Sapphire & Steel. They pointed out that the Doctor's few lines of explanation are all you need to understand the plot enough to enjoy it, and that if some of the individual bits seem pointless or make no sense then that is just because our cat minds are too highly trained, and we can't expect everything mannys do to make sense.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Ghost Light Part One

Ghost Light is the second story of season 26. It stars Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace. It starts with some mannys - we don't know who they are yet but doubtless this will be made clear in time - giving "dinner and your copy of Notorious Right Wing Tabloid Newspaper The Times" to a prisoner who is hidden behind a door so that we only get to see their eye.

Reverend Matthews (played by John Nettleton, Sir Arnold from Yes Minister) arrives at Gabriel Chase house, while the TARDIS arrives in a room elsewhere in the same house. The Doctor and Ace come out and investigate.

Some other mannys leave the house, frightened, in an attempt to build up a scary atmosphere about the place. Am I going to need Scary Cat's help to watch this, I wonder? He is the bravest of all cats, and would not be worried by things like that.

The rocking horse has glowing eyes. I suspect this is also meant to be scary, but it isn't. Ace admits she is frightened of, or "has a thing about", haunted houses. The Doctor asks her how many she has been in.

"One was enough. Never again."

The incidental music is very loud and intrusive here and so it is hard to make out some of what Ace is saying. They find a box on the floor and it is radioactive for some mysterious reason. It isn't very scary so far but it is building up the level of intrigue nicely.

They meet a manny who picks the box up, it is Michael Cochrane from Sharpe. He is looking for Redvers Fenn-Cooper, and gives some more exposition but the music does its best to drown him out and thus keep us in the dark for now.

Reverend Matthews is fed up waiting and goes around acting at the servants until he is met by Gwendoline. Michael Cochrane gets a gun and points it at the Doctor and rants something about a light "burning bright in the heart of the interior" which sounds like it may become relevant later. He sees the reflection of Redvers in the window and doesn't recognise it is himself. This is easily done, I've seen plenty of my friends do the same thing (although I've never done it myself of course).

The servants come in and capture Redvers and take him away as he shouts

"No, not the interior! Please, I don't want to go back to the interior!"

The Doctor and Ace meet Nimrod the butler, Gwendoline and Reverend Matthews, the latter of whom mistaiks the Doctor for the owner of the house, Josiah Smith. The Doctor trolls the Reverend for a while by not correcting him, until the real Josiah Smith comes in. As he does so the room gets darker and more atmospheric, clueing us in on the fact that Josiah is the baddy.

There is thunder and lightning and Redvers gets scared of it. I'm beginning to think he is really a cat.

His box glows and he screams, and everybody goes to investigate. Josiah gets blinded by the light. Nimrod takes over and assures the Doctor that Redvers "is being made comfortable." The Doctor and Ace recognise that Nimrod is "a Neanderthal," although why this is significant is not made clear - like most things in the story so far.

Nimrod goes to the prison room from the opening scene and gets knocked out by the prisoner who seems to be escaping, although we see things from the prisoner's point of view so we don't know what they look like yet.
Best guess so far:

Josiah and Reverend Matthews are about to have a debate when the telephone rings. It is the prisoner calling to tell Josiah

"I escaped."

Ace discovers the house is Gabriel Chase, which is the same haunted house she was in in the future. She tries to get angry at the Doctor for bringing her here, but it is difficult to hear her over the music. Fortunately it goes away in time for the next scene, which was once nominated in Doctor Who Magazine #250 as one of the greatest moments in the series.

I don't know if I agree that it is one of the greatest scenes evar, since it does not feature Paul Darrow, but it is a good scene, featuring character development for Ace and, arguably, the Doctor, as we learn about things he doesn't like.

"I can't stand burnt toast. I loathe bus stations - terrible places, full of lost luggage and lost souls."

He's obviously been to Perth Bus Station then.

Josiah has Mrs Pritchard (who you can tell is his chief henchmanny because she is dressed differently from the other servants and has her own name) chloroform Reverend Matthews so that we have one less character to keep track of - how nice of them to help out a poor confused cat.

Gwendoline sings a song to pad out the episode for a few moments, before we get more of Ace's backstory.

"When I lived in Perivale, me and my best mate, we dossed around together. We'd out-dare each other on things, skiving off, stupid things. Then they burnt out Manisha's flat. White kids firebombed it. I didn't care anymore."
"I think you cared a lot, Ace."
"That's when I came over the walls of the house. This house. I was so mad, and I needed to get away. It was empty, all overgrown and falling down. No one came here. But when I got inside it was even worse. I didn't know then. It was horrible!"

Josiah interrupts before Ace tells the Doctor any more. The Doctor knows Josiah is an alien, but he denies it and says

"I'm as human as you are."

To which the Doctor just replies

"Yes."

Ace runs to the lift and goes down to the basement. Mrs Pritchard sees her and traps her there. Ace finds the prison room and sees Nimrod having sleeps on the floor.
"There's a new scent in the dark - listen" says the prisoner, mixing up three senses in one sentence, along with some stuff it is hard to make out because of the prisoner's husky voice and the incidental music doing the scene's comprehensibility no favours.

Two husks come out from behind a curtain and mistaik Ace for M Khan. It's not much of a cliffhanger, but it'll have to do.

Part one of Ghost Light is an atmospheric episode, but the plot is impenetrable for now - it seems more like a Sapphire & Steel story than Doctor Who. I think I will get my friends Starcat and Scary Cat to help me out with the remaining parts, they both love things like this.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Blakes 7: Animals

There are three episodes of Blakes 7 that I haven't looked at yet on this blog, and the only one of those that has Servalan in it is...

Oh dear.

Animals starts with Scorpio! in space already. Dayna is defending some manny called Justin against Tarrant's accusation that Justin is a mad scientist, because Tarrant has noticed a pattern emerging when it comes to the scientists they meet living isolated existences on planets far from Federation space in order to conduct their experiments.

Dayna defends Justin because she knows him from before she joined the series, and there's also a pattern there regarding old friends that means this Justin's chances of surviving to the end of the episode are, to put it mildly, not good.

Dayna teleports down to the planet where she meets Og and his friends, who are the "animals" of the title even though there is another reading that the real "animals" are, of course, Mannys. Dayna runs away, shooting a couple of Og's friends with her pewpewpew gun until she sees Justin. Who is the real "animal" here? Do you see?

Federation pursuit ships attack Scorpio! and Tarrant has to fly away from their special effects.

Inside Justin's base he gets a bit creepy with Dayna while giving her - and us - the exposition about who he is and what mad science he does. He is a genetic engineer and surgeon who has made the animals, and not out of socks like would be perfectly normal. He doesn't say why for now, so as to save some exposition for later.

Dayna is stuck on the planet because Tarrant has gone back to Xenon Base to get Scorpio! repaired. Meanwhile Servalan has found out about the Federation ships that attacked Scorpio! earlier and is interested in the mysterious ship and the planet it was near, so she gets her henchmanny-of-the-week to give her the exposition about Justin's planet "Bucol 2" which is top secret, so of course that only makes her even more interested.

"Set a course for Bucol 2."

Darth Vader needed the Force to know the rebels were on Hoth, but Servalan just knows that if it is mentioned to her on-screen, it must mean Avon and his friends are involved.

Tarrant is proved right, Justin is definitely a mad scientist, and even Dayna says his work is "insane" when she finds out he was working for the Federation trying to make "radiation proof commandos."

Avon finally appears in the episode on board Scorpio!, trying to repair it with Orac, Vila and Soolin. There is some comedy business where Vila has to go into a dirty and smelly part of Scorpio! to do some repairs when he doesn't want to. The fact that a normally reliable Vila-being-silly scene isn't funny bodes ill for the rest of this episode.

Justin tries to justify (justinfy?) all the bad experiments he has done. It seems he and Dayna are coming around to each other's point of view, or it may be that Dayna is playing along with her mad friend until Scorpio! comes back and she can teleport away? He is very creepy.

Servalan meets with Ardus, who is played by Kevin Stoney. Kevin Stoney had already been in Blakes 7 back in Hostage, where he played a different character but also one who only met Servalan out of all the regular characters. Ardus gives Servalan more exposition about Bucol 2.

Because this is season four, Servalan is of course pretending to be Commissioner Sleer, and Ardus recognises her and has to pretend not to. But Servalan knows that he knows who she is and has him blowed up, although she would probably have done that anyway.

Servalan's spaceship lands on Bucol 2. Dayna goes outside to give Og noms and he throws her stunt double off a cliff, at the bottom of which Servalan's Federation troopers just happen to be passing. Back at Xenon Base, Avon and the others are finally ready to go and rescue Dayna, having not done very much so far this episode.

Justin finds Dayna's dropped pewpewpew gun and shouts

"DAYNA!"

so loudly that William Shatner took notes. Justin thinks Dayna is ded so he goes back to his base where he gets drunk and starts wrecking the place.

Dayna has been captured by Servalan and is made to tell her all the things we - and she - already know. But this scene isn't a complete waste of time, as it cleverly establishes that Servalan has a lie-detecting machine which goes "bong" every time Dayna tells a lie. This means that when Servalan asks Dayna if she loves Justin (a fairly out of the blue question but it does help us move on with the plot so I'll let it pass) and Dayna says "of course not" it goes "bong."

The idea that Dayna is in love with creepy Justin is pretty difficult to swallow, especially when you consider that Dayna knows Avon. Servalan says

"I have to have him, Dayna, you do see that?"

It sounds like everybody loves Justin now. He's no Jarvik, and writer Allan Prior is no Ben Steed... for which small mercy we must be thankful.

Servalan has another convenient machine that hypno-eyeses Dayna into hating Justin so that she will betray him. Most of the hypno-eyesing is done off screen, perhaps the BBC were worried that if viewers saw it then we would be hypno-eyesed into hating him too? They need not have worried, the episode has been successful enough at that already.

Dayna goes back to Justin's base and he lets her in. Dayna then lets in Servalan because for some reason her hating Justin also makes her want to team up with Servalan, even though she killed Dayna's father.

Servalan always knew how to make an entrance.

Servalan captures Justin and sends her troopers to go and capture Og after learning that Og is the cleverest and most important of the animals.

Avon, Tarrant and Soolin finally teleport onto the planet. They dramatically burst into Justin's base and then Avon dramatically kicks a chair out of the way and then he dramatically slips on the floor.

LOL.

This is actually the best bit of Animals, because the episode is so bad that you take what entertainment you can get from it. Avon looks a bit annoyed when he finds out that the front door has been left wide open when Servalan took her prisoners away, which means he slipped on the floor for nothing. This scene is all of Blakes 7 in microcosm.

Justin persuades Servalan to de-hypno-eyes Dayna in exchange for his cooperation (de-hypno-eyesing seems to consist of Servalan saying "you love him, Dayna, you love him" repeatedly. The BBC not worried about this working on the viewers, then), and while they are doing this he hears Avon trying to contact Dayna over her bracelet... which she has conveniently taken off for this scene to allow Justin to do. It was also convenient for the plot that Avon didn't think to try contacting Dayna until now. Mew.

Avon, Tarrant and Soolin have a shootout with the Federation troopers. Dayna runs away and Servalan tries to shoot her but shoots Justin instead. Wait, isn't this almost exactly how Jarvik got killed back in Harvest of Kairos? What are the chances of that happening?

Dayna escapes and tries to rescue Og but he gets shot by a trooper. Servalan's ship flies away and Dayna sees Justin's body on the ground. Avon says to his bracelet "Vila, stand by to bring us up" while Dayna has a sad, and so brings the episode to an end. Not a moment too soon.

Animals is a terrible episode of Blakes 7. When the best bits consist of something that should have been an out-take, and a one-scene cameo from a decent character actor, you know you do not have a winner on your paws.

Animals' weaknesses are many, from the misfiring "comedy" scenes to the multiple glaring plot contrivances, but the episode's biggest crime is sidelining our heroes Avon, Vila and even Tarrant in favour of Justin, a character who has all of the negative qualities of Jarvik but none of the positives. Yes, Animals is so bad it leaves me pining for the glory days of Jarvik and his manly manliness.

Fake News

It was in the news that Jacqueline Pearce has died, but can we believe anything they say when it says she was "Doctor Who star Jacqueline Pearce"? Everybody knows she is much more famous for being Servalan in Blakes 7 than for being Chessene in The Two Doctors. This sort of thing is why trust in journalism is at an all-time low. (Well, that and the fact that politicians tell a lot of lies.)

Besides which, she was last seen heading for the teleport room, so can we be sure she is really dead?

Rest in peace, Jacqueline Pearce. Maximum power!

I think it may be time for me to review some more Blakes 7...

Smile

Those of you who remember when I looked at Star Wars will know that I like watching cheesy old TV adverts from the 1980s.

I also like Blakes 7 of course.

So cheesy old TV adverts from the 1980s that feature the actors from Blakes 7 are even better!



Why is Paul Darrow calling Scotland? I'm a Scottish cat, is he trying to telephone me?

*Explodes*

He looks happy about it, but I hope that's not him doing an Avon smile upon seeing the 'phone bill...

Theatre of Blood

This 1973 film screams "Seventies!" at you, from the very filmstock and music of the opening titles through to the scene where Vincent Price is disguised in a ginger afro and medallion.

Price plays Edward Lionheart, the hammiest actor this side of a prime Paul Darrow, killing off his critics in a variety of Shakespearean themed vignettes. Diana "Avengers" Rigg plays his daughter/accomplice while Ian "Avengers" Hendry is his nemesis - the manny who gave a "best actor" award to someone other than Lionheart, can you believe it?

This is Vincent Price's film, and there's not a scene he's in where he doesn't let you know it.