You Are This: Wrong

A Christmas Carol (2000)

Ross Kemp plays "Eddie Scrooge" in this ITV TV movie adaptation of A Christmas Carol from 2000. While the film Scrooged (1988) is obviously the definitive present-day-set (present day at the time of making, that is) version, this attempted to set itself apart from the many, many other adaptations by being set on a London housing estate, with Scrooge and Marley as loan sharks.

An additional twist on the traditional story is that, after each visit from one of the ghosts, Scrooge relives Christmas Eve over again until he mends his ways - a subplot blatantly stolen from the film Groundhog Day - did the writer just watch a bunch of Bill Murray films as his inspiration for this?

There's a level of cheesiness and sentimentality inherent to A Christmas Carol that is hard to escape from. Once you accept and get past that, this was better than it had any right to be for what must have been fairly cheap to make, and little more than a vehicle for Ross Kemp as the 'star.' The Groundhog Day stuff actually made for an interesting twist on the usual story - Scrooge gets genre-savvy pretty quickly once it starts happening to him, although that was probably forced upon the makers due to the restricted run-time.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Dave the Daleks

Dave the Daleks is the first story of season nine of Doctor Who, it stars Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Katy Manning as Jo Grant, Richard Franklin as Captain Mike Yates, and John Levene as Sergeant Benton.

The show is stolen from under the noses of the regular cast by the principal guest-star for the story - not Roger Delgado (for a change) but Aubrey Woods, who had recently played the shopkeeper in the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and who would later camp it up even further as Krantor in Blakes 7's Gambit.

Dave the Daleks was first broadcast in 1972. More importantly than that, it was released on VHS video in 1986, making it the first Jon Pertwee era Doctor Who story seen by many fans too young to remember the '70s (or the Five Faces of Doctor Who repeats of the early '80s). It is therefore fortunate that it makes for a good point of introduction to the UNIT era, perhaps because it was the opener for a new season, and this in spite of the occasional reference to earlier stories.

Although originally broadcast as four episodes, on the VHS it was edited into a single, feature-length story, as was common practice in those days. While many stories were harmed by the removal of their internal cliffhangers and reprises (which could make the pacing around those moments feel a bit off), in Dave the Daleks the editing was virtually seamless, and tests confirm that eight out of ten cats are unable to even tell where the cliffhanger points should have been.

It starts in the most unpromising manner - with a scene of a manny doing some W-word. Although brief, this makes us cats extremely uncomfortable. The manny is Sir Reginald Styles, and luckily for us he quickly decides to get up and be attacked by a manny with a pewpewpew gun - much more enjoyable for us, but he doesn't seem to like it for some reason. The manny then disappears with a special effect, as though he had been teleported away. Sir Reginald describes what he thinks happened to his secretary Miss Paget:

"He vanished... disappeared into thin air... like a ghost!"

The Brigadier gets telephoned by the Minister (no, it's not really the Master with another cunning alias, although I expect Barry Letts had to be talked out of making it be so) in a little scene that lets us know that UNIT have already found out what happened from Miss Paget, then the Brigadier goes to put his "best man" onto it - by which he means the Doctor. I know the Doctor and Brigadier are friends, but I didn't know that went as far as the Doctor being the best man at the Brigadier's wedding!

The Doctor is trying to fix the TARDIS console. Jo thinks it was fixed, and makes a continuity reference to the trip they made in it back in Colony in Space.

The Doctor proves it is not fixed when he accidentally makes another Doctor and Jo appear. As will one day become a staple of multi-Doctor stories (and one of the most enjoyable things about them, truth be told), the Doctor doesn't get on with himself and says

"This won't do at all. We can't have two of us running about."

After the second versions of themselves vanish again, the Doctor says

"Well, it's a very complicated thing: time. Once you begin tampering with it, the oddest things start happening."

This is the direct equivalent of the Doctor and Jo's first scene in The Dæmons that set up the science vs magic aspect of that story - here it is establishing early the fundamental theme of the time travel plot we are about to see.

The Brigadier then comes in and gets that plot started, by telling them about the events with Sir Reginald at Auderly House. The Brigadier recapping things that we already know for the Doctor and Jo's benefit is cut short, as we go to a scene of another "ghost" manny, dressed similarly to the first, teleporting into a location shoot accompanied by some really dramatic incidental music. He hears a high-pitched whistling sound effect that scares him - do you think Auderly House has one of those nasty devices that are supposed to keep cats out of the garden?

The manny tries to run away but is ambushed by an Ogron who was hiding just out of camera shot.

The Doctor, the Brigadier and Jo arrive at Auderly House and talk to Miss Paget and Sir Reginald. Sir Reginald claims he was just having sleeps (he'll get himself a reputation as 'Sir Reginald Naptaker' if he's not careful), but the Doctor finds a clue that proves a manny was there.

UNIT soldiers find the manny that was knocked out by the Ogron, and the Brigadier and the Doctor examine his pewpewpew gun. Mike Yates is there, as is Sergeant Benton, who has found a mysterious device which he gives to the Doctor.

Somewhere in the future, the Ogrons report to their boss, the Controller.

The casual way the Ogron says "no complications" has been much-mocked by Doctor Who fans over the years, but I think there is a hidden layer of meaning behind it - we learn later that the resistance has penetrated agents into the security forces, and I think this Ogron is one of those agents. He doesn't want to say "no complications" in a slow, laborious voice in case he later gets accused of racism or xenophobia against Ogrons, which might lead to him getting 'cancelled' by his own side.

Back in the UNIT era, a little later than before, the Doctor has the pewpewpew gun in his laboratory, and he demonstrates to the Brigadier and Jo (and us) how it makes the things it pewpewpews disappear. He has also recognised the device Benton found as a time machine, from it having a "miniature dematerialisation circuit" in it. He turns it on, and it makes the special effect start - except this causes the unconscious manny to get teleported away, even though he was in a different scene at the time.

The Controller's henchmannys detect the time machine being used from the future, and then the Controller has to make his "REPORT" to...

...a Dalek! They make their first appearance earlier here than in many of their stories, because when he was writing them Terry Nation liked to save the Daleks for a surprise entrance at the end of part one. However, here the writer is Louis Marks, and he has clearly realised that if your story has of the Daleks in its title, the revealing of some Daleks, however sudden, isn't by itself enough to justify a cliffhanger moment.

Here the big revelation is that the Controller may be the boss of the Ogrons, but the Daleks are his boss. Like his character in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Aubrey Woods is here playing a henchmanny to the title character(s).

The Dalek appears only for a second, then the episode immediately cuts back to the Doctor and the time machine, which is now borked. The Brigadier gets telephoned by Benton, who tells him the manny "faded away... like a ghost." The Doctor guesses that these ghostly mannys will "probably try again" at Auderly House, and asks Jo

"How would you like to spend the night in a haunted house?"

The next scene finds them both there, where the Doctor is more concerned with stealing all of Sir Reginald's noms than looking for ghosts. Yates, Benton and the UNIT soldiers are outside guarding the house.

The following scenes, where first Benton and then Yates try to get some noms from Jo, are filler scenes but are excellent at giving a little bit of character building to all three of them (even Mike Yates, who I am not normally a fan of, is fine for his small part in this story), and also the Doctor when he hears what has happened and says

"Do you know, I remember saying to old Napoleon, 'Boney,' I said, 'always remember an army marches on its stomach.'"

The house itself also has a character, or the bits we see of it do anyway - the main room with the french windows that can seemingly open by themselves even when there aren't any ghostly assassins from the future there, the hallway with its ticking clock and eccentric background decoration, and the cellar (which we will meet anon). In terms of creating atmosphere it's maybe not quite up there with the set design from something like Sapphire and Steel's first assignment, but it's pretty close, and does help build the anticipation that something dramatic is going to happen, even if not actually a ghost story in the traditional sense.

This time it is three mannys that teleport to the exterior location: Anat, Shura and Boaz (the latter played by Scott "Carnell from Weapon" Fredericks), who all have proper futuristic-sounding space-names. The Doctor has spent the night fixing the mini time machine, but no sooner has he turned it on then Shura comes in and (after getting Venusian Karated a couple of times) demands he "turn that machine off, or they'll kill all of us!"

In the future, the Controller once again reports that they have detected a time machine being used, and asks the Daleks what they want him to do about it - he gets the inevitable response (although it is nice of the Daleks to show us their logical progression from premise to conclusion):

"WHOEVER IS OPERATING THE TIME MACHINE IS AN ENEMY OF THE DALEKS. ALL ENEMIES OF THE DALEKS MUST BE DESTROYED. EXTERMINATE THEM!"

Anat and Boaz capture Jo and force the Doctor to turn off the time machine. Anat is about to shoot the Doctor, telling him "the time has come for your execution," but she thinks he is Sir Reginald. The Doctor shows them a newspaper with a story about the real Sir Reginald to convince them that he isn't him - what sort of terrible future do they come from where they will believe something they read in a newspaper?

Boaz wants to kill the Doctor anyway, but Anat says "we are soldiers, not murderers" which is a big clue to the Doctor that they are not baddys really. They start to talk, but before the Doctor can get them to trust him, Yates and Benton enter the house and frighten the mannys into hiding in the cellar with the Doctor and Jo still prisoners.

When Yates and Benton don't see the Doctor and Jo in the house where they expected them to be, they become suspicious.

The mannys leave the Doctor and Jo in the cellar, from whence they try to escape while discussing their predicament with each other, so that we learn the Doctor is more sympathetic towards their captors than Jo, who describes them as "criminals" and "a bunch of thugs" because of how they have acted so far.

In the future, the Daleks tell the controller about their "new equipment" the "Time Vortex Magnetron," which will bring anyone using the mini time machine to their base - but only the one the Doctor had, not any other machines like it. The Controller tries to point out how big a limitation this is, which annoys the Gold Dalek so it says

"DO NOT DISPUTE WITH THE DALEKS! THE FUNCTION OF THE HUMAN IS TO OBEY!"

I wonder if he also argued with Willy Wonka when told about the Golden Ticket plan - 'What if Charlie Bucket doesn't find the planted coin at the right time?' 'What is he finds it but doesn't want to spend it on chocolate?' 'What if somebody else wants to buy the exact chocolate bar with the ticket in it?' 'What if Charlie gets the ticket but avoids the Fake Slugworth on his way home?'

There are so many potential points of failure in Wonka's plan that it would be tempting to think that there was no conspiracy to push the final ticket on to Charlie after all, except for the crucial fact that we know Wonka tracked the location of the tickets and knew in advance the intended recipients - at least this is certainly true in the case of Veruca Salt's ticket, since Fake Slugworth was already on the scene before the ticket was even unwrapped, and must have been true in Charlie's case as well in order for Fake Slugworth to intercept him between finding the ticket and making his way home.

The Time Vortex Magnetron also interferes with Anat's attempt to communicate with her own base (this is is not explicitly stated, but is so strongly implied that it may as well be - but cleverly bypasses the need for some additional exposition to do so), so she sends Shura to lave the house and go back to the tunnel where they arrived to try communicating from there. This leads to some nicely atmospheric scenes of Shura stealthing past the UNIT soldiers, but when he gets to the tunnel he is attacked by an Ogron. He pewpewpews it, but is injured in the fight.

Yates tells the Brigadier of his and Benton's suspicions, so the Brigadier tries to find the Doctor by telephoning him at Auderly House.

We cut back to the Doctor and Jo, still prisoners in the cellar, where the Doctor says

"Jo, every choice we make changes the history of the world."

At face value, this would appear to contradict the Doctor's famous assertion in The Aztecs that "you can't rewrite history, not one line" but the two positions are reconcilable if you take can't to mean mustn't. Jo asks the Doctor why the mannys need to remain here and wait for Sir Reginald to come back so they can kill him, or as she puts it:

"I mean, why don't they go back to September the 12th if that's where they want to be? You know, have another go?"

"Ah, that's the Blinovitch Limitation Effect."

is his explanation that isn't really an explanation at all, since there is no elaboration on what the "Blinovitch Limitation Effect" actually is, and indeed it is not mentioned again in this story. The Doctor is prevented from telling Jo (and us) any more secrets of time travel because Boaz comes in - he needs the Doctor to answer the Brigadier's 'phone call.

Anat and Boaz want the Doctor to tell the Brigadier that everything is fine, but he does so in a clever way that lets the Brigadier know that the opposite is true:

"Yes, well, you tell Captain Yates not to worry. Everything's fine. And tell old Styles too... and the Prime Minister."

"Right."

"Oh, and Brigadier?"

"Yes?"

"Don't forget to tell it to the Marines. Goodbye."

Even if you don't know the meaning of the phrase "Tell it to the Marines" (slang that was evidently still in use by the UNIT era), the way the Doctor says it is enough to let the viewers know what he is doing, so when the Brigadier hangs up Yates says

"There you are, sir. I said there was something wrong."

While Anat and Boaz are distracted by making plans for what they will do when Sir Reginald returns to the house, Jo tries to escape by threatening to smash the mini time machine unless they let her and the Doctor go. But while she is holding it, she accidentally switches it on and disappears into the time vortex.

The Time Vortex Magnetron brings Jo to the Controller's room, where he speaks to her and pretends to be friendly - he sends the Ogrons away and the Daleks remain concealed from her - Jo is easy for him to convince because she was already so distrustful of his enemies, the "guerillas" (as Jo calls them - and if you don't see the word written down you might think she was calling them 'gorillas,' which would be very confusing). He gets her to tell him where and when she is from so that he knows the right place and time to send more Ogrons to - our chance of pinning down the UNIT era precisely is spoiled when she tells him the year off-screen.

The Controller promises to try to rescue the Doctor, then as soon as Jo is taken away we see that the Daleks have been watching the whole conversation, and the Gold Dalek (the one that is evidently in charge) says that it will go itself to exterminate the enemies of the Daleks.

Soon a load of Ogrons attack Auderly House (the Gold Dalek is nowhere to be seen here - typical politician, mew!) and have a pewpewpew gunfight with Anat and Boaz. They run away and leave the Doctor, who takes one of their guns and pewpewpews an Ogron before it can pewpewpew him (quite a bit before, by the look of it), and then the Brigadier arrives and shoots a second Ogron just before it can pewpewpew the Doctor. The Brigadier must be overjoyed that he has finally found an alien that isn't immune to bullets, but it's worth noting that he literally shoots first and asks questions afterwards:

"Doctor what on Earth's going on?"

The Doctor thanks him and then immediately steals his jeep to drive after Anat and Boaz. In response to his jeep being taken, the Brigadier simply says

"Doctor, come back at once!"

It's practically his catchphrase now, isn't it?

Anat and Boaz run into the tunnel, followed not long after by the Doctor and the distinctive 'running about on location' incidental music that is unique to this story. The Doctor follows them into the tunnel, where a Dalek appears!

The Doctor, unsurprisingly, runs away. He catches up with Anat and Boaz just as a Dalek says

"exterminate"

to them in the most underwhelming way a Dalek has ever said their catchphrase. It's as if it already knows they're going to get away, which they do by using their mini time machine.

When they reappear after the teleporting/time-travel SFX, Anat says

"This may come as a shock to you, but you've just travelled two hundred years through time."
"Thank you, but I'm probably more familiar with the concept of time travel than you are."

Lol. Ogrons chase them and they split up. The Doctor finds a convenient ladder that takes him out onto location in the 22nd century. The eerie incidental music the Doctor finds there does a lot of the heavy lifting in convincing us that this is the ruins of mannys' civilisation that the Doctor finds himself in.

Now back at their base, the Controller talks to the Daleks:

"There was one curious thing, the girl referred to a companion in her own time zone. She called him the Doctor."

"DOCTOR? DID YOU SAY 'DOCTOR'?"

"He appears to have got through to our time. He was seen by the guards."

"THE DOCTOR IS AN ENEMY OF THE DALEKS, HE MUST BE FOUND AT ONCE AND EXTERMINATED!"

Maybe this explains why the Daleks are so keen to conquer the Earth, where there are many theologians, scientists, and medical professionals going by the title of 'doctor.'

The Daleks then tell the Controller that they want mannys to do even more W-word. The Controller again tries to argue with them, saying "they'll die." The Dalek responds:

"ONLY THE WEAK WILL DIE. INEFFICIENT [W-WORD]ERS SLOW DOWN PRODUCTION. OBEY THE DALEKS!"

Note to government leaders in 2020: if your response to the coronavirus pandemic resembles Dalek economic policy - you are the baddys.

Anat and Boaz meet with another guerilla, Monia. It becomes clear that he is their leader when he orders the two of them to stop arguing.

The Doctor is spotted by a security camera - something that seems obvious now, but to an audience in 1972 it would have seemed a very futuristic sci-fi thing to happen. He sees some of the mannys being forced to W-word, clearly demonstrating the terrible nature of this future world, before he gets captured by an Ogron.

The Controller tells Jo that the Doctor is "alive and well" and then there is a hard cut to show the Doctor being roughly treated by Ogrons. A manny interrogates him, in a scene that is very reminiscent of the bit in Inferno where the Doctor is questioned by the Brigade Leader - exactly like there, the interrogator has already made up their mind about who the Doctor is, and he cannot convince them of who he really is because they will not believe the truth. Jon Pertwee is excellent here, and underplays both fear and anger at his interrogator's behaviour.

The Controller comes in and starts being nice to the Doctor, who doesn't know how to respond to this until he is told that Jo is also there and "safe." He realises he will have to go along with what the Controller wants, for now.

The Doctor is taken away, and the Controller then tells a henchmanny about the Daleks' demand for more W-word, quietly threatening him with what will happen (the precise nature of which is not spelled out to us, which helps make the threat sound even more sinister) if he doesn't. After the Controller has gone, the henchmanny is revealed to us to be a spy on the side of the guerillas. He telephones Monia and starts to tell him about the Doctor, but he is then caught by an Ogron.

The Hospitality of the Daleks

The Doctor is having noms with Jo and the Controller, but he quickly confronts the Controller with the truth he has found out, as a way of letting Jo know that all is not as it seems here:

"Do you run all your factories like that, Controller?"

"That was not a factory, Doctor."

"Oh, then what was it?"

"A rehabilitation centre. A rehabilitation centre for hardened criminals."

"Including old men and women, even children?"

"There will always be people who need discipline, Doctor."

"Now that's an old fashioned point of view, even from my standards."

"I can assure you that this planet has never been more efficiently, more economically run. People have never been happier, or more prosperous."

"Then why do you need so many people to keep them under control? Don't they like being happy and prosperous?"

I like it that the Doctor does not mention the Daleks here at all, he is keeping his knowledge of them to himself for now. In fact when he goes on to ask the Controller

"Who really rules this planet of yours?"

he already knows the answer, he is just trying to pressure the Controller into admitting it - to Jo, or maybe to himself?

Is it a coincidence that the last Golden Ticket was found, out of everywhere in the world, in the very city where Willy Wonka's chocolate factory was located? But if Wonka was going to plant the tickets in specific places, you would think that would be the last place he would choose - he was so prejudiced against the local mannys who stole his "secret recipes" that he locked them all out and got in the Oompa Loompas to W-Word for him instead. So he must have had a very specific reason for wanting a local manny to find a Golden Ticket.

Only after the Controller has stormed out of the room does the Doctor tell Jo what he knows. We then see that the Daleks are watching the Doctor on their TV set (how very meta). This is the first time since The Dalek Invasion of Earth that the Daleks have not recognised the Doctor, but they do know by now that he is able to change his actor, so they plan to use the "Mind Analysis Machine" (no, not the Mind Analysis Machine) on him to find out if this is the Doctor really.

The Doctor and Jo try to escape. After the Ogron guard proves immune to some Venusian Karate, Jo hits him on the head with the wine bottle to knock him out. The Doctor quips

"Pity, that was rather a good vintage."

like he is James Bond, but he is then immediately undermined by Jo reacting to him with a confused

"...What?"

They run out and get on a motortrike that happens to be nearby, leading into a chase sequence that is notorious for the trike being so slow over the rough terrain that the Ogrons have to deliberately run in slow motion in order that they don't catch up with it too easily. But they do catch up with it, and the Doctor and Jo are captured again.

The Doctor is then put on a table and strapped into the Mind Analysis Machine, which makes him show black & white publicity photos from his days being played by Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell, superimposed over the show's present title sequence - which is just as much a giveaway. The Daleks are happy, by the sound of their voices, and chant that they are going to exterminate him now that they know he really is the Doctor... although I have to assume they were probably going to do that anyway.

The Controller ends up rescuing the Doctor, by telling the Daleks he can use the Doctor to capture the guerillas. It's possible that this actually is his plan, and he is not saving him for the Doctor's own good, but maybe given the direction of the Controller's character arc through the story he is already rebelling against the Daleks.

But the Doctor doesn't think so, saying to the Controller that he only saved him "for your own purposes." Then when the Controller insists that he is "a senior government official" the Doctor becomes righteously indignant, shouting back

"You, sir, are a traitor! You're a quisling!"

Internets discourse has devalued these terms to mean anyone who slightly disagrees with the speaker's position, but when spoken by Jon Pertwee, firing on all cylinders now that he's had his chase scene, you can feel their power.

Aubrey Woods is also great here, easily the best guest actor of this story, as he responds, defending himself by telling the Doctor and Jo the exposition about the Dalek invasion:

"You do not understand. Nobody who did not live through those terrible years can understand. Towards the end of the 20th century, a series of wars broke out. There was a hundred years of nothing but killing, destruction. Seven eighths of the world's population was wiped out. The rest were living in holes in the ground, starving, reduced to the level of animals."

"So the Daleks saw their opportunity and took over?"

"There was no power on Earth to stop them."

With further exposition about mannys being "sent down the mines, the rest [W-Word] in factories" because the Dalek "empire is expanding," it becomes clear that this story is an allegory for Capitalism, with the Daleks as the capitalist class exploiting the mannys who are the W-wording class. The Controller stands between them, on the side of the Daleks even though, as the Doctor rightly points out to him, he would have "helped more by organising the fight against them."

When Charlie buys the chocolate bar that contains the last Golden Ticket, it is the shopkeeper who selects the bar in question from the display behind him (where it is one of the ones placed prominently, not an anonymous bar from a pile) and even suggests it to Charlie: "Why not try a regular Wonka Bar this time?"

He only does this after Charlie mentions that he is buying this second chocolate bar "for my Grandpa Joe."

Could it be that the shopkeeper was under orders from Wonka to ensure that the ticket went to Joe specifically? Given that the Golden Tickets are essentially the gateway to an elaborate moral test, with punishments for the undeserving children and guardian, has Wonka singled out Joe for this treatment? Does Wonka have a motivation for revenge against Joe? Could Joe, in fact, be one of the very spies he himself told Charlie about, that stole Wonka's secrets? This seems unlikely, since Joe has been "bedridden for the past 20 years," so we must look for another explanation.

Even as the Controller says the guerilla resistance to the Daleks cannot do anything to make a difference, the scene cuts to the guerillas enacting their plan to rescue the Doctor - a clever contrast. The fight scene is fast-paced and exciting, helped by the dramatic music, but somewhat clumsily directed, with mannys and Ogrons needing to stand still in the right place for the SFX to get them. It's not quite Remembrance of the Daleks* levels of two-sides-standing-out-in-the-open-shooting-past-each-other tactics, but it comes close at times.

* Ben A A Ronovitch, writer of Remembrance of the Daleks, has the nerve to criticise the director of this story for his action set pieces on the DVD making-of documentary, Blasting the Past.

Monia, Anat and a couple of extra guerillas run in and rescue the Doctor and Jo. The Controller shouts for his "Guards!" which may be one of the purest examples of the trope Terry Pratchett was mocking with the title of his novel Guards! Guards! to be found in all of Doctor Who. Even better is Monia's retort

"Guards? You have no guards, they're all dead!"

The Doctor stops Monia from killing the Controller. When Monia says

"He's helped the Daleks. He's [W-Word]ed for them."

the Doctor replies, sadly but truthfully

"They would always have found someone."

Not cats though, lol. They all leave the Controller standing alone in the room, with conflicting emotions visible in his face.

With the grandparents all bedridden for 20 years, how did Joe know that Wonka "shouted 'I shall be ruined! Close the factory!'" unless an eyewitness to the event told him? Charlie is not old enough to be that witness, which only leaves his mother. And why would she be present at the moment Wonka discovered there was a spy present in his factory? There can be only one conclusion - Charlie's mother was that spy, and the last Golden Ticket was given to her family as Willy Wonka's long-planned revenge. It was not Joe that was the intended recipient of it, it was Charlie, her son, who the shopkeeper could identify because he was the grandson of "Grandpa Joe."

At their secret base, Monia and Anat tell the Doctor and Jo what they know about Sir Reginald from their history - he blew up all the mannys in Auderly House, and himself by mistaik, and this started off the wars that eventually allowed the Daleks to invade successfully. Monia then tells them why they risked so much to rescue the Doctor - they want him to go back to the 20th century and change history by killing Sir Reginald:

"You can succeed where we've failed, Doctor."

In the previous two stories the Doctor has been tempted with offers of ultimate power from the Master and then Azal, but surely this is something that is more likely to succeed in tempting the Doctor - to prevent terrible wars from ever happening and defeat the Daleks at the same time. But, as will later be the case in Genesis of the Daleks, the price asked is too much for the Doctor - killing one manny, Sir Reginald, is here the same as the Doctor killing the defenceless little Dalek mutants in the later story.

In the 20th century, Shura, who we haven't seen anything of in a while, is still injured, but he runs around on location (accompanied by the runs-around-on-location music) until he finds a secret passage (or possibly a back door, mew) into Auderly House without being seen by UNIT.

In the future, the Doctor has made his decision. Here the dilemma diverges from the one in Genesis of the Daleks - both Jo and the Doctor doubt that killing Sir Reginald is the right thing to do, not just because of the morality of it but because they doubt he is actually a mad bomber like Monia and Anat claim. When the Doctor learns that the guerillas took "Dalekenium" explosives to the past with them, and that Shura is still there and still trying to kill Sir Reginald, he realises the truth:

"You're trapped in a temporal paradox! Styles didn't cause that explosion and start the wars: you did it yourselves!"

They go back to the tunnel so that the Doctor and Jo can travel back to the past, while we learn from a short scene that the Controller has set up an ambush for them there. The Controller has Ogrons with him, but he sends them away when the Doctor tells him that he can change history:

"You spoke of the war, of its years of suffering and starvation. Well, I can prevent all that happening, you know."

The Controller says

"You saved my life. You could have let them kill me. Go, quickly."

While he spells out here that this was a turning point for him, it is left ambiguous just how rebellious the Controller was before that happened. He lets the Doctor and Jo go back in time and then he goes back to the Daleks where he makes one final attempt to bluff his way out of being exterminated - a futile one, and he even knows it is futile as he tries it. The Gold Dalek says

"YOU MUST BE EXTERMINATED!"

and only then does he defy them to their eyestalks with a wonderful last line

"Who knows? I may have helped to exterminate you!"

The Daleks decide to go back in time themselves to stop the Doctor from changing their history.

We get the next lot of exposition from a meta-scene as Alex MacIntosh reports to camera from Auderly House, a superimposed caption introducing him as though we are watching a UNIT era news programme instead of Doctor Who. A pity they didn't get Alastair Fergus back from The Dæmons for some continuity - or maybe not, he was a different kind of TV presenter, after all. As part of Alex's report we see Sir Reginald arrive back at the house, along with delegates for his conference, and also the Brigadier.

Our regular programme resumes as the Doctor and Jo run into the house and try to get the Brigadier to evacuate everybody. We see why - the Ogrons and Daleks start to arrive down at the tunnel, with cuts and editing used to give the appearance that there are more than just the three Daleks on their way (notoriously there are more Daleks on the VHS cover for this story than ever appear on screen at one time). The Daleks exterminate a couple of UNIT soldiers to show they mean business - after all, we're nearly at the end of the story now and the Controller is the only manny they've managed to exterminate up to now.

Sir Reginald doesn't want to leave the house, but when the Brigadier hears from Benton that UNIT are being attacked he takes charge. This is the ultimate irony of the story - if the Daleks had not travelled back in time in order to secure their version of history, Shura would probably have blown up Sir Reginald and the other delegates while they were still in the house and so the Daleks' version of history would have been preserved. But because of the Dalek attack, the Brigadier is able to force the delegates to leave, so they all survive and history is changed.

The Daleks and Ogrons advance slowly (or 'inexorably' is a good word for it if you want to be kind) across the open ground towards Auderly House, with the director doing a poor job here of disguising how few of them there actually are. They almost get away with it, but one shot in particular gives the game away by being a bit too wide, revealing the lack of other Daleks or Ogrons to either side of the small group in the middle of shot.

Shura, hiding in the basement (which he knew from earlier was the one room of the house that UNIT's security had a blind spot towards), learns from the Doctor and Jo that the Daleks are on their way, and they instantly come up with the plan to let the Daleks into the house and then use the bomb to blow them up. Shura has to stay to set the bomb off but, as the Daleks wander around the house getting confused (and disappointed) that there are no mannys there for them to exterminate, he gets the satisfaction of saving the world.

"WHERE ARE THE DELEGATES?"

"WHERE IS THE MAN STYLES?"

"THEY MUST BE FOUND AND EXTERMINATED!"

"Oh no, not this time. This time it's going to be different!"

The bomb blows up the whole house, as before. The final scene sees the Doctor tell Sir Reginald that the conference has been saved, and they have another chance to keep the world peace:

"You still have a choice."

"Don't worry, we all know what will happen if we fail."

"So do we. We've seen it happen, haven't we, Jo?"

What's so good about Dave the Daleks?

On paper, Dave the Daleks is one of the best Doctor Who stories of the Jon Pertwee era. At its core is something surprisingly rare in a series where the main character has a time machine - it is a plot about time travel. It is tightly and expertly written, with the initial mystery to hook in the Doctor (and the viewers) transforming wonderfully into the struggle by the guerillas to change their history for the better. The fact that it is Daleks who have conquered the Earth of the future (again) is a bonus - a shorthand way of instantly letting us know that whoever is opposing them must be goodys really.

Where there are flaws in Dave the Daleks, they are with the TV production rather than with the story itself or the script - the writer seems to have maybe forgotten that they had to make the programme on a BBC budget! The small number of Daleks may be the most obvious of these problems, but also scenes such as the slow-motion trike chase or the awkward action sequences indicate that the director was not comfortable with transferring the material from page to screen.

This has the result that Dave the Daleks is one of those stories that may be better as a book, where there are none of these limitations, and I am lucky that this is one of the few Target novelisations of Jon Pertwee-era Doctor Who that I have. That said, with the book you miss out on watching the enjoyable acting performances by Jon Pertwee, Nicholas Courtney, Aubrey Woods, etc. so it is even better to have both book and TV versions, and to be able to compare them.

You can see from this photo that the name is a little different, but that was not uncommon for Targets, such as Doctor Who and the Silurians becoming Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters.

Speaking of changes between book and screen, in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory Charlie's father is said to be ded (the exact line, spoken by Grandma Josephine, is "If only his father were alive..."), which is not the case in the original novel. This then would explain why Charlie cannot take his father as the "one member of your own family" the ticket permits him to bring along with him, but he does not even consider for a moment taking his mother, immediately offering the place to Grandpa Joe instead. Perhaps this is because Joe had faith in Charlie that he would get the ticket, while his mother was more pessimistic, telling him "there are a hundred billion people in this world, and only five of them will find Golden Tickets. Even if you had a sackful of money you probably wouldn't find one. And after this contest is over, you'll be no different from the billions of others who didn't find one."

Something must have happened in her past to make Charlie's mother so much more cynical than the others in her family.

And yet... while the Golden Ticket led to the test of character inside the chocolate factory, it was possible, however unlikely, to pass the test. Joe, had he been the one being tested, would definitely have failed, what with him saying "If Slugworth wants a Gobstopper, he'll get one."

But it was Charlie that Wonka was testing for worthiness to be his heir, not Joe. "Oh Charlie, forgive me for putting you through this," he says, and "I had to test you, Charlie. And you passed the test."

Why would Willy Wonka single out Charlie Bucket for the test, of all the children in the city, never mind the world, with a confidence in Charlie that he clearly didn't have in any of the other four children ("You did it! I knew you would, I just knew you would," he says), unless he had some special connection to Charlie?

The son of the spy whose unmasking provoked him into closing his factory, yes, but more than that - Charlie's mother's betrayal of him must have been much more than just the theft of a few recipes to incite such a long-delayed and elaborate vengeance - it must have been personal.

Willy Wonka is Charlie's father. How's that for a conspiracy theory?

Civilization: Beyond Earth

This computer game from 2014 was the successor to both Civilization V (released 2010) as well as the spiritual successor to the greatest computer strategy game of all time, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (released 1999, and usually known simply as Alpha Centauri). Civilization: Beyond Earth (or just Beyond Earth for short) suffers when compared to either of these older games, as it seems the makers could not improve on what had come before in some very important respects.

With 15 years elapsed since Alpha Centauri came out, it is no surprise that the mechanics of Beyond Earth are an improvement over it. Although some might argue that certain mechanics were backwards steps, I for one am glad to leave the days of increasingly tedious sprawling empire management and stacked armies of doom in the past - and if you do prefer that, the older games are still there for you.

However, there are three key areas in which Beyond Earth compares unfavourably with its immediate predecessor, Civ V, and these are much less understandable mistaiks considering how similar the engines behind the two games are.

The first and most significant issue with the game mechanics that makes Beyond Earth less fun for me to play is how the game has no option for reducing the abundance of native aliens. The aliens fill an important part in the setting of Beyond Earth, but mechanically they fill much the same role as barbarians do in Earth-set Civilization games, and Civ V had a nice, easy option for a player to turn the barbarians off (or turn them up, if so desired).

I'm not even sure turning the aliens off completely would be necessary, but the game could definitely have done with a way of turning their rate of spawning down, because I found so many games were made much less enjoyable by my early exploration of the planet being blocked by aliens and their nests, in addition to the mountains and canyons (twice as many terrain types as in Civ V) which already block movement. 

Secondly, the actual moment of winning a game feels much less satisfying than in Civ V. In Beyond Earth, you see a victory screen, and then have the choice of exiting or to keep on (pointlessly) playing. But with Civ V, as well as these options you can also see your score and how well you rank compared with the other civilisations in the game or with famous leaders from history, and also watch a replay. These may not seem like much, but I think they add a lot to the gaming experience. Your final score is then entered into the 'Hall of Fame' where you can see how your score ranks against those from other playthroughs. Beyond Earth is also supposed to have one of these, but (at least in my copy) it has always been borked with no scores recorded. 

The third problem is with the Wonders/Secret Projects. Or rather it is really two problems in one, since either of these individually would not be nearly so detrimental to the game as they are with both problems together. In Civ V the Wonders are (with a few exceptions) well balanced, powerful enough to be worth the significant investment of resources it takes to build them without being game-breakingly good in the way some Wonders from earlier Civilization games were. In Beyond Earth not only are most of the Wonders underpowered compared to their build cost, but also they require you to research optional "branch" technologies in order to build them at all - the combined opportunity cost in both science and production is too high for many of the Wonders to ever be worthwhile attempting.

In spite of all I have just said, these mechanical issues are not enough to prevent the game from being fun to play on the whole - my first objection about the aliens is the only one that can really ruin a game, and that only occasionally (albeit randomly). Where the game really lets itself down is in the setting or 'flavour' elements. A failure in flavour may not affect the game mechanics, but it certainly affects the game-play experience.

There are three key areas where Beyond Earth failed to live up to comparison with the flavour of Alpha Centauri - the benchmark against which its setting was always going to be measured, much more so than against Civ V, since they are the two sci-fi incarnations of Civilization, and by 2014 Alpha Centauri had already achieved the status of a classic, All-Time-Great computer game.

Of crucial importance to the setting are the main characters and factions in the game. Alpha Centauri from the very first got this absolutely right, with all seven of its original factions (and their leaders) being iconic, and the seven from its expansion only marginally less so. Beyond Earth made the mistaik of not wanting to give its factions strong identities, so that the player could shape their own character during play by their choice of in-game Affinities. But the result of this was that the main characters were all left bland, with little (though not nothing, to be fair) to distinguish between them.

Alpha Centauri also had the faction leaders' personalities woven throughout the game, with their dialogue giving flavour to the researching of new technologies, the building of new... er, buildings, and the completion of Secret Projects. The voice acting of each of these leaders brought them to life, which leads me to the second of the ways in which Beyond Earth failed - despite also having quotations from the various faction leaders accompanying its technology breakthroughs, buildings, Wonders, and even Affinity levels, they were all read out by the same voice actor. 

Having a single actor doing all the voiceovers worked well in the historical Civilization games (whether read by a famous actor such as Leonard Nimoy or Sean Bean, or not) because they were quotations from historical figures who, pretty much by definition, carry more real-world weight than the fictional characters invented for the sci-fi setting, who need all the help they can get to be brought to life. Having a single actor do all their voiceovers robs them of distinctiveness and makes them all blend together.

What makes this an even more baffling decision by the game's makers is that they did employ multiple voice actors to play the different characters - for their diplomacy screens only!

The third and final flavour issue is, as with the mechanics, the Wonders. Alpha Centauri had short animated movies to accompany the completion of each of its Secret Projects, several of which were among the most iconic parts of the game. Civ V didn't manage to have movies to go with its Wonders (I don't know why not), but at least it had appropriately memorable still images in their place - Chichen Itza is a personal favourite of mine, for example.

Beyond Earth cannot even manage that. The pictures are all very similar, depicting the blueprints of fictional buildings that don't even give you much, if any, indication as to what the Wonder actually does. In Alpha Centauri or Civ V you get a sense of triumph when you complete a Wonder. With Beyond Earth, the sense you get is more like that of disappointment.

My hope for the future is that one day we will get a Beyond Earth 2 that can somehow keep the many genuinely good elements of Beyond Earth's gameplay while at the same time improving upon the areas of weakness I have described here. For all that Alpha Centauri casts a long shadow over the genre, it would not need to slavishly copy the setting in order to be good... if it did, it would be more like Alpha Centauri 2.

Actually, now I've said it, that sounds like an even better idea...

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Dæmons Episode Five

Azal uses the power of CSO to become giant again. Bok comes to life again and pewpewpews Yates's gun - presumably Bok can't make him disappear because he's a regular character. Jo gets captured and Yates gets knocked out by some cultists.

Outside, even though the Doctor is aware that they're "facing the greatest danger the world has ever known," he still takes the time to answer Miss Hawthorne's question:

"But your car? How did you make it move by itself?
"Science, not sorcery, Miss Hawthorne."

He shows them the remote control, and Benton exclaims

"I'll be blowed."

It's time for some more exposition, as the Doctor explains to the villagers how the Master's "sorcery" is also science.

"Well, the emotions of a group of ordinary human beings generate a tremendous charge of psychokinetic energy. This the Master channels for his own purpose."
"But that is magic. That's precisely what black magic is!"
"No, Miss Hawthorne, I'm afraid not."

Well that's her put in her place then. I'm only surprised the Doctor didn't tell her to get out of his eyeline while he was at it, mew.

Yates escapes from the church and reaches the Doctor with news of what has happened in the cavern. The Master has decided to sacrifice Jo instead of his cock (lol) so has made her dress up in his idea of a proper sacrifice costume. He also sends Bok out to stop the Doctor or anybody else from coming to the cavern.

The Doctor's device finally makes a hole in the heat barrier to let the Brigadier and the rest of UNIT through. At the same time it also gives Azal and Bok sore heads. After all the UNIT mannys are through the barrier, the machine blows up with the sound of a stock thunderclap, which makes this scarier than it needed to be but may be a subtle indication that Azal was responsible.

The Doctor runs past Bok before he recovers from his headache. As soon as the Doctor arrives in the cavern the Master says

"Ah, Doctor, I've been expecting you."

and there's not a longcat on the shelf wouldn't volunteer to be his cat at this most Bond-villainesque of lines, purr.

The Brigadier has been trying to get into the main plot for four whole episodes, and he finally arrives to deliver the most iconic moment of his career. Yates demonstrates how Bok is standing guard and will disappear anything that comes too near, to which the Brigadier says

"Yes, I see what you mean. Never mind, we'll soon fix him. Jenkins!"
"Sir?"

"Chap with the wings there. Five rounds rapid."

Somewhat less iconic is what happens next, as the rest of the UNIT mannys all try to shoot Bok, with the same lack of effect as Jenkins's effort. Benton blows Bok up with a bazooka, but Bok reforms himself like a bargain-basement T1000 by means of reversing the film footage.

The Doctor tries to bluff Azal that he has a second device ready to give Azal another headache, but Azal sees through this immediately. The Master tries to order Azal to kill the Doctor, but Azal says

"I command. I do not obey."

He's a bit like a cat really.

Next the Doctor tries to persuade him to

"Leave humanity alone. Just go. You've done enough harm."
"We gave knowledge to Man."
"You certainly did. Thanks to you Man can now blow up the world and he probably will. He can poison the water and the very air he breathes - he's already started. He can..."
"Enough! Is Man such a failure then? Shall I destroy him?"

Oops, the Doctor's argument seems to have backfired. Azal should have given knowledge to Cats instead of Man(nys), we would have used the power wisely: to make more Blakes 7 of course.

Azal decides to give his power to the Doctor anyway (because he is like a cat) but the Doctor doesn't want it (because he is also like a cat).

"Then you will give your power to me?"

When the Doctor turns him down, Azal decides to give his power to the Master. But first he decides to kill the Doctor with his lightning, like he's the Evil Emperor at the end of Return of the Jedi. Jo tries to self-sacrifice, and this confuses Azal so much that he blows himself up.

Confused Azal is confused.

The Doctor explains that "Azal couldn't face an act as irrational and as illogical as [Jo] being prepared to give up her life for me," and "all his power was turned against himself. You might say he blew a fuse."

This is the most oft-criticised part of The Dæmons, that this resolution to the plot comes out of nowhere, and I have to agree that there is a lack of any foreshadowing that this was all that was required to defeat the baddys. However there is a certain logic and internal consistency to it, in that Azal (and the alien Dæmons in general) have been presented to us as the inspiration for all the evil demons in mannys' legends, and so it makes a kind of sense that they would be overcome by a good and noble act that is the opposite of what their legendary counterparts might do.

It's just a shame that the Doctor's explanation - the one given on-screen - doesn't say anything like this.

Everybody in the cavern runs outside before the church runs out of ontological inertia and blows up in sympathy with Azal. Bok turns back into a statue and the Brigadier realises that he has come all this way to accomplish basically bugger all.

Benton captures the Master for a moment, but he gets distracted and the Master tries to get away in Bessie. But, as has been established twice now over the course of the story, the Doctor can take control of Bessie using his remote control - nobody can complain that wasn't properly foreshadowed!

The Doctor says

"I want to deal with him later."

(Was this the line that launched a thousand ships?)

The Master replies:

"Do you, Doctor? You always were an optimist, weren't you?"

Even captured, he's still the coolest character in this season. The villagers boo him as he is being taken away by UNIT soldiers, but you can tell they don't mean it really.

Time for a komedy end bit: Miss Hawthorne asks Benton to "do the fertility dance" with her, and I'm sure that this is both literal and a clear euphemism at the same time. Jo asks the Doctor to join in the dance too, which at least could be interpreted a bit more innocently if you were so inclined. Then Mike Yates realises that this means the only named character left for him to dance with is the Brigadier, and with a 'what the hell, nothing ventured...' attitude asks

"Fancy a dance, Brigadier?"
"It's kind of you, Captain Yates, but I think I'd rather have a pint."

which is a diplomatic response, and doesn't close the door on Yates completely. The Brigadier came all the way to Devil's End for some action, after all...

What's so good about The Dæmons?

While Roger Delgado as the Master is certainly still a contributing factor to the greatness of The Dæmons, he can't be given the cat's share of the plaudits in the same way as he can for most of season eight so far.

This is because The Dæmons is very much an ensemble piece, with the various plot threads shared between members of the 'UNIT Family' with everyone getting to do something. As well as the Doctor and Jo, we have Yates and Benton acting like full Doctor Who Companions for much of the story, contributing both on their own and as part of the group. This approach to the main characters in the story culminates with the Brigadier - arguably the least well-served for things to do out of the regulars - achieving an absolutely iconic moment for his character.

The Master, meanwhile, is kept separate from the rest of the UNIT Family (which he has earned his honorary place in by his being in all the stories of this season, which is more than Yates or Benton can claim) for most of the story, only sharing three scenes with any of them, and only two with the Doctor (these are: the scene where Yates and Jo get captured; the climactic confrontation with Azal in the cavern; and the scene of his getting captured in Bessie).

Up until this point he had plenty of scenes, but they were shared either with villagers and henchmannys to begin with, or Azal once we passed the middle of the story. What it means, though, is that this is the first Master story where he at no point teams up with the Doctor, however briefly. Perhaps this is for the best - after all, the Master offered the Doctor "a half-share in the universe" when they last met, so it could well be the writers thought they could not top that here. But it seems to me a shame that they didn't manage to make it five out of five.

The complete UNIT Family will be together only once more after The Dæmons, in season nine's final story The Time Monster. While a very fun story in its own right, it doesn't have the same level of memorable moments and iconic status as The Dæmons, which is why I would consider this story the archetypical example of the UNIT era.

Scary face!

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Dæmons Episode Four

Rather than resolve the Master's predicament straight away, we first see what some of our other characters are up to. Jo decides to go to the cavern by herself.

As part of his instructions on how to build the technobabble device, the Doctor tells Osgood to "reverse the polarity," although he disappointingly doesn't say of what.

Azal talks to the Master in a big, shouty, Treebeard-Omega-Eldrad sort of voice. That's because they're all voiced by Stephen Thorne lol. We see the Master from between Azal's legs (and sometimes a cigar-shaped spaceship is just a cigar-shaped spaceship) and then from over his shoulders - now that his origin has been exposited and he has spoken with a regular character he is no longer quite so mysterious and thus is no longer given the status of a POV monster.

He knows that the Doctor is from the same race as the Master and wants to speak with them both. Azal says

"My race destroys its failures. Remember Atlantis?"

but as the Master won't visit Atlantis until the end of the next season, he probably doesn't. The Master runs away from the cavern and makes a 'phew, I got away with it' face, and then he starts laughing.

Yates sees that Jo is gone and decides to go after her, while Benton and Miss Hawthorne have a drink - well, they are in a pub after all!

The Doctor finishes his explanation to Osgood and goes to return to the village on his motorbike, leaving the Brigadier and UNIT to follow him when the device is finished and gets them through the heat barrier.

Jo and Yates go into the cavern where Yates makes a mess with one of the Master's books, ripped up by the Master's own "booby trap" forcefield - a useful demonstration to Jo in the short term, but surely a massive giveaway that they had been in here in the longer term? Well, a cultist comes in and completely fails to notice, which just goes to prove that you don't have to actually be good at stealth, just better than your opponent's Spot Hidden.

(Somebody tidies up the mess off-screen before the next scene in the cavern. I don't know who, but it is presumably neither Jo nor Yates since many of the pages landed on the other side of the forcefield.)

The Master's henchmanny shoots the Doctor off his motorbike, so the Doctor runs away, having only brought Venusian Karate to this gunfight.

There are then a couple of komedy filler scenes - one with Miss Hawthorne offering Benton some tea (I'm sure I'm not the first reviewer of this story to note that he's well in there, naughty Miss Hawthorne), the second with the Brigadier and Osgood trying to get the device going.

The komedy scenes are placed here in order to contrast with the terrifying scenes that follow, as we see mannys performing the black secret at the heart of their English paradise: Morris Dancing.

The Doctor tries to get past them but he gets captured because, as any Scottish cat knows, the Morris Dancers are evil. Their leader is the Master's henchmanny, who pulls a gun on the Doctor to make sure he doesn't get away.

One of the Morris Dancers has a fight with Benton until he gets knocked out by Miss Hawthorne, who says

"Look, I know these people, they're not wicked. Well... most of them anyway."

The villagers tie the Doctor to a pole with ribbons, and the image of this reminds me of something...

The Master's henchmanny calls the Doctor a "black witch" and suggests that they "burn him."

This leads to the villagers chanting "Burn him!" in such a way that must surely have influenced the witch scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. They're actually about to do this when Miss Hawthorne runs out and shouts "Stop!"

This scene was already ridiculous filler, so the plan she and Benton have come up with seems almost sensible under the circumstances. Miss Hawthorne claims the Doctor is "the great wizard Quiquaequod" and will use his magic power against them if they don't release him. The "power" consists of Benton shooting things (a simpler version of this plan having obviously been rejected as being not convoluted enough) and then the Doctor using his Chekhov's Remote Control from episode one to summon Bessie to run over the henchmanny.

I think what allows this scene to succeed (well... partially) is that Benton is also surprised - because while Jo and Yates saw Bessie operating under remote control earlier on, he didn't. On the other paw, where the scene finally goes too far is when Benton asks

"How on Earth did you do that, Doctor?"

setting the Doctor up for the reply

"Elemental, my dear Benton."

Mew.

In the cavern, the Master has all his cultists present and they do lots of chanting. When the Master goes to sacrifice a cock (or it could be a hen, I suppose, but that's less intrinsically open to my making a cheap joke), Jo runs out from where she and Yates had been hiding the entire time to try to stop him.

But it doesn't matter, because the Master summons Azal anyway.