Sunday 25 April 2021

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Curse of Peladon Episode Two


The Doctor pushes the Ice Warriors and Alpha Centauri out of the way so the falling statue misses them. While the Doctor keeps the king, Hepesh, and the delegates talking, Jo sneaks off to investigate who could have pushed the statue down. She finds a clue on the ground where the statue was.


Later, the king speak to Jo in private. He obviously fancies her, saying
"I was brought up by wise old men. I hardly ever see anyone young... or beautiful."
Smoov, your majesty. Very smoov.

While it was already pretty obvious that Hepesh is the brains behind Grun's actions, it is made explicit when we see him ordering Grun to kill the Doctor.

Jo shows her clue to the Doctor and he identifies it as "an electronic key." He immediately suspects the Ice Warriors (despite that it would have been them that the statue landed on if he hadn't been there to save them). When Jo asks why he tells her that
"Well, the last time that I encountered them, Jo, they were trying to colonise the planet Earth. And Peladon is very like Earth."
and he goes further, adding
"I know the Ice Warriors, Jo. They're a savage and a warlike race."
Jo, quite sensibly, says
"I still think you're jumping to conclusions."
Why has the Doctor made up his mind already? It is not like him to be so prejudiced. Well, unlike with many other times the Doctor mentions his previous encounters with aliens, the events he refers to here are from an earlier TV story that we can actually go and watch for ourselves. So I think we should take a look at the last time he met the Ice Warriors and see what all the fuss is about...

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Seeds OF DEATH Episode One


The Seeds OF DEATH is the fifth story of season six of Doctor Who, starring Patrick Troughton as the Doctor, Frazer Hines as Jamie, and Wendy Padbury as Zoe. Like The Curse of Peladon, it was written by Brian Hayles.

It starts with lots of mannys teleporting things about the place for the lols, but one of them is getting it wrong. We meet Osgood, played by Harry Towb (also seen in Terror of the Autons), who teleports off to the Moon to give Fewsham (Terry Scully, Groff in Dawn of the Gods) into trouble.


They and some other mannys get attacked by a POV monster and one of them is pewpewpewed to show us it means business. Osgood still bravely sabotages their teleporter rather than let the POV monster get its claws on it, so he gets pewpewpewed too. On Earth they know something is wrong when they lose contact with the Moon, but they don't know what.

The TARDIS lands in "a space museum" which the Doctor seems surprisingly happy about considering what happened to him last time he visited one of those.


Zoe finds a video that gives them (and us) all the exposition about their teleport system "Travelmat" (the inventor must have been a fan of Fraggle Rock), although we cats knew this already because we have seen Blakes 7. Then a manny comes in and points a gun at them, trying his best to be like a POV monster but we can tell it's a manny really.


With their teleports all borked, the mannys on Earth need a rocket to get from the Earth to the Moon, and Commander Radnor (Ronald Leigh "Children of Auron" Hunt)  says
"There is just one man, one man alone, who can help us now."
Is it Tom Hanks, lol?

The Doctor makes friends with the manny with the gun, Professor Eldred (must live), by showing an interest in his space museum. This allows them to get more exposition, about how space travel has been abandoned because mannys all prefer teleporting about the place to travelling in spaceships.

Radnor and his second-in-command Miss Kelly come in and it turns out that Radnor and Eldred (must live) were old friends who fell out because Radnor likes teleports while Eldred (must live) preferred rockets, and all the other mannys siding with Radnor made him very grumpy.


The remaining mannys on the Moon manage to send a short emergency message asking for help, which is cut off partway through. We now see that the POV monsters are Ice Warriors, and they pewpewpew the manny who sent the message. Slow zoom to their leader's face - cliffhanger!

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