Unacceptable

Why are there Netflix buttons on remote controls now? Why does the TV remote have three other buttons for streaming services on top of that? What even is Rokuten TV, I've never heard of it?

If these buttons were small and out of the way it might not matter so much, but they are large and prominently placed, especially on the TV controller where they are larger than the Mute and House buttons, both of which actually get used, and placed between the volume and channel changing buttons and the direction buttons, all of which see frequent use.

I am forced to conclude that this is deliberate, to maximise the chances of a careless Thumb pressing the wrong button by mistaik. This is completely unacceptable on the part of the makers of remote controls, and I expect Ceiling Cat is very disappointed in you all.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Carnival of Monsters Episode Four

The Doctor grows larger and longer until he is the same size as the aliens. Pletrac wants to pewpewpew him, but Kalik argues against this. The Doctor gets up and joins in:

"The tribunal is not deliberating. The tribunal is arguing. And quite nonsensically, if I may say so."

After he gets over his disappointment at not being on Metebelis Three, the Doctor begins to take over the scene. He quickly has the measure of the bureaucratic officials.

Orum: "One wonders why the tribunal is submitting to questioning by this creature. Shouldn't it be the other way round?"

Doctor: "Well, I'm sorry to have to tell you, gentlemen, but you are all in very serious trouble."

Orum: "Really one almost admires its audacity."

Vorg and Shirna try to be friendly to the Doctor, but he gets very angry with them as the owners of the miniscope, especially when Vorg refers to the creatures inside it as "livestock." When he finds out from them that "the scope's packing up" his priority is to save Jo and the other mannys still trapped inside.

This prompts a cut back to Jo, who is hiding from Harry and Major Daly on the ship, but gets caught (again) and locked in the cabin (again) and prepares to use her skeleton keys to escape (again). The Groundhog Day-esque repetitiveness of the scenes of the ship could have been used as the main plot of a Doctor Who story, but here it is used simply to pad out the episode and give Jo something to do while separated from the Doctor.

Shirna admits to the Doctor that Vorg has no idea how the miniscope functions, so the Doctor has to improvise a plan. With Jo elsewhere, Shirna has to act as his Companion temporarily - as evidenced by her dialogue during this bit.

Shirna: "What's the idea, Doctor?"

Doctor: "Well it's simple, really. You see the Scope's... er... omega circuit is broken. Now if I can link it to the TARDIS and use that as the master, I can reprogram the scope."

Jon Pertwee stumbles over his line slightly, which actually helps create the impression that the Doctor really is making it up as he goes along. Or maybe his mention of the "omega circuit" just reminded him of the previous story?

Shirna: "And what will that do?"

Doctor: "Well two things, I hope. It'll enable me to get Jo out of here in time, and get her out of this wretched contraption, and it will return all the other lifeforms to their original space time coordinates."

Vorg and Shirna agree to help the Doctor, while Kalik and Orum put their plan into action - having sabotaged the eradicator so that it can't pewpewpew anything, they have no other defences for if (or, as Kalik hopes, when) the Drashigs escape from the miniscope like the Doctor did. Orum says

"They'll never break through those plates. They're molectic bonded distillum."

(which is either nonsensical technobabble worthy of Star Trek Voyager or else the actor fluffing his lines and there not being time for another take.) Kalik replies:

"Then perhaps one had better give them a little help?"

With equipment from the TARDIS the Doctor has rigged up a device to send him back into the miniscope.

When the Doctor disappears, Pletrac pews at him with his little pewpewpew gun but he hits the machine instead, damaging it.

Jo has escaped from captivity (again) and made it back to the CSO interface between the ship and the miniscope's inner W-wordings, where she meets up with the Doctor.

Kalik succeeds in letting the Drashigs escape from the miniscope...

...and immediately regrets his decision, because he gets nomed. Vorg and Shirna have found the missing part of the eradictor (planted on them by Kalik so that they would take the blame if his plan went wrong in a way that it didn't) and so they use it to Hitchcock the Drashigs.

Inside the miniscope, all the mannys pass out from the failing power beginning to cause a failure of ontological inertia, even Jo and the Doctor, so it is up to Vorg and Shirna to carry out the second part of the Doctor's plan to... er, carry them out of the machine.

The plan succeeds, and the Doctor and Jo appear outside the miniscope just after it blows up. We also see the ship and its mannys returned to the Earth of 1926, and Major Daly finally gets to finish his book.

"Seems like the longest book I've ever read in me life."

If the SS Bernice does reach India after all, that surely means history must have been changed, based on what the Doctor said about it in episode one? Unless, of course, something else happens to it after the end credits roll, like maybe involving the dinosaur that presumably got sent to Earth along with the ship...

The last scene sees Pletrac grateful to Vorg and Shirna for pewpewpewing the Drashigs (never mind that they brought them to the planet in the first place) and Vorg decides that, since they are now lacking a miniscope, he can make them moneys by scamming Pletrac. We are supposed to laugh at Pletrac as his opinion of his own superior intelligence leads him to wager (and then lose) increasing sums against Vorg.

Doctor: "I don't think we need worry too much about our friend Vorg."

Jo: "He'll probably wind up president."

The Doctor and Jo certainly have a good old chuckle about it, before leaving in the TARDIS.

What's so good about Carnival of Monsters?

At its core, Carnival of Monsters is a carefully crafted, well-plotted science fiction story by Robert Holmes. To begin with, the seemingly disparate parts of the plot create a compelling mystery, and then they all come together by the end for a satisfying conclusion.

To make it even cleverer, the mystery that faces the Doctor and Jo is not the same as viewers at home are presented with, since we see the events that unfold outside the miniscope from the start, while the Doctor doesn't participate in them until the final episode.

Carnival of Monsters is also a rare (in fact almost unheard of) instance of a story without an antagonist. Kalik, a schemer who is eventually undone by the results of his own scheming, might superficially look like the closest thing to it, but he actually saves the Doctor's life more than once. Vorg, meanwhile, is the owner-operator of a machine "expressly forbidden by intergalactic law" and as such is responsible for everything that happened throughout this story, yet is presented to us as a quirky and cheeky character, not as an outright baddy.

The story contains several early examples of memorable Robert Holmes characters, in the shape of Vorg, Shirna, Pletrac, Kalik and Orum. Both the pairings of Vorg & Shirna and Kalik & Orum form double-acts of the sort that Holmes would later perfect with Jago & Litefoot, Garron & Unstoffe, and, of course, Avon & Vila.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Carnival of Monsters Episode Three

It would be a short episode if the Doctor and Jo got nomed immediately, so they don't. Vorg and Shirna try to build up the scariness of the Drashigs some more by saying "they're nomnivorous." Which means they'll nom anything, even spaceships.

Jo gets stuck in some water so can't run away any more. The Doctor uses the sonic screwdriver to detonate some marsh gas - a very similar use to the one he put the sonic screwdriver to use against the Sea Devils last season - and this sets fire to three Drashigs, which seems a bit harsh given how careful they were being to avoid appearing in the same shot as our heroes.

The Doctor frees Jo, but the Drashigs come back the very next scene (not on fire any more) and they are only saved when Kalik and Shirna persuade Vorg to put his paw into the scope and get in the Drashigs' way, because inside the scope it becomes giant again.

The Doctor and Jo get back into the futuristic set, and are both completely dry straight away despite having only just been running through water. It's probably a Time Lord gift or something, mew.

The Doctor finally puts the last pieces together to realise what is going on:

"We're in a miniscope!"

Jo needs a bit more of an explanation than that, and so do the viewers at home, so it goes on with

Doctor: "Well haven't you ever been to the zoo? Have you never kept goldfish in a bowl?"

Jo: "Well, yes, but that's slightly different, we're not animals."

Doctor: "We are to those creatures up there, Jo. 'Roll up! Roll up! Roll up! And see these funny little creatures in their native 'abitat! Watch them go through their funny little tricks! Poke them with a stick and make 'em jump!'"

He puts on a funny voice for the last bit and ends up with a remarkably close approximation of what Vorg is like.

The Drashigs follow them even into the studio, one of them smashing through the wall like it's made of polystyrene, and the Doctor and Jo have to run away again. Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning do their best to make the chase exciting, but the more scenes with Drashigs there are the more it becomes obvious that they don't appear on screen at the same time as the mannys so as to avoid giving away that they're not as big and scary as they're being made out to be.

Their path blocked by a deep shaft, the Doctor and Jo need rope to climb down it, so they head back to the ship where they know there is plenty of it in the hold. No sooner have they picked up some rope when Major Daly and Harry come in and they have to hide from them (again). Harry spots Jo's foot so she gets captured (again), but the Dr remains hidden. A Drashig bursts in through the wall (again, although a different wall) and knocks the Doctor out.

Having heard its rars, Harry and his mannys run in and shoot at it. We do actually get to see them and the Drashig in the same shot, which must have been terribly expensive. Worth every penny though - all the BBC moneys are up there on the screen. This bit is probably what gave Barry Letts the confidence to do Invasion of the Dinosaurs for the following season.

The guns are ineffective (get used to that, Harry) so Harry runs off to get some "dynamite," while Major Daly gets a ratatat gun with which to ratatat the Drashig. Harry throws the dynamite at another Drashig as it is about to come in through the hole, but when it explodes it also damages the miniscope, which Vorg and Shirna see from the outside - "a general power failure," says Shirna.

Jo is still on the ship from when she got captured, and she witnesses Harry and the other mannys forget all about her even when in the same room as her.

"Who are you?"

asks Harry, to which Jo replies

"Here we go again."

(again). She gets annoyed at them not being able to remember her and runs away.

The Doctor gets back into the machine with the rope so is able to progress with the adventure: use ROPE on SHAFT. At the bottom of the shaft he finds another metal panel, and this one lets him out of the miniscope. The cliffhanger is a tiny Doctor walking out of the machine and collapsing, the two strands of the plot finally properly intersecting for the first time.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Carnival of Monsters Episode Two

The Doctor shouts after the giant hand

"Hey!"

but, like a guard on the gate of Swamp Castle, he is too late. Vorg (who must have very dirty paws) pulls a tiny TARDIS out of his machine and calls it

"A bit of bric-a-brac lodged inside circuit three."

He demonstrates the machine to Kalik and Orum, two of the official aliens, showing them first the ship, and then an Ogron. He even provides a voiceover narration to accompany the pictures:

"They are of limited intelligence and are used as servants by some race called, er, Daleks, I believe."

This is either a callback to the Ogrons appearance in the previous season's Dave the Daleks, or else it could be deliberate foreshadowing for later in this season. Or both.

Vorg then shows them Drashigs, and calls them "the most evil, the most vicious and undoubtedly the most frightening form of life in the whole of the universe!" This is deliberate hyperbole on Vorg's part, part of his "pitch," we are not meant to take what he says at face value, since the Drashigs look nothing at all like Hoover.

In response to Orum's assumption that the pictures being shown are recordings, Vorg explains

Vorg: "The picture on the glo-sphere is an actual projection of what is now taking place deep down inside."

Kalik: "Do you mean that all these creatures are living in there?"

Vorg: "Within their own miniaturised environments, of course."

Inside the machine, the Doctor and Jo are trying to escape, but they only encounter Major Daly, Harry Sullivan, and the rest, who have all forgotten that they already met the Doctor and Jo last episode. Vorg uses his machine's controls to adjust "the aggrometer" to make "the Tellurians" (his term for mannys) "behave in an amusingly violent way." It cuts immediately back to Harry wanting to have a fight with the Doctor, who is confused by this behaviour but does agree to it.

After a short punch-up, the Doctor and Jo run away, and get chased by the mannys. The fight and chase scenes are little more than padding, but entertaining enough for that - Robert Holmes was always better at disguising his padding than many other writers, or maybe he was just clever enough to mostly avoid writing six-parters, where that was more difficult to do? The chase ends when the Doctor and Jo are caught and about to be shot, then Vorg turns the aggrometer back down and suddenly the Major and Harry wander off looking for noms, forgetting about the Doctor and Jo completely... quite cat-like behaviour in a way.

The Doctor uses the sonic screwdriver to open the metal hatch so he and Jo can move from the ship to another part of Vorg's machine.

This part of the machine is all futuristic-looking, with a giant pencil holder in the background. Even the Doctor is impressed:

"And just look at this, Jo. What a magnificent auxiliary capillary pump. Have you ever seen anything like it? I've never been small enough to get inside one of these things before, it's fascinating. It's like walking around inside a wristwatch. It's wonderful. It really is magnificent."

Jon Pertwee is doing his very best to sell this "wonderful" and "magnificent" set to us, and to be fair it is more impressive than Omega's lair from the previous story.

Outside the machine, the aliens have decided that Vorg has brought "zoological specimens" to their planet inside his machine illegally, so they decide to have the machine - and the specimens - "destroyed." Pletrac, the senior official alien, sends for an "eradicator" (a giant pewpewpew gun), and there is a bit of komedy business when he seems to change his mind for a moment, but really he just wants to stand further away from the pewing.

Fortunately for the Doctor and Jo, still inside, the eradicator is ineffective at eradicating the machine, it just makes it a bit hot.

Vorg looks inside the machine and sees the Doctor and Jo. They see his giant eye looking in at them. Orum and Kalik have convinced themselves that Vorg is a spy, and that he is using the machine to send secret messages to their enemies. When Orum examines the machine looking for a transmitter, he picks up the tiny TARDIS and it returns to its full size outside the machine. This convinces the paranoid aliens that it could be a kind of 'Trojan Horse' for mannys to invade their planet - nobody had better tell them the TARDIS belongs to the inventor of that strategy!

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Jo have escaped from one part of the machine to another - this one is on location. As they wander about, we cut back to outside, where Vorg, Shirna and the aliens see that they have got into the same environment as the Drashigs. Shirna wants Vorg to rescue them, but he says

"How can I? They're already as good as dead. Once the Drashigs get their scent, they won't stand a chance."

This line is important in establishing the peril that the Doctor and Jo are in, else when the Drashigs make their appearance we wouldn't know to be scared.

Cliffhanger!

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Carnival of Monsters Episode One

Carnival of Monsters is the second story of season 10 of Doctor Who, first broadcast in 1973. It stars Jon Pertwee as the Doctor and Katy Manning as Jo Grant. It was written by Robert Holmes.

It starts with a spaceship landing...

...out of which come two mannys, Vorg and Shirna. They meet the grey aliens that live on this planet, one of whom is busy pewpewpewing another.

After an establishing shot of a ship at sea, we hear and then see the TARDIS materialise. The Doctor and Jo come out, but they don't do anything else yet because it's back to Vorg and Shirna. They take off their dull grey spacesuits to reveal colourful costumes underneath. This seems to confuse the grey aliens. Vorg starts their "pitch," which I think means giving the aliens (and us) the exposition about what is going on:

"Roll up and see the monster show! A carnival of monsters,"

Clang!

"all living in their natural habitat, wild in this little box of mine. A miracle of intragalactic technology! Roll up! Roll up!"

They have a machine that isn't functioning properly, with a red warning light flashing to get their attention. This has obvious parallels with the TARDIS, which hasn't taken the Doctor and Jo to "Metebelis Three" like the Doctor intended. Jo gets scared by some chickens and then finds a crate marked "Singapore" which gives them the clues they're not where they thought they were. The Doctor is convinced they're not on Earth, despite all evidence to the contrary - such as the manny they see up on board the ship - which leads to Jo asking

"Don't you ever admit that you're wrong?"

They sneak about the ship avoiding the mannys on board, one of whom is Harry Sullivan, two seasons before he would join UNIT and end up as the Doctor's companion. The Doctor and Jo are stuck hiding behind part of the set so they don't get noticed by Major Daly, who is there reading a book until he decides to have some sleeps. Jo shows the Doctor a magazine that has references to "London" and "1926" to try to convince him this is Earth after all.

There is a commotion from outside the room they're in, because a dinosaur has just invaded (a season too early) and is frightening the mannys on the ship - except for Harry, who is too stupid to be scared, he just wants to shoot it. No wonder he'll turn out to be a good fit for UNIT. The Doctor and Jo get caught trying to sneak away, and Harry concludes they're "stowaways."

A short scene with the grey aliens begins to make their characters a bit clearer. Some of them, the ones with speaking parts, are "the official species" who are racist towards the "Functionaries." One of them says

"They've no sense of responsibility. Give them a hygiene chamber and they store fossil fuel in it."

which is Robert Holmes once again being a bit more clever with his writing than he needs to be. The point is that the officials are in charge of the planet, while the Functionaries do all the W-word, like an allegory for cats and mannys. Therefore we are obviously expected to sympathise with the officials, which is made even clearer by having them played by actors such as Peter "Packer" Halliday and Michael "Davros" Wisher, while as for the Functionaries, well...

Harry is taking the Doctor and Jo to put them in prison when the Doctor sees a metal thingy on the floor, but Harry can't see it even when he looks right at it, which is a mystery. When they're locked in together, the Doctor tells Jo "that metal is unknown on Earth" so it is clear he is beginning to piece together the clues about what is going on. Seeing the name of the ship, he begins to let Jo, and us, in on it too.

Doctor: "Well, in its time, the SS Bernice was as famous a sea mystery as the Mary Celeste."

Jo: "Why? What happened?"

Doctor: "Nobody really knows. A freak tidal wave was the popular explanation, although the Indian Ocean was as flat as a millpond on that night."

Jo: "You mean she sank?"

Doctor: "No. She vanished, Jo."

There's more layers of mystery to come as Jo notices the clock has gone backwards, and the Doctor points out it is "broad daylight outside" when "it should be pitch dark."

Escaping easily from the room thanks to Jo (who's getting dangerously genre-savvy these days) having brought skeleton keys in anticipation of this eventuality, they find the mannys are repeating their dialogue from their first appearance earlier, down to Major Daly having sleeps. The Doctor knows that the dinosaur will also appear at the same point in this cycle, so he and Jo use this to cover their sneaking a bit better this time, and they manage to get back to the TARDIS.

The Doctor goes inside for a "magnetic core extractor" but runs back out when he hears Jo scream. This is because Jo has seen a giant manny's paw coming towards them, and it picks up the TARDIS.

This is so surprising that it is the cliffhanger moment. This whole episode is a masterclass from Robert Holmes in establishing a mystery for the viewer, promising to resolve it over the course of the remainder of the story.