Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Time Warrior Part Four

Linx is distracted from killing the Doctor by Sarah, and then distracted from killing Sarah by another of the scientists collapsing. The Doctor spots Professor Rubeish behind Linx, so talks to him while pretending to still be talking to Linx:

Doctor: "Every species has its own weakness, Linx. For instance, you can only be stunned by a blow on the probic vent, that small hole at the back of your neck."

Linx: "In our case, Doctor, it is a strength, because it means we must always face our enemies."

Except that Rubeish is then able to hit him on the "probic vent" with a plank of wood, knocking Linx out. Not so rubeish after all! Rubeish then helps the Doctor tie Linx up - can we please get him as the Companion as well as, or even instead of, Sarah?

Bloodaxe comes in to demand Linx go to see Irongron. The Doctor, hiding, puts him off for a bit by impersonating Linx's voice and manner, but he knows this will not keep Irongron away for long so he disguises himself as the robot and goes to meet Irongron.

Irongron, being Irongron, decides to have a fight with the robot to "see something of the mettle of this gift," so the Doctor is forced to fight with him. After Irongron and Bloodaxe together can't beat the Doctor, Irongron suggests shooting it with crossbow bolts to "slow this iron man's speed a little." The Doctor then gives himself away in a most un-Doctorish fashion, more like Harry Sullivan's way of talking:

Doctor: "Isn't that a bit unsporting, old man? I mean... sitting ducks and all that?"

Irongron: "This iron man talks like some Norman ninny. Lift up your visor."

When Irongron and his mannys see the Doctor's face they call him "the wizard" and capture him.

"No, the sword is too quick and clean a death for you. Well, since you are a wizard, then by wizardry shall you die!"

Sarah, meanwhile, has been captured as well, and forced to help cook noms for Irongron and his mannys. She tries out some feminism on the other servants, although this is played for laughs because it was made in the '70s:

Sarah: "I'm not afraid of men. They don't own the world. Why should women always have to cook and carry for them?"

Meg: "What else should we do?"

Sarah: "Stand up for ourselves. Tell the men you're tired of working for them like slaves."

Meg: "We are slaves."

Sarah: "Then you should set yourselves free."

Meg: "Oh, and how should we do that?"

Sarah: "Don't you want to be free?"

Meg: "Women will never be free while there are men in the world, girl. We have our place."

Sarah: "What subservient poppycock. You're still living in the middle ages!"

Mew, what a terrible joke! Fortunately, the Doctor's plan was for Sarah to doctor (speaking of terrible jokes, mew) the noms so they will send the mannys to sleep, and Sarah is now in the perfect position to do this. She distracts one of the other servants by shouting

"Look at that great spider!"

which is some clever foreshadowing of the end of the season.

Irongron finds Linx and rescues him, and takes him to where his mannys are using the Doctor for target practice with the "magic" guns Linx gave them.

They keep missing him until Sarah sends a chandelier across the room for him to swing on over their heds to escape. They run away, and get out of the castle when the Doctor does some Venusian Aikido to the guards on the gate. They escape all the way to Sir Edward's set castle, but the Doctor wants to go back when the "potion" has made all the mannys have sleeps in order to rescue the prisoners.

He and Sarah take Hal the Archer with them, and get straight past the sleeping mannys into the laboratory. The Doctor starts sending the scientists back to the future but Linx comes in. The Doctor uses a metal fan to deflect his pewpewpew attempts.

Irongron wakes up and mistaikenly blames Linx for making all his mannys sleep:

"What, sorcery? Treachery! That toad Linx bewitched us all!"

He runs into the laboratory just as Linx is about to pew the Doctor and Sarah, so he gets pewed instead. 

Linx goes to leave in his spaceship, but Hal comes in and shoots him in the probic vent - as we learned earlier, his one weakness. Phew, that was lucky!

The Doctor can tell from the noise that the spaceship is about to blow up, so he, Sarah and Hal run away. The spaceship blows up the castle with a tremendously poor bit of stock footage of an explosion. Outside the TARDIS, Hal says

Hal: "Goodbye. You are truly a great magician, Doctor."

Doctor: "To tell you the truth, Hal, I'm not a magician at all."

...except inasmuch as his technology is sufficiently more advanced than Hal's as to be indistinguishable. But then the Doctor's technological level is matched only by the level of his pedantry. Hal is amazed by the TARDIS dematerialising, so he is probably just left thinking the Doctor is a liar as well as a magician.

What's so good about The Time Warrior?

As the first Doctor Who story be to predominantly set in a historical time period since (not counting the Atlantis scenes of The Time Monster or other stories only partially or briefly set in the past) 1967's The Abominable Snowmen, it certainly isn't the history!

The time period it is set in is only vaguely sketched through the odd line of dialogue, and is impossible to pin down precisely. The Doctor tells Rubeish it is "the early years of the middle ages" but Irongron's references to "Normans" suggest a post-conquest setting, putting it in the High Middle Ages. The king is mentioned but not named, though Sir Edward's line about "interminable wars" suggests one of the Plantagenets may be most likely, as they not only fought a lot of wars (that alone wouldn't really narrow it down) but many of those were abroad.

Robert Holmes's approach to writing history is more akin to that of Monty Python and the Holy Grail (which was in the process of being made at the same time as The Time Warrior was first broadcast), where all the mannys have dirty castles and dirty faces, unless they're a king or a time traveller.

The script's strength, therefore, is in being witty without undermining the drama or tipping over into being an outright comedy (except maybe in a few places where Sarah's feminist character trait is established in order to then be sent up - do we detect the paw of script editor Terrance Dicks in this?), and this is especially apparent in the dynamic we see between the baddys Irongron and Linx.

Robert Holmes specialised in writing memorable double-acts, such as Vorg & Shirna and Kalik & Orum who we saw in Carnival of Monsters, and Irongron & Linx certainly qualify for that too (Irongron also forms a good double-act with his henchmanny Bloodaxe in a couple of scenes). Circumstances bring them together and force them to team up and, despite one being an alien and one a manny from the middle ages, they are both bloodthirsty warriors which makes them kindred spirits in a way - shown most clearly in the times each one's dialogue unknowingly mirrors the other's. But their similar natures as baddys also mean they can never truly trust each other, and this in the end leads to both of their undoing.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Time Warrior Part Three

This is one of those uncommon instances where the recap of the end of the previous episode adds in a little bit extra that we didn't see before, thereby changing the context of the cliffhanger. Here it is that Sarah and Hal are observing the fight scene between the Doctor and Irongron and his mannys.

Hal shoots the axe from Irongron's paw (I presume that, like Avon with Travis in Orac, he was "aiming for his head" or at least is going to claim that when asked why he didn't just shoot Irongron). The Doctor runs to where Sarah and Hal are, and gets captured by them.

Linx asks Irongron to help him recapture the Doctor, unaware that he has just been fighting with him.

"Is this Doctor a long shank rascal with a mighty nose?"

asks Irongron, lol.

At Sir Edward's castle, Sarah talks to the Doctor and he finally convinces her that he isn't a baddy:

Sarah: "How do I know you're telling the truth?"

Doctor: "Because I never lie. Well... hardly ever. You ever heard of UNIT?"

Sarah: "You work for UNIT?"

Doctor: "In an advisory capacity, yes. Well, they asked me to look into this question of the missing scientists for them."

Sir Edward and Lady Eleanor are harder to convince, and Sir Edward, who thinks the Doctor is a magician, says

"I shall spare your life if you cast your spells and incantations to help me against Irongron, Doctor. Refuse and you die."

The Doctor quickly thinks of an "illusion" to help them when Irongron's mannys attack.

When they are alone together, the Doctor explains more about himself when Sarah questions him:

Doctor: "If you mean 'am I a native of the planet Terra?' the answer is 'no, I'm not.'"

Sarah: "Well, what are you then?"

Doctor: "Me? I'm a Time Lord."

Sarah: "A Time Lord?"

Doctor: "Yes, that's right. And my people are very keen to stamp out unlicensed time travel. You can look upon them as galactic ticket inspectors, if you like."

Sarah: "Galactic ticket inspectors? Oh, I could murder a cup of tea. You're serious, aren't you?"

Doctor: "About what I do, yes. Not necessarily the way I do it."

Irongron, Bloodaxe and Linx are fooled by the fake mannys in the castle at first, but then when Linx shoots one he realises they are dummies. They attack the castle, but the Doctor also has smoke and "stink" bombs to throw at them, which makes them all run away.

The Doctor and Sarah sneak into the castle disguised as monks. They get into Linx's laboratory where they see his spaceship, and also Professor Rubeish and the hypno-eyesed mannys who are there. The Doctor finds Linx's "osmic projector" (time machine) which he hopes to use to send them back to their own time, but he wants to de-hypno-eyes them first. They are interrupted by Linx coming in and have to hide, but the Doctor comes out of hiding to stop Linx from pewpewpewing one of the mannys. 

The Doctor again tries to do a deal with Linx, but it goes exactly the same way as last time and ends with Linx pewpewpewing the Doctor. Even the theme music knows the Doctor isn't going to succeed this time because it starts up early, coming in before he gets pewed for the cliffhanger.

Countdown to what?

Blake's Threesome

Or should it be Blakes Threesome?

Ming the Merciless for the next Prime Minister?

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Time Warrior Part Two

Sarah is taken to see Irongron, where there is much confusion because she doesn't know she is back in the past, while Irongron doesn't understand much of what she says because he lives in the past. This is only sorted out when Linx comes in and spots that Sarah is from the future, so he uses his hypno-eyes device on her to find out about the Doctor.

"He is a scientist. He was at the research centre. He said he was very fond of delta particles."

Sarah then sneaks away while Linx is showing Irongron the fighting robot he has built for him, because neither Linx nor Irongron has the greatest of attention spans - and I'm a cat saying this!

Hal the Archer also got captured, and Irongron makes him fight against the robot. He and his henchmannys all lol when Hal's arrows have no effect on the robot, but the Doctor uses a crossbow to shoot the remote control out of Irongron's paws in order to stop it, which succeeds because in this time period they were still using Aristotelian laws of motion. Out of control, the robot turns upon Irongron and, while he and his mannys are distracted by this, Sarah helps Hal to run away.

Irongron goes to get Linx to turn the robot off, and sees him with his helmet off for the first time.

Linx: "Well? What is it you need to say to me? Didn't I tell you you might not find my face pleasing?"

Irongron:" Aye, and never was truer word spoken. Are they all so fair of face beyond the stars?"

While Linx is away, the Doctor sneaks into his laboratory and sees the missing scientists, all wearing hypno-eyes headphones (which I suppose Linx may have bought from Global Chemicals). Professor Rubeish is there, and he has resisted the hypno-eyes because 

"Oh, didn't work with me. Strong-minded, you see."

Rubeish adds a touch of comic relief to the episode, as with his unfazed, understated reaction when the Doctor tries to explain the situation to him:

Doctor: "Now Professor, listen to me. This may come as a shock to you, so steel yourself. You have been brought back to the early years of the middle ages."

Rubeish: "That's interesting. I've always maintained that the loop theory of time shouldn't have been so arrogantly dismissed by Crabshaw and his cronies."

Linx bursts in and catches the Doctor. He zaps him with his baton, which must be the Sontaran equivalent of the sonic screwdriver, it has so many different uses.

Hal has taken Sarah to meet Sir Edward and Lady Eleanor. Sarah has leapt to the wrong conclusion that the Doctor is "helping" Irongron and Linx. As a journalist with an attitude like that, Sarah could easily have had a successful career in the BBC's News and Current Affairs department if she hadn't become a Doctor Who Companion.

"I'm sure the Doctor's the key to it all. He was there when one of the scientists was taken. He has a machine that can travel through time. Well it must be him, and somehow we've got to stop him."

The Doctor talks with Linx. This is the first ever mention of the Sontarans' and the Rutans' "perpetual war" and, when Linx asks where the Doctor is from, the first time the planet Gallifrey is named on screen. It is treated quite casually, but is an important revelation (as befits the story broadcast closest to the show's 10th anniversary) and demonstrates that this wasn't written by Terry Nation, who would doubtless have called the planet of the Time Lords something like Tempura. Arguably the events of The Invasion of Time are foreshadowed when Linx says of the Time Lords

"Ah, yes. A race of great technical achievement, but lacking the morale to withstand a determined assault."

The Doctor refuses to help Linx voluntarily, so Linx puts hypno-eyes headphones on him, obviously forgetting how well that didn't go for them in the last story.

The Doctor keeps trying to persuade Linx not to interfere in history by giving mannys advanced weapons:

"You give them breech-loading guns now, they'll have atomic weapons by the seventeenth century. They'll have the capability to destroy their own planet before they're civilised enough to handle it."

I mean, all the evidence is that this has happened anyway, mew.

The Doctor can't ignore these headphones so easily, but once Linx has left him alone he can get Rubeish to turn them off for him. The Doctor escapes and immediately encounters Irongron and Bloodaxe, does a bit of Venusian Aikido on them and then runs away.

They chase the Doctor (or at least his stunt double) into the courtyard for an extremely unimpressive fight scene filmed entirely in long shot. Eventually the Doctor falls over and Irongron shouts in triumph

"He who strikes Irongron dies!"

Cliffhanger!

What would it have looked like if Patrick Troughton had played Jason King?

Like this, I suppose.

Jason King: The Stones of Venice

Jason King was the spinoff from Department S that ran from 1971-72, keeping only Peter "Klytus (I'm bored)" Wyngarde's flamboyant Jason King as the main character. The telefantasy TV detective genre was well-established by the early '70s, so Jason King attempted to stand out from the crowd by playing around with and subverting all the by now familiar formulas. This was most obviously accomplished by having the character of Jason King, a writer of James Bondesque spy novels, continually comment on the events of the stories he himself was taking part in as though he himself had written them.

While other episodes of the series would take this even further (most obviously Wanna Buy A Television Series? in which the main plot takes place within a framing device of Jason King trying to sell the idea of a TV series to a producer, and includes several instances of scenes being shown twice and changed when the producer insists to Jason they be made more exciting), one of the most enjoyable instances of this playing with the format is found in The Stones of Venice.

This episode is set, as you might guess from the title, in Venice, so it includes a load of stock footage to try and convince us it is really taking place there (and not in a TV studio somewhere in the UK), plus one scene of a Wyngarde lookalike in some dark glasses who is actually on location in a place that could even be taken for St Mark's Square.

It begins in media res, showing us the end of the story before the beginning when we have no context to know what is going on. That in itself is not a major subversion of the format (though it isn't exactly common either), but this is only the start. The police then arrive to arrest Jason King, and the police captain is played by...

Roger Delgado!

This would have originally been broadcast on ITV in March 1972, around the same time as Delgado was also starring in The Sea Devils on BBC1. No stranger to playing telefantasy rentabaddys, here his role is a bit different - although Delgado's police captain arrests Jason King and tries to interrogate him, this becomes a framing device whereby King tells the episode's story to him in the form of extended flashbacks. This is also an excuse for much comedy where the captain is in the dark about events just as much as the audience is, putting him in the position of audience surrogate, and he reacts with increasingly exaggerated incredulity to the implausible occurrences that King unfolds.

The plot is therefore given an excuse to be even more outlandish than is typical even for this series, which frequently sent up the common tropes of telefantasy detective stories. Here it includes a sidekick for Jason King called "Toby" who is a champagne-drinking dog; identical twins who are both played by the same actress (including a poor quality split-screen effect for the one scene where they appear together), one of whom pervs on Jason King when he is changing his clothes (a complete reversal of the usual situation when Jason King is involved); and a a computer that can be trained to write novels in the style of Jason King by feeding in all his 'real' (that is, real within the confines of the TV show) novels, thus anticipating modern computer 'machine learning' (a.k.a. 'Artificial Intelligence') by about 50 years.

The combination of all these different elements makes for a completely ludicrous hour of television, but it is a lot of fun and Delgado is a great comic foil for Wyngarde, once again demonstrating what a versatile and underrated actor he really was.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Time Warrior Part One

The Time Warrior is the first story of season 11 of Doctor Who, starring Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and it introduces Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith.

It starts with a new title sequence for a new era. No matter how many times I watch stories from season 11, I always associate this "time tunnel" sequence with Tom Baker's Doctor, because it was used for six of his seasons and for only one of Jon Pertwee's.

The story properly starts with Irongron (David "Spiker" Daker) and his sidekick Bloodaxe having noms. Bloodaxe looks out the window and sees a rather poor bit of SFX, but it's still enough to impress him because this far back in history they didn't have CGI, and probably not even CSO! He cries out

"The stars are falling!"

Irongron says it is "Irongron's star" and wants to capture it. He takes his henchmannys and rides out on location where they find a spaceship, out of which comes "a Sontaran officer" called Lynx, which is also a type of cat (the best kind of lynx) as well as a brand of deodorant (the worst kind of lynx). In terms of quality I'd place the Sontaran Lynx somewhere in between those two. He plants some tiny flags and says

"By virtue of my authority as an officer of the army space corps, I hereby claim this planet, its moons and its satellites, for the greater glory of the Sontaran Empire."

Aliens quite often want to take over the world in Doctor Who, but this is the first time we have seen one claim it as a fait accompli.

Lynx's spaceship is damaged and he does a deal with Irongron to give him "magic" weapons "that can strike a man dead from far away" in return for his help with repairing the ship. When it turns out that Irongron and his mannys are too primitive to have anything that would help him, Lynx turns to camera and says

"Then I must take them from those who have."

It cuts to the Doctor and the Brigadier, where the Brigadier is telling the Doctor that scientists and "ultra-secret equipment" have been going missing, so the Brigadier is going to keep all his remaining scientists in "one of the most top secret security establishments in the whole country."

The Doctor meets Professor Rubeish, who is already objecting to the Brigadier's plan. He introduces the Doctor to "Miss Lavinia Smith."

Doctor: "I read your paper on the teleological response of the virus. A most impressive piece of work."

Lavinia: "Thank you."

Doctor: "Particularly when I realise you must have written it when you were five years old."

Of course she is really Sarah Jane Smith, a journalist who has demonstrated a high level of competence by penetrating "one of the most top secret security establishments in the whole country" but then thrown it away by getting busted within about 30 seconds. The Doctor immediately recognises that she has potential as a new Companion when he says

"Well, you can make yourself useful - we need somebody around here to make the coffee."

Lol, the Doctor is being a komedy sexist in order to give Sarah the chance to demonstrate that she is a komedy feminist.

Back in the past, some time has passed. Lynx has set up a room with scientific equipment, and he has made guns for Irongron. Irongron has captured one of his enemies, Eric the squire of Sir Edward, and Lynx hypno-eyeses him so that he answers Irongron's questions. For all that they are helping each other, Irongron and Lynx don't get on. Lynx says

"Did I not need their aid..."

and Irongron mirrors this when he says

"Did I not need his help, I'd..."

The Doctor and Sarah also don't get on with each other. She asks him about the equipment he is setting up, and he replies with both the technical and the simple explanation for the benefit of us watching at home:

Doctor: "That's my alarm clock."

Sarah: "Oh Doctor, kindly don't be so patronising. Now what is it really?"

Doctor: "It's a rhondium sensor. It detects delta particles. At a preset spectrum density of fifteen ams, it oscillates this little cylinder there, which promotes a vacuum in there which wakes me up. Clear?"

Sarah: "Well, why do you want to be woken up when it detects delta particles?"

Sarah's followup question helps differentiate her from Jo Grant, or at least what Jo Grant was like all the way back in her first story. The Doctor's device starts making noises, and Professor Rubeish disappears.

The Doctor uses his device to show a superimposed image of Lynx (the Lynx Effect, lol. Also mew), but it fades away after UNIT soldiers take a shot at it. The Brigadier runs in and demands the Doctor tell him what's going on.

Doctor: "Well, I thought I saw a man in armour."

Brigadier: "A man in armour? You mean, old-fashioned armour? You mean a ghost?"

Doctor: "Oh, I very much doubt it."

The Brigadier should know better than to throw around words like "ghost" in front of the Doctor, or has he forgotten the strange case of Sir Reginald Styles? The Doctor does, eventually, give the Brigadier (and us) an explanation of sorts:

"Someone's operating a matter transmitter, and the really odd thing is there's a time transference too. It's being worked from several centuries ago - past and present mixed up. Very interesting, that."

The Doctor has "a fix" on the source and plans on going there in the TARDIS. While he is still talking to the Brigadier we see Sarah sneak into the TARDIS behind their backs. The Doctor then gets inside and the TARDIS dematerialises.

The Doctor arrives outside Irongron's castle, where he says to the TARDIS

"Well done, old girl. Absolutely on target... for once."

He walks out of shot and then Sarah comes out of the TARDIS too.

Hal the Archer (Jeremy "Boba Fett" Bulloch) is about to shoot Irongron and make this a very short story indeed, when Sarah interrupts him:

"Excuse me, could you tell me where the nearest telephone..."

Hal's shot misses and he runs away, chased by Irongron's mannys. One of them captures Sarah, which the Doctor sees and he thinks out loud to himself

"How the blazes did she get here?"

which is an odd line because this is one story where there is an obvious (albeit wrong) explanation for how a character could have travelled through time without using the TARDIS.

The Doctor follows the manny who captured Sarah back into the castle, and then he hides from Lynx as he comes out. The Doctor nods, obviously recognising a Sontaran. Then, for our benefit, Lynx removes his helmet to show off the costume for his hed.

Potato face!

How typical of writer Robert Holmes to subvert the norms and conventions of an episode one cliffhanger - there was no real need for Lynx to remove his helmet, we already knew he was an alien, and his face isn't even scary after all that.