Since this year is the 60th anniversary of Doctor Who, we had a special extra-looooong Doctor Who Night. Its theme was 'the Bad in the Good and the Good in the Bad.' Even the theme was long!
Caves of Androzani
The Good
Just about everything. I mean. this story is about as close to purrfection that a Doctor Who story can get without having either Paul Darrow or cats in it. Robert Holmes wrote a lot of great stories, but this is his magnum opus in which every character and plot thread come together beautifully. There are three great cliffhangers out of four episodes, culminating in the greatest depiction of the Doctor's regeneration at the end. It's Peter Davison's best story as the Doctor, and Colin Baker's too for that matter.
The Bad
This Magma Beast costume isn't all that great.
Other than that, the only downside to Caves of Androzani is that Doctor Who can't be as good as this all the time. It is Doctor Who written for adults, which is nice to have occasionally. And I mean really written for adults, with grown-up political themes and characterisation, not just putting in gratuitous sex and swearing (like Torchwood, mew). But even though the series could do with being like this more often than it is in reality, the makers mustn't forget the core audience of kittens and little mannys for too long.
If the BBC wanted to make a grown-up sci-fi series they could easily do it, but it wouldn't be Doctor Who. It would be more like... Blakes 7.
Earthshock
The Good
While not in the same league of quality as Caves of Androzani (few Doctor Who stories are), Earthshock is an attempt at making a blockbuster action story on a BBC budget, and it is a pretty good attempt for all that.
A lot of this story's reputation rests on the shock appearance of the Cybermannys at the end of part one, which was a genuine surprise twist for TV audiences in 1982 (it isn't called Earthshock of the Cybermannys for a start), but that doesn't hold up today since it is hard to avoid the presence of the Cybermannys on the DVD box, or the iPlayer episode thumbnails. But even without that it holds up, with the Cybermannys used well as an implacable foe for the Doctor, and we get some classic Cybermanny tropes returning, such as a traitor among the mannys and having Cybermannys bursting out of their cardboard containers to go on a march.
The Bad
This special effect doesn't hold up. They might have got away with it in the era before home video, DVD, iPlayer, etc. but even then it gets used twice because it appears in the cliffhanger to part three and then in the reprise at the start of part four, so twice the opportunity to spot the joins.
You might be surprised that I also consider the death of Adric to be a bad thing. Reducing the number of Companions from three to two was undeniably a benefit of this - almost every story of season 19 showed us proof that three Companions was too many - and choosing the most annoying of the three to get rid of was also to their credit, but the way this was done was... not great.
First, you're never going to convince that Doctor Who is an 'anyone can die' kind of show. It's not The Sandbaggers. Likewise, killing off a Companion to show 'consequences' doesn't W-word when there are dozens of other occasions when the regulars survive similar situations. These general complains aside, the specific way in which Adric was killed off was handled badly because he dies off-screen, and the only confirmation we get in Earthshock that he is definitely ded is that the end credits change to be silent* and over a picture of Adric's destroyed badge on a black background.
Without the meta-confirmation this could simply have been a cliffhanger, with audiences reasonably expecting that Adric would be rescued by the Doctor using his time machine in the next episode. So by having Earthshock end in this way it winds up being a problem for the next story as well...
But before we get to that...
Dimensions in Time
This 30th anniversary story is (for now) the midpoint of Doctor Who's history, so it seems appropriate that it should be the midpoint of our Doctor Who Night celebration.
The Bad
A 15 minute long story that had to juggle all the surviving Doctors, as many Companions as they could get, the Rani and a "menagerie" of monsters, plus a crossover with Eastenders and a requirement that it be shot in 3-D would have been a struggle for even the best of writers. But the way this was written it barely holds together in a coherent manner, with one thing happening after another for reasons that even Sylvester McCoy rattling off technobabble cannot justify.
The only thing that saves this from being utterly terrible is that it isn't long enough to outstay its welcome as a bit of lightweight Children in Need entertainment from the strange days of the 1990s after the cancellation of the original series.
The Good
It's undeniably lovely to see some of the Doctors and Companions on screen together again, regardless of the nonsense they're taking part in. This is also the only time that Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart appeared together with Colin Baker's Doctor, allowing him to complete the set.
The scene where Lalla Ward as Romana meets Grant and Phil Mitchell (Ross Kemp and... the other one) and icily no-sells their cockney hardmanny act is the one genuinely good bit, ending on her delivering the punchline
"Doctor who?"
By the way, Dimensions in Time is canon. All cats know this to be true.
Time-Flight
The Bad
So why can't the Doctor save Adric again?
Tegan: "We can change what happened if we materialise before Adric was killed."Doctor: "And change your own history?"Tegan: "Look, the freighter could still crash into Earth. That doesn't have to be changed. Only Adric doesn't have to be on board."Doctor: "Now listen to me, both of you. There are some rules that cannot be broken even with the TARDIS. Don't ever ask me to do anything like that again. You must accept that Adric is dead."
It's come to something when Tegan is the voice of reason, mew. If we take into consideration some of the stunts the Doctor would later perform with the TARDIS in the new series (especially when it came to saving River Sue) then it seems like he just didn't want to save Adric.
But this isn't even the worst of it. Within a minute the Doctor suggests a "special treat to cheer us all up" and after that Adric is practically forgotten about! This is then followed by a knockabout komedy bit when the Doctor dashes out of the TARDIS in a panic to check the cricket scores in a newspaper.
The story has barely begun, and Time-Flight has started as it means to go on. The Master is the baddy in it, but he spends the first half in disguise as "Kalid" for no reason other than so he can be revealed as the Master at the end of part two (including rigging up some green slime to come out of his face when he is 'killed' as Kalid). The studio sets are poor, and many of the effects rubbish - I have to wonder if most of the budget for this got spent on Earthshock instead. Either that or they spent it on getting that Concorde wheel into the studio!
Having just thinned down the regular cast by disposing of Adric, we now get a number of guest characters acting as additional, temporary Companions - Professor Hayter (played by Nigel "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling" Stock) and the three crewmannys from the Concorde (including among them Michael "Sandbaggers" Cashman). Hayter gets to make a noble sacrifice, while the Concorde pilots act like comic relief in their clumsy attempts to help the Doctor, including trying to fly the TARDIS like their aeroplane.
Therein lies the main problem with Time-Flight - that of its tonal inconsistency. If it had been an outright comedy then it could have succeeded much better on its own terms (save for being inappropriately placed right after the tragic - stop laughing - death of Adric), but the light-hearted bits sit uncomfortably alongside the attempts at serious drama.
The Good
Those comedic elements are the parts of the story that W-word best, from the comedy of errors at Heathrow that leads to the Doctor getting involved in the story in the first place (including the exasperated airport manager and his security manny, the latter played by Sir Frank from Yes Prime Minister), to Anthony Ainley's purposefully melodramatic performance as "Kalid" (though this might have been better if it had avoided certain racial stereotypes that mean it hasn't dated well), to the good-natured Concorde crew's clumsy attempts at assistance, and then culminating in the Doctor leaving Tegan on Earth by mistaik.
The Doctor didn't seem in too much of a hurry to go back for her either...
Arc of Infinity
The Bad
What is the worst thing about Arc of Infinity? Giving us Gallifrey on the cheap so the BBC production team could have a holiday film in Amsterdam? No. Wasting Michael Gough in a nothing part? No. Time Lords called "Damon" and "Talor" (pronounced as "Tailor")? No. The ridiculous-looking Ergon monster costume? No. Besides which, that's barely more silly than the helmet Colin Baker has to wear as Commander Maxil. The fact that they produced a story where the Doctor won by (effectively, to all intents and purposes) gunning down the baddy? Not quite, though that is an unforgivable way to end a Doctor Who story.
The worst thing about Arc of Infinity is that it is boring. The first three episodes are some of the most padded in the show's run - quite an achievement for a four-parter. They certainly wanted to get their money's worth out of the Amsterdam filming, with loads of extraneous shots on location bulking out the runtime. At the same time the events on Gallifrey move at a glacial pace, with Maxil and his guards shuffling the Doctor and Nyssa in and out of different rooms just in the hopes that we don't notice that they're not actually doing anything to progress the plot.
Then, in part four, we get something genuinely interesting and unique in the show's history happening (see "The Good" below) and instead of spending time on this, it instead focuses on an extended chase through Amsterdam, showing off the location as much as possible. This was a story with its priorities in all the wrong places.
The Good
Basically, it's this scene.
Omega (Peter "Davo" Davison, although he's voiced by Ian "Stuart Hyde" Collier) has escaped from the anti-matter universe into the real world, but the "transfer" is unstable so he only has a limited amount of time before he is either sent back or else goes
A metaphor for the brevity of life itself, this moment is all too fleeting.
Coda: The Daleks in Colour
Not strictly part of Doctor Who Night, but I also watched this this week.
The Bad
If you want to bring new mannys into watching the classics of Doctor Who, then colourising them makes sense, since it is well-known that, just as doggys see the world only in black and white, some mannys simply cannot watch TV when it is black & white.
What makes no sense, however, is cutting down a properly long seven-parter to less than half its runtime, and still filling it full of flashbacks to scenes from earlier in the selfsame story! Was the target audience for this not only mannys with no attention span but also no short-term memory? Mew!
The only conclusion I can draw is that this was an attempt to cut down Terry Nation's first masterpiece so that it resembled the sort of episode one might see in the new series of Doctor Who. My suspicions were confirmed by the incidental music - slathered over every second of every scene, and doing its best to drown out the dialogue. The resemblance to a modern television production was uncanny. RTD must be so proud - they've turned something written by El Tel in the 1960s into something that could have been produced by him today.
The Good
This scene has lost none of its power after 60 years. Purr.
* Well, that is if we don't count the alternative version:
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