Monkey Challenge: The Fake Pilgrims

Something's not quite right...

This is an entertaining episode which spices up a typical Monkey plot with the novelty of the demons-of-the-week disguising themselves as the pilgrims to discredit the real pilgrims and ensure they are not welcome in any of the towns or villages they pass through.

Then, when Monkey and the others are weakened, dying of hunger and thirst, they strike!

Unfortunately, there was a small but fatal flaw in the fake pilgrims' plan - they're shit at fighting. The climactic fight, where Monkey turns himself, Pigsy and Sandy into an army of tiny versions of themselves to take on the fake pilgrims and finally defeat them.

There's a double delight to the fake pilgrims - not only do they look hilarious when in their disguises, their costumes when in their real forms are among the silliest the series has ever seen - and that's saying something. The silliest has to be the one that looks like an evil clown, with a white-painted clown face and a costume seemingly just made from dozens of balloons!

For a joyfully silly Monkey episode I'd recommend this one as being up there among the best of season 2.

And no sign of any evidence that this was too violent or gory for the original TV run - one of the fake pilgrims ends up getting chopped in half by Monkey, but it's done in a cartoony fashion with no blood.

Monkey Challenge: Better The Demon You Know

Well from Between Heaven and Hell the only way to go was up. This wasn't an exceptional (or even very memorable) episode, but a breath of fresh air after last week's rubbish.

Once again we had Buddhist philosophy side-by-side with Monkey craziness, exemplified by the climax of the story when the day is saved by the intervention of a many-armed Buddhist saint/goddess* who only spares the evil-spirit-of-the-week from being sent to Hell if her son and daughter-in-law can climb a mountain to fetch some of the sacred carrots that grow there.

*Though certainly not to be considered a deus-ex-machina ending, since the invoking of the goddess was a crucial part of the plot.

Tom Baker vs the Master

Yesterday I was investigating Duncan's Doctor Who DVDs when I saw that three of them were not on the shelf, they were in a bag with some noms. I then got sleepy and discovered that the inside of the bag was a nice comfy place for a cat to have sleeps.

When I woke up I found out that the bag had been moved (and was now being played by a different bag, but things changing like that is something I am used to from actors on TV) and I was not at home any more!

I was scared for a moment but then I found out that there was going to be Doctor Who on where I was, and instead of a TV it was being shown on a projector screen. It took Duncan and other mannys a while to set this up so I had time for more sleeps but then the Doctor Who night started.

"Through the millennia, the Time Lords of Gallifrey led a life of ordered calm, protected against all threats from lesser civilisations by their great power. But this was to change. Suddenly, and terribly, the Time Lords faced the most dangerous crisis in their long history..."

...trying to get the projector to work, lol!

The Deadly Assassin is one of the best Doctor Who stories ever, it is very exciting all the way through. In part 1 the Doctor knows that the Time Lord President is going to be assassinated and at the end of the episode it looks like it is the Doctor that does it!

Of course the Doctor is not really the baddy and in part 2 we find out he was trying to shoot the real baddy but he missed. The Doctor goes into the Matrix and finds he is in a world created by the baddy and they have to fight. At the end of part 2 the Doctor is about to get run over by a train!

The Doctor and the baddy spend the whole of part 3 fighting in the Matrix. The baddy is revealed and he tries to drown the Doctor in a very scary cliffhanger.

I wouldn't have been scared if Scary Cat had been there with me, but he was still at home so I was anxious to see what happened next. I'm glad I didn't have to wait a whole week to find out, because we watched part 4 straight away.

The baddy, Goth, is revealed to only be a henchmanny of the Master, who has a scary face! The Doctor beats the Master with the help of Castellan Spandrell and Co-Ordinator Engin, who are two old Time Lord mannys, but the Master gets away in his own TARDIS that looks like a clock. Will the Master return?

Yes! The next story we watched was The Keeper Of Traken. The Master returns, played by a different actor, and this time he is trying to take over Traken instead of Gallifrey, though otherwise his plan is quite similar.

He has a henchmanny who does his work for him - Kassia the consul is, like Goth, an important manny on the planet but not in charge, and the Master's plan is for them to become the manny in charge and then the Master will get control of a source of power from them.

The Doctor has help from Adric and Nyssa in this story - they are young while Spandrell and Engin were old. The Doctor beats the Master in the end but he gets away in his own TARDIS that looks like a clock. Will the Master return?

Yes. In fact he returns before the end of the story when he takes over Nyssa's father Tremas so he is played by another actor again from now on.

I didn't think this was as good as The Deadly Assassin because it was not quite as exciting and the setting of Traken was not as atmospheric as that of Gallifrey (it was also the worst utopia ever). I may have enjoyed this more if I hadn't seen an even better story just before it, but it was still good.

Logopolis is the very next Doctor Who story after The Keeper Of Traken. I found it very hard to understand everything that happened, because it was full of science-sounding things and I am only a cat.

I did follow the gist of the story though - it was full of danger for the Doctor after he met a mysterious white manny and spoke to him in secret. The Doctor and Adric then went to the planet Logopolis but they didn't know that Tegan was on board the TARDIS too.

The Master tries to kill the Doctor by using maths to shrink the TARDIS with the Doctor inside it. There is a funny bit when the tiny Doctor sees Adric's huge face on the scanner, then Nyssa (who was on Logopolis too) and Tegan's big faces.

The Doctor makes a "DO NOT WANT" face.

He is rescued by Adric and the Monitor (Logopolis is full of old mannys and the Monitor is their leader) who use maths to save him, so maths can be used for good as well as evil.

The Master then tries to take over Logopolis. Presumably he thinks it must have some great power source like Gallifrey and Traken had, but he accidentally kills everyone because it turns out that maths was the only thing keeping them alive (or something like that, I think).

The stakes are then unexplicably raised when it turns out that the whole universe was being kept going by maths, and the only way to save it is to go to Earth and do some science there.

The Doctor and the Master have to team up, which makes for an unusual but effective cliffhanger to part 3, but in part 4 the Master, to the surprise of nobody except the Doctor, tries to take over the universe.

The Doctor beats the Master by unplugging his machine, but then he falls off the building! The white manny, the Watcher, turns out to have been the Doctor all the time, and the Doctor regenerates.

Logopolis has not been a great story up to this point, until the last scene strengthens the whole by tying it together.

The last scene is really powerful because it's the end for Tom Baker's Doctor, and the moment really has been prepared for by clever foreshadowing. So it is sad but at the same time a happy ending - a new Doctor appears.

I was very tired after watching three Doctor Who stories in a row, so I went back inside the bag to have sleeps. When I woke up again I was back home on the Buddha Cushion with my friends and my fez. Was it all a dream? Well... no, because there are photos.

Mighty Fezthulhu

Behold my magnificent fez! You must now address me as "Fezthulhu." Although I may still answer to "Great Fez-wearing Khadulu," or "Aaaaaiiiiieegh" depending on how much sanity you have lost upon seeing me. My fez does not make me any less mighty, in fact I am mightier than ever! Please now lose D100 points of sanity...

Fugitives from Chance

Pirates! Yarr!

""One-Eye! Head for the gap as she opens! Tooth! Take some men starboard and make sure no one boards. To the death, lads! Cut their livers out!""

Captain John Mander is a pirate, but he is in trouble because his ship is "surrounded by His Majesty's navy, cornered with no hope of escape." But then a space ship comes along and beams them up.

After this it is time for the Doctor and Jo to enter the story. They are in the TARDIS "on their way to Rojak in the Mentrola Galaxy" when the Doctor detects that a planet is about to blow up. He also hears a radio signal from the planet.

""Number two gunner, stand by... Mr Swanson, check positions... on target..."

"Gosh! Is that coming from the planet?"

"It is indeed, Jo, and it sounds very earth-like to me.""

The Doctor lands the TARDIS on the pirate ship and he gets knocked out and captured straight away to save time - we are two pages into the story already, have to get a move on.

"The Doctor looked around and his jaw dropped in amazement. The whole ship, the deck, the ropes, even the sails were all made of metal! But what amazed him even more was the figure he saw rising from a hatch nearby. The huge figure, the rough, violent face, the long hair and unkempt beard, it was John Mander - made entirely from gleaming, polished gold!"

I think this means the Doctor recognises John Mander, but I'm not sure. Maybe that is just for us because we saw John Mander earlier when he got abducted and he wasn't so fabulous then?The Doctor is worried about the TARDIS.

""Don't fret none, Long Nose. She ain't been scuttled. She's too valuable for that. Queer little thing, ain't she?""

He calls the Doctor "Long Nose" lol. The Doctor tries to explain about the planet being about to explode, but the pirates are more worried about another ship that wants to fight them.

""You better explain yourself, Silver Locks," said Mander."

He calls the Doctor "Silver Locks" lol. The other ship is captained by Botega and is more advanced - the radio signal the Doctor heard came from him. Mander explains:

"His ship is full of things that we don't understand. There's no sails for a start and her guns are real accurate. Last time we fought we 'ad to 'ave a removal order, else 'e would 'ave sent us down to the bottom."

Lol that last bit sounds rude. I don't know what a "removal order" is and neither does the Doctor so he asks:

""What is a removal order?"

Mander brought a small instrument out of his pocket.

"See this? If you press that button there it means you want a removal order. If they grant you one, they take you to the penance box for a spell."

"They?"

"The things what run this planet. The things that brought us here."

Mander explains that all the ships on this planet were abducted from the Earth just before they would have faced impossible odds, and now they are forced to fight each other. The aliens that run the planet are "small bird-like creatures" with force fields. All the mannys get their bodies turned into different things when they are brought here.

"Some of his crew were marble, some coal, some water. Botega himself was made of glass."

This sounds perfectly reasonable to me, not to say fabulous. I wonder if any were turned into socks? After almost a whole page of exposition, the Doctor comes up with a plan to get things moving again quickly. He uses his radio in the TARDIS to contact Captain Botega to bring all the mannys in on the plan, except we don't get to know about it yet. We will have to wait and see what it is when they do the plan.

"High up among the clouds, in a city that showed the most stunning mastery over gravitational forces, a group of bird men were watching the happening with growing excitement.

"Botega's firing to miss. I up ten meggalodes."

"Mander's out to kill himself. Sixteen meggalodes he won't use the removal button.""

This sounds a lot like what happened in the Star Trek episode The Gamesters of Triskelion, only with pirates instead of Captain Kirk so not quite as good. The aliens are gambling over the mannys they are making fight. I bet the Doctor ends up making a wager with them to save everybody.

Botega's ship wins and captures all the pirates and the Doctor and Jo.

"The glass captain addressed the Doctor. "Well, we have done our part. We have fought without killing. Now you must do yours."

"Are all your men on deck?"

"Yes."

"Then press the button for a removal order."

"But... But..."

"Damn it, man, do as I say! We're running short of time!"

"There's only three pages left!" (the Doctor doesn't say that really.) The aliens are confused why Botega pressed the button when he won, so they investigate. This is what the Doctor wanted because now he can speak to them.

The Doctor warns them that their planet is about to blow up, but they tell him that they already knew about this and are going to use technology to make the energy blow the Earth up instead. They try to claim they are not baddys:

"We prefer peaceful coexistence."

(Starcat would like to interrupt to say this bit reminds him of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Conspiracy. Thank you Starcat, now you can go and have a sleep.)

"But our recent visits to earth have convinced us that something must be done. Already they are struggling through the rudimentaries of space travel, but at the same time they have polluted their lands and their seas, they have stocked more explosives than are needed to blow the entire planet up, and they have not progressed one iota towards any kind of emotional maturity. We have taken it upon ourselves to remove this pestilent sphere from the skies."

They sound a lot like baddys to me. Jo's counter-argument is:

""Why, you overgrown budgerigar, I'd like to wring your neck!"

Maybe not the most helpful thing to add to the conversation at that moment? The aliens show the Doctor their big Space Gun (it's not really called that, although I think it would be a better story if it was).

"The Doctor stepped forward.

"I'll make a wager you don't do it."

"A wager? You are in no position to make a wager."

"I have our lives and the lives of every person on earth against your own.""

Yay! I was right. The aliens are confident the Doctor can't win so their leader agrees. The Doctor bets they "can never destroy earth." All the mannys from the ships rush at the Space Gun but there is a force field around it so they cannot get it, and then the Doctor captures the alien leader because he doesn't have a force field.

"I knew you would have to remove your own protective force field in order to set up another round the projecto-scope."

Oh yes, the Space Gun is really called the "projecto-scope." With their leader captured the Doctor makes the aliens fire their projecto-scope in to space harmlessly, and then they have to let all the mannys go because he won the bet.

The aliens, who are called "Melovians," tell the Doctor they were fascinated by chance but they say they will be good from now on. The Doctor and Jo leave in the TARDIS.

This was quite a good story, if a bit like Star Trek, but the joke at the end is terrible (which is also like a lot of Star Trek).

""I wonder..."

"What?"

"Oh nothing. I just wondered whether they'll ever invite you back there if they ever discover how to control chance."

"I wouldn't like to bet on it.""

Monkey Challenge: Between Heaven and Hell

I'm afraid that I have no choice but to give this episode a slagging as it is, without a doubt, the worst episode of Monkey - so far, though with only six to go I feel quite confident the title will not be taken from it. Or should I perhaps say I really hope it isn't, as a worse episode than this doesn't bear thinking about.

Let's start with the title - "Between Heaven and Hell" - it's bland, and tells us nothing about what we are about to see. Really this ought to be called something like Monkey's Adventures in the Land of Greedy Dicks, at least then you would sort of know what you're letting yourself in for.

The story itself, such as we may charitably call it, sees the pilgrims visit a Buddhist shrine where, for a donation, visitors may crawl through a hole to get a glimpse of paradise. Tripitaka instantly recognises it for the obvious con it is, but because there wouldn't be an episode if he didn't then he goes along with his disciples' requests to visit it.

Sandy gets stuck halfway through the hole, meaning he can't get out and nobody else can go through after him. None of the disciples are able to use their magic to free him - again, the only reason for this is to avoid short-circuiting the plot of the episode - so they will have to break the shrine's wall to get him out.

The Buddhist priest demands an outrageous sum, 100,000 of the local currency, to pay for repairs and as compensation for the loss of the shrine's income in the meantime, and then we get one of only three (small) good bits in the episode, when Tripitaka cuts through the priest's euphemisms and calls this what it is: a ransom.

There then follows a series of unfunny escapades in which they try to raise the money, with Tripitaka and Monkey acting completely out of character all the while. Tripitaka sells the horse (though gets him back by the end of the episode), and Monkey tries to pawn his magic wishing staff and flying cloud but finds no takers.

Eventually, after 25 minutes, we get to something more interesting (though that's not saying much). Pigsy is employed to change his shape and act as a decoy princess, to draw assassins away from a real princess. Initially unwilling to risk his own neck, he is tempted by the offer of half the money needed to save Sandy.

We then get the second good bit of the episode, which is the facial expressions of the actress playing Pigsy-as-princess, both amusing and characterful, and conveying well that this is not the real princess.

Monkey, meanwhile, is employed by the assassins to kill the princess, having been promised exactly enough money to free Sandy. Disguised, he attacks Pigsy-as-princess and they fight. The trope of two friends, both disguised, fighting each other, is an old one and a good one - I recall a similar tale involving King Arthur and one of his knights - but it is completely wasted in this atrocious episode.

Pigsy gets in a lucky blow and stuns Monkey, and his mask slips. Once the explanations are over, Monkey comes up with a plan to cheat the assassins out of the money - a simple one, Pigsy will just pretend to be a dead princess.

This leads on to the last good bit of this episode (and if I'm making it sound like having three good bits in an episode is a lot, please remember that it really, really isn't when taken with all the piss-poor nonsense that surrounds it) when both Monkey and the assassins double-cross each other at the same time.

Sandy, meanwhile, has manages to get out of the hole by himself, simply by starving until he was slim enough to escape. When Tripitaka, Monkey and Pigsy go back for him they find the priest still demanding the money. Monkey has, like the audience, had enough by this point, and gives the priest a beating for his greed instead.

I can see no evidence that this episode was left out of the original TV run for being too violent or gory. I think it was left out because it was shit.

Dead on Arrival

Jo feels like she has "eaten ten tons of spaghetti" because she has been in the Doctor's "molecular adjuster." It has also made her look nothing like Katy Manning.

The Doctor puts the power on "ultra-boost " when "Suddenly..... Edgar Hodges - "

I don't know what this means or who Edgar Hodges is. Professor Cat has worked out an elaborate theory which he says 'proves' that Edgar Hodges is the Master. I think that he is a silly cat and this story is off to a silly start.

Jo "desperately" searches for the Doctor. Presumably she has already looked for him at UNIT HQ before hitting on the idea of looking for him at a random church.

I think Jo says "Ohy a coffin!" which is a funny thing to say.

While this story has been very silly up until now, the bit where Jo sees her own body lying in the coffin is very scary and effective.

Jo goes "Aaaaaiiiiieegh" and I imagine most mannys would do the same. Cats, of course, wouldn't immediately recognise themselves, they would just think "Oh what a shame that a very handsome cat is dead."

The Doctor goes back to his laboratory where the Brigadier (we can tell it's the Brigadier and not some other manny with a moustache - I will explain how after the next page) is pointing at a big flashing red light. The Doctor does not seem too concerned that there is a a hole in the space-time continuum until he sees that somebody is "trying to get through" it.

This story cleverly doesn't tell us the manny with a moustache is the Brigadier, it shows us instead because we can see his Brigadier rank insignia.

And it is a good thing that is there, because there were a lot of mannys with moustaches in the '70s and it could have been any of them.

Well he played Commander Maxil, why not some manny in UNIT as well?

The Doctor was going to set up a force field but now he is getting a message to remove his force field. I suppose he must have set one up since the last page.

How can Jo warn the Doctor about the aliens when he can't see or hear her? I'm sure we will get the answers soon, there's only two pages left to go.

Removing the force field causes the Doctor to turn into a ghost like Jo. I don't know why. Maybe we will get explanations on the last page.

Yay! The Earth is safe and everything is explained. Oh wait, I don't understand anything about that explanation. Neither does the Brigadier or Jo.

The only thing that is explained is why Jo doesn't look like Katy Manning in this story. Clearly from the last picture that is because Jo is being played by Katherine Parkinson (from The IT Crowd) in this story.