The Volcanis Deal

The Doctor and Turlough are on the planet Volcanis, where there are lots of volcanoes. That sounds to me like a proper sensible Terry Nation name for a planet.

Beneath his feet the ground heaved and split, gushing boiling mud and glowing lava. Flames licked round him with a heat so fierce that if the insulation in his white frock coat and cricket whites had failed for even a second, he would have been roasted alive.

It is good to know that the Doctor wears sensible clothes for the environment. I don't know why cricket players need their clothes to be volcano-proof, but then I'm only a cat. The Doctor thinks about space travel for a few paragraphs which are interesting and add depth, even if they are tangential to the story itself.

During the first few centuries of space travel, ordinary men had only been able to reach the planets of their own solar system.
In time, these had been fully developed, and it seemed that exploration had reached a dead-end because of the enormous distances which separated the sun from even the nearest stars. The Doctor was musing on this. He had no such restrictions.
He had made contact with hundreds of alien races on thousands of planets, in many different time dimensions, which had been colonised many light-years from parent Earth. But countless billions of worlds still remained unvisited.
No two worlds were alike. Many were terrifying; all were fascinating. And to a seasoned traveller like the Doctor, the proposition of landing on any new planet always made him inwardly cautious but deliriously happy.

The Doctor and Turlough investigate the planet briefly before the Doctor says "Not much here, Turlough. Let's push on, shall we?" and he wants to go to another planet - or possibly a star, it's a bit confused - called Ilium.

Just before going back into the Tardis, the Doctor throws his cricket ball away, which serves no purpose in the story other than to explain what's going on in this picture. It doesn't, however, explain Davo's mighty chin in the picture.

The Tardis takes off and then the writer gives away the fact that they have never really watched Doctor Who before writing this story.

The Doctor, now wielding a cricket bat, was consulting his astro-charts, and thinking of a recent West Indies Test Match at Lords.
They left Volcanis at a comparatively slow speed.
It wasn't until they were in deep interstellar space that it was safe for the Tardis to break through mil lions of faster-than-light barriers. From then on, the automatic computers took over navigation, until warning lights on the circular console informed them that they were approaching Ilium.
The Tardis suddenly slowed to normal speed time, about a hundred million miles beyond the orbit of Ilium's outermost planet.

Gamma Longcat wants to know what lions have to do with lightspeed barriers, but we don't have time to ponder that mystery because it is at this point that the story goes completely mad and the Doctor's cricket bat turns into a snake.

Snake! It's a snake! Oh, it's a snake!

The Doctor wrestles with the snake for a moment before it turns back into a cricket bat. He has a cup of "Indian blend tea" and has just concluded that he imagined it - even though Turlough saw it too - when "the Tardis fire-deterrent sprinklers" shoot "red hot slivers of metal" on the floor.

"Either I'm going crazy, or something is happening to my Tardis!" said the Doctor, then he heard Turlough shouting to him. His companion was gazing at him, his eyes bulging in horror.
"Turlough, what is it?" asked the Doctor taking a step towards him.
"Some - something terrible has happened to you, Doctor. You've grown two heads!"

Dun-dun-dun! That seems like the place to put a cliffhanger to me.

Did somebody order A LARGE HAM?!

City at the Edge of the World is the first in a run of four good episodes of Blakes 7. Aside from just having a great script, it is memorable for two reasons.

The first is that it guest-stars future-sixth Doctor Colin Baker as Bayban the Butcher. I don't really understand how manny noms work, or else I would make a joke here about butchers and hams.

As handsome as Colin Baker is here, I have to regret the fact that this was made in 1980, because in the '70s he looked like this:

That moustache. Purr.

Where was I? Oh yes, the second reason that City at the Edge of the World is memorable is that it is the only episode in all of Blakes 7 where Vila gets to be the main character.

He also gets to have a relationship with Kerril that is almost as short as a cat relationship. It starts with her pointing her gun at him...

(Meanwhile Bayban is doing the same thing with his friend Sherm.)

...By the time Vila has broken into the city's vault they are holding hands...

...By the time they have been teleported over 3,000 light years away to a spaceship they are up to having hugs and kiffs...

...And by the time they decide to come back again they are on to having arguments and huffs. It takes a bit longer than three minutes but it's as close as I've ever seen it done by mannys.

I think it was at this exact moment that Paul Darrow swore he would have his revenge on Colin Baker for daring to out-ham him in his own show.

Wayhey! Oh myyyyy, etc.

Bayban decides to go out with a HAM BANG! (A bit like Vila and Kerril did earlier, lol.)

At the end of the episode Vila looks like he enjoyed himself being the star for once. The final exchange of dialogue between him and Orac is one of the best examples of a Star Trek-esque 'comedy' ending in the series:

"I think I've just made the biggest mistake of my life."
"In the light of your previous record, that seems unlikely. I would predict that there are far greater mistakes waiting to be made by someone with your obvious talent for them."
"Shut up, Orac. Still, it's a comforting thought. Let's hope they've all got good legs."

Jarvik and the Giant Ant

If any episode of Blakes 7 can said to be so very bad it is really good then that episode is Harvest of Kairos.

I have already reviewed Harvest of Kairos back in 2010, but this time I want to talk more about the conflicting ideas in it that make it so bad, because it does have a couple of good ideas in there buried under Jarvik and the giant ant.

Let's start with Jarvik; his first line of dialogue and his first action:

"Woman, you're beautiful."

Ben Steed starts as he means to go on in his first of three sexist scripts for the series. Jarvik is a MAN. He seduces Servalan by being the manliest manny MAN in the series (or at least he, and Ben Steed, thinks he is) and goes on to successfully capture the Liberator and beat Tarrant in a fight, all by being a MAN.

Here's some more dialogue from Jarvik to Servalan:

"But when was the last time you felt the warmth of the Earth's sun on your naked back? Or lifted your face to the heavens, and laughed with the joy of being alive? How long since you wept at the death of a friend? Doesn't mean a thing to you, does it, Madam President? You've surrounded yourself with machines and weapons, mindless men and heartless mutoids, and when they've done your work, and the machines have done your thinking, what is there left in you that feels?"

Jarvik is so camp it becomes funny instead of offensive, and his scenes end up as immensely enjoyable for it.

Also he is very manly too.

One of the main reasons I could never consider this episode as truly good is because the regular characters all have to act stupid in order to make Jarvik seem clever. Avon rescues the others from one set of Federation guards that capture them, but the second set are not cleverly hidden at all and would have been discovered instantly if they had looked inside the big boxes before stealing them.

Avon gets a couple of clever moments, but on the whole Paul Darrow does not look like he thought much of the script and seems to play most of his scenes and Avon's lines with a contemptuous, bored expression - even when captured by Servalan.
Maybe he is just jealous that she got to kiff Jarvik instead of him?

Down on the planet Kairos we see the giant ant monster, filmed out in the open in broad daylight because the director wanted to show off how impressive and scary it is.

Whenever I see mannys watch this episode they always laugh at the monster. Cthulhu insists that it is nervous laughter, and he says that they have probably just lost some points of Sanity.

Fortunately for Dayna, Jarvik turns up to save her from the monster. This scene has the nice touch of Tarrant outing Jarvik as a baddy by noticing he has a teleport bracelet so he must have come from the captured Liberator.

On the subject of good points, as Shallow pointed out in the comments of my last review the mystery of why Kairos is so dangerous is quite well done, paying off with the monster as it does, but it is not enough to save the episode from being a stupid, sexist mess of manliness and stupidity.

There is one scene that almost redeems the story, though. It comes near the end of the episode when Avon, Tarrant, Vila and Cally are on the old spaceship that they found on Kairos and are flying it towards the Liberator.

Avon gives their spaceship the properties of the Sopron, clumsily foreshadowed throughout the episode like Chekhov's Rock.

This is the one scene of the whole episode where Avon looks like he is enjoying himself. Maybe because he is saving the day again? Or maybe because he knows it is nearly over.

Tarrant bluffs Servalan and Jarvik that their spaceship is more powerful than the Liberator so they should surrender.

Jarvik laughs at this audacious bluff that he sees through because he is a MAN, but Servalan is fooled because Zen backs Tarrant up, and because she is not a MAN she believes the computer instead of Jarvik.

I like the way this scene works because Avon, Tarrant and Servalan (and even Zen) are all behaving in character - for a change - and so the way Servalan is defeated has an authenticity to it.

Jarvik is too manly to be in any other episodes of Blakes 7, so his friend Captain Shad shoots him instead of Dayna. That is why Jarvik-7 is the name of an artificial heart, not the name of an exceptionally manly spin-off series.

Avon thinks Jarvik was a "Federation thug" but Tarrant describes him as a "special sort of MAN."

Poor Jarvik, all he wanted to do was be a manly MAN.

Harvest of Kairos is a very entertaining episode, with so many ideas - good and bad - crashing into each other it is never boring. In a way its greatest crime is not having enough of Avon in it, although the character of Jarvik is almost manly enough to make up for that.

If it had been Ben Steed's only episode then I think the sexist angle would be less problematic and more comic (because here it - like all of Jarvik's MAN traits - is so over the top as to become laughable), but when you consider this along with Moloch and Power... well, I will discuss those episodes in due course.

Class 4 Renegade

The Doctor, Turlough and Tegan are on the planet Melphis, in a very different genre of the galaxy to the one the Doctor usually inhabits. They agree to do a favour for DaSamPete, "the three headed man".

DaSamPete has lost his robot and he wants them to find it for him.

He handed the Doctor a small plasti-flex disc that carried a moving 3-D computer portrait of a squat robot with long heavy arms.
"Has he got a name?" asked Turlough.
"He's a Class 4 Subsection B - with modifications," said DaSamPete.

The Doctor, Turlough and Tegan are given flying chairs to travel about in. They go to "Melphis's one and only city".

The city was teeming with all sorts of life forms and in the courtyard of one market alone the Doctor recognised Stullubrian warriors, Mdimian traders and var-ious nomadic species.

They go to a "Robo-Mart" where the Doctor bribes a walnut for information.

"Have you seen any Class 4s around here?" the Doctor asked. The machine didn't answer. The Doctor put a red credit disc into the slot next to the walnut. A light went on and a soft, female voice came out of the synthi-voc. "A Class 4 Subsection B?" it said.

I quite like this picture because the Doctor, Turlough and Tegan are all recognisable from their silhouettes, although going by all the pictures so far I think the artist is just trying to avoid having to draw any of their faces.

They go to the "Southern Free Zone".

Free Zones were walled sections of large cities where the normal rule of law was suspended. they were usually rundown areas populated by thieves, runaways, murderers, malfunctioning robots and mutants of every shape and hue.

"...psychopaths..."

Avon's right, this does sound like Gauda Prime, except that it isn't the whole planet.

The Doctor helps repair a Class 2 Domestic robot in return for information, acting more like Avon than the Doctor should ever be. The robot tells him that the Class 4 robot they are looking for was trying to sell "Antherack."

In a vague attempt to make this seem more like Davo-era Doctor Who, Tegan and Turlough have an argument.

"It's not exciting, you imbecile!" Tegan said scornfully. "It's a waste of our time!"
"No, it's not!" said Turlough. "It's good fun. By the way, Doctor - what's Antherack?" The Doctor slowed down his Hovva-Hoppa [flying chair - ed].
"It's an illegal energy source," he explained.

They are too late though, as the robot tells them that mannys working for "The Brothers", also known as DaSamPete, already found the Class 4 and took him away. This twist to the story is handled very clumsily, delivered as pure exposition from a single informant as if it were the shoe-shining manny from Police Squad.

This whole page is very confusing - the Doctor uses technobabble to somehow find out that DaSamPete "are notorious smugglers" of Antherack. The Class 4 robot found their buried stash and decided to sell it in the Free Zone. Now that DaSamPete has been revealed to be a baddy and has captured the Class 4, the Doctor decides to stop him and they rush straight to "DaSamPete's recycling factory".

In the dramatic climax to this story, the artist can no longer postpone the inevitable moment when he has to draw the Doctor's face. So he has drawn it really small, with Turlough's half-hidden behind some steam and Tegan nowhere to be seen.

The Class 4 robot is (I have to presume) being interrogated by DaSamPete, by being held above a "boiling acid vat". The Doctor just has time to confront DaSamPete before the robot pulls the platform, itself and DaSamPete into the acid, killing them both and rendering the entire story completely pointless because it means the Doctor's presence and participation changed or accomplished nothing at all.

There only remains for the obligatory final joke to take up the last couple of paragraphs:

There was a growl of machinery behind them, a loud metallic belch, and a small ball of undissolved metal rolled out of a pipe near the base of the vat.
"The Class 4 Robot - or what's left of him," explained the Doctor, holding up the jet black lump.
"Can I keep it?" asked Tegan.
"Why?" asked Turlough. "Don't tell me you're getting senti-mental about a criminal robot."
"Not exactly," said Tegan, "I just thought it would make a pretty good paperweight."

Mew, that is the end of this awful story. It is so bad because of a combination of two reasons, either of which could have been forgivable by itself. The first is that the Doctor doesn't really doing anything throughout except for acting out of character, or to put it another way there is nothing in the characterisation that makes this feel like a Doctor Who story. The second is that the setting feels as if it belongs to a different kind of science fiction from the kind that belongs in Doctor Who - it is the sort we see in Blakes 7 or Star Trek V: The Final Frontier's Planet of Galactic Peace, being filled with criminals - there is nothing in the setting that makes this feel like a Doctor Who story.

Contrast this with the TV serial Caves of Androzani, which has its share of androids and criminals too, but the way they are used, and the way the Doctor and Peri interact with them and react to the events, makes all the difference.

The Comic Assassins: The Five Doctors

The Five Doctors is one of the greatest stories in Doctor Who history, as much for being a celebration of its first 20 years as for the adventure itself.

In 1990, when the special, feature-length episode was first released on VHS, Doctor Who Magazine ran a one page long comic by "The Comic Assassins" poking fun at some of the sillier bits of The Five Doctors...

I think that this shows that, in Doctor Who fandom, there are no sacred cows. (Moo.)

Avon and the Planet of Stock Footage

You can tell from Avon's expression that he is worried. That is because Volcano is not a good episode.

The best scene in Volcano by miles is the one in which Avon is the only one on the Liberator who hasn't been captured (because silly Vila teleported the baddys onto it by mistake) and he fights the Federation spaceships that are attacking the Liberator all by himself.

Then Avon gets captured by Mori (who would have been Travis if this has been season 2, like I think this episode was originally intended to be), because Cally's attempt at warning him by telepathy doesn't work for some reason. I think the reason may be to make the episode be longer.

Avon does not look pleased at being captured. Or maybe he is unhappy that Cally's telepathy is saying "there are three of them" when there are definitely four Federation baddys on the Liberator. I'm only a cat but even I can count up to four, silly Cally!

Avon gets his pewpewpew gun and shoots two of the baddys, in an action scene that is not terribly well directed but still manages to be exciting because it's Avon.

Mori shoots Avon! Mew!

Oh noes!

Fortunately Avon is only wounded. It would take more than a huge scary blast from Mori's gun to kill Avon.

Mori escapes to the planet, where he ends up falling into the volcano.

"My Precious! O my Precious!"

Meanwhile, in the other plot thread on the planet, the mannys there decide to use a big red button to activate their secret weapon: stock footage!

The stock footage is so powerful that it blows the whole planet up. Oh well, at least it brings the episode to an end.

Douglas Puglas, I Presume?