Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Silver Nemesis Part One

Silver Nemesis is President Donald J Trump's favourite Doctor Who story.
It is the third story of season 25 and was specially themed around silver to celebrate Doctor Who's 25th birthday, which is why it has cybermannys in it because they are silver, or at least look silver. It stars Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace.

Silver Nemesis has an unusual structure in that there are three separate sets of baddys as the antagonists to the Doctor and Ace. We are introduced to two of these groups at the beginning of the episode but the third is kept back for a surprise reveal at the cliffhanger ending, although I have already given away who they are.

The episode begin with a caption:

South America
22nd November 1988

We hear Wagner's music playing and see a manny with an '80s computer. Herr De Flores is about to shoot a birdy with a bow and arrow when he gets some "wonderful news" from the manny with the computer. We don't get to know what the news is yet, maybe his computer game has finally loaded? (I am too young a cat to get this joke, but I am reliably informed that it makes sense if you are old enough to remember the 1980s.)

In

Windsor, England
1638

(thanks to a second on-screen caption for keeping us informed) Lady Peinforte and Richard - played by Fiona Walker and Gerard Murphy, the former was in I Claudius as Agrippina and was also in Doctor Who all the way back in Sentence of Death, the latter was the Narrator of The Lord of the Rings - are also playing with bows and arrows and about to shoot a birdy. This cleverly parallels what De Flores was doing in the previous scene and establishes a thematic link between them, even though they haven't met.

Lady Peinforte has a silver arrow. They are about to leave her house but we don't find out where they are going yet, just as we don't know what De Flores's news was. This helps build up suspense over the first few scenes.

De Flores makes a speech to his henchmannys in which he mentions "the fuhrer" and then they toast "the fourth reich" so as to make it as clear as possible that they are Nazis. De Flores has a silver bow as well as a special case to keep it in.

The Doctor and Ace are listening to music when the Doctor's alarm goes off to remind him to do something that he has forgotten to do, but then he can't remember what it is he has forgotten, silly Doctor! Then they get shot at by some mannys (perhaps to encourage them to get on with the plot, there are only three parts to this story after all) and run away back to the TARDIS.

Lady Peinforte and Richard plan to kill Lady Peinforte's other henchmanny just to make it clear that they are baddys as well, since you have to work quite hard at that when one of the other factions in your story is Nazis. They drink a magic potion to travel in time from 1638 to 1988, but to cover up the fact that this makes no sense they make one of the best jokes in Doctor Who evar:

"Afraid?"
"Yes, my lady."
"When I employed you, you lead me to believe you were a hardened criminal."
"As my lady knows, before I entered your service I was found guilty of a large number of offences."
"Then have the courage of your convictions."

LOL!

The Doctor and Ace travel to Windsor to look for the silver bow, not knowing the Nazis have it. The Doctor finds a fez instead.

Now in 1988, Lady Peinforte and Richard are confused by technology. Richard is scared again but Lady Peinforte is not, which helps to further differentiate and develop their characters.

The comet Nemesis lands. The Nazis are on the scene but need to wait for the comet to cool down before they can capture it. Lady Peinforte and Richard also need to wait to get their paws on the Nemesis, but the local police arrive and capture it first.

The Doctor and Ace take the TARDIS back to Lady Peinforte's house in 1638 where they find the dead henchmanny. Ace (and through her, we the viewers) start to get the backstory from the Doctor about how he has known Lady Peinforte before, and how the Nemesis is made from "a living metal" called Validium and is a weapon of mass destruction. The Doctor is careful to let the exposition out a little at a time so as to not confuse us, but this does make this feel a lot like the sequel to a story that I haven't seen because it doesn't really exist - and while that sometimes works, it is not a technique that stands up to scrutiny because it is really just the writer cheatily avoiding introducing his setting and characters properly.

The policemannys get gassed, which is why they are not a fifth faction involved through the rest of this story.

Now it is time for some completely unnecessary padding - the Doctor and Ace go to Windsor castle in 1988 for some hijinks where they nearly meet the Queen and then get chased around the castle for a bit by some mannys. This couldn't be more irrelevant to the plot if it tried.

Lady Peinforte also isn't doing very much at that moment, but she is by far the most interesting character we have seen because she knows the Doctor and has a mysterious past relationship with him, and she talks to Richard about how she wants the Nemesis in order to have revenge on him.

The Nazis decide it is time to capture the Nemesis. De Flores is not very clever as he doesn't think it is important that the police have already been gassed by some unknown third party. He is more concerned with the arrow being missing from the statue, which makes him annoyed. So now we know the answer to the question "how do you make a Nazi cross?"

The Doctor and Ace arrive to get back into the plot. The Nazis capture them and De Flores thinks the Doctor has the arrow (presumably because he is the only other main character that he has met at this point), while the Doctor has noticed the gassed policemannys and tries to point out that this is important.

The Nazis threaten to shoot Ace unless the Doctor gives them the arrow that he doesn't have, but then a spaceship arrives and distracts them. It is the cybermannys, who have arrived just in time for the cliffhanger!

If we ignore the pointless padding scenes, this is a fantastic first episode. All three factions of baddys have their own character and points of interest for us viewers, especially the mysterious Lady Peinforte who knows the Doctor's secrets and so has the potential to be one of the Doctor's greatest adversaries... even if her past history with the Doctor isn't a "real" past history (one from previous television stories) but a cheat, somehow that only adds to the mystery.

The Gold Robbers

The Gold Robbers is a TV series from 1969 so obscure that, at the time of writing this, it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page. It has been released on DVD by Good Old Network though, which is how I have now seen it.

This is a strange cross between a police detective drama and a '60s telefantasy series - a gang of baddys led by a devious and shadowy mastermind steal five-and-a-half million pounds of gold (worth many tens, if not hundreds, of millions of pounds in today's moneys) and murder a policemanny in the process, but instead of putting Department S or The Avengers on the case, it falls to the more realistic police CID to catch the robbers.

The main character is DCS Craddock* as played by Peter Vaughan, best known for playing Denethor in The Lord of the Rings. He is a manny ahead of his time, possessing a difficult personal life more frequently found among '90s TV detectives.

Unlike in most telefantasy series, Craddock does not solve the case in a single episode. It takes him the whole 13 parts of the series to get to the bottom of it, a bit like how it took Captain Sisko seven seasons to sort out problems that Captain Kirk would have wrapped up inside an hour.

This is because the baddys are well-organised, disciplined and ruthless. But they are not invincible - because the job was so big, they had to involve amateurs in specialist roles. This plus other small slip-ups let Craddock and his team get their first breaks.

As the series progresses we spend more time with the baddys as they experience problems of their own - they have all this money but cannot spend it easily without being suspicious. Some of them want to use the money to stop being baddys, while others enjoy being baddys for its own sake. Cracks begin to appear as they don't trust each other, and these are made worse when Craddock starts arresting some of the little fish (nom!) and the mastermind has to start killing his own mannys to try and stop Craddock following the chain up to the top.

Craddock is also not infallible, as we see him and his fellow policemannys make mistaiks in the course of their investigations. Craddock often makes up for this by playing hunches that are right and trusting his instincts even when he lacks evidence (we know when he is right because we have already seen the baddys do it, shades of Columbo in this), and he bluffs more than one baddy even when he has a weak paw. He many not be John Steed, but we know he'll get there in the end.

This is an interesting and worthwhile series, with a fine cast and some great twists along the way that more than justifies its length. The Gold Robbers deserves to be better remembered.



* Craddock was the name of a character in Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. so this is a proper Terry Nation-ish sort of name for our hero.

Happy new year

Here is the winner of our 2017 Calendar Doggy of the Year competition to wish you all a happy new 2018.

And a happy new year to you from all of us cats as well!

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol Part Three

Madame de Gaulle was said to have been lunching with the American ambassador at the time of her husband's retirement when she was asked what she was most looking forward to in the years ahead.

She thought for a moment before announcing boldly "a penis."

A startled hush fell over the table until the former president leant over and said "my dear, I think it's pronounced 'happiness'."

Fifi lives! She is covered in comedy bandages and being looked after by Mrs Thatcher, but Fifi is alive! I am happy about that, not least because I don't think it would be a good message for the BBC to send out to its viewers that they can solve their problems by blowing up the Prime Minister's pets.

Trevor comes to tell the Doctor that he is leaving Terra Alpha and shows him a long list of everybody Mrs Thatcher has had "disappeared" (killed), just in case we had forgotten how much of a baddy she is since watching part two.

The Doctor has a microphone and sings a song (in a French accent for no reason) and Earl plays the music to go with it. He has a plan and says

"Everything is beginning to fall into place."

The Happiness Patrol arrive and are about to shoot the Doctor, but he acts so happy that they get confused and don't shoot him. The demonstrators join in and the Happiness Patrol end up pointing their pewpewpew guns at each other because they're the only ones who aren't acting happy. This allows Ace and Susan Q (her friend, who is at long last named out loud for our benefit) to escape from them (again) (again) (again).

Mrs Thatcher and her husband Joseph C hear an announcement:

"Happiness will prevail. Chaos in Forum Square. Fighting has broken out in the ranks of the Happiness Patrol itself. Happiness will prevail."

This is the first of several things that we are not shown happening but are told have happened by way of Public Exposition Announcements.

Fifi goes to chase some more aliens in the pipes, despite how well that went for her in the last episode. Fifi is a silly doggy, but she is cute and cuddly.
The Doctor, Earl and Ace go in the pipes with the aliens and join in getting chased by Fifi. The Doctor and Earl play music to make the studio set fall on Fifi and so Fifi gets squashed and they all get away.

Next the Doctor and Ace visit the Kandyman (again, at least for the Doctor). They take it in turns to troll the Kandyman so he doesn't know which one he wants to kill first until he tosses a koin to help him decide.

"I'm finding this rather tiresome. Heads or tails, Doctor?"
"Tails. Well?"
"That would be telling."

Oh what a giveaway. I think that particular line of dialogue has let the manny out of the bag with regards to the writer's influences for this story. The Doctor and Ace use the Kandyman's own kitchen utensils and ovens (which are a Health & Safety nightmare, fortunately for them Mrs Thatcher's regime has no use for such Political Korrectness) against him until he runs away and escapes into the pipes. The aliens then get into the Kitchen and they turn the "fondant surprise" upon the Kandyman.

By now there is a full scale revolution against Mrs Thatcher going on off-screen, which we only get to hear about from the announcements. These always begin by saying "happiness will prevail" even though they go on to announce that things are going very badly for the strong and stable Happiness Patrol.

Mrs Thatcher tries to act as though nothing is wrong in front of her henchmannys, though secretly she is preparing an escape shuttle. Except in the next scene Gilbert M and Joseph C steal it and fly away in the shuttle without her.

To celebrate their victory, Earl plays his music over the loudspeakers. Mrs Thatcher hears it as she tries to run away, but the Doctor meets up with her (again) for them to have a final confrontation.

"You can't get away, Helen A."
"There's a scheduled flight in an hour. You can't stop me, Doctor."
"Oh I know I can't. But it's not me you're running away from."
"Who is it, then?"
"Yourself. That's why you'll never escape."
"They didn't understand me."
"Oh, they understood you only too well. That's why they resisted you."
"I only wanted the best for them."
"The best? Prisons? Death squads? Executions?"
"They only came later. I told them to be happy, but they wouldn't listen. I gave them every chance. Oh, I know they laughed sometimes, but they still cried, they still wept."
"Don't you ever feel like weeping, Helen A?"
"Of course not, Doctor. It's unnecessary. And those that persisted had to be punished."
"Why?"
"For the good of the majority. For the ones that wanted to be happy, who wanted to take the opportunities that I gave them."
"What were these opportunities you gave them? A bag of sweets? A few tawdry party games? Bland, soulless music? Do these things make you happy? Of course they don't. Because they're cosmetic. Happiness is nothing unless it exists side by side with sadness. Two sides, one coin."
"You can keep your coin, Doctor, and your sadness. I'll go somewhere else. I'll find somewhere where there is no sadness. A place where people know how to enjoy themselves. A place where people are strong, where they hold back the tears. A place where people pull themselves together."
"Where there is no compassion."
"Where there is control."
"A place where there is no love."
"I always thought love was overrated."

And then Mrs Thatcher... Oh, it seems she is not actually called Mrs Thatcher in this, she is called Helen A. I am a silly cat. I can't understand why I thought she was Mrs Thatcher.

And then Helen A sees Fifi, who goes

This makes Helen A sad. It makes me sad too. Poor Fifi, all she wanted to do was nom things.

With that the plot is all over, or as the Doctor says:

"'Tis done."

Ace paints the TARDIS blue again (although to be fair that is the first time we have seen it being painted blue in this story), and the final exchange is, of course:

"Will they be all right, Professor?"
"Happiness will prevail."

The Happiness Patrol is one of the most savage and scathing attacks against authoritarian governments ever seen in Doctor Who (and that means ever seen full stop), and so it remains as politically relevant today as it was in 1988.

The final confrontation between the Doctor and Helen A is the heart of the matter, in which the Doctor exposes her for what she really is: she does not want mannys to be happy, she wants them to act as though they are happy no matter what her government does. To keep any sadness on the inside. To keep quiet. To conform.

Like all tyrants who pretend to democracy, she claims she is acting "for the good of the majority" and therefore that means anyone who disagrees must be in the minority, and can be portrayed as a handful of remoaning killjoys out to sabotage "the will of the people" - which in turn justifies any actions to

The Doctor is the moral polar opposite of Helen A. He recognises that the appearance of happiness is not the same as real happiness, and that enforced conformity does not equal approval. He knows that the mannys of Terra Alpha are not free until they can choose for themselves whether to be happy or sad, whether to agree with Helen A or to oppose her, and in their confrontation he pushes her until she admits this too.

At the end of their dialogue it is revealed that Helen A knew this all the time, but still chose to do what she knew to be wrong, and then when she cries for Fifi - and by extension herself - it is because under the façade of happiness Theresam A was the most unhappy of them all.

In the end, happiness does prevail.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol Part Two

After a recap of the final scene of part one where the Doctor and Earl Sigma are caught by the Kandyman, part two begins with Ace - once more a prisoner of the Happiness Patrol - who sees some black-clad mannys demonstrating against Mrs Thatcher and the Happiness Patrol. This is very brave because the Happiness Patrol are obviously going to kill them for being "killjoys."

The Doctor tricks the Kandyman into sticking himself to the floor so he can't kill them. Then the Doctor and Earl escape from the Kandyman into some pipes where they meet some aliens. At the same time, in a parallel plotline, the aliens are also helping Ace to escape from the Happiness Patrol (again). Then the Doctor meets Trevor Sigma (again) and trolls him (again). Aside from introducing the friendly aliens, this episode seems to be repeating itself a lot.

Mrs Thatcher decides to let her doggy Fifi go into the pipes to nom Ace and the aliens when she hears about the escape. Fifi chases Ace and an alien until they blow her up with some of Ace's Nitro Nine. Ace is, as usual, very quick to resort to explosives to solve a problem.

Trevor takes the Doctor to see Mrs Thatcher where he trolls her for a bit by pretending to be too important to answer any of her questions (such as who he is or whose side he is on), then he goes off to meet up with Earl again.

The way the Doctor moves from scene to scene, to meet with the required supporting characters in turn, makes the world of Terra Alpha feel very small - but deliberately so, as though attempting to make a plausibly realistic alien planet within the confines of a television studio was not even being attempted by the makers of this programme. Either that or all establishing shots of the Doctor travelling from place to place had to be ruthlessly edited out to make room for more scenes of Ace escaping from and being recaptured by the Happiness Patrol.

When Earl hears the Doctor is on his way back to the Kandy Kitchen, he says

"Not the Kandy Kitchen."

in a very similar way to

I think this may be a deliberate reference, as this era of Doctor Who is notorious for its many gratuitous callbacks to the earlier years of the show - another example of this here is the Doctor telling Trevor his name, or rather his "nickname," is "Theta Sigma", which is a reference to The Armageddon Factor from season 16.

Two Happiness Patrol mannys are waiting to shoot the demonstrators from the start of the episode, but the Doctor sneaks up on them and trolls them into throwing away their guns. This is another demonstration of the Doctor's moral philosophy, similar to the bit when he said

"Weapons: always useless in the end."

back in Remembrance of the Daleks Part Three. (Although, as in that story, this is somewhat undermined by how effective Ace's Nitro Nine continues to be.)

Mrs Thatcher wants to execute another prisoner, Ace's friend from earlier (whose name has still not been given on-screen), using the Kandyman's "fondant surprise" but the Kandyman is still stuck to the floor. The Doctor comes in and offers to release him if the Kandyman will stop the fondant surprise.

Ace tries to rescue her friend and ends up getting captured (again) (again) instead, but at least they don't get killed by the fondant surprise because the Doctor is successful. Trevor tells Mrs Thatcher that the rules say she has to use a different method to execute them next time, but this doesn't worry her too much as she has plenty. Mew and hiss, Mrs Thatcher is a pantomime baddy.

The Kandyman, who is no longer stuck to the floor, wants to kill the Doctor so the Doctor sticks him to the floor (again) and then leaves to find Ace. He meets up with Earl (again) and they see a poster of Ace, who is going to be appearing at "the Late Show at the Forum" - this is obviously going to be Mrs Thatcher's next attempt at executing her, although we will have to wait until next time to see it, as it is the end of the episode.

This episode contains a lot of repetition, and so feels like it is mostly padding. Escapes and recaptures, and revisiting earlier locations and characters, are so frequent (and so quickly reversed) that it is tempting to view this as deliberate commentary upon the padding often seen in the middle of a typical Doctor Who story.

While Ace has been continually moving from captive to escapee and back again ever since she parted company from the Doctor in part one, the Doctor has been more proactive in this episode - since (easily) escaping from the klutches of the Kandyman, he has been acting like a force of nature, sweeping into scenes with Trevor, Mrs Thatcher, the Happiness Patrol snipers, the Kandyman, even Earl, and taking them over effortlessly - none of them know how to deal with the Doctor because he does not fit into their view of how the world of Terra Alpha functions.

While many baddys (and some friends, for instance Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart) have experienced this of the Doctor over the years, here it is particularly fitting because of the allegorical nature of The Happiness Patrol. Terra Alpha is like the Village, it stands for all that is worst in manny society, and all that is worth fighting against. The Doctor has fought against plenty of power-mad conspirators, Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermannys, and the like before now. This time he is up against Mrs Thatcher.

Happiness will prevail!

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: The Happiness Patrol Part One

Happiness will prevail!

The Happiness Patrol is the second story of season 25. It stars Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and Sophie Aldred as Ace. There is dramatic music right from the start, fading in as soon as the title music is over. We are in the dark streets of Studio 8 at the BBC Television Centre, where Silas P and the Happiness Patrol are already busy entrapping an unfortunate manny who gets shot by their pewpewpew guns only because she has a sad. This quickly and neatly establishes that the Happiness Patrol are the baddys in much the same way as we get to know the Federation are the baddys in the first episode of Blakes 7.

The TARDIS arrives, and the Doctor tells Ace (and us) he has already heard "disturbing rumours" about this place, called Terra Alpha. The Doctor tells Ace it is "an Earth colony, settled some centuries in your future." I should hope so, otherwise that means there are Earth colonies already. Get the tinfoil cathats everybody, it's conspiracy theory time!

They meet Trevor Sigma, "on official business from Galactic Centre," who asks them questions but refuses to answer theirs, so the Doctor can't help himself but troll Trevor into answering a question.

The Happiness Patrol paint the TARDIS pink and the Doctor likes it. The Doctor and Ace get arrested for not having the right badges, but for a change this is all part of the Doctor's plan which was to try and get arrested. (It is not clear if the Doctor had any further steps to his plan worked out but I suspect not.)

Speaking to another prisoner, they find out lots of other silly things that are illegal: wearing dark clothes, listening to slow music, reading poems (unless they're limericks), and "walking in the rain, if you're on your own and don't take an umbrella."

We see another manny getting executed by the Kandyman by being drowned in "fondant surprise", which is a very Shakespearean death reminiscent of Clarence's murder in Richard iii.

On the subject of the Kandyman - however did they get away with it at the time? Watching this now, it was surely a lawsuit waiting to happen? I mean, just look at this:

Mrs Thatcher, played by Sheila Hancock, is the main baddy in charge of Terra Alpha. She electrics the manny that the Doctor and Ace had been talking to, so he had obviously given them enough exposition to be going on with. Mrs Thatcher has a pet doggy, but it is not a cute doggy, it is a grumpy looking doggy because Mrs Thatcher is a baddy.

The Doctor and Ace escape on a very, very slow moving go-cart. It makes the buggy from Day of the Daleks look positively zippy by comparison. Ace allows herself to be recaptured by the Happiness Patrol so the Doctor can get away, and we don't see much of their chasing him because the Happiness Patrol would all have to run extra slowly so as to not catch up.

Ace meets a member of the Happiness Patrol who is not happy really, and she lets Ace get away. Sadly Ace then gets captured again in the very next scene she is in.

The Doctor meets Silas P from earlier but, before he can entrap the Doctor like he did the manny from the start of the episode, the Doctor is rescued by Earl Sigma. Then the Happiness Patrol arrive and shoot Silas P instead. They must have a quota.

The Doctor and Earl Sigma escape into the Kandy Kitchen where they are caught by the Kandyman and his henchmanny Gilbert. The Kandyman menaces them and that is the end of the episode.

The Kandyman is very kreepy, especially his googly eyes - he is a terrific parody of a kute kharakter, and on top of that his spelling is worse than a lolcatz!

The Happiness Patrol is obviously a very sophisticated story working on multiple levels, so it is difficult to pass judgement on part one in isolation. Since there are only three parts it has to get a move on - the world building is done quickly and broadly, and even though entire characters exist solely to give exposition to the Doctor and then get killed off to show (or to reinforce what has already been established) how evil the baddys are, it nevertheless manages to achieve both a memorably distinctive visual style and a politically charged message at the same time.

Doctor Who Night 2017: Hammer Time

Doctor Who's 13th season (1975-6) was influenced a lot by the iconography of the Hammer Horror films, which began in the 1950s and were still in production at that time. This gave us our theme for this year's Doctor Who Night, as we watched two classic stories that very obviously draw inspiration (putting it mildly) from Hammer.

Pyramids of Mars sees Tom Baker at the height of his powers as the Doctor, with one of the most definitive portrayals of the character - simultaneously an alien and an exemplar of mannykind, as he battles against the forces of Sutekh.

Sutekh is one of the most powerful and evil baddys the Doctor has ever faced, with a memorable appearance and even more memorable voice - which he needs, because he doesn't actually do very much besides talk. Instead his actions are carried out by his minions, who are all themed around manny mummys from Egypt, as drawn from the Hammer Mummy film series.

It is a very serious story for the most part, with the fate of the Earth and maybe the entire universe at stake if Sutekh wins, but there is still time for some humorous moments such as this bit where the Doctor and Sarah go "Nonononononope!"

The second story we watched was The Brain of Morbius, which is not nearly as Spock's Brain as it sounds. The Doctor doesn't have to search the galaxy for Morbius's brain, it's there in that jar.

This is the story from which the Morbius Doctors Theory comes, as I have written about in the past. But there is a lot more to the story than just that one (in)famous scene - after all, it doesn't even involve the best baddy character in the story, who is not the monster Morbius but his creator, the monster Solon.

Solon, played by Philip Madoc in his second-best appearance in Doctor Who (after The War Games), is a mad scientist blatantly based on Frankenstein. He has a henchmanny called Condo and he makes Morbius a new body out of spare parts to put his brain in. As the old saying goes: