Conflict in Literature: Blakes 7 Season Three

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Colony in Space Episode Three

The story so far: I really hope Captain Dent's first name isn't Arthur, or it's going to mean the Doctor's line in The Christmas Invasion makes even less sense.

The Doctor declaws Morgan with some Venusian Karate, and when Morgan runs away the Doctor gets the buttons to turn off the robot.

The IMC baddys land their spaceship next to the colonists. Captain Dent and Caldwell do proper spaceship-landing acting, but the extra standing behind them can't be bothered.

Ashe and Dent agree to send for an adjudicator to arbitrate which of their groups owns the planet (the aliens who also live there are not getting a look in, obviously), and the Doctor is pleased because he wants to tell "the proper authorities" about the robot monster.

Jo and Winton sneak on board the IMC spaceship to look for proof of the robot monsters, but evil Norton warns his secret friends on board about them so they get captured.

Dent tries to blackmail the Doctor, and threatens to blow up Jo with a button if he tells the adjudicator what he knows. Jo and Winton have been manacled next to a big bomb, but they quickly get free. A guard comes in, shoots Winton and recaptures Jo. Winton is only injured and so he still gets away.

Dent sends Morgan to kill Winton, and they have a chase scene on location while some completely undramatic music undermines the scene. I wonder if Jon Pertwee insisted on this as a form of revenge on Winton for his getting to do these action bits instead of the Doctor? Winton runs up to Caldwell, who pretends to shoot him so that the other baddys go away.

This puts together an interesting pairing - not only do they both have fabulous '70s moustaches, this is the most hardline of the colonists opposite the most sympathetic of the miners, allowing for some character building for both of them - Caldwell helps Winton while still warning him to "get off this planet."

Winton stubbornly clings to the idea that an adjudicator will find in the colonists' favour, but Caldwell makes the stakes very clear to him:

"Now IMC want this planet and they're going to have it."

"The adjudicator's decision is law, if he says we can stay..."

"Even adjudicators can be dealt with. Oh, get your people off this planet before someone else is hurt."

When Winton gets back to the other colonists he wants to attack the IMC spaceship immediately, but the Doctor thinks going to Caldwell for more help is a better plan. Caldwell agrees to help the Doctor, and risks his career (and therefore his moneys, a significant step along his character journey) by forcing Dent to have Jo brought back to the spaceship (from where it would be easier to rescue her), but this goes wrong when Jo is captured from the baddys by some aliens who kill her guard after he shoots one of them first.

Not yet knowing that Jo is in the paws of the aliens now, the Doctor agrees to help Winton with the attack on the spaceship, but persuades him to try a stealth plan first, since it is always much easier to do stealth first and then fight when the stealth goes wrong than the other way round.

It lasts long enough for the Doctor and Winton to get inside the spaceship, but then Morgan recognises them and raises the alarm. They still manage to capture Morgan, Dent and Caldwell, so with all their named characters captured the baddys are forced to give up. Dent claims 

"You know this is an act of piracy punishable by death under interplanetary law?"

but because he has so far been claiming that almost everything the colonists have done is punishable by death, there's a good chance he's making this up.

With Jo not there after all that, the Doctor has to go to search for her. He and Ashe find the IMC guard's ded body.

The aliens have not done much in the story up to this, almost the halfway point, but now they take Jo to "their city," the door to which is hidden inside a big fake rock. Unknown perils await Jo inside, so this works well as a suspenseful cliffhanger moment.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Colony in Space Episode Two

A manny comes in and saves the Doctor from being menaced by the robot, even allowing him to reshoot the scene in such a way as to help the Doctor look more dignified when he falls over.

This helpful manny is Caldwell (Bernard Kay), who comes from IMC, the "Interplanetary Mining Corporation," and who claims he didn't know about colonists. This must be a very small planet that whole groups of mannys don't know about other groups and yet keep running into one another all the time, or maybe he is lying like Norton from episode one was?

Caldwell seems to be less of a baddy after he finds out two mannys have already been killed, and seems genuinely sad to hear it from the Doctor, but he does still capture the Doctor to take him back to his speaceship. On the way there they drive past the nondescript bit of quarry where the Doctor left the TARDIS and he sees that it is gone.

On the spaceship it is confirmed, in a scene that we see but which the Doctor is not present for, that the mannys from IMC are baddys who plan to lie to the colonists (just as Caldwell has already lied to the Doctor) that they have "just arrived" and are "surprised and shocked that the place has been colonised."

Their leader is Captain Dent (Morris Perry, Danglars in the BBC's 1964 adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, a similarly avaricious villain to the one he is playing here), and the plot thickens when it turns out that Caldwell really was surprised at the deaths of the colonists, but quickly guessed that Morgan (Tony Caunter) was responsible. Dent and Morgan are clearly greedy enough to do mining and make moneys from it at the expense of the colonists who want to live here, and Caldwell is tempted by this as well, enough to overcome his conscience for now.

Dent talks to the the Doctor to try to persuade him

"What's good for IMC is good for Earth."

but when he fails he quickly orders Morgan to have the Doctor killed and make it look like another monster attack.

On the way back the Doctor and Morgan get attacked by some aliens. The Doctor stops Morgan from shooting them so that he can have a gratuitous fight scene with them.

Meanwhile, the obvious baddy Norton gets the colonists to show him all the ways in which they are vulnerable, such as only having one electrician-engineer, Jim.

"We'd be lost without him."

In the next scene Norton goes straight over to Jim and murders him and frames an alien for it.

Norton then sabotages the power so that the lights go out. Mary says

"Don't worry, Jim'll fix it."

which makes Jo giggle. This is forgivable on the part of Jo, who is from the UNIT era and so doesn't know any better, but for a manny from the future like Mary it is in very bad taste for her to make a joke about one of the most infamous baddys in the BBC's history.

Back in the colonist's house, the Doctor explains his suspicions to Morgan:

"I think the whole thing has been faked by somebody who wanted to frighten the colonists away."

"But these claw marks? I mean, something made them."

"Yes, they could have been faked by some sort of mechanical device."

"You mean with something like this?"

So episode two ends in almost exactly the same way as episode one, with the Doctor being menaced by a robot, except this one has big komedy klaws on it. As if aware how un-menacing this makes the robot, Morgan tries to up the dramatic tension by drawing his gun and saying

"Purely business, you understand? Nothing personal."

He delivers the line in such a businesslike manner that it is only scary in the way that unrestrained capitalism destroying planets to make a few mannys rich is scary... and I suspect this was the writer's entire point, mew.

Big Gay Longcat reviews Doctor Who: Colony in Space Episode One

Colony in Space is the fourth story of season eight of Doctor Who, and was first broadcast in 1971. It stars Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and Katy Manning as Jo Grant. It is the second of the Pertwee Six-Parters.

It starts with a scene of three Time Lords telling each other things they already know, where they mention the Master and a "doomsday weapon." Rather than be exposition for our benefit, this is pure foreshadowing of things that will show up later in the story.

The camera dissolves to a close-up of the Doctor's TARDIS dematerialisation circuit. The Doctor is in his laboratory with Jo, where the Brigadier comes in and talks about looking for the Master. The Doctor knows that UNIT can't find the Master without his help, and after the Brigadier has gone he says

 "Well, look what happened last time. The man they arrested turned out to be the Spanish ambassador."

This is almost certainly a reference to Roger Delgado's previous role as a recurring antagonist in the old TV series Sir Francis Drake, where he did indeed play the Spanish ambassador. If the Doctor gets the TARDIS operational again, perhaps UNIT can pop back in time to 1588 and arrest him?

The Doctor thinks he has got the TARDIS operational again, and he invites Jo inside for the first time, where she says

"I don't believe it! It's bigger inside than out!"

If Katy Manning had wanted the job of playing Victor Meldrew in One Foot in the Grave she could have sent this bit in as her audition tape.

As soon as the Doctor plugs in his dematerialisation circuit, the TARDIS starts to dematerialise - well, that is what it's for, after all. The Doctor tells Jo he didn't do it and concludes

"Something's operating it by remote control. The Time Lords!"

Outside in the lab, the Brigadier comes in and sees the TARDIS disappear. He says

"Doctor, come back at once!"

Lol.

The Doctor recognises their destination as "the planet Uxarieus." On Uxarieus, there is a robot doing robot things. When it leaves the shot, the TARDIS appears. The Doctor opens the doors and Jo looks out, but she doesn't have the reaction you might expect:

"That's an alien world out there, Jo. Think of it."

"I don't want to think of it. I want to go back to Earth."

"Look, do you realize how long I've been confined to one planet?"

"All that talk of yours about travelling in time and space, it was true?"

"Well, of course it was true. Before I was stranded on Earth, I spent all my time exploring new worlds and seeking the wonders of the universe."

"But you don't know what's out there."

"Then let's find out. Don't you want to set foot in another world?"

"Well yes, I do, but..."

"Good, come on. We'll just take a quick look around, and then I'll try and get you back to Earth. Alright?"

"Alright."

Jo takes quite a bit more convincing than most Companions do, and it is because she is supposed to be an audience surrogate (a cat would surely have been a better choice for this but never mind), and this is the first time the Doctor has been to a world that isn't Earth since The War Games, all the way back in black and white, so by persuading Jo the Doctor is also persuading the audience to come along with him to explore a strange new world, to seek out new life and new civilisations, and boldly go where no cat has gone before.

When the Doctor and Jo leave the TARDIS together, a green alien with a spear sees them go while remaining unseen by them. He comes back later with his alien friends to steal the TARDIS.

The Doctor and Jo find the tracks of the robot we saw earlier, and then get captured by a manny with a gun. There is a hard cut to some mannys talking about having seen a "giant lizard" and some other mannys not believing them. The Doctor and Jo are brought in and are suspected of W-wording for a mining company, which the Doctor denies as vigorously as any cat would. The Doctor sees they have charts on the wall that show the mannys do not have enough noms.

Two mannys hear something raring outside their set, and when they go outside they see a giant CSO monster!

They telephone for help before something we don't see comes in and kills them. The Doctor and his new friend Ashe (John "Tlotoxl" Ringham) hear about the telephone call and rush off to help. Jo asks her new friend Mary about the monsters, and Mary replies

"There's no animal life, just a few birds and insects."

Er...

The Doctor investigates the mannys' room and sees claw marks. One of the other mannys helping says he saw the monster and

"It must have been at least 20 feet high!"

That's a long lizard! The Doctor shows how he is the clever one when he asks

"Then will you kindly tell me how a creature 20 feet high came through that door?"

The surviving mannys have a big argument about whether they should go back to Earth or not. The Doctor supports Ashe in saying they should stay. It is not clear why the Doctor picks a side here, except that it demonstrates to us which side is right by virtue of it being the side the Doctor has chosen.

Just when the argument is over and the wavering mannys have been persuaded to stay (like they're a colony of John Nathan-Turners), an injured manny comes in and tells them that the "giant lizards" have wiped out another colony on the same planet. This is Norton, played by Roy "Zippy" Skelton.

The Doctor goes back to the room for more investigating, until a robot comes in with great big claws on it. The crash-zoom-to-face cliffhanger had obviously not been perfected yet, since the camera cuts to the Doctor reacting to the robot's appearance, then back to show the robot and the Doctor falling over, and then finally to a close-up of the Doctor's face. But even then, instead of looking past the camera with a steely glare, as would later be perfected by Colin Baker (not too surprising, given how many goes at it he had), Jon Pertwee continues to look around frantically, as if he was not sure which camera was on him.

A more realistic reaction, perhaps, but it makes the ending seem confused rather than dramatic.

Big Breadwinner Hog

This gangster series from 1969 was almost the spin-off of the spin-off of the spin-off of The Man in Room 17, since it was originally intended to feature George Sewell reprising his role as Scaliger from Spindoe, except that Sewell was unable to do it due to his being in another series at the same time - and due to the timing of this series, I have to assume that he was being Alec Freeman in UFO.

Instead of simply recasting the character, as would have been unremarkably common at the time, they changed it enough to make a new character, Ackerman (played by Donald Burton), who had enough character traits in common with Scaliger to fill his place in the plot, but not so you'd notice the swap if you didn't know better. See also: Tarrant in some season 3 episodes of Blakes 7.

Superficially similar to Spindoe in terms of themes and basic plot - in each the title character (Spindoe/Hog) is a new arrival on the scene who upsets the status quo among several factions of gangsters with their own agendas, provoking them into an escalating violent conflict, into which mix is added a down-on-his-luck private detective (Scaliger/Ackerman) and the police.

If you wanted to see Big Breadwinner Hog as set in the same world as Spindoe, you could even assume that the gangsters of this series inherited the power vacuum left by the demise of most of the principal characters of the earlier series, and it would fit.

The chief difference that's immediately apparent is in the title character of Hogarth, a.k.a. "Hog" (Peter Egan), who is a young, up-and-coming gangster, instead of Spindoe's old man seeking to regain his lost glory. But with eight episodes to its predecessor's six, here the plot has more room to breathe and set itself apart, and it quickly twists in ways that Spindoe didn't - whereas Spindoe had a form that was familiar (even to someone only passingly familiar with the gangster genre such as myself), this series was continually surprising me with unexpected turns, and kept me guessing to the very last scene.

Of the many excellent character actors making up the cast, the one I would most single out for praise is Timothy West as the main villain Lennox, who displays a cold ruthlessness throughout, until the moment when he finally has to kill someone himself (as opposed to the many, many times he has ordered a henchmanny to do it), and we see him shaken and physically sickened by the deed.

Taggart: Flesh and Blood

The 1989 Taggart Christmas special was apparently broadcast a little early - on the 5th of September. As with most of series creator Glenn Chandler's episodes, this is a cleverly written piece where multiple seemingly-unrelated plot strands get neatly tied together by the time the end credits roll and the iconic theme music plays us out.

Taggart's complaints that Christmas decorations are going up too early on the 14th December seems absurdly old-fashioned from 30 years on, and it is amusing to see the relief on his face when he is rescued from spending Christmas Day with his relatives to go on a case.

The case itself has no connection with Christmas. A seemingly motiveless murder sees Taggart and his sidekick Detective Sergeant Jardine following up any lead in desperation, including the victim's hobbies. On the night she was murdered, she had been attending a Tabletop Roleplaying Game session, and Taggart sends Jardine along to speak to the other players, inevitably resulting in his joining them for a game.

This gives us a rare (possibly even unique) instance of a mainstream television drama portraying RPGs in the Scotland of the late 1980s. The players of the game are shown to be mildly eccentric, but no more so than is typical TV shortpaw for characters involved in an obscure hobby - certainly there are no signs of the 'Satanic Panic' stereotype that afflicted American players of Dungeons & Dragons in that era - the fact that the murder victim was killed on the same night her character was killed off in the game turns out to be coincidence; a red herring. The game has a 'Killer DM,' but not literally.

The other common roleplayer stereotype, that of socially awkward geeks uncomfortable around the opposite sex, is completely subverted when the RPG club is revealed to be a hotbed (so to speak) of sexual activity, as the girl that Mike 'Smoove' Jardine thinks he's well in with is revealed to us - though not to Jardine - as two-timing him with the game's DM. This has some basis in the reality of Scottish University RPG societies of that period, if anecdotes I have heard are anything to judge by.

It is unclear whether Jardine ever went back for a second game session, but somehow it seems unlikely.

The King in Orange