Thursday 4 April 2019

The Collection - Season 18 Blu Ray


It seems ironic that as John Nathan-Turner justifies his reasoning on this boxset for some of the changes he wrought on Doctor Who for the 1980 season – the variation a wider set of composers would reap; the re-casting of all the leading actors across the series; an influx of various new scripting voices – what he produces is the most consistent, cohesive and thematically unified body of work any year of the classic series would gift to us. That variation about which JNT waxes lyrical actually gives way to one, distinct authorial voice: Christopher H Bidmead. This is Season 18: the story of a universe in the thrall of entropy and societies on the brink of collapse. This is awe-inspiring, high-concept Doctor Who sporting a directorial flair and pizazz contrasting spectacularly with a brooding Tom Baker, the old man on his way out.

The Leisure Hive is an unsung joy of the classic series. Often noted for its multiple firsts –new theme tune and titles, electronic music, a burgundy costume for Tom – what usually goes unsaid is the breath-taking pace, structure and beautiful, beautiful direction from once-only Who turn Lovett Bickford.

Just look at that opening shot, much-maligned by other production crew and particularly Christopher H Bidmead who seems, not for the first time, to miss the point. After that brash new title sequence, the viewer is waiting, just waiting, for the Doctor to arrive. They’re given time to work out that at some point one of these tents will turn out to be the TARDIS and the Doctor’s snores creep into the auditory landscape subtly. Then, we see the crew, as joyous as ever, K9 being pulled along the shingle, Romana throwing stones, and Peter Howell bursts into “Oh I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside!” It’s an opening of grandiose abandon and should be celebrated far more than it is. The same can be said for the rest of the tale.

There’s an energy, dynamism and beauty to the planet Argolis. The ever-changing colours of its outside landscape sing of the new vibe Season 18 delivers from the off. The production positively glows, the music bombastic and strange, the camera angles new and thrilling. The first scene in the boardroom delivers its exposition on the move, the camera craning round the table as Brock’s terrifically realistic hologram relays his bad news. The scene in which Hardin and Stimson explain their experiments to Romana starts with vague tubular shapes before panning slowly down to the scientists. I love the shot of the door closing on the foamasi, one of the visitors to the hive in soft focus in the foreground before a fade into the shuttle approaching together with an electronic version of Holst’s Mars theme. Moments like this abound throughout a story which never stands still. Bickford is just as good, arguably better, than the more commonly renowned Graeme Harper and he is as much a star of The Leisure Hive as the almost unutterably good David Haig.

What’s most notable about these four episodes though is that they still, in essence, constitute a Season 17 story. Writer David Fisher’s Argolis is as well-explored and interesting a planet as the previous year’s Chloris. As much as script editor Christopher H Bidmead laments that he didn’t like the script, Fisher seems ironically to be starting from the same position as Bidmead, realising a world with laws and politics all of its own. Bidmead’s lashings of real science and a humour cull mean that the show feels different but in its four-act structure and conceptual intelligence, it’s much the same and feels beneath the gloss, very familiar. It’s packed full of ideas too: a machine to de-age the sterile Argolins in its very infancy, a mafia splinter group intent on one great coup, and at the heart of it all, the first inter-species romance in Doctor Who, expertly played by Adrienne Corri and Nigel Lambert. In fact, if The Leisure Hive had been produced a year earlier, I’d suggest it might be as well thought of as the likes of City of Death, and the foamasi would have been granted their gangsta shades to boot. As it stands, The Leisure Hive acts as a bridge between the two eras and to my mind, evidences the best of both. It should be heralded more often as the energetic, flashy work of art house genius it so clearly is. Tom Baker - on the new, and very entertaining commentary moderated with aplomb by Matthew Sweet - asserts “This is one of the best I’ve ever seen.” He’s right. It’s one of the best they ever made.

Poor Meglos can only feel like a let-down after the flashy flourishes and robust world-building of its immediate predecessor but it’s nowhere near as bad as its awful reputation suggests. There’s a strong three-act structure at play: a journey from Zolfa-Thura to Tigella and back again. The only trouble is, said three-act structure has been sledgehammered into a series with a four-act structure, meaning that the middle third (or Parts Two and Three) feel incredibly inflated and begin to sag. This doesn’t mean there’s no fun to be had on Tigella, however: Tom Baker is blistering as Meglos himself. In the darkness of the caves, his warbling cry of “I am Meglos!” becomes a terrifyingly alien yowl. Colin Baker’s Mysterious Planet is in desperate need of tunnels like these. And Romana spinning her yarns about angles of rotation is a joy to watch. Part One too, although side-lining the Doctor and Romana more criminally than ever Eric Saward side-lined his leads, is a strange and sometimes beautiful affair. Paddy Kingsland’s score on the plains of Zolfa-Thura is haunting and evocative, and the scene-sync effects convincing and unusual.

No, what really lets Meglos down is its over-simplistic argument between Religion vs Science. The Deons and Savants are both groups of playground bullies, digging their heels in and insisting they’re right. For a large part of Meglos, the drama is centred around the Savants’ belief in Science which is eventually proven correct and the Deons’ belief in Religion which is eventually proven wrong. Neither side boasts champions worth listening to. Their arguments are irritating as neither side is willing to consider, empathise or change their mind. And only in a season script-edited by Christopher H Bidmead could an entire religion be fundamentally pilloried as a feeble hiding to nothing. The very idea of religious belief is not only dismissed as thoroughly denounced. Three years later, Peter Grimwade would explore a similar argument in Planet of Fire which rather beautifully ends with the religious leader asserting that his condemners have missed the point. “Logar is everywhere,” Peter Wyngarde utters simply. It’s the kind of nebulous, wonderful complication completely missing from Meglos which makes the story seem not only pig-headed but childish too. And that cactus at the end is the poorest visual realisation of the entire season.

It is a wonder that Andrew Smith was never invited back to the Who fold given the very robust nature of Full Circle. It is full-blooded, well-plotted and thematically vivid. It is a difficult story to review, however, as it stands quite possibly as the typical Doctor Who adventure, a lesson on how to tell any story set on an alien planet. Look at Part One: the status quo is established and seen to be on the brink of collapse, coded mysteries act as motors for the plot (“Tell Dexeter we’ve come full circle!”) and finally the monsters are revealed. This narrative solidity continues through all four episodes, the story building to a climax with a very tangible sense of pandemonium as the Starliner is attacked. What Full Circle has that most other stories don’t is the uncertainty of the mechanics of new universe E-Space to play with, which adds to the sense of otherworldly oddness permeating events on Alzarius. When Adric pulls off the plaster from his knee, it’s a message that things here are going to be very different. The game has changed. The rules are about to be redefined. And we aren’t going home for a long time yet.

State of Decay is perhaps Season 18’s only lapse in terms of its global authorial intent. In The Writers’ Room documentary, Chris Bidmead laments how State of Decay turned out, suggesting that an attempt to emulate Hammer Horror is pointless with a formula as strong and original as Doctor Who’s. He has a point, but arguably the best thing about State of Decay is its Hammer atmosphere. The mauve and brown shades are pervasive, from costume to forestry to castle design to props. This is a story which, like The Leisure Hive, Warriors’ Gate and The Keeper of Traken elsewhere in Season 18, feels as if it’s been designed with every department on message, as if a modern-era tone meeting had taken place. State of Decay really is sumptuous.

Its script from Terrance Dicks is typically un-showy though. No plot holes could be found in Dicks’s entire Pertwee era but it’s not necessarily known for its majesty of dialogue or poetic flourish. So too, State of Decay feels professionally workmanlike and its structure cannot be faulted but there’s a simplicity to it when matched against its Season 18 stablemates. Things grind to a halt when the Doctor returns to the TARDIS to read print-outs of exposition in Part Three and there’s a sense that time is being marked before Dicks’s towering climax is unveiled. As an exercise in spooky atmospherics, State of Decay is of course a huge success. Part One’s bat scene and the sinister “Wasting” (which eventually comes to nought) are visceral highlights and the Doctor and Romana’s first meeting with the Lords and their resultant exploration of the tower are charmingly creepy scenes. Whilst others rate State of Decay as a successful Hammer homage, I’m rather taken with Christopher H Bidmead’s suggested version of events: Peter Moffett talks on the boxset about receiving a script in which “people (come) out of eggs.” In a parallel universe, we never got the mauve State of Decay; we got a clinically white sci-fi take on the vampire myth and I wonder that – even though its design may not have been quite so sumptuous - it wouldn’t have been quite wonderful?

Warriors’ Gate represents the antithesis to State of Decay. Its narrative is difficult to follow. Explanations don’t come easy. But it is filled with rich, new, imaginative ideas, which fully buy into the realm of a different universe and epitomise this season’s theme of societal and spatial entropy. Above all else, it is riveting. Like The Leisure Hive, there is as much a directorial voice as an authorial one here. Paul Joyce famously throws BBC guidelines into the lighting rig and points his camera at them. It works. Warriors’ Gate looks like nothing else on television. Possibly ever. Curiously in Season 18, both Warriors’ Gate and Meglos employ blue screens for a huge chunk of their screen-time in a much more successful, purposeful and assured way than, say, Underworld did only three years earlier. The blue screens here are actually used artistically, to present new worlds, new spaces and environments the viewer can’t find on All Creatures Great and Small. Perhaps this is a producer who know how to get the best use of his budget and it wouldn’t be the first time JNT would use hugely successful creative inventive to stretch the money further.

There’s a lot going on in Warriors’ Gate. The Gundan menace are distant but frightening. Their charging into the banqueting hall at the end of Part Three, axes raised, is a startling cliff-hanger, the little details such as the Tharil throwing its bread away in distress, the music heightening, Romana’s realisation of what is about to come, all make for a moment of supreme tension. There’s some lovely mirroring between the Tharils and the humans: as one group sit down for a packed lunch, the others are feasting. The idea of the mirror is reflected, as it were, in the narrative events. There is a sense that writer Stephen Gallagher is genuinely attempting to explore his themes and ideas in imaginative and diverting ways. Quite what is happening at all is sometimes elusive: when Romana and her Tharil friend hold hands, disappear and re-appear outside, the viewer is left wondering, “Just what is going on now?” When we see Adric suddenly run off into the white void, we wonder why. But with Warriors’ Gate, unlike, say Arc of Infinity, there is a certainty, an assuredness about its intent and we trust that what we’re seeing is what the author – be that Stephen Gallagher, Paul Joyce or Christopher H Bidmead - wants us to see. Disjointed, unusual and strange, Warriors’ Gate is never less than utterly intriguing and at times shockingly dramatic. In its own surreal way, it is something quite magnificent.

The first thing to note about The Keeper of Traken is its obvious beauty. The sets and costumes are mesmerisingly intricate and in-keeping with one another. Even the Melkur is a menacing-looking Adonis. The often-excruciating Roger Limb also provides his first quite marvellous and delicate score. Dennis Carey’s performance as the Keeper himself is a subtly beautiful turn. But is The Keeper of Traken a case of style over substance? I would argue that despite its highs being higher, Traken is poorer than Meglos, hugely over-rated by fans and easily the least enjoyable story of Season 18.

Admittedly, Part One in isolation remains a rather wonderful vignette. The way the Keeper allows Doctor Who to watch Doctor Who on the TARDIS scanner to introduce the plot is a masterful idea. Narration is not a device usually employed by the classic series and so its use here feels fresh and unusual. Anthony Ainley impresses as the mildly eccentric Tremas and the cliff-hanger is vital and immediate. Once we become fully entrenched in the tale, however, it becomes obvious that despite the gorgeous-looking grove and the leafy dresses, Traken society is beholden to stifling, dreary procedure. The idea of “rapport” with the source is over-written, laboured, undramatic and without narrative pay-off. The endless scenes of Consuls voting in stilted, formal dialogue are stultifying. Even as events climax, we’re asked to thrill as Adric and Nyssa fix up a machine, as Tremas talks of customary oaths and the Doctor fails to key in some digits, when all we really want to do is get The Master out of his TARDIS wreaking havoc. Traken has lots of interesting ideas but it doesn’t know how to dramatise any of them. Even most of the otherwise strong Part One is told in the past tense resulting in a lack of imminence. In its final scene, The Keeper of Traken eventually and suddenly comes to life and in that instant, we’re heading for a climax.

And Logopolis it is! What a strange and ethereal tale Chris Bidmead weaves. What’s most notable about the Fourth Doctor’s swansong is how much it shouldn’t work and how much it really, really does. We open on a bypass and spend ages with an air stewardess we don’t know changing a flat tyre. In the meantime, the Doctor and Adric wander around the TARDIS, talk about maths impenetrably and get caught in a gravity bubble after which they simply leave through the TARDIS back door and chat to a policeman. Take any other Fourth Doctor episode and you’ll find three times the incident on offer here by the end of Part One. Pyramids of Mars, The Invasion of Time, heck the aforementioned Underworld, have so much more going on than the laconic and naval-gazing Logopolis. Stories like The Android Invasion, Revenge of the Cybermen and The Sun Makers boast at least twice the number of locations. Nevertheless, the funereal tone, the sense of an ending, the oddness of the dialogue and the ghostly nature of this finale make it never less than engrossing. Paddy Kingsland adds immeasurably to the strangeness of the piece and is one of the season’s best finds.

Satisfyingly, the tale brings together all the fascinations of Season 18. It is really one of the very few times Doctor Who will attempt a thematic Season Finale before 2005. Logopolis explains the nature of the CVE through which the TARDIS was dragged at the beginning of Full Circle and “entropy increases” could be a term used to describe any of the stagnating worlds we’ve explored across the seven stories. Planet Traken returns briefly before being destroyed and even Romana is mentioned, her empty bedroom a sad reminder that change is on its way. Logopolis a culmination of everything Chris Bidmead has been striving towards this year and just as his one and only Doctor Who season is a genuine, epic success, so too is his finale: a bleak, doom-laden masterpiece about the end of the universe.

Elsewhere in the boxset, we meet the infamous Adric and contentiously say goodbye to K9 and Romana. Occasionally, Matthew Waterhouse can be relaxed and strong; on other occasions, his performance is inexcusably laughable. His “casual” walk across the console room at the start of State of Decay is excruciating. But his scenes with Tom Baker in Logopolis are natural and charming. Sadly, Waterhouse is an actor out of his depth, too young to carry the weight of so much material. He does work best here though once Romana has left and he’s allowed to be the Doctor’s apprentice. When Nyssa and Tegan arrive next year, he’ll be far more irritating and competitive but by the end of the season, there is something charming about Adric. The loss of Romana and K9 adds to the sense of doom that runs like a seam through the season. It’s difficult to disassociate the Doctor and Romana from Tom and Lalla and their separation here feels personal. That K9 goes too is the final message to the viewer that Tom is on his way out very soon. Lalla Ward and John Leeson deserve mention: their performances throughout the series never falter.

Throughout Season 18, Tom Baker presents himself very differently from the manic ball of energy he was a year before. At the start of Full Circle, he looks off-camera and announces, “You can’t fight Time Lords, Romana.” He could well be talking about JNT and Christopher H Bidmead whose plans were coalescing wonderfully around and in spite of him. By Logopolis, he seems distant and sad, even gaunt. He knows this is the end and walks slowly towards the readied guns of his script writers. It’s sad, but perhaps inevitable, that Tom would go out tragically. The powerhouse of Season 17 was a man not to be stopped. Here, he’s had his wings clipped and it is brittle unhappiness rather than exuberant over-confidence forcing him on his way to new pastures. Nevertheless, despite every obstacle in his way, it is Tom Baker, the star of the show, who leaves with the most dignity, despite the behind-the-scenes heroes of the season (Bickford, Joyce, Bidmead - responsible for the great body of scripted work that is Season 18 lest we forget - and John Nathan-Turner). JNT’s thoroughly bad taste (those question marks!) occasionally bleeds through and Bidmead’s Religion-Bad/Science-Good dictum occasionally leaves a bad taste in the mouth. But Tom can do no wrong because despite the greatness of Season 18, we’re on his side. And as the moment is prepared for, it is we, as much as poor Tom, who need to come to terms with regeneration.

For the third time in 12 months, we are gifted a blu ray boxset of staggering quality. The picture and sound are sparklingly astonishing, the CG tweaks to Logopolis powerful and dramatic. The new documentaries are well-shot, enlightening and hugely enjoyable. And for good measure, there’s K9 & Company with HD titles! We are living in a golden age of Doctor Who on Home Video and with the future of the range assured, it’s surely a time to celebrate. We’ve never had it so good. It’s worth looking through the credits of Lee Binding’s beautifully designed booklet at the talented people who put this set together: alongside the Bidmeads, Bickfords and Bakers of the Who world, it’s about time we added Ayres, Crocker and Chapman to our list of heroes.

JH

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