The Doctor has been called back to Earth by the Brigadier to investigate a new threat in Scotland, but his ties to Earth and UNIT are becoming stretched. The Doctor once again yearns to travel in time and space in search of mystery, adventure...and horror.
Season 13 of Doctor Who, airing from 1975 to 1976, marked another shift in tone. The last script commissioned in the Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks era was shot for this season and Philip Hinchliffe and Robert Holmes took over in full force. It's the first season where their vision of a show aimed at an older audience really kicks in, and it's the season that finally kills off the traditional "UNIT format" of the Doctor working alongside UNIT and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart on Earth that has dominated the show since Season 7. Season 12 began shutting down that format, and Season 13 finally ends it altogether. This season also marks a new format, still with 26 half-hour episodes, but now making up six stories, with only one six-parter and more four-parters. This makes things a bit snappier.
This is also, easily, Doctor Who's darkest and more horror-infused season to date (and possibly ever, though Season 14 is also in that conversation). Each of these stories is heavily inspired/influenced by a classic horror story, sometimes several, and it's no surprise this move was highly controversial, with the show taking heavy criticism from various viewers' groups concerned that the show had become too disturbing for children to watch.
Terror of the Zygons kicks us off with a story that's a huge amount of fun. We're in Scotland and local oil rigs are being attacked by an unknown force. The Doctor helps UNIT investigate, uncovering the threat of the alien Zygons, shapeshifters who can take on the form of humans. This is a bonkers story that has an absolute ton of crazy ideas (an alien posing as Harry, a cyborg Loch Ness Monster, organic alien technology), some very good prosthetics work and some very nice dialogue and characterisation, particularly of the Brigadier. It's not Doctor Who's subtlest hour and the Skarasen's stop-motion model shots are overly ambitious, but it's a fun story. It's also the effective end of the traditional UNIT era, and the last appearance of the Brigadier for over seven years. It's also the least horror-driven story of the season, though the shapeshifting aliens do recall Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.
Planet of Evil is a more direct homage to Forbidden Planet (itself a take on The Tempest, of course). The Doctor and Sarah arrive on a jungle planet with an invisible creature lurking in the jungle, a scientific expedition meddling with things they don't understand and a military back-up expedition about to arrive and complicate things further. The star of the show is the terrific alien jungle set, which the BBC loved so much they even let the team shoot a lot of it on film to make it look more convincing. Unfortunately, it goes a bit to waste as the second half of the story is mostly set on a spacecraft with some fairly nondescript visuals. The story has a lot of promise, but it's let down by the starship captain over-acting and the Doctor and Sarah having to spend about two-thirds of the story trying to prove their trustworthiness versus the blatant alien creature killing people. A shame as there's a lot of potential here, but it's a fun watch.
Pyramids of Mars has acquired a reputation of being almost unassailably superb over the years, and Russell T. Davies loved it so much he made a direct sequel to it in Series 14 of Modern Who. The main influence here is from every Egyptian and mummy-based horror story that came before it. The plot revolves around servants of the powerful alien Sutekh trying to free him from his prison which is powered by a structure on Mars. The story has a cracking pace with some fine acting from the likes of Michael Sheard, Bernard Archard and Gabriel Woolf, and some good action beats with a minimum of the "Doctor getting captured for half the story" shenanigans that have bogged down some recent serials. Sutekh is also a formidable, pitiless foe with an imposing presence. The late shift to a Crystal Maze-alike series of puzzles on Mars is a bit odd though, and feels like a close retread of Death to the Daleks (something that Sarah even notes in dialogue), with a rushed conclusion. Pyramids is still a very good story, but perhaps marginally overrated.
The Android Invasion is a Terry Nation story not to feature the Daleks, only his second script of that kind (after Season 1's The Keys of Marinus, twelve seasons earlier). Instead it opens with the Doctor and Sarah arriving in a rural English village which gets really weird, very quickly. There's a vague Wicker Man "cosy" horror angle here which is quite interesting, although the android duplicates risk feeling a bit too similar to Terror of the Zygons. There's one very clever plot twist, a lot of running around and some fun action scenes - including the Doctor memorably giving up on smart-arse dialogue or scientific exploration and just diving head-first through a window - but it feels like the story runs out of steam towards the end. The story is particularly disappointing as being a UNIT story lacking the Brigadier, and for being the final swansong of both Harry Sullivan and Benton (the latter bowing out having appeared in at least one story every season from Seasons 6 to 13, a formidable track record) but not really giving either character much interesting to do. Still, it's an entertaining story.
The Brain of Morbius goes full bonkers, riffing on Frankenstein but throwing enough curveballs to make it interesting. The Doctor and Sarah arrive on Karn, a planet near Gallifrey, where the scientist Solon (Philip Madoc) desperately seeks a humanoid head to house the brain of executed Time Lord criminal Morbius, whilst avoiding the wrath of the enigmatic Sisterhood of Karn. The barmy plot is offset by Philip Madoc's magnificently controlled performance as Solon and the effective, extremely weird vibe of the Sisterhood. But this is easily Doctor Who's most horrific story premise yet, with Solon waxing lyrical about cracking open the Doctor's skull and replacing his brain with Morbius', Sarah spending a chunk of the story blind, and a monster made out of the bits of other creatures. It's very effective but maybe let down a little by plot logic: why is the Doctor so quick to trust Solon again after he tries to crack his head open like an egg? And if the Sisterhood can peer inside Solon's lab to kidnap the Doctor, why can't they do the same to monitor his attempts to resurrect their foe Morbius? Still, very good stuff, especially Elisabeth Sladen's "blind acting" selling you on the absolute terror of her predicament.
The Seeds of Doom is our solitary six-parter for the season and it's clear that the writers decided to go overboard in trying to avert the normal pacing problems associated with long-haul stories. The first two episodes are effectively their own tale with the Doctor and Sarah visiting an isolated research base in the Antarctic where the discovery of alien pods in the permafrost naturally results in a horrific creature running amok. This is The Thing from Another World with a light dollop of Mountains of Madness thrown in for good measure. Eventually the threat, and thus the Doctor and Sarah, relocate to England where one of the alien pods is hatched out in the country retreat of the eccentric plant expert Harrison Chase, leading to further shenanigans.
It's all good fun, with a great guest turn from a pre-Only Fools & Horses John Challis, and a solid villainous turn from Tony Beckley as Harrison Chase. But it's definitely still a somewhat thin story, with the country house setting and tiny cast not really helping the latter four episodes with their pacing. It also tries to segue into being a UNIT story, but with no recurring UNIT characters available, that connection feels a bit unnecessary. It's clear the writers agreed, as this would become the last UNIT story of any kind until Season 26's Battlefield, a full thirteen seasons later.
Season 13 of Doctor Who (****½) is terrific viewing, with no real duds. When your weakest stories are still as enjoyable as Planet of Evil and The Android Invasion, and your strongest are of the quality of Pyramids of Mars, it's not really possible to complain. This is a very strong season of Doctor Who, even if the show is very clearly moving away from its original family-friendly vibe at a rate of knots, something that will only accelerate hard in the next season.
Some caveats with this season. The season is available on DVD and will be released later this year on Blu-Ray. The season is available on the BBC iPlayer and some other international streaming platforms, but due to a rights issue, Terror of the Zygons and The Seeds of Doom are both missing. I ended up buying those two stories on DVD and then watching iPlayer for the rest. When and if this problem will be rectified remains unclear.
Terror of the Zygons (****)
Planet of Evil (***½)
Pyramids of Mars (****½)
The Android Invasion (***½)
The Brain of Morbius (****½)
The Seeds of Doom (****)
Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.
Update: YoDanno has retracted the claim, after Margaret Weis confirmed the contract was for a Western series of novels and not Dragonlance.
Way back in 1983, when TSR was plotting what they called "Project Overlord", they had a plan for a line of gaming materials and a line of tie-in novels. Margaret Weis would edit the novels and Tracy Hickman, along with TSR's editorial team, would oversee the whole story and the gaming materials. TSR hired a "proper" science fiction/fantasy author of significant experience to write the books, similar to how SFF megastar Andre Norton had written the first Greyhawk novel a few years earlier under Gary Gygax's direction.
However, that author failed to deliver. It's been suggested that they kept creating their own plot twists and story ideas (that dragged the story away from the outline, which it needed to stick to to tie-in properly with the gaming storyline), and basically were not gelling. Eventually TSR cancelled the contract and Weis & Hickman agreed to join forces to write the novels directly, with the rest becoming history: The Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy, by some estimates, is the biggest-selling epic fantasy trilogy of the 1980s.
The identity of that original author has never been revealed, at least until today. Dragonlance historian YoDanno received a copy of the TSR contract confirming that SFF author Ron Goulart (1933-2022) was the original contracted author for the trilogy. Goulart worked extensively in SFF media tie-ins, as well as mysteries and original fiction, and is known to have been the "actual" author of the TekWar series, working on an outline provided by William Shatner.
This wasn't the first time a relative SFF "big name" nearly got involved in the franchise. In 2009 Jim Butcher, author of The Dresden Files and the Codex Alera series, was asked to write a "reboot" of the original trilogy. Butcher came on board under the impression that the project had the approval of Weis & Hickman, only to withdraw when it became clear that was not the case. Weis & Hickman have subsequently returned with new Dragonlance novels.
The Doctor has regenerated, to the mild consternation of his UNIT colleagues and companion Sarah Jane Smith. This new Doctor is less wedded to Earth and his work with UNIT, and is eager to resume his adventures in time and space. But a demonstration of the TARDIS to UNIT surgeon Harry Sullivan sets in motion a chain of events that'll see the Doctor and his companions marooned on different planets and in times without the TARDIS to rely on. It's going to be a long trip home.
The twelfth season of Doctor Who marked a significant change in the show's production. The team that had guided the show for the five previous years - star Jon Pertwee, producer-showrunner Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks - were all moving on. Philip Hinchcliffe came on board as the new executive producer, whilst veteran Who scriptwriter Robert Holmes was promoted to script editor and head writer. Letts and Dicks stayed on for the first story of Season 12 and to help cast the new Doctor, but then moved on.
For the new Doctor, the BBC had a quandary that the higher-profile actors they'd sought in the past were getting higher pay in film and on stage then the BBC could realistically afford, and Jon Pertwee in particular had felt that the show's gruelling production schedule and action made it a tough proposition (albeit not helped by fifty-something Pertwee insisting on doing many stunts and action scenes himself). One idea had been to return more to the familial setup of the show's origins, with an older Doctor dispensing wise advice, a female companion to act the audience surrogate and ask important questions, and a younger male companion to handle the action. To this end writer-actor Ian Marter, who had already impressed as a different role in Carnival of Monsters, was cast as UNIT surgeon Harry Sullivan. Subsequently Barry Letts decided to cast Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor after seeing him in the film The Golden Voyages of Sinbad, and with Baker only being ten years older than Marter this rationale disappeared.
Hinchcliffe and Holmes decided to take the show in a consciously "darker", more adult direction. Holmes in particular decided the show had gone as far as it could whilst taking into consideration six or eight-year-olds might be watching, and informally decided that the minimum age for watching the show should be ten to twelve, capable of handling more adult subject matter. He also wanted to make the show genuinely scary again and to get kids hiding behind the sofa, something he felt had not been the case during the avuncular Pertwee era. This would eventually become highly controversial, with their run (Seasons 12-14) attracting fierce criticism for violent and disturbing content. However, their run would also be hugely critically acclaimed, generating at least half a dozen stories that could all credibly do battle for the title of "best Doctor Who story ever."
Season 12 demonstrates this starkly: there is a massive shift and tone from the first story, Robot (the last produced by Letts and Dicks) to the second, The Ark in Space (the first under the Holmes/Hinchcliffe regime). Season 12 is even sometimes cited as the show's best season not because of the quality of all five scripts (at least three of which are mediocre, at best) but because two scripts stand head-and-shoulders above the rest of the season and much of the rest of the entire franchise.
This season is also unusual in being the second (after Season 8, the "Master Season") to have an ongoing metaplot that spans the season. This is lower in profile, but the idea was to remove the formidable resources of the TARDIS from the crew; they lose access to it in the second story and then move through time and space via other means (transmats, time rings) before finally reacquiring the TARDIS in the final story of the season. Each serial also has a cliffhanger directly leading into the next one, something that had not been seen regularly since the black and white seasons of the 1960s. Season 12 was also notable at the time for being the shortest season of Doctor Who to date, with just 20 episodes (albeit of around 20-25 minutes once recaps and credits were removed, so a lot less than half the length of modern episodes) compared to the then-standard 26. Subsequent seasons returned to the standard length.
Things kick off with Robot, the swansong of the Dicks-Letts-UNIT era. The newly-regenerated Doctor is erratic, with Harry Sullivan assigned to keep an eye on him. Tom Baker's debut as the Doctor is remarkable; whilst it felt like Pertwee took a few episodes to settle into the role, Baker arrives almost fully formed, with his sonorous voice, wild staring eyes, immense reservoirs of charm and formidable moral intelligence evident from his first appearance. Tom Baker immediately is the Doctor and lets everybody know it.
The story itself is somewhat pedestrian: an amoral scientific research organisation, "Think Tank" (referenced recently in Series 15 of Modern Doctor Who) is planning to trick the world into nuclear war and then ride out the aftermath in bunkers before taking control of the rebirth of civilisation. Somewhat randomly, they decide to ensure their success by building an over-emotional giant robot who exists in a near-permanent state of existential panic. This results in one of the oddest Doctor Who stories, with the creeping threat of fascism arising in Britain being genuinely chilling at times (helped by a coldly ruthless performance as Patricia Maynard as Miss Winters) being somewhat undercut by scenes of Sarah Jane Smith helping a giant robot to explore its guilt complex. The finale, where they say sod it and just have the robot become absolutely massive and start smashing up a British town (the vfx team again making promises they couldn't quite deliver), is entertaining nonsense, but the tonal imbalance of the story makes it hard to recommend. A shame as it has a huge amount of promise.
The Ark in Space marks the arrival of a new era more emphatically (at least tonally) than almost any story before or since. The Doctor, Harry and Sarah arrive on a space station in the remote future, learning that it carries the last surviving few thousand humans from Earth, ravaged by solar flares, in suspended animation. But alien insectoid creatures, the Wirrrn, have infiltrated the station and are turning the frozen colonists into both food and incubation chambers for their offspring. The Doctor and co have to convince the reviving colonists they are friends and then work out how to defeat the Wirrrn, who can absorb the intelligence and knowledge of the species they consume, making them a formidable foe.
The Ark in Space is hands-down one of the greatest Doctor Who stories of all time. The production design is brilliant, the space station is tremendously well-realised and its sleek minimalism feels like the Apple Mac has shown up a decade early. The Wirrrn themselves are an ambitious design that perhaps feels a bit too clunky, but still impressive; the scenes of human crewmembers being consumed by Wirrrn grubs and stumbling around in a half-consumed state are much more effective, as well as being more disturbing. This is definitely Doctor Who aimed at an older audience, the effects may look ropey to us now (the Wirrrn grubs are heavy on repurposed green bubble plastic) but the idea of humans being consumed as hosts for alien creatures is straight-up terrifying, and one wonders if Ridley Scott - who nearly worked on Doctor Who as a production designer in the 1960s - was sitting at home watching and taking notes (although the script for Alien was already doing the rounds in Hollywood at this point).
The weakest link in the story is probably guest actor Kenton Moore as Noah, who goes from chillingly threatening to hammy over-acting a bit too readily (sometimes in the same scene). More impressive is the supreme performance by Wendy Williams as Vira, who is chilly and efficient but remains sympathetic. Williams sells the idea of humans from tens of thousands of years in the future who have developed their own, peculiarly different culture and cultural idioms compared to modern humans. There's generally much more attention paid to detail, worldbuilding and dialogue (which was already pretty strong in the Pertwee era), which makes the story a constantly rewarding delight.
Elisabeth Sladen and especially Ian Marter are given much stronger material here as well, with Marter in particular impressing as Harry's bumbling chauvinism is overruled by a formidable sense of bravery, action and resolve. Sarah's claustrophobic mission carrying cables through a tiny service shaft surrounded by Wirrrn is also outstanding.
"Indomitable!"
But it's Tom Baker who bestrides the story like a colossus, getting some of his best-ever lines, easily his best-ever speech (and maybe the Doctor's best-ever speech about humanity across the entire franchise), and tackling each problem with intelligent resolve. Any lingering doubts that Tom Baker is the Doctor were firmly laid to rest here.
After that masterpiece it's down to Earth with a bump - literally - for The Sontaran Experiment. The first two-parter since Season 2's The Rescue, and the last until Season 19's Black Orchid, this story is one of the few from the Classic era to match a modern single episode in length and pacing. So it's interesting to see how the Classic show handled having to tell a story in the same timeframe. Unfortunately, the answer is "not very well." To save money the two episodes were shot in a focused five-day period entirely on location, with the full use of video outside broadcast. Depending on your mileage, this either makes the story look weirdly unreal or a zero-budget film made by overeager students somewhere around 1987. The pressure also didn't help the cast very much: Tom Baker broke his collar bone during one shot and had to rush back to location to complete the shoot, his signature massive scarf hiding his neck brace.
The script is unremarkable, the guest cast undistinguished, and the main selling point - the return of the Sontarans after Season 11's brilliant The Time Warrior - becomes the dampest squib in the show's history. Returning actor Kevin Lindsay (justified as the Sontarans are all clones) is a good actor but his script here is just not on the same level as The Time Warrior, and Styre is an obstinate idiot compared to the magnificently scheming Linx. Given the superb quality of the Sontaran makeup in The Time Warrior, it's also odd that the prosthetics in this story are so poor by comparison. There's a lot of running around what appears to be the same rock formation on Dartmoor, there's a very stupid-looking robot causing havoc and the story arguably undercuts the premise of The Ark in Space, with it here being revealed that loads of humans have survived on remote colonies and even a few who've made it back to Earth itself. Very disappointing.
Any such feelings of disappointment are atomised by Genesis of the Daleks. The top-rated Classic Who story on IMDB, Genesis is routinely voted the best Doctor Who story ever made, the best Dalek story and the best Fourth Doctor story. It's also the story that gave Russell T. Davies the idea for the Time War in Modern Who, with the Time Lords firing a warning shot at the Daleks that would later lead to an all-out conflict spanning the entirety of creation. It certainly has competition (not least from the very recent Ark in Space), but its reputation is formidable and mostly well-earned.
Terry Nation, creator of the Daleks, had returned to the show to helm some new Dalek stories, but his two previous scripts, Planet of the Daleks and Death to the Daleks had been small-scale and a bit repetitive, with Nation not shy about using stock ideas. The script proposal he sent in for Season 12 was so rote that it was rejected, but Letts and Dicks (commissioning the stories before Holmes and Hinchcliffe took over) masterfully suggested that Nation write a story exploring the very origins of the Daleks instead. Nation's resulting script, Genesis of Terror, was then thoroughly rewritten by Holmes, arguably Doctor Who's greatest-ever writer.
The result is a masterpiece. The Doctor, Harry and Sarah are intercepted by the Time Lords and sent to Skaro, homeworld of the Daleks, to disrupt the Daleks' creation. The Time Lords are fearful that one day the Daleks could become the supreme force for evil in the universe and defeat even them. The Doctor, reluctantly, agrees. He finds Skaro ravaged by centuries of war, a war initially fought with advanced weapons but now increasingly being fought with knives, bows and clubs. The planet is divided between the Thals (whom we've met before in The Daleks and Planet of the Daleks) and the Kaleds, two humanoid species, possibly just different nationalities of the same species, but who regard the other as physically and mentally inferior. The Kaleds in particular are obsessed with racial purity. The planet has suffered nuclear, chemical and genetic catastrophes, resulting in the mutation of some Kaleds into horrible creatures.
The Kaleds' chief scientist, Davros (a magisterial performance by Michael Wisher), has accelerated these mutations and placed them in experimental travel machines, creating the Daleks we all know and love, but he's also stripped them of their pity, morality and sentimentality, creating creatures obsessed only with destroying the impure and ruling in absolute power. Davros is instantly a formidable foe, the Doctor powerless as his normal appeals to rationality, scientific fact and morals falling absolutely flat. Arguably the greatest moment in the story comes when the Doctor asks Davros if he would create a virus capable of annihilating all sentient species and Davros calmly and then excitedly says he would, the power it would give him would be like that of a god, and the Doctor's expression turning to horror as he realises he's dealing with someone whose amorality would even make the Master think twice.
This is also a somewhat pitiless story: characters are gunned down without warning, Sarah and Harry are both put through the wringer (culminating in both being tortured by Davros whilst the Doctor is forced to watch) and the Daleks have never been more implacably evil and relentless. Some fans have complained about the prominence given to Davros after this story, with the Daleks becoming less master manipulators in their own right but more slaves to his will, but it's undeniable that the choice works brilliantly in this story. Davros' prosthetics work is also utterly fantastic (the makeup team made it so that Wisher could eat, drink and even smoke without having to remove his mask). But the story also has rays of hope: right from the start, the Kaleds are divided over the morality and wisdom of Davros's actions, and the Doctor finds willing allies amongst both the Kaleds and Thals to end the senseless conflict pretty easily. There's a strong message of hope in the goodness of human(ish) nature here.
This is also, easily, Doctor Who's best six-parter. The pacing is superb, with a constant shifting of the storylines as new complications and opportunities emerge.
The season ends with Revenge of the Cybermen, another historic story as it saw the return of the Cybermen in full force since Season 6's The Invasion, seven years earlier, as well as their last appearance until Season 18's Earthshock, seven years later. The Doctor and co return to Space Station Nerva, thousands of years before The Ark in Space, now serving as the base for the investigation of Voga, an errant asteroid recently caught by Jupiter's orbit. The Time Lords send the TARDIS back in time to rendezvous with the Doctor, but in the meantime the TARDIS crew have to investigate a plague, the mystery of the new moon and, obviously, the Cybermen.
Revenge is a bit of a mixed bag. The first episode is easily the best, with the mystery of the plague being compelling. The Doctor is at his most deductive and reasoning, and he uncovers what's going on with pleasing speed rather than gawping like an idiot until the script lets him work out what's happening (as Classic Who does on a semi-regular basis). The plot is also pleasingly twisty, with double agents, overlapping agendas and political intrigue between people who are really on the same side. The serial has a reasonably strong guest cast as well, and the location shooting at Wookey Hole is eerily atmospheric, despite the infamous behind-the-scenes chaos (Elisabeth Sladen being involved in a motorboat accident that hospitalised a stuntman, an electrician breaking his leg, and everyone on edge as a diver had drowned in the caves a few weeks earlier). Inheriting the sets from The Ark in Space also allows the serial to have a larger array of locations for the story to take place in than normal. Unfortunately, the decision to make the Ark less advanced than in the earlier story meant making the formerly pristine sets look dirty and dingy, taking away their impact.
The biggest problems in the story are the Cybermen themselves. The Cybermen had been a massive hit through the Patrick Troughton era for their implacable, emotionless appearances, their remorselessness and their terrifying ability to turn humans into more Cybermen. The Cybermen in this story are strangely emotional, declaring that everything is "Excellent!" and talking with weirdly transatlantic accents. Firing energy bolts from their foreheads also looks odd, and they prefer to kill people rather than convert them (despite the premise being that the Cybermen have been defeated in a war and are few in number). The Cybermen are more comical than threatening in this story, which is not the impact anyone wanted.
Season 12 of Doctor Who (****½) is a bit of mixed bag, with three pretty middling stories propping up two of the greatest Doctor Who stories ever written. The season is certainly worth watching for those two classics, and seeing the changing of the guard as Doctor Who heads into a more adult, more accomplished but also more controversial era. But if you've ever wondered how this franchise has lasted so long and has so many fans, The Ark in Space and Genesis of the Daleks will give you a good idea.
Indomitable!
The season can be seen right now on the BBC iPlayer in the UK, BritBox in much of the rest of the world, and is also available on DVD and Blu-Ray.
12.1 - 12.4: Robot (**½)
12.5 - 12.8: The Ark in Space (*****)
12.9 - 12.10: The Sontaran Experiment (**)
12.11 - 12.16: Genesis of the Daleks (*****)
12.17 - 12.20: Revenge of the Cybermen (***)
Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.
Sarah Michelle Gellar is indeed returning to her signature role of Buffy Summers, whom she played over the original show's seven seasons and 144 episodes from 1997 to 2003, as well as making additional appearances in spin-off Angel. Gellar is also an executive producer on the new show. She was resistant to returning to the role for many years, but apparently changed her mind after rewatching the original show with her teenage children. It is unclear if she'll be a series regular, recurring actor or even just a guest star in the pilot alone.
15-year-old Ryan Kiera Armstrong (one of the best performers in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew) has been cast as the series lead. Armstrong, who has also appeared in American Horror Story, IT: Chapter Two and Black Widow, will be playing a new Slayer who is told she has to save the world from the forces of darkness.
In the original Buffy, only one Slayer was "active" at any one time, imbued with super-strength and superior reflexes to take on the vampires. Buffy's brief "death" at the end of Season 1 allowed a second Slayer to become active (first Kendra and then Faith). At the conclusion of Season 7, Buffy was able to change the laws of reality so every single "potential" Slayer could become a full Slayer immediately, forming an entire army to save the world. Whether this change was permanent was unclear (though spin-off comics suggested it was).
The other announced cast members are Faly Rakotohavana as Hugo, Ava Jean as Larkin, Sarah Bock as Gracie, Daniel di Tomasso as Abe and Jack Cutmore-Scott as Mr. Burke.
Nora Zuckerman and Lila Zuckerman are the writers, showrunners and executive producers. Chloé Zhao will direct the pilot and produce. Fran Kuzui and Kaz Kuzui, who produced both the TV series and the original 1992 movie and own the rights, are returning as producers. Dolly Parton and her Sandollar production company will also produce; they worked on the original TV series.
At the moment only Gellar has been confirmed to return from the original cast, though the door is apparently open to many of the others returning if the pilot gets a full season pickup. Sadly, this will not be possible for Michelle Trachtenberg (who played Buffy's younger sister Dawn), who passed away in February.
The pilot is expected to shoot over the next couple of months with Hulu expected to make a decision on a full season order shortly after that.
Free to travel in time and space once more, the Doctor joins forces with journalist Sarah Jane Smith to investigate new mysteries. Their trips involve a meeting with the clone warriors of the Sontarans, a renewed threat from the Daleks, a return visit to Peladon and an unexpected infestation of dinosaurs in Central London. But a previous decision is coming back to haunt the Doctor, and will lead him to a fateful meeting with destiny on Metebelis III.
The tenth season of Doctor Who marked a fateful change for Jon Pertwee's tenure as the Doctor. Katy Manning departed as companion Jo Grant after three seasons, and the actor playing the Master, Roger Delgado, was tragically killed in a car crash. Pertwee made the decision to leave at the end of the following season, his fifth in the role. Producer-showrunner Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks both also decided to move on, though they'd also stay on into the start of Season 12 to oversee the transition to a new team.
The first task for Season 11 was to find a new character and actress to follow in Katy Manning's footsteps, a formidable challenge given her popularity in the role: at that time, she was the second-longest-serving companion. Actress April Walker was cast in the new role but she and Pertwee had no chemistry and she was quickly dismissed (with full pay for the season). Letts was approaching panic mode until a fellow producer recommended him a young actress he'd recently cast in Z-Cars, leading to a fateful meeting between Letts, Pertwee and Elisabeth Sladen. Pertwee was so taken with Sladen's performance that he stood behind her and gave up a thumbs-up to Letts.
History now records Sladen as the most popular Doctor Who companion of the Classic era, and maybe the most popular overall. She would have one of the longest runs in the show's history (three and a half seasons), return for an anniversary special, appear in a pilot for a spin-off show and then, in the Modern era, make multiple appearances alongside David Tennant's Tenth Doctor before getting her own TV show, which ran for five seasons and 53 episodes (featuring further guest appearances by Tennant and Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith), easily making her the most prolific companion of them all.
Her arrival on the show is a bit of a mixed bag. Like Jo before her, the writers came up with a great job and abilities for Sarah - she's an investigative journalist, good at making people feel at east and trusting of her and great at research, handy skills for a companion - but have a tendency to forget about that at times and she just runs around screaming at things and getting captured. Fortunately, she suffers from this far less than Jo and her skills prove useful multiple times through this first season. Her chemistry and repartee with Pertwee is also not as great as it would later be with Tom Baker, but they still spark off one another reasonably well.
The opening story, The Time Warrior, introduces Sarah and sees her join forces with the Doctor to investigate the mystery of scientists going missing from a facility under UNIT protection. Robert Holmes starts the story as a standard UNIT mystery but pivots hard (UNIT fails to appear after the first episode) to it becoming - amazingly - Pertwee's only period story. Aside from the start of Carnival of Monsters, where the Doctor mistakenly believes he's on a 1926 steam ship in the Indian Ocean, none of the Third Doctor's other stories take place in Earth's past. They're all in the near future, distant future or on an alien planet, making this a unique story in his era.
The bulk of the story takes place in the medieval period, with robber-baron Irongron (David Daker chewing the scenery with relish) joining forces with crashed Sontaran warrior Linx (Kevin Lindsay). In return for helping Linx fix his golfball spaceship, Irongron receives advanced weapons to help him conquer the neighbouring castle. The Doctor and Sarah decide to stop Linx and Irongron from changing the course of Earth's history. This is a splendid story, with Sladen immediately making a positive impression (at one point taking the Doctor prisoner because she thinks he's a villain, an unusual spin for a first companion story) and Irongron and Linx sparking so hard off each other as a villainous double act I'm surprised the set didn't catch fire. Holmes's script is witty enough to almost be considered a comedy, and the supporting cast is surprisingly accomplished, including the mind-boggling sight of Boba Fett and Dot Cotton working together (Jeremy Bulloch and June Brown, natch). It's a pacy and funny story which establishes the Sontarans, in their very first appearance, as a popular foe, mainly due to the success of the prosthetics, which are unusually excellent for Doctor Who in this era. Alongside Day of the Daleks, a very underrated story, and easily Season 11's high point.
Invasion of the Dinosaurs is, very easily, Doctor Who's most hopelessly ambitious story. Malcolm Hulke is gleefully writing cheques the BBC vfx department is not only unable to cash, but could never in a million years even start to think about cashing. He literally has things like a tyrannosaurus rex engaging the British Army in running battles on the streets of Central London, a pterodactyl attacking the Doctor in a parking garage and a confused stegosaurus materialising in a London Underground station. Obviously, none of this is remotely going to work or be convincing, and you have to respect the sheer insanity of them even trying, whilst goggling at some of the worst special effects in all of Doctor Who's history.
Still, when it's not trying to be Jurassic Park on a 1974 BBC budget, the story has its high points. The opening sequences, filmed at ridiculous o'clock in the morning to show London's streets utterly deserted (something that wouldn't work at all now), are very effective. London under alien attack and the Doctor having to defend it is a very rich idea for Doctor Who, following Season 2's The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Season 5's The Web of Fear and Season 6's The Invasion, and so it proves here. As a Malcolm Hulke joint, the serial has a deep bench of very well-drawn characters, with convincing motivations and competing agendas. It's a also a full-blown UNIT epic, with the Brigadier, Benton and especially Yates all having some excellent scenes. Sarah also gets some prime storylines, especially in the latter half when, to stave off six-part-itis, Hulke pivots the story into being what appears to be a post-apocalyptic space opera! There are several long stints without any dinosaur effects at all (ropey or otherwise), when the story becomes quite engrossing. Then, inevitably, they decide to have two dinosaurs fighting each other on a London high street and it all gets a bit silly. This story is crying out for a Day of the Daleks-style special edition to try to fix its glaring vfx limitations.
Death to the Daleks sees Terry Nation return and assemble a script out of what appears to be prefabricated flat-packs of his storytelling's greatest hits. So we have Daleks (natch), a crashed spaceship with a crew of marooned soldiers (almost directly lifted from Planet of the Daleks in the previous season), a mysterious alien city (mirrored from the Daleks' first appearance) and an exploited civilisation of locals who are divided into potential allies and enemies. This is all so rote you could fall asleep for the middle two episodes, wake up and be able to perfectly tell everyone what happened. However, there are some promising ideas here. The planet Exxilon drains the power of all ships that pass near it, and early scenes of the TARDIS losing power and the Doctor having to crank open the doors are entertaining (unless you start pondering how the power loss doesn't cause the TARDIS's internal dimensions to collapse and oh no I've gone cross-eyed). Even better are the newly-arrived Daleks finding their weapons don't work and having to nervously join forces with the humans for their own protection, since a Dalek without a working gun or defences is just a very slow target.
The idea of the Doctor and Daleks joining forces for a story is a bit under-developed though, with the two only briefly cooperating (and mostly offscreen!) before the Daleks are able to restore their dominance (through the comical medium of the Daleks re-arming themselves with machine guns and test-destroying a model TARDIS), whilst the Doctor undergoes an overlong game of The Crystal Maze to uncover the secrets of the alien city. There's some amusement here, but it's all a bit passionless. The human starship crew are severely under-developed compared to last season's Thals (and actor Julian Fox stares at the camera so much it's hilarious), and the Daleks are extremely inept. One explodes after being hit by an Exxilon native like three times using its bow as a club, and another self-destructs after some prisoners escape rather than trying to recapture them. There's some dumb fun to be had here, but not much more.
The Monster of Peladon is a sequel to Season 9's Curse of Peladon, but two episodes longer despite only having about half the plot. As its set fifty years after the events of Curse, most of that serial's cast of characters also fails to return, though fortunately we do get the return of Ysanne Churchman's outrageously bonkers vocal performance as Ambassador Alpha Centauri, who does a lot of the heavy lifting to keep the story watchable. The cast is game, and it's good to see the Ice Warriors back to being villains even if it's a bit of a shame that The Curse of Peladon's attempts to give them more depth has been ignored. The serial feels less like a sequel than a retread of the original, complete with debates over whether sightings of Aggedor are real or not and the wisdom of Britain Peladon joining the European Union Galactic Federation. There are some good elements to the story, but these are weighed down by its unwieldy length and pedestrian ultimate villain.
Planet of the Spiders is a strange story. It starts off with the Doctor straight-up killing an innocent guy in one of his experiments (however inadvertently), which he doesn't seem too concerned about, before being drawn into mysterious events at a monastery where Mike Yates is convalescing after the events of Invasion of the Dinosaurs. Giving Yates a redemption arc here is a good idea, and he has some good material (as well as a very flash car). John Dearth, with a splendidly villainous voice, also has a good punt as the villainous Lupton, but he runs out of story material about two-and-a-half episodes in and then spends most of the rest of the time standing around like a lemon. The alien spiders are also a mixed bag vfx-wise, sometimes coming across as menacing and threatening (arachnophobes should beware this story) and sometimes looking like overgrown Halloween decorations. Still, Invasion of the Dinosaurs has reset the baseline for vfx quality this season, so in comparison these spiders look state-of-the-art.
The story also has some quite ridiculous padding, most notable in Episode 2's infamously insane/inane chase sequence, which takes up half the episode and sees the use of the Doctor's new hovercar, Bessie, a gyrocopter, a speedboat and a mini-hovercraft. It's all very silly but somewhat entertaining. More fatal are the sequences set on Metebelis III with the downtrodden human natives/slaves who are just itching for an inspiring speech by the Doctor before rebelling. Some of the worst "yokel" accents you'll ever hear in your life can be found here, along with some of the worst acting ever seen on all of Doctor Who. Atrocious stuff.
The story does recover towards the end, when it takes on more mythical overtones as the leader of the spiders, the Great One, fills the Doctor with overwhelming fear and he has to confront that fear to defeat her...at the cost of his own existence. Cue a touching regeneration scene as the Third Doctor bids farewell to Sarah and the Brigadier, and we get our first glimpse of Tom Baker as the soon-to-be legendary Fourth Doctor. Changes are coming...
Season 11 (***) of Doctor Who is, unfortunately, Pertwee's weakest. Only The Time Warrior emerges as a clear winner here, with the other four stories all having their moments but also a lot of weaknesses that prevents any of them really impressing. A clear winner of the season is Elisabeth Sladen, who impresses as Sarah Jane (even if her best is yet to come), whilst Pertwee gives a more restrained, modest and emotional performance as his end approaches. The result is a watchable, solid, but rarely outstanding season of Doctor Who.
The season can be seen right now on the BBC iPlayer in the UK, BritBox in much of the rest of the world, and is also available on DVD. A Blu-Ray release is planned but has no confirmed date at the moment.
11.1 - 11.4: The Time Warrior (****½)
11.5 - 11.10: Invasion of the Dinosaurs (***½)
11.11 - 11.14: Death to the Daleks (***)
11.15 - 11.20: The Monster of Peladon (**½)
11.21 - 11.21: Planet of the Spiders (***)
Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.
A mysterious power emanating from a black hole threatens to overwhelm our universe, with even the Time Lords powerless to stand against it. In desperation, they recruit the first three incarnations of the Doctor with a special mission: locate the source of the danger and eliminate it.
In 1973, Doctor Who turned ten years old. The BBC was determined to celebrate the show's longevity, and the production team decided to create a story where the three Doctors - William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee - joined forces to face down a mutual threat. Producer/showrunner Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks also decided it was long past time to end the Doctor's exile on Earth. The format had succeeded in freshening up the show, but was also becoming limiting in the kinds of stories that could be told.
Slightly oddly, they decided to lead the season with the anniversary story, although airing in January 1973 made it closer to the ninth anniversary than the tenth (in fact, the first story of Season 11, airing in December 1973, was actually closer to the date). The Three Doctor is the first "multi-Doctor special," a concept that a lot of fans and creatives on the show love, and one that a lot hate (most famously, Russell T. Davies and Peter Capaldi). These stories, although still in canon, are generally an excuse for knockabout fun rather than doing anything too serious, and so it proves here.
That said, the story should really be called The Two-and-a-Bit Doctors, as William Hartnell was rather unwell at the time and found it difficult to stand and remember his lines, so is limited to pre-recorded VT footage on the TARDIS and Gallifrey scanners. This is a shame, but his warmth and irascible wit still comes through nicely in what would turn out to be his swansong (he passed away in 1975). The story itself becomes the Troughton-and-Pertwee Double Act and it is splendid, the two veteran actors sparking off one another with aplomb. The script also gives Jo Grant, Sergeant Benton and the Brigadier a lot to do, so the Doctors don't overwhelm proceedings. There are some superb visuals, with the entirety of UNIT headquarters sucked into a black hole, and some effective location filming in the inevitable quarry location. The monsters for this story - the Gel Guards - are both deeply stupid and highly prescient, acting as early predecessors to British television icon/nightmare from hell, Mr. Blobby.
Stephen Thorne is certainly...enthusiastic as long-missing Time Lord stellar engineer Omega (here not looking quite so much like a giant skeleton demon thing, as he was inexplicably portrayed in New Who's fifteenth series), but doesn't give a lot of nuance to his performance. I get the impression his mask was confining so he has to yell his lines rather than act them. But it does add to the "expensive panto" feeling of proceedings. The script has some great lines, and it's so much fun seeing Troughton and Pertwee joining forces you can forgive the slightness of it all. The story's biggest weakness is that the Brigadier acts like a total military dolt for most of it, an easy mistake to make when writing the character. Still, highly enjoyable, knockabout fun.
Carnival of Monsters starts as a weird one, with two apparently disconnected stories. In one, two new arrivals, entertainers, try to get through customs on the planet Inter Minor only to run afoul of customs. In the other, the Doctor and Jo arrive on a ship that famously disappeared in the Indian Ocean in the 1920s, which is attacked by what appears to be a dinosaur. The Doctor realises the ship is trapped in a time loop. The oddness of the two disconnected storylines is soon resolved: the entertainers are carrying a device called a Miniscope, in which a whole load of miniaturised creatures are being carried to entertain the crowds. A potentially fascinating premise is let down a little by the limited sets and locations available: the Doctor and Jo spend ages stuck in the guts of the machine, making their way across massive circuit boards. The serial hints at the possible return of the Cybermen before annoyingly pivoting to featuring creatures called Drashigs as the main threat, which are a very nice design but don't have a lot of depth to them.
More successful is Robert Holmes's banter-laden script, with a lot of funny lines and some early appearances for future Davros Michael Wisher (as Kalik) and companion Harry, Ian Marter (as Andrews). Leslie Dwyer and Cheryl Hall are also most entertaining as Vorg and Shirna. Potentially a great story is let down by what feels like budget limitations (the makeup for some of the aliens is poor, and some sets are overused) and pacing problems. This is a four-parter that can feel longer than some six-parters. Still, entertaining stuff, especially for the implication that the SS Bernice was a missing ship as famous as the Marie Celeste, but, thanks to the Doctor's actions, its disappearance never happens and the timeline adjusts (hence why we've never heard of it).
Frontier in Space is that rare Doctor Who beast, a full-blown space opera. Arriving in the 26th Century, the Doctor and Jo find the mighty Earth and Draconian Empires on the brink of full-scale war, with both sides accusing the other of attacking their ships. A full-blown Malcolm Hulke Special, packed with convincing, intricate worldbuilding (I would kill for some of this in the modern show), genuine political intrigue and the Doctor in full diplomat-pacifist mode, and with Jo getting some meaty plotlines. The Master showing up is much more tolerable here than normal, especially if you know this is Roger Delgado's last appearance: he tragically died in a car crash just a few weeks after the story was transmitted.
The story is very busy, avoiding the normal problems of duller six-parters, with the story moving from Earth to a penal colony on the Moon, to various spaceships and the Draconian capital. There's a lot of macho posturing, more subtle political overtures and military shenanigans, to the point where this story feels like a dry run for both Blake's 7 and Babylon 5 (Joe Straczynski is a noted Doctor Who fan, and the backstory of the previous Earth-Draconia War feels somewhat familiar). Throw in the Master, Ogrons, the surprise return of an old enemy, and you have what should be a total winner. What lets the story down is the fact that the Doctor and Jo spend most of it in prison. They go from being prisoners of the Earth Empire to incarcerated by the Draconians to prisoners of the Ogrons to prisoners of the Master, sometimes in what feels like the same episode.
Planet of the Daleks starts a rather dim trend for Doctor Who Dalek stories, with the appearance of the Daleks kept a surprise for the end of Part 1 of the story, despite "Daleks" appearing in the title, and in this case the last story pretty much letting us know that the Daleks might be about. This is Terry Nation's first Doctor Who script for almost a decade, and it's clear he hadn't been keeping up with the show in the interim as the script showed up with individual titles for each episode (something that hadn't been done for seven years at this point). The story has promise, as it brings back the Thals from the OG Dalek story and has a very small, focused cast, with each character getting a solid amount of development. There's also a rare moment of continuity as the Doctor talks about some of his former companions. The characters in this serial feel like their stories actually continue when the Doctor isn't around, which is rare at this point in the show.
Again, this is a four-parter masquerading as a six, and the pacing is a bit sluggish. There's a lot of people running around and getting captured and split up and infected with a fungal virus and needing a cure. The vfx are again a bit too ambitious as well, and Nation seems to be fall back too readily on ideas from earlier scripts (the sequences in the Dalek base feel a bit too reminiscent of the very first Dalek story). But there's a solid action-adventure story here, and the ending is a major cliffhanger which eventually gets tied up in a great comic story (Paul Cornell's Emperor of the Daleks).
The Green Death sees shenanigans down a coal mine in Wales, sparking an investigation from both the Brigadier (on the side of the local big energy conglomerate) and Jo Grant (on the side of the local eco-warriors). The Doctor, in something of a huff at everyone getting along without him, goes off to Metebelis III alone and, in one of the funniest sequences in the show's history, gets ten shades of trouble knocked out of him by the local flora and fauna. This sequence put me in mind of playing Dungeons & Dragons and one player has a strop and flaps off on a solo side-quest where the DM kicks the hell out of them until they get with the program and rejoin the rest of the party for the actual main story.
The rest of the serial unfolds as something of a spiritual successor to Season 8's The Dæmons, with the full UNIT team getting lots to do, with the locals pitching in to help or hinder as required. There's a right-on ecological message where the metaphor drives the story without the need for the writers to give a TED Talk on what it all means, a winning guest cast and one of the show's more outrageous villains. The ultimate bad guy is a very overused trope (one Star Trek had rather over-used a few years earlier) but the writers give him a ridiculous sense of humour and whimsy so he becomes a bit of a scene-stealer, and arguably loses because he's too busy trying to impress the Doctor with witty repartee rather than actually enacting his Evil Plan.
The story is also notable for seeing the departure of Katy Manning as Jo Grant after three seasons, making her (at this point) the show's second-longest running companion (after Jamie in Seasons 4-6, back when the seasons had far more episodes). It's probably fair to say that Jo had a mixed run as a companion, especially early on. She was supposed to be a skilled UNIT agent, trained in escapology as well as armed and unarmed combat, but the writers had a tendency to forget about that and have her screaming and getting captured. But when the script allowed it, Manning's superb sense of humour would come through (quoting Beatles lyrics to a confused Second Doctor in The Three Doctors), as well as her ability to unexpectedly take command of threatening situations (shutting down the prison riot in The Mind of Evil; posing as a royal princess in The Curse of Peladon; defeating the Master in a battle of wills in Frontier in Space, earning his grudging respect). Her departure is one of her best stories, especially for the impact it has on the Doctor, who seems more quietly devastated by her leaving than any other companion bar his own granddaughter Susan (at least at this point). Pertwee is particularly superb at this point.
Season 10 (****½) is a very enjoyable season of Doctor Who, with some great scripts, ideas and performances. Even when stories fall short of their potential, the ideas are at least very interesting. You can criticise the season for maybe being a bit too ambitious at the time, with the vfx creaking to realise the writers' vision, but it's all solidly fun stuff.
The season can be seen right now on the BBC iPlayer in the UK, BritBox in much of the rest of the world, and is also available on DVD and Blu-Ray.
10.1 - 10.4: The Three Doctors (****)
10.5 - 10.8: Carnival of Monsters (****)
10.9 - 10.14: Frontier in Space (****)
10.15 - 10.20: Planet of the Daleks (***½)
20.21 - 10.26: The Green Death (*****)
Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.
Back in 1977, Game Designers' Workshop released a curious black box emblazed with a line of dialogue: "This is Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone...Mayday, mayday, we are under attack...main drive is gone...turret number one not responding...mayday...losing cabin pressure fast...calling anyone...please help...this is Free Trader Beowulf...mayday." Underneath, in striking red on a black background, was the name TRAVELLER, which we were told means, "Science-Fiction Adventure in the Far Future."
Traveller is to science fiction what Dungeons & Dragons is to fantasy: an in-depth, rich roleplaying game which allows players to take on one of a myriad of roles, from soldier to explorer to engineer to medic to socialite, and explore the galaxy of a distant future. Players and Referees can create their own worlds, star systems and areas of space, or use an incredibly-detailed setting with almost fifty years of worldbuilding and detailing behind it, the Charted Space of the Third Imperium in (roughly) the year 5626 CE. Thanks to the stewardship of Mongoose Publishing and the popularity of YouTubers like Seth Skorkowsky, Traveller is enjoying possibly the greatest level of popularity in its history, with high sales and successful Kickstarters resulting in one of the most prolific release schedules for a contemporary roleplaying game, all of an unusually high and consistent quality.
But it wasn't always this way. Traveller has enjoyed periods of popularity before but also long hiatuses due to publishing problems, companies going bust and licences being moved around. For the first time, someone has attempted to tell the full history of the Traveller roleplaying game from its inception to the present. Shannon Appelcline is best-known for his magisterial four-volume Designers & Dragons series, which tells the story of roleplaying games from the 1970s to the 2000s (a forthcoming fifth volume will cover the 2010s). Here he takes that wide-ranging focus and here narrows in on one game and tells its full history over a generous page count of 300 A4 pages. It's entirely possible that no roleplaying game, except maybe Dungeons & Dragons, has had its story told in such detail before.
The book is divided into 14 chapters, exploring each edition and sub-edition of Traveller in a lot of detail, with additional chapters on various licensed producers of material and the history of the fandom. The early chapters cover the founding of Game Designers' Workshop and the early development of the game, created by Marc Miller, with sterling support from the likes of Loren Wiseman, Frank Chadwick, John Harshman and many more. There's discussion of the differences between Traveller and other SF games, in particular its strong focus on a hard science fictional approach (hyperjumps aside) rather than the science fantasy of the likes of Gamma World, Starfinder and Star Wars. There's also some interesting discussion on the early tension between those who wanted Traveller to remain a setting-less rules system and those who wanted to develop a detailed setting; the latter won the argument, very quickly. Appelcline's enviable industry-ranging knowledge means he can also contrast Traveller's position in the industry at any given time versus contemporaries, so we get frequent check-ins with what D&D was doing, what other games were coming out and what the trends were in gaming.
This is all accomplished in impressive depth. A lot of these kind of books can feel superficial, but This is Free Trader Beowulf certainly does not. Appelcline goes above and beyond the call of duty in referencing third-party sourcebooks and licences, and getting art from the most obscure corners of the fandom and the franchise, and setting it all in the context of the wider industry. He notes how Traveller's history impacted not only itself, but also other games, such as Warhammer 40,000, BattleTech (FASA started as a licensed Traveller production company), Stars Without Number and Alternity, and how its lifepath system inspired Cyberpunk, the darker tone of which inspired (for good or ill) Traveller's "darker and grittier" period as MegaTraveller and Traveller: The New Era. This era is when GDW learned that building up a beloved, detailed setting and annihilating it will not win you goodwill from the fans, something both Wizards of Coast and Games Workshop failed to learn from later on.
Appelcline's attention to detail extends to providing regular maps of various sectors in Charted Space showing where the various adventures released in one era take place relative to one another, as well as possibly the most exhaustive checklists of Traveller products ever put together, covering not just official releases but also licensed sourcebooks and even individual issues of fanzines.
The book has less art than I was expecting. It still has a lot of imagery, including iconic images from the various game editions, but rarely full-page spreads. This is not an art book in the same way that Dungeons & Dragons: Art & Arcana is, for example. The focus here is on the text and incomparable detail.
Appelcline's writing is engaging and detailed, with occasional bursts of wry humour as he considers the sometimes preposterous swings of fortune that accompany the history of the game and its various editions. I was a bit surprised to see that Courtney Solomon, who directed the risible D&D movie released in 2000, at one point owned a stake in Traveller's mainlicensee. At other points, a Traveller TV show was under development, and multiple video games (though only three ever saw the light of day). Fortunately, the story of Traveller never gets really dark as Marc Miller was very careful in maintaining ownership of the franchise and, whenever a business decision looked like getting totally out of hand, he'd pull the licence. Several times, this stopped Traveller from going under or getting stuck in development hell. If the book has a weakness, it's an unavoidable one in that it was published just a few months before Marc Miller sold the Traveller IP in its totality to Mongoose, finally satisfied (after a mere sixteen years of proven hard work!) that he had found a company who would do his vision and legacy justice. This would have provided a stronger ending to the book.
If the book has a weakness it might be that it's too detailed, though given that's the point of the book, that's like going to a Chinese restaurant and complaining the menu is a bit heavy on noodles and rice. But the richness and completeness makes the book as successful as it is. Another weakness is a couple of glaring typos that slipped through the net, but this is not a major problem.
This is Free Trader Beowulf: A System History of Traveller (****½) is simply the last word on the history of the world's oldest hard(ish) science fiction roleplaying game, and one of its most consistently popular TTRPGs. The wealth of detail may make this a bit more appreciable for hardened Traveller veterans rather than newcomers, but this is still an impressive, richly interesting work. The book is available now from Mongoose Publishing as PDF and print editions.
Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.
The Doctor's exile on Earth continues, but he has convinced the Time Lords into sending him on at least some clandestine missions, although they keep him on a short leash. The Doctor's latest adventures also include the return of some very old foes.
A key tenet of the Third Doctor era of Doctor Who is that the Doctor is exiled to Earth, where he joins forces with UNIT to combat various threats to the planet. This premise was meant to keep costs down whilst the show made the expensive transition to full-colour filming and more action. However, executive producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks began to find the format confining. One writer colleague opined that the format reduced the show to just two types of episodes: alien invasions and mad scientists. To shake things up, they introduced a new recurring threat in the form of the Master, the Doctor's opposite number and nemesis, which both made Season 8 very enjoyable but also rather predictable. More importantly, Season 8 had a test-run in the form of Colony in Space, the first story in two years to take the Doctor away from Earth.
For Season 9 they continued to shake up the format, with the Time Lords sending the Doctor on missions away from Earth. Even whilst on Earth, they decided to remove the Doctor from the environs of UNIT to have him have to combat threats without the resources of the Brigadier and his troops. As a result, of Season 9's five stories, only the first and last are "standard" stories for this era, with the Doctor and UNIT fighting a mutual threat.
Things get off to an absolutely splendid start with Day of the Daleks, in my opinion the most underrated story of the Pertwee Era and possibly the single most underrated Classic Who story of them all. As the title subtly indicates, this serial marks the return of the Daleks for the first time since Season 5's Evil of the Daleks. The Daleks have used time travel to alter history and invade and occupy Earth again (having done so previously way back in Season 2's The Dalek Invasion of Earth). However, they are opposed by a well-organised resistance force. The rebels have worked out that the Daleks took advantage of the chaos of the destruction of a 20th Century peace conference between the Soviet Union and China (currently teetering on the brink of a nuclear exchange) to invade, and believe that diplomat Reginald Styles sabotaged the conference. They plan to kill Styles to avert the chaos. The Doctor gets mixed up with events after the first assassination attempt on Styles fails.
This is a great story because it deals, for the very first time in the show, with the idea of a temporal paradox, a closed loop that is causing time to repeat in an inexorable way leading to disaster, which only the Doctor might be able to shut down. It's also excellent for how it presents the Daleks, as master manipulators ruling over a wrecked Earth from lofty towers, leaving it to human soldiers and Ogron shock troops to do all the running around for them (in reality this was to spare the increasingly ancient Dalek props from further wear and tear). Caught between is the Controller (Aubrey Woods), the overlord of the human population on behalf of the Daleks who likes to think he can reason with the Daleks and mitigate the damage to humanity, but clearly is weighed down by his conscience. It's Woods who helps carry the story, as his moral code struggles to assert itself and only finally succeeds after being exposed to the Doctor and Jo's compassion. The rebels are all a bit too posh (despite mostly good performances), but there's a unique feeling of Cold War doom to the story as the Brigadier gets reports increasingly indicating the outbreak of global annihilation. Given how unflappable the Brigadier normally is, his real worry as things get more tense is palpable. Things culminate in the long-awaited clash of UNIT and the Daleks, which has to be said looks laughably cheap even by 1972 standards in the original cut.
However, a "special edition" of the serial is featured on the various physical media and streaming releases, which uses moderate CGI, revamped Dalek voices (the originals are a bit tinny) and re-edits the final battle into something more impressive, though it also enhances one of the story's oddities, where the Doctor grabs an energy weapon and vapourises an Ogron. The special edition has him shooting two Ogrons to death, which feels a bit weird given the Doctor's well-known disdain for guns. The special edition is worthwhile for its much-improved final battle, but the CGI environments feel a bit much. Still, an underrated classic of a story.
The Curse of Peladon is another very fine story, though not quite as accomplished. The Doctor and Jo arrive on the planet Peladon at a crucial moment in its history, as it debates whether to join the Galactic Federation. The Federation has sent delegates from the planets Alpha Centauri, Arcturus and Mars to engage in negotiations, and the Doctor is disquieted that the Martian delegates are Ice Warriors, his old foes who have now apparently forsworn violence and are famed mediators. Someone is trying to sabotage the negotiations and the Doctor, mistaken as the Earth emissary, has to find out who. This is a great story for its whodunit aspect and fine political intrigue, with David Troughton (son of former Doctor Patrick) giving a stately performance as the young King. Katy Manning also shines as Jo Grant posing as a princess, giving haughty orders to her retainer, the Doctor. The alien delegates are great, with the Doctor trying to overcome his prejudice against the Ice Warriors. Special shout-out to Alpha Centauri here, a giant phallic creature with a massive eyeball who operates in a continuous state of anxious panic, but has a fine cutting line in the type of observations you wish more people would voice in Doctor Who more often. Like The Dæmons, this is a story whose critical reputation has waxed and waned over the years but feels like it's been on the slide recently, but I think is a winner, with a cracking pace and some excellent dialogue, even if the contemporary political satire (the story is based on the UK's debate on whether to join the European Common Market) is a bit on-the-nose.
The Sea Devils sees the Doctor visiting the Master, who was captured at the end of the aforementioned The Dæmons and is now imprisoned in a maximum security facility on an island. The Master's inevitable plans to escape coincide with some ship disappearances in the area, and the Doctor's discovery of the Sea Devils, aquatic cousins of the Silurians he met back in Season 7. This is another cracking story, with the usually-interminable length of the standard six-parter here alleviated by shifts in tone and setting. The three-way conflict between the humans, the Master and the Sea Devils is well-handled, and the full cooperation of the Royal Navy in the episode means some insane production values, complete with the use of a Royal Navy warship, rescue helicopter, hovercraft and speedboats making the story feel epic in a way no other story of this era (or possibly the whole Classic show) really gets close to. It's also nice to see the Doctor cooperating with a Royal Navy taskforce rather than UNIT (although exactly why he doesn't call in UNIT is unclear) and Captain Hart (Edwin Richfield) and Commander Ridgeway (Game of Thrones' Maester Luwin, Donald Sumpter) are splendidly-written characters. There's also a nice scene here of the Master enjoying watching The Clangers, setting up a gag thirty-five years later when a later incarnation of the Master finds himself watching Teletubbies.
The Mutants is a bit of a mixed bag. This is possibly the most "standard" Doctor Who story of Pertwee's run, with the Doctor encountering a tyrannical government and helping the freedom-loving rebels rise up against them. There's a bit more nuance here as the government is actually a colonial force from Earth and the rebels are the natives of the planet Solos angrily demanding independence from their overlords, who literally live in an orbital "Skybase." This is Bob Baker and Dave Martin channelling Malcolm Hulke, with a familiar mix of solid worldbuilding, some interesting characters and some biting contemporary political satire, this time riffing on apartheid in South Africa. There's also some hard science about the planet Solo's complex multi-century orbit resulting in seasons that last for decades (foreshadowing, if only coincidentally, Brian Aldiss's Helliconia Trilogy and George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire).
However, it's a story that feels like less than the sum of its parts. There's some great performances, and Paul Whitsun-Jones' Marshal might be one of the most despicable Doctor Who villains of all time for being an officious bureaucrat with zero morality whatsoever. Most of the rest of the cast is solid, generally getting the assignment of being earnest or incredibly hammy, but it's Christopher Coll and Rick James who stand out as the Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern-like (or Bodger and Grift, for JV Jones fans) Stubbs and Cotton, two ordinary guards who inadvertently trip over into becoming main characters. It's definitely a story that's very interesting in its ideas but, like most six-parters, feels too long.
The Time Monster rounds off the season in even more frustrating style. The Master is back, this time posing as a Scottish scientist (even if his accent veers from "tenuous" to "non-existent") trying to create matter transmission technology to help summon Kronos, a powerful chronovore from outside space/time. The battle of wits between the Doctor and the Master is splendid stuff, with the Master having his own assistants (who reluctantly swap sides once the Master's evil schemes are exposed) and there being a complex bit of business as the Doctor and Master try to materialise their TARDISes inside one another to defeat each other's plans, which is visually arresting (enough that the idea later gets revisited in Season 18). There's also some strong gags, like Sergeant Benton being turned into a baby and the Master time-shifting a V1 rocket from 1944 to take care of a UNIT column. Unfortunately all this good work is undone in the final two episodes, which reverts to nonsense as the Doctor and Jo run around in ancient Atlantis trying to stop the Master. If this had a been a four-parter set on contemporary Earth it would have been great, but the final two parts weaken the whole story.
Still, the ninth season of Doctor Who (****½) is mostly excellent, with three great stories in a row and two more which, if more flawed, still have much to commend them. The return of the Daleks, Ice Warriors and Silurians (if a different type of them) are all successful, and restricting the Master to just two stories works much better than him turning up every week. Jon Pertwee is also at his best this season, giving a mellower performance with less shouting, and Katy Manning has better material to work with than the previous season, particularly in The Curse of Peladon, The Sea Devils and The Time Monster.
The season can be seen right now on the BBC iPlayer in the UK, BritBox in much of the rest of the world, and is also available on DVD and Blu-Ray.
9.1 - 9.4: Day of the Daleks (*****)
9.5 - 9.8: The Curse of Peladon (****½)
9.9 - 9.14: The Sea Devils (****½)
9.15 - 9.20: The Mutants (***½)
9.21 - 9.26: The Time Monster (***)
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