Doctor Who: Season 16 - The Key to Time

The Doctor and his new companion Romana, a fellow Time Lord, are summoned to a meeting with the powerful White Guardian and is given a tremendous task: to track down the six missing pieces to the Key to Time, one of the most powerful artifacts in the universe. Their quest will take them across all of time and space, but also into a confrontation with the sinister Black Guardian.

Season 15 of Doctor Who was a bit of a mixed bag, as new showrunner Graham Williams struggled to meet the BBC's mandate to remove the horror from the show that had attracted significant complaints without completely gutting the show of its tension as well. The result was probably the most variable season of the show since the black and white era, if not ever.

For Season 16 (airing from 1978 to 1979), Williams decided to take a different tact by giving the season a much more serialised arc than normal. Whilst Seasons 8 and 12 had explored loose story arcs, the first about the Master and the second about the team being separated from the TARDIS and having to explore time and space by other means, Season 16 was going to have a more focused arc and even its own special subtitle: The Key to Time. In the event the arc ends up being a bit of a nothingburger. Aside from a bit at the start and end of each story (where some artifact, usually disconnected from the rest of the story, ends up being the Key) the arc might as well not exist, with only the end of the final story really dwelling on the Key and its powers.

The season kicks off with The Ribos Operation, by arguably the show's greatest writer, Robert Holmes. Holmes is no longer script editor, but it's clear new script editor Anthony Read knows better than to mess with a winning formula. We once again get some top-notch worldbuilding, very fine dialogue and the usual assortment of much-better-than-normal guest characters. The setting, a medieval ice planet where the people are unaware of the existence of space travel but the planet's location and resources mean a lot of aliens are undercover there at any one time, is ingenious and the plotting is pretty good, though even Holmes struggles with the "Episode 3 is mostly spent wandering around catacombs" problem, here enhanced by the "the Doctor calls in K9 and wins instantly" syndrome. Mary Tamm makes a positive first impression as new companion Romana, and it's entertaining to see the Doctor having a companion who is as smart as he is and can pilot the TARDIS as well (if not better), but is inexperienced.

The second story, The Pirate Planet, feels like it should be more momentous, as it's the first Doctor Who contribution by legendary British comic SF writer Douglas Adams. Adams had already written his famed radio serial The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy when he started work on Who and some of that humour can be found here. Adams is also clearly not one to let a good idea just be used once, as some elements of the Hitch-Hiker's series show up here with only slight modifications. The Pirate Planet isn't quite on the Hitch-Hiker's level, possibly as Williams' directive for this season was "less humour" after the previous season's Invasion of Time attracted massive complaints for being too silly. The story bounces along quite nicely and there's some good performances, but Bruce Purchase's over-the-top performance as the Pirate Captain is divisive (even if a late plot twist turns him into a much more interesting character than his earlier bombast suggests).

The third story, The Stones of Blood, is the only story this season to take place on Earth. With its invoking of standing stones and druidic ceremonies, the story recalls The Dæmons but lacks that story's warmth and banter (though it also treats its main companion much better). It's still a solid script, even if Beatrix Lehmann as Professor Rumford not only steals every scene she's in from Tom Baker (to the point where even he seems impressed) but his lunch money along with it. The story does an odd thing of completely shifting setting and tone in its final episode which a lot of people seem to hate, but I found quite intriguing, with the alien Megara (who feel like they've just teleported in from an episode of Futurama) proving to be quite amusing.

The fourth tale, The Androids of Tara, takes up to a weird alien planet where humans work alongside androids in a feudal society with kings and ceremonies, but also electric weapons. The story never really explains this oddness, and is rather stronger for it, with lots of political intrigue, scheming, insinuating and sword fights. Aside from the obvious inspiration of The Prisoner of Zenda, the story also benefits from its small stakes (the fate of the universe/galaxy/planet is not hanging in the balance) and the amusing inversion of finding the next part of the Key to Time immediately but the rest of the story is basically how the Doctor and Romana can extricate themselves from the chaos. It's also the strongest showcase for Mary Tamm, who has multiple parts to play and does so marvellously.

The penultimate part of the saga, The Power of Kroll, is the weakest, though still entertaining. The Doctor and Romana arrive on the third moon of Delta Magna where they run into a conflict between the owners of a methane refinery and the indigenous population. Complicating matters is the apparent return of the natives' god, a mile-wide squid called Kroll. Cue lots of running around as the Doctor has to mediate between the two sides, manage a gun-running rogue agent, find the next part of the Key to Time and avoid being killed by the gargantuan megasquid. As a Robert Holmes joint, the script is better than the story and premise deserves, with again some nice worldbuilding and some good dialogue, but Holmes was held back by the directive to include a really massive monster. The story also has a better guest cast than it deserves, especially Philip Madoc (from The War Games and The Brain of Morbius) and John Abineri (whose performance is compromised by the green paint he has to wear). The real star of the episode is the expansive location filming along the River Alde reed beds in Suffolk, which is actually quite successful in depicting a vast area of rivers and swamps on an alien planet, along with a surprisingly decent rubber squid monster (even if it gets a bit over-used) and even some very early attempts at computer graphics. It's just a little bit too Doctor Who-by-the-numbers, especially for Holmes (who considered it his weakest script, possibly because he'd deleted all memory of The Space Pirates from his mind).

The final story of the season is The Armageddon Factor, in which the Doctor and Romana blunder into a nuclear war between the planets Atrios and Zeos. Their quest for the final part of the Key to Time is also complicated by "the Shadow" ("the Shadow? THE SHADOW!"), a servant of the Black Guardian who is also on the trail of the Key. A potentially strong story is weakened by its six-episode length, which the story can't quite fill. However, Doctor Who fans rejoice! This the last six-parter to air in Doctor Who's history (kind of *), which will improve a lot of future episodes' pacing.

The guest cast is also splendid, with John Woodvine suitably authoritative as the Marshal and Lalla Ward making for a very charming Princess Astra, whilst cockney wide-boy Time Lord Drax (Barry Jackson) is extremely random but also entertaining. The story suffers a lot from "K9 solves all obstacles instantly" syndrome and from an ending that so abrupt you wonder if the writers' typewriter spontaneously exploded. The twenty-six episodes of buildup to the completion of the Key to Time and the final confrontation between the Doctor and Black Guardian ends up in the biggest damp squib (not damp squid, that was the previous episode) in the show's history.

Still, despite suffering from a lot of problems, like bogging down in running around caves in its latter part, the story is entertaining enough. The story feels more Robert Holmes than almost any other story not written by Holmes himself (and is mildly better than The Power of Kroll). What is interesting is that the story doesn't really betray the behind-the-scenes turmoil which was going on: Williams and Tom Baker were having an almighty barney, Baker actually quit at one point but changed his mind, and Mary Tamm decided to leave despite Graham Williams having no viable plan to replace her (again, after the exact same thing happened with Louise Jameson a year earlier).

Season 16 (***½) of Doctor Who is fine. It might be the most "fine" season of the entire show. There are no solid gold classics here, but also no total disasters either, and it's a notable improvement over the previous season (and the following). It's watchable, often fun, and the idea of the story arc is interesting, even if it ends up being mostly irrelevant and then underwhelming. Mary Tamm is a fine companion and it's a shame she doesn't come back for another season. One weakness here is Tom Baker's increasing disinterest in the show whenever he's not the centre of attention, with bursts of underacting and overacting, and few (if any) of the sonorous, well-written speeches his earlier seasons featured. This is the beginning of Baker's Latter Shatner Period.

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. The season is one of several awaiting release on Blu-Ray.

• 16.1-16.4: The Ribos Operation (****)
• 16.5-16.8: The Pirate Planet (***½)
• 16.9-16.12: The Stones of Blood (***½)
• 16.13-16.16: The Androids of Tara (****)
• 16.17-16.20: The Power of Kroll (***)
• 16.21-16.26: The Armageddon Factor (***½)

* Season 17's Shada was a six-parter but never completed due to filming strikes, though it was later completed through animation. Season 22's The Two Doctors was also three 45-minute episodes in length, so technically would work out the same as a six-parter. But anyway.

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Doctor Who: Season 15

The Doctor and Leela continue to explore time and space, but, after a series of unsatisfying adventures, the Doctor decides to return to Gallifrey on a clandestine mission of his own.

Seasons 12 through 14 arguably represent the "imperial period" of Classic Doctor Who's popularity, where it delivered certified banger after banger and many of the show's most revered stories were created. The stories were written by some of its best writers and featured the magisterial Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, along with the ultra-popular Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, the franchise's most enduring companion. Producer-showrunner Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes presided over this period of high-quality output, but the BBC was also inundated with complaints about the show becoming too scary for kids and too adult-leaning. Hinchcliffe decided to leave at the end of Season 14 and new showrunner Graham Williams had a mandate to bring back the show's warmth and humour, and maybe reduce the number of stories about, say, cracking the Doctor's skull open to replace his brain with that of a genocidal madman.

Things kick off with Horror of Fang Rock, which feels like it's just a continuation of the preceding era. The Edwardian setting, the focus of the lighthouse crew being stalked by a shapeshifting monster, and the general "classic horror movie" feel all feel like Hinchliffe is still around. The script by veteran writer Terrance Dicks, with Holmes still on board as editor, is responsible for keeping things on track. Managing to get four episodes out of a small lighthouse setting is impressive, and ably achieved by introducing new elements, new characters (via a shipwreck) and new capabilities for the invading alien force as the story proceeds. Louise Jameson also feels like she's settling in better as companion Leela, even if the writers still seem to occasionally struggle with a companion who's first response to danger is to confront it rather than run away and hide. Overall, a winner.

The Invisible Enemy follows that up by being one of the most unhinged stories in Doctor Who's canon. The opening, where the Doctor is possessed by an alien force and engages in a terrifying game of cat and mouse with Leela, is memorably creepy. The Fantastic Voyage stuff with clones of the Doctor and Leela going into the Doctor's body to eliminate the alien force is also good fun. It's the stuff between, with the alien shambolically taking over the medical space station, that is total guff, and the ending with the giant alien germ being guided around by his minions, may be among the funniest, least-threatening scenes in Doctor Who's history. In the middle we have the introduction of robot dog K9, who makes an immediate impression by shooting a guy in the groin (he was bad, so it was okay, I guess) and being sarcastic and unimpressed by the Doctor. Overall, a story that's probably worth watching only to see how absolutely bonkers it can be.

Image of the Fendahl is another location-limited story, with the Doctor and Leela confronting an alien skull that takes a bunch of scientists over in a priory. Having just had two stories where aliens can appear as other people and taken over people, this feels a bit redundant. The execution is fine, Wanda Ventham is a solid guest actor, but the plot is overly drawn out. The whole story is set in a single house and its grounds and writer Chris Boucher struggles to make the limited setting work as well as Horror of Fang Rock did (he immediately leaves the show after this, moving over to be script editor on Blake's 7, where he thrives). There's some creepy direction, but the final episode does descend into lots of running about and the Doctor spouting nonsense until he fully-expectedly wins. It's okay, but it's a bit Doctor Who-by-the-numbers.

The Sun Makers, on the other hand, is gloriously bananas. The script was basically written by Robert Holmes in an absolute fury over his tax bill, and unrestrained Holmes in full anger is a marvel. The Doctor and Leela arrive on Pluto, where the human race has been forcibly resettled to work off a debt to an alien race. People are taxed to live, eat and even die. The Doctor gets roped in when he stops a worker from committing suicide over having to pay his father's death tax (!) and is soon so enraged by the tax-collecting corporation that he happily agrees to set up a full-blown revolution.

Holmes's script isn't quite The Ark in Space or Talons of Weng-Chiang, but it is constantly witty, bristling with an undercurrent of vitriol. The cast is all on good form (even if the Doctor's motivations here are a bit lacking), especially Richard Leech as Gatherer Hade who delivers his insane platitudes to his superiors with aplomb. In fact, if you want a dictionary definition of "aplomb," Leech's performance is it. He is almost upstaged by Henry Woolf as his superior, the Collector, who comes across as Davros-from-Wish but plays it to the hilt, with his utter obsession with profit forecasts and achieving maximum business synergies (or whatever) even at the cost of thousands of lives, being genuinely repulsive. Everyone else struggles to compete, though there is a good turn by Michael Keating, soon to be immortalised as Vila in Blake's 7. Not Holmes's finest or subtlest hour, but this is a very entertaining story.

Underworld has an interesting idea, with the Doctor bumping into a bunch of Minyans, a race whom the Time Lords previously "uplifted" to greatness but inadvertently gave the tools to destroy themselves, leading to the Time Lord policy of noninterference in the affairs of other species. The Minyans therefore see the Doctor as a cursed god, a great idea that is abandoned after about one scene. The Minyans then arrive on a planet that has formed around a spacecraft they are chasing which holds the key to saving their species. There's a lot of running around in tunnels, rebels rebelling under the Doctor's tutelage (for all the Doctor's hatred of violence, he has no problem with other people doing it on his behalf) and a mad computer to cap it all off. There's a lot of interesting ideas here that aren't allowed to flower fully. The story also suffered severe budget limitations to the point where they couldn't afford proper sets, so instead built models and green-screened people into them. There are some scenes where this works really well, and some where it's a bit of a disaster.

Things are capped off by The Invasion of Time, where the Doctor arrives on Gallifrey and promptly goes bonkers, seizing control of the High Council and allowing aliens to invade for no apparent reason. Obviously there's a whole reason for it, but it's not a particularly good one. Then, unexpected Sontarans! The story is an overlong mess, but it's also oddly watchable. We don't go to Gallifrey all that often so it's interesting to see more of the Doctor's homeworld, even if it's all a bit underwhelming (the Time Lords get outfoxed by some very dumb aliens, and there's some Standard Primitives living like two miles from the city who are a problem but then not, as the plot demands). Season 15 was under huge budget problems due to the rampant inflation of the late 1970s (hence the Underworld issues), which leads to the bizarre sight of the deep interior of the TARDIS looking like a British hospital. We also have Leela leaving for no apparent reason, and the huge open-but-missed goal of not recruiting Hilary Ryan's splendid Time Lady engineer Rodan (after an initial bout of wet-blanketitis) as the replacement companion.

Season 15 (***) is well-intentioned, with some good ideas, but is ultimately a bit of a letdown after the preceding three seasons. Horror of Fang Rock and The Sun Makers are highlights, but The Invisible Enemy is enjoyable for all the wrong reasons. Every other story can be summed up as "promising but underwhelming."

The season is available on DVD and limited edition Blu-Ray. The regular edition Blu-Ray should be out later this year. The season is also available on BBC iPlayer in the UK, and on various overseas streaming services.

• 15.1 - 15.4: Horror of Fang Rock (****½)
• 15.5 - 15.8: The Invisible Enemy (***)
• 15.9 - 15.12: Image of the Fendahl (***)
• 15.13 - 15.16: The Sun Makers (****)
• 15.17 - 15.18: Underworld (***)
• 15.19 - 15.24: The Invasion of Time (**½)

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Doctor Who: Season 14

The Doctor continues to travel in time and space, but an emergency summons from his homeworld of Gallifrey results in him having to travel home alone to confront an old nemesis.

Season 14 of Doctor Who aired from 1976 to 1977 and is the last of three seasons produced by Philip Hinchcliffe. Under the stewardship of Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes, and impeccably led by Tom Baker, the series had acquired impressive critical results, with some of the highest-rated stores in the entire Who canon being made under their leadership, as well as excellent ratings. But the show had also attracted heavy criticism for leaving the kids behind and becoming too dark and adult. The show was relentlessly targeted by groups determined that the show should become safe, sanitised and predictable, something Hinchliffe and Holmes were not interested in.

The BBC was more minded to listen to the criticisms, though, and had to concede that Season 13's focus on horror had perhaps gone tad over the top for a show aimed at a family audience. Hinchliffe decided to leave at the end of Season 14, with Holmes likewise deciding to depart but he was asked to stay on into Season 15 to ease the transition. However, before they left, they clearly decided to give the complainers something to really complain about.

The season starts off relatively placidly, with The Masque of Mandragora, possibly one of the most forgotten-about stories in Doctor Who history. It's certainly not bad, but compared to the heavy hitters later in the season it's definitely flown under the radar. The story sees the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith inadvertently let the TARDIS be boarded by a hostile alien presence, the Mandragora Helix, which they unwittingly unleash in 15th Century San Marino. A guilty Doctor works to recapture the Helix whilst navigating political intrigue between Count Federico and his nephew Giuliano, whom he is trying to stop becoming the local Duke.

This is a reasonably good story, with some nice period detail. The serial was shot on location in Portmeirion, Wales (where The Prisoner was famously shot) where there were some buildings that at least looked the right ballpark for the time and region, which added a higher sense of production value, as did the superb costumes. The story itself is quite nicely executed, but the political scheming (despite riffing on Hamlet a lot) feels more interesting than the actual alien threat. I sometimes wonder if the story would have been better as a pure historical without the aliens. A good story without being too flashy. As a point of trivia, this is also the very first time - fourteen years into the show! - that someone asks how they can understand all the people they meet when they must be speaking wildly different languages.

The Hand of Fear starts off extremely dramatically: the Doctor and Sarah arrive in a quarry (an actual quarry for once, not one posing as a planet) and almost immediately get blown up in a construction accident. Sarah is possessed by a malevolent alien entity trying to regenerate its form from a single severed hand that landed on Earth millennia ago and storms into a nuclear power station to use its radiation to that end. This is a strong start that carries the story through most of its opening three episodes, with the sight of Sarah, wielding alien firepower, single-handedly storming a nuclear power plant being quite memorable ("ELDRAD MUST LIVE!"). The guest cast is compelling, and the prosthetics work for Judith Paris as the alien Eldrad is exceptional for the time.

Things drop off a cliff in the fourth episode, unfortunately, with the events on the alien homeworld being decidedly less interesting and Judith Paris' more skilled performance being replaced by Stephen Thorne's more bombastic and blustering one (revisiting his role as Omega in The Three Doctors). The resolution to the threat is also a bit ludicrous. This can be forgiven a little as they had to rush the end to the story to accommodate Elisabeth Sladen's decision to leave the show. Holmes outlined a loose ending which Tom Baker and Sladen disliked, so they rewrote it themselves to be more emotionally affecting. The normally magnificently aloof Baker gives one of his most emotional performances as he tries to get Sarah home and apparently succeeds (though, as we found out thirty years later, he was actually off by a few hundred miles), whilst Sarah's visible mixed feelings on going home versus continuing to adventure in time and space are well-sold by Sladen. Without this scene, the story would be a lot weaker.

The next story can only be described as a total gamechanger. The Deadly Assassin takes us back to Gallifrey, which we've visited very fleetingly before in The War Games and The Three Doctors, but never in this detail. The whole story takes place on Gallifrey and sees the Doctor return home and almost immediately be implicated in the assassination of the President of the High Council of Time Lords.

This is a remarkable story, first up for being the only Classic Doctor Who story where the Doctor has no companion for the whole story. There are some stories where he starts off with no companion but rapidly acquires one, but this is the only one where he has none at all, and this nearly continued for at least the rest of the season, but the writers found it so tough not being able to have the Doctor provide exposition to another character they changed their minds on that. It's also the story that rewrites our conception of the Time Lords, here presented as a stuffy, somewhat ossified species with unbelievable power but no will to use it, and instead consumed by their own internal concerns. It's also the story that establishes a lot of Time Lord iconography, including their costumes, ranks, government system, the Panopticon, the Matrix and the twelve-regeneration limit for Time Lords (something Steven Moffat didn't appreciate during his tenure when the Doctor hit the limit during his period in charge).

This is also the Doctor Who story - airing in 1976! - that adds its bit to the rise of the cyberpunk genre. The Time Lord computer system is identified as "the Matrix" and the Doctor interfaces with it through a VR simulation, eight years before Gibson. Doctor Who is rarely at the cutting edge of the latest science fiction subgenre, but here it was way ahead of the game.

The story hinges not just on an imperious performance by Tom Baker but an outstanding guest cast: Angus MacKay as Borusa (in the first of many appearances by the character), Bernard Horsfall as Chancellor Goth (probably the same Time Lord he played in The War Games), Erik Chitty as Engin and a splendid George Pravda as Castellan Spandrell, the Gallifreyan Poirot. We also have Peter Pratt becoming the second actor to play the Master, taking over from the sadly late Roger Delgado who passed away after Season 10 was filmed, delaying further appearances by the character. The Master's horrific visage, caused by a failed final regeneration, is a bit undercut by the prosthetics work being quite poor, but the idea of the Master, ravaged in agony, spending the last moments of his life trying to kill the Doctor and destroy Gallifrey, is appropriately evil. This is a great story that recontextualises a lot of what we know about the Doctor and his homeworld in a very entertaining way.

The Face of Evil, a disappointing and thankfully uncharacteristically mediocre script by future Blake's 7 showrunner Chris Boucher, drops the quality level significantly, although the idea - two descendant tribes of a crashed spaceship crew feuding with one another - is sound. The story tries to recapture the magic from the previous season's Planet of Evil, with a similarly impressive jungle set, but this set is less-successful, and they don't shoot it on film as much so it ends up looking cheaper. The central core threat of a mad computer system inadvertently driven insane by the Doctor during a prior visit which the Doctor barely remembers is also interesting, but under-explored, and not helped by the Tesh tribe being awful in both characterisation and costuming. That said, the story is buoyed to a high level by Louise Jameson's impressive performance as Leela, which is really above what the story deserves. It's unsurprising that the writers immediately decided to make her the new companion.

Boucher returns with The Robots of Death, an immensely superior script. The Doctor and Leela arrive on a massive sandcrawler where very rich miners try to keep their quality of life absurdly high by taking crazy risks, including crewing the crawler with a bunch of hyperintelligent robots who, surprise, rebel. More interesting is that some of the robots - which are all a marvellous design - have distinct personalities, goals and ideals, not all of them hostile. This is a story inspired a lot by classic science fiction, with a bunch of references to the works of Isaac Asimov and Frederick Pohl, and with some great pacing and characterisation, including a splendid guest turn by Pamela Salem (who will later return in Remembrance of the Daleks).

The story is let down a little by the story's descent into a fairly predictable pattern later on, and also by the higher-than-average bodycount, which the Doctor really doesn't seem to give much of a toss about. The Fourth Doctor disdains unnecessary death and destruction, but he also doesn't seem to be as remorseful as his predecessors or successors (excluding maybe Six) when a bunch of people die. The story also has a very abrupt ending, as if they almost had too much story for four episodes and had to cut hard.

The final story of the season is one of Doctor Who's most acclaimed moments, The Talons of Weng-Chiang. It's easy to see why the story has gained the reputation it has. The production design is absolutely remarkable, the sets numerous and exquisite, the guest cast is on fire, Tom Baker and Louise Jameson are establishing a really interesting rapport, and Robert Holmes' script is witty, clever and accomplished.

The story essentially has the Fourth Doctor playing Sherlock Holmes, investigating the disappearance of a number of women in late Victorian London. He allies with the local police, gentleman doctor Professor Litefoot (Trevor Baxter) and showman Henry Jago (Christopher Benjamin). I get the impression that Holmes inadvertently let Litefoot and Jago take over the script, and the two actors rise to the occasion with two of the best guest turns in Who history (a spin-off TV show was even mooted, and eventually realised as an audio series for Big Finish). For a six-parter, the pacing is crisp and Holmes keeps inventing new ideas, plot twists and turns to make the story really sing.

Unfortunately, the story hits a bunch of stumbling blocks. A key one is that the experienced actor John Bennett has a spectacular turn as the villain Li He'sen Chang, but he is sidelined as the story goes on by Weng-Chiang, played by Michael Spice, a graduate of the Stephen Thorne School of Shouty Acting (not as good as the Brian Blessed one) and a vastly less compelling villain. There is also a problem with the story's requisite monster, a giant rat. The rat looks bloody awful, not quite Invasion of the Dinosaurs awful, but not far off. More annoying is that the rat is really extraneous to the story at hand and could have been disposed of without a problem.

There is also a bizarre problem here with the decision to cast a very English actor as a Chinese villain. Britain in the 1970s had plenty of actors of Chinese descent available to play the role, and Doctor Who had even previously gone down that route just five years before this story in The Mind of Evil, which used British-Asian and Hong Kong (then administered by Britain) actors to good effect

 (negating the traditional, "well, it was the style at the time" excuse). Using both yellowface and prosthetics to make the actor appear Chinese feels rather unnecessary, and only exacerbated because the character is not even the main villain of the story.

Finally, that issue of the Fourth Doctor appearing a bit uncaring about the titanic number of casualties in the previous story recurs here to an even larger decree: the Doctor cracks jokes about a guy who is basically murdered right in front of him. There's a thin line between having a more practical Doctor who shrugs off immediate crises to focus on resolving the situation, and one who appears uncaring and even cruel. Arguably this story crosses that line, even if only slightly.

Despite all of that, Talons is still a terrific story with an immense script which sees out the Philip Hinchcliffe era in style. It's hard to overemphasise how incredibly successful these three seasons have been, contributing at least seven stories that hold a claim to being the best Doctor Who stories of all time (The Ark in Space, Genesis of the Daleks, Pyramids of Mars, The Brain of Morbius, The Deadly Assassin, The Robots of Death and The Talons of Weng-Chiang; some also add The Seeds of Doom). Hinchcliffe would be a very hard act to follow, as Graham Williams discovered very quickly.

Season 14 of Doctor Who (****½) is a terrific success, with only The Face of Evil being slightly disappointing and that still being buoyed by a mighty performance by Louise Jameson. It's sad to see Sarah Jane leave, though she does at least depart with two great stories for her character, and Leela is a fascinating replacement, though one the show will struggle more and more to accommodate in future stories. But this season contains at least three of the best Doctor Who stories ever made, and the rest are not too shabby. An impressive season, but not one to watch with little children.

The season is available on DVD and Blu-Ray. The season is also available on BBC iPlayer in the UK, and on various overseas streaming services.

• 14.1 - 14.4: The Masque of Mandragora (****)
• 14.5 - 14.8: The Hand of Fear (***½)
• 14.9 - 14.12: The Deadly Assassin (*****)
• 14.13 - 14.16: The Face of Evil (***)
• 14.17 - 14.20: The Robots of Death (****½)
• 14.21 - 14.26: The Talons of Weng-Chiang (****½)

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Doctor Who: Season 13

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.

• 13.1 - 13.4: Terror of the Zygons (****)
• 13.5 - 13.8: Planet of Evil (***½)
• 13.9 - 13.12: Pyramids of Mars (****½)
• 13.13 - 13.16: The Android Invasion (***½)
• 13.17 - 13.20: The Brain of Morbius (****½)
• 13.20 - 13.26: The Seeds of Doom (****)

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Doctor Who: Season 12

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.

BBC to release RED DWARF and DOCTOR WHO in HD

In an interesting move, the BBC has confirmed they are releasing Doctor Who and Red Dwarf on Blu-Ray in high definition...despite the original shows being shot natively on video, which should make such a process impossible.

Backing up and as previously discussed at length in our HD remastering discussions for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Wire, The X-Files and the proposed (and unlikely-to-happen) Babylon 5 remastering, it has been possible for various TV shows to be natively remastered in HD or even 4K because they were shot on film. Film retains a huge amount of information (as it's also what was used for movies, projected onto massive cinema screens) so getting a very high quality image from the original film source is a relatively straightforward process.

The complicating factor in most American TV shows is that, although shot on film, they were mastered (that is, having music, sound effects and visual effects added) on much lower-quality videotape, which is where the broadcast version of the episode exists. Videotape is impossible to remaster, because the extra visual information simply doesn't exist in the image. If you tried, the image would just come up very blurry with large and visible pixels. So, for shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation, the remastering team had to go back and re-edit every single episode together from scratch, re-add the music and sound effects and redo all of the visual effects from scratch in HD. This was both time-consuming and very expensive.

In case of British television shows which were shot on video - i.e. they never existed on film at all - it was assumed that they would simply never be remastered and would have to remain in standard definition forever. There has been some talk of advanced extrapolation - scanning the original material, blowing it up to HD and then filling in the pixels dynamically with an advanced algorithm - but this appears to be many years away still.

These new Blu-Ray editions appear instead to be "upscales", an attempt to make the episodes appear to be HD through a more primitive process of adding more pixels to the screen. It can be a very variable process, sometimes surprisingly effective and other times disastrous. I'd wait for reviews before seeing how well the upscale has been done.

In the case of Doctor Who, it appears that so far only a "test run" is being done with Season 12, the first season to star Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor. Originally broadcast from 1974 to 1975, this season was chosen as it features the most popular Doctor and features arguably two of the greatest Doctor Who stories of all time, The Ark in Space and Genesis of the Daleks. The Blu-Ray will also have lots of new special features, including a brand-new retrospective by Tom Baker on his time as the Doctor. It will be released on 11 June 2018.

Red Dwarf's release is much more confident, with Seasons 1-8 being released in a single box set in one go. This will be released on 1 October 2018.

Sailing back into HOSTILE WATERS

In 2001 Rage Software released a strategy game called Hostile Waters. Due to a copyright issue, it was given the slightly less-wieldy title of Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising in the United States. The game was released to a rapturous reception, with universal critical acclaim and high review scores. However, these did not translate into high sales. The game sunk pretty quickly and Rage Studios had to close its doors a couple of years later.

The appeal of Hostile Waters has never really gone away though. Retrospectives (like this one) surface every couple of years and the game has gained a new lease of life through re-releases on GoG and Steam. And it's both easy to see why the game is so beloved and why it also didn't resonate with a mass audience.

Hostile Waters is a strategy game inspired by the 1988 video game Carrier Command. It has an all-new story written by comic writer and novelist Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, The Authority, Crooked Little Vein). Set in the year 2032, it depicts a world utterly at peace. In an alternate-timeline 2012 humanity created the "Creation Engine", a nanotech reassembler which can take garbage, pollutants and other materials and recreate them as anything: food, clothing, electronics. The Creation Engine resulted in the collapse of the old order of capitalism and warmongering, as the abrupt arrival of a post-scarcity society made such things obsolete. Some of the old order did not like this and tried to ban Creation Engines, even going to war to obliterate them and all knowledge of how to build them. They were defeated in a brief, brutal and bloody conflict.

Hostile Waters opens with the peaceful, semi-utopian society that resulted from the Creation Engine coming under attack: missiles fired from a remote island chicane in the South Pacific are striking the major cities. An "adaptive cruiser" - a warship fitted with Creation Engines so it can build a complement of strike craft on the fly - named Antaeus is sent to the chicane to investigate. Sure enough, it turns out that the "old guard" of dictators, generals and now-redundant business tycoons are behind the attacks, using Creation Engines and genetic engineering to unleash a new threat, a biological WMD that they can use to blackmail the world. The early part of the game sees you - playing the commander of the Antaeus - investigating the threat, taking on Cabal military forces (who start off using traditional vehicles like Apache helicopters and Abrams battle tanks) and becoming aware of the more devastating weapons the Cabal is working on. Later on in the game the Cabal launches their bioweapon, which promptly turns on them and becomes a much greater threat than anyone was expecting.

What is interesting about Hostile Waters is the control scheme. It's real-time tactics game which anchors the in-game camera to one of your military units. There is no gods eye view of the battlefield like in, say, StarCraft or Command and Conquer. There is a strategic map (accessed via the F1 key) but this pauses the game. You can issue orders to your units in this mode, but you have to come out of the map to see them unfold. This makes for an engrossing variety of gameplay: at one moment your units are engaged in a furious real-time battle and then you pause the action for a leisurely appreciation of the battlefield and what orders you can give. You can also take direct control of a unit and fly/drive it around the battlefield like an action game before allowing the AI to take over again. This allows Hostile Waters to be both incredibly intense and also extremely relaxed at the same time.

Adding to the complexity here is the fact that you can't create infinite numbers of units. Instead you have a set number of "AI chips". Like in the novel and TV show Altered Carbon, people have their personalities captured on a chip at the moment of death (in this game the chip is called a Soulcatcher). You can assign one chip to one vehicle. You can't use copies as this causes the AIs to have massive existential crises mid-battle. Without a chip, the vehicle cannot operate autonomously and needs to be directly controlled by yourself. Even more brilliantly, the AI chips all have different specialities: Ransom likes to be in an attack helicopter, Patton in a tank with a big gun, Borden in a hovercraft and Korolev in a utility vehicle, either scavenging or repairing other units. Put them in other vehicles or give them weapons they don't like and they do not perform as well. The AI chips also have an amusing amount of banter they engage in during the game. Although their catchphrases do get a little repetitive, this eerily reinforces the fact these aren't people but electronic copies of their personalities at the moment of death.

The game's presentation is exceptional. As a seventeen-year-old game the graphics are obviously dated, but still eminently playable. The story, written brilliantly by Ellis with dialogue and narration far beyond the quality of video games even today, is narrated with gravitas by the mighty Tom Baker (Doctor Who, Little Britain). Church and Walker, your two advisors, are played by Glynis Barber and Paul Darrow from Blake's 7, and both do a fantastic job (especially Darrow). The voice actors for your units are also very good, packing a lot of personality into their audio barks and occasional commentary on what's going on. The minimalist musical score is also very enjoyable.

The game is also remarkable for how dark it gets, moving from a military wargame to, later on, The Thing-style body horror. There are hard moral questions asked in almost every mission and the game's morality gets pretty murky later on when you are asked to commit genocide.

The reasons for the game's failure are also unfortunately clear. As a PC-only game self-published by a small British company, it didn't have the marketing clout to get much advertising out, particularly in the United States. More damningly, the game did not ship with multiplayer. The pause-action-pause dynamic did not seemingly allow for any kind of multiplayer at all, and in the age of StarCraft, Total Annihilation and (a few months later) WarCraft III, this did not fly. Frustratingly, the creators did complete a multiplayer patch but the company collapsed on the very day it was finished, so they never issued it.

The game's cross-genre appeal also did not allow it to be categorised easily. It's a frantic action game and a slow-paced strategy game at the same time. It's a very cerebral, thoughtful science fiction story and also a pulpy, schlock military horror story simultaneously. For those who love their genres blended together, tonal variation done well and things to be unpredictable, Hostile Waters is one of the best games ever made. For those who like their games to fit into snug, well-delineated boxes with no flexibility, the game does not work as well.

Hostile Waters was released at the same time as several other strategy games which rejected the Command and Conquer/StarCraft paradigm in favour of doing something more interesting and original, such as Homeworld, Battlezone and Ground Control (and, although a lot less successfully, Star Wars: Force Commander). Ultimately, the middling sales of all these games and the outright failure of Hostile Waters seems to have led to the conclusion that all people wanted in the strategy space was more C&C clones, even today, which is a shame.

Hostile Waters is a fantastic game, if you can get into its headspace and how it does things. It's a remarkable, never-likely-to-be-repeated mash-up of transhumanist, post-Singularity hard SF, biological horror, military fiction and frantic action. It's influences are Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear, Command and Conquer and The Thing but it generates an atmosphere all of its own. It's a game screaming out for a modern remake, or even a HD remaster. It remains strongly recommended.

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