Airdate: March 13, 1971Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning
Written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin
Produced by Barry Letts
Directed by Michael Ferguson
I've talked a lot about how modern viewers of the classic series watch the stories wrong. That is, we tend to watch all the episodes of a particular story together, rather than at a rate of one per week. This gives us, watching on DVD, a vastly different perspective on stories than UK viewers had at the time they aired. But there's another important difference, and it's that modern viewers rarely watch "Doctor Who" in order anymore. Unlike modern shows, the DVDs aren't released in chronological order one season at a time. They're released on a story-by-story basis from the whole history of the series. This makes a real difference. Even though I know where a given story fits into the history of the series (in almost all cases, I can tell you what season a given story came from and what stories came before and after it), I still don't have a sense of how one story flows into another.
Of course, that was pretty much the original idea behind this blog. I specifically wanted to find for myself a new way of approaching "Doctor Who" so that I could see it in a new way.
As a result of this, I noticed for the first time ever that the beginning of this episode is extremely off-putting in a way that's very hard for me to pin down. There's something about it that just looks different. But as I'm writing this, this story is the only one from Season Eight to be released on DVD, so when I've watched it at all over the last ten years (since they started releasing the DVDs), I've been watching it in isolation.
One thing I noticed straight away is the incredibly fast pace of the editing. I never noticed it before, but it became very disturbing to me this time. The scenes are extremely short, and the story frequently intercuts repeatedly between different scenes. Part of the reason for this, I suspect, is because this four-part story was originally conceived as a seven-part story for Season Six. It went through extensive revisions before it arriving at its final form. So these four episodes have a lot of ground to cover. Also, the director seems to have been determined to create striking visual images as often as possible.
With a script that's packed to bursting with some very strong ideas, and a director with an energetic visual style, this really ought to be a fantastic story. But it's actually a bit crap. I'm not sure why, but that's what we'll be talking about over the next few days.
2 comments:
Jeez, Drew there's no satisfying you - when we have interminable 6-or-more-parters you complain about the padding, now with a 4-parter you complain about it going too fast.
Actually you're right. There's too much story packed in for the time, and it feels rushed. Further, what ought to be dramatic reveals (the tentacled monsters when you first see the ship, or the captured Master) step on each other, losing their impact.
I haven't seen this one for years, so I'll be watching one ep at a time over at Dailymotion, so I can see if not doing the whole story at once helps things. THis means I don't know if the subsequent episodes are as rushed as this one. Usually Part 1 of a story starts more slowly, and lets the pace build with the action; but with this one it doesn't look like they've left themselves anywhere to go pace-wise.
Yeah, Jim, you got me there. But if there's one thing I've learned from my involvement in internet fandom, it's that there's something seriously wrong with every damn episode ever, so if I can't complain about the one thing, I'll complain about the other.
Honestly, while it's tempting to say that this story needed another episode to properly explore all of its big ideas, what it really needed was a) a streamlined script that didn't try to cram absolutely everything in, and b) the budget and special effects capabilities of the new series, to properly capitalize on a really good alien menace that could in no way ever possibly be realized by the BBC in 1971.
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