“The Enemy of the Daleks”

…or Enemy of the Daleks, as it is more commonly, but also incorrectly, referred to.

This audio story from 2009 is the first Big Finish effort we'll be looking at; it features mainstays Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, once again reprising their roles of the Seventh Doctor and of Ace, respectively. Big Finish may quite possibly never have gotten off the ground if not for those two's stunning willingness to return to their old characters at the drop of a hat, whether or not the production has a license — Aldred put in an appearance in the low-budget Internet parody series Bitesize Who just a few years ago, for example. 

At any rate, they're very good, and in general The Enemy of the Daleks' cast is quite good (if nothing else, Nicholas Briggs as the Daleks, need I say more?). So is its sound design, though the Kiseibya's voices are not as intelligible as I think they're meant to be.

Now the writing… ah. Hm. Well, there's this divide in Who fandom — though it is somewhat arbitrary, as has been well-argued elsewhere — between the ‘frock’ and ‘gun’ approaches. The former embraces the beautiful silliness of a story about a daft old man moving through time and space in a police box and whose greatest enemies are pepperpots who sound like parrots with laryngitis, and are named after the “frock coat” worn by the Doctor (not that it's actually a frock coat in any incarnation past the first, any fashion enthusiast will be happy to tell you, but that's neither here nor there). The latter, whose totem is, ahem, obvious, prefer darker, more mature stories about war and moral dilemmas and totalitarian dystopias. 

The Enemy of the Daleks is an extremely gun story (…just look at the cover!), is the thing, and I just don't like gun stories very much. 

The central conceit is that this Japanese scientist in the future, while humanity is at war with the Daleks, creates a new and equally monstrous species to act as predators for the Daleks, finally kicking them off the top of the food chain that they otherwise occupy. These monsters, uneuphoniously called the Kiseibya, eat flesh in larval state and metal in adult form, making the Daleks the ideal food-source for them. The first sign that the Professor cannot control them is, however, when they begin eating all his scientific equipment, and it's clearly played for drama, even though, guys, this here is a mad scientist who created metal-eating monsters and is now upset that they're eating all his stuff. This is a joke. A good one too. Own up to that. 

The other problem is that, in presenting a “History tragically repeats itself” scenario, the story is trying very hard to be a thematic sequel to Genesis of the Daleks — a thematic sequel where the Doctor actually crosses the wires and exterminates the Daleks/Kiseibya before they can escape into the universe. Fair enough, but Bishop isn't actually up to the task of exploring the moral ramifications of this decision; in fact, the Doctor's main reason for going through with it appears to be that he has known all along that a great atrocity must be committed on this day in this place, and so It Is His Destiny to do this, and he knows it, and so he does, and GAWD NO. The fact that the characterization of McCoy's Doctor, as time went on, was increasingly swallowed up by the “machiavellian chessmaster who knows in advance everything that must be done, and does them out of a grim sense of duty” idea, is usually trumpeted as a good thing, but rather than making him epic and complex, I always felt it just robbed him of any real characterization.

Oh well. It's not boring at all, but it's all a bit too grim and gritty for me. 

Post-Scriptum:

• Not entirely sure what the point of the local human army detachment being a “Valkyrie Unit” entirely composed of women is, whether in- and out-of-universe. It's just there, a vaguely nonsensical detail in a story so very desperate to be taken seriously. …And come on, if you're going to stick Ace with a whole batallion of other trigger-happy female soldiers, you had bloody well better do something with it.

• This was my first exposure to companion Hex (I am not listening to the Big Finish audios in anything like chronological order) and, I mean, he's okay, I guess? I don't see much to tell him apart from Rory for now — yes, Hex actually came first, but that's neither here nor there. I also wish that just for the hell of it, it was Hex from Discworld as a companion. I don't even know what that would look like, but it sure would be funny. 

“Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth”

…so the ironic thing is that it'll probably be a while before I watch the actual, televised version of this story, seeing how I've already watched two other takes on the same plot and am getting pretty sick of it. The first version, of course, was the excellent bit of fun that is the Peter Cushing movie, which, in its sole greatest flaw, bears the syntaxically-nightmarish title of Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.. (All the rights words are there, but it just doesn't………!) 

The second, and subject matter of the present review, is the Terrance Dicks novelization of the same book, from 1977 — well, no, not even that; what I actually got was the 2009 audiobook read by William Russell (Ian Chesterton in the TV series, way, way back) and Nicholas Briggs (the latest and greatest of Dalek voice artists). 

I could recite the plot by heart at this point, but for the benefit of those not currently suffering from Dalek Invasion of Earth overdose: after numerous travels through time and space with 1960's English schoolteachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, the two runaway Time Lords known as the Doctor and Susan English, respectively, finally manage to land the TARDIS in what appears to be London, where they have been trying to return Ian and Barbara since the second episode. Unfortunately, it soon turns out that this is 22nd century London, and in ruins at that, following many long years of Dalek occupation. 

For indeed, the Daleks, last seen being karmically exterminated by their ancestral enemies the Thals at the end of The Dead Planet, are back with a vengeance. After meeting up with the local resistance, the TARDIS travellers are soon separated and all sorts of things happen as they trudge about the devastated England trying to figure out what the Daleks want on this planet and how to stop them. 

Notable secondary figures in this plot are the laughably-named Robomen, a first draught of the Cybermen (being robotized, emotionless humans) who serve as the Daleks' henchmen; Tyler, a resistance leader who has lost the use of his legs, but not the will to think up a giant bomb with which to rid the planet of the Daleks' filth; and David, a handsome young fighter in the resistance, who develops into Susan's love interest. (In both the televised episode and the audiobook, his last name is Campbell, but I'm told that in the printed version of the novelization, his name was, rather hilariously, David Cameron.) 

So how does it fare? 

Well, for a start, four hours and ten minutes is way too long for this story, which was perfectly condensed as the hour-and-a-half Cushing feature. But that can't really be helped, and I know there is much, much worse (some Doctor Who audiobooks push on 10 hours! Ten blinking hours!). 

As an audio product it's otherwise quite good. William Russell was always a bit too deadpan for my taste as Ian, but he's perfect as a narrator; he doesn't sound much like himself anymore, it must be said, making the times he's reading out Ian's dialogue somewhat eerie; but on the plus side, he's very good at voicing the First Doctor. He's not limiting himself to an impression of his late co-star, not by far; he couldn't do that if he wanted to, because Terrance Dicks took many liberties with the original teleplay when turning it into a novel. 

If nothing else, the Doctor's farewell speech to Susan is very different, and Russell's delivery of it, accordingly, couldn't be further from Hartnell's serene “one day, yes… one day I shall come back”; the corresponding line in the Dicks script (simply “One day, I'll come back!”) is angrier here, as if he's scolding Susan for doubting that he would. 

Aside from the weirdness inherent in an old man voicing Barbara or Susan, there is one weird bit that doesn't quite work, though; the Robomen's voices are described by Dicks as “slurred”, and Russell took that, I think, a bit too much to heart. They don't sound like zombies, they sound drunk. 

Meanwhile, Nicholas Briggs is predictably awesome as the various Daleks, bringing his full range into it, bless him; it's not that the original voices were bad (1960's Dalek voices, whether on the small or big screen, are the best non-Briggs Dalek voices, in my opinion), but Briggs is an outright wizard. At the drop of a hat, he is the Daleks, and that is because he gets them; as he has explained, when he voices the Daleks, he's not voicing emotionless robots, he's voicing three-dimensional people — it's just that those people happen to be inordinately awful, perpatually-angry little people. Hence he is convincingly confused or vainglorious or angry, without ever forgetting the all encompassing irrational hatefulness lurking beneath their every dark throught. 

The sound design is great; the music, where there is some, is fitting, though a bit forgettable; it's certainly no patch on Bill McGuffie's fantastic score to the Peter Cushing film, which contains, among other things, a marvelously energetic theme song, and one of my favorite pieces of movie music ever, Fugue For Thought. 

What of the script? Well, it does what it can with the meandering plot; certainly it conveys the apocalyptic scope quite well, and while no character is particularly deep, they're all believable people. Dicks is inordinately good at setting up moods, better than he is at thinking up people; thus things are creepy when they need to be, or majestic, or tense, or thrilling. The opening line “Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man” is justifiedly famous. 

The story itself, for which, of course, we cannot blame Dicks, is as I said needlessly meandering and needlessly reliant on Susan twisting her ankle at convenient times of the plot, but the sheer fun of a premise like “the Daleks have taken over the Earth” usually makes up for it, and the worldbuilding of what life is like under the Daleks for the resistance forces and for the mining slaves is actually quite well-thought-out. 

Dicks is quite good at foreshadowing the Susan/David romance, but not so much the Doctor's decision to leave her to live with him. The way the televised story made a story arc out of the Doctor's slow realization that she wasn't his little girl any more may have been a bit ungraceful at times (“jolly good smack-bottom” indeed), but it was something; here there is no trace of it; we spend most of the story with no insight into the Doctor's view of Susan, nor any signs that he's getting on in years in a way that would justify her determination that she needs to stay with him to take care of him. Then suddenly, we're told (in quite a hamfisted fashion) by David that “he knew all along”. Well, okay, jolly good, why shouldn't he have? What have we discovered exactly? 

Oh, and another failing, simultaneously very small and quite major: Dicks made the very questionable decision to refer to the mining-cart in which Ian gets trapped for most of the climax as a “giant bucket”. It is much, much harder than anyone in the production expected to take seriously the travails of a man trapped in what an old British actor keeps calling a “giant bucket” with the utmost seriousness. 

All in all, I enjoyed Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, but if you're not a dedicated Who fan, there are probably much quicker, much funnier ways to experience the story, starting with the Cushing film. (Unless, of course, you are visually impaired, in which case, yes, I'm not an expert, but this seems like a pretty fun audiobook.)

Post-Scriptum:

• An oft-repeated bit of trivia that non-Whovians in the audience may not be aware of: the cover of the novelization, here reused for the CD jacket, was drawn with the Peter Cushing flick as a reference, rather than the TV episode; as a result, the Dalek spaceship is modeled on that in the film rather than the one in the episode itself. Though it's endlessly cut that the Daleks are the only A-list aliens in popular culture who genuinely, unironically use flying saucers as their primary mode of transportation, there's no denying that the hovership in question is a much more interesting bit of design-work. 

• Also about the CD jacket: that Roboman, from this angle, looks fainty like he's about to ask me if I'm his mummy. 

“Eighth Doctor Adventures” - Part 1

In vaguely anachronistic order, I have begun reading BBC Books's Eighth Doctor Adventures from the second half of the 1990's, the medium by which Paul McGann's take as the title part in Doctor Who was to be developed after his planned TV season went bust. (I say "was to be" because there is heated rivalry between those who consider the Doctor Who Magazine comic-strips, the BBC Books Eighth Doctor Adventures, or the Big Finish audioplay Eighth Doctor Adventures the official continuation of the Eighth Doctor's story, being that the three accounts are often as irreconciliable as those things get in Doctor Who.)

The Eight Doctor Adventures have a complicated reputation, but for the moment I don't find them nearly as bad as people say they are. So:

Terrance Dicks's The Eight Doctors is often described as "bad fanfiction". I wouldn't say "bad" — but it's very, very obvious that it is "fanfiction" when compared to the real novels that were to come, the ones with an actual narrative structure, the one with an actual story that isn't just a reflection/"greatest hits compilation" of preexisting episodes. You know what, though? I like fanfiction quite a bit. 

What The Eight Doctors does most of all is try to be a sequel to The TV Movie, The Trial of a Time Lord and The Five Doctors simultaneously, and take that opportunity to smooth over continuity issues in those two stories. The way this enterprise is disguised as a story is extremely clunky, yes, but not enough credit is given to the fact that it's a pretty good attempt to make sense of those two stories. I did not believe it was possible to simplify the Valeyard as much as this does. 

The characterization is somewhat weaker. The past Doctors are done well enough, with the potential exception of the Seventh, who is sadly in his terminally unfunny Virgin New Adventures incarnation and whose story doesn't really lead anywhere. But… for one thing, it's a truism that no one really knew what to do with Rassilon until the new series recast him as a straight-up villain in The End of Time; he was dangling on the fence between good and evil, not in an interesting sense of moral ambiguity some much as in "the writers themselves aren't sure if he's a villain or not, and therefore try to sound as noncommital as possible". Add to that the even greater confusion on whether he's dead or a god or a ghost or an artificial intelligence or what in Gallifrey's "present-day", and it's no surrpsie that his Deus Ex Machinesque appearance here is nothing if not confusing. 

And the Eighth Doctor? A blank slate, very self-consciously. Dicks wipes his memory at the beginning of the story, to make sure he doesn't actually have to do any characterization on him. This is a patently stupid move — you can't have the main character of your new book series as a nonentity in the first book — and if you're going to do it anyway, you definitely shouldn't do it by having him lose his memory again after The TV Movie was already all about an amnesiac Doctor. That's just lazy. 

New companion Samantha Jones is not bad, at least. Some people think she's annoying, but not me. 

Now there's a novel. Perhaps my favorite of the Who novels I've read so far, Vampire Science actually succeeds in being a sequel (a good sequel) to The TV Movie, even sharing its San Francisco setting. It has all the good parts of that film (chiefly the slightly gothic atmosphere and the Eighth Doctor's character; also a campy-yet-scary villain, though not the same one) and none of the bad parts or occasional clumsiness. Sam is better than ever, the Doctor is fantastic… and it's also a heckuva good vampire story. The worldbuilding and characterization of the story's vampires is excellent; tasteful unique without at all trying to be a radical reimagining. 

The "head vampiress", Johanna Harris is a complex and immensely likable presence throughout the story, and the way her plotline plays out is full of twists and turns and unique ideas and defied expectations. After five seasons of Steven Moffat, it's also nice to have a sympatheitc villainess who isn't either koo-koo or trying to shag the Doctor (not that I hate all, or even most, of the various characters of that description; Missy's a fantastic version of the Master, and played to perfection; but it does get tiresome). 

Author Jonathan Blum also took the opportunity to canonize his earlier, unlicensed fanfilm Time Rift by having his character from there, Brigadier Kramer, appear in it. I can but applaud this, for Time Rift, terrible picture quality aside, is a very good piece of television, which it is not hard at all to imagine as a real 1980's episode of the series. This despite my apathy to Kramer as a character, who is little more than “the Brigadier, but American and a woman”. 

Genocide is another very good novel, very much apiece with Vampire Science (if you like one, I can't see why you wouldn't like the other). The characters are once again quite good overall, though the cast is more uneven; we get another fantastic villainess, in a completely different register from Johanna (variety, Mr Moffat, variety), but her human henchman is very one-note, and I couldn't help but conflate him with the much-despised Krasko in my mind, which… isn't a good thing. The worldbuilding is marvelous, though. Truly marvelous. 

It is strangely prescient of things to come (¨cough cough¨ Time War ¨cough cough¨) in the sort of moral dilemmas with which it presents the Eighth Doctor, but somewhat bungles up the delivery thereof. It looks good on paper, but then the detail is added (for urgency) that the timeline will crumble and the universe cease to exist unless the Doctor acts, and thus there's only one real option left, and no moral quandary. Oh well, points for trying. 

I like the way this story does australopithecines as characters, also. I feel like this is largely how talking to australophithecines would go. 

War of the Daleks gets a lot of hate as another, even more egregious case of "hacky fanfiction" than The Eight Doctors. Not altogether deservedly. Yes, the story exists in part to retcon a bunch of previous ones, chiefly the destruction of Skaro in Remembrance of the Daleks, but, with apologies to all the people who love said event and wish it hadn't been so unceremoniously undone, bugger that. I love Skaro as a setting, and cheered when it became apparent the new televised series had picked up Peel's decision to bring it back. Is the way in which it was brought back a bit clunky? Yeah, but it was always going to be clunky, and Peel at least wrings some decent character moments for the Doctor and Davros out of this. 

Yes, did I mention the characters? The first half of War's plot is kind of nonsensical (the Thals' motivations are meandering and daft), but things pick up immensely once we land on the resurrected Skaro and a triplefold battle of wits gets underway between the Eighth Doctor, Davros and the Dalek Emperor. The Dalek Emperor (a hugely magnetic presence in his two only real screen appearances, one of which was yet to come when War was released) has never been better than here; far from just an archetype, he is a fully-realized character, as deep and complex as non-redeemed Daleks get. 

All in all, it's not perfect, and its retcons are more or less as clumsy as everyone says they are… but that excepted, this isn't a bad book at all. If you like stories about Daleks as characters with agencies, rather than mindless monsters (and sweet Rassilon I do), this is the one for you. 

Paul Magrs's The Scarlet Empress isn't actually as revolutionary and postmodern as it's made out to be. The setting and atmosphere of the planet Hyspero is no different than what the televised story would revisit in The Rings of Akhaten, for one thing. What it is is a slightly absurdist version of Arabian Nights In Space, and that's always fun, innit? 

The big attraction of The Scarlet Empress is of course the proper introduction into Doctor Who (the careful phrasing is firstly because she actually began as a solo character elsewhere, and secondly because she had even actually already encountered the Doctor, albeit in a long-forgotten short story) of Iris Wildthyme, the Doctor's timey-wimey old bat of a fellow Gallifreyan. A Time Lady who exists as a shameless, dingy parody of the Doctor, Iris draws her appeal from how very self-conscious she is of the aforementioned fact; she's not quite fourth-wall-aware in this story (she is elsewhere), but her relationship with the Doctor is precisely that of an affectionate parody personified meeting the original. The Doctor is vaguely irritated by her existence, and something keeps nagging at him that's not 'right' about her; she, for her part, keeps criticizing his various flaws, and shamelessly steals and corrupts his trademark features, but she also loves him deeply without daring to say so out loud. It's all very clever. 

The plot is kind of meandering, but that's to be expected in an Arabian Nights-esque stories. There are a few other choice meta-moments in the story (such as a merciless satire of "canonicity" as a concept: a Lewis Carrol-esque visit to an alien library whose bigoted librarian insists it contains all the knowledge about th euniverse, which must be read in chronological order or not at all, and who cannot bear to think about "unreal things" without a dozen reminders and qualifiers that they are "imaginary stories"), too, which do get a chuckle. 

“Resolution”

Alright, so Chris Chibnall promised Daleks, and delivered Daleks, and therefore was not set on fire by the enraged Doctor Who fandom. What else?

A very good episode of Doctor Who, is what else. It does not altogether feel like a “special” in the way the Christmas Specials did (I suppose New Year's is even more of a formality for most people than Christmas; I suppose pledges of doing one's chores are somewhat poorer at stirring the heart than love, family and hot cocoa), but it's quite a good one-shot Dalek episode. The acting from the guest characters is great, Akinola's music is mostly unobjectionable this time around and has a few legitimately great moments (short though they are), the direction is up to the usual Series 11 standards, and… Chris Chibnall turned in a good script.

I know, I know. But it can happen! The Silurian two-parter from Series 5 and Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, for example. And I think Resolution is actually a better than those, even if it still has the Chibnall trademark of a science-fiction story and a relationship-drama story mashed together with a sledge-hammer (one scene from one, cut, one scene from the other) as opposed to actually being welded in any significant way. Resolution, in fact, has got that particular problem more than any of his previous episodes you'd care to name. But perhaps this is in fact a good thing, for it allows each side to stand on its own, leaving one with the somewhat boilerplate, but not really unpleasant, "Ryan's Dad" subplot, on one side, a frankly great Dalek story on the other. 

So the plot: on New Year's Day 2019, two archeologists, an immensely likable pair played by Charlotte Ritchie and Nikesh Patel, who, I'm sorry to say, are a billion times more interesting to watch than Ryan & Yaz for most of the time they're onscreen) dig up an ancient burial site beneath Sheffield — yes, of course it's beneath Sheffield, it's Series 11… or good as. Among the weird things they find is a fragment of a Dalek-creature, who has been buried on Earth since the 9th century, having been one of the first Dalek scouts sent out from the Planet Skaro way back in the day. A veritable army had, at the time, managed to subdue the Dalek and destroy its casing, but even after hacking the mutant blob apart, it still lived and twitched (as per The Witch's Familiar's addition to the Daleks' lore; gotta love that continuity), so they buried the pieces in the far corners of the Earth and founded a secret society (the Order of Custodians) to keep them separate. 

I should hasten to point out that this "buried in the four corners of the Earth", "Order of Custodians" nonsense is of absolutely zero importance to the plot, for the Reconnaissance Dalek promptly puts itself back together through some weird, ill-explained teleportation ability of his,  andwe never meet the Order, nor do they do anything of importance in the backstory that comprises their entire appearance. It's just daft, and probably the writing's capital sin, though it is one that's easily ignored.

“ExterminHEeElLLlllPPpPPP!!!!”

On the other hand, I've seen criticism of the idea that any number of 9th century warriors (even an army) would be able to destroy a Dalek's casing — but this is actually a nonissue, for it is the later, Time War Daleks who were practically indestructible, whereas the Reconnaissance Dalek is explicitly "one of the first to leave Skaro", meaning that A) it got there without time travel and B) it is therefore a thousand years older than the relatively-easily-destroyed models from The Dalek Invasion of Earth (who got to Earth in the 22nd century!). Most likely it was basically identical to the original The Daleks Daleks, and those guys could be destroyed by kicking them and making them fall down elevator shafts, or just pushing them against a wall really hard. See above.

So, having pulled itself back together, the Reconnaissance Dalek proceeds to possess Charlotte Ritchie's character (because yes, Dalek creatures can do that now, shaddap) and drive her around like a puppet in an effort to get her to build it a new and improved casing — the whole sequence with single-minded, possessed-Lin is truly glorious, and Nicholas Briggs as the Dalek's voice reaches new heights. The way Lin is made to speak along with it also extremely effective. One is truly saddened when it is over, though the product of Lin's smelting (the parallels to the Doctor's creation of a new Sonic Screwdriver in The Woman Who Fell to Earth are obvious) is quite a sight to; a misshapen, rusty Dalek clearly built out of spare parts, yet still fearsome enough.  

The reconstructed Reconnaissance Dalek has a verbal showdown with the Doctor, as Team TARDIS (who has been frantically tracking the Dalek thus far) finally catch up with it just a moment too late. It's an effective scene, though there's little that makes it stand out from earlier "the Doctor defies a Dalek" moments (the gold standards for those, of course, being Christopher Eccleston's turn in Dalek, which everyone else has just kind of been shamelessly copying). Whittaker's Doctor finally gets to show a bit of menace, an element which many critics agree was missing from her performance thus far. The Doctor has to deserve that “Oncoming Storm” title the Daleks give him/her.

(Speaking of which, if this is truly a pre-Dalek Invasion of Earth Dalek as we're led to believe, it does not entirely make sense that it would so readily recognize the Doctor, for at that point the Daleks had only met Hartnell's Doctor, and presumably didn't know about regeneration. Oh well.)

Unfortunately, this is where things take a turn for the… well, worse, though that's not to say the resolution of Resolution (heh) is bad per se. It soon becomes clear that we're not just trying to stop the Reconnaissance Dalek because the Reconnaissance Dalek might kill people (though it does do that, too, mind you). No, the Reconnaissance Dalek must be stopped before it highjacks all radio-transmitters in Great Britain in order to send a signal to the main Dalek fleet.

Whut? 

There is so much wrong with this idea. For one thing, considering there was an entire Time War in-between the Reconnaissance Dalek's arrival on Earth and the events of Resolution, and the Daleks changed leadership, like, ten times, it is no guarantee the current Daleks would even listen to that half-dead relic of their ancient times. It's a bit like worrying that one of Napoleon's army scouts, cryogentically frozen since 1807, might, if thawed-out today, lead the modern French Army on the warpath overnight if he's allowed to reach a telephone with which to call the French Minister of the Armies. 

Furthermore, the modern Daleks know full well that Earth exists and would be suitable to Dalek conquest. In fact, they've tried. Repeatedly. And the Doctor has stopped them. If he got the Reconnaissance Dalek's message of “I HAVE DISCOVERED A PLANET WE MIGHT CONQUER! IT'S CALLED EARTH! COME DOWN HERE!”, the Dalek Emperor would probably answer, as patiently as he could manage: "YES. WE KNOW EARTH EXISTS. WE KNOW. THERE'S A REASON WE STILL HAVEN'T CONQUERED IT YET; IN FACT, I THINK YOU'VE MET HER. BUT WE KNOW.” Hardly that scary an event.

The Dalek's final defeat (no, don't worry, the above picture isn't it) begins amusingly, but is by the end dull and a little bit confusing. It is praiseworthy that Chibnall tried to involve Ryan's Dad and his microwave-oven into the proceedings, but it only works the first time around; by the time the Dalek has lost its casing again and tries to possess Ryan's Dad, who inexplicably manages to fight it off better than Lin because……the power of love……?……, you just wish the microwave had been enough.

Still, in terms of tone, Resolution is everything you could want, and with strong actors and Series 11's ever-reliable visuals to go along with it, why deny yourself? It's one of the best Chibnall-era stories yet in my book, though perhaps not the best (I think I'd still rank Demons of the Punjab and Kerblam! above it, not necessarily in that order).

Post-Scriptum:

• Dear entertainment industry, could we just stop defeating bad guys by judicious opening of airlocks? Or other "irresistible sucking force" plot devices? Doctor Who, you, in particular, already played that card in Doomsday, and much more impressively than here. So enough.

“Frontier in Space”

As you may know, I am greatly fond of Doctor Who; not particularly of the season that wrapped up last Sunday, but of Who in general, certainly — whether classic or modern. The 1973 six-part serial Frontier in Space, which I have just finished watching, strikes me as one of the most excellent examples of Classic Who and of Jon Pertwee's Doctor, so let's examin exactly how.

Story. Frontier is a clever little science-fiction tale, not without its wisdom. The setpiece is the year 4500 or thereabouts, where Earth's space empire has come to an uneasy truce with another, the Draconian. The modern Earth is a nuanced and interesting portrayal of the future, neither a utopia (the Doctor gets an unpleasant trip to a penal colony on the Moon for political opponent) nor an all-out dictatorship (the President of Earth is obviously well-meaning; she is, incidentally, a woman, which should alone put an end to recent media's unfair claims that classic Who contained old-fashioned sexism in spades, a blatant untruth meant to make the casting of Whittaker as the Doctor more interesting). 

The plot sees the Doctor's old enemy the Master (more about him later) is conspiring to bring the two empires at war with one another, for the sake of a fourth party in whose interest it is to see them weakened by renewed hostilities. To do so, the Master uses the clever science-fiction device of a hypnotic ray that makes you see whoever is in front of you as your worst fear, exploiting it to make Draconians think humans (“Earth-men”, as they are stubbornly called) are attacking their ships, and vice-versa. 

The Doctor, accidentally landing inside one of the attacked ships alongside Jo Grant, suffers much trials and tribulations as he is captured by one Empire and the next and interrogated as a spy, fruitlessly trying to convince both that they're being tricked. By Episode 5, our heroes are aware of the presence of the Master (who makes a fruitless attempt to rectify the situation by imprisoning them himself, and shoots himself in the foot instead), and manage to convince the Draconian Emperor of the truth. But just as it seems like the serial is wrapping up, the true masterminds who employed the Master are revealed; and they're…

Though war between Earth and the Draconians is of course avoided, the Daleks are not foiled altogether, and so Episode 6 of Frontier in Space leads directly into the next serial, Planet of the Daleks. That is in itself a point in favor of Frontier's story; arc structures weren't as established in 1970's Doctor Who as they have been since 2005, but this is quite close to it and I like it. 

Humor. From the First Doctor's inability to keep his words straight (an amusing quirk that modern audiences have often, unfairly, reduced to William Hartnell simply flubbing that many lines accidentally; but it is generally agreed among Whovians that it happens too often to have been wholly uninentional) to the Twelfth Doctor's pretending to enter the TARDIS for the first time, Doctor Who has always included a decent dose of good humor, and while Frontier in Space is hardly The Husbands of River Song, it gets its fair amount of chuckles. Most are owed to our two rival Time Lords; the anecdotes Pertwee's Doctor tells to Jo to cheer her up are simply charming, and Delgado's Master occasionally lapses into cartoony villainy to hilarious results ("Don't you want to kill him?" "Of course I do!… It's just… long-range rocket missiles… it feels like it lacks that personal touch"). 

Villains. It is notorious that Doctor Who would have been cancelled before the end of its first season, all the way back in 1963, if not for the Daleks; ever since, alien monsters and well-acted villains have been staples of the show and one of its greatest draws. Indeed, it's the weakness of many too pedestrian villains such as Josh Bowman's Krasko that has been the greatest flaw of the current series, in my opinion. 

A very appropriate choice of reading. 

Frontier in Space on the other hand is lucky enough to have two great Doctor Who villains in one story, plus secondary one-shots. The first is Roger Delgado's Master, a wonderful evil counterpart to Jon Pertwee's Doctor, refined and unapologetic in his foulness, relishing any time he's on top just as the audience relishes any time he's on screen. Sadly, due to a car accident some few months after the end of shooting, this would be Delgado's last turn as the evil Time Lord; his being a Time Lord allowed the show to bring back the character with new faces, and I absolutely love the Master's portrayals by Anthony Ainley or Michelle Gomez later on, but just like no Doctors can be quite alike, no posterior Master ever recaptured quite the same spirit as Delgado's. 

The second are Doctor Who's iconic evil tin-cans, the Daleks, who are entirely themselves and manage to pose a real threat despite their inherent goofiness. It's not the Daleks' finest turn — if nothing else, their “metal parrot” voices lack the stunning range that Nicholas Briggs would later bring to them — but it is nearly impossible for a halfway-decent Who writer to go completely wrong with the Daleks, and I think we've established that Malcolm Hulke is more than decent a writer, on the faith of this episode alone.

In terms of secondary villains, I will give special recognition to Michael Hawkins as the warmongering General Williams, whose voice is consistently full of gravitas and seems to me to have been a great inspiration for Timothy Dalton's iconic portrayal of Rassilon in The End of Time. Speaking of great actors, John Woodnutt as the Draconian Emperor is also worthy of praise, though the Emperor isn't actually a villain; and as Pertwee himself would remark, the make-up on the Draconians is probably as good as alien makeup got in the Classic Series; it's hardly more rubbery than the very similar Silurians in The Hungry Earth forty years later. 

The most unremarkable creation of the serial would have to be the Ogrons, the Master and Daleks' extraterrestrial grunts, who are little more than their name suggests — ugly, ogre-like space Orcs of limited intelligence. They're never scary, and they're only amusing because of the superintelligent Master's frustration with their stupidity, rather than because of anything about themselves. Their design is woefully uninspired. Still, they're not meant to be the memorable part of the episode, and so one shouldn't be surprised that they're not. 

Frontier in Space is all in all an extremely pleasant Doctor Who experience, highly recommended to anyone with an interest in the series, or just looking to have a good sci-fi time.