Doctor Who Capsule Reviews: Season 18

(UPDATE: In terribly sad news, some hours after I published this post the news came out that Christopher Bidmead, script editor for Season 18 of Doctor Who, has passed away. Consider the following a tribute to him. Rest easy, sir: you had one hell of a vision.)

It certainly is shaping up to be a summer of interesting views for me, with plenty of things for me to talk to you about, because they moved me. Naturally, instead of doing that I'm here talking about Doctor Who again. But in like, a fun way that's got a lot of me just being totally extra. Let me introduce you to a fun summer ritual I came up with last year. Even though I'm up here in Canada, it still gets what I would call hot in the summer. Temps past 20 degrees Celsius with lots of humidity. It's not fun, and so I like to think of ways to cool off. A good way of doing that tends to be retreating down into my basement where things are a lot cooler since it's all underground and stuff. That's nice and all, but I need something to do down there. 

Enter, then, a mainstay of my absolutely going extra nonsense. A Playstation 3 using the AV cables of a Playstation 2 to plug into my VCR and display content on a boxy old CRT from about the turn of the millennium. I use this to record either Blu-Rays or digital media files onto VHS in an increasing chase of aesthetic, but as it turns out you can just watch the Blu-Rays on that thing. So that's what I did last summer, and what I chose to go through was my classic Doctor Who Blu-Rays. I'd pick a set, and watch a story a night from that season, splitting six-parters up over two nights. This led to some interesting results and whatnot, particularly my viewing of Season 15 with Tom Baker; I fell asleep during Underworld and nearly went fucking mad with how off the rails the last two parts of The Invasion Of Time went. Amidst that, though, I also rewatched what is not just my favorite season of Tom's, but perhaps my favorite of Classic Who as a whole: Season 18.

It being warm again, I have restarted this tradition. Having just finished Season 8 with Jon Pertwee (it was fine), I get to pick another... and I'm feeling my old favorite again. Then an idea struck me. Why don't I talk about it for the blog? So, here it is then. Over the next week or so, I will be watching a serial a night from Season 18 and writing about it in this little document the next day. When it's all done, you get my retrospective on why I think this season rules. As a special challenge to myself and an attempt at brevity, I'm imposing a limit on myself: 500 words per serial. That may not sound like a lot, but there's seven of the things. Pair that with the intro I just done, and the overall summation, and that's easily 4 to 5k in words. Not bad. Well, let's get on with it. I'll set the scene for you. It's half past eight on a weekday, the sun is just about to set over the hills to the westward, directly facing me, and I am down here cooling off. I have my drink, my snacks, and on this old console hooked up to a slightly older TV, we're going to watch the finale to the most popular of the Doctor Whos before that David Tennant chap came along. 

Welcome, dear friends, to a chill summer evening. Welcome... to Season 18.

THE LEISURE HIVE

Welcome to the 1980s. A radical reinvention from JNT in every sense, even if the result is mid for this season. The Brighton beach pan is a rocky start, but after that this just drips with style. Lovett Bickford is one of two (maybe more) directors who really Go For It this season, and it shows. At times this serial is moody, ethereal, disorientating, mysterious, and terrifying. I love the middle half where it's night on Argolis and the brightly lit Hive is now shrouded in shadow. This serial also has some of the most consistent cliffhanger game I've ever seen from Classic Who; all three are bangers. Doctor Who's severed tachyon head flying into the camera and screaming into the theme tune is horrific and genius. Him becoming old is shocking. Whatever the fuck is going on when Brock is exposed is, as mentioned, deliberately disorientating. There's a real visual language going on here, and the fact that both Bickford and the other director who Tried this year both got in trouble for it saddens me. 

Moving from Bickford to Bidmead, let's talk about tachyons. The new script editor's goal was, supposedly, to reintroduce hard science to the show and get away from the farce of the late 1970s. This serial is the one time he succeeds totally at this; if this was really his goal, he spectacularly fucks it up as early as the next serial, but in an interesting way we'll discuss later. Tachyons, though, are a nice bit of real science and applied fairly well here. The serial really gets into the weeds of how they interact with real objects and create afterimages, and expands that into the science fiction of trying to use them to influence the originals by duplicating them or manipulating time with them. All of that leads to the plight of the Argolins, and this is all very Cold War reflective. They're all dying as a result of nuclear war, and very remorseful and ponderous about the devastation it's caused, the Leisure Hive then being a way to promote empathy and understanding of other alien cultures in the wake of that. Compare to Pangol, then, the warmongering xenophobic Argolin who becomes the villain of the last episode. None of that, only a lust for war and conquest and destruction. The tachyons give him and his mother a second chance by [checks notes] turning him into a baby? Weird. We're really in the 1980s, though, because the West Lodge Foamasi in this are cutting hypercapitalist deals and killing so they can make a shitload of illicit money. 

This is a story that grows on me a little more every time I watch it, and though it's nobody's favorite there is a lot to appreciate here. The fact that a story this ambitious, this interestingly directed, and this forward-looking is mid bodes well for S18 going forward. Unfortunately, next is...

MEGLOS

Ohhhh dear. This is easily the worst serial of Season 18, a mess of images and tawdry aesthetic choices that just barely coheres into something merely mid instead of disastrous. There are merits, but they are more of a "longtime Doctor Who nerd admiring the kitsch" variety than a "this is quality television" variety. Things like the goofy look of the Savants or how fakeass the deadly plants look take me out of the thing, and that's even before you get into how this wastes the idea of the Doctor proving his innocence against his doppelganger's misdeeds by just... having the baddie walk out of there and thus prove Doctor Who is not evil to the side characters. I hate how Lexa gets killed, just a perfunctory "well she played her evil role and was stopped, better kill her off for no reason". Doctor Who has entered the 1980s, but this still feels like it has one foot mired in the quicksand of the late 70's.

And yet, there are things that kinda work. The spiral staircase and walkway is well used in one or two shots by director Terence Dudley. The Scene Sync technology which allows for panning in CSO shots actually kind of works sometimes (if you're watching on a CRT from 10 feet away like I was). I bought the Screens of Zolfathura here, and that's no mean feat. Shame you can still see some bluescreen through Grugger's beard, though. There are two big strengths in Meglos, and one of them is Tom Baker. Here he gets to partake in the old actor dream of getting to play against the type of his long-running character. Tom Baker as Meglos pretending to be Doctor Who is Doctor Who-esque, but with this undercurrent of malice and arrogance. Baker's Doctor rarely had those sorts of traits, but he pulls it off admirably. To say nothing of the unnerving image of him with green paint and covered in quills.

Then there's the chronic hysteresis, in which any notion of the Bidmead era being motivated by hard science goes out the window as Doctor Who literally counterspells a time loop by mirroring it early. Science still will motivate a lot of the stories going forward, but from here on there's a whiff of the alchemical always in the air. I also love how the trick works despite how deliberately bad the Doctor is at repeating the loop and how Romana has to feed him his lines. It's hilarious. Meglos is not good Doctor Who, but nor is it offensive Doctor Who. It's actually ahead of its time by about 5 years: the structure of the TARDIS team not being involved at the start while we glimpse the world is right out of Season 22... and, just like in 1985, they luxuriate before realizing at the end that they're out of fucking time and have to rush the finale. Like we are now. On to better stories.

FULL CIRCLE

Now this slaps. The E-Space arc has always fascinated me, and it's why I hyperfixate on S18 so much that I decided to do this. Every part of it bristles with an ethereal strangeness, especially the last serial. Here, though, we get walloped with concept after concept. Fittingly, for a story all about evolution and generations, we see the stirrings of the next generation of the show. Doctor Who is old enough to be a high school graduate now, and with young Andrew Smith's script plus Matthew Waterhouse as Adric, the show is now old enough to be influenced by those born when it debuted. Doctor Who has evolved, taking the best parts of what came before and mixing it all together into 100 minutes of vibes (plus a guiding hand from Bidmead) and the result is spectacular. After that shitty jungle in Meglos, it's so refreshing to see location shooting in lush green forests. The red light that they shoot in front of the actors, plus the mists and fog later, only accentuate things. Shame the back half is locked in corridors and labs, though. 

The story does manage to put the science back in science fiction, the last episode being half a base under siege and half microscope porn. At first the idea of evolution here appears to be completely batshit, postulating that spiders evolve into Black Lagoon creatures which evolve into British people. Really focus, though, and you see that the Marshmen are the ultimate in adaptive evolution, adapting and attacking the Starliner in this story in multiple inventive ways, and helped by Time Lord intelligence as Romana is possessed for half the story. There's an irony in how the Alzarians, themselves evolved Marshmen who adapted from the original Starliners, are unable to adapt and evolve in being able to fly their goddamn spaceship. The "Deciders" in this story can't decide to do jack shit. Authority, kids. Not one time.

All of that leads to a banger of an unexplored concept: Alzarius as Gallifrey's E-Space inverse. Consider: You have a society split between lower-class peasants and upper-class academics who rule over all. There's a gifted academic boy who finds all of that stuffy and wants to rebel against authority and goes on adventures. Oh, and the people on this planet heal from being wounded incredibly quickly: they have faster regeneration than regular humanoids. Oh, and a piece of tech that powers part of a TARDIS scanner can be replaced by taking something from one of these guys' microscopes. If we really want to stretch, Adric pilfers this tiny little image translator and then stows away on the TARDIS. He steals a box and then runs away. Adric is a mirror of the Doctor. 

Unfortunately every other subsequent story writes him as a smartaleck little shit, which leads nicely into...

STATE OF DECAY

A dangerous force from the ancient times, long thought lost, appears again in the strange new world of E-Space. Am I talking about the Great Vampires or about how this script is a lost relic from the Leela years dusted off in 1980? State Of Decay might be the most "traditional Doctor Who" script of the season: its mode of Doctor Who helping rebels take down an oppressive monarchy of vampires is well-trodden ground, but not unwelcome at all. We see how unjust this society is, and over 100 minutes we watch it crumble to dust. It's as if Terrance Dicks looked at the "You don't vote for kings" scene from Monty Python's Holy Grail and went "Hold my pint". Yet, this is still a Season 18 story, and it has one foot in that world as well. The visual strangeness is kept at a minimum, drowning in gothic and being directed in a normal way by Peter Moffat instead of by a madman like Bickford or next time. Even so, there's just a different vibe at play here by virtue of being in 1980. It's hard to explain, but watch some of this and then throw on a Leela era story and you'll feel it.

Talking about Adric for a bit... Well, this was filmed and written before Full Circle, so Dicks just sort of makes him a Dickensian type of character, a smartaleck who gets suckered in by the baddies before going good again, or something. If you take that reading I came up with where Adric is an E-Space mirror of the Doctor, this first adventure would be the equivalent of Hartnell and his friend Mr. Rock in that caveman story Stef Coburn doesn't want you to see. He's a smug little shit who gets a lesson in empathy and doing the right thing by his fellow TARDIS companions. This mostly consists of him getting a scolding by Romana in Part 4, so it's not perfect but it's there. This is also basically the last hurrah for K9, who spent the other stories either broken or not doing much. The final part gives him one last chance to be used to shoot stun lasers at guards. It really is a throwback to 1977.

One wish I have is that the Great Vampire was just using the three Lords for its own selfish plans of conquest. It would have made a nice hierarchy: the Lords use the peasants, promising them peace if they comply and then killing them all when their use has ended. Showing this as a tiered system of oppression, of the antagonists of the story getting their faces eaten by the leopard? That could have ruled. That being said, launching a rocket up into space so it can fall back down like a giant stake through the heart into the Great Vampire? That fucking rules too. This story is a safe throwback, but it's good. Now, on to my favorite piece of Classic Who.

WARRIOR'S GATE

Absolute cinema. A brilliant piece of surrealist avant-garde kino masquerading as a sci-fi adventure serial. Where other directors shoot Who like it's a fucking play, Paul Joyce is out here doing it like a film. There's a debt to sci-fi as the opening moody pans of the empty ship are straight from Alien, but no less than the French New Wave is an inspiration for a lot of the design and concepts in this. Joyce got in a great deal of trouble for bringing this style in to the workmanlike BBC Studio, and even got fired for a hot minute, but holy fuck is it worth it. This is the best looking, best feeling serial of the entire season: of most of Classic Who, even. The vibes are off the fucking scale here. I could just use the rest of my 500 words to scream variations of I FUCKING LOVE THIS but let's try to actually analyze.

In the still and empty void between two universes we get dueling concepts and ideologies. Freedom vs. slavery. Slave vs. master. Action vs. inaction. Heady concepts like the I Ching and the jumping of the timelines are just put out there for you to understand and comprehend, and even if you don't every part of the visual design is creating a mysterious fever dream for you to get lost in. The ruined castle gate and banquet hall with its robotic soldiers is Dark Souls shit 30 years early. The unnatural look of people being green screened onto a white void works, as did the CSO in Meglos, even if you can still see the fringing. I love the handheld camera shots at the end of episode 2, treating the burnt Tharil like some sort of slasher villain and using some Friday the 13th-style killer POV (even if the cliffhanger resolution is that he's a good guy). There is so much going on here and I kind of am using my 500 words to scream about things I love, so let's talk about the slavers and the Tharils.

It's all about cycles. The slavers become the enslaved. It happened to the Tharils, and we see all of that play out non-linearly. In a mad conceptual way, the same happens to Rorvik and his crew of slavers. Rorvik is enslaved not by an actual oppressive person, but by his own dogged insistence that he's in charge and is right. It's his undoing, as he constantly takes charge and takes action when the solution is to not do that, as the Doctor realizes. Romana does take action, though. I wish her exit was more built up (and Adric had more to do) but as it stands, she graduates from the Doctor. There's so much more I could say, but I only have this limited canvas. Warrior's Gate is a goddamn masterpiece, and it saddens me that Bidmead left and we got a Gun script editor next. Oh, what we could have had.

THE KEEPER OF TRAKEN

The beginning of the end. A major thread running through S18 is that of entropy and decay. It's major text time, but it's present here in a different way. This is the story of a noble and just utopia which has degraded into a moral rot, all thanks to the serpent in the garden. I used to dislike this story for how safe it stuck to the old capture and escape loop, and how the Doctor is constantly misunderstood and mistrusted so he can't solve the plot three episodes early. That weakness I now find a strength, as it shows just how far the supposed pure good of the Traken Union has fallen. Betrayal, violence, greed, bribery, murder... it all hangs in the air as Traken succumbs to the malevolence lurking in the garden. Thousands of years of peace and prosperity, laid to waste by one crispy asshole.

In a mad way (and forgive me for my lack of grass touching) it's the plot of the Star Wars prequels 20 years early. Poor Kassia plays the role of Anakin, a woman desperate to keep that which she loves and willing to sell her soul to do it, only to lose it all anyway. Hell, both are manipulated by dudes with melted faces in dark robes. Yes, the true entropy has arrived: A returning villain. S18 has not been cut off from deeper Who lore (plenty of references to Time Lords and Gallifrey), but this is a big one. The return of the Master, 5 years after The Deadly Assassin, another lore bomb. A rotting desperate decayed being who clings to life and seeks for his own renewal in the form of becoming a godlike being, which he very nearly does here before he's stopped. Doctor Who, itself, is kind of like that. Eighteen creaky old years and a star who's been here for almost half of those. Our old friend entropy creeping in again, here at the margins of the end. The end of Tom Baker approaches.

Traken is saved, yes, but it's not a happy ending by any means. The Master and his corruption are too strong to stop it, and so the happily ever after Tremas and Nyssa should have is destroyed. Tremas is dead, twisted and corrupted to be the Master's new suit. Come the next story, entropy will wipe the entire Traken Union out. All of its goodness, all of its intriguing bioscience, all its might and light... wiped clean by an uncaring universe. From the Argolin to the Dodecahedron to Mistfall, we have seen great change sweeping through the universe on this entropic tour. At last we come to the grand finale.

Next time, The End Of Tom Baker.

LOGOPOLIS

Entropy approaches. Logopolis is a slow burn masterpiece of elegiac storytelling, awash with vibes and poignance and meaning. It is a story which asks if this universe, this creaky old thing we call Doctor Who, has a place in the 1980s. It's of a long ago time, a time when police boxes were commonplace, and now we come to the very last one to measure and record it. To document what this was, in all its form. We come to a world where the Master is acting like it's 1971 and shrinking people again, where he's just fucking with the Doctor for half the runtime. We come to a world that long ago passed the point of no return, only kept alive by a motley crew of desperate alchemists and mathemagicians staving off the heat death of all existence. Block transfer computation is straight up science magic, an alchemy for the new age, and with it there's one final hope. With the right calculation, the right intonations, we might just keep this relic of a universe alive.

Tom Baker is incredible in this. All season he's had this grumpy surliness to him, but in this episode it plays as weary acceptance of what must happen. His meetings with the Watcher, his insistence that these three new kids listen to Dad for their own good as he risks his life multiple times, his infallible need to save the universe from the decay that will wipe it out... and his final last act of saving everything from the Master's shitty little schemes. The new trio are alright. Tegan's going to get some bangers later, but here she's just swept along for the ride and clapping back at all of this bullshit. Nyssa is lovely as ever, her quiet resignation at the horror of being the last Trakenite quite affecting. Adric is... well at this point it feels like we've lost the thread of him being a Doctor mirror, and he's just the little math whiz kid. All the pieces in play for the new era.

Yes, Doctor Who will survive. Entropy is staved off for another 8 years, and it turns out we can survive without the legendary Tom Baker after all. The cracks in the armor of the new era are evident even here, and Bidmead has already begun the process of leaving. We know what's coming, here in the future, and it can be seen... but that's not our problem here. Here we're sending off Logopolis. A beautiful tale of fighting entropy, of going boldly forward, of regeneration and refresh. It is the end, but as we've seen over S18? The moment was well prepared for.

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And that's that for Season 18, which is the strongest JNT season up until around 1988 or so. I unfortunately don't rate either the Davison or Colin Baker years that highly, and as I said above you can see the flaws forming as this era fades away. There are some strong moments upcoming with Davison that call back to these strange vibes, such as either of the Mara stories. For every one of those, though, you get some retrograde Gun story out of Eric Saward. I'm not here to throw the entire burden of Doctor Who getting cancelled at his feet, as it's a complex and tangled web of failures from multiple parties. I just don't like the types of things he prioritizes in his stories, that's all. Look at his Cyberman or Dalek stories for an example of this. Doctor Who can be so much more than legacy monsters shooting people as they fall down and go "argh", as I hope these writeups have shown. It can be stranger, wilder, more gonzo, and an encounter with the mysterious via the lens of early 80's aesthetics and a weird dude in a burgundy coat. There never was quite anything like Season 18 before, and there never will be again. I like that uniqueness, and let's sign off on that salute to it.

Here's to you, Season 18. You weirdo, you.