When I went to put up today's post, I realized I never posted yesterday's. D'oh! Okay then: two for the price of one!
This serial didn’t make a huge impression on me one way or the other when I first saw it, but I enjoyed it a lot the second time around. It has a lot going on, at times maybe a bit too much, but there are some really neat ideas played with here.
While the Third Doctor is tinkering with the TARDIS, it’s remotely hijacked by the Time Lords, and the Doctor and Jo are plopped down in the middle of a struggling human colony on a far-flung planet. As if lackluster harvests and sometimes-uneasy relations with the natives didn’t make matters hard enough for the colonists, they now find themselves beset by some sort of previously unknown indigenous beast and clashing with a team from a mining corporation that has a vested interest in the planet. It’s up to the Doctor and Jo to get to the bottom of the various tangled webs woven among all this and try to come up with a solution for the colonists’ many woes.
There’s a lot to like here. As I said, the plot is maybe a little overstuffed for its own good, but most of it works for me. There are a number of interesting, very human conflicts here: residents vs. business interests, colonists vs. natives, making use of a planet’s resources vs. stripping it of them. There’s also some sneaky use of nifty technology, internal colony power struggles, alien cave paintings, and religion rooted in the relics of tech whose operation has long since been forgotten, the latter of which I pretty much always enjoy seeing on Who.
If I was going to pick an element to reduce or eliminate, it would probably be the fact that things tip in a Master-ward direction in the second half. It’s no surprise—most every story did during Three’s early seasons—and I do enjoy Delgado’s Master a lot. No, it’s not that he’s out of place or his appearance feels repetitive. Rather, it’s just that there are already enough sources of conflict/possible antagonists here that his addition doesn’t really feel necessary.
The Doctor gets in a little of everything here. He spends a lot of time as a would-be mediator, both within the colony itself and between the colonists and the mining corporation. However, he also has the opportunity for a little hand-to-hand combat (never out of the question with Three,) some clever deductions (I like how he goes about trying to solve of the mystery of the giant beasts,) and a spot of historical extrapolation (trying to work out why the “Primitive” society has taken the trajectory that it has.)
Jo is a companion who generally feels like she never gets to do quite as much as the Doctor, and she does have her fair share of waiting around/wringing her hands/stumbling into trouble here. That said, this serial gives us one of our first looks at Jo’s escapology skills. Apart from generally enjoying the word “escapology” and being delighted that Jo took (and mastered) a class in it, a) it’s a good reminder that Jo has some definite training that’s relevant to her work with the Doctor, not nearly as “useless” as she tends to get credit for, and b) I always like it when companions get to be smart and badass in the same moment, and I’d say this qualifies.
No comments:
Post a Comment