Day 473: Underworld Part 4

Today I occasionally felt as if the world was conspiring against me. Between having a long day at University, facing the wrath of an oncoming cold and having some minor computer issues, today hasn't been that good. To top it all off, I had significant problems whilst watching Underworld today, meaning that I ended up having to stop and restart it around four or five times. It doesn't help that Underworld is, to be perfectly frank, completely awful.

The blue screen sets occasionally cause logic to be defied as we see K9 float in mid air. The direction is poor, such as in one scene where we hold on the Doctor and Leela for five seconds more than we needed to, presumably to pad the story out a bit more. The writing is poor as well, where Baker and Martin succeed in ideas, they fail in other aspects. Orfe has a pacifying ability that I honestly don't recall him using beyond the first episode, wasting a perfectly good and useful concept. Jackson, when preparing to leave, promptly forgets about the Doctor and Leela, then when K9 reminds him, he suddenly cares deeply about their plight, showing a lack of character consistency within the same scene. The villains all look identical, meaning that it is completely impossible to tell which one is talking at any point in time. The above wouldn't matter so much, were it not for the fact that the villains decide to have conversations amongst themselves at various intervals throughout the program. And this is just the start of a long list of problems that I have with this story.

But my major problem is slightly different. When I first watched Underworld, I was 15 or 16. For some reason, I actually enjoyed the story a great deal. And so when I watched this story again, I was hoping every single day that today would be the day that it would get better. I already planned out in my head that today's blog entry would be about how I still liked Underworld, despite all its problems. And there are things to like in it, there's a cracking scene in the middle of this episode as the Doctor faces off against the Oracle. But this is not enough to get around the fact that Underworld is just a very poor Doctor Who story.