Day 118: The OK Corral

This episode sees the departure of something that has been with us since this blog started: individual episode titles. Whereas before if you looked at the title of each entry and it would read Day 118: The OK Corral, from now on, it will read things like Day 119: The Savages Episode 1. This is both a good and a bad thing. On the one hand, it makes it easier from a production viewpoint, it will now be easier to distinguish between stories, now that an element of organisation has been introduced. On the other hand though, the individual titles brought an element of excitement to the series, and we are now missing the minor beauties of some of the titles, which will now be replaced with some more generic pieces. But here are some of my favourites:

The Day of Darkness has some nice imagery, which also draws attention to how tonally dark the story of The Aztecs is, while A Race Against Death brings a hefty amount of excitement to The Sensorites. Some say that The Sensorites is quite a dull story, but you can't really say that about its titles. The End of Tomorrow brings to mind the depressing nature of Dalek Invasion of Earth, as it shows that the perfect images of the future aren't the only things we'll get in these serials. The Dimensions of Time shows us the wonderfully temporal nature of The Space Museum, even if future stories with the words Dimensions and Time may not fare so well. The Death of Time and Flight Through Eternity are also wonderfully evocative examples of the oddball nature of The Chase. Small Prophet, Quick Return is a wonderful pun from The Myth Makers, although the rejected title of Is There a Doctor in the Horse? is admittedly far better. The Feast of Steven brings the fun nature of the show's Christmas episode to mind by giving us another gag. The Steel Sky brings a sense of wonder to The Ark and A Holiday for the Doctor is yet another great joke from Donald Cotton. But to finish this entry off, it's worth mentioning the first episode: An Unearthly Child. Evocative, with a helpful dash of curiosity as to what the show's about, it brought us this wonderful programme that is Doctor Who.

Day 117: Johnny Ringo

For best results with this blog, it is perhaps wisest to watch the video on the right before reading the entry.

So welcome to this blog

You haven't clicked wrong

This entry will be written

In the form of a song

But why has this fellow

Started to croon?

It's because this song is the Ballad

Of the Last Chance Saloon.

The Gunfighters features

A song that's throughout

It informs the viewers

What the story's about

But does it make the story

Better or worse?

I guess that we'll find out

Within the next verse.

It makes these episodes

Feel fake and unreal

In real life we don't need

A song to tell us to feel

It's kind of annoying,

It intrudes on the plot

Does it improve this story?

Some say it does not

But in my opinion,

The song is quite good

It gives you a change

From a normal story's mood

It juxtaposes death

With a jolly tune

That's why I am quite fond of

The Last Chance Saloon.

Day 116: Don't Shoot the Pianist

So this story is set in the genre of Western, a genre familiar to viewers of the time. This story, first broadcast in 1966, is in a time when audiences were enjoying adventures in the Wild West, most of which were American imports. So the audiences are watching this with prior knowledge of the tropes and natures of Western adventures, however it was actually poorly received at the time. There are several reasons as to why this could be. The stock response is to say that the reason why people said that it was bad is because it is bad. This is wrong, because it's actually a very funny script that's had some excellent direction from Rex Tucker, although some of the accents leave much to be desired. Another reason could be that audiences are snobby, as this serial is one of, if not the, first British productions in the Western genre. The audiences of the day would be used to the American serials, and so there could be some disappointment if the production values didn't meet their high standards for drama production. Then again, a couple of weeks ago we had monsters whose defining characteristic was that they had Beatle wigs and a singular eye made from a ping pong ball, so production values aren't probably on the viewers' mind. The key reason is probably at the top of this entry, where it states Day 116. 116 episodes of Doctor Who so far, and although it visits varying locations, and meets varying people and aliens, it is getting a bit old. It signals that perhaps it's time for a change, and not just in terms of production, but in something far more visible.

Day 115: A Holiday for the Doctor

It's another comedy episode as we delve once again into historical events with Donald Cotton (The Myth Makers) but instead of meeting the Ancient Greeks, today we meet cowboys. Now, this is a concept that I've possibly mentioned before, but this is an example of Doctor Who acting as a genre machine. In case I haven't mentioned it before, or you don't want to trawl through 114 posts to find an explanation for this term, then I'll explain. The TARDIS travels through time and space, and it takes its travellers on adventures. These adventures are, for the most part, different from the previous week's. Take for example going from a historical comedy with The Myth Makers, to a science fiction epic with The Daleks' Master Plan to historical drama with The Massacre after which there is a simple space adventure in The Ark and a fantasy game show in The Celestial Toymaker. Through looking at these varied genres, we can see that Doctor Who is a show where we travel to different genres, a genre machine. So why, I hear you ask, is a historical comedy so important for you to mention it here? Well, for a start, it's because it acts as a break from the high stakes adventures that we've had, the characters are allowed to relax and jokes can occur. It also means that the show remains fresh because the average viewing audience will have only recently finished watching 21 weeks of adventure, most of which ended with death and destruction. We've had 8 weeks of progressively nicer stuff, where things are finally allowed to get better for the TARDIS crew, and so a historical comedy is a natural continuation of this, because it has been the peak moment in past times for the crew to be at their happiest. Although, things will get worse quickly, and soon there'll be blood upon the sawdust at The Last Chance Saloon.

Day 90: Horse of Destruction

I suppose that I was predisposed to like The Myth Makers. Because for all its gags and hijinks in Ancient times, the final episode is where things really start to happen. If you were expecting the culmination of the Siege of Troy to be a farce, you are wrong. It is a war. People die. It is shocking and disturbing to see Paris, Cassandra and King Priam, three characters that have previously been figures of fun in the story, get killed, because this is how history plays itself out. Odysseus is no longer the comical straight man, he is instead a soldier, fighting to kill all who get in his way. It's nice to see Doctor Who tell stories like this, where they do not talk down to the audience and make it into a simple case of goodies vs baddies, it instead allows for sympathetic characters to play their part in history, and if that means that they'll be brutally killed, then so be it. This is partly down to the writer, Donald Cotton, but also due to our new script editor, Donald Tosh. He won't be with us for very long, and we'll deal with this concept more when we reach his final story in a couple of weeks, but he has been able to help make Doctor Who more adult, while still keeping the children's programme status, and all the fun and adventure that it implies.

We also, this episode, bid farewell to Vicki, as played by Maureen O'Brien. Vicki has been a wonderful character, more fun and light hearted than Susan ever was. She was the first new companion that the show has seen, and she has been able to take to travelling in the TARDIS well, and form a much missed double act with the Doctor, where she was able to act as granddaughter figure for him, where Susan, due to being mostly paired off with Ian or Barbara, was unable to. Vicki has been a wonderful character, fun and full of energy,nand has helped the show survive theough the loss of three of the four original regular characters. Her replacement is Katarina, a Trojan handmaiden, and as the TARDIS flies off to a new adventure, she is left questioning her own fate, particularly as it was prophesied that she would die. But that won't happen surely, the Doctor will save her, won't he?

Day 89: Death of a Spy

I suppose that I was predisposed to like The Myth Makers. It's a story that deals with time travel, as a reasonable proportion of it deals with the Greeks and Trojans discovering that the TARDIS crew is from the future, and as such, they want to receive advice about how they should act in order to secure victory. And it becomes quite the dilemna, because it is well known that the Greeks win, but they are being forced to make the Trojans win on pain of death, by telling their future. And it's this notion of time travel that's quite interesting, because for a series where time travel is an integral part of the structure, it doesn't come up as often as you'd think it would as a plot point. But now it does, and it adds a layer of suspense to the tale. Because the story of the Trojan Horse is well known, and so any dramatic tension as to what will happen is taken away, and so we need to find some other source of conflict, to allow the audience to remain interested, which is what we receive with this simple tale all about the future. And speaking of the future, it is not looking as bright for the next episode.

Day 88: Small Prophet, Quick Return

I suppose that I was predisposed to like The Myth Makers. It's because it's also a comedy story, with some incredibly funny moments throughout the story, indeed this episode's title is itself an absolutely glorious pun that took me several years to figure out, and when I finally 'got' it, I burst out laughing in the middle of the street at the beauty of this simple joke. There are other funny moments as well, such as the laugh out loud joy of Paris being forced to engage himself in a fight with Steven, where Paris doesn't want to fight at all, and Steven desperately wants to be captured. Because it's these little moments that make things memorable, and make them funny. We may look down on things that use comedy as a story telling device, on the grounds that apparently drama is better at it. But comedy is good as well, because it can leave the audience smiling at the absurdities of situations, or some particularly bad puns. The Myth Makers isn't just a massively underrated Doctor Who story, it's also a lost comedic classic.

Day 87: Temple of Secrets

I suppose that I was predisposed to like The Myth Makers. The Myth Makers is the overarching title that takes the following 4 episodes, and I rank these episodes reasonably highly. They concern the Doctor and co. arriving in Ancient Greece, whereupon they discover that they have arrived towards the end of the Trojan War. Hilarity ensues. But I was looking forward to experiencing this episode, and have done since I was a small child, and first discovered Doctor Who. I discovered the series in 2003, around the time of a Doctor Who repeat series on television, and my parents let me read the several books based on the series that we had lying about the place. One of them, the Television Companion, would become a book of great excitement for me, as I would read and discover about all these episodes that I had not yet seen, including those based on Greek myths and legends, a topic that I was very interested in due to a mild addiction to the video game Age of Mythology. And of the few that were based around these myths and legends, there are only two that I distinctly remember experiencing from around that period, one of which we'll get to in due course, and the other of which is this story. For I really wanted to watch this story, however it was missing from the BBC archives, and the novelization was has disappeared from our local library completely. So, I lived in hope that I might get to experience it one day. When I finally did, it ranked as a great piece that has finally been filled in my life. Because even though I had a vague idea of what happened, it was no match for experiencing the story as a whole, and it filled that vague thought process of mine, as to finally getting round to experiencing The Myth Makers.