Day 585: Snakedance Part 2

The Doctor's role in Kinda was fairly basic. He ran around, being one of the few sane people on the planet, and tried to find out what was going on. He found help from various sources, such as Todd from the base, and Panna, the wise woman of the Kinda. It's actually fairly common as a Doctor Who story, in that regard, to have the Doctor meet a few allies in order to find out what is going on. Thisn't necessarily the case in Snakedance.

In Snakedance, the Doctor spends much of his time running about and trying to figure out how to stop the Mara. He learns from discussion with some of the historians that there is a legend on the planet that speaks of the Mara's return (for it had already been a strong presence on the planet centuries before this story took place). However, their minds are closed to the prospect of the Mara returning, caught up in the idea that it is just a legend, and failing to take in new evidence to suggest that their current theories are false.

This is epitomised in a scene towards the end of this episode, where the Doctor bursts into a dinner gathering and attempts to tell everyone that the Mara is going to return, only to be dragged away by the guards. It's an important scene, because not only does it tell of the blindness to the truth that everyone besides the Doctor has, with respect to the return of the Mara, but also of the fact that the Doctor is completely failing in his quest to be taken seriously. The Doctor has been, at least for his past couple of incarnations, a strong presence, the sort of person who walks into a room and is immediately able to take command. In his fifth incarnation, however, he's lost that commanding presence, and this means that he's even more alone as he tries to fight off the threat of the Mara. It's an interesting direction to take the character of the Doctor in, and one that we'll see again, albeit rarely (the most prominent example that personally comes to mind is Midnight, from 2008), and shows that the series isn't afraid to take the Doctor in some new directions, if only to liven up the general story structure for a little while.

Day 584: Snakedance Part 1

Series 20 of Doctor Who is all about the past. Each story features the return of some old villain from the series' past, such as seeing Omega again in Arc of Infinity, and in this story, the Mara makes a return, last seen in Kinda. It's great to see the Mara return again, as it made a strong impact in Kinda, and it deserves a return visit to the world of Doctor Who.

The way in which it comes back is really interesting as well. It turns out that, when at the end of Kinda, we believed that Tegan was free of the possessive influence of the Mara, we were wrong. A small part of the Mara remained in Tegan's mind, building up its strength such that it can possess Tegan completely. It's really interesting to see this concept, because it's a departure from normal stories where villains return, where we just bump into them, only this time in a slightly different context. Here, we learn that the story didn't end when we thought it did, making this feel like more of a continuation of the original story than just a sequel.

This continuation is echoed in some of the production of the story. Not so much in the design, which is completely different by virtue of being on a different world with a different culture than that of the Deva Lokans, nor is it found in the direction, but instead it is found through the audio cues, as developed by Dick Mills (special sound) and Peter Howell (composer) both of whom had previously worked on Kinda. This mainly presents itself with a particular screech, that occasionally comes around when looking at the Mara, or some representation of it, that formed much of the underlying tension of Kinda and returns in Snakedance to provide this tension again, as well as a continuity that helps the story feel like it's a true continuation of the original story.

Day 583: Arc of Infinity Part 4

So the villain of this story is Omega, the first Time Lord, a character last seen in The Three Doctors. His story is interesting, being that as he harnessed the power of time travel, he was sent through a black hole and arrived in a universe comprised entirely of anti-matter. In both stories, his plan revolves around returning to the normal matter universe and wreaking vengeance on Gallifrey. However, in my opinion, the way in which he is treated in Arc of Infinity comes across far worse than that of how he was treated in The Three Doctors.

My reasoning for this is that we never really get to spend much time with the character of Omega. Much of the time in Arc of Infinity is spent keeping him to the shadows, with his true identity only being revealed at the end of Part 3, which is an ill-advised move in my opinion. You see, in The Three Doctors, we spent time with the character, we learnt of his motivation, we felt his emotions, we accepted him as a character in his own right. For Arc of Infinity, on the other hand, we spend virtually no time with him and so we're just left with this nameless entity of ill intent to the entire universe, and we're expected to remember this character from 10 years ago so that we can have any sort of emotional bond with him. To be perfectly frank, it's a waste of a good character, and is yet another reason why this story is so bad.

Day 582: Arc of Infinity Part 3

A lot of Arc of Infinity is set on Gallifrey, and as such the Doctor spends some time meeting up with old acquaintances to get their help as he tries to stop some unknown creature with connections to the Time Lords enter into our universe from a universe of anti-matter. This is all handled terribly. When we meet old friends of the Doctor, we never get any sense that these two characters have kniwn each other for any period of time beyond the scenes that they share together. Take, for instance, Damon, a Time Lord working in the records room. All we get as an explanation as to how he knows the Doctor is that the two are friends. There's no explanation as to how they became friends, or why they trust each other, instead we are just expected to accept that these two characters know each other on the basis of trust, and trust alone. It doesn't help that Damon is also severely lacking in any form of character, meaning that we also don't really care for him whatsoever.

Similarly, there's Councillor Hedin, who is also introduced on the grounds that he and the Doctor are old friends. Now, at the end of this episode, it is revealed that Hedin is a traitor. This is meant to be a major plot point in the story, that one of the Doctor's oldest friends has betrayed him. But we never get any sense that these two are friends. They never talk with each other about old memories, of how much the Doctor looked up to Hedin, of any sort of history between the two characters. This means that when we see that Hedin is the traitor, all we see is not some hero of the Doctor's, revealed as a villain, instead just another character in a funny hat who just happens to be slightly more evil than the rest of the characters in this story. It all goes as just more criticisms to put on the ever growing list of problems with Arc of Infinity.

Day 581: Arc of Infinity Part 2

The Ergon is the henchman of the villain of this story, who is yet to be revealed narratively (I'll get more into discussion of the villain when he is fully revealed), and there are several problems that we can see with this character. Apparently, it was designed with the Xenomorphs from Alien in mind, which you can sort of see, if you squint. And pretend that the Xenomorphs in Alien were chicken-like in nature. Because that's what the Ergon looks like: a giant chicken. This is actually representative of a greater problem with the story, being the general design of everything. Take, for instance, Gallifrey as shown below:

It's not very impressive, lacking the style and darkness as seen with previous interpretations of Gallifrey, instead looking like something rather dull and beige. There's a certain lack of care put into the design work, making things look less impressive than they could be on paper. Part of this, though could be due to a lack of budget, although there was apparently enough money to go on a trip to Amsterdam to film this story, a fact that makes virtually no impact on the plot whatsoever and goes to show that the money could have been far better spent on getting better design work, or at the very least, a monster that doesn't look like a chicken.

Oh, and whilst I remember, two thoughts that passed me by whilst watching this episode were that the backpackers were so unmemorable that when one of them got kidnapped, I actually forgot which one was gone, and so I was surprised to see the one that I thought was kidnapped wandering around as if nothing had happened. This is not a good sign for the script, if it's that hard to differentiate between two characters. Oh, and Tegan's back.

Day 580: Arc of Infinity Part 1

I was all set to enjoy Arc of Infinity. After Time-Flight brought new lows to Doctor Who, I was hopeful. Nothing could be worse than Time-Flight, I thought. And then, three minutes in. We meet two young teenagers, Robin and Colin, going backpacking through Amsterdam. Neither of these young men are particularly good at acting. Every line that they say is so unnatural that you become convinced that the characters are actually aliens who have come to invade Earth via Amsterdam. This isn't helped by the dialogue, which is written as if Johnny Byrne, the writer, has completely forgotten how to write for human beings and instead writes soley for alien creatures or the like, with lines like "The Dutch are a very civilised race" coming across as, whilst perfectly grammatically correct and effectively communicating the point, unlike anything that any normal human being would say. And then, halfway trough this episode, just as I can't believe that it can get any worse, something truly abysmal happens. Something that demands an entry all of its own to talk about...

Day 579: Time-Flight Part 4

So eventually, the day gets saved by the Doctor. The plot, which I don't belive I've gone into in too much detail, involved the Master kidnapping Concorde so that he could fix his TARDIS (I'm actually not sure exactly how this occurs, I missed some important plot developments in Part 3 which were never touched upon again for the rest of the story), ends up reducing itself to scenes of pilots fixing aeroplanes as the Master and the Doctor come to some sort of arrangement. This turns out to be quite enjoyable, as there's a certain sense of comfort that you can get simply by watching people do their job, and do it well.

But the story comes to an end just as it was getting decent, and so too does something else. Tegan Jovanka came onto the TARDIS in order to get to Heathrow Airport. She's been an odd sort of TARDIS companion, in that she doesn't really want to be going on adventures, and she doesn't really like the people that she travels with. But now that the TARDIS has landed at Heathrow, we sort of assume that she's going to leave, and that she'll be happy about it. So when the TARDIS does leave without her, it's a bit surprising to see her so sad about this fact. Because even though she disliked everything at first, it's hard to deny that the prospect of all of time and space being at your fingertips would be a bad one, making this one of the sadder companion departures. But sometimes, an end isn't really the end, as we shall see tomorrow with the start of the 20th anniversary series of Doctor Who.