WhoThrough: Doctor Who Season Five

The ongoing series sees Troughton go on, Zoe get on and Victoria get off.

When my wife and I married in 2014, we started watching Doctor Who in order, one story a week. Five and a half years later we finished and started again. These are a combination of my scattershot notes from the first and second WhoThroughs.

THE TOMB OF THE CYBERMEN

A very direct pick-up from last week — this gives Victoria a nod as our point-of-view character, and also has her ask who the Doctor is (his age anyway). Important stuff. Terrible continuity of character new Victoria who already guesses the Doctor won’t leave. The team get over the death of one of their crew in no time at all.

“So that’s why you attacked the moon base”. The effort to explain the last story and, somehow, Mondas is a struggle. Nice that this returns to ideas of conversion, the cybermen keen to make more of their number out of the smartest humans — that aspect is too easily lost as they become standard badies.

Arbitrary choices all over, needless time pressures and choices, and nobody holding the Doctor to blame as he gets them in and then complains that they should leave as people die. Collapses badly in episode four when the Cybermen go back to bed and the Doctor sets things up to kill any curious soul who shows up — a death just like the one he witnessed at the start, outside doors he found pretty easy to enter. Could you play this story on a loop, where the set-up the Doctor elves is the one he arrives to find? (No, but it’s close.)

THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMEN

A nice raft of mysteries — the spheres, the voice, the attacking Yeti — but a lot of forced tension and shuffling around in the first three eps. Oh the misplaced hope in making something so cuddly seem formidable. The Doctor really is a man with a history now, he’s travelled a lot prior to the show — a gentle reworking of the concept that got hints with Hartnell but is now central to him. “India/Tibet” opening momentarily made things feel like an old historical before breaking that with aliens. The TARDIS has a prop box, like improv theatre, or Q from the Bond films setting up items to be used.

The sudden arrival of the Great Intelligence’s voice is great — we’ve already got the yeti and Travers so another strange threat wasn’t expected. Funny how “the bell” and “Travers believes the companions” serve the exact same plot function at the exact same time: getting the Doctor freed from suspicion at last. Episode three’s hunt for a working sphere is a tedious run of plotblocking — looking in the wrong places, arbitrarily preventing anyone from popping outside the front door. I’ll never tire of Jamie saying “beastie”.

The Abbot’s hypnosis, and the commanding intellect, the past history and big scheme of the Great Intelligence — plus the aged-beyond-its-time body — are another step toward building The Master. Having ended a previous scene with an undisclosed plan for ‘dealing with’ the heroes, Victoria’s faking poisoning works terrifyingly well, a rare structural trick for the show. Something rather lovely about a villain who keeps insisting the Doctor is a friend and must be unharmed .Thought: The long running of Doctor Who is due in large part to the format allowing threats to get ever bigger while the Doctor gets ever more powerful without this breaking anything.

THE ICE WARRIORS

A rather 50s b-movie intro for the episodes! Love the Doctor saving everyone the moment he shows up — a way of earning trust equivalent to the psychic paper. Early sections are edited super fast. The dialogue here aims to entertain as well as get the story told, and it makes such a difference. It’s also delivered at a super fast clip. Check out the Doctor walking into a scene with “Why don’t you label your doors?” Indeed, the Doctor’s character is really clarified here, as he talks through his plan to go out unarmed but with a scientific bargaining chip. There’s a Robert Holmes quality to the double act of Penney and Storr.

Jamie and Victoria talking about sexy outfits is the best character dialogue in a while — chat as entertainment. (See also the Doc’s wind-up/pay-off jokes, using a chemical machine to make a glass of water, and the scavengers: “You’d give a polar bear indigestion.”) The Ice Warriors really need more effective sonic death rays. The concern over Jamie being dead is played for all the emotion it can be (in contrast to the first guy who dies in the avalanche). Realising the computer has a motive is the first real Asimov thing we’ve seen. Tension and arguments in last two eps are really emotional and strong.

THE ENEMY OF THE WORLD

Strange to do this story — about discovering a huge global manipulation device — right after one based around a global glacier-fighting device. Victoria’s wearing tartan like Jamie — which carries some pleasing subtexts, especially after Jamie asking her to dress like the futuristic women last story.

One helicopter shot going from attacker in medium close-up to a vast, sweeping wide shot, uncut, gives breathtaking scope. Sometimes there’s very sharp cutting between scenes, which feels like a style statement — as does starting scenes mid-dialogue, suddenly cut to.

Names in general seems bizarrely pedestrian — Giles Kent, Bruce, Colin — exactly when they need to be dramatic. It’s like smashing up crockery as a threat — somehow there’s a quaint tendency to veer small. That said, Fariah’s death is played full movie scale, all emotion, and is all the better for it. One that really lands.

The scene where the Doctor impersonates Salamander to Jamie and Victoria, proving his point to Bruce, is wonderful — escalating tensions as facts come out, the emotion as Fariah’s death is revealed. So much of the adventure writing is a cut above the norm — faking Kent being shot by breaking a window is a rare ‘good plan’, and the impact of Swann finding the newspaper, and then Astrid finding Swann, are immediately, appreciably huge. And the reveal of Kent as a baddie is a shocker that also adds up.

Salamander is like an evil Doctor — keeping young companions in an unlikely SF box, but for him the world is all gone rather than than all worlds being available. Another step towards the Master. The melodramatic acting in the bunker (“Colin!”) feels deliberate.

THE WEB OF FEAR

Is this the first time a guest re-encounters the leads where they’ve not aged while he, Travers, has reached the current time the long way round? Miss Travers wailing on the journo early on is great stuff. Soldier getting webbed in the face is wonderfully nasty. Paranoia in the first two eps feels hopelessly manufactured. The Yeti attack on Travers (from lost-episode reconstruction and next episode continuation) is genuinely frightening — good use of sound. (See also the screeching fungus as it’s cut.)

Lethbridge-Stewart believing about the TARDIS is both greatly suspicious at the time, and adorably appropriate in retrospect. A two-yeti attack on the Doctor feels formidable, the reveal of a dead companion shocking. A new move to put the Doctor in the centre — the Intelligence wants to capture him and drain his special knowledge. The instant and passionate loyalty between Jamie and Victoria is touching. Love the Doctor making plans with Jamie in case his mind is drained: “You’ll have to look after me.” Giving the Doctor 20 minutes, an episode length, to find a solution is wonderfully literal. Victoria smiles when she sees Travers, which made me realise you hardly ever see her do that.

Lethbridge-Stewart dismissing the journalist is enough to put you more on his side than the plot may intend…which, given its take of military over public oversight, is probably bad for the show. Certainly it’s more the tone of the Pertwee era. Why does the story rely on the Great Intelligence having an agent when, surely, it could spy on you just by drifting around silently and listening.

FURY FROM THE DEEP

Whipping a sonic screwdriver out like it’s normal is exactly the same as the TARDIS having a dinghy…or , in New Who, discovering the screwdriver has another setting: built into both devices and the Doctor are boundless unknown potential and abilities. Interesting audio work: dips when we’re looking at the file being stolen, the signal fault combined with a character speaking softly. The seaweed/foam power set — possession, toxic gas, sentient creatures, heartbeat — is so wide and disconnected that it gets oddly vague despite all the specifics. Recovered clips suggest visuals compensated for drab script.

Mr Oak and Mr Quill arrive with a vibe akin to Diamonds Are Forever’s Mr Wynt and Mr Kidd or Neverwhere’s Mr Croup and Mr Vandermar — that weird mix of long familiarity and formality for some reason unsettles us. Victoria is made to act out of character, and be treated differently from normal, in order to ‘earn’ her departure. Not removing the first helicopter before the Doctor elects to fly the second rather robs that moment of any tension. After the kidnap and possession, they still made Mrs Harris cook dinner for everyone. I quite like that Jamie takes Victoria’s departure the hardest.

Why does the animated version give everyone abnormally long arms? And the decision to shove a wanted poster for the Master into the background so often is stupidly distracting. Between these and the strange idea that a large space with three characters is more cinematic than a small space with three characters, failing to add the visual impact that seemed to help the original episodes when made, this is the most irksome of the animated reconstructions.

THE WHEEL IN SPACE

If this were the modern show, it’d be about Jamie getting over Victoria. The way he crushes on Zoe is blatant rebound. Victoria getting smaller on the scanner screen at the start, waving goodbye, is rather sweet. Holding the Cybermen back until the end of episode two works decently thanks to their name not being in the title! (Also the meeting of the wheel’s crew and introduction of Zoe fills out episode two decently, despite the Doctor’s absence.)

It’s a very Hartnell start — fluid link, tired Doctor, slow exploration. Jamie’s shocked by future food, but apparently not fruit salad or ice cream. (His time alone in episode one is oddly tense because it’s hard to gauge how much he’s meant to know of future times — enough to try to use a radio to contact help? You’d kinda assume yes, but later this story he doesn’t understand tape recordings.) Episode two would benefit from Jamie actually knowing they’re in danger of being blown up.

The way Zoe is set up with Jamie by Doctor Corwyn is pretty blatantly sexual. Zoe gets to be the Doctor, deducing things, while he’s not really up to it: a clever introduction. Frustrating plot-making behaviour: hiding cybermats, aiming at spaceships and not asking Jamie why he sabotaged the laser. That Jarvis is nuts makes him great/infuriating to watch, but also solves the problem of base under siege stories having bosses who act sensibly to keep plot going. Doctor informs everyone that Gemma is dead — you realise how rarely he does that. And it’s so sad. Genuinely worried the Doctor might be killed as he wearily greet two cybermen who’ve found him.

A surprising amount of ‘dialogue bridges’ going from scene to scene — a question asked at the end of one scene being answered at the top of the next, or talk of a menace segueing to a cyberman’s face. A rare, efficient, story-advancing style for this era — check out the way the plastic-coated cybermat lands in the Doctor’s hands with a single cut.

Once again we find the second Doctor flirting, this time with Doctor Corwyn. Strange to have the cybermen use a mind control ray rather than, say, attaching a technological implant — they do struggle to keep the ethos behind the cybermen at the fore. In fact the Doctor ends up adding tech to humans’ necks to prevent hypnosis — wouldn’t the cybermen do that sort of thing and the Doctor remove it? That said, Zoe’s scene about wanting to get beyond facts and experience emotions is very on-point — wanting to avoid becoming a cyberman by travelling in the TARDIS.

Shipless Cybermen flying through space should have been the defining image here — like them crossing the ice or the moon in past stories — but…well, it’s just not executed well enough, is it? All flappy arms and awkwardness.

Check out the WhoThroughs for Season One, Season Two, Season Three and Season Four.