[Summer Falls]

Originally Posted by Waldfrau (View Post) Nah, just the story with him and Sarah wasn't that interesting.

fair enough

[DigificWriter]

I'm back.

And so we open a new season and say goodbye (for a while) to Sarah Jane with The Masque of Mandragora and The Hand of Fear, a pair of stories that continue a trend of feeling decidedly like Modern Who in their execution.

With Masque, I kept drawing parallels to three of the seven Chibnall Era pseudo-historicals (The Witchfinders, The Haunting of Villa Diodati, and Village of the Angels), as well as the Third Doctor pseudo-historical The Daemons and the Sixth Doctor psuedo-historical The Mark of the Rani, which offered both familiarity and a sense of fun and adventure that particularly suits the Tom Baker era.

The story also gets props for what might be the first implication of homosexuality in Classic Who and for continuing to strike a nice balance between the traditionally compassionate and casually cruel sides of the Doctor's overall character, and ends up earning a very solid and respectable 3.8.

And then we have The Hand of Fear, which I felt was a very fitting sendoff for Sarah Jane that gave Lis Sladen some of her best material to work with and, as with Masque, felt very much of the Modern Who era stylistically.

As a villain, Eldrad reminded me very much of the Master, and I was also given flashbacks to the Ninth Doctor stories The Unquiet Dead and The Long Game and the Tenth Doctor stories New Earth, The Idiot's Lantern, and the Chris Chibnall-penned 42.

Sarah's departure also felt very much like what Russell T. Davies was aiming for with Martha Jones' exit, but executed far more deftly and without diminishing the character, and the fact that it works as well as it does is only enhanced by the fact that it was scripted by Lis Sladen herself along with Tom Baker.

Other positives for the story (for me, anyway) are the ridiculous charm of Sarah's outfit and the final scene of the serial where she realizes that the Doctor has dropped her off in the wrong place and deadpan\nonchalantly says that "he blew it" to a dog before wandering off whistling, fittingly enough given later developments for her character, a song about a dog.

Throw in the additional resonance that Sarah's return in School Reunion retroactively gives this story, and you get a rating of 4.5 and the third-best story of the Tom Baker Era to date.

[Summer Falls]

Ohh Sarah

[DigificWriter]

And so we say goodbye to Sarah and hello to Time Lords and a new Companion with The Deadly Assassin and The Face of Evil.

Because I started with Modern Who and the Ninth Doctor Era and then chose to start Classic Who with the Sixth Doctor Era, The Deadly Assassin marks my first true visit to Gallifrey and my first real deep-dive foray into Gallifreyan society.

Some bullet-point thoughts:
* It might've just been me, but it sounded as if Peter Pratt as the Master was channeling Roger Delgado

* I was initially caught off guard a little bit by Robert Holmes completely rewriting Time Lord society relative to the way they were portrayed in their last appearance in The Three Doctors, but given that all of my exposure to Gallifreyan culture prior to watching this story was actually informed by and based on what he established here, any issues I had quickly went away

* I was a little bit bored at first by the goings-on inside the Matrix, but I did appreciate just how much later stories involving the Matrix were informed by its use and establishment here

* I knew from other stuff I'd seen that there's a big development with towards to Gallifrey and the Doctor stemming from some of the lore introduced in this story, and so the ending was not what I was expecting at all

In terms of rating this one, I like the fact that so much of the lore it introduces vis a vis the Time Lords and Gallifrey was expanded on by later stories, and also like the fact that it gets directly referenced in The Timeless Children by the Spy Master, so for those reasons, on top of the overall story itself, I'm giving it a well-earned 4 out of 5.

For my review of The Face of Evil, I want to start out by shouting out three huge parallels that immediately leaped out at me:
* the PS4/PS5 video game series Horizon
* the Tenth Doctor episode The Doctor's Daughter
* the Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode Battle Lines

If these three things weren't influenced in some way by this story, I'll be incredibly shocked, to be honest, because the similarities are pretty staggering.

I really liked Liz Shaw, Jo Grant, and Sarah Jane Smith, but up to this point my favorite Classic Who companion had remained Peri Brown; that might have just changed, finally, with the introduction of Leela (I'll try and remember to revisit this topic later on in my watch-through of Clsssic Who and the Tom Baker Era), who is both simultaneously awesomely tough and innocently vulnerable in equal measure and who, as pointed out by the hosts of the Wanderers in the Fourth Dimension podcast, has several things in common with both the Doctor in general and the First Doctor in particular, at least in this story where she's pretty casually killing people without qualm.

I know there have been arguments made against her costume on account of it sexualizing her, but I didn't personally see anything overly objectifying or particularly sexualized about the costume myself, and would like to hypothetically ask the people who object to the costume what they would have expected a character with her background to be wearing both in this story and going forward.

Terrance Dicks apparently used his Target novelization of this story to place the events that set it up during a gap in the episode Robot, but I personally don't think you need to jump through those kinds of hoops to justify the existence of this story since we don't know what happened after the Doctor left Gallifrey at the end of the last serial, and I actuthink there's a neat kind of serendipity if he ended up leaving the Seveteem and Tesh Planet only for the TARDIS to end up bringing him back shortly thereafter to fix the mess he'd inadvertently made.

As for a rating, I love the fact that this story had so many similarities to the Horizon video games, The Doctor's Daughter, and Battle Lines, and with Leela's characterization and Louise Jameson's chemistry with Tom Baker (even if he might've been a bit crabby behind-the-scenes since he had supposedly not wanted the Fourth Doctor to get any more Companions), I'm going to give this one a 4.9 out of 5, tying it with The Brain of Morbius.

Next up, we've got The Robots of Death (written, as was The Face of Evil, by Chris Boucher) and The Talons of Weng-Chiang, and then I'll be halfway through Tom's run on the series.

[Summer Falls]

Who is the new companion?

[DigificWriter]

Originally Posted by Summer Falls (View Post) Who is the new companion?

Leela.

[Waldfrau]

Leela was wonderful!

[Summer Falls]

Originally Posted by DigificWriter (View Post) Leela.

oh thank you

i kind of wish in the new who we can get another character like her someone from a different time coming forward

[Waldfrau]

Yeah, in new Who it's mostly companions from the same time and planet we live. (With the exception of Nardole perhaps.)

[DigificWriter]

Nardole and Jack are the 2 official Modern Who Companions who are not from contemporaneous Earth.

Adam also kind of falls into this category if you consider him to be from an alternate version of 2012.

On topic, I'm halfway through The Talons of Weng-Chiang, and at the risk of sounding indelicate, I really don't think it was necessary for the serial to be Disclaimed by Britbox. Yes, there are things in the story that some people might find offensive or insensitive, but nobody Disclaimed The Idiot's Lantern, Fear Her, or Rosa despite the fact that there are parts of those stories that could be potentially troublesome for some people.

Are there parts of Talons that have racist tones and connotations? Yes. Was it really necessary to slap a warning about said connotations and tones on the serial? No, I don't think that it was.

[Waldfrau]

How could I forget Jack? Maybe because he seems so at home at where ever the party is.

Does "disclaimed" mean just those warnings like "smoking, sexual content, violence..." or aren't they broadcasting it anymore?

[DigificWriter]

^ Britbox slapped a content warning (disclaimer) in front of every episode of Talons because they got complaints about the serial's racially insensitive content, and I don't personally see the need for such a warning even though I recognize and acknowledge that the serial is indeed racially insensitive.

Anyway, rant over; on to actually rating and talking about the end of Season 14 from a narrative perspective.

Last Fall, I had an opportunity to see a production of Agatha Christie's stage play The Mousetrap, which helped give me a greater appreciation for The Robots of Death than I might otherwise have had because TRoD is almost a one-for-one reinterpretation of the play in a Dune-esque Science Fiction setting, which, IMO, elevates it from being just another cliched Murder Mystery story.

It's also fitting that TRoD is so blatantly a reinterpretation of The Mousetrap because Louise Jameson, who played Leela, ended up joining a West End production of the play in 2016, almost 40 years after TRoD was broadcast.

The story also has major parallels to the Tenth Doctor's trilogy of Ood stories (The Impossible Planet, The Satan Pit, and Planet of the Ood) and the Christmas Special Voyage of the Damned that elevate it even further.

Tom is back to emphasizing the nicer side of the Fourth Doctor here after a couple of stories that heavily highlighted his nastier and more casually violent characteristics, with a slight nod to the aforementioned Tenth Doctor at the start when Leela grouses at him because she misinterpreted the motive behind him giving her his Yo-Yo to play with, and there's also very little, if any, hint of the reportedly frosty behind-the-scenes relationship between himself and Louise present in the character's interactions with Leela here.

Speaking of Leela, Chis Boucher gets even more opportunities to showcase her and define her character than he did in The Face of Evil, and he takes full advantage of those opportunities by making her as awesome as possible while not subsuming her innocence.

The Robots of Death is a phenomenal story that masterfully reinterprets the world's longest-running stage play (the aforementioned The Mousetrap) and, as a result, earns a 9.9 out of 10, the highest rating I've given a Tom Baker serial to date.

Moving on to the already-mentioned The Talons of Weng-Chiang, Script Editor Robert Holmes pivots from Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap as reinterpreted by Chris Boucher to a love letter to Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, Gaston Leroux's Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, and George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, and does so without missing a beat, furthering the development of the onscreen relationship between the Fourth Doctor and Leela pretty spectacularly and giving us a slightly softer examination of the latter's characterization in a way that is different from how Chris Boucher wrote her but without contradicting his presentation of her.

Talons also gives us a great trio of adversaries for the Doctor in Li H'sen Chang, Magnus Greel/Weng-Chiang, and Mr. Sin and two memorable, if slightly superfluous, pseudo-Companions in Jago and Litefoot.

Robert Holmes had apparently wanted the villain of the story to be the 'Crispy Master', last seen in The Deadly Assassin, but had that plan vetoed by Phillip Hinchcliffe, and I'm honestly glad for said veto because, as much as I like the Master as a character, the story wouldn't have been as interesting with him in it because it wouldn't have been unique.

Even though The Talons of Weng-Chiang is, as previously mentioned, ife with writing and casting decisions that are racially insensitive by modern societal standards, the story it tells transcends such controversies to deliver a rip-roaring adventure that recasts the Doctor as Sherlock Holmes and Leela as a cross between Eliza Doolittle and Christine Daaé but without sacrificing their unique charactetistics, resulting in a tying 9.9 out of 10 rating and an incredible, if overly expensive, farewell to Phillip Hinchcliffe's 3-season tenure as Producer.

[Waldfrau]

In that case I think the disclaimer for racist tropes or whatever it was is warranted.

The PG12 stuff I watch on Amazon usually comes with 4 or 5 content warnings like "smoking, drinking, nudity, violence, sexual content..." - even if it's a PG12 cartoon. The Star Trek ep I watched last night had one scene with a guy holding a cigar and I'm still puzzled about what the "sexual content" was.

[DigificWriter]

^ You and I are talking about different things.

You're talking about the established warnings associated with the rating systems that exist in the UK and the US that are mandated by law and that help people - primarily parents - determine whether or not a program is suitable viewing.

I'm talking about a text Disclaimer that Britbox added to The Talons of Weng-Chiang (and which is separate from the aforementioned ratings system) only after moral concerns were raised about the serial's racially insensitive content and which both acknowledges and denounces said content.

I feel that such a Disclaimer is unnecessary because it draws a line in the sand and makes the racial insensitivity of the serial into a moral issue when doing so serves no practical purpose.

A hypothetical equivalent example would be Mad Men episodes coming prefaced with text acknowledging and simultaneously denouncing the program's depiction of casual smoking purely because of what we as a society now recognize as being the dangers of cigarettes.

[Waldfrau]

Ah, I get it. Would make more sense to just add it to the normal warnings.