Doctor Who #2 - The Daleks

The Daleks is as important and ground-breaking as the previous serial An Unearthly Child. It also has some of the same issues with pacing.

The story starts with the Doctor, his granddaughter Susan, and their two fellow travellers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright landing the TARDIS in a petrified jungle. From there, they get caught up in a war between the Daleks, unseen creatures encased in distinctive mechanical shells and the Thals, an Aryan-like race of humanoids.

This incarnation of the Doctor has yet to settle down into the proactive heroic do-gooder we know and love. In the Daleks he sabotages the TARDIS to force everyone to explore the Dalek city. Ian remarks that the Doctor "has a knack for getting himself into trouble". Of course, that means it's not himself, but also his companions, two of whom are there against their will. Of course, if he had not, the Thals would have been eliminated by the Daleks. The Doctor remains a passive character in this story, with Ian leading the attempts to escape from the Daleks, and the later attack on their city.

There is some silly and frustrating padding, such as the scene with a Food making machine, and the pace of the story is at times glacial. It also soon becomes clear that too much inter-Dalek dialogue is grating and unlistenable. And why are the female Thals dressed like they're trying to be Playboy bunnies?

These minor quibbles aside, it is still a fantastic story. There is tension and a weird creepy atmosphere that runs throughout. The script has some undertones of racial intolerance and Nazis that would be explored further in later stories.

It's also fascinating to two things about both the Doctor and the Daleks. Firstly, at this stage, neither are encumbered by their own mythology. Secondly, how both have a very analogue 1960s version of advanced technology, with everything working from dials and printouts. And of course, the MacGuffin for the story is the mercury filled fluid link that, without which, the TARDIS is rendered completely immobile.

Doctor Who #1 - An Unearthly Child

 

An Unearthly Child is essential viewing for anyone interested in Dr Who, even if it is something of a Curate's Egg. Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton are two school teachers in early 1960s London. They share the same gifted but bizarre pupil, Susan Foreman. They decide to team up to confront her mysterious guardian, known only as the Doctor, who seemingly lives in a junkyard, inside a Police Box.

The first episode is brilliant, and establishes the main characters quickly. Especially interesting is the title character. As the show is yet to get bogged down with its own mythology, the Doctor we see here is a genuine enigma. He has unclear motives and an abrasive streak in his character.

The story sets the template for a type of story that will recur throughout the show, even into the modern era. The Doctor and crew get separated from the TARDIS, and battle to fight their way back. In this case it is against hostile factions of a Stone Age tribe who have lost the power to make fire. This means, whatever else is going on, the stakes can be raised a certain amount, and solves the "why don't you simply take off again" problem. But, in An Unearthly Child there is very little else, and could have lost one of the four episodes to tighten the pace. There is plenty of creepy ambience, and the climax in the Cave of Skulls is far more gruesome than I would have expected for a children's show of that era.

The Doctor actually takes a back seat as the story progresses, with Ian being the proactive character who shows the cave people how to make fire again. This is a show that is, finding it's feet, but the basic elements are there. Oh, and for anyone who thinks the show is only nowadays a bastion of bleeding heart liberalism, at one point Ian and Barbara try to teach the cave dwellers about democracy and compassion with the phrase "a tyrant is not as strong as the whole tribe acting collectively".

 

 

The Day Time Ended (1979)

Not only does the title The Day Time Ended bear no relation to the events on screen, the events themselves often bear no relation to the other events in the film.

The plot, as far as I discern, sees a family moving into their new solar-powered home in the middles of the desert. The bad news is their house in right in the centre of some sort of time vortex. Beyond that, God only knows. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is clearly a big influence that the filmmakers were trying to cash in on, with cute kids, time travel, inexplicable events and alien abductions. The script feels like somebody wrote down every sci-fi trope they could think of, put them into a hat and drew them out one by one, regardless of how much sense they made.

In the right hands - or even the wrong hands - this sort of approach can work, with a delirious energy meaning never a dull moment for the viewer. Director John "Bud" Cardos had previously made some low budget exploitation gems such as nature-on-the-rampage classic Kingdom of the Spiders, but he can't make this mess come to life. The special effects are cheap and cheesy, especially the stop-motion aliens, and at least provide a distraction from the wooden human characters.

The finale is left open-ended and if anything feels like this is a pilot for a TV show that, thankfully, never went anywhere.

Eliminators (1986)

An affable, sometimes crazy piece of sci-fi action, Eliminators makes the best of a low budget, as well as having a storyline that predates the likes of Robocop and Universal Soldier.

Elderly billionaire recluse Abbott Reeves (Roy Dotrice) has been a busy boy, keeping himself alive with skin grafts, and transfusions, as well as perfecting his time travel matter transfer device, and turning the body of a pilot pulled from crashed plane wreckage in Mexico into a half-human, half-robot "Mandroid" (Patrick Reynolds) in order to send him to and from Ancient Rome. When Reeves orders his assistant Dr. Takada to dismantle Mandroid, Takada refuses, and is killed as he and Mandroid escape. Mandroid teams up with Takada's colleague Colonel Nora Hunter (Denise Crosby of Star Trek TNG and Pet Semetary), Takada's Ninja son Kuji (Conan Lee of Gymakta fame) and mercenary Harry Fontana (Andrew Prine) to take out Reeves. As they get closer to their target, they realise Reeves isn't just time travelling in order to collect antiques - his plans could alter the history and fate of the whole world.

For the most part, the story zips by at a great pace, keeping the twists and turns coming, as long as you don’t stop to think too hard about some of them, peppering them with plenty of gun fights and chases. The star of the show is Mandroid, who has some pretty nifty interchangeable weapons, not to mention his “mobile unit”, a mini tank which he detaches his legs to climb into. The action is not too grim or gory, making the film fine for teenage viewers, and I did wonder at one point whether anyone had planned a toy line based on the characters.

With Mandroid being, by his nature, pretty stern and emotionless, it’s left to Hunter and Fontana to maintain the human interest, and during the riverboat scenes, while they are no Hepburn and Bogart, they keep the lulls in the action going with their bickering. Lee does his best with a limited role, but his character is brought in at just the right moment to give the story a lift and an extra dimension.

The final twist in the tale seems to come from nowhere, and provoked a laugh out loud response from the audience I saw the film with, but in the schlocky, good natured context of this film, it works.