2,0 de 5 estrellas
Myths and Rubbish
Revisado en el Reino Unido 🇬🇧 el 29 de agosto de 2013
Only kind-of related box set, in which three stories are sold together for rather more than I think they are worth - the cardboard sleeve would therefore seem to be the most expensive bit, and it goes straight in re-cyc.
Time Monster.
I thought it was brilliant when I was 7 - the Master has found a way of evoking a monster that can destroy the world - 'Are you trying to tell us that all the classical gods were real?' - 'I can't pick the crystal up' - Thascales is Greek for 'Master'! But this is *not* a repeat of The Deamons (still less of Inferno, with which it shares some stock footage).
The plot is leaden. I don't know what the Master wants, and the action is very dull; Stuart Hyde ages 50 years, and then un-ages again (his voice completely unchanged), a doodlebug lands with a bang, Roundheads and UNIT shoot at each other (at point blank range with no fatalities and no close ups), Benton regresses to a baby...
The dialogue is often appalling - established characters have all become stock versions of themselves - it's like it's been written for kids by Mr Gumby - the Brigadier accuses Yates of being drunk, Jo refers to 'All that Cretan jazz' and says 'Groovy' far too often; 'Now I've got him really trapped', exults the Master - and all those hilarious lines about Jo's coccyx - and the treatment of Dr Ruth Ingram's Feminism is facile. The inspector, Dr Cook appears to moonlight at the Ministry of Silly Walks. The director, Dr Percival, is an old wet blanket, and the story gets a little better after Kronos has eaten him.
Jo's time sensor looks like it was designed by Shhh! (Hoxton's erotic emporium for ladies), Bessie's superdrive is moronic, and so is the idea that the brakes work by neutralising inertia
The two TARDISs each inside the other is a clever idea, but it's not really properly exploited, and why's the Master's one disguised as such a boring-looking computer? Landing on Atlantis it's still a boring computer - oh, for the grandfather clock!
Atlantis looks pretty, and it's nice to be in Jason and the Argonauts, and Susan Penhaligon and Ingrid Pitt are nothing if not easy on the eye - but before the Atlantis story can get going, the love-interest has been killed by a minotaur and Kronos, the angry giant white parrot, has destroyed the place. The following bit with two TARDISs, Kronos with eyeshadow, and the rainbow background only want the line, 'Groovy - We're in Gay Heaven!'
There are good bits - the moment when the doodlebug engine cuts out, and the farmhand's line 'Londoners!'. The Doctor's monologue about the hermit is so lyrical it seems to belong to a different story - probably Planet of the Spiders because the next thing that happens is that the dying Dalios is thrust in - with the voice of K'anpo Rinpoche! - George Cormack is the best thing in this, having far the best lines, and the bit where he dies in prison and we find Galleia and the Master in charge is straight out of King Lear. That's four good bits.
The gadget with the bottle and the forks - you worked that out in a restaurant with an empty bottle, right? Which means you were halfway down the next one...
1/5
Underworld
The story is Jason and the Golden Fleece, with Jackson being Jason, Orfe being Orpheus, Herrick being Hercules, Tala being Atalanta, all in pursuit of the P-7E - Persephone - and the race banks are the Golden Fleece (they are at least gold colour). It is a fairly faithful re-telling of the Greek source material, though the actual script seems almost bereft of merit - the characters are dull, it's not funny, it's not clever, it's not scary....
The cave effects are a blue set and a series of models, otherwise there is one set - the bridge of Jackson's ship is also that of the P-7E, with a lighting change - and (admittedly) there's some nice model work, but this is made on the absolute cheap; galloping inflation (coupled with some very obstructive BBC suits) is cited as the reason.
The result is an interesting object lesson in what can be achieved with not enough money and a lot of hard work; The Making Of tells an interesting story, though I do wonder if, after re-wiring the studio to make it work, they might just as cheaply have just built the set.
The result though is that whenever we see someone in the Underworld, we know they're not in the Underworld - however good the CSO is, it still looks like CSO - we know it's not real - nor does it help that half the characters in the Underworld have their faces hidden in those very boring black or grey hoods, and the two robots (if that's what they are - it's never made clear) look silly. The director appears to have been preoccupied by financial issues at the expense of the story; it's adequately told, but not well.
Less than a year before, they were producing first class telly, now this...
I think the best bit is that when a huge crowd of extras, including kids, run down the steps and board Jackson's ship. That looks great, and it's nice to see Jimmy Gardner (he later drove the Knight Bus on Prisoner of Azkaban).
2/5
Horns
The extra feature about the relationship between Dr Who and Blue Peter is very good, but as for the main feature...
The script isn't actually bad, it's a competent re-telling of the Minotaur story: Skonnos = Knossos, Crinoth = Corinth, Aneth = Athens, Seth = Theseus, Nimon = Minotaur, Soldeed = Daedalus, Sorak = Icarus. And it's not at all badly written; the script is not the problem here (though the absence of a final 'you cheated me!' confrontation between Soldeed and the Nimon is a glaring omission).
Visually, the Skonnons look great, and so does their planet, and if the youth of Aneth are wearing curtains (like the Von Trapp children) the big shot of their arrival on Skonnos - supported by the scarlet Romana - is visually impressive. The Nimon's lair looks good too; the only problem is the Nimon itself - it lacks any Taurean bulk, and commits that most heinous sin of any Dr Who monster - it looks stupid. This was the year of stupid monsters; Tythonians, Mandrels, Nimon, Krargs (oh yeah, Douglas Adams made the Daleks look stupid too, not forgotten that...).
And there are some very good performances - Malcolm Terris is horrible as the treacherous, cowardly bully of a co-pilot, and John Bailey gets every ounce of pathos out of Sezom, and Lalla Ward is at her best, and generally she's the one carrying the plot, rather than Tom Baker. By far the best bits are those with either Miss Ward and Mr Terris or Miss Ward and Mr Bailey - particularly the latter; the story is suddenly being played deadly straight and it palpably lifts. Simon Gyps-Kent does a nice job of a hapless Theseus, while Janet Ellis proves thoroughly irritating as the clearly besotted Teka - these two are intended to be the funny parts.
But the trouble is that Tom Baker and Graham Crowden have both decided to be funny as well - inviting the audience to join them in laughing up their sleeves at the story (and at the people that want to take it seriously) - Mr Crowden corpses as he dies - this is not in any way good practice. The story is being let down by the eponymous hero and the villain, and David Brierley's camp K-9 voice doesn't help; it's all rather like watching (for instance) Derek Jacobi trying to play the graveside scene from Hamlet while Cannon and Ball keep acting stupid and spoiling it (Ho, ho, how rib-ticklingly humourous is that...?).
The story lifts itself in the excursion to Crinoth, but that's in Episode 4; by then we've sat through three weeks of semi-drivel - oh hang on, it was 1979, better make that eleven weeks of drivel. It could have been argued, quite persuasively that, with such an explosion of interest in his HHGTTG, Mr Adams couldn't be bothered to do his day job of script editing Dr Who properly. By this end of the story, Dr Who had been quite crap for the fourth part of a year.
3/5 - but that's for Miss Ward, Mr Terris and Mr Bailey.
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