Season 18
BBC Video have finally released "Meglos", oddly one of my favourite Doctor Who stories, and it made me realise that Season 18 is finally complete on DVD. I have an enormous affection for Season 18, because while my first memory of Doctor Who is Romana being hassled by Daleks in "Destiny of the Daleks", Season 18 was the earliest point at which I was actively and obsessively watching the series. So I've been watching the whole season, episode by episode, late at night. I've also been writing copious notes and then expanding on them early in the morning or when I've just returned home from work. I've been writing stuff like this for a while now. It means I can throw something up onto a blog in the middle of the day in the space of 2 1/2 minutes, because everything's been pre-written.
So my Season 18 thoughts may get blogged, or I may wait and fanzine them if they're lengthy enough. Tonight I was writing about "The Leisure Hive". For example:
The design of the Argolins is relatively unusual for Doctor Who. Basically, before the advent of inexpensive computer generated images (CGI) there were two approaches to representing aliens in science fiction television: the Doctor Who approach, and the Star Trek approach. The Doctor Who approach is to make your aliens genuinely alien. You create them using complicated rubber masks, elaborate costumes or even rudimentary puppetry. The Star Trek approach is to use prosthetic make-up to turn a human actor into something a little less human, but still not so different that you lose the actor’s face. The Star Trek approach allows for a more engaging performance. The Doctor Who approach allows for a more engaging imagination. The Star Trek approach results in the Klingons. The Doctor Who approach results in the Daleks.
The reason I bring this comparison up is because the Argolins look as if they belong in Star Trek. They don’t look like proper Doctor Who aliens. Now Doctor Who does experiment with human-like aliens from time to time - the Drahvins in “Galaxy 4”, for example, or the Badger-haired Peladonians in “The Monster of Peladon” - but it experiments with them rarely enough that when they do pop up they still seem oddly out of place. Consider, for example, that the main villain of the preceding serial was a minotaur, and the villain of the subsequent one will be a talking cactus.
Anyone else have fond memories of Season 18? (To save time for the non-obsessive, it was Tom Baker's last year, wrote out Romana and K9, wrote in Adric, Nyssa and Tegan, and featured the stories "The Leisure Hive", "Meglos", "Full Circle", "State of Decay", "Warriors' Gate", "The Keeper of Traken" and "Logopolis".
So my Season 18 thoughts may get blogged, or I may wait and fanzine them if they're lengthy enough. Tonight I was writing about "The Leisure Hive". For example:
The design of the Argolins is relatively unusual for Doctor Who. Basically, before the advent of inexpensive computer generated images (CGI) there were two approaches to representing aliens in science fiction television: the Doctor Who approach, and the Star Trek approach. The Doctor Who approach is to make your aliens genuinely alien. You create them using complicated rubber masks, elaborate costumes or even rudimentary puppetry. The Star Trek approach is to use prosthetic make-up to turn a human actor into something a little less human, but still not so different that you lose the actor’s face. The Star Trek approach allows for a more engaging performance. The Doctor Who approach allows for a more engaging imagination. The Star Trek approach results in the Klingons. The Doctor Who approach results in the Daleks.
The reason I bring this comparison up is because the Argolins look as if they belong in Star Trek. They don’t look like proper Doctor Who aliens. Now Doctor Who does experiment with human-like aliens from time to time - the Drahvins in “Galaxy 4”, for example, or the Badger-haired Peladonians in “The Monster of Peladon” - but it experiments with them rarely enough that when they do pop up they still seem oddly out of place. Consider, for example, that the main villain of the preceding serial was a minotaur, and the villain of the subsequent one will be a talking cactus.
Anyone else have fond memories of Season 18? (To save time for the non-obsessive, it was Tom Baker's last year, wrote out Romana and K9, wrote in Adric, Nyssa and Tegan, and featured the stories "The Leisure Hive", "Meglos", "Full Circle", "State of Decay", "Warriors' Gate", "The Keeper of Traken" and "Logopolis".