(no subject)
Hosted the Northern Virginia Doctor Who Viewing Society this afternoon. So the apartment is nice and clean. We did our usual order a pizza and watch a dvd. With the recent passing of Nicholas Courtney, we decided a Brigadier episode would be appropriate. I only had Pertwee era dvds featuring UNIT, and they were mostly the 7 episode ones, which were a bit long for our purposes. Amy brought several later era dvds and we ultimately decided on Mawdryn Undead because it had 2 Brigadiers and one of the extras was Nicholas Courtney being interviewed as the Brigadier. The dvd also had a nice half hour making of documentary, outtakes, deleted scenes and a couple photo galleries. One thing we all commented on was the fact that the pacing was radically different than for NuWho. Of course, when you're writing your story over 4 22-25 minute episodes rather than one or two 45-50 minute episodes, it would be different. I think the story mostly holds up, except for one glaring point that my older more cynical brain was unwilling to gloss over. The aliens who stole the Regeneration Assistance Device of Rassilon were genetically mutated by their misuse of the device and yet somehow manage to infect Nyssa and Tegan so that they are unable to leave the ship because crossing the time line causes them the same problems as the aliens. which is totally not how cellular/genetic mutations work. While the Doctor does say that the genetic mutation must have had a viral component, (a) this makes no sense and (b) the virus didn't seem to affect the Doctor or the Brigadier. So I guess it was a virus that only attacked attractive twenty-something women. I can sort of explain away the Doctor not being affected because of the whole Time Lord thing. And I guess you could argue that the Brigadier wasn't affected because the 1983 Brigadier had already done the thing he was about to do that caused Old School Who fans to scream "Blinovich Limitation Effect" during a certain scene in the recent Christmas Carol story, which meant that he'd already been blasted with the energy that removed the virus from Nyssa and Tegan and caused the aliens to stop mutating and die already, but that's a stretch and it took me a while to come up with that explanation and it bugs me. I was just more accepting and willing to overlook the giant leaps of illogic when I was in high school and college.