3.03 The Myth Makers

[whatinthewho]

First Doctor with Steven and Vicki
Follows on from Season One, Season Two, Galaxy Four and Mission to the Unknown

Comments

[blogger_who]

I want to love the ending of this story. It's so sweet. It's just that...I can't imagine Vicki being happy in Troy. Once she learned about the local hygienic practices or lack thereof and the lack of technology I'd imagine that she'd regret her decision immediately. It just doesn't seem in character.

Otherwise I love it. What struck me during my latest review is that solo guitar music throughout as the Troilus and Cressida love theme. It's such a fun story and so well put together that it's a shame that it had to write out Vicki too.

[llywela13]

Replying in the wrong account again - sorry

[blogger_who]

Oh, I had forgotten that I also wanted to comment on the novelization. That was my first exposure to this story as well and it was really neat to have Homer as the narrator. Most scholars believe that he wrote The Iliad and Odyssey well after the actual Trojan War but there's so much ambiguity in what we know about that period that it's just about possible that he could have embellished events that he'd actually seen. It's to bad that that couldn't have been worked into the TV serial. I seem to recall reading that Cotton had had the idea but Donald Tosh didn't like it so it was removed, but it would have been really different without the first person narration element.

[llywela13]

:D I'm a historian by training. Homer, if he existed, lived several centuries after the period in which the Trojan War, or some variation thereof, is currently believed to have taken place. Archaeology places it in the 13th century BC, around the decline of the Mycaenean and Hittite empires (Hisarlik, the site believed to have been Homer's Troy, is in Western Anatolia and was most likely a client state of the Hittites). The epic poem that has come down through history as the Iliad would have been composed around 5 centuries later, preserving fragments of a much older oral history, and probably not transferred to written text until much later again. It definitely wasn't composed at the time the supposed events took place - only a few kernels of what may be true historical memory are preserved in the text, eroded and vastly distorted by time, distance, nostalgia for a bygone age, and various other biases.

Ahem. Historian's hat off again! Sorry, I just finished reading up on the latest historiography of the subject (Michael Wood's In