THE PLOT
With his regeneration settled, the Doctor attempts to return Tegan to Heathrow airport, to begin her air stewardess job. When they materialize, however, they are not at their destination. They find themselves on a massive spaceship, ruled over by three amphibian aliens: the imposing Monarch (Stratford Johns), and his associates, Enlightenment (Annie Lambert) and Persuasion (Paul Shelley).
The ship is home to representatives of various ancient human cultures: Greek scholars, Chinese warlords, Mayans, and Australian aborigines. They appear to have been granted eternal life by Monarch. The aliens insist that their plans for Earth are entirely benign. But something about Monarch rouses the Doctor's instincts...
CHARACTERS
The Doctor: The first-produced of Peter Davison's stories, and there are bits and pieces where his performance feels less settled and confident than in Castrovalva. Davison's voice sometimes gets a touch too high, and his interactions with his co-stars in the opening TARDIS scene feel a touch self-conscious.
Despite a few weak spots, though, his performance still mostly ranges from solid to excellent. I love the scene in which he dresses down Adric. It feels like a Tom Baker moment, but Davison sells it in a different way. He keeps his voice soft despite the sharpness of his tone, and gives a pleasant smile for the spectators the whole while. He is particularly on-form when playing opposite Stratford Johns. You can see his Doctor constantly thinking, putting on a pleasant face while probing for answers and weaknesses.
Tegan: As the first-produced Davison story, this is also the first time Janet Fielding has played Tegan since Logopolis. This explains why she is so much worse here than she was in Castrovalva. She does show good screen rapport with Peter Davison in their scenes together in the middle of the serial. But she's also back to overplaying her character's more strident qualities. Finally, while it's somewhat refreshing to have a traveling companion panic, I'm afraid I found some of her "breakdown" acting in Part Three to be uninentionally comical.
The character does get a few interesting beats. A notable one comes early on. When the Doctor decides all of them should leave the TARDIS, he instantly gives the key to Tegan. Though he has known both Adric and Nyssa longer, he seems to have an implicit trust that Tegan can take over as leader if something happens to him. There is also the unintentionally ludicrous moment in which Tegan converses with an Australian aborigine, as if it's normal for all white Australians to speak all aboriginal languages. Admittedly, Terence Dudley probably thought exactly that... but a trip to the library, or a brief interview with a few Australians living in the UK, would probably have disabused him of that idea, if he had taken the time to bother.
Adric: The Most Hated Companion in Who History (TM) has been quite tolerable up to now. It is only with this story that Adric starts to become truly irritating. He's dreadful in the early TARDIS sequences, massively obnoxious to both Tegan and Nyssa. The script does him no favors, but Waterhouse could have given these scenes a light touch. Instead, he cranks up the bombast, making Adric as unlikable as humanly possible. He becomes tolerable again around the middle of the story... but once the script requires him to side with Monarch over the Doctor, Waterhouse's performance plummets yet again, making both character and actor so poor that I more than half-wondered why the Doctor actually let him back into the TARDIS at the end.
Nyssa: She gets quite a lot of material during the second episode, when she and Adric are separated from the Doctor. She takes the lead almost immediately, and puts a lot of pieces together in her observations of the ship. This portion of the serial also sees Matthew Waterhouse's best performance, showing yet again that he and Sarah Sutton play a lot better when just acting opposite each other than when all four regulars are together in a scene.
Monarch: Stratford Johns is Monarch, the Ubankan leader who plans to colonize Earth. The episode is very gradual in doling out information about Monarch and his associates. The first three episodes put a consistently pleasant face on him. He rarely raises his voice, even when reprimanding Enlightenment for "blasphemy." He is instantly intrigued by the Doctor. For most of the serial, he plays the good host, giving the Doctor apparently free (though carefully controlled) run of the ship while keeping him under watch. He even hopes that the Doctor might make a valuable ally. This provides a rare serial in which the conflict is more intellectual than physical. The Doctor and Monarch are both trying to find out exactly who the other man is, and their tools are similar: watching, listening, studying what they see. Johns has considerable presence, and gives a shrewd performance. His associates, Enlightenment and Persuasion, are enjoyably sinister - and actually seem more alien and mysterious once they adopt human guise.
THOUGHTS
Terence Dudley is far from my favorite Who writer. His stories are plagued by generic plotting, lazy transitions, and weak endings. However, despite Dudley and despite this serial's own reputation as a dud, I really rather enjoy Four to Doomsday. It's my favorite Terence Dudley script by far, and the only one of his scripts in which he seems to be really trying to create an intriguing science fiction story, rather than deciding that, "It's just Doctor Who."
Falling in between the two script editors (the credited script editor is interim editor Antony Root), this still carries much of the feel of Bidmead's Who. There's an attempt at hard science fiction, with interstellar travel portrayed as a lengthy process. The dialogue carries a hint of the lyrical in places, with characters who go by names such as "Enlightenment" and "Persuasion," and with references to "the flesh time." Mix in representatives of long-dead cultures putting on pageants, and there is a tangible atmosphere of both the hard science fiction Bidmead claimed to be going for and the more lyrical science fantasy that he actually achieved. It remains a mix that I specifically respond to, which is likely a large part of the reason that I enjoy this serial so much more than "Monolithic Fandom" has decreed appropriate.
This is one of the few Terence Dudley scripts in which his status as a respected veteran television writer shows. The less-seasoned Who writers of every era have good scripts and bad scripts, but often have difficulty in juggling multiple regulars. With three companions, then, it is rather impressive that Dudley manages to give something substantial to each character. He even maintains a consistency of characterization. Tegan is the heart, responding emotionally to everything she sees. Nyssa is the mind, responding in an analytical fashion to each new discovery within the ship. Adric is misguided youthful idealism, taking every perceived slight far too personally and being too easily influenced by Monarch. Each character is written convincingly within those parameters, and no one is sidelined.
One area in which JNT definitely raised the bar for Who during his early years was in production values. All of the stories I have reviewed in this sequence have enjoyed strong productions, and Four to Doomsday is no exception. The ship model may look a bit creaky by modern standards, but was well above-average by the standards of its day. The interiors still look good, even today. There are a lot of raised platforms and staircases, which keep the characters' movements three-dimensional. Lighting is varied from one area of the ship to another, which helps to keep this as one of the series' more visually interesting stories. Everything is held together by a visually consistent design, almost certainly one of the series' best spaceship interiors. Just in terms of design imagination, I think the ship interiors here top many of those of the new series!
The story has earned a repuation as one of Davison's weaker efforts. An undeserved reputation, in my opinion, but it's fair to say that there are weaknesses. The first two episodes are mostly excellent, with a gradual but building sense of unease. But the story doesn't quite sustain four episodes, and the threads start to show in the second half.
Adric becoming an unswering convert to Monarch is one issue. A few minutes' conversation at the start of Part Three, and suddenly Adric is entirely convinced of Monarch's goodness, even after Persuasion orders the Doctor's death right in front of the boy. If Adric's conversion had been more gradual, with him having a lot of screen time with Monarch in Parts Two and Three, then it might work. As it stands, we are meant to accept Adric being willing to side against his friends with a silver-tongued alien after a single, five-minute conversation!
Still, the story keeps rolling along pretty well through Episode Three, and most of Episode Four. I didn't even object to the spacewalk scene. The bit with the cricket ball may have play out a bit silly, but it doesn't completely shatter my suspension of disbelief.
It all falls apart at the very end, though. Monarch growls, "I, too, am not without agility," and then proceeds to do one very stupid thing after another, while the Doctor and his companions run about for a bit. It's as if Terence Dudley realized that he had less than half an episode left, and simply rushed out an ending, regardless of whether that ending really suited the story that had preceded it or not.
Despite these flaws, I genuinely enjoyed Four to Doomsday. The weak ending pulls it down a bit, but not so much as to forget the story's virtues: A very strong production, uniformly good guest performances, a script that doesn't forget any of the four regulars, and some clever science fiction concepts. On the whole, much better than its reputation would indicate.
My Rating: 7/10.
Previous Story: Castrovalva
Next Story: Kinda
Search Amazon.com for Doctor Who
Review Index
No comments:
Post a Comment