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After the intelligent and sensitively-written (if not performed - see Lynda Baron) Enlightenment, the 1983 season of Doctor Who concluded (prematurely) with The King's Demons. After watching it this evening with DSoc, I wondered how it could have reached the screen. Tegan, after being written sympathetically in Enlightenment, degenerates into a one-note whining character over whose ignorance the Doctor can gloat, though Peter Davison does his best to depart from this reading of the script, and Janet Fielding is as spirited as she can be with such poor material. It's long been a weakness of this story that Turlough is marginalised early on, and serves no purpose other than to act as the eyes of the viewer in the dungeon, which makes him redundant as we have the camera to see what is going on. His farewell to the Master "Goodbye, whoever you are!" sums up the failure of the script to involve him in the action.
The supporting characters' motivations flip-flop all over the place, and the dialogue competes for floridity with that in the John Prebble episodes of The Borgias. The location filming is well-managed, though, and the interior sets good, though the medieval costumes look as if they were assembled from multi-period stock - still, better than latterday Robin Hood.
I'm probably being unjustly negative and will be reminded of the story's good points in the comments. I just found myself wondering what script editor Eric Saward was doing during this story, as it seems to belong to a different series altogether than its predecessor and successor (The Five Doctors) beyond the changes of setting and tone that one expects from Doctor Who.
The supporting characters' motivations flip-flop all over the place, and the dialogue competes for floridity with that in the John Prebble episodes of The Borgias. The location filming is well-managed, though, and the interior sets good, though the medieval costumes look as if they were assembled from multi-period stock - still, better than latterday Robin Hood.
I'm probably being unjustly negative and will be reminded of the story's good points in the comments. I just found myself wondering what script editor Eric Saward was doing during this story, as it seems to belong to a different series altogether than its predecessor and successor (The Five Doctors) beyond the changes of setting and tone that one expects from Doctor Who.
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