sir_guinglain

In which I resurface to write about Legend of the Sea Devils.

The second part of a still unfinished Doctor Who fiction about a stranded Cyberman (whom we might know) being restored to humanity on Karn with the help of a sister who once worked in a match factory in nineteenth-century northern England.

Title: The Brother of Karn
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: 13+
Pairings: None
Concepts and Characters: Sisterhood of Karn, Cybermen, UNIT, the Master/Missy
Link: https://oxforddoctorwho-tidesoftime.blog/2021/12/13/the-brother-of-karn/

Some remarks by me on last week's episode, before its context is changed by Survivors of the Flux later today:

I’m not able to offer reviews of every episode in this current series of Doctor Who, but Flux Chapter Four: Village of the Angels captivated with its grim sense of inevitability, its subversion of the Doctor’s control of events, and its group of well-defined lead characters. Remarks follow on some aspects of an episode I found highly successful and the strongest chapter, so far, of Flux. I’ve neglected the Bel-Vinder arc even though it might have something thematic to say about family which complements the theme of the main episode plot.

Read more at The Event Library.

So, Bad Wolf Productions will be taking over Doctor Who once Chris Chibnall and Jodie Whittaker leave... and not only does this mean the return of Julie Gardner and Jane Tranter in some executive capacity, but the beadline news is that Russell T Davies is returning as Doctor Who showrunner. This part of the news was completely unexpected to me, though I had wondered whether Bad Wolf might take over Who following the completion of His Dark Materials, series three of which is now in production.

Jackie Lane has died aged seventy-nine. She played Dodo Chaplet, travelling companion to William Hartnell's Doctor in Doctor Who, between Bell of Doom, the fourth and final part of the story the scripts and Doctor Who Magazine call The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve but which BBC Studios call The Massacre (26 February 1966) and The War Machines episode 2 (2 July 1966). Her character was created by a producer and story editor - John Wiles and Donald Tosh - who were exiting Doctor Who after their plans for the series were frustrated by the established character of the programme and the expectations of their managers. Dodo was written out as soon as was practical, unceremoniously being dropped by the new producer and story editor - Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis - less than half-way through The War Machines after Dodo was taken over by the supercomputer WOTAN and deprogrammed by the Doctor. Despite ever-shifting ideas about who Dodo was and how she should behave, Jackie Lane invested Dodo with humour, morality and bravery, and while she had little public interaction with Doctor Who fandom, only I think making one convention appearance, her contribution to the programme gained respect over the years as her episodes were released on video, DVD and audio. She was a point of brightness in a difficult time for the programme. Later in her career she was Tom Baker's voice agent, managing his successful career in advertising voiceovers.

Did I like Dodo? It's difficult to say, because I've only known the character as a mystery to be pieced together, not properly introduced in the second edition of The Making of Doctor Who, the first place I met her. Jackie Lane's biography was confused too, as nwhyte explored many years ago now. The character is overshadowed by the drama behind the scenes, at least for me. Yet she successfully renews the Doctor's compassion, damaged by the experience of The Daleks' Master Plan and exposed by his apparent indifference to the fate of the Huguenots of Paris in The Massacre, and renewed the 'space waif' granddaughter model of companion while reaching out to the contemporary model which would be better-realised later in 1966 in Anneke Wills's Polly. Jackie Lane made Dodo enthusiastic and innocent and helped bring back a sense of joy to the series. I wish we could see all her episodes, but we have some record of all her Doctor Who performances and that is very rare for mid-1960s BBC television popular drama.

Back at the end of May, the locked down and locked out Oxford (University) Doctor Who Society published a double issue, 45&46, of our fanzine, The Tides of Time. We didn't expect printing it would be possible, so it was released online as a pdf. With matters being a bit more flexible in the present state of Covid-19 affairs in England, we have now been able to print the issue, with corrections from the pdf, and copies can be ordered on eBay from the page linked below. This is the first issue to be perfect bound, with 172 colour pages including a card cover.

Tides of Time 45&46 on eBay

Thoughts over here on the first issue of Lytton, the limited comic series about the mercenary created by Eric Saward for Doctor Who in the mid-1980s, written by Saward himself and drawn by Barry Renshaw, published by Manchester-based Cutaway Comics.

( Picture as it appeared at The Event Library, where this post first was made )

My review of The Timeless Children, like that of Ascension of the Cybermen, appears at Space-Time Telegraph, the blog which is the successor of its writer-editor John Connors's fanzines, which included Top, Faze and This Way Up. I wrote it having only seen the story once and much of my initial enthusiasm was qualified by other people's reservations. Having rewatched some of the episode since, I was reminded of the focused performances throughout and minimizing of languor. Jodie Whittaker's portrayal of the Doctor's fury and disgust at the Master was electrical, combined with eye-rolling expressions of frustration at just how tedious her old friend can be.

I wrote in the review that there had been no indication in Ascension of the Cybermen that the Doctor was periodically experiencing chapters in the saga of Brendan the Irish policeman - 'Gallykissangel', as I've called it, the term having been suggested by Paul Dumont. Ian Bayley has pointed out that there are odd lines of dialogue in Ascension which might suggest that the Doctor is being surprised by new Brendan scenes, but if so I still find them very understated.

As for the review itself:

So it was about authorship after all. Ascension of the Cybermen turns out to have been undermined throughout by a streaming hacker who couldn’t resist introducing it himself at the end and boasting of his reinterpretation of the ensuing acts, of which the Doctor was both audience and unwitting star. The Timeless Children was visually engaging television and I was surprised by some of the resolution it presented, if only because I was expecting something more complicated. Performances were very strong, and as with Ascension of the Cybermen, I felt an energy in the production which I’ve rarely experienced in the Chibnall era. There were a few moments when it seemed The Timeless Children did not marry so well with Ascension of the Cybermen, however, and in hindsight the episode left lingering doubts about the wisdom of the decisions therein.

Read more...

(Apologies for the large spaces between paragraphs, but this must be what happens when you copy across another site's code.)

Finally, a few minutes before Praxeus started, I completed my write-up of Fugitive of the Judoon for the Doctor Who News Page.

I undertook the review of the second part of Spyfall for the Doctor Who News Page even though time was much more limited this week. The changes in the way I recalled the episode over the few days in which I wrote it are probably apparent! I enjoyed it, but I had a few concerns about some crucial moments.

Doctor Who 12.2 - Spyfall: Part Two, at Doctor Who News Reviews