I think that Nyssa is meant to be 15 or 16 in Keeper. Sarah Sutton was almost 19 when she started on Doctor Who and aged physically quite a bit over the next two and a bit years on the show.
Last Classic Who Story you watched
- Thread starter Pindar
- Start date
The script editor has to provide the raw material for the new Doctor to work with; if they're not keen on the casting they can't do that well.
Saward should have quit when Colin was cast, so his replacement could be someone who was keen on Colin's potential. Equally, JN-T should have involved Saward earlier: the script editor was involved in casting the first four Doctors (even though their suggestions were sometimes ignored, or they moved on soon after). Cartmel sat in on cssting for 7, and even though he'd have preferred Ken Campbell to Sylv, he then took Sylvester's Doctor in that direction.
96 onwards is a different set up of course.
Logopolis
1) They ought to bring back Nyssa and have her open a can of whoopass on the Master.
2) I still don't know how the Master thinks he's going to call the whole universe with a dictaphone and a radio telescope.
3) Nyssa is covered in lipstick, eyeshadow and blush in this story. To borrow my thought about Miss Jackson from The Hand of Fear, does Nyssa moonlight as a circus clown?
4) This wasn't the best-written or best-produced story.
1) They ought to bring back Nyssa and have her open a can of whoopass on the Master.
2) I still don't know how the Master thinks he's going to call the whole universe with a dictaphone and a radio telescope.
3) Nyssa is covered in lipstick, eyeshadow and blush in this story. To borrow my thought about Miss Jackson from The Hand of Fear, does Nyssa moonlight as a circus clown?
4) This wasn't the best-written or best-produced story.
The Third Doctor once built a time flow analogue out of stuff from a kitchen drawer and a cup of tea. Time Lords are clever.
I liked this one and "Castrovalva." They weren't perfect, but they had very clever and novel science-fiction ideas. Bidmead was clearly influenced by one of my favorite nonfiction books, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid. A lot of those two serials' technical and philosophical ideas are similar to ones in that book, and "Castrovalva" is the name of an M.C. Escher piece that's reproduced in the book.
I prefer Logopolis over Castrovalva, considerably. But I do find both lacklustre, and the former in the way it closes down on the on-screen longest-running Doctor ever (and ever since). I prefer the original idea of having Leela appear instead of Nyssa or Tegan (even if I really like Nyssa otherwise).
"Logopolis" does have some great ideas, though. It's the first time we got a close look at how the chameleon circuit is supposed to work, and the idea of materializing around a real police box to get the measurements right was nicely meta -- and it got even more recursive with the Doctor's and Master's TARDISes materialized around each other. (And another bit of recursion is that the date on which the first episode was stated to take place was actually the day it aired. That's a pretty common TV practice these days, but I think it was fairly novel then.) And it foreshadows "Flatline" in having a chameleon circuit problem shrink the TARDIS exterior and trap the Doctor inside. It's also notable as the debut of the cloister bell, the TARDIS "red alert" signal that's been greatly overused in the modern series. The idea of the Watcher, the Doctor's next incarnation folding back on his current one, is also an intriguing bit of recursion, though it was clumsy in execution and not very well explained.
It's very conceptually literate, too. "Logopolis" means "City of the Word," although the Greek concept of Logos was far more than that -- it was essentially the idea that the expression of an idea and the idea itself are one and the same. You can see this in the Biblical usage of Logos, "In the beginning was the Word... and the Word became flesh." In other words, the expression of the idea of the universe, the Logos, was what made the universe real. So it's a very fitting name for the city of mathematicians whose spoken calculations help shape reality and stave off the heat death of the universe.
It's very conceptually literate, too. "Logopolis" means "City of the Word," although the Greek concept of Logos was far more than that -- it was essentially the idea that the expression of an idea and the idea itself are one and the same. You can see this in the Biblical usage of Logos, "In the beginning was the Word... and the Word became flesh." In other words, the expression of the idea of the universe, the Logos, was what made the universe real. So it's a very fitting name for the city of mathematicians whose spoken calculations help shape reality and stave off the heat death of the universe.
Yeah, I love the vision and scope of its idea (and as a Greek, I got the reference straight away). And I also love how it ties that season together, and even feels alot like NuWho in how extraodinarily silly the finales can get. But I felt, given this was the Fourth's exit, it needed some kind of... emotion. And my biggest beef with Bidmead's writing is that it feels like a cliched academy dissertation - cold, austere, suggestive of emotion but never capable of it. That, and the rather random characterization that goes around the episodes.
Hmm, I can see that, I guess. But I liked it because it was intellectual. Emotion is easy to find in television, but intelligence and scientific literacy are far more rare.
There's no pedigree that excludes emotion and intellect. To say that one is exclusive of the other is antiquated nonsense. Which, I'm sure Bidmead would disagree with. And thats coldly present in Castrovalva, an overtly complicated plot that fails to immerse into the advetures because of its distant interest in the characters and thus provides with an empty experience that never really delves into this new Doctor in the way all the previous did, and started a sad trend of lacklustre post-regeneration stories that thankfully ended with the reboot in '05.
So, in short, I appreciate Logopolis in terms of scale, vision and its ability to bring the various plot points of season 18 into sharp focus, making it the most NuWho-esque season of OldWho in that manner. But I definitely don't like Castrovalva, which feels exactly like it is - a hurried mess.
Then it's a good thing that's absolutely not what I said. Of course I know that intellect and emotion go together. The problem is that, in television, they often don't go together as much as I wish they would. Emotion without intellect is all too common, so when a story is intellectual at all, regardless of its emotional content, that's a refreshing change. As I said (and you seem to have missed), I can understand your dissatisfaction at the lack of emotion. I'm not disputing that at all. I'm just saying that the intriguing ideas that the two serials touched on helped make them interesting enough that it compensated for their flaws somewhat. And the ideas it explored were from one of my favorite books. Obviously Godel, Escher, Bach is a far richer and more effective exploration of those ideas and many others (and certainly not lacking in emotion), but being reminded of a book I enjoyed so much made me feel a positive emotion toward the Bidmead serials. And maybe, for me, that helped make up for the lack of emotion within the serials.
I mean, "Castrovalva" is definitely flawed, but, like its immediate predecessor, it has a number of interesting and imaginative ideas, both Doctor Who-specific and more generally. Just as "Logopolis" got analytical about the TARDIS and the chameleon circuit, "Castrovalva" got analytical about regeneration and its aftereffects. The idea that a regeneration was unstable and could potentially fail was interesting, and the idea that a TARDIS included a Zero Room to help deal with post-regenerative recovery was logical. (It sort of reflects what the Second Doctor said in his debut, that the renewal process was "part of the TARDIS." Most of the Doctor's regenerations have happened in or right next to the TARDIS, or under Gallifreyan technological or mystical supervision, and it's interesting that the only two that didn't -- Four to Five and Seven to Eight -- were among the Doctor's most problematical regenerations.) And I like the idea of Castrovalva as an Escher lithograph brought to life, a topological maze folding back on itself, although the execution left something to be desired.
Logopolis is better than Castrovalva but The Keeper of Traken is better than either of them.
I think Denis Carey was better in Shada. The scene where the Melkur is attacking the old Keeper is somewhat let down by Carey writhing about as if he is in sexual ecstasy rather than physical pain.
This only applies to the VHS generation, but, when you were children did your parents get you out of the way by renting a Doctor Who VHS tape? I and some other kids once had to watch Day of the Daleks so we wouldn't be in peoples' hair when Mum and Dad had a meeting of their activist group. Same thing happened at a party when my parents couldn't get a babysitter - they stopped off on the way and randomly grabbed The Ark in Space VHS so we wouldn't be in the guest's hair..
The Romans - always a good laugh.
Since there's no 2016 season, I'm going to have a 13 story run on Saturday nights, which started with that one. The theme is SCA Who. Stories in which one or more characters (other than the Doctor or companions if possible) are creative types, anachronistic, or maybe re-enacting if it comes to it. So, The Romans has the running gags about the fridge, and Nero and the Doctor's musicality (or lack thereof).
Next up will be The Mind Robber...
Since there's no 2016 season, I'm going to have a 13 story run on Saturday nights, which started with that one. The theme is SCA Who. Stories in which one or more characters (other than the Doctor or companions if possible) are creative types, anachronistic, or maybe re-enacting if it comes to it. So, The Romans has the running gags about the fridge, and Nero and the Doctor's musicality (or lack thereof).
Next up will be The Mind Robber...
For the most part, although to modern eyes it's hard to get past the fact that Nero was basically trying to rape Barbara. I know that kind of "girl-chasing" scene was basic to the farce and comedy of earlier eras (see also Harpo Marx in his early films, although the end of Animal Crackers showed that his actions when he finally caught a girl were entirely innocuous), but when it's an emperor chasing after a slave woman, it has some even more unpleasant implications.
But then, "The Romans" also treats multiple murders and the burning of an entire city as a subject for comedy, so it's pretty dark humor all around, unusually so for Doctor Who. I remember the DVD commentary mentioning the delicate balance they had to strike in order to avoid being too macabre.
One thing that really struck me about "The Rescue" and "The Romans" is that the Doctor actually got into physical fights with bad guys -- and won! We think of Hartnell's Doctor as so frail, but that was more the actor than the character. Thanks to careful fight choreography, they were able to make it look like the Doctor could really kick ass even in his doddering, elderly form. (Much the same as the illusion of tiny Zoe outwrestling the massive Karkus in "The Mind Robber," though that choreography was less deftly executed.) And it resolves a longstanding paradox for me, because I always used to wonder when the Doctor could've learned the Venusian aikido that he suddenly manifested in his third incarnation, given that his previous two had been much less physical. Now I realize that his first incarnation was a scrappier sort than I thought, so he could easily have picked up the aikido sometime before his travels with Ian and Barbara. (Although I think there's a Missing Adventures novel that inserts a Venusian adventure into the early First Doctor era somewhere, despite the serials tending to transition directly into each other with no room for intermediate stories.)
Venusian Lullaby has the original TARDIS crew visit Venus, and covers assorted things from the series that mention Venusians. And, of course, the Doctor having a fight in The Romans is what convinced me that a kung fu epic would work with him, if handled carefully. (The Eleventh Tiger)
Ah, yes, that was the title. And apparently -- I looked it up -- it goes between "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" and "The Rescue," which is one of the only places in the Hartnell era where there's a discontinuity between serials, allowing for unseen adventures to take place. Also, if he learns Venusian aikido then, it would explain why he's suddenly got such a talent for physical combat in the next two serials.
Sounds interesting.
Similar threads
