Teeth and Curls: When the Doctor sees the Kraals emerging
from their craft he cries ‘oh my prophetic soul!’ which kind of mirrors my
shock when I heard they were to make a return appearance. Its almost an
indictment of the character that he is locked up for the first 20 minutes of
his own season finale and we don’t get to spend any time with him! However
there’s a lovely, lovely moment where the Doctor and Leela laugh
together as they ride a horse from Oseidon to Earth and seem to be basking in
each others company! If they can maintain that sort of chemistry for the second
year we will be in great shape. The Doctor says to the Master ‘is that a staser
you’ve got in your left hand…’ as if he is going to end the sentence ‘or are
you just pleased to see me?’ but can’t quite bear to go through with it…
Noble Savage: Without a doubt the finest innovation this
year has been to be able to spend more time with the superb Louise Jameson as
Leela. With one knockout performance after another and a general feeling that
she has never been away from the role, it is for Jameson’s inclusion alone that
I greeted the news of a third series of 4th Doctor adventures. She’s
one of the best actresses the show has ever employed and she has made some the
less enchanting tales this season more bearable. With bloodlust in her eyes,
Leela is looking forward to slitting the throats of the Kraals! She’s delighted
when she realises that the androids break like mortal men! As the Master tries
to hypnotise Leela she slaps him around the face! Leela gets to keep the horse
that she has fallen in love with at the end which was a lovely touch.
Scabby One: Thank goodness that the Master from the previous
adventure turns out to be a android duplicate! I cheered during that scene
because I genuinely thought that this was a real attempt to turn him into a
Graham Williams era style camp villain here and it was not a look that suited
him at all well. Its worth remembering that all the best Williams bad guys had
a sense of the vicious about them (Scarlioni, the Rutan, the Collector, the
Graff Vynda K, Grendel) whilst they were making us laugh ourselves silly. You
could believe in them even when they were blatantly ridiculous whereas the
Master here exhibits little more than camp villainy and its pretty limp
villainy at that (his ultimate plan is guessable to anybody who has spent a
little time with the character over the years). The duplicate Master gets lines
like ‘I would swear revenge on you but your own incompetence will inevitably
lead to your own destruction!’ which sink like a ship packed full of dwarf star
alloy because he is literally talking like he knows he’s the moustache
twirling villain rather than simply embodying the role. There’s a difference
between being a good character who does villainous things and playing up to the
role of a villain (with a knowing wink at the audience) but the line that
separates these two is completely blurred here. A knowingly post modern villain
can be fun but its cack handed here with outrageously over the top dialogue.
Mind you Leela calls him ‘charcoal face’ which is great fun! Its clear that the
Master is playing the Kraals for a fool early on and he plays up his betrayal
by his allies in the campest way possible! He’s undermined even more when he is
nervously clinging on to Leela on the back of a horse! ‘I shall achieve
apotheosis!’ – we had to have a line of that nature sooner or later! In a crazy
metaphor for his own ineptitude the Master is brought down by a copy of
himself. Ultimately his greatest weakness is his over ambition and by
complicating his plan with the duplicates to the nth degree is his downfall.
Standout Performance: Dan Starkey deserves some kind of
award for so accurately mimicking Roy Skelton’s zippy-like voice for the
Kraals.
Sparkling Dialogue: ‘There’s a face only a mother could
love!’
‘I refuse to be defeated by myself!’
Great Ideas: The Doctor explains that the Kraals look so
hideous because they have been exposed to radiation on their homeworld for over
two centuries. The Doctor and the Master trying to out-android duplicate each
other was great fun (‘if I know me I probably have something very clever up my
sleeve!’). The Master hunted down the worm in order to harness ZO radiation so
he can regenerate himself. I guess this is where his obsession with prolonging
his life really begins. By detonating Z radiation on Oseidon which is consumed
in O radiation he can bathe himself in the two and become practically immortal.
Electricity pylons came to life and started stalking the countryside? Hahaha!
Couldn’t we have listened to that instead? Spindleton is an absolute nutter who
wants to replace the entire human race with androids so he can direct the
planet to his design which he thinks has become a bit shabby and unBritish.
It’s a fruitloop dream and barely worth commenting on…but its better than the
Master’s car battery plan so lets be thankful it was mentioned!
Audio Landscape: Andy Hardwick and director Ken Bentley
deserve credit for so accurately bringing all the various sound effects from
The Android Invasion to life in The Oseidon Adventure. However there comes a
point where this sort of thing is done to death and you start to wish that
instead of trying to play fanboys like a harpsichord by making them coo when
they recognise old sound effects you start to invent some new ones. Real
effort has gone into recreating other peoples work from the past and somehow
after the same thing happening with The Ark in Space, The Brain of Morbius,
Terror of the Zygons, The Seeds of Doom, etc in the 8th Doctor
Adventures you start to think that perhaps the range has run out of steam
before it has even gotten going. What’s next? Return to the Planet of Evil?
Sutekh’s revenge? By churning out so much nostalgia Big Finish is falling into
the trap of getting lost in the past rather than being at the forefront of new,
original, innovative audio drama. The androids marching, the finger weapons,
Gallifreyan staser, helicopters, horse braying, the noise as the androids
change, hum of the Kraal spaceship, scientific equipment buzzing and humming,
blasting through the wormhole, the blast surface of the Kraal home planet, the
Kraal screaming doors, the shrieking Kraal bomb detonating, birdsong.
Isn’t it Odd: The Kraals? I’m not sure if their
return appearance was to genuinely re-invent them as a classier race of villains,
to take the piss out of them or just to use any old monster to finish off the
season on. They don’t make much of an impact in any of these ways. There has
been an awful lot of continuity shoehorned into this series of adventures
(after all old monsters equals more sales) but its actually quite
unrepresentative of the era. Leela featured in nine stories in total and only
one of those saw fit to bring back an old monster and that was in her last two
episodes! To have included Nerva and the Wirrn, the Daleks, the Master and the
Kraals strikes me as playing it safe a little this year and using these fan
pleasing elements as a buffer to lure fans in to the first season. The Kraals
are probably the most ridiculous example yet and were never the going to take
the title of ‘greatest villains’ (is there anybody out there whose favourite
bad guys are the Kraals? I hope so!) and to have them and the Master vying for
attention has the adverse effect of diminishing both of them. It’s the two
stories that have been entirely original – The Renaissance Man and The Wrath of
the Iceni – that I have enjoyed the most this year. Rather than churning out
generic Doctor Who run-arounds these were genuinely inventive, surprising
adventures. I personally think that they should be the blueprint for the second
4th Doctor/Leela season. I remember Nick Briggs saying once that
every villain needs a second outing…well he’s certainly gone out of his way to
prove it between this range and the 8th Doctor one! There are very
few stories left to plunder now…perhaps its time to start conjuring up some
original new monsters. Like Big Finish used to do. The scenes between
the Marshall, the Master and the Spindleton are fun but they hold no weight to
them whatsoever – there’s no drama in this tale in the slightest because all
the characters are so one dimensional and clichéd. If these three had managed
to take over the Earth it would be embarrassing…that’s how lame they
are! Unbelievably they manage to find out what the real Master is up to be
checking the recycle bin on the Kraals computer! The Master has been using the
Kraals to invade the Earth in order to steal an old car (sorry, TARDIS)
battery that the Doctor left behind during his exile? Are you fecking kidding
me that that is what this has all been about? Oh my sweet giddy aunt.
They don’t make them like they used to. I nearly spat my coffee over my shirt
when this plot revelation was revealed. A story could not hang on a more
vacuous MacGuffin!
Result: Better than the first half but only marginally. When
I said that the first episode of The Trail of the White Worm was a pointless
run-around I didn’t realise they were going to do the whole thing all over
again in The Oseidon Adventure! The Doctor even admits so at the cliffhanger!
That’s half of this 90 minute adventure that could be happily chopped!
Production wise this is beautifully done with plenty of kisses to the past (the
sound effects from The Android Invasion are deployed here to masterful effect)
and a general sense of pace and excitement. In five minute segments this is witty and silly and fun but played out
over an hour and a half you have is a hollow narrative being stuffed to the
brim with fluff. Android duplicates, bombs, radioactive surfaces, picturesque
villages, plans for immortality, UNIT …there is nothing original to any of this. As an exercise in nostalgia this is adequate listening
(although the company have delivered far better nostalgic hits in the past) but
as a piece of storytelling it is astonishingly flaccid. Something that could be
said for much of this series I’m afraid. Tom Baker barely registers but Louise
Jameson is on top form as ever and even though the script complicates his role
ridiculously Geoffrey Beevers manages to hold onto his dignity and deliver his
usual sterling work. Let’s have a better story for him next time though. Others
may have gotten a lot more from this adventure (and series) but superficial
nostalgia for its own sake is not really for me: 5/10
1 comment:
It's never a good sign when at the beginning of the fourth part of a four parter, the Doctor still doesn't know what the hell is going on. What chance does that leave the rest of us? The whole thing's a shambles, but at least it's often an amusing one. Spindleton's demands did have me cracking up, and the Leela/Fake Master teamup was fun. In the end though it was just a bunch of things that happened.
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