Doctor Who Season 6

SPOILERS TOTAL. You've been warned.

044: The Dominators

(First watched 2024-03-15, -17, -19, -20, -22) Well, no mention of the Wheel, so abducting Zoe it is I guess. The people on this planet sure seem to very easily believe what the Doctor says. They say they're easily willing to accept facts placed before them, but they don't seem to consider many alternatives first. Some more nice 1960s effects with the weapon the Quarks use on people.

I like how the Dominators basically stop paying attention to the Doctor because he managed to convince them he was part of a stupider species on the planet.

I like Jamie, man. Stuck without any technology and just falling back on his 18th century tactics... smash a robot with a boulder! And the Doctor is immediately like "Yep, only one person on the island crazy enough to be doing that!" I do wonder if there was any pushback at the time to him talking about things like killing redcoats?

Last episode had some weird stuff. Grenades made from the contents of a first aid kit?

Copying the last lines from a transcript. Love Troughton's silliness, and he and Frazer Hines really play off of each other well, so it's no surprise they kept them together so long.

JAMIE: Doctor, come on, will ye? The whole place is going to blow up.
DOCTOR: Oh, it's quite all right, Jamie. The planet is quite safe. There's just going to be a localised volcanic eruption. It'll only affect the island.
JAMIE: Maybe so, but we happen to be on the island.
DOCTOR: Oh, my word!

045: The Mind Robber

(First watched 2024-03-26, -27, -29, -31, 04-02) So trying to get away from that lava fast enough just in case the TARDIS can't handle it, they end up outside of time and space. As portrayed in the first two episodes anyway, I feel it is a bit more fanciful and abstract than the 60s TV production values can properly portray. There are times when they're clearly supposed to be walking through nothingness, but you can still see where the gray-white nothing floor becomes the gray-white nothing wall.

In episode 2 Jamie is replaced by a different actor. Without checking I wouldn't know if this was part of the original episode plan or something thrown in, but it was handled pretty well. And probably even a simpler explanation to follow than when the Doctor himself changed faces a few years back. It's actually pretty funny, the Doctor is given possible parts of Jamie's face to put back correctly and he just... blows it. (Checking now, I see Frazer Hines apparently had chicken pox for a few episodes.) Something about the chicken pox explanation, though. If he couldn't come to the recording, how did they get the footage of him prior to him turning to cardboard and being replaced by the other actor?

A few times "The Master" has been mentioned. My knowledge of the old show is limited, so I wonder if this is really the long-running character "The Master"? Or just someone else using a similar name. Most of the early Master stuff I've heard of has to do with the Third Doctor era but I couldn't tell you his first appearance. You might expect a lot of Masters and Rulers and Leaders to pop up. The Doctor doesn't seem to register any recognition upon hearing the name, but maybe The Master wasn't going by The Master the last time he knew him. (Checking now, it isn't. Just another Master.)

This story is in the end a lot of fun. Weird settings, weird fictional characters, weird early 20th century pulp author in control of things beyond his will. I don't know that it reflects very well on Zoe, though. Jamie we know is a weird 18th century goofball, but she's supposed to be a very learned person from the future. So her repeatedly insisting things like "No, Medusa is real and I MUST look at her!" makes her seem more foolish than I thought she was supposed to be.

046: The Invasion

(First watched 2024-04-03, -05, -07, -10, -12, -14, -16, -17) Of the first few I've watched, the non-animated ones seem... visually lower quality, darker. I wonder if they were secondhand recordings from back in the day that are now the best versions available?

So we meet again Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart, or now promoted to Brigadier as he is most generally known. At this point I guess we really start to get a sense of modern-Earth continuity going on. When they first showed up they decided to look up Professor Travers from two previous serials again, but he'd moved.

Zoe talks to a computer and makes it malfunction, like Captain Kirk sometimes did, though she did it in a more technical way. I... was again disappointed in her, though. When they weren't getting the answers they wanted from the machine, I thought she was using her technical expertise to essentially hack the machine and get more information. But no, she was just being pissy and intentionally breaking it.

In a later episode I think we finally see Zoe's skills put to good use. She's helping them aim missiles at the incoming Cyber fleet for maximum efficiency. Based on the way she described cascading explosions, I think it was essentially like the game Missile Command, but that game hadn't been made yet.

047: The Krotons

(First watched 2024-04-19, -21, -23, -24) The Gond city has some weird design choices, at least by internal logic. They think they're living in a dangerous wasteland where nobody ever goes outside... so why does it seem like everywhere is within easy access of a door or other entrance? We never actually see it, but they never have a problem going from inside to outside, and the Doctor and crew found their way inside and were wandering around the building with no trouble.

The Krotons'... "plan" didn't seem a very good one. Basically, do the bare minimum to survive and pray some high-brains come along and plug themselves in. Maybe that works if they think there's a chance of a rescue mission? But otherwise it seems like they could've done better with the Gonds. I get that they didn't want them learning too much and becoming a threat, but if they just separated the handful of good students and gave them some higher courses while they're still convinced they're essentially the assistants of the gods, they might've made their own high-brains.

048: The Seeds of Death

(First watched 2024-04-26, -28, -30, -5-01, -02, ) A future Earth where space travel was abandoned once T-Mat (transporter) technology allowed fast travel of goods and services around the world and even to the moon. I kept wondering what Zoe thought about this, but it wasn't addressed. The specific times of these future Earths are often left vague, but she was from a future where there were space stations and distant craft traveling around. So should this be the past for her, just one she was ignorant about even though she's so full of information? Doesn't seem it could be the future for her, I don't think _interstellar_ travel would be abandoned just because of the T-Mat. Also it seems a relatively near future since the engineers who worked on rocket travel are still around.

Not the first time I've seen this sort of thing in fiction, but it's pretty unbelievable how the One Guy who was still stuck on rocket technology has apparently been building a new model rocket on his own and keeping it mostly secret. This just isn't the sort of thing any hobbyist can do. A hobbyist with billions of dollars who forms a company of thousands working on their goal? That's a different story.

And the Ice Warriors again. The last time we saw them was on... yet another future Earth, that apparently didn't have much space travel going on or it would've been a bigger help against extinction when it came to that ice age. Future Earth, pick a lane!

In the modern show the Doctor uses psychic paper to help convince people he's someone in authority or someone who can be trusted, but do we have to headcanon that back in these days the TARDIS was performing a similar task psychically? Because for there to be a worldwide disaster on a necessary transportation system, and only one rocket to attempt a rescue/repair mission... they send the three mysterious visitors they'd find no record of if they bothered to check?

So the seeds of death finally show up, with the Ice Warriors spreading a fungus to uhhh... partially Marsform the planet. But the weakness of the fungus is... water? The most common thing on the planet? In the movie Signs I excuse a similar thing because conveying a realistically dangerous alien invasion really wasn't the point, but in a six episode serial all about such an invasion, it seems a goofier weakness.

049: The Space Pirates

(First watched 2024-05-07, -08, -10, -12, -14, -15) Halfway through and this seems kind of an unusual serial in that the Doctor and crew have had relatively little contact with the varying factions in the story. Briefly ran into pirates/defenders, then were sealed off. Traveled with the grizzled prospector guy for a bit, then ditched them. Now they've briefly run into the pirates again and run away from them...

I enjoyed the bit where they're on their separated segment of the space station, and the Doctor comes up with a plan that will either work or... not. "Doctor, if we don't know the proper polarization, instead of being drawn TO the next fragment we could be shot away!" "Zoe, don't be such a pessimist."

Now writing more after the last three episodes... not finding much to say. Maybe more would be notable if I'd seen more than just reconstructions. BUT these are the LAST missing episodes, so that era is over.

050: The War Games

(First watched 2024-05-17, ) When they show up in a ~World War I environment, I was thinking about how the time of the episode was closer to WWI than it was to me watching it. However, it now seems like it's not really WWI at all. But a "1917 Zone" full of captured people who've had their minds messed with.

Several episodes in, I am a little unclear on EXACTLY how the world they're in is put together, but in practice it reminds me of a Time Odyssey book I read where different parts of Earth were how they were at different points in Earth's history. In this case they do seem to be using a TARDIS-like time/space machine to drop people off in the different zones, but it feels more like they're in an entirely not-Earth environment and the borders between zones just display fake horizons from either side.

Doctor Who Season 7