It's the Macra incident all over again

10 June 2017

After the fairly ho-hum Monk trilogy, I had high hopes for Empress of Mars. Mark Gatiss is at his best when writing Victorians, and this was a typical Boys Own adventure tale of derring-do and serving the British Empire .... only on Mars, in a Tomb of the Cybermen sort of setting.

Of course in every regiment there is a bad apple or two. In this case there was the pilfering soldier (helpfully called 'Jackdaw') and a Captain who was a really nasty piece of work, probably because he rejoiced under the name of Neville Catchlove.

It was Catchlove, rather than the reanimated Ice Warriors, who was the real villain of the piece, though the Ice Warriors had a particularly unpleasant way of killing people.  The hero was a cowardly Colonel, brilliantly played by Anthony Calf, who redeemed himself with an act of selfless heroism that saved the day.  The Doctor didn't actually seem to do all that much, apart from attempting to negotiate between the species.

Meanwhile, the TARDIS, with Nardole on board, had decided to return to Earth. I'm not entirely sure whether this was simply a 'separate the Doctor from the TARDIS to stop it being too easy' device, or whether the point was to engineer a situation in which Missy would be released from the vault. 

However, the highlight of the episode was not Missy in the TARDIS, but the sound of the first friendly alien race with whom the 'e-mail' rigged up by the Doctor for the Empress made contact.  As soon as I heard it, I shrieked 'Alpha Centauri' before the interference on the viewscreen cleared to show everyone's favourite hermaphrodite alien, and definitely ahead of my husband (the 'proper' fan.) Just like in Gridlock where I identified Macra from a single waving claw.

Revisiting some old faces

The UK Drama Channel (Freeview channel 20) is currently showing some classic Doctor Who stories, one for each of the pre-2005 Doctors on Sunday afternoons at 4.00 p.m.  Just the thing watch whilst doing the ironing!

They started with The Aztecs, which is watchable enough, but not one of the best surviving Hartnell stories, in my opinion. This was followed by Tomb of the Cybermen, which is one of the classic Troughton stories, and one which actually manages to make the Cybermen creepy and scary.  (In general I think Doomsday was quite right and that Daleks beat Cybermen any day.)

Last week it was the turn of Pertwee, and Spearhead from Space.  I enjoyed this so much that I followed it by watching Rose on DVD in order to compare the effects of two very different new Doctor stories/series reboots starring Autons.  In both cases the shop dummies work much better than the Nestene Consciousness, which is slightly disappointing in both its felt tentacle and orange CGI guises.

This Sunday the channel will be celebrating the Doctor's 51st birthday with one of my all-time favourite stories, and one which genuinely terrified me as a child, The Pyramids of Mars. Between that and Sexton Blake and the Demon God (broadcast in the Sunday teatime slot in1978), I was definitely traumatised by all things Eygptian.

 It won't stop me from watching on Sunday though, even if I'm hiding behind the ironing board.