Planet of the Daleks is a serial that looks good.  David Maloney is one of those directors who knows exactly how to shoot the types of sets Doctor Who works with to give a false sense of scale even if it is limited by the studio.  This is also his first serial shot in color and the colors are quite vibrant greens and blues throughout.  The image of pools of molten ice are the perfect kind of dumb contradiction that I love from science fiction like Doctor Who.  Likewise Jon Pertwee commands every scene he’s in, even in a first episode that sidelines the Doctor and puts Jo Grant front and center while writing her as a generic companion (Katy Manning trying her absolute best with the material).  Bernard Horsfall is also here with commanding screen presence.  The Daleks themselves are presented as truly menacing and that’s also great.

The trouble with Planet of the Daleks lies in the script itself.  Terry Nation was given first right of refusal on Dalek serials after Day of the Daleks entered production without his permission, and the story that he came up with is basically the greatest hits of The Daleks, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Chase, and the first half of The Daleks’ Master Plan.  Essentially we have a story made entirely of spare parts, The Daleks being the main basis for the story itself.  Now these weren’t bad stories, and in 1973 when there was no home media outside of Doctor Who and the Daleks being rereleased on paperback later that year, viewers likely didn’t notice, but watching it in a marathon in the age of streaming, you can tell how little this serial has to say.

It wants to be anti-war which is good but feels like an afterthought when Nation’s earlier work did it far better.  Not helping matters is a first installment that is the closest direct rewrite of “The Dead Planet” but keeping the lead in that the Doctor and Jo know the Daleks are behind things while the script refuses to acknowledge it.  The second episode then builds to a revelation that there are thousands of Daleks on the planet.  The planet also has other Nation tricks: deadly plague, deadly fungus, invisible creatures, etc.  It’s certainly not a bad serial, but it is a tedious one.

Let’s get the issues with Frontier in Space out of the way first: much of the story follows the many captures and escapes of the Doctor and Jo; there is a silly, last minute monster added into the final episode; and it’s technically only the first half of a 12 part epic that’s really two 6 part serials.  For some people that is enough to bring this serial down in their eyes, but they’re ignoring just how much writer Malcolm Hulke put into this serial.  This is one of those serials where the alien race of Draconians genuinely feels like a complete culture and the text places them on the same level as humanity, the costumes and makeup being among some of the show’s best creature design.  Hulke lays out a believable conflict exploring humanity’s general tendencies towards xenophobia and how we are manipulated into authoritarianism.

Each capture and escape for the Doctor and Jo serves a purpose, usually to push the pair of them forward to unraveling the mystery pitting two empires on the brink of war.  Hulke takes what he laid down in Colony in Space in terms of where humanity is at and just expands it to give this quite realistic but often depressing picture of how humanity changes but never quite enough.  Having a third party slowly go from Ogrons to the Master to the Daleks is also perfect setup for an all time classic Dalek story (even if this story wraps up all of the plot it needed to and what followed really is a completely unconnected story).  Roger Delgado gives such a great performance as the Master it only adds to the tragedy of his untimely death that this would be his last.  He certainly plays off the Daleks in a more interesting way than Pertwee (who actively disliked working against them).  Paul Bernard is in the director’s chair for the final time and it’s certainly his best looking serial, even if Bernard sometimes favors too many wide shots.  This one is great, often underrated for the overrated story that immediately follows.

Combat Rock is a book with a reputation.  That is for good reason.  The experience reading this novel can be described as unpleasant.  Author Mick Lewis had already contributed a similarly unpleasant Past Doctor Adventures novel in Rags, and Combat Rock seems to wish to outdo that.  That’s the point at the center of the novel, to be as unpleasant as one possibly can be while maintaining some sort of narrative.  Or author Mick Lewis simply watched Cannibal Holocaust and thought that would be a good basis for a Doctor Who story, at least in terms of how it gained cult status and the cruelty it put on-screen, both real and fictional.  That and other Italian horror films.  Lewis as a person is unhinged, claiming to have spent time among a cannibal tribe, having a girlfriend descended from cannibals, and other wild claims just short of partaking in cannibalism himself.  Talking about this novel is generally an odd thing to do.  It lacks narrative cohesion, Lewis using a generic plot of once again space marines fighting against native inhabitants, but this time there are zombies.  The jungle planet of Jenggel (get it?) was a post-colonial holiday planet, but the indigenous natives have begun to fight back after literally raising the dead and causing a series of gruesome murders.  To give Lewis the benefit of the doubt, there is potential for a story with an incredibly strong anti-colonialist message throughout, the team of space marines in the OPG are portrayed largely as bad people, but the natives are presented equally as gruesome.  This comes across as Lewis thinking he’s being complex about how different cultures interact, but then just making the natives literal savages who are doing things that are unnatural.

The native characters are hardly characters, Lewis taking inspiration from several horror films for their portrayal at the best of times.  This sadly isn’t a novel with many a best of times, as Combat Rock’s indigenous characters more often are presented as part of Mick Lewis’ general fetish for strong, black women.  Practically every female character in this novel, and there are many, is reduced to being a sex object, has some form of sexual assault perpetrated against them, or is at the very least threatened with it.  The treatment of Victoria Waterfield in particular is horrendous, in terms of contributions to the plot she is damseled and forced to watch horrific acts of torture and murder while also being threatened with sexual violence.  Outside of what happens to her Lewis makes a point to go into how conservative she is which you think is going to be a comment on what a character like Victoria would be in reality and not in universe, but he also has characters go on about how pure her white skin is coming dangerously close to white supremacist talking points that go completely unexamined.  While I want to give Lewis the benefit of the doubt, already there was so much racism and sexism in Combat Rock that you can only give so much before it becomes a problem.

Having any sort of focus is the biggest structural problem with Combat Rock, Lewis clearly going for shock value.  The title is taken from an album by The Clash, a band I am honestly not at all familiar with nor an album I have listened to.  Lewis alludes to it in the text by referring to combat rock as a type of music once or twice, but that’s about it.  Especially odd since Rags, his other Doctor Who novel, at least had a connection to music because this one really doesn’t.  The actual plot is paper thin, despite running the full 280 pages the BBC Books allow, there isn’t a whole lot that actually happens narratively.  There’s a lot of supporting characters that are almost entirely one-note and fitting into some bigoted stereotype.  The racism and sexism is clearly coming from a fetishistic place, but there’s also a character called Pretty Boy whose introduction quite literally reads “bisexual, deadly, always wore black lace over his shining black leather; eyes underscored with just a little touch of liner.  But call him effeminate and it would be the last thing you ever did.  And yes, he was pretty.  Dyed black hair thick and wavy, cheekbones raw but sleek, a sensuous mouth, and not a scar on him.” (43-44) The novel treats its one confirmed queer character as a complete freak and implied predator, though he is among a group of explicit predators.  Even Jamie McCrimmon is given the treatment, portrayed as impossibly horny for about the first 100 pages, right up until the moment Victoria is kidnapped and then he becomes violent and determined to find her.

Somehow, the Second Doctor makes it through the novel unscathed, Mick Lewis unironically capturing the character better than most other authors who have attempted to do so in prose.  Don’t ask me how.

When I reviewed Rags three years ago, I implied Mick Lewis didn’t put effort in, yet for Combat Rock there is effort.  It’s effort into almost entirely the wrong things except the Doctor’s characterization to make the novel a truly unpleasant reading experience that doesn’t have anything to say outside of violence.  Any commentary is undercut by just how uncomfortable everything about the novel is and how much it’s clear Lewis is enjoying what he’s writing here.  Yet, it’s also no worse than Rags which already was quite bad.  2/10.

Whenever Doctor Who indulges in a story with a historical setting there is always the chance the audience will have little to no familiarity with the setting, so a balance must be struck to explain and explore the setting along with the plot.  History 101 is one such tale where my own knowledge of the setting is severely lacking.  The Spanish Civil War is a period of history that I only know of in passing, the American education system not really ever finding it a significant event enough to teach around in my experience.  I understand the conflict was essentially between fascists and a left wing faction of communists and socialists, and that the fascists one, but even then that is fairly limited knowledge.  Author Mags L. Halliday in writing History 101 presents this in the form of a traditional narrative, however it is explicitly wrapped in the idea of being an account of events in an attempt to be “true”.  This is while examining exactly what it means to see the “true” history of anything, Halliday never quite coming to a conclusion and much of the science fiction conflict comes from not so much altering history (though that is part of the thrust of the novel) but of altering the perception of history.  Halliday includes a rather extensive amount of resources she clearly has used for her own research and in how the novel was written.  The bombing of Guernica is the center of the novel, as well as the involvement in the Spanish Civil War of Eric Blair aka George Orwell, eventually coming to the conclusion that there was something that created an impossible question of the bombing.  It’s used to explain the Picasso masterpiece means so much because of the perception that it causes to those who view it both in person and through photographs and reproductions.

Halliday as a writer is clearly inspired by Lawrence Miles’ The Adventuress of Henrietta Street in the structure of the novel, although as this is a first story her focus is never quite as direct or focused.  Once again the Eighth Doctor Adventures have a first time writer writing a good first novel before never being commissioned again (she did recently contribute to Big Finish Productions’ latest volume of Short Trips though).  History 101 is one of those novels that were it presented as a traditional novel without the pretense of preserving the “truth”, while losing some of the major thematic element might have actually flowed better because the presentation is a gimmick that only feels like lip service is played towards instead of actually integration into the novel.  Halliday’s prose, however, is actually quite easy to read, flowing quite well and keeping the cast of characters quite manageable.  The novel is only focusing on one aspect of the war after all, even if Halliday is clearly aware of how large the conflict is.  There’s also this sense that Halliday is a fan of the Hartnell historicals, at least in terms of pacing the novel because we cover quite a large timeframe which helps greatly with the immersion of the novel.

Halliday excels at writing the Doctor and Fitz in particular.  They are separated for much of the novel, Anji being paired with the Doctor and sadly being characterized as a touch generic.  With the Doctor there is this sense of ephemeral fascination with history but that underlying edge that makes the Eighth Doctor work so well as a character.  When he confronts Sabbath because he’s Sabbath is in the novel and actually moving the arc forward, there is this uncertain dynamic that makes it incredibly easy to imagine how Paul McGann would have played these scenes.  Sabbath as a character is also used sparingly, but when he does appear there is that spark that really makes him work.  I don’t know if flirtatious is the word I’m looking for but there’s this fantastic connection with and parallel to who the Doctor is.  Fitz’s plot also slots very nicely into Sabbath’s plot, with the reveal that the man Fitz has been traveling with is Sabbath’s own agent in Spain, here to see the perception of history change.  Fitz is the lovable idiot, pretending to be an impartial observer even if that is something that’s an impossibility.  There’s a moment where he sings a version of “Climb Ev’ry Mountian” because he thinks that’ll work and the changes to history involved be damned.  The Absolute as a concept is also brilliant, being portrayed as almost an element of cosmic horror in terms of what it does for history and how it attempts to establish itself.  Halliday writes it almost as something that doesn’t exist, only the Doctor being able to see it for what it is, perhaps in a commentary on how people easily see what they want to see when it comes to history.

Overall, History 101 is a novel that only really suffers because there are points where the author is trying too hard to do what a very different author excelled at.  It excels when it is being an examination of the perception of history through the lens of the Spanish Civil War, even if there is a lot to be packed in its pages.  There’s also a sense of direction with this and the immediate precious installment that feels as if the Eighth Doctor Adventures have somewhere to go.  7/10.

I don’t think I’ve ever quite appreciated what Robert Holmes is doing with Carnival of Monsters.  This is a serial that’s set its sights squarely on taking down the medium of television and the BBC, the two things that allow Doctor Who to exist.  Taking essentially the American A-plot/B-plot structure which shouldn’t work nearly as well for a serial, Holmes puts the Doctor and Jo in a machine that makes them eventually gain the awareness of being watched and in the position of being in a television show.  Inter Minor as a planet is one ruled by bureaucracy and stagnancy, with a ruling class that approves decisions and a working class completely under their thumb.  It’s the setup for what at this point is a standard Doctor Who space story complete with Doctor Who and companion stand in played with beautiful James Acheson costumes and hilarious performances from Leslie Dwyer and Cheryl Hall.  They’re both the showmen and steal every scene they’re in.  Michael Wisher as essentially the main villain is this great slimy performance that just screams television executive, playing off Peter Halliday and Terence Lodge, all actors who have been in Doctor Who before.

Inside the miniscope we start with a historical setting with Tenniel Evans, Jenny McKracken, and Ian Marter rounding out the cast.  Despite the audience knowing there is an alien planet involved, that first episode is great at building the tension, breaking the trope of the end of episode monster reveal by showing us a dinosaur in the middle, instead having the TARDIS picked up and taken out of the machine.  Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning are at the top of their game, Holmes giving Jo some of the best material by having her save the day in the first half while the Doctor gets to be obstinate about not being on Earth (he’s sadly right).  Barry Letts got greedy and put himself in the director’s chair, so the serial also looks great.  The location work is really good at giving the impression of being on the open seas and integrating both the plesiosaur and the Drashigs into the footage (the Drashigs are also a great little meta commentary on Doctor Who monsters).  The only thing this serial falls flat is a little bit of the resolution being a touch too easy.  One of Holmes’ best.

This past weekend when the latest finale of Doctor Who aired I was worried that it would retroactively weaken The Three Doctors as a story, luckily it doesn’t.  This is the best of the anniversary stories because at its heart it is a story.  People like to say that the original series didn’t do character arcs, but this is yet another example of why they are wrong.  For Jon Pertwee as the Doctor this is the moment where his arc completely turns back to the willing hero once again.  The end of this serial sees the Doctor freed from his exile to Earth and able to travel among the stars again, Katy Manning as Jo getting this amazing single moment of sadness that the Doctor might be leaving her which of course would never happen.

The story itself is one that has fairly large stakes: Gallifrey (unnamed for another year) is having its energy drained and anti-matter is seeping into Earth, all the work of our first mythic Time Lord, Omega, a legendary figure who travelled through the black hole to give Gallifrey the ability to time travel.  Future stories would flesh out the mythology but writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin give another script with complete ambition and intrigue.

At the center of it all are the first three Doctors United with Pertwee and Patrick Troughton having this amazing dynamic of utter hatred of one another.  Nicholas Courtney and John Levene also make a great double act and there are two significant outsider supporting characters that have a role to play.  Future anniversaries would lose so much of this element which is what makes The Three Doctors work.  Lennie Mayne’s direction is slick, the performances just bounce off each other (Stephen Thorne gets his one Doctor Who role where he can give depth to the character), and the only thing holding it back are the occasional laughable effect.  It’s a stone cold classic.

Often regarded as one of the weaker Pertwee serials, like The Mutants before it there is actually a lot to like about The Time Monster.  The Doctor’s story about the daisiest daisy in Episode Six is the highlight, it’s a fascinating little examination of who the Doctor is and is worth half a star on its own.  The big scale ideas at play are interesting and an extension of what Robert Sloman and Barry Letts were examining in The Daemons the year before.  Roger Delgado gets to have some of his most charming moments and where the Master ends the story is equally fascinating for the character.  It feels like one last hurrah for the UNIT family because it’s so clear that the production team is ready to go all in with time travel.

The problem is that there’s a lot of messy ideas in the six episodes of the serial, mainly because Sloman and Letts were writing the serial on the fly after The Daleks in London fell through.  Splitting the plot into thirds is a good idea on paper, yet each of the plots, especially the final two episodes on Atlantis, are particularly stretched to their limits.  The depiction of Kronos is also something that works on paper, but Paul Bernard tries to obscure it instead of fully leaning into the silly white costume so it doesn’t really work.  Sloman and Letts wanted to make an epic finale with a larger scale but then it just doesn’t quite come together.  Heck they barely give Jo Grant much to do except banter, so much of the story is carried by the banter of Pertwee, Manning, Delgado, Courtney, and oddly John Levene and it just leaves it kind of meh.

This is a serial that by all accounts, it has a lot of what I love about Doctor Who and this era in particular.  Yet, The Mutants is one of those serials with a lot of elements that just don’t click.  It’s a serial with a handful of supporting cast performances that just do not work, Rick James being generally the worst (his delivery is almost entirely stilted).  The cast generally feels almost entirely miscast: Paul Whitson-Jones as the Marshal is the one supporting cast member that I think works well, Garrick Hagen is trying but the material for his character Ky really does dry up in the back half of the serial, and both George Pravda and John Hollis are competing with each other for most ridiculous accent (Pravda wins).

Bob Baker and Dave Martin also genuinely struggle, perhaps the most, with the pacing of a six part serial.  The Mutants has enough material for six but the script struggles with getting from plot point to plot point.  Structuring the inciting incident of the Doctor having to deliver a message for the Time Lords always keeps him as an outsider even though he supports the people of Solos in overcoming their oppressive, apartheid overlords.  Doing active commentary on South Africa during apartheid is also bold and actually quite good for what it’s doing, it’s just keeping the Doctor in the story naturally that doesn’t work (pulling the trick from Colony in Space and The Curse of Peladon would have worked much better).  The costumes of the story are brilliant, especially the futuristic designs, same with the general sets and the Mutants themselves.  Christopher Barry as a director also excels at the psychedelic sequences and making the sets feel both futuristic and the location feel like an alien planet.  I’d like this a lot more if there were just some minor changes to the structure and keeping the Doctor not feel like an observer who could easily leave whenever he wanted to.

Did I intend to immediately watch The Sea Devils after The Curse of Peladon? No.  Yet there’s something quite cozy about Doctor Who under Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning that’s quite hard to resist.  The Sea Devils is Malcolm Hulke’s script for the ninth season and largely it’s a retread of Doctor Who and the Silurians in the form of a sequel with the added weight of Roger Delgado as the Master.  What holds this serial back is that Hulke despite clearly wanting to reckon with the character choices made at the end of Doctor Who and the Silurians, isn’t writing a serial with the UNIT team.  Instead there are characters from the Royal Navy and the government to criticize and Jon Pertwee as the Doctor does criticize them but a lot of this feels like a retread.

Now for a retread, it’s a very good retread.  Michael E Briant as a director once again does great with the location work, getting a far better location to work with than Colony in Space’s dull quarry, getting to set up plenty of action shots.  Delgado as the Master being included means we get some deepening of the Doctor/Master dynamic as old friends turned enemies, and a great sword fight at the end of Episode Two.  And of course Pertwee and Manning are at the top of their game together, so this is a serial that’s a good time.  The Sea Devils themselves also have a cool enough design, even if things really play out so much like Doctor Who and the Silurians with less personality.

Reading Doctor Who and the State of Decay is honestly a bit of a trip but it really shouldn’t have been.  State of Decay on television while in the back half of the hardline science fiction Season 18 overseen by John Nathan-Turner and Christopher H. Bidmead, Terrance Dicks had actually had the story in his back pocket for a number of years.  Originally it was to be the opening serial to Season 15, but the BBC was adapting Dracula and did not want a second vampire story to conflict, so it was replaced with Horror of Fang Rock.  When reading Doctor Who and the State of Decay it becomes apparent that Terrance Dicks is adapting almost a combination of versions of his story because this is a novelization that feels tonally unlike everything that Season 18 was.  This is honestly for the best, it means that Doctor Who and the State of Decay feels like a classic adventure.  Dicks clearly was a fan of Dracula because almost all of the vampire tropes that are associated with Dracula adaptations, especially the Universal and Hammer adaptations, are here and played up.  They were there during the original serial but largely pushed to the background with the serious tone and rather bleak direction.

This is a novelization that really wants everything to be fun: it’s a fantasy adventure where the Doctor and Romana are trading banter so delightfully throughout.  Dicks is sure to maintain that relationship between the Doctor and Romana as two very close friends where the Doctor is clearly the inferior.  It’s Romana who puts a lot of things together and has to roll her eyes when the Doctor eventually catches up to where she was several paragraphs ago.  Adding Adric to that dynamic makes this one of his stronger stories in terms of characterization, especially in the novelization where Dicks clearly frames it that when he betrays the Doctor and Romana, the reader is supposed to hate him.  Adric is treated very much like the young teenager that he is, and it works so well in prose because Dicks adds just enough to make you understand where Adric was coming from and not put Matthew Waterhouse’s performance at the feet of directors who often struggled in giving him proper direction.  With the lightness in tone it makes the sequences when the Three Who Rule go full vampire feel like a Hammer film version of gothic horror, you can imagine in your head the color of Hammer blood which is particularly fun.  It means when Aukon is summoning his servants it feels far more grand than it did on television and everything just slots in quite nicely.

Overall, Doctor Who and the State of Decay is a novelization that works because it doesn’t try to emulate the tone of the television story, letting what Terrance Dicks clearly intended for the serial to really shine through.  It’s a quick little novelization with a lot of fun behind it.  8/10.