Day 163 — June 12th 2021
The Mutants Episodes Three and Four
The Mutants — Episode Three
The thing about Doctor Who is just how massively the quality can vary, even within the same episode. In this case I’m specifically talking about special effects. Early on we get a brilliant sequence showcasing the firestorm — both on location with fireworks going off at the mouth of a cave, and in model work as the Skybase is bombarded with multi coloured sparks.
But then a few scenes later we get the serial’s first use of CSO and… yikes. I don’t think I’m being over dramatic to describe it as some of the worst CSO the series has given us so far. It doesn’t help that Katy Manning is being shot from so far away that the technology is really struggling to keep up. At one point half her head disappears, and as she moves a blurry yellow shadow follows her across the floor. It feels somewhat churlish of me to complain, but it’s an effect that didn’t really need to be done as CSO in the first place, and that makes it feel like a more heinous crime to me.
It’s also surprising how something I can praise so highly in one area — the vibrant colours of the firestorm, for example — can be the same thing I’m going to criticise elsewhere. I understand the colours as part of the weather, and I’ll buy them as a side effect of the Marshall’s experiments, but why is the entire cave being lit by bright, multi-coloured lighting?
It feels like they filmed the firestorm sequence and then decided that since they’d already fixed the coloured gels over the lights, they might as well make the most of them by keeping them there for the rest of the story. It doesn’t look bad as such, and it lends the caves a unique alien quality, but what I loved about all the location filming in the first two episodes was how barren and real it looked. The planet is described disparagingly by the guards as being ‘grey, grey, grey’ and ‘a rotten hole’. Clearly they never set foot inside the caves, which are pretty much every colour but grey…!
Something else which stands out as being pretty poor in this episode is the acting. I try to avoid criticising performances too much as it somehow feels unfair (while I’m perfectly happy to call out a dodgy bit of scripting or some poor direction — perhaps that says something about how we regard those before the cameras as opposed to those behind…), but this episode has given us what might be some of the worst turns we’ve seen in the series to date.
James Mellor as Varon hasn’t been too bad up to now, but there’s points in this episode where I genuinely wondered if he might think he’s still in a rehearsal. Some seriously bizarre choices in his performance. And it doesn’t help that he’s paired up with Sidney Johnson as an old man who feels like he’s come straight out of Monty Python. Genuinely quite a difficult scene to watch. I was amazed to discover today that Johnson genuinely was an older man at the time of recording — soon to turn 70 — because he comes across so much as a younger man made up.
And yet it’s another example of just how freely the good and the bad can mingle in Doctor Who, because that same scene also gives us another incredible effect, when the old man turns around to reveal the spine of a Mutt breaking through the back of his shirt. We’ve seen a couple of examples of the transformation in this story so far but they’re usually focussed on a character’s hand (indeed, Varon’s hand is undergoing the process here), but there’s a real punch to this image which is sadly a bit lost in this scene.
A 5/10.
The Mutants — Episode Four
This is one of those occasions where I can’t tell if I’m just having a bad day and it’s effecting my enjoyment of the episodes I’m watching, or if the story has taken a bit of a dive off a cliff. I’m a bit tired today but otherwise pretty happy, so I fear it might be the latter.
I say that because I spent most of Episode Three complaining about all the things in the episode which didn’t work for me, and about half way through this one I found myself saying — out loud to an empty room — ‘I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to be looking at’. It came during the scene in which Doctor Who and Sondergaard make their way through the caves to find the crystal. I got that they were supposed to be on an expedition, I knew they were trying to discover what was at the heart of the caves… but I didn’t know what was going on with the weird video effects on the screen, or why Christopher Barry had opted to shoot this scene using CSO to add the actors in.
It’s the same setting as the sequence with Jo in Episode Three where I complained about the effects, and just like there, I can’t work out why they’ve done it this way. I can’t see any reason they couldn’t have shot it on location so it would look far less jarring. When they reach the end of the tunnel Doctor Who gasps in amazement and says ‘magnificent, it’s like a cathedral’, which is probably true of what the script described, but it’s certainly not a description of what we get on screen.
Adding to my confusion was the fact that much of the previous scene has been shot via a flipped reflection in a sheet of Mirrorlon. I understand why they did that — it makes it far easier to produce the effect of the earthquakes, allowing a more effective ‘shake’ to the image than could be achieved simply moving a heavy studio camera. The problem is that several shots in that scene are all shot via the Mirrorlon even when the image doesn’t need to shake. It gives an odd distorted effect to the picture which feels like it should be important but is really just an error.
It’s a shame because it feels like the kind of rookie mistake you’d expect from a new director unfamiliar with an effects-heavy series like Doctor Who… but this is Christopher Barry! The man who directed Power of the Daleks, among many others, and who’s work I was praising to the heavens only yesterday. It feels uncharacteristically sloppy. It also means I’m unintentionally finding fault in other areas now; yesterday I praised how natural the mist looked, never like they’d just stuck a smoke machine slightly out of shot… and here it looks exactly like that. All in all it combines to make a really unsatisfactory viewing experience.
Fingers crossed I’m just in a worse mood than I realised and the story can turn around again for the final third. 3/10.
