Day 245 — September 2nd 2021
The Ribos Operation Parts Three and Four
The Ribos Operation — Part Three
The best thing about this episode is just how much fun Tom Baker is having being part of it. Right from the word go you can tell he’s enjoying himself this week, and the more that’s the case the better he is. It helps that he’s playing opposite Iain Cuthbertson as Garron, and he always raises his game when he’s sharing the screen with a great guest star. I sat and laughed my head off at the moment early on when the Graf Vynda-K slaps Doctor Who around the face with his glove… so Doctor Who snatches the glove from him and slaps him straight back! Hah! That’s brilliant, and I’d put money on it being something worked up in rehearsals rather than being in the original script.
Baker’s enjoyment translates over to Doctor Who, too, and I think this is the most we’ve seen him enjoying himself for a long time. He did so much moping around during The Invasion of Time, and he’s so against taking up an adventure at the start of this story, so it’s great to see him having a bit of fun again, and he gets some of the best dialogue he’s had in ages, too.
Romana: ‘Doctor, there are men out there planning to kill us, and you’re just sitting here chattering.’
Doctor Who: ‘Please don’t panic, Romana. Come and sit down. Come on, come and sit down. Listen, when you’ve faced death as often as I have, this is much more fun.’
The relationship between the members of our new team seems to have come on in leaps and bounds in this episode, too, and the pair are getting on much better. Romana serves — rather well — as the straight ‘man’ to Doctor Who’s clowning, but it works so much better here than you might expect. I think we needed all that slightly pompous material from her in Part One so she’d work all the better here. I especially love Doctor Who asking her ‘we’re not a dirty gang, are we?’…!
It’s not only Doctor Who who gets the best dialogue in this episode, and it’s not only Cuthbertson who deserves to be singled out for praise, because there’s plenty of beautiful material for everyone in this one. I think the scene between Unstoffe and Binro the Heretic is rightly the part of this story which gets highlighted the most, and with good reason, because it’s incredible;
Unstoffe: ‘Binro, supposing I were to tell you that everything you’ve just said is absolutely true. There are other worlds, other suns.’
Binro: ‘You believe it too?’
Unstoffe: ‘I know it for a fact. You see I come from one of those other worlds.’
Binro: ‘You?’
Unstoffe: ‘I thought I should tell you, because one day, even here, in the future, men will turn to each other and say, Binro was right.’
It feels so unusual for Doctor Who, and I can’t think of a single other example of a scene like this in the stories I’ve watched so far. The entire narrative grinds to a halt for the scene, which is pretty lengthy, and we watch a two-hander between a pair of guest characters which really only serves to further the world building.
I said yesterday that I didn’t have much of a sense of Ribos as a place but that the characters were all incredibly richly drawn. This episode introduces us to several more characters — Binro and the Seeker being the main ones — but it uses them to enhance what we know about the planet. I get a real sense of the culture on Ribos now, and I totally believe in these characters as a part of that world. I’m stunned now that we’ve not seen a return to Ribos in the Big Finish audios, because it seems like just the kind of location a writer would be dying to explore.
Timothy Bateson puts in a fantastic performance as Binro, and I think it’s a particularly clever one; he manages to come across as being both the village idiot and the smartest person in the guest cast all at once. Indeed, there’s shades of actually being Doctor Who in there. I’m surprised that Bateson only puts in this one appearance in the series, because I’d have been clamouring to get him back again.
I’m going with an 8/10 for this one, though it was very nearly pushing a point higher than that. I’m hoping the story can stick the landing, because it’s not often you get a tale where the score goes up every episode…!
One thing I do want to mention quickly — because I’ve been meaning to for ages and keep not finding the right chance — is just how often characters have started breaking the fourth wall since Graham Williams took over the show. There’s a famous example in The Invasion of Time where Tom Baker does it (‘even the Sonic Screwdriver won’t get me out of this one…’) but watching through this time I’ve realised that it’s just one of many times in which he does it across Season Fifteen.
By the end of the season everyone’s at it, with the lead Sontaran directing his plans to the audience, and in the cliffhanger reprise which opens this episode, the Graf Vynda-K does it, too! I think it can be a really effective tool (everyone praises The Caves of Androzani for pulling a similar trick, and when it happened in the recovered episode of Galaxy 4 I thought it was incredible), but with it happening so often at the moment it’s starting to wear a little thin. I’m hoping they’ll start to reign that in.
The Ribos Operation — Part Four
I’ve not said anything about Paul Seed and his portrayal of the Graf Vynda-K yet, and that’s because, in all honesty, I’ve not been able to really get a handle on him. It’s such a bizarre performance. At times theatrical and rather pantomime, there’s points where you can only conclude that he’s taking the piss. I think it was Richard Briers who claimed to have accepted a job on Doctor Who simply as an excuse to ham it up a bit, and there’s points in this story where it feels like Seed is doing the same.
And yet, somehow, it totally works! He’s over the top, he’s ridiculous, he swings in mood and energy of the performance from scene to scene — sometimes from line to line — and I totally believe in him as a character. He was described in the last episode as being a complete madman, and that’s exactly what we get. This last episode is the best showcase for him, because we get to see him go through a real range of emotion, from anger to sadness, and we get a complete mental breakdown thrown into the mix. I have a feeling that this is a character, and a performance, which is going to stay with me for a long while.
Of course everyone else continues to be on top form, too, and Tom Baker is the best he’s been in absolutely ages. I know I said it a little while ago but he really does raise his game massively when he knows the guest cast are strong. It’s almost as though he knows they have the potential to upstage him, so he goes the extra mile to remain relevant. Compare the power behind his performance in this one to what we get in Underworld and it’s like night and day.
The real star of the show here, though, is probably Romana. It seems mad to me now that I didn’t take to her in the first episode yesterday because she’s absolutely brilliant. Her relationship with K9 is completely different to the one Leela had last season, or Doctor Who in any episode, but it feels like the most natural one yet. Pairing the two of them off to search the catacombs is a stroke of genius.
Romana: ‘He’s stolen the tracer! Oh, how could I have been such a fool.’
K9: ‘Question not understood. Kindly rephrase.’
Romana: ‘It’s vital to get that tracer back. What can I do?’
K9: ‘I will run through my databanks for information.’
Romana: ‘I wasn’t asking you, K9.’
K9: ‘No other entity is present.’
Romana: ‘I was talking to myself.’
K9: ‘That procedure is not logical. The purpose of speech is to
communicate information.’
Romana: ‘Be quiet, K9. You’re a very irritating computer.’
It’s a 7/10 for this one, with The Ribos Operation ending a lot stronger than it started.
