Day 324 — November 20th 2021
Vengeance on Varos Part Two
Vengeance on Varos — Part Two
One of the topics which comes up frequently when discussing this period of Doctor Who — and the hiatus in particular — is how violent the programme had gotten. I’ve always thought of it as a bit of an odd one, because to my mind Doctor Who has always been fairly violent. Fights have been a staple of the show going right back to An Unearthly Child, and it’s a show in which at least one person dies in almost every story. Watching this time around, though, I can see where the complaints come from. The series at this point seems to delight in violence in a way that I don’t think it ever really has before.
In Attack of the Cybermen it’s the sequence where Lytton’s hands are crushed to a bloody pulp, and we get a shot of him writing around on the floor with his blood smeared all around him. In this episode there’s plenty of violence, but I think the worst example is the often-mentioned acid bath scene. It’s makes for an uncomfortable watch, because Doctor Who is (perhaps unwittingly) responsible for the deaths of two guest characters, and just shrugs it off with a quip. Now I get that they’re supposed to be on the side of the baddies and they were about to put Doctor Who into the acid. That’s obviously important context in this situation, but I think pretty much all the previous Doctor Whos would have distracted the guards and made a break for it, rather than getting involved in the action here.
It’s telling just how readily the Sixth Doctor Who takes to a gun, too. He brandished one at the end of Attack — taking out a number of Cybermen with it — and he uses one here to destroy some of the equipment in the control room on Varos. I get the impression from the timing of this moment that it was likely the cliffhanger to Part Three in overseas broadcasts which retained the original format, and in fairness it’s one of the more exciting moments of the episode. Colin doesn’t get to use a gun in The Twin Dilemma, but he does rather lament that fact when bemoaning that Hugo has one where he doesn’t. I think when people talk about the Sixth Doctor Who not being that great a big part of that is just the natural feeling that he’s quite a different character to any of the others so far.
Still, Colin continues to give the part his all, and I can’t fault him for the way his character has been written. There’s several instances in this story where I suspect it wouldn’t have worked so well without his presence. And it’s not as though he doesn’t get some bits to do in this one which feel perfectly right for Doctor Who. The way he takes the piss while being led to the gallows, and his later explanation that he knew he wasn’t in any danger because he’d noticed the cameras were turned off, are exactly bits that I can imagine Tom Baker doing, and that’s usually a good indicator.
As for the story itself… it’s started to fall apart a little for me as this one’s gone on, and I think that’s because they’ve moved away from the core elements which worked for me in Part One. Had this been a full story of our heroes trapped in the Punishment Dome and managing to bring down the government while being broadcast to the whole planet I think I’d have enjoyed that more. Here, though, they try to explore other ideas like turning Peri in to a bird for a single scene, which seems to sit at odds with the rest of the story. Everything in here so far has been vaguely plausible, so where does this sudden miraculous branch of science come from?
It’s also something of a bugbear I’ve got with Philip Martin’s Doctor Who stories in general, because he seems to have something of a special interest in seeing women transformed into other things. Here it’s Peri into a bird and Areta into a lizard. In his next story it’s Peri being shaved and having an alien mind implanted in her. Martin has provided scripts for Big Finish down the years and I remember being so put off by a scene in Creed of the Kromon when I listened through the McGann plays a decade ago that it coloured my opinion of Martin for a long time. I can’t remember the specifics, but I’m sure he does something similar in his lost story Mission to Magnus, too. It’s not often that I’m totally put off a particular writer’s way of writing, but the way Martin handles women — especially the longer into his career you go — has always sat oddly for me.
Anyway, there’s still some good bits in this one. Sil continues to be a particular highlight, and I think it’s clear why he was marked for a return in both versions of Season Twenty-Three. I’m surprised how little interaction Colin Baker has with him in the end, because he already feels like the iconic villain of this era. Martin Jarvis is particularly good as the Governer, too, and giving him some more material in this episode really highlights that.
I’m dropping to a 5/10 with this episode, but that’s still enough to make this the highest rated Colin story so far.
