TV Review: Classic Doctor Who: The Three Doctors (to mmvoe)

This is a 1972 opening series of the tenth season of Doctor Who, and is the first in which a prior Doctor comes back.  It features the first three Doctors, who are brought together by the Time Lords as the home world of the Time Lords is under attack, and their energy is being sapped into a black hole. Because of this attack, the Time Lords go against their own rules, and put the three Doctors together to attack the threat.  The Doctors are played by John Pertwee (third and current to movie Doctor) Patrick Troughton (second) and first William Hartnell (First).  The first Doctor is not able to materialize, due to insufficient energy, but appears on a view screen.  He is often the most level headed, and is sent to calm the other two down.  As the first two get together, they become engaged in a rivalry, which hinders their effectiveness.  The stream in the black whole is sent to find a Time Lord.  The Doctors eventually discern that they need to follow the stream, and so they do so.  There the find an old Time Lord Omega, who helped establish the Time Lord realm to begin with, but all thought he had sacrificed himself in an explosion.  His "will" has allowed him to exist where nothing should exist, in a black whole which is made of antimatter.  However as his "will" is what allows him to exist, he cannot leave.  He has brought the Time Lord to force them to use their will so he can leave.  However he has gone made, and actually the particles have destroyed his body, so he is an empty suit of armor.  Omega has accidentally brought many friends and others from Earth to the black whole, in his attempts to find a Time Lord.  He agrees to send them back, if the two Doctor Who's stay.  They agree.  However the use Omega's insanity and anger against him, and are realized, and restored to their natural spot, when Omega is set free through death.  The black hole becomes a star.
I found this entertaining.  The soldiers of the world created have interesting weapons, but they seem to always miss.   Their appearance is somewhat grotesque.  They energy being which is sending everyone to the black hole is a interesting special effect. 

TV Review: Doctor Who: ***^The Pyramids of Mars

This is from the Tom Baker (1975) era as The Doctor with Sarah Jane (Elizabeth Sladen) as his companion.  It is available through instant Netflix.  I remember this show from when I use to stay up late and watch it on PBS in Utah--television style.  You had to stay up late sometimes to catch all the episodes in a series.  This has four episodes.  The Doctor lands on Earth in the past because of a temporal shift.  This shift is caused by an ancient monster/god of some power named Sutekh who was imprisoned by the other gods of the time on Mars.  There is somehow a connection between Sutekh and and Egyptian pyramid.  He inhabits an archaeologist, at least mentally, when he discovers the ancient tomb in Egypt.  This puts in motion a series of events in which Sutekh plans to fee himself by firing from Earth a rock at Mars to destroy the mechanism which is keeping him captive.  The doctor has to thwart this plan as Sutekh hopes to enslave everyone and take over the universe.  He apparently has power to do so if he were free.  The Doctor is able to destroy the rocket, but only by confronted Sutekh directly, who takes him prisoner and discovers he has a TARDIS which will easily help him in escape.  However the Doctor thwarts him with the control mechanism to the TARDIS which he attaches to the temporal shift machine Sutekh is using to travel to Earth to take control of the TARDIS.  An intriguing story.  Sutekh has some mean robot mummies, and the original archaeologist makes a good monster, looking like Boris Karloff. 

TV Review: *** Doctor Who: The Aztecs

This four part episode stars William Hartnell as The Doctor.  This Doctor Who series is different, as they do not face aliens or any type of monster.  However in this case it is dealing with different customs, as they visit the ancient Aztec civilization, which is built upon superstition, and human sacrifice to appease the sun god.  The Doctor is traveling with his granddaughter and two friends.  One of the friends is mistaken as the reincarnation of an former prophet/god.  She tries to change the custom, and gets the group in trouble with the current priests.
The group is trapped away from the TARDIS which is in the tomb, with a one-way door.  They have to devise a way to get out, while keeping out of trouble dealing with the new laws and customs.  At the same time the priest of sacrifice is pushing for more power, and suspects the reincarnation is a false god.  None of the science fiction stuff, other than traveling through time, but an enjoyable story.

*****Doctor Who Season Five

This is another wild ride, and the shows seem to keep getting better. This season introduces Matt Smith as the Doctor who loves his bow tie, and Karen Gillam as Amy Pond.  It starts with the Doctor, newly incarnated, coming to help a girl with a crack in her wall.  The crack follows just about every episode this season.  The Doctor says he will be right back, but actually comes back a dozen years later and Amy is now a woman.
My favorite episode included Vincent van Gogh.  I admire his work, and we get to see smatterings of it in the museum, and in Vincent's flat.  Vincent can see a monster others, including the Doctor, cannot see.  The monster has been killing innocents.  In looks like a big chicken.  In the end it is defeated, and they show Vincent his legacy.  However it does not prevent his suicide. 
The weeping angels are back in a two part episode.  Only this time there are hundreds of them, and they are out to get them.  However they are scared of the crack through which if anything passes they are forgotten and never existed.
Rory, played by Arthur Darvill, Amy's fiance, joins her on the Tardis.  They face off against vampires, an evil dream keeper and they have to choose between two dream sets and pick the real one so as to not die. There is a less serious one where The Doctor takes on as a human and rents a room.  He plays soccer and eats biscuits and tries to be human to fool the entity upstairs, where there really is not an upstairs, but through the powers of a space vehicle one was been created in everyone's mind. 
The show then turns serious as the Tardis blows up, and it is actually this event seeping through time and universes, which has caused the crack. The Doctor has to close the crack, leaving himself on the other side, and can only be brought back if someone remembers him.  This happens at Rory's and Amy's wedding when remembers something blue.

TV Review: ****^Doctor Who Season Four

Doctor Who Season Four, including “The End of Time”:  I again watched this season on Netflix Instant.  For some reason the last two episodes of this series are not with the rest of the series, but they are on Netflix Instant.  This season has Donna Noble, portrayed by Catherine Tate, as the regular side-kick to The Doctor, David Tenant.  Much of the series deals with how she became the sidekick even though she is just a “regular person.”  However in a later episode we are introduced to Doctor Donna, in which she is melded with the Doctor and takes on his intelligence combined with human instinct.  Episodes that stood out this season are:  "Silence in the Library/Forests of the Dead" in which the shadows are not shadows but creatures that devour anything with meat.  In this episode The Doctor meets his future wife.  We learn the dark is not always just dark and it is important to count your shadows.  "Midnight" in which a creature takes over The Doctor’s speech, and starts saying things before he does.  This is just creepy.  There is a series with all the old side-kicks as well as a few others, who must find the Earth which has been stolen by the Daleks.  "The Stolen Earth/Journey's End"  is a two-part series in which the Earth with several other planets have been put out of sync with time and thus hidden.  The Daleks are using the stolen planets to create a reality bomb and destroy all universes.  This is the episode where Donna saves the day.  There is also created a human Doctor in the same process that melded Donna with the Doctor.  This Doctor is given to Rose to take care of.  “The Next Doctor:” in this episode The Doctor is traveling alone and meets a character in old London who thinks he is The Doctor.  This is a fugue state on his part, and he knows of the Doctor from information tubes the Cyber-men have.  He has made a TARDIS from an air balloon, which in the end the real Doctor uses to save the day.  And finally in “The End of Time” the Doctor is again pitted against The Master in a battle for Earth.  This time the Time Lords are using him to make a return, destroying Earth. This season we also met the Ood, the Doctor's Daughter, and Agatha Christie.  Great fun.

Doctor Who: ****season Three

The first episode has the Doctor (David Tennant) kidnapping, by accident, a bride, Donna Noble portrayed by Catherine Tate.  She ends up on an adventure with The Doctor, as her fiance turns out to be a heal and just using her.  However she does not stay with The Doctor, and the next episode we are introduced to Martha Jones, a medical intern.  Her hospital is taken to the moon, as the intergalactic police are looking for an alien.  Just as everyone is running out of air, they are returned.  However there has been an adventure in the mean time.  There is an episode about Shakespeare, which is fun, but I didn't care for the witches.  William is great however.

There are a couple of great two-part episodes.  The first presents the Daleks in New York.  There is a cute bit of a relationship between a dancer and her boyfriend who is turned into a pig-man.  They genetically engineer Dalek and human combinations.  However this  doesn't work for the Daleks. 

Another is about the Doctor turning himself human in pre WWI England.  He is hiding from a family who want to use he and the Tardis to rule the universe.  This is very similar to "Goodbye Mr Chips" as The Doctor is a school teacher at a boarding school.  The Doctor falls in love in his alternate life, and has to decide if he wants to give up this life to be The Doctor.  He becomes The Doctor and is able to defeat his pursuers.

The season ends with a reintroduction of The Master, who also had hidden himself away, taking human form.  With the arrival of The Doctor, he remembers who he is, and steals The Tardis.  The Doctor pusues him, but not before he has become prime minister, and opens the way for an alien species to help him take over the world.  In this one Martha Jones saves the day.

Doctor Who ****^Season Two

Doctor Who Season Two:

I am still going through the Doctor Who Series on Netflix. David Tennant stars as The Doctor and Billie Pyper as Rose Tyler.  I have recently finished season Two.  The episodes are varied, but I think the “Girl in the fireplace” is classic.  This presents The Doctor forming a relationship with Madame Pompadour from France.  She was a real life character who was actually mistress to the King of France.   The Doctor, however, only sees her sporadically in her life, as they are on different time lines.  It is sad, but the Doctor will say, “I’ll be right back,” and it turns to be years in her time line.  However the Doctor is willing to sacrifice all to save her, but it turns out well, relatively so, in the end.  In one of those I’ll be right back, she passes away, and the Doctor arrives to see her driven away in the funeral carriage.  The king presents him a letter, and uses this remark he is said to have said in real life. “The marquise won't have good weather for her journey.”  It was a stormy day, and the roads were mud.  They carriage was taking her to her traditional home for burial.

Another interesting item in this season is the parallel universe, in which Rose’s father is alive.  However, in that world, her mother (the parallel mother not her real mother) is turned into a Cyberman.  In another story the Cybermen gain entrance into our world, and begin to raise havoc, taking over the world.  The Daleks (the four remaining) also show up and are fighting the Cybermen.  However the Doctor sends them all back into “the void.”   However in doing so, Rose and her family end up in the parallel world with no way back.

There are fourteen episodes in all.  This was a very fun ride.  My least favorite were “The Idiot’s Lantern” and the two-part about a Satanic being being freed.  They wove several events into the show including the 2012 Olympics and the coronation of the queen.

Doctor Who: ****^Season One

Doctor Who: ****^Season One

About every year or so I go thought the Doctor Who series on Netflix.  I have started with season one this week.  There are six seasons available on Netflix; however they lack some of the Christmas specials and episodes outside of the regular season.

Season One introduces us first to Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) and then to Doctor Who (Christopher Eccleston.)  In the first episode they take on a plastic monster, determined to make plastic come alive and take over the world.  After giving the monster a chance to leave people alone and the monster goes ahead with his plans and activates plastic monsters everywhere, the anti plastic is delivered and the monster destroyed.  Rose’s boyfriend is drawn into the plat, and her mother is a victim of the plastic men.

The Season continues through several other romps:  We see the explosion of our sun and the end of Earth.  The family who takes over British government determined to create nuclear holocaust so they can sale the remaining slag heap that was Earth.  We meet Charles Dickens, as he gets inspiration for his ghost stories. 

My favorite is a two part episode on the bombing of London during WWII.  A rocket has landed on earth, with medical nanobots escaping.  They do not know of human DNA and repair a child incorrectly, which causes a disease of their making others in the image of the repaired child, with a gas mask as part of his anatomy.  The child, as well as the other people infected, if they touch you will give you the same result.  They go around looking for “my mummy.”  It isn’t until he finds his mummy that the nanobots realize their mistake, and are able to correct it. 

This run goes through two future Earth worlds, where things have gotten out of where they actually should have been, because of third-party manipulation.  We are introduced to “Bad Wolf” and the evil the Doctor must confront.

I enjoyed this romp, and come back to it on a somewhat regular basis.

TV Time: *****Doctor Who Season Six

Dr Who Season 6 is now available through Netflix DVD.  The other seasons are on instant Netflix.  This is a terrific ride.  The season starts with Doctor Who's Death, then goes back and explains things on the road to this event.  There are some incredible turns in the general plot, for example we see the Doctor's marriage to River Song, discover who are her parents, and are introduced to the "Silence."  The Silence are evil creatures who you don't remember when you are not looking at them.  They are like a great conspiracy, manipulating things without anyone knowing about them.  They are still around at the end, and it is the Silence who have decided the Doctor must die.

This series has a greater use of poetry which is highly effective.  It also has a way of bringing back old characters.  In this case the characters are often old nemesis who now owe the Doctor.  This is especially true with the kidnapping of Amy and Rorie's baby girl.  She was conceived in the TARDIS which causes her to have time lord characteristics.

This is a show you have to see.  I watched Doctor Who as a youth, staying up late to watch it on PBS.  The plots and stories were fun then, but the special effects were always lacking.  That is no longer a problem, and the stories have just gotten more intriguing.  I LIKE DOCTOR WHO.