FOUR TO DOOMSDAY has 3 green aliens on a gigantic spaceship headed for Earth with the intention of arriving in friendship and the aims of helping mankind. Of course, their goal is far more sinister, and it will mean the death of all mankind and the destruction of Earth if they're not stopped. No, it's not "V", but I suppose it's an old story no matter how you look at it...
My question is, HOW did the writing and acting on DW get so bad so fast? When story editor Christopher Bidmead jumped ship, Anthony Root stepped in, though apparently from the first he only intended to be a short-term fill-in. It's bad enough to have at least 1 companion too many in the TARDIS crew, when when 2 of them are badly written and badly acted in the same story, something is terribly wrong. Once more, Tegan is just completely out-of-place (had her slot been filled by Leela or Sarah Jane as originally hoped, I'm sure it would have been a different matter). Here, not only does she whine throughout the entire story, but someone really screwed up both her hair and make-up this time around.
Then there's Adric. We've already seen him trying to be cunning by playing up to an dangerous alien, but this time he genuinely falls for the "line" he's fed and winds up fighting with all 3 of his friends. He wasn't this stupid in THE KEEPER OF TRAKEN!
Peter Davison's "passive and polite" Doctor really isn't cutting it. I kept picturing how much better this would have been with Patrick Troughton, especially in 2 scenes where Davison did shine-- saying to Adric "Now listen to ME you young IDIOT...!" and when he CUTS Tegan off in mid-sentence by saying, "You're spoiling my concentration!" It's clear the 5th Doctor had a LOT more potential than we ever got to see realized. I spent the most of the Christopher Eccleston & David Tennant eras thinking, "IF ONLY Sylvestery McCoy and Colin Baker had had writing THIS good!" I think that probably goes for Davison as well.
Had this been a Troughton story, the roles of Adric & Nyssa would no doubt have been taken by Jamie & Zoe. Jamie wasn't that intelligent-- but he had his wits about him, and was absolutely loyal to The Doctor, something Adric doesn't seem to be capable of comprehending. Nyssa is the one who really shines in this story. Like Zoe, she's VERY intelligent, but in a more low-key way. I loved the scene where she calmly asks to borrow the Doctor's sonic screwdriver, and doesn't explain what she's doing until she's succeeded in disabling one of the ship's robots. Peter Davison has said in an interview he would have preferred if he'd only had ONE companion-- Nyssa. I have to agree with that!
Stratford Johns as Monarch is interesting at times, but for all his claims of superiority and having put "the fleshtime" behind him, his arrogance and mood-swings show he's not as "advanced" as he'd like to think. It occurs to me this is somewhat of a variation on Dr. Corby from the STAR TREK episode "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", the idea of replacing "inferior" humans with "superior" androids, but in both cases it's not really a goal one would wish. One could also compare Monarch's androids with the series' own Cybermen-- it's surprising The Doctor didn't draw a comparison between the two, with the Cybermen being a much cruder version of the same horrible thing. I enjoyed Johns much more as the Monsignor in the Chris Lee film Dracula HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE.
It was fun seeing Philip Locke (THUNDERBALL) as Bigon and Burt Kwouk (A SHOT IN THE DARK) as Lin Futu, though after thousands of years of being on the ship, the 3 Earthlings who were planning to collaborate with Monarch sure changed their minds in a hurry. In this post-STAR WARS era, Monarch's spaceship is detail on top of detail on top of detail-- but wouldn't the money have been much better-spent on BETTER WRITING?
After so many stories explaining how only a Time Lord could operate the TARDIS (or was that lie all along?), I'd sure like to know how Tegan managed to move it at all. Finally, having Nyssa collapse with no warning at the end, just for the sake of tacking on a "cliffhanger" between stories, was completely uncalled for. This era of the show has a LOT to answer for...
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