ckuppe@spock.UUCP (Charles A. Kupperman '87 ) (01/07/86)
I'm going to wrap up my reviews of season 22 now, and I want anyone who cares to know that I'm not just throwing around my opinions but attempting to stir up a modicum of debate. My experiences with British fans have given me a taste for discussion of the relative merits of different stories and Doctors. I hope this net will move in that direction more and more. Timelash, by Glen McCoy. There were actually some people who liked this dismal story. I couldn't really understand why, as it suffered more than any other story from the defects of the 22nd season. (i.e., the Doctor and Peri practically spend the story inside the Tardis control room. It must be a VERY expensive set; JNT uses it in every episode for at least ten minutes, with the exception of Rani and Revelation - but I digress.) Peri does her fair share of screaming, and the pantomime villain turns out to be just that, to nobody's surprise in particular. Without spoiling the plot beyond its already considerable malaise, it is horrendous and really looks as if the writers were trying to pad out the length any way they could. Hence the LONG Tardis scenes in both episodes, and the utterly pointless resurrection of a dead character just to kill him off again. Revelation of the Daleks, by Eric Saward. I must be the only person who isn't ecstatic about this story. While I like Saward's work most of the time, he has his faults, and it is very easy to jump on them in this one. Again, like Resurrection, the plot is very hard to spot. Saward obscures the plot beneath a load of characters that would crush any other writer. To his credit, Saward keeps it interesting and exciting. Every one of the dozens of characters in this story is fascinating. While this story borrows from previous stories, it does not do it as obviously as Resurrection and Earthshock did, which ends up looking worse because it is assumed we will accept the premise of a Dalek army hidden on a planet just because we saw Planet, and it is assumed we will accept Davros' genetic engineering without being shown it, just because we've all seen Genesis. Enough about the plot. My principle with any story is to look at what it did accomplish, not what it didn't. Revelation of the Daleks was ostensibly about Davros' attempts to make a new Dalek army, and the funeral business. I won't be spoiling anything, because the highlight of Revelation of the Daleks is the superb characters. Also, the general theme of death is entertaining and well handled, particularly in the way characters die. (As in any Saward story, most of them do.) Unfortunately, there is no focus or direction with these characters: They die whenever Saward has no more use for them, halfway through the story. Most of the acting is good, but there are awful exceptions, and Davros is better than Resurrection, but by no means as good as his Genesis persona. All in all, this was in many ways a great story, but fairly dissatisfying in its final results. "I'm a very dangerous fellow when I don't know what I'm doing." Charles Kupperman