aerdnasarrih

I watched a few episodes of classic Doctor Who tonight and was reminded of how it used to be that adventure wasn't a dirty word on television. Normally I'm pretty down on my childhood era (the Seventies), but one thing they got right is the idea that you didn't have to get married and settle down to have kids if you didn't want to; that adventure and travel were goods in themselves, and that it didn't make you a lesser person if you didn't want an "ordinary" life. Yes, I got that all from an old scifi tv show.

Anyway, the ones I watched were Shada (a version that was partially Tom Baker's narration for the scenes they never shot), Planet of the Daleks, and I finished Frontier In Space. The latter two were Third Doctor serials, and Shada of course is the "unaired" episode with Four. Frontier In Space did pick up at the end (I'd put off watching it because it had gotten boring), and I especially love the way Jo defeated the Master's attempts to control her mind, first with his "you will obey me!" shtick (she just started yelling nonsense at him until he quit, awesome), and then with this gadget he'd been using to make everyone think they were seeing the things they most feared. Jo knew what the gadget was, so she just kept shouting "you're really the Master!" (he was making her think she was seeing a drashig), until he turned the machine off. I bet it was starting to overheat. Anyway, I think that the Master secretly had a crush on Jo. This was also a tad sad as it was Delgado's last appearance as he was killed in a car accident and they had to scrap the scripts that followed; so Frontier ended on a cliffhanger and the next show was somewhat of an abrupt left turn, into Planet of the Daleks.

I'm sick of Daleks so I was expecting to be bored but this one was one of the better serials of Three's run. I think it was because the Daleks weren't overused, and we didn't get "Daleks are awesomely the most horrid unstoppable creatures ever give up all hope OMG" because this is Classic Who where you're allowed to fight back. Also, the Thals were cool. (So what happened to them? I guess they were all killed finally. Maybe Three shouldn't have told them to be so peaceful and talk up the horrors of war.) And I do like the way you see Jo at the end deciding on her own she had to go home, instead of having to be pushed off the Tardis like a recalcitrant cow. In fact, the very next serial is The Green Death, where she meets her Welsh professor husband and leaves the show, but it works. (I've already seen The Green Death, the romance isn't tacked on as a "surprise rebound" thing, but is built up through the show.) And she leaves not because "life with the Doctor is too dangerous and the horror of it all has driven another companion away" but because she has grown up and fallen in love. Also the Welsh professor character is kind of like the Doctor -- science guy, has non-mainstream ideas, wants to travel and do good -- not some sort of stable, steady, polar opposite.