Eoghann Irving's Blog, page 4

The Invisible Enemy

Interesting Concepts Undermined By Execution

The Graham Williams era of Doctor Who is often characterized as low budgets, an excess of humor and Tom Baker hamming it up. There is some disagreement amongst fans about whether all of those are actually bad things, but The Invisible Enemy is a pretty strong argument for why they are all a problem.

If you just summarize what the story is about, it really sounds quite interesting. The concept of an intelligent virus that is able to coordinate how it spreads has a lot of potential for a story and even the notion of shrinking someone down to fight it, while far from original, is one that has produced lots of interesting stories over the years.

Unfortunately the story we get from Bob Baker and Dave Martin is in desperate need of a couple more rewrites. The pair are not known for producing subtle or particularly sophisticated stories but they have shown an understanding of Doctor Who’s story structure and how to put something entertaining together. Here though, nothing really lands.

If you think about the science for more than a moment, it’s truly terrible, but that’s fine we can hand wave that easily enough so long as we’re sold on the rest of what’s going on. Unfortunately none of the characters in this story are even given a personality, never mind something like a back story or a motivation. They are walking furniture.

There is some attempt to explore the concept of the virus, but it is at the most surface level and mostly just results in the Doctor insulting Leila for being stupid. Baker is charismatic enough to almost get away with it, but it’s not a great look for the Doctor. The jokey nature of the presentation also undercuts any sense of menace that might otherwise be generated by the infection spreading.

One highlight though is Leela who once again gets to show what she’s capable of, even if the Doctor continually dismisses her. She’s a great example of why it’s not necessary for the Doctor’s companion to be from present day earth.

Then we have the look of the serial. It’s bright, it’s sterile, it’s weirdly cartoony and even the model work seems a notch down from what I expect from Doctor Who. I’m really not sure what aesthetic they were going for here but it looks cheap. The costumes don’t just look silly, they don’t even fit well. The make up to indicate that someone has been infected is just plain weird. And then of course there’s the giant prawn… sorry… Nucleus!

The only thing that really stuck out to me visually in a positive way was the choice to have the spelling of everything be phonetic. I’m not sure why they did it, but it’s a lovely world building touch that’s just there in the background.

The cheapness shows not just in the design but in the production which just has no refinement.  Clumsily spoken lines are left in and when they chose to use a shot where Doctor rushes into the TARDIS causing the set to wobble presumably because they didn’t have time or money to re-do it. Doctor Who has always struggled with budget constraints to one degree or another, but previous eras were simply better at working around those constraints.

Of course I can’t finish a review of this story without mentioning K9 since it’s the story that introduces him. I’ve got a soft spot for that robotic dog because he represents some of my earliest memories of Doctor Who and in some regards he has an impressive showing here. But, all the problems are on display too. The difficulty in acting with a character that’s only a few feet tall, the limited mobility, how noisy the unit is. It’s a good example of an idea that really exceeds the available budget.

I can’t help when watching this story but think about what could have been. With a little more money and a script that digs below the surface level jokes, this could really have been something.  Instead it’s a historical curiosity at best.

I See You

Another of my experiments with low key self-portraiture. This time I went for a color shot and a more traditional pose. I’m squinting a bit though because of the flash, it’s a bad habit of mine. Other than that I rather like this one though. I’m making direct eye contact and my face looks relaxed and not too posed.

Since I was using on-camera flash there was some really bad glare in my glasses, but I was able to completely remove that using Lightroom and I don’t think it shows at all.

Review S11E03 – Rosa

I was looking forward to rewatching this one because the historical episodes are generally the ones held in highest regard in the Chris Chibnall era. Tackling a subject like Rosa Parks, a central figure in the history of US Civil Rights, is dangerous ground for a British show that generally isn’t that serious.

So let’s get the elephant in the room out the way first, this is not historically accurate. Which is a statement I could probably make about every single historical Doctor Who episode, but with this being a comparatively recent event (within some people’s lifetimes) it’s worth emphasizing. If you’re looking for facts I would encourage you to watch a documentary or read a book, not watch an episode of Doctor Who. Any value that this episode brings in terms of the subjects of Civil Rights or Rosa Parks herself are simply in drawing further attention to her outside of the US itself.

This Isn’t Where We Are Supposed to Be

Oh look, the Doctor can’t control where the TARDIS lands, I’ve missed that. There is an implication here that the TARDIS might have deliberately redirected them, or maybe it just got confused because of that Artron energy, but the point is this isn’t something the Doctor chose, she’s a cosmic hobo once more. I like it. It seems to me that even only three episodes in to his run it’s clear Chibnall is eager to reintroduce some elements from Classic Who which have been heavily downplayed in the modern series. Those would include the larger group of companions (only true in some eras of the show) and the Doctor just bouncing around the universe stumbling into things.

You Folks Ain’t From Round Here

The way Ryan gets slapped early on in this episode is a striking and effective image. It feels real to me in a way that sci-fi violence doesn’t and also shocking because it’s happening in Doctor Who. I also think that the anger that we see from these people is well observed, when people feel threatened (physically, emotionally or intellectually) lashing out in anger is often the reaction. In large part these “policies” in the South were about control and any threat to that control had to be smothered. We see this play out a few times for example when the bus driver is challenged, when Ryan tries to help a white woman and even the quiet anger when all of them are sitting together in a bar that only serves whites.

There is a tendency to simplify racism and racists by thinking of them as either tattooed, violent thugs or white hood wearing idiots. Seeing racism as something that only comic book villains do makes it easier to accept. What that misses is these sorts of situations can only be sustained by at least a tacit agreement of the majority of the population. A majority that probably considered themselves to be good, Christian people and who actually probably did give to charity and do other good things. People are complicated mmmkay?? Here for the most part we get very ordinary people who react with anger and violence when their normal is threatened and that is a much more chilling form of racism in many ways. Rosa doesn’t make any effort to show the white citizens of Montgomery in a good light, there’s no time wasted on showing us white people agonizing over their decisions, they just conform with society and in the process oppress.

Some might be inclined to think these scenes are stereotypical in their portrayal and in a sense they probably are. However, speaking as someone who spent half his life in Scotland and has spent the second living in West Virginia, let me tell you, those stereotypes come from a real place.

The Doctor Can’t Fix Racism

One thing I am very glad of is that they introduced an alien factor in this episode. I understand that some people are really keen to see a pure historical and that might be interesting in some situations, but for me at least this is not one of them. The Doctor needed an opponent to work against and that opponent absolutely could not be Segregation. For her to have played a direct and pivotal role in changing that would be incredibly dismissive of the sacrifices that real people made. So the Doctor doesn’t make a speech to change people’s minds, nor does she save Rosa Parks in any fashion.

I’m much happier seeing the Doctor and fam repeatedly outwitting Krasco to keep things on track and then very awkwardly sitting there and participating on the bus. She is still very much an active participant and not a bystander in the story, outwitting Krasco twice and driving the plan to keep time on track but she’s not a white savior here.

I must say one of the things I really enjoyed this episode was watching the back and forth of The Doctor and Krasco trying to upset and reset time, it was a fun sequence. There’s been a fair amount of criticism of Krasco because, theory goes, this type of racism should be long gone by his time. This is the least important detail in the entire episode and I’m not sure why people are so hung up on it. Racism is irrational, people can get fixated on things and use them as an excuse, the why behind Krasco just isn’t that interesting.

After School Special?

Once again the dialogue is very on the nose in this episode, in some ways even more so than in the previous two. The episode was written by Chris Chibnall and Malorie Blackman whereas the first two were just by Chibnall, which raises an interesting question. Does Blackman always write in this fashion, was she influenced by Chibnall or is the approach actually some sort of writing style directive for the season?

It’s made even worse in this episode by the need to cram in so much information about Rosa Parks. We have a couple of scenes that have an after school special tone to them as characters hurriedly recite key information for us to absorb. Clearly there is a strong intention on the show’s part to be more than purely entertaining but serving two bosses like this is not easy. In order to avoid these info dumps they would need to have given us more time showing Rosa’s life, but if they did that they’d effectively have cut the Doctor and companions out of the episode.

Checking in on Yaz

We get quite a lot of character moments this episode, not all of them are dialogue either. For example the look on Yaz’ face as she steps out of the TARDIS shows that she is clearly the most excited of all the companions to be traveling through time like this. It’s not that the others hate it, but while they’re a little hesitant, she is beaming. We arguably still have less development of Yaz over three episodes than we have on the other two, but I’d say her personality is pretty firmly shaped at this point and to me at least it’s very clear why she continues to travel with the Doctor.

I’m guessing a lot of people won’t have liked the conversation between Yaz and Ryan. It’s certainly another case of telling rather than showing, but again, in the confines of this episode you can’t show these things and yet they are directly relating it to what is happening in this episode. To my mind then, this is an example of when telling is what you need to do.

Ryan and Graham also get their moments to shine. Ryan, still putting up that cocky front, but genuinely shocked by the level of blatant anger he encounters even though it’s clearly not the first time he’s had to deal with racism. Graham gets less to work with but his conversation with the Doctor is touching. Overall I think this episode handles all the characters well and shows that it’s entirely possible to work with a “crowded TARDIS”.

A Mixed Success Then?

It feels a bit lecturing at times and I think the worthy goal of educating children does get a bit overbearing at times, but that’s only a few minutes out of the running time, most of which is a fun Doctor Who adventure so for the most part I do like this story. I don’t think a longer running time would have solved the problems it does have as it strikes me they are mostly just a clash of objectives.

I also want to mention the soundtrack as I haven’t really touched on sound so far in these reviews. There’s a simple reason for that which is that most of the time I don’t notice soundtracks unless they are getting overbearing. I don’t think that is a bad thing as sound is supposed to enhance the mood, not be the star. In this episode though I did find the way sound was used very effective at building tension which is exactly what was needed.

Scores: Words, not numbers man. Words not numbers!

Part 1: A Wizard in West Virginia

Shepherdstown is overrun with werewolves.

That’s Shepherdstown, West Virginia for those of you who are wondering,  most of you probably. It’s a small university town in the eastern panhandle of the state, the bit that’s more like an annex of Northern Virginia. And if you’re just passing through the town, which makes a lovely tourist spot as it happens, you certainly wouldn’t notice werewolf activity. But, dig under the surface and all sorts of things turn up.

How do I know this? Well apparently it’s an open secret amongst the locals and I would have known this if I’d bothered to do some proper research, but I’m not a local and I didn’t see any mention of giant, hairy, man wolves the brochure of the local university. I’m too lazy to do research so instead I spent a memorable night being chased by a whole pack of werewolves.

It does make sense when you stop and think about it though, which I had plenty of time do while I was hiding from those very angry wolves, as Shepherdstown combines both the obscurity of small town America with the regular influxes of fresh blood that are courtesy of its university and a tourist trade. Nobody stands out in that town, well… not unless they grow fangs anyway.

I’m getting a bit ahead of myself though, after all the werewolves wouldn’t have chased me in the first place if I hadn’t stuck my nose into their business. I wouldn’t call them civilized precisely, but they do have their rules. It all started off quite innocently, but I have a bad habit of getting involved in things.

My name is Douglas Brodie and I’m a wizard, now lets get the standard questions out of the way. No I don’t wear a pointy hat. I don’t have a long white beard. I do have a walking stick somewhere round here, but it is neither a magic wand or a staff.  I’ve also never had the opportunity to yell “You Shall Not Pass!”, but I keep hoping, because that would be cool.

I live in Charles Town, West Virginia, another small town in the eastern panhandle of the state. How I ended up there is a long story in its own right, maybe I’ll tell you some time, for now let’s just say I’m not from round these parts. In fact I’m not a native of the United States at all, I was born and raised in Scotland. If you’d asked me when I was growing up, I’m sure I would have told you I had no interest in travelling anywhere, but life likes to play tricks on you, or at least on me.

Anyway, there I was, recently relocated to America and since city living is more than a little expensive, I ended up somewhere close enough to Washington DC to have access to all the city amenities I could want, but far enough away to offer me rent I could afford. America is the land of opportunity, or at least that’s what everyone feels obliged to tell each other on a regular basis, I don’t think they were talking about Wizards when they came up with that particular slogan though. It turns out there’s not a lot of paying work for practitioners of the art. The problem is that while lots of people believe in magic, most of what they believe is wrong, and they don’t like you telling them that. They are particularly disinterested in paying you to tell them they are wrong.

Magic is very, very real, and it’s powerful too, but it’s not showy and it takes effort. People expect to see fireballs and explosions, that’s not how it works. For a start there are rules and there’s also physics. Magic is a lot more than just slight of hand, but you simply cannot ignore the law of conservation of energy. Doing anything remotely useful requires practice and education, shortcuts are… dangerous.

There are three groups of magic, the first is wizards, people who through time and effort can make use of magic. Then there are the innately magical like beithir or dragons, Teine biorach or Will-o’-the-wisps, Each-Uisge or kelpies. The third group are people who have been affected by magic, but cannot control it werewolves, unlike Shetland’s wulver, are in the that third group. Those second and third groups are while people need wizards, even if they don’t know it, and, of course, that’s where I come in. Or at least, I am generally standing in the wrong spot when life intervenes. People in need of assistance have a way of bumping into me. Like I said, magic is subtle.

Geas is just a fancy word for suggestion and in my case the geas is a particularly clever bit of magic. It’s a compulsion that operates below the level of conscious thought. I find myself compelled to offer assistance and somehow the world conspires to put me in situations where people need the sort of assistance I can offer. Ask me another time about how I ended up with that geas in the first place. It’s an interesting story, but it has nothing to do with werewolves, or even West Virginia for that matter. Now, where was I?

Oh yes, chased by werewolves. Of course it was the geas that got me into that particular mess. But I should back up a bit if I want this to make sense.

There was a young man standing on my deck when I pulled the car into the driveway of my house. After working an eight hour shift at Supermart 13 I wasn’t in the mood for a Jehovah’s Witness. I sat in the car for a minute, seriously contemplating just driving off again. But of course he had seen me and I was brought up well, so I’m still far too polite for my own damn good. Sighing heavily and mainly for my own benefit, I got out of the car, showing just a hint of frustration in the way I slammed the door shut.

The young man slouched, nervously straightening the collar of his shirt as he watched me walk towards him. He seemed too well dressed to be anything but a Jehova’s Witness, but he lacked their usual calm certainty. Feeling suddenly sorry for the boy, I nodded in his direction and tried to force a smile on my face. I’m not sure it was very reassuring.

“Are you the… ah that is… the um… wizard?” The boy’s tone was almost apologetic for asking such an absurd question. Though clearly fully grown I had now definitely classified him as a boy rather than a man.

I nodded again, keeping my face neutral as I wondered just who this young stranger was. I don’t advertise. Well, would you? Even so, word of mouth is a remarkably powerful thing and I suppose it was just possible that I’d started to make a name for myself. That couldn’t possibly be a good thing.

“I was told you could help me. That you would know what to do about werewolves.” The boy rushed through the words as though desperate to get the request out.

I paused, trying to come up with an appropriate response. In fact I had no idea what to do about werewolves of any sort. With a little time I would probably be able to find out. But what exactly was I about to get myself into?

“You’d better come in.” This time I hoped my sigh was inaudible. I could stall for a while longer, but I was just going to end up agreeing to this anyway. Besides it was over 90 degrees so I might as well take advantage of the air conditioning while the geas screwed up my life one more time.

Turning my back on the boy, I unlocked the door and with a practiced kick pushed it open to let him in. Now you might wonder what on earth I was thinking letting a stranger into my house, but trust me when I tell you that there is nothing worth stealing. I call it a house, but it is in fact what is colloquially referred to as a double-wide.

Hey, I work at Supermart 13, what do you expect, a mansion?

Inside was messy, but not embarrassingly so. I briefly considered offering my visitor a drink, but decided I wasn’t in that good a mood. Turning to face the boy I looked him up and down, just to make him squirm a little. Yeah, I can be an ass.

“So. Werewolves.” I said.

*****

It turns out that Steven’s girlfriend was missing and the local authorities had little to no leads to work on. Sadly that’s not as uncommon as it ought to be. Young women go missing. You’ve all seen it on the news. And it doesn’t explain why Steven was convinced that werewolves had his girlfriend Naomi.

In fact as far as I could tell from his stammered and barely coherent story, the only connection at all was that Naomi had apparently mentioned them in some recent emails to him. Something he hadn’t taken very seriously up to now.

So a missing student who talked about werewolves. The more cynical amongst you may be wondering what sort of drugs young Naomi was sampling. I had a strong suspicion that I wasn’t being told everything, but it as I’ve already told you magic exists, and so do werewolves. Plus Steven clearly wasn’t going to leave my house until he at least got a promise of assistance out of me.

And I wanted him to leave my house so I could have some peace and quiet.

Do you know what wizards hate about promises? They’re binding. Everything in life has consequences. Every action a re-action. The closer you are to the ethereal web (don’t blame me, the name wasn’t my choice), the tighter you are bound to its effects. The consequences can be hard to measure, but the short version is… don’t make promises you don’t intend to keep!

“Let me do a little research.” I told him in what I hoped was a reassuring voice. “Come back and see me tomorrow evening and I’ll see what I can find out for you.” He seemed to buy it and I was able to usher him out of the door with only another fifteen minutes worth of assurances.

He wasn’t a bad kid, but people in their late teens are so dramatic about everything!

I closed the door with a sigh of relief and headed for the fridge. It was a little early for anything heavy so I grabbed a soda. Magic and alcohol is a risky combination. Slumping down on my rather battered sofa I rubbed my eyes. Now all I had to do was find out the connection, if any, between werewolves, a student named Naomi and the local university. All before I started my next shift. Easy!

I sat there and pitied myself for a little longer before deciding I’d better do what everyone does when they need information. I headed straight onto the internet. More specifically in my case I sent a message to Mercedes begging for help.

It’s not that I can’t use Google you understand. I’m young enough to be more than functional on the web. But Mercedes is exceptional. That woman has sources. Lots of sources. Or something. I really don’t know how she does what she does exactly. She’s a secretive sort. I don’t even know her last name. Sometimes it’s best not to ask too many questions and just appreciate the assistance when you get it.

Unfortunately for me, Mercedes wasn’t responding right now. So I went to my best source. The Wikipedia entry on werewolves offered up a number of theoretical explanations for the phenomenon (without actually admitting they exist mind you), but was annoyingly short on specifics.

Sadly while there’s a good body of research into the magical world, no one has got round to digitizing it yet. And there isn’t exactly a local mystical library in Charles Town.

Perhaps a more pedestrian approach was required. Time to visit the Shepherdstown Police Department and find out what they did know about this Naomi.

Warriors of the Deep – Pantomime Meets Cold War Nihilism

There should have been another way…

It has been noted that all Silurian stories are basically the same. That’s an over-simplification but one that has a bit of truth to it too. The Silurians told us a tale of two races effectively going to war for ownership of Earth and the Doctor trying to persuade both sides to talk to each other. The Sea Devils did much the same thing only with aquatic Silurians  and the Master. The plot beats were different but the core was the same. Warriors of the Deep is essentially telling the same story for a third time and on the surface it looks like they threw in a team-up just to freshen things up, but there’s a much cleverer mirror plot happening.

Consider when Warriors of the Deep aired. This is 1984 and the cold war is in full effect, the USSR and USA are rattling sabers at each other and for those of us growing up at the time, things feel tense. So this story of a base under-siege in a claustrophobic underwater setting where two powers threaten to destroy the world with their games doesn’t try to make the humans look any better than the aliens.

On paper this is a pretty bleak story. The message is that if you keep escalating all that happens is everyone dies, which is literally what happens in this story (spoilers!!). Just as with previous attempts at diplomacy the Doctor cannot make peace either between the humans and the Silurians or the humans and the humans. Every group is so locked into their own ideology and world-view that they can’t even attempt to engage with the other parties. That’s some decently sophisticated stuff for a tea-time kids show.

And let’s be clear, “family show” label aside at this stage, Doctor Who was aimed at kids. Look at the budget, look at the acting, look at everything about it, this was not a prime-time drama. If someone had been paying attention I’m pretty sure they’d have shot down this overtly political bit of storytelling. Believe it or not there were some more blatant references to a Cold War that were edited out.

What probably lets them get away with it is the presentation. Not just that it’s sci-fi which was a genre that was thoroughly looked down on in the 80s but the production values and staging.  Everything is too brightly lit (a common problem in 80s Who) which just makes the sets and costumes look even cheaper, but they were cheap. Production on this episode was rushed and it absolutely shows. The Myrka is in concept a classic Who monster but let’s be frank it looks like an outsized pantomime horse. There’s really no question that to a large extent production let the script down.

And yet…

If this had been given a more realistic treatment, it would have been so grim and miserable to watch. We’re seeing Eric Saward fully moving into his nihilistic phase here. Deaths are needlessly gory and by at least some accounts several of the deaths were not part of the original script but added by him. In a strange way the cheap and cheerful sets and the stagey acting may have not only allowed the story to get aired, but also allowed the message of the story to be presented without turning people off the show completely and creating howls of outrage in the press.

Can I imagine a version closer to Johnny Byrne’s one where the base is falling apart and half abandoned? Yeah, very atmospheric. Do I want to watch a version where characters are brutally murdered, gassed, electrocuted, mind controlled and where it feels real and hopeless because everyone fails? Not really and definitely not as a Doctor Who episode. The world is full of grim and gritty stories, Doctor Who needs to be something else. And so in its weird half-panto format this story works for me despite all the production flaws.

Laughter

I find it much easier to practice portrait photography on myself than on friends or family who often have limited patience with me wanting to tweak the flash levels, adjust try a different angle, or get just one more shot in. Take this photo for example, I was trying to achieve two things:

Get some updated head shots that I could use online or at workExperiment with low key portrait shots

For anyone not familiar low key portrait photography emphasizes the lights and darks. Generally you’ll see a very dark background with no distractions, and the only part of the face illuminated. It’s a striking look though one that in the end I did not fully capture with this image. While the background is I think suitably dimmed, most of my face is quite well lit, I suspect due to working with on-camera flash.

Although I did not achieve the look I was originally going for I’m really happy with this image. I took several shots with slightly different angles to them and most of them were more traditional headshots, but with this one I managed to capture myself laughing, not an easy thing to do when doing self-portraits.

Now I may need to invest in additional lighting to try low-key photography again.

The Power of the Daleks – Templates For the Future

In many ways The Power of the Daleks is a template for a lot of what follows, certainly for the 2nd Doctor, but also for the future of Doctor Who. On the one hand that speaks to how successful the story is at what it was trying to do, but on the other it can make a lot of it feel very familiar and predictable if you’ve watched a lot of later Who. 

We’ll start with the obvious, there’s a new Doctor in town, well on Vulcan anyway. At this point the show didn’t know what a regeneration was and didn’t even call it that, and as a result there’s a lot of audience hand-holding going on here. Ben and Polly stand in for the viewer at home asking all the questions that might be going through people’s minds. To established fans it may feel like it’s over done but it was needed at the time.

I really like the way the Doctor initially reacts to the regeneration and how that is visually and audibly represented, I rather wish that was something we saw more of with future regenerations. What is much more commonly used is the confusion the Doctor shows but it’s done well here, without being too heavy handed. As we have come to expect (with only a handful of exceptions) by the end of the first couple of episodes the Doctor has largely settled down into his new persona.

From there we move on to a classic Base Under Siege scenario. This is something that would become synonymous with Troughton’s 2nd Doctor. It’s a format that has the advantage of being comparatively inexpensive while providing lots of opportunities for action and tension. Strictly speaking, while it’s not a format that was used with Hartnell, I think that The Tenth Planet is usually listed as the first Base Under Siege. However, I would probably argue that is not a pure base under siege formula because while the Doctor and his companions do spend all their time on a base, a significant part of the action occurs elsewhere.

In the case of The Power of the Daleks though, the focus stays resolutely on the Doctor and team and while other parts of Vulcan are briefly referred to we never see them at all or any characters in these other places. Instead almost everything happens in a handful of rooms and tunnels. That focus gives the story a claustrophobic feeling but that just works to its advantage as we see the Daleks slowly manipulate their way into a position of strength and the Doctor is seemingly unable to do anything about it.

And speaking of the Daleks they are at their absolute creepiest here. Hearing them repeat “I am your Ser…vant.” is far more threatening than endless cries of “Exterminate.” or “Seek. Locate. Destroy.”

This is the Daleks at their absolute cleverest. They start in a very weak position but gradually curry favor and pit the various factions against each other until they have become the dominant force on the planet. As I mentioned earlier, to the modern eye none of this seems particularly original including the fascist imagery of the human guards but up to this point the Daleks had more been brute force villains rather than clever ones. So this is the base under siege in its purest form and executed so effectively that it created a sub-genre.

It’s not the most original or challenging script but it distills Doctor Who down into an essence with remarkable effectiveness. The Daleks are chilling in this story, the Doctor and his companions feel like they are really under threat. The pacing is tight by the standards of 60s Who and for a 6 part story there is relatively little padding as the story moves forward with each episode.

I think a case could be made that this is the story more than any other which secured Doctor Who’s future and which cemented what the show would look like. People often talk about how Doctor Who can be anything it wants to be and that’s half true. It has the latitude to play in a lot of different times, places and genres but there are still some expectations that the audience has when it sits down to watch the show and most of them can be found in this story.

Delicate Pastels

Another flower macro shot? What can I say, I’m rather enjoying them and of course it was a good time of year for flower shots anyway. My goal here was twofold. I wanted to focus the viewer’s eyes on the center of the flower where I had captured the most detail and I wanted to really bring out the soft pastel colors of the flower petals.

I used my 25mm f1.7 lens for this shot. From a shot composition perspective that creates some challenges. As I’ve mentioned before it’s not an actual macro lens which means I do have to crop quite heavily to have the interesting part of the image take up the frame given the narrow depth of field. In this case I changed the aperture to f3.2 which is still quite shallow. But there’s a reason for that. I had my shutter speed at 125th of a second because there was a noticeable breeze blowing. While a higher f-stop would have given more depth of field which might have been nice, it would also have reduced my shutter speed or forced me to increase my ISO introducing noise into the image. Given that I knew I would have to crop, I really couldn’t afford either of those things.

I think this stresses the importance of taking your time with this type of photography and finding the absolute best settings. Some things you an fix or enhance in post but blurry shots and heavy noise are not among them.

“The flower that follows the sun does so even in cloudy days.”

Robert Leighton

Fortunately I had done a decent job of exposing the image. It could have stood to be a bit brighter but all the information was present so I could make my adjustments without adding noticeable noise. I didn’t want the image to be cloudy or dull though, I wanted it to be bright and warm. So I reversed my usual technique of a Gradient filter and had the center darker and the outside lighter .This still draws the eye to the flower but creates a brighter image overall.

Next up was some tweaking of the color palette using the HSL panel which allows me to tweak the saturation and luminance of various colors to draw out the color of the petals a little. And my final edit was to drop down the Clarity and Dehaze sliders while increasing the texture and contrast sliders. This gives a slight blurring while maintaining detail and works well for a soft, pastel type of image so long as you don’t go overboard.

All in all these were pretty minor adjustments to the image but they reinforce my firm belief that editing your images is part of the art of photography. It’s not just about what is physically there, it’s about what you see in your mind and conveying that to people who see the photos.

The Tenth Planet – Equipped to Survive

The Tenth Planet is famous for two things. Primarily because it’s William Hartnell’s last story and secondarily but also significantly for being the first appearance of the Cybermen. There are some interesting if perhaps unintentional parallels between these two things.

Tenth Planet starts in a pretty traditional way for Doctor Who at the time with the Doctor and our companions once again failing to get to the right place and stumbling into a situation. While entirely studio bound and confined to a very small number of sets, this story attempts a large scale and does so quite effectively on a tiny budget.

While the cast is painfully stereotypical at times, and the less said about the accents the better,  the diversity of nationalities definitely adds to the feel that this is an international situation, though it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that even in the far future of 1986 women still know their place and that is to make the coffee!

The story builds slowly, fading between scenes to set the stage and the initial focus is on the astronauts and their problems. It isn’t until very late in the first episode that any Cybermen make their appearance but things really never stops moving and unlike many stories of the time I don’t think there’s much padding here at all. It’s not revolutionary but it’s well constructed with smaller challenges and some strong personal motivation for General Cutler propelling things along.

Depending on who you ask the Modassian Cybermen are either masterpieces of body horror or incredibly cheap looking with tape holding their costumes together. The truth is of course, both. One of the reasons they work is because unlike later versions they are very obviously not robots and the people can be seen beneath the costumes. As they conveniently explain to us:

We are called Cybermen. We were exactly like you once, but our race was getting weak. Our life spans were getting shorter, so our doctors and scientists devised spare parts for our bodies until we could be completely replaced.

The Tenth Planet

They aren’t the only people who are getting weak though nor the only people whose bodies are going to get completely replaced. The Doctor notes that his body is “wearing a bit thin” as an explanation for his collapse in part 3. This wasn’t part of the script originally but an excuse to cover Harnell being unwell. As a result of this the Doctor is not a dominant part of the story although he does bring a sense of moral authority to various scenes he is present in.

Most of the elements that we see in modern Cybermen are present here at the beginning. They do come in large numbers, they are strong yet still vulnerable and lack independent personalities. However the thing that drives them here and that seems to be missing in so many Cyberman stories is the need to survive.

Their origin as stated in that quote above makes it clear that they exist in this form because it was the only way they could come up with to survive. Similarly the reason they brought Mondas back to Earth was to steal its energy so they could survive. Let’s not dwell too much on the 60’s sci-fi logic here and just take it at face value. They show no interest in dominating humans beyond taking advantage of them to extend their survival. Nothing about them really suggests they care about conquering or territorial expansion of any sort.

The theme of survival runs throughout the story. General Cutler is your generic gung-ho gun-loving US stereotype but he seems like a decent enough commander until his own son is threatened and after that his actions are driven by the desperate need for his son to survive and that leads him to do increasingly irrational things. While the Cybermen pride themselves on the logic of their actions, they have removed their heart and “improved” themselves so they think this is a rational step, but in doing so they have ceased to be human as Polly shows in her discussion with them, so was that really a rational thing to do or did the need to survive push them to irrational actions too?

And of course there is the Doctor. This script was originally written without the regeneration (though it wasn’t called that at the time) and as a result there isn’t a lot of build up to it and this isn’t a story about the Doctor particularly, but in the end he faces his own fight for survival and, with the conspicuous help of the TARDIS he is rejuvenated. It’s a very different regeneration to the ones which come later, but I really appreciate the simplicity of it. In comparison to the Cybermen the Doctor does not at any point seem willing to put others at risk in order to survive, in fact he makes a point of getting to the TARDIS on his own and keeping his companions outside.

You can also look at this as the show fighting for survival too. Changing the lead of the show like this is a desperation move with no guarantees of success, or at least that would have been how it seemed at the time. As it turns out it was exactly what the show needed in order to equip it for survival. While the ratings for Troughton may not have been as stellar as they had been during Hartnell’s Dalekmania period, the show had established that it could adapt and it would continue to do so.

The Spider in the Dandelion

Another macro shot with my 25mm f1.7 lens. When I started taking that shot my main goal was to see how much of the Dandelion I could get into focus and I was so intent on that I missed the spider at first.

As usual with these macros I knew I would have t do some heavy cropping to eliminate a lot of dead space around the dandelion. So I wanted to make sure that the image was as sharp as possible and there was very little if any noise. Moving my f-stop to with an I SO of 250 and a shutter speed of 1/320 second eliminated the risk of any motion blur while keeping noise low and giving me a reasonable depth of field. In fact given the strength of the sun I could probably have reduced ISO further and increased my f-stop a little higher.

It was only at that point after fiddling with my settings that I looked at the image again through the viewfinder and noticed the spider. I adjusted my position a little to make sure that it too was in focus because I think it adds something a little different to the image.

I knew before taking this shot that it was probably going to be in black and white. I was taking photos outside, in the middle of the afternoon on a bright and sunny day. That lighting creates really harsh and contrasty shadows which, for the most part, don’t look good in color. So the first thing I did on importing this into Lightroom was to convert it to Adobe monochrome. Then I cropped in as tight as I could get away with and dropped the Clarity Slider while pumping up the Contrast. After that I applied three radial filters for more local adjustments.

Darken the background, decrease the Clarity further to make it as smooth as possibleLighten the Dandelion itself and bump up the texture so the individual seeds stand outJust a tiny amount of darkening on the spider so it is clearly visible separate from the Dandelion.

I’m really pleased with how this one turned out.