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Doctor Who: Season 14

The Doctor continues to travel in time and space, but an emergency summons from his homeworld of Gallifrey results in him having to travel home alone to confront an old nemesis.

Season 14 of Doctor Who aired from 1976 to 1977 and is the last of three seasons produced by Philip Hinchcliffe. Under the stewardship of Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes, and impeccably led by Tom Baker, the series had acquired impressive critical results, with some of the highest-rated stores in the entire Who canon being made under their leadership, as well as excellent ratings. But the show had also attracted heavy criticism for leaving the kids behind and becoming too dark and adult. The show was relentlessly targeted by groups determined that the show should become safe, sanitised and predictable, something Hinchliffe and Holmes were not interested in.

The BBC was more minded to listen to the criticisms, though, and had to concede that Season 13's focus on horror had perhaps gone tad over the top for a show aimed at a family audience. Hinchliffe decided to leave at the end of Season 14, with Holmes likewise deciding to depart but he was asked to stay on into Season 15 to ease the transition. However, before they left, they clearly decided to give the complainers something to really complain about.

The season starts off relatively placidly, with The Masque of Mandragora, possibly one of the most forgotten-about stories in Doctor Who history. It's certainly not bad, but compared to the heavy hitters later in the season it's definitely flown under the radar. The story sees the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith inadvertently let the TARDIS be boarded by a hostile alien presence, the Mandragora Helix, which they unwittingly unleash in 15th Century San Marino. A guilty Doctor works to recapture the Helix whilst navigating political intrigue between Count Federico and his nephew Giuliano, whom he is trying to stop becoming the local Duke.

This is a reasonably good story, with some nice period detail. The serial was shot on location in Portmeirion, Wales (where The Prisoner was famously shot) where there were some buildings that at least looked the right ballpark for the time and region, which added a higher sense of production value, as did the superb costumes. The story itself is quite nicely executed, but the political scheming (despite riffing on Hamlet a lot) feels more interesting than the actual alien threat. I sometimes wonder if the story would have been better as a pure historical without the aliens. A good story without being too flashy. As a point of trivia, this is also the very first time - fourteen years into the show! - that someone asks how they can understand all the people they meet when they must be speaking wildly different languages.

The Hand of Fear starts off extremely dramatically: the Doctor and Sarah arrive in a quarry (an actual quarry for once, not one posing as a planet) and almost immediately get blown up in a construction accident. Sarah is possessed by a malevolent alien entity trying to regenerate its form from a single severed hand that landed on Earth millennia ago and storms into a nuclear power station to use its radiation to that end. This is a strong start that carries the story through most of its opening three episodes, with the sight of Sarah, wielding alien firepower, single-handedly storming a nuclear power plant being quite memorable ("ELDRAD MUST LIVE!"). The guest cast is compelling, and the prosthetics work for Judith Paris as the alien Eldrad is exceptional for the time.

Things drop off a cliff in the fourth episode, unfortunately, with the events on the alien homeworld being decidedly less interesting and Judith Paris' more skilled performance being replaced by Stephen Thorne's more bombastic and blustering one (revisiting his role as Omega in The Three Doctors). The resolution to the threat is also a bit ludicrous. This can be forgiven a little as they had to rush the end to the story to accommodate Elisabeth Sladen's decision to leave the show. Holmes outlined a loose ending which Tom Baker and Sladen disliked, so they rewrote it themselves to be more emotionally affecting. The normally magnificently aloof Baker gives one of his most emotional performances as he tries to get Sarah home and apparently succeeds (though, as we found out thirty years later, he was actually off by a few hundred miles), whilst Sarah's visible mixed feelings on going home versus continuing to adventure in time and space are well-sold by Sladen. Without this scene, the story would be a lot weaker.

The next story can only be described as a total gamechanger. The Deadly Assassin takes us back to Gallifrey, which we've visited very fleetingly before in The War Games and The Three Doctors, but never in this detail. The whole story takes place on Gallifrey and sees the Doctor return home and almost immediately be implicated in the assassination of the President of the High Council of Time Lords.

This is a remarkable story, first up for being the only Classic Doctor Who story where the Doctor has no companion for the whole story. There are some stories where he starts off with no companion but rapidly acquires one, but this is the only one where he has none at all, and this nearly continued for at least the rest of the season, but the writers found it so tough not being able to have the Doctor provide exposition to another character they changed their minds on that. It's also the story that rewrites our conception of the Time Lords, here presented as a stuffy, somewhat ossified species with unbelievable power but no will to use it, and instead consumed by their own internal concerns. It's also the story that establishes a lot of Time Lord iconography, including their costumes, ranks, government system, the Panopticon, the Matrix and the twelve-regeneration limit for Time Lords (something Steven Moffat didn't appreciate during his tenure when the Doctor hit the limit during his period in charge).

This is also the Doctor Who story - airing in 1976! - that adds its bit to the rise of the cyberpunk genre. The Time Lord computer system is identified as "the Matrix" and the Doctor interfaces with it through a VR simulation, eight years before Gibson. Doctor Who is rarely at the cutting edge of the latest science fiction subgenre, but here it was way ahead of the game.

The story hinges not just on an imperious performance by Tom Baker but an outstanding guest cast: Angus MacKay as Borusa (in the first of many appearances by the character), Bernard Horsfall as Chancellor Goth (probably the same Time Lord he played in The War Games), Erik Chitty as Engin and a splendid George Pravda as Castellan Spandrell, the Gallifreyan Poirot. We also have Peter Pratt becoming the second actor to play the Master, taking over from the sadly late Roger Delgado who passed away after Season 10 was filmed, delaying further appearances by the character. The Master's horrific visage, caused by a failed final regeneration, is a bit undercut by the prosthetics work being quite poor, but the idea of the Master, ravaged in agony, spending the last moments of his life trying to kill the Doctor and destroy Gallifrey, is appropriately evil. This is a great story that recontextualises a lot of what we know about the Doctor and his homeworld in a very entertaining way.

The Face of Evil, a disappointing and thankfully uncharacteristically mediocre script by future Blake's 7 showrunner Chris Boucher, drops the quality level significantly, although the idea - two descendant tribes of a crashed spaceship crew feuding with one another - is sound. The story tries to recapture the magic from the previous season's Planet of Evil, with a similarly impressive jungle set, but this set is less-successful, and they don't shoot it on film as much so it ends up looking cheaper. The central core threat of a mad computer system inadvertently driven insane by the Doctor during a prior visit which the Doctor barely remembers is also interesting, but under-explored, and not helped by the Tesh tribe being awful in both characterisation and costuming. That said, the story is buoyed to a high level by Louise Jameson's impressive performance as Leela, which is really above what the story deserves. It's unsurprising that the writers immediately decided to make her the new companion.

Boucher returns with The Robots of Death, an immensely superior script. The Doctor and Leela arrive on a massive sandcrawler where very rich miners try to keep their quality of life absurdly high by taking crazy risks, including crewing the crawler with a bunch of hyperintelligent robots who, surprise, rebel. More interesting is that some of the robots - which are all a marvellous design - have distinct personalities, goals and ideals, not all of them hostile. This is a story inspired a lot by classic science fiction, with a bunch of references to the works of Isaac Asimov and Frederick Pohl, and with some great pacing and characterisation, including a splendid guest turn by Pamela Salem (who will later return in Remembrance of the Daleks).

The story is let down a little by the story's descent into a fairly predictable pattern later on, and also by the higher-than-average bodycount, which the Doctor really doesn't seem to give much of a toss about. The Fourth Doctor disdains unnecessary death and destruction, but he also doesn't seem to be as remorseful as his predecessors or successors (excluding maybe Six) when a bunch of people die. The story also has a very abrupt ending, as if they almost had too much story for four episodes and had to cut hard.

The final story of the season is one of Doctor Who's most acclaimed moments, The Talons of Weng-Chiang. It's easy to see why the story has gained the reputation it has. The production design is absolutely remarkable, the sets numerous and exquisite, the guest cast is on fire, Tom Baker and Louise Jameson are establishing a really interesting rapport, and Robert Holmes' script is witty, clever and accomplished.

The story essentially has the Fourth Doctor playing Sherlock Holmes, investigating the disappearance of a number of women in late Victorian London. He allies with the local police, gentleman doctor Professor Litefoot (Trevor Baxter) and showman Henry Jago (Christopher Benjamin). I get the impression that Holmes inadvertently let Litefoot and Jago take over the script, and the two actors rise to the occasion with two of the best guest turns in Who history (a spin-off TV show was even mooted, and eventually realised as an audio series for Big Finish). For a six-parter, the pacing is crisp and Holmes keeps inventing new ideas, plot twists and turns to make the story really sing.

Unfortunately, the story hits a bunch of stumbling blocks. A key one is that the experienced actor John Bennett has a spectacular turn as the villain Li He'sen Chang, but he is sidelined as the story goes on by Weng-Chiang, played by Michael Spice, a graduate of the Stephen Thorne School of Shouty Acting (not as good as the Brian Blessed one) and a vastly less compelling villain. There is also a problem with the story's requisite monster, a giant rat. The rat looks bloody awful, not quite Invasion of the Dinosaurs awful, but not far off. More annoying is that the rat is really extraneous to the story at hand and could have been disposed of without a problem.

There is also a bizarre problem here with the decision to cast a very English actor as a Chinese villain. Britain in the 1970s had plenty of actors of Chinese descent available to play the role, and Doctor Who had even previously gone down that route just five years before this story in The Mind of Evil, which used British-Asian and Hong Kong (then administered by Britain) actors to good effect

 (negating the traditional, "well, it was the style at the time" excuse). Using both yellowface and prosthetics to make the actor appear Chinese feels rather unnecessary, and only exacerbated because the character is not even the main villain of the story.

Finally, that issue of the Fourth Doctor appearing a bit uncaring about the titanic number of casualties in the previous story recurs here to an even larger decree: the Doctor cracks jokes about a guy who is basically murdered right in front of him. There's a thin line between having a more practical Doctor who shrugs off immediate crises to focus on resolving the situation, and one who appears uncaring and even cruel. Arguably this story crosses that line, even if only slightly.

Despite all of that, Talons is still a terrific story with an immense script which sees out the Philip Hinchcliffe era in style. It's hard to overemphasise how incredibly successful these three seasons have been, contributing at least seven stories that hold a claim to being the best Doctor Who stories of all time (The Ark in Space, Genesis of the Daleks, Pyramids of Mars, The Brain of Morbius, The Deadly Assassin, The Robots of Death and The Talons of Weng-Chiang; some also add The Seeds of Doom). Hinchcliffe would be a very hard act to follow, as Graham Williams discovered very quickly.

Season 14 of Doctor Who (****½) is a terrific success, with only The Face of Evil being slightly disappointing and that still being buoyed by a mighty performance by Louise Jameson. It's sad to see Sarah Jane leave, though she does at least depart with two great stories for her character, and Leela is a fascinating replacement, though one the show will struggle more and more to accommodate in future stories. But this season contains at least three of the best Doctor Who stories ever made, and the rest are not too shabby. An impressive season, but not one to watch with little children.

The season is available on DVD and limited edition Blu-Ray. The regular edition Blu-Ray should be out later this year. The season is also available on BBC iPlayer in the UK, and on various overseas streaming services.

• 14.1 - 14.4: The Masque of Mandragora (****)
• 14.5 - 14.8: The Hand of Fear (***½)
• 14.9 - 14.12: The Deadly Assassin (*****)
• 14.13 - 14.16: The Face of Evil (***)
• 14.17 - 14.20: The Robots of Death (****½)
• 14.21 - 14.26: The Talons of Weng-Chiang (****½)

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

One night on stage in Toronto, famous actor Arthur Leander dies of a heart attack. The same evening, a deadly virus arrives in North America, spreading with unprecedented speed. Two decades later, a young actor who worked previously with Arthur is now a performer in the Travelling Symphony, performing Shakespeare whilst travelling a grand circle around Lake Michigan. When members of the Symphony disappear after visiting a town frightened by a figure known as "the prophet," events set in motion before and during the pandemic begin to converge.

Station Eleven was published in 2014 and has since been widely acclaimed, winning the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel in 2015 and being adapted as a well-received HBO mini-series.

The novel is unusual, given that it employs standard post-apocalyptic fiction tropes without seeming to be hugely interested in indulging them. The post-apocalyptic sequences hint several times at a capability to go all Walking Dead, overwrought-but-entertaining melodrama with absurdly larger-than-life villains, but Mandel avoids that cliche; she likewise avoids the temptation to go fully-stripped-back minimalism like The Road. Instead the story circles between and lands on an idea the novel itself notes was lifted from an episode of Star Trek: Voyager written by Ronald D. Moore: "survival is insufficient." It is not merely enough to survive a massive, world-changing traumatic event, life afterwards has to be worth living, through friendships and the creation and enjoyment of art and stories.

As a result the focus of the story is on Arthur Leander, a deeply flawed man who can't make relationships work and enjoys the trappings of fame too much, but who also suffers from constant imposter syndrome and fearing he is not as good an actor as people say he is. Mandel tries to make him a sympathetic human through his immense flaws, though how successful that is will vary by reader. Even when Leander is not on the page - which is quite a lot of the book as he dies on the opening page - his decisions continue to have an impact on the people he knew, and the impact of their actions on others. I must admit that Leander wasn't a particularly compelling character to me and I'd have much rather followed the story of Miranda, the author of the titular Station Eleven comic book whose surviving issues have an impact on several people in the post-apocalyptic timeline, but her story gets relatively short shrift. Given she gets a cameo appearance in the author's subsequent book, The Glass Hotel, I wonder if the author agreed.

Because of the trifurcated narrative, the book sometimes feels more like an anthology than a novel. We have several episodes from Arthur's life, either done in flashback from his POV or various friends and contacts (like Miranda), and several from the pandemic itself ravaging the world. These sequences are horrifying and well-done, but Mandel seems unwilling to dwell on the apocalypse itself, more on the before and after. We then get further episodes in the post-apocalyptic storyline, with Kirsten in the Travelling Symphony, and another friend of Arthur's as he is marooned at a remote airport and helps turn it into a new township, possibly the first new one to emerge after the pandemic.

All of these dispersed story elements come together at the end in a manner that is thematically satisfying, but highly coincidental. Maybe if the characters were unaware of their connections to Arthur, this idea would have worked as a piece of irony, but the fact that multiple people with this connection to Arthur all run into one another in this location twenty years later and remark on it risks feeling contrived. The other complaint about the novel, that despite the apocalyptic backdrop featuring the destruction of civilisation as we know it, it ends up feeling slight, was for me not a major problem. The book not descending into cliched conflicts between disparate groups of survivors was a major plus for me. We've seen that too many times before.

Station Eleven (****) is a fine, restrained novel about the creation, propagation and enjoyment of art, which just happens to feature an apocalyptic event to make that point more loudly. Mandel's prose is elegant, her character skills are fine. At just 330 pages in paperback despite a multi-pronged narrative with a large number of POV characters and three different timelines, it even occasionally feels a bit rushed, as if Mandel developed more plot points than she'd perhaps originally envisaged exploring. Still, an interesting, concise and mature novel.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Foundation: Season 2

The Galactic Empire is showing some early signs of the decline prophesised by Hari Seldon and his science of psychohistory. Unnerved, the Genetic Triumvirate of the Cleon Dynasty plan to shore up their position by marrying Queen Sareth I of the Cloud Dominion, a powerful ally, and employing the formidable General Bel Riose to neutralise the Foundation, now resurgent as a religious force in the galaxy. Meanwhile, Gaal Dornick and Salvor Hardin find themselves working together with a copy of Hari Seldon's consciousness to fulfil a key part of his design: the establishment of a Second Foundation.

The first season of Apple TV+'s Foundation was a very qualified, partial success. The vfx, music and general atmosphere and mood were all very accomplished, as were the performances of Lee Pace, Terrence Mann, Cassian Bilton, Lou Llobell, Laura Birn and Jared Harris. The political intrigue and scheming on the Imperial capital world of Trantor was also very well-done, justifying the show's informal tagline of being "Game of Thrones in space." Unfortunately, the show's quality level dipped rather wildly whenever it returned to the storyline of Terminus, the Foundation and Salvor Hardin; the weakest part of Foundation was the actual bit about the Foundation and adapted (loosely) from Isaac Asimov's source material. Pacing was also problematic.

Season 2 picks up the baton by adapting, also loosely, the second novel of the original Foundation Trilogy, Foundation and Empire. However, the season benefits a great deal from having all of its disparate plot threads converge at the same point, meaning the season has a much greater sense of coherence and structure from the start. The addition of Ella-Rae Smith as Queen Sareth, Sandra Yi Sncindiver as Sareth's advisor Rue, and Ben Daniels as Bel Riose are all excellent. The show's conceit of having the same three actors playing not just the Emperor at different stages of life, but clones of them repeating across generations also allows Terrence Mann, Lee Pace and Cassian Bilton to effectively play new characters. The season also has a dramatically increased screen presence for Jared Harris, who's heavy use in the marketing and almost total absence from Season 1 felt a bit like bait-and-switch marketing. Harris is more present in Season 2 and has a more satisfying storyline.

The season builds to an impressively epic finale, though Asimov purists, probably more satisfied by a closer following of the book then the first up to this point, may end up spitting blood at a pretty major divergence from the events in the novels. Those less wedded to the original texts will find much to admire here with impressive dramatic and vfx set-pieces established with solid character arcs and intriguing politicking. It helps that the show is allowed to be a character drama rather than emphasising explosions and action. Pacing is also much-improved, though some of the events with the founding of the Second Foundation threaten to chug a little.

Foundation's second season (****) represents an impressive improvement over the first season, with stronger writing, dialogue and characterisation, although some minor flaws remain. But the show is on a pleasingly improved trajectory.

The season is available to watch on Apple TV+ now. A third season is currently airing on the same service.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Doctor Who: Season 13

The Doctor has been called back to Earth by the Brigadier to investigate a new threat in Scotland, but his ties to Earth and UNIT are becoming stretched. The Doctor once again yearns to travel in time and space in search of mystery, adventure...and horror.

Season 13 of Doctor Who, airing from 1975 to 1976, marked another shift in tone. The last script commissioned in the Barry Letts/Terrance Dicks era was shot for this season and Philip Hinchliffe and Robert Holmes took over in full force. It's the first season where their vision of a show aimed at an older audience really kicks in, and it's the season that finally kills off the traditional "UNIT format" of the Doctor working alongside UNIT and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart on Earth that has dominated the show since Season 7. Season 12 began shutting down that format, and Season 13 finally ends it altogether. This season also marks a new format, still with 26 half-hour episodes, but now making up six stories, with only one six-parter and more four-parters. This makes things a bit snappier.

This is also, easily, Doctor Who's darkest and more horror-infused season to date (and possibly ever, though Season 14 is also in that conversation). Each of these stories is heavily inspired/influenced by a classic horror story, sometimes several, and it's no surprise this move was highly controversial, with the show taking heavy criticism from various viewers' groups concerned that the show had become too disturbing for children to watch.

Terror of the Zygons kicks us off with a story that's a huge amount of fun. We're in Scotland and local oil rigs are being attacked by an unknown force. The Doctor helps UNIT investigate, uncovering the threat of the alien Zygons, shapeshifters who can take on the form of humans. This is a bonkers story that has an absolute ton of crazy ideas (an alien posing as Harry, a cyborg Loch Ness Monster, organic alien technology), some very good prosthetics work and some very nice dialogue and characterisation, particularly of the Brigadier. It's not Doctor Who's subtlest hour and the Skarasen's stop-motion model shots are overly ambitious, but it's a fun story. It's also the effective end of the traditional UNIT era, and the last appearance of the Brigadier for over seven years. It's also the least horror-driven story of the season, though the shapeshifting aliens do recall Invasion of the Body-Snatchers.

Planet of Evil is a more direct homage to Forbidden Planet (itself a take on The Tempest, of course). The Doctor and Sarah arrive on a jungle planet with an invisible creature lurking in the jungle, a scientific expedition meddling with things they don't understand and a military back-up expedition about to arrive and complicate things further. The star of the show is the terrific alien jungle set, which the BBC loved so much they even let the team shoot a lot of it on film to make it look more convincing. Unfortunately, it goes a bit to waste as the second half of the story is mostly set on a spacecraft with some fairly nondescript visuals. The story has a lot of promise, but it's let down by the starship captain over-acting and the Doctor and Sarah having to spend about two-thirds of the story trying to prove their trustworthiness versus the blatant alien creature killing people. A shame as there's a lot of potential here, but it's a fun watch.

Pyramids of Mars has acquired a reputation of being almost unassailably superb over the years, and Russell T. Davies loved it so much he made a direct sequel to it in Series 14 of Modern Who. The main influence here is from every Egyptian and mummy-based horror story that came before it. The plot revolves around servants of the powerful alien Sutekh trying to free him from his prison which is powered by a structure on Mars. The story has a cracking pace with some fine acting from the likes of Michael Sheard, Bernard Archard and Gabriel Woolf, and some good action beats with a minimum of the "Doctor getting captured for half the story" shenanigans that have bogged down some recent serials. Sutekh is also a formidable, pitiless foe with an imposing presence. The late shift to a Crystal Maze-alike series of puzzles on Mars is a bit odd though, and feels like a close retread of Death to the Daleks (something that Sarah even notes in dialogue), with a rushed conclusion. Pyramids is still a very good story, but perhaps marginally overrated.

The Android Invasion is a Terry Nation story not to feature the Daleks, only his second script of that kind (after Season 1's The Keys of Marinus, twelve seasons earlier). Instead it opens with the Doctor and Sarah arriving in a rural English village which gets really weird, very quickly. There's a vague Wicker Man "cosy" horror angle here which is quite interesting, although the android duplicates risk feeling a bit too similar to Terror of the Zygons. There's one very clever plot twist, a lot of running around and some fun action scenes - including the Doctor memorably giving up on smart-arse dialogue or scientific exploration and just diving head-first through a window - but it feels like the story runs out of steam towards the end. The story is particularly disappointing as being a UNIT story lacking the Brigadier, and for being the final swansong of both Harry Sullivan and Benton (the latter bowing out having appeared in at least one story every season from Seasons 6 to 13, a formidable track record) but not really giving either character much interesting to do. Still, it's an entertaining story.

The Brain of Morbius goes full bonkers, riffing on Frankenstein but throwing enough curveballs to make it interesting. The Doctor and Sarah arrive on Karn, a planet near Gallifrey, where the scientist Solon (Philip Madoc) desperately seeks a humanoid head to house the brain of executed Time Lord criminal Morbius, whilst avoiding the wrath of the enigmatic Sisterhood of Karn. The barmy plot is offset by Philip Madoc's magnificently controlled performance as Solon and the effective, extremely weird vibe of the Sisterhood. But this is easily Doctor Who's most horrific story premise yet, with Solon waxing lyrical about cracking open the Doctor's skull and replacing his brain with Morbius', Sarah spending a chunk of the story blind, and a monster made out of the bits of other creatures. It's very effective but maybe let down a little by plot logic: why is the Doctor so quick to trust Solon again after he tries to crack his head open like an egg? And if the Sisterhood can peer inside Solon's lab to kidnap the Doctor, why can't they do the same to monitor his attempts to resurrect their foe Morbius? Still, very good stuff, especially Elisabeth Sladen's "blind acting" selling you on the absolute terror of her predicament.

The Seeds of Doom is our solitary six-parter for the season and it's clear that the writers decided to go overboard in trying to avert the normal pacing problems associated with long-haul stories. The first two episodes are effectively their own tale with the Doctor and Sarah visiting an isolated research base in the Antarctic where the discovery of alien pods in the permafrost naturally results in a horrific creature running amok. This is The Thing from Another World with a light dollop of Mountains of Madness thrown in for good measure. Eventually the threat, and thus the Doctor and Sarah, relocate to England where one of the alien pods is hatched out in the country retreat of the eccentric plant expert Harrison Chase, leading to further shenanigans.

It's all good fun, with a great guest turn from a pre-Only Fools & Horses John Challis, and a solid villainous turn from Tony Beckley as Harrison Chase. But it's definitely still a somewhat thin story, with the country house setting and tiny cast not really helping the latter four episodes with their pacing. It also tries to segue into being a UNIT story, but with no recurring UNIT characters available, that connection feels a bit unnecessary. It's clear the writers agreed, as this would become the last UNIT story of any kind until Season 26's Battlefield, a full thirteen seasons later.

Season 13 of Doctor Who (****½) is terrific viewing, with no real duds. When your weakest stories are still as enjoyable as Planet of Evil and The Android Invasion, and your strongest are of the quality of Pyramids of Mars, it's not really possible to complain. This is a very strong season of Doctor Who, even if the show is very clearly moving away from its original family-friendly vibe at a rate of knots, something that will only accelerate hard in the next season.

Some caveats with this season. The season is available on DVD and will be released later this year on Blu-Ray. The season is available on the BBC iPlayer and some other international streaming platforms, but due to a rights issue, Terror of the Zygons and The Seeds of Doom are both missing. I ended up buying those two stories on DVD and then watching iPlayer for the rest. When and if this problem will be rectified remains unclear.

• 13.1 - 13.4: Terror of the Zygons (****)
• 13.5 - 13.8: Planet of Evil (***½)
• 13.9 - 13.12: Pyramids of Mars (****½)
• 13.13 - 13.16: The Android Invasion (***½)
• 13.17 - 13.20: The Brain of Morbius (****½)
• 13.20 - 13.26: The Seeds of Doom (****)

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

The original author of the Dragonlance Chronicles (not!) revealed for the very first time

Update: YoDanno has retracted the claim, after Margaret Weis confirmed the contract was for a Western series of novels and not Dragonlance.

Way back in 1983, when TSR was plotting what they called "Project Overlord", they had a plan for a line of gaming materials and a line of tie-in novels. Margaret Weis would edit the novels and Tracy Hickman, along with TSR's editorial team, would oversee the whole story and the gaming materials. TSR hired a "proper" science fiction/fantasy author of significant experience to write the books, similar to how SFF megastar Andre Norton had written the first Greyhawk novel a few years earlier under Gary Gygax's direction.

However, that author failed to deliver. It's been suggested that they kept creating their own plot twists and story ideas (that dragged the story away from the outline, which it needed to stick to to tie-in properly with the gaming storyline), and basically were not gelling. Eventually TSR cancelled the contract and Weis & Hickman agreed to join forces to write the novels directly, with the rest becoming history: The Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy, by some estimates, is the biggest-selling epic fantasy trilogy of the 1980s.

The identity of that original author has never been revealed, at least until today. Dragonlance historian YoDanno received a copy of the TSR contract confirming that SFF author Ron Goulart (1933-2022) was the original contracted author for the trilogy. Goulart worked extensively in SFF media tie-ins, as well as mysteries and original fiction, and is known to have been the "actual" author of the TekWar series, working on an outline provided by William Shatner.

This wasn't the first time a relative SFF "big name" nearly got involved in the franchise. In 2009 Jim Butcher, author of The Dresden Files and the Codex Alera series, was asked to write a "reboot" of the original trilogy. Butcher came on board under the impression that the project had the approval of Weis & Hickman, only to withdraw when it became clear that was not the case. Weis & Hickman have subsequently returned with new Dragonlance novels.

Doctor Who: Season 12

The Doctor has regenerated, to the mild consternation of his UNIT colleagues and companion Sarah Jane Smith. This new Doctor is less wedded to Earth and his work with UNIT, and is eager to resume his adventures in time and space. But a demonstration of the TARDIS to UNIT surgeon Harry Sullivan sets in motion a chain of events that'll see the Doctor and his companions marooned on different planets and in times without the TARDIS to rely on. It's going to be a long trip home.

The twelfth season of Doctor Who marked a significant change in the show's production. The team that had guided the show for the five previous years - star Jon Pertwee, producer-showrunner Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks - were all moving on. Philip Hinchcliffe came on board as the new executive producer, whilst veteran Who scriptwriter Robert Holmes was promoted to script editor and head writer. Letts and Dicks stayed on for the first story of Season 12 and to help cast the new Doctor, but then moved on.

For the new Doctor, the BBC had a quandary that the higher-profile actors they'd sought in the past were getting higher pay in film and on stage then the BBC could realistically afford, and Jon Pertwee in particular had felt that the show's gruelling production schedule and action made it a tough proposition (albeit not helped by fifty-something Pertwee insisting on doing many stunts and action scenes himself). One idea had been to return more to the familial setup of the show's origins, with an older Doctor dispensing wise advice, a female companion to act the audience surrogate and ask important questions, and a younger male companion to handle the action. To this end writer-actor Ian Marter, who had already impressed as a different role in Carnival of Monsters, was cast as UNIT surgeon Harry Sullivan. Subsequently Barry Letts decided to cast Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor after seeing him in the film The Golden Voyages of Sinbad, and with Baker only being ten years older than Marter this rationale disappeared.

Hinchcliffe and Holmes decided to take the show in a consciously "darker", more adult direction. Holmes in particular decided the show had gone as far as it could whilst taking into consideration six or eight-year-olds might be watching, and informally decided that the minimum age for watching the show should be ten to twelve, capable of handling more adult subject matter. He also wanted to make the show genuinely scary again and to get kids hiding behind the sofa, something he felt had not been the case during the avuncular Pertwee era. This would eventually become highly controversial, with their run (Seasons 12-14) attracting fierce criticism for violent and disturbing content. However, their run would also be hugely critically acclaimed, generating at least half a dozen stories that could all credibly do battle for the title of "best Doctor Who story ever."

Season 12 demonstrates this starkly: there is a massive shift and tone from the first story, Robot (the last produced by Letts and Dicks) to the second, The Ark in Space (the first under the Holmes/Hinchcliffe regime). Season 12 is even sometimes cited as the show's best season not because of the quality of all five scripts (at least three of which are mediocre, at best) but because two scripts stand head-and-shoulders above the rest of the season and much of the rest of the entire franchise.

This season is also unusual in being the second (after Season 8, the "Master Season") to have an ongoing metaplot that spans the season. This is lower in profile, but the idea was to remove the formidable resources of the TARDIS from the crew; they lose access to it in the second story and then move through time and space via other means (transmats, time rings) before finally reacquiring the TARDIS in the final story of the season. Each serial also has a cliffhanger directly leading into the next one, something that had not been seen regularly since the black and white seasons of the 1960s. Season 12 was also notable at the time for being the shortest season of Doctor Who to date, with just 20 episodes (albeit of around 20-25 minutes once recaps and credits were removed, so a lot less than half the length of modern episodes) compared to the then-standard 26. Subsequent seasons returned to the standard length.

Things kick off with Robot, the swansong of the Dicks-Letts-UNIT era. The newly-regenerated Doctor is erratic, with Harry Sullivan assigned to keep an eye on him. Tom Baker's debut as the Doctor is remarkable; whilst it felt like Pertwee took a few episodes to settle into the role, Baker arrives almost fully formed, with his sonorous voice, wild staring eyes, immense reservoirs of charm and formidable moral intelligence evident from his first appearance. Tom Baker immediately is the Doctor and lets everybody know it.

The story itself is somewhat pedestrian: an amoral scientific research organisation, "Think Tank" (referenced recently in Series 15 of Modern Doctor Who) is planning to trick the world into nuclear war and then ride out the aftermath in bunkers before taking control of the rebirth of civilisation. Somewhat randomly, they decide to ensure their success by building an over-emotional giant robot who exists in a near-permanent state of existential panic. This results in one of the oddest Doctor Who stories, with the creeping threat of fascism arising in Britain being genuinely chilling at times (helped by a coldly ruthless performance as Patricia Maynard as Miss Winters) being somewhat undercut by scenes of Sarah Jane Smith helping a giant robot to explore its guilt complex. The finale, where they say sod it and just have the robot become absolutely massive and start smashing up a British town (the vfx team again making promises they couldn't quite deliver), is entertaining nonsense, but the tonal imbalance of the story makes it hard to recommend. A shame as it has a huge amount of promise.

The Ark in Space marks the arrival of a new era more emphatically (at least tonally) than almost any story before or since. The Doctor, Harry and Sarah arrive on a space station in the remote future, learning that it carries the last surviving few thousand humans from Earth, ravaged by solar flares, in suspended animation. But alien insectoid creatures, the Wirrrn, have infiltrated the station and are turning the frozen colonists into both food and incubation chambers for their offspring. The Doctor and co have to convince the reviving colonists they are friends and then work out how to defeat the Wirrrn, who can absorb the intelligence and knowledge of the species they consume, making them a formidable foe.

The Ark in Space is hands-down one of the greatest Doctor Who stories of all time. The production design is brilliant, the space station is tremendously well-realised and its sleek minimalism feels like the Apple Mac has shown up a decade early. The Wirrrn themselves are an ambitious design that perhaps feels a bit too clunky, but still impressive; the scenes of human crewmembers being consumed by Wirrrn grubs and stumbling around in a half-consumed state are much more effective, as well as being more disturbing. This is definitely Doctor Who aimed at an older audience, the effects may look ropey to us now (the Wirrrn grubs are heavy on repurposed green bubble plastic) but the idea of humans being consumed as hosts for alien creatures is straight-up terrifying, and one wonders if Ridley Scott - who nearly worked on Doctor Who as a production designer in the 1960s - was sitting at home watching and taking notes (although the script for Alien was already doing the rounds in Hollywood at this point).

The weakest link in the story is probably guest actor Kenton Moore as Noah, who goes from chillingly threatening to hammy over-acting a bit too readily (sometimes in the same scene). More impressive is the supreme performance by Wendy Williams as Vira, who is chilly and efficient but remains sympathetic. Williams sells the idea of humans from tens of thousands of years in the future who have developed their own, peculiarly different culture and cultural idioms compared to modern humans. There's generally much more attention paid to detail, worldbuilding and dialogue (which was already pretty strong in the Pertwee era), which makes the story a constantly rewarding delight.

Elisabeth Sladen and especially Ian Marter are given much stronger material here as well, with Marter in particular impressing as Harry's bumbling chauvinism is overruled by a formidable sense of bravery, action and resolve. Sarah's claustrophobic mission carrying cables through a tiny service shaft surrounded by Wirrrn is also outstanding.

"Indomitable!"

But it's Tom Baker who bestrides the story like a colossus, getting some of his best-ever lines, easily his best-ever speech (and maybe the Doctor's best-ever speech about humanity across the entire franchise), and tackling each problem with intelligent resolve. Any lingering doubts that Tom Baker is the Doctor were firmly laid to rest here.

After that masterpiece it's down to Earth with a bump - literally - for The Sontaran Experiment. The first two-parter since Season 2's The Rescue, and the last until Season 19's Black Orchid, this story is one of the few from the Classic era to match a modern single episode in length and pacing. So it's interesting to see how the Classic show handled having to tell a story in the same timeframe. Unfortunately, the answer is "not very well." To save money the two episodes were shot in a focused five-day period entirely on location, with the full use of video outside broadcast. Depending on your mileage, this either makes the story look weirdly unreal or a zero-budget film made by overeager students somewhere around 1987. The pressure also didn't help the cast very much: Tom Baker broke his collar bone during one shot and had to rush back to location to complete the shoot, his signature massive scarf hiding his neck brace.

The script is unremarkable, the guest cast undistinguished, and the main selling point - the return of the Sontarans after Season 11's brilliant The Time Warrior - becomes the dampest squib in the show's history. Returning actor Kevin Lindsay (justified as the Sontarans are all clones) is a good actor but his script here is just not on the same level as The Time Warrior, and Styre is an obstinate idiot compared to the magnificently scheming Linx. Given the superb quality of the Sontaran makeup in The Time Warrior, it's also odd that the prosthetics in this story are so poor by comparison. There's a lot of running around what appears to be the same rock formation on Dartmoor, there's a very stupid-looking robot causing havoc and the story arguably undercuts the premise of The Ark in Space, with it here being revealed that loads of humans have survived on remote colonies and even a few who've made it back to Earth itself. Very disappointing.

Any such feelings of disappointment are atomised by Genesis of the Daleks. The top-rated Classic Who story on IMDB, Genesis is routinely voted the best Doctor Who story ever made, the best Dalek story and the best Fourth Doctor story. It's also the story that gave Russell T. Davies the idea for the Time War in Modern Who, with the Time Lords firing a warning shot at the Daleks that would later lead to an all-out conflict spanning the entirety of creation. It certainly has competition (not least from the very recent Ark in Space), but its reputation is formidable and mostly well-earned.

Terry Nation, creator of the Daleks, had returned to the show to helm some new Dalek stories, but his two previous scripts, Planet of the Daleks and Death to the Daleks had been small-scale and a bit repetitive, with Nation not shy about using stock ideas. The script proposal he sent in for Season 12 was so rote that it was rejected, but Letts and Dicks (commissioning the stories before Holmes and Hinchcliffe took over) masterfully suggested that Nation write a story exploring the very origins of the Daleks instead. Nation's resulting script, Genesis of Terror, was then thoroughly rewritten by Holmes, arguably Doctor Who's greatest-ever writer.

The result is a masterpiece. The Doctor, Harry and Sarah are intercepted by the Time Lords and sent to Skaro, homeworld of the Daleks, to disrupt the Daleks' creation. The Time Lords are fearful that one day the Daleks could become the supreme force for evil in the universe and defeat even them. The Doctor, reluctantly, agrees. He finds Skaro ravaged by centuries of war, a war initially fought with advanced weapons but now increasingly being fought with knives, bows and clubs. The planet is divided between the Thals (whom we've met before in The Daleks and Planet of the Daleks) and the Kaleds, two humanoid species, possibly just different nationalities of the same species, but who regard the other as physically and mentally inferior. The Kaleds in particular are obsessed with racial purity. The planet has suffered nuclear, chemical and genetic catastrophes, resulting in the mutation of some Kaleds into horrible creatures.

The Kaleds' chief scientist, Davros (a magisterial performance by Michael Wisher), has accelerated these mutations and placed them in experimental travel machines, creating the Daleks we all know and love, but he's also stripped them of their pity, morality and sentimentality, creating creatures obsessed only with destroying the impure and ruling in absolute power. Davros is instantly a formidable foe, the Doctor powerless as his normal appeals to rationality, scientific fact and morals falling absolutely flat. Arguably the greatest moment in the story comes when the Doctor asks Davros if he would create a virus capable of annihilating all sentient species and Davros calmly and then excitedly says he would, the power it would give him would be like that of a god, and the Doctor's expression turning to horror as he realises he's dealing with someone whose amorality would even make the Master think twice.

This is also a somewhat pitiless story: characters are gunned down without warning, Sarah and Harry are both put through the wringer (culminating in both being tortured by Davros whilst the Doctor is forced to watch) and the Daleks have never been more implacably evil and relentless. Some fans have complained about the prominence given to Davros after this story, with the Daleks becoming less master manipulators in their own right but more slaves to his will, but it's undeniable that the choice works brilliantly in this story. Davros' prosthetics work is also utterly fantastic (the makeup team made it so that Wisher could eat, drink and even smoke without having to remove his mask). But the story also has rays of hope: right from the start, the Kaleds are divided over the morality and wisdom of Davros's actions, and the Doctor finds willing allies amongst both the Kaleds and Thals to end the senseless conflict pretty easily. There's a strong message of hope in the goodness of human(ish) nature here.

This is also, easily, Doctor Who's best six-parter. The pacing is superb, with a constant shifting of the storylines as new complications and opportunities emerge.

The season ends with Revenge of the Cybermen, another historic story as it saw the return of the Cybermen in full force since Season 6's The Invasion, seven years earlier, as well as their last appearance until Season 18's Earthshock, seven years later. The Doctor and co return to Space Station Nerva, thousands of years before The Ark in Space, now serving as the base for the investigation of Voga, an errant asteroid recently caught by Jupiter's orbit. The Time Lords send the TARDIS back in time to rendezvous with the Doctor, but in the meantime the TARDIS crew have to investigate a plague, the mystery of the new moon and, obviously, the Cybermen.

Revenge is a bit of a mixed bag. The first episode is easily the best, with the mystery of the plague being compelling. The Doctor is at his most deductive and reasoning, and he uncovers what's going on with pleasing speed rather than gawping like an idiot until the script lets him work out what's happening (as Classic Who does on a semi-regular basis). The plot is also pleasingly twisty, with double agents, overlapping agendas and political intrigue between people who are really on the same side. The serial has a reasonably strong guest cast as well, and the location shooting at Wookey Hole is eerily atmospheric, despite the infamous behind-the-scenes chaos (Elisabeth Sladen being involved in a motorboat accident that hospitalised a stuntman, an electrician breaking his leg, and everyone on edge as a diver had drowned in the caves a few weeks earlier). Inheriting the sets from The Ark in Space also allows the serial to have a larger array of locations for the story to take place in than normal. Unfortunately, the decision to make the Ark less advanced than in the earlier story meant making the formerly pristine sets look dirty and dingy, taking away their impact.

The biggest problems in the story are the Cybermen themselves. The Cybermen had been a massive hit through the Patrick Troughton era for their implacable, emotionless appearances, their remorselessness and their terrifying ability to turn humans into more Cybermen. The Cybermen in this story are strangely emotional, declaring that everything is "Excellent!" and talking with weirdly transatlantic accents. Firing energy bolts from their foreheads also looks odd, and they prefer to kill people rather than convert them (despite the premise being that the Cybermen have been defeated in a war and are few in number). The Cybermen are more comical than threatening in this story, which is not the impact anyone wanted.

Season 12 of Doctor Who (****½) is a bit of mixed bag, with three pretty middling stories propping up two of the greatest Doctor Who stories ever written. The season is certainly worth watching for those two classics, and seeing the changing of the guard as Doctor Who heads into a more adult, more accomplished but also more controversial era. But if you've ever wondered how this franchise has lasted so long and has so many fans, The Ark in Space and Genesis of the Daleks will give you a good idea.

Indomitable!

The season can be seen right now on the BBC iPlayer in the UK, BritBox in much of the rest of the world, and is also available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

• 12.1 - 12.4: Robot (**½)
• 12.5 - 12.8: The Ark in Space (*****)
• 12.9 - 12.10: The Sontaran Experiment (**)
• 12.11 - 12.16: Genesis of the Daleks (*****)
• 12.17 - 12.20: Revenge of the Cybermen (***)

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER legacy sequel show announces main cast

The Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot pilot is moving ahead at Hulu, with the streamer announcing the show's primary cast in recent days.

Sarah Michelle Gellar is indeed returning to her signature role of Buffy Summers, whom she played over the original show's seven seasons and 144 episodes from 1997 to 2003, as well as making additional appearances in spin-off Angel. Gellar is also an executive producer on the new show. She was resistant to returning to the role for many years, but apparently changed her mind after rewatching the original show with her teenage children. It is unclear if she'll be a series regular, recurring actor or even just a guest star in the pilot alone.

15-year-old Ryan Kiera Armstrong (one of the best performers in Star Wars: Skeleton Crew) has been cast as the series lead. Armstrong, who has also appeared in American Horror Story, IT: Chapter Two and Black Widow, will be playing a new Slayer who is told she has to save the world from the forces of darkness.

In the original Buffy, only one Slayer was "active" at any one time, imbued with super-strength and superior reflexes to take on the vampires. Buffy's brief "death" at the end of Season 1 allowed a second Slayer to become active (first Kendra and then Faith). At the conclusion of Season 7, Buffy was able to change the laws of reality so every single "potential" Slayer could become a full Slayer immediately, forming an entire army to save the world. Whether this change was permanent was unclear (though spin-off comics suggested it was).

The other announced cast members are Faly Rakotohavana as Hugo, Ava Jean as Larkin, Sarah Bock as Gracie, Daniel di Tomasso as Abe and Jack Cutmore-Scott as Mr. Burke.

Nora Zuckerman and Lila Zuckerman are the writers, showrunners and executive producers. Chloé Zhao will direct the pilot and produce. Fran Kuzui and Kaz Kuzui, who produced both the TV series and the original 1992 movie and own the rights, are returning as producers. Dolly Parton and her Sandollar production company will also produce; they worked on the original TV series.

At the moment only Gellar has been confirmed to return from the original cast, though the door is apparently open to many of the others returning if the pilot gets a full season pickup. Sadly, this will not be possible for Michelle Trachtenberg (who played Buffy's younger sister Dawn), who passed away in February.

The pilot is expected to shoot over the next couple of months with Hulu expected to make a decision on a full season order shortly after that.

Doctor Who: Season 11

Free to travel in time and space once more, the Doctor joins forces with journalist Sarah Jane Smith to investigate new mysteries. Their trips involve a meeting with the clone warriors of the Sontarans, a renewed threat from the Daleks, a return visit to Peladon and an unexpected infestation of dinosaurs in Central London. But a previous decision is coming back to haunt the Doctor, and will lead him to a fateful meeting with destiny on Metebelis III.

The tenth season of Doctor Who marked a fateful change for Jon Pertwee's tenure as the Doctor. Katy Manning departed as companion Jo Grant after three seasons, and the actor playing the Master, Roger Delgado, was tragically killed in a car crash. Pertwee made the decision to leave at the end of the following season, his fifth in the role. Producer-showrunner Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks both also decided to move on, though they'd also stay on into the start of Season 12 to oversee the transition to a new team.

The first task for Season 11 was to find a new character and actress to follow in Katy Manning's footsteps, a formidable challenge given her popularity in the role: at that time, she was the second-longest-serving companion. Actress April Walker was cast in the new role but she and Pertwee had no chemistry and she was quickly dismissed (with full pay for the season). Letts was approaching panic mode until a fellow producer recommended him a young actress he'd recently cast in Z-Cars, leading to a fateful meeting between Letts, Pertwee and Elisabeth Sladen. Pertwee was so taken with Sladen's performance that he stood behind her and gave up a thumbs-up to Letts.

History now records Sladen as the most popular Doctor Who companion of the Classic era, and maybe the most popular overall. She would have one of the longest runs in the show's history (three and a half seasons), return for an anniversary special, appear in a pilot for a spin-off show and then, in the Modern era, make multiple appearances alongside David Tennant's Tenth Doctor before getting her own TV show, which ran for five seasons and 53 episodes (featuring further guest appearances by Tennant and Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith), easily making her the most prolific companion of them all.

Her arrival on the show is a bit of a mixed bag. Like Jo before her, the writers came up with a great job and abilities for Sarah - she's an investigative journalist, good at making people feel at east and trusting of her and great at research, handy skills for a companion - but have a tendency to forget about that at times and she just runs around screaming at things and getting captured. Fortunately, she suffers from this far less than Jo and her skills prove useful multiple times through this first season. Her chemistry and repartee with Pertwee is also not as great as it would later be with Tom Baker, but they still spark off one another reasonably well.

The opening story, The Time Warrior, introduces Sarah and sees her join forces with the Doctor to investigate the mystery of scientists going missing from a facility under UNIT protection. Robert Holmes starts the story as a standard UNIT mystery but pivots hard (UNIT fails to appear after the first episode) to it becoming - amazingly - Pertwee's only period story. Aside from the start of Carnival of Monsters, where the Doctor mistakenly believes he's on a 1926 steam ship in the Indian Ocean, none of the Third Doctor's other stories take place in Earth's past. They're all in the near future, distant future or on an alien planet, making this a unique story in his era.

The bulk of the story takes place in the medieval period, with robber-baron Irongron (David Daker chewing the scenery with relish) joining forces with crashed Sontaran warrior Linx (Kevin Lindsay). In return for helping Linx fix his golfball spaceship, Irongron receives advanced weapons to help him conquer the neighbouring castle. The Doctor and Sarah decide to stop Linx and Irongron from changing the course of Earth's history. This is a splendid story, with Sladen immediately making a positive impression (at one point taking the Doctor prisoner because she thinks he's a villain, an unusual spin for a first companion story) and Irongron and Linx sparking so hard off each other as a villainous double act I'm surprised the set didn't catch fire. Holmes's script is witty enough to almost be considered a comedy, and the supporting cast is surprisingly accomplished, including the mind-boggling sight of Boba Fett and Dot Cotton working together (Jeremy Bulloch and June Brown, natch). It's a pacy and funny story which establishes the Sontarans, in their very first appearance, as a popular foe, mainly due to the success of the prosthetics, which are unusually excellent for Doctor Who in this era. Alongside Day of the Daleks, a very underrated story, and easily Season 11's high point.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs is, very easily, Doctor Who's most hopelessly ambitious story. Malcolm Hulke is gleefully writing cheques the BBC vfx department is not only unable to cash, but could never in a million years even start to think about cashing. He literally has things like a tyrannosaurus rex engaging the British Army in running battles on the streets of Central London, a pterodactyl attacking the Doctor in a parking garage and a confused stegosaurus materialising in a London Underground station. Obviously, none of this is remotely going to work or be convincing, and you have to respect the sheer insanity of them even trying, whilst goggling at some of the worst special effects in all of Doctor Who's history.

Still, when it's not trying to be Jurassic Park on a 1974 BBC budget, the story has its high points. The opening sequences, filmed at ridiculous o'clock in the morning to show London's streets utterly deserted (something that wouldn't work at all now), are very effective. London under alien attack and the Doctor having to defend it is a very rich idea for Doctor Who, following Season 2's The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Season 5's The Web of Fear and Season 6's The Invasion, and so it proves here. As a Malcolm Hulke joint, the serial has a deep bench of very well-drawn characters, with convincing motivations and competing agendas. It's a also a full-blown UNIT epic, with the Brigadier, Benton and especially Yates all having some excellent scenes. Sarah also gets some prime storylines, especially in the latter half when, to stave off six-part-itis, Hulke pivots the story into being what appears to be a post-apocalyptic space opera! There are several long stints without any dinosaur effects at all (ropey or otherwise), when the story becomes quite engrossing. Then, inevitably, they decide to have two dinosaurs fighting each other on a London high street and it all gets a bit silly. This story is crying out for a Day of the Daleks-style special edition to try to fix its glaring vfx limitations.

Death to the Daleks sees Terry Nation return and assemble a script out of what appears to be prefabricated flat-packs of his storytelling's greatest hits. So we have Daleks (natch), a crashed spaceship with a crew of marooned soldiers (almost directly lifted from Planet of the Daleks in the previous season), a mysterious alien city (mirrored from the Daleks' first appearance) and an exploited civilisation of locals who are divided into potential allies and enemies. This is all so rote you could fall asleep for the middle two episodes, wake up and be able to perfectly tell everyone what happened. However, there are some promising ideas here. The planet Exxilon drains the power of all ships that pass near it, and early scenes of the TARDIS losing power and the Doctor having to crank open the doors are entertaining (unless you start pondering how the power loss doesn't cause the TARDIS's internal dimensions to collapse and oh no I've gone cross-eyed). Even better are the newly-arrived Daleks finding their weapons don't work and having to nervously join forces with the humans for their own protection, since a Dalek without a working gun or defences is just a very slow target.

The idea of the Doctor and Daleks joining forces for a story is a bit under-developed though, with the two only briefly cooperating (and mostly offscreen!) before the Daleks are able to restore their dominance (through the comical medium of the Daleks re-arming themselves with machine guns and test-destroying a model TARDIS), whilst the Doctor undergoes an overlong game of The Crystal Maze to uncover the secrets of the alien city. There's some amusement here, but it's all a bit passionless. The human starship crew are severely under-developed compared to last season's Thals (and actor Julian Fox stares at the camera so much it's hilarious), and the Daleks are extremely inept. One explodes after being hit by an Exxilon native like three times using its bow as a club, and another self-destructs after some prisoners escape rather than trying to recapture them. There's some dumb fun to be had here, but not much more.

The Monster of Peladon is a sequel to Season 9's Curse of Peladon, but two episodes longer despite only having about half the plot. As its set fifty years after the events of Curse, most of that serial's cast of characters also fails to return, though fortunately we do get the return of Ysanne Churchman's outrageously bonkers vocal performance as Ambassador Alpha Centauri, who does a lot of the heavy lifting to keep the story watchable. The cast is game, and it's good to see the Ice Warriors back to being villains even if it's a bit of a shame that The Curse of Peladon's attempts to give them more depth has been ignored. The serial feels less like a sequel than a retread of the original, complete with debates over whether sightings of Aggedor are real or not and the wisdom of Britain Peladon joining the European Union Galactic Federation. There are some good elements to the story, but these are weighed down by its unwieldy length and pedestrian ultimate villain.

Planet of the Spiders is a strange story. It starts off with the Doctor straight-up killing an innocent guy in one of his experiments (however inadvertently), which he doesn't seem too concerned about, before being drawn into mysterious events at a monastery where Mike Yates is convalescing after the events of Invasion of the Dinosaurs. Giving Yates a redemption arc here is a good idea, and he has some good material (as well as a very flash car). John Dearth, with a splendidly villainous voice, also has a good punt as the villainous Lupton, but he runs out of story material about two-and-a-half episodes in and then spends most of the rest of the time standing around like a lemon. The alien spiders are also a mixed bag vfx-wise, sometimes coming across as menacing and threatening (arachnophobes should beware this story) and sometimes looking like overgrown Halloween decorations. Still, Invasion of the Dinosaurs has reset the baseline for vfx quality this season, so in comparison these spiders look state-of-the-art.

The story also has some quite ridiculous padding, most notable in Episode 2's infamously insane/inane chase sequence, which takes up half the episode and sees the use of the Doctor's new hovercar, Bessie, a gyrocopter, a speedboat and a mini-hovercraft. It's all very silly but somewhat entertaining. More fatal are the sequences set on Metebelis III with the downtrodden human natives/slaves who are just itching for an inspiring speech by the Doctor before rebelling. Some of the worst "yokel" accents you'll ever hear in your life can be found here, along with some of the worst acting ever seen on all of Doctor Who. Atrocious stuff.

The story does recover towards the end, when it takes on more mythical overtones as the leader of the spiders, the Great One, fills the Doctor with overwhelming fear and he has to confront that fear to defeat her...at the cost of his own existence. Cue a touching regeneration scene as the Third Doctor bids farewell to Sarah and the Brigadier, and we get our first glimpse of Tom Baker as the soon-to-be legendary Fourth Doctor. Changes are coming...

Season 11 (***) of Doctor Who is, unfortunately, Pertwee's weakest. Only The Time Warrior emerges as a clear winner here, with the other four stories all having their moments but also a lot of weaknesses that prevents any of them really impressing. A clear winner of the season is Elisabeth Sladen, who impresses as Sarah Jane (even if her best is yet to come), whilst Pertwee gives a more restrained, modest and emotional performance as his end approaches. The result is a watchable, solid, but rarely outstanding season of Doctor Who.

The season can be seen right now on the BBC iPlayer in the UK, BritBox in much of the rest of the world, and is also available on DVD. A Blu-Ray release is planned but has no confirmed date at the moment.

• 11.1 - 11.4: The Time Warrior (****½)
• 11.5 - 11.10: Invasion of the Dinosaurs (***½)
• 11.11 - 11.14: Death to the Daleks (***)
• 11.15 - 11.20: The Monster of Peladon (**½)
• 11.21 - 11.21: Planet of the Spiders (***)

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.