A bit of housekeeping. I’m not liking how these are turning out so much. Instead of writing them after I’ve finished watching the serial, I’m going to write a bit after each part, but keep it in one blog post per serial. I do want to put screencaps back in, but how I’m watching has changed, and it’s not very good for that. I used to pop the DVD into my computer, watch in VLC and used the command key combination to take a screencap. Now I’ve digitized my DVDs and store them in Plex, so I’m watching through Plex Media Player on my computer or the app on my Apple TV. So there’s no quick and easy way to grab a screencap.

Now that that’s out of the way… Let’s begin lucky season 13. The Zygons are here! They were in the 50th Anniversary episode, which is what made me start this project, so this might be a romp. This is their debut in Doctor Who.

Part One

Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart calls the Doctor back to the UK. Oil rigs in Scotland are being destroyed with no survivors. The Doctor downplays Brig’s concerns, but agrees to investigate.

Harry finds a man on the beach who warns him, but is shot at by a sniper. Harry gets grazed by a bullet. Is this why Harry leaves? Does he get spooked by being shot at and decides not to continue travelling with the Doctor?

Oooh! Creepy nurse lady is taking care of Harry. She’s super-creepy. Since I know Zygons are shape-shifters, I’m going to guess that she’s a Zygon! The cliffhanger was great, a Zygon is attacking Sarah. What I love most about it is that the Zygon looks absolutely horrible.

Part Two

What of the Zygons? Terror? Terror indeed. Terror of the terrible makeup. Terror of the makeup artists who can’t even be bothered to glue the latex mask to the actor’s face. Terror of boredom? Terror indeed.

Part Three

That dinosaur is quality SFX. Doctor Who is shelling out the big bucks! That was sarcasm. I called it! The nurse was a Zygon! Her morph from nurse to Zygon was perhaps even better than the dinosaur, which we’ve now found out is Nessy, the Lochness Monster.

So, let me get this straight. The Zygon have been living in Lochness for hundreds of years. They occasionally send the cybernetic Nessy out for a stroll. Now with some oil drilling, they’re getting upset, so they’re using Nessy to attack the platforms and kill all the oil staff? That’s… ridiculous.

Sarah found a secret door in the Duke of Forgill’s library. I’m guessing it’s going to lead to the Zygon base. I’m right! I’m brilliant! “The girl1 must be found and destroyed.” Oh, she found Harry Sullivan. Wasn’t sure it was really him, but he called her an “old girl,” so it must be him.2 The Zygon’s captured The Doctor! The Brig is firing artillery at their underwater ship. The Zygons are taking off… doesn’t the Duke care, they’re going to flood his house!

Wait. Them leaving is the cliffhanger? That’s not a steep cliff.

Part Four

Oh, I guess the cliffhanger is that The Doctor is on the ship. Okay, this is the first time I’m thinking that Harry is an idiot. Sarah is clueing things together, and he just brushes it off and convinces her to leave their investigation. Why do all Doctor Who aliens whisper everything and talk very slowly?

Oh, so the Zygons are refugees and wish to terraform Earth to resemble Zygonia or whatever they call their planet.

Oh no! The Doctor is dead! I bet he’s not dead. Yup, he was just playing dead, oh silly Doctor.

So the Doctor frees the Human captives, and blows up the ship, but doesn’t care about them being refugees?

1. She’s a woman. [↩]
2. Facepalm [↩]

Why is the Doctor so mean to Harry? Shouting out that Harry Sullivan is an idiot, while funny, was cruel. I honestly didn’t think anything Harry did was worth of that outcry. Harry was only trying to help, even if he got into some more danger than expected.

Any way, “Revenge of the Cybermen” wasn’t great. It really shouldn’t have ended the season. The plot was messy and disjointed.

1 Tom Baker season down, 6 to go.

I kinda wish all of classic Doctor Who was only two episode stories. It would be slightly more tedious as I would’ve had to write considerably more entries in this blog series that I currently have. But also, Doctor Who had a LOT of filler.

“The Sontaran Experiment” didn’t have a lot of filler, the story was decent and it was nice seeing Sarah have such a big role. She knew who The Sontarans were, as she had encountered them in her first story.

The cast beam down to Earth to scout out the situations out there. In case the Earth is a nightmare of radiation and lava and acid rain, The Doctor makes sure to bring a hat, Sarah puts on a plastic raincoat and Harry puts on some wellies. You know, sensible precautions.

They find some astronauts who crash landed on Earth responding to an emergency broadcast. They are being picked off one by one. Turns out a Sontaran is on Earth as a scout before an invasion fleet. He’s doing experiments on the astronauts.

Eventually The Doctor goes mano-a-mano with the Sontaran and wins. The heroes beam back up to the Ark in Space!

This was another fun romp! I quite enjoyed it. The Doctor his in true form, he’s already got his Jelly Babies ready to roll. Sarah is being a spunky feminist. Harry is condescending, but he’s okay.

They find an ark in space… a sleeper ship… the SS Botany Bay. They wake up some of the crew, and fortunately none of them are Khan Noonien Singh. Instead they’re weirdly British and bureaucratic. I guess that’s par for the course on The Adventures of Time Travelling Colonial Imperialist.

Turns out while they’ve been frozen, some bugs from Andromeda were taking over the sleeper ship and feeding on freeze-dried human.

Turns out these bugs were actually dislocated by the colonial humans and are just looking for a new home.

The strangest part of this episode is that The Doctor is just okay with letting these bugs die.

Welcome friends, to the Tom Baker-era! It seems to be a bit of a drastic change between Baker the first and Pertwee the only. Baker has so much humour in nearly everything he does. He brings a lightness to the show that has been sorely missing since the days of Patrick Troughton. I miss the clown that is Troughton, but we get a lot of silliness from Baker.

In “Robot,” The Doctor is recovering from his regeneration at UNIT. A new friend, Harry, is The Doctor’s doctor and making sure he’s okay after his regeneration. Soon we discover that there’s a ridiculous robot that is developed by a company and stealing weapons, but it has a prime directive not to hurt human. Yet, it is.

Turns out the humans in control of the robot are telling it to hurt humans and are getting ready to seize control of government away from the masses and towards them. As they are scientists and scientists know better than the rest of humanity how to properly govern.

Can I interject and say that scientists are probably right? Ford, Trump, Scheer probably shouldn’t be setting policy, let’s get some climate scientists setting policy. That’s just my two cents.

Doctor Who’s writers on the other hand, don’t seem to see it my way, and think that the power should either be with the masses or a lady whose dad had supreme power before her.

There’s a big firefight between UNIT and the Robot. UNIT is outgunned and none of the model tanks that are brought in seem to do anything. Maybe the production shouldn’t have used a six inch tank, and instead used a real one.

In the end, The Doctor uses some anti-metal solution to win. The Robot goes away. Hooray! Humans are victorious over dumb computers.