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Doctor Who: Earthshock [1982] The explanatory backstory of this is that Christopher Priest had been commissioned to do a story in which the generally-taken-to-be-irritating sidekick Adric [Matthew Waterhouse] was written off - but got squeezed out after delivering drafts, prompting script editor Eric Saward to change jobs and turn in his own fairly-hastily cobbled-together effort [which he would reprise with different old enemies as Resurrection of the Daleks] that went for the cheap boosts of bringing back the Cybermen [unseen since the first Tom Baker series nearly a decade earlier] and killing off a companion [not done since the Hartnell era, and then only with someone who'd strayed into the TARDIS a serial earlier]. It's a rather basic, dumb plot which opens in a quarry and caves where a suitcase bomb that could destroy the world is stashed, protected by two leotarded androids and mixing the Doctor [Peter Davison] and his full compliment of three companions with 25th Century army guys and some archaeologists. After this problem is defused, without any real sense of how the baddies planted the bomb since they're not supposed to be on Earth yet, we shift via TARDIS, taking along guest soldier James Warwick and some extras [a gimmick rarely used], to a space freighter commanded by Beryl Reid in a leather jacket where a huge cyber-army is being smuggled wrapped in cellophane in silos from which they explode as they did from tombs back in Tomb of the Cybermen. There's a human traitor [as in Resurrection] and a lot of a] running around shooting and b] standing around plotting; the show plays to fans some flashbacks to earlier Doctors and cyber-designs, but as with other Saward scripts, it's a rather grim, pointlessly violent show in which lots of back-up soldiers, crewmen, archaologists and Cybermen get blasted [even the Doctor uses a gun, which seems out of character, and Janet Fielding's Tegan fires a ray-gun point-blank on a Cyberman]. The climax involves the ship and army being zapped back in time to save the Earth and wiping out a] the dinosaurs and b] Adric - prompting the end credits of episode four to roll in dignified silence over his shattered badge for mathematical excellence. First-draft writing means this has been set up in episode one with
an artificial conflict soon resolved between the sulky boy and an even
sulkier Doctor [also out of character] and an infodump about the extinction
of the dinosaurs [then a big-ish new theory]. The death of a regular
character doesn't quite play as well as it might have: the serial is
so full of people being killed it seems the grief over Adric is disproportionate
in that so many other characters, some of whom are more immediately
likable, have been creamed. An Alien influence is discernible
in the proly crew and female officers [and a scanner showing the body
count], but the co-ed, wiped-out troopers prefigure Aliens.
As often, the Cybermen get good entrances but are disappointing: they
don't actually do much, except walk about and get wiped out. Sarah Sutton's
Nyssa sits most of it out again, lisping occasionally. Tegan, regretting
a gung-ho volunteer moment: 'I'm just a mouth on legs'. The best image
is thrown away - a Cyberman frozen in a door that has been dematerialised
and rematerialised as he's coming through. First published in this form here. Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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