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Doctor Who: Survival [1989] To all intents and purposes, this 1989 serial is the last of Doctor Who, in that it ends the mutating series that began in 1963; subsequent revivals bear the same sort of relationship to this as The New Avengers does to The Avengers. Coming at the end of a four-serial run that had consistently scuppered decent ideas and wasted good guest stars, it's a lower-case wind-down, but perhaps not a complete dud. Following developments with Ace [Sophie Aldred] in The Curse of Fenric and Ghost Light, this finds the Doctor returning her to Perivale, which she's moaned about for several seasons, and discovering all her old friends have been disappearing - transported by carrion cats to another world, where cheetah people [a bit too cuddly, like Tiger Tim] ride horses Planet of the Apes style, humans are hunted and those who surrender to their instincts sprout fangs and yellow eyes. Also mixed up in all this is the Master [Anthony Ainley] who gets a new costume with a lace collar and also fangs, but - just as Battlefield harped on about war - the point here is to go on about 'survival of the fittest', from jokes cracked by guest comics Hale and Pace in episode one to a brutal self-defence course tought by hypocritical TA Sarge [Julian Holloway]. Ace - whose very name has always been a handicap to taking her seriously
- gets more character development, nearly going werecheetah as her resentment
of normality, which has been expressed as a comical propensity for violence
and blowing things up, starts to go sour and she has to resist savage
impulses. The Earth stuff plays better than the red-sky alien world
runabout. At the end, we get a one-on-one fight between the Doctor and
the Master, with the Doctor realising again that not fighting is the
way to win ['if we fight like animals, we die like animals']. The 'final
end' is just the Doctor and Ace returning 'home', to the TARDIS, with
a tacked-on narration that suggests a future ['come on Ace, we've got
work to do'] but is mostly there to acknowledge cancellation. First published in this form here. Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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