Hello, dear listener, and welcome back to 500 year diary.
The only Doctor Who podcast that, given how unstable the current
political situation is, is not to be unexpected.
I'm Nathan.
I'm Ikta.
I'm Skibers, and I'm Tarpok.
It's the 5th of January 1984.
It's been just over 14 years since the doctor 1st ran into a
Silurian in Derbyshire, and nearly 12 years since he 1st met a sea
devil in BBC television centre Studio 8.
And this evening, they've been plucked from the pages of the
Doctor Who Monster book and sent out to attack Seabase 4.
And the only question is, why?
Let's see if we can work out the answer as we discuss Warriors of
the Deep.
So, I have to lay my card on the table.
I really thought that this was astoundingly boring, and I don't
think I thought that when I watched it for flight through
entirety.
And when I 1st watched it back in the day, I really, really liked
it, but I'm afraid now, and particularly at this sort of point in
recording this season of 500 year diary.
There seems to me to be like a base under siege with anything
interesting kind of accidentally omitted and enemies that are
depressingly generic and horrifically poorly realised.
Am I being unnecessarily cruel?
There is no unnecessarily cruel.
Only unnecessarily kind.
I don't think it's boring.
And I don't think it's as embarrassing as, say, time flight is.
Again, I really liked it on its 1st transmission.
And I think you touched on this in FTE, which is this was the 1st
season that we knew the story titles in advance, thanks to the
20th anniversary Radio Time special.
And so there was one paragraph summary saying that this was like a
set in 100 years in the future, study ins and sea devils, and that
was basically it, Cold War analogy and so on.
And I remember at the time, having not long watched 5 doctors, that
this was a step up from season 20 in terms of the look.
I thought it looked fantastic.
The sets were all clangy and metallic.
They were big with 2 levels.
Everyone looked fabulous with great hair and makeup, and there
were sea devils and salurians in it.
I was completely on board with this.
I was even on board with this in the 86, 87 omnibus repeat on a
Saturday afternoon where I...
When a whole 5 years, I felt like 50 years old then when I'd 1st
seen it.
But no, I really enjoyed it.
And I actually was really surprised watching it now.
It's not a story that I return to very often.
How much I actually enjoyed it.
I'm going to say that I think there's actually, it's important to
note there's a lot to recommend this story.
I don't think it succeeds.
I don't think it's a very good story at all, really, but there is
a lot that is actually good about it.
James had sought more money from BBC Enterprises.
He'd sought a budget injection from them because Doctor Who was
selling so well overseas.
And I think this 1st story where he gets that budget injection and
I think it shows on screen.
I think the set for this story might be the best realised set in
all of classic Doctor Who.
Mattress doors, notwithstanding. execution, but actually the
backdrop and how they put the set together looks incredibly
impressive.
I liked this at the time.
Similar to Simon, the Radio Times 20th anniversary, getting that
blurb in there knowing what was happening and so excited for it, as
well as it's the year that Simon and I met at school.
It is too.
And so it actually... form a Silurian triad.
I think there were more than 2 Doctor Who fans.
Thank you, Peter.
So this whole season, and that means a lot to me.
And so I carried that emotion when I watched this story.
And I actually, well, coming back to it, I think the urgency in
Peter Davis's performance here, this is where he really steps up, I
think is the doctor.
You know, if he had this season and this performance.
If I just judge him on that alone, he'd be up there as one of my
favourite doctors based on that.
I do think that his performance is really great this season, yeah.
And that's what gets me through this story in particular, but just
having the Silurians and Cedar was back, I thought, was
magnificent, and I still really enjoy it now, except I do see its
fault.
The slow moving villains and they're talking.
It was just...
Let's get on to that.
It was just...
I think Davidson knows when a script is poor.
He's, you know, he's instinctively, he knows when things are going
wrong in the production.
He seems to step it up when he thinks that he has to, just kind of
plug the gaps.
And so there's an extra urgency and kind of grimness to his
performance here that the script doesn't really merit.
I agree with you about the look.
That was what struck me most of all the 1st time through, and I
had enjoyed Space 1999, which also has a sort of fairly big set.
Words never heard before.
Really?
I mean, space 1999 has a much more expensive and lavish and huge
set than this, but it did have the 2 levels.
And so I was kind of reminded of Maine Mission a little bit by the
bridge.
Of course, the Johnny Byrne connection being the script.
I destroyed the 1st season of Space 1999.
And I don't know if this story is apocryphal or not, but
apparently he walked onto the set of Warriors in the deep and said
this all looks much better than it did last time. meaning Space
1999.
Yeah, it doesn't.
But, I mean, it does...
I think it helps it on films.
Yeah, but it is a much bigger and much more beautiful and
expensive set.
This one does wobble from time to time, particularly whatever it
is that they erect on location over the swimming pool, looks great
and he's very consistent with the rest of the set, but it wobbles
horribly during the action.
I think the set looks great.
I particularly like all the labels everywhere.
You know, like there's just a little label saying, you know, keep
this door closed, stuff like that.
Lakelord Nilson that says villain.
That's tattooed on his forehead.
So it seems very real.
I really like that a great deal. and I don't even object so much
to the fact that it's well lit.
I do think there is a problem with it not looking at all in any
way, like it's underwater.
And that's something, for instance, that under the lake before the
flood gets right, that that's a building, you can't really see out
the windows and stuff, but you're never in any doubt that it's
anywhere other than underwater.
But can I just say, I don't think that that's because of the sets
or the lighting.
I think it's because of the soundscape.
They've done more at the soundscape to make it seem like it was in
this metal clanging interior under the water than you would have
bought it more.
You can argue that it's no different to a space station.
Sometimes they're gleaming white and beautiful like that, and
other times they're dark and dingy and you worry that the oxygen's
going to leak out.
But I think that if it's underwater, let's sell it as being
underwater.
Make that visible in all of the scenes.
I think that's a problem.
And yet on the Silurian craft, I buy that.
Yes.
That's underwater.
Absolutely.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's that sort of strange screen off in the distance that seems
to have sort of odd water patterns projected onto it or something
like that.
So I do buy that.
I think that that is better.
I think that's a bad set, but I still think that it does seem
underwater.
But why do the cellarines need to be underwater?
Like, that's my big question.
It's sort of like they were not underwater the 1st time.
They were just in the caves.
Would you know 1st Silurians that don't bathe?
But if tiles tend not to.
But it's sort of like we've just latched onto the fact that the
sea devils were, their base was underwater and they could come
up.
And so now the cellarians just suddenly are underwater and they
have a craft that the doctor recognises and you're just going to
go...
They have to be underwater to wake the sea devils up.
But where do they come?
Why are they suddenly awake?
Well, exactly.
Let's unpick this.
Originally, it was only meant to be the sea devils.
But for some reason, they insisted, let's bring back the Silurians
as well and make them the sea devils leaders and commanders.
And so it doesn't really make sense in the plot.
And in fact, you can see the hasty realisation that they've done
something wrong in that line, which says that hexachromite is
lethal to reptiles, who we're suddenly mentioning here for no
reason and marine life, all marine life, but also reptiles, okay
just so that the ending works.
Like, that's a problem.
But I think that there's a real problem in the Silurians and the
sea devils seem to be here because they're recurring Doctor Who
monsters, and they're not in any sense being reintroduced to a new
audience at all.
And the most visible sign of that is there they are in long shot
at 2 minutes into the episode, having an incredibly boring
conversation where they just stand around.
Yeah.
So where's our episode one reveal?
Like, that's essentially it.
Where's our giant end of episode one reveal?
We're in a base under siege.
Why are we not concentrating on their experience as things like
their probe gets destroyed.
There's something going on outside in the water.
And then we learn about the cellular integration.
Which all gets kind of halfway there.
It's kind of tense.
It's just taking it from the wrong angle.
Yeah.
I think that this is where JNT is suffering from the success of
Earthshock, and there's a cyberman, but also the, I don't know
whether it's faded by this point, but the influence of Ian
Levine.
No, I think it's full steam right.
It's full steam right now.
And much as I love this season and season 22.
I recognise that the show is starting to eat its own young in
relying too heavily on past things.
Because of this, things like the 5 faces repeats and the monsters
repeats and all the 1000000s of clips that they would have had on
all the chat shows during the 20th anniversary.
I think the history of Doctor Who has gone to their head.
And so they've decided that the sea devils in Saudi Ureans, even
though they only appeared in one story each a decade ago, that
everyone will know who they are.
Can I just suggest what a much better version of Warriors of the
Deep would be?
And I...
One not directed by Pennant Roberts.
Yes.
That, who you praise in the FTE.
Exactly what you're saying.
Yeah, yeah. what you were all thinking.
One develops with age, honestly.
Revenge of the Sidement, which I know is a maligned story, does it
so much better.
As you're saying, where's this reveal?
What you should have is you have all of the intrigue of the other
power block opposed to this one on the base, and you think that's
what it's going to be about, and there's spies, and maybe there is
even another character who is working with this outside force.
You know, the Dr. Quinn figure, the master in the sea devils.
And then at the end of episode two, not one, but 2 is where
suddenly out of nowhere, there's this submarine that arrives, docks
and there they all are, the side of your ins and sea.
Or even better at the end of episode two, Dr. Solo rips off her
mask.
Salvix.
But I want to touch.
I want to go back to what you're saying about JNT and Eric
Saywood.
There is a pattern occurring here.
Like in season 19, we had the master back in the 1st story
reimagined as a literal master of disguise.
In season 20, suddenly we've got Omega in there and he's not quite
as he was.
He's now got a TARDIS, he's got the ergon here.
We've got the sea devils and saloons redesigned, and we've now got
the extra element of the murka without really thinking about it.
Next year, we're going to have redesigns of the cyber control of
the cyber tombs.
We going to throw in the crayons.
And there's this pattern that just keeps going on.
And as you said, there doesn't seem to be any rhymeal reason for
it, we're just going to use them because they were something from
the past.
But you see, I don't mind having like the murka or adding the
crimes word.
That is trying to do something, can build on the monster that you
have.
The problem is that JNT, I think, takes the wrong lessons from
Earthshock.
Earthshock does build the reveal of the cybermen very well. and
makes it exciting for a general public audience because sidemen
are front and centre.
The wrong model is the Arc of Infinity, which is, you know
bringing Omega back.
Okay, it's the 20th anniversary, and he was in the 10th
anniversary.
Okay, that's a line that you feed to the doctoral appreciation
society.
That's a headline for the Duas newsletter.
It's not for the general public who go, who's Omega?
Yeah.
I mean, they might have seen a repeat 18 months ago, who knows?
6000000 people did, but still.
And the problem here is, you know, if we take the model of current
Doctor Who, which brings back old monsters 2 or 3 times a season
without any problem at all, it's quite fine.
What you have to do is bring them back in an appropriate way and
reveal them inappropriate way for an audience that may not know
them.
So, if you just bring back the Silurians and the sea devils and
plot them on screen and say, oh, look, it's the Silurians and the
sea devils, no one knows what you're talking about, and no one
cares, particularly because you've stripped away anything that
made them kind of special and stand in the 1st place.
I think J and T needed to bring back old monsters and develop them
and do something new with them rather than just say, look, we've
brought them back.
I mean, this starts, doesn't it?
Perhaps with the sea devils.
There's sort of 2 years, isn't there, between the Siderians and
the sea devils?
And when the sea devils are brought back, they are suddenly much
more generic than the Silurians were.
So they have the same backstory as the Silurians.
They're a race of people who have as much claim to the planet as
we do.
And the Silurians does all of those things.
Maybe even halfway through the Silurians, it probably goes down.
You know, the Sillyrians have interesting things to say about
colonialism and immigration and indigenity.
They produce a new type of Doctor Who story, which isn't just
aliens invade or weird things happen on another planet.
Like it's a properly interesting premise.
It's Malcolm Holk, isn't it?
invaders or homegrown menace.
Yeah, that's it.
That's it.
But they've got characters.
There's different Silurians arguing about what's going on.
Yes.
Whereas the sea devils, you got the one leader and the rest of
them just seem to be warriors, which we've just sort of taken on
board here.
Yeah, and in the sea devils, of course, the master is there
manipulating them, and perhaps the most fun about the sea devils
comes from, you know, enjoying the master after his few stories
off.
So already in their sort of 2nd appearance, they're a bit more
generic and a bit less interesting here.
I mean, they're very much here for revenge.
It's almost like the moon base.
You know, the cybermen come back to eliminate threats or something
the next time round.
They're here to eliminate threats or something.
But nothing really very much about them as having a valid and
competing claim to the planet is here.
They could be interchanged with any sort of monster, I think, and
we've talked about that before because like, even in the sea
devils, there was action and they had their little guns, but they
moved, not slowly.
Yes.
Whereas here it's just like, and they can't even fire, like just
at the wall.
Like, I mean, it's just those battle sequences.
I just...
But even in the sea devils.
The idea of them being, once the rulers are here.
Yes, it's kind of fine.
It's given lip service, but that's about all, it's given even less
lip service in this story, I think. can I just say in the sea
devil?
So really, you think they were probably aiming for a return for
the Silurians, but then they decide they were going to set it in
the sea?
And so they said, let's make it an aquatic cousin of the
Silurians.
I think that's good.
That's fine.
You know, it's introducing a new race which is basically telling
the same story.
Another thing that they get wrong with bringing back monsters in
the 80s is that they bring them back divorced from everything that
made them special, divorced from all of their trappings.
It's not just the 80s, though.
It's all the way through.
No, not really.
The 80s is the problem because, okay, let's bring back the
brigadier.
You can't just bring that the brigadier and pop him in an 80s
story.
It doesn't really work.
You need to bring back the brigadier surrounded by the trappings
of units in a 70s style story that makes that nostalgia reel.
Which is what Modern Undead gets wrong and Battlefield gets
right.
Correct.
Absolutely.
And so here you needed a Silurian slash sea devil's style story.
You needed them coming out of the waves or out of the caves.
You didn't need them walking slowly down a white futuristic
corridor.
That's taking them away from anything that made them work.
And in fact, what does get it right is the two-parter in series
five, which brings them back to an audience that's never seen them
before and is aware that the audience has never seen them before
that it shows them underground.
It shows them reviving, it gives us a sense of their society.
And then it makes the whole story B about how we're going to
respond to their competing claims to the planet.
And like, I think that has all sorts of flaws, and I think it
flubs the ending in a really kind of depressingly unimaginative
way.
But on the way there, I think it creates great characters among
the Silurians.
You get to see them living underground in the spaces that they
live in.
They're all introduced to us properly and gradually as well.
Whereas here, they're just introduced in kind of broad daylight.
We're all somehow expected to know and care who they are.
And they are given the names, but that's all they're given.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Just expanding what you were saying, Peter, about, you know, taking
the trappings away.
I actually think it's right.
I thought one of the things that we kind of settled on is that
when the returning monster is more successful is you do something
different with them, for instance, like Curse of Peladonio.
Seeds of Death, they could be anything but Curse of Peladon.
You do something different with the ice Warriors, for instance.
So I actually don't have as much of a problem with the Brigadier
and Morton and it as you do because I think that's interesting
it's doing something different.
What I will say is what's missing from this.
It's not a matter of them coming out of in caves or having, you
know, stepping out out of the surf.
It's a matter of having what you're sort of saying, Nathan, more
of a discussion and a sympathetic discussion of the fact that this
race of beings are native to this planet and have a right to be
here as well.
And there's absolutely no discussion of that at all in Warriors of
the Deep.
I mean, there is a little bit actually.
No, there's no, no, it's just the fact that the doctor says it.
Well yes.
Yes, but the point is there's no discussion of it.
There's no, you know, the Siderians are presented as, as basically
they're just villains.
They're here to annihilate the human population of the earth by
creating a nuclear war.
There's no sympathetic character on the cellular inside, which
there is in the animal stories.
So you need to have differences between what you do in the Gypnol
2 parts or in series five.
That's what's missing from this.
And that's what I was wanting.
I was wanting the Dr. Quinn type figure to be already in contact
with the cellurians in advance of the story.
And that sort of is what leads the side of your engine.
Almost like having Dr. Sol hours a double- double agent.
I think she's helping Nilson, but he's actually on the Silurian
side.
Exactly.
Well, that kind of thing.
Maybe that maybe it's...
She could have been a marine biologist.
Maybe it's what she's faced from Mission to Destiny who has that
role. don't know.
But you know what I mean?
That's what's missing.
And that's why the unfortunate thing.
One of the unfortunate things about this story is it's one
dimensionality.
Yes, I think that's that's its biggest crime.
And there's something also in the presentation as well.
There was kind of a cheap and cheerfulness to the Silurian and the
sea devil costumes the 1st time round.
It's like they didn't look very good in the sea devils.
Let's just wrap some fish netting around them.
And suddenly that's an iconic image.
Whereas now you seem to have this collision between reality and
the fiction where they're trying to make the masks and the
costumes more elaborate and more detailed.
And yet that is hamstrung what we're seeing on screen because now
they have to move very slowly.
They can't get the costumes ready in studio and so you have, you
know, the sea devil hats at angles and things, you know, off the
heads.
And so they've reached this wall where they can't actually make
something that looked good in the 70s look good in the 80s.
I agree with you because, like, I mean, when you actually see
Salvex speaking, like, it's obvious that the actor's head is in
the neck, you know what I mean?
Like, it's so shoddy.
And the Silurians, like, they've done all that fibreglass stuff.
But when they're walking down that corridor, you see every join
around like, and you can hear them creaking.
And you're just there going, like, the original ones weren't great
in their suits, but my goodness, like, they look worse every
single episode.
I think that the Silurian costumes are well thought out.
They look good in a photo, say, on the cover of Matt Irvine's
book.
So in 1985.
So the original ones, the original ones, which we love, obviously
have a very real sense of being moulded out of 2 halves, and you
can see the joy like that goes across their head, you know, at the
midpoint. and the back of the heads are really undetailed and
stuff.
But what this has done is it's retained that sort of iconic 5
ridges with the central thing.
I think it looks really good.
The scales look really good.
All of that.
I don't know why it's not green.
I don't know why it has to be this pale tan colour, but I think
that that actually looks good.
I think giving them clothes works as well.
Remember the original silureans had that long thing that goes down
the front that's designed to hide the zipper in the costume.
Like they've got a, they've got a sort of thing around their
neck.
All of the sort of joins and stuff in the original salurines don't
really work.
So I think it's an iconic design that doesn't work in the 70s.
And I think the redesign here is quite good, except that they do
it so ham fistedly.
So they don't tuck their necks into the costume. what I was
saying.
They don't take necks in like, no.
Like, all of that stuff individually looks great.
And you put it together and there's the gap between the chest
plate and the neck and you see it walking down the corridor and
you're going, 0 my goodness, that one's knocked tucked in.
That one here.
It's like, do we only have 5 minutes to prepare?
for this episode.
Apparently so.
Yeah, it's really ham feasted.
And you're right about the sea devils as well because, you know
when the sea devils emerge from the sea in that iconic scene, It
is very clearly a bunch of people with turtle heads on the tops of
their hats.
Do you know what I mean?
Like, you're never in any doubt.
But you're never in any doubt where the actors' heads are and
there's turtle heads on top of them, you know.
And they loll about a little bit as well.
I have to say.
But there are whole seats, and they move quickly.
So you can kind of buy them as real creatures.
It helps with kind of the credibility as a whole.
Whereas here when they're just moving so slowly and sort of
turning slowly to each other.
It drags everything to a full stop.
There are heads falling off.
There's one scene towards the end where the main guy, Ikta, is
there.
Where Ignar is there and he's giving a big speech and behind him
is a sea devil guard, whose head is virtually falling off.
And I think the cameraman actually moves in order to make sure
that Ictor is occluding our view of the sea devil whose head is
falling off.
And, like, the whole...
Pendent up in the gallery, saying camera 5 to the left...
Like, they're really bad.
And, you know, the impression of the actors' heads being below the
sea devil's heads is given by the fact that there's those dots and
the little holes in the neck.
So they can see and breathe.
Yeah, yeah.
Like they're really, really astoundingly inept.
Okay, but we know why, don't we?
We were rushed for time for some reason and Pennant Roberts.
Wasn't the general election or something?
They didn't have enough studio. a little bit of background on
this.
The general election was called from 1983.
It was snap election, and so they needed to free up studio space.
And so the only thing they could do rather than actually lose
Warriors, the Deep's blocks and not have it filmed was to move it
forward.
Now, they were able to do that with everything else, but it was
the visual effects, which were a problem, because the people who
were going to work on visual effects, Warriors and Deep, were busy
on another project.
So that contracted the amount of time that they had to work on
things like the murker.
I don't necessarily think that's a problem when you're in the
studio recording it.
So you didn't have less time than they would have for any other
Doctor Who.
But this is a big thing.
This is where the wheel starts to come off Doctor Who because JNT
is aiming too big with the productions.
Famously, Philip Hinchcliffe would rule things in and out
depending on what could be achieved on screen.
And so he would say, let's definitely have a jungle and planet of
evil, because I know that we can reliably produce that and make it
look good.
Let's not have a robot in Brain of Morbius because that's not
going to work on screen.
Yeah.
Oh, that's one element too many to pay for.
Well, Robert Holmes says that Philip Hinchcliffe suddenly had
doubts about it and said, I don't think we're going to be able to
do a robot in Solon's place and make it look good.
And so we're just going to rewrite it.
JNT doesn't have that inhibition.
And so I think...
The issue's becoming too overconfident is the problem.
Well, it shouldn't be overconfident.
It should be a clear-eyed assessment of what can be achieved.
And he's had plenty of experience with that given productions like
earth shock and time flies.
The problem is that he's producing Doctor Who to try to match
things like Star Wars, which is the mistake that everyone else
makes.
It's the mistake that Michael Grade makes when he says, oh, you
know, it should have been more like Star Wars, and it just looked
like nonsense.
No, it shouldn't have been trying to compete with Star Wars.
A series of stories on the budget of, say, Planet of Fire and
Caves around Zani, would have looked fine and not lent into this.
We can't achieve what we're trying to do.
But instead, he's trying to do Warriors of the Deep.
He's trying to do, let's say, Resurrection of the Daleks later in
the season, which, yeah, it does look, there are elements which
look good, but the things which you need to film in the studio, you
don't have time to film.
You simply don't have time to put all of these monster costumes
together, make sure they're fisted right for the take.
You certainly don't have time, and this is one of the big problems
of the story along with the Merka, to film those action
sequences.
You need to prize them apart and film them a couple of shots at a
time to make them work and then knit it all together so that it
looks like something instead what you've got is a whole bunch of
monster costumes, shuffling across the set in wide shot, firing
their guns at point blank range and never hitting anything, and
it's all covered in wide shot and MCU, and it completely kills the
story.
It's kind of like going back to Dalek Invasion of Earth.
I mean, it's the same kind of sins as that, but it's not just the
lead up, which is why all the Mercer and light sort of stuff is
having its paint dry minutes before it appears.
Isn't it also the fact that they don't have or maybe it's because
of that, that they don't have much time to actually do the shots?
I mean, I'm sure Janet says at one point that there was one shot
that she just thought was the camera rehearsal and she wasn't
giving it her all.
She was just basically going through the motions.
Yes, that's that scene early in episode 2 where Tegan is hiding
outside the command centre when the doctor's gone in to confront
them and Preston comes across.
That, I think, is the scene chance talking about, where she just
sort of turns around in sort of shock and looks at Preston.
You think, well, that's weirdly underplayed and overplayed.
Yes, exactly. love that scene.
And what you're saying earlier too.
I love it.
And what you're saying earlier too, Nathan, about the sea devil
head falling off and the camera's trying to hide it.
They don't have time to say, cut, let's start that.
It's the kind of thing they've got less time than normal. fix the
costume.
They have the same time as normal, but you can't mount sequences
like that in the studio and make them work.
Maybe Graham Harper could have done it.
Maybe being the genius that he is on multicam, he could have made
a sequence like that work.
But when you get a director of Pennant Roberts standard, a typical
multi-camera drama director.
You have absolutely no hope of pulling together a sequence like
that.
It makes many characters, this many monsters and this many
costumes.
Well, you know, having 12 sea devils come through the door and
having 12 base people firing at them on the other side.
It's all covered far too broadly.
It makes the story look laughable in those instances.
And this is the problem with 1980s Doctor Who.
There's no quality control.
So we know JNT can produce Great Doctor Who.
He does frequently.
He also produces terrible Doctor Who, and that's from story to
story.
You get Warriors of the Deep, which is a failed production in a
lot of ways, notwithstanding some of the great things that we've
said about the set and all of that.
You then get a tight little production like The Awakening
following it.
You get time lash, followed by Revelation of the Daleks.
You get the caves around Dzani, followed by between the...
There is no quality control, and I think they are aiming too big.
It's the director, though.
We've always said it's the director.
That's a different show, even.
Harper and Peter Moffatt.
Absolutely.
I'm not sure.
Even Graham Harper could have pulled this off, though, although he
might have...
Oh, he would have been rushing around the studio floor making
things happen.
Yeah, well, that's about that.
I'm not sure that you could pull this together.
And so the problem with 80s Doctor Who is the fact that they are
aiming too big.
There are productions which don't work and become laughable.
And I think this is where the general public starts to see a
problem.
No, it can't hold a candle to Star Wars.
So why is it trying?
And it's pressured, but there's endless pressure to match Star
Wars or any of the other sort of sci-fi type films that you're
starting to get.
Another series, like, you know, it's not just Star Wars.
You know, you've got Buck Rogers in the 25th century was on. you've
got other things like that.
And, you know, Michael Grade points to this story and says that
this is rubbish.
When he was on room 101, they showed a clip, which was Dr. Solau
karate chopping the murka.
And of course, the audience laughed like a drain, and he sat there
saying, this was absolute rubbish.
I don't know why we're making it.
And it's because he wasn't watching the Kazer and Azani, which
clearly was a great example of Doctor Who production.
Yeah, okay, there's bits and pieces, but there always will be, but
it's a tight, well told, well shot production.
He's not thinking that.
The only thing he sees, the only thing which lingers in the
general public's imagination, is Warriors the Deep, and the
mattress store and the shuffling monsters.
And so there is big claim to be made for as of the deep that it
killed Doctor Who, I think, because he came in as controller of
BBC one in summer of 1984 and the 1st thing on his desk that you
would have seen was the internal BBC report saying that Warriors
of the Deep was unfit for transmission.
Do you think maybe that flag's something in his head?
I love Dr. Solau kicking the Merka.
What is she trying to do, though?
Die.
I just love it.
It's it's just it's something that was just emblazoned on my
memory as a kid.
Like, I really thought this is so ridiculous, but she's still
going to do that, you know?
Yeah, I mean, one of the things is that this sort of nonsense to
us doesn't matter all that much, because this is something that
you don't go back to, Simon, that I was kind of bored during, but
like, it's not a war crime, and like, there's lots of fun to be
had in how sort of silly and crummy it is.
I would have loved if Dr. Solo had survived and been taken by the
other block and put on trial for war crimes.
One of the charges was, why did you kick the murker?
But isn't it interesting, like, she never meets the doctor.
Like, she never doesn't have a single. she doesn't have a single
line of dialogue with the doctor, like Rulolenska in a couple of
stories time, like Cara in Revelation of the Daleks?
these strong women or villainouses or heroes just don't meet the
doctor in these stories.
It's very interesting That whole thing, I think, is also really
kind of undercooked too.
And you gestured, Simon, I think, at a version of this story, where
there is a proper parallel between the Cold War that's happening
between the mysterious other block and us.
The power block opposed to this one.
Yes, I love that phrase.
But there's only 2 of them.
No, because it could mean that we're actually on the USSR power
block.
Yeah, you know?
Yeah.
Notwithstanding the accents, but, you know, that's a BBC thing.
And then the Silurians come along and there, you know, a bigger
more frightening power block that pushes us together or comments
on what's been happening.
And by setting it exactly 100 years into the future, you are
inviting us to read it as the present day.
But there's none of that.
Like, there is none of that.
It's just eating up running time, that plot.
It doesn't mean anything.
No, for me, it's not eating up enough running time.
It's my problem.
It's neither one thing nor the other.
It's sort of a half pregnant.
They've had this idea that we're going to do a Cold War analogy
and it is timely.
The Cold War was picking up at that time. you know, Reagan.
Yeah, it's the same year that threads were shown.
Threads day after. those things were shown.
The whole missile run that they do at the beginning. reminiscent
of war games, that wonderful film of Matthew Broderick, which was
kind of quite important for me back in the day too.
It is so of the time.
And yet they then choose not to really do anything interesting
with it.
Do you remember the thing about the neutron bombs?
You know, how kind of horrible the neutron bombs were?
So neutron bombs are invented, you know, sometime before this, but
they become a bit of a thing under Reagan and stuff like that and
they're getting a lot of exposure and press at the time.
And these ones are proton bombs.
They get mentioned, though, in the story.
And the idea is that they explode, but the actual physical
explosion is quite limited, but they do kill all of the people
while leaving the space intact.
That was what the neutron bomb was.
Yeah, that's right.
That's still pretty distractive.
Yeah, yeah, but the idea is because in previous wars and in both
World War I and World War II, part of the thing that prevents you
from invading and taking territory is that during the course of
invasion, you destroy all the things that you want to acquire.
So it becomes not worth your while.
And then the neutron bomb solves that problem.
And so at the time it was felt to be particularly inhumane and
appalling because I think on some level because it sort of changed
that calculus.
And that gets mentioned here.
So the actual stuff about the Cold War is actually, absolutely, as
you said, completely relevant.
But what do we do with it?
How do we comment on it?
And in fact, we create a situation where these people come onto
the base and the only choice that we have is to poison them all
and then the sort of story ends.
And when the doctor says at the end of it, there should have been
another way, Johnny Byrne should have thought of another way.
That's where the problem lies.
It's almost like the threat of the sea devils and the Silurians.
They should have had their own agenda, obviously.
But the threat of them should have been what brought the 2 blocks
together.
Yes, exactly.
But you see, the thing with the, you know, the hexacromite gas and
everything.
And really, there is no choice but to use it to destroy the sea
devils and cellurians.
But also there's no choice story wise, not to use it anyway
because of the fact that there is nothing sympathetic that is
presented about the city levels and cellular.
They're just evil invading creatures who we have to destroy
otherwise we'll all die, and they'll destroy the all life on this
planet.
So in some respects, it's not an interesting thing to happen
anyway.
Exactly.
Johnny Burns making up this situation.
If there's no alternative, but to kill them all, that's because of
the situation that we've decided to make up.
So a story where the doctor does something like persuade the
Silurians and sea devils that they're doing the wrong thing, the
way that the doctor persuades more gain not to let nuclear weapons
off and kill a whole bunch of people a few years later.
You know, you don't have a heroic doctor at this point because no
one is really behind that as an idea.
You kind of need the ending to be like the ending of the channel
to do part of from series 5, where you actually physically get
both groups in a room.
The doctors persuaded the Silurians not to set off all of the
missiles.
And so there they are facing each other.
How are they going to make this agreement work?
Yeah.
No, I think what you can do is you can mimic the Syrians, the
original story, and have the doctor persuading them to not launch
the nuclear weapons, and then Walshack comes in, discusses them
all.
And so you still, you still need to have that resolution of, you
can't just have them all, well, let's go off and talk about this.
I mean, I think either is a more interesting proposition than what
we got, even though I do kind of like the ending.
Like you said, Nathan, as resolutions go, it just stops.
Yeah.
There's no denouement at all. extraordinary.
No.
And just the kind of killing everyone, like there's a nastiness to
it, and I think...
Yeah.
I think you and I disagree about what should be the permissible
level of nastiness. 100% is my upper limit.
Isn't the Todd's 120%?
not commenting on that.
No, but look at some of the great stories in history.
The Ark and Space, you've only got via left.
Okay, the rest of, in terms of speaking characters.
In Pyramids of Mars, they're all dead.
In Robots of Death, you've only got 2 cinema.
Horror Fang Rock.
They're all gone.
Exactly.
And they're all great.
But, but this has, you know, like people being blinded and, you
know, like people strangling their friends and, and like, it's
there's just a kind of, just a...
Yeah, don't move the story on it all.
I just happen for a bit of drama, whereas in something like horror
Fang Rock.
Every death moves the story forward.
That's right. that's right The commander and Preston could have
easily survived. right?
It was just...
I think it's just lazy writing.
I think they were meant to. originally.
Yeah.
The commander in Buick.
I just think Eric Seywood is good.
You have to lay a lot of blame at his feet.
And bringing Johnny Byrne back after the huge success of Arc of
Infinity.
Like it's like...
No, I'm serious.
I'm actually surprised how much I enjoyed it on the Blu-ray box.
What?
Archive Infinity.
Well, I was going in.
I was going with very low expectations.
Often that's a good thing.
I am also surprised by how much. true.
Yes, I think basically he's dined out far too long on Keeper of
Trarkan is the problem.
Yes, after that, you know, he's only as half as good and half as
good again.
Yeah, yeah.
Back to what you were saying, like, about the nobility of the
Silurians.
Like the doctor mentions their honourable and that, but you don't
get that at any point.
Yeah, they're not in the story, are they?
Do we remember, like, in the other 2 stories, you've got a lot of
characters that you actually spend a lot of time with that you
actually like?
I mean, I like Preston and Dr. Solo come to mind and perhaps
Maddox, but everybody else could be like the commander and then
his deputy and then the other evil guy.
There are actually too many characters.
And that's another problem with the 80s.
There's far too many supporting carriages.
You could easily have combined Preston and Buick into the same
character.
But then you do get kind of nice little side characters like
Karina, Maddox's friend who has some nice scenes or that guy that
you know, what did he have for lunch?
That guy.
Oh, yes, exactly.
That's got to be a Peter Davis rehearsal joke.
And again, I really quite like that.
It adds a bit of colour to incidental thing.
What have you been eating?
I actually agree with you, Todd, because the whole thing is so po
faced and so serious and no one says anything that isn't about the
immediate plot and the situation that we find ourselves in.
So having just a kind of a couple of throwaway lines is a relief.
It's coming from Peter Davison's coming from the doctor.
And this is a doctor, as people who listen to the podcast, know
that I don't really have didn't gel with.
And like when he's doing these little things, these little snarky
things and commentary and that, it really shines how good he is in
this story.
It's funny.
It's because it's so that's the only real incident of adding some
lightness to the story that it makes it feel really weird for me
and oh, and I think, oh, that's a bit dicky because it's so out of
place with everything else that's at the style of the rest of the
story.
It's also that weird thing of the doctor going around for 3
quarters of the story out of his normal costume.
It pokes me in the eye every time.
I like that.
Yeah okay.
It motivates the change of costume. from here on in.
Yeah, he has a different costume from here.
The green shirt comes to red shirt and yeah, trousers are
different.
Yeah, yeah.
Windows are the wrong size.
There was 2 doors.
No, that's true.
Look, going back to what we were saying at the start, there is
actually quite a lot about this story that is good.
The sets are good.
The lighting, I think, going against the received wisdom is
sometimes quite good.
Some of those corridors are really quite well lit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The model work looks fantastic.
I think the money is there on the screen.
The problem is being able to execute what the script is asking of
it.
And I don't think any director, be it Graham Harper or Pennant
Roberts, would have been able to make those battle sequences or
the sequences with the murka fighting off the extras, look any
good.
The merka.
So, the murket, they should have gone back to basics.
They knew a couple of days in advance that the costume wasn't
going to be ready and they made the decision.
Let's just go with it.
No, you can't do that.
That's why there was a report saying it was unfit for
transmission.
That should have prompted a wholesale rethink of what they were
going to do.
And, you know, these professionals do it a couple of days for the
studio and then make it work.
There should have been more point of view shots.
There should have been more glimpses of it rather than just
plopping it wide.
They should have turned down the lights for any scene that it was
in, shambling down the corridors.
They could have made the soundscape, more bestille and
terrifying.
There is any number of ways that they could have hidden that
costume more, except they just plop it in the middle of the studio
and say, walk down the corridor.
Okay, when you say they, terrible.
It's pennant.
No, quite seriously.
I also have been JNT.
Well, yes, but nevertheless, it's up to Pennant to adapt to the
camera script because you say, okay, you're still painting it.
Right, forget the back half.
Just give me the head.
I'll just hide the back of it in soft focus or something else
because, you know, all it needs to do is whack its tail against a
panel and there's and all the lights in the base go dim.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's it's so easy to add.
Failure of execution and a failure of conception.
Failure of imagination.
Yes.
It is woeful.
Oh, shocking.
And so are the electrocutions of the extras that go with it.
How are the extras?
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
The extras, that woman that places itself down on the floor, like
she doesn't want to hurt her knees or anything.
She just goes to sleep.
It makes the ones in Destiny, the Daleks look positively rather
animated.
It's not in any form.
We should not be getting that Exactly.
It is a bit of a tradition though, isn't it?
The aliens kill you in a way that makes you gently lower yourself
to the floor.
Except it's not that much of a tradition.
Doctor Who before this time, before the 1980s.
Let's say before season 20 onwards does not tend to do this.
It doesn't invite ridicule with scenes like that.
It's cheap, but it's not nasty.
This looks cheap and nasty as much as it looks great.
And you can't have that in a product that's going to screen.
I mean, the murka is shockingly shockingly bad.
Like unbelievably terrible.
And we did have... feelings.
The slither was shocking.
No, don't go back there.
Well, the murker would have been improved if everyone's there
waiting for it to come through a mattress store and all you hear
is, ah...
It doesn't have a mouth.
Like, it doesn't have a mouth.
It's just got a ridge.
Like, it doesn't have teeth.
Like, it's so bad.
But when it gets blinded.
Oh my god.
It doesn't have a mouth because tarpok feeds and my lactic.
I mean, it's it's shockingly shockingly bad.
And like the little hands that it has.
Actually, they're quite good.
The soundscape is terrible.
It goes, It sounds ridiculous.
It needs to sound bestial.
Yes, exactly.
But I mean, maybe we just didn't need it.
If you'd had 2 phalanxes of sea devils coming through. phalanxes
of cervix.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merka has been destroyed.
With that, and that's the other thing too.
Like, who, like, one of the big problems that we identified in
flight through entirety, or probably that I went on about, was in
the original Silurians that you just have everyone voiced by Peter
Halliday, I think, is doing all of the Silurians.
And because the Siurians need to be individual characters, it
would have been better if they'd been actors doing their own
voices and stuff.
But they still sound sort of roughly different and they don't
sound mechanical.
Here, they sound like they're robots.
Like no one seems to know what they are.
And because we've got the lights flashing like their daleks and
because they speak slowly. like the Silurians in the Silurians.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. and they have proper discussions and stuff
Something to do with beyond the range of the sensor.
He's so slow and plodding.
Oh, it's really boring.
And what biological reason makes a part of your body flash when
you speak.
Well, maybe you're an anglerfish.
Maybe...
But again, okay, we're going to spring back Silurians.
Let's bring them back without a central feature that they were
known for.
Why?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, they don't even open the doors with their...
Or burn through corridors or rock.
I suspect somebody watched Solarians and thought they looked
silly.
And so therefore, let's make them look less silly.
Therefore on screen, they look worse.
Well, I think there's always been a resistance or at least there
was resistance at this time.
They have to have the body shake when a monster was talking.
Like the cybermen tend to do.
So that is one of the things that happens with the Silurians, but
also they have the rubber mouth that the actor is able to
manipulate using a pair.
They manipulate with their tongue.
So their actual mouths kind of move, not properly, not fully not
in sync. story.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, they're not just wobbling.
They're faces.
They fight their lips. yeah Yeah.
So they do look like they're talking.
So clearly they're just there because like Doctor Who can't really
do monsters at this point or sort of proper monsters whose mouths
move.
Even in Cold War in series 7, it's kind of shocking that you have
the ice warrior whose lips move, like we have CGI, mouth
movements.
The reason the ud have the tentacles, you know, in the 21st
century is so that they can talk without having to sort of
synchronise their mouths.
So it's understandable in the 80s they can't achieve that.
But there was a solution to it in the 70s that was vastly better
than everyone should just talk slowly while a flashing light
goes...
Well, I was saying earlier about the collision between wanting to
make the masks and the costumes look more detailed and like look
better on screen.
But then failing to be able to animate them properly.
So the whole production looks like Solurians.
It's static.
It's just there on screen and not moving and all the good things
are swept up in that and the overall impression you take away is
of a bad piece of television when actually for quite a lot of it.
It's a good piece of television, it's just ruined by these
terrible set pieces and moments that don't work.
Yeah, I, like, we've been talking like forever long we've been
talking now, and I think you leave the impression that we don't
like this.
I mean, you may not.
But I still liked watching it.
And despite these, and I still like watching it.
And despite its failings and certain things, I still enjoy it.
But it could have been so much better, as I think, what we're
talking about.
Well, I agree with you, sir.
It's a subpar. it's a subpar story, but it's not, it's not the
sort of the time flight that I think some people make it out to
be.
No, it's definitely got lots to recommend it, which time flight
does not.
It's just that it's another in the increasing list of Doctor Who's
failed productions throughout the 1980s and you can't have that.
The general public takes away from Doctor Who, that it is, as much
as it's not, a failed production and that kills the series.
The one thing we haven't talked about, which is, I think, also
less successful about this story, are generally the performances
which I think the guest cast, as a rule, give pretty bad
performances with one or 2 exceptions.
But I don't think they've got much to go on with.
And I think, so I want to push back against the time flight thing
because I think time flight is clearly bad in all sorts of ways
and it fails as a production in a way that this doesn't, but it's
not attempting to do something so dull.
It's attempting to do something that the show could never do in a
1000000 years.
Again, it's a problem of scale trying to achieve too much.
But it's trying to do something weird and imaginative and
something, you know, it's a show that includes characters from the
present day who kind of interact in a recognisable way in all
sorts of ways.
Whereas this, everyone just declaims everyone's talking about
their job.
It is just basically the story of a bunch of people invade the
base.
They all shoot each other until we poison one side of them and
then it ends.
There's nothing imaginative about this.
There's nothing that we didn't do better 2 years ago in earth
shock.
Earthshock had characters, you know, like Earthshock had
characters in it.
Who can say anything about Vorsak as a person or Buick or Preston
apart from the fact that she has incredible hair?
That's my line.
I'm going to say stop.
She's got incredible hair and makeup and she looks good.
She does look great.
That's why, when Nathan said that, he looked very pointed.
I don't think we're going to argue the relative quality or lack
thereof time flight and worries of the deep because it's a losing
argument.
No, I will.
Warriors of the Deep is by far a better production than Timeline.
But I think there are some dimensions along which time flight is
better.
Of course, it does succeed better in some way.
There are some dimensions on which underworld is better than
this.
Going back to what I was saying about scale, time flight is
another failed production for Doctor Who.
It's one of the earliest ones in the 1980s that just doesn't
work.
And the problem, again, was failure of imagination.
As you said, Simon, when faced with the fact that they had to do
that heath on prehistoric earth in the corner of the studio, it
needed a wholesale rethink.
Let's find the money to go to Ealing.
If we can't do that, let's turn the lights down, let's turn up the
wind machine.
Let's just imagine, add a soundscape.
We needed to imagine it differently.
As it is, it's all there. floodlit in a corner of TC6 or
whatever.
I've often said that the bad directors on Doctor Who are bad, not
just for that kind of thing, but also just because they shoot
everything as if all the sets and all the costumes are perfectly
realised.
Yeah, right.
And all of the monster costumes.
Whereas the good directors realise that they are not 100% realise
and so they find every way they can to obscure them to hide them
to... reason why people don't associate the caves around us aren't
equality wise with its worst aspect, which is the magma creature.
It's because Graham Harper is faced with having to use this
creature and it's not very successful.
And so he does everything he can to not put in centre stage.
Yeah.
And which pen and you just get a full front on shot, and you'd be
seeing there going, uh, and it's half its head would probably be
slightly to one side.
Well, that's all the time we had for this week.
We'll be back next week to watch the Dodger encountering Sill in
an exciting new set of space corridors in Mind Wharp.
In the meantime, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts
and you can keep up with us on our website, 500-year diary.com
where you'll find our social media links, as well as links to all
of our other podcasts, including our other Doctor Who podcasts
Flight through Entirety, and the 2nd great and bountiful human
empire.
Until next time, can you please let the paint dry on the pantomime
horse before sending it into battle?
Thank you very much for listening and good night.
See you soon.
They really should have been another way.
That was 500-year diary, starring Todd Bealby, Nathan Bottomley
Peter Griffiths, and Simon Moore.
The theme was composed by Cameron Lamb.
This episode, a full front on shot, was recorded on the 18th of
May, 2025, and released on the 1st of June.
We're just over halfway through this season of 500 year diary, but
Doctor Who season 2 has now reached its end.
If you want to hear what we thought of the reality war, tune in to
the 2nd great and bountiful Human Empire on Monday.
We'll see you there.
Did you see the zipper in the bottom of the solarine as it
collapsed?
I wasn't looking at the Solurian's bottom.
I was looking at their shoes.
I was looking at that too, but I just went, are you kidding me?
Are you actually kidding me?
I've actually picked that up for the 1st time.
One of the reasons that the sea devils move so slowly is that they
have comedy novelty slippers on. like giant bare feet slippers.
Aren't the Salarians, are they on like the Haunted Nyman platform
boots?
No, no, they've kind of got like rubber flares that obscure their
plim soles, you know.
But I mean, again, you just don't shoot their feet.
Like, you don't have to shoot their feet.
Because it should have been a thing like in the recent episode
Lucky day where you get to the episode 4 and you're faced with the
Silurians and the sea devils in the command. going to start the
war and suddenly they unzip themselves and they're all operatives
from the opposite.
They are actually men in rubber.
Dear.
I mean, I've got the couple of notes that I have is episode 3 is
when it starts to really become more properly tedious.
So you agree with me?
No, no, no, no, no.
I don't entirely disagree with you.
That's where it all begins to fall apart in terms of all the
action sequences and seeing all of the problems on screen.
The 1st trip.
Why don't humans guns do anything?
It's the traditional...
Again, it's the way it's being shot.
You have these giant groups of opposing forces in wide shot, all
firing at each other and rarely making a hit, even though they
have targets ranged in front of them.
It just looks ridiculous.
This bits the tag.
I've already thought of the out.
Yeah, I mean, but you've got, like, some of the guns light up and
they've got their little plastic guns, you know, like the tiny
little plastic guns that they all hold sort of rather camply.
Like, no one holds them like these one.
CDs on the front.
No, no.
So the ones with the CDs on the front.
That's clearly an attempt to redo the C devils ones, which were
great, I think, originally, you know, because they're, they, they
hold them behind them.
Yeah, like they're in close up in cliffhangers.
They live crusting forwards.
That's awesome.
But now they're all holding them because they're like these little
dinky hands. scrub the floor.
That's what they look like.
They're so cute.
I think they got it looking so white.
And then, and then, but the humans guns do literally nothing.
They have no recoil, no beam comes out of them.
There's no explosions, there's nothing.
They're just pointing them at people.
Turlo has suddenly become a more accurate shot than any of the...
Oh my god.
And that's the other thing that really struck me is I don't
understand why these 3 people are travelling together at all.
Yeah, why are they all travelling together?
Because they are.
They don't like one another.
No, I think Tegan.
No, no, that's not true.
I think it's quite clear that the doctor and Tegan are fond of
each other.
It's quite clear that Turlo has a great respect for the doctor.
And Tegan and Turlo have like a brother-sister relationship.
Like a sort of a bickering brother and sister-in-law.
And in the actual thing.
Where does any of that sort of appear?
Do you know what I mean?
Because you've got Janet doing her sort of Janet face when, hey
wish me luck and she just goes, oh, yes, you.
You know, like, like, it's absolutely Janet reaction rather than a
Tegan reaction, I think.
Like, they're just all kind of angry at each other all the time.
Face it, Tegan.
He's dead.
He's drowned.
I love that.
Ratcliffhanger.
The doctor's falling into some water.
Face it, Tigger.
He's drowned.
Yeah, it takes 3 seconds to drown.
But can I just say, though, going back to our original comments
how brilliant that sequence, he's been doing a backbook or a stunt
doing a black over the thing.
When that was on in 1984.
Yeah, yeah.
I thought that was, I thought, we've arrived in the future.
You know, You didn't notice the wall.
No, no, no, not on a 43 cm.
It's something that could be achieved because not only do they
have great flats.
So the set looks good over that BBC swimming pool at Shepparton or
whatever.
Yeah, what is it?
It's a Shepparton, is it?
Shepperson, yeah, because they couldn't use the BBC internal one
for some election related reason.
Do you think it's any election?
Yeah, they were dunking Margaret Thatcher in there.
Labour was CSD.
It's because it's shot on single camera.
And so you can pull it apart.
It's something which can be achieved.
And so it looks good.
And can I just say that bit where the doctor kicks the guard in
the face is quite confronted.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, again, that's stupid as well.
Like, why does he do that?
But I do think there is affection there.
The doctor does want Tegan, not, you know, to hide in that, and
Turlow is desperate to get them out of the airlock and, you know
and somehow Tegan walks away from having a huge door fall on a leg
without it being broke.
No, she is...
Hobbling, but it's... slightly... slightly cool star.
When the door falls, does it break Tegan's legal?
break the door?
It's soft and kind of, you know, bouncy.
Yeah, it's like a koala mattress.
Yeah.
Memory foam.
Memory fan.
Gosh, this story looked good on paper.
I'm not convinced it did.
J&T's whiteboard.
Let's say doctor's wife at the bottom.
Thank God Johnny Byrne didn't come back.
Well.
He nearly did, didn't he?
No, I think this was this Guardians of prophecy.
Oh, that was amazing, was it?
No, 20, wasn't it?
23?
All I will say is a final word is that the base commander is no
Ronald Lehunt.
No, so few people are.
The briefcases.
Yes.
The costumes, they were a little better.
But he's not very good.
Well, it's the thing we were saying about the cast They seem to be
straitjacketed by those ridiculous futuristic costumes.
They're so buttoned up.
No, they don't look too buttoned up.
They look more like, they kind of look more like shell suits, don't
they?
Oh, yeah, they just like, it's a good thing.
Yes, they say in a good way.
They all about to board a bus to Hull or something.
Exactly.
And also the fact that Maddox in 2084, he doesn't even have a USBC
plug on his head.
He's got some great big sort of...
That's so good as well, sorry.
I'll just bleep that out.
You say fuck in this. the most reason one.
Yes, but that was deliberate.
No, no, no.
I put the robot over it.
He doesn't even have he doesn't even have a USBC plug on his
head.
But it's not just that.
I mean, the whole point of that is that it's got to feel like it
goes into his head because that's kind of part of the horror of
it.
You know, like he's had this surgery, that links him to the
computer in a way that's sort of really invasive and unnatural, and
now he's got these plugs in his head.
But he said the plugs are sort of just stuck to the outside of his
head because you can't. it looks reasonably okay.
Yeah, no, I think it's...
Along the cops and what we need... look marvellous and bespoke.
They really do.
With a little the little the drive, the the disk drive that goes
down, around bit of jutters.
Yeah, all along with tech, Dr. Solar use.
This looks really great.
The thing that the light beam thing looks good.
And that's the other reference we haven't made.
The thing that they blind Ian McCulloch with.
And that's the other thing that we haven't referenced yet, is that
there is, with Maddox's programming, a reference to Manchurian
candidate.
So, I mean, which is interesting because Mangerian candidate is
either well before or well after the main condition.
But nevertheless, it's that idea.
It adds into the Cold War thing.
So there are little bits that they are trying to do with the Cold
War.
But if you cut out half the silurian rubbish in the 1st 2 episodes
and just don't have them at all, and you make it a Cold War spy
story, which then turns into the silurians and sea devils, I just
think that might have been, might have been a better story and not
have all of these endless dialogue sequences between the silurians
in their underseen.
Yeah, I don't think we could have lasted out until, like, I think
they needed to come in at the end of episode one.
Okay, even episode one.
But the point, my point being, not seeing one, because they're
basically there...
Exactly, 2 minutes here.
Because it's so promising in that early sequence where the
satellite's going to attack the TARDIS.
I mean, it's quite jazzy and interesting and all this is this
is...
And the earth has gone horrible or bad in some way, but we never
follow up. knocked off course is always exciting.
It's always exciting.
Yeah, no, no, there's problems.
Just in general, there should have been another way.
Yes, exactly.
All of this.
There just should have been another way and any other way they
would have chosen would have made it better.
As it is, it is quite good in places, but it's just not good
enough.
And in some places it's actively terrible.
And the note that I had here is, as you've said earlier, it is the
beginning of the 1985 cancellation of the show.
Absolutely.
Happy note. let's end it there