I promise I’ll catch up on my new Doctor Who series reviews soon …
So, first up
Deadwood – Season Three
I still can’t decide if I love this show or hate it. What I do know is that it makes me watch it, whatever the feeling I am having. HBO’s complicated DVD menus sure do aggravate me, but the presentation is always high quality. Deadwood season three is easily the best of the three (so far, anyway) with the Bullock and Swearengen becoming allies in the town’s war against George Hearst. In fact, the third season is easily the best season as it sees the characters come to terms with who in what they are, but not in any sentimental or cliché TV show way.
What everyone knows and talks about when they mention Deadwood is the amount of swearing. Yes, in fact, episode 1 of season 1 was like listening to someone swear who didn’t know how to do it … ie, very odd and off-putting. But, what isn’t mentioned, though is immediately apparent if you haven’t watched the show in a while, is that convoluted language (vacillating from the eloquent, well-read classical style to gutter talk) that makes for quite a strange and highly stylized show. When Al comments “and Leviathan smiles” the audience is expected to understand and know what a Leviathan is and the literary reference (in this case, Hobbes’ very famous philosophic masterpiece). Not the average show about violence and swearing.
Doctor Who “The New Beginnings” Box set
The Keeper of Traken, Logopolis, and Castrovalva
Once upon a time, this was the “new” Doctor Who. Reinvented in 1980 under the leadership John Nathan-Turner, it is hard to believe the this looked really fresh and new, but it did. To be totally fair to this DVD set, you must remember that this was the “new” era of video effects, music videos were literally just beginning, and the synthesizer hadn’t yet become an innocuous invention and was appreciated as a new sound. The video effects look very dated now, but back then Duran Duran hadn’t even gotten off the ground (the New Romantics wave had barely started.)
This trilogy of stories features probably the most jaw-dropping TV moment of my entire life – the regeneration of Tom Baker into Peter Davison. Tom Baker had been the only Doctor for many Americans since the show first began to pop up on PBS stations and, although I did know something about the past Doctors by the time I saw Logopolis, I was not prepared to actually deal with seeing the series go on without the character I loved.
In the US we don’t perceive the series as being scary or family oriented or even mass market. It was mainly for more mature/geeky kids and was on Saturday nights and therefore will always be seen as a niche or cult program by outsiders (or the “not we”.) Add to that the essential “cheapness” of having the program shot on videotape in an era when only game shows and soaps were on video, science fiction in the post Star Wars environment shunned it as a whole. In short, being a Doctor Who fan in the US has always had some “shame” attached to it. Even now, as I write this, the show is all but invisible on people’s radars in the US because … well, it’s on the sci-fi channel, which carries such a stigma that some refuse to watch it. In fact, a few stragglers found it on BBC America and even though I said “the 2nd series is coming on Sci-Fi channel …” they will obviously wait until it shows up on what they consider “respectable” channels.
Much of the charm of the series – back when it caught the cult TV public’s eye on a bored Saturday night -- was generated by the personality of the lead actor playing the part of the Doctor and Tom Baker’s seven year reign in the role made him unquestionably "the" Doctor for many people. When, at the end of “Logopolis” he fell (rather feebly) from the Pharos radio telescope and regenerated into Peter Davison (the Vet from “All Creatures Great and Small”!!!) many casual viewers just dropped it altogether.
Watching it then was just bizarre. Oh sure, on soaps they occasionally have actors replacing another in the same role (with a disturbing disembodied voice-over saying “the part of so-and-so will now be played by …”) but to actually have a story device to change out the lead actor in the series and allow them to be different is just revolutionary. It can also be quite startling to a 12 year old (or whatever I was back then.) At one moment you are watching a character’s death and then (fortunately “Castrovalva” was broadcast back-to-back with “Logopolis”) you have to get used to entirely different person as the same character. And, it wasn’t the same at all.
Now, over 25 years later, it’s kind of embarrassing to watch these studio-bound melodramas because, although nothing emerged unscathed from the 80s, Doctor Who was then being managed by a man who especially was conscious of trends and fads. Add to that the introduction of THREE companions (none of which could act) and you have a series of comedic tragedies. But, on the plus side both Tom Baker and (yes I do like him) Peter Davison are great in this changing of the guard, as it were. Fans of the new series will find it mostly cheap, while fans of the old series might also find the new direction to be a little too casual (question marks on the lapels, a stick of celery … wha …?) But, for a generation, this really was a startling moment … something new and inventive and weird. I suppose that’s why were are still watching … hoping for that moment again.
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