1)Another one of my favorites. I remember a fanboy at the time greeting this with "So JNT can produce decent Doctor Who when he wants to!" It is a bit continuity-heavy, though. I wonder if someone seieng it for the first time would get as much out of it.
2)Apparently they gave the Daleks a new kind of tire for this to make them more mobile for outside shooting. Unfortunately, it has the effect of making them seem to wobble alot. I did like the "Dalek's-eye-view" and the new blast effects from their rayguns. I also like the Special Weapons Dalek - one of those would be a useful thing to have when you were stuck in traffic.
3)I liked the pre-credits bit with all the "famous quotes".
4)I thought Jasmine Breaks did quite well as the Girl. It's amazing how menacing a little girl can be.
5)Always good to see Pamela Salem again, this time as Rachel, a sort of predecessor to Liz Shaw, even down to being "dragged down from Cambridge."
6)At least they tried to make Totters Lane look more like the original than they did for "Attack of the Cybermen".
7)I had to laugh that the actor playing Group Captain Gilmore was named "Simon Williams:. It makes you wonder, man.
8)And there's Michael Sheard one more time, as the Headmaster. I gather he was appearing at the time in something called Grange Hill, which was set in a school, so casting him as a school employee who was a Dalek agent was something of a joke.
9)Nice joke with the book on the French Revolution, but didn't Susan take that book with her when she left?
10)Joseph Marcell who plays the night counterman at Harry's also played Geoffrey the butler on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. There's an interesting crossover idea. I tohught the "sugar" between Harry and the Doctor was quite good.
11)The Doctor is a pen-thief!
12)Ah, how well I remember old old TV's that used to take forever to come on...
13)Some good acting from Aldred in this, particularly in the scene with the "No Coloureds" sign, and then later on when she confronts Mike
.
14)The voice of the "battle computer" is the great John Leeson.
15)The Emperor is credited to "Roy Tromelly", but even if you can't do anagrams, if you're at all a fanboy of this era, you can recognize Terry Molloy's voice immediately. We get no explanation of how Davros went form bieng under arrest to being Emperor, though.
16)It kind of takes something out of it, that the grey Daleks' time sphere is a van de Graaf generator. I did like the Doctor's calling card, though.
17)I gather when they were filming the Dalek battle scenes the explosions were so loud that people called the cops because they thought it was the Provos, who were active at the time.
18)While it's interesitng to see the Doctor pull a "Captain Kirk" and talk the Dalek to death, why didn;t it take advantage of the ample time it had to just shoot him?
19)Some Fun Quotes:
- "She doesn't talk to strangers. Very wise."
- "Listen to me, Brigadier." "Group Captain, actually."
- "Humans."
- "Nothing even remotely human could have survived that." "That's the point, Group Captain. It isn't even remotely human."
- "Aim for the eyepiece!"
- "Don't you recognize your mortal enemy?" Ya dope!
- "I thought you said he was an old geezer with white hair."
- "Yes, it has changed. Several times."
- "The time is a quarter past five, and Saturday viewing continues with an adventure in the new science fiction series Doc-" Ah, yes, very amusing. Maybe the Doctor could go back and copy all the lost episodes.
- "I rigged something like it on Spiridon."
- "Who are you calling small?"
- "Only a fool argues with his Doctor."
- "I wish Bernard was here." I gather that's a Quatermass joke.
- "It was called that because TIme Lords have an infinte capacity for pretension." "I've noticed that."
- "And didn't we have trouble with the prototype." The Cartmel Master Plan at work, as he tries to make the Doctor more mysterious.
- "Daleks are such boring conversationalists."
- "Is he alright?" "No idea, I'm a physicist."
- "President-Elect of the High Council of Time Lords" I thought they deposed him?
- "You appearance is as inconstant as your intelligence."
- "We shall beocme all - " "Powerful? Crush the lesser races? Conquer the galaxy? Unimaginable power, unlimited rice pudding, et cetera, et cetera..." I like the reactions of the others while he's provoking Davros.
- "Emperor abandoning bridge."
20)Cliffhangers:
- Part One: The Daleks have mastered stairs! But why didn't it just shoot him, rather then very slowly follow him?
- Part Two: The Daleks have Ace surrounded! Lucky for her they spent five minutes yelling at her rather than killing her instantly.
- Part Three: "I think I might have miscalculated." For a super-genius, you do that alot.
- Part Four: The Doctor and Ace quietly leave...
Overall:
For me, this still holds up pretty well, even after all these years.
[Part of list of Doctor Who episodes here.]
Replies
It's amazing how menacing a little girl can be.
Apparently, you've never been a little boy.
"Nothing even remotely human could have survived that." "That's the point, Group Captain. It isn't even remotely human."
I can hear Sylvester rrrrrrrrolling that R right now.
"It was called that because TIme Lords have an infinite capacity for pretension." "I've noticed that."
One of the great Doctor/Companion teams of all time.
Colin Baker got stuck with lousy scripts (among other things). McCoy had some great scripts that were overlong and got hacked up into incomprehensibility. This was one of the scripts that didn't suffer from that, and shows just how much life the show still had in it, if it was handled right. One of my favorites.
The Emperor is from the TV Century 21 Dalek comic strip. A version appeared in "Evil of the Daleks", but that one was was immobile and had a different design.
Famous quotes? What were they?
I don't remember the exact quotes, but they were from JFK, MLK, DeGaulle and Prince Philip.
“Another one of my favorites. I remember a fanboy at the time greeting this with ‘So JNT can produce decent Doctor Who when he wants to!’ It is a bit continuity-heavy, though.”
That’s because it was the 25th anniversary episode. For the 50th anniversary, Big Finish revisited “Remembrance of the Daleks” on #183, “1963: the Assassination Games.”