24 – Twenty-Fourth Season – Sylvester McCoy

This season consists of 15 episodes of around 24 minutes each, making it just barely longer than Colin Baker’s last season, The Trial of a Time Lord. This shows that they were beginning to starve the show because the powers at the BBC really didn’t want to make it any longer.

Time and the Rani

Colin Baker was asked to return for one episode to do a regeneration into Sylvester McCoy. He counter-offered to return for a full season and do the regeneration at the end, but this was refused. So a very perfunctory regeneration takes place with Sylvester McCoy wearing a wig to resemble Colin Baker when lying face down.

The TARDIS has been forced by the Rani to crash land on the planet Lakertya. The Doctor and Mel are both lying unconscious on the floor when the Rani enters with an alien associate. She takes the Doctor but leaves Mel, whom she has no use for right now. But when the alien turns the Doctor over he regenerates. When the Doctor comes to in the Rani’s laboratory he is suffering from post-regeneration confusion, which the Rani intensifiers with an injection of a chemical to induce more amnesia. The Rani then puts on a wig and an outfit to impersonate Mel, which works for a time, but the Doctor’s true self pops up intermittently as he is gradually coming to his senses. Mel is seen on a screen, but the Rani convinces the Doctor that Mel is in fact the Rani. When Mel and the Doctor finally meet there is a bit of confusion therefor, but by checking each other’s pulse Mel realizes that the Doctor does in fact have a double pulse, so she accepts him as the Doctor. And when he checks Mel she had a single pulse, so she cannot be the Rani.

The Rani has kidnapped geniuses such as Einstein, Hypatia, and Louis Pasteur, but they are locked into cabinets for some reason. And she wants to add the Doctor to her collection. It turns out these geniuses are feeding their intellects into a giant brain which is calculating a mechanism involving a strange asteroid that will somehow create a Time Manipulator out of the planet Lakertya, but this will sadly kill all life on the planet. But the Rani expects to be off in her TARDIS when that happens, and then she will take control of the Time Manipulator and then control the universe. She is of course stopped by the Doctor.

Sadly, while The Mark of the Rani was one of the better stories for Colin Baker, this story is not of the same calibre.

Reviews

Paradise Towers

A rule of thumb on Doctor Who is that whenever the Doctor and a companion go looking for a holiday, trouble finds them. In this case they are going to Paradise Towers, which the brochures show as a lovely resort. But when they arrive, they find something more resembling a decaying public housing project. And they are almost immediately captured by a gang (called a “kang” in this story), in this case the Red Kang. And it is made up entirely of girls. There is also a Blue Kang, also made up entirely of girls. Sadly, the Yellow Kang has been made “unalive”. And that is literally what they say. So this isn’t something invented for social media in the 21st century, Doctor Who had it in the 1980s. And there are armed guards roaming the halls, called Caretakers. And finally there are the Residents, called “Rezzies”. There are also robotic vehicles roaming the hallways, which were supposed to be picking up trash, but are actually grabbing people and “unaliving” them and then delivering them to a sinister room in the basement. The Doctor is captured by the Caretakers and taken to the Chief Caretaker, who calls him The Great Architect, then tells his subordinates to kill him. Meanwhile, Mel gets separated, and is invited in for tea and cakes by two older women who are Rezzies. It eventually transpired that they are cannibals who want to literally eat her. Supplies are getting scarce in Paradise Towers. But Mel is rescued by a young man named Pex. Aside from him, the only men in this place are Caretakers. Pex is a bit of a coward, but is always trying to act brave and tough until he has to act, then he chickens out. And of course, in the end he gathers his courage to make the sacrifice that saves everyone.

The theme of this story revolves around the Doctor trying to convince the Red and Blue Kangs to cooperate, then for the Kangs to cooperate with the Rezzies, and finally for all of them to cooperate with the remaining Caretakers, because all of them are under threat b a maniac Great Architect who wants to kill all of the people who have in his eyes trashed his beautiful Paradise Towers. As Benjamin Franklin said, “we must all hang together or we will all hang separately.” Wise words from a wise man.

Reviews

Delta and the Bannermen

Filmed at a Welsh holiday camp, this was the first Doctor Who story since 1975 to be filmed entirely outside of BBC Studios.

The TARDIS lands on what seems to be a tollbooth in space, though you never see any tolls being paid. Instead, the Doctor is greeted as the 10,000,000,000 (ten billion in American parlance) customer and wins a free vacation on Earth as part of a package tour going to Disneyland in 1959. Mel thinks that is a great idea, but the Doctor decides he would rather follow in the TARDIS. Meanwhile a woman and some green companions are under attack by some soldiers, and only the woman escapes, stealing a space ship from the armed attackers. And she somehow winds up at the same toll booth and joins the tour group. They take off in a spaceship made to resemble an old tour bus, and everyone sings old rock’n’roll songs from the 1950s. There is a lot of that in this story. The tour bus is approaching Earth when it collides with a satellite just launched by the U.S., and this diverts them into a crash landing in Wales, with some assistance from the Doctor using the TARDIS to stabilize the bus.

It turns out the mysterious woman is Delta, Queen of the Chimeron race. The Chimerons were wiped out by the armed men, who are the Bannermen. Only Delta is still alive, but she brought with her an egg which hatches and soon there is a baby girl in the party. In the story there is a gentleman who raises bees, and describes how the queen bee produces offspring, and this is there as an analogy to what Queen Delta is doing. She is feeding her baby something like the Royal Jelly that Queen Bees produce, and this helps the child grow dramatically fast. In the space of hours the baby becomes an adolescent. For comic relief there is a pair of bumbling American agents who are searching for the satellite that the bus ran into. In the end the Bannermen are defeated, and Delta takes off in their spaceship.

The title Delta and the Bannermen was a play on the names of old rock bands, a theme of this story. It also reminded people of Echo and the Bunnymen, and it is interesting to note that Delta and Echo are consecutive letters in the phonetic alphabet.

Reviews

Dragonfire

The Doctor and Mel land on a trading colony called Ice World, which is indeed very cold. And who should they meet there but our old friend Sabalom Glitz, who we saw multiple times in The Trial of a Time Lord. Glitz is in debt to the local leader, a criminal named Kane, and is being forced to locate a treasure supposedly guarded by a dragon in the ice caves in order to discharge his debt. While they are in a cafe they met a waitress who calls herself Ace, and is a 16 year old girl from 20th century Earth. She seems to be fond of blowing things up, and in doing experiments on an explosive of her own design called “Nitro-9” she manages to get sucked up by a mysterious time storm and deposited on Ice World. Glitz is still a sleazy con man who sold his crew to Kane for 17 Credits each to serve as mercenaries. Kane is apparently dependent on being cold, and periodically goes into a cold chamber to cool down to temperatures in the hundreds of degrees below zero. And he can kill people just by putting his hands on their head and letting the intense cold kill them.

Kane has given Glitz a treasure map that has listening and tracking devices built into the seal so he can follow what they are doing as they search for the dragon and its treasure. And at the end of the first episode there is a famous cliffhanger where the Doctor is left hanging by his umbrella on a literal cliff face, though just why he is doing this is never adequately explained. Then they meet the so-called dragon, which at first seems to stalking them, but then the Doctor realizes the creature is friendly and they follow it to a room where it projects video that explains that Kane was sent here as an exile to punish him for his criminal activities. Then they learn that the so-called dragon is actually a bio-mechanoid creature placed here to guard Kane, and it contains a power device in its head. And this power device would power the spaceship that is what this colony actually is, and Kane wants the power to take off and go back to his planet for revenge.

At the end of the story Mel decides to join Glitz, but I did not see any good motivation for this development. But she points out to the Doctor that Ace has no where to go now. So one companion gone, and another takes her place. Ace would be the companion for the rest of McCoy’d run as the Doctor, making her the last of the classic series companions.

Kane’s demise at the end is particularly gruesome, reminiscent of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Reviews

Season 24

 Save as PDF
Share

Comments are closed.