stunt_muppet

Some meta, so as to procrastinate further on my homework. Specifically, meta on Planet of the Daleks, Episode 1.

I actually saw about half of Planet of the Daleks before it got removed from YouTube, so I figured I'd finish it up (or rather, watch it through from the beginning) and do some actual proper meta, which I haven’t done in a while.

Granted, I don't think this counts as Actual Proper Meta, since it's quick and in bullet points (and is a paltry 6 pages). But it's a start.

- First, allow me a moment to squee: high-quality pictures, wooo. Such a relief after the graininess of YouTube.

- I rather love how the Doctor leans against Jo for support, but Jo is so very tiny relative to him that she then has to lean him against something else. Also, I have a weakness for any scene in which one of them fusses over the unconscious or injured other, so I’ve got such a grin on my face right now.

- Also, if every Doctor has distinctive alien features or abilities, the Third Doctor’s is apparently the ability to not die when he takes a headshot. Seriously, this happened in Spearhead too, and while we’re told both times that the blow is ‘glancing’ (even though it doesn’t look like it is or should be), they both apparently do enough damage to render him comatose. I could write it off as the effects of the post-regenerative grace period in Spearhead, but I suppose since that hadn’t been invented back in the Seventies the healing coma in Spearhead was meant to imply that he could do this sort of thing whenever he needed to. Which is good, because he sustains that specific injury with alarming frequency.

- Something I’ve noticed: My knowledge of canon re: the wardrobe is somewhat limited; I don’t know if the clothes in the wardrobe are things that the Doctor has picked up over the years (which leaves the question of why he went shopping for women of rather varying sizes – no, Susan doesn’t explain it, because what fit Susan would most certainly not fit, say, Victoria), if the TARDIS magically produces clothes in the companions’ sizes (a bit far-fetched), or if the companions bring their own clothes (which works for, say, Donna, but not for companions who didn’t have a chance to pack, like Polly or Nyssa).

Since I’m choosing to go with a combination of the first and third explanation (we’ve seen the Doctor pinch outfits before, in The Crusade, so it’s not unreasonable that he might have built himself a wardrobe out of that, though that does leave the question of where he gets clothes to fit the different body types of his various regenerations, assuming he doesn’t know what each regeneration will look like), I find it notable that Jo apparently has a change of clothes in the TARDIS somewhere (she changes at the beginning of the serial, after the Doctor falls unconscious). Since there’s no visible time gap between the end of The Three Doctors and the beginning of Carnival of Monsters, and Carnival and Frontier run back-to-back, that means she had a change of clothes even before the TARDIS got repaired again. Which, I think, says something about how she feels about traveling with the Doctor.

One of the things I find interesting about Jo is that, while she travels in the TARDIS semi-regularly, she never lives in it, as do, say, Susan, Victoria, or Jamie. Presumably, after her adventures in each episode, she goes home, takes a shower, goes to sleep, and goes back to work the next morning. She has a life outside of her travels; again presumably, the Doctor has adventures without her as well. Aside from, say, Liz or the Brigadier, Jo is one of the companions most independent of him. Which, I think, is important to their relationship, and keeps it from becoming all sweetness and light – she never regards traveling with the Doctor as a permanent thing, and she never thinks of the TARDIS as home, not in any meaningful sense. Combined with her initial reluctance to travel (Colony in Space), we get the sense that she enjoys traveling with the Doctor, specifically; while she’s having fun, it won’t devastate her to lose that wider world, and her journeys are more like (really, really dangerous) vacations with a friend than a continuous search for new horizons. It’s notable that, by the end of this story (yeah, I’ve been spoilered), she’s tired and wants to go home – not to her room in the TARDIS, but back to her home.

And yet, the fact that she keeps at least a spare outfit and pair of shoes in the TARDIS indicates that she regards her presence in the TARDIS as, at least, habitual – frequent enough that she doesn’t have to make an occasion of it and she’ll need to be ready in advance for things like her clothes getting stolen by a future Earth government. She knows that she has a place there, and that she will, at some point, be back. I am so, so tempted to make a comparison to having a spare set of clothes, a toothbrush, shampoo, etc. at your boyfriend’s house for unexpected night stays, but there are some places even I won’t go.

For bonus points, Jo’s independence of the Doctor creates a handy antidote for what, at the beginning of her run, had the potential to be rather skeevy power issues. But then, one of the things I love most about their relationship is that it defuses said power issues so very neatly.

Ahem. That was a lovely diversion. Moving on now.

- I know Jo compares Popsicle!Doc in this episode to same in The Daemons, but IIRC, they weren’t the same thing. Popsicle!Doc in The Daemons (with full apologies to whomever I pinched that phrase from, as I’ve heard it before but don’t know its origin) happened because of whatever the release of psychic energy was at Devil’s End – the guy who was with the Doctor froze too, it’s just that the Doctor froze over and didn’t subsequently die. Here, he’s gone all frosty without, apparently, any outside stimulus. Which makes an odd sort of sense, if you think about it biologically – the whole purpose of the healing coma is to shut down other biological processes and focus all energy expenditure on healing, so it’d make sense that the body heat normally produced by cellular reactions would be absent.

It seems unlikely that his body temperature’s actually subzero, though. But that’s just me.

- On the subject of Popsicle!Doc, Jo mentions that some sort of heat shock can help him recover, a statement supported by the fact that the Doctor doesn’t wake up until the sun rises outside (fastest sunrise ever, by the way) and the temperature rises as well. But that actually doesn’t make much sense, because that means that the temperature in the TARDIS somehow corresponds to the outside temperature, which is…inconvenient, for a vehicle that can become suspended in deep space on command. Or maybe he was just comatose long enough? That’d seem to be the case, since he wakes slowly here, whereas he bolted upright suddenly when he woke in The Daemons.

- I love, love, love that Jo knows where the door controls and the scanner controls are. Best part is, we never see the Doctor instructing her on it or anything – she’s just picked it up from him. Because Jo is observant, and learns from her surroundings. Yes.

- Aw, Jo has mittens! Sweet knitted mittens. Also, I covet her jacket. I covet her entire outfit in this episode, really. She looks especially fab.

- Some nice set work going on here, too. The jungle looks quite good, even if a few of the trees are obviously false.

- No, Jo! Don’t throw the jacket away! It’s a lovely jacket! You can get it dry cleaned! Really! Because dry cleaning totally works on icky alien plant squirt.

- Also, removing the mittens is a Bad Plan. You could get nature on your hands, Jo! That’s never a good thing on a world full of creepy squirty plants.

- Another point – apparently the TARDIS can run out of oxygen, and it requires some sort of external filter to replenish its supply. I suppose this would come in handy is the Doctor landed on a world with no breathable atmosphere, but again, this makes the TARDIS much less insular and more in tune with/dependant on its surroundings that we’ve previously been led to believe it was. Also, the oxygen doesn’t seem to last very long at all; there’s a relatively short time between when the plants start squirting stuff all over the TARDIS (which is presumably what cut off the oxygen) and when the Doctor starts running out of air, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense considering how often we hear the TARDIS referred to as effectively infinite on the interior.

Combined with all the other abuses the TARDIS takes over the Third Doctor’s era (broken by the Time Lords, apparently completely wrecked by the Doctor to the point where he had to rebuild the interior, Time Rammed in The Time Monster, tossed off a cliff in The Curse of Peladon, jury-rigged and temporarily stuck in a time loop in Claws of Axos, and the list goes on) it’s almost as if the vulnerability we see in the Doctor in the Three era extends to the TARDIS as well. For the entire show up until now, the TARDIS has malfunctioned, but in the Three era the TARDIS doesn’t even seem particularly safe. It isn’t a haven. It’s only somewhat less perilous than the outside world. Which, I think, plays into the Doctor’s destabilization as a solitary individual – the inability to rely on his TARDIS or to consider it his ‘home’ (because home implies safety) forces him to think of himself outside of that context, and thus in the context of his friends and companions and the people around him (meta’ed about here).

- Oh, I know I shouldn’t laugh at the wobbly spaceship interior, I know it wasn’t the crew’s fault, I know I shouldn’t, but…hee, wobbly spaceship.

- Okay, so at the very beginning of this serial, the Doctor, after getting his TARDIS back from the Time Lords three serials ago, already has to call them up to come fish it out of the metaphorical pond. And now we find out that he apparently forgot to put air in the metaphorical spare tire, as well. Oh Doctor. It’s a wonder you make it anywhere in one piece.

- Also, I am amused that the Doctor apparently keeps a spare coat and shirt in a closet in the console room, rather than in the wardrobe. Yes, I get why they did that for narrative purposes – if he headed for a closet in the console room, we know what he’s doing, which might not be clear if he just wandered offscreen and came back with a new set of clothes, and actually having him head to the wardrobe would mean building another set. But…still. The smoking jackets must be close at hand. In case of fashion emergency!

- Aaaand…now I see why people don’t like this one as much as Frontier. The Thals really have no reason to help Jo, but they venture off into the jungle to find the Doctor anyway. I know that Jo’s very persuasive, but I think some of the time that was devoted to her wandering through the jungle could have been better spent making the Thals change of heart seem convincing. Are they good Samaritans under all that? Do they recognize the name TARDIS and already suspect that her “friend” is the Doctor or in some way connected to him? It’s just not clear.

Not to mention Jo seems a bit more flustered than usual here, especially during her conversations with the Thal crew. However, I think this I can attribute to her being very tired (she hasn’t had a break since Carnival of Monsters), scared for the Doctor, and probably starting to feel sick from the plant thing. Even Jo can only take so much. :(

- Wow, it is wobbly in there.

- Has a very short stride, does the Spiridon.

- I’m…not sure how I feel about the purple jacket. I like it a bit better than the green, true, but I don’t like the green one all that much, so that’s not saying a lot. And it isn’t the red or black jacket by a long shot. Plus, I can’t imagine the pale violet shirt looking anywhere decent on its own (without the jacket).

Though I suppose it does make for a nice sharp contrast with all the green in the background, whereas the green jacket would make him blend in. Of course, the black jacket would stand out too, but that is my black-jacket bias talking. Ignore me.

I realize now that I’ve never mentioned this whole order of preference I have for Three’s various outfits. In brief: The red jacket-white shirt-purple-satin-lined cape is my favorite of Three’s outfits, but the black jacket-white shirt-red-satin-lined cape from Season 7 comes in a very close second. Then Season 9 (?) comes around and we get the green jacket and mint green shirt, which I actually don’t like all that much because I think the shirt, especially, does nothing for him, color-wise. The navy-blue-and-red jacket from The Green Death is really rather nice, except that the red waistcoat he wears underneath it looks a bit wonky, and I don’t have any particular feelings about the Invasion of the Dinosaurs sapphire-blue jacket and pale blue shirt (that was from Invasion of the Dinosaurs, wasn’t it?). And now I am confronted with the purple jacket-purple shirt-no cape combo, and I don’t know what to think.

- Hey, wait a minute, that’s Chancellor Goth! One of the Thals, it’s the same guy that played Chancellor Goth in The Deadly Assassin! I didn’t recognize him for a while there.

- Is it bad that the namedrop of Barbara, Ian, and Susan made me all fuzzy inside? It did.

- A note: When Jo Grant meets the Thals, the first thing she tries to do is establish who they are, and whether they can help her. When the Doctor meets the Thals, the first this he does is establish who he is, in relation to them – which, of course, makes them instinctively distrustful of them. Yet again the whole theme of identity comes up – interestingly, in reference to his experiences as the First Doctor, whose character arc Three echoes in several significant ways. Like One, but unlike, say, Four or Two, Three very rarely disguises his identity or, while he’s on Earth, his alien nature, and is always quick to establish who he is and how he’s different from those around him regardless of whether or not they’ll believe him. Even at this late date, part of him is defined by that insularity and seperateness. It’s a very consistent trait of his, and I rather like seeing it.

Also, it’s a rather nice mirror of the scene in the bar at the beginning of The Daemons: Jo asks politely for help while the Doctor manages to antagonize everyone in the space of a few minutes. Hee.

- And another slightly clumsy bit of exposition; there’s no real reason for Vaber’s outburst there. Although, I guess, since Other Thal Played by The Guy I Recognize was talking about his “top secret mission”, Vaber might get frustrated at him for still placing importance on it. Still, it feels a bit shoehorned it. Ah well.

- “Light wave sickness”? Um, sure. Whatever you say, show.

- I love the out-there fanboy logic behind the invisible Daleks. “So what can we do to make the Daleks in this episode exciting? Can’t give them a supreme commander thing, we did that with Troughton. How about Daleks from the future? Nah, we did that last time. Oooh! I know! Let’s make them invisible. Dude. It’ll be so cool.”

Really, I’m surprised it took them until the New series to have a Daleks vs. Cyberman smackdown. I’m pretty sure the only thing holding them back was budget.

And, on that note, I should probably go make myself productive while I wait for the next episode to download. Cheerio.