The Robots of Death Part Two

The one where the Sandminer crew starts dropping like flies...

Over the years the Doctor has shown that he carries some pretty wild and wacky things around in his pockets, everything from a tuning fork and a box of drawing pins, to a Polaroid camera and a felt tip pen. But one of the weirdest has to be the blowpipe that he uses here to breathe above the sand. Now, I'd accept it a little better if it was the same one he used in the Matrix in The Deadly Assassin, but then I suppose that wasn't a "real" blowpipe, so he couldn't have had that on him. It's not even the sort of blowpipe the Sevateem might have had.

The Doctor is rescued from the scoop by SV7, a wonderful performance by Miles Fothergill. The fluidity and harmony these robots exude is so cool, and Fothergill does it so well, and with that wonderfully calm and silky voice too. When things start to get very panicked and desperate aboard the Sandminer, it's great to see the robots untroubled by it, just carrying out their duties in their usual serene manner.

The Robots of Death Part One

The one where the Doctor explains dimensional transcendentalism...

I'll be honest from the get-go: The Robots of Death is one of a handful of stories I had on VHS back in the late 1980s when I was developing rapidly as a fan, and I absolutely adored this serial. I played that tape so often I'm surprised it didn't snap. The Robots of Death, along with The Talons of Weng-Chiang, Spearhead from Space, Terror of the Zygons, Pyramids of Mars and Death to the Daleks, were the Doctor Who stories I built the foundations of my fandom on, so in reviewing this story, I'm going to try my hardest to be objective.

But it's so hard when you've got such fabulous, rich material like this. There's no denying that it's bloody good, and right from the start too. Actually, I'd quite forgotten just how impressive that opening model shot of the barren, windswept alien landscape is, with the beautifully designed Sandminer rolling inexorably across the tundra. It looks so epic, and I love the establishing shot of the bridge seen from the outside too (done so much better than a similar shot of the Hyperion III a decade later!).

The Face of Evil Part Four

The one where the Doctor removes himself from the mind of Xoanon...

Pennant Roberts, a director new to Doctor Who, was not the best at fight or action scenes (prime evidence: Warriors of the Deep). The struggle at the start of this episode between the Doctor, Leela and the Tesh is staged quite clumsily, with very little natural fluidity. The stuntman was Terry Walsh, who I'm guessing also arranged the fight scene, but this time around Walsh fails abysmally, perhaps restricted by the set, who knows? The struggle ends with the Doctor pushing the Tesh against the wall, which Xoanon has made lethal, and so yet again the Doctor is responsible for somebody's death (albeit in self-defence).

Meanwhile, the Sevateem are making their way through the mouth of the idol towards the Tesh ship, and when Calib and Tomas see the (really unconvincing model of a) Mordee ship, they realise that the Doctor was right all along. The ship, to them, is the gateway to paradise, and it's both heartening and tragic to see everything seer Neeva believes unravel before him. He now realises Xoanon is his enemy, and is determined to seek revenge for his tribe.

The Face of Evil Part Three

The one where the Doctor realises this is all his fault...

The lumbering shadow turns out to be a man in a spacesuit resembling the one worn by Neeva as a sacred garment. It's at this point that the Doctor sees a spaceship on a distant plain beyond the mountain, in a model shot which looks simply awful. It's a very plain plain indeed, and looks just like a toy spaceship, having no sense of scale or environment. When he sees the ship, it all comes back to him: "I remember now. The Mordee expedition. And I thought I was helping them."

We discover in this episode that everything we see on this planet has come about through the past involvement of the Doctor. The Sevateem, the Tesh, the time barrier, the mountain idol, Xoanon and the Evil One, they're all a direct result of the Doctor's previous visitation. Ironically, he has failed to recall this previous visit until now, until he sees the Mordee ship. You'd have though his memory would have been jogged by the word "Xoanon" more than the distant view of a spaceship, but who am I to question the way the Doctor's mind works?

The Face of Evil Part Two

The one where the Doctor faces the Test of the Horda...

It's so intriguing that the Doctor cannot remember how his face came to be carved into the side of a mountain on an alien planet he's never been to before. It's like something Steven Moffat would write, pulling the audience in with a seemingly impossible truth, then showing how that impossibility is possible (although with Moffat, the solution wasn't always very clear to me!).

I love the relationship that's developed so easily and swiftly between the Doctor and Leela. It feels like they have been companions for longer than one episode, the two actors appear to be quite at ease in one another's company. The thing is, I know that this was not the case, that Tom Baker was quite dismissive of Louise Jameson, feeling the character was not needed and that he could carry the series by himself. Behind the scenes, tensions ran high, so the fact the Doctor and Leela seem to gel so well on screen is testament to the professionalism of both actors. I think the tension would be more evident in other stories, but here, it feels lovely.

The Face of Evil Part One

The one where the Doctor is mistaken for the Evil One...

There was a whole seven weeks between the end of The Deadly Assassin and the start of this next adventure, putting a sizeable gap right in the middle of Season 14. People didn't mind so much back then. There'd been a three-week pause over the Christmas period during Season 13, and the same would happen with Seasons 15 and 18 (indeed, Warriors' Gate was even promoted as the first in a "new season" of Doctor Who). When it came to inserting a pause of a few months into the middle of Series 6 in 2011, fandom was in uproar, but even that was nothing in comparison to the immense gaps between series these days (entire years can pass without so much as a peep from the Doctor).

The Face of Evil opens with an argument between a bunch of scantily-clad primitive types who accuse the beautiful Leela of blasphemy, by claiming their god Xoanon is not real. Leader Andor intends to cast Leela out from the tribe, and her father Sole agrees to take the Test of the Horda in his daughter's place (after both Leela and her maybe-boyfriend Tomas both declined!). Within minutes of the episode opening, Leela's father has been killed and she is ejected from her tribe into the jungle wilderness. And to top it off, the unpleasant shaman Neeva instructs two tribesmen to go after her and kill her!

The Deadly Assassin Part Four

The one where the Master tries to destroy Gallifrey in order to extend his own life...

Has Dr Who ever looked so beaten and bedraggled as Tom does at the start of this episode, following his fight with Goth in the water? The sight of Tom's soaked and wilting curls and his torn and bloodied clothes proves the Doctor has been through hell and back, all in order to try and prove his innocence to Spandrell - which, incidentally, he doesn't strictly do. Spandrell ends up simply believing the Doctor because of what he goes through in the Matrix, and is also willing to believe that Goth is a traitor, without any physical evidence at all. Maybe he was disposed to the Doctor's truth all along, which makes me wonder whether all the Matrix scenes were actually necessary!

Goth is sacrificed by the Master, and left burnt and charred on the brink of death. To make matters worse, the Master calls Goth a "poltroon", a word so unusual and archaic that I had to look it up (it means coward, derived from the 16th century Italian "poltro", or sluggard). The Master is nothing if not well-educated in archaic Earth linguistics...