|
Doctor Who Frontios
I’ve
never been a fan of the Peter Davidson era of Doctor Who. Now I know
that it has its fans and that’s fine, but for me it was plagued by poor
production values, terrible scripting, some bad acting, strange and
cheaper than usual monsters and worst of all, that awful dramatic
synthesizer.
I am
however developing a new appreciation for Peter Davison and his Doctor
via these DVD releases and the way I’m doing it is by watching them
backwards. You see if you do that, you get the best stories first and
then when you’re invested you can stomach some of the weaker ones. You
begin with the Caves of Androzani, which is brilliant, then
Planet of Fire which is pretty good. The only problem with watching
Resurrection of the Daleks backwards is that it introduces this
character “Tegan” who’s really annoying. And then you get to
Frontios...
The
Doctor and his companions Tegan and Turlough are hovering above the
planet Frontios when something goes wrong with the Tardis. They land on
the planet and *shock* the Tardis is destroyed! But not to worry
there’s a nice juicy mystery to be solved; why do the inhabitants of
Frontios think “The earth is hungry”?
Set in
the far future, one of the last remaining pockets of humanity is
desperately trying to eke out a living on the unconvincing blue screen
tundras where it’s hard to get anything to grow in the Styrofoam soil.
They live in a militaristic society and fed propaganda about how good
life is. Those that aren’t in the military are not valued. They are
being bombarded by meteorites moved into position from above by a
mysterious force, who *Spoilers!* turn out to be giant bugs
...wait...no I’ve checked. I didn’t watch Starship Troopers by
mistake.
Despite the limitation of the sets, this is an engaging story with a
surprising amount of humour. The moment where the Doctor tries to
convince the Gravis that Tegan is an android that he got cheap because
“The walk isn’t right and that accent....” is priceless. This and the
following stories of Davidson’s final season show a promise that makes
us sad that he had decided to leave, he really grew into the Doctor
here.
Video:
The
video quality is commensurate with a restored program that was
originally broadcast in the early 1980’s, so not great but fine for what
it is and quite watchable.
Audio:
The
Audio quality is fine, just stereo but you can hear all the dialogue and
unfortunately the music quite well.
Special Features:
There’s a fairly comprehensive making of which details the struggle to
bring this story from Christopher H Bidmead’s mind to the screen. All
the major players are interviewed, Bidmead, Strickson and Davidson. But
strangely no Janet Fielding. It’s very interesting and gives you a good
idea of just how different an idea can become from the page to the
screen and just how short something can fall from expectations when
faced with a BBC budget. A commentary, deleted scenes, production
photos and PDF materials rounds out an interesting but fairly standard
package. |
