The Bishop on Doctor Who: 'Survival'
'Survival' isn't the worst Doctor Who story ever broadcast, but, like all the serials from the Sylvester McCoy era, it's close enough.
The TARDIS arrives in Perivale, so that the charmless Ace can catch up with her friends. It transpires that those friends have been kidnapped and taken to the planet of the cheetah people, so that the cheetah people can hunt them for the cheetah person equivalent of sport. It's a fine premise, really, but it all unfolds with the charm of a trip to the local two-dollar store. Rona Munroe somehow manages to make her dialogue both uselessly banal and not what any human being would actually say, a lot of it involving the expression 'survival of the fittest', made worse by flashes of what the Bishop assumes is intended to be funny. Whole scenes pass by in which events occur but nothing actually happens. The Doctor stands next to a poster of the musical Cats. It's no exaggeration to say a mildly talented child could have written it, and by the evidence on screen there's no reason to suppose one didn't.
McCoy is as needless and unconvincing as ever, and Sophie Aldred, an actress so clumsy her own accent sounds put on, is bamboozled by yet another Cartmel commission mistaking Ace for a character. The rest of the performers, with the exception of Anthony Ainley, should be ashamed of themselves.
And in the end, the Doctor rides a motorbike head-on into another character riding a motorbike. How does he survive? I don't know.
The TARDIS arrives in Perivale, so that the charmless Ace can catch up with her friends. It transpires that those friends have been kidnapped and taken to the planet of the cheetah people, so that the cheetah people can hunt them for the cheetah person equivalent of sport. It's a fine premise, really, but it all unfolds with the charm of a trip to the local two-dollar store. Rona Munroe somehow manages to make her dialogue both uselessly banal and not what any human being would actually say, a lot of it involving the expression 'survival of the fittest', made worse by flashes of what the Bishop assumes is intended to be funny. Whole scenes pass by in which events occur but nothing actually happens. The Doctor stands next to a poster of the musical Cats. It's no exaggeration to say a mildly talented child could have written it, and by the evidence on screen there's no reason to suppose one didn't.
McCoy is as needless and unconvincing as ever, and Sophie Aldred, an actress so clumsy her own accent sounds put on, is bamboozled by yet another Cartmel commission mistaking Ace for a character. The rest of the performers, with the exception of Anthony Ainley, should be ashamed of themselves.
And in the end, the Doctor rides a motorbike head-on into another character riding a motorbike. How does he survive? I don't know.
posted by Salisbury at 11:26 pm
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