Pyramids of Mars
Aug. 6th, 2006 04:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraPyramids of Mars (TB, 82). Also very good. A quick check on the fringes of Outpost Gallifrey suggests I have hit another good one (I knew City of Death was) and there may be many lesser episodes lurking in my future, rife with poorly costumed villains, alien quarries and unbelievably bad dialogue (although please, nothing as bad as Blake’s Seven’s The Warriors of Kairos, a permanent scar on my memory).
Anyway, back to the aforementioned Pyramids. Shot on location at a stately manor owned at the time by Mick Jagger, it’s a rather intense episode with a startlingly high body count (I think everyone dies apart from the Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith (I don’t remember ever seeing her as a companion before, which suggests a fairly heavy dose of repression on my part or just the sort of serial TV exposure luck that means I’ve seen the fourth series of M*A*S*H sixteen times and the first three not at all) and a nameless minion who bolts very early on after the first tomb is opened, sensibly enough. They kill everybody else off after establishing sympathy for many of them, or toying with you by raising your hopes that they’ll survive. Warlock survives a shooting in suitably dragged-through-forest-bleeding-painfully manner just to get your hopes up and then gets strangled on the couch; Lawrence almost reaches through to his possessed brother’s humanity before ending up on the couch as well.
The Doctor is irritable and tense, with little time for inconsequential emotions (understandable, when Sarah Jane does things like casually toss him boxes of gelignite – points to the BBC props department there, who came up with just the right saggingly aged and stained cardboard box that a poacher would keep sweating gelignite in - although she is also a rather good shot) and is, actually, possessed by Sutekh, rather than just faking it. And Sutekh has a very nasty competent presence as well for a villain, which is nice after all those excitable shouting machines I’ve been encountering recently (yes, I have seen Army of Ghosts and Doomsday. I was impressed by David Tennant finally managing to do a convincingly quiet threat after all his excitable shouting, and I was glad to see Mickey again, but I’m staying largely silent on the rest of it).
And on machines. Having robots disguise themselves as mummies is brilliant, and having Tom Baker disguise himself as a mummified robot is even more so. This show could feel like someone just made the whole thing up to justify the title, but for me it really worked. Plus, I love the Doctor’s line about finding a priest’s hole in a Victorian gothic folly. Oh, and the puzzle sequence on Mars – nice to seem some that were workoutable, and some that weren’t.
I checked out some of the added features, but I bore easily (which is why I haven’t gotten to the City of Death ones yet) and am not that rabidly completionist. Yet.
Anyway, back to the aforementioned Pyramids. Shot on location at a stately manor owned at the time by Mick Jagger, it’s a rather intense episode with a startlingly high body count (I think everyone dies apart from the Doctor, Sarah Jane Smith (I don’t remember ever seeing her as a companion before, which suggests a fairly heavy dose of repression on my part or just the sort of serial TV exposure luck that means I’ve seen the fourth series of M*A*S*H sixteen times and the first three not at all) and a nameless minion who bolts very early on after the first tomb is opened, sensibly enough. They kill everybody else off after establishing sympathy for many of them, or toying with you by raising your hopes that they’ll survive. Warlock survives a shooting in suitably dragged-through-forest-bleeding-painfully manner just to get your hopes up and then gets strangled on the couch; Lawrence almost reaches through to his possessed brother’s humanity before ending up on the couch as well.
The Doctor is irritable and tense, with little time for inconsequential emotions (understandable, when Sarah Jane does things like casually toss him boxes of gelignite – points to the BBC props department there, who came up with just the right saggingly aged and stained cardboard box that a poacher would keep sweating gelignite in - although she is also a rather good shot) and is, actually, possessed by Sutekh, rather than just faking it. And Sutekh has a very nasty competent presence as well for a villain, which is nice after all those excitable shouting machines I’ve been encountering recently (yes, I have seen Army of Ghosts and Doomsday. I was impressed by David Tennant finally managing to do a convincingly quiet threat after all his excitable shouting, and I was glad to see Mickey again, but I’m staying largely silent on the rest of it).
And on machines. Having robots disguise themselves as mummies is brilliant, and having Tom Baker disguise himself as a mummified robot is even more so. This show could feel like someone just made the whole thing up to justify the title, but for me it really worked. Plus, I love the Doctor’s line about finding a priest’s hole in a Victorian gothic folly. Oh, and the puzzle sequence on Mars – nice to seem some that were workoutable, and some that weren’t.
I checked out some of the added features, but I bore easily (which is why I haven’t gotten to the City of Death ones yet) and am not that rabidly completionist. Yet.
