I love the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) era, but it’s easy enough for me to name the one story I've re-watched the least…and here it is. “Carnival of Monsters” is the immediate follow-up to the joyful if hokey tenth anniversary romp, “The Three Doctors,” but it squanders that lead-in, as well as a rather intriguing first episode mystery, with some of the most appalling character, set, and costume design in the era’s history, and a story that seems to only peak when hand puppets scare the hell out of Jo (Katy Manning). And while I usually praise the guest cast in almost any Who tale as doing their very best to take the material and lift it as high as it can go, this time around we have some superb actors wasted in roles that require them to spout awful faux Shakespearean lines from behind splotchy gray makeup and bald caps.
Let’s get the plot synopsis out of the way. The Doctor and Jo have landed on a ship called the SS Bernice that our Time Lord hero remembers as missing, and it appears to be trapped in a time loop. The answer arrives in episode two, when it’s revealed that the ship, the TARDIS team, and lots of other nasty surprises are being held captive inside the futuristic equivalent of a galactic peep show known as the Miniscope. A pair of brightly-garbed con artists named Vorg (Leslie Dwyer) and Shirna (Cheryl Hall) travel the stars, showcasing the many life forms they've stolen from other worlds and imprisoned in the Scope for the entertainment of paying customers, but when they come up against a stone-faced (literally) planet of joyless bureaucrats on Inter Minor they find that business takes a turn for the worse. Meanwhile, the Doctor is determined to escape the confines of the Scope and put an end to this exploitation once and for all.
As with all Doctor Who, there are themes here if you want to find them. The idea of the Scope (which will be revisited with far more forcefulness in the Tom Baker tale “Nightmare of Eden”) sets up some interesting moral and ethical dilemmas, but it’s hard to see them past all the eye-blinding tights and bowler hats and other paraphernalia that come to this 1973 story like late ’60s Sgt. Pepper cast-offs. And when people complain about Who’s notorious low-budget effects or sets or monsters, the inhabitants of Inter Minor are definitely near the top of the list for what they’re conjuring in their minds. Very capable icons of the classic Who repertory company like Peter Halliday and Terence Lodge, as well as the original Davros himself, Michael Wisher, do their best to maintain their dignity, but that was made unlikely the moment the paint was slathered on around their still-pink lips. As for the puppet Drashigs, they’re really not too bad all things considered, but you know there’s a hand in there.
If there’s one positive thing I can say about “Carnival of Monsters,” it’s that Jo’s encounter with those Drashigs provides a rare bit of character development that later plays a role in a far better Pertwee-era epic, “Frontier in Space.” But how can the extras team – that wonderful band that assembles the amazing features and commentary and info text – make something out of this one? They do their damnedest, and the results are admirable if uneven, especially on this Special Edition re-release. A far more extensive audio commentary moderated by the always-reliable Toby Hadoke has been added, but additional documentaries on monsters and gadgets seem far more like filler than the usual featurettes, and shouldn't that one on the Mary Celeste have been on “The Chase” instead? There’s a nice look at Ian Marter’s Target books contributions, though; we take what we can get. Now see if you can follow the seed as I swap these pods around, come on, don’t be shy, step right up…
Source : ign[dot]com
No comments:
Post a Comment