Category: Uncategorized

STORY:    The Doctor (in leather pants) and Romana (in a short skirt), visit the planet Galentor where they encounter a Thals  (in tank tops) and a population besieged by ape monsters, robomen and ultimately Daleks.   The Doctor is captured by Robomen and taken to the Dalek base, where he is immersed in a cyberspace world and confronts the Dalek Empress….

REVIEW:   So, gosh. Did you know that this is #6 in the youtubers top ten Doctor Who Fan Films of the ‘Noughties’ – the ‘Noughties’ being the period from 2000 to 2010, or possibly all the way up to 2015 . How about that?

Here’s what’s going on: The Doctor, played by Adam Manning in leather pants, and Romana by Lizzie McWilliams in a short skirt, visits the planet Galentor, where it turns out, the Daleks are busily exterminating the human population using Robomen and genetically engineered ape beasts – Mugatos (a Star Trek reference).

The Daleks don’t actually get their plungers dirty, because they’re all CGI, so they stay on their CGI ships and platforms. Instead, they get a relatively tosh brand of Robomen to capture the Doctor and bring him to the maintenance basement of some building and hook him into their virtual reality machine.

That allows the Daleks to engage the Doctor mind to mind in a Matrix-like cyberspace, which is not CGI at all (really, not CGI – actual locations) where, instead of appearing as Daleks, they appear as hot women in nightgowns, ninjas, and a refugee from clockwork orange.

Meanwhile, back on Ga;emtpr, Romana has joined up with some Thals, and some natives and sets about organizing the resistance and figuring out how to rescue the Doctor.

All righty, the story takes a few risks here, goes in a few new directions…….

86 Minutes. Cast and Crew: Adam Manning as The Doctor; Lizzie McWilliams as Romana; Alison Manning as Loran; Gareth Simpson as Thragar & Garleth; Sarah Sutton as Empress of the Daleks; Gary Seymour as Mr. Robert Feck; David Lamb as Roboman #6;

Directed by Matthew McWilliams; Written by Adam Manning.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

http://www.westlakefilms.co.uk/tyranny.html

http://www.fanfilmfollies.com/columns/10questionsforadammanning

WATCH IT

Part one (13 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJfXJofbx48

Part two (24 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxACAH-xIKQ

Part three (23 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8T5i4hY5Kas

Part four (26 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CKtcL8w21I

Devious is probably the most famous and storied fan film out there. It’s a six episode serial made in the classic style, with 25 minute episodes.  It’s just not released yet.  The finished story, when it plays, will be 150 minutes, on a par with the Troughton and Pertwee stories.

Apart from that ambitious size and complexity, what makes it famous? For one thing, they managed to get Jon Pertwee to reprise his role as the Doctor back in 1995, a year before his death. That was his final performance as the Doctor, and perhaps his final performance ever. For that alone, it would be a part of history.

That scene from Devious appears as an extra on the ‘War Games’ DVD. It’s one of the few times that the amateurs ‘go pro’ – that a fan film makes it into the BBC official releases. Possibly, it’s the only time, I’d have to do more work than I want to, to verify that.

Jon Pertwee’s dialogue was later sampled with permission by Big Finish, for Zagreus, it’s multi-Doctor epic audio story.

Meanwhile, props from the fan film – the Doctor’s Tardis Console and several Daleks were borrowed by the BBC itself for use in 1999’s ‘Curse of Fatal Death.’ – the Tardis console did double duty, as the Master’s tardis console.

The Devious production also supplied props for a couple of stage plays – Evil of the Daleks and The Dalek Masterplan, both starring Nick Scovell as the Doctor, and adapted for stage by Scovell and Rob Thrush, back in 2006 and 2007.

Count in convention appearances, exhibitions, coverage in mainstream and fan media. It’s probably the most famous Doctor Who fan film ever… And it’s never been released.

So what the hell is it? Devious is a six part serial, set in Season 6B…..

WATCH IT NOW

Devious – War Games Short part one (7 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0ceZgWLwG0

Devious – War Games Short part two (6 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWTUCn3fp8Q

Devious Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgBjQjCqVZw

Devious Clips

The Never Was – A Fan Film Tribute with a Devious Twist (16 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wK7hnzlIyE

Season 6B – A Fan Made Documentary

STORY: When a broken crystal in the Tardis accidentally ages everyone thirty years, the Sixth Doctor and Jamie must mind the fort, while sending the Brigadier and Zoe to retrieve a replacement crystal hidden in a Mayan Temple.

REVIEW: So, let’s see. We have Colin Baker playing the Doctor. We have Frazier Hines playing Jamie Mcrimmon. Nicholas Courtney plays Former Brigadier Alister Lethbridge-Cook. Wendy Padbury pays Zoe Herriot. Oh and by the way, the Production Consultants were Terrance Dicks and Barry Lets.

Now, if any of these names are unfamiliar to you’re just not a Who fan.

Oh, and I’ll mention that part of it was shot on a cruise ship, and a significant part of it was shot in Belize on location among Mayan ruins and pyramids. You know, for production value.

So this is a fan film?

Amazingly yes!

Just go watch the video – it’s only seventeen minutes for god’s sakes.

17 minutes, Mini-DV video, filmed December 2003, released February 2004.
Cast… Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier, Wendy Padbury as Zoe, Holly Swift as the Boss, Ron Daniels as the Henchman, Mike Leahy as the Goon, Dan Murphy and Jennifer Lowden as the Archeologists, Anne Sedell as the old boss, Brian Stearns as the Unlucky Tourist. Special Appearance by Colin Baker as the Doctor and Frazer Hines as Jamie MacCrimmon.
Written by Ron & Priscilla Daniels & Jennifer Lowden, Produced by Dan Harris, Cinematography and Editing by Ryan K. Johnson, Directed by Paul Scott Aldred.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

http://www.eskimo.com/~rkj/death.html

WATCH IT

Part One (8.5 minutes)

Part Two (8.5 minutes)

Behind the Scenes (9 minutes)

Okay, here’s the skinny. Way back in 1963, when Doctor Who was starting up, it was working out stories, taking pitches, hiring writers, etc. The first script they did was Unearthly Child, written by Anthony Coburn. It was a success, thankfully.

Coburn was a friend and associate of Sidney Newman, and he’d actually been involved in the development of Doctor Who.  I think he was the one who came up with the word ‘Tardis.’  So of course, they invited Anthony Coburn to do a second script, and slated it into the production process as the second serial. It was originally going to be the follow up episode. But there were some problems with it.  It wasn’t ready.  The producers weren’t completely happy. It got pushed back, with the Edge of Destruction being written at the last minute to give a bit of breathing room. Still not ready, the Terry Nation whipped up something in no time at all, and the Daleks took its place. The rest is history, as far as Doctor Who was concerned.

As for Anthony Coburn, the Masters of Luxor kept getting pushed back and pushed back. I think that they just didn’t want it, but were having trouble saying no. Eventually, they did say no, and Coburn chose not to be associated with the show any longer.

There, the story should have ended. But the Masters of Luxor got published in August, 1992, by Titan Books, as part of a series of Doctor Who script books, for used and unused scripts.

Now available to the public, the script floated around for another nine years, until 2001, when a group of Chicago area fans led by Frank Smialek and Andrew Sarlo decided to mount a production of it. Partially because the ambitions of the script seemed achievable.

…..

This feels so much like a Hartnell serial, it’s uncanny. The lighting, the sets, the pacing, that formal theatrical style of dramatic acting that was a staple of the first decade or so of British television, it’s all there, and masterfully done.

The production design is exemplary. That’s partly a matter of the script’s gift and the productions talent and commitment. You have a very impressive Tardis console and Tardis set. It looks very authentic to the period. The costumes, props, the sets and robots are all well done, and authentic to the period.

Of course, this period was 1963 Doctor Who, shot on black and white and broadcast on low res TV, with a BBC production budget that was pretty shoestring and a production background that was heavily theatrical. When they did crazy ambitious stuff, you got stories like the Daleks of the Web Planet, which were impressive but flawed.

Apart from the Tardis walls and console, the most impressive production design are the robots – called ‘derivatrons’ You can tell there’s a lot of duct tape and aluminum foil in their DNA. They’re not the standard ‘tin can’ variety of robots – that’s the universal default for robot and that’s always hard to carry off well. What they’ve done here is gone for a more ‘golem’ style of bot, very roughly humanoid, without facial features. They’re almost like crude clay effigies, half formed and half finished, without the bother of detailing. Visually that works.

Which, I suppose, takes us to the story itself. What’s it about? Basically, it’s about a Pinochhio’s quest to be a real boy, by dismembering other real boys and wearing their skins…

Okay, not really. Although you have to admit, that’s a humdinger of a B-movie plot. But actually, this is what it is in a nutshell, although in a deeply philosophical way. Masters of Luxor is really the story of the ‘Perfect One’ and his own oedipal longings.

Episode One (18 minutes)

Episode Two (23 minutes)

Episode Three (30 minutes)

Episode Four (24 minutes)

STORY: The Doctor and Amaryllis follow a strange psychic signal to Earth, to the pastoral English countryside. Meanwhile, Ian and Angie, a young couple explore the supernatural. But who, or what is the source….

REVIEW: Timebase’s final two parter, and yet another change of direction. This reminded me of Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Diaries, or possibly of the Wicker Man. Pastoral gothic? Whatever. One of the strengths of the Booth Doctor’s oeuvre is its range, each story is different, there’s no retreading.

This one is perhaps the most modest production. It’s set in the English countryside. There’s a mysterious barrow, some ruins, a ghost that might not really be a ghost, an unfolding story. More, really gives the story away. The supporting cast is small, but competent. It’s not nearly as ambitious as Long Shadows, but not as uneven in performances.

As always, with Timebase, it’s beautifully shot. They know how to find effective locations, in this case what appears to be the ruins of a church or monastery. But they also know how to compose a shot – for example, there’s a quick throwaway shot of a person standing among some trees – normally that’s just a boring throwaway, but here they lowered the camera tilting it upward, so the person is in the foreground, he’s framed by a canopy of branches – it’s just a throwaway, but it works so well. This isn’t just keeping the lens focused, but there’s an implicit understanding of how to frame, how to make shots work.

The Churchtown Incident, Trailer

When Doctors Collide

The Pub With No Doors

STORY: A trip into the past, taking Amaryllis to play scrabble with William Shakespeare, leads to an adventure of cross dressing, conspiracy and a confrontation with unearthly powers….

REVIEW: Once again, Timebase goes off in a completely different direction with this two part serial. I think at this point, we’re going to have to face the fact that as far as two part serials went, Timebase was actually doing theirs better than the BBC Doctor Who.

I think that the difference is that when the BBC went with a two parter, usually they were just trying to bridge a bottleneck, some problem in budget or scheduling, so they grabbed up whatever they could and threw it in there. For Timebase, a two part serial was their chosen format, they really committed to it.

This time the Doctor and Amaryllis go to visit Shakespeare. Point of interest: Shakespeare always beats the Doctor at Scrabble, he just makes up words as he goes. It’s a nice little throwaway gag, a bit of the quirky wit or humour that really makes Timebase’s serials feel so much like the real thing.

Shakespeare soon enough drops out of the story, which is a little sad, as he was a fun character, and it looked as if he was going to be an integral part of the plot. Possibly that was the original plan, it does feel that plot threads were being laid out for him and then abandoned. It may be that the actor dropped out or had to leave and they retuned the script. Shakespeare is played by Ian Patterson, who seems to have been quite busy behind the scenes, so I’m not at all sure of that.

Or possibly, it was intended all along. I could see them being clever enough to pull a trick like that – lead the audience into believing it’s going to be one sort of story, and then suddenly shift direction and make it a different story. The Simpson’s does that sort of trick regularly, and I wouldn’t put it past them.

Whatever, we are left with Shakespeare’s drinking buddy, and his young protege, who is actually a girl (obviously) masquerading as a boy (not convincingly).

Back in Shakespeare’s day, women were not allowed in the theatre, so all the women’s parts were played by pretty young boys. Genderbending was a common feature in a lot of Shakespeare’s plays – girls dressing up as boys, boys pretending to be girls pretending to be boys. Sometimes it got hard to keep track. In this case, the girl is kind of in love with Will, so she’s helping him by writing his plays for him while he’s too drunk to notice.

So anyway, here they are, doing a riff on Shakespeare in Love, which looked like where they were going, but then, they pull a swerve. But they manage to make it continue to work as a plot point, it seems that some cultists need to a double sacrifice, a boy and a girl, and guess who they grab as the boy… even as the focus shifts to Curwen an ancient Old/Young warlock and his efforts to awaken his old Master now reincarnated as a washer-woman, and then raise up Cthulhu… or someone who looks a lot like him. Yes, this is The Doctor meets Lovecraft, with a bit of gender bending thrown in for good measure.

One of the most interesting things about the production was the largely successful effort to marry Shakespearean and Lovecraftian styles. With Shakespeare, we have not just the archaic diction, but the actions of stagecraft, with characters very clearly disappearing stage left and right, or visibly eavesdropping from the edge of stage, unrequited love, a bit of genderbending, some comedic slap and tickle.

With Lovecraft, we have that escalating sense of menace, that lovecraftian story convention of assembling apparently random pieces into a story, reincarnation and returns of dark things, ambition, an accumulating doom that boils over in a climactic revelation. Lovecraft fans will spot the references, starting with the Wizard Curwen himself – he’s actually the villain from the Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The elder sign is seen. Even great Cthulhu makes an appearance. Lovecraftian tropes – the degenerate inbred family/cult, or the alien beings outside our dimension trying to get in, are there.

I like it. These Timebase folk, they are people who think about things, who try and do interesting things. They’re not just about telling a straightforward linear story, they like to make it interesting, even a little challenging.

Once again, they found some good locations and used them very well, to establish setting and sense of place. There’s some wondeful cinematography, a shot of the Doctor and Amaryllis walking along the horizon at sunset leaps to mind. They do a lot of what seems to be genuine night shooting (rather than day for night) and they make effective use of shadows and darkness. As always, they’re very clever at making a little go a long way – a good example is the cult, which, through the magic of shadows, photography and getting every warm body into robes (Rupert Booth is listed as doing double duty as a cultist, back in Phase Four he also played a cyberman) comes across as formidible.

Amaryilis comes off well. That’s tricky. Paradise in Chains was really about her, and about the mystery at the center of her. It’s one thing to be the focus of the story, it’s quite another challenge to be simply a part of the story. But Deborah Riley manages to make the transition with a good performance. In some ways, I like Amaryllis less than Leslie, Leslie’s character had a sweetness to her. Amaryllis is more worldly, the relationship with the Doctor is more complex. Her character actually has things to do, she’s flirty and fun, she stumbles into some deeper trouble, and she acts effectively – she doesn’t just stand there and scream, or simply exist to ask the Doctor questions – its a role.

Some of the supporting characters are terrific, the guy who plays Shakespeare steals his scenes. The big hairy dude, who initially plays slap and tickle with Amaryllis is a nice stock Shakespeare type. On the other hand, most of the cultists are basically faceless and menacing, but that’s their whole point. Physically, the characters are diverse, they don’t look like they’re all in the same peer group.

The actor who plays Curwen… sorry Dude. I think he starts off okay, but he’s got two problems to wrestle with. One is that, like Rupert Booth’s Doctor, he’s playing a very old man, in a very young man’s body. Rupert Booth and Matt Smith both manage to carry it off by finding subtle ways, dress, references, mannerisms to express that there’s something else looking out. Here, Curwen’s sort of defeated by it. The other problem is that he’s trying to play someone up to his elbows in meddling with lovecraftian deities… That’s just tough.

Similarly, the actress who plays the washer-woman who is possessed by or the reincarnation of the old Master has an even tougher time. She essentially has to play two characters. One of which is a supernatural magician. Do you know a lot of lovecraftian wizards? Any idea how to play one? It’s tough. Jeremy Irons, a very good actor, came up against the same problem when he got recruited into Dungeons and Dragons… What’s the point of reference for an evil wizard? He ended up biting huge chunks of set.

On the other hand, who knows, maybe that’s how Lovecraftian power mad wizards, either reincarnated or artificially prolongued of life, end up acting. I’ve never met one, but I assume it takes a heaping helping of barking at the moon crazy.

I’ve talked about the persistent minor issues with the sound mix and edit before. They’re never bad enough to wreck the enjoyment, but they’re definitely noticeable. You either forgive it, or let it sink you. The bottom line is that these were amateurs working with limited equipment and resources, and some of this stuff, particularly the sound mix – there’s no substitute for experience and high end tools. It’s amazing that it’s as polished as it is.

One of the big weaknesses are the sets. Look, sets are hard. They cost money, and they take time to build. The tavern setting is barely passable. Curwen’s lair… ouch. It doesn’t wobble, that’s the best I’ll say for it. Or maybe I’m being harsh, medieval rooms tended to be small, cramped and cluttered, doorways were narrow. Truthfully, they’re nowhere near as bad or distracting as the flats we saw in Visions of Utomu. It’s a sign of how good the production is overall when a relatively modest flaw is the most I can come up with.

In some ways, it’s reminiscent of Regenesis, although that was more light hearted. In Long Shadows, they make a real effort to cultivate dread and fear. Both Shakespeare and Lovecraft built their stories to climaxes, to pivotal moments. Lovecraft far more spectacularly. Shakespeare sorted out his characters, Lovecraft pulled a monster out. The ending is spectacular, if you’re doing Lovecraft, it’s hard to get the payoff right, and they managed it.

It’s ironic in a way. If this was a one off, it would be a cult fixture: Shakespeare, Doctor Who and Cthulhu! It would be an amazing thing. But because it’s Timebase, because Long Shadows is keeping company with Phase Four and Paradise in Chains and Regenesis, and because their range is so consistently strong… it’s just “Oh yeah, Timebase did another one.” It’s not as singular as it deserves to be, simply because it’s part of a series which is so consistently extraordinary.

CAST: Rupert Booth – The Doctor, Cultist; Deborah Reilly – Amaryllis; Tom Hibbert – Curwen, Cultist; Selina Lock – Judith; Malcolm Herron – Daniel, Cultist; Lisa Gledhill – Sarah; Ian Patterson – Shakespeare; Maude Richard – Cultist; Richard Knapper – Cultist

CREW: Lisa Gledhill – Writer, Lighting, Visual Effects, transport, costume, make up, props, assistant editor, credits; Rupert Booth – Lighting, Camera, Visual Effects, transport, props, VT editor, dubbing, video effects, titles; Philip T. Robinson – Camera, transport, titles,

Rachel Chamberlayne – Lighting; Malcolm Herron – Lighting; Tom Hibbert – Lighting; Richard Knapper – Lighting, Camera, props; Selina Lock – Lighting, catering; Ian Patterson – Lighting. Camera, props, H&S, special sound, credits; Deborah Reilly – Lighting, transport, costume, make up; Maude Richard – Lighting; Hazel Gledhill – laundry; Rachel Chamberlayne – H&S; Gavin Chilvers – titles; Shot at Broadgate Farm Co-operative

WATCH IT NOW

Part One

Part Two

STORY: After defeating the Cyberman, the Doctor ponders the costs. His contemplation is interrupted when the Tardis malfunctions, taking him to a pocket dimension outside time and space. There, he encounters a ghost, a clown, a poet, a raconteur and a strange young woman who may be in heaven or hell….

REVIEW: With Paradise in Chains, we return to the two parts serial structure they established in Regenesis.

Regenesis and Phase Four were both very different stories, like night and day from each other. But Paradise, which sees the introduction of another companion, Amaryllis, played by Deborah Reilley, is a complete departure from what we’ve seen before.

It reminds me most of Tom Baker’s Warrior’s Gate, but it’s also of a piece with Hartnell’s Celestial Toymaker, Troughton’s Mind Robbers, or McCoy’s ‘ Greatest Show in the Galaxy, or Benedetti’s Broken Doors. Essentially, this is surrealism, not science fiction, and the Doctor, rather than moving through time and space, is caught between dimensions, exploring a strange realm that is as much mindscape as landscape.

It’s highly stylized, the sets are basically almost all non-existent black backgrounds, lending the project a feel of starkness and alienation. There are some scenes we end up on natural locations, but the transitions are immediate, to show that these locations are as unreal and disconnected as the black backgrounds. The Doctor may turn around and find himself in a wooded glade, but he and the audience knows that he hasn’t gone anywhere, the emptiness and the danger lurk just beyond.

The natural locations are all set in a park – there’s shots on a bridge overlooking a stream, down a flight of outdoor steps, amid a pile of jagged boulders – all carefully or subtly chosen to reflect the Doctor’s inner sentiments. Again, you have to admire how good they are at finding really good locations, visually effective locations that aren’t simply places that the story takes place in, but that enhance and reinforce the story.

One clever move was the Tardis interior. We don’t see it at all. We know that they were building it for Phase Four. I suspect it simply wasn’t ready, but if it was, I applaud the decision not to use it. Normally it would be immensely tempting to shoot with and around it.

But it’s not that kind of story, it’s a mystery with the Doctor being isolated, and so they’ve very wisely chosen to leave it out. The Doctor is alienated and in an alien place, it would have been a mistake to put him somewhere familiar.

They work hard at building a sense of strangeness. Structurally, it’s more than a little like Warrior’s Gate in that it apparently starts off as mainstream sci fi – in both, we see a spaceship, we see a spaceship interior, we see a pilot and a prisoner.

Then all of a sudden, the pilot is simply this ghost, wandering around making random cryptic remarks. The other characters are archetypes – a raconteur, a poet, a clown, strangely one dimensional, all except for the mysterious woman, Amaryllis, who mistakes the Doctor himself for one of those pesky archetypes, to the Doctor’s own annoyance.

Rupert Booth explores the Doctor’s personality further in this serial, taking him in new directions. This is one of the pleasures in watching Booth work, he manages to grow the character, to do something different, just about every outing. This time, his character is cranky, snappish, frustrated over his experiences with the Cybermen. He really could care less about the mystery in front of him, he just doesn’t want to be bothered – Amaryllis, the ghost, the archetypes – it’s all someone else’s problem. But he can’t help but being drawn in, he can’t help but caring, and he can’t help needing to solve the mystery.

Leslie, sadly, doesn’t have much to do this time around. Christine Potter’s character barely appears, but that’s of a parcel with the spartan, almost abstract nature of the production.

What carries the production is the deep sense of mystery, and the Doctor’s process of unravelling the mystery of where he is and how this place came to be. Again, there’s a stellar performance by Rupert Booth as the Doctor, with Deborah Riley as Amaryllis an effective foil.

I really have no criticism of this. A lot of the small technical glitches, the small problems in the sound mix, or an awkward shot, or a laboured scene aren’t there or aren’t nearly as noticeable. This is probably because eschewing a lot of exterior and location work, they’ve got a lot more control over their production. The things I might complain about, like a stiffness with some of the cipher/characters are part and parcel of what’s being done – this is an abstracted, surrealist journey so it’s a lot easier to get away with things.

This is an abstract, metaphysical Doctor Who. Let me put it this way, if you liked ‘Warrior’s Gate’ then this will be your favourite as a surreal masterpiece. If Gate left you cold, this will go to the bottom of your list as a pretentious mess. Personally, I like a good mystery, it’s consistently intriguing, it explores the Doctor’s character, and in the end, there’s someting bittersweet and redemptive to it.

When watching Timebase Productions, I’ll strongly recommend watching them in order. The Doctor and his companions are going through a journey together. Regenesis has to proceed Phase Four, and Paradise in Chains has to follow. That’s not the order they were released in, but it’s the order that the overall series follows. You can watch them out of order. But it’s just more enjoyable the other way, you get more out of it.

CAST: Rupert Booth – Doctor; Deborah Riley – Amaryllis; Christine Potter – Leslie; Simon Elworthy – Minstrel; Chelfyn Baxter – Raconteur; Gavin Chilvers – Raconteur; Shaun Borthwick – Raconteur;; Jonathan Ralph – Pilot; Kevin Crennell – Jester; Philip T. Robinson – Cybermen; Richard Knapper – Cybermen; Chelfyn Baxter – Void

CREW: Lee Paterson – writer, incidental music, studio sound, costume; Rupert Booth – writer, director, lighting, camera, transport, VT Editor, titles, set construction, designer, producer; Philip T. Robinson – camera, transport, costume, titles, set construction, designer; Lee Foster – incidental music; Renny Borthwick – director, lighting, production manager; Gavin Chilvers – lighting, title; Jeanette Smedley – lighting; Arthur Banks – lighting, studio sound, set construction; Malcolm Herron – location sound, set construction; Deborah Reilley – transport, costume; Simon Elworthy – studio sound, transport, costume; Sarah King – production assistant; Chelfyn Baxter – special sound; Michael Stevenson – set construction

Timebase, 1995

WATCH IT NOW

Part One

Part Two

STORY: The Doctor and Leslie go for a little holiday to a small town in the English countryside. Little do they know, the Cybermen have taken over, and soon, they and the entire world will be in danger…

REVIEW: Oh no, the Cybermen are up to their old tricks again! This time, they’ve isolated a small town as part of a larger infiltration and takeover scheme. The Doctor and Leslie separately stumble onto the plot quite by accident, and from there on, the story proceeds as the Doctor slowly works out their plot and plays a cat and mouse game with the Cybermen.

This is Timebase’s epic. A four part serial, done up in the classic style, and done well. It was, by far, Time Base’s most ambitious production. Perhaps almost too ambitious. Within the context of Timebase’s story arc, this is the technically second adventure. But it came out fourth in (1997) – after the first story Regenesis (1994), should have preceded Paradise in Chains (1995), and Long Shadows (1995).

From what I can tell, production seems to have started following Regenesis, but there was so much work – so many model shots, so many scenes, so many effects and props, that it’s shooting and post-production simply dragged on and on, and in the meantime, the stories that were to come later were finished and released first. My advice to you is to watch them in the order that I think they were intended, rather than the order of release. The Doctor and his companions are going through an arc over the course of the Timebase adventures, and watching in proper order adds a lot more to the experience.

Where was I? It’s a big story, and it feels big. It could have felt small, god knows, it’s an easy thing to blow. A handful of Cybermen take over a small town, scenes shot in the woods or someone’s living room…

But no, this feels big. The town streets are empty, there’s a lot of extras willing to lay around playing dead bodies. Or maybe it’s just the usual suspects doing double duty over and over again. But regardless, you get the sense of an entire community taken over, a population laid down and out. There’s a sense of scope.

That’s magnified by the settings and sets. One thing I’ll say about Timebase consistently, is that they have a really good eye for choosing locations that enhance the story.

In Regenesis, there were establishing shots of a brick building that conveyed ‘Mental Institution’, or a ruined building that reflected the Tribus’ own physical wreckage, or a filter saturated beach standing in for another dimension. In each case, effective location shots.

This time the shoot covers a lot of ground – country roads, the woods, a church interior, the cybermen’s space ship, even the Tardis Interior, and they’re able to consistently make it interesting. At one point, the Doctor shows up on a country road – boring – except that there’s a peculiar little vehicle, a kind of mini-farm tractor and wagon, that drives up to give the Doctor a ride. A scene where two characters fight over a cloaking device takes place in impenetrable woods, mirroring the action.

The Cybermen’s spaceship is seen both as a exteriors and interiors, there’s a sense of place there. The exteriors are competent model work. The interiors, maybe not so great, but serviceable.

Much more impressive, we get to see the Tardis interior and Time Rotor, and it’s amazingly well done. The walls with the ‘round things’ and the door are authentic to the series. It’s all a dead replica of the original Hartnell/Troughton Tardis console and interior.

The Tardis console is a particularly amazing prop, it lights up properly, it moves, it’s simply extraordinary. For Timebase, it appeared in only one of their other productions – Hidden Faces. But it’s been used in at least one other fan film, Tyranny of the Daleks.

The most impressive setting is the Cybermen’s base on Earth. They’ve taken over an Anglican church, and while the cast struggle a bit with the pews, the visuals of the church interior are amazing. Churchs are built that way, you know, stained glass, vaulted ceilings, the whole nine yards. But to fill it with Cybermen and make it their command center, that’s just brilliant. There is a juxtaposition of traditional, religious and mystical with the high tech, sci-fi and utilitarian which is unforgettable.

The Cybermen are appropriately menacing, not least because they’re omnipresent. The Cybermen are the Troughton ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’ version, and the costumes are spot on – these are dead accurate and BBC quality.

The Cyberman have always needed to be handled carefully. The voices are monotone, costumes are bulky, visibility is limited, so Cybermen tend to move slowly and with a certain amount of caution. It’s very easy for them to turn into a joke. It all depends on how you handle them.

Daleks are scary because they’re always on the edge of freaking out, they’re twitchy, inaccessible and vicious. Daleks are very interactive, they exhibit a lot of personality, blinking their lights, swivelling their guns and plungers and eye stalks and whirling about.

Cybermen, in contrast, are passionless and expressionless, their moves are slow and deliberate, they don’t interract much, they give nothing away. Their intimidation comes from being relentless. No matter what you do, the Cybermen will get you. Fight, run away, hide, it’s all the same to them really. They’re unstoppable, or they should be. They don’t hesitate, can’t be dissuaded, they don’t react, or interract, they’re just implacable. Even if they’re slow, they will eventually run you down

This quality comes across well. Phase Four’s Cybermen, as they all are, are slow. But these are clearly relentless and unstoppable. The Doctor throws up hurdles, but each time, sooner or later they get through it. They just do their thing, and it doesn’t matter whether we resist or flee or trick them. Implacable.

The Cybermen are actually true to their conceptual character. No hard feelings on their part, they’ve got a situation, they’re taking the most logical course of action. The Doctor ultimately defeats them by understanding their situation, and then using its logic against them. When he ruins their plan, there’s no shaking of metal fists. It’s just – time to move on.

What works especially well here is that there are a lot of them. I counted at least five Cybermen in a number of shots, plus a Cyber-Leader and Cyber-Controller. The costumes are used effectively, showing up in so many scenes and so many places it looks and feels like there’s an actual army, dozens on dozens, of them roaming around, leaving no place to hide. That’s a trick that sometimes the original series didn’t carry off successfully. In one scene, I counted fifteen or so, which I think is a composite shot. But the point is, it feels like there’s a lot of them, that they’re everywhere, and they’re dangerous.

This is a serious story, both the Doctor and Leslie have their witty moments, but the Cybermen are never played for laughs. Of the five principle supporting characters (apart from the Cybermen themselves) three of them end up dead.

All of the supporting cast turns in strong performances, even quirky at points. With four episodes to spread over, they’re allowed to develop as characters and identities, even subplots. They’re physically distinctive in looks – the businessman, the biker, the everyman and his wife, and they inhabit those looks and personas – they don’t seem like kids playing dress up. The relative youth of the cast doesn’t work against them, because they all so clearly come across as people from various walks of life.

The Doctor through the serial goes through a character arc, which is handled very well. Again, props to Rupert Booth, for playing the Doctor with depth – his character is alternately questing, thoughtful, sneaky, witty and even dejected. His performance is utterly fluid. There’s a blink and you’ll miss it moment when the Doctor is a prisoner of the Cybermen, utterly crushed and dejected, radiating apathy, and manages to reprogram their teleport right under their noses without them noticing. There’s a moment when the Doctor examines a victim, pronounces them finished, and then an instant later, tells the victim’s spouse that ‘she’ll be fine’ with convincing certainty. Booth is an amazingly expressive actor, you can tell what the Doctor is thinking, but he can also use it to have the Doctor lie, manipulate and plot effectively. He’s got a fey sense of humour and a wonderfully deadpan delivery, there’s not a moment when his performance rings hollow.

The battle with the Cybermen is a cat and mouse game, with the Doctor subverting their technology, and the Cybermen fixing it. He’s mostly one jump ahead of them, but there’s a lot of dramatic tension, because it’s only ever one jump, and sometimes it’s not one jump ahead at all, and he’s not ahead of them.

I don’t really want to give too much of the story away. I want you to watch it, hopefully, watch the whole Timebase series, and in proper order. There are things I want to point out and emphasize, so when you do watch it, you might appreciate it a bit more. Sometimes, when I do these things, I’ll point out flaws or problems, maybe to warn of them, or perhaps to explain.

But I’ll say that along with the main Cyberman story, everyone gets a story arc, and in particular, the Doctor and Leslie get a profoundly moving arc as their relationship develops. It’s a serial that works on several levels.

And finally, as to the Cybermen themselves, in the end, there’s a sort of easter egg, a big reveal that turns what you thought you knew about the Cybermen on its head.

That’s about it. I could site the usual caveats – bits where the sound drops, or cybermen voices are too muzzy, or a shot that doesn’t quite work. But why bother. This is classic Doctor Who.

Cast

Rupert Booth, Doctor, Cyberman, Cyber voices; Christine Potter – Leslie; Lisa Gledhill, Marie; Steve Palace, Martin; Chris Bevis, Royston; Ian Patterson, Miles, Cyberman; Barry Vaughn, Cyber Controller; Cyberleader, Philip T. Robinson; Cyber Voices, Rupert Booth; Cybermen – Richard Knapper, Graeme Nattress, Arthur Banks, Rupert Booth, Philip Robinson, Shaun Whiteheart, Julian Eales, Kevin Crennell, Kristian Wharton, Steven Palace; Convertees – Ian Patterson, Richard Knapper, Graeme Nattress, Peter Nattress

Crew

Rupert Booth – Writer, Director, Camera, Lighting, Hardware, Rupert Booth, Titles, set construction, set builder, props, video effects, special sound, incidental music, dubbing, VT Editor, production manager, designer, model builder; Philip T. Robinson – Producer, Camera, Lighting, Cyber Costumes Sculptor, Make Up, set construction, props, production manager, matte paintings; Richard Knapper – Producer, Camera, Costumes, set assistant, props, production manager, Ian Patterson – Director, Camera, Lighting, Costumes, Credits, Set construction, props, video effects, special sound, incidental music, dubbing, CGI animation, production manager, mechanical design, pyrotechnics; Neil Johnson – Lighting, set assistant

Arthur Banks – Lighting, CGI animation; Paul Ferry – Script Editor, set assistant; Sylvia Brown – assistant, special thanks; Barry Williams – assistant, set assistant, production manager

Claire Williams – assistant; Malcolm Herron – assistant; Peter Nattress – assistant

Lisa Gledhill – Make Up, set assistants; Selina Lock – costume, set assistant; Peter Herron – costume; Gavin Chilvers – titles; Philip Robinson – titles; Brian Moss – set construction, electronics, mechanical design, pyrotechnics; Arthur Banks – set construction; Malcolm Herron – set construction; Scott Goodman – set assistant; David Burke – set assistant; Emma Seager – set assistant; Barry Vaughn – set assistant, electronics; Sara Price – special thanks

Scott Talbot – special thanks; Allen Memorial Methodist Church

Copyright, 1997

WATCH IT

Part 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs7ooQmXdTE

Part 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvTJzylGGns

Part 3

Part 4

Synopsis: Alice Hemingway is an ordinary young woman. But strange things are happening. She’s having recurrent dreams of a flying child whispering about an oncoming storm. The army is having maneuvers near her home, and there are strange things in the woods. She meets a man…

Review: Let’s set our Wayback machine for something closer to home. Let’s leave the 80’s, that strange era when Hair Spray was sold by the gallons, Duran Duran was not a speech impediment and dinosaurs roamed the earth. Let’s go to 2009. 2009 was kind of a watershed year for the new Doctor Who. It was the year without a season. It was the year of David Tennant Leaving. Actually, the word was out in late 2008, David Tennant had had three successful years, he’d done great, now it was time, he had other commitments, but the BBC didn’t want to let him go.

The result was a series of ‘Specials’ – starting in December, 2008, with the Next Doctor – tweaking the fans as it were, and concluding in December, 2009 and January, 2010, with the End of Time.

So we had Shrodinger’s Doctor. He was here, he wasn’t here. He’s leaving. Oh look, there’s a special! He’s gone again. A lot of uncertainty in fandom. He was going, we didn’t know who the new guy was going to be. We didn’t know if we’d like the new guy. Russell T. Davies was leaving, Steven Moffat was taking over, we didn’t know what he’d do with the show.

It’s in this context that a fan group decided to go for it, and produce their own Doctor Who. As I’ve been writing these things, I’ve been starting to notice that a lot of the more interesting fan films seem to emerge on ‘cusps’ for the BBC series – at crisis points where the show is in doubt or uncertain, where there’s a state of anxiety or anticipation.

The Benedetti Doctor wasn’t produced by the 84-85 hiatus, but I think it owes a lot of its success, and its evolution into a body of work to that. Both Timebase, the Projection Room, BBV and Reeltime are all children of the post-1989 era, or of the failed revival of 1993. Gene Genius or Death Comes to time seem to be anticipating the revival of the show. So it fits that Fire and Ice should emerge from the gestalt in that period of uncertainty between the end of Tennant’s last full formal series, and the beginning of Matt Smith’s.

You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you? No worries. If you read enough of these, it’ll start to come clear.

Fire and Ice has the distinction of being voted the greatest Doctor Who fan film of the ‘Noughties’ by Youtubers. It got real press coverage. The ‘Den of Geek’ an online sci fi news site gave it a feature. It was going to be the launching pad of a fan based Doctor Who series that was intended to rival the new series in terms of ambition and quality. This was going to be the Greatest Doctor Who Fan Film Ever!

So what happened? Well, according to some reports, it played and people laughed their assess off. And not in the good way.

These things take an immense amount of work, a lot of time, talent and dedication, and it’s hard to sustain that in the best of times. Apparently there was a hard drive crash, which would be just heartbreaking. I kind of have the impression that there may have been a falling out, and perhaps some hard feelings. But really, the truth is that these things are just so difficult and require so much effort, it’s hard to sustain. There are a few people who were involved who are still floating around, but I haven’t seen much in the way of a production history or making of, from any of them. So I don’t really have a window into what was going on behind the scenes.

Which leaves us with Fire and Ice, the fan film, the pilot and sole survivor of the planned fan season. The artifact itself, shorn of much of its history and context. How is it?

Well, first up – there’s at least two or more versions out there. The full length version has been described as 75 minutes, although the long versions on Youtube is actually just under seventy 70. The broad consensus is that it’s too long, but fair warning, I haven’t watched it.

The version that I did watch on Youtube was 64 minutes. You know what? Still too long.

Technically that is. I’ve known a few film makers, and there’s this danger that many run into: Falling in love with your footage. The shot looks so good, the woman brushing her teeth or painting her toes, there’s such poety in it, yadda yadda. Let it stretch out for a bit. It’s only five minutes! You could show it in five seconds, but it’s so good how about ten or fifteen!

Sorry, you but you gots to kill your babies sometimes. There’s a lot of shots that could have done with some shaving, and a few that needed some hacking.

The trouble is that we, the audience, have not fallen in love with your footage. We’re okay with dating it for a while, but we don’t want to make a commitment. We want to get on with the story, because we’re looking for hotter sexier footage further on.

At this point, I’m going to step out of the review for a bit and have a digression. I figure if you’re reading this, it’s all right, you’ve got nothing better to do anyway. So why not? Now, I might have said this before, but the thing is, audiences are trained to have certain expectations. Form, convention, the three act story structure. Some are overt, things that everyone knows. Some can be subtle.

Running times are a subtle expection. We’ve all grown up with that. Basically, we’ve all grown up on television. Television divides its time up into half hour, one hour and two hour blocks. And of course, theatrical movies are generally structured as a two hour block.

Now, with television, they make way for commercials, announcements etc., so a television half hour – a self contained, satisfying, television half hour story is actually about 24 to 28 minutes. The old classic Doctor Who ran about 25 minutes per serial episode. A television hour is actually about 50 to 55 minutes. A two hour television movie typically runs 90-100 minutes. In the movie theatres, the movie experience is generally about 90 to 120 minutes, not much longer.

The point is, this is what we expect. Go off those ranges, people start getting uncomfortable. A two and a half hour movie? People are tapping their feet, checking their watches. A three hour movie, people are feigning death to get out. A four hour movie, and you start checking out your neighbors in case you have to kill them for food.

It’s not just the length, a longer work is paced differently, the beats, the climaxes and plot points, they’re in different places than we expect. So there’s an accumulating feeling of discomfort. It’s just stretching and stretching.

That same holds true for lesser lengths. 80 to 85 minutes is roughly all people will tolerate for a short movie. Less than that, and you’ve got trouble. Hard to even call it a movie. On the other hand, 65 or 70 minutes… Way too long for a television hour. Then there’s that uncanny valley, say 35 to 45 minutes – too long for a half hour, too short for a movie! It doesn’t fit for us, the pacing isn’t right.

Maybe this seems like crazy stuff. But trust me, it’s the way people work. Used to be that we were all happy sitting through six hour productions in Elizabethan England. Now… Out tastes different, not better, not worse, it’s just what we’re accustomed to, what our comfort zone is.

So, Fire and Ice at 70 minutes, or 64 minutes? That’s just death. The audience has some leeway, we’re willing to go a few minutes long, a few minutes short. But geez. Needed to be 55 to 60 minutes. Sorry, that’s how it is. Take it up with the entertainment industry.

Ah, you might say, but what about Day of the Doctor and Deep Breath, weren’t they extra-long and in my so called ‘uncanny valley’? Right you are. But then again, both of those had been building up goodwill and anticipation for eight years. We were going to watch them, no matter what. Fire and Ice didn’t have that going for it.

Okay, back to the review…

The first five minutes … smashing. The floating child thing is visually brilliant, and way creepy to boot. Setting up plot threads and raising questions intended for future episodes never produced, or maybe for a DVD commentary track.

Overall, Fire and Ice reminded me a lot of Rose. The feel and the progression of the story is very similar. Both of them really are stories about the Companions, not the Doctors. The Doctor is almost a secondary character, one who comes into the story, a force of chaos or change, an avatar of menace and possibility.

We get to know the Doctor through their eyes, as this mysterious, oddly quirky stranger who shows up and turns their orderly world around… Although more accurately, he doesn’t turn it upside down. He just shows them that beneath the safe orderly world they thought they lived in, is another world strange and beautiful and dangerous, and he’s a beacon of safety in it.

The two stories open the same way, basically with Alice and Rose, respectively, getting up in the morning and getting on with their day. Rose does it better – we see Rose’s mum, her boyfriend, her job, we kind of get to see where she is in life, we get a very strong sense of who she is. With Alice, not so much, her actions are mundane, we don’t necessarily get such a strong sense of who she is. Later on we’ll be told that she’s late for class, and then later that she’s been late for classes a lot, and then still later that she’s frightened by life – but none of this is really shown. Alice gets up, gets dressed, has her coffee…. but she’s not scrambling frantically because she’s late for class and needs to get her stuff together, we don’t see clips that seem to show her where she is in life, or what’s bothering her. They knew what they wanted to do, they just had a little trouble getting there.

The sense is that Alice, played by Jennifer Richman, isn’t really as immersed in her life, not as connected or grounded as Rose was. Maybe that’s deliberate. There’s several hints through the story that there might be a lot more going on with or around Alice than she realizes. Alice may be a lot more important, and Alice may have more gifts, than she knows.

The stories continue to unfold similarly. Both Rose and Alice get dragged out of their regular lives by encounters with the monster – literally because in both cases, it grows under their feet. Because of their proximity, they keep running into both the Doctor and the monsters. Eventually they’re deeply involved.

There’s differences. Rose’s episode is much more comedic, there’s cool surreal and silly bits. And it’s a bit more baroque, the plot, while linear, has wiggles to it as Rose tries to figure out what’s going on. In comparison, Alice’s episode tends to emphasize drama or suspense, and there’s more effort at a character arc than trying to put swerve into the plot.

Indeed, in both cases, the plot gets almost perfunctory – the Doctor confronts the Monster, has a little chat, the Doctor gets in trouble, and it gets sorted out by a third party coming to the rescue. In Alice’s episode, it’s because the Doctor had some tricks up his sleeve, in Rose’s episode, he just got lucky.

The point is that the two episodes are similar enough in terms of content and process that comparisons are almost inescapable. Is that a bad thing? Mmm maybe. Fire and Ice is going to suffer in comparison to Rose. But it’s not completely one sided.

Take Monsters, for instance. Rose gets Autons, which is sort of a silly-creepy monster, and kind of goes with the strong comedic touches of the episode. Fire and Ice gives us…. Ice Warriors.

Oops! Was that a spoiler! Did I just spoil something for you! Oh no!!! Actually, no, it’s not a spoiler, it’s an incentive.

Look, here’s how I see it. Sometimes, in a piece of work, there are plot twists, or revelations, or characters, that you go ‘wow’ for. They change the whole direction of the story, they make you think new things, or realize something. Those are the things you have to watch out for. Those are spoilers.

Now, there’s things which are part of the narrative, and which are things that may intrigue you in the narrative. It’s the premise, or the information that draws you in, that sets the story in motion. You don’t watch out for those. You actually talk about those. Those aren’t spoilers, they’re incentives.

Take the sixth sense as an example. Bruce Willis plays a sad psychologist in a bad marriage whose wife won’t talk to him. Not a spoiler, kind of an incentive. He tries to help a kid who can see dead people. Also not a spoiler, actually, a really intriguing incentive. This sounds like a pretty weird kid, I bet Bruce and the kid are going to get into some wacky hijinx! These are not spoilers. Bruce Willis was dead all along and didn’t realize it. That’s a spoiler! See the difference?

So anyway, I could say ‘Fire and Ice has some monsters in it.’ Well, big deal. Doctor Who always has monsters of one sort or another. But if I say ‘Fire and Ice has the Ice Warriors in it.’ Whoa! Stop the presses! I want to watch that! Ice Warriors are cool. You definitely want to watch an Ice Warriors episode a lot more than you want to watch a TBA monster. You see?

So Ice Warriors! Really well done too, in just about every sense. The build up is gradual but effective. They’re physically imposing, they contribute meaningfully to the action and sense of escalating menace. The costumes are great – very classic look, kind of inhuman, with a bulk that gives them menace, despite being somewhat slow moving. Their lair has good visuals, they have some history, some motivation, they argue their case convincingly against the Doctor without ever losing the fact that they’re the bad guys. They’re really well done.

Some people have said that they handled the Ice Warriors better than the Matt Smith episode. You know what. They’re right. I give this one to Fire and Ice, fair and square. They win.

I guess now we come to the Doctor, played by Kevin Raymond Moore. Well, he’s not a Rupert Booth. He’s not even a Barbara Benedetti. He’s not one of those actors that walks out and is The Doctor. Tom Baker had that. David Tennant and Matt Smith had it, from their first moment, they are The Doctor.

On the other hand, he’s not a complete failure either. Some fan actors that play the role, they’re not the Doctor, will never be the Doctor, it just ain’t who they are, no matter how long a scarf they wear. This guy, falls in the middle. He’s not the Doctor, but you could see him coming into the role. That’s fair enough, I mean, you look at someone like Davison or maybe Pertwee… They started off slow, and kind of established themselves as The Doctor through the episode. They both started off their adventures flat on their backs. Come to think of it, so did Tenant.

Anyway, my first impression was no. Too thin, too timid, too forced, trying to hard, not enough presence. He starts out a bit too slow and tentative. First glimpse, that’s effective. Second appearance… he needed to be a lot stronger, he starts out quirky and then doesn’t seem to have an idea where to go. Third appearance… sabotaged by a tweety bird. But the thing is, as he goes along, I tended to buy him more and more as the Doctor. At the end, was I completely sold? Don’t think so. Even by the end of the story, he still lacks that charisma, that magnetism that makes a Doctor.  But he was a lot closer.

At the end of the episode, I was willing to keep buying in. If they’d made more, I’d have watched, and I think it’s likely that over time, he would have gotten it, filled out or inhabited the persona of The Doctor more fully.  Does that make any sense? If there had been more episodes, I think… yes. As it is, he’s sort of a near-Doctor, or slightly better than that, but definitely not quite all there.

There’s a lot of really nice stuff here. There’s a scene of snow in the forest, that’s just beautifully done. The near car crash, terrific. But there’s downsides.   Jennifer Richman who plays Alice is simply not the actress that Billie Piper is. Or maybe she doesn’t get as much to work with from her script. Serviceable. Mostly the acting and a lot of the writing is like that, serviceable, not extraordinary. I think that maybe one line, from an Ice Warrior, really struck  me.  But then again, there were a number of lines and images that stuck with me.

One thing that strikes me, is that it is remarkable how computer animation has become accessible. We see an entirely CGI rendered Tharsis lizard romping around, interacting with the cast. The larger part, perhaps all of the Ice Warriors base that the Doctor sneaks into is CGI and composited in quite nicely. It’s perhaps a bit sub-par compared to things that they’re doing in Hollywood with real money. But even as little as ten years before, the amount and quality of CGI that we see would be outside the budget of anything but a fairly well funded Hollywood production.

The amount of processing power available keeps doubling, and long with it, we see these quantum leaps in the sophistication of editing software of all sorts, storing and manipulating film files in digital format, and doing increasingly complex CGI, all of it more and more accessible to ordinary people.

Apart from that, there’s some technical and structural problems. The sound mix has a few issues. Sound mix is probably one of the hardest things to work out, and it’s often overlooked. When it goes wrong it kills you dead. If people’s voices are muddy, or there’s too much echo, or voice levels are too low, it takes you out of the experience. And then, foley is just such an easy path off the cliff. The wrong incidental music in the wrong place, and it’s ‘WTF?’ Or too loud?

There’s a crucial scene, the first real meeting of Alice and the Doctor, out in the woods after he rescues her from a Tharsis Lizard. You can barely make them out, because the world’s loudest songbird is drowning them out with its tweets. Even worse, the tweety bird is a loop, so after a while, it gets visibly repetitive and annoying. Just a small tweak would have fixed it. But as it is, I’m sure that the incongruity had people howling with laughter.

It’s maddening. Think about how hard they must have worked to pull that scene together. How much weight and passion went into it, what care they must have taken. Think of all the love and attention and commitment that got lavished on the scene, from shooting, all the way to post production. Think of the care and ingeniousness that went into thinking ‘well, they’re in the woods, some forest sounds in the background, a bird tweeting.’ They must have felt so clever, and so proud of their attention to detail. And then, when it played, people laughed out loud at that point because the goddammed tweeting was so intrusive. I’m sure hearts broke at that moment.

Which is a shame, because generally the sound mix is pretty good. I actually like their music selections a lot. They do some David Bowie at the end, which in a commercial production, you’d never get the rights to.

There’s also a few strange choices that drag down the script. The big one is a pivotal moment. A monster attacks, Alice runs home, then she has what feels like a five minute long life-crisis speech with her friend about how she’s terrified by life and running away from her problems, before rushing back to help the doctor. Uh… what? Two things: First, kills the momentum right stone dead. Second, if you stop to have a heart to heart with your girlfriend in a situation like that, well, when you get back, the Doctor will have already been eaten.

I’m not saying she shouldn’t have had that conversation. It should just have taken place somewhere, else, earlier on, so that it didn’t interrupt the flow of the crises, and it would have been more meaningful because we’d have had more time to integrate it with the character. Again, that’s one of those things that people were probably laughing at. And again, I’d bet it really hurt, because it was an important moment for the creators, and it’s an important moment in the story.

But hey, this is a review not an autopsy. I don’t propose to spend all my time reviewing every decision, good or bad. Those were the two most destructive boners. They made other mistakes, but most of the others didn’t produce the level of sabotage that those two did.  Had they managed to dodge those bullets, the production would have had a better reception, would have been stronger.

What’s the bottom line? If you ask me, for a Doctor Who fan, is this worth watching? Yes! Definitely, yes. Totally!   Is it the best Fan Film evah! Nope. It’s good, but it’s got some problems that drag it down.

Is it a match for the new BBC series? Mostly, no, those problems I mentioned, it’s hard to rise above them. But the boners aside – there’s a critical weakness.

It’s not the story or the effects, Matt Smith had more than his share of crap stories, and a large part of Peter Capaldi’s work so far are epic stinkers. But the thing is, we loved Matt Smith and we were prepared to forgive him any number of things. Peter Capaldi is new, but he’s got a force of personality.

Here, we’ve got a story which is perfectly acceptable, even good. The writing’s not Shakespeare, but it does the job. The Ice Warriors are terrific and they’re well handled in almost every possible way. Ladies, gentlemen, we’ve had much worse.

The weakness, however, is the leading cast members – Alice and the Doctor. Neither of them truly comes across as a strong enough personality to carry the episode. I feel bad for saying this. I’m not sure what it is, maybe the script, maybe the directing, maybe the performance. But it’s there. And it’s tough – Tennant, Smith and Capaldi have all played very big very extroverted Doctors. So a quiet performance, even if deliberate, is just going to be pushed out. Doesn’t mean we can’t have quiet Doctors – Peter Davidson was well beloved. But a quiet Doctor needs support. Alice just isn’t well defined or focused enough.

So, mostly no.  But that operative word is ‘mostly.’  It’s not up there with the best of Ecclestone, Tenant and Smith.  But it’s far from easily dismissed.   Is it damning with faint praise to say it has a respectable claim to being on par with the average, or a match for the weaker.   It does do the Ice Warriors better than their recent appearance in the BBC show.  And Richman and Moore, while weak, are far from disasters.  It does a lot of good things.  In the end, a few bad decisions do damage, well, perhaps its worth looking past that.

The original plan was for a thirteen episode fan season. Can you imagine that? The sheer amount of work that entails boggles my mind. We’re not talking OCD sufferers with a camcorder here, we’re talking a remarkably professional production on a shoestring. It didn’t come off.

It’s entirely possible, that there was a plan to start off quiet and then build up the characters. If so, they should have talkd to Colin Baker. The plan for him was to establish his character as a major jerk, and then through the course of a seasons long arc reveal the loving and loveable soul beneath the hard exterior. We all know what happened to Colin Baker and his Doctor. This business is unpredictable and nasty enough that you can’t count on second chances, you make your hit count right now, because you may not get another shot.

Or it’s possible that even in the absence of any sort of plan like that, the actors would have grown into the role, comfort and increasing experience, in front of and behind the scenes would have refined this fan Doctor into something that could stand in the company of the BBC Doctors without a flinch.

So in the end, weak Doctor, weak Companion, an okay story undermined by boners, which just doesn’t have the oomph to compensate for them. Three legs – one of them had to be strong enough to carry the whole thing. Instead, it limps. By no means a failure. But it limps a bit.

Does it feel like authentic Doctor Who?

Mmmm not quite, but I think a lot of that comes down to excessive length … it’s padded and stretched longer than it needs to be, and this throws off the pacing, and it throws off our comfort. It’s trapped in uncanny valley. It doesn’t feel authentic to the show the way that Timebase Productions work does, it doesn’t feel like it you could just slip it in to the canon seamlessly. But it’s within sight of it.

You want my advice? Go watch it. There are plenty of versions online to pick from. Just do it, go watch. Decide for yourself if I’m right. What if I’m wrong, and it’s stupendous! What if I’m right, but by god, it’s still stupendous! Or what if I’m right about everything wrong, or its even worse… stop watching. Some talented people put their blood sweat and tears into it, they put their hearts and souls, and the only reward they’ll ever get is people like you and me watching it.

Postscript: The second story in the series was going to be called ‘Guardian of the Solar System.’ As I understand it, this was going to be a prequel to the 12 episode William Hartnell serial, the Dalek Masterplan. A substantial part of that revolved around the far future, when Earth ruled a vast space Empire, and was in turn ruled by a dictator named Mavic Chan.

That story will probably never get released, something about a hard drive crash, partial recovery.

But there was a trailer that they did for it. I’ll include the link, check it out.

2009. Running time 75 to 64 minutes, depending. Starring: Kenneth Raymond Moore as the Doctor; Jennifer Richman as Alice Hemingway; Carmel Stowe as Marisa; Emily Richman as Captain Lynn Johnson; Matthew Johnson as Lord Slyzzar; Cody Presswood as Corporal Rothemid; Jonathan Davis as various Ice Warriors; Ben Patrick as Child of Prophecy.

Produced by Kenneth Dinkins, Jennifer Richman and Aron Presswood. Directed by Kenneth Dinkins and Aron Presswood. Written by Kenneth Dinkins; & lots of little Richmans, Dinkins and Presswoods pulling up the rear.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Den of Geek

http://www.denofgeek.us/tv/doctor-who/20519/how-does-a-fan-made-episode-of-doctor-who-measure-up

Jed Rhodes Review

http://jedrhodes.blogspot.ca/2011/08/jed-on-doctor-who-fire-and-ice-review.html

WATCH IT

Youtube’s 69.40 minute verion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TQAB-b8pn4

Youtube’s 64 minute version

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuCqkATb3Gg

Guardians of the Solar System, different youtube trailers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG9-kJhQdBk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8Ac72KDI28

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0Uie7ijhuI

War in Heaven – final scene,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Aea5cqjz2s