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News bulletin. Angelo Felix named his game Shanna after his daughter. No wonder the game is so adorable.
Underworld
Browsing through my reviews, any hardcore Who fan would likely assume I’m playing the contrarian. X story is popular, so it must be rubbish. Y story is unpopular, so clearly it’s an hidden gem. No, that’s just my taste at work. I notice that fans of anything tend to be concerned with consistency. They became fans because of a static list of features; whatever fails to meet enough of those features is garbage, and whatever meets them all is perfect. There may be a small gray area in the middle. Usually not.
Me, I’m more interested in what could be than in what is. By nature the most interesting ideas tend to veer far from, or otherwise ignore, the status quo, so they’re rarely popular. By nature the closer you hew to the status quo, the more tedious you get as there’s nothing new to learn. On this basis I think I agree with the consensus about Underworld, but for the opposite of the usual reasons.
Underworld is a plodding mid-era Tom Baker four-parter by the writing team who dreamed up the Doctor’s robotic dog K-9, Bob Baker and Dave Martin. The common line is that the story fails because the special effects look awful, the sets look cheap, and a disturbing amount of humor has begun to creep into the show. If there’s a redeeming feature, it’s that the story is drowning in references to classical mythology and therefore can pretend to be educated.
Indeed the story is a bit of a failure, but I’d say that largely rests in Baker and Martin’s decision to truss up the myth of Jason and the Argonauts with some sci-fi trappings instead of taking a simple idea — such as the regeneration pods that have kept the crew alive for 100,000 years — and extrapolating it. For a small crew that has lived longer than most human civilizations, they all seem oddly… normal. We’re introduced to plot devices like a ray that makes people docile, and then the story never explains or explores them — what part they play in life, what their ramifications or consequences might be. Instead, we have an ancient plot to churn through and familiar symbols to quote so that the educated yet unimaginative can feel they got their license fee’s worth. Every time the story checks another box, I feel my eyes roll back into my head. Oh, look! The golden fleece! Sort of!
The serial has its points of interest, though — most notably those unconvincing special effects. By the time the story went into production, the ferocious continual inflation of the pound meant the budget was devalued and they no longer had money for sets. Cue ingenuity; for one of the first times ever, the story was substantially shot against bluescreen, with the actors layered on top of scale models.
The effect rarely fools the eye, but so what. This is ingenious stuff, here. Decades before George Lucas shot his Star Wars prequels almost entirely against blue curtains, we get a prototype of the same idea — and done reasonably well, under the circumstances. We do have depth, and layers. Actors walk out from behind matted bits of the scenery, and then around to the front again. Someone meticulously planned their walk paths, and lined up real surfaces whenever the actors needed to touch something. The effect is a bit like those sections in Final Fantasy VII where you’ve got polygonal characters running around on top of a bitmapped picture. You know the elements don’t fit, but it works well enough to get the message across.
So that’s kind of neat. The modelwork and much of the acting is rather nice as well, at least considering what they were given. Tom Baker straddles the line between reading the lines as written and doing his own personal comedy routine, as he would later devolve into. You can tell he’s bored, but I think he has every right to be. His small larks do inject a bit of life into the dust, helping to carry the attention through.
Underworld is probably amongst the least necessary Who serials ever, but it’s no no means horrible. Tedious in some respects; technically interesting in some others. It’s just so very nothing. I always forget which story this is, and almost immediately after watching it I forget again.