4.24: The Ribos Operation

In which Binro is correct.

Broadcast: September 1978

Watched: September 2020

The Ribos Operation, Part One

“Nothing. At all. Ever.”

Love that this starts with taking K9 on holiday and then the Doctor has to cancel because he meets god. Also the meta-bit where the Doctor bitches that he has to have a companion.

Tom getting caught in the net is well done. So is having a plot with multiple factions.

Best design in ages – the White Guardian’s planet, Ribos, the snow. The monster’s shit though. Quite amusing tone. Holmes has clearly decided comedy double acts are his thing by now.

It was quite good.

[I was having a crisis when I watched this. You can tell, can’t you?]

The Ribos Operation, Part Two

I’m enjoying the selection of comedy rustic accents. The whole con plot is very nicely done, especially Garron being annoyed by it. The ice time/sun time thing is a nice bit of world building.

Romana is one of the few companions to be an assistant instead of a friend. She’s very gullible, though. Love that “honest, open face” is dialogue.

The Ribos Operation, Part Three

The Binro stuff is lovely. It sort of comes out of nowhere – I guess there’s sort of a lot of stuff in this story about ignorance, or possibly innocence and experience, but this is [writer Robert] Holmes, who’s much more one for incident than theme, so my suspicion is this is just part of his “quick, need more stuff to fill part three” sort of routine. Anyway, it’s a lovely idea – sort of like the end of Vincent & the Doctor 32 years later, only it’s kind of telling Galileo he was right – and is really beautifully played.

Story continues to be fun. One of those Doctor Who stories that’s incredibly Doctor Who without being particularly like any previous story.

The Ribos Operation, Part Four

Ha, Garron’s from Hackney Wick. Probably why he’s such a hipster.

The are only two women in this story.

The Graff is an interesting character. They make him much nastier, and less of a comedy villain, in this one, presumably partly because the story is going to end with the Doctor handing him a bomb. That’s not played quite so nastily as it was in my memory of the story – the “only one will survive” prophecy is a device to set it up, and the Graff does ask for it by trying to blow his “guard” up instead. But it’s still not great that there’s a story in which the Doctor wins by handing the villain a bomb, is it?