7.12: Survival

In which I finally start watching Doctor Who. Which, ironically, does not survive.

Broadcast: November-December 1989

Watched: February 2021

Well. Last night I finished watching all 26 seasons of the original series in order. Might as well finish the notes too.

Survival, Part One

“...the one day of the week you can’t even get a decent television programme.” Which day is ChibWho on these days again?

One last terrible monster for old time’s sake. If you can call a cat a monster. The Cheetah people aren’t great. The animatronic cat is dreadful. Surely it would have been easier to use a real cat?

I like that old Who starts and ends on the streets of London (not to mention the parks; I actually know Horsenden Hill now from my walks, I didn’t in 1989). This one also feels like a huge influence on the new show: the threat is in suburbia (you sort of get that in Pertwee but starting with the authorities makes the emphasis difference); using satire and jokes to examine contemporary themes; the companion dealing with a personal story while the Doctor is distracted by the supernatural one; even celeb cameos (love Hale and Pace)... It’s basically the template for an RTD episode. 

The incidental music with the guitar riff feels kind of unusual for Who. Patterson is less of a cartoon than I’d remembered.

Oh right obviously it’s the Master. Ainsley is looking a bit puffy. I wonder if people actually remembered him well enough for the cliffhanger to work?

Survival, Part Two

I love that the Master distracts the cheetah people with a shiny ball. Ace’s trap catching the Doctor – McCoy cheerfully hanging upside down – is just wonderful. Also the Doctor asking for calm in the middle of the fight, doffing his hat to the cheetahs.

There’s a sort of structural neatness here – the first episode was real, this one’s an alien world, the third brings the two together.

That is a weirdly good looking milkman.

There’s a definite subtext in the fact it isn’t aggression but attraction that causes Ace’s eyes to turn.

Survival, Part Three

“Why do you keep calling me sister?”

This feels like the gayest the show has been to date so it’s sort of pleasing how Rona Munro is the only original writer to come back. [The Eaters of Light.] Apart from the Ace stuff, there’s something distinctly homoerotic in Master/Midge relationship, too, and at the end she’s writing the Doctor/Master relationship in the same vaguely homoerotic way that RTD does. I like how Patterson is suddenly worried he’s holding a boy’s hand.

This is the nastiest and most sinister Master has been since... Logopolis? Ever?

The way Midge dresses like a yuppie all of a sudden. Patterson gets destroyed because he’s showing weakness; Midge dies on command. None of it’s massively subtle but it works brilliantly.

OMG McCoy on a motorbike, and then it blows up, I’d totally forgotten that part. I hadn’t realised that until just seconds before the end Ace genuinely thinks the Doctor is dead. It’s quite fitting for the final story.

“If we fight like animals we die like animals!” works on the Cheetah planet, but suddenly sounds silly in Perivale.

I’ve always liked that the last story is called Survival. But part of me mourns for the fact it wasn’t called Cat Flap, as I believe was considered.