Good evening. It's time for another wander through the adventures of TV's Doctor Who. I will show you lovely pictures that I took while watching, and regale you with my opinions of what might have been happening onscreen at the time.
I don't always pay at lot of attention to the actual plot, but I like to think I get the *essence* of things spot on.
Tonight's experience:
Terror! Of the Zygons!
This week Doctor Who has gone to Scotland and just look at his little face! He loves it, doesn't he? He's got a little Scottish hat on, and a special Scottish scarf, and he's cackling madly at something off camera. One of those shaggy cow things? An incensed local? A corpse?
Harry and Sarah, as always, look very much like grown ups who have been asked to come collect their child from a party, because it got overexcited and started making the other children cry. Harry is particularly vexed, caught - as usual - between his natural desire to be incredibly polite and his strong instinct to grab Doctor Who by the throat and shout, "Not everything is here for you to be weird at!"
It soon transpires that they haven't gone to Scotland just to tick another box on Doctor Who's list of 'crazy hat/scarf combos I look amazing in'. No. There is a mission afoot! Some bad monsters have come to Scotland, and someone needs to make them die.
There's the Brigadier, Doctor Who's best mate. He's been saying, "Thank you for coming to help with the mission, and also for taking off the racist hat." Now Doctor Who is doing an investigate, on the phone. "Hello!" he's whispering. "Are you the villain? I bet you are!"
This is one of the bad monsters. He's doing a spy on Doctor Who through a secret camera. Lots of monsters like to watch Doctor Who, though I don't think they ever get counted in the viewing figures. But then they probably don't pay their TV licence.
This monster is called a Zygon, and he's thinking, "This Doctor Who fellow is a cocky one. Just the sort of problematic element we don't need while planning to take over the Earth. But boy can he carry off that hat/scarf combo!"
Doctor Who does a mysterious think. This is a thing he's got into quite a lot since he started being Doctor Who Number Four. Whereas previously he'd spend much of the story jumping around kicking people in the face and shouting "Die, space villain!", now he frequently seems to forget he's even having an adventure in the first place.
Quite often Sarah or Harry have to come and wake him up. "Come on Doctor Who!" they say. "We were trying to stop everyone dying. Remember? That was good, wasn't it? Let's do more of that!"
Doctor Who will then pretend to have some sort of revelation as a result of all the thinking. But since the revelation is almost always "I sense evil," there remains the strong possibility that he was just asleep.
The Zygons are a great design, aren't they? All blobby and horrendous. It must be quite fun being them, though, I think. You'd just spend all day tracing the exciting patterns in your own armpit.
These guys are in their spaceship, and the leader is having a good old hiss about how awesome it will be when all the humans are dead, and he can go out in the street without fear of being mistaken for a pizza and eaten by a hungry Scotsman.
The Brigadier has finally persuaded Doctor Who to come out and do some actual work. He's been smart here, and lured him outside with the promise of a dead body. Doctor Who loves a cadaver, and the Brigadier knows it.
Doctor Who spends a long time poking at the body and muttering creepily, before deciding that the murderer was probably a Loch Ness Monster. Astonishingly, he will turn out to be right. But I reckon he just says this whenever he's in Scotland, and he's just got lucky.
What do you reckon Sergeant Benton and his mate are up to in the background? It's clear from The Brigadier's demeanour that there's nothing dangerous happening. But Benton and his mate are throwing some quite extraordinary 'combat' poses. It's quite endearing, though I bet they'd be mortified if they knew anyone could see them.
Soon the story steps up a gear because - surprise! - the Zygons can turn into looking like people! Yeah! Take that, the Daleks! Let's see you disguise yourself as Doctor Who's friend and sneak up on him in a hayloft.
Actually, I think this Zygon is sneaking up on Sarah. Which seems unfair. It's Doctor Who that's going around Scotland shouting "Watch out - aliens are murdering people with a Loch Ness Monster!" But no, here goes this jerk, trying to kill lovely Sarah Jane.
Anyway, it doesn't work. Zygon Harry tries to murder Sarah with a pitchfork, but just kind of accidentally stabs himself to death with it instead. I think he gave himself away when he glowered out of the shadows with an air of sexy, brooding menace. As opposed to Harry's usual demeanour, which more closely resembles a kind of affable horse.
Meanwhile, in the Zygon spaceship, the King Zygon turns into this guy. He's an important Duke or something, and now the Zygons can infiltrate human society, and no-one will know.
It's a cunning two pronged plan. Firstly the Zygons manipulate the political infrastructure of human society so as to bring about its downfall from within. Then they tell a massive Loch Ness Monster to eat everyone. Can't fail.
Soon enough, the Zygons capture Doctor Who. He is, of course, delighted. Here we see him asking if he can play with all the various sticky out bits of the spaceship, and clearly considering poking his fingers into some of the more promising holes.
His Zygon captor wears the resigned expression of anyone trying to make Doctor Who behave. It looks like it has already decided that it's going to let him do what he wants, and pretend he was overpowered, like a supply teacher the week before Christmas.
The Brigadier is breaking the news that Doctor Who has been captured by aliens again, and is probably definitely dead, again. This is about the millionth time he's had to do this, and you can kind of tell. He looks quite sad, but only about as sad as you'd be if you broke your favourite cup, for example.
Harry doesn't seem bothered at all, does he? This is his last proper story, so maybe he's finally run out of patience for the whole thing. It can't be easy, maintaining an air of unflappable good humour with Doctor Who constantly pointing and laughing while aliens try to lay eggs in your face.
I've enjoyed Harry a great deal, and I'm sad to see him go.
Eventually Doctor Who confronts the villain and subjects him to some extra spooky Weird Staring. This is his main weapon against villains. Sometimes he augments it with a kind of low, dark chattering nonsense. In this case, he mostly just mocks everything about the Zygons, from the feasibility of their plans for world domination to their taste in interior decorating.
Eventually there is nowhere else for King Zygon to turn, except defeat.
Also, the Brigadier bursts in and shoots him several times until he stops moving.
To everyone's delight, the Loch Ness Monster turns up to bring the story to a close. He bursts out of the Thames and does a right old roar at all the passing traffic. He is very excited that it is time to do the invasion, and he really brings his all to the moment.
Sadly for him, he is a quite astonishingly terrible special effect. Most people simply do their best to avoid eye contact, and after a while, it becomes apparent that no-one is taking the invasion seriously. It becomes hard to escape the conclusion that the entire plan was ill conceived from the start, especially now all his friends are dead.
The Loch Ness Monster sneaks off back to Scotland to a life of solitude and contemplation. A sad ending to an otherwise excellent story.
See the next exciting adventure- The Planet! Of Evil!
Or why not reflect on the previous exciting adventure: Revenge! Of the Cybermen!
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