Keep On Traken

I rather loved the look of "The Keeper of Traken", the Doctor Who serial I finished watching to-day. It looks very 80s fairy tale, sort of like The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth. For that matter, I can see very clearly in this serial the influence Doctor Who had on Peter Jackson--I kept thinking of Rivendell.




Not to mention Tom Baker has Hobbit hair. I'm still not digging his new purple outfit--it just doesn't feel like his clothes. It's like he's wearing a uniform. I like how the Wikipedia entry for "The Leisure Hive" says the new outfit was part of a desire for better colour coordination. Making everything one colour isn't colour coordination, it's a failure to coordinate colour.

"The Keeper of Traken" wasn't particularly well written--the rather absurd set of circumstances designed to vilify the Doctor in the eyes of a supposedly totally peaceful civilisation was particularly bad. But gods, the sets. I love how the glass case around the Keeper's throne is like something for a mantelpiece clock.



And look at the detail on the wall of one guy's home;



The designs moulded into the doors, the designs printed on the windows, all of it extraordinarily intricate. It's a bitter shame again that this was all shot on video tape. It's like looking at a Mucha painting through a shower door. Wonderful, 80s fantasy art nouveau in any case.