Diminishing Damnation

Years ago, a friend told me the only good scene in 1976's The Omen is near the beginning, when Damien's nanny kills herself. Now that I've finally seen the movie, I'm inclined to agree.

There are a number of good performances in the film. Gregory Peck, David Warner, and particularly Patrick Troughton as a priest in a constant state of panic and dread, are all fantastic. But the whole film is hampered by one central problem--we never get an impression of Robert's (Peck) relationship with Damien (Harvey Spencer Stephens).

Part of the reason the nanny suicide scene works is that it's natural at that point in the film that we don't know much about the main characters. The film establishes a normal five year old's birthday party. It's quite jarring when a woman just established as a caring and apparently normal nanny is suddenly standing on a balcony and proclaiming her love for the boy before hanging herself.

But after this, as Robert slowly investigates warnings and clues, the lack of any established relationship between himself and his adopted son diminishes the internal dilemma he's supposed to be wrestling with. I can understand if maybe they wanted to minimise the use of a child actor in horrific scenes, but scenes of the two bonding normally would have helped tremendously. Some scenes of Robert trying to understand Damien's behaviour by relating it to his own childhood or getting impressions from a psychologist would have been nice. Damien really needed to be more of a character in this film.

The Omen is available on HBOMax.

Twitter Sonnet #1636

A dizzy road exists beyond the ground.
A sea of tar consumes the endless man.
The oiled line would scream beneath a sound.
A louder noise than all the guns of Pan.
A pair of quiet ties have sought a neck.
But only one can turn the chest to straw.
The veins convey a drowsy type of wreck.
The sleeping dog can dream its razor paw.
Admit the heavy socks were moral feet.
A truth was facing time for stealing toes.
Defined in loss we kept a pace to beat.
Without a foot the bunny chose to pose.
The awkward dog was nothing bad to fear.
The menace dies in weakly watered beer.

Smorgasbord of the Doctor

There are a lot of reasons The Two Doctors is significant for Doctor Who canon, but the three parter doesn't really get to the meat, so to speak, of the story until the third episode. This is where writer Robert Holmes really leaned into trying to convince the audience to go vegetarian while convincing the Doctor in the process. I doubt he actually converted many, if any, viewers but the attempt is entertainingly grotesque.

This is the first time two incarnations of the Doctor, Six (Colin Baker) and Two (Patrick Troughton) met without it being an anniversary episode and it's the first time the show shot on location in Spain. Like City of Death and Arc of Infinity (shot in Paris and Amsterdam, respectively), The Two Doctors makes use of the beautiful scenery. Which is always really refreshing for a show typically shot on cheap plywood sets.

I wonder what the locals made of this trio. Colin Baker was coaxed out of his coat by the incredible heat in Seville and Jamie's (Frazer Hines) removed a black coat that had initially accompanied this costume. I rather wish Jamie had actually dressed like that all the time during his original tenure on the show. He almost looks like the character he inspired on Outlander.

Meanwhile, Peri (Nicola Bryant), of course, was already showing plenty of skin. The Sixth Doctor's companion for most of his run, Peri is notorious for being weakly performed and written, her character concept apparently being primarily about her physical beauty. But, yeah, she's a knock out. Those gams . . .

And Robert Holmes was eager to use every asset to push his message. The second episode cliffhanger is Peri being straddled by Shockeye (John Stratton) with a point of view shot from her of him leering down at her with grasping hands saying, "Pretty, pretty." It looks like he's about to rape her and that's likely the intended impression. But, no, of course he simply wants to chop her up, cook her and eat her. The strategy here is to transfer the horror of one crime to another and maybe also for the young viewer, lusting after Peri, to be horrified at what a colossally ugly waste it would be for her to be slaughtered beyond recognition.

Later, Jamie, the Second Doctor's companion, receives a similar threat as Shockeye is busy "tenderising" the meat unconscious on the table. Also in Holmes' arsenal are scenes of Shockeye and Two arm in arm like a couple Mr. Hydes on the town in top hats, eager to sample all kinds of cuisine.

Of course, if this kind of thing really turned people into vegetarians, no-one who's ever seen Cannibal Holocaust would think of touching meat again. Activist vegetarians so often think that meat eaters haven't made the connexion mentally between the food on their plate and the happy little calf bounding about in the field but that's not true. People are quite conscious of compartmentalising and they have no qualms about it, some even relish in it (again, see Cannibal Holocaust. Or rather, don't). Even as a vegetarian myself, I can't help but laugh watching Two and Shockeye grinning at the waiter and the waiter misunderstanding when Shockeye asks, "Do you serve humans?"

The serial also features Jacqueline Pearce as the chief villain, an Androgam like Shockeye, but one who's been genetically altered to stabilise her appetite. Despite his apparent disgust for Androgams, the Second Doctor very amusingly points out how stupid it is to go to the trouble of modifying one species to behave like another.

Six does not benefit from being placed beside Two, of course. It's hard to say exactly what it is but somehow when Two says, "Come along, Peri," it's with infinitely more gentle understanding, even if Two, like all the Doctors, is supposed to be a bit self absorbed. Something about Colin Baker's performance is just so tinny and disconnected in a way that's difficult to describe.

Twitter Sonnet #1143

The cutlery across the kitchen moved.
Accord asserted by the forks awoke.
As nothing filled the spoon could prove.
A story cut is not in full revoked.
Continued stars inflame the worlds below.
A watch the size of pockets ticked apace.
A row of silent daisies think, "Hello."
An army brought an ant for just in case.
A cycle starts again but in a car.
An amber motor's gone without a sound.
Elab'rate hats adorn the taller tsar.
His cap was set too high to see the ground.
The hedges hid an empty plot of grass.
A cloud of wasps became a pretty mass.

Paper Doctor Who

This week I finally got around to watching the 2016 animated version of 1966's Power of the Daleks, the first serial of the Second Doctor's tenure on Doctor Who. The original live action episodes from the serial, with the exception of a few clips and stills, are lost due to the BBC's ill-advised junking policy. Audio of all six episodes survived, though, so this was used to create an animated version. I found the result a mixed bag, mostly I prefer the old releases consisting of stills, clips, and title cards combined with the surviving audio of lost episodes. Your mileage may vary, depending on how comfortable you are with this particular form of animation, but I found the combination had a persistently distracting disharmony.

Mind you, I realise this was probably the best that could be afforded. Traditional hand drawn animation or fully 3d computer animation might have been better but even then I don't think it would have quite added up properly. So much of Patrick Troughton's performance is in his face and body, any animated version will inevitably be the work of other creative impulses and limitations. The old Star Trek animated series from the 70s wasn't quite as jarring, partly because the actors were recording specifically for animation, but animated Kirk and Spock were always of a different species than their live action counterparts. The 2D computer animation for Power of the Daleks also might suffer from my familiarity with its association with parody.

Maybe it's just me, but on shows like Space Ghost Coast to Coast, Sealab 2021, and Harvey Birdman, it seemed like part of the joke. It created a sense of deliberate unreality, post-modern and a bit punk, reliant on the consistent impression that these images are being pushed outside their originally intended parameters. Space Ghost bantering nonsense with Zorak, the petty insecurities that come through in their dialogue and delivery undermining the simplistic hero and villain figures paralleled by computers stretching the drawings past their intended range. It was ridiculous, oddly imposing the external reality on the animation, and therefore funny.

So it feels out of step with the experience we're supposed to be having with Power of the Daleks. I love the idea that the Second Doctor's first moments are both frightening and funny, and Troughton is a big part of that in the surviving clips. The animation sanitises it, removes the sense of anxiety at the strange and uncomfortable.

Sometimes the animation carries its own sense of eeriness, typically divorced from any eeriness intended in the story. I felt sometimes like I was watching demon puppets who'd become trapped in a recording, especially in long pauses where they stand there blinking, shifting their eyes around, as though slightly panicked they're temporarily unconstrained by any dialogue from the audio, frightened by the sudden imposition of freedom.

The Daleks come off a little better, being fully 3D animation. Their familiar peevish monotone dialogue fits well with the animation and the sequence where a horde of new Dalek shells are manufactured is the most effective part of the animated serial. All in all, though, I prefer the audio accompanied by stills and clips.

Mars versus the Moon

No Doctor had greater capacity for panic than the Second Doctor. Sometimes Five came kind of close but Two uniquely gives me that sense of someone about to melt down completely in utter terror. Here he nearly succumbs to the horror of deadly soap suds from the good 1969 serial The Seeds of Death--not to be confused with the Fourth Doctor serial, The Seeds of Doom.

These seeds come courtesy of the Ice Warriors, most of this serial having been written by Brian Hayles, who wrote the first Ice Warrior serial. This is the second and features the lumbering saddle-bagged menace exploiting Earth's dependence on T-Mat and the technology's relay system on the moon. This was the first story to feature Doctor Who's answer to Star Trek's transporter beam, the Transmat or T-Mat, a device still commonly mentioned by name in Doctor Who media to-day.

The Seeds of Death begins with the TARDIS appearing in a private museum to rocket technology owned by Earth's pre-eminent rocket engineer, Professor Eldred (Philip Ray), who's grown bitter about his life's work having been rendered irrelevant by the T-Mat. In fact, he's so bitter that the Doctor (Patrick Troughton) has to pitch in on coaxing Eldred to go back to work when a sudden disruption of the T-Mat creates a need for a rocket.

The first episode spends so much time on Eldred (not to be confused with Eldrad from The Hand of Fear) it's a little odd he's shuffled into an inconspicuous support role for most of the remaining five episodes. More important is the pretty know-it-all named Gia Kelly (Louise Pajo) who seems to hold in her head the sum total of Earth's expertise in Transmat. A scene where she and Zoe (Wendy Padbury) rig up a trap for the Ice Warriors made me contemplate a series starring the two where they go about solving problems and losing patience because no-one can keep up with them.

This serial was also the first appearance of one of the Ice Warrior commanders (Alan Bennion). This one doesn't have the cape seen on the commanders in the two Peladon serials, making his head look a bit oversized and, in comparison to the foot soldier variety, his body exceptionally slender.

I like how often actors are placed in front of this pulsating background, there's a sort of groovy 60s concert quality to it.

I also like that it didn't take much convincing for Earth's authorities to assign Jamie (Frazer Hines) to the rocket team. No-one questions the wisdom of going into space in a kilt. Zoe was sensible enough not to wear a skirt.

Aside from the fourth episode in which Patrick Troughton is conspicuously absent (he was on holiday) it's a solid serial in which the Doctor plays a nice, active role in the end.