Today,
The Underwater Menace comes out on DVD and an era ends for
Doctor Who fandom. With this last release the entire extant
canon of the classic series has been released: every surviving
episode on DVD, every lost episode represented as a narrated
soundtrack and fan-made reconstructions.
The episode of The Underwater Menace recovered in
2011 and released today, barring a miracle, is the last time I will
see a “new” episode of classic Doctor Who and the last
time fandom at large will have reason to reconsider a story.
And it's a Season Four Troughton story, to boot. One
more episode of the painfully under-represented Ben and Polly, who
have only one full story to their names (The War Machines).
One more episode of Troughton, whose performance depends so much on
his physicality, lurking on the edges of scenes and scheming from the
sidelines. It's even one of those rare stories where he gets a human
opponent, not the best one he ever got but seeing him play against
someone rather than something is a distinct pleasure.
It's a story from before The Moonbase, which is
where Troughton's character really settled into its default mode so
it'll be interesting to see how different he is in this one from the
character as more usually defined.
I'm not kidding myself here, The Underwater Menace
is something of a legendary trainwreck and 25 extra minutes of moving
pictures is probably not going to change that but it is an
interesting and extra special way to end my (and a good chunk of
fandom's) journey through classic Who.
No comments:
Post a Comment