I have returned! I have a functioning laptop and everything. Things are looking up.
The past few weeks have been really exciting. I spent a lot of my free time (and non-free time) rewatching Doctor Who so that I could host a round about Jamie McCrimmon for Quiz of Rassilon. If you are a Who fan who doesn’t know about Quiz of Rassilon then a) you are about to become extremely happy and b) I’ve written about it! Hosting a round was genuinely great and I enjoyed seeing the scroll of comments cursing my name as I barraged people with incredibly difficult questions about my favorite piper.
Having seen “The Mind Robber” too many times to count I think I’m ready to finally admit that “The War Games” is my favorite Troughton serial now. It’s so incredible – stylistically, narratively, emotinally. It touches on a lot of things but doesn’t go deeply into them, leaving a lot of room for personal analysis and for writers to play around I think. It also serves as the greatest hits of Troughton’s Doctor as is it was his last serial. While they didn’t make a big deal out of it the way finales are treated now, we got the Doctor blustering into a stranger’s office and pulling rank, trying out some accents, getting into some comedy hijinks with Jamie, and doing an awful lot of running. Plus, he’s pitted against a character who is clearly the Master. It’s one of those strange instances where the 10 episode monstrosity is anything but bloated and could probably function reasonably well as an entire show unto itself. Incredibly rich stuff to lead us out of the 60s. I’m considering following up and continuing with the Third Doctor (I find it quite difficult sometimes to get through Third and Fourth Doctor stuff, I will not be taking arguments) but I’ve crammed so much Doctor Who into such a short amount of time that I’m ready for a bit of a break.
McCallum Mania
Once I was able to focus on literally anything else again, I found myself scrolling through David McCallum’s imdb and checking off a bunch of his guest appearances. I had already seen the “Sixth Finger” episode of Outer Limits (because it’s wildly famous, apparently) but had no idea that he had also starred in “The Forms of Things Unknown,” which was kind of written as a pilot of what would have been a different show called The Unknown.
A lot of the direction and images are absolutely gorgeous and the actors give their all trying to make their characters as recognizable yet creepy as possible, but unfortunately this episode has so much pretention and obscurity heaped onto it it’s impossible to really engage or even feel anything. It’s using a lot of the trappings of New Wave and making as many “interesting” choices as it can but it’s never for the service of the story or characters so it just doesn’t make any sense. McCallum has some terrific moments as a scientist who believes he’s found a way to slip time back and wake the dead (after having woken himself up first) and there are moments where he leers on the screen that are wildly magnetic. Kind of a shame that nothing quite works the way it should.
He was also in an episode of Night Gallery, a story which literally took me five hours to remember I watched. He plays a psychiatrist at a mental institution and once a patient’s outbursts and blatant lies about a farmhouse and a woman named Marian start getting to him, he decides to check out the ruins of the farmhouse himself. Except the farmhouse is there, and he falls in love with Marian, and refuses to believe that she is a werewolf despite the mulitple mutilated sheep and people piling up around him, plus the fact that she tells him she’s a monster and begs her to leave. At one point I thought the twist might turn out to be that David was a patient falling under another patient’s delusions, which has certainly been done before but would at least have made some sort of sense. Nope. It’s a bunch of choppy editing, tonal shifts, stylistic choices and weirdly untouched sexism and racism that makes this a thoroughly mediocre outing. Marian’s wig and original white Victorian dress are fascinatingly bad, the leads have no chemistry, and just about the only thing I enjoyed was seeing McCallum’s flowing ’70s locks, him dressed in a turtleneck sweater and the treehouse set. That turtleneck sweater got me through a lot.
Finally, I watched my first episode of Perry Mason (the older version, obviously. I’ve seen exactly one episode of the 2020 remake). In “Fifty-Millionth Frenchman” McCallum was a Frenchman who got caught up in a wife’s scheme to kill her husband after they had both decided to kill her husband’s boss. There was a lot of plot but none of it really mattered. McCallum was kind of sweet as a bookish nerd whose only goal in life was to own the bookshop he worked at, but as far as cases or tolerable accents go, this episode wasn’t one of them.
I do now have the issue of not quite knowing what to watch next after a torrent of steady Doctor Who for a purpose. I’ve bought myself a copy of the 1958 BBC “Our Mutual Friend” miniseries, but who knows when it will arrive. Next up might just have to be Freud: The Secret Passion or Sol Madrid if I can ever find a watchable copy of it.