Underworld - Episode 4

I tend to have a little tradition when watching these DVDs and that’s watch the special features when I get to the final episode. This helps to try and put any of the stories flaws and positives into context. I have been looking forward to this one as it shows a lot of the blue screen that the actors would have worked against. Watching the documentary its clear just how much blood, sweat and tears went into this story and it makes me appreciate what they do. The set used for the Oracle is the same as the one that we saw in episode one and its used much better for the oracle because it’s much darker and the colours used are also quite good. The effect used to represent the oracle is quite good because I suppose if they had gone for something physical then it would have looked rather ropey.

There was a lot more going on in this story but compared to the previous episodes is not as big a statement as it first seems. The main thing about this episode is getting two small gold canisters which is the quest that the Minyans had been looking for. This seemed like it wouldn’t take very long and wouldn’t create much tension but credit to Bob Baker and Dave Martin did a good job in making something interesting come out of this. There was a nice case of there being two versions of these canisters. One had the genetic bank for the Minyans whereas the others had a bomb in it. There was a bit of fun with the Doctor making his way back to the oracle to hand back the canisters and telling the guards that the ones he had were the bombs but they didn’t believe him. The Minyans get the proper canisters and that’s the end of that.

I don’t think that this story has been anywhere near as bad as I have previously thought and whilst there have been problems from start to finish, at least they tried and they pulled it off. Star Wars Episode IV was released just before this serial started to air and its fair to say that this basically rewrote the rules on sci-fi production values and other areas of the genre. When you compare the movie which had a budget of around $11 million compared to this serial which probably didn’t even have 1% of that spent on it then this story isn’t going to come across good. The story does have links to Greek mythology and Jason and the Argonauts and if only more of that had made it into the story then I would have liked this years ago.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this entry for episode one, this was the last Doctor Who story that I watched in its entirety. It was painful for me to watch as I just couldn’t get past the CSO. However I failed to appreciate the good things that were in this story and as a result over the course of four days I have revaluated this story and think that out of the five serials I have watched for this season, this is probably the third best. Out of Tom Baker stories so far (this being the 21^st), this is the 17^th best story but before I started this marathon I would have placed this at the very bottom. That shows that this isn’t the best but neither is it the worst.  Now I wait for Louise Jameson’s final story and the final story of the season.