95. The Feast of Steven

 in Doctor Who / Doctor Who / Reviews / Television  tagged Doctor Who / Jean Marsh / Peter Purves / Sara Kingdom / Steven / The Daleks' Master Plan / William Hartnell by

TheDaleksMasterPlan00006Doctor Who, season 3 continues …

This one is another CGI one recreated thanks to the clever people at Who Recons.  It’s a bit of a surreal episode and all that you’ve heard about it is correct.

It’s detached from The Daleks’ Master Plan, but that’s not really an issue because some of the other episodes haven’t exactly been tightly interwoven.

It plays in two parts, both on Earth.  The first half is with the TARDIS being taken for a real police box when it materialises outside a police station and the Doctor needs to fix the scanner (and more, apparently, given the way it detected a poisonous atmosphere).

TheDaleksMasterPlan00007The Doctor is taken into custody for loitering around a police box.  Steven puts on a policeman’s uniform to try and extricate him, while Sara Kingdom fixes the scanner eye.

Being set in a familiar environment means that the CGI isn’t half as off-putting as usual, although it does let itself down a lot when Sara is supposedly captured for clambering over the TARDIS (we don’t see her doing any such thing).

The second half of the story is less successful as the TARDIS lands in a film studio that’s busy filming several movies in rooms next to each other.  A bit of a runabout ensues as the TARDIS crew ruin the filming.  For this one, the CGI isn’t really up to the task.  There’s a lot of audio shouting going on, and precious little on the CGI to give us half a clue of what it’s all about.

TheDaleksMasterPlan00008It ends in a runabout farce, which the CGI interprets as a Benny Hill-style chase, until the trio end up back in the TARDIS and they dematerialise again.

The final scene is the one we all know about wherein the Doctor, Steven, and Sara raise a glass to Christmas (it was Christmas in the police segment of the story), and then the Doctor turns to the camera to say his words to the audience.

This would probably be an excellent episode to have as live-action.  The CGI is reasonably acceptable, and it’s not tied into the main story, so if you’re going to give a CGI episode a chance, this would probably be a good one to pick.

Next time … Volcano