After revising "The Happiness Patrol" (Do you suppose the Secret Service is going to dress in pink after that?), we found ourselves in a sufficiently silly mood that we could actually accomplish the task we'd never managed to do before...
(Yeah, I know blinking text was started as a joke, still is, and can be very annoying. This is one of the few times in my life I will ever put it in a web page I have published. --Joe)
So without further a dieu, since you've all been waiting so patiently for this with baited breath (no, this has nothing to do with Joe's moniker on the web... to find out about that, you need to ask certain wenches), we'll get right to it... no more editorial comments... whodathunkit...
Dunderhead and Doris buy a nice little tree for their home... but rather than fading away, this old soldier comes back to save his home once again... not without a little help from you know Who, though. So after searching through some archaelogical digs (and we don't mean to find Excalibur here) Dunderhead comes up with an old uniform. You know Who arrives to find a different Brigadier (who's vexed by her name of Winifred) who has to dispose of a nuke while Morgaine comes in from yet another direction (Just how do you get perpendicular to three dimensions, anyway? Trivial: assume n dimensions and let n=4) in attempt to steal Arthur's paper knife. You know Who is mistaken for a famous magician (no, not Harry, uh, Hopkins, no, uh Hackenschmidt, no, uh... oh yes... Houdini). Meanwhile, at another archaeological dig, Ace violates even her own safety standards (Ace has safety standards??) then does a wonderful imitation of a rather wet lady. (We're not touching that comment with a seven foot sword.) Dunderhead finally arrives and recognizes you know Who, despite having regenerated twice since the last time they saw each other during a continuity error. As Zbegniev told Bambera, all hell has long since broken loose. Ace and Sun-Yi trap themselves in a chalk circle with said paper knife, preventing Morgaine from getting her fingers on it. (Maybe she needed a good nail clipper.) Luckily, Dunderhead finally gets to shoot something that isn't immune to bullets, saving the Earth. When questioned if Earth couldn't do any better for a champion, he quite honestly replied, "Probably. I just do the best I can." They stop Morgaine, lock her in a chalk cell (we think... hope... pray), and the women get to go off in Bessie and have an Estrogen fest.
As you can see, we liked this one. Ben Aaronovich still does fine work. We're glad he came back. It's certainly the best story since "Revelation of the Daleks" and quite probably since "Caves of Androzani."
You know Who and the gal with no safety standards arrive at an old house in Perivale (This has nothing to do with something to cover "Legs."). They meet the neanderthal butler and people whose table manners are similarly evolved. Eventually they discover the overgrown light bulb in the basement (instead of neon noodle) who wants to stop evolution in order to catalog all life on Earth. Luckily you know Who finds the self-destruct switch (Why do aliens always have a findable self-destruct mechanism?) and forces the overgrown lightbulb to devolve into many millions of particles.
Could someone please go back to the cutting room floor, find the missing episode, and splice it back in? The story is very good. It's like "Warrior's Gate" in that you have to watch it several times to get it (or read the novelization). We like it nonetheless. We just wish it had that missing episode. (Put the rumor mill away. It only seems like it. There really isn't an episode missing from it. We include this disclaimer for the comically-challenged.)
You know Who and Miss Safety-standards-ain't-me venture back to WWII... the big one... well, OK... the big deuce (and we're ABSOLUTELY NOT referring to NHL2Nite). A couple of women undrown themselves in order to drive Earth onto the slow road to the galactic slag heap... heaven to Fenric. Luckily Fenric has to play a game of chess before doing something intelligent like defeating you know Who. Fortunately, the monster prevents Fenric from making the move which would open the lock. You know Who breaks Miss No-safety's faith in him (you might say he blew her safety valve) so that the monster could kill Fenric with the poison.
As you can tell, there's not a whole lot of plot with this story. There's a whole lot of subplots, but we just couldn't bring ourselves to trying to review them because we have limited space here on this server. We now know what happened with the missing episode. It mutated. It became part of this story... at least on video. And you thought YOU wasted your $19.95...
You know who makes one last return. Only this time, he's not quite himself, and he intends to cause a CATastrophe on that planet for Miss No-safety's friends. Of course, he plans a cataclysm for you know Who ("Typical. Abosolutely typical."). Luckily, none of them are catatonic, so you know Who is able to get them off the planet before their emotions catalyze it. And so the series ends with everyone feline good.
It's a shame this was the last episode of the series as done by the BBC. It was good, so at least the series ended on a high note. The true shame is that they cut it off in the middle of a renaissance, as science fiction was becoming really big and good sfx became really cheap.
What a season. Two good seasons back-to-back for JN-T. The worst stories in seasons 25 and 26 were mediocre at worst, unlike some other seasons where quality was all over the place. It becomes quite obvious that part of the problem during the JN-T era was not necessarily JN-T himself, but a certain script editor who shall remain nameless (though his initials are Eric Saward). Andrew Cartmel brought a lot of fresh blood to the series, and it's a damn shame that the Beeb was so short-sighted.
And you thought you'd get out of it without any trivia questions from us... HA! HA! HA!
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