From drwho-l-owner-shill=harper.cc.il.us@lists.pipex.com Sun Oct 26 21:20:13 1997 Received: from firewall.harper.cc.il.us by info1.harper.cc.il.us (AIX 3.2/UCB 5.64/4.03) id AA20154; Sun, 26 Oct 1997 21:20:11 -0600 Received: from solpipe.pipex.net by harper.cc.il.us (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA08490; Sun, 26 Oct 97 21:20:18 CST Errors-To: admin-drwho-l@lists.pipex.com Received: (qmail 13567 invoked by uid 5378); 27 Oct 1997 03:17:48 -0000 Date: 27 Oct 1997 03:17:48 -0000 Message-Id: <199710270310.TAA03182@mailtod-1.alma.webtv.net> Errors-To: admin-drwho-l@lists.pipex.com Reply-To: drwho-l@lists.pipex.com Originator: drwho-l@lists.pipex.com Sender: drwho-l@lists.pipex.com Precedence: bulk From: chrisk@webtv.net (Chris Krisocki) To: Multiple recipients of list Subject: GV: Four to Doomsday X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas X-Comment: The Dr Who Mailing List Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Mime-Version: 1.0 (WebTV) Status: RO Perhaps the first example of style over substance in his era, which would plague the JN-T years later on, Four to Doomsday is wonderful to look at, but a great deal of the scripting and dialogue is just awful. When the first lines are, "We're there Nyssa. Get the Doctor will you?" you know it's going to be a banal story. Apart from the acting, the history is off in a few instances: the Maya civilization didn't around 6,000 years ago, the number should be about half that. Also, the wearing of beards was not fashionable throughout most of the Roman Empire, yet one of the gladiators has one - unless he's supposed to be representative of a non-civilized culture, though in that case why is his clothing the same as all the other Romans? They can't be Greeks since the Greeks usually held athletic competitions in the nude. The concept of the story is rather fascinating, even with all the plot holes. The concept of giving a person a completely robotic body but with all the emotions and memories intact came as a shock to me when I first saw this. One thing that puzzles me is why they'd need to have those discs on their hands if they only have one of their chips intact. Surely just removing the two other ones would be enough without having to add something extra? Anyway, Adric's acting is appalling; this is probably his worst story and he has some terrible dialogue which Matthew Waterhouse didn't have to skill to pull off convincingly. The sets are amazing, though there's a bit of string in one of the doorways for some reason. John Black does a marvellous job directing, and he shows off the highly detailed sets to their best advantage. Roger Limb had yet to hit his boring period, so the music is good too. Style over substance. I've got a few jokes which I'll mail to shill one of these days; I'll include one here: when Adric is struggling with Enlightenment, doesn't it look like he's trying to rape her? Closest Adric ever got to snogging someone :)