The Highlanders episode 2 discussion:
M: Well, Polly likes to be on top.
Sp: Rhubarrrrrb… arrrr….
<lots of ARRRRRs>
H: So I take it you all enjoy Trask and his men?
<several aborted pirate jokes>
P: So, if you’re going to skip all that, we might as well skip to final thoughts.
Sp: Between the pirate crowd and the chewed Highlander accents at the beginning, and the Doctor pretending to be German (?).
M: So a Scotsman, a Pirate, a British Noble, and a German Doctor walk into a bar…
R: And the bartender says, “What is this, some kind of joke?”
Sp: Well, the accent changes made me a little nauseous. But my goodness that was fun.
R: This was one of the funniest episodes I’ve seen in a long time. The one armed milk-maid comment was just the start at the beginning and it just rolls the whole way through.
H: Which makes a very good contrast from the brutality of last week.
M: Even before the milk maid comment there was “Is that all that women of your age do is cry?”
H: And before that was Algernon Fa-Finch.
M: It was Aw-Awesome.
P: I bet he was Fa-Flattered.
M: This was my favorite Polly so far.
Sp: It was an amazing bad-ass transfer. She became 00-Polly.
H: Something that I was thinking the entire episode, she was very Barbara-esque. She was very competent. We haven’t seen a female companion this competent in some time.
P: Who wrote this story?
<looks up on internets… there is a race to see who finds it first>
E: Elwyn Jones and Gerry Davis.
H: Ah, yes. I remember Gerry Davis was in, but I couldn’t remember the other one. Elwyn probably wrote the scripts, but then Gerry rewrote parts and got a co-credit.
Cz: Actually, according to Wikipedia, the script was commissioned from Elwyn Jones, but was too busy, resulting in Gerry Davis writing all of the screen play.
M: And if you care, everything else Gerry Davis wrote were Cybermen stories.
K: Okay… the episode? The funny?
<digressing continues…>
Sp: Why was it so funny to you, Historian?
H: <laughs> I thought this was a great Troughton episode. He was wonderful and manic and hilarious. I wish we had the full video of the episode so that we could see him do his thing.
Sp: Missed out on his physical comedy.
R: Doctor Twanky.
K: Also there was cockney slang with the “Fiddle” remark.
H: That means it’s a con-game.
Sp: Lots of money changing hands in this episode. Or attempts of changing hands until it was discovered that there was no money to change hands with.
P: It’s an interesting observation of how the power of money literally influences others.
H: An absolutely historically accurate. How do you think common soldiers made money? They certainly didn’t get paid very much.
K: So they took tips?
H: So they took bribes.
K: I thought he had papers to take the prisoners?
H: He did, but there was certainly the idea of money greasing the wheels.
Cz: What kind of job made the most money back then?
P: King.
H: Yeah, that’s probably accurate.
Cz: Besides king?
Sp: Queen?
SG: Merchants.
H: Lawyers.
P: Did I actually see the Doctor using a gun? Oh my!
H: You saw the Doctor pointing a gun. He’s done it before. But he won’t fire.
K: Unless it’s a gun in the old west.
H: True, but that was kind of a mistake.
P: So I liked the progression of the story from the prisoners getting from the frying pan to the fire. I also expected the Doctor to dress as a ghost and he didn’t, and that kinda threw me.
H: But this is so much funnier. And it’s actually an effective disguise.
K: And it goes back to something they said earlier about the prince being disguised as a women, too.
H: Final thoughts?
Cz: What was with the 6-inches of water in the bottom of the prison?
H: They are in this whole in the ground. The water level is 6-inches down by their feet. But the water line is above their heads nearly to the bars in the ceiling. So when the tide comes in they will drown.
Cz: You could swim… grab the bars and hold yourself up and breathe between them.
H: All night? You’d still drown.
P: I thought the sets were great. Each one was very appropriate in my mind.
Sp: Yes, that was very much an 19th century pit.
H: 18th.
P: I thought that each set was unique enough that you could tell where the story had gone without much thought, which you can’t always say with Doctor Who stories. Didn’t they run down that corridor before?
Sp: Office – pit – dungeon – office – pit – office – pit – dungeon – pit – extended office – redressed office.
Cz: Swamp!
H: No swamp. I was actually very impressed with the dungeon set. I thought it was very elaborate with the space they usually have to build sets. It was two levels.
M: It also had water side, boat, and side of the ship.
P: The flow of the camera transitions in the recon was helpful.
H: With like zooming into the photos?
P: Yeah.
Sp: The “Ken Burns effect” was very well done this week.
R: <Scottish accent> Would that not have been more the “Robby Burns” effect?
H: I will end you.
P: <Scottish accent> Screw it, I’m done.
M: Yay Polly! I was very pleased with the change of pace in terms of the writing and style of the episode. I thought they made great use of the separation of the Doctor and the companions. They do that a lot, but they haven’t done it as well as this in a long time of running the parallel story lines.
Sp: Yeah, usually when the Doctor and the companions are separated one of them is in trouble and is incompetent or nerfed, and one is saving the former. But here they were being awesome, and that was nice.
H: It’s kind of reminds me of some of the Hartnell historicals, like the Romans and the Crusades.
E: Everyone pretty much covered what I was thinking. But I have to say that I was extremely amused by the Doctor’s antics here. He does have a really wonderful falsetto.
SG: I liked the episode. Polly was a little scary, but that’s alright. She was just like “whoa, you’re going to slap a bitch” or something. But it was fun, and I wish I could have actually watched the Doctor hitting that guy on the head. It was just random. That was awesome. And I’d never seen so much recorder use as this Doctor has done.
R: Oral fixation…
SG: I liked it, but it would have been nicer if it wasn’t a reconstruction.
Sp: So the accents and the very beginning, where they just being chewed horribly, or was it due the sound of the recon. The not-Polly girl in the pit. I had a hard time understanding her.
H: Welcome to Scotland.
K: Hey!
Sp: So, it was fun, slapstick. All the heroes were equally competent and had stuff to do.
R: The only thing that this episode was missing…
K: Besides moving pictures.
R: Was Terry Gilliam animations.
Sp: The recon did a decent job with that with some of the face photos.
R: Yeah. The toady actually… he really does kind of look like Terry Gilliam.
Sp: Yeah, actually.
R: The whole thing was just a really entertaining farce.
K: I liked it. I want more like this one, but with moving pictures. I don’t really have anything bad to say. NO IDEA how the Doctor is going to rescue them, and that makes it even more cool. I worry they are going to cross the Atlantic twice, kinda like in the Romans.
P: The Doctor has access to his TARDIS, and freedom.
K: But he can’t steer it.
M: The Doctor has access to accents.
Sp: “Okay Ben, I’m going to need an accurate account of their army and an equal amount of closets!” Bonk, thump, foomph. Bonk, thump, foomph. Bonk, thump, foomph.
<Historian has a heart attack!>
Sp: The project is lost, I have broken the Historian.
R: The project is lost, the Historian is regenerating.
H: Oh, I wish. <Hartnell voice> Yesh yesh yesh yesh yesh.
K: Now that you can breathe, take us home, boss.
H: Gosh, well. After the kind of horror and brutality of the first episode – attempted hangings, people getting shot, stabbed, etc. This episode was good to have a light touch. There were a few dark points here as well, but the emphasis was definitely on the comedy, which I think was very canny of Gerry Davis, because there is only so much harshness I think people can take. Which I think was definitely an issue in the previous season. This feels like more of a balanced story.
M: It was very Shakespearean, putting clowns in the middle of the tragedy.
H: But in this case the clown is our hero. But it’s an excellent point. And hopefully the rest of this story will continue to keep this balance and be as entertaining.
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