The Macra Terror episode 1 discussion:
Special Guest this week: D = Doomed (Cz’s boyfriend)
P: Oh my gosh, new credits. And they’re fast too!
H: And Pat’s face. We get a face in the credits.
Cz: Why does the soundtrack rape? I felt harassed.
P: What aspect of the soundtrack made you feel harassed?
Cz: The people singing about being really happy. And they had his head in a trap thing… I don’t know, there was just really intense music for no reason.
R: Yeah, we do seem to be getting stalked by the soundtrack again.
H: I think a lot of that was done for very specific reasons in the story.
K: But the sound effects just never ended.
H: You mean the sound outside on the planet.
K: Part of it. But also in the hallways.
P: Rock and tumble machine.
E: Made an obnoxious amount of noise.
K: Etc. All of that and more. Just more distracting that creating a mood or anything. At least since it’s a recon and the soundtrack is most of what we have to work with, so it’s very apparent when it’s extreme…
Cz: Bad?
R: Intrusive.
P: I think one of the more aggravating portions of that was the music was often louder than the words.
H: Something that ticks me off in modern Doctor Who as well.
R: There was at least one moment of definite “attack of the soundtrack” though. Medok is hiding in the construction site… DRAMATICALLY! Dun dun dun! Nothing is going on. He’s waiting. He’s watching. The music, on the other hand…
P: Is giving it all away.
H: It makes me wonder if there wasn’t some kind of quick cut, or jump cut to him. With the Doctor looking around and suddenly it jumps to Medok.
R: It’s still didn’t seem appropriate. Nice bit of creepy 1984 with the Controller on the screens though.
Cz: Is this the first Utopia / Distopia thing?
H: No, “The Savages”.
P: “The Ark” was definitely a Utopia.
K: It’s science fiction. Distopias happen.
H: I wouldn’t necessarily call this a Utopia. I would call this a place where people are always happy. Not quite the same thing. The idea is like a holiday camp in space. Thus the happiness. Keeping time with music and all that.
E: I found that really creepy.
A: I made me think of the Village.
P: From the Prisoner.
H: Which was filmed at Portmerion, which is a holiday camp.
P: Reader(s), if you don’t know The Prisoner, you should watch it!
H: Not the remake!
<general laughter>
P: So, this feels like brain control to me. The whole festival, “nothing succeeds like success.” Quotes like that were often appearing in this episode, and they’re very indicative of a controlled society, in my opinion. I think your 1987 observation was very enlightening.
Everyone: ’84.
A: I kept thinking “The Happiness Patrol,” although the original viewer would not have seen that.
P: What’s up with the blind guards who pass everyone by?
R: Have you seen any Doctor Who?
P: No, I’m a guard.
H: I will bet only their shooting could be so precise.
P: Hey, they hit every target they see.
<giggles>
H: My thought was “how can I see with this blast shield down?” It’s night and they’re wearing sunglasses. “Hit it!”
P: I wonder what they saw on the Time Scanner that made them so worried that they came out of the TARDIS with a club.
H: A giant lobster claw.
P: Then they should have come out of the TARDIS with a giant nutcracker.
E: If it looked like a lobster claw, how come the monster was described looking like an insect.
H: I can explain that. The original idea that the writer was given and discussed with the script editor was for spider creatures, because they’d never been done on Doctor Who before. And then it changed to insects, but Jerry Davis said that sounds a little too much like the Zarbi. So it changed again to these crab-like creatures, but that line somehow managed to slip through every single draft until it was filmed.
P: Or he’s never seen a lobster.
H: They are a little insect like.
E: Yeah, I grew up around lobsters and crayfish.
A: Scorpions have pincers too.
P: How about that Refreshing Department?
A: I wish we had a video of that. It sounded like they were having a lot of fun.
P: And I wonder what a sunlight and a moonlight treatment is?
K: They showed Ben in what looked like under tanning lights, or something.
H: Jamie as well.
Cz: Covered in females.
P: “Call the ladies off, I’m worried what they will do to me.” If he’d been wearing a kilt…
H: I don’t wish to know that.
A: I do.
<general laughter. Some nervous.>
P: I thought that the rock tumbler as the opposite of the clothes press was a fun comedic moment. And the line “you look smashing. You look like a prince.” was a great line.
H: Another fun fact about that sequence in the episode. So, in the earlier part of the episode you will notice that Polly’s hair is longer, and she got it cut to a nice short cut during the refreshing scene.
Cz: She probably got gum stuck in her hair.
H: Anneke Wills <Polly, aka Eye Candy> showed up for the rehearsal and read through with a new short hair cut. So they put her in hair extensions for the first part of the episode, and they added the scene for her to get a haircut. Which is why it’s in a bun during the opening scenes.
R: British people seem to derange easily.
K: Or at least Doctor Who extras.
H: It’s say you should wait and see what happens to Medok.
R: So, what’s going to happen to him has driven him insane?
H: No, just learning more about the story will give you a better idea why he is the way he is.
P: Still, he has lines like “have fun before they crawl all over you.” He’s pretty angry.
K: Well, yeah. He gets thrown into the loony bin prison for seeing something he wasn’t supposed to.
R: And this is the year he was going to make the Majorette championships.
K: That opening band bit was… I don’t have words.
H: Again, Holiday Camp. So, how about Medok being confronted by his happy ex-friend. That was a pretty cool scene.
K: Ola, the police chief, was very wide eyed in his shots. Not the best stills for him.
P: Again for me the major theme in this story was Dystopia. They went off about “it’s time to go to bed” but they described it as curfew.
H: Have we hit the final thoughts stage?
K: Yes.
Cz: I really hope next week the soundtrack doesn’t harass me.
K: Don’t count on it. They’re usually consistent about those sorts of things within a story. Usually.
A: I liked the story. I look forward to seeing where it goes, because I do enjoy these cheery yet with sinister undercurrents types of stories.
P: I heard some flute playing when he returned from the “dangerous at night” place.
H: Yes, that’s how they knew he was coming.
P: Also I liked his quip when the Controller said “Happy sleep time” and he says “Same to you!”
A: There was an interesting line when he came back in from being out at night, and the guy said that he could be killed if he wandered around at night. And it wasn’t clear if he could be killed by the guards or something else.
P: Also I didn’t get a very good explanation about the oxygen supply story. The dangerous gas and how this is somehow normal.
K: They were mining for natural gas.
H: They were sending men into the gas mines…
P: As punishment, by the way.
H: …and that was the control center. So presumably if there was an accident in the mines they could pump extra oxygen in if there was a gas leak. Did anyone else find it interesting that the Doctor and his friends never got an actual explanation of what they use the gas for and why they were mining it?
P: Yes. It made me wonder if this is what is really going on. The aliens are making the humans work for them to get this gas.
H: Well, I guess we’ll see.
E: The beginning of this episode – I found it creepy to begin with. All the singing and everything was so happy. It was pretty much my first warning that something was horribly, horribly wrong with it. Maybe I’m just genre savvy. I never trust that kind of happiness in Doctor Who.
H: We are so much more cynical than audiences in 1967.
P: This episode made me think of Logan’s Run. Especially when you consider the rejuvenation sequence and the overall happiness. Also, why is there a pilot? What’s flying?
E: That’s a good question. I want an answer to it.
K: Old script revision again, or was that really a plot point? Hum…
R: I’ve got nothin’. It was cute episode, I’ll be interested to see where it was going. But not much happened other than being attacked by the soundtrack for me.
K: I haven’t seen this one before, although I think I’ve read about the plot. But I knew that the episode would end at the first site of the monster, ala The Daleks. It was so obvious. Doctor Who gets predictable… so I guess we really are more in the “as we know it” types of Doctor Who tropes. And I want to see more lobsters. Om nom nom.
H: Well, I have seen a different reconstruction of this story. And I like it a lot, but my initial reaction to the first episode was not great. Although I enjoyed the rest of the story a lot. I think it holds up a lot better the second time around for me for sure. And I think seeing the seeds of the rest of the story was really cool. And seeing you guys pick up on some of that was really cool. I can tell you that I think this story just keeps getting better.
K: Are there any stories left in The Project that you haven’t seen yet?
H: Yes.
K: Good.
H: Won’t tell you which one though.
K: Which ONE? There’s only one? So you’ll be all “no, don’t want to give away spoilers” for most of the rest of the project? Aww…
H: Admittedly, it’s been 5 or 6 years, so I’m not going to remember the details. I went on a recon binge around then.
K: Still, recently enough. 🙁
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