Perhaps I shouldn't have been so hasty to take time off from rambling on about visuals last time, but I'd forgotten there were a couple of missing episodes coming up. This one is my son's first ever recon, though he's listened to narrated audio before (first Power of the Daleks, because I recommended it to him for a long car journey; then The Celestial Toymaker, which he heard me listening to and was intrigued enough to get me to restart).
Unfortunately it wasn't a very good introduction to recons. Isaac has some (minor) hearing impairment, and the quality of the soundtrack at the start is too bad even for me to make out what's going on - he was completely lost. After a few minutes I suggested we switch to the narrated audio from The Lost TV Episodes Collection that I used to listen to Marco Polo, but he still wanted the pictures. After a bit of fiddling we managed to play the sound from the CD and the images from the recon. It wasn't an ideal situation because they weren't running at quite the same speed, so we kept having to pause the audio to let the video catch up; but at least we could follow the plot. Ironically the sound quality improved after the opening scenes, and there was very little narration needed!
Enough about the experience, though; what of the actual content? Acting and (particularly) direction are always harder to judge in a recon. There's no obvious bad stuff happening; that's about all I can say. The only new sets are Robespierre's office and the Doctor's surgery, both of which are uninspiring but do the job. The music continues to be used well.
That leaves the story, and here's another bloomin' great coincidence when Ian gets taken to the house where Susan and Barbara are staying, though this does allow for some subtle recaps. Meanwhile, it seems that Barbara actually fancies Léon! Don't go there, Barbara - he's a creep, and I bet he's the traitor too. Not that I make instant judgements of people or anything.
Susan gets to do nothing other than be sick again, but at least when she puts herself and Barbara in peril because of it she doesn't have any choice in the matter. Still, I would have liked to see what happened with the leeches.
Once again Hartnell gets the best scenes. Keith Anderson's Robespierre was not what I expected, which was an evil, ranting madman. Instead, while undoubtedly paranoid, he had enough of a thread of rationality to be an interesting, complex character. And the verbal dueling between the Doctor and the man known as "the Incorruptible" is spot on, with the former managing to keep the discussion away from areas he knew too little about, while the latter more than holds up his end.
Lemaitre, meanwhile, continues to interest me. I wonder whose side he is on? Or perhaps, how many sides? His tricking the Doctor means that, in effect, everyone has now been captured. Boo!
One final note: the day before the recording of this episode David Whitaker announced that he would be resigning as script editor at the end of the production block, going at the same time as Carole Ann Ford. More than that: he was leaving the BBC to concentrate on his freelance writing. His replacement? The writer of this story, Dennis Spooner.
Broadcast:
Date: Saturday, 29th August 1964
Viewers: 6.4 million
Chart Position: 36
Appreciation Index: 53
Rating:
5/10.
Next Time:
A Bargain of Necessity.
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