Hm. Well, the cliffhanger to the previous episode of The Masters of Luxor
resolved as I expected, and unfortunately that put me in a less than
charitable mood. There's only been one decent cliffhanger in the whole
story so far, and that was the one with no immediate peril. I know the
early stories were very slow-paced, but this is getting a bit
ridiculous! The only thing that happens that advances the plot in this
episode is that we move Ian from one room (the one where the Doctor
spends the entire episode doing virtually nothing) to another (the
torture chamber). Meanwhile Susan and Barbara move back there from the
room where they were locked last time.
Actually, other than a lot of discussion and finding Tabon, we are
pretty much where we were two episodes ago - which can be fine, but
there hasn't even been a proper escape-recapture cycle! Ian isn't
recaptured - he basically gives himself up - while Susan and Barbara
never escaped. If this were a modern episode you could cut straight from
the Perfect One saying that one of the travellers had to give up their
life, two cliffhangers ago, to the scene at the end here with Ian being
tortured.
I'm underselling this story a little, I know, but then I did say I was
not in a charitable mood. Ian's "man of action" sequences spice it up a
bit - I liked the scene where he tricks a robot into falling down the
stairs, and his confrontation with the Perfect One simmers with
suppressed anger as he tries to outwit his enemy. But that's about it
for sparkle. I'm not the world's biggest fan of The Daleks - it's
a bit of a mess in places, both in terms of script and of direction -
but I'm really glad it was the serial B that was actually produced,
rather than this.
One thing that makes me a little sad is how much older Carole Ann Ford
and (particularly) William Russell sound here than they did in Farewell, Great Macedon,
even though there's less than two years between the releases. In some
scenes, Russell seems to have more difficulty with his Ian voice than
the Doctor's - which makes sense, given that he was born in 1924.
Perhaps they were less inspired by the material but I was reminded that
they are not going to be producing new audios forever, no matter how
much they might want to. Still, even if they stopped tomorrow, I would
be grateful for the extra adventures we've had with them in the last
five years.
I haven't said anything yet about the third voice in these audios, so
let's talk a little about Joe Kloska. I didn't recognise his name and he
doesn't have a Wikipedia page so I looked him up on IMDB: he's not done
a lot of TV or films, and I haven't seen anything he's been in.
Presumably he's mostly done radio and/or theatre. When I first heard his
derivitron voice I wasn't entirely sure about it - it wasn't what I
expected - but I quickly adjusted. As pointed out in the disk 2 extras,
having the same person play all the guest parts actually works well here
because the robots are all based on Tabon, and Kloska provides enough
variety (aided by a little voice processing) to give us a sense of who
is who while maintaining the family connection.
Rocky Roads (The Robots), part 3: The Lost Script
For more than a quarter of a century, little was known generally about
the story. That changed when Titan Books decided to start releasing
script books of old serials, and contacted Anthony Coburn's widow about
the script for The Tribe of Gum. She found the Masters of Luxor script and it was released in book form in August 1992.
Rating:
3/10.
Next Time:
The Flower Blooms.
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