'Doctor Who: Pyramids of Mars' (1975)



It's the end of another week which means that I get to round it off by watching some classic Doctor Who. I've got enough to keep me going for the next couple of weeks and then hopefully CEX will be open again and I can grab more. Lets wait and see what happens.
In the meantime though, it's 1975 and I was only a couple of months old when this story was first broadcast (now I feel really old dammit...) It's time for 'Pyramids of Mars'...

The TARDIS materialises on Earth in the year 1911 inside an old priory owned by Egyptologist Marcus Scarman. Scarman has been possessed by Sutekh, last survivor of the god-like Osirans, held prisoner inside a pyramid in Egypt by a signal trasnmitted from one on Mars. Sutekh desires his freedom and instructs Scarman to construct servicer robots that will build a missile with which to destroy the Martian pyramid. Can the Doctor defeat the power of a god...?

Well of course the answer is yes (it's the Doctor...) but the way in which it happens is pretty clever and serves to draw the tension out until the very last minute. I've seen 'Pyramids of Mars' before and even I was sucked into the whole 'how will they win?' thing.

It's a bit of a shame then that the rest of the story doesn't quite hit those heights, not even in a 'building up to the finale' kind of way. There's a lot of running through forests, a lot of ducking below windows and a lot of hiding in the old gamekeeper's cottage; there's not a lot more than that though, just the Doctor explaining to Sarah why things could get really bad if Sutekh escapes from his prison. We know that already, we don't need to be told and investigative journalist Sarah could probably work this out for herself. The pacing felt a little bit off to me then, like we know it's urgent but no-one seems to be acting like it is. There was enough there to keep me watching but I kept finding myself waiting for the story to actually start...

That's not to say it's all bad though. I never knew that servicer robots could be so sinister untl a pair was set on a hapless poacher. It was like watching a nineteen seventies 'cheap BBC' version of 'The Terminator' with these impassive but deadly robots that just wouldn't stop...
It was also interesting to see Bernard Archard's performance, as the possessed Professor Scarman, a week after I'd moaned about Richard Briers doing the same thing in 'Paradise Towers'. Archard shows us all how it should be done with an understated performance that does the job more than admirably. Tom Baker, of course, is brilliant as the Doctor; full of those little moments that he does where a little grin or twinkle in the eye shows us that he isn't really one of us but wants to be.

'Pyramids of Mars' has enough going for it to be a solid watchable 'Doctor Who' story but felt, to me, like it needed an injection of adrenaline to really push it to the next level. Any story featuring Tom Baker's Doctor is always good though, maybe I'll have to factor that in to my next choice...

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

'Conan the Barbarian: Battle of the Black Stone’ – Zub, Scharf, Canola (Titan Comics, Heroic Signatures)

Image
It’s starting to look like this could be the week where I make a half decent dent in my ‘Comics TBR Pile’, lets see how we do... I’ve really been struggling with the ‘Savage Sword of Conan’ collection just recently (more than one reason but I want to finish the collection first before I talk about it) and I thought that I’d have to take a little step back from ‘Conan’ comics and come back when I was in a better mood for it. Until I realized that there was another ‘Conan’ comic lurking in the TBR pile and maybe I could give that a go instead. So that’s what I did. I’ve caught little glimpses of the ‘Black Stone’ storyline, in other ‘Conan’ comics, but I can’t help but feel that the event has kind of passed me by a little. That’s on me though to be fair, I’ve got the attention span of a goldfish right now and there are so many books that I just haven’t been able to focus on; I suspect a couple of them talk about a Black Stone… Oh well, I’m here now. Where better a place to catch up on ‘B...
Read more

‘Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth’ (1992)

Image
Every time Halloween comes round, I promise myself that I’ll watch more horror films and read more horror fiction; we’re halfway through the month and you can see how that’s going so far… There’s still plenty of October left though so lets see how I do from now until the end of the month ;o) First up is ‘Hellraiser 3’ which I watched last night, mostly because I love it (you can tell how this post is going to go, sorry…) but also because it was cheap on Prime and I’m still just on the wrong side of payday. Here goes… TV reporter Joey Summerskill’s life is changed forever when she witnesses the horrific death of a teenager, torn apart by bloody chains. Joey’s search for a story leads her to the Lament Configuration Box but it has already been opened, waking an old evil from its slumber… Now Pinhead walks the earth once more, creating a new army of Cenobites from the transmuted flesh of his victims; his one desire to reclaim the Box. Even with help from an unexpected source, Joey Summers...
Read more

‘Dig Me No Grave’ – Robert E. Howard

Image
  Page Count: Fourteen Pages, eight lines and two words (sorry, it has been one of those weeks) I was looking for something short and sweet, to end the week on, and came across ‘Dig Me No Grave’ courtesy of Paperback Warrior’s write-up . Having read it, I can attest to it being short (all of fourteen and a bit pages in ‘The Dead Remember’ collection) but sweet? Not at all and that is meant in the best possible way :o) ‘Dig Me No Grave’ was originally published in the February 1937 of ‘Weird Tales’ and while it has appeared in other collections since then, I read it in ‘The Dead Remember (The Dark Man Omnibus: Volume 2) and also found it in my copy of ‘The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard. If you’re an e-reading type, you can grab yourself ‘Dig Me No Grave’ over at Project Gutenberg. John Kirowan is woken, in the middle of the night, by his friend John Conrad, bearer of bad news and come to beg a favour. The occultist John Grimlan has just died and Conrad asks that Kirowan att...
Read more