DOCTOR WHO-SCREAM OF SHALKA

 

DOCTOR WHO-SCREAM OF SHALKA

 

It’s mind boggling how bad SCREAM really is. I mean under there somewhere is a good Pertwee story waiting to get out and be a novel or something (SCREAM was novelized; and there was a fan fic FEAST OF STONE and the second planned story was BLOOD OF THE ROBOTS).

 

Obverse books BLACK ARCHIVE on this horrid story featured an in depth look at the unmade sequel story Blood of the Robots. This book also revealed that the Big Finish audio drama Immortal Beloved was originally intended as a Shalka sequel before being adapted to feature the Eighth Doctor.

 

The first 18 minutes are not that bad other than the unneeded death of an old woman. The Doctor is properly eccentric, almost too eccentric, and later apologizes for being rude to the military men. He makes note that he is a lot of contradictions: he had friends in the military but opposes military and guns; he has killed billions. There some reason he does not want to take on another companion as his companion robot THE MASTER (yes that shit is right, his companion robot is now the Master in one of the stupidest movies ever and BTW what is it with animated WHO and its obsession with robot companions, DEATH COMES TO TIME, another crappy animated POS has one, too) tells Alison. Sophie is good as Alison but she’s always good (especially in STORMBREAKER, they should have approached her reprise the role in the horrid ALEX RIDER TV show, which, well…). Here she’s sedate. In any case, we never learn what the Master is talking about and why the Doctor says he won’t lose another one and that he gave up so Alison would not be killed and did this before (I kept thinking he meant Tegan in EARTHSHOCK which resulted in Adric’s death but who knows). In any case, it seems they were trying to give this whacko Doctor (even by the Doctor’s standards) a sense of mystery. He’s properly (well, not properly) forcibly “different” and silly.

 

You can see RTD maybe getting something out of this: black companion (but cliché anyway), her boyfriend who is a Medical doctor, military men who seem like UNIT, and more. There’s also STARGATE well, wormhole gates, and WALKING DEAD style assaults, and the ozone layer breaking down. Why was that? Why was weather a problem? We also see things (baby Shakla) emerging from heads (including Alison) and that reminded me of the worst Chris E episode where poor Adam got a mechanical device in his head and got the dopey Doc mad at him (that’s another story and Adam in the original was doing it to save his father which would have made the dumb Doc even meaner). The things come from the ground like in TREMORS. And a black hole almost sucks in the Doctor and his companion, which uses a nodule to shut it? Or something? Ala the superior DOOMSDAY in our better DW future.

 

There’s dialog that IS good, even great but far more really dopey lines and conversations. The first half is marred by having short segments and what seems like cliffhangers every 3 to 5 minutes that black out and fade back in. WTF was that about?

 

On line this was tedious. On DVD, not as much but make no mistake, after the first shaky 18 minutes, things go downhill. The Doc seems to have solved the problem so just wants to leave but finds his TARDIS missing. He just wants to get it back and leave even though he hasn’t solved the problem at all: the monsters are still invading and even worse. There’s stuff about lava, old women dying, the invasion spreading to the rest of the world, and the sun crashing into windows? What?

 

I could care less about any of this. NONE of this has the special spark that RTD’s DOCTOR WHO will have in future and lost when Moffat took over in 2010. DW meant something from ROSE to MIDNIGHT and having a WAR OF THE WORLDS style story like this is NOT the way to bring back DOCTOR WHO. It was impersonal and frankly boring.    

 

It’s also grim. I won’t even point out that the animation is crude and unsophisticated because if the story were any good I wouldn’t mind that at all. But the story sucks and seems not to know what to do with itself but use tired clichés from 1950s sci fi movies which are ALL more interesting than this.

 

This Doctor isn’t even that interesting. Frankly the way Richard E Grant plays him and sounds, I kept thinking of him as the 8^th Doctor, his co star Paul McGann in WITHNAIL AND I. He’s rather unremarkable to be honest. Yet he is the 9^th and talks about Lon Chaney, Andy Warhol (who is said to have wanted to paint all nine of the Doctor), and that he comes to Earth for the wine and the total eclipses. He yells Yee Haw or something when he jumps into the giant monster thing which is actually housing the aliens (?) and the monster sounds like the monsters from Irwin Allen’s VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA (THE MENFISH mostly) and LOST IN SPACE (the giant cyclops). As well as STAR WARS fighter ships (which stole the sound from Irwin Allen’s shows).  

 

The Doc also uses vocalizations to control the control of the Shakla or something. Honestly, I wasn’t really fully paying attention as this was so boring.

 

Gosh, I waste enough time on this POS. The REAL Ninth Doctor awaits. So… ROSE, I’m coming to get you.