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Underworld
chuffnobbler
Posts: 10,772 Forum Member
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Just seen this for the first time in several years.
Quite shockingly bad, for so many different reasons. I really don't know where to beginlisting the reasons for Underworld's awfulness.
Mrs Chuff and I were dumbstruck. We could not believe that such a piece of work had been commissioned, let along actually made. It's not just the shonky CSO, which of course is part of the story's legend ... I can't imagine the script editor paid much serious attention to the written word. Some characters get absolutely no dialogue for whole episodes. The majority of characters are only named in the credits. The costume designer's weird fetish uniforms for the guards are very unsettling.
Underworld is my new "worst Doctor Who story", beating Colony In Space and The Runaway Bride. Quite astoundingly, awesomely horrible for many, many reasons.
Quite shockingly bad, for so many different reasons. I really don't know where to beginlisting the reasons for Underworld's awfulness.
Mrs Chuff and I were dumbstruck. We could not believe that such a piece of work had been commissioned, let along actually made. It's not just the shonky CSO, which of course is part of the story's legend ... I can't imagine the script editor paid much serious attention to the written word. Some characters get absolutely no dialogue for whole episodes. The majority of characters are only named in the credits. The costume designer's weird fetish uniforms for the guards are very unsettling.
Underworld is my new "worst Doctor Who story", beating Colony In Space and The Runaway Bride. Quite astoundingly, awesomely horrible for many, many reasons.
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Having said that, I don't believe the CSO is as bad as has been made out over the years - there are plenty of worse examples in other stories - and, while it's hardly stunning to look at, overall it's nowhere near as cheap-looking as The Invasion of Time which followed it (now, there's a dreadful story in pretty much every aspect). God, it's dull, though ...
(I don't mind the guards' uniforms, actually... Maybe that says something about me! :eek: )
Poor old Season 15. It must be one of the most maligned Doctor Who seasons ever.
And yet the season began so well, with Horror of Fang Rock. In many ways, I think Fang Rock and Image of the Fendahl would have been more at home in Seasons 13 and 14.
I'm going to second Analysethis on this one. I HATED Donna in this one, and I was not happy when I found out she was coming back, specifically because of this episode.* I wasn't particuarly thrilled with much of the episode. VoTD wasn't much better, but honestly, I'd rather be watching VOTD than RB any day.
*Disclaimer - whilst by the end of season 4 I grew to like Donna, it didn't stop her irritating me in later watches of this episode.
As a season, it's not a total disaster. As DavetheScot says, both Horror of Fang Rock and Image of the Fendahl stand out and would have fitted into either of the previous two seasons. And The Sunmakers is, if not a great story, certainly an enjoyable one. I think, though, the high quality of those previous two seasons (probably the two most highly regarded in the programme's history - and rightly so, in my opinion!) contrasts so sharply and so quickly with the drop in quality evident in Season 15's other stories that this season tends to be viewed more harshly than it maybe deserves.
As The Invisible Enemy requires and relies on quite ambitious sets, the production doesn't really succeed and, true, the Nucleus is just plain awful but the story itself isn't at all bad. Like I said, Underworld's main problem is the fact that it's just boring. I absolutely loathe The Invasion of Time but IMO that's just one completely crap story out of six. Compare that with, for example, the Creature/Nightmare/Nimon triple whammy of pantomime crapness that finished off Season 17.
(Or absolutely anything from the Sylvester McCoy years
Season 15 is wildly inconsistent to say the least. Horror Of Fang Rock, Fendhal & Sunmakers are all great but Underworld, Invisible Enemy & Invasion Of Time are terrible.
It's no surprise that Underworld and IE are both written by Baker and Martin - the classic series worst regular writers IMO.
Yes, they are the last gasp of the gothic horror era. Apparently even they managed to get Graham Williams a slap on the wrist from the overly sensitive BBC managers attempting to appease Mary Whitehouse, although I believe Whitehouse didn't lodge any more complaints after The Deadly Assassin.
One of the biggest problems with Season 15 is the obvious budget cuts that were imposed on the series at that point. That does tend to affect people's judgements a bit.
Actually, I have to say I'd prefer the likes of Horns of Nimon, which was at least bad in a way that was entertaining to watch, over the tedium of Underworld any day. The performance of the villain in Nimon was such a great slice of ham that I still don't know how the hell they let him away with it!
I'd actually say the same for Series 12, which ranged from the terrific Ark In Space and Genesis of the Daleks, to the unusual and weirdly interesting Sontaran Experiment, to the plodding mediocrity of Robot and the abysmal awfulness of Revenge of the Cybermen.
To pic up on the McCoy comment: Time and the Rani is poor-quality DW, but has high points that still make it watchable. Kate O'Mara impersonating Bonnie Langford is utterly priceless. The bubble traps are very nifty. Some of the quarry locations are eyecatching and unusual. Underworld has none of that. It has Trogs. And whole episodes where "main characters" have not got a single word of dialogue, and other characters are only given a name int he credits. And weird fetish costumes. Horrible.
They are a mess in places but at least they have a bit of life to them and some amusing bits. Even Baker & Jameson can't do much to liven up Underworld and CIS is just so dull.
In comparison: Paradise Towers has plenty of life to it(Richard Briers overacting, and lesbian cannibal grannies).
Hmm. Whatever its faults, Colony In Space also has a coherent story (albeit woefully padded out). Paradise Towers may have a few more superficially appealing qualities (I'll give you Brenda Bruce and Liz Spriggs, but Briers is capable of so much more) - but its story makes very little sense and the execution of the teenage gangs is so excrutiatingly embarrassing that it makes CIS' filing cabinets look like Tom Baker at his peak.
I liked the Kangs myself!
Actually, I think the McCoy era in general gets a worse name than it deserves. Certainly, it has its low points; Time and the Rani, Silver Nemesis and Battlefield. But almost every era of Who has these; look at Pertwee's last series (almost nothing good bar The Time Warrior). Tom Baker had Revenge of the Cybermen, Destiny of the Daleks and Meglos; even the rightly-admired Season 13 had The Android Invasion. Davison had Time Flight and The King's Demons. Colin Baker had The Twin Dilemma, Attack of the Cybermen and Timelash.
And look at some of the good stuff from the McCoy period. The whole last series barring Battlefield was excellent, Remembrance of the Daleks and Greatest Show in the Galaxy were pretty good too (the latter a bit too clever for its own good, but that almost added to the charm for me). Paradise Towers, Delta and the Bannermen and The Happiness Patrol were silly, of course, but also very enjoyable and entertaining, I thought.
The McCoy stuff always gets slagged, but there is so much brilliance in there. Even when it's poor, there is still something to grab hold of. I do like the Kangs, but Paradise Towers has so much else going for it (as in my post above). Crappy Battlefield has great characters (the blind hotelier, the Czech pilot).
To go back to my point at the beginning of this thread: Underworld has very little going for it. Leaden script, faceless characters, rubbish effects, horrific costumes. A lack of energy and inspiration permeates everything in Underworld. The same goes for Colony in Space, but Colony is two episodes longer and therefore worse.
I don't think that anything in the McCoy years comes close to this level of rubbishness. Even the weakest story (Time and the Rani, in my opinion), or the stories which try to show their spectacle and great ideas but don't have enough substance to carry them (Battlefield and Silver Nemesis) still have life and energy. There are flickers of Whoishness throughout those stories that still remind me I am watching DW. All that Colony and Underworld can offer is caves/quarries that are supposed to be DW because they are caves and quarries, not because of what happens in them. That is poor DW.
Interesting to see davetheScot mentioning King's Demons. I watched it recently for the first time in about ten years. Something and nothing. I have already forgotten it, in fact.
McCoy lovers unite, then?!
Sorry - but the twilight years of Classic Who just don't do it for me ... or for many others. Story-telling that will draw in a mainstream audience is thrown out of the window by an inexperienced script editor and a producer who wanted to leave the show years before. It's all very well creating incident - but when there's no coherent reason for it, and little depth to your characters other than a shallow and rather gauche attempt to make the Doctor 'mysterious', it's rather pointless.
I don't doubt that there is potential in the McCoy years, but it's so frustratingly underdeveloped, and inaccessible to the audience the show needed to survive in the slot it had been given. What is the point of all those interesting nuggets when stories like Ghostlight are beyond comprehension?
All a matter of taste, ultimately, but being scheduled against Coronation Street isn't the only reason DW was axed in 1989 ... You may not prefer Underworld or Colony In Space but, for all their flaws, I'd take 'em over the vast majority of stories in the McCoy years - and so did the mainstream audiences.
Ghost Light isn't beyond comprehension. Even I understood it, so it can't have been that complicated! Far easier than Warriors Gate, anyway.
The majority aren't always right. Sometimes the enlightened minority are
Apart from anything else, they had Ace, my favourite classic series companion!
There are some unusually perceptive (and caustic
I'm glad you enjoyed the McCoy era - but if the minority really is so enlightened, how come the show was axed? It wasn't all about being scheduled against Coronation Street ... And if Andrew Cartmel was such a genius, how come his career nose-dived after he script edited one season of Casualty?
*goes to watch the perfectly comprehensible Warrior's Gate
The line "The backblast backlash will bounce back and destroy us all!" is one of the alltime DW greats, though.
To prove that dave and I are not one and the same, I am happy to confirm that Ace is one of my least favourites, and I am pleased to have voted her out in the Companion Survivor thread!
I don't think Andrew Cartmel's career has nosedived. He's written a number of plays and is doing some stand-up comedy.
It's true that DW did lose some of its shine in later years, and there are a lot of reasons for why the series came off TV in 1989, but I am sure that there was something of a resergence in the series' zest for life and quality in its last couple of years.
But that's taken us off the original point ... Underworld is ARSE!
Because the majority were not enlightened
Don't know, don't care. Any subsequent failures by those who worked on it don't change my liking for the McCoy era.
Clearly not if you don't like Ace!