Tuesday 23 April 2024

What's Wrong With... Full Circle


1) Adric...

2) Matthew Waterhouse's performance...

Why are the Time Lords only now summoning Romana back home? They didn't even send her on the Kay to Time mission.
The TARDIS passes through a CVE and ends up in E-Space. We're told this is a smaller dimension than N-Space - so what are the odds that there's a planet at exactly the same co-ordinates here as Gallifrey has in ours? 
Is E-Space big enough to even have a 10-0-11-00 by 02 from a Galactic Zero Centre?
CVE's have been keeping the universe ticking over for a while - so why don't the Time Lords know about this, and hence the widely-travelled Doctor?
The TARDIS has visited Gallifrey twice in recent years, and each time landed smack in the middle of the Capitol - once in the very centre of the Panopticon. So why does it materialise in the outer wastes this time, and why does this not seem to bother the Doctor and Romana?
Turns out they aren't on Gallifrey at all - but the scanner is showing what the outside is supposed to look like... 
What is the point of the image translator? Surely you want to see exactly what's outside the ship - not what might be there. It's never been mentioned before or since - and no wonder.

The evolutionary process makes no sense at all - despite this being what the story is all about. For a start, it isn't properly evolution anyway. It's more of a mutation, if the Marshmen rely on being bitten by spider toxin to metamorphose.
How many times has the process gone full circle? It can only have happened the once as there's no way the exact same set of circumstances could replicate themselves over and over again. But the story seems to imply that this has been going on for generations.
If it has just happened the once, then how could the Starliner people have forgotten absolutely everything from the last time?
If the humanoids lock themselves in the Starliner every Mistfall, then how can they be wiped out by the Marshmen in order to be replaced? Who lets them in each time? 
There really ought to be two societies of humanoids - the one who stayed in the Starliner and the "evolved" Marshmen outside.
Just because the Marshmen turn into humanoids, it doesn't necessarily follow that they would adopt the motivations and mind-set of the people they've replaced. They've killed them - not sat down and had lessons on being Terradonians from them.
Where did the initial instinct to go to the Starliner come from in the first place?
The closer you look into it, the more it falls apart.

Why does Romana turn into a Marsh-person when bitten, when the venom is supposed to have the opposite effect? Why pick up a fruit to throw at the spiders when she's just seen them hatch out of the them?
Could you have have operated the Starliner after the rapid demonstration the Doctor gives at the conclusion? I'd at least wanted to have taken notes.
The vessel is a weird shape. It doesn't have to be streamlined to travel through the vacuum of space, but surely it ought to have been better designed for escaping a planet's atmosphere.

Going back to the top, Adric is actually a good idea for a character - a young male who is a bit "Artful Dodger". The problem is that the idea simply isn't translated onto the screen. It's not as if the character deteriorates over time - he simply never gets off the ground.
Waterhouse is simply too inexperienced for such a prominent role as Doctor Who companion.
The actor playing Varsh would have been so much better - even Bernard Padden (Tylos) who we know went up for the role.
It beggars belief that he was regarded as the best candidate at the auditions. One might expect it from JNT, but not from Barry Letts or Christopher Hamilton Bidmead, who had both been actors themselves (and Letts certainly knew how to cast effectively).

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