The Witchfinders - A Review

The second half of the series is still proving to be superior to the opening half, and the writers whose names aren't Chris Chibnall are still proving to be far better than the one who is called Chris Chibnall. He has finally taken a back seat and let others come up with a clutch of more interesting storylines.
I quite liked The Witchfinders, by Joy Wilkinson, though it was far from perfect.
This was a darker episode which dwelt on horrific themes - both historical and fictional. I wasn't at all happy that they actually pointed out that women had a hard time in the 17th Century. Talk about stating the obvious. I'm sure even those viewers who have little interest in history in general, or of the witch craze of the 16th and 17th centuries in particular, were aware of this. This lecturing was made rather redundant when they had the local landowner, most powerful person in the district, a woman.
The real history derives from the fact that hundreds of people - most of whom (but by no means not all) were women - were branded as witches and subsequently jailed and executed. Female victims were generally older, unmarried women, in a time when the norm was that women were supposed to have a husband. Many had acted as midwives and herbalists, and knew how to prepare potions for the curing of various maladies. As soon as a neighbour turned against them and made an accusation - often simply because they wanted their property or had a simple falling out with them over something - these things which had benefited the local community could be twisted and used against them.
King James I (VIth of Scotland) certainly had an obsession about witches and wrote a book about them - prompted by his belief that a group of Berwickshire witches had attempted to kill him by summoning a storm to wreck a ship he was travelling on. This, however, was not enough to justify his presence in the storyline. If you are going to come up with a Celebrity Historical, then the celebrity has to have a reason for being present. If you know anything about James, then you'll know that he was extremely paranoid, following a number of abduction and assassination attempts going back to when he was a baby. The idea of him running around the wilds of Lancashire in the middle of a witch infestation, with minimal protection, was simply ludicrous.
The fictional horror derived from a couple of movies - 1968's cult classic Witchfinder General (starring Vincent Price as a fictionalised Matthew Hopkins), and its unofficial follow-up Blood on Satan's Claw (1971).
With the dead witches rising from the grave I was also reminded of the Hammer film Plague of the Zombies (1966).

The two guest artists were fine in their own ways. Siobhan Finneran played Becka Savage totally straight. At first glance she seems an outright monster, but we then see how she wants to save her community and will do anything it takes to protect the villagers from Satan. Alan Cumming, on the other hand, has a lot of fun with a foppish King James. Some might think his performance a tad pantomime-ish, but personally I thought that such a bleak subject matter needed a little lightening, and he did have a great scene with the Doctor when she had been captured and accused herself by Savage of being a witch.
In the same way that I thought it highly unlikely that the King would be traipsing around the countryside, so I thought that it was nonsense that a powerful landowner would go round cutting down their own trees. A job for the servants, surely.
The witch outbreak turns out to have alien origins - the work of the Morax. At last we get an alien species in the programme who are actually evil. All the aliens this season, just about, have been a huge let down as they have turned out to pose little or no threat, and been superfluous to the plot. This has been one of the problems with Jodie Whittaker's Doctor. Doctors are defined by the threats they face, and how they deal with them, and she has had nothing to play against. We've still to see any sort of defining moment for this particular incarnation.
When Becka began to mutate into a Morax I half expected her to shout "Pyrovile!". As I said, the revenant witches reminded me of a classic horror movie, and they were genuinely creepy as they stalked through the mist-shrouded forest. Sadly, this took place quite late in the proceedings, and we were treated to a rather rushed ending.
Not a bad episode, but well short of being a great one. Russell T Davies and Gareth Roberts had far more fun with witches a decade ago.

Holiday Break

I am disappearing off on holiday to the Eternal City for the next week or so. There won't be any updates until I get back, so my reviews of The Witchfinders and It Takes You Away will be late - but hopefully worth waiting for. They will both appear on my return - which should be Monday 3rd December.
Caio for now.

G is for... Gavrok

Gavrok was the sadistic leader of the Bannermen, who were hunting the Chimeron people to extinction. The Chimeron queen Delta was the last survivor of the race, but she had in her safekeeping the egg of a new princess, from whom a new generation could spring. Delta fled to a space-port but Gavrok gave chase, issuing a bounty on her head. When Delta transferred to a tourist craft which was heading for Earth, Gavrok killed the Toll-Keeper after learning of her destination. The Doctor's companion Mel was on the same tour craft, with the Doctor following on in the TARDIS. A collision with a satellite caused the craft to crashland elsewhere on the planet - just outside a holiday camp in South Wales. Unfortunately, also on the tour craft was a bounty hunter who knew of Gavrok's reward, and he gave away Delta's location. Never intending to pay the monies, Gavrok beamed a destructive signal to the bounty hunter's communicator, hoping that the blast would kill Delta as well. This attempt failed. The Bannermen ship then landed near the camp and Gavrok led his men on a hunt for the Chimeron. The Doctor tried to negotiate with him, but to no avail. A trap led to Gavrok and his men being covered in honey and attacked by a swarm of bees. They then launched an assault on the camp, after Gavrok had placed a sonic mine on the roof of the TARDIS. The Chimeron egg had hatched, and the child rapidly grew into a young girl. She could generate a high pitched sound which the Bannermen could not stand. Her voice was amplified to attack Gavrok and his men. Stunned by the sound, Gavrok stumbled into the detonation zone of the sonic grenade and he was destroyed, whilst his men were all captured.

Played by: Don Henderson. Appearances: Delta and the Bannermen (1987).

• Henderson had come to fame as the rather seedy but philosophical D.S. George Bulman, in the spy series The XYY Man. This ran for 13 episodes between 1976 - 77. His character was then given another series, called Strangers, which ran between 1978 - 82, where Bulman was promoted to Detective Chief Inspector. Bulman then got a third series - called Bulman - in which he was no longer a police officer but investigated on his own. It ran from 1985 - 87.
• He's probably best known for his appearance as an Imperial Officer - General Taggi - in the first Star Wars movie.

G is for... Gavin

One morning, Rani Chandra and Clyde Langer woke up to find their families had disappeared. They went to visit Sarah Jane Smith and her son Luke, but they were nowhere to be seen either. In fact, the pair appeared to be the only people left on the planet. They travelled into town and found it deserted. However, they soon encountered a pair of huge robots. These were hunting for something, broadcasting a message demanding the sun and the air, otherwise the missing people would not be returned. Exploring the city, Clyde and Rani discovered that there was one other person still around - a schoolboy named Gavin. A keen nature lover, who lived with a foster family, he could not explain why he had been unaffected by the mass disappearance. He ran off, and they tracked him down to a park where he liked to go. The two robots arrived, and Clyde and Rani discovered that it was not the sun and air they were looking for, but the son and heir. Gavin was really an alien, royal prince of a far-off planet from which the robots had been sent. He had been placed on Earth as a baby for his protection following an invasion, his true nature hidden by a bio-damper. Removing this allowed the robots to find him. His planet was free once again, and so the robots had come to Earth to fetch him back home to rule. As soon as they had transported him away, everyone was returned - oblivious that they have ever been gone. The reason that Clyde and Rani had not been taken was because they had earlier been grounded by the Judoon, so were not permitted to leave the planet.

Played by: Joe Mason. Appearances: SJA 4.4 - The Empty Planet (2010).

G is for... Gathering Coils

Semi-organic technology from the Stenza homeworld, which appear as a writhing mass of electrified tentacles. They are used to gather and collate information. A Gathering Coil was sent to Earth by a Stenza named Tzim-Sha to aid him in a manhunt. Random people were selected for these hunts, and they were taken back to their planet as trophies. Tzim-Sha sought to rule the planet should he be successful in his hunt for a young man named Karl, even though he was forbidden from using technological aids. The Gathering Coil first attacked a train on which Karl was travelling. Also on board were Graham O'Brien and his wife Grace. Her grandson, Ryan, had earlier discovered the pod which the Stenza had used to travel to Earth. The newly regenerated Doctor landed on the train after falling from the TARDIS. The Coil scanned Karl then departed, installing itself elsewhere in the city - Sheffield - to feed information back to Tzim-Sha.
The Doctor used her sonic screwdriver to disable it, but only temporarily. When Tzim-Sha went to Karl's workplace to abduct him, the Coil acted as a barrier to stop the Doctor and her friends from stopping him. Grace destroyed it with an electric cable, but at the cost of her own life.

Appearances: The Woman Who Fell To Earth (2018).

G is for... Gastropods

An ancient legend on the planet of Jaconda told of how its ruler had offended the Sun God. They sent a swarm of giant slug-like creatures to lay waste the planet to punish the people. Many centuries later, this legend proved to have been based on a real event, as one of the creatures hatched out - Mestor. Soon the whole planet was overrun with the creatures - Gastropods - and Mestor seized control from the rightful ruler. This was an elderly Time Lord named Azmael, who had once been an old friend of the Doctor. The Jacondans were enslaved, and the population began to starve as the Gastropods once again laid waste to their crops. Mestor maintained control thanks to powerful mental capabilities, such as telekinesis. He could even place his mind into the bodies of others. He told Azmael that he had a scheme to move two other worlds in the Jacondan solar system into orbit around the planet, so that they could be used as new food sources. To achieve this, Azmael was sent to abduct twin boys from Earth - Romulus and Remus - who possessed the mathematical skills to achieve this. The newly regenerated Doctor and his companion Peri gave chase, along with an Earth security officer named Hugo Lang.

On discovering that Mestor had amassed a huge number of Gastropod eggs, with especially hardened shells and which responded to heat, the Doctor spotted his real scheme. The two smaller planets would fall into Jaconda's sun, resulting in an explosion which would destroy the planet. The eggs would survive - flung out into space to colonise other worlds. The Doctor prepared an acid to attack Mestor. The Gastropod ruler transferred his mind into Azmael's body, however, unaware that he was close to death. The Doctor destroyed his original body, and the old Time Lord died, no longer able to regenerate. Mestor was expelled. The other Gastropods did not share his mental powers, and the Jacondans rose up against them - led by their new ruler, Hugo.

Played by: Edwin Richfield (Mestor). Appearances: The Twin Dilemma (1984).

• Richfield had previously appeared in the series as Captain Hart in The Sea Devils.
• Mestor's "spirit" is seen to emerge from Azmael as he dies. As he can inhabit other people's bodies, he may have simply transferred to a nearby host and so may have actually survived.

G is for... Gas Mask Zombies

When a small boy was fatally wounded by a falling bomb during the London Blitz, he was taken to the nearest hospital for treatment. However, it had not been a German bomb which had landed, but an alien spaceship. This was a Chula ambulance craft, filled with nonogenes designed to repair warriors so that they could return to the fighting. The nanogenes used the boy as a template, mistaking his gas mask for part of his anatomy. He was brought back to life with increased strength, and his touch could infect others with the nanogenes - causing them to be copied and to replicate the child. Thus, they too had faces turned into gas mask, and they carried the same injuries he had - such as a scar to the hand and serious crush injuries. Within a short space of time, every doctor, nurse and patient in the hospital was affected. The contagion then began to spread to the wider community, affecting the soldiers tasked with guarding the spacecraft. The boy, Jamie, was compelled to seek out his mother. Psychically linked to him, all the others affected asked for their mother as well. The last person in the hospital to succumb was Dr Constantine. Before transforming, he was able to point the Doctor towards a girl named Nancy, who looked after orphaned children. The Doctor realised that she was not the boy's sister, as she claimed, but his teenage, unwed mother. When the nanogenes came into contact with Nancy they were able to recognise the true genetic pattern for humans, and all those affected were changed back - old injuries such as amputated limbs even being restored.

Appearances: The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances (2005).

• Originally planning to use real WW2 gas masks, the production team found that they were now banned as they were made from asbestos. New ones were created, with baked bean tins used for the respirator section.