You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all the same

I watched the last two remaining episodes in my Doctor Who #5 “marathon” last night. First came Castrovalva, which was Peter Davison’s debut. A neat enough episode. I loved the MC Escher nature of Castrovalva, where you could go down several flights of stairs and end up where you started. My office as a grad student had several Escher prints—he’s the patron saint of crystallographers because of the symmetric elements in many of his works. Among them was Relativity, about which our elderly Polish lab tech used to say “That hurts my mind.”

I was also intrigued by the discussion of recursive operations, which is a very important computer programming concept. Functions that call themselves. In the ideal world, there’s some escape mechanism from this process, a trigger that says enough. Adric, in the case of this episode, who was able to see his way clear of the trap. I think this was the least annoying appearance of Adric of all the episodes I’ve seen him in. Perhaps because he’s stuck in a spider web for most of it. There were a couple of witty moments: the Doctor’s comment about Democracy when everyone points him in a different direction, finding a bottle labeled “the solution,” to which he says, “‘Oh my little friend, if only you were.” I couldn’t figure out where the wheel chair came from at that very moment. It seemed like something more at home in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy pertaining to infinite improbability.

I also liked the way Shardovan was cast originally as the bad guy—there was even a bit of dialog about evil that ended just as Shardovan entered the room which seemed like foreshadowing. My biggest complaint, again, is The Master. In virtually every episode I’ve seen featuring him, the nature and behavior of his guise seems completely at odds with his motivation, and often seems extraneous to the story. Once he’s unmasked—or reveals himself—the whole charade seems pointless. I was taken in, though. I never realized that the same actor was playing Portreeve.

My final episode was Mawdryn Undead, part one of the Black Guardian trilogy. Notable alone for Nyssa’s sexy outfit, but it’s actually a decent story with a worthy denouement: Tegan thanking the Doctor for his sacrifice, even though matters altered the outcome. The dual-year storyline and the French farce of keeping the Brigadier away from himself worked well. I liked the way Mawdryn’s colleagues moved, too. They shuffle-floated along as if animated. Very cool.