You're listening to Fusion Patrol, a Lister-supported podcast.
Each week we take a single episode of a science fiction TV series, movie, or audio and overanalyze
it to within an inch of its life.
Welcome to the discussion.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Fusion Patrol, I'm Eugene.
And I'm Simon.
And tonight we are looking at the newly restored, animated Doctor Who adventure, The Savages.
This is a four part story, and the synopsis goes something like this.
Part 1 The Doctor, Steven, and Dodo arrive on a desolate
planet.
The Doctor, however, is certain they've landed in a future age of great peace and
prosperity.
He wanders off to confirm his opinion.
All the while, both groups are unaware that they are being observed by the animal-skin-wearing,
spear-wielding titular savages who apparently aim to kill them.
The Doctor is found by space-age guards and welcomed.
civilization has apparently been tracking the TARDIS's path through space and time
and anticipated its arrival. The Doctor is taken to the city and he makes arrangements
for the guards to collect Steven and Dodo. In the city, the Doctor is welcomed and made
a city councillor, while Steven and Dodo are given a guided tour of the fabulous city,
but their guides, Avon and Flower, aren't very forthcoming with answers to their questions.
As the Doctor begins asking questions about the nature of the process that made all this
we see the guards in the wastelands hunting, capturing, and returning a young savage woman,
Nanina, to the city.
Dodo, dissatisfied with the answers they're getting, slips off to investigate on her own,
while the doctor begins to learn the secret of the city.
For them to achieve their greatness, they must tap the vital life force of a very special kind of prey animal.
Dodo stumbles across just one such prey animal, an old, weak savage,
who has been tapped of his life force and released back into the wild.
Part 2
Dodo, at first scared by the savage, realizes he is unwell and helps him exit the city.
She continues back along the corridor he came from and enters the extraction laboratory
as they are depleting Nanina.
Dodo, mistaken for a savage in strange clothes, is assumed to be there to be extracted.
She fights back to the surprise of the technicians.
Senta, leader of the lab, realizes she's one of the travelers.
Steven alerts the Doctor that Dodo is missing, but he seems unconcerned and goes back to
listening to the Elders explain how their civilization works.
A guard helps investigate and finds Dodo, returning her and Steven to the Elder's
chamber, where the Doctor is once again uninterested in what she saw.
He tells the Elders he wishes to get some notes from his TARDIS, and the trio depart
to collect them.
Jano, the head elder, has Edel, the head guard, follow them.
Once outside the city, the doctor explains he didn't want Dodo saying what she'd
seen in front of the elders.
They come across the savage that Dodo helped leave the city, and the doctor sends Steven
and Dodo to the TARDIS to get medicine.
Edel catches up with the doctor and treats the ailing savage as less than human, which
outrages the doctor.
Edel uses his zap gun to make the doctor return to the city.
and Dodo return and give the medicine to the savage, thinking the doctor has just wandered
off again. More savages are watching them, and debate killing them, but when they make
their move, a combination of caution and the words of the now-recovering savage that they
helped keeps them alive, and they learn more about what happened to the doctor.
In the city, the doctor makes his displeasure fully known. He finds their system of extracting
life force from one group of people to benefit another group to be utterly detestable, and
He will not participate.
Jano sends him to the extraction lab to have his life force extracted.
Despite his alien physiology, the extraction process appears to be working on the Doctor.
Part 3 The life force extraction of the Doctor is
complete and was an unqualified success.
Probably.
Jano arrives to congratulate Senta and then he informs him that he will be partaking of
the Doctor's life force personally.
For purely altruistic reasons, of course, he wouldn't want to risk anyone else's
life with an untested procedure.
Jal, the leader of the savages, will help Steven and Dodo hide, although there are others,
such as the hot-headed idiot Tor, who does not agree with helping them.
They have discovered that the guards are now searching for Steven and Dodo.
They go back to their caves, the one place the guards will not go.
But one guard, Exsours, does follow.
Steven uses a mirror to reflect the light gun's beam back at Exsours, taking him prisoner.
Armed with a gun, Steven, Dodo, and Chawl return to the city to rescue the Doctor.
Jano has been infused with the Doctor's life force and possibly something more because
he is acting as if he is the Doctor and Senta, the brilliant scientist, is too stupid to
notice.
Perhaps they should rename him Dodo.
Left alone, Jano prepares to destroy the equipment, but recovers his personality enough to stop
before doing any damage.
Now inside the city, the guards are monitoring Steven and Dodo's progress down the corridor.
They use the Doctor as bait and trap them as gas fills the corridor.
Part 4.
Steven, Dodo, and the nearly catatonic Doctor are trapped in the corridor and things look
bleak until Jano releases them.
Realizing that someone has betrayed them, Edol finds Jano near the door controls and
accuses him. Jano is outraged at the accusation and personally takes command of the expedition
to track down and recover the strangers. Edel insists on going along.
In the wilderness, the trio encounter Chal and he leads them back to the caves while
Steven tries to hold off their pursuers. He does a fair job of it, but when Jano has the
opportunity to capture him, he hesitates and Steven gets away. They all make it to the
caves, but Jano, Edel, and the guards are nearby. Jano trips and puts himself in a position
shot but a now recovered doctor stops Steven telling him he must not harm Jano.
Jano sends the rest of the guards back to the city over Edel's protests.
The doctor informs everyone that they cannot leave the planet until they destroy this evil
society by destroying the transference machine and he will do so with help from inside the
city.
That night Jano arrives.
Not only has he absorbed some of the doctor's intelligence, he's also absorbed some of
the Doctor's sense of right and wrong, and he realizes that they must destroy the transference
machine.
Exsaurce, who is still their prisoner, has heard this and escapes.
Nannina chases after him and pleads with him not to say anything.
She reminds him that he does, after all, owe her his life.
In the city, Edel confers with Senta and the Elders.
Senta tells about the transference from the Doctor, and Edel is convinced Jano will betray
them, so he assumes emergency leadership powers.
Just then Jano arrives with everyone under his control.
When he learns what Edel has done, he has him arrested.
He then seals the doors and tries to convince the others that the equipment must be destroyed,
but when they refuse, he starts destroying the machines himself.
The so-called captives join in and overwhelm the others, joyously destroying the equipment.
Exsaurce has the opportunity to stop it, but he does not.
Edel breaks back in, intent on killing them.
He and Steven struggle, and Edel is killed.
the society's hold on the Savages destroyed, the two sides suggest that Stephen be the
man to lead them into the future.
Encouraged by the Doctor, he agrees to stay.
The End.
That was far longer than I thought it was going to be.
So the Savages.
Another missing story back in the stable.
Sort of.
What did you think?
I did not know anything about this story.
So I kind of came to it.
with relatively few expectations. It's a first Doctor story, not my favourite Doctor, with
Stephen and Dodo, who are not companions who have particularly stuck with me. I really enjoyed this
actually. I mean, it's not the greatest Doctor Who story ever, but it was a solid story, very
enjoyable to watch, extremely political, no kind of, I mean obviously the kind of sci-fi element
is it's a futuristic situation with a magic machine that does the the extracting but no kind of
monsters or bug-eyed aliens in it. Yeah, the kind of thing I really appreciated. It reminded me a
I don't think this was as good as Enemy of the World, but you know, it's still got that
sense of discovering a Doctor Who story that really is better than some of the ones that
people go on and on about.
Yeah, I think that's fair. I, I, I don't know. I, I, um, at one point in the 80s, and, and
I think we've mentioned this before in the podcast, I don't do the recreations and I
I don't do the telesnaps.
I just, okay, but I'll read the target novels.
And this one was novelized.
And at one point I did in fact have all target novelizations and that would
have been in the early eighties.
But I can't find this one.
And it was one of the later eighties ones.
Well, close to the mid eighties, I think 84, 85, something like that.
And I'm wondering if I've just never even read the book.
I, I just don't remember anything about it.
And savages is always just dismissed as the savages.
You know, no one no one
no one waxes poetic about, oh, we need the savages back.
So I had no clue what it was.
And I have seen scant few pictures of it,
although I've seen a few since I did the review and have some thoughts on that.
But yeah, it wasn't it wasn't bad.
It was, it was, it was better than all of last season's Doctor Who.
Um, but, uh, yeah, yeah, I, I get, was it wasn't bad at all.
Wasn't fantastic, but yeah, it was, as you say, there's some political aspect to it.
Um, and there's certainly, I don't know if, I don't know if there is another
episode that I can recall where the first Doctor really takes that, "There are some
things that are evil in this universe that need to be fought" attitude. Right? I mean,
that's a famous line from Troughton, but Hartnell definitely had a sense of justice,
but I don't recall him ever standing up and saying it like he does in this one.
It certainly takes a while to come to the fore, given that early on he's quite sort
of self-interested, shall we say.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Is this done by the same producer that did the early Troutons?
Yes, Innes Lloyd, isn't it?
I think he was around through the transition into the Trouton era.
So he probably did moon base, which is where that also comes from the some things that
must be fought.
So I wonder if that's something that falls within his keen on on.
I have I asked you a question.
You didn't answer it.
Not during the podcast before.
Is Dodo supposed to be dumb?
We consider Dodos to be stupid animals, not saying that they were just not adapted for
having somebody club them. And, but you know, we, we, it's not as common as it used to be,
but go back to the sixties and seventies, calling someone a dodo was you're stupid.
So the name of a companion dodo, and I know it's supposed to be some probably Dorothy,
I don't know, but there's, you know, there were, there were times in the celestial
toy maker where she was really stupid. And in this episode, I don't think that she was
too bad, but Steven's line, even Dodo couldn't be that dumb, makes me think that actually
was intended that way.
The doctor is carrying an idiot with him.
And I don't know, because there's so few Dodo stories.
And I'm guessing that in his lawyer didn't particularly care for Dodo because of how
Dodo got dumped.
But yeah, well, you've got to presume he didn't care much for Stephen or indeed Hartnell either.
No, no one in this serial is sticking around for long after this.
No, but I mean, Hartnell, we've got reasons and I have no idea why Stephen left.
Maybe he was, he wanted to go.
We know Dodo was not.
No, he didn't.
He did not.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
He didn't, he didn't want to go.
Contract had ended, but he didn't want to go and the producer refused to renew it.
Hardenwell wanted him to stay and the producer wasn't interested, essentially.
Okay.
Interesting.
Well, then he cleared two and two and two.
Or three and three, actually.
Is it three and three?
Is Tenth Planet right after War Machines?
I don't think it is.
There's something else, but I can't remember what.
Hmm, it would be Ben and Polly.
Hmm. Yeah.
And I don't know.
Anyway, so, you know, this this episode,
basically the scientists eat the artists
is what I'm getting out of it.
That's kind of a slightly different variation on the Eloy and the Morlocks.
Then we got more of the worlds.
Now, that wasn't the parallel that I was saying.
No, there's others. There's others.
That was my first one.
It's like their base, I think, I think.
And then maybe that's my maybe that is my question is,
let's say you've got a scientist and let's say he takes the life force
from an artist, does he become more artistic?
Is that is that what's going on here?
Are we taking not just this keeps me young, this keeps me alive,
but we're taking some thing and conveying it into their civilization
they can do more, be better, be more rounded.
Because I that's where all my questions are.
It's like, how does this transference process is the damage permanent?
Or are the savages all the way they are
because they just keep getting milked too often?
It's like they just never recover.
If they were left alone in 10 years, would they be back to what they would have been?
Or is this something that just permanently depletes them?
I don't think it is something that permanently depletes them. I mean,
like a blood transfusion.
Probably, yeah. It probably depends on what you interpret it as being allegorical for. But
the way that the observations that I was making, with the kind of exception of what we get at the
they seem to be quite careful not to take too much.
Like if you put them back, they will recover
and you can do it again.
In addition to which, the doctor's pills seem to promote
some sort of recovery, which you would think
they wouldn't do if it was some sort of finite life essence
rather than, the concept that I have in mind here is energy.
I think they talk about life force or something like that.
But the idea that they can take away energy and deplete that,
you'll be able to build up your energy again,
just like your energy is wiped out
when you have an illness
and it takes you a while of rest to recover,
but you will be fine.
You will, depending on the illness,
you will essentially be as good as you were before
as long as you don't get ill again.
And I think that seems to be the problem here.
But we do see, and obviously we can make the argument that there's something to do with
alien physiology, we do see that there's more than just energy transferred from the Doctor
to Jano.
We do.
And you know, that bit at the end.
of these kind of sci-fi concepts where you can do a sort of transfer from one to another,
invariably they wind me up because they're so ill-defined.
And they suggest some sort of very kind of unsophisticated conception of what identity
means in the mind of the writer. So you have some sort of transfer operation like this.
Along with life force, you end up discovering that all knowledge or capabilities or memories
is transferred across, and in this case, conscience. And there's not been a careful enough consideration
of what identity is or what it means to be the person that you are and what sort of combination
of physical embodiment combined with your memories, your rational thought processes,
the kind of chemical effects of one on the other that all of these kind of have interacting
to make you the person that you are. So up to a point I was quite enjoying this. I actually
thought that Frederick Jager doing Hartnell was quite a sort of fun idea because...
I would truly love to see that actual performance.
Well, exactly. If the concept is this is energy being transferred and what you're getting
there is a load of Hartnell energy, I was willing to accept that quite readily on the
basis of, well, that was quite entertaining and it fits with the idea. It was the notion
that not, well, not only the notion that some part of the doctor's conscience comes across
separately and individually, but that it's so obvious that that's what's going to happen,
that the doctor is totally counting on it. He's 100% certain that this is what's transpired.
Well, he's smarter than they are.
So I think, but at some point shortly after the transfer,
in a couple of instances,
Jano does not even know he is Jano.
He clearly thinks he is the doctor.
Just by the way, when people are talking to him,
I'm like, he responds to them as if they're nuts.
You know, like they don't realize who he is.
And so I thought, frankly, I thought by the end of this,
we were gonna have to have that re-transferred
back to the doctor.
Well, we've certainly seen that before.
But is Jano gonna be like this forever?
-Yeah. -Yeah.
I mean, I didn't get the sense of that.
I got more of the sense of the kind of energy
that Jano had received was not usual,
and that it affected his personality and his behavior
in ways that were kind of at a level
where he wasn't even immediately aware of them.
He had to sort of stop and think to realize
that what he was doing was atypical
because it's almost that instinctive kind of energy
in the way that you speak and interact
and behave with other people.
So it didn't seem to me that he thought he was the doctor
thought he wasn't Jano, but more that it hadn't occurred to him in the instant that the way
he was behaving was not Jano-like, that he had to stop and reflect because it wasn't
happening on a conscious cognitive level, it was happening on a kind of instinctive
gut reaction level.
There's something about, there's something about the way he interacts with Edel in a
couple of instances where I distinctly got the impression that it was the doctor.
It was not Jano instinctively reacting to the way, for example, the way he would refer
to, I think there's a point where Edel says, the strangers, like he doesn't know who the
strangers are.
If it were Jano, it's that confusion that makes me think that the doctor is there.
But again, it's not really very well defined.
And is Jano permanently affected?
Will he always be a little bit of the first doctor till the day he dies?
Or...
I don't know.
that there was some kind of reciprocity in it in the sense that if the savages can recover,
then the elders will lose some of it over time and need to replenish it, which is,
it's kind of reflected in the fact that you assume they have more than one in transference each.
Yeah, they said that, they said as much. They said they picked the time and who needs it the most,
And so I assume that there's some sort of medical condition that they can identify in somebody or
or some need that they identify and go, OK, well, that's the most deserving person to get this today.
But yeah, so there must be some depletion of it. But that's the energy. But will he lose his
conscience for right and wrong as he goes along? Because there's one other thing about this.
The situation is that the elders just don't get it.
They, they are not, they are not people doing bad things to their
benefit and knowing that they're bad.
They appear to be fully unaware of the fact that what they're doing is bad.
Until the doctor opens Jane O's eyes.
It's, I mean, there's lots of parallels in history.
People doing bad things because they think, well, they think the
savages are a lesser people, uh, or, or not even people.
It's an interesting idea.
I think this could be probably could have used a, maybe another pass on the
script, but it was, it was not bad.
It was, it was not bad.
I mean, I think, I think part of how this works is connected with what you think is
going on in terms of the exploitation here. I thought that it was a kind of a satirization
or an allegory for how capital exploits the labor class, that the energy being taken is like
the workers who build things in society not actually having the time or the wealth and
resources to be able to enjoy the fruits of it, while the privileged class is swanning around
in these magnificent environments that have been built on the backs of it. And I felt that that
kind of connected with the conclusion which I thought was probably inspired by the Luddites,
so destruction of the machinery. But the other possibility was that it was
supposed to be some sort of racial allegory. And I did discover that the original title of the
serial during the scripting stage was The White Savages, which suggests that actually it was
Or possibly both.
Yeah, well, that presents all sorts of implications, doesn't it?
That's an unusual kind of savage.
Normally they're not white.
Oh god, that's just terrible.
Well, okay, so I'm going to come back to this, though.
the Eloy and the Morlocks, if it is capital and workers,
then that is the same parallel,
except it's flipped on the end, right?
In HG Wells, it was the laborers
who ended up eating the rich, which, you know,
I don't know why he's portraying that as a bad future,
but, you know, that's kind of how it,
or at least that's how I always took that to be.
I mean, they were the idle rich
and the laborers were working underground
and toiling away and became monsters and cannibals.
And so it is kind of,
but I also got definitely got the impression that,
for example, the artwork,
our people used to be artists
and we used to do stuff like this.
I definitely got the impression that this was a society
where the scientists came up with the idea
and then who did they pick on?
You know, we don't need the artists.
Maybe it was the laborers, maybe it was both.
Maybe it was supposed to be on.
But if it's transferring in, then you'd take the artist
because if you had an engineer
who had all that life force from artists,
you would make some beautiful cities
and you'd be Johnny Ive.
And it's just kind of, yeah,
it's just all sorts of things that this could have,
this could have broken down along on its line.
But yeah, I definitely see the parallel to the,
I think they may even go so far as to say
They don't use capital, but they definitely absolutely say, you know, there is those that
need and those that take from those that don't or something of that nature.
Yeah, it was it was definitely there.
It was definitely there.
Let me ask this question.
Given that very soon now Hartnell will leave and we all know what a great story of the
10th planet was.
That was a fantastic departure for the doctor.
He just didn't do much in two episodes and then fell over.
Great exit for Hartnell.
Dodo quite literally disappeared in the middle of a story with a note.
She went up to her aunts and we never see her again.
Which I think may be the worst exit ever.
Was this a good exit for Steven?
Yeah, I thought so.
See that's that might take on it too.
It's like this is one of the better companion departures.
It sort of makes sense in context of the story.
It's not like, "Oh, Leela fell in love."
It does.
I mean, there's a similarity to, I think, maybe the way Nyssa departs.
It's the finding you don't end up where you started.
You're not going back home, which is quite an interesting kind of a different take in
its own right, particularly when you try not to mess up the web of time.
But still, you find some sort of calling, and that essentially is what Stephen has done
here.
The people on the planet need him.
He recognizes that he has an ability to help them, and that this is an opportunity that
he will feel like he's missing something if he gives it up.
Because the problem is always, you leave the Doctor, you leave traveling through time and
space.
you're missing something when you give it up.
So you need to have something to sort of balance that.
Yeah.
And I think he, well, he earned the trust of the savages throughout the course of the
episode.
I don't know that he earned the trust of the elders, but Jano has the Doctor's trust in
him kind of thing.
So I mean, I don't know how the rest of the elders felt.
They all seemed to be pretty happily going off to the conference room there at the end
to, to proclaim him the new leader or whatever, but yeah, I, when I came out
of this story, I did kind of think, yeah, that was, that was pretty good.
That was pretty good.
I mean, Ian and Barbara, when they left, they had never been able to get back to
home, not once ever, and there was their chance.
So yeah.
All right.
I'll I'll take it.
Um, Susan, of course, didn't get a choice.
Vicky, I can't figure out why did Vicky leave? I know where she left, but why did she leave?
Do we know? Did she just fall in love? Which is her, I can't even remember her
departure story, so it's obviously not. It's one that doesn't exist. It's, she got
left behind in the Myth Makers maybe? Is that the Myth Makers?
Okay, no, I haven't seen the Myth Makers. Yeah. I think she's Cassandra, isn't she?
of myth. Maybe that's the grump. Anyway, yeah, so Divan and Dodo are the next to go. It's probably
one of the better, probably one of the better ones. I will say though that he did take a
frustratingly long time to fight back when they were being pursued by eyesore or exors in the
caves. It's like, jump him. It's like, we already know that the guards don't expect anybody to fight
back, jump him, take his gun. Then they're just not expecting it. And I think they were
just dragging the time out. But that was that was my critique of Stephen.
The characters of Avon and Flower, that was weird. Brought him in a little bit at the beginning.
Never see him again. Yeah. I feel like they should have been there at the end.
you know, new generation of people. Yeah. Okay. Do you have anything specific about the,
the else about the story that before we talk about the recreation and, and one other thing?
Yeah. It was one of the interesting things about the story is this,
that within this kind of far future setting, the elders recognize the doctor, like they know,
Oh, and is he is and his path. Yeah. He's, he's kind of famous. So I'm wondering whether that
kind of fame, is that like the Matt Smith fame thing where he had to wipe himself out from all
the historical records across space and time because he'd become so well known that it was
a problem? Or is it like the one doctor where the doctor goes so far into the future that
people have heard of him there, as he calls it, the vulgar end of time?
That's a good question. I mean, obviously, they've got some sort of technology that's
been tracking him, so they are very advanced.
They're advanced. They presumably don't have time technology themselves, do they? But they
recognize that it exists because they have this admiration for time-space exploration
And they see the Doctor as being a kind of singular standout with respect to.
So another question I had in relation to that was when we get the existence of the Time
Lords introduced, which I guess we probably already have, haven't we?
Because it's the Meddling Monk.
How does that fit with there being others like him?
Well, okay, so a couple things. I mean, for starters, I think there was a sort of unwritten
rule for a long time that the Time Lords were kind of the only people who had time travel.
How that works over the life of the universe is another story, but it is a very rare thing.
And the Time Lords don't use it. And even if they did use it, they go somewhere and
and then they come back. They're not tracking a path through the universe like the Doctor
is. And we don't know, maybe they were tracking the Meddling Monk as well, but they knew somehow
that the Meddling Monk was never going to show up on their planet.
I have to say that this was my headcanon, was that the Time Lords don't interfere, so
they wouldn't have shown up on the Elder's radar for that reason. And the Meddling Monk
possibly just trying to keep a low profile so that he doesn't get his collar felt by
the Celestial Intervention Agency. That was my rationale. But obviously they weren't thinking
about it. Yeah, it's a pretty bold prediction that said we've been expecting you. We've been
following you through space and time and we've been expecting you. It's like, it's a big space
and time. If you're assuming that he's going to randomly end up on your planet someday,
Maybe they know where the TARDIS is going more than the Doctor does. It is a little bit weird.
Days before canon had been set down and it was a wild west of ideas for the show. I don't know.
People are kind of, I mean we killed off the Time Lords, when I say we I mean RTD and the other guy,
Chibnall and because time Lords we know too much the thing or they tried the whole cart
mall there's not enough mystery in the doctor and I'm not gonna I'm not gonna
argue well I'm certainly not gonna argue that their attempts to make the doctor
more mysterious were were well-founded but I'll make the argument that maybe
there is something to the argument that says it's a little too well-defined he's
a little too well defined. But at the same time, when he isn't well defined, you get
all this conflicting stuff when there is no plan behind it.
Matthew: Yeah, it wouldn't conflict if we didn't have the Time Lords being such a prominent
feature of the series later on.
But it really when it conflicts is in the future when they define the time Lords. So yeah. Yeah, exactly the way I mean
it's part of the
part of the point my point simply being is that
the more the more you you have to have some of this codified or
You will just keep ping-ponging back and forth between different ideas and eventually they settle on the time Lords
But anything else just one last thing that I noted that's not connected with
The animation was the doctor's reacting vibrator. Yes. What about his reacting vibrator?
Nothing, nothing
Perfectly innocent name for it to have perfectly innocent name for him to have it. Yes. I see
I'm glad I hope that's what I I'm sure that's what the prop looked like. Um, I
I certainly hope that's what the problem is.
Better than looking like a Sonic, just call it Sonic screwdriver.
Screwdriver.
Yes.
Yeah.
Um, one thing I want to say that's sort of, sort of not exactly about the animation,
but it could easily segue into it.
So we've got a relatively new producer here, as we've mentioned, and I haven't
had the chance to watch the bonus materials on the disc, but however, I have.
for a variety of reasons, watched bits of them.
And one of the things that was mentioned
in the, I think, the making of,
is that this is the first episode of "Doctor Who"
to make major use of location footage.
This is one of the things that the producer,
this producer brought in to the show.
They'd had stuff like the French Revolution,
where they had a double walk across some fields and one up.
But this is a big use of them out in a quarry.
So this is a milestone in Doctor This.
Maybe that's the first quarry they ever visited.
And we don't have it.
- It is.
- We don't have it to watch and enjoy.
Because all of the pictures I see of it from the stills,
which I've subsequently seen, looks so much better
than the animated backgrounds that we got.
Moving into, I'm gonna criticize one thing
about the animation is like, I think they blew it
on the scene and the sets or the planetary sets.
Because yeah, I know there was lots more trees
and there were bushes and it actually looked
like people could live out there in the wilderness and people could hide a little bit better.
And I know that's harder to animate, but they could have at least put some green bushes
in the background or something, anything, but it's just a desolate rock garden.
And if it's behind them, why wouldn't they do that?
Do they just not have any green in their palette?
We're out of green bits for the animation or something.
Why would you want an alien planet to be green?
Well, because it was.
Because it was.
But that's clearly--
I don't know.
That's one of the things where I don't think the animation has
to do that.
So--
I don't think it has to do it.
I just don't think it works as effectively,
because it just doesn't--
this just doesn't feel like--
well, first off, there's a few places in it
where you can't reconcile with what they're talking about,
with what's on the screen.
I think the bit where she's complaining about, where they're trying to get Nannina across
the ravine.
It's like, "What ravine?"
And there is no ravine.
And...
Well, that I grant you is more of a problem.
But I don't necessarily think that you have to make the backgrounds look like a quarry
because this episode stands out for being the first serial where you actually see a
quarry.
at the time that would have been quite an exciting thing because you know you're looking at
location footage and how much more realistic that looks. Looking back at it now after seeing
however many Doctor Who serials filmed in quarries you would get less excited about that but you might
feel like it was of value because you're looking at the original footage. Given that that's gone
I don't see the need to recreate it.
I'm not saying they needed to recreate it because it was the first time they were in
a quarry.
And again, a lot of the pictures I've seen do not look anything like any other quarry
we've ever seen.
There are people walking down paths that have bushes and stuff on either side of them.
There are people which typically quarries don't have much vegetation left.
So they actually look like they're outdoors and I think with one picture I've seen accepted
that it would look better.
We have seen a very much, every time we get to an animated planet, they are pretty much
what we're looking at here.
Macra Terra, I seem to recall the planet looked like that.
for any of those. They've just they've gone with a sort of generic Star Trek rocky background
and they don't have to do that. I get why they don't want to have people walking in and amongst
the bushes, but why is it just such a dull, disinteresting, boring background? That's my
complaint. It's boring. It's not visually interesting at all. And I think that's not
That is a reasonable complaint, but it's exacerbated by the fact that they show so
much of it, which is a choice.
And it is, I think, informed by the fact that animation can create a much bigger
vista, you'd have had close shots in the quarry because you'd have wanted to make
sure that the background was just quarry.
And with this, you can be as wide as you like.
But what that does is emphasize how dull and featureless the background actually is.
And there is the scene I did want to mention.
I've seen a picture of it and I sure, unless it's staged for a photo op, there
is the scene where the doctor is wandering and he hears the savages hiding out of
sight and he's like, Oh, come on out, come on out.
And then Edel and I think X, X, or, uh, show up as, Oh, I've been waiting for it.
He's like, and he has to turn around and look,
not where he was expecting them to be.
But from the stills I've seen,
there are about four feet behind him,
hiding in a tree like a two year old
hides under a coffee table.
It's so bad that I'm hoping it's a publicity still
and not an actual scene from the thing.
But, you know, it feels like that's the scene
where they're hiding in the bushes and the doctor's trying to coax them out.
And it, that probably didn't come off very well on the show.
I have to say from watching.
So I did watch the recon for some of it to get a sense of what
the original would look like.
Although it's very difficult because the stills don't give
you a kind of real sense of it.
Certainly the location footage didn't stand out for me.
Obviously it's interesting that it was the kind of first example of it, but in
almost every respect, I didn't think that the sets that they used for the original
serial were much of a loss and that a lot of the animated sets, particularly in the
Elder City, looked a lot better.
And you know, also the kind of standard TV studio caves.
So yeah, it's not the best animation and the backgrounds are not the best.
backgrounds. I mean, it's not the best Doctor Who animation by any stretch, but
I had the same time.
It wasn't, it wasn't, uh, looking to me like it was particularly outstanding.
It, the, the, the, the location footage was particularly outstanding in any
respect, other than being the kind of first real extensive example of it.
With regards to the animation, I thought there was something very
interesting about this animation and I didn't notice it.
until they had Nanina on the table.
And, you know, they've got her lying down on the,
you know, they're about to gas her.
Her hair moves.
And after I noticed that,
and I made a note of it in my notes,
it's like, "Interesting, they made her hair move."
Then I started looking at it,
and I'm not sure this isn't one of the best bits
of animation we've had,
Because the characters are actually doing things.
They're twiddling their thumbs.
They're doing a little bit more expressive hand gestures.
They turn and look at things.
They even, at one point, turn their back to the camera.
It's not like 1930s Disney hand animation,
but compared to a lot of the ones we've seen,
which, you know, pin the tail on the donkey arms and stuff.
Actually, they're moving quite a lot more than usual.
Even when you see, uh, Jano, right?
Collars, thumbs to his lapels that he's not wearing.
I mean, they are, they're doing, they're doing the motions.
And, uh, I don't know, maybe they,
maybe they spent all their money on motion
motion and left it off in designing trees in the background. I don't know. But I like
it so much better than Celestial Toymaker. It's not even funny. But I'm willing to give
Celestial Toymaker a pass. But yeah, I mean, I, I, I'm not going to say it's one of the,
I'm not going to say it's the best animation. It's not the best drawings. Yeah. I mean,
I think even other animations from this team have impressed me more.
I think those aspects that you're talking about are justified praise.
And I think that probably reflects the fact that this is quite a sort of a
mature, um, a mature process for animating, right?
I mean, this is not like, I mean, they've done Galaxy 4, haven't they?
But most of the, most of the stories that they've done had been second
Doctor stories with obviously Troughton and other companions, so it's not like
they're reusing the same drawings, but they're certainly reusing the same
techniques and experiences in a way that, because these days and actually for
quite some time now, half the anime, so every other animation, is produced and
directed by Anne-Marie Walsh. I don't know what the name of the outfit is, but
But it's a similar group of personnel for each animation that they make.
Whereas every other one is produced by Big Finish plus some other animation house in
Asia or somewhere.
And they seem to try a different technique for each new story that they do.
And some of them I think are quite successful.
I mean, we can argue until the cows come home over the web of fear.
But the, the, the problem inevitably is that as well as kind of hitting on some
really useful and maybe newer and more interesting animation techniques, they're
also making a bit of a dog's breakfast of it when they're trying to do something
that they, you know, that is perhaps too experimental or they don't necessarily
have the experience doing or isn't well suited to doing one of these, but they
don't realize it other than by trying it out and you know they don't have the
budget to start again so that's what gets released on DVD. So this this to me
feels like the safe option even if I would say that releases like the Macra
Terra or Enemy of the Daleks just looked better to my eye than this one.
Oh, I definitely think that the artwork on this is not fantastic.
It's alright.
And like I said, the artwork was okay, but I just felt like they were moving it better,
which is just another component of the total animation.
So not crazy about the backgrounds, thought the artwork was eh, all right.
And but I thought they were, they were upping their game on movement for this style of animation,
right?
They haven't, they haven't gone to the rotoscope or if they did, they've learned how to do
it.
But yeah, it's, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna complain much except for the backgrounds.
No, I've no, I'm absolutely not going to complain.
I'm interested in what changes and developments there are,
as well as what kind of new and exciting things
they're doing.
And obviously, this is the safe option.
There are fewer of those new and exciting things.
But you've mentioned the hare.
I did notice the torch in the cave,
although I wasn't sure that we hadn't had
something like that before.
And obviously, one of the major features of this story,
And it is quite important to the story and it's reasonably well realized
is all of the kind of vapor stuff.
I mean, it's, it's just an overlay, but it works well.
So there are things that, and in particular, if you do compare it to the
recons, which are mostly just.
Tele snaps.
Some of those things are the things that really do make a difference because
you've got to see, you know, the vapor moving to understand what the threat is.
There are instant short sections of very 3d animated sequences in the
telesnaps for reasons that I have no idea.
Why?
Yeah.
They've done that for a couple of them, I think.
And they do that in the evil of the Daleks one as well.
Yeah.
Weird.
Okay.
Just somebody said I could do it.
Put your hand up.
All right, go ahead.
I, yeah, I, I guess I'm going to, I'm going to plant my flag and say that.
Typically speaking, low grade animation.
No, that's a, that's a bad way to phrase it.
Let's just say I grew up watching Scooby-Doo and Hannah Barbera cartoons.
And there is a style to that.
And there is, you know, a certain, a certain amount of we're doing this on a low
budget and, and that level of animation, you hit that level of animation and I
I don't notice it.
You have to drop below that before it starts bothering me,
or I start noticing it.
Or you have to really pick up your game.
Like I said, if somebody puts the original Snow White
or Sleeping Beauty in front of you,
you can tell that somebody spent a lot of time
drawing that by hand.
There is above and beyond.
But there's a wide range in between those two
I just don't care and won't notice. So the fact that stories like the Ice Warriors, I think it's
the Ice Warriors, where I noticed that the, you know, the arms looked like they'd been pinned on
with brads and were spinning at the elbows. It's terrible. That I noticed, that's worse than
Scooby-Doo animation. You know, we could go back all the way to the, like the, what was the Sylvester
McCoy when we started doing animation, it's not even a recreation. It's original stories
way, way back. Those are terrible. Yeah. You know, done on computers. Yeah. Yeah.
Those I spot all the original animation for Shada. Yes. Very bad. Very kind of basic.
That's not an on way, but, but jarring to my idea of what animation needs to look like to,
to achieve, to achieve sufficient enough for me to then ignore the fact that I'm watching
animation. So what I was getting at is I would not have noticed just for some reason something
about the way the hair did when she was turning her head. I'm like, that's different. And
that caught my mind. And then I started watching the animation. Up to that point, I was completely
just paying attention to the story. More important than that. I had already kind of copped onto
the, the backdrops looking a little dodgy at that point, but because they'd captured
her and they'd had that whole thing with the ravine and this, that and the other.
And I'm like, yeah, I'm just, you're not getting that from what we're, what they've put on
the screen.
But so it was from that point forward, then I started looking at the animation and going,
I think they've done better here than they have in the past, but web of fear, you know,
web of fear, that one triggered my, something's wrong with the animation.
That that's, that's that.
We don't have to read it up.
I think it's the same thing that gets me about the CG animation is that there's a certain
amount of bobbing and weaving going on that everybody's sort of always moving.
I do kind of think that we're still at the point where a 2D animation is a better fit
for, I don't know, the budget that they have for doing this.
for whatever reason, they cannot make a 3D animation
work really well, but they can,
using their kind of simple tricks and savvy,
they can make a 2D animation look good most of the time,
unless for some foolish reason,
they do a long shot of people walking,
which they do a number of times in The Savages,
and it still looks awful.
But it's really the only time where I, you know,
have what you're describing, that moment of being sort of taken out of the story to look
at the animation because of how bad it is.
Yeah. So going back to the Scooby-Doo analogy, I don't know, you may have never seen Scooby-Doo
in your life. I don't know. I watched a lot of it as a kid. And there is a animation of
the group walking that they use over and over and over and over again, right? Each, and
Each person has their own style of walking.
And they're always in the same order and it's, they're just recycling
it over and over and over again.
I noticed that they're recycling it over and over again, but it gets the job done.
If they could get it that good for them walking through a group of people, it'd be okay.
The problem is it's a different group of people each time.
Yeah.
Each time, you know, they're, they're in the city with flour and whatnot, or
they're in the countryside for want of a better word with.
I wonder if they use the same technique though.
I mean, in other words, do they, do they make, I don't know, however many
frames, let's, let's make it up a number.
Do they make 20 frames of one cycle of taking steps?
Yes.
Yeah.
However many, and then just replay it over and over again, or are they actually kind
of, because they're doing it with a computer.
I also think they're not necessarily bothering to personalize it.
You know, when you're talking about Scooby-Doo and you've got multiple episodes,
It's worth Scooby and Thelma and Yogi, and I've run out of memory of names of the characters,
having their own individual steps.
You know, that you actually can tell, as it were, who they are from the way that they
walk.
But they're not doing that in this because they're animating a character who appears
to walk in that way once and is one of a dozen characters who has to walk in that way.
some point during the episode, so they all walk in an identical way. And I understand
why they need to make that cost saving. I think my argument would be, please just don't
have the long shots. Please, please do a three-quarter shot.
[Crosstalk]
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You don't need to, or just have them stop for a moment. And I
I don't know.
It's the one thing for some reason
that does take me out of it.
- So anything else on the animation?
- Not on this animation in particular.
- Okay.
On any other animation in particular?
- Well, I wondered if you'd seen some of the comments
that were made at the BFI when this was shown.
- No, I haven't.
So, because some of the animators were talking,
I think some of this stuff is bar chat from afterwards,
and they were saying that nothing had been inked yet,
but discussions were happening with BBC Studios.
They are not making another Doctor Who story,
but they are expecting to be not only
making a new Doctor Who story,
but beginning some kind of an arrangement
where they are making more than one at once.
And to be clear, these are the animators that,
you know, we've got two lots of animators working on it.
We don't know that Big Finish or whoever
aren't making another Doctor Who story
and a Doctor Who animation at this minute.
And we could still get another one in 2025 with any luck.
But what they're saying is rather than them
doing nine months of animating, releasing the serial,
And then only when it's kind of gone out the door, do they even start work on the next
one?
They could be getting one started and then beginning to work on the next one because
they are reusing some of the assets.
I mean, not in this case, but we've, we've seen that discussed before.
You know, if you're, if they're doing multiple trout and cereals and they did a whole number
of them, was it season five or six?
I forget.
Um, five, I think.
And so, you know, rumors, of course.
What else do we get when we're talking about Doctor Who?
But that would be quite exciting if we were going to get a slightly faster throughput
on the animations.
Not least because it might mean that the Blu-ray box sets get more of the stories animated by
the time they come out.
Yeah, because I'm still ticked off that someday I'm going to have to buy the Blu-ray set again
with the crusade on it or you're going to have to buy the crusade separately i don't know that
they're going to release the set again of course they will i think you're going to have to just
stick stick the crusade in there on your shelf between one and two or two and three and it's
going to stick out like a sawsome that is that is just that is not acceptable fucker you're gonna
but actually anyway this is going to release it okay i cannot tell you how many times i've
bought Sharder before I got the copy that's in the box set. And I was still happy about
it because they'd broken Sharder up into six episodes. So, you know, every cloud has a
silver lining.
I haven't re-bought the Power of the Daleks new animation.
No, I didn't either actually. Yeah, I might end up buying it one day if it weren't for
the fact that I know that there will be a either that version or an even better version
and even more updated version when the Blu-ray set comes out for season four.
Yeah.
Okay.
So I'm just going to, I'm going to add here, uh, let's take a look at season three of Dr.
Who.
We've got galaxy four now.
We do not have a mission to the unknown.
We don't have the myth makers.
Dalek master plan.
That's a biggie.
Yeah.
That is a biggie.
The massacre.
You don't have the arc.
We do the celestial toy maker.
We do now the gunfighters.
Woo.
Hope they animate that someday.
And so we've got the savages and yes, the next one is the war machines.
And then it's the smugglers and then the 10th plan.
And it's, it's the smugglers, isn't it?
that when they animate that, doesn't that pretty much wrap up season four?
Well that's because actually season four I was when I was talking earlier I was
saying there's that sequence of Troughton animation starting with the
Macra Terra faceless ones evil of the Daleks that's season four. Season four is
the smugglers, 10th planet, power of the Daleks, the Highlanders. Oh the Highlanders
we haven't got. Yeah. Underwater, moon base, Macra Terra, faceless ones, evil of the
So yeah, if they could just crank out the smugglers and the Highlanders, which sounds
to me like two they could be working on at the same time.
Although I don't know, is the Smugglers set in space or is the Smugglers set down near
the coast of Cornwall?
Something like that.
Where Patrick McGowan was running around as the Spectre or whatever it was.
Scarecrow.
It's going to be a complicated one and the Highlanders is going to be a complicated one.
We know from comments that Charles Norton has made that they're not as intimidated by those episodes as they were when the project started.
So I wouldn't rule them out at all.
Now, I'd really like to, I'd really like to see them all. All of them, even the historicals from all the old ones.
Just do them. Sell me the Blu-ray. I'll buy it.
I want to mention one more thing that's not animation, not the story, another aspect of
the production, but I want to mention it because I want to know if you noticed it, because
it's one of those things that we tend to talk about, which was the soundtrack.
Okay, two things came to mind.
The music sucks and the sound quality was pretty good.
The sound quality was good and I've seen Mark Ayres talking about the fact that as they
go on through this project, the remaining stories are more and more dodgy.
So even the work that he had to do cleaning this up was quite extensive.
But then again, as we've kind of talked about the animation technology advancing, so do
the tools that are available and you know from the kind of AI tools that you can use
in producing this podcast that you can clean up things relatively easily now without really
having to touch them yourself when previously it would have been an incredibly time-consuming
manual job that would have been too expensive to do.
Now, I've taken some of the old podcasts where we were on Skype and only had recordings from
my side of the computer, so Ben sounded like he was on the end of a tin can. And surprisingly
good rebuilds of those have been possible, and I'm not Mark Ayres, you know? And he's
a pro with a whole lot more at his disposal than me.
I, I, I wanted to say that I, I really liked the music for this serial.
So I'm curious why you thought it was rubbish.
I only noticed it twice in both places.
I, I can't say it was intrusive.
I only heard it like twice and both times I heard it, it was like, eh, eh, eh.
So the rest of it maybe was there and I was just like, yeah, whatever.
Because I liked it as music, but I've said before that I regard a successful score as
being one that you don't notice. And I noticed this.
Yeah, I'm not a night camper.
Didn't, but yeah, well, yeah, but except that's the reason you're saying you didn't like it
because it was intrusive. And I'm saying, I think it was a problem that it was intrusive
because it didn't quite fit, didn't quite fit the story.
So I enjoyed the music,
but I didn't like it as a score for the serial.
- Yeah, I'm definitely in the old school camp
that you gotta have good music and it's gotta fit,
but there are producers and it's a very common thing
in modern times.
It's like, if you, I think the,
in when "Star Trek The Next Generation" was out,
the producer, Rick Berman was like,
if you can't hear there better not be a beat.
And I don't want to hear it.
It's like, why bother then?
You can't hear it. Why bother?
It doesn't it doesn't work in my mind.
And it's just extraneous noise
because you're not conscious of it.
You're it's it's playing in.
It's it's a subconscious element
that affect your interpretation of the story in the way
that Nina's moving hair affects.
It does, because little things like twiddling the fingers, it's the absence of these things
that you notice, not their presence.
They don't appear to you because they seem right.
And that's what an effective score does.
It fits.
I'm going to need to do some scientific research on this.
I need a paper.
I need peer-reviewed papers on this, because I don't buy it.
I don't buy it.
I've reminded myself of one other aspect of the animation I meant to mention as contrasted to
the recon which was mentioning Nenina and whether you were aware of Nenina's costume
being different in the animation. Nope because they don't know what her costume looked like in
the show. She was more like the prototype savage for Leela, but she wears a sort of
knee-length dress in the animation, which I assume is a kind of 2025 choice that in
the 60s and 70s, they were going for the more scantily clad savage, for the female savages
only obviously, but when it came to animating it was one of those things where they decided
they didn't want to kind of reflect the decisions that were made at the time. I think there's
another one in this because I find it hard.
How about fewer moving parts?
Sorry?
Fewer moving parts for when you're animating.
Well, possibly, but there's another kind of example of this as I understand it, which
feel like I could see on the recons because they're black and white,
but apparently the elders were bronzed up,
for want of a better way of putting it. Their faces were colored bronze,
and that hasn't come across in the animation.
-Huh. Well, that goes with your white savages thing, doesn't it?
-Indeed.
-Because the savages definitely looked pretty pale.
-Yes, and I don't know whether that was intended to be because they'd been drained of energy
and they were looking more pale.
In the animation, they were looking a bit gray,
which I wondered was, was that supposed to be an artifact
of having been drained?
But I didn't really notice it changing
when they were drained, so I wasn't sure.
- Oh yeah, I'm looking at a image of, wow,
that is a really low res image.
Okay, yeah, Nanina's definitely got legs in there.
Yeah, okay.
- I don't know, I don't know.
I mean, I haven't watched any of the behind the scenes material on it.
So maybe we'll get, you know, like in the Abominable Snowman, we have chosen to portray
the Tibetans as looking like Tibetans as opposed to white people in face.
So I find it hard to believe that they would change her skirt though for that because never
underestimate the depths of casual sexism present even today.
I mean, I don't know.
I don't...
If you make a movie and it was set in the 60s, you wouldn't hide a miniskirt.
This is true, but this is not set in the 60s.
But in a way it is.
I mean, it is the 60s.
I can see how you wouldn't put that in blackface, but yeah.
I think the argument for saying it's not gratuitous is saying it was the 60s when it was gratuitous.
In other words, it's not gratuitous because it is gratuitous, and that's a difficult argument
to make.
It's hardly gratuitous now, though.
Well, it's gratuitous in the sense it's unnecessary.
Why should she be in a skimpy costume?
Is it any more logical?
Is it any more practical?
By the way, what are the men wearing?
I mean, I have no clue what the men were wearing on their legs.
Were they wearing pants or were they also draped over in animal skins?
They're wearing what we call trousers.
Like a toga.
Oh, okay.
That's kind of odd.
I'm not sure.
I didn't see their legs.
I don't know whether they were wearing togas or whatever, but they were not wearing briefs,
let me put it like that.
Okay.
Yeah, pants here is trousers there. But in other words, are they actually wearing animal skins?
Or are they wearing a pair of trousers, if you will? It's like, which wouldn't make sense.
Definitely some skins and things. But on the other hand, I think even even in the animation,
there were some bare shoulders on the women, whereas the the chaps all seem to have proper
shirts of some sorts.
So, uh, I, I think you'd have to argue that you were deliberately trying to
recreate the 1960s gratuities in which case, you know, what's your argument
for not doing bronze face if you're going to be offensive, tease a whole thing.
All right.
So I think if I've got this right next week, I can tell you right now, we're
Going to be starting our coverage of the 2025 season of Dr.
Who.
Well, Hey, yeah.
So we wanted to start it off with a good one, the savages.
And, uh, and then, and then we've got, um, what is it?
Eight weeks of eight weeks of yeah.
Yeah.
We shall see.
Fingers crossed, fingers crossed, fingers crossed.
All right, Simon.
Thank you for joining me.
It's a pleasure as always, and listeners, I do hope you'll join us all again next time on Fusion Patrol.
You've been listening to Fusion Patrol. Thanks for listening.
If you've enjoyed this episode, we hope you'll consider supporting us at buymeacoffee.com/fusionpatrol
or patreon.com/fusionpatrol. For our monthly Patreon subscribers, we're currently running a
special series on Babylon 5. Come join the conversation and find other content at FusionPatrol.com.
And we're back on social media, where you can also follow us on Mastodon and the Fetiverse.
Our address is at podcast@fusionpatrol.com.
Our music is "Fight the Future" by Amberwolf.
This has been a Lone Locust Production.