The Solar Penquin review of Deadly Assassin debunked

>Ok, so I'm a little bit late, but here's my review of Deadly Assassin,
>and why I *still* think it's crap...
>
>First, I'd better come clean about a couple of prejudices. I don't like
>the futuristic, outer-space stories set on alien worlds. They're too
>science-fiction-y for my taste.

Uh-huh...

> I much prefer the historicals and
>psuedo-historicals. Also, I don't the Hinchcliffe era. (In fact I'd
>list it as the third worst era, right down there with McCoy and
>Pertwee.) It's too serious; not nearly enough comedy in it for me.

Exactly why so many true science fiction fans like it. Not everything
should be a giggle fest.

>So, as you can imagine, this Hinchcliffe-era story set on an alien planet,
>is never going to make it onto my top ten list, no matter how good it is.

Ah, a true open mind...

>But I'll try my best to put these prejudices to one side, and judge
>the story entirely on its own merits...

Which you have basically admitted you can't possibly do.

>The biggest problem is that it's set on Gallifrey even though there's no
>time travel in this story, so it doesn't gain anything by being set on
>the planet of the *Time* Lords. It could just as easily be set on any
>bland , generic planet. Yes, alright, so it does introduce other
>aspects of Gallifreyan mythos (e.g. the Matrix, the Castellan, etc.) but
>that's the point: it *introduces* them, and it could just as easily have
>introduced them as the mythos of ABGP ("any bland, generic planet")
>leaving the Time Lord planet to be free for stories about time travel.

Whaaaa? This makes no sense. It has every reason to be set on
Gallifrey and there is no prerequisite that a Gallifreyan story need
have time travel as a main plot element. This is a downright silly
argument.

>Even worse, here we have a detective story -- a murder mystery, no
>less -- set on a planet of time travellers, but not making any use of
>time travel! Just imagine the possibilities for a time travelling
>murder mystery... (E.g. Your father's will leaves all his fortune to
>your younger brother, so you travel back in time to kill your brother
>*before* your father dies. How are the police going to solve this
>apparently motiveless crime? Or better still, make sure your brother's
>never born in the first place. How will the police even prove that a
>crime's been committed?) There's all sorts of potential here, but this
>story just wastes it all!

You just show why you are not good at thinking in true science fiction
terms. It's one of the first laws that Time Lords cannot travel back
and forth in time on their own planet. You can very easily create
paradoxes left and right. You really need to let go of this thing
about time and being on Gallifrey and there really should be some time
travel thing, etc. It's a non starter of an argument.

>Anyway, let's look at it in detail. And just in case there's someone
>who hasn't seen it before...
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>Episode one is plotless runaround of capture, escape and running up and
>down corridors all for no reason at all. Well, alright, there's that
>weird scene right at the start where we keep cutting back and forth
>between the Doctor in the TARDIS and a fish-eye lens view of crowdds of
>people milling about. Somehow we're supposed to guess ...

Guess? Why guess? It's not hard to figure out.

For no reason at all? I beg to differ.

>...that he's haviong
>a premonition of the President's murder, and that the Doctor's
>motivation in the rest of episode one is to prevent the murder
>happening. Of course, he could equally well be receiving a telepathic
>message showing something that had *already* happened and explaining why
>his TARDIS has been summoned back to Gallifrey. Or maybe he was having
>a flashback to an untelevised adventure, showing us what happend the
>last time he visited his homeworld. Or dozens of other possible
>explanations. Unless you just happen to guess the right one, none of
>his actions in the rest of episode one make any sense at all, and you'll
>have to wait for next week's episode to find out!

Why does everything need to be neatly laid in front of you and
explained right away? Sometimes the whole point of having a
cliffhanger serial is that the audience doesn't have all the pieces
and the anticipation of finding out what happened gives you all the
reason to tune in next week.

All those so called dozens of other explanations are pointless once
you see episode two, so chill.

>Anyway, despite the fact the the TARDIS received an official recall
>signal from Gallifrey, the Gallifreyans seem to treat it's arrival as
>unauthorised. If being summoned there by an official recall signal
>isn't sufficient authority, then what is!?!

But Goth could have easily sent it without telling anyone else or
without anyone else knowing, in fact that point would be important for
making it look like the Doctor had come back for his own reasons not
known by the higher ups.

>The guards arrive and
>immediately identify the TARDIS as a Type Forty, just by looking at it.
>So how does a Type Forty looking like a police box look any different
>from any other type of time machine looking like a police box!?!

For the same reason they can recognize their fellow Time Lords after
they regenerate. Remember, they aren't like you, they have more
abilities than you, and simple Tardis camouflage may work on you but
not them. Watch Time Monster (if you must) to see how easily the
Doctor recognizes the Master's Tardis, so you could say the precedent
had long before been set.

>But
>it's a good thin they idenitified it so easily, because it lets us learn
>learn that the Doctor's TARDIS wasn't "de-registered"; no, it was
>removed from the register instead. Erm... isn't that what
>"de-registered" means? How hard would it have been for Robert Holmes to
>come up with a word like "destroyed", or "demolished", or "turned into
>scrap metal", or almost anything _except_ "de-registered"!?!

Hammering points like this into the ground are tiresome.

Removing a registration is like it was never registered to begin with
while de-registering is taking something out of commission with the
records of it's existence still available. Let's move on.

>Ok, so we've got the Doctor in the TARDIS, which is surrounded by
>guards. And instead of just dematerialising it and landing on the
>opposite side of the capitol, he starts the elaborate game of capture
>and escape. It ends up with him back inside his TARDIS, which is
>surrounded by guards. Great way to pad out the episode there, Robert.
>Shame you couldn't do it by introducing an actual bit of plot or
>something like that.

The place he ultimately wants to be is in the Panoptigon or close to
it, so the cat and mouse game suits the Doctor and Master's separate
plans. He can't get there if he is captured.

>Luckily a little bit of plot soon arrives, in the shape of Chancellor
>Goth, who claims that he wants to look at the outside of an old Type
>Forty. (Once again, how does a Type Forty looking like a police box
>look any different from any other type of time machine looking like a
>police box!?!) And then he decides to have it trasmatted to the museum.
>Without even consulting the museum's curators about whether they even
>*want* it there.

You complain about padding. How about adding an entire scene with
museum curators squabbling about where to put it. That would be
compelling television, wouldn't it. Maybe the Chancellor has the
authority to do exactly what he did, and nothing more need be read
into it.

>And, more importantly, the Castellan agrees, instead
>of pointing out that the Chancellary Guard equivalent of a SOCO or CSI
>team hasn't done any forensic tests on the TARDIS yet.

And what tests would those be? No crime has yet been committed bar
the unofficial landing. Are you asking for more padding here?

>Yes, with hindsight we know that Goth has an ulterior motive for his
>actions, but the other Time Lords don't know that yet. From their point
>of view, it should look like he's just doing pointless, stupid things
>for no reason at all.

How do you *know* this? Even if I were to grant you that some of
those things appear pointless (and I'm not), higher ups can be
eccentric and do things on a whim. No one was given any reason to
question Goth's actions because he wasn't doing anything that appeared
peculiar.

>Yet, they all act like his actions and ideas make
>some kind of sense! They even violate proper police procedure to have a
>vital piece of evidence from a criminal investigation left in a museum
>and forgotten, just to please the random whim of a slimy politician.

Vital how? Evidence of what? Forgotten, I don't think so.

>If
>the Time Lords really are a race of bureaucrats, as fan myth suggests,
>they should be more like Sir Humphrey Appleby, and keep on following
>their own procedures, no matter what the politicians say. (In fact the
>fan myth is wrong. Far from being too bureaucratic, the real problem
>is that Time Lords simply aren't bureaucratic enough!)

How do you know what their procedures are? You keep thinking in terms
of Earth police. Stop that and you are on your way.

>So, the guards transmat the TARDIS to a museum. But instead of sending
>it to an exhibition of veteran and vintage vehicles, they send it to the
>exhibition of ceremonial robes.

Could you see the entire room? You really don't know what all was in
there.

Maybe that is other end of that transmat. You assume they can put it
exactly anywhere they want. Maybe that's where the bulk of the
museums exhibits get put before the crew positions it exactly where
they want it.

For ***'s sake, did you want them to build another fucking set to
satisfy this lame point? All the Doctor had to do in this case would
be to walk however far it would be from the vehicle exhibit to the
costume exhibit. You really are reaching.

>Wow... the Doctor (and Goth) were
>really lucky that the most incompetent operator ever just happened to be
>at the transmat controls today! Once in the museum, the Doctor steals
>the Gold Usher's robes. The Castellan soon finds out, but doesn't radio
>the guards on the Panopticon doors and tell them to keep out a stranger
>dressed in the very distinctive robes of the Gold Usher. No, instead he
>just seems to take the Doctor's entry to the Panopticon as a fait
>acompli. And so it soon is.

It's been a long while since I've seen this and I can't remember
exactly what happened. But the Doctor changed robes with another Time
Lord, so even if they were looking for him at the door, it's unlikely
they would have been able to spot him dressed in another color.

>Then, finally, after a whole episode of these pointless, random things
>happening for no reason at all, it now looks like the Doctor has
>pointlessly, randomly killed the President for no reason at all. No
>change there, then. But apparently we're supposed to find this somehow
>more shocking than all other random, pointless things we've been
>watching for the past 25 minutes. No, sorry.

I thought it was a good cliffhanger. It fit in nicely with the
visions he saw at the beginning of the episode. Hey, we didn't have
to wait until next week to find out what those visions were, now did
we?

There was nothing random or pointless about them. He left the note to
try to warn them while at the same time try himself to save the
president.

>And so on to episode two. And, for a few minutes it looks like the
>story might be improving. The guards finally mange to show some signs
>of competence, and arrest the Doctor. He's interrogated and explains
>what he was doing throughout last week's episode. And it all starts to
>make some kind of sense. Until... the Castellan and the other Time
>Lords say that premonitions are impossible. Ummm... They're *TIME*
>Lords. Isn't it possible that the Doctor had this vision when he was in
>the *future*, after the murder had already happened?

The Time Lord time line is supposed to be unique, otherwise things
could get far too complicated. You aren't supposed to be able to
travel to Gallifrey's past or future.

They say those kind of premonitions are impossible because they don't
understand how it was done.

> Once again, this
>story would make more sense if it were set on Any Bland, Generic Planet
>instead of a world full of *time* *travellers*!!!

Nope.

>Goth wants the Doctor tried, convicted and executed before the election,
>because it's traditional for the incoming president to pardon all
>political prisoners. Waitaminute... the Doctor hasn't been convicted of
>anything yet, so there's nothing he can be pardoned for. He's not
>officially a prisoner, just a suspect who happens to be in police
>detention. He can't be released with the convicted prisoners, so
>there's no reason to rush the trial at all. Of course, with hindsight,
>we know that Goth is just talking bull*** because he has his own
>reasons for wanting to rush the trial. But the other Time Lords don't
>know that, and yet not one of them says "Excuse me, Goth, but you're
>talking bull***."

Of course he's a prisoner who's on trial and about to be convicted of
the crime and executed in 3 hours, before a new president was to be
elected. How did you miss that? He then gets 24 hours to try and
figure out who really did it.

>BTW we're told the reason for the election is that the President died
>without naming a successor. Well, he didn't say any names out loud, but
>surely his successor would have been named in that list of retirement
>honours he'd written. Remember? The one that was going to give
>everybody some surprises to think about. And why aren't the Castellan
>and his team investigating that list. Even if they think the Doctor was
>the killer, the list could give some clues as to who hired him! (Or at
>least tipped them off that Goth wasn't the President's chosen
>successor,) But such a potentially useful piece of evidence is never
>mentioned at all!

That may have just been his speech. We don't really know if there
were actual names on it or not. Plus it could have been pinched by
one of the Master's goons. Or the list could be irrelevant due to the
death of the president and Gallifreyan law.

I will admit that it would have been nice to have a line added to the
dialog which dealt with the piece of paper. Hey, you finally scored a
small point, good on you.

>Anyway, the Doctor takes advantage of a very contrived loophole in the
>plot... ops, I mean in Gallifrey's constitution, and gets himself
>released. He then shows the Castellan that he couldn't have killed the
>President because the gun he used had faulty sights. And, somehow,
>no-one in the Chancellery forensics team had spotted this when they
>examined the gun! Even odder, the Castellan accepts the new evidence
>completely, not once even wondering if the Doctor could have killed the
>President and then damaged the sights afterwards!

Probably because the Catellan has his doubts about the Doctor's guilt
from the very beginning of the investigation. The fact is the
Castellan has a number of people under him who are supposed to be
doing the leg work, any number of them could be hindering the
investigation on behave of the Master to speed things along.

>Never mind. Another lead soon turns up. The killer must have been seen
>by the television camera covering the ceremony. And, for no reason at
>all, the only recording is still untouched inside the camera. The TV
>company hasn't been showing highlights of the assassination in its news
>bulletins. No-one recorded the live broadcast on DVD or good old VCR.

Stop thinking in terms of 2005 CNN broadcasts. We are talking about
Gallifrey which has a completely different society.

>The guards didn't take the film, hoping it would add to the evidence
>against the Doctor. And, strangest of all, Goth and the Master haven't
>even bothered to retrieve this damming piece of evidence against them.
>The Master literally only steals it when the Doctor and friends arrive
>to get it for themselves. What's he been doing all this time? Sitting
>around, twiddling his thumbs and whistling a happy tune to himself!?!

I will grant you this one, your first decent sized point. I just
don't think it occurred to anyone to check it. I was a camera that
probably wasn't used much because of it's distance from the subject
matter and maybe Gallifrey hadn't had a Zepruder moment before.

>Oh well, at least they now know the Master's involved, and they soon learn
>that he's got access to the Matrix. The Doctor goes in after him,
>and...

>But I'm running out of time. I'll post my thoughts on episodes three
>and four later. We're only two episodes in, and the story's already a
>complete, ugly mess! And the really frightening thing is... It's going
>to get worse!

Complete and ugly to you, maybe. Congratulations, many paragraphs and
1.5 points made trying to criticize a 29 year old piece of children's
science fiction television. WELL DONE Hil... ah... Solar Penguin.

.

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