The base under siege
style of storytelling for Doctor Who, while introduced at the tail end of the
William Hartnell era with The Tenth
Planet, was popular in the Patrick Troughton era. It feels just a bit odd that for the third
release in The Early Adventures, Ian Potter wrote The Bounty of Ceres which takes the base under siege formula and
applies it to a story that could never have been produced for the television
series, the effects would have been laughable if attempted, Hartnell wouldn’t
have done any of these stunts for John Wiles, the villain would have been a
disembodied voice, and some of the sets would be models with black curtains to
emulate space. Yet with this breaking
the idea that the Early Adventures being a continuation of the Lost Stories,
but the story is just so good.
The basic premise of the
story starts sometime after The Time
Meddler with the Doctor fiddling with that part from the Monk’s TARDIS,
which causes it to crash into a spaceship which is failing. The TARDIS is lost and the Doctor, Steven,
and Vicki have to try and save the crew, uncovering conspiracy and a villain
that is an abstract concept. Now I’m
going to go a bit into the villain who only gets maybe twenty to thirty
lines. Lisa Bowerman goes uncredited as
the villain and while the voice is obviously her voice in the role, the
presence of the villain is felt as you almost feel the cold of space as there
are scenes where it breaks into the ship.
The villain is a real threat much like the alien in Midnight, one of the best episodes of the New Series. This is what you need to evoke when it comes
to telling a story as Midnight is a
story famous for claustrophobic atmosphere and fear, while that isn’t always a
scary sense coming from the story, the tense atmosphere just oozes from each
scene. It’s actually Lisa Bowerman who
is directing this story that allows the story to have just a tense atmosphere
overall which mixes with Potter’s excellent script to make a good story.
Peter Purves as Steven
and the First Doctor steals the show in this outing. Purves admits in the interviews at the end
that he isn’t really impersonating William Hartnell, but doing what Richard
Hurndall did in The Five Doctors. What he does is emulate the spirit of the
character to create a performance of nostalgia for the 1960s and something
fresh and new for the character. It even
puts the always wonderful performances from William Russell to shame. The Doctor in this script is embodied by
Purves and Potter as that mischievous character we saw in The Time Meddler and The Myth
Makers, my favorite Hartnell stories mainly because of his
characterization. Steven is also really
interesting in this one as while he isn’t getting some crazy background but is
self-sufficient as he understands the guiding principles of the science of the
story. He’s the man of action in the
story when one of the cliffhangers sees him almost asphyxiated. Maureen O’Brien as Vicki is also great as
while there is an age difference between her and the other characters, she is
on equal footing in comparison with the Doctor and Steven.
To summarize, The Bounty of Ceres is a nice mixing of
styles when it comes to the old and the new.
It perfectly encapsulates the old 1960s base under siege style of story
with a budget and scope of a modern day story.
Purves and O’Brien steal the show in this one for their characters and I
could hear them narrate all day. The
problems come in the fact that it is a bit too formulaic for my liking and on
the whole the supporting cast really is nothing to write home about but for
what it is it’s enjoyable. 85/100.
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