Ok, back to my rather rash assertion that no single episode of original Who matches the new ones. (I have to engage with this thread somehow or my head will burst).
I got Robots of Death and yes, I can see that the plot is pretty tight (if a little confused towards the end) and there's a welcome lack the sort of explication that burdened so many JNT stories. Thanks for the tip.
There is a lot of corridor running, though, and a few problems (such as: if these robots really can run so fast, why do they walk everywhere so slowly?).
The effects are pretty bloody good and the costumes are superb (for the time, anyway). A few too many characters, perhaps, but that's a minor niggle.
So, yes, I'll give you that one. I still maintain that the majority of old Who was pretty sloppy (Hinchliffe seems to have had a firmer hand but, even then, stories such as Hand of Fear and Terror of the Zygons have far too much running back and forth, waiting for something to happen) and had a lot of time-filling that RTD doesn't tend to allow (unless it's the increasingly annoying "isn't this great!" exchanges).
I do love old Who - which is why I shall be blubbing again at about 7:55pm this Saturday - but I think it increasingly made the mistake of not knowing who its target audience was, trying too hard to be hardcore SF (how many people understood what the hell was going on in Warrior's Gate when they were kids, for example?) when it was best at sticking to simpler stories like the ones we have now and, yes, Robots of Death (the plot may be complex, but the idea is very simple).
So, my point is that even if RTD is one of the weakest writers, he's a great producer. |
