OK, so the reviews I've previously written for Mekel's page have made it pretty clear that this is not only one of my least favourite Nyssa stories, but that its success with fans ended the character-led revival that seasons 18 and 19 had acheived and meant that a character as different and intriguing in her own right as Nyssa would never be considered again. Instead 'Doctor Who' attempted to do glossy shot-'em-up sci-fi with cardboard characters and ended up looking cheap and silly - just the opportunity that the higher echelons of 80s BBC management wanted to ditch the series.
But does that mean that Earthshock is bad in its own right? I finally got my rear in gear and bought the video, and to my consternation, found that it wasn't. Episode one is actually really nicely paced and it rips off all the good bits of 'Alien' with a breathtaking lack of subtlety. And it has some wonderful regular cast moments - Davison's 'E-space is another universe, there isn't a taxi service that runs to and fro' still makes me chuckle, and when Nyssa and Tegan do a marvellous job of persuading the Doctor to make it up with Adric, and he leaves with the words, 'But I'm not promising anything', there is a lovely look between Sutton and Fielding with a marvellous sotto voce 'Of course not, Doctor' from Sutton.
But then the cybes turn up, the androids are suddenly very easy to destroy, so its off to the next menace, the bomb (my award for the most unthreatening looking bomb in the history of TV), then off to the freighter for lots of wandering around corridors and pretty naff (and verrrrryyyy slllowwwwwww) battles. Things only perk up when the Cybes get on board the bridge and Davison gets the opportunity to do some acting - stuff that nonesense about 'well prepared meals', I'm talkng about the scene where the Leader orders Tegan to be destroyed - simple bit of sound effects and some great acting - a great statement of the Doctor's compassion for the individual.
Of course, as a recent DWM stated it, it is impossible to recover the growing sensation at the time in ep 4 that Adric was really going to cop it. You, the viewer, really believed that they wouldn't dare do this to a regular character, and of course, by dying, the vulnerability of the characters that Bidmead had been trying to inject was finally writ large - for the next few years, we never knew if Nyssa or Tegan were going to make it through their designated last story - something that was quite effectively played on by the production team. And yes, Mekel's quite right, that last scene, because Matthew Waterhouse has put on his anorak and is safely out of the building, is a fantastic one - one that had a pathos that no regeneration ever managed. The three regulars do a wonderful job (and I bet there was a lot of their input and Peter Grimwade's - not Saward's or JNT's) - Sutton turns from the screen silently so we are reminded of the appalling losses that the character has now suffered. Tegan's unwillingness to accept what she's just seen is marvellously portrayed - with Davison almost totally unmoving - then Nyssa reaches out to comfort Tegan and her mask of bravado collapses for the first time since 'Logopolis' - the only sound in the final shot is the two girls crying quietly - hell, it's good, because its so underplayed - an effective contrast to most of the noisy rubbish of the previous 3 episodes.
So there's my verdict - episode one, smashing (if plagiarised). Last moments of episode four, quite sublime for the series. What a pity that most of what came in between is total pants. Oh well, more of that next month when Time-Flight comes out!
