Month: January 2021

Episode 6: The Aztecs

/ Kari / Leave a comment

Today, we look at The Aztecs, a famous serial and Josh’s favorite of the Hartnell era.  Are its awkward brownface and excessively clothed Aztecs dealbreakers, or is all that outweighed by the Doctor’s first love interest, Barbara’s steely determination and Ian’s hilarious chicken outfit?

Daleks Aren’t Robots!? is a podcast in which two Whovian friends take two non-Whovians on a deep dive through the show from the very beginning.

Theme: Garage – Monplaisir

What we showed Kari: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ysa7jRW-B7w

Podcast Contents Include

Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though.  – Kari

SUMMARY

The Tardis lands in an Aztec tomb, and the group can’t get back into the tomb once they leave it because the door shuts. Barbara is mistaken for the reincarnation of Yetaxa, an Aztec god-priest. Luckily, the Aztecs are one of her academic specialties and she can play along and stall for time. Things get political, but fire-free, when Barbara tries to stop human sacrifice, Ian wears a Battle Chicken outfit, and the Doctor gets engaged, but in the end they find a way back into the temple AND the TARDIS, and escape.

GUEST STARS

  1. The Aztecs. There are a lot of them, and many receive some characterization, good or bad or some of each. I have read a little bit about the Aztecs but not a ton, so I don’t know how accurate it all is, but while there is a little bit of smugness about how “civilized” they aren’t compared to the Doctor and his time traveling team, it’s honestly not as bad as I thought it was going to be.
  2. The Doctor gets a LOVE INTEREST! It’s Cameca, an Aztec wise woman who gives good advice to others and knows a lot about botany. She’s very intelligent, pretty, age-appropriate, really keen on him, and while initially it appears he’s just buttering her up to get help back to the TARDIS, he keeps the token she gave him when he leaves. She even manages to get engaged to him, though it’s an accident on his part.
  3. There are two baddies, an evil high priest named Tlotoxl, who I mostly called Evil Priest, and Ixta, a warrior that Evil Priest sets up as Ian’s enemy. Evil Priest is SUPER over the top and just chews every speck of scenery ever. He doesn’t believe Barbara is a reincarnation of Yetaxa, and sees the strangers as political threats to his power. Ixta wants to command the armies instead of Ian.
  4. There’s also a good priest, Autloc, who does believe Barbara is Yetaxa, and even when he’s not sure, he’s generally presented as a decent person. In the end he loses his faith and goes to wander in the woods, which is sad, and it is presented as such.

THE SETTING

  1. The setting is earth! And an actual place in actual history.
  2. There are multiple sets for multiple locations in this episode, and both the sets and the costumes look pretty good for the most part, apart from the hilarious Battle Chicken Ian and the Puma Man outfit Ixta wears.
  3. However, all the outfits include pants, which is hilarious. These are the most clothed Aztecs who have ever existed.
  4. They are also, apparently, all white. Yikes on trikes. >.<
  5. Susan really gets the short end of the stick in this episode. She’s in a tent going to Aztec school for much of the episode, and then imperils the party by not agreeing to an arranged marriage with the next sacrificial victim due to die in a couple days. He honestly didn’t seem that bad, I’m not saying she should have agreed but she didn’t even try to stall for time by asking to think about it or anything. Susan’s not this dumb, show! This is getting frustrating!

THE TEAM

  1. Barbara is the queen of this episode, successfully pretending to be an Aztec priest-goddess.
  2. Not only that but she heads straight for the corpse of Yetaxa to investigate it, identifies where and when they are and lets no one push her around. At one point Evil Priest tries to gatekeep her by asking her about Aztec cosmology but she knows all the answers.
  3. Her motive throughout is preventing the Aztecs from sacrificing people, which for some reason she thinks will stop Cortez from destroying their entire civilization (which is absolutely not correct). She’s really upset when it doesn’t work, because she genuinely loves the culture. Again, a lot less smugness than expected, and they end up not interfering in the indigenous culture (though not from lack of trying).
  4. Ian gets a surprisingly large amount of fighting in this episode, most of which is cheesy and should have the Star Trek fight music playing while it happens. He also gets to wear an INCREDIBLE bird warrior outfit that has feathers everywhere and he looks like an overgrown Pokemon. BATTLE CHICKEN ATTACK! Also Ian can do the Vulcan nerve pinch!
  5. The Doctor gets to woo Cameca, who is presented as pretty wise and daring herself, and he was very flirty. I could ship it, it’s a shame she’s probably not going to come back.
  6. The Doctor also gets at least one comeuppance, when he is deceived into helping Ixta in his fight against Ian, providing some knockout juice to slow Ian down. And at one point he actually DOES apologize to Barbara, a real apology.
  7. But he also turns out to be right in his conflict with Barbara and Ian at the beginning. They CAN’T stop the sacrifices; the societal inertia and religious practices are too much.
  8. Speaking of which, the Doctor is TOTALLY willing to let people be sacrificed in this episode. Zero issues with that, yet again.

THE SHOW

  1. The show is really really reaching already for reasons they can’t get back to the TARDIS. And at the end the TARDIS breaks again. It’s got the same downtime as the transporters on Star Trek, it seems.
  2. They still haven’t fed it. Couldn’t they have gotten a leg or an arm from the Perfect Victim? Surely the Aztecs could spare ONE limb for a hungry time machine!
  3. The Doctor had his first romance on the show, and almost ended up getting married. His eyes almost fell out of his head when he found out he was engaged, but he couldn’t leave Cameca’s ornament behind.

Sources Include

Episode 5: The Keys of Marinus

/ Kari / Leave a comment

Today, down a member, the Daleks Aren’t Robots!? team looks at “The Keys of Marinus,” a much-maligned Doctor Who serial.  Is it truly as bad as some say? What do all the weird references to fascism mean? And what’s with the brain slugs?

Daleks Aren’t Robots!? is a podcast in which two Whovian friends take two non-Whovians on a deep dive through the show from the very beginning.

Theme: Garage – Monplaisir

Podcast Contents Include

Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though.  – Kari

SUMMARY

The TARDIS and crew visit a planet with acid oceans, and they find a monk named Arbitan being attacked by a bunch of goons called Voords who are all wearing wetsuits with handles on the head. Arbitan tells the team he has a machine that can brainwash everyone on the planet into making moral decisions but he hid the keys so the Voords couldn’t use it for evil. He asks them to get the keys back, so they go get them: one from a location where brain slugs have taken over, one from a jungle, one from a frozen cave, one from a city where Ian is framed for murder. They get the keys back but Arbitan was killed by Voords while they were gone, so they blow it up and leave.

THE SETTING

  1. The settings are really the stars in this one and there are MULTIPLE ones.
  2. I love how foreign the world is this time–the glass sand, the deadly acid sea. Never try to go swimming in unfamiliar water, folks!
  3. For a while people kept getting sucked into the building, and I started wondering if it was an oversized gazebo or some other carnivorous masonry monster.
  4. The TARDIS has an invisible force field barrier around it, which turns the cast into mimes and it’s hilarious.
  5. The team is fitted with teleportation watches to zip them around the planet to where each key is, and the plot utilizes them to pretty good effect I think. Although they split the party again.
  6. Each of the settings for the keys is nicely themed. The first is Morpit, which seems to be a luxurious Greco-Roman world but only because giant slugs make everyone think it’s that way by putting stickers on their foreheads. It’s actually a run-down, shabby, nasty place, but Barbara escapes, smashes up the evil brain slugs (which are ADORABLE) and rescues both Altos, Arbitan’s associate, and Sabeetha, Arbitan’s daughter, from the brain slugs. The group splits up because OF COURSE.
  7. The next key location is a jungle filled with human-strangling plants, and it’s through a hidden temple full of boobytraps. They get a fake key here, puzzle out the location of the real one, and escape.
  8. The third place is a snowfield, a scary trapper’s hut, and then an ice cave. They escape from the trapper, who tries to murder them by giving them raw meat so the wolves will attack them, and then tries again by pulling down a bridge across a cave chasm. The group solves the puzzle, retrieves the key and steals their stuff back from the murderous trapper.
  9. The last place is a city, and we see what looks like a jewelry store. Ian immediately gets hit on the head, yay, and framed for murder, boo, forcing the Doctor to defend him in court, and the group to find the key, which was stolen from the jewelry store by the real murderer.

ARBITAN, THE VOORDS & OTHER GUESTS

  1. We need to talk about Arbitan. He ran a machine that made moral decisions for everyone on Marinus and mind-controlled them. NO ONE IN THE GROUP POINTS OUT THAT THIS IS HORRIFYING until the very end, and then it’s still mostly an afterthought! The doctor tells Sabeetha, Arbitan’s daughter: “I don’t believe that man was made to be controlled by machines. Machines can make laws, but they cannot preserve justice. Only human beings can do that. Now I only hope that you’ll carry on his good work, please.”
  2. The Voords wear wetsuits with big rubber handles sticking out of the head, which was hilarious. But. One of the Voords’ wetsuits had a tear in it, and they were completely dissolved by acid, leaving only the wetsuit behind in his tiny coffin-submarine. That is kinda hardcore for a children’s show!
  3. There are several minor characters who get their own subplots. Arbitan’s daughter, Sabeetha, and Altos, Arbitan’s former associate, help find the keys and end up as a couple and it’s cute.
  4. There’s a violent, scary mountain man named Vasor who tries to sexually assault Barbara. He says a lot of scary, unsettling things.
  5. And there’s a whole courtroom of people in the trial episode–they don’t get much time but they all have at least a little personality. I thought they did a nice job considering the number of NPCs in this episode.

THE TEAM

  1. I would say there’s not really a ton of character-building for the Doctor and his team in these episodes, because by this point we know who these people are.
  2. Susan freaks out about the homicidal vines, and Barbara doesn’t believe her, even though Susan is always right.
  3. The Doctor gets to play lawyer, which is fun. He’s surprisingly good at it.
  4. Ian stays cool under pressure, even as he’s about to be executed.

THE SHOW

  1. The TARDIS miniature is freaking adorable! Did they save any of the miniatures from the early show, or are they all lost like the Marco Polo ep?
  2. This time the TARDIS is working but the color TV is broken.
  3. Costuming for the Voords was hilarious. A wetsuit with a big rubber handle coming straight off the head-cover? What prompted that?
  4. A lot of elements from this episode were reused from previous episodes, which you said was to save money. I recognized a hallway and some other stuff, but was there anything prominent I missed?
  5. There’s an attempted sexual assault in this, from Vasor, who is a bad guy, and also you hear another bad guy hit his wife, who later also turns out to be a bad guy. Did anyone complain?

Sources Include