I don't know what to expect or what I hope to gain from this latest detour through the false nostalgia of an imaginary 1970s childhood, but it looks pretty weird. Weird is good.
Unnecessary key:
Series 1 (1979)
Series 2 (1981)
Series 3 (1981)
Series 4 (1982)
Elemental demi-gods are summoned to help children in need when a time warp swallows their parents, or something like that. This pseudoscientific twist on the haunted house story is drowning in atmosphere and the main child actor's surprisingly good. Don't know what to make of the Time Lords yet.
Similar and yet a very different beast to the first serial, the kids' show has prematurely grown up to present a more disturbing ghost story, now firmly in the paranormal vein. Spread over eight parts and three and a half hours total, it's much too long for my millennial attention span to handle, but atmospheric enough to enjoy as background ambience until you have to pay attention at the end.
We swing all the way back to sci-fi as our enigmatic heroes clean up some time meddling from the future. The series is characterised by its low-budget, minimalist locations, but using an apartment block is just boring and the padding's more torturous this time. There's some commendably unsettling imagery, but that flying pillow would have been laughed out of Doctor Who.
99 minutes is a much more appropriate length for these stories. Figures disappearing from photographs and other people getting trapped in their place is exactly the sort of uncanny thing that creeped me the hell out as a child, and this was probably my favourite. It's fun to see Steel getting increasingly fed up with these thankless assignments as they go on too.
This is the only serial with multiple writers, which explains why its psychological stately home murder mystery infidelity plot with a looming threat of biological armageddon feels so cluttered. Despite all that, it still manages to drag on, as they tend to, making the resolution even more of a letdown.
The cramped service station setting feels like they're taking the piss now, and I was glad to see the back of the series until it picked up in the second half, when it turns out that things are not, thankfully, what they seem, and that our aloof anthropomorphic heroes have a personal stake in events for the first time. The ending isn't on the Blake's 7 level, but it's interesting. I wasn't longing for more though.
