I am a child of the 80's. I mean, I was born in 1968 and was certainly present during the 70's, but I was a teenager throughout the 80's and that is where my pop culture heart will always find anchor. I don't have to remind you that, being the heart of Cold War and with Reagan driving the politics here in the States and Thatcher driving the politics in the U.K,, both post-apocalyptic and dystopian themes were ascendant in genre entertainment. From quality films like The Road Warrior and Brazil to trashy cash-ins like Solarbabies or Cyborg, my entertainment was filled with pessimistic visions of the near future. I saw news reports recently about a study that basically said that the music that you love when you are 14 becomes the foundation of the music you love for the rest of your life -- you certainly might expand your interests, but more likely than not you will frequently find yourself back enjoying the same styles that tickled your brain back then. I think that applies not just to music, but to your other entertainment preferences as well.

Which is a long-winded way of saying, holy crap but today's viewing of Doctor Who on the Time Treadmill played on my teenage neurons like a maestro at Carnegie Hall. So let's talk about that.

Paradise Towers - Parts 1 & 2

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

There is a particular type of madness that British writers really seem to excel at, far beyond us Americans. Here in the U.S. our entire psyche is wrapped up in rugged individualism, whereas the British  have stiff-upper-lip-ism and commitment to duty and class. And so Great Britain has a proud tradition of characters who are slavishly devoted to maintaining appearances and following the rules even at the expense of reality. At least as far back as the delusional Artilleryman in War of the Worlds, spinning grandiose plans of defending humanity from underground cities while having barely dug ten feet of tunnel, you have characters whose entire sense of being is a delicate house of cards waiting to collapse. 

In Paradise Towers the Seventh Doctor and Mel go to visit a utopian housing estate constructed of the finest architecture and amenities (including a much-advertised glorious swimming pool on the top floor), only to find a dystopian claustrophobic nightmare populated by the insane. There are rival gangs of color-coded teenage punk girls, there are uniformed security guards struggling to maintain order, there are sweetly kind but cannibalistic elderly matrons living in their simple flats, and there are homicidal maintenance robots roaming the halls. Oh, and there is a self-proclaimed hero, apparently the only man in the building older than a teenager but younger than middle-aged, who spends 100% of his time boasting about his bravery and heroism, and spends 0% of his time actually doing anything heroic.

And then, the sweet sauce that makes it all come together perfectly:  a pitch-perfect synth--pop score that underscores everything brilliantly without being repetitive or overstated, composed by Keff McCulloch on very short notice after John Nathan-Turner rejected the original composer's work for the story.

The essential story is that at some point after the titular Paradise Towers were built there was a war that took away all of the men of military age. The men too old to send off to battle were placed in charge of security, with a rigid rule book. Robotic machines were built to maintain the property and repair damage. The women were left to be kept safe in their homes. The young girls? They wound up in different factions of graffiti-painting street gangs. Meanwhile, down in the basement, another machine lurks and pulls the strings. The Doctor and Mel come striding into this mad house, and are swept up in the consequences.

Sylvester McCoy is absolutely on point in this story. No more aggressive malapropisms, just wit and curiosity tinged with a steely darkness. His experience in clowning comes through occasionally in little bits of slight-of-hand, and in his sly facial expressions. He is nothing short of hypnotic to watch, and it is fantastic to see him fully come into his own so quickly.

Mel is... Mel. She screams a lot, and runs around a lot, and at the end of the second episode she is about to be devoured by a pair of very sweet old ladies who happen to also be cannibals. Poor dears. As much as I might be cheering for them to succeed, I don't suppose they will. More's the pity.

Writer Stephen Wyatt knocks this one out of the park. He was specifically brought in by Producer John Nathan-Turner, who wanted someone who had never written for the series before. Wyatt had been a fan of the First and Second Doctors, and wanted to write a story that harkened back to that era where there was no heavy continuity or backstory needed. The Doctor and companion(s) arrive in the middle of a situation, encounter conflict, resolve conflict, end of story. No old enemies to remember, no Time Lord mythology to dissect, just an interesting environment populated with interesting characters. I am kind of bummed to see that he only wrote one other story for the show (The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, which I will get to in about two weeks), but I do hope that this story helps set  the tone for the remainder of McCoy's run.

Even the diminished budget does not negatively impact this story. Where the previous one was just a mess of bad creature effects and cheap sets, the nature of the environment of Paradise Towers seems to be more conducive to the available production funds. 

In a lot of ways, the story and environment remind me of something I would have expected to come out of the classic 2000 A.D. magazine from whence Judge Dredd sprang into being. Paradise Towers could very easily be a self-contained mega-block in Mega City One, populated with exactly the same kind of manic crazies that swarmed those pages. Once again, an aspect of the story that just coddled my happy little reptilian brain in all the right ways.

I just love this story so much!!

STATS:

Doctor(s): Seventh
Companion(s): Mel
Episode(s): Paradise Towers - Parts 1 & 2
Steps Walked: 7,505 today, 2,391,714 total
Distance Walked: 4.31 miles today, 1,237.70 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 7 today, 21 total
Weight: 245.02 lbs (five day moving average), net change -62.28 lbs