Written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin
Directed by Norman Stewart

Doctor Who is a British science fiction television series that has been around on and off since 1963. The main character is just known as “The Doctor” and is a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. This means he travels through time to various places. One of his favorite places to visit is Earth. Typically, he has a companion traveling with him, usually female, sometimes male, sometimes one of each. He travels in a time machine known as a TARDIS, which is disguised as a British Police booth.

A Time Lord can regenerate if fatally wounded, which has accounted for all the different actors who have played The Doctor throughout the years.  In this story-arc, the Doctor is portrayed by Tom Baker.  He is traveling with Leela (portrayed by Louise Jameson).  Leela is considered to be a primitive, but her backstory is that she is a descendant of an Earth survey team that crash-landed on a planet. Her character was supposed to be sort of an Eliza Doolittle to the Doctor’s Henry Higgins.

In Underworld, the Doctor and Leela are traveling in the TARDIS when they get to the edge of the cosmos. They discover they are not alone there, as another ship is present from the planet Minyos. Minyos was destroyed more than 100,000 years ago, and the crew of the ship has been continuously regenerating themselves to finish out their quest.

What exactly is their quest? They are looking for a missing ship carrying the DNA of the Minyan race.  They have traced the ship to the edge of the cosmos only to learn the missing ship has now transformed into the center of a small planet, a fate that nearly happens to them as well.

I actually remember watching Underworld back when I first found Doctor Who. The line “the quest is the quest” made an impression on me, as well as seeing the ship’s hull affected in the vortex as it nearly became the center of a new planet.

Underworld is much maligned in Doctor Who circles, and I believe unfairly so.  Yes, it trots out the overused plot of an evil computer at the center of what’s happening, but there is plenty else here to redeem it.  One of the best is the back-story of the Time Lords and the Minyans (ha!), which shows how the Minyans expelled the Time Lords from their world. After that disaster, the policy of non-interference was developed, which seems to have been largely ignored except when convenient for a storyline.

The other issue, which is also quite a valid complaint, is the overuse of the color-separation overlay technique, where actors are filmed against a blue background, and then the sets are added behind them, thus saving on the cost of constructing the sets.  Unfortunately, this makes the story-arc quite flat as the characters don’t interact much with the set around them, and it’s noticeable.

Other than that, I quite enjoyed Underworld.  The story is a familiar one, yes, but also handled quite enjoyably. If you’ve seen stories from the Tom Baker era of the series, you pretty much know what to expect, although he’s a bit toned down from the bombastic personality he would display near the end of his run. I quite enjoyed his performance and his interaction with a race that already had a bit of a bias against Time Lords.

Louise Jameson always delivers as Leela and definitely ranks up there as one of my favorite companions from the first run of the series. I wish they would bring her back as they did with Sarah Jane.  She’s a lot of fun to watch and wonder as to how her “primitive” perceptions are going to misinterpret a situation. Jameson delivers it all quite believably.

The guest cast is also excellent, hampered only by the issues presented with the C.S.O. technology. It’s a preview of the problems seen in the most recent trilogy of Star Wars films, and not an easy problem to overcome if Lucas couldn’t do it with the budget he had.  It’s hard to be convincing when you don’t understand what exactly is going on around you, and for people who were unfamiliar with the series to begin with, the actors do a decent job. If you can blank out those moments and concentrate on how they deliver the story, they do a great job.

As usual, the BBC has done a decent job with the DVD release.  There’s an audio commentary that brings Baker and Jameson together with the writer of the story-arc, Bob Baker.  There are a couple of featurettes included as well, which are interesting. I wondered why it took so long to release this story-arc from this era, but the answer wasn’t to be found on the DVD. Perhaps it had to do with the cool reception it has received from series fans.

I liked Underworld quite a bit. Some of that might be that it made an impression on my tween brain back when I first saw it, but I don’t think it’s really as bad as it’s been regarded in series circles. I wouldn’t necessarily introduce someone to the series with this, but it’s not as bad as some say it is.  If you haven’t seen it in a while, give it a shot.


SPECIAL FEATURES:

• Commentary on Underworld with Tom Baker, Louise Jameson, Writer Bob Baker
• Info Text
• Into the Unknown
• Underworld – In Studio
• Photo Gallery