The Reign of Terror
So the first season of classic Doctor Who is now complete on DVD — or as complete as it will get. The seven-part story Marco Polo is missing, and is represented on DVD by a half-hour cut-down photo reconstruction set to the surviving audio track. And then there is the case of the season finale, the six-part The Reign of Terror. As with Marco Polo it’s one of those early-era historicals, this time set during the French Revolution. For years the serial was missing, but in the 1980s four of its six parts were recovered from a film archive in Cyprus. Cypress should also have held copies of episodes four and five, but they were destroyed during a Turkish invasion in 1974. Such is the way of things.
As with the Patrick Troughton serial The Invasion, the serials two missing episodes have been animated for DVD release. New pictures are set to the existing audio, and bingo; we have a completed episode. Whereas The Invasion was animated by famed British studio Cosgrove Hall (responsible for Danger Mouse and Count Duckula, among other series), The Reign of Terror was primarily animated by a guy off of the Internet who calls himself Otaking.
The results are, shall we say, mixed. The discussion that I have seen has focused on the rapid cutting in episode four, which goes against the directorial style of the existing episodes (and indeed most 1960s TV). People have also singled out lots of weird touches like candles that cast shadows of themselves on the wall, or an odd cutaway to a character’s crotch as he rose from a chair. The animation definitely has its problems, but I wouldn’t consider any of that a major issue.
The biggest thing that stands out to me, to the extent that I find the animation hard to watch, is a drastic difference in character models from one shot to the next. In one scene it took me a while before I realized that two separate shots depicted the same character, as the geometry and shading looked so completely different. I just thought there was another unspecified character in the room.
The other problem, which ties into the above confusion, has to do with dialogue. Due to various decisions it often takes some concentration on my part to work out who is talking, and to whom. Although I understand the impulse to avoid as much lipsync as possible, as it is very time-consuming and tedious work, there seems to be little attention here to the flow of the script. Halfway through a sentence we will cut to a shot of the character standing up with his mouth closed. Sometimes a character barely opens his mouth before we switch to an extended reaction shot. This is particularly evident in conversations involving Hartnell; it seems whenever another character is talking all we see is close-ups of Hartnell’s face. A couple of times — and this is almost cute — the moment a character begins to talk, the top of another character’s head passes in front of his mouth.
To make it stranger all of this is contrasted with sudden jump cuts to an extreme blow-up of a character’s mouth. That… still doesn’t help me follow the discussion. It just makes me feel like I’m being jerked around.
The thing that confuses me about the character models is that there are only limited drawings for each character. Then the animators apply a morphing effect to the portraits to add lipsync and generally make them less static. I can understand the model shifting if we’re talking about hundreds, or even dozens, of frames of animation. Here it’s just a few individual drawings. Seriously? You can’t draw six pictures of William Hartnell with the same general facial geometry? And then once you have the pictures you can’t be bothered to animate a complete sentence?
As I say, I don’t so much care about the specific editorial choices. So the editing jumps around more than it should from a historical perspective; okay, whatever. So long as the cutting doesn’t interfere with my moment-to-moment comprehension, I’ll accept the stylization. The visuals are a new product, and you have to give them some creative leeway to do what the animator feels they need to do. What bothers me about the above two issues is the extent to which they interfere with my comprehension, and generally make the viewing experience more work than it should be.
When I watch The Invasion, I almost feel a twinge of disappointment when the animation ends. I’ve shown it to a couple of people, and they were enthralled with episode one — and then totally lost interest when it hit episode two and switched to a live-action archive TV show. The animation was that good, on its own merits. Here, I was relieved when the animation ended and I could relax my attention. I don’t think I would show this to someone who wasn’t already invested in the era, as I don’t think it reflects well on the series. It’s better than recons or the narrated episodes, in that I do feel that I can follow the story now — but I still have to work at it.
Maybe I could accept that better in the middle of a more interesting story. As it is, this is a simple and rather uneventful tale — so all the while that I’m focusing, I can’t help but wonder if it’s worth the effort. By no means is this a poor story, and I’ll take even a slightly dull Hartnell over great swaths of the show’s history. What rankles me is the juxtaposition. If Reign were to swap animation teams with The Invasion, I think I could handle things a little better; a story as still and simple as The Reign of Terror demands the clarity of a Cosgrove Hall, while a story as jumbled as The Invasion could withstand a little more shaking.
To my understanding the animation team here underwent several changes in procedure as the project went along, and to be sure the end of episode five is much steadier than the start of episode four — but the above problems persist to the end. Previously, on the basis of the Invasion animations, I was eager to see their work on the remaining missing episodes. Now I approach the prospect with more caution.