Spearhead from Space
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My brain being rather on the small side cannot hold much memory,a bit like one of those old memory cards with 54mg,I need to upgrade to at least 4 gig of memory for me to retain any information before the last lot of info is pushed out the other side of me head.Thus I was very surprised that I had in fact seen Spearhead From Space after all,I could of sworn blind that I had not watched it before,even after reading the synopsis.But as soon as I saw Mr Pertwee stumble out of the Tardis and being taken away by the men of Unit to the hospital it all came flooding back.Well it nearly did,for one thing the Blu Ray version looks superb,and for what I am assuming (i have no idea of the budget for the series at the time) is a low budget BBC show,looks tremendously sharp and crisp,obviously being filmed in 16mm film stock adds mightily to the look of the story. Once the story is up and running you instantly get the impression that Jon Pertwee is really putting his stamp on the role as the new Dr,I should imagine at the time of broadcast this would of been a hell of change in acting style compared to Patrick Troughton,with Pertwee coming over all flamboyant dandy.I won't go in to much depth about the story,since im pretty sure you are all more familiar with the story more than I am.Lets just say its your standard alien invasion with added meteorites,but of course with any of the early Dr Who series,it was always how good the monster or aliens looked,well as a kid that was how I use to measure an episode any way.Well the Autons would of been pretty scary to the little me back then,and the scene where the showroom dummies in the windows of the shops coming alive and shooting everybody,would of given me nightmares that evening,even if they were all wearing dressing gowns. Caroline John's as the new assistant was just as irritating as any of the other assistants,me personally I would prefer the Dr to be a solo character,but hey who am I to argue.Apart from the Dr himself,my favourite character is Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier with just enough British stiff upper lip to make him a pretty likeable character.Overall a very entertaining story and a good start to the Pertwee years,My only gripe would be Ed Wood style octopus the Dr has to fight off towards the end,still Pertwee does a a fine job grappling with the tentacles and looking all boss eyed.