From: ira2p@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU (Iain Robert Asplin)
Subject: Re: Invasion of Time SUCKS! Was Re: Continuity catalog part two
Organization: University of Virginia
Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1992 02:56:18 GMT

In article <15468@umd5.umd.edu> jblum@hamlet.umd.edu (Hi ho -- Kermit the Frog here...) writes:
>>	True, but if the Matrix is such a key ingredient of Time Lord
>>society, why is it such a mystery to the Doctor that Engin has to explain
>>its functions to him?  
>
>I'm pretty hazy on the exact dialogue, but it sounds to me like he's just
>explaining that particular system does.  Not the concept of this vast
>universal databank known as the Matrix.
>
He explains the system, and he calls it "the Matrix" in addition to the
APC Net, and the Doctor is still clueless until Engin explains the 
functions.


>
>
>How do we know he's really the first?  Remember what happened to him after
>the use of the Key -- his memory of the whole incident vanished.  The only
>person who knew that the key was the Great Key was Borusa -- and do
>you think he'd tell anyone?
>
>This kind of incident might have happened before.  A President gets his
>hands on the Great Key, tries to use it for some purpose or another, and
>at the appropriate time the Matrix Lords step in and wipe out all
>knowledge of the event.  Using the Great Key could turn out to be another
>Tomb of Rassilon - style trap, designed to track down the power-mad and
>either tame or eliminate them.
>
>Is that devious enough for you?

Could be.  The point of all this though is we have to speculate on this
stuff, and this isn't something I would leave the audience to speculate
on if I were writing this.  It should have been explained somewhere or
at least suggested more strongly than it was.


>
>Fudge factor time.  There could actually be room for individual-style
>housing if the city is big enough.  If the Doctor's old house was near the
>edge of the city, you could get away with it.  Yes, I'm stretching it like
>taffy, but it's no bigger stretch than the ways they explain "immortal
>barring accidents".

No, can't fudge this, unless there is a mountain right up against the
citadel, since the Doctor says the old man he visisted when he was a boy
was halfway up a mountain behind his house.  

Also, what about Susan's descriptions of the silver-leafed fauna from
"The Sensorites?"  The way she speaks of it it certainly isn't just a
nature park (and even if it were, even nature parks seem alien to Rodan
"It's all so _natural_!")


>
>>	And what about the air car Romana says she got for her 70th
>>birthday in "The Pirate Planet?"  (OK, so that's after TIOT, but still..)
>
>Domed cities don't preclude air-cars.  Again, the Trantor analogy.
>
>>>Why?  After all, Isaac Asimov wasn't limited by having to stay inside the
>>>worldwide city on Trantor, or "The Caves of Steel".
>
>>	That's two stories.  Who has already done three on Gallifrey,
>>and the fact that we're stuck in one city every time is really restrictve,
>>I feel.
>
>Why?  Where are the restrictions coming into play?
>
>Incidentally, Asimov set four novels on the Earth of "Caves of Steel" and
>two short stories and a gigantic novel on Trantor.  Some of them were set
>entirely inside the cities without exhausting them.  Others went outside
>for part of the story, or even to different planets -- but then, so have
>the Gallifrey stories.  "Five Doctors" had the Death Zone, and "Arc of
>Infinity" had Amsterdam.  Even "Invasion of Time" gets outside.  There's
>no reason why defining an an "inside" and "outside" to civilized Gallifrey
>should limit the story possibilities.


I just think it is far more interesting to have some of civilized Gallifrey
outside this one Citadel, so that we can get to see different styles of
city or perhaps some towns or villages or the countryside.  
There is also a big difference between the kind of detail Isaac Asimov
wrote into his interior cities and the restrictions of television of
actually having to build sets for these cities.
Yes, you do notice that Five Doctors and Arc of Infinity _did_ go outdoors
on Gallifrey, and that is precisely what I want to see!  (Well, Arc didn't,
but you get the idea).  I know that Arc of infinity's running around
the corridors of Gallifrey in the first two parts was beginning to bore me,
but mixed in with this very cleverly and used to the full in the later
episodes was the Amsterdam location material.  

>
>>	God, this story is bad.  From the tinfoil Vardans who turn out to
>>be ordinary humans in stupid-looking uniforms, to the plot holes and
>>continuity errors, to the trundling in of the Sontarans for the last two
>>episodes just to make the story last six instead of the usual four,
>
>Won't say anything about the Vardans, I admit they were unimpressive.
>However, I loved the sudden appearance of the Sontarans, because it added
>another whole level of deviousness to the story -- the Doctor was being
>manipulated just like he thought he was manipulating the Vardans who
>thought they were using him.
>
>Like I said, the story has flaws, in production and writing, but the
>sheer scale of the ideas used in the story redeem it in my eyes, if not
>in yours.
>

The Sontarans use was only to make the story two episodes longer, not
to make the story more devious.  And if that was the intention from
the beginning (to have them come in towards the end), then they should
have dropped some sort of hints prior to the Part Four cliffhanger.
All we got was the dismantling of the quantum force field around Gallifrey
(or should I say makeing a hole in it?), but we had no reason to suspect that
ths was for the Sontarans as opposed to the Vardans.