![]() I think the set that they’re in musta looked really cool and there is the promise of shark in the water below (way way cool), but to have them strung up and to go to that well and have them escape (the other well) even before the episode’s end is… it’s a bit too much. By the halfway point in the episode our heroes are captured and five minutes later they’re laid out and prepared as a sacrifice to the god of the Atlanteans. If there is a criticism I can level against this story at this early a time, it’s that the story moves a bit slow and falls into the Doctor Who clichés a bit quickly. Unfortunately, all the markings that this story are about to get a little too batty are all right in front of me and I… oh dear. Now I’ve seen it for a second time, I still can’t say I think it’s that bad. The first time I watched this story, I didn’t think part one was that bad. We have to be grateful, I suppose, that the production team sought to poison our eyes and our brains for that two minutes so that this story could at least partly exist, I just wish they'd put something more memorable in, something I'd rather see. That the first Troughton episode that exists does so for the most abstractly bizarre two minutes of Doctor Who I've ever seen is both blessing and curse, I think. This story also has the reputation for having the first episode of Troughton that exists in its entirety (episode three), but the reason behind that has nothing to do with Troughton and more to do with someone's idea of the biggest practical joke I've ever seen in terms of Doctor Who history. It's easy to get bogged down in the fictional mythology of a place that doesn't seem to exist, or to get wrapped up in the only real Atlantis story that can exist if you're giving it a one off (that of its fall otherwise what's the point?), but surely there can be a better solution than this. Maybe it's the fact that Atlantis is too untouchable or difficult to break down to do an interesting or compelling story. The most ironic thing is the fact that Doctor Who can't ever seem to do Atlantis right. Regardless, there's always discrepancy and there's always argumentation, but when the fandom is pretty universally in agreement on a story's quality, and when that agreement swings negative, you're in a lot of trouble. Not that people say it's terribly good, but it's far from the most consistently loathed of that season, or even of Tom Baker for that matter. I, for one, actively hate " The Armageddon Factor", but I seem to be in the minority. You'll always find dissenting opinions about plenty of stories. no one seems to disagree about "The Underwater Menace." That's never a good thing. Granted, we here at Classical Gallifrey thought the last time The Doctor visited that legendary lost city it was a complete and total disaster, but there are plenty who disagree. It's interesting to think that in Doctor's Who's massive, almost-fifty-year history that he's only ever gone to Atlantis twice. And all this stuff is well and good, but don't you think it's time for The Doctor to touch on something else that's deeply mythological and legendary, that pushes the show into a giant cool direction? The Doctor and his companions had already been all over time and space, from meeting Marco Polo and Emperor Nero to encountering The Daleks several times to even getting encased as displays in a large space museum. It's still fairly early in Doctor Who lore (comparatively we're in Doctor Who's fourth season, meaning it's right around the time The Initiative should be showing up to give you a scope of "just how early" we are in the show), but it does give the show the opportunity to touch on rich, unmined material that had previously been untouched. "The Underwater Menace" is only Troughton's third story. They're simple choices that fold into larger mythologies or stories and provide "a Doctor Who take" on whatever it is we're talking about. This can be anything from "The Doctor hangs out with The TARDIS" to "The Doctor and the O.K. Background & Significance: One of the things about Doctor Who that I always tend to love is whenever they go for the simple-yet-high-concept story, something so blindingly obvious that you're shocked you didn't think of it, or rather, that it hasn't happened before. ![]()
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