Doctor Who: Battlefield (Story 156) (2009) Review

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(More customer reviews)Amazon dose not give the "RELEASES IN DETAIL's" like they should. So from website of the go to man on all Doctor Who DVD's (and hell, even VHS)Steve Manfred. Here are the detail's for "Battlefield".
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Doctor Who: Battlefield starring Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor, Sophie Aldred as Ace, and guest starring Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart. 2 discs.
On Disc 1:
- All four 25-minute episodes (the original 1989 versions) with full restoration treatment.
- Graphical menus, episode and scene selection features, and subtitles for the hearing impaired.
- Optional commentary track with actors Sophie Aldred, Nicholas Courtney, and Angela Bruce(Brigadier Winifred Bambera), Writer Ben Aaronovitch, and Script Editor Andrew Cartmel.
- Information Text subtitles option. Displays pop-up production trivia throughout the story.
- Isolated Music option. Plays the story with only the music soundtrack playing by itself.
- "Storm Over Avallion" 23-minute featurette about the making of the story, featuring interviews with Actors Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, Angela Bruce, Nicholas Courtney, and Jean Marsh (Morgaine), Writer Ben Aaronovitch, Script Editor Andrew Cartmel, and Director Michael Kerrigan.
- "Past and Future King" 12-minute featurette about the writing of this story, featuring interviews with Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel, Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, Angela Bruce, and Michael Kerrigan.
- "Watertank" 7-minute featurette that goes into detail about the near-fatal accident that occurred during the scene of Ace trapped in the flooding spacecraft airlock when the glass in the tank she was in cracked open.
- Studio Recording. 19 minutes of raw footage from the studio floor during the original studio recording session for this story.
- "From Kingdom to Queen" 8-minute interview with Jean Marsh charting her 1965, 1966, and 1989 appearances in Doctor Who.
- Radio Times Listings. PDF files for your computer containing the original Radio Times TV listings for this story, as well as some contemporaneous articles about it they ran.
On Disc 2:
- Battlefield Special Edition.
A 95-minute movie-format version of the story, with numerous deleted scenes edited back into the action, other reediting of the action and the music, boosted CGI effects,and a Dolby 5.1 sound mix. Comes with graphical menus, scene selection menu,and subtitles for the hearing impaired.
- Season 26 Trailer A 1:30 trailer for the entire 26th season that was shown to the press in 1989.


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The Doctor and Ace join forces with UNIT and his old friend the Brigadier against Morgaine (Jean Marsh) and Mordred, Arthurian villains who recognize the Doctor as Merlin.
DVD Features:FeaturetteInterviewsPhoto gallery

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Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric (Story 158) (1975) Review

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(More customer reviews)"The Curse of Fenric" tries so hard to be a quintessential Doctor Who story. Pseudo-historical tales are a hallmark of the show, and this one is set at a British naval base during World War II but features an extraterrestrial (extradimensional?) threat very much true to form. Like some of the most beloved classics especially from the early seasons of Tom Baker, "Fenric" takes classic and cliche motifs from known horror movies and translates them into a science fiction idiom, in this case any number of "living dead" type movies like "Evil Dead II" or "Prince of Darkness" (to name the ones I've actually seen, not being a big fan of horror films myself): the emergence into our world of a demonic being through some sort of activating text and/or ritual, his bringing an army of zombies or vampires to bear against the heroes, surrounding them in a frail safehold and besieging them there, and yes, we even have the poor ill-fated priest who ineffectually waves a Bible or cross at the creepies only to be promptly overtaken by them. "Fenric" also features an ecological undertone similar to many of the greats from Jon Pertwee's time (especially "Inferno") as the zombies are in fact a badly mutated version of humanity from some polluted industrial meltdown of a future. Then too there's a Cold War fable a la "The Armageddon Factor" (among others) as the Russian and British soldiers decide to stop their clandestine maneuvers against each other so as to fight their common enemy, evil itself (originally airing in 1989, this may well be one of the last of its kind). Why, with the final chess game between Fenric and the Doctor, there's even a whiff of "The Celestial Toymaker" from way back.
And yet it all comes across as trying too hard. Knowing in retrospect that this is the next-to-last story in the show's classic run it may be too easy to say this, but it almost seems as if the producer and his staff are attempting to jumpstart the waning popularity of Doctor Who by haphazardly throwing in everything that ever worked--missing the basics in the process. First of all, they left out the heart: The spirit of fun and adventure just seems to be missing, and the combination of quintessential elements seems artificial and contrived rather than natural and creative. Second of all, they forgot the brain: once again as with "Ghost Light" a fledgling writer is doing his best but not apparently getting the direction and feedback he needs from the script editor. As a whole the story is far more coherent, thank goodness, but there are still far too many fuzzy points, plotline tangles, and sheer implausibilities for a final draft--and overall the horror-to-sci-fi translation is incomplete and unripe, with too many things a trifle too supernatural and unscientific for the Doctor Who fictional universe. Finally, they lost their courage: the story bends over backwards painfully to cast the Soviet soldiers in a good light while vilifying the Brits--to the degree that it winds up as an embarrassing display of self-persecution. If only they'd had a wonderful wizard to consult with on these matters.
Still, for all that, "The Curse of Fenric" is reasonably enjoyable and entertaining, and it has its moments. This is the BBC, so the historical sets and costumes are top-notch. Having the believably clunky British decryption computer summon forth Fenric by spitting out an English translation of his cursed verses from Norse is clever. McCoy does great as the Doctor, and at one point rambles off a quick summary of what must be Time Lord Theology (and Theodicy) which is rather interesting and convincingly abstract. The way he bumbles in and somehow makes himself at home in a top secret naval base really is classic Doctor Who, utterly uncontrived. And the story as a whole nicely and intriguingly thematizes faith and doubt, giving it more multilayered texture than the average monster movie. All of this makes "Fenric" worth watching despite its flawed nature, but none of it justifies making this a double-DVD set by including a director's cut version of the same story over again.

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The Doctor and Ace are put to the ultimate test when the TARDIS materializes in Second World War England at a top-secret naval base. The army church, built on Viking graves, bears inscriptions calling for the wolves of Fenric to return for their treasure. Thereafter, evil will reign. Even as the Doctor translates the inscription, hideous corpses rise up from the sea, and the evil Fenric is now free to summon his wolves to a killing rampage.DVD Features:Audio CommentaryExtended takesFeaturetteInterviewsMusic Only TrackOtherPhoto galleryProduction Notes

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