"I'm not mad about your tailor."
I really went back and forth on whether or not to rate and include this story as a part of the Season 17 roundup. While it has the production code and filming dates to prove its credentials, it was also certainly never finished and only released in full, in any way, many years later. Still, it feels very much of a type with the rest of the season in spite of its incompletion. Whatever the case, it is a strange coda to this era because of the various ways in which it has been brought to audiences. It's quite ironic, actually - the story famous for never being released is now the most rereleased Doctor Who story.
The story itself is generally a charming one. The peaceful atmosphere of Cambridge University feels markedly different from the sci-fi settings common to this era, with only City of Death as this part of the story's close analog. Aside from that passing resemblance, the story is tonally of a kind with that previous serial, but feels quite different in its execution. For one thing, there is less of a conscious attempt to include jokes in the script - although there are some good ones regardless. In particular I found the professor's remark about trying to get undergraduates talking to each other banned quite funny. If I had to pinpoint the difference, this would-be finale six-parter is making more of an effort to be a grand-scale conclusion to the season, rather than whatever City of Death was being.
The side characters are quite good, especially the dotty Professor Chronotis. I also liked Chris Parsons, but thought he was a bit underused; it could have been nice to have more of the story from the perspective of this outsider/everyman character to draw more of a comparison with how absurd the Doctor's world is. A lot of the villain Skagra's scenes are animated, so I feel like it's hard for me to formulate an overall opinion. His costume is a little too much for me to find him threatening in his live-action scenes, but it looks a bit better in the animated ones.
On the soundtrack of this version: Mark Ayres does an excellent job of emulating Dudley Simpson's style. It almost slipped my mind to mention that we wouldn't be getting any more Dudley soundtracks, but it seems worth noting. This Doctor's era was almost entirely characterized musically by Simpson's work, and it is profoundly odd to think that we'll never have it again. Whether this will turn out for good or ill remains to be seen.
Although I adored the location scenes from Cambridge in the earlier half of the serial (the gondola, the bike chase, and any scenes on that gorgeous set for the Professor's TARDIS) the actual setting of the titular Shada failed to impress me much. It feels like not enough time or awe is spent on the place given the leadup, and I was certainly not too thrilled with the extensive scenes spent fleeing the Krargs.
Despite the story tapering off like this, I found it quite solid on the whole. It is a little sad that we never got to see this story fully fledged as a part of its intended season, but the 2017 release with the animated segments feels like a fairly complete way to enjoy Shada. If I had included this 138-minute omnibus with the other ratings, it probably would have enjoyed something like an 8.00.
Well, enough of these feverish ramblings. With the last sort-of-televised entry of the Seventies out of the way, there is one last literary interlude I had planned before all is said and done. The Well-Mannered War is next.
(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 6 October 2021.)
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