Doctor Who: The Ribos Operation (1978)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Written by Robert Holmes
Directed by George Spenton-Foster
Starring Tom Baker and Mary Tamm

Features:

• Commentary with Baker and Tamm
  
• Pop-up production notes
  
• Photo gallery
  
• Who’s Who character info
  

Rating: NR, suitable for most audiences

Anamorphic: N/A

My advice: Who fans should own it, others can skate by with a rental.

On his way to a much deserved and long overdue vacation, the Doctor is side-tracked by the enigmatic White Guardian. The Guardian informs him that the universe is in grave danger, and in order to prevent the coming catastrophe, the Doctor must recover the six fragments to the Key to Time, a powerful artifact hidden away all over the time-space continuum for safekeeping. To aid him in this quest, the Guardian assigns him a new assistant, a recent graduate of the Time Lord Academy named Romana.

The first stop in this quest is the planet Ribos, a frozen and inhospitable place populated by a culture just barely out of the dark ages. Here they encounter the shrewd “merchant” Garron and his accomplice Unstoffe, as well as the posturing intergalactic warlord Graff Vynda-K, an upstart noble with a vengeance streak that’s looking to purchase a planet on the cheap from Garron.

In fairly short order, it becomes plain to the Doctor that Garron isn’t on the up and up, but as there is little love lost for Vynda-K or the hostile natives, he doesn’t precisely tip his hand. Garron and Unstoffe are con men, travelling the spacelanes finding suckers to part from their money. The current scheme involves attempting to sell the Graff rights to the planet Ribos, an essentially worthless hunk of frozen rock, but in order to sweeten the deal, Garron has faked the presence of a very rare and very valuable mineral in the planet’s mines.

And of course, Garron has no claim on the planet and no authority to sell it. The real scam lies in getting the Graff to leave his deposit in the care of the natives, and then steal the money and run. But the Doctor has some larcenous intentions of his own, having discerned that Garron’s bogus mineral sample is in fact a disguised portion of the Key to Time.

As Who stories go, this one’s decent, but not great. The real distinguishing characteristic is in the secondary acting. Garron and Unstoffe are brilliantly done, though the Graff is a bit over-played. I’m beginning to suspect that all Who villains are mandated to be cackling caricatures stripped of all menace by mediocre acting. Fortunately, the performances of the principles and other secondary characters makes up for it in this case. And since there are very little to no instances where visual effects are called for, the traditional problem of cheesy low-budget SFX in Doctor Who is neatly sidestepped.

For extras, the disc is loaded by most standards, though a bit underpowered compared to some of the other titles in the series. The commentary with Baker and Tamm is entertaining and informative, and the pop-up production notes (a standard on the Who discs to date) are as always worthy. As stated, it falls a bit below the bar set by other releases in the series, but far above average TV series discs.

This one’s a must if you want to get in on the Key to Time story arc, and it stands up plenty well on its own. Fans of the show won’t want to miss it, and it makes an excellent entry point into the show for new fans, as well, since it lets viewers get a good taste of the quality of the writing without asking them to ignore shaky visual effects right off the bat. Once the writing has its hooks in them, though, it’ll be too late for them to object on such superficial grounds as FX.