The Newly Discovered Episodes (Enemy of the World and Web of Fear)

As usual, my ambitious plans to keep up with my blog have fallen through. But the news of the recovered episodes finally got me back on here.

Most of the joy from fans, I'm sure, is over The Web Of Fear, one of the most beloved Second Doctor stories, and rightly. While there the plot doesn't quite hang together if you're paying attention, the script builds the character and suspense that the endless base-under-siege stories in the Troughton era usually forget. And more importantly, director Douglas Camfield gives it tremendous atmosphere and intensity; even with only a single episode and reconstructions, it was obvious that this was terrific stuff. I can't wait to watch those.

Despite that, the one I'm really excited for is Enemy of the World. It's largely forgotten as the only story of Season 5 to lack monsters - the villain is simply human, albeit played by Patrick Troughton himself. Which is too bad, because it's one of the best Troughton stories, and with Barry Letts at the helm, I'm sure it, too, lives up to its potential. It's a brilliant script that starts as a riff on Bond flicks before taking a fantastic turn in the fourth episode and building to a knockout finish. Even on a reconstruction, it's a great yarn. But being able to actually watch it and see Troughton's Salamandar and the world Letts and Whitaker create will be something else. I'm buying and watching that this weekend, and I'll put up a review Sunday.

But this iTunes thing... yeah, that's not so hot. I've never liked iTunes - I use Winamp at home, but I've always prefered any of a dozen other music programs. The User Interface lacks flexibility. The program runs slowly, no matter how fast the computer. And the Copy Protection on its songs that made it difficult to use it with another computer program on the same computer both sucks and blows. I ultimately decided to just uninstall it. I only used it for whatever music I'd bought on iTunes over the years, and there wasn't much of that, since I prefer buying CDs. So the idea of reinstalling it wasn't exactly exciting.

Apparently iTunes feels similarly sentimental towards me. Attempting to re-download and reinstall this resulted in numerous random errors that made what should have been a straightforward task an hour-long ordeal. When I finally did get everything working, my antivirus told me that, just coincidentally, I suddenly had a virus.

iTunes is evil, I tells ya. Pure evil.

But I'm sure the episodes themselves are gonna be great, if I survive the journey of actually getting to watch them.