2 out of 5

Directed by: Bill Sellars

I can understand why this serial is a favorite: it’s silly, pretty much from start to finish.  And I don’t mind silly.  But ‘Celestial Toymaker’ doesn’t feel like it comes by its hijinks at all naturally; instead, every element of it is forced, making all of the ‘quirk’ feel hollow and boring.  Yes, I think this matches a criticism I’ve wielded previously, to which (y’know, memory servin’) I’ll addendum similarly: that every Dr. Who probably relies on forced machinations, but it’s a matter of whether or not it the serial waves its hand enough to distract us from whatever’s behind the curtain.  Initially, ‘Celestial’ does: the Doctor ‘becomes intangible’ – invisible, but still audible – and he exits the TARDIS, Steve and Dodo in tow (with a funny, lampshade question from Dodo as to how the intangible Doc opened the TARDIS door, rather setting the stage for the shoulder-shrug vibe to come).  He reappears, then announces his realization that they’re dealing with the immortal ‘Celestial Toymaker’ – Michael Gough – who traps people in order that they may become more ‘dolls’ in his collection.  When the TARDIS vanishes, the games have begun.  Doc is told to accomplish a Trilogic stacking game in the exact amount of moves while our companions face episodic games, such as a hidden key hunt, or an obstacle course.  Because Hartnell tries to occasionally help his Steve and Dodo, the Toymaker makes him intangible once more, which is really an excuse to let Hartnell not be in the next couple parts.

While the oddball creativity of the games should make this a notable set of episodes, the structure suffers from the same overall problem of serials like ‘The Chase,’ where the one-focus-per-part ruins any sense of momentum.  Combined with the incredibly random (and somewhat stupid, and somewhat annoying) nature of these games and the ‘dolls’ involved, ‘Celestial Toymaker’ struggled to maintain my interest even with in a single part.  The maneuver with the Doc was an amusing way to keep Hartnell off camera, but, okay, a moving block game, the Toymaker “ups the ante” by limiting Doc’s timeframe (somehow it was imposed that he must complete the game the same time Steve and Dodo finish their path), moving the game forward hundreds of moves so that he’s that much closer to completing it.  Right, it does, essentially, limit the timeframe, but… it’s also, like, helping him?  Because it doesn’t really matter if you messed up one hundred moves ago because I’m going to skip to correct move #900 at some point…

It’s just a weird mash-up of interesting concepts that was stalled to the point of tedium by the absence of Hartnell and a resulting questioningly stilted structure.