Enlightenment [TV/1983.3.1 ~ 3.9]

 (created by @aquatics64)

★★★★★

  "You are a Time Lord. A Lord of Time. Are there lords in such a small domain?"

  I remember falling in love with Enlightenment at first sight. The depth, the detail, the richness and texture in everything from the costumes to the dialogue — it captured me with its imagination, and made me stay with its underlying solemness. After all, how sad would it be to be entities who reside outside of time and other ephemeral spaces, but cannot exist without the living, breathing creatures they consider little more than playthings?

  Barbara Clegg tapped into something special here; so rarely has Doctor Who delved into cosmic beings more mysterious, more powerful than Time Lords at this point. The concept of the Eternals is perhaps one of the most fascinating of all from the classic series — immortal beings who cannot be said to possess "life", because they exist outside time and do not abide by its rules. They have a detached air around them, and this is the key to Enlightenment's brilliance: the way small cues in the actors' performances that suggest the unearthly, the disquieting and mystifying... almost like they're not supposed to even exist in the same world as you. Keith Barron and Christopher Brown knock it out of the park, especially Brown with Marriner's silky, tragic-romantic and utterly unnerving fascination towards Tegan — one of the most memorable guest cast of the John Nathan-Turner years, for sure.

  The originally transmitted four-parter is gorgeous on its own, and I would still give Enlightenment in that form full marks (after all, that is how I first watched it); however, I must send a round of applause for everyone who's worked on the 2009 feature length version. The added music is beautiful, and works perfectly with the already incredibly memorable Malcolm Clarke score. The edited sequences and cuts work wonders in most places and are thankfully not too intrusive in others. The CGI works, and some of the added shots (like the ships gliding across a black ocean of white specks, illuminated by the orange glow of the sun behind them) are simply perfect. This is a far cry from the hackjob that Genesis of the Daleks' feature length cut was, as it retains all the serial's beauty and poetry... its disquieting splendor.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ  

  "Enlightenment wasn't the diamond, enlightenment was the choice" — trust an ambitious story about a race among the stars by gods beyond gods to tap into philosophy. I'd go as far as to cite Enlightenment as one of the crowning jewels of the classic era, let alone the 1980s. The theme (and here, I mean both the core set of ideas and the Malcolm Clarke score) is beautiful, the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough are incredibly strong as characters, and the combined efforts of Barbara Clegg and Fiona Cumming act as the driving force that makes all this ambitious (bonkers, even) nonsense into something truly special.