Category: Doctor Who
Doctor Who episode 539: State of Decay – Part Two (29/11/1980)
There’s a very creditable attempt to create a creepy atmosphere, as the Doctor and Romana spend most of the episode exploring the E-Space equivalent of Castle Dracula, discovering that it’s a spaceship (the kind of reveal that would have been the punchline in most series), that its storage bays are filled with drained corpses, the fuel tanks are being used to store blood, and that underneath, something vast waits for the Time of Arising.
Doctor Who episode 538: State of Decay – Part One (22/11/1980)
‘Night must fall, Romana.’ The biggest tell that this was originally intended for the 1977 series is that the Doctor and Romana are involved in the main story by halfway through the first episode, rather than hovering uneasily outside the action. Unsurprisingly, this is much more traditional than Full Circle, and a much less awkward fit for the new house style than The Leisure Hive. As you’d expect from a Terrance Dicks script, the setting is established with economy, and the script pithily establishes the Lords in their castle and the peasants in their village. The Doctor implies that the Lords are leeches feeding off the efforts of the peasants, but we’ve already been clued into their darker purpose: ‘flesh and blood has its place.’
Doctor Who episode 537: Full Circle – Part Four (15/11/1980)
‘We’re all basically primeval slime with ideas above its station.’ A parable of evolution where the Deciders have been frozen in indecision for four thousand generations, repeating the same futile pre-launch procedures without ever pressing the button. Their refusal to adapt to change is finally overturned at this crisis point, as the rest of the Alzarian ecosystem rises up to cast them out. If this were made now, there would be an overt Green commentary, with the human race being expelled from the planet that birthed it, and which it has abused. I suspect there’s something of this theme lingering round the edges (it would certainly chime with executive producer Barry Letts’ instincts).
Doctor Who episode 536: Full Circle – Part Three (8/11/1980)
Tom Baker’s confrontation with the Deciders is brilliant. Mere minutes after they pardoned their own children, with great solemnity and pomp, their authority crumbles before the Doctor’s coldly furious verbal assault, as he accuses them of the responsibility for deceiving the community and permitting the slaughter of another child. In a season that already contains his brilliant performance as Meglos, this is Baker at his electrifying best. Cancel the resignation: he can wipe the floor with these people.
Doctor Who episode 535: Full Circle – Part Two (1/11/1980)
Some meddling kids steal the TARDIS and leave Romana at the mercy of a spider. In between, K9 gets decapitated (which is almost too horrible, except Romana immediately says he can be repaired) and the Doctor meets the Deciders (including new member George Baker) as if they’re the judges in a TV talent show.
Doctor Who episode 534: Full Circle – Part One (25/10/1980)
Suddenly the ethos of Season 18 starts to come into focus: this, like Meglos, features a conflict between two opposing factions: the questioning of the Outlers and scientific enquiry of Dexeter versus the authority and received wisdom of the Deciders. It’s all done with much more conviction than Meglos, though with fewer jokes, and the combination of a serious-minded script and some real effort in production makes this easily the best-looking and most coherent episode of the season to date.
Doctor Who episode 533: Meglos – Part Four (18/10/1980)
It’s a shame JNT didn’t introduce two-parters until the Davison years, as I think there’s probably an entertaining, small story of the Doctor’s evil double in here (definitely more fun than Black Orchid). Critically, the two of them meet for a few minutes, and it’s done better than any previous time the Doctor’s actually been face to face with his doppelganger. All you’d need to do is strip away all the Savant/Deon rubbish (which is resolved entirely off-handedly with Lexa shot and killed the moment she runs out of plot, and the rest of the Tigellans left to deal with hostile vegetation on their own).
Doctor Who episode 532: Meglos – Part Three (11/10/1980)
A rare example of a third episode that’s better than the first two, this is really a showcase for Tom Baker’s dual performance. As the Doctor, and almost for the last time, he’s at his breezy best, offering broad grins to the hostile Tigellans, dropping quips (‘Who’s Who?’, ‘Let’s hope that many hands will make the lights work’) and trying to blow out the flames once Lexa decides to sacrifice him to Ti. As Meglos, he’s entirely different: ‘I am Meglos’ he howls at Caris as he menaces her; ‘Earthling? You again?’ he asks plaintively as his body starts to disintegrate. He creeps through the shadows of the Tigellan underground like Victor Caroon in The Quatermass Xperiment. This is all very strong, and distracts from the staleness elsewhere.
Doctor Who episode 531: Meglos – Part Two (4/10/1980)
This episode is built around Tom Baker’s performance as Meglos: not the Doctor possessed, as in The Invisible Enemy, or playing evil, like in The Invasion of Time, but a villain wearing his body. He’s great: no twinkle in his eyes, the toothy smile entirely fake, persistently on the verge of snapping and killing the foolish Tigellans that stand between him and the dodecahedron. He manipulates Zastor’s trust and Lexa’s faith, assessing them coldly with that gimlet stare. And once he’s stolen the dodecahedron and begins reverting to his cactus form, he’s largely kept in the shadows – which makes the spiny makeup look quite disturbing.
Doctor Who episode 530: Meglos – Part One (27/9/1980)
This is a strange story: almost like a pause for the audience to catch up with the new look and feel of the show before it plunges headlong into E-Space and the gradual phasing out of the fourth Doctor’s team (and then the Doctor himself). I’ve seen it suggested that this is a Season 17 throwback (it isn’t, the writers were brought on board by Bidmead), or it’s the deliberately funny one (again, I don’t think so: it isn’t very funny and apparently neither JNT nor Bidmead liked the scripts). It vaguely reminds me of The Space Pirates, not particularly because it features space pirates, more because it clumsily introduces a conflict that eats up a huge chunk of the running time without ever letting the Doctor and companions interact with any of the other characters. They don’t even leave the TARDIS in this: a worrying foreshadowing of many extended TARDIS sequences to come.
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