Category: Episode by Episode
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.
Doctor Who episode 529: The Leisure Hive – Part Four (20/9/1980)
It’s a pity The Leisure Hive never gets time to breathe as a story. The episodes are so brief and frenetically directed there’s never a moment when you can sit back and appreciate it before suddenly there’s a new effect or it’s darted in a different direction. The plot here is no more complex than The Horns of Nimon: after the Foamasi war, the Argolins invented the tachyon recreation generator to save their species: Pangol was the result, and now he’s all grown up he wants to finish the job and lead his people back to their blood and thunder days. But while The Horns of Nimon interspersed the plot with jokes and quieter moments (like Romana’s interaction with Sezom), The Leisure Hive hurtles from one room to another, one experiment to the next, breathlessly and relentlessly. It’s exhausting to watch.
Doctor Who episode 528: The Leisure Hive – Part Three (13/9/1980)
At points watching this episode I bad temperedly reflected that all the flashy direction and bafflegab just got in the way. If Graham Williams’ mantra was ‘it’s all about telling stories, nothing else matters’ then JNT’s might be “No-one cares about the story as long as it looks pretty”. That’s overly harsh: there are flashes of brilliance in this, the best being the Doctor seeing his aged reflection in the mirrored surface of the recreation generator, and the secondary meaning of ‘recreation generator’ itself. The chittering Foamasi look good in close up (I’m less sure of their ambling walk). And I love the realisation that ‘Pangol’s very young and everyone else is old’ – it’s a great “hidden in plain sight” reveal that Bidmead re-uses in Castrovalva.
Doctor Who episode 527: The Leisure Hive – Part Two (6/9/1980)
Like Terror of the Autons, this is a fizzy pop version of a much more traditional Doctor Who story, where the point is to make something that feels totally 1980. As such, a lot of it feels more dated than Season 17, which was less concerned with being modish. The dayglo pink video effects and the solarization on the surface of Argolis looks like something from the Ashes to Ashes video; some of the extreme close ups make it difficult to get a sense of scale or setting. But Bickford also includes some really strong moments – especially the giallo style murder of Stimson, who’s stalked through the Hive making weird discoveries (including Klout’s Slitheen-style skinsuit hanging in a wardrobe) before finding his way to the darkened tachyon room and his death at the hands of something horrible.
Doctor Who episode 526: The Leisure Hive – Part One (30/8/1980)
How fitting that the John Nathan-Turner years should begin on Brighton beach, plus what looks like a gay couple visiting space Center Parcs. This announces its entrance and exit with screams courtesy of Peter Howell’s excellent reworking of the theme music (still, for me, the true Doctor Who theme), and from Tom Baker as the Doctor seems to be torn apart. In between, 24 of the strangest minutes in years.
Doctor Who: Shada (not broadcast)
Shada hangs like a ghost over Doctor Who, often glimpsed but never definitively. There have been at least half a dozen attempts to do so: in books, audios, animations, official and unofficial. As far back as 1980 the new producer John Nathan-Turner proposed finishing it off as a couple of specials. But it defies all attempts to exist as a final version. Even the 2017 version, a Frankenstein’s Monster of original footage, animation and newly-recorded video, almost consciously avoids being the definite article by virtue of excising the cliffhangers and episodic structure. As much as any of the missing 1960s episodes, it’s impossible to experience this as it would have been on TV. It doesn’t exist. It never existed.
Doctor Who episode 525: The Horns of Nimon – Part Four (12/1/1980)
Anthony Read’s interest in adapting the Classics in a sci-fi context threads through stories he script edited, and this, which he wrote. More than that: the idea of the Doctor becoming a mythical figure himself is very attractive (Steven Moffat plays with it all the time). This ends with the jokey implication that the Doctor was around to advise the historical Theseus and ponders on the way that ‘legends are made’ by admirers telling and retelling stories, aggrandising them in the process, so that they last forever. Douglas Adams picks up on this, and reiterates it at the end of Shada. And so, while this is the unintended conclusion of the Graham Williams years, it’s an oddly fitting one, that reinforces the idea that, in the end, ‘it’s all about telling stories. Nothing else matters.’
Doctor Who episode 524: The Horns of Nimon – Part Three (5/1/1980)
Doctor Who begins the 1980s with an episode that’s not a million miles off what Christopher H Bidmead might have enjoyed, with lots of old men in charge of the second Skonnon Empire, the science of wormholes connecting two quantum singularities, the power complex modelled on a giant circuit board, and Soldeed marvelling at the ‘monumental piece of electronic engineering’ that is K9. Of course, Bidmead would have disdained the story’s roots in Greek myth, and Tom fooling around trying to spy on the Nimon. But apart from that, there aren’t really many jokes: some of the performances may raise a smile, but the script probably won’t.
Doctor Who episode 523: The Horns of Nimon – Part Two (29/12/1979)
The Doctor spends the majority of this episode stuck in the TARDIS and kept away from the action, which speaks to the thinness of the story. What there is I enjoyed, particularly Lalla Ward getting the chance to sweep in and tear a strip off Soldeed, expose the Co-Pilot and take command of the Anethans as they plunge into the Nimon’s power complex. This is a top episode for Romana. The Doctor’s arrival, by way of contrast, is almost entirely played for laughs as he accidentally arrives smack bang in the most conspicuous spot in the city, haphazardly confronts Soldeed and makes a hash of escaping.
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