‘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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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