Doctor Who — The Leisure Hive, Meglos, Full Circle, State of Decay, Warrior’s Gate, The Keeper of Traken, Logopolis

Posted on October 31, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

The 18th season of Doctor Who started with the show getting a new producer, John Nathan-Turner. Depending on who you ask, Nathan-Turner was either the best or the worst thing that ever happened to Doctor Who. He pushed the series away from what he felt was the “silliness” of the previous season and, in doing so, he alienated both Tom Baker and Lalla Ward. (Ward was close friends with Douglas Adams, whom Nathan-Turner blamed for turning the show silly.) Nathan-Turner pushed for more serious stories and for better production values. He also hated K-9, which upset a lot of younger viewers. My personal feeling is that Nathan-Turner was not a good producer for Tom Baker’s Doctor but he was a great producer for Peter Davison’s interpretation of the character. As for the Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy years, let’s keep things cheery and not go there.

By the end of the 18th season, Tom Baker, Lalla Ward, and John Leeson (the voice of K-9) had left the show. Completing my look back at Doctor Who, here are Tom Baker’s final serials.

The Leisure Hive (1980, directed by Lovett Bickford)

John Nathan-Turner hated K-9. If there was any doubt about that, consider that his first serial as the show’s producer opens with the Doctor and Romana on holiday Brighton. K-9, for some reason, rolls out to the ocean and explodes, taking him out of commission until the Doctor can rebuild him.

Personally, I would have been happy if this entire serial had just been Tom Baker and Lalla Ward on that beach in Brighton. Nathan-Turner may not have been a fan of the Doctor and Romana working together by Baker and Ward but viewers like me definitely disagreed. Alas, it is not to be. Romana wants a real holiday (Brighton, in a reminder of just how British Doctor Who really was, doesn’t count) so she and the Doctor and the remains of K-9 go to the leisure planet of Argolis. Unfortunately, Argolis is having financial problems and is at risk of being taken over by the Foamai. When the Doctor is framed for a strangulation murder that was committed with a scarf, he is forced to stand trial and become an experimental test subject.

It’s an okay start for Season 18, though Tom Baker, for the first time since taking over the role of the Doctor, was starting to look disinterested. John Nathan-Turner was eager to get away from the “silliness” of the previous season but, ironically, a story set on a leisure planet and featuring an intergalactic crime syndicate would have very much benefitted by Douglas Adams’s sense of humor.

Meglos (1980, directed by Terence Dudley)

The Doctor is asked to help broker a peace between two warring planets. Unfortunately, Meglos — a sentient cactus — traps the TARDIS in a time loop and then plots to thwart the peace.

When viewers think of this serial, they usually remember Meglos taking on the form of the Doctor and Tom Baker wearing makeup that made him look like a humanoid cactus. That’s because the plot is nothing special, though I do appreciate that we finally got to see what it’s like to be stuck in a time loop. Jacqueline Hill, who played Barbara when the serial first began, appears as Lexa, a high priestess of the planet Tigella.

Full Circle (1980, directed by Peter Grimwade)

Having been ordered to return Romana to Gallifrey, the Doctor instead materializes on a swampy plant that is located where Gallifrey should be. The TARDIS has slipped into E-Space, a small pocket universe. As for the planet that they’ve landed on, it’s inhabited by swamp monsters, a group a humans who live around a crashed starliner, and a mad scientist.

The idea of E-Space was an interesting one and Lalla Ward gives one of her strongest performances of the series, as Romana is briefly possessed in this episode. Unfortunately, this episode also introduced Adric (Matthew Waterhouse), an annoying child genius who became the Doctor’s newest companion. Adric was one of the least popular of John Nathan-Turner’s additions to Doctor Who. A few seasons later, Adric would be blown up while fighting the Cybermen and there would not be a dry eye in the house.

Tom Baker, unhappy with Nathan-Turner’s ideas and annoyed with Waterhouse decided to leave the role while filming this serial. Waterhouse reportedly cursed at Baker while filming one scene. They should have left the little punk behind just for doing that.

State of Decay (1980, directed by Peter Moffatt)

Still trapped in E-Space, The TARDIS materializes on a planet where the villagers live under the shadow of a dark tower. Ruled over by three cruel lords, Zargo, Camilla, and Aukon, the villagers are forced to regularly sacrifice their young to appease their rulers. The Doctor, Romana, K-9, and Adric investigate and discover that Zargo, Camilla, and Aukon are vampires! After being defeated by the Time Lords, the vampires retreated into E-Space, where they found a new planet to rule. Of course, that little tosser Adric wants to become a vampire. Why Romana and the Doctor didn’t leave Adric behind on the vampire planet, I’ll never understand.

Even the weaker seasons of Doctor Who usually featured at least one classic serial and, in the case of Season 18, it was State of Decay. For all of the justified criticisms of John Nathan-Turner time as producer, he did make an attempt to improve the show’s production design and it paid off with this atmospheric serial that paid homage to the great vampire films while also retaining its Doctor Who identity. Tom Baker seems to be rejuvenated by the clever script and he and Lalla Ward’s chemistry is allowed to shine. K-9 even gets to do something other than getting kicked around. State of Decay is a Doctor Who classic.

Warrior’s Gate (1981, directed by Paul Joyce and Graeme Haper)

Still trying to escape E-space, the TARDIS materializes on a similarly trapped spaceship that is run by Captain Rorvik (Clifford Rose). Learning that the ship is carrying an enslaved race known as the Tharils, the Doctor set them free. The Tharils help the Doctor reenter N-Space. However, Romana decides to stay behind to help the Tharils. The Doctor gives her K-9 and then leaves with Adric. The Doctor should have left Adric behind too.

This was Lalla Ward’s final episode and both she and Romana deserved a better send-off. Romana deciding to disobey the Time Lords, I can understand. Leaving the Doctor, even to help the Tharils, doesn’t seem like something Romana would have done. John Nathan-Turner finally got his wish, though. K-9 stayed with Romana. What are Romana and K-9 going to do in an alternative universe? They don’t even have a TARDIS.

The only highlight of this episode was Clifford Rose’s manic performance as Captain Rorvik. Otherwise, it was a forgettable send-off for two great companions.

The Keeper of Traken (1981, directed by John Black)

The Doctor and annoying Adric are summoned to the planet Traken, where the Master (Geoffrey Beevers) is attempting to capture a power source that will give him a new set of regenerations. (The Master doesn’t look as badly decayed here as he did during The Deadly Assassin.) With the help of the Keeper of Traken, Tremas (Anthony Ainley), and Tremas’s lovely daughter Nyssa (Sarah Sutton), the Doctor is able to stop the Master. However, as soon as the Doctor leaves, the Master emerges from a long clock and somehow merges with Tremas’s body, giving him a new set of regenerations.

Despite the presence of Adric, this is not a bad story. The Master makes his return and, in the final minutes of the serial, Anthony Ainley takes over the role. Ainley would play The Master for the rest of the original show’s run. While Ainley’s Master was always more cartoonishly evil than Roger Delgado’s, he still proved to be a worthy adversary for the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors.

Logopolis (1981, directed by Peter Grimwade)

This is it. This is final serial to feature Tom Baker as the Doctor. Things start with the Doctor materializing the Tardis around an actual police box in an effort to fix his chameleon circuit. The Master then materializes his TARDIS around the Doctor’s. It all fun and games until the universe starts to unravel and the Doctor sacrifices his life while literally holding space and time together. Along the way, the Doctor gets two new companions, Nyssa (who has been traveling with the Master under the impression that he’s her father) and Teagan (Janet Fielding), an outspoken Australian flight attendant who entered the TARDIS thinking that it was a police call box.

Whatever else you might want to say about season 18, it gave Tom Baker a fitting send-off. After seven years of saving civilizations and planets, the Fourth Doctor finally saved the entire universe. Perhaps knowing how traumatized viewers would be to see the Fourth Doctor die, this episode featured Peter Davison (familiar to viewers as Tristan Sebring from All Creatures Great And Small) as the Watcher, a mysterious figure who merged with the Doctor at the end of the serial and turned out to be his Fifth Incarnation.

I had hoped to discuss some of the Fifth Doctor’s adventures this October but time has caught up with me. (It’s a pity because Peter Davison more than made the role of the Doctor his own and several of his serials — Kinda, Snakedance, and Enlightenment to name just three — are worthy of being considered classics.) For me, as someone who to watch Tom Baker’s Doctor on PBS while growing up, this does seem like the right place to stop.

For now.

Doctor Who — Destiny of the Daleks, City of Death, The Creature From The Pit, Nightmare of Eden, Horns of Nimon, Shada

Posted on October 30, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

Remember when I was writing about classic Doctor Who for Halloween? Let’s get back to that with a look at the 17th season of the original series. This season is a controversial one. It featured some of the show’s worst serials but also one of its best. Today, it’s remembered for introducing Lalla Ward as the second Romana and for featuring Douglas Adams as the script editor.

One frequent complaint about this season is that, under Adams’s influence, the season featured more comedy than before and it sometimes felt more like a version of Hitchhiker’s than Doctor Who. There’s some truth to that but Adams’s influence also made Season 17 into a season unlike any other. Many of Adams’s ideas didn’t work but he did give us City of Death.

Destiny of the Daleks (1979, directed by Kim Grieve)

Destiny of the Daleks will always have a place in my heart because it opens with Romana regenerating into Lalla Ward. I will admit right now that, as a kid watching Doctor Who on PBS, I had a huge crush on Lalla Ward. So did Tom Baker. He ended up marrying Ward, though the marriage did not last for long. The relationship between Baker and Ward often seemed to reflected in the relationship between The Doctor and Ward’s Romana. Long before the Doctor Who reboot had people buzzing about the Doctor and Rose, fans of the original series knew that the Doctor and Romana were in love.

Destiny of the Daleks opens with Lalla Ward’s Romana cheerfully informing the Doctor that she’s decided to regenerate because she was bored and she’s decided to look like Princess Astra. The Doctor points out that Princess Astra is a real person and Romana can’t just take on her appearance. Romana then tries out several other appearances before The Doctor tells her to go with Astra. This goes against everything that the show had established about Time Lords and regeneration but at least we end up with Lalla Ward as Romana.

It’s too bad that the rest of the serial itself isn’t that interesting, even if it does feature the first appearance by the Daleks since Genesis of the Daleks. Davros returns as well, though he’s now more or less just another generic villain. The Daleks have a new enemy, a group of robots called the Movellans. The war between the Daleks and the Movellans are at a standstill because both are governed by logic. That goes against everything we know about the Daleks.

This was Terry Nation’s final script for Doctor Who. Reportedly, he was angered when Douglas Adams extensively rewrote the script. Nation moved to America and later created the original MacGyver.

City of Death (1979, directed by Michael Hayes)

City of Death is a Doctor Who classic. Romana and the Doctor visit modern-day Paris and the BBC found the money to allow the production to shoot on location. The Doctor and Romana walk around Paris, hand-in-hand. Count Scarlioni (Julian Glover) is actually an alien who wants to steal the Mona Lisa so that he can use it to fund his time travel experiments. Countess Sacrlioni (Catherine Schell) is a classic femme fatale. An American private investigator named Duggan (Tom Chabdon) wears a trench coat and solves problems by punching first and asking questions later. John Cleese and Eleanor Bron appears as museum patrons who think the TARDIS is a work of modern art. Douglas Adams later reworked bits of his script into Dirk Gentley’s Holistic Detective Agency.

Even people who cannot stand the rest of season 17 will agree that City of Death is one of the best of Tom Baker’s serials. City of Death balances humor and drama and it features an excellent villain in the form of Julian Glover. Tom Baker and Lalla Ward are at their best, the story is genuinely interesting, and — much like Jago and Lightfoot from The Talons of Weng-Chiang — Duggan deserved his own spin-off.

The Creature From The Pit (1979, directed by Christopher Barry)

This serial features the season’s first appearance by K-9, who is now voiced by David Brierley. Though this serial was third to be aired, it was the first to be filmed.

It’s not much of a serial. The TARDIS materializes on yet another feudal planet where Lady Adastra (Myra Frances) rules through fear. Lady Adastra’s critics are thrown in the pit, which is said to be home to a great monster. Instead, it’s home to a gentle blob that was sent to the planet as an ambassador. The Doctor helps the blob gets its freedom while Romana and K-9 are briefly detained by a group of bandits. Whatever potential the story had is short-circuited by the very unconvincing monster.

Nightmare of Eden (1979, directed by Alan Bromley and Graham Williams)

Two ships materialize in the same location and end up locked together. Then the TARDIS materializes and the Doctor offers to find a way to unlock the two ships. One of the ships is a luxury space liner and the passengers are soon being menaced by clawed monsters that look like stuntmen in rubber suits. The other ship is a trade ship that the Doctor comes to suspect is involved in a drug-running operation.

Once again, the monsters were not at all convincing but the Doctor investigating the interstellar drug traffic was at least something different. Much like City of Death, Nightmare of Eden, with its luxury spaceliner, had a few moments of satire that worked. Unlike City of Death, the supporting characters were not that interesting and Tom Baker himself just seemed to be going through the motions. Nightmare of Eden was better than a lot of Season 17 but it still ultimately comes across as being rather muddled.

The Horns of Nimon (1979 — 1980, directed by Kenny McBain)

The Horns of Nimon, is it terrible or is it great? Some defend it because of its allusions to Greek mythology, its deliberate humor, and the over-the-top performance of Graham Crowden as Soldeed, the leader of the Skonnan Empire. Others, like me, point out the turgid pacing, the bad creature effects, and the fact that the majority of the serial is just people walking around. Based on the myth of the minotaur, The Horns of Nimon looks and feels cheap. Crowden splits his pants at one point and I guess there was no time to stitch them back up. The whole thing is just too slapdash.

Shada (2018, directed by Pennant Roberts and Charles Norton)

For decades, Shada was the Holy Grail of Doctor Who. The final serial of the 17th century, Shada was in the process of filming when the BBC’s technicians went on strike. With 50% of the serial filmed, production was suspended and eventually canceled.

Afterwards, Shada developed a legendary reputation. It was often described as being a potential masterpiece, despite the fact that Season 17 was not one of Doctor Who‘s best. Footage of the Doctor and Romana visiting Cambridge was widely released and even used in The Five Doctors. The footage itself did look good but that was because it was mostly just Tom Baker and Lalla Ward relaxing and trading funny quips. There was very little of the actual plot to be found in those scenes.

Finally, in 2017, Shada aired. Animation was used for the unfilmed sequences and a white-haired Tom Baker even returned to shoot some new linking scenes. Shada was finally broadcast in the U.S. And, it wasn’t bad. It may not have been the masterpiece that so many assumed it would be but it was certainly an improvement on The Creature From The Pit, Nightmare on Eden, and the Horns of Nimon.

The Doctor and Romana travel to Cambridge to help out another timelord, Prof. Chronitis (Denis Carey). After Chronitis is apparently killed, The Doctor and Romana discover that space criminal Skagra (Christopher Neame) is seeking a Time Lord named Salyavin who is somewhere on the prison planet, Shada. Things get muddled once the Doctor actually travels to Shada but the Cambridge scenes are a definite highlight of the serial, a very British diversion for a very British show. Much as with City of Death, the best moments are the ones where Tom Baker and Lalla Ward just get to play off of each other without having to deal with any sort of intergalactic menace. Also, as with City of Death, Douglas Adams would borrows bits and pieces of Shada for Dirk Gentley’s Holistic Detective Agency.

Shada may not have been a masterpiece but it would have been a decent end for the seventeenth season.