Tag Archives: Doctor Who

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

Posted on 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 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.

 

 

 

Doctor Who — The Ribos Operation, The Pirate Planet, The Stones of Blood, The Androids of Tara, The Power of Kroll, The Armageddon Factor

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The sixteenth season of Doctor Who featured the usual six serials but, for once, they were all a part of a much bigger story.  Season 16 would open with the Doctor being assigned to find the six segments of the Key of Time and it would end with an appearance from Lalla Ward, who would not only play one of the Doctor’s companion but who would (albeit briefly) become a companion to Tom Baker himself.

The Ribos Operation (1978, directed by George Spenton-Foster)

The Ribos Operation begins with the White Guardian (Cyril Luckham) materializing in the TARDIS.  He has come to give the Doctor (Tom Baker) and K-9 (voiced by John Leeson) a mission.  The balance of the universe is maintained by the White Guardian and the Black Guardian.  The balance is at risk of collapsing unless the Doctor can track down the six segments of the Key of Time.  Each segment has been hidden on a different planet, disguised as something native to that world.  The White Guardian gives the Doctor a locater to help him find each planet.  He also gives the Doctor a new assistant, a Time Lady named Romanadvoratrelundar (Mary Tamm).  The Doctor calls her Romana.

And so stars the Key of Time saga.  As played by Mary Tamm, Romana was a new type of assistant for the Doctor.  As a fellow Time Lord (though referred to as being a “Time Lady” because this serial was filmed in 1978), Romana has just as much knowledge as the Doctor and she does not view him with the awe that other companions viewed him.  The sophisticated and almost haughty Romana is not with the Doctor for adventure.  She is there to complete their assignment.

Their first mission takes them to the icy planet Ribos and finds them getting involved with a scheme by a human named Garron (Ian Cuthbertson) to sell the largely worthless planet to an exiled tyrant named Graff Vynda-K (Paul Seed).  (In this case, “operation” means swindle.)  When Graff discovers that he’s been cheated, he comes after both Garron and the Doctor.

The Ribos Operation is an enjoyable story.  Graff is a great megalomaniacal villain and I liked the idea of trying to trick him into buying a worthless planet.  It was the future equivalent of selling swampland.  Mary Tamm also makes a strong impression as Romana.  The Key to Time saga got off to a good start.

As for the first segment of the Key to Time, it was a piece of the fake crown jewels of Ribos.

The Pirate Planet (1978, directed by Pennant Roberts)

The Doctor and Romana are next directed to a planet called Calufrax that is known for being cold and boring.  When they land, they find themselves in an apparent paradise.  It turns out that they are actually on a hollowed-out planet called Zanak that materializes around other planets and, in the style of Galactus, plunder their resources.  Zanak is apparently controlled by the one-eyed Captain (Bruce Purchase) but the Doctor and Romana discover that it is actually the Captain’s nurse (Rosalind Lloyd) who is calling the shots.

The Pirate Planet is famous for being one of the serials written by Douglas Adams.  The loud but stupid Captain and his long-suffering assistant, Mr. Fibuli (Andrew Robertson), certainly do seem like they would be at home in one of Adams’s novels and the story overall has more humor than even the typical Tom Baker episode.  It’s a clever script, though and both Purchase and Robertson give good performances as the two pirates.

The entire planet of Calufrax turns out to be a segment of the Key to Time.  When I first saw this episode as a kid, that struck me as being very weird.  It still seems weird but that’s Doctor Who.

The Stones of Blood (1978, directed by Darrol Blake)

The Doctor, Romana, and K-9 are brought to modern-day Cornwall, where Prof. Emilia Rumford (Beatrix Lehmann) and her friend Vivien Fay (Susan Engel) are studying a stone circle.  For the first two episodes of this serial, it appears that the main villains are going to be a group of modern-day druids but it turns out that the stones are actually aliens who feed on blood, and Vivien Fay is a galactic war criminal named Cessair and that she has stolen the Great Seal of Diplos, which also happens to be the third segment of the Key of Time.

This serial sees the Doctor returning to Earth for the first time since Image of Fendahl.  The first two episodes have an almost gothic horror feel to them before the serial heads in a different, more intergalactic direction during its second half.  In a clever twist, it turns out that the “stones of blood” were actually just red herrings.  After spending four episodes convincing the viewers that the key would be one of the stones, it instead turned out to be the Great Seal of a planet that no one had ever heard of.  This was another enjoyable serial, featuring a memorable villainess and a clever story.

The Androids of Tara (1978, directed by Michael Hayes)

Romana finds the next segment within minutes of landing on the planet Tara but the Doctor wants to take a break and do some fishing.  While he is doing that, Romana is attacked by a bear and rescued by Count Grendel (Peter Jeffrey).  Grendel takes Romana back to his castle, where he soon reveals that he’s not as kind as he seems.

The Androids of Tara is an adventure story that takes place on a planet where a feudal society is matched with androids and electronic weapons.  This episode gives Mary Tamm quite a lot to do as she plays not only Romana but also the Taran Princess Strella and the android versions of Strella and Romana.  Grendel hopes to marry Romana-as-Strella and become the ruler of Grendel.  The Doctor, along with Price Reynart (Neville Jason) and the swordsmen Zadek (Simon Lack) and Farrah (Paul Lavers), works to rescue Romana.  The Doctor even fights a duel with Grendel.

The Androids of Tara is a bit silly but it’s all in good fun.  Tom Baker seems to enjoy playing the swashbuckler and Peter Jeffrey, a familiar character actor, is an appropriately melodramatic villain.  This serial allows Mary Tamm her chance in the spotlight and she makes the most of it, reminding us that Romana could be just as strong as the Doctor.

The Power of Kroll (1978-1979, directed by Norman Stewart)

The TARDIS travels to a swamp planet where a crew of humans are running a methane refinery and the planet’s inhabitants (called Swampies, by the humans) worship a giant squid named Kroll.  Kroll is giant because it ate a segment of the Key of Time.  Kroll attacks both humans and Swampies until the Doctor manages to extract the Key of Time.  Kroll explodes and, since Kroll was also the main source of methane on the planet, the refinery closes.

This serial made the mistake of focusing on Kroll.  Like so many Doctor Who giant monsters, Kroll is not at all convincing.  That and some poor acting from the guest cast and a largely humorless script all combine to make this the most forgettable part of the Key to Time saga.

The Armageddon Factor (1979, directed by Michael Hayes)

The search for the final segment leads the TARDIS to the warring plants of Atrios and Zeos.  Atrios and Zeos have both been scarred by nuclear weapons.  Princess Astra (Lalla Ward) of Atrios wants end the war but the fanatical Marshal (John Woodvine) is determined to continue the war.  A mysterious figure known as The Shadow (William Squire) steals the TARDIS and abducts Princess Astra, who is revealed to also be the sixth segment of the Key of Time.  The Shadow is working for the Black Guardian (Valentine Dyall).  In pursuing The Shadow, the Doctor meets yet another renegade Time Lord and classmate, Drax (Barry Jackson).

The Armageddon Factor is about two episodes too long and is often needlessly complicated but there were a few clever moments, like the discovery that Zeos was no longer inhabited by humans and that the missiles were being launched by a super computer.  (K-9 was able to communicate with it and broker a peace.)  For viewers of the series, The Armageddon Factor is best-remembered for introducing Lalla Ward.  Dissatisfied with the way Romana was developing, Mary Tamm announced that she was leaving at the end of the season.  When Romana regenerated in the following season, she ended up looking a lot like Princess Astra of Atrios.

Doctor Who — The Invisible Enemy, Image of the Fendahl, The Sun Makers, Underworld, The Invasion of Time

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Having survived the Horror of Fang Rock, the Doctor and Leela resumed traveling through space and time.  Along the way, they picked up a new companion named K-9.  Here is the rest of the fifteenth century, which began in a British lighthouse and ended on Gallifrey.

The Invisible Enemy (1977, directed by Derrick Goodwin)

This the one where K-9 makes his first appearance.

As a story, The Invisible Enemy is no great shakes.  The Doctor (Tom Baker) and Leela (Louise Jameson) materialize on a spaceship that has been infected by a sentient virus.  Everyone, except for Leela, gets infected.  The virus wants the Doctor to lead an infection of the entire universe.  When the virus orders the Doctor to kill Leela, he breaks free from its control.  He and Leela go to a space medical center, where Prof. Marinus (Frederick Jaeger) uses Leela’s natural immunity to help create a cure for the virus.  At one point, the Doctor and Leela are cloned and the clones are injected into the Doctor to fight the virus.  It’s a fantastic voyage for all.

Prof. Marinus’s assistant is a boxy robot dog named K-9 (voice by John Leeson).  Since Marinus has to go back to Earth, he gives K-9 to The Doctor and Leela as a gift.

How you feel about K-9 says a lot about how you will feel about the remainder of Tom Baker’s time as the Doctor.  Some fans consider the introduction of K-9 to be the show’s jump the shark moment.  A lot more, myself included, have always liked K-9 and view him — along with the sonic screwdriver — as being an essential part of the original show’s charm.  Love him or hate him, K-9, who come figure out any puzzle and who could shoot a loser from his nose, became one of the most recognizable symbols of the Tom Baker years.

Image of the Fendahl (1977, Directed by George-Spenton Foster)

The Doctor and Leela are drawn back to modern-day Earth, where scientists, witches, and cultists are all being influenced by skull that is estimated to be at least twelve million years old.  The scientists assume that the skull is human but actually, it’s the skull of a Fendahl, a race of psychic vampires who developed on the legendary “Fifth Planet.”  The Time Lords tried to destroy the Fendahl but one escaped in the form of a skull.  It first killed all the life on Mars.  (But what about the Ice Warriors and the Pyramids?  Doctor Who continuity rarely added up.)  Then it landed on Earth, where it influenced human evolution to create a race that it could use to its own advantage.

Image of the Fendahl feels like a spiritual descendant of The Daemons, with the same emphasis on rural British atmosphere and paganism (Leela teams up with a white witch) but without the assurance of UNIT waiting on the sidelines to take care of the threat.  Image of the Fendahl, with its suggestion that humanity was specifically developed to be food, is considerably darker than The Daemons and Tom Baker, so often criticized for playing up the humor of the Doctor’s character, gives one of his more serious performances.  When one of the scientists who has been possessed by Fendahl seeks to kill himself and bring an end to the threat, the Doctor hands him a gun.

Image of the Fendahl is yet another Doctor Who serial in which the main threat is revealed be the result of the Time Lords meddling.  The Fourth Doctor spent a lot of time cleaning up Gallifrey’s messes.

The Sun Makers (1977, directed by Pennant Roberts)

The Doctor, Leela, and K-9 materialize on Pluto, where they discover that colonists and workers are expected to pay exorbitant taxes to the Company or risk being exiled to the Undercity.  The Company’s tax collector is the Controller, who turns out to be a quivering mass of seaweed.

The Sun Makers is Doctor Who at its most satirical, poking fun at the British tax system.  Apparently, the original script was much more pointed in its attacks on the Inland Revenue services but the BBC, being the BBC, demanded that the script be watered down.  In human form, the Controller still clearly resembles Denis Healey, the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer.

The Sun Makers is Doctor Who at its most straight-forward, an enjoyable diversion from the more serious episodes.

Underworld (1978, directed by Norman Stewart)

The TARDIS materializes on the R1C, a spaceship that has been on a millennia-long quest to find a missing ship that was on its away to Minyos 2 and which contained the genetic files of the original Minyans who lived on Minyos 1.

This is another story where the Doctor has to deal with the bad decisions of the Time Lords.  Before adapting their policy of non-intervention, the Time Lords meddles in Minyan evolution and the end result was that the Minyans viewed the Time Lords as gods and the Minyans also used all of the Time Lord technology that they had been given to fight a civil war.  The Doctor feels a responsibility to help the crew of R1C complete their quest.

The R1C eventually ends up going through a space nebula and crashing into a planetoid, where they discover the ship they were searching for.  The crew of the ship is being used as slaves by the Oracle, a super computer.

Underworld is one of the more boring of the Fourth Doctor’s serials.  The story feels slapdash and the idea of a supercomputer was a well that the Doctor Who had already gone to far too many times.

The Invasion of Time (1978, directed by Gerald Blake)

The Doctor returns to Gallifrey and assumes his position as President of the Time Lords.  He also seems to go through a total personality change, exiling Leela and announcing that a group of psychic aliens known as the Vardans will be the new masters of Gallifrey.

Leela, even after being exiled, is convinced that this is all a part of some plan on the Doctor’s part and it turns out that she’s right.  The Doctor is only pretending to be allied with the Vardans so that he can discover the location of their planet and put them into a time loop.  What the Doctor does not realize is that the Vardans are themselves being used by the Sontarans, who are planning on invading Gallifrey.

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that the 15th season would end on Gallifrey.  It also seems inevitable that the Sontarans would eventually try to invade Gallifrey.  The main threat of the Sontarans has always been that they are so stupid that they will try to invade any planet.  The most surprising thing about this serial is that Leela stays behind on Gallifrey so that she can marry Andred (Chris Tanchrell), the head of the Citadel Guard.  The idea of Leela living with the Time Lords has been responsible for a lot of fan fiction and it does seem unfortunate that the show didn’t do more with the idea.

Louise Jameson had already decided to leave the show and originally, Leela was to die while fighting the Sontarans.  This was changed because it was felt Leela’s death would be too traumatic for younger viewers.  Instead, the younger viewers were traumatized by K-9 announcing that he would be staying on Gallifrey with Leela and Andred.  Luckily, for them, the final shot of the fifteen season was The Doctor looking at a crate labeled “K-9 Mark II” and smiling.

Little did the Doctor suspect that the quest for the Key of Time was waiting in his future.

 

Doctor Who — Horror of Fang Rock (1977, directed by Paddy Russell)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The first serial of the 15th season of Doctor Who finally allowed viewers a glimpse of an alien race that they had previously only heard about.

The Rutans are the mortal enemies of the Sontarans.  Their war has gone on for centuries, with neither race getting the upper hand (or tentacle, as the case may be).  Nearly every episode in which the Sontarans appeared involved an attempt to turn Earth into an outpost against the Rutans.  In Horror of Fang Rock, a Rutan travels to Earth and tries to do the same thing against the Sontarans.  Luckily, the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Leela (Louise Jameson) are there to stop it but not before every other character in the serial has been killed.

Horror of Fang Rock takes place early in the 20th Century, at an isolated lighthouse on an island in the English channel.  Other than The Doctor, Leela, and the Rutan, the characters consist of two lighthouse keepers and the four survivors of a shipwreck.  They’re all noble English stereotypes, with names like Lord Palmerdale, Colonel Skinsale, and Adelaide Lessage and none of them survive the horror of Fang Rock.

When I first saw this serial as a kid, it actually left me feeling rather depressed.  It certainly didn’t seem like everyone deserved to die.  Even my mom, who rarely watched the show with my dad and me but who did sit through the first 25 minutes of Horror of Fang Rock before finding something better to do, was surprised when I told her that no one had survived.

When I recently rewatched this serial, I better appreciated just how efficiently Horror of Fang Rock is put together.  It mixes traditional gothic imagery (like the fog-covered island and the dark lighthouse) with aliens and it does a good job of it.  The Rutan itself turns out to be a glowing green mass.  It looks convincingly evil and extraterrestrial.  As soon as it appeared, I understood why the dull-witted Sontarans never seemed to be sure how to defeat the Rutans.  The Rutan was a creature totally unlike the usual humanoid aliens that populated Doctor Who.  It also made sense that only the Doctor and Leela would be able to survive a confrontation with the Rutan because the Rutan was so alien that rest of the inhabitants of the lighthouse had no idea how to respond to it.

At the end of this serial, the Doctor causes the Rutan mothership to explode.  Leela looks straight at the explosion and, as a result, her brown eye turn blue.  Louise Jameson’s eyes were always blue but they weren’t considered to be the right color for the savage character she was playing so, for her first few serial, she had to wear extremely uncomfortable contact lenses.  One of her conditions for returning for Season 15 was that she would no longer have to wear them.  The show’s producers gave in and that was the right decision.  By the time Horror of Fang Rock came along, Baker and Jameson had moved pass their initial awkwardness and were now a strong team.

holds up well as one of the few Doctor Who stories to actually be as scary as the show’s critics claimed.  Tom Baker and Louise Jameson are at their best and the Rutan proves to be the rare Doctor Who alien to live up to the hype.

Doctor Who — The Talons Of Weng-Chiang (1977, directed by David Maloney)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The TARDIS materializes in Victorian-era London.  Accompanying the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) is his new companion, Leela (Louise Jameson).  After returning Sarah Jane Smith to her own time (more or less) and saving the Time Lords from being destroyed by the Master, the Doctor meet Leela on an unnamed planet in the far future.  Though Leela, with her short animal-skin outfit and her very large knife, seemed like a savage, she was actually the descendant of a group of Earth astronauts who had crashed on the planet centuries before.  Leela insisted on traveling with the Doctor and the Doctor reluctantly decided to try to civilize Leela or, at the very least, get her to stop carrying that big knife around with her.

Hence, the trip to London.  The Doctor wants her to see where her ancestors came from.  The Doctor’s plan is to take her to the Palace Theater, owned by Henry Gordon Jago (Christopher Benjamin), so that they can see a performance by the magician Li Hi’sen Chang (John Bennett).  Instead, they end up getting caught up in a series of murders that involving Chang, a giant rat in the London sewers, a miniature killer named Mr. Sin (Deep Roy) who snorts like a pig, and a 51st century war criminal named Magnus Greel (Michael Spice).

The Talons of Weng-Chiang is not only one of the best of the Fourth Doctor’s adventures but it’s also one of the best Doctor Who serials ever.  Victoria London, with its foggy streets and its collection of eccentric rogues, proves to be a perfect fit for Tom Baker’s Doctor, allowing Baker to try out the Sherlock Holmes persona that he would later use when he played the great detective himself in a BBC production of Hound of the Baskervilles.  Louise Jameson is also a delight in this story, with Leela’s naturally independent nature befuddling all of the very proper Victorians that she comes into contact with.  Louise Jameson had the unenviable task of trying to follow in the footsteps of the beloved Elisabeth Sladen.  (The show’s writers helped out by making Leela the opposite of Sarah Jane is almost every way.)  Supposedly, Tom Baker had not wanted a new companion and initially treated Louise Jameson very coldly, though he eventually warmed up to her.  With her performance in this serial, Louise Jameson proved that she definitely deserved to be a part of the Doctor’s adventures.

Of course, for many, the real highlight of this serial is the chemistry between Henry Gordon Jago and Professor Lightfoot (Trevor Baxter), the coroner who has been investigating a number of strange murders in London.  The blustery Jago and the reserved Lightfoot are almost as important to defeating Magnus Greel than the Doctor and Leela and the scenes in which they become an unlikely detective team are so enjoyable that it’s not a surprise that the BBC considered giving them a series of their own.  (From 2010 to 2017, the pair did star in an audio drama, one that imagined them investigating other mysteries and even teaming up with other Doctors.)  Of course, when I first saw The Talons of Weng-Chiang, I was just happy that Jago and Lightfoot managed to survive all six chapters.  After you watch enough Doctor Who, you learn not to get to attached to any of the supporting characters.  That Jago and Lightfoot did not fall victim to Mr. Sin was cause for celebration.

The Talons of Weng-Chiang actually has a pretty interesting story, one that justified its 6-episode length.  Magnus Greel is one of the great Doctor Who villains, a time traveling war criminal who pretended to be a God.  For the most part, Michael Spice was convincing as Greel, though his over-the-top delivery of a threat to “rip your flesh,” is one of the serial’s few unintentionally funny moments.  Another false step was the “giant rat,” which was clearly a normal-sized rat shot on a miniature set.  The rat looked bored.  When the rat has to interact with the Doctor and Leela, it becomes a giant rat dummy that looks very little like the normal rat.  And finally, a stuntman had to do a few scenes inside a rat costume.  All of the rat stuff doesn’t do much other than leave you wondering whether the story really needed a giant rat at all.   Of course, it’s really not Doctor Who if there isn’t at least one notable case of special effects failure.

The rat aside, there is another thing that has to be discussed when it comes to The Talons of Weng-Chiang.  When I was a kid, I didn’t really notice it because I was too busy enjoying the action set pieces, Tom Baker’s tongue-in-check performance, the Jago/Lightfoot team-up, and everything about Louise Jameson.  Rewatching The Talons of Weng-Chiang as an adult, the thing I immediately noticed was that, for an episode that featured a lot of Chinese characters (the majority of whom were not presented in a particularly positive light), there weren’t many Chinese actors in the cast.  The most prominent Chinese character was played by John Bennett, in full yellowface.  Reading about the production of the serial, I was not surprised to see that one of the inspirations was Sax Rohmer’s notoriously racist Fu Manchu novels.  While The Talons of Weng-Chiang may not be as flat-out racist as Rohmer’s novels, it still has its share of negative racial stereotypes.  (Of course, the story’s main villain is not Chinese.  Magnus Greel is described as being “the butcher of Brisbane,” make of that what you will.)  The Talons of Weng-Chiang is well-acted, well-directed, and well-written and there’s no way it would be made today, at least not in the same way that it was made in the 70s.  I’m not saying that’s a bad thing or a good thing.  It just a reminder of how much things have changed since 1977.

The final serial of the 14th season, The Talons of Weng-Chiang was a triumph and also proof that the Doctor could still have worthwhile adventures, even if he was no longer traveling with Sarah Jane.

Doctor Who — The Deadly Assassin (1976, directed by David Maloney)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Having had a vison of the President of the Time Lords being assassinated, the Doctor returns to his home planet to prevent it from happening.  Instead, he ends up framed for the crime.  The Doctor insists that he is innocent and then announces that he will be a candidate for the presidency.  Under Time Lord law, a candidate for president cannot be prosecuted for any crimes in the run up to the election.

The Doctor’s investigation leads him into the Matrix, a virtual reality world that is the collection of all the Time Lords’s consciousnesses.  He discovers that the assassination was actually masterminded by The Master (Peter Pratt, replacing the late Roger Delgado).    Having used up all of his previous regenerations, The Master is now a decaying skeletal figure who can barely speaks and wears a black hood.  12 lifetimes of evil appear to have caught up with him.  The Master’s plan is steal the black hole nucleus that was captured by the first Time Lod, Rassilon (sorry, Omega!), and use it to give himself a new set of generations.  Doing so will also destroy Gallifrey.

This was an important serial for many reasons.  It was the first serial to feature The Doctor on his own, with no other companions.  Having a companion usually gave the Doctor a chance to explain things that might seem strange or alien to the audience at home.  For The Deadly Assassin, we learn that Gallifrey has a BBC-like television service that provides coverage of political events and helpfully explains what is happening even though the audience of Time Lords would presumably already know.  The Doctor also spends a good deal of time talking to himself.  Normally, that could have been awkward but Tom Baker was a great talker and very good at handling solo conversations.  This serial also fully introduced us to Time Lord politics and featured the first appearance of the Doctor’s former teacher, Borusa (Angus MacKay).  Finally, and most importantly, it featured the return of the show’s greatest villain, The Master.  The Master hadn’t been seen since Roger Delgado’s tragic death in 1973.

The Deadly Assassin was one of the more violent of the Doctor Who stories.  The President was assassinated.  Time Lord anchorman Runcible (Hugh Walters) ended up with a dagger in his back.  The Master’s ally, Chancellor Goth (Bernard Horsfall), attempted to drown the Doctor in The Matrix.  After receiving outraged letters from parents, the BBC actually edited out the scene of Goth holding the Doctor’s head underwater from rebroadcasts.  The Deadly Assassin was also one of the scarier serials of the classic era.  The Master was truly a frightening figure with his raspy voice and his burned-out, skeletal appearance.

I’ve always liked The Deadly Assassin.  It features a genuinely interesting story and Tom Baker gives one of his best performances.  (Baker had specifically asked to do one serial without a companion.)  The serial’s cynical view of politics almost made it ahead of its time.  The Deadly Assassin ends with The Doctor being told that he’s won the election and that he is now President of the Time Lords.  He’s also told that it’s far too early for him to even think of resigning.  Of course, the Doctor makes a run for his TARDIS.

Doctor Who — The Hand of Fear (1976, directed by Lennie Mayne)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The TARDIS materializes in a quarry and, for once, it’s an actual Earth quarry and not just an alien plant that looks like a quarry.  An explosion both knocks Sarah Jane Smith out and also exposes a fossilized hand that has been hidden away under the rocks for centuries.   The hand belongs to an executed alien was criminal named Kastrian Eldrad (Stephen Thorne, playing yet another Doctor Who baddie).  When the hand is found, it starts to search for sources of radiation so that it can fully regenerate back into its original form and then seek revenge on its home planet.

The Hand of Fear would have been a standard Doctor Who adventure, except that it ended with Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Sladen) announcing that she can no longer handle the death, violence, and occasional mind control that goes along with being the Doctor’s companion.  She asks the Doctor (Tom Baker) to return her to South Croydon.  The Doctor reluctantly agrees.  While Sarah is packing her things, The Doctor suddenly gets a telepathic message telling him to come to his home planet of Gallifrey and he realizes that, even if Sarah wasn’t leaving, he would not be able to take her with him.  When The Doctor tells Sarah this, it upsets Sarah.  Even though she impulsively decided to go home, it’s obvious that it’s not really what she wants.  When The Doctor drops her off on Earth, she tells him not to forget her and we know that he never will.  As the Doctor dematerializes, Sarah looks around and sees that she’s on Earth and probably in England  but nowhere close to South Croydon.Plenty of companions had come and gone before this episode but none of them had quite the impact of Sarah Janes Smith.  Sarah was one of the few companions to actually be viewed as being an equal of the Doctor.  Even though she spent a lot of time doing typical companion things like being menaced by aliens and asking the Doctor to explain things, Sarah Jane still always projected a determination and inner strength that made her more than worthy to be traveling through time and space.  Even dressing like Andy Pandy during her final appearance couldn’t diminish Sarah Janes Smith as a character.

Elisabeth Sladen had the perfect rapport with both Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker.  Sladen and Baker were apparently close enough that they improvised their final goodbye and the emotions in that scene feel very real.  For viewers like me, who were introduced to Doctor Who by PBS airing the Fourth Doctor’s adventures, Sarah Jane was the first companion that we met and her suddenly leaving came as a shock.  She just seemed as if she was meant to be a part of the TARDIS crew forever.

Sarah Jane Smith would return, of course.  There was K-9 and Company in 1981.  There were the Sarah Jane Adventures, which ran from 2007 to 2011.  Sadly, the wonderful Elisabeth Sladen passed away in 2011.  For many of us, it felt like losing a valued a childhood friend.

Doctor Who — The Seeds of Doom (1976, directed by Douglas Camfield)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Working on behalf of World Ecology Bureau (?), the Doctor (Tom Baker) and Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Slader) are sent to a remote research station in Antarctica where an expedition has unearthed two mysterious plant pod.  The Doctor recognizes the pod as a Krynoid, an alien that survives by laying its seeds in a host organism who is then slowly and painfully transformed into a plant.  One of the members of the expedition, Winlett (John Gleeson), has already been infected.  The infection is so bad that the Doctor is forced to say that there is nothing that can be done to save Winlett, other than amputating his arm to try to slow the infection.

While the Doctor and Sarah Jane try to deal with the Krynoid, a pant-obsessed millionaire named Harrison Chase (Tony Beckley) learns of the pod’s existence.  He sends two of his henchmen, Scorby (John Callis) and Keeler (Mark Jones) to collect it for him.  While the now fully mutated Winlett kills the other members of the expedition, Scorby and Keeler steal one of the pods.  Scorby blows up the base, killing Winlett and nearly killing the Doctor and Sarah Jane as well.

That’s all in the first two episodes of this six-episode serial.  The remaining four episodes find the Doctor and Sarah Jane (and eventually UNIT) invading Chase’s estate and trying to destroy the Krynoid before it grows big enough to destroy all animal life on Earth.  Chase becomes possessed by the Krynoid, Keeler turns into fungus, and several people are strangled by plants.  There’s even a death by mulcher.

The Seeds of Doom is one of those serials that has really stuck with me.  I think it’s because of how desperate the Doctor gets once he realizes that he’s failed in his mission to keep the Krynoid from escape Antarctica.  Tom Baker was usually known for being the funny Doctor but, in this episode, he’s almost an action hero, smashing through windows, beating up numerous henchpeople, and maybe snapping one man’s neck.  (It’s hard to tell if the Doctor killed him or just rendered him unconscious.)  It’s a different side of the Doctor but it’s appropriate because, for once, the Doctor isn’t one step ahead of everyone else.  There’s no time for fun and games when the Krynoid has already taken over Chase’s entire estate.

Harrison Chase was one of the best of the Doctor Who one-off villains.  Tony Beckley gave a great performance as Chase, playing him as someone who was an evil fanatic even before his mind was taken over by the Krynoid.  By the end of the serial, as he rants while bullet fly around his estate, Chase has become a truly wonderfully loathsome character.  Watching him, it’s easy to imagine Tony Beckley playing a minor villain in a James Bond movie.  (Sadly, Tony Beckley died just four years after playing Harrison Chase.)

Still, the moment that has always stuck with me is Sarah Jane discovering Keeler, covered in spores and grasping onto his last strands of humanity before becoming a Krynoid.  There was always considerable debate over whether or not Doctor Who was too scary for its target audience.  That debate usually seems pretty dumb but I imagine The Seeds of Doom inspired more than a few nightmares.

The Seeds of Doom brought the 13th season of the classic series to an impressive end.  The Doctor and Sarah Jane decided to take a vacation.  They had earned it.

Doctor Who — Pyramids of Mars (1975, directed by Paddy Russell)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Did you ever wonder who built the pyramids of Egypt?

It was the aliens, of course!

In 1911, Dr. Marcus Scarman (Bernhard Archard) excavates a pyramid.  When he enters a room that has the Eye of Horus over the doorway, he is hit by a beam of light.

Months later, The Doctor (Tom Baker) and Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Slader) materialize at the Scarman Estate in England.  They run into Dr. Scarman’s friend, Dr. Warlock  (Peter Copley).  (Dr. Warlock?  Really?)  Warlock explains that Scarman has been missing every since he went to Egypt and that his estate is now occupied by a mysterious man named Namin (Peter Maycock).

Namin is eagerly waiting the arrival of Sutekh (Gabriel Woolf), who Namin thinks is an ancient Egyptian god but who is actually the last-surviving member of the Osirian alien race.  The Osirians imprisoned Sutekh on a temple on Mars but Sutekh has taken over the body of Scarman and is using him to construct a missile that will free Sutekh from his Martian prison.  The possessed Scarman returns his estate, kills Namin, and gets to work.

Pyramids of Mars takes the usual Doctor Who themes of aliens and time travel and mixed them with mummies and ancient Egyptian curses.  This serial doesn’t skimp on the horror.  Sutekh tries to strangle almost everyone he meets and, once the Doctor and Sarah reach Mars, there’s plenty of scenes of mummies come to life and stalking pyramind to appeal to the most discerning of viewers.  Pyramids of Mars is one of the Doctor Who episodes that is perfect for October!