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.

October True Crime: Dr. Crippen (dir by Robert Lynn)

Posted on October 2, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen

In 1910, a homeopath named Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen was executed by hanging in the UK.

An American by birth, Dr. Crippen had come to London in 1897 with his second wife. (His first wife died of a stroke and Crippen sent his only son to live with his grandparents.) Cora Crippen was a former music hall singer who hope to continue her career in London and who did manage to make friends with several prominent members of the city’s theatrical community. Dr. Crippen was widely regarded as a meek man who was dominated by his rage-prone wife. Crippen struggled to hold down a regular job and eventually ended up as a manager at the Druet Institute for the Deaf. By at least 1905, Dr. Crippen was having an affair with a young typist named Ethel Le Neve.

Cora disappeared in early 1910. When her friends stopped by the house to ask for her, Dr. Crippen said that his wife had left him for another man and had returned to America. Later, he claimed that Cora had subsequently died in California. When Ethel was spotted wearing Cora’s jewelry, the London police launched their own investigation into Cora’s disappearance. After Crippen was interviewed by the police, he and Ethel fled to Brussels and then boarded an ocean liner heading for Canada. After Crippen and Ethel disappeared, the police searched Crippen’s home and found a torso buried in the basement. It was assumed that the torso was all that was left of Cora.

(As some have pointed out, it didn’t seem to make much sense for Crippen to dispose of Cora’s head, legs, and arms but to keep her torso. Apparently, at that time, it was common for human torsos to show up in the Thames, the result of people jumping in the river and then having their body split apart by the current. As such, the Thames also became a popular place to dump murder victims. One wonders why Crippen wouldn’t have done the same.)

Meanwhile, on the ocean liner heading to Canada, the captain noticed that one passengers looked like a freshly shaven Dr. Crippen and that the “boy” he was traveling with was obviously a young woman in disguise. The captain sent a wireless telegram to London. Chief Inspector Walter Dew boarded a faster liner and actually managed to reach Canada before Crippen. When Crippen and Ethel arrived in Canada, Walter Dew was waiting for them.

Fate simply wasn’t on Crippen’s side. If Crippen had bought third class tickets instead of sailing first class, it’s probable the captain would have never seen him during the voyage. If Crippen had taken a boat to his native United States instead of Canada (which was then still a British dominion), Dew would not have been able to take him back to the UK without an extradition hearing and it’s entirely possible that the evidence would have been ruled insufficient. Instead, Crippen was promptly returned to London and put on trial for murdering his wife.

During the heavily-covered four-day trial, Crippen’s defense was that Cora had returned to America and that there was no way to prove that the torso was Cora’s. Though the jury found Crippen guilty in just 22 minutes and he was hanged a month later, there were many who felt that Crippen was innocent or, at the very least, that his guilt had not been proven. I imagine that one reason why so many people doubted Dr. Crippen’s guilt was because he just didn’t look or act like a murderer. He wasn’t Jack the Ripper, a shadowy figure moving through the night. Instead, he was a short, balding, and rather owlish looking man who wore glasses and who, in most photographs, has a quizzical expression on his face.

In short, Dr. Crippen seems as if he was literally destined to eventually be played by Donald Pleasence.

The 1963 film, Dr. Crippen, takes a rather straight-forward approach to telling the story of the doctor. It opens with Crippen (Donald Pleasence, naturally) on trial for the murder of his wife and it largely tells the story through flashbacks. Cora (Coral Browne) is portrayed as being a no-talent narcissist who regularly cuckolds her husband while Ethel Le Neve (Samantha Eggar) is portrayed as being a naive young woman who truly loves Dr. Crippen. The film leaves open the question of whether or not Crippen killed his wife, though it seems to strongly suggest that Crippen was innocent of the crime and the only reason he fled London was because he wanted to be with Ethel. Donald Pleasence is excellent as Dr. Crippen, playing him with just enough ambiguity that the viewer is left to wonder whether he did it or not. Pleasence turns Crippen into a sympathetic figure while still holding back just enough to suggest that emotional darkness that could have led even the meek Dr. Crippen to becoming a murderer. Nicolas Roeg’s black-and-white cinematography captures both the harshness of Crippen’s life in prison and the fleeting romance of his brief time with Ethel.

As for the real life Crippen, both his guilt and his subsequent execution continue to be controversial, with some claiming that DNA testing proved that the torso did not belong to Cora. (Other have quite reasonably pointed out that the sample used had degraded quite a bit over a hundred years.) There have been many attempts to win Dr. Crippen a posthumous pardon but all have failed and will probably continue to fail unless Cora’s remains are somehow discovered in a grave somewhere in California.

Shortly before his execution, in his final letter to Ethel Le Neve, Crippen wrote, “Face to face with God, I believe that facts will be forthcoming to prove my innocence.” After Crippen was hung, Ethel spent three years in Canada before returning to London. She changed her name, worked as a typist, and eventually married and had two children. She died in 1967, fifty-seven years after Dr. Crippen.