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 — The Daleks (1963-1964, directed by Christopher Barry and Richard Martin)

Posted on October 1, 2025 by Jedadiah Leland

It’s easy to forget that Doctor Who was originally meant to be an educational show for children.

When the BBC’s Head of Drama, Sydney Newman, first developed Doctor Who, he envisioned it as being a show in which an eccentric old man known as the Doctor and his granddaughter, Susan, would travel to past eras and meet actual historical figures and witness great events firsthand. Accompanying them would be two teachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, who would make sure the kids at home understood what they were watching. While Newman allowed that, in order to keep the kids watching, there would be occasional episodes that would focus more an adventure than learning, he also said that the show would not feature any “bug-eyed monsters.”

The first serial, An Unearthly Child, stayed true to Newman’s concept. After stumbling across the TARDIS while investigating the homelife of their newest pupil, Ian and Barbara found themselves traveling to pre-historic times with The Doctor and Susan. Susan was played by Carole Ann Ford while Ian and Barbara were played by William Russell and Jacqueline Hill. Playing the role of the Doctor was veteran actor William Hartnell. Hartnell was 55 years old when he first played the Doctor but he looked and came across as being much older. He played the Doctor as being a crotchety old man, one who resented being saddled with two new companions and who could be quite rude to those he considered to be his inferior. This was early in the series so there was no talk of Time Lords or anything else that Doctor Who fans now take for granted. Susan even took credit for naming The TARDIS, the Doctor’s time machine that, on the outside, appeared to be a blue police call box.

An Unearthly Child introduced the UK to the Doctor. It got respectable ratings and reviews. Viewed today, it’s also pretty boring and it’s easy to see the limitations in Newman’s original concept. Hartnell plays the Doctor as being so ill-tempered that it was a surprise that he didn’t just jettison Ian and Barbara into space. (I used to watch Doctor Who on PBS with my father. The first episodes that we got were the Tom Baker years, followed by the Peter Davison and the Jon Pertwee episodes. It was only then that PBS started showing the Hartnell episodes. To go from Baker, Davison, and Pertwee to the grouchy Hartnell was indeed jarring.) If the show had continued in the style of An Unearthly Child, it probably would not have lasted for more than two series.

Fortunately, the second serial changed everything.

Written by Terry Nation and originally called The Mutants, the second serial introduced The Daleks, the shrill-voiced cyborgs whose cries of “Exterminate! Exterminate!” made them almost as popular as The Doctor himself. Squid-like creatures who lived in tank-like robotic shells and who spoke in electronic voices, the Daleks lived on the planet Skaro. Centuries of nuclear war against the Thals had left the Daleks mutated and trapped in their shells but they were still obsessed with exterminating all of the Thals and eventually conquering the universe. With their robotic exteriors, the Daleks were bulky and often moved awkwardly. (The recurring joke is that all the Doctor has to do to escape the Daleks is find a staircase.) But because the Daleks were so relentless and so determine to exterminate everyone who wasn’t a Dalek, they were still intimidating. Writer Terry Nation based the Daleks on the Nazis, a comparison that was undoubtedly easy for British audiences in 1963, less than 20 years after the end of World War II, to see.

A seven-episode serial, The Daleks premiered on December 21st, 1963 and ran through February 1st, 1964. While the serial was airing, word spread about The Daleks. The first episode was watched by six million viewers. The seventh and final episode was watched by ten million. Four million people were brought to the show by The Daleks. Sydney Newman may not have wanted bug-eyed monsters on Doctor Who but no one could argue with ratings like that. While the First and the Second Doctor would still have a few strictly historical adventures, The Daleks paved the way for the future of the series. The Daleks would return many times. The cavemen from An Unearthly Child were never seen again.

The Daleks opens with TARDIS materializing on the planet that will later be identified as Skaro. The Doctor and Susan want to explore. Ian and Barbara are upset because they want to go back to 1963. (Ian and Barbara always annoyed me but, of all the companions on the original series. they probably did have the most realistic reaction to being swept up in the Doctor’s adventures.) The Doctor flat-out lies about needing to get mercury to repair the TARDIS and uses it as an excuse to explore a nearby city. Soon, The Doctor, Ian, and Barbara are the prisoners of the Daleks while Susan meets the peaceful Thals in the forest. The Daleks and the Thals have been at war for centuries and it has destroyed their world. The Doctor tries to broker a peace, which just leads to the Daleks killing even more Thals. The Doctor can be excused because this was his first meeting with the Daleks. The Thals should have known better than to trust the people who specifically decided to become cyborgs because they didn’t want to ever have to stop fighting.

Seen today, The Daleks holds up fairly well. At seven episodes, it runs a bit long and, for those of us who grew up with Tom Baker and Peter Davison in the lead role, William Hartnell’s Doctor takes some getting used to. The nonstop bickering between The Doctor and Ian gets old quickly. The Thals are almost too naive to be believed.

But the Daleks themselves remain a brilliant creation and, even when seen in grainy, black-and-white, it is easy to understand why they became a phenomenon. Their relentless determination to destroy and exterminate make them intimidating but what really stands out about the Daleks is how forthright they are about what they want. It’s not just that the Daleks want to exterminate you. It’s that they’ll tell you that they want to exterminate you, as if it’s the most reasonable desire that any creature could have. (One reason why The Thals are so unsympathetic is that they keep falling for Dalek tricks, despite the Daleks being pretty honest about their hatred of the Thals.) From the minute that the Daleks make their first appearance, cornering Barbara in their city, they give Doctor Who a jolt of energy that it very much needed.

This serial ends with The Doctor convinced that the Daleks have been destroyed and will no longer be a threat. Of course, The Doctor had never been so wrong. The Daleks would return and Doctor Who would never be the same.