5T4 - The Keeper of Traken 4

The Master's return to Doctor Who after five years (although, really eight years, as I'll explain in a minute) is hampered by many factors. Not only is this not The Master we knew from the classic run of stories that Roger Delgado appeared in during the Pertwee era, it's an imitation of the shadow of that Master that appeared in The Deadly Assassin. And whereas Peter Pratt wore a full face mask in Assassin, in The Keeper of Traken, a new actor, Geoffrey Beevers, is wearing makeup (with teeth painted on his lips - very weird).

Even though it's supposed to be the same Master, they actually look quite different. It also doesn't help that The Doctor doesn't react to The Master's unveiling near the end of Part Four with any great sense of occasion. When I first saw this story as a kid, I had no knowledge of the Delgado Master, but if I had, I would have considered him a mild inconvenience for The Doctor, based on Tom Baker's reaction.

But, much like the Pratt Master, Geoffrey Beevers's Master is being handled here merely as a steward to the throne, keeping the seat warm until the REAL Master, inhabiting the body of Tremas, appears on the scene to take over the mantle. When The Master does take over Tremas's body, for some reason, the body he is now inhabiting changes considerably. His hair is short and dark, his beard is different, even his clothes are completely changed. Is this part of the Keeper's powers that The Master was still possessing in order to take over another body?

More likely, it was the first overt reference to the programme's long history that John Nathan-Turner brought into his fresh, new vision of Doctor Who in the 1980s. Nathan-Turner wasn't interested in bringing back The Master as a character, he was interested in bringing back the very same Master as played by Roger Delgado, with the only drawback being the obvious fact that Delgado was no longer alive to play the part. In forcing Anthony Ainley to do a pastiche on the original Master character, it did a massive disservice to Delgado, Ainley, and the entire premise and integrity of Doctor Who.

The Doctor has always changed his appearance with each regeneration, so why not The Master? Because, in the eyes of JNT, those fans of the show who remembered Delgado's appearances ten years prior (i.e., not you, children and other new viewers to the show) wouldn't recognize The Master unless he looked like he did when we first saw him. JNT probably thought he was appeasing, even delighting, the true fans of the series when he made this move, because he was doing it to please who he thought was the standard representative of the diehard Doctor Who fan - unofficial series continuity adviser Ian Levine. The thing is, very few Who fans had the recall of the old days like Levine did, so Anthony Ainley playing a new regeneration of the Master who looked different than his predecessor would have been just as effective, if not more so, than Delgado 2.0.

As much as I like Anthony Ainley's performance as The Master, I wish he was encouraged to play his own version of The Master. In making this new Master so much like the old one, John Nathan-Turner took the first step down the long, slippery slope of appeasing to Doctor Who fandom.

5T3 - The Keeper of Traken 3

See, here we go now - Nyssa packing heat in the form on an "ion bonder", a device which works much like a stun gun, wasting fosters left and right. Considering she made this device on her own, and that she is a deadly shot with it, leads me to believe that Nyssa is actually a secret member of the Traken Rifle Association, and that if Tremas were to find out, he'd be beside himself (which he just very well may be by the end of this story).

This Nyssa I could become a fan of. Not that we need a gun toting teenaged girl in a fairy skirt on Doctor Who (I can hear the frantic nattering of computer keyboards as scores of fanfic writers work on expanding that premise as I type this), but these scenes with Nyssa at least give her some sort of spark, something which was all but absent in Episode Two.

I have to laugh at Proctor Neman, though, truly an inept character. On his agenda this story is: get bribed, get bribed again, but turn it down, get knocked out by a teenager armed with an ion bonder, attempt to kill The Doctor, only to get knocked out with the same ion bonder, knocked out a third time (this time by headbutt), then eventually, and mercifully, killed by a possessed Tremas. And The Mas...er...Melkur had the good mind to promote him to official servant (wearing the red choker, like Kassia before him. What was he thinking? No wonder his plan to become Keeper never worked...

5T2 - The Keeper of Traken 2

The Doctor and Adric meet Nyssa in this episode, and the groundwork is laid for another (last minute) addition to the TARDIS crew. Usually, when a new companion is introduced into the series, that companion's initial scenes outline the course which his or her character will take over the next few stories, and serve as a bit of a showcase.

If Nyssa's first few scenes are any indication of what's to come, then please leave her on Traken. This is no slight at all against Sarah Sutton, I would like to stress, but Nyssa is the very epitome of a posh, privileged genius who has obviously been to private school on Traken. She also talks like a polite android, making scenes between her and Adric immensely stale and rife with Bidmeadian pseudo-science. In fact, Nyssa initially comes across as a female version of Adric, only better acted and slightly less awkward.

Oddly, though, the Adric-Nyssa team brings out each of their better qualities. Adric doesn't seem half as annoying as he did when he was nipping at Romana's elbows, cloying for attention. In fact, Adric, with his modicum of other-worldly experience, takes on a Doctor role to Nyssa's companion as the pair of them handle the more scientific aspects of the plot while The Doctor and Tremas (the more interesting double act in this story) handle the basic, more interesting stuff.

On to Episode Three. I think this Melkur fellow is more than he seems, by the way.

5T1 - The Keeper of Traken 1

The Keeper of Traken starts off in a bizarre fashion, devoting the entire first half of the episode to a prologue to introduce everyone to the characters and the situation on Traken before The Doctor lands there. The circumstances are exceptional as the Keeper is specifically seeking out The Doctor's help and so must brief him on his mission.

It's a convenient way of getting past all the exposition and introductory dialogue from all the members of the Traken council, however, it still seems a somewhat heavyhanded way of dispensing with the necessary information. The scenes that The Keeper shows The Doctor and Adric are blunt and to the point, and thus terribly unnatural, like much of the dialogue in this episode (as well as the beards. As an aside, Tony Gallichan from the Flashing Blade Podcast is right - Season 18 is the Year of the Beard. Every male character (and possibly even the female Tharil) seems to be sporting a beard in this season. Even The Doctor gets in on the act in The Leisure Hive!).

It's not that this episode is bad, by any means, it just seems slightly stilted, as if we're watching a dress rehearsal of a lesser known Shakespeare comedy.

5S4 - Warriors' Gate 4

In order to watch 750+ Doctor Who episodes within one calendar year, I've found that, unfortunately, I've had to watch episodes in some less than ideal situations - on loud buses, while fighting sleep, and waiting in bus stations and dentist offices. For most stories, I can maintain a reasonable semblance of an attention span while keeping my eyes peeled for the next #41 bus. Not so Warriors' Gate.

And that is no means a complaint, but one of the highest compliments I can pay a Doctor Who story. Doctor Who can often be enjoyed on many levels, but there's perhaps a greater ratio between the very basic plot here (Tharils trying to escape from their oppressors, the crew of the Privateer) and what the real action is all about - The Doctor trying to find the way out of E-Space. Warriors' Gate also happens to be really good, highlighted by some of the best direction the series ever had (even though it caused much strife behind the scenes and nearly got Paul Joyce fired) and a truly believable crew of the slave ship Privateer.

The crew are doing terrible things to the Tharils, treating them like cattle, but their motives aren't evil. Business is business for the crew as they pursue the best bonuses they can get. Thus, their motives are more believable than most other "villains" seen in the series, but the crew is really there to provide a tangible antagonist. Their ship, whose incredible weight is actually collapsing the void around the gateway into nothingness, adds the story a needed sense of urgency.

At the end of the day, The Doctor and Adric leave E-Space, leaving dear friends Romana and K-9 to help the Tharils. But it's the complex journey to that simple ending that makes Warriors' Gate worth watching.

5S3 - Warriors' Gate 3

I have to admit. Once characters start disappearing into mirrors and walking through strange, black and white still images of stately English homes which takes them back in time to an age when the Tharils were lords and masters, then I start getting a tad confused. At times during this episode, I felt like Adric - wandering around a white void, flipping coins.

Up until now, I've been depending on The Doctor to help me through this one. When he passed through the mirror and started pleading for answers from Biroc, I was nodding along with The Doctor when the Tharil gave his cryptic responses. But it frustrates me to this day when The Doctor figures it out for himself, out loud, but stops while figuring out what the Gateway actually is. For one of the few times in this Chronic Hysteresis, I actually had to go back and rewatch sections building up to this moment so that I could finally understand.

It was only then when I realized that the scatterbrained K-9, his memory wafers shredded by the time winds, has been spewing out the fact that the Gateway is collapsing all along. And here I thought, along with everyone else, that he was just babbling…

5S2 - Warriors' Gate 2

Much like a large portion of Episode Three of State of Decay, a large chunk of this episode is spent watching The Doctor extract information from an electronic source (in this case, a Gundan robot) while everyone else gets all the action to do, and, also like State of Decay, those same scenes that threaten to be dull are actually the best parts of the episode.

It's mostly down to the fact that we, the audience, are as interested in what the Gundan has to say as The Doctor is (and, later, Rorvik). The approach to this story is very abstract, but what makes it believable is that what's happening on screen is abstract and odd to the characters, as well. Never before have dramatic characters and audience alike been so keen to hear the answers. When the Gundan has his head swiped off by his less loquacious companion, thus stopping the tale dead, we're as disappointed as Rorvik and The Doctor are.

I could be all smug and go on about how brilliant the moment is when The Doctor replaces the goblet in this episode that he will knock over in Episode Three, but I never caught it on the first few viewings, and have only ever had it pointed out for me when reading books about it years after the fact. Part of the reason I didn't notice it upon the initial viewings is probably because I wasn't looking for it, but it's mostly because the moment is treated so subtly that it's easy to miss. Director Paul Joyce doesn't focus on The Doctor picking the goblet up in this episode, but instead gives us the payoff in the next episode when, decades in the past, The Doctor knocks the goblet over in the first place.

Halfway into this story, and it's nowhere near as confusing as I thought it would be, but it is still one of the most unique Doctor Who stories to date.

5S1 - Warriors' Gate 1

From the outset, you can see at least three similarities between The Mind Robber and Warriors' Gate. In both stories, the TARDIS behaves oddly, much of the action takes place in a white, featureless void, and thirdly, and most importantly, everything is really, really weird. Actually, things don't get too weird in Episode One, as everything that seems bizarre (time dams, time sensitive lions) is explained shortly afterwards. Things only seem weird, but they're not weird for weird's sake.

Biroc can traverse time lines willy nilly and appears in the TARDIS in both his own timeline and that of The Doctor's. The same seems to be the case with the TARDIS crew, who couldn't be more disjointed. It's like The Doctor and Romana are in their own timeline, while Adric and K-9 are in an entirely different timeline on the other side of the console room. Neither side interacts much, and no one talks to Adric, who flips a coin, presses a button, then stares at the scanner screen for the rest of the episode. Having said that, this just might be Matthew Waterhouse's best work on the series yet.

The best thing about this episode, though? Having a director, namely Paul Joyce, that actually gives a damn in wanting to put out the best possible show he can. The opening shot, a slow, tracking shot throughout the entire Privateer spaceship before ending up in the bridge, is inspired. It's an echo of the first shot of Season 18 in that it's somewhat superfluous, but puts an immediate stamp on the story and shows that it will be unlike anything seen in Doctor Who to date.

5P4 - State of Decay 4

Because of the fact that State of Decay was written for a very different era indeed, it is the last of a breed of stories that hadn't been seen for some time already, and wouldn't be seen for a good while after this - Gothic horror. Any story that would threaten to frighten children after this would ultimately resort to a typical mid-80s gorefest.

And that's the interesting thing about the horror in State of Decay. Despite some truly gruesome makeup for the Three Who Rule (especially in their death scene, as seen above), and an entire vat full of blood, the real chills in this story are the ones that are implied and by the reactions of others to them. Scenes such as The Doctor and Romana's exploration of the vampire's larder, The Doctor's reading out of vampire legends, and the Three Who Rule describing the havoc they'll cause when they get out of E-Space are chilling, and yet all of the terror in those scenes are described without a single drop of blood being spilled.

The fact that the best scenes in this story are the ones where we have to use our imagination is probably a good thing, given the fact that easily the weakest sequence in this story is the depiction of the Hydrax turning in mid-air and returning to the planet to destroy the Great Vampire, which ends up looking like a paper cutout of a rocket and a glove puppet. Still, State of Decay is a real highlight of Season 18, and it's good to see Terrance Dicks winning out in his battle with Christopher H. Bidmead as the pedantic science is kept to a minimum here.

5P3 - State of Decay 3

I've already mentioned the scene in this episode between The Doctor and Romana in captivity, but it bears mentioning again if only because it's just so damned sweet. One can't help but feel all warm and happy watching Tom Baker and Lalla Ward patch up whatever disagreement they may have had during the production of this story (well, really, whatever disagreement they were having since they met in 1979). You'd almost think that Baker proposed to Ward before the camera rolled.

There's an incredibly long scene involving The Doctor and K-9 hypothesizing about vampires that takes up a good chunk of this episode, consists almost entirely of Tom Baker reading vampire legends off of ticker tape to K-9 (well, himself, really), and it's utterly enthralling, once again proving that more often than not, the best actor to compliment Tom Baker is Tom Baker. Even Peter Moffatt, who is positively inspired in this, uses a small crane shot to include, for the first time ever, Tom Baker and the K-9 prop in the same shot without having Baker kneel down.

Another great, spooky episode which ends with a completely unnerving smile on Zargo's face that I won't soon forget.

5P2 - State of Decay 2

State of Decay was director Peter Moffatt's first venture into directing Doctor Who, and while his later efforts aren't looked upon that kindly, I find his work in this story to be rather good. Look at how fluid the actors move around in an interesting, yet natural, way during the first meeting between The Doctor, Romana, Camilla and Zargo. It's an excellent way to pep up a pure dialogue scene that could have been dull otherwise.

There's other scenes where Moffatt combines two shots into one via a well placed dissolve. The best example is during the resolution to the climax of this episode in Episode Three, but the shot of Aukon staring dead into the camera, boasting about his "servants" as a slow motion shot of a bat flying is superimposed over him. is inspired.

This is a genuinely creepy story, slowly building to revelations throughout the course of this episode. The Doctor and Romana spend the entire last half of this episode exploring the depths of the Hydrax, discovering, to their ever increasing fear and unease, the real story behind the Three Who Rule. Spooky stuff, and, judging by the similar theme that Horror of Fang Rock* had, you can tell that Terrance Dicks was in a particularly grotesque mood in 1977...

*Horror of Fang Rock was a replacement story for State of Decay in Season 15

5P1 - State of Decay 1

I have to admit - I loved this story as a kid, but as the years go on, I've become more fascinated in the many behind the scenes issues that were hampering the production at the time.

I remember even thinking as a child that Tom Baker's hair looked quite different than usual. Only years later did I read that Baker was so ill at the time that his hair was no longer able to retain its natural curl, and had to be curled by the hair and makeup people before work on State of Decay started. (I still haven't found out what exact illness had afflicted him, though. What kind of illness uncurls hair?)

Of course, the funnest thing to do when watching this story is try to pick out the moments when Tom Baker and Lalla Ward were getting along off camera, and when they were yelling at each from across the room. Witness their first two scenes together in Episode One. Romana tells the Doctor, "You really are wonderful!" (a compliment returned by The Doctor later in Episode Three in a scene that positively feels post-coital). Then cut to the location shot, filmed weeks earlier, of The Doctor and Romana exiting the TARDIS, barely able to look at each other. Sad and lovely at the same time.

Ah, but there, a little less than ten minutes into the episode, I realize that the immediate future of the show isn't as bright as I remembered, because Adric has just walked into the console room. It reminds me of the first few minutes of The Phantom Menace, which is an enjoyable romp where we're first introduced to the Jedi at their peak, slicing and dicing droids everywhere using only the power of the force. Every time I watch that movie, I start to think to myself, "Why did everyone, including me, hate this movie so much?". And then Jar Jar shows up (and then as if that wasn't bad enough, Mannequin Skywalker appears a few minutes later) and it all comes flowing back.

Look at the way Matthew Waterhouse walks into the console room. I can imagine director Peter Moffatt saying to him before the scene, "OK, Matthew, just walk naturally across the room and then stop when K-9 tells you to". And then look how Waterhouse walks. You can almost see him saying to himself "Walking naturally...walking naturally..." as he bounces unnaturally across the floor with a stupid grin on his face. No one walks like that! What a tepid start for the actor in his first story in production. He didn't seem this bad in Full Circle. Did he take acting lessons in between this story and that one?

5R4 - Full Circle 4

Few death scenes in Doctor Who have affected me as much as Varsh's in Episode Four. It is one of my earlier memories of the show, and it is the first one that made me sad then, and still makes me sad today.

You might think it's because Adric's last link to his homeland, his brother, has just died, leaving Adric with nothing to stay on Alzarius for (this is in keeping with Who tradition: kill the potential new companion's entire family so that he/she has no choice but travel in the TARDIS. Believe me, this won't be the last we'll see of this in Season 18). It could be because, with Varsh dying on not Adric, we lost the better brother, and were forced to accept the silver medal, Adric, into the TARDIS instead of his older, better-acted brother.

No, it's the moment where Varsh decides to stay and fend off one too many Marshmen, have his oxygen cylinder run out, and then scream "Adriiiiic!" in a way that contained both the right amounts of urgency and panic. Richard Willis did a superb job with Varsh, but his final scream chilled me as an 11-year-old, and I still found myself deeply saddened when watching it today. Willis gives it all during that scene, and whether it was his decision to raise the intensity for that scene, or that of first time Who director Peter Grimwade, it is a commendable scene, and one of the highlights of a truly splendid Doctor Who story.

Top kudos, though, for this and most stories of Season 18, go to Tom Baker. In watching Baker's final season, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that it could be his finest work in Doctor Who. There's a scene in Episode Three where he chastises the Deciders for allowing the failed experimentation the Marshchild to occur where he simply dominates the screen. Look how long he pauses after his wonderful line "Not an alibi, Deciders!" (which follows an even more wonderful line, in response to the Deciders disgust with the Marshmen, "Easy enough to destroy. Have you ever tried to create one?"). Baker stands there, having silenced the room (and the audience) for three full seconds before carrying on. It would be easy to laugh off Baker's later years in Doctor Who as a flurry of lines like "Would you like a jelly baby?" and other such verbal and physical sleight-of-hand, but Season 18 strips everything that was the bluster of the Fourth Doctor down and concentrates on what is a fantastic series of performances from the programme's lead actor.

And, finally, it is the very last scene in this episode that officially triggered my personal ascent from keen fan to obsessive watcher. Up until that point in my brief time watching the show, every four- or six-part story had a beginning, a middle, and an end, ready to start anew the next week. Even in the Key to Time arc of Season 16, each story had a definite conclusion. But I remember, as an 11-year old, watching all the story threads wrap up, but the last niggling holdout was the fact that The Doctor and Romana were still trapped in E-Space. I thought to myself, "They're kind of running out of time to flip the switch and get out of E-Space so that next week's episode can start". But there, as The Doctor and Romana both stared off into the distance, wondering how to get out of their predicament, the credits crashed in, and the week long wait until the next story became excruciating. Here was a series that was so wide in scope and imagination that the stories that were being told were no longer capable of being confined to a mere four episodes. Doctor Who became bigger in my eyes at that exact moment. I had taken my first step into a larger world...

5R3 - Full Circle 3

When Varsh and the rest of his gang invade the TARDIS in Episode Two, and then, amazingly, pilot the TARDIS to land directly beside The Doctor on board the Starliner in this episode, it signals one of the great shifts in how one of the great icons in Doctor Who will be treated from here on in - the TARDIS itself.

Look at how sacrosanct The Doctor's time ship was in the early days of the show, and how irritated, almost panicked, The Doctor would become by the very notion of something penetrating the safety of the TARDIS. In fact, it took until Season 3's The Daleks' Master Plan for a non-companion (namely Bret Vyon. Now where's his companion status?) to successfully enter the ship. Even in the years since then, you could almost count on one hand how many others crashed the TARDIS party, even if only for a short while. Only during the early Tom Baker era did The Doctor start inviting people in to his previously private abode.

But now, four kids casually open the door to the TARDIS and tell Romana, at knifepoint, that they're taking over the ship. (As an aside, how did they get in? Did Adric have a key, too? At the climax of Episode Two, Adric slams the outer doors shut, but then tells Tylos to open the doors after chastising him for closing them in the first place!). Looking ahead, this is the first of many occasions of TARDIS abuse that would happen throughout the 1980s as this once mystical time machine became increasingly knocked down a peg or two.

5R2 - Full Circle 2

Okay, there's no point in delaying this any further. What John Nathan-Turner saw in Matthew Waterhouse to think that he could, as a teenager in only his second ever acting job, become a new companion (and, within a couple stories from this, the senior companion) is beyond me. As a kid, I loved Adric. But I was a kid. And so was Waterhouse at the time. Maybe that's why I enjoyed the character so much, because he was me, as a wide-eyed, awkward child given free reign of the TARDIS.

It's immediately apparent that there is zero chemistry between Waterhouse and the two established leads, Tom Baker and Lalla Ward. The only question regarding the relationship between the three of them is who hated Waterhouse more - Baker or Ward. Based on some early scenes in this episode, the tiebreaker goes to Ward. She barely looks at Waterhouse in their scenes together in the TARDIS, and when she does, her face is filled with contempt. Coupled with the fact that Baker and Ward were in the midst of a love-hate relationship at this time, too, the TARDIS must have been a super happy place to be.

Part of Waterhouse's failure is the fact that he's clad in pajamas in this story, that, barring the odd temporary costume change, was a look he would sport throughout his entire tenure on the program. Even Tom Baker failed to escape the magic wand of sameness that John Nathan-Turner had cast over the costume department (discarding his new hat and reinstating his favourite buccaneer boots were Tom Baker's most successful signs of rebellion after years of having carte blanche around the Doctor Who set). Lalla Ward's continued flourish for realistically changing outfits every story was clearly grandfathered in. Notice, though, how there's no closet in her room...

5R1 - Full Circle 1

Season 18 of Doctor Who is, without a doubt, pound for pound, the least Earth-centric season ever made. Only two stories, The Leisure Hive and Logopolis, feature scenes set on Earth, and even then, only the opening scene of the The Leisure Hive is set on Brighton beach, and less than half of Logopolis takes place on our world.

As much as I've always enjoyed Season 18, this lack of Earth familiarity did make it a slightly distant and aloof season, far away from the cares and concerns of those suffering through the first throes of Thatcherism in the UK in the early 1980s. Full Circle starts Doctor Who's furthest trip from Earth. Not only far from Earth, but in a different universe altogether - E-Space.

Even the problems faced by the Alzarians in the opening episode of this story have nothing in common with any Earth-type sensibilities. Deciders, Mistfall, Outlers....Adric - there are very few parallels drawn between our world and Alzarius. This is an approach that would be sternly frowned upon by Russell T Davies today, but in 1980, and especially with the writing team that put together this story, it is perfectly in keeping with what this revamped series, under the stewardship of John Nathan-Turner.

Andrew Smith, who turned 18 during the production of his only Doctor Who, and was probably like most other nerdy, teenaged Doctor Who fans who wrote fiction - he set his story on a far and distant world in a story that was relatively free from cliche or influence from outside sources because he simply had not enough life experience to knowingly reference any known works or themes. Add in Christopher H. Bidmead's pedantic love for deadly accurate scientific dialogue, and you have a way out story that should be crushed under the weight of its own technobabble.

The fact that Episode One of Full Circle doesn't collapse, but is actually one of the more intriguing opening episodes seen in some time, is, given the circumstances, remarkable. Many seeds are planted (sometimes literally) in this episode to flower in the rest of the story, and is nothing short of brilliant. Well, Matthew Waterhouse short of brilliant.

5Q4 - Meglos 4

Meglos is the second story broadcast in Season 18, but it seems clear that the script by John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch had initially been prepared in the same vein as Season 16 or 17, and mercilessly hacked and refined by script editor Christopher Hamilton Bidmead to fit in with his vision for Tom Baker's final season. Anything that didn't enhance the story was gone, to be replaced by nothing.

The result is, like The Leisure Hive before it, a very lean story with only the essential scenes left in. Apart from the standard twenty-four and a half minute length for Episode One, the remaining installments are all barely 21 minutes long at most, with Episode Four clocking in at an infinitesimal 19:33, a duration that is only matched by The Mind Robber, Part Five as the shortest in Doctor Who history.

Another hallmark of Season 18, in addition to its tight editing, is the desire by John Nathan-Turner to return to the story links that were seen in the early days of the programme, where each story flowed into the next. Thus far in Season 18, K-9 was damaged in The Leisure Hive, then was seen being repaired in the opening shots of Meglos. Episode Four of Meglos ends with a sudden call from Gallifrey to The Doctor, which signposts where the TARDIS will be off to in the next adventure. It actually serves as a refreshing reboot of the series, taking it back to its core values at a time when the programme was in desperate need of some sense of direction.

5Q3 - Meglos 3

I love how, in the pursuit of a cliffhanger, sometimes characters in Doctor Who will stray so far from their ideals just to provide some tension to end an episode on. Case in point: Brotadac, who has been nothing but a bumbling sidekick since the beginning of this story, but slips into homicidal maniac mode by barking "She's seen to much! Kill her!" at his men in regards to Romana. Fortunately, the members of Grugger's crew are taking his sudden change of heart as seriously as we, the viewers, are, and they just continue to slowly advance on Romana as Episode Three begins until General Grugger intervenes, allowing Brotadac to calm down again.

Speaking of stepping out of character, this is what "the human" (for lack of a more specific name) literally does in a scene in this episode when he is trying to wrestle free from Meglos, who is strolling around Tigella in the guise of The Doctor. The portrayal of Meglos is the second in as many strong performances in Season 18 by Tom Baker. Baker is genuinely chilling as the title villain and is a delight to watch in this, as he is throughout a season that saw Baker take a few more risks in the role of The Doctor that he had seldom done since the Hinchcliffe era.

Despite the studio lit jungle sets and an overly poor reputation in fan circles, I really am enjoying Meglos much more than I ought to be...

5Q2 - Meglos 2

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that it's in Meglos that the very thing that this blog is named after, a chronic hysteresis, occurs, trapping The Doctor and Romana not only in a time loop, but also trapping them in a bubble that prevents them from participating in the story proper, thus leaving the door open for The Doctor's prickly doppelganger, Meglos, to swoop into Tigella and raise trouble.

The thing is, there aren't enough interesting characters to help push the story along without the aid of The Doctor. None of the Savants (well, neither of the Savants) are at all memorable, poor Edward Underdown, as Zasta, is so clearly ill that it's impossible for him to give anything more than he already is, and Jacqueline Hill (not Barbara) as Lexa is a single minded religious zealot. Hill is very stern and believable in this, but single minded religious zealots never stray too much from their convictions to leave you guessing what they'll do next.

Thus, we're left with the poor man's comedy duo of General Grugger and Brotadac to carry much of the plot, paid minions doing the bidding of a cactus to try and steal a giant dodecahedron (called, conveniently, the Dodecahedron). I actually quite enjoy this story, for some reason, but Episode Two is not it's strongest point.

5Q1 - Meglos 1

Meglos has perhaps one of the least inspiring beginnings of any Doctor Who story ever. It opens with The Doctor and Romana performing some repairs on K-9, necessary after his run-in at Brighton Beach in the opening moments of The Leisure Hive. But what a tepid few shots to open with - no establishing shot of the TARDIS in flight, just a cold opening in the TARDIS console room, catching The Doctor and Romana almost mid-sentence in their banal conversation. How dull!

What isn't dull, though, is the realization of the Screens of Zolpha-Thura with the aid of a then groundbreaking technique called Scene-Sync. Scene-Sync was an advanced CSO technique that, instead of keying in a static background behind actors standing in front of a blue screen, superimposed actors over shots of a live model which was shot with a camera slaved to the camera shooting the actors. When the camera covering the actors moved, the slave camera did the same thing over the model shot. Doctor Who was used as a guinea pig to try out this new technique in preparation for its big debut in a BBC production called The Borgias (although another stellar example of Scene-Sync can seen in the opening episode of Carl Sagan's landmark series Cosmos in a sequence where Sagan walks through a model of an ancient library in Alexandria).

The results of Scene-Sync in Episode 1 are no less impressive. Grugger and Brotadac look as if they really are on a distant planet, dwarfed by massive screens that they walk in front of, behind, and even interact with. It's a shame Scene-Sync was never used again after this story. Even though it's 1980 special effects, it still looks impressive today.