September 26: Meglos Parts Three & Four

For some reason these episodes are getting shorter and shorter; not only are parts three and four both around 20 minutes long, but the cliffhanger reprises are getting longer too -- there're two full minutes of footage from part three at the start of part four.  And then the whole thing ends early, meaning that the last episode of Meglos only has 15 minutes of new footage.

The real Doctor listens to Lexa's accusations. (Meglos Part Three)
©BBC

And yet even with this there's still padding; Romana leads the Gaztaks around in circles in part three, and there's some stuff with the two Tom Bakers (one the Doctor, the other Meglos) wandering around the screens of Zolfa-Thura in part four.  Part three in particular feels like one great big stalling moment; other than the Doctor working out that he has a doppelgänger and Lexa taking over, the episode is waiting for Meglos to leave the city and get on with the main plot.  Even the part of the plot that should be really dramatic (the Deons are staging a revolution and driving all the non-Deons out onto the inhospitable surface!) feels more like a damp squib, and it doesn't help that it's apparently undone three minutes into part four.

Fortunately Tom Baker is still worth watching, and his performance as Meglos is very good, full of nuances that we don't really expect from Tom.  It's a tribute to his skills that you're never in doubt as to whether you're watching Meglos or the Doctor, and he's just about the most watchable thing in a story that often feels pointless.  Things happen on Tigella just so that something happens, rather than for a good reason.  Oh sure, there are nice moments here and there, but too often things occur in such an undramatic manner (witness, for instance, the death of Lexa in part four, which feels so arbitrary and meaningless that it verges on insulting) that it's hard to care.

When Gareth Roberts was writing "The Lodger" for the eleventh Doctor, in one draft he apparently had the main villain be Meglos, with the joke being that the Doctor had completely forgotten who he was.  That's sort of the position of this story in fandom ("oh right, that story does exist"), and it's not hard to see why.  It's not a story that's been written with any real intent in mind beyond (barely) filling four episodes; the direction is more workmanlike than inspired, and there's no drive or passion behind the writing -- new writers John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch seemingly more interested in writing in generic clichés of the sort of thing they think should be in Doctor Who rather than anything personal.  In fact, it goes further than that.  In the past there have been stories that haven't worked for one reason or another, but it's generally felt like there was at least some care and style going into the writing, even when it was Terry Nation just turning in another Dalek tale.  Meglos, however -- despite the efforts of the cast and the actual production crew -- feels like the first serial that has contempt for its audience, interested more in the paycheck at the end than in anything in the story; all too often, it feels like "eh, good enough".