One of the more striking things about the second half of
The Leisure Hive is that part two's cliffhanger, with the Doctor now incredibly old, isn't immediately reversed at the start of part three. No, instead they leave the Doctor as old and wizened for an episode and a half. It's a bold move, and while you might have reason to be worried about essentially sidelining the Doctor for that long, given how little was going on in the first two parts, these two episodes fortunately pick up the pace and provide a good deal more in terms of incident. Pangol starts getting bloodthirsty, declaring that a new Argolis will dawn that will once again be war-like (apparently he missed the lesson about the futility of war that all his fellow Argolins learned), and our heroes start to wonder why Pangol looks twenty-five when the Argolins became sterile forty years ago. We also get a great lead-in to the cliffhanger, as we're finally introduced to a Foamasi that the Doctor then takes to the Argolin boardroom, and part three's cliffhanger gives us possibly the best literal unmasking we've seen on the show yet, as the Foamasi removes Brock's face to reveal another Foamasi.
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Romana and the aged Doctor talk with a Foamasi. (The Leisure
Hive Part Four) ©BBC |
That unmasking is hampered somewhat by the follow-up sequence in part four, where we get a lot of shots of Foamasi being undressed and revealed, and we learn that there is no way such (frankly) fat creatures could have fit into fake human skins. And there's some stuff about independent Foamasi parties trying to buy Argolis under the legitimate government's beak that's apparently related to gangsters in some way (famously, "Foamasi" is an anagram of "mafiosa", which is close enough to "mafioso"), but this is honestly so far down in the mix that it's difficult to notice, even when you know about it.
No, part four is all about Pangol revealing that the experiments in tachyonics have led to successful cloning techniques that mean Pangol can make an army of himself, which leads to his now-explicit warmongering -- including blowing up the departing Foamasi shuttle. It's reasonably exciting, even if we learn early on that the Doctor has thrown a spanner in the works and created tachyon images (as seen in the first episode) instead of long-lasting clones, and that this process has also de-aged the Doctor. Nevertheless, the dying Mena is taken into the Recreation Generator along with Pangol, and a revitalized Mena emerges with a baby Pangol to lead Argolis into a better future. And the good Foamasi are okay! ("You mentioned Foamasi?" the ambassador says -- a line that's oddly popular in fandom.) Everything can be left in safe hands as the Doctor and Romana depart.
The difference between seasons 17 and 18 is one of the most startling style shifts in all of
Doctor Who, and the new direction is made abundantly clear in
The Leisure Hive. Not only does this look and sound unlike anything we've seen and heard on the show before, but it also strikes a significantly more serious tone than what we've been used to. It's a little too unengaging as a story in its own right to be a real success (the action is lopsided and Pangol's actions, while striking, aren't built up as the threat they probably should have been), but in purely aesthetic terms
The Leisure Hive impresses. A qualified success, then, and one that makes us interested to see what happens next -- is this a fluke or the shape of things to come?