October 11: Four to Doomsday Parts Three & Four

It doesn't take long for us to learn what Monarch's really planning: according to Bigon, he wants to get rid of everyone on Earth, take all its silicon, and make more electronics in his quest to travel faster than light -- that way, he'll be able to travel back in time to meet the creator of the universe, who he believes to be himself.  Obviously the Doctor can't let this happen, so the rest of the last two episodes are about how he's going to stop Monarch from putting his plan into motion.

Of course, you need complications when something like this happens, and unfortunately much of these complications involve Adric and Tegan.  Adric continues his downward slide, being totally captivated by Monarch's "give everyone immortality by turning them into robots" plan for some inexplicable reason.  It feels an awful lot like the betrayal subplot in State of Decay, except here it's played for real.  The upshot is that you really want to smack Adric upside the head -- although his dressing down by the Doctor in part four (the conversation which begins with "Now listen to me, you young idiot.  You're not so much gullible as idealistic.  I suppose it comes from your deprived delinquent background") is made particularly entertaining because of Adric's prior behavior.  And Tegan is continually in hysterics, yelling at the Doctor and then running off and (somehow) causing the TARDIS to dematerialize and rematerialize out in space next to Monarch's spaceship.  It's not very pleasant or entertaining to watch her either.

The Doctor tries to spacewalk to the TARDIS. (Four to
Doomsday Part Four) ©BBC

But at least Peter Davison can be relied upon to entertain as the Doctor, working his way through the situation without tipping Monarch off too much as to his intentions.  It's fun to watch him and Bigon disable monopticons and try to devise a way to stop Monarch, and even when they're found out (in a dramatic cliffhanger to part three that ends with the Doctor about to be beheaded) the Doctor still manages to turn the tables.  A good chunk of part four involves him trying to reach the TARDIS out in space, and even this is entertaining, even though it just involves several attempts to try and float to the TARDIS.  (I'll not comment on the feasibility of the cricket ball stuff, as plenty of people have discussed that elsewhere, but I will say that the effects are really nicely done.)

This attitude sums up Four to Doomsday -- it's entertaining even when it's not doing much at all.  Even the resolution of the story, while being rather abrupt (Monarch confronts the Doctor, who throws the shrinking poison at him and ends his threat), still feels much in keeping.  It's clearly not a story for everyone's tastes, but if you're willing to accept it on its own terms then there's a decent amount of enjoyment to be had here.  Davison impresses in his first serial in the role, even if he's not quite settled yet, and the guest cast do a great job of propelling the story along -- Monarch is a despot who acts kindly toward his antagonists because he knows they can't threaten him, and it's a nice change of pace (even when this changes as Monarch begins to take the Doctor seriously).  It's not an important or epic tale, but that's okay: Four to Doomsday may be a slight story, but it's certainly not without its charms.

October 10: Four to Doomsday Parts One & Two

It's often been pointed out, but Four to Doomsday doesn't quite seem like the Doctor Who we're used to; instead it's structured much more like a Hartnell story, with the TARDIS arriving in an unfamiliar environment and slowly working things out about it as they explore -- there's little in the way of establishing scenes for anyone outside the TARDIS, and the audience learns about things at the same time as the main characters do.  It's a refreshingly more sedate change of pace.  And in keeping with the Hartnell theme, there are also moments that seem designed to be educational in nature ("Pass the sodium chloride", the nature of the recreationals) -- it really does feel like a 60s story.  There are even four people in the TARDIS again.

Except that's where the parallel falls through.  The Hartnell crew had an old man, a young girl, and two middle-aged adults.  Here we have three youngsters and someone who's old but seems almost as young.  This actually wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for the fact that writer Terence Dudley seems to have given the three companions the most broad of characterizations.  He's read that Tegan is bossy, Nyssa is smart, and Adric is chauvinistic (for some reason -- he never seemed to feel that way before), and so that's what the actors get to work with.  Sarah Sutton comes off the best because she's sussed that if she plays the lines with a hint of detached amusement then it'll work out.  Janet Fielding has to spend all her time complaining (mainly about how the Doctor didn't take her back to Heathrow and that she doesn't like Monarch's spaceship), and Matthew Waterhouse comes off the worst because his lines are all designed to make him sound like a stuck-up, awful brat, and he's not experienced enough of an actor (to put it kindly) to play against them.  This is therefore really where the rot starts to set in for Adric -- when it was just him and Tom Baker he could play the bright-eyed inquisitive, but now he has to fight for attention between two other companions, one of whom has been written in much the same way as Adric had been.  Adding two other TARDIS crewmembers was probably the worst thing to happen to Adric's character, and it's sadly not going to get much better.  It doesn't help that Tegan and Adric don't seem to like each other very much.

Four to Doomsday is actually the first story filmed for the new TARDIS team, and you can sort of see it in Davison's performance.  He's energetically enthusiastic about everything, particularly in the first episode, and even his voice is at a higher pitch than it generally is.  But it's nice to see such ebullience -- makes everything seem more exciting, somehow.

The actual story in these first two episodes is rather slight -- we're as much in the dark as to Monarch's intentions as the Doctor is.  But the exploration of the ship is quite nice, and the slow revelation as to the nature of the humans inhabiting it is built up well.  Oh, and apparently Tegan is an accomplished draftswoman, with some really well done sketches as to what the well-dressed early 80s couple is wearing.  Less plausible is her ability to speak the dialect that the aborigine Kurkutji is speaking¹¹⁸.  However, as the rest of the story so far has been quite charming, we can forgive this.  And it's a great cliffhanger for part two, as Bigon the Athenian lifts up his face to reveal that he's a robot, and then pulls out a small circuit board from his chest.  "This is me," he says solemnly.  Of course, we're not really any nearer to understanding what's going on on this ship (beyond the idea that Monarch wants to take 3 billion of his fellow Urbankans to make a home on Earth); maybe we'll get some answers next time.







¹¹⁸ In the 1980s there were around 200 different Aboriginal dialects still in existence (according to Ethnologue), most of which only had a relative handful of speakers.  Even if we assume that she got lucky and Kurkutji spoke one of the more widespread dialects, like Warlpiri, there's still the matter of how Kurkutji (we later learn) is from roughly 33000 BC, so he should be unintelligible anyway (by way of comparison, only about 1000 years separates Modern English from Old English, and that's still largely unintelligible to current English speakers).
     But then, even from an internal logic point-of-view, this gets weirder when you think about it; on a ship full of Greeks, Mayans, Aborigines, Chinese, and Urbankans, only Kurkutji is singled out as requiring a translator.  So either the TARDIS translator is able to translate all the other languages on board except this particular one, or everyone else is speaking English and Kurkutji just refuses to conform.  Except that everyone presumably understood everyone else before the TARDIS arrived, so they must be speaking some sort of common tongue that the TARDIS is translating anyway.  Unless Urbankan is remarkably similar to English.

October 9: Castrovalva Parts Three & Four

So, starting with season 19, Doctor Who moved from its traditional Saturday time slot to a twice-weekly affair, on Mondays and Tuesdays.  What this means is that (although I admit I might be imagining things) there's a tendency for stories of this period to feel like a game of two-part halves, and Castrovalva is no different.  The first two episodes were almost chamber pieces in a way -- you essentially had a cast of the Doctor, Nyssa, and Tegan, with occasional appearances from Adric and the Master, and after part one's exploration of the TARDIS we got part two's exploration of the forest around Castrovalva.  But parts three and four are about Castrovalva itself, and the supporting cast increases appropriately.

Full marks to new Doctor Who director Fiona Cumming, by the way, for that marvelous tease of a wounded Doctor early in part three.  To recap: Tegan and Nyssa have discovered that the Doctor is missing, and that there's a trail of blood leading away from his last location.  Then Cumming gives us a shot of a long trail of blood which leads to a prostrate Doctor -- except it turns out that the Doctor is just listening to the ground to determine how many people there are ahead, and the blood is in fact irrelevant to his current condition.  It's a really nice touch in a story full of imaginative moments.

The new Doctor is surrounded by natives. (Castrovalva Part
Three) ©BBC

Part three has those moments, for instance, as it continually thwarts our expectations about what's going on; the Doctor is seemingly captured by unfriendly natives, but they're actually very civilized and have just gone hunting for the purpose of exercise.  The town's physician, Mergrave, offers the Doctor a suspicious-looking drink, but it seems to help exactly as it's said to do. There's the charming scene where a little girl teaches the Doctor that three comes after two (a result of him being unable to remember about Adric).  Castrovalva itself seems to be an idyllic, peaceful place, but the cliffhanger reveals that space itself appears to be folding in on itself, and there doesn't seem to be any way out.

Part four has some fine moments as well; the scene where the Castrovalvans try to draw a map for the Doctor is wonderful, and the effect of space-time collapsing is well realized.  Castrovalva, in case you don't know, is the name of an M.C. Escher print of a castle on a hill -- it's not one of his optical illusion prints, but that's clearly the inspiration for a lot of what we get here, with our heroes continually heading down and yet always ending up back at the square.  It turns out that's for a reason: Castrovalva is a trap deliberately constructed by the Master to trap the Doctor (with some help from Adric), with a fake village and fake inhabitants all designed to defeat the Doctor once and for all.  Boy, the Master plans ahead, doesn't he?

Davison does an outstanding job, playing the Doctor like someone waking up in a brand new body and taking nothing for granted.  There's a subtle nuance to how he behaves that really sells it, but there's also a brand new energy at play here -- witness how he bursts into his quarters to confront Tegan and Nyssa about Adric.  Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton, as Tegan and Nyssa respectively, have a much more thankless task of trying to remain rocks in a sea of chaos, and while occasionally you get the impression that they're not quite sure how to play things (Fielding, for instance, often seems to default to outrage), in general they do a decent job with what they're given.  And Anthony Ainley's portrayal of the Portreeve gives lie to the complaint (from later in the series) that he all too frequently plays the Master as a two-dimensional cackling villain -- his Portreeve is wonderful and suggests that the problem with the Master lies in the scripting, not in the acting.  It is a bit of a shame when he reveals himself to be the Master, though, as he's just not as interesting -- particularly as it's the end of the episode, which means that after Shardovan, one of the Castrovalvans, sacrifices himself to end everything (with a great line: "You made us, man of evil, but we are free"), everyone hurries to escape the collapsing Castrovalva -- with the Master dragged back inside by his angry creations.

Castrovalva, in general, has a more relaxed feel than many of its predecessors -- even when people are frantically running around, there's still a sense of peace lurking just beyond the edges.  In large part this is because of Peter Davison's performance; he seems to be making an effort not just to explore what it means to be in a new body, but also to be as distinct from Tom Baker as possible.  So to that end he's considerably more accessible and less in control, and in this case it works.  And he's bolstered by a story which provides a puzzle for the Doctor to work through, rather than for a concrete threat to fight against.  In this respect, it's different from any regeneration story we've had yet -- the stakes are much lower and the story is focused firmly on the Doctor.  It's this approach, matched with the sheer charm of the piece and the talent in front of and behind the camera, that makes Castrovalva a success. 

October 8: Castrovalva Parts One & Two

Hey, it's Doctor Who's first-ever pre-titles sequence, as we get a replay of the regeneration of Tom Baker into Peter Davison (well, it has been nine months between seasons), and then BAM! Right into the modified opening titles -- modified in that it's Peter Davison's face there now, not Tom's.  And they've added a sort of ripple effect.

There were a handful of loose ends at the end of Logopolis (such as, what happened to the Master?), and Castrovalva endeavours to address these points by picking up where Logopolis left off.  And so we see the Master escape while the Doctor's companions help the newly-regenerated Doctor inside the TARDIS.  Only it seems there's something wrong with Adric...

Hang on a moment though; why is Tegan going with them?  Look at it from her point-of-view: she's been kidnapped (accidentally, but still) and forced to wander a white corridor labyrinth (that still upsets her, judging from her reaction in this story), then taken to an alien planet, where she demands to be returned to Earth, and then she sees the universe almost destroyed by some evil madman who ends up killing the only person she feels she can trust ("I'm staying with you," she tells the Doctor in Logopolis.  "You're the only insurance policy I've got") -- except then she watches as some weird-looking plaster-of-Paris-esque dude merges with the Doctor and creates a brand new person.  She's on Earth, in what appears to be her own time period; what possible reason does she have for getting back inside the TARDIS?  She must have incredibly strong feelings of loyalty to someone who doesn't actually look like the Doctor.  Or maybe no one's actually thought about this.

But anyway, into the TARDIS, where we start¹¹⁷ to see Peter Davison stretch his muscles as the Doctor -- which he does by impersonating the first three.  He does a good job (although his Hartnell is the best), and it's a nice sequence that seems designed to remind the audience that there were in fact Doctors before Tom Baker.  I also like the self-deprecating humor, as he first realizes in dismay that his hair isn't curly anymore, and then when he finally sees himself in a mirror.  "That's the trouble with regeneration," he says despondently.  "You never quite know what you're going to get."  But he soon seems happy enough, as he picks up a cricket bat, and soon we see that he's going to be wearing a sort of Edwardian cricketing outfit.

The interesting thing about this story's approach to the regeneration of the Doctor is how drawn out it is.  It's most like Jon Pertwee's debut, where he spent the first couple episodes of Spearhead from Space bed-ridden, but Castrovalva goes even further than that -- this is the weakest we've ever seen the Doctor, and it's explicitly because of post-regeneration trauma.  This means he's not much help when the Master (via Adric, who's actually a block transfer computation projection -- just go with it) programs the TARDIS to head back to the hydrogen inrush that led to the formation of the galaxy (huh?  Do they mean the universe?) -- an event that the TARDIS can't withstand.  (Cue part one's cliffhanger.)  This means that the Doctor is fighting not only his own healing synapses but also the Master's efforts to kill them all.  They manage to escape, but the Doctor is still unwell -- and the Zero Room that he was recuperating in was jettisoned in order to escape the Master's trap.

The second half of part two involves Tegan maybe piloting the TARDIS (her abilities are deliberately questioned) to a place called Castrovalva, where the Doctor can relax.  They build him a small Zero Cabinet and wheel him around the planet on a motorized wheelchair, but when the wheelchair falls in the water the motor shorts out, which apparently means the wheels don't work anymore either?  So Tegan and Nyssa have to lug this cabinet around.  And then the episode ends when they put the cabinet down, wander off, and then come back to find that he's not in the cabinet anymore.  The fact that this cliffhanger works at all is a testament to how much effort Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton have been putting into this thing, that this is something of a distressing moment and not just a case "oh, well OK then".

But then, these first two episodes have been surprisingly compelling.  The cast is quite limited (consisting of the four regulars and the Master, with an occasional line from one other guest actor), and the focus is thus on the Doctor's regeneration, to an extent that we haven't seen before, and it's this that makes Castrovalva work so far; the series is interested in exploring its own mythology a bit, and we're willing to go along for now, to see what they come up with.







¹¹⁷ Well, he starts from our point of view, but Castrovalva is actually the fourth story Davison filmed (the result of several different debut story scripts falling through), which means he's had time to figure out how to play the character and thus can work backwards from that to give us what's probably a more coherent, thought-out performance than what we otherwise would have gotten.

October 7: K-9 and Company - "A Girl's Best Friend"

It opens with a truly heinous title sequence, which looks like they drugged Elisabeth Sladen, dressed her up in various "casual" outfits, and propped her up around the English countryside.  And interspersed with that is various shots of K-9, while the whole thing is backed by an awful manufactured-pop-sounding theme (complete with John Leeson chirping "K-9" at various intervals) that's just catchy enough to get immovably stuck in your head, no matter how much you wish it wouldn't.  And there are reused shots in the sequence!  It's only like a minute long, and yet you had to reuse shots from earlier in the titles?

Even on the surface, K-9 and Company¹¹⁶, the only 20th-century Doctor Who spin-off to ever make it to the screen, is an odd proposition: a show about a robot dog and a journalist, stuck out in rural England investigating things, doesn't exactly sound like a dynamic premise, but even beyond this it's a weird show.  This establishing episode is full of things that don't really go together, as it bends over backwards to put Sarah Jane Smith in that rural setting, give her K-9, and then set them both loose on the locals, most of whom are engaged in pagan worship.  No, it doesn't exactly sound like a winner, does it?

But to the credit of most everyone involved, they almost make it work.  It's great to see Lis Sladen back as Sarah Jane Smith, and she is the anchor that this episode needs -- fortunately, the title sequence wasn't a warning of things to come.  She gives the proceedings the necessary grounding, and she seems to have no trouble interacting with K-9 (and remember, this is a new pairing, as K-9 was introduced after Sarah left).  This is K-9 Mark III, by the way -- Mark I having stayed with Leela on Gallifrey, and Mark II having left with Romana in E-Space.  Except, according to the accompanying documentary, all they did to make it Mark III was give the prop a fresh coat of paint.  The other actors also do a fine job: we get to finally meet Sarah's Aunt Lavinia (as played by Mary Wimbush, who to me will always be Bertie's Aunt Agatha in Grenada's Jeeves and Wooster), and the rest of Moreton Harwood are well acted, even when they're being shifty.  And it all looks good, thanks to John Black's capable direction; you can at least believe that you're in a house in the English countryside.

Sarah, Brendan, and K-9. (K-9 and Company - "A Girl's
Best Friend") ©BBC

So the acting is good, the direction is good... it's only the story that's bonkers.  It starts like a mystery (people keep disappearing) and then takes a left turn into Crazytown when it turns out that something like half the village of Moreton Harwood are pagan worshippers of the goddess Hecate, since they think she's the only reason the crops will grow, and that suddenly Hecate demands human sacrifice despite having been perfectly content without it for 90 years.  They plan on sacrificing Sarah's cousin Brendan (as played by Ian Sears, who actually copes quite well with a rather thankless character), and it's only thanks to K-9 that Brendan is saved.  Of course, this means that just about everyone we saw on screen is now in jail for attempted murder.  It's a strange premise for a story, let alone a whole series -- what would the other episodes have been like?  Would Sarah and K-9 have roamed the English countryside stamping out pagan cults, as the ending scene seems to suggest?  Or would they have stayed in Moreton Harwood and helped solve the massive soil acidity problem?  And would a computer as capable as K-9 have mastered the art of reading sheet music, so that the excruciating tag scene would never happen again?

It's a curiosity, to be sure, and it's great fun to see Sarah and K-9 together, but let's be honest: if it weren't for the Doctor Who connection there'd be no reason to watch K-9 and Company.  It's not a show that stands up to repeated viewings -- in fact, it's a rather shallow affair to begin with (it's certainly not subtle in its (vaguely offensive) portrayal of rural English residents, for instance).  But it is part of the history of the show -- the continued partnership of Sarah and K-9 into the 21st century makes that clear -- and it's not as bad as it could have been; as I said, there's enough that's right with this show to keep it from sinking into unwatchability.  That said, let's all be thankful that this never went to series (so that we never had to see the title sequence again, if nothing else) and quietly move on.







¹¹⁶ Well, officially it's only the show that's called K-9 and Company -- the actual episode is called "A Girl's Best Friend".  But as it's the only one they made, no one really calls it anything other than K-9 and Company, unless you're being strictly precise.

October 6: Logopolis Parts Three & Four

Nyssa, Adric, the Monitor, and Tegan look on as the Master and
the Doctor discuss forming an alliance. (Logopolis Part Three) ©BBC

The first half of this episode is really about setting up the second half; while we get the sense that the Doctor is in danger, it's more about introducing those sonic projectors that "create a temporary zone of stasis", so that the Master can use them later on.  There's also the discovery that the Master has been fouling up the working of Logopolis, introducing errors into the code they're working on (and I'm entertained at this point every time, when Tegan shows the corrected code to the Doctor on what is clearly a printer test page).

But what's most interesting about Part Three is how, after the Master introduces a temporary halt to the workings of Logopolis, the Monitor becomes incredibly distressed.  And we soon learn why: this isn't a temporary halt -- Logopolis has ceased completely.  The Monitor then goes on to explain that the universe has actually passed the point of impending heat death, but that they'd been staving off the entropy by opening voids to other universes (such as the Charged Vacuum Emboitment that took the TARDIS into E-Space) -- in effect, turning the Universe from a closed system to an open one.  But they hadn't finished their work when the Master intervened, and now entropy is taking over.  It's a complicated idea in some ways, but it's also quite imaginative in others, and the way that the death of the universe is heralded not by explosions and fire but by total silence is really clever indeed.  It also means that the situation is serious enough for the Doctor and the Master to work together to fight it, by implementing the nearly-complete program the Logopolitans had devised.  It's a big moment -- so much so that it actually forms the cliffhanger, as the Doctor shakes hands with the Master after scolding his companions ("I've never chosen my own company," the Doctor berates them -- something that's true for this incarnation for every companion except Sarah).

Part four is about racing to save the universe using the Pharos Project on Earth (since Logopolis is dead and crumbling to dust, and even the Monitor perishes in a really well-done effect) -- but while the Doctor and the Master are doing that, the Watcher has taken Nyssa and Adric out of time and space, where they can see the effect of the "entropy field" as it destroys huge parts of the universe (thus putting this story in the running for all-time highest body count), including Nyssa's home world of Traken.  This is a scene designed to try and make this abstract concept of entropy into something concrete, and at this it succeeds: we're not dealing with the idea of places dying so much as we're confronted with it, by witnessing the destruction of a planet we've just been visiting.  The Keeper, the Fosters, the Consuls...they're all gone.  It's amazing Nyssa copes as well as she does.

Tom Baker (with a little help from Adrian Gibbs) regenerates
into Peter Davison. (Logopolis Part Four) ©BBC

But of course, it's all leading up to the final moments of the story, where the Doctor, after having saved the universe by permanently opening a CVE, has to stop the Master from holding the universe ransom by threatening to close the CVE by pulling out a cable, even though he must know it will mean his death (he's been receiving foreshadowing, remember).  That flashback sequence as he dangles from the cable, of some of the villains he's fought as the fourth Doctor, is really nice and not something we've seen on the show before.  And of course, it's followed by the Doctor's fall (accompanied by an electronic "scream" from the music) and then a flashback of all his companions, as well as the Brigadier.  Then one final, gorgeous line from the fourth Doctor -- "It's the end.  But the moment has been prepared for" -- and the regeneration starts, thanks to some help from the Watcher (interesting how it's been 18 years and the production team still doesn't want to take the idea of regeneration for granted -- though, admittedly, they haven't had one since 1974), and we're greeted by the youthful face of the new, fifth Doctor, Peter Davison.  The whole sequence of the fourth Doctor's "death" is done so stylishly well, while hitting all the right thematic notes -- it may be the best regeneration sequence the show has done to date¹¹⁵.

Logopolis is a story about endings. There's the big theme of entropy and decay, realized in both large ways (the death of the universe) and little ways (the TARDIS's crumbling), but there's also the theme about how compromises have to be made for the greater good, with the Doctor working with the Master, the Logopolitans using technology... even Tegan swallowing her pride to roll a flat tire to the garage (even if she only makes it twenty feet).  This paints a bleak picture throughout the story, but it feels entirely appropriate for the fourth Doctor's swan song.  There's a sense in which the entire season, which has been all about decay and change in some ways, has been leading up to those final moments, where even the Doctor isn't immune to change and death.  It's probably unintentional, but it does give Logopolis an extra sense of inevitability.  But this final fourth Doctor story is done so well, with such care and style, that even without this extra edge it would still be a triumph.  Writer Christopher H. Bidmead and director Peter Grimwade have defied everyone's expectations (including Tom Baker's) by giving us a story that's both monumental in its importance (this is the clearest example ever of the entire universe genuinely being at stake) and quiet in its ambitions.  It neatly straddles those two positions, and the final result is gorgeous.

They had a rocky start, but season 18 has ended up being one of the stand-out seasons of the entire show.  This was a season that promised all sorts of changes, and in general it delivered.  John Nathan-Turner managed to rein in Tom Baker, to the show's benefit, and Chris Bidmead has brought a new direction to the show's stories, with an emphasis on science over fantasy and a reduction in the amount of humor in the show.  The last five stories of this season have all been winners and have amply shown that this approach has paid off.  The ratings may not reflect it (but then they haven't been reflecting this all season, hovering instead around 6 million or so -- this shows that a) the public wasn't terribly excited to see more Tom Baker shenanigans, and b) rival network ITV has finally found a decent competitor for Doctor Who, the US import Buck Rogers in the 25th Century), but this is a show with a new vitality, ready to tackle the 1980s head-on.  Of course, whether it actually follows up on that promise is a different story for another time...

And so we say farewell to Tom Baker, the fourth Doctor and the longest-serving actor in the role (probably ever).  His indelible mark on the programme is still felt (with his long scarf remaining emblematic of the show even today), and even while I find myself looking forward to Peter Davison I know that I will miss Tom Baker quite a bit.  Baker is undeniably one of the best actors to take on the role; we can quibble about some of his later seasons, but there are large parts of Tom Baker's tenure that are held up as bona fide classics, and that's due in no small way to the man himself.  Baker has always been larger-than-life, and that's a quality that served him well, as his portrayal of an alien being who occasionally finds himself at right angles to humanity, but nevertheless is interested in exploring and enjoying himself, is utterly wonderful, and there's never a moment where he's not worth watching.  The show will, for better or worse, be in his shadow for the rest of its original run.

But before we move on to Peter Davison's full debut, it's time to take a slight detour toward Doctor Who's first ever spin-off: the hour-long K-9 and Company...







¹¹⁵ Though Eccleston to Tennant is also a strong contender.

October 5: Logopolis Parts One & Two

It's the beginning of the end for the fourth Doctor, as I watch the first two episodes of his final story.  There's definitely a theme of endings running through these two parts, as the Doctor (somewhat more somber than usual) reflects on the unstoppable force of entropy.  But we get some firsts, as well: it's the first time we hear the Cloister Bell (that toll of doom that persists into the 21st century version), and the first time we hear the TARDIS's (broken) ability to disguise itself as being the result of the chameleon circuit.  And it's this circuit that arguably sets these events in motion, as the Doctor resolves to fix it by measuring a real police box and taking the dimensions to a place called Logopolis, where the locals there can help the Doctor fix the problem.

But despite this feeling of somberness and decay, it doesn't really seem to affect the Doctor himself until halfway through part two, and before that he seems more or less his usual self.  He does seem awfully worried about the gravity bubble that results from materializing around the police box that's actually a TARDIS (the Master's TARDIS, in fact; it's not made 100% clear, but it's not exactly a big secret either), though, and while we've seen something of this sort before in The Time Monster (where the Master's TARDIS is inside the Doctor's and the Doctor's is inside the Master's), it hasn't been as fully explored as here, with some memorable imagery of TARDISes inside TARDISes.  (And note that they've pulled the old seasons 14-17 TARDIS prop back into service for this: you can tell by the windows and the lack of a door handle, among other things.)

There's also the stuff about the Master being back ("So he did escape from Traken"), and, as About Time points out, the Watcher figure is likely meant to be a bluff, to make us think that that's in fact the Master (even though the last shot of The Keeper of Traken spoils this).  But we're back to shrinking people as a method of killing.  And while all this is going on, an Australian air hostess named Tegan Jovanka, of all things¹¹⁴, accidentally wanders into the TARDIS and spends the better part of two episodes trying to find her way back out again.

There are still some nice moments -- I like the part where the Doctor and Adric brace themselves against the TARDIS doors, expecting the Thames to rush in and flush the Master out, only to find they've landed on a barge instead of in the river, and the weary way in which the detective knocks on the police box's door, fully expecting the Doctor and Adric to be inside, is understated genius.

But once the Doctor meets up with the Watcher on the bridge, there is a real sense of inevitability about the proceedings ("I've just dipped into the future.  We must be prepared for the worst," the Doctor tells Adric), as the Doctor heads to Logopolis.  Of course, even with that there's still time for a terrible pun (after Tegan asks about her aunt, whom the Doctor has seen the shrunken corpse of, the Doctor replies that he's seen "a little of her"), but still, on to Logopolis, where mathematics is the all-important language of the universe.  But the Master is wreaking havoc on the planet (having hitched a ride in the Doctor's TARDIS), and Nyssa, from the last story, is there too for some reason.  And then the cliffhanger (which seems to show the Doctor planning on leaving Adric and Tegan behind on Logopolis) instead focuses on a problem with the Logopolitans' calculations: the TARDIS is rapidly shrinking...







¹¹⁴ Tegan is a Welsh name, while Jovanka is the name of a Slavic nymph.  Allegedly, producer John Nathan-Turner was trying to decide between the two when script editor Christopher H. Bidmead saw the two names and mistakenly thought it was a first and last name.