18 – Eighteenth Season – Tom Baker

We now come to another chapter. After five years of Jon Pertwee’s Doctor, most of which was spent on Earth, a new regime was put in place to spice things up. And the team of Philip Hinchcliffe (Producer) and Robert Holmes (Script Editor) produced three of the best seasons of Doctor Who, with such classic stories as Genesis of the Daleks and Talons of Weng-Chiang. But there was controversy over the level of violence, and Mary Whitehouse in particular was campaigning to change that. So Philip Hinchcliffe was moved to a different show at the BBC, and Graham Williams was brought in to tone down the show. And with Script Editor Anthony Read, and especially with Douglas Adams, an element of humor became much more pronounced. But with the runaway success of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams really couldn’t continue in the role, and Graham Williams was worn out and needed a break. So an assistant producer of a few years’ standing was promoted to Producer: John Nathan Turner. He would keep this role right up to the end of the classic series. And as Script Editor he brought in Christopher Bidmead. And Barry Letts was back in a new role as Executive Producer. JNT (John Nathan Turner) clearly wanted to reduce the comedy aspects, and step one was to get rid of K9. The changes to the show are perhaps the cause of Tom Baker deciding to leave at the end of this season.

Another big change this season was that JNT got permission from the BBC higher ups to produce 28 episodes, instead of the previous 26 per season. This enabled him to eliminate the 6-part stories that had mostly been unsatisfactory in previous years. They were mostly good 4-part stories with a 2 episode tail tacked on that was either filler or not central to the main story. With Season 18 we would have 7 stories of 4 parts each. And to go along with this a new opening graphics and a new arrangement of the Doctor Who theme.

The Leisure Hive

This story starts with the Doctor, Romana, and K9 on a blustery Brighton beach for what has to be the worst possible holiday. Romana throws a ball and tells K9 to fetch it, and he tries…all the way into the water where he blows up. Since Brighton is not working out, Romana suggests the Leisure Hive on the planet Argolis. They had suffered a defeat in a war with the the Foamasi (anagram of Mafiosa) forty years earlier, and it left the planet irradiated and caused cellular damage to the Argolins that can lead to rapid death from aging. So the Argolins brought in an Earth scientist named Hardin who is experimenting with tachyon technology to produce rejuvenation. But he is a fraud and his technology doesn’t work. Yet with Romana’s help they get it working, sort of.

Meanwhile a group of Foamasi offer to buy the planet, which could be a good thing since it is going bankrupt. But something smells rotten here, and people are dying. Fortunately, the Doctor and Romana can sort it out. Along the way, the Randomizer is left on Argolin. I guess the Doctor is not afraid of the Black Guardian any longer, and now he should have more control of the TARDIS. Though he seemed to have perfect control getting to Argolis in the first place.

Of great interest is seeing the Doctor aged another 500 years. It was a great makeup job.

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Meglos

Meglos is a sentient cactus, last of his race, who lives on a desert planet called Zolfa-Thura. In the same system is a jungle planet called Tigella. Meglos has enlisted the help of a pirate group who kidnap a human and bring him along for Meglos. The human (who is only identified as Earthling in the cast list) is then combined with Meglos, and Meglos takes over the human form. He then throws the Doctor and Romana into a time loop ( they call it “chronic hysteresis”) as they were on their way to Tigella, having been invited by the ruler to come help solve a problem. The Tigellans have two castes, one scientific, the other religious, and the ruler Zastor tries to mediate between them, but things are getting bad. The source of power on Tigella is an object called the Dodecahedron. And that is what Meglos is after. With the Doctor tied up in the time loop, Meglos impersonates him and goes to Tigella, where he steals the Dodecahedron. The Doctor and Romana have figured out a way to get out of the Time Loop and go to Tigella, but the Doctor is arrested. This does get sorted out eventually, and TARDIS then follows Meglos and company back to Zolfa-Thura, where we now have two identical “Doctors” and hilarity ensues.

This is not another City of Death, but it is a nice enough romp. It is a very typical classic Doctor Who story. The main point of additional interest is that the high priestess is played by Jacqueline Hill, who played the original companion Barbara Wright with the first Doctor William Hartnell. And K9 is back, though for how long remains to be seen. And at the end Romana gets a message from Gallifrey that they want her to return. What can that mean?

Reviews

Full Circle

A theme of this story is teenagers. First of all, the author, Andrew Smith, was a teenager at the time he wrote the scripts for the four episodes. Second, there is a group of teenagers we meet very early in Episode One who reject the society they were part of. And third, there was a teenage actor, Matthew Waterhouse, who plays a teenage math genius named Adric (an anagram of Dirac, the famous physicist). In the story, there is a group of humans living on a spaceship that landed long ago on this planet. They are spooked by the apparent arrival of “Mistfall” which happens every 50 years due the planet’s orbit. The Doctor, Romana, and K9 arrive on the scene due to an accident of some kind. They were heading to Gallifrey because Romana got a summons from the Time Lords. She is reluctant because she fears, probably rightly, that they will make her stop traveling and settle into boring Time Lord life. She has gotten quite enamored of traveling with the Doctor and does not want to give it up. But en route, something happens to the TARDIS, and it tells them they have arrived at Gallifrey, but when they go outside it is another planet, Alzarius. They have somehow crossed into E-space by means of a Charged Vacuum Emboidment (CVE). So they will have to figure out a way to get back to their own space. But for a few stories they are going to be in E-space, so Romana gets to have a little more fun before getting back to Gallifrey.

The leaders of the people on the spaceship are called the Deciders, which is a very ironic name because they prove to be incapable of making a decision. It is the arrival of the Doctor that upsets all of their certainties.

This is perfectly good classic story. Not brilliant, but enjoyable.

The E-space Trilogy, as it is known, consists of Full Circle, State of Decay, and Warrior’s Gate.

Reviews

State of Decay

This is a vampire story written by Terrance Dicks several years earlier that got pulled from the schedule because the BBC was making a major Dracula production and didn’t want it to be overshadowed in any way by Doctor Who. The TARDIS is still in E-space, but they find a planet to land on. There they find primitive peasants who are being exploited by the Three Who Rule, who are vampires. But there are remnants of technology on the planet, and it soon becomes clear that a spaceship called the Hydrax had landed on this planet long ago. And it is still here. The Tower that the Three Who Rule (TWR) live in is in fact the Hydrax, with all of the old technology covered over by paneling and fabrics. One of the TWR has mental powers and can tell that Adric is special, so he plans to make Adric a vampire as well. The Great One is an immense vampire sleeping under the tower, and it turns out this race was an ancient enemy of the Time Lords, who destroyed the vampires with great difficulty. But this one escaped into E-space. Now the TWR want to awaken it, and use Romana as a sacrifice. The Doctor cleverly manages to kill it, and it looks like all is well. But Romana got bitten by a bat, and there may be future repercussions from that.

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Warriors’ Gate

This is one of those stories where even after you have watched 2 or 3 episodes you don’t entirely know what is going on. The Doctor, Romana, Adric, and K9 are in the TARDIS when something goes wrong. Meanwhile, some kind of space ship also encounters problems with its engines. The clue is when K9 announces they are at coordinates 0,0,0. Since N-space has positive coordinates, and E-space has negative coordinates, this can only mean they are at the interface, a kind of Null-space. The space ship has one being who is lion-like in appearance, and we learn he is the navigator. He can apparently sense time streams and move among them. The Doctor follows him into a building in this featureless white void, and find robots there. One of the robots explains they were built by slaves in a revolt against the Masters. It turns out the ship is carrying a cargo of these lion-like creatures which it has enslaved and Romana will not stand for it. The twist comes when we learn the lion-like creatures were the Masters that the robots were meant to destroy, and now they in turn have become enslaved. The ship manages to destroy itself trying to blast through the barrier, but the lion-like creatures have been rescued. And in the end Romana decides to stay with them. They need a Time Lord to help rescue their fellows enslaved on many worlds, and apparently have learned from this that enslaving others is not a good idea. Romana really did not want to return to Gallifrey so this solves a problem neatly, and in an echo of the goodbye to Leela the Doctor gives her K-9, thus solving the problem JNT had with the robot dog. So now its the Doctor and Adric in the TARDIS as it re-enters N-Space.

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The Keeper of Traken

The Doctor and Adric are back in our normal N-space and appear to heading to Traken, a place of peace and harmony, when the Keeper of Traken, an extremely old man, appears in the TARDIS to tell them that there is evil on Traken and asking the Doctor’s help. They land in the garden of the palace (the Grove) where there is an alien statue that has been there for years and attended to by the Lady Kassia, but which suddenly starts speaking to her. The statue then seems to be a robot of some kind with an evil scheme and he has recruited Kassia to his aid. Whoever is behind the robot is clearly trying to take over Traken, and Kassia is willing to help. As the Keeper is very old and near death, there will be a new Keeper soon, and Kassia’s husband Tremas is the designated successor. And he has a daughter named Nyssa. So the forces seem to be the robot and Kassia on one side, and the Doctor, Adric, Nyssa, and Tremas on the other side. Adric analyzes energy readings and deduces that there is another TARDIS operating here, and it proves to be the apparent robot. Inside this TARDIS is the Master, and he has used up all of his regenerations. He thinks he can use the power of the Source of Traken to get a new body and new lives, but Adric manages to sabotage the Source which stops him. But in the end he takes over the body of Tremas (an anagram of Master) and seems to be ready to spread evil throughout the Galaxy once again.

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Logopolis

The cloister bell is tolling, a sure sign of trouble. The Doctor has a plan to fix the broken chameleon circuit by having the TARDIS materialize around a real police box, and then take measurements of all of its dimensions so that the mathematicians of Logopolis can compute the proper codes to fix the circuit. But he does not know that the Master survived and is back in action. The Master has had his TARDIS already materialize around the real police box, so when the Doctor materializes his TARDIS around it, the Master’s TARDIS is now inside the Doctor’s TARDIS. Meanwhile, a mysterious figure in white (The Watcher) seems to be watching everything. The Doctor notices and talks to him, then sets out for Logopolis. The Master sabotages the calculations by the mathematicians of Logopolis, but then he goes too far and destroys Logopolis, which will cause the death of the universe because Logopolis has been creating Charged Vacuum Emboitments (CVEs) to funnel off the excess entropy and keep the universe going. With Logopolis out of action, the entropy rises quickly. The Doctor gets the program for repairing things, but needs a computer to run it on, and Earth is where he finds it, in a radio telescope called the Pharos Project. The Master is of course still trying to maximize his power, and in the conflict the Doctor stops him, but is killed. At this point the Watcher merges with the Doctor, and a regeneration takes place, leading to a new Doctor, played by Peter Davison.

Nyssa is back, and was brought to Logopolis by the Watcher. And another companion, an airline Stewardess (as she is called) named Tegan Jovanka wanders into the TARDIS by mistake while looking for help. So now there are three companions in the TARDIS, along with a brand new Doctor.

Reviews

Season Reviewed

I thought this was a good season overall. Meglos and Full Circle were the weakest in my opinion. But Warriors’ Gate was the kind of experimental story that I love seeing Doctor Who attempt. The remaining stories were solid and I would happily rewatch any of them. Finding a way to bring back the Master was great, even though I thought Anthony Ainley was not quite as good as Roger Delgado. But then I think Delgado is the best Master of them all. And the Regeneration was very interesting. I find it curious that in classic Doctor Who each regeneration was different, while in the revived series it tends be pretty much the same each time. I don’t really have an opinion on whether that is a good thing, I am just noting it.

Tom Baker Reviewed

Tom Baker remains to this day the person who played the part longest, and I doubt that record will ever be broken. Colin Baker wanted to break it, but ended up with a shortened tenure, which is really too bad, but in the face of the hostility of Michael Grade what could be done? But prior to the revived series, Tom Baker was the most common choice of fans for the best Doctor, and not a bad choice at that. Stories like Genesis of the Daleks, Talons of Weng-Chiang, and City of Death are among the best Doctor Who stories ever produced. And Baker had a way of commanding your attention when he was on the screen.

Romana Reviewed

Of course, there were two Romanas. Romana I was played by Mary Tamm, and Romana II was portrayed by Lalla Ward. They were very different, and of the two I think I prefer Romana II. She really made me believe she was another Time Lord.

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