15 – Fifteenth Season – Tom Baker

With the 15th season there was a changing of the guard. In the 1970s Doctor Who, the two major determinants of the show (other than the actors) were the Producer and the Script Editor. For Jon Pertwee’s run as the Third Doctor the Producer was Barry Letts, and the Script Editor was Terrance Dicks. But when Jon Pertwee left, they both decided to relinquish their roles as well, and in came Philip Hinchcliffe as Producer and Robert Holmes as Script Editor, and this team made the the first three seasons of Tom Baker’s Doctor. This era is a regarded by many fans as the best of the Classic Doctor Who series. But it was also controversial for its darkness and violence, and received a lot of attention from people like Mary Whitehouse. So the BBC pulled Philip Hinchcliffe off of Doctor Who and put him on a different program (a cop show called Target), and brought in Graham Williams as the new Producer. But to aid in continuity Robert Holmes stayed on a Script Editor for first few stories of the season before being replaced by Anthony Read.

In the revived show that started in 2005, the roles of Producer and Script Editor were largely combined in a new role called Show Runner.

Horror of Fang Rock

The TARDIS lands on a rocky bit of land next to a light house, where a glowing ball was spotted descending into the sea. It might have been a shooting start, but it wasn’t. Soon we have a base under siege story where a mysterious alien can apparently use electricity to kill people. There were three people manning the lighthouse, then a boat with four more people, and the Doctor and Leela. In the end only the Doctor and Leela survive, but they do beat off an alien invasion from the Rutans. The Rutans are engaged in a long-running war all over space against the Sontarans, who we have seen before in The Time Warrior and The Sontaran Experiment.

The Doctor uses a diamond to help focus the lighthouse light and blow up the Rutan ship, and warns Leela to not look. But she does anyway, and is temporarily blinded. But as her sight returns, we discover that the color of her eyes has changed from brown to blue. This was a cover for a comfort change. Louise Jameson has blue eyes, but when she was cast as Leela they decided that Leela ought to have brown eyes, so they made he wear red contact lenses to change her eye color. She found these very uncomfortable, so with this change she didn’t need to wear them any longer.

While the Rutans are connected to the Sontarans, this is the only episode in which they appear. But they do get mentioned in a number of Sontaran episodes.

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The Invisible Enemy

A spaceship on the way to Titan Base passes through a mysterious cloud, and the crew become infected with a virus that turns them into helpless slaves of some alien being that controls them. They kill the crew at Titan Base, then make the commander one of them as well. The Doctor and Leela in the TARDIS pick up a MAYDAY call from Titan Base, but the TARDIS also passes through the mysterious cloud, and the Doctor (though not Leela) is infected, and the Doctor is judged suitable for the breeding Nucleus. There is no help for the Doctor on Titan Base, but there is a Hospital/Research Station on a nearby asteroid, so they go there. It appears that whatever has infected the Doctor is in his brain. This is also where they meet K-p, the robot/mobile computer of Professor Marius, head of the research station within the hospital.

At this point Doctor Who meets Fantastic Voyage. They make short-lived clones of both the Doctor and Leela, shrink them to microscopic scale, and inject them into the Doctor to find and destroy the nucleus. But while they are doing this, the infected minions of the Nucleus are attacking to gain control of the Doctor, who still has the Nucleus inside his brain. Eventually the Nucleus escapes the Doctor’s brain, and goes to Titan Base to breed. Leela says the answer is simple, just blow up Titan Base. The Doctor tries something more sophisticated, but in the end blows up Titan Base. And the Professor gives him K-9, who now becomes an additional companion in the TARDIS,

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Image of the Fendahl

In Science Fiction there is a long history of writers noticing the asteroid belt and thinking “there must have been a planet there once that got destroyed, leaving the asteroids as the remnant.” In reality, putting together all of the asteroids would not nearly be enough to form a planet. They are small and there aren’t as many as people think because of inaccurate movies showing large numbers of rocks that a spaceship has to carefully pick through. But in this story the Fifth planet idea gets another pass as the original home of the Fendahl, a deadly creature that absorbs the life energy from the organisms around it. It was so dangerous that the Time Lords destroyed the planet by sealing it in a time loop. But the creature managed to get to Earth, where it apparently died, leaving behind a skull that looks human but is far older than any human skull could be.

From here we get classic Gothic Horror story as a scientist finds the skull and experiments with it, bringing it to life. One of the scientists on the team thinks he can use this to become the master of the planet. And then ideas of witchcraft and covens come into the story. Finally one of the team is transformed into the Fendahl, and the Doctor has to save the day, which he does by blowing them up. Maybe Leela is having an influence on him.

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The Sun Makers

This is essentially a story about the evils of capitalism. The inhabitants of Earth made a bad deal with a race called the Usurians, and if you think you spot “usury” in there, give yourself a cookie. The Usurians are the model of greedy, evil capitalists, and the first scene is where one of the workers comes to pay the death tax for his father, only to be told he doesn’t have enough money since they raised the tax rates. No problem, he can just work more overtime, but he is already working two full-time jobs. This is all set on Pluto, which has been made habitable by the creation of six artificial Suns, hence the title of the story, but it never has any relevance to the story, really. The Doctor and Leela land there, and get involved with freeing the essentially enslaved humans.

K-9 is an active participant this time, unlike in the previous Image of the Fendahl which he pretty much sat out. The problem with K-9 is that he rolls along the floor, so anything other than a flat floor and he can’t move. In Image of the Fendahl there were a lot of outdoor scenes where K-9 wouldn’t be able to get around, so they made him have a fault that the Doctor was only able to correct at the very end of the story. Also, the writer, Robert Holmes, was getting some revenge after a bad experience with the tax authorities.

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Underworld

The TARDIS materializes on a starship from a race called the Minyans, and it is on a quest to find another ship of theirs that carries the genetic information of their race. It turns out that the Time Lords got involved with this race,and it turned out bad. leading to the Time Lords’ policy of non-intervention. The Minyans mostly killed off their race in civil wars, leaving just the two ships. They locate the ship but it is in the middle of a planetoid of rock, something that nearly happened to the ship the Doctor is on. Inside the planetoid are tunnels, and two groups of people. One is the overseers who have the weapons, and the rest are the mass of slaves. And since it all takes place in tunnels, you get the title Underworld. After the requisite amount of captures and escapes, the Doctor manages to destroy the overseers and set the slaves free.

This story does not have a great reputation, but I would call it just an ordinary story of its time. The problem is that they ran out of money and had to everything with CSO instead of physical sets, and it really shows. K-9 is again an important companion, as he was in the previous story. And Leela is still the bloodthirsty warrior of the Sevateem. I like Leela a lot, and it is shame she won’t be around much longer.

The subtext here is given away at the end, in that this story is loosely based on the story of Jason and the Argonauts. The Doctor makes it explicit in the last scene, but Minyans = Minoans, Orfe = Orpheus, Herrick = Hercules (Heracles), and so on.

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The Invasion of Time

As has become the pattern at this time, the last story of the season was a 6-parter to bring the total for the season up to 26 episodes, or exactly one-half a year. But as also frequently happened, it ended up being one story of 4 parts and one added one of 2 parts. This tended to make it look like they were stretching it out just to fill the time. In this story, the Doctor first meets with shadowy aliens, then returns to Gallifrey. When he was there previously, in The Deadly Assassin, he was a candidate for the Presidency of the High Council. The only other candidate was an ally of The Master and was killed in that story, leaving the Doctor as the only surviving candidate. He now insists on taking up his office, but he is behaving oddly, and appears to be betraying the Time Lords. That can’t be, surely, and it is revealed to be a deeper plot. The Aliens he met earlier are the Vardans, and he needs to stop them, but first he has to get their trust, which he does to some extent by removing the defenses of Gallifrey. But he is able to get the location of their home planet, and send them back home, and then putting the planet into a Time Loop. This is the same thing we in Image of the Fendahl when the Time Lords did it to the Fendahl home world after blowing it up. So by the end of the fourth episode he is able to say “We have won, Gallifrey is saved!”

Which is when the Sontarans appear. The Vardans were merely a tool of the Sontarans, and with the defenses of Gallifrey temporarily down they can make a move. The last two episodes are about defeating the Sontarans, and feature a look into the inside of the TARDIS. We see floor after floor, with industrial stairwells, a pool, a garden, and an infirmary. To defeat the Sontarans the Doctor has to obtain the Key of Rassilon, which he uses to construct a Demat (dematerialization) gun that makes any target disappear is if it had never existed. But in using it the Doctor loses all memory of what had transpired on Gallifrey. This conveniently leaves him free to go away and have adventures, and would let the Time Lords elect a new President.

At the end, Leela elects to stay on Gallifrey, having apparently formed an attachment to young Guard officer, though no evidence of that appears in the script. In reality, Louise Jameson had decided to leave the show to return to the theater. She had asked to be killed, but the higher ups at the BBC decided that would bother the children watching, hence the romance. This puts her in the company of others like Susan, Vicky, and Jo Grant, who all left the show in similar ways. K-9 also elected to stay with Leela. But in the closing, we see the Doctor with a box labelled K-9 MkII.

This script waas thrown together as a last minute replacement for another one that fell through, and the plot holes make that evident. It is not a bad story, but you have to suspend your disbelief a good deal with this one.

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Season 15

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