14 – Fourteenth Season – Tom Baker

The Masque of Mandragora

The TARDIS is briefly trapped by a Mandragora energy field, and then lands in 15th century Italy in the fictional country of San Martino. It turns out the TARDIS carried a piece of Mandragora with it from the Mandragora energy field, and this piece is ready to cause mischief. The Duke of San Martino just died, and we learn it was caused by a poison administered by the court astrologer, Hieronymous, who is in league with the Duke’s brother, Count Federico. But now Federico needs to bump off the new Duke, who is the son of the one who just died. As all of this is playing out, the Mandragora gives the astrologer, Hieronymous real powers, and puts in place a plan to take over the entire Earth. Fortunately, the Doctor is up to the task, kills Heironymous, gets rid of Mandragora, and leaves the new Duke secure on his throne.

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The Hand of Fear

The TARDIS lands in a quarry just as an explosion is set to take place, and the Doctor and Sarah are both partially buried under rubble. But Sarah has touched a stone hand in the rubble and it takes over her mind. She now says to herself that “Eldrad Must Live”. She is taken to the hospital, but wakes up and steals the stone hand from a doctor who is studying it, and heads for the nearest nuclear station. The radiation from the reactor core is absorbed by the hand and it becomes something alive instead of a piece of stone. Fearing what it might do, they call in tactical nuclear strikes from the RAF, but instead of blowing up the nuclear site, the energy is absorbed by the hand as it regenerates into a complete being, Eldrad. It tells them it comes from Kastria and want to go back and help its people, so the Doctor brings Eldrad to Kastria where it regenerates into its original form and is revealed as a criminal. But the Doctor manages to throw it into a very deep chasm.

Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor gets a telepathic message from Gallifrey telling him that he must return, but he knows he cannot take Sarah with him, so he drops her off on Earth. This would be the last regular appearance of Sarah Jane on Doctor Who, but she does appear in a few of the revived series shows, and gets her own spin off series years later called The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Sarah Jane Smith has been widely regarded as the best Companion to the Doctor, though I rather like Jamie from the Second Doctor as being a contender.

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The Deadly Assassin

The Doctor arrives on Gallifrey and sees a vision of the President being assassinated. He tries to prevent it, but is unsuccessful and is accused of being the assassin himself. But he soon learns that the Master is behind it all. And when he learns that the Master has gone into the Matrix and deleted all records of himself (the Master), the Doctor goes in the Matrix and fights the Master’s helper. It is all a fight on a psychological plane, but contains the famous cliffhanger of the Doctor being held underwater that got Mary Whitehouse so upset. In the end, the Master gets away, because of course he does. This is a fun little romp with Tom Baker expending a lot of energy.

However, the Master has changed. The original Master, Roger Delgado, tragically died in an automobile crash a few months after filming Frontier in Space. Since he was a Time Lord they could have just had him regenerate into another actor, but they decided that he had run out of regenerations and was hanging on as a miserable monster surviving on pure hate. His plan was to use the power of the black hole that powered Gallifrey (aka The Eye of Harmony) to regenerate himself, which would have caused Gallifrey to be destroyed, with the desirable (to him) consequence of killing the Doctor.

This story contains the first mention of the Celestial Intervention Agency, which will become more prominent in the future. And it is the first serious look at Gallifrey and the Time Lord society. And I believe this is the first time we hear of the absolute limit of 12 regenerations for a Time Lord. I’m sure when this story was written no one could have imagined this becoming a constraint on the show, but in New Who that did happen. The insertion of the War Doctor made Matt Smith’s Doctor the twelfth regeneration, so they wrote in that the Time Lords could grant extra regenerations if they chose. But most of the details we have come to accept of how Time Lord society works comes from this story

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The Face of Evil

The Doctor lands on a jungle planet which seems to be inhabited by a savage race called the Sevateem, one of whose inhabitants, Leela, has just been condemned for heresy. They meet in the jungle, but the Doctor realizes something is not quite right. There is technology around that is way above the knowledge or ability of the Sevateem. And their shaman, Neeva, has artifacts that come from an Earth spaceship. Some of these artifacts allow Neeva to talk to his god Xoanon through radio transmission. Meanwhile, the Doctor is identified by everyone as “The Evil One”, and when Leela takes him into the jungle they find a cliff into which is carved the face of the Doctor! So the Face of Evil is the face of the Doctor. But how?

It turns out the Doctor has been here before, but didn’t remember it. But he goes through the mouth opening of the face carved into the rock, and inside finds a space ship, with people inside who are called the Tesh. It turns out that both the Tesh and the Sevateem are descendants of the ship crew, Sevateem is a corruption of “Survey Team”, and the Tesh are the descendants of the technicians who stayed with the ship. And Xoanon is a computer with a bad case of split personality and insanity caused by the Doctor many years previously when he botched a repair of the computer. In the end, the computer is cured by the Doctor, and he leaves the Tesh and the Sevateem to work out how to live together. But Leela comes with the Doctor when he leaves the planet, becoming the new companion.

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The Robots of Death

The we open in a mining ship on a planet where the crew seems to be bickering; well, the human crew is. There is a larger crew of robots. Then we see a human in a storeroom get attacked and killed by a robot. From there it is like an Agatha Christie story as th4e human crew is killed one at a time. And when the TARDIS lands in the middle of this ship, everyone assumes that the Doctor and Leela are the killers. After all, the killings started when the two of them appeared on board. We know it was the robots, so that part is not a mystery to us. But the robots, in a nod to Isaac Asimov, have as their prime directive to never harm humans. So how is this happening?

If you are paying close attention you might notice that one of the crew seems to just drop out of sight around the midpoint of the story, and it turns out he is not what he seemed to be. He is not just an engineer on the ship, but in reality a brilliant but insane robot scientist who wants to kill all of the humans and make robots the dominant race. And he might have got away with it if not for the Doctor, who realizes that the robots respond to his voice. But by releasing helium gas into the laboratory, it alters the scientist’s voice, and the command to “kill all the humans” takes him out.

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The Talons of Weng-Chiang

The TARDIS lands in Victorian London, and in order to not stand out Leela is forced to wear clothes, which she does commendably. But they almost immediately come across a group of Chinese thugs killing a white man. By the time the police arrive, the thugs are gone, and the Doctor and Leela are taken to the police station. Meanwhile, a theater owner named Jago has a popular magic act performed by a Chinese man. And a series of young women have all gone missing. And just to reinforce the air of Victorian mystery, the Doctor is dressed in the canonical Sherlock Holmes outfit of a deerstalker cap and an Inverness cape. Other references are the Giant Rat (see The Giant Rat of Sumatra, mentioned in The Sussex Vampire), and the name of Litefoot’s housekeeper is Mrs. Hudson, same as Sherlock Holmes.

Jago gets enlisted to help the Doctor, along with a coroner named Litefoot, and Jago tells tells Litefoot that the Doctor is sent from Scotland Yard, and probably solves all of their cases but lets the other Yarders take the credit. This is of course a direct copy of Sherlock Holmes. So what we have is a mashup of Sherlock Holmes, Fu Manchu, and Jack the Ripper, with of course a science fiction element in the form of a baddie who is actually a criminal from the 51st century.

The inherent racism of the Fu Manchu element is unavoidable, particularly when the main Chinese character, the magician, is played by an English actor doing stereotypical Fu Manchu dialog. Still, this story has a reputation for being one of the best despite all of that. And it does have its charms, with Tom Baker being marvelous and Leela being bloodthirsty. And the characters of Jago and Litefoot proved popular enough that they got their own series of audio adventures on Big Finish. It is a good story, though not what I would call the best story, and if you can overlook the Yellow Peril racism it is worth a watch. And it is the final story produced by Philip Hinchcliffe.

Another tie-in that is worth mentioning: Magnus Greel, aka Weng Chiang, is a criminal from the 51st century. And he mentions that he is puzzled by the Doctor, because the Doctor seems to have knowledge of different times, but is not a Time Agent. Then in 2005, in the first season of the revived Doctor Who, we meet Captain Jack Harkness, who is a Time Agent. From the 51st Century.

As was usual at this time, the final show of the season had six episodes, rather than the four of the other stories. This allowed the season to run to 26 episodes total, exactly half a year’s worth.

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Season 14

This season brings an end to the Philip Hinchcliffe era of Doctor Who. It is notable for the many outstanding stories he produced in his three years, and many fans consider this the best era of Doctor Who. It a darker series of stories, with a strong element of horror, though leavened by Tom Baker’s inherent humor.

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