State of Decay

Four Episodes
Aired between 22nd November 1980 and 13th December 1980

Written by Terrence Dicks
Produced by John Nathan-Turner
Directed by Peter Moffatt

Synopsis

Whilst looking for an exit from e-space, the TARDIS takes its crew to a planet where there's one primitive village that sits at the foot of a giant gothic tower.

As the Doctor and Romana explore the planet (unaware that Adric has stowed away in the TARDIS), they soon find out that the lords of the tower rule over the village and demand a selection of people that are taken to the tower never to return.

If that wasn't odd enough, the Doctor soon finds out that all forms of reading and studying are forbidden, and the practice of science is punishable by death.  Only a select group of old men have rebelled, and hide themselves deep within the woods.

They use scraps of technology that they've found, and these seem to come from an old crashed ship called the Hydrax.  The Doctor gets the stuff working again and looks through the logs.  They tell of a three man crew - Captain Sharkey, Nav Officer Lauren McMillan, and Science Officer Anthony O'Conner.

Meanwhile, Adric sneaks out of the TARDIS and ends up earning his keep at the local inn of the village chief - Ivo.  Whilst there, he is found by one of the rulers, Orcon, and taken to the tower.

The Doctor and Romana leave the rebels cave and are soon attacked by vampire bats shortly before being captured by soldiers and taken to the tower.  Once there, they meet King Zargo and Queen
Camilla.  They wittily spar back and forth until the Doctor mentions the hydrax.

One of the guards, Habris, comes in and says that Orcon wants to speak to the King and Queen about the "time of arising".  They post guards outside the throne room and confine the Doctor and Romana there.

The Doctor and Romana figure out that the names Zargo, Camilla and Orcon are descendent of Sharkey, McMillan and O'Connor.  They also discover via a hidden bulkhead panel that the tower IS the Hydrax.  They use the bulkhead and explore the old parts of the ship until they find lots of bodies stored in the bowels of the ship, with drip feeds that lead to a huge vat of blood in the fuel tanks.  This, coupled with the steady, thumping heartbeat, leads the Doctor to understand that the three who rule ARE the original crew of the Hydrax, and have been transformed into Vampires by a huge vampire creature known to them as the great one.

They are captured by Orcon who understands that they are Time Lords and are the great enemy, they apparently fought a great war back in the days when Rassilon was young.  The vampires were ultimately destroyed apart from their king who disappeared (meaning, he fled into e-space and is now hibernating).  With this knowledge, the Doctor and Romana know they must kill the head vampire or the universe is doomed.

Lucky for them, the old rebels decide to infiltrate the tower and they help them escape.  As this happens, Romana hears that Adric has been captured and she wants to rescue him.  The Doctor goes to get more info from the TARDIS, leaving Romana and one of the rebels, Tarak, to find him.  They do indeed find him, laid on a bed, sleeping like a vampire.

Everything goes awry when the King and Queen awaken and attack.  They kill Tarak and keep Romana and Adric as sacrifices.

The Doctor learns from ancient records that the Time Lords used "bow ships" and formulates a plan.

The Doctor sends K9 to sort out the guards and he goes to set off the scout ships that lie dormant at the top of the Hydrax. Meanwhile, Romana is put on a sacrificial alter where bats suck on her blood,

and the great king vampire begins to awaken.

Unfortunately for him, the Doctor manages to launch the scout ship, sending it straight up, then it runs out of fuel and falls straight down, it's spike'd nose piercing the king vampire's heart and killing it.

In response, Orcon, Zargo and Camilla crumble to dust and the villagers are free.

The Doctor gets the technology working and leaves Ivo, and the remaining rebels to figure out their new tech, whilst he, Romana and Adric go off to find a way out of e-space.

Trivia

• This story was originally written during Phillip Hinchcliffe's run as a producer in 1977.  Whilst the story was good enough, they were told they couldn't use it because the BBC were doing a serious attempt at Dracula, and didn't want the competition (or didn't want it to look like they were taking the mickey out of it).  It worked out okay in the end, because the alternative script was The Horror of Fang Rock.

• The original working title was "The Vampire Mutation", but script editor Christopher H. Bidmead didn't like it.  He wanted "The Wasting" but Terrence Dicks thought they'd be the butt of the joke for "Wasting everyone's time". 

• Talking of Bidmead, he had a heavy hand on this script, wanting to place more emphasis on scientific theories and less on the horror element.  His contribution was the evolution of the Hydrax Crew names, which he thought was fascinating, but Terrence Dicks was not pleased at all.  Despite this, he made the changes and the script was presented to Director Peter Moffatt.  As it happened, Moffatt had seen an earlier draft and he demanded that the original script be returned or else he wouldn't do it!  Terrence won his victory and the script was returned to its original state

• This was the first story actually filmed in the sequence, and so the first time Matthew Waterhouse (Adric) had been on the set.  He and Llala Ward didn't hit it off at all and tensions grew even harder amongst the crew.

• Tom Baker believed that the Time Lords would have blue blood and if you look at the bat scene, his blood is indeed blue.  JNT was not impressed when he found out, but there wasn't the time to re-shoot.

The Review
Shown only three years beyond the point in which it was written, the State of Decay stands out in the midst of season eighteen like an absolute sore thumb.  It's a pseudo-historical set on an alien planet, and there's some of those through the Key to Time era, but what's different in this is that there's the added element of nostalgia.  State of Decay returns with the gothic horror elements thrust upfront and is unapologetic about it.

If we follow the old formula of Brain of Morbius being Frankenstein and Talons of Weng Chiang being the Phantom of the Opera, then you'd be forgiven for saying State of Decay is Dracula, but it's not.  Well, not really.  It's far more like Hammer Horror Dracula than the actual Bram Stoker story.  It's got the intimidating castle on the cliff, it's got the suspicious villagers warning the visitors not to visit said castle, oh and it's got over dramatic vampires.

I like State of Decay because it's not trying too hard.  There's probably lots wrong with it, ham acting for one, but they're not necessarily things to get hung up on because in a way, it's not meant to be taken that way. The beauty of it is that it's taking all these horror tropes and just playing with them and it does so in a way that's fun.  You might say it's clumsy and obvious but I disagree. Look at the line from Romana when the Doctor tells her about the hermit on Gallifrey.  There's not a "LOOK AT THIS - AREN'T I FUNNY!" moment, it just flows.  For every hissing vampire woman, there's unsettling revelations about the threat they pose and blood hidden in great vats.

Maybe it's because we've had such a run of bad stories of late that I want to give this a higher mark than perhaps it deserves, but to me, State of Decay is a final farewell to old Doctor Who and is a pretty damn good one at that.

Rating 

9 out of 10

Rewatchability Factor

7 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• The Savages

• The Daemons

• The Face of Evil

• Terminus

• The Mysterious Planet (Trial of a Timelord Parts 1-4)

• The Impossible Planet (Doctor Who, Series 2)

• The Vampires of Venice (Doctor Who, Series 5)

Full Circle

Four episodes
Aired between 25th October 1980 and 15th November 1980

Written by Andrew Smith
Produced by John Nathan-Turner
Directed by Peter Grimwade


Synopsis

Romana is upset that she has to return to Gallifrey.

The Doctor seems to sympathise, but he knows it's impossible to refuse the call.  On their way, they luckily pass through a Charged Vacuum Embodiment (C.V.E. or in other words, a rift in space).  This event takes them to another dimension that they refer to as Exo-Space or E-Space.

At first, The Doctor and Romana don't realise what's happened, and they think the TARDIS is faulty when they supposedly land on Gallifrey, but the area outside is a wooded clearing.

They begin to trouble shoot the problem, when a young boy called Adric barges into the TARDIS and collapses.

They learn that Adric is one of the descendants of a colony crew that crash landed here thousands of years ago.

They are ruled by a council of three men called the deciders, and  they are periodically trapped inside the ship when toxic mists descend on the planet.  Adric's brother and some of his friends have rebelled against society and hide in a cave nearby.  They were goading Adric into helping them steal fruit from the community (Adric's a nerd who has a badge for mathematical excellence).  Adric was caught by one of the Deciders who was in the market, but before he could be taken in, the Decider was dragged into the marsh by some humanoids.  His final words to Adric were that they had come "full circle".

The mistfall is upon the planet again, and Adric gets the Doctor and Romana to try and help him get his brother and friends to safety.

The Doctor gets to the colony ship and starts to investigate, as he finds the fact that the deciders have been lying to the colonists - the mists are perfectly fine.  The monsters (marsh men) rise up out of the swamp and make their way onto land.

One of them gets into the colony ship and is captured.  The Doctor tries to stop the colonists from dissecting the marsh man up, but it gets free, kills the surgeon and itself. 

As the Doctor is messing about, Romana and Adric stay in the TARDIS.  The Marsh Men come along and take it on their backs to a cave above the starliner (the colonist's crashed ship). They intend to use it as a battering ram.

The Marsh Men are scared off and Romana goes outside to find out why.  They meet Adric's brother and his friends and they find some fruit that has strange spiders in it.

The kids run into the TARDIS as they swarm against them, but Romana gets bitten and possessed.

She turns into an ally of the Marsh Men and starts to direct them. Adric and the kids meanwhile manage to haphazardly pilot their way to the starliner.

Ultimately, the Marsh Men, led by Romana attack the starliner.

The Doctor figures out that the Marsh Men are actually ancestors of the humans living there (they killed the original colonists).  Romana is captured and injected with a serum devised by the Doctor and he cures her.  The Marsh Men are driven out of the star liner when the colonists discover that the marsh men don't like pure oxygen (they use cylinders to drive them out).  Adric's brother is killed in the attempt.

The Doctor gives the deciders knowledge on how to pilot their star liner and he goes off again with Romana in the TARDIS.

Trivia

• This story was written by a fan who'd read a Doctor Who production book that was published with a "how to create a script" section at the back.  He impressed Script Editor Christopher H Bidmead and he was brought in.  After extensive work on the script, it was made 

• The role of Adric was thought up by John Nathan-Turner, but didn't quite turn out how he wanted.  The original concept was for him to be a sort of Artful Dodger character.  The reality was much more a whiny brat than skilled pickpocket.

• The name Adric is derived from eminent physicist P A M Dirac. 

• By this time, Tom Baker and Llala Wards relationship was worse for wear.   Guest stars recollect that they would be at opposite ends of the rehearsal room, screaming and shouting at one another

The Review

The first thing fans comment on when they discuss this story is that it was written by a genuine fan. I think because of that, a lot of people try to look for things to like about it, effectively giving it a "pass" because if it's bad, there's a fear of the "I'd like to see you do better", especially when you realise that the fan in question was nineteen at the time.  I'm not immune to those feelings, but as much as I want to like it, I just can't.  Why not?  Because to me, it's very, very boring.

I know some people will say "hold on, there's a lot of science in there and fascinating stuff about evolution".  Yep, I'll give you that, there is.  But it's just not covered in an interesting way for me.  I'm not even sure how I'd do it.  Look, it's sort of like Day of the Daleks.  The concept is pretty good, but you've to watch three quarters of it before you get to the point.  And to add insult to injury, the whole thing is so wooden.

There's only two people in this entire story that show any kind of genuine pathos - one is the Doctor, and I don't mean Tom Baker. I'm talking about the surgeon that gets killed by the Marsh Man, the other is Login who has some compassion for his daughter being trapped outside.  Everyone else is pretty bland.  I didn't care about Adric's brother or his mates.  Adric himself is totally unsympathetic, and even Tom Baker and Llala Ward are just plodding through it all. 

The tension in the plot is built around the Marsh Men attacking, the mists killing people, and the spiders.  Well, the spiders are laughable, the Marsh Men lumber about so slowly that they never feel like a threat at all, and there's absolutely no fear about the mists because we never get to build up anticipation that the Doctor's going to die when he come's into contact with them, I.e. the killer mist theory's immediately disproved and done in a very casual manner. 

Sorry to all fans of this story, but despite the slightly interesting concept of long evolution, this story is booooorrrinng!

Rating

5 out of 10

Rewatchability Factor

4 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• The Rescue 

• The Sea Devils

• Planet of Evil

• The Face of Evil

• The Pirate Planet

The Leisure Hive

Four Episodes
Aired between 30th August 1980 and 20th September 1980

Written by David Fisher
Produced by John Nathan Turner
Directed by Lovett Bickford


Synopsis

The Doctor and Romana want a holiday.  They try Brighton Beach, but the Doctor ends up taking them there in the winter and K9 is so depressed that he throws himself in the sea and blows up.

Romana suggests going to "The Leisure Hive" on the planet Argolis, which they do.

Argolis is a planet devastated by a nuclear war between the Argolins and the Foamasi. In the aftermath, the Argolins have built a domed leisure complex there.  This complex is however almost bankrupt, and the Argolins are getting desperate.  They have used the funds from it to look at Tacyhonic research, the ability to distort and manipulate time, with the hopes of finding a way to make themselves young again and ensuring the survival of their race.

The Foamasi are offering a buy out of the complex, but Pangol, a young Argolin and leader of the Tachyonic Recreation Generator research, is totally against it.

It turns out that a rogue person (or creature) is running around the hive, sabotaging the experiments in Tachyonics.  The Doctor gets embroiled in it, firstly by nearly having his arms and legs ripped off,

and then by being aged five hundred years.

It all culminates in the fact that a Foamasi private business syndicate (in other words Mafia), have been causing the problems so that the Argolins are forced to sell the leisure hive and thus the technology to them at a low rate.

The Foamasi government turn up and arrest the mafia lizards, but now that Pangol has the faults identified and fixed, uses the tachyon generator to multiply himself and create an army of Pangols with which to start up the war with the Foamasi again.

What he doesn't know is that the Doctor slipped into the machine as well and the duplicates are all of the Doctor.  He returns to his normal age and helps to stop Pangol.

Pangol tries to run the process again, but he gets turned into a baby and the currently dying leader of the Argolins (Mena) is rejuvenated back to a good age.

The Doctor and Romana go back in the TARDIS and go away again, leaving behind the randomiser from the console as the Doctor is fed up of running from the Black Guardian.

Trivia

• By the time John Nathan-Turner sat in the Producers seat, he'd been working on the show for three years and he had a good idea on what he wanted to change. He soon became a "new broom" that would sweep clean a lot of the old stuff away including most of the humour in the show, the Doctor's old costume, the old title sequence, and the old ways of TV production. 

• Once the old stuff was gone, Nathan-Turner ushered in brand new things, like a new title sequence that was bang up to date with the eighties, a brand new fibre glass TARDIS, and he gave the Doctor a brand new costume (including the inclusion of "?" on the Doctor's collar that would stay until the end of the classic series). He also got rid of Dudley Simpson and gave the job of incidental music to the Radiophonic Workshop.  

• Barry Letts returned to help smooth the handover, and he agreed that the show had gotten a little bit silly, and helped tone it down a bit

• John Leeson also arrived back as K9 for this season (not that you see much of him in this story)

• David Fisher's original concept had been for the Foamasi to be like mafia and wear dinner jackets and bow ties, but as noted above, Barry Letts and Nathan-Turner jumped straight on that.  Coincidentally, "Foamasi" is an anagram of "Mafiosa"

• The new script editor, Christopher H Bidmead came in and wanted to put the show back on scientific roots, that's why there's a load of talk about Tachyonics going on in this one

The Review

There's no other word for it.  This story is a mess. One huge mess. Just look at the synopsis.  Oh, wait, I've thought of another word to describe it too.  Boring.  Very, very, boring.  Tom Baker plays a supporting role again, but Llala Ward just has a very tedious set of scientific words to get through, and messes about with prisms and computers for half the story.

John Nathan-Turner's "new broom" approach wasn't totally misguided.  I've spoken numerous times in the last couple of seasons about how Tom Baker turns more and more into Eric Morcambe (see the Ribos Operation onwards) and the general production quality of the show went significantly downhill.  I like humour, and some of the stories work well, but if you've watched them in sequence, there is definitely a sense of "it'll do" to it, which is what JNT was all about changing.  The problem is, that he was quite draconian about it and half of the stuff he implemented was what we in the industry call a bad idea.

The humour was meant to be toned down, and despite what some argue, it was in this (there's a bit of witty mannerisms from the Doctor in it, okay).  This is good.  Having over a hundred seconds of a camera panning along a deserted beach isn't.  Having a story set on a leisure planet and only showing some naff men playing zero G squash isn't good, in fact, it's awful.  Talking for almost the whole story about Tachyonics as if we all care is even worse.

On that, the inclusion of the Tachyonics makes no sense anyway.  Having a story about sabotage and a hidden assassin could work (and in some sequences, the story does manage the tension quite well), but the whole plot with Pangol is just ludicrous and sticks out like a sore thumb.

The scenes of the Doctor getting old and getting ripped apart are ultimately pointless too...but at least they were done as cliff hangers, and as some guides mention - they were instrumental in giving a huge shock to the audience of 1980 who had grown complacent.  All of a sudden, they were shown that things could and probably would start happening to the Doctor.  Look at the next story for how that progressed.

At least the Foamasi masks looked great. It's just a shame that their bodies were all puffy and clearly didn't fit into the human suits they were supposed to.

Rating

3 out of 10

Rewatchability Factor

3 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• The Macra Terror

• Nightmare of Eden

• Terror of the Vervoids  (Trial of a Timelord)

• Delta and the Bannermen

• Paradise Towers

Shada

Six Episodes
Never Aired

Written by Douglas Adams
Produced by Graham Williams
Directed by Pennant Roberts


Synopsis

In the far future, on a research space station called "Think Tank", a sinister looking man undertakes an experiment that sucks his colleagues minds into an autonomous floating grey sphere.

 He smiles at his handiwork, takes the sphere and puts an automated quarantine message on the speakers.

Back in 1979, the Doctor and Romana have visited Cambridge, to see the Doctor's old friend (and fellow Time Lord), Professor Chronotis.  Apparently Chronotis summoned them, but he's not in at first, so they go punting.

Chronotis arrives whilst they're out and meets a student called Chris Parsons.  Chris borrows a book from the scatterbrained Professor and it turns out to be a very special one - it's the Worshipful and Ancient Law of Galifrey - an artefact from the time of Rassilon that contains a huge amount of power and Time Lord secrets.

The Doctor and Romana return to see Chronotis who asks them to help him find the book.  After a lot of searching, Chronotis suspects that Chris may have the book.  The Doctor goes to find him.

Skagra, the man from Think Tank goes to see Chronotis, and manages to use the sphere to steal Chronotis' mind whilst Romana is inside the TARDIS, looking for more milk.

 Chris Parsons turns up to question the Professor about the book and helps Romana with him.  The Professor manages to beat out a message on his hearts that says beware Shada.

The Doctor (having missed Chris Parsons) returns to the university with the book.

He encounters Skagra who sets the sphere on him.  The Doctor races away and escapes in the TARDIS.  They decide after all that they need to speak to Skagra and go to his invisible ship to see him.  Romana and Chris are taken prisoner and the Doctor's mind is taken by the Sphere.  Skagra seems to hold all the cards once he's taken the book and he grabs Romana, stealing the TARDIS to go and find the hidden Time Lord prison planet of Shada.

The Doctor survives (the sphere only took a copy of his mind) and he uses Skagra's ship to go after him. The ship takes them to Think Tank, where they find out that Skagra is a scientist who tricked the others into putting their intellect into the sphere.  They are suddenly attacked by Skagra's henchmen - the Krargs, giant slate like monsters.  They escape, but the scientists of Think Tank are killed.

Meanwhile, Chris' colleague, Claire goes to Chronotis' room and finds that it's in fact a TARDIS itself.  As she dematerialises the room accidentally, it brings back Chronotis who seems less forgetful and more purposeful.  They go after Skagra too.

The lot of them ultimately meet up at Shada, and Skagra says he intends to use the sphere to trap everyone's minds in the universe, merging them into one giant super mind.  He needed to get to Shada, because there, the master criminal known as Salyavin had the power to project his will into others minds and therefore it would be crucial to the plan for the sphere to inherit that power.

Using the Krargs to guard everyone, Skagra opens Salyavin's cell, only to find it empty.  It turns out that Chronotis is the master criminal himself.  He repented for his crimes, managed to escape, made every Time Lord forget about the prison planet and stole the book so he would be safe and could live out his life peacefully on earth.

Skagra attacks everyone with the sphere, bringing the other prisoners under its control.  K9 holds them off but Skagra escapes in the Doctor's TARDIS.  The others take off in Chronotis' TARDIS and the Doctor manipulates the force fields to sneak on board his own TARDIS.

Skagra takes the TARDIS to his carrier ship and there they have the final battle.  Romana and K9 ultimately defeat the Krargs, and the Doctor makes a mind control helmet and uses it to counteract Skagra's commands. He takes control of the ship and puts Skagra in prison, leaving him there for the Time Lords to deal with.

The gang all return to Cambridge and have a nice cup of tea, baffling the Police with the sudden return of the room to it's normal place in the time and space continuum.

The Doctor and Romana leave and whilst tinkering on board the TARDIS, Romana asks if the Time Lords exagerated Salyavin's crimes because he seemed like a "nice old man".  The Doctor smiles and says yes they always exaggerate, just like with him. He expects in 200 years someone to say "was that really the Doctor, he seemed like such a nice old man."

Trivia

• So, lets get the obvious thing out of the way.  This story was never shown on TV.  It was partially filmed on location and had a slight bit of studio work.  The crew had done rehearsals for the next block of filming and had all gone off for lunch.  When they returned, they discovered that the TV studio had been locked and a technicians strike had been called (supposedly over the jurisdiction of whose job it was to operate the clock on the kids show, Play School)

• The strike was so disruptive that it was impossible to make up the scenes in time to get it out, so the story was shelved. Incoming Producer, John Nathan Turner said he wanted to finish it and use it as a Christmas Special, but it never really materialised in the time that Tom Baker stayed with the show, and it was decided to can it once he'd left.

• Parts of Shada were used for The Five Doctor's when Tom Baker couldn't be procured.

• This is the last story Douglas Adams wrote for Doctor Who.  As is well documented, he used parts of this story to form his Dirk Gently novel, and he used the unrealised script of Doctor Who and the Krikkit men to form the basis of his third Hitchhikers Novel "Life, The Universe, and Everything".

• This was the last time that a six part Doctor Who story would be used.  The format from this point on would be split into two or four part stories, occasionally three

• This was also the last story that Graham Williams was involved in. It's little known, but he had a significant hand in shaping this story into what was to be shot.

• This, sadly, is also the last time we see the 70's opening sequence, and hear the 1967 version of the music from Delia Derbyshire on the show

• As if that wasn't all, David Brierley's tenure as K9 came to an end as well.  John Leeson would reprise the role in the next season

• And the lasts keep on coming.  This was the last time Tom Baker would wear his iconic multi-coloured scarf and different frock coats.  

• The TARDIS was remade after this story too, making it bigger and lighter to carry around set

• A plus point is that this is the most re-made Doctor Who story ever, with a VHS release, Two DVD's, a radio play, and two books (one being a fan produced one).

The Review

It's actually refreshing to have something this complicated in a Doctor Who story for a change.  The six part format does offer a good opportunity to really dig deep into some of the aspects of the story, such as why Skagra wants what he wants, what Salyavin did to get imprisoned, what the Krargs are and why they feature in this at all, how come Skagra knows about the Time Lords and Shada in the first place, and much more...well, I said there was opportunity for that.  The reality was a little bit different.

In fairness, the story does a very good job of some things.  As I've just said, the story is complex enough to be intriguing at first. It throws in a good bit of foreshadowing with the mention of Salyavin, as if Skagra is going to be him and puts a mystery in the way with the ultimate Mcguffin - the book of the Time Lords.  It also does a good job of integrating the real world into the story, just like in times gone by (and particularly in the fifth and sixth Doctor's run) with alien menaces in sleepy English villages, this manages to capture the feel of things going down in Cambridge quite well.  Another point worth mentioning (that others don't necessarily agree with) is that for 60-70% of the show, Skagra actually acts like a villain, as in he DOESN'T tell anyone what his ultimate plot is, nor does he put them in easily escapable death traps.  It's a shame then when ultimately, Douglas Adams couldn't find a way to uncover the character's purpose without him getting fed up and blurting it out in front of everyone.

The downfall of Shada, like a lot of past Doctor Who's, is the format. Douglas Adams chose to go down the line of focusing more on the cat and mouse aspects of racing after the bad guy, at the expense of more essential but perhaps less visually interesting parts of the story.  Fair enough I suppose, but it is a shame because what starts as a great little story, soon drops down into monotony and a thick layer of tedious humour, incredibly low budget action scenes, and non-sensical plot points.  If it had the cash to throw around like mission impossible, this wouldn't matter, but they don't.  It's curious to note as well that the book of the Time Lord's starts off as extremely important, and acts like it's going to be the major focus of the story, but gets less and less relevant as time goes on.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Shada is fine for the first couple of episodes, but once they all hop in the TARDIS, things go downhill until it ends bewilderingly, with the Doctor leaving Skagra to die of starvation in his spaceship, and letting Salyavin off because he's probably a nice-guy after all.

Rating

7 out of 10

Rewatchability Factor

5 out of 10 (if watching 6 parter)

3 out of 10 (if watching the 2hr plus 2018 cut)

Watch this if you liked...

• Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

• The Time Meddler

• Terror of the Autons

• The Five Doctors 

• The Mark of the Rani

The Horns of Nimon

Four Episodes
Aired between 22nd December 1979 and 12th January 1980

Written by Anthony Read
Produced by Graham Williams
Directed by Kenny McBain


Synopsis

The Doctor is making repairs to the TARDIS again, this time, they're quite big ones.

To help him do the repairs in peace, he materialises in a bit of space he thinks is empty, but it turns out it's very close to a manufactured black hole.  Luckily, he spots a ship nearby and used the TARDIS' force field to dock with it.

Onboard, the Doctor and Romana find that it's an old warship from the planet Skonnos.  The crew are taking a bunch of kids as sacrifices to their God, the Nimon along with a rare material called Hymetusite. Unfortunately for them, their computers are down and the ship is drifting.  The Doctor agrees to help the ship so that he can work out what's going on, but once it's repaired, the only surviving Skonnos crewman onboard blasts off, taking Romana with him and leaving the Doctor and K9 behind.

Once at Skonnos, Romana confronts the leader, Soldeed, who is perplexed to see her onboard.  He sends her, the Anethans and the guard into the "complex" to take the Hymetusite to the Nimon as sacrifices.  Once inside the complex, they soon find it's like a maze, and the walls curiously move.

They discover that the Anethans are getting frozen (possibly as meals for the Nimon) and they come face to face with the creature, that looks a lot like a bull.

After a lot of messing about with K9 and the console, the Doctor turns up looking for Romana and eventually meets up with them as he goes into the complex.

He distracts the Nimon long enough for Romana and the Anethans to escape, but the Nimon doesn't care as it's got hold of the Hymetusite.

Whilst in the complex, the Doctor works out that the Nimon isn't one creature, it's a race of creatures who are like parasites.  It uses a manufactured black hole to bring about it's race to new worlds, and then devours them.  This Nimon has tricked the Skonnos people into giving it the power sources needed to summon it's race through the hole.

The Doctor is nearly stopped by the Nimon as he meddles with the giant power complex computer,

and accidentally sends Romana to Crinnoth, a world ravaged already by the Nimons.  She gets back as more and more Nimons are coming to Skonnos.

The Doctor meanwhile modifies the machine to send them all back, but Soldeed sets up a self destruct as he feels the Doctor and his cronies have ruined his chances of galactic conquest.

The complex blows up, taking Soldeed and the Nimons with it. The Anethans get to go back home in a Skonnos battleship and the Doctor, Romana and K9 go off again in the TARDIS.

Trivia

• This is the only story in which the Time Rotor on the TARDIS console has been removed on-screen.

• I don't think I need to say this is a retelling of Theseus and the Minotaur.  What perhaps isn't so clear, is the reference to the ship being white.  It refers to the agreement that Theseus had with his father, to paint a white flag and fly it from his ship as he returned home if he survived his encounter with the Minotaur.  In the story, he forgets to do this, and Theseus' father thinks he's dead, and so throws himself off a cliff in despair

• Graham Williams had all he could take of Tom Baker's moods, and as he wrote to the Drama department, the lack of good stories coming in.  He planned to hand over Doctor Who to John Nathan Turner from the next season, and usher in the 1980's with a totally new crew.

• Douglas Adams was also in a similar position.  Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series was becoming immensely popular and he was getting pulled away to make the most of it by writing the novels and working up a TV script, as well as wrangling a load of useless scripts for this show.  As it happens, he barely touched this story as he was far too busy.  He agreed to write the series finale, before he went though

• Sadly, this is the last Doctor Who story to be scored by Dudley Simpson.  John Nathan Turner was coming in and decided to change things up and get in someone new for this role from the next story onwards

• In it's defence, the filming of this story was set to rigorous timescales due to ongoing industrial disputes (see the next story).  So, when Soldeed dies and gives a monumentally over the top death scene, it's because the actor was "corpsing" but they didn't have time to re-shoot it

The Review

So, The Horns of Nimon is the third crack at doing a myth's and legends story in Doctor Who (fourth, if you count the reference to the Minotaur in The Mind Robber).  I must ask myself however, why was there ever a need for a third crack at it anyway?

You see, that's the big problem with The Horns of Nimon - it's all seemingly done on a whim. The fact that the Nimon's are Minotaurs is almost totally irrelevant to the plot.  The maze complex is similar. I mean, they do try to give it meaning by turning it into a giant circuit board that powers a machine to bring more of its kind to the planet, but from what I remember, the walls and circuits just move about on a whim anyway and are not linked to the operation of the black hole, they're just there to move walls and stop characters from turning back.

Don't get me wrong, there's a decent gem of an idea in the heart of it, with the Nimon's posing as God's, and the barely touched ethical tidbit of only the Skonnos military surviving the previous war, but these things are outweighed by the total lack of believably of the characters.  The Anethans are inept, the guard who keeps shouting "weakling scum" loses his humour after the first couple of times he does it, and the less said about the ham acting of Soldeed, the better!  Even Tom Baker looks like he's past caring about it all and has decided to muck about telling crap jokes and hanging about in the background whilst Llala Ward does all the hard work.  Speaking of her, thank God her character gets a chance to come to the fore.  If it wasn't for the rare instance of Romana showing her intelligence and potential, this story would be borderline unwatchable.

To get a better scope of what I mean by all of this, compare The Horns of Nimon to the Pyramids of Mars.  Both have Tom Baker (but look at the difference in the character), both deal with destructive "Gods", but the approaches to the stories are galaxies apart.  Doctor Who under Graham Williams never felt so lazy.

Rating

4 out of 10

Rewatchability Factor

5 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• The Time Monster

• Underworld

• The Pyramids of Mars

• Terminus

• The God Complex (Doctor Who Series 6)

Nightmare of Eden

Four Episodes
Aired between 24th November 1979 and 15th December 1979

Written by Bob Baker
Produced by Graham Williams
Directed by Alan Bromley and Graham Williams (See the Trivia)


Synopsis

A huge space liner, Empress, manages to "crash" into another, smaller spacecraft, Hecate, melding both together during matter transmission.

As the crews try to sort it out and "detangle" the ships, the Doctor offers his help.

We're introduced to the crew and passengers throughout - Captain Rigg of the Empress has a first officer who's hooked on a particularly addictive drug called  Vraxoin.  Then there's a scientific crew collecting samples of planets and species in a Continuous Event Transmuter (CET) machine. The Hecate is captained by a single pilot called Dymond.

As the Doctor tries to help Rigg and Dymond untangle the ships, they begin finding strange swamp creatures within the liner, and discover that Vraxoin is much more of a problem on the ship than what it initially looked like.

Everything begins pointing back to the CET machine and Tryst, the eccentric German scientist who created it.

The CET machine is unstable and where it normally puts up film of the recreated portions of alien planets, the mangled ships make the process unstable, allowing things from the digital Polaroids to move out into the ship and vice versa.

On the CET data for Eden, the Doctor and Romana find a member of Tryst's crew, called Stott.  He turns out to be a space drug enforcement officer who was trying to get to the bottom of drug running.  He was left on the planet.

As the Doctor and Romana get closer to the truth, the space customs officers turn up and try to bust the Doctor for possession on Vraxoin.

They give them the slip and through all the dodging and hiding, they discover two key things, the Mandrels turn into Vraxoin when they die (and are clearly the source of the drug) and Tryst has sold out, becoming a drug runner to pay for his expeditions.  He seemingly trapped the mandrils in the CET machine to transport them without them being detected, then to convert them to Vraxoin at a later point.

The Doctor ultimately saves the day by leading the Mandrils back into the CET machine using his dog whistle like the pied piper.

Tryst and Dymond detangle the ships and try to make a get away,

but the Doctor turns the machine on them, trapping them in the machine so that the Customs and Excise Police can arrest them.

Trivia

• Bob Baker and Dave Martin wrote a few Doctor Who stories over the years, but Dave Martin said he'd finally had enough of it.  Bob Baker therefore submitted a speculative script on his own and it got picked up

• As it happened, this would be the last Doctor Who story that Bob Baker did 

• Vraxoin was originally called Xyp or "Zip" but Llala Ward petitioned to change the name so taking drugs wasn't as appealing to kids 

• Director Alan Bromley was chosen for this story.  He'd not done one since the Time Warrior, and it was quickly discovered that he didn't gel with the new production team and cast. Bromley was meticulous in how he wanted lines saying, and refused all advice given to him.  Relationships between Tom Baker and him became volatile, and everyone was growing to hate the production.  It got so bad that Graham Williams had to step in - it's unclear on if Bromley quit or if he was sacked, but Williams ended up completing the story 

• The guy who plays Tryst supposedly came up with the stupid German accent during rehearsal in order to relieve some of the tension.

• After the story was done, the crew all had t-shirts printed with the Doctor's line: "I'm relieved the Nightmare is Over"

The Review

Doctor Who has always been good at social commentary, but I doubt if anyone thought it was brave enough to tackle such touchy subject as drug abuse.  This was seven years before Grange Hill even dared to tread in the same area. You could say the Talons of Weng-Chiang did this, but hardly on the same scale.

Refreshingly enough, this story hasn't got all that much humour in it (okay, okay, except the "Oh my Everything" scene).  But really, it's only in there as much as say, the Robots of Death.  I don't mind that at all. 

Nightmare of Eden is a complex story, with multiple things going on - the ship crash, the drugs, the Mandril's and the Stott arcs all to keep track of.  Whilst that sounds great, I think that it does mean that the story is diluted to give attention to each aspect.  It would work great in a novel, because you just make the novel bigger, but in a TV show when you're restricted on time, it means that the story becomes wide and shallow as opposed to narrow and deep. 

Ultimately, that's how I'd describe Nightmare of Eden, wide an shallow.  Good ideas are there, but drown ironically in a lot of corridor chasing and messing around with blurred corridors.  The pacing is slow and by episode 3, I'd got a little bored of it all.  I didn't really care about Stott at all, although again, it's nice to see Doctor Who taking an adult approach by inferring that him and Della were lovers.

Carnival of Monsters which is a similar problem is much more dynamic because it thrusts the Doctor and Jo into the machine, forcing them to confront and deal with the monsters. This story doesn't do that and so you don't get the buy in as much from the audience.  Yes, the Mandrills slaughter a load of passengers, but as Rigg says, they're only economy class.  To us, they don't even have names, so why should we care?

This was a decent attempt at a serious issue, but the slow pacing and limited budget on the Mandrils just bring this down a little and make it somewhat of a chore to watch.  There have been similar stories that have gone before, and they were better told.  Big shame.

Rating

6 out of 10

Rewatchability Factor

4 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• Carnival of Monsters

• The Robots of Death

• Terror of the Vervoids (Trial of a Time lord Part 3)