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)

The Creature From the Pit

Four Episodes
Aired between 27th October 1979 and 17th November 1979

Written by David Fisher
Produced by Graham Williams
Directed by Christopher Barry

Synopsis

The Doctor and Romana intercept a distress signal that leads them to a jungle planet.

Once there, they find the remains of a strange stone egg that seems to be the source of the signal. Before they can investigate it fully, they're taken prisoner and hoisted back to the local's ruler: Adrastra.  They say that no one is allowed in that region on pain of death.

On their way to Adrastra, the column is attacked and Romana is kidnapped by bandits who are after metal.  She quickly gets the better of them with the help of K9 and goes off to find the Doctor.

The Doctor meanwhile meets Adrastra and tells her some of the things he's found out about the egg. Adrastra decides to spare the Doctors life, but takes him to "The Pit" where she throws one of her engineers down for being incompetent.

Romana mounts a rescue attempt but K9 is disabled by Wolf Weeds and the Doctor throws himself down the pit.

Whilst in the darkness, the Doctor finds an old astronomer called Organon, and also finds out there's a great whacking green blob down there too.

Most people (including Adrastra) think that the creature is trying to kill people, but it doesn't kill the Doctor.

Adrastra takes Romana to interrogate her about the secrets of the egg, and comes to realise that she can use her and K9 to destroy the creature.  She heads off into the tunnels of the pit to find it and kill it.

The bandits meanwhile find out that Adrastra will be gone and they break into her palace to steal her metal.  They end up finding a strange plate that takes over their minds and they go into the tunnels with it.  It turns out that the disk is a communications device that the creature (really called Erato) needs to talk.

It isn't hostile, it came to the planet to offer a trade agreement vegetation in return for metal.  Unfortunately, it met Adrastra who wanted to keep her monopoly of metal and so she stole its communicator and kept it prisoner in the pit for years.

Adrastra is killed as the truth comes out, and the people intend to trade with Erato for metal, but he tells them that the egg was his ship and it was sending out a signal to his people and he expects mass destruction to be close at hand.

Erato and the Doctor soon discover that Erato's people have sent a neutron star to crash into the jungle planet.  They come up with a plan to encapsulate the star in a shield and neutralise the threat which they do.

Organon is made ruler and a trade agreement between them and Erato is drawn up.

Trivia

• This was actually the first story produced with Llala Ward taking the role as Romana.  You can see that her dress was more akin to Mary Tamm's version of the Character and to a degree, some of her lines too.  It didn't take long for Llala to put her stamp on things though

• This was Christopher Barry's final Doctor Who, and in part it was because he found both Tom Baker and Llala Ward difficult to work with (arguing about their lines etc.)  

• In 1979, it was an incredibly bold decision to try and do a protoplasm monster and get it right. They'd tried something like it before with the Ogron Eater (see Frontier in Space) with disastrous results, but for some reason it was decided not to use actual slime and CSO, they wanted a practical effect.  The creature was made and came on set to roars of laughter as it looked more like a giant *cough* thingy, than Alpha Centauri ever did!  The effects team were forced to work into the night to change its appearance and add some more tentacles on before filming resumed

• John Leeson, the immortal voice of K9 who spent his rehersal days scurrying about on all fours, was unavailable for this series.  David Brierley stepped into the slot and gave K9 a more human approach to things, like it or not.

The Review

Looking on the Creature from the Pit for the first time, I can see a glimmer of something magical inside it, trying to get out.  If you look at the film sequences of the TARDIS landing in the Jungle and Tom Baker, covered in sweat as he moves through the tropical jungle (or under very hot studio lights), or when he falls down the pit and is looking around with only a lit match, there's a very creepy air to it. The scene's promise much in the way that the dark streets of Victorian London did for Talons of Weng-Chiang.

Indeed, there's more than just a bit of good lighting and some jungle scenery.  We get the added bonus of the story trying to flip the script and show us a good guy that's made out to be a bad guy.  It's been done before but not really enough to say it's cliche. In many ways this story is a serious drama, especially judging by Karela's bid to take the metal for herself at the end, as well as the body count and Adrastra's effective on screen "execution".

The thing that lets the side down is that because it's in the era of Graham Williams and Douglas Adams (and to an extent, in the middle of Tom Baker's disillusionment with the series), it can't fulfil the things it's trying to be.  For a lot of it, we get cheap jokes and one liners, which do work at times, but...here's the thing....

For many stories, this unceasing wisecracking has been somewhat of a detraction from the drama and The Creature From the Pit is no exception, but at least this story replaces that lost drama with something.  Instead of serious horror, we get quirky characters which is Douglas Adams' forte.  I mean, if you remove the Doctor, Romana and K9, this could easily have been written by Terry Pratchett.  The characters of Organon the wittering astrologer, or the bumbling primitive's who come up with hair brained plans to raid Adrastra's palace and can easily be talked out of killing Romana are all spectacular in their own way, but they're not in the least bit adding to the drama.

It's not without it's own appeal, but even with the presence of interesting characters, I find myself mourning this story for what it could have been if it had been done in the new series, with actual CGI effects for the creature and a little less silliness.

Rating

7 out of 10

Rewatchability Factor

6 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• The Ambassadors of Death 

• Planet of the Daleks

• Planet of Evil 

• The Androids of TARA

• State of Decay

City of Death

Four Episodes
Aired between 29th September 1979 and 20th October 1979

Written by David Agnew
Produced by Graham Williams
Directed by Michael Hayes

Synopsis

The Doctor and Romana are on holiday in present day France.  As they take in the sites,

they are oblivious to clandestine experiments going on in the basement of Count Carlos Scarlioni.

The count is working with a scientist on a futuristic machine, but the scientist, Professor Kerensky, is unhappy because of the sheer amount of money it will take to develop the work that the Count has laid out for him.  Scarlioni says it won't be a problem at all and hands him three million franks.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Romana visit the louvre and experience strange time distortions that cause the Doctor to faint. As he comes to, he notices an alien bracelet on a woman that was suspiciously hanging around the Mona Lisa and with some slight of hand, he takes the bracelet.

He and Romana leave and go to a cafe to examine the bracelet, but are followed, first by a detective called Duggan, then by thugs who take all three of them at gunpoint to Scarlioni's mansion. The woman with the bracelet was Scarlioni's wife.

Through investigation, the Doctor, Romana and Duggan find out that Scarlioni somehow has six Mona Lisa's in his Chateau and is about to steal a seventh. 

The Doctor goes back in time to 1505 to visit Leonardo Da Vinci, but he's not home. 

He does get captured by a guard however and the guard's captain turns out to be Carlos Scarlioni! 

The Doctor figures out that Scarlioni is an alien and convinced Leonardo to paint multiple Mona Lisa's.  In the future, he will then steal the Mona Lisa and use its absence as a way to sell the copies and make a fortune.

The Doctor manages to escape and writes on the blank canvas' "this is a fake".

Meanwhile, back in 1979, Romana and Duggan try to stop the Countess from stealing the Mona Lisa but fail and get captured.  Scarlioni forces Romana to complete his experiment to transport himself back through time.  He explains that he is really an alien called Scaroth of a race called the Jaggeroth, and says that there are many copies of him scattered throughout time.

He's actually one alien, that split when his ship (that landed on pre-historic earth) exploded as he entered the time vortex.  He's been forced to guide humanity in its development throughout history until it was advanced enough to get to the level of tech capable of building the machine.

He goes back in time to warn himself not to start the ships engine, but the Doctor, Romana and Duggan travel back to pre-historic earth and stop him long enough for the ship to detonate.

Scaroth returns to the chateau in 1979 but his own henchman butler sees his true form and panics, destroying the equipment and therefore killing him.  The chateau sets afire and the threat is ended, leaving the Doctor, Romana and Duggan to enjoy the rest of the sights of Paris like the Eiffel Tower.

Trivia

• This was the first Doctor Who story to be filmed outside of the UK

• David Fisher, the man who was supposed to write a story for this slot, was going through a divorce at the time, and couldn't find the time to get the work done.  Time was very tight and the popular story goes that Graham Williams locked Douglas Adams in a hotel room for a weekend with a typewriter and a bottle of gin and wouldn't let him leave until came up with the scripts.  Because of this, the story is credited to David Agnew (a pseudonym because it wasn't allowed for the script editor to commission his own work)

• The original script called for the Countess to use the bracelet to rig the roulette wheels at casinos to pay for Scarlioni's experiments, but Williams thought it gave a bad impression to kids

• Douglas Adams pilfered his own story and used parts of it in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

• Due to opposing TV channel - ITV going on strike, this story received huge ratings and was the highest of Doctor Who's run at 16.1 million people tuning in for episode 4.

• During this story's run, Doctor Who weekly was first published by Marvel Comics.  It continues to this day as Doctor Who magazine and has been a stalwart of the show, even in the dark times during the series' cancellation

• Douglas Adams' novel of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was also published during this story's run

• John Cleese agreed to appear in the show as returning a favour to Tom Baker

The Review

Despite the rave fan reviews that this story gets, and despite the clever and witty things it does, I was preparing to sit down and give City of Death a pretty scathing review. 

Those of you who have been reading the reviews in order so far will see that from the start of the previous season (see The Ribos Operation), the show had been developing more and more of its comedy routines.  As fantastic a writer as he was, with the appointment of Douglas Adams as Script Editor, this started to grate on me, as more and more cheap gags found their way into the stories.  Now, I'm not a killjoy or a dementor, I love the jokes, but they're either A) in stories that have a serious tone and therefore stand out like a sore thumb, or B) the funny story is placed within a serious dramatic plot line and therefore detracts from the bigger plot and makes the characters look like morons.  It was getting to the point where it just didn't feel like the same show (then again, perhaps that was what they were going for).

In that context, City of Death is one to absolutely dread because it's something Douglas Adams has been fully unleashed upon, and so you just know that there's going to be laugh a minute gags and farces galore.  And that's what it is...except...

Douglas Adams is a genius when it comes to comedy writing.  Unlike the rest of the stories where he shoehorned his humour into someone else's story, I found that City of Death's complex plot is very complimentary to the humour it displays.  It feels right.  It feels like a Douglas Adams story, where the humor is a payoff because the characters are shown to be capable of handling the complexities of it all.  Well, except Duggan, but it's an hilarious twist to see his thuggish ways being the thing that saves the universe.

It sound hypocritical, but when you lift City of Death out of the Doctor Who continuum and watch it without a regard to what is coming before or after, then it is an absolutely fantastic story, worthy of all the praise.  It's mind boggling to think that it was put together and scripted within a weekend, because it's stood the test of time. It could be remade today with modern effects and still be one of the best stories produced.  It is a high ranking story, without doubt, and a must for anyone new to Doctor Who, but be warned that when you put it beside the other non-Douglas Adams stories, you're in for quite a shock.

Rating

10 out of 10!

Rewatchability Factor

8 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• The Reign of Terror

• The Massacre 

• Vincent and the Doctor (Doctor Who, Series 5)

Destiny of the Daleks

Four episodes
Aired between 1st September 1979 and 29th September 1979

Written by Terry Nation
Produced by Graham Williams
Directed by Ken Grieve

Synopsis

As the Doctor treats K9 for Laryngitis (*shrug*), Romana decides that she wants to regenerate.  She "tries" multiple faces on before deciding to become the spitting image of Princess Astra (See The Armageddon Factor).

They land on Skaro and soon discover that the Daleks have returned to the site of the long-abandoned Kaled bunker and are using slaves to dig underground in order to find their creator, Davros.

An enemy race called the Movellans arrive, trying to work out the Daleks plans and stop them.

The Doctor and Romana team up with them and soon discover that the Movellans and Daleks are locked in an inter-stellar battle that's being going on for years.  Their battle computers are so finely tuned that they anticipate each others moves and are now at a stalemate.  The Daleks hope that by resurrecting Davros, he will be able to give them the edge in the war.

Whilst the Doctor works with the Movellans, he discovers that they are a race of robots and they too have ideas of galactic conquest.

In a pre-emptive strike, Davros sends suicide Daleks with bombs strapped to them so they can blow up the Movellan ship.

The Doctor foils this plan by blowing them up early.

The slaves rebel and storm the Movellan ship, shutting down all the robots except their leader, who is stopped from detonating a bomb at the last second by Romana.

Davros is imprisoned by the slaves on board the Movellan ship which they will use to get back to civilisation.

The Doctor and Romana will simply return to the TARDIS and have more adventures.

Trivia

• Douglas Adams came on-board officially as Script editor.  He wanted new and fresh writers, but as he asked around, it became obvious that a lot of people didn't know how to write well for Doctor Who.  He reluctantly began to ask around old writers, and Terry Nation was one of them.

• This was the last story Terry Nation would write for Doctor Who and it's speculated that Douglas Adams had to do a lot of work to get it ready for broadcast. 

• At the end of The Armageddon Factor, Mary Tamm jokingly said why not ask Lala Ward to step in.  Graham Williams did and she slipped into Romana's shoes.  Mary Tamm said later that she would have happily done a regeneration scene, but she was never asked.

• One of the costumes Romana changes into is Zilda from Robots of Death

• Romana's costume was designed to be identical to the Doctor's but in different colours.

• The actor who played Tyssan was partially deaf, but could lip read quite well

• This story was the first time ever that "Steady cam" rig was used in the BBC.

Review

My feelings on The Destiny of the Daleks can be summed up in one short phrase: "....but the Dalek's aren't robots".

If you believe some of the guides I've read, then Douglas Adams' original ideas revolved around a planet of the dead (where the conversations about "Zombies" come in), but as you can see, he got Terry Nation and so he got to do a Dalek story.  After the success of Genesis of the Daleks, this is no bad thing, but by this time even Terry Nation isn't clear on what's happening with the Daleks anymore and decides to throw all of his continuity out of the window by suggesting that the Daleks are robots.

"But, they don't say that, they even mention it's the battle computer that's the logical thinker"

Yes, but the Doctor and even Davros himself use the line, ANOTHER race of robots when referring to the Movellans.  Davros talks about re-programming (could be genetic, but come on).

"Is it so bad?" 

Yes, yes it is, because it undermines all the good work that's gone before.  At the bottom line, any writer can introduce ANY concept they want to in a story, without even justifying it, but to do so pulls the viewer out of the rich world you've created and cheapens the integrity of the story.  In other words it undermines all the sacrifices characters have made and the angst they went through.

There's no finer example of just that in Romana's regeneration.  Why can she regenerate at will?  If we accept that she can, then why are we even worried about the Doctor succeeding or losing at all.  Don't worry, he can just will a regeneration up and he'll be fine.  And they only get 13, so Romana's lost almost a quarter of her life, trying to find a face that suits her.

As a fan, you can't wish it away or pretend it didn't happen, you just have to endure it, much like this story....but....as an abstract concept, two armies locked in an impasse vying for an edge is good.  The Doctor visiting a world of "Zombies" is good.  It's just all the continuity that gets in the way.

Rating

4 out of 10

Rewatchability Factor

4 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• The Dominators
• Genesis of the Daleks
• Resurrection of the Daleks