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

Fifth Doctor Episodes

Summary

Season Nineteen Episodes

Castrovalva
Four to Doomsday
Kinda
The Visitation
Black Orchid
Earthshock
Time-Flight

Season Twenty Episodes

Arc of Infinity
Snakedance
Mawdryn Undead
Terminus
Enlightenment
The King's Demons

Twentieth Anniversary Special

The Five Doctors

Season Twenty One Episodes

Warriors of the Deep
The Awakening
Frontios
Resurrection of the Daleks
Planet of Fire
The Caves of Androzani

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