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 God Complex (Doctor Who Series 6)
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