State of Decay Part Four

The one where the Great Vampire arises (or his hand does)...

It's so hard to tell, which is why I missed it at the end of part 3, but Adric actually throws a knife at Zargo, which imbeds itself firmly into the vampire's heart. It's directed by Peter Moffatt with rather too much obfuscation, resulting in it passing me by completely the first time. I can understand they might not want to show something as graphic as a knife to the heart in a family show, but in that case, why have it in the final draft? At least we didn't get a comedy "booiiiing" sound effect like we did in The Robots of Death.

The Three Who Rule cannot wait for the Great Vampire to arise so that they can get on with swarming through the universe, devouring people and planets and growing ever greater in number. The Great One apparently knows the secret of passing more easily between E-Space and N-Space, so the threat is very real. Now that the Great One is sufficiently regenerated, all wounds healed, it's almost time for The Arising. In readiness, Aukon plans to sacrifice Romana, a Time Lord and sworn enemy of the Great Vampires.

State of Decay Part Three

The one where the Doctor tells Romana of the Great Vampires...

We get told a lot of information in this episode, but it's told engagingly, and rarely feels like a blatant info-dump. The early scene between the Doctor, Romana and Aukon tells us that the Hydrax fell through the CVE and was lured to the planet by the Great One, and now the Three Who Rule hope their master can help them return to N-Space.

It's also revealed that Zargo, Camilla and Aukon are not ancestors of Sharkey, MacMillan and O'Connor - they are Sharkey, MacMillan and O'Connor! They were given "unending life" by the Great One, and now they hope for the same for the Chosen Ones (ie, the Doctor, Romana and Adric).

State of Decay Part Two

The one where the Doctor and Romana discover that the tower is the Hydrax...

The first 10 minutes of this episode are sublime, some of the best written, performed and directed Doctor Who ever, but you'd be forgiven for not realising it. It's all done so subtly, so organically, that you don't quite realise that you're watching brilliance. It's almost like you're spellbound by the brilliance. It all starts with Terrance Dicks' effortless yet elegant dialogue, which inspires the performers to riff on it gleefully, and it's all directed so precisely by Peter Moffatt.

Everything that takes place or is said between the Doctor, Romana, Zargo and Camilla is so well done. Moffatt directs the foursome like they're performing an Elizabethan dance, keeping the characters on the move all the time through what is a very dialogue-heavy scene. If they'd all just sat down and chatted for 10 minutes, the scene would be much less engaging, but thankfully it's orchestrated like a stage play, with characters moving in and around one another, foregrounded and backgrounded, so that the visual is never dull.

State of Decay Part One

The one where the Doctor and Romana encounter a swarm of carnivorous bats...

I have a deep-rooted relationship with State of Decay. When I was five I had the Pickwick audio cassette of the story which I listened to over and over again, both fascinated by and slightly afraid of Tom Baker's doom-laden narration. It came out before the Target novelisation, and differs from both the TV and book versions significantly (I seem to remember it cuts a lot of K-9 out). Another fundamental connection I have with this story is that (I believe) it is the first memory I have of watching Doctor Who. There's a very specific scene and shot (maybe in part 3 - I'll know when I get to it) of Romana and the Doctor climbing the ladder to the top of the Hydrax, which for some reason, despite its humdrum quality, stayed with me. I can even visualise it in the same hazy way I could for all those years until I got the VHS and could relive it again.

The episode opens with a tracking shot of a huge cathedral-like tower looming over a rural landscape and village. So far, so folk horror. The architecture inside the tower is what I might call gothic, others might call rococo, still others might call Romanesque, but whatever the truth, it's a gorgeous design by Christine Ruscoe which, in partnership with Amy Roberts' sumptuous costumes, just screams HAMMER HORROR! Doctor Who and Hammer are two of my favourite things in the world, so State of Decay is already shaping up well.

Full Circle Part Four

The one where the Marshmen run riot through the Starliner...

It's weird seeing the Marshmen lumbering along the Starliner's corridors, but a cool sight nonetheless. We've only seen them on location, or in their natural habitat, so far, so it's mildly arresting to see them flooding the ship, wielding cudgels (and robot dog heads). They're really good at marauding, smashing up laboratories, breaking their way through barraged doors and tearing up those bloody silly system files. And there's a lot of them. Romana lets an awful lot of the Marshmen in!

Another thing the Marshmen do well is kill people, and the first victim we see is Tylos. I'm not sorry to see him go, he should have been written out episodes ago, but the way he goes at least has some pathos to it, as he helps a nameless supporting actor escape the clutches of a Marshman, only to be dragged back by the same monster. There's a very deliberate shot of the rescued man deciding not to return the favour, and running away instead of helping to save Tylos. It's a nice little character beat for a background artist, giving him more characterisation than Tylos had!

Full Circle Part Three

The one where Romana gets possessed by the Alzarian eco-system...

It's weird seeing the TARDIS rammed with youths in pyjamas. It's also amazing how the Outlers manage to operate the door mechanism and instigate dematerialisation with the very first switches they try. Beginners' luck, I suppose. These kids are becoming less relevant as the story progresses, starting out as a way to introduce new companion Adric, but increasingly becoming wallpaper. In truth, Tylos should have been written out in some way by now, because his presence is pointless, and Keara's only really there because she's Login's daughter. It's a real shame that Richard Willis is wasted as Varsh, because he's got such a striking screen presence, and he can act, which helps. It would be quite a different couple of years had Varsh become the companion instead of Adric

The Doctor is getting frustrated by the community's endless preparations for the fabled Embarkation, when the Starliner finally leaves Alzarius and returns to Terradon. Login tells him that the preparations take generations, despite the fact everything is checked and counter-checked on a monotonously regular basis (it takes six people to change a circuit at one point). Surely it's ready to go by now?

Full Circle Part Two

The one where K-9 has his head knocked off...

The Marshmen really are the perfect monsters. They're ugly, they're lumbering, they're scaly, they growl, and they emerge from the marshy waters grasping and dripping with seaweed. Peter Grimwade directs their emergence from the marsh with horror film elan, making it one of the most effective monster scenes Doctor Who's ever had. And if their initial appearance isn't eerie enough, once they've made it to the side of the water, they stand still, hissing and moaning as they acclimatise to their new world. Grimwade also has the Marshmen leer into the camera lens a few times, which proves he had a good eye for what's scary!

The Doctor and K-9 watch from the undergrowth as the Marshmen lumber slowly but purposefully through the forest, wading through bog and fen. Surprisingly, the Doctor asks K-9 to follow the Marshmen to see where they settle. This is the robot dog that can barely move across a perfectly smooth, flat surface, never mind a lumpy, boggy, grassy, muddy wasteland. At least the Doctor's optimistic about his pet's abilities!

Full Circle Part One

The one where creatures emerge from a black lagoon...

The Time Lords have put out a call for Romana to return to Gallifrey, and she's not very pleased about it. As the Doctor reminds her, she was only sent in the first place to help him find the Key to Time, and that's long done and dusted. The scenes between the Doctor and Romana in her bedroom are tiny glimpses into the real emotions and feelings of these characters, and it's refreshing because we're too used to them just swapping wisecracks and trying to outsmart one another. Here, writer Andrew Smith gives Romana a visceral, truthful reaction to the Time Lords' call. Why would she want to go back to Gallifrey after everything she's seen and done with the Doctor? It's a common refrain of many companions (once you've seen the universe, how could you possibly want to go back to the humdrum of daily life back home?) and you really feel Romana's pain.

The Doctor seems quite resigned to the fact she has to go back. In fact, he doesn't seem too bothered at all, and is quite looking forward to returning so he can see how Leela and Andred are getting on, and so that K-9 can meet his twin. Lots of little nods to continuity, stemming back as far as The Invasion of Time three seasons back, but not so heavy that they confuse the lay viewer. It's nice little mentions like that which please long-term fans (and again, are realistic things for the Doctor to say), but do not alienate everyone else.

Meglos Part Four

The one where the Doctor pretends to be Meglos pretending to be the Doctor...

It really gets my goat when characters believe everything complete strangers say, and put all their trust and faith in people who don't have any evidence of what they're claiming. This is a prime example: when Romana and Caris hurtle along the Tigellan corridor and bump into Zastor and Deedrix being taken away, it takes no time at all for the Tigellans to believe that there's an evil doppelganger called Meglos walking about who's stolen the Dodecahedron. Only Caris has ever seen Meglos, and the Doctor only suggested there was a doppelganger, but never evidenced it.

With not a whimper of doubt, both Zastor and Deedrix believe everything Romana and Caris tell them, even though they have no idea who or what Meglos is, don't ask, and nobody tells them. Soon after, they present this melange of information to Lexa, mentioning that Meglos has made off with the Gaztaks. "Is this true?" Lexa asks of Zastor, who nods sagely. And she believes him, even though she just condemned Zastor to death on the surface and doesn't know who the Gaztaks are. It's bad scripting, and very bad script editing.

Meglos Part Three

The one where Romana goes round in circles...

Those Savant wigs really are awful, aren't they? In the scene between Deedrix and Caris in the power room - in which they basically summarise the dilemma they're in yet again - Crawford Logan's wig isn't even on level, which I find quite distracting! Incidentally, Logan, as well as playing Deedrix, also provides the voice of Meglos, uncredited. I always assumed it was Christopher Owen, who played the Earthling.

This episode has a lot of nothing going on. There are three strands, and none of them get anywhere very far by the end. We've got Romana, prisoner of the Gaztaks, who promises to lead them to her spaceship, but actually all she's doing is leading them round and round in circles, wasting everybody's time (including mine). There's some amusingly silly pseudo-science guff about not being able to navigate on a planet that rotates anti-clockwise, but essentially the whole thing is pointless. Indeed, the Gaztaks have had nothing worthwhile to do since before the end of part 1.

Meglos Part Two

The one where Meglos, disguised as the Doctor, gets all spiky...

It's tiresome enough having to watch the same bit over and over again as part of the chronic hysteresis, but to have the looped footage reprised from last week as well really takes the biscuit! There's something incrementally irksome about watching Tom Baker pretend to trip over time and again, and by the time they manage to escape the loop - by rather half-heartedly re-enacting it all themselves - I was eternally grateful to the great god Ti myself!

What puzzles me about the chronic hysteretic loop is that it's the same moment happening over and over again, but the people trapped within it remember it happening. So the Doctor and Romana have a linear memory of the amount of times they've looped, and said those words and done those things, but their physical selves keep looping backwards to start again, essentially reliving the same thing repeatedly. So are they looping back in time (as the story suggests) or simply being forced to re-enact the same moment? It's confusing, because by rights they shouldn't remember they're looping, although Meglos does say their only respite is the amount of time between the loops. Still, I'm just glad it's over with, because it was such a ridiculous way to delay the Doctor actually entering the narrative.

Meglos Part One

The one where the monster is a talking cactus...

The sheer excitement of the new opening music and titles is easy to overlook with familiarity, but they really were a huge step forward in updating Doctor Who's tired image for the 1980s. BBC1's Saturday schedule was so full of colour and variety back in 1980 (US import The Dukes of Hazzard, Larry Grayson's Generation Game, Paul Daniels' Magic Show) that Doctor Who needed to get noticed, and these sparkly, pacy new titles were just the job. I love how the starfield fades gently into the episode proper, momentarily placing the fiction among the stars.

Oh, but what a disappointing story title. Meglos. What is it, what is it supposed to mean to the viewer? It's along the lines of other story titles that mean absolutely nothing, such as The Krotons or anything written by Christopher H Bidmead. Just a one-word title, a made-up word at that, conveys absolutely nothing about what the story's about. We know now, all this time later, that Meglos is about Meglos, and that Meglos is the enemy, but coming to the story without that foreknowledge, it's just meaningless. Original title The Last Zolfa-Thuran would have been a bit better because at least then you get an inkling of what the story will be about. Calling it Meglos is just as dull as calling Paradise Towers 'Kroagnon', or The Caves of Androzani 'Sharaz Jek'. It doesn't mean anything.

The Leisure Hive Part Four

The one where Pangol incites a second war between the Argolins and the Foamasi...

The episode durations for the first two stories of Season 18 are unusually short, but the reprises also feel tiresomely long. For this episode, it lasts almost two minutes, which is rather long for an episode lasting just 21 minutes 19 seconds. And when the reprise includes dead dialogue ("Is it something to do with the random field frame?") and various people leaving rooms at an orderly pace, it becomes very humdrum.

The reprise extends the Foamasi attack on Mr Brock though, to include the defrocking of creepy old Klout (a character with not a single thing to do or say throughout). The whole thing feels a bit like they're stripping Brock and Klout, until you see their face masks fall to the floor among their clothes. It's a mix of horror and unintentional comedy, topped off by the Foamasi official proclaiming: "Now that I have your attention..."

The Leisure Hive Part Three

The one where an ally proves to be a lizard in disguise...

One aspect of JNT's stylistic revolution I've not gone into very much so far is the radically different incidental music, in this case provided by Peter Howell. Veteran composer Dudley Simpson had pretty much had a monopoly on Doctor Who for the last few years (except if Douglas Camfield was directing!), but as dependable as he was, it was certainly time for a change. Simpson's first work for the show was for Season 2's Planet of Giants in 1964, and his last was for Season 17, so he'd had 15 years (on and off) to give Doctor Who all he had, and I think, to be fair, that's what he'd done.

The switch to music provided by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop on a more permanent basis (Simpson was not a member of the Workshop, which had only scored three Doctor Whos in the past*) was another way to modernise and refresh the programme. Howell, as well as updating the theme music, scored The Leisure Hive with an ocean of gorgeous synthesised soundscapes. There are waves of sound washing over the visuals, draping and drenching it in sci-fi ambience to match the snazzy graphics and model shots. The score manages to be moody and nimble, and stands shoulder to shoulder with Brian Eno's work with David Bowie on the Low and Heroes albums, and also calls to mind the early, innovative work of musicians like Gary Numan, John Foxx and Vangelis (Howell's score sounds very Vangelis sometimes, to be extent that it starts to become the score from Bladerunner in my head!).

The Leisure Hive Part Two

The one where the Doctor ages into an old wizard...

Considering the way this episode ends (with the Doctor aged into an old, white-haired and bearded man), I think Tom Baker looks remarkably youthful in the shot where he reveals he wasn't in the Tachyon Generator at all (where he's standing in front of the TARDIS). For some reason, in that one shot, he looks as young as he did when he started being Dr Who, back in '74. Curious, seeing as this is a story about time experiments and rejuvenation (and the season has a theme of entropy as a whole).

What I like about this episode is that Tom Baker gets to be the Doctor - his Doctor - much more than in part 1. He comes out of his shell more and Tom is able to inject more personality into his performance, more of the little quirks and eccentricities that make watching his Doctor so compelling. The beaming grin is back, and the staring googly eyes, and that wonderful wit that the Fourth Doctor often uses as a weapon, or defence. When Pangol asks the Doctor how he got out of the Tachyon Generator, he replies: "Through a hole in the back". When Pangol states that there is no hole, the Doctor holds up his (damaged?) sonic screwdriver and says: "There is now."

The Leisure Hive Part One

The one where (almost) everything changes...

Welcome to the new season on BBC1, and there's a new look for Dr Who... Boy, is there a new look. It's a new everything! Practically everything changes between Seasons 17 and 18 apart from the two lead actors, and there's even some significant changes there. There's a lot to look at, so much to comment on and pick through, so let's get on with it.

I'm loving those new titles, and that new theme arrangement. It's so arrestingly new and fresh, so modern and clean and sci-fi, but it also feels so right, like it should always have been that way. After too many years of the same old (albeit lovely) time tunnel effect, and the same old picture of Tom Baker, it's a welcome development for the opening titles and music to get a good shake-up, to bring the programme firmly into the 1980s. It's a feast for the eyes and ears: the rainbow colours, the movement through the starfield, the developing head of the Doctor (Tom now looks correctly 46 rather than 40), the new logo and bubbly font. It's almost too much to take in all at once, like a Newness Overdose.