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.

Romana escaping the Gaztaks by leading them into a nest of bell plants seems a tad ruthless, seeing as we know the "lush aggressive vegetation" is ultimately lethal. She leads these cosmic hobos to their possible deaths, and there are a fair few of them - six unnamed Gaztaks, plus Grugger and Brotadac. So Romana could be willfully responsible for the icky deaths of eight men, and however hard they pull her hair, that's hard to justify!

Another plot strand is that of the Doctor, the real Doctor, who spends the episode denying the accusations thrown at him by the Tigellans - namely, that he's pinched their Dodecahedron. He comes up with the idea that there may be a doppelganger at large, but all they needed to do was check the CCTV. Surely the Tigellans have CCTV?

To be honest, after everything it's thought the Doctor's done, it's a little unrealistic that Zastor would let him back into the power room to check out the scene of the crime. However, Lexa has other ideas. Ideas which turn her from a religious fanatic into a religious extremist: she commands that all non-believers (all non-Deons) are banished from the city to the surface of Tigella to be at the mercy of the lethal "lush aggressive vegetation". Lexa seems to have no doubt in her mind that allowing all these people to be killed will bring back her mighty god, and when she tops it off by announcing that the Doctor is to be sacrificed to Ti in exchange for the return of her beloved glowing rock, that's when you know she's gone completely Tlotoxl (which is ironic). "Faith dwells in the deed, not in the word," Lexa asserts.

The third strand of the episode, and by far the most interesting, is Meglos's struggle to keep himself to himself. Again, his story doesn't develop very much insofar as all he's trying to do is find his way out of the city, but the internal struggles he's enduring are fascinating. Meglos is made up of three component parts: his spiky Zolfa-Thuran self, the Earthling's body print, and the Doctor's 'desktop theme'. The Earthling inside him is fighting to escape, protesting that Meglos has no right to do this to him, and that anything would be better than being subsumed by a power-crazed cactus (he's not wrong).

The effect used to illustrate Meglos's splintering is really nicely done, and simple. The Earthling pulls away from Meglos, who puts his arm back around the human to keep him within, all using a static cross-fade. It's a real shame the Earthling hasn't been given a proper name because that would help to humanise him immeasurably, to make him an actual character who we could feel for, instead of just being defined by his planet of origin. It's a strange choice on behalf of scriptwriters John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch, and a choice presumably approved by script editor Christopher H Bidmead. Give this guy a name, a bit of background, a bit of personality, and you've got drama, emotion, consequence, viewer investment! But no, he's just "Earthling", although Christopher Owen tries his best with very little material.

Tom Baker continues to terrify as Meglos. It's quite a brave move to make the Doctor so villainous and monstrous, because kids watching at home are used to seeing Tom Baker larking about and making them smile while he saves the universe. Here, he's cold, stiff, overbearing and dangerous, lurking in the shadows and creeping up on Caris like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It feels a bit odd for Meglos to get so chatty with Caris, but Tom is just so good in these scenes, particularly the bit where he says he is not the Doctor. "I am MEGLOS!" he raves, eyes wide, his face contorted with inner pain. This cactus has one hell of an ego, and the very idea that Caris doesn't know who he is really niggles him. This also proves that Tom Baker can still act, rather than just be Tom Baker as Dr Who.

A few quick observations:

• I absolutely love Peter Howell's gorgeous electro-choral music for the Deons, which I've only just noticed in this episode. It's there when the Doctor, Zastor and Deedrix go down to the power room, and prominent during the climactic sacrifice scene. Howell conjures something akin to Enya produced by Jeff Lynne, and I love it (because you can't beat a bit of ELO!).
• Still impressed by Philip Lindley's multi-level sets for the Tigellan underworld. There's one very brief shot at 11m 21s where Lexa looks down from a high gantry at two Deons below, which really shows off the layers of Lindley's work (director Terence Dudley's camera move "revealing" the high gantry really helps).
• The Doctor mentions baryon multiplication, just a few weeks after we had baryon shields in The Leisure Hive. This must be a Bidmead thing.
• The shoot-out between the Gaztaks and the Tigellans is quite well staged, with laser beams actually going from A to B, which was often not the case in Season 17. It doesn't look like a very deadly shoot-out, despite the proximity of the two factions, but it's another attempt by Doctor Who to be a bit Star Wars.

The cliffhanger sees the Doctor trussed up on a sacrificial altar, which not very long ago was the dais for the Dodecahedron to sit on. How has Lexa managed to get a huge triangular rock down into the power room and suspended above the dais in so quick a time? Where did she get the rock from, if they don't venture onto the surface? Also, why doesn't the Doctor protest at all? He just lies there utterly resigned to his fate, almost unconcerned. Usually he'd be spouting all sorts of glib obfuscations to try and avoid death by squishing, but here he's oddly mute, content only to pull the odd fearful face. It's nice that Lexa let him have a lovely black satin pillow to rest his head on though.

You know what's best about it all? Peter Howell's score, particularly the bit right at the end where the synthesised Psycho-style stabs morph seamlessly into an electronic voice chanting "Die, die, die, die!" Genius.

First broadcast: October 11, 1980

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Tom Baker's Meglos is really scary.
The Bad: Romana spends almost the entire episode leading the Gaztaks, and the viewers, round in pointless circles. We're at the end of part 3 and she's had no discernible impact on the plot at all yet (but then, neither has the Doctor, who's simply arrived).
Overall score for episode: ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆

"Would you like a jelly baby?" tally: 24

NEXT TIME: Part Four...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Two; Part Four

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: https://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/08/meglos.html

Meglos is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Meglos-Tom-Baker/dp/B004ASO950