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.