The Horns of Nimon Part Three

The one where the Nimon's plan for mass migration becomes clear...

It's the first episode of the 1980s, and the first notable thing to happen is that a dying man splits his pants. Let's hope it's not a bad omen for what lies ahead, but I suppose it summarises the last few weeks of the 1970s quite aptly!

Now that the Doctor's back on the scene, Romana reverts back to her second-in-command status, which is a shame because Lalla Ward made a fantastic lead. Most of this episode concerns the Doctor, Romana, Seth and Teka running along corridors and asking questions to which there are few answers. Simon Gipps-Kent's Seth feels like a prototype for Season 18's Adric, but I can't help thinking it might have been better if Gipps-Kent played Adric, or perhaps Seth became a companion who stayed on into Season 18. I don't feel the same fondness for Janet Ellis as Teka sadly. As the prototype Nyssa of the set-up, she's just as plain as Sarah Sutton.

Teka's actually quite annoying. Every time she opens her mouth it's to ask a really dumb question, but she never tries to understand for herself. This is typified in the scene where she asks Seth what's happening, and he quite honestly admits: "I don't know". "Why don't you know?" counters Teka. No, why don't you know, Teka? You've seen and heard just as much as Seth has. She's a poorly written character, a tragically weak female whose sole use in the story is to ask questions, which is what companions did before Romana happened. If I was Seth I'd want to dump the wet lettuce of a girl and zoom off into the stars with the Doctor, Romana and K-9. Oh, if only...

Robin Sherringham's physical performance as the Nimon is dictated to by the unwieldy nature of the costume. He has to lean forward to shoot his horny lasers, and bend very carefully at the knees to reach lower than waist height. And because he's wearing platform boots, he has to walk very carefully to distribute the weight of his top-heavy helmet. The Nimon come in for a lot of criticism for the way they look and move, and that's largely justified. But what if the helmets are actually helmets, within the fiction? There's nothing to say that the bull-heads are their real heads and faces, and you can plainly see that the helmet's tipping up sometimes, or lop-sided. What if the Nimon really are wearing bull-faced helmets, and actually look like regular guys underneath?

After a lot of investigation of the Nimon's technological set-up, the Doctor concludes that the bullish bully is actually doing something remarkably epic. The Anethan tributes are being used as mere food, slammed in larders for when the Nimon wants a midnight snack. The sacrifices are separate to what's going on with the radioactive hymetusite, which is being used to fuel a nuclear furnace to power a two-pronged horny transmitter. And it's not transmitting radio signals, or an SOS. It's transmitting huge amounts of energy, fed into the black hole.

Writer Anthony Read's story is developing very nicely, and I like that he's put in plenty of context and background to add flavour. All the background about the Skonnon empire, the ongoing aggressions with Aneth, the loss of Skonnos's entire scientific retinue (except Soldeed), it's all juice for the meat. And Read's imagination is on a par with Bob Baker's in the last story. The Nimon planet Crinoth is dying, so the aim is to use instantaneous matter transmission to beam the surviving Nimon from Crinoth to Skonnos as a mass migration. It's an interdimensional invasion, like locusts pouring through a hole in the wall. And the tech being used is awesome: two black holes connected by a hyperspace tunnel. The ideas at play here are great, such as the fact the power complex is one giant positronic circuit, and the walls keep changing as the circuits trip and switch.

By the end of part 3, two more Nimon have arrived by transmat. They're smaller than the first one - mini Nimon - but it means that the migration has begun, and that soon more and more (perhaps millions) of Nimon will pour through the hyperspace tunnel to colonise this galaxy.

At one point in this episode, the Doctor whistles for K-9 because he has some computations he needs doing, but K-9 never actually gets there because within 30 seconds of leaving the TARDIS, he's demobilised by Soldeed. So that was all rather pointless, wasn't it?

I must mention Nigel Wright's gorgeous studio lighting too. He floods the sets with "high alert red" when the Nimon power complex cranks up, and everything looks very Dario Argento. And when it's not red, Wright wisely keeps the lighting slightly lower than usual, so that there's shadow and texture in the Nimon corridors. A less sensitive lighting designer might've just flooded the Skonnon sets with blankets of light, but by just dipping them very slightly, you get a bit of atmosphere otherwise missing. Wright's other two Doctor Whos showed his sensitivity to the needs of the story too (Robot and The Ark in Space), but sadly this was his last for the programme before moving on to shiny floor shows like Jim'll Fix It and Crackerjack.

The cliffhanger has Tom Baker pulling a goggly face as Soldeed threatens him with death. It's one of those pointless cliffhangers that don't actually mean or amount to anything. But as Graham Crowden advanced on Baker milking his melodramatic dialogue ("You meddling fool!"), it occurred to me that what's really wrong about The Horns of Nimon isn't the story, or the sets, or the lighting, or even the Nimon. It's Graham Crowden. He's spoiling it with his panto-style performance. He's playing Abanazer in space, but everybody else is playing it straight. Soldeed doesn't fit, and he's spoiling it. And this is even more frustrating for the fact that he's actually not so OTT in his scenes with Michael Osborne's Sorak (the scene where he explains to Sorak that he plays the Nimon "on a long string" is just right, for example).

First broadcast: January 5th, 1980

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Big fan of Nigel Wright's lighting.
The Bad: Not a fan of Janet Ellis's weedy Teka. She's the wimpiest female since Kirsty in The Highlanders.
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/the-horns-of-nimon.html

The Horns of Nimon is available on BBC DVD as part of the Myths and Legends box set. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Legends-Monster-Underworld/dp/B002SZQC98/