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.

The scene in Romana's bedroom (the first living quarters we've seen since the 1960s?) is beautifully played. "You can't fight Time Lords, Romana," says the Doctor despondently. "You did, once," she counters, to which he wistfully replies: "Hmmm, and lost." We've not had properly measured interpersonal scenes between the leads like this for years, and as a sign of things to come, it's surely welcome. Romana's bedroom is interesting too: scatter cushions, low-hung paintings and chrome chess pieces.

Paddy Kingsland's melancholic music is gorgeous too, making everything seem mysterious and spooky, especially the bit where the TARDIS spins into E-Space. The Radiophonic Workshop boys (Howell, Limb and Kingsland) did such sterling work in helping revive Doctor Who in Season 18, making it sound fresher and stranger than it had for many years.

The TARDIS thinks it's landed in "the wilderness of outer Gallifrey" (why land so far away from where they need to go?), but in actual fact they have landed on an idyllic leafy planet, populated by young men and women (but mainly young men) in pastel pyjama outfits and pumps who idle at the riverside harvesting fruit. It immediately feels like a real world, with real people doing real things as part of their own way of life. Naked young men frolic in the water too, making me wonder if Derek Jarman is directing, but no, it's Peter Grimwade, who would become one of Doctor Who's most creative directors and imaginative writers.

Grimwade shoots the untroubled world of Alzarius beautifully, using gentle (but never dull) tracking shots, and benefitting from some clever lighting from Mike Jefferies using red, pink and green gels to cast otherworldly hues on proceedings. It's subtle, never in your face, and makes it all feel quite dreamy and pastoral. It's the best Doctor Who's looked for years.

Two older men cut open a riverfruit (looks like a marrow to me!) to analyse its innards, and find that insects have begun to lay eggs within. This is apparently a sign of something coming, something that recurs roughly every 50 years. Something called Mistfall.

We're also introduced to a gang of Artful Dodger-type scamps who try - and fail - to steal riverfruit. They are the Outlers, young boys and girls who have decided to live their lives separately to the Elite and their Decider leaders. I think Andrew Smith probably intended these youths to be like the Baker Street Irregulars or Fagin's gang of pickpocketing urchins, but they sadly come across as a bunch of feckless public school RADA graduates. Bernard Padden's Tylos is particularly unconvincing, while June Page struggles to make any kind of impact at all as Keara. Best of the bunch is Richard Willis as Varsh. Willis was a seasoned former child actor by this point (aged 22 here) and knew his way around a script, whereas I get the feeling Padden and Page were less confident.

And then there's Adric, Varsh's estranged brother, who wishes to join the Outlers. Played by Matthew Waterhouse, Adric is quite a precocious young man, played with absolute conviction by Waterhouse. He sometimes comes in for stick from fans who think he was a poor actor, but I've never thought that. I don't think he was a strong actor, but he could act and was very serious in doing so. Sometimes he acts too much, too sincerely, but that's got to be better than just wandering nonchalantly through your performance like smoke on the breeze (I'm naming no names here, but I will when I get to them).

It's interesting that Adric has some kind of foresight or premonition of his future. He feels that he won't be aboard the Starliner when it takes off, but neither will he be on Alzarius. It's a very early indicator that Adric is the Doctor's latest travelling companion, but at this point we're not to know that. It's odd that he has this "second sight", something never taken forward.

It's refreshing to have this focus on young people in Doctor Who. If you think about it, the programme very rarely characterises those it's trying to engage the most. Stories are most often populated by middle-aged male actors (and often older), and seldom feature characters closer to the age of the target audience (children and teenagers). If you place The Horns of Nimon to one side (something we'd all like to do from time to time), the last story I can think of to feature young people as strongly as Full Circle does is The Faceless Ones (there are pockets along the way, but the "young people" in stories such as The Dominators and The Leisure Hive are hardly that). Younger viewers would be able to relate in some way to characters such as Adric and Keara, and this season marks the start of a concerted attempt to make Doctor Who feel younger than it had.

There's also a noticeable focus on family from Season 18 on. Before John Nathan-Turner and Christopher H Bidmead, the idea of family in Doctor Who was a rare thing. Sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, weren't often a part of storytelling, but in the 1980s, family becomes more important (Mena and Pangol, Adric and Varsh, Tremas and Nyssa, Tegan and Vanessa, the Cranleighs, Tegan and Colin, Ambril, Tanha and Lon, Tegan and Andrew Verney, Romulus and Remus, the list goes on...), which is another example of how the production team was trying to make Doctor Who more relatable.

Anyway, back to the story... The Deciders have decided that Mistfall is coming. Mistfall happens roughly every 50 years, so really, they should be expecting it. Things move very swiftly, because not long after slicing open the riverfruit and finding the spider eggs, the previously placid waters start to bubble and churn, and the near-naked swimmers struggle to stay afloat as something tries to drag them down. The scene where they are rescued from the water is a real eye-opener because Amy Roberts' insubstantial costumes for the Alzarians make it look like they're stark naked. I don't think we'll ever see quite as much bare bottom in Doctor Who as we do in Full Circle (if you excuse the toddler's exposed posterior in Underworld!).

It's a bit too sudden for Mistfall to crank up almost immediately after the eggs are discovered. Surely the eggs are supposed to be an early indicator of something changing in the eco-system, but now Mother Nature is going full throttle and the environment begins to change rapidly. Decider Draith commands that everybody retire to the Starliner within two hours, to escape Mistfall and its toxic atmosphere, and it's mentioned that they may have to stay in this locked down state for 10 years (feels like 2020). As the Elite nonchalantly traipse back to the Starliner, we're given a brief glimpse of the ship, which looks nothing like a spaceship (or indeed, anything in particular). It's a jumbled design, quite indiscernible in shape.

Adric, trying to prove he can steal riverfruit but failing in this simple task quite spectacularly, trips on a tree root, falls and hits his head, rendering him unconscious. All hail The New Susan Foreman! It's a bit pathetic to have your new companion twist his ankle and knock himself out, and it really weakens the character in the viewer's developing opinion of him. Later, when he staggers into the TARDIS, he collapses pathetically to the floor, and I'm wondering why? All he did was bump his head and graze his knee. Not a good development for the character. I want Adric to be a tough cheeky chappie, not an effete milquetoast.

Grimwade's direction of the Mistfall scenes is fantastic. He manages to make the previously warm, idyllic location turn cold, dangerous and menacing, with the seething, bubbling waters spewing a thick fog as something begins to filter to the surface. Decider Draith is terrifyingly sucked down into the boggy waters and killed, and as he slips below the surface he gives Adric the ominous warning: "Tell Dexeter, we've come full circle!"

Grimwade uses slow-motion to show the creatures rise from the blackened lagoon, and they look absolutely monstrous. We don't know what they are yet, but the one thing we do know is unsettling: they are monsters from the bottom of the lake revived by a cyclical ecological phenomenon. Maybe they're revived, or maybe they're an evolutionary product? Either way, these Marshmen look fantastic, the best Doctor Who monsters since the Fendahl.

First broadcast: October 25th, 1980

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The emergence of the Marshmen is directed really spookily by Peter Grimwade, probably the most effective of the three similar scenes in Doctor Who's canon (along with The Sea Devils and The Curse of Fenric).
The Bad: Adric trips and falls over in his first episode. Not a promising start.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★☆☆

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

NEXT TIME: Part Two...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part Two; Part Three; 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/full-circle.html

Full Circle is available on BBC DVD as part of the E-Space Trilogy box set. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Space-Trilogy-Warriors/dp/B001MWRTUY