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.

We join the Doctor and Romana in the TARDIS trying to fix K-9 after he blew up on Brighton beach at the start of The Leisure Hive. There's a marked emphasis on continuity between stories here, with Lalla Ward still wearing her sailor's outfit. It was a reflection of new producer John Nathan-Turner's idea to make Doctor Who a bit soapier to try and get viewers more invested in the programme as an ongoing series, rather than a collection of disjointed serials. Whether he succeeded or not is open to discussion, but there's no denying it was quite a forward-thinking approach to take, 25 years before Russell T Davies and the Tyler family.

My, doesn't Tom Baker look thin? Stripped of his saggy, baggy new costume, his clothes seem to hang off him. He looks under-nourished and underweight. It's common knowledge that Tom was ill for a period during filming Season 18 (I think he even had to have his usually naturally curly hair permed while making State of Decay) and actually lost about 30lbs in weight. Looking back, you feel quite concerned for him!

Also unwell during the filming of Season 18 was guest actor Edward Underdown, who plays Zastor, leader of the Tigellans. Draped in regal orchid purple, Underdown was only in his early 70s but was unwell, and this is reflected in his woeful performance. I say performance, but actually he's just saying the lines he's learned, there's barely any artifice or performance involved at all, bless him. He knows his lines, but he's not acting, he's just reciting them in the gaps between other people's. It's a shame, because he was a respected actor in his heyday, voted most promising screen male newcomer in 1950.

While Zastor leads the Tigellan people as a whole, his subjects are divided - and I mean divided - into two distinct groups: the scientific Savants and the religious Deons. The Savants are led by Deedrix, who all sport ridiculous sculpted blond(e) wigs. Or is it supposed to be their real hair? If it's their actual hair, why does every Savant have exactly the same colour and style? And if they're wigs, why do they all wear them? Is it a fashion thing?

Meanwhile, the Deons (so-called because they worship the all-powerful Dodecahedron) are led by - HOLY MOLY, IT'S BABS!!! Of all the people to turn up in a guest star role leading a bunch of religious zealots on an alien planet, I least expect it to be dear Jacqueline Hill, 15 years after she stopped playing companion Barbara Wright. It's lovely to see her back, and she looks just as elegantly beautiful as she ever did, but it's such a shame she's not back as Babs. It's a real missed opportunity, as it would have been lovely to have a kittle kiss to the past by having an old companion back for a few weeks.

And there's the Tigellan hair thing again. Is that long trail of white hair supposed to be her actual hair hanging out the back of her bonnet, or is it part of her ceremonial attire? Either way, I'd much rather see Babs' beehive back in play.

Hill is really good as the religiously fanatic Lexa, a woman who believes that the great Dodecahedron, which gives Tigella its power, is actually a god that fell from the sky which is to be worshipped. She holds no truck with the scientific Savants who reckon it's an engineered artefact. In truth, the Dodecahedron is both of these things: it's some kind of device which provides power to the people (or, when it blows a transformer, doesn't) but it is also worshipped as a deity by the Deons, that is unavoidable. Anything or anyone can be a god if enough people believe it, and worship as such, even if that thing or person is a false idol. I mean, we all sort of worship the great god Google, which we turn to whenever we have a question in life, or are in search of some answers or direction!

June Hudson has come up with some sumptuous and rich costumes once more, including the flowing robes in lilac, violet, plum and magenta for Zastor and the Deons, and the ragtag pirate-like outfits for the Gaztaks. The Tigellan sets are also impressively designed by Philip Lindley, who creates a lovely multi-level complexity to the underworld as Lexa and Zastor walk along a raised gantry, down a spiral staircase, then along a corridor and round a corner, all in one take.

Slightly less imaginative is the subterranean spaceship the Gaztaks find beneath the surface of Zolfa-Thura, which is your bog standard silver and grey sci-fi design with some flashing coloured lights and banks of switches and knobs (and lit plainly by Bert Postlethwaite). Lindley has even used the ubiquitous triangular walls first created for The Mutants in 1972 and which so many set designers treated as an off-the-hook alien wall throughout the 1970s (and not just for Doctor Who).

The Gaztaks themselves are pantomime-esque space pirates, fortune seekers on the lookout for opportunities to make a bit of loot led by the gruff, bewhiskered General Grugger. Their arrival on Zolfa-Thura is quite impressive, with new technology Scene Sync enabling director Terence Dudley to match model shots to live action in a more advanced way than the old school Colour Separation Overlay (CSO, or Chromakey). It's a shame the model work is shot on video, rather than the much more convincing film, but I suppose it wouldn't look right overlaying the actors in studio onto filmed backgrounds. Scene Sync does a good job of placing the live actors on an alien world, at the foot of the huge Screens of Zolfa-Thura, something CSO would have struggled with, but the excessive fringing around the live performers is jarring (especially Brotadac's spiky, feathery headgear). I admire how impressive it must have looked at the time though, especially considering how dated BBC effects from later in the 1980s can look (such as in the otherwise delightful The Box of Delights, or The Chronicles of Narnia). Still, no amount of new effects can disguise the bit where the Gaztak extra trips and almost goes arse over face as they approach the Screens!

Plot-wise, there's a lot to try and grasp, but it all seems so disconnected. The power struggle going on beneath Tigella between the Deons and the Savants is quite separate to the Gaztaks' arrival and exploration of Zolfa-Thura, and in turn both scenarios are totally separate to what's going on in the TARDIS (which is, to be honest, not very much). I don't mind the idea of developing separate story strands which come together as the story progresses, but I think it would work better if the connections started to be made more strongly by the end of the first episode.

Of course, none of this would be happening if Romana hadn't thrown that beach ball into the sea in The Leisure Hive. Then, K-9 wouldn't have got waterlogged and blown up, and wouldn't need to be repaired, which means the TARDIS wouldn't have to stop and float in space in the Prion System, Zastor wouldn't see the Doctor passing through and invite him to Tigella to sort out their squabbling, and so Meglos wouldn't have to appropriate the Doctor's appearance to set his plans in motion to infiltrate the Tigellan city.

I think.

Ah, Meglos. The idea of a talking cactus is one of Doctor Who's craziest notions ever, and that's saying something for a programme that has also come up with a virus that looks like a raw prawn, and a universe that looks like a frog on a chair. There's no beating about the bush, the idea of a talking cactus is awful, silly and utterly embarrassing. It's also narratively really dull, with whole scenes between Meglos and the Gaztaks spent with a camera fixed on a static cactus prop, with the occasional cutaway of Bill Fraser or Frederick Treves looking perplexed. Imagine flicking through the channels back in 1980, from ITV to BBC2, then to BBC1, only to find that this week Dr Who is fighting a chatty cactus. Mind you, probably nobody was watching BBC2, which was showing a 17-year-old film from China about Tibetan serfs!

There's also some editing issues here, because there are a number of times when characters learn something they haven't been told yet, or have been told off-screen when we weren't looking. For example, Meglos reveals his plan to the Gaztaks off-screen, and when we return to them, the Gaztaks are already questioning whether it can be achieved (the viewer vaguely gathers it's to do with infiltrating a city, but it's not specified it's Tigella). Also, Meglos instructs Grugger how to operate "the procedure" off-screen, resulting in the viewer not knowing what "the procedure" is.

Ultimately, we see that "the procedure" is that Meglos jumping out of his cactus body (which shrivels post-coitally) and into that of the human hostage the Gaztaks bought along with them. I can't pretend to relate to the dreams and aspirations of a sentient space succulent, but when Meglos requested a 6ft 5in male Caucasian he was probably hoping more for Armie Hammer than a geek in a business suit and specs.

The make-up job on actor Christopher Owen is really well done, and can't have been an easy assignment for Cecile Hay-Arthur, but she pulls it off and it's undoubtedly her finest Doctor Who work.

The ending of the episode just gets sillier and sillier. I mean, how can an alien cactus have a spaceship with switches and buttons it can't operate itself? How can it even have a desk? And why does his databank have a Season 18 publicity picture of Tom Baker on file? As the cliffhanger canters casually closer, Meglos morphs his spiky face into that of the Doctor's, with a view to infiltrating the Tigellan city to get his pointy digits on the Dodecahedron, which was apparently made on Zolfa-Thura.

How is Meglos able to take on the form (and clothes) of the Doctor without a physical body-print? If he can do that from just looking at a photograph, why did he need the Gaztaks to drag that poor Earthling halfway across the universe to be used as a vessel?

Meglos traps the TARDIS in something called a chronic hysteretic loop, a fold in time, which means our heroes are destined to repeat the same section of dialogue and stage directions over and over again, "round and round for all eternity". Oh how very tiresome.

It's the end of part 1 and the Doctor's not even left the TARDIS yet...

First broadcast: September 27th, 1980

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The Scene Sync bits work really well for the time.
The Bad: An evil talking cactus. Really?
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/meglos.html

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