Logopolis Part One

The one where there's a TARDIS within a TARDIS...

Logopolis. Great word to roll around the mouth, but what does it mean? It's one of those Doctor Who stories named after something that doesn't mean anything until you've sat down and watched it, like Meglos, Praxeus or, indeed, anything written by Christopher H Bidmead. When I was a teenager first encountering this story on VHS, I thought it was pronounced "LO-GO-PO-Lis", stressing the first three syllables in a most unlikely way! I used to say "SON-ta-ran" too until I learnt better!

This 550th episode of Doctor Who opens with a policeman using the telephone of an actual, real police box, which even 40 years on, is ridiculously exciting for a Doctor Who fan. This episode is full of moments like that, teetering dangerously close to fanwank, but that's no reason not to find it exciting! Something wibbly seems to happen to the police box, and the copper is pulled menacingly inside it by malevolent laughter. Attack of the killer clowns?

Fanwank Moment #2: the Doctor and Adric wander round a gloriously melancholic set called the TARDIS cloisters, where designer Malcolm Thornton has dressed standard roundelled walls with Greek urns and creeping ivy. It's a gorgeous juxtaposition of nature and technology, and as the Doctor wrings his hands about the TARDIS falling apart (literally at one point), I wonder whether the ivy is supposed to be growing in the cloisters, or that it's there because the Ship is decaying, rotting, giving way to nature in some weird way. I've always assumed the cloisters were meant to have ivy there, but this time it struck me that maybe the creepers are an indication of entropy within the TARDIS, just as ivy and weeds gradually take over an abandoned graveyard.

The cloisters aren't very big (certainly nowhere as big as seen in the TV movie), but director Peter Grimwade keeps Tom Baker and Matthew Waterhouse on the move, and the chemistry between the two which I've watched develop since Full Circle is still evident here, as Adric follows his mentor around like a lost sheep, constantly in awe at every word that leaves the Time Lord's mouth! It's such a sweet dynamic. The Doctor asks if Adric has heard the time column recently - "wheezing like a grampus", which is an odd thing to say as a grampus is a type of dolphin. Dolphins don't wheeze, they chirrup and whistle. Maybe when a grampus does wheeze, it means there's something wrong...!

Adric's disappointment at being told they're not going to Gallifrey after all is wonderfully boyish, but it's doubly tragic when you consider that one of the very first places the Doctor goes after Adric's demise is Gallifrey, in Arc of Infinity.

Meanwhile, a series of events is playing out in a contemporary suburban street in Great Britain, Earth. An Australian air stewardess is late for her first day at work, and is being given a lift by her Aunt Vanessa. There's a lovely little repartee between Janet Fielding and Dolore Whiteman, although the portrayal of Tegan as ditzy and forgetful seems a bit off. She comes across more like Jo Grant than the Tegan Jovanka we come to know. Maybe she's just nervous because it's her first day, but I really would have recommended a more reliable-looking car than the bashed-up jalopy used here! Interestingly, Tegan turns left at the end of her road...

It's not long before the car inevitably breaks down with a puncture, and the two squabbling women spend the rest of the episode arguing over the benefits and drawbacks of feminist independence while they try to change the tyre. The intriguing thing about this however, is that they break down in the same lay-by that the wibbly police box is in, the one that ate the policeman with laughter.

Elsewhere, the Doctor decides that the only way to reverse the onslaught of entropy within the TARDIS is to obtain the precise accurate measurements of a real police box, and then go to a place called Logopolis where the locals can use something called Block Transfer Computation to map a brand new template for the Ship. The people of Logopolis use mathematics to create solid objects, which is a remarkably ingenious idea on Bidmead's part. It's like some form of arithmetical 3D printing. Plus, the Logopolitans don't use computers to transfer their blocks (or whatever), they speak the mathematics, intoning or chanting the maths until the result manifests. Crazy, mind-blowing ideas of Douglas Adams proportions, only dropped into the script rather less subtly than Adams might do. Bidmead has the ideas, but lacks the lightness of touch.

The Doctor decides to land the TARDIS on Earth in 1981, but it's not clear why he chooses to go to that time when he admits himself that police boxes are largely obsolete by then. Why not go back to the 1950s or 60s when there were police boxes all over the place? Just because Logopolis was being made in the 1980s doesn't mean that is when "now" is (especially for two aliens whose home is not Earth, never mind the 1980s). It makes no sense that the TARDIS materialises next to the wibbly police box in 1981 where we saw the policeman eaten by laughter, and where Tegan and her aunt have broken down. It's all rather too convenient.

Still, this leads to Fanwank Moment #3, where the TARDIS materialises around the police box, resulting in the police box prop appearing inside the TARDIS control room. I mean, if fans aren't moist at the sight of this, they're not proper fans at all. And then, as if things can't get any better (or wetter), Adric climbs up on the police box roof to help the Doctor with his measurements. I mean, this is just nectar for the eyes, an episode bursting with visuals fans might only have dreamed of before!

I love the detail of the policeman's bicycle toppling over when the TARDIS lands around the police box too, and there's also references to how the Doctor obtained his TARDIS (he should have waited for them to fix the chameleon circuit before he took it, but "there were rather pressing reasons at the time" he says, intriguingly).

Something else which happens throughout this episode is that the Cloister Bell keeps chiming, signalling "wild catastrophe". It chimes when the Doctor is in the cloisters, but stops when we see Tegan and Vanessa park up in the layby. The fact it stops means wild catastrophe is no longer imminent, but then it starts up again when Tegan enters the TARDIS later in the episode. It all suggests that Tegan Jovanka is key to this catastrophe somehow. At one point Adric states that the Cloister Bell means "someone's trying to get in touch with us", but maybe that someone is the TARDIS itself. Rather like in Inside the Spaceship, perhaps the Ship is trying to communicate imminent disaster to its crew in a wildly obscure manner?

One of my favourite scenes in any Doctor Who story ever takes place in this episode, when the Doctor peeps out of the TARDIS in the layby and first of all spots Tegan (and has no idea what a big part in his future that purple girl will play!) and then spots a mysterious ghostly figure observing them from the field across the road. Grimwade directs with just the right amount of distance to make the figure both discernible and indistinct. The figure is dressed all in white, but it's hard to tell much more. And it looks like it has a death mask for a face, but we're not close enough to make out whether it can see or speak. The observer simply watches, but the spine-tingling thing is that the Doctor seems to recognise something in the figure. Not necessarily an identity, but what it might represent. Tom Baker's eyes glaze in a mix of fear and realisation, and Paddy Kingsland's melancholic music suggests a moment of epiphany for our hero.

He knows. Who is this who is coming...?

Fanwank Moment #4 is when the Doctor and Adric actually go inside the police box and enter another TARDIS control room, one lit slightly darker in ochre. And there stands another police box. It's all so thrilling and subversive, and highly intriguing. It's also highly puzzling, because I assumed the second control room was a second TARDIS, within which stands the original police box from the layby, but when the Doctor and Adric go into that box and emerge in a third control room (lit even more darkly, and sounding like it's underwater), that's when my mind melts. So it's some kind of recurring anomaly, a gravity bubble of infinite regression. The Doctor and Adric could go on walking into police boxes and entering TARDISes forever, until they reach the nucleus of the anomaly. I know Steven Moffat was only 19 when Logopolis was being made, but are we sure he didn't write this madness?

Seeking help from the local garage, Tegan sets out with her punctured wheel but stops almost straightaway to see if she can phone for help using the police box telephone. Tegan Jovanka's First Mistake! The door of the box creaks open, and we see the look of disbelief on her face as she steps inside to the gleaming futuristic dimension within. It's an innovative way to have the new companion first encounter the TARDIS - alone, with no explanation - and Fielding gets the wonder and amazement across really well, especially when she calls out to off-camera, suggesting the control room is much bigger than we ever see.

Just before Tegan enters the TARDIS, the police box within dematerialises, which means that the second TARDIS has gone elsewhere (with the Doctor and Adric inside). So it confuses me how the Doctor can then exit the TARDIS via the back door, when the TARDIS he was inside has gone. I think. To be honest, I'm a bit lost, but in a gloriously enjoyable way!

The cliffhanger is a strange beast. The Doctor is directed to Aunt Vanessa's car by the policeman, and sitting inside are two little dollies, one of Vanessa and the other of the copper who was laughed to death at the start of the episode. This instantly informs the Doctor that the Master escaped Traken, and is still about somewhere, but the viewers might have been left a little puzzled. Only long-term fans would know that the Master used to have a Tissue Compression Eliminator to miniaturise his victims, and this is not referred to at all here. So Doctor Who fans will get the dreadful connection, but the seven million other people watching will be confused as to why two dollies on the back seat of a broken down sports car means that the Master escaped Traken. The Master last miniaturised somebody in 1976's The Deadly Assassin five years previously. Does Bidmead really expect the lay viewer to remember that?

A few quick random thoughts:

• I like the wistful references back to Romana, with the Doctor peering sadly into her old bedroom. "I suppose we're going to miss Romana," he says. "And K-9," adds Adric. It's like the Fourth Doctor is taking stock of his recent past.
• I love the bit when the TARDIS materialises next to the police box in error, and the Doctor strides over to where the box should be in the control room and feels for it. And then Adric goes over to the same empty spot and tries to feel for what the Doctor couldn't feel. It's a lovely little moment that Waterhouse does so well, showing Adric's innate curiosity and confusion simultaneously.
• Adric's fascination with Block Transfer Computation is delightful too. Of course a mathematical boy genius would be entranced by the idea that arithmetic could create solid objects. The power of maths! Again, Waterhouse translates Adric's wonderment and curiosity beautifully.
• When the Doctor and Adric first step into the police box and enter the first control room, the Time Lord suggests it is not his own ship, but a separate one, although it looks like his own "down to the last detail". Which means the Master has purposefully made his own TARDIS interior look like the Doctor's in order to trick him. Wily devil!
• As the Doctor and Adric go deeper into the regression, the Doctor says: "We can't go back." Why? What would be wrong with going back out of the police boxes to where they started, rather than deeper into the anomaly?

First broadcast: February 28th, 1981

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: A police box within a TARDIS within a TARDIS? Fan heaven! Also, that spine-chilling scene where the Doctor clocks the Watcher.
The Bad: For the moment at least, it's all very confusing, with more TARDIS interiors than there should be, and a Cloister Bell that chimes for wild catastrophe seemingly at random.
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/2014/09/logopolis.html

Logopolis is available on BBC DVD as part of the New Beginnings box set. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Beginnings-Logopolis-Castrovalva/dp/B000LE1HLQ/