Logopolis Part Two

The one where someone from the last story randomly turns up...

This is the last episode that we get to see the Fourth Doctor/ Adric dynamic working in isolation, which is a shame. I'll be sorry to see the relationship corrupted by the arrival of additional companions, and ultimately by the change in Doctor. This episode is full of little moments of charm between the two, such as the continuation of the reprise where the Doctor just knows Adric is there behind him, and shouts over his shoulder calling for a diversion to help him escape the police.

Adric searches around for a prop and finds the copper's bicycle, and it's a lovely little moment when Matthew Waterhouse looks at the bike in confusion because of course Adric doesn't know what a bicycle is! Adric then pretends he's fallen off the bike to distract the policemen, allowing the Doctor to skip merrily back into the TARDIS with a cheeky wave. Adric hurls the bike into the pursuing policeman's path before rushing into the TARDIS and slamming the door in their face. What a team!

Back inside the TARDIS the Cloister Bell's at it again, ringing at seemingly random times like a spoiled child trying to get daddy's attention. But daddy isn't paying attention, despite Adric's frequent reminders. "Shut the door then!" snaps the Doctor, who has bigger problems on his mind after realising the Master is still at large.

The Doctor's in a doomy mood, and the little squabble between him and Adric when he's deciding to jettison Romana's bedroom is lovely. "Do you want a quick decision or a debate?" snarls the Doctor, to which Adric retorts: "Sorry!" A warring uncle and nephew, but as soon as the Doctor flips that switch, they're pals again. It's such a lovely, truthful dynamic between these two.

Why does the Doctor specifically jettison Romana's room? Is it just because he doesn't want any more reminders of her? It's one of many questions of logic posed in this episode, not least about what the Doctor decides to do next: "Materialise the TARDIS underwater, and open the door!" I'm sorry, but WHAT??!! Just seconds ago Adric mentioned flushing the Master out of the TARDIS, and the Doctor said "There's no telling what that would do to the TARDIS systems." Now he's planning to do just that?

What was Christopher H Bidmead thinking when he wrote this episode? It's such a let-down after the imaginative heights of part 1. The Doctor spends a silly amount of time trying to flush the Master's TARDIS out of his by trying to land at the bottom of the River Thames. Does he not think everything else which isn't nailed down will be flushed out with it? Does he not think that water and electronics most definitely do not mix? Does he really think he and Adric will be able to swim around the TARDIS underwater? It's a really stupid idea that only the under-fives would agree with.

Thankfully, the Doctor fails to land the TARDIS underwater, missing by just a few metres and materialising instead on a jetty. But who's that looking down at them from the bridge above? It's that white feller from the Barnet bypass, and he's beckoning for the Doctor to come and see him. Director Peter Grimwade's spooky reveal of the Watcher looking down on them is well shot, and we only see the Doctor talk to him from a distance. All we can glean from the exchange is that the Doctor ends up disconsolate, defeated, resigned to what he's told. He hangs his head as if he knows something terrible must happen. "Nothing like this has ever happened before," the Doctor tells Adric. The Doctor knows his time is up.

Meanwhile, highly strung air hostess Tegan Jovanka is still cantering around the TARDIS trying to find her way out. She spends a lot of the episode wandering anxiously around the cloister room, menaced by incessant laughter and yet another police box. Presumably this is the Master's TARDIS disguised as a police box, but why he spends all this time laughing at Tegan is a mystery. And why does Tegan insist on running everywhere, even short distances? If it's supposed to add urgency and panic to the scene, it fails. It just means Janet Fielding looks silly.

There's so much time wasted in this episode, and so little plot development. The Master materialises his TARDIS as a police box, then dematerialises and rematerialises as a big bush, and all the time he's having a right good laugh at Tegan's increasing anxiety. It's like everybody's waiting for part 3 to arrive.

The Doctor decides that they must go to Logopolis. "I've just dipped into the future," he tells Adric. "We must be prepared for the worst." The Doctor knows more than he's letting on, but it's interesting that as soon as he's had his chat with the mysterious Watcher, he starts preparing for something inevitable. At the end of this story, the Doctor memorably says that "it's the end, but the moment has been prepared for". It seems the preparations start here, with the decision to go to Logopolis regardless of the fact the Master's still on board. The Doctor cannot change what must happen.

Halfway through the episode, Tegan bursts into the TARDIS control room, exhausted and confused. The reactions from Tom Baker and Matthew Waterhouse are great, looking at each other through startled and furrowed brows with a side glance. From their perspective, this lilac woman running in is probably the most unexpected and unlikely thing that could possibly happen!

"Who is she, where did she come from, what are we going to do with her?" panics the Doctor, appealing to Adric to try and solve this and get rid of the mouthy Aussie. I adore Tom's reaction when Tegan starts shouting at the Doctor, his face flinching as she hurls a tirade of questions at him. When the Doctor puts two and two together and works out that Tegan and the miniaturised Vanessa are related, something inside of him clicks into place, and he insists that Tegan has to stay with them on Logopolis. It's as if he realises Tegan is a key part of the events to follow, that she has to be there because she's been implicated from the start. Interesting...

And so we arrive on Logopolis, which looks like a huge brain, with dwellings resembling little caves where the locals sit and play on their abacuses. The Logopolitans look like a bunch of white-haired kindly grandfathers in flowing robes, and of course they all look identical. And there are no female Logopolitans, because women obviously aren't very good at maths in this part of the universe. The Logopolitans have been expecting the TARDIS, and gather round for its arrival with their leader, Monitor. It seems the Fourth Doctor has visited Logopolis before, and he and Monitor are old friends.

In the background of this pleasant reunion, the Master's TARDIS materialises in the form of a super-conspicuous bush (the one thing there isn't on Logopolis is bushes, so maybe the Master's chameleon circuit is faulty too?). Then the Master's TARDIS changes its form to an ionic column (there aren't any ionic columns about on Logopolis either), then dematerialises altogether. Why does it change its form before it leaves? Or in the case of the bush, after it's arrived? It's nonsensical!

Everybody sets off for the telescope building (the Doctor oddly refers to it as both an aerial and an antennae), which is a recent addition to the Logopolitan landscape. Because while the Logopolitans can seemingly do extremely complicated sums standing on their heads (it's an expression, by the way), sometimes, when the sums get really complicated, they need technology to help them along. And what better technology than a computer from 1980s Earth? Erm...

Tegan Jovanka is taking all of this surprisingly well. Janet Fielding is a great actor, and tries her very best with the material, but unfortunately the character is very poorly written here. No thought is given to how this character would be feeling or reacting to what's happening to her. Bidmead is far more interested in his ideas than his characters.

I mean, Tegan has had A Very Bad Day so far, by anybody's standards. First of all her car broke down on the way to the first day in her new dream job, then she stumbled into a police box which was actually a vast futuristic spaceship. While looking for the crew, she gets hopelessly lost and finds herself being laughed at by a disembodied voice in a room full of ivy and police boxes. Then, when she finally finds other people (who are dressed very strangely) she's whisked away to another planet entirely, full of weird-looking alien grandads, and told next to nothing about how or why or where. But she goes along with it, even managing to get into the groove of being the Doctor's companion for a short while by applying her secret knowledge of dead Mediterranean languages (Pharos is apparently "Ancient Greek for lighthouse").

Eventually, Tegan's credulity does snap ("too right I'm upset!") and she insists on someone telling her what's going on. Adric explains to her what the TARDIS is off-screen, out of earshot, which is a shame as it would have been a great character moment to see her reaction, but no: Bidmead is more interested in block transfer computation than character development.

Then, out of the blue, for no apparent good or credible reason, Nyssa from The Keeper of Traken turns up. She claims that the Doctor's friend brought her to Logopolis (ie, the Watcher), but why he does this is not clear. Why would a teenage girl from the last story have any significance on what's happening now? On the face of it, it's deliciously intriguing, a curveball twist worthy of the new series. So there had better be a good explanation for this when it comes...

The cliffhanger sees the TARDIS shrinking in size as the Logopolitans' computations seem to have gone awry (that'll teach them to use a BBC Micro). "But the Doctor's in there!" says Adric, telling everybody what they already know.

I'm not done yet:

• I still have no idea what the cloister bell is reacting to. It starts ringing, it stops ringing, it's warning of some imminent catastrophe. But what precisely is triggering it? It seems random, and ultimately gets dropped entirely.
• How did the Master know the Doctor was repairing his chameleon circuit? Adric asks if the Master read his mind, and the Doctor snaps that "in many ways we have the same mind". But that's not an explanation, Mr Bidmead, it's an obfuscation. Is he alluding to the APC Net on Gallifrey, repository of all Time Lord knowledge? Somehow I doubt it. So how did the Master know to land his TARDIS around that police box on the Barnet bypass on Earth in 1981?
• Tegan isn't happy with the way the TARDIS keeps lurching about. "Crazy idiot of a pilot!" she says. "Wait 'til I have a word with him." Thirteen words, but so much wrong with them. What makes Tegan think that she's in a vehicle/ aircraft/ ship of some kind? OK, she found a control panel, but that could just have been a computer. Why does she think it can be flown? From her perspective, she is in a building - a very large building that seems to be inside a police box, but still... And then she refers to the pilot as a man, which while very likely at the time, doesn't resonate with what we know of Tegan's feminist leanings. Unless she just assumes a bad pilot would be male!
• Why does Adric think the Doctor is "going after Nyssa"? Just because the Doctor received a faint message from Traken that the Master had escaped doesn't mean he's going back there. Name-dropping Nyssa for no good reason is just poor writing, an attempt to foreshadow, but actually just very clumsy.
• Grimwade shows us all of the Logopolitans beavering away with their abacuses in the doorways of their little caves, then cuts to a model shot of Logopolis with all of the little doorways empty. Oops!
• I love the bit where Tegan explains that Pharos is Ancient Greek for lighthouse, and Adric says "what's a lighthouse?" Of course he wouldn't know what a lighthouse was! I love these little reminders that Adric is from another universe, it's just as important as companions from the past, such as Victoria Waterfield and Jamie McCrimmon, not automatically knowing what things from their future are.
• When Nyssa turns up, Adric gives her a jubilant welcome. "Who's Nyssa?" asks Tegan, a little snarkily. "She's the friend who helped me on Traken," replies Adric, as if that explains everything. It reminds the viewer who she is, but doesn't answer Tegan's question at all. Bidmead again fails to manage his characters properly.

I'm hoping part 3 is more like part 1 and less like part 2.

First broadcast: March 7th, 1981

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The Doctor's distant chat with the Watcher on the bridge is eerie. You can just about see the Fourth Doctor resign himself to his demise. Tom Baker's body language says more than the words we cannot hear.
The Bad: Christopher H Bidmead has a very poor grasp of character, failing to write Tegan truthfully. He puts the girl through a lot, and she just takes it all on board (and she doesn't even know her auntie's dead yet).
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆

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

NEXT TIME: Part Three...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; 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/