The Leisure Hive

The war between the Fomasi and the Argolin lasted 20 minutes, and during that fight the planet Argolis was laid to waste, its survivors made sterile by the radiation. As a monument to the horrors of war, the Argolin have built the Leisure Hive, a galactic tourist attraction, which showcases the latest developments in the science of tachayonics. Just as the Doctor and Romana arrive the first accidents begin to happen and guests begin to die, immediately pushing the Time Lords to the front of the suspects list. The Doctor suspects sabotage and finds himself and Romana working under duress with experiments to roll time back and rejuvenate the last Argolins. Only after a dosasterous experiment ages the Doctor by 500 years does the true purpose of the experiments come to light: a mad Argolin named Pangol intends to replicate himself a thousandfold and take the planet back into a war...

The Leisure Hive is the season premiere for 1980, ushering in the new age of Doctor Who under the guidance of new producer John Nathan-Turner. In a departure from the previous years of the program, the theme music is changed and played with synthesizers and an actual guitar, the opening sequence is remade into a moving starfield with the Doctor's face formed out of the stars, and the show's new "neon" logo is introduced. A few other visual changes were made to the show with this massive revamping: the Doctor's costume changed to a darker overcoat, hat and scarf, and the police box exterior of the TARDIS was changed again to the "pyramid" roof version, and that would stay until the show's final regular episode.

Now the actual episode. Jay and I watched this one together but we enjoyed a guest for this as well, in the form of my friend Jim. Jim is relatively new to the classic episodes of Doctor Who, his interest only recently piqued by the Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant adventures, so I felt he needed a bit of a view on where the series came from. Of course, he was warned that Jay and I pretty much just talk through the shows, but he still took part. Brave brave soul.

K9 makes a very short appearance at the beginning of part 1 as he and Romana take a walk along the beach at Brighton, his voice restored to normal, but then he's sidelined again for the rest of the show after a disasterous encounter with the water. K9 go boom. "That wasn't very smart of him," Jay muttered. Of course, who's really to blame; was K9 stupid or was Romana being a bitch by throwing a ball into the water?

The Hive struck us all as being pretty claustrophobic for a vacation resort; a small place, it seemed, with radioactive sand outside. Not really what I call relaxing. And you have to come in by shuttle. And it takes a long time for them to land. A long long time. It was actually one of the longest shots of the production, with an equally long stretch of synthesizer music being played, although by the time it was over it felt more like an anthem had been run through. The BBC music people showing off again, we figured. "Make the synthesizers stop," Jay pleaded.

Argolins die in an interesting way. They have these tall beehive hairdos (which made us wonder about the title again) and at the top this little pyramid with small balls attached, and as the littlke balls drop off the Argolin in question would age. If only Clinique knew about this planet. If only this planet knew about Krazy Glue.

The rapid ageing of the Doctor during the time experiment is an interesting twist; he goes forward 500 years and comes out all wrinkled and with white hair and a beard, showing that a Time Lord can indeed age a lot before regenerating. The last time the Doctor discussed his age he was somewhere around 750 years old, and he managed to age 500 in the same body, hinting at the longer end of a Time Lord life cycle. At least the temptation to throw a different actor into the scarf for the episode as some "future" Doctor was resisted, but I think it would have been fun if the process had been to age him backwards and Jon Pertwee emerged from the experiment.

Effects? There were a few. The landing of the shuttle. The exploding hourglass was okay although the visual effects layered over it at first were a bit lame. And the sequence where Pangol is replicated in the tachayon generator is a bit.... bad. But it was 1980, and still miles ahead of what had been done previous on the show. The new season, and the new Doctor Who had arrived in style, keeping in touch with the same show that it was in 1963 even if it didn't look like it at first. I remember when I was in grade 6 I saw this one for the first time and until I actually saw Tom Baker's face in the starfield I thought I had the wrong channel.

So another adventure viewed and enjoyed, even if Jim was left wondering if Jay and I really like the series or if we are just telebullies picking on a show that can't defend itself back. It's okay, we do like it. It's all done out of love.

NEXT EPISODE : MEGLOS

Shada

The Doctor and Romana are summoned by the Doctor's old friend Professor Chronotis, another Time Lord who has left Gallifrey and is now living quietly on Earth. Chronotis wants the Doctor to return something to Gallifrey, a book called "The Ancient and Worshipful Law of Gallifrey", one of the Time Lord artefacts that should never have left the planet. Also after the book, though, is a criminal scientist named Skagra, who wants to use the book to take him to the prison planet Shada in search of the imprisoned Time Lord criminal Salyavin.

Sound like a thin plot? Well, it sort of is, and how it was supposed to successfully fill 6 episodes is a bit of a mystery. Written by Douglas Adams, who was still serving as script editor at the time, Shada is unlike any Doctor Who adventure so far, being that it never got finished. Halfway through production the BBC went on strike and the story was never finished beyond the location work and a block of studio recording, but what did survive was preserved and eventually released on a special VHS tape with Tom Baker, several years later, providing linking narration for the adventure where there is no visual to go by. The project is of course interesting, but to look at it as it might have been when finished, one can see why script editors shouldn't be allowed to contribute scripts to the seasons they are working on without someone keeping watch on them. Shada, if you ask me, was two episodes too long, even in this diminished format, and some of the dialogue was starting to get a bit tedious, so maybe it was best that Shada met this fate as opposed to being completed and being a clunker ending to an overall poor season.

All is not lost with Shada, though, and in the years to come it would be revisited, and with more success in my opinion.

NEXT EPISODE : THE LEISURE HIVE

The Horns of Nimon

The Doctor and Romana encounter a stranded space ship on the edge of a black hole, and find inside a group of young nobles from the planet Aneth being taken as sacrficies to the mysterious Nimon on the planet Skonnos. The Nimon has come to Skonnos and set up shop as the planet's new saviour and promised new technology and a return to glory for the warmongering world if they keep the shipments of young people coming, but this shipment is to the the last and the Nimon's great journey of life will be completed. The Doctor has suspicions about this sort of thing and with Romana realizes that the Nimon is not a single creature but a race of parasites swarming from planet to planet sucking them dry of resources until they are but a husk.

As with Underworld and its parallels to the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece, The Horns of Nimon is another story heavily influenced by myth, this time that of the Minotaur and his maze. (Interestingly, a huge ball of string was examined in the TARDIS holds just a few stories ago, in The Creature from the Pit where the Doctor claims to have been in the maze and used the string to find the way out as opposed to unravelling his scarf.) Renaming the Minotaur in this case and having the psuedo heros coming not from Athens, but from Aneth, are clever but not brilliant plot devices, and sticking the Nimon in the middle of a power complex where the walls keep changing is... hm. Unnecessary? Unless, of course, the Nimon have a sense of humour that is not explored fully here, and the shifting walls of the maze is part of some kind of jolly joke on the sacrfices. The Nimon costumes are.... interesting; actors walking on blocks so their feet look like hoofs, their bodies wrapped in black lycra, and massive bull-heads with horns that fire lasers top it off. Okay they're striking to look at but not remendously mobile; their roars of "Pursue her!" when they are chasing Romana about make one gigggle, and then when they just sort of lumber after her while she sprints off... well... you can imagine. Still, there was a Minotaur back in The Mind Robber and it was far from perfect, these Nimons representing a lot more effort being put into a costume. Even if in The Mind Robber the Minotaur was only seen for a few seconds.

The real character piece of this one, though, goes to the character of Soldeed, the crazed almost evangelistic leader of Skonnos. Seizing the Nimon's offer of power and technology greedily, all Soldeed can do it sit about and dream of bullying Aneth and the other planets in the galaxy once more, just like they did in the old days. Any hiccups in this plan, like, say, the Doctor's interference and the realization that there are thousands of Nimons coming sends Soldeed off the deep end, his collapse and hysterics during a confrontation with Romana in part four being nothing short of cheesy goodness. Call it payback in part for zapping K9 and dismantling him.

And as with The Creature from the Pit this was one of the last titles released on VHS and my copy suffers from the same while balance problem as the aforementioned episode. Which annoys me. I haven't asked around if anyone else's copies are bad, but if any of you reading this have crap copies, let me know so I don't feel totally left out. Cheers, thanks a lot.

NEXT EPISODE : SHADA

The Nightmare of Eden

Another distress call brings the TARDIS to the scene of a hyperspace collision between two spaceships over the planet Azure. The larger ship, a passenger liner named Empress, came out of its warp drive and partly materialized around a smaller ship, creating matter interface overlap zones throughout its decks. The Doctor has ideas about how to separate the ships but once he finds out that there are deadly drugs being smuggled on board Empress he finds his attentions are divided. To add to everyone's troubles, a prominent zoologist named Tryst has brought on board a machine he uses to capture and display rare animals and environments in a computerized dimensional matrix, and with the unstable matter zones all over the ship people can now walk into the projections, and monsters from the planet Eden can now walk out.

Fun. Many steps up from the previous adventure. And in a setting where K9 does not have to be left behind in the TARDIS until he is called for as a handy plot device. The captain of Empress is entirely believeable as a blue collar guy realizing he's in deep shit for this accident, and the merchant ship's captain, Dymond, also credible as the outraged independent guy being literally crushed by a big corporation. The shining star of the supporting cast has to be Tryst though, with his little glasses and German accent.

Effects wise we're not talking anything exceptional here but they crew did the best they can. The monsters, called Mandrels, aren't what I would call fierce, especially when the backs of some of the costumes can be seen unzipping as the actors shamble about the sets. They roar real good though. But if we want to talk about a stellar special effect look no further than the big honkin snot wad dribbling out of Tom Baker's nose just towards the end of part three (it's okay he snorts it back up) followed closely by Lalla Ward's dress making her arms disappear like a war amp when standing with them behind her back. I hated that dress. She's so fair that slate grey does nothing for her. Other visual giggle this time include the sequence where K9 cuts a hole in a wall "Big as you can" as the Doctor says, and it's hardly big enough to climb though. And the cutaway chunk wobbles dangerously as a set worker holds it in place before it is pulled away by the Doctor. Oh and K9 has a blue ray now! How about that!

So this is Doctor Who and its anti-drug message. The drug in question, vraxoin, is taken orally even though it is a powder. At least that's how we see it taken, even if by accident. It could immediately be likened to cociane or heroin but the effect of the drug is more alog the lines of what happens to people on E. Or was it called X back then? Either way, drugs bad. "There's always a choice," the Doctor says sombrely, so you know he's not going to exactly feel for you when you overdose. Of course the irony of this is that friends of mine have watched this one on 'shrooms. It's like eating a double quarter pounder with cheese while watching Super Size Me. I've done the latter.

Drugs bad. Doctor Who good.

NEXT EPISODE : THE HORNS OF NIMON

The Creature From the Pit

The TARDIS pick up a distress call from the overgrown jungle planet of Chloris, and leads the Doctor and Romana into the clutches of the greedy Lady Adrasta. Metal of any kind is rare and valuable on Chloris, and a trading mission from another planet rich in metals but in need of cholorophyll has gona awry, with Adrasta desperate to keep her grip on the monopoly of metal. The Doctor attempts to make contact with the mysterious "creature" which lives in the pit while Adrasta seeks to use K9 as a weapon to kill it once and for all. But the creature is not a mindless monster waiting to kill all who come near it but a desperate alien wanting off the planet before its people exact a terrible revenge for Adrasta's hostility.

This is a pretty basic kind of script, with the Doctor and Romana going back and forth between being free and then captured by Adrasta's people. There are several good points to the whole adventure like Adrasta's oozing evil, the vicious killings of Madame Karela, and the fierce wolfweed plants that attack and immobilize K9, but there are a couple drawbacks. The biggest one is the Creature itself. It was 1978 when this was made so we have to forgive the production crew their failed attempts at realizing the Creature, but to watch it in any time period save perhaps 1963 is to see a big green garbage bag monster with the odd phallic limb sticking out here and there. I'm not sure if cgi could even save this one. I mean really.... it's a blob. A big green blob. A huge green blob, really. How it actually made it down the pit in the first place though is a bit of a mystery, as the well that the Doctor jumps down to gain entrance is hardly big enough for it.

I watched this one with Jay and as one can imagine, we were kinda cruel to the Creature. And the whole production really. Jay spotted that one of the supporting cast, the character Organon, had a more than passing resemblance to the first Doctor (and indeed he was cast in that role for two of Big Finish's Doctor Who Unbound adventures). And then we started in on the members of Astrasta's palace guard and their hockey mask uniforms. And we went after the Doctor for wiping the creature's slime trail in his hair. The only big hangup we had with this one was actually watching the copy I have; the VHS copy is crap. I paid money for crap. Whatever happened to it, the copy has bad picture quality with the white level going way up all of a sudden and blinding the viewer. I had the adventure captured to a DVD by a friend of mine but somewhere in there the disc failed and thus Jay never got to see the ending so I had to fill him in. And my precis can never do the poor quality of the effects justice.

Carrying on from his bout of laryngitis in Destiny of the Daleks K9 now has a new voice, provided by David Brierly, as John Leeson was off on a project doing talking books for the deaf. Or the blind. The new K9 voice isn't too bad and he manages to "be" K9 alright, but he just sounds wrong. At least it's just a temporary measure. K9 gets a real bum deal this episode, attacked by wolfweeds, threatened with destruction, and then hauled around by the guards and anyone else who can carry him (a dummy model is used and it's pretty obvious it's just a box with a head).

The violence level of this episode is really up there. People are thrown down pits to be killed by a monster. There are stabbings. The Doctor clubs down two guards with a set of wooden stocks. Lady Adrasta slaps Romana around real good and has a knife at her throat a lot. K9 shoots stuff. An entire planet is threatened with obliteration.

Rock on!

NEXT EPISODE : THE NIGHTMARE OF EDEN