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