The Five Doctors

An unknown force reaches out across time and space and kidnaps the Doctor from his previous time streams and dumps them on Gallifrey's darkest secret: the Death Zone. The fifth Doctor follows with Tegan and Turlough and joins with his first, second and third selves along with Susan, Sarah Jane Smith and the Brigadier to discover the identity of their kidnapper and stop him - if they can.

I wouldn't go so far as to call this Doctor Who at its finest, but certainly at its most nostalgic. The script is a delightful romp through the series' past, bringing not only previous Doctor and companions into the mix but also some old enemies like the Master, the Cybermen, the Daleks, and the Yeti. And there's that nice cameo of K9 with Sarah Jane before she is abducted, keeping their own little bit of continuity alive after the not-so-hot K9 and Company almost two years previous.

"Funny how they made the "beware of dog" sign in K9 font," Jay mused as we watched it.

The version of The Five Doctors that we watched was the special DVD release edit, which was not designed to replace the original (so the packaging says) but to offer an enhanced version of it, along with a remastered 5:1 soundtrack and all the extra bits of edited material chucked back in for good measure - most of the new footage being Peter Davison as the Doctor staggering about the new TARDIS console room and falling down a great deal. And some pretty sad moments with Turlough and Susan locked in the TARDIS waiting for the Cybermen to blow them up (although Turlough looks like he's going to ask Susan to make a man of him before he dies). The one bit of footage that is always welcome though is the rescued bit from Shada, the unfinished Tom Baker adventure with Lalla Ward, as neither could be part of the special episode. (Actually, Tom Baker reportedly declined as he did not want to play second fiddle to any of the other Doctors, and as he and Lalla Ward were divorced by then it's doubtful they would be working together).

So Jay and I watched the new footage. I pointed out what was new as I have seen two different edits of the show before this one, with really bad effects and a mono soundtrack to boot. In fact, I still have the original UK version on laserdisc, it's the second release on VHS that was double-packed for value with The King's Demons that I not longer have. Bad me, I replaced the original. In some ways I wish I had not, for while it's cool to have all this extra stuff put back in, it was obviously taken out for a reason as not much of it adds to the plot but tends to slow things down a bit. There's a longer shot of President Borusa (yes, we go back to Gallifrey again but while Borusa has regenerated *again* the Castellan is still the same ... Thalia has been replaced by Flavia and the rest of the High Council are dead from venturing into the Death Zone to contact the Doctors) but it does nothing for the show.... in fact, when I told Jay it was one of the bits that was put back in he just stared and then went "...why?"

The pairings of the Doctors and their respective companions are very good, though. The first Doctor is reunited with Susan after her departure in The Dalek Invasion of Earth although it is not clear where this takes place in his own continuity (and as William Hartnell is dead the role is passed to Richard Hurndall, who does an incredible job, really). Funny, though, Susan doesn't seem resentful at the way the Doctor left her on Earth, and even though she is no longer a young girl, he immediately talks to her as if she had not aged a day. She even manages to sprain her ankle for old times sake. The second Doctor is joined by the Brigadier sometime after the Brigadier's retirement, but during what some revisionists (including script writer Terrance Dicks) refer to as season 6B, where the second Doctor is employed as an agent of the Time Lords before his exile to Earth and thus is travelling alone and can remember that Jamie and Zoe were returned to their own places in space and time. The Third Doctor is paired with Sarah Jane, obviously sometime during his final season as he recognizes her, but she is expecting his successor. And for those who watched School Reunion last year, Sarah isn't harbouring any resntment at being left behind on Earth. Not yet anyways. As the story develops Tegan spends a lot of time with the first Doctor, which makes for some interesting dynamics between two strong characters. And additional to cameos by K9, Jamie and Zoe, Liz Shaw and Mike Yates appear together, even if they did not meet during the classic series (they missed each other by a season, although novels that have been written after have them sharing scenes).

So we have a fun celebration of the series which was broadcast just days after the show's 20th anniversary. It was not considered to be part of either the 20th or 21st seasons as it was shown a couple months before season 21 began (much like the Christmas specials of the new series) and it never gets mentioned by anyone again so who knows if the adventure itself in canon, really, but who cares. It's Doctor Who. Shut up and enjoy. Funny, though, Jay and I just talk through the whole thing...

NEXT EPISODE : WARRIORS OF THE DEEP

K9 and Company

Distinguished scientist Lavinia Smith makes the social faux pas of commenting on local withcraft practises in the letters column of her community newspaper, sparking outrage amongst her neighbours. Lavinia does not care; she is eagerly awaiting the return of her neice, Sarah Jane Smith, for the Christmas holiday. When Sarah does arrive, she finds her aunt missing, a young ward named Brendan, and a mysterious box left by the Doctor. Inside the box is the newest model of K9, mark 3, sent to Sarah as a gift, and just in time as Sarah and Brendan come under attack from a local coven of witches,

Uh yeah.

This was painful to watch, right from the very start when John Leeson squeaks out the lyric to the opening theme in his little K9 voice. The pain continues through limp performances from almost the entire cast, the obvious exception being Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, reprising the role almost four years after leaving in The Hand of Fear. The dorky student Brendan is just a more earthy version of Adric, just wearing regular clothes. And why is it called K9 and Company? K9 has little to do with the story and its events, showing up late in the adventure and then being left behind a lot, right up until he raids the witches lair and shoots everyone down (those who Sarah does not karate kick into oblivion).

Well can you blame the BBC for trying? K9 had just left Doctor Who to a great public outcry, so what better way to grab some ratings around Christmas than to give him his own show and pair him up with the most popular companion in the series' history? With Doctor Who between episodes as Tom Baker had just left the role for Pater Davison to assume, fans wanted more, now more than ever. All the pieces for spin-off bliss were right there, but they somehow did not come together properly. The good news is, though, that the concept of this "team" was not totally abandoned and Sarah and K9 would return together again, just not for a while.

NEXT EPISODE : CASTROVALVA

Warriors' Gate

The TARDIS has drifted farther into E-Space to where all the co-ordinates read zero. With E-Space reading negative co-ordinates, and N-Space being positive, the Doctor and Romana believe that they are in the region where both universes intersect and the way out must be nearby. The white void outside the ship in an opaque nothing, but the travellers meet a lion-like man named Biroc who is running from his captors, slavers who are also marooned in E-Space. The slavers use Biroc and his people, the Tharils, to navigate their ship as the creatures are time sensitives, and they are desperate to escape, even desperate enough to strap Romana into their machinery and use her in place of one of the Tharils. The Doctor discovers the physical Gateway, which is guarded by the Gundan robots, and in turn discovers the secret of the Tharils and how they came to be slaves.

I remember times as a younger person when I would randomly come across something that looks to be confusing, overly complicated, and boring. At first glance, Warriors Gate seems to be just that, and I remember feeling somewhat drained after watching it. People can really only take so much bad CSO white void screens and cryptic lion people, but then throw in a severely damaged and babbling K9 and at first it can become intolerable. But then, maybe when you get older, you realize, as I did, that this story is beautifully crafted. The whole concept of the intersection between universes and the way it is falling apart is fantastic, the Tharils realized quite well on screen, the Gundan robots incredibly creepy, and the crew of Rorvik's space ship a real bunch of thugs, even those two clods playing cards below decks while counting their union dues. I think the best bit was the flashback sequence at the climax of episode three, with the Gundans raiding the Tharil banquet hall, and then the sudden flash forward back to real time. The fake axe hitting the table could have been done better though. Don't tell me it wasn't fake; you saw how it bounced when it was dropped on Tom Baker's back in episode two.

Warriors' Gate sees the end of the "E-Space trilogy" with the TARDIS going back to N-Space, but with a lighter crew than before. Romana doesn't want to go back to N-Space and spend the rest of her life on Gallifrey, and being with the Doctor has opened her eyes to the plight outside its bounds. Romana joins with Biroc to help free his people, leaving the Doctor in what has to be one of the most casual departures ever in the show, except maybe for when Dodo blew the Doctor off at the end of The War Machines back in 1967. Both being Time Lords, maybe there's no point in getting attached as their lives are so long they might run into each other again. But off Romana goes, and she takes K9 with her as he can only function properly in E-Space now due to being blasted by the Time Winds. The Doctor and Adric leave, the Doctor stating that Romana will be incredible.

NEXT EPISODE : THE KEEPER OF TRAKEN

The State of Decay

Still looking for the way out of E Space, the Doctor, Romana and K9 arrive at a small inhabited planet hoping to find some help. What they find instead is a society where the people are living in a cultural dark age, working all day in fields to service the needs to the Three Who Rule in their tower. Adric has managed to stow away on board the TARDIS and falls under the thrall of the Three, who plan to induct him into their order. The Doctor and Romana discover that the rulers are not benevolant but are instead vicious vampires following the ways of the Great Vampire himself, an ancient enemy of the Time Lords who vanished from known space thousands of years previous after the Time Lords hunted down and killed the rest of its people.

There's nothing like good atmospheric vampire story, and The State of Decay is just that. There are vampire bats. There is a creepy old tower. There are superstitious peasants and gothic-looking robes, extreme makeup, blood, and a bit of overacting from the players representing Zargo, Camilla and Aukon, but all in good fun. Tom Baker and Lalla Ward continue to make a solid Doctor and companion team, but Matthew Waterhouse's Adric leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth of a true fan, wondering why producer John Nathan-Turner felt the need to clutter up the TARDIS crew with an annoying young boy. Hm.

The sustained thread of E Space comes up a few times over the course of the show, with it being revealed that the Great Vampire deliberately came here to escape the Time Lords, and at the time of his awakening will go back and resume his path of destruction and killing to satisfy his appetite.

Maybe I've watched too much Buffy though, and my ideas of what makes a vampire scary have changed. These three aren't that scary, just their fashion sense is. I'm not quite sure what it is they lack. Maybe we needed to see them killing more people.

NEXT EPISODE : WARRIORS GATE

Full Circle

The Time Lords want Romana back.

Technically, Romana has departed Gallifrey illegally at the behest of the White Guardian to assist the Doctor with finding the Key to Time, but now with that mission fulfilled it is time for her to go home. Trouble is, now she has regenerated and experienced life out in the universe with the Doctor, she doesn't want to go. She is saved the trouble, though, when the TARDIS flies through a space-time distortion and ends up on a marshy forest planet, despite the scanner showing that they are on Gallifrey. The Doctor has a theory about negative space time co-ordinates, but it would suggest that the TARDIS has left normal time and space altogether. The TARDIS has landed on the planet Alzarius, bringing the Doctor, Romana and K9 into contact with a young orphan named Adric. Adric's people are preparing for a ritual retreat into their crashed starliner, something they do every so many years when the planet's air supposedly becomes toxic. The truth, however, is that when the mists come to Alzarius, creatures known as Marshmen rise from the swamps and walk the planet, and the governing Deciders keep the citizens of the Starliner in willful ignorance, despite the terrible truth about their own links to the planet.

Some of the location work for Full Circle is incredible, with a riverbank location dressed up with massive amounts of cobwebs and exotic fruits to make it look like some foreign land. This sort of terrain is of course difficult for K9 to traverse and the odd cable can be spotted tugging the robot along. The use of the river itself is very good, even if the costumes of some of the extras become see through when they are swimming, but the visual of the Marshmen rising from the swamp at the climax of part one is something truly chilling. Too bad the Starliner looks like it was chunked together with old bits of Capsela.

The Doctor gets to see something of himself in Romana and her rejection of the summons back to Gallifrey, but has himself accepted that it isn't exactly easy to fight the Time Lords, having done so once before and lost; his freedom is hard-gained. It seems, though, that the Doctor's enthusiasm for travel and adventure is contagious even amongst his own people, with Susan obviously a willing partaker at the outset of his adventures way back in the beginning.

And then there is Adric. Orphaned, rejecting the rules of his own society, too smart for his own good yet so naive at the same time ... you just know he's going to find a way off Alzarius with the Doctor and company

The truth of what has happened is finally figures out at the close of the adventure; the TARDIS has actually passed through a sort of wormhole between universes, into a region known as E-Space, or the exo space-time continuum. They shouldn't be there at all, but now they are, and they're stranded.

NEXT EPISODE : THE STATE OF DECAY

Meglos

The planet Tigella is in a lot of trouble. Dependant on an energy source they do not understand, and forced to live underground rather than fight off the deadly foliage above, they need help when their energy source begins to falter. The religious sect of their society, the Daeons, do not want anyone - least of all an outsider - to go near their symbol of power, the Dodecahedron, for they believe it is sacred, a god. The Savants, the more scientific minded, believe it is an artefact and needs to be studied. Their leader, Zastor, has the solution; he will contact the Doctor. En route to Tigella, though, the TARDIS is snared in a chronic hysteresis, which sees the Doctor, Romana, and K9 going through the same two minutes of their lives in a perpetual loop. The hysteresis is no natural phenomenon, though; behind it is the cactus-creature Meglos, who models his appearance on the Doctor and with the help of the Gaztak mercenaries plans to go to Tigella himself and steal the Dodecahedron.

I suppose script editor Christopher H. Bidmead was having fun letting all of this techincal sounding stuff slip into the dialogue. Doesn't make for easy speech though. Chronic hysteresis indeed. Sounds like a one-day science fiction convention event at the SkyDome. And Savant is actually French for scientist, isn't it? But why, ask Jay, Jim and I, do all the Savants have to have such bad hair? Why is it so often in Doctor Who and a lot of other science fiction that alien races are never as diverse as humans are? Why why why?

Yes, as you can gather I did not watch this one alone. The internationally famous Jim Wylie sat in with Jay and I, watching in sheer horror as Jay and I mocked the show we say we enjoy. But then he started to help.

The special effects of this one were interesting, and even though there was very little shimering on the edge of the CSO effects with the screens of Zolfa-Thura (which look a lot like the bits of shell from The Creature from the Pit) the set still looked like a model. All those sequences with the Doctor and company running around the base of it looked a bit hokey. The Gaztak ship looked a little clunky to be capable of space flight. The plants on Tigella all looked like rubber.

And what about planets like Tigella? How do entire cultures evolve underground with enough scientific know how to expand a city and fuel it, but not have enough know how to go upstairs and cut down some trees? It boggles the mind. And if they are familiar with aliens, then presumeably they may have space travel of their own, so why not just leave? One might argue that the religious hyperbole of Lexa, leader of the Deons, might hold people there but if the Savants are so willing to defy the religious sect, why hang around?

Oh Lexa. Jaqueline Hill returns from wherever she has been hiding ever since leaving the role of Barbara Wright to play again in Doctor Who, making her the fourth person out of eight to play both a regular role and another character, the others being Nick Courtney who was Bret Vyon in The Dalek Master Plan before he became the Brigadier, Ian Marter who appeared in Carnival of Monsters before becoming Harry Sullivan, John Leeson in Power of Kroll taking a holiday from his role as the voice of K9, Lalla Ward as Astra in The Armageddon Factor before becoming Romana, Colin Baker who would appear in Arc of Infinity before taking on the role of the Doctor in 1984, Jean Marsh returning in Battlefield in 1989 after her apperances in The Crusades as Joanna and The Dalek Master Plan as Sara Kingdom, and the latest would be Freeman Agyeman who will play new companion Martha Jones in the 2007 series after an appearance as a victim of the Cybermen in Army of Ghosts.

I always get a bit thrown by this sort of thing; the Doctor notices everything, or so he says, but he doesn't twig when he sees his old friends' faces on other people. Wierd.

Creepy factor for this episode? It's actually pretty high; Meglos needs a human body to bond with to effectively double as the Doctor, but when his control starts to break down and the human tries to escape, the Doctor-facade begins to break down and we see Tom Baker painted green and covered with sharp quills, then he has to retreat to the sahdows to gather his strength.

K9 is once again next to useless. After being short circuited in The Leisure Hive when he takes his impromptu swim at Brighton, he's now unable to fully recharge for the entire episode and has to be dragged around. Gah. I mean I like K9 but it might be time to think about putting him in his kennel for a bit. Maybe give him his own series.

The adventure ends happily enough, but an interesting twist presents itself; Romana leans out of the TARDIS to tell the Doctor that she has just been called by Gallifrey, and they are wanted back on their home planet immediately...

NEXT EPISODE : FULL CIRCLE

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

It's In The Blood

This one is one of my own creations, so bear with me while I talk abut my own idea rather than review someone else's. I wanted to submit something to the Canadian Doctor Who fan fiction magazine and my original idea went something like this: the Doctor and Romana arrive on a garden moon owned by a royal family and take a break from their travels there. While the Doctor visits with the hosts, Romana is stung by some sort of insect in the flower beds, and the poison it carries starts to slowly kill her. Once the crew return to the TARDIS, Romana goes to her room and quietly regenerates, maintaining her calm through the process and even managing to to influence her final appearance.

This is my own take, of course, as when we next join the show, Romana emerges from her room already regenerated . Who knows how much time really passed between The Armageddon Factor and Destiny of the Daleks; the Doctor and Romana could have gone to all sorts of places in that time, allowing them to form a bit better of a bond than the one they have at the end of the Key to Time series.

My second draft of the story, though, went a bit longer and changed substantially; the TARDIS arrived on a weapons satellite in deep space which is on a locked-off course. K9 estimates that the craft was in flight for centuries but cannot determine where it is going, and when he attempts to patch into the flight computers his systems are infected with a virus that renders him inactive. The Doctor and Romana explore the satellite and come across all sorts of biological weapons stores, and Romana is accidentally exposed to a chemical that she feels working its way through her blood like a toxin. The Doctor, unaware of Romana's situation, presses on and realizes that they have found a Minyan weapons cache which seems to be on course for Gallifrey, and the weapons inside are all biological weapons developed centuries ago to kill the Time Lords in an act of revenge for their botched attempt to elevate the Minyans from barbarism. Romana manages to keep her situation a secret from the Doctor while he steers the satellite away from Gallifrey and onto a course for the planet's sun, and once within the TARDIS she regenerates.

I prefer the second draft, and hopefully if the first hasn't been published yet I might get a chance to slip it in and put a better foot forward.

NEXT EPISODE : DESTINY OF THE DALEKS

The Armageddon Factor

The quest for the sixth and final piece of the Key to Time takes the Doctor, Romana and K9 to the warring twin worlds of Atrios and Zeos. Atrios has been brought to its knees by overwhelming opposition and the fanatical Marshal will stop at nothing to rally his people to fight back from their seemingly doomed position. When the TARDIS crew arrive, the Princess Astra has been kidnapped by what are first assumed to be Zeon agents, but a third party is revealed lurking between both worlds; the sinister Shadow. Where the Doctor has been sent on the quest by the White Guardian, the Shadow is in the employ of the Black Guardian and has been sitting waiting for the Doctor to arrive. The Doctor may have collected the first five segments already, but the Shadow seems to know where the sixth and final piece is, and its secret is somehow linked to Astra, the sixth princess of the sixth royal house of the sixth dynasty of Atrios...

Whereas The Power of Kroll had very little mention of the Key to Time until almost the very end, The Armageddon Factor, the six part season finale, is concerned with nothing but finding the final piece. Almost all of the key players in the tale have something to do with it, and the showdown that everyone knew was coming to posess it starts in earnest in episode three when the Doctor and the Shadow meet face to ... well... skull. With a nylon over the mouth. And how is the Shadow as a foe? He kidnaps and terrorizes Astra. He plunges two worlds into war just to keep a death toll running. The captures and tortures Romana. He captures K9 and places the robot under his control, turning him against the Doctor. Yeah, he's bad.

Jay and I undertook this viewing together, although we didn't have as much to say this time as we have before. I was almost passing out from being up late the night before and Jay was actually engrossed in the adventure, but after a short break for the plight dining of the Gerard Square McDonald's, the commentary track was back in full force. Neither of us was particularly enamoured with Romana's white version of an Elvira dress, although we were amused at how she forced open a door to a transmat relay despite being unable to do so a couple scenes before. And then she overpowered the Atrian surgeon, Merak. K9 was smug as usual, which we will allow him after his traumatic experience of being lured into a recycling furnace by a glowing projection that looked like the Canadian Film Board logo. And we loved the Doctor's manic performance in this one, with him taunting the Shadow, mocking the Marshal, going power mad for a moment with the completed Key to Time before him, and finally telling the Black Guardian where to go.

As with most six part stories we are once again faced with a story within a story, with the war between Atrios and Zeos falling into the background eventually, but there is no definite split as with previous stories where the first four episodes were one plot and the final two were something else; The Armageddon Factor evolves its way along, never feeling slow or draggy, but with the introduction of another rogue Time Lord, Drax, in episode five, things do suffer a bit where pacing is concerned. Some of the sets suffer a bit from lack of funding, probably from the money running out towards the end of the season. Jay and I had to laugh at the tape-drive computers of the Atrian war room, and the circuit boards pulled from Speak N Spells stapled to the walls of the Zeon computer room (which are reminiscent of records hammered into the wall at a dump called The Happy Tap, but that's different, the blandness of the Zeon corridors and even the layer of dust on top of the time rotor in the TARDIS. And on the subject of the TARDIS, the continuity people need to be fired; in the previous episode the police box prop had the white light flashing on the roof when it materialized, but in this one it was the spinning blue lamp again, making me wonder if maybe they had a TARDIS for studio and a different one for location.

Once the whole Key to Time plot is resolved, though, the Doctor and Romana are left facing a greater threat than before: the wrath of the Black Guardian. The Doctor has been threatened before but this time he takes things a bit more seriously and fits the console with a device that will randomly select destination co-ordinates and effectively keep him on the run from the Black Guardian for a while. When the next season would commence, the randomizer would be working its magic and throwing the Doctor and Romana headlong into danger.

But before going there, how's about a piece of fan fiction?

Good.

NEXT EPISODE : IT'S IN THE BLOOD

The Androids of Tara

The search for the fourth segment of the Key takes the Doctor and Romana to the planet of Tara, which appears to be right out of a mideval idyll, complete with princes, dukes, a princess locked in a cell, swordsmen, horses... and androids. Romana recovers the segment fairly easily on her own while the Doctor goes fishing and K9 sulks in the TARDIS, but she falls into the clutches of Grendl of Gracht, a man obessed with becoming king. Prince Reinhart of Tara is next in line for the throne and Grendl attempts to thwart that by kidnapping the prince, only to have the Doctor put an andoid prince on the throne instead. To make matters even more confusing, Romana is a dead ringer for the princess Strella. And dead is what everyone will be if Grendl gets his way ...

I watched this with Jay. Can you tell? What started out as enjoying the show and maybe making the odd crack about lame production values has now evolved (or devolved) into us running our own commentary through the whole adventure. And to be fair, we did enjoy a bit of the commentary on the DVD, listening to a (probably) drunk Tom Baker lusting after the obviously embarassed Mary Tamm, and asking who's that and who's that as people appear on the screen. "Is that Stuart Fell?". I'm sure some of the other names he mentioned were either porn directors of names he'd pulled out of the phone directory. Jay spotted Henry from Punky Brewster in a crowd scene. Really.

Tara has some interesting characters. Swordsman Farrah is too pretty, all blonde and lithe. Madama Lamia is a fantastic evil womam, doing Grendl's bidding and making him androids when he demands it. Pity that she and every woman on Tara have some infatuation with scuplting their hair across their foreheads and cheeks. "Is that the Mara?" Jay asked. Romana does her bit for the fashion conscious by dressing in something that everyone on Tara is wearing that year. And she even got K9 to agree with her. And NOBODY else was dressed like that. At all. What would Vivian Westwood say?

Grendl struck us both as a bit of a pervert, like he'd enjoy striking people in the face with a certain part of his anatomy. And that nose. "Is that Cyrano de Bergerac?" I asked. He has a requisite henchman named Till who looks like he should live under a bridge somewhere. "He's hot," Jay said. I hope he was kidding.

Oh right, K9 was in this too, wasn't he. Good dog. Came when called for. Shot an android. Blew out a couple walls. Yay dog.

The location work done for the show was just incredible, using forests and streams and an interesting little building that was a mishmash of Olde Englande style archetecture with a distinct Japanese influence on the inside. And some big castle too, which I've seen somewhere before. On a postcard, I think.

For The Androids of Tara there seems to be less of a sense of urgency about the whole Key to Time issue, made more obvious by the Doctor's decision to stop and rest and go fishing and have some fun with the locals, even if that fun is initially under duress. And we laughed along where we were supposed to, for the most part. And then it was over.

"Is that it?" Jay asked.

NEXT EPISODE : THE POWER OF KROLL

The Shadow of Weng Chiang

The TARDIS is drawn to another part of Earth by the tracer. The Doctor and Romana are suspicious about two segments being on the same planet and plan to investigate carefully, and then are swept up in the flood of events in Shanghai of 1937. The opium trade is still alive and well and Japan is threatening to invade, and the Tong of the Black Scorpion, lead by a young woman who recognizes the Doctor, are acting with their own agenda and using the mystical Dragon Paths to move across space at their whims.

Yep, you read it right, the Tong of the Black Scorpion. If the title wasn't enough of a giveaway, this is David A McIntee's own sequel to the gothic horror Tom Baker tale The Talons of Weng Chiang, complete with a plot of pluck Magnus Greel out of time before his zygma beam takes him back to Victorian times, and the vicious Mr Sin hacking and slicing his way through everyone around him. Shadow has a lot more violence in it than Talons, most of it being executed by Sin in the last quarter of the tale. I found all the hinting about Sin's presence to be a bit unnecessary; he's on the cover of the book, we know he's in it, why shroud him in secrecy for so long before he actually emerges? I often complain about Dalek stories with the word "Dalek" in the title for waiting until the end of episode one to show one of them; if you're going to blantantly show off your baddies, then waiting for a cliffhanger moment to reveal them isn't so much of a cliffhanger anymore, just an "It's about time," moment. If you follow? Do you?

A lot of fans have said that they want more adventures with the fourth Doctor, Romana and K9, and most figured they would be tacked onto the end of their regular run as the Key To Time series seemed like a pretty sealed set of adventures. Clever of McIntee to "interrupt" the series right in the middle with this tale, then, and for him to make it still fit in with the continuity. He does a bit of his own speculation into the nature of the Key itself and why the tracer would pick up a stream of chronon radiation and mistake it for an actual segment, which makes sense (as far as the series and its continuity goes). What does not make sense, though, is Romana singing in a nightclub as a cover. Being a fan of Star Wars like McIntee I am sure this idea came from one of the old Star Wars comics (#77 I think) where Princess Leia finds herself on stage doing a torch number quite by accident, and even in that instance I thought it was a bad idea. Or maybe McIntee heard Mary Tamm sing at a cabaret at a convention once. Maybe. Anyways, not my favourite part. Nor was my favourite part the inevitible showdown between Mr Sin and K9, but maybe McIntee figured a long confrontation between these two would be predictible.

McIntee loves his history, that much can be seen when reading the full body of his work as he takes the Doctor to China in not just this novel but the previously blogged Eleventh Tiger, to Haiti in White Darkness and to modern day Los Angeles in The King of Terror. It's obvious the man has travelled and wants to inject all of his own observations into his work, and for me sometimes it works, other times it sounds so different that my mind still goes back to the BBC studio versions of the world... which is where this blog is going now...

NEXT EPISODE : THE ANDROIDS OF TARA

The Stones of Blood

The search for the third segment of the Key to Time takes the Doctor and Romana to Earth in present day. The trail leads to a stone circle in the countryside where lately a group of druids have been gathering and pouring blood onto the stones, an act which brings the stones to life. The sacrifices are made in the name of the Celtic goddess the Calleach, but the goddess is anything but divine, and the stones are actually alien creatures called Ogri. And someone out there has gotten hold of the segment the Doctor and Romana are searching for, and they know how to harness its powers for their own evil ends.

This one was fun. It was also a bit creepy whith bloodsucking stones rampaging all over the English countryside. The entire body of the show's location work was done on video, giving the show a uniform look, and several dusk-scenes were used to loan an air of menace to the countryside. The Ogri don't exactly look convincing as they slide around on the ground or when one goes over a cliff into the sea, but other areas of the script cover for this. Romana is tricked to the edge of a cliff by an image of the Doctor, but the viewer never actually sees him through her eyes; all we hear is his voice in a manner reminiscent of one of the missing hikers in The Blair Witch Project. And just to make the Ogri more frightening, one of them absolutely kicks the shit out of K9, leaving him battered and scrapped. It's interesting to note how every so often in a television show one of the main characters gets absolutely demolished and demoralized; KITT from Knight Rider got slammed the odd time to boost ratings, Kira got her ass kicked real good once in Deep Space Nine, even Simon McCorkindale's Manimal was thrashed once, and this time it's K9's turn. Well we can't have the Doctor or Romana brutalized close to death can we? Anyways, they'd just regenerate.

The supporting cast of the adventure is quite small, with most of the work falling to the elderly archaeologist Amelia Rumford. Amelia's got all the makings of a companion in her but it was not meant to be. Interesting thing is, though, later on in years the Big Finish audios would introduce a companion for the sixth Doctor whose attributes would be very similar to Amelia's. Amelia not only steps in to ask the companion questions when Romana is captured and absent for most of part three but she also provides a hint of comic relief while waving her billy club about and demanding that she and the Doctor capture an Ogri in the cause of science. The other character of note is the evil Vivien Fay, also known as the Calleach, or Cessair of Diplos, who is on the run from the Megara justice machines for her crimes on her home world. She's almost a match for the Doctor; she's indeed older then he is but her trouble is she stayed in one place too long and got lazy. 4000 years on Earth with only the Ogri as company would do anyone in. But she's powerful enough to hijack a hyperspace cruiser and even miraculously conjure up a silver wrap to go with her painted skin at the climax of part four.

Oh and while I'm on about the continuity error there, how's about the full on view of a stagehand at the climax of part two while an Ogri runs into the doorway in the basement of DeVries' house. Ah these are the moments we live for, just like the stagehand running off-screen back in The Keys of Marinus.

So three segments down, three to go. Half way done. So why not take a break and look at a couple novels thrown in for fun?

Good, I knew you'd like that.

NEXT EPISODE : THE SHADOW OF WENG CHIANG

The Pirate Planet

The next segment of the Key to Time is apparantly on the planet Calufrax, somewhere the Doctor knows to be a cold wet and unpleasant place. Imagine his surprise though when he and Romana emerge from the TARDIS and find instead a temperate climate, and a bright world full of happy people and lots of mineral wealth. Ruling over this land of plenty is the Captain, a yelling blustering bully of a tyrant who every so often announces that they are about to enter a new age of prosperity, and presto the mines are full of jewels once more. It seems that the Captain's planet, Zanak, is actually hollow and leaps across space and materializes around other worlds, smothering them and mining them dry. The mineral weath goes to the people, and the Captain keeps the compressed remains of the mined planets as a souvenir. But how does the ageing Queen Zanxia come into this? And what of the Mentiads, whose psychic powers increase exponentially with the death of every planet?

The Pirate Planet is a bit of an off-the-wall adventure with extreme characters and a casual disregard for the laws of physics as they apply to relocating entire planets, but when you consider that Douglas Adams wrote the script, all is forgiven. Or indeed praised. Tom Baker's Doctor always flourishes when the script is about having fun, so he does an exceptional job this time, despite that dog bite on his face. Romana's naivety is still very much alive and well, staying calm and aloof when she is arrested by the Captain's guards, and not realizing that she is actually in any danger. And I do like the Captain; a loud scurvy swabs kinda pirate who was disfigured when he crashed on Zanak and was rebuilt with mechanical prosthetics to serve Zanxia in her mad quest for immortality. He's even got a robot parrot named Avatron that kills at his command. Until K9 shoots it out of the air that is. The Pirate Planet is one of those few tales where K9 is actually allowed out of the TARDIS as it lands rather than be left behind until he's called for to come and save people.

The Mentiads are an off semi-zombie army; they're not exactly intimidating from a distance in their bright yellow robes, unless, of course, you think they're Hare Krishnas coming to ask you for money. Clever, though; a psychic gestalt made stronger by absorbing the energy released by in the dying throes of a planet. Misunderstood by the people, they live outside the city (again here's another planet with one city on it, and nothing else) and only come in when they detect another of their number about to emerge. The Captain fears and hates them, doing his best to wipe out new Mentiads before they can join the gestalt and be protected.

And what can we say about poor Mr Fibuli? That's a hell of a name actually. He's the closest thing to a friend that the Captain has aside from his flying buzzard-droid. The buzzard deserved to die, though; it was a horrible CSO effect. Serves it right for picking a fight with K9.

Oh yeah and they find the second segment of the Key to Time. Almost forgot that bit.

NEXT EPISODE : THE STONES OF BLOOD

The Ribos Operation

The Doctor and K9 are called away from their plans for a holiday by the White Guardian and presented with the task of locating and gathering the six segments of the Key to Time. The Key has the power to stop time itself when assembled, and to keep it safe the segments have been scattered across the universe and disguised as other objects. The White Guardian provides the Doctor with an assistant, the Time Lady Romanadvoratrelundar (shortened to Romana), a tracer to locate the segments, and a dire warning to beware the Black Guardian, who also wants the Key to Time for his own purposes. The Doctor reluctantly agrees and the TARDIS takes them to the planet Ribos. The first segment of the Key is actually disguised as a piece of a rare mineral being used by con men Garron and Unstoffe to broker the illegal sale of the planet to the deposed Prince of Levithia, the Graff Vynda Ky. Ribos is a cold primitive world and outsiders are viewed with suspicion and greeted with hostility, but the true danger lies in incuring the wrath of the Graff himself, for if he can't buy the planet, he may just kill for it.

So Jay and I reconvened for this viewing and had a good laugh at just about all of it. In a nice way, of course. For starters there's the matter of Tom Baker's face; just prior to the commencing of the shooting of the season he was bitten on the face by a small dog named George, and despite the best efforts of the makeup ladies at the BBC it's very visible in his close-ups. From farther back it just looks like herpes. And if Tom Baker didn't want an assistant when Louise Jameson joined as Leela he certainly gets to externalize all his reservations this time; the Doctor doesn't want an assiant and from the outset he is rude to Romana. He mocks her credentials from the Academy, scorns her youth and outright laughs at her lack of experience outside of the Capitol. Romana is a bit of a snob, though, and goes about psychoanalsing the Doctor's hostility as a retort. Yes, this is going to be a match made in heaven.

As for the other characters, Jay and I think that everyone on the planet is gay. Garron? Gay. Unstoffe? Gay. The Graff? Gay gay gay gay gay gay gay. All of them. Garron's funny bum-kissing accents and attutudes are just too fey to ignore. Unstoffe looks like he's had a sex change operation. And the Graff is a pampered prince used to getting his way. All the time. Even speaks of himself in the third person and swans about in his fine robes and his oh so fetching tiara/crown/hat. Problem is he is kinda hot. Nice teeth. The Seeker isn't a lesbian though. Binro looks like a homeless perv, despite being the only man on Ribos who can think for himself and thus he endures the scorn of the entire community. I mean imagine telling people that the world is round! How dare he!

Maybe the Shrivenzale is gay too. That'd be the big green lizard thing that Garron and Unstoffe drug every so often to sneak into the scared chambers of the city. Jay didn't see it at first when Romana was walking past it; it looked like a big green couch. A breathing one, mind you. The costume was so poorly realized though that when it is seen "walking" in part four it's obvious that the actor inside is crawling, dragging his back legs behind him, no matter how clever the camera angle. And what do we think of the Graff's guards with those garbage can helmets?

"They're hot," Jay said.

Actually they kinda were.

And K9. We can all see he's too wide to get through the doors of the police box. Showing him inside trying to get out is just reinforcing the fact.

First segment found, though, and five more to go. Will Romana loosen up? Will the Doctor kill her? Will K9 ever fit through those doors?

NEXT EPISODE : THE PIRATE PLANET

The Invasion of Time

The Doctor has come home to Gallifrey, and he's pissed. After a meeting with strange alien beings who guarantee him complete power over the Time Lords, the Doctor goes home to claim his right as president of the High Council of Time Lords. Leela does not know why the Doctor has changed so dramatically, shouting and bullying his fellow Time Lords. K9 is in on it but he's not saying. After the Doctor becomes President he then turns on his own people, selling them out to the warlike Vardans in their quest for power and dominion over all space and now time itself. But the Vardans are just a foil, and lurking in the background are the nefarious Sontarans.

More Time Lord continuity in this one, with the Doctor reopening a technical loophole he used to escape immediate execution back during The Deadly Assassin. Borusa has undergone a regeneration it seems, and the Capitol of Gallifrey has seen some slight redecorating, making for some very tight corridors. The guards' uniforms have been preserved, as have the high-collared robes of office for the rest of the Time Lords. And there's a Time Lady in this one, the only one seen so far in the entire series. Gallifrey's outer wilderness is also explored when Leela is banished from the citadel and makes contact with the outcast Time Lords who have chosen to live off the land as opposed to carrying on in the safety of their contained world; people after the Doctor's own hearts.

The story itself is a good one, with the Doctor acting out a massive subterfuge in order to gain the confidence of the Vardans and then move against them. But like so many other six part stories, the final two episodes are almost a new story in themselves with the Sontarans arriving to take advantage of the situation on Gallifrey. A chase through the TARDIS ensues with the slimy Time Lord Castellan Kelner helping the Sontarans. Unlike previous trips through the inside of the ship, the TARDIS interior this time is made up of a lot of Victorian brickwork with the roundelled walls ending at the console room. The console room itself feels smaller, the lighting coming from the side now instead of from above; not sure if this was intentional or not, but the long shadows on the console room walls make for an interesting effect. The different lighting also makes K9's casing look more metallic than before.

This is also the last adventure for Leela and this model of K9. Leela takes her thing for passive-agressive men even farther and takes Time Lord guard captain Andred as her husband (and I get this feeling he was not consulted), and K9 chooses to stay with her to look after her (like she needs it). The Doctor looks a bit put out by this despite his initial reservations about her as a companion, but all is not lost; he has another model he has secretly constructed in a box just waiting to be used. The season ends with the Doctor grinning into the camera, heading off into the unknown. Is he going to be lonely? The gap between the seasons leaves a lot of room for authors to play with the Doctor and K9 on their own before returning them to the TV series continuity. So far no-one has done this, but anything is possible.

NEXT EPISODE : THE RIBOS OPERATION

Underworld

Even Time Lords screw up. In their history, the Time Lords attempted to raise the people of the planet Minyos to a higher state, and the Minyans welcomed them as gods. And then the Minyans rebelled, kicked the Time Lords out and blew their planet to bits with weapons they developed. The Time Lords settled on Gallifrey and swore to never interfere again, and the survivors of the Minyan race went off in search of their lost colony ship, the P7E and the race bank cylinders it carried. The Doctor, Leela and K9 encounter a Minyan ship on its fabled Quest, and together they discover the P7E at the heart of a newly-formed planet. The systems of the ship have gone mad over the milennia and created a personality with god-like delusions; the Oracle, as it is called, rules over the guards who in turn terrorize and oppress the Trogs, their slave class.

Uh. Okay, the good thoughts first. Time Lord history lesson good. Oh yes. Some more insight into the Doctor's people is always interesting, finally justifying the non-intervention policy that saw the Doctor exiled to Earth in The War Games.

AWFUL effects. Was there no budget for this thing? All the caves of the planet are CSO effects. All the extras hired as Trogs are awful. The supporting cast are bad too. Even the regulars aren't given enough to really make them stand out. Mind you, Louise Jameson does carry a guy, even if he is a skinny one with dirty feet. Good thing it is all done as a CSO though; K9 would never make it through real tunnels.

Every now and again a brilliant series can go wrong. This is one of those times. Rack it up with previous clunkers like The Gunfighters and Day of the Daleks. Still, the comforting thing here is it's been a long time since the show produced anything this terrible. I think that if there was some way to swing a deal with the cosmic powers that be and we could trade four existing episodes in for four of the missing ones from the 60's, Underworld would be the first ones up on the block.

I've got to show this one to Jay. I'll update this listing when I have.

NEXT EPISODE : THE INVASION OF TIME