The Horns of Nimon

Chapter The 141st, is when panto season well and truly arrives.

Plot:

The Minotaur legend but set in Space! How could it fail?!! The planet Aneth is forced by Skonnos, a planet previously the centre of a huge military empire but now long past its prime, to provide regular tribute of seven vestal virgins and seven lumps of a space fuel crystal. These are given to the Nimon, a bull-headed creature living on Skonnos who arrived promising the Skonnon leader Soldeed the regeneration of his world in exchange for these presents. It's a con, of course: the Nimon uses the crystal fuel to create a hyperspace travel system involving artificially created black holes. Using this, the other members of his race can arrive, feed on all the planet's energy (including absorbing the fresh-faced Anethan sacrifices), and then send a single Nimon on to the next world to begin the cycle again.

The old Skonnon ship bringing the final complement of Anethans and crystals breaks down (thanks to being pushed to unsafe speeds by its idiot co-pilot) and starts to fall into the black hole the Nimon is creating near Skonnos. The Doctor, Romana and K9 also get pulled in, and arrive on the Skonnon ship. Here, they meet two young lovers from Aneth: Seth and Teka, who are part of this last delivery. The Doctor uses some of the crystals to power the ship out of the black hole, but is back on the TARDIS without Romana when the co-pilot zooms off to Skonnos without him. He catches up with them on Skonnos, when they're all thrown into the labyrinthine power complex where the Nimon resides. They manage to avoid getting killed (unlike the co-pilot, who is killed by the Nimon in one of the most memorable Doctor Who deaths ever - more on that later). Romana takes a trip using the Nimon transport to the last planet ravaged by the bulls, Crinoth, and pieces together what's going on. With Seth and Teka's help, the TARDIS team defeat the Nimon, and Soldeed gets killed.

Context:

The Discontinuity Guide (an irreverent 1990s paperback Doctor Who episode guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping, which became an absolute bible to me at the time, and has been ever since) finishes its entry on The Horns of Nimon with the statement that the story is "Rather wonderful with some friends and a bottle of wine." I again couldn't tempt the family to watch this, and - though I hate to disagree with the Discontinuity Guide - I don't think it's a good enough watch to invite people over for. I did have some wine, though: a cheeky little Chilean Carménère, from which I sunk a few glasses as I watched the DVD late one Saturday evening. I found that the effects of the wine didn't get me through more than two episodes, though. The story is great in places, but it doesn't go down that smoothly, certainly not as smoothly as the Carménère. I cannot in all conscience recommend watching the final episodes of The Horns of Nimon while you're sobering up!

First time round:

Late 1997; I was living in a studio flat in Worthing, after having moved in with the Better Half the previous year; but, she was away at university and I only had TV to keep me company. Perhaps for this reason, I had expanded the scope of TV on offer to me by getting cable. I specifically wanted a package including UK Gold as they were regularly showing old episodes of Doctor Who at that time and had been for many years, cycling through the colour episodes, and starting at the beginning again once they'd finished. I'd timed it badly, though, as they were mostly showing stories I'd already seen, or previously purchased on VHS, at the point when I got connected. The handful of stories I did manage to see for the first time, and tape for rewatching, of course, were amongst the most weary of stories, with poor reputations which - mostly - on seeing the episodes for the first time, were confirmed. The Horns of Nimon was one such story, and I would have watched it when it was broadcast on a Sunday morning, in a sort-of semi-omnibus format - all the episodes would be shown in one go, without end credits, until the final episode, but the cliffhangers would be maintained by having a commercial break at the point each episode ended (and, if I remember rightly, an extra break in the middle of the final episode). I had to wait until 2003, near the end of the VHS range's life, to get the full experience without adverts, and with end credits and everything.

Reaction:

At the end of episode 2, the midpoint of The Horns of Nimon, the nasty Co-pilot (who reminds me of someone - can't quite put my finger on who right now) is caught in his lies, found out, and killed by the Nimon. He is zapped, rolls around on the floor and groans unconvincingly, then slumps with his backside to camera so the audience can see that his trousers have a massive split in them (this, mind you, is only the second worst wardrobe malfunction of the story). Depending on various factors (including the company and the amount of wine consumed) this can seem funny or it can seem rubbish. I've watched it multiple times over the years, and sometimes it falls one way, sometimes the other. Anticipating the viewing of this moment, it is of course both funny and rubbish simultaneously, and that goes for the whole of the story, until you open the DVD box and put it to the test - Schrödinger's camp! This watch, it fell mostly on the rubbish side, I'm afraid to say. I appreciate that Tom Baker gets to deliver some funny lines, but he also gets some very weary and forced lines - this time (and it would definitely be different watching another time), I wasn't tickled overall.

What's the first most egregious wardrobe malfunction in the story, you ask? The Nimon costumes, of course. And yet, the concept was sound, and even some parts of the design as it ended up. Viewed from the side, the curving of the rear of the head / helmet sweeping far down the back of the performer is really quite striking. Front on, though, and it's just too fat and bulbous, and the detailing is crude - it needed to be much sleeker. The decision to have them all wear platforms means they are already wobbly; adding a top heavy bull's head was asking for trouble, and the only feeling of danger watching comes from the worry that one of them might come a cropper. Other design decisions are similarly mixed: the Skonnons costumes are OTT but in a majestic and operatic fashion, but the Anethans are all dressed in cheap yellow Judo suits. The Skonnon senate room set is magnificent, every other set is drab with the feel of a yellow-and-brown 1970s living room. The spaceship models are shot on video rather than film, and look fake, but the "space tunnel walk" scene where the Doctor, Romana and K9 travel down an extended force-field from TARDIS to ship, is a quiet triumph of the VFX work of the era.

Big does not necessarily mean bad in Doctor Who performances, particularly with villain parts. Understated naturalism is usually not as effective. And Graham Crowden's performance as Soldeed is big and bold and berserk, yes, but it's not quite right. It isn't the precise and controlled excess that Brian Blessed delivers as Yrcanos in Mindwarp, as a comparable example, or that Crowden himself gives a few years after Nimon as Jock in A Very Peculiar Practice - a masterclass in the larger-than life arena, which gives even Blessed a run for his money. When he creeps around the labyrinth calling out "Lord Nimon, Lord Ni-iiiiiii-mon, it is I - Soldeed" only the most serious fan watching wouldn't get at least the flicker of a smile playing across their face. Ditto for his magnificent delivery of "My dreams of CONQUEST" just before he dies. A few seconds later, though, as he slumps down dying, he's also openly corpsing - and this laughter is not in character at all; he has a look on his face that seems to be aimed at the floor manager, questioning whether they are going to go for another take.

The script similarly has material that seems good, material that seems bad, and material that can change from one to another like an unstable waveform. Unlike it's stablemate The Creature from the Pit, which I watched for the blog earlier this year, The Horns of Nimon is not short of plot -  exactly the opposite, in fact. So much time is taken up with uncovering the exposition, gradually filling in the details of the Nimon's cosmic Ponzi scheme, that lots of activity at the end - the Skonnons starting to rebuild their society with Sorak in charge, the Doctor persuading them to give Seth and Teka a ship, Seth and Teka making off towards home - is covered by a couple of lines of dialogue between the Doctor and Romana in the TARDIS right at the end. This rushed and throwaway conclusion is particularly hard of the two Anethans, who deserved a slightly better ending. Janet Ellis, in an early acting role before she became a Blue Peter presenter, is rather good as the young and idealistic naif, and it is a nice running gag to have her unrealistic expectations of Seth blow his minor acts of heroism out of proportion, giving him a reputation he'll spend a life living up to. The script has lots of other great ideas, such as the moving walls of the labyrinth being part of a massive circuit board, but it also contains many longueurs where characters wander around the drab walls of that massive circuit board. All in all, The Horns of Nimon is very like the labyrinth depicted within it: it keeps switching around. Sometimes, it's drab and tatty, sometimes it's incisive and laugh-out-loud funny.

Connectivity: 

They both feature a character that claims to be the last of their race, but they're not telling the truth (Soldeed's Nimon co-conspirator knows it's lying, but Doctor Ten doesn't yet know what the Face of Boe's pronouncements mean).

Deeper Thoughts:

The December Ritual. I've written before here about some of the yearly rituals I indulge in when advent comes around and the days count down towards Christmas. This year, I can add a new ritual to my usual lot. As well as putting up the decorations, reading some Dickens, slamming on the festive playlist, and opening each door on the advent calendar, I have also stopped daily to have a moment of paralysing fear that a far right government is going to be given rein to dismantle the very edifices of civilisation in front of me. What a gift! Yes, the UK is having a general election on the 12th of December, and nobody with any sense can relax and enjoy the season until it's over with. Maybe nobody with any sense will ever be able to relax again, depending on how it goes. Watching The Horns of Nimon, I was particularly drawn to the Co-pilot character. As I said above, he reminds me of someone, being a bumbling guy with a mop of messy blonde hair, who looks like a bit of a joke, but underneath it all is a bully yearning for long past days of power and empire; a person who creates the problems he expects other people to fix, who abandons people in the blink of an eye if they're no longer useful to him, and just lies and lies and lies. Who is it that he can possibly be reminding me of? 

Actually, sod it, that's too subtle, and the time for subtlety is behind us: it's the current UK Prime Minister I'm talking about, Alexander Johnson MP. I will not call him by his usual 'B--is' sobriquet, nor even write it out in full - he is not my, nor anyone's, cuddly chum, he's a ruthless politician who wants us to make him seem less threatening, so he can get away with more of whatever the hell he likes in his entitled way - I will have no part in it. I'd never have thought before this watch that The Horns of Nimon was a political allegory, but it seems to be quite relevant to our times. Just like Soldeed and his deal with the Nimon, the current government in my country have shady characters standing behind them waiting to take advantage - they might seem manageable now, but they are undoubtedly poised, once they get a whiff of what they want, to devour everything that we hold dear. Also, in Brexit, I believe we have - like the people of Skonnos - helped manufacture a black hole that's going to suck in everything for years to come. But what about the positive side of the story, could that be a parable too? Oh yes. The different tribes (Gallifreyans, Anethans, and even Skonnon moderates like Sorak) work together to deny the powers of darkness. There's a lesson there, for sure.

You may think I'm being extreme or histrionic comparing the Conservative party in the UK to the villains and monsters in a Doctor Who story. I admit, it is a little unfair... on the Nimon. I'm not joking. The Nimon, as destructive and amoral as they are, are driven by their life cycle (their "great journey of life" as they put it) and consume to live and multiply; A. Johnson has no need to pursue power except for its own sake, he has no philosophy, it's all a game to him. This has been made clear during the very few times he's allowed himself to be subjected to even the slightest scrutiny in an interview (those that he hasn't managed to swerve), and been presented with the words that he'd previously written as a journalist. These stated, for example, that single mothers (like mine) produce "ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate" kids, or that less well off working mothers (again, like mine) produce kids more likely to "mug you on the street corner". On being presented with these, his reaction is sheer incredulity that anyone would think he took such things seriously. It was just a fun wheeze. And as he was to journalism, now he is to politics. He doesn't care about the misery, hatred and division that his ruthlessness or carelessness - or mix of the two - creates.

Wouldn't it be nice to wake up on Friday the 13th of December, the day after the poll, to see him get the electoral equivalent of being knocked to the floor and having his trousers split? It's still possible. Vote. Don't vote for the Conservatives. And vote tactically. You may not like or trust Corbyn or Swinson or Blackford, but none of them are going to get a majority; their working together, though, ending the policies of the extremist Tories, but denied the numbers to indulge in their own extremes: that might just be the best thing for the country. It's certainly better than the alternative, and that's the most we can hope for now. Don't stop hoping. I'll see you on the other side... 

In Summary:

Tatty / Hilarious.