Nightmare of Eden

Chapter The 217th, is silly but nonetheless somewhat addictive.

Plot:

Near the planet Azure c. 2116, two spaceships crash into each other; the first, a cruise ship called the Empress, was coming out of space warp in a semi-materialised state at the time, and now is stuck enmeshed with the other smaller ship, the Hecate. The Doctor, Romana and K9 arrive on the Empress and find its Captain Rigg arguing with the one-man crew of the Hecate, Dymond, who is keen to be on his way. The Doctor has a plan that will separate the ships, but they need to reach the power unit of the Empress which is blocked by the Hecate cutting across the hull. There are also now aggressive creatures called Mandrels (not Mandrills, though that would have been just as silly) aboard. A zoologist Tryst is travelling on the Empress having finished a long expedition. He's collected specimens, flora and fauna from various planets stored in a prototype Continuous Event Transmuter (CET) machine - essentially an electronic zoo storing the materials on laser crystals. The crash has made the machine unstable, letting the Mandrels (collected from the planet Eden) escape and run amok. The Doctor finds evidence that someone on the Empress is taking a dangerous drug, Vraxoin. Captain Rigg's drink is spiked with some of the drug, and he acts strangely, eventually attacking Romana.

The instability allows the Doctor and Romana to jump into the CET projection of Eden, finding themselves on the small extracted section of the planet where they investigate. They find one of Tryst's expedition party Stott, who was thought lost; he's been collected up in the CET crystal and stuck in there until the crash. Stott is really an undercover agent investigating the Vraxoin smuggling. He shows the Time Lords that he's able to leave the projection at different exit points leading to different areas of the ship; this allows the Doctor and Romana to reach the power unit and instigate the ship separation plan. A Mandrel attacks but is electrocuted and dissolves into powder - the Mandrels themselves are the source of the drug! As the ships separate, the Doctor finds himself on the Hecate, and discovers equipment to receive signals from the CET machine. Tryst and Dymond are the smugglers - Tryst evaded security by storing the Mandrels in the CET, planning to broadcast them to Dymond. On the Empress, the Mandrels are rounded up and put back into the machine. Tryst performs the transfer, and Tryst and Dymond attempt to escape in the Hecate. But the Doctor uses the CET to scoop them up and imprison them. They are pulled out of the projection and arrested.

Context:

On the 20th December 2021, Online Pre-Order Santa bought me an early Christmas present, the Blu-ray box set of season 17, Tom Baker's sixth and penultimate run. This is the tenth release of the range; all the sets lined up on my shelf are now looking like a veritable collection, not just a random few boxes. This set for example plugs into a continuous run of three years and 80 upscaled episodes on Blu-ray that take Doctor Who from the 1970s into the 80s. It's all very exciting. Including the version of Shada completed with animation, I have previously blogged five out of the six stories on this set. To introduce something of a random factor, I flipped a coin. It came up heads, so I proceeded to watch the final remaining one, Nightmare of Eden, for this latest post; it was the story in the set to have new effects, so I watched that enhanced version. This now completes the fourth full season of Doctor Who I have covered bit by bit in random order for the blog over the years. The other three were season 8 (Jon Pertwee's second year), season 23 (Colin Baker's second year, The Trial of a Time Lord) and new series 13 (Flux). I watched the Blu-ray on twelfth night, the decorations all taken down, and a fire crackling away in the living room's hearth. That much was atmospheric, but it was slightly undermined by the Better Half, who was reading a book in the corner of the room and occasionally snarking about the quality of the acting.

A shelf, my house, recently

First Time Round:

I have mentioned this on a blog post before, but Nightmare of Eden is the first Doctor Who story I ever experienced in any way (and it was a very small way). When I was a youngster (this is early December 1979 when the story was first broadcast, so I would have been seven years old), the merest hint of the Doctor Who theme tune would terrify me and send me racing out of a room. As such, the first glimpse was inevitably going to be midway through an episode. My memory is that I looked through a crack in the door into my parents' bedroom, where they had a black and white portable TV, and it was showing a scene of a woman in a billowy dress and a tiny malevolent metal horse scooting about. I was just as scared by this as I was by the theme tune, and ran away again. The images were thereafter etched into my memory by the fear, and later I worked out from that and the rough timing that it was almost certainly a scene from Nightmare of Eden episode three, and the metal horse, K9. I later caught odd glimpses of Full Circle (spider attacking blonde lady's face), Warrior's Gate (Mat Irvine showing off a model explosion on Saturday morning kids' TV) and The Keeper of Traken (curly haired girl looking wistful in a garden) and was not scared by then, but still not interested. Finally, about two years after that first nightmare glimpse of Nightmare, I  watched a full episode and then a full story, and very rapidly I became a fan (more detail of how this came to pass is recounted in the Deeper Thoughts of the Carnival of Monsters blog post from a few years back).

It was many years before I got to see the rest of Nightmare of Eden. For a contract period starting in the summer of 1997, I got a cable package that included the channel UK Gold, and they at the time were showing omnibus editions of Doctor Who on Sunday mornings. I had a lot of the later Tom Baker episodes that were being shown already on VHS, but it did give me a chance to tape and keep a succession of the generally unloved, lower-half of poll positioned stories: The Invasion of Time, The Creature from the Pit, The Horns of Nimon, Nightmare of Eden, and Meglos. None of them were quite as bad as the reputation that preceded them, and Nightmare of Eden was my favourite of the bunch. Maybe the schedulers of the VHS range agreed on that last point, as it was the first of the five to be subsequently released on tape, less than 18 months later. So it was that in January 1999, I got to see the story in full with the beginning and end credits in place.   

Reaction:

The box set including Nightmare of Eden does a great deal to improve the reputation of season 17, perhaps one of the most unloved in Doctor Who's history (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more details of the set). The season did have a lot of issues stacked up against it, and it's worth listing them to give context: the budget was in real terms reportedly one of the lowest ever given to a run of Doctor Who; the main star of the show, though no doubt a genius in his own way, was becoming more and more difficult to work with; the new script editor, though no doubt a genius in his own way, was unqualified and not a good fit for the role; industrial action was a potential issue that could, ahem, strike at any time, and Doctor Who was still a difficult show to find sympathetic writers for, so scripts would often fall through or need major reworking at short notice. In order to make an impact across the year, producer Graham Williams put a bit more budget allocation into the Dalek opener, and a reasonable amount more into the foreign jaunt and Cambridge-based finale. This left the middle three episodes with less, Nightmare of Eden particularly: it has no location work, and the model effects are on video rather than film. The other two of those middle 'poor relation' stories have at least one input from a very talented individual to salvage a bit of pride; The Horns of Nimon has some fantastic costume design by the peerless June Hudson, The Creature from the Pit has good direction from seasoned pro Christopher Barry. Costume design and direction on Nightmare of Eden were not so lucky.

The Better Half's snark about the quality of the acting is maybe justifiable; there's a lot of shall we say 'large' performances; never large enough to reach, say, Graham Crowden's operatic silliness in The Horns of Nimon (Lewis Fiander comes closest with his outrageous comedy scientist accent) but sufficient to stand out in the wrong way. There are various moments where another take was needed (a character calling someone by the wrong name slips through, for example, and different members of the cast pronounce "Hecate" differently). Some of the cast are playing it relatively straight, but a good few are pitching it at the level of a children's comedy skit. I don't think the actors are to blame in this instance, though. I've always seen such inconsistency as a symptom of less than adequate direction; I may have been wrong about that on previous occasions, but there's a weight of evidence to confirm it to be the case here. The special features on the disc consistently speak of an unhappy production with members of cast and crew severely at odds with the director Alan Bromly (some of the crew had T-Shirts printed at the end of the shoot to commemorate surviving this particular Nightmare, that's how bad it got). Bromly wasn't around to give his side of the story (he passed away before Nightmare of Eden was even released on VHS) but its on record that he resigned midway through his work, leaving the producer to finish the taping and post production. He can't have been all that happy either.

Another infamous aspect of the production is the Mandrel costumes, but they aren't that bad at all (apart from a visible zip in some shots, they are a perfectly reasonable design), the issue is with how they are performed, lit and shot - there's one scene of a single Mandrel emerging from the mist where it looks perfect. Unfortunately, key sequences require the Mandrels to be on the over-lit spaceship corridor sets. All the other costumes are terrible no matter how one might light them: Romana is in a maternity dress, and every other outfit has been put together based on the principle that futuristic = glitter and sequins. The Eden jungle sets are okay, better than the drab spaceship sets. There are occasionally some nice trippy visuals as characters move around in the unstable areas of the ships, and the effects sequence of the Mandrel dissolving into powder is nicely done. Visually it's not a complete failure, but it is one of the worst looking stories of the period (and that's saying something, as failures of production design were more common during Graham Williams's tenure, alas).   

 

Underneath this gaudy upper layer, though, is a very solid script. As with every story in the season, it's full of great ideas and comic lines ("Of course we should interfere, always do what you're best at", "I don't work for anyone, I'm just having fun", "Just in the same way a jam maker conserves raspberries", etc. etc.). Unfortunately, like most of the stories, the execution leaves something to be desired. The quality of the ideas is unsurprising given that the author is recently departed and already much missed Bob Baker and the script editor is the long departed and still much missed Douglas Adams. Baker's previous scripts for Doctor Who with writing partner Dave Martin, and Douglas Adams' work for the show and elsewhere, were ever brimming with big concepts; here, there's the two ships being stuck, crashed neatly into one another because of  hyperspace materialisation - a clever extrapolation from a popular sci-fi concept of the time; the CET machine, a miniaturised digital zoo; and, a race of creatures that turn into narcotics when they are electrocuted. Best of all, there is the instability of the projected image of the CET machine which allows great moments like Romana watching the recording of the planet Eden and seeing eyes in the forest staring back at her; the end of episode two also - the Doctor and Romana jump into the projected image and find themselves in another world; it's a great turn of the story, and one of those episode endings that has the audience wondering where the narrative is going next. These are all fun and typically envelope-pushing ideas of Who stories of this vintage; what's unique about this story is that at heart it has a very serious intent.

Should they have gone there? The drug smuggling story, and the scenes of characters having taken drugs, are still quite shocking to watch even now, as Doctor Who has never really done anything like it before or since. It arguably had to be an over-simplification of the issues to be told in a subplot of 100 minutes of kid-friendly TV, but it nonetheless is breaking new ground and so shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. Some of the story's best moments arise from this theme. Whatever you think of the pitch at which he starts his performance, the way David Daker (as Captain Rigg) modulates it once he comes under the influence of Vraxoin creates some great scenes, both darkly comic (Rigg laughing as he watches the passengers being slaughtered) to raw and terrifying (Rigg suffering from withdrawal and attacking Romana). There's also the magnificent moment at the end where Tryst tries to justify his crimes to the Doctor, who coldly rejects him with a "Go away". I'm sympathetic to the argument that a serious issue is cheapened by being part of a presentation that elsewhere looks so unserious; but, if Nightmare of Eden had been presented with more realism and restraint, it would almost certainly have turned out to be unsuitable for a family audience. Imagine the scene between Rigg and Romana being played out with totally naturalistic performances on a moodily lit spaceship set with nobody wearing any glittery light-entertainment gear. It would have been traumatising. Maybe two wrongs do sometimes make a right.

 

Connectivity: 

Both Nightmare of Eden and Flux feature spaceships crashing together, unstable areas of space-time and characters able to move in and out of a projected moving image. Flux contained lots and lots of elements from Doctor Who's history, but it couldn't find room to include any Mandrels, alas.

Deeper Thoughts:

Galactic Salvage Insurance Report: Doctor Who: The Collection - Season 17 Blu-ray box set overview. But for being stuck at home in self-isolation after testing positive for Covid, I would have had a nice write-up of the BFI screening of City of Death in December 2021 that may have been of interest to anyone reading (Hi Mum!). As it was, I heard that those that could make use of their booking were well entertained, and that the main interviewee Julian Glover was interesting and funny. It was a shame to miss him in particular, as Glover doesn't have much of a presence on these Blu-rays; his contributions to discussions of City of Death are restricted to material that appeared previously on the DVD that have been ported over to this set. Focus on this run is usually centred on its second story as it is one of the best of Who's history and was the first to film outside the UK; the Dalek story is a distant second place, and the remaining ones are best not dwelt upon at all - except maybe the finale Shada, but that's usually seen as its own thing in a space elsewhere somewhat removed; it was technically not part of the season having been scuppered by a strike and so never finished or broadcast. The semi-animated Shada, previously available as a feature length omnibus version, is presented here in what's called "The Definitive Version", as full episodes with cliffhanger endings for the first time. This extension of the season from 20 to 26 episodes, as well as restoration throughout, makes a big difference. Suddenly, this is the season as originally intended; taken as a whole, the deficiencies of certain episodes (as there always are in any season of Doctor Who) balance out. In summary, this latest watch is the most I've enjoyed this run of stories. 

Just based on the restoration, an episodic Shada and the new digital effects in Nightmare of Eden (which are really good and improve a thousandfold the crucial scenes of ships in space, as well as smaller moments like the insect that flies out of the Eden projection, and various laser blasts), I'd recommend buying this set. If you haven't got it already, it is still available in limited edition packaging at the time of writing (usually these sets sell out - I told you it was unloved!), but it will be available in standard packaging too soon, the window between the different versions of these releases seems to be shortening. In terms of Special Features, there isn't one major one that stands out as a reason to buy in the same way that, say, the John-Nathan Turner biography Showman or the Terrance Dicks tribute Terrance and Me and Me did for their respective sets. Instead of one big Christmas present, there are a lot of enjoyable stocking fillers. There's a long documentary in tribute to Douglas Adams's life and career; it doesn't break any new ground, but it's nice to have it, particularly some of the archive footage of Douglas. It's funny that most people interviewed focus on Adams's impact on them in person rather than through his work (he was an arch procrastinator, so the work is by far in the minority); it falls to Richard Dawkins to be the fanboy, quoting some of his favourite parts of Adams's books. It's also interesting to know that his successor as Doctor Who script editor Christopher Bidmead was a friend, as Bidmead seems to have spent the years since and to date criticising Adams's approach in the role.

Davros in the specially made trailer for the set

Other long features include a comprehensive discussion with Lalla Ward on season 17; this is taken from an interview from 2007, some of which has been used in other featurettes on the set, but most of which has not been seen before; there's also a separate long chat with Tom Baker setting the world to rights (but not really touching on anything as boring as season 17's stories); similarly, there's a 40-minute tour de force convention appearance by Tom recorded in 1997 where he avoids the subject of Doctor Who altogether and is all the more entertaining for it. Best of the longer new pieces is Matthew Sweet's latest In Conversation interview, this time with Bob Baker. It wasn't intended to be so, but it acts as a commemoration, Baker having died in November 2021 between the interview being recorded and the box set coming out. He is an engaging and frank interviewee throughout, and there's a staged moment accompanying the end credits that's very sweet. As usual, there is a Behind the Sofa for each of the stories (including Shada), where selected Doctor Who luminaries watch and comment entertainingly on sections of the action a la Gogglebox; here, the viewing teams are Katy Manning and Nicola Bryant, Colin Baker and Matthew Waterhouse, and Mat Irvine, June Hudson and Graeme Harper. The two best documentaries for me, though, are not new, a couple of pre-existing authored docs that previously appeared on DVDs: Paris in the Springtime (the Making of City of Death) and A Matter of Time (an overview of Graham Williams's producer-ship); I'd not seen either of these for a good while, and they are very enjoyable.

The late, great Bob Baker (pictured with Matthew Sweet and a couple of other friends)

There's plenty of archive clips included also: a Swap Shop, an Ask Aspel, a couple of Wogans, lots of Blue Peter clips from 1979 (featuring the somewhat forgotten line-up of Simon Groom, Christopher Wenner and Tina Heath). There's also commentaries old and new, information text and lots of other bits and bobs. More than enough to occupy even the most obsessive fan for months; I should know, as I am such a fan, and I'm still working through it (and still have a few things left to watch from the last release, season 24, too).

In Summary:

The script is not quite paradise, but it's pretty good; the execution, though, is a nightmare.

Destiny of the Daleks

Chapter The 183rd, where robots from the last days of Disco meet the Daleks and their creator; that actually sounds fun, but it isn't somehow.

Plot:

The Doctor and a newly - and sillily - regenerated Romana arrive on Skaro. They leave K9 in the TARDIS as the robot dog has - sillily - developed laryngitis. A spaceship lands nearby crewed by a bunch of silver disco robots called the Movellans. The Doctor and Romana don't realise they are robots at first even though it's blindingly obvious. They are silly. Anyway, the Daleks are back on their ancestral planet using enslaved humanoids from various parts of the galaxy to mine for something. They are using slaves even though they could do it much quicker themselves. This might be because they have, somehow, become coldly logical robot creatures exactly like they haven't been previously; but, they are manifestly rubbish at being logical. From his previous visit to the Kaled city, the Doctor remembers a short cut to what he thinks the Daleks are after: Davros. The Daleks' creator has been abandoned but kept alive by suspended animation technology in his chair for the centuries since the original Daleks thought they had killed him. This has clearly affected him a bit, as his voice is different and his face has changed so it looks like a mask that doesn't quite fit properly. Funny that.

The Daleks need Davros to help in their war with the Movellans, which is at an impasse because the fleets and battle computers of both sides are too logical to make any offensive move. The Doctor gets the slaves freed in exchange for letting the Daleks have Davros, then makes a break for it. With the help of the freed slaves, the Doctor and Romana defeat the Movellans (the robots have some serious design flaws). Davros's Daleks, each with multiple bombs attached for a suicide attack, approach the Movellan ship, but the Doctor goes back to the Kaled city and finds Davros, and uses Davros's remote control to blow the Daleks up before they do any harm. Davros is imprisoned to be taken off for trial. The freed slaves commandeer the Movellan ship, and the Doctor and Romana continue their wanderings through time and space in the TARDIS.

Context:

Watching the four episodes of Destiny of the Daleks from the DVD for the blog, I was not transported back to 1979 but to almost a decade later and the dark autumn weekday evenings of the late 1980s. The reason for this is that, despite its featuring what would seem to be the popular draw of Tom Baker with Daleks, I could not interest any of the family in watching with me. I had to find time when everyone else was out of the living room to catch up with each episode on my own. It was very reminiscent of how I watched every Sylvester McCoy episode in the 1980s when my family of that time were similarly not interested, somewhat furtively and definitely alone.

First Time Round:

I first saw this story from the VHS, which was released in early July 1994. This was around the time I graduated from university in Durham. I'd got my results and then stayed around, with all my stuff packed up, in a college room for a week or so between the end of term and the ceremony, which was held shortly after everyone else had gone home. It was an odd time as a graduand having nothing to do for a brief pause, except arrange the hire an expensive robe and hat and wait for another phase of one's life to begin. As such, I'm pretty sure I didn't buy and watch the story until I was back home in Worthing a little later. The one memory I have of watching it is not a memory at all but a lack thereof. Either I was tired or I'd had a little too much shandy while watching, or - just maybe - the story itself contributed in some way to this effect by numbing my brain - but I watched it, thought 'yeah, okay', then the next day could not remember how it ended, specifically regarding the fate of Davros. Had he appeared again for a resolution scene at the end? All I could remember was a blur of wonky Daleks with garlands of bombs round their domes squawking and blowing up. I had to fast forward to watch the last few minutes again, for which I had previously zoned out.

A clearer memory was my first reading of the novelisation. For some reason, a friend of mine, Andrew, invited me to meet him in Portsmouth for a day out. We went there a couple of times, as I remember, and this visit must have been sometime in the spring or 1988; I recall seeing a poster advertising Morrissey's first solo album Viva Hate when we went to the shops there. I travelled on the train to meet him, and read the Destiny of the Daleks novelisation on the way. The trip there and back was sufficient time to complete the slim volume. Both of us lived in Worthing at the time, so I've no idea why we went all that way and why we didn't travel over together. Perhaps he was staying with family for a visit and wanted an excuse to get out of their house for a while. That would fit. I don't want to get too Marcel Proust about it, but aside from Terrance Dicks's prose, I can only remember fleeting impressions: that Morrissey poster, Strawberry Switchblade playing at a funfair on a green by the seafront, and my buying and eating a roast almond Yorkie. They don't make the almond version of this UK chocolate bar anymore, and it was a favourite of mine at the time. Anyway, the book was much more exciting to read than the screen version was to watch years later. 

Reaction:

If I had to summarise Destiny of the Daleks in a word, I'd be torn between a choice of two: 'tatty' or 'threadbare'. I'm not talking about the production design though, I'm talking about the script. Some of the production design doesn't help, that's definitely true. Where they are saving money by reusing old elements, it shows: the original Davros mask from Genesis of the Daleks four years earlier is showing signs of wear and tear; it also doesn't fit actor David Gooderson, replacing the original Davros actor Michael Wisher who proved unavailable for the recording of Destiny. The Dalek props too are aged and could do with refurbishment. The Movellans are well turned out, though; whatever you think of the choices involved for hair and outfit, which look they might have been made for some high concept Hot Gossip routine, they are done to a high level of quality. The Movellan ship set too is gorgeous. The sets for the Kaled city on the other hand look like the money had run out; perhaps it had all been spent hiring the Steadicam, used here for the first time on a Doctor Who, giving us a few stand-out gliding shots. Even the more conventionally filmed location sequences are excellent, though, with Winspit quarry in Dorset being well used to give some interesting landscapes. The hit rate of the look and feel then is about on a par with any other story of the period. The script though...

Whoever was responsible for the story that ended up on screen (see Deeper Thoughts for more details), it contains much that doesn't work. The central conceit that the Daleks and the Movellans have reached a logical stalemate, each side anticipating the other's every move and therefore locked into immobility, is an interesting one, but is a bad fit for Daleks. They aren't emotionless robots, and have never before been characterised as such. It's heavily implied that they are no longer organic creatures in protective shells, but have dispensed with the organic component altogether. The Doctor and Romana both refer to them as being robots, which is just not the case before or since this story. Even if one accepts this is somehow true, or at least metaphorical (they have got so used to their way of operating that they act like robots, say), I'm still not sure that the stalemate idea hangs together. Couldn't one side or the other just use a random number generator subroutine to choose what to do? How would the other side anticipate that? The scene where the Doctor, Romana and the Movellans play Scissors Paper Stone to demonstrate the difference between machine and human intelligence is cute (goes on a bit, though), but doesn't really make sense. The game involves making a random choice between three options, with no factors to dictate any particular order to favour one of the three options over the others, so there's no reason for a machine to play them in the same order as another machine.

The script also has problems of logic, and lack of follow through typical of other Nation stories. In one episode, the Daleks find the concept of self-sacrifice so illogical as to be unbelievable, in the next episode, a platoon of them have been easily persuaded to strap bombs onto themselves and do a kamikaze run at the Movellan spaceship. In the first episode, it's established as vital that the Doctor and Romana take regular does of anti-radiation drugs, and the Doctor sets a timer for when they'll need the next dose. By the time the timer goes off, they have been separated. The Doctor takes his pills, but can't give any to Romana who by that time has been captured. Romana shows signs of being ill and swoons. But the faint is a feint: Romana's just pretending to be dead as part of an escape plan. She's successful, and meets up again with the Doctor. He doesn't give her any drugs, she's perfectly fine anyway, and it's never mentioned again. Sure, I can tell myself they must have taken the necessary medicine later off screen at some point, but that's a hell of a cop out. The fuss about the levels of radiation set up at the beginning also begs the question of who's giving tablets to all the Daleks' slaves, either before or after they're freed? Why do the Daleks need the captured humans at all, except to provide the Doctor with a rebel fighting force later? It can't be a logical decision; as Romana points out, they'd do the job a lot quicker with machinery. So they're doing it out of spite? If so, how does that stack up with them as robotic slaves to logic? 

Even scripts with lots of plot holes can have exciting action moments. Here, though, Destiny also fails to deliver. The Daleks are portrayed too often as weak. The Doctor jokes about them not being able to climb, he puts his hat over one Dalek's eye stalk and it has a hissy fit. The pepperpots talk a good game, endlessly chanting their repetitive slogans, but there's hardly any extermination. They only kill one character in battle, and a couple more prisoners are lined up and zapped. Davros is literally pushed around by various characters. As he is essentially a wheelchair user, the optics of this did not look so good to me on this latest watch. I know he's evil and all, but he should be allowed to be in charge of his own propulsion. The Movellans are a bit of a pushover too; you just remove their easily accessible power source and they do a bit of community theatre spaced-out hands in the air acting, and then kark it. Peasy. Again, one wonders where a non-robot race could place its most vulnerable point that would be more illogical than the super logical Movellans managed. None of these flaws on its own is that big a deal, but they mound up until they blot out the light of anything good. If there was a bit more pace then maybe one would not have time to think about it: take out an episode's worth of padding and tighten it up a bit, and switch your brain off, and a three-parter Destiny of the Daleks would be an engaging enough, though superficial, season opener.

Connectivity: 

Both stories that open a new season of Doctor Who and feature an alien race landing on a fairly barren celestial body in order to search for someone. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Adams Nation Damnations! In the Deeper Thoughts last time on Russell T Davies, Douglas Adams and Terry Nation were a couple of the contenders I considered but discarded as competition for Davies's crown as the biggest TV writer ever to work on Doctor Who. Destiny of the Daleks was the only time they worked together (in the loosest sense of the term as we shall discover), Douglas Adams as Script Editor, Terry Nation as writer. Well, maybe Nation wasn't the writer, even though he was credited as such. Adams later claimed that Nation did not deliver full scripts for any of the episodes, just what amounted to storyline notes, and Adams himself had to write the lion's share of the story. It's difficult to know how much this is true. Director Ken Grieve backed up Adams's version of events, putting the amount contributed by Adams at 98%; it is also not the first time in Doctor Who's history that the criticism had been raised of Nation's work needing heavy rewriting. Adams's reported woes are consistent with, if a bit more extreme than, those of a few script editors on Doctor Who working with Nation before. It seems unlikely though that the BBC would have had to pay Nation had he not produced actual screenplays for all four episodes, though they would likely still have paid him if they were slim and under-running. It's likely that some exaggeration has crept in to the telling of the anecdotes in the years since.

It's definitely on record that Nation's scripts came in late. The production team wanted to start the season that year with a Dalek story, the metal meanies' return with a bang after four whole seasons without them. Nation had agreed as long as he was able to write it, but he wasn't available to do this such that the story could be recorded first that year. It was dropped to third slot in the production order, making it a tight turnaround to get the episodes made in time for broadcast. When Nation's scripts came in later than expected even on that schedule, it must have necessitated that the in-house script editor had to do any rewrites rapidly rather than everyone wait for the back and forth of Adams' teasing the necessary changes from Nation's pen. It's definitely clear that Adams contributed some material. There is a sequence where the Doctor is reading a book on the origins of the universe by Oolon Colluphid, a reference to an established minor character from Hitch Hiker that can only have been put in by Douglas. Additionally, there's the sequence at the beginning where Romana regenerates. This is of course a standard thing for a script editor to do, writing the sections necessitated by cast changes in the wider production, unconnected to the story of the week provided by the commissioned author.

The sequence at the start of episode one annoyed lots of purist fans at the time, and probably has annoyed more such fans since and to this very day. Without being too po-faced about it, I do think these people might have something of a point. It takes what was one of the most dramatic and significant devices in the history of the show - regeneration, meaning the change of one lead actor for another, a significant and rare event in the show's history - and uses it for a throwaway comedy five minutes. Romana has been recast and this is played out as if the wearing of bodies for Time Lords is like the wearing of clothes for us mere mortals. If it was side-splittingly funny, it might be worth it, but it's smile humour at most, somewhat witty and whimsical but overlong. Crucially, it seems padded out. Other moments that one suspects could have been contributed by Adams are similarly drawn out and not that funny. He could have been having an off day, but - if Adams really did contribute 98% of this material -  I'd expect it to be a lot funnier and much more interesting.

Lots of the material, as mentioned when talking about the story above, is standard Terry Nation serial peril-to-peril plot, without any effort towards surrounding coherence or escalation. There's slaves, and radiation poisoning, and countdowns, and planet destroying bombs; all these crop up again and again in Nations's work, but seem too humdrum to be things that would preoccupy Adams's psyche. Then again, if Nation had written the basic storyline, one wouldn't have thought he'd base it on his creations being robots, nor continually refer to them as such, as he should know if anyone should that they aren't. Even the reason why K9 doesn't appear is contentious and up for interpretation; depending on who you ask, either it was because Nation didn't want the K9 to upstage his creations (which suggests that he was shaping the story as author), or that the production team believed use of the K9 prop would be a nightmare in the quarry location (suggesting that the script editor was dictating elements that could be used for practical reasons).

The final point that suggests Adams contributed a lot to the episodes is that Nation was reportedly aghast at what ended up on screen. I say 'reportedly', as I've seen it relayed as fact in many reputable sources, but I don't believe I've ever seen a direct quote from Nation to back it up. It's true that after his contribution to the 1979/1980 series, Nation didn't work on Doctor Who again, but the same is true of Douglas Adams. They both moved on to bigger and more lucrative things that would take both men eventually, separately, to the USA. If Nation's last Who script never reached the screen as he intended it, neither did Adams's (see the blog post on Shada for more details). And both men died in California after an insufficiently long innings (Nation was 66 years old at the time of his death, and Adams a heart-breakingly young 49). It's almost 20 years since Douglas's untimely death (the anniversary of that sad occasion will be the 11th May this year) and at the time of my writing this it's but a few days to the 24th anniversary of Nation's death (9th March). It doesn't therefore matter therefore exactly what part of the story was written by whom. Both writers contributed greatly to Doctor Who during its history, and I'd be tempted to watch a story by each to celebrate their contributions on those milestone dates. I just won't ever pick Destiny of the Daleks for either of them, that's all. 

In Summary:

Tatty script with some threadbare (and, to be fair, some good) visuals.

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.

The Creature from the Pit

Chapter The 121st, which contains scenes that some viewers may find inadvertently naughty.

Plot:

Answering a distress call, the Doctor, Romana and K9 arrive on the planet Nominative Determinism (Chloris), which is abundant in greenery, but has very little metal. The cruel Lady Adrasta owns the only mine, all worked out now but still useful to house the giant creature to which she occasionally feeds her enemies. After the Doctor recklessly jumps into the pit to investigate the creature, having some intimate but fruitless attempts to communicate with it, Adrasta captures Romana and K9. She wants to kill the creature, but hasn't had the necessary firepower until K9 arrived. By threatening Romana's life, she gets K9 to agree, and they all venture into the underground tunnels, bumping into the Doctor. Before Adrasta can harm it, the creature regains its translation device and explains that it is Erato, an ambassador from the planet Tythonus. Erato came to the planet fifteen years earlier to negotiate a trade deal - their metal for Chloris' chlorophyll - but had the bad luck to run into Adrasta, who imprisoned it rather than risk losing her monopoly. Erato kills Adrasta and then seems to be in a hurry to leave the planet. It turns out that Erato's distress call has provoked the Tythonians to fire a neutron star at Chloris to destroy the planet rather than saving Erato (tip: don't work for the Foreign Office of Tythonus, they're a bit lax with the old duty of care to employees). Anyway, the Doctor and Erato work together to stop the star, and everyone lives happily ever after.

Context:

It took a month to watch and write up the last story for the blog, so I was hoping next for something short that zipped along. Alas, the random number generator decided upon The Creature from the Pit: not that short, and certainly not very pacey. I decided not to try involving the Better Half or kids this time, and watched the DVD by myself, an episode per evening, across the four working days after the Easter Bank Holiday Monday. It wasn't too difficult to get through in 25 minute chunks, but it can hardly be said to depict the most urgent of action.  One's mind could very easily wander...

...so, talking of randomising: it occurred to me watching this story after having recently watched The Leisure Hive disc of the Tom Baker Season 18 Blu-ray box set (which I'm finding even more hard-going than The Creature from the Pit - more on that later), that the randomiser was a very pointless addition to Doctor Who lore. Introduced at the end of season 17, this TARDIS plug-in was supposed to bring the erratic nature back into the Doctor's wanderings, and to stop his enemies from being able to follow him. But, by my count, it's used only twice, and in both cases it takes him to somewhere he's been before: Skaro (in Destiny of the Daleks) and Earth (in City of Death). Elsewhere during that latter story, the Doctor overrides it to visit Leonardo. In The Creature from the Pit, he overrides it to answer a distress call. In the next two stories, he happens to be nearby and gets sucked into the action anyway. In the season finale, Shada, had it been finished and transmitted, he'd have been seen to override it to answer a call from Professor Chronotis. At the start of the next season's opening story, the previously mentioned The Leisure Hive, he overrides it to go on a holiday; and, at the end of that same story, he gives the thing away. What was the point? (The Creature from the Pit may not have fully engaged me, I fear, if this sort of trivia was taxing my brain.)

First-time round:

This is one of only a handful of Doctor Who stories that I saw for the first time as a repeat on UK Gold sometime around 1997. UK Gold, known just as Gold now, is a UK pay television channel, which for a lot of fans was their key way of consuming - and recording for keeps - vintage Who stories during the period of time when Doctor Who was off the air as a going concern. It wasn't that way for me. Stories from 1982 onwards, when I became a fan, I saw as they were broadcast on BBC1. The stories before that, I mostly caught up with when the VHS releases came out. If you weren't lucky or flush enough to have collected them all, though, and particularly after BBC video discontinued loads of titles for no good reason in 1996, UK Gold was always there - showing Doctor Who weekly (or sometimes more frequently) from 1992 to 2007.

I got cable during the 1990s, and UK Gold came with my channels package. The memory's a bit sketchy, and I've long since got rid of the recordings, but I believe the first story that was shown after I was connected up - in omnibus format on a Sunday, as I recall - was new to me: The Invasion of Time. I had timed things poorly to get much more out of UK Gold's schedules, though. They'd already shown most of the earlier ones I hadn't seen, and weren't very far off those 1982 episodes, after which nothing would be a surprise. The Invasion of Time was followed by six weeks of showing all the Key to Time stories, which I'd already seen by then (well, nearly all of them - the final story was pulled on the weekend of Princess Diana's death, as its narrative features a princess in jeopardy; a bit of an overreaction, but it helps me to date this to Summer 1997). By my reckoning, I only managed to tape four more previously unseen stories before I decided not to renew the cable subscription, and they were The Creature from the Pit, Nightmare of Eden, The Horns of Nimon, and Meglos, plus The Invasion of Time: five of the least popular stories in the history of Doctor Who. Oh Well.

Reaction:

When you're the kind of obsessive like what I am, and you've watched all the episodes of Doctor Who several times, a title alone can bring up a host of preconceptions about a story. I thought it might be worth examining these in this case; so, before pressing play on episode 1, I scribbled down the following about The Creature from the Pit:

• Giant green duvet with a cock
• Nice to have a female villain and henchwoman
• Geoffrey Bayldon's good in it
• Tatty

All told, my impression was that this was the last exhausted twitch of an era coming to an end, being part as it is of producer Graham Williams' final year; they'd spent a lot of money and energy on the opening two stories (the one with Daleks, the one with overseas location filming), were saving a bit of money and energy for the finale, which alas was destined never to be finished. That left the remaining three stories feeling a bit lacklustre, with The Creature from the Pit the shabbiest of the lot. After watching the story, would I still feel the same?

Taking the points above in order then, and starting with the creature: it does most definitely look like a giant green duvet with a cock, there's no getting away from it. In its first appearances, in episode 2, it stalks around preceded by a substantial member. According to comments made by Tom Baker, this caused hilarity / panic in the studio gallery, and the prop was altered: in its appearances in episode 3, it has two cocks. They're smaller, but no less phallic, and it doesn't help that the action requires the Doctor to fondle and blow into them. By the final episode, all appendages are gone, but the damage is done. It's impossible by then to take Erato - in erect or castrated form - seriously, which is a shame as the script towards the end attempts to make this alien character somewhat more complex than usual. They might have been on to a loser anyway, even if the creature had been a giant green inflatable sans nob - the story they'd attempted the previous year with a giant green alien (The Power of Kroll) highlighted the problems of trying to have characters interact realistically with something of a vastly different scale; they should have learnt those lessons and not tried something so similar again.

It is indeed good to have a female villain and henchwoman. One of Graham Williams's strengths was that the stories made during his regime involved a wider range of decent roles for women; it wasn't too high a hurdle, though - eras before his would regularly see entire male guest casts with only the regular companion actor representing 51% of the world's population. Myra Frances gets a panto villain to play, and doesn't hold back. Better still is Eileen Way's sadistic underling Karela, who gets to shiv one of the cuddly bandits. But, aside from being there to elicit boos and hisses, what do the two of them achieve exactly? Not a great deal, and they're not alone in that. The bandits themselves deliver a few comedic lines, and are used at one point to move a prop into play, but other than that they serve no plot function. Geoffrey Bayldon is good in it delivering funny dialogue, but you could lift his character out of the narrative and not affect it one jot.

Finally, we come to the tattiness or otherwise of The Creature from the Pit. In this, my pre-watch impression was the least fair: the jungle sets and costumes are impressive, and the lighting in the underground sequences is sensitively handled. This wasn't the last gasp of the old regime - this story was the first one to be filmed of the season, so the energy and money hadn't run out. It's not the visuals that are tatty, it's the script; The Creature from the Pit has got story enough only for one episode spread across four, with random unconnected characters and a bit of humour thrown in to pad things out. This has little to do with budget -  story beats don't cost very much. So what went wrong? It's only a guess, but author David Fisher famously was having a domestic crisis around this time, which prevented him finishing the scripts for his other commission of the year (which ended up after a Williams and Adams rewrite as City of Death). Perhaps this had an impact on The Creature from the Pit's plotting too.

Connectivity: 

Both The Creature from the Pit and Claws of Axos are 1970s four parters where the Doctor travels underground to communicate with blobby alien lifeforms that are not all they seem.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Hobgoblin of Little Minds, and all that. As mentioned above and in recent blog posts passim, I have bought the Season 18 Blu-Ray box set, which I'm struggling through very slowly. The set contains Tom Baker's last seven stories, and a lot of people think they're the bee's knees. I wouldn't go that far, but certainly think they're watchable. For some reason, though, it's been a slog this time. It might be that the stories' very consistency - a quality aimed for by incoming producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Christoper Hamilton Bidmead, and supported by Barry Letts returning to the show as exec producer - is the barrier, particularly when watching all of them together in one block. It's easy to see why those three gentlemen thought things had to change. They had the same feeling of the previous era of Who as I had going in, that it was tired and tatty. As I said above, though, this might have been at best an exaggerated impression. If, as I propose, the only real problem with Creature from the Pit was plotting rather than tone or visual production values, could some of the the work done to distance season 18 from its precedents be said to be an overreaction? Was the baby thrown out with the bath water? Should, perhaps, Doctor Who not be consistent at all?

Clearly some of the changes made were successful. The new theme tune and credits sequence are welcome sprucings up (the previous style of titles was seven years old, the theme arrangement older than that, so it was overdue). It was also a good idea to not chop and change the costume designer every story and instead have one team working on the whole year, particularly as the person to lead that team was the operatically eccentric genius that is June Hudson. But, when the changes are less about the cosmetic and more about the scripting, they're not so convincing. Bidmead's focus on technology and science, leads - possibly unconsciously but nonetheless consistently - to a set of stories where civilisations or groups are stuck in some form of stasis, often caused by reliance on faith or belief, which requires a technological or scientific solution. There's a tendency - perhaps to leaven the harder science - to favour a poetic manner of storytelling too. This does not make for the most dynamic stories, but does create lots of opportunities for bearded men to sit about talking in spaceships that won't fly.

The approach also ended up having an impact on tone. The show that had long sampled the look and feel of other media to provide differing textures, story to story, was being held back. (Interestingly, the gothic story of the year State of Decay only got to be produced in its horror pastiche finery at the insistence of the director - if it had been up to Bidmead, it would have looked more like Full Circle or The Leisure Hive).  The Creature from the Pit looked and felt nothing like City of Death, and that's probably a good thing, even if it means the risk of any one story being a failure. It's not like the approach stopped that anyway. The second story of season 18, Meglos - a story very similar to Creature from the Pit, featuring as it does a jungle planet, a ridiculous green villain and some comic relief bandits - is just as silly as anything Graham Williams produced. New script editors came in to replace Bidmead the following year, and the show introduced more action-oriented adventures, and more variety in locales, and it was a welcome relief. Interestingly, Bidmead himself was able to contribute scripts during his successors' era that successfully fit this new model. Season 18 stands then as an interesting if not wholly successful experiment; just don't try to watch them all in one go, that's my advice.

In Summary:

The pits.