Frontios

The Doctor with Platagenent (centre)

Christopher H. Bidmead was asked back by Eric Saward to write another story, and it was his best story by far. A more traditional Who-tale than ‘Logopolis’ and ‘Castrovalva’, ‘Frontios’ again is a strange, single word title stemming from the location of the story. Whilst the similarities don’t end there, at least there’s a decent story here rather than four episodes of exposition of a scientific concept.

Turlough at work

A rust-proof, solid cast adds to some pretty good design work (bar the Tractators), and it all comes together to make an exciting adventure which pace and energy. The production got off to a horrific staff when the actor booked to play Mr Range was brutally murdered the day of his costume fitting, and the actors recall that hanging over the production, which it surely would. However the whole team deserve kudos for pulling it all together in the wake of such a tragedy.

Bidmead’s fascination with the TARDIS hadn’t waned, it plays an important role in this story. I’m trying to think of a single Peter Davison story which doesn’t feature a TARDIS scene, and at the moment I’m coming up blank. So there’s some phaffing about going on at the start as the TARDIS gets pulled down towards Frontios. And then the TARDIS ends up in pieces scattered around the tunnels of Fronitos.

The Doctor is trapped!

The plan of the Tractators is a little like the Daleks’ plan to pilot Earth around as a big space ship. Which is their plan for Frontios too. They use a strange machine to make the tunnels, and they require a human operator which is merely a plot device I guess. The Tractators are presented as burrowing insects (albeit not the most convincing ones), so I think making the machine responsible for the tunnelling was a strange choice by the author.

Tractators at work.

He uses Turlough very well, and Mark Strickson turns out a fine performance as a companion losing their mind. He’s a decent foil for the Doctor, with an added pinch of cowardice yet displays bravery at times too, especially in ‘Frontios’. It is a bit convenient plotwise that Turlough has a race-memory of the Tractators which slowly reveals the way to defeat them and their leader, the Gravis, but it’s easy enough to overlook.

It’s a very moody piece and there are some great, strong characters such as Plantagenant (Jeff Rawle), the colony leader, and his 2IC, Rudge, played by Onedin Line and Carry On veteran, Peter Gilmore. Sadly Tegan’s character is getting lost with no development whatsoever. Janet Fielding always puts in a good performance, but they never write any changes in her character, nothing since ‘Snakedance’.

The sets are rather stylish in places, and generally good. The stuff which is supposed to be ‘outside’ on

Frontios is done better than say ‘Snakedance’, the lighting is worked to better suit the location. The mixing of tunnels and the TARDIS is great. The only disappointment is the Tractators, bigger than humans but shelled insects. It’s fair to say that they were never going to be well realised, it was asking too much. Their arms are just basically hands which look terrible and are the worst part of a bad costume. The movement is hampered by the costume two, with no legs – or should I say one? But they don’t hop, they shuffle everywhere. Hard to take seriously a monster which if you pushed over – and that looked pretty easy to me to do, they wouldn’t be able to get back up.

So that is ‘Frontios’, a well written, exciting piece with just a couple of issues.

7.5/10

Logopolis

Tom Baker and Mathew Watherhouse

One thing that feels imminent is the end of the fourth Doctor, all the way through season 18. Things had changed and a change in the lead man was what was needed to really reboot the series and launch it unapologetically into the 80s. The final tale of season 18, Logopolis, sees Tom Baker say goodbye in a script written by Christopher H. Bidmead, which seems to indulge the author a lot.

Not to say that this is a bad story. It certainly has an epic feel to it, but it is absolutely riddled with issues. But let’s start with the new companion – Tegan Jovanka. When she appears in episode one with her Aunt Vanessa, there are some great exchanges between the two. Breath of fresh air? Definitely! A real feeling relationship with a bit of humour. John Nathan-Turner cast Janet Fielding as the Australian air-hostess, and the casting was perfect.

The Doctor is found in the TARDIS cloister room. The cloisters ring impending doom, so at the final story for the fourth Doctor, it’s fitting to start there. The set is rather nice too. All of a sudden the Doctor wants to repair the chameleon circuit, and decides to materialise around another police box. Turns out the Master already did that, so we have a TARDIS inside a TARDIS inside a TARDIS… the conundrum continues on and on. Except that unlike

in ‘The Time Monster’ they are all the Doctor’s TARDIS, which makes little sense. The Master dematerialises, but the issue continues, and yet there the Master is to kill Auntie Vanessa. Bidmead, that who sequence makes no sense at ALL!

The Logopolitans await the Doctor's arrival.

As I said, Bidmead seems to be playing with ideas, but he forgot to make something that made sense. We have all this guff about materialising the TARDIS underwater to flush the Master out. We have the Watcher – a projection of the next Doctor. I liked that idea. We end up on Logopolis where the Monitor and the Logopolitans are trying to harness the power of the CVE to stop the Universe disappearing thanks to entropy.

Apparently the collapse of the Universe has started, and only Logopolis stands between the Universe and total disintegration. Pity the planet looks so rubbish. I mean really it does, it’s the final story for a great Doctor and the corridors and backdrops look like white tarpaulins with a bit of sand. It’s a dreadfully unconvincing design.

Anthony Ainley and Sarah Sutton

Oh yes so the Master is back, now played officially by Anthony Ainly in a frilling costume with tails. That’s right –TAILS! Pantomime much? Although much of performance is pitched softly with chilling undertones, so I think he did a good job in his first full story as Master. We will have to wait and see if he returns. Did he need to go the beard, just like Roger Delgado? Probably not.

Nyssa (Sarah Sutton) suddenly shows up, brought to Logopolis by the Watcher – why? Don’t really know. She is manipulated rather callously by the Master whom she believes is her father briefly, but she adds little to the story. She sees her planet, Traken, destroyed in a heartbeat by entropy on the TARDIS screen. Considering the Master has also taken over her father’s body, I guess I expected her to be a bit more upset than she was. In fact the rate that the TARDIS scanner shows the entropy taking over the Universe, you’d think the whole Universe would be gone in 1-2 minutes. Perhaps hard to show but it seems impossible that anything survived.

The Master and Doctor face off.

The Doctor and the Master team up in a chilling end to episode three. They end up at Earth’s Pharos Project, a disk aimed at the sky, to send information taken from Logopolis to keep the CVE open and save the Universe. This they do, but the Master turns around and sends a bulletin to the Universe that if they don’t accept him as supreme leader he will destroy the CVE and the Universe with it. The Doctor then climbs out onto a moving gantry to disconnect the cable, he does but falls to his doom. This at least prevents the master from destroying the CVE. The Master runs away as guard approach the control room connected to the gantry. It’s not shot very well sadly, and the use of a still photograph of Anthony Ainley to show he is watching the Doctor’s struggle to get to the cable is frankly laughable. But I guess Peter Grimwade, the Director, was very stretched on both budget and time.

It's the end, but the moment has been prepared for.

On the fake Astroturf below the dish, the Doctor is joined by his companions, and then the Watcher. They become one, and the Doctor has a new face – Peter Davison. That scene was done nicely bar some of the replayed clips of enemies and friends, which had out of sync sound and were unneeded. The style of combining the two (in fact three) actors was different from previous regenerations, and I liked that very much.

The story is a real mixed bag. It’s big on gloom doom, but not on action. I still don’t understand why a CVE – Charged Vacuum Embointment, which it has been established as a gateway to E-space, can stop entropy. I don’t understand WHY the Universe was decaying to the point of no return. I do understand they wanted to link back to E-space and therefore the CVEs gained importance. I don’t understand why some shots are grainy, others are blurry, and the look of the thing is very inconsistent.

It has an epic feel, needed for a Doctor’s finale. It’s well acted for the most part. The design is stretched too far – and dolls are used to represent the shrunken remains of the people the Master kills with his Tissue Compression Eliminator. Not convincing at all. It smacks of a story that struggled to get made to be honest. It’s a little to ideas-focussed for mine. But Tom Baker – what an amazing 7 years he gave to the part. Wonderful wonderful performance over the years, and he is wonderful in his final tale.

6.5/10

Full Circle

Draith and Dexeter investigare killer cantelopes!

‘Full Cirlce’, written by Andrew Smith who at the time was 17 years old, sees the Doctor and Romana head to a place called ‘E-space’, a universe with negative coordinates. We see some interesting new creatures and ideas in a story I can at least say I enjoyed more than the previous two, without being amazed or anything like that.

Marshmen rise from the swamp

It’s got a bit more ‘soul’ than the last two stories. It also has its limitations. It deals with some interesting issues, particularly about scientific exploration of  species other than ‘human’, and indeed with the concept of evolution. Not bad for a 17 year old!

Christopher H Bidmead has been making his mark on the series already, so I think he probably had a lot to do with this script. Having said that it’s still a story with severe limitations, and one that asked a lot of the director and designers. We have the ‘marshmen’, who are really the same as the humans, but much earlier in the evolutionary cycle. Then we have these spiders which look pretty darned scary in most shots (mixed in with the odd shot where they look completely fake!) who also share the same DNA. It’s a bit confusing.

Romana is savaged by a spider

Whilst I was reasonably impressed with the spiders, the Marsh-men look pretty rubbish up close. Fantastic when they are walking out of the swamp during ‘mistfall’, but when they linger for any length of time on screen they look very poor – their design appears to made from the bottom of bathmats.

The characters are not that well written. We have a group called ‘outlaws’ who are just really naughty children, and of course we have Adric, played by Mathew Waterhouse, destined to become a companion by story’s end. Sort of. He stows away. The character is presented as a know-it-all type, which isn’t a good basis to start a companion character, but Waterhouse’s acting is fine. It’s nevertheless a strange match with the Doctor and Romana.

Marshman under the knife

Then we have three ‘Deciders’, the people who run the society. James Bree and Alan Rowe play two of the Deciders. The third Decider is Login, played by George Baker, perhaps the strongest character of the story. He, at least, is someone we care about. Tom Baker seems to be more at ease and gives his best performance thus far of the season, whereas Romana has a bad time of it getting bitten by a spider and turning nasty for a time. Lalla is always good.

The story is set in a community, but it’s difficult to understand the community. They appear to live in a sort of Eden, with a huge space ship at its door which they prep for takeoff, however the technology from the space ship in no way appears to affect the society. They are busy prepping it, replacing parts, yet seem to live very simple lives. We never see their dwellings either. When they have to return to the safely of the space ship, they take barely anything with them. I wondered if they still lived permanently in tents or something

Bree, Baxter and Lowe do some deciding.

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The ending is a bit… flat really. They force the marshmen out of the Starliner and take off. The issue was that no-one knew how to launch the ship – the manuals told them how to fly after takeoff. Oh, and the Doctor works out that they’ve been preparing for launch for 40,000 generations. Oh please! In that time they would have developed technology with the Starliner at hand. And the space ship, despite regular and constant maintenance, would not be in any condition to take off, or indeed stand.

It’s still a little dull this one, but not as much as the first two of Season 18. Some interesting ideas at the very least.

6.5/10

The Leisure Hive

John Nathan-Turner took over the reins for the 18^th season, and this was the story which opened it. I have to admit to rather liking season 17, despite what the pundits might say about it, and so one story into a new season I am struggling. Everything is different. The look is different, the them is different, the costumes are different, the special effects appear different, everything is deadly serious, the picture seems somewhat washed out for some reason. It’s a huge adjustment as a viewer.

David Haig

They believed, JNT and his script editor Christopher H. Bidmead, that the humour element had gone too far. And they were right, I have to begrudgingly say. However, the decision to basically eradicate ALL humour from the series is not exactly logical. They could have toned it down a lot and still had room to move. Instead, it seems to be abandoned. The Doctor’s costume goes all purply. He had various coats which he wore up to the end of season 17, now it’s an official ‘costume’, which question marks on his shirt collar (not subtle) and everything is more co-ordinated. Don’t see why it was needed and don’t particularly like it to be honest.

Adrienne Corri

Tom does seem to be showing the years a bit more by now. It’s his seventh year in the part after all. In this story he is aged – brilliantly by make-up I must say it’s one of the best aging jobs I have seen done, and he remains old for over two episodes, which Tom Baker hated but I thought was a good aspect of the story. His performance is very good too as the old Doctor.

 I like the reworking of the theme music by Peter Howell. We see the re-introduction of the middle eight too which has been missing, bar a couple of odd episodes, for many years from the theme. However the Radiophonic Workshop took over the incidental music in this story, and we bid a very fond farewell to Dudley Simpson. On the DVD they talk about Simpson’s music sounding a bit ‘samey’, but I have to disagree. He’s done most of the last 12 seasons I’ve watched and I don’t recall ever thinking ‘oh he’s used that theme again’ or ‘doesn’t he ever try something different’. Anyways, the decision had been made and I hope ‘The Leisure Hive’ is NOT indicative of what’s to follow because the music is loud and over done and seems to underscore 90% of the story. It’s intrusive and really effects the ability of the viewer to enjoy the story.

Tom Baker's amazing make up job.

I’m not really sure what was going on in the tale too. The four episodes run at around 1 hour 27 minutes, so we’ve had around 13 minutes cut from what we normally have over four parts. It’s a pity because this story could really have done with more explanation, especially about Tacyonics. From a quick research job I discovered a Tacyon is a particle which can move faster than light. To use it regenerate a person back to their younger self, I can sort of see that. But to duplicate people into solid beings? That was just confusing and not very logical to me. They wanted the science to be more real. Well, if anything the ideas in ‘The Leisure Hive’ are less believable.

They seem to be very limited on sets too. It’s mostly corridors and cheap ones at that. Ok you can level that criticism at most Doctor Who stories, but it’s really obvious in ‘The Leisure Hive’. The director, Lovett Bickford, has tried a bit of hand-held camera stuff, and a laboriously long opening shot at Brighton Beach with a pretty pointless scene the point of which seems to have been to blow up K-9. John Leeson returns in a strange move, especially for him. If he decided to leave, why would he come back a later?

The DVD frankly looks like it is a second or third generation picture, I’m not sure why but it is very blurry. It does nothing to enhance the story! The exterior stuff on Argolis, the model shots mixed with the new effects device, ‘Quantel’, are however excellent. Not so the shot of the shuttle leaving and arriving. It’s the same unconvincing shot taken through a hole looking up at the rear of the shuttle. It sounds a bit rude doesn’t it? It looks poor and it’s used at least four times.

Look, maybe the ideas are interesting but it’s very confusing to be honest. It’s taken very seriously, Tom Baker seems very dour for 97% of the story, apart from the moment he suggests they arrest his scarf for murder! I can still hear the music ringing in my head 24 hours later. It’s held together with some strong casting, Laurence Payne in the first episode returns to Who – he was in the Gunfighters. David Haig as Pangol is strong too, and Adrienne Corri as Mena is absolutely excellent. The final episode builds up nicely and is a good finish to the story with Pangol becoming a baby.

HOWEVER> I have left the worst to last! The Foamasi. A reptilian race whose design was apparently left to costume. They are laughable. They are perhaps the worst ever creatures in Doctor Who. They are green and fat and clearly men in … well it kinda looks like a dress doesn’t it? It is clearly material. It’s a joke, and shatters the believability of this story completely.

I realise I have really seriously panned this story like almost no other. It’s not the worst. It just has some shocking elements like the music and the Foamasi. It’s not easy to follow, it’s very serious and deadpan, there’s no shades of light and dark.

4/10