Logopolis, Kinda, Snakedance

[nwhyte]

Those of you who care will have noticed that I'm working my way through classic Who in vaguely historical order; so since I finished the first three Doctors last year, I've been gradually ticking off the Tom Baker stories. The result of this has been that I am now least well versed in the Davison era, so I have been compensating a bit - Logopolis,

Comments

[qatsi]

How can he have known that the Doctor was headed for the Barnet by-pass?

I can imagine some hand-waving explanation that the Doctor had mentioned it while on Traken, in conversation with Tremas, and the Master had assimilated the knowledge.

Although it's quite rarified, Logopolis is one of my favourite stories. I disagree with you slightly about great regeneration stories - I would count Logopolis as one of those and I'd drop The Caves of Androzani. But maybe that's because Logopolis was the first regeneration story I saw, and the other ushered in a new low point in the classic series.

[inuitmonster]

I've seen the last two Tom Baker stories and the first three episodes of Castrovalva recently. I was struck by how annoying Tegan is... she is rubbish and incompetent yet spends all her time whining. I liked Adric a lot more than everyone else does, he seems strange rather than wooden, like a lot of those mathematician types.

[nwhyte]

Yeah, part of the reason I watched Kinda and Snakedance is that they are the only two stories in which she gets to do something else!

seawasp is also an Adric defender.

[blue_condition]

I found it very easy to dislike some aspects of the show during the "Lots of people in the Tardis bickering" years - which I think really damaged the Fifth Doctor era. We just didn't see enough of him. I much prefer the RTD "floating ensemble with companions semi-attached to their original timeline" approach, as long as it doesn't get too soapy.

[inuitmonster]

although a problem of this kind of RTD thing is you end up not actually doing very much travelling in time and space.

[bookzombie]

Um, I assume when you say "featuring the only returning monster of the Davison era" you mean the only monster that was a Davison-era creation? Otherwise we have Daleks, Cybermen, Omega, Sea-Devils, Mutants, the Black Guardian (off the top of my head).

[nwhyte]

Mutants?

I meant the only creatures to appear twice in the Davison era, apart from the guest spots for Daleks and Cybermen in The Five Doctors. I don't count the Master and the Black Guardian as they are villains rather than monsters!

[bookzombie]

Not sure where the mutants came from...

[mscongeniality]

We'll leave out the fact that the Third Doctor survived a much longer fall in The Paradise of Death, since that story is of dubious canonicity.

My feeling on that relatively short fall triggering a regeneration was that for some reason, his time was past. He knew it ever since the Watcher first showed up, and the longer he went on in the Watcher's presence, any misstep could trigger the regeneration.

I could also be over-rationalizing.

[nwhyte]

My problem with that is that it is a slightly circular argument; the Watcher is generated, in a sense, by the regeneration, so we stuill have the same problem!

[blue_condition]

Logopolis didn't work for me first time round, because IT TOOK TOM BAKER AWAY! - but on subsequent viewing, cheesy effects apart (the Watcher included), the conceptual depth of the story was excellent - and I liked the way the themes of recursion and mathematics continued into Castrovalva.