Doctor Who 18.07 Logopolis
ADRIC: "Are you sure?"
DOCTOR: "This is life. Nothing's sure."
Overview
The season 18 finale, this is the second story in the loose trilogy that began with The Keeper of Traken and concludes with Castrovalva, the season 19 opener, so although it can be watched as a standalone story, it makes much more sense if you watch The Keeper of Traken first!
Logopolis brings another era of Who to an end, marking the end of Tom Baker's tenure as Doctor - the longest serving Doctor ever, to date. I always have mixed feelings about this story. It's entertaining, and certainly strives for an epic feel to do justice to the Fourth Doctor's final adventure, but I always struggle a bit with the messiness of the plot, because I'm not convinced that it really makes a whole huge amount of sense; it certainly is a triumph of mood and style over plot. Although since holey plots don't usually bother me that much on Who, I'm not sure why I have a problem with this one. Also, some indefinable quality has been lost from the show since the early days of Tom Baker's tenure, seven years earlier - we are now into the '80s and budget restrictions are starting to bite. The harsh glare of videotape really exposes the cheapness of sets and costumes (the location sequences shot on film look much, much better), while idle companions spend far too much time standing around looking blank, arms hanging loose by their sides, instead of continuing to act and react naturally in the background of any given scene (it might have helped if they'd been allowed to have pockets in their costumes, or been given something else they could do with their hands). All of which is a long-winded way of saying that although I enjoy this story, I don't think the show is quite as good at this point as it used to be.
There is rather a grim, melancholy feel to the whole of Tom Baker's final season, which really comes to a head here, in his final adventure, in which he is deeply preoccupied by the notion of entropy and decay - and visibly disturbed by the lurking figure known only as the Watcher, who hovers close by throughout. Just why the Doctor's impending new regeneration should take on a physical manifestation and actively contribute to the story is never explained - it has certainly never happened again! It is just one of the oddities this story is riddled with.
With the Doctor on the brink of regeneration, a new team of companions is assembled through the course of this story, to ease both him and viewers through the transition. Adric has already been with him for a few adventures now, but in this story he is joined by Nyssa, who we had already met in the previous story, The Keeper of Traken (and who is pretty much stranded with the Tardis team henceforth, since her home world is utterly destroyed during this story) and by the feisty, impulsive, argumentative air hostess Tegan Jovanka, who wanders into the Tardis by accident and finds herself swept along on a remarkable series of adventures she could never have imagined in her wildest dreams! Tegan is by far the most charismatic of the bunch and, since the others are all aliens, she instantly becomes the audience identification character of the show, being the sole contemporary human on the team. She can be abrasive at times, but then again she has reason to be, and her bull-headed determination and gung-ho attitude is like a breath of fresh air alongside the wooden Adric and ever-serene Nyssa - although I do enjoy Nyssa's intelligence, elegance and inner strength and wish she'd had a larger role to play during her time with the Doctor.
Observations
Random thoughts while watching:
I rather like that the first shot of the episode is of a police box - a real police box - actually being used as a police box, with a constable making a phone call from it, only for a police box-shaped Tardis to materialise around it, severing the connection. There's something mildly post-structuralist about that.
Ah, the cloister room. It would be cool if the Tardis still had that - it would fit right in with the design of Matt Smith's console room! And then there's the cloister bell, heard for the first time in this story. It feels very iconic for something that hasn't actually been used all that often.
I am rather amused by how utterly baffled Adric tends to be by the Doctor. Scientifically, they are on the same wavelength more often than not, but socially...Adric is just too literal-minded and pedantic to be able to keep up with the mercurial Doctor, especially when he starts babbling aphorisms and expressions that the boy has never heard before. Even if the Doctor were communicating his thoughts clearly, there's an awful lot that Adric just doesn't seem to understand.
I've read the novelisation for this story. Adric works rather better as a character on paper than he does on-screen.
The Doctor has been promising to take Adric to Gallifrey for a couple of stories now. They never do make that trip and this is where the Doctor stops promising it, explains why he feels it would be a bad idea and instead offers to take his young companion to his 'home from home', Earth, which Adric has never been to and has barely even heard of. This story highlights the fact that Adric and Nyssa are both aliens, from a human perspective - while from their perspective Earth is just another planet, no different to any other they might happen to visit; mildly interesting but nothing special.
I like the continuity inherent in the Doctor's ruminations on the Time Lords' likely reaction to Romana's decision to stay in E-Space - he has fallen foul of their strict laws of non-intervention himself, that was how he got himself exiled on Earth for so long in the first place, so no wonder he is reluctant to call their attention upon either himself or Romana again now.
The Doctor wants to measure a real police box in every possible dimension so that he can take the Logopolitans up on what is apparently a long-standing offer to help him fix the Tardis's chameleon circuit. That's fair enough, as far as it goes. What I don't understand is why he chooses to do this at a time in history when police poxes are all but obsolete. Sure, external to the story, it is so that he can acquire Tegan from the year in which this story is being made, so that he has a contemporary human companion for viewers to identify with, but internal to the story...wouldn't it make more sense to go to an earlier time period when police boxes were abundant?
We spend an awful lot of time in the first episode watching Tegan and her Aunty Vanessa attempting to fix their spare tyre. Methinks the episode may have been running short, so that some padding was required. Either that or someone thought it would be a good way of introducing us to Tegan!
Adric can be like a dog with a bone, at times - once he's latched onto an idea, he never lets go of it! His constant questioning of absolutely everything gets rather wearing after a while. No wonder the Doctor tends to seem as much irritated by the boy as he is fond of him, especially since he's in such a tetchy mood anyway throughout this story, preoccupied as he is by his sense of impending doom.
There's a lot of rather woolly technobabble in this story, including the Doctor's half-hearted attempt at explaining to Adric why the Tardis's chameleon circuit doesn't work and how he hopes to repair it. The logic behind this decision is sound - he is right that it doesn't always pay to be so distinctive and that a functioning chameleon circuit is how the Master managed to evade them on Traken. But whatever the Logopolitans were hoping to achieve with the chameleon circuit doesn't seem to work, and afterward the Doctor appears to give up on (or simply forget) the idea of ever getting it fixed.
I like that it is clear the Doctor still misses Romana, in what is now the second adventure since she left. It is always good to know that he remembers his companions after they've gone - he's so used to a rapid turnover that he doesn't often allow himself any emotion over it. But as a fellow Time Lord, Romana was special.
More backstory on the Doctor's original flight from Gallifrey - the Tardis was in for repairs when he 'borrowed' her, he tells Adric, but he had 'pressing reasons' for leaving in a hurry, so didn't hang around to either wait for those repairs to be completed or to find another Tardis that was in better condition. We have never, though, heard the full circumstances of what happened back then, why he left in such a hurry.
I'm rather amused by the Tardis landing alongside the police box instead of around it. The Doctor has far more control over its steering now than he did a couple of regenerations ago, but it is still rather more miss than hit.
One Tardis materialising around another causes some unpleasant dimensional anomalies, we learn - and witness - here.
It amuses me that Adric uses the pin of his badge for mathematical excellence to pick locks. It's such a ridiculous costume detail to be stuck with, it's just as well it does at least make itself useful from time to time!
Adric got lumbered with a hideously unflattering costume all round, really, although it probably would have looked better in black and white, so it's a shame for him that he belongs to the colour era. Whenever he hooks his thumb into his waistband, I find myself thinking that Matthew Waterhouse must have been absolutely desperate for pockets to stuff his hands into. Actors always like having pockets or buttons or something else to fiddle with, so that they've got something to do with their hands in static scenes.
I like Tegan's reaction to the Tardis interior. Unlike most other new companions, she had absolutely no introduction to the insanity that follows the Doctor around before she entered, and she also has no one to guide her through the culture shock. She simply goes to use the police telephone to call for help with her aunt's broken down car, finds the door unlocked - and steps into an impossible nightmare. I love how desperately she tries to hold it together while running around endless, identical corridors like a rat in a maze, hopelessly lost. It takes an impressively long time before she breaks down in frustrated, frightened tears, and even then she pulls herself back together quick smart. She's great.
Throughout this story, everyone always uses the wrong door to enter the Tardis. In every other story, they use the door on the right, but in this one they use the door on the left, the one with the telephone set into it.
There's this moment when Aunty Vanessa is confronted by the unseen, laughing Master and backs away from him in terror, and it looks like she has actually fallen over in fright...but no, she hasn't fallen, she's made of stronger stuff than that - she was reaching for the tyre she'd spotted earlier, lying by the side of the road, so that she has a weapon to fend him off with. It doesn't work, of course, and is in fact the last thing she ever does, poor woman, but she wins my respect nonetheless. This is clearly where Tegan gets her feistiness from!
Both the Doctor and Adric refer to the Master shrinking people to death as his calling card, his signature weapon.
Adric never stays where the Doctor tells him to - he always, always follows the Doctor, even when forbidden. But I like that the Doctor knows and accepts this, and will make use of it, as when he calls for the unseen Adric to create a diversion for him, knowing that the boy won't have stayed in the Tardis as instructed.
The Doctor jettisons Romana's room to gain extra power to break free of the Master's Tardis - I think this is the first time we've seen him jettisoning rooms for a power boost. It is also a symbolic way of severing the last of his physical ties with Romana, in an attempt to also put his emotional bond with her behind him. The Doctor never likes to look back toward those he has left behind; he always looks ahead to the future.
It is interesting that Nyssa has managed to send a distress call to the Doctor and that this has triggered the Tardis cloister bell. Also interesting that the Doctor deliberately sends Adric on a fool's errand just to get him out of the console room, so that he can listen to the distress call privately.
I like that the Doctor offers 'lingering powers of the Keepership' to explain how the Master was able to take possession of Tremas's body, rather than it being something any Time Lord could do, which would be well dodgy. I also like that he is inclined to beat himself up over leaving Traken before checking that the Master really had been destroyed, because he is right, he really shouldn't have just rushed off like that. He was complacent and careless and as a result the Master is free to wreak havoc.
It is never explained just how the Master managed to escape his certain doom at the end of The Keeper of Traken.
Interestingly, when Adric asks if the Master can read the Doctor's mind, he replies that as they are both Time Lords, in many ways they have the same mind.
Gotta say, the Doctor's plan to land the Tardis underwater, open the doors and flush the Master out is absolutely nonsensical. It does generate tension, however - even though I know it isn't going to work, I still always feel worried about Tegan, as the Doctor doesn't know yet that she is lost somewhere inside the Tardis and would drown if it filled with water. Also, I always get this mental image of the Thames emptying and it still not being enough water to fill the seemingly endless Tardis interior!
Adric really has learned a lot about the Tardis controls - he handles it like a pro in this story, even flying it by himself at one point, albeit under supervision. I don't think the Doctor has had a companion since who could operate the Tardis controls like that (well, apart from River Song, who is a special case and not an actual companion, as such).
I start to really struggle with the plot of this story around about the time that the Doctor, having previously stated that he absolutely cannot go to Logopolis with the Master possibly aboard, then about turns and decides to go to Logopolis anyway, Master or no Master, because his future self has told him that he will. That's the kind of causal paradox that always bugs me in any show: someone doing something they wouldn't normally do just because someone from the future has told them that they will, rather than because there is any logical rationale for that action. Pre-determination always makes me twitchy.
Man, Logopolis is even dustier and more boring than Traken! It's an awful set.
Having talked to the Watcher and learned that his regeneration is imminent, the Doctor's initial plan is to abandon Adric on Logopolis while he heads off to face whatever lies ahead alone. Now that's a danger that would never occur to most companions: the risk that the Doctor might abandon them on some completely random planet just because he had more important things to be getting on with, no time to waste, and thought leaving them someplace at least reasonably safe was his duty discharged, whether they wanted to make a life in that place or not - I mean, seriously, Logopolis is no place for a lively, inquisitive teenage boy to be facing an indefinite future! Sarah Jane got off lightly, by that token, as he did at least get her to the right planet, the right country and the right year when he ditched her in such a rush, even if it was the wrong city! It is just as well, for both Adric and Tegan's sakes (since he adjusts his abandonment plan to include her), that the Doctor's original plan goes awry almost at once.
I rather enjoy how utterly stymied the Doctor is by Tegan's presence aboard the Tardis. He isn't often wrong-footed like that. He just can't deal with her at all, instead fobs her off on Adric - who isn't the most sympathetic person to be explaining what's what to a shell-shocked passenger!
Nyssa turning up on Logopolis is a bit random. The Doctor's 'friend' - the Watcher - brought her, she tells us. But we aren't told how or why. Because the Doctor himself didn't have time to respond to her distress call yet future history related that she joined him and therefore needed to be collected from Traken before it was destroyed? It's all a bit woolly.
I quite like the Monitor - for a bit-part guest character, we get to see quite a few different sides to his personality: his impatience when the Doctor is pussy-footing around instead of handing over the police box dimensions so they can get on with the task at hand; his charm when soothing the Doctor's companions in their alarm over being shut out of the Tardis while the Doctor tests the Logopolitan fix he's been given; his utter bewilderment when the computation goes wrong; his absolute dedication to duty and single-minded focus on the task at hand; and his distress over the destruction of Logopolis and his life's work.
The Master - complete with shiny new body - spends far too much of this story lurking just off-screen laughing his evil laugh of evil. It gets irritating after a while, and doesn't improve much when we are finally allowed to see him.
Adric is a very needy character. He means well, but he's always so desperate to be useful, he needs to be needed - needs to be seen to be needed, seen to be useful. He seems terribly insecure.
It says a lot about Logopolis that when the Monitor and Adric find the sad little corpses of the Logopolitans the Master has killed, the Monitor's immediate reaction is to decry sabotage - it is Adric who points out that it is murder.
I like the Doctor's never say die spirit. He just will not give up, ever.
I like how outraged Tegan is by the oppressive all-work-all-the-time atmosphere on Logopolis and how earnestly she stands up for what she perceives as exploited slave workers. She doesn't understand anything about the society she's landed in, but she doesn't let that hold her back!
The Doctor really isn't the person you want around when you receive bad news. He avoids telling Tegan about her aunt's death for as long as he possibly can, then when he does finally tells her and she understandably breaks down in tears, all he can muster up by way of comfort is an awkward pat on the shoulder as he steers her off into a corner to sob her heart out all on her own while he confers with the Monitor. He's far more comfortable dealing with a crisis than dealing with grief-stricken females! The Second Doctor was far better at this sort of thing. And then he has to tell Nyssa about her father's death, too, but at least in that instance the crisis has escalated to a point where Nyssa has no time to dwell on her loss - much to his relief, I'm sure.
It must be torture for Nyssa to have the Master walking around wearing her father's face. Absolute torture. Poor Nyssa. She lost her stepmother in the last story, The Keeper of Traken. In this story she learns that her father has not only been murdered, but has had his body stolen by a sociopathic Time Lord who proceeds to play mind games with her before unleashing the entropy field that then destroys her home planet. Has any other companion ever been put through the wringer like that?
Wouldn't it be nice if the personal losses suffered by both Nyssa and Tegan in this story had been allowed even a fraction of the focus the pseudo-science is given? Something about the writing and direction of this story really just don't work, emotionally. It could have been so powerful, on an emotional level, but that just isn't conveyed. Instead it feels cold and clinical, with the terrible tragedies it contains largely glossed over, denied the chance to make any real impact.
You know, you've got to respect the Logopolitans' dedication to their work. But it is hard to avoid also feeling frustrated by their tunnel vision - I mean, seriously: the Master shoots several Logopolitans right there in broad daylight, and everyone else is so focused on the task at hand that they don't even notice! They very nearly deserve what happens to them!
So, the Master broadcasts a blanket of silence to bring Logopolis to a halt, not because he has any particular ill-intent toward the place but simply as a bargaining tool, because he believes they hold a secret that he can twist to his own ends, if only he can learn what it is. But he is meddling with matters he does not understand, and by silencing Logopolis for just those few minutes, merely to prove he was capable of it, he unleashes a tidal wave of entropy that threatens to destroy the whole universe. That's one hell of a mistake to make! It is also very dodgy science. Best not to dwell too much on the plot, as it tends to fall apart under scrutiny.
The Doctor seems to end up being forced to cooperate with the Master for the greater good on an awful lot of their encounters. I do like how reluctant he is on this occasion, the way he can't even bring himself to look at his fellow Time Lord when they shake hands on their alliance, and how vehemently all three of his companions argue against the alliance - Nyssa especially, since this is her father's murderer.
Tegan refuses to go with the others in the Tardis to safety, instead following the Doctor. Her argument is that he is her ticket back to London airport, where she was meant to be starting work this morning. That makes no sense, however. The Tardis is her ticket back to London, surely - the Doctor can't get her there without it! She'd be much better off sticking with the time machine than its errant operator!
It makes no sense that the Logopolitans would have copied 1970s Earth technology to run their programme - surely there must be more sophisticated technology out there that would work much better!
Look at Adric channelling the Doctor by not giving straight answers after talking alone with the Watcher.
Nyssa doesn't have a demonstrative personality, is quiet, reserved and unemotional by nature, but her grief is palpable in the scene where she realises that her home world, Traken, has been obliterated by the entropy field unleashed by the Master. It's a nicely understated performance by Sarah Sutton, in what can't have been an easy role. From this point on, Nyssa is completely alone in the universe, the last of her people, with no home to return to.
The death toll in this story really is astronomical, even by Doctor Who standards - whole solar systems are wiped out of existence, including Nyssa's home world of Traken. The death toll must be in the billions - and the Master is completely and utterly responsible, albeit inadvertently. It is probably his worst crime to date, whether he intended it or not.
The script editor, Chris Bidmead, has said that he deliberately made the Master as randomly malicious as possible because he wanted to establish him as a truly legitimate threat to the Master. He very quickly devolves back into panto villain, though, helped both by Ainley's performance and the direction, which isn't the best for this story.
Chris Bidmead was also responsible for the overload of science in this era of the show - I can see where he was coming from, with his desire to inject more 'real science' into the show in place of the 'magic science' of old, but feel that the execution of this conviction is decidedly flawed and leads to imbalance.
The Doctor and the Master's plan involves using the Pharos Project on Earth to beam the Logopolitan's unfinished programme into a Charged Vaccuum Emboitement in space so that it will stay open and thus stop the entropy field from spreading. I think I've understood that right, but I find this part of the plot quite difficult to follow - the Logopolitans had to work constantly at their computations to achieve the same effect, yet it seems one short-lived burst of this programme is all it takes to resolve the problem permanently. Yet the programme is meant to be unfinished. Yet the Master threatens to use the threat of sabotaging it to hold the universe to ransom. Yet once the Doctor disconnects it, the whole huge universe-threatening problem seems to be completely resolved, never to be mentioned again. And the Master did actually broadcast his blackmail message, yet nothing ever comes of it. All told, it just doesn't make a whole huge amount of sense - the plot is riddled with holes you could drive a truck through.
I enjoy Adric and Nyssa's perspective, as intelligent aliens, on human attempts to make contact with alien intelligences. And I love that they use it as a means of making a distraction for the Doctor and the Master to carry out their plan, presenting themselves to the bewildered guards as aliens responding to the invitation - because it is, more or less, the truth!
The scenes shot on location on film look fantastic compared with the overly bright harshness of the videotaped scenes shot on set. The difference between the two is glaring. Somehow it is easier to believe that these are real people having a real adventure when they are filmed on location, whereas the videotaped scenes on set are a lot harder to buy into because they look so obviously staged and fake.
Oh, I like the little montage of former companions that the Doctor hallucinates when he falls from the Pharos antenna, seeing all the close friends he has had in this regeneration: Sarah, Harry, the Brigadier, Leela, K9 and both Romanas, all interwoven with his current trio of companions urgently calling his name.
So, the Doctor regenerates once again, merging with the Watcher to transform from Tom Baker into Peter Davison. But he and his companions are still on hostile territory at the Pharos Project, surrounded by guards and with the Master still lurking nearby - regeneration isn't often accompanied by such a cliffhanger ending!
Quotable Quotes
DOCTOR: "The more you put things together, the more they keep falling apart, and that's the essence of the second law of thermodynamics and I never heard a truer word spoken."
DOCTOR: "There's bound to be an awful lot of fuss about Romana. Why she stayed in E-space, official investigations, that sort of thing."
ADRIC: "The Time Lords won't approve?"
DOCTOR: "What? She has broken the cardinal rule of Gallifrey. She has become involved, and in a pretty permanent sort of way. I think that you and I should let a few oceans flow under a few bridges before we head back home."
ADRIC: "Earth's the planet with all the oceans, isn't it?"
DOCTOR: "That's the chap."
ADRIC: "It sounds wet."
DOCTOR: "Well, it's only the exterior of a Tardis that exists as a real space-time event."
ADRIC: "But mapped on to one of the interior continua."
DOCTOR: "Precisely. That's very good."
ADRIC: "So you can change it into anything you like."
DOCTOR: "Ah, well, that's a sore point. According to the handbook, yes: because the outer plasmic shell of a Tardis is driven by the chameleon circuit. Or so the theory runs. In practice I always meant to ask Romana to help me fix it one day."
DOCTOR: "She [the Tardis] was in on Gallifrey for repair when I borrowed her."
ADRIC: "I thought she was yours?"
DOCTOR: "Well, on a sort of finders-keepers basis, yes. I should have waited till they'd done the chameleon conversion, but there were other pressing reasons at the time."
DOCTOR: "Two point six metres off target. What a landing."
ADRIC: "It's not bad for the Tardis."
DOCTOR: "That's what I just said: what a landing."
DOCTOR: "The Tardis and I are getting rather better at these short hops."
DETECTIVE: "I'm not paid to have opinions, sir. I'm paid to do my duty."
DOCTOR: "Well, I do have opinions."
DOCTOR: "Are you ready?"
ADRIC: "If you are."
DOCTOR: "What? Well, I'd feel more confident if you just said yes."
ADRIC: "Yes."
DOCTOR: "Good."
DOCTOR: "Never guess. Unless you have to. There's enough uncertainty in the universe as it is."
DOCTOR: "The cheeseboard is the world, and the pieces the phenomena of the universe, as my old friend Huxley used to say. Cheese board? Chess board. And the opponent makes no allowances for mistakes nor makes the smallest concession to ignorance. I'm an ignorant old Doctor, and I've made a mistake."
DOCTOR: "I envy you your Tardis, Master."
MASTER: "Excellent, Doctor. Envy is the beginning of all true greatness."
DOCTOR: "Still, while there's life, there's six of one and half a dozen of the other."
MASTER: "Woolly thinking, Doctor."
DOCTOR: "Yes, but very comforting when worn next to the skin."
ADRIC: "The Earth people use it to beam messages to the stars. The Doctor calls it reiterated invitation to alien intelligences in deep space.
NYSSA: "And that's us."
ADRIC: "So they'll be very pleased to see us."
DOCTOR: "It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for."
The Verdict
Overall, this adventure is never going to top my list of favourite classic stories - there are too many plot holes and inconsistencies for that - but is it nonetheless engaging and entertaining and a suitably grand farewell for the Fourth Doctor.
DOCTOR: "This is life. Nothing's sure."
Overview
The season 18 finale, this is the second story in the loose trilogy that began with The Keeper of Traken and concludes with Castrovalva, the season 19 opener, so although it can be watched as a standalone story, it makes much more sense if you watch The Keeper of Traken first!
Logopolis brings another era of Who to an end, marking the end of Tom Baker's tenure as Doctor - the longest serving Doctor ever, to date. I always have mixed feelings about this story. It's entertaining, and certainly strives for an epic feel to do justice to the Fourth Doctor's final adventure, but I always struggle a bit with the messiness of the plot, because I'm not convinced that it really makes a whole huge amount of sense; it certainly is a triumph of mood and style over plot. Although since holey plots don't usually bother me that much on Who, I'm not sure why I have a problem with this one. Also, some indefinable quality has been lost from the show since the early days of Tom Baker's tenure, seven years earlier - we are now into the '80s and budget restrictions are starting to bite. The harsh glare of videotape really exposes the cheapness of sets and costumes (the location sequences shot on film look much, much better), while idle companions spend far too much time standing around looking blank, arms hanging loose by their sides, instead of continuing to act and react naturally in the background of any given scene (it might have helped if they'd been allowed to have pockets in their costumes, or been given something else they could do with their hands). All of which is a long-winded way of saying that although I enjoy this story, I don't think the show is quite as good at this point as it used to be.
There is rather a grim, melancholy feel to the whole of Tom Baker's final season, which really comes to a head here, in his final adventure, in which he is deeply preoccupied by the notion of entropy and decay - and visibly disturbed by the lurking figure known only as the Watcher, who hovers close by throughout. Just why the Doctor's impending new regeneration should take on a physical manifestation and actively contribute to the story is never explained - it has certainly never happened again! It is just one of the oddities this story is riddled with.
With the Doctor on the brink of regeneration, a new team of companions is assembled through the course of this story, to ease both him and viewers through the transition. Adric has already been with him for a few adventures now, but in this story he is joined by Nyssa, who we had already met in the previous story, The Keeper of Traken (and who is pretty much stranded with the Tardis team henceforth, since her home world is utterly destroyed during this story) and by the feisty, impulsive, argumentative air hostess Tegan Jovanka, who wanders into the Tardis by accident and finds herself swept along on a remarkable series of adventures she could never have imagined in her wildest dreams! Tegan is by far the most charismatic of the bunch and, since the others are all aliens, she instantly becomes the audience identification character of the show, being the sole contemporary human on the team. She can be abrasive at times, but then again she has reason to be, and her bull-headed determination and gung-ho attitude is like a breath of fresh air alongside the wooden Adric and ever-serene Nyssa - although I do enjoy Nyssa's intelligence, elegance and inner strength and wish she'd had a larger role to play during her time with the Doctor.
Observations
Random thoughts while watching:
I rather like that the first shot of the episode is of a police box - a real police box - actually being used as a police box, with a constable making a phone call from it, only for a police box-shaped Tardis to materialise around it, severing the connection. There's something mildly post-structuralist about that.
Ah, the cloister room. It would be cool if the Tardis still had that - it would fit right in with the design of Matt Smith's console room! And then there's the cloister bell, heard for the first time in this story. It feels very iconic for something that hasn't actually been used all that often.
I am rather amused by how utterly baffled Adric tends to be by the Doctor. Scientifically, they are on the same wavelength more often than not, but socially...Adric is just too literal-minded and pedantic to be able to keep up with the mercurial Doctor, especially when he starts babbling aphorisms and expressions that the boy has never heard before. Even if the Doctor were communicating his thoughts clearly, there's an awful lot that Adric just doesn't seem to understand.
I've read the novelisation for this story. Adric works rather better as a character on paper than he does on-screen.
The Doctor has been promising to take Adric to Gallifrey for a couple of stories now. They never do make that trip and this is where the Doctor stops promising it, explains why he feels it would be a bad idea and instead offers to take his young companion to his 'home from home', Earth, which Adric has never been to and has barely even heard of. This story highlights the fact that Adric and Nyssa are both aliens, from a human perspective - while from their perspective Earth is just another planet, no different to any other they might happen to visit; mildly interesting but nothing special.
I like the continuity inherent in the Doctor's ruminations on the Time Lords' likely reaction to Romana's decision to stay in E-Space - he has fallen foul of their strict laws of non-intervention himself, that was how he got himself exiled on Earth for so long in the first place, so no wonder he is reluctant to call their attention upon either himself or Romana again now.
The Doctor wants to measure a real police box in every possible dimension so that he can take the Logopolitans up on what is apparently a long-standing offer to help him fix the Tardis's chameleon circuit. That's fair enough, as far as it goes. What I don't understand is why he chooses to do this at a time in history when police poxes are all but obsolete. Sure, external to the story, it is so that he can acquire Tegan from the year in which this story is being made, so that he has a contemporary human companion for viewers to identify with, but internal to the story...wouldn't it make more sense to go to an earlier time period when police boxes were abundant?
We spend an awful lot of time in the first episode watching Tegan and her Aunty Vanessa attempting to fix their spare tyre. Methinks the episode may have been running short, so that some padding was required. Either that or someone thought it would be a good way of introducing us to Tegan!
Adric can be like a dog with a bone, at times - once he's latched onto an idea, he never lets go of it! His constant questioning of absolutely everything gets rather wearing after a while. No wonder the Doctor tends to seem as much irritated by the boy as he is fond of him, especially since he's in such a tetchy mood anyway throughout this story, preoccupied as he is by his sense of impending doom.
There's a lot of rather woolly technobabble in this story, including the Doctor's half-hearted attempt at explaining to Adric why the Tardis's chameleon circuit doesn't work and how he hopes to repair it. The logic behind this decision is sound - he is right that it doesn't always pay to be so distinctive and that a functioning chameleon circuit is how the Master managed to evade them on Traken. But whatever the Logopolitans were hoping to achieve with the chameleon circuit doesn't seem to work, and afterward the Doctor appears to give up on (or simply forget) the idea of ever getting it fixed.
I like that it is clear the Doctor still misses Romana, in what is now the second adventure since she left. It is always good to know that he remembers his companions after they've gone - he's so used to a rapid turnover that he doesn't often allow himself any emotion over it. But as a fellow Time Lord, Romana was special.
More backstory on the Doctor's original flight from Gallifrey - the Tardis was in for repairs when he 'borrowed' her, he tells Adric, but he had 'pressing reasons' for leaving in a hurry, so didn't hang around to either wait for those repairs to be completed or to find another Tardis that was in better condition. We have never, though, heard the full circumstances of what happened back then, why he left in such a hurry.
I'm rather amused by the Tardis landing alongside the police box instead of around it. The Doctor has far more control over its steering now than he did a couple of regenerations ago, but it is still rather more miss than hit.
One Tardis materialising around another causes some unpleasant dimensional anomalies, we learn - and witness - here.
It amuses me that Adric uses the pin of his badge for mathematical excellence to pick locks. It's such a ridiculous costume detail to be stuck with, it's just as well it does at least make itself useful from time to time!
Adric got lumbered with a hideously unflattering costume all round, really, although it probably would have looked better in black and white, so it's a shame for him that he belongs to the colour era. Whenever he hooks his thumb into his waistband, I find myself thinking that Matthew Waterhouse must have been absolutely desperate for pockets to stuff his hands into. Actors always like having pockets or buttons or something else to fiddle with, so that they've got something to do with their hands in static scenes.
I like Tegan's reaction to the Tardis interior. Unlike most other new companions, she had absolutely no introduction to the insanity that follows the Doctor around before she entered, and she also has no one to guide her through the culture shock. She simply goes to use the police telephone to call for help with her aunt's broken down car, finds the door unlocked - and steps into an impossible nightmare. I love how desperately she tries to hold it together while running around endless, identical corridors like a rat in a maze, hopelessly lost. It takes an impressively long time before she breaks down in frustrated, frightened tears, and even then she pulls herself back together quick smart. She's great.
Throughout this story, everyone always uses the wrong door to enter the Tardis. In every other story, they use the door on the right, but in this one they use the door on the left, the one with the telephone set into it.
There's this moment when Aunty Vanessa is confronted by the unseen, laughing Master and backs away from him in terror, and it looks like she has actually fallen over in fright...but no, she hasn't fallen, she's made of stronger stuff than that - she was reaching for the tyre she'd spotted earlier, lying by the side of the road, so that she has a weapon to fend him off with. It doesn't work, of course, and is in fact the last thing she ever does, poor woman, but she wins my respect nonetheless. This is clearly where Tegan gets her feistiness from!
Both the Doctor and Adric refer to the Master shrinking people to death as his calling card, his signature weapon.
Adric never stays where the Doctor tells him to - he always, always follows the Doctor, even when forbidden. But I like that the Doctor knows and accepts this, and will make use of it, as when he calls for the unseen Adric to create a diversion for him, knowing that the boy won't have stayed in the Tardis as instructed.
The Doctor jettisons Romana's room to gain extra power to break free of the Master's Tardis - I think this is the first time we've seen him jettisoning rooms for a power boost. It is also a symbolic way of severing the last of his physical ties with Romana, in an attempt to also put his emotional bond with her behind him. The Doctor never likes to look back toward those he has left behind; he always looks ahead to the future.
It is interesting that Nyssa has managed to send a distress call to the Doctor and that this has triggered the Tardis cloister bell. Also interesting that the Doctor deliberately sends Adric on a fool's errand just to get him out of the console room, so that he can listen to the distress call privately.
I like that the Doctor offers 'lingering powers of the Keepership' to explain how the Master was able to take possession of Tremas's body, rather than it being something any Time Lord could do, which would be well dodgy. I also like that he is inclined to beat himself up over leaving Traken before checking that the Master really had been destroyed, because he is right, he really shouldn't have just rushed off like that. He was complacent and careless and as a result the Master is free to wreak havoc.
It is never explained just how the Master managed to escape his certain doom at the end of The Keeper of Traken.
Interestingly, when Adric asks if the Master can read the Doctor's mind, he replies that as they are both Time Lords, in many ways they have the same mind.
Gotta say, the Doctor's plan to land the Tardis underwater, open the doors and flush the Master out is absolutely nonsensical. It does generate tension, however - even though I know it isn't going to work, I still always feel worried about Tegan, as the Doctor doesn't know yet that she is lost somewhere inside the Tardis and would drown if it filled with water. Also, I always get this mental image of the Thames emptying and it still not being enough water to fill the seemingly endless Tardis interior!
Adric really has learned a lot about the Tardis controls - he handles it like a pro in this story, even flying it by himself at one point, albeit under supervision. I don't think the Doctor has had a companion since who could operate the Tardis controls like that (well, apart from River Song, who is a special case and not an actual companion, as such).
I start to really struggle with the plot of this story around about the time that the Doctor, having previously stated that he absolutely cannot go to Logopolis with the Master possibly aboard, then about turns and decides to go to Logopolis anyway, Master or no Master, because his future self has told him that he will. That's the kind of causal paradox that always bugs me in any show: someone doing something they wouldn't normally do just because someone from the future has told them that they will, rather than because there is any logical rationale for that action. Pre-determination always makes me twitchy.
Man, Logopolis is even dustier and more boring than Traken! It's an awful set.
Having talked to the Watcher and learned that his regeneration is imminent, the Doctor's initial plan is to abandon Adric on Logopolis while he heads off to face whatever lies ahead alone. Now that's a danger that would never occur to most companions: the risk that the Doctor might abandon them on some completely random planet just because he had more important things to be getting on with, no time to waste, and thought leaving them someplace at least reasonably safe was his duty discharged, whether they wanted to make a life in that place or not - I mean, seriously, Logopolis is no place for a lively, inquisitive teenage boy to be facing an indefinite future! Sarah Jane got off lightly, by that token, as he did at least get her to the right planet, the right country and the right year when he ditched her in such a rush, even if it was the wrong city! It is just as well, for both Adric and Tegan's sakes (since he adjusts his abandonment plan to include her), that the Doctor's original plan goes awry almost at once.
I rather enjoy how utterly stymied the Doctor is by Tegan's presence aboard the Tardis. He isn't often wrong-footed like that. He just can't deal with her at all, instead fobs her off on Adric - who isn't the most sympathetic person to be explaining what's what to a shell-shocked passenger!
Nyssa turning up on Logopolis is a bit random. The Doctor's 'friend' - the Watcher - brought her, she tells us. But we aren't told how or why. Because the Doctor himself didn't have time to respond to her distress call yet future history related that she joined him and therefore needed to be collected from Traken before it was destroyed? It's all a bit woolly.
I quite like the Monitor - for a bit-part guest character, we get to see quite a few different sides to his personality: his impatience when the Doctor is pussy-footing around instead of handing over the police box dimensions so they can get on with the task at hand; his charm when soothing the Doctor's companions in their alarm over being shut out of the Tardis while the Doctor tests the Logopolitan fix he's been given; his utter bewilderment when the computation goes wrong; his absolute dedication to duty and single-minded focus on the task at hand; and his distress over the destruction of Logopolis and his life's work.
The Master - complete with shiny new body - spends far too much of this story lurking just off-screen laughing his evil laugh of evil. It gets irritating after a while, and doesn't improve much when we are finally allowed to see him.
Adric is a very needy character. He means well, but he's always so desperate to be useful, he needs to be needed - needs to be seen to be needed, seen to be useful. He seems terribly insecure.
It says a lot about Logopolis that when the Monitor and Adric find the sad little corpses of the Logopolitans the Master has killed, the Monitor's immediate reaction is to decry sabotage - it is Adric who points out that it is murder.
I like the Doctor's never say die spirit. He just will not give up, ever.
I like how outraged Tegan is by the oppressive all-work-all-the-time atmosphere on Logopolis and how earnestly she stands up for what she perceives as exploited slave workers. She doesn't understand anything about the society she's landed in, but she doesn't let that hold her back!
The Doctor really isn't the person you want around when you receive bad news. He avoids telling Tegan about her aunt's death for as long as he possibly can, then when he does finally tells her and she understandably breaks down in tears, all he can muster up by way of comfort is an awkward pat on the shoulder as he steers her off into a corner to sob her heart out all on her own while he confers with the Monitor. He's far more comfortable dealing with a crisis than dealing with grief-stricken females! The Second Doctor was far better at this sort of thing. And then he has to tell Nyssa about her father's death, too, but at least in that instance the crisis has escalated to a point where Nyssa has no time to dwell on her loss - much to his relief, I'm sure.
It must be torture for Nyssa to have the Master walking around wearing her father's face. Absolute torture. Poor Nyssa. She lost her stepmother in the last story, The Keeper of Traken. In this story she learns that her father has not only been murdered, but has had his body stolen by a sociopathic Time Lord who proceeds to play mind games with her before unleashing the entropy field that then destroys her home planet. Has any other companion ever been put through the wringer like that?
Wouldn't it be nice if the personal losses suffered by both Nyssa and Tegan in this story had been allowed even a fraction of the focus the pseudo-science is given? Something about the writing and direction of this story really just don't work, emotionally. It could have been so powerful, on an emotional level, but that just isn't conveyed. Instead it feels cold and clinical, with the terrible tragedies it contains largely glossed over, denied the chance to make any real impact.
You know, you've got to respect the Logopolitans' dedication to their work. But it is hard to avoid also feeling frustrated by their tunnel vision - I mean, seriously: the Master shoots several Logopolitans right there in broad daylight, and everyone else is so focused on the task at hand that they don't even notice! They very nearly deserve what happens to them!
So, the Master broadcasts a blanket of silence to bring Logopolis to a halt, not because he has any particular ill-intent toward the place but simply as a bargaining tool, because he believes they hold a secret that he can twist to his own ends, if only he can learn what it is. But he is meddling with matters he does not understand, and by silencing Logopolis for just those few minutes, merely to prove he was capable of it, he unleashes a tidal wave of entropy that threatens to destroy the whole universe. That's one hell of a mistake to make! It is also very dodgy science. Best not to dwell too much on the plot, as it tends to fall apart under scrutiny.
The Doctor seems to end up being forced to cooperate with the Master for the greater good on an awful lot of their encounters. I do like how reluctant he is on this occasion, the way he can't even bring himself to look at his fellow Time Lord when they shake hands on their alliance, and how vehemently all three of his companions argue against the alliance - Nyssa especially, since this is her father's murderer.
Tegan refuses to go with the others in the Tardis to safety, instead following the Doctor. Her argument is that he is her ticket back to London airport, where she was meant to be starting work this morning. That makes no sense, however. The Tardis is her ticket back to London, surely - the Doctor can't get her there without it! She'd be much better off sticking with the time machine than its errant operator!
It makes no sense that the Logopolitans would have copied 1970s Earth technology to run their programme - surely there must be more sophisticated technology out there that would work much better!
Look at Adric channelling the Doctor by not giving straight answers after talking alone with the Watcher.
Nyssa doesn't have a demonstrative personality, is quiet, reserved and unemotional by nature, but her grief is palpable in the scene where she realises that her home world, Traken, has been obliterated by the entropy field unleashed by the Master. It's a nicely understated performance by Sarah Sutton, in what can't have been an easy role. From this point on, Nyssa is completely alone in the universe, the last of her people, with no home to return to.
The death toll in this story really is astronomical, even by Doctor Who standards - whole solar systems are wiped out of existence, including Nyssa's home world of Traken. The death toll must be in the billions - and the Master is completely and utterly responsible, albeit inadvertently. It is probably his worst crime to date, whether he intended it or not.
The script editor, Chris Bidmead, has said that he deliberately made the Master as randomly malicious as possible because he wanted to establish him as a truly legitimate threat to the Master. He very quickly devolves back into panto villain, though, helped both by Ainley's performance and the direction, which isn't the best for this story.
Chris Bidmead was also responsible for the overload of science in this era of the show - I can see where he was coming from, with his desire to inject more 'real science' into the show in place of the 'magic science' of old, but feel that the execution of this conviction is decidedly flawed and leads to imbalance.
The Doctor and the Master's plan involves using the Pharos Project on Earth to beam the Logopolitan's unfinished programme into a Charged Vaccuum Emboitement in space so that it will stay open and thus stop the entropy field from spreading. I think I've understood that right, but I find this part of the plot quite difficult to follow - the Logopolitans had to work constantly at their computations to achieve the same effect, yet it seems one short-lived burst of this programme is all it takes to resolve the problem permanently. Yet the programme is meant to be unfinished. Yet the Master threatens to use the threat of sabotaging it to hold the universe to ransom. Yet once the Doctor disconnects it, the whole huge universe-threatening problem seems to be completely resolved, never to be mentioned again. And the Master did actually broadcast his blackmail message, yet nothing ever comes of it. All told, it just doesn't make a whole huge amount of sense - the plot is riddled with holes you could drive a truck through.
I enjoy Adric and Nyssa's perspective, as intelligent aliens, on human attempts to make contact with alien intelligences. And I love that they use it as a means of making a distraction for the Doctor and the Master to carry out their plan, presenting themselves to the bewildered guards as aliens responding to the invitation - because it is, more or less, the truth!
The scenes shot on location on film look fantastic compared with the overly bright harshness of the videotaped scenes shot on set. The difference between the two is glaring. Somehow it is easier to believe that these are real people having a real adventure when they are filmed on location, whereas the videotaped scenes on set are a lot harder to buy into because they look so obviously staged and fake.
Oh, I like the little montage of former companions that the Doctor hallucinates when he falls from the Pharos antenna, seeing all the close friends he has had in this regeneration: Sarah, Harry, the Brigadier, Leela, K9 and both Romanas, all interwoven with his current trio of companions urgently calling his name.
So, the Doctor regenerates once again, merging with the Watcher to transform from Tom Baker into Peter Davison. But he and his companions are still on hostile territory at the Pharos Project, surrounded by guards and with the Master still lurking nearby - regeneration isn't often accompanied by such a cliffhanger ending!
Quotable Quotes
DOCTOR: "The more you put things together, the more they keep falling apart, and that's the essence of the second law of thermodynamics and I never heard a truer word spoken."
DOCTOR: "There's bound to be an awful lot of fuss about Romana. Why she stayed in E-space, official investigations, that sort of thing."
ADRIC: "The Time Lords won't approve?"
DOCTOR: "What? She has broken the cardinal rule of Gallifrey. She has become involved, and in a pretty permanent sort of way. I think that you and I should let a few oceans flow under a few bridges before we head back home."
ADRIC: "Earth's the planet with all the oceans, isn't it?"
DOCTOR: "That's the chap."
ADRIC: "It sounds wet."
DOCTOR: "Well, it's only the exterior of a Tardis that exists as a real space-time event."
ADRIC: "But mapped on to one of the interior continua."
DOCTOR: "Precisely. That's very good."
ADRIC: "So you can change it into anything you like."
DOCTOR: "Ah, well, that's a sore point. According to the handbook, yes: because the outer plasmic shell of a Tardis is driven by the chameleon circuit. Or so the theory runs. In practice I always meant to ask Romana to help me fix it one day."
DOCTOR: "She [the Tardis] was in on Gallifrey for repair when I borrowed her."
ADRIC: "I thought she was yours?"
DOCTOR: "Well, on a sort of finders-keepers basis, yes. I should have waited till they'd done the chameleon conversion, but there were other pressing reasons at the time."
DOCTOR: "Two point six metres off target. What a landing."
ADRIC: "It's not bad for the Tardis."
DOCTOR: "That's what I just said: what a landing."
DOCTOR: "The Tardis and I are getting rather better at these short hops."
DETECTIVE: "I'm not paid to have opinions, sir. I'm paid to do my duty."
DOCTOR: "Well, I do have opinions."
DOCTOR: "Are you ready?"
ADRIC: "If you are."
DOCTOR: "What? Well, I'd feel more confident if you just said yes."
ADRIC: "Yes."
DOCTOR: "Good."
DOCTOR: "Never guess. Unless you have to. There's enough uncertainty in the universe as it is."
DOCTOR: "The cheeseboard is the world, and the pieces the phenomena of the universe, as my old friend Huxley used to say. Cheese board? Chess board. And the opponent makes no allowances for mistakes nor makes the smallest concession to ignorance. I'm an ignorant old Doctor, and I've made a mistake."
DOCTOR: "I envy you your Tardis, Master."
MASTER: "Excellent, Doctor. Envy is the beginning of all true greatness."
DOCTOR: "Still, while there's life, there's six of one and half a dozen of the other."
MASTER: "Woolly thinking, Doctor."
DOCTOR: "Yes, but very comforting when worn next to the skin."
ADRIC: "The Earth people use it to beam messages to the stars. The Doctor calls it reiterated invitation to alien intelligences in deep space.
NYSSA: "And that's us."
ADRIC: "So they'll be very pleased to see us."
DOCTOR: "It's the end. But the moment has been prepared for."
The Verdict
Overall, this adventure is never going to top my list of favourite classic stories - there are too many plot holes and inconsistencies for that - but is it nonetheless engaging and entertaining and a suitably grand farewell for the Fourth Doctor.