Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor Era (1974-1981) - Part 2

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm reviewing classic Doctor Who stories based on my fading memories of a Twitch marathon I watched ages ago, again!

I've reached the second era of the Fourth Doctor's run here, which was when Graham Williams took over as producer and Anthony Read took over as script editor (before passing the job over to Douglas Adams for season 17). So this article will feature reviews of every serial from seasons 15 to 17, starting with Horror of Fang Rock and ending with The Horns of Nimon.

I'm still dropping SPOILERS for every story I review, but they'll be limited to the current serial and those that came before it. I'm not jumping ahead in my personal timeline.

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I feel like I must have mentioned this already, but I'm introducing ratings for these reviews and you can browse what they mean to me below.

10	My favorite episode of something I watched and adored as a kid, shame I'll never remember what.
9	Would likely make it onto my 'top 10 favourite episodes' list.
8	As good as my favourite episode of classic Doctor Who, which is in this very article!
7	Ain't nothing wrong with a 7, it's a respectable score.
6	Definitely on the right side of watchable.
5	The serial held my attention.
4	I was getting a little bored with it.
3	Really bored now.
2	A rating I didn't give to a single Doctor Who story.
1	A technical and artistic disaster.

It's cunningly designed so you can't argue with any of the scores, because the only person who knows if I was bored is me. Well, okay I suppose the person I was chatting with online who was watching the Twitch marathon themselves has a good idea how I felt as well, though they were more bored than I was.

1977-78 - Series 15
092	Horror of Fang Rock	4 parts	5
I'd heard that this story took place entirely within a lighthouse and I was curious to see how that worked out. Turns out that the Doctor and Leela walked up and down the stairs for four episodes worrying while everyone around them had their own agendas and then died. In fact so many people died in this story that they had to ship in a new bunch of replacements mid-story! I have to admit, I wasn't fully registering everything happening on screen because my brain had decided to give the drama a low priority (I was more fascinated by the speaking tube with the whistle in the stopper to let you know someone was calling), but there were a few moments that I really loved: Leela slapping a hysterical woman. Leela's eye-roll when the woman later fainted. Leela grabbing a sledgehammer and smashing someone's door down to check in on them. Leela weighing up basically every object she picked up to assess how best to use it as a weapon. Leela figuring out how to use the lighthouse itself as a weapon. Plus, uh... the sets looked convincing! Very circular. The effects shot of the lighthouse firing its laser at the Rutan ship was also genuinely impressive for the two seconds I got to see it. I can't really blame Leela for giving in to her temptation to stare at it and almost blinding herself in the process. Especially as it was written in the script especially so that Louise Jameson didn't have to wear brown contact lenses anymore, as bright flashes can apparently change your eye colour now. I wasn't all that impressed by the Rutan though. They finally showed the enemy the Sontarans have been at war with for forever for just this one time only, it never appeared in the series again, and it was a shapeshifting jellyfish monster too dumb to shift back into a human when he needed to climb some stairs in a hurry. The story's also notable for a couple of other reasons, as it's one of the rare serials where only the Doctor and his companion survived, and I believe it's the first time the series ever had two pseudo-historicals in a row (though Talons of Weng-Chiang was from the previous season).
093	The Invisible Enemy	4 parts	6
I knew going in that this story was going to have problems, with my first clue being that fans generally rank it down near the bottom of the classic serials, but I tried to give it a fair shot. Even though it had Bob Baker and Dean Martin's names on it. It didn't make a great first impression by starting with the Doctor getting zapped by evil lightning from his console... mostly because it was the old console! They'd stopped using the wood panelled secondary console room! But I was surprised by how much I liked the first episode overall, with the Doctor and Leela having to deal with mind-controlled astronauts on a space station, complicated by the fact that the Doctor was infected too. Then the second episode was pretty great too, as Leela got the Doctor to a hospital built into an asteroid by piloting the Tardis herself (somehow), and then held off the infected after they followed them inside by smashing into the facility with a shuttle! But then the third episode happened, where the Doctor and Leela's clones were miniaturised and put into the Doctor's brain, and the series waved goodbye to sense, science and reality to take a fantastic voyage into a world of CSO bullshit. I mean I'm sure I actually saw flying columns in there at one point, and the characters stopped at one point to feel the breeze between the Doctor's ears! And yet I didn't hate that episode either really; I'm starting to think that I actually enjoyed this story! Though I did need some time to recover when the virus escaped his brain and was enlarged into a sinister prawn monster which started waving its arms around, as I was ripping my own kidneys out by laughing too hard. I've seen some bad designs and poor effects these last few weeks, but the Nucleus is the first Doctor Who monster to try to kill me in real life. It's a shame it wasn't really an invisible enemy. On the plus side, the sets looked pretty good... sometimes. I once tried reading the novel Feersum Enjinn by Iain M. Banks and I got about a third of the way through before the phonetic writing got too much for me and I had to quit reading books forever, but the signs all over the two space stations saying things like "IMURJINSEE EGSIT" and "ISOLAYSHUN WARD" amused me, especially as a: it was never commented on, and b: the episode began with Leela learning to write properly. I also liked how people kept coming up with slightly insulting theories to why Leela was immune to the infection, with the Doctor saying it was because she's all instinct and intuition, and the hospital staff wondering if it was due to her aggression and her savage way of looking at things... and then it turned out at the end that she had a biological immunity which could be used to cure everyone and defeat the virus, and they'd just missed it. Even Leela's blood is a weapon. Oh plus this is the serial that introduces the robot dog! I wasn't exactly dreading K-9 showing up, but I suspected that adding a comedy robot to entertain small children and force Tom Baker to crouch down all the time wouldn't be a net positive for the series. But holy shit I loved the little guy immediately! He's like a logical Spock in a box that shoots lasers out of his nose and gets into daft conversations with the eccentric Doctor.
094	Image of the Fendahl	4 parts	4
Season 15 was the beginning of a new era for Doctor Who, with Graham Williams taking over from Peter Hinchcliff as producer and Robert Holmes passing the script editor torch to Anthony Read. So I was a little surprised that the Robert Holmes-style gothic horror continued with Horror of Fang Rock, and this tale of mysterious murders and occult rituals happening in a basement. Turns out I hadn't done my research properly, as Holmes had actually stayed on as script editor for the first half of the season. I thought this story started pretty well, with the Doctor and Leela being typically great together and Tom Baker getting lines like "Your ancestors have a talent for self-destruction that borders on genius." Plus I have to give it points for atmosphere and production quality. But it soon ended up on the wrong side of interesting to me and my attention faded fast. Though I did notice that the Doctor claimed to be offering someone a Jelly Baby when he was actually holding a bag of liquorice allsorts, revealing a talent for sweet-deception that borders on frivolous. I'm really struggling to drag much more of the plot out of my memory, though I do remember that a few episodes in I had to make a decision about whether to go get food or keep watching, and when I came back with my Pot Noodle the Doctor was handing a guy a pistol so that he could shoot himself in the head. I started paying more attention after that. Thankfully the story did pick up a bit once the heroes had a plan and it's always nice to see an episode end with a huge explosion. Though maybe it would've been better if the Doctor hadn't ultimately solved every crisis so far this season by blowing it up. Variety's good.
095	The Sun Makers	4 parts	6
I have to give The Sun Makers credit for one thing: it wasn't anything like the other stories so far this season. This time the monster of the story was taxes; more specifically taxes paid to a company which owned everything and considered its citizens to be an exploitable resource. Clearly writer Robert Holmes was unhappy about his wallet ending up lighter than he wanted, but it was nice to watch a Doctor Who story that was actually about something for a change, especially one by a writer who was often pretty good at this scriptwriting thing. There was another monster though, and that was the ridiculous squeaky-voiced overacting paper-sniffing Blofeld wannabe who got flushed down his own wheelchair toilet at the end. A lot of things about that guy suddenly made a lot more sense when it was revealed he was an alien. His performance did fit the tone of the episode though, as they were definitely leaning more into the dark comedy on this one. The story had the whole Tardis crew out doing stuff this time, with the Doctor escaping traps, Leela threatening the local criminal gang, and K-9 being the cute puppy version of a Dalek. I have no idea why a doctor working at an asteroid hospital decided he wanted his robot dog to be a mobile weapons platform, it seems more useful for armed revolution than surgery, but it amuses me that the Doctor's current team is probably more dangerous than UNIT. Man, Leela and the Brig would've been an amazing team... Other thoughts: This serial had some epic hallways, possibly the longest corridors in all of Doctor Who. This might have been the first time that a non-Time Lord villain knew about the Time Lords and the Doctor's reputation without him visiting them once before. The rifle props looked terrible. It ended with the liberated humans throwing a dude off the top of a building to his death and then cheering. A bit more shocking than yet another giant explosion, but different at least! The fact that they made suns, not hugely important as it turns out.
096	Underworld	4 parts	3
That Doctor Who Magazine poll I keep mentioning chose this as the worst Tom Baker story and it's nice to be able to agree with the fans for once! I mean I wouldn't put it at the absolute worst, but bottom five seems fair. It is the anti-Talons of Weng-Chiang, in production values if nothing else. The trouble with Underworld, aside from the science and everything else, is that due to budget problems they didn't have enough money to make another Doctor Who serial to come before the big season finale, but they went and did it anyway! Typically what a TV series will do when their cash runs low is to make a bottle show, like the First Doctor story Edge of Destruction, which takes place on the standing sets with as few actors and visual effects as possible (or a clip show if they're really desperate). What Doctor Who decided to do, on the other hand, was to make a Star Wars-style space adventure inspired by the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, featuring some of the most extensive model effects they'd ever created. So the first episode took place inside a small spaceship set, the crew's epic quest was a short walk through a cave, and then at the end of it, they found themselves at the same small spaceship set again! I was expecting the crashed ship to be a typical Doctor Who situation, where the Doctor visits a new place, meets some people and learns about what's going on there (you know, like in The Sun Makers). But the serial didn't have time to waste on the descendants of the other crew because the pacing in the earlier episodes had been so slow, with everything dragged out to fill time and save money. The heroes basically rushed in, met an evil computer and its henchmen, and got everyone out. It was a bit of a missed opportunity really as they had a similar background to Leela, who was also descended from a starship crew with evil computer problems. They could've drawn comparisons there. Though to be honest the serial wasn't a total disaster for me and I did find things in there to appreciate. Like I thought the actors did pretty well, considering that the cave scenes were all shot on blue screen and composited live. Actors didn't get a whole lot of practice with blue screens back in the 70s. Plus the effects themselves seemed pretty decent for the time as well. Somehow this is the most modern that classic Doctor Who has ever looked to me. Because it looks like an FMV game from the 90s, the kind that came on 7 CDs and probably featured Christopher Walken or Dennis Hopper at some point. I was so fascinated by how they pulled this off in 1977 that I watched a documentary about it (don't worry, I paused it whenever it looked like something was happening in the episode). There was a lot of cleverness involved in making this story, but sadly not enough on the writers' side of the process, because the science in this was terrible. The story exists in a universe where the mass of a spaceship was enough to attract asteroids, which began to collect and form a planet around the ship within minutes. And when the crew located the planet that had formed around the other ship, they dived through to the planet's core to discover there was Earth-level gravity down there... except for in one shaft, where the gravity was low enough for them to float down by waving their arms. But then the gravity at the bottom of the shaft was normal again! I guess I should've known what I was in for when I saw Bob Baker and Dean Martin's names at the start. Also, after the last story broke the season's streak of explosive finales, this one made up for it by detonating two 2000 megaton fission grenades and blowing up an entire planet! That's a horrifying amount of power for something that looks like a can of lager, and the name's a bit of a concern as well. Did the Minyans issue their troops with these 'grenades'? Because that would explain how they lost their last planet. Which incidentally turned out to be the reason why the Time Lords started their non-interference policy, as they'd kind of helped the Minyans develop to that level of tech. So that's two serials in a row now featuring people who already knew about the Time Lords; if this was a modern series I would've suspected it was leading to something...
097	The Invasion of Time	6 parts	6
Then the last serial of the season started with a mysterious alien race plotting against the Time Lords! In fact, it began in medias res with the Doctor already conspiring with the aliens against his own people! That's a proper story hook right there. The Deadly Assassin is one of my top five classic Doctor Who stories and this sequel didn't quite match it, but the first few episodes were great, with the Doctor storming back into Gallifrey with an actual plan, immediately seizing power, and then yelling everyone into submission as he became even more erratic and weird than usual. It's rare for a Doctor Who story to be about the mystery of what the Doctor's up to (outside of the McCoy era at least), and the dude's fun to watch when he's on a mission. But then the plot went a little off the rails later when the Sontarans finally showed up in person and it devolved into a lot of running down hallways. In fact, they even made a joke about them going through the same room over and over again. Then the Doctor shot the villain with a gun and that solved everything! The writers kind of missed the point of the character there. Who wrote this anyway? Oh... the producer and script editor of the series. Still, there was enough good in here to make it my favourite of the season (with The Invisible Enemy in second place), and I liked how they showed a little more of Gallifrey, giving us a few scenes outdoors. They still reveal what the city looks like, but they at least put an orange filter on the location shots to make the place look suitably alien (and to earn continuity points by matching the description given way back in The Sensorites). And then they showed us the inside of the Tardis and it looked like a derelict mental hospital. Damn. Maybe this would've been the time to use their powers of blue screen for good, by giving us some impressive virtual sets... not that it was really an option this time, as they were pretty much forced out of their studio by a strike. Still, it did give us the scene where a Sontaran tripped over chairs while trying to chase them around the swimming pool; a truly iconic moment in Doctor Who history. At least it had got a good resolution for the Doctor's out of character behaviour, as it turned out he was turning his Doctorishness up to 11 to block the aliens' telepathy and he couldn't tell anyone because he couldn't trust the stuffy Time Lords to think chaotically (and Leela's an open book). The resolution to Leela's plotline wasn't so good though, as she suddenly decided she loved a guy she had like two conversations with and she was going to stay on Gallifrey with him! Not only is that the most clichéd way for a female companion to leave, it was given absolutely zero set up! There was no hint at all up to that point that she was interested in the guy or wanted to live in that maze of hallways populated by gits. I'm not sure I would've wanted Leela to die heroically, she was already capable of that from the start and her whole character arc was about learning to become someone better, but there are smarter ways to drop a character than this. Sarah Jane's exit was similarly abrupt and it was great (even if they never explained why he couldn't just pick her up again afterwards), and Liz's off-screen departure was at least 100% in character. Oh plus Leela took the dog with her, which is cool because she always loved that little robot killing machine. Fortunately, it turned out that the Doctor had a spare robot dog sitting in a box for unexplained reasons, so K-9 hadn't been written out after all!

1978-79 - Series 16: The Key to Time
098	The Ribos Operation	4 parts	5
The Ribos Operation was the beginning of the epic Key to Time saga that spanned six serials (26 episodes!) So it was kind of like the Keys of Marinus back in Hartnell's first year, with the heroes going on a Final Fantasy quest to collect all the crystals in various unrelated adventures. Except five times longer. After a scene with the Tardis console room all lit up by an outside glow and looking amazing, the first episode stopped at a wasteland for a bit so that the all-powerful Q-like White Guardian could explain the premise. Turns out that the Doctor had been chosen out of everyone in all of time and space to do a job for him: collecting six hidden gems which together give the wielder godlike powers over the universe (I feel like just saw this in a movie...) But then the story got bored of setting things up and his new companion just appeared in the Tardis all ready to help out! She was a Time Lord like him, apparently sent by the President of the Supreme Council of Gallifrey and that's all the explanation the episode was interested in giving. Though she at least revealed that her name was Romanadvoratnelundar, which opened the door to all kinds of terrible Gallifreyan names going forward that the series thankfully didn't step through (even the Doctor thought it was ridiculous and just called her Romana... despite her preference for 'Fred'). She was the opposite of Leela, highly educated but sheltered, which is cool because it meant that the two of them had a very different relationship. They were much more on the same level, with the Doctor having to try harder to impress. I should probably write something about the actual story on Ribos, but I didn't find it all that interesting, to be honest. I'd heard great things about this story and when the two con artists showed up they had me thinking that it was going to be a clever crime caper. But then it devolved into a lot of running around in the dark catacombs and ended with the Doctor surreptitiously strapping a bomb to the villain and letting him walk off unawares and explode. What the hell, man? The planet itself was a good setting though I thought. It'd been a while since the series last pulled a Curse of Peladon and featured a primitive medieval world visited by future space travellers. This time though the locals had no idea about aliens, which led to a great scene where... actually it didn't really lead to much of anything. Though Unstoffe did get to tell homeless heretic heliocentrist Binro that he was right.
099	The Pirate Planet	4 parts	5
I really wanted to like this one, because it had Douglas Adams' name in the credits and I feel that it's less confusing for everyone if it's only attached to good things, but the serial wasn't really working for me. Which is a shame, because there was a lot of interesting ideas it in, and I can't say that a hollow planet that teleports around to steal the wealth of other worlds and then place them in a display case is a well-worn concept. Plus a revolution against an evil government that's making everyone unimaginably rich is fairly unusual as well. It's like The Sun Makers flipped on its head. I think it might be the tone of it that really threw me off, because I wasn't able to take anyone's problems seriously. Looking at the pattern in my reviews so far I could almost convince myself I'm only watching the series for the comedy, but this serial proves that the characters have to be grounded in some way and there has to be a level of reality to it all or else the story just doesn't work for me. The Doctor can't be eccentric if everything around him's weird too. And the science got so insane that the ending was basically 'the Doctor pressed the right buttons and something clever happened'. Plus I realise that the pirate captain's over the top behaviour was an act, but man that guy was over the top. Even his costume was overacting and I hate his cyborg helmet so much, with its droopy eye and the pipe under his nose. I can't complain about his mechanical parrot though, seeing as it meant we got a robot dog vs. robot bird deathmatch, with K-9 taking the drone down hard (off-screen) and coming back with it in its mouth! Somehow. Also, it was so strange to see a villain like him drop the act when his put-upon henchmen died and show some actual grief.
100	The Stones of Blood	4 parts	7
I've reached the 100th serial! If this marathon had kept going into the modern series I'd be halfway to Planet of the Dead and a third of the way to Jodie Whittaker's third season. Plus it was first broadcast on the week of the 15th Anniversary, so that lined up well. I'm actually a little surprised that Doctor Who Magazine's 50th Anniversary poll agrees with me that this is the best of the Key to Time saga, because I figured that this was a story only I was ever going to really like. It started off looking like yet another serial about cultists and sacrifices, but then the Doctor's investigation was interrupted by rampaging standing stones and I suddenly woke up and started paying attention. Plus K-9 got so wrecked that they were pulling his shredded ticker tape paper supply out of his insides, which was kind of horrific. I thought I had a handle on where the story was going from there though, with the Doctor tracking down the witch and stopping the stones... but then he ended up on a spaceship and everything took a turn for the Douglas Adams. Soon it had degenerated into an absurd trial for his life for the crime of letting the judges out of a locked room! Tiny sparkly floating robot judges! So he just pulled a wig out of his coat and got on with it, because what else can you do? It's a shame I didn't think the villain was all that impressive in this one, because the crazy old professor with her truncheon and the sparkly biomachines were fun to watch (whatever trick they used to create that light show did the job, they looked great). I think this was about the point where I decided I liked Romana as well, even if she did make K-9 forget Tennis. So this was a good one I thought. In fact, according to my calculations it's made it all the way into my top five! Because even after spending a whole month watching 158 hours of old-school Doctor Who, this one still managed to defy my expectations, hold my interest and keep me entertained. Plus I liked it just a little bit better than The Time Warrior.
101	The Androids of Tara	4 parts	6
I have to admit, I was expecting more from this one because it's based on a classic. I don't know if that classic's any good, I've never read Prisoner of Zenda or seen any of the movies, but the Futurama episode Prisoner of Benda was pretty great! Though I do remember the first episode being pretty decent, with Romana finding the next Chaos Emerald almost immediately, and the last ended in a swordfight so I can't complain there either. I think it was the middle of the story that let me down, where Romana had been kidnapped, then she escaped, then she was kidnapped again. A lot of this story just wouldn't have happened if Leela had still been around and kicking ass (partially because she wouldn't have coincidentally been an identical doppelganger of the local royalty so there would've been no reason for the villain to capture her under the belief that she was an escaped android duplicate that he'd commissioned... or whatever happened there). On the plus side, this was about the point where I figured I should've been getting sick of Tom Baker playing the Doctor and I really wasn't. In fact, I was preemptively getting sick of Peter Davison instead because even though I'd only seen like one of his stories I knew for a fact that he wasn't Tom Baker in a blonde wig and a cricket costume. It helped that the writer kept giving him lines like "Would you mind not standing on my chest, my hat's on fire," and at one point he managed to haggle down his payment for a job. Though the Fourth Doctor really needed to lay off the drugged wine as he got tricked yet again here. The villain was pretty great in this one as well. Every now and again classic Doctor Who would introduce a guy who clearly wasn't the Master, but the actor totally should've been, and he's one of them. Definitely the right person for the part. They really needed better parts inside that robot dog though as it took him forever to get anywhere in this story. At least he seemed quieter than the last K-9.
102	The Power of Kroll	4 parts	3
They weren't going to top an entire planet being a key in disguise in The Pirate Planet, but a giant squid a mile wide is a clear second place. Well, it would've been if it had actually been the key instead of a creature mutated by it at least... though it still vanished when they used the wand on it for some reason. Robert Holmes wrote some great stories for the series and this wasn't one of them, but it might not have been all his fault as he'd been instructed to tone down the humour this time. In fact this kind of felt like a rogue Pertwee era serial, with the evil human company oppressing the locals on an alien world, except without the aliens being even slightly sympathetic. I'm sure they were supposed to be, at least by the end, but all they ever did was try to sacrifice the heroes and man I was getting sick of sacrifices by this point in the series. Plus I can see why the actress playing Romana quit after this season as she sure got captured a lot. Though saying that, my favourite scene in the serial was actually the one where they were all on the murder rack, being stretched by the shrinking vines until their spines snapped. Didn't seem all that realistic to me, but then nature's full of weird and wonderful ways to kill you so what do I know? Plus Time Lords apparently have the natural ability to scream at the right pitch to shatter a glass... but only when they need to escape a vine rack. The most interesting thing about the humans' side of the story for me was that there was a lot of returning Doctor Who actors there, like the mad scientist from Brain of Morbius (who was also in The Krotons and The War Games), the mindwiped prisoner from The Mind of Evil, and K-9's voice actor from stories that aren't this one. The most interesting thing about the Swampies was that the green body paint the actors used didn't wash off afterwards. And the most interesting thing about Kroll the squid itself was that it used to enter a dormancy period of a massive duration, just like I did while watching this serial. To be fair it actually ran about 8 minutes shorter than the typical four-parter, but I wouldn't have guessed while sitting through it.
103	The Armageddon Factor	6 parts	5
It would've been hard for anything to feel like a let down coming right after The Power of Kroll, but The Armageddon Factor somehow managed it for me. Not because it was bad, but because it started off so interesting, with the two planets at war and the princess conspiring with a doctor to try to make peace because the military commander was only interested in victory. There was a mystery there that caught my attention. Then came the twist that the war had all been set up by another group of evil aliens who were manipulating the commander and having him fight an empty computer-controlled world and I was like "Wait, what happened to my story? Is that seriously the end of it?" Though the second part of the serial was alright I guess. It did have a few interesting turns, like the heroes trapping the overzealous commander in a time loop before he could blow up the star system, K-9 getting brainwashed by the enemy, and the Doctor running into an old friend of his: a Gallifreyan ex-con with a London accent who was working with the villains. Plus I honestly wouldn't have predicted at the start that the story would have a scene where the Doctor was shrunk down and used the restored K-9 as a Trojan dog! I totally called that Princess Astra herself was the final key piece though, and the fact that I spoiled the story for myself a few years back does not in any way diminish my incredible deductive achievement because I all remembered about her was that the actress took over as Romana for the next season (in fact, to be honest, I kept waiting for her to turn up as the princess in Androids of Tara). I might have guessed about the White Guardian being the Black Guardian as well if they hadn't given it away early. So after 26 episodes of high stakes adventures, the Doctor finally assembled the key and then immediately got rid of it again, making this more like the Waste of Time saga. Though if the Doctor used his godlike power to put every key item back where he found it, I guess this meant that Garron got his jethrik back! Happy ending! Though the serial actually ended with the Doctor attaching a randomiser to the Tardis to evade the Black Guardian, letting him randomly appear exactly where he's needed in the universe without having to lose his hard-earned piloting skills and the Tardis' repaired ability to end up more or less where he wants it to! Which is good, because as a modern series fan I prefer it when he can actually steer the thing.

1979-80 - Series 17
104	Destiny of the Daleks	4 parts	5
This serial is possibly the most perfect example of a '5' rated serial for me. I didn't love it, I didn't hate it, it didn't particularly interest me, I wasn't exactly bored, and it was fairly well produced without anything dumb to sabotage it. Well okay, the Movellans' costumes were a bit daft, but I loved those guys so I'm counting them in the 'plus' column. I like that you can see them behaving like robots all the way through if you're paying attention, and that they seemed to be trying to make up for 15 years of predominately white male Doctor Who casts all by themselves. It's a pretty grim episode overall, to the point where I can imagine the production crew having arguments about the few moments of humour that slipped through. They were back on Skaro again, there were suicide bomber Daleks yelling at everyone and Romana got thrown into a labour camp to work until she died of radiation poisoning (just like Sarah Jane). Of course the Daleks had her hitting rocks, as that's what advanced aliens always make their prisoners do in these stories (see: The Dominators, Deep Space Nine's The Homecoming etc.) Speaking of Romana and comedy, she went through a really strange regeneration in this, apparently triggering it on a whim because she was bored with her look. Then she flashed through a selection of different bodies before settling on stealing Princess Astra's face! I realise that they had to get Lalla Ward into the role somehow after Mary Tamm decided not to return, but trivialising regeneration probably wasn't the right way to do it. Plus it just confuses things! (Her palette-swapped version of the Doctors coat and scarf was great though). Oh, plus Davros turned up very much not dead, after being left sitting in his chair gathering cobwebs for years on 'secondary life support'. Even after a good long sleep, he was still a real bastard, but I'm not sure I would've wished on him a hundred years of spiders crawling over his face. The good thing about Davros is that he's much more interesting to chat with than the Daleks, so the Doctor was able to have a couple of good scenes with him here, the second scene enhanced by the fact that he detonated all the Daleks at the end of it in a huge explosion. Meanwhile, Romana kicked a man's arm off, which was also pretty hardcore. Also, I liked how the episode explained why Davros and the Doctor are so damn good at what they do and why they're so important to everyone, and that's because they're both mad. To be more specific, they can think outside of the box. Either one of them could've come up with an unpredictable move that broke the deadlock between the Movellan and Dalek battle computers, helping their side to gain an advantage. (Their super intelligence likely helps too).
105	City of Death	4 parts	8
The problem with City of Death is that it was written by a very creative, imaginative author with a fantastic way with words, who was also one of the most legendary sci-fi writers to ever live. Wait, that's not a problem, that's actually a good thing! I wasn't 100% impressed with Douglas Adams' first script, The Pirate Planet (more like 54%), and the man definitely wasn't born to be a script editor, but I can believe that this story was written by the same guy who did Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I'm a bit of a Hitchhiker's fan by the way, in fact it's the only novel I've ever destroyed twice. By carrying it around everywhere in a backpack I mean, not out of anger... or jealousy. It was actually pure fluke that this got the highest ever UK audience for Doctor Who, as their rival channel, ITV, was shut down by a strike, but man did it deserve it. It's just a shame that when the wheel turned and the strikes came around to bite Doctor Who, they took Douglas Adams' final story, Shada, away from us. Well, in live action form anyway. Anyway, the plot of City of Death was about a Bond villain in a mansion (like in Seeds of Doom) trying to rewind Earth's history to the ancient past (Invasion of the Dinosaurs) so that he could change history and prevent his crappy situation from ever happening (Day of the Daleks). Because he had been splintered throughout history by the explosion that simultaneously triggered the creation of life on Earth (I... got nothing). It didn't seem like he had such a terrible life, with his big house, immense wealth, a violent butler, and a beautiful wife (probably), but I suppose he was also forced to exist simultaneously in time periods before the invention of toilet paper (or the technology to make ultra-realistic rubber masks). I was a little disappointed I only got to see two of him in the end really, as it felt like the Doctor should've visited a third version to see how he was coping. Things in stories tend to happen in threes. But hey, at least the Doctor actually used his time machine to check something in the past for like the first time ever and he even got to do some Day of the Tentacle-style meddling with history while he was there (though the music sounded more like Gabriel Knight to me.) Part of the reason this story worked so well for me is that the supporting characters were great. Well okay, the scientist guy was doing an annoying voice, I wasn't keen on him, but the rest of the cast took the lines they were given and made them sing. Anyone who's seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade knows that Julian Glover's pretty good as a villain, and his concise conversation with the Doctor was a highlight. But Duggan was the one stealing the episode every chance he got, with his talent for thumping things, opening wine bottles, missing the point, and saving humanity. I loved the conversation where the Doctor explained to him why they wanted to get captured, because of the insight it gave into how the Doctor operates, and that there is actually a method to his madness. Plus the Doctor and Romana actually had time to have a bit of a holiday in Paris before the plot kicked in, though that wasn't necessarily a good thing. This was the first Doctor Who story to film outside the UK, starting a dark tradition that doomed future stories like Arc of Infinity, Planet of Fire and The Two Doctors to feature a lot of scenes of people running around on location. There's a lot of running around in this one too (and crossing roads and taking trains...) and that's probably the only real flaw in the serial. Tighter editing could've improved the pacing, especially in the first episode. Viewers at the time were apparently a bit bothered by all the humour as well, which is understandable. I mean the villain liked to pull his mask off to reveal a one-eyed bug monster underneath and it was never explained a: how it fit, b: how it moved, and c: how the hell their marriage had gone on so long without his wife noticing something was up in bed. Even its name kind of seems like it's meant to be a parody of titles like Ambassadors of Death and Robots of Death, despite the fact that unlike the ambassadors and the robots, the city never went on a killing spree. But then something more serious and accurate like City of Art Fraud or City of Scenic Filming Locations wouldn't have had the same ring to it, and City on the Edge of Forever was already taken. Personally, I've found that Doctor Who's humour has stood the test of time better than the rest of it, so a goofy story with witty dialogue is much more appealing to me than a serious one. As long as Morton Dill doesn't show up again. In fact, this was my favourite classic Doctor Who story out of all of them, despite the fact the first part took forever to get started. Like the Mona Lisa, it's a one of a kind work of art by a genius in his field. I'm still only giving it an '8' though.
106	The Creature from the Pit	4 parts	5
Oh man, this story... I'd heard it wasn't great, it lives down in the bottom fifth of the Doctor Who Magazine 50th poll, but I didn't know why people weren't keen on it. And then I came to the same terrible realisation as so many before me: they'd changed K-9's voice! How was I supposed to enjoy this otherwise pretty decent story of the Doctor trying to make friends with a giant green dick monster when every sound out of the electric dog's mouth was wrong? Plus he got taken down by tumbleweeds! The prop used to depict the eponymous creature was a bit unfortunate (and everyone in the production crew knew it), but you gotta work with what you've got and... well it didn't come off as a complete rip-off of Star Trek's The Devil in the Dark, so they did well there. But I love the comedy in Doctor Who and even I thought that they played this one too jokey. They even gave the Doctor a comedy astrologer sidekick! There were some great lines in there, but when the Doctor pulls a book out a book about climbing written in Tibetan and then follows it up by pulling out a second book called 'Teach Yourself Tibetan', that's clearly too far. Deadpool can get away with playing the fool to an audience of no one, the Doctor not so much. Plus there's no way he can't read Tibetan. In the middle of the action was Myra Frances as the villain Lady Adrasta, who was given a great opportunity to really ham it up and yet somehow didn't. She actually helped salvage the episode for me with her menace and sincerity, plus she had the best line in the whole story when she furiously commanded Romana to "POINT THE DOG AGAINST THE ROCK!" They tricked me though, as I was waiting for the reveal that she was the one who'd come from space to screw the planet over, because her name was an anagram of 'ad astra'. But no, it was the creature in the pit who was the alien, who'd come to the planet Chloris (ugh) fifteen years ago to trade their abundant metal for chlorophyll (which his people were dangerously low on). It was a deal that would've benefitted everyone on both planets greatly... except for the people who'd made their wealth by holding all the metal. Once again in Doctor Who, the moral of the story is to not let self-serving assholes gain the power to make decisions that affect whether or not your star system gets wiped out by a neutron star sent by the self-serving assholes on the other planet. I appreciated that saving the creature and dealing with Adrasta was actually only the first step towards fixing things. Plus I also liked that the story ended with the Tardis doing stuff in space, as it was still very rare at this time for it to be used as anything more than the magic wardrobe the Doctor walked out of at the start of a story. It's just a shame that he was using it to help a blob creature weave an aluminium egg spun from his own body around a city-sized neutron star. This series really needed a science advisor.
107	Nightmare of Eden	4 parts	3
I'm not really sure why my attention slipped right off this one (though I'm guessing the scientist's irritating fake accent was a factor), but after the first episode I just stopped giving a damn about this story entirely. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, as suddenly everything else around me seemed more interesting by comparison and I was able to get some cleaning done instead of watching episode two. The serial was a bit like that episode of Red Dwarf where the crew found they could walk into projected photos developed with mutated fluid, except here there were sparkly fascist disco police officers harassing them and the monsters were all secretly made of drugs. In fact, I was hoping for a Lister and Rimmer cameo with them showing up to fix the Vendatron in the background, but sadly this was filmed about a decade too early for that. I did actually catch the episode I skipped a few hours later on the next showing just to make sure I hadn't missed something that made the whole story click, but all I really learned is that I couldn't stand the twinkly beeping sound on the bridge anymore. Though there was one thing I liked about the story, and that's the scene where the Doctor stowed away on a shuttle and realised that the pilot had his own air supply so he'd be taking the whole trip without oxygen.
108	The Horns of Nimon	4 parts	5
I tried not to read to much about the stories coming up during the Twitch marathon, so most of the time when I started watching a new serial I only had the vaguest idea what to expect. But I knew which ones were considered to be the classics and I knew that Horns of Nimon wasn't one of them. In fact it's in the bottom 15 classic serials on both IMDb and that magazine poll I keep checking, and the general consensus seems to be that it's all kinds of terrible. But then The Space Museum and The Dominators weren't sitting too far away those lists and I enjoyed both those stories, so I was willing to give it a chance. And to be honest I kind of enjoyed this one too. To be fair I'd just sat through four... well, three episodes of Nightmare of Eden so anything would've have been a relief by comparison, but I surprised by how much there was to like in this one. Like the spaceship at the start had pretty good sets for instance, and for once they were supposed to wobble! Plus I liked how that guy kept yelling "WEAKLING SCUM!" at the kids in the hold every time he went down there, like it was standard procedure. I enjoyed the Doctor and K-9 stuck on the Tardis together too, because I tend to enjoy any scene that puts the two of them together, even though the dog had the wrong voice and it ended with the Doctor sticking a 'First prize' rosette on his head. It's been well established that the Doctor has stuff in his pockets and sometimes that stuff may be used in ways that amuse him. Sure the minotaur monsters were rubbish, the villain seemed to think he was in a pantomime, and worse there was padding, but it's Doctor Who, I'm used to that. Doctor Who monsters are almost universally a bit crap, and this particular monster was universally crap, but he reminded me a bit of the Jaffa from Stargate with the big helmets on so I just pretended that's what was going on here. It was easy when they spent most of the story building a stargate and were ultimately killed by a staff weapon. What's funny though, is that this serial is a big part of the reason why Douglas Adams' run as script editor is considered to be one of the Fourth Doctor's worst seasons, but it was written by the previous script editor Anthony Read. Which probably explains why it was inspired by Greek mythology like Underworld. But this was Read's final story for the series and Adams' last as script editor as well. Plus it was the last serial to feature the original Delia Derbyshire theme, the kaleidoscopic time vortex titles, Graham Williams as producer, the Doctor's famous scarf etc. It's just a shame that they couldn't have gone out on a better story...

---	Shada	6 parts	6
Though The Horns of Nimon wasn't supposed to be the final episode of season 17, as they had a big six-parter in production, written by Douglas Adams, featuring expensive City of Death-style location filming in Cambridge. Trouble is that was killed off halfway through by strikes and they never went back to finish it for whatever reason. Well, they did, in 2017, but by that point the actors had aged a bit too much to match the original footage so they had to fill in the unfilmed gaps with animation instead. So that's the version I watched. I've seen a few animated reconstructions by this point (and the music video for Take on Me) so the way Shada kept switching between live action and cartoon really shouldn't have bothered me, but it kind of did. It was more like watching a Doctor Who story with scenes from Archer spliced in, perhaps because of the art style they used, perhaps because the characters sounded 30 years older every time they went to Toontown. But hey I like Archer and this was the closest I'll get to hearing Tom Baker guest star in an episode, so I'm not complaining. In fact, this was a pretty fun and watchable story, and it also had moments of actual threat that a lot of Fourth Doctor stories have been missing. I mean at one point the villain had killed Chronotis, kidnapped Romana, stole the Doctor's mind, nicked the Tardis and was off carrying out his sinister plan, while the one person who could stop him was trapped on present-day Earth. So the Doctor had a bit of a hole to dig himself out of there. It was nice to see him having to work hard to get his Tardis back, even though it was spoiled a bit by the way he basically taught a spaceship how to time travel to give chase. Plus man the jokes in this were dragged out at times (yes I get that the Professor's forgetful, yes I understand that the computer thinks the Doctor's dead etc.) and the story was full of nonsense, with Chronotis just coming back from the dead and getting his mind back because it was convenient for the plot. But it was damn close to being another City of Death at times, with the same wit, tone and excessive use of location shots featuring people making their way around a picturesque city. No Duggan though. The similarity was enhanced for the animated version as they added a very City of Death soundtrack, replacing the Keff McCulloch score used in the 1992 VHS reconstruction. And I have to mention that there was actually a scene where the Doctor was so impressed with Romana that he gave her a medal and saluted her! There's no reason why this should've ever worked in an episode of a half-way serious TV series, but it was the highlight of the whole story for me. Felt almost like she'd finally graduated. I'm not sure if Shada counts as a proper serial or not these days, but it ain't great that industrial action left us with one less complete live action Douglas Adams story in the canon. Especially as it would've raised the number of Tom Baker serials in total up to 42. If they absolutely had to lose one story from this season it really should've been Nightmare of Eden. Maybe it's still not too late!

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COMING SOON

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, the Fourth Doctor era concludes as he faces entropy and takes a journey through E-Space in season 18.

You must have your own opinions about these Doctor Who serials, surely? Maybe you even have opinions about my opinions about them. If you do, you should absolutely leave me a comment in the box below.