Doctor Who: The Fourth Doctor Era (1974-1981) - Part 3

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures I'm still reviewing all those stories I watched during Twitch's classic Doctor Who marathon. I've reached the 80s at last, the classic series' final decade and I'm writing about Tom Baker's final season as the Fourth Doctor. That's The Leisure Hive to Logopolis for everyone who hasn't memorised an episode guide.

1980 was the point that John Nathan-Turner took over as producer and he remained in the role for 10 years until its cancellation, when he was finally freed. It was also the point where Christopher H. Bidmead become the script editor, but he only stuck around for the one season. The two of them brought a few changes to the show, but the one I feel like talking about right now is that bloody logo up there. Apparently, the designer thought that a neon sign was the ideal style to make the logo look fresh and modern, and maybe it was really trendy in 1980, I wasn't born yet, I wouldn't know. But right now it looks like it should be hanging up on a shop wall. Plus it's not even an illuminated sign, it's just glass! I hate it so much!

This era also got a new arrangement of the theme music, which was kind of a big change seeing as the original theme had been around in slightly different variations for 17 years. And I don't hate it! In fact, it really grew on me over the next few seasons. I think I still prefer the original theme better though and I'm definitely not so keen on the slit-scan tunnel being replaced with the cheesy starfield. Nathan-Turner thought that the old opening title sequence looked dated and needed an update, but I think the kaleidoscopic time vortex has actually aged better. Making new a title sequence for every season is something I can definitely endorse though, so it's a shame I reckon that they stuck with variations of this one for the next 7 years.

There'll be SPOILERS beyond this point, but not for future episodes. Only past and present ones, relative to the story you're reading. So I won't be sharing my first impressions of Jodie Whittaker's Tardis console room halfway through my review of The Keeper of Traken.

---

Feels like I should mention yet again that I'm using a rating system for this, based on how much I cared about each story.

10	The best story idea I've ever dreamed up for an imagined TV series that'll never be made.
9	Nothing in classic Doctor Who is going to make it this high so don't worry about it.
8	City of Death.
7	The high end of watchable, the low end of excellent.
6	It's doing a lot of things right.
5	It maintained my interest.
4	I was mildly distracted.
3	I was considerably distracted.
2	Nothing in classic Doctor Who is this bad.
1	Except for The Web Planet.

Only City of Death gets an 8, because it is the best, but there are still plenty more 7s up for grabs! Actually, I've just checked my notes again and it turns out that I'm only going to give one more 7 away before the end of the series. With Peter Davison's era yet to come you may already have an idea of what that lucky story will be... but you're wrong.

1980-81 - Series 18
109	The Leisure Hive	4 parts	5
The first Doctor Who serial of the 80s didn't change the format as much as Spearhead from Space did for the 70s, but I could definitely tell that the new producer and script editor had decided to do the show up a bit. The direction was more stylish, the humour had been toned way down, there was more use of video effects, the music sounded like it was from an Amiga game, and the Doctor had question marks on his collar. They also took the bold step of blowing up K-9 at the start! That was legit horrifying. It was like one of those British safety videos from the 80s that taught kids not to lick power lines or whatever. The story had an interesting setting, as it took place at a leisure hive, which turned out to be a cross between a leisure centre and Babylon 5, built by a dying race as their last gesture to the universe. Its goal: to prevent another war by creating a place where other races could come together and play zero-G tennis. Also they'd been researching cloning and de-aging there, and something to do with tachyons. Plus aliens were trying to buy the planet, and someone was going around killing people, and bloody hell there was a lot going on in this story. Also, just to make things more complicated, the Doctor was put on trial for murder and aged by 500 years, and those two events weren't even related! It was surprisingly fantastic old age makeup though, and Baker did a good job of playing the older Doctor for a good chunk of the story. Longer than I would've guessed. But he was kind of subdued even before being aged as they'd confiscated a lot of his wittier lines to help build the mood and tension. Didn't help build my interest though. There was plenty of world-building and drama going on in this tale of a young man choosing revenge over the peace the last generation spent their final years working to create, and it was certainly a lot more intelligent than The Horns of Nimon, but... meh. That scene where guy's mask was torn off revealing that he was secretly a bird-chameleon man underneath was incredible though.
110	Meglos	4 parts	5
I don't get it, Doctor Who's new team obviously wanted to get away from the campiness of Baker's last couple of years and tell more serious science fiction stories, but then they made the villain of their second serial a cactus plant. A talking cactus plant mastermind who could shapeshift into the Doctor as long as he had a human host to possess. And it had to be a human it seems, kidnapped from present-day Earth, despite the fact that the story was filled with human-looking aliens from at least three other worlds. I'll say one thing about this story, it didn't bore me. I was shaking my head at a lot of it and I might have even rolled my eyes once or twice, but it somehow kept me engaged despite being a simple tale of a cactus working with galactic marauders to infiltrate a planet of blonde Romulans in disguise as the Doctor so that he could steal their mysterious holy power source and install it in a world-killing superweapon he had lying in his back yard. One possible reason I can think of for this is that it was really short, with episode 4 not even breaking 20 minutes. In fact, if you only count the time the Doctor was actually involved in the main plot it was more like a two-parter. I also liked that K-9 finally got his proper voice back! Speaking of actors coming back, the story also had Barbara in it and man she'd done a total 180 on the subject of religious sacrifices in the meantime! Well, it had actress Jacqueline Hill at least, playing an alien this time. It's not unheard of for a guest actor to return to play a companion (Harry, Amy) or even the Doctor (Six, Twelve), but this is the only time I can think of where it went the other way and a companion's actress returned in another role. Shame it wasn't a particularly interesting role, as she was pretty much there to be wrong and obstructive during a crisis. Though by the end she'd sacrificed herself, the Doctor had failed to return her holy relic and without power everyone had to move upstairs to live with the hostile killer plants without the decades of preparation they needed, so that was kind of interesting. Not a great outcome for anyone though really; this was the one time that someone other than the Brig had called the Doctor for help and he screwed it all up! In his defence, the Tardis was delayed by a time loop until halfway through episode two... though hang on, it's a time machine; the time experienced by its occupants during a journey doesn't have the slightest effect on the time that it arrives. In fact, they even mentioned this at the end, when they told the poor kidnapped human that they could get him back to Earth before he'd left.
111	Full Circle	4 parts	5
I don't know what bothered me more during this story: the gross watermelon spiders, K-9 getting his head smashed off, or Adric's rubbish costume with his maths award pinned onto it (it was K-9 getting his head smashed off, because damn man). They should've known better than to let an electronic dog out into a damp forest really. I mean he'd keep stopping to piss oil on the trees. Full Circle was a return to semi-serialisation for the series, as the Tardis was already on its way to Gallifrey (as requested in Meglos) when they fell into the space hole, and they were still trapped in E-Space when the end credits rolled. Plus it got an additional continuity bonus when it mentioned Leela and the other K-9! The noisier one that didn't continually explode or get its head smashed off. I miss those guys. The story started off with a bit of a mystery and some nice location shooting, but I was more interested in getting to see one of the bedrooms on the Tardis again for the first time in decades: So much beige. Plus it seems that the Doctor had gotten rid of those old pull-out beds that Susan used to like stabbing with scissors. The story also started with a guy called Adric trying to steal watermelons and accidentally getting someone killed when the mysterious mists came in. I've heard a few bad things about Adric from Doctor Who fans over the years but to be honest he didn't seem so terrible to me here, even if he did steal the Tardis at one point (in addition to a chunk of the Doctor's screen time and a device from his starship that seemed useful). The other folks on the planet had run away from the mist back to the safety of their crashed ship, which is where the plot started to thicken. Turns out that the people there had inherited the ancient vessel from their ancestors, and their indecisive council of Deciders had them running endless repairs on it so that a future generation would someday be able to take off and return to their home planet of Terridon. The first twist was that the ship already worked, they just didn't want to admit that they didn't know how to fly it. The second twist was that they were already home; their Marshmen ancestors had murdered the original crew and taken their place like the current Marshmen were trying to do now, bringing things Full Circle It was a bit convenient that the Marshmen's rapid adaptability had left their descendants looking exactly like the Terradonians they'd killed after a million or so years living on the ship, but hey half the alien races in Doctor Who have evolved to look human, so whatever. The moral of the story: evolution is weird, procrastination is bad, stealing is good. I have to admit that I didn't see any of this coming, as I was expecting a 'the monsters are misunderstood!' plot that either ended with everyone being friends or the Doctor shaking his head at the inhumanity of man. I also expected more of an explanation for why a spider bite turned Romana into a Marshman agent, helping them attack their more evolved Alzarian cousins, but the writer tricked me there as well! At least it meant that someone other than Adric got to take a turn at getting people killed. Plus it gave the Doctor a chance to science up a cure for her, which isn't something he's done much since his Pertwee days. But I have to admit that the most impressive part of the story for me was the Deciders' room with all of its shelves full of instruction manuals. The set decorators must have worked their asses off on that one.
112	State of Decay	4 parts	5
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I wasn't 100% gripped by this serial. Though it did pick up for me as it went on, especially when the Tardis crew teamed up with an ally I'm going to call Medieval Duggan because I can't remember his name and he liked thumping people. It's a shame he died because I was hoping they'd trade him for Adric. This was the first story with Adric on the crew and he impressed right away. Well actually no, he tried to steal food from starving peasants, joined up with the villains when they offered him wealth and power, mocked Romana when she tried to rescue him, and then chose to become a vampire feeding on the suffering locals because it seemed like a good idea. Even K-9 quickly got sick of him; the logic Adric used to talk his way past him only worked because the tin dog couldn't find a single reason to care about his safety. But any problems I had with it were offset by the fact that the Doctor saved the day by dropping a spaceship from orbit straight into the giant Vampire King's heart. Also K-9 leading an assault on a castle and then posing on the throne afterwards was awesome. Science and technology empowering the oppressed like a boss. The biggest surprise for me of this whole two-month Twitch marathon was how much I love this dumb-looking metal dog. You could argue that giving the Doctor a companion with a gun goes against the spirit of the series and I wouldn't necessarily disagree, but you'd be arguing against Brigadier Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart. I was also surprised to see Teletext making a cameo appearance on the rebels' computer system... though I totally called that the villains' castle was really a spaceship. Wait, is that crew manifest from December 1998? The story featured the second ancient crashed spaceship of the E-Space trilogy, only this time the society that grew up around it was a primitive medieval era one, held back in a State of Decay by their vampire masters because it made them easier to control. So this was another situation where people were waiting thousands of years before they were ready to make their move. In fact, it's interesting just how well this and Full Circle fit together considering that this story was written three years earlier, but then I suppose it had to be redrafted so they could replace Leela with Romana and Adric. They left the vampires in though. Sci-fi and fantasy universes all have their own particular set of unwritten rules that you subconsciously pick up on and instinctively judge new content by, and for me the supernatural has always seemed to be against Doctor Who's rules. But there's a magic trick Doctor Who writers can always pull to get around this: they just say they're aliens from the planet Dæmos or Zombulon or Dracula III or whatever, and that sort of just about worked to excuse them here for me. Adding a Time Lord/Vampire war into the backstory also kind of helped, weirdly.
113	Warriors' Gate	4 parts	6
Personally, if I was writing a Doctor Who story, I probably wouldn't have the characters wander around a featureless white void and then find themselves at a mysterious castle with a time mirror portal that fixes robot dogs and takes people back to the black and white photo timeline where lion people once ruled. Mostly because it doesn't make any damn sense and I'm much happier when stories make sense. I mean look at this, what even is this? And how did they all breathe when they were outside in the white void dimension anyway? Why didn't they freeze to death or float away? What were they standing on? But even as the logical part of my mind was crying out in agony I still managed to find some entertainment in this one. In fact I straight up enjoyed it, which was impressive for an episode where the Doctor basically did nothing in the end but allow events to play out. It helped that the direction gave it a more modern feel than most serials so far, with good pacing and surprisingly interesting camera moves. Plus the working class asshole crew of the slaver ship were great, all the way from the resolute and tireless captain, to the lazy gits hanging around the lower deck. It was one of the very few Doctor Who stories where I wanted them to cut away from Tom Baker and show me more of the side characters. Also it had a great multi-level ship set for them to hang out on, so that helped too. Even Romana's abrupt departure was handled pretty well I thought. Their next stop after escaping E-Space was going to be to drop her off on Gallifrey anyway, so it didn't come entirely out of the blue, and it felt like had one foot out of the door during the whole story really. She was done with being a companion at this point; she'd gotten the experience she was missing when she first joined and she was ready to go off on her own adventures. Plus she could apparently build her own Tardis from the data in K-9, which is... weird, but okay. She really was the noblest Romana of all. And K-9 had a few good lines in his final appearance as well. I'll miss those guys. Plus Adric was there. But never mind that, what's more interesting is that this story introduced dwarf star alloy into Doctor Who lore, which is what the slaver ship was built from. Though I'm more familiar with it from rival time travel series Legends of Tomorrow, where it's a crucial component in the Atom's exosuit. Did I mention that their ship looked a lot like Serenity from Firefly? Because it doesn't, but it kind of does. Well it did anyway, until the slavers blew it up when they tried to break the Warriors' Gate and their back blast backlash bounced back. At least the crew of dumbasses died doing what they loved: the dumbest possible shit.
114	The Keeper of Traken	4 parts	3
Here's a Doctor Who fact for you that I haven't tried too hard to verify: The Keeper of Traken is apparently the last time the series had zero human representation on screen. Everyone looked very human here, but they were either Gallifreyan, Alzarian, or a native of Traken. The reason this hasn't happened again is because the Doctor started recruiting from present day Earth again and he's usually had at least one human companion with him since. The serial's also notable for featuring the Master's first on-screen regeneration... except not really, as what he did here was use his last remaining Source powers from his brief time as Keeper of Traken to merge with someone else's body, taking on their appearance but somehow reclaiming his lost goatee. Space magic really can do anything! What else do I remember about the story? Uh... there was a statue shooting Atari 2600 eye beam lasers, it had some pretty big sets, a woman had eyes painted over her eyelids and we weren't supposed to notice, and the Doctor carried a gun for a while to replace his shooty robot dog. Oh, plus it was Adric that saved the day by building a thing. So it had come to this. I have to admit, I kind of checked out on this one shortly after the wizard in the comfy chair materialised in the console room and started offloading exposition. The scene only lasted for like seven minutes but it felt like it took up a whole third of the first episode! Many stories start off with a hook to catch the viewer's attention but I guess they decided to go with the exact opposite here for the sake of variety. Plus it didn't help that I'd spoiled this story for myself years ago, so I already knew that the Melkur was actually the Master in a Tardis and that he'd possess Tremas at the end, so there wasn't a whole lot of mystery or surprise left in it for me. This is why I roll my eyes every time people say things like 'tests show that spoilers actually enhance our enjoyment of stories' and 'I'm not going to give a spoiler warning for a 25-year-old episode'. I was the one who ruined the ending of this for myself, I'm not blaming anyone, but the fact is that if I hadn't read spoilers for this 37-year-old story that I only got around to watching last July I might have enjoyed it more. Or at all. In fact, I might have written my some actual thoughts about the serial here instead of ranting about spoilers. That said, I also knew that Nyssa joined the Tardis crew at the end, so I was genuinely surprised when she didn't. I feel like I'm being kind of harsh to the serial, as there was a proper story in there about a wife willingly making a deal with evil on a planet of absolute good so that she could selfishly avoid sacrificing her husband to his duty. Spoilers: she done made a mistake. Though the serial wasn't all that interested in questioning the morality of them having a Keeper at all. Way back in Keys of Marinus the Doctor came across a telepathic computer constructed to eliminate evil from the minds of men, and he wasn't particularly sad to see it blown up because he felt that people shouldn't be controlled. Okay to be pedantic he was specifically bothered about people being controlled by machines and the Keeper of Traken was a person, but if they'd had any kind of discussion of the subject they could've brought that up! And if they actually did bring it up they could've done it in a way that I'd remember! But the story's opinion on the matter seemed to be that putting a bad person in charge is bad and putting one good person in charge is good, except it kind of sucks for the good person and their family, and that's all we got. I don't know if I actually wanted any more than that, but I definitely wanted more of something. It was funny watching Anthony Ainley play a really nice bloke though, as I'd seen him play the Master before and Tremas was basically the exact opposite of that. I actually found it kind of tragic that he made it through the whole adventure as the Doctor's temporary companion only to be killed in the last five minutes because he couldn't resist sticking his hand on a strange clock. Mostly because I knew it meant that every time the actor returned he'd be doing that evil laugh all the time. But I guess with a name like Tremas it was inevitable he'd turn out to be the Master in the end, one way or another. Anyway, Keeper of Traken bored me to tears and I didn't give a damn about any of it. For me it's the worst of the Fourth Doctor's run, the third worst Doctor Who story overall, and the only non-Hartnell story in my bottom five.
115	Logopolis	4 parts	4
Logopolis, man... One interesting thing about this serial is that it featured two different versions of the Doctor: one a mysterious ghostly figure who observed the events from afar, played by a guy in a white mask, and the other a miserable idiot who spent the story being continually outplayed and doing dumb things, played by Tom Baker. Seriously, at one point he attempted to open his Tardis' doors at the bottom of the River Thames to flush the Master's Tardis out! While he was standing next to the bit where all the water was going to come rushing in! Without checking the scanner first to see if he'd even landed in the Thames (he hadn't)! Personally, I wouldn't want any amount of Thames water inside my house, wrecking all the electronics, whether I was inside it at the time or not. I remember being moderately entertained by the first episode or two, but the more I think about it the more I wonder if that's only because I was judging it in relation to The Keeper of Traken. Because this story was insane. I'm tempted to go through the whole bloody thing point by point, but here's the short version: The Master impossibly predicts the exact place and time the Doctor will materialise his Tardis because he wants to surreptitiously hitch a lift. He then does everything possible to make the Doctor aware of him, including murdering strangers for no reason with his trademark Tissue Compression Eliminator and luring the Doctor into inexplicable recursive Tardises. The Doctor escapes through the back door of an actual police box, but nearly gets arrested for the crime of leaving two dolls on the back seat of an abandoned car. The Doctor realises that it's a terrible idea to bring the Master to Logopolis and tries to flood his Tardis to flush him out, but after that fails he takes his mid-regeneration future projected self's advice and goes there anyway. This leads to nothing but bad things, because it turns out that the Logopolitans are currently keeping the universe from falling apart due to entropy using a combination of reality-warping calculations performed in their heads and a replica of a radio telescope from 1981 Earth. Plus, his mid-regeneration future projection also brought Nyssa there too, presumably with his spooky teleportation powers because he ain't got a Tardis. But then the Master puts his plan into action, temporarily stopping the Logopolitan calculations so that he can ask them what they're doing. This break in the process causes the city and everyone in it to crumble to dust from entropy... except for every character we care about. Fortunately, they were just about to complete a program to make the fix permanent, so the Doctor and Master just have to fly over to the original radio telescope on Earth to sort that out. Which is incredibly convenient... except for the people living in the chunk of the universe already obliterated by entropy by that point, like the folks on Traken. The moral of the story: never ever trust your mid-regeneration future projection, and if you need your Tardis fixed that badly suck up your pride and go visit Gallifrey... especially if you've been trying to get there since Meglos. Official investigations into AWOL Time Lords are bad, the annihilation of the universe is worse Man, I hadn't seen a serial that felt this much like an adaptation of one of the writer's weirder dreams since Pertwee's finale, Planet of the Spiders. And I haven't even mentioned the tiny Tardis yet. Or the Master expecting to hold the universe to ransom from a radio telescope control room. Or way it kept cutting to an air hostess trying to fix her car. But they weren't the only reasons this lost me as it went on. For one thing, I was close to yelling "Just hit him!" at the screen when a room full of people decided to stand around and let the Master do what he was doing while reality collapsed around them. The Doctor just generally seemed grumpy and useless all story really, even before he knew about his impending death. It was a big contrast to the Anthony Ainley's new version of the Master, who seemed love literally everything that he did, especially if it involved casual murder or betraying someone. While I'm throwing abuse at the serial, I have to point out that if the Logopolitans used mathematics to make solid objects, then by the look of their city they must've been shit at maths. And the Cloister Bell, it's a bit rubbish isn't it? It's supposed to be an alert for "wild catastrophes and sudden calls to man the battle stations" but I never notice it because it sounds like part of the soundtrack. Also rubbish was that cardboard cutout of the Master they stuck behind the Doctor as he was slipping off the antenna walkway. Well okay, it was likely an entire fake background that they could tilt with the camera, but the effect looked much the same. Though it's fitting that the very first Master story ended with the two of them working together at the top of a radio telescope and here they got to do it again for the very last Fourth Doctor story. Speaking of that, this was a regeneration story so now I get to add 'letting go of an antenna' to the list of causes of death, which currently includes: maybe old age/maybe Cybermen energy drain, Time Lord punishment, and visiting a radioactive giant spider cave. Logopolis, man...

113	K-9 and Company: A Girl's Best Friend	4 parts	2
Here's a surprise bonus review for you: the pilot episode of K-9's first spin-off series, starring Sarah Jane Smith! Though not really, as I spent the first 10 minutes waiting for some kind of hook or plot to appear and then turned it off in frustration when it didn't. I've seen a lot of classic TV these last few months, I've gotten used to the leisurely pace and sub-Game of Thrones production values, but I'm just not used to watching episodes this bad without robot silhouettes on screen taking the piss out of it. I did eventually put it back on to listen to the audio while I did something else, just in case something interesting happened. But it didn't. Well, there was a bit of human sacrifice, but I'd already gotten enough of that from Doctor Who. Nice opening titles though.

CONCLUSION

---

I've grown to like the idea that the Doctor's new persona after regeneration is subconsciously influenced by the previous Doctor's experiences and state of mind (to the point of nicking his companion's accent sometimes). The First Doctor grew to like travelling with companions and saving the day, so the Second Doctor was more friendly and heroic by nature. The Second Doctor ended his run by going through the trauma of The War Games, where his companions were mindwiped and he was exiled by the Time Lords in a new body, so the Third Doctor was tough, reluctant to make connections with people and had no time for authority figures. And the Third Doctor was stuck on Earth his entire life due to his attachment to his friends, so the Fourth Doctor's personality was exactly what it needed to be for him to immediately jump into his time machine and make a break for it. Only by turning into Tom Baker could the Doctor be flaky enough to abandon the Brig.

Tom Baker's take on the Doctor didn't just bring back the eccentricity, it dialled up the alienness to the point where he was almost a live-action Bugs Bunny at times, except with gravitas and a scarf. By this point the Doctor had decided that saving planets was his mission in life, but he was also having fun doing it. The guy was out to entertain his audience, his companion and himself, sometimes to a ridiculous degree. Like when he pulled a comedy routine involving a 'how to climb' book written in Tibetan and another book on 'how to read Tibetan', while dangling from a rope, for the benefit of no one at all. Baker's tendency to liven up the scripts he was given with extra humour could undermine the tone, especially when the writer didn't intend their story to degrade into farce. But when a good writer got the character right he was capable of being flippant one moment and then turning deadly serious (even convincingly furious) when the situation got real. This incarnation of the Doctor had inherited a bit of Baker's madness (and irascibility), but he also came off as extremely competent and intelligent, partially due to his fantastic deep voice and line delivery that could make the gibberish the character came out with sound profound. Plus he may have been putting on a show, but for his encore he always won.

I just wish they hadn't fake killed him off in so many cliffhangers. Seriously, it got ridiculous.

I've noticed that a lot of Doctor Who fans put the Fourth Doctor at the top of their lists, maybe because of his alien charm, maybe because his episodes were the ones repeated on TV where they lived, or maybe they just like his scarf. Me, I tend to prefer the witty upbeat Doctors over the grumpy ones, so this wasn't even a contest: the Fourth Doctor is my favourite classic Doctor. The dude was carrying the weaker stories on his broad shoulders, making them work through sheer force of personality alone. Actually, that's not entirely true, as he was rarely alone. The Fourth Doctor had almost as many companions as the First Doctor. Equal, in fact, if you count K-9 and Romana twice. And now I'm going to write some words about them.

Sarah Jane Smith: She's a contender for the most loved of all companions both modern and classic and I can see why. She was curious, intelligent, enthusiastic and she'd go off and investigate things on her own if people were going to be patronising to her. Elizabeth Sladen had decent chemistry with Pertwee, but she was great with Baker and her childish ad-libs were fun. She also had a real gift for appearing to be genuinely terrified of whatever weirdness the two of them were facing that week, which was handy for all the gothic horror stories the writers put them in.

Harry Sullivan: The guy had some great scenes, especially when he was trying to solve problems with the others, but I found that he also took away from Sarah Jane's screentime and her friendship with the Doctor, and that was a bit of a problem. Plus he was intended to be an Ian-type who could do the action scenes if they decided to cast an older actor as the incoming Doctor, but that didn't happen so he was a little superfluous from the start. Personally, I think I would've been just as happy if he'd stayed on with the other two a season longer, or if Sarah Jane had left and he'd become the only companion, but I can't complain about the way it worked out.

Leela: I probably shouldn't have been surprised by how much I liked Leela, considering she was like the Fourth Doctor's very own Jamie. She was also the first companion in seven years who wasn't from near-future England, and her naivete and fondness for stabbing people set her apart from the rest. Though she seemed the most intelligent and inquisitive of her tribe, and she ran from a chance to lead them because she couldn't be tied down to a boring life by people she couldn't respect, so she was well qualified to be the Doctor's protégé. Plus I loved how Louise Jameson countered Tom Baker's over the top eccentricity with her absolute conviction and sincerity.

K-9: I was kind of dreading K-9 as he was clearly a gimmicky comedy robot thrown in to appeal to younger kids and Doctor Who didn't need to have its very own Scrappy Doo hanging around for half of Tom Baker's run. Plus his name is a bloody pun! But I ended up loving the thing almost immediately, both of them. Neither was much good at moving and the laser made them into a bit of a deus rex machina (that's Latin for 'dog from the machine'), but they had a very Spock and Kirk relationship with the Fourth Doctor that worked great. Except for when the MK-II's voice changed for a season. I didn't realise how irreplaceable John Leeson was until he was replaced.

Romanadvoratrelundar: The Doctor Who staff really made life difficult for themselves when they came up with Romana, as she was a genius Time Lord with the same education as the Doctor and there was no Ian or Barbara around to ask the dumb human questions like there was when Susan was a companion. But I thought she worked well in both her incarnations, even though they made her regeneration into a joke, and Lalla Ward's tumultuous off-screen relationship with Tom Baker affected their on-screen interaction more than you'd ideally want.

Romana began as the antithesis of Leela, as she knew everything, wore clothes and was typically unarmed, but she was also learning from the Doctor during their journeys as his protégé. The two companions kind of had opposite arcs, as Leela became (a little) more civilised and ultimately settled on Gallifrey, while Romana became more rebellious and ran from her homeworld to have adventures as rogue Time Lord in her own right. She had a similar attachment to the robot dog though and ended up walking off with one herself. In fact, now that I think about it Sarah Jane got a robot dog too!


There was also Adric, Nyssa and Tegan, but they carried on into the Fifth Doctor's run so I'll write about them later. None of them got a robot dog.


My top three Fourth Doctor serials:

---

1. City of Death (8)
2. The Face of Evil (7)
3. The Deadly Assassin (7)

Spoiler: this looks a lot like my top five for the series in general.


Bottom three Fourth Doctor serials:

---

1. The Keeper of Traken (3)
2. The Nightmare of Eden (3)
3. The Seeds of Doom (3)

I get that Seeds of Doom is considered to be a classic, but it was made up of two distinct chapters and I couldn't give a single damn about either of them. People are always talking about how the series gets kids hiding behind couches, so it seems I've got an unusual problem for a Doctor Who fan in that I'm not into horror and I don't care if it's scary. Which is good, because for an adult viewer it's really not. But also bad, because if I've never had the slightest interest in seeing the classic Fu Manchu, Mummy or Frankenstein movies, then what chance did Talons of Weng-Chiang, Pyramids of Mars and Brain of Morbius have to win me over?

Though maybe I just need to watch them again sometime, with breaks, when I'm in a better mood and I haven't already sat through two entire serials beforehand.

---

COMING SOON

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, reviews for the entire Fifth Doctor era! That's 20 stories in one post, surely some of them have to be good.

I encourage you to leave a comment below if you've got any opinions on these episodes or my reviews. Only you can prove that I'm not talking to myself here.