The Horns Of Nimon: Ranking - 142

    The Horns Of Nimon

(Season 17, Dr 4 with Romana II, 22/12/1979-12-1/1980, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Douglas Adams, writer: Anthony Read, director: Kenny McBain)

Rank: 142

'Welcome to Sknonnos, sacrifices, you’ve hit the Bullseye! Here are your prizes: a bendy Nimon, a chequebook and pen, a speedboat that looks a little bit like The Whomobile and your impending destruction. Give them a big hand…a hand with a staff infused with a Jasonite crystal. Ouch!’

 

Some Dr Who stories hit the bullseye: impassioned pleas for humanity’s future set against a monster whose buried deep within our collective psyche. Or they’re character stories, about people we’ve come to know and love pushed to extremes by dangerous or emotional circumstances. Others have lots to say about our contemporary society and its failings despite being set in the far past or the far future. Yet more shape what we think of as our favourite programme, breaking and bending rules to provide us with something extraordinary. Some don’t actually do any of these things but they still grip us because they look amazing on screen, the BBC using every bit of expertise at their disposal while getting lucky with the budget allocation. Others are acted with such sincerity and guts they kind of make up for it that way. Sometimes a story will get lucky and deliver on all counts. And others get unlucky and just miss – not by much but by just enough, in all departments, so that a slightly silly story ends up exaggerated by a tired cast who are having too much fun to stop near the end of a season when the money is running out. Poor ‘Horns Of Nimon’. It’s the scapegoat (scape-bull?) for all sorts of the things that people don’t like about the late Tom Baker era – the hammy acting, the unlikely plot, the way that growing inflation has hit the programme budget and made everything look cheaper in real terms than it ever will again – and been blown up of all proportion to be ‘the story that’s so bad it makes you cringe’. Producer Graham Williams realised it was going a bit wrong at the script stage and decided to bury it in the fifth slot of his six story season over the Christmas holidays assuming no one would be home to see it – and then the collapse of season finale ‘Shada’ meant that instead of being a cute little bit of filler it became the colossal heavy ‘end of an era’ instead. 

 Actually I find ‘Nimon’ a really good, engaging story, albeit one clearly made under pressures of time and money. Unlike some true howlers in the Dr Who catalogue this one just got slightly unlucky in every avenue rather than being horrendously wrong or way out in one particular area (looking at you ‘Orphan 55’ and ‘The Dominators’!) ‘Nimon’ is a story that has a lot of important and very Dr Whoy things to say about religion and faith and worshipping people who betray your trust. It’s just that, because of the hurry in which it was made and the crippling inflation of the late 1970s, the story ends up losing all its nuances, the God who betrays everyone looking like a man wearing a bull’s head on his shoulders, dressed in hotpants and platform shoes, in front of some patently unfinished sets that have been shot in near-darkness because they think we can’t tell, in front of which a lot of bored-yet-delirious actors have been working far too many hours and can only see the absurdity. Rumours went round for years (thanks, once again, to Peter Haining and his first ever detailed guidebook to Who ‘A Celebration’) that it was meant to be a pantomime, put on specially for Christmas, with not one but two villains who were eating the space-furniture (despite one of them having a mouth that’s immovable in the bull’s head). Most fans see how OTT this story looks, an odd combination of the worst fashion excesses of both the 1970s and the 1980s (the transmission straddles both decades: who would have thought most people would be wearing shoulder pads a few years after seeing Soldeed here?!) and point and laugh. I mean, if the actors can’t take it seriously then how can we? 

 However I first came to this story from Terrance Dicks’ Target novelisation and it’s another of those maybe dozen or so stories that works so much better on the printed page than on TV (not least because of all the extra back story Terrance gives us) so I see this programme as more nuanced and powerful than anything that actually made it to screen, a script bursting with ideas and characters who have more nuanced than how they’re played on screen. Far from being an empty story that needs to be camped up it has a really big message behind it too. One-time Who script editor Anthony Read wasn’t with the programme very long and found working on other people’s scripts exhausting when what he really wanted to do was work on his own. He’d struck up a good friendship with his successor Douglas Adams though (seeing the brilliance of the first draft of ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ when most people considered it daft and said it would never work) and kept his bridges intact, realising that as a freelance writer one day he might be in need of some quick money. This was one of those times: Read had been busy working on ‘The Omega Factor’, Louise Jameson’s big spooky hit after her role as Leela about a detective convinced his wife was killed by a group of hitmen with extra-sensory powers, before finding himself in a bit of a lull. So he proposed a Who script that would sort-of combine the two, along with his great passion for Greek myths and legends (‘Underworld’, a re-telling of ‘Jason and The Argonauts’ in space, was mostly his idea too). A great lover of ancient history, Read had found himself wondering what might have happened if the myths and legends were true but misinterpreted due to humanity’s ignorance of the time. He also wondered if the Ancient Greeks, so accurate and scientific in almost every other way, could conceivably have been right about the Gods they’d once worshipped, but that for some reason they’d moved on to terrorise another planet out in space. He saw them as having spooky supernatural powers as well as technology far in advance of anything humans had created and the half-human half-animal look of many illustrations of the time. One of his biggest ideas, which never quite made it to screen, was the idea that the labyrinth myth was really a gigantic circuit board like those found in computers, a maze of electronics that were so big you could walk down them and which kept changing the size of the environment. 

While Read never mentioned it, too, his time working on ‘The Lotus Eaters’ in 1972, a film about British spies but shot on location in Greece, seems to have been a big influence on this story. For a man like Read who adored Ancient Greece and the ‘birth of democracy’ it must have struck him as sad what the country had fallen into by the early 1970s: between 1967 and 1974, the years when most of the rest of the world was getting into flower power and a hippie sense of community, Greece was under a right-wing dictatorship thanks to a military coup. It’s the age-old story: a tyrant seizes power at a time of political rest and uncertainty, seizing it from a caretaker coalition government, and takes over to make themselves lots of money. Only the difference this time was that there was a trio: ‘The Three Colonels’ ruled by restricting movement in and out of the country, people’s ability to protest, made communism a crime and the imprisonment torture and exile of anyone who disagreed with them. The only people the Three Colonels seemed to hate as much as the people they were meant to be protecting was each other: each colonel had slightly different roles and a slightly different support network but were afraid to take one of the others out in case the resulting revolt meant they lost their power too. So, for the first time (the only time?) in Dr Who we have not just one megalomaniac but three: there’s the Bull himself of course, The Nimon: impossibly powerful, with technology far ahead of their people so he’s greeted like a God, the script ambiguous as to whether he actually is one or not, though he can’t live on the planet himself and just comes to harrumph every now and again and demand sacrifices. Then there’s Soldeed, the humanoid whose convinced of his own brilliance, taking a little bit on the side and enjoying the power the Nimon gives him. Secretly he thinks he should be top dog and he’s certainly more hands on, a bully who delights in cruelty. Only he needs to keep the Nimon sweet to retain any of his power. Then there’s Sorak, the military ruler. Unlike the other two he’s thick as two short planks and used to obeying orders, without any ambition for more – but he’s also a sadistic ruler who delights in cruelty and because of the fear they have for him the army remain loyal to him (this seven year period of Greece saw colossal funding for the army even when the people were starving). So that’s Nimon with the power and technology, Soldeed with the brains and the engineering abilities (he rebuilt Sknossos more or less singe-handedly, such as it is) and Sorak with the soldiers, each one in a dance to please the others while hoarding as much wealth as they can. It’s a labyrinth of politics, impossible to unravel without giving more power to one of the three, none of whom deserve it and much harder to take this system down than it is, say, taking down Davros or a Cyber-leader who hold all the power, a trio of madmen locking horns. The one who really should be running this planet meanwhile, scientist Sezom, can see through exactly what’s going on but is powerless to stop it because he has right on his side, but nothing to back it up with. Until the Doctor, Romana and K9 help him out. 

While all this in-fighting is going on the people suffer. The Nimon has no interest in their welfare just their resource: he’s wandered his way across the universe taking over planets for their minerals and then abandoning them to their fates: the hint is that he once did this to Earth back in the days of the myths and legends. Soldeed doesn’t care about the people as long as he gets to live in opulence. And Sorak only cares as long as he’s somewhere near at the top of the food chain and can shout at people on the way down. And all expect more from their people than they can possibly give. At its heart ‘The Horns Of Nimon’ is a story about sacrifice: most obviously in the way that certain bright teenagers are handed over to the space minotaur (the way that Greece’s brightest and best were killed, imprisoned or exiled). But it’s also about the soldiers who, when we join them, have just survived a war but only at great cost with the loss of so many of the families they were fighting for. ‘The Horns Of Nimon’, then, isn’t a story about a bull in hotpants (although it is that too): it’s a story about what price you’re prepared to pay as an individual to keep your home and your loved ones safe, about whether you’re prepared to risk all to stand up to the bullies even though you know you won’t win, whether it’s better to sacrifice your principles or your life. Actually the Sknossans are pretty brave as Dr Who alien communities that go: they’re a bit on the weedy side in how they’re written and portrayed (and it doesn’t help that they cast a future Blue Peter children’s presenter in Janet Ellis and poor unlucky Simon Gipps-Kent in the youthful roles, a fine actor in his twenties who was cursed with looking a decade younger and so frustrated at the sort of roles he was stuck with it seems to have lead to his death from morphine poisoning a few years after this serial). Even before the Doctor arrives they don’t go down without a fight – their downfall is the all too believable situation where they fight amongst themselves the way any civilisation would, unsure which villain to take down first and how. There are no solutions until these people get their own benevolent aliens who combine all the best features of their enemies, the Doctor and Romana bringing their technology, their brains and – by winning the people over – their heart. ‘Nimon’ is also, at least on paper, a sort of space-age ‘Aztecs’ that looks anew at whether an empire is worth saving when bits of it are so good and forward thinking even when other parts are so barbaric, which is a very satisfyingly Who-ish angle to take. 

Most people only see the Ancient Greek symbols though, which is fair enough because there are rather a lot of them. The name ‘Nimon’ is an inversion of ‘Minos’, the Greek King who caused all the problems and who was assumed ruled by the divine right of God so couldn’t be toppled. ‘Skonnos’ is clearly ‘Knossos’, the name given to the Minoan civilisation of nearby Crete and allegedly where the Minotaur used to live. The Anethans are clearly the Athenians, the people who were sent into the Minotaur’s labyrinth to die. Seth, Gipps-Kent’s hero, is clearly Theseus, the ‘divine founder’ of modern Greece who survives fighting alongside the Doctor to re-form his world too by the end of the story. Other links are less clear: Soldeed feels like Daedaluas, though, the ‘engineer’ of the labyrinth who built it in the first place and knows all its secrets. The torture chamber of the original myth might well be the ‘Power Complex’ – the torture both literal and symbolic, given the three-way fight over power on this planet (the best line of the story comes when Romana is told this is where the Nimon God lives. ‘That fits’ she says). The two power sources are interesting too: ‘Jasonite’ comes from the ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ tale already studied at length under ‘Underworld’, while ‘hymetusite’ is named both for Mount Hymettus (a mountain that overlooks Ancient Greece perhaps symbolising a ‘way out’) and quite possibly ‘hemusite’, a real mineral that combines a ridiculous amount of powers that are usually separate but are combined together (copper, molybdenum, sulphur and tin) rather like the combined powers of the three nasties at the heart of the story. A lot of fans dismiss that ideas being derivative and boring, but to me it makes sense: a lot of Dr Who is about the horrors of history repeating itself if not enough people heed the warnings; the idea of the future so closely matching the past, because mankind (and beings that at least look like man) never learn is a very Whoy message. Admittedly a lot of the darkness of the original story is lost (and it really is a dark story: a woman condemned for having sex with a beast, the child of their union exiled to a labyrinth and the suicide of the father of the hero, who forgot the message giving him the all-clear by putting white sails on his ship, which turns him into a monster at the time of his greatest triumph). But this is a drama for a family audience at a Saturday teatime: it was never going to be nor meant to be as gory and sexual as an adult interpretation would be. 

When the finished script dropped into Douglas’ in-tray he must have been thrilled: this was a frenetic year and both Douglas and producer Graham Williams were looking to move on at the end of the season. They’d had multiple story ideas fall through, lots of others sail over budget and ‘Destiny Of The Daleks’, a story which, like most Terry Nation stories, had to be fleshed out considerably at short notice. Read knew what it was like to be a script editor and deliberately wrote ‘Nimon’ to be a small, compact story with a relatively tiny speaking cast, few special effects and even a hint dropped heavily in the script that the two alien planets we see could be the same sets re-dressed with the lights dimmed low for the one that had been used up (something which happens exactly that way in the final story). Adams, by his own admission, left this story alone so he could get on with the others that were demanding all his time, which has confused many who look at the many jokes in it and assume they must be his. You see ‘Nimon’ is funny but in an entirely different way to, say ‘The Pirate Planet’ ‘City Of Death’ or ‘Shada’ and Read was unlucky to be part of Who at a time when the man whom a lot of fans (though by no means all) agree is the funniest man to ever work on the show. During his time on Who fans had begun to grow accustomed to a particular brand of sophisticated humour which Read doesn’t share (and sensibly doesn’t try to match). Douglas’ wit is dry and cerebral, full of the absurdities of life told in a deadpan way which leave the viewer a few beats before they connect with; a lot of the time too he’ll throw half-jokes into the script, statements that can be read at face value but in the context of the other lines leave you looking for the punchline and sometimes finding one that isn’t there. Douglas was an academic who’d started writing at Cambridge and viewed world-building as an intellectual exercise. Read’s work, too, is full of the absurdities of life but he’s from Midlands mining stock: his idea of the absurd isn’t intellectual but heartfelt, dripping with anger at the fact life isn’t better, full of visual humour at these huffing puffing bad guys who are only brave at certain times (just note the way Soldeed only feels powerful when he has the Nimon’s stick in his hand). Read’s characters don’t have time for punchlines, they’re too busy struggling with whether to throw actual punches; had he created Arthur Dent he’d have arm-wrestled the council trying to knock his house down to the ground in desperation before marking a dark quip about it. The big difference is that you can imagine a laughter track on Read’s work whereas you can’t ever imagine one on Douglas’: a lot of fans see the two next to each other, work out that Read’s work isn’t quite as multi-layered as Adams’, and attack it for being ‘obvious’ – but any writer whose work is sat next to Douglas’ would seem one-dimensional. ‘The Horns Of Nimon’ has some great jokes, almost all of them at the expense of the bad guys. We at home can see things that they can’t, if only because we know what one of the other tyrants are plotting and how their attempts to lead their people their way are all getting tangled somewhere in the middle and ending up a big mess. Script on script ‘Nimon’ is one of my favourites: not one of the very very best but still an excellent idea with lots happening in the plot and some great characters to get our teeth into. 

So what went wrong? Well, a lot of what ended up on screen feels like a bull let loose in a China shop. It’s as if everyone, from director Kenny McBain down, realised they were no longer working with the closely knit subtleties of a Douglas script and could go for the jugular, even though ‘Nimon’ isn’t that sort of a script at all. It feels like every other line in this story is given the wrong emphasis or played for laughs. It doesn’t help that Graham Crowden was cast as Soldeed: though a fine actor, who at one point was seriously considered for the 4th Doctor if Tom Baker said no and who steals the show from not only a Doctor but a Doctor’s son and a Doctor’s mum in medical comedy ‘A Very Peculiar Practice’ (Peter Davison, David Troughton and Barbara Flynn respectively) he’s just come from a heavy year’s Shakespearing and needed a break. Crowden was a colossal giggler and heavy drinker and found a willing accomplice in Tom, who was an old friend (Tom had, in fact, once been his understudy in a Stoppard play at the National Theatre – rumour is they did a lot of drinking and giggling then too). One of the few things in common with all eras of Who is that the rehearsals are an absolute ball: the actors get the silliness in scifi out of their system and enjoy themselves doing something different and sometimes ganging up on the poor writers by picking holes in the script and adding bits of their own; most of the time the actor/actress playing the Doctor is right at the heart of this. Some producers tore their hair out at this and fought it, others went with it, some actively encouraged it but most managed to get it out of the cast’s systems by the day of recording. Something weird seems to happen at the end of the Williams era though: he had a really interesting love-hate relationship with Tom who considered him both his best friend and worst enemy, often at the same time. Baker felt Williams’ departure heavily: he didn’t get on with replacement John-Nathan Turner all that much (who’d been working as production unit manager for some years) and knew the younger man wouldn’t be quite as indulgent with the jokes. Baker respects Douglas’ writing too much to mess around with it but everyone else in season 17 is fair game and, with Crowden egging him on, he just doesn’t stop: the two old friends have great fun improvising jokes and trying to top the other. Of course this is Tom so a lot of them are funny, such as him giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to K9 or the gag where the poor dog gets covered in ticker-tape. But there are so many the finely balanced scripts, on a knife-edge of drama and comedy, descend into farce. There’s the infamous death scene of Soldeed too, recorded at the absolute last minute on the last day, but Crowden didn’t hear and assumed it was a camera rehearsal so hams his part up as if he was a Dalek-pig hybrid from ‘Daleks In Manhattan’, ending with face clutching and a manic giggle that even The Master can’t match (it is, at least, in character: it totally fits Soldeed’s personality that even his heroic noble sacrifice would be a grand theatrical gesture, perhaps in the hope of some future historian witnessing it and writing what a brave figure he was, even in death). 

The cast spend most of their screen time chewing the scenery – and rather bland scenery it is at that. You can tell that we’re at the end of the year, with the most heavily slashed budget (accounting for inflation) of the series’ entire run. Sets are re-used and clearly put up in a hurry (one of the Tardis walls is upside-down, something nobody noticed till post-production), many of them taken from other sources (one wall could be seen most weeks on ‘Multi-Coloured Swap-Shop’) and not built all the way across to save money. The original intention, of having a corridor that kept changing every time we saw it just like the labyrinth of old, ends up reduced to K9 walking through a wall in some dodgy post-production effects. Even the Tardis has seen better days: you can still see the chalk marks from when it was borrowed, in between stories, for a photo-shoot by a greetings card company (you know the one, the 4th Doctor standing in front of different ages written out on the Tardis wall and wishing you a happy birthday). The lighting on the Tardis comes from actual disco lighting which was all that was left in stock – and talking of disco the costume department decided the Minotaur didn’t look quite right naked so gave him gold hotpants. Coupled with the fact that actor Robin Sherringham is teetering on enormous platform soles (to make an already tall actor seem even taller) and you half-expect the cast to start performing ‘Saturday Night Fever’ any minute (actually that story’s not too far removed from this one: ‘Nimon’, too, is about competing characters going ‘look at me!’ only its from their respective war-rooms rather than a dance-floor). The co-pilot, meanwhile, splits his trousers in one of this story’s epic death scenes and, instead of cutting away, the camera seems to delight in going for a close-up (in case you’re wondering Sknossos seem to have a branch of Marks and Spencers). Romana, at least, gets the only decent costume, one which like many of Lalla Ward’s ideas, comes from a story she sort of saw within the script: this week it’s ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, figuring that the Nimon was a kind of ‘wolf’ character pretending to be benevolent (and figuring red would subconsciously anger him): it might be the only time anyone, other than the writer, actually gave any proper thought to this script. Every person in this bar the regulars are totally mis-cast, with really good actors (John Bailey, for instance, was excellent as ‘The Commander’ in ‘The Sensorites’ and Edward Waterfield in ‘Evil Of The Daleks’) wasted on the wrong roles. Don’t even get me started at the literal interpretation of impossible God Nimon, who has impossible powers, who ends up a man wearing a bulls’ head with horns that zap lazerbolts. Nobody in this story seems like a viable threat: I mean the co-pilot has turned ‘weakling scum!’ (a single line in the script) into a catchphrase, the Nimon looks as if he’d be very easy to push over as he’s barely keeping his balance as it is and all you need to do with Soldeed is break his staff in two: even I think I could probably defeat them, never mind the Doctor, Romana and K9, the most ‘invincible’ of all the Tardis teams: there’s no jeopardy here at all. All the subtleties in the script, all that sense of a ruthless fight over power by people who don’t properly understand how to control it, all that film noir struggle and desperation, is turned into a brightly lit cartoon. ‘The Horns Of Nimon’, more than most stories, even more than most 1970s stories, looks utterly ridiculous. 

 You would normally rely on the director to tone this down as rehearsals wore on, only in this case it’s a newcomer whose never had to deal with Tom Baker before (who was, rightly, highly protective of his character after six years on the show and felt he knew better than anyone how to make Dr Who). You would normally rely on Graham Williams to step in too, but he’s already mentally out the door. The script editor might have had a word – only Douglas Adams is too busy feverishly writing ‘Shada’ and has only glanced through this script. Nobody is in charge except Tom Baker, whose finally got to call all the shots the way he wanted. To give him credit he suddenly seems to realise the mayhem around him and by episode two is under-playing his part, turning his Doctor dark and sombre to better contrast against the larger-than-life world around him: it works too, for the most part. Mostly, though, the patients have taken over the asylum and are partying without rules and a slightly scatterbrained and silly in places script suddenly becomes a farce. It’s not that anything is so very wrong either: there have been far dafter monsters than The Nimon and far more OTT performances than Crowden’s, but together they emphasis all the wrong parts of the script so that it ends up going from poignant take on recent history and a warning about home truths for the future to being a farce. 

Yes there are problems, even without the constraints of budget time and comedy. There’s not enough time given over to the Sknonosses to get to know those people and while the latest Blue Peter guest star, Janet Ellis (mum of pop star Sophie Ellis-Bextor) tries hard she and the other locals are barely sketched never mind flesh and blood characters, refugees a bit hopeless and helpless without the protection of their Nimon God. I wish the two planets were more obviously two different places, because they were apart from the Nimon’s influence – you can tell that its the same set slightly redressed without much effort put in. There’s so much to enjoy in this story that never gets talked about though: the opening with the Tardis in peril, pulled into a black hole, is genuinely tense. Sknonnos feels like one of the more ‘real’ worlds Dr Who has visited, with a back story that makes it seem as if its existed long before the Tardis landed there. The dialogue could be sharper, with too many good ideas that just aren’t taken up even without the cast getting hold of them. There are parts that work really well though: the opening, with the Tardis being sucked through a black hole, is genuinely tense. The portal is a great idea, ‘Stargate’ fifteen years early and the screen that connects the two worlds that’s like a magician’s curtain is a neat touch, decorated with lights that change colour depending on who has just walked through (so much better than the similar ones in stories past). Best of all there’s the great twist that, after two and three-quarter episodes of just the one Nimon and the viewers’ natural assumption that the budget couldn’t stretch anymore, suddenly there are three of them with hints of a whole army. Best of all, though, is the original script which is full of skullduggery and scheming and a mad old fight for power of the sort I wish this series would do more. The end result is a flawed story sure, one that might even be fatally flawed in so many ways but a pantomime? The worst Dr Who story ever? A hopeless stupid story that should never have been made? Hardly. ‘The Horns Of Nimon’ might not be a top-tier classic but I like it a lot for the story it is – and love it for the story it oh so could have been. If you can only be prepared to look through the labyrinth of all the things that went wrong and can ignore all the other guidebooks then you, too, might find much to love in between the bull. 

 POSITIVES+ Romana. Lalla Ward carries this story, ignoring the games her co-stars are playing and delivering this story utterly straight. Luckily Romana’s given a lot to do this story and she handles it all well, being a surrogate Doctor for most of it as she explores and problem solves the way he normally does. Her character, especially this second incarnation of it, has really come into her own across this season as she moved from being naive monster bait to a fighter of injustice every bit as impassioned as the Doctor, if not quite with his street smarts. By this story she’s stopped being his disciple though and started thinking for herself, becoming a key presence in her own right without the need to believe in a higher source. Which, after all, is what this story of trust and deceit and the labyrinth of navigating life, is all about. She even gets her own screw driver for this story –n and it’s totally in character both that she made it herself and that the Doctor tries to poach it as it’s better than his (while verbally dismissing it!) That’s Romana all over, the pupil quickly outgrowing her teacher now she’s a bit more experienced. Needless to say Lalla nails every line. 

 NEGATIVES – The incidental score. Not that he knew it at the time (he’d still been commissioned to do ‘Shada’ before it was cancelled and didn’t know the next producer was John Nathan-Turner, with whom he did not get on at all) but this story is the last time Dudley Simpson got to compose music for Dr Who. It’s not one of his best: half of it is uninspired and half of it is nicked from old stories. Such a sad way for the writer who worked on more Dr Who episodes that possibly anyone in history to go (at least if you count ‘new’ additions to each episode, otherwise it’s the Radiophonic Workshop for the Tardis sound effect and Ron Grainer/Delia Derbyshire for the theme tune). 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Despite being a relatively unpopular story amongst fans, the star of ‘The Horns Of Nimon’ has had a surprisingly busy time in the spin-offs appearing in an audio story, a book and a comic strip in addition to his cousin appearing on TV in ‘The God Complex’ (2013). Their appearance in the traditional end-of-first-episode cliff-hanger in ‘Seasons Of Fear’ (2002), was one of the first really big shocks of the Big Finish main range, coming out of nowhere (it’s #30). We think we know where the story’s headed: the 8^th Doctor is investigating weird time distortions and, what with this being an early episode featuring his audio companion Charlie Pollard (rescued by the Doctor in the R101 air disaster where she should have died thus creating an anomaly) at first thinks it’s because of her. But no: there’s a bull who thinks he’s a God bellowing in our ears. The Nimon should be more suited to radio than they are TV, given that they’re one of those monsters who work better on the printed page than they do on TV (where you can y’know, see them) but alas this sequel makes them out to be even dottier and more OTT. The hammy artificial-distorted robotic ‘Azal’ voice isn’t doing them any favours and some of their lines are very over-written bellowing lines like ‘we require sustenance!’ at the tops of their voices (plus inevitably the incidental characters go around shouting ‘weakling scum!’ like in the TV story). It’s not one of the better stories in the range, although they do make for a good contrast with McGann’s underplayed and more cerebral Doctor (who refers to the Nimon as ‘interstellar locusts’ when explaining the Nimon to his companion).  

 
‘Space In Dimension Of Relative and Time’ (2014) is the comic strip – and boy is it a weird one! The plot goes backwards page by page, unravelling from the starting point featuring the aged 11^th incarnation from ‘Time Of The Doctor’. There’s a new companion called Alice, a new variation on the ‘crack in the wall’ time distorter known as ‘ARC’ (which doesn’t seem to link to infinity) that has created a copy of the Doctor and a black hole that’s sucking all the insides out of the Tardis. The Nimon, never the luckiest of Dr Who monsters, chooses this moment in time to launch his long-awaited revenge on the Doctor and, inevitably, attacks the wrong one. Oops, are his horns red! (Which is a bad colour when you’re a bull). The Nimon, meanwhile, has been up to old tricks, persuading the people of the planet ‘Datastore 8’ that he’s a God and pilfering all their resources for himself. It’s all more complicated than this run-down makes it sound (boy does it get complicated!) and continues in the same vein, with lots of dopplegangers turned to ash before time gets sent backwards and the Nimon is defeated before his plan even begins, apparently dying in the sort of huge explosion they could never do on telly without setting everyone alight but which looks really good in the comics. A truly bonkers read.

‘The Maze Of Doom’ (2020) is the novel, one of the few original full-length 13^th Doctor stories, this one written by David Solomons. You could view this story as a sort of prequel to ‘Nimon’, about his appearance on Earth – only instead of being set in Ancient Greece it’s set in modern London, where various Nimon are woken-up, Silurian style, from tunnels underground. Needless to say, the tunnels are like a maze. This is one of those novels I’d   have loved to have seen on TV and which would look rather good on a modern budget, as the Nimon get to stomp around the capital like the Daleks, Cybermen and Yetis once did. On paper it’s not quite the same, although there is a cute rendering of a ‘cuddly’ Nimon on the front cover. 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘Have you noticed how people's intellectual curiosity declines sharply the moment they start waving guns about?’

State Of Decay: Ranking - 143

   State Of Decay

(Season 18, Dr 4 with Romana II and Adric, 22/11/1980-13/12/1980, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Christopher H Bidmead, writer: Terrance Dicks, director: Peter Moffat)

Rank: 143

'Hello, I'm one of the old ones and I've just dropped into your bloodbank to take some out. No not in, out. I told you I want to make a withdrawal. What do you mean? It's a bank isn't it?!' 

I came to ‘State Of Decay’ near-last out of the ‘old’ 20^th century DWs and, well, let’s just say it wasn’t quite what I expected from the guidebooks and what seemed a straightforward story about vampires from, in Terrance Dicks, one of DW’s most refreshingly straightforward writers and a story made in the early JNT era when DW was as straightforward as it ever gets. This story is...weird. It’s hard to put your finger on why, as all the hammer horror cliches are there (albeit in a very DW scifi rather than true blood-curdling way) and yet nothing in this story is quite what it seems at all. The haunted castle is actually a rocket and that the trio of vampires we meet are the survivors of a ship that crashed in e-space, mutating into vampires (though quite how that mutation happens is never really explained).These vampires aren’t outcasts living on the fringes of society – they are the society, the masters and rulers of an empire and their castle isn’t relegated to some out of bounds castle but overshadows everything else. The ‘state of decay’ in the title refers not to them so much as the planet and the masses on it and while the vampires can drink blood directly they mostly live off ‘energy’ in a more general scifi ‘Savages’ type way (you’ll have to wait for the Plasmavores in ‘Smith and Jones’ for DW’s first true blood-sucking monsters). Weirdest of all, despite the Medieval vibes, this lot are technologically amongst the most advanced race we’ve ever seen in the series, their abilities as advanced as the timelords. In other words its a story where all the expected tropes are there, but twisted – far more so, than, say, the pretty traditional twists on Frankenstein in ‘Brain Of Morbius’ or the mummy’s curse in ‘Pyramids Of Mars’. This story must be even weirder when seen through modern eyes I should think. Thirty years before ‘Twilight’ DW finally got round to doing a story about vampires, but they don’t look much like my namesake Robert Pattinson. No this lot are immortals, ‘old ones’ who are well old, very out of place now we’ve had three decades of being sold vampires as being young, vibrant and sexy. Which is pretty odd when you think about it. I mean, vampires can be any age but vibrant? Sexy? They’re the living dead, people! They’re meant to be pale barely-walking corpses. See modern Who’s take ‘Vampires In Venice’, where they’re all young sexy fish people, for a particularly flesh-filled example – if you must. Where did our expectations change so drastically? All that said anyone watching DW for goth kicks will like ‘State Of Decay’ a lot, a story which features as many of the ‘Addams Family’ cliches inside 100 minutes as it can: secret towers, dark lighting, bats, lots of blood. The vampires are, in so many ways, one of the deadliest of all DW foes, with a history as old as the timelords and lots of mentions of the power they contain – yet there’s little in the script that actually shows such a power. Instead ‘Decay’ is more of a comedy script, something which might be explained by the fact that is a hasty re-write in the more kiddie-friendly era of the series, rather than the horror-filled Phillip Hinchcliffe era it was pitched for (the story was turned down by the BBC controller in 1977 not, as it happens, for any violence that might have given Mary Whitehouse kittens but because the BBC had just done a ‘straight’ drama of ‘Dracula’ and they feared some of the plot twists made their big epic look like a parody; by chance this story ended up going out just when the new romantic movement was making goth trendy again and couldn’t have been better timed – much of this story looks like a Siouxsie and the banshees promo). Really, though, it’s not a story about vampires at all but a typical DW (and very typical Terrance Dicks) story about growing up and learning to become independent, without trusting the people around you at face value. The vampires have kept their people enslaved for years with promises of keeping them safe, even though they’ve been the enemy keeping us in our place all along (they’re our Royal Family basically, complete with crowns). The vampires’ bloodsuckingness is really just a clever metaphor for that old DW favourite class and society, where the people in charge are stinking rich and the people who work under them just stinking, taken to extremes. Adric, the new Alazarian on the block in his second story, finds to his cost repeatedly that aliens aren’t all as benevolent as the Doctor, Romana too struggles to be as independent as usual and gets rescued a lot (presumably the original script was written for Sarah Jane) and even the Doctor is surprised by some of the things he finds out because he never for one second believed that the old legends of vampires could be real. A lot of people have a very different world view by the end of this episode and that includes the viewer. The vampires, after all, are defeated by the Doctor not in the usual hammer horror way but through intelligence (best line: ‘he has the greatest weapon of all...knowledge!’) after years of banning education on this planet just in case anyone else figures that out too – and if that line doesn’t summarise DW in a nutshell I don’t know what does (it was, after all, first pitched as being ‘educational’ every bit as much as it was ‘entertainment’), although its typical of this story that we get the stake-through=-the-heart cliche at the end anyway, in deeply odd circumstances (spoilers: the vampires’ own castle is really a rocket ship and its that which is used as the stake!) There are lots of clever moments in this story that make it more than just your run-of-the-mill vampire story, with more to sink your teeth into than most. Not everything works though admittedly: this story is a prime example of why DW needs to have at least one human character in there somewhere to make us care. By the time the Doctor and Romana have finished pontificating from a timelord point of view and the old ones have discussed pre-history with them that leaves us with Adric’s eyes to see things through – and he isn’t even from our sodding universe but e-space, so he still knows things that we don’t! Talking of which, e-space is barely mentioned this story too; the others either side of it, ‘Full Circle’ and ‘Warrior’s Gate’, are all about getting stuck in this scary dimension away from ‘normal space’ where everyone might get trapped forever; this planet might as well be in our space too for all the effect it has on the plot (which goes to great lengths to say that the vampires were once ‘everywhere’). With all this talking going on you rather long to have some more of the vampire cliches too and the fake flying bats just don’t cut it. This is a story which is oddly low on action, thrills spills and kills for a story that’s all about blood-sucking mutants, something which makes ‘State Of Decay’ one of the more dated DW stories. That said, in many ways that’s a relief: you know what’s going to happen in every variation of ‘Dracula’, starting with the BBC version it was feared this story would lampoon. ‘State Of Decay’ keeps you guessing how things are going to turn out throughout with a clever script that’s full of twists and turns and goes for existential scares that curdle the blood in a philosophical sense rather than jump-screams. And I for one prefer that. So fangs very much!

+ There’s a great finale (spoilers) in which it looks as if Adric has sided with the baddies and an unconscious Romana is about to be sacrificed that’s solved not because of the usual ‘wave a sonic screwdriver at the problem to make it go away’ or even K9’s laser beams but because of the events across the rest of the story that the Doctor has inspired, stirring up a rebellion that should have started a long time ago. It’s enough to make you want to turn off your TV sets and pick up your burning pitchforks and join in, which after all is also what this show is all about.

- Usually I stick up for Matthew Waterhouse and Adric. After so many stories with Romana as an equal it was about time we had a youngster wet around the ears and as teenage prodigies go Adric has a lot more going for him and is a lot less drippy than, say, Wesley Crusher. It’s about time that the series, looking for a younger audience, had a juvenile character viewers could relate to, like the olden days of Susan and Vicki. Matthew, too, copes admirably with a one-dimensional character whose personality changes script by script considering his age and that he’d done barely any acting before this. The production team truly shot themselves in the foot making this Adric’s second story though: the Adric of ‘Full Circle’ gains our sympathies through all the awful things that happen to him but here Adric as at his worst, reckless, unrealistically naive and putting his foot in it more times than a Sensorite-Voord lovechild. It’s this story, more than any other, that makes you want to punch the annoying brat and leave him behind and if this was the production team’s idea of what their core teenage audience was like then its no wonder the viewing figures begin to drop off alarmingly from hereon in. Reportedly nobody told Lalla Ward about the cast change until the first day of recording (this story being filmed before ‘Full Circle’) and she assumed it was a bad joke. Many fans still assume it was. 

Nightmare Of Eden: Ranking - 144

      Nightmare Of Eden

(Season 17, Dr 4 with Romana II, 24/11/1979-15/12/1979, producer: Graham Williams, script editor: Douglas Adams, writer: Bob Baker, director: Alan Bromly with an uncredited Graham Williams for some scenes) 

Rank: 144

'Hey man, wanna smoke some Mandrel? Or if that's not to your taste there's a whole gamut of the galaxy to try. Ever snorted an Abzorbaloff? That gives you the munchies that does. Smoking a Krynoid is kind of like smoking grass, except that it's made out of actual grass and instead of waking up with a hangover you don't wake up at all. And then there's the Mara which will open all the doors to your consciousness if you take it plus you also get a free snake tattoo, groovy! Haha fooled you, I was an undercover Judoon all the time. Now listen to my Who all-star charity record 'Just say nooooooooooooooo or we’ll have to release more charity records and then the Doctor and you will really be in distress!'

 

 

Ah, dear ‘Nightmare Of Eden’, the well-meaning anti-drug story that you’re so proud of Dr Who for trying but which looks as if everyone making it was on drugs. ‘Trainspotting’ as re-made by the cast of Sesame Street, that’s ‘Nightmare Of Eden’, as everyone tries to smuggle in one of Dr Who’s hardest-hitting scripts about not just addiction but the horrific effect it has on the universe around you behind the sort of pantomime acting you only get at Saturday teatimes. This story has a more substantial feel than most 4^th Doctor scripts and, talking of substances, is the only Who story to date where the plot revolves around drug-smuggling, the sort of thing American scifi series do all  the time nowadays but was rare in a 1970s and decidedly English series meant for children. It makes sense though: one of the great things about the Whoniverse is its realism and accuracy (give or take the odd clumsy bits of science), how representative it is of what might really be out there good bad and indifferent: after all everything else we have is out there in space too, it makes sense there would be drug pushers in the future too. Vraxoin is pitched as a sort of all-things drug, one that makes the user as giggly high as cannabis, hallucinate as much as LSD and as spaced-out and desperate as taking heroin, a gateway and end drug all in one. It’s an odd, curious, unsettling watch where thousands of passengers suffer after a shuttle crash when a pilot is somewhere over past the fifth dimension and commits mass genocide on the side in a desperate attempt to get his fix, while his drug dealer appears to be such a kind and environmentally concerned young man. Of all the ordinary things Dr Who turned extraordinary, addiction might just be the most, well, extraordinary choice of material. I don’t for the life of me understand why ‘Eden’ doesn’t get more kudos though, a hard a hitting tale of dependency and addiction and the ripple effect that causes to the universe around you. It’s a story that goes out of its way to show how taking drugs is so not cool. A few panicked memos from the producer and a point raised by Lalla Ward toned things down to make drugs sound less ‘appealing’ to children compared to the first planned draft (the name got changed from the children-friendly and more likely ‘Zip’ to the unpronounceable ‘Vraxoin’), but it’s still quite a hard hitting plot for its day that manages to convey the horrors of addiction whilst being kind and understanding to those who fall to their clutches. Unlike most adult shows trying to get down wi da kiddies that only makes children more likely to disobey they mean it too: poor Secker isn’t a cool rebel but pitiable, trying to lose himself in a fake artificial world where he stops carting about things, especially the people and species he’s put in harm’s way with the scenes of him laughing his head off or on his knees pleading for another fix some of the hardest hitting the series ever did.  Not even ‘Grange Hill’ was doing this sort of thing on children’s telly back then. It would be the most grungy gritty real life Dr Who story going, had it not been set on such a brightly lit spaceship with so many actors hamming up their lines.

For that’s the downside of this poorly treated story: no one is taking this most serious of Dr Who stories seriously. I’ve long wondered, was it a deliberate choice perhaps demanded from on high by a scared producer and worried script editor to make it seem more child-friendly? (Unlikely given what else Graham Williams and Douglas Adams got away with but still). Was it a rogue acting choice, where this particular cast suddenly decided to have a particular amount of fun one day, the way they did with the next story ‘The Horns Of Nimon’ too (another actually pretty gritty script turned into a bright and gaudy pantomime)? Was it Tom Baker seeing what he could get away with against an old fashioned director? (Alan Bromley, who was considered out of touch when he did ‘The Time  Warrior’ in the far more staid and straight-laced 3^rd Doctor era, who lost control and was effectively sacked before the end, with Williams taking over from his notes?) Was it all end of term it is from a production team that had been working too hard? Was it hysterics that we were at the end of a season that had been financially squeezed like no other and that the money had run out for all the costumes and sets? Was it panic at the amount of things that went wrong while making this story? (visual effects designer Colin Mapson, who worked on more episodes of the series than anyone bar John Nathan-Turner, Dudley Simpson and the Radiophonic Workshop, called it without doubt the most disastrous story I was ever involved in’ and was so grateful when it was over he had t-shirts printed for the last day that read ‘I’m So Relieved The Nightmare Is Over’).Was it the first sight of a Mandrel on set, the unintentionally cutest Who monster since The Sensorites? Was it simply that nobody involved in this story besides the writer understood what he was doing? Whatever the cause its one of the greatest mysteries of Who to me that a story that we should be at least nodding and marking with respect for trying to be tough ends up being dismissed by most fans as that silly one with the cute monsters and all the jokes. There are quite a few Dr Who stories that ‘got away’ because they weren’t treated with the proper care and authority they deserve but this is surely one of the worst offenders, a story that should have been an ‘Eden’ that turned into a ‘nightmare’.  

Certainly Bob Baker was aiming for tough. We know him best today for his two cute canine-heavy co-creations (K9 and Wallace and Gromit) but in his time Baker did a number of hard-hitting series too, including co-writing an episode of cop show ‘Target’ in which Katy Manning of all people plays a heroin addict and trafficker (she really was trying to shake off her Dr Who image in the late 1970s wasn’t she?) that quite shocked the public (it’s ‘Big Elephant’ if you want to, ahem, track it down) and a standalone and by-1970s-scandalous TV thriller ‘Murder At The Wedding’, both with his usual co-writer Dave Martin. By 1979 the pair were so revered that they had been invited to adapt the latter into a novel; Martin, who’d always wanted to write a book was thrilled and wanted to write lots more – after the fiasco that was ‘The Armageddon factor’ you can also sympathise with a writer who felt his work was always being mistreated when it was adapted on screen; Baker, who felt television was the better format with a wider audience, wasn’t so keen: why talk to a few hundred people niche people when you have a readymade family audience of millions?! Martin had also just had a big family and had moved house further away from his friend, which put a strain on their writing relationship (where they used to meet at each other’s houses, one of them walking about saying ideas while the other sat at a typewriter; hard to do in a house of screaming children). So after a decade of working together (and a career including the two old friends agreed to go their separate ways with a handshake, wishing each other good luck. Martin was happy for Baker to keep up his Dr Who appearances though, which he juggled alongside writing his other hard-hitting crime shows now that he had a reputation for them before it dawned on him, why not make a Dr Who story about the same thing? Douglas Adams’ presence as script editor is perhaps stronger here than on the rest of the stories that aren’t his too, as ‘Nightmare of Eden’ does a ‘Hitch-Hikers’ job of making very serious points in an often silly way in a story that seems right up his street (although the problems making it were also partly what made him quit as script editor at the end of the year; Graham Williams too).

Clearly it would have to be different showing drugs on Dr Who as opposed to Target and the like. You couldn’t actually show anyone using drugs on a series still overwhelmingly considered as being for children. You couldn’t have any syringes or needles or pills or mysteriously coated sugar-lumps or anything that a child might copy. The great thing about Dr Who though is the scope the setting gives you to twist any ‘real’ life thing into a space age (or historical equivalent). One of the stories Baker had considered for another show involved the guilt and shame that came from a drug user crashing a car into another one while high from drugs – that was easy enough to turn into a spaceship. Remembering a rubbish package holiday and the endless calls to his insurance policy to claim that gave Baker the idea of a drug that was so new the insurance policies of the spaceships wouldn’t know what to do about it. And while the story couldn’t show any actual drugs being actually smuggled through customs (how do you even have borders and customs in a universe where lots of species travel between planets?!) there was all sorts of other ways of doing that in Dr Who, Baker coming up with the deeply clever idea of a drug that (spoilers) came from the body of an alien monster, one which had been smuggled in using a microscopic ‘jungle’ planet under the pretence of the preservation of endangered animals around the universe. The drug smuggler clearly couldn’t be like the hardened bad-asses Baker had been writing for but then not all drug peddlers were – some were charming, a few were sweet, a handful even had an air of respectability and everyone who didn’t know what they did for a day job thought they were nice and probably did kind things for charities. Tryst is one of the programme’s greatest twists, a scientists who seems as if he’s doing the right things for the right reasons and whose charm and intelligence fools even The Doctor for three episodes until the horrid truth hits him: while everyone has been running in fear from the mandrels the ‘real’ monster is the man who says he’s trying to save them. Having a drug that comes from a monster is a terribly inventive idea (and one that Baker certainly couldn’t use on his more realistic shows!): a lot of Dr Who stories are about trying to teach us not to be scared of aliens that don’t look like us especially in its early days (take your pick, today we’ve gone with ‘The Savages’, tomorrow it could be ‘Galaxy 4’) but ‘Nightmare Of Eden’ takes it further, with the monster that’s been growling at us for three episodes treated in the most appalling way for a short human drug fix. You start off being scared by it (or at least you should – they do rather botch that on screen) and end up feeling sorry for it an apparent predator turned into a apparent victim.

That’s kind of true for the rest of the story too which makes Secker not as some evil mastermind criminal but a pathetic man who just can’t cope with the mundanity of even Dr Who’s extraordinary world. At the start of the story you think he’s the baddy; only by the end of the story do you realise it’s the person making money off his desperation and becomes increasingly desperate. What’s great about this story, and indeed this era, is that there’s no lecture to go with it (if this was the 13^th Doctor she’d be making an impassioned speech to camera by episode four): you’re left at home to make your mind up, even though it’s obvious how dangerous and addictive drugs can be. For an industry pretty notorious for its drug use, where In the 1970s more people were taking something than not if enough biographies are true, its quite a brave bit of television. If any work of fiction was going to make me drug free/tee-total it’s this one, a story about the darker excesses of human nature, the ever steady call of temptation and how it’s always at arm’s reach. That leads into another theme of this story, mankind’s fall from grace in the Bible and the original Eden, when humanity was kicked out because Eve got the munchies and fancied an apple, inventing the idea of sin. ‘Eden’ seems at first to be a daft and funny name for a jungle planet full of radiophonic howls and swamp-fog (it never looked like this in any illustrated Bible I ever saw!), but at least its free, at least it’s pure, at least the Mandrels inside it get to live free and full Mandrel lives. Despite the cliffhanger of episode two (when The Doctor and Romana jump into it despite being earned about certain death if they did) it’s on the outside, in the spaceship, where the real monsters lie: the people who act as if they want to save your soul or your pets but really just want to take your money. Greed is portrayed as an addiction as powerful as any drug, as Tryst wastes all that talent and all those resources and inventions to repeat an endless cycle of exploitation. This isn’t conservation for the good of the nation – it’s for his own bank account and preservation. The snake of course is the lure, the obsession, the drug that takes you out of your mind and turns you into someone else, where you lose all that purity in your desperate struggle to forget your existence,  your problems, your responsibilities, your relationship with the people around you who miss the real you. They don’t shy away from it either: Secker used to be meticulous and orderly but now has become reckless and undisciplined, rudderless, endangering himself and others in his drug-addled fog (they cut it from the script but originally Secker was meant to question everything the first episode, answering orders with lines like ‘what’s so good about time?’ and ‘what’s so good about work?’ that drove his employers mad). It’s another one of Dr Who’s regular themes that advanced technology will only be useful if humans advance with it and use it for good to help one another; few stories are quite as devastating about what can happen if the wrong people abuse it as this story though, where innocent mandrels die. 

Tryst seemed such a hero at first too, with his CET machine, basically an electronic zoo where you can see exotic creatures up close in their natural yet artificial habitat (like the miniscope from ‘Carnival Of Monsters’) saving animals two by two, like that other Biblical hero Noah  (all this story is missing to complete the set is the space plague, ‘The Flood’ via Mars, Terminus’ Lazurs, the Vespiform locusts and Samaritan Slitheen). But it’s all fakery to get people to trust him and Tryst is still a monster underneath. Although it’s not in the script Lewis Fiander plays the part with a heavily accented German accent; to most fans this is deeply daft and off-putting but it puts me in mind of the Nazi scientists who ended up being wooed and cooed over to the Allied side after WW2, rehabilitated by the press in the fight against the Russians in the Cold War despite being the enemy a few years earlier, a subtle comment on American and British greed (if ‘subtle’ is quite the right word to use about an accent that strong). After all, this is a story that asks big questions about whether ‘good’ inventions like the CET machine can be truly good if the people who make them are responsible for evil. There’s a sly comment on zoos too: not as strong as the one in ‘Carnival’ at least but nevertheless this story takes similar pot-shots at people who claim to love animals but only save the expendable ones, that are ‘useful’ or can make money in some way, The Doctor getting in a scathing line about how this style of conservation is the same as ‘conserving raspberries in jam’. That’s what separates us from animals, our ability to exploit and use our intelligence for bad. Only in a sense this time it’s more like a portable safari, animals that you can see from the safety of your own seat, unless you jup in it like The Doctor (where it’s all very real).  

There’s another ‘snake’ here too: bureaucracy. That’s the natural villain of the 4^th Doctor, the biggest rebel of all the regenerations in so many ways, someone who breezes in and turns worlds upside down in an afternoon despite the work of tyrants and dictators across quadzillions of years. It’s got out of control: the rules that were once made to keep us safe and help us have been misinterpreted, made too strong so that they’ve cut back on our enjoyment and in turn caused more suffering (‘I don’t make the laws’ says Fisk at one point when it’s pointed out how wrong they are ‘I just enforce them’. This is a world where conformity is automatic. Even when it’s stupid). That’s the real snake that took us from the Garden of Eden where we were ‘free’ – it’s what told us where to go, what to do, who should do it. Most of the first episode is trying to get an insurance company to pay out, with as many terms and condition hoops and exceptions to jump through in the future as there are now. We aren’t free to be ourselves anymore, instead we have to ‘prove’ our motivation, our character, over and over and over. It’s crueller than that though: bureaucracy keeps us in our places and tells us who we can and cannot be. Just check out The Doctor’s line ‘they’re worse than idiots they’re bureaucrats, they just exist to tangle people up’. The best gag in the story though comes from an irate official pointing out how many people Secker’s sloppiness has just killed. ‘They’re only economy class, what’s all the fuss about?’ he replies an answer dripping in venom, given that he’s clearly only lower class himself (either by birth or by circumstance, working a rubbish job in order to make the money he needs for his drug habit). The hint is that it’s rules like this, the fixed position that Secker will be trapped in for the rest of life, that made him turn into drugs in the first place. Tryst, of course, has no regard for rules either: at first that makes him the hero, the scientist able to think outside the box and so create his box of delights, his CET with all its wonders; but ‘Nightmare’ is a clever multi-layered story that shows how freedom can be a two-edged sword. It’s rules that keep us safe and stop us exploiting one another; even Tryst isn’t above the law when his crimes are revealed.  

There are lots of little things to love about this story. The Mandrels themselves are clever, a sort of cross between a bear and a dog that comes out as a sort of shaggy bigfoot with big green ‘cat’s eyes’ taken from a car that glow in the dark, with a radiophonic workshop growl that’s really effective and a name that combines a ‘mandril’ (an aggressive shouty monkey that even some conservationists are terrified of) and a ‘mandreal’ (an implement used in metalwork): they’re both, to some a scary monster they’ve been told to be afraid of and to others simply a tool to be used. For once I love the fact that they’re a Dr Who monster that never talks: usually that means hours of exposition and The Doctor trying to work out a species’ background at boring length but here the spell would have been broken if we’d heard them talk to each other in unbearably cute voices. The Mandrel costumes are often mocked and its true that even at my speed I could probably escape most of them at a quick walking pace on their home planet. However we’re not on their home planet – we’re on a spaceship with limited space to run and if you were to wake up with one leaning over you, roaring, breaking through a wall as in the episode two cliffhanger you probably wouldn’t find them funny either. Admittedly they’d look even better dripping with slime (the way they were meant to in the script). And if they didn’t have a zip visible down their back with the padding foam coming out (in the electrocution scene). But they look good when seen in long shot when the camera doesn’t linger on them and those radiophonic growls are super effective. Talking of the electrocution scene, they mess up the effect rather on TV but if you’re in the right mood the scene where The Doctor kills one by accident, running for his life as a mandrel touches a wire and ends up electrocuted, is one of the era’s most powerful scenes: The Doctor is mortified at being an inadvertent cause of its death  but then the penny drops as he sees the mandrel turned to powder form. The fact he’s then easily ‘busted’ for being covered in vraxoin (and is already a suspicious stranger who turned up out the blue just as things were getting out of hand, wearing clothes that scream eccentric and exactly the sort of person pulled over by customs officials for ‘standing out’) is one of Baker’s cleverest bits of writing.

In fact both Bakers are on great form: as much as he might have caused the director to have a nervous breakdown adding them (including a cut gag of Romana chomping on an apple in Eden and The Doctor commenting ‘better not – remember what happened last time!’) Tom improvises some of his greatest jokes. The stick everyone usually beats this story with is the one at the end when he’s caught by the mandrels (painful!) and emerges in a tatty costume complaining ‘ooh my legs, ooh my arms, ooh my everything!’ sometimes cited as Dr Who’s worst scene which isn’t horrifically bad so much as not quite as funny as it thinks it is. There are worse scenes in the opening credits of the ‘TV Movie’ or shots at random from the lower half of the Jodie Whittaker stories that would make anyone’s hair curl. Or curl more in Tom Baker’s case). That gag’s reputation rather overshadows the really great ones he slips into this story – the jelly baby offering, the running rings around the ship’s officers, the way The Doctor should be having the worst day of anyone on this ship given the things that happens to him but still reacts as if he’s enjoying  relaxing holiday (‘I don’t work for anyone’ The Doctor says at one point when being questioned ‘I’m just having fun’). I admit I’m a sucker for this particular period of Dr Who comedy and enjoy more than most fans do and more than I should (‘Here am I K9, trying a little lateral thinking, and what do you do? You trample all over it with logic’). Not every writer gets this free-wheeling deeply anarchic yet highly moral Doctor right but Baker gets him bang-on in this story (The Doctor also gets one of his best descriptions when Rigg calls him an ‘Inter-galactic Mr Fixit’) using comedy to mask the darkness of the villain’s plan and their need to be taken seriously. It’s the way this Doctor changes in a heartbeat too, choosing when to get angry and serious. Just look at the way The Doctor, who’s spent most of the story laughing with Tryst and swapping banter with a fellow ‘;genius’, can only growl ‘go away’ to the man whose let himself, his species and The Doctor down.  This is an a rare occurrence in the Graham Williams era (when Mary Whitehouse shenanigans turned him into more of a comedy figure than a dark one, the way he was when Phillip Hinchcliffe was in charge) and Tom Baker’s dark snarl is the highlight of a story that otherwise doesn’t take itself very seriously at all.  

That said, no other character fares as well. Poor Romana gets precious little to do  and her only memorable moment is one they cut back heavily in episode three so as not to scare little children (when Secker, mad from going ‘cold  mandrel’ and turns threatening in his desperation). If you’re keeping score of the great Dr Who romance this is a story where she and Tom are distantly cold; there are none of the tantrums of their later stories but mostly they kept apart and said as little to each other as possible (Lalla spent most of her time in her dressing room drawing illustrations for her rather good ‘Astrology For Pets’ book and was often so carried away she missed the director’s frantic pleas to come to set)  Shockingly Bob seems to forget how to write for his own creation, K9, whose come a long way from his early days when he was right in the middle between dog and robot, ending up either one (he’s used as a blaster weapon for much of this story) or the other (the unforgivably stupid scene when he starts ‘sniffing’ round Stott when The Doctor says the guard is a ‘friend’. There are, also, rather too many scenes where the Doctor, Romana and K9 are all engaged in scientific gobbledegook which is meant to make them look terribly clever, but just makes the viewer feel left out (it’s hard to deliver on a plot that’s all about the mistakes made by humanity when none of the regulars are human, a problem in quite a few Romana stories but particularly here). Where this story really falls flat though is the humans: this is one of those spaceships where everyone is bored in their work, which is totally in keeping with particularly Douglas’ acerbic view of the future being as humdrum as now but in fancier vehicles, but makes for bland viewing. Tryst feels oddly one-dimensional for such a potentially strong character even if you read his lines rather than watch/hear him (admittedly it’s hard not to read his lines out in that accent once you’ve heard them). Dalla, bigged up in the press before this story, has no discernible character or impact on this story at all (because she was blonde and beautiful; for some odd reason the usual photographers weren’t available on the days when the Mandrels were on set, which the production team used to their advantage, making up a story about how they were considered ‘too scary’ to show – a cheque they really couldn’t cash). Even Secker, the one character with a rich and juicy backstory, never feels like someone you care about and can invest emotion or time in because there isn’t a character there beyond ‘druggie’. We don’t find out how he became a user, whether he used to be a respected person with a fine job who fell from grace or grew up in the slums of Betelgeuse or Zigorous 3 or whatever. We don’t know either that much about how Baker and Martin divided up their scripts but I’m willing to bet that Baker’s strengths was in delivering plot and metaphor (which is excellent this story) and the odd one-line zinger, but that it was Martin who filled in the gaps of characterisation and fleshed ideas out into ‘real’ people. The ‘whodunnit’ angle never really takes off either – unlike so many other DW instances, from ‘The Robots Of Death’ down, there’s no sense of drama, of wondering who will be next or trying to work things out before the Doctor, even if the Mandrel link ends up being rather a clever twist. The plot too, despite its brilliant points, spends an awful lot of time delaying big revelations and saving them for the cliffhangers so ends up being another one of those Dr Who stories where people spend half their time running around for no reason (at least its new I suppose: usually drug films, even anti-drugs films – as indeed most seemingly pro-drug films are at their core, are full of static people shooting up in grubby alleyways and dirty toilets: ‘Nightmare Of Eden’ must be the only example where the lights are on full blast and everyone is running around a glisteningly clean set at top speed).

And that’s before the production team got involved and gave this story such rubbish sets to run around in. After all Bob Baker’s been around the block enough ow, weith this his last of nine stories for the series: he really should have known that two spaceships and a jungle planet, a workable machine prop and an ‘army’ (end result: five) of monsters was pushing it in most years, never mind the one where inflation meant the budget fell like never before. It feels like everyone realised it would look terrible no matter what they did so everyone just sort of gave up. Few Dr Who productions feel as amateurish or as rushed (or under-rehearsed) as this one: actors come in at the wrong time, dry, clash with each other’s lines or have what they say drowned out by Dudley Simpson’s music arriving at exactly the wrong time. Bromley was a great TV director: some of the best, most cerebral ‘Out Of The Unknown’ stories were directed by him. Unfortunately he’s totally the wrong old-school director for this new type of story juggling japes and jokes with cuts to the jugular; by his own admission he didn’t understand it at all and treated it like a colourful romp. I’m not sure why they invited him back or why he said yes: he’d already complained he couldn’t make sense of ‘The Time Warrior’, his only other Who, and considered it rubbish despite it being a pretty much foolproof trademark Bob Holmes Dr Who story; there’s no way he was going to have the subtle touch a story like ‘Nightmare Of Eden’ needed, a story full of hints and symbolism rather than full-on plot. Because the director doesn’t care for this story much everyone begins to think the same and whenever anyone asked for direction it never came so the cast began to mess around, Baker worst of all, much to the director’s anger. When matters came to a head as early as day two, Baker snapping to the gallery ‘is there a director up there? Or just a commentator?’ Williams stepped in. Even though he too was once so irate he wrote a whole story about his star getting his own way, Williams sided with Tom Baker: he understood how the show worked when the director didn’t. The cast and crew back from lunch after one heated row too many to find the director had been sent home and Williams himself was directing the rest from the notes that had been made. Williams wasn’t thrilled by this script either but you can still tell the moment he takes over around halfway through episode one (though like most 1970s stories this one was shot in order of set, so the production schedule wasn’t linear); the actors start lifting their performances, adding subtleties, playing it less for laughs. Before then though you have some of the worst and most excessive performances ever seen in the series. Everyone treats this story with a nod and a wink and an eye roll, often with both eyes, making sure we get the joke. These characters can’t even walk into a room normally and don’t speak their lines so much as declaim the, as if trying to wake up the back rows of a theatre. You know you’ve got problems when the subtlest and most nuanced actor in the room is Tom Baker, the star whose famous for being larger than life – a lot of this era feels like other cast members truing to go out of their way to ‘top’ him but few are quite so blatant about it (the nearest candidate is the next story ‘The Horns Of Nimon’, where a similarly promising story also ends up a load of bull). Or maybe they’re just trying to distract from the sets and the overall design: boy have there been a lot of bland spaceship sets in Dr Who over the years but this one takes the (probably plain or vanilla) biscuit: it doesn’t look like people live and work here it just looks like a set. The original plan was to film the jungle Eden bits on film before budgets got slashed so they did that in the studio too and it looks even worse, a huge retrograde step after the brilliant jungle planets of old. Even the post-production is amongst the worst of its vintage: an asbestos scare on day one meant an evacuation of TV centre (a true sign of things to come with ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ nine years later)  and everything got rushed, including the notorious Dalla death scene where she’s clearly blasted in the neck – and then dies, clutching her stomach (maybe all humans have developed a weird nervous system by this point in the future where every attack is felt in the stomach first? That might also explain the aversion to any colour that isn’t white, yellow or light grey, to save people being sick everywhere).

Goodness knows you learn to see through performances and rubber costumes and the occasional wobbly set (not as many as critics say: I’ve counted maybe three?) as a Whovian; I’ve always said if you’re looking for a series that looks amazing you’re watching the wrong show; this is instead a script that sounds amazing, thanks to script and sound effects (sometimes incidental music too). ‘Nightmare Of Eden’ pushes that to an extreme though: rarely has such a good script been treated in such a horrible way. There are lots of times when ‘Eden’ is truly un-watchable, a nightmare indeed; it’s only when you dig through to the core story that’s there underneath it all that you realise that it is Eden after all. Nevertheless it’s still closer to paradise than Hell and I have to say I’ve never understood the hate for a story that means well, even if it doesn’t always appear on-screen well. It’s a whole load of contradictions no other series could pull off and a testament to its writer, in the way that it manages to be a cute story that doesn’t shy away from the horrors odd drug-taking, a story about the darker side of human nature that still fits in some terrible jokes and one that makes you both glad and sad to be alive, often in the same scene simultaneously. Did it save kids from drugs? Probably not, but its low-key preaching and realism (understanding why people take drugs but showing the unglamorous realities of a life of addiction) is way more effective than any amount of jazzed up school programmes and certainly its hearts are in the right place. If the production team ended up tipping it down the silly side that doesn’t take away from how hard-hitting an powerful a lot of the ideas in this story truly are, taking risks that nothing else out there in 1979 would even consider let alone dive into head-first. In other words, despite its relatively high ranking, I can see why so many more casual fans skip this one altogether and more committed fans warn others to steer away from it. But I’m addicted to Dr Who and need my fix, happy to watch all of it good bad or indifferent and while this isn’t the strongest hit out there it’s still a purer, better dose at its core than fans give it credit for, even when diluted with sawdust and iron filings and whatever they’re using to pad out drugs nowadays.

POSITIVES + The story starts with a clash of spaceships, The Empress and The Hecate, with Dr Who taking even something as ordinary as a car crash and taking it to its logical extremes. It’s a really great model effect as the two ships are wedged in tight on screen, as helpless and unable to move as two cars that have collided at the corner of a car park.

NEGATIVES – Usually sets only do their job in Dr Who if you don’t notice them so you know something’s gone wrong when this one stands out for being too clean, too shiny, too bright, too artificial, too un-lived in, too set-like  to be believable, particularly as a spaceship that’s been travelling for months. If anyone deserves a raise on this ship it’s the cleaners who make it look as if its only had one careful owner who only drove it round the local solar system on Sundays. Amazingly you don’t even see any damage following the collision.  

 
BEST QUOTE: Romana: ‘I don’t think we should interfere’ Doctor: ‘Interfere? Of course we should interfere. Always do what you’re best at that’s what I say!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Our old friend ‘Time and Time Again’, Dr Who Magazine’s 30^th anniversary comic strip, is back again with Ace and Benny still trying to revive the 7^th Doctor by passing through his timelines collecting artefacts to try and revive him (yes, just like ‘Name Of The Doctor’). Benny corners the 4^th Doctor as he travels about the swaps of Eden, the Doctor complaining that he’s ‘about to get caught by the mandrels – and that’s not very nice at all!’ The Doctor assumes Benny wants his autograph (‘Don’t tell me, it’s for your auntie’) and keeps interrupting her as they hide from the monsters, before he tries to shut her up with a jelly baby – exactly the artefact she’s after (‘as long as it’s a green one with a leg missing’, to which the Doctor comments on her misplaced sense of priorities!) Good fun and the Mandrels look great in illustrated form! 

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