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?’