Full Circle: Ranking - 131

                                                              Full Circle

(Season 18, Dr 4 with Romana II and Adric, 25/10/1980-15/11/1980, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Christopher H Bidmead, writer: Andrew Smith, director: Peter Grimwade)

Rank: 131

  'By gum Romana lass, after all that trouble with t'Tardis earlier we seem to have entered a parallel world where everyone talks as if they be from Yorkshire. Even K9's at it, he's flipping turned into a whippet so he has. Let's have some Yorkshire tea with our jelly babies and maybe a Yorkshire pudding while I try to sort out what's gone on ‘ere…
                                                                                                            'By ‘eck Romana, I'm reet chuffed, I just worked out what's 'appened. The Tardis has gone an' flown right into Eee-by-gum space! I don’t know what’s been gannin in her head these days I reet don’t…' 

Out of all 328-ish stories in Dr Who so far ‘Full Circle’ is the one that feels most as if a baton is being passed on, when the baby boomer and before children who’ve been making it up till now are replaced by what sociologists now term ‘Generation X’, written produced and made for a completely different era. But a different era that stil has roots in the old because it’s being made first and foremost by fans: by 1980 Dr Who had been running for seventeen years - long enough for the children who grew up watching the early episodes to become writers themselves and to have folk memories of the series, to know what it’s like to be part of the main audience it was being made for, beyond looking things up in the archives. So far in season 18 we’d already seen the youngest producer for the series so far in thirty-three year-old John Nathan-Turner, who worked for many years as production assistant on the show and knew it well. Script editor Christopher H Bidmead was younger than most at thirty-nine too. But now we have the first writer for the series who’d been a mere toddler when the series first started (Andrew was a whole sixteen months old when the first episode of ‘An Unearthly Child’ went out and therefore the perfect age for the Troughton years onwards). Few TV series ever run long enough to reach this point and certainly no so-called children’s series and this gives Andrew a unique voice within the series up to that time (though he’s joined later by fellow fan Marc Platt who wrote ‘Ghost Light’ in 1989). We make the claim a few times within this project that the 1960s stories especially were the parents and children talking to each other about the collective trauma of the Second World war and where society should go from here, because there weren’t many other series where both generations would have been watching together. ‘Full Circle’ though comes full circle, being a story where the baby boomer children are now the adults and Generation X are the kiddies with ideas of their own. And what a fascinating story it is too. 

This a story about children first and foremost and their fears about what they might turn into when they become adults, along with that sudden realisation that happens in most people’s life somewhere around their teens when they realise that the big bad authority adults trying to keep them in place and telling them how to behave don’t really know any more than they do. Despite being called ‘Deciders’ they don’t really know the truth of the planet or the decisions they make – they’re in a position of power through age and experience, not wisdom and in many ways are the worst people to be in charge because they flout authority for authority’s sake and don’t listen t any opposing view. Real adulthood is about making your own decisions based on the evidence before you, without taking it on trust, but being open to the wisdom learnt from the people who came before you. Growing older doesn’t get you closer to a place of perfection, it gets you closer to state of devolving into an animal again, driven by instinct rather than knowledge because beneath all the societal niceties we are all still animals underneath and there’s no one golden moment when you ‘grow up’ to become something more than that (the novel plays this up more, with all the creatures on this planet sharing a sort of latent telepathy which knows when the time of great change is coming). After all, you can’t have illusions of grandeur in a society where everyone (spoilers) has evolved from spiders. ‘Full Circle’ is set on a planet named Alzarius where a spaceship crashed generations ago and the outer shell is still intact enough to be called home by most of the adults. Most of the teenagers though have broken away to create a society of their own, calling themselves ‘The Outliers’, convinced that everything the adults believe is wrong. They live on the fringes of society trying to pull a new society together but they can’t do it alone and mostly get by nicking bits of fruit from the society they’ve just left and dreaming about how it will all be better when they’re older. Like a homing beacon, though, they’re turning into the sort of adults they resented, creating their own hierarchy and turning on each other with petty squabbles and fights of the sort they promised themselves they would never have. At the same time there are marsh-children who by instinct reach a certain age themselves (a time known as ‘Mistfall’) and climb out of the Alzarian swamps to walk into the crashed spaceship – the adults are terrified, assuming they’re going to be attacked and the marshmen do look scary, with their reptilian bodies and squashed drone-like heads, amongst the most ‘alien’ aliens in the series, at least in this era. Only, in one of the most magnificent twists in the entire twists (spoilers) it turns out that Alazrius suffers from a quirky orbit that means that every fifty years they pass through a different part of space which does strange things to everyone’s DNA and moves everything around: it’s that which makes the swamp creatures head into the rocketship and take it over, only the adults get scared and trap them inside starving them of the Alazarian gasses they need to live, so the humans die out and the marshmen…transform into the humans. And this has been going on for generations, on a continuous loop, with the two sides of the generation gap so scared of each other even though it turns out that they share the same DNA and are exactly the same as each other, destined to go through the same cycles of fearing who comes after them and becoming the thing they feared. It’s one of the better Dr Who twists that you don’t necessarily se coming – everyone is afraid not of some stranger but of themselves in a different form and the monsters they are running from in fright are just their descendants. It’s a beautiful piece of writing, one that confused many a fan at the time but is perfectly in keeping with the original Dr Who ethos in the 1960s that the pre-war and baby boomer generations really aren’t that different and that one day everything the adults own now will be theirs (see ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ ‘The Chase’ and especially ‘The Space Museum’ for more inter-generational struggles in the 1960s). 

 The symbols of dreading turning into the person you once feared don’t stop there either: this story is also about Romana and the end of her time in the Tardis. ‘Full Circle’ starts off with a summon from the timelords to go back home (it seems odd that the timelords have wait till now, a full nine stories – counting ‘Shada’ – since the ‘Key To Time’ struggles against the Black Guardian was resolved but it works nicely thematically in this story). She doesn’t want to go: she’s learned so much being alongside the Doctor, adding real-life experience to her book knowledge and the thought of living a boring life back on static old Gallifrey and gong through the same routines day after day fills her with horror. Romana may be in her 130s but in timelord age she’s basically a teenager herself and has been working with the Doctor as a sort of apprentice, learning from him how not to become the adult she felt doomed to grow up to be. So she effectively runs away across the course of this story, using the Tardis’ unexpected flight into E-space as a means to go her own way and escape. Though she doesn’t officially leave till ‘warrior’s gate’ in two stories time you can already feel her making up her mind to leave here, at the earliest opportunity, to not just be with the Doctor but to become the Doctor and have adventures of her own as an adult. Because that’s what the Doctor does: he inspires people. For all of their early clashes, for all of Romana’s despair at the Doctor’s childishness and disorganisation and flippancy, she’s come to see that his way of living, as an outlier just like the rebels on Alzarius, is best. For Smith as a fan and as a writer the Doctor represents a whole new way of living that doesn’t have to be the way everyone else lives: that you can be kind and be a rebel, living out your best life without the confines of what society tells you to be. I’m willing to bet there aren’t many fans who disagree with that statement either: while previous writers have either come to love Dr Who or admired it as an adult, for Smith the love for Dr Who and what it represents runs deeper than that; ’Full Circle’ is the first love song to this series and everything it represents that couldn’t have been simply tweaked and re-written as a bit of standalone scifi; like many of the ‘comeback era stories (also written by fans who grew up loving the series) that admiration for everything Who represents runs through it dearly. 

 So how did a teenager get to write for the series? A combination of talent and luck. Smith had already been writing for years and had written a number of barbed gags about the early days of the Thatcher administration for topical news shows ‘Not The Nine O’Clock News’ and ‘The Week Ending’. Armed with a copy of Malcolm Hulke’s 1974 textbook ‘The Making Of Dr Who’ he’d written an outline for a different story ‘The Secret Of Cassius’ about a spaceship approaching Pluto and being shocked t find it inhabited. Andrew and sent it in, unasked, to the Dr Who production office. The first person who read it was Douglas Adams who’d liked the writing and put it in a ‘keep pile’, but also requested a second idea which became ‘Full Circle’ (but was the titled ‘A Colony Of Devils’). Alas Douglas was in the process of leaving the series so never got to commission it and he regenerated into Anthony Root, who also liked the story enough to set up a meeting, but he was only in the job temporarily so never got any further than asking tentatively for a first draft of episode one. Christopher Bidmead didn’t know any of that when he entered the production office and found, to his horror, that his predecessors had left him very few stories that had actually been started (‘The Leisure Hive’ and ‘Meglos’ were the only two). In his big vision for the future of the series Bidmead had talked about setting up a young writer’s group to encourage more talent, similar to the one Andrew Cartmel will unofficially create later in the decade, but found that writers’ unions would have been against it and reluctantly dropped the idea. With no one else to turn to he began to look through the ‘backup’ pile of stories and fell in love with ‘Full Circle’, a story that was very much an idea after his own heart: a monster who isn’t really a monster and an intellectual twist that changed everything you thought you knew about this planet. He hired Andrew to write a full draft without knowing that he was an inexperienced teenager, particularly impressed at the way Andrew had written out a synopsis in exactly the professional way that the production team wanted, unlike most of the other unsolicited manuscripts (he didn’t know about Hulke’s book at the time!) Most script editors on finding out the truth at a first meeting would have dropped them then and there but Bidmead stayed true t his word about nurturing new talent and worked closely on the one script he didn’t write in season 18 that he really believed in. You can tell: there’s a lot of love and care in ‘Full Circle’. 

 Unfortunately there’s also Adric, the future companion whose become synonymous with this story and who every fan loves to hate, but who wasn’t one of Andrew’s creations and isn’t in his first draft (it’s one of the biggest false assumptions in the series that, given the writer behind this story was also a teenager, Andrew was writing about himself but nope: Adric would have been a more literary creation all round than a mathematical logical one). JNT and Bidmead both had been discussing about how they wanted to attract a new and younger audience and between them came up with the idea of a teenage mathematical genius who would be like a mini-Doctor, a rebel who broke away from a rigid society so he could see the universe. He’s written in the script as being ‘to our eyes around fifteen’ though as Alzarius has such a wild and wonky orbit he could be older than Romana or The Doctor in reality. They figured he could become the younger audience’s identification person, as a contrast to the cleverness of Romana and to replace K( as a children’s favourite (JNT loathed the robot dog and tried to farm him out to a spin-off series; see ‘K9 and Company’). They figured he would be perfect to introduce in this story and got Andrew to write him in, even though he’s far less developed than the other outliers, an adult’s idea of a teenager who doesn’t fit a story about a teenager’s view of adults. On paper Adric was to be the artful dodger in space, always mischievous and ducking and diving and getting into fun scrapes. In practice? He’s more like Oliver, the spoiled kid whose used to being treated as special until he ends up in tough times and ends up running away to be with a team of misfits who think he’s posh and untrustworthy, when really he’s a goody two-shoes whose never known real pain or struggle and thinks the people he’s run away with are a bunch of losers: even his brothers (that all makes the Doctor Fagin, a part that Christopher Eccleston is playing on TV now, funnily enough). It would have been a lot more obvious to create an outsider character who was thick and rejected by society, but Bidmead shaped Adric to be more or less a younger version of himself (and to reflect a lot of the Dr Who nerds he’d already met): earnest, bright, interested in science and mathematics and with a deep understanding of how the world should work but little experience of how it actually does (to any Star Trek fans reading: he’s our equivalent of Wesley Crusher). He’s Romana again in other words, but in pint-sized form and given extra unlikeable qualities of being sulky and brattish and prone to sulking (like I say, an adult’s idea of a child). His name comes from Dirac, the quantum physicist Bidmead really admired, figuring that if this was e-space this might be his parallel world version (equally, for a draft or two, Alzarius was named Yerfillag, the mirror image of Gallifrey, and still shares its co-ordinates, just in a different dimension).

In time Adric will become shorthand for everything that was wrong about 1980s Who: a sulky prodigy with no people skills who always sides with the baddies and who spends most of his time in the Tardis either doing maths, something clever with computers or pouting. Adric is the kind of kid we watched programmes like Dr Who to forget having to rub shoulders with in the classroom. Anyone but anyone would have struggled to play a character as instantly unlikeable as this. And who do they give it to? Matthew Waterhouse, an inexperienced filing clerk on his second acting job who, by coincidence, is the first actor to have grown up loving the series (and is seven months older than Andrew and twenty-three months older than the series itself. For context even Russell T Davies was seven months and Steven Moffat two years old in November 1963, making them all four close contemporaries which given the gap between their eras of the show is just insane. All the moaning about how young the cast of the next series of DW in 2024 will be have nothing on the kids of 1980). Matthew has born the brunt of a lot of criticism from Who fans over the years but it’s not his fault: ‘ve seen him in other things and, with the benefit of another twenty-thirty years experience and better characters, he can really act. But he plays Adric exactly how he is on the page, as an insufferable know-it-all, without the benefit of experience that would have brought nuances and depth to the character. Almost as soon as they introduced him everyone seems to have realised that he was a mistake and he will indeed (spoilers) be killed off by the end of the following year. He always did his best though (even if his inexperienced best is clever never really good enough) – the real blame lies with the production team for casting him and writing him that way. 

 That said everyone assumes that the story that introduces Adric should be awful too, but really it’s very good – and not just the bits without him either. What people forget is that, right here back at the beginning, Adric was a genuinely promising character who was, if not quite one of us, then more us than the pair of clever timelords and their robotic dog. He makes sense in this story in a way he never quite will again. Thanks to his fellow teenager writer, in ‘Full Circle’ Adric gets way more back story than most companions along with more reasons to leave in the Tardis at the end than most (it’s very on character for both of them that Adric smugly stows away assuming he’s been unseen and the Doctor sees but let’s him think he’s got away with it – that will be their relationship to the end pretty much). After all, you can’t say he’s one-dimensional here: the tragedy Adric goes through in this debut story alone – shunned by his peers for being elitest, desperate to rough it with the lower classes, watching his beloved brother Varsh sacrifice his own life for his - should have given the DW writers enough trauma to play off for a whole series. Matthew is really rather good at the scene where he mourns his brother too or indeed any scene that gives him something to get his teeth into rather than merely stand around – Matthew channelled his own still burning grief at losing his elder brother Nicholas to suicide two years earlier and you can tell; this scene feels ‘real’ in a way that few including Adric ever will be. In Smith’s hands Adric’s not the know-it-all who still gets everything wrong; he’s a child cast adrift in a world of adults who doesn’t quite understand how it works and keeps messing up, which fits well with the theme of the story. Though Bidmead’s baby Smith ending up creating he most memorable parts of Adric: his badge for mathematical excellence he wears like a totem, his desperate longing to fit in and belong somewhere anywhere, his rather naïve utopian vision of what life outside civilisation would be like and his disappointment that it’s not as romantic or luxurious as he thought (Waterhouse will rebuild his career after Who partly on the back of a critically acclaimed one-man play based on ‘The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn’ and plays the boy let loose on an un-colonised America in much the same way Adric should always have been). 

 You have to say, though, that the other outliers - whom Andrew did create - are more interesting; well up to a point. Varsh is a young man with an old problem on his shoulders, the one nominally in charge of his gang and trying to keep everyone safe. He finds it an arduous task compared to the freedom he experienced at the bottom of the ladder on board the space freighter and begins to see life from a different angle becoming as authoritarian and brusque as the strict humans he despises. His confidence is, like the grown-ups, a cover for just how insecure he really is and yet it’s working enough to fool Adric, also unsure of his place in the world, who clearly looks up to him. Richard Willis struggles to make varsh any more than just a bigger brattier version of Adric, though. June Page as Keara too is hugely loyal to Varsh to a fault, in a way that she never is to the rest of the authority figures, which only makes things worse: Varsh can cope with letting himself down but the girl who has a crush on him and his younger brother? That’s just too much pressure when all he wants is to be a kid! Though they share next to no chemistry on screen Willis and Page fell in love while making this story and later got married, one of three meetings on the set of Dr Who that resulted in weddings (see ‘The Tenth Planet’ and ‘Shada’ for the other two), although alas this is the only one that didn’t last (Willis gets remarried a few years later to Kate ‘Rani’ O’Mara!) Unfortunately we don’t really get to see as much of their relationship in the plot as perhaps we should. The original draft of ‘Full Circle’ featured the marshmen far more, especially a young girl that hangs around the Doctor and whom he calls, sensibly enough, Marsha. We at home see her as truly innocent and pure and are horrified when the human adults see her as a threat to be tortured and near-dissected in their quest to know more about this world and how it works: it’s a real gut-wrenching moment that the show should have been brave enough to go with. Alas Mary Whitehouse-fuelled fears about violence meant that Andrew was made to back track and the whole plot element of the marshmen becomes watered down. It’s a shame: so much of the plot relies on them being more than just ‘monsters’ and yet that’s all they are for the vast majority of the story, mute beings that loom and don’t actually get to do anything much. As for the humans, well: they’re every authoritarian figure ever seen in the series and while they need to be a faceless bunch so that we can compare and contrast the youngsters it’s a shame they have to be quite this faceless. As brilliant as the script is (and even better as the first draft was before it got mucked around with) you come away wishing there had been just one more draft to make the most of all these great ideas. 

 And it is great. Yes fans can and have pointed out elements nicked from other Dr Who stories as Andrew Smith would have known, being an early organiser of the Dr Who Appreciation Society: the marshmen rising out of the swamps is a direct steal from ‘The Sea Devils’, the idea that the monsters are actually quite human and that the humans are the monsters (many stories especially ‘Galaxy 4’ and ‘The Savages’), the smashed starship that isn’t quite what we think it is (‘Planet Of Evil’ ‘Face Of Evil’), the spiders (‘Planet Of the Spiders’). However rather than blindly copy these ideas the way lesser writers do Smith is clearly just so steeped in Dr Who lore that he’s been watching carefully what will and what won’t work, juggling these elements within his own very new story and coming up with something new. Like Frontios’ and unlike any other Who story (weirdly enough the only two stories to do this are nearly next to each other alphabetically) the only villain here is gravity (sorry, mavity, I forgot which universe I was in then for a minute) with lagoons that change to marshland because of the chemical imbalance when Alzarius gets pulled closer to the sun. It’s a great and all too plausible idea. I’d go so far as to say that ‘Full Circle’ is one of the best Who stories of the 1980s in terms of pure script, certainly the deepest, most complex and metaphorical one Who had had for some time, since the Douglas Adams days, a neat starter for the main course of deeper stories to come this same season like ‘Warrior’s Gate’ ‘Keeper Of Traken’ and ‘Logopolis’ that nevertheless stands out a mile in context coming between the camp silliness of ‘Meglos’ and the gothic retro feel of ‘State Of Decay’. It’s arguably the first story where new script editor Christopher H Bidmead gets to have a big say in shaping it too and it’s as big a stylistic shift as we got with any of the modern showrunners taking over: in a flash Dr Who becomes weirder, deeper, less about the plot and more about meaning than the monsters. 

 For instance the title refers to the evolutionary lifespan of the planet Alazarius, something added by Bidmead and the only change Andrew was said not to like (mostly because the BBC still frowned on using the word ‘Devil’ on TV back then; you can tell how much this title sticks out compared to what came before it because the novelisation was the first Who book that didn’t put ‘Doctor Who and…’ at the front because that would have been silly. Though, admittedly, not as silly as some of the titles we did get). Had we just ended up here in this story from larks with a giant cactus the week before (which story was written by the novice teenager again?!) it might have felt like too much of a change in one go, but as the start of the E-Space (‘Exo’ as opposed to ‘N’ or ‘Normal’, ‘Latin’ for ‘outside’) trilogy it sets this story up to be a bit different. And it is. While ‘State Of Decay’ is just like our universe but with vampires both ‘Full Circle’ and ‘Warrior’s Gate’ really go out of their way to show different kind of a universe where the usual rules don’t apply. Especially this story in a way because the idea of a pocket universe ‘outside’ normal space-time going about things its own way in parallel to ‘our’ space is very much reflected in the main plot. As a whole the idea of e-space is frustratingly underused but holds lots of promise, allowing the production team to tell some very different stories even if the means of the Tardis’ accidental journey there is oddly handled and treated as a bit of a joke. Though the first draft of Full Circle’ wasn’t written for a trilogy or a different universe you can tell the writer and script editor have gone away to think about this world too: it’s there in the planet’s unusual orbit, the unique marshfruit everyone lives off and even the speedy metabolism of the locals which mean they can heal all wounds in seconds. 

 There are some great lines scattered across the script too that really ‘get’ the 4th Doctor’s mixture of childish playfulness and stern authoritarian and no wonder really, this being the first person to write for the series who was a fan before they were a writer – The Doctor’s reaction to the marshmen to wonder why he’s scared it off when everyone else is running away, commenting that ‘he’s always been good with children’, is one of this regeneration’s best lines. Smith is surprisingly less sure-footed with K9, the dog all but ignored in his penultimate story (though not for lack of trying: the original draft had a sub-plot about K9 being worshipped as a God by locals and K9’s puzzlement, but Bidmead diplomatically took it out knowing how much the producer, already wary of commissioning new writers, hated the dog) and even less sure with Romana though, who at times is the Doctor’s equal and at others is treated like every other generic companion: the scenes of her being possessed by cheap-looking spiders, for instance, is laughable and Lalla Ward struggles to be convincing when acting being hypnotised, given that she’s an actress who uses movement so much all the time. The scenes with the spiders all round are some of the worst actually: the model effects haven’t got any better since ‘Planet Of The Spiders’ eight years ago and they don’t move convincingly at all, especially the shot of one biting Romana which is all too obviously the actress flicking off a fake rubber spider from her face with the footage then reversed, one of the cheaper Who trick shots and not one of the better ones. The spiders don’t really need to be there: I’ll buy the idea that the marshmen evolve into humans when starved of particular gasses but saying that spiders then evolve into marshmen seems like an evolutionary quirk too far: there’s just no reason for them to grow legs and crawl into the swamps when, by the looks of things, they’re faring better than the marshmen are. And why do both exist at the same time anyway? Wouldn’t the same evolutionary homing device, caused by the heat of the planet’s strange orbit, transform all the spiders at roughly the same time? The script could easily have been written without them (we only need them for the traditional cliffhanger when they bite Romana – and having something that traditional in the middle of such an esoteric story always felt wrong anyway). 

Other ways that this story comes across on screen lets it down badly too, seemingly made in the cheapest and most basic way possible despite being a story positively bursting with great ideas everywhere you turn. There just aren’t enough extras here to convince you that this is a proper colony with a history. The acting is, at times, atrocious, some of the worst across the board in the series. The sub-plot partway through of having Romana possessed also feels like a really backwards step and something that’s been done better hundreds of times before, taking up space where a greater look at this most interesting of planets ought to be. It doesn’t help that Lalla Ward, along with Tom Baker, is about the only member of the cast giving this story their all so when she ends up being made to act hypnotised and act all bland too that just leaves Tom Baker and even his personality isn’t big enough to fill the entire screen (though his impassioned rant against the Deciders in the finale brightens the last episode up no end).Tom, meanwhile, is in an angry, sullen mood (this is the last bump in his relationship with Lalla Ward when both of them were struggling to be in the same room as each other; things will be much happier for their last story together as filmed ‘Warrior’s Gate’ and the pair will marry months later, to the surprise of everyone who worked on this story and remembered their cross words and angry glances at each other). Matthew Waterhouse is, believe it or not, by far the best actor of the ragtag bunch of teenage off-worlders, blankly reading out lines that ought to be invested with high emotion. The decision to paint a possessed Romana in hi-vis scotch tape and shine a camera at it so that she ‘glows’ doesn’t work any better than it did in ‘Death To The Daleks’ (you think they’d have learned to stop trying that technique by now, although it did reportedly work rather well on the Romana waxwork in Madame Tussauds. At the same exhibit Tom Baker was turned into the cactus from ‘Meglos’ and he’s still, to date, the only person to ever be an exhibit in the museum twice at the same time). The starship set is one of the more boring ones too, all cold steel and clinical walls without any sense of having been lived in for generations although the library, with books crammed into every nook and cranny, is more interesting. 

 Thankfully some aspects do work on screen, especially the location filming with lots of lingering shots of the swamp (Blackwater Park in Iver Heath Buckinghamshire, which looks a lot more convincing than the swamp in ‘The Power Of Kroll’). The marshmen costumes are excellent for their era, slimy and warped and not as obviously men in costumes as normal and even if their scene coming out of the water isn’t as strong as the one in ‘Sea Devils’ to a generation of fans who’d never seen it this was the best cliffhanger in years, especially when matched by one of the best incidental music of the era (Paddy Kingsland at his best). The model heads look alien, with clever details such as the slight impression of the spider-eggs left as an early clue as to what they’d grown from. The costumes were based on wet suits to enable the actors to stay underwater comfortably – even so there’s clever use of the slow mo-replay machine to slow the footage down and let us linger on the way they move coming out of the water. They’re a rare Who alien that actually seem suited to their natural terrain (Smith clearly spending more time thinking about his world-building than more experienced writers did for the series). Best of all most of the marshmen action is shot through a fish-eye lens, which makes tem automatically alien and strange and unlike other instances where these sorts of shots are used it works with what we see of the marshmen too (as their eyes really are naturally wide apart). The sound, too, is great: the sound the marshmen make is actually pig grunting slowed down and reversed (a natural fit given that of all the animals bar the monkey family they have the most in common with humanity) recorded by Dick Mills on a pig farm especially for the story rather than taken from tape. 

 The result is a mixed story, one where the production team got very lucky in hiring their writer (nobody but nobody watching this story, who hadn’t read the article about the new writer and companion in the radio Times, would have guessed not only at Andrew’s real age but his lack of experience) but unlucky in other aspects, mostly the casting and the set design, ending up a story that’s still something of a chore to sit through, with long periods where nothing happens except big drips talking to other big drips when all we want to see is more of the fascinating dripping monsters. It got unlucky with the timeslot too: this is the era when ITV started putting the big budget ‘Buck Rogers In the 25th Century’ on up against Who and the ratings take a nosedive they never fully recover from. To many casual younger fans Dr Who had lost its way: it looked childish and cheap and silly and wasn’t for ‘them,’ anymore, even though – in script terms at least – it had never been more for them than with this story. There’s a reason more fans who saw this story remember it than what happened in Buck Rogers this week though: there’s a really clever story about generational trauma and cycles at the heart of ‘Full Circle’ and an intelligence not often seen in Who as well as this. It’s just unfortunate that it’s also a story made at a time when even the best episodes had major issues with the way they were being put together on screen and that this one suffers from those issues more than most. Like mistfall itself it’s a generational anomaly, an intellectual script that no one quite knows what to do with so they pretend it’s business as usual, treating it as a bit of kid’s TV rather than the start of a whole new brave dawn. Smith himself will never write for the series again: not through lack of trying either, but JNT and Bidmead will fall out and without the script editor there to champion his work there was no way the producer was going to allow the protégé of the man he saw as walking out on him at a time of need to keep writing for the series, a great pity for everyone (Andrew didn’t get any other scripts made either, retraining as a police officer before Big Finish tempt him out of retirement and have him write for the series again). Not surprisingly, given the discrepancy between what should have been and what is, Andrew Smith’s novelisation is tonnes better than the episode itself. Still, the idea of a series that’s once again trying really hard to do something new, stymied not by ambition or ideas but by money, is pretty much full circle where we came in with Dr Who and if ever there was a story written by someone who ‘understands’ this series then it’s this one, a small triumph and something of a revolution in an era when the series had fallen into a bit of a rut. 

 POSITIVES + There’s a ‘look’ and an atmosphere about ‘Full Circle’ like no other story and it gets the balance between exotic locations shot on film and static studio sets better than any other story – we really feel how exotic these alien marshes are when set against the static man-made spaceships that don’t belong in this world. The mist that drives the story permeates through everything, shrouding the planet in mystery. Almost every scene of this story is someone trying to pull the wool over someone else’s eyes and keeping the truth about them, so it makes perfect sense that we at home see everything through a fog too. The production team g the extra mile, too, by adding powder-paint to the foliage and using exotic lighting to make the swamp loo alien. All this makes Alzarius feel like the production team really did set off for a planet in e-space, where our earth-based knowledge of how worlds work doesn’t apply – rather than down the road in Buckinghamshire. 

 NEGATIVES - The outliers are middle-aged people’s idea of what hip teenagers are like in 1980, whatever planet they’re from and however young the writer was. They sit around a cave but otherwise they’re a clichéd version of teenagers hanging round the shops with nothing to do and giggling about the ‘squares’ who are in charge back at the spaceship. You half expect a scene with an off-license and under-age drinking just to ram home the point that ‘they’re meant to be like you, yoofs of 1980!’ (maybe that isn’t fog – maybe the outliers are vaping just out of shot?) Most frustratingly of all, in an episode about needing to break out of repetitive patterns and cycles, nobody here learns anything: the closest is Adric and he ‘learns’ not by putting things right on his home world but by running away in the Tardis. The whole plot of ‘Full Circle’ centres (see what I did there) on the fact that teacher’s pet Adric is so desperate to join this band of outlaws he’ll even break the cardinal rule of all planets and steal from people but, honestly, why would anyone want to join this bunch of losers? They can’t even steal fruit properly without getting caught. 

BEST QUOTE: Login: ‘A little patience goes a long way’. Doctor: ‘Yes, but too much patience goes absolutely nowhere!’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Mistfall’ (2015) is a Big Finish audio adventure (#195 in their main range) that sees Andrew Smith return to Alzarius a full thirty-five years on. A 5th Doctor adventure from the era after Adric’s death (in the brief period between ‘Mawdryn Undead’ and ‘Terminus’ when Tegan, Nyssa and Turlough were all in the Tardis together, though weirdly the latter isn’t haunted by The Black Guardian in this story) it’s an emotional homecoming for them all, the Tardis escaping certain destruction by jumping through e-space thanks to the co-ordinates Adric once programmed into the Tardis at the beginning of ‘Earthshock’. Smith puts together a script that’s much closer to his original plan for the story with several ideas that were in his original draft. Alazarius is referred to as ‘the planet that slept’ and Merrion the Decider is much closer to his original vision for the captain of the Starliner. The best parts, though, repeat what ‘Full Circle’ did so well: the marshmen coming out of the gloom while Nyssas and Turlough are stranded out in the open at night. You could argue that this sequel is a bit unnecessary, given that it doesn’t do a lot the original didn’t do, but it repeats everything in some style and the emphasis on the marshmen rather than the humanoids is definitely a plus. It’s a shame this story was recorded in the days before Matthew Waterhouse joined the Big Finish team though as a return home for Adric would have been all the more bittersweet and dramatic. 

 Set in the gap between ‘Full Circle’ and ‘State Of Decay’, ‘The Invasion Of E-Space’ is one of Big Finish’s Companion Chronicles (2010) and once again written by Andrew Smith. Though the slight plot is about the Tardis crew’s attempts to create their own artificial Charged Vacuum Emboitment to take them back to n-space, really it’s a ‘getting to know you’ story. On screen Romana and Adric only shared three stories together and were never the best of friends and this story harks back to their very uneasy alliance. They’re a bit too similar: both a bit posh and spoilt learning that the universe is darker and stranger than they first realised and in timelord terms Romana is not much more than a teenager herself. She sees a lot of her younger self in Adric during the ‘Key To Time’ season and is surprised to feel almost parental towards him. The story starts off well then goes a bit downhill when a Sontaron-style race named The Farrion turn up to use the CVE themselves, but this short story runs out of time to do any more than make them caricatures. Not one of the better stories in the range, though Lalla Ward has great fun reading it out. 

 One of the oddest Dr Who spin-offs was the ‘Viewmaster’ toy, which in the days before home video was the only way to see parts of the story whenever you wanted and were everywhere in the early 1980s (I never had the Dr Who one for instance but I did have 1980s animation epic ‘Mysterious Cities Of Gold’). The pictures were in 3D too, well sort of (the effect was like staring down a pair of binoculars at pictures that look far away but sort of blurrily move; it’s a more convincing effect than in ‘Dimensions In Time’ anyway). There were twenty-one photographs from the serial used, which sort-of tell the basic story complete with captions explaining what was going on. Given that the production team had signed up to having one of these made across the year ‘Full Circle’ is the best choice available, a very visual story in what was a rather un-visual era and the toy sold so well they did the same again with ‘Castrovalva’ the choice from the following season. The cover illustration of Tom Baker is awful though. 

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