Logopolis
(Season 18, Dr 4 with Adric Nyssa and Tegan, 28/2/1981-21/3/1981, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Christopher H Bidmead, writer: Christopher H Bidmead, director: Peter Grimwade)
Rank: 17
'Those potential Dr Who crossover computer games:
Pac-Cyber-Man - in which a grey metallic sphere converts people into ghosts
Grand Theft Auto 1903 - In which the Dr drives around in a souped-up Bessie and the Whomobile
Green Death Minecraft - forget sheep that look like building blocks, this game comes with giant maggots down Welsh mines!
Donkey Kong Robot- Like Donkey Kong, but with a giant robot throwing barrels at you
Extremis - The Sims. Papal edition.
Wolfenstein - Nobody Puts Hitler In A Cupboard!
Diablo - Make your way through hell. Jo Grant sacrifices herself for you at the end
Call Of Duty - War Games cross-time edition. Set Roman battalions on Nazi troops!
Pokemondas - The Cybermen cards all look the same but you still gotta catch 'em all. Assuming they don't catch you first!'
It’s the end #4 – and the moment has been prepared for. So much so that we actually see the Dr’s ‘premonition’ of his doom in this story that haunts himself like a ghost. ‘Spooky’ is the word for ‘Logopolis’, which makes it sound like quite a few other Who stories but it’s not in an ‘aaagh run for your sofa!’ paranormal haunting kind of a way, more a feeling of existential dread that something is so fundamentally wrong the with the universe even the Doctor can’t simply swan in and save us from it like usual. Not this timer: the usual laws of a Dr Who story don’t apply. Everyone watching knew that this was Tom Baker’s last story and the fact that he was leaving the show after seven years even made the BBC news, so there’s feeling of inescapable doom throughout: no matter what the Doctor does, no matter what he tries, he’s meant not to win this one. What’s more he knows it. The 4th Dr in particular is the active hero of the Whoniverse. He runs around madly saving everyone like it’s a calling, overpowering regimes left right and centre with a tug of his scarf, getting involved in the heart of the action in a wild variety of different planets and cultures in a way the 1st and 2nd Drs would never dare and the 3rd Dr would if only he hadn’t been stuck on Earth with a bunch of boring bureaucrats. He is, of all the Drs, a force of nature, big, tall and ever-moving The 4th Doctor, who can take down civilisations and empires as quickly as looking at them, who can walk into a planet that’s been under dictatorships for millennias and then topple them within minutes, who can argue his way out of anything with anyone, seems to be warned of what’s coming in a conversation even we’re not privy too and doesn’t even fight it. To see Tom Baker, the actor who played the Dr longer than anybody (and likely ever will now it seems to be an unofficial ‘rule’ that actors retire after three seasons and/or specials) standing still helpless in the hands of fate is a more terrifying prospect than perhaps anything else that can be put on screen. It’s not the way any of his fans expected this most heroic Doctor to go out. It’s certainly not the way Tom Baker wanted to go out (he’s on record as hating the way he died; mind you, Tom hated pretty much everything after John Nathan-Turner took over as producer) but it’s the perfect ending for his Dr in so many ways. We’ve seen the Doctor fight so many heroic battles that seeing him fight another one wouldn’t have been special – however we’ve never had another story quite like ‘Logopolis’ before or since.
You know that something
is up as soon as the Tardis cloister bell starts ringing in the opening
episode, the sort of thing you only hear if a great sacred building is under
attack. The sound is described, at typical Bidmead length, in the script as ‘a
sort of communication device reserved for wild catastrophes and sudden calls to
man the battle stations’. The fact that
we haven’t heard it ring in eighteen years, despite all the scary things we’ve
seen attacking the Tardis down the years (you think it would chime in ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ at the very least),
raises the tension for this final story in a way nothing else could do (and
makes the oldest constant in the show besides the theme tune sound as if its
howling in pain). It’s a sound that still sends shivers down my spine, even
with all the vastly inferior stories that have cloister-belled since. The very
fact that it’s even referred to as a ‘cloister’ bell suggests something
enclosed, separate from the world where nothing can get at it, not least
because the Tardis is forever dodging around in time and space like the
knitting pattern in an endlessly woollen scarf, but here the decay has even
spread to The Tardis. The whole of season 18 has a funeralaic air to it, as the
Doctor goes from an untouchable superman to someone who gets hurt, grows old
and decays, is out of his depth and (in the last few minutes of ‘Keeper Of
Traken’) loses like never before, but now it’s no longer just noises off: you
feel it, in every frame of every scene of every episode of this story, an
inevitability and certainty of fate and pre-destiny that cannot be avoided even
with a space time machine.
What’s impressive about
‘Logopolis’ though is that, whilst far from being dramatic or shouting it never
raises its voice above a whisper, it still manages to be epic on a grand scale.
It’s a story that is designed to be epic and yet simultaneously mundane, like
the old feeling of the ordinary and extraordinary colliding but in reverse, so
that the biggest event seen in the series thus far happens on a really tiny
way. More people die in this story than maybe any other in Dr Who history,
including Traken that we got to know really well just a story ago (and while a
few planets in the Whoniverse deserve to be blown up, that was one of the nicer
ones), but they do so in a way that’s quiet and eerie. This is a story where
the universe goes wrong not because someone’s exploded it invaded it or set it
on fire like usual but because the universe was always in a state of decay and
the people holding it together can’t manage it anymore, a land where people
crumble into dust rather than get caught in gunfire and lasers. This is a story
where The Doctor is visited by a portent of doom not on some magic castle in
outer space but by the side of a busy main road. As much as The Master’s along
for a ride (literally, hitching a lift in the Dr’s Tardis and so turning even
the most alive and reliably unreliable machine in all of scifi against him),
really it’s the dark forces of entropy that kills the Doctor here, the age-old
idea that collapse of everything is inevitable given enough time, that things fall
apart and the centre cannot hold, that all things must pass even for someone as
bursting with life as this particular Doctor. It’s the law of thermodynamics:
that energy will eventually dissipate and change into something else if left long
enough, a principle first used for the concept of regeneration but used here by
Bidmead to show that everything comes to an end, eventually, even long-running
Doctors. Technically it’s all The Master’s fault but really he only speeds up a
process that’s been happening since day one and was always going to end up here,
with The watcher the fickle hand of fate moving everything into place, an
ending that’s been there since the start because - as Bob Dylan nearly said - whoever
isn’t busy being born is busy…regenerating.
A lot of early Dr Whos
deal with pre-destination, back when The Tardis was an impossible magical box
of super powers rather than transport. There’s a question that runs through the
early days when the Doctor went back into Earth’s past every other story about
what can and cannot be changed: that certain timelines are fixed and have to be
that way because fate demands that it should always be that way (and it’s
always going to be that way no matter what you do to avoid it). You can see it
most in ‘The Space Museum’, a hugely under-rated story that has the Doctor and
companions arriving in the story a whole episode early and working out how to
avoid the fate that seems to be ready for them, of becoming exhibits (the
answer? Probably nothing they did but the way they shaped other people’s
behaviour and caused a revolution on the planet). ‘Logopolis’ is ‘The Space
Museum’ in reverse: the Doctor doesn’t try to avoid his fate but embraces it
because he knows he has no choice. He can’t jump a time track because that
would be to cheat and he knows that this particular time track was always
waiting for him to ride sometime. ‘The future lies this way’ says the Doctor,
with confidence at one point, knowing he can’t go backwards. To defy the
universe would be to defy fate and who knows what ruptures that would cause if
he did that? (‘Waters Of Mars’ tries to answer exactly this question, as the
Doctor tries to avoid a fixed point in time in the viewers’ future and it all
unravels in spectacular style). The 21st century series has done
this a few times in fact, most notably ‘The End Of Time’ and ‘Time Of The
Doctor’ which very much have the same feeling (although the 10th and
11th Doctors both manage to
avoid his fate for a few centuries first by running away!) Not the 4th
Doctor though: when your time’s up, your time’s up and the most argumentative
of Doctors doesn’t argue, this most flippant of Doctors doesn’t make jokes,
this most pro-active of Doctors doesn’t run away, he accepts his fate
gracefully, as if he always knew secretly that it would end here. ‘Planet Of
the Spiders’ upped the ante by making the 3rd Doctor’s fate a
Buddhist parable, where he had to change because his flaws had got the better
of him, but ‘Logopolis’ is positively Old Testament, with the idea that
everything we ever do is foretold and that free will, even the Doctor’s free
will, is an illusion.
Who planned all this in
advance? Well, that’s the question, ‘Logopolis’ ducking the question of a God
or timelord deity by having it just be a law of nature. Speculation had been
rife about how this Doctor might bow out but few watching would have guessed
that it would be in a story that’s really about mathematics, computer banking
and the ‘safety’ of numbers (and what happens when even numbers aren’t safe). There
are two major scientific-mathematical principles at war with each other in this
story (and the script is ambiguous enough that either or both or none of them
might be right). The Doctor himself talks about a ‘causal nexus’ that’s set in
stone and quotes Aldous Huxley (referring to him as ‘an old friend) who seemed
to believe in a figure behind all the rules of nature playing all the parts.
The real quote is that ‘the chess board is the world – the pieces are the
phenomena of the universe’ (only this being Tom Baker it’s ad libbed as ‘cheese
board for added daftness!) - the rest of the quote he doesn’t get to say is
that ‘…the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. The player on
the other hand is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair and
patient. But we also know to our cost that he never makes a mistake or makes
the smallest allowance for ignorance’. In other words nature doesn’t care who
you are: everyone has to die and no one can escape the pattern of life laid
before them. A lot of the earliest scifi (back when it was more like fantasy)
use similar principles: it’s in CS Lewis’ ‘Narnia’ books for instance (where
Azlan the Lion is Jesus and Narnia is Heaven, with events on Earth tweaked to
make it run to a pattern) or Michael Ende’s ‘The Neverending Story’ (which is
similarly obsessed with entropy and pleads for a boy to come from ‘our’ world
because that’s the only fated way Fantasia can be set right again – all ‘Logopolis’
is missing is a luck dragon). Huxley had a rival though, Heisenberg who
rejected the casual nexus as a ‘superstition’ that there was someone out there
with a grand plan and who created an ‘Uncertainty Principle’ of his own, that
the more precisely you looked into mathematics and codes the weirder and less
predictable they became. There can’t have been a creator: it’s just nature
running to a set of mathematical principles its due to follow without stopping
regardless. A lot of pre-Who scifi used to be based on the idea: I’m willing to
bet my remote-controlled Dalek, for instance, that Bidmead read Isaac Asimov’s
books that for the most part take a clinical scientific view of the future,
such as the ‘Foundation’ series (that reduces mankind to a statistic that can
be second-guessed, with similar ideas of pre-destiny with even individual moves
foreseen like a chess board), the ‘Black Widowers’ crime books (in which there
was always a logical solution – ‘Robots Of Death’ comes straight from one of
these books) or ‘The Gods Themselves’ (in which entropy over-runs the universe,
because the universe always runs out of steam), all very ‘Logpopolitan'.
Mankind was always going to head to the stars and reach the achievements that
we do, but it wasn’t in the stars, it
was in the statistics. And equally we’re going to go through times of
devolving, of going back to dark times and heading backwards, because that’s
part of man’s progress too. ‘Logopolis’ feels to me like writer Christopher H
Bidmead, a keen reader of literary scifi who’d only taken his Dr Who script
editor post to make it more grown up’, using it as the launchpad for a debate
between the two arguments. Only he never works out who wins: is ‘The Watcher’,
for instance, a supernatural ghost sent by God or a side effect of science and
time going wrong, with the universe trying to squish itself back together again
to cover up the cracks of a fixed point in time? Could it, perhaps, be
both?
Dr Who is at its heart a
highly lyrical, poetical series, so much so that people coming to it for the
‘science’ half of the term ‘science fiction’ sometimes feel hard done by
compared to the nuts and bolts and space shuttles with serial numbers of other
less literate scifi series (like ‘Star Wars’ ‘Battlestar Galactica’ or
‘Stargate SG1’). No other story has ever treated Dr Who like a mathematical
equation or logic problem. And yet ‘Logopolis’ fits because it somehow manages
to be both: a unique story that manages to both be a poetic story about logic
and a literary story about numbers. New script editor and ‘Logopolis’ writer
Christopher H Bidmead was already on his way out the door after just a single
year, tired of butting heads with producer John Nathan-Turner and editing
stories about talking alien cactuses when he wanted to making literate scifi,
but the draw of writing Tom Baker’s all-important finale was too strong so he
came back to write it (and, thanks to various scripts dropping out, ended up
writing it’s similarly poetic yet mathematical sequel ‘Castrovalva’ too). You
can often tell what a script editor really wants to do with their time in
office from what moves they make first, either in their first week or at their
interview: David Whittaker wanted to educate, Dennis Spooner wanted to
entertain, Terrance Dicks wanted to tell a good story, Robert Holmes wanted to
make people question everything, Douglas Adams wanted to baffle and make people
laugh, Andrew Cartmel wanted to take down the government, Steven Moffat wanted
to scare the pants off everyone watching and Russell T Davies wanted the world
to fall in love with Dr Who the way he had as a boy: Bidmead’s first move was
to take out a subscription to a hard science magazine for the production office
and get people to read it, to make the viewers interested in the un-trendy
subject of maths (if ever there was a case of the ordinary hitting the
extraordinary in Dr Who it’s numbers, because nothing is more boring than a
maths lesson). And maths doesn’t argue, it doesn’t care what universes you’ve
saved today or how much of a case you argue: it knows that everything has a
beginning and an end and it can’t be avoided. IT’s a fact of nature, of life,
of science, that you can only get so far (the number nine) before you go back
and start repeating on yourself (by going back to 0 with a 1 in front of it):
it doesn’t matter who you are, if you’re from a planet called Gallifrey in the constellation
of Kasterberous and you’re all powerful, it’s the same law for everyone,
unchanged everywhere in the universe. That’s why the voyager probe, sent out
into space to make contact with aliens, came with mathematics because that was
thought to be a universal language far more than words (the astronomer from
Jodrell Bank in episode four is listening out in case there is ever a reply to
this).
Really, though,
‘Logopolis’ is about computers – it sees life as a computer programme that’s
been set into motion and can’t be altered, no matter how many gadgets you throw
at it to slow decay down it will get there in the end. Many fans have wondered
what inspired ‘Logopolis’ to be so very different. Was it the delivery of
Bidmead’s long awaited computer? Was it, indeed, the delivery of a second after
the first succumbed to decay and collapse and over-use (every computer owner
remembers their first blank screen moment with horror, the death of a faithful
friend they never even got to say goodbye to: you can imagine how many
computers I go through writing so many words; it’s a lot and *sob* I remember
them all). It seems more than possible that the matrix, Robert Holmes’
impossible world of combined timelord imagination, was Bidmead’s starting point
for this story when he got the job as script editor and went back through the
series lore for ideas that caught his eye, trying to work out how it could
possibly work in scientific terms. Or maybe Bidmead just watched the ‘prime
computer’ adverts in Australia starring Tom Baker and Lalla Ward in 1980 which,
technically, weren’t official Dr Who products but featured them in costume and
everything. Or maybe he simply leafed through his new word processor
instruction booklet as it was the nearest thing to hand? Whatever the
inspiration, there’s a planet full of wise old man doing computations trying to
hold off the inevitable inertia that comes with a universe forever expanding
but running out of steam and which will one day stop. There are all sorts of
links to computers on the planet: there’s the detail, for instance, that the Logopolitans
use a hexadecimal base-16 system used in early computer coding. There’s also a sea of workers are laid out like a circuit board,
working on ‘block transfers’ – numbers that are stored by your computer
automatically on different bits of hard drive as and when you sue them - while the only one who can relay information
to The Doctor and interact with him is called ‘Monitor’. Of course we’d already
had one sort-of computer at the heart of the show. Bidmead was fascinated by
the Tardis and read in the news that there was only one original police
telephone box left, on the Barnham Bypass. This totally fitted his idea: the
theme of decay and entropy and how things outlive their usefulness and gave him
a plot ‘excuse’ for the Doctor to want to go to Logopolis in the first place
(although, alas, there was a bit too much decay: the phone box was vandalised
the week before filming and a prop had to be used instead anyway, with the
location moved to the A413 in Denham, near Gerrard’s Cross). The Doctor needs
to get measuring the real thing, with the delightfully Dr Whoy sight of an impossible
spaceship by the side of a busy main road. And like many people who start
getting into computers and start creating artificial worlds at a click of a
button (these are prime days for coding) the thought must have struck Bidmead:
what if the entire world was a computer simulation? And like many people who
spend any time with computers and learn how fragile they are he must have
wondered: what if the computer went wrong one day? So Bidmead has The Master to
land nearby and effectively become a ‘Trojan virus’ hiding in plain sight,
using his Tardis to replicate the Doctor’s until there are four of them
apparently inside each other, or maybe even a ‘master over-ride’ bit of software
(sneaky!)
It makes a nice change
from computers being something they are to fear, as they were in practically
every story they appeared in before this (the 2nd and 3rd Drs, particularly,
liked ranting about how computers doing the work of man was positively evil,
while even the 4th accidentally gave a computer schizophrenia in ‘The Face Of
Evil’; perhaps ‘Logopolis is the computer’s revenge?) In that context even the
unexplained ‘watcher’, the ghostly figure who follows the Doctor around and has
conversations with him that even we can’t hear, makes sense in this story in a
way it couldn’t possibly in any other: this world is a computer programme with
an AI model, a prediction of what would normally happen once the Doctor and the
rest of the universe are programmed in, assuming the rest of us didn’t have
free will and interfered, causing it to change. Although the way things are
written it could also easily be a ghost a premonition of the Doctor’s that
other people can also see. That’s the greatness of ‘Logopolis’ – it has both
scientific and literary answers to everything. The Doctor’s now at a part of his life where
he has to die for the universe to work properly because to live on any longer
would be to change the ‘code’ and no one, not even the Dr is more important
than ‘fate’. The Master’s return and the fall of Logopolis was always
pre-destined, as inevitable a part of the universe as any fixed point in time
and even the 4th Doctor, the most anarchic and anti-establishment of all the
regenerations so far, knows that he has to follow the ‘rules’ and accept his
fate.
‘Logopolis’ could have
been banal, an extended metaphor taken too far, but Bidmead was always one of
Dr Whos’ more thoughtful, intelligent writers and what he does so cleverly is
place the mathematics along with the imagination so that we get the best of
both worlds, the ordinary and the extraordinary together (Logopolis itself, in
fact, has a double meaning: in Greek it could mean either world of numbers or
world of letters: logos, after all, often contain both together). Logopolis
could just as well be a world of magic as a world of numbers: it’s not filled
with nerdy coders after all but wise old men who’d look right with a wizarding
hat on. The fact they can create things out of thin air is very like magic, but
then so is a computer programme running to code you’ve just invented (it still
seems like magic, no matter how many boring IT lessons I sat through making the
thing work. It wasn’t a thrill I had very often, given how often computers tend
to go wrong when I’m around them, but even I felt a sense of power at making a
computer run a simple programme). In theory landing the Tardis on a road should
be the most boring place we’ve ever been. Instead its one of the scariest as
The Master lands too and places his Tardis inside the Doctor’s, Russian doll
style, each one darker and more threatening than the next, having popped out
long enough to scare the living daylights out of arriving companion Tegan. Even
the tissue compression eliminator, a device of indescribable terror when used
by the Roger Delgado Master, is wielded more as a scientific instrument by the
Anthony Ainley Master on Tegan’s poor Aunty Vanessa (only the second relative
of a companion to ever die on screen – and the first was last week, in ‘The
Keeper Of Traken’, when Nyssa’s dad Tremas turned into the Master). I love the
moment Logopolis crumbles, the Logopolitans disappearing too as they disappear
like a screenwipe, bits of them at a time. Logopolis itself, a planet of people
counting numbers and block computations should be one of the most boring
planets we can visit: you’d think it would be filled with robots, little
Kamelions running around, but instead its filled with wise old men, sages full
of the wisdom of the universe. It feels less like a stuffy computer and more
like an old folk tale. The idea of inevitable entropy as a villain is such a
powerful idea too: usually there’s safety and comfort in numbers: tyrants can
rise, tyrants can fall and civilisations can grow and decay in what in Tardis
terms is the blink of an eye, and yet numbers are solid and unchangeable and
should stay the same across all time regardless of how many mathematicians are
around to study them. Except in this story, which doesn’t just have one baddy
threatening one corner of the universe but a sense of something ‘gone wrong’
that threatens all of it – everything you’ve ever known.
There’s also a new
companion to enjoy in the unlikeliest named Australian ever, Tegan Jovanka (maybe
she has Cornish and Polish blood? JNT, not sure of the name, wrote them both
sown for Bidmead to choose from and the writer, misunderstanding, thought it
was a first and second name so used both). Tegan stumbles across the Tardis by
accident when trying to phone the police, just as Dodo did fifteen years
earlier at the end of ‘The Massacre’. Only Tegan feels far more ‘real’ than
Dodo ever did: her shock at walking into the Tardis and her near breakdown as
The Master taunts her are some of the most understandable companion arrival
scenes of the lot. Unlike some of her later stories, that make her butt of the
jokes, you’re meant to feel sympathy here: Tegan started the day prepared for
anything, having been crisis-trained by her air stewardess job to stay cool and
calm no matter what life throws at her – and here she is pushed further than
any Human should ever be pushed. Her sulky bolshoiness can become wearing but
not in this story where Bidmead makes it
a natural response and her literal fear or flight syndrome (a woman used to
moving and literally leaving her life behind to travel, whose forced to stay
still and deal with stuff for possibly the first time in her life) makes her
endearing. Janet Fielding is excellent from the word go and, despite her
relative lack of experience on television, the camera already loves her (she
steals more scenes than is comfortable from the others in the cast when the
Doctor becomes Peter Davison and the other three are all passive to a certain
extent: Tegan’s always doing something, even if it’s fuming and tutting). I wish
Bidmead would have stayed on to write Tegan beyond her first two stories as no
other writer except her creator ever gets her quite right.
In theory Tegan’s stumbling across the Tardis just now would seem like an accident, but just like Dodo (who, so it’s hinted, is really the offspring of Anne Chaplet, a French girl we’d been following throughout ‘The Massacre’) and especially because it’s in this story it feels pre-ordained. Even more so the fact that Nyssa simply ‘arrives’. There’s a theory that The Tardis only ever picks up whoever is needed for each run of adventures (going back to ‘The Space Museum’ it’s notable that it’s never Susan in the exhibit instead of Vicki, or Steven instead of Ian, as if everything has a set time). ‘Castrovalva’ will have the Doctor talking about all the different ‘roles’ the Tardis crew need: Tegan has to be there to be pro-active, while Nyssa is the quiet thinker and Adric the computer nerd. It’s amazing how many stories across Davison’s run wouldn’t work without at least two of the three there (and how, quite often, the spare part – usually Nyssa – is sent to sleep). The three are together for the first time in this story, their three very different characters feeling like the characters in a computer game, with different special skills needed in different ways depending on the puzzle set by the computer coders. Of course Adric is the one most at home here; his background as a ‘mathematical genius’ whose socially awkward but who’d never really had a chance to show his skills off beyond his first story, might be another of this story’s starting points; I’ve wondered too if Adric is Bidmead’s version of his younger nerdier self, at the same age as the ‘traditional’ viewing audience at home (not that he’s admitted that in public given how unpopular the character is!) interested in maths and maybe a bit too bookish and unworldly for his own good. Adric makes most sense when Bidmead is writing for him though (indeed it feels almost as if successor Eric Saward made Adric a scapegoat for all the things he hated about Bidmead’s era, which he quickly dismantled): he’s like Romana in that he asks all the intelligent questions that need to be asked, but unlike her he’s listening to the answers, learning and soaking up information like a sponge. Nyssa is underused in only her second story (a real sign of things to come) but she gets one brilliant scene: her simple but effective words as, still grieving the death of her stepmum, then her father, now she sees her entire world and everything she ever knew blown up in front of her, Traken’s last survivor. Lesser actresses would have sobbed uncontrollably, stamped their feet raged, demanded vengeance, but that’s not who Nyssa is: she’s polite even through her tears, still too reserved to cry in public. It’s Logopolis’ best scene actually, even more than the Doctor’s death, filled with a quiet sadness at the unfairness of the world.
Not everything about ‘Logopolis’
is perfect though. The Doctor gets a bit of a raw deal in his final story, as
if everyone can’t wait to be rid of him. Perhaps they were: Tom Baker had spent
most of his final year angry, at anyone and everyone but especially his younger
co-stars and the new producer (he may have felt betrayed, after JNT had been an
ally across so many of his fights with predecessor Graham Williams). He was
especially angry during this story though: he’d lost his pal in Lalla Ward,
nobody else was talking to him much, most of the old production team had gone,
and he spent most of the location filming for ‘Logopolis’ stuck on a dirty
coach waiting for the endless downpours of rain to stop, while the producer
told corny jokes: if Tom hadn’t wanted to leave before making this story he
certainly did during it. There’s a school of thought that he never actually
wanted to leave, but that he put in his resignation hoping to get a rise in
salary only to be turned down, much like Pertwee before him. When a guest of
the Longleat fan convention in 1983 (the first, really) leaving the show was
still fresh in his mind and Tom told an audience gleefully that he ‘was pushed’
into leaving, to audible gasps. When naturally asked by who Tom grinned and
replied ‘why The Master of course!, but with a twinkle in his eye that
suggested otherwise. At least he got in one last bit of mischief: nowadays
everyone greets his farewell interview, wondering if the next Doctor could be a
woman, as a bit of fortune-telling, but really it was Tom being cheeky one last
time and trying to create trouble for the producer, who had to deal with an influx
of calls asking how could they be thinking such a thing?
Tom wanted more comedy in his stories because
that’s what he felt most comfortable with and what he felt the Doctor was for and
what would help him get any future work – instead he got the most serious Dr Who
story since ‘The War Games’. It’s a real shame he never gets one last chance to
be the Doctor of old, dashing and heroic and flippant, with an episode of jokey
banter to make us remember what we’re missing. Instead Tom starts quiet and
gets quieter, until by the final episode he’s barely saying a word and the
long-awaited verbal joust between the Doctor and Master (not seen since ‘Frontier
In Space’ eight years earlier) is a bit of a damp Fish Person: The Master
gloats and the Doctor just takes it. Even the mutterings of dark humour, the
bad puns that follow something dreadful, don’t seem very 4th
Doctorish, as if Bidmead doesn’t know how to write comedy or understand the
code for how this Doctor is meant to run. And yet despite it all Tom Baker
manages to deliver one of his best performances, channelling his anger, grief
and manic energy into moody silences and a zen acceptance.. As things get more
and more out of control he gets stiller, as if trying to hold the universe
together by sheer effort. As the stakes get bigger he gets more introverted. As
the plot gets to a point where he’s never needed friends around him more he’s
never seemed more alone. Baker hated this story and everything to do with it, forgoing
his usual big extroverted farewells to simply walk off set when his last scene
was recorded (he didn’t even turn up at his own farewell bash, as hosted by the
BBC). And yet he’s still finding new ways to deliver his all.
Given their relative
inexperience none of the other regulars can yet match Baker’s intensity. Only when Anthony Ainley is on screen does Tom
get an actor to match his strength and he’s superb when he’s allowed to be,
back in the days when The Master was a genuine threat rather than a pantomime
villain (as he’ll become more and more every time we see him, to the point
where he’s playing second fiddle to The Rani in four years’ time, unthinkable
when watched back to back with this story where it feels like The Master is the
biggest that the Dr’s ever faced, if only because he’s acting so differently to
anything he’s ever faced). At times the pair spar as well as the old ones ever
did, with a nice scene where The Doctor praises The master’s Tardis and his
rival looks pleased because ‘envy is the beginning of all true greatness’ (the
absolute antithesis of the Doctor’s view that greatness is something that
everyone is capable of, whatever their lot in life and that the universe is
better shared, not hoarded). Even here though, in perhaps his greatest story
(give or take Survival’) the biggest problem with ‘Logopolis’ is that the
problem is that while Bidmead is invested in everything else in this story he’s
not interested in The Master at all and you can tell. Even by The Master’s
standards his plan is bonkers: broadcast a radio signal telling the universe to
bow down to him (surely he knows by now that this will just get all the baddies
attacking him now they have a fixed point to aim for: The Daleks, for instance,
aren’t going to become slaves to anyone). The Master is never allowed to take
up a full identity of his own, he’s not the anti-Doctor’ the way the Delgado
version was, the 3rd Doctor’s outward brusqueness and inner charm
turned inside out. He’s a generic fits-all threat and even though Ainley tries
gamely to turn him into one he’s working against a script that doesn’t let him
have the fun banter he wants. By the end of the story you’re not quite sure who
he is in this incarnation and for anyone who’d started watching the show in the
past eight years there’s no reason to think that The master is anyone
particularly special. He’s most like Graham Crowden as Soldeed in ‘The Horns Of
Nimon’ indeed, though better acted. This
Master doesn’t have the charm of Delgado or the blunt survival instincts of
Peter Pratt in ‘The Deadly Assassin’. Ainley tries to go for creepy cunning and
scheming when the Doctor’s not around and it fits him well (I’ve long said he’s
one of the most under-rated actors in the series) but when Tom’s on the screen
he turns into a pantomime villain by contrast, going too far over the top. Had
The Master stayed the a scary threat he seems in the first episode, had he even
turned out to be The watcher’ (the story keeps you guessing what exactly it is),
had he been at the head of entropy rather than carried along with it, he could
have been amazing. Instead, by the end, he’s been reduced to being a blow-up
photograph in a doorway, to save the graphics team a few extra pennies while
the Doctor dangles off a radio antennae (they’d never have dared to do that to
Delgado)..
But what an ending, when
The Master whose been working so hard to help the Doctor suddenly turns on him
(because you can’t change a computer programme?) and The Doctor is sent
hurtling from a radio mast. On paper it’s a dumb and stupid end: this Doctor
has survived so much and he’s not even that high up (while we all know The
master’s going to turn evil again: it’s in his DNA). And yet, it’s perfect. The
idea of the Doctor, whose defied the gravity of every situation he’s ever been
in, falling to his death because of Earth’s gravity, also makes some kind of
sense, the man from the sky brought down to Earth. Jodrell Bank was, too, home
to the biggest bank of computers around in England in 1981 (and Dr Who had
already done the other, in The Post Office Tower, back in 1966), a point that’s
often lost on modern viewers who only know the telescope as a museum. Bidmead
writes a lot of simple emotion in powerful strokes here: the Doctor holds on,
but just as the centre of the universe can no longer hold together nor can the
Doctor hang on, he has to let go sometime. And gravity is an unstoppable law of
nature: all the timelords in the world can’t defy it (not without hover-boots
anyway) and ‘Logopolis’ is all about how laws have to be followed. In the
context of their relationship, too, it’s as fitting a place as any for the
Doctor to die: we first met The Master against the backdrop of a radio
telescope back in ‘Terror Of the Autons’ in 1970 and while eleven years is a
long time to remember, some fans would have recognised it and seen this
showdown as an ‘inevitable’ battle already foreshadowed. It’s hard for many
fans to sit through the end without shedding a tear, as the Doctor’s life
flashes before his eyes as he bids goodbye to every friend (and quite a few
enemies) who’ve accompanied him across the past seven years. Especially the
camera pan down from the telescope right into where the companions are sitting
round the Dr, leaving a space for the camera so that we, too, are at our hero’s
bedside as he breathes his last and the ghostly Watcher merges with him,
turning him stage by stage into Peter Davison, the universe restored to how it
was always meant to be, the most glorious ctrl-alt-delete button press in the
universe (I’m still sad I can’t buy a computer that re-enacts this scene every
time it reboots itself). It was JNT’s idea to have old clips running through
the Doctor’s mind as his life flashes before his eyes and it’s a clever trick,
one that – for pretty much the first time barring ‘The Three Doctors’, makes
use of the fact that this long-running programme has such a long history to
draw from, that it can make viewers nostalgic. Of all the many brilliant regenerations in Dr Who,
this is probably my favourite even though the 4th is not my favourite
Doctor: its mood is right on the verge of a funeral and a wake, a memorial and
a celebration, as things inevitably come to an end – and things inevitably
begin all over again.
‘Logopolis’ isn’t perfect
then. Few stories are after all. But it is impressively close being deeply
original, incredibly brave, beautifully crafted and wonderfully moving, a story
about the inevitability of change that wraps up the longest unbroken run of Dr Who
with the same lead actor in its long history with a spooky, not-quite-right
feel that’s all of its own. It’s nothing like we expected – and yet it’s better
than we expected. I so wish Christopher Bidmead had been around Dr Who longer,
as both script editor and writer, because his vision for DW is one of the most
interesting and unique the show ever had, with an internal logic all of its own
and a way of making the universe simultaneously more logical and stranger than
we could possibly imagine. This is science the way it was originally taught, as
an of-shoot of an attempt to understand the universe and how it works (all the
Renaissance ideas of alchemy and astronomy, trying to decipher the pattern that
makes life work the way it does, in the days before mankind used science as a
distraction from life’s bigger questions of fate, responsibility and purpose).
Today, in our world of collapsing civilisations and social chaos, ‘Logopolis’
also feels as if its aged better than almost any other traditional Dr Who story
from the 20th century run, a warning from history about complacency and how
things can go wrong to even the bravest and best of us, with the added benefit
that it guesses the central place computers have in our lives and a setting
that starts not in some time-locked house or studio set but on a simple bland
road that, a few car designs aside, looks as if it could be filmed this morning.
This is a big story about big ideas, but it also feels like a story that
absolutely takes place in ‘our’ world, with the extra frisson that it could be
happening now that you don’t get from the other epic Dr Who stories with
sparkly suits and laser weapons and scientific gobbledegook: everything here
feels real, even a little too ‘real’ in many ways. Would that all maths lessons
had always been this interesting – and this pertinent to ‘real’ life (although
the hope that getting my sums wrong meant that I wouldn’t have to go to school
and timelines would implode, sadly, never seemed to work when I tried it). ‘I
hate farewells’ says the Doctor in episode one, before he even knows what’s
going on. So do I. But they happen all the same. And few happen quite as
beautifully or poetically as ‘Logopolis’ an unusual yet fitting end to the long
run of the man many still think of as ‘The’ Doctor.
Another of those
occasional anecdotes without a home: the production team thought they’d found
the perfect house for Tegan and Aunty Vanessa, in Ursula Street in Battersea, not
too far from TV centre. They’d contacted the owners who were only too pleased
to be in Dr who, yet when the camera crew turned up on the day no one was in. In
something of a panic, the production team went banging on every other door down
the street – and to their surprise met writer Andrew McCulloch. He’d already
co-written ‘Meglos’ for this same season and was currently hard at work on the
first draft of the (eventually dropped) debut Peter Davison story ‘Thoros-Beta’.
Being paid to have a camera crew go round his house was far more fun than
staring at a blank screen – and JNT couldn’t exactly argue at missing a
deadline when he was helping him out with a crisis now could he?!
POSITIVES + I wish we’d
seen The Watcher in other regenerations – its such a good idea and makes this
crossover of Doctors feel very different to all the others. If the other
Doctors all ended up ‘dying’ because of their biggest phobias, 1st Dr so full
of life regenerated because he wore himself out, the 2nd who loved being on the
sidelines was exiled to being in the middle of life on Earth and the 3rd action
hero who could face up to anything fated by karma to face his fears then it
makes total sense the 4th Dr, who was such a big presence in every meaning of
the phrase, ends up a phantom who isn’t quite there. There’s a sense of wonder
that hasn’t been around since the Hartnell days as we find out new things about
regeneration and it’s such a private matter the Dr even has his own
conversations with ‘The Watcher’ we don’t get to hear. The costume, a simple
white affair, is highly fitting for the ‘blank canvas’ style of the future
(most production teams would have gone all out with 1980s bright colours but
mercifully ‘Logopolis’ is a much subtler affair all round), the spooky effects
impressive for 1981 and uncredited actor Adrian Gibbs is excellent despite
doing nothing more than wander around and beckon, like the ghost of Christmas
past (to this day many fans assume he’s Peter Davison in costume, so good is
the blend of the three faces at the end).
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