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Production Code: 4Q
First Transmitted
Cast
Crew
The Doctor, travelling alone in the TARDIS, arrives on a mysterious jungle planet which he cannot resist exploring. He soon encounters Leela, a savage from the local tribe, who denounces him as the Evil One of fable amongst her people. She has been exiled from her tribe, the Sevateem, for profaning their god, the mysterious Xoanon, which speaks to them through the tribe’s shaman, Neeva. Her father, tribal elder Sole, tried to intervene to protect her but died when taking the ritual of the Test of the Horda on her behalf. Now Leela is an outcast beyond the indivisible barrier beyond her tribal home. It is in this jungle beyond that she encounters the Doctor, who soon wins her over by defending her from invisible monsters that rampage in the jungle, attracted by vibration of any kind. When he explores further the Doctor finds a sophisticated sonic disruptor which creates the forcefield that keeps the creatures from attacking the village itself. Leela regales him with more folklore of her people: the god Xoanon is kept prisoner by the Evil One and his followers, the Tesh, beyond a strange black wall. The Sevateem have meanwhile decided to launch an attack on the domain of the Tesh to free their god. They are led by the combative Andor, who is determined to free his god and does not listen to criticism. Two warriors are scouring the jungle when they find the Doctor, and they too call him the Evil One, making a protective hand gesture which the Doctor interprets as the sequence for checking the seals on a Starfall Seven spacesuit. The warriors seize the Doctor, but not Leela, and take him to the village council where his face is shown to all the tribe. Andor is convinced the prisoner is the Evil One, and has him confined. However, Leela manages to free him by using poisonous Janis thorns , which paralyse the guards first and then kill them. The pair flee the village and head to a clearing beyond which the Doctor is greeted with a stunning sight: carved into a mountain nearby is an impression of his own face.
The Doctor cannot recall clearly why his face is depicted so, and persuades Leela they should return to the village to find out more, despite the death sentence upon them. They return to Neeva’s holy tent and the Doctor inspects the ancient tribal relics, recognising them as artefacts from an Earth survey expedition. He also finds a transceiver used by Neeva to hear the commands of Xoanon. It speaks with the Doctor’s own voice, conveying exhilaration on hearing the Doctor that "At least we are here. At last I shall be free of us." They then head off to inspect the dark Wall that stands at the entrance to the realm of the Evil One. The Doctor deduces it is a primitive time barrier, and is convinced the Sevateem warriors massing there will be massacred if they attack the fortress of their enemy, the Tesh. From a distance they see the massacre unfold, as laser beams cut down warriors armed only with basic tribal weapons. Half the tribe is lost in the assault and one of the elders, the devious Calib, is first back at the camp where he find the Doctor and Leela. He is evidently intent on using the Doctor to break Neeva’s hold on the tribe by exposing the faith in Xoanon as misplaced mythology. Another tribesman, Leela’s friend Tomas also arrives, and is appalled to find Calib has stabbed Leela with a Janis thorn to prevent her exposing his schemes. The Doctor gets Tomas to help him move Leela to Neeva’s tent where he uses a bio-analyzer to synthesise an antidote to the poison. When the surviving warriors return, the Doctor, Leela and Tomas are invited to address the tribal elders in defence of their lives. Leela makes matters worse when she accuses Xoanon of causing the trap at the Wall. Calib intervenes to suggest the Doctor is not the Evil One, and this can be proven by getting him to take the fabled Test of the Horda. In the centre of the village is a pit full of Horda, two foot long savage worms which hunt in packs and react to the movements of their prey. They are reputed to strip flesh from a man in an instant. The Sevateem evolved the Test of the Horda as a measure of justice and bravery. It involves suspension on a rope above the pit, and accused characters are gradually lowered into the pit by means of a rope. As the accused, the Doctor is given a crossbow which has to be fired at the exact correct moment to sever the rope without causing him to fall into the pit – which is, of course, the fate of the guilty. The Doctor triumphs in the Test of the Horda and is presumed therefore to be a non-malign influence and freed. He uses his freedom to examine some relics of the tribe and repairs a disruptor gun. He also tells some of the tribe that the Sevateem are the descendants of a “survey team” which left a Starfall Seven Earth colony ship. The Doctor and Leela then go to examine the face in the mountain and they climb into the face by scaling the Doctor’s teeth. Neeva has meanwhile retreated to his tent where the voice of Xoanon tells him that the tribe will be destroyed and the mysterious being then causes the sonic disruptor to shut down, leaving the village open to attack from the invisible beings. These descend on the village, killing indiscriminately, including crushing Andor to death. Tomas uses the disruptor gun built by the Doctor to expose the true appearance of the invisible beings: they are ferocious, angry depictions of the Doctor’s own face.
Leela and the Doctor notice a figure in a space suit in the “mouth” entrance and follow it through a projection of a wall. Beyond this barrier is a rocket, which the Doctor recalls as belonging to the Mordee Expedition, his memory of events earlier in his regeneration now returning. Xoanon has detected the Doctor nearby, and when he reaches the ship the god-creature is both ecstatic that "We are here” while also manically pledging that "We must destroy us." The Doctor and Leela now meet three representatives of the Tesh, who serve and worship Xoanon. They are human too, but technologically advanced and possessing telepathic abilities. The Doctor deduces both Sevateem and Tesh are descendants of the same crew from the Mordee Expedition, with the Tesh (or technicians) involved in the same deadly eugenics exercise as the Sevateem. The invisible creatures that attacked the Sevateem are also part of the same deranged scheme: the Doctor once carried out repairs on Xoanon but forgot to wipe his personality print from the data core, leaving computer with a split personality. The Doctor and Leela are soon imprisoned but evade their captors and find the remote communications device used to communicate with Neeva. The Doctor tells him to tell Calib, who is now tribal leader, to lead the Sevateem survivors thorough the mouth of the carved face in the mountain. Calib accepts this instruction and leads them into the safety of the mouth, where the invisible beings can no longer threaten the tribe. With Leela keeping guard and holding the Tesh at bay with a disruptor gun, the Doctor ventures into the computer room of the ship to confront Xoanon. He blames himself for creating the maddened split personality of the computer and now attempts to persuade it to shut down. When Xoanon refuses it channels a vicious mental assault at the Doctor, causing him to collapse. As the Doctor writhes on the floor, Xoanon booms: "Who am I?"
Leela resuces the Doctor from the mental assault, and as he recovers he warns her of Xoanon’s power. Moments later they realise the computer has electrified the walls to try and kill them and the Tesh become more purposeful in tracking them down within the spaceship. The Tesh also come under attack from Calib, Tomas and the survivors of the Sevateem, who now reach the spaceship too. This diverts the Tesh while the Doctor and Leela return to the computer room, where Xoanon briefly takes control of Leela’s mind. Most of the Sevateem come under the telepathic control of the computer too. The Tesh and Sevateem soon converge on the computer room too and interrupt the Doctor as he tries to repair Xoanon, realising the computer has now triggered an atomic explosion. Elsewhere in the ship Neeva is alone but crazed, his faith in Xoanon shattered. The shaman uses the disruptor gun against one of the images of Xoanon/the Doctor projected through a wall. The ensuing blast kills Neeva but also interrupts Xoanon’s control of its subjects, allowing the Doctor to resume his repair work and complete his repairs. Xoanon’s circuits explode, knocking the Doctor out. Two days later the Doctor wakes up to find himself aboard the spaceship in the care of Leela. She explains Xoanon has been quiet and he interprets this as success for his extraction experiment. They visit the computer room and find Xoanon’s identity and sanity there restored. The computer confirms it was running an eugenics experiment and thanks the Doctor for his repair work. The Doctor then contacts the survivors of the Tesh and Sevateem and tells them Xoanon is now cured and able to support their new society. He then heads off to the TARDIS followed by Leela. She insists she join him on his travels, and when he refuses she jumps into the TARDIS with him and starts the dematerialisation process.
When I was a young fan, the one thing that puzzled me about this story was how The Doctor in his fourth incarnation could have visited this planet and become the god depicted in the great stone carving in the rockface. There never seemed to be a break in continuity between the stories in the Tom Baker era. Each episode led into the next. And it HAD to be the Baker era because it WAS his image on the rockface and in the mad computer, Xoanon. There is a later story in which an image of Jon Pertwee’s doctor is revealed and The Doctor remembers visiting a place before. But this is the fourth Doctor’s own work, apparently. This is an example, incidentally, of The Doctor having consequences for his actions. In the 2005 episode Bad Wolf, much is made of that being the first time The Doctor has had to face up to a mistake he made in the past – he left Satellite Five without helping them rebuild their communications after the defeat of the Jagrafess and as a result the economy and government of Earth collapsed leading to a century of chaos. But this story shows that even back in his fourth incarnation The Doctor had to face up to his mistakes sometimes. The mistake in this case occurring when he ‘fixed’ the organic mind of the Xoanon computer by mentally linking to it. Accidentally, he had left his own personality in the computer and turned it schizophrenic. It fell upon him, therefore, to repair the damage and allow the two peoples of the planet to go forward together. The way the tribes have degenerated from the original space colonists and retained a vague race memory of what they are, is very well done. Seveteem, Leela’s tribe are, The Doctor realises, the descendants of the SURVEY TEAM. The Tesh, from the technicians. The throne made out of a command chair from the ship, various holy artefacts that are, in fact, part of the technology their ancestors brought, are all only half understood or not at all. An interesting comparison might be made with the tribes of the Mad Max films in a post-apocalypse world where people have forgotten about technology but still have bits of it lying around. Since Doctor Who was always popular in Australia, it has to be asked if the Seveteem inspired some of that film? Leela, of course, was destined to enter Doctor Who mythology in her own right. The Doctor seems to have taken to her from the start, although one of the most impressive and memorable scenes in this story is the one where he is angry at her for using deadly Janis thorns to kill people who could simply have been stunned. Leela’s penchant for killing is a perfect contrast to his own pacifism and respect for all life. Some people are invited to become his companions in the TARDIS. Others are thrust upon him unwillingly. Leela, resourceful and cunning, bluffs her way aboard and begs to be taken, and dematerialises the TARDIS in order to make it fait accompli. Now, it has to be said, that dematerialising the TARDIS shouldn’t be as easy as that. The Doctor has stated before that the TARDIS is symbiotic with him, and even if it was not, it is a complicated piece of equipment that Leela has never seen before, so how does she know what to do? This is a slight story hole. But one fans are prepared to overlook in order to get such an interesting character on board. For myself, I never found her as interesting a companion as Sarah or Jo. I felt The Doctor needed somebody from Earth along with him. Earth people tend to keep his feet on the ground and show him up when he gets too pretentious. But we had Leela and then Romana, and then Adric and Nyssa before we actually got Teegan, the next Earth born companion. And the stories rarely came back to the familiar Earth of U.N.I.T. and the Brigadier. Doctor Who was taking a new direction. A bold one, and an exciting one, but one that, perhaps, some of us were reluctant about.
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