| Production Code: 4Z
First Transmitted
Cast
Crew
Plot Outline from Wikipedia The Fourth Doctor returns to Gallifrey after meeting a group of aliens in space, bringing Leela and K9 with him. He is behaving very strangely and when the Chancellory Guard under their Commander, Andred, arrive at the Panopticon Chamber to interrogate him, the Doctor demands to be taken to Chancellor Borusa, who is now in charge of the Time Lords. The Doctor claims the vacant Presidency of Gallifrey having previously been a candidate and, after the demise of Chancellor Goth, is now automatically elected. Under law this request cannot be refused. The Doctor then chooses a Presidential chamber and asks it be decorated with lead lining throughout. Shortly afterward a ceremony is held to swear him in as President of Gallifrey and he is presented with the various trappings of office. However, when the circlet connecting him to the Matrix, repository of all Time Lord knowledge, is placed on his head, the Doctor collapses in pain.
The Doctor is taken to the Chancellory to rest and recover. When he regains consciousness he reminds the Time Lords that no aliens are allowed on Gallifrey and instructs that Leela be expelled from the Capitol Citadel, where she will have to fend in the wastelands. She tries to avoid banishment, but the Doctor is serious about this banishment. The Doctor now retreats to the TARDIS where he shares a secret plan with K9, but is obviously very concerned about the situation he has found himself in. He is planning to aid an invasion of Gallifrey itself and to this end sets about destroying the induction barrier that defends the planet from external threat. K9 sets about this task while the Doctor returns to the Panopticon, the great hall of the Time Lords, and laughs cruelly as three alien beings start to materialise.
The invading beings are known as Vardans. They appear as shimmering manifestations who made an alliance with the Doctor some time ago, and the Doctor advises the Time Lords, including the stubborn Borusa, to submit to their new and powerful masters. The Doctor then asks Borusa to meet him in his office, and when this happens the Doctor explains he has had the lead walls installed to prevent the Vardans entering the room on thought waves and reading his mind. He sent Leela away to protect her, he explains, and is now able to work with Borusa to defeat the Vardan threat. A new problem has emerged, however, with the ascendancy of the obsequious and compliant Castellan Kelner, who is being far too co-operative with the Vardan occupation. The toadying yet ambitious Castellan soon has Borusa placed under house arrest and starts a process of expelling trouble-making Time Lords from the safety of the Capitol. Leela has meanwhile kept her faith in the Doctor and reasons that if he wishes her to leave the Capitol it is with good reason, so she departs for the wastelands. She is accompanied by Rodan, a Time Lady who previously maintained the transduction barrier. They are welcomed warily by a tribe of outsiders (perhaps Shobogans) who have rejected Time Lord society in live in the wastelands. Their leader, Nesbin, explains some of the background to his tribe. Back in the Capitol, however, things are looking grim for the Doctor when Andred corners him and decides to execute him in the name of liberty.
K9 helps the Doctor overpower Andred, and then explains the danger and abilities of the Vardans to Andred, with his TARDIS providing a shield to his thoughts. The Doctor is hoping to persuade to reveal their true form so that he can time loop their planet. Leela has also organised her own resistance movement in the wastelands, comprising Nesbin’s people and the exiled Time Lords, all of whom are drilled into a fighting force which soon launches an assault on the Capitol. The aliens and Kelner have meanwhile decided the Doctor is behaving in an untrustworthy manner. The Doctor reaffirms his loyalty to them by agreeing to dismantle the final force field protecting Gallifrey from attack. He does not fully disable it, but rather places a large hole in it. The Vardans use the hole to properly invade Gallifrey and appear as humanoid warriors. Their manifestation enables K9 to track down their home planet and supply the Doctor with the correct co-ordinates. He uses this to beam the Vardans back to their home world and then traps it in a time loop. At about the same time Leela and her warriors reach the Panopticon, but celebrations are shortlived when a Sontaran warrior appears in the chamber.
Gallifrey has now been invaded by the Sontarans, led by Commander Stor, who finds Kelner ever ready to pledge support, even if the other Time Lords remain resistant. The Doctor and his party escape and the Doctor uses his freedom to try and pressurise Borusa into revealing to him the location of the Great Key of Rassilon, a missing item of the Presidential regalia. They then regroup at the TARDIS where Rodan is put to work using the TARDIS’ controls to repair the hole in the forcefield. However, Kelner imperils their resistance when he manipulates the stabiliser banks of the Doctor’s TARDIS to try and destroy the resistance force within by hurling them to the heart of a Black Star.
The Doctor manages to over-ride the threat, so their enemies change tack. The Sontarans, assisted by Castellan Kelner, gain access to the Doctor's TARDIS and try to hunt down the President and his friends, pursuing them through the labyrinthine corridors. Stor is after the Great Key too, knowing the Doctor has now persuaded Borusa to yield it to him. The Doctor uses distractions to buy time while he kills the remaining Sontaran troopers. On the Doctor’s instruction, a hypnotised Rodan and K9 construct a special forbidden Time Lord weapon: the Demat Gun. Powered by the Great Key itself, the Demat Gun erases its victims from time itself. The Doctor takes the Gun and confronts Stor in the Panopticon. Stor intends to destroy the Eye of Harmony with a bomb, but the blast is cancelled out by the Doctor with the Demat Gun which obliterates Stor, wipes the Doctor’s mind of recent events, and also destroys itself. Kelner is arrested and Borusa begins the process of rebuilding Gallifrey. The Doctor is ready to leave, but Leela decides to stay on Gallifrey because she has fallen in love with Commander Andred, leader of the Chancellory Guards. K-9 decides to stay behind to look after Leela. The TARDIS dematerializes and the Doctor reveals he is not alone: he pulls out a box labeled K-9 Mk II.
Analysis by Cuisle Well, the Time Lords are still acting as insufferably as ever. Their reaction to The Doctor arriving back on Gallifrey is to summon the Chancellery Guard, a police force with the second worst uniform in fiction next to the Watch of Ankh Morpork in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. The other thing they have in common with the Watch is that a few of them manage to rise above their disadvantages and redeem themselves with a bit of real courage. Commander Andred is one such. Having managed NOT to kill the Lord High President, aka The Doctor, he becomes his loyal ally and does his best to overthrow first the Vardens and then the Sontarans. In one scene, he and Leela are hiding from the Sontarans and he is hit in the arm by one of their heat rays and stays silent despite severe pain, an example of the kind of courage that even the Chancellery Guard throws up from time to time. This is a story with a lot of highs and a lot of lows. Andred was one of the highs. Another was the induction of The Doctor as Lord High President. As Leela said ‘It does The Doctor great honour’. Those of us who adored him as the Fourth Doctor were thrilled to see him thus honoured. The ceremony managed to have a certain pomp and majesty. And bear in mind we knew what that was in February 1978. Eight months before, in the summer of 1977 we had all watched the 1952 coronation run in it's entirety to celebrate the Jubilee. We knew what these things should look like. The Panopticon was FAR from Westminster Abbey, but they managed to capture something like it as The Doctor received the sash and rod of Rassilon and swore to uphold the Laws of Time. Even though it was clear something funny was going on and the investiture was not entirely above board, could anyone doubt his sincerity? The only part of the ceremony that was a real letdown was the plastic gel blow up cushions used to present the Sah and Rod and the missing Great Key. What WERE the set designers thinking of? Another high of the episode was Borusa, The Doctor’s former teacher, who again proved to have a spark of courage and wit about him, unlike so many of the Time Lords. It is easy to wonder what happened to that great race who were the gods of the Minyan people! The majority of them seem an insipid lot. Apart from Borusa the only ones with any spirit were Rodan the traffic controller and the outsiders, Time Lords who had rejected the life inside the Citadel. What a shower. Surely Rassilon must be pretty much disappointed with them all. The actor playing Castellan Kelner deserves credit for his portrayal of an oily turncoat who himself is a disgrace to the name of Time Lord. He is also one of the highs, as are the Sontarans when they finally get there. The Vardans, however, are not. Even before we could see them they were unpromising. The Vardan leader sounded like William Pitt the Younger in Blackadder the Third – for those not familiar with the reference, a stereotypical British public schoolboy of about fourteen. The voice carried almost no conviction at all. And when they did appear they looked like overgrown boy scouts. But the Vardans are not the real problem. They are no sooner defeated when the Sontarans arrive. This is a bit of a story hole, as nobody seems sure if they had been manipulating the Vardans or just took advantage of the Transduction Barrier being down to attack their old enemy. Either way, The Doctor was soon ready to outwit them along with his band of allies, Rodan, Andred, K9 and Leela, as well as Borusa. A wonderful but pointless aside occurs when Borusa is sitting in the swimming pool area of the TARDIS, sipping a cool drink and reading a Daily Mirror from April 1912 with the story of the Titanic on the front. The Doctor assures him he had nothing to do with that. Modern viewers will smile ironically and recall the picture of the Ninth Doctor in Clive’s shed. The eventual destruction of the Sontarans is done quite ingeniously in the end. Under hypnotism, Rodan and K-9 are able to construct one of the most deadly weapons imaginable. The De-Mat gun. With the Great Key as the final piece The Doctor is able to use this to make Stor and the other Sontarans never to have existed while the TARDIS repairs the damage to the Transduction barrier. The Doctor has his memory of his term of office as President wiped out in the process and he is happy to relinquish the title again. It is a clever ending. The only problem is that it was rushed in the last five minutes of an episode that was mostly a madcap chase through the endless and very strange rooms of the TARDIS. Possibly the worst and most obvious padding EVER in a Doctor Who episode. And then comes a parting. Leela chooses to stay with Andred. The
Doctor’s reaction to their hand holding is a knowing ‘ah!’
It is a moment not unlike Jo’s departure for the same reason,
love. And when The Doctor closes the TARDIS door before he replies
to her ‘I’ll miss you’ with ‘I’ll miss
you, too, Savage,’ there is a curiously vulnerable moment which
is rare in the 4th Doctor era. The pathos of the moment, though, is
lightened the next moment as he pushes out a box labelled K-9 Mk II
and smiled impishly.
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