| Production Code: 5N
First Transmitted
The Doctor - Tom Baker
Crew
The Doctor and Romana’s holiday in Brighton is brought to a sudden end when K-9 takes in sea-water and explodes. They instead venture to the Leisure Hive of Argolis, a holiday complex built by the surviving Argolin following their devastating war with the Foamasi. As ever, they arrive at a point of crisis in the year 2290. The Leisure Hive is facing bankruptcy and the Argolin’s Earth agent, Brock, arrives with his lawyer Klout, bearing an offer to buy the planet outright. Regrettably the offer is from the Foamasi, the only species that could live on the radiation-infused surface of Argolis, and so the Argolin Board will not consider it. Hit by the shock of events, the ageing Board Chairman Morix succumbs to a rapid death – the Argolin war curse of advanced cellular degradation – and in her absence his consort Mena is declared the new Chairman. The Doctor is intrigued by the manipulation of the tachyon in the Hive’s Tachyon Regeneration Generator, which is the main tourist attraction and is able to duplicate and manipulate organic matter. He witnesses the Generator kill a human tourist after it has been sabotaged, the latest in a series of acts of wilful damage. No sooner has Mena returned to Argolis than her own body clock begins to speed up. Her Earth scientist Hardin has been brought to Argolis to help her and her people by using time experiments to rejuvenate a people rendered sterile by the war of forty years earlier. Recognising the value of scientists, she engages the Doctor and Romana to help Hardin with his work. The time travellers know Hardin has been faking his work, but Romana also feels the experiments should have worked. The death of Hardin’s assistant, Stimson, is pinned on the
Doctor and the Time Lord is forced into the Generator as a trial of
sorts. After further sabotage he emerges as an ancient old man with
flowing white hair. Pangol, Mena’s son, is the most warlike
and vindictive of the Argolin and interprets this as proof of guilt,
ordering the Doctor and Romana to be confined. Hardin frees them to
help him in his experiments. Pangol now usurps his mother as leader of the Argolin, declaring to Brock and the Board that he is the first of the new Argolin: a product of cloning experiments conducted in the recreation generator. This, he contends, is the future of the Argolin, who will use the Generator to recreate themselves and rise up again. As a skilled tachyon engineer he starts to clone himself in the Generator, creating hundred of Pangols in battle-dress and ready for conflict. The Doctor interferes in the tachyon manipulation with three happy consequences: Pangol’s clones become unstable and disappear, and he is reduced to the age of a baby; Mena is rejuvenated and saved from death; and the Doctor himself loses the added centuries. The only cost is the Randomiser which the Doctor loses in the Generator but had been fitted in the TARDIS to prevent the Black Guardian tracking them.
This episode represented a new era for Doctor Who. It had new titles, a new arrangement of the music, new incidental music, and a new ethos, we were told. Oh dear! There is an old adage, don’t fix what isn’t broken! Doctor Who wasn’t broken. It didn’t need fixing. Just because it was the 1980s now didn’t mean the theme tune and title sequence needed overhauling. The old theme was still well ahead of its time and the old vortex tunnel was iconic. As for the stories themselves, nothing about The Leisure Hive seemed to be in any way a change for the better. The first episode opened with a very artistic panning shot of a very windy and cold Brighton that revealed Romana and K9 playing ball while The Doctor slept in a deckchair. This whole sequence had only one purpose, to disable K9 for the duration of the story by having him blow a fuse in the sea water he ran into accidentally. The number of plots where K9 was USEFUL were limited. With K9 out of action, The Doctor and Romana then travel to Argolis, a rather sad place which a twenty minute war rendered uninhabitable. Something of a topical warning in 1980 with the Russians and Americans squaring up to each other over Afghanistan. But after that things got just a little bit surreal. The Argolins were intriguing looking people with fantastic costumes and make up producing something that was distinctly alien, but to my mind the colours were just too bright and surreal and it made them look too much like comic book characters. The Foamasi, were slightly more convincing, despite being obviously rubber and green-painted Hessian. Interestingly, two of the renegade Foamasi had Human skin disguises very similar to those used rather more effectively in 2005 by the Slitheen. The Slitheen came with an explanation of how large creatures get inside a Human skin – the compression field. A lot of complaints about the story concerned the impossibility of the large Foamasi inside Human bodies.
The rest of the story was so broken up and confusing it was almost impossible to follow, even watching all four episodes in one sitting. Working out who was on which side, and exactly how many sides there were was a major headache. The end result was a colourful four episodes, with two lots of aliens and The Doctor transformed into an old man by the Tachyon Recreation Generator, which allowed for an interesting performance from Tom Baker, but there was a serious lack of SUBSTANCE to the whole thing and the end result was a case of ‘exactly what was that all about?’ The 1980s saw a sad falling off of interest in Doctor Who. This episode seems to be where the rot began to set in. although it seems only those like me who had been with the series for at least the past ten years thought so. New viewers seemed to enjoy the fact that every new special effect technique going was employed to create a ‘look’ without any regard to the substance. They seemed happy to attract a new generation of viewers who loved spectacle and forget those who preferred a good story.
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