Logopolis (1981) Review

"We're so old..."
"I know, right?"

Logopolis is a mess of interesting ideas, that sadly never achieves the coherence and pace this kind of story requires.

WRITTEN BY

Christopher H. Bidmead, the script editor of Season 18. Interesting, since I'm pretty sure Terrance Dicks mentioned at one point that script editors couldn't write stories in his time. Anyway, Bidmead is a scientist, and boy, this story makes you know it.

PLOT

Um... there's a planet full of mathematicians, whose calculations are keeping the universe from melting... and the Master(hell yeah) sort of screws everything up.

ANALYSIS

I think I'll need to watch Logopolis many many more times, and with subtitles, to properly follow what's going on. There's simply so much of it that seems to come out of the blue and it all feels like filler anyway.

The first two episodes are a wasteland of technobabble and really bizarre ideas that go nowhere. 
For example: the Doctor and Adric travel to Earth to get the exact dimensions of a real police box for the Logopolitans to calculate... something out of it... and implement it on the Doctor's TARDIS, which will somehow fix the chameleon circuit. But the Master's TARDIS has travelled into the Doctor's TARDIS and they're out of sync or something, causing there to be multiple TARDISes... until there suddenly aren't. And then the Doctor decides to literally flush out the Master by flooding his own TARDIS with the water from the river Thames(officially the dumbest idea ever in a Doctor Who story).
And in the midst of all of this, we have companion introductions, and the Doctor's impending doom, and the mystery of the cloister bell, and a dozen other things. 

It's all happening at the same time, and doesn't come together at all. I just get the feeling that Bidmead came up with so many interesting ideas and couldn't bring himself to cut any of them, or even dumb it down for the general audience. 

Whilst the technobabble persists in Episodes 3-4, it at least picks up the pace and sticks with a more clear storyline(the Master accidentally causes entropy to disintegrate the universe and it's up to him and the Doctor to stop it whilst also fighting in-between). 
The incredible scale of Logopolis, and the brilliant build-up to the Fourth Doctor's demise, is its saving grace. 

The regeneration itself is a bit of a mixed bag. The oppressively downbeat tone is very nice, and I liked the peaceful final moments and flashbacks to the Fourth Doctor's companions and enemies. But at the same time, it felt like this shouldn't be something that kills the Fourth Doctor. It felt like a situation that he could get out of if this wasn't his final story. I mean, he dies because the Master causes the radio telescope to rotate and he either isn't strong enough to hold onto the cable or gantry, or willingly lets go(which makes no sense even if he does know his regeneration is impending).

Whilst I love the concept of the Watcher itself, I really didn't like his inclusion in the regeneration sequence itself and seeing Peter Davison with white make-up on. I prefer a simpler transition from one actor to another.

CHARACTERS

Tom Baker gives a great final performance, foreboding and exhausted. He looks like he's almost completely drained physically and mentally, going on by pure determination(rather like the Master in The Deadly Assassin).

Matthew Waterhouse's enthusiasm once again trumps his inexperience. He's like the Doctor's puppy dog, always ready to help him and show the TARDIS around to strangers. I remain wary, because I've heard people say he becomes really awful in season 19 and he has been awful before, but at least right now, he's really good.

Sarah Sutton returns as Nyssa... and whilst she does get a really good scene where she sees Traken being destroyed, I've still yet to see a reason why she should be a companion. Her presence is extremely convoluted and her story arc with the Master goes nowhere. 

Janet Fielding is introduced as Tegan Jovanka, a stewardess-in-training... and yet another companion whose presence just seems kind of unnecessary. She's extremely theatrical in her acting(over-the-top gestures) and actually kind of reminds me a little bit of Clara as she constantly makes really dumb decisions and butts in on the conversations. On the positive side, she has a very firm personality(which makes her way more interesting than Nyssa) and doesn't act like a spoiled princess(which makes her way more tolerable than Clara). I loved her determination to replace her flat tire on her own. 

This is also Anthony Ainley's first full story as the Master, and of all the new characters, he is easily the most disappointing. I've seen Ainley before in other stories(The Five Doctors and Survival), so I know he can be good, but in here, he's really done a disservice. First of all, he chuckles evilly way too much, to the point where it becomes actually laughable. 
Secondly, he is extremely short-sighted and frequently needs the Doctor to get himself out of trouble. As a villain, he's incompetent, and not very far away from Jonathan Pryce's parody version in The Curse Of The Fatal Death. 

As such, it doesn't feel like the Doctor is fighting his greatest foe in a struggle for the universe, it's more like he's trying to stop an idiot from bringing the metaphorical house of cards down.

The final major character is the Monitor, who is the head of the Logopolitans. A great performance from John Fraser, who really sells the dignity, wisdom and kindness that represent the planet. I honestly believed that he and the Doctor are old friends. I know my description here is generic, but yeah, he's just really good in the role and made the story more interesting to watch, because I was invested in the fate of Logopolis.

NOTES

*I love the way Adric reacts every time he sees Nyssa. He happily shouts "NYSSA!!" like he just got a birthday present.

*Tegan's insults to the Master are hilarious. "You revolting man!" "I wouldn't take orders from you if you were the last man in the universe!" (I guess Tegan's a submissive at heart.)

*There's a great exchange between the Doctor and the Master, where the former compliments the latter's TARDIS, and then the Master suggests envy is the beginning of greatness. It's villainous without being explicitly villainous, and that's the kind of writing the Master should have.

*Considering that a quarter of the universe is junked in this story, how the heck did the Time Lords allow the Master to go free? Surely this is the worst crime documented in Time Lord history!! At the very least, they should've dragged the Doctor back to Gallifrey immediately to report. If this isn't brought up in the next Gallifrey story, I will be upset.

*Why does the Watcher take Adric and Nyssa out of the universe? I mean, yeah, it's a place of safety from entropy, but surely he knows that the only thing they'll do is go back to find the Doctor. Why not just put them down right next to the Pharos Project?

*It seems a little absurd for the Doctor to sneak around the guards of the radio telescope. Doesn't he have UNIT credentials or some other excuse he could use to get by? 

*The Master pretends to remove the lightspeed overdrive gadget from his TARDIS(which is necessary to beam out the Logopolitan program to the cracks in time and space) and gives the fake to the Doctor, hence why they can't use his TARDIS to get to the radio telescope. But once they get into trouble, the Master does use his TARDIS(since the original is still attached to it) and the two meet there. Still, despite the fact that the Master obviously needed to use it to travel in the TARDIS, the Doctor doesn't question that he has the actual gadget and even tries to get it when the Master casually tosses it out. Maybe I'm missing something, but shouldn't he have already guessed it wasn't real when the Master used the TARDIS and tossed the gadget out of the door? He's a bit slow on the uptake, is what I'm saying.

*Speaking of the cracks in time and space, they were actually present in Doctor Who all the way back in Tom Baker's era!!

*You have to love the adorable 80s graphics in the TARDIS scanner.

*I forgot to mention it in the previous review, but "This type's not my forte". Brilliant joke. 

*I highly recommend the documentary on the Logopolis DVD. It's very informative about Tom's last season and has some great anecdotes from the man(my favourites being his explanation for why the Doctor listens to his glass of water and his "advice" to Peter Davison).

*I love how the Doctor yells at Adric: "Do you want a quick decision or a DEBATE?!". This is the kind of Doctor Clara needed.

*The cloister bell is first heard in this story, and the Doctor explains it's used to communicate danger(it's like a phone alarm - you're supposed to respond to it).

*I hate the Master's silky, black, jester-esque outfit.

CONTINUITY ADVISOR

1) The story opens with a policeman on Earth, and a mention of "Totter's Yard".

2) The Doctor doesn't want to return to Gallifrey, since he'd have to explain how Romana broke the cardinal Time Lord law of non-intervention, which was established in The War Games, and explained further in Underworld.

3) The callback to Gallifrey itself has been a minor subplot since Meglos.

4) The Doctor wants to fix the chameleon circuit, which was broken in An Unearthly Child, the very first story.

5) We briefly see Romana's room, and her beach costume from The Leisure Hive. The Doctor later jettisons this room to boost the TARDIS' power and dematerialise(what caused it to get stuck, I don't even know. The Master, for whatever reason?)

6) The Doctor mentions to Adric that the TARDIS was mid-repair when he borrowed it. I'm not actually sure if we've heard this before or not, but it's definitely something that carried over to the new series, as we see in The Name Of The Doctor.

7) The Master returns, having escaped from Traken with Tremas' body, as seen in the previous story. 

8) Like in Terror Of The Autons and The Deadly Assassin, he miniaturises his victims. 

9) The Doctor mentions that the Master is down to his twelfth regeneration.

10) Adric says he can swim, and we saw him grow up in a riverside community in Full Circle.

11) The Watcher's appereance has a precedent in Planet Of The Spiders, where the Third Doctor's Time Lord mentor Kan'po Rinpoche also cast a future shadow of his next incarnation, though without all the white make-up. 

BEST QUOTE

"I'm not paid to have opinions, I'm paid to do my duty!" - Detective Inspector.

CONCLUSION

Whilst it sadly didn't come together well at all, I must at least applaud the creativity of the story, and the appropriately high stakes that make it stand out from the Doctor's other adventures.

And thus we come to the end of Season 18, and the Tom Baker era. I'll make a separate post detailing my thoughts on the Fourth Doctor, and my Top 10 stories from him, so let's just talk about Season 18 here.
In short, I loved it. Whilst it does have a clinical feel to it, I definitely prefer the intelligent, hard sci-fi approach to the almost lackadaisical feel of the late Williams era. Tom's U-turn from cartoon to a near-mythological figure elevated the season even further and the brief return of Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts(my personal favourite producer-script editor combo) added a nostalgic touch. 
This season was a great example of what Doctor Who should aspire to be like. Varied, cool-headed, and trying to educate and entertain. It also tied together really well, in a way that almost made it seem like the new series, with elements from all stories coming together in the end. It's not just a series of adventures, it's an ongoing journey through time and space, and felt appropriately mystical and dramatic.

Let's see if John Nathan-Turner can keep it up for Peter Davison's first season...