Day 266 — September 23rd 2021
The Horns of Nimon Parts Three and Four
The Horns of Nimon — Part Three
The Nimon be praised!
I’ve a complicated relationship with the Nimon. I think the idea behind them is fantastic. One scout setting itself up as a god on an unsuspecting planet and using the people it finds there as a means to bring the rest of the race through to ravage and destroy. Add in some of the imagery of the story, like the two gigantic spires reaching up from the temple, artificial black holes and the idea that the labyrinth is created as a result of a giant circuit clicking into position and I think you’ve got the basic building blocks for a really good story.
The problem is… they don’t make a really good story. They make a pretty dull one. There’s very little energy in this episode, and there’s several occasions in which it looks like the actors are standing around waiting for their next cue. I think a big part of that is that as great as the basic idea of the Nimon’s design is, it clearly doesn’t work in operation. There’s a shot in this episode where the sacrifices have to hand their offerings of Hymetusite over to the creature and you can see just how tall he towers over them. It’s fantastic! It feels like a genuinely scary, genuinely large monster without having to go to the extremes of Kroll or Erato. But then a few scenes later the actor has to do an ungainly squat down to reach some of the controls on the set and it looks ridiculous. Any good will built up by the sheer size of the Nimon is dissipated instantly.
It doesn’t help that the head piece is so clearly that — a head piece. It doesn’t look so bad from the front (although the decision to give the creature a squashed face is an unusual one) but whenever the Nimon turns around you can see the back of the mask not sitting flush to the actor’s back and the effect is spoilt. See also any time they decide to show you the creature’s feet and reveal that the impressive height is partly thanks to the actor wearing platform shoes. It feels like they’re so close to getting it right, but then they fall short at the last moment.
One area where I think the Nimon works unconditionally is the voice. Clifford Norgate gives a pretty powerful performance anyway, but they’ve also added some sort of reverb to the voice which makes it sound genuinely alien. I can’t make any complaints about that.
Overall my biggest problem is still that I’m just a bit bored by this story. All those great ideas ultimately build up to very little, so I’m dropping to a 4/10. Tell you what though, I know exactly how I’d bring the Nimon back, utilising all these elements the way I think they should be…
The Horns of Nimon — Part Four
The last two episodes of this story fall into the 1980s, but it’s fitting that the last story to broadcast any episodes in the 1970s should end with the main setting being blown up. It’s felt like a staple of the decade…
As a story to bow out of the decade as a whole, and as a start to the 1980s, though, The Horns of Nimon has been more than a little underwhelming. I’m going with a 5/10 for this final episode, which brings the score to another round 5/10 overall.
I maintain that this story is filled with some great ideas, and I think there’s a brilliant tale buried in there somewhere, but it just never quite makes it to the surface. Even Tom Baker seems like he’s going through the motions in this one, and that’s the biggest shame because he’s been more engaged with the series this year than I think he has in a while. Doctor Who gets sidelined a bit in this story — he spends most of the second episode locked in the TARDIS and this final episode he spends flicking switches on a single set while Romana gets to go off and do all the exploring.
That’s no bad thing, though, and it gives Lalla Ward a chance to shine some more. I’ll confess that when she first turned up in the programme I thought of her as being a companion I wasn’t overly keen on, but I’ve been won over across this season. I always thought that this particular pairing came across a little too smug and aloof, and that they needed a human character to ground them, but I’ve changed my mind on that now. I can appreciate just how popular they are.
From a rating point of view, this story also marks the end of the Graham Williams era (I’ll be doing the Britbox version of Shada tomorrow as a feature-length special, but it was never a broadcast Doctor Who story, so it won’t be appearing on my list of ratings at the end of the year). I think it’s fair to say that it’s been more than a bit patchy, and the average score for the last three seasons — 5.4/10 — indicates that it’s been my least-favourite era by far, by quite some margin.
That’s not to say it’s been all bad. There’s been a handful of gems scattered throughout. Fang Rock and Sunmakers both scored 8/10, and City of Death is in joint first place for my favourite story of the marathon so far. I think I’m ready for a change in approach, though, so I’m looking forward to leaping into the John Nathan Turner era from the day after tomorrow, which will see me through until very nearly the end of the year.
