Day 271 — September 28th 2021
Meglos Parts Three and Four
Meglos — Part Three
It’s probably a bit churlish of me to pick on the new production team but they’re clearly having a bit of an issue so far with episodes under-running. Both this one and the last one have featured longer than average reprises from the previous episode leaving the actual running time of the episodes at around 18 minutes. I’ve not checked the specific timings but I’m sure I noticed The Leisure Hiverunning a little under, too. When this story began it didn’t matter too much because they still seemed to be packing a lot into the running time, but this episode feels a little light on incident.
Aside from the shortness of the episodes, this story’s structure continues to be a bit unusual. Having kept Doctor Who and Romana away from the action until the last third of Part Two, they’re now three quarters of the way through the story and they’ve yet to meet — or even hear about — the villain. Romana brushes past him briefly without realising, and Doctor Who himself is still speculating that he must have a doppelganger running around somewhere.
I was a fan of trying something different yesterday, but it’s gone a little far for my liking now. Being this far in without our heroes really having any sense of what’s going on — let alone how to fix it — makes the whole enterprise feel curiously lightweight. Doctor Who hasn’t really had a chance to care about the situation yet, so why should I?
That’s not to say that this episode is entirely without merit. Tom Baker is clearly revelling in being able to play the baddie, and his turn as Meglos is surprisingly scary. There’s a point in this episode when he leads Caris away from her friends and boggles at her which genuinely unnerved me. We’ve seen Tom Baker play the baddie before now — notably in The Face of Evil — but this feels like the first time they’ve gone to any length to make him so terrifying. It’s also a chance for Baker to give us the best performance he’s done in ages, swinging wildly between snapping in rage (‘I am Meglos! The last Zolfa-Thuran!’) and writing in agony as the human side of the cactus tries to break free.
And isn’t that just a perfectly Doctor Who sentence?
There’s some more flashes of decent direction in here, and the interior sets are pretty good on the whole. There’s some nice use of different levels, which I’m always a fan of, and I can totally buy this as a civilisation which has retreated into the caves and built their city around them. The jungle looks decent but I think it suffers by being so brightly lit — compare this to the one we had in Nightmare of Eden and it’s like night and day… literally.
I’m dropping to a 5/10 for this one.
Meglos — Part Four
This has to be the shortest episode of Doctor Who we’ve ever had. When you take out the reprise from Part Three and the credits at either end, there’s less than 17 minutes of actual episode here. I can’t say that’s especially a bad thing, though, because although this story started out pretty strongly and I was impressed by Part One, my interest has waned more with each episode.
The structure continues to be the biggest failing here. Doctor Who and Romana need to depart in the TARDIS to follow Meglos back to his home planet, so a few minutes into this episode they say their goodbyes to the guest cast and head off. The scene feels so out of place at this point in the story, and it’s made even worse when we pop back at the end to repeat it. But the biggest problem in that scene isn’t our heroes taking off so early, it’s Jackie Hill sacrificing herself to save Romana’s life. It comes completely out of nowhere and feels so at odds with the character we’ve been watching for the first three-quarters of the story.
As I’ve mentioned we have to return to Tigella at the end of the story so Doctor Who and Romana can drop two guest characters off having taken them on their trip to Zolfa Thuran. Only… I’m not sure what the point of taking them was. One of those characters gets to do anything in the narrative — they hit a guard over the head with a rock so that K9 can shoot him… but what was the point? Couldn’t K9 have simply shot the guard to begin with? I spent more time shouting ‘why are you even here’ at the screen than trying to engage with the story, and that’s never a good sign.
As with Part Three, this isn’t totally awful. There’s some great split-screen work when Doctor Who and Meglos come face to face, and it’s nice to see the return of the scene-synch technology integrating actors into the model work. And I love the final scene with the Earthling standing around waiting to be taken home. Actor Christopher Owen is still around, so I think it’s unforgivable that Big Finish haven’t yet done a series of him travelling around with Doctor Who and Romana. I’d make it a gimmick that you’d never discover his name.
3/10
