Day 280 — October 7th 2021
Logopolis Parts One and Two
Logopolis — Part One
Let’s kick off with a confession: I’m not a fan of Logopolis. It’s a rare story where I know I didn’t enjoy it much last time around because I’ve a friend who loves it, and he texts me every so often to ask if I’ve ‘stopped being wrong’ about the story. With that in mind, I’ve not been looking forward to it as it’s loomed at the end of the season — and the end of Tom Baker’s tenure — but I’ve decided to go in with an open mind and see if this time around I might find something more to enjoy in here. If nothing else, it’ll brighten said friend’s day if he reads the blog.
And it has to be said that there’s some nice things in this opening episode. The set for the TARDIS Cloisters is beautiful, with the crumbling stone and slowly being engulfed by ivy. It’s the perfect setting for Doctor Who to sit Adric down and bang on about entropy. There’s some nice locations on display, too. I love it when we get to see an ordinary residential street in the series because it’s so rare in Old Testament Who. Having met Adric for the first time in an alien swamp and Nyssa in an alien palace, it’s nice to see Tegan making her debut on the doorstep of a regular house in London. It’s the first time we’ve met a companion from Earth since Sarah Jane joined way back in Pertwee’s time, and even she came on board while sneaking around a top secret scientific establishment. We’ve not met a companion in as ordinary a setting as this since Ben and Polly first encountered Doctor Who in a nightclub 15 years ago.
Unfortunately, most of those statements come with some caveats. It’s great to meet Tegan in an ordinary setting, but she’s hardly a ‘real’ person. She spends the first half of the episode desperately trying to make sure we know she’s an air stewardess; making constant references to how reliable aircraft are compared to cars, practicing her safety instructions and wondering about ‘maintenance schedules’. None of her dialogue feels in any way natural — she comes across just as alien as the aliens do. And then when she stumbles into the TARDIS it gets even worse. Far from being totally thrown by the ‘bigger on the inside’ aspect of the police box, she immediately wonders where ‘the pilot’ might be. She’s not in any way realistic at this stage, she’s only saying and doing the things the script needs her to.
As lovely as the ordinary street setting is — and the layby on the side of the road, too — this story doesn’t really take place in these locations. Most of the narrative is inside the TARDIS and comprises of Doctor Who and Adric talking about maths. I’ll say that I really like the idea of the infinite TARDISes stacked inside each other each one darker than the one before it. It’s a great image, and once again I wish the set of the Control Room were always lit this atmospherically. But I spent the whole episode longing for our heroes to get out of the ship and spend some time in the real world. The most interesting part of this episode fore me isn’t the infinite TARDIS Control Rooms or discussions of how the ship should work. It’s the moment Doctor Who is put in the back of a police car. There’s something about that which is so captivating because it feels so unreal, and it’s a shame it’s a strand of story dropped before the end of the episode, never to be picked up again.
There is one aspect of the TARDIS in this episode which interests me, and that’s the mystery of just what happened to the prop during filming. The ‘real’ police box in the layby here is the Newbury Prop used between The Masque of Mandragora and Shada, given a bit of an overhaul to more closely resemble the newer prop introduced in The Leisure Hive. For the opening shot of the story, in which a policeman uses the phone in the box, the doors look pretty much as they did when the box was last before cameras.
The key things to note in this shot are that the ‘Pull to Open’ panel on the left door is in pretty good shape — notably clean and legible — and the lock is on the right hand door. But that’s only the case for this single shot. For the rest of the episode, the panel is grubbier and the lock has been repositioned on the left-hand door, with the hole on the right filled in. All these scenes were shot across two days with a weekend between them, but scenes were recorded out of order, so these modifications must have been made to the prop in-situ during filming. But why? It would be a lot of work for pretty much no reward. TARDIS expert Clayton Hickman has tried to solve this riddle a few times down the years, but no one seems to have a satisfying answer.
It’s a 5/10 for me.
Logopolis — Part Two
The thing my friend says he loves the most about this story is the ‘funereal atmosphere’, and I’ll admit that watching this episode I do sort of get that. There’s something about the scene in which Doctor Who spots the Watcher for the first time which is genuinely creepy. That it takes place somewhere real — on a bridge overlooking the river Thames — makes it all the stronger for me, playing into the same ‘real’ aspects that I enjoyed in Part One.
There’s some nice flourishes of direction throughout this one, largely taking the form of close ups on a troubled Tom Baker, and I think they’re really helping to lift things for me. They’re injecting some tension into the story where I feel it’s missing from the script. Tegan being menaced by the chuckles of the (unseen) Master while roaming the TARDIS cloisters is the perfect example — the scene itself is nothing special, but the angles it’s shot from make all the difference.
Unfortunately, this episode is home to several of the things which bothered in in Part One. Tegan continues to be a bizarre type of character who never comes anywhere close to feeling like a real person. If anything she’s even worse in this one, without her aunt to bounce off. When the TARDIS lurches uncontrollably she complains about the person who’s ‘flying’, even though she has no reason to believe she’s anywhere off the ground. And when she finally comes face to face with Doctor Who and Adric she demands to see the ‘captain’. I’ll concede that Baker and Waterhouse’s reaction to her intrusion makes the scene work, and it’s the highlight of the episode.
Otherwise it’s lots more talk about mathematics, and when the action switches to the hideous sets representing Logopolis we’re about as far removed from the ‘real’ down to Earth stuff I so enjoyed early in the story. It also doesn’t help that the last few minutes of this episode are a complete mess. Nyssa shows up from nowhere (‘a friend of the Doctor’s brought me,’ she explains) and Tegan introduces herself like they’re spouses meeting for the first time at the office Christmas party. Doctor Who keeps telling us that the situation is dire, but it’s incredibly hard to give a toss about any of this.
3/10
