Season 15 is a step down from the preceding two seasons, and wait a minute, I’m pretty sure that photo I found is from Season 18.
The Review
Here’s the scores for the stories:
The Invasion of Time: 9/10
The Invisible Enemy: 8.75/10
Horror of Fang Rock: 8/10
The Sun Makers: 7.9/10
Image of the Fendahl: 7.5/10
Underworld: 7/10
There are two problems I think with Season 15 that made it a step down, though not that big of one. One is that nobody could ever figure out exactly what to do with Leela. She was extremely competent at being a huntress, but unfortunately I think companions have to be a bit more knowledgable than her to be successful. Louise Jameson reportedly got frustrated during filming with the direction of her character, and I agree. The other issue, despite how much I enjoyed The Invasion of Time, is that this season now seemed preoccupied on the fact that the Doctor was a Time Lord. Seriously, it came up in almost every story. I think this is only going to get worse as the classic series goes on and Doctor Who lore turns in on itself. However, there were just too many stories that were overly complex or far too derivative. At least we have K9, K9 is amazing. Long live K9.
8.025/10 Thought it would sink below an 8, pleased to be wrong
Story 97, Episodes 474-480, Season 15 Episodes 21-27
Doctor: The Fourth Doctor
Companions: Leela, K9
The Invasion of Time takes us back to Gallifrey in what actually feels like a season finale, a rarity for a non-regeneration story in the Classic series.
The Review
The tribe of Time Lord dropouts
There’s a lot going on in this story, but almost all of it is good fun. The episode starts with the Doctor signing a contract for unseen aliens, and returning to Gallifrey, demanding to made President. Never has it been more apparent the Time Lords were running on autopilot behind their incredible technology. After Goth’s death in The Deadly Assassin, it seems that as the only other candidate the Doctor is legally required to President, which is quite unfortunate for Gallifrey. A lot of the Gallifrey citadel still looks kind of dingy, the President’s office is pretty nondescript. The Doctor orders Leela banished to outer Gallifrey, and it’s clear that something is up. Our main Gallifreyan cast are the old and snarky Chancellor Borusa, the pathetic guard leader Castellan Kelner (every oligarchy gets its Castellan says the Doctor), the honorable guard Andred, and finally, a Time Lady, Rodan, whom Leela meets and sure seems to be an early attempt at Romana. When Leela and Rodan do escape to Outer Gallifrey they meet a group of Time Lords who rejected the citadel out in the orange sands of the planet. Rodan getting roasted by their leader is an amusing scene.
Leela in the TARDIS pool
The main enemy are the Vardans, a race that can project themselves without fully materializing and are instead represented by some trippy crackling foil. The Doctor has the Time Lords bow before them, but when he gets in his now lead-lined office reveals that the Vardans read thoughts and he is playing along to find a way to defeat them. We never quite see why the Doctor thought the Vardans so much of a threat that Gallifrey couldn’t handle them, but he has to blow a hole in Gallifrey’s shields to get them to materialize so he can find out who they are. Once they’re just some fascist soldiers, it’s easy for the Doctor and K9 to see them off. The Doctor triumphantly heads back to the Panopticon where in a whammy of a twist, there are the Sontarans who were behind the Vardans all along. The whole time Castellan was actually working with the Vardans, and now sides with the Sontarans. After the Doctor shakes down Borusa for the Great Key of Rassilon, he retreats with the good guys into his TARDIS. The corridors of the TARDIS are hilariously plain and nondescript, looking like backstage at a theater. Even the pool is amusingly low-rent. The Sontarans bumble along through it until the Doctor has his final weapon, the De-Mat Gun.
The Sontarans are appropriately intimidating in this story
The episode is a romp from start to finish, and I can see people disappointed if they expected a more serious tale of invasion. Tom Baker has many blowups under the stress of his deception, but has several fun moments including leering right over Andred’s shoulder as the latter gradually understands the plan. Instead of a dramatic showdown with Sontarans, we instead get an amusing chase through never before seen rooms of the TARDIS. Borusa’s dry wit contrasts perfectly with the madcap Fourth Doctor. It’s an entertaining story, and what more could you ask for? The Doctor loses his memory of this adventure because Rassilon didn’t want him to know of the De-Mat Gun or something. Leela decides to stay because she loves Andred, which is a fittingly random ending to a character the writers could never figure out. K9 Mark I stays with her too. So, Sarah Jane was dumped because no humans on Gallifrey, but here, a human gets to stay on Gallifrey and marry a Time Lord? It also raises questions about why the Doctor never stopped by to talk to Leela again. Is she long dead by the next story on Gallifrey? It’s weird. At least we have K9 Mark II on the way.
It’s a fun story, with the Fourth Doctor at his strangest, as we get a tour of Gallifrey and the TARDIS.
9/10 Way too much strangeness to get a 10, but it’s good alright.
Tom Baker staring down the camera at the end of the episode is weird and it also kind of rules
Story 96, Episodes 470-473, Season 15 Episodes 17-20
Doctor: The Fourth Doctor
Companions: Leela, K9
Underworld has a promising first episode, but then churns out to be the archetypical classic Who far future story.
The Review
On the Minyan ship
It wasn’t long ago that I realized I could not tell you the plot of the Pertwee-era tale The Mutants, despite having watched it relatively recently. I probably gave it a fair review too. The problem with it was that it falls right into the trap of these far future genre stories in the classic series. The Doctor and company arrive in the far future and meet an oppressed group of people working under an oppressive regime. The truth about the regime is found out and they are defeated. Of course, this is either a future human colony or has aliens that look exactly like humans for some reason. Underworld is this story. It’s a shame because the first episode is intriguing, the Doctor and Leela avoid being sucked into a spiral nebula and materialize on a nearby ship run by the last four Minyans who have been regenerating themselves over 100,000 years tracking a signal said to contain the race bank of their species. An added twist is they believed the Time Lord to be Gods, and the resulted disintegration of the Minyans is what led to the Time Lord non-intervention pact. For such a dull episode, and actual little fragment of serious Gallifreyan lore! They track the signal into a new planet at the heart of the nebula and it all falls apart.
This is a good shot! It’s 1978, cut them some slack
Of course we meet the descendants of the Minyans living in some horribly stratified existence where worker slaves mine the rocks in order to survive underground. It is all controlled by some arch supercomputer that has fashioned itself the Oracle. There’s a lot of chroma key blue screen tunnel action, it’s not very convincing, especially when K9 is concerned. Tom Baker is clearly just going through the motions, but his performance of the Doctor comes so naturally that he still is enjoyable. Really though, these far future rebellion stories are starting to tire me the way the barrage of base under siege stories at the end of the Troughton era did, and I liked those stories far better to begin with. The Sun Makers would have been just as dull as this story if it weren’t for the colorful villainous performances and amusing tax satire. This story is about mythology I guess, with the Oracle and quest supposed to be something out of the Greek mythos. It’s definitely one of the most unmemorable stories I’ve watched, not because it’s truly bad, but not a lot happened. Still though, the Minyans, responsible for the Time Lord non-interference doctrine. Can’t change that canon!
Could you imagine following a quest for A HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS. That is so long!
7/10 Saved from being in the 6 range because the first episode was intriguing
We do get to see the Doctor in a smock, which is great
Story 95, Episodes 466-469, Season 15 Episodes 13-16
Doctor: The Fourth Doctor
Companions: Leela, K9
Robert Holmes got mad at the British tax code, and wrote The Sun Makers, maybe the straightest satire that the show has ever done.
The Review
The Gatherer, who constantly calls the Collector a wide-range of amazing honorifics
This is a patently silly story, and that’s completely fine. It takes place somewhere in the distant future on Pluto, a bunch of humans are taxed to death by the Company which completely controls life. We are first introduced to Gatherer Hade in an excellent performance by Richard Leech, the pompous taxman dressed like a Pharaoh. His boss is the sniveling Collector, a reprehensible man who only cares about full profit maximization and only takes breaks to avoid the horrific screams from people getting publicly steamed. The story really revolves around those two villains and another archetypical performance by Tom Baker, who is fun as always. Setting the story on a terraformed Pluto was random and fun, got to be the only Doctor Who story to take place there. We follow an average worker, Cordo, who almost commits suicide but then is inspired to become one of the leaders of the revolution. An excellent scene involves the Gatherer freeing the Doctor from the corrections facility saying his arrest was a mistake, the two playing off each other is a joy to see.
Pluto’s joyless corridor
A lot of the story is your standard fare, run through corridors, including one just completely blank white hallway which I suppose fits the story. K9 gets to join the team for this story, and I’m impressed that his prop works as well as it does as it rumbles along through the hallways. Leela makes a bit more sense leading a revolution, but reading on this story it seems Louise Jameson got frustrated with Leela and it’s not hard to see why. Playing somebody who is constantly behind the curve can get just plain aggravating. The workers genuinely don’t know who gets the Company’s profit, and it turns out that the Collector is an alien Usurian, his race having strung along humanity from centuries moving them from a dying Earth to Mars, exhausting it, and now out to Pluto. The Doctor’s takedown that conquest through economic corporatism is almost as bad as military conquest is straightforward and a good slam. All in all, this is far from a classic, but it’s a fun little oddity that I wish was discussed more than it was.
Story 94, Episodes 462-465, Season 15 Episodes 9-12
Doctor: The Fourth Doctor
Companions: Leela, K9
In a very complicated story, we learn of the missing planet in-between Mars and Jupiter, and meet a type of God.
The Review
The Doctor and Leela in her new dress
I’m going to try and break this down so you (and me) understand: on the original fifth planet of the solar system, the Fendahl and accompanying Fendahleen (all part of one Gestalt mind you) evolved that fed on life itself, even their own. The Time Lords quickly saw this and dealt with it by destroying the planet and erasing it from history. A Fendahl skull, identical to a human one but with a hidden pentagram, flies to Earth and slowly influences the development of humanity. Twelve million years later, the skull is recovered and studied by Dr. Fendelman, whose name is due to the influence of the Fendahl. He uses a time scanner that slowly charges the skull up, allowing it to control Thea, a scientist. Another scientist, the effectively disturbing Max, is the local occult leader, who performs the ritual of the Fendahl thinking he can control it. He cannot. Thea becomes Fendahl, the avatar of death, but the Doctor, Leela, a psychic grandmother and her grandson, and hotshot scientist Colby destroy the Priory she is in, killing her. The Doctor takes the Fendahl skull and dumps it into a supernova, ending the Fendahl: forever. The skull also glowed by the way.
The Doctor and ‘Eustace’
The problems with this story are two-fold: it is too complicated, and the villain never speaks. It is very difficult to face a wordless villain, and I think a lot of classic Who stories struggle from that. Max does a suitable job as a minor villain, that guy is straight up creepy and no surprise he was a cult leader. Leela was fine in her story, but she’s been disappointing to me as a companion this season, they don’t really know the right angle to take her character. The fact that her revealing outfits are an attempt to sex up the show is pretty embarrassing. Even beyond that shallow motivation, you don’t need to show a lot of skin to be attractive. Really, this story is a worse Pyramids of Mars, right down to it taking place in a priory. In that story you also had a god-like foe, but Sutekh was imposing, astonishingly powerful and evil. The concept of the Fendahl is a bit more abstract, and the budget didn’t help the snake-like Fendahleen. K9 is also out of action for this story, he doesn’t even get to say affirmative at the end of it. This story had a cool idea, but just doesn’t really work. Still fine though. Tom Baker holding up four fingers while saying ‘three minutes’ is an iconic Fourth Doctor moment.
It was not clear at all to me that the Fendahl were from the original fifth planet of humanity by the way.
Story 93, Episodes 458-461, Season 15 Episodes 5-8
Doctor: The Fourth Doctor
Companions: Leela, K9
We literally enter the Doctor’s mind in an inventive story taking place in the year 5000.
The Review
Infected Swarm members and the SwarmDoctor
Some first parts to stories are slow, brooding, but this one starts immediately. A ship is infected by something in space called the Swarm, and lands on a human base on Saturn’s moon of Titan. The infected crew immediately kill almost everybody else, but a mayday is sent out drawing in the Doctor and Leela. People infected by the Swarm say “contact has been made” which is suitably creepy, and have bizarre grey hairs and patterning around their eyes. The action doesn’t stay on Titan for long, the Doctor gets infected with the Swarm’s Nucleus, it’s leader, and is taken to the Bi-Al Foundation, an imaginatively rendered hospital asteroid. Of course, if you’re the Doctor, how do you remove the virus from yourself? By cloning you and Leela, and shrinking the clones, and putting those clones inside your own body. Part three of the story is wonderfully bizarre, as the Doctor and Leela travel through his brain, including a visit from phagocytes! It’s incredibly weird fun, especially that they’re less clones and more just extensions of the same person. There is some rumination on a virus’ right to exist as a virus, but not much more beyond that.
The Nucleus!
Another interesting idea is that the virus feeds on thought, deep intellectual thought, the Doctor shuts himself off in order to progress it from spreading. Here, Leela’s ‘savagery’ actually serves a narrative purpose, putting her into a much better situation than the previous story. Her intuitive, instinctual way of thinking psychologically makes her immune to the Swarm. Unfortunately this is shown to be in the case of some kind of physical characteristic, but I liked the idea of her having a different way of thinking being important. The Doctor eventually sides with her in blowing up the virus instead of forcing it to live in a reduced capacity. Unexpectedly, this story introduces us to K9! K9 is a robot dog owned by Professor Marius on the asteroid, and you think that the idea would be dumb but K9 acts completely straight answering ‘affirmative’ like a computer would. Somehow, the mixture works, and K9 is such a fun character that I am excited to see him join the TARDIS team. The last word of the story ‘I hope he’s TARDIS trained’ from Marius is really bad though. Overall, this was a unique and fun story that I actually thought was better than the more famous one proceeding it.
I like when Doctor Who isn’t afraid to get weird, and this story certainly wasn’t. Take risks 70s Who!
Story 92, Episodes 454-457, Season 15 Episodes 1-4
Doctor: The Fourth Doctor
Companion: Leela
Horror of Fang Rock sees off the Gothic horror era with a lighthouse showdown that might’ve been a lot better in the new series.
The Review
The miniatures department sure gets their work in
We start out with three lighthouse keepers, and none of them survive the story. In fact, the only survivors are the Doctor and Leela. It’s a genius idea for a story, being stuck on a lighthouse at night with a panicked group of people as an evil alien assaults them from outside. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite all work that will just due to the limits of the low production values in 1977. The lighthouse interior is rendered the best it possibly could, though I thought I spied in the first episode some green screen/chroma key going on. The exterior shots are clearly models, and we never got a good sense of the terrain outside as anything other than rocky. In the new series, I can easily imagine this being rendered with spectacular production values. The enemy Ruton is also a green blob jelly type creature, which is scary in some kind of primal way but also looks just a bit silly. Bless 70s Who though because they try the best they can to bring Terrance Dicks’ script to life, and do so admirably.
In conversation with a Ruton
Leela unfortunately I think does not come off well in this story, her primitive viewpoints often feel blunt and are unsuited for the horror mystery. I do appreciate her slapping and rolling her eyes at the other woman, Adelaide, when she screams bloody murder but I think this story would have benefited much better from Sarah Jane (wouldn’t they all?) I’ve taken a break from the classic series but I don’t remember Leela being this ineffective as a companion. Tom Baker is in full brooding mode here, though I did enjoy his very tone deaf grin explaining that an alien is coming to possibly kill all of them. The Doctor’s inexperience in the classic series shows when he instead of locking the Ruton out, he traps everyone inside the lighthouse with it. The addition of the crew from the stranded ship add some color to the story, but I quite liked the idea of it being about three lighthouse keepers of different generations. The fourth episode does dial up the horror killing everybody else, revealing the Ruton, and having the Ruton mothership come to Earth. All in all, could’ve been better, but still an enjoyable story with a memorable monster.
Season 15 starts off with a story that is suitably scary, but does not leave me looking forward to a full Leela season.
8/10 Upgraded from a 7.5 over understanding of the limitations of 70s BBC
Reviewing Doctor Who from Start to Finish 