Meglos

Having lived in the future, it's impossible for me to die in the present.

I went in to Meglos thinking that I might have to rant about the science vs. religion aspect of it. It turns out that that was a complete red herring. I was actually somewhat surprised at how much I enjoyed it. Granted there are a lot of flaws, especially in Episode Four, but it was not the pile of garbage I was expecting.

Plot Summary

The Doctor and Romana are in the TARDIS fixing K-9. They are passing a system with two planets, Zolfa-Thura and Tigella, which the Doctor has visited. Tigella is divided into two factions: the scientifically minded Savants and the religious Deons. The leader of Tigella, Zastor has received the message from the Doctor, sent as they passed the planet, and has invited him to help them. The planet is currently losing power from their source, the crystalline Dodecahedron, which the Deons worship. Both sides are squabbling as to how to fix the problem and are openly contemptuous of the other.

Meanwhile, a band of rogues land on Zolfa-Thura where they have been sent for by Meglos, a cactus entity who is the last survivor of a planetary war. The rogues have brought a captive from Earth whom Meglos uses to transfer his essence. Using the body of the Earthling, he sets a repeating loop of time and traps the TARDIS within it. He then takes on the image of the Doctor and has the band of pirates take him to Tigella.

Upon landing on Tigella, Meglos goes to see Zastor and agrees to help repair the dodecahedron. In reality, Meglos is planning on stealing it to power Zolfa-Thura. The high priestess Lexa insists that before the Doctor can see the dodecahedron he must swear an oath to Ti, the god who gave the Tigellans the dodecahedron. Meglos agrees.

Back in the TARDIS, the real Doctor and Romana have become aware of the time loop they are trapped in. The Doctor suggests they perform the actions from the beginning of the time loop at the end. This throws the time loop out of phase and they escape, setting course to land on Tigella.

After Meglos takes the oath to Ti, he insists on being left alone to repair the dodecahedron. Lexa reluctantly agrees but quietly waits in the adjoining chamber. Meglos uses his matter converter to shrink the dodecahedron and steals it. Lexa and a Savant named Caris observe him leaving and then find the dodecahedron missing. Lexa sounds the alarm and orders the guards to arrest the Doctor.

The Doctor and Romana land on Tigella with K-9 in tow. The Doctor makes it to the city entrance but notices that Romana has lagged behind, distracted by burn patterns on the vegetation. He sends K-9 after her and enters the city. Meglos, having heard the alarm and beginning to lose control over his projection as the Doctor, hides from the guards. The real Doctor is found by Lexa and Zastor and arrested.

While looking at the plants, Romana is attacked by an aggressive plant. She escapes but is turned around and finds the pirate ship. K-9, having tracked her to the carnivorous plant, gives off the search to return to the TARDIS for a battery recharge. Romana is confronted by the pirates who capture her. She offers to take them to her ship and they agree, thinking to plunder it.

In the control room, the Doctor determines that there must be a doppelganger about. He has Zastor show him the dodecahedron chamber. Lexa meanwhile has become convinced that Ti is angry with them and must be appeased. She motivates her followers and institutes a coup. Zastor is arrested and the Doctor taken away to be offered as a sacrifice to Ti.

Meglos struggles to maintain his form as the human is trying to break free of his control. He captures Caris who had come down to check on some equipment to help him escape, informing her of his true identity. He loses control for a moment and Caris arms herself and leads him away as prisoner.

Romana leads the pirates to the aggressive plant who attacks them. Romana sees K-9, grabs him and runs into the city just before the doors shut due to Lexa's declaration of lockdown. The pirates break free and begin to smash down the outer doors. The guards open the inner door due to the noise and Romana flees into the city. The guards engage in a gun battle with the pirates smashing through but are overrun.

Romana sees Caris with Meglos and thinking he is the Doctor, knocks her down. Meglos meets up with the pirates and the whole party returns to the pirate ship. Caris recovers and explains to Romana what is going on. The two go to search for the Doctor who is tied down on a stone slab about to be crushed by a suspended boulder. They reunite with Zastor and stop the sacrifice by informing Lexa that she has the wrong Doctor.

Informed of who Meglos is, the Doctor decides to travel to Zolfa-Thura to stop him. Before they leave, one of the pirates who was felled but not killed, fires his gun at Romana. Lexa steps in front of the shot and is killed. The Doctor, Romana, K-9 and two Savants travel in the TARDIS to Zolfa-Thura.

On Zolfa-Thura, Meglos places the dodecahedron on top of his bunker and returns it to normal size. The array around it will focus the energy of the dodecahedron into a planet destroying beam. The head of the pirates, General Grugger, suggests they destroy Tigella and Meglos happily obliges. He programs the weapon and heads out to check the array alignment.

The Doctor slips in, posing as Meglos and reprograms the array alignment. However, Grugger becomes suspicious and greedy and orders his men to imprison the Doctor. His men grab both the Doctor and Meglos and place them in the ship's brig.

Romana and the Savants observe the Doctor's capture and go to rescue him. K-9 stuns the guard and the Doctor is freed. They grab Meglos to keep him contained but Meglos releases himself from the human body and his cactus form wriggles back to the base. The Doctor informed him before their rescue of his altering of the array, which would destroy the base if fired.

The Doctor, his friends and the released human head back to the TARDIS as Grugger has started the countdown to fire. Meglos gets back to the base but does not reach them in time to stop the countdown and the entire facility (including the dodecahedron) is destroyed as the TARDIS dematerializes.

Back on Tigella, the society makes preparations to clear and colonize the surface of Tigella as their underground city will have to be abandoned. The Doctor says his goodbyes and he and Romana makes plans to return the human to Earth before heading to Gallifrey where they have been summoned.

Analysis

While I enjoyed the story of Meglos for the most part, there are a lot of flaws in the story development. One would think that if you have your actor playing both the Doctor and the villain, it would be an excellent story as with The Enemy of the World. While Tom Baker does very well in his role as Meglos, it is so underutilized that it just seems like a waste. On top of that, there is all this extra stuff that ends up going nowhere.

I'm not entirely sure why it was decided to make Meglos a cactus. I get the idea of making it necessary to meld him with a humanoid as that was used as a plot point, but again why a cactus? I'm guessing that someone thought seeing the makeup spines on both Tom Baker and the other guy would be interesting and it flowed from there. But the use of a cactus did make Meglos' inching back to the base in Episode Four look rather silly. It also makes me wonder how the base was built given that Meglos would have been unable to do anything himself without transmogrifying into a creature with digits and mobility.

Still, Tom Baker as Meglos was enjoyable. There is a brooding, eerie quality that he uses, especially in his eyes. It reminds me a bit of his performance as Rasputin in Nicholas and Alexandra which also was heavily dependent on the use of his eyes to encourage discomfort. I only wish there had been more time with the Doctor confronting Meglos. They are locked in a cell together at the end but still have very little interaction with each other. It just feels like a waste of an opportunity. I'm sure budget considerations had a lot to do with it as well.

On the subject of waste, let us discuss Lexa, played by Jacqueline Hill (aka Barbara). First, there was no real reason to have the society divided in the science vs. religion camp. It offered nothing and was barely played with except as a pretense for Zastor asking the Doctor to help them and providing a cliffhanger at the end of Episode Three. The story sides heavily on the science side (as I would expect a Doctor Who story to) but the divide is never really used except to portray the Deons as obstructions that allow Meglos to get away.

Jacqueline Hill does very well in her limited use as Lexa but there is almost no depth allowed to her character. She is just a stereotype of an obstinate priestess who has a quick revelation at the beginning of Episode Four to resolve the cliffhanger. Her sacrifice for Romana is not set up at all and is shot so poorly that Romana has to explain what happened after it's over. It just feels like a waste. To my knowledge, no actor who has played a Doctor or a companion has ever come back as a single story role player. Role players actors have been promoted to the Doctor or companion but this is the only instance of the reverse. While her portrayal was fine, it would have been so much nicer to make use of the reverse progression. If she had been tricked or brainwashed by Meglos into helping him, you could have had a set up that would have drawn on her previous companion role in an ironic way that could have been so much more impressive.

I would have also liked the pacing to work a bit better. Episode One is entirely set up with the Doctor and Romana not even leaving the TARDIS. In fact, we're halfway into Episode Two before they even enter the story properly. That doesn't overly bother me as that happened in Second Doctor stories too but even so, Episode One feels a little rushed with Meglos' plan not explained particularly well. Worse, the replay from the previous episode in each subsequent episode is quite long into what are already short episodes. It would have been so easy to cut down on this and perhaps even add a minute or so on the back end which would have given the story another one and a half to two minutes to play with and that could have helped the pacing out quite a bit.

As mentioned before, there is no build up to Lexa's sacrifice in Episode Four and little context around it. It's a casual dismissal of a character who was not needed any more. Similarly in Episode Two there is a long drawn out sequence of Romana getting attacked by a carnivorous plant to separate her and the Doctor. It is overly long and somewhat poorly shot, although that might have more to do with the obvious space limitations. Still, you get a sense that when the authors of the script broke down their story into episodic form, they found the cliffhangers and then found they had to pad their way between each of them and that led to the unevenness where something was slow here and rushed there.

All that being said, Episodes Two and Three are fairly engaging. Meglos doesn't dilly-dally and if it hadn't been for his being watched, he probably would have gotten away without too much effort. The interplay that Meglos is given in these two episodes are enjoyable, especially in his creep factor contrasted to the Doctor's jovial triviality. The principle problems lie in the slow development with a crammed backstory in Episode One and the rushed and poorly developed climax in Episode Four.

One other quick note. A lot of folks probably have problems with the poor green screening effects used whenever the story was on Zolfa-Thura. Admittedly, these are not great especially looking back at it 35 years later. However, I have a soft spot for these type of cheesy effects as they remind me of the similar type of cheesy effects seen in Faerie Tale Theater which I grew up on. I would also point out that unless you had a movie level budget (and sometimes even not then) these type of effects were about the best you could do. So while others might dislike them, I found them nostalgically charming.

Overall, I think Meglos is a story that would have benefited from a couple more rewrites. There is a strong kernel of a good story there and some decent casting to work with. I would imagine that if the writers knew they were going to get Jacqueline Hill for Lexa, they would have changed the dynamic of her character so I'm not going to put my disappointment regarding that on them. But there were some writing flaws as well as some directing miscues. Still, the kernel is enough that I would go back to this story a second time. It did convince me that my initial impression of it through hearsay was wrong but it would also be wrong to say that it didn't manifest different flaws in my eyes. Not overly poor but way too much potential left on the table.

Overall personal score: 3 out of 5