Full Circle

It has come full circle.

Part one of the E-Space trilogy and the introduction of Adric. I've heard good things about this, including the idea that Adric's introduction was also his best story. I can't speak to that, although I will admit that in the Adric stories I have seen, his acting is usually a bit subpar. Of course, he also has Nyssa who usually has less personality than a block of wood, to offset him, but that's a discussion for another time. Anyway, on to the story.

Plot Summary

The Doctor and Romana are returning to Gallifrey although Romana is unhappy about it. The TARDIS is suddenly caught in a bit of turbulence although no damage occurs. When it appears they have landed on Gallifrey, they find themselves on a totally different planet, the planet Alzarius. The Doctor and Romana begin to examine the TARDIS to figure out why they didn't materialize on Gallifrey.

Nearby a group of people are residing by a river. A small group of youths sneak from the underbrush and steal several river fruit that the people have gathered. Some of them give chase to the youths but they elude them and the youths gather in a nearby cave. They celebrate their theft, teasing Adric, the younger brother of Varsh, about his dreams of leaving in the starliner and his continual wearing of a badge for mathematical excellence he earned before leaving the society. Angered by this teasing, Adric vows to raid fruit by himself.

As Adric approaches the camp, the river and surrounded marsh begin to bubble and release large quantities of mist. First Decider Draith declares that mistfall is approaching and that everyone must follow established procedures. The people gather up their belongings and head back to a space craft where the other deciders and a scientist named Dexeter had been examining the river fruit, which have become infected with strange eggs.

Draith sees Adric stealing fruit and gives chase to him. Adric runs but trips, injuring his knee. Draith tries to grab him but Adric throws him off and Draith hits his head, stunning him. Draith begins to sink into the marsh. Adric tries to pull him out but an unseen force pulls harder and Draith is sucked into the river.

Injured and in shock, Adric stumbles away and discovers the TARDIS. He bangs on the doors and when Romana opens them, he collapses inside. She and the Doctor take him to a bed where Adric speaks of mistfall not being a legend as he had been told by his brother but true. The Doctor, beginning to suspect what has happened, heads out with K-9 to observe the mist. As he does so, a group of creatures begin to rise out of the water. The Doctor orders K-9 to follow the creatures while he heads off to investigate elsewhere.

Adric, fully healed from his injury, heads back to the cave where his brother and friends are. Romana has given him a homing device to find the TARDIS again should he need to. The others decide to hide in the TARDIS as they are locked out of the starliner. Adric feebly tries to stop them but fails. They enter the TARDIS as Romana had left the doors open and try to take control. Adric distracts his brother and Romana gets the drop on Tylos, although she returns his knife after holding it against his own throat as a measure of good faith. Their quarrels are put aside though when the Marshmen lift the TARDIS and drag it to the cave the youths were hiding in.

The Doctor discovers the starliner and enters using his sonic screwdriver. He is unaware that a Marshchild that he smiled at earlier is following him out of curiosity. Once inside, the Marshchild becomes agitated and scared. It attracts the attention of the people who threaten it. The Doctor also discovers it and tries to calm it down. However, the people in the ship knock the Doctor out and net the Marshchild. Both are taken before the Deciders. Second Decider Nefred has been promoted to First Decider and he and Decider Garif have asked a citizen named Login, who is also the father of one of the outliers (Kerea), to be the new Third Decider.

The Deciders elect to hold the Doctor while the Marshchild is given to Dexeter for examination. The Doctor is allowed to see Dexeter's work. The Marshchild has been put under anesthetic, allowing Dexeter to take tissue samples. The Doctor decries Dexeter's methods but does find the information interesting. He discloses to the Deciders that the marsh gasses aren't toxic, much to Login's surprise. Nefred admits that some lies are told to the people for their own protection. Login takes the Doctor aside and offers to help him get back to the TARDIS if he will help him find his daughter. The Doctor agrees.

The TARDIS is placed in a cave by the Marshmen who attempt to break in. K-9 enters the cave to observe but one of the Marshmen knocks his head off with a club. Romana and the outliers wait inside until they hear the thumping stop. Opening the door, she sees the Marshmen retreating from the cave as the river fruit have begun to burst open with spiders hatching from eggs. The outliers panic and run back into the TARDIS. Varsh closes the door, trapping Romana outside. Adric tries to open the door but accidently starts the TARDIS on coordinates preprogramed by Romana. Romana sees the TARDIS disappear. She tries to fend off the spiders with a riverfruit but it bursts open and a spider falls on to her face and bites her. She stumbles and passes out.

The TARDIS materializes inside the starliner just as the Doctor and Login were preparing to leave. The outliers exit and Login is delighted to see Kerea again. The Doctor grabs Adric and the two go back into the TARDIS to return to the cave. The other three are arrested and taken before the Deciders. The Doctor and Adric return to the cave and collect Romana and K-9's body (his head having been taken by the Marshmen as a new club). Romana is infected with a psychotropic toxin. She does not remember the Doctor but now has a mental link with the Marshmen.

The three return to the starliner and the Doctor heads back to see the Deciders while Adric waits with Romana. The Deciders have elected to give Dexeter permission to conduct experiments on the Marshchild and he prepares to slice into it's skull while awake. The Doctor, observing over a viewscreen, shouts at him to stop but Dexeter ignores him. As the blade bites, Romana gives a scream of pain and the Marshchild bursts from it's restraints. It kills Dexeter and begins to smash the lab. It sees the Doctor on the screen and remembers him as a friend. It tries to grab him but smashes through the screen and electrocutes itself.

Furious at their actions, the Doctor points out that they could have left at any time as the ship is ready. Login is stunned by this but Nefred admits that although the ship is ready, they don't know how to fly it. This surprises the Doctor and he heads up to the lab to check on a theory. Before he can validate it, Adric finds him and tells him that Romana has gone. They head back to the TARDIS to look for her but figure that she has left. Romana has snuck below to the emergency hatches and opens them to allow the Marshmen in. The Marshmen begin to attack the people and the ship.

The Deciders attempt to herd the people into secure locations within the ship while the Doctor is attacked by a Marshmen using K-9's head as a club. He disarms that Marshman but others come. They stop when Romana appears, acting like one of them. The Doctor manages to appeal to a small part of her old self by motioning towards the TARDIS, which distracts both her and them. He then heads back to the lab to develop a serum to cure Romana. The Deciders waffle on whether to try and take off but the Marshmen breach the book room and begin to attack. One smashes Nefred on the head and the other two Deciders carry him out. They find a new safe room where Nefred reveals to the other two that they cannot go back to their home planet because they were never from there to begin with. He dies shortly afterwards.

The Marshmen break into the lab just as the Doctor finishes developing the serum. Attempting to fend them off, he discovers that they cannot adapt to the atmosphere when large volumes of oxygen are released into it. Adric, Varsh and Kerea grab oxygen tanks and drive the Mashmen back. Romana, having followed them, collapses due to the atmospheric change and the Doctor gives her the serum. He then continues his studies of the cell structure of the Marshmen with Kerea helping him.

Adric and Varsh drive the Marshmen further away but their oxygen tanks begin to run out. Adric runs back to the lab to grab more while Varsh holds his ground. The Doctor goes with him and also finds Decider Login. He tells Login to flood the ship with oxygen as that will drive the Marshmen away. He does so, but before it takes effect, Varsh is overrun by the Marshmen. Adric tries to pull him out of the room and behind a closing door but he is unable and Varsh is killed. The Marshmen begin to flee out the emergency exits and they are resealed once they are gone.

In the aftermath, with Romana recovered, the Doctor informs Login and Garif that they are actually descendants of the Marshmen. The Marshmen evolved from the river fruit spiders and when the starliner crashed, a group of Marshmen got aboard. Cut off from their fellows and in a different atmosphere, they evolved into their current form, a secret contained within the files only given to the First Decider. The Doctor shows them how to launch the ship as Login and Garif have decided that they should leave as that is what they have been preparing for.

The Doctor and Romana return to the TARDIS with a repaired K-9. The Doctor discovers a new optical circuit that Adric had stolen and given to the Doctor. He installs it to see the starliner lift off. He also tells Romana that they passed through a CVE and are trapped in E-space, an area with a negative spacial dimension. They take off in an attempt to find another CVE that will allow them to return to normal space. They also are unaware that after returning the optical circuit, Adric stayed aboard.

Analysis

Taken as a whole, this is a good story. It does have some unfortunate flaws that keep it from being great, but it definitely better than average. I will admit that I think it was built up a little too much in my mind by some of the things I had heard about it and that left me a little underwhelmed.

The Doctor is very good in this. The Doctor is rather dour in Season 18 stories, in keeping with the mood of the season, but here that mood lifts a bit and you can see some of that old childish spirit come back. You can also see some of the outrage come back in his fury with both Dexeter and his methods as well as the Deciders for their deliberate deceptions. He is quite enjoyable and the only downside is how little he is actually seen, especially in Episode One.

The Deciders were all also very good. George Baker gets special attention as Decider Login since he is the most well known actor and had the largest part. But Draith and Nefred were also quite good. It is never explicitly stated, but there is a bit of a suggestion that Draith might be Adric and Varth's father. That gives his death scene a bit more poignancy and doubles the overall tragedy of Adric given that both his father and brother were dragged out of his hand to their deaths. Nefred was also quite good as a man who clearly had the weight of hard secrets on his shoulders. He was excellent at portraying a man who might be doing the wrong thing but always trying for the good of the society as a whole and I appreciate that level of performance.

Still, it is hard not to give great praise to George Baker as Decider Login. He was quite well done as a practical man thrust into leadership. He also functions very well as a pseudo-companion with his ignorance of the situation having just been promoted. He asks the questions that you would not expect from Romana and Adric is not around to ask. He didn't have to give a great deal of emotional range but he played off Tom Baker very well and the two made an excellent team.

The direction in this story was also excellent and made up for what could have been several deficiencies. It's always nice to see a story on film so there is a plus there. The filming of the Marshmen was always done with a bit of shadow in the right areas and it made them much more believable and scary. About the only part that didn't work were some of the close up shots of the Marshchild. Those were hard to avoid but it was much easier to see the edges of the mask in those cases. The spiders were another scene where the direction and film style made up for what could have been a very cheesy effect. The spiders were puppets and that couldn't be avoided. But the direction was such that they gave a real vibe and it would be easy to get creeped out by them if you have a genuine hang up about spiders.

The overall story was pretty good too. There was a nice bit of action, but the overall mystery of what the colonists actually were is what drove the story. I suspected that the people would be related to the Marshmen but I wasn't convinced enough that I was constantly interested in seeing what came next. You can't get a much better driver to a story than that. The dialogue was fairly whit-y and managed to avoid long expositional scenes. Even moments where Login (and the audience) was being brought up to speed, the dialogue flowed naturally and not in a grand info dump or "lets repeat things we already know" way. I thought it a well written and well paced story.

All that being said, the outliers nearly bring this story to a crashing halt. If there is a major drawback to this story, it is them. The actor who plays Varsh isn't too bad, but the other three are near dreadful. I had heard that some consider this Adric's best story and it might be from a character point of view, but it certainly not from the standpoint of his acting ability. Overall, I think Kerea was the worst, followed shortly by Tylos and then Adric. All three of them are stiff and remind me of school play acting. There are pauses in dialogue with no natural lead ins, emotional jumps from nowhere and yet they all still come across as boring.

The scene where they attempt to take over the TARDIS is particularly bad as they never can seem to get a handle on how to play it. It doesn't help that Romana, who isn't great in this story, still runs rings about them in acting ability. When she holds the knife on Tylos, you can see her express her meaning and menace in only how she moves and how she uses her eyes. Tylos meanwhile tries to express his fear but is so clearly overmatched that it just wastes her efforts in this scene. It's a real waste of a good effort by Romana and that is a shame.

Another moment in this story that underwhelmed me was Varsh's death. I had heard about it before, including his scream for Adric and I was expecting a bit more out of the scene. It plays fairly well but I had imagined Varsh screaming for Adric as the Marshmen actually attacked him in more of a plaintive wail rather than a yell down a hall to hurry and help him. His yell there made his near silence as he is dragged beneath the closing door a bit anti-climatic. I think it would have played better if he had screamed as he was pulled from Adric's grasp. I also think the scene played a bit odd in how fast he died. After losing his grip. Adric immediately jumps up and turns the wheel to open the door. We find the Marshmen gone and Varsh's body lying there. It happened so fast that it loses it's effect because it is less believable. If Adric had had more trouble opening the door or Varsh had been dragged down a shaft where they would have had to find him later, that would have given it more effect. Some of this is my own hang up because the imagination played it differently that what actually happened, but it does feel like a lost opportunity. Having Kerea come in with a very wooden giving of Varsh's belt to Adric as a memorium didn't help the situation either.

Overall, I think the good fairly outweighs the bad on this one. It is not excellent, though it had that potential. But it is still good enough to go back and watch again. I think it would be even better if you didn't have the specter of Adric as a companion lingering over the story, but that's a minor quibble. I don't know if I would expressly seek this one out to watch again, but I certainly wouldn't mind if someone else put it on.

Overall personal score: 3.5 out of 5