The Leisure Hive

Arrest the scarf then.

The Leisure Hive is the first story of the Christopher H. Bidmede era and if there is any story that defines his era, this may be it. David Fisher wrote this story in the vein of the silly Douglas Adams overseen Season 17, going so far as to envision the Foamasi as Jersey Shore style villains. Bidmede came in and slashed nearly all the comedy out of the story and reworked as much scientific techno-babble as he could. He also cut anything out that he saw as story padding. As such, this story has episodes almost as short as The Mind Robber and that includes reprises that last for 1-2 minutes. But does this slash and burn style help or hurt the overall story?

Plot Summary

The Doctor and Romana relax on Brighton Beach when K-9 short circuits himself by chasing a beach ball into the water. Romana takes him back to the Doctor and requests to go to a place with legitimate entertainment: the planet Argolis, which was turned into a recreation planet after a devastating nuclear war.

On Argolis, the chairman of the board, Morix, is trying to get additional investment from his human banker Brock. Brock is unwilling to invest himself but has an offer to buy the planet outright from the reptilian race, the Foamasi, with whom the Argolans had their nuclear war. Morix refuses to sell but dies before negotiations can continue further. Morix's wife, Mena, takes over as chairman and plans to revitalize their facilities by using anti-aging techniques developed using their expertise in tachyonics with an Earth scientist named Hardin.

The Doctor and Romana arrive on Argolis as Mena's son Pangol is giving a demonstration of their experiments in tachyonics. A member of the audience is curious and he is invited in to test it but something goes wrong and he is mortally injured. The Doctor rushes forward to help but is pulled away by a guard who mistakes him for Hardin. He and Romana are taken to Mena who suspects them of being spies (as they have no identification) and orders their arrest.

The Doctor and Romana run back to the main hall unaware that a group of Foamasi have infiltrated the hive. Romana gets back to the TARDIS but the Doctor is drawn to the Tachyonics machine where he appears to be pulled apart. Romana yells for him, alerting the guards. The Doctor emerges having used his sonic screwdriver to escape, but still revealing that it was an illusion by the machine. When brought before Mena, the Doctor and Romana reveal that they are very familiar with tachyonics and Hardin, who has just arrived, is eager for assistance, not wanting to reveal to Mena that he falsified his data and hasn't made the experiment work right yet.

Even with their help Hardin thinks about confessing the whole thing but his financial backer, Stimson, compels him to try and make it work. Stimson goes to talk to Brock in his quarters but finds them empty. He does however find a human mask and suit in the closet. Panicked, Stimson runs away into the main hall where he is strangled with the Doctor's scarf.

The Doctor, Romana and Mena all review the layout and plans for the rejuvenation techniques but encounter technical problems due to Foamasi sabotage. Mena briefly collapses due to accelerated aging brought on by the fallout of the war, but she recovers. The Doctor goes to look for the source of the sabotage while Romana goes to assist Hardin. The Doctor enters the main hall and finds his scarf around Stimson's neck. He is arrested by the guards and brought before Mena for trial. As none but circumstantial evidence can be found, Pangol suggests trial by test. Mena scoffs at this but changes her mind when Hardin and Romana enter stating that they've made the process work but only require one more test.

The Doctor is put into the tachyon machine while Hardin transfers the information from his lab. Romana goes back to the lab and discovers that their experiment reverted itself in a bad way. She runs back to stop it but Hardin has already begun the process. They stop in the middle but the Doctor emerges having turned into an old man. Pangol has the Doctor and Romana placed under house arrest and confines them to an empty suite.

Pangol does a little investigating and determines that Hardin faked his results. Mina confronts Hardin and he admits to fudging the final results but that he and Romana did make the process work. He requests and is given leave by Mina to have access to the lab to continue working. She does deny his request to have Romana assist him. Hardin however sneaks into their quarters and frees the Doctor and Romana to determine what went wrong.

With guests leaving rapidly, Brock brings up the Foamasi offer once again. Mina is still hesitant but agrees to look at the offer. Pangol suspects forgery as the documents are not issued by the government and the Foamasi government owns everything. Brock demurs, suggesting that a form of private enterprise still functions. Pangol becomes incensed and informs Brock that he is not actually a biological child of Mina (the Argolans having become sterile after the war) but a clone produced by the generator. Showing off a view of the generator, he sees the Doctor sneaking around and alerts the guards.

The Doctor, Hardin and Romana had snuck into the generator room to investigate what went wrong. Romana snuck in while the Doctor and Hardin took care of the guards. They are forced to flee when Pangol enters with his troop. He observes someone in the generator and activates it, turning the aging up to 10,000 years. However the generator is empty as a Foamasi had pulled Romana out before Pangol activated the machine.

The Foamasi takes Romana back to the lab with the Doctor and Hardin. It speaks with the Doctor and the whole group heads to the conference room. Pangol has returned to the conference room where Brock is still trying to get Mina to sign the papers. As the Doctor and his group enter, Brock panics at the sight of the Foamasi. The Foamasi grabs Brock and pulls off his mask to reveal that Brock is actually another Foamasi in disguise.

The original Foamasi reveals himself as a government agent while the fake Brock and his associate were representatives of a crime family attempting to gain control of Argolis to use it as a base of operations. The agent arrests the two and takes them to his shuttle with the intention of taking them back to the home planet for trial.

Pangol, now having whipped himself in to a frenzy with Mina's impending death, refuses to let the Foamasi go and orders the shuttle destroyed when it attempts to take off without clearance. He then sets up the tachyon generator to create a clone army of himself, prepared to go to war with the Foamasi and any other system that would oppose him.

While Pangol is setting this up, the Doctor, Romana and Hardin try to figure out how to both stop Pangol and fix the generator. The Doctor takes the randomizer out of the TARDIS and sneaks into the generator to counteract the previous sabotage. Romana realizes what the Doctor has done and tries to stop it but Pangol enters the generator and begins to make his clones. The clones, masked, step out and take her away. Once they are down the corridor, the clones take off their masks to reveal a rejuvenated Doctor. Since he had been in the machine, his essence was replicated while taking on Pangol's outfit. However, the clones are unstable and they disappear, except for the original Doctor.

Hardin discovers Mina passed out and dying in the conference room. He picks her up and decides to try and put her in the generator as a desperation attempt to keep her alive. Pangol sees what he is doing and runs into the generator after Hardin places her in and the door closes behind them. The Doctor arrives, noting that he left the generator in regeneration mode and it begins to work on both of them. The Doctor smashes the controls and a youthful Mina emerges holding Pangol, who has been reduced to a baby.

Mina vows to raise Pangol correctly this time and asks to contact the Foamasi to avoid another war. The Foamasi agent emerges, noting that the destroyed shuttle was launched by the fake Brock before the agent could board in an escape attempt. The two go to discuss arrangements between their two planets while Hardin looks after Pangol. The Doctor and Romana slip away in the TARDIS with the Doctor dismissing the threats of the Black Guardian and refusing to reinstall the randomizer.

Analysis

Despite some flaws, I rather like this story, although I can't say that much of that credit goes to either David Fisher or Christopher Bidmede. The plotline, for the most part, is fairly good but I think it is the overall atmosphere and tone that really help sell it and credit there must be given to Lovett Bickford. I also think they got a rather good cast for this story as nearly everyone sells themselves in a very believable way.

This story kicks off the season of entropy and nowhere is that better exemplified in the form of the Doctor. The producers actually got somewhat lucky in that Tom Baker had a bad case of illness in the period between seasons and came back looking rather badly. It ties in rather nicely with the way things worked out for this whole season and even beyond that, you can tell that he's pulling in his A-game. After running with just about whatever he wanted in Season 17, Tom Baker is heavily clamped down and it suits him. He presents himself in a serious manner and that adds a level of gravitas that might have been lost given the changes that were made. It also adds a bit more punch in the few and far between instances of comedy. If Bidmede made one major error, it was in cutting out the comedy completely. A few jokes sprinkled here and there (such as the scarf line) would have lightened things a touch and made the story much more palatable to regular viewers.

Romana gets a nice little arc and some good scenes here and there, although I feel like she had more scenes cut for time. Hardin always seems so insistent in working with Romana that you can't help but think they might have had a couple of more scenes showing their interaction while the Doctor did his own thing. But even with those scenes absent, it's nice to see Romana in full scientist mode and especially nice to see her being consulted as the scientific mind rather than the Doctor, freeing him for more intrigue. I do think her K-9 short circuiting reaction was a bit over the top, especially in contrast to how blasé she was when talking to the Doctor while carrying him back to the TARDIS. Still, a strong performance that I enjoyed.

Mina was the standout among the secondary characters. It's actually something of a shame that she had to spend a good portion of two and a half episodes acting like she's dying (which was well acted) because her performance when fully lucid is excellent. She's a hard driven yet compassionate woman, trying to die with dignity and grace. She does fall a bit flat in the final scene where she comes out of the generator. The whole scene is very rushed and both her and the Foamasi representative sound like they are doing a quick run through rather than a proper performance. You have to wonder if the union was threatening to cut the lights in five minutes when they filmed that scene.

I rather liked the Foamasi and I also liked the slight mystery angle where you have two criminals trying to get a deal while being pursued by a government agent. That was the better story and I rather wish that it had been drawn out just a bit longer rather than indulge in the whole bit with Pangol. I liked the design of the Foamasi and the fear that they seemed to inspire in Mina as well as the rage in Pangol. I thought they worked well as the primary villain in the first three episodes.

But then we come to Pangol and the oddity that is Episode Four. Pangol, through the first three episodes, has been shown to be arrogant and chafing for leadership. But in Episode Four, he goes totally off the rails into full totalitarian mode. With the plot revolving around finding about the Foamasi sabotage and their plans to take control of the planet, Pangol's sudden declaration of himself as the next Alexander the Great and the creation of a clone army is just a complete and total surprise.

What's more, the whole thing is a giant fizzle as it is resolved in less than fifteen minutes of show time. They are clones of the Doctor but you get the impression that even if they had been clones of Pangol they wouldn't have lasted long either. So the whole deviation is an exercise in futility. All it does is allow the Doctor to be made back to his normal self and that could easily have been done as a tie in with trying to revive Mina as the groundwork was laid for Hardin's age reversal experiments. Pangol could easily have been left as the skeptic that we've seen in many different stories only to be shocked at the end. I think it was just a very clumsy deviation.

It also might not have been that good but a better stretch would have been trying to save Mina as well as a temporary escape by the criminal Foamasi, destroying part of Hardin's work and adding that much more tension to trying to save Mina. You could have also added that the rapid aging and instability of the original tachyon experiment was causing the Doctor to become weak and die, thus the race becomes to save both him and Mina, which would actually unite Hardin, Romana and Pangol. The Foamasi agent could also contribute as it would be something of an interplanetary incident if it was known that Foamasi criminals acted in ways that led to the death of the Argolan leader. What's more, the interaction between the agent and Pangol would have formed a more natural bridge of the two planets looking to create a stable peace and comradery rather than the patch job that was shown in the last minute of the show.

There was some interesting and arty direction in this story. There was also some very shoddy direction so it's an odd mix there. Any time the story went into noir, especially with close ups and shadows, it looked really good and intense. There are also some very nice long shots from the exterior into the hive itself which I enjoyed. But then there were also other shots where there was too much lighting, giving a harsh appearance to everything. There was also the very bad blue screen of the Doctor and Romana retreating to the TARDIS in Episode One as they passed through the racquetball court. I think Barry Letts would have chided them for that shot.

The other significant problem is editing. Bidmede clearly went through and slashed everything he could that was not part of the bare bones story. That led to a number of transitions where you could just feel that more had been discussed and shot but that we weren't privy to it. In a story like this, because it was so straight-forward, that's less of an issue; but when a man who is supposed to be interested in emphasizing the science can't explain what this magic box is actually doing or why it's doing things wrong, I would say that you can take an extra minute or so to explain it. They could have had even more time by cutting back on the reprise time as well so the slash and burn that was done actually created confusion rather than effectively streamlining the story.

I got rather harsh towards the end but there is still a lot to like in this story. It's just frustrating when you see a story that could have been the stand out story of the season be reduced to a middling state. I think it also says a lot for Christopher Bidmede's approach that the story that I found the best of his season was the story that was leftover from the Philip Hinchcliff/Graham Williams transition days (State of Decay). But I do like this story a bit more than some fans and I could easily watch it again. Even the stupidity that is Episode Four has a bit of entertainment and gives enough of a run around to keep you engaged. Not a horrible start to the JNT era but less than it could have been.

Overall personal score: 3.5 out of 5