The first line of dialogue we hear on the planet Tigella is “It’s going to blow!”, and most fans begin watching Meglos thinking the exact same thing. It’s nobody’s favourite Season Eighteen story, and incoming script editor Christopher H Bidmead has always been upfront that he commissioned it in a hurry and wasn’t happy with the result. Strangely, despite being commissioned by Bidmead, writers John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch seem to be deliberately writing for Bidmead’s precursor Douglas Adams. The Gaztak mercenaries could have come straight out of Adams’s script for The Pirate Planet, their kidnapping of a bewildered human accountant (played, apparently, by Jacob Rees-Mogg) is pure Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the story’s central theme of science versus religion is firmly within Adams’s atheistic wheelhouse.
Still, change in Doctor Who is a gradual process. There are plenty of perfectly good stories that feel like throw-backs to a previous era. What makes Meglos so unpopular is the fact that it makes so little sense. If you’re the kind of person who gets agitated over the alien life-cycles in Prometheus, please turn away now: the titular Meglos is the last Zolfa-Thuran, a race of intelligent cacti. His base is full of controls designed for human hands, his mercenaries – the Gaztaks – are humanoid, and the inhabitants of the nearby planet Tigella are also humanoid. In order to carry out his plan, Meglos needs a humanoid life-form, but where can he possibly find one? The Gaztaks decide they have no option but to travel to Earth and abduct a human, who Meglos then merges himself with, creating a cactus-man. From this launchpad, Meglos can turn himself into an exact replica of the Doctor by looking at a photo of Tom Baker until the human reasserts himself, at which point Meglos makes his escape as a sort of a sea cucumber.
Jacqueline Hill hovers a decent distance above the material as a Tigellan priestess, but otherwise the forces of reason and superstition are equally matched in how boring they are.
You could fairly question whether anyone could structure a plot like this, but if anyone can, Flanagan and McCulloch can’t. The ground work is fundamentally lazy – both the Tigellans and Meglos have previous knowledge of the Doctor, which excuses the writers from having to properly set up the relationships. This could be forgiven if the time saved was spent doing something interesting, but there is a phenomenal amount of padding in the first two episodes of Meglos, to the point where episode three feels like a pretty solid episode one. Eventually all this wheel-spinning and time-wasting becomes self-reflexive. Meglos traps the Doctor and Romana in a time loop, which they get out of by reciting the dialogue from the moment they’re stuck in at a speed which outpaces the loop. It’s the kind of challenge that normally ends with a cut back to Greg Davies and Alex Horne in the studio.
Given all this, I was surprised to find myself enjoying Meglos. It’s not the best story of the season, but it’s far from the worst either. The messing-around in the first two episodes is at least buoyed by having Tom Baker and Lalla Ward doing it; imagine if this story had aired followed her departure, and we had to watch Baker and Matthew Waterhouse slowly driving each other mad inside the TARDIS. If the leads are on fine form, the supporting cast are more variable. Jacqueline Hill hovers a decent distance above the material as a Tigellan priestess, but otherwise the forces of reason and superstition are equally matched in how boring they are. As the Gaztaks, Bill Fraser and Frederick Treves give the kind of reaction shots that suggest they were waiting for gifs to be invented, but Baker is surprisingly restrained. His villainous performance as Meglos is only a hair nastier than his Doctor in a bad mood, a self-critical note that – in its own way – contributes as much to the end-of-era feel of Season Eighteen as anything in the more ostentatiously doom-laden stories.
Lalla Ward is truly iconic. I’d always liked her Romana but mostly because of the truly great stories she was in, like City of Death. Watching the bad stories, though, makes it palpable what she brought to the show. When Tom is at his most wayward and self-indulgent, she feels more like the Doctor than he does. On encountering the Gaztaks, she takes their threat seriously but is also completely confident in her ability to outwit them, which feels like the fundamental promise of the show restated, that brutality will always be defeated by brains. That’s useful, because there aren’t many other areas where Meglos displays a keen intellect. But in its ridiculousness, there is still something of the spirit of Doctor Who encapsulated. There are better stories which could slot seamlessly into a thousand other science fiction series, but no other show could have a scene where a room full of space pirates gradually realise they are talking to a massive sentient cactus. How can you not find a little joy in that?
Next: Full Circle (1980)
