|
BBC Meglos |
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| Episodes | 4 |  |
| Story No# | 111 | |
| Production Code | 5Q | |
| Season | 18 | |
| Dates | Sept. 27, 1980 - Oct. 18, 1980 |
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With Tom Baker, Lalla Ward,
John Leeson as the voice of "K9". Written by Andrew McCullouch. Script-edited by Christopher H. Bidmead. Directed by John Flanagan. Produced by John Nathan-Turner. Executive Producer: Barry Letts. |
| Synopsis: A shape-changer impersonates the Doctor, and leaves him accused of murder and heresy. |
Overlooked a little too often by Tom May 20/5/98
"I like his coat!" Brotadac, on the Doctor
One of the many surprises thrown up by the recent DWM poll was the position of the often overlooked Meglos: 138th. Meglos appears in a very consistent Season, although only Warriors' Gate is a true classic from Season 18. Meglos, in contrast to The Leisure Hive, is a barrel of laughs. The two stories are so different in every way that I tend to imagine Meglos as a late Season 17 tale -- a fleeting reminder of the pros and cons of the Williams Era.
As a big fan of Seasons 15 to 17, I enjoy Meglos a lot. It has a similar feel to The Creature From The Pit, a story that grows on you -- as does Meglos. The concepts lean dangerously on the Technobabble side, but why not? It all provides a humour that the other six tales of the season lack. The only things people comment on about Meglos are the Chronic Hysteresis (which is fun) and the fact that Meglos himself, is cactus-covered.
The eponymous doppelganger is a very good, powerful advesery for Romama and The Doctor, but then again, he was played by Tom Baker. The two hapless Gaztaks are amusing and unsurprisingly, have a nice little confrontation with K9. Brotadac's constant dreams of having the Doctor's new (since the previous story) coat are a little unrealistic, but personally I have to say it's in keeping with the style of the story, which works.
It seems JNT had yet to really get to grips with production of Doctor Who yet, and the tone is comicly reminiscent of Season 17, with Tom Baker giving a gloriously grandiose performance, revelling in his last chance to play for laughs as the Doctor. Lalla Ward is, as ever, stunningly good as Romana, having quite a lot to do here. Jacqueline Hill appears as Lexa, but sadly dosen't match her performances as Barbara Wright in the '60s. The Dodecahedron (if that's the spelling!) is a good and curious artefact, and is central to the ending.
There is good visual work here -- after all, it's Season 18, and I find the music suitably absurd -- witness the Sound Effects when Meglos roars "I AM MEGLOS!" The dialogue is occasionally ridiculous ("Having lived in the future, I can hardly die in the present."-Meglos), sometimes cliched, but mostly great ("Let's hope many hands will make the lights work," and "He sees the threads that join the universe together, and mends them when they break."-Zastor, on the Doctor).
There's nothing poor at all about Meglos, yet somehow it fails to fully satisfy. 7/10
A Review by Stuart Gutteridge 20/6/99
Meglos is the one story in Season 18 that always gets slated and quite frankly it isn`t hard to see why. After the triumph,that was The Leisure Hive, Meglos comes as something of a letdown. For a start the visuals are terrible in comparison, the Tigellan jungle isn`t really any different from any other seen in Doctor Who and the whole thing has a dated feel to it.
The acting isn`t that much better either, the Gaztacs and the Earthling seem totally unnecessary, and it isn`t explained why Meglos needs them. Brotadac is the worst offender, his only interest being in The Doctor`s coat, and Grugger doesn`t fare much better; kicking K-9 doesn`t add anything. Jacqueline Hill gives a competent performance as Lexa, a role not really worthy of her talents.
There are some plus points to Meglos however, the first being the storyline concerning the conflict between science and religion a theme carried throughout the tale. Tom Baker and Lalla Ward is another; it is particularly interesting to see how Baker differentiates between the characters of The Doctor and Meglos; the doppleganger idea itself though is unoriginal even being suggested as the basis for a story (the Doctor has an evil son) by William Hartnell at one stage. Overall, Meglos is a disappointing tale, in an otherwise excellent season.
No no no!!! by Mike Jenkins 18/3/02
The person who reviewed this story before me said that Meglos was (and I quote) "A disappointing story in an otherwise good season". I would say it's the other way around. Meglos is a CLASSIC in an otherwise boring season. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's just that for a Graham Williams groupie like myself, the JNT 'it has to be serious' stuff tended to wear a bit thin. Particularly after Tom left. Let's face it, after Tom, it was a different show. It was good, but it was a different show. It might be all the eggnog I've drunk but the wonderfully cliched villiany in Meglos, the creature that is, and his woefully inadequate henchmen, not to mention the way Tom plays off of everyone. There are some moments where it pretends to be serious and they are the best of all because they are the most funny. I've always wondered if DNA (Douglas Noel Adams that is) wrote this under another pseudonym, as he did with City of Death. And where this story may not live up to that one, it's very close and easily the highlight of this overly serious season.
What was the point? by Tim Roll-Pickering 11/11/02
The new look Season 18 continues with another story that feels like a left-over that has been destroyed through rewrites and creative conflicts. Meglos is a very difficult story to categorise, being a terrible mixture of doppleganers, the all too familiar religion versus science conflict and a runaround with a bunch of intergalactic space pirates. The result is a confusing mess that is difficult to follow and leaves the viewer wondering what it's all about.
The story is immensely slow, with the Doctor and Romana literally frozen out of the main events until well into Part Two. Very little effort is made to flesh out the individual characters, with the result that they all come across as weak and ineffective. Meglos himself is an interesting idea but it is exceptionally hard to understand just how a giant cactus has been able to survive and plot for so long. Also unclear at times is the importance of the 'Earthling' to Meglos' plans or what might have happened had the Earthling been a different size from the Doctor. The middle parts of the story are little more than a runaround on Tigella, before the final part which focuses on Zolfa-Thura and sees the Doctor and Meglos each impersonate the other and try to win through. It is puzzling that when Romana, K9 and the Tigellans reach the cell holding the Doctor and Meglos, the latter makes no attempt to pretend he is the real Doctor and thus escape from the planet. Finally the whole thing ends in an explosion and coy ending back on Tigella as the Doctor and Romana offer to get the Earthling back in time for tea before they answer the summons from Gallifrey.
The guest cast is noticeably weak in this story, with virtually no performances standing out at all. Former companion Jacqueline Hill plays Lexa, a role far removed from Barbara, but brings so little to the part that one wonders if it would have been an improvement had someone else been cast. Bill Fraser manages to inject a little life into General Grugger but the character is over the top at times and ultimately fails. Ultimately the main performance is Tom Baker's dual role as the Doctor and Meglos. The former remains a subdued ageing individual, as he was in The Leisure Hive, whilst the latter at times behaves like a pantomime villain. Although it makes it clear throughout just which is which, it does little to enhance the story.
Production wise Tigella is a mixture of straightforward interior sets and an artificial studio jungle, whilst the Gaztak ship and the Zolfa-Thuran sets are equally cheap. However the video effects are an improvement, most obviously the surface of Zolfa-Thura where CSO is used but techniques are in place to allow actors to move around objects and thus the environment feels a lot less artificial than before. This is however the only noticeable feature of an uneasy dreary story that is best forgotten. It is unsurprising that, at the time of writing, this story is the only one from the 1980s that has yet to be released on video. 1/10
A Review by Will Berridge 10/3/03
It’s easy to see why Meglos is the ‘forgotten story’ of season 18 (in fact it seems to be the joint-least reviewed surviving story on this site), as it doesn’t convey anything like the sense of importance that accompanied the two epic trilogies that followed it.
The Zolpha-Thura side of the plot actually starts of rather well, the series reaching its far-fetched best, as the Gaztaks, entering Meglos’ control room, try to figure out where their host’s voice is emanating from and find themselves staring at a large plastic cactus. ‘Yes’ it responds ‘I am a plant. A xerophyte, to be precise.’ It could only happen on Dr. Who. The villain’s not only a giant cactus, it’s a giant cactus that likes using big words. The audacity of it. Having him impersonate the Doctor most of the adventure was a bit of a cop-out though, and giving him a control centre designed for humanoids was a big oversight. (Almost every being in the Dr Who universe is humanoid, and those that aren’t metamorphose into one as soon as they can. You just can’t get any cactuses that can act, can you?) The Gaztaks themselves are loveable rogues, and succeed for many of the same reasons as the slaver crew in the same season’s Warriors' Gate, though Grugger doesn’t have Rorvik’s manic edge, and you suspect they’re really only there to provide the light entertainment, especially when, amongst other things, they’re too thick too work out where the extra burgundy coat came from.
Being acted for laughs is, however, preferable to just being laughably acted, as all the Tigellans are, bar Lexa, whose one dimension is brought out well enough by Jackie Hill. Caris is woeful, especially when trying to show distress or astonishment (watch out for her frequent expressions of gobsmacked awe, especially in the ‘ultimate impossibility’ scene), and whoever’s playing her should be acting in Wizadora. Deedrix, too, is acutely painful, particularly when he scoffs smugly at the Deon’s beliefs. And whatever giving the savants less than convincing blonde wigs was meant to achieve, it doesn’t. But if they’re bad (they are), Zastor is much, much worse, a character whose relatively promising lines could have been read with more conviction by a tellytubby.
It might be a tad spurious of me to rant on about the inability of the guest cast, as (a) I can’t act to save my life (b) plenty of the series’ stories filled with dull incidental characters have been redeemed by magnificent performances from whoever’s acting the Doc, especially in the case of the great Tom Baker. However, this story unfortunately sets a (rather obscure) Doctor Who record - for the longest time it takes any of the TARDIS crew to exit the time machine, which doesn’t happen until midway through the 2nd Episode. (It would be running Castrovalva pretty close, but in this Adric’s actually outside the TARDIS the whole time. And they never leave it in The Edge of Destruction, so this doesn’t count.) And half the TARDIS scenes the Doctor, Romana and K9 appear in are in fact the same scene, as a result of Meglos’s ingenious ‘chronic hysteretic loop’ (if the word ‘hysteretic’ does exist, then I don’t know how to spell it.) Being able to play the same piece of film 8 times (if you include the reprise, I think) must have done a lot for the budget, though. Unfortunately it also wastes entirely the two best characters in the story, Romana achieving little in plot terms at all, and the Doctor just managing to provide someone convenient for Meglos to impersonate, and turn up and the end to ensure the villains get blown up. At least Baker made up for this by turning in a sublime performance as Meglos, relishing in ‘old favourite’ lines like ‘this is only the beginning…’ and conveying a traditionally arrogant and insane quality within an utterly one-dimensional character. And bringing arrogance and insanity to a cactus is quite an achievement.
Embarrassingly enough, I like this story for a series of traditional reasons - likeable villains, insane villains, some of the more hilariously bad acting (Didn’t you realise Deedrix, Zastor and Caris were meant to be self-conscious parodies of badly acted characters all along? Oh…), and the direction of those with the ‘screens’ of Zolpha-Thura which I find stimulating for some highly unfathomable reason. It’s a pity the crapness inevitably shines through in other aspects of the story. 7/10
A Review by Paul Williams 12/5/03
With a few exceptions fandom has been harsh on Meglos. The acting, the sets, the characters and the script have all been criticised, perhaps a little bit unfairly. Jacqueline Hill's performance as Lexa is a case in point. This isn't bad, merely average and should not be compared with her acting as Barbara fifteen years earlier. If we are making comparision with other stories then let's look at the preceeding season seventeen. Is the acting of the characters on Tigella any worse than those on Skaro, Chloris and Eden? I think not.
The sets are indeed awful, especially the jungle plants which don't even look dangerous although Lalla Ward does a more convincing job than the Gatzeks in making them appear so. Even the Eden jungle was more convincing than this. A previous reviewer highlighted the implausibility of Meglos having humanoid controls in his ship. Unless of course his people had enslaved others from neighbouring planets in the past. Still the crime of bad sets was one committed in many other previous, and later stories.
Now we come to the characters. Meglos is a delight, and not just when played by Tom. He comes accross as one of the better villains in the season and makes up for the ineptitude of his servants. The earthman seems irrevelant to the plot. If Meglos can copy the Doctor's body from a video screen then why can't he do that to anyone. The characters on Tigella suffer, like the TARDIS crew in episode one, from a lack of action in episode four. The death of Lexa was completly pointless and not even dwelt upon. Meglos aside, the characters created for this story can easily be forgotten.
It is the script which is both the best and the worst part of this story. Episode one, despite the absence of the regulars, could have been fantastic. The scene is set well on Tigella and on Zolfa-Thura but better editing would have interspersed these scenes to create more tension. Padding, such as the endless reptition of the same TARDIS scene, the jungle chases and the mental battle between Meglos and the earthman occurs frequently in parts two and three. Somewhere en route the story forgets about the conflict between science and religion and becomes a standard run-around with a villain grabbing an impossibily advanced weapon. This sits uneasily on the fence between the silly sesason seventeen and the serious season eighteen.
The high points of the script lie in some of the dialogue and in fantastic cliffhangers to episodes one and three. The "Oh, but he does" line is a chilling moment, offering hope for the remainder which is rarely fulfilled. Nevertheless Meglos is not as bad as it is described.
A Review by Paul Rees 1/9/03
I find Meglos to be one of the less successful of Tom Baker's serials: it's rather dull, it drags a little and the whole thing is just unengaging.
I think the main problem is that Meglos is not quite sure what it wants to be. There are moments of silliness which are reminiscent of the preceding 'pantomime' season; however, the production values and Baker's measured performance are more in tune with John Nathan Turner's 'harder-edged' ethos. As a result, you have an unsatisfying mixture of farce and realism. In particular, several things appear to have been included primarily for comedic effect, and seem oddly out of place: for example, how does Meglos trap the TARDIS crew in a time loop? And how do the TARDIS crew manage to escape from it, merely by 'going through their lines'?
The central premise - a cactus attempting to take over the universe - sounds like the plot from a very bad B-movie. It is, indeed, impossible to take seriously - unlike the similarly themed Seeds of Doom. As if aware of this, the guest cast seem to be just going through the motions - even Jacqueline Hill fails to shine - and I am, by this point, tiring of Romana's desire to be a 'mini-me Doctor'. We also have the perennial religion/science divide, inserted this time a little clumsily into the plot. These sort of issues were explored much more effectively and sensitively in stories such as Planet of Fire and The Daemons.
Whilst the guest cast are lacklustre, the lead actor turns in an astonishing dual performance. Tom Baker is simply wonderful here as Meglos; it's a timely reminder of what an accomplished actor he actually is. The idea of the Doctor having a doppleganger who has already betrayed those whom the real Doctor has come to help is an interesting one, and much less contrived than the Massacre's 'what a coincidence, there's this chap who looks just like the Doctor!' story line.
I must also mention the production values, which are generally pretty high: the set design and the musical score in particular are worthy of praise. We do see some dodgy CSO (especially in the first and the last episodes) but by no means is it the worst realised Who story.
Despite these positives, however, I'm not a great fan of Meglos. It does have potential and Baker is excellent, but it just seems to fall generally flat. Much style, but little substance. 6/10
A Review by Thomas Tillier 11/11/05
As we all know, Meglos is the shadowy story of season 18 but it is significant for some reasons. Firstly, it is Chris Bidmead's first fresh script (Lesiure Hive and State of Decay don't count) and secondly it is the end of an era really (before the arrival of Adric). True, the design of the story is poor but so were others (Underworld anybody?).
Meglos is a nice little story that trundles along but is far from perfect, but can you tell me a perfect Doctor Who?