Remember Black Orchid? Yeah, I'd rather I didn't as well, but no point in denying what is real. Well, my point when reviewing that story was that it was hugely superfluous despite being much shorter than an average Classic Who story. Well, proving that Season 19 was the Season of Superfluity, this story also suffers from that problem, albeit at normal length (hence the title of this post). While Black Orchid was stretching itself to fit at best an episode of content into two, Four To Doomsday could maybe fill two episodes - but probably not. And this story is four episodes long. Yiiiikes.
Happily, it's not quite as bad as Black Orchid, with some vaguely interesting concepts and some hilariously bad performances to keep the interest, despite all the abject nothing going around. The problem is, you have to stagger through a lot of shit to get there, especially the first episode, which is a strong contender for the worst individual episode in Classic Who's history. Within the first five minutes, Tegan has complained enough to fill a medium length Opera, Adric has been casually sexist and made us wonder why we all got so sad when he smashed into the Earth a few stories later and Nyssa has been a complete non-entity. I can understand if they watched this episode before making the decision to reduce the number of companions.
Eventually (and I mean after a good 15 minutes of pretty much nothing of note aside from ridiculous technobabble) they meet Monarch, who looks absolutely ridiculous.
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| They look more like Silurians than the Moffat/Chibnall ones do. They're not actually Silurians of course, but who's counting? |
After a scene meeting the human inhabitants of the ship which should have taken about 2 minutes but instead takes a good 5, if not more, the two lizard people flanking Monarch in the picture above turn up - but in human form, looking like the lamest 80s pop duet of all time. And this is apparently enough of a shock for a cliffhanger. Say what you like about the Dragonfire "cliff hanger", at least there was a bit of suspense and mystery involved.
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| "Enlightenment and Persuasion" never broke through in the US charts, but they did have a couple of decent charting singles in the UK |
Over the next three episodes, we get revelation after revelation: the humans on board the ship are actually robots with the consciousness of the original humans, Monarch actually wants to destroy the Earth, and he was lying when he said a supernova destroyed his home planet, he actually did it himself, but he also wants to go back in time to meet himself when he created the universe because he thinks he's God? Eh?
I mean, don't get me wrong, at the heart of this story there's a fairly interesting idea, and the potential for some really interesting stuff surrounding Monarch: an egotistical power-mad leader so obsessed with himself that he thinks he's God is a great idea. The issue is there is absolutely no third dimension to the character and he is never even remotely likeable, which means that he's just another villain of the week. Stratford Johns puts in a hilariously over-the-top performance, which means the character isn't totally unentertaining, but given the entire story rests on top of his believability as a character, it all ends up falling flat. Also there's too many fucking sub-plots as you can see from my description above. You could have cut out two or three of the 'twists' I mentioned and lost pretty much nothing.
Enlightenment and Persuasion are about as interesting henchmen as a pair of walking blocks of wood, and all of the android human characters are similarly dull as bricks. Bigon the Greek could have been the sympathetic ally character, but instead is just a boring exposition machine. Who distractingly looks a bit like Jeremy Corbyn.
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| Try and unsee it now |
This story is of course also the Fifth Doctor's second outing, and does precisely nothing to establish his character. Peter Davison seems utterly bored throughout the entire thing, and who can blame him? The three other regulars are similarly uninterested, especially Matthew Waterhouse, and again, absolutely no blame on his part, as the script does its absolute best to make Adric as utterly unlikeable as possible. I'm not sure the audience member is meant to sympathise with Tegan when she knocks the living daylights out of him, but let me assure you, you most certainly do.
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| K.O |
Oh right, Tegan. Adric definitely takes the much-coveted 'Biggest Shitead' award for this story, but Tegan gives him a good run for his money. She spends the entire story complaining at the Doctor about everything he does and theorises, and to Peter Davison's credit, he definitely acts like someone who wants to knock her out but is resisting the urge to do so. Although how much of that is actually acting we can only theorise.
After storming off in a grump, she beats up Adric then nicks the TARDIS, actually managing to dematerialise it and creating a massive inconvenience for the Doctor. Now the obvious real reason for this is to extend the story, adding on both that 5 minute sequence, and also a large 'action' piece at the end to retrieve it out in space, but I'll humour the writer and assume that the character implications here (Tegan being frightened, out of her depth and fed up with the Doctor, which gives her a level of depth rare in companions of the era) are intentional. But again, I think it's mainly so we can have 10 minutes of the Doctor cocking about in space through the use of a very unconvincing greeenscreen. Hurrah for us.
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| "I don't feel right" |
There's nothing actively terrible here. This story's badness mainly comes from being ridiculously padded and not really having all that much good of note. There's so much worse in this season alone that it's difficult to call Four To Doomsday a terrible story, but it's very far from good and how little most of what actually happens has to do with the main plot means it just feels like a slog most of the time. Monarch is a supremely one note villain, the side characters are all dull as hell, and the regulars do their best to make themselves supremely unlikeable.
This is clearly the product of a sub-par writer. Let's see what else he did for Doctor Who, hmmmm. The King's Demons? Passable I guess. K9 and Company? Lmao. Black Orchi-
Suddenly everything makes sense.
Final Score: 2/10. Not the absolutely worst story ever made, but there aren't any likeable characters or interesting story beats going on here, and how badly it's padded makes watching it a bit of a slog. One I probably won't be watching again anytime soon.
Next Episode: Frontier in Space
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