The A-Z of Classic Who | Full Circle: Shithead Revisited

Full Circle is a perfectly watchable story, with some good moments and ideas, but eventually hampered by mediocre execution and a few bizarre choices. Maybe a hint of missed opportunity, but perfectly passable, with some enjoyable bits and far from bad.

Final Score: Huh? What? I have to write more than that? Oh for fucks sake..

Fine.

Full Circle brings us to Season 18, known as the Transition Season, also known as the Bidmead Season, also known as the Tom Baker Stopped Giving A Shit Season. Despite a great deal of promise, it was a season that ended up being painfully average and its far from coincidental that that's a good description for this story as a whole.

The problem with writing about stories like this is that describing and analysing why something is painfully average and nothing else is far harder than writing about why something is great or shit. What's bad about Black Orchid? It's dull, thinly plotted and poorly written without any interesting features, story beats or character moments. What's great about City of Death? It's ingeniously plotted, well acted, put together flawlessly and has an excellent villain at the centre of the piece. What's average about Full Circle? Errrrr...

But I'll try. Because I'm wonderful like that.

Romana was sick of The A-Z of Classic Who's shit

We'll look at the story's strengths first, and there are quite a few. The central concept is a strong enough one, the society is a believable one and the decision to avoid a straight up villain of the piece does the story credit. There's only one character who could fit the bill, and he's more of an evil scientist than a cackling villain, plus he suffers a gruesome death relatively early on. Therefore, the main characters of the piece fit in well with the moral ideas put forward. Login in particularly works a character torn between his duty to society and his daughter. This also gives him a moral compass which puts him at odds with the other higher up in the society, and this is a dynamic that is generally successful.

The Doctor and the Deciders had decided to settle down and watch an episode of Alzarius's top sop opera, Marshenders

For someone who doesn't give a shit, Tom Baker puts in a good performance, the soundtrack is for once fairly decent and the production design of the starliner fits in well with the overall tone. The story is also paced quite well.

The main strength, however, is the central plot. The Marshmen are an interesting race, which are presented as both dangerously hostile and sympathetically peaceful. It is to the story's credit that it avoids the Pocahontas route and instead presents the colonists as fearful of the Marshmen but not overly xenophobic towards them, and the story presents their fear as having a fairly solid foundation. The Marshmen aren't really any more than mindless savages - but the subplot with the Marshchild the Doctor befriends and its death doesn't mean that they can't be sympathetic.

The central plot of the starliner is a clever one and the twist at the end of the story is a pretty good one and one that makes sense in the story's context. I won't spoil it here but its safe to say the pieces are littered throughout the story and one can piece them together if one can be bothered. Again, this aspect of the story is strengthened by the fact that the main colonist characters are generally good, although not brilliant, ones.

The Marshmen were regretting going paddling in such cold weather

Let's look at the negatives. Firstly, this is the story that introduces Adric. As we have established in previous entires, Adric is a shithead who only gets a pass from being called the worst character in the show's history for two reasons: firstly because of his death and secondly because NuWho's insistence on creating awful characters has bumped him down to the point where he's probably not in the bottom 10 anymore. But make no mistake: he's an annoying shithead and his introductory story does nothing to subvert this.

SHITHEAD

He spends pretty much the entire story whinging, in his introductory scene he flat out tells someone he's better than them, he rewards the Doctor and Romana's friendly hospitality by betraying them and he contributes basically nothing to the overall resolution of the story. He's just an annoying chip in the side of the characters actually doing things in the story. As always.

That he's introduced alongside a gang of very similar bad teenage actors doesn't help. They include Adric's brother, who is such a boring and ineffectual character you barely notice when he kicks the bucket at the end of the story, and Login's daughter, who's bad acting and ineffectiveness to the story dampens Login's otherwise strong character. 

Adric was dismayed that he hadn't won the Worst Dressed competition

The story of these outcast teenagers adds nothing to the story except to bring Adric into the main cast and it actively detracts from the far more interesting stuff going on with the Marshmen and the colonists. It also serves to bring Romana away from the main plot where she could have actually served a purpose other than being possessed entirely through her own stupidity.

Oh, yeah. This is not one of Romana's finest outings, with her characteristic intelligence and wit seemingly deserting her in the face of having to return to Gallifrey. Among her achievements this story is presetting the TARDIS controls so a bunch of rowdy teenagers can use them, getting herself possessed by failing to recognise a threat from the spiders so obvious it scared the Marshmen off and then, through said possession, letting the Marshmen into the starliner to cause all sorts of problems. Lalla Ward also gives somewhat less than her best, perhaps understandable given they were actively trying to write out her character and therefore she probably had lost all the shits she gave a long time ago at this point, no doubt exacerbated by the offscreen sexual tension with Baker that everyone and their mum now knows was making production on these stories hell. Still, its a bit painful to watch given what we know she is capable of.

Oh no! A toy spider you can get at Poundland!

Also, for some reason the directing and editing of this story feels a bit off at points for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. It almost but not quite puts a dent in what is otherwise a well paced story. It succeeds despite it and its a bit odd given Peter Grimwade would go on to direct Logopolis, Kinda and Earthshock, three very well directed stories, but I'd be remiss not to mention it.

So, Full Circle overall? Its fine. What works works and what doesn't work doesn't, averaging out to create an okay story but one that doesn't ever get better than that. The central plot, some decent characters and a strong moral foundation give it a strong base to work on, but some poor plot decisions hamper it. Its probably a missed opportunity, but I'm not sure how much better it really could have been given the circumstances. Its the perfect encapsulation of Baker's final season in the role: perfectly fine, but a shadow of what the show had once been like under him, and crying out for new blood and ideas to breathe life back into the show. 

Final Score: 5/10. A perfectly fine, average romp with some strong characters and ideas, but hampered by the stupid teenager plot, some loose directing and the story probably not being as tightly plotted as it should have been. Nothing terrible but nothing great either.

Next Episode: Fury from the Deep