So, farewell then

Saturday, March 21^st 1981. A living room somewhere in North Wales.

A boy not quite nine years-old sits glued to his television set, just as he is every week for six months of the year. But for him, this is no ordinary day. Today something both magical and awful is going to happen.

Because today is the day when the boy’s hero dies.

Of course, he doesn’t really die. Because the boy’s hero is no ordinary hero. His hero can change his form at a whim; cheat death just when it seems that there’s no escape. And besides, the boy’s already read that that nice chap from the vet programme’s going to be his hero from now on.

But try telling that the boy. All he knows is that his hero of seven years (although he only remembers the last five) is going to die. And the boy’s never lost a member of his family before.

And - even when he does lose a member of his real family years later - it’ll never feel quite the way as this did then.

Let’s get the clichés out of the way first, shall we. ‘Logopolis’ is the end-of-an-era, the end of Tom Baker’s unparalleled seven-year stint and (if you’re being really picky) the end of Barry Letts’ on-screen contribution to Doctor Who. So many ends then that it’s little surprise there’s a funereal air hanging over not just this episode, but the whole of this story. It’s the closest (with perhaps ’Androzani’ aside) that Who fans have got to losing their hero by terminal illness: you know the end’s coming; the final moment is just a matter of time.

But in many ways the real end came some twelve months before. With the debut of its eighteenth season, Doctor Who was unrecognisable from the happy-go-lucky, made-on-a-shoe-string ‘Tom Baker show’ of the mid-to-late seventies. Out had gone the postgraduate humour and the asides to camera; in had come hard science and a subdued star. Even some of the stories looked as though they’d had proper money spent on them for once. And love or hate the short-lived Bidmead/Nathan-Turner era, you can’t deny that it had people taking Doctor Who seriously again.

Because years before a certain J Michael Straczynski had even coined the term ‘story arc’, here’s the culmination of a year-long treatise on change, decay and the terminal state of the known universe. ‘Logopolis’ - and season eighteen as a whole - is perhaps Doctor Who’s only successful foray into producing a thematically and intellectually cohesive narrative across a whole series. Forget ‘Bad Wolf’; this is the sort of layered subtext that Russell T Davies should be imbedding into his scripts.

But beyond the gravitas that a story such as ‘Logopolis’ instils, there is of course much to criticise in these final twenty-five minutes of Who’s boldest and most experimental of years up to this point. For despite the well-intentioned attempt to bring back some real science into the Doctor’s travels, the result is often clunky dialogue and clumsy rhetoric which even Tom Baker - a seven-year master of making exposition palatable - struggles to convince with. And with so many endings strewn about, it must be remembered that ‘Logopolis’ was also a time of beginnings. And the final stage in JNT’s new template for the show’s next five years: a TARDIS crewed by bickering teenagers and an over-reliance on the programme’s legacy which would swiftly come to choke its own creativity.

And that sense of change beyond recourse is no better illustrated than in Tom Baker’s swansong performance. Philip Hinchcliffe once put down the enduring success of his three halcyon years as producer to the performance of his leading man. And perhaps if you ever needed one defining reason as to why the mid-to-late seventies is the era that Joe Public most associates with their memories of Doctor Who, then it’s down to one thing: Tom Baker. In ‘Logopolis’, Baker acts as though he’s a man on the way to his own funeral (which, in a professional way, he was…at least for the next decade or so). And it’s the sheer moroseness of his central performance that dictates the tone of this final episode; and just manages to raise the story above the level of synaptically-troubling science into something truly epic.

It’s certainly no small achievement that the sheer spectacle of watching the fourth Doctor’s final fall overrides some of part four’s less cohesive elements. Such as why exactly does the Watcher take Adric and Nyssa out of time-and-space (only to allow them to return shortly after)? And does the Master really think that the entire universe is tuning-in on their trannies to hear his ransom demands? ‘Logopolis’ is hardly short on logic bypasses (episode two’s ‘flush-out-the-Master plan’, anyone?) but at least in episode four we get enough tension to override these quibbles. Or, as Spielberg once said about Jaws’ implausible denouement, ‘if I’ve got them after two hours, then I can do anything’.

Then there’s Waterhouse’s Adric, already showing signs of the irritating-little-shit collapse of his once promising character amidst the onslaught of the two girls’ arrival. And while I genuinely think that Ainley’s Master was never better than in this story (in which he only appears in two of the episodes, remember) there are still hints of the moustache-twirling panto-villain to follow. Speaking positively though, ‘Logopolis’ is unique in that it offers perhaps the most stark examination of the Doctor and the Master’s somewhat ambivalent relationship. With the Doctor almost physically repulsed by his presence one moment, and then trading intellectual Gallifreyan banter with him the next.

And in a story steeped with the foreshadowing of its hero’s fate, there are a few pointers for the show’s direction over the next few years as well. The judicious use of flashback here would soon descend into overkill, as any old excuse to raid the archives would become a Nathan-Turner signature. And the whole idea of making the Doctor’s regeneration a visual event also has its roots in this episode.

On which note, I’m not ashamed to say that it’s a moment that still makes me want to cry. Baker lying prone, with Paddy Kingsland’s ethereal music accompanying his final moments in the role, is still one of the formative images of my childhood. And as the companions and enemies of seven-years past each come to say goodbye - and the Doctor’s half Baker/half Davison transformation has him briefly resembling a baby (again reinforcing the concept’s birth/death metaphor) - there’s still a sense, twenty-five-years on, that this really was the end. And the moment, prepared for or not, really was here.

Because - to that not quite nine-year-old boy - Tom Baker was the Doctor. In fact, as Nyssa almost says, ‘he was the Doctor all the time‘.

And for the nine-year-old boy in many of us, he always will be.

(‘The Bumper Book of Made-Up Doctor Who Facts’ has this to say about ‘Logopolis’: some fans genuinely thought that the Watcher was Peter Davison dressed up. Genuinely. And some of these fans now have mortgages and families)