Meglos
A power crisis in the underground habitat of the planet Tigella revives an age-old debate between science and religion. Tigella’s scientists want to examine their power source, the otherworldly Dodecahedron, more closely to see if it can help to avert the impending crisis that would force the Tigellans back to their planet’s uninhabitable surface. But the planet’s religious faction, led by Lexa, refuses to allow anyone access to the Dodecahedron, which they claim is a sacred relic. Zastor, Tigella’s leader, comes up with an unorthodox compromise: call for the Doctor’s help. But just as the TARDIS responds to the call, another plan is set into motion: Meglos, the last surviving member of the cactus-like Zolpha-Thuran race, has enlisted the aid of Gaztak pirates to take over the physical form of a hapless human. Once Meglos has this ability, he uses it to impersonate the Doctor, go to neighboring Tigella, and steal the Dodecahedron for himself. To ensure that the real Doctor doesn’t interfere with his plan, he traps the TARDIS in a chronic hysteresis – a time loop – from which the Doctor and Romana have to devise an ingenious escape. But by the time the real Time Lords arrive, the damage is done – the Dodecahedron is missing, and the Doctor is arrested for the gravest crime possible on Tigella.
written by John Flanagan & Andrew McCulloch
directed by Terence Dudley
music by Peter Howell and Paddy KingslandGuest Cast: Edward Underdown (Zastor), Jacqueline Hill (Lexa), Crawford Logan (Deedrix), Colette Gleeson (Caris), Bill Fraser (Grugger), Frederick Treves (Brotadac), Simon Shaw (Tigellan Guard), Christopher Owen (Earthling)
Notes: This marks the only time that a former companion has returned to televised Doctor Who in a completely different role. Jacqueline Hill was one of the three original TARDIS travelers, Barbara Wright, in the earliest seasons of the series. Guest star Bill Fraser made himself infamous by claiming, during the publicity for Meglos, that he only took the part of General Grugger on the condition that he would get to kick K-9 onscreen. Apparently he was such a good adversary for the robot dog that he took on K-9 without the Doctor around to stop him in K-9 & Company.
Original Title: The Last Zolfa-Thuran
Broadcast from September 27 through October 18, 1980
LogBook entry & review by Earl Green
Imbued with the energy of anti-time and possessed by the power-mad Zagreus, the Doctor wrestles for self-control and terrifies Charley into hiding within the TARDIS. A familiar face appears to Charley as she hides – the Brigadier, or, more precisely, a TARDIS-projected simulation of Lethbridge-Stewart intended to help her. Its method of doing so, however, is unorthodox to put it mildly: Charley must divine the true nature of the increasingly disastrous situation from a series of metaphors, ranging from her own childhood to a visit to Gallifrey’s past to an insane amusement park where animatronic cartoon characters are slaughtering one another. The Doctor, too, hears from some familiar voices in his own past, coaxing him to regain control of his own mind. But all too late, the Doctor realizes that his body and soul are not Zagreus’ only battleground, and the real battle for the fate of the entire universe is only now being joined.
The Doctor lands his TARDIS just outside the office of the President of the Time Lords, and whisks President Romana and her K-9 unit away to Earth to see to unfinished business. At St. Cedd’s College, Cambridge, an elderly Time Lord refugee going by the name of Professor Chronotis has summoned the Doctor to help him return a book, “The Ancient and Worshipful Law of Ancient Gallifrey”, to the Time Lords themsevlves. His plan to have the Doctor do this for him, this preserving his anonymity, has one major snag: Chronotis appears to have accidentally loaned the book out to one of his students, Chris Parsons. Before the Doctor can locate the book, Parsons and his friend Clare Keightly have already figured out that there’s something strange and perhaps even dangerous about the book. And something dangerous is certainly on the trail of the book – a megalomanical criminal named Skagra, using his mind-draining sphere, will stop at nothing to find Chronotis and the book. He hopes to use the book to find the well-hidden Time Lord prison planet, Shada – and once there, he hopes to drain the mind of the Time Lords’ most dangerous criminal, Salyavin, using his knowledge to take over every sentient mind in the universe.
A powerful coalition of time-traveling races monitors access to history, stopping newly-emergent time travelers and redirecting them to the planet Gryben for “processing” – though that process often strands them there permanently. That logjam of stranded time travelers has given rise to a new movement – Free Time – seeking to force these temporal superpowers to allow free access to the timeways.
A summit of the temporal superpowers is scheduled on a secluded artificial planetoid, and Coordinator Narvin is sent by President Romana to represent the Time Lords. Going with him, barely camouflaged, are Leela and K-9. But the out-of-place savage and her robotic dog aren’t there to protect Narvin; Romana has personally charged them with rooting out those responsible for an expected attempt to disrupt the conference. Leela does indeed find danger lurking, but all is not as it seems. Is someone sabotaging the summit to ensure its success?
An inquiry begins regarding the timeonic fusion weapon, President Romana’s unorthodox measures to locate and retrieve it, and her apparent inability to do so – or even, for that matter, to prove that it ever existed. But curiously, the Matrix, the repository of all Gallifreyan knowledge, seems to differ with the established record – a visual document exists of the weapon being created, and even test detonated, by the Time Lords themselves. Cardinal Braxiatel admits that research was carried out, in which he himself participated, but no test of the weapon ever occurred. When Romana digs deeper to find out why the Matrix records conflict with his account, a computer virus is unleashed which Romana’s K9 is barely able to contain – and if he fails, or his batteries run out, that virus will lay waste to Gallifrey’s computer-dependent society. And while she is trying to eavesdrop on Romana’s behalf, Leela discovers how her husband Andred died…and who killed him.
A most curious assortment of travelers boards a train bound from Munich to Switzerland in 1939. Romana and Leela are traveling incognito, but so is swindler and arms dealer Mephistopheles Arkadian, who Romana interrogated during the Gryben crisis. He promises to give her vital information regarding that incident if she and the Time Lords turn the other cheek for only three hours and let him have his way with history. Arkadian’s specific historical interest revolves around a young woman on the train, a Nazi sympathizer named Cecilia Pollard – the sister of Charlotte Pollard, the Doctor’s traveling companion when he was last seen before vanishing into the divergent universe. While Romana uneasily agrees to Arkadian’s terms, she can’t speak for the Time Lords’ Celestial Intervention Agency, and no sooner do Narvin and Torvald appear then things start to go disastrously wrong. Time itself jumps the tracks, creating two parallel timelines – and somehow Leela and Cecilia Pollard have become stranded in the newly created alternate history, along with a Time Lord who has his own murderous intentions. Romana and Narvin are left to wring information out of Arkadian – and hope that Leela can gain enough of an awareness of what’s happened to help them heal the timeline. But Leela is preoccupied with a problem of her own: she has found the man she believes to be responsible for her husband’s death, but at a point in his own timeline before he committed the murder. And if killing him now will prevent that from happening, Leela is prepared to do it – and history be damned.
The body of the mutilated Time Lord from Davidia is returned to Gallifrey in stasis – and in complete secrecy – for further study. Romana and Braxiatel discover that the experiment of opening Gallifrey’s doors to other temporal superpowers may have unintended consequences; one of Braxiatel’s alien students is caught trying to poison Gallifrey’s water supply in the name of the Free Time movement. Complicating matters even more is the fact that he’s caught by Andred, who is still on the run after having broken out of his imprisonment. The question of whether or not Romana will appoint Braxiatel to be the new Chancellor of the High Council is at the heart of Inquisitor Darkel’s latest political power grab, as she plays all sides against the middle and finds her most willing (if unwitting) ally in the naive Castellan Wynter. By preying on his fear that his inexperience will cut his reign short, Darkel convinces him to unleash the Pandora creature, which K-9 had managed to corner in a data partition in the Matrix. But in so doing, Wynter discovers in the most horrible way that the mutilated body from Davidia is himself – but even his attempts to deny Pandora a body and mind to inhabit will prove unsuccessful, as she seeks a victim who now sits in an even higher office.
In the Time Lord Academy, unrest grows as more non-Gallifreyan students are expelled following an attempt by a student with Free Time ties to poison the Time Lords’ water supply. The situation is made worse by Braxiatel’s disappearance from Gallifrey, and many of the students feel they’re being singled out because of their race without any regard to academic performance or actual evidence that they have terrorist ties. In the Academy archives, Romana uses K-9 to consult with what’s left of the entity known as Pandora; with its past and present aspects having found a host in the exiled Braxiatel, what remains of Pandora can only advise Romana vaguely on future matters. Pandora continues to predict that Romana will institute a totalitarian government on Gallifrey, installing herself as the Time Lords’ Imperiatrix during a bloody civil war. And when Inquisitor Darkel, with the cooperation of CIA Coordinator Narvin, makes a brazen grab for the presidency, it begins to look like Pandora’s predictions are inevitable.