Logopolis

Logopolis is the final jaunt of Tom Baker as the TARDIS-occupying Time Lord before death and regeneration turn him into Peter Davison. It's hard to quantify, insomuch as it has a somewhat cluttered plotline that renders it a Big Think for even the most stalwart Whovian. (Doctorian? Certainly not!)

The Doctor, traveling with his young charge Adric, gets a woof-woof from the TARDIS alarm system alerting him to the fact that there could be a snag in the space-time continuum. Completely spacing this out (no pun intended), he travels instead to Logopolis, which is a city-planet where a bunch of pale, New Agey hermit monks encode the fabric of the universe by chanting mathematical mantras. Already we're in surrealist fever-dream territory.

The Doctor teleports to Earth first, and then the cosmic no-goodnik called The Master floats his imitation U.K. Police Call Box (an antique item from a time long gone, we must assume) on in and uses the weird, dimensional shifting "chameleon" faculties of the Doc's TARDIS as a cover around which to place a weird sort of cloaking device around his own. Confused yet? Yes. Good.

A plucky, spunky little Bonita Applebum of a U.K. flight attendant, Tegan (Janet Fielding), who seems as if she might have escaped from an illustration in an old issue of Heavy Metal magazine, complete with a jauntily placed little stewardess hat, goes into one TARDIS, gets trapped in another, and generally serves as something for the pocket-protector-and-dungeon-dice geeks who love them some Dr. Who to sort of ogle.

Am I coming through? Open all hailing frequencies, Captain!

Somehow everyone gets to Logopolis, which is a cavernous sort of dream-like place that has a synthoid meditation-tape subliminal soundtrack. I'm not entirely sure about the plot from this point on, but I do know just watching this show helped me shed ten pounds and improved my mood and ability at self-actualization.

Moving right along.

A weird, white, mummy-like watcher called The Watcher is seen lurking around in the background during the episodes, which were four in total and ran around an hour and a half altogether, making Logopolis sort of a movie just as much as any of the other Dr. Who adventures. The Master, Nyssa, the flight attendant, and the Doctor — who at one point is shrunk into a mini-TARDIS by some distortion in the space-time continuum, a foreshadowing, one supposes, of the incipient regeneration to come — go gallivanting around the cavernous Logopolis rock world trying to prevent the fabric of reality itself from unraveling.

The Master, ostensibly a badaholic, actually joins in the fun and good times trying to prevent the world as we know it from blinking into cosmic nothingness, because the Logopolitans (Logopolitans? Surely not!) can't do their mathematical mumbo-jumbo mumbles and whatnot, or at least not project them out into space so they can re-knit the whole stinking mess and not bring about "The End of the World as We Know It." In which case, brother, nobody would feel fine.

You just know the whole thing culminates in a not-very-bloody showdown at a giant satellite dish in jaunty old England. The Doctor duels The Master Anthony Ainley), who has since flipped back from trying to save everyone to being a supervillain. The Master, a Time Lord who can travel space and time in a police call box and unravel the nature of reality itself, gets tangled up in the Doctor's scarf. Then, for reasons I can't quite remember, as I've slept since then, the Doctor lays down and "regenerates" into Peter Davison after The Watcher comes forward to reveal he was actually The Doctor all along. In that case, we ask ourselves: Who (no pun intended) in the hell have we been watching up to this point? The Watcher watches himself, apparently.

Bringing to mind that line from the old Pink Floyd song "Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun":

"Over the mountain, watching the watcher."

We're all observant watchers of the Doctor's adventures. We may not always follow them, comprehend them, or be able to explain why such-and-such occurs. You'd have to be a wispy-haired, universal mathematician god-being in a hollowed-out New Age dungeon cavern with a meditation soundtrack to grok the answer. Until then, the next great adventure is only one death and rebirth away.

Logopolis | FULL EPISODES | Season 18 | Doctor Who: Classic

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