How do you reconcile the different phases of the Tom Baker era. For me it goes something like this – dour, fun, cold (Hinchcliffe, Williams, JNT) but there really is more to it than that. Tom was laugh out loud funny in the Hinchcliffe era and could be (albeit very rarely) deadly serious in the Williams era. But what of his final hurrah with JNT/Bidmead. Sleek, cold, logical but at least while he was with Romana II still with a sense of fun – mad old Uncle Tom was not going down without a fight and this months Fourth Doctor release seems to have that end of term feeling, a last hurrah, a lap of honour before the inevitable meeting with The Watcher and that awful moment at the Pharos Project when my childhood ended.
Such was the impact of Tom’s regeneration, my life was never quite the same again – but onwards, upwards and backwards to a time when fun was more on the agenda and The Doctor (Tom Baker) has decided to take Romana (Lalla Ward) to the Lake District to visit of all things a Pencil Museum. Joyful, just joyful – this is the carefree Tom of early season 18 just wanting to get away from it all. If only life were that simple….
The Doctor (being the Doctor) has got it wrong and has landed in the middle of a war zone. A war in which The Sontarans have been fighting an enemy for so long that they cannot remember, an enemy that does not stay dead, an enemy that comes back to life and The Sontarans may not be able to contain it. Despite the jovial atmosphere that Tom Baker creates this is very much a season 18 story, it may not have been achievable on screen in 1980 but this is very much set in the era of entropy and the radiophonic workshop because this story is grim, doom laden and has a bleakness about it that screams 1980 – and when a story makes you empathise with the Sontarans you really have gone down the rabbit hole and perhaps ended up in a pencil museum…
The story follows a couple of different threads and it is completely logical (in a Bidmead sort of way) in involving bubbles of time and some-such techno-babble dressed up to sound like “hard science” (I still call it magic) but in the context of the story it works very well – it also serves The Sontarans very well giving scope to develop them beyond their TV characterisation & Dan Starkey gives a wonderful performance as ALL of them giving each distinct characteristics which differentiate them as characters and not just a generic clone race – they have been fighting a war a very very long time so it is logical that they would develop, and their greatest characteristic is honour.
A relatively short story but big on concept and big on adding layers to an old enemy. Just a shame that they didn’t actually get to the pencil museum! 8/10.
Written by Ed Watkinson
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