N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!

Logopolis may have its faults as a standalone story but as season-wrapping finales go it’s probably never been bettered. So doom-laded is it that it would almost have been a disappointment if the Doctor hadn’t regenerated at the end of it all.

“I hate farewells.”

The Doctor, Logopolis: Part Two

Lack of ambition is not one of Logopolis‘s flaws — ultimately it is the entire universe at stake — but it’s often the little things that you’re left quibbling with.

For example, if police boxes are all but obsolete in the 1980’s, why not aim instead for 50’s Britain where they’d be more commonplace?

And, even if the shrunken police constable and Auntie Vanessa were more realistic-looking, would your first thought still not be that they were simply dolls?

And jumping on a bit is it a somewhat premature Nyssa saying ‘He was the Doctor all the time’? (It feels a little bit too expository for my liking.) It also makes me wonder if they’d really made Peter Davison stand on a wet and windy Barnet by-pass as his first taste of Doctor Who. (Of course I know they didn’t, but seven-year old me might well have thought The Watcher was played by Peter Davison. I do remember vividly the mystery of the Watcher, my memory perhaps aided by the re-run of Logopolis in the The Five Faces of Doctor Who repeat season later in 1981.)

There’s also an extraordinarily petulant ‘We’re doing it’ from Adric when Tegan tells him ‘there’s work to be done’. Is he sulking because he’s not going to have the Doctor to himself any more?

But to counter all that we get infinite regression — the TARDIS within a TARDIS within a TARDIS and so on — the introduction of the Cloister bell, the constable’s bicycle falling over when the TARDIS materialises around the police box, Tom Georgeson (albeit briefly), the return of Nyssa and the introduction of original mouth-on-legs Tegan Jovanka.

And John Fraser as the Monitor gives one of my favourite guest performances. His comment that ‘There does seems to be some positive development’ when the TARDIS returns to normal size is wonderfully understated. In a similar vein, I’ve also always been fond of the Doctor’s perfunctory ‘I hate farewells’ when he gets in the TARDIS prior to said TARDIS shrinkage.

“It’s the end. But the moment has been prepared for.”

The Doctor, Logopolis: Part Four

Elsewhere, all of the season’s themes of entropy and decay come to a head, with the universe’s existence itself threatened by the Master’s interference in both the Doctor and the Logopolitans’ plans.

With a new body at last, the Master is played here by Anthony Ainley almost as a moustache-twirling pantomime villain. Perhaps the Master’s sanity has finally cracked after all those years of clinging to life as an emaciated corpse?

All that and some funky wah-wah courtesy of Paddy Kingsland and the Radiophonic Workshop.

“Entropy increases.”

The Doctor, Logopolis: Part One

It’s often been said that Logopolis is funereal, and there’s certainly a suitable sense of foreboding about it all, especially in Tom Baker’s farewell performance. I’ll have more to say about Tom Baker and the Fourth Doctor before moving on to Season Nineteen, but for now let’s say, in Logopolis, he was once again marvellous in the role he made his own.