N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
For all of 21st-century Doctor Who‘s much-vaunted season arcs I don’t think either Russell T Davies or Steven Moffat ever attempted anything quite as sophisticated as Christopher H. Bidmead.
“Everything breaks eventually.”
Rorvik,
Warriors’ Gate: Part Four
Season Eighteen is by no means perfect — and it gets off to such a dry start with The Leisure Hive and Meglos that you fear most of the joy has been sucked out of the show — but by the E-Space trilogy and beyond you start to appreciate that, in giving the season a thematic rather than narrative arc, Bidmead has tried to do something that no-one else has done before or since. *
Flawed as Logopolis might be when viewed on its own, as a finale to a season about death, decay and things just generally coming to an end, it’s just about perfect.
“He sees the threads that join the universe together and mends them when they break.”
Zastor, Meglos: Part One
I’ve said before that I don’t necessarily buy the argument that Douglas Adams’ playful approach was any less scientifically serious or sophisticated, nor that there’s intrinsically a greater scientific merit in Bidmead’s take on science in Doctor Who, but after my initial misgivings, I have thoroughly enjoyed Tom Baker’s final season. (It’s often been suggested that Tom Baker himself did not find it enjoyable, but when he watched clips of the stories back in The Tom Baker Years over a decade later, he was rather taken with some of them, suggesting he’d quite like to see the stories in full.)
By Logopolis, its place in the arc of the Fourth Doctor’s adventures — despite that initial jar of contrast in tone between the end of season seventeen and The Leisure Hive — feels natural given the apparent length of the Fourth Doctor’s life. It makes me wonder just how many unseen adventures the Doctor, Romana and K-9 have together after their visit to Professor Chronotis and also to speculate, in a narrative sense, whether something happened that made the Doctor so much gloomier by the time he’d reached Brighton beach.
Of course, tone was not the only thing to change in Season Eighteen — the whole look and feel was given a spangly 80’s makeover: new title sequence, new theme tune arrangement, new incidental music composers, new costume for the Doctor, new companions and of course ultimately a new Doctor.
* 31/03/2019 UPDATE … Or apparently not. Recently Bidmead has commented that they didn’t have time for such planning — “We were really making it up as we went along!”
"My favourite Fourth Doctor stories are Genesis of the Daleks, The Seeds of Doom, The Deadly Assassin, The Androids of Tara, City of Death and The Keeper of Traken / Logopolis finale."
"My least favourite Fourth Doctor story is Revenge of the Cybermen."
