Doctor Who: Meglos review (DVD) ★★★

Now this is an odd one. It’s 1981, Tom Baker’s last year as the Doctor, the new script editor (Christopher H Bidmead) and producer (John Nathan-Turner) have put a straight face on it. Baker will get fed up with this very quickly and quit, so will Lalla Ward, both feeling a children’s show is being angled towards adults too much, and they’ll get married briefly but that’s by the by.

Meanwhile you can only imagine there was some sort of script-left-over-from-last-year scenario, combined with a contract-says-we-have-to-make-it crisis. So among the high-concept stuff about entropy and alternative universes we get this little story of a megalomaniac cactus plant (I am not making this up) imitating first an accountant at a bus stop, then the Doctor. Oh, and there’s a bunch of incompetent pirates stuck in the middle. Well, there would be – you need a comic turn in an already-farcical story.
The effect is a strange bunch of episodes in context. They feel just wrong in this season, although they might have done well in the run-up to the Horns of Nimon or something. It’s not that Meglos is particularly badly made, although bits do misfire – Jacqueline Hill, who played the Doctor’s first companion, Barbara Wright, is cast in another role for the older fans to enjoy but it doesn’t quite come off and the experiment is never repeated (companion Michael Craze was originally cast in a Peter Davison story but the idea was scrapped after this).

It’s very much a whacky story that would have fitted into the middle-late Tom Baker seasons as a filler and done OK. Surrounded by the new po-faced version it just looks like a leftover. As with other so-so stories 2Entertain has come up with some good backup material to explain where it all went wrong as well as a nice bipgraphical piece on the aforementioned Jacqueline Hill, but it doesn’t quite compensate for the so-so story at the centre.