Meglos - Episode 1

Meglos is interesting for a few reasons. Firstly it’s one of the shortest titles for a Doctor Who story (Robot being the shortest), secondly its infamous for the villain being a cactus and third and perhaps most importantly, it sees the return of Jacqueline Hill who was last seen 453 episodes ago but in a different role than she is in today. I don’t quite know whether it was a good idea to bring Hill back but as someone else because whenever I see her I just think that its Barbara talking and not Lexa. That’s not to say that she doesn’t give a great performance because she does and manages to at least seem different to Barbara but its not hard to imagine Barbara saying the things that Lexa says.

As I mentioned this story is infamous for being the one with the cactus in it and sadly that is the one thing that lets this story down because from the moment that it appears on screen I find myself losing a little bit of interest. It could only happen in Doctor Who where someone thought “I know what Doctor Who hasn’t had before….a talking cactus!”. Quite why JNT let this through the production meeting baffles me. Actually forget that never mind JNT, what about Barry Letts? There is something that doesn’t quite make sense and it is to do with the cactus because it required a booth to transfer to the weird looking human but doesn’t quite such a thing when changing to look like the Doctor.

The CSO that appears in this episode is quite impressive and apart from some fraying around the edges of people’s hats the effects worked very well and its been a while since the effects have looked quite so good. In fact the production values for the episode looked quite good and its easy to see that this story was required relatively early in the season run.

It’s strange (in a good way) that the Doctor and Romana spend the entire episode in the TARDIS trying to fix K9. Now firstly I want to know why they would bother considering that he is of little value to the story but secondly its fun that they manage to find something to do while not actually achieving anything. Their episode only really starts once they start to go over the same events over and over again.

The cliffhanger is quite good because the Doctor appears saying that they mustn’t upset the tigellans and considering that it comes out of nowhere and I think that anything has to be better than a cactus or a human with cactus spikes all over his face and hands (cant quite understand why they don’t go through his clothes) and the next episode should be good. I think that I feel a lot more warmly about this episode than I did 24 hours ago. I don’t think that it will ever be a classic but I think that there is going to be something good that comes out of the story come the final episode.