The Leisure Hive - Episode 4

The final episode of this story is one that I was worried wouldn’t live up to my new expectations. The start of the JNT era is going better than I would have imagined when I started to watch these stories. The reprise is still good and I don’t know whether its changed slightly but it seems more harrowing as Brock’s mask has been pulled off. The revelation that Brock is a Fomasi comes with an explanation which works and that is the real Brock is still on Earth and the Fomasi that is pretending to be Brock is a traitor. This just seems to spur Pangol into action and this is definelty his episode because he becomes quite the dictator, not even waiting for Mena to die before installing his authority on Argolis. He is immediately the villain of the piece and this is proved by the fact that he is willing to shoot the Fomasi ship down even though he knows that it will start a war.

The whole episode is geared towards the new army of Pangol’s coming out of the generator. The effect of creating dozens of Pangols is something that we have to give credit to the Quantel 5000 machine. It’s another example of how the show has changed. Another thing that works in the stories favour is the incidental music. Whilst it’s a shame that Dudley Simpson’s music is no longer a part of the show its fair to say that his music wouldn’t have had the effect that Peter Howell’s did during the scene where the Pangol’s are marching out of the generator. The effects are the thing that stand out for me in this episode with the multiple Pangol’s is one such impressive one use but another is the shot of two Doctor’s appearing in the same shot. I am reminded of that shot in ‘Enemy of the World’ where Salamander and the Doctor appear on screen at the same time and thought how impressive that was and it was by 1968 standards and it shows how far the technology has come in 12 years.

Once the Doctor gets to be back to his old self he is running around like he usually does and whilst he doesn’t get going until quite late in the episode it means that it falls to Romana to be the one that again moving the action along. She has really been on fine form over the last four episodes and Lalla Ward has taken the role of Romana and made it her own.

If I had to find fault with the episode then it wouldn’t be the Fomasi costume which was actually quite good but it was the part where the Fomasi inform Mena that hadn’t taken off and that in fact it was the Fomasi Brock that was killed onboard. It does seem odd that they waited until Pangol was a baby and the danger had been averted that they decided to show themselves. This is something that doesn’t quite work for me but to be fair it’s the only thing that I could pick fault in. This has been another good solid episode and I think/hope that Meglos is going to be better than I had thought of in the past. But that’s in the future and this opening season story is a lot better than the previous one and one thing is for sure, the show is never going to be the same again.