(551) Logopolis - Part 2

The first thing after the titles are finished that appears on screen is the sight of the Watcher. The first couple of minutes are back on the lay by where the Doctor is about to be taken to the police station and gets Adric to create a diversion to give the Doctor the opportunity to escape and to be honest he doesn’t have to try very hard because all he does is pretend he’s fallen off a bike and that’s all that is needed. Once the story leaves the lay-by that is when it starts to go up a gear.

Tegan appears to have found her voice in this episode and despite spending most of her time running around in the TARDIS, when she does eventually meet the Doctor and Adric, the noise levels go up and the number of TARDIS crew is going up to pre-1970 levels. Nyssa doesn’t appear until the final couple of minutes which is a bit of a surprise. What is also a bit of a surprise is that at the half way point of the story that the Master still hasn’t appeared. There are a couple of chuckles but that’s about it.

The story moves to Logopolis and the first thing that we see is a model set which isn’t the greatest if I am being honest because for me the scale of things in the shot don’t quite add up to me. I know that I maybe (and probably am) wrong but it just doesn’t work for me. When we get down onto the planet then a number of things strike me. The first is that the person playing the monitor looks a lot like Noel Edmonds and I cant get rid of that thought at tall. The idea that the Logopolitans mainly use their heads to come up with mathematical sums instead of using computers even though they do have a giant satellite.

The cliffhanger is rather good because of the fact that the Doctor is about to be shrunk to a rather small size. At the half way stage the story is starting to take shape and things are working out well. This episode might have a certain amount of glumness about it but compared to the previous episode it does seem that the narrative moves along at such a speed that there isn’t the time to worry about it. Two episodes left and there is a part of me that wishes the story would end differently but sadly that’s not going to happen but at least the moment has been prepared for.