Meglos is the 2nd serial of the 18th season. It first aired September 27 and the 4 episodes ran through October 18 1980. It was written by John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch, the director was Terence Dudley. Tom Baker is the Doctor and Lalla Ward is the companion Romana. Jacqueline Hill, who played the First Doctor's companion Barbara Wright, appears as Lexa. That's her to the left. I have to admit I didn't recognize her.
The Doc and Romana are in the Tardis while trouble is brewing in the Prion star system. Zolfa-Thura is a desert world with an intelligent cactus called Meglos as it's only inhabitant. He calls some space pirates and gets them to kidnap an Earthman. On Tigella they get their power from the Dodecahedron. Meglos wants to steal that and use it as a weapon. They used blue screen to put the actors in the scene with the model of the giant 5 sided discs above. That was something they have used on the program before, what they hadn't used before was the Scene Sync camera mount. It synced the two camera together so that when the camera man panned or tilted the camera on the actors the device moved the camera on the model accordingly.
Meglos uses the kidnapped human as a host for his mind. He's the last of his race and he's a big dick. He traps the Doc and Romana in a time loop and heads for Tigella, disguised as the Doctor, to steal their Dodecahedron. He wants to use it to power his planet busting weapon. The Doc and Romana break out of the time loop and land on Tigella. Then there are two Doctors running about.
The Doctor will puts things right before the end credits. The story moved along ok but it wasn't much better than average. The writers said they had written more humor that didn't make it to the screen. It was part of the plan by the producer to make the series more serious. They also wanted to get rid of K-9. I'm not much of a fan of K-9, I wouldn't miss him much.
The extras have a featurette on the writers, one on the Scene Sync motion control system, a nice tribute to the late Jacqueline Hill, an explanation of entropy, a photo gallery, an Easter Egg of the titles and music and a commentary with Lalla Ward, John Flanagan, Christopher Owen (earthman), Paddy Kingsland ( incidental music) and Peter Howell (composer of new title music).
Comments