Production Code: 5W
First Transmitted
1 - 18/01/1982 18:55
2 - 19/01/1982 19:05
3 - 25/01/1982 18:55
4 - 26/01/1982 19:05
Plot
The TARDIS arrives on board a huge spaceship where the Doctor and his companions encounter the frog-like Urbankans and a population of human androids. The androids are drawn from four different ethnic groups - Greek (led by Bigon), Chinese (led by Lin Futu), Mayan (led by Villagra) and Aboriginal Australian (led by Kurkutji) - and perform regular displays of dance and other rituals termed 'recreationals'.
The Urbankans' leader, Monarch, aided by his ministers Persuasion and Enlightenment, is engaged in a complex scheme to plunder from Earth the raw materials needed to enable him to travel back in time and thereby confirm his belief in his own status as the universe's divine creator.
Monarch has a poison that he intends to use to conquer humanity so that Earth can be repopulated with his androids. The Doctor, however, throws a canister of the poison at Monarch, causing him to shrink away to virtually nothing.
Episode Endings
The time travellers are astonished as a man and a woman appear wearing elegant green clothes identical to those earlier sketched by Tegan. The man introduces himself and his companion: they are the previously frog-like Persuasion and Enlightenment.
Bigon demonstrates to an astonished Doctor that within his chest and beneath his face there is just a mass of electronics. Holding up a printed circuit connected to his chest, he states: 'This is me.'
Adric is restrained as, on Persuasion's orders, the Doctor is forced to his knees and one of the Greek androids raises a sword to decapitate him.
The Doctor and his companions depart in the TARDIS. Once they are on their way, however, Nyssa suddenly collapses.
Roots
There is an allusion to Matthew 26:11 and parallels ('The poor you wil always have with you').
Enlightenment's description of love as 'the exchange of two fantasies' is a quote from Renoir's La Règle du Jeu.
Von Daniken.
Moonraker.
Dialogue Triumphs
The Doctor : [On being introduced to Persuasion] "Friendly, I hope?"
Monarch : "Conformity is the only freedom."
"If a frog with a funny hairdo can turn itself into a semblance of a human being..."
Persuasion : [Confiscates the Sonic Screwdriver but says] "You may keep the pencil."
Double Entendre
The Doctor : [The Doctor asks Bigon,] "If you feel this way,why have you not acted before?"
Bigon : "Nyssa, relieve him"
Monarch : "Is this one of your dropping times, Doctor?"
Adric : "He knows I'm no good with my hands"
"How can Earthlings have penetrated us?"
Continuity
The Doctor is short-sighted in his right eye, and thus carries a magnifying glass, as well as a notebook and some string. He states that only his Professor at the Academy [Borusa or Azmael (The Twin Dilemma)] really understood artron energy, which powers the TARDIS (see The Deadly Assassin). Magnetic fields fluctuate artron energy. The Doctor can go into a trance that limits the need for oxygen (see Terror of the Zygons), and can withstand the absolute cold of space for six minutes or so.
The TARDIS' spacepacks [derived from the equipment seen in The Web Planet and The Moonbase], even without their visors [used against solar glare], protect their wearers from radiation, decompression, and the other perils of space walking [and must therefore erect a force field around the individual].
The TARDIS has a power room and bathrooms, and must have an airlock. Aboard are copies of works by Alfred North Whitehead (Principia Mathematica) and Bertrand Russell, as well as a handbook for the Type 40. Tegan hits some buttons [and the TARDIS relocates as an emergency measure to get her to stop].
The molecular structure of the TARDIS is Earth like, and neither laser keys nor directional cobalt flux can open the lock.
Tegan's flight was AA778, due to leave at 17:30. She's an accomplished artist. Nyssa is skilled in bioengineering and cybernetics. Traken had the technology to detect gravitational waves. Adric's gullible, spiteful and sexist [but he's not having a good day]. He uses the Greek name for the Milky Way: Galaxia Kyklos.
The three billion Urbankans, ruled by Monarch, who appoints ministers and keeps slaves, are now all stored on chip, inserted into androids when required. He destroyed their world, which orbits the star Inokshi in Galaxy RE 1489. They can shape-change technologically, and, in biological form, used to secrete a deadly poison. They can hypnotise.
Around 33000 BC the Urbankans first visited Earth. Around 6000 BC they returned to visit a civilisation that the Doctor wrongly identifies as Mayan, recognising certain pre-Mayan aspects of clothing. Around 2200 BC, during the Futu Dynasty [not a recognised dynasty, but unrecorded during the legendary prehistory era of the Five Sovereigns, pre-2205 BC], they came again. They were last on Earth in the Athenian era, around 500 BC.
Bigon's rough estimate of the speed 'doubling' each time is either wrong, or Monarch spent varying long stretches of time back at home.
QV
Location
Four days out from Earth, at 4:15pm on 28 February 1981.
Links
Nyssa's comment that the thing that increases density and reduces matter isn't ridiculous is probably a reference to the Master's tissue compression eliminator.
Untelevised
The Doctor was a friend of Francis Drake, was at Heathrow when they were rebuilding Terminal 3, and once took five wickets for New South Wales (He used to bowl a good Chinaman.) [This almost certainly refers to the fourth incarnation, as he carried a ball in The Ark in Space and practised his bowling in The Hand of Fear. As a Chinaman is a left handed googly, ambidexterity is implied: see The Curse of Fenric.
Trivia
Stratford Johns, best known for his starring role as Barlow in the BBC police series Z Cars and its Softly, Softly spin-offs, plays Monarch.
Look out for the monopticons - floating, ball-like security cameras aboard Monarch's ship.
Technobabble
'These will eliminate the need for telemicrographics.' (All the stuff with the cricket ball in space is accurate.)
Goofs
Tegan not only speaks the correct one of over 3000 Aboriginal languages, but one over 35,000 years old!
In episode one, as Monarch tries to open the TARDIS, you can spot the head of a production person, crouching behind the equipment.
Monarch seems unconcerned by the fact that Tegan is leaving in the TARDIS, given that he wants to steal it.
In episode four the Doctor and Tegan take the space pack helmets before they realize that Monarch has turned off the life support.
What thing 'increases density' in the lab, and why is such emphasis given to it?
And why did Monarch keep on going back and forth to his homeworld? [He's raiding both worlds, and only succeeded completely last time.]
If he's got the travel time to his extra galactic home down to 1250 years, then he's already achieved his ambition of faster than light travel. [This has been achieved with a hyperspace drive, whereas he wants to go FTL in real space.]
Fashion Victim
'Are you fashionable, Tegan?' asks Enlightenment. Well, judging by her quiff (which has flopped by the end of the story) and her (very accomplished) drawings of the Human League... Sadly, yes, for 1981.
Cast & Crew
Cast
The Doctor - Peter Davison
Adric - Matthew Waterhouse
Nyssa - Sarah Sutton
Tegan - Janet Fielding
Bigon - Philip Locke
Enlightenment - Annie Lambert
Kurkutji - Illarrio Bisi Pedro
Lin Futu - Burt Kwouk
Monarch - Stratford Johns
Persuasion - Paul Shelley
Villagra - Nadia Hammam
Crew
Director - John Black
Four to Doomsday