Doctor Who: Frontios (1984)

There's a been-here-before feel to this Peter Davison serial: it's set in the far future, purportedly further on than the TARDIS has ever been before, and the last of humanity has quit the Earth to find another home - similar set-ups feature in The Ark and The Ark in Space, though Who also gave Earth an Empire (Colony in Space, The Mutants) or hinted that all humanoid races in the universe were seeded from Earth. In a fairly desperate attempt to up the stakes, this means that the future of mankind really is up for grabs on the desolate planet of Frontios (which suggests that the Doctor has known all along the outcomes of every other adventure) and there's see-sawing about the Time Lords' policy of non-intervention (even Tegan has noticed that the Doctor never seems to practice this). The TARDIS is destroyed, reduced to a pile of ash and a hatstand with other elements scattered through underground caves, by what seems to be a mere meteor strike, again going against underlying presumptions of the previous twenty years. Paradoxically, this was the period when the show was most concerned with tying up its continuity but also most prone to junking whole chunks of the premise for a momentary plot turn. The chief villain, a sentient giant louse with gravity powers, is manipulated in the last episode into pulling the box back together again before it is defeated and marooned on an uninhabited planet (I'd forgotten this when I resolved Time and Relative in similar fashion).

The last of humanity are a bunch of shipwrecked colonists, including Lesley Dunlop with '80s hair, Peter Gilmore and William Lucas doing blustery and scientific one-note clichés and Jeff Rawle as the hereditary ruler (whose feebleness prefigures his comic variant on this in Drop the Dead Donkey). They are at war with an unknown enemy who call down metor strikes and suck people underground (a creepy effect). The Tractators are weird-looking beasts, with insect carapaces and Tenniel-like exaggerated human faces, but their pinched-at-the-knee dresses hobble them so badly they look foolish as soon as they take a few steps. Mark Strickson, perhaps the hammiest companion the Doctor ever had, does frothing-at-the-mouth panic and an expository rant about the monsters (though he gets a funny bit of business persuading the colonists that the hatstand is a deadly superweapon), while Janet Fielding has to crawl through tunnels in a leather miniskirt, greenish tights, cassata blouse and slightly spikier hairdo. Davison's Doctor, as surprisingly often, works well: whimsical, indecisive, blithely hypocritical in trading on his Time Lord status while pursuing his own ends, not above deceiving the Gravis (John Gillett) by claiming to have no interest in the situation and letting the villain explain his schemes as if to an impartial observer. He also pretends Tegan is an android he got cheap because of the unconvincing walk and accent.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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