Doctor Who: Vengeance on Varos [1984]

It's a little unfair to label Colin Baker the worst Doctor Who, but he certainly had the misfortune to be taking the lead role when the show was at its worst - his mercurial, sometimes supercilious or boastful Doctor makes a change after the increasing niceness of late Tom Baker and Peter Davison, but his ridiculous outfit is the ugliest of producer John Nathan-Turner's attempts to give the Doctor a uniform-like unvarying costume and poor Nicola Bryant was given quite the whiniest panicking cleavage companion business ever seen on the show. This particular serial is probably the best of Baker's brief run: it's stuck with dud effects badly handled on the studio floor [trailing killer vines that probably ought to be animated] and Nabil Shaban's capitalist tadpole-thing villain Sil is better conceived than executed by the monster-makers, but Philip Martin's script has good satirical ideas, comes up with a variation on the curable dystopia formula and is a frame for decent guest performances.

Varos is a former penal planet subsiding as a mining colony, where a vital element of time-space machines is found: an offworld company has the exclusive rights to the mineral and is screwing the price down, keeping the Varosians poor. The system of government is unusual but oddly credible, with an elected governor [Martin Jarvis] who has to put things to the vote and gets painfully zapped if his propositions lose, and which manages to be a genuine if crass democracy while manipulated by an elite badguy class. There are funny cutaways to a couple of couch potatoes paying little attention to Jason Connery being tortured on TV and getting on with their tiny lives as the big struggle goes on.

Episode Two [of two] gets a bit busy, with Peri briefly transformed into a quill-covered bird-woman by a Phantom-masked mad scientist who slavers over her and clumsy business with the useful killer plants, but the ending plays well as the Doctor stands back and allows an arbitration to settle things rather than a revolution. In answer to Mary Whitehouse criticisms, this actually foregrounds violence as entertainment, with Varos exporting videos of its tortures and executions to eager viewers. There's the usual '80s Who tendency to slaughter hordes, with Baker playfully startling some goons who proceed to fall into the acid where he's supposed to be disposed of.
KIM NEWMAN

First published in this form here.

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