Doctor Who Story 110 The Leisure Hive by Lovett Bickford written by David Fisher 1980
18 September 2007An OK Tom Baker adventure, and I believe the last one available on NTSC DVD at this point. The best part is the aged makeup on Tom Baker which is fantastic, and this one is mostly notable as the end of the Doctor using the Randmizer he installed at the end of the Key of Time Series. Enjoyable, but nothing too special, except I do think Tom Baker’s last season uniform with the question marks on the color is my favorite of all.
The Doctor (Tom Baker) and Romana (Lalla Ward) have turned off the randomizer, and decided to go on a vacation, but they are in Brighton, on the off Season and cold. Romana accidently blows up K-9, but decides she wants to go the planet Argolis and it’s giant pleasure domes the Hive. The Argolin race is dyeing, and their planet is a wasteland thanks to a war with the Foamasi, a reptilian race, who it seems now want to buy the dead planet of it’s adversary, and take it out of the horrible debt it is in. The Argolins are led by Mena (Adrienne Corri) mother of the young Pangol (David Haig) who hates all aliens and especially the Foamasi, and runs a machine that plays image games based on a tachyon technology, but it seems to backfire and someone is actually ripped to pieces by the machine.
REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS…
Mena has brought a human scientist to try and regenerate herself and her race using the Tachyon technology, but he faked his results and needs Romana to help him, and they think they succeed, but are not correct. The Doctor is meanwhile being blamed for deaths, he did not commit, their are Foamasi spies who are causing problems, but also Pangol has done something to the Tachyon device, and when they test it on the Doctor he is aged to over 1250 years old!!!
They then find out that Pangol was in fact created by the Machine, and is using it to create and army and go back to the war like ways, and again fight the Foamasi, but the Doctor puts the randomizer from the Tardis inside and when it creates the army, they are all the Doctor, but luckily the first one was regenerated, as they rest are just images, and begin to fade.
Pangol plans to restart the process, but the Earth scientist has put Mena in there to regenerate her, and they are both regenerated, but with Pangol back to a baby, and things are back to safe and good.
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Enjoyable, though not all too impressive.