Inspirations - Meglos

This is the 110th Inspirations post I have written, and for the very first time I'm going to use the word "formula". Welcome to Meglos - the story voted least favourite of the entire Fourth Doctor's seven year run, as voted by readers of DWM during the programme's 50th anniversary year. The main reason for this lowly position is that the story is formulaic. It looks like what a Doctor Who story is supposed to look like, at least by people who don't actually know the programme all that well.
Back in 1969 producer Derrick Sherwin decided to have the 7th season set entirely on contemporary Earth, with the Doctor exiled by the Time Lords, and having to join forces with UNIT, led by Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, who had already been introduced in a couple of Patrick Troughton stories. Sherwin had a dislike for the more fantastical space-bound stories, and wanted the series to move towards something more akin to the Quatermass serials of the 1950's. He believed these would look better, especially as the programme was going to move into colour production, and he also thought present-day settings would make things cheaper (this despite The Invasion going way over budget). Of course, as soon as the decision had been made and plans were well advanced, Sherwin left to take on another job, and realising the new Earth-bound version of the programme fell to new producer Barry Letts and his script editor Terrance Dicks. Dicks' friend and fellow writer Malcolm Hulke warned that the new format left only limited plot possibilities - mad scientists and alien invasions. In other words, Letts and Dicks would be stuck with a formula. Were the Pertwee seasons formulaic? No, they were not. Letts and Dicks rose to the challenge and ensured that there was still a wide variety of story forms. There are some bad scientists in the early 1970's, but very few mad ones. As for alien invasions of the Home Counties, this is one of those misconceptions which non-fans perpetuate - like wobbly sets and spaceships made of washing-up liquid bottles. There were more alien invasion stories in the first 5 years of New-Who than there were in the 5 years of Pertwee, despite the limitations imposed by the Doctor's exile.
With all of time and space available, Doctor Who had never been formulaic. Writers may have played with formula, but always given it a twist. Meglos, on the other hand, seems to have been put together by committee. With two writers and an extremely hands-on script editor, with an executive producer looking over their shoulders, it probably was. Throw in an unimaginative director, lack of location filming, and some underwhelming performances from the guest artists, it's no wonder that it is so unloved.

Meglos is the only story written by actors Andrew McCulloch and John Flanagan (neither of whom ever appeared in the show). The new script editor Christopher H Bidmead had seen a play by the pair and so approached them about writing for the series. The play was a political satire about Thatcherism, set in a funeral parlour, but Bidmead saw some potential.
It was Flanagan who came up with the idea - an old chestnut - of a society wherein two factions are at loggerheads - one scientific / rational and one religious / mystic.
Science and Religion have been incompatible in certain respects for centuries. Even today we have Creationists, who tend to accept the Biblical story of the creation of the Earth, animals and human beings literally - the Earth created in 7 days, Adam and Eve etc. Victorian prelates worked out the age of the Earth from the Bible, counting all the various generations mentioned. Science, on the other hand, shows that the planet was already billions of years old when the human race came along. Those Victorian prelates claimed that the fossils of sea creatures found at the tops of mountains were proof of the Biblical flood, whereas geologists could show that this demonstrated the way land formations changed over millions of years, with tectonic forces raising up ancient sea beds.
Another great conflict between Science and Religion was in the area of cosmology. If God had created everything in the universe for the benefit of Mankind, then the Earth must therefore lie at the centre of that universe, with everything else in orbit around it. Astronomers, however, found that this was not the case. The Earth rotated around the Sun, which was just one of billions of stars. This conflict is epitomised by the treatment of Galileo Galilei by the Catholic Church. He was an advocate of the Heliocentric view of the universe - wherein the Earth orbited the Sun. When he came to write about this he phrased it within the context of a philosophical discussion, rather than put forward a straightforward thesis. This still wasn't acceptable to the Vatican, which put him on trial and forced him to recant his views.
In Meglos, we have a society which is split between the mystical Deons, who believe that their power source - the Dodecahedron - was given to them by their god, Ti, and so is deserving of worship. The other section of society is the Savants, who accept it as simply an object of obscure origin which provides energy to power their underground city. 'Deon' derives from deus (Latin) and dios (Greek), which mean 'god'. Savant comes from the Latin sapere, meaning 'knowledge' or 'learning'.

The Dodecahedron (a 12 sided geometrical figure) is really the power source for a weapon built by the alien Zolfa-Thurans, who wiped themselves out in some sort of war. Only one of their race survives - Meglos - and he wants it back. Meglos' name derives from megalomaniac - because that's what he is. It's like calling your baddie Villainus. The inspiration for the form of the alien came from a cactus in McCulloch's kitchen.
Considering that Bidmead, and Barry Letts, wanted to have more real science in the programme, we have a quite idiotic time-loop on display, which keeps the Doctor and Romana out of the plot for the whole of the first episode. First of all, the people trapped in the time-loop are aware that they are in a  time-loop. Then we have them breaking out of it by simply going through the repeated motions themselves but out of phase with it - so breaking it by seemingly confusing it. Bidmead called this time-loop a Chronic Hysteresis. Chronic obviously refers to time, whilst a quick check on-line reveals that Hysteresis is "the phenomenon in which the value of a physical property lags behind changes in the effect causing it, as for instance when magnetic induction lags behind the magnetizing force". Put simply, it's like when a rubber band returns to its usual shape, but not immediately. This seems to imply that the Doctor and Romana would have gotten out of the time-loop eventually, which at least fits with Meglos' plan to delay them rather than just trap them forever. Quite why he doesn't just do the latter is never explained. Like the megalomaniacs who populate James Bond movies, he just has to leave the door open enough to let his enemy eventually defeat him.

Meglos devises a typically complicated and convoluted plan to steal the Dodecahedron back. He employs some comedy pirates, led by a couple of pensioners, to abduct a human being from Earth to provide him with a physical template which forms the basis of his impersonation of the Doctor. He somehow knows that the Doctor has been to Tigella before and is known to the leader of the planet, who has invited him to come and help them. Impersonating the Doctor will allow him access to the power source. He could have simply had the Gaztaks abduct a Deon Tigellan to achieve the same aim a lot quicker and easier, without bringing the Doctor into the picture. The Gaztaks are going to raid the city anyway, so they could also have just let him have access using one of their forms as his template. Meglos' ultimate aim: to sit in his bunker and blow up planets. If he has any other goal, it is never mentioned.
The director chosen to helm this story was Terrence Dudley, who had worked with John Nathan-Turner before. He had previously produced Doomwatch, driving it into the ground and forcing creators Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis to quit. He later produced Survivors, prompting Terry Nation to also walk away from his own show and contributing to its premature demise. He would later write some fairly dull Doctor Who stories.
K9 at least contributes something to this story, but in keeping with JNT's desire to incapacitate it wherever possible it has a problem with its batteries and keeps running out of power. Bill Fraser, who plays the Gaztak leader General Grugger, claimed he would only take the part if he got to kick K9, and so become the most hated man on TV. he did kick K9 in one scene, but did not become the most hated man on TV - mainly because very few people were actually watching Doctor Who at this time.
Season 18 saw a huge fall in viewing figures for the first few stories, due in most part to the arrival on ITV of glossy new US import Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

The most notable thing about the production is the return of Jacqueline Hill to the programme after a 16 year absence. She had, of course, played original companion Barbara Wright. Hill had quit acting to raise a family and was looking to get back into the business. She plays the fanatical Deon leader Lexa. Later, JNT would prohibit people who had been regulars on the show from reappearing as other characters. Director Graeme Harper had wanted to cast Michael Craze (companion actor Ben Jackson) as Krelper in The Caves of Androzani, but JNT vetoed this.
Another thing of note was the arrival of a new VFX technique. Doctor Who had been employing CSO - Colour Separation Overlay - since it moved to colour in 1970, championed in no small part by Barry Letts. As well as the problem of fringing around people or objects placed against a CSO background, and reflective surfaces like the legs of giant robots vanishing altogether, it could only be used for static shots. As the image to be broadcast was composed of two different camera images - one looking at actors and another looking at a model elsewhere in the studio - the model shot had to be perfectly still. If one camera were to move it would have a disproportionate affect on the other - making one part of the image swing drastically out of alignment. A new process called Scene Sync was devised to get round this. The two cameras would be locked together via computer, so that if one moved then the other would adjust at the correct scale in relation to it. Figures could now move more freely through CSO backgrounds, allowing panning shots which had been impossible beforehand. Meglos was the first story to use this new technique, seen best in the sequences involving the planet Zolfa-Thura and its massive screens. Sadly, it did nothing to address the fringing problem.
Next time: if Creationist viewers were unhappy about being represented as deluded fanatics this week, then we get a story which owes a lot to the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin. The show gets a teenage new writer, and a teenage new companion...