The Leisure Hive marks the biggest shake-up of Doctor Who since Spearhead From Space, which saw a new Doctor, new companion and new Earthbound format all introduced, alongside the move into colour.
Graham Williams has resigned, and his nominated successor, John Nathan Turner, has been given the producer role. He's learned from his experience as Production Unit Manager on the programme and is confident he knows what works and what doesn't. He's seen the hell which Tom Baker has put his old boss through, and the next time the star makes his regular threat to quit, he'll take him up on the offer.
He could never "get" the style of humour exhibited by Douglas Adams, and thinks it has gotten out of hand anyway, so wants to suppress this. He's backed up in this by the new Script Editor, Christopher Hamilton Bidmead, and a new Executive Producer, employed to keep an eye on him as he has never produced before, and this is one of the BBC's key programmes. The man employed to hand-hold is none other than former producer Barry Letts.
JNT has decided to make some sweeping changes, some narrative, some structural, and some cosmetic.
These changes have been welcomed by many - but there are just as many fans who see them as mistakes.
The changes begin with the opening credits. JNT's argument was that Baker was seven years older, and the old image of him in the titles was out of date.
The "time tunnel" effect is replaced by a rather dull starfield, whilst the iconic diamond logo becomes a shaped fluorescent tube. One is timeless, the other dates it badly.
The music is updated to make it sound more contemporary and modern - but we all know that nothing dates quicker than the future when it comes to sci-fi.
The music of the JNT era is as badly dated as the imagery, thanks to the move away from conventional instrumentation, or the odd really avant garde electronic composition.
Dudley Simpson's services were dispensed with, to be replaced by in-house Radiophonic Workshop composers, with variable effect. The reason was partly economic, moving it in-house, but one suspects that JNT was wilfully breaking with the past to stamp his own mark.
He would deliberately avoid using writers and directors from before his time, purely on the grounds that they had worked on the show under other producers. He never once thought of the great contribution they might make, so was in effect throwing out the baby with the bath water.
For many, the changes wrought by JNT were simply a triumph of style over content.
The Leisure Hive is directed by one of the newcomers - Lovett Bickford. He sets out his stall with a sequence the like of which has never been seen in the programme before - a lengthy tracking shot along Brighton beach, passing various colourful beach tents until we alight upon the similarly shaped TARDIS. There's no dialogue - just the wind, the flapping of canvas, and then the snores of the sleeping Doctor.
It's either a novel and original way of launching a story / season - or a pretentious waste of a minute and half of the episode. Bickford fancied himself as a bit of an auteur, but his inexperience would cause problems in studio. He wanted single-camera, hand-held shots, with ceilings on the sets. The latter were harder to light, whilst the former led to lots of delays - causing him to overrun dreadfully. As such, he couldn't be invited back under BBC rules.
On the beach - the location chosen as it was near JNT's house - K-9 failed to work on the shingle, despite a lot of money being spent to upgrade it. It now had caterpillar tracks instead of wheels, but these simply slid on the shiny pebbles. You can clearly see the means by which they got round this problem - fishing twine attached to the prop to pull it along.
On Argolis, the Doctor and Romana discuss a video they have seen in which they have spotted some fakery. However, the video stopped playing before they entered the room.
The story revolves around the Tachyon Generator. A problem even today is the programme's handling of time manipulation.
The Doctor is aged by the machine, physically, but his mind is only a few minutes older on his emergence from the machine.
By this reckoning, Pangol should have ended up as a baby with a 30 year old's mind at the conclusion.
Why did the Doctor age within his current incarnation, and not emerge looking like Sylvester McCoy?
The Generator duplicates Pangol's clothing and the war helmet - yet somehow manages to duplicate the Doctor in the same outfits, instead of his own clothes.
Where does he get his clothes at the end? The Argolin outfit is too close-fitting to have had the heavy overcoat and scarf hidden underneath.
The rotund Foamasi fitting into their human disguises is the one everyone talks about - so much so that RTD came up with the whole gas exchanger business when he came to create the Slitheen.
Why do the West Lodge pair just stand there when the good Foamasi rips off their disguises?
Why does the TARDIS translation not work, when the Argolin can understand them perfectly well?
Why did the Government Foamasi not bring a translator of his own? He has to use the villain's.
Why do the Foamasi try to frame the Doctor when they won't have any idea who he is? When they kill Hardin's business partner, they could simply have hidden the body outside the Hive.
Why do they feel the need to dispense with their disguises every time they want to get up to some villainy?
At the conclusion we hear that the baddies got blown up and the nice Foamasi is alive and well. Pity we don't get to see one of the most exciting things that could have happened in what is a rather dull story - but there's another problem with this. How do we know that this isn't simply one of the villainous aliens, pretending to be the nice one?
Why does no-one seem to react when Brock turns up at the Hive about half an hour after being seen on a live video message from Earth?
He appears to have a lot of authority, for someone who is only thinking of investing in the Hive.
Mind you, Argolin law makes little sense, with people making things up as they go along. Sentencing someone who is only suspected of a crime to being used as a human test subject in a scientific experiment can't possibly be on the Argolin Statute Book, surely?
The Pangol duplicates, which are supposed to be identical, are of different heights.
The Argolins complain that other resorts have zero-gravity swimming - yet have zero-gravity tennis. They would both feel exactly the same to the tourist.
Finally - what precisely does the Doctor do at the end? He throws something at a screen and it somehow brings everything to a conclusion.
And is the Doctor still the Doctor now - or just a stable Tachyonic copy?
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