Tom Baker vs the Master

Yesterday I was investigating Duncan's Doctor Who DVDs when I saw that three of them were not on the shelf, they were in a bag with some noms. I then got sleepy and discovered that the inside of the bag was a nice comfy place for a cat to have sleeps.

When I woke up I found out that the bag had been moved (and was now being played by a different bag, but things changing like that is something I am used to from actors on TV) and I was not at home any more!

I was scared for a moment but then I found out that there was going to be Doctor Who on where I was, and instead of a TV it was being shown on a projector screen. It took Duncan and other mannys a while to set this up so I had time for more sleeps but then the Doctor Who night started.

"Through the millennia, the Time Lords of Gallifrey led a life of ordered calm, protected against all threats from lesser civilisations by their great power. But this was to change. Suddenly, and terribly, the Time Lords faced the most dangerous crisis in their long history..."

...trying to get the projector to work, lol!

The Deadly Assassin is one of the best Doctor Who stories ever, it is very exciting all the way through. In part 1 the Doctor knows that the Time Lord President is going to be assassinated and at the end of the episode it looks like it is the Doctor that does it!

Of course the Doctor is not really the baddy and in part 2 we find out he was trying to shoot the real baddy but he missed. The Doctor goes into the Matrix and finds he is in a world created by the baddy and they have to fight. At the end of part 2 the Doctor is about to get run over by a train!

The Doctor and the baddy spend the whole of part 3 fighting in the Matrix. The baddy is revealed and he tries to drown the Doctor in a very scary cliffhanger.

I wouldn't have been scared if Scary Cat had been there with me, but he was still at home so I was anxious to see what happened next. I'm glad I didn't have to wait a whole week to find out, because we watched part 4 straight away.

The baddy, Goth, is revealed to only be a henchmanny of the Master, who has a scary face! The Doctor beats the Master with the help of Castellan Spandrell and Co-Ordinator Engin, who are two old Time Lord mannys, but the Master gets away in his own TARDIS that looks like a clock. Will the Master return?

Yes! The next story we watched was The Keeper Of Traken. The Master returns, played by a different actor, and this time he is trying to take over Traken instead of Gallifrey, though otherwise his plan is quite similar.

He has a henchmanny who does his work for him - Kassia the consul is, like Goth, an important manny on the planet but not in charge, and the Master's plan is for them to become the manny in charge and then the Master will get control of a source of power from them.

The Doctor has help from Adric and Nyssa in this story - they are young while Spandrell and Engin were old. The Doctor beats the Master in the end but he gets away in his own TARDIS that looks like a clock. Will the Master return?

Yes. In fact he returns before the end of the story when he takes over Nyssa's father Tremas so he is played by another actor again from now on.

I didn't think this was as good as The Deadly Assassin because it was not quite as exciting and the setting of Traken was not as atmospheric as that of Gallifrey (it was also the worst utopia ever). I may have enjoyed this more if I hadn't seen an even better story just before it, but it was still good.

Logopolis is the very next Doctor Who story after The Keeper Of Traken. I found it very hard to understand everything that happened, because it was full of science-sounding things and I am only a cat.

I did follow the gist of the story though - it was full of danger for the Doctor after he met a mysterious white manny and spoke to him in secret. The Doctor and Adric then went to the planet Logopolis but they didn't know that Tegan was on board the TARDIS too.

The Master tries to kill the Doctor by using maths to shrink the TARDIS with the Doctor inside it. There is a funny bit when the tiny Doctor sees Adric's huge face on the scanner, then Nyssa (who was on Logopolis too) and Tegan's big faces.

The Doctor makes a "DO NOT WANT" face.

He is rescued by Adric and the Monitor (Logopolis is full of old mannys and the Monitor is their leader) who use maths to save him, so maths can be used for good as well as evil.

The Master then tries to take over Logopolis. Presumably he thinks it must have some great power source like Gallifrey and Traken had, but he accidentally kills everyone because it turns out that maths was the only thing keeping them alive (or something like that, I think).

The stakes are then unexplicably raised when it turns out that the whole universe was being kept going by maths, and the only way to save it is to go to Earth and do some science there.

The Doctor and the Master have to team up, which makes for an unusual but effective cliffhanger to part 3, but in part 4 the Master, to the surprise of nobody except the Doctor, tries to take over the universe.

The Doctor beats the Master by unplugging his machine, but then he falls off the building! The white manny, the Watcher, turns out to have been the Doctor all the time, and the Doctor regenerates.

Logopolis has not been a great story up to this point, until the last scene strengthens the whole by tying it together.

The last scene is really powerful because it's the end for Tom Baker's Doctor, and the moment really has been prepared for by clever foreshadowing. So it is sad but at the same time a happy ending - a new Doctor appears.

I was very tired after watching three Doctor Who stories in a row, so I went back inside the bag to have sleeps. When I woke up again I was back home on the Buddha Cushion with my friends and my fez. Was it all a dream? Well... no, because there are photos.