DOCTOR WHO:  THE LEISURE HIVE

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#36:  THE LEISURE HIVE (4 Parts)	
ORIGINALLY AIRED:  8/30/80 to 9/20/80
WRITTEN BY:  David Fisher	
DIRECTED BY:  Lovett Bickford
PRODUCER:  John Nathan-Turner
SCRIPT EDITOR:  Christopher H. Bidmead

This is the first story under the new producer, John Nathan-Turner, hereinafter called JNT, who immediately made several visible changes. The opening and closing credits were reshot from the former time-tunnel effect to a starscape, and the theme music for the credit sequences was reorchestrated. In addition, all the incidental music underscoring each show was assigned to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which had scored some shows in the past.

JNT also insisted Tom Baker wear makeup, which he apparently never had before; and decreed there would be no more 6-part stories (Hooray!). This show also saw the first appearance of the Doctor's slightly modified costume, all in shades of maroon, burgundy and red. Question marks were embroidered on the lapels of his shirt--something which has carried over into the completely different costumes of Peter Davison and Colin Baker.

For JNT's first season, Barry Letts returned as executive producer. He previously produced the show for most of Jon Pertwee's five years, up until the first Tom Baker story, ROBOT. And, of course, John Leeson returned as the voice of K9.

This story--as with several this season--is occasionally hard to follow, partly because the appearance of the Foamasi was limited to teasing glimpses for the first one or two parts. Additionally, THE LEISURE HIVE is difficult to fathom because some important information is conveyed in dialogue by a hard-to-understand electronically enhanced computer voice.

This story provides Tom Baker with quite a stretch, as he ages 500 years and appears as a fragile old man of uncertain memory. Baker, aided by terrific makeup which completely covers his trademark curly hair, is wonderfully Merlin-like and believable.

The story begins with a long, slow pan across the beach at Brighton, with the Doctor snoring on a beach chair next to the TARDIS. K9 glides none too smoothly across the sand, listing recreational facilities in this galaxy to Romana: Yegros-Alpha, offering atavistic therapy on a primitive asteroid; Zaakros, home of the galaxy's largest flora collection; and Zeen-4, known for its historical reenactments.

Romana, wearing a long period bathing costume, a sailor suit blouse and a straw hat, tosses a ball toward the sea and tells K9 to fetch. He follows it into the water and shorts out. Romana dumps K9 into the Doctor's lap, saying, "You've got the century wrong, you've got the season wrong; and you've got K9's sea water defenses wrong." The Doctor tells Romana this is the second time he's missed the opening of the Brighton Pavilion. He previously tried to take Leela there and instead wound up off the Channel coast in THE HORROR OF FANG ROCK.

Romana thinks it was dangerous for the Doctor to have bypassed the randomizer to reach Brighton. "Well, I can't spend the rest of my life running away from the Black Guardian," the Doctor says.

Rather than freezing on Brighton Beach, Romana wants to go to Argolis, the first of the Leisure planets. She tells the Doctor in relative Earth date 2250 there was a war there against the Foamasi, a reptile race, who dropped 2000 interplanetary missiles, wiping out the planet. The survivors built a recreation center called the Leisure Hive, with an experiential grid--cells of different environments designed to produce physical, psychic and intellectual regeneration.

The action shifts to Argolis; the Argolin are green skinned humanoids with strange upswept blonde and green hairdos that terminate in a spiral containing purple beads. They all wear long yellow robes.

A meeting takes place in a board room. Present in person are a number of Argolin and, via a holographic telecommunicator image, Brock, the Earth agent responsible for their bookings. He informs the others Argolis is suffering from an escalating negative cash flow and is headed for bankruptcy.

Pangol, the youngest Argolin, son of Chairman Morix, argues Argolis has created a new science--tachyonics--but Brock points out after 40 years this is little more than a curiosity. He turns down the Argolin invitation to join the board and invest in the Leisure Hive.

Shortly thereafter a shuttle from Earth arrives, carrying Brock and Klout, his lawyer. He's changed his mind and decided to accept the directorship. He's had an offer from the Foamasi to buy the whole planet of Argolis, although it is a dead world in a radioactive atmosphere. The Foamasi have a highly developed intelligence and, as reptiles, they are resistant to radioactivity.

Pangol is called away from the board meeting to demonstrate the tachyon recreation generator to some tourists. In the exhibition hall, his lecture includes solid tachyonic images of nongravity squash.

The TARDIS materializes, and the Doctor and Romana exit. Observing Pangol's demonstration, the Doctor says the methodology has to be unreal transfer because that's the only way to manipulate solid objects. Romana tells him this part of the galaxy doesn't discover unreal transfer until 2386.

Pangol steps into the image chamber of the generator. His head and arms appear to become disconnected from his body, moving on their own.

In the board room, Morix becomes ill; a bead falls off the spiral at the top of his head and he appears to age. A short while later he dies. Sudden aging and rapid death are another legacy of the war with the Foamasi.

Outside the hive, two Foamasi cut their way in and reseal the wall behind them.

Another shuttle from Earth arrives, carrying Mena, Pangol's mother. Now that Morix is dead, she is the new Chairman. She carries a holocrystal of the first trials of the Earth scientist Hardin, who has found a better use for tachyonics--to manipulate time.

Back in the exhibition hall, Pangol explains the matching tachyon field creates a temporary reduplication of any physical object. A skeptic in the audience--visitor Loman--is invited to test the equipment himself. Pangol starts the projector, causing the existence of two temporally coincident Lomans. Pangol proceeds to manipulate one without harming the other; but as his arms come off, Loman screams. The Doctor rushes into the image chamber to help. Romana tells Pangol the Doctor is a scientist. Pangol thinks the Doctor is Hardin and has him taken to see Mena.

In the board room, Mena, Brock and the others observe the holocrystal of Hardin's experiment, which explores the temporal anomaly inherent in tachyons, which travel faster than light. An old woman is turned into a young one in seconds--a complete cellular rejuvenation, which would not only aid the Argolin personally, but would serve as an attraction for future tourist business.

The Doctor and Romana enter the board room, and Mena says the Doctor is not Hardin. A voice over a loudspeaker announces Loman's death. The Doctor and Romana sneak out. Mena alerts security to apprehend them.

Both Time Lords have spotted Hardin's experiment as a fake. As they float through the nongravity squash game, the Doctor tells Romana, "Two discontinuous holographs had been edited together. I noticed vague interference patterns."

Romana makes it back to the TARDIS, pulling the Doctor's scarf, but he's not on the other end of it; it's connected to the statue of an Argolin. Leaving his coat on the floor, the Doctor enters the image chamber of the generator. A Foamasi pushes a button on the control panel and Romana sees an image of the Doctor's head, arms and lower body separate.

Pangol rushes in and discovers the controls are jammed. The Doctor suggests shorting the servolock on the door. He isn't inside the generator at all. It was only a tachyon image, which now disappears. The Doctor got out through a hole in the back which he made with the sonic screwdriver. "A common fault of tachyon particles is they can induce a certain temporal instability," he tells Pangol.

Hardin arrives on another shuttle from Earth. The Doctor and Romana are taken to see him and Mena, who asks if the Doctor has ever experimented with time. Romana says Gallifrey abandoned tachyonics when they developed warp matrix engineering.

While Hardin sets up a new experiment, Mena shows the Doctor and Romana a glimpse of Argolis through a window. The planet won't be habitable for 3 centuries due to a war which lasted 20 minutes. In addition, there will be no future generations of Argolin; all the survivors are sterile. Mena explains the purpose of the hive is to promote understanding between lifeforms of all culture and genetic type.

Mena starts to show them the experiential grid, but a Foamasi sabotages the fibre optics, causing interfibral malfunction. One of the beads falls off Mena's spiral and she slumps over, looking older.

Mena, the Doctor and Romana enter Hardin's lab. Mena and the Doctor leave, but Romana stays, volunteering to help. She picks up a wafer wave inducer, which feeds directly from the tachyon drive. Hardin says the divider circuit automatically dephases, but he admits he doesn't know how to lock the phase.

Stimson, who has funded Hardin and persuaded him to fake the experiments, realizes he's about to be found out and tries to leave Argolis. He goes to see Brock to get clearance to leave on the next shuttle, but there's no one in Brock's room--only a Klout-shaped mask hanging in the closet. Stimson runs away into the exhibition hall, where he's attacked and killed by a Foamasi.

Romana and Hardin try an experiment with an hourglass and achieve stasis--bringing time to a stop.

In the exhibition hall, the Doctor checks the controls of the generator and finds the failsafe has been overridden and "eliminate intruder" coded into the computer. Brock hands the Doctor his scarf; the other end is wrapped around the neck of Stimson, who is dead.

The Doctor is accused of the murder and Mena holds court in the board room, in the presence of the Helmet of Theron, a sacred reminder to the Argolin of the evil that dwells in violence. Theron led Argolis into the war that wiped out the planet. The Doctor swears his innocence before the helmet.

At a power level of 450, Romana and Hardin get the sand to fall upwards in the hourglass. They've succeeded in reversing time. After they leave to tell Mena, the hourglass explodes.

Hardin and Romana interrupt the Doctor's trial to tell Mena the experiment worked. Hardin announces Romana has solved the wave equations in all four dimensions, but there must be one more test before the procedure can be used on an Argolin. Pangol insists the test be performed on the Doctor, as a kind of trial by fire to prove his innocence. Romana tells the Doctor at most, the procedure will knock off 10 or 12 years from his age. He enters the image chamber of the generator.

Romana returns to Hardin's lab to switch through the recording equipment, and sees the exploded hourglass. She tries to stop the experiment but she's too late. The generator door opens and the Doctor exits. His hair is white, and he has a long beard; he's aged 500 years. "Was I in there long? It felt like centuries," the Doctor says, aghast when he sees himself in the mirrored surface of the generator.

He and Romana have collars placed around their necks, which will allow them limited freedom in the hive, but will cause pain if they try to remove them or enter unauthorized areas.

Pangol tells Vargos, an Argolin guide, the experiment with the generator has degraded the segmentation. Although Pangol requests Hardin's equipment removed from the generator, Mena allows the Earth scientist to continue his experiments in negative time images, but refuses to allow Romana to help him.

Romana thinks the Doctor's aging process can be reversed with temporal asymmetry; meantime, his condition is unstable.

Hardin removes the collars from Romana and the Doctor and tells them Brock has asked him to look into the recreation generator. While the Doctor was in the generator, he noticed two circuits behind baryon shields. What was the function of the second one?

As Hardin is a human and can't age too much; and the Doctor is too far aged to risk another tachyon surge, Romana volunteers to go into the generator to find out what the second circuit is.

Brock shows Mena and Pangol the terms offered by the Foamasi to acquire Argolis. It's not an official government offer; it's from some private citizens called the West Lodge. Pangol tears up the document, saying he has something better than money--manpower. The war was 40 years ago and no Argolins have been born since, but Pangol is much younger than 40. He's the first of the new Argolin--the child of the generator--cloned from cells donated by his fellow Argolin. Now the regeneration process has stood the test of time--Pangol is the only clone to live to adulthood--the reduplication program will proceed.

The Doctor writes come calculations on the outside of the TARDIS. Hardin calls an Argolin guide away from the generator controls. When he looks at the Doctor's figures, the Argolin faints. "You know, I had a feeling he wasn't quite ready for the rigors of warp mechanics," the Doctor remarks. Romana enters the generator and runs into a Foamasi, just as Pangol turns it on.

The Doctor returns to his room saying, "No doubt about it, all this rushing around takes it out of you, particularly when you're 1250 years old." Romana and a Foamasi enter with a box she removed from the generator. Romana says the Foamasi is a friend who got her out of the generator before Pangol started it up.

The Foamasi tries to communicate but no one can understand what he's saying. It has something to do with the random field frame--the box Romana took from the generator. The Foamasi leads the Doctor to the telecommunicator, which is tuned to the board room. The Doctor realizes there is someone in that room the Foamasi wants to reach, so they head off there, acquiring another Foamasi along the way.

In the board room, Mena is dying; Pangol is ready to take over as Chairman. The Doctor's party enters, and one of the Foamasi grabs Brock and pulls his face off; it was a mask. Beneath it is another Foamasi. Klout's head is pulled off and he's a Foamasi also.

The Foamasi who saved Romana from the generator takes a voice synthesizer from the Brock impersonator and explains he's a representative from the Foamasi Government. The two Foamasi just unmasked are saboteurs and murderers, the cause of all the accidents at the hive. The West Lodge hoped to acquire Argolis for its illegal activities and sent these two to assure the deal would go through. The Government Foamasi wraps up the two criminals in a sort of cocoon of filaments. They'll be taken back to face trial.

Mena passes out on the floor. Pangol refuses permission for the Foamasi to leave. Romana, Hardin and the Doctor return to Hardin's lab and find the random field frame missing. The Doctor suggests using the randomizer from the TARDIS as a second random field frame with a stabilizing matrix. Romana thinks it's too risky; she wants to build a new one and sets about modifying one of Hardin's oscillators, while the Doctor sneaks out.

Pangol returns to the board room and gets the Helmet of Theron. Mena tries to stop him, but she is too weak. In the exhibition hall, Pangol addresses the guides, declaring himself the new leader. The Doctor enters the TARDIS, picks up the randomizer, sneaks into the generator with it and hooks it up to the antibaryon shield.

Romana sees this on the telecommunicator and rushes into the exhibition hall to tell Pangol the Doctor is in the generator. The Foamasi shuttle launches and Pangol orders it blown up--an act of war. Pangol dons the Helmet of Theron, enters the generator and starts to duplicate into an army of Pangols. Then he exits and removes the Helmet, followed by his duplicates.

A group of helmeted generator duplicates capture Romana. One by one they remove their helmets. Each is the Doctor. One explains, "It's terribly simple. It's a tachyon image--outwardly Pangol, inwardly me. Unfortunately, these tachyon images are very unstable, or fortunately, depending on your point of view." One by one they disappear, until there's only one left--the real Doctor, who was the first one out of the generator after Pangol. He's his own age again and now gets back into his own clothes (although where they came from is a mystery). Romana realizes the images were multiplied in a FIFO stack--first in first out.

Hardin reaches Mena in the board room and carries her to the generator. Pangol tries to stop him, but before he can push Mena out, the equipment cuts in. The Doctor had set it on rejuvenation, not duplication, and it can't be turned off. The Doctor throws the Helmet of Theron at the generator to stop it running. A much younger Mena exits with a bawling baby Pangol, saying, "This time I must try to bring him up properly."

This doesn't make too much sense. If the generator was on duplication before, why did it rejuvenate the Doctor? If it was on rejuvenation before, why did it duplicate the Doctor in Pangol's image?

A Foamasi enters; the shuttle that blew up was piloted by the West Lodge leader who had impersonated Brock. The Foamasi ambassador and Mena adjourn to the board room. The Doctor hands over Baby Pangol, still crying away, to Hardin.

As the Doctor starts to leave, Romana reminds him to get the randomizer. He doesn't want it. "I don't like not knowing where we're going to turn up next," he says. Romana asks about the Black Guardian. "Some galactic hobo with ideas above his station. The cosmos is full of them. Anyway, there's been enough randomizing on this job," the Doctor replies.

So, the randomizer, which was largely ignored the previous season, is gotten rid of forever. The Doctor and Romana enter the TARDIS, which dematerializes.

Adrienne Corri, who plays Mena, has appeared in many British and international films, including CORRIDORS OF BLOOD (1962), THE TELLTALE HEART (1962), DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (1965), A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1970), VAMPIRE CIRCUS (1972), MADHOUSE (1974) and ROSEBUD (1975).

Ian Talbot, who plays Klout, played Travis in the Pertwee story THE SILURIANS.

Laurence Payne, who plays Morix, played Johnny Ringo in the Hartnell story THE GUNFIGHTERS; and Dastari in the Colin Baker story THE TWO DOCTORS.

David Allister, who plays Stimson, plays Bruchner in the third installment of the Colin Baker story THE TRIAL OF A TIME LORD.

Clifford Norgate, who provides the Generator Voice, also performed the Nimon Voice in the Tom Baker story THE HORNS OF NIMON.