Logopolis and Steven Moffat

[Stevil2001]

Recently rewatched Logopolis and was struck by how Steven Moffat-y it was:
* paying off a vague arc in the season finale
* hints about future knowledge that don't quite make sense (like, what did the Watcher tell the Doctor to send him to Logopolis?)
* dropping said hints as soon as the story is over
* the first half of the story is spent preventing the Doctor from getting to the actual plot
* tying the regeneration into some kind of universe-level threat (to be fair, this is both Moffat and Davies)

Most importantly, I think: is Logopolis the first Doctor Who story to be completely about the show itself? By this, I mean, the Doctor usually stumbles into other peoples' stories: the Tribe of Gum trying to make fire, the Thals trying to survive in the woods, and so on.* But there's no story to Logopolis independent of the fight between the Doctor and the Master and the deepening of the mythology about the TARDISes. He doesn't interrupt someone else's story; from the beginning it's about the Doctor trying to better protect himself from the Master, and there would be no story if the Doctor didn't allow the Master to infiltrate Logopolis. It strikes me as very Moffat move: compare tales like "A Good Man Goes to War" or "The Big Bang" or "The Wedding of River Song."

* I guess Inside the Spaceship is an early exception to this.

 

[DWF]

Logopolis is about as far away from RTD and Moffat's style as you can get, the story was apart of Christopher Bidmead's attempt to bring in hard science fiction on the show. The story also focuses on the Doctor and his attempts to stop the Master, his companions really only get the way in this one.

The Watcher probably told the Doctor of his upcoming end and regeneration, which is why he said the moment has been prepared for.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

I strongly disagree on how far it is from the RTD/Moffat eras of NuWho. Logopolis IS the most RTD-esque season finale that OldWho ever had. Hard science or no, Bidmead arced the story to the previous ones, and as he says on the DVD quite purposely too.

A threat of universal scale.
A story arc that pays off on specific plot points from earlier that season.
A weary Doctor who contemplates his own state of affairs, here via him chasting his companions for following him.

All these remind of RTD, no Moffat so much - Moffat's thing has been time paradoxes and the like, and while the Watcher doing what he can to ensure the timeline is a Moffat-y element, but its too vague to actually count as such.

As is, Logopolis seems to me like a clear influence for RTD's era, and indeed that whole season does, arc-wise. Remember, season 18 is basically the Entropy arc, after all.

 

[Stevil2001]

^ I can see that. What does strike me as Moffat-y is that the companions go through giant emotional traumas that no one ever mentions-- Davies would have made the whole thing about Nyssa/Tegan's feelings (on some level, at least

The Watcher probably told the Doctor of his upcoming end and regeneration, which is why he said the moment has been prepared for.

Maybe, but the Doctor never seems to fear for his own life, but does decide he needs to repair the chameleon circuit, but clearly is not told what exact threat the Master represents, otherwise he wouldn't go to Logopolis. So what does the Watcher tell the Doctor that makes him think fixing the circuit is the best bet? Maybe he does it to protect the companions-- there's a lot of trying to get them out of the way of danger by keeping things from them (another very Moffat element, I think).

How does the Watcher bring Nyssa from Traken to Logopolis, anyway?

 

[DWF]

^ I can see that. What does strike me as Moffat-y is that the companions go through giant emotional traumas that no one ever mentions-- Davies would have made the whole thing about Nyssa/Tegan's feelings (on some level, at least

The Watcher probably told the Doctor of his upcoming end and regeneration, which is why he said the moment has been prepared for.

Maybe, but the Doctor never seems to fear for his own life, but does decide he needs to repair the chameleon circuit, but clearly is not told what exact threat the Master represents, otherwise he wouldn't go to Logopolis. So what does the Watcher tell the Doctor that makes him think fixing the circuit is the best bet? Maybe he does it to protect the companions-- there's a lot of trying to get them out of the way of danger by keeping things from them (another very Moffat element, I think).

How does the Watcher bring Nyssa from Traken to Logopolis, anyway?

The Watcher tried to take the TARDIS out of time and space with all of the Doctor's companions onboard but Tegan sneaked away on her own, she put own self in danger. And it's pretty clear the Watcher told him soemthing of his own future, the Doctor goes from trying to flush the Master our of the TARDIS to calmly going to Logopolis.

 

[DWF]

I strongly disagree on how far it is from the RTD/Moffat eras of NuWho. Logopolis IS the most RTD-esque season finale that OldWho ever had. Hard science or no, Bidmead arced the story to the previous ones, and as he says on the DVD quite purposely too.

A threat of universal scale.
A story arc that pays off on specific plot points from earlier that season.
A weary Doctor who contemplates his own state of affairs, here via him chasting his companions for following him.

All these remind of RTD, no Moffat so much - Moffat's thing has been time paradoxes and the like, and while the Watcher doing what he can to ensure the timeline is a Moffat-y element, but its too vague to actually count as such.

As is, Logopolis seems to me like a clear influence for RTD's era, and indeed that whole season does, arc-wise. Remember, season 18 is basically the Entropy arc, after all.

Bidmead arced the E-space trilogy together and the Master trilogy together but certainly not the entire season. The Great One in Planet Of The Spiders and the War Lord in The War Games were also universal threats. RTD was more influenced by Buffy with it's season long story arcs than classic Doctor Who.

 

[inflatabledalek]

I think The Moff's view of Logopolis can be summed up by the short piece of fiction he wrote for (IIRC) DWM's Complete Fourth Doctor Special (where each story had a little introduction from one of the book/comic/audio writers before the updates and corrections for the Archive of each adventure), which was entirely about taking the piss out of the "Flood the Tardis" scene.


[It turns out the Watcher is really the Fourth Doctor from a timeline where he's emptied out all of the Thames into the Tardis, who has gone back in disguise to warn his younger self not to be such a tit...]

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

I strongly disagree on how far it is from the RTD/Moffat eras of NuWho. Logopolis IS the most RTD-esque season finale that OldWho ever had. Hard science or no, Bidmead arced the story to the previous ones, and as he says on the DVD quite purposely too.

A threat of universal scale.
A story arc that pays off on specific plot points from earlier that season.
A weary Doctor who contemplates his own state of affairs, here via him chasting his companions for following him.

All these remind of RTD, no Moffat so much - Moffat's thing has been time paradoxes and the like, and while the Watcher doing what he can to ensure the timeline is a Moffat-y element, but its too vague to actually count as such.

As is, Logopolis seems to me like a clear influence for RTD's era, and indeed that whole season does, arc-wise. Remember, season 18 is basically the Entropy arc, after all.

Bidmead arced the E-space trilogy together and the Master trilogy together but certainly not the entire season. The Great One in Planet Of The Spiders and the War Lord in The War Games were also universal threats. RTD was more influenced by Buffy with it's season long story arcs than classic Doctor Who.

We argued this before. And as was said before, The Leisure Hive freed the Doctor from the randomizer element and led them straight to the E-Space arc. Full Circle introduced the CVEs and E-Space. And Warrior's Gate depicted entropic collapse on a smaller scale. Each story lead to the next, and as such, that season is an arc that resolves itself in Logopolis. Castrovalva is largely an epilogue to the Master portion of the story.

And I know I'm not the first person to call Logopolis, and indeed series 18, an RTD-esque storyline in the stakes and scope of things.

I think The Moff's view of Logopolis can be summed up by the short piece of fiction he wrote for (IIRC) DWM's Complete Fourth Doctor Special (where each story had a little introduction from one of the book/comic/audio writers before the updates and corrections for the Archive of each adventure), which was entirely about taking the piss out of the "Flood the Tardis" scene.


[It turns out the Watcher is really the Fourth Doctor from a timeline where he's emptied out all of the Thames into the Tardis, who has gone back in disguise to warn his younger self not to be such a tit...]

LOL!

 

[Stevil2001]

I think The Moff's view of Logopolis can be summed up by the short piece of fiction he wrote for (IIRC) DWM's Complete Fourth Doctor Special (where each story had a little introduction from one of the book/comic/audio writers before the updates and corrections for the Archive of each adventure), which was entirely about taking the piss out of the "Flood the Tardis" scene.


[It turns out the Watcher is really the Fourth Doctor from a timeline where he's emptied out all of the Thames into the Tardis, who has gone back in disguise to warn his younger self not to be such a tit...]

Hah! Though I think he did pick it as one of his top Tom stories (though not the top) in a DWM column a couple years back, when he gave the best story for each Doctor. (I mean, I love Logopolis, but you can't deny that that flooding scene makes zero sense.)

I'm not saying that Steven Moffat sat down when plotting Series 5 and thought, "How would Christopher Hamilton Bidmead do this?" but there are some interesting parallels.

 

[diankra]

I may have missed this somewhere in the thread, but.. Logopolis was a replacement script, written to close the season when it became clear that Tom was leaving and that even without that none of the possible scripts was ready for production in slot seven (Timeflight was originally pencilled in).
So the pulling together of the season plots is a a product of Bidmead writing it to close the season rather than pre-planning. But I think Stevil has a point about this not being a story where the Doctor lands in someone else's story as usual (though it's not the first time that the story has only happened because the Master set it in motion in the first place).

 

[DWF]

I strongly disagree on how far it is from the RTD/Moffat eras of NuWho. Logopolis IS the most RTD-esque season finale that OldWho ever had. Hard science or no, Bidmead arced the story to the previous ones, and as he says on the DVD quite purposely too.

A threat of universal scale.
A story arc that pays off on specific plot points from earlier that season.
A weary Doctor who contemplates his own state of affairs, here via him chasting his companions for following him.

All these remind of RTD, no Moffat so much - Moffat's thing has been time paradoxes and the like, and while the Watcher doing what he can to ensure the timeline is a Moffat-y element, but its too vague to actually count as such.

As is, Logopolis seems to me like a clear influence for RTD's era, and indeed that whole season does, arc-wise. Remember, season 18 is basically the Entropy arc, after all.

Bidmead arced the E-space trilogy together and the Master trilogy together but certainly not the entire season. The Great One in Planet Of The Spiders and the War Lord in The War Games were also universal threats. RTD was more influenced by Buffy with it's season long story arcs than classic Doctor Who.

We argued this before. And as was said before, The Leisure Hive freed the Doctor from the randomizer element and led them straight to the E-Space arc. Full Circle introduced the CVEs and E-Space. And Warrior's Gate depicted entropic collapse on a smaller scale. Each story lead to the next, and as such, that season is an arc that resolves itself in Logopolis. Castrovalva is largely an epilogue to the Master portion of the story.

And I know I'm not the first person to call Logopolis, and indeed series 18, an RTD-esque storyline in the stakes and scope of things.

You are the first person that I know to make such a connection and there's nothing official to back it up, there's no talk of a season long entropy arc.

In Smith's original outline, the adventure involved the TARDIS landing on the planet Alzarius, where monstrous Marshmen rise from the swamps during the time of Mistfall. As the Doctor and Romana explore, a space freighter crashlands on Alzarius, and the time travellers must help its crew repair the ship while fending off the Marshmen and gigantic cave-dwelling spiders. They are aided by a young Marshchild, who has been rejected by the rest of her kind due to her pacifist nature. In the end, the Marshchild sacrifices herself to keep the Doctor and Romana safe until the mists vanish and the Marshmen retreat to the swamps.
Bidmead was impressed with the striking images that Smith conjured in “The Planet That Slept”, but asked him to make several changes as he fleshed the story out into script form. Bidmead wanted to give Doctor Who a much stronger scientific underpinning, and so he and Smith decided to make evolution an underlying theme of “The Planet That Slept”. The Marshmen, spiders and even the ship's crew would all be different evolutionary stages of the same creature. The space freighter had now become a passenger liner which crashlanded on Alzarius centuries before the start of the story.
Smith also had to integrate elements of a story arc that Bidmead had conceived, which would begin in “The Planet That Slept” and run through the next two serials. This had been developed at the suggestion of fan advisor Ian Levine, who recalled the tighter continuity between stories sometimes seen in Doctor Who during the Sixties. For his part, Bidmead wanted to impart more meaning to the Doctor's seemingly aimless wandering. Nathan-Turner was less keen on this idea, having witnessed the difficulties that overarching plots had imposed on Season Sixteen, when every story involved the search for a segment of the Key To Time. However, he ultimately consented to Bidmead's notion of a shorter story arc; this concerned the TARDIS becoming trapped in a pocket universe called E-Space, from which the Doctor would strive to escape.

This is from Sullivan's Doctor Who site.

 

[DWF]

The E-Space trilogy was a hap hazzard affair, but the Master trilogy was actually JNT's idea.

Around this time, Tom Baker decided to leave Doctor Who at the end of Season Eighteen after starring in the series for seven years. Although Nathan-Turner felt that it was time for a new Doctor, he was very concerned that viewers would no longer accept a change of lead actor. To this end, he wanted to reintroduce a popular element of the programme's past in order to bridge the changeover from Baker to his successor. Since Romana would be leaving Doctor Who partway through Season Eighteen in Warriors' Gate -- the story that would preceed The Keeper Of Traken -- he initially thought to bring back a former companion for a handful of adventures. To this end, he approached both Elisabeth Sladen (who had played Sarah Jane Smith from 1973 to 1976) and Louise Jameson (who had been Leela in 1977 and 1978), but both actresses declined his invitation to return to Doctor Who. Nathan-Turner was also mindful that although K-9 would be exiting the programme along with Romana in Warriors' Gate, the version of the character left on Gallifrey (in Season Fifteen's The Invasion Of Time) could be reintroduced if the need arose.
As the summer progressed, Nathan-Turner began to consider alternative plans for the end of Season Eighteen and the start of Season Nineteen. Since his efforts to bring back an old friend of the Doctor's had failed, he instead decided to reintroduce an old enemy. This was the Master, an evil Time Lord who had originally been played by Roger Delgado until the actor's untimely death in 1973. The Master had already been resurrected once in 1976's The Deadly Assassin, in which Peter Pratt had played the character in a condition of near-complete physical deterioration. Nathan-Turner now wanted to restore the Master to an echo of Delgado's incarnation -- albeit in a less humorous and more malevolent form.
At this stage, The Keeper Of Traken was designated Serial 5T, and was planned to be the penultimate story of Season Eighteen. Nathan-Turner and Bidmead felt that the character of Mogen could easily be replaced with the Master, and that The Keeper Of Traken could be revised as an effective vehicle to explain the villain's transformation from his cadaverous state to a rejuvenated body. This would also presage the Doctor's own imminent regeneration. The new Master would then appear in both Baker's final adventure and the first story to feature the Fifth Doctor, forming a loose trilogy of serials to guide the audience through the major upheaval of Baker's departure.

There really was no pre-planned season long story arc.

 

[Mr Awe]

No, I don't see much similarity between Logopolis and nuWho (either RTD of Moffat). However, flash forward a number of years and I start to see some similarities.

Mawdryn Undead has some timey-whimeyness that was unusual for the classic series but more similar to Moffat's style. Perhaps the story that reminds me the most of new Who, and particularly Moffat, is Battlefield where a future version of the Doctor helps at key points where they're battling essentially being from a universe where magic replaced science.

Perhaps more importantly, in late classic Who, there's more character development with Ace. You get to see her background, how it influences her character, some development, and an interesting future had the series continued. I see Ace as almost a prototype companion for the new series in general and for Rose specifically.

But, no, Logopolis doesn't have much to do with anything new Who related.

Mr Awe

 

[Doctorwhovian]

I wonder if JNT's wish to get Sladen back was sort of the genesis of K9 and company (Which I think aired in the gap between Logopolis and Castrovalva).

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

There really was no pre-planned season long story arc.

Nobody is sayign that there was. However, it comes off like that, because the end result does feel like a loose arc around entropy. It may not have been intended to be such, but the Star Trek trilogy if TWOK, TSFS and TVH wasn't intended either, and it still is considered a trilogy.

Is that so hard to understand?

 

[DWF]

There really was no pre-planned season long story arc.

Nobody is sayign that there was. However, it comes off like that, because the end result does feel like a loose arc around entropy. It may not have been intended to be such, but the Star Trek trilogy if TWOK, TSFS and TVH wasn't intended either, and it still is considered a trilogy.

Is that so hard to understand?

It might feel that way for you but it for everybody nor is it meant to be an arc.

 

[sidious618]

Logopolis is definitely the type of old school Doctor Who episode that I can see translating to new Who without a huge overhaul.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

There really was no pre-planned season long story arc.

Nobody is sayign that there was. However, it comes off like that, because the end result does feel like a loose arc around entropy. It may not have been intended to be such, but the Star Trek trilogy if TWOK, TSFS and TVH wasn't intended either, and it still is considered a trilogy.

Is that so hard to understand?

It might feel that way for you but it for everybody nor is it meant to be an arc.

Like I said, I'm not the only one. Wikipedia stated this before I ever did, and you can find opinion similar to mine on the internet if you look. Chill the frak out.

 

[DWF]

Nobody is sayign that there was. However, it comes off like that, because the end result does feel like a loose arc around entropy. It may not have been intended to be such, but the Star Trek trilogy if TWOK, TSFS and TVH wasn't intended either, and it still is considered a trilogy.

Is that so hard to understand?

It might feel that way for you but it for everybody nor is it meant to be an arc.

Like I said, I'm not the only one. Wikipedia stated this before I ever did, and you can find opinion similar to mine on the internet if you look. Chill the frak out.

If you can find a link to anything official please post it, otherwise it's little more than a fan theory.

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

It might feel that way for you but it for everybody nor is it meant to be an arc.

Like I said, I'm not the only one. Wikipedia stated this before I ever did, and you can find opinion similar to mine on the internet if you look. Chill the frak out.

If you can find a link to anything official please post it, otherwise it's little more than a fan theory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_arcs_in_Doctor_Who#Entropy