Review of Meglos (#110)
DVD Release Date: 11 Jan 11
Original Air Date: 27 Sep – 18 Oct 1980
Doctors/Companions: Four, Romana II, K-9
Stars: Tom Baker, Lalla Ward, John Leeson
Preceding Story: The Leisure Hive (Four, Romana II, K-9)
Succeeding Story: Full Circle (Four, Romana II, K-9, Adric)
Who doesn’t love a talking cactus? Or, better yet, a Doctor-shaped talking cactus with spine-covered skin? (If you guessed me, you’d be right.)
As with so many of the stories we’ve explored in this Bad Reputations series, there are some good ideas lurking at the heart of Meglos, but somehow they never come to fruition. The weirdly realized antagonist, its incoherent plan, and the heavy-handed religion-v-science subplot all contribute to an underwhelming product that lands at #200 of 254 on io9’s Best-to-Worst list.
Sometimes a rewatch helps me find something in a story that I hadn’t appreciated before. Usually, I find that my vague recollections only cover the surface of the plot or setting or characterization. To a certain extent that’s again true for Meglos, where Tom Baker’s cactus-y mien overshadowed all other memories such that even the identity of his Companion(s) had been lost to me. Realizing I got not only Jacqueline Hill (though not as Barbara) but also Lalla Ward’s Romana II was thus a delightful re-discovery.
But for the most part, my impressions of the adventure were merely reinforced. The CSO scenes, though apparently using a “Scene Sync” technique that was at the time cutting-edge, haven’t aged very well; the wig work on the poor Tigellans (especially the Savants, but also Lexa’s ‘do, which never looks like anything but a hat to me) is distracting; and the “lush, aggressive vegetation,” which had fallen off my mental radar, did not improve my opinion of the story.
I did love the chronic hysteresis. Of all the plot devices writers John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch threw at the proverbial wall, that’s the one that stuck, as far as I’m concerned. I mean sure, the idea of having a botanical baddie rather than the traditional zoological one is a fabulous twist, on the page. Even the Bell Plants that first plague Romana and then serve as her means of escape from the Gaztak mercenaries hold a certain intellectual charm.
But that’s where the difference between print fiction and televised fiction rears its ugly head. At some point, everything in the script has to be realized on the screen, and some wacky sci-fi concepts translate better than others.
On the other hand, some things are constant, like the need for clear, believable motivations for your characters. While I could follow what both factions of Tigellans wanted, and the Gaztaks were one-dimensional manifestations of greed, I never really grokked why Meglos was set on galactic domination or how it settled on the Dodecahedron as the means to that end. At some point, “Well, this creature is a megalomaniac!” ceases to be enough without some sense of how it became so.
Perhaps that’s what it all comes down to: I have difficulty accepting an antagonist that is a mere caricature. And when that antagonist’s appearance is a million times more memorable than its personality, motivations, or plan, I can’t help but feel that the writers have missed the point.