Paradise Towers Episode 4

Season24@30. Anyone flicking channels back in 1987 and catching sight of a silver sprayed Richard Briers doing his best zombie voice might have had their idea of what Doctor Who was like reinforced. What could have been quite a strong scene is completely undermined both by the performance and the design decisions. Its representative of  a story where the great and the ridiculous share the screen in equal measure. In this final episode however much writer Stephen Wyatt tries to draw together the story strands the results cannot escape the feeling that things are coming to a conclusion because it’s the last episode rather than organically and shows how all that running about back in part 2 could have been better utilised. 

The Anvil Cap was all the rage in 1987!

There are a number of issues around Kroagnon’s story. We’ll just skip over the matter of how he manages to get his brain into someone else in a matter of minutes but it is worth asking why has he been picking off victims one at a time? If he controls the cleaners he could have begun his total cleansing of the building much sooner. And if it was the Chief Caretaker he wanted to take over he could have done that ages ago. Then there’s the question of why the inhabitants turned on him in the first place and then left his brain lying about. I know architecture can be unpopular but this reaction seems extreme. Once reanimated of course the issues lie in the visualisation. You can see what Richard Briers was going for but the performance is too over the top and the silvery make up nowhere near spooky enough.

Meanwhile Mel has been wittering on about it for three weeks and finally she gets to have her swim only to be attacked by some sort of yellow metal sea lion. This seems to be included just to give her something to do and only repeats story points we already know (Mel is obsessed with swimming, the cleaners are dangerous, Pex is a coward). As it turns out a lot of the episode takes place poolside in what is noticeably not a studio set like the other areas. 

She took it right back to John Lewis the next day

Pex’s cowardice has been something of an overstated motif and in this episode when he holds back rather than diving in to rescue Mel from the cleaner it seems a retrograde step in view of what he does later. Surely Mel’s watery predicament was the opportunity to show that events were changing him and he is prepared to act so that when he is ribbed later by the Kangs, Mel could turn round and say `well actually he saved my life`. Pex’s final act is quite a bold move from the writer even if the scene itself can’t quite muster the seriousness it should though there’s a real melancholy afterwards.

The Doctor’s role here is as an enabler getting people to think for themselves and come together in an early version of what the show did on its 2005 return. I have to say of all of the cast it is Sylvester McCoy who has impressed me the most. His Doctor here is worlds away from the clownish character of the previous story. His moments of whimsicality, thoughtfulness and delight in fooling the caretakers light up the screen. Here is a Doctor viewers will like to share time with.

Mel’s issues are more to do with her lack of background- she just seems to have been invented because the Doctor has to have a companion and her preoccupation with the freaking swimming pool makes her irritating. Bonnie Langford does her best and has a great rapport with McCoy so keeping them apart for much of the story doesn’t help avoid the impression the writer couldn’t really think of anything to do with her. 

There is a pleasing momentum driving the episode though, peppered with action utilising the large sets and Nicholas Mallett creates a strong sense of gathering events. It concludes an intriguing story sitting somewhere in between the garish Doctor Who of the three previous seasons and the more mythical enigmatic approach to come over the next two. You can see the way the team are pushing at the boundaries of what at the time were the clichés of the show yet sometimes they can’t help falling into them. It’s one of those stories in which the ideas outpace their deployment and are not always supported by the production values.

Yet there is plenty to admire- the sense of the place is vivid and the characters- especially in episode 1- livelier and more diverse than usual. The central idea is unusual (albeit borrowed) and there’s enough going on to keep us interested even when the story treads water. It is unusual to have a story in which cannibal OAPs menace the companion with a toasting fork and the brain of a genius is lurking in the basement while gangs roam empty corridors. Put that way it sounds amazing and if the end result doesn’t quite reach the heights it might, you have to admire the effort . `Paradise Towers` is a positive step forward in the programme’s late 1980s evolution towards something more adventurous.

Next time- Of course, of course it’s `Delta and the Bannermen`, “the rock and roll years” etc…