Full Circle (Doctor Who)

Did You Know?

• A novelisation of the serial, written by Andrew Smith, was published by Target Books in September 1982.
• Paddy Kingsland's incidental music for the serial was released as part of the compilation album Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop Volume 4: Meglos & Full Circle in 2002.
• The serial received an audio sequel from Big Finish Productions titled Mistfall.

Plot

The TARDIS travels through an anomaly, and the Doctor and Romana find themselves on Alzarius, a forested world. A small humanoid community lives there around a grounded spaceship, the Starliner, which is governed by three Deciders. A group of outsiders called the Outlers challenge Adric, whose brother Varsh leads them, to steal a riverfruit. Head Decider Draith and scientist Dexeter spot eggs inside the fruit and think this signals Mistfall, a phenomenon that happens every fifty years because of the planet's orbit. The lake starts bubbling and releasing mist, so the Alzarians hurry into the Starliner. Draith sees Adric taking a riverfruit but gets pulled underwater. After Adric enters the TARDIS, the Doctor and K9 watch amphibious Marshmen rise from the lake. The Doctor sends K9 after them, and they knock his head off. Deciders Nefred and Garif seal the Starliner and pick citizen Login to take Draith’s place. The Doctor slips onto the Starliner, followed by a young Marshchild. Adric brings the Outlers to the TARDIS, which Marshmen carry into a cave. The Outlers accidentally leave Romana behind, where spiders hatching from riverfruit attack her. The Outlers materialize onto the Starliner. The Doctor and Adric rescue Romana, but she becomes possessed after a bite. On the Starliner, the Doctor is horrified when chief scientist Dexeter performs vivisection on the Marshchild. The Marshchild escapes, killing Dexeter and itself. The Doctor announces the Starliner no longer needs repairs and is ready to leave, but Nefred admits no one knows how to fly it. Romana starts letting Marshmen pour through the lower decks. Nefred is mortally wounded and confesses the Alzarians are not descended from Terradonians. The Doctor cures Romana and sends Adric and Varsh to drive the Marshmen off using oxygen cylinders, which results in Varsh’s death. The Doctor and the healed Romana examine cells from the spiders, Marshmen, and Alzarians, finding them similar. The Doctor deduces the Alzarians are descendants of Marshmen that rapidly evolved to look like Terradonians. The Marshmen are forced out. The Doctor shows the two remaining Deciders how to pilot the ship. As the Starliner lifts off, the Doctor tells Romana they are now trapped in the smaller universe of E-Space.

Production

The initial concept for Full Circle came from Andrew Smith, a seventeen-year-old law student and Doctor Who enthusiast. He picked up script formatting skills from The Making of Doctor Who, a book that included production documents from the serial Robot. Before this, his only writing credits were sketches for television and radio. At fifteen, in 1978, he sent in his first unsolicited script, The Secret of Cassius, about a spaceship finding an atmosphere on Pluto. Script editor Anthony Read turned it down that August but told Smith to keep trying. The next April, Douglas Adams, who had taken over as script editor, invited Smith to watch a day of filming for The Creature from the Pit. This visit sparked the idea for a story Smith initially called The Planet That Slept, which he submitted later that year. That outline featured a gentle, outcast Marshchild, nicknamed Fem by the regular cast, who grows close to the Doctor and Romana. In the climax, this female Marshchild dies to rescue the Doctor. The Marshmen were described as "disfigured savages and psychopaths" who treat K9 as a god and try to sacrifice Romana to him. The Starliner, too, was different: Smith imagined it as a freighter that crashes on Alzarius, with giant spiders boarding it while the crew looks for minerals. In December 1979, Christopher H. Bidmead took over as script editor, wanting to refocus the series on "education, education, education." He found that Adams had left almost nothing ready for the eighteenth season, with only David Fisher's The Leisure Hive available. Bidmead came across Smith's outline for The Planet That Slept and met with him in February, unaware that Smith was a teenager. Smith expected just advice, so he was surprised when Bidmead started talking about a full script. On 25 February 1980, Bidmead officially commissioned the script, with a deadline of 1 April.

Themes and influences

Full Circle takes evolution as its central theme, but it leans more on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s ideas than on Darwin’s. Lamarck believed that changes an organism makes during its lifetime could be passed to its offspring, and this is shown in the Marshmen’s swift, deliberate shift from living in water to breathing air. The Doctor acts like a Darwin figure, overturning the Deciders, a ruling class that keeps society orderly through ritual and secrecy. Graham Sleight points out that the story blurs the line between primitive and civilized. The Alzarians have built elaborate lies to hide how much they resemble the animal-like Marshmen. As in other Doctor Who tales, scientific questioning exposes this system of deceit. At first, the Alzarians seem like colonists threatened by the native Marshmen, playing on a then-common fear of post-imperial reverse colonialism. But the twist is that the Alzarians are actually native to the planet themselves. John Toon compares how Full Circle and Warriors’ Gate, the last part of the E-Space trilogy, treat circular history. The Alzarians are stuck repeating the same pattern of domination by their rulers, while the Tharils in Warriors’ Gate actively try to break free from their own history as slave owners.

Broadcast and reception

Full Circle was broadcast on BBC1 in four weekly parts from 25 October to 15 November 1980. Although the first episode's viewership saw an uptick from the preceding serial, Meglos, the second's viewership of under four million was one of the lowest in the show's history. The remaining two episodes attracted a larger audience, but remained under six million, outside of the week's top 100. The serial competed for viewers with ITV's concurrent broadcast of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. The final episode saw a decent Appreciation Index score of 65. The second and third episodes were followed by a promotion for a Doctor Who exhibit at Madame Tussauds. Two days before the first episode was broadcast, the serial was advertised in Radio Times with an article playing up the youth of Smith and Waterhouse. Another article in the Daily Express also focused on the two teenagers. Waterhouse appeared in several interviews before and during the serial's broadcast, introducing the serial and character on Top of the Pops, BBC Radio Cymru, Playground for BBC Radio 1, and Multi-Colored Swap Shop. The latter two also promoted clips from the serial's first episode. The serial's broadcast came amid heavy media attention to the series, as Tom Baker announced his departure from the show the day before the first episodes aired, leading to frenzied speculation on who his replacement would be until the announcement of Peter Davison's casting on 4 November. The serial was broadcast in the United States in May 1981, also airing as an 83-minute television movie. That summer, the serial was rebroadcast by the BBC from 3 to 6 August, airing one episode an evening from Monday to Thursday, although it did not air on BBC Cymru. The rebroadcast saw low ratings, although the second and fourth episodes exceeded the original viewership. It was bought by New Zealand the same year, and aired in Australia in the spring of 1982. It was screened in Brunei, Canada, Gibraltar, and Swaziland over the next two years before being reissued, after which it was further broadcast in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. UK Gold screened it episode-by-episode in May 1994, and from July screened a compilation form. BBC Prime rebroadcast it in the spring of 2000.