The Lost Stories 3.7, episode 4: Tabon of Luxor

Well, finally we get to meet one of the real Masters of Luxor - and it's a bit of a disappointment, to be honest. For one thing, there's too much exposition; and the Doctor and Ian's reactions to Tabon swing too quickly. I don't think William Russell was quite up to his usual form distinguishing the two voices, either, and I occasionally had to do a double-take as I readjusted my idea of which character was speaking. I wish they'd got Peter Purves in to play the Doctor opposite Russell's Ian, but that opens up the whole recasting issue, which I don't want to go into here!

Carole Ann Ford fares better, both in terms of plot and performance. Susan gets to be smart once again, spotting the hidden camera and dealing with it intelligently; and she and Barbara get all the action that can be portrayed effectively on audio (climbing never seems to work). Of course, they also get the cop-out peril of being put in the life-drainer and it then not working on them (well, so far as the Perfect One is concerned it's never worked, but you know what I mean - it doesn't drain their lives); but at least it wasn't made into a cliffhanger.

Speaking of which, we have another of those all-too-easy-to-predict cliffhangers at the end of this episode. For me, there are (I think) two effective types of cliffhanger:

1. Ooh, How Will They Get Out of That? This puts people in peril, and we get a week of wondering what's going to happen next. For me not to be disappointed there must be some action that is taken to avert the crisis. Resolutions like "the apple wasn't poisoned after all", or "it was just a tremor, the volcano isn't actually erupting" are no good. If the life-drainer situation above had been a cliffhanger it would have failed in the same way.
2. Ooh, That's a Twist! Something new is introduced, and we get a week of speculating about it. It doesn't have to imperil anyone, it just needs to be intriguing; but it has to prove to be genuinely interesting next time.

Of course, some combine the two. The first glimpse of a Dalek plunger works brilliantly because we are left wondering both what the heck it is, and how Barbara will get away. If it had just been the latter it wouldn't have been so good because the peril is less than it appeared, but as it is the danger just adds spice to a twist with an excellent reveal. Other cliffhangers have neither, and generally they feel as if the story has just stopped (like ad breaks at inappropriate moments on commercial TV).

Back to this, though, and at the end of the disc we get the first of the extras, a bit of discussion between David Richardson and Nigel Robinson about the adaptation of the story to audio. It was interesting that they mentioned religious allegory and that it had been mostly cut out - since I found it pretty explicit anyway!

Rocky Roads (The Robots), part 2: Moving the Goalposts
Getting the story lineup finalised for the new show's first season proved difficult. In September 1963, David Whitaker and Verity Lambert decided that Terry Nation's script The Survivors needed less work than Anthony Coburn's for The Robots, and swapped them in the running order. By late October a run of seven serials had been hammered out; ironically, fewer than half would make it to the screen. The Masters of Luxor limped along until the following year, when it was pushed back to season 2 and eventually written off.

Rating:
3.5/10.

Next Time:
An Infinity of Surprises.