OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 554
STORY NUMBER: 115
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 14 February 1981
WRITER: Johnny Byrne
DIRECTOR: John Black
SCRIPT EDITOR: Christopher H. Bidmead
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 5.2 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - New Beginnings (The Keeper of Traken/Logopolis/Castrovalva)
Kassia has the Doctor, Tremas & Adric locked up. Melkur commands her to engineer her own succession as Keeper. Nyssa helps her father & his friends escape and they return to Tremas' quarters seeking the plans for the source manipulator, suspecting Kassia will attempt to gain control of it and seeking a way to stop her. The old Keeper dies and Kassia is summoned to the chamber as chaos breaks out over Traken. The Doctor and his friends attempt to return to the Tardis but are once again confronted by Melkur who dematerialises from the Grove. As Kassia ascends to the Keeper's throne the Doctor & Tremas attempt to stop her but Katura completes the transition granting her mastery of the source. But Kassia starts to scream as her body vanishes and then a familiar noise is heard as Melkur materialises on the throne.......
Seven year old me watching this: uggh, who is that inside of Melkur, he doesn't look that nice does he? What I didn't spot then was, in the same pull back shot, the roundeled walls behind the figure. Or notice the significance of the noise as Melkur vanished and reappeared again. I didn't know who it was in control of the Melkur. But elsewhere across the land fanboys everywhere were going wild at the return of one of their favourite villains....
The Doctor is a bit trigger happy with the ion bonder he takes off Nyssa isn't he? He's stunning Fosters with it left, right and centre almost as if this story was written for K-9 being there doing the job. It's Nyssa who gives him the Ion bonder, having taken a couple of pot shots first herself, and between Nyssa & the Ion Bonder that's K-9's plot functions covered!
The writer of this story, Johnny Byrne, was new to Doctor Who but had made a large contribution to the first year or so of Space 1999. He'd script edited All Creatures Great & Small, a series which new Doctor Who producer John Nathan-Turner had been a Production Unit Manager on (several other Who personnel have connections with the series as we'll see shortly). Nathan-Turner had offered him the Doctor Who script editor's position only for Byrne to turn it down but indicate he would like to write for the series.
The director of this series, John Black, is someone I know very little about. He has one more Doctor Who tale to his name and bar a few IMDB credits there doesn't seem to be a lot known about him.
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