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Logopolis is the seventh and final serial of the 18th season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four weekly parts on BBC1 from 28 February to 21 March 1981.

The serial is set on the planets Earth and Logopolis. In the serial, the Doctor, a time traveller from the planet Gallifrey, forms a temporary truce with his arch-enemy the Master (Anthony Ainley) to stop the unravelling of the universe which the Master had started by accident.

Logopolis is Tom Baker's last story as the Fourth Doctor, and marks the first appearances of Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor and Janet Fielding as new companion Tegan Jovanka.

The serial received positive reviews with many calling it a worthy farewell to Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor. Baker's performance received much praise from critics.

Alerted to impending trouble by the TARDIS's Cloister Bell, the Fourth Doctor decides to stay out of trouble, and instead repair the TARDIS's broken chameleon circuit by materialising around a real police box on Earth and recording its exact dimensions with Adric's help. With those, he can give the mathematicians of the planet Logopolis the right block-transfer computations to repair the circuit. The Master learns of the Doctor's plan, and materialises his TARDIS around the police box first, causing a recursion loop with the Doctor's. The Doctor eventually breaks his TARDIS out of the loop, but when they step outside, he sees a figure in white, the Watcher, telling him to go to Logopolis immediately. En route, they find they have gained a passenger, Tegan Jovanka, an airline stewardess who entered the police box seeking help for a broken-down car.

At Logopolis, everything seems normal as the Doctor provides the Monitor, the lead mathematician, his measurements to give to the others and perform their verbal calculations. They soon discover that the Master had arrived first, with several of the mathematicians killed by his tissue-compression eliminator. The Master's TARDIS materialises, and he and Nyssa, under his hypnotic control, seize the control center and use a device to silence the other mathematicians, demanding the Monitor to explain the purpose of a radio telescope on the planet. The Monitor begs for the Master to stop the silencing device. The Master does so, but to the Monitor's horror, the mathematicians remain silent, and they find the planet starting to turn to dust. The Monitor quickly explains that their calculations were used to power Charged Vacuum Emboitments (CVEs) which were used to funnel off excess entropy from this universe to prevent its approaching heat death; without the CVEs, entropy is taking over. The Monitor urges the Doctor to use their program to create a fully stable CVE, before he disintegrates. The Doctor and Master agree to work together and, after releasing Nyssa, bring Tegan with them to the Master's TARDIS and depart for Earth. Adric and Nyssa try to follow in the Doctor's TARDIS, but initially end up far outside the universe, and watch as entropy obliterates the sector of space with Nyssa's home planet, Traken. However, they fix the controls to track and follow the Master's TARDIS to Earth.

On Earth, the Doctor and Master use the radio telescope of the Pharos Project – from which the Logopolitans modelled theirs – to send the program, while the Doctor's companions help to waylay the project's guards. However, the Master holds the Doctor hostage with his tissue compression eliminator and broadcasts a message across space, threatening to close the CVE and render the heat death process completely unstoppable, effectively blackmailing the rest of the universe to submit to him. The Doctor quickly runs out onto the telescope's gantry to disconnect the power cable, which will prevent the Master from re-instigating the heat death process, but the Master in turn tilts the dish downwards. Left with only the cable supporting him, the Doctor tears it out of its housing, deactivating the dish, but also dropping the Doctor several hundred feet to the ground. The Master escapes in his TARDIS.

Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan gather around the mortally-injured Doctor, who has visions of his past companions and enemies. His three companions see the Watcher appear, and the Doctor explains that "It's the end... but the moment has been prepared for." The Watcher touches and merges with the Doctor, causing him to regenerate into the Fifth Doctor.

Peter Davison (The Doctor)

Janet Fielding (Tegan Jovanka)

Sarah Sutton (Nyssa)

Anthony Ainley (The Master)

Actors joining the regular cast of Doctor Who in Logopolis

The serial introduces Janet Fielding in the role of Australian trainee flight attendant Tegan Jovanka. Nathan-Turner conceived the role in collaboration with Bidmead, with the intention of introducing a younger female character who would display a superficial self-assurance masking inner vulnerability, without returning to the stereotype of screaming female companions of earlier serials. Brisbane-born Fielding had lost some of her native Australian accent since emigrating to the UK in 1977, but revived her accent to audition successfully for the part.^[2] Nathan-Turner initially wished to reintroduce a former companion to provide continuity for viewers following Baker's regeneration, but created Tegan when Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah Jane Smith) and Louise Jameson (Leela) both declined to return for the duration of season 19.^[3]

Two cast members returned from the previous serial, The Keeper of Traken: Sarah Sutton reprised her role as Nyssa, joining the TARDIS crew as a companion; and Anthony Ainley had his first full exposure in the role of the Master, a part he would continue to play for eight years. Outwardly, Ainley's beard and dark costume suggested close continuity with Roger Delgado's portrayal in the early 1970s, but Ainley imbued his part with a greater focus on revenge and blackmail.^[4]

The part of the mysterious Watcher was played by Adrian Gibbs; his part was left uncredited in order to foster a belief among fans that Peter Davison had played the role wrapped in white fabric. In fact, Davison's only appearance was during the final seconds of Part Four as the newly regenerated Doctor, for which he attracted a full actor's fee.^[5]

For the outdoor scenes in Part One, in which Doctor materialises the TARDIS next to an actual police box on Earth, the production team had initially planned to film on location in a layby on the Barnet Bypass, in the outskirts of North London. By the 1980s, police boxes had been obsolete for many years, but one of the last surviving boxes in Britain was still standing here, and it was intended to film the TARDIS prop standing next to the real police box. However, shortly before filming was due to take place, the production team discovered that the Barnet police box had been vandalised and subsequently demolished. Filming was re-located to a layby on the southbound side of the A413 Amersham Road near Denham, Buckinghamshire. An older TARDIS prop which had last been used in season 17 was brought out of storage and assembled on location to stand in for the real police box. Today, the M25 bridges the road where the scene was filmed.^[6][7]

It had originally been intended to film the outdoor Pharos Project scenes in Part Four on location at the Jodrell Bank Lovell Telescope in Cheshire, but this was precluded by budgetary constraints. Instead the exterior scenes were filmed at the BBC's receiving station in Crowsley Park, and miniature effect shots were created using a scale model of a radio telescope. The scenes in the structure of the telescope were shot on lighting gantry in the Top of the Pops studio at Television Centre, London.^{[8][9][10][8]}

Incidental music in the serial was composed by Paddy Kingsland, and includes leitmotifs for Logopolis and the Watcher. In Part Four, an excerpt from Symphony No. 8 by Franz Schubert is heard playing on the technician's headphones in the Pharos Project control room.^[11][12]

The closing titles sequence was recompiled with Tom Baker's face removed from the closing credits of Episode 4. The same opening and end title sequence and arrangement of the theme music was used for the following story, Castrovalva, and next three seasons, but was altered to include Peter Davison's face. Episode 4 of this story was the last time, for the next 24 years, the lead character was listed in the credits as "Doctor Who" (thus making it the only time Peter Davison was credited as "Doctor Who"). Beginning with the next story, Castrovalva, until the series's cancellation in 1989, the character was credited simply as "The Doctor". The 1996 television film did not have an on-screen credit for the Eighth Doctor, but listed the Seventh as the "Old Doctor". The 2005 relaunch returned the credit to "Doctor Who", and then again to "The Doctor" in "The Christmas Invasion" (at the request of David Tennant). Also, Episode 4 was the first to credit two actors as "Doctor Who" or "The Doctor" when a regeneration scene was involved. It also happened at the end of Episode 4 of The Caves of Androzani (1984). In both instances, Peter Davison was billed second.^{[citation needed]}

According to Christopher Bidmead, the Logopolitans employ a hexadecimal, or base-16, numerical system, a real system commonly used in computer programming. When Adric and the Monitor read strings of numbers and letters, the letters are actually the numbers between 10 and 15, expressed as single digits.^{[citation needed]}

Logopolis was repeated on BBC2 in November/December 1981, as part of "The Five Faces of Doctor Who". Stripped across four consecutive evenings from Monday to Thursday 9–12 November 1981, with viewing figures of 5.5, 5.0, 6.0 and 5.4 million respectively.^[14]

The serial was the last Doctor Who story aired on its traditional Saturday evening slot for four years. When Peter Davison took over as the Fifth Doctor in January 1982, the BBC moved Doctor Who from Saturday nights to a new weekday prime time slot, airing two episodes per week. It did not return to Saturday evenings until January 1985.

Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping wrote of the serial in The Discontinuity Guide (1995), deeming it "a magnificent farewell."^[15] In 2011, Patrick Mulkern of Radio Times awarded the serial four stars out of five. Much praise was given to Baker's performance, writing, "He's brooding, sparky and never for a second looks ready to give up."^[16] In The Greatest Show in the Galaxy: The Discerning Fan's Guide to Doctor Who, Marc Schuster and Tom Powers deemed the episode "melancholy yet fascinating."^[17] In Doctor Who: The Episode Guide, Marc Campbell awarded the serial a 10 out of 10, praising it for "its weighty subject matter and the enormous scale of its threat."^[18] Conversely, Andrew Blair of Den of Geek felt the serial lacked pathos and regarded it as "a missed opportunity."^[19] Charlie Jane Anders called it "A moody, dark saga about computational engineering, that never quite gels as a story and has a nonsensical ending."^[20]

Logopolis

Author	Christopher H. Bidmead
Cover artist	Andrew Skilleter
Series	Doctor Who book: Target novelisations
Release number	41
Publisher	Target Books
Publication date	21 October 1982
ISBN	0-426-20149-3

A novelisation of this serial, written by Christopher H. Bidmead, was published by WH Allen (hardback) and Target Books (paperback) in October 1982.^[21] An unabridged reading of the novelisation read by Bidmead was released by BBC Audiobooks in February 2010, with a completely new cover.

The story was released on VHS in February 1992.^[21] In January 2007, the serial was released on DVD as part of a trilogy, entitled New Beginnings, alongside The Keeper of Traken and Castrovalva.^[21] Logopolis was also released as part of the Doctor Who DVD Files (issue 46) in October 2010.^[21] On 18 March 2019, Season 18 was re-released on Blu-ray, and given a new CGI option, including newly filmed shots filmed on location at Lovell Telescope.^[22]

Fathom Events, in conjunction with the BBC, broadcast Logopolis to select cinemas in the United States on 13 March 2019, ahead of the planned Blu-ray release of Season 18 on 19 March 2019. The broadcast included additional interview footage with Baker, Fielding, and Sutton.^[23]

Paddy Kingsland's incidental music for the closing regeneration scene of Part Four was included in the 2013 soundtrack album Doctor Who: The 50th Anniversary Collection (Silva Screen Records SILCD1450), under the title "It's The End…".^[24]

• Anghelides, Peter; Richards, Justin, eds. (August 1994). "Logopolis" (PDF). Doctor Who In Vision (052). Jeremy Bentham. Retrieved 21 January 2025.
• Burk, Graeme; Smith, Robert (1 October 2013). Who's 50: The 50 Doctor Who Stories to Watch Before You Die—An Unofficial Companion. ECW Press. p. 213. ISBN 978-1-77041-166-1. Retrieved 17 January 2025.
• Campbell, Mark (2011). Doctor Who The Episode Guide. New York: Oldcastle Books. ISBN 978-1842436608. Retrieved 2 January 2023.
• Cornell, Paul (2013). The Doctor Who discontinuity guide. London: Orion. ISBN 9780575133181. Retrieved 3 January 2023.
• Schuster, Marc (2007). The greatest show in the galaxy : the discerning fan's guide to Doctor Who. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. p. 152. ISBN 9781476610771.
• Wright, Mark, ed. (2017). "State of Decay, Warriors' Gate, The Keeper of Traken, and Logopolis". Doctor Who: The Complete History. Vol. 33, no. 57. London: Panini Comics, Hachette Partworks.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Fourth Doctor.

• "Doctor Who Classic Episode Guide: Logopolis". www.bbc.co.uk. BBC. Archived from the original on 18 January 2016. Retrieved 23 December 2024.
• Logopolis on Tardis Wiki, the Doctor Who Wiki
• Logopolis on YouTube

• Doctor Who – Logopolis title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database