Story
Mel is keen to visit Paradise Towers, a massive apartment complex in the future (presumably on Earth, though it’s never said for sure) that she’s apparently discovered in the TARDIS database. She especially wants to go for a swim in its very famous pool up on the roof. The Doctor is grumpy and bored by the idea of visiting a blandly luxurious apartment building but reluctantly agrees.
When the TARDIS materializes, they find Paradise Towers has fallen on hard times. It’s dirty and run down, crawling with rats and littered with junk. The residents (“rezzies”) are all elderly women, at least some of whom have turned to cannibalism. All-girl teenage gangs roam the corridors. The small troop of caretakers are so wrapped up in their excessively detailed rulebook they can’t actually manage to do anything.
The Doctor and Mel soon get split up, and variously learn that soon after Paradise Towers opened, there was a war and all the able-bodied people were drafted to fight it, leaving behind only the children and the elderly— and those who went to fight never returned. In their absence, Paradise Towers has fallen into a kind of post-apocalyptic anarchy. But there’s even worse going on: the “cleaners,” robots supposed to keep the tower clean and in repair, are killing people one by one. Everyone is in denial, trying to pretend this isn’t happening, but the Doctor has to bring them together to fight the monster lurking in the basement, that’s in control of the robots and plans to wipe out every living thing in Paradise Towers.
Review
There are few things more painful to watch than failed comedy and unfortunately, that’s what Paradise Towers is. Dr Who at its best always has a sense of humor, but that’s layered on top of a serious underlying story. Only occasionally over the course of the series has it attempted outright comedy, usually with poor results, and this is probably the worst example. The Caretakers and their rulebook are supposed to be a parody of British bureaucracy (script editor Andrew Cartmel and writer Steven Wyatt both cite Terry Gilliam’s Brazil as a model) and are farcically exaggerated in their rule-keeping. The one young man present in the Tower is a draft-dodger named Pex who now imagines himself to be a Rambo-style action hero. The cannibal old ladies and the “Kangs” (the girl gangs) are respective parodies of British stereotypes. All of them struggle fiercely to be hilarious, and all of them fall flat with the kind of damp thud that only unfunny humor can really achieve.
The underlying story makes no sense, either in plot structure or science fiction world-building. Wyatt admits he wrote the script without any overall plan or outline— he wrote the first episode without even knowing what the ending would be or what the explanation would be for the situation in Paradise Towers. The initial concept was merely to satirize “urban squalor,” exaggerating the kind of problems faced in many housing projects in both the US and UK. There was almost no thought given to making the world of the story make sense. Cartmel and Wyatt decided the teen gangs should be all girls because boys would be too like “Lord of the Flies” and having them be girls would be more interesting and different. Fair enough— but no in-story explanation is ever offered. We’re repeatedly told the adults left their children behind when they went off to war— all the children. So was this a civilization with no male children? It’s made clear at one point that the Kangs have never even heard of boys. They don’t even know there is such a thing. This is not explained.
Meanwhile, what exactly went wrong in Paradise Towers, leading to such a collapse of civilization among those left behind? Did the parents leave no babysitters for the children? Were the older “rezzies” supposed to watch the kids? That swimming pool Mel wants to visit— the Kangs regard it as mythical, “the great pool in the sky” and consider it to be the afterlife. But it’s a quick elevator ride away and we learn the Kangs play in the elevators a lot— and know their way to the pool with no difficulty later in the story. How long have they been abandoned, or how young were they at the start, to build that kind of mythology even if they’d been unable to visit the pool whenever they wanted?
Meanwhile, the monster in the basement turns out to be the original architect of Paradise Towers, named Kroagnon, who on his previous project went insane and filled the place with deathtraps to stop people from messing up his beautiful artwork. The Doctor says the adults, before leaving for the war, prevented him from doing the same here by trapping him in the basement before he could finish Paradise Towers, “but it was foolish, he was bound to escape sooner or later.” Good point. So is there any reason they didn’t just kill him? Or (radical suggestion) hire someone other than an omnicidal maniac to build the building they planned to leave their children alone in?
None of these and many other plot holes are given the slightest bit of attention, because the story is more interested in telling jokes and doesn’t think logic or world-building are important. The Doctor escapes from the Caretakers at one point by thumbing through the rule book and telling the guards the rules say after guarding a prisoner for 35 minutes they have to stand up and close their eyes for a minute and a half, which they dutifully do without checking the rule book for themselves. This sort of thing is what Paradise Towers wants to do, rather than tell a story. It might have got away with it if it had managed to be actually funny, but it just isn’t.
The production lets the story down badly. The famous pool, when Mel finally reaches it, is depressingly ordinary. Most Holiday Inns have better pools, and no matter how frantically Bonnie Langford tries to sell what the script tells her to do, she can’t make us believe it’s as thrilling as it’s meant to be. The cleaner robots are so slow-moving that their victims have to throw themselves into their claws in order to be caught by them (and even apart from that, they have no equipment that looks remotely like anything useful in cleaning a corridor). The dingy little corridors look good as what they are, but we never get any glimpse of a run-down version of the sort of wide-open space and architectural marvels promised in the pictures of Paradise Towers in their heyday.
These sort of things are perennial problems for Classic Dr Who with its tiny budget, and fans are used to forgiving them— when the story banks some goodwill through good writing, and good storytelling. Here, it has none, so even the flaws that aren’t its fault can’t be forgiven.
With the arrival of the Seventh Doctor, the series has a distinctly new look, a new style, and even new music— but the quality has actually taken a nosedive. Will Classic Dr Who manage to improve before it’s too late? There’s the real cliffhanger…
Next Week:
“Delta and the Bannermen,” 3 episodes.
