Since I have recently acquired the whole of Sylvester McCoy’s first season on Doctor Who, I thought I’d do a review of his second serial, Paradise Towers. Mel wants to go swimming, but the TARDIS pool had sprung a leak and had to be jettisoned. So the Doctor decides to take Mel to a swank, 21st century resort called Paradise Towers. Upon arriving all is not well. The building is dilapidated and overrun by gangs of teenage girls. The Doctor and Mel are captured by one of these gangs, the Red Kangs. They learn that people are mysteriously disappearing. They become separated when the Caretakers, a group of overly officious security guards, capture the Doctor themselves. Mel is taken in by two kindly elderly ladies who seem to have ulterior motives themselves. The Doctor meanwhile manages to escape from his captors and falls back in with the Red Kangs. Mel in the meantime has left the old ladies with the only young man in the whole building, the overzealous Pex. Pex it turns out is actually a cowardly soldier who went AWOL and hid away on a transport ship to Paradise Towers. He’s now trying to make up for his cowardice by helping Mel. The Doctor in the meantime has discovered that the buildings architect is actually living inside a machine and has been using his cleaning robots to wipe out the citizens of the tower. The architect is extremely egotistic and believes that no one deserves to live in his creations but himself. The Doctor and Mel must convince the various rivla factions to trust each other and team up to rid the tower of this evil.

I know among older Who fans than myself the Johnathan Nathan Turner years are sometimes looked at as a bit of a joke. I can see why. This episode was rather silly in it’s premise and it’s acting. Pex would look right at home on The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers while the Chief Caretaker seems to be doing an impression of John Cleese doing an impression of Hitler. And this is BEFORE he becomes the bad guy! The sets looked nice though and even though low budget had a kind of Judge Dredd feel. You also really have to suspend your disbelief so as not to think why don’t they go some place else? Though they do mention that apparently there is a war on, but no one knows for sure as everyone’s been locked up in the towers for so long. This episode would seem to be a close cousin to the revival series’ Gridlock. But it was all good fun which in the end is the important thing. This serial is currently not available on DVD.

Bit of trivia: Julie Brennon who played the strangely named Fire Escape, was married to former companion Mark Strickson (Turlough). Also be on the lookout for Nisha Nayar as a Red Kang. Nayar would be more easily remembered as the woman programmer in the Ninth Doctor stories Bad Wolf/ The Parting of Ways.

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