and Susan explore outside the ship and discover that this place is populated not by people but by robots intent on serving them; once the Doctor and Barbara join them they discover that the robots are diverse in design and structure, with most work being done by simple versions, more complicated tasks being handled by the Derivitrons, higher tasks delegated to the Proto model, and all of them reporting to and serving the Perfect One. The Perfect One is a robot evolved up to human form, but unlike those beneath him he is not dedicated to serving; having achieved his own state of perfection he has his own sinister agenda which will cost the TARDIS crew their lives if allowed to proceed.
Luxor is another of those Lost Stories plucked from the distant past of the series and made real by Big Finish with the participation of William Russell and Carole Ann Ford, both serving as narrators and as the voices of their on screen characters and their missing co-stars. The production is enhanced by the usual sound effects including the period version of the TARDIS console room and the doors opening, and a tension-building orchestral-sounding score which punctuates some of the more atmospheric scenes. The script was originally submitted to be the second serial produced but was dropped in favour of The Daleks, and it's hard to say if this script would have ignited the imaginations of the British public to the same extent and propelled Doctor Who into the spotlight as successfully. Luxor is a bit more cerebral than The Daleks and featured a lot of scenes of confrontation between the regular cast and the Perfect One, and while the robots are menacing in their right in audio, one has to wonder how well they would have been realized on screen. The Daleks, although mutants inside machines, were still credible monsters and a race of robots would have just looked like men in robot suits... and there would probably just have been three or four of them whereas on audio there can be vast numbers implied and realized through overlapping clunking footsteps.
As the producers of the audio wanted to stay as true to the original script as possible they only added a few things to it, like some dialogue to place this serial directly after Farewell Great Macedon and effectively structure a "season 1A" kind of continuity between the end of Reign of Terror and the start of the second season. Other bits of dialogue were left as they were, including Susan still addressing her schoolteachers as Mr Chesterton and Miss Wright, whereas in the other episodes she has been calling them Ian and Barbara for quite some time. The tension between the crew, though, is not there as it was in The Daleks ,so either the plan was to have things mellow out after the escape from the Tribe of Gum or Big Finish tweaked that as well. Titan Books released the script version of the story back in 1992 as part of their script book range, but I only got the first four of the ten they produced (file under: nice idea but doomed) and Luxor wasn't one of them. Big Finish picked up the rights to it twenty years later in 2012 but I held off on listening to it until now for this project. Hearing it fresh and attempting to put it into perspective with the other episodes of various media lends it an air of the familiar yet unknown, like finding a lost televised episode one only heard about forever.
Not much is really known about the planet Luxor, though; the story is not set there, just on a place the people of that world built for their own purposes. If this is a prison and execution centre, then the people of Luxor have a desire to treat everyone well right up to their last days. The Perfect One is a physically perfect looking humanoid but has not been made flesh, he is still an android at best but a self aware one looking to become perfect. He's calm and cold and sees what he is doing to people for his own ends as necessary, making him a true sociopath. At heart, though, he is still a robot, and subject to the same vulnerabilities as any other logic-driven machine.
As I was listening I picked up on a few of the elements that were used in other serials which followed; the mega city complex was much like the one the Daleks inhabited on Skaro, mysterious power drains putting the TARDIS out of action would crop up here and there in the series, and the notion of effectively a madman striving for perfection through a race of robots... well, yeah, we'll see that one eventually, too. But with the constant upgrading of the robots to a more perfect state, this feels less like a replacement for the Daleks and more of a seed for the notion of the Cybermen. But not for a while.
NEXT EPISODE: DOMAIN OF THE VOORD
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