The Horns of Nimon

The Horns of Nimon was the last Doctor Who story to be script edited by Douglas Adams, and the last to be produced by Graham Williams. It’s a shame that given that the first two seasons of Doctor Who that Graham Williams had produced had been so good that his time as producer had to end with a story like this one. The Horns of Nimon is one of those Doctor Who stories where if you were to look at it just from the point of view of what had been written, the ideas, the dialogue, not the visuals then it would have come across as a good story. If you then look at the finished production your view of The Horns of Nimon would probably drop. One of the things that Doctor Who was criticised for at the time that The Horns of Nimon was made, is school boy level humour. While its true that season 17 had its fair share of humour, the season 17 story that seemed to have the most was The Horns of Nimon. The main contributors of this when watching it are clearly Graham Crowden who played Soldeed and Tom Baker. Graham Crowden is incredibly funny in some scenes in The Horns of Nimon and incredibly bumbling in others. With Soldeed, you clearly have a villain who is a genius scientist but is also a lunatic underneath it all. Particularly when in Part 4 of The Horns of Nimon when Soldeed's plan to restore the Skonnos empire to its former glory falls to pieces because the Nimon have deceived him and he ends up being reduced to this insane, hysterical mess, its really funny when Soldeed looses it. With Tom Baker its feels like when he got his hands on the script for The Horns of Nimon that he didn't think to much of it and watching The Horns of Nimon its clear that the two reasons that he puts as much humour as he does into the story is because one he doesn't much of the script for The Horns of Nimon and two because he's clearly trying to improve what he had to work with in the script by putting more humour into it but at the same time as that it's also clear in this story that The Doctor uses humour in The Horns of Nimon link he does in City of Death, as a ploy to put his enemies off guard. Lalla Ward has a lot more to do than in other stories in season 17 and that was written in on purpose because the writer Anthony Read felt that the writers hadn't been making the best use of the character and Anthony Read also felt that Tom Baker would feel thankful that he wouldn't have to be in every scene. Now lets talk about the Nimon themselves, I loved the masks, which where very good. I really liked their voices which I felt, and still feel are really effective, I'd love it if their look was updated and they were brought back in the current Doctor, Peter Capaldi's era. I had mixed feelings when I first saw The Horns of Nimon and still do now, there are things about it that I like and things about it that I don't like, on the whole it's an okay, fun story and is a better story than people make it out to be, not 10 out of 10 better but a 4.5 or 5 out of 10 I'd say.