Full Circle (Doctor Who)

Full Circle is the third 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 25 October to 15 November 1980.

The serial involves the alien time traveller the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) discovering the life cycle of three closely related species on the planet Alzarius—the humanoid Alzarians, the Marshmen, and the Marshspiders—coming "full circle". Full Circle is the first of three loosely connected serials set in another universe to the Doctor's own known as E-Space and introduces Matthew Waterhouse as the companion Adric.

Plot
En route to Gallifrey, the TARDIS passes through a strange phenomenon and ends up in an alternative universe called E-Space. The TARDIS lands on the lush forest planet of Alzarius, home to a small civilisation of humanoids who live in a grounded spaceship, the Starliner. Originally from the planet Terradon, the ship crashed on Alzarius generations ago. Their society is an oligarchy ruled by three senior colonists known as Deciders. A sudden series of irregular events culminating in the mysterious "mistfall" are interpreted by Decider Draith as a bad omen, which occurs every fifty years. One of the younger colonists, Adric, then watches Draith get pulled into the river by a sinister underwater force. His last words before he drowns are "Tell Dexeter we've come full circle!" Adric heads into the forest in panic, finding the TARDIS, where the Doctor and Romana take him in.

As strange mists begin to cover the forest, frightening amphibious creatures known as Marshmen rise from the river, and scuttling Marshspiders begin to appear everywhere. The other Deciders order the Starliner sealed and select a new Decider. The Doctor gains entry to the Starliner, followed by a Marshchild. Both are found and taken to the Deciders. The Doctor is appalled when chief scientist Dexeter starts to perform vivisection experiments on the Marshchild.

After Adric inadvertently leads a small band of outcasts to the TARDIS, they commandeer the ship leaving Romana stranded in a cave filled with Marshspiders. Romana is bitten by a spider and begins to undergo a transformation, appearing to be possessed and under the influence of the Marshmen. The Doctor administers a protein serum to cure her, and they discover that the Starliner has been maintained for 40,000 generations - but nobody knows how to pilot the ship. They also deduce that the people living in the ship are not the descendents of the original crew and passengers who crashed there, but are actually descended from the Marshmen - who killed off the original Terradonians millennia earlier and evolved to take their place.

It is also deduced that oxygen in its pure form is toxic to the Marshmen and this non-lethal defence is used to force the Marshmen out of the Starliner. The Doctor helps the colonists aboard the ship finally leave the planet by programming the ship to take off, but Adric opts not to go with his people and instead stows away in the TARDIS.

Conception and writing
Teenage fan Andrew Smith had previously submitted a number of storylines to Doctor Who script editors, who received them with interest. Smith initially submitted Full Circle under the title The Planet That Slept. Recently hired story editor Christopher H. Bidmead was impressed by the idea, and commissioned the script for Part One on February 25, 1980, followed by the next three episodes on March 31. Producer John Nathan-Turner and Bidmead were planning to introduce a new companion for the Doctor named Adric, whom they asked Smith to introduce in the serial. The two had developed a character document on January 30, which outlined that Adric was "fifteen, small for his age, wirey [sic] and strong, with short straight black hair." To reflect his origin in a parallel universe, Adric's name was chosen as an anagram of quantum physicist Paul Dirac's surname, as Dirac had predicted the existence of antimatter. Part of the original concept for Adric would have been to present a repetition of the Doctor's own backstory, with Adric's home planet initially named as Yerfillag, or Gallifrey (the Doctor's home planet) backwards. Bidmead had also previously suggested "a trilogy of stories with a linking theme" to Nathan-Turner, outlining the concept of a parallel universe called E-Space in a document on June 12.

Working titles for this story included The Planet That Slept. At the time of writing this story, Andrew Smith was a seventeen-year-old who achieved his lifelong ambition to write for the show.

The exterior locations for Alzarius were filmed at Black Park in Buckinghamshire.

Reception
The second episode of the serial achieved 3.7 million viewers, which was one of the lowest viewing figures in the programme's history up to that time. This was due to the BBC's competitor, the ITV Network, screening Buck Rogers in the 25th Century in the same timeslot, which had severely impacted on the ratings for this season of Doctor Who. The serial was repeated on BBC1 (except BBC1 Wales) across four consecutive evenings from Monday to Thursday, 3–6 August 1981, achieving viewing figures of 4.9, 4.2, 4.6 and 6.4 million viewers respectively.

In print
A novelisation of this serial, written by Andrew Smith, was published by Target Books in September 1982. The novelisation opens with the Starliner crashing on Alzarius. An audiobook of the Target novelisation was released on 29 January 2015 read by Matthew Waterhouse and John Leeson.

Home media
Full Circle was released on VHS in October 1997. The DVD was released in January 2009 as part of a boxed set called The E-Space Trilogy. This serial was also released as part of the Doctor Who DVD Files (issue 85) in April 2012. Paddy Kingsland's incidental music for the serial was released as part of the compilation album Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop Volume 4: Meglos & Full Circle in 2002. In 2019, the story was released on Blu-ray as part of the Doctor Who Collection Season 18 box set.

Academic Studies
A book on the serial, written by New Zealand academic John Toon, was released by Obverse Books in January 2018 as part of its Black Archive series. It won the Sir Julius Vogel Award in the category of Best Professional Production/Publication in 2019.