The Leisure Hive - Plot

Plot

The Doctor and Romana’s holiday in Edwardian Brighton is brought to a sudden end when K-9 takes in sea-water and explodes. They instead venture to the Leisure Hive of Argolis, a holiday-complex-cum-peace-message built by the surviving Argolin following their devastating twenty-minute war with the Foamasi forty years earlier. They arrive at a point of crisis. The Leisure Hive is facing bankruptcy because of falling tourist trade (through stiff competition from other Leisure Planets) and the Argolin’s Earth agent, Brock, arrives with his lawyer Klout, bearing an offer to buy the planet outright. Regrettably the offer is from the Foamasi, the only species that could live on the radiation-infused surface of Argolis, and so the Argolin Board will not consider it. Hit by the shock of events, the ageing Board Chairman Morix succumbs to a rapid death – the Argolin war-curse of advanced cellular degradation – and his consort Mena is declared the new Chairman. The Doctor is intrigued by the manipulation of the tachyon in the Hive’s Tachyon Recreation Generator, which is the main tourist attraction and is able to duplicate and manipulate organic matter. He witnesses the Generator kill a human tourist after it has been sabotaged, the latest in a series of acts of wilful damage.

No sooner has Mena returned to Argolis to replace her spouse than her own body clock begins to speed up (one of the side-effects of the radiation-heavy atmosphere). Earth scientist Hardin has been brought to Argolis to help her and her people by using time experiments to rejuvenate a people rendered sterile by the war. Recognising the value of scientists, instead of confining them Mena engages the Doctor and Romana to help Hardin with his work. The time travellers know Hardin has been faking his work, but Romana feels the experiments should have worked.

After discovering a skin of Klout in a wardrobe, Stimson, Hardin’s financier who travelled with him and persuaded him to fake the demonstrations, is brutally murdered and his murder is pinned on the Doctor. The Time Lord is put on trial while Romana and Hardin perfect the Time Experiments. Just in time, they manage it and succeed in bargaining the Doctor's freedom. However, after they leave, the hourglass of their experiment shatters. Mena wants to be the first guinea-pig for the time experiment due to her worsening condition, but the Doctor volunteers instead. As he is inside the machine, there is a malfunction and he emerges five hundred years older—an old man with flowing white hair. Pangol, Mena’s son, is the most warlike and vindictive of the Argolin and orders the Doctor and Romana to be confined, fastening special collars on them to limit their movements within the Hive. Hardin later frees them, which is when the slower-witted Doctor sees something odd in the name of the Recreation Chamber. Romana sees it too eventually. Recreation; re-creation, the repeated creation of things, or people.

The three of them, sneaking back to the Recreation Room, find that certain of the Argolins, led by Pangol, are performing dangerous experiments, trying to perfect some secret project using the entertainment as a blind. Meanwhile, Brock and Klout bring a new offer from a mysterious organisation calling themselves the West Lodge. It is then, in tearing up the offer, that Pangol reveals the secret of his past and the reason that he is the only young Argolin in the Hive. He was the only successful, un-deformed child of a cloning experiment meant to save the Argolin using the Recreation Generator. But Pangol has been driven insane by hatred of the Foamasi and a xenophobic fear of all aliens, lusting after a war-forged empire like their ancestor Theron (who started the war and doomed the Argolin to extinction). He needs an alien witness to see his taking Mena's place after her death and the beginning of what he called the 'New Argolis'.

Meanwhile, the Doctor, Romana and Hardin have found Foamasi agents in the Hive and escort them to the council chamber, where the agents reveal Brock and Klout for what they are; Foamasi impersonators. The lead agent reveals the West Lodge to be a hounded criminal group who needed Argolis as a base of operations. With the leader (Brock) captured, the organisation was doomed to fold and the Foamasi prepare to take the rogues for trial. But Pangol refuses to let them pass and, taking the Helmet of Theron (a sacred symbol on Argolis, reminding the Argolins to espouse peace and understanding) and rallying the Argolins to his cause. The Doctor, seeing what the mad Argolin is up to, takes the Randomiser from the TARDIS and attaches it to the Recreation Chamber, hoping to destabilise the mechanism.

Romana tries to stop Pangol from using the Generator, but she cannot persuade him or the Argolins to stop the madness. The Foamasi shuttle tries to leave and is destroyed by Pangol before he dons the Helmet of Theron and uses the Generator to create an army of Tachyon replicas, creating an obedient and renewable army to rebuild the Argolin race. He orders Romana to be put outside, while Hardin finds Mena dying and carries her to the Generator room. As Romana is taken, the clone Pangols are revealed to be merely Tachyon images of the rejuvenated Doctor built up in a FIFO stack; first in, first out. She and the first Doctor to emerge (the real Doctor) go back to the Generator Room, where Hardin has put Mena into the Recreation Generator.

Pangol, enraged that the Doctor has foiled his first attempt to create an army, goes back into the Generator, which closes behind him. The Doctor reveals that he set the machine on 'rejuvenate', but it cannot be stopped. Pangol and Mena seem to be merging, so the Doctor grabs the Helmet of Theron and throws it into the visualising crystal, stopping the mechanism. Mena exits rejuvenated, holding Pangol, who has regressed back to being a baby. It is now that the Foamasi agents make their appearance and reveal that the West Lodge criminals tried to escape in the shuttle (so, in the words of the Doctor 'Brock and Klout are kaput'). Against Romana's wishes, the Doctor leaves the Argolin and Foamasi to make up and the Randomiser attached to the Recreation Generator (thus leaving the TARDIS and time-travellers vulnerable from the Black Guardian).