Carl Sagan's Meglos

Carl Sagan's Meglos

Round about the time that 'Meglos' was shown, I was in the middle of my only semi-serious dabble with gardening, as I had a large collection of cacti and succulents in our greenhouse. I even attended monthly meetings of a branch of the National Cactus And Succulent Society in Ringwood.

I don't remember much about these trips, apart from having Kit-Kat and lemon squash in the interval plus the fact that most of the lectures seemed to be slide-shows of trips down the Grand Canyon. I've never visited it in real life, but if I ever did venture down there, I get the feeling that I'd recognise several of the rocks as old friends.

So when a big fat cactus turned up on 'Doctor Who' I did get slightly paranoid, wondering if the production team had been spying on me and were taking the pee by turning a cactus into the latest villain.

The DVD documentary 'Meglos Men' has since reassured me that nothing so sinister was going on, and the prickly customer at the heart of this story was simply based on a rather sorry specimen who lived on their kitchen table. There was even some thought given to having Meglos return to face Matt Smith's Doctor when ideas were kicked around for the script that would become 'The Lodger'...

But people don't always notice that the other central idea in 'Meglos', the dodecahedron, traces its ancestry all the way back to the Ancient Greeks with the mathematics of Pythagoras and his followers.

If you've ever played 'Dungeons & Dragons', you'll be familiar with the five Perfect Solids - the tetrahedron, the cube, the octahedron, the dodecahedron and the icosahedron, otherwise known as the d4, d6, d8, d12 and d20 dice.

These are the only five three-dimensional objects whose faces can be made of regular polygons and if you want the mathematical proof of that, consult Appendix 2 of the book version of Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' as I'm not going into it here! Keen D&D players may ask about the d10, but take a look at it and you'll see that its faces have unequal sides, so it doesn't count.

Pythagoras is a tricky sort with hindsight. Although obviously a vital figure in the development of mathematics, he was all in favour of pure thought and looked down on folk that actually bothered to check things through experimentation. I think the Doctor would probably have Had Words with him if they'd ever met.

In the 'Cosmos' episode 'The Backbone Of Night', dear old Carl Sagan talks about the dodecahedron and its mystical significance. The other four Perfect Solids were thought to represent that familiar foursome of Air, Earth, Fire and Water, with the dodecahedron having a link to a mysterious fifth essence (=quintessence) associated with the heavens.

As such, it was something to be kept apart from ordinary people, which is what's going on down Tigella way, with only the select few being allowed to gaze upon the miracle that is the dodecahedron.

'Meglos' also shows off with its innovative Scene-Synch work, but 'Cosmos' got there first as well. The first episode has Carl exploring the now destroyed Library of Alexandria, lamenting the loss of so its many missing books and scrolls. This is achieved by the use of some intricate models and moving camera trickery that may seem very familiar.

'Cosmos' also suggests that if the philosophers and science of Ancient Greece had continued on their quest for knowledge and history had taken a different path, we might now be sending ships to the nearest stars.

And on these starships would be the symbol of the dodecahedron...

(By Andrew Trowbridge)