Doctor Who: The Horns of Nimon

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The Horns of Nimon is the fifth and final completed serial of Doctor Who Season 17. It was broadcast in four episodes from December 22, 1979, to January 12, 1980. It was written by Anthony Read and directed by Kenny McBain. It stars Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, Lalla Ward as Romana, David Brierley as the voice of K9, and Graham Crowden as Soldeed.

Answering a distress signal, the TARDIS becomes involved with a failing Skonnan ship carrying young “tributes” to the Nimon, a horned creature ruling from a vast power complex on Skonnos. The Doctor and Romana are separated as they uncover a scheme of energy theft and conquest, where the Nimon’s “great journey of life” is really a cycle of invasion. With quick wit, technical skill, and help from the brave captives, they navigate the maze-like corridors, expose the fraud behind the rituals, and stop a new horde from arriving. It is a bright, myth-flavoured adventure that lets the Fourth Doctor’s playfulness and Romana’s calm intelligence shine.

The show, the story is loosely based on the Greek myth of the Minotaur in the Labyrinth, with science fiction twists. It features a race of alien beings called the Nimon, who manipulate and exploit weaker civilisations through deception and parasitic expansion.

Episode One

The Doctor tinkers with the TARDIS’s guidance while Romana rolls her eyes: and a battered Skonnan warship blares a distress call. They dock. A bullying Co-Pilot and a frightened crew are hauling “tribute” to Skonnos: young captives from peaceful Aneth, including bright-eyed Teka and her boastful friend Seth, who claims he’ll slay monsters because stories need heroes.

Engines are cooked. Romana, with K9, jury-rigs a restart using a TARDIS component; the Co-Pilot pockets the credit and her tool: and then traps her aboard as the ship lunges for home. The Doctor is shaken loose and delayed. On Skonnos, high priest Soldeed, peacock-robed and persuasive, reassures the bombastic Marshal that their god, the Nimon, will soon restore the empire: if tributes and precious hymetusite keep flowing.

In a cyclopean Power Complex, walls meet at wrong angles; lights pulse like a heartbeat. Soldeed descends alone to a cavernous chamber where the bull-headed Nimon steps from shadow, horns crackling. It demands more power, more victims, and new machinery that arrives in smooth, coffin-like globes. Romana’s ship makes orbit. The Co-Pilot rehearses a lie; Seth quietly admits to Teka that his heroics are bluff. The Doctor gives chase in the TARDIS. Below, echoing through the maze, a voice purrs: “Bring the tributes.”

Episode Two

Skonnos celebrates the “victory” of a repaired warship. Soldeed grandly receives Romana and the captives, then surrenders them to the labyrinth with a politician’s smile that never reaches his eyes. The Co-Pilot blusters that he saved the mission; the Nimon hears him out: and kills him with a casual surge, the body sliding away like a burned shadow.

Romana counts steps and corners, realising the corridors loop and reconfigure: this isn’t architecture, it’s a machine. Seth bluffs guards, fumbles a stolen blaster, and (by accident) saves Teka, proving there’s more to him than stories. The Doctor lands, trades barbs with Soldeed, and slips after Romana into the maze with K9 mapping angles that refuse to stay still. They find huge, glossy spheres like black pearls stacked in a chamber; inside one, tools for building a gateway; inside another, nutrient racks.

A third begins to hum. K9’s scans call the maze a “transfer conduit.” The Doctor’s grin fades. The Nimon isn’t merely taking tribute: it’s preparing an invasion route. Romana is herded onto a dais and bathed in light; she and a humming sphere vanish. In the sanctuary, Soldeed rattles at locked doors as if he, too, is kept outside the secret. In the maze, a fresh sphere opens and something steps out that looks exactly like the first Nimon.

Episode Three

Romana rematerialises on a dying world (Crinoth) where the air tastes of ash. An old man, Sezom, shelters among wreckage with a crystal-tipped staff and a single truth: the Nimons are locusts in god-masks, arriving at starving planets through labyrinth engines, draining them, and moving on. Crinoth was last. Skonnos is next.

He shows Romana a patched control room and a trick to ground the horns’ power; he dies buying her escape when a Nimon prowls through the rubble. On Skonnos, more globes crack and more Nimons step out to a chorus of demands. Soldeed’s certainty frays; he clutches his staff and shouts doctrine at machines that ignore him. The Doctor, K9, Seth, and Teka duck patrols, free the other Aneth captives, and puzzle the maze by rhythm rather than sight: counting pulse cycles to find transfer nodes.

K9 stuns a pursuing Nimon with a precise burst to the horns; it lurches, recovers, and roars, proving they can be hurt, not easily killed. Romana reappears via a returning sphere and describes Crinoth’s ruin. The Doctor outlines a mad solution: reverse the flow, overload the power lattice, and break the gateway before a whole herd arrives. Seth finds his courage and volunteers to hold a junction. Teka squeezes his hand and grins. The next globe begins to glow.

Episode Four

The herd starts to come through. Horns blaze, globes throb, and the Complex glitters with lethal geometry. The Doctor and Romana jury-rig Sezom’s grounding trick into the heart of the lattice, threading cable and hymetusite like fuse and match. K9 draws fire, nicks horns, and recites power figures while Seth and the freed Aneths barricade corridors with fallen globes.

Soldeed, cornered by the truth, chooses zeal over sense: he tries to shut down the “sacrilege,” triggers alarms, and is gored by a feedback surge. He staggers into the hall, staff raised, and dies with a final, theatrical curse: “You are all doomed!” The Doctor flips the last switches. Energy whips back along the maze; Nimons howl as the conduit inverts. Globes implode. The gateway collapses in a fountain of light.

Surviving Nimons scatter into blind corridors; one falls under Seth’s steady shot: no bluff this time. The Complex begins to fail, walls de-phasing. The travellers herd captives and Skonnan workers out into harsh daylight as the labyrinth flickers and dies. Without a god, without tribute, Skonnos faces itself. Teka tells Seth he’s exactly the hero she believed in: because he decided to be. The Doctor retrieves Romana’s stolen component, pats K9’s scorched flank, and leaves the Skonnans to rebuild under their own, very mortal sky.

Themes

As a campy, late-season riff on myth and masquerade, The Horns of Nimon is lively, uneven, and more charming than its reputation allows. The Theseus-and-Minotaur scaffolding, Romana’s swashbuckling turn, and Tom Baker’s wry detachment keep the pulse up even when the scenery wobbles. It can’t touch the urbane clockwork of City of Death or the jewelled precision of The Robots of Death.

It sits a rung below the sharper invention of Nightmare of Eden and the warmer parable of The Creature from the Pit. In the era’s ledger it lands lower-mid-tier: broad, cheeky, occasionally inspired: the Adams-era sense of play stretched to its pantomime edge.

Continuity-wise, its threads are neat. The Randomiser era begun after The Armageddon Factor still frames the wanderings from Destiny of the Daleks and City of Death through to this caper, which (broadcast order considered) hands the baton to the colder reset of The Leisure Hive (with the unaired Shada lingering as the ghost finale).

Its “science in ritual robes” idiom converses with The Stones of Blood and The Face of Evil, while its mythic tech echoes the classical reworking of Underworld and glances back to The Myth Makers. Decades on, the Minotaur lineage will wink back in The God Complex. By its final chant, The Horns of Nimon has done its work: closing a lighter, loopier stretch with a grin, and clearing the runway for a harder, stranger season to come.

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