Right off the bat, I had 2 problems with this story the first time time around. One, Channel 12 ran "The Talons Of Weng-Chiang" before this, and two, I'm pretty sure I walked in on Part Two. I hate when that happens.
Leela, as I've said, took some time to grow on me. BUT, BOY, did she.
Leslie Schofield
This may be the biggest role I've ever seen him do. His most high-profile may be STAR WARS, when he's the one who warns Peter Cushing the rebels may destroy The Death Star and suggests he evacuate... HEH. He's also in the 1991 Jeremy Brett version of "The Boscombe Valley Mystery", where he plays "William McCarthy", the same part that was played by Peter Madden in the 1968 version of the same story. (I find it fascinating to compare different adaptations of the same story, and particularly get a kick out of comparing Jeremy Brett episodes against Douglas Wilmer and/or Peter Cushing episodes, which invariably are BETTER!)
a place which the inhabitants think is a world but which is actually a spaceship
If that was a book, it sounds like it was the inspiration for that STAR TREK episode "For The World Is Hollow And I Have Touched The Sky". If so, Chris Boucher was wise to "take it further" and alter it, so ST fans wouldn't say WHO was ripping off TREK.
I took Diana Rigg’s image as the ‘Avengers’ girl Emma Peel and made it a little more primitive to get Leela.
I've always felt that the outfit Leela wore in "The Horror Of Fang Rock" (pants & heavy sweater) made her look like an AVENGERS girl! I wish she'd have dressed like that more often after that, as her repeatedly alternating between the brown jungle outfit and the white lingerie got too repetitive.
I thought it was all wrong for the Doctor’s companion to kill, because it might look as if we were condoning that for the children.
The Doctor thought it was wrong, which he stressed often in the stories. But Tom Baker's opinion should not have come into it!
we wanted Raquel Welch in the jungle, handy with a knife
Well, she WASN'T QUITE Raquel Welch... but still VERY attractive in her own way.
somebody who could handle things on her own, rather than let the Doctor do it.
One might say, a female "Ian Chesterton".
A companion would would contrast with the Doctor’s more pacific nature. He is not supposed to initiate violence, except in self defence
The contrast was what so often made things so interesting.
Leela was the girl who would simply go out and stab someone in the back!
As someone once said... "YES, BUT THEY WERE ALL BAD!"
Although Leela was uneducated, I didn’t want to make her stupid so I looked around for creatures that were uneducated but intelligent. One was my dog, who’s sadly no longer with us, and one was the little girl who lived upstairs, Sally, highly intelligent but of course hadn’t gone through any education, so there were my role models. I only used little things, like a twist of the head when I heard something, holding the breath, animal instinctive qualities.
I also wanted her to not have an accent but to have slightly careful speech, and I took out all the apostrophes so instead of wasn’t, was not, instead of couldn’t, could not, just slightly studied, slightly archaic.
This is EXACTLY what I find so fascinating about her. Grown up in a jungle, yet speaks BETTER than most normal British people!
That reminds me, I just re-watched MY FAIR LADY, and that arrogant Hungarian language expert believed Eliza was "an imposter"-- because she spoke English TOO perfectly to possibly be a native of England.
I thought the Doctor should have deposited her as far away from the TARDIS as possible.
Good thing Tom Baker wasn't writing THE STORIES. In that light, hilarious that Leela wound up ON GALLIFREY.
"Tread carefully."
So the NEXT thing he does is trip and fall flat on his face!
my interest really plummets when The Tesh pop up in the latter half of the story and it becomes a bit of a chore to watch.
OH yeah. My joke name for this story is "Planet Of The Idiots". That goes for BOTH sides. Leela has to be the most intelligent one there, someone who wants to KNOW things and learn while all around are people brainwashed into believing dogma.
in a previous, unseen adventure
It was a bizarre thing, but interesting as a one-off. I got tired of it when they started doing it in several stories during Sylvester McCoy's far-too-brief run on the show.
When I look back on "The Face Of Evil", THE best thing about it is definitely Leela. And I swear, she never looked prettier than she did at the end of Part Four. She'd clearly made herself look nice trying to impress The Doctor. She wanted to be AWAY from that place, and he was her way out. So when he dismissed her, she wasn't going to take "no" for an answer. I don't for one second, however, believe SHE's the one who activated the TARDIS... heh.
This segues so nicely into "The Robots Of Death", that story actually makes it easier for me to tolerate THIS story.