A city formed from whispers. A world shaped by numbers intoned. A Universe held together by incantations … but the spell is about to break. The death of the Fourth Doctor draws near ... but is it the one he deserves?

The Doctor is on the run. Pursued by a dead man and haunted by a ghost of the future. All three are about to embark on the greatest scientific endeavour of all time.

Not all heroes have memorable or meaningful deaths of course. They can die peacefully in their sleep. Or by tripping over that loose piece of carpet on the stairs. Or as the result of an ill-advised midnight snack. But a heroic and meaningful death sees the character pushed to their very limits, to a final battle where their courage, their strength, their genius, their invulnerability are exhausted and falter. They face the enemy bare, stripped of their armour and their brilliance.

And we see who they really are.

A school of thought holds that the Fourth Doctor doesn’t get the death he deserves. For while the Second Doctor invokes the wrath of the Gods Themselves, and the Third Doctor fights a gargantuan monster with the most powerful mind in the Cosmos, the Fourth disconnects an electrical cable and loses his balance. An oversimplification, of course, but by the left frontal lobe of the sky demon, this incarnation’s demise confounds everyone’s expectations.

In the hands of actor Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor became a force of nature. He was an arrogant, bohemian, brilliant, brooding, capricious, charming, conceited, detached, distant, enigmatic, erratic, fearless, flamboyant, friendly, fiercely intelligent, furious, impatient, intimidating, irrational, loud, opinionated, pedantic, playful, quiet, resourceful, restless, rude, sombre, thoughtful, unpredictable, warm, witty and whimsical hero.

However, the writer of his final story, Christopher H. Bidmead, saw him more as a slightly eccentric and unpredictable, but essentially rational and serious, scientist. And while it’s fair to say that most of the audience envisaged the Fourth Doctor going down in a heart-wrenching blaze of glory after an epic battle against the very personification of evil – after all, a whole panoply of iconic villains and monsters debuted in, or were unique to, this era: Kettlewell’s Robot, the Wirrn, Davros, the Zygons and the Loch Ness Monster, the Anti-Matter Creature of Zeta Minor, Sutekh the Destroyer, Styggron and the Kraals, Morbius, the Krynoids, the Mandragora-Helix-infused Brethren of Demnos, Eldrad of Kastria, Xoanon, Taren Capel and the Robots of Death, Magnus Greel and his Giant Rats, Mr Sin, the Rutan Scout, the Swarm Nucleus, the Fendahl, Gatherer Hade and the Collector, the Graff Vynda-K and the Shrivenzale, the cyborg Pirate Captain, Cessair of Diplos, Count Grendel of Gracht, Kroll, the Black Guardian and his Shadow, Scaroth Last of the Jagaroth, Skagra, the Argolins, the Marshmen of Alzarius, the Great Vampires, and the Tharils, to name but one or two – Bidmead instead had the novel idea of pitting him against an abstract scientific concept and the aforementioned electrical cable.

Arguably more so than any other twentieth century story, Logopolis presents one person’s vision of how Doctor Who should be, with science and the scientific method at its heart.

It would be fair to say that Logopolis has divided opinion. Two viewpoints - magnificent or disappointing - have characterised the debate for over four decades. It’s the end … but it’s not the moment anyone has prepared for. And it’s got a lot to do with a late 1970s microcomputer called the Vector Graphic MZ System B ...

From Indie Ink Awards Finalist, writer and illustrator Francis O’Dowd, this unofficial and unauthorised series of beautifully illustrated books asks, ‘Do each of the Doctor’s incarnations die a death befitting a hero?’ The question is more complex than you might imagine ...

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