When your alien overlord hobby is “human scrapbooking.”
Short Synopsis
The Doctor and his three-companion circus stumble onto a spaceship run by Monarch, a giant frog-like alien who wants to enslave humanity. Unfortunately for him, his evil plan involves a lot of standing around giving speeches while wearing a glittery robe.
Extended Storyline
Fresh off Castrovalva and still adjusting to having three companions (which is at least two too many), the Fifth Doctor lands the TARDIS on an enormous spaceship. Instead of excitement, what follows is… well, a surprisingly polite meet-and-greet.
The ship’s owner is Monarch, a gigantic, green, toad-like alien who insists he comes in peace — which is almost always code for “I’ve already started planning your funeral.” Monarch’s hobbies include space colonization, enslaving races, and throwing together a weird intergalactic cultural festival for his guests. His sidekicks, Enlightenment (a glittery android queen) and Persuasion (her equally glittery consort), do most of the talking, probably because Monarch keeps droning on like a frog at a TED Talk.
The Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa, and Adric soon discover that Monarch has gathered humans from Earth’s history — Aboriginal Australians, Ancient Greeks, Mayans, Chinese mandarins, you name it. The twist? They’re not actual humans anymore. Monarch has “kindly” converted them into androids, preserving their cultures in the same way a Victorian butterfly collector preserves moths: frozen, lifeless, and creepy. It’s basically Night at the Museum if the museum was run by a fascist frog.
Naturally, the companions react in wildly different ways. Adric, being Adric, decides that Monarch’s offer to colonize Earth sounds kind of reasonable. (You can almost hear the Doctor sighing, “Of course you’d say that.”) Tegan, meanwhile, spends much of the story in a near-panic, threatening to steal the TARDIS and get the heck out. Nyssa mostly faints, thanks to the script needing someone to keel over at random.
The Doctor, realizing Monarch’s true plan — traveling faster than light to go back in time and become humanity’s “god” — decides that’s a hard no. He also figures out that Monarch himself is not quite as immortal as he’d like to believe. Cue a bit of sabotage, a lot of running down corridors, and finally, Monarch is exposed to deadly radiation. Rather than exploding spectacularly, he simply shrinks down to doll size, leaving behind the most anticlimactic villain death since “tripped over his own shoelace.”
With Monarch neutralized, the androids are free to live their own lives… provided they’re okay with being soulless robots forever. The Doctor and companions depart, still squabbling as if nothing happened.