The Leisure Hive is the first serial of the 18th season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four weekly parts on BBC1 from 30 August to 20 September 1980.
Meanwhile, the young Argolin Pangol (David Haig) seeks to start a war against the Foamasi, to whom his people had previously lost, with an army made of clones of himself.
The Fourth Doctor and Romana's holiday in Brighton ends abruptly when K9 chases a ball, takes in seawater, and explodes.
They instead venture to the Leisure Hive of Argolis, a holiday complex and message of peace built by surviving Argolins after their devastating 20-minute war with the Foamasi forty years earlier.
They arrive at a point of crisis: the Leisure Hive is facing bankruptcy (because of falling tourist trade due to stiff competition from other leisure planets) and the Argolins' Earth agent, Brock, and his lawyer Klout have arrived bearing an offer to buy the planet outright.
After discovering a skin of Klout in a wardrobe, Stimson, Hardin's financier, who travelled with him and persuaded him to fake the demonstrations, is brutally murdered and the Doctor is blamed.
Due to her worsening condition, Mena volunteers to be the first guinea pig to test the time experiment, but the Doctor is selected instead.
Sneaking back to the Recreation Room, the trio discover a group of Argolins, led by Pangol, performing dangerous experiments in order to perfect a secret project, under the guise of entertainment.
But, driven insane by hatred of the Foamasi and a xenophobic fear of all aliens, he lusts for a war-forged empire like that of their ancestor Theron (who started the war and doomed the Argolins to extinction).
The Foamasi shuttle tries to leave and is destroyed by Pangol, who dons the Helmet of Theron and uses the Generator to create an army of Tachyon replicas, in order to rebuild the Argolin race.
Pangol and Mena seem to be merging, so the Doctor grabs the Helmet of Theron and throws it into the visualising crystal, stopping the mechanism.
The Foamasi agents reappear, revealing that the West Lodge criminals tried to escape in the shuttle (so, in the words of the Doctor "Brock and Klout are kaput").
[3] The opening sequence on Brighton beach is John Nathan-Turner's paean to Visconti's celebrated 1971 feature film, Death in Venice.
Among the changes Nathan-Turner instituted was the scaling back of K9's appearances (the unit is out of commission for most of this serial), eventually writing the character out in Warriors' Gate.
In a further attempt to update the image of the series, the original 1963 Delia Derbyshire arrangement of the theme music was replaced by a more contemporary-sounding arrangement by Peter Howell,[4] and a new, '80s-styled neon tubing logo (which was en vogue at the time) designed by Sid Sutton[6] replaced the diamond logo most associated with the Fourth Doctor.
Peter Howell's incidental music was released as part of the compilation album Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop Volume 3: The Leisure Hive in 2002.