Holidays and state funerals appear to have got in the way of my retrospective. so, it's back in the TARDIS saddle, a new University semester up and more writing and reviewing. Summer has officially ended for me now...
“That’s the trouble with regenerations,” says Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, studying his reflection in a full-length mirror, “you never quite know what you’re going to get.”
What we did get was Dr Who on Monday and Tuesday evenings at 6.55p.m. Quite why this scheduling change was made, I’m not certain, but the problem the show immediately had was to try and discover a new audience; BBC Scotland transmitted the series at 3.30pm with the children’s television programs. Showing two episodes a week also cut down the suspense levels between some cliff-hanger endings and reduced the transmission of the show from six to three months, reducing the ability of a story to gain an audience through longevity. It would be easy to blame the scheduling if the series had taken a dip in ratings, but Castrovalva held firm at around 10 million viewers. I for one, back in 1982, found the new slot awkward because it was supper time. However, watching anew, it was a pleasure to see those Sid Sutton titles whirl again and Peter Davison’s bright visage stare back at me from the screen. Castrovalva’s problem wasn’t the schedule and it wasn’t Davison; no, there was something else not quite right about the debut outing for our new Doctor.
There’s a real place called Castrovalva. It’s an Italian hilltop town in Abruzzo. The Dutch artist M.C. Escher made a lithograph of it. This era-opening story is based at the serene city of Castrovalva, whose architectural design is based on later lithographs of imaginary cities created by Escher. The recurring theme of the artist’s work, one of mathematical recursion, forms the basis of this low-key adventure.
The Master, realising the Doctor survived his fall from the Pharos Project’s space scanner, kidnaps Adric and directs the TARDIS to Castrovalva, a world created through the process of block transfer computation, created thanks to the young lad’s mathematical genius. As he’s not cooperating with the Master despite being trapped behind a complex web of restraining bars, it isn’t clear how the venomous Time Lord is overseeing this. In the Roger Delgado days, he’d have simply hypnotised him. Nothing so simple for the 1980s. We have to show pain! We have to show Adric is a real man! He’s defiant! The Master is cruel! It’s hard to write sarcastically. The weakest aspect of this intriguing failure is the Master, who is such an ordinary, rather grasping villain it’s hard to take him seriously. He’s developed an ability to shapeshift, which is rather good, but other than that, he’s hopelessly unimaginative and at the climax, as Anthony Ainley whirls like a Dervish and cries: “Don’t try to make a fool out of me!” all you can think is: “But they have!”
I was rather pleased he managed to shut Adric up, as the young lad has a tendency to talk without thinking. Curiously, Adric also seems to come and go as and when his mind pleases, so the all-powerful Master’s hardly got him restrained. Maybe he needed to lie down amongst all the excitement, temporarily letting his prisoner off the leash. This new Master is a bit hopeless. He thinks fast, concocting two methods to kill the Doctor in as many episodes, but the execution of these plans is a bit of a shambles and his motivation doesn’t really make sense. The Master has gotten vengeful all of a sudden. I preferred it when he just wanted to take over the world.
The design team do okay attempting to bring Escher’s graphics to life, but they were never going to look entirely convincing. The budget just won’t stretch that far. Given the low likelihood of anyone picking up on the Escher reference, I’m not sure why they bothered. To boot, writer Christopher H. Bidmead includes complicated scientific scenarios and even more complicated dialogues. At one point of explanatory chaos, Tegan says: “I’m talking nonsense.” Not just you, love, everyone is. The Doctor spends most of the serial incapacitated, spinning in a wheelchair or lying in a zero cabinet, hence no one is around to explain what on earth’s going on. The idea of space folding in on itself is called recursive occlusion, but it’s a theory the effects team have trouble trying to pull off. They do okay, just, and the story is most interesting during these scenes in the cramping city, when the Doctor finally manages to recover his wits enough to understand the space-time trap he’s been caught in. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you view your climaxes, escape involves nothing more complicated than running down a tunnel.
The support cast is grim in this one. Standing around looking glum isn’t acting and seeing Sarah Sutton pull a face after getting her feet wet, or Adric trying to blag a policeman, or the Master acting the twit, was almost heart breaking. I wanted the ground to swallow the cast and politely bury them they were so inadequate. I’m undecided about Tegan who is bossy and submissive in equal measure. I don’t know why she doesn’t change her uniform, or at least her shoes, after all Nyssa puts on trousers and the TARDIS is full of wardrobes.
Thank goodness then for Peter Davison as the Doctor, who brings a fresh, invigorating presence to the show. Unlike some, I’m not bothered by his youth or the cricketing outfit he chooses to wear. Davison is a fine actor, not a great one, but a smart one who does the expected well and occasionally offers the insightful unexpected. Early on, as his regeneration goes awry and the TARDIS spins towards ‘Event One’, Davison does tiny impersonations of his predecessors. Seeing him mimic William Hartnell was a joy; he was even better at Patrick Troughton. When he finally reached the sanctuary of the Zero Room, a place of tranquil repose within the TARDIS, we finally got to see Davison’s Doctor: a thoughtful, unflustered, encouraging, reliable figure of a Time Lord. Gone is the shillyshallying of Troughton, the condescension of Pertwee, the blustering kafuffle of Baker, here is an actor who wants to show a hero in control of himself, mentoring his friends and comprehending the full implications of a situation.
Later on, when the Doctor is solving the riddle of Castrovalva, Davison displays more moments of characterful insight: attempting to count to three and being corrected by a little girl was pure joy, his sudden authority when realising he’s been lied to about Adric’s plight, discussing recursive dimensions with Mergrave, his look of almost stupefied admiration when he witnesses space folding in on itself, best of all fiddling with his spectacles as he reads and recognises all the volumes of the city’s historical records are the same age [I thought this would play a larger part in the eventual revelation, but the writer chose a far simpler and less interesting route instead] and the Doctor’s final words “It’s going to be splendid!” all hint at better things to come for his portrayal.
I can only hope the series serves him well for while Castrovalva tries hard to be different, to not be a monster-of-the-week adventure, it is, sadly, a searing non-entity of a story, let down by a list of appalling performances and boxed in by its own recursive cleverness:
Four to Doomsday was the first adventure recorded by Peter Davison for Dr Who. Due to a sudden rewrite of his debut story, Season 19 was filmed out of order, so you might expect to witness a few teething problems. There aren’t many. However, the same obvious pitfalls which befell Castrovalva recur here. The support acting is horrendous, most noticeably from Matthew Waterhouse, whose turn as Adric is baffling, being chauvinistic, arrogant impertinent and remarkably intellectually incompetent. Even the Doctor is driven to call him an ‘idiot’. Adric’s motivation for siding with the villain seems extraordinarily ill-informed, as if he never considered the implications of cyborg technology on the emotional core of organic beings. Is the lad not human? Oh, wait; that’s true he isn’t, not exactly; he’s an Alzarian. Perhaps being descended from Marshmen has twisted his mind.
Tegan has a couple of right ding-dongs with him and when she shoves Adric hard enough to knock him out, you rather feel he’s got it coming. Character developments like this did the lamentable Mr Waterhouse no favours in his portrayal. Mind you, Tegan’s no better, displaying impatience, touches of blind panic and, when attempting to thieve the TARDIS, outright recklessness. Considering how dull her character is, Nyssa comes across as surprisingly sensibly grounded. She’s got enough scientific know-how to cope with the techno stuff and a mature, calming demeanour which contrasts sharply with her two colleagues. Peter Davison keeps the warring sides apart, just, and especially in the opening two episodes he steers the brood effectively through the action, keeping them on a tight leash. The ties wander a bit as the serial progresses.
Luckily, we’re gifted a wonderful villain in Stratford Johns’ Monarch, an effusive, charming Urbankan majesty. The scenes where he discusses moral philosophy, military strategy, the shortcomings of ‘flesh time’ and the properties of scientific processes while watching an entertainment with his ministers Enlightenment and Persuasion has all the hallmarks of a Roman Emperor, including his chilling schemes, his benign deceptions and his leisurely attitudes. The Doctor isn’t fooled for a moment, unlike Adric who seems to revel in the Urbankan’s claim to be a God. The young lad’s not even fussed by the alien’s class system which includes slaves; did he learn nothing from the plight of the Tharils in Warrior’s Gate?
Monarch is the last survivor of his species, frog-like humanoids whose planet he destroyed in pursuit of his own experiments, turning his people into microchipped subservient cyborgs. He wants to take over the Earth, having visited several times in the past and kidnapped a few humans for unspecified purposes. The leaders of the represented humans have each been promised power over a dominion on Earth. Yet they too have been turned into cyborgs, powered by a triplicate chip where their heart should be. It is interesting Monarch appears to have kidnapped people who, it could be argued, share a fundamental humanist philosophy: an Athenian, a Mayan, an Aborigine, a Confucian. Monarch doesn’t appear to have learnt from their civilisations, but he’s thoughtfully not eradicated a person’s soul when condensing their life essence into microchip form. Luckily one of the leaders, Bigon, the Greek philosopher, has retained enough of his conscience and sides with the Doctor. Bigon is played with some deftness by Philip Locke, who as Vargas so skilfully menaced Sean Connery in Thunderball. Another of ours, Burt Kwouk, pops up as the Chinese Lin Futu.
Monarch’s plan seems to be threefold: to conquer the Earth by slaughter, to exhume all its minerals and to travel faster than the speed of light. None of it really makes any sense and none of it is dwelt on at length, which is both a plus and a minus. The time travel implications feel a step too far. Conquest and practical genocide feel like evils quite enough. Writer Terence Dudley spends a good deal of time creating a workable and intriguing plot based around the mechanics and assurances of immortality. Monarch dismisses ‘flesh time’ and pontificates on his great strides in cybernetics, considering his process the saviour of the Urbankan people. The story is run through with so many other traditional sci-fi elements that the central thrust of the villain’s immorality becomes buried: the enormous spaceship, kidnapped humans, interstellar travel, aliens, androids, invasion, poisons, genocide, philosophy, revolution, a God complex. Dudley can’t quite pull all the threads together and the last episode falls a bit flat, with Tegan stuck in the TARDIS, Nyssa mostly hypnotised, Adric mostly an imbecile, Monarch mostly seated, a lot of dragon dancing, some slow-motion fighting in zero-gravity.
[Point of order: the science at the climax was criticised at the time, but the physics involving the momentum of a cricket ball delivering propulsion makes perfect sense; additionally, the Doctor has survived in zero gravity for short times before, notably in Nightmare of Eden, and we shouldn’t be surprised he can cope with sub-zero temperatures as he ventured into the Antarctic without protection in The Seeds of Doom.]
Despite the unconvincing ending, there’s much to admire in Four to Doomsday. The production values are first class. The model work and effects are better than reasonable and the realisation of Monarch’s observation globes, the monopticans, was brilliant. Hats off to Mickey Edwards’ FX department. Designer Tony Burrows also proves a winner. His interiors are superb. The corridors, the huge high ceilings of all the rooms, the different laboratories, the throne room; it all looks convincing and breathtakingly space age. Colin Levers’ Urbankan costumes complement the fantasy, monumental look and feel of the space craft.
I’ve watched Four to Doomsday on three occasions now and this was the first time I enjoyed and recognised the intent of the story. Previously, I’d dismissed it, chiefly because the Doctor’s companions are so trivialised. However, the story doesn’t deserve such a simplistic criticism. John Black’s direction keeps things in check and promotes the best elements of the narrative to great effect, particularly with regard to the Urbankans and Bigon. It’s so disappointing the TARDIS crew hasn’t been pulled into better shape:
The basic assumption of many viewers is that Kinda is something to do with eastern religious philosophies. This is based on a very obvious reference to the Wheel of Life: “The wheel turns, civilisations rise; the wheel turns, civilisations fall.” That simplistic view of the story rather misses the point as it has more to do with man’s control of his mind and how the conscious fights the subconscious, how good and evil battle, chiefly through the realm of dreams. So, you could easily claim it has overtures of Jung and Freud. The story also touches on the ancient Greek fable of Pandora’s Box, the Bible’s Eden myth, DNA collectivism, group telepathy, Chinese wind chime superstitions, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Aboriginal Dreamtime, vampirism, the breadth of man’s madness, and the recurring religious theme of the great saviour. Kinda is a surprising serial.
Deva-Loka, or Planet S14, is under surveillance for future Earth colonisation, but the survey team is having trouble with the natives, the titular Kinda. We’ve seen this before and it never ends well. The team is led by Sanders, a Colonel Blimp type figure of old-fashioned blinkered order, a man hopelessly out of his depth who would rather do press-ups than take any effective action to investigate the [never explained] loss of half of his unit. His second-in-command is the slowly unhinging, unravelling Hindle. Their science officer is Todd, a woman struggling to cope under the restraint of her military superiors. This trio are brilliantly envisaged respectively by Richard Todd, Simon Rousse and Nerys Hughes.
Todd is a very famous star who refuses to slum it and delivers a fine performance as an aging commander, fixed in his bigoted views, his routines, his loyalty to the soldier’s oath; when these are taken from him, the childlike docility he exhibits is equally fascinating, all the certainties he once knew being replaced by a long-buried glee at the effortlessness of life. That Richard Todd refuses to veer into the stereotypical is admirable; both sides of Sanders’ persona feel genuine. Simon Rousse has the difficult of task of making the lunatic Hindle sympathetic. His mind has been turned by the monotony, the creeping quiet of the forest, too long in the uniform, too long in space. By accident, he discovers how to control the two local natives, referred to as ‘hostages’, imprisoned in the team’s protective outpost, the dome. This fuels his mania and he begins to exert a chaotic, frighteningly believable, regime over his charges, persecuting in turn the Doctor, Adric and Todd. His many schizophrenic switches of mood encapsulate the nature of his insanity, never more so than when he forces Adric to assist in the design and construction of a model city populated by paper cut outs of people. When the Doctor accidentally steps on one, he’s aghast at the murder of an innocent, yet incongruously he’s wired the dome to destruct, killing everything inside a fifty kilometre radius. It is the opening of the Box of Janna [an Islamic term for a jewellery box] which proves his salvation. This supernatural artefact, a sort of Pandora’s Box in reverse, alters the function of the human brain, turning the recipient into a docile creature, suppressing their natural antagonistic instincts and allowing him or her to exist in a state of idealised bliss.
Nerys Hughes has the hardest role as the surrogate companion to the Doctor. A popular actress from TV’s sitcom The Liver Birds, Hughes is more than competent, acting as an essential barometer of the audience’s fears and aspirations. We recognise she’s fighting a losing authority battle against her robust male colleagues, but she’s proactive enough to retain our interest even when saddled with asking questions. Unfortunately, by episode 3 she’s taken a backseat as the Doctor makes enquiry after enquiry of Panna, the blind matriarch of the Kinda, played with some fortitude and humour by Mary Morris. Not being human, the Doctor hasn’t been affected by the Box, so Panna assumes he must be intellectually subnormal. She calls him “the idiot” and Peter Davison seems to enjoy the obvious irony.
Davison is efficient rather than good. Early on his relaxed demeanour seems completely at odds with his predecessors; for instance, he doesn’t appear remotely concerned by the fact he’s managed to lose Tegan in the jungle, which serves in part to create the problems he later encounters. Once he recognises the delicate societal balance of Deva-Loka’s inhabitants is under threat not only from the lunatic assertions of Hindle, but from an outside evil force, he becomes very one-track, almost obnoxious, and spends too much of his time pointing at people. Mind, he has had to keep Adric in line. The young lad is badly represented again, moaning mostly. During the final episode he accuses Tegan of being responsible for the whole affair; she gives it straight back, like any good Aussie girl would.
Janet Fielding really comes into her own in Kinda. Hypnotised by the Sleep Chimes, she is mentally transported to her subconscious. There’s a very fine zoom close up of her eye which tells us we’re entering the realm of self-thought. Here, in a nightmare obsidian environment of darkness, Tegan is baffled by the conundrums forced on her, particularly when starkly informed she doesn’t exist. A stranger, Dukka, confronts Tegan with paradoxes of reality. She meets her own self and they debate which of them is real. This sequence is excellently played by Fielding, who displays all the exasperation we’ve come to expect, but this time the panicky desperation comes with a vim of control and genuine dread; the darkest of fears inhabit those places we never venture and Tegan is in that hollow. What is real freedom and who possesses it? She’s being faced with the same temptations as Eve in the garden or Jesus atop the mountain, will you free the devil into the world of man? Afflicted by this unseen evil, she seduces a youthful male Kinda, Aris, and passes the evil onto him, causing Aris to seek power over his race.
The peace-loving Kinda fear solitary sleep because of the nature of these dreamtimes. They communicate telepathically, have a matriarchal society, a hereditary life essence and an evil enemy in the Mara, a serpent-like creature which crosses over from the realm of dreams, where it has been banished, into the real world. Tegan, as a “not-we” was susceptible to the Mara’s influence and inadvertently brought the evil into the open. The Doctor realises the Kinda don’t see reflections of their physical selves in a mirror [like the Greek gorgon], but an image of their soul, hence Hindle’s ability to control the two hostages – they believe he’s a magician like their own mask-wearing, dancing and frolicking Trickster, who has captured their self-essence – and when the Mara, or Aris, is confronted with his own soul, he will vanish back into his realm of dreams.
This is a jerrymandering of all sorts of ancient mythology regarding the properties of mirrors and reflections: Vulcan’s fortune telling mirror, Perseus and Medusa, the Aztec’s smoking mirror, Merlin’s divinations, Snow White, Dracula, Through the Looking Glass, the breaking of mirrors bringing bad luck. All of these have some input into the Doctor’s final solution being a circle of polished solar panels. His contention is that if the Mara cannot look at itself once, if its evil appears to multiply, the actual being will banish itself. This recalls Tegan’s earlier encounter with not just one, but dozens of her own person: the Mara recognises these multiples cannot exist and Tegan pleads to escape its obsidian world should it drive her mad. Of course, turning this evil superstition onto itself is an elementary narrative device, but doesn’t really provide a decent climax. There’s no science fiction in Kinda, only an adventure crammed full of pseudo-religious imagery and annotation.
Does this spoil Kinda as an adventure? It would be easy to say ‘yes’. In many respects, like the first two stories of the season, there are strong ideas lurking beneath its exterior and writer Christopher Bailey crams as many as he can into the screenplay. However, like Season 18’s Warrior’s Gate, this overload of ideas gives rise to narrative confusion. I will freely admit my summary above may not be the writer’s intent nor another observer’s interpretation. It is pleasing after almost twenty years to finally have a Dr Who adventure which is prepared to tackle superstition and unnatural psychodynamics without the need for an alien monster. Yes, there is a manifestation of the Mara, and I’ll not comment on the naff giant serpent, but essentially the Mara is a psychological enemy, a latent evil which inhabits us all, as demonstrated vociferously by Hindle’s deranged antics. Aris’ sudden obsession with power is almost laughable in comparison. What Kinda does is take us beyond the world of technology and into the realm of reason. How successful you consider the serial depends on how much you can be entertained by this principle.
I believe there is plenty to entertain us. The serial isn’t perfect. Malcolm Thornton’s jungle sets are okay, but you always know this is house-bound filming, especially when the designers haven’t bothered to cover up the studio floor. The interiors are realistically small, but uninteresting. There’s a silly automated Total Survival Suit thingamajig which seems superfluous to requirements. It’s there and Nyssa isn’t; the poor lass is side-lined completely, resting up in the TARDIS, which is disappointing as her compassionate attitudes would have benefitted the story. In her place Adric is… well, less said. The Kinda are not very impressive.
What is good are the central supporting roles from Fielding, Todd, Hughes, Rousse and Morris who all grasp the mettle with both hands and deliver consummate performances which make us believe in, fear for and empathise with their situations and actions. Director Peter Grimwade rightly, boldly, forefronts their stories over and above the Doctor’s. Davison, by comparison, just asks all the questions. Kinda is a strong Dr Who story, full of intelligent theories and fantastic performances. It may struggle towards the end, but if audiences wanted an indication of where the Fifth Doctor’s era was going to take us, this adventure firmly pitches us into the preserve of myth and enchantment, sorcery and psychology, the natural cycle and the nature of evil.
Eric Saward’s The Visitation features a wonderfully erudite performance from Michael Robbins as Richard Mace, a 17th Century thespian and “gentleman of the road” – a highwayman in other words. He sparkles well in scenes with Peter Davison, where the latter attempts to cajole the former into deeds of reluctant heroism. Believing everything which is occurring around him must be some form of magic, Mace takes androids, time travellers, TARDISes and Terileptils in his Shakespearian stride.
It’s a good job Robbins and Davison provide a decent double act because there is precious little else to entertain us. Devoid of humour, this pseudo-historical nonsense begins on shaky ground with the Doctor once again admonishing Adric and the youngster copping an almighty strop. Matthew Waterhouse’s increasingly erratic performances are becoming repetitively annoying. Rumours abounded that he and Davison did not get on, thanks in the main to a comment Waterhouse passed suggesting the new star would never be as good as Tom Baker. Whether true or not, their on-screen relationship is fraught and untidy. The Fifth Doctor is far better equipped to deal with Nyssa. Or perhaps she’s better equipped to deal with him, being less prone to panicky outrages, as well as eminently practical and logical. Sarah Sutton may not be the most eloquent actress in the series’ history, but she’s head-and-shoulders above most of her immediate competition. It’s disappointing she spends most of episodes 3 & 4 in the TARDIS knitting together a homemade android destruction machine.
[Point of TARDIS order: how come the android can shoot its laser gun in the TARDIS? I thought weapons didn’t function in its environment?]
The early scenes are reminiscent of The Time Warrior, as a meteor shower pre-empts the arrival of an alien spacecraft. The confused peasantry reminds us of The Time Meddler and the deadly plague which the invaders plan to spread is a shallow imitation of The Silurians. There’s nothing very new here. Even the suggestion the Doctor may have inadvertently started the Great Fire of London harks back to an incident in The Romans. The lizard like Terileptils are a rogue militaristic race. This band of partisans have escaped the horrific conditions of the Tinclavic prison mines of Raaga, but they are not the least bit intimidating, a poorly realised Kraal / Zygon / Sea Devil. The android they use to do some dirty work is an unnecessary hodgepodge resembling a walking glitterball when all it needed to be was a shadow of the Grim Reaper. The location shooting is very welcome and looks grand, so congratulations to the camera crew, but for some reason the alien bases are bathed in green or red light and look distinctly muggy. The inept denouement is embarrassing for all the worst reasons.
Black Orchid, with its 1920s setting and non-science fiction related plot, marked a return after fifteen years and some eighty-five adventures to the truly historical story. It is most welcome and although ultimately the serial proves more of a diversion from the norm than the start of a successful trend, it succeeds by sheer willingness of the cast to entertain. For good measure breaking records, this is also the first two-part adventure since The Sontaran Experiment in Season 12. Shorter stories would become a regular addition to the Peter Davison era and continue into the latter days of the series.
The Doctor still can’t return Tegan to Heathrow Airport 1981 and instead the TARDIS is waylaid in Cranleigh, Surrey, where the local gentry are holding a cricket match and garden party. Mistaken for a replacement allrounder, the Doctor scores a century and takes a five-for winning the match for the Lord’s team. We knew his cricket whites would come in handy sometime, but the stick of celery which he constantly replaces still goes unexplained…
There’s a mystery afoot at Cranleigh Hall. Nyssa bears an uncanny similarity to Lord Cranleigh’s fiancé Ann, who was once engaged to his brother, George, a famous botanist. Nyssa tries to explain she’s from a place called Traken, but the locals only believe it’s a town near Esher. Their pedantry is ghastly. The two girls decide to play a joke on the guests and wear matching costumes to the fancy dress ball. Tegan dances the Charleston, chats up a Knight of the Realm and drinks screwdriver cocktails. Adric feeds his stomach, constantly. The Doctor though is fascinated by the Black Orchid, which George Cranleigh discovered in the Amazon before his untimely death. While dressing for the party, he accidentally finds the entrance to a priest’s hole and follows the passages to a secret upper floor where a dead body is secreted in a cupboard. Meanwhile, someone kidnaps Ann – or is it Nyssa?
Black Orchid is often compared to the work of Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers, but if these comparisons suggest the story is a ‘whodunit’ they are wide of the mark. There isn’t a mystery to solve in the best of those traditions because we’ve already seen the murders being committed, so we know the killer isn’t among any of the established guests. The addition of a tribal warrior, who is never allowed to venture below the upper floors also blurs the lines of believability. The Doctor doesn’t solve the mystery through observation, interview, clue and deduction, as a Poirot might, he triumphs by stealth and a lucky guess. The disfigured and mentally unstable George Cranleigh is a sorrowful figure, entirely unsuitably for a ‘villain’, if that’s what he’s supposed to be. The treatment meted out to him by his domineering mother is the real crime and it’s dispiriting the Doctor doesn’t broach the subject, being more concerned with rescuing Nyssa / Ann. A little more subtlety in the narrative would have helped.
Despite the one-dimensional plot, there’s a lot to enjoy in Black Orchid: the cricket match, the garden party, the double affair, the gentle humour, the costumes, interiors and locations, the jiving 1920s jazz music, even the performances stretch the imagination: Nyssa and Adric’s constant double-takes at the courtesies of late Edwardian England, Sarah Sutton’s dual playing of the doppelgangers, Peter Davison’s despairing “Why do I always let my curiosity get the better of me?” as the Doctor becomes lost in the secret passageways, Janet Fielding’s Tegan at last appears to be enjoying herself.
Other than the unsettling nature of the story, which is part Jane Eyre, part Hunchback of Notre Dame, and shows little sympathy for the wronged botanist, the most noticeable oddity is how prepared this new Doctor is to try to convince the ignorant he’s a time traveller and even allow people to view the wonders of the TARDIS. Back in the days of William Hartnell, the Doctor was ultra-protective of his personal history and his time machine. He didn’t want Ian and Barbara to step inside; he religiously locked the door and guarded the key. He kept its and his secrets safe. Gradually, in the same way the Time Lords have become demystified, the erosion of the almost deified time machine has become complete. Not only have companions as diverse as Leela, Adric and Tegan piloted the ship, but everyman, alien and his uncle seems to be stepping in and out of its doors. This time it’s the turn of a few policemen, whose exclamations of “Strike me pink” and “It’s extraordinary” hardly cut the mustard. In the 1966 movie Daleks: Invasion Earth: 2150AD, Bernard Cribbins’ uniformed copper fainted, a far more likely reaction. Still, there you have it. If the Fifth Doctor wants to demystify his mode of transport, I guess that’s up to him.
Black Orchid is a fun, inconsequential and unexpected treat. Pity they had to film it during an inclement autumn; sunshine would have brought more joy:
The opening episode of Earthshock is intentionally structured so as to misdirect viewers as to who the enemy might be. It is, quite simply, a masterpiece of suspense and terror and, as single episode comparisons go, sits among the very, very best of Dr Who. Director Peter Grimwade handles the cast and cameras with dexterity, squeezing every last drop of tension from the gloomy underground caves, the banter of the unsuspecting military squadron and the twin black-clad silent figures who flit speedily between locales, spitting laser beams from their hands. It’s a slow build. We meet Lt Scott and his troops, and the palaeontologist Prof Kyle, who are all struggling to make sense of the sudden disappearance of her science team. Mysterious power surges are disrupting their hunt. Eventually two of the troopers discover the gory remains of their colleagues unaware they are being observed.
Meanwhile, the Doctor’s been arguing with a petulant Adric, who wants to return to E-Space, feeling his contributions to the TARDIS team are being overlooked in favour of Nyssa. In his own fit of pique, the Doctor accidentally lands the TARDIS in a the same cave system the military troops are exploring. Stepping out to calm down as well as investigate, the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa are mistaken for saboteurs. Suddenly, the deadly black androids appear silently from the shadows, shooting down the troops. Peter Grimwade cuts away to another location entirely, a control centre of shining technology and three silver suited Cybermen. The Leader orders the death of the Doctor.
The climax of this superb opening episode and the return of the Doctor’s second most popular monster was kept well hidden from audiences in 1982. The complete lack of publicity for the Cybermen’s comeback was a masterstroke. So when I and nine million others saw the Cybermen in all their impressive glory, it was a genuine surprise and a thrilling one. They do not disappoint, back to their single-minded ruthless best, although both David Banks as the Leader and Mark Hardy as his Lieutenant display vocal nuances which, like those first sing-song Cyber-voices in The Tenth Planet, hint at the original human being who still inhabits a Cyber-soul. They have also acquired an understanding of vengeance, for the Cyber Leader makes the Doctor’s life a misery out of pure spite for past defeats. Writer Eric Saward has mined the archives for the best bits of Cyber-stories, combined and reimagined them together in a thrill packed adventure which never lets up pace from start to finish.
[Three black and white clips from The Tenth Planet, The Wheel in Space and Revenge of the Cybermen are used to illustrate the Cybermen’s affinity with the Doctor, which is a smart touch. The Cybermen hatching from their cocoons brought back memories of Tomb of the Cybermen and as they maraud to Malcolm Clarke’s techno beat music score, we are reminded of their marching in The Moonbase.]
Unusually for Dr Who, this serial is almost entirely action orientated. This helps immeasurably to cover up the numerous quibbles which closer inspection and repeated viewings reveal. Episode 2 kicks off with the continued devastating battle with the sprite-like androids. Following the stand-off, the Doctor uncovers and disconnects a bomb powerful enough to destroy most of planet Earth, he traces the arming signal to a space freighter on warp-drive [odd this, as Dr Who has never knowingly borrowed Star Trek techno-jargon; it’s a first and from now on it wouldn’t be the last], discovers silos chock full of Cybermen, battles them from the ship’s bridge, gets captured and has an explosive verbal and physical set-to with the Cyber Leader in the TARDIS control room. There are gun battles and fights galore. If you wanted to see how the Star Wars generation begins to influence Dr Who, this is the strongest evidence. The Cybermen stomp around the darkened interior of the space freighter like Imperial Stormtroopers, blasting all and sundry to smithereens, while Tegan and Lt Scott huddle, hide and try to avoid them. The Doctor, like a young Jedi Knight, is arguing the toss with the impatient, vulgar, staunchly traditional, Captain Briggs, eventually winning his argument and catching a Cyberman in an anti-matter trap. Not much good it does, the villains simply blow up the second door onto the bridge.
But what’s all this violence in aid of? The year is 2875 and the Cybermen have rejuvenated their race and numbers. An intergalactic conference is taking place on Earth and the Cybermen planned to explode the Cyber-Bomb thus leaving most of the Galactic Federation leaderless and the galaxies open to attack and conquest.
[Point of order: I’m assuming it’s a Galactic Federation conference; no-one mentions it, but the time-line fits. It might also be a peace conference with the Draconians, but that would be occurring some 300 years after the events of Frontier in Space and I assume politics and intergalactic cooperation will have moved on by then.]
Once the Doctor deactivates the bomb, the Cybermen revert to Plan B, using the freighter as a missile. The Doctor realises the ship is so large and travelling so fast it will cause a cataclysm as enormous as the one which wiped out the dinosaurs, effectively killing all life on Earth. Adric, left behind on the bridge with the crew, tries to override the activation codes, but only succeeds in sending the ship hurtling into the past. While the Cyber Leader is defeated in the TARDIS and the crew escape the stricken ship, Adric remains alone, certain he can reverse the polarity… or whatever. You really do need to ignore the obvious questions: how does falsely cracking an alien computer code result in a freighter going back in time and which timeline have the escaping freighter crew flown into? If you think too hard, the whole premise falls about your head.
I’m no lover of Adric, and I acknowledge this is a manipulated ending to provide closure, but his final scenes are rather poignant. Here is this young man, a little childish, certainly sheltered, struggling with his own identity and his relationships with women and authority figures, a man too easily influenced, too easily riled, a man seeking affirmation for his life and work, and finally he’s achieved it: mathematical problems are his forte and he gamely applies himself to the problem-solving task with the same urgency the Doctor would. For a brief moment he’s in control on the bridge of the freighter. The older, experienced pair of leaders, Briggs and Scott, can do nothing. They are entirely reliant on Adric’s genius. Ultimately, he’s abandoned on the freighter watching the world and his death rush towards him. It’s a solemn, powerful moment.
No companion has been killed off since the Season 3 epic The Daleks’ Masterplan when Katrina was ejected into space and the [disputed] crew member Sara Kingdom bit the dust – literally. It doesn’t serve as any consolation that Adric’s gold badge is the weapon the Doctor uses to asphyxiate the Cyber Leader, a tussle of much brutality ended with a volley of point-blank laser bolts to the Leader’s wriggling torso. The TARDIS controls have been damaged in the fight and the Doctor is unable to save Adric: Time Lord Law interferes. The Doctor could theoretically go back and rescue him, but that would disturb the natural cycle of the universe. Instead he stands forlorn with his companions. Dr Who has rarely been better or more affecting. The credits scroll up silently over a shot of the boy’s broken gold star; a morbidly sentimental step too far perhaps, but a send-off with some emotion.
Throughout it all, director Peter Grimwade never lets control of the tiller lapse. The action is efficient, vicious and palpable. The Cybermen are excellent adversaries, so cold you entirely understand why the Doctor is moved to violent action, reflecting his own conversation with the intransigent Cyber Leader as he pleads for Tegan’s life:
Doctor: “Emotions have their uses.”
Leader: “They restrict and curtail the intellect, the logic of the mind.”
Doctor: “They also enhance life. When did you last have the pleasure of smelling a flower, watching a sunset, eating a well-prepared meal?”
Leader: “These things are irrelevant.”
Doctor: “For some people, small, beautiful events is what life is all about.”
While the Doctor might here be speaking of sunsets, by the time Adric is being obliterated to space dust the audience can see the emotion which forces him into aggressive action and then to sudden mourning. Davison is particularly astute at the story’s climax. Despite all their bickering and all his uselessness, Adric wasn’t deserving of a fate so cruel. Nor are the wholly innocent millions residing on Earth deserving of their impending death. No mention though is made of the millions of dinosaurs this space-age time travelling meteorite exterminated.
In thespian terms there is hardly a foot wrong. Not only are the companions and the Doctor on form – although Nyssa again gets stuck in the TARDIS for an episode or two – but so are the support cast. James Warwick’s vigorous Lt Scott and his second-in-command Snyder [Suzi Arden], Beryl Reid as the intransigent Cpt Briggs and June Bland as her second Berger, Alec Sabin’s traitor Ringway and Clare Clifford’s Prof Kyle, all of these are genuine, well presented characters, displaying energy, verve and emotion. Even David Banks’ Cyber Leader comes across as a personally calculatingly bitter enemy. I much prefer the Cybermen when they reveal glimpses of their human forebears, it makes them more realistic. Beryl Reid in particular shines. Briggs is a woman past her prime as a Captain, motivated only by money, serving no fools, yet fully prepared to risk her life when it comes to the head. Her casting and performance is often criticised, but there is a place for older characters on Dr Who and why should we not show them being capable, arrogant, assertive and conciliatory as befits the role? Reid is a fine actress and although she admitted later on she had not a clue what was happening, she acquits herself brilliantly and believably. I should offer plaudits too for the non-discriminatory nature of this vision of future Terran society. Women are shown to be as capable as men, occupying positions of authority and standing; a pity the production couldn’t have included minorities in the casting, but I’ll not labour the point.
Nor will I highlight the dozen or so implausibilities in the plot. They really don’t matter because the narrative doesn’t let them matter. I can nit-pick with the finest, but sometimes it is best to accept the rough with the smooth. Suffice to say, none are as glaringly obvious as the issues I experienced with The Moonbase or Tomb of the Cybermen. The production values are better than first class. The cave sets are realistic and shrouded in shadow, allowing those pesky androids to drift in and out of the dark. The freighter interiors are cavernously superb; the bridge head, peppered with electronic consoles and readout screens, felt fussy but provides a suitable arena for verbal and physical confrontation. Designer Bernard Lloyd Jones should take a bow. Top plaudits too for Keith Hopper’s camerawork, much of it in half-light, and John Gatland’s atmospheric sound recording. Steve Bowman and Dave Chapman offer splendid effects, including some fine model work, and better than normal laser bolts. The marvellous presentation helps distract us from those narrative inconsistencies, including the freighter's baffling timeslip.
The Fifth Doctor’s debut season had been jogging along quite nicely, but with Earthshock it finally hit top gear and delivered an adventure which can quite easily sit alongside some of the very best of Dr Who. It might not be as thought-provoking as some stories during Jon Pertwee’s socially conscious era, but Earthshock demonstrates Dr Who can still entertain with consistent visceral brilliance.
This is something to do with the Master’s TARDIS being under repair. We never find out how he escaped from Castrovalva. He’s taken to kidnapping Concordes and hauling them through a time-contour back to the Pleistocene era so the hypnotised passengers can help him break into the temple of the Xeraphin, a gestation alien race stuck on Earth in its pre-history, allowing him to source their power. For some inexplicable reason he needs to disguise himself as an obese Arab magician called Kalid. The Doctor is baffled. Nyssa looks pretty. Tegan gets stuck at Heathrow Airport.
Time Flight is perplexing not only in its plot, which can’t be explained without resorting to reams of notes, but in its execution. Quite how the production team expected to recreate prehistoric Earth on an end of season budget is anyone’s guess. The sets are unimaginative, a series of underground caverns or rocky plains. The plasmatron monsters are so appalling I can’t even describe them. The Airfix model of the Concorde shows up the cheapness of the production. So does the scene where Tegan pushes an airplane wheel around like a dinner plate. The acting is bargain basement stuff, your worst theatrical nightmare coming true. Writer Peter Grimwade ought to stick to directing. This is a horrendous screenplay. There’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo about psycho-kinetic beings [again???]. The Master’s plans are so convoluted a snake couldn’t unravel them. Several characters disappear half-way through without any explanation. The whole exercise is stodgy to the extreme.
The most interesting aspect is the opening few moments, when the first Concorde vanishes and we learn the Doctor has been busy returning Briggs, Scott and Berger to Earth of the 27th Century. Adric’s passing gets a mention. Then it’s back to basics and a run around Heathrow, but with more success than Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor managed in The Faceless Ones. The location scenes and the stock Concorde footage is well done, but you can’t work miracles with dialogue as crass as this.
You sense, given care and attention, this serial could have grown legs. It was the sort of complicated extended Master story they excelled at in the Pertwee era and could have developed into a slow burn of a six-parter. In fact, the Doctor mentions the Brigadier and UNIT in an attempt to explain the TARDIS’ presence on Terminal 3’s mezzanine level. A faceless, voiceless nobody called Sir John Sudbury requests the Doctor investigate the vanishing airplanes. Always happy to oblige, the Doctor does just that, but it’s a rushed investigation at best during which I discover the TARDIS doesn’t have an internal gravity at all. Back to basics indeed.
John Nathan Turner really should have recruited Nicholas Courtney, dressed him up as Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart and fed him Captain Stapley’s lines. The sentences even sound like the Brigadier! Not bringing back UNIT was a missed opportunity which might at least have provided some cheerful nostalgia.
Season 19, perhaps more than any other since the early days of Seasons 2, 3 or 4, is a mixed bag. There are some very good adventures, some bad ones and some average ones. The consistent groundwork laid by John Nathan Turner in Season 18 appears to be bearing fruit. Thoughtful stories hold the audience’s interest and good performances keep some of the lesser episodes from failing too badly. Only Time Flight is entirely problematic. Both it and the opener Castrovalva, struggle with replicating the writer’s intentions, but Time Flight also has a narrative which defies any kind of clarity and that’s a huge let down given the general accessibility of the scripts. It also looks as if the show simply ran out of money. Budget was always a problem for Dr Who and expanding each season from 5 stories for Pertwee’s era, 6 for Baker’s and now 7 for Davison’s is stretching it too far. Quantity does not always lead to quality and several times the productions lack refinement. If the closer had been dumped, or if Four to Doomsday or The Visitation had been postponed to the next season, the overall production values may well have increased.
The season also had to deal with its new twice-weekly time slot. This doesn’t appear to have been a problem, most episodes reaching audiences of nine or ten million, but after only thirteen weeks, the series would now be off the air until next January, an eternity at thirty-nine weeks. The BBC filled the gap with a few summer repeats, but it isn’t enough; one of the beauties of the program was the impression it was always on the box. By the time the new batch of stories come along, many casual viewers will have moved on to another early evening program.
Peter Davison as the new Doctor is fine. He’s quite sharp with his charges, like an idealistic first-post teacher, but I like his casual demeanour, which hints at playfulness, but not silliness. He gives each script the attention it deserves, even the dross, and manfully struggles with some head-shakingly crass situations. When he’s good, like his predecessors, Davison has excelled. After a slightly shaky beginning, he improved tremendously and by The Visitation, his slightly off-hand manner was getting quite agreeable. He perhaps needs to tone down the hectoring – as he did in Earthshock when confronting the Cyber Leader – and now Adric has gone the bursts of quarrelsomeness will probably dissipate. Best of all, I enjoyed Davison when he’s up against it, when things are not turning his way and the Doctor is at a loss to fathom his situation: arrested in Black Orchid, head in hands; struggling with his memory lapses in Castrovalva; pondering the silos on the seemingly empty freighter or defusing a bomb in Earthshock. Here, there is a sense of a Time Lord not quite in full control of his actions. A change from Hartnell, Baker and Pertwee who always seem to know, and Troughton who acted the fool.
His companions are more miss than hit. Tegan’s growing stronger and Janet Fielding deserves plaudits; although she appears to be written out this was never the case, she was always going to return the next season. The producer and script writer were juggling with the idea of reverting back to the opening few seasons of the show when the concluding episode of the adventure delivered another minor cliff-hanger to lead into the following story [Four to Doomsday, Earthshock and Time Flight all share this to a lesser or greater degree]. Sarah Sutton’s Nyssa has to spend too much time sick, captured, brainwashed or simply standing around doing very little. Perhaps with Adric out of the way she’ll have more to accomplish. We ought to end with Adric, for if any one moment defines Season 19 it is this young man’s unexpected end, a sacrifice to save others and one which lasts long in the Dr Who memory banks. Never before has an established companion made such an impactful exit. He won’t be missed, but the team gave him a grand send off.
Currently, John Nathan Turner’s doing an okay job. He’s steadied the ship, renovated the captain, removed the humour, given back some of the show’s science-babble, instilled a few new characters, brought back a couple of old favourites, and generally tried to make the show entertaining enough for adults while still accessible for children. It’s a hard balance, but Peter Davison’s boyish appearance and easy charm as well as the appeal of his two female companions just about cracks it.
Bringing back classic villains after a few seasons can be successful. It worked well for the Ice Warriors in The Curse of Peladon; not so well for Davros and the jury is still out on Anthony Ainley’s new Master. There never really seemed a need to bring back Omega, Stephen Thorne’s revenge ridden, insanity prone Time Lord from The Three Doctors, but John Nathan Turner did it anyway. The outcome is a desultory effort which adds nothing to Time Lord history and takes away from Omega’s personal villainous legacy. A lot of money was thrown at this, including a foreign location shoot in Holland. It contributes nothing but surface gloss. The substance beneath it is a hurried and harried mess.
Omega somehow survived the catastrophic explosion which destroyed his antimatter world, has made contact with a treacherous Time Lord and obtained a TARDIS through which he has gained access to the Matrix. Omega left the anti-matter universe through a dimension gateway in Rondel, an intergalactic region devoid of all stellar activity and formerly the location of a collapsed Q-Star. These galactic oddities are so named because they emit Quad magnetism, the only known shield for antimatter. The region’s colloquial name is the Arc of Infinity. To exist in our universe, Omega needs to shed his Quad magnet suit and bond biometrically with another Time Lord. For some reason the Doctor is the prime candidate. For some other reason Omega’s TARDIS is stuck in Amsterdam. So are Tegan and her cousin, who are menaced by something called an Ergon, a psycho-kinetic monster which resembles an enormous plucked chicken.
So, there’s a traitor in the High Council and the dithering Time Lords force the Doctor’s TARDIS to return to Gallifrey where he’s arrested and sentenced to death lest he prevaricate the biometric bonding. Nyssa forcefully takes charge of investigations. As well as forgetting the meaning of the word ‘justice’, Gallifreyans have neglected how to build a-new and instead construct furniture from Ikea; I was very impressed with the comfy leather sofas. Time Lord costumes are less and less convincing however, all these swishing robes and guards with peacock plumes stuck in their helmets. Apparently Leela was meant to return, which explains why Nyssa keeps shooting everyone; she’s obviously been given the Sevateem warrior’s lines and prompts. Tegan’s comeback is hopelessly derivative, a lucky coincidence, and she ends up running around chilly Amsterdam in a skimpy summer outfit. The Doctor does not look happy to see her.
Peter Davison’s performance starts off frantic and never ceases pace. He’s only following the narrative action, which flits from event to event with increasing speed, some scenes lasting bare seconds. He’s not given any support from anyone. Seasoned veterans such as Dr Who returnees Michael Gough, Leonard Sachs and Ian Collier are as bad as new comers like Colin Baker, Andrew Boxer and Neil Duglish. It’s hard to understand how someone can overact in a monster costume, but Ian Collier manages it. Latterly, Davison has to play the reconstituted Omega and this short sequence is excellent. Suddenly, the tale feels emotionally relevant and for a brief period we sense Omega’s longing to experience real life again. The moment where he watches street entertainers, smiling with the children, has tiny reminiscences of James Whale’s Frankenstein. A little more of this kind of subtlety might have helped Arc of Infinity to succeed.
There’s no subtlety from the pre and post production crews either. Roger Limb’s dreadful music score pounds away, interfering with every scene. The effects are trashy. Johnny Byrne’s script goes even further towards demystifying the Time Lords. They appear to be incompetent, their justice system is nothing of the sort and their entire security set up seems wholly inadequate. There’s a complete lack of scale on Gallifrey now; the planet and its fabulous citadel appears small and insignificant, highlighted by the tableau of the Council Chamber doubling up as an execution space. Ron Jones directs with a sledgehammer. The whole episode feels like an expensive broken folly. Still at least I discovered why guns were suddenly being fired in the Doctor’s TARDIS – the space ship’s state of temporal grace is malfunctioning. It’s on the Doctor’s list of maintenance repairs.
Arc of Infinity is not a good way to kick off a celebratory season:
While Arc of Infinity brought back a monster from ten years ago, Snakedance chooses to reimagine the Mara, who so successfully graced Kinda less than one year before. The Doctor has been training Nyssa and Tegan to pilot the TARDIS. During coordinate lessons, Tegan sent the TARDIS to Manussa, not Earth. This instantly raises a question: what’s been happening in between these two stories? Tegan was already on Earth, so why does the Doctor suddenly want to return there, and having left of her own accord this time, why also would Tegan? You feel many weeks and months may have elapsed since we last met the time travellers, the kind of unexplained gaps we occasionally saw in the Hartnell era. This opens the gate for a whole slew of extra-curricular adventures, the kind novelists penned for the non-canon but officially sanctioned ‘continuation’ books. Strange though that the Aussie air hostess hasn’t changed her outfit. Nyssa has and about time too.
Back to Snakedance. Christopher Bailey’s second Mara story doesn’t quite have the punch of his first, partly because it isn’t doing anything the first adventure did. This is exactly the problem Terror of the Autons had in relation to Spearhead from Space. Ditto The Silurians and The Sea Devils or the Peladon duology. All second stories hold few surprises and even worse for Snakedance the climax is almost exactly the same, except here instead of using mirrors to banish the evil python, the Doctor uses the projection of mental energy through a Great Crystal. If you pay attention, you’ll also recognise many similarities between Snakedance and the Third Doctor’s swansong Planet of the Spiders, not least the psychic properties of the seductive crystal, which the evil Mara needs to manifest itself. Fear also plays a significant role in each monster’s anticipated victory.
By examining ancient runes and experimenting with a smaller replica of the crystal, the Doctor and Nyssa realise that the jewel is manmade. It was the Manussan’s ancestors who first manifested the Mara by focussing their psychic power through the Great Crystal, thus projecting all their ambitions, angers and fears into a single living entity. The Mara, through the great Sumaran Empire, ruled Manussa for three hundred years, until it was banished by the Snakedance and [this is unexplained] took up residence on Deva Loka. Now, through Tegan’s susceptible sleep-prone mind, the Mara wants to manifest itself again.
Does that make sense? Did I explain it right? One of the problems with the serial is it confuses what is essentially a very simple plot because the writer is obviously padding his premise. There is so much discussion about the properties of the crystal, and the revelation it was manmade was genuinely fantastical, but when the Doctor eventually learns he must use it to focus on the ‘still’ I became hopelessly lost. Given the Mara’s main supernatural ability seems to be a mesmeric one, you’d think focussing on not looking at its eyes might be a better instruction. The final conflict does indeed involve just that, but it’s hard to see how the Doctor reversed the process of the Mara’s materialisation on his own, when the runic messages clearly indicated a group of menthids were necessary. Dojjen, the all-powerful shaman, doesn’t even join the fight; he wanders off with a rueful smile. Thankfully, when the Mara does finally emerge off Tegan’s arm tattoo, the beast is better imagined than the one we saw in Kinda. The superimposition of Tegan’s head over the serpent’s mouth is well done, giving visual and verbal interpretation to its hissing form. In fact this effect is used several times, most notably in a carnival hall of mirrors, where the Mara tempts Tegan and she finally succumbs.
This has been the climax of a slow build and Janet Fielding has never been better. She takes on a whole gamut of characters: as a child, as the scared adult, the provocative seductress, the menacing Mara and the possessed Tegan, all mischievousness and ominous, heavy toned intimidation. The scene where the pathetic showman Drydale expounds his intention to utilise Tegan for capital gain before being summarily petrified into doing her bidding is memorable in the intensity of her motionlessness. Director Fiona Cumming moves the camera around the static Janet Fielding, following the extravagant swagger of the showman, but all the while the audience waits for her to move; we know it’s coming, but when… A very strong scene and the serial has many of these verbal jousts in the opening two episodes: Tegan confronting a soothsayer, the visualisation of her nightmare, the curator Ambril explaining the history of Manussa and the legends of the cave system, the bored Lon discussing politics with his equally uninterested mother, the Doctor listening to Chel’s sympathetic understanding of Maran mythology, Tegan laughing at other people’s misfortune and Nyssa’s confusion at her callousness.
The problems for the serial start in the third act when the Doctor spends most of the episode stuck in prison reading Dojjen’s cryptically scribed autobiography. This ragged solitary old shaman spends his time meditating on a sand dune. Nyssa gains access to the Federator’s palace with ease, so much ease we never see it, and she even knows where Ambril’s quarters are, despite the fact she’s not met him or even knows who he is. Meanwhile, the Federator’s bored and spoilt son decides to take up the Mara’s cause after being seduced by Tegan’s evil self. At this point you feel the need for something more. The Mara is doing nothing but pervert a subtle palace coup as Lon, or rather the Mara, seeks to usurp his father’s position and return Manussa to the age of the Sumarans. It might have been more effective to have Tegan mesmerising more disciples and taking over the ten-year ceremony which plays a central part in the serial’s climax. As it is, Lon takes centre stage, dressed in a sexy little toga and looking a bit daft repeating a series of verbal affirmations, none of which speed us to the finale. Eventually, Tegan pops up at the very end, unleashing the Mara on the public. This scene might have worked better with a host of dignitaries; after all, why would the Mara want to enthral the peasant class when the elite clearly hold sway in this rudimentary society? What we get instead is distinctly below par.
There are some interesting aspects to the story. I liked the extended history lesson we get of the planet Manussa, that it has three separate eras, that archaeology has uncovered relics from its past, that it is steeped in mythology, that its nations have formed a Federation ruled by a hereditary monarch referred to as the Federator. It hasn’t developed technically, but as the Doctor discovers, in a distant antiquity, great intellectual strides were being made; the Mara’s reign destroyed those scientific impulses and the planet has barely recovered from its three hundred year plunge into mysticism. In fact, the Mara is the first truly supernatural monster Dr Who has ever featured, having not been created organically but through the collective minds of ancient Manussans. Its power resides in the fear of others and makes it a much more interesting entity than some of the Doctor’s more popular adversaries.
Tele-visually, I particularly enjoyed the scenes in the marketplace, which highlight the level of economic, industrial and societal development. It’s a cross between an Arab bazaar and a flea market, the kind of place you’d expect to find an old carny like Vorg [see Carnival of Monsters]. Hiding the TARDIS in a cramped back alley stuffed with bric-a-brac was an affectionate tribute to its very first appearance in An Unearthly Child. The set designers could have made things more realistic by spreading some sand on the studio floor though. Nonetheless these cluttered scenes brought back memories of The Crusades and even The Underwater Menace, both serials where the Doctor and his companions spent time evading soldiers and hunting for clues among the throng. The carnival aspects were well-realised too, although the processioning snake wasn’t near impressive enough. The Punch and Judy show with its crocodile replaced by a serpent was an original notion, suggesting the Manussans might be descendants of Earth colonists. The kids show clearly displays the influence the Mara holds over the population at large through oral tradition. It’s a sudden interest in these traditions which sparks Martin Clune’s louche and very believable Lon into life. This brings him into conflict with Tanha, his overbearing mother, played with much assiduousness by Colette O’Neil, and Ambril, a solid John Carson.
There’s not much wrong with the performances. They keep us interested when the action starts to waver. The problems with Snakedance lie elsewhere: another over-involved plot and a general sense of a story not going anywhere we haven’t been before. Expanding the scope of the Mara’s intentions, and bringing more emphasis on the Snake Dancers themselves, an aspect which is virtually brushed aside until a single line spoken by Dojjen a few minutes from the end, might have helped. Like Time Flight, the story would benefit from a longer run time; in fact there appears to be plenty already edited out in addition to those obviously excised scenes involving Nyssa in part 3. For instance, the serial starts too briskly – why don’t we see the Doctor instructing his companions on the rudiments of TARDIS navigation? – and concludes too suddenly; there’s no summary coda. I’m not a fan of the six-part adventure but Snakedance seems to plead for the format. There’s a feeling we’re missing acres of explanatory script.
Let’s not kid ourselves that Mawdryn Undead is great science fiction. It isn’t. It is intriguing and has a faint air of nostalgia, primarily brought on by the return of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and one is grateful perhaps for a more nuanced slice of villainy – the unnamed group of unfortunate mutants, led by the titular Mawdryn, simply want to die – however, it is so convoluted, and so dull, that it ceases to be entertaining and becomes an endurance test of relentless mediocrity.
Let’s start with the inept opening episode, set primarily at a posh boarding school. Two students, Turlough and Ibbotson, steal a schoolmaster’s vintage car and crash it. This whole episode and the shenanigans which follow in the headmaster’s office, the nurse’s infirmary and at the school’s obelisk folly are directed and written with the [in]competence of a school play. I may as well be watching a skit of Billy Bunter. Drama: nil. Script: stereotypical Mr Chips garbage. Humour: non-existent. Acting: atrocious. Scenario: almost interesting. Thank goodness Nicholas Courtney turns up as the Brigadier to cast a moment of much needed gravitas. He’s retired to a maths teacher’s job, which seems unlikely until you learn the part was originally written as Ian Chesterton. I can almost imagine actor William Russell’s stupefied face as his older Ian meets Peter Davison’s very sprightly Doctor, who attempts to explain Time Lord regeneration to him. It would certainly make for some interesting dialogue. Russell wasn’t available, so the Brigadier makes a safer reappearance. I enjoyed the mystery of his amnesia, which is resolved in a lovely fashion by the adventure’s end. Nicholas Courtney is excellent indeed.
Unfortunately, the production team ran rough shod over all the established time lines of UNIT, Lethbridge-Stewart and the Third Doctor’s adventures by basing this tale in two time zones, 1977 and 1983, neither of which make any linear sense. If the makers of Dr Who want to bring back previous characters they ought to note the history of those fictional individuals. In a show with such a long running accepted time frame, of which novel adaptations, magazines, fanzines and critical theories are being written, it isn’t acceptable to simply bulldoze over that history. It makes for an enormous plot hole, not just for Mawdryn Undead, but for the whole show from The Web of Fear and the foundation of UNIT way back in Season Five, adventures quite obviously set in the mid-1980s.
This is poor enough; wait till I get started on Paddy Kingsland’s ridiculous invasive music score or the tardiness of Mark Strickson’s Turlough, who may be a schoolboy alien, but is clearly several years too old for a boarder and acts like a rabbit caught in several headlights at once. And I thought Matthew Waterhouse’s Adric was bad. Turlough’s a non-starter from the very moment he opens his mouth and sneers in that feckless, selfish, snidey manner he has. That he lies and cheats and is basically on an assassination mission does not endear him to this viewer. At the end, he sheepishly asks if he can join the TARDIS crew. The Doctor must reckon something’s afoot; his offer of welcome is extremely reserved. So is mine, chiefly because I know this dude is a wrong ’un. We’ve seen him communicating with the Black Guardian and accepting an offer of a free trip home if he can kill the Doctor. “You’re powerful enough to destroy him yourself,” Turlough quite rightly claims. “I can’t be seen to interfere,” states the Black Guardian. So, cue another plot hole: from the off Turlough should have nothing to fear, because if the Black Guardian can’t be seen to interfere in the Doctor’s death, he can’t be seen to interfere in anyone’s – so why is Turlough so scared of the blustering, black robed, gob-spitting, hallucination? He never even physically meets him, only hears him through a communication crystal or via a strange and very poorly realised hallucinogenic. This is the least threatening appearance of an uber-villain Dr Who has ever provided. Valentine Dyall, who barely featured in The Armageddon Factor, is still so narked the Doctor thwarted his plan for inducing cosmic chaos he’s got a skinny runt of a boarding school boy to drop rocks on the Time Lord’s head. The useless scamp can’t even do that. Hopeless. Just dire. There’s another four-letter word but I can’t use it here.
[Point of order: when we met the White Guardian way back in The Ribos Operation, he sat on cane furniture, looking neatly coiffured and sipping sherry in what seemed to resemble a Garden of Tranquillity. He might have been the ‘good’ half of universal balance, but he wasn’t averse to a hint of blackmail to get the Doctor’s assistance. We later learnt this charming man was the Black Guardian in disguise, so we know he’s able to create world’s which would astonish his visitors and draw them into his fold. Yet here, he appears against a weird pop-art spiral background of pink and blue squares which is so badly executed it resembles something drawn by school children. Dr Who has a production crew of consummate professionals. Couldn’t they have come up with something more impressively mind-expanding than this? Shading the lens in gauze, distorting the viewfinder, shadows and fog… anything to suggest mystery and malevolence. What we get instead is, well, what is it exactly? Let’s just say it’s crap and leave it at that.]
Is there a story? Yes. A bunch of naughty scientists from some undisclosed time and location obtained a metamorphic symbiosis regenerator from Gallifrey. I don’t know how they managed this. We don’t learn. It wasn’t a gift like the one given to the Minyans [see Underworld] for Mawdryn specifically claims they stole it. The scientists were captured and the Time Lords removed the correct energy source. One assumes this would need to come from a TARDIS in the same way the Doctor’s regenerations are in part fuelled by energy from the time capsule [see The Tenth Planet, Castrovalva]. Instead, the scientists became perpetually deathless mutations, stuck on their elaborate star ship, caught in a constant time warp ellipse. Their only possibility of escape is to activate an onboard transmat, which they can use every six years once the star ship draws close enough to Earth. The Doctor’s attempts to relocate Tegan with Quantas Airways c.1983 led him directly into the transmat’s path and an emergency landing. Handy for everyone all-round then: Turlough, the Black Guardian, Mawdryn, the Brigadier, maybe not the Doctor who realises the only way out of the situation is to use his remaining regenerative lifeforces to allow the mutants one final fatal transformation. Luckily there’s eight of them. Imagine if there were eighty-eight? Thankfully, the Brigadier is on hand in both time zones, and thanks to the unique properties of time travel is in danger of meeting himself, a catastrophic moment known as the Blimovitch Limitation Effect [see The Day of the Daleks] and one which might just save the situation, but more through luck than anyone’s judgement.
I wasn’t as confused as I had been the first time I watched this four-part nonsense, but it really does take some unravelling. I was impressed by Peter Davison’s interpretation of the Doctor, particularly when he chooses to sacrifice his life as a Time Lord to save his friends, a moment which deserved longer reflection than the few seconds it gets – the soul-wrenching crisis doesn’t really sink in as it’s barely discussed. Janet Fielding too offers another fine performance as the almost permanently nervy Tegan. The major complaint isn’t the mutant narrative either, which is handled well.
No. It’s the introduction of Turlough, the overarching Black Guardian plot, the time frames, the dreadful minor supporting performances, the complete lack of anything like the simplest of sensibilities. For instance, why does everyone suddenly know so much about the side effects of time travel, how does Mawdryn first gain entry to the TARDIS and why is it never once locked, why does everybody have to run everywhere, why are the mutants sleeping in a hidden compartment on a totally empty spaceship, why is it decorated like an art-deco cruise liner, who are the mutants, where are they from, who is Turlough, where is he from and why is he so annoying? The list of questions is endless. When David Collings’ Mawdryn declares “It is finished” with as much sombre straight-facedness as a Messiah escaping from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, I was rather pleased it was. There’s an unsatisfying UNIT-esque explosion to end the tale and I breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
For the most part, Mawdryn Undead has little to recommend it. I’d like to say the actors try, but I’m not sure even they understood what they were doing, other than running backwards and forwards between corridors, schools, the TARDIS and a transmat capsule, whether in 1977 or 1983. Peter Grimwade’s script is mostly a dud. Peter Moffatt’s direction is leaden. Stephen Scott’s designs are passable. There are a host of cute little nods to previous Dr Who adventures – notice Tom Baker’s blood-red overcoat, the Brigadier’s reminiscences, “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” – but cute little nods and returning villains and companions are not enough to sustain an adventure which has promise but simply can’t keep it.
It was great to see Nicholas Courtney again. It reminds me how much he was missed from The Android Invasion and The Seeds of Doom, as well as his potential to appear in Time Flight. Courtney’s extended scenes with Davison and with Janet Fielding’s Tegan are exceptional and bring back a warm feeling of wistfulness which the adventure as a whole doesn’t deserve. It’s lucky Courtney is in it, for without his valuable turn and the more sensitive performances he draws from Davison and Fielding whenever he’s on screen, Mawdryn Undead would be a comprehensive flop:
After the unusual, nuanced villainy of Mawdryn Undead, Season 20 surprises again with a serial in which nobody dies.
The main antagonist here is the Black Guardian who keeps nattering to Turlough like some overgrown scowling goblin whose hopped onto his shoulder and won’t disappear. Valentine Dyall and Mark Strickson are a bad comic double act, overacting every possible second they get when on screen together. Janet Fielding’s Tegan has taken an enormous dislike to the Ginger-One, even more so now they’ve had to spend an entire adventure trapped together in the ventilation system of a transporter star ship. These two contribute nothing to the story which works adequately well without them. Nyssa, poor lass, gets infected with Lazar’s disease and is kidnapped by a giant bi-pedal beagle called the Garm – another in a long list of recent dreadfully inadequate monsters – still at least this one’s friendly. Sarah Sutton is finally given something meaningful and constructive to do. Strange how the infection leads to Nyssa stripping down to her under-slip for most of the runtime. It’s not as sexy as it sounds. Apparently, the actress’s fan mail kept asking why Nyssa spent most of the previous season trussed up in long trousers and a neck-high blouse, so the act of shredding her clothes was deliberately added by the writer, although it isn’t entirely clear why she suddenly drops her skirt. “I’m so hot,” she moans. Ah, well, there you go then.
This is Nyssa’s final outing in the TARDIS. At the end of the adventure, she elects to stay behind on the titular space station Terminus, essentially to become a scientific nurse, using the skills she was taught on Traken to create an antidote to the Lazar disease. It seems wholly appropriate for the faithful, calm and clearheaded Nyssa to be thinking like this and is one of the most effective departures a companion’s ever been afforded. I thought the young Space Raider Olvir was going to profess his love for her, a story thread which did seem to be developing, but is quietly forgotten; maybe it did happen, as we never learn exactly what Olvir and his superior Kira choose to do once the Doctor resolves all the conflict on the stricken Terminus.
The adventure kicks off with some Black Guardian / Turlough sabotage on board the TARDIS. The unbreakable time capsule is broken up when the Ginger-One removes the Space-Time Element. It isn’t clear how the Black Guardian knows where this is located or the importance of it. The break-up effects are more than reasonable. The TARDIS prevents its destruction by materialising in a transpositional space, latched onto the side of the nearest object, an empty transport star ship.
[Point of TARDIS order: according to the Doctor, this fail safe has never worked before. We don’t see the TARDIS exterior in this story, only a wall, which appears to resemble the wall of the transport ship. So, I assume the chameleon circuit finally activated, or has the transposition materialisation meant the original edifice overrides the TARDIS structure?
[At some point, the TARDIS must reconstitute itself, or else when the Doctor returned he wouldn’t be able to dematerialise. The TARDIS break-up is never mentioned again. From a writing point of view, this seems foolish. If you’re going to invent a crisis, you really need to provide a solution and, while everyone lives and we get a nice little adventure out of it, the removal of the Space-Time Element is never resolved.]
Back to the adventure. Nyssa goes missing, the Doctor follows her, Tegan and Turlough get lost, two Space Raider pirates board ship and get abandoned when their pilot realises the transport is heading for Terminus, the destination for all Lazars. Lazar’s disease is a thinly veiled interpretation of leprosy. The idea of an outcast sector of society has promise, although it is a rather unpleasant and unsettling promise, sufferers being sentenced to captivity and, it is strongly hinted, death. They’re all dressed up like extras from Ben Hur. This is a shocking premise for Dr Who and is quite effectively managed. I was immediately reminded of those early episodes where the Doctor did research into plagues to help the plight of afflicted societies [The Sensorites, The Ark, The Silurians]. Instead, it’s Nyssa who discovers the solution.
In a large plot-hole, Olvir insists no Lazars survive a trip to Terminus, yet at the story’s end the Doctor says there is a return transport which takes away all the cured patients. He can’t be right, surely; after all, not even the Vanir, the armoured guards who run the establishment, seem to know of it. They too assume everyone dies. And if people did survive, why does nobody hear the good news; all the Lazar sufferers are terrified of the place as it offers them no salvation, only death. One of them even tells Nyssa as much.
However, there’s an even larger plot-hole regarding the super-space-station itself, which sits at the centre of the universe in a void in space. The Doctor realises that the huge space station is in fact an enormous space ship which was once attempting time travel using radiation fuel. When the pilot attempted to time jump, the ship was too heavy, so he jettisoned a tank of fuel into the void, a radiation leak so huge it started a chemical reaction which became what we term ‘the big bang’. The spaceship was thrust thousands of years into the future, where it remained undisturbed until Terminus Inc took it over, installed the Vanir and used it as a lazaretto colony, like those old, abandoned islands in Earth’s Venice lagoon. The problem here is two-fold: 1) the Doctor knows this isn’t true: in Castrovalva the TARDIS was out of control and travelling back through time towards ‘Event One’ and there was no mention of any spaceship then. 2) if the space station / ship was in existence before ‘Event One’ how could this so called ‘Big Bang’ be the beginning of everything: there was clearly something else here before it.
Whatever the merits logic-wise, this section of the adventure does inject a goblet of tension, as the Doctor fights to prevent a second radiation leak and the ending of the universe. However, most observers probably recognise the serial really doesn’t need this silly plot device. It would surely be enough for a second radiation leak simply to blow up the space station. To throw time-travel and universe creation into the mix is damaging to what was turning into a fairly enjoyable, if rather one-dimensional adventure. Terminus is peppered with these half-decent ideas. For instance, we don’t learn anything about the origin of Lazar’s disease, how it spreads, why it’s so infectious, why there is no cure; a huge oversight. And then someone decided to name all the characters after legends in Norse mythology, but if you’re going to draw an allusion, at least do it: writer Stephen Gallagher doesn’t even bother, the names just sit there, like an enigma with no code. It was Gallagher who got us all tied in knots with Warrior’s Gate. Someone should give him a lesson in story structure; once more, he’s bitten off far more than he can chew and the adventure suffers because of it.
The Doctor and Kira, played with no substance and enormous hair by Liza Goddard, spend their time investigating the labyrinth-like space station, the Garm kidnaps and cures Lazars, Olvir [Dominic Guard, decent] hunts the missing Nyssa, the Vanir argue amongst themselves and we never meet a single representative of Terminus Inc. To be brutal, Terminus is a bit dull, despite being an interesting diversion towards providing actual scientific solutions to the solar system’s medical problems. It’s also visually very dark, due to many of the sets being filmed in half-light. This was the director’s decision as much of the designs were unfinished thanks to a BBC strike. The production was hampered across the board; like Warrior’s Gate it was overambitious, overran and overbudget. The special effects model work is exceptional, the freighter interiors [when we see them] very good and the makeup effective, so you can see where the money went. Even the Vanir’s armoured radiation suits look grand, but they are incredibly cumbersome. The Garm is forgettable. The performances, Miss Sutton and Miss Fielding aside, fairly humdrum.
The story has an overriding sense of foreboding, which given its theme I suppose it deserves, and that makes Terminus a relentlessly sombre affair:
On its premier, several commentators considered Enlightenment to be a fabulous Dr Who adventure, one of the best of all time. It certainly isn’t that, although a showing of No.72 on the Dr Who Fanzine list of The Top 200 Stories Ever suggests some still think it is.
The relative success of the story is mostly due to its innovative notion of sea faring ships taking part in a race through space and the stunning series of images this provides. Backing this up are a few decent performances. For this viewer, however, these good points can’t cut the mustard and the adventure tails away into a series of badly executed confrontations which spoil an otherwise interesting and provocative serial. Chief of these is the climax to the whole thing, of which there are two, and both are so poor they resulted in bouts of head-in-hands bemusement in this household.
Apparently, as with Terminus, a BBC strike played havoc with the production and it had to be completed in two batches several weeks apart. It hardly notices, although singer Leee John [from eighties funk and soul outfit Imagination] is an ineffective last minute replacement, playing a pirate as if he’s been asked to read something substantial, like Sheridan or Marlowe. There were also scripting problems with extra scenes needing to be written, which seems odd as Barbara Clegg’s initial space-race adventure feels extremely foreshortened, starting in the middle of an undisclosed TARDIS power failure and featuring an extended coda to finalise the Black Guardian storyline.
I’d like to say the latter story arc was resolved satisfactorily, but it isn’t. Again, throughout the whole adventure, Turlough has been in communication with his overlord. The longer this goes on, the more stroppy and arrogant he seems to become. He also comes across as tremendously adult. I recall he was at boarding school in Mawdryn Undead, so that makes him at the most eighteen, yet his science knowledge, his bearing and demeanour constantly hint at someone much older. Now, I am aware Turlough isn’t human or at least not from Earth – he keeps mentioning this – so it’s possible he could be older by many years, or evolved preternaturally greater mental capacities, but no one has questioned him about his origin, his race, how he ended up on Earth, etc. This is a massive omission of elementary character development. I suppose, if I’m being generous, it surrounds Turlough with a halo of intrigue, but it also makes the Doctor, Tegan, and before them Nyssa, appear crass, unwelcoming and impolite. I mean, they’d ask, wouldn’t they? And we’d hear it, wouldn’t we? Given the ponderous pace of this loose trilogy of Black Guardian stories, all that repetitive running between corridors and crawling through pipework, you’d think the writers might find a few minutes to tell us who the Ginger-One actually is. But no, not a glimpse. At the story’s end, having finally defied the Black Guardian, Turlough asks the Doctor’s assistance in returning him to home his planet. Good luck with that, mate.
The TARDIS is being depowered by the White Guardian, who warns the Doctor about an impending disaster for the universe. This makes no sense whatsoever. The White Guardian is supposed to be one of the two most powerful entity beings in the universe. His counterpart uses a pocket sized crystal to communicate with Turlough, so why does the White Guardian need to use the TARDIS’ energy to drop cryptic codes to the Doctor? During these apparitions, the Black Guardian interrupts proceedings and tells the Doctor he’s out to kill him, which fails to put the wind up Peter Davison, but rather takes the wind out of Valentine Dyall’s sails. I know Turlough hasn’t been the most efficient of assassins, but now his target is aware he’s lined up for the kill, the Doctor won’t be walking into any apparent dangers, will he – or will he?
Having landed on an Edwardian sailing yacht, the Doctor proceeds to investigate his surroundings with just about the most cavalier disposition the Fifth incarnation has ever possessed. This is Davison’s best turn as the Doctor for some time. Of late he’s been prone to hanker about, garbling his sentences and interrupting or starting them with huge intakes of stubborn breath, as if he’s struggling to convey even to himself what he’s talking about. His Doctor seems a young, slightly scatter-headed Time Lord, constantly jumping out of one frying pan into another, and he’s definitely playing him like that, all fuss and stress and bother. Jon Pertwee’s elegant Third Doctor would have a fit. So too the obstructive, argumentative, but paternal and thoughtful, First Doctor. William Hartnell simply wouldn’t speak his lines this fast, or without proper erudition. He’d give the phrases and the information they contain proper reverence. Too often, Davison has just been gabbling. Not so here and the lighter tone is noticeable and rewarding.
The scenes onboard the S.S. Shadow, the mysterious teak lined sailing ship, are uniformly excellent and continue to be so throughout the serial, augmented as they are by two very good acting turns from Keith Barron as Captain Striker and his mate, Marriner, played by Christopher Brown. These two are intensely creepy as the alien Eternals, a race of super-beings who live in the endless nothingness of eternity. To amuse themselves, the Eternals have created a space spanning sailing contest, a race around the solar system, in ships borrowed from the minds of ephemerals. The Eternals need human minds to think for them [one assumes any alien mind would do, they’ve simply conveniently chosen Earth], because having existed for an eternity they’ve thought of everything. This concept is similar to Mawdryn’s mutants, although here the prize isn’t death but Enlightenment. The Eternals cannot die [it’s in the name]; instead their quest is knowledge, by which they actually mean wisdom. Apparently, Enlightenment is housed in a crystal inside a golden gateway, and is being offered by the Guardians, which seems both opportune for the story and, at its climax, Turlough. It is also highly dangerous for the two superbeings of light and darkness, for if someone else has their powers of deduction, what purpose would there be for them?
These kind of narrative ****-ups are becoming de rigour for these latter-day serials. In addition to an inability to create character, either producer John Nathan Turner or script editor Eric Saward or both don’t seem to have a firm grip on storytelling techniques. All the intrigue surrounding the race and the Eternals is blown out of the water in favour of a hunt for a fabled crystal and an ineffectual head-to-head between the Guardians. The fantastic opening episode, and all the ensuing anachronisms on board, its magnificent climax as the Doctor and Tegan stare out at a star-scape littered with antiquated sailing barges, the peculiar crew, the even more peculiar officers, the mystery of the Eternals, is just thrown overboard, rather like Captain Wrack and her first mate Mansell.
The Doctor’s got these godlike beings sussed. They have something of the War Lords about them, from way back in The War Games, when those all-powerful warmongers kidnapped regiments of hardened troops to fight battles for them. “Parasites!” the Doctor explodes indignantly, “You feed on living minds. You use them as blue prints… [“Diversions,” replies Striker amiably]… Oh, absolutely! Living minds are contaminated with crude emotion. They’re organic, irrational, creative, entertaining and you talk as if they were toys.”
Trouble is, the pirate Captain Wrack – an over eager but ironically entertaining Lynda Baron – is in cahoots with the Black Guardian to win the race, so just when the tale gets interesting, it reverts back to the same old ding-dong between evil and good. Turns out she’s been focussing dark energy [You what-what? I thought so too] to sabotage her rival’s ships. This would work fine if it didn’t rely on the Black Guardian and would make more sense if she wasn’t sailing the ship which looks set to win; if The Buccaneer is so fast, why is she bothering to blow up anyone’s ship? Come on, script editor, read your scripts before you sign them off!
Episode three is remarkably tedious, and even includes a hopelessly longwinded tribute to the good old Third Doctor days with a complete misunderstanding of how quickly a vacuum in space can be created [see The Mutants and Frontier in Space]. Fortunately for Turlough and unfortunately for us, the Doctor saves the Ginger-One just in time. Turlough ends up a hero, but his slovenly, greedy little shoulders don’t really seem man enough to bear the acclaim.
Dinah Collins’ costume department has pulled out all the stops by borrowing left, right and centre from the BBC’s naval props department, probably old series like The Onedin Line. There’s a couple of cutely flippant scenes set over dinner and at a stuffy, naval reception which sound out of place yet don’t feel it. Similarly, designer Colin Green does good work by recycling abandoned sets from other shows in a bid to cut costs. Pity director Fiona Cumming couldn’t have found some long buried talent. The show falls very flat after that creepy debut episode, which honestly must rank as one of the best of the 1980s.
I’m completely torn. There are aspects of Enlightenment I admire and, rather like the three previous serials, the eventual piece feels too short. I wonder what the Barry Letts / Terrance **** partnership would have made of these? Turned them into epic six-episode Jon Pertwee adventures probably. The erratic telling and stop-start, quick-slow action simply doesn’t hold my interest. Perhaps, fatally, it’s the over reliance on the Black Guardian / Turlough dynamic to provide tension which kills it. The suspense simply isn’t there. We don’t believe it and nor do the actors.
Statistically, every so often a comprehensive disaster has to strike Dr Who and The King’s Demons is Peter Davison’s entry in the log book. This two part adventure is set during the reign of King John and involves the Master attempting to nullify Magna Carta, thus preventing an Earth-type democratic onslaught throughout the universe for the next thirty thousand years or so. Suggesting that no race, humans included, could found democracy on their own with or without Magna Carta is a stretch of the imagination in anyone’s history book. The ancient Greeks managed it for goodness sake. This is small fry to the Master, even the Doctor admits it.
The story makes complete sense only once you learn it was written solely to introduce Kamelion, a real-life prototype robot devised by a software designer Mike Power. The Master is exploiting the robot’s chameleon qualities by having it impersonate King John. Kamelion was set to be a new companion in the TARDIS. “I’m very grateful,” says the Silver-One. I’m not. He’s rubbish. A C3PO rip off who can barely move. Kamelion is so crap, I remember thinking even in 1983 that the series had descended about as low as I’d ever known it. My opinion hasn’t changed much, although I’ve subsequently seen The Creature from the Pit.
The piece looks okay, the acting’s bearable on a barrel scraping level, but the storyline is just dreadful, Turlough is still stroppy and Tegan gets to swap woeful double-entendres with the Doctor: “Look at the size of that bed!” she wails; he pulls off the goat skin covers invitingly, “Another way of keeping warm.”
The Master is worse than appalling in this one and it’s hardly Anthony Ainley’s fault, his character’s been written that way. Referencing previous adventures, given it’s the 20th Anniversary series, it was fun to see the Fifth Doctor brush up his sabre skills and engage in some extended swordplay with the villainous Sir Gilles Estram – an anagram of ‘Master’. Referencing The Gunfighters, Dr Who hit another stupendous low point when Gerald Flood’s King John chooses to entertain the court by singing a ballad. Truly, truly terrible.
Part 1 of The King’s Demons was the show’s 600th episode. It was also the lowest rated of Peter Davison’s era.
“One day I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine.”
So speaks William Hartnell in a short clip preceding events of this anniversary special. It’s taken from his parting speech to Susan Foreman after the climax of The Dalek Invasion of Earth. It’s nice to see the First Doctor when he was at his best, but that’s not a very representative clip of Hartnell’s incarnation. The monologue from The Edge of Destruction might be more indicative. However, as this story involves the First Doctor reuniting with his now older granddaughter, I suppose it’s apt.
When preparing to celebrate Dr Who’s 20th anniversary, it wasn’t going to take a genius to suggest a rehash of The Three Doctors. Between them, John Nathan Turner and Eric Saward concocted the idea and requested Robert Holmes to script it; his version proved too complicated to mount and was ditched in favour of a simpler effort from Terrance ****, one which spends enough significant time with each Doctor, but fails to generate many of the sparks we saw in Season 10, chiefly because most of the various incarnations don’t meet until the last ten minutes. Instead, they are paired off with significant companions and while it is a joy to see all the returnees, some of the choices don’t quite hit home. For instance, while I love Sarah Jane Smith, Jo Grant would surely be a more important companion to the Third Doctor. Or perhaps he should have been teamed with the Brigadier, who gets saddled with the Second incarnation.
[Point of companion order: the presence of other companions as ‘phantom challenges’ during a deadly game of fear, has been criticised by continuity geeks, not always fairly. Liz Shaw and Mike Yates didn’t know each other during an adventure, true, but they had certainly both worked at UNIT, and possibly together, we simply may not have seen it. Worse, though, is the Doctor explaining Jamie and Zoe must be unreal because they wouldn’t remember him after the Time Lords wiped their minds in The War Games. The Doctor is wrong in this assumption. When his friends were returned to their own time, they were allowed to remember the first adventure, but no more. The biggest error though is having the Second Doctor meet the Brigadier on the day of his UNIT retirement party and then have him recognise Tegan, who he didn’t meet until after he retired [see Mawdryn Undead]. I suppose if you’re going to write generic characters and fill in the cast dependant on who was available or willing to return, you run the risk of inconsistency. More concerning perhaps is why the companions need to be involved in the story at all, other than for a bit of genuine nostalgia.]
Not everyone was able to contribute. Tom Baker backed out completely. He had after all only departed two years before and felt a return would be damaging to his post-Who career. A cleverly inserted clip from the unfinished Shada has him punting on the Cam before a nasty Time Scoop traps Doctor Four and Romana in a time eddy. This should really have been of more importance to the Doctor’s survival, but it isn’t, which rather gives the impression of a scene forced on us without thought. In fact, the whole adventure is a piecemeal affair which is less a cohesive narrative and more a series of loosely connected scenes designed to provoke short-term interest and allow the stars to shine, or not, depending on how you feel.
It’s great to see these grand actors back. Jon Pertwee is statesmanlike, bickery, robust. Patrick Troughton all fiddlesticks. “Fancy pants and scarecrow,” Doctor One calls them. He’s portrayed by Richard Hurndall, who is simply marvellous in a tribute act to William Hartnell, evoking the mannerisms of his predecessor, but cleverly not impersonating him per se. He brings back memories of those first few seasons, many episodes of which I recently watched for the first time, and does so without damaging the lead actor’s reputational portrait. Of the companions, Nicholas Courtney comes off the best, as you might expect, doing his put-upon, disbelieving act. Carole Ann Ford has the hardest role, stuck in the TARDIS with a subdued Turlough, and I wondered if she wasn’t supposed to be Nyssa.
We get some familiar monsters too. The Dalek isn’t handled very well; it explodes and festers memorably but is too easily bested. The Yeti is a hoot, howling in caves and menacing Doctor Two and the Brigadier in the same way it initially attacked Jamie and Victoria in The Abominable Snowmen. The Cybermen are plentiful, but ineffective, bested not only the fantastic Raston Warrior Robot but also by a conniving Master. Strangely, having all been wiped out, the Cybermen are later seen to still be building a bomb around the TARDIS, Cyber Leader included. Continuity really went out the window with this one.
I like Anthony Ainley’s Master though. He’s finally got a delightful devilish air about him, wrapped up in a Dracula cloak and making caustic remarks about his home planet. At one point he comes across the corpse of his emaciated self [from The Deadly Assassin] and shrugs with indifference. [It’s another dreadful continuity lapse, but hey...] Summoned to Gallifrey by the High Council of Time Lords, the Master is at his most debonair. “What can I do to help you?” he smirks. On hearing the Death Zone has been reactivated, he senses the latent evil inherent in all species, including his own: “The black secret at the heart of your Time Lord paradise.” Offered a new set of generations in return for assisting the Doctor, he looks suitably stunned: to think he went to all the bother in The Deadly Assassin when he might have just done the Time Lords a reasonable favour. Nevertheless, the idea of someone else killing the Doctor before he does spurs the Master on, for he can’t bear the idea of a universe without his nemesis. However, when he tries to help, the Doctors don’t believe him – why would they? – but he perseveres, realising he may just be able to double cross them at the end. A swift right hook from the Brigadier puts paid to that idea.
[Point of Master order: I was disappointed Doctor One never said: “Didn’t you used to be a Monk?” That would have squared off Peter Butterworth’s famous villain in a single line.]
The Time Lords are very underwhelming. We saw them recently in Arc of Infinity, so another appearance this season feels like overkill. Malcolm Thornton reuses designs. We’ve all seen the costumes. Gallifrey’s Citadel has an exceedingly low-key atmosphere this time around. Not even death and treason can spark it into life. The architecture of Rassilon’s crypt is spectacular though, some of the best background artwork the show’s ever put together. We also learn a few interesting snippets of information about Gallifreyan history:
Before the days of Rassilon, the Time Lords were a ruthless, heartless, powerful race who misused their powers and created the Death Zone, surrounding it with an impenetrable force field to prevent escape. Using the Time Scoop, they kidnapped other beings and set them against each other. This suggests the Time Lords had knowledge of time travel before the Age of Rassilon, which neatly supports the legend of Omega who, having discovered the power for time travel by collapsing a star [see The Three Doctors], was bitter at being overlooked in the annals of Gallifrey. Omega, if he had to return, really should have come back in this story. Anyway, back to history lessons: Rassilon put an end to the barbaric Death Zone practice. It’s no wonder the Time Lords were so vehemently against the War Lords when they tried them for a similar practice in The War Games. Not all barbarism has been erased however; we learn the Time Lord security services still have a Mind Probe torture device and that the Coronet of Rassilon has unique mind-control powers. To prevent the Death Zone from being reactivated, Rassilon had himself entombed in an enormous mausoleum called Rassilon’s Tower – a castle which looks as if belongs in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – and has protected the secret of immortality with a boundary of fear and a series of riddles. It’s all a bit Exillon and Sutekh, but the familiarity doesn’t breed contempt. Instead, there’s a cosy feel to the whole thing, which might not have been the idea either.
[Point of Rassilon order 1: if the forcefield is impenetrable, how come the Time Lords have a transmat facility which pitches contestants right into the Death Zone. Why didn’t Rassilon deactivate this? There’s even a transmat facility in his mausoleum, which rather negates the point of anyone fighting their way through the Death Zone and his Tower to seek reward.
[Point of Rassilon order 2: later on, in the reboot series, our own Timothy Dalton got to play the great founder Time Lord. Here he’s voiced by Richard Matthews. It’s a pity we had to see the actor as well, bearded face and such like, a bit like King Canute. The voice alone would have been spectacular.]
The adventure kick starts in a flashy new TARDIS control room. Doctor Five has finally come good on a promise and made it to the Eye of Orion – he promised it at the end of The King’s Demons – where he’s refurbished the console and chilled out. Even Turlough’s mellowed, engaging in watercolour paintings. Later on, while Doctor’s Five and One argue over courses of action, the Ginger-One’s at a picnic table taking tea and scones with Tegan and Susan, a hilarious little sketch which I thoroughly enjoyed, the complete antithesis of what you’d expect from all the time travellers.
The trapped Doctor Four is creating a temporal instability for his successor, but it doesn’t last long and when he makes it back to Gallifrey, Doctor Five seems as right as the rest of himself. The story proceeds as best it can within the confines of the guest star structure and the 1 hour 40 min feature-length format. This doesn’t do the story any favours either and it lacks cliff hanging moments. Peter Moffatt’s direction is average at best.
[The serial was shown abroad in a four-part version. I viewed the first episode on its own, but couldn’t find the others online, so I watched the one-off special. I think it succeeds better like this, if only because the end credits for the individual episodes read exactly the same, revealing in advance characters and monsters to come. The USA got to view the film on the anniversary day, November 23rd,1983, but sadly in the UK we had to wait until November 25th so the film could feature during the fundraiser Children in Need.]
When Doctors One, Two and Three finally meet up, it’s almost as if The Three Doctors is being re-enacted, the trio are so effective, Hurndall included. We have them petulantly snapping at each other, performing a Time Lord version of a Mind Meld, Pertwee finally says “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” and it was a lovely touch to have Doctor One solve the riddle “To lose is to win, and he who wins shall lose” proving, as he always used to in those early serials, that his deductive powers are far superior to his enemy’s, the folly of the Death Zone and Rassilon’s game.
Terrance **** has written a sterling celebratory tribute to twenty years of Dr Who. It creaks a lot – shows its age, I suppose – but the real pleasure was to see all these familiar faces interacting with each other again. You only wish, like much of Season 20, that they could have been given a bit more time, the story seems to need it. As the credits kick in, there’s one last memory to jog, as Delia Derbyshire’s original theme tune transports us back to 1963 again before Peter Howell’s 1980s reimagining segues seamlessly into it.
I really shouldn’t rate this so highly. I’m being sentimental:
4 from 5.
Some promotional pictures. That's Tom Baker's waxwork in the last one, I believe. Hope you enjoyed that review @CoolHandBond
I would like to add my appreciation to chrisno1 for posting these wonderfully detailed reviews of the Doctor Who series, I’ve been watching them over the past couple of years on the BritBox streaming app and since the Pertwee era they are all new to me as I had stopped watching the series by then back in the day, and your reviews handily clear up some plot points I have 🍻
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Thanks for the feedback @CoolHandBond The forums overrall have gone quiet so its nice to know my work is appreciated. I'm finding the Colin Baker episodes hard going and as I'm back at Uni my time is short, but my challenge is to get through to Doctor Eight by Christmas. Fingers and sonic screwdrivers crossed.
Season 20, for an anniversary season, is a disappointment.
As a viewer, and I’ve watched it twice, originally in 1983 and in full once again in March 2022, the best word to colloquially describe it is ‘half-baked’. Almost every story, even the dreadful Arc of Infinity, have elements of interest and potential which urgently need an authorial guiding hand and mind to develop them. Instead these ideas, such as Lazar’s Disease, the Eternals or the legends of the Mara, sit on the fence watching proceedings, desperately wanting to join the melee, but not being allowed to do so. I don’t really understand how this was allowed to happen. How could the show which I have loved and respected for its writers’ abilities to conjure successful and memorable stories end up forgetting its prime recurring objective: to be solid, mature and entertaining.
John Nathan Turner’s aim when taking over as producer was to simplify the story lines. He hasn’t done that. He’s removed the humour, which might be welcome, but has in turn made all the adventures overly dramatic and frequently, intensely dull. The constant approach to recent storytelling seems to always involve some form of time travel, which has made the Doctor’s and by extension the Time Lords’ innovations less and less remarkable. When the show first started, the TARDIS was the only machine capable of traversing the fourth and fifth dimensions. This gave the Doctor, as a character, a uniqueness which has gradually been eroded. This isn’t John Nathan Turner’s fault, the process began well before he arrived on the scene, but it is indicative of lazy writing on the part of the production team. The most obvious recent case in point is Terminus, a half-decent serial completely knocked sideways by a silly notion about the alpha and omega of the universe. Each of the stories of Season 20, the noble exception of Snakedance apart, cling to the idea that we as an audience will only enjoy an adventure if some form of time meddling or universe bending is involved. This repetition isn’t new either, but this year the stories creak and groan under the weight of summary expectation.
Perhaps the biggest failure of the run is the sudden want to bring back old enemies. I recall the clamour in the fan magazines of the early eighties for Daleks, the Sontarans or Zygons to reappear, many recollections being hopelessly romantic about these monster’s exploits, considering The Invasion of Time or The Chase as classics. Turner dutifully bowed to their wishes first with the underwhelming reshaping of the Master, then with the much more successful return of the Cybermen in Earthshock. Lightning doesn’t always trike twice. The production team seem to want it to strike six times: Omega, the Mara, the Black Guardian, the Master all return, and for balance so do the Brigadier, the White Guardian, the Time Lords, and in a way, Tegan Jovanka. The hotch-potch of companions and monsters which fills the celebration episode The Five Doctors only serves to make these returnees defunct. The fact the Black Guardian / Turlough storyline drags over three stories only emphasises the actual paucity of these ideas. Loosely and affectionally coined by fans as ‘The Black Guardian Trilogy’, these three stories could all have stood better without the over-arching storyline. It is quite clear that Nyssa could have occupied Turlough’s role in each of the stories following her exit and equally that he – and Tegan – are devoid of any purpose in Terminus. I will concede that had the proposed seventh story, Warhead, not been cancelled we might have witnessed a searing return of the Daleks, but somehow I doubt it.
As I mentioned several times in my reviews, the whole season feels as if it was completed in a rush, without structural thought and lineal thinking. I kept longing for explanations. I kept hoping the pace would pick up. Peter Davison and the cast spend a lot of time running everywhere, but they are running without purpose and this doesn’t create suspense only restlessness. Terminus, for instance, had massive potential as a six part adventure, where not only could the Lazar disease be cured, but the corporation overthrown, the Vanir reformed, the space station saved, and intertwining the story could be the plight of the afflicted, which isn’t given the time it deserves, a mere few lines from one character. How much more social comment would writers like Malcolm Hulke, Robert Holmes or Chris Boucher make with the set up? How much more peril would they put the Doctor in? How much more entertaining would they make it?
Whimsey is of course hypothetical. I have to deal with what I see and I can’t mark stories on potential. The problems which I detected in the mixed-bag offerings of Season 19 have not departed. If anything they’ve worsened. The budget is pumped into two or three high-class projects leaving the others to flounder. The tragedy of Season 20 is that the big bucks have gone on some duff stories. The two which appear to have been made on the cheap [Snakedance and Enlightenment] probably succeed better than all the others. When you look at what can be achieved using recycled props, as in Enlightenment, you do wonder whose thinking cap is malfunctioning behind the scenes.
The one-off festival adventure The Five Doctors can’t compensate for the troubled season, which admittedly suffered from union interference and obstruction. The special was a fine way to end the year and proved that simple storylines well-written and enthusiastically cast and developed can succeed on both a visceral and an intellectual level, even if the end product has several problems of its own. What it does prove however, is there is no need to strive for deep spiritual significance or extravagant universe threatening plots, for sometimes, as in the early seventies, a thriller style experience with a sci-fi twist and setting can be enough to tantalise the viewer as long as its presentation is solid and convincing. The problem with Season 20 and the growing influence of the show’s producer isn’t only that the presentation is less than convincing, but the screenplays are as well. The cast and director are being given nothing effective to work with. Their battle is lost before they even set foot on the studio floor. Dr Who should never be like this. Watching two past Doctors and a clutch of former companions wrestle manfully with these problems – and just about win through – only serves to suggest the support simply doesn’t exist for the current team.
At the end of the celebration special, Richard Hurndall’s Doctor One says to Peter Davison’s Doctor Five: “It’s reassuring to know my future is in safe hands.” I am glad he’s convinced. In my opinion, that remains to be seen.
I like the Sylvester McCoy episodes I've seen better than Colin Baker and most what I've seen of Davison. His first season's much too silly, but after Ace is introduced the show changes tone and in some ways anticipates 21st century Dr Who.
I'm not surprised youre slowing down @chrisno1 as I think the first four Doctors are the essential ones and now youre into the show's slow decline. But please keep going, at least up to the Eighth Doctor's only appearance.
Jodi Whitakers Doctor actually reminded me in some ways of Davison's: too many companions and too tentative, uncharacteristically lacking in selfconfidence.
Continuing the occasional policy of resurrecting old villains, John Nathan Turner brings back the Silurians and the Sea Devils and does both a disservice by chucking them into a sporadically appalling action-orientated adventure and, worse, not even bothering to adequately explain their motivations, allegiances and histories. Writer Johnny Byrne constantly references articles from a perceived Silurian / Sea Devil mythology which as an audience we’ve never seen before, including the great Silurian Triad, Silurian battle cruisers, a cumbersome electrified creature known as a Myrka and a Sea Devil Elite Attack Battalion. He gives the monsters individual names [they were unnamed both in The Silurians and The Sea Devils] and their leader Ichtar, claims to have met the Doctor before, but certainly not in this regeneration, so how does he know? There was much audience confusion when the serial first aired as to which adventures the Doctor and Ichtar are referring too, as the incidents and facts didn’t gel with accepted historical Dr Who data, either from the T.V. show or the novelisations. Byrne is on record as stating he was referring back to the original 1970’s Jon Pertwee adventures, but close examination simply doesn’t back this up; Byrne either hasn’t got his detail correct or he’s embellished it to the point it sounds unique. The controversy was partly assuaged by writer Gary Russell, who in 1996 penned the unofficial standalone Third Doctor novel The Scales of Injustice [a great title that] which uses Byrne’s extra, ‘original’ information to fill in all the explanatory blanks with this one. Even more galling however is the Doctor’s insistence, advocated at great length, that the two reptilian races are noble creatures with great scientific minds who only want to live in peace; both here and from past experience he ought to know that is not the case – indeed the monsters of Warriors of the Deep are some of the most single-minded and unnuanced of the Davison era, wholly focussed on their plan of genocide, an extinction not just of humans but everything on planet Earth. Their scheme involves prevaricating a nuclear conflict between mankind’s two great superpowers. [It isn’t mentioned who these factions are, but when Tegan says: “This is just like it was in my day” we get the inference that she’s talking East vs West. The serial came out during the last onset of the Cold War, when the fear of nuclear conflict was still very strong. The serial is set in 2084, so, given recent developments between Russian and the Western European powers, it isn’t that far removed from our contemporary reality.] The problem isn’t the overarching notion of two warring superpowers, and there’s actually an interesting subplot involving two spies who set out to sabotage a missile defence system, it’s the cramming of Silurians and Sea Devils into it, or if you prefer, vice versa. Too much begins to happen too fast and the stories don’t effectively overlap. Like many of the Season 20 adventures, Warriors of the Deep has all the hallmarks of a classic six-part Third Doctor / UNIT adventure, but it’s curtailed to such an extent as to be rushed and ill-thought. More exposition and more character development are the necessities. Normally I’d add more tension, but director Pennant Roberts hasn’t got a handle on this one at all and in an almost all-action narrative he’s hopelessly elementary when attempting to add any semblance of suspense. He’s not helped by a truly appalling lumbering sea creature, the Myrka, which resembles a large green pantomime dragon. It makes me long for the days of Drashigs and Loch Ness Monsters. The Myrka demonstrates the lengths one should never go to when making a Dr Who story: the monster operators were the same two puppeteers who impersonated Dobbie the Horse on the children’s television show Rent-A-Ghost. Add to that the general poor standard of SFX – still no laser beams – the unimaginative costumes and the apathetic supporting cast, headed by sixties spy veteran Tom Adams [of Where the Bullets Fly] and Hammer virtuoso Ingrid Pitt [returning ten years on from The Time Monster and roundly made to look an incompetent] and you really have a stinker. Perhaps only Peter Davison saves the show, displaying a less agitated version of his usual self because he’s spending so much time fighting villains rather than arguing with his TARDIS crew; the scene where he surrenders his weapon to the Sea Base commander as a show of trust was a wonderfully achieved moment of contrition which recalled similar occasions in the Jon Pertwee era. However, no other Doctor has been so remiss as to leave the TARDIS doors open, allowing anyone to wander in and have a sneaky peek round. That’s just a silly narrative get-out for the writer which sadly also diminishes the steadfastness of the central character. It’s odd too that the Doctor is determined to put a halt to a situation which he knows must never have come to fruition, for he’s visited the far future of Earth and there seems not to be evidence of mass human extinction c.2084. Maybe he’s worried he’ll revisit one of those ‘alternative futures’ of the UNIT era too.
A quick note to Bond aficionados. The idea of starting a war between superpowers recalls both You Only Live Twice and The Spy Who Loved Me; Stromberg in the latter is especially keen to preserve only aquamarine life. The guards on Sea Base wear uniforms clearly culled from the same wardrobe as the radiation suits used by Dr No and his team. The Doctor however isn’t wearing one when he falls into the Dr No reminiscent heavy water pool; he is left for dead by the cowardly Ginger-One. Tegan at this point is clearly bra-less, which seems appropriate given her summery minidress; curiously she acquires a brassiere midway through episode two. Pity she didn’t think to change her completely inappropriate pink heeled shoes. Like her outfit, an awful lot more thought should have gone into this whole story:
At one point ex-Liver Bird Polly James’ Jane Hampton describes the legend of the Malus, the monster of The Awakening, as mumbo jumbo. She’s not far wrong. A modern day episode populated by a whole village dressed up as Roundheads and Cavaliers from the English Civil War, a psycho-kinetic organic machine monster sent as an advance scout for an invasion force, timeslips from 1643 to 1984, a decrepit church with an alien secret, a big steaming stone face: you call it, The Awakening’s probably got it.
It’s hard to figure if this is a good adventure or not. The pace is exceedingly fast, which might paper over the production cracks but can’t help explain what the hell’s going on. The acting’s pretty decent, which is a bonus. The production design is good, particularly the church nave, although Barry Newbury, who designed the very first Dr Who adventure way back in 1963 and takes his final bow here, only has five sets to build and one of those is an empty barn. The costumers have dug into the BBC wardrobe again and the civil war dress looks great. The Malus makes a curious and curiously unthreatening monster. It’s best as a distasteful little imp clinging to the TARDIS wall; the alternative big stone head thing was simply absurd.
Tegan’s family has no joy whatsoever; her aunt and cousin have been killed, now her grandfather is in peril. No wonder she wants to stay in Little Hodcombe for a bit after the poor old man is mistreated by the villainous mesmerised magistrate. Peter Davison is fine. Janet Fielding chipper. The surly Ginger One has finally learnt how to knock people out with a rock.
The Awakening recalls much of The Daemons, although writer Eric Pringle claims he’d never watched it. It lacks most of the Season Eight classic’s attention to background detail and loses confidence because of it – for instance it is never explained why a whole village should so blindly follow the instructions of the local magistrate and take part in vicious war games and allow a woman to be burned at the stake. The scenes set around the deserted village conjure memories of The Android Invasion, but just as they start to get interesting we are plunged headlong into the alien / supernatural angle and all tension and enquiry is thrown out in favour of the ubiquitous Fifth Doctor run-around. The hints at the paranormal were quite welcome, but when the Malus is revealed as being a sort of organic psychic robot from the planet Raaga where the Terileptils were imprisoned [see The Visitation] I rolled my eyes in dismay. Once again, the Doctor knows everything about the alien, so the mystery is easily solved and the story has nowhere to go except rush to its conclusion. Ultimately, one nasty beheading aside, the alien just isn’t very interesting.
Yes, the indestructible Time and Relative Dimensions in Space machine gets blown apart by something as insignificant as a meteor storm. Given some of the scraps the old girl has been through, this is something of a disappointment. The fact an alien creature known as the Gravis is able to generate a huge mental gravitational force and reform the busted time travel craft is equally surprising and ultimately equally unsatisfactory. The TARDIS is stronger than this, surely? I did, though, like the sequences set in the semi destroyed console room, with sections of it blown into the sedimentary rocks of the planet Frontios.
There is a fair bit to enjoy in Frontios, writer Christopher H. Bidmead’s third adventure and another which unfortunately relies on a villain’s knowledge of the Time Lords and his obsession with time travel. That Gravis, the said villain, is a man in a rubber suit made to resemble an upright woodlouse doesn’t help my enjoyment either. For every positive step forward in this adventure, there is another step back.
Peter Davison is excellent as the Doctor. He’s less energetic than usual, gets to practice his cricketing skills again and has a few wonderful scenes, notably in the opening episode as he tries to help the physician Mr Range while surreptitiously querying him for information about the planet and the colonist’s history. The Doctor’s scholarly bent is emphasised by Davison’s constant fiddling with his half-lens spectacles. Later on, he brilliantly deceives Gravis in a beautifully erudite manner and even has time to gently mock Tegan by pretending she’s an android [“I got her cheap because the walk’s funny… and as for the accent, well…”]. Janet Fielding’s good too although the leather miniskirt is another inappropriate fashion misstep. Mark Strickson is unintentionally hilarious as Turlough, especially when succumbing to deep ancestral memory lapses, a moment of such wild eyed terror for the lad I thought his eyes were going to pop out of his head. We learn his planet was once taken over by Tractators, the nasties who feature here, but his ancestors managed to fight them off. Turlough also has a pop at poor Tegan by laughing gleefully as he reads about the destruction of Earth from the TARDIS log. She looks both upset and mad all at once. Turlough does that to you, I guess. Still, at last we have irrevocable evidence he’s not human.
So what’s going on then? Well, the TARDIS has been sucked down to the eerily empty world of Frontios where a space ship loaded with the last survivors of Earth [note: of Earth, not of the human race] also crash landed forty years previously. It is ruled by the Orderlies, a security force led by Brazen, and the overseer Plantagenet, son of the dead Captain Revere. The colonists are struggling to establish civilisation on the barren planet and believe themselves under attack from neighbouring worlds. In fact their enemy is beneath them: Gravis is the nucleus of an insectoid burrowing race called the Tractators who infest worlds, enslave the populations and hollow out the planetoid shell for use as a space ship.
All of these ideas have been done before on Dr Who so there are no surprises. Dressing actors up as insects harks all the way back to The Web Planet and there’s been little change in the standard of special costume effects, the Tractators are dreadful monsters in any book. The notion of a space ship carrying thousands of colonists was first mooted in Season 3’s The Ark, a story that contradicts Frontios as there the survivors travel to Refusis II; The Ark in Space utilises a similar idea, but the Earth is not destroyed in that story. The canon is further complicated by the Ninth Doctor’s adventure The End of the World, but I’m not reviewing the reboot series, so that’s less important here. The uninhabitable planet of Frontios and the human struggle for survival is familiar from the Third Doctor story Colony in Space; there’s a lot of running around in tunnels in that one too. It’s unfortunate that David Buckingham’s designs don’t have the epic sense of space we saw in that Jon Pertwee episode, because here the action is confined to a studio bound set of the planet, the sick bay and the old colony ship. When the meteorites hit or a revolution occurs, all the action has to take place in the same small stages and any sense of scale or of a genuine world outside the confines of the camp is lost. Even the tunnels and the Gravis’ underground base of operations seems hopelessly small with actors appearing on opposite sides of the set attempting to make as if they were hundreds of yards away, when in fact they were just around the corner.
Strangely, the Doctor explains at length and in detail the reasons why he can’t meddle with the situation on Frontios. He does it several times and initially I thought it was odd he should be so determined not to interfere – let’s face it, this has never been a major concern for him – until I realised it’s because this moment in future history is so far ahead of any other moment that even the all-powerful Time Lords haven’t foreseen this point of future. He isn’t altering time and history on Frontios – a crime in itself – he’s actually creating history, interfering at source, as it were.
The serial plays it safe when it ought to be taking risks. The story is far too fast. Davison thought it was too slow, but he’s wrong. There is a lot of detail missed out here, most significant is the revolution subplot, which rears its old head midway through episode three only to peter away to nothing. When Mr Range is accused of sedition, he’s put on trial and a woman appears to interrogate him [in the cast list she’s named as Deputy] and after this scene, she’s never seen again: so who earth was she? Brazen’s warmongering exploits are touched on, but never exploited to anything like the potential they could have been [I’m thinking of a lunatics like Marshall in The Mutants or The Marshal in The Armageddon Factor]. The idea of the soil sucking the dead to their graves has horrifying vampiric overtones, but is so played down as to be simply a poor special effect. The Tractators need for a human mind to power its burrowing machines seems both unlikely and is ultimately underused. The appearance of a zombified Captain Revere piloting the machine was a great cliff-hanger, but the terrifying nature of this incarceration is barely dwelt on. Yet again, the Doctor – and here it is also Turlough – seem to know too much about the monsters for it all to be coincidence. The story is so anodyne that the Gravis isn’t even killed; the Doctor transports the giant slug to an uninhabited world where he can do no harm; given the manner in which he reconstituted the TARDIS this seems like a long shot. Tegan says the former great one is having fun studying rocks.
The cast do okay, but the adventure is compromised by lacking ambition. This story, like so many of Davison’s is crying out for more detail, more time, more intrigue. It flashes by with a whirl and a wave and not so much as a by your leave. Peter Gilmore, who plays Brazen, is the serial’s ‘guest star’; he was the lead in the BBC’s Victorian shipping yarn The Onedin Line.
At the end of the adventure, the TARDIS is being sucked into yet another space / time distortion. Poor old girl…:
Resurrection of the Daleks has its detractors. It also has supporters. I fall in the latter group. I freely admit this is not a perfect Dalek or Dr Who adventure, but when watching it I was reminded of the thrust and vigour which director Douglas Camfield gave Season Six’s The Invasion, a Cyberman story that succeeded despite some obvious missteps. The same occurs here. The spirited, all-action slant director Matthew Robinson brings to a fairly ‘ho-hum’ narrative drives the adventure, the competent cast run with it and together they paper over a raft of cracks which would normally sink a ship with all hands.
Chief among these authorial issues is Eric Saward’s insistence on repeating the formula of Earthshock: cram in as many references to a monster’s past exploits as possible to create a familiar and compelling tale. It’s certainly familiar and for the most part it remains eminently watchable, but you do get the impression there’s almost too much flattery on show. Prime suspect is the return of Davros, the Dalek’s creator. Since his inception in Genesis… this crazed Kaled scientist has gone hand in hand with his charges and it remains to be seen what more Davros can continue to add to Dalek mythology. Since their inception in 1963, these mutant, unemotional, despotic, all-conquering, fascist war machines have rendered the universe their warrior playground, becoming the most feared alien race ever to exist. Having Davros reappear and begat his own brand of cunning rather pulls the rug from under the Dalek toes, so to speak. Once again, these masters of great evil are seen to kow-tow to their creator, which diminishes their authority. The Supreme Dalek is rightly suspicious of Davros, but he makes very slow decisions, allowing the humans ample time to exact their own course of revenge. The Doctor himself hardly has anything to do with the titular Daleks: he throws one out of a warehouse window and spends a suspenseful few minutes hunting the fearsomely brutal mutant which survives, but otherwise, he’s fairly well tied up with Davros or the Dalek minions, here called Drones. The Drones recall the Robomen from The Dalek Invasion of Earth. They are a much better interpretation, being able to think intelligently for themselves and act independently; they even challenge their Dalek overlords. Maurice Colborne and Rodney Bewes do great work in their respective roles as Lytton and Stein; the climax to episode two was particularly gripping. Meanwhile Terry Molloy’s impersonation of Davros is merely workmanlike; he’s too prone to shouting. Active support is given by Rula Lenska, Del Henney, Chloe Ashcroft, Jim Findley and Philip McGough; the cast is almost universally excellent. There’s a small role too for Leslie Grantham as Davros’ stooge, Kiston; Grantham would soon play another villain, the character of Den Watts in Eastenders, and forever be associated with the role.
Given the tremendous attention to re-embellishing the old, it comes as no surprise that the Daleks don’t have a coherent plan. They want to rescue their creator, invade Earth, find an antidote for a deadly virus, capture the Doctor, assassinate the Time Lord High Council, and more. The list is cobbled together from previous stories and is thus hopelessly complicated, involving as it does a time corridor and an attack on the prison ship which houses Davros’ frozen lifeform. This throws up numerous very obvious plot holes. For instance, it appears even in a state of cryogenic suspension Davros has been alive enough to develop a mind altering drug. Never mind. That’s not as daft as the Daleks hiding a deadly virus on twentieth century Earth in a place where it can be easily uncovered or despatching Rodney Bewes’ Stein to retrieve the Doctor from the same location when the TARDIS could surely have been directed to the opposite end of the time corridor. All the Dalek eggs seem to be in inhabiting the same basket.
The Earth bound scenes were partly filmed around Butler’s Wharf, just shy of Tower Bridge in London. It’s a lovely location now, but was empty, disused and in disrepair in 1984. The setting recalls those early Thames-side scenes in The Dalek Invasion of Earth and has an added touch of daring by featuring a pair of killer policemen roaming the silent streets. The opening scene of violence, terror and death is particularly striking. In fact this is one of the most blood thirsty Dr Who adventures for many a season. There are over seventy deaths shown on screen and even the peaceable Doctor lends a hand wiping out Daleks – although he bottles it when confronting Davros – Terry Molloy’s nemesis laughs at him and calls him a coward. Nail hitting head, I’d say. Davros pleads for clemency by insisting he wants to mutate the Kaled gene again, providing a more rounded intellect for the Daleks, but as they would still lack compassion the Doctor decides to carry out his assassination plan anyway – except he doesn’t. No reason. He just doesn’t. The clash between the two enemies is half-hearted at best and, having been built up for almost four episodes, it comes as a huge disappointment. Luckily there’s that deadly disease on hand.
The virus aspect of the story is the one which has the most legs. The Daleks and Movellans have been at war for centuries, their battle computers at a stalemate. Ninety years after the events in Destiny of the Daleks, the Movellans have won the war by developing a Dalek-deadly disease which has slaughtered millions of the screeching pepper-pots. Splintered for safety, one of the remaining factions has come to revive Davros and spring him from prison so he can formulate an antidote. The Daleks have reverted to using clones of humans as drone soldiers because their own numbers are so depleted. This is all a plausible and efficient storyline, but the manner in which Eric Saward has ballooned the narrative almost buries the original idea which should work on its own, being a neat reversal of the Dalek’s own plague tactics [see Planet of the Daleks, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, etc]. In fact, given how keen he was to borrow from the Doctor’s past – we even have a ‘brain drain’ sequence where the Doctor recalls all his past lives and companions – I’m surprised Saward didn’t bring back U.N.I.T. instead of having a bomb disposal squad investigate the Movellan virus capsules.
[Point of interest: the brain-drain scene was a blatant steal from the movie version of Flash Gordon (1980); an editing oversight forgot to include Leela in the Doctor’s memories; it also forgot Kamelion but I couldn’t give a fig about him.]
Ultimately, it’s the ambition of the director, not the writer which wins this battle. Matthew Robinson, along with his designer John Anderson, have conjured places and locations which feel and look believable. The space ship interiors as well as the dingy warehouse are all excellent, the latter demonstrating what can be done with minimal input. The pace rarely lets up. There’s a palpable sense of tension. By the end of the serial, only the Doctor, Turlough and Tegan remain standing. The poor, unsettled Aussie suddenly decides to leave the TARDIS crew; the death and destruction has finally got to her – not just here but generally, I recall Warriors of the Deep had a similar ‘everyone’s deceased’ climax.
Janet Fielding has had a rough ride as Tegan Jovanka, a companion who never quite seemed at home in the TARDIS. She spent most of Season 19 wishing she was anywhere but there, has been twice possessed and seen members of her family killed by aliens. She’s had a tendency to whine, but this makes her oddly endearing. She’s genuinely frightened of virtually every world she steps on and any alien being she meets. Almost every other companion takes to time travel like ducks to water; her reluctance and obvious frailty makes her unique among the various TARDIS crew. It’s quite obvious she’s often not having a good time. Being paired up with the surly Ginger-One doesn’t help and again Turlough’s role seems curiously written. He sounds like Nyssa or Romana II, being knowledgeable about the TARDIS and a great portion of the universe. The trouble I have with the Ginger-One is that I can’t forget he was an obnoxious little runt of a pupil at a boy’s boarding school. I find his character change, this slow unravelling of his past, completely astonishing, and not in a good way. To be honest, I’d rather Sarah Sutton had stayed on: she sparred well with both Peter Davison and Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson can’t spar with his own reflection. Davison himself is rather good again in this one, barring the odd characteristic, emotional outburst.
A quick note must be written about the transmission times for this adventure. Due to the BBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics, the story was initially shown [in the U.K. only] as two 45-minute episodes. Subsequent repeats, DVD releases, etc, have all restored the original as planned four-part format, which is how I watched it.
Despite its many flaws, I thoroughly enjoyed Resurrection of the Daleks, predominantly because I didn’t have to think about it too hard. Some may consider I’m being lazy, but I’ve watched 134 Dr Who adventures over the last year or so, and frankly, my brain deserves a rest:
My memory of Planet of Fire, watched as a bored fifteen year old, was two-fold. Firstly, I thought it was a rubbish adventure, badly acted and an extravagant waste of production money jetting to the Canary Islands for some pretty scenery. Secondly, I instantly fell in love with Nicola Bryant’s ballsy, nit-picky Peri, chiefly because she has the attitude and the model figure to don a tiny pink bikini and blatantly show more skin than even Louise Jameson’s Leela. Teenage musings aside, with its nods to H. Rider Haggard’s She and a raft of fine performances, Planet of Fire is ripe for a long overdue reassessment.
The Doctor is mulling over Tegan’s departure. It’s hit him harder than we expect. While Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor regretted the loss of Sarah and latterly showed some interest in catching up with Leela on Gallifrey, he never really chimed with his other companions. Romana #1 didn’t even get an exit scene, appearing fully regenerated in Destiny of the Daleks. Not so Tegan, whose tirade at the Doctor’s lifestyle, the planet hopping, the monsters, the villains, the constant interfering, the death and the destruction, seems to have struck a nerve. Consequently, even that hard as nails self-centred little bastard Turlough is showing concern for the Time Lord.
Peter Davison is excellent in Planet of Fire, delivering one of his most nuanced and effective performances. He is much calmer than usual, displaying moments of scientific and social insight and some great scenes of pathos: teasing the truth from Turlough, reassuring Peri with a deft half-smile that he really will save the day, battling the Master in a gripping climax of fervour and flame. The scene where he struggles all-at-once to win over Elders, heretics, Chosen Ones and Kamelions is one of Davison’s best moments ever. Writer Peter Grimwade also shows some dextrous wordsmithery seldom displayed before.
Davison is aided by the accomplished lead players of a huge supporting cast. Mark Strickson is an actor I’ve never warmed to; I simply can’t forgive tetchy, spineless Turlough his shortcomings. Ever since he burst into the TARDIS in Mawdryn Undead the atmosphere surrounding him has been foul. He tried to kill the Doctor twice, frequently sabotages the time machine, is impetuous and secretive, he lies and he retreats from moments of potential danger. There’s a change afoot, brought about by long buried family histories. While we again espy his dishonesty, even that is eventually overcome as the Doctor delivers an ultimatum that finally wrenches the truth from the Ginger-One. Throughout the serial, there’s an extra glint of steel to Strickson’s performance which is belatedly welcome. The revelation about his past life as a political prisoner on Trion, his home world, how he was separated from his family and banished to Earth is well played and answers all the questions we’ve had about his origins since his debut. Apparently, he’s not a young kid at all but Junior Ensign Commander Vislor Turlough, identification code VTEC 9/12/44. There’s an unusual line of ironic humour from the Ginger-One when he explains that Trion prisoners are scattered about the universe; his guardian was a sleazy solicitor in Chancery Lane. Peter Grimwade and script editor Eric Saward tend to cram Turlough’s personal details into the narrative and you feel it fits a little too neatly together. The story itself seems burdened with the unnecessary complication created by having Turlough discover his long lost brother is the Chosen One of a dying planet. Additionally, the time line of their two histories doesn’t make sense. In fact, like the good old days of Dr Who, time on the planet Sarn conveniently expands and contracts to fit the action when it’s perfectly clear characters cannot travel distances in such brief, or long, seconds.
Surprisingly, Stickson also goes all James Bond on us, re-enacting the pre-credit teaser from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by rescuing a drowning girl. He’s fairly incompetent at it, hindering rather than aiding the girl’s salvation. This is Peri, or Perpugilliam Brown. [Thank God they shortened that name.] She’s an American student on vacation in the Greek islands with her archaeologist stepfather Howard Foster. She’s bright and bushy tailed, sexy and confident. She’s bored in the sunny Hellenics waiting for crusted artefacts to be retrieved from the seabed. “Looks like Elton John,” she quips as a centuries old statue is loaded for transport. Peri’s met two English guys [Two! Crickey, go girl!] and has decided to hightail it to Morocco for some fun and frolics among the hashish and the djellebas of Marrakesh. Howard deceives her into missing the plane by abandoning her alone on the salvage vessel.
[Point of character order: I initially thought Howard was Peri’s boyfriend, a sort of mid-thirties aged mentor figure. The dialogue between them hints at a relationship that goes deeper than the chaste one expected between stepfather and stepdaughter. Actor Dallas Adams seems too young to play a fatherly part. As the story progresses, Howard’s more youthful stature gels better with the requirements of the role, but there is definitely an uneasy frisson between the two, as if they are on the edge of a romantic break up not sparring over an airline ticket.
[A Dr Who fiction novel Shell Shock proposed Peri as the victim of sexual abuse by her step-father. This might be a stretch too far, although it does go some way to explain Howard’s want to control every move of a twenty one year old woman. Interestingly, her delirium as she recovers from potential drowning [“Don’t leave me alone… Don’t turn out the light”] highlights the fear and confusion of abuse, which manifests itself again when malfunctioning robot Kamelion impersonates first Howard Foster, then the Master. Her blind acceptance when confronted in unfamiliar circumstances with an apparition she believes is Howard feels genuine and certainly hints at deep rooted fears: abuse victims often remain in thrall to their perpetrators for many years after the events; they also identify with the victim role, which is initially how Peri behaves. Equally, however, these same reactions could be drawn from the closure of a clandestine, unsuccessful affair. Perhaps Howard Foster is romancing both mother and daughter? The script leaves all these intonations unresolved: when I watched it, I was certain it’s never made clear Howard is Peri’s stepfather; I initially thought her mother was married to the other, older, archaeologist Kurt.
[Like several other Davison adventures, this character issue reveals the brevity of the telling, that the story itself is too condensed for the audience to make proper sense of it. People, characters and places are introduced with the minimum of fuss and exposition. For instance, when the Doctor meets the heretics, he’s accepted for who he is with virtually no argument or discussion. He convinces them almost instantly. Thinking back to the more robust early to mid-seventies eras of Pertwee or Baker, I can imagine the fight / capture / torture / explanation which would ensue and fill up a tension packed episode. It might be repetitive, but it’s more realistic than resolving confrontations in a minute or two.]
Back to Peri. The girl discovers a phallic looking platinum carved artefact, left behind by the archaeologists as historically worthless, and decides she can sell it and still make her way to Morocco, if only she can get off the boat. Cue the swimwear audition. I’m not really here to comment on women’s bodies, but young actress Nicola Bryant looks marvellous in the pink cleavage boosting two-piece, all tanned legs, belly and bosom. Bryant is roundly derided in some circles because of her whiney voice and fake American accent. I don’t mind it. My experience of speaking to American women is they do sound tremendously nasal. What I like most about Peri is she’s a spunky, upfront, biting little character who won’t stand for any nonsense, which rather contradicts what I just wrote about her as a potential abuse victim. Peri constantly takes the initiative. At various times, she puts one over Turlough, the Master, Kamelion and the Doctor and while she may have a penchant for groaning and wailing, well, what female companion hasn’t, Leela excepted? Bryant is given several opportunities to shine – those initial scenes in Greece, a cliff-side confrontation with Howard / Kamelion, another with the Master, a coy coda with Davison’s Doctor who with some reluctance lets her join him in the TARDIS – she doesn’t disappoint in any of them.
So, as I’ve mentioned, the Master is back. Anthony Ainley is very good once again, recalling the sly countenance he presented in The Five Doctors. The Master’s aim is as usual convoluted to the extreme. He’s basically trying to extend his life expectancy by stealing the essence of Sarn’s volcanic numismation flame, an immensely rare catalytic reagent with similar properties to the Sacred Flame and the Elixir of Life from Karn [see The Brain of Morbius]. Obviously the Time Lord High Council reneged on their promise to gift him a new cycle of regenerations if he helped save the Doctor’s life [see The Five Doctors]. Instead, the Master makes telepathic contact with Kamelion, using the TARDIS’s interlinked central nervous systems and uses the Silver-One to locate the distress beacon. The Master wants to match his TARDIS’ coordinates with the Doctor’s because he’s had an unfortunate accident attempting to build a larger Tissue Compression Eliminator and shrunk himself to doll-size. There’s a brilliant scene where Peri upends his miniaturised laboratory and goes ‘Master hunting’ in his black walled control room, like an angry woman hunting a mouse with her shoe. Later the Doctor peers into the same box with an amused smile: “You made it too powerful for your own good,” he says. “A small design problem,” comes the agitated reply. “And a very small master,” chuckles the Doctor. This comic drama is absolutely terrific and I enjoyed both the fun and the reasoning behind it. All the questions about why the Master needs to control Kamelion, why he’s on Sarn, why he’s not left his TARDIS, and so on, become clear in a simple and effective manner. It also sets up the startling climax. Throughout Ainley is suave, sophisticated and menacing. There’s no evidence of the histrionics he displayed in Castrovalva and at last he’s allowed to be rid of Counsellor Tremas’ Traken outfit; the black suit and tie he dons is definitely more fitting, being sleek, slightly demonic, corporately purposeful. It brings to mind Roger Delgado’s early turns in Season Eight.
I won’t say much about Kamelion. The robot never featured after The King’s Demons, but he serves a purpose here. The Master prevaricates some TARDIS sabotage, before Kamelion transforms into first Howard Foster, then the Master, confusing and frightening the bejesus out of Peri. However, she proves intelligent enough to better the renegade Time Lord and make good an escape. I was reminded of Jo Grant performing similar antics in Frontier in Space. She leaves the Silver One and his new faces to the gullibility of Timanov, the High Elder of Sarn, who waits anxiously for his God to send a messenger from the skies that will ignite the Great Flame. Timarov is played by Peter Wyngard, famous from Jason King, and he’s outstanding as a stately traditionalist, enforcing the religious law of the land, standing by his principles under adversity, remaining dignified even as the action whirls around and against him. Eventually, it’s all too much for the devout Timarov and he chooses to remain on Sarn to await its destruction rather than escape with the remainder of a dwindling population. A fitting end to a character who displays the pious cut of the righteous.
We don’t actually see Timarov’s death, but it seems clear he walks into the volcanic fires. We do though witness the Master’s end, which is of a similar stance. Trapped in his miniaturised laboratory, the life-giving flame restores the Master to full size, but the Doctor has a back-up plan. There’s another great moment for Davison’s portrayal as he watches his nemesis burnt to a cinder. He is shocked, appalled and saddened all at once. As Ainley cries: “Won’t you even show mercy to your…” we expect the Doctor to switch off the override facility he’s rigged; could he really be murdering his own ‘brother’? Thoughts of James Bond c.2021 spring to mind. The Master’s plea is left tantalisingly incomplete. Davison doesn’t move a muscle. He watches and ruminates, a flicker of melancholy crossing his youthful features. Perhaps those words of Tegan’s about death and destruction are haunting him again.
On the production side, the set designs are good if spartan. This time of watching, I loved the location shooting on Lanzarote, which doubles for both Greece and the dying planet of fire of the title. Sarn is a world riven by volcanic activity which is about to rip it apart. The pumice ridden scenery of Lanzarote lends itself to this, all those rocky outcrops and vast mountain ranges. It was great to have some chases and set-tos performed across these impressive natural landmarks instead of in tatty BBC studios. Additionally, one or two scenes are filmed around hotels and lookout points which add a genuine air of cinematic quality to the early proceedings. It’s disappointing the budget – or perhaps the ambition – of the production couldn’t have utilised more local sites and filmed the whole episode on location as the adventure seems to cry out for the epic. Still, we should be thankful the foreign locations are sensibly used, not shovelled in as a gimmick like unfortunate Amsterdam in the dreadful Arc of Infinity. John Walker’s camera work is exceptional, but Malcolm Thornton’s designs don’t feel big enough for the production’s aims and after the early expansive Lanzarote interiors, the studio bound scenes are a disappointment. Another minus point is John Peacock’s costumes, which seem to have escaped from a Biblical epic. Horror movie icon Barbara Shelly is wasted in a small role as one of the heretics. Fiona Cumming, never my favourite director, helms with just about enough vigour.
Planet of Fire isn’t classic Dr Who, but it does go a long way to repairing the damage administered to the series over the last few lacklustre seasons, when stories have tended to be extremely good or extremely poor. This adventure, with its above average performances and general competencies, is more than welcome. I was both surprised and heartened by how decent I found it. I can only wonder how good Peter Davison’s era might have been if the thought and energy placed here had been replicated across the board instead of in fits and spurts. Peter Davison’s brilliant at last, Nicola Bryant is astonishingly good in a debut role and we finally get shot of the troublesome Turlough. All things look set for a bright future.
Only one question remains: have we seen the last of the Master?
Robert Holmes was a writer and script editor for Dr Who for ten years from 1968 to 1978. His contribution in particular to the Philip Hinchcliffe / Tom Baker seasons is astonishing. A high bench mark for achievement in both storytelling and characterisation, those years hold high favour with this reviewer. His occasional forays into Dr Who’s world appeared to have bitten the dust after The Power of Kroll, a serial he was disappointed with, but one which I found endearingly enjoyable. His return to the fold for Peter Davison’s finale as the Fifth Doctor yet again displays all of Holmes’ unquestioned ability to conjure a believable, character driven narrative which doesn’t insult the viewer’s intelligence by baffling them, nor does it appear too derivative. One of the hallmarks of Holmes’ scripts and stories was his ability to weave young adult science fiction [let’s not call it ‘children’s’] around an established and familiar premise, one which often had a horrific overtone. The Caves of Androzani, which is undoubtably the crowning achievement of Peter Davison’s tenure, uses Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera as a jumping off point, returning us with a hefty dose of nostalgia and some verve and vigour to those halcyon days of 1974 – 77 when Dr Who appeared to be breaking the shackles of its moniker as a ‘kid’s show’. Quite simply, Androzani is a mature, violent, thoughtful and characterful slice of science fiction. It doesn’t condescend to its audience. It understands we are intelligent and treats us with the intellectual respect we deserve. That it is also able to raise socio-political issues surrounding monopolies and big business, trust and betrayal, as well as enacting a cave based battle for supremacy among the agents of Androzani Major and Minor only adds to its status as a Dr Who classic among classics.
The opening scenes are played out again on wide open rocky landscapes. Not Lanzarote, but one of those infamous BBC quarries. Peri has replaced her bikini top [which she wore under the tail-tied shirt in Planet of Fire] with a more practical matching vest. She’s teasing the Doctor, and also ourselves. He’s doing some detective work hunting for exotic glass on Androzani Minor. Once more volcanos abound, but these are mud volcanos. As the Doctor heads for a series of dangerous looking caves, Peri’s already got the measure of his intent and reputation: “Is this wise, I ask myself,” she mutters. Later on, while the Doctor attempts to understand the situation he’s uncovered, she smiles grimly and reproaches him: “I thought you knew everything!” Yeah, me too! It’s about time the Doctor landed on a planet where he genuinely hasn’t got a clue what’s happening. Removed of his foresight, and also by the writer refusing to use the Doctor’s solar system spanning mind of information, we find our heroes trapped in a horrifying tale of gunrunning, drug smuggling, deformed geniuses, android rebels, Federal forces, manipulative corporations, sly presidents, bluff, double-bluff, betrayal and a struggle of life and death.
Spectrox is the most valuable commodity in the universe because it has the ability to extend a person’s life by ten times the usual years. It can only be found in Spectrox Spores, which are mined far underground on Androzani Minor. The spores are lethal when not refined. Peri and the Doctor accidentally contaminate themselves with the disease and, like the hero of Dead on Arrival, the Doctor has to battle the odds while acutely aware both he and Peri are dying. This adds an extra layer of suspense and melancholy to the story. Whenever the pace slows, the writer and director remind us of the time traveller’s physical plight; by the end of the serial, the Doctor is an exhausted, weary and maniacally desperate man, performing feats of endurance we haven’t witnessed since Jon Pertwee braved the radiation levels on Solos [see The Mutants]. The atmosphere is tense throughout, brought on by the excellent cave interiors and the small sweaty environments inhabited by the federal army and the rebels. It’s no wonder patience is running out for Major Chellak and his men. They seem to be almost absorbed by the darkness, running, fighting and living with, from and in the shadowy realm of death.
Androzani Minor has a twin planet, Androzani Major, where life is palatial and calm. The Sirius Conglomerate is managed by Morgus, as smooth and calculating a villain as you can imagine. John Normington is excellent as this wily, creeping, slug like man, who moves with such slowness, but with such purpose, that he’s as threatening as he is benign. Nothing is beneath this paragon of corporate callousness. Years before, he left his business partner, the scientist Sharaz Jek, trapped in a mud lava flow. However, while Morgus’ riches have grown on the back of the supply of Spectrox, Jek has been secretly stockpiling the drug, snaring all the natural spores by using an army of androids who can farm the deadly flowers without injury. Morgus is using gunrunners to deliver weapons to Jek in return for Spectrox, making it appear the Sirius Conglomerate still has reserves of the drug. In reality, he’s skint of it and Jek, who has all the Sirius and Federal communications illegally tapped knows this, seeking to bring down his rival and the monopoly he runs. The Sirius government also have their suspicions. “Patriotism is only an illusion,” trills Morgus. Too right: he’s profiting vastly from an illegal trade in goods, transferring labour forces with impunity, raking in metallurgical products to extend a monopoly of supply; he even closes a production-poor copper mine by sabotaging it, inflating the prices of his own stock. When the President finally confronts Morgus over his proven conceits, slippery David Neal only feels the force of the megalomaniac’s ambition and takes a step too far.
The contrast in the scenes between the grimy, dirty caves of Androzani Minor and the flashy, stripped back, colourful, techno-hip of Major is brilliantly portrayed, no better than in our first glimpse of Morgus: he’s communicating using a holographic projection of Major Chellak. The Major meanwhile relies on a small computer screen. The Federal army’s underground barracks are light years away from the sleek marble and platinum proofed environs of the Conglomerate. Morgus’ precise air is nicely reflected in his subaltern, Krau Timmin [Barbara Kinghorn] who watches and waits for the opportunity to assert her own brand of tyranny. The Doctor meanwhile has to contend with Martin Cochrane’s bullish Chellak, who is forced to execute him and Peri after a no-show-trial. There’s a brilliant interchange between Cochrane, Davison, Nicola Bryant and Robert Glenister, who plays his lacky Salateen. As the command post comes under attack, he casts a quick nervous glance at the time travellers – is it the intruders who are to blame? Cochrane is asking. Peri doesn’t much fancy dying. The Doctor, as he did in Black Orchid, reflects that curiosity has finally got the better of him. The cliff hanger ending offers no way out for our heroes.
That they do escape offers a fantastic twist in the tail. It’s not done by trickery or illusion, we really do see the Doctor and Peri being shot, or at least a version of them. This again displays Holmes’ natural flair for writing, for discovering the obvious in the simple, for not creating plot holes by complicating the incidents we see on screen. Debut director Graeme Harper doesn’t shy away from the terror either. He provides a series of tricksy camera angles to confuse us and, to increase the tense, nervous atmosphere, he uses extreme close-ups of people’s faces. We see the sweat and fear and confusion. He’s clever enough to insist on tiny points of detail, like shadows passing over faces as an elevator ascends, or the gradual onset of Spectrox Toxaemia [cramp, spasms, slow paralysis of the thoracic spinal nerve, thermal death], or the glee with which the chief smuggler Stotz taunts his charges. Maurice Roeves is assertive and dangerously presumptuous.
It is never entirely clear who these mercenaries are working for, but it’s certainly clear who they and the federal forces fear: Sharaz Jek. Trapped underground, Jek is a reminder of Taren Capel, the robot’s best friend in Chris Boucher’s classic The Robots of Death. He’s engulfed in a leather body and head suit which hide his hideous scars. He is consumed with revenge for the betrayal Morgus dealt him. Like Leroux’s Phantom, he seeks recognition for his work, the true work, not the fraudulent one impersonated on the solar system by the Sirius Conglomerate. Jek might be all rage and anger and envy, but he’s also got a softer side and, on seeing Peri, he wishes her to be his companion in life. The moments where Jek attempts to persuade Peri of his love are both pathetic and scarily cruel. Everyone knows he’s hiding a deformity behind his mask, it’s a stereotype, and we wait and wait for the reveal. When it comes, Peri is so shocked, Jek runs and hides from her reaction, a moment of emotional insight from Christopher Gable, who imbibes the character with much dignity despite the villainous, gothic overtones. This Beauty and the Beast angle is perhaps the one which works less successfully, being a tad rudimentary in the telling, but Nicola Bryant plays it brilliantly, evoking memories of Sarah Jane Smith with her scatter gun, stuttering, nervy approach. Davison too has seldom been better. Finally given a script to get his teeth into, he needs to act as well as say his lines and we are rewarded with an astonishing performance of anxiety, emotional depth and forthright moralities. He’s also funnier than usual, insulting the great and good in turn. “You have the mouth of prattling jackanapes,” observes Jek, “but your eyes tell a different history.” A great paradoxical line that as, because of the mask, it is only Jek’s eyes the Doctor can see.
A sense of menace and foreboding consumes the adventure as the stakes rise step by step. Decision making becomes hurried and mistakes are made, not least by Morgus, who delivers Shakespearian asides to the audience, a reminder that we are watching an unfolding tragedy of epic scale. As the Doctor rushes to Peri’s rescue and Jek’s android forces are destroyed by sheer weight of numbers, the action becomes overwhelmingly physical and torturous. Confrontation follows confrontation, each one building on the last, until the adventure reaches its crushing crescendo, the events echoed in the tolling bell that underpins Roger Limb’s outstanding incidental music. It is a bloody, gripping and quite stupendous climax.
And for the third story this season, every character ends up dead, and this time that also includes the Doctor, whose past life swirls around him in possibly the best regeneration sequence ever. His companions implore him to survive, the Master demands his demise, the fifth incarnation, surrounded by so much killing at every turn can only utter one word, the death he feels most responsibility for: “Adric.” With miraculous timeliness Davison regenerates into a puzzled looking Colin Baker. He doesn’t take long to assert himself: “Three ‘I’s in one sentence? Makes you sound like a rather egotistical young lady… Change! And not a moment too soon.”
Had the producer grown tired of the youthful Davison, we wonder? It’s barely relevant, but Colin Baker’s appearance and two acerbic lines suggests he was seeking something more robust and belligerent that the Fifth Doctor’s too tactful interpretation. We saw signs of where the team wanted the Doctor to graduate towards in this season, but the balance has shifted too late for Davison, who had always intended to depart after three seasons. As if to remind us of the sort of era we are passing, the end of episode two recalls some of the shoddy monsters of years gone by. Graeme Harper’s attempts to disguise the Magma Beast did well until this point, where upon we are given a tacky ‘man in a monster suit’. Like the giant rat in that other great Robert Holmes adventure The Talons of Weng-Chiang, it’s a moment you rather need to accept for what it is, even though it unkindly betrays poor production work and a lack of foresight from the team. This is unfortunate as across the board this is a phenomenally strong outing. Script, direction, acting and music are all first class. Add to that the marvellous set designs from John Hurst, Andrew Rose’s costumes, John Walker’s camera work, Malcolm Campbell’s sound mixing and editor Roger Guertin’s incisive cutting and you really have a visual and audial treat. There’s even time for a nod to us Bond fans as the Doctor breaks his handcuffs using a laser, just how OO7 managed it in Never Say Never Again.
The Discontinuity Guide is quite sniffy about this adventure, citing it as overrated and derivative. Well, they thought Enlightenment was a classic, so who knows, right? Several polls have listed Androzani as one of the best or the very best adventures of all time, from both Classic and Reboot series. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it is certainly a stunning achievement and merits regular watching. You only wonder how good a Doctor Peter Davison might have been if his material had been so better provided.
If I’m honest, I don’t really enjoy Peter Davison’s interpretation of the Doctor. I’m not entirely certain why. He’s pleasant enough on the eye, is a capable actor and displays enough bravado and energy for a Time Lord hero. Early on he seemed a little hectoring, speaking to Nyssa and especially Adric as if they were his children. Tegan merely seemed an inconvenience. His tendency to rush everywhere is more a directing problem. As we approached his final few adventures many of these problems have been ironed out and Davison, or rather his Doctor, has matured into a more thoughtful and studied young man. It’s as if he’s had fresher's week and wants to settle down to business. It’s come a bit late unfortunately.
The actor hasn’t been assisted by the general poor standard of serial during his reign. Davison’s is the Doctor who [so far] features in the least number of stories [20] and the least number of episodes [71] so it’s hard to gauge his overall success. In theory, you’d think fewer stories would induce the production team to a higher quality of product, but the budget is instead stretched to breaking point across seven serials a season. So, while Davison might be manfully willing an interpretation of the Doctor, those around him are spreading their workload too thin. Subsequently, while some recent adventures have been exceptionally fine, most have teetered towards the mundane. This might be due to a poor script or lackadaisical acting, but frequently it’s the low overall production values. You can see the creaks and groans all around; Season 21 even features two different versions of a slug monster [the second one is in The Twin Dilemma which is a Sixth Doctor story]. There is also a preponderance of stories relying on aliens interfering or questing for the secrets of time travel, the repetition of which gets extremely dull and was highlighted worst by the way a time-travel angle was shoehorned into Terminus, a so-so story at best but one completely derailed by this farcical notion.
The whole three-year era can be epitomised for me by its mid-point, three stories lumped together as ‘the Black Guardian Trilogy’. What this triumvirate does is demonstrate exactly where the production team are going wrong. They revive an old villain, they attempt to bring back old companions, they introduce an uncertain element of doubt to the TARDIS crew, a popular companion is written out, all three stories involve the discovery or exploitation of the secrets of time travel, poor supporting performances, melodramatic scripts, haphazard editing, bland costumes, unfortunate effects, ambition without thought or deed, complicated narratives lacking any depth of detail to explain what’s happening – time and again these errors occurred throughout Davison’s era and they continually hamper the stories.
I have mentioned in several reviews my opinion that certain adventures could have been extended and others dropped entirely, making the production costs cheaper [less sets to construct, less actors to cast] and the stories more decipherable. Both Time Flight – perhaps beyond saving anyway – and Terminus certainly demand it and others might benefit from an extra episode or two. However, even if the plots could be adequately explained, the production teams themselves would have to pull out more stops than they manage, and that appears unlikely. The foreign trips seem a waste of money, although Lanzarote is better utilised than Amsterdam. The guest star policy is doomed to failure. How many famous actors want to slum it on a cheap sci-fi show simply to fill a void on their CV? For every successful Richard Todd and Nerys Hughes, there’s an Ingrid Pitt or Lynda Bellingham.
Davison isn’t helped by his entourage either. Lumbered with the warring Adric and Tegan, replaced by the warring Turlough and Tegan, he’s really only got Nyssa to rely on and Sarah Sutton is too simpering to make an impression. Adric’s untimely death at the end of Earthshock was a great moment for the show; not because he died, although some rejoiced, but the manner in which his passing was represented. It was a great moment for Davison’s Doctor as well and he recalls the young Alzarian last from his line of companions when regenerating. It’s fair to say Janet Fielding’s Tegan gets more credit than most, but that’s only because she stuck around for almost the whole tenure. Her departure was sudden and appeared to be carried out in a fit of pique. The Doctor seems rather brusque once she’s delivered her home truths. It’s interesting Davison’s two best performances come after she’s departed and his character is given time to reflect on the implications and havoc his meddling causes. Nicola Bryant’s Peri makes an instant impression and you rather wish she’d been around earlier. It was good to have the Doctor sparring with someone who exhibits a little gumption. I have high hopes for the American.
And so we depart Davison’s era, slightly dispirited after three years of almost perpetual under achievement. Two five-star stories is a low return [although no worse than Patrick Troughton] but what the era truly lacks is consistency, with too many highs followed by lows. It’s particularly galling that the celebration 20th Season, sadly disrupted by strikes, is probably the least exciting term since Jon Pertwee’s swansong in 1974 [Season 11] and is only saved by the sentimental nostalgia fest of The Five Doctors.
I’m not sorry to see Peter Davison depart, only sorry there is so much untapped potential on display. The lack of planning and forethought of the past two or three years does not bode well for the future. The ratings for these midweek serials, perhaps the ultimate indicator of success, slipped steadily from nine and ten million at the start to only six by the end. It’s tempting to believe that leaving the show transmitting once a week on a Saturday tea-time might have helped secure a more devoted audience, but I’m not convinced. There’s simply too much wrong with the system and change was definitely required.
Bring on the new Doctor then…
Peter Davison showing off the Doctor's cricketing skills
Janet Fielding as Tegan, looking intensely worried as always; she gets a pic for sticking around so long
Turlough going all James Bond on us, saving Peri, remarkable...
And following on, my personal choice as the best regeneration of the Classic Series...
It is almost impossible to watch The Twin Dilemma. I thought The Gunfighters and The Creature from the Pit were fairly atrocious, but this debut outing for Colin Baker as the Doctor can quite happily sit alongside them as one of the very worst serials Dr Who has ever produced.
Russell T. Davies is on record as stating that “The Twin Dilemma was the beginning of the end of Dr Who.” In a 2009 fan’s poll published in Dr Who Monthly to celebrate 200 adventures of Dr Who, while The Caves of Androzani was voted number 1, its immediate successor was voted number 200. Dead last. It still has an appalling reputation. I’ve watched a lot of Dr Who, and while I have accepted some shoddy production qualities, dodgy scripts and a slew of wooden performances, the sheer lack of panache attached to The Twin Dilemma is startling. It is bad right from the first scene where a concerned father is begging his mathematical genius twin sons not to play equation games lest they ‘change events on a massive scale’. When the two lads are subsequently kidnapped, he goes into panic mode and you wonder immediately, if these children were so precious, why did he leave them to their own unsupervised devices? Their usefulness to the plot is zero anyway as the alien gastropod Mestor has already got a Time Lord to help him work out the mathematical problems. This is a doddery man called Asmael who happens to be the Doctor’s old mentor [well, no he isn’t, that was K’Anpo; see Planet of the Spiders]. When we initially meet Asmael, he’s calling himself Edgeworth. I don’t know why he had to disguise his name. I don’t know why he has to be a Time Lord at all. He’s the ruler of Joconda, a planet devasted by these sluglike aliens. The action switches from the barren Titan 3 to Joconda. There is no reason for the kidnappers to stop at Titan 3; none at all; maybe they needed a loo break. On Joconda, we finally learn Mestor’s achingly insane scheme. It struggles to assert itself, swimming against a tide of putrid snail goo. Anthony Steven was an experienced writer, but he’d never written for Dr Who or for sci-fi before. It was a mistake, I feel, to ask a new writer to take on the challenge of launching a new Doctor.
The best thing in the serial is Nicola Bryant, who gives back one hundred percent of the obnoxious behaviour the new startlingly garish Sixth Doctor delivers. I enjoy the fact she keeps criticising his attitude, pushing him to do the right compassionate thing and chastising him when he doesn’t. At the end of the story, he states that as an alien, it’s only logical he doesn’t share her human qualities. This makes utter nonsense of the preceding twenty-one seasons of Dr Who and shovels The Twin Dilemma further and further down the list of abominations. If the Doctor wants to be a Gallifreyan, he should nip back to the Citadel and reclaim his right to the Presidency. It’s the fact he doesn’t act like a Time Lord which endears him to us; take that away and you’ve got no humanisms to work with.
I do applaud the producers for deciding to emphasise the Doctor’s alien characteristics, but Colin Baker isn’t the man for this. Unlike Tom Baker, who early in his tenure admirably presented alien and slightly vulgar characteristics without resorting to extrovert flamboyancy [that came later], Colin Baker’s performance is unsubtle and haphazard. The script doesn’t help him, taking up the baton of troublesome regenerations and running with it so forcefully the joke wears extremely thin: half-way through episode one a crazed Doctor tries to strangle Peri. When I watched this in 1984, I turned off the TV and vowed not to watch the series ever again; so while that pledge didn’t last, this viewing is a first for me. Baker is not helped by being provided with the most appalling costume, one which highlights his egotistical character – the suit is indescribable, but it certainly ensures this Doctor is always the centre of everyone’s attention. Costumer Pat Godfrey should hang her head in shame. She’s equally poor with the monster outfits which look as if they escaped from The Web Planet or were recycled from Frontios.
Maurice Denham had a great stage and film career, but even his guest star spot can’t help save this. I ache for poor Nicola Bryant: three adventures into her acting career and she’s saddled with being the most experienced and competent performer on the show.
Frankly, The Twin Dilemma is four episodes of space garbage:
It’s hard to summarise one adventure, but here goes.
The final story of Season 21 is unusual in that it allows the audience to meet the new Doctor, the previous incarnation having regenerated. The experiment is not a success. The sharp differences between Colin Baker’s acerbic performance and Peter Davison’s more prudent delivery is so great it is a genuine chalk and cheese battle. It would be easy to say Baker isn’t helped by the script, but in fact the dialogue isn’t the problem. The problem is the actor’s insistence on over emphasising every detail of every sentence, every phrase, word, consonant and vowel is hammered home with a roll of the tongue and a cluck of lips; every gesture is exaggerated, every glance toned with incessant delirium. The fact the Doctor is meant to be experiencing a ‘bad’ regeneration makes sense, but his sudden mood swings, changes in attitude, melodramatic tantrums and moments of cowardliness are out of character not just for Doctor Who, but for most heroes.
Some critics have a theory that Colin Baker’s interpretation is based on the reformed angel, the bad cop come good, a man with redemption on his mind. So, having accused Peri of being evil and decided she needs to die by strangulation – out of character even for a Time Lord, I suspect – he then spends the remainder of the episode attempting to correct his mistake and win over his colleague. This is all very clever – except the Doctor doesn’t spend time attempting to make good his mistake. No, he continues to be boorish, rude, loud, pompous, uningratiating, ham-fisted, egotistical, competitive, ungallant, obnoxious and conceited. He’s simply appalling. He doesn’t even dress well. One of his best lines comes when he attempts to explain his erratic and atrocious behaviour and passes off his quite dreadful harlequin suit as a demonstration of how “I’ve even lost my sense of style.” He’s not only violent towards Peri, but he’s constantly condescending. And not just to her: he treats his predecessors with equal disdain, tossing their clothes wastefully around the wardrobe room and referring to the Fifth Doctor as having “a sort of feckless charm.”
Thankfully Peri’s in a forgiving mood and despite near strangulation, tries to cajole the Doctor into action. Some of their exchanges are quite tasty and I enjoy that she’s prepared to stand up to a man who is essentially a bully, but this is all wrong for Dr Who. At the end of the drama, they appear reconciled, but her smile is as forced as you can get. Colin Baker still looks too pleased with himself to be appreciated.
There is something horribly wrong going on here. I don’t think it was the intention of the production team to veer so far away from an accepted formula. This looks suspiciously like an actor misunderstanding what his role is supposed to be. The Doctor is the barometer of decency, morality and ethics. If he starts to behave in a manner which denies all the key facets of his personality, those which we have always witnessed to prevail – yes, even in the dark days of William Hartnell’s brittle and belligerent premier Time Lord you always knew he had a heart in the best place – the audience will lose sympathy for the hero. After Peter Davison’s near Herculean feat to rescue Peri and sacrifice his life to save hers, this sudden self-centred arrogance is decidedly, wrongfully challenging. Time, I suppose, will tell how the Sixth Doctor progresses, but if Baker’s going to remain such a selfish, intolerant narcissist, this will be a very tough few weeks watching.
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Holidays and state funerals appear to have got in the way of my retrospective. so, it's back in the TARDIS saddle, a new University semester up and more writing and reviewing. Summer has officially ended for me now...
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Nineteen
CASTROVALVA
“That’s the trouble with regenerations,” says Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor, studying his reflection in a full-length mirror, “you never quite know what you’re going to get.”
What we did get was Dr Who on Monday and Tuesday evenings at 6.55p.m. Quite why this scheduling change was made, I’m not certain, but the problem the show immediately had was to try and discover a new audience; BBC Scotland transmitted the series at 3.30pm with the children’s television programs. Showing two episodes a week also cut down the suspense levels between some cliff-hanger endings and reduced the transmission of the show from six to three months, reducing the ability of a story to gain an audience through longevity. It would be easy to blame the scheduling if the series had taken a dip in ratings, but Castrovalva held firm at around 10 million viewers. I for one, back in 1982, found the new slot awkward because it was supper time. However, watching anew, it was a pleasure to see those Sid Sutton titles whirl again and Peter Davison’s bright visage stare back at me from the screen. Castrovalva’s problem wasn’t the schedule and it wasn’t Davison; no, there was something else not quite right about the debut outing for our new Doctor.
There’s a real place called Castrovalva. It’s an Italian hilltop town in Abruzzo. The Dutch artist M.C. Escher made a lithograph of it. This era-opening story is based at the serene city of Castrovalva, whose architectural design is based on later lithographs of imaginary cities created by Escher. The recurring theme of the artist’s work, one of mathematical recursion, forms the basis of this low-key adventure.
The Master, realising the Doctor survived his fall from the Pharos Project’s space scanner, kidnaps Adric and directs the TARDIS to Castrovalva, a world created through the process of block transfer computation, created thanks to the young lad’s mathematical genius. As he’s not cooperating with the Master despite being trapped behind a complex web of restraining bars, it isn’t clear how the venomous Time Lord is overseeing this. In the Roger Delgado days, he’d have simply hypnotised him. Nothing so simple for the 1980s. We have to show pain! We have to show Adric is a real man! He’s defiant! The Master is cruel! It’s hard to write sarcastically. The weakest aspect of this intriguing failure is the Master, who is such an ordinary, rather grasping villain it’s hard to take him seriously. He’s developed an ability to shapeshift, which is rather good, but other than that, he’s hopelessly unimaginative and at the climax, as Anthony Ainley whirls like a Dervish and cries: “Don’t try to make a fool out of me!” all you can think is: “But they have!”
I was rather pleased he managed to shut Adric up, as the young lad has a tendency to talk without thinking. Curiously, Adric also seems to come and go as and when his mind pleases, so the all-powerful Master’s hardly got him restrained. Maybe he needed to lie down amongst all the excitement, temporarily letting his prisoner off the leash. This new Master is a bit hopeless. He thinks fast, concocting two methods to kill the Doctor in as many episodes, but the execution of these plans is a bit of a shambles and his motivation doesn’t really make sense. The Master has gotten vengeful all of a sudden. I preferred it when he just wanted to take over the world.
The design team do okay attempting to bring Escher’s graphics to life, but they were never going to look entirely convincing. The budget just won’t stretch that far. Given the low likelihood of anyone picking up on the Escher reference, I’m not sure why they bothered. To boot, writer Christopher H. Bidmead includes complicated scientific scenarios and even more complicated dialogues. At one point of explanatory chaos, Tegan says: “I’m talking nonsense.” Not just you, love, everyone is. The Doctor spends most of the serial incapacitated, spinning in a wheelchair or lying in a zero cabinet, hence no one is around to explain what on earth’s going on. The idea of space folding in on itself is called recursive occlusion, but it’s a theory the effects team have trouble trying to pull off. They do okay, just, and the story is most interesting during these scenes in the cramping city, when the Doctor finally manages to recover his wits enough to understand the space-time trap he’s been caught in. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you view your climaxes, escape involves nothing more complicated than running down a tunnel.
The support cast is grim in this one. Standing around looking glum isn’t acting and seeing Sarah Sutton pull a face after getting her feet wet, or Adric trying to blag a policeman, or the Master acting the twit, was almost heart breaking. I wanted the ground to swallow the cast and politely bury them they were so inadequate. I’m undecided about Tegan who is bossy and submissive in equal measure. I don’t know why she doesn’t change her uniform, or at least her shoes, after all Nyssa puts on trousers and the TARDIS is full of wardrobes.
Thank goodness then for Peter Davison as the Doctor, who brings a fresh, invigorating presence to the show. Unlike some, I’m not bothered by his youth or the cricketing outfit he chooses to wear. Davison is a fine actor, not a great one, but a smart one who does the expected well and occasionally offers the insightful unexpected. Early on, as his regeneration goes awry and the TARDIS spins towards ‘Event One’, Davison does tiny impersonations of his predecessors. Seeing him mimic William Hartnell was a joy; he was even better at Patrick Troughton. When he finally reached the sanctuary of the Zero Room, a place of tranquil repose within the TARDIS, we finally got to see Davison’s Doctor: a thoughtful, unflustered, encouraging, reliable figure of a Time Lord. Gone is the shillyshallying of Troughton, the condescension of Pertwee, the blustering kafuffle of Baker, here is an actor who wants to show a hero in control of himself, mentoring his friends and comprehending the full implications of a situation.
Later on, when the Doctor is solving the riddle of Castrovalva, Davison displays more moments of characterful insight: attempting to count to three and being corrected by a little girl was pure joy, his sudden authority when realising he’s been lied to about Adric’s plight, discussing recursive dimensions with Mergrave, his look of almost stupefied admiration when he witnesses space folding in on itself, best of all fiddling with his spectacles as he reads and recognises all the volumes of the city’s historical records are the same age [I thought this would play a larger part in the eventual revelation, but the writer chose a far simpler and less interesting route instead] and the Doctor’s final words “It’s going to be splendid!” all hint at better things to come for his portrayal.
I can only hope the series serves him well for while Castrovalva tries hard to be different, to not be a monster-of-the-week adventure, it is, sadly, a searing non-entity of a story, let down by a list of appalling performances and boxed in by its own recursive cleverness:
2 from 5.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Nineteene
FOUR TO DOOMSDAY
Four to Doomsday was the first adventure recorded by Peter Davison for Dr Who. Due to a sudden rewrite of his debut story, Season 19 was filmed out of order, so you might expect to witness a few teething problems. There aren’t many. However, the same obvious pitfalls which befell Castrovalva recur here. The support acting is horrendous, most noticeably from Matthew Waterhouse, whose turn as Adric is baffling, being chauvinistic, arrogant impertinent and remarkably intellectually incompetent. Even the Doctor is driven to call him an ‘idiot’. Adric’s motivation for siding with the villain seems extraordinarily ill-informed, as if he never considered the implications of cyborg technology on the emotional core of organic beings. Is the lad not human? Oh, wait; that’s true he isn’t, not exactly; he’s an Alzarian. Perhaps being descended from Marshmen has twisted his mind.
Tegan has a couple of right ding-dongs with him and when she shoves Adric hard enough to knock him out, you rather feel he’s got it coming. Character developments like this did the lamentable Mr Waterhouse no favours in his portrayal. Mind you, Tegan’s no better, displaying impatience, touches of blind panic and, when attempting to thieve the TARDIS, outright recklessness. Considering how dull her character is, Nyssa comes across as surprisingly sensibly grounded. She’s got enough scientific know-how to cope with the techno stuff and a mature, calming demeanour which contrasts sharply with her two colleagues. Peter Davison keeps the warring sides apart, just, and especially in the opening two episodes he steers the brood effectively through the action, keeping them on a tight leash. The ties wander a bit as the serial progresses.
Luckily, we’re gifted a wonderful villain in Stratford Johns’ Monarch, an effusive, charming Urbankan majesty. The scenes where he discusses moral philosophy, military strategy, the shortcomings of ‘flesh time’ and the properties of scientific processes while watching an entertainment with his ministers Enlightenment and Persuasion has all the hallmarks of a Roman Emperor, including his chilling schemes, his benign deceptions and his leisurely attitudes. The Doctor isn’t fooled for a moment, unlike Adric who seems to revel in the Urbankan’s claim to be a God. The young lad’s not even fussed by the alien’s class system which includes slaves; did he learn nothing from the plight of the Tharils in Warrior’s Gate?
Monarch is the last survivor of his species, frog-like humanoids whose planet he destroyed in pursuit of his own experiments, turning his people into microchipped subservient cyborgs. He wants to take over the Earth, having visited several times in the past and kidnapped a few humans for unspecified purposes. The leaders of the represented humans have each been promised power over a dominion on Earth. Yet they too have been turned into cyborgs, powered by a triplicate chip where their heart should be. It is interesting Monarch appears to have kidnapped people who, it could be argued, share a fundamental humanist philosophy: an Athenian, a Mayan, an Aborigine, a Confucian. Monarch doesn’t appear to have learnt from their civilisations, but he’s thoughtfully not eradicated a person’s soul when condensing their life essence into microchip form. Luckily one of the leaders, Bigon, the Greek philosopher, has retained enough of his conscience and sides with the Doctor. Bigon is played with some deftness by Philip Locke, who as Vargas so skilfully menaced Sean Connery in Thunderball. Another of ours, Burt Kwouk, pops up as the Chinese Lin Futu.
Monarch’s plan seems to be threefold: to conquer the Earth by slaughter, to exhume all its minerals and to travel faster than the speed of light. None of it really makes any sense and none of it is dwelt on at length, which is both a plus and a minus. The time travel implications feel a step too far. Conquest and practical genocide feel like evils quite enough. Writer Terence Dudley spends a good deal of time creating a workable and intriguing plot based around the mechanics and assurances of immortality. Monarch dismisses ‘flesh time’ and pontificates on his great strides in cybernetics, considering his process the saviour of the Urbankan people. The story is run through with so many other traditional sci-fi elements that the central thrust of the villain’s immorality becomes buried: the enormous spaceship, kidnapped humans, interstellar travel, aliens, androids, invasion, poisons, genocide, philosophy, revolution, a God complex. Dudley can’t quite pull all the threads together and the last episode falls a bit flat, with Tegan stuck in the TARDIS, Nyssa mostly hypnotised, Adric mostly an imbecile, Monarch mostly seated, a lot of dragon dancing, some slow-motion fighting in zero-gravity.
[Point of order: the science at the climax was criticised at the time, but the physics involving the momentum of a cricket ball delivering propulsion makes perfect sense; additionally, the Doctor has survived in zero gravity for short times before, notably in Nightmare of Eden, and we shouldn’t be surprised he can cope with sub-zero temperatures as he ventured into the Antarctic without protection in The Seeds of Doom.]
Despite the unconvincing ending, there’s much to admire in Four to Doomsday. The production values are first class. The model work and effects are better than reasonable and the realisation of Monarch’s observation globes, the monopticans, was brilliant. Hats off to Mickey Edwards’ FX department. Designer Tony Burrows also proves a winner. His interiors are superb. The corridors, the huge high ceilings of all the rooms, the different laboratories, the throne room; it all looks convincing and breathtakingly space age. Colin Levers’ Urbankan costumes complement the fantasy, monumental look and feel of the space craft.
I’ve watched Four to Doomsday on three occasions now and this was the first time I enjoyed and recognised the intent of the story. Previously, I’d dismissed it, chiefly because the Doctor’s companions are so trivialised. However, the story doesn’t deserve such a simplistic criticism. John Black’s direction keeps things in check and promotes the best elements of the narrative to great effect, particularly with regard to the Urbankans and Bigon. It’s so disappointing the TARDIS crew hasn’t been pulled into better shape:
3 from 5.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Nineteen
KINDA
The basic assumption of many viewers is that Kinda is something to do with eastern religious philosophies. This is based on a very obvious reference to the Wheel of Life: “The wheel turns, civilisations rise; the wheel turns, civilisations fall.” That simplistic view of the story rather misses the point as it has more to do with man’s control of his mind and how the conscious fights the subconscious, how good and evil battle, chiefly through the realm of dreams. So, you could easily claim it has overtures of Jung and Freud. The story also touches on the ancient Greek fable of Pandora’s Box, the Bible’s Eden myth, DNA collectivism, group telepathy, Chinese wind chime superstitions, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Aboriginal Dreamtime, vampirism, the breadth of man’s madness, and the recurring religious theme of the great saviour. Kinda is a surprising serial.
Deva-Loka, or Planet S14, is under surveillance for future Earth colonisation, but the survey team is having trouble with the natives, the titular Kinda. We’ve seen this before and it never ends well. The team is led by Sanders, a Colonel Blimp type figure of old-fashioned blinkered order, a man hopelessly out of his depth who would rather do press-ups than take any effective action to investigate the [never explained] loss of half of his unit. His second-in-command is the slowly unhinging, unravelling Hindle. Their science officer is Todd, a woman struggling to cope under the restraint of her military superiors. This trio are brilliantly envisaged respectively by Richard Todd, Simon Rousse and Nerys Hughes.
Todd is a very famous star who refuses to slum it and delivers a fine performance as an aging commander, fixed in his bigoted views, his routines, his loyalty to the soldier’s oath; when these are taken from him, the childlike docility he exhibits is equally fascinating, all the certainties he once knew being replaced by a long-buried glee at the effortlessness of life. That Richard Todd refuses to veer into the stereotypical is admirable; both sides of Sanders’ persona feel genuine. Simon Rousse has the difficult of task of making the lunatic Hindle sympathetic. His mind has been turned by the monotony, the creeping quiet of the forest, too long in the uniform, too long in space. By accident, he discovers how to control the two local natives, referred to as ‘hostages’, imprisoned in the team’s protective outpost, the dome. This fuels his mania and he begins to exert a chaotic, frighteningly believable, regime over his charges, persecuting in turn the Doctor, Adric and Todd. His many schizophrenic switches of mood encapsulate the nature of his insanity, never more so than when he forces Adric to assist in the design and construction of a model city populated by paper cut outs of people. When the Doctor accidentally steps on one, he’s aghast at the murder of an innocent, yet incongruously he’s wired the dome to destruct, killing everything inside a fifty kilometre radius. It is the opening of the Box of Janna [an Islamic term for a jewellery box] which proves his salvation. This supernatural artefact, a sort of Pandora’s Box in reverse, alters the function of the human brain, turning the recipient into a docile creature, suppressing their natural antagonistic instincts and allowing him or her to exist in a state of idealised bliss.
Nerys Hughes has the hardest role as the surrogate companion to the Doctor. A popular actress from TV’s sitcom The Liver Birds, Hughes is more than competent, acting as an essential barometer of the audience’s fears and aspirations. We recognise she’s fighting a losing authority battle against her robust male colleagues, but she’s proactive enough to retain our interest even when saddled with asking questions. Unfortunately, by episode 3 she’s taken a backseat as the Doctor makes enquiry after enquiry of Panna, the blind matriarch of the Kinda, played with some fortitude and humour by Mary Morris. Not being human, the Doctor hasn’t been affected by the Box, so Panna assumes he must be intellectually subnormal. She calls him “the idiot” and Peter Davison seems to enjoy the obvious irony.
Davison is efficient rather than good. Early on his relaxed demeanour seems completely at odds with his predecessors; for instance, he doesn’t appear remotely concerned by the fact he’s managed to lose Tegan in the jungle, which serves in part to create the problems he later encounters. Once he recognises the delicate societal balance of Deva-Loka’s inhabitants is under threat not only from the lunatic assertions of Hindle, but from an outside evil force, he becomes very one-track, almost obnoxious, and spends too much of his time pointing at people. Mind, he has had to keep Adric in line. The young lad is badly represented again, moaning mostly. During the final episode he accuses Tegan of being responsible for the whole affair; she gives it straight back, like any good Aussie girl would.
Janet Fielding really comes into her own in Kinda. Hypnotised by the Sleep Chimes, she is mentally transported to her subconscious. There’s a very fine zoom close up of her eye which tells us we’re entering the realm of self-thought. Here, in a nightmare obsidian environment of darkness, Tegan is baffled by the conundrums forced on her, particularly when starkly informed she doesn’t exist. A stranger, Dukka, confronts Tegan with paradoxes of reality. She meets her own self and they debate which of them is real. This sequence is excellently played by Fielding, who displays all the exasperation we’ve come to expect, but this time the panicky desperation comes with a vim of control and genuine dread; the darkest of fears inhabit those places we never venture and Tegan is in that hollow. What is real freedom and who possesses it? She’s being faced with the same temptations as Eve in the garden or Jesus atop the mountain, will you free the devil into the world of man? Afflicted by this unseen evil, she seduces a youthful male Kinda, Aris, and passes the evil onto him, causing Aris to seek power over his race.
The peace-loving Kinda fear solitary sleep because of the nature of these dreamtimes. They communicate telepathically, have a matriarchal society, a hereditary life essence and an evil enemy in the Mara, a serpent-like creature which crosses over from the realm of dreams, where it has been banished, into the real world. Tegan, as a “not-we” was susceptible to the Mara’s influence and inadvertently brought the evil into the open. The Doctor realises the Kinda don’t see reflections of their physical selves in a mirror [like the Greek gorgon], but an image of their soul, hence Hindle’s ability to control the two hostages – they believe he’s a magician like their own mask-wearing, dancing and frolicking Trickster, who has captured their self-essence – and when the Mara, or Aris, is confronted with his own soul, he will vanish back into his realm of dreams.
This is a jerrymandering of all sorts of ancient mythology regarding the properties of mirrors and reflections: Vulcan’s fortune telling mirror, Perseus and Medusa, the Aztec’s smoking mirror, Merlin’s divinations, Snow White, Dracula, Through the Looking Glass, the breaking of mirrors bringing bad luck. All of these have some input into the Doctor’s final solution being a circle of polished solar panels. His contention is that if the Mara cannot look at itself once, if its evil appears to multiply, the actual being will banish itself. This recalls Tegan’s earlier encounter with not just one, but dozens of her own person: the Mara recognises these multiples cannot exist and Tegan pleads to escape its obsidian world should it drive her mad. Of course, turning this evil superstition onto itself is an elementary narrative device, but doesn’t really provide a decent climax. There’s no science fiction in Kinda, only an adventure crammed full of pseudo-religious imagery and annotation.
Does this spoil Kinda as an adventure? It would be easy to say ‘yes’. In many respects, like the first two stories of the season, there are strong ideas lurking beneath its exterior and writer Christopher Bailey crams as many as he can into the screenplay. However, like Season 18’s Warrior’s Gate, this overload of ideas gives rise to narrative confusion. I will freely admit my summary above may not be the writer’s intent nor another observer’s interpretation. It is pleasing after almost twenty years to finally have a Dr Who adventure which is prepared to tackle superstition and unnatural psychodynamics without the need for an alien monster. Yes, there is a manifestation of the Mara, and I’ll not comment on the naff giant serpent, but essentially the Mara is a psychological enemy, a latent evil which inhabits us all, as demonstrated vociferously by Hindle’s deranged antics. Aris’ sudden obsession with power is almost laughable in comparison. What Kinda does is take us beyond the world of technology and into the realm of reason. How successful you consider the serial depends on how much you can be entertained by this principle.
I believe there is plenty to entertain us. The serial isn’t perfect. Malcolm Thornton’s jungle sets are okay, but you always know this is house-bound filming, especially when the designers haven’t bothered to cover up the studio floor. The interiors are realistically small, but uninteresting. There’s a silly automated Total Survival Suit thingamajig which seems superfluous to requirements. It’s there and Nyssa isn’t; the poor lass is side-lined completely, resting up in the TARDIS, which is disappointing as her compassionate attitudes would have benefitted the story. In her place Adric is… well, less said. The Kinda are not very impressive.
What is good are the central supporting roles from Fielding, Todd, Hughes, Rousse and Morris who all grasp the mettle with both hands and deliver consummate performances which make us believe in, fear for and empathise with their situations and actions. Director Peter Grimwade rightly, boldly, forefronts their stories over and above the Doctor’s. Davison, by comparison, just asks all the questions. Kinda is a strong Dr Who story, full of intelligent theories and fantastic performances. It may struggle towards the end, but if audiences wanted an indication of where the Fifth Doctor’s era was going to take us, this adventure firmly pitches us into the preserve of myth and enchantment, sorcery and psychology, the natural cycle and the nature of evil.
Personally, I can’t wait:
4 from 5.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Nineteen
THE VISITATION
Eric Saward’s The Visitation features a wonderfully erudite performance from Michael Robbins as Richard Mace, a 17th Century thespian and “gentleman of the road” – a highwayman in other words. He sparkles well in scenes with Peter Davison, where the latter attempts to cajole the former into deeds of reluctant heroism. Believing everything which is occurring around him must be some form of magic, Mace takes androids, time travellers, TARDISes and Terileptils in his Shakespearian stride.
It’s a good job Robbins and Davison provide a decent double act because there is precious little else to entertain us. Devoid of humour, this pseudo-historical nonsense begins on shaky ground with the Doctor once again admonishing Adric and the youngster copping an almighty strop. Matthew Waterhouse’s increasingly erratic performances are becoming repetitively annoying. Rumours abounded that he and Davison did not get on, thanks in the main to a comment Waterhouse passed suggesting the new star would never be as good as Tom Baker. Whether true or not, their on-screen relationship is fraught and untidy. The Fifth Doctor is far better equipped to deal with Nyssa. Or perhaps she’s better equipped to deal with him, being less prone to panicky outrages, as well as eminently practical and logical. Sarah Sutton may not be the most eloquent actress in the series’ history, but she’s head-and-shoulders above most of her immediate competition. It’s disappointing she spends most of episodes 3 & 4 in the TARDIS knitting together a homemade android destruction machine.
[Point of TARDIS order: how come the android can shoot its laser gun in the TARDIS? I thought weapons didn’t function in its environment?]
The early scenes are reminiscent of The Time Warrior, as a meteor shower pre-empts the arrival of an alien spacecraft. The confused peasantry reminds us of The Time Meddler and the deadly plague which the invaders plan to spread is a shallow imitation of The Silurians. There’s nothing very new here. Even the suggestion the Doctor may have inadvertently started the Great Fire of London harks back to an incident in The Romans. The lizard like Terileptils are a rogue militaristic race. This band of partisans have escaped the horrific conditions of the Tinclavic prison mines of Raaga, but they are not the least bit intimidating, a poorly realised Kraal / Zygon / Sea Devil. The android they use to do some dirty work is an unnecessary hodgepodge resembling a walking glitterball when all it needed to be was a shadow of the Grim Reaper. The location shooting is very welcome and looks grand, so congratulations to the camera crew, but for some reason the alien bases are bathed in green or red light and look distinctly muggy. The inept denouement is embarrassing for all the worst reasons.
The Visitation is spectacularly ordinary:
2½ from 5.
BThe Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Nineteen
BLACK ORCHID
Black Orchid, with its 1920s setting and non-science fiction related plot, marked a return after fifteen years and some eighty-five adventures to the truly historical story. It is most welcome and although ultimately the serial proves more of a diversion from the norm than the start of a successful trend, it succeeds by sheer willingness of the cast to entertain. For good measure breaking records, this is also the first two-part adventure since The Sontaran Experiment in Season 12. Shorter stories would become a regular addition to the Peter Davison era and continue into the latter days of the series.
The Doctor still can’t return Tegan to Heathrow Airport 1981 and instead the TARDIS is waylaid in Cranleigh, Surrey, where the local gentry are holding a cricket match and garden party. Mistaken for a replacement allrounder, the Doctor scores a century and takes a five-for winning the match for the Lord’s team. We knew his cricket whites would come in handy sometime, but the stick of celery which he constantly replaces still goes unexplained…
There’s a mystery afoot at Cranleigh Hall. Nyssa bears an uncanny similarity to Lord Cranleigh’s fiancé Ann, who was once engaged to his brother, George, a famous botanist. Nyssa tries to explain she’s from a place called Traken, but the locals only believe it’s a town near Esher. Their pedantry is ghastly. The two girls decide to play a joke on the guests and wear matching costumes to the fancy dress ball. Tegan dances the Charleston, chats up a Knight of the Realm and drinks screwdriver cocktails. Adric feeds his stomach, constantly. The Doctor though is fascinated by the Black Orchid, which George Cranleigh discovered in the Amazon before his untimely death. While dressing for the party, he accidentally finds the entrance to a priest’s hole and follows the passages to a secret upper floor where a dead body is secreted in a cupboard. Meanwhile, someone kidnaps Ann – or is it Nyssa?
Black Orchid is often compared to the work of Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers, but if these comparisons suggest the story is a ‘whodunit’ they are wide of the mark. There isn’t a mystery to solve in the best of those traditions because we’ve already seen the murders being committed, so we know the killer isn’t among any of the established guests. The addition of a tribal warrior, who is never allowed to venture below the upper floors also blurs the lines of believability. The Doctor doesn’t solve the mystery through observation, interview, clue and deduction, as a Poirot might, he triumphs by stealth and a lucky guess. The disfigured and mentally unstable George Cranleigh is a sorrowful figure, entirely unsuitably for a ‘villain’, if that’s what he’s supposed to be. The treatment meted out to him by his domineering mother is the real crime and it’s dispiriting the Doctor doesn’t broach the subject, being more concerned with rescuing Nyssa / Ann. A little more subtlety in the narrative would have helped.
Despite the one-dimensional plot, there’s a lot to enjoy in Black Orchid: the cricket match, the garden party, the double affair, the gentle humour, the costumes, interiors and locations, the jiving 1920s jazz music, even the performances stretch the imagination: Nyssa and Adric’s constant double-takes at the courtesies of late Edwardian England, Sarah Sutton’s dual playing of the doppelgangers, Peter Davison’s despairing “Why do I always let my curiosity get the better of me?” as the Doctor becomes lost in the secret passageways, Janet Fielding’s Tegan at last appears to be enjoying herself.
Other than the unsettling nature of the story, which is part Jane Eyre, part Hunchback of Notre Dame, and shows little sympathy for the wronged botanist, the most noticeable oddity is how prepared this new Doctor is to try to convince the ignorant he’s a time traveller and even allow people to view the wonders of the TARDIS. Back in the days of William Hartnell, the Doctor was ultra-protective of his personal history and his time machine. He didn’t want Ian and Barbara to step inside; he religiously locked the door and guarded the key. He kept its and his secrets safe. Gradually, in the same way the Time Lords have become demystified, the erosion of the almost deified time machine has become complete. Not only have companions as diverse as Leela, Adric and Tegan piloted the ship, but everyman, alien and his uncle seems to be stepping in and out of its doors. This time it’s the turn of a few policemen, whose exclamations of “Strike me pink” and “It’s extraordinary” hardly cut the mustard. In the 1966 movie Daleks: Invasion Earth: 2150AD, Bernard Cribbins’ uniformed copper fainted, a far more likely reaction. Still, there you have it. If the Fifth Doctor wants to demystify his mode of transport, I guess that’s up to him.
Black Orchid is a fun, inconsequential and unexpected treat. Pity they had to film it during an inclement autumn; sunshine would have brought more joy:
3 from 5.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Nineteen
EARTHSHOCK
The opening episode of Earthshock is intentionally structured so as to misdirect viewers as to who the enemy might be. It is, quite simply, a masterpiece of suspense and terror and, as single episode comparisons go, sits among the very, very best of Dr Who. Director Peter Grimwade handles the cast and cameras with dexterity, squeezing every last drop of tension from the gloomy underground caves, the banter of the unsuspecting military squadron and the twin black-clad silent figures who flit speedily between locales, spitting laser beams from their hands. It’s a slow build. We meet Lt Scott and his troops, and the palaeontologist Prof Kyle, who are all struggling to make sense of the sudden disappearance of her science team. Mysterious power surges are disrupting their hunt. Eventually two of the troopers discover the gory remains of their colleagues unaware they are being observed.
Meanwhile, the Doctor’s been arguing with a petulant Adric, who wants to return to E-Space, feeling his contributions to the TARDIS team are being overlooked in favour of Nyssa. In his own fit of pique, the Doctor accidentally lands the TARDIS in a the same cave system the military troops are exploring. Stepping out to calm down as well as investigate, the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa are mistaken for saboteurs. Suddenly, the deadly black androids appear silently from the shadows, shooting down the troops. Peter Grimwade cuts away to another location entirely, a control centre of shining technology and three silver suited Cybermen. The Leader orders the death of the Doctor.
The climax of this superb opening episode and the return of the Doctor’s second most popular monster was kept well hidden from audiences in 1982. The complete lack of publicity for the Cybermen’s comeback was a masterstroke. So when I and nine million others saw the Cybermen in all their impressive glory, it was a genuine surprise and a thrilling one. They do not disappoint, back to their single-minded ruthless best, although both David Banks as the Leader and Mark Hardy as his Lieutenant display vocal nuances which, like those first sing-song Cyber-voices in The Tenth Planet, hint at the original human being who still inhabits a Cyber-soul. They have also acquired an understanding of vengeance, for the Cyber Leader makes the Doctor’s life a misery out of pure spite for past defeats. Writer Eric Saward has mined the archives for the best bits of Cyber-stories, combined and reimagined them together in a thrill packed adventure which never lets up pace from start to finish.
[Three black and white clips from The Tenth Planet, The Wheel in Space and Revenge of the Cybermen are used to illustrate the Cybermen’s affinity with the Doctor, which is a smart touch. The Cybermen hatching from their cocoons brought back memories of Tomb of the Cybermen and as they maraud to Malcolm Clarke’s techno beat music score, we are reminded of their marching in The Moonbase.]
Unusually for Dr Who, this serial is almost entirely action orientated. This helps immeasurably to cover up the numerous quibbles which closer inspection and repeated viewings reveal. Episode 2 kicks off with the continued devastating battle with the sprite-like androids. Following the stand-off, the Doctor uncovers and disconnects a bomb powerful enough to destroy most of planet Earth, he traces the arming signal to a space freighter on warp-drive [odd this, as Dr Who has never knowingly borrowed Star Trek techno-jargon; it’s a first and from now on it wouldn’t be the last], discovers silos chock full of Cybermen, battles them from the ship’s bridge, gets captured and has an explosive verbal and physical set-to with the Cyber Leader in the TARDIS control room. There are gun battles and fights galore. If you wanted to see how the Star Wars generation begins to influence Dr Who, this is the strongest evidence. The Cybermen stomp around the darkened interior of the space freighter like Imperial Stormtroopers, blasting all and sundry to smithereens, while Tegan and Lt Scott huddle, hide and try to avoid them. The Doctor, like a young Jedi Knight, is arguing the toss with the impatient, vulgar, staunchly traditional, Captain Briggs, eventually winning his argument and catching a Cyberman in an anti-matter trap. Not much good it does, the villains simply blow up the second door onto the bridge.
But what’s all this violence in aid of? The year is 2875 and the Cybermen have rejuvenated their race and numbers. An intergalactic conference is taking place on Earth and the Cybermen planned to explode the Cyber-Bomb thus leaving most of the Galactic Federation leaderless and the galaxies open to attack and conquest.
[Point of order: I’m assuming it’s a Galactic Federation conference; no-one mentions it, but the time-line fits. It might also be a peace conference with the Draconians, but that would be occurring some 300 years after the events of Frontier in Space and I assume politics and intergalactic cooperation will have moved on by then.]
Once the Doctor deactivates the bomb, the Cybermen revert to Plan B, using the freighter as a missile. The Doctor realises the ship is so large and travelling so fast it will cause a cataclysm as enormous as the one which wiped out the dinosaurs, effectively killing all life on Earth. Adric, left behind on the bridge with the crew, tries to override the activation codes, but only succeeds in sending the ship hurtling into the past. While the Cyber Leader is defeated in the TARDIS and the crew escape the stricken ship, Adric remains alone, certain he can reverse the polarity… or whatever. You really do need to ignore the obvious questions: how does falsely cracking an alien computer code result in a freighter going back in time and which timeline have the escaping freighter crew flown into? If you think too hard, the whole premise falls about your head.
I’m no lover of Adric, and I acknowledge this is a manipulated ending to provide closure, but his final scenes are rather poignant. Here is this young man, a little childish, certainly sheltered, struggling with his own identity and his relationships with women and authority figures, a man too easily influenced, too easily riled, a man seeking affirmation for his life and work, and finally he’s achieved it: mathematical problems are his forte and he gamely applies himself to the problem-solving task with the same urgency the Doctor would. For a brief moment he’s in control on the bridge of the freighter. The older, experienced pair of leaders, Briggs and Scott, can do nothing. They are entirely reliant on Adric’s genius. Ultimately, he’s abandoned on the freighter watching the world and his death rush towards him. It’s a solemn, powerful moment.
No companion has been killed off since the Season 3 epic The Daleks’ Masterplan when Katrina was ejected into space and the [disputed] crew member Sara Kingdom bit the dust – literally. It doesn’t serve as any consolation that Adric’s gold badge is the weapon the Doctor uses to asphyxiate the Cyber Leader, a tussle of much brutality ended with a volley of point-blank laser bolts to the Leader’s wriggling torso. The TARDIS controls have been damaged in the fight and the Doctor is unable to save Adric: Time Lord Law interferes. The Doctor could theoretically go back and rescue him, but that would disturb the natural cycle of the universe. Instead he stands forlorn with his companions. Dr Who has rarely been better or more affecting. The credits scroll up silently over a shot of the boy’s broken gold star; a morbidly sentimental step too far perhaps, but a send-off with some emotion.
Throughout it all, director Peter Grimwade never lets control of the tiller lapse. The action is efficient, vicious and palpable. The Cybermen are excellent adversaries, so cold you entirely understand why the Doctor is moved to violent action, reflecting his own conversation with the intransigent Cyber Leader as he pleads for Tegan’s life:
Doctor: “Emotions have their uses.”
Leader: “They restrict and curtail the intellect, the logic of the mind.”
Doctor: “They also enhance life. When did you last have the pleasure of smelling a flower, watching a sunset, eating a well-prepared meal?”
Leader: “These things are irrelevant.”
Doctor: “For some people, small, beautiful events is what life is all about.”
While the Doctor might here be speaking of sunsets, by the time Adric is being obliterated to space dust the audience can see the emotion which forces him into aggressive action and then to sudden mourning. Davison is particularly astute at the story’s climax. Despite all their bickering and all his uselessness, Adric wasn’t deserving of a fate so cruel. Nor are the wholly innocent millions residing on Earth deserving of their impending death. No mention though is made of the millions of dinosaurs this space-age time travelling meteorite exterminated.
In thespian terms there is hardly a foot wrong. Not only are the companions and the Doctor on form – although Nyssa again gets stuck in the TARDIS for an episode or two – but so are the support cast. James Warwick’s vigorous Lt Scott and his second-in-command Snyder [Suzi Arden], Beryl Reid as the intransigent Cpt Briggs and June Bland as her second Berger, Alec Sabin’s traitor Ringway and Clare Clifford’s Prof Kyle, all of these are genuine, well presented characters, displaying energy, verve and emotion. Even David Banks’ Cyber Leader comes across as a personally calculatingly bitter enemy. I much prefer the Cybermen when they reveal glimpses of their human forebears, it makes them more realistic. Beryl Reid in particular shines. Briggs is a woman past her prime as a Captain, motivated only by money, serving no fools, yet fully prepared to risk her life when it comes to the head. Her casting and performance is often criticised, but there is a place for older characters on Dr Who and why should we not show them being capable, arrogant, assertive and conciliatory as befits the role? Reid is a fine actress and although she admitted later on she had not a clue what was happening, she acquits herself brilliantly and believably. I should offer plaudits too for the non-discriminatory nature of this vision of future Terran society. Women are shown to be as capable as men, occupying positions of authority and standing; a pity the production couldn’t have included minorities in the casting, but I’ll not labour the point.
Nor will I highlight the dozen or so implausibilities in the plot. They really don’t matter because the narrative doesn’t let them matter. I can nit-pick with the finest, but sometimes it is best to accept the rough with the smooth. Suffice to say, none are as glaringly obvious as the issues I experienced with The Moonbase or Tomb of the Cybermen. The production values are better than first class. The cave sets are realistic and shrouded in shadow, allowing those pesky androids to drift in and out of the dark. The freighter interiors are cavernously superb; the bridge head, peppered with electronic consoles and readout screens, felt fussy but provides a suitable arena for verbal and physical confrontation. Designer Bernard Lloyd Jones should take a bow. Top plaudits too for Keith Hopper’s camerawork, much of it in half-light, and John Gatland’s atmospheric sound recording. Steve Bowman and Dave Chapman offer splendid effects, including some fine model work, and better than normal laser bolts. The marvellous presentation helps distract us from those narrative inconsistencies, including the freighter's baffling timeslip.
The Fifth Doctor’s debut season had been jogging along quite nicely, but with Earthshock it finally hit top gear and delivered an adventure which can quite easily sit alongside some of the very best of Dr Who. It might not be as thought-provoking as some stories during Jon Pertwee’s socially conscious era, but Earthshock demonstrates Dr Who can still entertain with consistent visceral brilliance.
Loved it:
5 from 5.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Nineteen
TIME FLIGHT
This is something to do with the Master’s TARDIS being under repair. We never find out how he escaped from Castrovalva. He’s taken to kidnapping Concordes and hauling them through a time-contour back to the Pleistocene era so the hypnotised passengers can help him break into the temple of the Xeraphin, a gestation alien race stuck on Earth in its pre-history, allowing him to source their power. For some inexplicable reason he needs to disguise himself as an obese Arab magician called Kalid. The Doctor is baffled. Nyssa looks pretty. Tegan gets stuck at Heathrow Airport.
Time Flight is perplexing not only in its plot, which can’t be explained without resorting to reams of notes, but in its execution. Quite how the production team expected to recreate prehistoric Earth on an end of season budget is anyone’s guess. The sets are unimaginative, a series of underground caverns or rocky plains. The plasmatron monsters are so appalling I can’t even describe them. The Airfix model of the Concorde shows up the cheapness of the production. So does the scene where Tegan pushes an airplane wheel around like a dinner plate. The acting is bargain basement stuff, your worst theatrical nightmare coming true. Writer Peter Grimwade ought to stick to directing. This is a horrendous screenplay. There’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo about psycho-kinetic beings [again???]. The Master’s plans are so convoluted a snake couldn’t unravel them. Several characters disappear half-way through without any explanation. The whole exercise is stodgy to the extreme.
The most interesting aspect is the opening few moments, when the first Concorde vanishes and we learn the Doctor has been busy returning Briggs, Scott and Berger to Earth of the 27th Century. Adric’s passing gets a mention. Then it’s back to basics and a run around Heathrow, but with more success than Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor managed in The Faceless Ones. The location scenes and the stock Concorde footage is well done, but you can’t work miracles with dialogue as crass as this.
You sense, given care and attention, this serial could have grown legs. It was the sort of complicated extended Master story they excelled at in the Pertwee era and could have developed into a slow burn of a six-parter. In fact, the Doctor mentions the Brigadier and UNIT in an attempt to explain the TARDIS’ presence on Terminal 3’s mezzanine level. A faceless, voiceless nobody called Sir John Sudbury requests the Doctor investigate the vanishing airplanes. Always happy to oblige, the Doctor does just that, but it’s a rushed investigation at best during which I discover the TARDIS doesn’t have an internal gravity at all. Back to basics indeed.
John Nathan Turner really should have recruited Nicholas Courtney, dressed him up as Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart and fed him Captain Stapley’s lines. The sentences even sound like the Brigadier! Not bringing back UNIT was a missed opportunity which might at least have provided some cheerful nostalgia.
As it stands, Time Flight is unbearably terrible:
1 from 5.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Nineteen
Summary
Season 19, perhaps more than any other since the early days of Seasons 2, 3 or 4, is a mixed bag. There are some very good adventures, some bad ones and some average ones. The consistent groundwork laid by John Nathan Turner in Season 18 appears to be bearing fruit. Thoughtful stories hold the audience’s interest and good performances keep some of the lesser episodes from failing too badly. Only Time Flight is entirely problematic. Both it and the opener Castrovalva, struggle with replicating the writer’s intentions, but Time Flight also has a narrative which defies any kind of clarity and that’s a huge let down given the general accessibility of the scripts. It also looks as if the show simply ran out of money. Budget was always a problem for Dr Who and expanding each season from 5 stories for Pertwee’s era, 6 for Baker’s and now 7 for Davison’s is stretching it too far. Quantity does not always lead to quality and several times the productions lack refinement. If the closer had been dumped, or if Four to Doomsday or The Visitation had been postponed to the next season, the overall production values may well have increased.
The season also had to deal with its new twice-weekly time slot. This doesn’t appear to have been a problem, most episodes reaching audiences of nine or ten million, but after only thirteen weeks, the series would now be off the air until next January, an eternity at thirty-nine weeks. The BBC filled the gap with a few summer repeats, but it isn’t enough; one of the beauties of the program was the impression it was always on the box. By the time the new batch of stories come along, many casual viewers will have moved on to another early evening program.
Peter Davison as the new Doctor is fine. He’s quite sharp with his charges, like an idealistic first-post teacher, but I like his casual demeanour, which hints at playfulness, but not silliness. He gives each script the attention it deserves, even the dross, and manfully struggles with some head-shakingly crass situations. When he’s good, like his predecessors, Davison has excelled. After a slightly shaky beginning, he improved tremendously and by The Visitation, his slightly off-hand manner was getting quite agreeable. He perhaps needs to tone down the hectoring – as he did in Earthshock when confronting the Cyber Leader – and now Adric has gone the bursts of quarrelsomeness will probably dissipate. Best of all, I enjoyed Davison when he’s up against it, when things are not turning his way and the Doctor is at a loss to fathom his situation: arrested in Black Orchid, head in hands; struggling with his memory lapses in Castrovalva; pondering the silos on the seemingly empty freighter or defusing a bomb in Earthshock. Here, there is a sense of a Time Lord not quite in full control of his actions. A change from Hartnell, Baker and Pertwee who always seem to know, and Troughton who acted the fool.
His companions are more miss than hit. Tegan’s growing stronger and Janet Fielding deserves plaudits; although she appears to be written out this was never the case, she was always going to return the next season. The producer and script writer were juggling with the idea of reverting back to the opening few seasons of the show when the concluding episode of the adventure delivered another minor cliff-hanger to lead into the following story [Four to Doomsday, Earthshock and Time Flight all share this to a lesser or greater degree]. Sarah Sutton’s Nyssa has to spend too much time sick, captured, brainwashed or simply standing around doing very little. Perhaps with Adric out of the way she’ll have more to accomplish. We ought to end with Adric, for if any one moment defines Season 19 it is this young man’s unexpected end, a sacrifice to save others and one which lasts long in the Dr Who memory banks. Never before has an established companion made such an impactful exit. He won’t be missed, but the team gave him a grand send off.
Currently, John Nathan Turner’s doing an okay job. He’s steadied the ship, renovated the captain, removed the humour, given back some of the show’s science-babble, instilled a few new characters, brought back a couple of old favourites, and generally tried to make the show entertaining enough for adults while still accessible for children. It’s a hard balance, but Peter Davison’s boyish appearance and easy charm as well as the appeal of his two female companions just about cracks it.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Twenty
ARC OF INFINITY
Bringing back classic villains after a few seasons can be successful. It worked well for the Ice Warriors in The Curse of Peladon; not so well for Davros and the jury is still out on Anthony Ainley’s new Master. There never really seemed a need to bring back Omega, Stephen Thorne’s revenge ridden, insanity prone Time Lord from The Three Doctors, but John Nathan Turner did it anyway. The outcome is a desultory effort which adds nothing to Time Lord history and takes away from Omega’s personal villainous legacy. A lot of money was thrown at this, including a foreign location shoot in Holland. It contributes nothing but surface gloss. The substance beneath it is a hurried and harried mess.
Omega somehow survived the catastrophic explosion which destroyed his antimatter world, has made contact with a treacherous Time Lord and obtained a TARDIS through which he has gained access to the Matrix. Omega left the anti-matter universe through a dimension gateway in Rondel, an intergalactic region devoid of all stellar activity and formerly the location of a collapsed Q-Star. These galactic oddities are so named because they emit Quad magnetism, the only known shield for antimatter. The region’s colloquial name is the Arc of Infinity. To exist in our universe, Omega needs to shed his Quad magnet suit and bond biometrically with another Time Lord. For some reason the Doctor is the prime candidate. For some other reason Omega’s TARDIS is stuck in Amsterdam. So are Tegan and her cousin, who are menaced by something called an Ergon, a psycho-kinetic monster which resembles an enormous plucked chicken.
So, there’s a traitor in the High Council and the dithering Time Lords force the Doctor’s TARDIS to return to Gallifrey where he’s arrested and sentenced to death lest he prevaricate the biometric bonding. Nyssa forcefully takes charge of investigations. As well as forgetting the meaning of the word ‘justice’, Gallifreyans have neglected how to build a-new and instead construct furniture from Ikea; I was very impressed with the comfy leather sofas. Time Lord costumes are less and less convincing however, all these swishing robes and guards with peacock plumes stuck in their helmets. Apparently Leela was meant to return, which explains why Nyssa keeps shooting everyone; she’s obviously been given the Sevateem warrior’s lines and prompts. Tegan’s comeback is hopelessly derivative, a lucky coincidence, and she ends up running around chilly Amsterdam in a skimpy summer outfit. The Doctor does not look happy to see her.
Peter Davison’s performance starts off frantic and never ceases pace. He’s only following the narrative action, which flits from event to event with increasing speed, some scenes lasting bare seconds. He’s not given any support from anyone. Seasoned veterans such as Dr Who returnees Michael Gough, Leonard Sachs and Ian Collier are as bad as new comers like Colin Baker, Andrew Boxer and Neil Duglish. It’s hard to understand how someone can overact in a monster costume, but Ian Collier manages it. Latterly, Davison has to play the reconstituted Omega and this short sequence is excellent. Suddenly, the tale feels emotionally relevant and for a brief period we sense Omega’s longing to experience real life again. The moment where he watches street entertainers, smiling with the children, has tiny reminiscences of James Whale’s Frankenstein. A little more of this kind of subtlety might have helped Arc of Infinity to succeed.
There’s no subtlety from the pre and post production crews either. Roger Limb’s dreadful music score pounds away, interfering with every scene. The effects are trashy. Johnny Byrne’s script goes even further towards demystifying the Time Lords. They appear to be incompetent, their justice system is nothing of the sort and their entire security set up seems wholly inadequate. There’s a complete lack of scale on Gallifrey now; the planet and its fabulous citadel appears small and insignificant, highlighted by the tableau of the Council Chamber doubling up as an execution space. Ron Jones directs with a sledgehammer. The whole episode feels like an expensive broken folly. Still at least I discovered why guns were suddenly being fired in the Doctor’s TARDIS – the space ship’s state of temporal grace is malfunctioning. It’s on the Doctor’s list of maintenance repairs.
Arc of Infinity is not a good way to kick off a celebratory season:
1 from 5.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Twenty
SNAKEDANCE
While Arc of Infinity brought back a monster from ten years ago, Snakedance chooses to reimagine the Mara, who so successfully graced Kinda less than one year before. The Doctor has been training Nyssa and Tegan to pilot the TARDIS. During coordinate lessons, Tegan sent the TARDIS to Manussa, not Earth. This instantly raises a question: what’s been happening in between these two stories? Tegan was already on Earth, so why does the Doctor suddenly want to return there, and having left of her own accord this time, why also would Tegan? You feel many weeks and months may have elapsed since we last met the time travellers, the kind of unexplained gaps we occasionally saw in the Hartnell era. This opens the gate for a whole slew of extra-curricular adventures, the kind novelists penned for the non-canon but officially sanctioned ‘continuation’ books. Strange though that the Aussie air hostess hasn’t changed her outfit. Nyssa has and about time too.
Back to Snakedance. Christopher Bailey’s second Mara story doesn’t quite have the punch of his first, partly because it isn’t doing anything the first adventure did. This is exactly the problem Terror of the Autons had in relation to Spearhead from Space. Ditto The Silurians and The Sea Devils or the Peladon duology. All second stories hold few surprises and even worse for Snakedance the climax is almost exactly the same, except here instead of using mirrors to banish the evil python, the Doctor uses the projection of mental energy through a Great Crystal. If you pay attention, you’ll also recognise many similarities between Snakedance and the Third Doctor’s swansong Planet of the Spiders, not least the psychic properties of the seductive crystal, which the evil Mara needs to manifest itself. Fear also plays a significant role in each monster’s anticipated victory.
By examining ancient runes and experimenting with a smaller replica of the crystal, the Doctor and Nyssa realise that the jewel is manmade. It was the Manussan’s ancestors who first manifested the Mara by focussing their psychic power through the Great Crystal, thus projecting all their ambitions, angers and fears into a single living entity. The Mara, through the great Sumaran Empire, ruled Manussa for three hundred years, until it was banished by the Snakedance and [this is unexplained] took up residence on Deva Loka. Now, through Tegan’s susceptible sleep-prone mind, the Mara wants to manifest itself again.
Does that make sense? Did I explain it right? One of the problems with the serial is it confuses what is essentially a very simple plot because the writer is obviously padding his premise. There is so much discussion about the properties of the crystal, and the revelation it was manmade was genuinely fantastical, but when the Doctor eventually learns he must use it to focus on the ‘still’ I became hopelessly lost. Given the Mara’s main supernatural ability seems to be a mesmeric one, you’d think focussing on not looking at its eyes might be a better instruction. The final conflict does indeed involve just that, but it’s hard to see how the Doctor reversed the process of the Mara’s materialisation on his own, when the runic messages clearly indicated a group of menthids were necessary. Dojjen, the all-powerful shaman, doesn’t even join the fight; he wanders off with a rueful smile. Thankfully, when the Mara does finally emerge off Tegan’s arm tattoo, the beast is better imagined than the one we saw in Kinda. The superimposition of Tegan’s head over the serpent’s mouth is well done, giving visual and verbal interpretation to its hissing form. In fact this effect is used several times, most notably in a carnival hall of mirrors, where the Mara tempts Tegan and she finally succumbs.
This has been the climax of a slow build and Janet Fielding has never been better. She takes on a whole gamut of characters: as a child, as the scared adult, the provocative seductress, the menacing Mara and the possessed Tegan, all mischievousness and ominous, heavy toned intimidation. The scene where the pathetic showman Drydale expounds his intention to utilise Tegan for capital gain before being summarily petrified into doing her bidding is memorable in the intensity of her motionlessness. Director Fiona Cumming moves the camera around the static Janet Fielding, following the extravagant swagger of the showman, but all the while the audience waits for her to move; we know it’s coming, but when… A very strong scene and the serial has many of these verbal jousts in the opening two episodes: Tegan confronting a soothsayer, the visualisation of her nightmare, the curator Ambril explaining the history of Manussa and the legends of the cave system, the bored Lon discussing politics with his equally uninterested mother, the Doctor listening to Chel’s sympathetic understanding of Maran mythology, Tegan laughing at other people’s misfortune and Nyssa’s confusion at her callousness.
The problems for the serial start in the third act when the Doctor spends most of the episode stuck in prison reading Dojjen’s cryptically scribed autobiography. This ragged solitary old shaman spends his time meditating on a sand dune. Nyssa gains access to the Federator’s palace with ease, so much ease we never see it, and she even knows where Ambril’s quarters are, despite the fact she’s not met him or even knows who he is. Meanwhile, the Federator’s bored and spoilt son decides to take up the Mara’s cause after being seduced by Tegan’s evil self. At this point you feel the need for something more. The Mara is doing nothing but pervert a subtle palace coup as Lon, or rather the Mara, seeks to usurp his father’s position and return Manussa to the age of the Sumarans. It might have been more effective to have Tegan mesmerising more disciples and taking over the ten-year ceremony which plays a central part in the serial’s climax. As it is, Lon takes centre stage, dressed in a sexy little toga and looking a bit daft repeating a series of verbal affirmations, none of which speed us to the finale. Eventually, Tegan pops up at the very end, unleashing the Mara on the public. This scene might have worked better with a host of dignitaries; after all, why would the Mara want to enthral the peasant class when the elite clearly hold sway in this rudimentary society? What we get instead is distinctly below par.
There are some interesting aspects to the story. I liked the extended history lesson we get of the planet Manussa, that it has three separate eras, that archaeology has uncovered relics from its past, that it is steeped in mythology, that its nations have formed a Federation ruled by a hereditary monarch referred to as the Federator. It hasn’t developed technically, but as the Doctor discovers, in a distant antiquity, great intellectual strides were being made; the Mara’s reign destroyed those scientific impulses and the planet has barely recovered from its three hundred year plunge into mysticism. In fact, the Mara is the first truly supernatural monster Dr Who has ever featured, having not been created organically but through the collective minds of ancient Manussans. Its power resides in the fear of others and makes it a much more interesting entity than some of the Doctor’s more popular adversaries.
Tele-visually, I particularly enjoyed the scenes in the marketplace, which highlight the level of economic, industrial and societal development. It’s a cross between an Arab bazaar and a flea market, the kind of place you’d expect to find an old carny like Vorg [see Carnival of Monsters]. Hiding the TARDIS in a cramped back alley stuffed with bric-a-brac was an affectionate tribute to its very first appearance in An Unearthly Child. The set designers could have made things more realistic by spreading some sand on the studio floor though. Nonetheless these cluttered scenes brought back memories of The Crusades and even The Underwater Menace, both serials where the Doctor and his companions spent time evading soldiers and hunting for clues among the throng. The carnival aspects were well-realised too, although the processioning snake wasn’t near impressive enough. The Punch and Judy show with its crocodile replaced by a serpent was an original notion, suggesting the Manussans might be descendants of Earth colonists. The kids show clearly displays the influence the Mara holds over the population at large through oral tradition. It’s a sudden interest in these traditions which sparks Martin Clune’s louche and very believable Lon into life. This brings him into conflict with Tanha, his overbearing mother, played with much assiduousness by Colette O’Neil, and Ambril, a solid John Carson.
There’s not much wrong with the performances. They keep us interested when the action starts to waver. The problems with Snakedance lie elsewhere: another over-involved plot and a general sense of a story not going anywhere we haven’t been before. Expanding the scope of the Mara’s intentions, and bringing more emphasis on the Snake Dancers themselves, an aspect which is virtually brushed aside until a single line spoken by Dojjen a few minutes from the end, might have helped. Like Time Flight, the story would benefit from a longer run time; in fact there appears to be plenty already edited out in addition to those obviously excised scenes involving Nyssa in part 3. For instance, the serial starts too briskly – why don’t we see the Doctor instructing his companions on the rudiments of TARDIS navigation? – and concludes too suddenly; there’s no summary coda. I’m not a fan of the six-part adventure but Snakedance seems to plead for the format. There’s a feeling we’re missing acres of explanatory script.
A huge disappointment:
3 from 5.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Twenty
MAWDRYN UNDEAD
Let’s not kid ourselves that Mawdryn Undead is great science fiction. It isn’t. It is intriguing and has a faint air of nostalgia, primarily brought on by the return of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and one is grateful perhaps for a more nuanced slice of villainy – the unnamed group of unfortunate mutants, led by the titular Mawdryn, simply want to die – however, it is so convoluted, and so dull, that it ceases to be entertaining and becomes an endurance test of relentless mediocrity.
Let’s start with the inept opening episode, set primarily at a posh boarding school. Two students, Turlough and Ibbotson, steal a schoolmaster’s vintage car and crash it. This whole episode and the shenanigans which follow in the headmaster’s office, the nurse’s infirmary and at the school’s obelisk folly are directed and written with the [in]competence of a school play. I may as well be watching a skit of Billy Bunter. Drama: nil. Script: stereotypical Mr Chips garbage. Humour: non-existent. Acting: atrocious. Scenario: almost interesting. Thank goodness Nicholas Courtney turns up as the Brigadier to cast a moment of much needed gravitas. He’s retired to a maths teacher’s job, which seems unlikely until you learn the part was originally written as Ian Chesterton. I can almost imagine actor William Russell’s stupefied face as his older Ian meets Peter Davison’s very sprightly Doctor, who attempts to explain Time Lord regeneration to him. It would certainly make for some interesting dialogue. Russell wasn’t available, so the Brigadier makes a safer reappearance. I enjoyed the mystery of his amnesia, which is resolved in a lovely fashion by the adventure’s end. Nicholas Courtney is excellent indeed.
Unfortunately, the production team ran rough shod over all the established time lines of UNIT, Lethbridge-Stewart and the Third Doctor’s adventures by basing this tale in two time zones, 1977 and 1983, neither of which make any linear sense. If the makers of Dr Who want to bring back previous characters they ought to note the history of those fictional individuals. In a show with such a long running accepted time frame, of which novel adaptations, magazines, fanzines and critical theories are being written, it isn’t acceptable to simply bulldoze over that history. It makes for an enormous plot hole, not just for Mawdryn Undead, but for the whole show from The Web of Fear and the foundation of UNIT way back in Season Five, adventures quite obviously set in the mid-1980s.
This is poor enough; wait till I get started on Paddy Kingsland’s ridiculous invasive music score or the tardiness of Mark Strickson’s Turlough, who may be a schoolboy alien, but is clearly several years too old for a boarder and acts like a rabbit caught in several headlights at once. And I thought Matthew Waterhouse’s Adric was bad. Turlough’s a non-starter from the very moment he opens his mouth and sneers in that feckless, selfish, snidey manner he has. That he lies and cheats and is basically on an assassination mission does not endear him to this viewer. At the end, he sheepishly asks if he can join the TARDIS crew. The Doctor must reckon something’s afoot; his offer of welcome is extremely reserved. So is mine, chiefly because I know this dude is a wrong ’un. We’ve seen him communicating with the Black Guardian and accepting an offer of a free trip home if he can kill the Doctor. “You’re powerful enough to destroy him yourself,” Turlough quite rightly claims. “I can’t be seen to interfere,” states the Black Guardian. So, cue another plot hole: from the off Turlough should have nothing to fear, because if the Black Guardian can’t be seen to interfere in the Doctor’s death, he can’t be seen to interfere in anyone’s – so why is Turlough so scared of the blustering, black robed, gob-spitting, hallucination? He never even physically meets him, only hears him through a communication crystal or via a strange and very poorly realised hallucinogenic. This is the least threatening appearance of an uber-villain Dr Who has ever provided. Valentine Dyall, who barely featured in The Armageddon Factor, is still so narked the Doctor thwarted his plan for inducing cosmic chaos he’s got a skinny runt of a boarding school boy to drop rocks on the Time Lord’s head. The useless scamp can’t even do that. Hopeless. Just dire. There’s another four-letter word but I can’t use it here.
[Point of order: when we met the White Guardian way back in The Ribos Operation, he sat on cane furniture, looking neatly coiffured and sipping sherry in what seemed to resemble a Garden of Tranquillity. He might have been the ‘good’ half of universal balance, but he wasn’t averse to a hint of blackmail to get the Doctor’s assistance. We later learnt this charming man was the Black Guardian in disguise, so we know he’s able to create world’s which would astonish his visitors and draw them into his fold. Yet here, he appears against a weird pop-art spiral background of pink and blue squares which is so badly executed it resembles something drawn by school children. Dr Who has a production crew of consummate professionals. Couldn’t they have come up with something more impressively mind-expanding than this? Shading the lens in gauze, distorting the viewfinder, shadows and fog… anything to suggest mystery and malevolence. What we get instead is, well, what is it exactly? Let’s just say it’s crap and leave it at that.]
Is there a story? Yes. A bunch of naughty scientists from some undisclosed time and location obtained a metamorphic symbiosis regenerator from Gallifrey. I don’t know how they managed this. We don’t learn. It wasn’t a gift like the one given to the Minyans [see Underworld] for Mawdryn specifically claims they stole it. The scientists were captured and the Time Lords removed the correct energy source. One assumes this would need to come from a TARDIS in the same way the Doctor’s regenerations are in part fuelled by energy from the time capsule [see The Tenth Planet, Castrovalva]. Instead, the scientists became perpetually deathless mutations, stuck on their elaborate star ship, caught in a constant time warp ellipse. Their only possibility of escape is to activate an onboard transmat, which they can use every six years once the star ship draws close enough to Earth. The Doctor’s attempts to relocate Tegan with Quantas Airways c.1983 led him directly into the transmat’s path and an emergency landing. Handy for everyone all-round then: Turlough, the Black Guardian, Mawdryn, the Brigadier, maybe not the Doctor who realises the only way out of the situation is to use his remaining regenerative lifeforces to allow the mutants one final fatal transformation. Luckily there’s eight of them. Imagine if there were eighty-eight? Thankfully, the Brigadier is on hand in both time zones, and thanks to the unique properties of time travel is in danger of meeting himself, a catastrophic moment known as the Blimovitch Limitation Effect [see The Day of the Daleks] and one which might just save the situation, but more through luck than anyone’s judgement.
I wasn’t as confused as I had been the first time I watched this four-part nonsense, but it really does take some unravelling. I was impressed by Peter Davison’s interpretation of the Doctor, particularly when he chooses to sacrifice his life as a Time Lord to save his friends, a moment which deserved longer reflection than the few seconds it gets – the soul-wrenching crisis doesn’t really sink in as it’s barely discussed. Janet Fielding too offers another fine performance as the almost permanently nervy Tegan. The major complaint isn’t the mutant narrative either, which is handled well.
No. It’s the introduction of Turlough, the overarching Black Guardian plot, the time frames, the dreadful minor supporting performances, the complete lack of anything like the simplest of sensibilities. For instance, why does everyone suddenly know so much about the side effects of time travel, how does Mawdryn first gain entry to the TARDIS and why is it never once locked, why does everybody have to run everywhere, why are the mutants sleeping in a hidden compartment on a totally empty spaceship, why is it decorated like an art-deco cruise liner, who are the mutants, where are they from, who is Turlough, where is he from and why is he so annoying? The list of questions is endless. When David Collings’ Mawdryn declares “It is finished” with as much sombre straight-facedness as a Messiah escaping from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, I was rather pleased it was. There’s an unsatisfying UNIT-esque explosion to end the tale and I breathed a heavy sigh of relief.
For the most part, Mawdryn Undead has little to recommend it. I’d like to say the actors try, but I’m not sure even they understood what they were doing, other than running backwards and forwards between corridors, schools, the TARDIS and a transmat capsule, whether in 1977 or 1983. Peter Grimwade’s script is mostly a dud. Peter Moffatt’s direction is leaden. Stephen Scott’s designs are passable. There are a host of cute little nods to previous Dr Who adventures – notice Tom Baker’s blood-red overcoat, the Brigadier’s reminiscences, “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” – but cute little nods and returning villains and companions are not enough to sustain an adventure which has promise but simply can’t keep it.
It was great to see Nicholas Courtney again. It reminds me how much he was missed from The Android Invasion and The Seeds of Doom, as well as his potential to appear in Time Flight. Courtney’s extended scenes with Davison and with Janet Fielding’s Tegan are exceptional and bring back a warm feeling of wistfulness which the adventure as a whole doesn’t deserve. It’s lucky Courtney is in it, for without his valuable turn and the more sensitive performances he draws from Davison and Fielding whenever he’s on screen, Mawdryn Undead would be a comprehensive flop:
2 from 5.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Twenty
TERMINUS
After the unusual, nuanced villainy of Mawdryn Undead, Season 20 surprises again with a serial in which nobody dies.
The main antagonist here is the Black Guardian who keeps nattering to Turlough like some overgrown scowling goblin whose hopped onto his shoulder and won’t disappear. Valentine Dyall and Mark Strickson are a bad comic double act, overacting every possible second they get when on screen together. Janet Fielding’s Tegan has taken an enormous dislike to the Ginger-One, even more so now they’ve had to spend an entire adventure trapped together in the ventilation system of a transporter star ship. These two contribute nothing to the story which works adequately well without them. Nyssa, poor lass, gets infected with Lazar’s disease and is kidnapped by a giant bi-pedal beagle called the Garm – another in a long list of recent dreadfully inadequate monsters – still at least this one’s friendly. Sarah Sutton is finally given something meaningful and constructive to do. Strange how the infection leads to Nyssa stripping down to her under-slip for most of the runtime. It’s not as sexy as it sounds. Apparently, the actress’s fan mail kept asking why Nyssa spent most of the previous season trussed up in long trousers and a neck-high blouse, so the act of shredding her clothes was deliberately added by the writer, although it isn’t entirely clear why she suddenly drops her skirt. “I’m so hot,” she moans. Ah, well, there you go then.
This is Nyssa’s final outing in the TARDIS. At the end of the adventure, she elects to stay behind on the titular space station Terminus, essentially to become a scientific nurse, using the skills she was taught on Traken to create an antidote to the Lazar disease. It seems wholly appropriate for the faithful, calm and clearheaded Nyssa to be thinking like this and is one of the most effective departures a companion’s ever been afforded. I thought the young Space Raider Olvir was going to profess his love for her, a story thread which did seem to be developing, but is quietly forgotten; maybe it did happen, as we never learn exactly what Olvir and his superior Kira choose to do once the Doctor resolves all the conflict on the stricken Terminus.
The adventure kicks off with some Black Guardian / Turlough sabotage on board the TARDIS. The unbreakable time capsule is broken up when the Ginger-One removes the Space-Time Element. It isn’t clear how the Black Guardian knows where this is located or the importance of it. The break-up effects are more than reasonable. The TARDIS prevents its destruction by materialising in a transpositional space, latched onto the side of the nearest object, an empty transport star ship.
[Point of TARDIS order: according to the Doctor, this fail safe has never worked before. We don’t see the TARDIS exterior in this story, only a wall, which appears to resemble the wall of the transport ship. So, I assume the chameleon circuit finally activated, or has the transposition materialisation meant the original edifice overrides the TARDIS structure?
[At some point, the TARDIS must reconstitute itself, or else when the Doctor returned he wouldn’t be able to dematerialise. The TARDIS break-up is never mentioned again. From a writing point of view, this seems foolish. If you’re going to invent a crisis, you really need to provide a solution and, while everyone lives and we get a nice little adventure out of it, the removal of the Space-Time Element is never resolved.]
Back to the adventure. Nyssa goes missing, the Doctor follows her, Tegan and Turlough get lost, two Space Raider pirates board ship and get abandoned when their pilot realises the transport is heading for Terminus, the destination for all Lazars. Lazar’s disease is a thinly veiled interpretation of leprosy. The idea of an outcast sector of society has promise, although it is a rather unpleasant and unsettling promise, sufferers being sentenced to captivity and, it is strongly hinted, death. They’re all dressed up like extras from Ben Hur. This is a shocking premise for Dr Who and is quite effectively managed. I was immediately reminded of those early episodes where the Doctor did research into plagues to help the plight of afflicted societies [The Sensorites, The Ark, The Silurians]. Instead, it’s Nyssa who discovers the solution.
In a large plot-hole, Olvir insists no Lazars survive a trip to Terminus, yet at the story’s end the Doctor says there is a return transport which takes away all the cured patients. He can’t be right, surely; after all, not even the Vanir, the armoured guards who run the establishment, seem to know of it. They too assume everyone dies. And if people did survive, why does nobody hear the good news; all the Lazar sufferers are terrified of the place as it offers them no salvation, only death. One of them even tells Nyssa as much.
However, there’s an even larger plot-hole regarding the super-space-station itself, which sits at the centre of the universe in a void in space. The Doctor realises that the huge space station is in fact an enormous space ship which was once attempting time travel using radiation fuel. When the pilot attempted to time jump, the ship was too heavy, so he jettisoned a tank of fuel into the void, a radiation leak so huge it started a chemical reaction which became what we term ‘the big bang’. The spaceship was thrust thousands of years into the future, where it remained undisturbed until Terminus Inc took it over, installed the Vanir and used it as a lazaretto colony, like those old, abandoned islands in Earth’s Venice lagoon. The problem here is two-fold: 1) the Doctor knows this isn’t true: in Castrovalva the TARDIS was out of control and travelling back through time towards ‘Event One’ and there was no mention of any spaceship then. 2) if the space station / ship was in existence before ‘Event One’ how could this so called ‘Big Bang’ be the beginning of everything: there was clearly something else here before it.
Whatever the merits logic-wise, this section of the adventure does inject a goblet of tension, as the Doctor fights to prevent a second radiation leak and the ending of the universe. However, most observers probably recognise the serial really doesn’t need this silly plot device. It would surely be enough for a second radiation leak simply to blow up the space station. To throw time-travel and universe creation into the mix is damaging to what was turning into a fairly enjoyable, if rather one-dimensional adventure. Terminus is peppered with these half-decent ideas. For instance, we don’t learn anything about the origin of Lazar’s disease, how it spreads, why it’s so infectious, why there is no cure; a huge oversight. And then someone decided to name all the characters after legends in Norse mythology, but if you’re going to draw an allusion, at least do it: writer Stephen Gallagher doesn’t even bother, the names just sit there, like an enigma with no code. It was Gallagher who got us all tied in knots with Warrior’s Gate. Someone should give him a lesson in story structure; once more, he’s bitten off far more than he can chew and the adventure suffers because of it.
The Doctor and Kira, played with no substance and enormous hair by Liza Goddard, spend their time investigating the labyrinth-like space station, the Garm kidnaps and cures Lazars, Olvir [Dominic Guard, decent] hunts the missing Nyssa, the Vanir argue amongst themselves and we never meet a single representative of Terminus Inc. To be brutal, Terminus is a bit dull, despite being an interesting diversion towards providing actual scientific solutions to the solar system’s medical problems. It’s also visually very dark, due to many of the sets being filmed in half-light. This was the director’s decision as much of the designs were unfinished thanks to a BBC strike. The production was hampered across the board; like Warrior’s Gate it was overambitious, overran and overbudget. The special effects model work is exceptional, the freighter interiors [when we see them] very good and the makeup effective, so you can see where the money went. Even the Vanir’s armoured radiation suits look grand, but they are incredibly cumbersome. The Garm is forgettable. The performances, Miss Sutton and Miss Fielding aside, fairly humdrum.
The story has an overriding sense of foreboding, which given its theme I suppose it deserves, and that makes Terminus a relentlessly sombre affair:
2 from 5.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Twenty
ENLIGHTENMENT
On its premier, several commentators considered Enlightenment to be a fabulous Dr Who adventure, one of the best of all time. It certainly isn’t that, although a showing of No.72 on the Dr Who Fanzine list of The Top 200 Stories Ever suggests some still think it is.
The relative success of the story is mostly due to its innovative notion of sea faring ships taking part in a race through space and the stunning series of images this provides. Backing this up are a few decent performances. For this viewer, however, these good points can’t cut the mustard and the adventure tails away into a series of badly executed confrontations which spoil an otherwise interesting and provocative serial. Chief of these is the climax to the whole thing, of which there are two, and both are so poor they resulted in bouts of head-in-hands bemusement in this household.
Apparently, as with Terminus, a BBC strike played havoc with the production and it had to be completed in two batches several weeks apart. It hardly notices, although singer Leee John [from eighties funk and soul outfit Imagination] is an ineffective last minute replacement, playing a pirate as if he’s been asked to read something substantial, like Sheridan or Marlowe. There were also scripting problems with extra scenes needing to be written, which seems odd as Barbara Clegg’s initial space-race adventure feels extremely foreshortened, starting in the middle of an undisclosed TARDIS power failure and featuring an extended coda to finalise the Black Guardian storyline.
I’d like to say the latter story arc was resolved satisfactorily, but it isn’t. Again, throughout the whole adventure, Turlough has been in communication with his overlord. The longer this goes on, the more stroppy and arrogant he seems to become. He also comes across as tremendously adult. I recall he was at boarding school in Mawdryn Undead, so that makes him at the most eighteen, yet his science knowledge, his bearing and demeanour constantly hint at someone much older. Now, I am aware Turlough isn’t human or at least not from Earth – he keeps mentioning this – so it’s possible he could be older by many years, or evolved preternaturally greater mental capacities, but no one has questioned him about his origin, his race, how he ended up on Earth, etc. This is a massive omission of elementary character development. I suppose, if I’m being generous, it surrounds Turlough with a halo of intrigue, but it also makes the Doctor, Tegan, and before them Nyssa, appear crass, unwelcoming and impolite. I mean, they’d ask, wouldn’t they? And we’d hear it, wouldn’t we? Given the ponderous pace of this loose trilogy of Black Guardian stories, all that repetitive running between corridors and crawling through pipework, you’d think the writers might find a few minutes to tell us who the Ginger-One actually is. But no, not a glimpse. At the story’s end, having finally defied the Black Guardian, Turlough asks the Doctor’s assistance in returning him to home his planet. Good luck with that, mate.
The TARDIS is being depowered by the White Guardian, who warns the Doctor about an impending disaster for the universe. This makes no sense whatsoever. The White Guardian is supposed to be one of the two most powerful entity beings in the universe. His counterpart uses a pocket sized crystal to communicate with Turlough, so why does the White Guardian need to use the TARDIS’ energy to drop cryptic codes to the Doctor? During these apparitions, the Black Guardian interrupts proceedings and tells the Doctor he’s out to kill him, which fails to put the wind up Peter Davison, but rather takes the wind out of Valentine Dyall’s sails. I know Turlough hasn’t been the most efficient of assassins, but now his target is aware he’s lined up for the kill, the Doctor won’t be walking into any apparent dangers, will he – or will he?
Having landed on an Edwardian sailing yacht, the Doctor proceeds to investigate his surroundings with just about the most cavalier disposition the Fifth incarnation has ever possessed. This is Davison’s best turn as the Doctor for some time. Of late he’s been prone to hanker about, garbling his sentences and interrupting or starting them with huge intakes of stubborn breath, as if he’s struggling to convey even to himself what he’s talking about. His Doctor seems a young, slightly scatter-headed Time Lord, constantly jumping out of one frying pan into another, and he’s definitely playing him like that, all fuss and stress and bother. Jon Pertwee’s elegant Third Doctor would have a fit. So too the obstructive, argumentative, but paternal and thoughtful, First Doctor. William Hartnell simply wouldn’t speak his lines this fast, or without proper erudition. He’d give the phrases and the information they contain proper reverence. Too often, Davison has just been gabbling. Not so here and the lighter tone is noticeable and rewarding.
The scenes onboard the S.S. Shadow, the mysterious teak lined sailing ship, are uniformly excellent and continue to be so throughout the serial, augmented as they are by two very good acting turns from Keith Barron as Captain Striker and his mate, Marriner, played by Christopher Brown. These two are intensely creepy as the alien Eternals, a race of super-beings who live in the endless nothingness of eternity. To amuse themselves, the Eternals have created a space spanning sailing contest, a race around the solar system, in ships borrowed from the minds of ephemerals. The Eternals need human minds to think for them [one assumes any alien mind would do, they’ve simply conveniently chosen Earth], because having existed for an eternity they’ve thought of everything. This concept is similar to Mawdryn’s mutants, although here the prize isn’t death but Enlightenment. The Eternals cannot die [it’s in the name]; instead their quest is knowledge, by which they actually mean wisdom. Apparently, Enlightenment is housed in a crystal inside a golden gateway, and is being offered by the Guardians, which seems both opportune for the story and, at its climax, Turlough. It is also highly dangerous for the two superbeings of light and darkness, for if someone else has their powers of deduction, what purpose would there be for them?
These kind of narrative ****-ups are becoming de rigour for these latter-day serials. In addition to an inability to create character, either producer John Nathan Turner or script editor Eric Saward or both don’t seem to have a firm grip on storytelling techniques. All the intrigue surrounding the race and the Eternals is blown out of the water in favour of a hunt for a fabled crystal and an ineffectual head-to-head between the Guardians. The fantastic opening episode, and all the ensuing anachronisms on board, its magnificent climax as the Doctor and Tegan stare out at a star-scape littered with antiquated sailing barges, the peculiar crew, the even more peculiar officers, the mystery of the Eternals, is just thrown overboard, rather like Captain Wrack and her first mate Mansell.
The Doctor’s got these godlike beings sussed. They have something of the War Lords about them, from way back in The War Games, when those all-powerful warmongers kidnapped regiments of hardened troops to fight battles for them. “Parasites!” the Doctor explodes indignantly, “You feed on living minds. You use them as blue prints… [“Diversions,” replies Striker amiably]… Oh, absolutely! Living minds are contaminated with crude emotion. They’re organic, irrational, creative, entertaining and you talk as if they were toys.”
Trouble is, the pirate Captain Wrack – an over eager but ironically entertaining Lynda Baron – is in cahoots with the Black Guardian to win the race, so just when the tale gets interesting, it reverts back to the same old ding-dong between evil and good. Turns out she’s been focussing dark energy [You what-what? I thought so too] to sabotage her rival’s ships. This would work fine if it didn’t rely on the Black Guardian and would make more sense if she wasn’t sailing the ship which looks set to win; if The Buccaneer is so fast, why is she bothering to blow up anyone’s ship? Come on, script editor, read your scripts before you sign them off!
Episode three is remarkably tedious, and even includes a hopelessly longwinded tribute to the good old Third Doctor days with a complete misunderstanding of how quickly a vacuum in space can be created [see The Mutants and Frontier in Space]. Fortunately for Turlough and unfortunately for us, the Doctor saves the Ginger-One just in time. Turlough ends up a hero, but his slovenly, greedy little shoulders don’t really seem man enough to bear the acclaim.
Dinah Collins’ costume department has pulled out all the stops by borrowing left, right and centre from the BBC’s naval props department, probably old series like The Onedin Line. There’s a couple of cutely flippant scenes set over dinner and at a stuffy, naval reception which sound out of place yet don’t feel it. Similarly, designer Colin Green does good work by recycling abandoned sets from other shows in a bid to cut costs. Pity director Fiona Cumming couldn’t have found some long buried talent. The show falls very flat after that creepy debut episode, which honestly must rank as one of the best of the 1980s.
I’m completely torn. There are aspects of Enlightenment I admire and, rather like the three previous serials, the eventual piece feels too short. I wonder what the Barry Letts / Terrance **** partnership would have made of these? Turned them into epic six-episode Jon Pertwee adventures probably. The erratic telling and stop-start, quick-slow action simply doesn’t hold my interest. Perhaps, fatally, it’s the over reliance on the Black Guardian / Turlough dynamic to provide tension which kills it. The suspense simply isn’t there. We don’t believe it and nor do the actors.
I’ve probably undermarked this one:
2 from 5.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Twenty
THE KING’S DEMONS
Statistically, every so often a comprehensive disaster has to strike Dr Who and The King’s Demons is Peter Davison’s entry in the log book. This two part adventure is set during the reign of King John and involves the Master attempting to nullify Magna Carta, thus preventing an Earth-type democratic onslaught throughout the universe for the next thirty thousand years or so. Suggesting that no race, humans included, could found democracy on their own with or without Magna Carta is a stretch of the imagination in anyone’s history book. The ancient Greeks managed it for goodness sake. This is small fry to the Master, even the Doctor admits it.
The story makes complete sense only once you learn it was written solely to introduce Kamelion, a real-life prototype robot devised by a software designer Mike Power. The Master is exploiting the robot’s chameleon qualities by having it impersonate King John. Kamelion was set to be a new companion in the TARDIS. “I’m very grateful,” says the Silver-One. I’m not. He’s rubbish. A C3PO rip off who can barely move. Kamelion is so crap, I remember thinking even in 1983 that the series had descended about as low as I’d ever known it. My opinion hasn’t changed much, although I’ve subsequently seen The Creature from the Pit.
The piece looks okay, the acting’s bearable on a barrel scraping level, but the storyline is just dreadful, Turlough is still stroppy and Tegan gets to swap woeful double-entendres with the Doctor: “Look at the size of that bed!” she wails; he pulls off the goat skin covers invitingly, “Another way of keeping warm.”
The Master is worse than appalling in this one and it’s hardly Anthony Ainley’s fault, his character’s been written that way. Referencing previous adventures, given it’s the 20th Anniversary series, it was fun to see the Fifth Doctor brush up his sabre skills and engage in some extended swordplay with the villainous Sir Gilles Estram – an anagram of ‘Master’. Referencing The Gunfighters, Dr Who hit another stupendous low point when Gerald Flood’s King John chooses to entertain the court by singing a ballad. Truly, truly terrible.
Part 1 of The King’s Demons was the show’s 600th episode. It was also the lowest rated of Peter Davison’s era.
Enough said:
½ from 5.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Twenty
THE FIVE DOCTORS
“One day I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine.”
So speaks William Hartnell in a short clip preceding events of this anniversary special. It’s taken from his parting speech to Susan Foreman after the climax of The Dalek Invasion of Earth. It’s nice to see the First Doctor when he was at his best, but that’s not a very representative clip of Hartnell’s incarnation. The monologue from The Edge of Destruction might be more indicative. However, as this story involves the First Doctor reuniting with his now older granddaughter, I suppose it’s apt.
When preparing to celebrate Dr Who’s 20th anniversary, it wasn’t going to take a genius to suggest a rehash of The Three Doctors. Between them, John Nathan Turner and Eric Saward concocted the idea and requested Robert Holmes to script it; his version proved too complicated to mount and was ditched in favour of a simpler effort from Terrance ****, one which spends enough significant time with each Doctor, but fails to generate many of the sparks we saw in Season 10, chiefly because most of the various incarnations don’t meet until the last ten minutes. Instead, they are paired off with significant companions and while it is a joy to see all the returnees, some of the choices don’t quite hit home. For instance, while I love Sarah Jane Smith, Jo Grant would surely be a more important companion to the Third Doctor. Or perhaps he should have been teamed with the Brigadier, who gets saddled with the Second incarnation.
[Point of companion order: the presence of other companions as ‘phantom challenges’ during a deadly game of fear, has been criticised by continuity geeks, not always fairly. Liz Shaw and Mike Yates didn’t know each other during an adventure, true, but they had certainly both worked at UNIT, and possibly together, we simply may not have seen it. Worse, though, is the Doctor explaining Jamie and Zoe must be unreal because they wouldn’t remember him after the Time Lords wiped their minds in The War Games. The Doctor is wrong in this assumption. When his friends were returned to their own time, they were allowed to remember the first adventure, but no more. The biggest error though is having the Second Doctor meet the Brigadier on the day of his UNIT retirement party and then have him recognise Tegan, who he didn’t meet until after he retired [see Mawdryn Undead]. I suppose if you’re going to write generic characters and fill in the cast dependant on who was available or willing to return, you run the risk of inconsistency. More concerning perhaps is why the companions need to be involved in the story at all, other than for a bit of genuine nostalgia.]
Not everyone was able to contribute. Tom Baker backed out completely. He had after all only departed two years before and felt a return would be damaging to his post-Who career. A cleverly inserted clip from the unfinished Shada has him punting on the Cam before a nasty Time Scoop traps Doctor Four and Romana in a time eddy. This should really have been of more importance to the Doctor’s survival, but it isn’t, which rather gives the impression of a scene forced on us without thought. In fact, the whole adventure is a piecemeal affair which is less a cohesive narrative and more a series of loosely connected scenes designed to provoke short-term interest and allow the stars to shine, or not, depending on how you feel.
It’s great to see these grand actors back. Jon Pertwee is statesmanlike, bickery, robust. Patrick Troughton all fiddlesticks. “Fancy pants and scarecrow,” Doctor One calls them. He’s portrayed by Richard Hurndall, who is simply marvellous in a tribute act to William Hartnell, evoking the mannerisms of his predecessor, but cleverly not impersonating him per se. He brings back memories of those first few seasons, many episodes of which I recently watched for the first time, and does so without damaging the lead actor’s reputational portrait. Of the companions, Nicholas Courtney comes off the best, as you might expect, doing his put-upon, disbelieving act. Carole Ann Ford has the hardest role, stuck in the TARDIS with a subdued Turlough, and I wondered if she wasn’t supposed to be Nyssa.
We get some familiar monsters too. The Dalek isn’t handled very well; it explodes and festers memorably but is too easily bested. The Yeti is a hoot, howling in caves and menacing Doctor Two and the Brigadier in the same way it initially attacked Jamie and Victoria in The Abominable Snowmen. The Cybermen are plentiful, but ineffective, bested not only the fantastic Raston Warrior Robot but also by a conniving Master. Strangely, having all been wiped out, the Cybermen are later seen to still be building a bomb around the TARDIS, Cyber Leader included. Continuity really went out the window with this one.
I like Anthony Ainley’s Master though. He’s finally got a delightful devilish air about him, wrapped up in a Dracula cloak and making caustic remarks about his home planet. At one point he comes across the corpse of his emaciated self [from The Deadly Assassin] and shrugs with indifference. [It’s another dreadful continuity lapse, but hey...] Summoned to Gallifrey by the High Council of Time Lords, the Master is at his most debonair. “What can I do to help you?” he smirks. On hearing the Death Zone has been reactivated, he senses the latent evil inherent in all species, including his own: “The black secret at the heart of your Time Lord paradise.” Offered a new set of generations in return for assisting the Doctor, he looks suitably stunned: to think he went to all the bother in The Deadly Assassin when he might have just done the Time Lords a reasonable favour. Nevertheless, the idea of someone else killing the Doctor before he does spurs the Master on, for he can’t bear the idea of a universe without his nemesis. However, when he tries to help, the Doctors don’t believe him – why would they? – but he perseveres, realising he may just be able to double cross them at the end. A swift right hook from the Brigadier puts paid to that idea.
[Point of Master order: I was disappointed Doctor One never said: “Didn’t you used to be a Monk?” That would have squared off Peter Butterworth’s famous villain in a single line.]
The Time Lords are very underwhelming. We saw them recently in Arc of Infinity, so another appearance this season feels like overkill. Malcolm Thornton reuses designs. We’ve all seen the costumes. Gallifrey’s Citadel has an exceedingly low-key atmosphere this time around. Not even death and treason can spark it into life. The architecture of Rassilon’s crypt is spectacular though, some of the best background artwork the show’s ever put together. We also learn a few interesting snippets of information about Gallifreyan history:
Before the days of Rassilon, the Time Lords were a ruthless, heartless, powerful race who misused their powers and created the Death Zone, surrounding it with an impenetrable force field to prevent escape. Using the Time Scoop, they kidnapped other beings and set them against each other. This suggests the Time Lords had knowledge of time travel before the Age of Rassilon, which neatly supports the legend of Omega who, having discovered the power for time travel by collapsing a star [see The Three Doctors], was bitter at being overlooked in the annals of Gallifrey. Omega, if he had to return, really should have come back in this story. Anyway, back to history lessons: Rassilon put an end to the barbaric Death Zone practice. It’s no wonder the Time Lords were so vehemently against the War Lords when they tried them for a similar practice in The War Games. Not all barbarism has been erased however; we learn the Time Lord security services still have a Mind Probe torture device and that the Coronet of Rassilon has unique mind-control powers. To prevent the Death Zone from being reactivated, Rassilon had himself entombed in an enormous mausoleum called Rassilon’s Tower – a castle which looks as if belongs in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings – and has protected the secret of immortality with a boundary of fear and a series of riddles. It’s all a bit Exillon and Sutekh, but the familiarity doesn’t breed contempt. Instead, there’s a cosy feel to the whole thing, which might not have been the idea either.
[Point of Rassilon order 1: if the forcefield is impenetrable, how come the Time Lords have a transmat facility which pitches contestants right into the Death Zone. Why didn’t Rassilon deactivate this? There’s even a transmat facility in his mausoleum, which rather negates the point of anyone fighting their way through the Death Zone and his Tower to seek reward.
[Point of Rassilon order 2: later on, in the reboot series, our own Timothy Dalton got to play the great founder Time Lord. Here he’s voiced by Richard Matthews. It’s a pity we had to see the actor as well, bearded face and such like, a bit like King Canute. The voice alone would have been spectacular.]
The adventure kick starts in a flashy new TARDIS control room. Doctor Five has finally come good on a promise and made it to the Eye of Orion – he promised it at the end of The King’s Demons – where he’s refurbished the console and chilled out. Even Turlough’s mellowed, engaging in watercolour paintings. Later on, while Doctor’s Five and One argue over courses of action, the Ginger-One’s at a picnic table taking tea and scones with Tegan and Susan, a hilarious little sketch which I thoroughly enjoyed, the complete antithesis of what you’d expect from all the time travellers.
The trapped Doctor Four is creating a temporal instability for his successor, but it doesn’t last long and when he makes it back to Gallifrey, Doctor Five seems as right as the rest of himself. The story proceeds as best it can within the confines of the guest star structure and the 1 hour 40 min feature-length format. This doesn’t do the story any favours either and it lacks cliff hanging moments. Peter Moffatt’s direction is average at best.
[The serial was shown abroad in a four-part version. I viewed the first episode on its own, but couldn’t find the others online, so I watched the one-off special. I think it succeeds better like this, if only because the end credits for the individual episodes read exactly the same, revealing in advance characters and monsters to come. The USA got to view the film on the anniversary day, November 23rd,1983, but sadly in the UK we had to wait until November 25th so the film could feature during the fundraiser Children in Need.]
When Doctors One, Two and Three finally meet up, it’s almost as if The Three Doctors is being re-enacted, the trio are so effective, Hurndall included. We have them petulantly snapping at each other, performing a Time Lord version of a Mind Meld, Pertwee finally says “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” and it was a lovely touch to have Doctor One solve the riddle “To lose is to win, and he who wins shall lose” proving, as he always used to in those early serials, that his deductive powers are far superior to his enemy’s, the folly of the Death Zone and Rassilon’s game.
Terrance **** has written a sterling celebratory tribute to twenty years of Dr Who. It creaks a lot – shows its age, I suppose – but the real pleasure was to see all these familiar faces interacting with each other again. You only wish, like much of Season 20, that they could have been given a bit more time, the story seems to need it. As the credits kick in, there’s one last memory to jog, as Delia Derbyshire’s original theme tune transports us back to 1963 again before Peter Howell’s 1980s reimagining segues seamlessly into it.
I really shouldn’t rate this so highly. I’m being sentimental:
4 from 5.
Some promotional pictures. That's Tom Baker's waxwork in the last one, I believe. Hope you enjoyed that review @CoolHandBond
Excellent review, as usual @chrisno1
I would like to add my appreciation to chrisno1 for posting these wonderfully detailed reviews of the Doctor Who series, I’ve been watching them over the past couple of years on the BritBox streaming app and since the Pertwee era they are all new to me as I had stopped watching the series by then back in the day, and your reviews handily clear up some plot points I have 🍻
Thanks for the feedback @CoolHandBond The forums overrall have gone quiet so its nice to know my work is appreciated. I'm finding the Colin Baker episodes hard going and as I'm back at Uni my time is short, but my challenge is to get through to Doctor Eight by Christmas. Fingers and sonic screwdrivers crossed.
Keep up the great reviews Chris.
There were a couple of good stories in the CB era. The SM will also be tough.
Oh, your work is appreciated…I enjoy reading your reviews…I just thought it more polite to not interrupt your fine thread 🍸
Thank you very much, @Sir Miles and @The Red Kind
Continuing on, before a reset next week:
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Twenty
Summary
Season 20, for an anniversary season, is a disappointment.
As a viewer, and I’ve watched it twice, originally in 1983 and in full once again in March 2022, the best word to colloquially describe it is ‘half-baked’. Almost every story, even the dreadful Arc of Infinity, have elements of interest and potential which urgently need an authorial guiding hand and mind to develop them. Instead these ideas, such as Lazar’s Disease, the Eternals or the legends of the Mara, sit on the fence watching proceedings, desperately wanting to join the melee, but not being allowed to do so. I don’t really understand how this was allowed to happen. How could the show which I have loved and respected for its writers’ abilities to conjure successful and memorable stories end up forgetting its prime recurring objective: to be solid, mature and entertaining.
John Nathan Turner’s aim when taking over as producer was to simplify the story lines. He hasn’t done that. He’s removed the humour, which might be welcome, but has in turn made all the adventures overly dramatic and frequently, intensely dull. The constant approach to recent storytelling seems to always involve some form of time travel, which has made the Doctor’s and by extension the Time Lords’ innovations less and less remarkable. When the show first started, the TARDIS was the only machine capable of traversing the fourth and fifth dimensions. This gave the Doctor, as a character, a uniqueness which has gradually been eroded. This isn’t John Nathan Turner’s fault, the process began well before he arrived on the scene, but it is indicative of lazy writing on the part of the production team. The most obvious recent case in point is Terminus, a half-decent serial completely knocked sideways by a silly notion about the alpha and omega of the universe. Each of the stories of Season 20, the noble exception of Snakedance apart, cling to the idea that we as an audience will only enjoy an adventure if some form of time meddling or universe bending is involved. This repetition isn’t new either, but this year the stories creak and groan under the weight of summary expectation.
Perhaps the biggest failure of the run is the sudden want to bring back old enemies. I recall the clamour in the fan magazines of the early eighties for Daleks, the Sontarans or Zygons to reappear, many recollections being hopelessly romantic about these monster’s exploits, considering The Invasion of Time or The Chase as classics. Turner dutifully bowed to their wishes first with the underwhelming reshaping of the Master, then with the much more successful return of the Cybermen in Earthshock. Lightning doesn’t always trike twice. The production team seem to want it to strike six times: Omega, the Mara, the Black Guardian, the Master all return, and for balance so do the Brigadier, the White Guardian, the Time Lords, and in a way, Tegan Jovanka. The hotch-potch of companions and monsters which fills the celebration episode The Five Doctors only serves to make these returnees defunct. The fact the Black Guardian / Turlough storyline drags over three stories only emphasises the actual paucity of these ideas. Loosely and affectionally coined by fans as ‘The Black Guardian Trilogy’, these three stories could all have stood better without the over-arching storyline. It is quite clear that Nyssa could have occupied Turlough’s role in each of the stories following her exit and equally that he – and Tegan – are devoid of any purpose in Terminus. I will concede that had the proposed seventh story, Warhead, not been cancelled we might have witnessed a searing return of the Daleks, but somehow I doubt it.
As I mentioned several times in my reviews, the whole season feels as if it was completed in a rush, without structural thought and lineal thinking. I kept longing for explanations. I kept hoping the pace would pick up. Peter Davison and the cast spend a lot of time running everywhere, but they are running without purpose and this doesn’t create suspense only restlessness. Terminus, for instance, had massive potential as a six part adventure, where not only could the Lazar disease be cured, but the corporation overthrown, the Vanir reformed, the space station saved, and intertwining the story could be the plight of the afflicted, which isn’t given the time it deserves, a mere few lines from one character. How much more social comment would writers like Malcolm Hulke, Robert Holmes or Chris Boucher make with the set up? How much more peril would they put the Doctor in? How much more entertaining would they make it?
Whimsey is of course hypothetical. I have to deal with what I see and I can’t mark stories on potential. The problems which I detected in the mixed-bag offerings of Season 19 have not departed. If anything they’ve worsened. The budget is pumped into two or three high-class projects leaving the others to flounder. The tragedy of Season 20 is that the big bucks have gone on some duff stories. The two which appear to have been made on the cheap [Snakedance and Enlightenment] probably succeed better than all the others. When you look at what can be achieved using recycled props, as in Enlightenment, you do wonder whose thinking cap is malfunctioning behind the scenes.
The one-off festival adventure The Five Doctors can’t compensate for the troubled season, which admittedly suffered from union interference and obstruction. The special was a fine way to end the year and proved that simple storylines well-written and enthusiastically cast and developed can succeed on both a visceral and an intellectual level, even if the end product has several problems of its own. What it does prove however, is there is no need to strive for deep spiritual significance or extravagant universe threatening plots, for sometimes, as in the early seventies, a thriller style experience with a sci-fi twist and setting can be enough to tantalise the viewer as long as its presentation is solid and convincing. The problem with Season 20 and the growing influence of the show’s producer isn’t only that the presentation is less than convincing, but the screenplays are as well. The cast and director are being given nothing effective to work with. Their battle is lost before they even set foot on the studio floor. Dr Who should never be like this. Watching two past Doctors and a clutch of former companions wrestle manfully with these problems – and just about win through – only serves to suggest the support simply doesn’t exist for the current team.
At the end of the celebration special, Richard Hurndall’s Doctor One says to Peter Davison’s Doctor Five: “It’s reassuring to know my future is in safe hands.” I am glad he’s convinced. In my opinion, that remains to be seen.
I like the Sylvester McCoy episodes I've seen better than Colin Baker and most what I've seen of Davison. His first season's much too silly, but after Ace is introduced the show changes tone and in some ways anticipates 21st century Dr Who.
I'm not surprised youre slowing down @chrisno1 as I think the first four Doctors are the essential ones and now youre into the show's slow decline. But please keep going, at least up to the Eighth Doctor's only appearance.
Jodi Whitakers Doctor actually reminded me in some ways of Davison's: too many companions and too tentative, uncharacteristically lacking in selfconfidence.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Twenty-One
Part One
WARRIORS OF THE DEEP
Continuing the occasional policy of resurrecting old villains, John Nathan Turner brings back the Silurians and the Sea Devils and does both a disservice by chucking them into a sporadically appalling action-orientated adventure and, worse, not even bothering to adequately explain their motivations, allegiances and histories. Writer Johnny Byrne constantly references articles from a perceived Silurian / Sea Devil mythology which as an audience we’ve never seen before, including the great Silurian Triad, Silurian battle cruisers, a cumbersome electrified creature known as a Myrka and a Sea Devil Elite Attack Battalion. He gives the monsters individual names [they were unnamed both in The Silurians and The Sea Devils] and their leader Ichtar, claims to have met the Doctor before, but certainly not in this regeneration, so how does he know? There was much audience confusion when the serial first aired as to which adventures the Doctor and Ichtar are referring too, as the incidents and facts didn’t gel with accepted historical Dr Who data, either from the T.V. show or the novelisations. Byrne is on record as stating he was referring back to the original 1970’s Jon Pertwee adventures, but close examination simply doesn’t back this up; Byrne either hasn’t got his detail correct or he’s embellished it to the point it sounds unique. The controversy was partly assuaged by writer Gary Russell, who in 1996 penned the unofficial standalone Third Doctor novel The Scales of Injustice [a great title that] which uses Byrne’s extra, ‘original’ information to fill in all the explanatory blanks with this one. Even more galling however is the Doctor’s insistence, advocated at great length, that the two reptilian races are noble creatures with great scientific minds who only want to live in peace; both here and from past experience he ought to know that is not the case – indeed the monsters of Warriors of the Deep are some of the most single-minded and unnuanced of the Davison era, wholly focussed on their plan of genocide, an extinction not just of humans but everything on planet Earth. Their scheme involves prevaricating a nuclear conflict between mankind’s two great superpowers. [It isn’t mentioned who these factions are, but when Tegan says: “This is just like it was in my day” we get the inference that she’s talking East vs West. The serial came out during the last onset of the Cold War, when the fear of nuclear conflict was still very strong. The serial is set in 2084, so, given recent developments between Russian and the Western European powers, it isn’t that far removed from our contemporary reality.] The problem isn’t the overarching notion of two warring superpowers, and there’s actually an interesting subplot involving two spies who set out to sabotage a missile defence system, it’s the cramming of Silurians and Sea Devils into it, or if you prefer, vice versa. Too much begins to happen too fast and the stories don’t effectively overlap. Like many of the Season 20 adventures, Warriors of the Deep has all the hallmarks of a classic six-part Third Doctor / UNIT adventure, but it’s curtailed to such an extent as to be rushed and ill-thought. More exposition and more character development are the necessities. Normally I’d add more tension, but director Pennant Roberts hasn’t got a handle on this one at all and in an almost all-action narrative he’s hopelessly elementary when attempting to add any semblance of suspense. He’s not helped by a truly appalling lumbering sea creature, the Myrka, which resembles a large green pantomime dragon. It makes me long for the days of Drashigs and Loch Ness Monsters. The Myrka demonstrates the lengths one should never go to when making a Dr Who story: the monster operators were the same two puppeteers who impersonated Dobbie the Horse on the children’s television show Rent-A-Ghost. Add to that the general poor standard of SFX – still no laser beams – the unimaginative costumes and the apathetic supporting cast, headed by sixties spy veteran Tom Adams [of Where the Bullets Fly] and Hammer virtuoso Ingrid Pitt [returning ten years on from The Time Monster and roundly made to look an incompetent] and you really have a stinker. Perhaps only Peter Davison saves the show, displaying a less agitated version of his usual self because he’s spending so much time fighting villains rather than arguing with his TARDIS crew; the scene where he surrenders his weapon to the Sea Base commander as a show of trust was a wonderfully achieved moment of contrition which recalled similar occasions in the Jon Pertwee era. However, no other Doctor has been so remiss as to leave the TARDIS doors open, allowing anyone to wander in and have a sneaky peek round. That’s just a silly narrative get-out for the writer which sadly also diminishes the steadfastness of the central character. It’s odd too that the Doctor is determined to put a halt to a situation which he knows must never have come to fruition, for he’s visited the far future of Earth and there seems not to be evidence of mass human extinction c.2084. Maybe he’s worried he’ll revisit one of those ‘alternative futures’ of the UNIT era too.
A quick note to Bond aficionados. The idea of starting a war between superpowers recalls both You Only Live Twice and The Spy Who Loved Me; Stromberg in the latter is especially keen to preserve only aquamarine life. The guards on Sea Base wear uniforms clearly culled from the same wardrobe as the radiation suits used by Dr No and his team. The Doctor however isn’t wearing one when he falls into the Dr No reminiscent heavy water pool; he is left for dead by the cowardly Ginger-One. Tegan at this point is clearly bra-less, which seems appropriate given her summery minidress; curiously she acquires a brassiere midway through episode two. Pity she didn’t think to change her completely inappropriate pink heeled shoes. Like her outfit, an awful lot more thought should have gone into this whole story:
2 from 5.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Twenty-One
Part One (cont.)
THE AWAKENING
At one point ex-Liver Bird Polly James’ Jane Hampton describes the legend of the Malus, the monster of The Awakening, as mumbo jumbo. She’s not far wrong. A modern day episode populated by a whole village dressed up as Roundheads and Cavaliers from the English Civil War, a psycho-kinetic organic machine monster sent as an advance scout for an invasion force, timeslips from 1643 to 1984, a decrepit church with an alien secret, a big steaming stone face: you call it, The Awakening’s probably got it.
It’s hard to figure if this is a good adventure or not. The pace is exceedingly fast, which might paper over the production cracks but can’t help explain what the hell’s going on. The acting’s pretty decent, which is a bonus. The production design is good, particularly the church nave, although Barry Newbury, who designed the very first Dr Who adventure way back in 1963 and takes his final bow here, only has five sets to build and one of those is an empty barn. The costumers have dug into the BBC wardrobe again and the civil war dress looks great. The Malus makes a curious and curiously unthreatening monster. It’s best as a distasteful little imp clinging to the TARDIS wall; the alternative big stone head thing was simply absurd.
Tegan’s family has no joy whatsoever; her aunt and cousin have been killed, now her grandfather is in peril. No wonder she wants to stay in Little Hodcombe for a bit after the poor old man is mistreated by the villainous mesmerised magistrate. Peter Davison is fine. Janet Fielding chipper. The surly Ginger One has finally learnt how to knock people out with a rock.
The Awakening recalls much of The Daemons, although writer Eric Pringle claims he’d never watched it. It lacks most of the Season Eight classic’s attention to background detail and loses confidence because of it – for instance it is never explained why a whole village should so blindly follow the instructions of the local magistrate and take part in vicious war games and allow a woman to be burned at the stake. The scenes set around the deserted village conjure memories of The Android Invasion, but just as they start to get interesting we are plunged headlong into the alien / supernatural angle and all tension and enquiry is thrown out in favour of the ubiquitous Fifth Doctor run-around. The hints at the paranormal were quite welcome, but when the Malus is revealed as being a sort of organic psychic robot from the planet Raaga where the Terileptils were imprisoned [see The Visitation] I rolled my eyes in dismay. Once again, the Doctor knows everything about the alien, so the mystery is easily solved and the story has nowhere to go except rush to its conclusion. Ultimately, one nasty beheading aside, the alien just isn’t very interesting.
So, so…:
2 from 5.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Twenty-One
Part One (cont.)
FRONTIOS
This is the one where the TARDIS gets destroyed.
Yes, the indestructible Time and Relative Dimensions in Space machine gets blown apart by something as insignificant as a meteor storm. Given some of the scraps the old girl has been through, this is something of a disappointment. The fact an alien creature known as the Gravis is able to generate a huge mental gravitational force and reform the busted time travel craft is equally surprising and ultimately equally unsatisfactory. The TARDIS is stronger than this, surely? I did, though, like the sequences set in the semi destroyed console room, with sections of it blown into the sedimentary rocks of the planet Frontios.
There is a fair bit to enjoy in Frontios, writer Christopher H. Bidmead’s third adventure and another which unfortunately relies on a villain’s knowledge of the Time Lords and his obsession with time travel. That Gravis, the said villain, is a man in a rubber suit made to resemble an upright woodlouse doesn’t help my enjoyment either. For every positive step forward in this adventure, there is another step back.
Peter Davison is excellent as the Doctor. He’s less energetic than usual, gets to practice his cricketing skills again and has a few wonderful scenes, notably in the opening episode as he tries to help the physician Mr Range while surreptitiously querying him for information about the planet and the colonist’s history. The Doctor’s scholarly bent is emphasised by Davison’s constant fiddling with his half-lens spectacles. Later on, he brilliantly deceives Gravis in a beautifully erudite manner and even has time to gently mock Tegan by pretending she’s an android [“I got her cheap because the walk’s funny… and as for the accent, well…”]. Janet Fielding’s good too although the leather miniskirt is another inappropriate fashion misstep. Mark Strickson is unintentionally hilarious as Turlough, especially when succumbing to deep ancestral memory lapses, a moment of such wild eyed terror for the lad I thought his eyes were going to pop out of his head. We learn his planet was once taken over by Tractators, the nasties who feature here, but his ancestors managed to fight them off. Turlough also has a pop at poor Tegan by laughing gleefully as he reads about the destruction of Earth from the TARDIS log. She looks both upset and mad all at once. Turlough does that to you, I guess. Still, at last we have irrevocable evidence he’s not human.
So what’s going on then? Well, the TARDIS has been sucked down to the eerily empty world of Frontios where a space ship loaded with the last survivors of Earth [note: of Earth, not of the human race] also crash landed forty years previously. It is ruled by the Orderlies, a security force led by Brazen, and the overseer Plantagenet, son of the dead Captain Revere. The colonists are struggling to establish civilisation on the barren planet and believe themselves under attack from neighbouring worlds. In fact their enemy is beneath them: Gravis is the nucleus of an insectoid burrowing race called the Tractators who infest worlds, enslave the populations and hollow out the planetoid shell for use as a space ship.
All of these ideas have been done before on Dr Who so there are no surprises. Dressing actors up as insects harks all the way back to The Web Planet and there’s been little change in the standard of special costume effects, the Tractators are dreadful monsters in any book. The notion of a space ship carrying thousands of colonists was first mooted in Season 3’s The Ark, a story that contradicts Frontios as there the survivors travel to Refusis II; The Ark in Space utilises a similar idea, but the Earth is not destroyed in that story. The canon is further complicated by the Ninth Doctor’s adventure The End of the World, but I’m not reviewing the reboot series, so that’s less important here. The uninhabitable planet of Frontios and the human struggle for survival is familiar from the Third Doctor story Colony in Space; there’s a lot of running around in tunnels in that one too. It’s unfortunate that David Buckingham’s designs don’t have the epic sense of space we saw in that Jon Pertwee episode, because here the action is confined to a studio bound set of the planet, the sick bay and the old colony ship. When the meteorites hit or a revolution occurs, all the action has to take place in the same small stages and any sense of scale or of a genuine world outside the confines of the camp is lost. Even the tunnels and the Gravis’ underground base of operations seems hopelessly small with actors appearing on opposite sides of the set attempting to make as if they were hundreds of yards away, when in fact they were just around the corner.
Strangely, the Doctor explains at length and in detail the reasons why he can’t meddle with the situation on Frontios. He does it several times and initially I thought it was odd he should be so determined not to interfere – let’s face it, this has never been a major concern for him – until I realised it’s because this moment in future history is so far ahead of any other moment that even the all-powerful Time Lords haven’t foreseen this point of future. He isn’t altering time and history on Frontios – a crime in itself – he’s actually creating history, interfering at source, as it were.
The serial plays it safe when it ought to be taking risks. The story is far too fast. Davison thought it was too slow, but he’s wrong. There is a lot of detail missed out here, most significant is the revolution subplot, which rears its old head midway through episode three only to peter away to nothing. When Mr Range is accused of sedition, he’s put on trial and a woman appears to interrogate him [in the cast list she’s named as Deputy] and after this scene, she’s never seen again: so who earth was she? Brazen’s warmongering exploits are touched on, but never exploited to anything like the potential they could have been [I’m thinking of a lunatics like Marshall in The Mutants or The Marshal in The Armageddon Factor]. The idea of the soil sucking the dead to their graves has horrifying vampiric overtones, but is so played down as to be simply a poor special effect. The Tractators need for a human mind to power its burrowing machines seems both unlikely and is ultimately underused. The appearance of a zombified Captain Revere piloting the machine was a great cliff-hanger, but the terrifying nature of this incarceration is barely dwelt on. Yet again, the Doctor – and here it is also Turlough – seem to know too much about the monsters for it all to be coincidence. The story is so anodyne that the Gravis isn’t even killed; the Doctor transports the giant slug to an uninhabited world where he can do no harm; given the manner in which he reconstituted the TARDIS this seems like a long shot. Tegan says the former great one is having fun studying rocks.
The cast do okay, but the adventure is compromised by lacking ambition. This story, like so many of Davison’s is crying out for more detail, more time, more intrigue. It flashes by with a whirl and a wave and not so much as a by your leave. Peter Gilmore, who plays Brazen, is the serial’s ‘guest star’; he was the lead in the BBC’s Victorian shipping yarn The Onedin Line.
At the end of the adventure, the TARDIS is being sucked into yet another space / time distortion. Poor old girl…:
2 from 5.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter davison
Season Twenty-One
Part One (cont.)
RESURRECTION OF THE DALEKS
Resurrection of the Daleks has its detractors. It also has supporters. I fall in the latter group. I freely admit this is not a perfect Dalek or Dr Who adventure, but when watching it I was reminded of the thrust and vigour which director Douglas Camfield gave Season Six’s The Invasion, a Cyberman story that succeeded despite some obvious missteps. The same occurs here. The spirited, all-action slant director Matthew Robinson brings to a fairly ‘ho-hum’ narrative drives the adventure, the competent cast run with it and together they paper over a raft of cracks which would normally sink a ship with all hands.
Chief among these authorial issues is Eric Saward’s insistence on repeating the formula of Earthshock: cram in as many references to a monster’s past exploits as possible to create a familiar and compelling tale. It’s certainly familiar and for the most part it remains eminently watchable, but you do get the impression there’s almost too much flattery on show. Prime suspect is the return of Davros, the Dalek’s creator. Since his inception in Genesis… this crazed Kaled scientist has gone hand in hand with his charges and it remains to be seen what more Davros can continue to add to Dalek mythology. Since their inception in 1963, these mutant, unemotional, despotic, all-conquering, fascist war machines have rendered the universe their warrior playground, becoming the most feared alien race ever to exist. Having Davros reappear and begat his own brand of cunning rather pulls the rug from under the Dalek toes, so to speak. Once again, these masters of great evil are seen to kow-tow to their creator, which diminishes their authority. The Supreme Dalek is rightly suspicious of Davros, but he makes very slow decisions, allowing the humans ample time to exact their own course of revenge. The Doctor himself hardly has anything to do with the titular Daleks: he throws one out of a warehouse window and spends a suspenseful few minutes hunting the fearsomely brutal mutant which survives, but otherwise, he’s fairly well tied up with Davros or the Dalek minions, here called Drones. The Drones recall the Robomen from The Dalek Invasion of Earth. They are a much better interpretation, being able to think intelligently for themselves and act independently; they even challenge their Dalek overlords. Maurice Colborne and Rodney Bewes do great work in their respective roles as Lytton and Stein; the climax to episode two was particularly gripping. Meanwhile Terry Molloy’s impersonation of Davros is merely workmanlike; he’s too prone to shouting. Active support is given by Rula Lenska, Del Henney, Chloe Ashcroft, Jim Findley and Philip McGough; the cast is almost universally excellent. There’s a small role too for Leslie Grantham as Davros’ stooge, Kiston; Grantham would soon play another villain, the character of Den Watts in Eastenders, and forever be associated with the role.
Given the tremendous attention to re-embellishing the old, it comes as no surprise that the Daleks don’t have a coherent plan. They want to rescue their creator, invade Earth, find an antidote for a deadly virus, capture the Doctor, assassinate the Time Lord High Council, and more. The list is cobbled together from previous stories and is thus hopelessly complicated, involving as it does a time corridor and an attack on the prison ship which houses Davros’ frozen lifeform. This throws up numerous very obvious plot holes. For instance, it appears even in a state of cryogenic suspension Davros has been alive enough to develop a mind altering drug. Never mind. That’s not as daft as the Daleks hiding a deadly virus on twentieth century Earth in a place where it can be easily uncovered or despatching Rodney Bewes’ Stein to retrieve the Doctor from the same location when the TARDIS could surely have been directed to the opposite end of the time corridor. All the Dalek eggs seem to be in inhabiting the same basket.
The Earth bound scenes were partly filmed around Butler’s Wharf, just shy of Tower Bridge in London. It’s a lovely location now, but was empty, disused and in disrepair in 1984. The setting recalls those early Thames-side scenes in The Dalek Invasion of Earth and has an added touch of daring by featuring a pair of killer policemen roaming the silent streets. The opening scene of violence, terror and death is particularly striking. In fact this is one of the most blood thirsty Dr Who adventures for many a season. There are over seventy deaths shown on screen and even the peaceable Doctor lends a hand wiping out Daleks – although he bottles it when confronting Davros – Terry Molloy’s nemesis laughs at him and calls him a coward. Nail hitting head, I’d say. Davros pleads for clemency by insisting he wants to mutate the Kaled gene again, providing a more rounded intellect for the Daleks, but as they would still lack compassion the Doctor decides to carry out his assassination plan anyway – except he doesn’t. No reason. He just doesn’t. The clash between the two enemies is half-hearted at best and, having been built up for almost four episodes, it comes as a huge disappointment. Luckily there’s that deadly disease on hand.
The virus aspect of the story is the one which has the most legs. The Daleks and Movellans have been at war for centuries, their battle computers at a stalemate. Ninety years after the events in Destiny of the Daleks, the Movellans have won the war by developing a Dalek-deadly disease which has slaughtered millions of the screeching pepper-pots. Splintered for safety, one of the remaining factions has come to revive Davros and spring him from prison so he can formulate an antidote. The Daleks have reverted to using clones of humans as drone soldiers because their own numbers are so depleted. This is all a plausible and efficient storyline, but the manner in which Eric Saward has ballooned the narrative almost buries the original idea which should work on its own, being a neat reversal of the Dalek’s own plague tactics [see Planet of the Daleks, The Dalek Invasion of Earth, etc]. In fact, given how keen he was to borrow from the Doctor’s past – we even have a ‘brain drain’ sequence where the Doctor recalls all his past lives and companions – I’m surprised Saward didn’t bring back U.N.I.T. instead of having a bomb disposal squad investigate the Movellan virus capsules.
[Point of interest: the brain-drain scene was a blatant steal from the movie version of Flash Gordon (1980); an editing oversight forgot to include Leela in the Doctor’s memories; it also forgot Kamelion but I couldn’t give a fig about him.]
Ultimately, it’s the ambition of the director, not the writer which wins this battle. Matthew Robinson, along with his designer John Anderson, have conjured places and locations which feel and look believable. The space ship interiors as well as the dingy warehouse are all excellent, the latter demonstrating what can be done with minimal input. The pace rarely lets up. There’s a palpable sense of tension. By the end of the serial, only the Doctor, Turlough and Tegan remain standing. The poor, unsettled Aussie suddenly decides to leave the TARDIS crew; the death and destruction has finally got to her – not just here but generally, I recall Warriors of the Deep had a similar ‘everyone’s deceased’ climax.
Janet Fielding has had a rough ride as Tegan Jovanka, a companion who never quite seemed at home in the TARDIS. She spent most of Season 19 wishing she was anywhere but there, has been twice possessed and seen members of her family killed by aliens. She’s had a tendency to whine, but this makes her oddly endearing. She’s genuinely frightened of virtually every world she steps on and any alien being she meets. Almost every other companion takes to time travel like ducks to water; her reluctance and obvious frailty makes her unique among the various TARDIS crew. It’s quite obvious she’s often not having a good time. Being paired up with the surly Ginger-One doesn’t help and again Turlough’s role seems curiously written. He sounds like Nyssa or Romana II, being knowledgeable about the TARDIS and a great portion of the universe. The trouble I have with the Ginger-One is that I can’t forget he was an obnoxious little runt of a pupil at a boy’s boarding school. I find his character change, this slow unravelling of his past, completely astonishing, and not in a good way. To be honest, I’d rather Sarah Sutton had stayed on: she sparred well with both Peter Davison and Janet Fielding, Mark Strickson can’t spar with his own reflection. Davison himself is rather good again in this one, barring the odd characteristic, emotional outburst.
A quick note must be written about the transmission times for this adventure. Due to the BBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics, the story was initially shown [in the U.K. only] as two 45-minute episodes. Subsequent repeats, DVD releases, etc, have all restored the original as planned four-part format, which is how I watched it.
Despite its many flaws, I thoroughly enjoyed Resurrection of the Daleks, predominantly because I didn’t have to think about it too hard. Some may consider I’m being lazy, but I’ve watched 134 Dr Who adventures over the last year or so, and frankly, my brain deserves a rest:
4 from 5.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Twenty-One
Part One (cont.)
PLANET OF FIRE
My memory of Planet of Fire, watched as a bored fifteen year old, was two-fold. Firstly, I thought it was a rubbish adventure, badly acted and an extravagant waste of production money jetting to the Canary Islands for some pretty scenery. Secondly, I instantly fell in love with Nicola Bryant’s ballsy, nit-picky Peri, chiefly because she has the attitude and the model figure to don a tiny pink bikini and blatantly show more skin than even Louise Jameson’s Leela. Teenage musings aside, with its nods to H. Rider Haggard’s She and a raft of fine performances, Planet of Fire is ripe for a long overdue reassessment.
The Doctor is mulling over Tegan’s departure. It’s hit him harder than we expect. While Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor regretted the loss of Sarah and latterly showed some interest in catching up with Leela on Gallifrey, he never really chimed with his other companions. Romana #1 didn’t even get an exit scene, appearing fully regenerated in Destiny of the Daleks. Not so Tegan, whose tirade at the Doctor’s lifestyle, the planet hopping, the monsters, the villains, the constant interfering, the death and the destruction, seems to have struck a nerve. Consequently, even that hard as nails self-centred little bastard Turlough is showing concern for the Time Lord.
Peter Davison is excellent in Planet of Fire, delivering one of his most nuanced and effective performances. He is much calmer than usual, displaying moments of scientific and social insight and some great scenes of pathos: teasing the truth from Turlough, reassuring Peri with a deft half-smile that he really will save the day, battling the Master in a gripping climax of fervour and flame. The scene where he struggles all-at-once to win over Elders, heretics, Chosen Ones and Kamelions is one of Davison’s best moments ever. Writer Peter Grimwade also shows some dextrous wordsmithery seldom displayed before.
Davison is aided by the accomplished lead players of a huge supporting cast. Mark Strickson is an actor I’ve never warmed to; I simply can’t forgive tetchy, spineless Turlough his shortcomings. Ever since he burst into the TARDIS in Mawdryn Undead the atmosphere surrounding him has been foul. He tried to kill the Doctor twice, frequently sabotages the time machine, is impetuous and secretive, he lies and he retreats from moments of potential danger. There’s a change afoot, brought about by long buried family histories. While we again espy his dishonesty, even that is eventually overcome as the Doctor delivers an ultimatum that finally wrenches the truth from the Ginger-One. Throughout the serial, there’s an extra glint of steel to Strickson’s performance which is belatedly welcome. The revelation about his past life as a political prisoner on Trion, his home world, how he was separated from his family and banished to Earth is well played and answers all the questions we’ve had about his origins since his debut. Apparently, he’s not a young kid at all but Junior Ensign Commander Vislor Turlough, identification code VTEC 9/12/44. There’s an unusual line of ironic humour from the Ginger-One when he explains that Trion prisoners are scattered about the universe; his guardian was a sleazy solicitor in Chancery Lane. Peter Grimwade and script editor Eric Saward tend to cram Turlough’s personal details into the narrative and you feel it fits a little too neatly together. The story itself seems burdened with the unnecessary complication created by having Turlough discover his long lost brother is the Chosen One of a dying planet. Additionally, the time line of their two histories doesn’t make sense. In fact, like the good old days of Dr Who, time on the planet Sarn conveniently expands and contracts to fit the action when it’s perfectly clear characters cannot travel distances in such brief, or long, seconds.
Surprisingly, Stickson also goes all James Bond on us, re-enacting the pre-credit teaser from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by rescuing a drowning girl. He’s fairly incompetent at it, hindering rather than aiding the girl’s salvation. This is Peri, or Perpugilliam Brown. [Thank God they shortened that name.] She’s an American student on vacation in the Greek islands with her archaeologist stepfather Howard Foster. She’s bright and bushy tailed, sexy and confident. She’s bored in the sunny Hellenics waiting for crusted artefacts to be retrieved from the seabed. “Looks like Elton John,” she quips as a centuries old statue is loaded for transport. Peri’s met two English guys [Two! Crickey, go girl!] and has decided to hightail it to Morocco for some fun and frolics among the hashish and the djellebas of Marrakesh. Howard deceives her into missing the plane by abandoning her alone on the salvage vessel.
[Point of character order: I initially thought Howard was Peri’s boyfriend, a sort of mid-thirties aged mentor figure. The dialogue between them hints at a relationship that goes deeper than the chaste one expected between stepfather and stepdaughter. Actor Dallas Adams seems too young to play a fatherly part. As the story progresses, Howard’s more youthful stature gels better with the requirements of the role, but there is definitely an uneasy frisson between the two, as if they are on the edge of a romantic break up not sparring over an airline ticket.
[A Dr Who fiction novel Shell Shock proposed Peri as the victim of sexual abuse by her step-father. This might be a stretch too far, although it does go some way to explain Howard’s want to control every move of a twenty one year old woman. Interestingly, her delirium as she recovers from potential drowning [“Don’t leave me alone… Don’t turn out the light”] highlights the fear and confusion of abuse, which manifests itself again when malfunctioning robot Kamelion impersonates first Howard Foster, then the Master. Her blind acceptance when confronted in unfamiliar circumstances with an apparition she believes is Howard feels genuine and certainly hints at deep rooted fears: abuse victims often remain in thrall to their perpetrators for many years after the events; they also identify with the victim role, which is initially how Peri behaves. Equally, however, these same reactions could be drawn from the closure of a clandestine, unsuccessful affair. Perhaps Howard Foster is romancing both mother and daughter? The script leaves all these intonations unresolved: when I watched it, I was certain it’s never made clear Howard is Peri’s stepfather; I initially thought her mother was married to the other, older, archaeologist Kurt.
[Like several other Davison adventures, this character issue reveals the brevity of the telling, that the story itself is too condensed for the audience to make proper sense of it. People, characters and places are introduced with the minimum of fuss and exposition. For instance, when the Doctor meets the heretics, he’s accepted for who he is with virtually no argument or discussion. He convinces them almost instantly. Thinking back to the more robust early to mid-seventies eras of Pertwee or Baker, I can imagine the fight / capture / torture / explanation which would ensue and fill up a tension packed episode. It might be repetitive, but it’s more realistic than resolving confrontations in a minute or two.]
Back to Peri. The girl discovers a phallic looking platinum carved artefact, left behind by the archaeologists as historically worthless, and decides she can sell it and still make her way to Morocco, if only she can get off the boat. Cue the swimwear audition. I’m not really here to comment on women’s bodies, but young actress Nicola Bryant looks marvellous in the pink cleavage boosting two-piece, all tanned legs, belly and bosom. Bryant is roundly derided in some circles because of her whiney voice and fake American accent. I don’t mind it. My experience of speaking to American women is they do sound tremendously nasal. What I like most about Peri is she’s a spunky, upfront, biting little character who won’t stand for any nonsense, which rather contradicts what I just wrote about her as a potential abuse victim. Peri constantly takes the initiative. At various times, she puts one over Turlough, the Master, Kamelion and the Doctor and while she may have a penchant for groaning and wailing, well, what female companion hasn’t, Leela excepted? Bryant is given several opportunities to shine – those initial scenes in Greece, a cliff-side confrontation with Howard / Kamelion, another with the Master, a coy coda with Davison’s Doctor who with some reluctance lets her join him in the TARDIS – she doesn’t disappoint in any of them.
So, as I’ve mentioned, the Master is back. Anthony Ainley is very good once again, recalling the sly countenance he presented in The Five Doctors. The Master’s aim is as usual convoluted to the extreme. He’s basically trying to extend his life expectancy by stealing the essence of Sarn’s volcanic numismation flame, an immensely rare catalytic reagent with similar properties to the Sacred Flame and the Elixir of Life from Karn [see The Brain of Morbius]. Obviously the Time Lord High Council reneged on their promise to gift him a new cycle of regenerations if he helped save the Doctor’s life [see The Five Doctors]. Instead, the Master makes telepathic contact with Kamelion, using the TARDIS’s interlinked central nervous systems and uses the Silver-One to locate the distress beacon. The Master wants to match his TARDIS’ coordinates with the Doctor’s because he’s had an unfortunate accident attempting to build a larger Tissue Compression Eliminator and shrunk himself to doll-size. There’s a brilliant scene where Peri upends his miniaturised laboratory and goes ‘Master hunting’ in his black walled control room, like an angry woman hunting a mouse with her shoe. Later the Doctor peers into the same box with an amused smile: “You made it too powerful for your own good,” he says. “A small design problem,” comes the agitated reply. “And a very small master,” chuckles the Doctor. This comic drama is absolutely terrific and I enjoyed both the fun and the reasoning behind it. All the questions about why the Master needs to control Kamelion, why he’s on Sarn, why he’s not left his TARDIS, and so on, become clear in a simple and effective manner. It also sets up the startling climax. Throughout Ainley is suave, sophisticated and menacing. There’s no evidence of the histrionics he displayed in Castrovalva and at last he’s allowed to be rid of Counsellor Tremas’ Traken outfit; the black suit and tie he dons is definitely more fitting, being sleek, slightly demonic, corporately purposeful. It brings to mind Roger Delgado’s early turns in Season Eight.
I won’t say much about Kamelion. The robot never featured after The King’s Demons, but he serves a purpose here. The Master prevaricates some TARDIS sabotage, before Kamelion transforms into first Howard Foster, then the Master, confusing and frightening the bejesus out of Peri. However, she proves intelligent enough to better the renegade Time Lord and make good an escape. I was reminded of Jo Grant performing similar antics in Frontier in Space. She leaves the Silver One and his new faces to the gullibility of Timanov, the High Elder of Sarn, who waits anxiously for his God to send a messenger from the skies that will ignite the Great Flame. Timarov is played by Peter Wyngard, famous from Jason King, and he’s outstanding as a stately traditionalist, enforcing the religious law of the land, standing by his principles under adversity, remaining dignified even as the action whirls around and against him. Eventually, it’s all too much for the devout Timarov and he chooses to remain on Sarn to await its destruction rather than escape with the remainder of a dwindling population. A fitting end to a character who displays the pious cut of the righteous.
We don’t actually see Timarov’s death, but it seems clear he walks into the volcanic fires. We do though witness the Master’s end, which is of a similar stance. Trapped in his miniaturised laboratory, the life-giving flame restores the Master to full size, but the Doctor has a back-up plan. There’s another great moment for Davison’s portrayal as he watches his nemesis burnt to a cinder. He is shocked, appalled and saddened all at once. As Ainley cries: “Won’t you even show mercy to your…” we expect the Doctor to switch off the override facility he’s rigged; could he really be murdering his own ‘brother’? Thoughts of James Bond c.2021 spring to mind. The Master’s plea is left tantalisingly incomplete. Davison doesn’t move a muscle. He watches and ruminates, a flicker of melancholy crossing his youthful features. Perhaps those words of Tegan’s about death and destruction are haunting him again.
On the production side, the set designs are good if spartan. This time of watching, I loved the location shooting on Lanzarote, which doubles for both Greece and the dying planet of fire of the title. Sarn is a world riven by volcanic activity which is about to rip it apart. The pumice ridden scenery of Lanzarote lends itself to this, all those rocky outcrops and vast mountain ranges. It was great to have some chases and set-tos performed across these impressive natural landmarks instead of in tatty BBC studios. Additionally, one or two scenes are filmed around hotels and lookout points which add a genuine air of cinematic quality to the early proceedings. It’s disappointing the budget – or perhaps the ambition – of the production couldn’t have utilised more local sites and filmed the whole episode on location as the adventure seems to cry out for the epic. Still, we should be thankful the foreign locations are sensibly used, not shovelled in as a gimmick like unfortunate Amsterdam in the dreadful Arc of Infinity. John Walker’s camera work is exceptional, but Malcolm Thornton’s designs don’t feel big enough for the production’s aims and after the early expansive Lanzarote interiors, the studio bound scenes are a disappointment. Another minus point is John Peacock’s costumes, which seem to have escaped from a Biblical epic. Horror movie icon Barbara Shelly is wasted in a small role as one of the heretics. Fiona Cumming, never my favourite director, helms with just about enough vigour.
Planet of Fire isn’t classic Dr Who, but it does go a long way to repairing the damage administered to the series over the last few lacklustre seasons, when stories have tended to be extremely good or extremely poor. This adventure, with its above average performances and general competencies, is more than welcome. I was both surprised and heartened by how decent I found it. I can only wonder how good Peter Davison’s era might have been if the thought and energy placed here had been replicated across the board instead of in fits and spurts. Peter Davison’s brilliant at last, Nicola Bryant is astonishingly good in a debut role and we finally get shot of the troublesome Turlough. All things look set for a bright future.
Only one question remains: have we seen the last of the Master?
4 from 5.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Twenty-One
Part One (cont.)
THE CAVES OF ANDROZANI
Robert Holmes was a writer and script editor for Dr Who for ten years from 1968 to 1978. His contribution in particular to the Philip Hinchcliffe / Tom Baker seasons is astonishing. A high bench mark for achievement in both storytelling and characterisation, those years hold high favour with this reviewer. His occasional forays into Dr Who’s world appeared to have bitten the dust after The Power of Kroll, a serial he was disappointed with, but one which I found endearingly enjoyable. His return to the fold for Peter Davison’s finale as the Fifth Doctor yet again displays all of Holmes’ unquestioned ability to conjure a believable, character driven narrative which doesn’t insult the viewer’s intelligence by baffling them, nor does it appear too derivative. One of the hallmarks of Holmes’ scripts and stories was his ability to weave young adult science fiction [let’s not call it ‘children’s’] around an established and familiar premise, one which often had a horrific overtone. The Caves of Androzani, which is undoubtably the crowning achievement of Peter Davison’s tenure, uses Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera as a jumping off point, returning us with a hefty dose of nostalgia and some verve and vigour to those halcyon days of 1974 – 77 when Dr Who appeared to be breaking the shackles of its moniker as a ‘kid’s show’. Quite simply, Androzani is a mature, violent, thoughtful and characterful slice of science fiction. It doesn’t condescend to its audience. It understands we are intelligent and treats us with the intellectual respect we deserve. That it is also able to raise socio-political issues surrounding monopolies and big business, trust and betrayal, as well as enacting a cave based battle for supremacy among the agents of Androzani Major and Minor only adds to its status as a Dr Who classic among classics.
The opening scenes are played out again on wide open rocky landscapes. Not Lanzarote, but one of those infamous BBC quarries. Peri has replaced her bikini top [which she wore under the tail-tied shirt in Planet of Fire] with a more practical matching vest. She’s teasing the Doctor, and also ourselves. He’s doing some detective work hunting for exotic glass on Androzani Minor. Once more volcanos abound, but these are mud volcanos. As the Doctor heads for a series of dangerous looking caves, Peri’s already got the measure of his intent and reputation: “Is this wise, I ask myself,” she mutters. Later on, while the Doctor attempts to understand the situation he’s uncovered, she smiles grimly and reproaches him: “I thought you knew everything!” Yeah, me too! It’s about time the Doctor landed on a planet where he genuinely hasn’t got a clue what’s happening. Removed of his foresight, and also by the writer refusing to use the Doctor’s solar system spanning mind of information, we find our heroes trapped in a horrifying tale of gunrunning, drug smuggling, deformed geniuses, android rebels, Federal forces, manipulative corporations, sly presidents, bluff, double-bluff, betrayal and a struggle of life and death.
Spectrox is the most valuable commodity in the universe because it has the ability to extend a person’s life by ten times the usual years. It can only be found in Spectrox Spores, which are mined far underground on Androzani Minor. The spores are lethal when not refined. Peri and the Doctor accidentally contaminate themselves with the disease and, like the hero of Dead on Arrival, the Doctor has to battle the odds while acutely aware both he and Peri are dying. This adds an extra layer of suspense and melancholy to the story. Whenever the pace slows, the writer and director remind us of the time traveller’s physical plight; by the end of the serial, the Doctor is an exhausted, weary and maniacally desperate man, performing feats of endurance we haven’t witnessed since Jon Pertwee braved the radiation levels on Solos [see The Mutants]. The atmosphere is tense throughout, brought on by the excellent cave interiors and the small sweaty environments inhabited by the federal army and the rebels. It’s no wonder patience is running out for Major Chellak and his men. They seem to be almost absorbed by the darkness, running, fighting and living with, from and in the shadowy realm of death.
Androzani Minor has a twin planet, Androzani Major, where life is palatial and calm. The Sirius Conglomerate is managed by Morgus, as smooth and calculating a villain as you can imagine. John Normington is excellent as this wily, creeping, slug like man, who moves with such slowness, but with such purpose, that he’s as threatening as he is benign. Nothing is beneath this paragon of corporate callousness. Years before, he left his business partner, the scientist Sharaz Jek, trapped in a mud lava flow. However, while Morgus’ riches have grown on the back of the supply of Spectrox, Jek has been secretly stockpiling the drug, snaring all the natural spores by using an army of androids who can farm the deadly flowers without injury. Morgus is using gunrunners to deliver weapons to Jek in return for Spectrox, making it appear the Sirius Conglomerate still has reserves of the drug. In reality, he’s skint of it and Jek, who has all the Sirius and Federal communications illegally tapped knows this, seeking to bring down his rival and the monopoly he runs. The Sirius government also have their suspicions. “Patriotism is only an illusion,” trills Morgus. Too right: he’s profiting vastly from an illegal trade in goods, transferring labour forces with impunity, raking in metallurgical products to extend a monopoly of supply; he even closes a production-poor copper mine by sabotaging it, inflating the prices of his own stock. When the President finally confronts Morgus over his proven conceits, slippery David Neal only feels the force of the megalomaniac’s ambition and takes a step too far.
The contrast in the scenes between the grimy, dirty caves of Androzani Minor and the flashy, stripped back, colourful, techno-hip of Major is brilliantly portrayed, no better than in our first glimpse of Morgus: he’s communicating using a holographic projection of Major Chellak. The Major meanwhile relies on a small computer screen. The Federal army’s underground barracks are light years away from the sleek marble and platinum proofed environs of the Conglomerate. Morgus’ precise air is nicely reflected in his subaltern, Krau Timmin [Barbara Kinghorn] who watches and waits for the opportunity to assert her own brand of tyranny. The Doctor meanwhile has to contend with Martin Cochrane’s bullish Chellak, who is forced to execute him and Peri after a no-show-trial. There’s a brilliant interchange between Cochrane, Davison, Nicola Bryant and Robert Glenister, who plays his lacky Salateen. As the command post comes under attack, he casts a quick nervous glance at the time travellers – is it the intruders who are to blame? Cochrane is asking. Peri doesn’t much fancy dying. The Doctor, as he did in Black Orchid, reflects that curiosity has finally got the better of him. The cliff hanger ending offers no way out for our heroes.
That they do escape offers a fantastic twist in the tail. It’s not done by trickery or illusion, we really do see the Doctor and Peri being shot, or at least a version of them. This again displays Holmes’ natural flair for writing, for discovering the obvious in the simple, for not creating plot holes by complicating the incidents we see on screen. Debut director Graeme Harper doesn’t shy away from the terror either. He provides a series of tricksy camera angles to confuse us and, to increase the tense, nervous atmosphere, he uses extreme close-ups of people’s faces. We see the sweat and fear and confusion. He’s clever enough to insist on tiny points of detail, like shadows passing over faces as an elevator ascends, or the gradual onset of Spectrox Toxaemia [cramp, spasms, slow paralysis of the thoracic spinal nerve, thermal death], or the glee with which the chief smuggler Stotz taunts his charges. Maurice Roeves is assertive and dangerously presumptuous.
It is never entirely clear who these mercenaries are working for, but it’s certainly clear who they and the federal forces fear: Sharaz Jek. Trapped underground, Jek is a reminder of Taren Capel, the robot’s best friend in Chris Boucher’s classic The Robots of Death. He’s engulfed in a leather body and head suit which hide his hideous scars. He is consumed with revenge for the betrayal Morgus dealt him. Like Leroux’s Phantom, he seeks recognition for his work, the true work, not the fraudulent one impersonated on the solar system by the Sirius Conglomerate. Jek might be all rage and anger and envy, but he’s also got a softer side and, on seeing Peri, he wishes her to be his companion in life. The moments where Jek attempts to persuade Peri of his love are both pathetic and scarily cruel. Everyone knows he’s hiding a deformity behind his mask, it’s a stereotype, and we wait and wait for the reveal. When it comes, Peri is so shocked, Jek runs and hides from her reaction, a moment of emotional insight from Christopher Gable, who imbibes the character with much dignity despite the villainous, gothic overtones. This Beauty and the Beast angle is perhaps the one which works less successfully, being a tad rudimentary in the telling, but Nicola Bryant plays it brilliantly, evoking memories of Sarah Jane Smith with her scatter gun, stuttering, nervy approach. Davison too has seldom been better. Finally given a script to get his teeth into, he needs to act as well as say his lines and we are rewarded with an astonishing performance of anxiety, emotional depth and forthright moralities. He’s also funnier than usual, insulting the great and good in turn. “You have the mouth of prattling jackanapes,” observes Jek, “but your eyes tell a different history.” A great paradoxical line that as, because of the mask, it is only Jek’s eyes the Doctor can see.
A sense of menace and foreboding consumes the adventure as the stakes rise step by step. Decision making becomes hurried and mistakes are made, not least by Morgus, who delivers Shakespearian asides to the audience, a reminder that we are watching an unfolding tragedy of epic scale. As the Doctor rushes to Peri’s rescue and Jek’s android forces are destroyed by sheer weight of numbers, the action becomes overwhelmingly physical and torturous. Confrontation follows confrontation, each one building on the last, until the adventure reaches its crushing crescendo, the events echoed in the tolling bell that underpins Roger Limb’s outstanding incidental music. It is a bloody, gripping and quite stupendous climax.
And for the third story this season, every character ends up dead, and this time that also includes the Doctor, whose past life swirls around him in possibly the best regeneration sequence ever. His companions implore him to survive, the Master demands his demise, the fifth incarnation, surrounded by so much killing at every turn can only utter one word, the death he feels most responsibility for: “Adric.” With miraculous timeliness Davison regenerates into a puzzled looking Colin Baker. He doesn’t take long to assert himself: “Three ‘I’s in one sentence? Makes you sound like a rather egotistical young lady… Change! And not a moment too soon.”
Had the producer grown tired of the youthful Davison, we wonder? It’s barely relevant, but Colin Baker’s appearance and two acerbic lines suggests he was seeking something more robust and belligerent that the Fifth Doctor’s too tactful interpretation. We saw signs of where the team wanted the Doctor to graduate towards in this season, but the balance has shifted too late for Davison, who had always intended to depart after three seasons. As if to remind us of the sort of era we are passing, the end of episode two recalls some of the shoddy monsters of years gone by. Graeme Harper’s attempts to disguise the Magma Beast did well until this point, where upon we are given a tacky ‘man in a monster suit’. Like the giant rat in that other great Robert Holmes adventure The Talons of Weng-Chiang, it’s a moment you rather need to accept for what it is, even though it unkindly betrays poor production work and a lack of foresight from the team. This is unfortunate as across the board this is a phenomenally strong outing. Script, direction, acting and music are all first class. Add to that the marvellous set designs from John Hurst, Andrew Rose’s costumes, John Walker’s camera work, Malcolm Campbell’s sound mixing and editor Roger Guertin’s incisive cutting and you really have a visual and audial treat. There’s even time for a nod to us Bond fans as the Doctor breaks his handcuffs using a laser, just how OO7 managed it in Never Say Never Again.
The Discontinuity Guide is quite sniffy about this adventure, citing it as overrated and derivative. Well, they thought Enlightenment was a classic, so who knows, right? Several polls have listed Androzani as one of the best or the very best adventures of all time, from both Classic and Reboot series. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it is certainly a stunning achievement and merits regular watching. You only wonder how good a Doctor Peter Davison might have been if his material had been so better provided.
Superb:
5 from 5.
The Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison
Season Twenty-One
Part One
Summary
If I’m honest, I don’t really enjoy Peter Davison’s interpretation of the Doctor. I’m not entirely certain why. He’s pleasant enough on the eye, is a capable actor and displays enough bravado and energy for a Time Lord hero. Early on he seemed a little hectoring, speaking to Nyssa and especially Adric as if they were his children. Tegan merely seemed an inconvenience. His tendency to rush everywhere is more a directing problem. As we approached his final few adventures many of these problems have been ironed out and Davison, or rather his Doctor, has matured into a more thoughtful and studied young man. It’s as if he’s had fresher's week and wants to settle down to business. It’s come a bit late unfortunately.
The actor hasn’t been assisted by the general poor standard of serial during his reign. Davison’s is the Doctor who [so far] features in the least number of stories [20] and the least number of episodes [71] so it’s hard to gauge his overall success. In theory, you’d think fewer stories would induce the production team to a higher quality of product, but the budget is instead stretched to breaking point across seven serials a season. So, while Davison might be manfully willing an interpretation of the Doctor, those around him are spreading their workload too thin. Subsequently, while some recent adventures have been exceptionally fine, most have teetered towards the mundane. This might be due to a poor script or lackadaisical acting, but frequently it’s the low overall production values. You can see the creaks and groans all around; Season 21 even features two different versions of a slug monster [the second one is in The Twin Dilemma which is a Sixth Doctor story]. There is also a preponderance of stories relying on aliens interfering or questing for the secrets of time travel, the repetition of which gets extremely dull and was highlighted worst by the way a time-travel angle was shoehorned into Terminus, a so-so story at best but one completely derailed by this farcical notion.
The whole three-year era can be epitomised for me by its mid-point, three stories lumped together as ‘the Black Guardian Trilogy’. What this triumvirate does is demonstrate exactly where the production team are going wrong. They revive an old villain, they attempt to bring back old companions, they introduce an uncertain element of doubt to the TARDIS crew, a popular companion is written out, all three stories involve the discovery or exploitation of the secrets of time travel, poor supporting performances, melodramatic scripts, haphazard editing, bland costumes, unfortunate effects, ambition without thought or deed, complicated narratives lacking any depth of detail to explain what’s happening – time and again these errors occurred throughout Davison’s era and they continually hamper the stories.
I have mentioned in several reviews my opinion that certain adventures could have been extended and others dropped entirely, making the production costs cheaper [less sets to construct, less actors to cast] and the stories more decipherable. Both Time Flight – perhaps beyond saving anyway – and Terminus certainly demand it and others might benefit from an extra episode or two. However, even if the plots could be adequately explained, the production teams themselves would have to pull out more stops than they manage, and that appears unlikely. The foreign trips seem a waste of money, although Lanzarote is better utilised than Amsterdam. The guest star policy is doomed to failure. How many famous actors want to slum it on a cheap sci-fi show simply to fill a void on their CV? For every successful Richard Todd and Nerys Hughes, there’s an Ingrid Pitt or Lynda Bellingham.
Davison isn’t helped by his entourage either. Lumbered with the warring Adric and Tegan, replaced by the warring Turlough and Tegan, he’s really only got Nyssa to rely on and Sarah Sutton is too simpering to make an impression. Adric’s untimely death at the end of Earthshock was a great moment for the show; not because he died, although some rejoiced, but the manner in which his passing was represented. It was a great moment for Davison’s Doctor as well and he recalls the young Alzarian last from his line of companions when regenerating. It’s fair to say Janet Fielding’s Tegan gets more credit than most, but that’s only because she stuck around for almost the whole tenure. Her departure was sudden and appeared to be carried out in a fit of pique. The Doctor seems rather brusque once she’s delivered her home truths. It’s interesting Davison’s two best performances come after she’s departed and his character is given time to reflect on the implications and havoc his meddling causes. Nicola Bryant’s Peri makes an instant impression and you rather wish she’d been around earlier. It was good to have the Doctor sparring with someone who exhibits a little gumption. I have high hopes for the American.
And so we depart Davison’s era, slightly dispirited after three years of almost perpetual under achievement. Two five-star stories is a low return [although no worse than Patrick Troughton] but what the era truly lacks is consistency, with too many highs followed by lows. It’s particularly galling that the celebration 20th Season, sadly disrupted by strikes, is probably the least exciting term since Jon Pertwee’s swansong in 1974 [Season 11] and is only saved by the sentimental nostalgia fest of The Five Doctors.
I’m not sorry to see Peter Davison depart, only sorry there is so much untapped potential on display. The lack of planning and forethought of the past two or three years does not bode well for the future. The ratings for these midweek serials, perhaps the ultimate indicator of success, slipped steadily from nine and ten million at the start to only six by the end. It’s tempting to believe that leaving the show transmitting once a week on a Saturday tea-time might have helped secure a more devoted audience, but I’m not convinced. There’s simply too much wrong with the system and change was definitely required.
Bring on the new Doctor then…
Peter Davison showing off the Doctor's cricketing skills
Janet Fielding as Tegan, looking intensely worried as always; she gets a pic for sticking around so long
Turlough going all James Bond on us, saving Peri, remarkable...
And following on, my personal choice as the best regeneration of the Classic Series...
https://youtu.be/xH1UPBxPFQs
The Sixth Doctor - Colin Baker
Season Twenty-One
Part Two
THE TWIN DILEMMA
It is almost impossible to watch The Twin Dilemma. I thought The Gunfighters and The Creature from the Pit were fairly atrocious, but this debut outing for Colin Baker as the Doctor can quite happily sit alongside them as one of the very worst serials Dr Who has ever produced.
Russell T. Davies is on record as stating that “The Twin Dilemma was the beginning of the end of Dr Who.” In a 2009 fan’s poll published in Dr Who Monthly to celebrate 200 adventures of Dr Who, while The Caves of Androzani was voted number 1, its immediate successor was voted number 200. Dead last. It still has an appalling reputation. I’ve watched a lot of Dr Who, and while I have accepted some shoddy production qualities, dodgy scripts and a slew of wooden performances, the sheer lack of panache attached to The Twin Dilemma is startling. It is bad right from the first scene where a concerned father is begging his mathematical genius twin sons not to play equation games lest they ‘change events on a massive scale’. When the two lads are subsequently kidnapped, he goes into panic mode and you wonder immediately, if these children were so precious, why did he leave them to their own unsupervised devices? Their usefulness to the plot is zero anyway as the alien gastropod Mestor has already got a Time Lord to help him work out the mathematical problems. This is a doddery man called Asmael who happens to be the Doctor’s old mentor [well, no he isn’t, that was K’Anpo; see Planet of the Spiders]. When we initially meet Asmael, he’s calling himself Edgeworth. I don’t know why he had to disguise his name. I don’t know why he has to be a Time Lord at all. He’s the ruler of Joconda, a planet devasted by these sluglike aliens. The action switches from the barren Titan 3 to Joconda. There is no reason for the kidnappers to stop at Titan 3; none at all; maybe they needed a loo break. On Joconda, we finally learn Mestor’s achingly insane scheme. It struggles to assert itself, swimming against a tide of putrid snail goo. Anthony Steven was an experienced writer, but he’d never written for Dr Who or for sci-fi before. It was a mistake, I feel, to ask a new writer to take on the challenge of launching a new Doctor.
The best thing in the serial is Nicola Bryant, who gives back one hundred percent of the obnoxious behaviour the new startlingly garish Sixth Doctor delivers. I enjoy the fact she keeps criticising his attitude, pushing him to do the right compassionate thing and chastising him when he doesn’t. At the end of the story, he states that as an alien, it’s only logical he doesn’t share her human qualities. This makes utter nonsense of the preceding twenty-one seasons of Dr Who and shovels The Twin Dilemma further and further down the list of abominations. If the Doctor wants to be a Gallifreyan, he should nip back to the Citadel and reclaim his right to the Presidency. It’s the fact he doesn’t act like a Time Lord which endears him to us; take that away and you’ve got no humanisms to work with.
I do applaud the producers for deciding to emphasise the Doctor’s alien characteristics, but Colin Baker isn’t the man for this. Unlike Tom Baker, who early in his tenure admirably presented alien and slightly vulgar characteristics without resorting to extrovert flamboyancy [that came later], Colin Baker’s performance is unsubtle and haphazard. The script doesn’t help him, taking up the baton of troublesome regenerations and running with it so forcefully the joke wears extremely thin: half-way through episode one a crazed Doctor tries to strangle Peri. When I watched this in 1984, I turned off the TV and vowed not to watch the series ever again; so while that pledge didn’t last, this viewing is a first for me. Baker is not helped by being provided with the most appalling costume, one which highlights his egotistical character – the suit is indescribable, but it certainly ensures this Doctor is always the centre of everyone’s attention. Costumer Pat Godfrey should hang her head in shame. She’s equally poor with the monster outfits which look as if they escaped from The Web Planet or were recycled from Frontios.
Maurice Denham had a great stage and film career, but even his guest star spot can’t help save this. I ache for poor Nicola Bryant: three adventures into her acting career and she’s saddled with being the most experienced and competent performer on the show.
Frankly, The Twin Dilemma is four episodes of space garbage:
½ from 5.
The Sixth doctor - Colin Baker
Season Twenty-One
Part Two
Summary
It’s hard to summarise one adventure, but here goes.
The final story of Season 21 is unusual in that it allows the audience to meet the new Doctor, the previous incarnation having regenerated. The experiment is not a success. The sharp differences between Colin Baker’s acerbic performance and Peter Davison’s more prudent delivery is so great it is a genuine chalk and cheese battle. It would be easy to say Baker isn’t helped by the script, but in fact the dialogue isn’t the problem. The problem is the actor’s insistence on over emphasising every detail of every sentence, every phrase, word, consonant and vowel is hammered home with a roll of the tongue and a cluck of lips; every gesture is exaggerated, every glance toned with incessant delirium. The fact the Doctor is meant to be experiencing a ‘bad’ regeneration makes sense, but his sudden mood swings, changes in attitude, melodramatic tantrums and moments of cowardliness are out of character not just for Doctor Who, but for most heroes.
Some critics have a theory that Colin Baker’s interpretation is based on the reformed angel, the bad cop come good, a man with redemption on his mind. So, having accused Peri of being evil and decided she needs to die by strangulation – out of character even for a Time Lord, I suspect – he then spends the remainder of the episode attempting to correct his mistake and win over his colleague. This is all very clever – except the Doctor doesn’t spend time attempting to make good his mistake. No, he continues to be boorish, rude, loud, pompous, uningratiating, ham-fisted, egotistical, competitive, ungallant, obnoxious and conceited. He’s simply appalling. He doesn’t even dress well. One of his best lines comes when he attempts to explain his erratic and atrocious behaviour and passes off his quite dreadful harlequin suit as a demonstration of how “I’ve even lost my sense of style.” He’s not only violent towards Peri, but he’s constantly condescending. And not just to her: he treats his predecessors with equal disdain, tossing their clothes wastefully around the wardrobe room and referring to the Fifth Doctor as having “a sort of feckless charm.”
Thankfully Peri’s in a forgiving mood and despite near strangulation, tries to cajole the Doctor into action. Some of their exchanges are quite tasty and I enjoy that she’s prepared to stand up to a man who is essentially a bully, but this is all wrong for Dr Who. At the end of the drama, they appear reconciled, but her smile is as forced as you can get. Colin Baker still looks too pleased with himself to be appreciated.
There is something horribly wrong going on here. I don’t think it was the intention of the production team to veer so far away from an accepted formula. This looks suspiciously like an actor misunderstanding what his role is supposed to be. The Doctor is the barometer of decency, morality and ethics. If he starts to behave in a manner which denies all the key facets of his personality, those which we have always witnessed to prevail – yes, even in the dark days of William Hartnell’s brittle and belligerent premier Time Lord you always knew he had a heart in the best place – the audience will lose sympathy for the hero. After Peter Davison’s near Herculean feat to rescue Peri and sacrifice his life to save hers, this sudden self-centred arrogance is decidedly, wrongfully challenging. Time, I suppose, will tell how the Sixth Doctor progresses, but if Baker’s going to remain such a selfish, intolerant narcissist, this will be a very tough few weeks watching.