Doctor Who Season 19: Doctor In Cricket Gear

The story so far: like three before him, Tom Baker has given up the role of the Doctor, and script editor Christopher Bidmead has stepped down from the role, having seen Baker’s reign to its conclusion. Now we’re about to meet the Fifth Doctor in the form of Peter Davison, star of All Creatures Great and Small. To take on Baker’s mantle would be a momentous challenge, given how synonymous with the role Baker had become, and if Davison were to accomplish it, he’d need to have a reliable band of co-stars, writers, directors, and overall cast and crew behind him. In other words, this season will be a test not only for Peter Davison but for John Nathan-Turner. It’s one thing to put out a solid season of Doctor Who when you have a decent enough script editor handling the stories and one of the best performers to ever take on the role in front of the camera. It’s quite another to sell the audience on a new Doctor when it had become very, very accustomed to the previous one.

The new season would see a tweak to the show’s scheduling – it would be moved away from its traditional Saturday teatime slot and instead air twice a week on Monday and Tuesday. Scheduling tweaks are often a sign of a show being mucked about with by a broadcaster, especially when it comes to long-running shows – disrupting the watching habits of audiences is a good way to lose audiences in television. However, here it panned out well – the previous season had suffered unusually poor ratings, in part as a result of ITV counterprogramming it with Buck Rogers (beedeebeedeebeedee), whilst the ratings here shot up, doubling compared to the weakest points of season 18. This did, however, have the effect of halving the span of time in the year that Doctor Who was on – the season was over and done in 13 weeks from January to March 1982, whereas since season 13 the show had generally started in autumn and ended in spring.

Things are a little odd with the script editor situation with this season, and that’s exacerbated by the fact that the early serials were produced out of order so that Davison could get a chance to ease into the role before tackling his regeneration story. The first two stories produced this season – Four To Doomsday and The Visitation – were in fact the second and fourth in the running order respectively, and were script edited by Antony Root, who’d been drafted in on a temporary basis but was keeping a keen eye out for someone to take over the role. The Visitation happened to be penned by one Eric Saward, and Root recommended to John Nathan-Turner that Saward be given the spot.

Saward thus filled the role for the rest of the season. Though Root is credited as script editor on Earthshock, this was kayfabe, since that was another Saward-penned story and whilst the BBC’s policies against script editors editing their own scripts were mutable to a certain extent – and had been bent by Doctor Who script editors in the past – Saward was perhaps a little new to the role and junior in the BBC to be doing that straight out of the gate.

The upshot of this is that season 19 offers us an introduction to the Sawardian era of Doctor Who – a period which would last up to the late portions of season 23, representing one of the longer tenures of any script editor – but it’s a somewhat disguised one if you don’t keep the script editor chronology in mind. Four To Doomsday is the only story he doesn’t touch, The Visitation was written by him but script edited by Root (the only story Saward would contribute to the show which he did not also script edit), and the rest has him script editing, but with stories which would have in part been commissioned by Root (or Bidmead). Still, we shall have to see what new tendencies creep in under his watch, now we know where to look – because they may point the way to the turbulence the show would encounter as relations between Saward and Nathan-Turner became increasingly strained.

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That’s for the future, though – what of the present? The first story in the running order was, for the most part, the fourth produced – Castrovalva, penned by Christopher Bidmead. Of course, it opens with the regeneration scene from Logopolis (in a rare pre-credits sequence, no less!), so there’s quite a production gap between then and what we subsequently get. Still, things start out OK – the credits sequence is basically Tom Baker’s last one with Peter Davison’s photo added in, then we shift to the TARDIS crew hustling the Doctor back to the TARDIS so they can get away from the Pharos Project. They don’t actually make it, though – the Doctor collapses, and they’re all apprehended by facility guards, and the Doctor is bundled into an ambulance.

Oh, Fifth. What’s about to happen really isn’t your fault.

A rapid escape plan sees the Doctor, Tegan, and Nyssa bundle into the TARDIS, with Adric held captive by one of the security guards – and then the Master’s TARDIS arrives, stuns the security guards, and dematerialises, leaving behind a subdued and dazed Adric, who then operates the TARDIS controls with surprising skill. Was the Master just being helpful? Or was he tampering with Adric for his own reasons? And why is the Doctor fumbling around the TARDIS looking for a “Zero Room”? What the hell is a Zero Room in the first place?

In his early scenes, Davison is splitting the difference between riffing on the personalities of the previous Doctors and being generally panicy and upset – the idea being that his regeneration is unstable, fragments of his old personalities are still knocking about in his head, and he needs to pay a visit to the meditation space offered by the Zero Room to gain a new equilibrium, restabilise, and allow his new personality to coalesce. This at least means his iconic cricket garb has some justification – he stumbles onto the TARDIS’s cricket team changing room, uses it for his costume change, and starts to feel better at that point.

This, and the fumbling around in the TARDIS looking for the Zero Room, takes up much of the first episode. Once the Doctor, Nyssa, and Tegan find it, the Doctor declares that he must rest, but affirms that the rest of the TARDIS crew are more than skilled enough to look after things whilst he’s recuperating, affirming that Tegan is “a fine co-ordinator” and hyping up Nyssa and Adric’s technical and navigational skills respectively. This is quite a nice way to establish the new character chemistry (which, of course, was test-driven in the three stories produced before this, as well as Logopolis), in which Tegan is the responsible big sister and Nyssan and Adric are the brainy younger siblings.

As for the Doctor, he doesn’t seem as paternalistic as his previous four incarnations have all been from time to time; rather than being the father figure, he seems more like a cool uncle or older cousin who’s been tasked with babysitting the family but is doing it on a friendly, informal basis rather than trying to exert a lot of authority. This in part arises from the way the Doctor is very vulnerable in this episode – he’s never seemed in such need of nurturing from them as he does here, or as weakened in a sustained way. (There’s a bit in episode two where he resorts to a wheelchair, which the TARDIS seems to manifest for him in response to his need.)

All this gives the early part of the story an air of a soap opera themed around the logistical problems of operating the TARDIS and helping the Doctor’s recuperation, rather than a Doctor Who serial primarily focusing on the immediate story to hand, which for the first couple of story relies on the Master using the abducted Adric’s mathematical mind to perform computations (including some capable of projecting a simulated Adric into the Doctor’s TARDIS itself).

Something resembling a plot beyond “the Doctor has regenerated” finally emerges midway through episode 2 – to evade a trap set by the Master, the gang have to jettison a bunch of rooms from the TARDIS, including the Zero Room, which means they need to find somewhere else with similar properties to help him. Fortunately, the TARDIS Information Service – a sort of Hitchhiker’s Guide To the TARDIS – notes that the settlement of Castrovalva has such properties, so the story shifts to getting the Doctor there so he can finally unrustle his jimmies. (It’s at Castrovalva that he encounters and enjoys some celery, and the emotional support celery he keeps pinned to his coat for the rest of his run is a souvenir from its planet.)

To be honest, the first half of the story is a bit shaky – the pacing seems just a little off, and some of the decisions made feel unusual when set next to Logopolis. Inconsistencies with previous serials which aired years or even decades ago are one thing, but (which Bidmead and Saward would surely have had to hand to double-check this against). There’s a bit very early on where Adric talks about the Doctor’s regeneration, which is a little odd since the Fourth Doctor never seemed to talk to him about it, so why should he suddenly know what was going on there when he was profoundly confused for all of Logopolis?

Given how much focus was given to the Watcher stuff in Logopolis, it’s kind of wild that there’s no real follow-up on it here; for that matter, it feels odd that if the moment had, as the Fourth Doctor reassured us, been prepared sure so thoroughly, that the regeneration should be such a rough one. After all, the whole “tulpa of your next regeneration” thing feels like it’s meant to be a hallmark of a Time Lord attaining deeper understanding of the process, but this seems to have been even rougher than the Third Doctor’s post-regeneration lethargy in Spearhead From Space. Maybe recovering from being Tom Baker is a bit like having a hangover?

Once the story reaches Castrovalva itself, things pick up somewhat, even though it often relies on vibes and atmosphere more than it does active plot. The peaceful atmosphere ends up being a cunning ruse – for Castrovalva is a trap set by the Master. In this respect, the story is an inversion of Logopolis – whereas that is about a real community with unique properties that is subverted and destroyed by the Master, here the tale is about such a thing created by the Master for the sake of subverting and destroying the Doctor, and which the Doctor in turn unravels. Logopolis was a community of mathematicians, whose calculations sustained the universe; Castrovalva is an illusion created by a mathematician’s calculations (the enslaved Adric), and will go away once he stops performing block transfer computation in his head (with some fun effects to establish its Escher-like architecture).

The issue is that this neat philosophical idea isn’t really underpinned by a solid story. Since the tale is once again playing keep-away with the Master for a good chunk of it, he doesn’t have that much time at the end to elucidate how his plan was supposed to work, and so it comes across as him luring the Doctor to Castrovalva for his own purposes, having him in his power in the first night, and then absolutely not doing anything with that.

We also get the original sin of Eric Saward’s tenure as script editor: when Nyssa and Tegan end up confronting the Master, neither of them sell the moment like Nyssa saw her planet destroyed as a result of his machinations in the previous story (or is dealing with the trauma of him having stolen Tremas’s body), or like Tegan’s beloved aunt was murdered by him not too long ago. They react to him like he’s a generic pantomime villain, not someone who is directly and personally responsible for bereavements they have still not had any time to properly process.

It’s understandable why cast and crew would forget the emotional stakes here, having made three stories between Logopolis and this one in terms of the actual production order – but it’s the script editor’s job in part to spot this sort of thing and solve it, particularly if you are the sort of script editor who puts a lot of emphasis on working with the show’s past continuity. The Nathan-Turner and Saward team-up would be responsible for a great swathe of returning villains and much waffle about stuff like how Mondas fits into the Cybermaan backstory – but they gloss over an emotional detail like this, and that’s surely a bigger issue than whether some monsters who haven’t even been on the show for years came from Mondas or Telos originally.

I like nerd shit, continuity can be fun (but should never be allowed to be such a burden that it becomes a barrier to writers to coming up with new things for the show and to new viewers enjoying the stories), but if you’re prioritising nerd shit, wiki-tickling, and continuity with decades-old material over the immediate character development and emotional stakes of the present story, your sense of priorities has seriously gone awry. That is exactly the trap that people accuse the show of falling into at the nadir of the Nathan-Turner era, and whilst Castrovalva does not depend overly much on any stories other than Logopolis, the underselling of the personal impact of Nyssa and Tegan coming face to face with the Master definitely points to part of that problem.

The Master tortures Adric. Remind me: why am I meant to dislike the Master?

Castrovalva, then, is an oddity. The mellower music and often deceptively gentle atmosphere of the story kind of puts me in mind of Robin of Sherwood – despite the fact that we’re already in 1982, this feels more 1980s than any of the late-period Tom Baker stories, in part because Baker’s presence is inherently a reminder of earlier years and in part because the show really seems to be staking out an atmosphere-and-vibes-based approach which shows like Robin of Sherwood would subsequently make a cornerstone of their approach. It feels like a shaky mid-tier story for its first two episodes joined with a stronger story for its last two – but I am not sure the actual Castrovalva section would have benefitted from being padded out to fill more space. As we’ll see later this season, experiments in shorter stories are forthcoming.

Four To Doomsday was written by Terence Dudley and script edited by Antony Root, which means that it’s the sole story this season not to have Eric Saward’s fingerprints on it. On its way to try and return Tegan to Earth, the TARDIS materialises on a spaceship in deep space – equipment flitters and glimmers, but no crew are in evidence, and the atmosphere is sufficiently contaminated as to require space helmets to go outside. As the Doctor goes out to investigate, unseen figures in a control room observe – Monarch (Stratford Johns), Enlightenment (Anne Lambert), and Persuasion (Paul Shelley), reptilian entities who are headed for Earth on an errand they are a little mysterious about. The triumvirate play host to to guests hailing from a range of Earth cultures and points in history, so they’ve been there before… but will Earth survive their latest visit?

The basic concept of this serial is that the TARDIS crew have been gently encouraged to accept the hospitality of the triumvirate and are trying to figure out what’s going on, whilst the triumvirate are observing them in turn – a fun model where there isn’t much in the way of direct menace, people being overtly held prisoner, and full-on action for much of the running time, but there is a lot of subtle manipulation, guarded conversations, and propagandistic deceptions. This is something of a return to the gentler pace of the Hartnell years, and certainly an interesting contast with the generally quite fast-paced Fourth Doctor era.

Some of the rhetoric in the serial touches on modern issues more directly than the show has for a while – talking about war, famine, the ozone layer, and all that sort of thing. The Fourth Doctor era would have its moments of social commentary, of course – just look at The Sun Makers – but this would most frequently be on the level of telling stories which thematically touch on the issues, rather than citing Earth’s problems directly. Ever since the end of the Third Doctor era, the show seemed to do social commentary at that sort of one step removed – here the show seems to be edging closer to being more direct, which feels like a nice shift in approach.

The range of characters picked up from Earth cover an impressively diverse range of cultures, with some casting issues. Bigon (Philip Locke) of ancient Greece is one, and his casting seems fine, as is that of Burt Kwouk as the Imperial Chinese representative Lin Futu. Kurkutji is an Aboriginal Australian, and is played by Ilario Bisi-Pedro – a Nigerian actor, just as the Mayan noblewoman Villagra (Nadia Hammam) is not played by someone of that background, which feels a touch more problematic – but it’s still a more diverse cast than the show often had in the 1980s, and an attempt is made to show Kurkutji speaking in an Aboriginal dialect which Tegan happens to understand. (The script even remembers to have the Doctor ask about the specific dialect, rather than treating such languages as a monolith.)

There’s recreational dancing where traditional dances are performed, which I think risks being appropriative – but there’s also a bit where the Doctor tells Lin Futu that the Chinese are, in the 1980s, the most populous and powerful people on Earth, which feels like a big thing to say at the height of the Cold War when the USA and USSR were the generally-acknowledged superpowers, but also kind of true. One wonders if fans unhappy with the shift away from Tom Baker were grumpy about the show “going woke”. (Or “being politically correct”, as would have been the more likely gripe at the time.)

Adric might rank among those who’d complain. There’s a bit early on in this serial where Adric is being shitty about women, and Nyssa and Tegan both call him out on it. (The Doctor is not present, so can’t be blamed for not taking him to task.) Specifically, he gets annoyed at Tegan and says women are all “mindless, impatient, and bossy”, and when Nyssa points out that she is a woman and she’s reading the Principia Mathematica he says she doesn’t count because she’s not a woman, just a girl. When Tegan says “I heard that” he says she was meant to, making it clear that he was specifically trying to be nasty and offensive.

He doesn’t improve over the course of the serial, acting like an absolute grumpy brat and generally being rude and unco-operative. At one point he ends up openly agreeing with Monarch’s propaganda, decides that he and the triumvirate want only good for Earth, and then gets angry at Nyssa and Tegan when they object. In one scene, he has a shouting match with Tegan, starts to grab at her, and gets shoved away, knocking himself out when he bangs his head on the furniture. (I cheered, but unfortunately he recovers consciousness later.) He is eventually persuaded around by the Doctor, but it still comes across as Adric thinking that colonialism is just fine and fantastic, and only being perturbed when mass genocide and the strip-mining of Earth becomes part of the plan, and more crucially only believing that when a man tells him, not when a woman tells him much the same thing.

All this just confirms my opinion that of all the Doctor Who companions, Adric is the one who’s most likely to join an Incel forum; he was almost bearable last serial, but that may be because he was barely in it and made no attempt at light banter in the bits he was in. Here, he’s even more smug, smarmy, full of himself, and – worse yet – convinced of his own intelligence when in fact he is being an utter fool. Imagine if genocidal fascist Captain Yates, instead of going all coy and conspiratorial about becoming a genocidal fascist in Invasion of the Dinosaurs, just spent hours on end boring everyone to tears in the UNIT canteen wittering on and on about alt-right talking points until, oh, I don’t know, the Third Doctor said something withering which cut him down to size, or the Brigadier called him into his office for a telling off, or Sgt. Benton and the lads threw him a blanket party like in Full Metal Jacket. That’s the level of irritating we’ve got going on here. The only thing which prevents this completely wrecking the serial is that it’s quite clear we are meant to disagree with him and think he’s being a dipshit here, but it’s outright bizarre to even do that when the show is still struggling to sell fans on Adric as a character.

And we’re stuck with him for the foreseeable future. If only he’d, oh, I don’t know, die in a horrible starship crash or something.

Incredibly, the plan for this was originally for Nyssa to exit the TARDIS at the end of this story; Davison went to bat for her and argued that her personaity as a companion was too compatible with his vision for the Fifth Doctor to simply discard at this point, and so she won a reprieve. I can’t see how you’d sit down and try to select one companion from the admittedly quite overstuffed-seeming TARDIS at this point and not come to the conclusion that Adric has to go, but there you are.

Since this was the first serial produced in the season, Davison hadn’t hit his style for the camera yet, and so the Doctor is notably more quirky and goofy than he is once Davison strikes the somewhat more sober tone he intends to take for his run – comparing this to the end of Castrovalva, where his style has largely emerged, is particularly jarring. This is most notable in the earliest episodes – he finds his stride by the end of the serial, and one wonders whether it wouldn’t have been better to simply have more in the way of rehearsals to get Davison to the point where his Doctor persona seems natural.

The other production shortcoming here is the space helmets. They’re just not executed well – there’s no faceplate on them, which on the one hand at least doesn’t obscure the actors’ expressions, but at the same time it doesn’t look remotely airtight. An effect to make a glowing effect flash on and off when they put the helmets on to get across the idea it’s projecting a force field would be something. More generally, they just don’t seem to perform much function for most of the serial – with the TARDIS crew wearing them or carrying them about for no apparent reason in situations where they really don’t need them. The end result is that they’re a near-constant visual reminder of how crappy they look, which is kind of an issue.

The silliest thing is that when they actually do a space walk, most of the characters other than the Doctor use normal space suits, with only the Doctor actually making use of the helmet. Why would you do this? What’s wrong with putting the Doctor in a space suit? Sure, it will mean you have to momentarily take him out of his costume, but it’s been done before in the show – Pertwee wore one in The Ambassadors of Death, for instance. There’s likewise a bit later on where the life support is cut off, but again, what’s wrong with having the characters don space suits for that? No, I’m sorry, it’s just a clumsy aspect of the serial all around.

Doctor, no! That thing’s bigger on the inside!

That said, I think Four To Doomsday is better than the fandom generally regards it – it tends to bump around in the lower reaches of the Doctor Who Magazine polls. It’s far from perfect, and it makes some creative decisions I take issue with, but the story is both interesting and executed in a manner that feels distinctly different from what we’ve become used to under Baker, and so it’s an important step in establishing the style of the new Doctor’s era.

Next up is Kinda by Christopher Bailey, which was written when Nyssa was expected to be gone, so she spends more or less the entire story having a nice lie down in the TARDIS, having fainted at the end of Four To Doomsday. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew decide to explore the mysterious jungle planet they’ve landed on, Deva Loka. This is home to the Kinda, apparently a pre-technological people – though the presence of massive crystalline wind chimes in a clearing suggests that there must be higher technology here than it first appears, and more broadly the planet seems almost too ideal for the Kinda’s purposes, to the point where they basically face no negative circumstances arising from local factors whatsoever – no predators, no diseases, no competition, the ecosystem resolutely refusing to significantly challenge them in a way that natural ecosystems don’t.

Of course, non-local problems can arise – and they’re here in the form of an off-world colonial expedition, an exploratory team here to assess the potential of the planet for full settlement. One by one, the exploratory team have been picked off, until they now consist of just the gruff commander Sanders (Richard Todd), lead scientist Todd (Nerys Hughes), and security chief Hindle (Simon Rouse). They have taken hostages from the Kinda as a deterrant against attack, but their personnel are still getting picked off one by one. When Adric and the Doctor encounter the mecha the colonisers use to explore the jungle – without its pilot – it reactivates and automatically heads back to base, forcing the Doctor and Adric along ahead of it and separating them from Tegan.

Tegan, meanwhile, is having a nice nap near those windchimes… but as they tinkle in the background, she finds herself falling into a dark and puzzling dream, in which the mysterious force known as the Mara demands to gain entry into her mind and make use of her body to enact its will. It’s just a dream, right? But on Deva Loka, there is great danger in dreaming alone…

Kinda is a fascinating exercise in planting Doctor Who somewhere which superficially looks like its comfort zone, and then increasingly pushing it out of there. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the action taking place inside the colonists’ base. In his increasingly desperate and destructive plans to defend the dome, culminating in wiring it with bombs so that if he decides it has been irreversibly compromised he can blow it up and destroy the jungle for miles around it, Hindle takes the logic of the Base Under Siege to its ultimate conclusion. Indeed, the genius of Hindle’s role here is that whilst this story very much isn’t a Base Under Siege, he believes it is.

Likewise, surface appearances are misleading outside the base too. At first it looks like we’re dealing with a gendered society where men are mute telepaths who take the orders whilst women are speaking telepaths who give the orders. Then it becomes apparent that there are women among the mutes, and that the speaking women constitute an elite priestly caste, of whom we only meet two – Panna (Mary Morris) and Karuna (Sarah Prince), the wise elder and her child apprentice. Then it becomes apparent that the elite circle are more closely linked than anyone could have expected – with Panna’s knowledge, memories, and persona becoming merged with Karuna after Panna dies, with the implication that this has been the case for time immemorial. In parallel, it has become apparent that the planet is home to a group mind which at the very least takes in all of the Kinda, and might even incorporate the whole ecosystem – which would mean that Panna and then Karuna end up being the voice of the entire planet.

Throughout all this, the story is riddled with implications and outright hints towards a hidden history which, unusually for the show, is never fully expounded. We can infer a lot, though – that once there was a much more technological culture here, that it collapsed due in part to the Mara, that the line of priest-queens (each of whom is a gestalt entity made up of the psyches of all the preceding ones) who take on the voice have been directing the telepathic unity of the world to try and keep the Mara contained, and that there is a cyclical nature to life on Deva Loka, in which every so often the priest-queens fail to contain the Mara and the world falls to darkness again before re-emerging after an era of great suffering.

Somewhere in the rewrites – a contentious process between Bailey and Saward, since Bailey thought Saward was junking too many of his themes and undertook rewrites himself to fix the damage – someone seems to have lost sight of the fact that we never find out what happened to the other expedition members, and that the Mara cannot be responsible because the Mara is not active in the story until it re-emerges into the world through Tegan. I suspect the intention was that Panna (Mary Morris) was arranging to pick them off one by one because of the threat that minds not integrated into the telepathic web of the world posed, for the Mara is only able to escape through the dreaming of a mind not part of the network, and that this element was cut so as to make Panna/Karuna seem more benign.

Either way, what you end up with here is a story which, at its best, is richly enigmatic, and sees the series stepping away from the sense that it needs to explain the bulk of the material in the story by the end of it. Nowhere is this more effective than in the dream sequences – Tegan’s psychic assault from the Mara or the Doctor and Todd’s glimpse at an allegorical version of the planet’s past are wonderful, bordering on the Lynchian.

The serial is not executed perfectly, mind you. Bailey has since said he regrets lifting the direct names of concepts from Buddhism to name the characters and concepts in this story, for instance. “White folk playing Generic Primitive People” is frequently an unappealing look, especially when – as is the case here- the version of Generic Primitive People are, except for the leadership figures, very much riffing on the sort of cultures which were romanticised and appropriated en mass in the 1960s tiki bar craze. The bit where they make a cargo cult mecha out of bits of wood is likewise playing on tropes about Pacific islanders.

Nonetheless, there’s a sense that Bailey has his heart in the right place here. As well as the anti-colonialist thrust of the story, there’s also an openness to the idea that family structures and gender roles are cultural constructs. Karuna alludes to having seven fathers. On finding the pilotless mecha, Adric asks of the pilot “But where is he?”, and the Doctor says “or she, or…” in a way which seems outright forward-thinking by 1980s standards. The character of Todd could happily have been played by a man, but a woman is cast in the role, and I have to wonder whether JNT practiced gender-blind casting on that front.

Hindle and Sanders’ respective mental breakdowns are a bit cartoonish, but I think it works because it’s clearly not meant to be read as conventional mental illness of any sort, but the by-product of a dysfunctional interaction with the telepathic network of the planet. (Of course, arguably much mental illness is the product of a dysfunctional interaction with prevailing environmental or social conditions, but the air of the fantastic here certainly helps it read less like a comment on real mental illness.)

We may as well do Adric-watch this time around: Adric pretends to co-operate with Hindle in order to try and help the Doctor, which if this were an isolated incident would be fine, but he’s been doing variations on “pretend to co-operate with the villain” (State of Decay), “eagerly co-operate with the villain” (Four To Doomsday), or “get forced to co-operate with the villain” (Castrovalva) a hell of a lot. Aside from Castrovalva, he seems to be eagerly buying in each time, and it’s yet one more way in which the show is comprehensively failing to sell us on liking him as a character.

Also, Adric is shitty to Tegan about how she ended up getting possessed by the Mara, and suggests it meant she had a weak mind. Tegan points out that Adric ended up causing a problem when he got in the mecha which is driven by the pilot’s brainwaves, but the fear in him led to him losing control of it and opening fire on a bunch of Kinda. His rebuttal is that he was about to get the hang of the thing when the Doctor interfered. Was this intentional character development? Are we meant to see Adric as evolving into a villain? If so, clearly that particular story arc didn’t pan out in the long run, presumably because it would require people to continue to tolerate Adric until it bore fruit.

Seeds are sown concerning Tegan here as well. Sandifer notes that the ending here is a little dissatisfying, but I would counter that it’s not meant to be fully satisfying – with Tegan’s understated lines questioning whether the Mara has fully gone from her, I think the production team must have on some level been toying with the idea of a sequel from the start, and eventually of course they made one – Snakedance, in the next season. In this sense, an ending which feels incomplete is apt, because it leaves us with a sense of unfinished business, a feeling that the other shoe has still yet to drop. Whether it will be at all satisfying when it does drop will be a job for a later article, but as it stands Kinda is oddly fascinating, and perhaps offers the first really compelling story of the Davison era.

“Hey babe, wanna try out a character arc?”

The following story is The Visitation – written by Eric Saward and the other story this time where Antony Root script edited. After the diversion to Deva Loka to accommodate Nyssa’s recuperation, the TARDIS crew are making another attempt to get Tegan to Earth so she can finally take up that flight attendant job. (Erm, wouldn’t police inquiries arising from the death of her aunt derail her first day on the job anyway?) The TARDIS comes down in the right place, wrong year – somewhere west of London, at the future site of Heathrow, back in 1666.

As they take a stroll to get an exact fix on the time period, the TARDIS crew are attacked by local villagers, who have taken to violently driving away all strangers – for the Plague is running through the land and the only sure defence is isolation. The Doctor and his friends escape thanks to the help of an unusual new ally: Richard Mace (Michael Robbins), an actor whose career was derailed by the closure of the theatres (as an anti-plague precaution) and who has become a “gentleman of the road”. In other words, he’s a highwayman, though he has become desirous enough for company as well as coin that he elects to help the TARDIS crew for the sake of being friendly.

As they take shelter with Mace in a nearby barn, the Doctor realises that Mace has somehow obtained a piece of alien technology which he’s mistaken for jewellery, and Nyssa discovers anachronistic power packs stashed in the straw. With Mace relating stories of an unusual comet seen in the sky some nights before, it’s apparent that aliens have come down to Earth – they turn out to be Terileptils – and are making use of the village’s isolation for their own ends. Yet what is the purpose of their Visitation?

This story is famed in part for a contentious decision made by John Nathan-Turner – the inclusion of a bit where a Terileptil breaks the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver, which would not appear for the entire rest of the classic series. This, in itself, is frustrating even if you care about continuity to the extent that John Nathan-Turner seems to have done did. What, the Doctor can build himself an entire new K9 but he can’t bodge together a new sonic screwdriver – even though Romana did exactly that during her stint in the TARDIS? Come off it, JNT. (Saward himself expressed the belief that the Doctor had a whole cupboard full of them.)

However, there was more motivation here than just breaking an iconic feature of the show for the sake of it. See, Nathan-Turner has argued for the necessity of breaking the sonic screwdriver by arguing that it was a crutch for lazy scriptwriting and made it too easy for the Doctor to get out of situations. Elizabeth Sandifer has pointed out why this is wrong-headed – having an easy way to get the Doctor out of captivity thanks to his wonder-lockpick means that lazy writers can’t pad out episodes with imprisonment and escape sequences too much, much as the psychic paper in the new series helps brush past the “Doctor established credentials” bit which needs to be overcome to address the actual story.

To Sandifer’s points, I would add that this is a solution to a problem which hadn’t even manifested in the show. The sonic screwdriver has been a factor in the show since the Second Doctor era, and at no point from then to now did I ever get the sense that it was being overused. Indeed, there were well-established weaknesses which would prevent it being used in some circumstances. A string of previous producers and script editors dealt with it fine. Why did JNT think this needed to change?

One might speculate that this wasn’t a problem with scripts reaching production but scripts submitted – if Bidmead or Root had complained about having to reject too many scripts or do too many rewrites to tone down the screwdriver, that might have been a motivation. It’s still a silly, clumsy solution to the issue when a producer or script editor can simply produce a style guide for wannabe contributors to the show, in which they could set clear limits on the use of it and point out established ways in which the “why not use the sonic screwdriver?” problem can be solved. Show bibles are more common these days, but such things did exist for BBC productions by the early 1980s – Chris Boucher had done one for Blake’s 7 – and if you’re seeing a regular problem come up in submitted scripts, that’s something you solve by tightening up your show bible, not by vandalising the imagery of the show.

I wonder if JNT was responding not to a perceived problem in the scripts that were actually produced, or in submissions to the show, but in fanfic? I can easily imagine fan writers leaning on the screwdriver too much in their efforts, and this creating the perception in the minds of those who read a lot of fanzines that the screwdriver is used all the goddamn time for everything, even though that’s fanon and not reflected in the televised show.

Either way, it’s a clunky solution to the problem, and perhaps its clunkiness comes down to one important factor: it was a writing constraint imposed by a producer who, for all his other qualities, wasn’t a writer. Of course, Doctor Who has had producers who didn’t write for the show before – indeed, the likes of Barry Letts or Graham Williams were exceptions in this respect. Sure, Philip Hinchcliffe had a previous career history in writing and script editing when he became producer for the show’s best run ever – but Verity Lambert had no writing background and her stewardship for the show laid the foundations everyone else built on.

Equally, though, Lambert probably pulled that off because she didn’t impose such heavy-handed mandates on writers – and she trusted her script editors to work with the writers to get scripts to the point she needed. There is, ultimately, a difference between a producer saying “We should destroy the sonic screwdriver” and “The sonic screwdriver seems to be being used too much – what do we do about that?”; the latter diagnoses a problem but offers a chance for the writers to come up with suitable solutions, the former simply mandates a solution, and when a non-writer does this for the sake of supposedly improving the writing, they risk having the reverse effect altogether.

Still, it’s not fair to blame this story for that decision – especially when it is as good as this. As Sandifer has noted, it owes a fair bit to The Time Warrior in terms of setup – Saward having greatly admired Robert Holmes – since both stories are pseudo-historicals in which the action is set up by an advanced alien landing in a period of English history and proceeding to use his advanced technology to pursue his own agenda at the expense of the humans. However, the execution is very different; whereas in The Time Warrior the local bandit gang were conscious collaborators with the villain, here the opponents use mind control. There, two factions of humans were at loggerheads; here, Mace is the only local friend the TARDIS crew have. There, the events are essentially taking place out in the margins of history, away from especially notable events; here, the Doctor manages to purge the Terileptil plague by causing the Great Fire of London. (Shades of The Romans!) The end result is a story which adeptly takes a classic Doctor Who premise but offers a fresh spin on it – which is something Doctor Who regularly needs to do simply because avoiding repeating itself entirely would soon become a damaging creative constraint in its own right.

We also get more soap-influenced character moments here. In particular, early on the crew are picking over the events of Kinda, and the Doctor is trying to urge Adric to be more sensible about his escape plans – sage advice that I am sure Adric will take to heart and will ensure his survival for seasons to come. Adric-watch time: the boy blunder of the Doctor Who franchise once again proves himself less competent than Nyssa – who works up a trap which lets her destroy the Terileptil android all by herself – and less sympathetic than Tegan, who is also quite complainy but at least makes complaints which are well-justified, and with less emotional intelligence than either. (Nyssa has to say to him “I said empathise, don’t get angry” when he says something snippy in response to being asked what the Doctor would do if he were there.) Saward manages to make him less annoying largely by keeping him out of the way. Perhaps Saward can be prevailed upon to write a script which solves the problem once and for all?

More generally, though, Saward manages to do the character interaction stuff better than we’ve seen so far this season, largely by letting the actors show that their past experiences have an appropriate emotional weight. Between that and the strength of the main story, it’s a fabulous serial which is executed wonderfully, with Mace being a really enjoyable one-off ally at that. You can absolutely see why Antony Root thought that Saward could viably replace him in the script editor role – anyone would be tempted to make that call if they mostly had The Visitation to go on.

“Can’t we have left him behind in the Great Fire of London, Doctor?”

Terence Dudley’s second script this season is Black Orchid. With the season scaled back to the more usual 26 episodes, there wasn’t space to do 7 four-parters – but instead of dialling back to 5 four-parters and a six-parter, JNT decided to go with 6 four-parters and a two-parter. This story, which sees the TARDIS crew blagging their way into a 1920s costume party (thanks to a case of mistaken identity) and getting caught up in a murder mystery, is something we’ve not seen since The Highlanders – a pure historical! That’s right, the only thing science fictional going on here is the arrival of the Doctor and pals in the TARDIS – it’s essentially a pure period piece.

It’s also “Doctor Who does Poirot”, which shows a canny understanding of the historical format, which was often used to do concepts like “Doctor Who does Westerns” (The Gunfighters) or “Doctor Who does Shakespeare” (The Crusade). Fortunately, the Doctor’s dressed for the occasion this time – for the party’s host, Lord Cranleigh (Michael Cochrane), is a cricketing buff and puts on a match to kick off the festivities. It also picks out the “someone in history looks exactly like a TARDIS crew member” idea from The Massacre – in this case, Sarah Sutton gets to play the dual role, since Nyssa looks exactly like Ann Talbot, Lord Cranleigh’s fiancée. (In other casting news, Ahmed Khalil is cast as Latoni, an indigenous Amazonian.)

The major problem with it is that a two-episode serial isn’t quite enough space to do a meaty enough murder mystery; to do a proper mystery in this style, you need to introduce us to a lot of characters and flesh them out enough that we have a range of subjects to do that with, and within the scope of the episodes there just isn’t time to do that (though trimming back self-indulgent moments like the cricket sequence may have helped there).

Distastefully, the resolution involves big dollops of ableism (crossing over with racism at that, since the disabled individual in question was mutilated by a Brazilian tribe). As Sandifer has noted, if the story had done more to suggest that the cause of the murderer’s lashing out was not the torture he had received but the grotesque imprisonment he was subjected to when he returned home, then you’d have something – and perhaps you can catch a note of that in the way the murderer lurches back from his own brother and falls off the roof of the house at the end. Nonetheless, it’s still a blot on the story.

Another point about it I dislike is the way the Doctor gets out of being framed for murder – by showing police officers the inside of the TARDIS and demonstrating that his story about being a time traveller is true. This to me feels like it breaks the rules of the historical subgenre a bit too much – it’s an ultimately science fictional solution to a historical challenge. On the whole, though interesting in theory, Black Orchid is a bit of a misfire at best, a thoughtless repetition of the prejudices of the era it’s visiting whilst failing to critique them at worst. The latter is the same mistake the show made with Talons of Weng-Chiang, so it is at least a very classic Who way to screw up – but it reflects badly on JNT and Saward that they did not endeavour to do better than their predecessors in this respect.

Speaking of Saward, we’ve got one of his stories next – Earthshock, in which he indulges in the traditional naughtiness of Doctor Who script editors by editing one of his own scripts and camouflaging that (in this case, as mentioned, it was by crediting Root as the script editor, when in fact he did nothing of the sort). We start off with a group of space squaddies coming in to help out an archaeological expedition, some of whose members have run into trouble in a cave system. This was years before Aliens offered its vision of space marines (small-s, small-m, we aren’t talking Warhammer 40,000 here), but the look of the emergency response team feels very modern. They’re clearly wearing paintballing armour, but the nice thing about paintballing armour is that it does at least look like somewhat futuristic armour, and on the whole it’s a much more modern take on “soldiers in space” than we’ve been used to seeing in the show so far.

Meanwhile, Adric is sulking in his bedroom like a petulant pouty big-faced baby boy; he is therefore in his natural habitat. When the Doctor tries to have a chat with him about it, it goes as poorly as trying to engage with a moody adolescent when they’re right in the middle of a bad mood tends to go. Specifically, Adric is “tired of being considered a joke” and thinks everyone teases him too much and always criticises his mistakes out of proportion to everyone else’s and the Doctor doesn’t give him enough time. “It’s never your fault when something goes wrong!” Adric complains, and he’d have kind of a point if it really is more or less never the Doctor’s fault when major mistakes happen and very often is Adric’s.

The scene smacks somewhat of Saward ticking the fanbase off for complaining too much about Adric – after all, by the time Saward was tackling this script, the fandom will have already loudly and proudly declared its thoughts on season 18, and griping about Adric would likely have taken up a significant proportion. Adric feels like he’s an outsider in the TARDIS crew, not as respected or loved as anyone else, which is perhaps a common misconception people develop about themselves – though it is, again, kind of true. It’s true in terms of fan reception, and true in terms of his prominence in the narrative (he’s been sidelined a lot lately, largely because writers would prefer to write about the Doctor, Tegan, and Nyssa given the choice), and true in terms of the internal dynamic, where he’s too often been the bratty, shitty version of Nyssa who fails to be helpful a lot.

Let’s think on that: we have had 100% turnover of the other companions since Adric came on, and the Doctor’s regenerated. If Adric, despite having more TARDIS experience than any of the other companions and, arguably, having seniority over the Fifth Doctor has failed to establish a compelling niche for himself in the crew, that speaks poorly of how useful the character is to the show. We didn’t even have much time away from Romana before we immediately met a new companion – Nyssa – and saw the process of Adric being pushed out commence; there was never a significant period when Adric was the sole companion, and whilst that might have given him a chance to bed in, equally the fact that it was so easy for him to be usurped (remember, Nyssa wasn’t ever meant to be a companion!) feels like a weakness.

Ultimately, being super-good at maths is the sort of thing which is of limited utility outside of a Christopher Bidmead story, and it’s especially niche when the Doctor himself and Nyssa aren’t exactly innumerate and have more hands-on technical skills. (Adric has griped about being no good with his hands before.) Moreover, Adric has often shown himself to be kind of a shitty dude – if he thinks people are teasing him too much and being mean, it’s surely in part because he’s astonishingly rude to everyone around him, and frequently so. He can dish it out, but he can’t take it, and that’s not an appealing quality in the slightest – especially when he often doesn’t know the line between gentle ribbing and simply being horrid. You might be able to read that as neurodiversity on his part, but remember – there’s a point where he is called out on that in Four To Doomsday, and he makes it really clear that he intends to be nasty and hurt people’s feelings by saying that stuff.

There’s a bit in episode 2 of this where Adric, unaware of the gunfight that’s happened with the androids, strolls right out into the open asking after the Doctor, and Nyssa and Tegan say “Oh no, Adric!”, which is basically the audience response whenever Adric shows up. However, things are looking up, because Adric actually proposes a solution – he realises he wants to go back to his own people, which would mean a return to E-Space. That’s great – an entire universe away is an appropriate distance to keep Adric – but the Doctor points out how astonishingly dangerous and risky this would be (the TARDIS only went there the first time by accident), prompting Adric to attempt some calculations to show how it could be done. The Doctor insists on not helping Adric with his E-Space calculations specifically because Adric has been whining about being treated as a joke and not taken seriously – what better way to take him seriously than to trust him to do what he’s good at (mathematics), and Nyssa and Tegan try to reason with the Doctor and convince him to mend bridges (because why bother trying to reason with Adric when he’ll just be a shitter to you about it?), yet before the expedition can be undertaken, they cross paths with the investigation team, and end up attacked by androids under the control of the Cybermen…

Wait, sorry, before I can go into discussing the bulk of the actual story I need to address Adric again. You see, a lot of the conversation about Adric’s desire to go home is absolutely steeped in continuity nods from season 18 – you’ve got his origins, the whole E-Space thing, the complications of getting to and from E-Space, and the relationship of Logopolis to all that to consider. In other words, you need to be pretty up on what’s been going on in the show from Full Circle onwards to follow what the Doctor and his pals are talking about.

As a reminder, season 18 had absolutely horrible ratings, and season 19 had bounced back – but I suspect as a result of this, when the story aired literal millions of people were simply baffled by the discussion, because they hadn’t seen the stories which would provide the essential background to it. I was fine, and enjoyed the moment, but it’s a significant instance of the show simply not giving much of a fuck about new viewers, and forgetting that any serial could potentially be someone’s first exposure to it – an attitude not healthy to the long-term health on a show which depends on smooth onboarding of new viewers to keep its numbers up.

Anyway, so back to the body of the story: towards the end of the second episode, the serial shifts into a Base Under Siege mode, as the action relocates to the space freighter that the Cybermen are stowing away on and from which they were controlling their androids. The set design and model work here is really nice – basically doing an Alien-style blue-collar starship on a BBC budget with flair – and the story structure of one and a half episodes on Earth, two and a half on the freighter means that it feels much less constrained and low-rent than Base Under Siege stories often risk seeming.

Nicely, there’s a gratifying number of female characters in this story – women are seen among the archaeologists, among the soldiers, and among the freighter crew, and the freighter is commanded by Captain Briggs, played by veteran Beryl Reid wonderfully. Nor are they mollycoddled – women die fighting the Cybermen in this too, although I cannot, off the top of my head, name any.

See, here’s the problem the serial runs into: a good Base Under Siege story relies on having a tight cast of characters in the Base, who we get to know early on and whose personal clashes can drive the story as much as the external threat. Earthshock, however, has too many characters for it to elegantly introduce us to more than a fraction of them, and even those that stand out don’t have enough space to do very much. Between the freighter crew, the archaeologists, and the squaddies, there’s too many moving parts here…

…and that, alas, is why discussion of this episode keeps getting dragged back to Adric, because only he gets much in the way of good character moments. Adric and the Doctor’s conversation patching things up, in which Adric shows that he completed the calculations, the Doctor praises him for it, and Adric says that after his bout of angry-maths he realises he doesn’t want to go back after all, is quite nicely realised – had Waterhouse been sticking around, it would have been a useful opportunity to soften the character, but for that to work it should really have been done back towards the start of this season (in which Adric’s prickliness could be chalked up to bereavement and confusion in the wake of the Fourth Doctor’s death), and here it’s too little, too late.

Speaking of too little, too late, this story was cooked up to give the Cybermen a big, exciting return to action, but they look as pathetic here as ever, caught up in inferior versions of classic Cyberman moments. You’ve got the Quisling aspect of stories like The Invasion, you’ve got Cybermen emerging from pods like in Tomb of the Cybermen or The Wheel In Space, you have them pontificating about their lack of emotion like in The Tenth Planet, the gold weakness from Revenge of the Cybermen and so on, all remixed in a retread of past glories. There’s a bit where Tegan creeps up on a Cyberman, is about to shoot it, but fumbles about with her gun and botches it and gets captured in a humiliating fashion; far from making them seem scary, this just makes Tegan seem pathetic.

They’ve also got their old hypocrisy intact. The Cyber Leader talks about Cyberman superiority for lacking emotions, but does all sorts of stuff which can be ascribed only to spite, not their much-vaunted logic. Sadly, to tease out an example of this, I’m going to have to talk about Adric again. Adric’s decision to stay behind on the freighter after the Cybermen rig it to crash into Earth offers, finally, a moment in which he actually seems sympathetic – the Cybermen are threatening to kill Tegan if the Doctor doesn’t accompany her to the TARDIS, but have decided that they want Adric on the freighter’s bridge. The Doctor and Tegan don’t want to leave Adric behind, and their complaints threaten to lead to Tegan being gunned down, but Adric urges them to co-operate and agrees to stay behind, saving Tegan, who he always got along with worst.

However, this sudden moment of decency on Adric’s part comes at the cost of damaging the narrative’s premises. What is the logic behind the Cybermen leaving Adric on the bridge? There is no diegetic justification for it; Saward merely needs to keep Adric on the freighter for plot reasons, and so he has the Cybermen arbitrarily decide they want him on the bridge, despite the fact that they have no logical need to keep him there and the Doctor and Tegan will apparently be more co-operative if they bring Adric to the TARDIS with them. With apparent benefit from taking him along, and no apparent benefit from leaving him behind, why wouldn’t the Cybermen bring him along?

Sure, sure, this sort of niggle is usually the sort of thing which is best left for wiki-tickling fan bullshit, but it poses a particular thematic problem with the Cybermen, who purportedly work on principles of pure, unemotional logic. If that’s true, then they shouldn’t do nearly as much illogical shit as they do in this story – and, to be fair, in plenty of previous stories. If we take the view that the Cybermen are full of shit and are nowhere near as free of emotion as they claim – just the nice ones – that helps somewhat, but they still believe themselves to operate on the basis of logic, and should be shown to do so.

With the Cybermen still rubbish, too many characters among the freighter crew, space marines, and archaeologists for anyone to really stand out, and most of the TARDIS regulars being unusually ineffective this time around, it’s no wonder discussion of this story constantly comes back to Adric, who finishes the serial by doing an amazing, wonderful thing, the absolute best thing I have seen him do onscreen yet: he dies.

Alas, Adric manages to annoy me even as he succumbs to the curse of fatal death. In the last moments of the serial, multiple people urge Adric to come with them and evacuate the ship, rather than sticking around to try and solve the logic codes the Cybermen have imposed to override the controls on the freighter. He’s increasingly shitty to them, momentary allows him to be dragged on, and then when the bulkhead door leading into the bridge is closing, jumps through to keep trying to crack the puzzle. Even though he believes he is protecting Earth, this does not come across as him being motivated by altruism – instead, it just seems like he’s just too headstrong and arrogant to be satisfied leaving a puzzle unsolved, an impression I am pleased to note is shared by Sandifer.

The result of this is that in his last moments, all his emotional responses are rooted in him being frustrated at the puzzle and sad that he’ll never know if he got it right – there’s no sign of any worry for any of the people he believes are about to die. Nobody on Earth dies – or at least, no human person dies – because the freighter has fallen back in time 65 million years, to the time when the dinosaurs went extinct – the freighter hit Earth and caused the extinction, presumably because the dinosaurs all committed suicide rather than deal with Adric. Adric himself dies not out of heroic self-sacrifice, but because he’s a nasty little smart-ass who absolutely has to be right.

Our last shot of Adric cuts away before we get to see him Adric go up in flames as the ship careens through the atmosphere, alas – come on, BBC, you showed us blood for Blake’s death in the last Blake’s 7 episode, what are you being coy about? – and the decision was made to roll the credits of the last episode to silence, over a still shot of Adric’s crushed gold badge for mathematical accomplishment, rather than using the usual outro sequence. That, at least, was the right call – how could anyone have heard the music over the cacophony of nationwide celebration that ensued?

Earthshock has had a fairly decent reputation over the years, and has consistently come in as being the number 2 Peter Davison story of all time on Doctor Who Magazine polls. This shows appalling taste on the part of the fandom – you’re going to rate this over The Visitation, Whovians? Really? I realise that the end of Adric is a memorable moment, and all joking aside the production does an OK job of making it seem poignant (by playing every emotional manipulation card available), but it really seems to me that Earthshock’s reputation is based almost entirely on that one moment, in part because it is the last thing you see when you watch the serial and so the final impression you are left with. This warm recollection of the serial glosses over a lot of the storytelling shortcomings, the slackness of motivation, and perhaps most annoyingly the way the pacing absolutely goes to shit in the back half. It does a wonderful and important thing for the series by removing Adric, but having him spuriously fall in love with a Kinda or something and deciding to stay behind on a previous adventure would have done the job just as well, and rid us of him earlier.

The season finale is Time-Flight – the first of several stories penned by Peter Grimwade, who had previously directed several serials. As one might expect, this kicks off with the TARDIS crew discussing Adric’s death, largely so the Doctor can say that having experienced that they can’t use the TARDIS to go back and undo it (with the implication being that if you make a nonsense of your personal timeline you end up doing more harm than good). Then the Doctor proposes going on a visit to the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, and everyone cheers up more or less instantly. Good thing nobody actually cared too much about Adric, eh? The rapidity with which the characters regain their equilibrium here rather undercuts the admittedly good job Earthshock did of making Adric’s death seem like a big moment, and consequently hurts Earthshock in retrospect – it’s impossible to treat it with the same gravity once you know it’s going to be brushed off so quickly.

However, the TARDIS instead ends up materialising in Heathrow Airport in the modern day. The Doctor is able to swiftly overcome any awkward questions from the security chaps by namedropping UNIT – who not only tell Heathrow administration that the Doctor has full security clearance, but also suggest that they involve him in a little mystery. It seems that one of our Concordes is missing – and when the Doctor and the TARDIS gang take a ride on another Concorde (packing the TARDIS so they can use its instruments) along the same route, they find the problem: somewhere on that route is a gap into a time tunnel, leading to hundreds of millions of years ago in the past, where the mysterious Kalid is setting the captured Concorde passengers to perform some onerous task. And behind the mask of Kalid lurks an old adversary – the Master!

Now, we’ve had Doctor Who episodes shot on location in airports before – The Faceless Ones did it and made good use of the concept. Here, though, we only really get the start and the end of the story at Heathrow – the conclusion is a bit slack and underwhelming, and is largely used to set up a fakeout where it looks like Tegan has inadvertently left the TARDIS crew (the Doctor and Nyssa perhaps reasonably assuming she’d want to stick around to take up that airline hostess job she’d been complaining about losing out on), when in fact she’ll be back at the start of season 20.

In principle, Tegan getting to use some actual air hostess skills on an adventure is a fun shift, but even so all that happens in the ancient past, and in the end much of the first episode is busywork to get the TARDIS crew into the main matter of the story, when they could have just have easily materialised in the area, seen a stranded Concorde and – presto! – you have them involved without spinning your wheels to that extent. Really, the biggest advantage the TARDIS gives a writer is that it lets them drop the Doctor and pals directly in the middle of a story without needing to spend a lot of time on setup, so Grimwade failing to make use of that is a problem. If you were guessing that he did it because his story wasn’t quite substantial enough to fill out the four episodes, you’d be right on the money.

This, however, is the least of the serial’s problems. This is one of the most reviled stories of the Davison era – consistently ending up at the bottom of the Doctor Who Magazine poll when ranking the Fifth Doctor stories – and not even Davison himself likes it, bemoaning the fact that because the season’s budget had ran out they couldn’t do justice to the script. One wonders if it would have been better to scrap Time-Flight, assign another two episodes to Black Orchid (to get some more actual murder mystery action in, rather than setting up a fairly superfluous mystery the viewer gets to unravel fairly quickly), and give another two episodes to Earthshock (to give the characters room to breathe, and to allow for a sustained 10 minute shot of Adric’s charred bones smoking in a crater). After all, one of the major budget headaches with Doctor Who is the fact that you need to get new sets and costumes and actors for each new serial – doing one less serial a season and spending a touch more time on the serials which could do with a bit more attention seems a viable cost-cutting measure.

Alas, the team pressed on with Time-Flight, and the end result is galling. The outdoor scenes set 145 million years ago offer up the least convincing otherworldly landscape we’ve seen on the show for ages – it’s very, very obviously on a soundstage, with the crew unaccountably failing to disguise that fact nearly as well as they have fora good long time. There’s even shots where the characters are clearly, unambiguously stood mere feet away from a matte painting, and where the camera is set up at an angle to the painting so the perspective goes wrong – a goof we’ve not seen since the 1960s. (The problems extend beyond the 1:1 scale shots: the model shots of Concorde in the prehistoric wasteland are also pathetic.)

There’s also a fair bit of bad Colour Separation Overlay in this serial – including some which is entirely needless, because they did some location filming in places which are later the focus of CSO scenes, so they could have just shot all the bits of the scenes in which the CSO-enabled effects were not absolutely necessary on location. We’ve seen CSO go badly wrong in the show as a result of budget shortfalls too, of course – that’s how Underworld happened – but at least in Underworld the CSO was representing something that could clearly not have been realised conventionally, with the resources they had to hand. Here, it’s replacing something they could have just shot directly.

It’s not just the backdrops that are shoddy. A lot of the monsters look like lumpy grey turds on legs, and the Master’s disguise as Kalid is outright horrible – take the Celestial Toymaker, make him even more of a Fu Manchu ripoff by giving him the moustache and an obviously overstated foreign accent, throw in some massive buck teeth to make sure the racial caricature in question is as viciously demeaning as possible, and then add lots of grey, and you’re there. I’m sorry, but yellowface casting is still that if you palette-swap to grey. This is the sort of thing which badly marred Talons of Weng-Chiang, but this is more like a Celestial Toymaker situation: if you’re racist in a good serial, then you damage an otherwise good serial, but if you’re racist in a bad serial, you give me absolutely no reason to give any of your serial’s shortcomings the slightest benefit of the doubt.

“Me the Master/me play joke/me dress up like a racial caricature so hate-filled that it makes Talons of Weng-Chiang seem positively sympathetic in comparison.”

And good golly, is this serial bad – and unfortunately, it’s the sort of bad which gives the impression that everyone just kind of gave up on the possibility that it might be otherwise, which is the sort of thing which always makes bad special effects less forgivable. (“Cheap with heart” over “expensive but heartless” every time, remember – and both are better than “cheap and heartless”.). Forget about the budgetary problems and the racism for a moment – it costs no money to not write a script stuffed to the gills with awkward technobabble, and yet here we are. Worse yet, a lot of the technobabble dialogue here seems to exist only to plug holes in other bits of technobable dialogue – characters explaining to each other stuff for the sake of avoiding fanzines snarking about plot holes, rather than saying anything of interesting.

Incidentally, if we’re going to do technobabble, could we get some to explain why two random aeroplane pilots have are even slightly able to operate the TARDIS? Sure, they need the help of a psychic projection of a dead character who shows up, helps them, and disappears without materially contributing again in order to properly land it, but the fact that they were able to mess with the controls and get it going at all without falling into some horrible time spiral or otherwise having the sort of accident you expect if you just randomly stab at the TARDIS controls without the slightest idea how to fly the thing feels like a massive stretch.

At one point, Nyssa says “you know how the Doctor collects spare parts”, which is pretty fucking rich given that he apparently doesn’t have a spare sonic screwdriver to hand. (Incidentally, we’ve not seen one story since it got broken which would have at all been disrupted by its presence, further rendering JNT’s explanation for its removal nonsensical.) Oh, and the reason that Nyssa and Tegan are making with the quips is that, yet again, this is a story where they utterly fail to react to the Master like he’s the dude who murdered their family members; for that matter, the Master is done no favours by this script either. As in Castrovalva, the show is determined to treat him as a cheap pantomime villain, which makes me feel really bad for Anthony Ainley, since he managed to have a genuinely menacing presence in Logopolis but has here been reduced to a joke to an extent that Delgado’s Master never was, even at his most clumsily used.

The conclusion of episode 3 involves lots of incoherent waffle and vague “let’s use the force of our minds and concentrate really, really hard to solve the problem”, and this is pretty bad in itself – but it would almost be better had the Doctor, Nyssa, and Tegan succeeded at that point in helping the group mind that the Master is manipulating break free, because then you could quickly wrap up the story and save everyone from the burden of episode 4, which is an utterly joyless slog.

There’s only one bit in Time-Flight which sparks a smile. Since Matthew Waterhouse’s contract lasted to the end of the season, there’s a bit where an illusion of Adric appears to dissuade Tegan and Nyssa from continuing to infiltrate the Master’s base. Certainly, threatening the return of Adric is a suitably villainous thing for the Master to do, and it is seriously gratifying to hear his scream of agony when they outright ignore his pleas and walk on. Other than that, it’s an utter turd of a story to conclude the season on. I can only assume Davison’s defences of the script arise from the fact that Davison is too lovely to actually say what he really thinks about it.

Davison’s first season, then, ends on a bit of a slump, with its last three stories being at best interesting misfires (Black Orchid, Earthshock), at worst actively bad and infuriating to watch – Time-Flight is perhaps the worst thing the show has done since that ugly season 11 slump at the end of the Pertwee era, and this is not a good sign for the show at all. If it were simply the case that the stories Antony Root script edited were good (and they both are, at the very least, at a baseline acceptable level of quality), and the stories that Eric Saward handled were shit, it would be easy to diagnose the problem – the wrong man became script editor. That isn’t the case, however – as well as script editing two entirely solid stories (Castrovalva and Kinda), Saward directly wrote one of the best stories in the season, and the first tale that can be said to be a Fifth Doctor classic, in the form of The Visitation.

Nonetheless, something is going wrong, and whatever it is can’t be chalked up to Davison, who along with Sutton and Fielding is one of the bedrocks of this season. (It would be nice to include Anthony Ainley among those pillars, except this season gives him nothing helpful to work with.) Whatever’s going on seems to be happening somewhere backstage – you’ve got solid talent onscreen, and too many instances when they seem to be just kind of waiting around for a decent story to show up. Under Bidmead, whatever other complaints people may have about the direction he took the show in (in collaboration with JNT), the quality control function of the script editor was working nice and reliably. Now that is slipping – and when the show’s script editor starts to fail at that crucial role, the fabric of the show itself is endangered. We’ll keep going on this journey, but I fear the ride is about to get bumpier before it gets better…

Best Serial: The Visitation, by an absolute mile. Like I said – you could see why, if you were solely judging Saward on the basis of it, that you’d think “here’s a chap who has an instinctive knack for what Doctor Who is about and how to make it good.”

Worst Serial: Time-Flight, good grief, what an absolute snoozer of a serial.

Most Important Serial: In principle, Castrovalva has the advantage here – after all, it’s the debut of a new Doctor. However, its importance is blunted by the fact that it wasn’t actually the first story Davison made as the incumbent Doctor – that was Four To Doomsday. Furthermore, every Doctor gets a first story – but companion deaths are rare indeed. Earthshock was the first companion kill the show’s pulled off since The Daleks’ Master Plan, and the only time the classic show would kill off a companion who’d actually had some semblance of longevity.

To be honest, killing companions isn’t a well I am keen to see Doctor Who go to very much – it’s an adventure story for the whole family, the heroes should usually survive. However, I would argue that the fact that Earthshock happened, even if it was the result of bad circumstances (namely, Adric simply not working out as a companion), is of tremendous importance and utility to the show going forwards. Since the show has done this once, it means that forever after going forwards there will always be the possibility, however faint, of the show doing it again, and this is a tremendous aid to tension: we know that companions will probably survive, but we cannot be 100% cast-iron sure in a way we were before Earthshock. With our poor Trojan friend Katarina, there’s always the asterisk there that she’d only been in the show for the tail end of The Myth Makers and the start of The Daleks’ Master Plan, and according to some accounts was never intended as a long-term companion, but if Adric can be killed off (especially when the option to gently send him to E-Space was right there), anyone can be.

Well, perhaps not just anyone. Killing Adric is in some ways a cheap option; if you had to line up the TARDIS crew of season 19 and were told you had to write one of them out of the show, you would pick Adric every single time. Killing off a popular companion would be a different matter, and would require considerable finesse; I think you could make it work, but I don’t think the team of JNT and Saward could have made it work.

Least Important Serial: Let’s see… rule out Castrovalva (first story to air with Fifth Doctor), Four To Doomsday (first Fifth Doctor story produced), Kinda (sets up a sequel), and Earthshock (jettisons the trash). Black Orchid is a landmark as the very last pure historical of the classic show – and of the televised series in general, unless and until a new-Who showrunner grows a spine and makes a pure historical. (Seriously, why wasn’t Vincent and the Doctor one?) Time-Flight had an end-of-season cliffhanger leading into the start of next season.

That leaves us with The Visitation, which takes away the sonic screwdriver – but as I outlined above, doing that was a daft idea in part because it was a solution to a problem that didn’t actually exist. Not only would this be undone in the new series, but also having the sonic screwdriver available wouldn’t materially affect any subsequent story in any way that truly mattered.

However, The Visitation does do one thing which is truly important: it proves that the Fifth Doctor era could produce an absolutely excellent, top-flight story if it wanted to. Oh, and it was also the point when Eric Saward arrived, and that’s not an unimportant thing.

For this one, I may have to pick Time-Flight, since the cliffhanger it sets up is ultimately nowhere near as important as the lingering plot threads of Kinda, since those drive an entire story whilst the Time-Flight cliffhanger merely affects the opening reaches of the next tale.

Season Ranking: Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear.

1. Season 13 (10/10).
2. Season 14 (10/10).
3. Season 18 (9/10).
4. Season 12 (9/10).
5. Season 7 (9/10).
6. Season 17 (9/10).
7. Season 6 (8/10).
8. Season 4 (8/10).
9. Season 8 (8/10).
10. Season 9 (8/10).
11. Season 15 (8/10).
12. Season 5 (8/10).
13. Season 2 (8/10).
14. Season 16 (7/10).
15. Season 1 (7/10).
16. Season 10 (7/10).
17. Season 3 (7/10).
18. Season 19 (6/10).
19. Season 11 (4/10).

Yes, taken overall this is the second worst season the show has ever produced. It’s better than a season where Jon Pertwee and company are all glumly shuffling in to punch the clock and do the job whilst they still want to burst into tears at any moment over Roger Delgado’s death as Elisabeth Sladen desperately tries to keep the ship above water, but it’s comfortably worse than any season preceding it. This is largely thanks to that late-season slump. Time-Flight is not a story that a show with a shred of self respect would ever make, and unlike in season 11, JNT and company don’t have a soul-shattering bereavement striking at the very heart of the troupe to blame here. This all on them.

Let’s not overstate the case, mind. Six out of ten means it’s hanging in there and is on balance more good than bad. There’s diamonds in the rough here – but there’s more rough and less diamonds, and aside from The Visitation the peaks aren’t as high as they used to be. And it has been most of a decade since the troughs ever went this low.