Doctor Who Season 22: Doctor At the Funeral Parlour

The story so far: Five Doctors came and went. Now the Sixth Doctor has arisen, only to be torpedoed below the waterline immediately by his first story, the risible The Twin Dilemma. Nine months have passed; now the Sixth Doctor has the challenge of winning over audiences who’ve had the better part of the year to digest the scene of him choking out Peri in his first episode. Will his first full season turn things around?s

Rather than consisting of 26 twice-weekly episodes of around 25 minutes each, this season consisted of weekly 13 episodes of around 45 minutes each (which comes to double length when you account for less time given to title sequences, credit sequences and repeating pre-cliffhanger scenes), with the show returning to its traditional Saturday slot. The upshot of this is that you got about as much Doctor Who this season as in any other from seasons 7 to 21, spread out over about the same span of the year, but with the BBC needing to schedule less episodes. The format had been tried out with Resurrection of the Daleks in the previous season, and despite the actual content of that serial being poor the scheduling experiment seems to have worked.

First up is Attack of the Cybermen – credited to Paula Moore, said name being a pseudonym for Paula Woolsey, though it has subsequently been claimed by some that this was Eric Saward and Ian Levine using her as a figurehead for a story which at most had some suggestions from her, but was largely done by Saward with input from Levine. One of the most absurd thing about Eric Saward and Ian Levine is that they both keep trying to claim credit for this story, which is ridiculous because anyone with taste would want to disavow it completely.

Saward’s fingerprints certainly are all over this, what with the story bringing back Lytton (Maurice Colbourne), the space mercenary from Resurrection of the Daleks who escaped into 1984 London at the end of that serial, having set himself up as the leader of a team of bank robbers. Saward seems to have regarded Lytton as a signature character of his – he did a comic about him recently – so his presence here is a dead giveaway.

Then again, there’s a lot of comedy schtick early on which is quite un-Sawardly. A good chunk of the first episode involves the Doctor and Peri clowning about in search of a distress signal emanating from 1985 Earth (in the vicinity of Totter’s Lane scrapyard, no less) with the TARDIS taking various forms as a result of the Doctor botching a repair to the chameleon circuit. Nathan-Turner circulated the rumour that the chameleon circuit repair would be permanent, rendering the old police box redundant, in yet another example of him courting controversy to pump the ratings.

This is the sort of thing which keeps happening in Saward’s era – not always, but often enough that it’s noticeable, the TARDIS will fail to materialise square in the middle of a story, necessitating a chunk of busywork early on to actually get the Doctor and the gang involved in the first place. It’s either a fundamental misunderstanding of the benefits the TARDIS offers as a storytelling device when it comes to cutting past all that, or a desire to provide filler to pad out otherwise insufficient stories. “The TARDIS just randomly shows up somewhere without explanation” is a perfectly good way to start a Doctor Who story; the 1960s show relied on it exclusively, the Pertwee era only dialled it back due to the whole “exiled on Earth” thing, and for most of the Tom Baker era it happened around half the time.

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“The TARDIS just randomly shows up without explanation” abruptly declined as a story starter once John Nathan-Turner became producer, so I assume it was one of his mandates; certainly the major exceptions to the rule in the Fourth Docter era were season 16 with its Key To Time gimmick and season 18, which junked the randomiser in its first story. That said, Christopher Bidmead tended to be a bit more artful at working in “Oh no, a space phenomenon!”, or “Oh no, a distress signal!”, or “Let’s deliberately visit this place!” than Saward was; under Bidmead, the setup for a story would be got past briskly so that the actual story could begin promptly. Under Saward, it increasingly drags, until it gets to silly extents this season, I suspect because Saward had a brace of scripts which struggled to fill their running time and adding schtick to the beginning before the Doctor gets involved in the story allows for padding.

The Doctor seems to be in a better mood this time, but Peri seems anxious and unhappy – like she’s walking on eggshells and is traumatised due to suffering horrible domestic abuse. When she mentions being worried, the Doctor has a temper tantrum, before declaring “I won’t hurt you, promise!” whilst booping her nose, and all this would seem charmingly eccentric if we hadn’t seen The Twin Dilemma, but because we have it’s just an uncomfortable reminder of that. Which is a real shame, because Colin Baker’s able to recalibrate his performance here to be somewhat more likable, and the script isn’t forcing him to do anything abominable this time – he’s a bit prickly and rude, but then again so was the First Doctor. Peri, on the other hand, is done few favours by this script, which seems to regard her as being there for standing around in a very tight top complaining a lot. (There seems to have been a production mandate to emphasise her cleavage as much as possible during this season.)

It takes most of the first episode before the Cybermen show up in earnest, at which point we end up with a bifurcated plot, with Cybermen plotting in the sewers (as in The Invasion) whilst in deep space a group of partially converted prisoners try to escape from a slave labour detail on Telos. On the plus side, this serial does at least remember that cyber-conversion is a thing, which is something the Cyberman stories have largely forgotten since Tomb of the Cybermen. On the minus side, the serial includes the absurdity of the Cybermen having slave labour that’s converted enough to add in cyber limbs for better work purposes (and thus better escape purposes), but is spared brain conversion. Why? If you converted their brains and made them obedient to the Cyberman power structure they’d stop trying to escape, and you wouldn’t need to waste Cyberman personnel guarding them.

Then again, applying common sense to this story is a fool’s game. The first episode cliffhanger comes about because the Cybermen have invaded the TARDIS. They manage to do this because, erm… the Doctor and Peri left the door open when they went out to look around. Note that the TARDIS is disguised as an old-fashioned organ at the time, due to the chameleon circuit being temporarily fixed, so it’s actually kind of weird that the Cybermen were able to identify it to get inside in the first place, though having the doors just sort of hanging open was probably a help.

Again, we get into the JNT/Saward era having a really weird attitude to continuity. On the one hand, Saward (either as writer or as script editor) is happy to let an absurdity like “oops, left the door open” stand. On the other hand, much time in the second episode is spent waffling about the Cyberman backstory and trying to reconcile the whole Mondas/Telos thing and make sense of Cyber-history. On the one hand, this is certainly an improvement over stuff like, say, the conversation at the start of Earthshock about why it’s difficult for Adric to go home, which is pitched in terms which would be utterly incomprehensible to someone who hadn’t seen the second half of season 18.

On the other hand, the conversation achieves little beyond making it very clear that the history of the Cybermen doesn’t make that much sense – it’s the sort of thing which simply doesn’t stand up to even this mild level of scrutiny, and if you absolutely must use the Cybermen, you’re better off simply coming up with a strong self-contained story which doesn’t need lots of explanation of past tales, especially when you’re diverging significantly from the setup depicted in them in the first place. The wrinkle to that added here is that Telos was inhabited before the Cybermen moved in by the weirdly sexy Cryons, who can only live at low temperatures and so had big freezer complexes ready to be stocked with Cybermen. It’s the Cryons who’ve hired Lytton to infiltrate the Cybermen in order to undertake a heist – steal the Cyberman time-ship, which the Cybermen stole from someone else already and don’t really understand, and prevent the Cyberman plan to change history by averting the destruction of Mondas.

Yep, that’s another Saward signature, if Resurrection of the Daleks is anything to go by – stuffing too many plots into a single serial. You have the Tomb of the Cybermen sequel in which the Cybermen are carrying out a defrosting process on Telos and struggling due to some of them coming out feral and murderous, you have the Tenth Planet sequel with them trying to undo the events of that serial with a time-ship, you have the Invasion riff with Cyberman bases being established in the London sewers, you have the Cryons going to war with the Cybermen, you have Lytton running a gang in London with the aid of his controlled policemen from Resurrection of the Daleks, you have the escaping slaves…

At least this time all of these different strands have better connections between them, but even so it’s still too much for a 90 minute story to properly serve, even if it were a tightly-written and high-quality story, rather than a clumsy one which relies on “oops, left the door open” for a cliffhanger. Something needed cutting. The Lytton angle could be done without, for one thing – just tell a tight story where the Doctor and Peri land somewhere, realise they are on Telos, and then end up entangled in the Cryon counterattack, boom. You’d also avoid the infamous scene where Lytton has his hands crushed by the Cybermen, which uses an excessive amount of blood and generated complaints at the time. To be honest, I don’t think it’s too traumatic, but that’s largely because Lytton looks so bored and sad during it rather than giving the impression of actually being in any sort of intense pain. It looks like what it is – a man squeezing packets of fake blood concealed in his hands as two Cybermen gently clutch at him.

For a story which makes such a big deal of continuity, it’s also certainly willing to introduce ideas which are faintly nonsensical. Apparently Cybermen all have an internal distress signal transmitter, which when activated will bring other Cybermen running to help. Um… really? That doesn’t seem to have been a thing in prior stories, and Cybermen make a big deal about not really caring about the feelings of others, and indeed they declare “Emotion is a weakness”.

That’s in the context of the scene where the Doctor goes back to try and save the doomed Lytton. There was almost something here – almost the kernel of an interesting idea, where the Cyber Controller assumes that the Doctor has come back to Lytton because Lytton is his friend, and the Doctor’s come back is that Lytton isn’t his friend – that Lytton, via working for the Daleks, did terrible things, and has done some seriously violent shit for the Cryons as well, and that he is kind of a terrible person, but the Doctor still has empathy for him and wants to help him, and that’s the power and potence of the very emotion that the Cybermen discard as valueless.

The Cryons keep trying to lure Peri away into a dark corner so they can purr at her and gently stroke her, and she seems tempted, possibly because the Cryons are weirdly sexy, possibly because getting groped by alien ice lesbians is simply more fun than being in Attack of the Cybermen.

However, as soon as the hint of an actually good and interesting idea emerges, Attack of the Cybermen ensures that the opportunity is wasted. The last few minutes of the serial are absolutely predicated on a foolhardy bid to redeem Lytton and make him seem like a big-ass hero; the final line of the story has the Doctor declare that he’s never misjudged anybody quite as badly as he did Lytton. This, and the declaration here that he was working for the Daleks under duress (something which Resurrection of the Daleks badly fails to establish), all feels like a last-ditch attempt to make people feel positively about Saward’s pet character. It’s rubbish, and it completely ruins the opportunity to make a point – namely, that just because someone is a piece of shit mercenary who isn’t fussy about who he works for doesn’t mean he should be subjected to the horrors of Cyber-conversion.

Next up is Vengeance On Varos, the first of the two stories that Philip Martin would write for the show. The TARDIS urgently needs Zeiton-7 ore for repairs to the power system – but there’s not many places you can get that. Fortunately, it’s within a short hop of Varos, a world which is one of the major sources of the stuff – but it’s a benighted place, where the authorities work the population to the bone in return for meagre rations and debased, violent entertainment based around the torture and execution of dissidents.

The trick here is that Varos is not a full-blown dictatorship – it’s a quasi-democracy, but one which uses televised violence, torture, and all that bread and circuses stuff to manufacture consent and make its citizenry complicit in their oppression. The Governor (Martin Jarvis) can be voted out, but the thing most likely to make this happen is discontent with the meagre rations and luxuries offered to them, and the thing which sets the economic health of Varos – and therefore the capacity of the governor to distribute largesse – the moneys received for sales of ore. And the Governor’s negotiation strategy is not his own choice – every so often he must seek the endorsement of his people for his position, and the longer the Governor holds out for a fair deal for the planet, the more the squeeze goes on, and the more likely it is he loses a vote. And each time a Governor loses a vote, he is subjected to torture… and to lose too many is death.

It gets worse. The Governor isn’t free to simply shop around for the best deal, and indeed isn’t free to make many decisions at all – the position is selected by random and bound by arcane regulations, the net effect of which is to compel the Governor to negotiate with only one company, the Galatron Mining Corporation, and dance to their tune. This is much to the delight of Sil (Nabil Shaban), the alien Mentor who has been dispatched to negotiate the latest contract on behalf of Galatron. Can the Doctor help the Governor extricate Varos from this morass? Does the Governor even want to? And if he did, will the bloodthirstiness that has been encouraged within the population be his doom?

Vengeance On Varos boils down to the series turning a satirical eye on televisual violence, which is a tricky thing coming from a TV show making such a sloppy use of violence as Doctor Who is at this point. 2000 AD did a lot of this sort of stuff in its hyper-violent pages – and this is about as 2000 AD-ish a story that Doctor Who ever attempted. However, the trick in doing this without seeming like an utter hypocrite is to make sure your other uses of violence don’t boil down to the same essential thing you are criticising here. This is a show which, a season ago, put out Warriors of the Deep and Resurrection of the Daleks – stories in which being merciful was portrayed as weakness and causing mass death through chemical or biological weapons a legitimate if regrettable fallback in the face of sufficiently sustained opposition.

Though this was not done as part of an organised conspiracy to encourage the public to accept militarism and war crimes (whereas the media is part of an organised and carefully planned system of manipulation on Varos) that isn’t actually much better; getting lulled into the negative direction of the culture and repeating it makes you complicit as surely as being part of a planned conspiracy, after all, and perhaps has much the same effect. The violence in this story was also controversial – the acid bath sequence is often cited in that respect – but it is at least in the context of a story which is actually saying something interesting about violence, rather than taking the Sawardian route of going “ooh, violence, isn’t it dark and visceral and nasty” but not having much to say about it or its causes. For my money, the real problem with the acid bath scene isn’t that it happens, it’s that the Doctor is so flippant about it – an instance of the story itself falling into the very same trap of normalising glib, dispassionate violence that it’s trying to satirise.

Perhaps the most effective aspect of the satire is the storytelling device where, because the torture complex’s doings are broadcast to the population, we get regular comments on the action from a pair of Varosian citizens who’ve been watching the action at home. The clear intention is to nudge the audience into interrogating why they, themselves, are watching and enjoying this material – not to say that you are necessarily a bad person for watching, but definitely to suggest you are a bad person for watching uncritically, and a key component of media literacy is to interrogate and think about what you are watching rather than smiling and clapping at whatever slop is served up to you. In other words, the characters of Arak (Stephen Yardley) and Etta (Sheila Reid) are not bland stand-ins for the Doctor Who audience as a whole; Arak stands in for the uncritical audience, whilst Etta stands in for the audience who are thinking a bit more.

(The cleverest bit of the concept, meanwhile, is the episode 1 cliffhanger, which as Elizabeth Sandifer notes is ingenious: the Doctor apparently dies, whilst being filmed by the Varos media machine, so we cut to the Varos media production room where Sil and the Governor and others are watching, and the Governor says “and cut it… now!”, so the diegetic transmission cuts just as the episode cuts.)

The problem there is that once you actually act as a discerning, intelligence audience member who analyses and thinks about what is being served up to you, too much of Doctor Who from this general time period falls apart at the seams. Warriors of the Deep, Resurrection of the Daleks, Attack of the Cybermen – none of these stories can survive the scrutiny of an audience member who is actually applying some taste, discernment, and critical thought to what they are seeing. It is, perhaps, a sign of Saward and Nathan-Turner’s own media illiteracy that they greenlit and made this serial without any realisation of what would happen if Whovians took its message to heart and seriously thought about what they were being presented with.

This is another story in which it takes a while for the Doctor and Peri to actually arrive in the story, but in this case it works – it means that Martin has space to do his Varos worldbuilding before they show up, so we can get a handle on the unusual situation before the Doctor arrives. This can be a useful technique because it allows the writer to dump the Doctor and their companion into a situation which we understand better than they do – something which is unusual for the show – and so we can get the thrill of seeing whether the gaps in their knowledge will become pitfalls for them to fall into, or whether they’ll figure out what we have in time to save the day. It works particularly well for the Sixth Doctor’s quirky, volatile style, since it means he can just barrel in and cause chaos in response to nastiness from the authorities.

The performances here are very hit and miss; Areta (Geraldine Alexander), the squeeze of the captured rebel leader Jondar, gives this speech which is extraordinarily on the nose when it comes to outlining the situation on the planet (when we’ve all perfectly well figured out what the deal is based on what we’ve seen to that point), and the performance is utterly lacklustre. The problem isn’t that it comes across as a composed speech rather than off-the-cuff dialogue – you can make that work if doctrinaire speechifying is a character trait of the individual in question. Nor is the problem a lack of confidence – the character is a captive, after all, and is being harassed by her captors. The main problem is that she seems tired and bored of the whole thing, as is the case with much of her performance.

(Jondar himself is played by none other than Jason Connery – Sean Connery’s disappointing son. This was about a year before he replaced Michael Praed as the title character in Robin of Sherwood – a show which, at the time, was far more adept at providing the sort of thoughtful blend of family entertainment and gripping adventure with a touch of menace which had previously Doctor Who‘s wheelhouse.)

On the other hand, Martin Jarvis’s turn as the powerless Governor is wonderful – especially in the sequence where he tries to appeal to the better nature of a guard who has been set to oversee his destruction. And then there’s Sil, brought wonderfully to life by Shaban. With a makeup and costume job tailored to account for Shaban’s disability (due to his brittle bone disease), Sil is an unforgettable onscreen presence, and whilst Jarvis’s performance is realistic and understated, Shaban hams it up with absolute glee. As with The Sun Makers, a caveat has to be placed here that depicting the main evils of capitalism as emanating from evil foreigners who aren’t really proper humans sails awfully close to some viciously antisemitic tropes, but otherwise, Sil is a delight.

If you think of Season 22 as a TV show financed by Sil, it makes sense. Vogons write impossibly awful poetry, Sil bankrolls impossibly awful Doctor Who stories.

Vengeance On Varos feels like it is tantalisingly close to being actually good. It isn’t quite there; the tonal misjudgement of some scenes, the poor performances in some plot-critical roles, and the way the pacing doesn’t quite work all conspire to drag it down. Nonetheless, it feels genuinely clever and insightful in a way Attack of the Cybermen or Resurrection of the Daleks weren’t, and one could see how the story could have been fantastic had those niggles been resolved; it’s not a wrong-headed story which should have been abandoned, it’s more like a rough first draft of something which would have been dynamite after another revision or two.

The biggest problem, of course, is that the most impressive bits of the serial by far generally don’t involve the Doctor or anything he is doing; he gets caught up in time-eating busywork for a lot of the story, and then the situation resolves itself as a result of changes off-planet outside of his control. The most memorable thing he does is ask the right questions at the right time – looking past the bluster of Varos’s media facade and querying just who Sil is, and why he’s got the right to yell orders at the Governor. Once the Doctor knows that, he’s then able to start getting the Governor onside by offering him a different way. Other than this, a lot of the Doctor’s contributions are either distasteful or forgettable. As in The Twin Dilemma, this is a Sixth Doctor story whose biggest weakness is the Doctor himself, a distressingly common thing this season.

Following this is The Mark of the Rani, the first of several serials to be penned by the husband and wife team of Pip and Jane Baker. The Doctor and Peri find themselves drawn to a 19th Century coal town in the north of England, where mobs of locals are smashing up machinery, a summit of some of the greatest inventors of the Victorian era is being arranged, and the Master is up to no good. Yet the angry mobs are not, for once, his doing (or a reaction to him): their minds have been sapped of the chemicals which would otherwise give them restful sleep and soothe their anger by the Rani (Kate O’Mara), another renegade Time Lord, whose experiments on a far-off planet she is the tyrant of has left its inhabitants without those selfsame chemicals. When the Master and the Rani team up, it spells trouble for the Doctor and Peri…

The location for this is least lovely – the end credits give thanks to the Ironbridge Gorge Museum, and well they should, because the place seems to have offered a fantastically well-preserved presentation of a Northern industrial village which gives a richly authentic backdrop to the action. At the same time, the picturesque surroundings risk underlining a romanticisation of the Industrial revolution – and, specifically, the establishment-backed social order of the Industrial revolution, in which industrialists are wise philosopher-kings uplifting everyone and the working classes are better off when they knuckle down and make themselves useful to their betters.

There’s a nasty political aftertaste to this story. The serial is intent on casting working-class Northerners as Luddites; it understands the Luddite movement enough to realise that it was not based on knee-jerk superstition but a genuine concern at industrialisation destroying formerly-secure livelihoods, but it also is very quick to cast working-class folk concerned for their jobs as ragged, ignorant, violent savages, villains in their own right and the puppets of worse villains. Against the backdrop of the Thatcher government’s conflict with the miners, this is deeply unfortunate. Worse yet – the actions of these Northerners isn’t the result of them coming to their own conclusions about things, it’s the result of the Rani’s mental tampering – and therefore not really natural, a phase which will pass once the Rani’s influence is disspelled. The Rani’s meddling with society is also said to have caused peasant revolts in medieval times and the American Revolution, so essentially any time the British upper crust get a bloody nose she’s responsible. And I’m to take her as a villain?

(By comparison with the most recent explicitly mining-themed Doctor Who story, The Caves of Androzani makes it evident that Sharaz Jek is no champion of the working class; for one thing, he doesn’t actually lead any working class people, just androids of his own making, and for another he was a business partner in the Spectrox prospecting operation before he was betrayed., The conflict in Caves is not a labour dispute or a strike – it is a civil war within capitalism, an establishment capitalist coming under attack from a capitalist who he pushed out of the sphere of legitimate business.)

The idea of the Rani is not terrible. Female villains have been fairly thin on the ground in Who, and redressing the balance is a worthwhile effort, and we’ve already seen a benign Time Lady – why not as malevolent one? And when she and the Master first face off she snarls, “I thought that last mad scheme of yours had finished you for good!”, and frankly she’s got him dead to rights. Kate O’Mara is fun in the role too. There’s problems, though. “Rani” is an Indian term very roughly corresponding to “Queen”; giving her a foreign-style name is a little off, and giving her one based on a culture colonised by Victorian Britain, the setting of the story, has deeply unfortunate implications. She isn’t Indian in aesthetic or appearance, so we’re in cultural appropriation territory but, considering the casting, fortunately outside of brownface territory. Nonetheless: having a title associated with a culture subject to Victorian-era British colonisation, and showing up in the heart of the Empire making trouble for the established social order? Well, it sits oddly with me to treat that as unalloyed villainy.

In addition, throwing in the Master is really damaging to her debut story. If she’d been introduced by herself and given space to get established, it would be one thing – but adding in the Master is the sort of thing that takes up narrative space that could be better used establishing her. Comic books and their movie adaptations understand this: you don’t start with the crossover where two villains team up to fight the hero, you have the two villains established separately so when the crossover happens it’s more of an event. As much as I have talked about how JNT as a producer had the attitude of a wrestling promoter hot-shotting their territory, I have to say in some respects he was kind of bad at it – he didn’t realise the potential of building this sort of buzz before you go for the crossover.

Moreover, the Master would take up space even if he were being mild, gentle, and deferential to the Rani – none of which were ever likely. Whenever Ainley comes onscreen, he’s constantly upstaging O’Mara, but to be fair to him that’s not his fault at all – he is doing what the script asks of him, because it has the Master trying to dominate the situation constantly, and typically being allowed to. The result is that you end up with scenes between the Master, the Doctor, and the Rani in which the Rani ends up getting pushed to the periphery; the Doctor, as the opponent to both of them and the ostensible good guy, is obviously going to be central, and the Master ends up central in part because he’s meant to be pushy, in part because a character with well over a decade of history in the show is inevitably going to have advantages over a character who we have literally only just met this episode.

Between this and a few too many scenes where the Doctor and the Master are out in the world actively doing stuff and the Rani is just kind of hanging out in her lab watching the action, the end result is that the Rani ends up a supporting character in her own debut. She even gets bumped back after the Master in the end credits! No wonder she never quite ended up as popular as the Master – here she isn’t given a chance to shine out of his shade, in the only other canonical story about her she’s overshadowed by the fact that it’s a regeneration story and so we’re inherently more interested in getting to know the Seventh Doctor than anything she’s up to, and her other televised appearance was Dimensions In Time, the charity Doctor Who/Eastenders crossover nobody asked for.

Trapped in season 22, the Rani and the Master resort to hard liquor to numb themselves until it’s over.

The other problem with throwing in the Master is that he complicates the story – and with Pip and Jane making their writing debut for the show, they really should have gone simple. A straightforward tale about just the Rani’s scheme (sapping the brains of humans of certain vital chemicals in order to undo a botch she’s made on an alien world that’s fallen under her control) or just the Master’s scheme (compromising the greatest minds of Victorian industry and using them to turn 19th Century Earth into a think tank and factory for his own diabolical purposes) would allow whichever concept was selected room to breathe, and leave conceptual space to pursue the other story idea later on. However, just as Saward seems to have had a tendency to overstuff his own scripts, he seems to have encouraged (or at least tolerated) overstuffing in others.

Honestly, a lot of problems here would have been solved had the Ainley Master’s demise in Planet of Fire been allowed to stick, and the Rani we meet here was the Master in a new regeneration. We could have had Missy several decades early, the “Rani” title and the appropriation and inadvertent implications which come with it are avoided, and we wouldn’t have had Ainley tripping O’Mara up here. (Oh, and while we’re at it, maybe we should either get rid of the mines which turn people into rubbish Ents, or find a way to implement them which makes them darker and creepier.)

Sticking to just one plot (either the Rani’s offworld issues or the Master’s attempt to subvert the greatest minds in British industry) would also mean that there was scope to actually get to the point on either of them. As it stands, we never go to the Rani’s pocket empire to see how she’s fucked things up; nor does the Master’s summit of industrialists ever come close to happening. In essence, the story teases us with a hint of two much more interesting stories, and then fails to deliver on them at all, instead eating time with a minefield sequence with the rubbish Ents.

The concluding scene also makes no sense – the Rani’s TARDIS is accelerating out of control, and the Master and the Rani are pressed by the accelerative force against the wall and being threatened by a rapidly-growing Tyrannosaurus… which does not seem to be being affected by the accelerative force. By that rights, the T. Rex should be pressed against the wall gurning next to them, not sat on the floor rapidly aging from childhood to adulthood. Poetic licence and not letting yourself get hung up too much on physics is one thing, but then throwing in an acceleration effect in the scene which affects two characters but doesn’t affect everything in the room is contradictory on its own terms.

I will give Colin Baker some credit here. The script here gives the Doctor lots of lines to talk up what a villainous super-genius the Rani is, and he makes sure to sell all of them. For all the story’s flaws, it knows that it needs him to take her seriously if we’re to take her seriously, and he takes every opportunity the script gives him to do that. Unfortunately, the script tends to have him pay more attention to the Master than the Rani whenever the three of them are in the same place, and there’s not much Baker can do about that short of sabotaging scenes in a deeply unprofessional fashion.

As for the Sixth Doctor’s general behaviour… well, he’s being a bit arsey in the first episode – more so than he has been in the last two serials, less so than in The Twin Dilemma (which is basically the worst the Sixth Doctor ever gets) – but in the second episode he seems to be doing better, and he even starts dialling back the rudeness towards Peri. There’s a bit where he’s offered a gun and says “No thanks, I’ve given them up, you know”, which given his gunplay in Attack of the Cybermen (and, for that matter, Resurrection of the Daleks) feels like moral progress. Bit by bit he’s inching away from being an outright terrible Doctor and more towards being an actually alright Doctor stuck in a story which just doesn’t quite work, and whose thematic implications are at best failing to read the room, at worst actively boosting the position of the powerful against those they would break.

Next up is The Two Doctors by Robert Holmes, which has the Second Doctor and Jamie visiting a space station on an errand for the Time Lords, that being “the price I pay for my freedom”, and…

Oh, wait, hold on now. How is Jamie meant to know of the Time Lords when he only learns of them in The War Games? What is the Doctor doing willingly and consciously working for them? What’s up with the mention of them having visited Victoria to give her a lift in the TARDIS to take up new studies elsewhere?

This is the bit where Season 6B – the concept that right after the end of The War Games the Second Doctor had a stay of execution, and was used as the Celestial Intervention Agency of the Time Lords as a deniable asset until the time came for his regeneration into the Third Doctor – gets locked into canon. It is partly the fault of Terrance Dicks, of course – and since he co-wrote The War Games, he’s allowed to retcon it if he wants. As well as penning the 2005 novel World Game, depicting a Doctor late in Season 6B, he also put in the bit in The Five Doctors where the Second Doctor remembers Jamie and Zoe having their memories wiped.

When both Dicks and Holmes are implying Season 6B, it’s as good as canon; Holmes has proposed alternative readings, but frankly none of them are quite as elegant as Season 6B, which fits this serial like a glove, right down to the bit where the Second Doctor talks up how his visit isn’t a breach of Time Lord neutrality because he doesn’t officially exist and is so a deniable asset. It even sets up good reasons why the Sixth Doctor doesn’t remember living through the Second Doctor’s side of this adventure – if the CIA wiped the Second Doctor’s memories of Season 6B when they triggered the Doctor’s regeneration and blocked his recall of time travel theory just before Spearhead From Space.

Anyway, the Second Doctor has been sent by the Time Lords to the space station Camera to negotiate with the head researcher, Dastari (Laurence Payne), an old friend of the Doctor’s. The Doctor is perturbed to see that the scientists on the station use Androgums as servants – these being members of a generally barbaric race prone to cannibalism, though the lead servant, Chessene at least has been augmented by Dastari to a super-genius level… and she’s decided to sell the station out to the Sontarans. The Base is Under Siege – and whilst this squarely in the Second Doctor’s wheelhouse, we’re a Doctor early for him to be up to speed with foiling Sontarans. As the invasion unfolds, the Second Doctor has never been closer to death.

This causes the Sixth Doctor to have a funny turn – after all, he’s at risk of being paradoxed out of existence. Peri suggests he should “see a Doctor”, which rings a bell. The Sixth Doctor checks his contacts list and decides that his old friend Dastari would be the perfect person to visit for a check-up. They arrive some time after the attack, with the derelict space station’s automated systems not pleased to see them, and encounter evidence of a terrible massacre – and that some researchers had been conducting research on time travel. Were the Time Lords responsible for this – and out to eliminate a nuisance asset along the way? Or is someone trying to frame them? We will only discover the answer once the Sontarans’ motivations are made plain – and to unravel that will require the talents of The Two Doctors…

“You know I told Davison he should only do three seasons? Well, in your case I’d make it three episodes…”

This gains points for having both a return from the Second Doctor and Jamie and bringing in Jacqueline Pearce, Blake’s 7 legend, to fill the role of Chessene. She essentially plays her as Servalan with a worse costume budget. However, neither of them are used as well as they could be. The Second Doctor is taken out of the action early in the first episode, and we don’t get him back again until about fifteen minutes into the second, and isn’t really talking until 20 minutes in there, which effectively means that he’s absent for over an entire episode – and when he’s already splitting his time with the Sixth Doctor, this means he’s less present in the story than he could be.

Moreover, his portrayal is off here. The Second Doctor is outright racist against the Androgum, refusing to contemplate the idea that they could be good, and whilst Dastari’s high-handed attitude about elevating them is colonialist in its own way this leaves a bad taste in the mouth. He’s really horrid to Jamie at that, in a way he never was during his incumbency as Current Doctor. What the hell? One wonders if some of these lines – those not involving Jamie – are relics of the version of this story where it was a First Doctor/Sixth Doctor crossover, which was the plan before Richard Hurndall died. After all, in The Five Doctors the First Doctor was portrayed as being a bit sexist.

As for Chessene, she spends most of the first episode, after the space station falls, knocking around in Spain to set up the side of the plot that unfolds there. This is a by-product of the story not really having enough substance for three episodes – which, remember, is six episodes in “old money”. In terms of its running time, this is the longest story the show has attempted since Shada, and the the longest it actually managed to finish since The Armageddon Factor. In a tighter serial, sprawling less, we wouldn’t need to track the logistics of Chessene, the Sontarans, and the Androgum chef Shockeye (John Stratton) – who’s a comedy Scotsman who makes Jamie’s portrayal seem positively low-key.

The Seville setting was a JNT mandate – just as going to Lanzarote for Planet of Fire was. Between that and going to Amsterdam for Arc of Infinity, it seems like he’d decided on a policy of one jaunt outside the UK per season. Given that the biggest mark he’d made on the show prior to becoming producer was on City of Death, when he realised that the production budget allowed them to shoot the serial in actual Paris rather than a BBC studio facsimile thereof, perhaps he regarded taking Doctor Who out of the studio and into location shoots a bit more ambitious than Yet Another Quarry or Yet Another Forest or Yet Another English Village or whatever as being one of his trademarks.

Or maybe he just fancied taking a holiday disguised as work. Either way, setting this in Spain doesn’t really add anything which couldn’t be provided by setting this in the English countryside, just as Arc of Infinity doesn’t get anything out of being set in Amsterdam it couldn’t have got out of filming in London. City of Death makes its Paris location crucial due to the Louvre connection, and Planet of Fire at least made good use of the volcanic national parks on Lanzarote to evoke an alien landscape. What we get here is a bit of an out-of-the-way rural area, and a nice old house for the aliens to make a base in, which is exactly the sort of action that the show keeps showing us happening in England all the time.

Meanwhile, Robert Holmes had his own axe to grind; a committed vegetarian, he largely uses the Androgums as an opportunity to slam meat-eating in about as direct and heavy-handed terms as you could hope for. There’s no subtlety here, nor even the sort of cleverness associated with similar very direct Robert Holmes satires like The Sun Makers. It culminates in the Second Doctor being made half-Androgum. To be fair, he does get out of it – he deliberately convinces Shockeye to play truant with him so they can go on a gourmand expedition (Androgum is an anagram of gourmand, by the way), presumably because he knows that if he skips the stabilisation process he’ll reject the Androgum genes and be restored to his former self. All this, I suppose, provides some scope to accept that the Eighth Doctor was half-human for a bit during the TV movie before he likewise got better, but it still continues the project of making the Second Doctor seem grotesque and disgusting and horrible here. It also means he spends much of the third episode behaving in a very un-Second Doctorly fashion, which further saps the point of doing a crossover in the first place.

Why would you do a reunion project like this and make the beloved former Doctor returning seem horrid? Maybe to make your current Doctor seem nicer by comparison, after you did a character assassination on him in The Twin Dilemma. The Sixth Doctor wavers here between the slightly softer take he had in Vengeance On Varos and being more directly rude and horrid. There’s a bit where he kills someone by smothering them with cyanide, and on the one hand the action itself was justifiable self-defence against a murderous cannibal using the resources to hand, but on the other hand he follows it up with a callous quip more appropriate to James Bond than Doctor Who. The Sixth Doctor is also just as cutting about the inability of Androgums to be moral or decent as the Second Doctor is. We’ve had monsters it’s impossible to negotiate with in Doctor Who before, of course – the Second Doctor met them a lot, the Sixth Doctor has already met the Cybermen. Nonetheless, the Androgum here are presented as being just people-like enough to make this seem awkward and nasty, and it also makes Holmes’ slam on meat-eating seem more awkward and less persuasive.

On top of all that and a bit where the Sixth Doctor starts showing Androgum-like traits due to the Second Doctor’s contamination, and considers eating a cat as a snack, this serial does nothing for anyone. It doesn’t help rehabilitate the Sixth Doctor. It damages the Second Doctor. The Sontarans end up basically in the way, a complication thrown in when the Androgum could do fine, who end up deleting themselves from the serial before the end conveniently so Holmes doesn’t have to wrap up their storyline. The Androgum consist of a crude caricature and Pearce trying to inject some Servalan-like dignity and glamour into proceedings but being dragged down by the rest of the production. We don’t even get much of a conversation between the Second and Sixth Doctors until some fifteen minutes before this shambles stumbles to a finish.

Despite rather looking forward to the serial, I ended up disliking it intensely; its slamming between weak comedy, weak science fiction, and utterly incongruous bits of darkness, like a supporting character bleeding out after being stabbed with a kitchen knife, makes it seem like Robert Holmes is desperately trying to self-destruct the show to save it from what it has become.

Next up is Timelash, the sole story penned by Glen McCoy. The Sixth Doctor is being shitty again, and the TARDIS has encountered another time corridor like the one from Resurrection of the Daleks – this time it’s a by-product of the titular Timelash, a form of punishment used by the planet Karfel in which undesirables are tossed across spacetime as a form of really hardcore exile. Karfel is ruled over by the Borad (Robert Ashby), a tyrant who is only ever seen on viewscreens, never in person, and is on the verge of war with the Bandrils after Karfel has high-handedly breached the vital treaties governing the relationship between the two cultures. The Doctor and Peri may well be able to solve this – but to do that they’ll need to contend not only with the Borad but the latest appointee to the post of Maylin, the Borad’s second-in-command: the nefarious Tekker (Paul Darrow). And the Borad has an agenda – for once he sets eyes on Peri, he says to himself in his best Borad voice “Ah! I will make her mah wife!”

This is the story which has the Doctor encounter H.G. Wells… kind of. The character of Herbert (David Chandler) is very clearly meant to be Wells, except he’s written in a manner suggesting that Glen McCoy didn’t really know much about Wells beyond the fact that he was a pioneering science fiction author who wrote The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds. None of Wells’ socialist politics make it into the story – troubling indeed in a season which has already sailed into politically tasteless waters – and he’s introduced as a dabbler in occultism who thinks he’s summoned spirits when in fact he’s just encountered someone who’s fallen through the Timelash, and only seems to think that “science fiction” is an interesting concept after his adventure. This clashes with what we know about his career and the development of his opinions, frankly. The bit where he talks up how he’s not good at sports and stuff makes him come across less as a literary figure and more as a caricature of science fiction fans, a horrid instance of Doctor Who tossing stones about whilst standing directly in the middle of the glass house.

This is the second serial in a row with a prominent Blake’s 7 cast member in a key role, and just as Pearce played Chessene as a somewhat more rubbish, Tesco own-brand version of Servalan, Darrow plays Tekker as a somewhat more rubbish, Tesco own-brand version of Avon. Specifically, he’s a character who thinks he is a genius master manipulator on the level of Avon, but isn’t, which is how he comes undone – it’s a rather clever way of dealing with the limitations of Season 22-vintage Doctor Who. He also only shows up about halfway into episode 1 and leaves about halfway through episode 2, which means his presence coincides with the strongest segment of the serial.

“Don’t get too excited, Paul, Jacqueline wasn’t able to save The Two Doctors…”

Here’s the issue: the story runs out of plot a good 15 minutes before the end, leaving the cast to eat up the rest of the running time with schtick. A chunk of the remaining time is eaten by the Doctor needing to go do something dangerous to stop a missile striking Karfel and not wanting Peri or Herbert to go along with him, which leads to them both, individually, having long conversations with him about how badly they want to go, all in a situation where we’re constantly being told there’s no time to lose and they need to go sort out this missile thing immediately. It’s a big pile of incessant schtick and the Sixth Doctor being unpleasant and Herbert being a weird cartoon of a science fiction nerd rather than anything substantive. Then that ends with still eight or so minutes to go (including credits), so even more time needs to be eaten up, and so the Borad turns up alive and has to be defeated again in a somewhat less satisfying way which throws in some drive-by misogyny from the Doctor just to make it even more grim and nasty.

I was almost tempted to say that Timelash was on the verge of being good (without actually being good) at the point when the Borad got defeated the first time, only for my heart to sink when I realised there was this amount of time left, all eaten up with bullshit busywork after what is clearly the proper ending of the serial has come and gone. This might have been just fine as a one-episode story – a two-parter by the standard of prior seasons – but as a 90 minute story it’s rubbish.

Which isn’t to say that Timelash doesn’t get into trouble well before this – it’s just the point when it becomes irredeemably awful. For instance, the story shows the influence of The Face of Evil, in that this is a world the Doctor previously visited and his lingering influence has affected the culture; in this case it was apparently the Third Doctor and Jo who specifically showed up. However, McCoy as writer and Saward as script editor don’t seem to get why The Face of Evil was interesting: it showed the Doctor returning to a situation he created and bears responsibility for, and compelled to face the consequence of past mistakes. Here, there’s no past mistake and the Doctor isn’t forced to second-guess his previous intervention: the Third Doctor warned people that the scientist the Borad used to be was a wrong ‘un, and events here demonstrate that he was basically correct.

There’s other instances of the tale misunderstanding the better stories it’s riffing on. The Borad is out to marry Peri, after subjecting her to the same bizarre transformation as him, and aside from the transformation angle it’s a rehash of the “Sharaz Jek is in love with Peri” angle from Caves of Androzani, but much clumsier, not least because in that story Jek was played as having actual emotions. Then again, Timelash doesn’t seem to wholly understand itself: there’s a bit where a character declares “They were no more rebels than you or I!” in the middle of a conversation in which he was advocating a revolution against the Borad, and whilst perhaps you could imagine that’s meant to be hypocrisy on his part or a failure to fully acknowledge to himself what he’s advocating, that would be a weird and discordant note in the scene in question. (We could also quibble with the Doctor using a gun in this when two stories ago he said he’s giving them up.)

Somewhere in the midst of all this muddle, there’s something approaching a fun story about a third-rate Avon trying to simultaneously manipulate a proper villain and the Doctor, and it’s no surprise that Timelash starts working once Paul Darrow comes onscreen and falls to bits not long after his character reaches his exit.

The season finale is by Eric Saward – no Paula Moore controversy here, his name is on it and everything. It’s Revelation of the Daleks, and the Doctor and Peri have arrived on the world of Necros – a funeral planet. The opening images from this are wonderful – the Doctor and Peri arrive in this snowy landscape, and there’s an eerieness in the air. Mutated, zombie-like humans prowl the forests, and someone has established a giant tombstone, with the Doctor’s face carved upon it, standing at the entrance to Tranquil Repose, the grand mortuary complex.

Inside, people with assault rifles are infiltrating the ranks of the undertakers, the Doctor’s almost-late friend Arthur Stengos (Alec Linstead) has been abducted from the suspended animation capsule he’s been residing in since his near-death, and the assassin-knight Orcini (William Gaunt) and his apprentice Bostock (John Ogwen) are infiltrating the complex on a mission of their own. Still, business as usual continues The almost-dead are entertained in their suspended animation by the banging tunes broadcast by the avuncular DJ (Alexei Sayle), after all – and at the centre, the Great Healer continues his medical experiments. Only the Great Healer is Davros (Terry Molloy again), and he’s been using the quasi-dead as fodder to create a new race of Daleks loyal to him…

The Fifth Doctor’s passivity in Resurrection of the Daleks seems to have rubbed off on Davros a little, because he spends much of the serial sat in his headquarters watching the progress of the different characters through Tranquil Repose and chuckling to himself, saying “Just according to Keikaku.” (Translator’s note: “Keikaku” means plan.) The DJ is doing much the same, albeit with a less extensive surveillance network. “Suddenly everyone sees and knows too much!” snarls Davros – and he’s completely right, we didn’t need two characters working that schtick in this story.

It worked fine in Vengeance On Varos – but the two characters doing it were sat there talking to each other, so their interaction justified having two of them, and of course that was in a context where having characters watching everything on screens and reacting to it engaged intelligently with the themes of the story. This isn’t the case here – it really comes across like Saward spotting a gimmick which worked well in the story this season which came closest to success and opting to mimic it without understanding why it worked in context. It’s absurd to imagine that a script editor would have this poor an understanding of scripts he himself edited, but here we are.

The story also suffers from a certain excessive redundancy. Check out these plotlines:

• You have the Doctor and Peri, interested in visiting Stengos, coming to Tranquil Repose and gradually working their way to the middle of the complex, where Davros and his Dalek factory wait.
• You have Arthur Stengos’ daughter Natasha (Bridget Lynch-Blosse) and her buddy Grigory (Stephen Flynn), worried about Stengos, coming to Tranquil Repose and gradually working their way to the middle of the complex, where Davros and his Dalek factory wait.
• You have Orcini and Bostock, hired to whack Davros, coming to Tranquil Repose and gradually working their way to the middle of the complex, where Davros and his Dalek factory wait.
• You have Daleks loyal to the Supreme Dalek, unimpressed with Davros trying to make his own Dalek faction with blackjack and hookers, coming to Tranquil Repose and gradually working their way to the middle of the complex, where Davros and his Dalek factory wait.

You get the picture. To be fair, all of these people have somewhat different motivations and investigative methodologies, but even so this is a proliferation of remarkably similar subplots. Elizabeth Sandifer has, in a bold attempt to find a redemptive reading, argued that this is meant to mimic channel-surfing on television, but if this is the case the same basic shit is airing on every channel, which is the most boring and frustrating form of channel-surfing there is.

The multiplicity of very similar plotlines is certainly handy for filling time and for setting up a big, exciting confrontation at the end when all these different groups collide at the centre, but on the other hand – even with some of them getting killed off before the final confrontation – it does mean that the conclusion of the story is overstuffed, and verges on the Doctor just sitting there watching other people resolve things. Indeed, so many characters are required at the finale that Saward is reduced to just having waves of Daleks showing up to escort a bunch of them to Davros’s office for the climax, because there’s no time to get everyone there through more nuanced means.

Still, there’s other subplots here which give glimmers of something better, and some of the characters are rather fun. The chemistry between the ill-tempered undertaker Jobel (Clive Swift) and his infatuated assistant Tasambeker (Jenny Tomasin), and the way Davros exploits this to tempt Tasambeker, is a lovely little subplot which could have done with further development – and certainly didn’t deserve to be wrapped up as abruptly as it did, though with all the other plots here it by no means has sufficient time to properly explore its implications. Orcini is a fun character – an excommunicated warrior monk turned assassin who sticks to the old code of honour of the “Grand Order of Oberon” he used to belong to. He also bears a certain resemblance to John Hurt’s War Doctor, and it’d be a tempting headcanon, given the circumstances of the Eighth Doctor’s regeneration, to imagine he chose the form in part as a tribute to Orcini.

Throwing in Alexei Sayle as the DJ – if you don’t recognise the name, he’s the landlord in The Young Ones – is one of John Nathan-Turner’s bits of stunt casting; David Bowie was considered, but of course there was never any prospect of that happening, and Jimmy Savile was also considered for the role, and thank fuck he refused, it’s bad enough that A Fix With Sontarans exists. Sayle’s DJ does at least earn points for stepping in to stop Peri being creeped on by Jobel, and has a sweet conversation with her about fake accents which is perhaps a little long and self-indulgent but a nice meta joke about Nicola Bryant faking her American accent. Nonetheless, he’s an incongruously comedic note in a story which is too Sawardian to be funny.

(Incidentally, a point about Nicola Bryant’s fake American accent I’ve just been reminded about: apparently, JNT required her to maintain the pretence and keep up the accent during public appearances, even out of character. This just reaffirms my sense that he came at the producer’s role with the same sensibilities as a wrestling promoter – in this case, maintaining “kayfabe” for the sake of controlling the image around the show and setting the narrative.)

There’s a subplot where Davros has been working with the manipulative Kara (Eleanor Bron), who’s been making money selling rations produced from dead bodies from Tranquil Repose – Davros’s cut of the money helping fund his research. I can’t help but think that Jacqueline Pearce would have been a much more natural fit for the Kara role than for playing Chessene in The Two Doctors, but Bron does fine in the role. I can imagine a better version of this story where it was purely about Kara doing the whole Soylent Green deal.

Indeed, I can imagine a good version of the story which primarily focused only on one or two of these things. Once again, Saward just crams ideas into the script and refuses to kill his darlings: he simply won’t delete a storyline which isn’t working out, even when it’s vampirising time from other plots which could thrive given just a little more time. The end result is a serial which teases you with glimpses of all the good stories it could be telling you, but comprehensively failing to tell any of them.

The serial does at least look good, which is a help, and a testament to Graeme Harper as a director trying to turn Sawardian’s leaden prose into gold. The idea that blue is the colour of mourning on Necros is a small one but a nice one, adding an aesthetic to the episode (between Peri’s blue coat and hat and the Doctor’s stylish blue cloak and the staff’s blue uniforms and the blue flowers everywhere) which is not what you would expect from the concept but is still quite touching. It also means that the TARDIS is an omen of doom when it shows up on the planet – something the script doesn’t directly comment on, but is still nonetheless true. If you wanted to give Saward some credit, you could point to that and say it’s a genuinely subtle and clever bit of writing; I am more inclined to think it’s an accident, precisely because Saward clearly isn’t a good enough writer to think of that. He just doesn’t go in for subtlety; Eric Saward knows writers who use context, and they’re all cowards.

Davros is, for much of the serial, also the beneficiary of some great production design. The image of Davros as this disembodied head, entombed in vast mass of life support machinery and swivelling around to face whoever he’s talking to, is great – a nice visual metaphor for Davros’s continued spiral into becoming even more dehumanised than his creations. It’s kind of a shame, late in the serial, when it turns out that that’s just a decoy, and that the real Davros is still much as we saw him at the end of Resurrection of the Daleks (minus the jizz) – wheeled out to set up a scene in which someone blows his hand off, because Saward can’t resist an opportunity to be nasty.

Elsewhere, though, Davros is failed by the imagery of the show as badly as he’s helped. There’s a bit where Davros’s wheelchair hovers in a way which looks awful (it’s bad CSO which fails to do the perspective properly) and does honest to goodness Force Lightning, because the way we make Davros better is to just make him the Doctor Who equivalent of Palpatine, right? Well, I guess he did the “Somehow (the villain) survived” thing well before Palpatine did, so fair’s fair.

As with Attack of the Cybermen and Resurrection of the Daleks, this is very concerned with continuity, though if you missed Resurrection of the Daleks good luck figuring out what Davros’s current deal is and how he got free after Destiny of the Daleks. Yet again, the story has a very weird relationship to its own continuity: sometimes it’s gulping it down like popcorn, sometimes it shows a total disdain for it. The entire plot essentially boils down to “Davros got free from the Daleks for a bit, he did some shit, the Daleks capture him again and take him away”, and that’s kind of it: it’s a serial very much concerned with picking up the thread left by a previous story and laying groundwork for a subsequent story, with the current plot almost being an afterthought.

At the same time, there’s honking great continuity errors. There’s a bit where the Doctor points out that the last time he saw Davros his ship blew up (true), and Davros’s escape from that situation is explained, but this overlooks the fact that the most vivid image we had of Davros’s fate at the end of Resurrection of the Daleks wasn’t of his ship blowing up (cool though that was), it was of him infected with the Movellan virus and jizzing himself to death. Saward does not even attempt to explain this, and whilst paying excess attention to canon may be a failing of this era of the show, Resurrection of the Daleks only happened a season ago so most viewers could be expected to remember it (especially given the, ah, profuseness of Davros’s death cum).

“So you see, Doctor, the masterful aspect of my plan is-” “How did you survive the death jizz?” “Shut up. As I was saying-” “Seriously, we all saw you spaff yourself to a sticky demise last time, how did you get out of that one?” “Shut up! Now, my plan-” “Really, you were dosed to the gills on Movellan cum virus and shooting stringy ropes of mortality across your lab, how did you manage to-” “Enough! Daleks, exterminate the Doctor!” “ACT-U-AL-LY, WE WERE WON-DER-ING A-BOUT YOUR DEATH SPUNK OUR-SELVES…”

Revelation of the Daleks leaves me with an unavoidable sense that Eric Saward simply does not understand his own stories, which is as comprehensive a failure as a script editor, writer, or any other form of storyteller I can think of. Whether or not the faults of season 22 of the show can be exclusively laid at his feet is another question – certainly, Nathan-Turner seems to be hot-shotting again, what with the celebrity casting and bringing back our Blake’s 7 favourites and the trip to Spain and summoning Troughton for a completely demeaning final appearance on the show and whatnot. And we’ve since learned of a wider morass of dysfunction behind the scenes, in part down to some individuals (including Saward and Michael Grade) simply disliking Colin Baker. The stink of sabotage is in the air, and despite Baker and Bryant doing their level best there’s only so much they can do to salvage the material they are given.

Nonetheless… to my mind, Doctor Who lives and dies on the quality of its stories. Even a bad season has merit if there are good stories in it; season 11 had The Time Warrior, and last season had The Awakening and The Caves of Androzani. Bad quality control is undesirable and stops the show being as consistent, makes the peaks less frequent, and the troughs more frequent, but if the occasional good script slips through then you can do something with that.

Season 22 was a slate of six stories which are mostly absolutely rotten, and at best merely point to a story which might be good rather than telling a story that is actually good in its own right. And if the script editor, who is responsible for commissioning stories and scouting out new writers, as well as being responsible for polishing scripts until they shine, is not at least partially responsible for that, who is?

OK. Let’s assess the damage.

Best Serial: Vengeance On Varos. By the standard of any other season, it would not be a good story; it’s a couple of revisions away from actually being good, but it isn’t there yet. By the standards of this season, it stands head and shoulders above the rest. The one benefit of Eric Saward completely giving up on quality control to the extent he blatantly did here is that it meant he wouldn’t get in the way of a good idea coming through, and the “cut it… now!” cliffhanger is genuinely superb. If you squint, you can see what the Sixth Doctor era could have been if it wasn’t constantly getting in the way of itself.

Worst Serial: Oh, fuck.

Set aside Vengeance On Varos, obviously. Also set aside Mark of the Rani, it’s a story with profound problems but the location is lovely (and actually intimately thematically related to the story, unlike in The Two Doctors where the location was chosen solely to let John Nathan-Turner work on his tan).

That leaves us with a plethora of apt picks for this category. Attack of the Cybermen disappears up the arse of continuity. The Two Doctors tried to make Troughton unlikeable. Timelash creeps towards being good, but then utterly wastes your time for the last sixth or so of its running time. Revelation of the Daleks constantly flirts with telling a better story but passes all of the better options up in favour of the dullest possible version of an Eric Saward story it can offer.

Um… OK. Let’s clutch at straws. Troughton still amused me at points in The Two Doctors and my libido won’t let me condemn Jacqueline Pearce doing Servalan, even if it’s a low-rent ersatz Servalan. Timelash has Paul Darrow doing “what if Avon was rubbish”? Revelation of the Daleks did have all those fun and interesting characters and story concepts tucked away into the corners, and it’s nice to see them even if only briefly.

It’s got to be Attack of the Cybermen. It’s got all the flaws of any other story this season, but there’s only one bit where it shows a pointer to what a better version of it might have looked at – but chickens out by trying to make us see Lytton as a hero, rather than going with “Lytton was a shitter, but he does not deserve what happens to him here.”

Most Important Serial: Revelation of the Daleks, largely because it keeps the whole “Dalek civil war” concept going, which would eventually yield genuinely good stories like Remembrance of the Daleks.

Least Important Serial: Let’s see… set aside Revelation. Set aside The Two Doctors because it’s our last sight of Troughton and it confirms season 6B. Set aside Attack of the Cybermen and Mark of the Rani because both of them involve enemies who will come back. Set aside Vengeance On Varos because it shows a level of media-savvy which will come back in the new series when Russell T. Davies is spoofing reality TV. By a process of elimination, we have reached Timelash, which seems fair.

Season Ranking: You know what’s coming.

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 20 (7/10).
15. Season 16 (7/10).
16. Season 1 (7/10).
17. Season 10 (7/10).
18. Season 3 (7/10).
19. Season 19 (6/10).
20. Season 21 (5/10).
21. Season 11 (4/10).
22. Season 22 (2/10).

This is two entire tiers worse than season 11. Season 11 was mostly poor, but it had one truly excellent story in the form of The Time Warrior. Season 22 does not have a single story you could call excellent. More than that, it doesn’t have any stories which you can say is unambiguously good. You have Vengeance On Varos, which is mediocrity desperately swimming towards quality, and then you have dross.

Give it some credit. It does Jon Pertwee the honour of not only offering his image to spark a little nostalgia in Timelash, but also making sure his final season is not, in fact, the worst season of Doctor Who ever. But otherwise, this is trash. Though the violence came in for criticism, and the cheapness of the production values likewise got mocked, neither of these are really the problem: the problem is that the show has no goddamn idea how to tell a story any more. Eric Saward is quick to pile blame on all and sundry, but again, whilst the producer exerts a lot of control over the big picture approach of the show in classic Who, it is the script editor who is responsible for delivering the stories, and of the four script editors who served under Nathan-Turner only one of them seems to have just given up on the very idea that good scripts are possible to the extent Saward had here.

Faced with all this, an understandable response is distress.