Category: Episode by Episode
Doctor Who episode 569: The Visitation – Part Four (23/2/1982)
‘Try and think what the Doctor would do if he were here.’ Possibly the most “basic” Doctor Who story so far, it’s all perfectly adequate without ever giving the impression that there’s anything going on beyond the edge of the TV screen. In that sense, it’s the polar opposite of Kinda, which implied a whole society we never really see. The Visitation reduces the 17th Century to a few old-fashioned houses and a forest; one fruity local, and a punchline that’s like something from a World Distributors Annual. It succeeds because it’s mostly aiming to achieve the bare minimum. It’s less dense and complex than one of the new series’ celebrity historicals.
Doctor Who episode 568: The Visitation – Part Three (22/2/1982)
‘Kill them Scythe Man, and you die as well!’ This is like a checklist of Saward cliches – the monster that declares, ‘Excellent!’. The oddly civilised baddies (the Terileptil talks about living with grace and beauty). ‘You must think me a fool.’ Because a lot of its being done for the first time, it has novelty value, and there are some nice moments like the Doctor suggesting to the Terileptil, ‘Why not smile and let me live?’ Saward has an earned reputation for brutality in his scripts, but half the time they’re actually pitching for black comedy, and I think some of that is evident here.
Doctor Who episode 567: The Visitation – Part Two (16/2/1982)
‘Are you capable of carrying a tired thespian?’ After Kinda threw buckets of ideas at the wall, this offers practically none. It looks very nice though, with some pretty spring filming and authentic-looking locations. It’s a shame, Mace aside, that it’s populated by non-characters with banal descriptions like ‘Poacher’, ‘Miller’ and ‘Scythe Man’ (unforgivably, villagers who grew up together don’t call each other by their names), but it requires no effort to follow, and was probably just the job for eating your dinner in front of on a Tuesday evening.
Doctor Who episode 566: The Visitation – Part One (15/2/1982)
‘While you were enjoying 48 hours peaceful sleep in the delta wave augmenter, my mind was occupied. Taken over.’ Welcome, Eric Saward: one of the key creative figures of 1980s’ Doctor Who, making his debut with a script that demonstrates some of the most grating elements of his style (suddenly, everyone in the universe talks like they’re a bowdlerised Shakespeare character), but also some of the strengths.
Doctor Who episode 565: Kinda – Part Four (9/2/1982)
‘Was it real or not?’ The script has a charming awareness of its own obfuscations, and Todd becomes a brilliant audience mouthpiece, baffled and irritated by the gnomic comments of Karuna, and demanding rational explanations which, by and large, are forthcoming. The Mara lives in the ‘dark places of the inside’ (‘or wherever’ – the Doctor doesn’t buy into the mysticism either) and has used Tegan to cross into the material world and possess Aris.
Doctor Who episode 564: Kinda – Part Three (8/2/1982)
‘You male fool.’ Though the script is dismissive of men, it’s notable that neither of the female companions even appears in the episode. Again, this skirts with being baffling because the script is full of poetic allusions: ‘Wheel turns, civilisations arise, wheel turns, civilisations fall.’ You could write a book on the thematic depth and imagery (oh, they have). On the flipside, if you’re just interested in following on with the story basically Aris the Kinda has been possessed by an evil force and plans to kill the human settlers, even though the wise woman has already planned to defeat the invaders through a mix of the telepathic box, and reasoning with Todd.
Doctor Who episode 563: Kinda – Part Two (2/2/1982)
‘I don’t want to understand everything, I want to work things out for myself.’ The difference, I think, between this and the earlier stories this season is the balance it strikes between the elevated SF of the forest, and the rather more robust scenes inside the dome with Simon Rouse’s portrayal of Hindle’s insanity, and Davison’s brilliantly judged “phew, what a loony” reactions. In both strands, madness is creeping in to disrupt the world, it’s just we understand the rules a lot better in one setting than the other.
Doctor Who episode 562: Kinda – Part One (1/2/1982)
‘A perfect fifth.’ While making Doctor Who, Davison was also recording two sitcoms (Sink or Swim for the BBC and Holding the Fort for ITV, and there was a two-month break between the recording of The Visitation and Kinda to allow Davison time to tape Sink or Swim. Maybe the gap gave him chance to assess what he wanted to do with the role, because his performance here is a lot more confident than in Four to Doomsday, bringing the familiar elements of fraying patience, insouciance and sudden manic bursts of energy that characterise the fifth Doctor. Or maybe it’s just that this was conceived for Tom Baker, and Davison’s responding to a script that includes jokes (‘An apple a day keeps the.. Never mind.’) and casual authority.
Doctor Who episode 561: Four to Doomsday – Part Four (26/1/1982)
‘You may keep the pencil.’ And after criticising Nyssa’s inaction in the previous episode I’m immediately proved wrong by the way she leaps to the Doctor’s rescue. Her evident delight when he tells her she’s brilliant is lovely, and you can see why Davison thought she was a better fit for the fifth Doctor than Adric, who needs to be talked round into not siding with the baddies, and Tegan, whose weepy impetuousness has now put the TARDIS and its crew in peril.
Doctor Who episode 560: Four to Doomsday – Part Three (25/1/1982)
‘This is the graveyard of all those taken from Earth.’ I really like the macabre turn this episode takes: not only that the crew are android copies of humans abducted thousands of years ago, but the fate of their flesh (Enlightenment talks about being ‘relieved of the flesh time’ with a shudder) after the android duplicates are created: ‘The subject is then terminated and their body used to fertilise the Flora Chamber.’ This is all explained by Bigon, through neat scene shifts back and forth, as Nyssa is prepared to undergo the process. It gives a pungent oomph to this that was lacking in the frothy first half.
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