Category: Episode by Episode
Doctor Who episode 559: Four to Doomsday – Part Two (19/1/1982)
‘If a frog with a funny head who can turn itself into a semblance of a human being in a matter of minutes, there isn’t much of a limit to what it can’t do. To say nothing of the dress-making.’ This is weird. For the sixth episode in a row, not a lot happens: vast swathes of it consist of people watching people – Monarch watching ‘the children’ Adric and Nyssa watching the crew of the spaceship; Persuasion watching the Doctor and Tegan watching the ‘recreationals’. Jeopardy is in short supply; the focus instead is on mystery – how can three billion life forms be on board one ship. Except even the mystery isn’t that taxing: when the crew don’t require oxygen and can be repaired, it’s not a huge leap to Bigon revealing he’s actually an android.
Doctor Who episode 558: Four to Doomsday – Part One (18/1/1982)
‘Come along, children. Not in front of our hosts.’ This was the first Davison story recorded, and it shows. The new Doctor is written like a character in a 1940s’ children’s book, with the old-fashioned cadence of a fusty professor: ‘I wonder, could you tell me who or what you are? And where we are?’; ‘Would it be in order for you to take me to your leader?’ But this is just representative of the oddly formal nature of the whole piece, as the Doctor and friends are almost ritually introduced to Monarch and his curious crew.
Doctor Who episode 557: Castrovalva – Part Four (12/1/1982)
‘The Doctor has journeyed dangerously to honour us here in Castrovalva, and look at the outcome.’ Though the Doctor is still in a weakened state, Davison’s cleverly inching his performance closer to “normal” every episode. The scene where he asks Mergrave to draw him a square to prove the impossibility of Castrovalva is great: he plays it with the slightly fusty authority of a professor, but with a streak of youthful impatience, recalling Hartnell’s young/old take on the part.
Doctor Who episode 556: Castrovalva – Part Three (11/1/1982)
‘Sorry. No time. Must dash.’ We’re starting to get more of a grip on the new Doctor: the disarming candour; polite, almost comically so, even in the midst of a crisis. But, crucially, the sense that this is all battling with impatience and frustration causing occasional burst of sarcastic snippiness or brusqueness (for example when he realises Nyssa and Tegan have been hiding the kidnap of Adric). I quite like that. The boyishness – the Doctor looks younger than his companions when he tells a local girl, ‘We’ll have to give you a badge for mathematical excellence’ – is very disconcerting, slightly Troughtonish, and gets dropped as Davison develops his performance.
Doctor Who episode 555: Castrovalva – Part Two (5/1/1982)
‘So, this air hostess person’s flying it, eh? Well I wish her the best of luck.’ In it’s new, twice-a-week broadcast slot, perhaps the audience was willing to overlook slower episodes because it never felt long until the next one came round. This has some nice bits, but is largely killing time, again, until the TARDIS arrives in Castrovalva – already seeded as the Master’s back-up plan in case the hydrogen inrush failed to destroy the TARDIS. In practice this involves lots of scenes wandering around the TARDIS – which given Logopolis offered much the same, in practice means the audience has spent a large chunk of the last six episodes watching people wander round the Ship. It’s worse than The Invasion of Time. Then, to shake things up, there are lots of scenes of Tegan and Nyssa wandering through some bucolic countryside as Nyssa does the daintiest striptease ever committed to film.
Doctor Who episode 554: Castrovalva – Part One (4/1/1982)
‘If escape were that easy Adric we could all be free of this nasty world.’ While previous regenerations have picked up from the end of the previous story, this is a straight continuation of Logopolis 4, with the amazing vanishing security guards reappearing to menace the new Doctor and friends, the Master having come up with yet another plan on the fly, and references to block transfer and the Logopolitans. This makes sense as a follow up to The Five Faces of Doctor Who, which concluded with Logopolis in December 1981. The plus is that it provides immediate jeopardy directly connected to the Doctor’s regeneration.
The Five Faces of Doctor Who (2/11-3/12/1981)
‘How far, Doctor? How long have you lived?’ It’s hard to appreciate the Peter Davison years without understanding the sudden accessibility of past Doctors. This BBC2 repeat season, organised by JNT, preceded the release of any Doctor Who videos, and was the first time many fans had been able to see Hartnell, Troughton and even Pertwee in action (previous BBC repeats had religiously stuck to featuring only the current Doctor). Viewing figures were good – averaging five million (Pertwee was most popular).
K9 and Company: A Girl’s Best Friend (28/12/1981)
‘Oh, Doctor, you didn’t forget.’ Filling the gap between Seasons 18 and 19, this curio broadcast over the 1981 festive season is easy to mock, with its hilariously bad title sequence and theme music, a performance of incredible camp from Linda Polan, and the notion of a series of adventures for Sarah and K9 investigating the covens of England. There are, it’s true, numerous laughable elements, but the biggest surprise is that this works.
Doctor Who episode 553: Logopolis – Part Four (21/3/1981)
‘While there’s life…’ I find it impossible to watch this dispassionately: there’s so much sadness wrapped around Tom’s departure – much more than in Pertwee’s, which felt more like the celebration of an era than a funeral – that the context of this episode overshadows the content.
Doctor Who episode 552: Logopolis – Part Three (14/3/1981)
‘I am prepared for the worst.’ From Logopolis ‘the unravelling will spread out until the whole universe is reduced to nothing’. It’s a grand idea, and Bidmead makes it accessible by showing the localised effects – the great city falling silent, its people turned to dust and its streets collapsing on themselves. The eerie silence and accelerating decay contain hints of the Daleks’ time destructor on Kembel. The scale of the fourth Doctor’s last hurrah is epic.
Next Time... 