My companion is not for sale!
Nostalgia carries a weight out of proportion to its actual heft, and no story in Doctor Who demonstrates the siren song of the past so clearly as Robert Homes’ “The Two Doctors” (Story Production Code 6W), bringing together Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor alongside Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor in three forty-five minute episodes stuffed with Sontarans, space stations, Spain, and a Scottish accent courtesy of Frazer Hines’ Jamie. The success (and publicity) of the recent “The Five Doctors“—originally to have been written by Holmes before Terrance Dicks took over the scripting duties for various and sundry reasons—almost certainly helps drive producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward’s desire to have Troughton and Hines return yet again to a show which, between the airing of the second and third episodes of “The Two Doctors” in late February 1985, finally receives its cancellation notice.
The axe doesn’t quite take this time around, leading instead to the odd structuring of the forthcoming Season Twenty-Three, but the incessant threat of impending doom leading up to this near demise must be seen as a factor in the constant recycling of old friends and foes alike, with several stories penned by trusted hands from the series’ past, such as Holmes, and four of the six stories in Season Twenty-Two featuring returning characters from Doctor Who‘s greatest hits collection. But upon seeing the Second Doctor and Jamie, initially shot in black and white before shifting to color, one cannot deny a sense of immediate delight. Nostalgia tugs at the hardest of hearts, after all, especially when two hearts are involved.
Nearly ten minutes elapse from the beginning of the story to the first appearance of the Sixth Doctor and Peri, with the opening scenes devoted to the Second Doctor and Jamie, who have arrived at Space Station Camera on an errand from the Time Lords. The dating here is fuzzy; the characters obviously have aged along with the actors, though this concern was entirely ignored in “The Five Doctors,” but given the reference to having dropped Victoria off to study graphology, the events here ostensibly occur between “The Evil of the Daleks” and “Fury from the Deep” from the perspective of the Second Doctor, that being the range of Victoria’s TARDIS tenure.
For the second story in a row (though “The Mark of the Rani” comes after “The Two Doctors” in terms of production dates), a group of incredible intellects serves as the initial locus of the action, with Space Station Camera, a pure research facility funded by the Third Zone governments and led by Joinson Dastari (Laurence Payne, channeling a somewhat glam Karl Lagerfeld), hosting the scientists Kartz and Reimer, whose time travel experiments have drawn the ire of the Time Lords. The Second Doctor, as an exile, is dispatched by Gallifrey to unofficially express their displeasure at this tinkering with the time continuum, but scarcely before he can finish haranguing Dastari, the Sontarans attack the station. Their assault is aided, for reasons initially unexplained, by Chessene (Jacqueline Pearce, better known as Servalan on Blake’s 7), a technologically augmented “Androgum” bio-engineered to “mega-genius level” by Dastari.
The appearance of the spherical Sontaran battle cruisers comes with little fanfare, as though the mere mention of the Sontaran threat should resonate with the audience. As has been typical of Nathan-Turner and Saward’s aegis, however, they forget that not everyone has a well-worn copy of Jean-Marc Lofficier’s two volume Target Programme Guide or Peter Haining’s Doctor Who: A Celebration at hand. This menacing foe last appeared some seven years previously, in “The Invasion of Time,” where the Fourth Doctor fed them to carnivorous plants that just happen to grow in the TARDIS’ arboretum. They’re hardly household names in 1985. For those who caught the sole airings of the three prior Sontaran stories, the sight of a gloved, three-fingered hand holding a ray-gun stick brings a frisson of knowing pleasure; for everyone else, as with the Silurians and Sea Devils in “Warriors of the Deep,” it’s just another made-up word in a story rife with technobabble and typically dense Holmes-ian world building. Indeed, so little significance is placed on the revelation of the Sontarans—strangely, given that Holmes himself debuted them in “The Time Warrior“—that the first time viewers see one in full on screen (Varl, played by Tim Raynham), he is standing in the Spanish sun, in a villa just outside Seville…
The Sontarans, along with Chessene, Dastari, the omnivorous Androgum chef Shockeye (John Stratton), and a kidnapped Second Doctor, repair to Spain in the current day, Earth being near enough the Madillon Cluster to serve as a staging ground for the next battle against the Rutans—and also to give Shockeye a chance to sample the repudtedly succulent flesh of the natives. The chef’s cannibalistic impulses run throughout his appearances; at one point veteran director Peter Moffatt even focuses on him throttling and eating a rat, with giblets a plenty in the shot courtesy of the effects team, a rather jarring addition to the show’s growing record of gore and guts over the past few seasons.
Holmes portrays the Androgums as an underclass of sorts, with the uncomfortable suggestion on the space station that they are a servant species. The Doctor, the Second in particular, scorns them as a matter of course, rebuffing Shockeye’s recitation of his full name, declaiming “I’m not interested in the pedigree of an Androgum,” and later decrying them as barbaric, uncivilized, “a race to whom treachery is as natural as breathing.” Villainous, nigh on irredeemable species are not uncommon on Doctor Who, but quite seldom are they humanoid. Various facial disfigurements push Shockeye, a “pure” Androgum, away from a human norm, not unlike the quick addition of a nose ridge or pointed ear as a marker of alienness on many a science fiction series, but still the viewer is left with an oppressed human-ish species that, through Chessene’s manipulations, hopes to overthrow its shackles. Where, indeed, should the viewer’s sympathy lie? Holmes leans into their innate villainy through the Grand Guignol spectacle of Shockeye’s irrepressible appetites and Chessene’s coolly amoral mien, yet also has the chef note the Androgums’ nearness to humanity, given “there cannot be a creature on the planet that humans do not kill and eat.” It’s a discomfiting presentation all around, and though Holmes takes pains to present the Androgum threat to be as real as that of the Sontarans, it feels odd for Doctor Who to root so clearly, and without nuance, against an oppressed underdog, regardless of their perfidy.
The Sixth Doctor learns of the Second Doctor’s plight by means of a “time-slip in the subconscious” that reaches him as his predecessor is apparently being executed, causing him to fall to the floor in a trance. The one person he can think to consult on this malady, which he regards as an apparent side effect of his still-recent regeneration, is none other than Dastari himself, given his preeminence as a “pioneer of genetic engineering.” They arrive on Space Station Camera some twelve days after the attack, by which time the resident computer has decided to try to kill the Doctor for being a Time Lord in a sub-plot that goes nowhere, while Jamie, who survived the Sontaran assault, turns atavistic in near record time, hiding in the station’s core and pouncing on Peri when she disturbs his belongings. (The suggestion, then, seems to be that the Second and Sixth Doctors are existing in some sort of shared timeline where both exist at once, Blinovich Limitation Effect be damned, though perhaps Peri has the best response to all the temporal convolutions here, noting, “Circular logic will only make you dizzy, Doctor.”)
After quickly reuniting the Scotsman with his sporran, the Sixth Doctor, Peri, and Jamie travel to Spain right on the heels of the Sontarans, whose craft has fortuitously taken twelve days to reach Earth. Another telepathic trance allows the Second Doctor to imprint the tone of a particular bell in the Sixth Doctor’s mind, and after a sounding out a few notes from a particular opera by Rossini, he recognizes the distinct “boing” of the Santa María la Mayor, the largest of the bells in the Giralda bell tower in Seville, it being time once again for the somewhat traditional once-per-season foreign shoot on Doctor Who.
Holmes, with the connivance of Nathan-Turner and Saward, no doubt, postulates that successful time travel requires “a molecular stabilisation system,” one the Time Lords possess biologically through a nucleic symbiosis with a TARDIS that grants them and their passengers safe passage through the time continuum. By extracting the relevant nuclei—quite painfully and fatally—from the Second Doctor’s cells, Dastari will enable Chessene’s time capsule (falsely credited to Kartz and Reimer) to function properly, with the prize of unlimited time travel offered to the Sontarans for their assistance in covering Chessene and Dastari’s tracks through the massacre on the space station. No such mention of this new limitation on time travel occurs as recently as three stories prior, where the Cybermen flit about time without issue, to say nothing of the Daleks, who have had the same technology whenever required by the plot, as far back as Season Two. As ever, this tinkering with the basic workings of the show reveals the tension between the narrative needs of good storytelling and the efforts by Nathan-Turner and Saward to aim Doctor Who directly at the fans most keenly aware of the canonical lore being tossed aside like so many costumes in the TARDIS dressing room.
With the longest run-time of any story since 1979’s “The Armageddon Factor” (or the unaired “Shada” from 1980, if you prefer), Holmes and Moffatt have more space to fill in “The Two Doctors” than usual, resulting in the addition of sub-plots and two side characters, the vainglorious, underemployed British actor, lepidopterist, and part-time restauranteur Oscar (James Saxon) and Anita (Carmen Gomez, the current real-life mayor of Gibraltar), a local resident who knows a secret entrance to the villa where Chessene and the Sontarans have holed up. Oscar provides a bit of comic relief, affecting bravery in hopes of winning the attentions of Anita, a nice respite from the unsettling operation Dastari intends to conduct on the Second Doctor. They recur in the final episode, where the entire story turns abruptly from body horror to farce—and then to tragedy.
A series of time-padding complications sees the Sixth Doctor, Jamie, and Peri interrupt the attempted operation on the Second Doctor, wherein Peri is captured for supper by Shockeye and the Sixth Doctor and Jamie confront the leader of the Sontaran 9th Battle Group, Stike (Clinton Greyn), before escaping and then rescuing Peri but not the Second Doctor. Chessene then decides, for seemingly no reason at all, to have Dastari turn the Second Doctor into an Androgum, to serve as a consort to her. It’s mere child’s play for Dastari to whip up a quick ancestry transfer from the unwilling Shockeye to the captive Time Lord. The need to eliminate the now irrelevant Sontarans, however, distracts them long enough for Shockeye to wake up and realize that he now has a kindred, and hungry, spirit in the Androgumized Second Doctor. Off they traipse, in top hat, bow tie, and matching bushy red eyebrows to Seville for some delectable Spanish fare.
To their credit, both Patrick Troughton and John Stratton play the Androgum Second Doctor and Shockeye to the hilt in these scenes, and their arm-in-arm meanderings around Seville before landing in the restaurant managed by our good friend Oscar give both actors a chance to agreeably ham it up on the way to some jamón. It is, nevertheless, a jarring shift in tone. Just moments prior, Shockeye prepares to run a long knife across Peri’s throat before being called away fortuitously, and Chessene attacks the Sontarans with a gas that kills one and disfigures the other, eliciting copious quantities of trademark Saward-ian green goo in the process. To follow that up with such levity, Troughton in particular reeling off an euphonious litany of dishes to sample, each more exquisite and elaborate than the last, lands quite dissonantly, though made more palatable to be sure by the lovely shots of all the protagonists running around sun-dappled, picturesque Seville and calling to mind the location shooting in Paris and Amsterdam on past foreign sojourns.
Stike, alas, does not get to ride in a horse-drawn carriage over Spanish streets after surviving Chessene’s attack with coronic acid (fatal to Sontarans, natch). While everyone else is playing cat and mouse in the city, trying to find Shockeye and the Second Doctor, he attempts to use the time travel device, thinking he forced the Sixth Doctor to prime with his nuclei when he captured him previously. The device malfunctions, as the Doctor removed a vital component, leaving the Sontaran commander near death. Anticipating that he could escape using the capsule, he previously ordered Varl to set their craft to self-destruct to destroy everyone in the villa, of which he is now the sole occupant. It’s just not Stike’s day.
Having sated themselves on “lobsters, clams, and squid, brains in white sauce, two whole suckling pigs, a ham with figs, eight steaks, and an entire family paella,” the Androgum Second Doctor and Shockeye must pay their bill, with Oscar insisting that their proffered form of payment, a “twenty narg note” will not suffice. Shockeye pulls the ol’ “slash and dine” routine, plunging a knife into Oscar’s chest. Holmes takes an exceedingly strange tack here—it’s a wound that, in any other situation on Doctor Who would be painful but not fatal,. There’s no narrative need to kill off a character in place predominantly for comic relief, other than to shock the audience. And yet, rather than allowing for a “straight” death, Oscar instead goes out in an over-the-top manner, begging Anita to care for his moth collection and bemoaning that none shall see his “definitive Hamlet.” A similar tonally discordant note takes place in “Vengeance on Varos,” where the Doctor makes a quip after two guards melt away in an acid vat. Oscar’s death is played for laughs rather than as a comment on the savagery of Androgums, a fate the Sixth Doctor fears will happen to him if the genetic transfer becomes permanent in the Second Doctor.
The final fifteen minutes of the story continue the violent bent, with Chessene recapturing the Time Lords and their companions and returning them to the villa, where Shockeye brandishes Stike’s dismembered leg amidst the rubble from the explosion. The Sixth Doctor proffers the “Briode nebulizer” he purloined from the time capsule, and after Chessene satisfies herself that it works by sending Peri safely through time, she orders the quartet killed, with Jamie reserved for supper. The Sixth Doctor escapes and helps free Jamie, leading Shockeye on a chase that ends at Oscar’s lepidopterology gear, including the bottle of cyanide used to kill his prey. In a scene almost unthinkable previously for the show, the Sixth Doctor wraps Shockeye’s head in the moth net and suffocates him with a cyanide-laced cloth. Self-defense it may be, but it’s one of the most visceral scenes on Doctor Who since the excessive moments of blood and drowning in “The Deadly Assassin,” capped off with a jaunty aside as “Your just desserts,” by a Time Lord rather too proud of his lethal efforts.
Dastari saves the day, realizing, after seeing Chessene fall to the ground and taste the blood spilled by the Sixth Doctor during his escape, that he has erred grievously in endowing “a lowly, unthinking creature of instinct” with such intellect, and he refuses to dispatch the Second Doctor and Peri, being killed by Chessene for his change of heart. Jamie intervenes, and she jumps in the time capsule, which actually doesn’t have a functioning Briode nebulizer since the Sixth Doctor only added enough of his symbiotic nuclei for a single trip. She dies, in agony, reverting to her true Androgum form at the end. In classic Second Doctor fashion, he pops into his TARDIS as soon as the butcher’s bill comes due, encouraging the Sixth Doctor to stay out of his way in the future—and the past. Our current TARDIS team heads for their own craft, with the Doctor encouraging a vegetarian diet from here forward, a final bit of trademark moralizing from Holmes’ pen.
All the parts exist for a romping adventure with wit and wonder aplenty, involving the beloved Second Doctor and his most faithful companion. So why doesn’t it work? In a word, Sontarans. The no-neck-no-goodniks are shoehorned into this story, which has zero narrative room for them despite a run time of over two hours. There’s no reason for them to be involved, even given Holmes’ connection to his creation, and their scenes could have been far more profitably spent on additional Androgums, deepening that aspect of the story; only at the very end of the final episode does Chessene proclaim what it was all about:
Chessene: I put myself among the gods.And now I shall liberate my people. With me as their leader we shall reign over all other beings.
It’s all rather bog-standard conquerer stuff but never even hinted at up until the very end. Dastari’s motivations, too, receive no attention; is he blinded by love for Chessene, or simply egotistical enough to need his genetic masterpiece to succeed at any price? Cutting the Sontaran roles—with no disrespect intended to Clinton Greyn and Tim Raynham for the performances as Stike and Varl—provides ample space for the Androgum threat to be developed beyond a very one-dimensional condemnation of them as instinct driven beasts. To involve the Sontarans in so feckless a manner drains them of any residual excitement they might bring to future appearances, and indeed, they do not recur until the series reboots in the 2000s.
It must be said that the guest cast plays their roles with bravado and skill. Jacqueline Pearce’s presentation of Chessene conveys an incredible emotional restraint, making her final return to her feral Androgum nature all the more compelling, and she exudes menace even when silent and motionless, quite a feat indeed. As Dastari, Laurence Payne straddles the border between wanting to see an experiment succeed and revulsion at the costs of said experiments, gradually realizing the bloodshed he has unleashed and making his eventual betrayal of Chessene believable, all done while wearing shaded glasses that hide his eyes. Regarding John Stratton’s Shockeye, well, it’s a role that could overwhelm an actor, or lead to over-acting, but he embraces it with gusto. One believes Shockeye’s hunger.
Neither Nicola Bryant nor Frazer Hines have much to do in “The Two Doctors,” with both being captured and used as pawns (and potential appetizers) with distressing regularity. Bryant’s Peri does serve as the audience’s voice, asking those questions viewers often have for the Doctor, like, “What are you saying? I don’t understand,” while also doing her best to distract Chessene and Shockeye by pretending to be an American exchange student looking to rent the villa. And Frazer’s Jamie does get in a few knife stabs and tosses, all of which move the plot along, but on the whole, they are sidelined, with Hines spending more time alongside the Sixth Doctor than bantering with his own.
Patrick Troughton seems in as fine a fettle as ever in “The Two Doctors,” the Androgum scenes in particular affording him a delightful range, and the Second Doctor displays some of his trademark impatience and irascibility in Holmes’ script. The scenes he shares with Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor work delightfully, Baker acting as the older regeneration despite the visual age discrepancy. Baker himself appears to be having a blast in this one. When they appear alongside one another, one anticipates their interactions keenly, not unlike the compelling banter between the Doctor, the Rani, and the Master in the story just prior. Yet, incredibly, those moments of shared presence occur but infrequently, all confined to the latter half of the story.
Ultimately, “The Two Doctors” falls short of its potential not because of too much focus on Doctor Who‘s past but because of how that past is integrated into the present. The reason “The Three Doctors” stands as the best of the “reunion” stories is due to the extent to which the Second and Third Doctor work together in that story from start to finish; “The Five Doctors” and “The Two Doctors” bring the various regenerations of the titular Time Lord together only at the very end, limiting the chance for viewers to see that interplay between them which provides far more fascination and interest than any amount of narrative complication that keeps them apart. It’s not enough to throw the call-backs, the lore, on the screen and say, “Look at these things you like!” The Second Doctor brings more to the show than a few toots of a recorder or a pro forma “My giddy aunt,” something Holmes should know, given that he wrote two stories for Troughton in the late 1960s. As wonderful as it is to see Frazer Hines and Patrick Troughton as Jamie and the Second Doctor, they, and the audience, deserve more than for them to be wheeled out as mere props.
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Post 146 of the Doctor Who Project