There’s a tendency to dismiss Colin Baker as the “other” Baker to have been the Doctor, the one without the scarf, the one in a clown’s outfit. Such simplistic assessments shortchange the real talents that Colin Baker brings to Doctor Who with his portrayal of the Sixth Doctor, while also reflecting the ways in which his character suffers from decisions made by producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward, the production team responsible for all but two of Baker’s episodes.
From the very beginning of his run, when the Sixth Doctor pops up in the Fifth Doctor’s clothes at the end of “The Caves of Androzani,” Nathan-Turner and Saward indicate their intentions for this new regeneration:
Sixth Doctor: Change, my dear. And it seems not a moment too soon.
Spoken directly to the camera, and by extension to the audience, the Sixth Doctor’s assertion takes the tone of a challenge, signaling a shake-up of the series as a whole. Viewers do not wait long to see the first fruits of this new direction, with Colin Baker’s debut story, “The Twin Dilemma,” airing six days after Peter Davison’s departure as the final installment of Season Twenty-One. It is not, to be charitable, a promising start.
Between a garish new costume that, as the lore goes, was designed as an in-jest, over-the-top response to Nathan-Turner’s desire for an ensemble utterly devoid of taste or style, and a “regeneration crisis” sending the Sixth Doctor through a gamut of emotions, from utter cowardice and extreme self-pity to overweening vanity and repugnant violence, Anthony Steven’s “The Twin Dilemma” predisposes the audience to reject this change in Doctors, a response that has the unfortunate side effect of spilling over onto Baker himself. Even had viewers been willing to forgive, or at least countenance, the Doctor trying to strangle Peri, as the result of a very difficult regeneration, Nathan-Turner and Saward double down at the end, undoing any goodwill the Doctor might have mustered during the story:
Sixth Doctor: Whatever else happens, I am the Doctor. Whether you like it or not.
Whence this confrontational attitude? Whence, indeed, this insistence on forcing change, as though trying to wrest control? Nathan-Turner has been at the helm of Doctor Who since 1980, some three and a half years before the Sixth Doctor’s pointed retort to the audience. He directly shapes not just the entirety of the Fifth Doctor’s character arc but also the conclusion of the Fourth Doctor’s time on the series. Whatever Doctor Who has become by 1984 and Colin Baker’s arrival, it’s Nathan-Turner’s handiwork, no one else’s.
By the time the Sixth Doctor returns for his first full season, Season Twenty-Two, almost a year later, there’s reason to be worried that the response to the Doctor’s defiance might be that the audience does not “like it,” reflected in part by the decision to headline the season with the ever-reliable bio-mechanical menaces in Paula Moore’s “Attack of the Cybermen,” the Mondasians being overdue for an encore, having been last seen in Season Nineteen’s “Earthshock.” To counterbalance the unfamiliar new Doctor, then, particularly this prickly version of Gallifrey’s favorite son, the production team leans heavily on more comfortable call-backs to the series’ history. Nathan-Turner and Saward pull out all the stops for this season, with the Daleks and Davros, the Master, and the Sontarans alongside the Second Doctor and Jamie, all making appearances. Far from seeking radical change, it’s old home week on the TARDIS in 1985.
Tensions between the series and the BBC—to whom, at least in part, the Sixth Doctor’s aggressive statement of intentions seems directed—cannot be overstated. Frequently under fire for the increase in violence in the series, to say nothing of its budgets, however slim relative to what they attempted to put on screen, Doctor Who in 1985 is no longer the darling source of Dalek-mania at the BBC. Undercutting any attempt at developing audience interest in the new Doctor and all the old friends and foes returning with him, Michael Grade and the BBC put the series on “hiatus,” a decision announced while Patrick Troughton makes a bravura return in “The Two Doctors.” Hello, goodbye…
And what of the Sixth Doctor himself? After the wobbly start in “The Twin Dilemma,” hints of his essential “Doctor-ness” begin to reveal themselves as early as “Attack of the Cybermen,” where his mania subsides and the Doctor that the audience expects starts to peek out. His humility at the end of that story warms viewers to this harlequin-clad character, not that he has much to brag about: Telos and the sole remaining Cryon inhabitants are destroyed in order to save Earth from a collision with Halley’s Comet. He returns to his accidentally interventionist ways in Philip Martin’s “Vengeance on Varos,” helping to bring about the collapse of a dystopian dictatorship premised on audience participation in televised executions, a fanciful extrapolation of Eurovision phone voting at the time—and a fretful harbinger of the excrescences of reality television to come.
We begin to see flashes of Baker’s own take on the Doctor around this point. “Vengeance on Varos” requires a significant range from the Doctor, from an apparent death scene to a series of caustic rejoinders with the avaricious slug-like trader Sil (Nabil Shaban), and Baker proves his ability to transition between the moods, but in a restrained, organic way, rather than the frenetic mask shifting of “The Twin Dilemma.” Baker’s Sixth Doctor becomes a chameleon of sorts, taking on far more varied personality traits than any Doctor before, some as conflicting as his patchwork coat, and it’s Baker’s gift that the audience is left wondering, every time, whether the Doctor is acting these emotions to bring about his desired resolution or actually feeling the emotions in the moment. This malleability, alas, will bring about an inherent uncertainty about the Doctor that leads to a less-than-felicitous conclusion for this regeneration.
Baker’s finest moment, and indeed the Sixth Doctor’s high point, comes in Pip and Jane Baker’s “The Mark of the Rani,” wherein the Doctor matches wits, and words, with not just the Master (Anthony Ainley) but another renegade Time Lord, the Rani (Kate O’Mara). The story, of an attempt to take over Earth by mentally enslaving the heralds of the Industrial Revolution using mind control maggots, breaks no new ground, but the Bakers’ endow—one might waggishly say “lard”—their script with excessive verbosity, and the three Time Lords make the most of it. Ainley and O’Mara play wonderfully against Colin Baker, ripostes and witty repartee flying alongside vintage technobabble of a quality and quantity last seen during Tom Baker’s run. It’s a verbal tour de force; not deathless prose by any means, but solid interplay amongst three actors who know their craft well.
Kate O’Mara’s Rani stands as one of four solid new additions to Doctor Who‘s rogues’ gallery during Colin Baker’s era. The amoral, genius chemist nicely counterbalances the Master; where she’s only interested in saving her own Gallifreyan skin, the Master’s need for revenge against the Doctor stands out all the more starkly for its self-sabotaging nature. Sil, the oleaginous villain played by Nabil Shaban, appears in another Philip Martin story beyond “Vengeance on Varos,” reprising the role in “Mindwarp” during Season Twenty-Three. Shaban plays the role this side of comic relief, imbuing the hyper-capitalist character with just enough pathos that one feels sorry for his eventual demise at the hands of a barbarian king played, as seems appropriate, by Brian Blessed…
Rounding out the quartet, Tony Selby introduces the slick yet curiously noble raconteur Sabalom Glitz to the series in “The Mysterious Planet,” sent to a renamed and devastated Earth to recover data stolen from the Time Lords. Loyal to no one but himself, Glitz nevertheless helps save the day against the Sixth Doctor’s final and most notable foe, indeed, “The Ultimate Foe“: the Valeyard (Michael Jayston).
Some context seems required. Doctor Who earns a reprieve from its “hiatus”—feared broadly to be a euphemism for cancellation—in the form of a truncated Season Twenty-Three, comprising fourteen episodes instead of the more typical twenty-two episodes. Eric Saward hits upon the notion of linking all the episodes into an overarching story, “The Trial of a Time Lord,” with three mostly independent four part stories—Robert Holmes’ “The Mysterious Planet,” Philip Martin’s “Mindwarp,” and Pip and Jane Baker’s “Terror of the Vervoids“—tied together with a courtroom framing device and wrapped up with the two episode finale, “The Ultimate Foe,” written in part by Holmes and in part by the Bakers.
The Valeyard prosecutes the Sixth Doctor for the crime of intervention, and eventually, of genocide, with the three sub-stories presented as evidence in the trial. It’s a sham trial, of course, put on by a corrupt High Council to conceal their destruction of Earth in order to hide evidence that the Matrix has been tampered with; the Valeyard tinkers with moments in each of the stories shown in order to implicate the Doctor, and it’s these alterations that feel deeply at odds with the character of the Doctor as we have come to know him. Just as in “The Twin Dilemma,” the Sixth Doctor is shown to be malevolent, craven, careless, arrogant, and cruel. Baker, as noted, can pull it off with ease, and the strength of his performances makes the audience’s attitude to the Doctor all the more ambivalent.
Even though viewers know, inherently, that the Doctor cannot be as presented on screen, just seeing the Doctor behave in these ways creates dissonance—generating not pleasant, surprise-laden frisson, but actual disdain. That the Valeyard is revealed as a future regeneration of the Doctor, harboring all his worst impulses, only sours the audience on the Doctor further. Even the best heroes have feet of clay, but after starting the Sixth Doctor’s journey as a cad, it’s less than comforting to know that he winds up, in the end, a villain. Small wonder, then, that the Valeyard never returns to the screen, the whole of Season Twenty-Three eventually treated canonically as though it never happened.
Nor, alas, does the Sixth Doctor return. He simply pops into the TARDIS at the end of “The Trial of a Time Lord” and disappears, Baker having been informed that his services are no longer required during the airing of the story. Regrettably, if quite understandably, he chooses not to return for a regeneration scene to introduce the Seventh Doctor, leaving the Sixth Doctor’s final words as “carrot juice” rather than some more stirring epitaph.
Most Doctors find significant definition through their companions, but, as with much about the Sixth Doctor, not in this case. His two stalwart traveling chums serve more as counterbalances than as integral parts of his personality and its presentation. To be certain, both Nicola Bryant as Peri, his companion for all but six episodes, and Bonnie Langford as Mel, brought in for the final stretch, bring life to their charges, but given the constant fluctuations in the character they are playing against, there’s very little room to establish the kind of rapport that most companions receive as a matter of course.
Bryant’s Peri deserves focus. Established, in “Planet of Fire,” as a somewhat vacuous American teenager spending a gap year abroad, she becomes a moral compass for both the Fifth Doctor and the Sixth. Especially at the start of Colin Baker’s run, Peri is the only adult in the TARDIS, asking the sensible questions like “Why are we staying here?” and “Is that tunnel safe?” The answer to the latter question, inevitably, is “No.” Bryant never allows Peri to be sidelined, making the most of rather thin scripts; by the time she is granted an interest in botany by the writers, Peri has shed everything but the forced American accent, which, to American ears, never quite lands despite her best efforts. All the more shocking, then, when Peri seemingly dies during the events of “Mindwarp,” an unexpectedly final and spectacular exit asked for by Bryant herself. The decision to retroactively resurrect her in “The Ultimate Foe” robs the character of a notable finale, though a life as a warrior queen alongside, as seems appropriate, Brian Blessed isn’t a terrible second act…
Much like the costume foisted upon the Sixth Doctor by John Nathan-Turner, the Sixth Doctor’s unsettled mien sits poorly on Colin Baker’s shoulders. Despite his ability to take the Doctor through every emotional range asked, there are certain octaves that this time traveller should hit but sparingly. The Doctor should fail; he should grieve; he should flounder and fear. But he should also rise, he should also prevail, and do so with an inimitable style. In the few moments where we see Baker’s take on the role fully—notably in Pip and Jane Baker’s “The Mark of the Rani” and “Terror of the Vervoids“—the Sixth Doctor stands toe to toe with his predecessors: believable, complex, fallible, and noble, driven by a desire to right the wrongs he sees, no matter the scale or the cost. Those moments, through no fault of Baker’s, occur too infrequently, so that we are left with an overall impression of the Sixth Doctor as a poorly dressed marionette, dancing jerkily to an off-tune song. Colin Baker, the Sixth Doctor, and the audience all deserve better.
Post 153 of the Doctor Who Project