Doctor Who Project: The Two Doctors

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.

Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines as the Second Doctor and Jamie in 1966, or 1985?

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.

Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor

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.

Laurence Payne and Jacqueline Pearce as Dastari and Chessene

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.

Sontaran Battle Cruisers Approach!

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…

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Doctor Who Project: The Mark of the Rani

It’ll be something devious and overcomplicated.

Every great hero comes matched to an equally great adversary: Holmes and Moriarty, Superman and Lex Luthor, Tom and Jerry, Kirk and Khan. For the Doctor, that iconic foe, that near-platonic opposite, comes not in the form the Daleks or the Cybermen, worthy opponents though they may be, but in the Master, the renegade Time Lord gifted with all the Doctor’s own advantages, from intellect to regeneration to a TARDIS. Their duels hold legendary status in Doctor Who, but also show a decidedly one-way record of victories in favor of Gallifrey’s favorite son, making for rousing storytelling but rather anticlimactic narratives. Pip and Jane Baker, established British TV writers penning their first of several Doctor Who tales, introduce a complication to the usual pas de deux in “The Mark of the Rani” (Story Production Code 6X), adding the Rani (Kate O’Mara), an amoral, exiled Time Lord, into the mix with their two episode, ninety-minute story, turning the typically double-sided affair into a Time Lord triangle. She doesn’t like either of them one bit, and the feeling is mutual all the way around.

Kate O'Mara as the Rani

A brilliant chemist, the Rani sets up shop in a Victorian mining town during the tumult of the Luddite riots, draining a brain fluid from miners who think they are going for a bath after a long shift; the chemical activates the brain’s sleep centers, and without it the victims turn into rambunctious, hyperactive louts whose behavior can be attributed to the machine-mashing Luddites, allowing her scheme to go unnoticed. (Her need for the chemical is off-handedly attributed to a planet she rules, where her biological tinkering with the inhabitants has prevented them from sleeping.) The setting, filmed partly on location at the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust in Shropshire, plays to the BBC’s talent for clothing extras in period costume, and the sheer number of sartorially accurate people director Sarah Hellings has running around the streets and mineworks of Ironbridge’s preserved Victorian town in the opening minutes sells the reality of the time and place wonderfully, as well as if not better than any of Doctor Who‘s other “historical” stories.

After a hard day down the pit

If we’re in Earth’s past and the Master (Anthony Ainley) is involved, then odds remain good that he’s seeking, in Peri’s words, to “pervert history” in order to bend the planet to his will. An assemblage of geniuses, gathering at the behest of George Stephenson, one of the main sparks of the incipient Industrial Revolution, provides the Master with the opportunity to shape the course of events on Earth to create “the platform for the most devastating power in the universe,” answering only to him. The regenerating elephant in the room, the little matter of the Master’s seeming demise in “Planet of Fire,” is brushed past with a quick quip: “I’m indestructible. The whole universe knows that.” And, as ever with the Master, he cannot simply enact his plan, instead drawing the Doctor’s TARDIS off-course so that he might get his revenge on his nemesis as well. As events transpire, revenge may be a dish best served cold, but the Master keeps dropping it on the way to the table.

Anthony Ainley as the Master

The Sixth Doctor and Peri thus appear on the scene, with Peri already dressed for a trip to Kew Gardens in the same era, the Master’s efforts changing only the physical, rather than temporal, location of the TARDIS’ landing spot. Before long they intervene in an attack by the Rani’s victims on a cart transporting machinery to George Stephenson (Gawn Grainger). The assailants all have a garish red circular mark on their neck from the Rani’s experiment, the eponymous Mark of the Rani, which draws the Doctor’s interest keenly. They set into town to meet Stephenson, with the Doctor eventually figuring out that the bath house is at the center of it all. So he decides to scruffy himself up and take a dip…

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Burma Shave: ASL Action Pack #19 (MMP) Released

Just in time for the week-long gaming bacchanal known variously as AvalonCon, DonCon, or the more quotidian World Boardgaming Championships, Multi-Man Publishing has released the latest in their long-running series of map-and-scenario compilations for Advanced Squad Leader, Action Pack #19: Roads to Rangoon. With three double-sided maps and ten scenarios on cardstock designed by Gary Fortenberry, and featuring a cover sheet illustrated by Nicolas Eskubi, this bagged expansion centers on actions between March and April 1942 in Burma, pitting British, Commonwealth, and Chinese forces against Japanese troops and their allies in the Burmese Independence movement.

Cover sheet detail from Action Pack #19 by Multi-Man Publishing; art by Nicolas Eskubi

Something of a sequel to Action Pack #9: To the Bridge!, also by Fortenberry, which mostly concentrated on combats in Burma in February 1942, this new Action Pack provides a number of small-scale encounters; only two cards have more than fifteen squads per side and just four run longer than six turns, making these strong candidates for tournament or single-session club play.

Contents overview of Action Pack #19 by Multi-Man Publishing

The three double-sided geomorphic maps (20a/b, 21a/b, 22a/b) in the style known colloquially as “Fortenberry” maps come in the familiar “Starter Kit”-type thick cardstock finish. The two sides of each map look mostly the same, having different map-edge woods hexes to enable them to mesh seamlessly with other boards. With crisp art by the inestimable Charlie Kibler, they make a solid addition to the jam-packed ASL map inventory, most notably bringing a pair of new river boards (20a/b, 22a/b) to the game system as well as a hill-festooned forest/grain explosion (21a/b) with a small stream, chapel, and graveyard tucked in for good measure. 22a/b is the pick of the crop, featuring a two-hex river running against a built-up village; walls guard one side of the water feature and imposing stone buildings run along an orchard-lined road, making for a very difficult riparian crossing under fire…

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Doctor Who Project: Vengeance on Varos

When did they last show something worth watching, eh?

By 1985, Doctor Who has, in keeping with the essentially protean nature of the main character, embodied many genres: historical romps, action adventures, existential ruminations, alien crime whodunnits, twelve-part space operas, and comedic asides. Rarest of the dramatic forms, though, stands the didactic commentary, wherein the Doctor encounters a situation germane to contemporary events. Philip Martin, channeling his inner Roberts (Sloman and Holmes, the keenest practitioners of social commentary on Doctor Who), revives the lost art of pointing fingers at the present in “Vengeance on Varos” (Story Production Code 6V), putting on trial the very idea of television itself as an addiction, a veritable opiate of the masses. But where Robert Holmes made a merry jest of workers overthrowing (and throwing over) the ruling classes in “The Sun Makers,” Martin takes a darker tone from the off.

Jondar (Jason Connery) awaits his fate

After an establishing model shot of a domed city on a barren landscape, director Ron Jones kicks off the ninety minute, two episode story with a close up of a shirtless rebel (Jondar, played by Jason Connery) being tortured via laser blasts, his screams and torment all for the enjoyment of the overworked citizens of Varos, portrayed in miniature by Arak and Etta (Stephen Yardley and Sheila Reid). It’s a discomfiting beginning, with Jondar’s agony mixed at full blast on the audio track; Arak and Etta take it in hungrily as they pick at the meager rations offered for their daily meal, the dissonance between their contentment and the captured rebel’s suffering landing quite effectively. When the bread is lacking, the circuses must be increased.

Arak and Etta (Stephen Yardley and Sheila Reid) enjoying some light torture with their meager meal

Colonized originally as a prison planet hundreds of years in the past, Varosian society holds a strict social demarcation between the descendants of the overseers and those of the prisoners, who toil still in the mines. Varos represents the sole source of Zeiton-7 ore, used to power the engines of “space-time craft,” and thus should be a wealthy planet. An off-world mining conglomerate, represented by the slug-like Sil (Naibil Shaban) seeks to extract as much ore as possible from the planet for the lowest price, and has driven the planet to financial ruin in the process. As part of contract re-negotiations, the Governor (Martin Jarvis) submits his proposal to lower rations in order to hold out for a better price to the viewers, who resoundingly reject the plan, voting in real time on their viewscreens, subjecting him to a near-lethal shock as a consequence. Television ratings have real consequences in this setting—a situation no doubt weighing heavily on the mind of producer John Nathan-Turner at the time, with Doctor Who‘s own fate constantly in the balance.

Nicola Bryant and Colin Baker as Peri and the Sixth Doctor, popping around a corner to say hello

From the moment the TARDIS arrives on Varos, so the Sixth Doctor and Peri can procure Zeiton-7 to reline the “transitional elements” in the power-drained time rotor, we watch Arak and Etta watch our time travellers attempt to escape from the Punishment Dome, where they have fortuitously interrupted Jondar’s execution. Martin continuously puts the viewers (the real ones) a step removed from the action, highlighting the artifice of television and the choices made by the people controlling the screens. The moments of second-order distance, with the Doctor and Peri’s travails frequently observed through screens that are shown on the screen, work tremendously well in highlighting the inherent desensitization caused by watching from afar, made more striking by the CRT televisions of the time, with their slight blurring and glare when themselves filmed.

Watching the Sixth Doctor on television

The cameras constantly follow the Doctor, Peri, Jondar, and his partner Areta (Geraldine Alexander) as they confront the psychological horrors of the Purple Zone, which cause fears to become visually manifest—specifically, a giant fly’s head, which, as an effect, fares slightly better than the mega-rat in “The Talons of Weng-Chiang.” The Chief (Forbes Collins), who is secretly working in league with Sil to undermine the Governor, exalts in the potential for sales of the tapes of the chase and eventual execution to “every civilized world,” a grim commentary of the galactic culture of the time (and, indirectly, of the direction of contemporary international media sales towards gore and violence). Once the Doctor enters the “No Options Kill Center,” the tongue-in-cheek dystopian nomenclature played characteristically straight in this story, the Governor orders the camera operator to zoom in on the Gallifreyan’s death throes, the executive function on Varos at once political and directorial. For yet again, John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward deliver a cliffhanger in which the Doctor, convinced by the telepathic devices in the Dome that he is suffering from heatstroke, seemingly dies…

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Doctor Who Project: Attack of the Cybermen

This looks familiar.

John Nathan-Turner takes no chances with Season Twenty-Two, rolling out those crafty bio-mechanical cyborgs as the marquee attraction to open the Sixth Doctor’s first full season in Paula Moore’s “Attack of the Cybermen” (Story Production Code 6T). Indeed, the entire story, told in the new format of two forty-five minute episodes airing weekly in the once-traditional Saturday evening time slot, bespeaks an attempt, at times seemingly desperate, to appeal to Doctor Who‘s roots, with scarcely five minutes passing between references, both oblique and obvious, to the series’ history. The resulting tale succeeds quite resoundingly at integrating Colin Baker’s recently regenerated Doctor into the fabric of the show, but as with prior attempts by producer Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward to reward long-time viewers with moments of in-group recognition, the excessive reliance on audience awareness of key moments and figures from the Doctor’s past mutes the effect for more casual viewers, who are more likely to be confused than thrilled at the mention of Telos…

A puzzled Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) peers outside the TARDIS

The Doctor’s more immediate history comes into play from the start, with a very familiar face planning a diamond heist in central London, circa 1985: Lytton (Maurice Colbourne). Last seen escaping to 1984 London via time tunnel from the chaos of the exploding Dalek ship in “Resurrection of the Daleks,” with two Dalek-enslaved bobbies in tow, this mercenary from the planet Vita 15 sets up an interplanetary distress beacon that draws the TARDIS to Earth. No expository set-up to his prior role occurs during the first episode, and while Colbourne plays Lytton with an ominous air, the full impact of seeing him only affects those who remember that prior story, which aired almost a year earlier.

Lytton (Maurice Colbourne) scheming again

And where, indeed, does the TARDIS land? Oh, just 76 Totter’s Lane, a nondescript little junkyard owned by one I.M. Foreman. This return to the series’ birth feels so on-the-nose that, frankly, one wonders why it took twenty-two seasons to happen. While it would take a cold heart indeed to not smile at the moment, it’s sadly played here as a one-off, just a visual name-drop in a story filled with knowing nods to the past. In short, there’s reference, but no reverence, as though simply showing the place itself should suffice to convey meaning. The Sixth Doctor and Peri leave as quickly as they arrive, without a word said about the location’s significance.

The Sixth Doctor and Peri (Nicola Bryant) come full circle

The general lack of respect for tradition goes somewhat further in the case of the TARDIS, whose chameleon circuit the Doctor has finally “fixed,” after a fashion. Upon materializing on Totter’s Lane, it takes the form of a painted Victorian cabinet, and later appears as a pipe organ and a wrought iron gate. Even though the chameleon circuit returns to its “broken” state by the end, it’s a discomfiting change from the familiar blue police box, done for no reason other than that it hadn’t been done before. Too, the prior inviolability of the TARDIS has, under Nathan-Turner’s aegis, fallen by the wayside; from being blown up in “Frontios” and invaded by inter-dimensional imps in “The Awakening,” it’s a small step to being easily opened and occupied by Cybermen later in the plot. Entire stories once revolved around Daleks and other ne’er-do-wells laying siege to the previously impenetrable TARDIS doors.

The, erm, TARDIS?

The story’s first episode establishes Lytton’s efforts to lead his heist team into the sewers, with the opening scene showing two workers killed by a mysterious figure whose identity is fairly easily guessed given the cybernetic fuzz of the first-person camera work, should the tale’s title not have sufficed. (And, of course, long-term viewers will remark to their less-than-impressed friends that the Cybermen set up shop in London’s sewers back in the 1970s as well.) The Doctor and Peri track Lytton’s distress signal to a workshop with an entrance to the sewers, and they follow him down below, though not before knocking out Lytton’s two faux-police guardians, who, like the intergalactic rogue himself, are not explained at all for viewers lacking familiarity with “Resurrection of the Daleks.” When the first episode reaches its midpoint, or what would be the normal cliffhanger for a “standard” length episode, the Cybermen finally make their grand entrance, appearing from behind a hidden door in the sewers after Lytton calls to them, suggesting that Moore originally wrote the story for a four-episode format. Old habits die hard…

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Doctor Who Project: The Twin Dilemma

That hardly sounds in character.

Each new Doctor’s inaugural tale must fulfill two objectives, often at odds with each other. In addition to providing a rousing introduction for the new title character, one that establishes a tone, an arc, for the adventures to come, the story must still function as a narrative whole, placing the new Doctor in some engaging situation that puts the fledgling Time Lord’s fresh attitude to the test. Not all of Doctor Who‘s post-regeneration stories work as well as others, and Colin Baker’s proper debut as the Sixth Doctor, in Anthony Steven’s “The Twin Dilemma” (Story Production Code 6S) doesn’t quite deliver the comprehensive punch of, say, Jon Pertwee’s “Spearhead from Space,” which introduced the Third Doctor in as compelling a tale as possible.

Nicola Bryant and Colin Baker as Peri and the Sixth Doctor

In part, this narrative disconnection comes about because producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward seem intent on telling one long story with their run on Doctor Who. Most other Doctors take over at the beginning of a season, with months passing between the prior Doctor’s regeneration and the new Doctor’s first real appearance, separating the audience from their memory of the predecessor. Here, Colin Baker assumes the role in Season Twenty-One’s final story; only six days pass between the Sixth Doctor popping up with a burr under his saddle at the end of “The Caves of Androzani” and the first episode of “The Twin Dilemma.” Having built the Fifth Doctor’s story as a continuous slide into ruin and despair with the first six stories in Season Twenty-One, Nathan-Turner and Saward seem intent on directly addressing the trauma they caused by inducing a regeneration crisis in the Sixth Doctor that leaves him initially with no discernible character at all.

A less-than-impressed Peri taking in the Sixth Doctor's gesticulations

Such a character-driven focus can pay real narrative dividends, and a more daring approach might have seen this as the sole focus of a story, a tight two-episode tale along the lines of Season One’s “The Edge of Destruction,” where the TARDIS crew turns on each other in an existential fugue, revealing far more of their true identities than any encounter with a Dalek ever could. But as with Peter Davison’s initial story, “Castrovalva,” Nathan-Turner’s concept of the “regeneration crisis” in “The Twin Dilemma” starts out strong and then flounders as the “action” part of the plot fails to keep pace. For once again, the notion of magical sums comes into play.

Romulus and Remus (Gavin and Andrew Conrad) -- or maybe the other way around

Two precocious, mathematically gifted twins, with the unfortunate names Romulus and Remus (Gavin and Andrew Conrad), disappear from their home on Earth, kidnapped by Professor Edgeworth (Maurice Denham), who seeks to harness their genius in order to move planets. Adric, it might be noted, similarly found himself trussed up in a skien of webs in the Master’s TARDIS in “Castrovalva,” his own calculation skills used to power the “block transfer equations” that create the mysterious town of the same name out of sheer nothingness. Much of beginning of “The Twin Dilemma” establishes the twins and the efforts of the Earth authorities to rescue them, padding out the story by introducing characters never seen again, save Lieutenant Hugo Lang (Kevin McNally), whose squadron of space fighters explodes while chasing Edgeworth’s space freighter to the asteroid Titan 3.

Maurice Denham as Professor Edgeworth (for now)

The Sixth Doctor, inevitably, turns his sights on supposedly abandoned Titan 3 as well, seeking a hermitage in which to recover his senses; the Fifth Doctor obviously never replaced the TARDIS “Zero Room” he retreated to (and then ejected) during his own regeneration crisis. His behavior immediately after his regeneration veers wildly—madly, even—at turns irascible, cowardly, brash, and, in a frankly shocking twist for the character, violent. Throughout “The Twin Dilemma,” the Sixth Doctor, and indeed Nathan-Turner behind him, seems to be daring the audience to dislike the Doctor. By the time he accuses Peri of being an alien spy and pushes her to the ground, throttling her, one might well say he succeeds…

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