Doctor Who Project: Colin Baker Retrospective

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.

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

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.

All Change in the TARDIS

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.

The return of the Cybermen

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.

The gang's all here

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…

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Doctor Who Project: The Ultimate Foe

Oh, no! Now I really am finished.

It all comes down to this. After twelve episodes, spanning nearly three full months, “The Trial of a Time Lord” finally concludes with “The Ultimate Foe” (Story Production Code 7C Part 2), written by Robert Holmes (episode thirteen) and Pip and Jane Baker (episode fourteen). The prior three sub-stories establishing why the Sixth Doctor is on trial—Holmes’ “The Mysterious Planet,” Philip Martin’s “Mindwarp,” and the Bakers’ “Terror of the Vervoids“—tax the audience’s patience, teasing at a conspiracy regarding the Matrix, that impregnable repository of all Time Lord knowledge, while hiding any real evidence to support the claim, like some poorly scripted mystery novel written by many hands. Taken on their own, the prior installments of “The Trial of a Time Lord” work well enough as Doctor Who stories, but viewers inevitably feel shortchanged by their incomplete nature. They are missing something vital, a feeling of helplessness mirrored by the Doctor’s own predicament as “The Ultimate Foe” begins, with the Inquisitor (Lynda Bellingham) about to pass judgement on our hero, much to the delight of the prosecuting Valeyard (Michael Jayston).

The Sixth Doctor, the Inquisitor, and the Valeyard confront each other in the courtroom

With the Keeper of the Matrix (James Bree) testifying that the Matrix can only be accessed with the Key of Rassilon, which he wears on his person at all times, eye witnesses are the only proof the Inquisitor will entertain regarding evidence tampering. At a trial being held “out of time,” on a space station in the middle of nowhere, how could the Doctor possibly muster such assistance? No minor shock, then, when Sabalom Glitz (Tony Selby), last seen in “The Mysterious Planet,” and new companion Mel (Bonnie Langford) suddenly appear in the courtroom, an answer to the Doctor’s greatest need. Whence this miraculous gift? Further shock still, with the Doctor’s benefactor revealed as his long-time adversary: The Master (Anthony Ainley).

The Master (Anthony Ainley) glowers from on high

Scarcely four minutes pass in the first episode of “The Ultimate Foe” before the Master’s intervention, a scene with greater impact than any in the three hundred fifty odd minutes of the dozen prior episodes. For those viewers who slog through the story to this point, the Master’s unforeshadowed appearance, commandeering the screen in the trial room, proves ample payoff, a moment of glee at the unexpected twist, to say nothing of the welcome return of a familiar fiend. Yet one wonders why producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward withhold this revelation for so long, when even a brief aside or two inserted into the sub-stories, hinting at his involvement, might amplify the anticipation. And on reflection, the Master appearing from on high—from inside the Matrix, as it transpires, much to the Keeper’s chagrin—feels like an unearned deus ex machina, dropped in to solve an insuperable plot conundrum caused by multiple writers contributing to the same story.

Mel (Bonnie Langford) and Sabalom Glitz (Tony Selby) make a surprise appearance

Aided by Glitz’s testimony, which fills in the “censored” gaps about the Matrix being surreptitiously accessed from “The Mysterious Planet,” the Doctor discovers that the Time Lords moved Earth “billions of miles across space,” resulting in its devastation, to hide the knowledge that had been purloined from the Matrix by the Andromedans. This implication of the High Council in a conspiracy and cover-up, resulting in mass death and the destruction of Earth’s “ancient culture,” finally reveals what the entirety of “The Trial of a Time Lord” has been about, with the Doctor set up as a scapegoat to hide the Gallifreyan leadership’s complicity in genocide. Well, almost what it’s all about.

The Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) takes a defiant stance

The real revelation, the whole point of this fourteen episode-long, season-spanning story, comes as an adjunct to the High Council’s perfidy. Almost in passing, the Master reveals the Valeyard’s role in the trial:

The Master: They made a deal with the Valeyard, or as I’ve always known him, the Doctor, to adjust the evidence, in return for which he was promised the remainder of the Doctor’s regenerations.

The Doctor’s ultimate foe, then, is the Doctor himself…

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Doctor Who Project: Terror of the Vervoids

Is it going to be the Doctor’s defence that he improves?

Doctor Who seldom actually toys with temporality itself, treating time, broadly, as a setting rather than a concept or plot device to be explored. But by taking the Sixth Doctor “out of time” in order to conduct “The Trial of a Time Lord”—the fourteen episode story that makes up the entirety of Season Twenty-three—producer John Nathan-Turner creates an interesting, if ultimately risky, pivot for the series. Having been confronted with his supposed misdeeds in “The Mysterious Planet” and “Mindwarp,” the first two four-episode sub-stories in “The Trial of a Time Lord,” the Doctor draws, for his defense, on an event from his future instead of his past, in the form of Pip and Jane Baker’s “Terror of the Vervoids” (Story Production Code 7C Part 1), episodes nine through twelve of the season-long story.

Watching the Time Lords watch the Sixth Doctor

This decision to present a story that happens in the Doctor’s own future serves two functions. Primarily, given the trial framing device that drives “The Trial of a Time Lord,” there’s no easy way, during a secret Gallifreyan trial conducted outside of time, to introduce a brand new companion to take Nicola Bryant’s place, with Peri having (seemingly) perished at the end of “Mindwarp“—the idea of a companion-less Doctor apparently beyond countenance for even a single episode. Thus, our first encounter with the future Sixth Doctor is of a winded Time Lord huffing and puffing on an exercise bike as Mel (Bonnie Langford) encourages him, part of an ongoing exercise regime. The easy banter and non-verbal interplay between Langford and Colin Baker suggests to viewers that Mel and the Doctor have had an extended series of adventures already.

Colin Baker and Bonnie Langford as the Sixth Doctor and Mel

More importantly for the overall story of “The Trial of a Time Lord,” this future-looking helps shatter the long-standing conceit of “Gallifreyan Standard Time,” that sense that although Time Lords can flit between past and future at will, there’s a consistent “present” time in which Time Lord history takes place, a continuum off limits to meddling via time travel. Up to now, the Doctor’s past has been linear and inviolable—the several meetings of the Doctor’s various regenerations notwithstanding. Otherwise, why not just pop back, for instance, and stop the death of the Lord President in “The Deadly Assassin,” once the Doctor uncovers the true murderer? Or whisk Adric off the doomed cargo ship before it plunges into Earth? Narratively speaking, the ability to simply undo anything that happens drains all the meaning from the stories on offer, which is why prior producers and writers have taken pains to prevent time travellers from revisiting their own timelines (qv. the Blinovich Limitation Effect). It’s a dangerous genie to let out of the bottle, prone to cheapening the Doctor’s efforts and sacrifices. But by this point, Doctor Who already having been placed on hiatus by the BBC once, Nathan-Turner seems willing to try just about anything.

Colin Baker as a bemused Sixth Doctor

So, suddenly, the Sixth Doctor finds himself plucked out of the time stream, but he somehow also continues on as though the trial has not yet taken place—otherwise, the events of “Terror of the Vervoids” could never have occurred, had he sequentially gone directly from the end of “Mindwarp” to the trial itself. Because they are recorded in the Matrix, the repository of all Gallifreyan knowledge and experience, pulled straight from the minds of Time Lords themselves, those events, and all the other unseen exploits of the Sixth Doctor and Mel, did/do/will happen; otherwise, they would not be there for the Doctor and the Valeyard (Michael Jayston) to call upon as evidence. He’s there and not there, Schrödinger’s Sixth Doctor.

When, exactly, does “The Trial of a Time Lord” take place? Simply put, out of time; that’s Nathan-Turner’s story, and he’s sticking to it. (Of note, long-serving Eric Saward departs as script editor after episode eight, resuming the duties for episode thirteen only—which was produced before “Terror of the Vervoids”—due to issues with the scripting of the final two episodes of the season, per Paul Kirkley’s irreverent history of Doctor Who, Space Helmet for a Cow. It’s all very confusing, much like “The Trial of a Time Lord” itself.)

Michael Jayston as the Valeyard

By removing the Doctor from his own timeline, heretofore unthinkable temporal shenanigans become possible, and while they do not play much of a role in “Terror of the Vervoids”—which, more than the prior two sub-stories, finally begins to add substance to the trial framing device—the mere fact of the Doctor’s future being already written enables the main pay-off of “The Trial of a Time Lord” in the final two episodes. We still have Pip and Jane Baker’s four episodes to get through first, though.

Honor Blackman as Professor Lasky, reading a bit of Agatha Christie

What does happen in “Terror of the Vervoids,” then? Oh, just Murder on the Orient Express, in space, with violent plant creatures…

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Doctor Who Project: Mindwarp

I endeavour to maintain a certain continuity.

Continuity stands as the primary problem with Doctor Who by its twenty-third season. Long-time producer John Nathan-Turner and equally long-serving script editor Eric Saward take pains to ensure that the Doctor’s weekly adventures not only reflect an awareness of the Time Lord’s nearly 150 prior stories but also refer to them whenever possible, rewarding those devoted viewers who will surely complain should a relevant canonical aside be skipped—or worse, be misconstrued. But those fans with knowledge of the Doctor’s entire history make up a steadily dwindling percentage of the possible audience, and more casual viewers, those vital to the series’ continued success, often feel like they’re entering a conversation they don’t fully comprehend when a call-back to a prior story occurs, especially when it’s not entirely germane to the events on offer.

Lynda Bellingham as the Inquisitor

Sometimes, however, there’s not enough continuity. The decision to present Season Twenty-three as a single fourteen episode story, “The Trial of a Time Lord,” comprised of four tightly interwoven sub-stories, to which Philip Martin’s “Mindwarp” (Story Production Code 7B) contributes episodes five through eight, highlights this dilemma. Viewers who do not watch from the beginning of the story arc need on-ramps to clarify what they might have missed; in theory, the fact that the sub-stories mostly stand on their own should limit what might be missed. Yet Martin’s entry picks up from the events of the first four episodes, “The Mysterious Planet,” with the scantest of recaps, scarcely addressing the most significant plot point introduced by writer Robert Holmes, that of a possible conspiracy on Gallifrey involving the Matrix. “Mindwarp” just assumes that viewers remember that subterfuge, or indeed even why the Doctor is in the dock at all, fighting for his life against the Valeyard (Michael Jayston), jumping headlong instead into the prosecutor’s next piece of evidence in the trial without dwelling on or developing the overall framing device tying the fourteen episodes together.

Michael Jayston as the Valeyard

Doctor Who, it must be noted, has a history of long stories that can confuse viewers jumping in mid-stream—six episodes stories being fairly frequent through to the first half of Tom Baker’s run and the epic “The Daleks’ Master Plan” clocking in at a whopping twelve (or thirteen) episodes—none of which take pains to catch tardy audience members up to speed beyond the traditional cliffhanger reprises. Too, addressing “The Trial of a Time Lord” as its constituent parts is a more recent phenomenon, not in keeping with the experience of the audience at the time, but the lack of an extended recap of the end of “The Mysterious Planet” to start episode five, as would happen in any other story between parts, bespeaks the production team themselves treating the segments as separate narrative entities at the time. For a series attempting to stay alive, then, the lack of emphasis on engaging more casual viewers, perhaps even tuning in just because they saw Brian Blessed’s name in that week’s Radio Times listing for Doctor Who, suggests an overall blindness to the needs of less-than-rabid fans—a failing that has contributed mightily to the series being in its currently precarious state.

Brian Blessed as King Yrcanos

“Mindwarp” proper, the “evidence” being shown to the Inquisitor (Lynda Bellingham) and the panel of Time Lords overseeing the Doctor’s trial for incessant interference with other culture and peoples, follows the Doctor and Peri as they land on the pink-tinted planet Thoros-Beta, the source of high-tech weaponry found on a backwater planet. The Doctor seeks to investigate this meddling in the development of a less advanced civilization—the same crime, the Valeyard eagerly notes, of which he himself is accused. Martin immediately leans into the conceit of the story being presented in a courtroom as evidence, with the Inquisitor wondering just why an introductory scene of our time travellers bantering about the TARDIS materializing in water is vital to the trial, leading to events skipping forward, something many a viewer, anxious to get to the action, has doubtless wanted as well.

The Sixth Doctor and Peri on the pink-hued shores of Thoros-Beta

The Doctor, in that “irrelevant” prologue scene, indicates that they have come to Thoros-Beta because of information received from a “Warlord of Thordon” as he was dying, pointing directly to an off-screen adventure to which the audience is not privy, in effect creating continuity unknown to all viewers, whether they are brand new or have hidden behind the couch since 1963. It’s a contextualized continuity reference, though, lacking the dissonant effect canonical name drops often engender. But the same cannot be said for the main revelation of the first episode, as the news that Thoros-Beta is also home to an oleaginous former foe of the Doctor lands with a thud…

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Doctor Who Project: The Mysterious Planet

I was beginning to fear you had lost yourself.

Season Twenty-three almost wasn’t to be. In February, 1985, midway through the airing of Season Twenty-two, news broke that the BBC had pulled the plug on the forthcoming season, then already in preparation, owing as much to budget woes as to a general sense of dissatisfaction with the show’s direction and popular reception. Not until December of the same year did Doctor Who get a new lease on life, with the BBC green-lighting a truncated Season Twenty-three consisting of fourteen twenty-five minute episodes stitched together under a single framing narrative, “The Trial of a Time Lord,” putting the Sixth Doctor (and the show itself) in the dock for crimes real and imagined.

Colin Baker is the Sixth Doctor

The brainchild of longtime script editor Eric Saward, this series of four linked stories—”The Mysterious Planet,” “Mindwarp,” “Terror of the Vervoids,” and “The Ultimate Foe”—presents heretofore unseen events in the Doctor’s past and future as evidence in his trial, with far heavier narrative connections between the parts, written by different authors, than seen in the last thematically linked season, Season Sixteen’s Key to Time arc. The stakes could not be higher, either for the Doctor or for Doctor Who, with nearly eighteen months elapsing since the last time the Doctor appeared on televisions in the UK, in “Revelation of the Daleks” in late March, 1985. Significantly, no repeats of earlier episodes had occurred since then either, the last rerun being “The Five Doctors” in August 1984, this absence itself telling of the series’ regard (or lack thereof) at Television Centre.

The TARDIS, trapped in a blue light

Mindful of the need to get it right, producer John Nathan-Turner and Saward turn to veteran hand Robert Holmes for the first four episodes, “The Mysterious Planet” (Series Production Code 7A), returning the Sixth Doctor to the air on September 6, 1986, with a jaunty, revised opening theme. (Of note, the story is presented week-to-week under the rubric “The Trial of a Time Lord,” but most critical discourse has, broadly, settled on addressing the sub-stories by their working titles, corresponding to how the components were commissioned.) After an elaborate effects shot showing the TARDIS being drawn into a space station, Holmes wastes no time establishing the trial framing device, with the Doctor immediately confronting the Valeyard (Michael Jayston), prosecuting the charges against him for the benefit of a panel of Time Lords, presided over by the Inquisitor (Lynda Bellingham).

The Inquisitor (Lynda Bellingham) and the Valeyard (Michael Jayston)

The Doctor’s crimes? “Conduct unbecoming a Time Lord” and “transgressing the First Law,” that broad Gallifreyan prohibition against “meddling” in the affairs of other peoples. For those paying attention at home, Holmes takes care to note that the Doctor has been on trial for the same charges before—resolved in the conclusion of “The War Games” which saw the Second Doctor sentenced to exile on Earth after a forced regeneration—and also that the Doctor has been stripped of his title as Lord President, last referenced in “The Five Doctors” and originally established in “The Invasion of Time” some eight years prior. Nathan-Turner and Saward here unravel awkward, narrative-constraining continuity while still referencing it, not unlike having K-9 get wet and short out whenever his ray gun snout would resolve a plot too quickly.

The Inquisition views Peri and the Sixth Doctor

The framing narrative, with a jury of Time Lords watching the Doctor’s adventures on screen just like the audience at home, continues the metatextual self-referential tendency of Season Twenty-two; watching the watchers makes up much of the narrative heft of “Vengeance on Varos” and, to a lesser extent, “Revelation of the Daleks,” with “The Mysterious Planet” pausing the action frequently for the Doctor, the Inquisitor, and the Valeyard to comment incredulously on what has just been seen. The Valeyard explains the footage as deriving from the Matrix, that storehouse of all Time Lord knowledge, fed by the Doctor’s own experiences; a surreptitious surveillance device installed in every TARDIS, including the old Mark 40s, apparently, psychically records other moments outside those witnessed by Time Lords—a rather huge alteration to the Doctor Who canon, with potential ramifications for all future stories and also calling into question many outcomes of past stories, but a change necessary for the frame device to function.

And where do the Doctor’s “criminal” activities take place for this initial segment of his trial? Oh, just a barren little planet called Ravelox, in the Stellian Galaxy, devastated by a fireball that Gallifreyan records contend wiped out all life. Ravelox also happens to be known by a different name as well: Earth…

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Doctor Who Project: Revelation of the Daleks

Suddenly everyone sees and knows too much!

When in doubt, roll the Daleks out. As Season Twenty-Two of Doctor Who comes to a close, the fate of the series rests in the balance. Producer John Nathan-Turner pulls out all the stops to bring Colin Baker’s debut season to a strong finish by headlining the scourge of Skaros in script editor Eric Saward’s “Revelation of the Daleks” (Story Production Code 6Z). The problem remains, alas, that the Daleks, having been on the losing side of a dozen confrontations with the Doctor over the years, each more feeble than the last, have worn out their welcome; their staccato cries of “Exterminate!” and single-minded devotion to evil lack the ability to captivate the imagination in 1985 they possessed in 1963.

Davros (Terry Molloy), or at least his head

By the Third Doctor’s era, some twelve years prior, the Daleks already are little more than hapless tin cans, their worn-down props in desperate need of refurbishment. Indeed, Davros himself, creator of the Daleks (alongside Terry Nation, to be sure), becomes a mere cipher of the cunning, calculating, amoral foe first seen in the Fourth Doctor’s run, and by the time the Fifth Doctor confronts him in “Resurrection of the Daleks,” Davros exists on a one-dimensional plane, all vitriol and no guile. There’s nothing new under the Skarosian sun…

A Dalek resplendent in white shell with gold roundels

But somehow, Saward, Nathan-Turner, and director Graeme Harper—helming his second “finale” story after a strong showing with Season Twenty-One’s “The Caves of Androzani“—manage the unthinkable: they make Davros and the Daleks interesting again. True to the story’s title, there’s no hiding them, and scarcely eight minutes pass before the first Dalek, in resplendent white with gold roundels and trim, rolls onto the screen, followed by Davros (Terry Molloy)—or at least his head—spinning around madly, rejoicing that the Doctor has fallen into his trap. Wisely, Saward and company realize that there’s little point in sequestering the perfidious pepperpots until that traditional first episode cliffhanger, particularly given that “Revelation of the Daleks” is the last of the two part, ninety minute stories experimented with this season. No, these Daleks are “revealed” right away, and the audience gains awareness beyond the Doctor’s own, emphasizing that they are watching something happen to him rather than experiencing events alongside him. With few exceptions, it’s only the Doctor who is unaware that Daleks are puttering about, and their matter-of-fact presence, patrolling like robotic rent-a-cops amidst humans, adds greatly to their impact.

The DJ's viewscreen

The emphasis on seeing the Doctor recurs throughout “Revelation of the Daleks,” which follows “Vengeance on Varos” in casting the audience very explicitly at the center of a panopticon; viewers watch others watch the Sixth Doctor and Peri on screens, much as the audience itself is doing at home, and characters frequently speak upwards towards cameras mounted high on walls in the halls of Tranquil Repose, a cryo-mortuary on Necros, devoted to housing victims of disease in cryogenic suspension until cures can be found for their maladies (a concept very much in vogue in the 1980s). The TARDIS arrives on the snowy plains of this necropolis planet so that our time travellers can attend the “funeral” of Professor Arthur Stengos, a renowned agronomist, and their travel by foot to the mortuary is monitored on a screen by Davros—and also, in an exceedingly jarring subversion of viewer expectations, by a nameless DJ (Alexei Sayle), played here as an amalgamation of Wolfman Jack and any number of stereotyped American personalities, who spins tunes from Earth’s past for the frozen inhabitants of the cryo-catacombs.

Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant as the Sixth Doctor and Peri, wearing traditional blue mourning garb

The viewer really doesn’t know what to expect, a rare experience on Doctor Who, made more intriguing by rather camp segments involving the vainglorious mortician Jobel (the incomparable Clive Swift, in a role inspired by embalmer Mr. Joyboy from Waugh’s The Loved One) and his blue uniformed cadre of assistants; a highly formalized and heavily stylized agri-factory owner, Kara (Eleanor Bron) in thrall to Davros, who stands in the way of her control of the food supply for the galaxy; plus an attack on the complex by corpse snatchers seeking the very body of Arthur Stengos that the Doctor has arrived to mourn. Combined with tense, almost discordant music courtesy of Roger Limb and exceptional direction by Harper, who employs camera angles shifting from point-of-view to (barely) steady-cam close-ups of action sequences and high, long shots showing off the set work and well chosen location scenes, the overall effect is one of welcome disorientation. This is not, Nathan-Turner seems to shout, your parents’ Doctor Who

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