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…