The Collection - Season 19 Blu Ray

A crowded TARDIS, a new, less commanding Doctor and a return to the more philosophical, ponderous tales of the 1960s. Sound familiar? Season 19 got there first. Big historical event such as say, Rosa Parkes making her stand or the Great Fire of London? Check. Stories as close to purely historical as one can get, based on buried family secrets? Check. A second outing for a Doctor which takes in an impressive spaceship in its first few minutes and includes a bit of magical space walking? Check. An old enemy reinvigorated for a new era? Check. A disappointing finale? Check. There are huge similarities between both series, not just those of superficiality, and it’s been nice to revisit Peter Davison’s first episodes in the wake of Jodie’s, making for neat references and comparisons. 

Compared to Jodie Whittaker’s fledgling series, Season 19 is perhaps rather better, despite three script editors playing musical chairs, out of order filming and far less money thrown at it. It is certainly more innovative, charming and at times, poetic. Like Whittaker’s season though, its chief strength is in its variety of scope, from locations (jungle planets, fairy tale cities, spaceships, 1920s country mansions, London 1666, modern-day Heathrow and even finally prehistoric Earth) to narrative forms (high-concept philosophy, action-adventure, religious metaphor, historical yarn and murder mystery). Perhaps Season 19 feels so fresh and invigorating precisely because it never stands still. Whereas Chris Chibnall tends towards traditional story structures, Season 19 is never quite sure what it wants to be or how precisely it rolls, making for a more unpredictable and surprising set of adventures.

Castrovalva is an admittedly rather unfriendly way to open a season but in its own way is quite brilliant. Whereas The Woman Who Fell to Earth is perhaps the most user-friendly jumping on point for any newcomer to the TARDIS, even eschewing a title sequence in fear it might put off the lay public, Castrovalva essentially starts mid-adventure, the Doctor continuing to lock horns with a similarly newly regenerated Master from previous tale Logopolis. We aren’t introduced to the companions at all, simply asked to go along with their plight and accept their very strange dialogue. Because quite remarkably, everybody in the story – and I mean everybody, companions too – talks as if exploring endless examples of recursion. “If we had an index file, we could look it up in the index file,” says Tegan, forgetting her auntie died a few hours ago, large portions of the universe have been destroyed and a stranger she flew off with in his spaceship has just changed his face. “I had installed a trap behind that trap that would have been a joy to spring,” says the Master, seemingly accepting that most of his schemes end up thoroughly quashed. “Was there ever a man with such capacity to lose both his quarry and himself?” asks Mergrave, the first person we meet in Castrovalva. Even the first exchange between the Portreeve and the Doctor is served with lashings of recursion:

DOCTOR: Will I find the Doctor here?

PORTREEVE: Oh, yes, Doctor, very soon.

Even the Doctor notes Mergrave’s later statement that, “Because, sir, I maintain I am and I am a man of my word” as a “perfect example of recursion.” Finally, the solution to Castrovalva itself relies upon a recursive paradox: “The books are old but they chronicle the rise of Castrovalva up to the present day.” It is some bravery, nay gall, on the part of the crazed mind of Christopher Hamilton Bidmead that he decides to open Peter Davison’s first series by exploring a philosophical theory for a couple of hours, attendant jeopardy located largely at cliff-hangers. The two settings, the corridors of the TARDIS and the beautifully designed city itself, lend themselves to architectural recursion too and weaving Tom Baker’s scarf through the TARDIS to find one’s way home lends a pleasingly mythic touch to the Fifth Doctor’s first outing. Castrovalva is a bold decision and I can’t imagine this sort of tale happening at any other point in the entire history of the show. We could have been given a fresh new take on Doctor Who here – the golden opportunity was there - but instead we were gifted one of the most intelligent, gentle and thematically sublime scripts the show would ever have. In his insanity and possibly losing millions of viewers into the bargain (for Davison, Castrovalva had better average ratings than any of his later stories) Bidmead created something which might distance those tuning in to watch sci-fi high-jinks, but in its own way something remarkably beautiful and blissfully poetic.

Four to Doomsday follows and continues the minor peril: high concept ratio established by Castrovalva. The first two episodes sail by, new ideas and mysteries making for a curious piece, as the viewers attempt to jigsaw together precisely what is going on, excitingly at the same pace as the Doctor. Part One’s cliff-hanger in which the attractive new guest stars reveal themselves as the frogs we met mere moments ago is perhaps the high point of Four to Doomsday, a cliff-hanger reliant on turning the narrative on its head, as opposed to putting the regulars in obligatory danger. The second one pulls a similar stunt and it’s amazing how Part Three’s execution-style ending seems so drab by comparison. In fact, the whole of Part Three sags hugely before Part Four picks itself back up for a climactic spacewalk sequence. It’s a shame the script couldn’t have been tightened to include Stratford Johns’s delightful Monarch in this sequence. As it stands, his defeat (let’s throw some poison at him) feels like an afterthought and deflates the ending somewhat. A rough diamond then is Four to Doomsday in the end but sports more beautiful set design, terrific lighting and effects, some hard-hitting juxtapositions and an imaginative, for the most part lively script.

Kinda is one of 80s Doctor Who’s crown jewels and much has been written by better Who scholars than me about its uniqueness. To get the tragic out of the way with first: the jungle set is terrible: plastic trees, studio floors and artificial turf make for an unconvincing alien environment particularly after two such lavish stories. The lighting is wretched. No gobos at all seem to have been used to give even a hint that light is passing through high leaves, let alone the passing of the sun during the day. Finally, that snake… It’s bloody awful, isn’t it. (The fabulous CG version MUST be a default for any first-time viewer!) But it’s a testament to the incredible talent of writer Christopher Bailey and the tour de force performances of Peter Davison, Simon Rouse, Nerys Hughes, Jeffrey Stewart, Janet Fielding and Mary Morris that the show remains an out and out triumph. 

The script is so strange, so very odd. Composer Peter Howell adds to the weirdness, synthy howls and melodies combining to give Deva Loka an aural landscape all of its own. The scenes inside Tegan’s dark place are frightening and sinister. The decline into madness on the parts of Hindle and Sanders is truly unsettling to watch. And those cliff-hangers! It must be said Season 19 has some of the very best cliff-hangers in all Doctor Who, matched only by perhaps Philip Hinchliffe’s second and third years. There are moments in Kinda when scripting, performance, music and atmosphere come together to make the hairs on the back of one’s neck stand on end: Hindle taking a seat as the two Kinda prisoners kneel either side of him, their soles now trapped in mirrors; the moment Sanders first opens the Box of Janna and his face lights up with orange radiance; the dream sequence with the clocks at the end of the world; the old couple playing chess; Todd’s gut-curdling scream as the Doctor suddenly opens the lid. Kinda is its own beast, rare and powerful and to be found absolutely nowhere in any Doctor Who before or since.

The Visitation was at the time of transmission lauded as a return to the Doctor Who of old. After three avant-garde excursions into philosophical/pseudo-religious realms told in unusual forms, it’s easy to see why. The Visitation has all the hallmarks of a traditional classic Who story: atmosphere, a rich historical setting, the plague, the Great Fire, a Great Monster in the Terileptils and their lovely-looking android, a terrific opening sequence and some old-school theatrical dialogue. This should work. The only problem is, nowadays The Visitation seems a little feeble. The pace is, even compared to other episodes of Season 19 and certainly to the same writer’s Earthshock, pedestrian. The plot is simplistic, the cliff-hangers dreary and the big moments lost. How much better and more memorable would the opening sequence have been if it were Death complete with scythe that burst through those doors and not a bejewelled robot? How much stronger would the threat of those rats have been if we’d met victims of the plague as opposed to dull, masked villagers? All the elements are there for the story to be a rich, atmospheric period piece and we get a sense of that in those last scenes in London, the use of glass shots and filmed sets suddenly lending the period a vivid tangibility. Unfortunately, Eric Saward is a few drafts away from the sort of old-fashioned classic we really want The Visitation to be. When we should be watching the plague tear through the villagers, we’re watching Nyssa happily build a small machine in the TARDIS. When we should be watching the Terileptils stalking the streets of London in their hooded cowls, we’re busy enjoying Adric attempting to pilot the TARDIS or the Doctor looking at some maps on the scanner. There’s no urgency to The Visitation. It’s limp and flagging, especially after such an astonishingly unusual start to a season. Perhaps in another series, Season 20 for instance, it would be a highlight, but here, it fails to shine amongst a string of extremely good, hugely ambitious opposition. I must make special mention of Michael Robbins's Richard Mace: the fruitiest guest star of the season and a joy to be around. 

A friend challenged me to watch Black Orchid with him once. I thought it was dreadful. He thought it was 10/10 magnificent. Of course, the truth is somewhere in between. It feels extremely lazy and something of a modern trend to say that a story “Isn’t Doctor Who” but I see it more and more online, especially in the wake of the loathsome #Not My Doctor brigade. The DWM Time Team condemned The Two Doctors as “Not Doctor Who.” I just don’t understand that attitude. It’s best to review what is there than to pretend it doesn’t exist; rebut rather than remove. Of course, Black Orchid is a very, very odd example of Doctor Who, but isn’t all Season 19? It seems to want to be a murder mystery but the killer is revealed early on: it’s the chap in the shit clothes. It reaches for the tropes of Agatha Christie: the Amazon and Latoni representing the mysterious “other” and the Cranleighs having an historical family secret. But there’s not enough time in this two-parter to give the viewer clues or invite them to play detective. As it goes, Black Orchid is not very good at being a period sleuth drama. Nor is it very good at being Doctor Who, absent are the exciting tropes of yore replaced by a pleasant cricket game, a fancy-dress party and a cold outdoor collation. It has a title sequence, the TARDIS lands and an adventure of sorts ensues, so it is quite provably Doctor Who, but it certainly feels like it perhaps doesn’t want to be at times. 

The harlequin killer does however pose a frightening image of villainy and its arrival at the party is the story’s most chilling moment. The Nyssa-Ann plot feels like an effort to give Sarah Sutton something to do after confining her to the TARDIS occasionally (and she does come into her own here, Sutton’s performance as Ann subtly different) but only really becomes important at the story’s climax which admittedly it navigates rather well. The fire spreading through the house feels urgent and unusually domestic in its terror. What makes Black Orchid feel unfocussed and almost “tossed off” is the unforgivable trip to the TARDIS with the peelers in tow. Honestly, what was Terence Dudley thinking when he decided, “I know. I’ll just get the Doctor to show everyone the TARDIS and they’ll all believe him?” The solutions to the mysteries are not to be found in the setting or the characters. It’s, simply put, lazy writing and makes for the feeling that despite the strong period detail, the gorgeous costume and set design and the very strong performances, Black Orchid is as disposable as its writer thinks it is.

Earthshock’s impact on Doctor Who was aptly seismic. After its incredible success, much of what came after was informed by it and so it’s perhaps more difficult from a 21^st Century viewpoint to appreciate how different the story was at the time. No other tale before it had attempted such a brazenly action-packed, movie-on-a-TV-budget endeavour before. The scenes are markedly shorter, the narrative more thrilling and breathless, and for once its director knows it. Everything about Earthshock combines to make for something very special indeed. 

What’s most notable of all though is not the rightly-lauded reveal of the Cybermen, nor the shock death of Adric. No, it’s the way in which Eric Saward allows us some time with Adric in the first half hour, and in a stroke of genius, paints him as a bit of a dick. He’s annoyingly smug, argumentative and patronising. The thrill of his death later is that we feel instantly guilty about hating him earlier. It’s a tremendously clever move on the part of Eric Saward and one never to be repeated. Enough has been said about Earthshock’s multiple successes: the surprises, the pace of its direction and performances, the lighting, the sets complete with running water, the running silhouettes and Malcolm Clarke’s moody music. What is notable now, with over thirty years’ hindsight, is Eric Saward’s script: it looks fairly straightforward but is actually robust and complex, the opening episode in the caves foreshadowing the climax in its dinosaur bones and offering an ultimate solution in plain sight as early as the fifteen-minute mark. Classy.

Poor, much-maligned Time-Flight. What a shame it follows a series of such excellence. But is it really as bad as its detractors would have us believe? It does all the things we now expect of a season finale. It completes Tegan’s story, taking her back home to Heathrow, a destination to which we’ve been headed all season (this year’s arc if you will). It includes the Big Bad Master from the season opener in a surprise reveal at the mid-way point. It also includes some call-backs to earlier adventures: the Terileptils make a re-appearance, the recent Melkur says hello and finally Adric’s ghost materialises. Time-Flight’s problem though is that it doesn’t make any of these elements its focus. 

The real story here should be the “will she/won’t she” decision of Tegan’s possible departure. Adric should appear as very final ghost, rather than the first in a series of convenient obstacles, to give his death some meaning and be pivotal to the characters’ emotional climax. When we should be experiencing the fall-out of Earthshock’s devastating ending, seeing its effects on a fellow time traveller who’s been granted a tantalising glimpse of home, we’re watching the Doctor and the Master swap TARDIS parts on a set which definitely isn’t outdoors. The script spends so much time wittering on about mechanics, psycho-tronics and electronics whilst Roger Limb jabs at his synthesiser incessantly over the top of all the bafflegab, that this final adventure of Season 19 becomes very quickly wearying. It’s a shame because all the ingredients for a dramatic, hard-hitting finale are present and correct. 

Like Jodie Whittaker’s series, it’s easy to see how the crowded TARDIS doesn’t always work, companions confined to lesser duties for stories at a time and with little room to show them truly develop. Just as nobody in the Whittaker season asks the obvious questions of the Doctor, so to here nobody seems to want to deal with the obvious consequence of their adventures. Nyssa’s status as an orphan does nothing to propel her decision making. Tegan is a one-trick “Take me home” mouthpiece who confusingly decides she no longer wants to go home off-screen. Adric is probably the best served companion and he isn’t exactly somebody we enjoy being with. (Seriously, who else would deliver the sentence “Why is he never around when you want him?” like Matthew Waterhouse?) Chris Chibnall’s Yaz is JNT’s Nyssa and hopefully like Nyssa, Yaz will enjoy more development the following season. Both TARDIS teams are pleasant enough but on occasion don’t really feel like they are part of an ongoing story.

Across the season, leading man Peter Davison undergoes some transitional acting decisions but always impressed. In the interview with Matthew Sweet on the Special Features disc, he bemoans the fact that he didn’t put his stamp on the part early on, preferring to find his way in the playing of it. Watched in the order the stories were produced rather than broadcast, there’s a clearer through-line of development in Davison’s performance. In Four to Doomsday and parts of The Visitation, he’s more measured and definitely posher. “And I’ll keep it,” he tells Tegan outside the TARDIS of his promise to get her home, with all the plummy rah-rah of an Eton school boy. In Four to Doomsday, he is given some unfortunate gags which make his Doctor seem like a bit of a patronising, witless bore: he makes a crap joke about the names of the people he meets at almost every turn, which now seems the very antithesis of the behaviour of a modern Doctor.

LIN FUTU: Greetings. I am Lin Futu.
THE DOCTOR: Well, I’d never have guessed it. You look in the best of health to me.

It’s a joke that doesn’t even make sense and paints a picture of a Doctor who sits condescendingly above those he meets. Fortunately, this habit dies a quick death and is peculiar only to this story. 

Davison throughout the whole season though, like Jodie Whittaker, never delivers a line without true commitment, although some decisions on the parts of both actors are questionable. It is, perhaps ironically, only by Time-Flight that he really has a handle on that breathless, frantic delivery we now associate with his Doctor. He flies around the TARDIS for the first time like a New Series Doctor, breaking new ground for a show contented to use older actors in the role for its opening 18 years. Here is the first Doctor with the dynamism of youth as his ace card. There is only one moment in the entire season when I feel I can see Davison himself. He’s lying, eyes closed, on the TARDIS floor in Part Four of Time-Flight clearly feeling rightfully aggrieved by the whole dreary escapade. Nyssa asks, “How are you going to deal with the Master?” and he replies with a withering sigh and an irritated, “I’m thinking about it.” It’s a terrific moment and one can really feel the season spluttering to a stop along with him. 

All told though, Davison is such a good actor that he pulls off the part of the Doctor with utter aplomb and his regrets that he should have made his mark more strongly can be confined to the history books because his Doctor is present and boundless and wonderful. If Jodie Whittaker needs any advice – indeed, if Chris Chibnall needs any advice – they’d do worse than to sit through these episodes of imaginative passion, ambitious, far-reaching story-telling, intellectually stimulating and (for the most part) completely gorgeous-looking Doctor Who.

9/10

Addenda: This Special Edition Blu Ray box set continues the almighty success of July’s Season 12. It’s presented in a beautiful box, with staggeringly strong, original artwork. The remastering job on the episodes is magnificent, the film sequences in true HD for the first time. Castrovalva’s new effects are subtle and the icing on the cake for an already incredible story (I disproportionately love that the unsightly reversed question mark on Davison’s collar has been righted!). The new Making Of documentaries are fabulous too: the Mark Strickson-led visits to old locations make for beautiful looking retrospectives and the more standard affairs for Four to Doomsday and Earthshock are informative and fun. I can dream of a time when all 26 classic seasons sit alongside one another: the ultimate chronicling of the best programme in the universe. 

JH