When John Nathan-Turner became head producer and effective showrunner (using the modern parlance) of Doctor Who in 1981, he wanted a clean slate. There was a new title sequence, new music and new visual effects techniques, but his plan for a new cast had to involve delicately maneuvering the immensely popular Tom Baker off the show and then gradually transforming the entire regular cast over the course of the season. Romana and K9 were out, and new companions Adric, Nyssa and Tegan were in.
Season 19 opens with this new TARDIS crew in place, but also some uncertainty about how to proceed with the new Doctor. At 29, Peter Davison was the youngest Doctor so far and he found portraying the character a daunting prospect after Baker's iconic, sonorous approach over seven full seasons. But with a new, younger, fresher feel to the cast and the writing team, it wasn't long before Davison found his feet.
Things kick off with Castrovalva, an effective sequel to Logopolis with the same writer (exiting script editor Chris Bidmead). The Fifth Doctor has arrived confused and bemused, and needs the sanctuary of the Zero Room on the TARDIS to heal properly. When the Zero Room is destroyed in a mishap, he decides to seek refuge on the planet Castrovalva, famed for its recuperative properties. But the Doctor is falling into an elaborate sequence of traps prepared by the Master, who has captured Adric and is using his mathematical abilities against his friends.
Castrovalva is almost as weird a story as Logopolis, but not as accomplished, with the epic, universe-spanning tone of the latter replaced by...well, it's hard to describe. Having helped stop the TARDIS fly into the Big Bang and total annihilation, Tegan and Nyssa spend at least a solid episode carrying the Doctor around a forest in a box, and then the team spends a bunch of time inside an M.C. Escher print whilst Anthony Ainley holds Adric prisoner and terrorises him into doing his bidding, mostly by the terrifying over-use of a hydraulic lift. It's all a bit weird, but Peter Davison makes for an engaging new Doctor, especially his charming impersonations of his predecessors William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker as his brain settles down from regenerative stress. The story goes for a bit of a wander around Episode 3 as people run around waiting for the plot to end (not an uncommon problem for 4-parters), but it's reasonably entertaining.
Four to Doomsday has a bit of a rough reputation, though this mainly stems, I think, from the pretty nonsensical characterisation of Adric throughout the story. The rest of the cast get off pretty well, and the story benefits from the civility of the bad guys, with Stratford Johns giving a magisterial performance as the villainous Monarch despite a limiting makeup job. The aliens planning to invade Earth are incredibly well-mannered and polite, constantly (and apparently genuinely) reluctant to kill the Doctor and his companions as that would be terribly rude, which is at least something of a change of pace. There are some iffy effects, but clever use of the unadorned studio walls as the interior of the spaceship, and some nice additional guest turns, particularly an under-used Burt Kwouk (Cato from the Pink Panther movies). It's not often that Doctor Who gets a well-known movie actor as a guest star, and it's clear they weren't sure what to do with him when they got him, so he gets very little screen-time or action, but impresses whenever he does show up.
Kinda is one of the Fifth Doctor's best-known stories, mainly for its unusual script and atmosphere. It recalls the preceding season's Warriors' Gate in its use of surrealist imagery, but Kinda plays its script much straighter. A very standard Doctor Who premise - an Earth scientific team on a primitive planet run afoul of the natives and a powerful alien entity known as the Mara - is played with unusual intensity and thoughtfulness, with exemplary worldbuilding and a strong performance by Janet Fielding as Tegan is taken over by the Mara and spends most of the first two episodes battling the creature in her own mind (including some splendid split-screen work as Tegan has to work with an identical copy of herself). Simon Rouse also gives an intense performance as a man falling into the grip of a total mental breakdown, and Nerys Hughes, better-known at the time for her comedic performances, is also very good.
A very unique-feeling story is unfortunately a little undercut by the writers once again not giving Adric consistent characterisation, and by not having Nyssa in the script at all (resulting in her spending the whole story comatose on the TARDIS, which may redefine the meaning of "cop-out"). Also, Tegan being taken over by the Mara is a Big Deal, but after two full episodes of fighting the creature in her mind, Tegan spends about ninety seconds actually possessed by the creature, which is an odd choice. Still, left-field Doctor Who can work very well, and this is mostly a success.
The Visitation is much more standard meat-and-potatoes Doctor Who and very splendid for it. Team TARDIS arrive near London in 1666 to find the country in the grip of plague, with the alien Terileptils and their impressively blinged-out killer robot taking advantage of the chaos to their own ends. The crew team up with "gentleman of the road" Richard Mace to halt the aliens. This story is thunderously enjoyable with almost every Doctor Who trope executed with enthusiastic aplomb, and Michael Robbins' performance as Mace often verges on the scene-stealing. Even the alien makeup is unusually decent, with the Terileptils being the first Doctor Who monsters to get animatronic support. Coupled with Michael Melia's solid performance as the chief alien, this results in a highly solid slice of Doctor Who, only let down again by some iffy effects and most of the various villagers being non-entities as characters.
Black Orchid has an interesting place in Doctor Who history. It's the first purely period piece, with no science fiction elements bar the TARDIS crew, since Season 4's The Highlanders, which aired sixteen years earlier. It's also the last pure period piece ever. Every episode of Doctor Who to air after this one always has some extra science fictional element in the story or characters. The lack of an SF element makes the story more interesting: Something is Up, but we know it can't be an alien or a monster responsible.
Unfortunately, the story suffers from pacing. As the first two-part story since The Sontaran Experiment in Season 12, which also had big pacing problems, Black Orchid is a bit all over the place. We get the Doctor and his crew arriving in 1925 England, befriending the local gentry (thanks to the Doctor's outstanding cricket skills) and attending a party with the gag that Nyssa looks exactly like one of the partygoers, Ann, leading to them wearing identical costumes to confuse people. We then get an inevitable murder and the Doctor playing detective. A reasonable setup is let down by the fact that the Doctor spends a chunk of the story as the prime suspect for the murder, and then there isn't much investigating to be done as the murderer reveals himself. The story also has a very weird ending where the murderer is dealt with, but the people who enabled his crimes are not, and the deaths of at least two innocent people are not really followed up on.
Against that, the lowered stakes make for a more enjoyable story, and the characters for once get to dress up in new clothes (Nathan-Turner's determination that the entire crew should all have fixed costumes, not just the Doctor, is a clear bad decision, making things feel very flat visually) and have more fun. Even Adric is more bearable this story. It also doesn't outstay its welcome, even if it feels like it was written more with a four-part structure in mind. Inoffensive.
Then we get to the season highlight: Earthshock. Clearly the most expensive story of the season, it's also, easily, the most pure Doctor Who Big Action Movie type of story they've ever attempted to this point. The Doctor arrives on Earth in the year 2526 to find a platoon of space marines being attacked by hostile robots in deep subterranean caves. After the Doctor helps eliminate the robots, he traces the signal controlling them to a freighter in deep space, which is acting as an unwitting Trojan Horse to deliver a massive army of Cybermen to Earth. These Cybermen are, compared to their forebears, sleek, imposing and formidable.
The result feels like Aliens, as a pure action piece with everyone (even Tegan, Nyssa and the Doctor, though the latter only in extreme duress) grabbing guns to blow away Cybermen with wild abandon and the Cybermen doing the same to the unusually large supporting cast. There's something of a guilty pleasure to be had here as for once the Doctor's normally peaceful approach has little chance of success, so effectively a military operation against the Cybermen is the order of the day. The guest cast is outstanding, especially James Warwick, Clare Clifford, Alec Sabin and June Bland, and the regular cast all get a fair bit to do. This is also, easily, Adric's best story as he first jousts with the Doctor about whether he should go home to E-Space or not, then saves the day in a battle with the robots and then proves instrumental in events on the freighter. Matthew Waterhouse is at his most likeable here. Nyssa gets short shrift in the second half of the story as she observes events from the TARDIS, but has some good moments in the first half. A little bit incongruous is Beryl Reid's performance as a hard-bitten freighter captain, but you can't deny she doesn't give it everything she's got.
Of course, Earthshock gets that absolute shot in the arm from its hugely unexpected (at the time) ending, which is a total cold shower to every expectation viewers might have developed about Doctor Who to this point. With its thunderous pace, mostly solid action sequences, impressively-designed new Cybermen, shock ending and superb supporting cast, this is a great story only let down by some pretty odd plot holes (which get bigger the more you think about them) and the Cybermen being more emotional than in previous appearances ("THIS IS EXCELLENT NEWS!" - the Cyber Leader about absolutely anything), which tends to dent their terrifying visages.
Things are rounded off by Time-Flight, which has a great killer premise: a Concorde vanishes on final approach to Heathrow Airport, so the Doctor, using his UNIT credentials for the first time in many years, commandeers a second Concorde to match its course, discovering a time warp leading back in time some 140 million years. The excellent first episode, massively helped in terms of production value by location filming at Heathrow and some filming on an actual Concorde, is instantly undercut by the remaining three, which are Doctor Who at its most panto. A game secondary cast can't help compensate for some of the worst sets we've seen on the show in many a year, the least-surprising plot twist ever, and the Doctor and his companions being very underwhelmed by the massively traumatic events they've just experienced.
There are a few laughs - intended and not - and you can't help but admire the ambition which is wholly unmatched by the budget, but this is easily the most disappointing story of the season.
Still, Season 19 of Doctor Who (****) is good fun overall. Peter Davison is a likeable new Doctor, and if the TARDIS is too crowded, at least it feels like they give it a good go (Chris Chibnall probably should have learned from this season that two companions max is a good rule to adhere to). Even the weaker stories have their interesting moments.
The season is available on DVD and Blu-Ray (with some very high-quality extras and documentaries), as well as streaming on BBC iPlayer in the UK and various services overseas.
19.1 - 19.4: Castrovalva (***½)
19.5 - 19.8: Four to Doomsday (***½)
19.9 - 19.12: Kinda (****)
19.13 - 19.16: The Visitation (****)
19.17 - 19.18: Black Orchid (***½)
19.19 - 19.22: Earthshock (****½)
19.23 - 19.26: Time-Flight (**½)
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