Doctor Who: Season 26 and the TV Movie

The Doctor's travels with his companion Ace have returned him to Earth in the near future, where an interdimensional incursion sees him reunite with UNIT and his old friend Brigadier Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart. But the Doctor is also playing a longer game, intrigued by Ace's troubled history in Perivale, a suburb of London where nothing ever happens...until it does.

With the quality and ratings of Doctor Who backsliding through the mid-1980s, it was a welcome surprise - though an unwelcome one to the BBC executives eager to cancel the show - that the 25th silver anniversary season in 1988 had seen something of a return to form for the show. The season had restored some mystery to the Doctor's character, made the Daleks a force to be reckoned with once again and seen successful experiments with surrealism (in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy), though the season had also wasted the Cybermen. Still, the show seemed to be on the upswing under increasingly confident script editor Andrew Cartmel, and was even holding its own in the ratings war with soap opera Coronation Street.

For the 26th season, Cartmel brought in a promising team. Ben Aaronovitch returned from the previous season's Remembrance of the Daleks to do for UNIT what he'd done for the Daleks, alongside Ian Briggs, the creator of the character of Ace, for one of Ace's most important stories. Newcomers Marc Platt and Rona Munroe also joined the team. The decision had been taken to continue the path taken in Season 25, of making the Doctor darker and more manipulative, whilst querying the mystery of his background. Ace also became the most-fleshed-out companion in the show's history, driving much of the action in three of the four stories in the season and her background and motivations being explored in a way never before seen for the companion role.

Battlefield is a very promising story that never quite takes off. It's a collection of great, sometimes classic, vignettes and individual scenes which don't cohere into a solid whole, built around a very solid premise. The idea here is that, on a parallel Earth in a neighbouring dimension, the legends of King Arthur were real, undertaken by warriors who mixed feudal fighting styles and notions of chivalry with energy weapons and spaceships. The Doctor got involved in their feud, becoming known as the sorcerer Merlin. However, that was also a future Doctor. When the battle between Arthur and Morgaine's forces spills over onto our Earth, the Seventh Doctor doesn't really have a clue what's going on and has to work with clues and messages left by his future self, whilst also just purely winging it.

This creates a nice contrast between this story and Aaronovitch's last one, Remembrance of the Daleks, which had the Doctor as a master manipulator, moving the Daleks and Davros and humans around like chess pieces with no worthwhile opponent. It's also fun seeing UNIT back in the mix, with Nicholas Courtney on excellent form as the Brigadier and Angela Bruce making a fine Brigadier Bambera. It's also great to see UNIT as a genuinely multi-national organisation, with French, Polish and Czech troopers amongst others.

The rest of the cast is exemplary, with Jean Marsh knowing how to make Morgaine sing, chewing the scenery in one scene, being scary in another and being even compassionate in another. One of Aaronovitch's best ideas here is that Morgaine's forces are not "evil" as such, but merely misguided and still following the codes of honourable combat: Morgaine's fury when she learns her son has accidentally desecrated a memorial to fallen soldiers in a churchyard is palpable. Christopher Bowen's Mordred is also solid, and Marcus Gilbert's Ancelyn is great fun, with 200,000 volt charisma (Gilbert went on to play Arthur himself in Sam Raimi's Army of Darkness just three years later). Even the individual UNIT troops are well cast, with Dorota Rae stealing her every scene with a small role as the Brigadier's helicopter pilot. The great worldbuilding and plotting, and excellent casting, is backed up by some nice battle sequences and a great bit of prosthetics work with the Destroyer, easily the best monster of the season (and, in technical terms at least, maybe all of Doctor Who), played with gravity-laden menace by Marek Anton.

Unfortunately, the story just doesn't really come together. There's a bit of panto in the feeling of characters running around, and there's some plotting shortcuts that feel like script placeholders that were never fleshed out (Ancelyn being thrown several hundred feet by a single grenade to fly through the roof of a building to meet the Doctor is unintentionally comical). The ending also feels like it could do with some work, and I go back and forth on whether Aaronovitch's decision to spare a character who was going to be killed off was a good idea or not. Battlefield can be a lot of fun but feels a bit shambolic.

Ghost Light, on the other hand, is Doctor Who at its quietest and most horrifying. A Gothic horror story unfolding in a haunted house that (as usual) is more than it seems, this serial also has a phenomenal cast, great dialogue and a solid premise, with a very well-thought-out theme of evolution and how that factors back into the story, with Ace's character evolution, the evolution of humanity itself, the character of Nimrod (the last surviving Neanderthal) and the atrophying static of the villainous Light all being great ideas.

Unfortunately these ideas are delivered in a very dense script, which should have been a four-parter than than a three-parter, with some ideas under-explored. There's also a lack of clarity in some ideas - realising that "Control" refers to a scientific control group rather than something in charge complete changes the viewer's perception of a character - and precisely how much the Doctor knows about what is going on is left fuzzy.

The absolute standout of the serial is Sophie Aldred as Ace. Her performance in her debut story lacked subtlety, but she improved immensely over Season 25 and this season is knocking it out of the park. Sylvester McCoy is also on top form; both actors played into the cheesy fun of Battlefield but here respond to the Gothic horror and deep-rooted character clashes and excel. It also helps that Platt gives the Seventh Doctor one of his two all-timer pieces of dialogue:

Ace: "Don't you have things you hate?"

The Doctor: "I can't stand burnt toast. I loathe bus stations - terrible places, full of lost luggage and lost souls. And then there's unrequited love, and tyranny, and cruelty."

Ace: "Too right."

The Doctor: "We all have a world of our own terrors to face."

Ace: "I face mine on my own terms!"

Ghost Light - which I remember once calling the In Utero or The Holy Bible of Doctor Who, brilliant but you're not going to be putting it on at parties - is hard work but ultimately rewarding in being a fine piece of horror and a parable about childhood terrors.

The Curse of Fenric is the season highlight and a strong challenger to Remembrance of the Daleks' position as the McCoy story. The story takes the Doctor and Ace to a remote British military base in Northumbria in 1943. A codebreaker is using an advanced machine to break the encryption on the German U-boats, but the Soviet Union has discovered that their erstwhile allies may be on the brink of other, less positive developments and send in a strike team to intervene. There's a strange disagreement between the chief codebreaker and the naval commander going on, and the local vicar is facing a confidence of faith, something that becomes more important than expected.

This is a great story packed with fine performances and nice ideas. Nicholas Parsons was a typical John Nathan-Turner bit of stunt casting, but Parsons was a professional, serious actor long before he was a gameshow host and relishes the chance to show his acting chops here, and his performance is heartbreaking. Dinsdale Landen is suitably gruff as Dr. Judson and Alfred Lynch is memorably haunted as the Viking-obsessed Commander Millington. Tomek Bork is also great as Captain Sorin. The Soviet strike team is also painted with excellent depth, such as them coming from different parts of the USSR, so the Armenian gets mocked by the Russians, and the Cossack is suitably proud of his heritage.

Even better is the way the store coheres together, succeeding where the (very) superficially similar Battlefield fails. The ideas of faith and hope drive the narrative onwards as the Doctor confronts of his most formidable foes, a deadly enemy who can be trapped by the inescapable logic of his own beliefs. The action sequences are solid (even if the timeslot means some punches are pulled), and the makeup for the Haemovores is quite exceptional.

If McCoy and Aldred were outstanding in Ghost Light, they manage to go a step further here. The Seventh Doctor's confidence turning to desperation is brilliantly played by McCoy, and the sequence where he is surrounded by Haemovores and he fends them off by a demonstration of faith - intoning the names of all his companions one by one, knowing he could rely on every single one of them - is superb. But the story really belongs to Aldred as she confronts the trauma of her past in a way she wasn't expecting, falls in love, has her faith tested by possibly her bloodiest story, and emerges stronger for it all.

The story only has a couple of weaknesses: the writing and performances of the two evacuees who fall prey to the Haemovores can be a bit questionable, and the editing is a bit choppy, a result of the story going 15 minutes over time and having to be cut down. The Blu-Ray release incorporates two alternate cuts of the story, both incorporating the extra footage, one in episodic format and a more recent, movie-length version with a totally recut score by original composer Mark Ayres and subtly updated effects. Both cuts are better, clearing up some spotty plotting and adding some more scenes that make the characters resonate better.

Survival is an odd Doctor Who story. After the events of the two preceding stories, Ace decides to lance the boil of her childhood trauma by getting the Doctor to take her home to Perivale so she can check in with her mates. The town turns out to be boring beyond belief, and a much smaller place than Ace remembers. There's a classic Doctor Who mystery - most of Ace's old gang has gone missing and there are cats doing weird things in the neighbourhood - and some interesting guest characters, with the most random being the shopkeepers played by famous-at-the-time comedy double act Hale and Pace. Eventually a link is discerned between Perivale and a dying alien planet, whose inhabitants don't care about their impending demise, only the thrill of the hunt, and the Doctor encounters the Master, now consumed by an alien force.

This isn't as strong a story as the previous two, but that's a high bar. It's instead a lyrical and offbeat tale from Rona Munro, who would make minor history by becoming the only writer to work on Classic Who and Modern Who when she returned ten seasons and twenty-six years (ha!) later to writer The Eaters of Light. The story is simple: the Doctor, Ace and Ace's friends have to escape from the alien planet before it is destroyed, and deal with the planet's ability to "infect" people and make them into hunters. Even the Master isn't hatching some Machiavellian scheme. The result is a very contemporary-feeling story unfolding in youth centres, on housing estates and on suburban back streets, as well as the alien planet. In many respects, the story feels like it aired sixteen months before Rose, not sixteen years. There's a lot of "you can't go home again," ideas floating around here as well as the continuing evolution of Ace's character.

There's a great performance from Anthony Ainley, here appearing as the Master for the very last time, eight years after his first appearance, giving a more measured and subdued performance that is far more menacing than his normal scenery-chewing. Lisa Bowerman is also outstanding as Karra, the main alien character. Bowerman would go on to play companion Bernice Summerfield (the first major, popular companion to debut in non-TV media) in various Doctor Who audio projects up to this very day.

The weaknesses in the story are the Cheetah People, who actually have great prosthetics and makeup, but just look a bit too cuddly, and the Doctor feels a bit inert in the story and too reactive. The finale gag, which has the Doctor escaping from an exploding motorbike, also feels a bit random and shoehorned in for the sake of a big effects piece.

Survival, of course, also holds another special place: it is the final episode of the Classic run of Doctor Who, bringing the show to an end after 26 seasons, 695 episodes (701 including the untransmitted story Shada from Season 17, which has since been finished with animation), 155 serials (156 including Shada), 7 Doctors and (approximately) 26 companions. When the show was written this was not the intent, with planning for a twenty-seventh season, which would have seen the departure of Ace midway through the season before the Doctor's regeneration at the end, in the early stages. It was only during production that rumours of the axe began to swirl, and Andrew Cartmel hurriedly wrote a monologue for Sylvester McCoy to record as a way to bring the entire saga to an end.

"There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea's asleep and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice and somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace, we've got work to do."

The twenty-sixth and regrettably final season of Classic Doctor Who (****½) sees the show go out on an impressive high. Battlefield is the weakest link but at least that's fun, and the other three scripts are interesting, thought-provoking, well-made (for the time) and smart.

The season is available on DVD and Blu-Ray as well as streaming on BBC iPlayer in the UK and various services overseas.

Whatever happened to this guy?

The Doctor Who flame was kept alive in the 1990s through novels, a stage play, comics, audio dramas and an increasingly popular series of VHS video releases of the original show. An attempted 30th anniversary special in 1993 fell apart during pre-production, and was hurriedly replaced by an awful, zero-budget charity episode recorded on the set of soap opera EastEnders. The novels and associated comics and short stories were arguably the key to keeping the light burning, especially as new writers came on board, including a certain Russell T. Davies, an unknown Steven Moffat, and people like Mark Gatiss and Paul Cornell (creator of the aforementioned Bernice Summerfield). But it would take until 2005 for the show to return full-time.

There was one serious attempt to relaunch the show, however, in 1996. The BBC joined forces with Fox to trial a TV movie which could act as a backdoor pilot for a new run. Fox had enjoyed huge success with The X-Files and were eagerly exploring more science fiction and supernatural ideas. They'd just cancelled a space opera called Space: Above and Beyond, and roughly as their Doctor Who special aired, they'd just started shooting a pilot called Buffy the Vampire Slayer, based on a cult movie from a few years earlier (and would provide a template for the eventual return of Doctor Who).

The TV Movie, as it is rather unfortunately called by default, is a fascinating look at the universe where Doctor Who is just another American midlist science fiction show, and not a hugely edifying one. The plot, where the Master tries to use the TARDIS to destroy Earth on the eve of the millennium, is odd, but at least it fits into the established canon, featuring Sylvester McCoy as the Seventh Doctor before he regenerates into the Eighth, played with winning eccentric energy by Paul McGann. The movie is actually a huge workout for McGann, who has to carry the whole damn thing on his shoulders.

Eric Roberts is divisive as the Master, but I think he does a pretty good job given the mustache-twirling limitations of the character as written. Daphne Ashbrook is also fine as quasi-companion Grace, even if the script seems uncertain about her acceptance of what's going on. She sometimes flips from Scully-ish scepticism to Mulder-style total acceptance in the space of a single scene.

The movie also seems odd in its treatment of the canon: it uses the Seventh Doctor as the lead-in instead of the Fourth, as the BBC themselves had nonsensically suggested (Tom Baker being the best-known Doctor in the USA), and the Master even retains his yellow eyes from Survival, but the Doctor is also suggested to be half-human, something out of keeping with the mythos (and firmly rejected in the 2005 iteration).

The main problem with the TV movie is that it's very ordinary with flat lighting and unremarkable direction. This is Doctor Who if it was the most generic, dull American mid-season replacement show you can imagine. It's not offensively bad, and you can point to McGann and Robert's performances, and a superb TARDIS set, as maybe solid foundations that a regular series could have built on, but ultimately this is the most unforgivable thing Doctor Who can be: boring.

The TV movie got indifferent ratings in the USA, so Fox passed on the chance to do a follow-up, but a startling nine million viewers tuned in for the BBC transmission. Plans by the BBC to commission their own series fell foul of internal politics, and in the event it would be a frankly ludicrous nine years before the show would return full-time, and when it did, it would certainly not be boring.

26.1 - 26.4: Battlefield (***½)

26.5 - 26.7: Ghost Light (****½)

26.8 - 26.11: The Curse of Fenric (****½ or ***** for the extended cut)

26.12 - 26.14: Survival (****)

TVM: The TV Movie (**½)

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Doctor Who: Season 25

London, November 1963. A strange white-haired man said to be living in a junkyard with his granddaughter has disappeared, along with two of her schoolteachers. But he disappeared with the mission that brought him to this place unfulfilled. A few weeks later, but much longer for him, he returns to complete his task, and prevent the streets of London being turned into a battleground between two factions of the most dangerous species in the galaxy.

It would probably be fair to say that, after the underwhelming twenty-third and twenty-fourth seasons, expectations ahead of Doctor Who's silver anniversary year were low. The show had the feeling it was running on fumes: the budget had been slashed, the quality of the scripts was apparently deteriorating and the episode count almost halved over Doctor Who's traditional format. Ratings were on the slide and angry fan calls for the showrunner (as he'd now be called), John Nathan-Turner, to be sacked were being roundly ignored, leading to furious diatribes in the fanzine community.

Of course, it wouldn't be Doctor Who if it was predictable. For the twenty-fifth season, the creative crew riposted by delivering its finest set of episodes in years, and for its opener, its best story since Season 21's The Caves of Androzani.

Remembrance of the Daleks is, by any measure, a triumph. The debut script by Ben Aaronovitch - best known today for his Rivers of London urban fantasy series - is phenomenally good. The characters banter with one another believably, there are exceptional monologues on the mutability of time, and the script interjects mystery back into the Doctor's character. In fact, for almost the first time in the entire series, the Doctor is revealed to have set the events of the story in motion himself, laying an elaborate trap for the Daleks only to realise that things are complicated because the Daleks have divided into two factions with different motivations, something he was not expecting.

The white Imperial Daleks and grey Renegade Daleks (led by a black Dalek Supreme) despise one another due to their differing notions of racial purity. The Imperial Daleks have accepted cybernetic enhancements and deliberate mutations to make themselves more powerful (one such mutation resulting in a "Special Weapons Dalek" that can blow away entire streets). The Renegade Daleks believe these mutants are freaks, only fit to be destroyed. The metaphor for human racial superiority is expanded more directly as well: a black cafe worker muses with the Doctor on how if people had never decided they liked sugar, the sugar cane industry wouldn't have happened and he'd be an African. A key moment in the story is when Ace, vibing on the coolness of being in Swinging Sixties London (though 1963 is actually a bit before the swinging fully kicks in), is confronted with the less-cool spectre of racial bigotry.

In fact, Remembrance of the Daleks has a good claim for being the first "modern" Doctor Who story, rather than 2005's Rose. The story works on multiple levels of theme and metaphor, the Doctor is far more intelligent and cunning than we've traditionally seen, often acting rather than reacting, and the VFX work is beyond any other story produced in the Classic run to date. Daleks blasting one another on the streets of London, rocket-propelled grenades flying, spaceships landing in school playgrounds, the Doctor jury-rigging powerful weapons on the fly...this is Who at its most action-packed, even beyond Earthshock. The show is helped by its new stunt coordinator Tip Tipping, fresh off the set of James Cameron's Aliens, resulting in some pretty decent stunts and action sequences. The story also uses continuity in a neat way, tying in with the events of the first-ever Doctor Who story from 1963, An Unearthly Child, but lightly enough not to confuse people who hadn't seen that story recently (which, in 1988, was the majority of viewers).

As well as the excellent script, memorable dialogue, cool plot twists, impressive (for the time) action and several of the most "badass" moments in all of Doctor Who history (Ace single-handedly taking on a Dalek assault squad armed with a baseball bat being a highlight), it has an exceptional cast. Old reliables like George Sewell and Michael Sheard give great performances, but it's Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred who take centre stage. McCoy makes the Doctor convincingly dark and manipulative in a way we've not seen before, cementing his position as the best Doctor since Tom Baker, whilst Sophie Aldred dials down the enthusiasm of her debut to deliver a more compelling performance (and cementing her position as the best companion since Tegan, if not Sarah Jane Smith). Pamela Salem also gives a great guest performance, having previously been on the show over a decade earlier in The Robots of Death. Dursley McLinden also gives a solid guest performance as Mike, though this is tinged by tragedy: he later died of complications related to AIDS, and his character and story inspired Russell T. Davies' mini-series It's a Sin.

Remembrance of the Daleks is something of an embarrassment of riches, with so much packed into the story it could have easily been a six-parter and still felt crammed. As it is, it holds a claim to being the last truly great serial of Classic Doctor Who, though a couple of the stories after this have a go at breaking that claim.

The Happiness Patrol feels like a thematic sequel to the preceding season's Paradise Towers, in that it also feels like a JG Ballard novel come to life. The Doctor and Ace arrive on a planet where citizens are mandated to be happy on pain of death (resulting in the TARDIS getting a pink makeover). Does this make much literal sense? No. But as a nightmarish dreamscape it almost works, with Ace working to corrupt the titular "Happiness Patrol" not to be so happy, and the Doctor working with blues player Earl Sharp to help bring down the society. The guest cast is also in overdrive, with Sheila Hancock (as a Margaret Thatcher analogue), Lesley Dunlop, Ronald Fraser and Richard D. Sharp delivering great performances.

Production value-wise, the story is a mixed bag with some great costumes and excellent animatronic creature effects, but poor sets (the sets look dowdy and distinctly misery-inducing, which is odd given the vibe). The Kandy Man also feels a bit random: he gets the best lines and his happy and cheerful performance belaying his murderous intentions is a nice juxtaposition, but he looks ridiculous. He's also not really important to the story and could be removed with no issue, which would have improved the story no end. As it stands it's a solid story, and much better when viewed as an adult than as a kid (especially after coming off the action high of Remembrance of the Daleks).

Silver Nemesis aired on the actual 25th anniversary of Doctor Who itself, but is a bit of a mixed bag. The idea here is that the Doctor has unleashed a powerful superweapon in a prior, off-screen adventure and here has to ensure it is neutralised whilst fending off multiple forces on its trail. This is pretty much the exact same plot as Remembrance of the Daleks, even down to the fascist metaphor, although that's less subtle here as literal Neo-Nazis show up in pursuit of the weapon. We also have a returning classic monster with the Cybermen, but they have almost nothing to do in the story. The Cyberleader is incompetent (to the point where his lieutenant keeps pointing out that he's an idiot) and the Cybermen themselves are wiped out too easily by gold weapons. Ace fighting off a whole Cyber-platoon with a catapult and gold coins is a cool visual but a very dumb idea.

This is a shame because other elements of the story work better. The Doctor having a hidden, darker past is again hinted at, and Fiona Walker as Lady Peinforte and Gerard Murphy as Richard are a great double-act. The location filming at Arundel (standing in for Windsor Castle) is also very impressive and, for the second story in a row, we have a lot of riffing on music, this time jazz, with Courtney Pine guesting as himself (only the third time this ever happened in Who history, and both prior times it was newsreaders who only appeared on TV). Some of the action sequences are effective, and the Nemesis itself, which can speak and seems urgently concerned that people find it beautiful (given its ability to lay waste to vast amounts of the galaxy, most respond in the affirmative, with alacrity). The first episode is also quite strong. But it's a bit of a letdown overall, wastes the Cybermen, and is overshadowed in every way by Remembrance of the Daleks.

The Greatest Show in the Galaxy rounds off the season and is a very bizarre story. This is Doctor Who returning to the "Surreal Who" school of story, previously seen in Warriors' Gate, Kinda and Snakedance. The Doctor and Ace arrive at a galactic carnival where people have to keep the audience entertained or die a horrible death. They find both allies and enemies amongst the carnival entertainers and other guests, with a constantly shifting web of allegiances to keep on top of.

It's deeply weird, not helped by the story expanding from three to four episodes, meaning a first episode where the Doctor and Ace take the whole length to even reach the circus.

What helps elevate the story is the guest cast, with Jessica Martin as Mags, the random werewolf; T.P. McKenna as Captain Cook (getting the assignment); Ricco Ross as the Ringmaster; Ian Reddington as the Chief Clown; and Peggy Mount as the Stallslady all turning in sterling performances. It helps that Ian Reddington doesn't do a cliched "evil clown" performance but something more interesting, with McKenna's what-ho-fellow-well-met fellowship giving way to more vicious selfishness as he tries to survive the travails of the carnival.

Most intriguing is the ending, where the Doctor starts off doing slapstick comedy to entertain the audience but then slowly becomes more manipulative and cunning as he builds up to defeating the enemy. The arc here is the Doctor going from one of the exhibits at the carnival to the grand ringmaster, manipulating everyone else without them realising it.

The twenty-fifth and - alas! - penultimate season of Classic Doctor Who (****) is a winner. The scripts are better, the dialogue is becoming more modern and naturalistic, the effects are improving, and the Doctor-Ace team is becoming one of the most definitive in the show's history, but the season is definitely too short, with great ideas having to be rushed.

The season is available on DVD and Blu-Ray as well as streaming on BBC iPlayer in the UK and various services overseas. It's currently only available on limited edition Blu-Ray, but the standard edition is expected to be released in 2026.

• 25.1 - 25.4: Remembrance of the Daleks (*****)
• 25.5 - 25.7: The Happiness Patrol (****)
• 25.8 - 25.10: Silver Nemesis (***)
• 25.11 - 25.14: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (****)

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Doctor Who: Season 24

The TARDIS has been drawn off course with such force that the Doctor has been injured and forced to regenerate. The Rani takes advantage of the Doctor's post-regenerative confusion to trick him into helping her with her amoral plans of scientific experimentation, whilst his companion Mel sets out to rescue him.

Season 23 of Doctor Who had seen the show both metaphorically and literally in a fight for its life. Cancelled by BBC1 controller Michael Grade on the questionable grounds that he didn't like it (despite it pulling in almost nine millions viewers at the time), the show had been granted a reprieve after a national press campaign and massive fan blowback. The resulting trial season saw ratings drop, but with the episode count halved, the cost of the show had also been significantly reduced. The show was also started to generate additional revenue streams, via a series of releases on home video. The show was given a lifeline: it would continue with the 14 episodes a year format pioneered by Season 23, but Colin Baker would have to be let go as the Doctor.

Baker, understandably annoyed by the decision, declined to return to film a regeneration story. With script editor Eric Saward having quit the show under highly acrimonious circumstances at the end of Season 23 as well, this left producer John Nathan-Turner - himself continuing only extremely reluctantly - opening the next season with no script editor, no script and no Doctor. With little choice, he tapped the last writers from Season 23, Pip and Jane Baker, to pen a new story. With negotiations continuing to try to get Baker back to return for at least one more story, it was also unclear when the regeneration would take place, meaning the script had to be kept open-ended. Nathan-Turner finally succeeded in hiring a new script editor, the young Andrew Cartmel, who promptly found Pip and Jane Baker refusing to listen to any of his story edits. Baker finally confirmed he was not coming back at all, so the new Doctor would have to start the story in Bakers costume and wearing a wig during the regeneration scene, which was suboptimal to say the least.

To say it was a trial by fire was an understatement, and the resulting script, Time and the Rani, is a mess. The story does do well by bringing back the magisterial Kate O'Mara as the Rani, who reportedly begged Nathan-Turner to be allowed to return to rainy England after spending too long filming the drama series Dynasty in California, and the story is kept borderline watchable really by O'Mara's gusto (including selling the Rani's totally deranged decision to impersonate Mel to win over the Doctor), Bonnie Langford's enthusiasm and a sharp upturn in the quality of visual effects. The story is surprisingly accomplished in deploying sharp video effects such as the killer "soap bubble" trap that the Rani employs, and even some primitive CGI with the brand new title sequence (the totally computer-generated TARDIS is really quite impressive for 1987).

The guest cast also does well, with risible material. Wanda Ventham gives a very good guest turn, and it's amusing to note that during filming she brought her 11-year-old son, a certain Benedict Cumberbatch, to watch the shooting. The rest of the cast is solid, O'Mara is outstanding and Bonnie Langford has to rise to the occasion as a driver of the story given the Doctor's instability. But of course the most notable performance has to go to newly-anointed Seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy. A comedian and light entertainer, best-known for making kids laugh, McCoy was keen to bring a more dramatic and darker touch to his performance as the Doctor. Whilst he's limited by the script, McCoy does give the most charmingly off-kilter performance as the Doctor since early Tom Baker, and immediately makes the character work.

Great effects (not even mentioning the very solid prosthetics work for the alien Tetraps), good performances and a good Doctor can't make up for the fact that the script is very weak and contrived, and almost all the location filming takes place in the exact same Doctor Who stock quarry we've seen a thousand times before.

Paradise Towers, on the other hand, sets out its claim for greatness by asking a very simple question: what if J.G. Ballard wrote a Doctor Who? The resulting story is a mostly-legally-distinct rewrite of Ballard's seminal novel High-Rise as a Who story, and it has to be said it's pretty solid. The Doctor and Mel visit Paradise Towers, a famed luxury apartment complex, only to find it's descended into being a totally dystopian post-apocalyptic hellhole. The tower is divided between the robot Cleaners, officious Caretakers, eccentric old Rezzies and the Kangs, all-girl gangs divided by colour who engage in mock conflicts, though not to the death (or "unalive," as the story prophetically calls it).

The story is deliciously dark (two Rezzies try to eat Bonnie Langford alive!) and quite funny, with a solid guest cast. The weakest link, infamously, is Richard Briers, a comedic actor who decided to go "big" for his dramatic villain role. His performance in the first three episodes is okay, but his playing of a "zombified" version of the character in the final episode is horrendous and makes getting through to the end tougher than it should be, which is a shame as so much of the rest of the story works well. Paradise Towers also nearly made a claim for being the first Doctor Who story to feature canonically gay characters (though a whiff of subtext remains with Tilda and "room-mate" Tabby) before the production team decided not to go in that direction (Who's first gay characters being cannibalistic lesbians trying to feast on Bonnie Langford would have given every tabloid writer in the northern hemisphere convulsions for weeks, though the publicity would have been impressive).

Delta and the Bannermen is one of those stories that's not great, but everyone involved is clearly enjoying the hell out of it, so you almost don't care. The Doctor and Mel win a trip to 1959 Disneyland but, due to a collision between the transport spacecraft and an American test satellite (and also a collision between the writers' ideas and the reality of the budget), have to divert to a sub-Butlins holiday camp in Wales instead. The story then goes completely berserk, with the Doctor and Mel having to contend with a love triangle between two locals and an alien space princess; a newly-hatched big green alien baby; two American intelligence agents; an enigmatic bee-keeper; motorbikes; rock and roll; and a squad of unhinged mercenaries led by Don Henderson at his most gloriously scene-consuming.

It's all unhinged, but kind of holds together and works, though the production values are desperately strained here. Sylvester McCoy continues to give an exceptional performance, but Mel is put on the back burner in favour of Sara Griffiths as Ray, who stands in as the Doctor's companion for this story. Griffiths' performance is 100% pure charm and she only misses out on being promoted to full companion because of the decision to film this story first and Dragonfire second, otherwise we'd have had Sara Griffiths as Ray rather than Sophie Aldred as Ace. Fortunately, thanks to the power of Big Finish Audio, Griffiths would get her stint as the Seventh Doctor's companion in a later audio series. 

The rest of the cast is mostly solid, but the script is a bit janky in places, and the new three-part format (each of Seasons 24 through 26 would feature two four-parters and two three-parters, all 25 minutes) is not really successful. The three-parters in this era would generally feel like two-parters stretched out too long or four-parters badly rushed, and this is definitely the latter. The script is also not helped by a bit of a tonal mismatch, with a fun, madcap feel that's rather undercut by some fleeting moments of Eric Saward-meets-Robert Holmes level of cynical ultraviolence. Still, entertaining, and the level of Welsh location filming and accents make this feel like the Russell T. Davies era arrived early.

Dragonfire rounds off the season by taking the Doctor and Mel to Iceworld, a shopping resort on the planet Svartos. Here they meet old friend Sabalom Glitz and a new ally, Ace, a teenager from Earth transported to Earth by a "time storm." The four decide to team up and track down a legendary treasure, said to be guarded by a dragon. However, they also run afoul of the enigmatic Kane, who wants to escape from the planet and return to his homeworld, no matter the cost.

Dragonfire is a bit Doctor Who-by-the-numbers, with lots of running around corridors and one of the cheapest monster costumes you'll ever see in your entire life. The script is also a bit of a mess, with main villain Kane (Edward Peel) spending a lot of his time getting in and out of the freezer, which is...odd. Tony Selby imbues Glitz with his traditional insouciant charm, and secondary villain Belazs (Patricia Quinn) gets way more character development and motivation than Kane. The story also relies a bit too much on the revelation (spoilers!) that the alien dragon is actually friendly, beyond which there isn't too much to the story.

However, the story is most notable for introducing the character of Ace. Almost uniquely for a Doctor Who companion, Ace is given a ton of characterisation and backstory here, with her status as an orphan, feeling out of time and place back on Earth and her love of chemistry and explosives being well-established. She is also depicted as a person of action, taking offensive and defensive action (usually involving nitro-9 explosives) whilst all Mel can do is stand and scream. The script was rushed towards the end, leaving writer Ian Briggs and script-editor Cartmel with several major plot holes, including the way that Ace got to Iceworld not making any sense. However, various Doctor Who fanzines (and the actual Doctor Who Magazine) saw fans furiously theorising that a larger plan was at work and there was a bigger story to Ace's arrival, something Cartmel was happy to run with in later seasons. Yes! This is the first long-running Doctor Who mystery box storyline, a novel idea for the Classic series but something the modern one would run with (perhaps a bit too much).

Season 24 of Doctor Who (***) is quite possibly the most underwhelming of the entire 26-season run of the Classic series. It's quite short and one story, Time and the Rani, is arguably one of the dozen or so worst Doctor Who stories of all time. Even its strongest moments, Paradise Towers and Delta and the Bannermen, would barely pass muster in a typical Third or Fourth Doctor season. But Sylvester McCoy gives a genuinely intriguing performance as the Doctor, and there's a lot of goodwill generated by the show bouncing back from the messy way the Colin Baker era ended. There's a notable improvement in the quality of video effects, and the new title sequence and music are both very solid.

But the decision to air opposite Britain's biggest series at the time, soap opera Coronation Street, was to damage the show's ratings permanently. And the show was about to find itself up against some formidable science fiction opposition working with a much higher budget that would leave Doctor Who looking very dated indeed: on the exact same day the fourth episode of Time and the Rani aired in the UK, the very first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation aired in the United States.

The season is available on DVD and Blu-Ray as well as streaming on BBC iPlayer in the UK and various services overseas.

• 24.1 - 24.4: Time and the Rani (*½)
• 24.5 - 24.8: Paradise Towers (***½)
• 24.9 - 24.11: Delta and the Bannermen (***)
• 24.12 - 24.14: Dragonfire (***)

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Doctor Who: Season 23 - The Trial of a Time Lord

The Doctor has been summoned by the Time Lords to a remote space station, there to stand trial again for interfering in the affairs of other worlds and times. His memory of recent events wiped (and his concern for his missing companion Peri growing), the Doctor has to formulate a defence in a trial where he doesn't know the rules, and the other side is not playing fair.

During the transmission of the twenty-second season of Doctor Who in early 1985, BBC controller Michael Grade tried to cancel the show. The resulting blowback of public opinion saw the BBC give it a stay of execution, an eighteen-month break to recover its creative mojo and come back swinging, but with a reduced count of just fourteen, 25-minute episodes, the shortest season in the show's history (and, in runtime at least, shorter than even the most recent Disney co-produced seasons).

Surprisingly, the BBC made no effort to refresh the show's creative team. Executive producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward remained in-situ (to even their own bemusement) and were given very little direction on how to handle the show's return. They did decide to dump the scripts they were developing, including the return of the Celestial Toymaker (that would have to wait for another forty years, in the event), the Ice Warriors and Sil, and instead developed a new story arc. They decided that, since the show was on trial by the BBC in reality, they would put the Doctor on trial in the story itself, an idea some (including star Colin Baker) found too cute, but does have a sort of perverse appeal.

Technically, Season 23 consists of one fourteen-part story called The Trial of a Time Lord, although this is a bit cheesy. More accurately, the season consists of three four-part stories that are linked by scenes back in the courtroom before the story is resolved in a concluding two-parter. These scenes are well-played by Colin Baker, the superb Lynda Bellingham as the Inquisitor and the accomplished Michael Jayston as the prosecutor, the Valeyard, though their use can be variable: sometimes commenting intelligently on the story, and at other times descending into acrimonious bickering.

The first four-parter, informally known as The Mysterious Planet, sees the Doctor and Peri arrive on the planet Ravolox, where they get involved in mysterious events revolving around two alien mercenaries, Sabalom Glitz and Dibber, the primitives who inhabit the surface of Ravolox and the more sophisticated society living in an underground society under the oversight of a robot with a very stupidly-sized head. The story is a classic Who culture clash playing off the different factions.

This is the effective swansong of legendary scriptwriter Robert Holmes, who had written or script-edited almost all of Doctor Who's all-time greatest stories and made a return in Season 21 with the epic The Caves of Androzani (and Season 22's okay Mark of the Rani). The Mysterious Planet was written when he was very ill, and is not among his best scripts. However, many of the Classic Holmes Hallmarks are present and correct. The secondary cast is very good, spearheaded by the Glitz-and-Dibber double act (Tony Selby and Glen Murphy sparking off one another superbly), and the robot villain is channelling 150% pure Douglas Adams energy. Joan Sims feels like she should be miscast as Queen Katryca, but instead it's a barmy bit of casting that works better than it should.

The story does descend into more running-around-corridors than it really should, and the Planet of the Apes-esque story elements are not as effective as they should be, but overall this is okay. A mid-tier slice of Robert Holmes whimsy, enlivened by some hints that things are not as they first appear. The story is enlivened by its opening visual effects sequence, a motion control tracking shot of the Time Lord space station with the TARDIS caught in its tractor beam, easily the most striking model shot in all twenty-six seasons of the original run of the show (and, given its insane cost, not one to be repeated again).

Mindwarp, the second serial, is a sequel-of-sorts to the preceding season's Vengeance on Varos and sees the return of the revolting Sil, played again with wicked relish by Nabil Shaban. The story this time revolves around Sil's boss, Kiv (a more stately performance by Christopher Ryan), who is dying and whose brain needs to be transplanted to another body, resulting in a lot of scheming as he looks for another host candidate, whilst simultaneously trying to take economic advantage of a planet ruled by King Yrcanos, played with scene-stealing thunder by Brian Blessed.

Yes! After many years, Doctor Who was finally able to snatch up a guest role by the legendary King of Shout himself, between his more standard activities of climbing K2 equipped only with spoons and a mask to drain more oxygen than normal from him, for the challenge. Blessed not only steals the story, he packs it up and slings it over his shoulder before travelling to Mars purely under his own motive power. Your tolerance for the story will entirely depend on your tolerance for Brian Blessed at his absolutely least-restrained and most unhinged. "WE MUST FIND WEAPONS, SUCH AS THOSE THAT TURN OUR ENEMIES INTO SLIME! WE'LL PILE THE HEADS OF OUR ENEMIES BEFORE US LIKE MELONS IN A HEAP!"

If your TV speakers survive that ordeal, there are some additional pluses, like a fully throttleable performance by Patrick Ryecart as the brain-transplanting doctor Crozier, and, of course, that ending. The ending to Mindwarp was, for six weeks anyway, Doctor Who at its absolutely most mind-blowingly tragic, horrible and shocking, far moreso than when Adric wiped out the dinosaurs with his own mediocrity (and several million tons of exploding antimatter attached to a starship travelling at insane velocity, but still). It's one of the very rare times when the show feels like it's gone out of control and doing something fresh, dangerous and mind-blowing, all helped by Nicola Bryant giving her best performance to date. Of course, the show manages to torpedo even that a few weeks later, but it's still a brain-melting end to a Classic Doctor Who story that not just breaks its normal rules, but atomises them.

Unfortunately, outside of the ending, some solid performances and Blessed's Defcon 1-level shouting, the story suffers a little in pacing. Whilst Shaban is outstanding, Sil doesn't actually have much to do in the story given the villain duties are being carried out by Kiv and Crozier, and Blessed is dominating everything else. There's also more the whiff of panto about this season than any prior, and this story is probably the most panto-like of the lot. Still, it's quite an unusual Doctor Who story in many respects.

Terror of the Vervoids is, perhaps to make up for Mindwarp, almost an aggressively normal story in comparison. The Doctor and new companion Mel have arrived on a space liner transporting a bunch of people through space. Murders take place, and the Doctor - who is handily known to the captain - has to investigate.

This story isn't the best-regarded, which is interesting as it may be the strongest of the season. The standard murder mystery plot in a constrained setting is a good fit for Doctor Who, making it odd it hasn't been used more often, and the decision to have the Doctor already known to the captain, thus avoiding two episodes of the Doctor being the prime suspect, is a very smart way of sidestepping that problem, allowing him to just investigate. The mystery is reasonable, and the cast of characters who may be involved is well-drawn, including a splendid guest turn from Honor Blackman (Cathy Gale from The Avengers, an early genre rival of Doctor Who's).

The story probably gets its reputation from the introduction of Bonnie Langford as Mel. Rotating off the popular Nicola Bryant in favour of a musical star and dancer not known for her heavyweight acting deeply annoyed the fans at the time, but it has to be said that time has been kind to Langford in the role. Her more recent appearances in the modern show have been strong, and her performance in Season 23 is actually very credibly good. It's only in Season 24 where the writers don't seem to know what to do with her that she risks becoming grating. In this story she's bossy and takes charge, but this is a fresh change from Peri, who was often far too passive in the face of the Doctor's bluster. The story also suffers from the mystery element giving way to a more standard "monsters running amok" ending, although the Vervoids are at least a striking and memorable design, and their motivation - survival - is effective.

The end of the story is also interesting, with the Doctor backed into a corner and having to morally question his decisions in a way that he didn't all that often in the classic series, in the process inadvertently giving the Valeyard the ammunition he needs to close his case and push for the Doctor's execution.

As people I think more commonly know, the season was supposed to end with a two-parter co-written by Robert Holmes and Eric Saward, but Holmes passed away having delivered only a rough draft of the first episode of the two. Saward and Nathan-Turner clashed horrendously over the finale, which ended on a cliffhanger with the Doctor and Valeyard locked in combat and falling into space, which Nathan-Turner felt was a gift to allow the BBC to cancel the show. Saward, who wanted to honour Holmes's dying request to end the story that way, was not to be moved and quit on the spot, taking his own draft for the final episode with him. Nathan-Turner had to call in Vervoids writers Pip and Jane Baker to pen the finale with no recourse to Saward's script at all.

The resulting two-parter, The Ultimate Foe, is not fantastic, and clearly had some major writing compromises going on, but it holds together better than you might expect (as even Saward had to admit many years later). The first part recalls The Deadly Assassin, with the Doctor and Valeyard doing battle amidst surreal imagery inside the Matrix, the Time Lord computer system. The second part sees the Doctor joined by Sabalom Glitz, Mel and even the Master as they team up to take down the Valeyard. It's okay, with some solid scares (the cliffhanger with the Doctor being sucked into quicksand is memorable, and the resolution quite amusing), but it wraps up the entire season arc far too perfunctorily, and somehow manages to introduce a new cliffhanger that the show never resolves again, whilst also retconning the splendidly dark ending of Mindwarp out of existence.

Overall, Season 23 of Doctor Who (***) is the definition of okay-but-underwhelming. None of the four stories are absolutely terrible or unwatchable, but it is overall less than the sum of its parts. It's a season straining almost visibly under the weight of behind-the-scenes chaos, but managing to deliver some watchable entertainment for all of that.

The season is available on DVD and Blu-Ray as well as streaming on BBC iPlayer in the UK and various services overseas.

• 23.1 - 23.4: The Mysterious Planet (***)
• 23.5 - 23.8: Mindwarp (***)
• 23.9 - 23.12: Terror of the Vervoids (***½)
• 23.13 - 23.14: The Ultimate Foe (**½)

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Doctor Who: Season 22

The Doctor continues his adventures in time and space in his new sixth incarnation, along with his American companion Peri. The Doctor's latest adventures see him crossing wits with the Daleks, Cybermen, the Master and the Rani, among others.

The twenty-second season of Doctor Who aired in 1985 and came at a strange time for the show's fortunes. Peter Davison had departed the previous season as the Fifth Doctor and we'd already experienced a full serial with Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor, one in which he'd memorably tried to kill his assistant Peri in the throes of post-regenerative madness. Fans were sceptical of the new incarnation and the BBC was suffering a series of renewed complaints about the show being too dark and too violent. The new BBC1 controller, Michael Grade, also hated the show and controversially decided to cancel it after the production of the twenty-second season, sparking massive public outcry (and a charity single so horrible that all record of it needs to be struck from existence). The BBC commuted Doctor Who's death sentence to instead a longer-than-normal hiatus, mandating changes to production and improvements in quality for its return (orders that were, arguably not really followed through on).

This was all too late to impact Season 22 itself though. The show returned to airing on Saturday nights, its spiritual home, with a new format. Instead of most serials consisting of four 25-minute episodes (through, between the credits and recaps, the amount of actual new material in an episode averaged 20-22 minutes), this season consisted mostly of serials of two 45-minute episodes, with one coming in at three. The season was still the same length as almost every season since Jon Pertwee's debut in 1970, but how that length was assigned had changed.

Whether it improved things or not is questionable: script editor Eric Saward was keen, feeling it enabled a longer setup of the plot and characters, with less of a mad rush to get the Doctor involved, but fans seemed to feel that this could mean the Doctor not joining the action until too late in the day. The longer setups were sometimes effective, but also sometimes meant a rushed conclusion instead. There was also the practical consideration that the BBC also asked for 25-minute edits of the episodes for overseas transmission, meaning that a mini-cliffhanger had to occur halfway through every episode anyway, so in some cases the longer episodes just feel like two standard episodes squashed together. Still, an interesting idea and one that would be picked up again by the modern show when it began in 2005.

Things initiate with Attack of the Cybermen. The Cybermen had impressed with their return in force in Season 19's Earthshock and their short appearances in the anniversary special The Five Doctors, so bringing them back again was a no-brainer. John Nathan-Turner was interested in bringing in the topical element of Halley's Comet, whose return in 1986 was being hugely hyped up, and also in doing a story that tied in with Doctor Who's past. Fan consultant Ian Levine was talked to extensively about the ideas for the story, resulting in a decision to bring in elements from The Tenth Planet (the first Cyberman story from Season 4, airing in 1966) and Tomb of the Cybermen (a Season 5 story from 1967). The problem was that in 1985, Doctor Who fans did not have access to on-demand streaming or media releases, and neither story was available on VHS (The Tenth Planet missing its final episode and Tomb of the Cybermen being completely missing until its fortuitous discovery and return to the BBC archive seven years after this story transmitted). Levine also suggested some random references to the very first Doctor Who story, An Unearthly Child, such as a return to the Totter's Lane junkyard. Finally, Saward was keen to reintroduce the character of Lytton from the preceding season's Resurrection of the Daleks.

The result is a story that is belaboured and bowed by the weight of continuity, although it ironically suffers less from this today, when you can actually watch most of the those preceding Cyber-stories on the BBC iPlayer without too much trouble. It's again heavy on action, with lots of exploding Cybermen and fierce laser gun battles, and this can be fun (and certainly a change from the normal problem of Doctor Who monsters being indestructible to normal weapons) but threatens to be monotonous. The story also suffers from a bit too many elements (a common Saward trope) with Halley's Comet, the fixing of the TARDIS chameleon circuit, the Lytton story, the Cryon story, the Cybermen machinations, a failed bank heist and the Doctor and Peri still trying to find their post-regenerative footing all vying for screen time. For all that, the story actually holds together reasonably well and the pacing is certainly very brisk. Production values are reasonable, for once, although the Cyber Controller (reinstated in the story at John Nathan-Turner's insistent, somewhat redundantly) is wasted.

The story also marks the continuation of Nicola Bryant being asked to walk around in ridiculously revealing outfits (her pink leotard is a bit incongruous in the London sewers), culminating in even the Cybermen thinking it's a bit much and insisting she change into something more sensible for their trip to Telos. When Bryant is allowed to actually act as Peri and is given some meaty dialogue or emotions to play, she does very well, but these opportunities are few and far between in the story. The story also fails to capitalise on something it only realises in its closing minutes, that the Doctor has badly misjudged Lytton and failed to realise he is capable of redemption, leading to bitter regret. For all that Saward has a mixed reputation in Who fan circles, he does at least try to make his guest characters more complex, realistic characters. The casting for this story is also superb, with a brilliant turn in particular from Maurice Colbourne as Lytton and Brian Glover as Griffiths, though once again Saward seems inclined to kill characters the second they stop serving a story function, a trope which is starting to verge on the comedic. An interesting story, but a messy one with a lot of unfulfilled potential.

The second story, Vengeance on Varos, is stronger and cleverer. The Doctor arrives on a planet where politicians have to keep their constituents happy not just around the time of elections, but every single day. Instant popularity polls are carried out for every decision and if the elected officials are not up to snuff, they can be punished with pain or even death. The satire verges on the Malcolm Hulkeian (though its actually newcomer-to-the-show Phillip Martin writing), with the secondary characters as well-drawn as any Robert Holmes story. Particularly, utterly magnificent is Nabil Shaban as Sil, the most repulsive villain in Doctor Who history with easily the best prosthetics work. Martin Jarvis is also very strong as the Governor, and Jason Connery provides some rare eye candy for the other side as he is forced to spend half the story in a state of undress. Game of Thrones fans may also spot a young Owen Teale (Alliser Thorne) as a villainous guard.

The story is also notable for its wonderfully modern-feeling metaplot, as much of the adventure is recorded and transmitted to the people of Varos as it unfolds, leading to some superb commentary from the characters watching the story unfold. In a stronger season, the story would perhaps not stand out as much, but arguably it's the strongest or joint-strongest story of the season, so is more notable.

The Mark of the Rani introduces the titular Rani, a renegade Time Lord who, unlike the Master, is not totally evil but instead amoral, interested only in pure research. A superb setup sees the Doctor and Peri arrive in an early 19th Century mining village riven by tensions between the local industrialist and Luddite workers scared of being replaced by machines (oddly topical!), with the Rani (a barnstorming performance by Kate O'Mara) manipulating the situation to her advantage. Unfortunately, the story takes a bit of a nosedive due to the interference of Anthony Ainley's Master, who feels very awkwardly shoehorned into the script. Pip and Jane Baker, not the most popular Doctor Who writers, actually deliver some good work in their debut, the Rani's TARDIS is a very good bit of slightly surreal design (with dinosaur embryos suspended around a central console that arguably puts the Doctor's to shame) and there's both exceptional location filming and some impressive stuntwork. The over-acting and cheesy dialogue for the Master derail (pun intended) what could have been a much stronger piece. Still, it's watchably entertaining and nobody can take over a scene like O'Mara can.

The Two Doctors came from John Nathan-Turner feeling that The Five Doctors was a big hit, so he asked Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines if they wanted to come back for a further story down the line. The story sees the Second Doctor and Jamie running afoul of a conspiracy between the villainous Androgums and the Sontarans, with the Sixth Doctor and Peri showing up to lend a hand. The story is again enhanced by a wonderful guest cast, led by Troughton and Hines at their best, but with Blake's 7's immortally villainous Jacqueline Pearce threatening to steal every scene she's in. John Stratton, Laurence Payne, James Saxon and Carmen Gomez all deliver great performances in possibly one of Who's strongest-ever guest casts, all with a script by the returning Robert Holmes, unleashing devastatingly witty lines.

All of this is extremely good, but the direction is a bit pedestrian, and the story's length - at three 45-minute episodes this is the longest Doctor Who story to air since Season 16's The Armageddon Factor - sees a fair bit of filler added in. The Sontarans also feel a bit pointless, and the story could have easily taken place without them. The location filming in Seville is beautiful and they clearly want to show off the locations by having characters wander around the city and the surrounding Spanish countryside for a bit longer than is optimal, whilst this probably the most egregious story for using Peri as eye candy, although she is also given a bit more do in the story than most of her instalments, which is a relief. It's also clear that Patrick Troughton is having an absolute whale of time, with formidable comic timing and some of the most outrageously good eyebrow-acting you will ever see. His passing just a couple of years after this story was very sad. It just feels the story is overlong and a bit flat in its direction, otherwise this could have been the season highlight.

Timelash, on the other hand, is clearly the season lowlight. The idea isn't bad, with the Doctor returning to a planet he has visited previously to see it crushed under the heel of the villainous Borad, who likes to punish people by throwing them into the time vortex. There's a bunch of rebels who need to rebel (mostly by running around corridors, in the time-proven manner) and need the Doctor's help to do so, and a fascinating secondary villain performance by Blake's 7 star Paul Darrow, here delivering an over-the-top performance that sort of works (reportedly to get back at Colin Baker for a scene-stealing turn on the third season of Blake's 7 five years earlier). The problem is that the story is thin, the secondary cast is undistinguished, and the gimmick of having a temporary companion who turns out to be a famous person is under-utilised. There's also some appalling effects, bad sets and some flat performances (reportedly the result of Nathan-Turner pulling his stars out of rehearsal to go and do PR in the States) resulting in a story that is, at best, deeply insipid.

The season ends with Revelation of the Daleks, an interesting and offbeat story by Saward. Some of his tropes are present here, but the story is less action-packed and more thoughtful than normal, with a well-drawn secondary cast with some great performances, particularly by Terry Molloy, Eleanor Bron, William Gaunt and Clive Swift. Alexei Sayle and Jenny Tomasin give more acquired performances, interesting but more arguable in their success. It's a bit of an odd story with Davros harvesting the dead to turn into Daleks and various factions in the mortuary of Tranquil Repose feuding with one another. The Doctor and Peri spend more than half the story just getting into the building, leaving little time to formulate plans to defeat Davros, and the Daleks are at their least interesting here, despite the great paintjob for Davros's Imperial Daleks (who will be revisited more formidably in Season 25's Remembrance of the Daleks).

There are some really effective horror moments, as well as black comedy, and Saward even remembers to leave a few characters alive at the end so the Doctor can pretend to have achieved an actual victory. There are some stupid moments, with the episode one cliffhanger (in which Davros engineers a polystyrene statue to fall onto the Doctor to not kill him, just scare him) being one of the most underwhelming and weirdly-contrived in the show's history. Still, Graeme Harper's direction is outstanding, the musical score is superb and the horror vibe is for once effectively melded into a Doctor Who story, with some good location filming and a more chill relationship between the Doctor and Peri being much more welcome.

Season 22 of Doctor Who (***½) is perfectly watchable, if rarely outstanding. Colin Baker improves as the Doctor over the course of the season, and every story bar Timelash has some merit to it. Even Timelash arguably falls into the "so bad it's good" category thanks to the sheer volume of scene-chewing going on by Paul Darrow. Nobody's going to call it the best season of Who ever, but if anything it's probably slightly underrated.

The season is available on DVD and Blu-Ray as well as streaming on BBC iPlayer in the UK and various services overseas.

• 22.1 - 22.2: Attack of the Cybermen (***½)
• 22.3 - 22.4: Vengeance on Varos (****)
• 22.5 - 22.6: The Mark of the Rani (***½)
• 22.7 - 22.9: The Two Doctors (***½)
• 22.10 - 22.11: Timelash (*½)
• 22.12 - 22.13: Revelation of the Daleks (****)

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Doctor Who: Season 21

The Doctor's adventures continue, but are getting bloodier and darker, to the consternation of companions old and new. As the Fifth Doctor's time draws to an end, his regeneration sparks the arrival of a more assertive Doctor...and a more dangerously unpredictable one.

The twentieth anniversary year of Doctor Who had been a great success, but with perhaps a slight pall over proceedings: after just two years in the role, Peter Davison announced he would be departing after his third season. Producer John Nathan-Turner had hoped he would last at least a year or two longer, but Davison had followed the advice from Second Doctor Patrick Troughton, that three seasons in the role was optimal.

For Season 21, the production team had to introduce a new Doctor, a new companion and shake up the show's atmosphere and tone. By this time the positive viewer reception to (very relatively) high-octane, high-action stories like Earthshock and The Five Doctors had led script editor Eric Saward that this approach could be explored in more stories, despite the production difficulties and costs incurred.

First up was Warriors of the Deep, a political-action thriller set on an underwater seabase in the year 2084. The Silurians and Sea Devils return for the first time since the early Jon Pertwee era, on a mission to capture the base and use its proton missiles to trigger a global holocaust, which the Silurians and Sea Devils stand to benefit from. It's a strong premise, especially with some nice political intrigue on the base between representatives from the two different power blocs on the verge of war.

Unfortunately the story was stymied by a formidable foe: Margaret Thatcher. The then-British Prime Minister called a surprise general election just as the show went into production, which meant that BBC News needed the extra studio space for its election coverage. Warriors had to wrap two weeks ahead of schedule, meaning that shooting and rehearsal time was slashed, not to mention set construction time, costume fittings and prosthetics.

Knowing that may make the resulting show more forgivable. If anything, the okay model work, excellent Silurian prosthetics, okay Sea Devil ones and funky futuristic makeup and sets might impress more knowing they were thrown together in five seconds flat. But even they can't help the Myrka, a terrible creature design effectively realised as a pantomime horse, nor the poorly-choreographed action sequences where nobody knows how use cover or flanking. The story is also decidedly gratuitous in a way the Holmes/Hinchcliffe era flirted with but never went all-in on, with several characters killed just for the sake of it rather than because it makes sense. The Fifth Doctor has some good moments, as does Turlough when he is drafted as a soldier, but in the face of production limitations, the story never really has a chance to come together. It also destroys credibility that the Doctor and his companions would be accepted into helping the seabase crew so easily given the political and military tension. There are some good moments - the Silurians are generally used effectively - but the story is less than the sum of its parts.

The Awakening starts well with a very intriguing mystery, with a contemporary English village where the people are stuck re-enacting battles from the past with unusual vigour. There are some very strong guest performances, and the realisation of the villainous Malus behind a wall is one of Doctor Who's more striking cliffhangers (and the vfx for realising the creature are impressive by 1984 standards). Unfortunately, the story is slight, the resolution slightly pat and the latter part of the story feels like a direct retread of The Dæmons. But it's enjoyable enough and quite short.

Frontios starts off with the TARDIS arriving on a planet in the remote future, where the colonists might be the last humans alive in the entire universe, a concept so good that Modern Doctor Who has used it twice (in Utopia and Ascension of the Cybermen). The setup, in which the TARDIS is apparently destroyed, has also fuelled more than one season of Moffat-era Doctor Who. As a Chris Bidmead story, there are some hard SF (or at least harder-SF-than-normal) ideas in play, and the Tractators are a fabulous creature design, and mostly executed well on-screen. The guest cast is very good, with an early role for future British comedy and drama stalwart Jeff Rawle, as well as a great guest role for Lesley Dunlop, whose character Norma strikes up a formidable team with Turlough. The story falters in its home stretch, though, and may have been stronger as a three-parter. The ease with which the TARDIS subplot is resolved is a bit credibility-straining, to say the least.

Resurrection of the Daleks is the big, crowd-pleasing return of the Daleks in force for the first time since Season 17's underwhelming Destiny of the Daleks. The story is pleasingly epic, with action unfolding simultaneously in the then-contemporary London Docklands and a space station in the distant future, where the Daleks are trying to liberate their creator Davros and gain his help in defeating a Movellan virus that has devastated the species. Davros, still sore over being betrayed by his creations, is willing to help, but is also playing his own game to ensure the Daleks are totally loyal to only him. The result is a complex web of competing aims, complicated by the intervention of British soldiers, the crew of the prison and a squad of mercenaries employed by the Daleks and led by the redoubtable Lytton, who quickly realises he is unlikely to survive to get his payment.

The story has a lot going on and a large cast, although given Saward's tendency to murder characters the second they cease to be of use, the size of the cast drops quickly. Maurice Colbourne arguably steals the show as the mercenary Lytton, though Saward seems a bit too enamoured of him and keeps him around longer than he should have. Leslie Grantham is effective as Davros' reluctant minion Kiston, and it's amusing to think it was his performance in this story led to his casting as "Dirty" Den on EastEnders a few months after this story aired. A cast-against-type Rodney Bewes does his best as Stien, and is excellent in some scenes and terrible in others, though generally only when the dialogue is not up to the task ("I can't stand the confusion in my mind!"). The real plaudits go to Terry Molloy as Davros. With Michael Wisher from Genesis of the Daleks not available and David Gooderson having impressed nobody in Destiny, Molloy does a bang-up job of properly succeeding Wisher with aplomb.

Again, Turlough gets some good stuff to do, but Tegan spends a large chunk of it out of commission with concussion before leaving at the end. They try to build up her departure by showing her revulsion at the growing number of fatalities, but it's a still a bit undersold. It's also annoying to learn that Janet Fielding would have stayed longer, but Nathan-Turner didn't want a companion to be around longer than her Doctor, which is a frankly bizarre rule. Resurrection is bleak, bordering on the nihilistic, but the plotting is clever, and the continuation of the very slowly-unfolded "Davros Saga" is satisfying (fortunately, we won't have to wait as long for the next two parts).

Also, a minor point of historical trivia, but Resurrection of the Daleks is the first Doctor Who story to air as 45-minute episodes, due to the need to condense the viewing schedule to make room for coverage of the 1984 Olympics. This format, of course, would be used again the following season before becoming standard in Modern Who.

Planet of Fire is a bit of an odd story. It writes out Turlough, but John Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward seemingly realised at the last minute that despite introducing Turlough in Season 20 in a blaze of mystery, they'd proceeded to do nothing much with him or his enigmatic backstory. As a result we get a full origin story and background download for Turlough, at the same time as also having to write out the robot companion Kamelion (introduced only in the previous season's The King's Demons and promptly never mentioned again) and write in new companion Peri, played by Nicola Bryant. Bryant, a solid actress, has little to work with here as Peri's only characterisation note is "American." There are hints of a strange relationship between her and her stepfather which are never explored further, and Bryant has little to do but walk around in a bikini in Doctor Who's most blatant nod towards audience-boosting eye candy yet.

The story does use a lot of location filming in Lanzarote, which is very effective as both the actual Lanzarote and the alien planet Sarn. The sweeping location vistas are more impressive than almost anything that we've seen before in the series. The story also makes surprisingly good use of Peter Wyngarde, a British actor normally noted for his flamboyance and screen-chewing tendencies in shows like Department S and Jason King. Wyngarde adopts a more subdued tone here, inspired by Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, and his performance is impressive, probably more than the story deserves.

As it stands the good worldbuilding, reasonable pacing and stunning location shooting is let down the Crushingly Inevitable Return of the Master, though it does gain a point for the legendary scene where Peri almost kills him with her shoe, which would have automatically qualified for the most ignoble death of a recurring villain in the whole show.

Not sure how to follow that up, Nathan-Turner and Saward decided to call in the big guns: Robert Holmes. The legendary Doctor Who writer had not written for the show since his last turn on The Power of Kroll in Season 16, which he'd felt had been underwhelming due to the demand of him to include a monster in the story. Lines of communication had reopened when he was courted to write the 20th Anniversary Special, although that job had eventually gone to Terrance Dicks. Holmes agreed to write a story for the following season instead, and after consulting with Nathan-Turner and Saward it was also decided this story would be the swansong of Peter Davison's Doctor.

The result is a masterpiece, absolute Peak Doctor Who. The Caves of Androzani comfortably goes toe-to-toe with the likes of Genesis of the Daleks, City of Death and The Ark in Space as a candidate for the greatest Doctor Who story of all time. It's the synergy between Holmes' relentless script and the absolute stellar direction of Graeme Harper (whom, many years later would return to work on the modern show) which catches fire and doesn't let up. The guest cast is outrageously good, from Christopher Gable's genuinely disturbing turn as Sharaz Jek to John Normington's charismatically evil Morgus to Martin Cochrane's turn as the slightly bumbling general Chellack. British drama stalwart Robert Glenister is also outstanding in two roles, and Barbara Kinghorn does a lot with a tiny part.

The story has excellent production values, almost rivalling Planet of Fire despite the much less glamorous location filming, a phenomenal musical score and some unique conceits, like Morgus breaking the fourth wall to directly address the audience with the reasoning for his actions. The story also arguably has two of the show's best cliffhangers, and easily Davison's best performance as the Doctor as the sheer magnitude of what he has to do to save Peri and himself fully hits him and then drives him off the edge of reason, culminating in him gleefully crashes a starship at high speed into a planet with only limited concern for the other passengers (who are, to be fair, all arseholes). The regeneration scene is also superb, with the Fifth Doctor going out in the diametric opposite way to the Fourth, who sacrificed himself to save the entire universe. The Fifth instead sacrifices himself in the dark, for just one life, someone he's only just met. We finally get to see the Fifth Doctor that could have been instead of the slightly more fuzzily-defined one we ended up with: Peter Davison was a superb actor but only occasionally had scripts that rose to the occasion.

Because John Nathan-Turner was a bit of a lunatic, he decided to give the Sixth Doctor a full story to bed in before ending the season, resulting in the notorious The Twin Dilemma. More than one Doctor Who Magazine, online or fanzine poll had rated The Caves of Androzani as the greatest Doctor Who story of all time (new and old) and The Twin Dilemma as the very worst (new and old), which lowers expectations so much that it's actually pretty impossible for the story to meet them.

The Twin Dilemma is indeed chronically underwhelming. The main plot, about twin genius teenage mathematicians (think of Wesley Crusher, but two of them, written to be even more annoying, and played by far worse non-actors) kidnapped by a giant slug to blow up a solar system, is bonkers enough, but kind of entertaining. The guest cast is okay, though the elderly Maurice Denham might be a bit too overstretched by the requirements of the role. Most of the other actors are fine, and Doctor Who trivia fans might note the casting here of a very young Kevin McNally as heroic space pilot Hugo Lang; McNally would return to the franchise thirty-seven years later as the fan-favourite Professor Jericho in Flux.

Where the story hits a stumbling block (made of razor blades) is its characterisation of the Sixth Doctor. The Doctor is shown to be completely unstable after his regeneration, almost throttles Peri, cowers behind her to avoid capture, and spends a large amount of the story uninterested in what's going on because he wants to become a hermit. Colin Baker does his best - with gusto! - to meet the demands of the script, but you can't help but feel this was all just a really bad idea. Making the audience hate the Doctor is the dumbest possible thing you can do in Doctor Who, and then leaving fans on the between-season break not sure if they want to see this Doctor continue could have been fatal to the programme (some might argue it almost was). The main beneficiary of these scenes is Nicola Bryant, who plays Peri's confusion, revulsion but ultimate strength as she angrily defies the crazed Doctor and then the alien enemies of the story in a rather impressive way. But although the story is weak, it's probably not as poor as The Horns of Nimon, or a fair bit of Seasons 23 and 24.

Season 21 of Doctor Who (***½) is all over the place. It has two of the weakest stories in the show's run for some years (Warriors of the Deep and The Twin Dilemma) and one of the all-time absolute classics (The Caves of Androzani) as well as a solid Dalek story (Resurrection of the Daleks) and possibly three of the most forgettable and least-discussed Doctor Who stories of the entire franchise (The Awakening, Frontios and Planet of Fire). But it's never fundamentally unwatchable (though the opening episode of The Twin Dilemma comes close), Davison has his best-ever moments as the Doctor, and it's quite remarkable that the season dedicates most of its length to sequentially writing out regular characters and/or writing them in, resulting in a systematic replacement of the entire show's cast from start to finish, something most other shows simply can't do. Ultimately, a watchable and fascinating - if not always for the right reasons - season.

The season is available on DVD as well as streaming on BBC iPlayer in the UK and various services overseas. The season is scheduled for release on Blu-Ray in 2026.

21.1 - 21.4: Warriors of the Deep (**½)

21.5 - 21.6: The Awakening (***)

21.7 - 21.10: Frontios (***½)

21.11 - 21.12: Resurrection of the Daleks (****) (2x 45-minute episodes)

21.13 - 21.16: Planet of Fire (***)

21.17 - 21.20: The Caves of Androzani (*****)

21.21 - 21.24: The Twin Dilemma (**½)

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