Castrovalva
(Season 19, Dr 5 with Adric, Nyssa and Tegan, 4-12/1/1982, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Christopher H Bidmead, director: Fiona Cumming)
Rank: 72
'Ah so Doctor, you escaped from Castrovalva? Well try some other paintings for size: The Tardis is being run over by a train in Turner's 'Rain. Steam and Speed', there's a melted watch attacking you in Dali's 'The Persistence Of memory', there's a pile of Andy Warhol soup cans set to fall on your head and I've teamed up with The Sea Devils for Monet's 'Lilypads' and 'The Silence' for 'The Scream'. Now all I have to do is leave in my Tardis I parked in this Magritte painting and...what? 'This is not a Tardis?' Just a one-dimensional drawing of one? What's happened to my dimensional stabiliser? Curse you Doctor!...'
In which the Doctor, who isn’t quite formed yet, visits a world that doesn’t really exist and is nearly defeated by an old enemy playing a fictional version of himself: ‘Castrovalva’ has a unique feel about it, as ghostly and ethereal and as rule-breaking a story as any in the show’s catalogue. It’s the perfect accompaniment to the 4th Doctor’s demise at the end of ‘Logopolis’, another place that on the one hand is made up of pure mathematics and ‘block computer transfers’ but on the other is pure imagination, a story that’s right at the join between these two universes. Many Dr Who stories are thoughtful, like crossword puzzles to solve interactively, but this is the only one that’s a Rubik’s cube, a set of different sections impossibly linked that only make sense viewed from the ‘right’ angle (with a dash of ‘Snakes and Ladders’ thrown in for the way directions defy all logic). Dr Who at its most cerebral, it’s as brave and as daring as any story and the fact that it happens at the start of a new series, with a whole new series, as the last-minute replacement for another script that fell through at the last minute, makes the liberties it takes all the more courageous. That story was ‘Project Zeta-Sigma’ by ‘Meglos’ writers John Flannagan and Andrew McCulloch and, despite starting at the exact same place, with the 5th Doctor waking up in the 4th Doctor’s scarf and clothes at the end of ‘Logopolis’, couldn’t have been more different: it reads very like what ‘Warriors Of The Deep’ will become, a cold war parable between two super-powers with nuclear arms locked in a stalemate. Only they just happen to be invisible. And they live in an invisible spaceship. What was intended as a budget saving device confused the heck out of producer John Nathan-Turner who thought that all they could put on screen would be a blank screen while some voices talked and asked them to have another go, moving the story to the end of the season (to the slot that ‘Time-Flight’ had) before dropping it altogether. Intended to be a very template Dr Who story that was different precisely because this Doctor couldn’t yet hit the ground running, it’s the source of the Doctor’s choice of outfit: something in the story reminds Tegan of cricket uniforms, so she comments on them to the utter confusion of Adric and Nyssa who only know crickets as insects and picture them in cricketting outfits – it takes the Doctor coming out of the Tardis wardrobe in cricketing whites to explain the mistake. Needing someone who knew the series and could write for it in a hurry, JNT went to recently departed script editor Bidmead to ask him to come up with something – anything – with none of the usual restrictions, except that it had to feature the newly regenerated Doctor being slightly out of his depth.
Wanting to make the most of not having those restrictions. Bidmead got to thinking what he could possibly throw at this new Doctor. His inspiration seems to have come from the rest of his conversation with JNT when he asked over ‘old friends’ (that he’d last seen only a few months ago but hadn’t expected to see again so soon). One of these was BBC head of serials Graeme MacDonald: it was common practice for the Who producer and script editor to meet with him every so often with outlines of the forthcoming stories to get final confirmation and make any last-minute changes. Bidmead had been tickled by a confession JNT had made about the Escher paintings that hung in MacDonald’s office, with their impossible architecture and mind-bending perspectives. JNT even asked Bidmead to sit on a different side of the desk so JNT wouldn’t have to look them (in the producer’s words ‘art should be soothing, not give one a headache!’) Though he agreed and took it as the good-natured joke it was meant to be, secretly Bidmead fundamentally disagreed with the producer: he loved art that made him think and changed the way he viewed the world and he thought a logic problem like this was exactly the sort of thing Dr Who should be doing. Only because this is the 1980s era of DW he doesn’t send the Tardis off to meet Escher (as would have happened in the 1960s or the 21st century) – he sends the Tardis inside a world that’s just like the painting, a world that (spoilers) it turns out is mathematically impossible and is complete and utter fiction, a figment of mathematic equations. Instead, partly as an in-joke, but partly as a last-gasp attempt to convey his vision or the series during his time as script-editor (when he tried to bring more maths and science and logic to the Whoniverse) Bidmead set about creating a world that wasn’t really a world and which defied all logic, with similarly impossible architecture.
Bidmead went away and read up on Escher, the Dutch artist who’d moved to Italy and set many of his paintings there. One he particularly liked was Escher’s simplest, a simple drawing of a tower the artist gave the made-up name ‘Castrovalva’, the name of an actual town in the district of Abruzzio. Imagining the sort of world that might exist inside Bidmead ‘borrowed’ imagery from several other paintings: ‘Bovert’ (‘High and Low’) which features different views of the same building rendered in the same way as a double-exposed photograph so that both existed at once; ‘Trappenhuis’ (‘House Of Stairs’) which features a staircase going up and down simultaneously, depending which way you viewed it; ‘Klimmen en Dalen’ (not ‘Come On Dalek’ as you might think but ‘Ascending and Descending’) where people go up and down a staircase, impossibly, side-by-side without acknowledging the other; ‘Relativiteit’ (‘Relativity’) – yet another staircase but divided into three that run parallel but not intersecting); ‘Watervall’ (‘Waterfall’) in which water somehow flows, impossibly, up as well as down; ‘Tekenen’ (‘Drawing Hands’) in which two hands come ut of a drawing, pen in fingers, and draw each other and ‘Belvadere’ (a place name) which features the front and back of a building in the same place simultaneously, while beside a man sits staring at cuboid, looking puzzled (replicated on screen here in the scene where the Doctor, sitting at a park bench, first begins to wonder about the realities of this world). As you might have guessed, all of these play havoc with ideas of perspective and mess around with your perception of reality. One painting that’s never mentioned but ‘feels’ as if it should have been an inspiration, by the way, is ‘Self Portrait In Spherical Mirror’, where Escher’s own hand contains a ball where he sits in his own library staring out at the viewer, looking to all the world like one of the ‘Brian Of Morbius/Timeless Children’ pre-doctors.
On a level even above that, however, this story plays around with one of Escher’s favourite concepts, that of ‘recursion’ – something we would think of as a branch of postmodernism today, a painting that knows it’s a painting. It’s a bit subtler than that though: it’s an idea impossible to sum up in a single sentence but in Escher’s paintings at least is a mathematical concept that deliberately confuses the idea of something with the method used to make it, so that something complete can be hidden inside something bigger that only seems complete, part of an open-ended cycle that further blurs the line between reality and fantasy. Those hands drawing each other is a case in point: the left hand simply can’t be creating the right hand because the left hand itself only exists because the right hand created it. This is very like the many time-travelling stories in Who where something only exists in the present because somebody in the future went back to the past to create it. For a series that came up with the concept of the Tardis its actually a surprise they hadn’t tried something impossible-except-in-theory like this before. A lot of the language in this story is ‘recursive’ too, full of small concrete statements hidden in much larger abstract ones that sound like they make sense but are actually contradictory nonsense when you sit down to study them (‘How do I know you’re telling the truth? ‘Because, sir, I maintain I am, and I am a man of my word’). Nothing in this world is quite concrete and every question people ask about this world only make it less defined because what we’re told is more and more contradictory. Sadly nobody uses ‘recursive humour’ though (and to understand what recursive humour is, you, uhh, need to understand how recursive humour works. Ho ho ho).
It’s a brilliant if complicated concept and they almost get away with it despite the odd dodgy special effect: there’s something not quite right about this world from the moment we land tin Castrovalva, but it’s not until the episode three cliffhanger that we finally realise that this world can’t exist, that the geography is all wrong and that it’s all a big trap, the newly regenerated Doctor sent to heal in a place that’s fictional, created by The Master using Logopolis-like mathematics (with the unwilling help of Adric who might or might not be double-bluffing and secretly making it obvious nothing is real: the script is ambiguous about this) and fed into the Tardis databanks so a desperate Nyssa and Tegan take him there. Ironically, it’s this ‘fake’ world that feels like one of Dr Who’s better thought out planets until it implodes in on itself: it has a library, houses, markets, a tapestry, a history, traditions, children, animals, all the details that most alien worlds probably have somewhere but which we don’t always get to see, all believable yet not obviously stolen from anything ‘ours’. The people we meet feel ‘real’ too and their gradual realisation that they’re fictional and just blocks of data is devastating – when the librarian Shardovan notices that the 500 year old history of ‘Castrovalva’ includes entries in the present day for instance, or when the tapestry updates itself automatically with the days’ events or when the Doctor makes the Castrovalvans draw a map of their homes which are in four different places at once. This aspect of the story was inspired by a childhood thought of Bidmead’s when reading a book and trying to create one of his own: what if these people he was writing about knew they were fake, artiticial creations who didn’t know it? What if he, himself, was a fake construct created by another being he couldn’t comprehend? Would he act any differently if he knew? And while he felt alive he couldn’t seriously vouch that everyone around him was (most writers would turn these other people into robots or androids, but Bidmead goes a whole other way and makes them computer constructs who think they’re flesh and blood). Anyone whose ever played ‘The Sims’ or similar sandbox strategy games with characters they create will have thought of this, but ‘Castrovalva’ was written before such games existed . This is the great central conceit of the story then: what does it mean to really be alive? Especially if you can be fooled into thinking that you’re real? And what do you do when you find out you’re not?
It’s fitting that the newly regenerated 5th Doctor should be thrust into this story because he doesn’t know who he is yet - throughout this story he isn’t quite cooked yet, as ghostly and half-formed as Castrovalva itself. This Doctor spends longer than almost every other Doctor trying to work out who he might be (only the 2nd Doctor arguably takes longer, taking six full episodes to reach the point where Davison is after four in ‘Power Of The Daleks’).It’s a great contrast: there the Doctor is, genuinely real but disbelieving it as he floats in a ‘zero cabinet’ because his senses are overwhelmed, in a city full of people who know with some certainty they’re real, even though they aren’t. For a while he even spends time in a zero cabinet that’s shaped like a coffin: never has a regeneration felt more like a physical re-birth. This is, notably, the first time the Doctor spends time being his younger selves before pulling his new self together and working out who he is now based on who he used to be: there are some lovely scenes of him in the Tardis unravelling the 4th Doctor’s scarf, babbling lines spoken by past regenerations, mimicking their/his mannerisms (pronouns are weird for timelords), even tootling on the 2nd Doctor’s recorder brought out of storage. And when he does decide he’s kind of an anti-Hartnell: a wiser older head on young shoulders (rather than an old looking head on young ones), with all the extra experience of those extra lives but without the authoritarian respect that made people listen to the First Doctor (even at times when he didn’t know what he was doing and improvising wildly, still green around the gills). The 5th Doctor is kind of the ‘mid-life crisis’ era (along with the 6th Doctor), someone whose experienced so much and yet is coming to realise how little he still knows.
Until now regeneration has been as much a mental, psychic process as a physical one, but this regeneration looks as if it really hurts and Peter Davison plays it as if he’s still suffering PTSD after the fall from the radio mast in ‘Logopolis’. For most of this story he’s a passenger – literally given that Tegan and Nyssa have to lug him around for most of the story – helpless and hopeless in ways that the 4th Doctor would never have been. It’s a brave gambit given how much was riding on this story which didn’t just launch the series but a whole new timeslot on Mondays and Tuesdays with an audience who might not have been able to catch the series on Saturday teatimes. It’s a gamble that only partly comes off too: it takes a month for Peter Davison to fully ‘become’ the Doctor and watching him act all loony and levitate in zero rooms isn’t a substitute for Tom Baker dashing around being eccentric. To be honest, for me it never really feels as if this more passive and quieter regeneration ever really is the Doctor until his swansong in ‘Caves Of Androzani’ (when they finally work how to play him, a as a decent man pushed past his limits) and so much of the 5th Doctor’s era is a waste, with everyone so sure what they don’t want him to be (i.e. Tom Baker) that nobody is quite sure what they do want him to be. The fact that he spends his first story being given the runaround by the people around him (in stark contrast to, say, ‘Power Of the Daleks’ and ‘Robot’ where the new-born manic Doctor is giving everyone else the runaround trying to keep up with him) is a bad sign. Even though ‘Castrovalva’ was actually the 4th Who story Davison filmed (partly because of the script problems, but also sensibly to give him a chance to find out where he was going before asking him how he was going to get there) it never quite feels as if Davison knows what he’s doing, although already there are touches of this Doctor’s best trait: his vulnerability, something none of his predecessors ever had and the small moments of toughness when he gets fed up being polite and tries to take control. Curiosity about the new Doctor made this the last Dr Who story to break the ten million mark in the 20th century (by contrast ‘Logopolis’ only made an average of six million; the day change was partly to be a trial run for new soap ‘Eastenders’, with which Who has always had close ties – see ‘Dimensions In Time’ for a full crossover – but also because ITV had put ‘Buck Rogers’ on at the same time and Who was haemorrhaging ratings so badly). At the same time, though, the ratings fell off so sharply by the end of this story that people seem to have got bored waiting to find out who the Doctor might be. I can see why: two episodes of not much happening, except the companions pushing the Doctor round on a trolley and getting muddy do test the patience rather and the second episode particularly is one of the hardest going of the 1980s because not much happens at all (at least the first episode throws yet another Master plan at us, sending The Tardis back to The Big Bang – yes again!)
The part of this that works, though, is that for the first time in a long time The Master’s plan feels like a real threat. We don’t get too fussed when baddies seem to have the edge on the 4th Doctor because he’ll invariably do something amazing to get himself out of trouble, but you don’t know that here because this Doctor is so new and unsure of himself, out of it for this story more times than he’s, well, in it. The 5th Doctor is weak and confused, so The Master ought to have it easy. By contrast The Master has never been more confident or in charge (oddly so, actually, given that his plans for ‘Logopolis’ and sending the Tardis back to ‘even one’ in the opening episode both fall apart in quick succession). Anthony Ainley’s revived Master will become written as a pantomime villain in series to come, but Bidmead understood how to write for him and both here and in ‘Logopolis’ he’s at his best, running rings around the Doctor apparently for fun by having him, well, running round in rings trapped in the fictional city with no way out. He’s the Doctor’s equal who pushes him to his limits, with all the same tools of intelligence and imagination and gadgets at his disposal but who uses them to ‘wrong’ the universe, to tip it out of equilibrium, not ‘right’ it, because he wants the universe to reflect the chaos he feels in his mind. Ainley’s reveal (spoilers) as ‘Portreeve’, the kindly custodian of Castrovalva, is one of Dr Who’s better surprises and shows off just how much of ‘The Master’ is just a role, not Ainley being himself, all sweet and doddery in contrast to the laser-sharp brain of The Master’. ‘Neil Toynay’ (an anagram of ‘Tony Ainley’) is the first time the production team went to the trouble of keeping his disguise quiet, an idea created by one time extra and director Fiona Cumming’s husband Ian Fraser late one night when she was worrying about the credit in the Radio Times. It’s a great and very apt example of misdirection: you’re so busy looking at the shifty Shardovan you overlook the kindly Portreeve completely the first time round. Legend has it longterm Who videotape editor Rod Waldron, who’d seen everything the programme could throw at him across years and who knew Ainley well after editing both ‘Keeper Of Traken’ and ‘Logopolis’ was so surprised at the revelation in the editing suite he fell off his chair! Admittedly, like the Moffat stories to come, this is a trick this story can never play twice (once you know who The Master is you’ve lost a large chunk of the enjoyment of watching this story the first time round) nevertheless it’s still fun to look back and see how they did it, making Portreeve so very different. Having an enemy whose so sure of who he is he can pretend to be the complete opposite is a clever idea for a new Dr’s debut especially and follows on from tales like ‘Power Of The Daleks’ (where the Daleks aren’t themselves either) and ‘Spearhead From Space’ (where people have been replaced by plastic mannequins) that builds on the idea of identity and our ability to think who we are).
No wonder the Tardis cloister bell, only established in ‘Logopolis’ are ringing again, the part of the Tardis that warns of impending doom – a neat addition to the series that really ups the drama (though you have to question why it wasn’t ringing for some earlier stories – ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ at the very least). It ‘knows’ what’s going on, that it’s being sent to a place that doesn’t really exist, but with the Doctor unconscious it has no one to ‘tell’. Poor Nyssa and Tegan are all so new to this (this being their third and second story, respectively) that it’s a wonder they get as far piloting the Tardis into The Master’s second trap today and out of his first, following the Tardis databanks well enough to pilot the ship to Castrovalva in the first place. The Master, for all his laughing and terrorising of the pair, obviously respect them greatly by even thinking they can pilot their way out of the big bang and for both of the companions this quest is personal over and above rescuing the Doctor: The Master killed Nyssa’s dad Tremas and Tegan’s Aunty Vanessa. Of all the people they see on their travels he’s the one they hate the most, so facing him without the Doctor properly there yet ought to be the single scariest thing they do. Alas Bidmead, uncharacteristically, doesn’t seem to have thought that through. What he does manage to do, though, is give both companions a lot to do in this story, using the first two episodes as a chance to get to know them better in the Doctor’s absence. Bidmead created Tegan and while Johnny Byrne wrote the script for ‘Keeper Of Traken’ Bidmead really took to Nyssa and developed her in the script editing stage and few writers understood them better. Tegan is a naturally expressive, emotional Human who struggles to control her temper and is pushed to her limit by her travels, but she knows that if she’s going to come out of this alive she has to be more like Nyssa, calm and controlled (this is also part of her air stewardess training kicking in). For her part aristocrat Nyssa is terrified and secretly thinks Tegan has the far more natural reaction and is struggling to really feel things this story, to lose the natural numbness and detachment her upbringing has given her. They make quite the team, this pair of opposites and even if JNT had to intervene in rehearsals to remind the actresses that on screen they weren’t that many stories in yet and so weren’t best friends just yet their chemistry and mutual respect shine through. Poor Adric gets a raw deal though, kidnapped by The Master before the story has properly got going and even though he’s the member of the Tardis team we now the best by far (this being his sixth story) you totally buy the ambiguity that he might have sold The Doctor out to The Master now the Doctor isn’t ‘himself’ anymore and looks as if he might ‘lose’. As much as this is a coming of age story for the other three, that goes double for Adric whose morality is tested like never before (and though other stories copy this idea, it’s never done as well after). Bidmead returns Adric to his ‘artful dodger’ personality from ‘Full Circle’ here after a few stories of being more like Oliver Twist, the young kid hanging round the Doctor’s coat-tails and asking questions. The Doctor has been his father figure since losing his brother on Alzarius but now, with his father figure apparently gone (and looking not much older than he is himself) Adric isn’t thinking straight either, easily seduced by The Master. Not least because the timelord in black seems to respect him far more, to the point of building his entire third plan around him (odd for an enemy who only briefly saw the lad on Traken and Logopolis and hasn’t really seen do anything that complicated with mathematics or computers just yet).
Or is he? Something ‘Castrovalva’ never quite gets right is the ambiguity of how much Adric knows what’s going on and how much of a hand he plays in ‘creating’ Castrovalva. As seen on screen The Doctor works out what’s going on and tears down one of the ever-changing Castrovalvan tapestries, revealing Adric behind it. But was the Alzarian leaving clues for him to follow all along, knowing that The Doctor would see through the contradictions in this world once he finally woke up? (While The Master, for all his brains, isn’t really a ‘details’ kind of guy to pick up on them too and is having far too much fun poncing about in white). The way it’s done on screen is quite ambiguous: no one welcomes Adric back with open arms as the ‘hero’ but nor does anyone tick him off for working with The Master either, while for his part Past-Portreeve is too busy running for the exits to tell the bioy he’s the reason it all went wrong. Assuming this world is Adric’s creation though, more than The Master’s it reveals a lot about him. Naturally it’s a world based on mathematics, as you’d expect, with or without deliberately contradictions thrown in, but what’s remarkable is how much Adric makes this world like The Tardis rather than Alzarius. There are no marshy swamps, no ‘us v them’ societies, no marshmen who come out of the swamp and evolve. Instead we have a library and an apothecary, two things very much associated with the ‘Doctor’. We meet three characters who all sort-of resemble the past Doctors (did the 4th Doctor sit Adric down with the family photo album at some stage to natter about himself? It would be entirely in keeping, especially after Romana left). Shardovan, the authoritarian librarian, is the first Doctor, an endless source of information. The kindly magistrate Ruther with the twinkle in his eye on the outskirts of the action is the second Doctor. The dashing apothecarist Mergrave, who sacrifices himself at the end when he works out what’s going on, is surely the third Doctor (complete with love of costumes, even if it’s the Second Doctor who would most appreciate all these way-out hats. But then, why does Adric some up with hats at all? Nobody on ‘Full Circle’ was seen to wear one and neither do the Doctor or Romana – only in ‘State Of Decay’ would he have seen anyone wearing any and, honestly, he saw more people wearing crowns in that story).All three are the sort of father figure he’s been desperately searching for his whole life and even more so since losing elder brother Varsh (and thought he’d finally found with the Doctor, until he ended up young): they’re firm but fair and each one remarkably similar. That leaves Portreeve, who isn’t a projection at all of course, but The Master (Portreeve is indeed an archaic name for ‘magistrate’, a pseudonym he’s used before). When he was created by Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts between them the original plan was to have The Master revealed to be the Doctor’s brother, in a final showdown that was sadly never made because actor Roger Delgado died before it could be written, never mind filmed. Someone in this production team, though, has clearly been reading up on this: ‘Planet Of Fire’ has The Master die while in the middle of saying the word ‘brother’ and this story, too, points to a much deeper and more trusting relationship with the Doctor than we usually see. It’s as if. By becoming Portreeve. The Master can go back to the way things used to be when their relationship was kinder (I’d even go so far as to say The Master feels more like the elder brother again now he looks younger, after years of The Doctor being more authoritarian than he is). The Master is great in this story despite it being an odd fit when you think about it (a trap built from a world conjured up from logic is a Cybermen trap - The Master’s the most illogical foe there is! Indeed it was JNT who asked Bidmead to stick The Master in after reading the scene breakdown).
It’s not just the main cast, though, but the extras who sell this world – actually much more than most worlds in the Whoniverse that are actually, you know, real. There are children playing in the street, something we hardly ever see (the one who talks, Souska John, is the daughter of assistant floor manager Nick and niece of Liz Shaw actress Caroline). There are even animals, with one of several uses of chickens for ‘atmosphere’ in a Dr Who story (see ‘Carnival Of Monsters’ and ‘Fires Of Pompeii’ for two more). The town itself looks like the sort of place people have walked down for generations, not a bit of computer block transfer, especially the library and its many books (including ones that go right up to the present day despite being thousands of years old: an early clue) and the tapestries that mark several centuries (and which keep changing: another clue). When things fall apart (because the town centre cannot hold) it’s devastating because this lace seems so ‘real’ and it’s really well done too, with (for its time) one of the best uses of digital technology in all of Who and several ‘trick’ shots. Usually computers are meant to make the places we see on screen feel clearer and more natural but here they’re used for chaos, with the camera made to stare at the monitor of the action taking place which is staring at the camera and so on, inside itself ‘recursively’ until the image distorts (the perfect depiction of the plot as written in the script), while the scene of the camera image divided into five (the seperations created by the use of actual fuzzy felt shapes, a 1980s children’s toy that ironically enough I used to create my own Dr Who adventures with, then removed by CSO so that the pictures appeared to bleed into one another). Even something as simple as the director turning shots around so they enter scenes from the ‘opposite’ direction of where they should have arrived is clever and contributes to the feeling that something isn’t quite right even before the Doctor starts working it out. Only the rather obvious ‘upside down’ trick shot, when the actors run from left to right and the whole scene is flipped as a mirror image (something that should have been more tightly edited to look less obvious) doesn’t quite work.
So, ‘Castrovalva’ is a story that takes a bit too much of a meandering path to truly be called a top tier classic, with episode two, quite literally, getting bogged down for far too long. This is a story that really makes you draw on your patience and as such is perhaps not the very best idea for an explosive ‘new season, new Doctor, new timeslot’ format. If you’re patient enough to let it unfold, though, ‘Castrovalva’ rewards you greatly, a pretty darn good attempt to do several impossible things from the first: re-create a series of paintings that defy logic, throw this Doctor in at the deep end against a real threat at the peak of his powers and allow us to get to know two of the companions that little bit more. The beginning and ending at least are right up there with Dr Who’s best stories: bold, imaginative, daring, trying something no other show would think of never mind try and with just the right balance of action, plot, humour and character moments. Especially episode one which continues Bidmead’s fascination with The Tardis as a place where magical things happen, an open-ended machine that can do practically anything and as elastic in the way it works as the series format itself, unlike so many lesser writers who treat it as a sort of intergalactic bus service. I love the fact that there are rooms referred to that we haven’t heard mentioned before never mind explored yet, even though we’re nearing the show’s 20th anniversary (although sad that half of them we don’t get to see before they’re jettisoned in episode two). The twist in episode four, too, is gripping stuff you really don’t see coming and which turns the entire story up on end in one move). Yes it’s a shame about a lot of the middle but it wouldn’t be an Escher-influenced piece of art without some contradictions and a story that can bring you down as wel as pump you up. Sometimes in the same scene simultaneously. Overall for a piece of scifi its impressive, for a series entering its 19th year on television it’s hugely daring (there are no short cuts in Castrovalva, only right angles) and for a last minute replacement it’s a triumph. Maybe they should have let Adric conjure a few more worlds to let the Tardis loose in given how good this one is?
POSITIVES + There’s a really sweet moment when a still recovering Doctor finds himself in the Tardis wardrobe (for the first time on screen, though people were always coming out of it in the Hartnell and Troughton days) going through old costumes. The moment when he plays the 2nd Dr’s recorder for a few bars, before sadly putting it back again as if he’s not that person anymore, is really sweet (and a moment improvised by Davison on the spot) while Peter’s a natural mimic, arguably more convincing at being Hartnell and Pertwee than he is being the 5th Dr. Most regenerations are only interested in the future and shed the past but this one enjoys spending time there. This is, surely, a side effect of the fact that ‘Castrovalva’ is the first story shown since the beloved ‘Five faces Of Dr Who repeats’ in the gap since ‘Logopolis’ (‘An Unearthly Child’ ‘The Krotons’ ‘The Three Doctors’ ‘Carnival Of Monsters’ and ending with a repeat of ‘Logopolis’ itself, weirdly, even though it had only been on a few months earlier), the first time Dr Who had dipped into its archives to repeat a story that was anything more than a year old. As much as this story is impressively new there’s something warmly nostalgic about it too, particularly these opening scenes and at nineteen years old Dr Who now has more than heritage and nostalgia to draw on. In a few years’ time this trait will get silly, but here it’s judged to perfection. There was even more nostalgia in the studio: at one stage in episode one when Davison wasn’t needed yet he had a ‘lighting stand-in’ to get the positions right (not unusual in TV: even Russell T has done it standing in for Christopher Eccleston). Sometimes they even roped in studio visitors. On this story it happened to be Patrick Troughton who turned up without knowing it was his successor’s debut story (not least because he’d been in the role for months by then).
NEGATIVES – In between the elaborate trap set by The Master in ‘Logopolis’ and the city of ‘Castrovalva’, the rogue timelord tries to send The Tardis back to the big bang so that everything inside explodes and he could be rid of his old adversary forever. Which is nuts: this is an enemy who won’t kill the Doctor until he can see the look on his face when he’s been outsmarted (something key to the plots to both stories when they get going). It’s all a bit daft and a bit desperate and feels like an attempt to throw in some jeopardy to get the story moving before the Castrovalva bit takes off, rather too easily solved with a bit of Tardis data-banking, the jettisoning of lots of rooms (why does this work?!) and a touch of lippy (no, seriously). Normally this would have been enough plot going to keep whole series alive (indeed, its mighty close to the ‘crack in the wall’ idea of series 5 of New Who) but here its a side journey, just an excuse to build up to the first cliffhanger and once the Tardis gets out of it, it’s never mentioned again (you think Tegan would have said something sarcastic to The Master like ‘so that was your idea of the big bang? I’ve had bigger!’) You can tell that Bidmead has, for the most part, forgotten what he wrote at the end of ‘Logopolis’ nearly a year earlier. If they wanted jeopardy, then why not carry on from the end of ‘Logopolis; when people are still shooting at the Doctor and no doubt confused as to why the man they were running after was dangling from a radio telescope and why he now has a different face (none of the guards seem to mention the guy who was threatening the universe seconds earlier either. Maybe because they’ve got problems of their own and all have different faces now – this regeneration thing really does seem to be ditching this story!) Well, all except Tegan who wanted to go home and here has the chance, right at the start of the story (she doesn’t know the Doctor enough to care for him more than, say, planning Aunty Vanessa’s funeral just yet). A more experienced script editor would have caught these missing bits – but then this story never had an official script editor as Eric Saward hadn’t started work (JNT did it himself for the most part: I suspect the more anorakky references to stories past are his). Also, if The Master has gone to the trouble of assuming his first two traps for The Doctor aren’t going to work how come he never sets a trap in case ‘Castrovalva’ fails? I totally thought we were in for a whole series of these revelations: ‘Yes Doctor, you thought you were on a spaceship with Stratford Johns as a giant green frog but actually ‘Authority’ turns out to be me, The Master! Now get this green make up off me! Oh and day hello to my pet pink snake I’m , ahem ‘Kinda’ fond of it, heh heh heh…’
BEST QUOTE: Shardovan: ‘You made us, man of evil – but we are free!’
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Big Finish story ‘Psychodrome’ (2014), which is a story in the ‘Fifth Doctor Box Set’, makes good use of securing Matthew Waterhouse’s services for the first time (till 2014 most of the 5th Doctor stories are set during his second and third years) and carries on immediately after the closing seconds of ‘Castrovalva’ and features a 5th Doctor who still hasn’t quite recovered from his regeneration yet. It’s the first chance the companions have really had to talk to the new Doctor and there’s a lot of lovely character moments, before the plot descends into yet another of those ‘captured by primitive tribesmen on an alien planet’ type stories.
Previous ‘Logopolis’ next ‘Four To
Doomsday’
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