The Caves Of Androzani: Ranking 41

 

The Caves Of Androzani

(Season 21, Dr 5 with Peri, 8-16/3/1984, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Robert Holmes, director: Graeme Harper)

Rank: 41

In an emoji: 🦇🥛

   'Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals with the cast of Dr Who: 

Sharaz Jek - The Phantom Of The Opera 

Cats - Novice Hame 

By Jeeves - VOC Robots 

Staright Express - A Mummy On The Starlight Express  

Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat - The 6th Dr'

 

It's the end #5 - and the moment happens almost by accident. There had been caves in Dr Who before of course but these are ‘the’ caves, impossibly dark and cavernous in a story that pushes the Doctor to his limit and beyond and sucks all the light out of him. There are other stories that do what this one does, with a plotline where one of the companions gets sick and nearly dies, but this is ‘the’ one where they get sick, poor Peri fading before our eyes minute by minute to the point where she all too believably would have died if not for the Doctor’s sacrifice at the end. There are other stories – many many other stories – where the Doctor becomes embroiled in a battle going on between two different factions in a cold war parable, but this is ‘the’ cold war parable, one that has the Dr land in the middle of something he doesn’t fully understand and nearly pay for that ignorance with his life. There are other mad protagonists causing trouble for the people under them in Dr Who, scarred and troubled souls with an axe to grind, but Davros aside Sharaz Jek is ‘the’ unhinged baddie, his view of the world as distorted as his acid-drenched face. The Doctor, particularly the 5th Doctor, is always heroic and dashing but in this story he’s ‘the’ ultimate hero, tested to his limits and beyond to the point where, to all intents and purposes, he readily gives up his life because it’s the right thing to do and he really doesn’t know if he will be able to regenerate (indeed, the 6th Doctor’s future instability points to hw close he came to dying here). There are many great Robert Holmes stories out there too, but to many fans this is ‘the’ Holmes story, the one where one of the most acknowledged masters of the typewriter delivers the greatest of his greatest hits. Even though all the bits that make it up had been tried in other Dr Who stories before many times (the quarry planet, the caves, the ‘drug smuggling’ of ‘Nightmare Of Eden’, even the ‘phantom of the opera’ feel is like the 1970s passion for recycling big high concepts out of copyright and putting the in a scifi setting), no other story did it quite like this. ‘Caves Of Androzani’ may be as fictional as all the other stories we see in Dr Who but this one feels oddly real, a story that looks as if it positively hurts. 

 Mention ‘The Caves Of Androzani’ to almost any fan and there’s a look that comes into their eyes, of deep sombre understanding, of having survived this Jek-obean tragedy, because watching ‘The Caves Of Androzani’ unfold isn’t just watching a bit of light-hearted escapist scifi, it’s to acknowledge everything that’s brutal about the darker side of humanity and the universe we live in. It’s to have watched a story that goes to places few other Dr Who stories would dare to go (and none that try a similar tack go to this well). And it’s all the more surprising for the fact that, watched in order, the brutal realism of this story seems to come from absolutely nowhere. It was only the week before this that we were having larks on Lanzarote with a Master who’d become increasingly toothless, only a few months earlier we’d had an underwater pantomime (although ‘Warriors Of The Deep’ as a script is really much closer to how ‘Androzani’ turned out: in a parallel universe where the scripts were in a different order there’s a version of ‘Androzani’ just as hated, with Ingrid Pitt kung-fu kicking a pantomime magma beast that’s just as stupidly brightly lit), less than a year before ‘The Five Doctors’ had been a celebratory 20th anniversary special that was a bit of a party. This story is more like a wake, a story in mourning for the 5th Doctor from the moment he steps on the planet right up until he, near enough, dies before our eyes. 

 It’s a funny thing the 5th Doctor era: for the most part it’s the most shallow, surface-level soap-operay era of Dr Who there was in the 20th century, full of novelty stories that are lightweight and where the biggest source of tension comes from which other Tardis member Tegan’s in the biggest strop with this week, but each season (at least as planned) has a big cathartic killing spree in there somewhere. Near the end of the first year Adric was sacrificed in the name of the Cybermen and in the third (ut in a story planned for the second) Tegan’s nerves were sacrificed in the name of the Daleks, a little like soap operas get to do once a year at Christmas (and both these stories written by script editor Eric Saward, Holmes’ biggest fan). ‘Androzani’ feels like the odd one out though: it has no recurring baddy and instead of putting characters we know and love through the mill it relies a lot on our sympathies for Peri, a companion who we’ve barely met. This is the only story the ever-popular Holmes wrote for the 5th Dr following a six year break from the series (you have to ask what happened to him in those six years to make his final four scripts for the show so much darker than the rest) and that’s a great shame because in his (literally) dying moments Peter Davison finally gets to use all that potential, his youthful innocent heroic Doctor (the youngest by far until Matt Smith comes along) out of his depth from the moment he lands on Andozani and severely tested in a world where being innocent and naive gets you killed.

 Though it’s not the direct Buddhist parable of ‘Planet Of the Spiders’ or even ‘The End Of Time’ where all the Dr’s faults come home to roost, you still get the feeling that this story is fate’s way of cutting this particular Dr’s naivety down to size. He happily lets Peri wander off on an unknown planet the way he always let Adric, Nyssa, Tegan and Turlough do, where she stumbles into a den of spectrox, a poisonous substance created by bats. This isn’t your usual gravel pit quarry alien world but a raw primal planet battle-scarred by violence. The local planet isn’t home to the usual helpful natives but drug smugglers fought in a ferocious war who couldn’t care less about the health of the oddly-dressed strangers who’ve just arrived. These aren’t your usual Holmesian double-acts either but people for whom suffering and pain come as naturally as breathing – the scene where Krelper fights for his life after being dangled off a cliff by Stotz couldn’t be less like the whimsy of past Holmes stories like ‘Carnival Of Monsters’ and ‘The Sunmakers’. This isn’t the cutesy robot Kamelion down in the darkest tunnels we’ve ever had in the series, but a killer android who has impossibly fast reflexes. And chief baddy Sharaz Jek isn’t the more hapless Master as he is now, but The Master as he used to be in ‘The Deadly Assassin’: a scarred crippled genius whose been shaped by a bitter and twisted world to the point where he’s been turned mad, so far separated from the kindness and morals of the Dr’s largely cosy and optimistic little world that even our beloved timelord can’t talk him round. 

That is, as it happens, all quite deliberate. Holmes, a former script editor himself in the Tom Baker era, was not a fan of the direction the show had taken in the 1980s. For him Dr Who was about the horror of life, a scifi universe where bad things happened but the Doctor was the good person who undid them all. Honestly he didn’t see the point in a series that had become a tidy formulaic soap-opera where everyone had larks in the 1920s and where Stratford Johns got to big it up as a giant space frog. He was particularly critical of the way the 5th Doctor had been written as a quiet presence too often overlooked in his own show. Holmes would have been quite happy to have never written for Who again, despite his long ties to the series, except that script editor Eric Saward had paid the compliment of asking him to write anniversary story ‘The Five Doctors’ for the 20th anniversary. Holmes’ script had been too complex and too dark for such a celebratory event and the writer baulked at having to do too many re-writes when Doctors and companions dropped out, but Saward believed that Homes understood this show better than anyone and wanted to move it back to where it had been alongside him. Producer John Nathan-Turner was less than sure (he didn’t like using writers on the show from before his time, whether out of genuine desire to make the show go somewhere new or insecurity as to how it was going on his watch, or both). Saward, caring enough to put his foot down where he would usually softly tread around the producer, insisted. Holmes saw the effort his young protégé was going to so agreed, on the condition that he write this story his way, with no meddling and no re-casting and no links to other stories (because he couldn’t be bothered to watch them/read the scripts). 

 And so in one go Holmes re-moulds the 5th Doctor into who he wants him to be, punishing him for all the things that he feels the show has got wrong and showing that you can’t have someone that naive and gentlemanly in a universe this dark and that in real life he wouldn’t last five minutes. I’ve always seen this story as Holmes, always a writer for a metaphor, commenting on how cosy this show has become since the late 1970s and the Mary Whitehouse-inspired shove into being a family entertainment show and all the ways its become increasingly cut off from both the more violent nature of TV programmes (and indeed video nasties) in the 1980s and the real life that spawned it, full of Thatcherism, unemployment, cold war tension and ‘space wars’ weaponry. This is a Dr Who story made for an audience where half the people watching are unemployed or the children of parents who are, where most of the other half are struggling on a pittance afraid of speaking out or losing their jobs, pretty much everyone is broke and there’s a war being raged in the Falklands with another looming between superpowers. ‘Androzani’ is a world gone wrong where everything has spiralled out of control because of petty misunderstandings that led to two tyrants taking power who care more about destroying the other than protecting their half of the planet, until both are set on each other in a massive bloodbath. For one month Dr Who has gone from being dreamy escapist fantasy and returned to what it used to be when it was the most daring boundary-pushing thing they could get away with on TV and suddenly everything that the era’s got slightly wrong snaps back into focus. 

 All Doctors regenerate to learn something to some extent: the 1st, 9th and 12th all learn the lessons of sacrifice for those you care about and how some people are worth getting hurt for, the 2nd Doctor learns responsibility, the 3rd the price of his curiosity putting other people in danger, the 4th not to hang around on telescopes and so on, but the 5th Doctor learns perhaps the biggest lesson of all: that not everyone is as much of a gentlemen and that to survive you need to toughen up (in the first draft the Doctor dies out of simple exhaustion at trying to stay alive, before Saward added the bit about the Spectrox poisoning, taking the word rather aptly from his own make of typewriter: it may be that Saward was going for a different tack, about how this was true of the show too and how his hero Holmes was showing him how to behave in the production office, to hold his ground in fights. The sheer effort of making this show was indeed grinding him down and making him miserable by now and the idea of a writer being poisoned by their own typewriter is a very Holmesian gag). There’s a theme in this story about the dangers of surviving too long: maybe as an overhang from the ‘5 Doctors’ plot (which, after being taken over by old friend Terrance Dicks, became a sweet story about the dangers of immortality) Holmes throws in the idea of spectrox as an elixir of life, but asks why anyone would risk their lives for something that extends it. In that story the Doctors all turn immortality down for being a curse; here the Doctor would give anything to live just a little longer. 

 At last the 5th Doctor comes alive right, ironically right at the point where he dies: pushed to his limits he clings to his moral compass like a life-raft and does the right thing come what may whatever it costs him, not because he wasn’t being quiet and small out of having nothing to say, but because he’s too kind for his own good (I’d love to have seen what Holmes would have done with the similarly unsure 8th or 13th Doctors, for similar reasons). Peter Davison is never better than when he’s pushed so far out of his depth and you really feel his increasing frustration that everything he normally does to calm down a situation just isn’t working – that the people of this world have no time for his politeness, charm and geniality because they’re too busy fighting to survive themselves. He’s a delight when the script gives him something to sink his teeth into (he’s on record as saying that ‘Androzani’ is his favourite story by far) – if only we’d had this Doctor a few years earlier the show would still be on the air without a gap now, quite frankly. His Doctor gets frazzled and flummoxed and bewildered and his cricketing whites get splattered by mud and blood, but still he refuses to become as corrupt as the people around him, only interested in saving Peri. The third episode cliffhanger, when the Doctor’s basically dying and about to collapse, held at gunpoint in a spaceship by gun-smugglers as he’s starting to lose consciousness, crashing to Androzani at a rate of knots, but still he keeps fighting to stave off unconsciousness on to save Peri because that’s what the Doctor does, is one of the greatest Dr Who cliffhangers of them all and all the better for the fact that it isn’t one that’s easily solved in the final part for a change (closely followed by the 1st episode cliffhanger where our heroes are, to all intents and purposes, murdered in front of our eyes by a firing squad – and even if (spoilers) all isn’t quite what it seems at the start of week two, even that feels like its darker than the usual cliffhangers, as you even see the bullets hit the Dr and Peri’s corpses as they fall to the ground). 

 Most of all, though, Holmes is writing about how Dr Who, as a child of the 1960s that still believed in the same philosophies of tolerance, equality and exploration, didn’t belong in this world anymore, that it was an anachronism from a bygone era. In many ways the 1980s are its polar opposite: a time of piracy, impatience and exploitation, all about individuals climbing all over each other to make the most money. ‘Dr Who’ as a concept would never ever have been suggested in 1984 and Holmes knows it (he was right too: one of the reasons the 9th Doctor is such a hard-edged Doctor is to get away from the 1980s and 1990s image of his am as an eccentric Edwardian bumbling around in space). This story is basically Thatcher’s capitalism gone mad and taken to another degree, where people are happy to make a literal killing if it means getting more loot for themselves and everyone is fighting over resources oblivious to the harm it causes the people around them. The idea of having a drug that’s ‘the most valuable resource in the universe’ (according to Jek’s rival Morgus at least) because it could extend life when treated by people who can afford to pay for such treatments, and yet which is deadly to the touch for the lowly workers mining it (some of whom are replaced by androids, but not all) is so incredibly prescient to the 1980s it hurts. This is the era of miners scrabbling for the last few fossil fuels and risking their lives for a pittance before their livelihood got forcibly taken away from them, an era when industries were finding ever new ways to push limits to make money at the risk of their employees’ lives. There is no health and safety at all on Androzani, just a scramble to the death over dangerous substances. Holmes wasn’t the sort of writer who made the Dr his ‘mouthpiece’ the way David Whittaker, Douglas Adams, Andrew Cartmel and Russell T Davies did (to name the four most obvious): he all but laughs at the 3rd Dr’s liberal toryism and the 4th Dr’s flippancy even while he’s having fun writing for them, but here the Doctor feels like his own frustrations at how all the bad things he saw on the horizons in the 1970s and warned about have come to pass and a howl of protest that we’ve forgotten who we used to be, the way with the Falklands War the British have turned from being the last line of brave defence to the first line of aggressive colonialism. Holmes’ original draft played on that idea much more and was called ‘Chain Reaction’, harking back to the long-running conceit in Dr Who that we should be careful about how we act because our actions always impact somebody, sometimes for generations to come. Everything in this story triggers somebody to react in another way so that, by episode four, something innocuous from episode one has gone way off the scale and become some big drama. The clever title, too, was a pun on the explosives in this story too and how when you set one off the whole lot goes off (but got changed into a more Who-friendly one, which is memorable too but just seems wrong for a story that well, isn’t Who-friendly at all). This is a world where death isn’t something that happens ‘over there’ in an imaginary world but is happening to us, right here and now, in 1983 and the story is all the better for the injection of realism that makes this story feel as if it ‘matters’ in a way few other 1980s DW stories do. 

 There are lots of little details that make this story soar where other equally ambitious and dark stories fall flat on their face. Let’s start with the dialogue: you could have forgiven Holmes for not giving these characters as much to say when they’re struggling to survive, but even though the scenes are tight and the dialogues are short they do much to embellish the atmosphere. Most particularly the Doctor’s quips: usually used to soften the blow of a world in turmoil and win people over, they become jokes that get him into trouble, which then turn into the darkest most edgiest bits of humour in the series as the Doctor gets increasingly sarcastic in a way we’ve never seen him before, with nothing to lose. In the days before she became the 6th Dr’s whiny sidekick Peri was a truly brilliant companion too, sarcastic herself and world-weary, damaged and real in ways that Tegan Adric Nyssa and Turlough weren’t however promising and well played their characters. Nicola Bryant’s slow fade from passionate new adventurer to a shaky frail husk is brilliantly portrayed (all the more so considering how little acting experience she’d had: this is a tour de force performance that would have pushed the most experienced of actresses but she’s word perfect, never more so than telling her executioners to ‘get on with it!’) you have to wonder if its method acting that makes her so goo at being ill, though: she shot these scenes in a sand pit in the freezing cold weeks after being back from filming in Lanzarote and her legs turned blue, what with being dressed in her usual miniskirt. Talk about suffering for your art…We also learn (finally!) why the Doctor carries a stick of celery in his lapel, because he’s allergic to certain gasses (a request of Peter Davison, who was promised he would be given a solution before he left the show): it fits this story’s atmosphere of impending doom that the Doctor had a premonition he might die somewhere here one day (though frustratingly we never see it turn purple and no other Doctor ever bothers carrying any). 

A word too for the decisions taken by director Graeme Harper. He’s full of enthusiasm, what with this being his first TV directing role and he was incredibly fond of Dr Who as a show, having started his career on it as an assistant floor manager (indeed, he became a director as part of a bargain with JNT that following his hard work stepping up on ‘Warrior’s Gate’ when the real director became ill he would be guaranteed a job on this show if he took the BBC’s director’s course and passed, which he did). Harper makes the most of the chance to ‘correct’ a lot of the things he thinks this show’s been getting wrong all these years. Perhaps the biggest change is the lighting: till now Dr Who has been a battle between the lighting people who want the show dark and the director who want the cast and sets to be seen. Harper isn’t interested in that – he wants everything to be in the shadows, looming and treats this story as practically a black-and-white story rather than a colour one (it’s also a mercy when the magma beast turns up that it’s kept in the shadows). No light in this story is wasted, it’ feels rationed, like hope, very fitting for a script where the characters are so shadowy and Jek himself talks at one stage about the ‘blackness in the mind’. There’s even a clever use of lighting to provide occasional shafts of sunlight, as if holes have been cut in the cave that we never see, to explain how we get any light at all and offer just a tiny pinprick of hope. So at last, 21 years in, we have a cave that’s properly dark and I can’t tell you what a difference that makes. Harper’s also spot-on with the regular action scenes: these androids aren’t lumbering monsters but fast-paced robots designed to cause damage and the action feels like an inevitable part of the plot rather than tacked on to break up the talking. It was Harper’s idea to use real machine guns too (Holmes’ script had lazers), making it seem all the more brutal when the Doctor and Peri are shot (even if the staccato burst does overwhelm the picture and makes it strobe, even that adds to the realism of this story). A lot of this story is shot on hand-held cameras for extra realism too, as if we’re watching real footage rather than make-believe, back in the days when this was a highly unusual thing to do (again, this makes more difference than you might think). Harper even went to the length of mocking up a two-heart t-shirt for Peter Davison to wear and shooting it in the dark on infra-red to show his timelord biology (rather than merely using computer trickery). Androzani itself feels like a really unusual planet: the outside is mud that hasn’t set yet and which is opened up and melts every time Androzani gets near the sun (a detail in the script that would just have got lost with any other director, but not this one). The costumes ‘feel’ right, with everyone in South American guerrilla gear (bandanas and Che Guevara type costumes), even though there really isn’t any reason why Androzani soldiers would copy Earth, they have to wear something and its aesthetically ‘right’ whatever the logic. The sets feel lived in too, rusting over and decaying, not the usual ‘straight out of storage’ brightly coloured sets we usually got (this is one of the few stories not t get its own sets specially built, but Harper really turns it to his advantage and doesn’t tidy them up); Morgus’ brightly lit and sanitised office is the only set here that isn’t covered in grime and that only fits his double-crossing character all the more. Harper is, to date, the only director to have worked on Who in both the 20^th and 21^st centuries (starting with ‘Rise Of The Cybermen’) and it’s not hard to see why: he has a feel for this show, an enthusiasm most directors don’t possess and even though he’s the old hand nowadays not the hot young thing that enthusiasm is still very much there.  There’s only shot the whole show that isn’t first-rate and that’s the every end when the caves burn down (which, once you see it, is just a few flames turned on and nothing actually burning at all). 

 Best of all though is his quirky casting. Christopher Gamble was a sodding ballet dancer of all things before being hired to play Sharez Jek, but that makes perfect sense, given this is a deformed man whose face is burnt so badly he wears a mask and mostly acts with his body, pouring his heart and soul out into a quite brilliant performance that switches between an ice-cold purr to a fiery rant. The pair had worked together before and were old friends, Harper encouraging Gamble on his first acting role out of the ballet, variety show ‘Melodies For You’ in 1967 (Gamble nicknaming him ‘Twinkle’ in response for his enthusiasm) and had originally been put up for the smaller role of Salateen, but he pleaded with Harper to give him the role of Jek because he said he knew from the script how to play him. And he does too, brilliantly, making Jek both scary and sympathetic, which is a harder thing to pull of than you might expect – honestly maybe only Michael Wisher’s managed it in the whole of Dr Who. At one stage this role was offered to David Bowie whose agent turned down due to clashes with the film ‘Labyrinth’ and then it was sent to fan and estate-loaner-for-location-filming Mick Jagger which would have been, uhh, interesting. Would the character have been re-named Jumpin’ Jek Flash I wonder? Funnily enough the whole plot is because Jek can’t get no satisfaction and nobody in the story can get what they want. John Normington is just as note-perfect as bitter rival Morgus. The pair couldn’t be more of a contrast: despite the mask he wears Jek’s emotions are all on the surface and he’s too open and raw, pushed over the wedge by circumstances, while Morgue might be open-faced but he hides his feelings and motives behind a symbolic mask. Throw in Robin Glenister as Salateen (whose all too believable as – spoilers - an android, especially the intense stare that barely blinks) and the mercenary pair Maurice Roeves and Michael Cochrane as Stotz and Chellak and you have one of the finest casts Dr Who ever assembled, everyone playing this story, which could so easily have gone hammy and melodramatic, impressively straight (Roeves is still one of only a handful of actors to have appeared in Dr Who and Star Trek both, playing a Romulan in ‘Next Generation’ episode ‘The Chase’. Which sadly isn’t a crossover and doesn’t feature a Dardis, Mekkanoids or Peter Purves doing an outrageous American accent – see *Here* for why). What’s more, everyone in this story dies, most of them horrible excruciating deaths – except for the Doctor and Peri of course but they as near as dammit do too (contrast with Steven Moffat’s era where everybody lives!) 

By the time the end of the story comes around (episode 4 being the longest Dr Who episode up to this point at 25.37 minutes because they just couldn’t find a way to cut it down anymore) and the Dr is lying unconscious on the Tardis floor, having given up his life to save Peri by giving her the only spectrox antidote left, it feels as if the audience at home has been put through the wringer alongside our hero. There are many many fans who will tell you ‘Androzani’ is the greatest ever Dr Who story and they’re not far wrong, although it is, in truth, all a bit much sometimes. The very best Dr Who stories are one where everything is in perfect balance, where the imagination and whimsy and jokes are levelled out by the seriousness of the plot and the realistic acting, but this story is almost unrelentingly grim. That’s something to applaud in itself after the past few years of stories that go too much the other way and be fluffy and light and I can see why so many fans use this story to hook in casual viewers: this one is so unlike the traditional Dr Who image of being silly and is played like those gritty working class BBC dramas around in the 1980s, without any of the ‘its only DW’ acting you see from time to time (particularly in the 1980s). It’s undeniably a great story, one where the script and the acting and the direction is note-perfect. For me, though, there are other better stories simply because there are other stories that offer more of a range than this, that get the balance between charming and primal, comedy and drama, darkness and light, despair and hope better. There’s no room in this story for a breather, for a chance to explore this world and its characters beyond their miserable lives, no chance to find out what this world used to be like before gun and drug smuggling became the norm. Of course a lot of those other stories I love just as much or even more wouldn’t exist without this one too: once this re-set button has been hit later DW stories get to play with this story’s levels of violence and sincerity, like ‘Vengeance On Varos’ and ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’. Even though in real life this story was followed by the tinsel laden brightly coloured mismash that was ‘The Twin Dilemma’ (a story where the Dr’s effectively the baddy for the best part and everything else is unforgivably twee) which only made ‘Androzani’ stand out all the more. Steven Moffat, when asked about comedy in Dr Who, said that he thought it was central because without it the show would be too horrible to watch in so many ways – this story is the closest the show has come, with even the humour that is there darker than any Androzani tunnel. I’m amazed though that in the forty years since this story was on that we’ve never had a return visit, to both Androzani the planet and Androzani the concept, with no other DW story being quite as relentlessly nasty as this one (even the stories that try for a bit, like ‘The End Of Time’ and ‘Waters Of Mars’, share those bits with moments of pure comedy at the start before things get serious: this story feels doomed from the moment the Tardis lands). Instead ‘Androzani’ remains unique: a story where everything is dark, including the atmospheric lighting and a story you can show your non-Who friends every time they make snide comments about this being just a ‘kid’s show’. ‘Androzani’ is really quite the trip, especially if you’ve been on a lot of the other journeys the Tardis took before watching this. No wonder the Doctor collapses at the end of it; so do we. 

 POSITIVES + The regeneration, when it comes, is the icing on the cake, totally different to all the previous ones. Instead of the sad lament for the dying 3rd and 4th Drs this one is pure torture, a feverish and hallucinating 5th Dr haunted by the companions who’ve left his side, the first time the Doctor is visited by the face and voices of his companions - even Kamelion amazingly (taped at the absolute last minute as part of the season wrap party as old friends said goodbye to Davison for real; all except for poor Sarah Sutton who was recuperating from chickenpox and had to be shot separately and Kamelion whose scene was taped as part of ‘Planet Of Fire’ ): it’s a very moving experience indeed, especially this Doctor’s last words being to call out to the companion he couldn’t save, Adric. Notably too, as the Doctor struggles to make his regeneration kick in, he hallucinates Anthony Ainley having great fun mocking him (the actor turned up with a badge that read ‘I killed the Doctor’ to get him in the mood!), not unlike the scenes of The Dr taunting The Master via the Keller machine in ‘The Mind Of Evil’ this being the last push the Doctor needs to refuse to give in and keep fighting, knowing that there is evil still out there to defeat. It’s a very fitting way for the 5th Doctor to go, even if you can forgive the lingering resentment towards Peri which means the 6th Doctor is so very very different in the series finale ‘The Twin Dilemma’ (a story that’s, well, not taken quite so, uh, seriously as ‘Androzani’ shall we say. Colin Baker, incidentally, couldn’t fit I the 5th Doctor’s trousers so has them wide open with the sweater pulled down for the regeneration – he spent the moments before the shot, cutting the growing tension by mooning everyone, even Peter Davison’s wife Sandra Dickinson – to a cheer, as she wasn’t a particularly welcome guest with the production crew). No wonder the 6th Dr is so angry and unhinged when he wakes up: this is as close to death as he ever truly comes (and I rather like the way the 6th Dr wakes up resenting Peri for having sacrificed himself for her, in an un-heroic gesture the antithesis of the 5th Dr, as if he’s carried on a folk memory of what he went through and needs to avoid this next time, even if the next story and subsequent ones then take the bickering too far).That final explosion, after years of seeing Doctors fade away gently, still takes me by surprise even now (Harper based it on the feel of Beatles song ‘A Day In the Life’ and has the new Doctor sit up on the final chord). Even as a fan who didn’t see these stories on first transmission (as I was a babe in arms), who doesn’t have any particular affection for this regeneration, this is one of the most moving regenerations of them all, exquisitely made. 

 NEGATIVES – Of course, it wouldn’t be Dr Who without something going wrong somewhere. The Magma Beast is one of those Dr Who monsters that’s meant to be ferocious and evil and looks about as threatening as a soft toy eating jelly tots. What’s weirder is that this is a story that doesn’t need it to be there at all – it’s just something that lives in the caves and gets woken up by the gun battles going off every few minutes, with no part in the plot (the only part it had, right at the end where it chases the Doctor and falls off a cliff, got cut when the film sessions over-ran, delayed by yet another strike, this time for scenery). You think for a moment Holmes is going to stray into ‘but of course the real hideous monster is mankind’ territory but no – instead it feels as if someone (probably John Nathan-Turner who, call credit to him, let the rest of this story through unchanged where lesser producers would have baulked at such dark ideas on over a Saturday teatime) got back to Holmes about his script and commented that there wasn’t a ‘monster to scare the kiddies’. As if they weren’t hiding behind the sofa from the killer android and gun runners and face-melted ranting psychopath anyway. Thankfully, though, we’re spared another ‘Myrka’ moment thanks to the quick thinking of director Graeme Harper who uses the Beast sparingly without the camera lingering and shoots the sequences as close to being in the pure dark as he can get away with. 

 BEST QUOTE: Sharaz Jek on the Doctor: ‘You have the mouth of a prattling jackanapes, but your eyes, they tell a different story’. 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Matrix’ (1998), part of the short-lived ‘Past Adventures’ series by BBC Books which replaced the Virgin ‘Missing Adventures’ run, features the Valeyard trying to undo the 7^th Doctor’s lives at certain key moments of his life (not unlike ‘Turn Left’ a decade early). One of these is making the Doctor drink the bat’s milk himself rather than giving it to Peri and watching her die instead. Surprisingly there has yet to be another story set on Androzani in the Whoniverse, despite this being such a seminal story.

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