The Two Doctors

At the behest of the High Council of Time Lords, the second Doctor and Jamie go to a space station in the Third Zone. The Doctor runs afoul of his old friend, Dastari, with the demands of the Time Lords, and the station is attacked by a shock force of Sontarans. The sixth Doctor feels a time slip and with Peri comes to the station to investigate, and they find Jamie left behind with the dead, and the Doctor abducted to be part of an obscene experiment that will grant the Sontarans and the bloodthirsty Androgums mastery over time.

Right from the opening moments where the Doctor and Jamie are shown in black and white with an older version of the TARDIS console, you can feel this is going to be a fun adventure. With Robert Holmes holding the pen there is no reason why it wouldn't; the dialogue is witty and quick, the plot makes sense, and it's a treat to have it encompass three 45-minute episodes. There hadn't been a story over the approximate 90 minute length since The Armageddon Factor (the cancelled Shada doesn't count), and this fits the bill perfectly as an epic.

The story moves from the devastated space station to an area of 1985 Spain just outside of Seville, with some beautiful location footage that looks hotter than hell in DVD quality. There's no real reason that the episode had to take place there aside from John Nathan-Turner's established routine of shooting in a foreign location once per season (although in the years to come, there would be no more of this), but Holme's script is easily adaptable so the setting isn't important; it's the characters you want to watch. Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines step right back into the roles they left behind as if they haven't been away, the obvious signs of ageing hard to conceal but we're used to overlooking wobbly set walls and boom mics, so why not ignore some wrinkles and grey hair? And the current TARDIS crew of Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant interact with them beautifully. Who else have we got... the scheming Chessene (played with style by Jacqueline Pearce) and her bloodthirsty Androgum buddy Shockeye bring both meance and comedy to the story. Then there's Dastari, a brilliant scientist reduced to the assistant of his own creation. I just wish he didn't look like he was wearing an Elton John cast-off costume. There are only two Sontarans in the story; their presence is almost incidental and they're hardly the best the Sontaran officer corps has to offer by comparison to previous characters such as Linx or Styre. And check out the brilliant Oscar and Anita - hapless humans who get caught up in the intregue as only Robert Holmes can create. Holmes also goes a step further and refers to humans as Tellurians, a term first used in Carnival of Monsters, giving us a clue as to where this adventure is starting from and also suggesting that Inter Minor from the 1973 story may be part of the Third Zone itself.

Jay and I had a good share of laughs over this one, enjoying it thoroughly. We lamented Jamie's loss of youth. We chortled at Peri's near-misses with her cleavage threatening to whack her in the face as she runs away from Shockeye. And we loved the innuendos of Shockeye's obsession with cooking Jamie; the chef's lust for him verges on the sexual.

The story was originally penned under the title The Androgum Inheritance, which I personally would have preferred; at this point it hadn't even been two full years since The Five Doctors was aired, and this whole numerical Doctor title thing starts to look a bit b-movie after a while (although this is the season for it; Attack of the Cybermen was done under the working title Cold War). This would also be Patrick Troughton's last on screen appearance as the Doctor before his death, but he proves himself to be right on his game as the Doctor, even spluttering "Oh my giddy aunt! Oh crumbs!" in the face of certain death while strapped down to an operating table.

Other notes of interest include the discussions about Time Lords posessing a symbiotic nuclei which would aid them in travelling through the time vortex in a TARDIS, and the fact that the Doctor is operating on behalf of the Time Lords before they put him on trial in The War Games. Yes, that's a bit of a tricky one; the script indicates that the Doctor and Jamie have left Victoria somewhere to learn graphology for a while, but the revisionists like to think that this could be another season 6b story with the Doctor in limbo and being allowed out to work on behalf of the Time Lords for a while. This would certainly explain how he came to be on his own in The Five Doctors, but not why Jamie is with him this time. Not easily, anyways.

So let's take a break from the TV episodes again and have an audio, one of the best in the range if you ask me...

NEXT EPISODE : DAVROS