“A man is the sum of his memories, you know— a Time Lord even more so.”
In the barbaric ancient history of the Time Lords, in the early days of their control over time, they used the “Time Scoop” to kidnap dangerous life forms from around time and space and drop them in the “Death Zone” on Gallifrey to fight for the amusement of the Time Lords. The practice was eventually abolished, the use of the Time Scoop banned, and the Death Zone forgotten— until now, when an unseen villain has reactivated it and uses it to scoop up all five of the Doctor’s selves, along with an assortment of past companions, and dropped them in the Death Zone. Alarmed that the Doctor has vanished out of time, and that the Death Zone is now draining energy from Gallifrey, the High Council recruits the Master to enter the Zone and rescue the Doctor. It all turns out to be part of a scheme to use the Doctor to open the way into Rassilon’s tomb, located at the heart of the Death Zone, where a great secret is hidden that our villain hopes to steal.
In critical terms, The Five Doctors is not the best story the Classic series ever did. In fact it’s just barely a story at all— a Doctor Who Magazine reviewer once said it’s more like a fan convention sketch put on video. But I have to give it this: it may be the most fun Doctor Who episode ever. Fan Conventional Wisdom tends to think it’s only so for the dedicated fan, but I just have to contradict that with the following observation: this was the first— the very first— episode of Doctor Who I ever saw. I knew nothing at all about the series having vaguely heard of it. And look at me now.
I could go on in my usual wordy and unorganized way about the writing or the sets or whatever nuances about the story that I happen to notice (sometimes I have a lot of these, sometimes not), but for this particular story I’m not sure anything could capture it more than the single word: fun. This is a story you just sit back and smile at.
There’s a lot of lore for the Details list, though:
Details
- John Nathan-Turner knew he wanted to do a multi-Doctor story for the 20th aninversary from the moment he started thinking about it. This wasn’t as obvious a choice as it now seems in hindsight: at the time the only prior example was The Three Doctors— which wasn’t actually a tenth anniversary show, it was the opener of the tenth season (a full year before the actual 10th anniversary). It was only after The Five Doctors aired that fans started to think multi-Doctor stories were the “tradition” for the series’ anniversaries.
- The first writer commissioned to work on the story was the great Robert Holmes. According to interviews and articles I’ve seen over the years, JN-T was reluctant to have Holmes contribute to Dr Who. The reasons are unclear but the best I can make of it is that JN-T thought Robert Holmes had been so influential over the series’ most popular and successful era that he would overshadow the current series’ creative team. Whatever the reason, it was apparently script editor Eric Saward who persuaded JN-T that for the 20th anniversary special, it had to be either Robert Holmes or the equally influential Terrance Dicks (who would take over the writing when Holmes finally quit the project).
- Holmes’ script was titled The Six Doctors, but the title wasn’t an indication that he was planning on introducing a previously unknown incarnation like the recent War Doctor. Instead, it was a nod to the fact that a new actor would have to play the First Doctor, since William Hartnell had passed away in 1975. Also in a nod to the change of actor, the story was going to involve a reveal that an android had been impersonating the First Doctor. Almost nothing else is known of the story, at least nothing I’ve seen discussed. Holmes eventually walked away when he became too impatient with JN-T’s ever-increasing laundry list of cameos for past companions and monsters. Feeling it was impossible to tell a good story that worked in so many miscellaneous elements, Holmes finally said “enough.”
- Replacing him, Terrance Dicks embraced the over-the-top crowd of character by writing a script that, as noted above, was less a story than an excuse for everyone to be in the same place at the same time. Faced with the same problem Steven Moffat would note about writing The Day of the Doctor— that the Doctor’s character is designed to steal the spotlight so it’s almost impossible to have two of them meet without diminishing each other— Dicks’ solution was to essentially give each of them a separate adventure. The First and Fifth Doctors meet briefly early on, but for the bulk of the story all the Doctors are on separate paths, independently working out what’s going on, until they finally all meet up in the tomb of Rassilon for the climax of the story (the Second and Third Doctors don’t even know they’re in a multi-Doctor adventure until that point). The separate storylines give plenty of room for each to meet an abundance of guest characters while also taking their proper turn in the Doctor’s solo spotlight.
- Notoriously, Tom Baker declined to participate in the episode. The story as generally told in fandom is that he was trying to distance himself from Dr Who altogether (shades of the stories Star Trek fans tell about Leonard Nimoy and his “I am not Spock” issue) but this doesn’t really appear to be the case. As part of the off-screen 20th anniversary celebrations of Dr Who, there were two major conventions, one in England and one in the US, and Tom Baker attended both of them along with all the other surviving actors who’d played the Doctor. He had also been in negotiations to join the cast of The Five Doctors that went well enough for JN-T to assume it was all settled and he would appear. It is true that Baker eventually turned it down out of a reluctance to reprise the role, not just because the money wasn’t right or he had other commitments, but it wasn’t a flat refusal from the start.
- Baker’s withdrawal meant Terrance Dicks had to do a late rewrite of the script in response. He’d originally written the story to have the First Doctor remain in the TARDIS in a smaller part (because the actor wouldn’t be an original Doctor). With Tom Baker dropping out, Dicks reassigned the threads of the story: the Fifth Doctor took over the story that the Fourth would have had, while the First Doctor took over the story originally given to the Fifth. That left two companions (Turlough and Susan) in the TARDIS alone rather than having a Doctor with them, but since he wasn’t going to do much it didn’t really alter things.
- Although there are plenty of perils in the Death Zone, the biggest threat (until the Doctors meet the real villain at the end) comes from the Cybermen. At least three different groups of Cybermen are in the zone, menacing all of the Doctors at one point or another. Terrance Dicks did not like the Cybermen as villains (note that they didn’t appear once in the five years he was script editor of the series) but Eric Saward was a big fan (having reintroduced them in Earthshock) and insisted. I haven’t heard anyone point this out directly, but it may be a subtle “take that” over being forced to include them that Dicks’ script turns them into cheap cannon fodder, whole squads of them getting easily mowed down by other, more serious threats.
- Sarah Jane Smith has K-9 with her at the start of the story, which makes the K-9 and Company spinoff episode officially canon (confirmed by the new series’ School Reunion and the Sarah Jane Smith Adventures spinoff).
- Speaking of Sarah, we do have to mention the adventure of “Sarah Jane Smith and the Gentle Slope of Doom.” The script called for Sarah to be walking along a road in a dense fog, miss her footing, and end up clinging to the side of a sheer cliff until the Third Doctor arrives to throw her a rope. But once filming began, the director searched the entire area chosen for all the location work and couldn’t find anywhere suitable to film the scene— apparently the location scouts had missed one of the requirements. They finally had to film the scene on a gentle grassy slope beside the rode. Elisabeth Sladen sells it as hard as she can but there’s just no hiding from the fact that when the Doctor throws Sarah a rope, she could much more easily have just stood up and walked back to the road. (There’s actually enough slope that it makes sense for Sarah to trip and roll downhill before catching herself, so the scene where she actually falls, and then moans in frustration at the whole situation, isn’t bad. What they should have done is, while on location, decided to skip the “throwing a rope” bit and simply have the Doctor’s arrival reassure Sarah after she’d hit this low point.)
- One continuity error has led to an interesting fan theory. The Second Doctor and the Brigadier at one point encounter what seem to be the Second Doctor’s old companions Jamie and Zoe who say they’re trapped behind a force field and will be killed unless the Doctor turns back. The Doctor realizes they’re just impostors because he knows that Jamie and Zoe had their memories of the Doctor erased when the Time Lords returned them home. The problem is that happened in Troughton’s final episode, at the end of season 6, right before the Time Lords forced the Doctor to regenerate and then exiled him to Earth: the Second Doctor shouldn’t know about it. Fans “playing the game” (as the Sherlock Holmes fans call it) have proposed what’s called the “Season 6B theory” in response. Putting this incident together with the fact that the Third Doctor was often sent on missions by the Time Lords during his exile, and that The Deadly Assassin says this was done at the behest of the Celestial Intervention Agency (CIA), the Season 6B Theory suggests that when we see the Second Doctor spiraling into blackness at the end of his final episode, he wasn’t immediately regenerated: instead, the CIA snatched him away and sent him on adventures we haven’t seen, before finally returning him to the moment of his exile (perhaps when he was about to regenerate because of injuries during the last of those unknown adventures). Further support for the Season 6B Theory will come from another story a couple of seasons from now.
- So, shouldn’t the later Doctors all already remember how these events will turn out, given they’ve all experienced it from the First Doctor’s point of view? The recent Day of the Doctor tries to address this problem by saying the earlier Doctor’s won’t retain any memory of their encounter once their timelines are straightened out, but that won’t fly in the case of The Five Doctors. Doctors One and Two in this story clearly remember the events of their prior meeting with the Third. (Which, come to think of it, raises the same question for The Three Doctors).
- Offscreen: by the time of The Five Doctors, a number of American PBS stations were showing episodes of Dr Who, most of them sticking to the Tom Baker years. PBS decided to show The Five Doctors nationally, on the same day that it would show in the UK: the actual 20th anniversary, November 23, 1983. Then the BBC decided to delay it a couple of days and show the story during their annual Children in Need telethon that year. PBS did not change its schedule, and the result is that The Five Doctors is the only episode of Doctor Who, Classic or Modern, to air in the US before it aired in the UK. (The 1996 TV movie also aired in the US before the UK, but it’s a special case.)
- After The Five Doctors completed filming, but before it had been broadcast, Peter Davison announced he would be leaving the series after the next season. He had become friends with Patrick Troughton on the set of The Five Doctors, and Troughton had advised him to do only three seasons (as Troughton himself had done), in order to avoid getting typecast. Of course the seasons Troughton did were twice as long as they were in 1983. Davison also felt the writers hadn’t figured out how to handle his version of the Doctor very well. Ironically, that would change after he’d made his decision and it was too late: he’d say at the end of season 21 that if they’d written him that well all along, he would have stayed longer. But more on that when we get to it.
Next Week:
“Warriors of the Deep,” 4 episodes, the season 21 premiere.
