“If anything happens to myself because of this, I will never forgive himself.”
The Story
The Second Doctor and Jaime visit a space station / research institute at the behest of the Time Lords, who are concerned about dangerous time travel experiments being conducted there. The Doctor also finds his old friend Dastari has been conducting genetic engineering research, enhancing the intelligence of his servant, an Androgum named Chessene, to “mega-genius” level. The Doctor warns that Androgums are a dangerous and aggressive species and that enhancing Chessene’s intelligence won’t change her nature— and sure enough, she and a (non-enhanced) Androgum chef named Shockeye poison everyone on the station while the Sontarans attack. Chessene’s conspired with the Sontarans to steal the time travel research and also kidnap a Time Lord to study the “symbiotic nuclei”, the part of Gallifreyan biology that makes them uniquely capable of time travel.
Meanwhile, the Sixth Doctor has decided to go fishing and Peri is bored to death while he spends hours without catching anything. The Sixth Doctor senses something happening in his past and soon finds his way to the space station in the aftermath of the Sontaran attack. They join up with Jaime and follow Chessene and the Sontarans to rescue the Second Doctor. The villains have set up a hideout back on Earth, in Seville, Spain, where they are already scheming to betray each other. The Two Doctors and their companions have to extricate themselves from the situation without allowing either the Sontarans or Chessene to gain the power of time travel.
Review
The first question that occurs when the title of this episode pops up on screen is, “What? Didn’t we just have The Five Doctors?” There’s no anniversary to celebrate, and even in-universe there’s very little justification for why the Doctor manages to meet himself, nor why he senses things happening to his far-past self as if they are happening “now.” In both prior multi-Doctor stories, the Time Lords of the Doctor’s “present” (don’t examine that too closely) reached back into his past and brought his former selves forward to meet him. In the recent 50th anniversary special, the “Moment” does something of the same sort. Here, I suppose the fact that two scientists are conducting time travel research could be invoked to explain the situation. At one point the Sixth Doctor believes his earlier self was actually killed in the Sontaran attack, and that his paradoxical continued existence proves the time travel experiment has already damaged the fabric of space-time — but this is quickly discovered to be untrue, and the question of why things happening to the Second Doctor continue to affect the Sixth remain unexplained.
Outside the question of Whoniverse logic, the episode is symptomatic of the series’ descent into what Doctor Who Magazine called “permanent celebration mode.” Following all the success and hype of the 20th anniversary year, JN-T started to lead the series more and more deeply into being about itself and its own lore: which in the days when there were neither repeats on air nor home video releases of past episodes meant alienating all but the most dedicated fans.
All that said— the story is very nice on its own merits and is my favorite out of this otherwise weak season. The writer is the great Robert Holmes, and while even he cannot fully rise above the problems endemic to the season, he manages a better job of it than anyone else. There are so many terrific one-liners in the dialog that I had real difficulty deciding which to use in the page quote above (the runner up was “Circular reasoning will only make you dizzy, Doctor”). Robert Holmes’ displays his usual penchant for memorable supporting characters with the out-of-work actor (now restaurant manager) Oscar and his girlfriend Anita, and there are some very gripping dramatic moments as well (see below). But there are also some places where the story falls flat. Oscar’s death at the hands of Shockeye is meant to be shocking but doesn’t really come across. Mortally wounded, he gives a Shakespearian-style death speech that’s so stagey you expect the Doctor to deliver a punchline like “He’s okay, it’s just a flesh wound.” He doesn’t, but the scene needed it so much that you’re left feeling nothing about what was supposed to be a moving moment. Eric Saward’s desire for more action-violence is on display throughout in a series of needlessly graphic scenes culminating in the Doctor finally killing Shockeye by holding a cyanide-soaked rag over his face.
The business of the Time Lords’ “symbiotic nuclei” is also problematic. The series had long shown examples that the Doctor (and presumably Time Lords in general) were in some way uniquely linked to time, or uniquely suited to time travel, in ways no other species could match. But bringing the symbiotic nucleus into it comes across rather like George Lucas bringing midichlorians into Star Wars: it ruins more than it intrigues. Holmes tries to keep a bit of mystery going with the Doctors giving disinformation about it to the Sontarans and Chessene, without ever making clear what was true and what wasn’t, but in the end rather than being intrigued we just want the series to forget the whole thing— which it did, never bringing it up again.
Outside the writing, the production lets Holmes’ story down in the area of Shockeye himself. The villain of the story is the enhanced Androgum, Chessene, but the monster is Shockeye— or it’s supposed to be. Holmes’ script required the Androgums to be able to pass for human, at least barely, but to be massive hulking figures, especially the “natural” androgum Shockeye. Holmes’ portrayed the species as sort of cave-man-like, hominids not quite evolved all the way to being an intelligent species, but close. They needed to cast someone like Dave Prowse but instead they give us a Shockeye played by a late-middle-aged, scrawny guy with a pot belly who couldn’t physically intimidate anyone. Good monster concepts have been let down by Dr Who’s budget before, but this is worse: you can excuse a poor special effect or monster due to Dr Who’s tiny budget, but that excuse doesn’t apply to casting.
This is nothing against the actor himself, a well-known BBC actor named John Stratton. JN-T, who always had more of an eye for publicity than for storytelling (which he entrusted to his script editors) had a habit of “stunt casting:” getting well-known actors just to put their name in the Radio Times listing, without regard for whether they were at all right for the character. Sometimes it worked out well, when name and part lined up right, but not always. This is a time it didn’t. When he penned his novelization of the story for the Target book series, Holmes was careful to follow his script’s description of Shockeye rather than tailoring it to match what appeared onscreen.
This is more of a pity because the issue of Dastari’s artificial enhancement of Chessene (and a later failed attempt to convert the Second Doctor into an Androgum) is really what the story is about— in fact Holmes titled the story The Androgum Inheritance, it was JN-T who switched it to The Two Doctors for PR reasons. We needed to see a convincing picture from Shockeye of what natural Androgums are really like. With this story, Holmes is very deliberately playing with the white hat/black hat romantic nature of the Dr Who universe, and making us feel uncomfortable with its implications. In the Whoniverse as in a lot of science fiction, alien races are often one dimensional (dramatically they often represent a single aspect of human nature) and there’s a share of critics who are bothered by the unfortunate implications if you assume the writer thinks that applies to races or cultures in real life. Holmes invites us to confront that question— when the Doctor criticizes Dastari for enhancing Chessene, warning that her nature would be unchanged, Dastari essentially accuses him of racism. But then, Dastari didn’t educate Chessene and so prove she was as intelligent as anyone, he had to surgically and genetically alter her: so who is the racist if Dastari believes an Androgum can only amount to anything by being biologically redesigned?
The question doesn’t have an easy answer and I don’t imagine Holmes wants us to think it does, even as he reaffirms that in the Dr Who universe, like it or not, that’s how things are: the Doctor of course turns out to be right, and over the course of the story Dastari is confronted by increasing evidence of the fact as Chessene commits more and more brutal acts despite his efforts to persuade her that her enhanced intelligence should show her a better way. It all culminates in a scene close to the end when the Doctor has been wounded and Chessene sends Shockeye to follow his blood trail. Then she pauses, looking down at the blood spatter on the ground, wrestles with herself until, with an expression of despair, can’t help herself from falling to the ground and licking up the blood— while in the background, Dastari watches, horrified as he finally realizes the truth. It is a powerful and disturbing scene, and leaves us with questions we may not enjoy asking.
Details
- The episode was originally written to feature Richard Hurndall reprising his role as the First Doctor from The Five Doctors. JN-T was impressed enough with his performance to want to see him in the series again, and believed that since he was “really” the First Doctor he could bring him back without needing a special occasion to justify it. Unfortunately Hurndall was unable to appear, so the series contacted Patrick Troughton instead. This leads to an interesting question: with Hurndall, the story was going to show us a First Doctor from before he fled Gallifrey, when he was still a Time Lord in good standing, which is why he was working as the Time Lords’ ambassador to try and talk Dastari into stopping the time travel experiments. But now that the story was about the Second Doctor, it raises the question: what’s the Second Doctor doing on a mission for the Time Lords? He was on the run from them, and was exiled and forced to regenerate the moment they caught him. The continuity question leads to:
- The “Season 6B Theory”: at the end of season 6, the Time Lords caught the Doctor. Jaimie and Zoe were sent home and had their memories erased, and the Doctor regenerated into Jon Pertwee. But in The Five Doctors, the Second Doctor knows about Jamie and Zoe having their memories erased, and now here the Second Doctor is on a mission for the Time Lords along with Jaimie who also knows about them. The Season 6B Theory suggests that in between the end of season 6 and the start of season 7, the Second Doctor had unseen adventures as an agent of the Time Lords. We heard back in The Deadly Assassin about the “CIA”— Celestial Intervention Agency— who were the ones sending the Third Doctor on missions after his exile. According to the Theory, the CIA rescued the Second Doctor moments before his regeneration and made him one of their agents for a while, also picking up Jaime and Victoria (who is mentioned in The Two Doctors though she doesn’t appear) to assist him. The Second Doctor as seen both here and in The Five Doctors was lifted out of that part of his timestream. Eventually, the CIA returned him to the moment from which he’d been rescued, completing his regeneration with no memory of the “season 6B” part of his life. Fan fiction authors, you may now begin writing.
- The story filmed on location in Seville, and features a lengthy scene of our characters searching the town in episode 3, to showcase the location. Filming abroad was another of JN-T’s publicity ideas. At first he wanted to go to America and set the story in New Orleans, but that fell through and he eventually arranged the production to go to Seville instead. Robert Holmes was not pleased: in the first place the location had no relevance at all to the story, and as a writer he rightly protested against introducing irrelevant material (it should have been set in the “default” London). He was also forced to do rewrites covering the location details after New Orleans fell through, which only emphasized how irrelevant the location was to the story. Holmes’ objections aside, I think it does no harm to the series overall to occasionally recognize that there are other places on planet Earth, and if London as London doesn’t have to have anything to do with the story, neither does anywhere else.
- Robert Holmes was a lifelong vegetarian and admitted that in large part the character of the androgum chef Shockeye was a deliberate “take that” against meat eaters. Shockeye spends most of the episode wanting to taste the meat of “the human animal” and confidently asserting that there’s nothing wrong with that since “lower animals don’t feel pain the way we do.” The name Androgum is an anagram of “gourmand.”
The Beginning of the End
While The Two Doctors was on the air, the BBC came out with the announcement that the next season of Dr Who was being cancelled and the show was going on an 18 month hiatus while they thought over its future. The news astonished everyone, from fans to entertainment news reporters. It was only a year or so since all the 20th anniversary celebrations, when the program was regularly hailed as a prized British institution. How could its fortunes fall so fast?
It’s easy enough for today’s fans to look back (as I’m doing in these posts) and talk about how bad the quality had fallen off in this season— but that’s hindsight. The series actually enjoyed considerable prestige at the time. I mentioned JN-T’s “stunt casting” above— it was problematic but the reason he could do it was that even the best-known BBC actors were delighted to have a chance to appear in the series (especially those with kids). The series was still doing well in the ratings. In fact it was winning its time slot— and conspiracy-minded fans immediately noted that the show it was beating was produced by the wife of the BBC executive who decided to put Dr Who on hold (I have no idea if this was actually true— but the story was soon circulating at the conventions). It didn’t help quiet the conspiracy theories that the executive in question, Michael Grade, was up front about the fact that he hated Dr Who. He repeatedly rehashed standard one-liners about wobbly sets and rubber monsters, and threw in accusations of bad writing and bad acting (carefully cherry-picking his examples) to suggest that Dr Who had always been an embarrassment to the BBC. He described the fans as “loonies” in one interview. (Grade was still at the BBC, all those years later, when the new series started up. Asked by a reporter about his opinion of Dr Who’s return, he replied, “As long as I don’t have to watch it.”)
The BBC’s stated reason for the hiatus was that Dr Who had become too expensive to produce, an excuse which of course invited both conspiracy theories as well as gales of laughter from anyone who had ever tuned in to an episode and seen what a shoestring budget the show actually had. It was a bit brazen for Grade to criticize the sets and monsters when the BBC caused both by strangling the show with a tiny budget. In fact the BBC had long given Dr Who the exact same budget (and studio resources) they’d give to a sitcom that didn’t need any special effects, non-standard props or monster costumes at all. In any case, the timing of the announcement was hardly indicative of cost-saving: with The Two Doctors on the air, season 23 was already in production. The scripts had been written and the writers paid, directors had been hired (and so, by contract, would have to be paid whether the episodes were taped or not). If the BBC wanted to save money, they could have announced the hiatus would follow season 23. Instead their abrupt cancellation meant they spent a chunk of money for nothing.
It was also pointed out that Dr Who was now being seen in 54 countries and bringing back quite a large chunk of money to the BBC. It was a highly profitable property. To that the BBC replied that the money from overseas sales went to BBC Worldwide and not to the BBC itself. “It’s a matter of internal accounting,” they said. Former script editor Douglas Adams, who by now was the Very Famous Douglas Adams, replied at a fan convention I attended, “Then instead of cancelling Dr Who they should sack the internal accountants.”
The BBC at the time was lobbying for an increase in the license fee (the tax that supports the BBC) and several press reports suggested that the cancellation, and specious protests about expense, were basically an attempt to blackmail the public into supporting the fee increase.
So what’s the truth? I don’t know, and it’s beyond my power to research it enough to find a credible answer. What is certain is that Dr Who disappeared from the airwaves for 18 months after the end of season 22, and when season 23 finally returned (not with the previously-contracted scripts, which were never made) the series had been fatally wounded. Classic Dr Who would never recover either its “British institution” stature, or its ratings popularity.
Next Week
“Timelash,” 2 episodes.
