The Caves of Androzani

Chapter the 290th, in which there's no point crying over spilt bat's milk.

Plot:
A twin planet system, Androzani Major and Androzani Minor, in the far future. Androzani Major is fully colonised by humans, whereas its twin planet - with its extensive cave system, and regular eruptions of superheated mud - is home to not much more than a colony of bats. A rich and powerful industrialist Morgus is in partnership with engineer Sharaz Jek to refine Spectrox - a life-extending drug made from the bats' droppings. The raw Spectrox is highly toxic, so can only be harvested by androids Jek has built. The unscrupulous Morgus doesn't want to share the profits: he provides faulty equipment, meaning Jek is caught unawares by a mud burst and almost killed. The army are sent in and capture the refinery, but Jek is able to escape with the stockpiles of Spectrox. He hides out in the caves, guarded by his androids; he knows that the public on Major will not wait forever for Spectrox and digs in to wait the army out. He purchases weapons in exchange for quantities of the drug, and infiltrates the army base with an android duplicate of second-in-command Salateen, whom Jek previously captured and kept alive for company. Morgus is secretly arranging the weapons shipments to Jek to prolong the war, as the scarcity of Spectrox is pushing up the price and making him even more wealthy. A lengthy impasse follows.

The Doctor and Peri arrive on Minor, and through accidental contact with raw Spectrox become ill. This causes everything else to unravel, and almost everyone to get killed. They're mistaken for gun-runners or spies. Jek takes a shine to Peri, and captures the Doctor and Peri before the army can execute them. The Doctor and Peri escape with the real Salateen, but then get split up. The Doctor is captured by the gun-runners, but escapes. Peri is captured by Jek again, and becomes seriously ill, falling unconscious. The army is led by the real Salateen to Jek's base. The Androids kill Salateen and the rest of the army, but get destroyed in the process. The army's commander is locked out of the base by Jek and killed in a mud blast. Morgus's crimes are uncovered by his PA and he goes on the run to Minor meeting up with the gun-runners. The lead gun-runner Stotz kills the others, as they won't team up with him and Morgus to find Jek's base. In the base, Jek attacks Morgus. Stotz shoots Jek, mortally wounding him, but not before he strangles Morgus to death. The android Salateen kills Stotz, and Jek dies in the android's arms. The Doctor travels to an area of the caves where he collects the milk of a queen bat, the antidote for the Spetrox poisoning. He rescues Peri from Jek's base after the gunfight, just as mud is exploding everywhere, and carries her to the TARDIS. He accidentally drops the phial of antidote, so there's not enough for both of them. He gives it all to Peri who recovers. He regenerates.

Context:

I watched this from the special edition revisited DVD across two weekends in January 2024, the first two episodes one day, then a two week gap before watching episodes three and four together. I was accompanied both times by all three kids (boys of 17 and 14, girl of 11). The only issue with this way of spreading out the episodes is that the second cliffhanger is the only one that's not fantastic, but I didn't think the youngsters would have the patience to sit through three episodes on the trot in either sitting, so couldn't leave things on the Doctor and Peri seemingly killed by firing squad (end of episode one) nor on the Doctor bracing for a crash landing on Androzani Minor (end of episode three). All the kids seemed to enjoy both halves, but middle child pointed out a flaw that had never occurred to me during any of the very many times I'd watched this story in the past: why doesn't the Doctor drink some of the queen bat's milk at the point when he's just harvested it? He'd be cured before making the difficult journey back to deliver the rest to Peri, and therefore would be much more likely to be successful. Waiting until she's cured first puts both their lives in more danger (and of course, because he spills some of the milk, ultimately means he has to regenerate).

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This story marks another season of Doctor Who completed, classic series 21, Peter Davison's third and final run from 1984. This is the 19th season done out of the total of 39 seasons to date (at the time of writing). In full, I have now completed classic seasons 3, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14 to 17, 20, 21, 23 and 25, and new series 2, 6, 10, 11 and 13).

First Time Round:

I cast my mind back to watching this story on its debut BBC TV broadcast in 1984, 40 years back or thereabouts. I still have some very strong memories of the run of stories of which it formed a part. I can remember the excitement of waiting for the first episode of the first story, Warriors of the Deep, and a sudden need to rush to the loo with only a couple of minutes to go; I can remember finding myself without enough time to do homework due in the next day, which I would normally have squeezed in to the slot between the end of Doctor Who and bedtime, because the episodes of Resurrection of the Daleks were twice the usual length; I can vividly recall the negative schoolroom reactions to The Twin Dilemma. I can remember nothing about watching The Caves of Androzani, though, apart from thinking it was jolly exciting. It has always been a popular story, but I don't think it was seen, by me or anyone else, as quite as big a deal then as it is now.

Reaction:

This is another story, like Genesis of the Daleks, which is impervious to my criticism. It won't matter even one millilitre of Spectrox whether I say nice or nasty things here, Caves will always be one of the most popular Doctor Who stories, nestling towards the apex of fan polls (it came fourth out of the first 60 years worth of stories in the 2023 Doctor Who Magazine poll). Genesis is a great story with some great characters and moments, but it's not what you'd call innovative or different. Caves, on the other hand, it's a somewhat atypical story to get such high honours; it does something subtly different to the usual. At one point during this watch, the youngest child asked "Who's the baddie?" and her two siblings and I replied more or less in unison "All of them". It was nice that they'd picked up on this; every speaking character apart from Peri and the Doctor is venal, brutal, predatory or all of the above. Morgus is probably the worst of the bunch - funding a war he is publicly condemning just to keep himself rich, bumping off his rivals at the drop of a hat - and the Doctor barely gets to meet him, certainly doing nothing to stop him. In the story, the working title of which was Chain Reaction, the status quo established at the start is fatally disrupted, the balance of power shifted forever, and almost everyone killed, all because of the introduction of one tiny, random factor. The Doctor and Peri follow some tracks into a cave and accidentally contaminate themselves after coming into contact with a highly toxic material; this one action causes the world of the story to unravel without the forces of good having to do anything (which is useful as they are preoccupied with just surviving).

As many others have pointed out, including me in blog posts passim, this story's fresh take was very successful and this made it become a template for future stories. Unfortunately, it's too restrictive a structure to emulate. A story of a cynical world devoid of hope where the heroes actions don't make much of a difference except by accident is tonally very bleak. That's fine for the sombre finale seeing out your leading man, but it would quickly become unpleasant to watch if the trick was repeated on every ordinary Saturday night. The Doctor has generally to notice and care that people are being evil and try to stop them, and for the first year following Colin Baker's introduction (entering with a rather marvellous couple of lines at the end of this story) he mostly doesn't. Lots of stories with lots of cynical characters and an ineffective Doctor follow. The writer of this story, Doctor Who veteran Robert Holmes, turned in a great script, but even he couldn't reproduce the lightning in a bottle of The Caves of Androzani in his later work for Colin Baker. Nobody else could even come close. I can't wholly blame this story's success for what happened after, though. Caves is the logical extension of a story style started by script editor Eric Saward a couple of years earlier with Earthshock, and continued since. It should have been the logical conclusion, though. It should have dawned on all involved that doing a cynical actioner without any nice characters nor hope is a dramatic dead end beyond this one-off proposition.

Just taking the story on its own terms rather than what it might have subsequently inspired, there's obviously a lot to love. Watching in two separate halves accentuated it, but it's definitely already there in the structure of the story that it falls into two main sections cleaving at the halfway point. The first two episodes are set-up so that the last two can run like a whippet to the finish line. At the halfway point, the Doctor is separated from Peri after having found out about their predicament and a way he can save them both; he spends the next two episodes single-mindedly pursuing that objective in what is essentially one extended chase sequence. That it feels seamless, and the first half doesn't seem too expository, is down to great scripting and great direction. Graeme Harper - in his first but by no means last Doctor Who story as credited director - delivers some striking visuals and a coherent set of performances than combine to produce a instantly solid and consistent story world. It was no easy target either; the tone of Caves is both doom-laden and thrill ride. Harper manages to achieve both in harmony without either cancelling the other out, and he does it with breath-taking verve: all the restless cross-fades of different glimpses of Sharaz Jek when he's first featured, not allowing the audience to get a proper handle of the character; the floating transparent hologram screen showing one character talking while another character walks behind it; all the many many gunfights (the story must hold the record for the most blank rounds expended in any one Doctor Who production). Harper - directing from the studio floor rather than the gallery - makes material recorded in Television Centre feel like a movie. He can't make the rubbish Magma Beast costume look good, alas, but he gives it his best shot.

Aside from the brief appearances of one dodgy monster, which the story doesn't need anyway (I wrote the synopsis above without needing to reference it once) everything else is a cut above what made it to screen in other stories of this period. Roger Limb produces his best incidental score. The regeneration sequence is probably the best ever - a crescendo of sound and colour inspired by the end of Beatles song A Day in the Life. Imagery does not, though, come at the expense of character. Sharaz Jek is a contender for the most complex villain in Doctor Who's history. The mask hiding his deformity, the genius and the possessiveness allude to The Phantom of the Opera - an inspiration for a previous story by the same writer, The Talons of Weng-Chiang. Like the Phantom, Jek isn't an entirely unsympathetic character, and arguably behaves more heroically than half of the cast, while obviously still being a monster. Christopher Gable grabs the role with relish and enjoys mining the contradictions. The death of the character, in the arms of his android creation, is a magnificent moment. In normal circumstances, a performance like Gable's would dominate a Doctor Who story, but the other characters are so well drawn and the actors so well cast and directed, that everyone meets him at that high level (including the two regulars). John Normington, Maurice Roeves, Roy Holder, Robert Glenister, all are magnificent. Davison's take on the desperate, reckless Doctor battling against inevitability, scornful and sarcastic about the world he finds himself in, is so good that one wishes the script had come up a year or two before: Davison probably wouldn't have left so soon had he got material like this earlier.

Connectivity:

Both The Caves of Androzani and Eve of the Daleks see the Doctor seemingly killed at the first  cliffhanger (the crash into the beginning credits for the non-episodic 21st century story, but it counts) and then be seen to be alive in subsequent scenes following soon afterwards.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Regeneration Game. The blogging of this story sees another milestone; I've now watched and blogged all the regeneration stories of the classic 20th century series. I've done most of those from the 21st century new series also, only missing the most recent two (at time of writing) The Power of the Doctor and The Giggle. The latter of these provided an interesting echo between those two phases of Doctor Who, for those in the know at least, as it featured the Toymaker as the instigator of the Doctor's change of appearance. This is a role that the character was originally planned to have in the 1960s serial where he first appeared, The Celestial Toymaker. For a number of reasons, the producers of the time wanted to recast the Doctor around that time, and it was initially slated that when the Toymaker made the Doctor visible again after a period of invisibility towards the end of the story, it would be with a different face. In the end, this did not happen, and Hartnell did a further five stories before bowing out. At the end of the fifth of those, the process that would eventually be called regeneration kicked in. The Doctor undergoes a natural but disruptive process that changes his appearance and personality. This obviously had more potential for future repetition than what would have effectively been a magic spell cast by the Toymaker; had they gone with the original plan, it's hard to imagine Doctor Who would have lasted beyond the next change of its lead (they'd either have had to get the Toymaker back again or thought or something completely different, either option further stretching the suspension of audience disbelief).

The invention of regeneration is most certainly therefore a key part of the show still being a going concern after 60 years and counting. What's interesting, though, is how slowly it took for various writers and producers to use the process to build up the drama of the show's main star leaving. As I recently mentioned when covering Hartnell's last story The Tenth Planet for the blog, the metamorphosis of one Doctor into another is tacked on at the very end in that story. It happens in the last few minutes of the final episode, not arising from the circumstances of the previous three and a bit, and without any context as to what's going on. The explanations come in the following story, making the dramatic question about whether the new Doctor will be accepted (neatly mirroring a question that might be in audience minds) rather than what act of bravery will bring about the current Doctor's end. The next changeover in the War Games is very similar: the backstory of the Doctor's people, the Time Lords, is built up throughout the ten episodes, so their capturing the Doctor and putting him on trial does not come from nowhere. It's cleverly constructed, but it's still more exposition than drama. It's only with the third Doctor's swan song, Planet of the Spiders, that the regeneration feels built in to the story as a whole. It's also where the term regeneration is first used, and the rules settle down to pattern that remained thereafter: it's a process brought on by significant injury or illness. The one thing missing (as I've pointed out before in the blog post for the next regeneration story Logopolis) was the inclusion of heroism on the part of the Doctor. This was rectified in Baker's swansong: his version of the Doctor dies saving the universe rather than facing his greatest fear as Pertwee's Doctor does.

It was a shame that having refined the pattern, it only got used once more in the classic series, for The Caves of Androzani. Davison's Doctor sacrifices himself to save his friend, but - because of circumstances out of the control of the writers - the two Doctors after Davison bow out at the beginning of stories, not the end. This made it pretty difficult for their regenerations to be the culmination of anything, and they both see the Doctor lose his life inadvertently rather than because of any action by the character. In the new series, the heroic sacrifice pattern has been followed more or less for each Doctor's final story, but on occasion - The Parting of the Ways, or The Power of the Doctor, for example - the ending has still felt a bit tacked on. This is because it's a deceptively difficult thing to pull off; it has to be a somewhat sudden, accidental action that brings about the change (dying of old age is not dramatic enough, though The Time of the Doctor flirts somewhat with the idea); if the Doctor sees things coming too far in advance, he or she should be clever enough to work out some other way to save the day without sacrificing their life (as they usually do, week in week out). In order to preserve story flow, a couple of tricks are commonly deployed: either the Doctor is forewarned by a prediction of death, too vague to do something about in advance but specific enough to give the whole story an elegiac feel (The End of Time), or the injured Doctor holds back the inevitability of his death for a lengthy spell (The End of Time, again, or Twice Upon a Time).

What's also happened during the 21st century is that the series has played more with the regeneration concept outside of the Doctor's swansongs. In the classic series, there was a jokey sequence explaining a change of actor playing Romana, and a depiction of a different transformation process allowing the Master to be played by someone new, but neither were true regenerations - those were saved for the Doctor. As the new series years continued, we saw full-on regenerations for the Master, then River Song, then just some random soldier bloke on Gallifrey. The Doctor had been seen starting to regenerate midway through a story but aborting it, and we've seen him fake a regeneration. The apotheosis was the Timeless child backstory explained in Jodie Whittaker's time in the role; not only was the Doctor the progenitor of all Time Lords, the regeneration process of all subsequent Time Lords having been derived from experiments on her person, but also the Doctor had had many other faces that the audience were unaware of before being William Hartnell. The Giggle throws in another new innovation with bi-generation; this was specifically done to change the emotion of the process. After thirteen stories where regeneration is a sad goodbye, we have a regeneration with a happy ending. The old Doctor gets to hang around and - presumably? - die of old age, happy with his adopted family of Bush, Temple and Nobles. Perhaps that's enough mucking around with regeneration now. We'll see when Ncuti Gatwa bows out whether it'll be something weird and different again; hopefully, though, that won't be for a good few years yet.  

In Summary:

Obviously superlative, but one wouldn't want Doctor Who to tell such a story every week.