Chapter the 336th, is a Doctor Who two for the price of one offer, a BOGOF with Bug-Eyed Monsters.
Plot:
The Doctor takes Peri fishing on an alien planet, then collapses in the TARDIS. He's somehow been linked across time to his second self. That Doctor, accompanied by Jamie, is on a mission for the Time Lords, just like he always wasn't. He is visiting Professor Dastari, who runs a research centre space station, trying to persuade him to stop some of his team doing time travel experiments that could endanger the universe. Dastari's own research is in genetic manipulation; he has augmented an Androgum (aggressive, food-obsessed aliens) called Chessene - she is planning an attack on the station, having allied herself with the Sontarans. The attack happens, Jamie escapes and the Doctor is apparently killed. Really, he's been taken to Earth by Chessene, with another Androgum called Shockeye plus Dastari (who's in on the conspiracy). They are joined by two Sontarans. The other Doctor and Peri arrive on the abandoned station to investigate, and find Jamie living wild in the ducts. The Doctor recreates the mental link with his former self and works out that he is being held in Seville. The three of them travel there in the TARDIS, and run into Oscar and Anita, who have just witnessed the Sontaran ship land. Oscar has been setting up moth-catching equipment for later that evening, but he and Anita need to go back to their jobs at a nearby restaurant.
The Doctor, Jamie and Peri attempt to sneak in to the hacienda where the other Doctor is being held. Chessene, Dastari and the Sontarans are trying to get that Doctor's help to get the experimental time capsule to work. He refuses. Chessene betrays the Sontarans, killing them with acid. Dastari operates on the Doctor turning him into a hybrid Androgum to make him more amenable, but he and Shockeye escape and go to the centre of Seville to have a meal at Oscar's restaurant. When he won't accept alien currency for the meal, Oscar is stabbed to death by Shockeye. Shockeye escapes; the second Doctor is left behind, and returns to normal. The sixth Doctor, Peri and Jamie arrive just in time to get him out of the restaurant before the policÃa arrive. Chessene captures them all and takes them back to the hacienda. The sixth Doctor pretends that he has made the capsule operational. Shockeye is going to cook a human (Jamie) for himself and Chessene to eat before they leave. When the sixth Doctor tries to free Jamie, Shockeye wounds him; the Doctor flees outside, with Shockeye pursuing him, following the blood trail. The Doctor stumbles across Oscar's cyanide jar and uses it to kill Shockeye. Chessene sees some of the Doctor's blood and licks it up, much to Dastari's disgust. He turns against her, so she kills him, and tries to escape in the capsule. It blows up, killing her. The second Doctor summons his TARDIS by remote control, and he and Jamie say goodbye. The sixth Doctor decides that he and Peri should become vegetarians.
Context:
It has become an annual tradition that I download a Doctor Who story to watch when I'm away on holiday. It's not always possible, but often the selected story is vaguely appropriate because it includes scenes filmed in my holiday destination, or just scenes filmed in a country other than the UK. Sometimes, the characters in the story themselves go on holiday. The Two Doctors has not been selected for any trips before; I was holding it back thinking the day would probably come when the family visited Seville. We came very close in 2025; a nice Airbnb was very nearly selected, but we decided instead that the kids would prefer somewhere with a beach. So, to Menorca we went and - with very few stories left to blog - The Two Doctors had to finally accompany us (well, me, anyway, I didn't try to get any of the rest of the family to watch with me). Menorca is at least Spanish territory, so there is something of a link. I downloaded the three episodes from the BBC iplayer and watched them on my phone over the course of the break.
Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. This story completes another season and another Doctor. The tally stands at 12 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-9 and 11-14), and 38 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 11 now remain.
First Time Round:
I have a clear memory of watching the first episode on its initial UK broadcast on BBC1 on Saturday 16th February 1985. My Mum had made me a 'boil in the bag' prawn curry (definitely not a Vesta, probably Birds Eye or Tesco's own brand) for my tea. I watched Doctor Who in the living room, with the plate of food on my lap. I remember seeing the scene where the Doctor lands a weird alien fish on screen, and this momentarily putting me off my food. It didn't last long, and the plateful was scarfed down soon afterwards. An underlying message of the story is a promotion of vegetarianism but this didn't take with me. I've no strong memories of the rest of that episode nor my first watch of the others on the following two Saturdays, but I do remember a general feeling - in my serious fan manner - that it was too early in Colin's era for him to be sharing the spotlight with a returning Doctor. Now a lot of time (more than 40 years) has gone by, would I feel the same way?
Reaction:
Robert Holmes, who penned The Two Doctors, was one of the writers most instrumental in the success of 20th Century Who. There's a run of stories through the 1970s that he was involved with, directly or indirectly, that is seen by a majority of fans as a golden period, a template for Doctor Who excellence. As I mentioned in the blog post for one of his two 1960s stories
The Space Pirates, though, that golden period doesn't quite extend to everything he wrote for the show. His first two stories are not generally liked, and neither are his last two. The final one was The Trial of a Timelord, co-written with many other people, and with so much negative stuff happening behind the scenes (including Holmes' failing health and death before his scripts were realised) that it would be churlish to criticise him or any single contributor. What, though, of his penultimate story? The Two Doctors was commissioned and produced before the BBC had threatened Doctor Who with cancellation in 1985; the series was ostensibly in rude health. The story Holmes had written immediately before was The Caves of Androzani, one that forever after would be in the top tens of all-time Doctor Who story polls. He was on a hell of a high. Immediately before Caves, though, Robert Holmes had been the first writer commissioned to write 20th anniversary special The Five Doctors, and he could not manage it. He tried but failed to weave the excessive set of 'shopping list' demands of returning actors and plot elements into a coherent narrative. The Two Doctors is a similar challenge: it requires the inclusion of a returning Doctor, companion and monster, and the arbitrary locating of some sequences in a foreign country (originally planned to be New Orleans, but when filming there fell through changed to Seville).
Maybe Holmes wanted to prove that he could achieve a 'shopping list' story after all. Or, perhaps, he was chosen because the story slot was the equivalent length of an old six-parter. There hadn't been a story of such length broadcast since the late 1970s when Holmes was last regularly writing the show. Even then, though, he didn't often write those longer ones. Usually in the 1970s, Holmes would work with writers to shape such stories to have a "dogleg", a sharp turn of the plot to a new focus after the two or four episode mark, to feel like a new but linked story was starting, keeping audience interest from sagging. He eschews that approach for The Two Doctors. There's a more gradual move from the action set on the space station to the action in Seville. It might have worked better to confine the space station stuff to part one and concentrate on Seville for parts two and three, or maybe vice versa. Probably, Holmes thought he had enough elements to keep things interesting without such a structure, and to be fair he does almost pull it off. The sixth Doctor doesn't appear early enough at the beginning, and the Sontarans are dealt with too early before the end; with a couple of tweaks to resolve both those points, the story would flow pretty perfectly. The second point is more forgivable as his new creations the Androgums are conceptually strong and nasty enough to carry the climactic villainy on their own. The first point, though, is much more of a problem. Aside from his face in the beginning credits, Colin Baker doesn't appear for the first 10 minutes of his own show.
The story starts with Patrick Troughton (seen in black and white at first, and using an older TARDIS console prop, both nice touches), and that is okay; it's an intriguing hook. It then stays on him, and the minutes stretch out. At several moments, I was inwardly screaming "Cut away!" and not just because it would be polite to the leading man. I was right in my feeling in 1985 as mentioned in the First Time Round section above; it's too soon for Colin's Doctor to be sharing the spotlight, and being pushed so far out of it delegitimises him - it feels like Troughton is conferring official status on him, rather than the other way round. Cutting away, and then intercutting between the parallel action of Colin and Pat's exploits would additionally have given the story a boost to its dynamism. A restless intercutting approach, a combination of script and direction decisions, was one of the things that enlivened The Caves of Androzani, after all. That, though, was directed by one of the most dynamic Who directors of the time, Graeme Harper; The Two Doctors, on the other hand, is directed by Peter Moffat. He is a safe pair of hands, and known for getting all the needed material in the can efficiently, even sometimes ahead of schedule (almost unprecedented for Doctor Who with its complexities far exceeding its budgets); the material that ends up in the can, though, isn't usually energetically paced. There's a couple of major issues with how key story beats are revealed; these may have stemmed from the script rather than having been introduced by the director, but one can't help but believe that a different director would have seen the issues ahead of time, and nudged the more than competent writer or script editor to fix them. Alternatively, of course, they could very well have been introduced by the director.
The first reveal of a Sontaran, and the moment where it becomes clear that Dastari is a traitor who is allied to the bad guys, are both handled in the same way: the reveal is held back for a long time, then finally achieved in a pedestrian long shot that might usually be used just for establishing a location. In both instances, the long shot is from no character's POV, so the moments are robbed of any drama. It should be a big deal for the Doctor (either of them) to discover that his old enemies are involved in the plot, and his old friend allied with them. As it is, the moments are underwhelming, and the impression is given that there was no need to hold the revelations back at all. Moffat achieves better things in the quieter moments. Though not perfect, the interactions between the sixth Doctor and Peri are much warmer and wittier than elsewhere in the season, with the squabbling dialled down. The sixth Doctor's haunted monologue as he worries about the fate of the universe is one of Colin Baker's standout moments in the role. Troughton and Frazer Hines effortlessly recreate the second Doctor and Jamie, with many funny lines and bits of business. Moffat gets two compatible but interestingly different takes on villainy from the two actors playing Androgums, building on the script's efficient world-building, establishing the race's culture and attitudes. John Stratton gets the showier Androgum role, drooling over the prospect of eating many different members of the cast, the hissable panto baddie. Jacqueline Pearce gives a masterclass performance throughout of savagery suppressed and hidden behind a veneer of elegance. The shocking moment where she cannot control her animal impulses and licks up spilled blood from the ground is magnificent, even though it is again mostly filmed in a long shot. At least there's a cut to a reaction from Dastari watching in disgust (a medium shot).
This era of Doctor Who comes in for some flak for excessive violence; but, as shocking as Shockeye's actions are, I don't think anything here is gratuitous. The underlying theme of the piece is about the ethics of how we treat creatures we perceive as lesser than ourselves; Shockeye's sadism is therefore very much in keeping. His callously offhand murder of bumbling comic foil Oscar fits with character and theme, and ups the ante when he has the Doctor cornered towards the climax of the story. The Doctor's use of Oscar's abandoned cyanide jar on Shockeye comes in for a lot of criticism. Again, though, I think it's the direction that's the problem. It needs to be urgent: the Doctor is about to be killed, and stumbles across the only thing he can find with which to defend himself when his adversary is almost on him. Because what made it to screen is instead done at a much more leisurely pace, it makes the action seem too premeditated. People don't like the Doctor's quip afterwards "Your just desserts", but I think it's rather funny. The tone is consistently of a dark comedy. Given the theme, all the subplots about genetic manipulation also integrate rather well. As such, I'm not sure it needs the prototype time travel machine as the MacGuffin. The Sontarans could just want to weaponise the genetic augmentation process somehow, and Chessene could just be planning to upgrade her whole planet en masse. This would mean no need to feature machinations by the offscreen Time Lords - a plot idea already overused in the series at this point - and would also mean that the second Doctor doesn't need to be working on his people's behalf (which breaks the established continuity to such an extent that a lot of complicated backstory has needed to be reverse-engineered by fan writers over the decades since the story's broadcast).
Other points to note: there's very good lighting in the scenes of the sixth Doctor, Peri and Jamie in the space stations ducting; Colin's lighter, more summery version of his costume works much better than the usual version; Peter Howell's score is one of his best. Although there is no reason at all why the action has to take place in Seville, it's still interesting to get away from the usual visual textures on occasion. The story can't resist the insertion of some touristy moments in the chase scene, which does slow things down when they should be speeding up as the denouement approaches. The only truly heinous moment is when Dastari has a flower thrown to him from a woman on a balcony. The characterisation, costumes and masks for the Sontarans are different from what went before, but work well. All in all, it is not as bad as its reputation; Holmes script is pretty close to the quality of his 'golden period' work; with more dynamic direction, and a few tweaks, this could have been another classic.
Connectivity:
Both The Two Doctors and Search Out Space feature the current Doctor unexpectedly teaming up with at least one character from the show's past (Colin working with the second Doctor and Jamie, Sylv with K9).
Deeper Thoughts:
The joy between the land and the sea. Perhaps a summer holiday is not a conducive time for too much original thought; I'm undoubtedly not the first to notice it, but it struck me in a contemplative moment in the sun of Cala'n Forcat that travel is all about dwelling in liminal spaces. The hotel we stayed in appears in photos like it's sitting atop a rocky outcrop in the middle of the ocean. In fact, it's on a high cliff edge, and behind the hotel are paths and steps down to multiple small coves. This is Cala'n Forcat; though there weren't the huge expanses of sand that you might except on a Spanish beach, there were clear blue waters to swim in at the base of ravines, with tall rock walls either side. It was a dramatic landscape, similar to (but a lot warmer than) the Welsh cliffs featured in 2024 story 73 Yards. In the script for that story, its writer Russell T Davies highlights such areas at the edges of things as places of magic, but also of conflict. I half suspect he just introduced the line about the war between the land and the sea to be a reference to the planned spin-off series, but there is a truth there nonetheless. The Balearics have been of strategic importance in many wars, annexed and occupied multiple times. The nearest town to where we were staying was Ciutadella (literally, the Citadel), which has been a fortification since the times of Ancient Carthage. Obviously resorts don't tend to be warzones these days, but liminal spaces come with risks as well as potential; this is possibly why we are drawn to them. Even if one doesn't go for beaches, the act of travelling takes one to the liminal spaces that are airports and train stations. Even if one never leaves home, taking a break puts us in the liminal mental space of being between work and play.
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| Cala'n Forcat |
Looking back at
the first holiday trip I covered for the blog in 2016, we again stayed in a place on the boundary between one area and another, outside a castle on the edge of woods. I started the blog the previous year, but had fit my posts around holiday breaks in the summer of 2015. As this time we were staying at Leeds Castle, somewhere that was the location of a Tom Baker story, and said story could be brought with us to watch in the cottage, it seemed too good an opportunity to waste. This started an annual tradition. I took
The Leisure Hive (a story where the Doctor goes on holiday) to Shanklin in 2017 (between land and sea again), but ended up watching the story when back home, much closer to the liminal space of the Brighton beach on which some of it was filmed. The following year was the first foreign trip for the blog, to Tenerife, and I took along a story that involved the production team taking a foreign trip (
Vincent and the Doctor). In 2019, I visited a European location with
It Takes You Away (in which the TARDIS fam visit a European location). After a couple of years' suspension of holidays away because of Covid and lockdowns, I took
Hell Bent to watch on the island where it had been filmed, Fuerteventura, in 2022 (and stayed in a resort at the edge of sand dunes). The year after, I listened to
Marco Polo (The Doctor and friends on a long trip) while on a short trip to Kos. In 2024, I revisited Fuerteventura, this time with
The Ice Warriors (completely thematically divorced from the surroundings, but I did at least experience the Troughton era mainstay of a foam machine during that break). That brings things up to this year and The Two Doctors.
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| Ciutadella |
Holmes's Sontaran story itself comes from a liminal space in Doctor Who's span. It was a watershed between celebration (the hoopla of 20th anniversary) and chaos (the hiatus and the aforementioned crises in the making of the subsequent Trial of a Time Lord season), between when the series was seen as an unassailable institution able to film abroad, and when it had to struggle to endure. The production team were adjusting to a new format of 50 minute episodes before circumstances dictated they revert back again to half that length. Given another year, someone might have realised that they could have had a one-part self contained story (or even more than one) rather than three part stories like The Two Doctors. Would that have made a difference to the programme's longer term survival? At the time of writing, Doctor Who is in another such uncertain space. Will it endure? As said above, liminal spaces contain risk, but they also contain potential. Recent announcements up to August 2025 have been of a new multimedia event for 2026 in the mould of previous years' Time Lord Victorious and Doom's Day, and a new fan show on the official Youtube channel. Neither are things that tend to happen for shows that have been cancelled. Even more positively, news reports on the 21st August 2025 quoted an interview with Kate Phillips, chief content officer at the BBC, at the Edinburgh TV Festival. She said that the series will remain on the BBC "with or without Disney". Comments from the Beeb in 1985 were nowhere near as friendly to the show. Amusingly, she summarised the position as "The TARDIS is going nowhere" which perfectly summarises both the potential and the risk of this liminal space. Anyway, I'm almost out of stories to blog, and they'll have to get their fingers out to have new ones before summer 2026, so I might have to vacation without a Doctor Who story next year. What a thought!
In Summary:
Not too bad, and quite a dark comedy for something filmed in such bright sunshine.
