The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot

Chapter the 347th, one of the two best things made to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who.

Plot:

It's late 2012, and the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who is less than a year away. The fifth Doctor actor Peter Davison is concerned that the planned TV special will only feature new series Doctors, and starts a campaign for old Doctors to be included too. He recruits sixth and seventh Doctor actors Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy (eighth Doctor actor Paul McGann could only promise to be involved subject to work commitments, and fourth Doctor actor Tom Baker doesn't answer his phone). The three of them protest outside Television Centre; a passing John Barrowman informs them that the special is being filmed in Cardiff. They get a lift with Barrowman, sneak into the studios via the Doctor Who Experience exhibition, and end up performing in the special inside three Dalek props. They celebrate while ignoring a phone call from Russell T Davies, who's also desperate to be involved. In post-production, the scene with the three Daleks is cut, but luckily they were also filmed for a scene where they hide under dustsheets (as the Zygons do in The Day of the Doctor), which makes it to the finished programme.

Context:

At the time of writing, the most recent Blu-ray season box set from the Doctor Who collection has been out about a month; this one showcases the 21st season of the series, first broadcast in 1984. I've been watching the episodes and extras on it continuously since it came out, and I'm only halfway through - it is a very comprehensive ten disc set. One of the extras I have watched already was The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, Peter Davison's comic short film made for Doctor Who 50th anniversary in 2013. I did touch on this story in passing in the Deeper Thoughts section of the post on The Five Doctors, which I blogged in 2020. Seeing it again on Blu-ray, and listening to the newly recorded commentary on the set, I feared I hadn't done it justice with that fleeting reference, so am covering it as another unexpected extra for the blog in April 2026 (following the two episodes of Dalek Master Plan covered last time).

First Time Round:

One could argue forever about what's the worst or the best Doctor Who story. The Season 21 Blu-ray season box set contains one story (The Caves of Androzani) that has topped polls, and one (The Twin Dilemma) that has languished at the bottom of the same polls. A good few fans, though, find the former a bit overrated and the latter unfairly maligned. Official Doctor Who skits are much less numerous, of course; with less competition, I think there's a good argument to be made that The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot is the best Doctor Who skit. It was probably given a boost on my first watch from coming hard and fast after what is indisputably the worst Doctor Who entertainment show. Again these are few and far between, so there's never been a poll. If there were, Doctor Who The Afterparty would almost certainly come last. On the evening of 23rd November 2013, after having enormously enjoyed The Day of the Doctor anniversary story (another poll-topping story), I switched over to BBC3 to watch the Afterparty. This was a shambolic live show attempting to celebrate 50 years of a television show by being dismissive of most of its stars and interviewing pop band One Direction over the worst satellite link-up ever seen on live television. It did do a good service in featuring the three stars of the comedy skit that was to land on the red button service immediately after the live show, something that might not have been known about by many viewers. To say that the following 30 minutes of comedy were better than the Afterparty is like saying that chocolate is better than a tracheotomy.

Reaction:

Elsewhere on the aforementioned Season 21 Blu-ray box set, there is an interview with companion actor Mark Strickson (who played Turlough in the 1980s) recorded at the Doctor Who 50th Celebration at the ExCeL in London, the day after The Day of the Doctor's transmission. Strickson is a little grumpy from being in the middle of travel to and from his home in New Zealand (and - who knows?! - maybe from being at the Afterparty the previous evening too). Asked what he thought of The Day of the Doctor, he tells the interviewer that it was a good story, but maybe not that great as a celebration of 50 years of Doctor Who. Featuring all the old Doctors just with archive clips clearly wasn't celebratory enough for Strickson, and perhaps many other viewers. What's fun, though, is that - by extending a gag about his taking mock umbrage at this very idea - Peter Davison ends up creating exactly the celebration required. Stuffing The Day of the Doctor with all the surviving classic Doctor actors, many looking markedly different to how they did back in their day, could have been made to work (The Power of the Doctor has a good stab at it a few years later), but it would have been contrived and cluttered. Steven Moffat made the right choice; his insurance, of course, was providing production funding to Davison's comic short; he'd clearly seen that Davison had stumbled across an original and effective way to complement the main anniversary special. It's not just a clever name - the Reboot acts as a nice comic sequel to The Five Doctors, and has the same intent: to showcase as many Doctors, companions, guest stars and monsters as possible. It even has some call backs - the use of Shada footage to explain away Tom Baker's lack of involvement, and Davison getting to say "Sorry - must dash!" at one point.

It's funny too. Though Davison had long displayed comic chops as a performer, he was untested as either a comedy writer or director, but does both extremely well. His co-stars Sylvester McCoy and Colin Baker have also both demonstrated over the years that they can handle humorous material, and with their director they each form distinct and heightened comic personae as themselves (in inverted commas): Peter is a bit grumpy and at odds with the world, Colin is the slightly brash voice of common sense, and Sylvester - in a sweet performance - is permanently bemused. McCoy's delivery of "He probably won't", after talking of famous Hollywood director Peter Jackson's tendency to keep his cast hanging around until he gets a moment of inspiration, is worth the entrance fee on its own. Then there's his almost thrown-away "Got it a bit wrong actually" when he and Baker are both quoting their best Doctor Who lines. This is prompted by McCoy being asked by baker whether he wants sugar in his tea, calling to mind a famous scene in Remembrance of the Daleks ("Every great decision creates ripples" / "In your tea?"). McCoy was filming the Hobbit trilogy with Jackson around this time, which forms a running gag. Watching all these mentions of the director and his work, one doesn't think for a moment that Jackson would actually appear, but then amazingly he does, and even more amazingly we get Ian McKellen in costume as Gandalf too. It's the biggest but not the only casting coup. Getting Olivia Coleman was impressive enough - as is mentioned on the Blu-ray commentary, the joke about Coleman's ubiquity ("I'm usually in everything") has become even more relevant in the years between then and now.

One shouldn't underestimate the casting coups that came from inside the world of Doctor Who, of course. From the commentary, it's clear that a certain guerrilla style was required, with Davison grabbing any opportunities when he could (filming at a real-life convention allowed him to get a very funny scene with Paul McGann, short notice arrangements nabbed a quick scene with Matt Smith and Jenna Coleman, a sheer fluke led to an appearance from Dan Starkey in costume as a Sontaran). A sequence inspired by Davison's regeneration sees Steven Moffat haunted by floating heads of many, many companion actors from Doctor Who's long history whizzing around him. Most are accounted for, though it's a shame that Mark Strickson didn't get to take part in this very celebratory moment. He was in New Zealand during filming, of course, but then so were Peter Jackson and Ian Mckellen! John Barrowman gets a bigger cameo. The revelation of the personal secrets of "Barrowman" ("Don't tell anyone - please") is such an insanely good gag that I won't spoil it for the uninitiated by spelling it out here. It's undoubtedly coincidence, but the action meshes perfectly with the real world of Day's production: Tom Baker doesn't need to join the classic Doctors' protest as he's been cast in the 50th anniversary show already; Paul McGann is up for it but then drops out, off filming The Night of the Doctor. Davison, Colin Baker and McCoy appear in the sets used for Day, and interact with many of the real life production crew playing themselves.

It was only when Russell T Davies appeared right at the end of this story that I realised he had otherwise kept himself completely out of the 50th anniversary hoopla. Maybe he didn't want to steal any of his friend Steven Moffat's thunder. Or maybe he was just saving himself for this triumphant moment ("Quel dommage Davros!"). Everyone is more than happy to send themselves up, and it's all very good natured and fun. Doctor Who's a family show, and the stars and fans alike all talk about the Doctor family; as such, it's appropriate that this is a family affair. Davison's wife, sons and grandson appear in the story. His daughter appears too as well as producing the short, and she ropes in his son-in-law. Georgia Moffat and David Tennant are both hilarious, acting out being put-upon by Davison and reluctantly helping him with his crusade. Colin Baker's family are all present and correct and contribute to another funny scene. The sons of Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee are in small roles within the piece too. It's like the most expensive home movie ever, but is always entertaining enough to justify its existence (rather like the show that inspired it). It truly is the perfect celebration of Doctor Who's history in all its quirky glory.

Connectivity:

The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, like the two recently found episodes of The Daleks Master Plan, features Daleks and journeys between different locations within one story. If one were to cheat just a tiny bit and include Day of Armageddon (the episode in between the newly found episodes, discovered a couple of decades earlier) they both feature human characters disguising themselves as aliens (the three heroes of the Reboot pretend to be Daleks and Zygons, the first Doctor dons the garb of alien delegate Zephon).

Deeper Thoughts:

More new old Who. After nearly a year of no Doctor Who on TV, spring 2026 brought not only a couple of found episodes, but three stories newly available in novelised form. These new Target paperbacks are clad in the usual stylish design, with evocative cover illustrations by Dan Liles. It may be my imagination, but the paper stock being used feels a little bit nicer than for previous books in the range too. Unlike the last few batches which concentrated on recently broadcast tales, these three adapt stories from 2005 to 2010. The first, Aliens of London, is a version of a story from the earliest season of the relaunched series. It's adapted by long-term Doctor Who extended universe creative Joseph Lidster. In an author's note, he celebrates ticking off a bucket list achievement in writing a Target novelisation. It surprised me that he'd not done one before now, to be honest. He's a good fit for the material (a favourite story of mine, by the way, though many wouldn't share my opinion). Like many a long-term fan, he comes to this book primed with approaches that have been used before for such adaptations. He chooses what I'll call the Malcolm Hulke method: finding or inventing POV characters within the story to expand on the events they witness. This undercuts just one moment: there's a great throw-away line on TV about a character having a "wife, a mistress and a young farmer" that doesn't work as well here because we've had a preceding scene where we've met all three at length. The rest of the time it works. I enjoyed sequences from the perspective of Barry (I'll give nothing more away - it's better to go in unspoiled) and Tosh (Torchwood's part of the action is somewhat expanded from the original). The strictness shown in avoiding any omniscient narration, and some nips and tucks for better flow, mean some details are lost, for example the rising hysteria about aliens that gives context to Jackie's reporting the Doctor and Rose to the authorities.

The inner life of characters like Mickey, Jackie and Harriet Jones brings out the melancholy in the story that TV viewers might have missed.  Lidster's work also nicely dovetails with Russell T Davies's short story prequel "Where Did They Get the Pig?" from a Doctor Who Magazine special in 2025. There's some nods to future stories, like a scene of Captain Jack watching Margaret Blaine escape to the Isle of Dogs at the end. Jenny T Colgan gets to pull the same trick in her adaptation of the Weeping Angel 2-parter from Matt Smith's first season, The Time of Angels. River Song's inner thoughts are informed by the knowledge she has that Amy is her mother, even though that wasn't revealed to the audience back in 2010 (presumably the writer of the TV version Steven Moffat already had it in mind back then). With the full details of River, Amy and the eleventh Doctor's character arcs (which Moffat probably hadn't fully worked out this early) known to her, Colgan is able to be add many nice touches, and she captures all the characters well. There's also a - very nerdy, but nonetheless welcome - reference to Amy somehow being linked to the Pompeiian character also played by Karen Gillan in earlier story The Fires of Pompeii. All the stories adapted this time are 2-parters, so there isn't the need to put in much extra material to fill the page count. Colgan adds an opening section introducing the person that wrote the journals about the Weeping Angels referenced by River and the Doctor; amusingly, this is a person from our present who romanticised the past and sought the Angels out to send him there. He finds once he's living in it that it's very far from being a golden age.

If you want more radical new material, then the final one of the three books is for you. This is Matt Jones's The Satan Pit, based on his own scripts for the 2006 David Tennant story. If Lidster took the Malcolm Hulke approach, then Jones does it like Donald Cotton: he reshapes the material using a framing device where his characters tell the tale in their own words. We join the story after the events depicted on TV have taken place, and the rest of the book is formed of first-person testimonies from the three survivors, Ida, Danny and Zack, to authorities that disbelieve their talk of a magic man in a flying box that saved them. The book acts therefore as both novelisation of and sequel to the TV version. Like Lidster, Jones is rigorous about limiting the action to what these three characters' experience, though at the end there's a clever way of covering the climactic events for which none of them are present. Like Colgan, he makes use of future developments in the series after this story - by the end of the book, the Ood have been liberated (as shown in TV in Planet of the Odd, a couple of years on from The Satan Pit), and there's an addendum connecting to The End of Time. Jones tweaks the characterisations of the guest cast to make them more distinct from one another. Danny becomes a hopeless romantic who rapidly develops a somewhat creepy crush on Rose. Having this as Danny's emotional starting point gives more room for him to mature into as the story progresses. I don't rate the TV version of this story that highly (though many wouldn't share my opinion), but this prose version is much better. The book ends with a courtroom drama climax, the resolution of which will be new to anyone reading, For this reason, and for its more original structure, it's probably my favourite of these latest three books, but all of them are definitely worth a read.

In Summary:

A very expensive home video, but much better than that sounds!

Index: Peter Davison

Peter Davison's Fifth Doctor Stories ...

Season 19:

Castrovalva

Four to Doomsday

Kinda

The Visitation

Black Orchid

Earthshock

Time-Flight

Season 20:

Arc of Infinity

Snakedance

Mawdryn Undead

Terminus

Enlightenment

The King's Demons

The Five Doctors

Season 21:

Warriors of the Deep

The Awakening

Frontios

Resurrection of the Daleks

Planet of Fire

The Caves of Androzani

Return Appearances:

The Power of the Doctor

Honorable Menshes:

The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot (Peter Davison, but not playing the Fifth Doctor)

In Summary:

The cricket one.

Kinda

Chapter the 344th, is a gift for Christmas.

Plot:

The Doctor, Adric and Tegan explore the paradisiacal planet Deva Loka while Nyssa sleeps off a hangover in the TARDIS (a hangover from the end of the previous story where she fainted, I mean). Tegan falls asleep by some wind chimes and dreams of a mysterious figure who psychologically tortures her until she agrees to let him borrow her form: this is the Mara. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Adric come across a single-person armoured battle unit, the TSS. Operating autonomously, it escorts them to a dome set up by a survey party reviewing the planet for possible colonisation. Many of the survey team have gone missing outside the dome, leaving only three survivors. Commanding officer Sanders goes out to investigate, leaving the unstable Hindle in charge. Possessed by the Mara, Tegan finds Aris - one of the Kinda, indigenous people of Deva Loka - and the Mara transfers to him. Sanders returns to the dome a changed man, meek and smiley. He was given a wooden box by a Kinda, which he urges the others to open. It is a healing device for the mind, but Hindle refuses to open it. The Doctor and Todd escape and find that Aris is planning to attack the dome. The increasingly unhinged Hindle has wired the dome up with explosives, and an attack could mean the end of the world. Adric uses the TSS to stop the attack, but Aris escapes. The Doctor and Todd confront Hindle, who has regressed to childhood and is building a model city in the dome. Using reverse psychology, Todd gets Hindle to open the box, and his mind is healed. The Doctor disconnects the explosives. With the help of the Kinda, the Doctor traps Aris in a circle of mirrors. The Mara detaches itself from him in the shape of a red snake, and Aris is pulled free. The snake grows to massive size, but unable to face its reflection disappears. Tegan hopes she is free of the Mara's influence (she isn't, but that's another story).

Context:

Watched from the Blu-ray disc from the season 19 Collection box-set, a couple of episodes per night in mid-December 2025. I was accompanied for the whole thing by the eldest of my children, a young man of 19 years back from university for the Christmas hols. He enjoyed the story. I thought I'd adjusted the settings to select the version with enhanced effects, but when we got to the end it was the as-transmitted version. I had to pause the programme, go to the menu and flip the switch, so the eldest got to see the sequence of the Mara in the circle of mirrors both ways. He was very complimentary about Chris Petts's CGI work (as indeed he should be, it's magnificent).

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm very, very close to catching up. This story completes a season (the 19th of the classic era) and another Doctor's era. Blogging Peter Davison's final remaining story makes it 15 out of 15 Doctors and 41 out of 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-26, and new series 1-15). None of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War are left, just the 5-episode The War Between the Land and the Sea spin-off remains to be blogged.

First Time Round:

This is one of a few key watershed moments in my early history of Doctor Who watching. The first episode of Doctor Who I ever saw in full was from An Unearthly Child, first ever Doctor Who story (thanks be to a 1981 season of archive repeats for that symmetry). The first full story I ever saw was The Krotons, and the first colour one was Carnival of Monsters (both were later in that same repeat season). The first episode of Doctor Who that I saw on its debut broadcast was the second part of Castrovalva, in January 1982, a few weeks after the repeat season ended late the previous year (sarcastic thanks be to the scheduling of my weekly Cub Scout session for my missing parts of Castrovalva). The first full story I saw on its debut broadcast was Kinda. I had to pretend to be sick for two consecutive Mondays to get out of cubs and watch it in full, and I was mesmerised by it. I should say exaggerate my sickness rather than pretend, for I was already somewhat sick... at heart: you see, I already had an immense crush on Tegan Jovanka. It was a definite moment for the prepubescent me seeing Janet Fielding playing the Mara-possessed Tegan, with the smallest smidge of sexuality that she felt she could get away with, but that wasn't the main reason for the story's appeal. It had something that the young me could sense but couldn't identify. I now know it to be nothing much more than well-written drama, but it was mysterious at the time. Kinda was the story of the year for me. I was out of step with the fandom of the time, though - Kinda came bottom of the Season Survey readers' poll in Doctor Who Magazine that year. People voted Four to Doomsday and Time-Flight higher. You can't trust people, can you?

Reaction:

Doctor Who didn't have any real competition for the affections of UK children until 1977. Star Trek was popular, sure, but back then comprised only three seasons played in endless rotation - it wasn't something new, which reduced the excitement quotient significantly. None of the other competitors (from Land of the Giants to Space:1999) even got close to Star Trek's level, let alone Who's. But then there came Star Wars. From that point on, there was a dividing line: once Star Wars was there as a good-looking, high budget option for the straight-laced kids, Doctor Who became the thing the strange kids loved. There had always been a certain strangeness in Who and its fan audience, but the programme seemed to embrace it increasingly as the 1970s ended and the 1980s began. Kinda might just mark the apotheosis of that process. It is downright weird in many places: the dream sequences where Tegan encounters mysterious characters in the landscape of her own mind, for example, are visually interesting and cryptic, but they're also abrupt. They have clearly been cut down from longer sequences as the episodes were overrunning, but this manages to make them even more unsettling. The climax of the third episode is a bravura sequence where an apocalypse is represented, simply but with devastating effect, by an alarm clock going off and an oversaturation of the picture leading to a white screen. A few stories later - with the same director - the show would begin a period starting with Earthshock (which then became a template for future stories) where it tried to ape sci-fi action movies. It was enjoyable, but it was also a bit safe. Maybe it would have been better to leave that sort of stuff to George Lucas: I don't think Lucas would or could ever produce something like Kinda.

The biggest action sequence in Kinda sees two people in wooden boxes dancing around each other for a minute or two in a cramped studio. It's all the better for that, in the opinion of this reviewer at least. The cliffhanger ending of episode two is one of the best in the history of Doctor Who, and all that it requires is a small box plus engagement with viewer imagination. The staginess on display in places somehow seems apt. Kinda is not aiming for naturalism: it is a didactic morality tale told using symbols and artifice. The irrepressible dynamism of director Peter Grimwade has to have an outlet, of course, and he creates Kinda's fireworks in character and performance. To do this he assembles one of the best guest casts ever put together for Who, and they all respond well to an excellent script from writer Christopher Bailey. Stalwart British stars Richard Todd and Mary Morris are as good as one might expect, but this is true of everyone down through the credits list, no matter what the size of the role or the experience of the performer. The stand-out performance is Simon Rouse as Hindle. I have seen the moment in the final episode where he holds up the broken cardboard figure of a man and says "You can't mend people" dozens and dozens of times over the years, but it never fails to be spine-tingling. Doctor Who has definitely been guilty in the past of egregious use of mental health issues for antagonist motivation. It can be an easy catch-all just to call a villain insane; but Hindle's nervous breakdown is played with sensitivity and is grounded in reality. The subplot of his worsening mental health and its eventual healing links thematically with Kinda's central idea about the power of the mind. Ultimately, the story champions the power of community and shared ideals in opposition to the individualistic thinking of the colonist, which was quietly radical at the time and remains so now.

The regular cast are also firing on all cylinders. The ones that are not written out, that is. I believe the reason Sarah Sutton's Nyssa does not appear for the majority of this story was contractual rather than dictated by the story, but reducing the number of regulars having to share out action and dialogue is a good move. Peter Davison, in some of his earliest work as the Doctor, is unshowy but strong. Janet Fielding gets an opportunity that's rare in Doctor Who to do challenging material as the companion, and she is pitch perfect. Her turn as the Mara-possessed Tegan casts a long shadow: Tegan's only possessed for two short scenes, but Fielding burns through the screen in both of them. It is no surprise that a sequel (Snakedance) was quickly commissioned that leans in more to the 'evil Tegan' premise, and lets Fielding play the antagonist throughout. Her earlier scenes where she struggles to keep her sanity through various nightmare scenarios are great as well. Even Matthew Waterhouse's turn as Adric isn't too bad in this story: the character's more adolescent immaturity is a nice counterpoint to Hindle's mental regression to a younger childhood. As if following a Doctor Who 'conservation of sexism' rule, Tegan being given more interesting material is balanced out by another female actor having to do the thankless scenes of wandering around with the Doctor asking questions. This falls to Nerys Hughes as Todd, but her more mature approach and the quality of the dialogue make it a rather nice guest performance, all in all. She does at least get to save the day by getting Hindle to look in the mysterious box and be healed.

Kinda has a little something extra beyond the good performances, good script and - for the most part - good visuals. The Discontinuity Guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping - a touchstone of fan opinion for those enthusiasts of the show that were around in the 1990s - is almost surprised to find that beneath the allusions and parallels Kinda is at heart "a very original piece of genuine SF". It is rare for Doctor Who (and Star Wars for that matter) to tackle science-fiction ideas head on; usually they're just used as set dressing for an adventure story. Not so here. So much careful thought and depth has been put into the society on Deva Loka and the legends of the Mara. No matter how bad you might find the final realisation of the snake in all its papier-mâché glory, this is a world and set of characters that seem real. There is so much clever world-building in every line and moment such that the story lives long in the imagination after a viewing. The Kinda, for example, refer to anyone who is not Kinda (a tribe that commune telepathically, let it not be forgotten) as the 'not-we'. This is just so beautifully right. It has also become a way that fans refer to the uninitiated in the real world (in a similar way that Harry Potter fans use 'muggle'). Little details are tossed lightly away like seeds in the breeze, but they take root: the box of Jhana, speech only being something that women can do, the consciousness of the tribe's wise woman passing to their young apprentice on death, etc. Depending on how the mood takes me, Kinda could well be the answer to the question of what is my favourite ever classic era Doctor Who story, so it was a good one to come up as the final classic story to blog. It's weird but it's wonderful. I don't know of any story in any big TV sci-fi franchise that has ever tackled similar material, nor done it so well. Take that Star Wars!

Connectivity:

Both Kinda and Wish World / The Reality War feature real world physical manifestations arising from the thoughts of humans; they also both feature an antagonist who is one of the Pantheon of Discord (The Mara is the Pantheon's "God of Beasts" according to Harriet Arbinger in The Legend of Ruby Sunday).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Christmas List. The shallow surface reading - and I've been very guilty of thinking this way myself, believe me - is that after only a single Christmas special in the entirety of the classic Doctor Who era, a Christmas special for our favourite programme then became a mainstay only when the series returned in a blaze of glory for the 21st Century. The smallest bit of research, though, gives the lie to this: Doctor Who had a presence in the Christmas TV schedules almost all the way through the classic era (and then triumphantly built on this once the show was back on TV from 2005 onwards). In the early days, Doctor Who was on almost all the year round, so couldn't avoid yuletide. Christmas TV was handled slightly different back then, though; the only day that really had any significance was 25th December; any broadcast on a day around the main one could go out as normal without the makers having to prepare anything different. This, though, proved to be a good thing for Who. On its third Christmas after staring in 1963, the regular Saturday broadcast of Doctor Who happened to fall on Christmas Day, the only time this happened in the 20th century. So, as seemed traditional with all types of programmes, an episode was broadcast that was much less good than usual. Instead of doing what Doctor Who normally did but being more epic or more accessible or both, the episode (The Feast of Steven, sixth episode of story The Daleks' Master Plan) broadcast on 25th December 1965 was composed of a string of lame gag-free sketches. Even worse, the Christmas Day episode of this Dalek story, didn't feature any Daleks. This was during the height of Dalekmania, when any episode featuring the metal meanies would have been perfect festive viewing for families.

This was doubly unfortunate, because every Doctor Who broadcast during the festive period up to The Feast of Steven had been a Dalek episode, but these ones with actual Daleks. In 1963, 28th December saw the broadcast of The Survivors, second episode of story The Daleks. The following year, Who went out on Boxing Day with Flashpoint, the sixth episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth. The timing was no doubt accidental, but they couldn't have been chosen better as a gift for viewers of the time: the poisonous pepperpots' first on-screen appearance, and the big finale of their return adventure. At least The Daleks' Master Plan's seventh instalment on New Year's Day 1966 saw the Daleks return to the show again. Each of the remaining 1960s seasons saw a story broadcast that bridged Christmas and New Year, but none were Dalek stories. At the end of 1966, Patrick Troughton's first story The Power of the Daleks was slightly earlier (starting on Bonfire Night) and so was done with before the end of December. Christmas Eve saw the second part of following story The Highlanders instead. The Enemy of the World's first two parts aired on the 23rd and 30th of December 1967, and The Krotons kicked off on 28th December 1968. None were Christmas themed, but any new Doctor Who episode has got to be better than none at Christmas time. December 1969 fell during the longer than usual gap between Patrick Troughton's last story and Jon Pertwee's first. For a few years from Pertwee's debut, though, the twelve days of Christmas period coincided with the excitement of the launch of a new series of Doctor Who. This was the case for six seasons, all of Jon Pertwee's five runs and Tom Baker's first set of episodes. Usually the seasons would start early in the New Year (with part one of Day of the Daleks airing on the 1st January 1972), though later on the seasons slipped forward a little to a start in the last days of December.

Simply starting new seasons of Doctor Who just after Christmas was clearly not sufficiently feeding the audience's festive need for Who: from December 1971, a new innovation came along. Omnibus Doctor Who repeats were made and shown around Christmas, and proved popular. A cut down version of The Daemons aired on 28th December 1971, an omnibus of The Sea Devils on 27th December 1972, The Green Death got similar treatment on 27th December 1973 (airing in the middle of new story The Time Warrior's weekly screenings). On 27th December 1974, a Planet of Spiders omnibus including Jon Pertwee's regeneration aired the day before the new season started with Tom Baker's debut Robot's episode one on the 28th. For Tom Baker's second season the launch shifted forward to the autumn, but seasons ran every week for six months and would still cross the festive period. Usually, omnibus repeats would also nestle in the schedules in a short gap between the stories broadcast in one year and the next. The Android Invasion finished its weekly airings on the 13th December 1975, but on 27th December that year an omnibus of Genesis of the Daleks aired before the season resumed with The Brain of Morbius from 3rd January 1976. Towards the end of that year, the season - plus another couple of omnibus repeats - had paused by the 4th December, though the new stories resumed with The Face of Evil on New Year's Day 1977. Mid-season story The Sun Makers completed by 17th December 1977. After that, The Robots of Death - which had first aired near the start of that year - aired in two stitched-together 50 minute repeats on New Year's Eve 1977 and New Year's Day 1978. A week later, new Who broadcasts resumed with Underworld part one. The Robots of Death would be the last regular Doctor Who repeat shown for Christmas; after this, repeats aired during the summer instead.

The weekly airing of new Doctor Who episodes still happened around Christmas, though. The 23rd and 30th December 1978 were the days for broadcasts of the first two parts of The Power of Kroll; the 22nd and 29th December 1979 saw the first two episodes of The Horns of Nimon. Nothing aired in late December 1980 (the last episode of State of Decay aired on 13th December) but the current Doctor Who run resumed on the 3rd January 1981 with Warrior's Gate's first episode. At the other end of that year, Doctor Who's first ever spin-off K9 and Company aired on BBC1 on 28th December; it was set at Christmas and had K9 singing a carol and everything. From 1982, each new season of Doctor Who shifted to a start in the first week of January again, in the first few days of the year before Twelfth Night. Peter Davison's first season (including Kinda) started on the 4th January 1982. Things remained the same until Michael Grade put Doctor Who on hiatus in 1985. December 1985 to January 1986 became the first twelve days of Christmas period since Doctor Who started devoid of a new episode or a special repeat. It was a 22-year unbroken record. Don't anybody tell Michael Grade this; he loves the role of panto villain, and would no doubt revel in being the man who cancelled Doctor Who's Christmas. A quirk of scheduling delaying the start of Doctor Who's season in 1988 meant a couple of episodes aired in the Christmas / New Year period, and during the 'wilderness years' a few BBC2 repeat showings happened in late December or early January, but these were slim pickings. The party was over.

The party came back with a bang in 2005, though: Doctor Who was on the cover of the Christmas Radio Times, Doctor Who toys were big sellers for the kids that year, and the show had a special episode airing on the big day, 25th December. Doctor Who has proved very popular at yuletide since. From 2005 to 2017, 13 Christmas specials specials were aired, one a year, all of them on the big day. From 2019 to 2022, four more festive specials aired on New Year's Day. The specials returned to Christmas day again for 2023 and 2024. Even though there was an embarrassment of riches in this time, it didn't quite end there. In 2015, BBC4 showed The Face of Evil in two stitched-together 50 minute chunks on the 28th and 29th December, and the story was chosen deliberately because it had originally aired around the Christmas period. On 23rd December 2024, a colourised, edited version of The War Games aired, also on BBC4. Even a couple of years before, the idea that such a thing could happen would have been laughed off. This breathless rundown of Christmas past has been a real education: we fans have been so lucky, and the gifts continue. At the time of writing this is 2025, we have just reached the end of December airings of a spanking new Whoniverse spin-off, which is available as a box set on iplayer for the Christmas period (this century's version of K9 and Company?!), and we've been promised a Doctor Who special for Christmas 2026. After that, who knows, but I think it would be foolish to put any money against such goodies continuing in years to come.

In Summary:

Incidentally, a groovy Kinda Christmas to all of you at home! 

The Power of the Doctor

Chapter the 298th, where it's getting, it's getting, it's getting kind of hectic.

Plot:
All this written down in order is going to seem like the fitful dream of a kid who's gone to bed after eating too much sugar, but here goes anyway: The Doctor, Yaz and Dan battle against Cyber-Masters (regenerating Cybermen made from dead Timelords, with the collars and everything) on a floating train in space. The Cybermen kidnap the train's cargo - a wibbly energy creature disguised as a child. With this, the Master - allied with the Cybermen and the Daleks, and posing as Rasputin in the court of Tsar Nicholas II in 1916 - sets up a planet-sized Cyber conversion machine in orbit around Earth. Dan leaves to go back to his ordinary life, finding the Doctor's adventures a bit too dangerous after he nearly got killed on the space train. The Doctor's old friends Tegan and Ace have been recruited into UNIT by Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, and investigate some missing seismologists and missing paintings respectively. Tegan receives a package supposedly from the Doctor containing what looks like a toy Cyberman, labelled as a Russian doll. The TARDIS tracks the Cyber-Masters to the Cyber-planet in 1916, and finds the Master's TARDIS disguised as a police box. Kate calls in the Doctor; the Doctor and Yaz arrive at UNIT HQ and meet Tegan and Ace. The Doctor seems socially awkward meeting them, and somehow gives them both a static electric shock (which also happens later with Yaz). All the missing paintings have been altered to feature the Master as Rasputin, and the Master has sent a message inviting them to a location to attend his "keynote address" on seismology. When our heroes arrive, they find the missing seismologists all dead, shrunk by the Master's tissue compression eliminator.

Taken into custody and imprisoned in the UNIT building, the Master taunts Kate, Tegan and Ace. Following coordinates sent by a rogue Dalek, the Doctor takes the TARDIS to the inside of a Bolivian volcano. The Daleks capture her. In UNIT HQ, the Russian Doll Cyberman - which turns out to have been sent to Tegan by the Master - grows to full size and splits open, then troops of Cybermen emerge led by Ashad (a clone copy made by the Master before he killed the original). Kate is taken to be Cyber-converted, Tegan stays in the building to help Kate, and Ace escapes by parachuting from the roof. Vinder, on a mission to rescue the wibbly energy creature (remember that, from the beginning?) crashes onto the Cyber-planet. Yaz tracks the Doctor down in the TARDIS; she's been taken to Russia in 1916. After doing some disco dancing, the Master uses a process called forced regeneration to make the Doctor regenerate into a copy of him. Yaz arrives, and the Doctor-Master coerces her into joining him in the TARDIS. He goes off causing mischief, trying to ruin the Doctor's reputation. The Doctor (in her Jodie Whittaker persona) appears in a realm of consciousness and meets manifestations of old versions of herself - the Guardians of the Edge - who tell her there's a way she can reverse what the Master's done. Yaz manages to escape in the TARDIS, stranding the Doctor-Master on an asteroid somewhere in space. A holographic AI version of her Doctor appears before Yaz, implanted by the real Doctor earlier who passed it off as static electricity. With that guidance, Yaz is able to pick up Vinder and Ace. The latter is dropped off at the volcano to stop the Daleks, the former hides in the TARDIS as Yaz goes back to collect the Doctor-Master.

Holo-AI Doctors (looking like the Peter Davison and Sylvester McCoy versions) appear to Tegan and Ace too. Ace meets Graham, who's also investigating the volcano. The Daleks set the volcanoes all over the world to erupt. With help from Vinder and the holo-AI Doctor, now looking like the Fugitive Doctor that was hiding out in Gloucester, Yaz manages to reverse the forced regeneration process. Tegan rescues Kate and they both escape UNIT HQ, just before it is blown up (Tegan having sabotaged the Cybermen's equipment with help from her holo-AI Doctor). Ace and Graham set Nitro-9 charges in the volcano. The TARDIS comes and picks everyone up, and the Daleks are all blown up. With the extended fam's help, the Doctor stops the eruptions by Cyber-converting the lava, turning it into steel. She sends Vinder back home, and then asks the wibbly energy creature (it's still hanging around) to destroy the Cyber-planet. The dying Master is still on the planet, and uses the creature's power to zap the Doctor, fatally wounding her. Yaz returns everyone else home, and has one last moment with the Doctor, the two of them sitting on the TARDIS roof eating ice cream while it floats in orbit around planet Earth. The Doctor tells Yaz she has to do the next bit alone. After being dropped off, Yaz immediately bumps into Graham and Dan - they are on their way to a support group that Graham has set up for friends of the Doctor on Earth. The meeting includes Kate, Tegan and Ace as well as some other old friends Ian, Mel and Jo. The Doctor regenerates atop Durdle Door, regaining a familiar set of teeth...

Context:

In the 1980s, episodes that were longer than Doctor Who's usual 25 minute duration (The Five Doctors feature 20th anniversary length special, for example) were sometimes chopped up for repeat or overseas showings, with new credit sequences shoved in to make them fit the majority pattern. I'd had a passing thought when I was writing the Deeper Thoughts section of The Krotons blog post in 2023 about whether any fan had created such edits of new series shows. Remembering this, I decided to experiment with my watching of The Power of the Doctor. I watched it, on my own from the BBC iplayer, over four nights in April 2024, stopping at the end of each approximately 22-minute long quarter. Like those stories in the 1980s, the arbitrary cliffhangers were a little more pedestrian than usual, but none were as bad as the ones in The Five Doctors (the Master walks down a short staircase - woo!). My Power of the Doctor episode one ended with the Doctor seeing the defaced paintings and declaring "That's not Rasputin, that's the Master", the second ended just after the forced regeneration, with the Doctor now in the Master's form at the door of the TARDIS threatening Yaz; episode three ended with the eruption of the volcanoes around the world. That's not too bad, I don't think; each section fell into an episodic structure in line with those older Doctor Who stories: episode one is about the set up of the mystery, ending with the Doctor's discovery of the main adversary; episode two sees the plan develop and ends at the Doctor's lowest point; episode three throws in the curveball of the Guardians of the Edge; episode four wraps it all up.

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. As well as finishing 24 of the 39 seasons to date (at the time of writing), I have also watched almost all of the specials that came in between seasons for anniversaries, festive periods, etc. With The Power of the Doctor now covered, there is only one special left to blog (The Giggle from 2023), though there will be at least one more Christmas special shown in 2024, and - one hopes - another annually thereafter.

First Time Round:

There was a period of only approximately 18 months between my writing this blog post and originally watching The Power of the Doctor, but it seemed like a lot longer looking back. I outlined my initial reactions to the story in the Deeper Thoughts section of the contemporaneous blog post for Orphan 55, which I published two days after the Jodie Whittaker finale was first shown. It was a time of upheaval in the UK; we had in short order got ourselves a new monarch and a new Prime Minister (I'll touch a bit more on this in the Deeper Thoughts section below). The change of Doctor happening at the same time felt like it might destabilise us completely, but thankfully things have been a bit more static and calm for old Albion since then under the firm and strong leadership of David Tennant and Ncuti Gatwa.

Reaction:

Brace yourselves, but - as outlined in this story - the power of the Doctor is the friends she made along the way. Yaz has a line of dialogue that pretty much says this verbatim, and the action involves a lot of people coming together to save the day who all have in common that their lives have been touched by the Doctor. It then has a resolution scene at the end bringing even more of the Doctor's old friends together to look after each other, and most importantly to look after the latest in the long line of ex-companions Yaz, adjusting to her post-TARDIS life. The friends she made along the way - it's so hackneyed that its gone beyond cliche and into meme, but the story doesn't for a moment let the commitment to this theme slip. Even the antagonist is driven by the misguided desire that he wants to become the Doctor and travel the universe with a companion; like everything in the story, this is nicely aligned with the history of the series. There's always been something of the inferiority complex about the Master, living in the Doctor's shadow. The plan also involving mucking about with Daleks, Cybermen, volcanoes and paintings is less resonant to this theme of course, but is still in keeping with The Power of the Doctor's hectic style in trying to cram in as many returning characters and elements as possible. In total, and including the regenerated fourteenth Doctor with a new old face, there are seven returning Doctors. No less than six companions return, seven if you count Dan who leaves at the start of the story but returns at the end (three are cameos including one of the very first stars of the show from 1963, William Russell as Ian Chesterton).

There's two recurring guest characters (Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and Vinder) and the top three on the Doctor Who villainy chart are represented, including the latest incarnation of the Master and a recent recurring Cyberman villain, Ashad. It has clearly been written with an understanding of its place in the canon of multi-Doctor stories; weaving in all those Doctors, companions and foes almost out-Five Doctors The Five Doctors; the missing paintings and involvement of UNIT is reminiscent of The Day of the Doctor. The story was an extra commission from the BBC to form part of the Corporation's centenary celebrations (which aside from this special Doctor Who story were rather muted in the end), so perhaps it was irresistible to include a lot of the programme's history (it having endured for nearly 60 of the Beeb's 100 years by then). It's not just a multi-Doctor celebration story, though, it is the final send off for Jodie Whittaker's Doctor - was there not felt to be a risk that her swansong would be overshadowed by all these returning elements? I doubt writer and executive producer Chris Chibnall was planning to have Whittaker regenerate at the end of a Sea Devils story; Legend of the Sea Devils looks to be the story that had been hastily added to the schedule at the last minute to bump up the numbers. As far as I can see, though, it has never been confirmed exactly how much of Power's planning and scripting had been done before the request came in to provide a centenary special.

My guess is that nothing was forced upon him, and Chibnall always planned such a story to write out his Doctor; it's a bold move, and it pays off. The character of the thirteenth Doctor has always been one that surrounds herself with a large 'fam', so the gang show approach does not jar. Whittaker doesn't suffer too much from a lack of screentime, and her presence - and her absence - dominates. It's a story of what it's like to be with, or be without, the Doctor. Making it seem effortless, Whittaker embodies the Doctor in the abstract and the specific, and everything else in the story is in orbit around her. Considering all the disparate elements to be combined in the final narrative, the plotting hangs together well. The only bit I'm still scratching my head over is forced regeneration; I understand it conceptually, but the visual of it doesn't align with the intention of the character. If the Master wants to be the Doctor, shouldn't he force a regeneration on himself, making him become her, not the other way round? This would have given Whittaker a chance to do something different, playing the evil villain for a part of the running time, and would have upped the ante when the Master is trying to destroy the Doctor's reputation: anything evil he did would have been done by someone who looks like our Doctor. If he wants to travel the universe looking like Sacha Dhawan accompanied by Yaz, then he could just kill the Doctor and steal her TARDIS, after all. Of course, this story is the swansong of Sacha Dhawan's Master too, and depriving viewers of even a second of his colossal, fantastic, unhinged performance might seem like sacrilege. He'd still be indelibly stamped onto the history of Doctor Who just for the Boney M scene, mind: the Master throwing shapes and Cossack dance moves to the 1978 Euro-Disco hit Rasputin, while a Dalek and a Cyberman look on askance.

There's also the wonderful conceit of the Master using famous paintings as a calling card - the visual of a Rasputin-disguised Master in The Scream or Girl with a Pearl Earring is a joy to behold. Rasputin's historical reputation (mesmeric powers, can't be killed) makes him an obvious choice as a Master alias; what's startling and perhaps genius about this is that there is no need for him to be disguised at all (in fact it would make much more sense for all the action to happen in the present day rather than split between 1916 and 2022) - the Master presumably just thought it would be funny. Again, this is in keeping with the character's actions in the history of the show. Apart from the Master's unnecessary disguises, the other two major returns from 1980s Who are Tegan and Ace. For everyone like me, who first got into the show when Peter Davison became the Doctor, this is every bit as exciting and important as Sarah Jane Smith coming back in School Reunion, only double. The script nails the older versions of their characters perfectly. Any fan would have to have a heart of petrified steel lava not to get a bit emotional seeing both reunited with holographic versions of their Doctors. The Guardians of the Edge sequence allows some more fun cameos - David Bradley, Colin Baker, Paul McGann! Fans of a more recent vintage would be well served too; Vinder and Ashad come back, having appeared in recent seasons. Then Graham pops up. Seeing people from different eras working together is pure, distilled Five Doctors juice ("I'm Ace", "Yes, you are" says Graham). Just when you think the story might be cameo-ed out, there's Jo Martin being the Doctor one last time too. Once the story's almost over, you get another few for good luck: Katy Manning as Jo Jones, Bonnie Langford as Mel, and - I'm getting a bit emotional again - William Russell as Ian Chesterton.

With David Tennant appearing at the end, that's at least one returning face from every decade of Doctor Who's existence; if you aren't charitable enough to give it anything else, that's an almighty triumph of logistics at least. The story seems to me to be more of a piece with the three specials in 2023 than the ones preceding it in 2022. Taken together, the four stories from The Power of the Doctor to The Giggle are the ultimate celebration of the show's history and set-up for its future. Even small details like the blowing up of UNIT HQ ("I'd only just signed the lease") fit nicely, allowing Kate-Lethbridge Stewart to move into Tony Stark's Avengers Tower the following year. Also distancing The Power of the Doctor from the rest of 2022 is that there's nothing in there about Yaz's feelings for the Doctor, which had been highlighted in both of the previous two specials. I can just about buy that they've both made their peace with things after the conversation in Legend of the Sea Devils, but I still think that it should have been Yaz's decision to part from the Doctor before she changes into someone new, rather than the Doctor essentially telling her to sling her hook. The emotional arc of the piece is restored by the 'companion's anonymous' scenes at the end, though: we know Yaz's is going to be looked after. Finally, there's the most beautiful regeneration sequence in the history of the show thus far: the Doctor atop Durdle Door with energy shooting far, far out in every direction. Then, we're off again, zooming into a bright, shiny future...

Connectivity:

Despite their broadcasts being separated by 35 years both The Power of the Doctor and Paradise Towers feature the Doctor played by Sylvester McCoy, and Mel played by Bonnie Langford. Echoing the action in the 1980s story, the UNIT building escape in the 21st century story involves heroic characters travelling to the highest floor of a skyscraper building in order to escape metallic killers (these adversaries move a bit faster, though).

Deeper Thoughts:

Two Yorkshire women with blonde bobs leave their job in the same week: Fit the Second. (Note: for Fit the First, of which this is the late-following sequel, see the Deeper Thoughts section of the Orphan 55 post from October 2022  - link in the First Time Round section above.)

The UK's politics was so turbulent in 2022 that the wikipedia entry that comes up when one searches on 'UK government crisis October 2022' has a link at the top that says - I kid you not - "This article is about the crisis that ended Liz Truss's premiership. For the crisis that ended Boris Johnson's premiership, see July 2022 United Kingdom government crisis", emphasis mine. In the UK, it was the year of three prime ministers, and - with Whittaker turning to Tennant, and it being common knowledge that Gatwa was waiting in the wings - the year of three Doctors too. After Johnson and Truss came Rishi Sunak; it's not that Sunak was exactly competent, but just by not being a clown car on fire he managed to usher in a period of relative stability. Was that local political turbulence followed by relative calm echoed somehow in the world of Doctor Who at the time? A lot of fans are very critical of the run for which showrunner Chris Chibnall was responsible, the stories from 2018 up to 2022 and The Power of the Doctor. Putting aside any subjective judgements about the quality of the stories (and there were times in those years reading fan discussions on the internet that I hoped like hell that people would put aside their subjective judgements about the quality of the stories) the production of the show did face more challenges than at any other time in its history. For a start, the world outside the show, that at some level needed to be reflected in the stories - Doctor Who always counterpointing its far-out space action with the recognisable and the grounded - was changing very rapidly.

This can clearly be seen in the story Revolution of the Daleks, a festive special shown on the 1st January 2021. The story was made as part of the series that aired a year earlier, with filming happening in the autumn of 2019, and the script was presumably written a while before that. The character of politician Jo Patterson, played by Harriet Walter, is ruthlessly fixated on public order and then becomes prime minister, so has too many things in common with Theresa May to be coincidental. May, though, had been out of power for nearly 18 months by the time Revolution of the Daleks got to an audience. As we saw above, May was just one of three prime ministers during Chibnall's time (with only a hair's breadth from it being four), so it was hard for scripting to keep up with real life; perhaps connected to some of that governmental instability was the biggest impact to the making of the show in this period, the Covid-19 virus. No matter what else was depicted in the story, it couldn't have predicted lockdowns, mask-wearing, vaccines and Joe Wicks TV workouts. It feels a bit unfair of fate that Chibnall didn't get to make more Doctor Who when the restrictions were eased, but he left at a time of his own choosing, and went out with a bang with The Power of the Doctor. It's a story in which you'd be hard pressed to discern any compromises indicative of it having been made in the aftermath of a pandemic. That he made any Doctor Who at all after Revolution of the Daleks, let alone such bold and brash and visually impressive fare as Flux and the 2022 specials, is a source of wonder to me. Once he'd left and Russell T Davies had taken up the showrunner job again, though, the money really started to flow and even greater things became possible.

Imagine if Chibnall were to comment publicly during Davies's period in charge, talking loudly and constantly about how he could do better? He'd never do such a crass thing, of course, and probably never want to do it. The world of television production seems to be more polite and honourable than the world of politics, because no such restraint exists there. In April 2024, Liz Truss - one of those quick-changing 2022 prime ministers and architect of one of the aforementioned 2022 crises - published a book with her plan to "Save the West", and was on the interview circuit expounding on said plan. Liz Truss was prime minister for 50 days. For a chunk of that short time, party political activity was suspended because of the funeral of the monarch, otherwise it might have been even shorter. She crashed financial markets and lost control of her own MPs in the space of a very few weeks, and her tenure ended in utter failure. With that track record, for her to have the sheer gall to lecture anyone on how to run anything is another source of wonder to me. I'm not equating her dismal record in any way with Chibnall's; whatever you think of the quality of his work, though, you know and I know that he's never going to publish a book on his plan to save Doctor Who, and will only ever say positive things about his successor. I sense a part of online Doctor Who fandom wants the Truss approach, however; and that, base and lowest common denominator as it is, she's scratching a similar itch in politics fans on a certain stripe.

If you like one showrunner more than another, it can get pretty tribal in the rarefied atmosphere of social media sites. When Steven Moffat took over from Davies, I read a lot of posts by people who imagined that Moffat was sneaking in references in his stories that took pot shots at the previous house style. They were convinced that he was in some way critical of Davies, even though there was no evidence of this in any of his public pronouncements. Moffat has hopefully, finally, put that to bed by agreeing to come back as a hired hand (he's writing the third story in Davies's first Ncuti Gatwa season, Boom). For anyone that might be imagining that Davies has any issues with his immediate predecessor, I'd direct you to the comments he makes in Doctor Who Magazine issue 603 about the controversial Timeless Child plotline that Chibnall introduced to Who and which Davies is developing further in Gatwa's episodes: "That's a gift handed to me by my predecessor... it's an honour to take it on from him" and "There's so much story in it!". Maybe we could all take a lesson from this interconnected and respectful approach when it comes to Doctor Who and to politics. Liz Truss knows that she's unlikely ever to hold high office again, but she will have seen from certain UK populists of recent times, who have made a living of sniping from the sidelines while not having the responsibility of any direct power, that this doesn't mean she can't have influence. It is telling that a lot of the interviews she gave in April 2024 were aimed at the hyper-partisan US; without extreme polar opposite tribes, who possibly don't represent the nuanced reality that sits between the poles, many negative things - including online Doctor Who flame wars and Truss's book - might not need to exist.

In Summary:

The Power of the Doctor was inside of us all along!

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.