Doctor Who (The TV Movie) - 4K restoration

Chapter the 348th, 30 years on, he's still back and it's still about time.

Plot:

The Daleks exterminate the Master (nobody knows why); his dying wish is that the Doctor should escort his remains to Gallifrey, and the Daleks agree to this (nobody knows why). It's a trick though, as the Master has survived as a globular snake-form (nobody knows how). The snake-form attacks the TARDIS, forcing a materialisation in San Fran Vancouver on 31st December 1999 (which used to be the future). On leaving the TARDIS, the Doctor is hit during a street gang shoot-out. A gang member Chang Lee accompanies him to the hospital in an ambulance with paramedic Bruce, but the snake-form Master has also hitched a ride. Because of the Doctor's binary vascular system, the surgeon on call Grace is confused and kills him. In the morgue afterwards, a delayed regeneration kicks in, and a new Doctor emerges. The snake-form meanwhile takes over Bruce's body. The Doctor wanders around a disused wing of the hospital suffering from amnesia, changes his clothes, and then finds Grace. She's quit her job at the hospital because the management are covering up that they treated an alien. The Master meets up with Chang Lee and persuades the boy to help him steal the Doctor's life force. The TARDIS power source, the Eye of Harmony, will help with this plan; when the Master opens it, the Doctor regains his memory. Its power becomes a threat to the world, which will be destroyed at exactly midnight. That's midnight Pacific Daylight Time, presumably. Anyway, there's then a chase, a MacGuffin (the Doctor needs to get a chip from an atomic clock to fix the TARDIS) and a big confrontation. The Doctor saves the world, leaves Grace and Chang Lee, and goes back to adventuring in the TARDIS. To be continued... actually, no, not to be continued, alas.

Context:

This may seem like cheating, as I have already blogged about this one, but I ran out of Doctor Who stories to blog last year and at the time of writing I'm still living through a long gap before they show any more. As a 'wilderness years' style break from creating and posting chronological indexes of my random musings for each Doctor - like the Paul McGann starring feature-length story, this blog post is positioned in between the classic and the new series Doctors - I decided to revisit the Doctor Who TV movie. Its 4K restoration, which I was lucky enough to get a ticket to see at its BFI screening in May 2026, anyway makes it seem like something new. In fact, as we in the audience were told at that screening, it was something new, even something unique - the BFI version was specially made so it could be shown at 24 frames per second (as is standard for movies) rather than the 23.98 frames per second standard of Blu-ray. So - in the nerdiest way possible - we were very privileged that day. Insert joke here about how lucky we were to see a TV movie that was over slightly more quickly.

First Time Round:

See my first blog post on the TV movie from early on in the blog's life for my memories of this story from 1996. Casting my mind back again to those days, I see further evidence of a theme that I'll come back to in the Reaction section below: the TV movie could not possibly be wholly successful because it was trying to please too many different groups. Why, for example, was the sell-through VHS of the movie available in the UK before it was broadcast on television? This was simply because BBC Worldwide had put money into the production's budget, and they wanted to maximise sales before a mass audience got to see the story for free. If one were to set out to make a straight-to-video Doctor Who special, though, one would almost certainly go about it differently to how one would make a special aimed at a BBC1 primetime TV audience (a one-off TV movie aimed at a US audience would be approached differently still, and a pilot for a US TV series differently from that). The upshot for me was having to make a decision about how to experience the story first as a fan. In the 1980s, I had been an excited viewer of new Doctor Who as it aired, and I was eager to be one again (even if for one night only). In the 1990s, though, I had become a collector of Doctor Who as it came out on VHS, and the urge to continue this, with something excitingly new rather than an archive release, was strong. I squared the circle by purchasing the VHS as soon as it became available, but not watching it until after the broadcast. As a small commemoration of this (so small that it would go unnoticed if I didn't point it out); I published my blog post indexing Paul McGann's brief tenure on the 13th May 2026, exactly 30 years to the day after the VHS was originally scheduled to go on sale. And this post celebrating the TV movie's sprucing up has been published on the 27th May 2026, the 30th anniversary of the BBC TV screening.

Reaction:

There's not much I can say about the magnificent restoration that's been done to the TV movie: when viewed in the NFT1 auditorium at the BFI, it looked and sounded amazing. The TV movie always looked and sounded pretty good, though. The restoration can't do anything to fix the script. If the look of the piece is stunning, the narrative just leaves one feeling stunned. Writer Matthew Jacobs for years thought Doctor Who fandom disliked his contribution, but anyone in the know would not blame him: the root cause - as I touched on in the Context section above - is that Jacobs was servant to too many masters. It was too much of a challenge creating something that would appeal to both US and UK audiences (and the executives that represented them) with differing levels of knowledge about Doctor Who and its concepts. The TV movie is the transatlantic equivalent of a 'euro-pudding' movie; this is a term used to describe large-scale European co-productions, where concessions made to the multiple funding sources from different territories result in a homogenised mess. US productions don't suffer in this way as much, because pockets tend to be deeper, but money still needs to come from multiple sources and there still can be the curse of multiple and contradictory exec notes pulling the writer in too many directions. The budget for the production came from four places: Fox, Universal, BBC Worldwide and BBC Television. Much as a UK-based fan viewer might have bristled at too much of a US focus, only Fox had the power to greenlight a series. Producer Philip Segal should have concentrated on pleasing them, and cut - or at least not highlighted - links to the past history of the show. Anything might have happened in terms of the movie's ratings that would have meant there was no future funding from Fox, but at least the pilot would have been coherent.

Some of the truly damaging decisions can't even be blamed on distant execs, but were made by Segal trying to legitimise his story as part of the overall continuity of Doctor Who, pandering to his inner fan. This is not hindsight bias either; even at the time, I was far from alone in thinking that featuring Sylvester McCoy and a regeneration rather than starting with Paul McGann was a terrible idea. This wasn't something insisted on by the BBC (who believed McCoy's years on the original series were a failure), it was all Segal. Focussing on the Doctor's rebirth not only delays the introduction of the star and the main plot, but it also skews the story's focus toward the more esoteric elements of Who lore (regeneration, finite numbers of lives, eye of harmony energy, etc.) instead of something more immediate and accessible like an alien invasion. I was the epitome of devoted Doctor Who fan in 1996, and I didn't care about that stuff, so I'm struggling to think of anyone who would have. Rather than be annoyed at little errors (McCoy holding the sonic screwdriver facing the wrong way, McGann saying the wrong total number of lives a Time Lord has), I was annoyed at anyone thinking they mattered enough to apply clumsy fixes (a blur is applied to the screwdriver, McGann redubs the line). When it's not tying itself up in these knots, Jacobs's screenplay creates some good set pieces, nice lines and good jokes. The casting is perfect, the direction is dynamic. But nothing makes any sense from one moment to the next, and every time I watch, the mounting number of questions this creates in my mind overpowers my viewing pleasure. I've seen the TV movie dozens of times over the years, but the questions keep coming. It's not just questions about Doctor Who continuity either. It can't be midnight everywhere in the world at the same time, can it?! That's just common sense.

Beyond issues with fictional continuity and real world logic, there are character issues. The kiss between Grace and the Doctor is one example. The controversy about the Doctor having a snog has been wildly overstated over the years; I don't remember it seeming too much out of place, even at the time. But Grace's reaction to it - asking the Doctor to kiss her again - doesn't sit well with her attitude before or after the kiss sequence, where she thinks the Doctor is a dangerously unstable individual. The inconsistency in her behaviour throughout regarding how much she believes the Doctor, and how much evidence she's given that he's telling her the truth (a plate glass window goes all wibbly in front of her, that should be a clincher) undermines the moment where she finally picks a side and joins up with the Doctor. This is the sequence with the traffic cop ("Now, would you stand aside before I shoot myself"), which I think is the one truly magic moment of the story. Jacobs captures the essence of Doctor Who in that one scene, and it's magnificent to watch (as long as one forgets anything that came before and after). Every scene probably works better if viewed as a standalone that doesn't relate to any other; even then, though, a lot of the material is very derivative of other sources. It's like a 1990s greatest hits: the paramedic and hospital scenes are very ER, the cover up of alien activity is very X-Files (the skeptical Grace acts as the Scully of the TV movie), the look of the Master is very Terminator 2, the cloister room is straight out of a Batman movie (it definitely has more bats than it does cloisters - it's more of a belfry room). Collectively it becomes a little too much, but it probably made sense to help the uninitiated in the audience orient themselves towards Doctor Who as similar genre fare.

It reads like I'm criticising Jacobs too much, but to reiterate: I think he did the best possible job with the contradictory mission statement he was given, and the same goes for director Geoffrey Sax and the cast. Segal is the one to blame, but it's hard to blame him too much either: the Herculean effort he put in over many years to get this one movie created, and for it to have even the slimmest hope of leading to a series, was almost as much as holding back death and turning back time and all that jazz. It's 30 years in the past now, and Doctor returned to TV as a going concern just under a decade later, so the only tiny trace of blame that can be left is for making something that looks good but doesn't hang together as a narrative. And that's something that's not exactly rare in US television nor in Doctor Who. 

Connectivity:

Like The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, the TV movie 4K restoration features multiple actors playing the Doctor, one of whom is Sylvester McCoy. Both stories kind-of sort-of feature the Daleks: the comedy short directed by Peter Davison technically features only Dalek operators and props not fictional Daleks from Skaro; the TV Movie just has a voiceover for the offscreen metal meanies, provided seemingly by someone who's never heard a Dalek before.

Deeper Thoughts:

Walker General Hospital patient record for John Smith: the TV Movie at the BFI, 17th May 2026. Fan friends David and Scott, mentioned many times before on the blog, met me early on the Sunday morning of the screening. We took our seats in NFT1, the biggest screen at BFI Southbank. The programme was more packed than usual, and the event was even more like a mini-convention than ever, with a display of props in the building to view after the screening, as well as the usual signing stalls and Quiz of Rassilon event. The quality of the giveaways for the opening quiz was higher than usual, including some exclusive artwork and signed action figure sets. Regular hosts Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy asked a number of people up to the stage to briefly explain what they'd provided: Al Dewar from toymaking company Character Options, Jonathan Wilkins from Titan Comics, and John McLay, the curator of a Doctor Who art exhibition. The quality of the prizes entailed the questions being somewhat more challenging than usual; does anyone out there know the address of the Institute where the Doctor gets the atomic clock chip (nobody did in the audience at the BFI)? Eventually, they dispensed with questions altogether and gave a prize to someone occupying a random seat number, K10 (as K9 would have been too obvious). A couple of prizes were given to those who'd travelled furthest to be at the screening; these were two American gentlemen, one from Boston, one from Virginia ("Don't give them the Blu-rays" said Johnson to Fiddy, who as usual was on duty delivering the winnings to people in the auditorium,"They might not work").

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Pontiff

Next was the traditional round-up of social media posts about the event. One of which was someone asking whether - if they high-fived everyone in the front row - they would get a prize? "Let's see, " said Johnson, after which the tweeter fulfilled his part of the bargain, and Johnson added "The answer's No". Dear reader, this was just joshing and the game fellow did indeed get a prize. All this took longer than usual, leaving not much time to talk to Reecy Pontiff, author of a book called Leap of Eighth, which sounds like a fascinating guide to Paul McGann's Doctor's extended universe appearances. After her brief interview on stage, there was a sweet video statement from Matthew Jacobs shown. In this, he described the TV movie as "a stepping stone through the wilderness years". Then the main feature played out. There wasn't much in terms of surprising audience reaction, though McCoy's scream during the Operating Room scene elicited a few titters (it ended up cut for the first UK transmission, because of concerns about being too scary rather than too risible). There was also a warm round of applause elicited by the final caption with the dedication to Jon Pertwee, who died a week before the movie was shown on UK TV screens in 1996. Before the first panel, there was time for one more single interviewee to come up for a brief chat. This was Doctor Who props enthusiast James Sutton, who showed off the TARDIS toolkit, sonic screwdriver, and an Eye of Harmony staff from the movie. He also wanted to make a statement about something that had bothered him for years: because the 70s prop replicated for the movie was never used consistently by Jon Pertwee or Tom Baker, Sylvester McCoy has been unfairly maligned for decades. There's no way he can be said to be holding the sonic screwdriver the wrong way round. "A huge relief to hear that," said Johnson archly.

Sutton with original sonic and toolkit bag props

The first panel featured four people who had worked on the restoration - David Palfreyman, who scanned the film reels (twice), colourist Darren Mostyn, Mark Ayres, responsible for sound remastering and mixing, and supervising producer and picture restorer Paul Vanezis. They briefly outlined the negotiations with Universal that lead to 219 film reels being delivered to the UK in October 2025. This was in the nick of time, as much of the celluloid is suffering from vinegar syndrome, and might not have been playable had it been left any longer. There then followed round-the-clock work for the small restoration team, or most of them at least. After a detailed description of the overtime put in by David and Paul, Mostyn said "I feel guilty now only doing 9 to 5!". Vanezis was asked about whether there was any new material found, but he explained that it was a fairly lean production, so there aren't any significant deleted or alternate scenes that haven't been seen before. Everything will be on the Blu-ray, anyway. One thing that will be slightly different is a moment where the broadcast had a flaw because of a scratched negative. This has now been fixed, because it "Takes half an hour to do, unlike in 1996". It was a panel that was heavy on the technical detail, and therefore a little dry, but it ended with an impassioned speech from Ayres about the quality of the production, and Geoffrey Sax's work in particular. To anyone who thought that the TV movie was not real Doctor Who his message was "It bloody well is". The panel was followed by what Johnson referred to only as the last piece of footage to be shown as part of the screening. I assumed it would be a compilation of extras from the Blu-ray as is usual, but instead it was The Night of the Doctor in full, and it was wonderful to see it on the big screen.

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Palfreyman, Mostyn, Ayres, Vanezis

The final panel featured Geoffrey Sax and Paul McGann. Sax began by saying of the restored version he'd just watched that "It scrubs up very well." McGann hadn't sat through the whole thing, and was asked whether he watches himself onscreen, as some actors don't - "I'd rather not". He explained that it has got easier as the years go by. Because of the strong memories of doing the work, he finds watching things he's in more like watching "A film of a holiday rather than following the story". Both Sax and McGann talked about how they believed while working on the movie that they would later be coming back to Doctor Who as a series: "There was an atmosphere of 'we'll reconvene in six months'", "You know the odds, realistically, but you can't work in that spirit". Sax outlined the differences between working on a pilot compared to standalone or episodic pieces. He also talked about Jacobs's script saying that most of it worked, but there was a challenge to create the final Doctor Master confrontation as the script just stated "They fight in a cool and interesting way". McGann added that sex scenes are written like that. This led to a discussion of the kissing in the TV movie. "The K word!" It was pretty chaste, thought McGann, "No tongues or anything". It was pointed out that Eric Roberts's Master also kisses Grace, and that's a lot more full-on. "That's Eric, though, isn't it?!" said McGann. McGann was also surprised that even to this day no Doctor has given a companion a 'frenchie': "Not even Tennant, like?"

McGann comes to the stage to join Sax

Both gentlemen answered in an unequivocal affirmative when asked if they'd have accepted the same job on a production that was just funded by the BBC without US involvement. Though later McGann did speak about some hesitancy agreeing to sign up for Doctor Who back in the 1990s. Had it gone to series, it would have taken at least six years of his life, and would have meant a move to live in Canada for filming: "The Stakes were high... my kids would have been Canadians". In the end, his agent helped him to be comfortable enough to accept the role. This agent was Janet Fielding (who had played companion Tegan in Doctor Who in the 1980s). McGann hadn't even known she'd previously been an actor prior to the Doctor Who offer as it wasn't something she talked about, but she was able to tell him from experience that (as he quoted her) "It ain't going to be like other jobs ... you'll still be talking about it in 30 years' time". Indeed he was. This may be an exclusive, I can't remember hearing McGann talk about it before, or it may have been a joke, but McGann said he is convinced that Philip Segal could not tell him and his brother Mark apart, and that's why both of them were invited to audition for the Doctor role. Sax discussed the practicalities of filming in Vancouver in the cold of January and February 1996. The final goodbye scene of the movie was shot in heavy rain, which gave Grace actor Daphne Ashbrook's hair "a life of its own". Yee Jee Tso, playing Chang Lee, fell into the fountain during that shoot. McGann described Tso as having a Tigger-like energy. Despite its comparatively large budget compared to BBC-produced Doctor Who, the TV movie was still made with speed and economy, with a maximum of two takes for any shot, according to McGann. He acted out a typical exchange: "Could we go for another take? Was it in focus? Yes. No you can't."

(L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Sax, McGann 

What for me was the biggest exclusive of the day was Sax confirming that the Dalek voices heard at the beginning could have been worse. The post-production dubbing was done by a Canadian firm, The Loop Group, and none of them had ever heard a Dalek. So, what was originally recorded were some very polite Canadian voices chanting "Exterminate, Exterminate". Sax ended up having to voice the Daleks himself: "Some people like it, some people think it's absolutely terrible", "It's my Hitchcock moment... I'm also the chicken squawk". McGann talked a little about the making of The Night of the Doctor: it was shot in a day with writer Steven Moffat furiously rewriting as it was being made, handing McGann pieces of paper with new dialogue. He just had to lie to people (including the other Doctor actors when filming The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot) if asked whether he was returning for the 50th anniversary. It eventually did leak, so the release of the short was brought forward. It was supposed to be a red button extra on the anniversary day 23rd November 2013, but ended up released on McGann's birthday 14th November. Moffat texted McGann "Happy Birthday" when letting him know. McGann thought this worked out okay as instead of being lost in the anniversary hubbub, "It had a week to itself". The final question was Sax being asked whether he was ever asked to work on Doctor Who after its return in 2005. He had worked with people involved in post-2005 Who production before, and was indeed asked to direct a couple of times, but he had clashes on the dates involved. After that, he wasn't asked again. "They thought you were playing hard to get" said McGann. 

In Summary:

A transatlanti-pudding. But a very good-looking one.

The Giggle

Chapter the 304th, is having a laugh, isn't it?!

Plot:
The Doctor and Donna return to Earth to find everyone driven out of their wits. London is a battle-zone with everyone attacking everyone else, believing only they are in the right. UNIT come along in helicopters and take the Doctor and Donna to their new skyscraper HQ; Mel is working for them now, and is reunited with the Doctor, having travelled back to Earth somehow. When a new satellite network was recently connected up, it started broadcasting a signal that affected people, but UNIT have developed a bracelet that gives the wearer immunity. The Doctor traces the source back to 1925, the first ever television picture captured by John Logie Baird of a vent's doll called Stooky Bill. The Doctor takes Donna back to 1925 and they find the toyshop where the doll was bought, and confront the Toymaker, old foe of the Doctor's. After a bit of roaming around the Toymaker's realm, the Doctor and Toymaker play another game against each other, but the Doctor loses. That makes it 'one all' after the Doctor's defeat of him years before. The Toymaker wants to have the best of three rematch in 2023 and disappears. The Doctor and Donna race back after him to UNIT HQ, where he arrives lip-syncing and dancing to the Spice Girls, and killing people. A big powerful superweapon has been used to destroy the new satellite and cancel the giggle signal, but the Toymaker takes it over and zaps the Doctor, as he believes that the third game must be played against a new Doctor. A rare thing happens, though: bi-regeneration, and instead of changing, the Doctor splits in two. The two Doctors beat the Toymaker at a game of catch, and he is imprisoned in UNIT HQ (bound in salt). The new Doctor manages to duplicate the TARDIS. He goes off for new adventures, while the old Doctor stays on Earth with Mel, Donna and the other Temple-Nobles as his surrogate family.

Context:

On the 4th July 2024, there was a general election in the UK. As mentioned too many times to count in this blog over the years, I am a politics nerd, and will usually stay up into the wee small hours watching news coverage of the results coming in. It was no different this time. On a previous occasion - see here - I watched a Doctor Who when there was a lull (after the exit poll and a couple of initial counts, there's usually a gap before the results come thick and fast). I planned to do the same with The Giggle when it had come up for the blog (a tale about conflict between people who each believe only they are right and everyone else is wrong seemed apt somehow). As it turned out, though, the eldest (young man of 18, who'd voted that day in his first ever election) wanted to join me for the coverage. He wasn't keen on seeing The Giggle again so soon, so instead we watched episodes of political sit-coms The Thick of It and Parks and Recreation. A few days later, The Giggle became the first Doctor Who I watched for the blog under a new Labour government; I watched it alone from the BBC iplayer one evening.

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 post marks the second completion of an entire Doctor's televisual era, that of the fourteenth Doctor (as portrayed by David Tennant) following the recent completion of Paul McGann's eighth Doctor. People may not think this counts, for two reasons. First, the fourteenth Doctor is played by the same actor as the tenth Doctor and so some might lump them together (and I haven't finished blogging the tenth Doctor's stories yet); second, if you separate out the second incarnation played by Tennant, that incarnation only appears in three stories in total, so perhaps referring to it as a "televisual era" is a bit grand. The narrative in those three stories, though, is at pains to define him as different to the previous Doctor, albeit with the same face, so I'm taking it. Two down, thirteen to go...

First Time Round:

Watched with the whole family (Better Half and three kids, two boys and a girl) on its live broadcast on 9th December 2023. The decorations were up in our house, the Christmas playlist was in full swing, and we were starting to get just a little bit festive. The Giggle was the third of a set of three early Christmas gifts for that year. Unfortunately, it marked the end of the season of goodwill for the Better Half and the series. It's one of those unfortunate twists of fate: Ncuti's performance is exactly like a bloke at work that she doesn't get on with, right down to the use of "Honey" and "Babes" when talking to people (which I find harmless, but I can see how it might not go down well with various generations of feminists who'd just about won the battle to get certain older males to stop calling them "Love" and "Darlin'"). There isn't much that can be done; it's just one of those things. She gave it another couple of chances, persevering with the Goblins Xmas story and Space Babies, but has bailed on anything after that.

Reaction:

There's a lot packed in to this story's running time. Russell T Davies writes as someone who knows he's got one of the most (if not the most) popular Doctor actors in David Tennant for only a short and rapidly diminishing time, and doesn't want to waste a second. The pre-credits scene (like that of the previous special) takes us briefly back in time to inject a small amount of historical setting into the trio of specials that are mostly contemporary or spacey. The setting of 1925 and John Logie Baird's first experiments with television is an interesting one, inspired by research Davies did for the series Nolly that he made just before he took up the Doctor Who showrunner gig again, with the same actor John Mackay as Baird. The very first images ever shot on television were of a creepy doll that looks like something out of a scary Doctor Who episode; it's a gift. The moment where the dummy, burning under the lighting required to capture an image, falls forward and its mouth opens is a great jump scare. Once the idea of a puppet villain was in his head, that sparked the idea of a puppet-master that led Davies to the 1960s vintage Who character of the Toymaker. That decision made, there's very little Stooky action required in the episode ultimately, the repeated image of the face is enough. There's also one wonderful scene of Catherine Tate as Donna attacked by dolls, which displays some wonderful marionette work by the behind the scenes puppet-masters and allows Tate to shine. The story keeps moving on to the next thing, though; the horror changes from Chucky to The Purge: the giggle associated with that early TV image is beamed out by a recently completed satellite network to bring out the worst of humankind. Early scenes of carnage as London fights are very effective, and accompanied by a great and giddy score by Murray Gold. Then UNIT helicopters turn up, and we're already on to the next bit.

This fast movement probably takes us whizzing past any worries that some things don't add up on first watch, but upon rewatching they might give us pause: the Toymaker has godlike powers, can turn people into balloons and bullets into flower petals with just a touch; so, why did he need to wait for the launch of some satellite and connection of some network? Maybe we can chalk this up to the Toymaker's sense of fair play. He can only use our own technology to effect this change as this is all about showing humanity itself. This next section allows for some satire (the politician broadcasting how little he cares about the populace - "No change there, then" says Donna sardonically), some fan service (2000s regular cameo newscaster Trinity Wells is back, shame she's the equivalent of an anti-vaxxer in the world of this story), and drama. This last is provided by Jemma Redgrave as the redoubtable Kate Stewart going feral when she turns off her control bracelet and succumbs to the giggle. It is a tour de force, but it makes me feel slightly uneasy: are we really one dose of anger away from becoming reactionary and bigoted? I hope not, but Davies often does like to present the darker side of humans en masse. The Doctor ("Hating each other? You've never needed any help with that.") and the Toymaker ("And then there are the mind games, oh, the dating and ghosting, the deceit and the control") both get very critical of the human race. Not much time to dwell on this further, though, as the Doctor and Donna zip back to 1925. Almost in passing in this section, Davies also manages to introduce some new UNIT characters (The Vlinx! A handsome soldier!) and reintroduce the character of Mel, finally giving Bonnie Langford's character something of a proper backstory too.

Where were we? Our heroes have found the Toymaker. As the villain of the piece, Neil Patrick Harris is never not outrageous, but never not sinister. He does voice work, costume changes, juggling, puppetry, lip-sync and dancing - it's a very demanding role, and he rises to the challenge. There's physicality in the performance, but also control. The confrontation scene of the Doctor and Donna in the 1925 toy shop is sublime: the Doctor works out who he is facing and worries for his companion, but she won't take any crap from the Toymaker or anyone. The cherry on the cake is the moment of memory where we get a couple of brief colourised clips of William Hartnell and Michael Gough from the story of the Doctor's previous run-in with this god-like gamester. The story as a whole is a gang show with a big cast of UNIT regulars, but these moments of Tennant and Tate together, facing off to the baddie, are the ones that I'll really treasure, with some memorable dialogue ("Dice don't know what the dice did last time, games don't have a memory"). There's more fan service when the Toymaker puts on a puppet show to get Donna (and any audience member) up to speed with the Doctor's recent history. It's not long, though, before the plot and our heroes are on the move again. The dialogue even picks up on this break-neck shuttling ("I'm already running" says Donna with exquisite timing as the Toymaker's realm collapses around them). Back to 2023, the Toymaker attacks (accompanied by the Spice Girls' Spice Up Your Life). The giggle plotline is switched off by a great big plot-device / gun, but the Toymaker takes control of it, and shoots the Doctor. We viewers are wrong-footed; we knew that this was coming, but it's too soon - there are still 19 minutes to go, so it can't be time for Tennant to regenerate quite yet, can it?!

The final section gives Davies the chance to play regeneration as a happy ending for the first time. We don't have to mourn the old Doctor because he splits into two: one David Tennant, and one brand-new Ncuti Gatwa version. It's a novel-ish idea (the Doctor splitting into two versions of himself after a regeneration happened in one of the big Tennant stories in his first time around, after all). But it gives a chance for the two Doctors to interact, and what could be more Doctor Who anniversary special than a multi-Doctor story?! The risk is more that Gatwa is going to get overshadowed than Tennant, I feel, but he holds his own with aplomb. I'm not so sure about the decision to split the clothes between the two Doctors such that Gatwa spends the rest of the story running around in his boxer shorts. Gatwa only getting half a costume in his first episode is made up for by him having the most costume changes of any lead actor in his stories thereafter, I suppose. The Doctors challenge the Toymaker to a game of catch in a well-shot sequence. They defeat the bad guy, split the TARDIS into two (ridiculous of course, but fun) and then the pace slows down to explain why things have been so hectic up to now. This is the Tennant Doctor's chance to retire. He's been rushing around and wearing himself (and herself before that) out, and he needs to stop. There's an interesting idea buried in here that he must have been successful in this, because the Gatwa version is so well adjusted (having done "rehab out of order"). There's also a bizarre section where lots of significant and not so significant moments in the Doctor's history are namechecked (Mavic Chen was a puzzling choice of foe to come to the Doctor's mind at this moment). The Doctor is able to settle down with a family of sorts, the Temple-Nobles, Wilf and Mel, while Ncuti goes off into the Space-Time vortex to new adventures (accompanied by Gold's boisterous and wonderful theme for the fifteen Doctor).

Tennant's last line "I've never been so happy in my life" shouldn't leave a dry eye in the house. The set-up presents problems for the future, though, as every time Ncuti goes back to UNIT HQ in contemporary London, Tennant is out there somewhere and there's no logical reason why he shouldn't be called in to help out. This goes double for Tate who we see during The Giggle haggling for a job at UNIT (in a very funny scene). There's a few other minor blemishes: they make the best of it that they can, but it's very obvious that Bernard Cribbins isn't in the episode; he sadly passed away after filming the scene for Wild Blue Yonder; it's nice to get a reference to Sabalom Glitz in 21st century Who, but if he dies aged over 100, then how old is Mel supposed to be now? It seems odd to make a thing of the TARDIS finally being wheelchair accessible but then not letting Shirley go in. Donna's line asking the post bi-regeneration Doctors if they come in "a range of colours" feels like a microaggression to me, and should have been cut. The negatives are a small fraction compared to all the good stuff crammed in there, though.

Connectivity:

Both The Giggle and The Night of the Doctor were special Doctor Who episodes shown in an anniversary year that ended in a regeneration that was a bit unusual compared to the established norms of the process (bi-regeneration, or guided regeneration using the Sisterhood of Karn's potions).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Duckpond Factor. Serial TV drama, where sequences can get written and rewritten at a fast speed, and editing can leave scenes or lines on the cutting room hard-drive (the modern equivalent of the cutting room floor), will often contain the odd moment that accidentally or expediently doesn't get a clear explanation. Serial TV drama, particularly genre fare such as Doctor Who, increasingly is structured with arc plots that run over the course of one or more seasons, so will often contain moments without a clear explanation where that explanation is being deliberately withheld to pay off in future. For the viewer, and the amateur reviewer like what I am, this presents the challenge of knowing how to tell the difference. What looks like a plot hole might not be a plot hole, it might be something that's going to be covered in an episode's time, or a season's time, or many years into the future. Does one give a story the benefit of the doubt or not? Steven Moffat, showrunner of Doctor Who for most of the 2010s, presented the most difficulties in this regard; he clearly had a long-term plan that played out for the three seasons and specials starring Matt Smith, with questions being raised and answered throughout that time, right up until Smith bowed out in The Time of the Doctor. But he also left loose ends, like any writer. For all those years, certain fans were waiting for an explanation of a comment in the very first story of Moffat's tenure The Eleventh Hour, where the Doctor queries new friend Amy about why there are no ducks in her home town's duckpond. It could have just been a line of dialogue not meant to have any significance, it could have had a scripted explanation that later was cut, or it could have been meant to be left to the audience member's imagination (a popular theory is that the ducks - like Amy's parents - have been sucked out of existence through the crack in time in Amy's childhood bedroom; likely correct, but never confirmed).

When presented with moments in current episodes that have the 'duckpond factor', and knowing that there's at least another season of Doctor Who in the can that could furnish more information about what we've seen thus far, what is one to assume? And what about the extra complicating factor of recent Who embracing the supernatural in its storytelling (something that of course was thoroughly rationalised in the text of the show)? In a story like 73 Yards, for example, one isn't intended to ever fully understand everything that's going on, so it's even harder to know what one should worry about. Of course, some fans worry about everything, and maybe let that leads them to some unnecessary negativity. In an interview in July 2024, showrunner Russell T Davies mentioned that he will likely never reveal why Anita Dobson's recurring character from Ncuti's first run episodes Mrs. Flood keeps breaking the fourth wall, looking right down the camera and seemingly addressing the audience directly. He says: "That hasn’t been explained, and it might never be, frankly... It’s very interesting, within the Doctor Who offices, we know exactly why that happens and yet I’m showing no sign of putting that on screen." This has got a lot of people online hot under the collar, and I can't understand why. He doesn't say that he won't explain who Mrs. Flood is, only that he might not explain why she sometimes acts as a Greek Chorus. Steven Moffat was quick to defend Davies on twitter, explaining that it's something that has happened in Doctor Who consistently through its history (and of course in many a drama or comedy going right back to the ancient Greeks).

Once we know Flood's true nature, we will probably quite easily be able to join the dots for ourselves. In the same interview, and receiving the same online opprobrium, Davies explained that there had originally been a line in The Devil's Chord, explaining how some temporal feedback or similar phenomenon caused the big song and dance number to happen at the end of the story. The explanation was even shot, but they cut it as it was "boring". He speculates that the scene "probably would have made a lot of people happy", but I think he's wrong. If you don't like the song and dance at the end, you'd probably still dislike it even with a one-line fig-leaf to explain it; if you do like it, and you have any kind of imagination at all, you'll almost certainly have done your own mental housekeeping and assumed your own explanation along the lines of what was cut (as I did myself in my blog post for the story, written long before Davies's interview). At least he's explained it in an interview: it's more than the duckpond conspiracists got. The Giggle sees the fourteenth Doctor bow out without a definitive in-universe explanation for why his clothes changed when he regenerated from Jodie Whittaker; nobody seems as bothered by that, or any of the numerous loose ends throughout Who's history. Mind you, the story also contains the wonderful line from the Toymaker to the Doctor "I made a jigsaw out of your history" which could be used to explain literally anything that's happened before or since. Will this make Doctor Who fans satisfied? Probably not. Many fans complained that the other 21st century Doctor Who showrunner Chris Chibnall's stories were over-explanatory. It's almost as if the Doctor Who showrunner job is an impossible one where you can't please people!

In Summary:

Well, that's alright then! (In fact, it was better than alright, it was very good.)

The Night of the Doctor

Chapter the 303rd, covers some Doctor Who, but probably not the Doctor Who you were expecting.

Plot:
During the Time War, the Paul McGann version of the Doctor materialises on a stricken space-gunship. When its sole occupant Cass finds out that he is a Time Lord, a people she holds in contempt because of their contribution to the carnage, she refuses to escape with him in the TARDIS. He is still trying to persuade her when the ship crashes onto the planet Karn. Both Cass and the Doctor are killed, but the Sisterhood of Karn restore the Doctor to life for a short period. They believe he is the one hope of ending the war, and offer him a controlled regeneration using mixtures of their elixir. The Doctor has so far refused to fight in the war, and is in no mood to change now, but they persuade him. He chooses to become a warrior, sends the Sisterhood away, salutes his companions of old, and drinks the mixture. He regenerates into a young John Hurt, and dons Cass's bandolier - ready for battle at last.

Context:

Is this cheating? My calculations tell me that at my current rate of blogging I have enough TV stories left to see out 2024 and no further, but there's a whole new Ncuti Gatwa season in post-production that is unlikely to be shown before spring 2025. I don't want to end up having to blog that in broadcast order; I'm also sentimentally inclined to attempt reaching the blog's 10th anniversary in May 2025. For that reason - and also because I think it might be interesting - I am going to throw in (randomly, natch) a few more of the odds and sods of dubious canonical status. I've already covered Scream of the Shalka and even An Adventure in Space and Time; if they're fair game, then the only reason not to cover The Night of the Doctor would be its short duration (see the Deeper Thoughts section below for more on that). Even though it's only a few minutes long, The Night of the Doctor depicts significant events in the mythology of the show, and that swayed me. I watched it on my own a couple of times from the iplayer taking notes, in mid-June 2024.

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 post marks the significant milestone of the completion of a Doctor's televisual era; the eighth Doctor becoming the first one completed for the blog. I kind-of sort-of already completed Paul McGann with a single post in the very first year of blogging, depending on your views of what counts or doesn't. With this 2013 special short and McGann's recent cameo in The Power of the Doctor additionally written up, though, there can be no doubt - at the time of writing, that's every visual appearance by his Doctor covered.

First Time Round:

It's hard to be 100% sure after more than a decade, but I'm pretty sure that The Night of the Doctor was the first newly made Doctor Who I ever watched on a smartphone screen. I was at the office in South Quay, London for my day job on Thursday 14th November 2013, and saw online messages that something had become available to stream as a taster for the big 50th anniversary special due in nine more days' time. I didn't want to wait to watch it, but also didn't want to watch it on a big monitor in the middle of a working day in the office. So, I used my phone (actually one provided by work as I recall, which had relatively recently become an iOS device, swapped in after years of them providing a Blackberry that I doubt would have been useable for watching video easily). When I came home after work, I undoubtedly would have watched it again on a bigger screen (I seem to remember it was available on TV using the red button service) with anyone from the family dragged in if they were interested (I don't recall who was and who wasn't). That weekend I left for a working trip to Paris for the next week, coming home on the following Friday. The next day after that, of course, was The Day of the Doctor.

Reaction:

Paul McGann, with typical humour and self-deprecation, has described himself as the George Lazenby of Doctor Who, having only - before The Night of Doctor at least - played the role once on TV. Like James Bond, the Doctor is a role an actor is forever associated with after playing it, even if it was only the once. The comparison to Bond's 'one hit wonder' actor doesn't hold up, though. For a start, the period McGann wasn't playing the role was only a relative blip. After the TV movie was broadcast in May 1996, McGann started recording audio stories for Big Finish, the first being released early in 2001 after he'd had less than five years away from the part; he's continued making them ever since. In parallel with this, he was the face of the Doctor in other media (the ongoing comic strip in Doctor Who Magazine, the original novels published by BBC Books) from immediately after the TV movie's broadcast right up to the point that Christopher Eccleston appeared on TV in 2005. Were many members of the James Bond fandom during the Roger Moore years clamouring for Lazenby to come back or to have his own rival series of movies? Maybe some of them were, but how long did they keep it up? Despite his ubiquity in tie-in media, McGann has still been felt not to have been given a fair crack of the whip, and some fans are still - almost thirty years on - asking for his return. When Russell T Davies first hinted that he had ambitions for a Marvel-style stable of spin-off shows, a pitch that came from many corners of fandom was a McGann-starring Tales of the Time War, or similar. Watching The Night of the Doctor, one can instantly see why.

McGann has aged well, growing into the part, and looks perfect; there's a magnificent new costume that is much better than the slightly fake outfit worn in 1996 (in the story of the TV movie, it was explicitly stated to be a fancy dress costume, not something a hardy adventurer would keep for long). Even considering the American TV money that the first outing had, production values have improved between 1996 and 2013, so this brief return is pretty glossy. Mainly, though, it's all about the performance. McGann's a great actor, with a great controlled take on the role, honed over the years to remove any small amounts of hesitancy that can be seen in the TV movie. To a certain extent, he has to be great, as he only has a very limited amount of onscreen action to make a mark. Not including the 30-second pre-credits sequence where he makes a dramatic entrance right at the end with a killer line, there's a scene on the spaceship with Cass that lasts a minute and a half, and - after the Sisterhood have witnessed the ship crash - a four minute scene of the Doctor in conversation with Ohila, leading to his regeneration. It's two scenes and just over five minutes, and McGann burns through the screen throughout. To give him his due, writer Steven Moffat stuffs those minutes with so much good material. The spaceship scene with Cass is something that was unique at the time: the Doctor, all his initial chumminess and quips dying away, has desperately to try to save someone who rejects him, and refuses to be saved. It's interesting that there is now a very similar scene where Ncuti Gatwa faces the same challenge (I won't specify exactly where and why to avoid spoilers in this streaming age). In both instances, it is a gift to the performer.

The scene with the sisterhood allows McGann to run the gamut: humorous cynicism at first, as he refuses to accept Ohila's attempt to pressure him into a decision, dawning resolution that he must suppress the more peaceful parts of his nature, a commanding anger as he sends everyone out of the room. If there's one mild criticism I have, it's that he's persuaded a bit too easily, but they only had a handful of minutes, so what could they do? At this point, as someone who wasn't familiar with the details of his Big Finish adventures, his litany of companion names took me out of the action momentarily (and presumably the list has subsequently dated as he's continued doing audios for over a decade and counting after Night of the Doctor); it's a nice tribute, though, to the makers and the audience of the dramas that kept the character performance alive. With a great final line - "Physician heal thyself" - he regenerates and is woven in to the wider fabric of the series. The character has an onscreen start and end now; even if there's never anything televisual ever made or shown of his adventures in between, and even for someone who has no knowledge of the extended media tie-ins that take place there, we can always imagine our own stories - with an indelible image of the hero of those stories - to plug the gap.

Connectivity:

In both Space Babies and The Night of the Doctor, the Doctor arrives on a craft in space that's undergoing mechanical trouble that if left unchecked will eventually mean everyone aboard is killed. At least according to Cass's reaction on discovering he's a Time Lord, both crafts have monsters on board too.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Duration Game. Many moons ago, I expounded in the Deeper Thoughts section of a blog post about the longest Doctor Who stories ever. As I wrote then, long stories are rarer than one might think. Until the 1980s, four or six part stories were standard; in the final years of the classic series, it was four and three parts. In the new series years, and in one experimental season of Colin Baker's tenure, individual episodes were double the length of the classic era, but the stories tended not to be more than two - and very rarely - three parts; as such, they did not breach the established ceiling. In the first seven years of Doctor Who, there were a handful of exceptions that were longer than the established standard durations of the time, and - if you count them as single stories rather than linked separate stories under a banner title - The Trial of a Time Lord and Flux did this more recently too (I count one as a single story, but not the other - I won't get into why just now). But what about stories that were shorter than the norm? In the classic era, two times 25-minute long episode stories came along occasionally, but as they were the equivalent length of a new series one-parter, and because one-parters have formed the vast majority of stories in the last 14 years of the show, one can't exactly call that duration a rarity. Sometimes individual episodes of stories ran short, but collectively the story was still about average. For Doctor Who as broadcast on TV, there was really only one shorter than usual story in 60+ years. This was Mission to the Unknown, a 25-minute single episode teaser for the longer Dalek Master Plan story to come. Some might lump this in with that later story, but it's made difficult by the slightly bizarre decision to broadcast another story in between. I decided to cover the story for the blog on its own (see here).

For a story shorter than 25 minutes, one has to go beyond broadcast TV Who, which unavoidably entails considerations of canon. As I widen the definition of acceptable stories for the blog (see Context section above for more details), I have to ask myself certain questions of anything I want to include. The first would be: does it star the Doctor? You'd think this would be a no-brainer, but I've already broken that rule blogging the K9 and Company pilot (I had a moment of weakness!). Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? I can't blog every Big Finish audio ever made, so I have to next ask: does it have visuals? (An aside: I might make an exception for radio adventure Slipback; I won't for The Paradise of Death as I already covered its novelisation in a Deeper Thoughts section a while back; as for The Ghosts of N-Space - no, just no.) Was it released as an official Doctor Who or official spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Have I not already covered it in passing with another connected story (as I did with the Children in Need shorts Born Again and Time Crash in The Christmas Invasion and Voyage of the Damned posts respectively)? With all those rules considered, there are certainly other future contenders to add to the list, but none under 25 minutes, except for maybe each of the 2006 Tardisodes or other similar short prequel scenes or special trailers made over the years. I can't see myself being able to spin an entire blog post out of any of them though, they don't have sufficient content and aren't self-contained. As such, I suspect that The Night of the Doctor - which I think meets all the criteria above, just about - is going to be the shortest story ever covered for the blog.

In Summary:

For one night only - again! - Paul McGann shines.

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.