20x7. The Five Doctors
Writer: Terrance Dicks
Director: Peter Moffatt
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner
Synopsis: The Doctor's past selves, along
with several companions and enemies, are captured with the "Time Scoop"
and brought to the Death Zone on Gallifrey, where President Borusa
hopes to force them to play the Game of Rassilon and unlock the secret
of immortality.
Review: Let's
just get this out of the way - the actual plot of "The Five Doctors" is
relatively weak, and the potential for a reunion of Doctors and
companions is underrealized. In particular, it seems questionable for
Borusa to have brought Daleks, Cybermen, Yeti, and the Master into the
Death Zone if his objective was to manipulate the Doctors into solving
the mystery of immortality - what if one or more Doctors had been
killed along the way? The only possible explanation supplied by the
script is that perhaps some element of danger was necessary for the
Doctors' travails to meet the requirements of Rassilon's "game," and
that's me doing guesswork rather than anything that the episiode itself
makes clear. (The real explanation may simply be that this was the 20th
anniversary special and therefore the creative team wanted to bring
back some of the more popular villains as well as former Doctors and
companions.) And while it was nice to have the familiar faces on-hand,
the Fifth Doctor doesn't have any particularly strong reaction to
seeing Sarah Jane Smith, the Brigadier, or even his own granddaughter
again.
And yet, I can't help but like it anyway. Maybe it's
partly nostalgia value - I'm pretty sure that it was the first
installment of Doctor Who that
I ever saw even in part, and it was also all I knew of Hartnell,
Troughton, and Pertwee for a period of time before my PBS station
picked up the pre-Tom Baker serials. And whatever its lapses in logic,
the script does have an effective pace and a sense of adventure that
will keep most Who fans' interest. The Doctor/companion pairings aren't all the most
natural - I suspect that the Brigadier was put with Troughton and Sarah
Jane with Pertwee after it became clear that Tom Baker would not be
participating - but they work well enough for the obligatory
expositional dialogue.
The use of the scene from "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" as a
pre-credits teaser was an appropriate way to incorporate the late
William Hartnell (whose version of the Doctor is otherwise
well-captured by the recast Richard Hurndall) into the proceedings, and
Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee ably assume the personas that we know
and love. Peter Davison, who is often at his best when the Doctor is
staring off in contemplation of some mysterious happening, gets plenty
of opportunity to do that here, ably reflecting the character's unusual
wisdom and intellect. Perhaps the best moment of "The Five Doctors" is
its last, when Tegan asks him if he's really going "on the run...in a
rackety old TARDIS," and he responds, with a youthful breeziness that
I'm not sure any of his precedessors could have managed, "Why not?
After all, that's how it all started."
Once again, Gallifrey is
portrayed as a somewhat corrupt and declining society - the fact that
anyone (even the President) is able to access and abuse the time scoop
and cause widespread energy drains across the planet does not speak
well for their leadership structure, and the other Time Lords appear
unable to do much to bring the situation under control. Neither do they
question Borusa's decision to recruit the Master to try to rescue the
Doctor, even though they all know him to be a man of evil and
deception. A less generous interpretation, of course, would be that
this is simply the script's excuse for bringing the Master into the
story, but the grudging acceptance of the Chancellor and Castellan
might reflect a certain desperation on their part. Rassilon himself is
spoken of with trepidation, and he projects a somewhat sinister
presence even before we learn the fate he has in store for Borusa. It's
not hard to see why the Doctor eventually chose a life of independent
exploration over what might have been a comfortable but stifling life
among his own kind, and I can certainly understand why he wants as
little to do with Time Lord politics as possible.
This
brings me to the one thing that doesn't quite fit about this
explanation: the comparatively aloof (and sometimes selfish) First
Doctor is the one that I sometimes *could* imagine being relatively
content on Gallifrey, or at least less inclined to rebel out of
disappointment at the Time Lords' refusal to use their powers to help
other species. The First Doctor's personality is also key to one of the
more unsettling (and underplayed) elements in the script here. Namely,
I don't think that Borusa - corrupt though he may be - truly deserved
his eventual fate of obtaining "immortality" by being trapped in stone
in Rassilon's tomb. The other Doctors seem caught off-guard when the
First Doctor manipulates him into this by urging Rassilon to grant
Borusa what he wants, but none of them exactly take issue with it, even
though Borusa had been a teacher and mentor to the Doctor on Gallifrey.
The Master also desired immortality and gets let off relatively easily
by comparison (the Brigadier knocks him out before he can obtain an
audience with Rassilon), and he's probably caused considerably more
suffering and death than Borusa ever has. In all, I'm not sure whether
the script intends for this to be controversial or if the question
arises more by accident.
Still, none of that prevents "The Five
Doctors" from succeeding as an entertaining, nostalgic romp that brings
many of the program's most beloved elements together for a distinctly
Whovian adventure. While it doesn't live up to all of its potential,
it's successful enough for me to enjoy it for what it is rather than
lamenting what it could have been.
Other notes:
- The
Second Doctor realizes that the illusions of Jamie and Zoe aren't real
because their memories were erased back in "The War Games" - but first
of all, they did retain the memories of their initial encounters with
him, and second of all, this happened shortly before the Time Lords
forced him to regenerate, so how would he be out and about visiting the
Brigadier when captured by the Time Scoop? Unless I'm missing
something, the chronology here doesn't really add up.
- In the
Special Edition DVD, Terrance Dicks is amusingly forthright about his
dislike of certain elements of the story. When Sarah Jane falls down a
not-at-all-steep hill, he exclaims, "It's just a gentle declivity!" He
also is apparently none too fond of the Cybermen, calling them "stupid
silver lummoxes" and attributing their prominence to the influence of
Script Editor Eric Saward.
Rating: *** (out of four)
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