November 11: The Caves of Androzani Parts One & Two

Standard and special edition DVDs

So here we are: Peter Davison's final story as the Doctor.  And after a six-year absence, Robert Holmes has returned to the Doctor Who world to give the fifth Doctor his sendoff.

But while Holmes's script is well-written and tightly plotted, the star of this production is Graeme Harper for his directorial debut on Doctor Who.¹³¹  His direction gives a real sense of energy to everything -- there are handheld shots, lots of camera movement, tight closeups, slow fades between scenes (rather than the usual cuts)... even direct addresses to camera, as Morgus delivers his asides directly to the audience (this was a misunderstanding by John Normington of what Harper was asking for, apparently, but Harper loved the effect so much he kept it).  This isn't to say that the other directors working on Who have been bad, but Harper is a revelation -- this is his triumph more than anyone else's.

However, where these two episodes excel is that they've been given a script that almost matches the work Harper is putting into things, and everyone involved seems to be rising to the occasion.  We get more flashes of the sarcastic, facetious Doctor that's been cropping up periodically throughout season 21, but here he's repeatedly put in completely powerless situations, which makes these verbal jabs feel much more dangerous.  Both General Chellak and Sharaz Jek warn the Doctor about his comments, but they're really the only weapons the Doctor has.  Nevertheless, you get a distinct feeling that the Doctor could get himself killed this way.  It doesn't help that everyone in this story is rather ruthless and amoral -- even General Chellak, who's the closest this story comes to a moral person, is willing to have the Doctor executed on orders and to sacrifice troopers just to maintain his reputation.  It gets to the point where Sharaz Jek is just about the most reasonable person here, and he's clearly mad.

Sharaz Jek with the Doctor and Peri. (The Caves of Androzani
Part Two) ©BBC

But what works for these two episodes, what sets them apart from stories like Warriors of the Deep or Resurrection of the Daleks, is that the Doctor and Peri aren't drawn into the violence and brutality that surrounds them.  Those earlier stories had the Doctor getting his hands dirty, but here all he wants to do is get Peri out of there -- and then later to cure her of the spectrox toxaemia she's contracted.  He has no interest in the power struggles going on over the spectrox (other than a mild curiosity as to what spectrox is, such that it's causing these problems -- it's a drug that extends the lifespan, apparently) and would much rather be somewhere else.  "I'm sorry I got you into this, Peri," the Doctor says.  "...I should have never followed those tracks.  Curiosity's always been my downfall."  Keeping the Doctor and Peri out of the violence but nevertheless still a catalyst for the events that are occurring is a good move on Robert Holmes's part: it essentially lets them have their war movie cake and eat it too.

So we get some fabulous direction (another gem: watch the way Morgus walks around the video projection of Chellak, and the way Chellak watches him move around the room), a cracking script, and a cast who are more than willing to rise to the occasion -- Peter Davison feels like he's playing with fire, Nicola Bryant acts genuinely terrified around Sharaz Jek, John Normington underplays the ruthless Morgus with a cold detachment while Christopher Gable gives a performance of barely controlled rage, ready to go off at the slightest provocation...  The only real complaints are that Nicola Bryant outs herself as not American in the first episode (no American would pronounce "glass" the way she does, with an ah ([a]) sound), and the Magma Beast, with its too-big head and always open mouth, isn't the most convincing monster ever -- although it's still leaps and bounds ahead of almost any other monster the Davison era has given us.  The final story of the fifth Doctor is off to an excellent start.







¹³¹ Officially, at least; apparently Harper directed a chunk of Warriors' Gate when the production took its toll on Paul Joyce.