Castrovalva Four to Doomsday Kinda The Visitation Black Orchid Earthshock Time-Flight

BBC Season Nineteen

• Soap! by Rob Matthews
• A Review by James Neiro

Soap! by Rob Matthews 18/10/01

Tom! Gone!
What was arguably the most difficult transition in the show's history was handled pretty well by the production team. Indeed, they'd had the whole of the previous series to adjust the 'house style' of the show with good old Boggle still in the role. The new title sequence was already established, and the movement towards both more hardcore sci fi and a rather bleaker worldview had already culminated in a grim story in which the Master didn't so much try to destroy the universe as take the sellotape off and let it destroy itself. Old companions had left and new ones had joined, and a reinvented Master was all ready for a Delgado-like series of battles. Added to that, season 19's opening story picked up exactly where season 18's closer had left off, utilising its puzzling block transfer concept into the bargain.

And yet Castrovalva's opening episode didn't quite flow. We were left alone with Nyssa and Tegan, neither of whom we really knew that much about. The most established of the trio of companions, Adric, was made to act weird and so couldn't be our identification figure. The story was wildly unlikely - as I say, block transfer was a difficult idea to get to grips with, and though it had been under-explained in Logopolis, we had at least been allowed the impression that it was something a bunch of wise men had perfected over - presumably - millennia. I'm no physicist, but the idea that Adric could do it alone - or even with a bit of help from the Master - didn't strike me as believable. Another valid point someone made in a review of this particular story was that it was written successfully for fans, but not for general audiences. There wasn't enough in the way of contrived plot summary in the opening episodes - something which would have been helpful not only for those who hadn't seen Logopolis, but for those - like me - who had, but didn't completely understand it.

Anyway, it was a reasonably good start for Davison's Doctor. My favourite moment in his first episode was when he scratched his head and was shocked to find no curly hair there - particularly because it was done visually, with no accompanying lines. His 'channelling' of previous incarnations also helped put the loss of Tom into the wider context of the show's history. As indeed did the presence of the Master - though in my opinion, Anthony Ainley's giggling Delgado knock-off was nowhere near as effective as the cunning emaciated version from The Deadly Assassin and The Keeper of Traken, and his disguises in this season as the Portreeve and Kalide served no plot purpose at all (unlike his use of the Melkur-Tardis, which was necessary both because he was immobile, and because it was a devilish cunning way of infiltrating Traken). A shame, because Ainley was great as Tremas, as the Porteeve, and, in his final story Survival, as the more feral Master. It would seem to be the fault of the producer and directors that he'd degenerated to the status of a bearded silly sod by the end of season 19.

With an unusually extended lineup of companions in the Tardis, it seems that it was decided the best way to replace Tom's one-man show would be to establish some kind of group dynamic. Many fans have commented both that there's more of a soap opera feel to this series than before, and I think that's true. Unfortunately, this was the season's major failing. For one thing, the stories were linked by rather clunky opening scenes in which the characters would make some pointless reference to the previous adventure. More importantly, though, soap opera just doesn't work when you can't mention sex and no-one drinks; The attempt to inject a soapy element made it look more like a kids show. Sexuality was conspicious by its absence. I don't expect a Tardis shagathon of course, but a frank admission of human nature - or indeed a bit of an explantion of Time Lord-nature - is necessary if you're going to go down that route. We got both of these with the Virgin books only because the concept was free of the shackles of 'kid's show' . Benny Summerfield or Chris Cwej would certainly never have made it to our television screens.

A shame, because the regular companions in season 19 were a dull bunch who didn't really gel as friends or convince as antagonists (or, for that matter, ever change their clothes). The maligned Adric was actually perfectly okay when teamed with Baker, but with Davison - hell, even their matching yellow outfits made me feel queasy, as did the Amazing Purple Woman aka Tegan, whom the Doctor didn't think twice about leaving behind on Earth at the end of the season (neither did he seem too chuffed to have her back at the beginning of the next). One would think that with stories as bland as The Visitation or Time Flight, there would have at least been plenty of room for developing relationships between characters. But all they did was engage in contrived bickering. Adric and Nyssa weren't even treated as young adults; in Black Orchid, they were actually referred to as 'children'. Indeed, in Four to Doomsday the Doctor - much to everyone's satisfaction, I should think - referred to Adric as a 'young idiot'.

So what better to do with these lifeless companions than kill 'em off for effect? Adric became a memorable companion just by dying tragically, certainly becoming a more important figure than if he'd left by simply popping off to Xeraphas to study trigonometry.

Tegan, meanwhile, ought to have been left at Heathrow. The only hope for a really convincing relationship in this quartet was between the Doctor and Nyssa, and if it couldn't have flowered in this season, it should have been allowed to in the next. Think about what the Doctor should mean to Nyssa - he's the man who battled the killer who supplanted her father and yet who, because of his friendship with Tremas and his new guardianship of her, had also supplanted her father. One could conceive of her developing a crush on him - especially in this younger body -, only to gradually realise his true alienness (there was some hint of this in Snakedance the next season). It seemed to me that there was a sexual frisson between the two in their very few scenes alone together, and certainly the Doc's asexual nature felt more jarring in this aforementioned younger form, and should perhaps have been addressed, rather than creating a campy effect by never mentioning it.

Disappointingly, the scene they shared at the beginning of Arc of Infinity was just another of those annoyingly frequent ones where the Doctor ran breathlessly around the console trying to do something. Probably something very interesting to do with accelerating time compensators or neutron whisk override or something. Yawn.

Season 19's standout stories were Kinda and Earthshock - the one for its daft psyho-mysticism, the other for its straightforward action plot. One of the superficial problems with Kinda was the dreadfully obvious studio lighting (the scenes should have been set at night), but it was intriguingly different to any Who story seen before, and felt genuinely more fitted to Davison than Baker. At the same time, an actual plot might have been nice. A good story, after all, fits this kind of psychological and mythical stuff in though subtext rather than incomprehensible blather. Earthshock, meanwhile, added a lot of momentum to a season than had been sadly lacking that since Castrovalva, and of course continued the updating of the show with a dramatic redesign of the Cybermen.

The best thing to be said for this season was that there was a reasonable effort towards originality - something which was dropped the next year in favour of recurring villains (ostensibly there because of the show's twentieth anniversary, but they stuck around for the next couple of years for good measure). After the drama, strong stories and rapport between actors of season 18, however, it was disappointingly limp. A bit of a wasted opportunity.

A Review by James Neiro 16/4/11

Doctor Who was nearing a milestone with its 20th season but all eyes were on its current - the 19th - and everyone waited anxiously to see how Peter Davison would turn out as the new Doctor.

Castrovalva, the season opener, continued the Return of the Master story arc and would be the only story in the show's history to have a large portion of the story filmed within the TARDIS. It would also be the first time since The Invasion of Time that we, as a viewer, could journey to the deepest corridors of the time machine.

Four to Doomsday aired next in a rather dull tale set aboard an alien starship. The following story, Kinda, would be a visually stunning and refreshingly scripted four-parter set on the planet Deva Loka. A lot of effort was obviously put into the set and boy does it show. The Visitation aired next, followed by the two parter Black Orchid, the first story in decades without a supernatural or alien element.

Earthshock would air next and saw the return of the Cybermen, redesigned for the final time. Earthshock would shock fans with the unexpected departure of Adric who would be killed off in the final few minutes of the episode. The season finale would see the crew attempting to recover from their grief at losing Adric. It would also see the surprise return of the Master and would also see the shocking departure of Tegan.

Season 19 was a season not to be missed and proved that even though Tom Baker had left the role, Doctor Who still had a lot of tricks up its sleeve to keep the audience glued to their TV screens.