22 – Twenty-Second Season – Colin Baker

In season 22 the BBC decided to make a scheduling change. In the previous season they had shown 2 episodes of around 22 minutes each in a week. Now they decided to combine them into one episode of 44 minutes per week. So it is an hour and a half either way, but with fewer cliffhangers in the new schedule. But for the purposes of syndication in some foreign markets the story was re-edited into 4 parts. The other change was that the show returned to its Saturday time slot.

Attack of the Cybermen

A man has assembled a squad of criminals to assist him in stealing a large quantity of diamond, or so he says. But as they make their way through the sewers of London, it turns out there are Cybermen here, and the man knows all about them. The man turns out to be Lytton, who we saw in Resurrection of the Daleks as working for the Daleks. He seems to be interested in working for the Cybermen now. Meanwhile the Doctor and Peri are investigating a Galactic distress signal that is coming from Earth, which is unexpected since Earth is still in the 1980s (1985, to be precise). In fact, Lytton had sent the distress call which brought the Doctor, and he is playing a deep double or triple game. The Cybermen capture everyone and force the Doctor to take them to Telos, the current planet of the Cybermen, last seen in Tomb of the Cybermen. But Telos had inhabitants, the Cryons, a species adapted to very cold temperatures. They would love to get rid of the Cybermen and take back their planet. Interestingly, they all seem to be female

But when the Cybermen were introduced in The Tenth Planet they were from the planet Mondas, which was in our own solar system but opposite of Earth. Mondas was destroyed in that story, in the year 1986. But the plan of the Cybermen now is to crash Halleyś Comet into the Earth in 1985, destroying it and thus saving Mondas.

This is a decent story. Colin Baker’s Doctor is less disagreeable in this story, and at times sympathetic. But Peri is so whiny it grates on you the whole story.

Reviews

Vengeance on Varos

The TARDIS loses power, and for repairs needs the rare mineral Zeiton-7, which only occurs on the planet Varos, so of course the Doctor and Peri head there. But Varos has a government in which torture and executions are broadcast to the people as entertainment. The planet had originally been a prison planet, but over time had evolved until people no longer remembered why the rules had been set up the way they were. The TARDIS lands next to the execution chamber, and the Doctor frees the prisoner there (Jondar), and then they meet Jondar’s wife Areta. The government of Varos is mining and selling the Zeiton-7 ore to the Galatron Mining Corporation, whose representative Sil is on Varos to negotiate the price. As we first see the negotiations, Sil seems to have the upper hand and is offering a very low price. And he is secretly allied with the Chief Officer, who seems to be against the Governor. There is the usual sequence of capture-escape-recapture-reescape, until in the end some of the bad guys including the Chief Officer are dead, Varosd gets a much better price for its ore, and the Doctor gets the Zeiton-7 ore he needs to fix the TARDIS. And with more revenue the Governor announces that things will change, with no more executions and torture.

This story contains the infamous scene where the DOCTOR manages to push two guards into a vat of boiling acid, and the guards are never seen after that. BTW, the actor playing Jondar. Jason Connery, is the son of actor Sean Connery of James Bond fame.

Reviews

The Mark of the Rani

The TARDIS is suddenly being pulled off course, and lands in a 19th century mining town in England, which just happens to be the home of the engineer and inventor George Stephenson, known to us as the father of railways for his investigations of steam power. The Doctor of course wants to meet him, but realizes there is something wrong going on here. Men who had been hard-working miners suddenly turn violent and assault other people and machinery. They are labelled as Luddites, but this is not strictly accurate. It turns out they have been made this way by the Rani, another renegade Time Lord who was exiled for her experiments on other intelligent beings. She had caused a huge problem on the world she ruled by making it impossible for her subjects to sleep, and is using humans as a source of the chemical she needs to solve her problem. But a side effect of this is that it turns the humans violent. Then the Master turns up, and we discover that he had somehow caused the Doctor ‘s TARDIS to be brought here. He is able to join forces with the Rani, but the Doctor is able to enter the Rani’s TARDIS and disable the controls somewhat, so that when the Rani and the Master try to escape in the Rani’s TARDIS it is out of control.

Unlike the early years, the historical stories y now only had historical locations, but no actual events. But this story had a lot of outside film shooting, unusual for a Doctor Who story. The reason is that the BBC had a film crew already arranged and paid for, but which was not needed on the show that had booked it. Rather than let it go to waste, JNT was able to grab it for Doctor Who and do a rewrite of the script to accommodate the location shooting.

The Rani is a different character than the Master, and Kate O’Mara plays her beautifully. I have seen it said that she is not evil, simply amoral, but I dissent from that view. The Master is a mustache-twirling villain driven by hate, at least as Anthony Ainley plays the role. The Rani is experimenting on humans with a total disregard for how that will affect them. In this, I see her as analogous to some of the Nazi prison doctors who pursued experiments and studies on the concentration camp inmates with a similar lack of concern, and I have no doubt we would agree that they were definitely evil.

BTW, Rani is a Hindu word for Queen, a deliberate choice of the writers.

Reviews

The Two Doctors

This is a three-part story so it runs for about 2.25 hours. And unusually it is a multi-Doctor story that is not tied to any anniversary of significance. The Three Doctors was shown in the tenth anniversary season, The Five Doctors in the twentieth anniversary season, and The Day of the Doctor in the fiftieth anniversary season. But this was shown in season 22, but it was a somewhat longer story. It starts with the Second Doctor and Jamie visiting a research space station at the request of the Time Lords to stop research into Time Travel, but the Doctor is refused and captured by a Sontaran expedition that invaded the station. It seems that they also had their eyes on the secret of Time Travel. It seems that the TARDIS is not just a machine, and that to be operated safely you need the symbiotic DNA of a Time Lord, hence the capture of the Doctor. But this somehow causes the sixth Doctor to momentarily blackout and collapse in the TARDIS. He decides to seek medical help in, of all places, the very station where the second Doctor was captured. But he gets there later and the station seems dead, though Jamie has somehow survived. The bad guys and the Sontarans have taken the second Doctor to Earth, and found a place in Spain, outside of Seville, and the sixth Doctor figures it out and follows them. A humorous sub-plot involves an alien chef called Shockeye who is obsessed with food and eating, and in particular wants to cook and eat a human being. At various times both Peri and Jamie are laid out on his counter, but of course rescued in the nick of time.

This was Patrick Troughton’s final appearance as the doctor. He died in 1987 while attending a Doctor Who convention. And while this story was being shown on British television the BBC announced the cancellation of the planned Season 23 with Colin Baker.

Reviews

Timelash

The TARDIS is caught in a time tunnel that is taking them to the planet Karfel, which the Doctor has been to previously in his Third incarnation, accompanied by Jo Grant. The story of that previous visit is all off-screen, but is alluded to once again in The Sarah Jane Adventures story Death of the Doctor. Karfel is under the control of a dictator called the Borad, and he uses the time tunnel, called the Timelash, as punishment for any rebels. They are sent on a one-way trip to Earth. One such rebel (Vena) somehow ends up in the study of a fellow named Herbert somewhere in Britain in the 19th century after she has stolen a valuable amulet of power, but prior to that her image passes through the TARDIS. When the TARDIS lands on Karfel Peri is kidnapped and held to force the Doctor to retrieve the amulet, and he returns with the amulet, Herbert, and Vena. The Doctor realizes he must defeat the Borad, but the Borad also realizes he must defeat the Doctor. For reasons not entirely clear the Doctor had fortuitously taken a hand mirror from Herbert’s study before returning to Karfel, and uses it to somehow confuse the android trying to push him into the Timelash, allowing the rebels to fight off the guards, then the Doctor goes into the Timelash to steal some crystals he can use to make weapons.

This is not by any stretch a brilliant story, but it is enjoyable enough if you don´t think too hard about the plot. Herbert turns out to be a young H.G. Wells who gets the ideas for his novels from this adventure. And in the end the Borad is sent into the Timelash to 12th century Scotland where he becomes the Loch Ness Monster. And the lizard-like creatures in the caves of Karfel are called Morlox, while in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine he has the Morlocks as his underclass in the future. And the female character Vena in this story compares with Weena in The Time Machine.

Reviews

Revelation of the Daleks

The TARDIS lands on the planet Necros in the middle of winter, and the Doctor and Peri set off to investigate something when a deformed mutant attacks them. He has the Doctor down and is choking him when Peri beats him with a tree branch. Before he dies he explains that “The Great Healer” experimented on him, causing his appearance and his aggressive personality. Simultaneously there is something happening in a high-tech funeral home called Tranquil Repose. Two people have broken in and are looking for something. Then in a separate location a woman named Kara (Eleanor Bron) is being extorted by The Great Healer for money to fuel his operation. And there is a disk jockey (Alexei Sayle) who seems to have his own camera network showing him everything going on in the area. He sees the two people who have broken in, and he sees the Doctor and Peri. Well, it turns out The Great Healer is none other than Davros, and he is using Tranquil Repose for tow purposes. First is to take human brains and turn them into Daleks; and the second is to use the bodies as a food source, sort of a Soylent Green to a food shortage. Kara wants to eliminate Davros and take over the food operation herself, so she hires an assassin named Orcini, a renegade from the Knights of Oberon to kill Davros. As is frequently the case in Doctor Who, by the end the body count is pretty high. But something is odd here — the Doctor is barely in this story, and certainly does nothing to advance the plot or solve the problem.

This story was the last until the 2005 revival to feature 45 minute episodes. And it was also the last to use film for outdoor location filming. Video recording had improved to the point that in the future all outdoor location shooting would also be done by video recording. And in this episode they inserted a brief shot of a Dalek in flight to puncture the myth that Daleks could only move on flat surfaces. Of course they had climbed stairs in both Resurrection of the Daleks and The Chase, but had done so off-screen so it went mostly unremarked.

Reviews

Season 22

This was a season of ups and downs. On the high side, Revelation of the Daleks although very dark and light on the Doctor, was a fantastic story, possibly the best of Colin’s short run. And The Mark of the Rani was a really good story in an interesting location, and introduced a character that has become a fan favorite. On the down side we have Timelash which is frequently rated as the worst of all the Doctor Who stories. And the fact that Vengeance on Varos tops Timelash is a case of leaping over a very low bar. So despite some good stories, the season as a whole is disappointing.

The Lost Season 23

Normally the final show of a season would include an announcement that Doctor Who would be back the following year, but not this time. Although BBC Controller Michael Grade bears a lot of the blame for this, department head Jonathan Powell also was critical of the level of violence of the show, though I don’t think it was particularly more violent than some of the Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker seasons. Perhaps more significant is that Eric Saward, the Script Editor and frequent script writer, was not a fan of Colin Baker in the role. And if you look at Revelation of the Daleks you can see this clearly. In the season finale, with the Doctor’s biggest enemy, the Doctor is completely sidelined. In any case, a hiatus was announced, depriving us of a planned story involving the Celestial Toymaker, among other planned shows. This resulted in an 18 month gap instead of the planned 9 month gap.

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