24 – Twenty-Fourth Season – Sylvester McCoy

This season consists of 15 episodes of around 24 minutes each, making it just barely longer than Colin Baker’s last season, The Trial of a Time Lord. This shows that they were beginning to starve the show because the powers at the BBC really didn’t want to make it any longer.

Time and the Rani

Colin Baker was asked to return for one episode to do a regeneration into Sylvester McCoy. He counter-offered to return for a full season and do the regeneration at the end, but this was refused. So a very perfunctory regeneration takes place with Sylvester McCoy wearing a wig to resemble Colin Baker when lying face down.

The TARDIS has been forced by the Rani to crash land on the planet Lakertya. The Doctor and Mel are both lying unconscious on the floor when the Rani enters with an alien associate. She takes the Doctor but leaves Mel, whom she has no use for right now. But when the alien turns the Doctor over he regenerates. When the Doctor comes to in the Rani’s laboratory he is suffering from post-regeneration confusion, which the Rani intensifiers with an injection of a chemical to induce more amnesia. The Rani then puts on a wig and an outfit to impersonate Mel, which works for a time, but the Doctor’s true self pops up intermittently as he is gradually coming to his senses. Mel is seen on a screen, but the Rani convinces the Doctor that Mel is in fact the Rani. When Mel and the Doctor finally meet there is a bit of confusion therefor, but by checking each other’s pulse Mel realizes that the Doctor does in fact have a double pulse, so she accepts him as the Doctor. And when he checks Mel she had a single pulse, so she cannot be the Rani.

The Rani has kidnapped geniuses such as Einstein, Hypatia, and Louis Pasteur, but they are locked into cabinets for some reason. And she wants to add the Doctor to her collection. It turns out these geniuses are feeding their intellects into a giant brain which is calculating a mechanism involving a strange asteroid that will somehow create a Time Manipulator out of the planet Lakertya, but this will sadly kill all life on the planet. But the Rani expects to be off in her TARDIS when that happens, and then she will take control of the Time Manipulator and then control the universe. She is of course stopped by the Doctor.

Sadly, while The Mark of the Rani was one of the better stories for Colin Baker, this story is not of the same calibre.

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Paradise Towers

A rule of thumb on Doctor Who is that whenever the Doctor and a companion go looking for a holiday, trouble finds them. In this case they are going to Paradise Towers, which the brochures show as a lovely resort. But when they arrive, they find something more resembling a decaying public housing project. And they are almost immediately captured by a gang (called a “kang” in this story), in this case the Red Kang. And it is made up entirely of girls. There is also a Blue Kang, also made up entirely of girls. Sadly, the Yellow Kang has been made “unalive”. And that is literally what they say. So this isn’t something invented for social media in the 21st century, Doctor Who had it in the 1980s. And there are armed guards roaming the halls, called Caretakers. And finally there are the Residents, called “Rezzies”. There are also robotic vehicles roaming the hallways, which were supposed to be picking up trash, but are actually grabbing people and “unaliving” them and then delivering them to a sinister room in the basement. The Doctor is captured by the Caretakers and taken to the Chief Caretaker, who calls him The Great Architect, then tells his subordinates to kill him. Meanwhile, Mel gets separated, and is invited in for tea and cakes by two older women who are Rezzies. It eventually transpired that they are cannibals who want to literally eat her. Supplies are getting scarce in Paradise Towers. But Mel is rescued by a young man named Pex. Aside from him, the only men in this place are Caretakers. Pex is a bit of a coward, but is always trying to act brave and tough until he has to act, then he chickens out. And of course, in the end he gathers his courage to make the sacrifice that saves everyone.

The theme of this story revolves around the Doctor trying to convince the Red and Blue Kangs to cooperate, then for the Kangs to cooperate with the Rezzies, and finally for all of them to cooperate with the remaining Caretakers, because all of them are under threat b a maniac Great Architect who wants to kill all of the people who have in his eyes trashed his beautiful Paradise Towers. As Benjamin Franklin said, “we must all hang together or we will all hang separately.” Wise words from a wise man.

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Delta and the Bannermen

Filmed at a Welsh holiday camp, this was the first Doctor Who story since 1975 to be filmed entirely outside of BBC Studios.

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Dragonfire

Reviews

Season 24

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