19 – Nineteenth Season – Peter Davison

With the advent of the Fifth Doctor, Doctor Who moves from one episode a week on Saturday evenings to two episodes per week on Monday and Tuesday evenings. This means that with the same number of episodes (26), it can only last 13 weeks instead of 25 weeks. And instead of fitting in a 6-part story, they started to do 2-part stories. For this season it is Black Orchid that is the 2-parter.

Castrovalva

There is a town in Italy called Castrovalva, which M.C. Escher visited an then made a lithograph print of it. And that is a clue to what is going on here. The story opens with a recap of the regeneration scene from the end of Logopolis, and then has the team being chased by the police because they are in a restricted area. They don’t quite make it to the TARDIS in time, but then Tegan, Nyssa, and the Doctor manage to get away. But Adric is being held by the police. But then the Master’s TARDIS appears, and shoots all of the police, leaving Adric, but he is hidden behind the Master’s TARDIS for a crucial few seconds, and the Master has gotten him. Then the Master’s TARDIS disappears, and Adric gets in the Doctor’s TARDIS. And now we see that the Doctor is not doing well. He refers to Adric as “Brigadier” and “Jamie, to Tegan as “Vicki” and “Jo”, and does some mannerisms suggestive of the first two Doctors. Adric has programmed the TARDIS, but under the control of the Master has the TARDIS heading to Event One, the birth of the galaxy. To escape they jettison rooms from the TARDIS, but one of them is the zero room the Doctor needs to finish his recovery. In the TARDIS data banks, they find a reference to Castrovalva as a place even better than the zero room, but this was placed there by Adric under the Master’s influence. They get to Castrovalva, only to discover it is like ans M.C. Escher drawing of recursive space. The Master is finally defeated, but of course he will be back. But by the end of the story the Doctor seems to be back to health.

You should think of this as the concluding story in a three-story arc all about the return of the Master. Anthony Ainley will keep the part for the rest of the classic run of Doctor Who,

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Four to Doomsday

It looks like the Doctor losing the ability to control where the TARDIS goes is back again. This time they are supposedly headed to Heathrow to let Tegan off so she can pursue her job. But instead, they wind up in an advanced spaceship. The spaceship is under the control of three green and ugly beings, Monarch, Enlightenment, and Persuasion. They seem friendly at first, but of course they turn out to be baddies. They are descended from frogs, and they are headed to Earth and plan to arrive in four days, and there appear to be Earth people on the ship, from Ancient Greece, the Maya, the Chinese, and the Aboriginal Australians. The Doctor learns that they have been picked up in previous visits to Earth, which happened thousands of years ago. But these are not the descendants of the people that were picked up, these are the same people! And the answer becomes clear when we learn that these are Androids with all of the memories and experiences of the original people. Monarch has a plan to find a way to travel faster than the speed of light, and he believes that if he does he can go back to the very beginning and find himself there as God. Adric is quite taken in by Monarch, but the Doctor manages to get through to him in time. And Monarch’s plan includes wiping out all human life on Earth and using its minerals to continue his research. In the end he is a victim of the poison he planned to use on the humans.

At the end Nyssa collapses in the control room of the TARDIS. This is because originally the producer had planned to forward with only two companions, Adric and Tegan, and the following story Kinda was written on that assumption. But Peter Davison strongly objected because Nyssa was the kind of companion that fit with his idea of the Doctor. So in a quick rewrite Nyssa spends the time during Kinda “resting” in her room on the TARDIS. Of course she had to be written in to this script because the decision to make her a companion was so last minute.

Note: The head of the Chinese group is played by Burt Kwouk, who is best known for playing Cato in the Pink Panther series

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Kinda

Nyssa again collapses at the beginning, and is sent into the TARDIS for a nice long rest. She will reappear at the very end refreshed and ready for more adventures. Meanwhile the Doctor, Adric, and Tegan explore this alien jungle world they have landed on. They find a kind of wind chimes, and Tegan suddenly gets very sleepy. The Doctor and Adric find a machine, and when Adric closes the door it comes to life and marches them to a dome base. There they find three people who are exploring and evaluating the planet for colonization. And they have two natives that they have taken as hostages, which the martinet commander Sanders calls standard practice. The number 2 is a security officer Hindle who sees danger everywhere. And there is a scientist Todd who is studying the two native hostages, and has concluded they are telepathic because they never speak but seem to somehow communicate with each other.

Tegan has a weird dream in which she meets a being who torments her, and when she finally gives in, he transfers a snake marking to her arm. The snake is the mark of the Mara, and evil being from outside this reality, and Tegan is vulnerable because she is frightened and insecure, thus a good vehicle for the Mara to come into this world. She wakes up, meets a native man, and transfers the snake to him, where upon he begins to speak, and then organizes the rest of the natives (who are called the Kinda) to attack the dome base and free the hostages, one of which is his brother. But the snake is an evil being called the Mara and it only wants to see everything destroyed. Fortunately the Doctor finds a way to save the day.

This story has a deep subtext, constructed around Buddhist ideas, that makes it rather special, but it was not well received by the fans. There are also echoes of Carl Jung in this story, and some critics rated it among the best of all Doctor Who stories.

I can see why people have such a dislike for Adric, but I really think it is matter of how he is written, rather than any intrinsic problem with Matthew Waterhouse. Adric, and to a lesser extent Tegan, are characters that are unlikeable at this point. Will they get better as we go forward? Nyssa seems like a fantastic companion at this point.

This was the first story done under the new script editor, Eric Saward.

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The Visitation

We open with a manor house where a magnificent shooting star is seen, and shortly after that the house is attacked by energy weapons. Meanwhile, the Doctor is attempting to deliver Tegan to Heathrow so she can get on with her career, but he makes a slight error and arrives where Heathrow will be…in about 300 years. Still having problems controlling the TARDIS. But they all get out to explore, only to be attacked by villagers. They are rescued by a man named Mace who claims to be both an actor and a highwayman. He takes them to a shelter, and the Doctor notices that around his neck is a pendant that contains an alien artifact. Then Nyssa finds a couple of power packs. Something is wrong here. They go to the manor house, and discover that it has been taken over by an alien of a race called Terileptils. He is an escaped criminal and decides that killing all the humans and taking over the planet would be a good idea. A typical Doctor Who enemy, in other words. He can control people by means of bracelets that have the power packs like Nyssa found, by if you can remove the power pack the control ceases. The alien has two other Terileptils from his group that are in London proper, and his plan is to release a bunch of rats that carry fleas that have an engineered version of the Plague that is even more deadly. The Doctor manages to stop them, but in so doing he starts a fire, which of course is The Great Fire. This means we can date this adventure precisely to September 2, 1666. And of course the fire kills the three Terileptils who are in a building on Pudding Lane in London and burns all of the evidence.

Note: The Sonic Screwdriver was destroyed in this story. JNT never liked it because it was the all-purpose answer to any problem the Doctor confronted. It would not return under JNT. Ironically Nyssa constructs a much larger sonic device in this story and uses it to destroy an android

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Black Orchid

JNT had a desire to produce spinoff featuring K-9, but the BBC said they would only approve it if he gave up two weeks of Doctor Who in the schedule, bringing the season back to 26 episodes. So would he do a 6-parter, as in the Tom Baker days? In the end, he decided to do a two-parter, the first since The Sontaran Experiment in 1975. But this one is not Science Fiction, it is more Doctor Who meets Agatha Christie. The TARDIS lands in a countryside train station in 1925, where a chauffeur is waiting for a “Doctor”. And it is for a cricket match, so they go along with it and the Doctor is of course very much an expert cricketer. His host Lord Cranleigh invites the group to come back to the estate for a fancy dress (i.e. costume) ball to follow the match. And then mysterious things start to happen. And by an astonishing coincidence, Nyssa is the identical match to Lord Cranleigh’s fiance Ann. So they decide to have some fun and dress identically for the ball. Obviously Sarah Sutton played both parts. JNT wanted to highlight each of the companions in a story this season. Matthew Waterhouse had his go in Four to Doomsday, and Janet Fielding had her big part in Kinda, so this was Sarah Sutton’s turn to shine. And with two identical women and people dressed in costumes it is no surprise that a murder occurs, and the Doctor is the main suspect, particularly when the “Doctor” who was supposed to come play in the cricket match calls to apologize for not making it.

This is a nice tight little story, and the two parts together run about 50 minutes.

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Earthshock

A group of scientists who are exploring a cave system run into trouble, and a military team is sent to investigate and help them. Most of the scientists have disappeared in the cave system, and no one knows why. And of course the TARDIS lands inside the cave system And of course the Doctor is accused of causing the problem. But then two androids with weapons show up, and they seem to be protecting something. and that something proves to be a bomb big enough to destroy the planet. The Doctor manages to disable the bomb, but sees that the signal is coming from space, and sends the TARDIS there, where he finds a large freighter with an anti-matter drive. And on this freighter are bunches of Cybermen, who have enlisted the aid of the ship’s navigator. They put the bomb in place to disrupt a conference of planets that are discussing how to band together to defeat the Cybermen. The bomb is no longer operational, but they realize the ship itself, with its anti-matter drive, can cause an equally destructive explosion. They set the controls on the freighter and lock them with encryption and leave the ship, but Adric stays behind and works to decrypt and unlock the controls. One of his attempts sends the ship back in time around 65 million years. But as he works on the last one, a wounded Cyberman comes in and shoots, wrecking the console. So Adric is stuck on the ship as it crashes into the Earth, creating the explosion that kills the dinosaurs. RIP, Adric.

I won’t miss Adric, who for some reason was written as an unlikable character. But in this story he is actually more likable.

This is the second story this season that provides an explanation for events in the past, the first being The Visitation, which ¨explained¨ the Great Fire of London. But this sort of thing has happened before in Doctor Who. In the First Doctor story The Chase we had the explanation for the Mary Celeste mystery, In the Third Doctor story The Pyramids of Mars we learned that the pyramids really were built by aliens, and in the Third Doctor story Terror of the Zygons we learned that the Loch Ness Monster was really a Cyborg controlled by the Zygons. You can learn a lot by watching Doctor Who.

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Time-Flight

A Concorde supersonic jet is landing at Heathrow when it suddenly disappears. And a few minutes later the TARDIS lands in the concourse of Heathrow. This draws the attention of airport security, but the Doctor tells them to contact UNIT, which gets them out of this problem, but UNIT tells the airport to put the Doctor on the missing aircraft case. He quickly formulates an hypothesis, and has the TARDIS loaded onto another Concorde which then follows the exact same flight path and also disappears, but with the Doctor, Tegan, and Nyssa aboard. The Doctor explains that they have been sent back in time through a time tunnel and are now 140 million years in the past. Everyone seems to be experiencing illusions or hallucinations, and then they run into a professor who has managed to overcome the illusions due to his prior researches into hypnotism. He was on the first flight that got sent back in time, so they now everyone is here somewhere. And the professor shows them the Citadel, where the other passengers and crew from the first flight have been forced into slave labor by the illusions/hypnosis. A mysterious being called Kalid seems to be at the heart of this, but we then discover it is actually the Master. And that makes sense as we know from previous stories that he is a master of hypnotism. The Doctor gets everyone back to the present day at Heathrow (but only one of the two planes), but Tegan wanders off, and when the Doctor has to make a fast exit she gets left behind. This is not her exit, though. She will be back in the next season. They wrote this as a deliberate cliffhanger to link from season 19 to season 20. And in this story Nyssa’s empathic gifts are prominent. Also, Adric makes an appearance as one of the hallucinated beings.

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Season 19

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