20 – Twentieth Season – Peter Davison

Arc of Infinity

The Doctor spots something crossing the dimensional barrier and headed for him, and in the TARDIS it looks like another being is taking him over. But it fails. Meanwhile, two students sightseeing in Amsterdam decide to sleep in a crypt over night when one is awakened by a sound we all know as a TARDIS landing. But it is not the Doctor’s TARDIS. And when the young man investigates he is shot by a strange creature. The other student sees him later but he is a zombie under control, so he takes off rapidly. Then he meets the cousin of the zombie who is coming in on a flight to Amsterdam, and it turns out to be Tegan Jovanka, of all people. AndTegan says they should investigate. The Doctor, meanwhile is pulled back to Gallifrey by the Time Lords, who know that the being who tried to merge or take over the Doctor is an anti-matter being from the anti-matter dimension. Do we know of any being who is anti-matter and lives in the anti-matter dimension, hmmm? It is of course Omega, last seen in The Three Doctors, but to keep the secret for the first couple of episodes he is listed in the cast as The Renegade. Anyway, this could be a grave danger to all of the Time Lords and even the Universe, so they decide that it is better for all concerned if the Doctor is put to death. And not the kind you can regenerate from. There is a traitor among the High Council, for sure. And the head of the guards, Commender Maxil, is played by none other than Colin Baker, who would take over the role of Doctor when Peter Davison left. At the end, Tegan is back on board the TARDIS with Nyssa and the Doctor.

I’m not exactly clear on what the Arc of Infinity is, but it seems to be some kind of device that Omega is using to cross over to this universe.

Reviews

Snakedance

The TARDIS lands on the planet of Manussa, which is not at all what the Doctor expected. But it appears that Tegan somehow gave the wrong coordinates. Then she has a nightmare about going into a cave and screams. The Doctor realizes this was no ordinary dream, but a manifestation of the Mara. which was not killed on Kinda, only banished. They leave the TARDIS to find that this planet was the origin of the Mara, which was banished 500 years ago. And of course they are right in time for the festival commemorating the event. Tegan is afraid and confused which makes it easy for the Mara to regain complete control. Tegan now has the snake mark on her arm, just as on Kinda. She sends for the son of the ruler who is to be the successor when the older man dies. We never see that ruler, so it doesn´t matter that much, but his wife is a major character. Like many of these stories there is a medieval setting, with lots of ¨My Lord” and ¨My Lady¨. There is a crystal at the heart of the plot which is key to the Mara returning, and Tegan manages to get the rulerś son Lon to be roped in, and he too gets the snake mark on his arm. Lon is then able to arrange to have the crystal removed from safe keeping and brought out to the Festival, where he places it in the right place to enable the Mara to materialize as a giant snake. But the Doctor has worked out that the crystal simply works as a receiver and transmitter of peopleś thoughts, and the crystal is necessary because it receives and transmits the fear of the people at the ceremony. So the Doctor does not look at the snake, which somehow kills it. So in this sequel to Kinda we know now that Tegan is finally free of the Mara. In Kinda she said she was free, but the Doctor merely gave her a concerned look.

Reviews

Mawdryn Undead

This story is part of a 3-story arc involving the Black Guardian taking his revenge on the Doctor as the result of the events of the Key to Time series in Series 16. in that, the Black Guardian tried to get the key from the Doctor, but was foiled because the Doctor realized he was trying to present himself as the White Guardian. The Doctor dispersed the segments of the Key and fled using a randomizer so that the Black Guardian could not follow him. But a few series later he stopped using the randomizer on the belief that the Black Guardian was not trying to follow him any longer. I guess he was wrong in that.

This story is one of the ones only a show like Doctor Who can do because it plays with the idea of Time. The story introduces the character of Vislor Turlough. He is an alien marooned on Earth and hiding out as a student in an English boarding school. He is contacted by the Black Guardian and enlisted to destroy the Doctor, and in return is promised transportation back to his own home. And at this school, by sheer coincidence, is a Mathematics instructor named Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, retired from UNIT. The TARDIS has avoided a collision by landing on a spaceship, but when it goes to Earth the time is wrong. They reach the school, but this time find a younger Lethbridge-Stewart there, who gets recruited to join Tegan and Nyssa. On the alien spaceship are characters who stole a Time Lord device to prolong their lives, but now they want to die. And the resolution involves the Blinovitch Limitation effect.

BTW, Mawdryn is a Welsh word that means ¨undead¨. And we see a return of the exquisite techno-babble ¨reverse the polarity of the neutron flow.¨

Reviews

Terminus

The Black Guardian tells Turlough how to cripple the TARDIS, and when he does it a field of instability is created in Nyssa’s room. A door opens, and the Doctor tells her to go through the door to save herself. Eventually everyone from the TARDIS goes through the door, and it then closes and disappears. The Guardian probably had something to do with all of that. They all find themselves on a ship, and are shortly joined by two people who have boarded the ship and are looking to loot the cargo. But that was a bad mistake, as the cargo of this ship is people with a leprosy-like disease, who are called Lazars. The ship then docks at Terminus, a space ship located at the exact center of the universe. There we meet people in armor who are guards, sent there by the Terminus Corporation, and kept under thumb by their need for hydromel, a drug supplied by the Corporation. Without it they die, so the Corporation has them in a pickle. And Nyssa contracts the disease.

Terminus is supposedly a place for curing the Lazars, and Nyssa is taken for the treatment. All of the Lazars believe that the “cure” is a myth, and the guards don’t know anything about it or care. But she does in fact recover, and realizes that the cure could be much more reliable with some good old-fashioned science. In the end, Nyssa elects to stay on Terminus and use her scientific knowledge to make lives better. Turlough, in the meantime, is still being controlled by the Black Guardian whose only aim is to kill the Doctor.

We learned last season that three companions made for an excessively crowded TARDIS, and so Adric was sacrificed to rectify the count. With Turlough being added, someone else had to leave, and it was Nyssa. Too bad, she was the one I liked best out of the whole group. The other thing to note os that once again Doctor Who rewrote history. The Terminus ship was responsible for the Big Bang.

Reviews

Enlightenment

The White Guardian tries to send a message to the Doctor but it is garbled. But the Doctor does get some coordinates and takes the TARDIS to what appears to be a sailing yacht. But it soon transpires that this is a a ship in space, using solar sails to go around the solar system. It is in a race with a several other ships, including a Greek galley and a pirate vessel. The officers of each ship are Eternals, but the crew are humans from the appropriate era, whom the Eternals call Ephemerals. Whoever wins the race receives Enlightenment from the two guardians, Black and White. The Eternals seem somewhat vacuous, and the Doctor says they are actually dependent on the Ephemerals for their ideas. The Eternals are definitely powerful, though, and can be dangerous. Several of the other ships have been blown up, and the Doctor figures out that it is the pirate ship that is behind it.

Turlough is still trying to kill the Doctor, but not doing a very good job of it, and the Black Guardian at one point tries to kill Turlough. But at the very last minute Turlough rejects a chance to sacrifice the Doctor in return for a share of Enlightenment. This causes the Black Guardian to disappear in smoke and flame, but the White Guardian tells everyone that he will be back, and warns the Doctor because the Doctor has now thwarted the Black Guardian twice, the first time being in The Key to Time (see The Armageddon Factor). So now Turlough has gone to the good side, and the Black Guardian Trilogy is ended.

This story was written by Barbara Clegg, and directed by Fiona Cumming, making it the first Doctor Who story to be both written and directed by women.

Reviews

The King’s Demons

This is the two-part story for the season, so it is a quick little morsel. The TARDIS lands in England in 1215, which is famous as the year the Magna Carta was signed. But King John seems at this point to be a guest in the castle of Sir Ranulf Fitzwilliam, where he is behaving rather badly, which Sir Ranulf doesn´t understand. The King makes accusations against Sir Ranulf, leading Ranulf’s son to explode in anger, and then to having the son face the Ling’s champion in combat, which he can´t possibly win. But in the middle of the joust, the TARDIS lands right in the middle of the jousting grounds, and the Doctor, Tegan, and Turlough emerge. The King seems to enjoy their presence, though. He says they are demons, but he calls them the King’s Demons. But another knight arrives, who left King John in London only four hours before. So this King John is an impostor.

It turns out the King’s champion, Sir Gilles Estram, is actually the Master (and Estram is an anagram of Master). And the false king is actually a robot named Kamelion that the Master picked up on Xeraphas, the planet of the Xeraphins seen in Time-Flight, and it can change shape to resemble anyone. In the end, the Master is defeated for now, and Kamelion joins the crew of the TARDIS.

This became the final show of Series 20 by accident. There was a Dalek story that had been commissioned, but labor problems at BBC meant it had to be postponed. The Dalek story would appear in the following season as Resurrection of the Daleks. This story was shown on BBC Television on March 15, 16 of 1983. The Five Doctors was always intended as a stand-alone story to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the show, and aired on November 25, 1983, just two days after the actual anniversary of November 23.

As for Kamelion, they had planned him to be a kind of companion, a la K9, but the creator of the robot died in an accident and no one could make it work it work properly, so he was kept mostly out of sight until they wrote him out. He was destroyed in Planet of Fire.

Reviews

The Five Doctors

This was a 90-minute anniversary special to celebrate 20 years of Doctor Who. Tom Baker declined to appear, so they used some footage from the un-aired Shada for him. Richard Hurndall portrayed the first Doctor as William Hartnell had died in 1975.

Each of the 5 Doctors is taken, against their will, to the Death Zone of Gallifrey by means of a Time Scoop. They find that a number of Cybermen, a Dalek, a Raston Warrior Robot, and a Yeti are also there to add to the fun. And some companions are also grabbed, such as Sarah Jane Smith, Susan, and the Brigadier. And cameo appearances by Liz Shaw, Mike Yates, Zoe, and Jamie as phantom spirits. The Fifth Doctor travels to Gallifrey in his TARDIS, accompanied by Turlough and Tegan. In the center of the Death Zone is the Tomb of Rassilon, marked by a tower, and everyone heads there by different routes since they suspect the answer lies there. The High Council of Gallifrey then summons the Master, and asks him to go into the Death Zone to help the Doctor, offering him regenerations as an inducement. Each of the first three Doctors has to fight against an enemy to get there. First Doctor fights a Dalek, Second Doctor a Yeti, and Third Doctor the Cybermen. The Fifth Doctor uses the return device given to the Master and arrives in the High Council room, and it is revealed that there is a traitor within the ranks of the High Council.

The final scene takes place in the chamber of Rassilon’s tomb, and we learn the meaning of the saying that in The Game of Rassilon to win is to lose. And watch for the place where Jon Pertwee says “I’ve reversed the polarity of the neutron flow.” Always a crowd favorite, that line.

Reviews

Season 20

 Save as PDF
Share

Comments are closed.