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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Revelation of the Daleks

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Season 22

The Lost Season 23

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