One of the morbid fascinations of looking over old Doctor Who is assessing all the moments when the series could have ended – the 1989 cancellation, obviously, and the 1985 hiatus. It could have stopped when William Hartnell left the role, and conversations about the wisdom of keeping the show going persisted across the Troughton-Pertwee handover. That’s the thing, though – we know about these because we know there were discussions to this effect in BBC boardrooms. When might the viewers, who should, ideally, have the casting vote, have decided the show wasn’t worth persevering with?
From this perspective, 1982 has to be one of the biggest crisis points. There is no indication that the BBC was anything other than completely supportive of the show at this point – indeed, Barry Letts had been lured back as a kind of supervising producer in order to smooth over the coming changes – but it’s hard to imagine the production team feeling relaxed and confident. Tom Baker, who had been the Doctor since his wordless debut at the end of 1974’s Planet of the Spiders, was moving on. Eight years is a fair old length of time to be playing any role, but for a family TV series it’s remarkable – by 1982, there are people in Doctor Who‘s target audience who weren’t born when Baker’s predecessor was in the role.
Before Peter Davison makes his debut proper in this story, then, the moment has been prepared for. The core idea is that there should be a large cast of regulars and semi-regulars to maintain continuity while the lead role changes, which isn’t a bad idea (although as Matt Smith and Steven Moffat can attest, sometimes a clean break is counterintuitively the best way to follow up a popular era). Unfortunately, implementing this plan sees producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Christopher H Bidmead making several unforced errors.
The first is the decision to make the Master one of those continuity characters. Ideally, the Master should represent chaos rather than stability, and he should also reflect the personality of the current Doctor in some way. The problem with Anthony Ainley’s Master is that he’s designed as a one-size-fits-all Master, a generic idea of the Master who can face off against anyone chosen to replace Baker, and that wonderful funhouse-mirror quality you get when Pertwee meets Delgado or Capaldi meets Gomez can’t exist. Sure enough, in Castrovalva we get a Master who likes cackling, overcomplicated disguises and plans that go wrong as soon as he puts them into action, and that’s that.
The problem with the companions is subtler, and it might not even have registered until Bidmead started this script. Davison’s first season was recorded out of sequence, as Bidmead needed more time to write the introductory story after John Flanagan and Andrew McCulloch’s Project Zeta Sigma was deemed unusable. He could, therefore, have taken some early notes on how Davison was establishing the character and used it to shape his debut. Despite this, Bidmead decides not to introduce the new Doctor as a fully-formed character, but rather suffering a regenerative trauma that leaves him wandering the corridors of the TARDIS worrying away at his scarf, forgetting how many companions he has and impersonating mannerisms from his old selves. He’s basically exhibiting symptoms of dementia, and while that sort of thing gets you an Oscar if you’re Anthony Hopkins it remains a strange way to introduce an adventure hero.
While the Doctor is incapacitated, his companions take the lead. This shouldn’t be that much of a problem: there are three of them, and together they should be able to fill the gap. The problem is how new they are. Director Fiona Cumming instructed Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton not to be too warm towards each other, arguing that Tegan and Nyssa had only just met in the previous story. This might make her the only person to have noticed an essential problem. Once Adric gets kidnapped by the Master, the burden of dealing with the Doctor’s regenerative amnesia falls to Tegan, who made her first appearance in the last story, and Nyssa, who’s been around for two stories but only joined the TARDIS crew in the last one. There’s something risibly hollow about watching them go through the regeneration-story beats for companions established in The Power of the Daleks – worrying that ‘their’ Doctor is gone, learning to accept this new Doctor – when neither of them really know the Doctor at all. Tegan even gets to pilot the TARDIS – unsuccessfully, yes, but still more effectively than you’d expect from someone who didn’t know it existed until a few days ago.
That demystification of the TARDIS – from magic box to something that you can just about land if you have a background as an air hostess – is very much in line with Bidmead’s vision for the show. He is notorious for his abhorrence of anything fantastical, horrific or otherwise not strictly scientific in Doctor Who, which would be an easier pill to swallow if he was better at writing drama. The opening episode of Castrovalva is largely concerned with the Doctor looking for the “Zero Room”, a hitherto-unmentioned part of the TARDIS that can help the Doctor repair his regeneration-frazzled brain. This should be suspenseful, except we only learn the importance of the Zero Room once the Doctor is inside it. For the viewers, the preceding ten minutes has been about the Doctor getting lost in a corridor. Things that need to be explained are left as impenetrable jargon, and things that don’t need to be explained are flogged to death. It’s not just the audience who aren’t being kept in the loop: Castrovalva has two separate instances of companions urgently yelling “He’s the Master!” at characters who have no idea who the Master is.
Once the crew get out of the TARDIS at the end of – mercy – episode two, things pick up a little. Bidmead’s defenders often praise him for having a unique vision, but Castrovalva, like a lot of his scripts, becomes better the closer it gets to standard Doctor Who. The revelation that the native Castrovalvans, introduced as post-apocalyptic scrapyard tribal warriors straight out of a Bow Wow Wow video, are in fact all nice old librarians once they take their feathered helmets off is the kind of camp subversion of SF tropes that this show does better than any other. The final episode is notable for creating a genuine sense of peril and tension without any monsters appearing, and Cumming – one of those rare Doctor Who directors who seems happier doing effects-based spectacle than nuts-and-bolts TV Centre drama – has great fun using then-new video and computer effects to create a vision of reality collapsing.
Even so, with the time wasted on board the TARDIS, this all means that by the start of its final episode Castrovalva has accumulated the level of mystery and danger you’d expect from a solid part two. It’s a muted entrance for Peter Davison, who would struggle against the perception that his Doctor was bland and passive, and the problems of the Ainley Master and three companion set-up are visible already. Doctor Who would continue – contrary to the popular memory, it remained a solid ratings hit right into the middle of the Colin Baker years – but more through luck than judgement.
Next: Four to Doomsday (1982)
