5.14: The Five Doctors

In which, let’s be honest, there are actually only four Doctors, and only three proper ones.

Broadcast: November 1983

Watched: December 2020

“I can’t tell you how much I’ve been looking forward to this reunion.” Well this is lovely. It doesn’t have the depth of Day of the Doctor, but it’s clearly a massive influence, and as an exercise in turning a bunch of cameos into a story it’s outstanding. Just so much fun.

Seeing Hartnell at the beginning made me feel quite emotional. I had lesser versions of that with almost everyone, including the Shada clips and the words “by Terrance Dicks”. Pertwee yelling “Great balls of fire!” is great.

I like the way the mysterious black gloves suggest the Master. Also, love his grin when the Time Lords are telling him how evil he is

The Dalek shooting itself and yelling “under attack!” is hilarious. Odd they don’t feature more heavily, given it’s been four years and they’re such a huge part of the show.

Oh the Brig’s moustache is back. He grew that quickly.

The Time Lord politics would be more interesting if there were any links to Arc... It’s weird how it’s same cast, except Borusa, but it’s not building on that earlier story at all. I sort of like the inversion though: in Arc it’s the Doctor who the Time Lords wrongly persecute, this time it’s the Castellan (”no, not the mind probe” is a truly terribly delivered line). Shame in someways we don’t see Maxil again, that’d be funny.

The eye of orion looks like Yorkshire.

Was the TARDIS re-designed? If not why all the fussing at the beginning?

1Doc tells Tegan to make tea. The sign times have changed is that 5Doc tells Turlough to help her. He’s oddly sidelined in this – barely gets anything to do, far less than most of the cast.

Huh, we’re in North Wales. I would have guessed the Lake District.

Hurndall is great as the first Doctor, he even does some fake Billy fluffs (”The scanner is keyed to my... to our brain patterns”).

This is the first time we get the full on “the Master isn’t really the enemy, compared to those guys” thing that we also get in Trial, Magician’s Apprentice, really all of Missy. Sort of inherent in the way he ends up betraying his allies to help the Doctor defeat them, right the way back to Terror of the Autons, but nonetheless – “my best enemy” is a good description.

Susan knows what a Cyberman is. Perhaps they attack Earth sometime after 2164.

3Doc: “I think I’ll go Mike, she’s nervous enough as it is” – love the implication that the very last thing you need on a bad day is to bump into Mike Yates. He and Sarah were quite friendly, too. Funny to think that, at this point Jamie, and Zoe had only been out of Who as long as Rose has now.

The raston warrior robot is in some ways odd – all the other monsters are greatest hits, why do we get him not an Auton or Ice Warrior? That said, the scene where it beats the shit out of the cybermen for a giggle is weirdly satisfying; 80s Cybermen seem to do a lot more dying than killing.

The chess board bit is the same as Death to the Daleks and something else I can’t place. The Mutants? I’m not sure “easy as Pi” makes any actual sense – the digits of Pi don’t seem to bear any actual relation to where anyone stands – but it’s the sort of Terrance trick that’s very clever if you’re 10.

Weird how 5Doc is taken out of the action for so much of this.

Tegan greets Sarah in exactly the same tone she greets Nyssa in Logopolis.

The Brig, Sarah and Tegan all enter the tower with the “wrong” Doctor.

I really like how the Master is in a really, really bad mood because the Doctor wasn’t more grateful. Also that the Brig just twats him.

Not clear if Time Lord musical notation is the same as ours. I do like the way so much of the incidental music is re-purposed bits of the theme tune.

Is Borusa doing something stupid to burn through his regenerations so quickly? There is a half spoken implication that if you regenerate your term ends.

LOL the TARDIS dematerialises just before the cybermen set off their bomb. They’re basically clowns here for our amusement in this.

The end is very similar to The King’s Demons (or Morbius, come to that), but works far better here for reasons I can’t entirely articulate.

Interesting how Dicks makes 1Doc the clever one, even though he’s the youngest.

Is this a different version of the theme tune at the end?