DOCTOR WHO - THE FIVE DOCTORS (1983)

 

DIRECTED by Peter Moffatt 

SCREENPLAY by Terrance Dicks

STARRING - (Deep breath now)...

Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor

Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor

Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor

Richard Hurndall as the First Doctor

Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor (archive footage)

William Hartnell as the First Doctor (archive footage)

Janet Fielding as Tegan Jovanka

Mark Strickson as Vislor Turlough

Elisabeth Sladen as  Sarah Jane Smith

Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman

Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart

Lalla Ward as Romana (archive footage)

Anthony Ainley as The Master

Philip Latham as Lord President Borusa

Dinah Sheridan as Chancellor Flavia

Paul Jerricho as The Castellan

David Banks as The Cyber Leader

Mark Hardy as The Cyber Lieutenant

Richard Mathews as Rassilon

Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon

Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot

Caroline John as Liz Shaw

Richard Franklin as Captain Mike Yates

David Savile as Colonel Crichton

John Leeson as Voice of K9

Roy Skelton as Dalek Voice

PLOT - An unknown evil force is tracking down the Doctor and his past incarnations and removing them from time and space.

One by one, the first five incarnations of The Doctor (and several old friends) find themselves imprisoned in the Death Zone - a region of the Doctor's home planet of Gallifrey where the ancient Time Lords used to pit alien species against against each other in gladiatorial combat.

The Death Games have been revived by the same unknown enemy that has stolen the Doctor's lives - can the various Doctors survive the perils of the Death Zone to expose the corruption that lies at the dark heart of Gallifrey ?...

PERFORMANCES - For Doctor Who's 20th anniversary the show's production team pulled out all the stops to create a movie length special that reunited the then current Doctor - Peter Davison - with many of the show's past stars in an epic adventure.

On paper this sounds too good to be true and sadly it was - out of the four previous Doctors only two - Patrick Troughton (the second Doctor) and Third Doctor - Jon Pertwee - made it to the birthday bash, Tom Baker - the fourth Doctor (the one who everyone really wanted to see) turned it down as he felt it was too soon after his departure and he also had issues with some members of the production team. Baker's place was filled by using archive footage from the half filmed TV adventure - "Shada" - which was never completed due to a BBC strike. The other missing Doctor was William Hartnell who had died a few years previously - his shoes where filled by Richard Hurndall who does a passable impersonation of Hartnell's first Doctor with the addition of a clip of Hartnell from classic story "The Dalek Invasion Of Earth" serving as a prologue of sorts.

The "main" Doctor at the time was the fifth Doctor (Peter Davison). Davison was a bit of a divisive figure at the time - many people thought he was "too young" to play the Doctor and that he came over as slightly bland. Of course his main sin was mainly that of not being Tom Baker.

Baker had played the role for a (still never beaten) record of seven years and many people at the time simply just refused to accept any other actor playing the Doctor. Davison had one hell of a job filling Baker's shoes, fortunately time has been much kinder to him and these days his tenure as the Doctor is looked back on by many with fondness, that sticking point of him being too young now singles him out as being groundbreaking - it's pretty much the default age these days for the Doctor to be played by an actor in their twenties or early thirties, also it's been so long ago since Tom Baker graced the TARDIS that viewers are much more accepting of actors other than him playing the part (although there are some people these days who find anyone other than David Tennant as the Doctor to be troubling. The more things change as the saying goes...)

In this story Davison gets to show more of a "Sherlock Holmes" side to his Doctor as for the majority of the episode he's on Gallifrey uncovering a conspiracy to revive the ancient death games. These scenes are ok but generally involve Davison hanging around with a bunch of dull Time Lords whilst the earlier Doctors get all the cool stuff to do.

Speaking of earlier Doctors - Hurndall is decent enough as the stand-in First Doctor, he's probably about as close to Hartnell as they could have got at the time short of using a Ouija board, but it's still a shame the real First Doctor couldn't be there. I do like how he gets paired with the Fifth Doctor's companion Tegan (Janet Fielding), seeing the uptight original Doctor hanging out with a mouthy, grumpy Australian who dresses like a prostitute is strangely entertaining.

Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor steals the show. He upstages everyone pretty much in the same way he did in "The Three Doctors" ten years earlier. This time he gets paired with the retired Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart (Nicolas Courtney) and the two almost become a double act in their own right.

There's also a nice little scene where Troughton sadly reflects on the fates of his companions Jamie (Fraser Hines) and Zoe (Wendy Padbury) when he encounters evil ghost versions of them in the Death Zone. It's nice to see a more introspective side to this Doctor.

Third Doctor - Jon Pertwee gets most of the really cool stuff to do. He always was the "action Doctor" of early Who and here he's his usual suave self as he faces off against the Master (Anthony Ainley), a platoon of Cybermen and even gets to abseil down a cliff to infiltrate the top floor of the Dark Tower. Pertwee is teamed with his final companion Sarah Jane Smith (Elizabeth Sladen).

Sarah was probably one of the most iconic companions of classic Who (so iconic in fact that she was the first old school companion to return in the modern series, and even got her own spin-off show which only ended because of Sladen's untimely death).

To say she's so iconic she gets a little short changed here though, because in this story Sarah Jane Smith gets subjected to one of the ABSOLUTE silliest and most lame scenes in the entire sixty plus year history of Doctor Who (and I realise that's quite a bold statement with this show).

I'm taking about the scene where Sarah trips over and SCREAMS HYSTERICALLY as she's falls about two feet down a slight hillock with a slow gradual incline.

Honestly, to hear hear her yell you'd think that she was hurtling at a rate of knots down a Grand Canyon style chasm with a bed of six foot high razor sharp spikes at the bottom. To make matters worse the Doctor then rescues her by throwing her a rope and pulling her out of "the pit" with a rope attached to his car. SHE COULD HAVE JUST GOT OFF HER KNEES AND WALKED OUT !!!!!!! It's completely ridiculous but absolutely hilarious at the same time. To be fair, in the original script it was supposed to be a cliff that Sarah plummeted off but clearly they couldn't find one on the day of filming so had to make do the best they could. Why not just - I dunno - rewrite the scene instead ? Just a thought...

The Doctor's other various companions don't get a lot to do either. The Doctor's Granddaughter Susan (Carol Anne Ford - the very first "Doctor Who Girl") gets trapped in the TARDIS besieged by Cybermen with the fifth Doctor's companion Turlough (an alien "schoolboy" who never changes out of his school uniform - even though he absolutely hated the place). Several other old companions make cameos as ghosts. Still it IS an anniversary with an already overloaded cast for it's runtime, so this is to be expected. It's nice to see them all the same.

This being an anniversary special we're also well served for villains - aside from the Cybermen, a Dalek and a Yeti we also get not one but two evil Time Lords for our money. First there's The Master (Anthony Ainley) - the Moriarty to the Doctor's Holmes. 

He's not actually the main villain in this outing - instead he's been sent by the Time Lords to help rescue the Doctor(s) -(Well they DID used to be best friends). Ainley is gleefully sadistic and looks like he's having lots of fun showing a more mischievous side to his version of the Master. Amusingly the Master seems quite put out at points when various Doctors scorn his attempts at help, plus he ends up being punched in the face by the Brigadier (something the Brig's probably been itching to do for decades by this point).

Then we get Borusa (Philip Latham) - president of the Time Lords and the Doctor's ex-tutor at the Time Lord Academy. Borusa had appeared in various stories in the past, always played by a different actor every time (God only knows what he gets up to that causes him to burn through his regenerations so quickly as he spends most of his time sat on his arse in Gallifreyan boardrooms, but I digress). Borusa's previous incarnations where all good guys - not so this time as this latest regeneration has been "seduced by the dark side of the Force" and is now only interested in power for the sake of power (considering he's the leader of the most powerful race in the Universe you think he'd be satisfied), anyway - Latham does a good job of bringing this interesting villain to life but he's nowhere near as much fun as the Master.

SFX - "Man in a suit" monsters all the way.

The 80's Cybermen are great - made even better by the fact that the Cyber Leader has clearly been watching Star Wars and appears to be channeling his inner Darth Vader.

We get a new monster too - The Raston Warrior Robot who's basically a dancer in a leotard wearing a silver mask. He has a really unconvincing way of teleporting but he does manage to take out an entire platoon of Cybermen, which brings us to...

VIOLENCE -  This story contains what is probably one of THE most OTT moments of onscreen violence in Doctor Who's sixty plus year history - I'm talking about the infamous Cyber Massacre scene.

Put it this way -  the Raston Warrior Robot goes into full-on Robo Ninja mode and thoroughly kicks the Cybermen's shiny metal arses.

Using lasers, spears and flying buzzsaws the plucky Raston slices, dices, beheads and burns alive confused looking Cybermen left, right and centre.

One Cyberman gets impaled through the chest and ACTUALLY VOMITS before shuffling off his mortal coil and going to Cyber Heaven. It's awesome !!!! It'd never happen in the Disney sanitised Doctor Who we get these days, worse luck.

As if that wasn't bad enough for our cybernetic friends, a second platoon then gets wiped out by the Master when he tricks them into marching across a deadly chess board and they get blasted to death by lightning.

It truly sucks to be a Cyberman on Doctor Who's birthday - that'll learn the cheeky metal scamps.

Oh and there's a bit where a Dalek accidentally shoots itself and blows up, revealing the twitching dying Kaled mutant that lies within.

Of course, these days we're used to seeing the horrors that the Dalek casing hides within, but back in 1983 we'd never been party to this before. This is THE first time we ever see a Dalek in it's true form. For Doctor Who fans of the time this was a big deal and it doesn't disappoint.

RATING - I love this story, it's everything a Doctor Who anniversary special should be - it celebrates the past whilst looking to the future and also has some genuinely crowd pleasing moments.

It's by no means perfect - the absence of William Hartnell and (particularly) Tom Baker does harm it a little bit and there needed to be a few more returning monsters, BUT given the limitations the production team where working under at the time they really did pull a blinder with this one. Out of all the anniversary specials I think this was only bettered by "Day Of The Doctor" some thirty years later.

4 and a half Doctors out of 5.

Happy birthday Doctor Who.

ART -

Below - The cover to the issue of Radio Times which was available on the week of broadcast...

...and the modern day comic book adaptation which pays homage to it.

Below - the front covers of the two editions of the Target novelisation of the story (which went on sale a whole week BEFORE the show was broadcast - and you think the internet's bad for spoilers...)