>"The Earth Is Hungry"

Back in ye ancient days of 1984, there was I with my shiny video tapes that I could just afford in order to record a mere three stories of the new season just about to start. Of course back then we didn't really know that these would all be available on VHS let alone shiny DVD as now, so it was crucial to decide what to go for. Having pored over the descriptions of what to expect from the Anniversary Special, I ended up with "the dalek story", "the regeneration story" and "the new doctor story". With hindsight, I would actually have recorded Resurrection and Androzani as before, but my other choice would have been Frontios!

The story still stands up well today as one of the better stories of the Davison era. With Chris Bidmead at the helm the script was going to be sound, Paddy Kingsland to provide his usual atmospheric scores, a competent director in Ron Jones, and great design by David Buckingham, what could go wrong. Well, all-in-all, nothing at all - if anything its the confines of the studio that perhaps let it down, with cave-setting always quite tricky to realise - Androzani had similar issues - but in both cases lighting was actually used to great advantage, but one wonders how it might have seen in real caves on film ...

This is also one of those rare stories that enabled Mark Strickson to act and Turlough to have some measure of character. It was a real shame he hadn't been used better during his tenure on the show, and it's only his creator Peter Grimwade and Bidmead that really brought Turlough to life. The scenes of his dribbling race-memory-recall are excellent, though it's a bit handy that his home planet just happens to be one that the Tractators invaded in the past!

Ah, yes, the Tractators ... why is it the "monster" can make and break a story, in spite of how great a script it has. Fortunately they don't get too much "in the way" in the story, and it's a shame that in a typical lack of communication between departments we have dancers contracted to move the "lithe" creatures, and the designers created an "intractable" (ahem) costume that fails to provide any grace whatsoever!

The Gravis was an interesting idea, but its threats did seem a little easy to ignore -the novelisation does much to address this so you could really feel the unease of whether he'd grasp that Tegan was not a Gallifreyan serving machine after all. Hmm, actually, he is a bit thick not to realise the Doctor's little tricks even down to his eventual defeat by his own hands!

Also, the minimal visual effects used do seem a little basic, and it's a shame that the DVD producers didn't take the time (or rather, given the budget) to upgrade the effects to a more modern look rather than fuzzy red blurs illustrating the Tractator kinetic abilities. Not that this detracts from the story itself.

"The TARDIS has been destroyed"

Even back at broadcast I thought it strange that the Doctor would be going on about his hatstand, not knowing how much of a mcguffin that would be (or even what the word meant back then :)). It's later poingnancy as being the only remaining part of the ship was a real impact back then, even if I knew we had several more stories to go so the TARDIS couldn't really be gone. Actually, at the time I suspected the chameleon circuit had worked ... but no it was actually dispelled into separate components within our own natural dimensions instead and providing a magical moment when Tegan comes across roundels in the tunnels - still highly effective even now!

Still not sure how the Gravis knew of the Doctor by reputation, TARDISes and Time Lords when this was meant to be so far into the future they weren't meant to be there - if he were just a legend by then I'd have thought there'd be more excitement over him being there (a Tractator equivalent of an autograph wanted?!!). But then as we established earlier he is thick, and can't add up too well either - he'd been stranded for millennia but was on Frontios 500 years ... [actually a deleted scene clarifies this so maybe I should cut him some slack :)]

"The people of my planet"

As I said earlier, Turlough is used well in the story, but it seems weird now how he goes on about his planet without actually saying it. Unknown at this time, of course, but Trion is mentioned just three weeks later!

Plenty of bits to catch the eye in the story, but quite a lot cut out too it seems (which you can see in the deleted scenes bit). I must say the episode pace is pretty good so the extra to-ing and fro-ing cut helps the broadcast version keep running well. And it wasn't until just now watching it that I realised that episode three is essentially just "running around corridors!". Speaking of which, a good "revere-lation" (sorry!) at the end of the ep with Ron Jones choosing not to use a "crash-in to the Doctor's face" for once - hoorah! - especially with the nasty-looking excavation machine turning up (which again the novelisation makes even nastier than on screen).

Always good to see the Doctor's glasses in use (another Bidmeadism).

The restored picture looks great and some great camerawork (like looking up out of the tunnels to the ship), but the clean-up does also show up the Tractators a bit, and also where the scene was speeded up in order to make them look like they could move faster! There's also the unintentionally funny scene of the guards beating up a Tractator with their battons to watch out for!

The production notes also point out some of the inevitable continuity errors: I clearly remember the incident with the metal bar blocking the doors "moving" higher to enable the escape back at broadcast, but never noticed things like Turlough's blazer switching from buttoned up to open, Norna crouching to look in the tunnel (from below) but then standing (from above), or a boom shadow (though this doesn't detract and looks 'natural' anyway).

"A risk shared is a risk doubled"

All in all, a great story and also a great cliffhanger ending too, harking back to the old Hartnell story-telling days (not that I knew this at the time) - it's a shame they didn't retain the Resurrection trailer that immediately followed the end titles when it was broadcast just to maintain that flow :)

I shouldn't care about these people. They're loathsome. The only one who's not complete slime is Chellak and he's the least interesting character, a sheep among wolves. He's not really a bad guy underneath, but he gets pushed around by everyone else, he's happy to execute the Doctor and Peri for no good reason and basically he's a loser. Everyone else is slime and you're looking forward to their deaths, hopefully in humiliating and painful ways.

The Caves of Androzani arguably shouldn't work. On first broadcast, when I saw it as a child, for me to an extent it didn't. It's bleak and unpleasant, like bathing in used engine oil. It certainly shouldn't have been taken as any kind of template. This is the kind of story that works in the hands of Peter Davison, Robert Holmes and Graeme Harper, but in the hands of Steve Cole or Trevor Baxendale makes you want to plant bombs in bookshops. Nevertheless in 1984 it worked like crazy. As so often 'twas Robert Holmes, the grand old man of Doctor Who, who could break the rules. His characters aren't just bastards. They're unbelievable screaming motherfuckers. Holmes hit a roll, a momentum with which he created a cast any one of whom could on their own have been the "unmatched throughout the series" highlight of another story. Sharaz Jek = work of genius. Stotz = has me backing away from the television. Morgus = makes the above look like Disney heroines. "Have the lift maintenance engineer shot." It's profoundly satisfying to see him get what he deserves, from Krau Timmin and then from Jek. I'm not sure what that glowing special effect did to him in episode four, but I'm happy to assume that it wasn't nice.

I could talk about these people for hours. Best of all, they're all completely different. It's no identikit parade of faceless macho mannequins, but a rich mix of villains that in that department outdoes just about any other work of fiction I can think of. Stotz is fascinating even before we see horrors like his terrifying scene with Krelper and the pill. He's a genuinely clever psychopath.

Then of course there's Jek. I discussed the others first to get them out of the way, since here there's so much to say. I'll be here a while. Everyone knows that Christopher Gable went in to read for another part, but on seeing the script fell in love with Sharaz Jek and went to Graeme Harper to ask for him instead. Forget the script for a moment. I've already discussed how astonishing it is that Robert Holmes pulled off what he did here, but I'm about to address the nuts and bolts of TV production. For Graeme Harper, the most script's terrifying line must have been: "You think bullets could stop me now?" That's the acid test. A bad actor or half-hearted direction could have sunk it like a stone and basically killed the whole story, which had all been building up to that confrontation. Why don't Morgus and Stotz just blast down Jek on the spot? Think about it. The guy should be Swiss cheese. In any other story, we'd be rolling our eyes and hooting at the TV... but the televised production doesn't even let you blink. You believe Jek! One truly feels that mere bullets wouldn't do the job. Admittedly the script has already made it clear that he's extremely hard to kill, but by that point our guts are screaming that this man is practically superhuman.

A further point of interest is that Sharaz Jek is an operatic character in a grittily realistic production. In a perverse way John Normington plays up Morgus by playing him down, with that psychotically tight self-control, but the world of Androzani is a million miles away from the plastic BBC corridors of much eighties Doctor Who. It has bullets, not laser beams. Its tough guys feel like tough guys, not ballet dancers and RADA graduates. Nevertheless amidst all this is a richly theatrical creation, using language as flamboyant as anything Holmes ever wrote. "You have the mouth of a prattling jackanapes." I'd kill to hear a Hollywood action hero say that. You can roll it around your tongue like wine, but furthermore it characterises Jek. It's horror as poetry, with luscious descriptions of grossness. When Jek says he wants Morgus's head, that's no metaphor. "Congealed in its own evil blood." "The flesh boiled, hanging from the bone." Jek's obsessed with physicality. He's besotted with Peri's beauty, mentally shattered by his own deformity and speaking a language of blood. It's perfect that he ended up being played by a professional dancer.

Eventually of course Jek becomes the only sympathetic character! He's acting from pure motives rather than greed. Love, or at least his twisted version, and hatred. They're beautiful in their clarity and he's dominated by them. He's like a terrifying child.

Then there's his best line. "I am mad."

I can't believe I'm reviewing a Davison story and I haven't talked about Peter Davison yet. This is one of those rare stories which you couldn't quite do with any other Doctor. The 5th Doctor, especially in Season 21, was the last good man in a bleak universe, which ultimately ended with him giving his life to become Colin Baker. Seasons 21 and 22 are twin epitomes of grossness, but in opposite ways. Colin Baker's era had a flamboyance, a larger than life quality that at its best gave us the likes of Vengeance on Varos. A Davison story on the other hand was always more human and real, as was exemplified in this final farewell. He's a hero in the fullest sense. For the Doctor as a character, I think this remains his finest hour in all his lives since 1963.

The Colin Baker era's stabs at tragedy (Lytton, Oscar Botcherby) were always fumbling and awkward. In contrast there's something uncomfortable about Resurrection of the Daleks and Caves of Androzani that few eras ever attained. Plus of course this story shows Davison's dark sense of humour, letting him stand up to the psychos with deliciously dry sarcasm that's flippant but always purposeful. Watch his first scene with Chellak. That line where he asks for a chair. He's deliberately testing the general. Then in the detention cell in episode one he's asking all the right questions, having already basically worked out the truth about both Salateen and Morgus. This is my 5th Doctor, the one who had Turlough pegged almost from the beginning but never said a word.

His finest moment in this finest moment is of course part three's cliffhanger. Obviously it ends with Davison's toe-tingling "not going to let you stop me now" speech, but personally I love the whole scene all the way from "Ah, Stotzy, have you had a good rest?" and "Sorry, seems to be locked".

Even his relationship with Peri is interesting. She's just as sarcastic, whiny and unenthusiastic as she would be in Season 22, but Davison lets it all roll off him. He's so much more tolerant than in his early days with Adric, Nyssa and Tegan. In fairness he didn't choose any of them; they're miscellaneous orphans who stowed away or got dumped on him, and it's already the end of Castrovalva before he's in a position to do anything about it. (Note that he spends the entirety of Season Nineteen trying to get rid of Tegan, albeit at her request, and he's not exactly reluctant to lose her when they finally reach Heathrow in Time-Flight.) Peri on the other hand was offered her place on the TARDIS.

Plus of course she has the right idea. Androzani really is horrible. Anyone with a brain would want to get away. The Doctor is the hero, but she's the ordinary girl trapped in a nightmare. She's terrified by Sharaz Jek, to the point where she jumps at the Doctor's hand hitting her shoulder.

The regeneration is different too. Everyone knows about the fan theory about the episode three cliffhanger, with the Doctor feeling woozy just when Harper reused the regeneration special effect. He pulls himself together and we get on with the scene. However there's a further regeneration foreshadowing when the Doctor goes down for the milk of the Queen Bat and hears voices, a multiple echo of Sharaz Jek saying, "She's dying, Doctor." Eventually the old faces parade works surprisingly well, trumping the similar idea at the end of Logopolis by bringing the actors into the studio to record new lines. We'd never seen a regeneration like this before, a slow poisoning in which the Doctor basically spends four episodes dying by degrees. Even he says, "It feels different this time."

Continuity menks might surmise that Androzani's backstory is similar to that of Robots of Death. "Where are you from, Earth?" "As they used to say on Earth, every cloud has a strontium lining." There's also the fact that Jek's androids get confused by the Doctor's alien physiology, making it look like a fairly human-centric universe.

Oh, and Morgus's asides to camera. What the hell? As soon as your attention's been drawn to them, they're unbelievable. I love them.

I like the plot. It's hardly an original observation, but I'll say it again... The Caves of Androzani is an SF historical. There aren't any diabolical menaces or plans to destroy the universe, but simply the passion and violence of the characters. We don't need aliens. Everyone's quite enough of a threat to each other. Okay, there's the Magma Beast, but it's little more than a lava flow on legs. There's nothing intelligent or consciously antagonistic about it. Meanwhile for once the Doctor isn't trying to beat the bad guy or save the world, but simply wants to get back to the TARDIS.

I'd always vaguely approved of Robert Holmes, but rewatching all these old stories has heightened my appreciation of him. He's a storyteller, a wit and a wordsmith, but moreover time after time he does things with Doctor Who that no one before or since has thought to do. The Caves of Androzani is unique. It's spiky, uncomfortable and I didn't particularly enjoy it when I was eleven, but it's a breathtaking achievement.

Wow! What a piece of work! Watching this on a Monday evening or two in 1984 aged 9 was akin to being bludgeoned. It was like the scene in American Werewolf In London where the Nazi monsters burst in on the family watching The Muppet Show and massacre them, only stretched over the course of 100 minutes.

This is proper nightmare television. Sudden death lurks around every corner, often meted out with - presumably unintentional - agonizingly clumsy slowness (Mercer’s death is oddly effective in its fumbled confusion: no one is sure who to shoot). Faces melt off! People scream and judder grotesquely when exterminated! The woman from Play School is machine-gunned to death! British bobbies shoot innocent passers by!

And like all the best nightmares – or perhaps Tegan is imagining all this whilst lying in bed with a high fever – nothing makes any sense. The Daleks wield a kaleidoscope of nonsensical plans that manage to cancel each other out. No one is who they seem; and if they were it wouldn’t matter anyway. The whole thing is one big frightening scattershot bloodbath that appears potentially quite logical to the casual viewer but is in fact all happening completely at random, as if generated by a computer or a madman.

It is, of course, all baloney of the highest order. It appears to have been written by a man with severe sleep deprivation in a single sitting, just typing the first thing that comes into his head, wired on coffee and amphetamines. It has its detractors – and rightly so – but would you really swap it for another Power Of Kroll, for example? It’s nice that the more thoughtful or mysterious or comic adventures can be off-set against this kind of macho nonsense; you wouldn’t get an episode like this in Quantum Leap after all, would you?

And you wouldn’t laugh at a Dalek trooper’s hat in real life either.

Naturally 'Caves of Androzani' has got an awesomely high reputation as being one of the, if not THE, best story of the Eighties, rivalled perhaps only by the likes of 'The Curse of Fenric' or 'The Greatest Show In The Galaxy' or, in my opinion but not everybody else's, 'Remembrance of the Daleks' (It's good fun if nothing else isn't it). So when, a few months ago, I purchase 'The Caves of Androzani' on DVD I was expecting to be blown away by this 'awesome story', and the fact that it was the only regeneration story currently on DVD from the programme's 26-year-run, I was itching to view. 

What I got was a perfectly sound story, and I certainly can see why its reputation is so high, but it was still an anti-climax.

I suppose if I delve deep into the characterisation of Holmes, and the detailed society and culture of Androzani Major/Minor I can indeed agree that it scores top marks on that level. I will first present my annoyances with the story. These are minor glitches overall and they are beside the notorious television remotes of Morgus and the unconvincing Magma creature (and somehow Graham Harper thought that it was terrifying, and even asked Peter Davison at the end of Episode 2 on the DVD commentary if he and Nicola thought it terrifying too!). But there are other things - mostly the fact that it is so much more of an 'adult' programme rather than a 'children/family' programme because there is very little action till up to the final episode and I found that, although I enjoyed it, my younger cousins tended to switch off a lot when watching it. Another thing is the incidental score - which IS effective in some places, but in others it can be very tedious. And I have to say that the mercenaries chasing the Doctor at the start of Episode 4 are terrible shots, and Cralper looks ridiculous as he runs stiffly with his tiny gun held at his waist, firing randomly.

But lets move on to the much better things - and these are (apart from what I mentioned at the start) Davison's performance. The acting is excellent throughout - and I do agree that the performance of Davison at the end of Episode 3 is exceptionally good and hits the exact amount of anger and desperation without going outside of the Fifth Doctor's character, which I found was not the case when I recently watched 'The Visitation' where a lot of the Doctor's actions and manner of talking were not unlike Colin Baker's performance. It wasn't until I read Paul Clarke's review of this story that it suddenly hit home that the caves are actually sets and not really caves - I honestly never realised they were studio sets - obviously deep down I knew they were because of the picture quality, but I hadn't though about it till now. So excellent cave sets are evident - however Morgus' office is terribly bland, but the 'hologram' effects of Morgus talking to Chellak or Stotz are exceptional for the series.

The main thing I love about Caves is the ending. Harper's direction coupled with Davison's performance is immense as he trudges on towards the TARDIS carrying Peri in his arms as is his performance in the TARDIS in what is a spectacular regeneration scene as you all will agree - but they do cheat slightly by flooding the camera with light effects so that they just switch clips from Davison to Baker in between but this doesn't detract.

Overall then - Caves is a perfectly good story, and in comparison to 'The Three Doctors' which I'm watching now it excels miles. It's just that the heaps of praise was raising expectations a little too high.

My interest in Doctor Who began after viewing the new series featuring Christopher Eccleston - and enjoying it I decided to look into the Classic Series and find out what the fuss was about - a year later and I'm a fan and have started collecting the BBC Worldwide DVD series, beginning with 'The Five Doctors' which I think - showing you Time Lord history, a look a the characters of the first five Doctors and many of the companions, as well as Daleks, Cybermen, Yeti and the Master - is possibly THE single best way to introduce a sprouting youngling Who fan to the world of classic Doctor Who - of course, like any Who story, it has flaws - but I think it works very well, as I will now demonstrate...

Like 'The Eight Doctors' Novel by Terrance Dicks, 'The Five Doctors' is a celebration of the years gone by, and you immediately sense that that is what you're about to be given when, before the titles roll, one of William Hartnell's most famous lines is given - 'One day I shall come back. Yes - I shall come back. Until then there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties - just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mind'...WEEEEWW-DIDDLY DUM, DIDDLE DUM...

First a look at the present TARDIS crew - the Fifth Doctor is my secondary favourite Doctor (Sylvester McCoy topping all others) and I was at first slightly sceptical of his boyish nature, and sometimes I even felt as though he sounded slightly camp, but as the story progressed I grew to admire him, until by the end I vowed to make sure that I would give him a fairly bulky slot in my Who DVD Collection (at the present he has the highest percentage). As companions go it was rather shaky - for some reason, try as I might, I can't seem to come to like Tegan at all, her loud mouth attitude putting me off from the word go. Turlough is a lot more calm and relaxed (maybe it was due to the Eye of Orion's positive bombardments, I don't know) and carried an air of respectability around with him.

The basic plot is very straightforward - a sinister looking figure made up of black gloves and arms which waves over Eighties futuristic equipment is using a shimmering triangle to carry the Doctor's incarnations and place them in the middle of a sinister arena known as the Death Zone on the Time Lord planet Gallifrey - in the heart is the legendary Dark Tower, tomb of Rassillon - "the greatest single figure in Time Lord history"[The Second Doctor]. Also the villain has placed many of the Doctor's past companions in there too, which leads me to something that has always got under my skin when it comes to the Five Doctors - the scene when Sarah Jane falls down a ledge and the Third Doctor rescues her by pulling her up with a rope and Bessie - can it be called a ledge? Ah yes, Pertwee rescued Sladen valiantly from the horizontal slope! Not only does she obviously force herself to role down the hill, but surely she could have climbed back up on foot without needing any help from a rope-pull! To be honest Sarah Jane has never been my favourite companion and I fail to see what the fans see in her so much. Anyway, a look at the past Doctors...

The First Doctor was a real let down. According to the inner leaflet of the DVD it states that Hurndall's interpretation of Hartnell's character is excellent - to be honest this grumpy old pensioner had cleanly cemented his place in 'my worst Doctor so far' category. But then I hear great praise of William Hartnell, and watch clips of his era, and find him to be a very likeable Doctor and he is slowly climbing up the ranks. The Second Doctor made a highly entertaining debut into my experience of him. Although he is, I have heard, very different in the multi-doctor stories to his own era, I still find him to be a very fun and amusing little man - particularly when he is reciting an old Gallifreyan poem to himself, [Brigadier] "Are you in pain, Doctor?" [Second Doctor] "Age has not mellowed you has it, Brigadier?" In fact the whole way through, the endless humour exchanged between both the Doctor and the Brigadier is priceless. Moving on to the Third Doctor, I've never been a fan of Pertwee to this day. Being one of the all-time great Doctors, I was very let down by his overall character. There's very little in the way of humour, so from my earliest memories of watching clips from the Pertwee era he didn't seem to lighten the mood and I always found his stories to be particularly chilling. However, 'The Five Doctors' is very much the three Doctors, with the Fifth Doctor working behind the scenes in the Capitol, because, expecting an epic with five Doctors all together in one big adventure, the Fourth Doctor merely gets a sluggish rowing scene with Romana in a boat and that's it - wasn't impressed.

As regards to the villains - the Dalek's appearance was far too short for my liking and didn't create the slightest feeling of tension of fear at all, as was the case with the Yeti. The Cybermen had a lot more to do, but even they didn't seem at all powerful or fearful although the scene with the Raston Warrior Robot [obviously a man in a suit] slaughtering them all was particularly good. Finally, the Master's little story here works well - for most of the story I was led to believe that he was the evil traitor, and his constant failings to be accepted by the Doctors brings him in the end to turn on them and try and gain immortality for himself.

But the highlight of 'The Five Doctors' for me is when that panel opens up revealing the dark room. The Fifth Doctor steps through, and after an adventure of Daleks, Cybermen and Doctors, you get reminded of that weird room with all those models of the Doctor and that eery music kicks in once again - brilliant.

Overall, I find 'The Five Doctors' to be an excellent celebration and introduction for Doctor Who and works very well.

A highly unusual story. I remember "The Discontinuity Guide" stating that it almost seems like Terrence Dudley doesn't seem to know what it's like to write for Doctor Who. And, as I watched this story with this premise in mind, I found this notion not only plausible but highly effective. 

In the hands of a lot of other authors, "Four To Doomsday" would have resorted to many of the cliches an invasion story in Doctor Who uses. In fact, if we go back a few years to the early Tom Baker days, we have a story called "The Android Invasion" that runs along some somewhat similar lines. Except that, of course, "Four To Doomsday" is highly intelligent sci-fi and "Android Invasion" is a pretty big load of bunk! 

The greatest pitfall it assails that much of "cliche Who" has failed at is the characterisation of its main villain. Since JNT took the helm as producer in the previous season, we have seen many of the more megalomaniacal characters becoming more subdued and layered in stories like "Warriors Gate" and "Leisure Hive". This tradition continues in the characterisation of Monarch. He's very "plummy" both in dialogue and portrayal. And though, like all the maniacs in Who that are trying to take over the universe, his eventual true colours show in a complete disintegration of his personality - even this is handled with a great sense of finesse. Rather than subjecting us the OTT stuff we saw in the pre-JNT days - we get a very convincing and even three-dimensional character. And thanks to this characterisation, Monarch easilly rests in my memory as one of the better villains of the Davison era.

Counterpointing the very excellent Monarch is an equally-strong portrayal in the stereotypical "rebellious character that the Doctor allies himself with in order to take down the bad guy". Bigon is also very well-executed both on paper and in performance. He is ironically tragic as the atheist greek philosopher who has more soul than anyone else on the ship. His relationship with Monarch is also quite fascinating as the dictator allows him his existence because he sees him as a "moral galvaniser". Again, another convention we have seen in countless other stories, but Terrence Dudley gives us a whole new slant on the premise and makes this story thoroughly refreshing because of it.

Now we come to the TARDIS crew. This, in many ways, is their first "proper" story even though the current line-up has been around for two stories. Both those stories were spent dealing with the Doctor's regeneration and we really don't get much of a sense of what their relationships will be like since all the focus is on dealing with a crisis rather than genuinely inter-relating with each other. But, in this story, we definitely see what things will be like with Doctor Five at the helm. It's an awkward sort of muddle, really. Which isn't an entirely bad thing. We've only got one 20th-century human in the mix - the rest are all aliens. Thus creating a nice breeding ground for misinterpretation and even some hostility now and again. And with this new Doctor being a bit more meek like Troughton rather than assertive like Tom or Pertwee, we get even more soap opera drama between the crewmembers because he doesn't tend to "put the companions in their place" when they appear to be getting out of hand. Although this isn't always done quite so effectively in other stories of this season - I quite like how it's done here. And all the companions get fairly equal attention - something that, again, doesn't always go so well in future stories. 

I also enjoyed how, for once, Adric really did join the bad guy for a bit rather than just pretend to like he has in other stories. And the scene where the Doctor "strips him down" in episode four is well-realised. Showing that this latest incarnation can lack assertiveness sometimes, but still knows when to truly take a stand and not back down. And even though Davison is a bit "shaky" in places because this is his first story in filming order, much of what would become "definitive fifth Doctor" is in strong evidence here and he shows that the character is going to move in some wonderful new directions now that old Tom has been laid to rest once and for all. 

Accompanied with all this are some extremely gorgeous sets, a neat form of scanning equipment (the Monopticons) and some really well-choreographed dance sequences (did I just use "well-choreographed dance sequences" in a review of a Doctor Who story? Yes, yes I did). And, of course, the wonderful space walk sequence in episode four. Again, very cheap-looking by the North American standards I'm used to when watching T.V. - but still, a very exciting little moment. Especially with the way the Doctor uses the basic laws of inertia and a cricket ball to save the day! A very "Who-esque" moment if I ever saw one! 

However, along with this, we do get some plot loopholes and things do "sag" ever-so-slightly now and again cause there just doesn't seem quite an adequate amount of story to fill the four episodes. But these problems only weigh down the story so much. "Four To Doomsday", for its flaws, is also a triumph of style and sophistication. I might even go so far to say that it is a shining example of all that is good in 80s-style sci-fi. Not just in context of the series, but the genre in general. A bit of a hidden gem that is oftentimes overlooked just because the monsters aren't quite bug-eyed enough! 

Watch this one again and see just how well it has stood the test of time. It's outstanding stuff!