The Two Doctors

Dear Gary—

Doctor: “I was him; he will be me.”

Jamie: “Who will I be?”

What a breath of fresh air it is to have Jamie McCrimmon back on board for The Two Doctors. Unfortunately we still have Peri along for the ride and she has never been more annoying; her questions are more incessant, her whining more obnoxious, and her stammer more pronounced.

The Two Doctors is this mix of good and bad, and I suppose the good outweighs the bad simply because the good consists of Jamie and the Second Doctor. I gladly sit through the extended running time of the serial just to get more of these two.

The first few moments of The Two Doctors is filmed in black and white with Doctor Two and Jamie in the TARDIS, and for a brief time I can reminisce of better times. The pair remains, even with the advent of color, and the adventure begins. It might not be the better times of old, but it is better than it has been of late.

Then the scene switches to Doctor Six and Peri, with the perpetually petulant Peri complaining that she’s bored on the rather pleasant looking alien planet the Doctor has escorted her to on her three month guided tour of the galaxy.

The first episode of this overlong three episode serial sets up the plot nicely with the Second Doctor and Jamie at the scientific research space station; presents the concepts of Androgum augmentation and the Kartz and Reimer time machine;  introduces the characters of Dastari, Chessene, and Shockeye; establishes the Spanish setting with Oscar and Anita; and reveals the Sontaran involvement. It also pads out its running time with endless shots of the Sixth Doctor and Peri roaming about corridors and climbing up and down scaffolding.

Perhaps because it is overlong, or perhaps because so many scripts of this era suffer similarly, The Two Doctors is full of intriguing elements that are never given their due and stuffed with villains who are redundant. In this case it is the Sontarans who come up with the short end of the stick. The Sontarans are a total afterthought; inserted into the plot and forced to fit where they clearly don’t belong. Why? For the sake of nostalgia? For fan familiarity? If so, why are they so very un-Sontaran? These are not the compact little warriors I know and love. These are tall, lumbering wimps who pander to an augmented Androgum. Stike is continually stating that he should be on the battle front for the vital strike in the Madillon Cluster, so why doesn’t he go already? And since when will a tiny knife rip a hole through Sontaran armor to leave a wound that spouts green blood? So much for the probic vent being the only vulnerability of a Sontaran.

The Sontarans serve no purpose and there is no reason why Chessene needs their allegiance. They do carry out the massacre on the space station, but the massacre also serves no purpose. And the ‘frame up’ of the Time Lords is ludicrous. What possible point is any of that? None of it is explained, fleshed out, or properly tied in with Dastari’s and Chessene’s plans. They couldn’t have picked a more attention-getting or suspicion-arousing means of sneaking out with a time machine if they tried.

Dastari is supposedly a friend of the Doctor; a reasoned scientist; a brilliant mind. Yet he goes along with the heavy handed and deadly plans of an Androgum. It is suggested that he is so swept up in this god-maker role that he turns a blind eye to the obvious (“I have no doubt you could augment an earwig to the point where it understood nuclear physics, but it’d still be a very stupid thing to do!”). It is an effective scene at the end when Dastari witnesses Chessene falling upon the blood spilt by the Doctor and he realizes that what the Doctor warned him of is true: “She’s still an Androgum; you can’t change nature.” But really, the senseless slaughter of “forty of the finest scientific minds ever assembled in one place” didn’t tip him off? Or the casual murder of an eighty year old deaf woman?

Then there is the bizarre attempt to turn Doctor Two into an Androgum consort for Chessene. Dastari must really be caught up in his monster maker mentality to go along with that one. And if Chessene wants an Androgum hubby, what of poor old Shockeye? Oh, right, he doesn’t have the Time Lord gene that allows for symbiotic time travel. Between the misinformation Doctor Six feeds Stike, and the presumed information on the part of Chessene, and the half information provided by the Doctor to Peri, we get a nebulous explanation of the Time Lords’ ability to time travel.

I don’t know what all the fuss is about with allowing Androgums or any other race to have the ability to travel in time. How does this make them more of a threat than the ability to travel in space? They could spread their barbarity through all of space just as easily as through time, yet they haven’t. Why? So they travel backward or forward a few centuries from their present. Now what? Are they any more equipped to conquer than they are in their here and now?  And back to Stike the Sontaran; he wants to get to a physical location—the Madillon Cluster—not to a different time zone; his battle is raging now (not to mention the Sontaran love of war, and to go back to alter time in such a way as to win before the battle even begins does not strike me as the Sontaran way, at least not as originally conceived).

But all of this is really just an excuse to allow the Second Doctor to finally break free of his confines and run amok with Shockeye (“they look quite pally”). This brings me to Shockeye. Shockeye is brilliantly conceived and acted and twice as disgusting. Don’t view The Two Doctors while eating. It’s hard for any depiction of food on camera to spoil my appetite, but The Two Doctors succeeds where better cinematic fare fears to tread.

It also leads to more padding while they all crisscross their way through the streets of Seville. However this filler is much more enjoyable to watch.

Until they meet up, that is. “Good night, sweet prince.” Oscar has to die just so the Sixth Doctor can get in his Lennie Briscoe wisecrack. He’s not quite through, either. The real zinger comes after he kills Shockeye: “Your just desserts.” It is not the killing I mind; it is the unfeeling flippancy. I called the Fourth Doctor out on this in The Ribos Operation, but that was an anomaly for him. With the Sixth Doctor it is becoming an alarming trend.

Yet even with the contrast of the Second Doctor, I’m finding that I do not dislike the Sixth Doctor as much as anticipated. He can hold his own despite the handicap of Peri, below par scripts, and some rather disturbing character traits.

“Well, what’s the use of a good quotation if you can’t change it?” After a dearth of good quotations from the Fifth Doctor, Doctor Six is starting to ramp up the memorable dialogue.  Or how about: “It is the province of knowledge to speak, and the privilege of wisdom to listen.” (If only Peri would take this to heart.) And then there is the heartfelt reaction upon learning (so he thinks) that the universe will come to an end. Peri adopts her own flippant attitude towards the news, but the Doctor waxes poetic: “She can’t comprehend the scale of it all. Eternal blackness. No more sunsets. No more gumblejacks. Never more a butterfly.”

“He’s not the Doctor I know,” Jamie says of Doctor Six upon first meeting him. No, he is not the Doctor I know either, but he is the Doctor. For better or worse. Two Doctors; Doctor Two and Doctor Six.

And so, Gary, I will lay some flowers on Algernon’s grave as I send this out . . .