Hogan Reviews

As we near the end of our Multi-Doctor catch-up marathon we’re left with the original three TV serials, with “The Two Doctors” being a bit of the odd one out as it wasn’t to celebrate any kind of anniversary but instead the producers at the time saw how successful “The Five Doctors” had been and decided to do it again! So we have the Second Doctor and Jamie join the Sixth Doctor and Peri in the middle of Season 22 for no real reason, in a story partially filmed on location in Spain, also for no real reason! Plus it’s a three-parter but at a time when each episode was the length of two regular episodes, making this effectively a six-part story which in the 80s was practically unheard of. In other words “The Two Doctors” is a very odd story, but is it a fun story to watch?

The story starts off with The Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) and Jamie (Frazer Hines) in a black and white scene on the TARDIS that slowly fades into colour (nice touch!) and The Doctor explains that they left Victoria behind to study graphology but will be back to get her eventually and that the Time Lords have sent them on a diplomatic mission (bloody hell, no wonder fans had to create “Season 6B” to cover all of that nonsense!) They arrive on a space station kitchen and meet the rather unpleasant cook Shockeye (John Stratton), who is a Androgum, basically a humanoid-looking species that have very animal-like base instincts, and after the cook asks for but is denied permission to eat Jamie our time travelling duo head to the office of top scientist Dastari (Laurence Payne). At the meeting The Doctor reveals he’s there to put a stop to the time experiments going on in the station and is unimpressed by his prize experiment: a Androgum called Chessene (Jacqueline Pearce) who has been augmented and forcefully evolved to “mega-genius levels”, changing her appearance to a flat-out human in the process. The Doctor claims no matter what he’s done he won’t be able to stop her base Androgum instincts. As this is happening Chessene allows a Sontaran battlecruiser to dock with the ship and the station is soon overran as The Doctor tells Jamie to run.

Sometimes you press the screenshot button at JUST the right time…

Meanwhile the Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) and Peri (Nicola Bryant) are fishing for a while then go inside the TARDIS where The Doctor collapses. He wakes as a vision of the Second Doctor being executed plays and he becomes understandably worried that his past self has some how been killed and so he will soon wink out of existence. He decides to visit his “old friend” Dastari on the space station, arriving several weeks after the attack and finding nothing but death and destruction. They spend a good while avoiding traps and working out what happened, including coming across Jamie covered in rags and delusional, the Doctor helping his old friend relax and regain his reason and finding out about the Sontarans and how Dastari and his younger self vanished. The Doctor believes the Sontarans want Dastari to use his skills to transplant the “symbiotic nuclei” of a Time Lord into a Sontaran, giving them time travel. With a quick bit of mental linkage The Doctor, Peri and a now cleaned up Jamie head to where he’s being held, which is a villa in then-modern day Spain. Outside the villa a couple made up of former English stage actor Oscar (James Saxon) and local girl Anita (Carmen Gomez), approach the villa and mistake a landing Sontaran ship for a plane crash and go to investigate. As it turns out Dastari wasn’t kidnapped and instead is working alongside Chessene and the Sontarans in order to perfect time travel but laments having to be on Earth (it’s on the Sontarans’ insistence as they wish to launch an attack on a nearby star system controlled by the Rutans) and is concerned when his perfect creation also says its so Shockeye can eat human food, something she shouldn’t be concerned about.

“Wow, we never had on-location foreign shoots in our day, Doctor!” “… What?”

As the Second Doctor tries to convince Dastari that his plan of giving Chessene his nuclei (not the Sontarans…) is madness his older counterpart, Peri and Jamie arrive and are guided to the villa by Oscar and Anita, who leave soon afterwards. Peri causes a distraction while The Doctor and Jamie slip in and investigate the prototype Time Machine, saying that once the machine is primed with a Time Lord nuclei anyone can control it, making the nearby Sontaran commander Stike (Clinton Greyn) very happy. Meanwhile Peri is chased off the premises by a hungry Shockeye, who manages to knock her out and take her back to his kitchen to eat later…

It’s certainly a weird story to watch, especially the new blu-ray print at the on-location scenes in Spain were done on film (like all location filming, to be fair) so spruce up very nicely indeed. The story does drag but not too badly thanks to several changes in scenery and a bigger cast to switch between…

The Continuity:

Tall Sontarans, It’s just wrong! Sontaran with a weird goatee? Fine.

The big one here is the whole “Season 6B” controversy, that the script makes no sense within the Second Doctor’s TV era so a new period in between the end of “The War Games” and before Pertwee’s first story was created for some of the 90s books, with the book “World Game” stating this was The Doctor’s second mission for the Time Lords during this period, but conversely the Big Finish audio drama “The Black Hole” tried to retcon this by having the Doctor and Jamie be in the middle with travelling with Victoria and having to do the mission for an injured Time Lord they find (and then having Jamie and Victoria’s memory of the events erased) Ironically Big Finish would later establish a series of Season 6B stories starting with “Beyond War Games”, making the effort of Black Hole for nought!

The book “So Vile a Sin” has two alternate timelines branching from this story, one where the Doctor is caught and has his throat slit by Shockeye and one where he arrives in time to save Oscar. Beyond that though, not much has spun off from this story. The Androgums have yet to make an expanded universe appearance, which given the species that have is actually somewhat surprising! Obviously the Sontarans are a big continuity link, but I’m not going to list all their appearances here…

Overall Thoughts:

The Second Doctor is the only Doctor to appear in all three Classic Era multi-Doctor stories… though it would be hard for any other Doctor beyond the Third to do that anyway, thinking about it…

Every time I stick “The Two Doctors” on I have a fun time, especially if spread over a night or two, but I’m well aware of its flaws. The villains’ plans are long-winded and there are many cases of “escape, get captured, escape” writing to pad the story out. Yet because Patrick Troughton is having such a blast and there are moments of fun comedy and drama (plus a surprising amount of violence!) I can definitely see myself sticking it on again in a few years…

As The Doctor and Jamie escape Stike in the cellar (by Jamie stabbing him in the leg!) they have no time to rescue the Second Doctor and flee, leaving him at his captors’ mercy. Chessene hears about the “second Time Lord” and decides to go to plan B: implant Androgum genetic material into the Second Doctor so she can control him directly and then kill the Sontarans and everyone else who tries to interfere. Simple enough! At the same time the recovering Stike tells his men that he’ll soon gain control of the time machine and that they are to prepare the ship for self-destruction so there can be no witnesses. Peri is saved from the butchers knife as Chessene calls Shockeye away to unwillingly donate his genetic material to the Doctor, which he does, complete with giving the Time Lord weird ginger eyebrows like him. To further her plan Chessene also throws “coronic acid” at the Sontarans melting one completely and badly injuring Stike, but while this is going on Shockeye and the now half-Androgum Second Doctor head out to the town to eat local food.

The Second Doctor looks at Destari’s crap sunglasses in horror.

This is leads to a bunch of on-location scenes in Seville as the cast all run about after each other but eventually Shockeye and the Second Doctor arrive and eat tonnes of food at the restaurant owned by Oscar and Anita, but when the former asks for them to pay he’s stabbed to death by the Androgum, who then leaves. The Sixth Doctor, Peri and Jamie arrive in time to see Oscar’s last moments and that the Second Doctor has reverted to normal, the process not completed allowing his Time Lord genes to fight back, but there’s no time to celebrate as Destari and Chessene arrive and take them all back to the villa and force the Sixth Doctor to fix the time machine. After Peri is used as a guinea pig they’re happy everything is set, locking up the two Doctors and but then Chessene waits for Shockeye to eat Jamie as she is also interested in how humans taste. The Sixth Doctor frees himself and heads to the kitchen, managing to save Jamie though getting cut in the process, his blood spilling on the floor which causes Chessene to get to her knees and start licking it, confirming to Dastari that what the Doctor said about her instincts were true so he runs to free the Second Doctor from his chains. Meanwhile the Sixth Doctor is chased by Shockeye but he manages to defeat the Androgum by using Oscar’s moth-catching cyanide, putting it on a rag and smothering him to death. Blimey Doctor, I bet you feel bad abou- wait, he just says “your just desserts” with a smile. Never mind. The Sixth Doctor is quite the incarnation sometimes…

A bonus sixth screenshot to capture that rare moment of The Doctor just straight up killing someone via cyanide. Doubt that’ll happen again, somehow!

In the end Chessene sees Dastari rescuing the Second Doctor so shoots him dead but is disarmed by a Jamie knife toss to the hand, so she runs into the time machine only for it to explode due to the Sixth Doctor having rigged it to blow the second time its used (explaining why Peri survived). The two Doctors part ways and the Doctor and Peri talk about after everything they’ve been through they’ve decided to become vegetarians…