Doctor Who Debuts: Castrovalva By @ThePlanetHarris

Castrovalva: 

Peter Davison’s Debut as The Doctor 

By Steven Harris

          Replacing Tom Baker as the Doctor was never going to be easy. Baker was (and remains) the longest-serving Doctor in the history of the show and by outlasting various script editors and series producers was  potentially bigger than the programme itself. In casting a 29 year old replacement head honcho John Nathan-Turner was taking a risk. Yet not that much of a risk. Peter Davison was already a household name, courtesy of his stint as the dashing if rash Tristran Farnon in the popular Sunday night series All Creature Great and Small.

          It was a clever idea, though, for former script editor Christopher Bidmead to show a regeneration in crisis and a Doctor uncertain of himself for much of the first story. Some argue that the Fifth Doctor’s composure was never quite recovered from this uncertainty. On the whole the naysayers were probably finding it difficult to adjust to a rather different Doctor; less arrogant, more of a team player.

          Castrovalva began on 4^th January 1982 with a break from previous traditions by showing a pre-credit sequence which was basically a rerun of the ‘death’ of the Fourth Doctor with, for some inexplicable reason, a line about the Watcher (Baker’s stalker throughout Logopolis who turns out to be his next incarnation) being shifted from Nyssa to Tegan (or is it vice versa?). Baker transmutes into a smiley but blond man and the credits roll at last.

          As the episode opens properly Adric, Nyssa and Tegan are dragging the Doctor to the Tardis which, for fans of continuity, is in an entirely different field to the one it landed in during Logopolis. They are being chased by security men who are played by entirely different actors from the security men in Logopolis. Anyway, shush now, perhaps the previous actors had better jobs to go to?

          The security guards catch up with the Timelord and his Scooby gang. There follows some hideous acting and some fairly bad dialogue, mostly in the mouth of Adric, as an ambulance pulls up (well, a man had just fallen a very long way from a huge telescope thing). Tegan steals the ambulance and she and Nyssa manage to get the Doctor inside it and scarper. Adric is left behind in the clutches of the acting police, I mean the security guards.

          Inside the Tardis Nyssa knows how to close the door so they are safe but Adric is still out there. The Doctor vanishes into the interior of the ship. Outside the Master’s Tardis appears and zaps everyone in the field – security men and Adric – before apparently vanishing again. The girls go to rescue Adric who is all woozy. Once they are back in the Tardis they fail to see the Master’s Tardis hovering in mid-air nearby.

          Adric gets the Tardis moving while Nyssa and Tegan discuss the Doctor’s strangeness. Well yes, it is a bit strange for a man neither of them know especially well to change his entire physical self in front of their eyes. That’s not what they mean though. They wonder what he meant by looking for the Zero Room. Adric’s little ears perk up, his face doesn’t bother to change expression but he goes off to find the Doctor.

          In a corridor there is a thread tied to a door handle. When Adric catches up with the Doctor we realise that the thread is his scarf which he is unravelling as though he has entered the labyrinth of Minos. See what Bidmead did there? Davison is literally unpicking Baker’s Doctor in order to make room for his own portrayal.

          “Ah, you’ve come to help me find the Zero room,” says the Doctor, who may have gained a doctorate in the bleeding obvious. “Welcome aboard. I’m the Doctor. Or I will be if this regeneration works.”

          This is the first time there has ever been any suggestion that regeneration might not work, something which is examined in other ways when Davison hands over to Colin Baker in a couple of years’ time. For now it is left hanging in the air while the Doctor rambles about Romana (long gone) runs out of scarf and begins leaving items of clothing as markers instead.

          Nyssa and Tegan have meanwhile found the Tardis Information System as they try to work out how to understand the controls. For a highly advanced piece of technical equipment the interface looks about as clever as a ZX Spectrum, which is probably what it was based on.

          To prove to any late comers that this is indeed Doctor Who they are watching, Davison now gives a passable impression of William Hartnell, all “Hmm” and waistcoat grabbing. Maybe Adric is confused, maybe not. Hard to tell with such awful facial expressions.

          In the console room Nyssa and Tegan have what might appear to be a pointless conversation about the subject of recursion but which is there to lay the seeds of the concept as it becomes integral to later episodes. All those who bitch that Moffat-era Who is too complex for kids to grasp should check out Castrovalva. The name ‘Castrovalva’ itself comes from an early M.C. Escher lithograph although not one which plays with perspective and visual recursion. Nyssa defines recursion as descriptive of ‘procedures which fall back on themselves’. Got that five years olds? Clear as mud from behind the sofa, I’d say.

          The Doctor is now channelling Troughton and wibbling on about Ice Warriors and the Brigadier (who, onscreen at least, had never encountered one another). He falls to the floor, convinced Adric is Jamie (if only, Frazer Hines can act): “When I say run, run! Don’t you understand. The regeneration is failing.” Adric thinks it will help if he just leaves the Doctor to it and goes wandering the corridors. Maybe it will help, maybe Adric will get kidnapped by Cybermen and blown up in the prehistoric Earth event which killed off the dinosaurs. We can only hope.

          In the console room the Tardis Information System is showing something about their destination being ‘Hydrogen in-rush. Event One’. It makes little sense to Nyssa and Tegan so they go looking for the others.

          The Doctor, now unencumbered by a sulky bad actor of a sidekick spots himself in a full-length mirror that just happens to be lying about in a corridor. He continues in the vein of Troughton, Pertwee and Baker by appearing slightly disappointed at his new appearance. “That’s the trouble with regeneration,” he mumbles “You never quite know what you’re going to get.” He fiddles with a conveniently placed recorder but it doesn’t seem to work for him. A quick play with a cricket bat is an altogether different thing, though, and prompts him to enter a dressing room full of cricket gear.

          Adric (yes him again, sorry) is stumbling through corridors and breathing heavily. I think it is meant to convey distress but it just makes him sound like he’s been having a wank. The Master is spying on him and saying “Mwahaha” so perhaps this newish incarnation of the Doctor’s deadly enemy is a peeping Tom and a swinger?

          The Doctor emerges from the dressing room in a snazzy cricket jumper and a pair of striped trousers which were last seen on a cricket pitch when W.G. Grace was smashing balls across boundaries. He grabs the crickety jacket near the mirror and a hat and decides he’ll get used to how he looks.

          

 Nyssa and Tegan catch up with the Doctor, almost literally bumping into him as he is chasing what he thinks is the sound of  the Zero room door closing. He is weaker now and unsteady on his feet. Luckily Nyssa finds the Zero room and they all enter. It’s rather like a space-age chill-out room without the beanbags, and Tegan thinks it smells ‘like roses’. The Doctor can’t recall why but does remember that the gravity is ‘only local’ and has a bit of a restful float in mid-air.

          The image of Adric, caught up in some weird metallic web, appears on a panel overhead. He pants and wriggles about as though the Master, who has captured him, is prepping him for a little BDSM. Be that as it may, Adric yells that he has locked the Tardis coordinates as a trap, presumably under the Master’s influence. Nyssa heads for the control room to try and sort things out.

          The Doctor wakes up prematurely and can feel that something is wrong. The Tardis Cloister Bell is chiming. He tries to leave the Zero room but is far too weak. Tegan pulls him back in and goes to look for Nyssa herself.

          Nyssa is surrounded by swirly gas at the console and puzzling over the display reading which is all about hydrogen. Tegan arrives moaning about how hot it is. Between them they work out that Event One means that the Tardis has been put on a collision course with the Big Bang. The ship rocks and everyone stumbles. The Master appears on a screen to gloat and shout “Farewell, forever!” at them. The credits happen.

          All is not well in Timelord land, then. Whereas Troughton and Baker were up and about and being proactive fairly swiftly after their regenerations, Davison is more like Pertwee in the respect that he is seemingly no good for anything yet aside from impersonating previous Doctors and calling his companions by the names of other companions he has known in the past.

          The fact that this Fifth Doctor is more reliant on the help of those he travels with is a recurring feature throughout his tenure. He’s still the Doctor, once he sorts himself out, and still a super genius and a hero, but he needs the humans (and alien folk) around him more, seems more vulnerable, not always so certain of his own brilliance. That’s quite a departure. All four previous Doctors may have had quirks and foibles but they shared a streak of arrogance and certainty which stretches from Earth to Gallifrey. It could be said that there are echoes of the Fifth Doctor in the Eleventh, given that it is by now completely clear that travelling without companions, and usually humans, is not a good idea for Matt Smith’s incarnation as it leads to his biggest emotional miscalculations. Oh and the glasses thing, but Tennant started that one.

       

   Viewing figures were initially good for Peter Davison’s arrival as the Timelord but by his second series they began to drop, a trend that continued through the 80s until Nathan-Turner had screwed the show up so much that the BBC finally got to cancel it (something people like Michael Grade had allegedly wanted to do for a very long time).

          In retrospect, the Fifth Doctor is unique in respect of a lightness of touch and the fact that he is less idiosyncratic than any of the other classic Doctors. Davison plays the Doctor more as an affable, if rather intelligent, older brother, not as a cracked genius deigning to hang out with lesser mortals and show them some of the wonders of the universe. For me his finest season was his final one, a last hurrah that saw him face down Daleks and Davros, outsmarting Sea Devils and even shrinking the Master down to size with his own shrinky down to sizey gun. Sadly he will be remembered as much for a stick of celery and the rubbish catchphrase ‘Brave heart, Tegan” as he will for these triumphs.