I always find it very easy to forget just how good The Caves of Androzani actually is. I first watched this story 30 years ago as part of the BBC’s 1993 repeat season, where then showed a story from each & every Doctor on a Friday night, and as a result it would have been one of the first Peter Davison stories I watched properly. If this is your introduction to an era, then it’s very easy to take it that the rest are just like this, and just as good. Especially when you’re 13.
But then, of course, you go and watch the rest of Doctor Who, and you get swept up in how wonderful all the other eras and Doctors are, and so you start taking this one for granted. It’s not until you go back and watch it again that you realise: it’s brilliant. Just brilliant.
I’ve mentioned before that Eric Saward & JNT were a script editor & producer who were paired together longer than they should have: they just didn’t seem to work well together. The reason for this I think is that that Saward was writing for a hard drama series, while JNT was producing a light entertainment show. Basically it was a clash of guns & frocks, and neither seemed to know how to work best with each other. One of JNT’s weaknesses was that he wouldn’t allow previous writers to return to the show, so it must have been like Christmas had come early for Saward when he managed to get Bob Holmes on board to write a story.
Holmes is right up Saward’s street. Although he started writing under Terrance Dicks, when it came to making the show himself, the stories he made were darker, more violent than previously. Saward is not a writer to let a character walk out of a story alive, and so to find a writer who could play to his wheelhouse and do it so well must have been bliss for him. You can sense a bit of hero worship in the way that Saward structures Season 22 in the image of this story – especially his own Revelation of the Daleks.
That’s not to say Saward doesn’t have his dabs all over this story. The setting is very reminiscent of Saward’s Earthshock, with the studio bound caves swarming with boiler suited soldiers just like the first two episodes of that story. No one makes it out alive at the end, with the exception of Krau Timmon; characters are held at gunpoint & force fed suicide pills, and are tortured for information. It’s a brutal, gritty, fatalistic story, but one that succeeds because it’s the last great Robert Holmes script.
There’s a lot to be said for Graham Harper’s direction of this story as he makes his Doctor Who debut proper1; there’s a dynamism that is perfect for the story, his use of close ups is fantastic and he gets some amazing performances from his cast, but the real reason this story is a classic is down to the writing.
Holmes plots everything perfectly. Part One is pure world building: all the characters are introduced – including the Magma Beast – and the stage is set. The Doctor and Peri do very little other than blunder around & get captured, but we understand exactly what is going on in this world; who everyone is, and what part they play in events. But this isn’t just any world building, this is Bob Holmes world building, so we get a rich, fully formed society – full of Kraus and Traus, spectrox, and a dozen other little tidbits that are left for us to imagine the bigger world these people live in. Nicola Bryant plays Peri’s increasing fear as she approached her fate beautifully – if only she were given more opportunities than this to show what she could do, other than just be ogled at by the Villain of the Week.
But ogled she must be, as we head into Part Two and we get a proper introduction to Sharez Jek, surely one of the finest villains that we’ve ever had: a triumph of costume design and performance by the wonderful Christopher Gable. There’s more than a touch of Jek in Flux‘s Swarm, and Gable glides around the set, flipping from louche charm to malevolent rage in an instant. Holmes fills Jek with depth and backstory that makes him tragic and almost sympathetic…. but not quite. He also gives him some fantastic dialogue; please tell me I’m not the only one who has called anyone a prattling jackanapes…?
By Part 3 the TARDIS Team are separated – as are the Doctor and his arms, almost. As events spiral, the pieces move into place for the final bloodbath, each side destroying the other; the die was cast of The Doctor’s departure as he & Peri catch spectrox toxaemia very early on, and Holmes does so well at keeping the increasing sense of dread going through the whole story, building to the climax. It gives The Doctor more than one hero moment to go out on, his Part 3 cliffhanger only being beaten by his sacrifice in giving Peri all the bat’s milk. After that, it’s time for change: and not a moment too soon…
As a final episode this is a helluva way to go out. Davison is on peak form here, playing his Season 21 flippancy and sarcasm down in the quieter moments when needed, but never losing sight of it. The Nu Who method of doing regeneration stories is to have a full blown, epic celebration of the Doctor who is leaving; the Classic series went with the approach of “The Doctor will always get out of every pickle he’s in, until such time as we don’t want him to” – and this is a classic example of that. From the very start The Doctor’s fate is sealed, with the plot pushing him forward only in as much as it gets him closer to that inevitable end. Bar a few choices here & there, this is as close to Raiders of the Lost Ark as Doctor Who gets, in that the central characters have little effect on the eventual outcome of the story; from The Doctor’s initial curiosity they spend the next four parts just trying to get out of the situation they’re in. That fatalism and the sense that it’s not actually going to happen this time just builds & builds, driven by an amazing writer, director and cast all coming together beautifully.
Davo has went on record to say that if he’s had more stories of this quality, he would have stayed on, but you can’t sustain a season with stories like this – as Saward shows in Season 22, when he tries to bottle lightning and produce more of the same, but with vastly reduced results. It’s interesting that it took me another decade or so to see the end of Androzani after the 1993 repeat: I had set the VHS to record while I was out, but the transmission started late so the last 2 minutes or so were chopped off. Still, I’m sure I didn’t miss much… After a few more abortive attempts to watch it on UK Gold it wasn’t until the DVD came out that I finally got to see the end.
Maybe that’s why I don’t watch The Caves of Androzani often. Or maybe it’s because, much like Holmes’ work as script editor, I think it’s best savoured rather than chugged. Either way, I’m looking forward to the next way the quality of this story takes me by surprise.
COMING TOMORROW: “You will be like uzzzzz…..”
- Warrior’s Gate doesn’t count I’m afraid ↩︎
Skies Full of Diamonds 