Time pair o' docs

[scarfman]

My favorite Doctor Who story of all time is The Two Doctors. I defended it in Dreamwatch Bulletin once back when it was Doctor Who Bulletin and solicited "defense against clangers" articles from the readership.

Baker's characterization is right for the first and perhaps only time after Holmes'd last written him dialog, the last shot of Caves of Androzani.

It's Troughton's best return performance, the only reunion when he wasn't written as a caricature of the character he played when he was the lead. (And I'm happier to see him in his own, graying hair than in the Five Doctors wig.)

The two companions presented represent either end of the range of them all, from the able-if-uneducated warrior to the whiner/screamer. And the interaction between the Doctor and Peri is real arguing, not just mindless bitching (review Timelash for contrast). This is partly because of Baker's Doctor's improved characterization as noted above, and partly just because Holmes is writing the dialog.

The guest characters are memorably characterized as well. Oscar Bocheby is effective comic relief at the beginning and tragic relief at the end. The villains are well matched, with Chessene's convoluted deviousness and the Sontarans' paranoid xenophobia to provide plot twists as we go along. Shockeye is nicely over-the-top (in America we'd say he chews the scenery, but I wouldn't give Shockeye ideas) in contrast to Dastari's woodenness (not Lawrence Payne's first appearance on Doctor Who. What was his first? Answer below...).

The defense against accusations of "cannibalism" are probably already all well known to everyone here. Just in case though: The definition of cannibalism is the ingestion of one's own species. The ingestion of a character's own species isn't depicted at any time in The Two Doctors. There is dialog that suggests Androgums believe in the practice of cannibalism - i.e., Shockeye's surprise that humans don't have recipes for eating humans - but no such incidents are portrayed.

The defense against this particular complaint of Season 22 violence, the Doctor's killing of Shockeye, is that it was self-defense: Shockeye was so much stronger than the Doctor (which admittedly was not pointed up in the script and/or action well enough to be clear) that anything less than deadly force against Shockeye would have been insufficient.

The issues about continuity don't scare me. Robert Holmes always believed that the Time Lords manipulated the Doctor's travels from his first departure from Gallifrey with Susan along; this was just Holmes' chance to write it in. The trial at the end of The War Games, Holmes maintained, was just proof of how mindbogglingly hypocritical the Time Lords always were. Once you get that far, the only continuity bobble left is Jamie's usage of the words "Time Lords", and doctoring the memories of one unwashed primitive humanoid can't be any challenge to a people to whom the degenerative time loop is a judicial sentence. (Of course, you're free to subscribe to an alternate interpretation of your choice as you wish; I only maintain that no alternate interpretation's necessary.)

Mostly, it was a story that could not have been told by any other show than Doctor Who, unlike most Doctor Who and much series sf. I mean, you couldn't have turned it into a (e.g.) STAR TREK script by merely making a global-search-and-replace of the hero's name for the other show's. We've all seen'em on both Doctor Who and STAR TREK: The Doomsday Machine episode. The Changing History episode. The Shootout at the OK Corral episode (in which, on Doctor Who, Lawrence Payne played the gunslinger Johnny Ringo). There are few like it on any series, and few series that demand such stories of every episode. I know; one of my hobbies is playing armchair story editor and converting stories from other sources into treatments for Doctor Who serials, like when I was rereading The DaVinci Code last week (my first was Raiders of the Lost Ark; my favorite is The Wrath of Khan). The Two Doctors is one of ours.

Edit Crosposted to doctorwho here.

Comments

Moby Trek

[athelind.livejournal.com]

...turned it into a (e.g.) STAR TREK script by merely making a global-search-and-replace of the hero's name for the other show's...

And on that note, one of the Laws of Star Trek is that Every Trek Series Has To Do Moby Dick At Least Once.

In classic Trek, of course, it was "The Doomsday Machine", which you used as an example above.

TNG didn't really get its Moby Dick moment until First Contact -- but that explicitly established the trope.

DS9 dedicated most of a SEASON to it, during the period when Our Heroes are evicted from the station by Gul Dukat and the Dominion, and Sisko is determined to the point of obsession to retake it. In fact, Dukat has much the same obsession during the REST of the series; DS9 is the Moby Volleyball caught between two Ahabs.

For Voyager, it's "The Year of Hell" -- which is easily one of my favorite Star Trek episodes, from ANY series. It's arguably the best of any of the Moby Trek iterations.

Did Enterprise ever do one? I gave up on the show early on.

Re: Moby Trek

[scarfman]

Did Enterprise do one? Yes. The whole of season three. Late in the season Archer stole someone's ship's warp core; subsequently I saw the word "thug" bandied about on the 'net.

I don't recall that Dukat's seizure of the station lasted "most of a season". But then, DS9 wasn't really Star Trek, which is why those who say it was the best Star Trek enjoyed it but I remember it poorly.

Re: Moby Trek

[guldensupp.livejournal.com]

Why wasn't "DS9" "Star Trek?" What rule did it break that made it non-Trek and made "Enterprise" (God, I hate prequels) or "Star Trek: Voyager" Trek?

I liked "DS9" a great deal, because it was the most literary, in the sense of characters. They all developed through the course of the series. Sisco was no longer the angry, young man; he had become a world-worn man of faith and character. Quark was more than a greedy money hungry businessman. And so on. True, "DS9" was a darker show in many ways and it explored themes that were ignored or treated with contempt by the other series (religion and the horror of mostly), but it was still in the ST universe and it explored and expanded on several of the original Trek stories ("Trouble with Tribbles," "Errand of Mercy," "Day of the Dove," and "Mirror, Mirror" to name those that I recall). It was much better than Enterprise, which threw established continuity out the window along with the bathwater.

Gregory (sorry for ranting)

Re: Moby Trek

[scarfman]

Why wasn't "DS9" "Star Trek?" What rule did it break that made it non-Trek and made "Enterprise" (God, I hate prequels) or "Star Trek: Voyager" Trek?

Mostly its darkness. A large part of what made 60s Star Trek a cult phenomenon was its optimism: "Things are bad now but we'll survive and they'll get better." DS9 has its triumphant moments, and its cuttingly dramatic moments, but it was never happy.

Another fundamental aspect of the difference is the way it developed Earth and the Federation. This started in late TNG, but perhaps only because they were working up to the DS9 premiere. One of Gene's first principles - you'll find it in The Making of Star Trek, Whitfield, 1968 - was never to go back to Earth, in aid of heightening the archetypal nature of the characters. DS9 was all about Earth's place in the universe, politically and spiritually. That's why Voyager was set seventy years' travel away; even Rick could see he'd wandered too far from the Vision.

Also it wasn't set on a ship. Even Voyager was set on a ship. DS9 really didn't feel like Star Trek to me at all till Sisko got a ship - and then he gave it to Worf.