Another adventure from the Island of Abandoned Posts …
Multi-Doctor adventures should be, indeed have been, a rarity in the overall canon of Doctor Who. And for good reason. When one era of the show segues into another, the audience (hopefully) moves on with the program, but the front-of-camera talent are quite ready to move on to the next chapter of their career. Multi-Doctor stories were reserved for Anniversaries such as The Three Doctors for the 10th or The Five Doctors for the 20th and, of course in nu-Who, The Day of the Doctor for the 50th. For the sake of this argument, we are overlooking the echo of Matt Smith in Deep Breath or bi-generational odd-ness which kept David Tennant around quite recently in The Giggle.
Through the increasingly determined efforts of JN-T in the early to mid-80’s, Doctor Who not only recognized, but started to strip mine for story continuity, the direction for new tales–even seasons–to take. Perhaps the apotheosis of this was getting Patrick Troughton back for a one-off story in the heart of the Colin Baker era in The Two Doctors. And there’s no getting around this–it’s an odd–and perhaps deliberately so–off-putting story.
In the nix-master through which stories were commissioned back then, the production team was determined to set stories out-of-England. Amsterdam and Lanzarote were budget-safe locations to set a story and film. Add in a returning monster and it’ll be ratings gold–at least that was the theory. When Robert Holmes was asked back to write in Doctor Who, he got this assignment. Notions of Autons in Singapore were floated and costed-out before being discarded. Even The Two Doctors was supposed to have been originally set in New Orleans before being re-routed to Seville.
But Holmes–with Troughton already committed–found these constraints a bit too much to overcome in the end., and as a result The Two Doctors just feels off somehow, and it shows. Nowhere is this exemplified better than in the representation of the Sontarans. Last seen in The Invasion of Time, they at least had a consistent representation of being short, squat, focussed clone soldiers in all of their appearances, until The Two Doctors.
Perhaps the heat of a Spanish summer was too blame, but these Sontarans were tall, as if a Cybermen had been incorporated into the design. Just one mis-step too many, along with some uniquely lackluster direction by Peter Moffatt, for why, in the end, the longest ‘completed’ story between The Armageddon Factor to the end of the classic era (and yes we view Season 23 as four stories instead of one) felt excruciatingly long back in 1985.
The HD-caps for The Two Doctors were completed quite awhile ago, but hey, if you haven’t seen them yet, they’ll be new to you.
