The Tour makes it’s last foray into Davison Classic Capitology for quite a while with a vastly improved set of caps from Earthshock. Every Doctor has a story which seems to cement that actor as the Doctor. To this end Peter Davison was arguably not terribly well-served by his initial run of stories. Castrovalva was all about instability, in Four to Doomsday you could see him still wrestling with the part, Kinda has all sorts of oddities attached to it, and The Visitation is a bit vanilla. But Earthshock positively teemed with drama, only the second appearance of the Cybermen in 14 years, this was a story which moved with authority and precision.
And then there’s Adric.
No way to avoid that one. Companions come, but Adric was, in essence, the first companion to really go. The first “companion death” since both Katarina and Sara Kingdom died in The Daleks Master Plan, but really the first one to matter (because let’s face it, aside from being from the Hartnell era, did either Katarina or Sara Kingdom stick around in the series long enough to matter in the long view), all of the signposts were there. In taking the decision to have Adric die in Earthshock, it did feel like the series was shedding a share of its innocence, but the ramifications would reverberate all the way to The Caves of Androzani.
It’s a seminal tale, one of the very few stories which made each of the four individual lists for the 50 for 50 Countdown (oddly it never got chosen for the overall list, but that’s just luck of the draw).
The 50th Anniversary looms ever larger and the pace of Classic Capitology quickens. Where will it all go next?
