Production Code: 6W
First Transmitted
1 - 16/02/1985 17:20
2 - 23/02/1985 17:20
3 - 02/03/1985 17:20
Plot
The second Doctor and Jamie are sent by the Time Lords to space station Camera in order to put a stop to unauthorised time travel experiments being carried out there under the auspices of the head of projects, Dastari.
Dastari has been biologically augmenting Androgums, a race of voracious gourmands, including the chatelaine Chessene who has secretly allied herself with Group Marshal Stike of the Ninth Sontaran Battle Group. The Sontarans raid the station, killing almost all aboard. They capture the second Doctor and take him to Earth, imprisoning him in a hacienda near the Spanish city of Seville. There Dastari, also in league with the Sontarans, plans to dissect him in order to find the Rassilon Imprimature - the symbiotic nuclei within a Time Lord's genes that are the key to time travel.
The sixth Doctor and Peri rescue Jamie from the station and then follow the trail to Spain. The second Doctor is imprinted by Dastari with genes taken from Shockeye, the space station's Androgum chef, but the sixth Doctor rescues him and kills Shockeye.
Chessene destroys the Sontarans and, reverting to base instincts, kills Dastari. She herself then dies through molecular disintegration when she attempts to time travel without the Imprimature.
Episode Endings
The sixth Doctor and Peri make their way through the infrastructure of the seemingly deserted space station. The Doctor attempts to disarm the station's computer but receives a defensive blast of vorum gas in the face and collapses unconscious just as Peri is attacked by a fierce humanoid creature.
Peri runs from the hacienda chased by Shockeye. She trips and falls, and Shockeye quickly looms over her, muttering with delight.
The sixth Doctor and Peri head off to their TARDIS. Peri hesitantly enquires if they are going fishing again and the Doctor tells her that they are not: from now on, it is a vegetarian diet for both of them.
Roots
References to The Barber of Seville and Hamlet.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Oliver Wendell Holmes.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (cannibalism and the chase scene).
V and Time Bandits (rat eating).
The Island of Dr Moreau.
Waiting for Godot (Shockeye and the crude second Doctor).
Dialogue Triumphs
Sixth Doctor : "What's the use of a good quotation if you can't change it?"
Shockeye : ""The gratification of pleasure is the sole motive of action." Is that not our law?"
Chessene : "I still accept it, but there are pleasures other than the purely sensual."
Shockeye : "For you, perhaps. Fortunately, I have not been augmented."
Chessene : "Take care. Your purity could easily become insufferable."
Peri : "What's that awful smell?"
Sixth Doctor : "Mainly decaying food. And corpses."
Peri : "Corpses?"
Sixth Doctor : "That is the smell of death, Peri. Ancient must, heavy in the air. Fruit-soft flesh peeling from white bones. The unholy, unburiable smell of armageddon. Nothing quite so evocative as one's sense of smell, is there?"
Peri : "I feel sick!"
Stike : "It is not easy being commander. The loneliness of supreme responsibility..."
The Doctor : "Eternal blackness. No more sunsets. No more Gumblejacks. Never more a butterfly."
Double Entendre
Jamie : "Look at the size of that thing, Doctor."
The Doctor : "Yes, Jamie, that is a big one."
Shockeye : [Describes Peri] "A fine, fleshy beast"
"I've been for a scout round."
Continuity
The Doctor attended the inauguration of space station Camera before 'falling from favour'. Somehow Dastari has heard that the Doctor is no longer flavour of the month on Gallifrey [perhaps he hails from Minyos (Underworld) or Dronid (Shada)].
The sixth Doctor misquotes Dr.Johnson and attributes it to Rassilon. His address book features Archimedes, Brunel, Columbus, Dante and Da Vinci (see City of Death). He is able to close his respiratory passages when he detects the poisonous gas (see Pyramids of Mars), and can telepathically contact his previous incarnation on the 'astral plane'.
Ripples in time can be measured on the Bocca Scale (Kartz and Reimer's experimentation measured 0.4) The Doctor talks of the holistic fabric of time, which might have been punctured by the Kartz Reimer experiments. The space station was created by various Third Zone governments. [It is stated that humans have not yet reached the Third Zone, and it can be surmised that all the events take place in, say, the 1980s.]
The Sontarans seen here are taller than humans (see The Sontaran Experiment). Group Marshal Stike leads the 9th Sontaran Battle Group, and he and Varl use large rifles in addition to their usual wand-like guns. Sontarans have green blood, and are vulnerable to coronic acid.
The Doctor states that much of what he said about time travel was for Stike's benefit and consequently not true. Therefore the following 'statements' should be taken with a pinch of salt: he says that the biological make up of Time Lords features symbiotic nuclei, affording protection from molecular break up [and the Blinovitch limitation effect?] and symbiotic control of the TARDIS. This protection is extended to other travellers in the TARDIS.
[The implication is that if a Time Lord is not in the TARDIS then time travel (even if the controls could be understood) is deadly.] Time travel is impossible without some form of molecular stabilization system: Kartz Reimer used a briode nebuliser, into which the Doctor copies the 'Rassilon imprimature', turning the module into a fully functioning time machine.
When the Doctor is stabbed by Shockeye his blood seems very dark.
Gumblejacks are apparently very tasty fish. The Doctor becomes a vegetarian. Shockeye calls humans Tellurians. His money (narg notes) is redeemable on any of the Nine Planets. This is the only Doctor Who story to mention Shepton Mallet.
QV
Location
Space station Camera.
Seville and the surrounding countryside [1980s].
Links
Peri offers the Doctor celery when he seemingly faints, and he then talks of jelly babies and his recorder.
Untelevised
The Doctor has been to Seville before.
Trivia
The opening moments of the first episode, featuring the second Doctor and Jamie in the TARDIS, are in black and white - recalling the stories of the second Doctor's own era.
Jacqueline Pearce, better known as the evil Servalan in the BBC science fiction series Blake's 7, appears here as Chessene.
Goofs
The Androgums speak English (as Dona Arana recognizes).
Despite being a recluse, she is able to supply Shockeye with a current list of Seville restaurants.
Cast & Crew
Cast
The Doctor - Colin Baker
The Doctor - Patrick Troughton
Jamie - Frazer Hines
Peri - Nicola Bryant
Anita - Carmen Gomez
Chessene - Jacqueline Pearce
Dastari - Laurence Payne
Do-a Arana - Aimee Delamain
Oscar - James Saxon
Shockeye - John Stratton
Stike - Clinton Greyn
Technician - Nicholas Fawcett
Varl - Tim Raynham
Crew
Director - Peter Moffatt
The Two Doctors