How exciting! All five Doctors in one story! Well....William Hartnell who played the first Doctor was actually dead at this point so really I should say...How exciting! Four Doctors in one story! Well...Tom Baker decided not to return so technically it's only three Doctors. Confused yet?
With the 50th anniversary fast approaching this year, it was fun to sit down and see how the celebrations were played out for the 20th anniversary.
Given the fact that William Hartnell had died by this point the decision was made to hire a new actor who vaguely resembled him to play the part of the first Doctor. This was brave decision and not one I could imagine them doing today! I think they got away with it here because at this point old episodes of Doctor Who were not readily available and so the public may not have been as familiar with William Hartnell as we are now.
William Hartnell is not completely unrepresented however as, in a rare pre-credits sequence, we see an old clip of him taken from the end of The Daleks Invasion Of Earth as he bids goodbye to his granddaughter Susan with the words "One day I shall come back, yes I shall come back..." It was quite thrilling to see him again and really demonstrated how far I had come in my quest. I originally saw this clip over a year ago on the 12th January 2012!
Meanwhile Tom Baker turned down his invitation to return to the series which is a real shame! At this point he had only been gone for two years and I suppose having played the part for so long he really didn't feel like returning to a role he was pretty much already type cast in! We still get to see him however as footage is used from the incomplete story, Shada, before he is apparently trapped in a time eddy after being captured by the mysterious floating triangle which captures the other four Doctors.
The main plot of the story is that someone has kidnapped all the incarnations of the Doctor and placed them down in "The Death Zone" on Gallifrey. Here they all head to the tower in the centre which holds the tomb of one of the greatest Time Lords of all time, Rassilon, who apparently leaned the secret of immortality...so how did he die exactly?? Along the way the Doctor and his companions meet many an old foe, from Daleks, Cybermen, the Master, Yeti and a few new ones including the excellent Raston Warrior Robot! The Raston Warrior Robot kicks the Cybermens asses in one of the more spectacular scenes from the story. One part that especially sticks out to me is when one Cybermen gets impaled through the chest unit and lurches forward to vomit out some white gunk!
As well as the returning Doctors we also get many returning companions! Susan is back by her Grandfathers side and wastes no time in falling over and spraining her ankle proving that things rarely change!
Sarah Jane is also back. She is still living with K9 apparently who fortunately gets left at home. Poor Sarah Jane is involved in one of the poorer parts of the story when she is required to fall down a steep embankment only for the third Doctor to come along the road and rescue her. Unfortunately it seems the production team were unable to find a suitable location to film this scene and therefore poor Elizabeth Sladen as Sarah has to pretend to be trapped down a slight hill. As she is hauled up by the Doctor's rope its blatantly obvious that she could clearly just stand up and walk back up the hill!!
The second Doctor's companion is the Brigadier, despite the fact he had only just had a return to the series in Mawdryn Undead it was still awesome to see him back.
As the Doctors and companions get to the tower we see other companions acting as phantoms designed to keep people away from Rassilon's tomb. These include Liz Shaw and Captain Yates for the third Doctor and Zoe and Jamie for the second Doctor. The second Doctor realise that Zoe and Jamie must be mere phantoms when he remembers that as the Time Lords wiped all memory of him from their minds then Zoe and Jamie should not remember the Doctor at all. Now this throws up a problem in continuity. I can't go into to much detail here as its pretty complicated and it's not an exaggeration to say that books have literally been written about this problem. I will outline it below. It is known as the "Season 6b Hypothesis"
During the second Doctors final adventure at the end of season 6, he is eventually caught and put on trial by the Time Lords for his interference. Jamie and Zoe are returned to their own times with the memory of the Doctor erased from their minds and the Doctor is exiled to Earth with a new face thereby becoming the third Doctor. So the problem is, if the memory erasure happens just before the Doctors exile and forced regeneration, then how can the second Doctor as seen in The Five Doctors be aware of Zoe and Jamie having their memory erased as this could not possibly have happened yet from his point of view?? Therefore, as we never actually see the regeneration from second Doctor to third Doctor, the hypothesis has been established by fans (and pretty much made canon by some BBC books) that there must be a missing season between seasons 6 and 7 where the Doctor was not straight away exiled to Earth but first made to run errands for the Time Lords. I'll touch on this subject much later when I do my review of the sixth Doctor story, The Two Doctors, as things will hopefully make more sense then!
Anyway back to the story in hand. I love The Five Doctors, it's just a great celebration of the show. It's also much longer than I remembered it to be! I told my brother that I'd have to take over the television for a bit longer this night as instead of a 23 minute episode I was going to have to watch one that was about an hour long but I think the actual running time of the story comes to about 1 hour 40 minutes!
If I had any criticism of the story it would be that its shame that for the most part the Doctors are kept separate from each other, having their own little adventures on the way to the tower. They do meet at the end but it would have been nice to see them meet sooner as the banter between them sometimes is just brilliant and I would have liked to have seen more of it.
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