Who Reviews Castrovalva by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s walking up the down staircase.

  

First stories are always – or at least mostly always – unreliable affairs that at best give you an inkling of what the new Doctor will be like. In the history of Doctor Who, it’s also become quite the thing for new Doctors to spend most of their first story asleep, confused, staggering about the place or, in one later case, just a bit psychotic, to stir the pot of confusion as to what the emergent Doctor’s personality will be like once they’ve settled down and got on with some proper Doctoring.

Castrovalva, like Spearhead from Space before it and The Christmas Invasion many years later, chooses to put the Doctor into a restorative sleep for great chunks of its story. Were one to be in a particularly cruel or catty mood, one could say that in Castrovalva’s case, the Doctor had perhaps read the script in advance and decided to get forty winks in while he could.

The joy, the exuberance of Doctor Who was under significant attack at that time, as the supposed silliness of the Graham Williams and Douglas Adams team gave way to the John Nathan-Turner/Christopher H Bidmead era of equally supposed but rather more self-proclaimed seriousness. Hence, the exuberant Fourth Doctor was written out in a forgettable beige maths-lesson of a story (Logopolis), and the new Doctor, the youngest to date, was written in with what amounts to nothing much beyond an homage to Escher and his geometrically-impossible but philosophically interesting drawings.

Castrovalva is a trap from start to finish – a plot of the newly-regenerated Master’s to trap the Doctor and his friends in an ever-confusing looping of space and time so things happen again and again without ever getting anywhere. It’s been noted elsewhere that John Nathan-Turner, bless him, had an almost catastrophic gift of taking the narrative inside the viewer’s mind and slapping it up on screen. After the show had been on hiatus for eighteen months and its very future was at stake, it was Nathan-Turner who would decide to put the Doctor on very public trial in later years.

The writing of this instinct is very much on the wall in Castrovalva, where after years of the assured and beaming presence of Tom Baker in the Tardis, many fans were unsure that this callow Davison youth could effectively embody the role of their favourite Time Lord. Hence, with the audience-calming instinct of a lemming, in Castrovalva the young new Doctor announces ‘I’m the Doctor – or will be if this regeneration works out,’ ‘That’s the trouble with regeneration – you never quite know what you’re going to get’ and ‘Oh no – the regeneration is failing!’ Way to calm fears, there.

Add to that the odd division of the story into ‘Tardis sections’ where the Doctor wanders about getting swamped by previous versions of himself and then going for a mid-air nap, ‘Master sections’ where the new Master gets his Fifty Shades of Adric on round the back of the Tardis set, and then the actual Castrovalvan plot, which is so basic a fully-regenerated Doctor of any stripe would sort it out within minutes, not to mention the seemingly endless shots of Nyssa and Tegan trudging around the woods with a Zero Coffin supported between them, and what Castrovalva gave us back in the day was a way to confirm many of our worst fears straight off the bat - this was not a Time Lord we recognised. If anything, for most of the run-time of Castrovalva, the Fifth Doctor rather fails to take much shape at all.

When he finally begins to pull himself together, in an environment of books and learned blokes with beards though, there are glimmerings. Hopeful glimmerings of a new way of being the Doctor. He could probably do the running about and standing up to villains, but this new young Doctor, aided by a certain height and slimness of stature, seems more like a Thinking Doctor. A quieter Doctor, who clocks everything that’s going on, and while everyone else is running about and panicking, pieces solutions together, allowing him, at the crucial moment, to tear a tapestry, throw a thingummybob and save the universe. That, it becomes clear, is how this Doctor rolls – always thinking, only acting when he absolutely needs to, and when he’s absolutely certain of being effective. As such, it’s a very different Doctor to the one who fell to his death off a Big High Telescopey Thing in the previous story, but even though about 75% of Castrovalva is taken up with faff and sleeping, in the time he gets to really stamp his Doctor on the screen, Peter Davison does something that gives us a different direction, a different take on the character. In essence, he does the same sort of thing as his eventual successor in the Youngest Doctor stakes, Matt Smith, does in his first story, The Eleventh Hour. He takes what’s on the page and makes you focus on his Doctor while everything else is going to hell. Focus on Peter Davison when he emerges from his nap in Castrovalva and you won’t go far wrong – even while Anthonly Ainley, bless him, is trying to act him off the screen as the Portreve, and doing a damn good job of it too. It’s Davison’s gathering into himself of the role that catches and keeps the eye, as he becomes a point of focus while the mathematical rules of matter go utterly tits-up and old men turn out to be invigorated evil gits, and history turns out to have been written this afternoon. Peter Davison, by the end of Castrovalva - or rather by about the end of Episode 3 of Castrovalva – is the Doctor. He’s by no means Tom Baker’s Doctor, but you can’t take your eyes off the young blond man, because it’s like someone has poured the essence of the Doctor into this man’s frame and he’s been coming to terms with the oldness of himself in the youngness of his body, and by the end of Episode 3, he’s ready to do the whole universe-saving thing, but in his own way and his own style.

Castrovalva is unlikely ever to top polls of ‘favourite regeneration’ stories – almost every other regeneration story is better than it, with perhaps a notable exception for ‘the next one.’ But against the background of a shonky script and an endlessly beige ‘world,’ Davison and Ainley together succeed in wringing some drama, some meditations on renewal, and above all, a new way of being the Doctor that doesn’t involve being Tom Baker, out of the story, kicking us into a new era of a show that had long seemed inseparable from its previous star.