Tony’s counting down.
Four to Doomsday has
something of a forgettable reputation among Who-fans, which does it a
considerable injustice. As with Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith and his Time of
Angels, the first story Peter Davison worked on as the fully-fledged Doctor is
for the most part a high-point in his first season, delivering a Doctor more
sure of himself after his regeneration. Four to Doomsday shows plenty of sides
to this new Doctor, who could all too easily have suffered by comparison to his
predecessor’s huge personality. We see his enthusiasm for science and gadgetry,
his charm and humour when presenting himself and his companions to the people
on whose ship he arrives, his whirring mind behind a young warm smile, and
something new – if you actually look at what happens throughout the course of
Four To Doomsday, the Fifth Doctor keeps his hands remarkably clean all the way
along, only acting decisively to do what the humans can’t. Showing a charm that
mingled Pertwee with Hartnell’s original in stories like Marco Polo, and
disguising his rebellious cunning behind smiles in a way of which the Second
Doctor would be proud, Four To Doomsday gives Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor what
could well have become a signature characteristic – a commitment to the
self-determination of the people he meets along his travels. Most of his work
in Four to Doomsday involves simply talking, persuading Bigon and Lin Futu of
the folly of going along with Monarch’s insane ambitions. It’s only at the end
of Episode 4 that the Fifth Doctor acts against Monarch, and when he does, it’s
so simple and almost thoughtless, it takes our breath away. Really though, he
acts to rob Monarch of his power, because by then the Doctor knows the
post-Flesh-Time humans would be prevented from doing so themselves. There are
plenty of similarities between the Fifth and Tenth Doctors, but Four To
Doomsday shows us a Fifth Doctor who seems, like the Tenth in Human Nature/The
Family of Blood, to feel the responsibility of the Time Lord, to understand how
easy it would be to take decisive action immediately and put a stop to the
Urbankan insanity, but instead acts only when he has to, going out of his way
until then to be merely an idea, an inspiration to revolt.
The story of Four To
Doomsday, from writer Terence Dudley (who also wrote Black Orchid and The
King’s Demons), admittedly doesn’t make an enormous amount of sense – giant
walking froglike creatures who have moved beyond ‘Flesh-Time’ and appear to be
on a permanent commute from their home planet of Urbanka to Earth and back
for…y’know…Reasons, are just about believable. Their manipulation of matter,
allowing them to take forms that are significantly less froglike, is nifty –
and also probably saved Persuasion and Enlightenment actors Paul Shelley and
Annie Lambert from a few gruelling hours in the make-up chair each morning. Humans
reduced to androids with circuitry-souls…OK. One has to ask why anyone would do
such a thing, but OK, we can cling on to the story that far.
When it turns out that
Monarch is more or less out to strip the Earth of its mineral wealth (this
time, but never before), so he can travel faster than light, go back to the beginning
of time and have a chinwag with…himself, (because he’s so brilliant he must
surely have created the universe)…well, OK, logic and reason have pretty much
leapt out of an airlock after a cricket ball. There seems to be a lot going on
in the background of Terence Dudley’s imagination of the storyline that never
entirely makes it onto the screen, leaving only these bumpy impressions of
ideas – Flesh-Time, and the move beyond it, Monarch’s scientific genius and his
subsequently vast, narcissistic egotism.
But if you stop worrying
for a moment about what Four To Doomsday is actually about, what you’re left
with is an environment where a driven megalomaniac and his obedient ministers
and slaves control every aspect of life, with a ticking clock of devastation to
Earth and the megalomaniac’s desire to seem like a reasonable, benevolent frog-god
colouring everything the Tardis team are allowed to say and do. After the
confusionfest that was Castrovalva (and Logopolis for that matter), such a societal
set-up was actually surprisingly simple, for all the reasoning was mad, and
when you have an actor like Stratford Johns as your central megalomaniac, what
you have is a situation which, however weird it might be, and however much he’s
covered in green face paint and Rice Krispies, is leant a surprising amount of
gravitas, subtlety and knife-edging by his performance. Persuasion and
Enlightenment, while having the look (presumably deliberate given their
in-story creation based on Tegan’s drawings) of Fifties noir pulp fiction characters,
bring a certain suavity to the Urbankans that adds to the surreality of the
situation as they flank their Monarch, underlining the difference between them.
Having some of the leading
humans played by actors of the standing of Philip Locke and Burt Kwouk, (Bigon
and Lin Futu) raises the stakes even further, and this is the point – the Fifth
Doctor had big shoes to fill after the departure of Tom Baker. We defy any
actor to succeed as well as he needed to do in a Christopher H Bidmead script,
so Four To Doomsday was Davison’s first real chance to shine and establish this
new Time Lord, and with actors of this quality, and a script which, subjected
to even the most cursory scrutiny, results in a lot of blank looks and
blinking, the Fifth Doctor could have failed right out of the gate.
That didn’t happen.
It didn’t happen because
Stratford Johns was a good enough actor to give Monarch some credibility in
spite of the bizarre premise of the story, but more than that, it didn’t happen
because Peter Davison walked into Dour To Doomsday and nailed the Fifth Doctor
to every corner of the screen. You simply can’t take your monopticons off him
for a second, strolling and bounding around the ship with authority, with
purpose, with the cheery smile that was so unlike his predecessor’s unnerving
goggle-eyed manic grin, and mastering his environment, bizarre though it was.
We see the wheels turning, Troughton-like, behind the smile, we see the
Pertweean politesse when dealing directly with Monarch and his ministers, and
we see shades of Baker’s bluntness too, calling Adric an idiot and telling him
to shut up, and similarly silencing Tegan so that she doesn’t break his
concentration. But all of it is mastered by this young-looking, blond new
Doctor, sometimes trying his hand at a comedy no-one understands, and still
poking at areas of his personality to see who he really is, but striding and
bounding around Monarch’s totalitarian state with an air of being able, should
he wish to do so, to absolutely own it, to bring it tumbling down, with just a
handful of words. The terrible gift of the Time Lord, worn with a new, younger,
lightness of step that make us curious all over again about the Doctor and of
what, on a bad day, he might be capable.
Rather more than Tom Baker’s bold
performance which wears its intellectual dangers on its sleeve, Davison’s
Doctor seems like an insidious idea in the midst of any autocracy, like a
nuclear bomb trying desperately not to have to explode your world and hoping
you never give him cause.
Now yes, absolutely, the
wheels start trundling off Four to Doomsday in Episode 4, which seems
determined to get its money’s worth from the ‘entertainment’ extras it’s paid
for – its dragon dancers and wrestlers and aboriginal dancers and so on. Then
of course there’s the overextended ‘Doctor in Space’ CSO sequence. And the
unfortunate, sudden ‘Wait, what happened there?’ business of the Doctor
throwing Monarch’s flask of poison straight at its owner at the end, where it
somehow shatters on nothing-remotely-shatterworthy-at-all, and shrinks the
Urbankan down to the size of a toad. The suddenness of that in particular
unravels three episodes of building politesse that show the Fifth Doctor off to
singular advantage. When the Fifth Doctor decides you can’t be saved, when the
bomb of an older man’s justice in a younger man’s body finally goes off, doing
what the humans need him to do, he’s something more shocking and heartless than
you expect the Doctor to be. With a little more writing making its way to the
screen, that could have been an edgy new element to his personality, but with
the best will in the world, in Four to Doomsday, it just feels rushed and
senseless, undermining three episodes of good work.
For all the unravelling in
Episode 4 of Four to Doomsday though, if you’re looking for a mesmerising early
Fifth Doctor performance, you’d be hard pressed to find better than his second
story. Give it another spin today and remind yourself of the power of the first
‘young’ Doctor.
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