Caves of Androzani at 40
As long as we’re talking about 40th anniversaries, this past Saturday marked 40 years since the last episode aired of “Caves of Androzani”, Peter Davison’s final story as Doctor Who.
One of the unique things about Doctor Who is the way it rolls its cast over on a pretty regular basis, including the actor that plays the title character. This isn’t totally unusual—Bond does the same thing—but what is unusual is that the show keeps the same continuity, in that the new actor is playing literally the same character, who just has a new body now.
The real-world reason for this is that Doctor Who is a hard show to make, and a harder show to be the lead of, and after about three seasons, everyone is ready to move on. The in-fiction reason is that when the Doctor is about to die they can “regenerate”, healing themselves but changing their body.
This results is a weird sub-genre of stories that only exist in Doctor Who—stories where the main character gets killed, but then the show keeps going. And the thing is, these basically never work. Doctor Who is a fairly light-weight family action-adventure show, where the main characters get into and out of life-threatening scrapes every time. “Regeneration Stories” tend to all fall into the same pattern, where something “really extra bad” is happening, and events conspire such that the Doctor needs to sacrifice themselves to save everyone else. And they’re always deeply unsatisfying, because it’s always the sort of problem that wouldn’t be that big a deal if the main actor wasn’t about to leave. There have been thirteen regular leads of the show at this point, and none of their last episodes have been anywhere near their best.
Except once.
In 1984, Doctor Who was a show in decline. No longer the creative or ratings juggernaut that it had been through most of the 1970s, it was wrapping up three years with Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor that could most charitably be described as “fine”. Davison was one of the best actors to ever play the part, but with him in the lead the show could never quite figure out how to do better than about a B-.
For Davison’s last episode, the show brought back Robert Holmes, who had been the show’s dominant—and best—writer throughout the seventies, but had’t worked on the show since ’79. Holmes had written for every Doctor since the second, but had never written a last story, and seemed determined to make it work.
The result was extraordinary. While most previous examples had been huge, universe-spanning stakes, this was almost perversely small-fry. A tiny colony moon, where the forces of a corporation square off with a drug dealer whose basically space Phantom of the Opera, with the army and a group of gun-runners caught in the middle. At one point, the Doctor describes the situation as “a pathetic little war”, and he’s right—it’s almost perversely small-scale by his standards.
That said, there are enough moving pieces that the Doctor never really gets a handle on what’s going on. Any single part would be a regular day a the office, but combined, they keep him off balance as things keep spiraling out of control. It’s a perfect example of the catalytic effect the Doctor has—just by showing up, things start to destabilize without him having to do anything.
What’s really brilliant about it, though, is that he actually gets killed right at the start. He and new companion Peri stumble into an alien bat nest, which lethally poisons them, even though it takes a while to kick in. Things keep happening to keep him from solving all this, and by the end he’s only managed to scare up a single does of antidote, which he gives to his friend and then dies.
It's also remarkably better than everything around it—not just the best show Davison was in, but in genuine contention for best episode of the 26 seasons of the classic show. It’s better written, better directed, better acted than just about anything else the old show did.
It’s not flawless—the show’s reach far exceeds the grasp of the budget. As an example, there’s a “computer tablet” that’s blatantly a TV remote, and there’s a “magma beast” that’s anything but. But that’s all true for everything the show was doing in the 80s—but for once, it’s trying to do something good, instead of not having enough money to do something mediocre.
My favorite beat comes about 3/4 of the way through, when the Doctor has either a premonition of his own death, or starts to regenerate and chokes it back—it’s ambiguous. Something happens that the Doctor shakes off, and the show won’t do something that weird and unclear again until Peter Capaldi’s twelfth Doctor refused to regenerate in 2017.
It also has one of my favorite uses of the Tardis as a symbol; at the end, things have gone from bad to worse, to even worse than that, and the Doctor, dying, carries the unconscious body of his friend across the moonscape away from the exploding mud volcano (!!), and the appearance of the blue police box out of the mist has never been more welcome.
As a kid, it was everything I wanted out of the show—it was weird, and scary, and exciting. As a grown-up, I’m not inclined to argue.