Review of The Doctors Revisited – Fifth Doctor
By now you know the drill. It’s time to look back at the Fifth Doctor and his stint piloting the TARDIS. What made him unique?
Well, for one thing, at 29 years old, Peter Davison was the youngest actor ever to play the Doctor (a record he held until Matt Smith came along and beat him by two years). For another, he was already fairly well known, not least because he’d spent the previous three years or so as Tristan Farnan on All Creatures Great and Small (I’ll admit it took me quite a while to think of him as “the Doctor” instead of “Tristan” when I started watching pre-Hiatus Who).
Perhaps most importantly, though, he was the first one to go from watching the show every week to playing the lead. He knew what it meant to fans, because he was one of us.
All of these traits informed the way Davison played the Doctor, and helped make him an interesting contrast to the Fourth Doctor. Previously, iconically over-the-top Tom Baker had made the Doctor very alien and unpredictable. Davison’s Doctor had a more steady, “down-to-earth” and human quality. As Janet Fielding, who played Companion Tegan Jovanka, put it, Five was “less self-consciously eccentric.” (Fielding appeared in interview sections along with Davison himself; other Companion actors Sarah Sutton, Matthew Waterhouse, Mark Strickson, and Nicola Bryant; and post-Hiatus cast and production team members Steven Moffat, David Tennant, Marcus Wilson, Noel Clarke, and Hugh Bonneville.)
Having explored what set apart this Doctor from his predecessors, the documentary continues as always to his Companions. A large portion of the piece is spent on Five’s primary TARDIS crew of Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan. Because there were so many Companions at once, the dynamics among them provided a new element for storytelling. The most dramatic of these, of course, was the departure of Adric – to date still the only long-term Companion (I’m not counting the First Doctor’s one-story Companion Sara Kingdom or his two-story Companion Katarina here) to die on the Doctor’s watch. The event shocked viewers at the time, and though I know there are plenty of fans who have a strong dislike for the character, there can be no denying that no other Companion has been written out quite so dramatically.
Soon the Doctor was saddled with another unlikely Companion, in the form of Turlough, whose original backstory threw another big twist into the dynamics on board the TARDIS; he was there to kill the Doctor. It was a tough line to toe for actor Strickson – after all, how does one make the threat real, yet the character not irredeemably unpleasant? Somehow it worked, as Turlough then traveled with the Fifth Doctor through his penultimate adventure.
Finally we turned to the most notable of the Fifth Doctor’s enemies. He began his Regeneration battling the Master, and was plagued by his old nemesis throughout. It was even through the Master’s machinations that he ended up with perhaps his most bizarre Companion, the shape-shifting android Kamelion (though there is a brief clip including Kamelion, not so much as an oblique reference to it is ever made – appropriately enough, as it effectively disappears in every episode until its last, and no one really noticed).
More triumphantly, though, this era saw the return of the Cybermen for the first time in seven years. The triumph came in that the return was kept a complete surprise until the on-screen reveal at the end of Episode One (something that clearly could never be done today, with the ubiquity of the Internet and BBC security leaks ~grumble~). It was a great moment for viewers. I can only hope to be part of an audience experiencing something like that some day.
Rounding out the special, Moffat introduces the story chosen to represent Five’s era. The surprise has already been revealed, but even knowing ahead of time that the Cybermen appear, Earthshock is quite a good serial that stands the test of time remarkably well. I know plenty of people who consider Five “their Doctor,” and while I don’t have such an emotional investment, I’ve always liked him. If you’ve never had the opportunity to watch him, the Revisited/Earthshock combo is not a bad place to start.