The Caves of Androzani Part Four

The one where the Doctor sacrifices himself to save Peri...

Roger Limb's score for The Caves of Androzani is one of my favourites of the entire canon. The music evokes a creeping, almost subcutaneous feeling of dread and doom, a constant background thrum which throws you emotionally off-kilter. It's a subliminal special effect (all the best music is subliminal in its effect) which tells you that something is coming, something bad. It has a doomy, uncompromising, funereal feel, telling us that the end is nigh, culminating in that gothic death knell, counting down the minutes until this Doctor's final end...

And what an end! The Fifth Doctor is seen as one of the most self-effacing incarnations, a man who feels things more than most of his other selves. This Doctor wears his hearts on his sleeve, and so must we as we enter his final phase. This is a brutal, challenging world he finds himself in at the end of his life - so different from the pastoral simplicity of Castrovalva, where he began.

The Caves of Androzani Part Three

The one where the Doctor almost has his arms ripped off...

The magma creature may not be the most realistic monster ever, but you have to admit it's a lovely design and, in a static sense, looks stunning. It probably looked better in an Doctor Who exhibition than it ever did on screen, but nevertheless, some of director Graeme Harper's camera angles manage to give the costume a degree of menace, at least for younger viewers. It advances on the armed soldiers mercilessly, all fangs and talons. It's not as lamentable as some people claim.

Salateen and Peri scramble back to Chellak's headquarters and the Major reveals all about his android copy and the fact Sharaz Jek has taps and cameras everywhere. Robert Glenister gives a sterling dual performance in this story (complete with an impressive wave of hair), striking the right balance between the real Salateen and the android version. Glenister is a master of the 'creepy stare', such as when he glares through the wall at the body prints of the hiding Salateen and Peri, or when the android just plain does not believe a word Chellak is telling him. The eyes are piercing and unsettling.

The Caves of Androzani Part Two

The one where the Doctor and Peri discover they have two days to live...

For years I felt that the style of The Caves of Androzani reminded me of something else I'd seen, but I was never able to identify it until this latest viewing. The wonderful politicking that goes on at the top of this episode between Morgus and the President - the knowing comments, the snarky back-and-forth - is like the House of Cards political thrillers written by Michael Dobbs, and which were soonafter adapted into a trilogy of TV mini-series by screenwriter Andrew Davies, producer Ken Riddington and director Paul "Graff Vynda-K" Seed. The way in which House of Cards' Francis Urquhart conspiratorially turned to camera to confide in the viewer is exactly the same as what Morgus does here. Yet The Caves of Androzani made it to screen more than five years before House of Cards...

The majority of this second episode is spent in Sharaz Jek's lair, where the Doctor and Peri get to know their new captor better. Yes, our heroes are still very much alive, not riddled with bullets and bleeding out on the floor of the cave as we were led to believe. Their saviour was Jek, a brilliant android engineer, who somehow managed to create lifelike android duplicates of the Doctor and Peri in super-fast time, replacing the real couple with the copies so that the robots could be executed and the real ones saved.

The Caves of Androzani Part One

The one where the Doctor and Peri are shot in a military execution...

Robert Holmes! Remember him? It's great to see one of Doctor Who's best ever writers back on the beat, writing for the show in the bright and ballsy 1980s. Last seen limping into obscurity following the damp squib that was The Power of Kroll, Holmes seems to have made a triumphant comeback for what will prove to be Peter Davison's final story. Just seeing that name on screen inspires much confidence.

I adore the opening sequence as we zoom through space towards a planet, accompanied by the familiar sound of the TARDIS materialising. It then fades to a shot of the battered old police box appearing on an alien world, its little light flashing enthusiastically. What a classic materialisation, a meat-and-potatoes conventional arrival for this Doctor's final adventure. Shots of Monument Valley in Utah were used to show the mountains of Androzani Minor, but somehow director Graeme Harper manages to make a sand quarry in Dorset look like an alien world, thanks in no small part to a beautiful glass shot.