Castrovalva Part Two

The one where 25% of the TARDIS is thrown away...

Nyssa, the girl who seems to know everything and likes you to know it, has to learn all about hydrogen by reading aloud from the TARDIS databank. This databank is quite a utilitarian affair: a uninspiring dun monitor screen, with verbose jargon in place of straightforward definitions and information. It's Wikipedia written by Christopher H Bidmead.

The entry for Standard Flight Procedures (stage 387) reads like an academic report: "If the Logical to Physical mapping techniques described in Stages 11-275 have been understood [some hope!] and implemented, i-o ambiguities should not normally create difficulties at this stage. On zeroing the coordinate differential, automatic systems reactivate the real world interface (see: Main Door, The Opening of). Main door closure techniques, though not a direct reversal of the above procedure, are centred around similar differential layer-slippage to create the minimum of user involvement in the mathematical sub-structure."

And the user is supposed to understand what the heck all that means?

As Tegan says: "Hogwash!" I do like how Tegan speaks her mind, and quite often it's something quite blunt but realistic. She might have gotten over her auntie's death super-quick, and she might have the capacity to accept time machines, alien worlds and dimensional transcendentalism with ease, but she also has a knack of saying what needs saying. While Nyssa's intent on just giving up and letting the TARDIS hurtle towards Event One, Tegan's having none of it, and comes up with the idea of "enormous thrust". If they can't stop the TARDIS heading towards oblivion manually, then perhaps the science of momentum can save them.

I'll tell you one thing though, that Nyssa needs a good slap. She can be so patronising sometimes! She's like the school swot, a know-it-all whose sole ambition in life is to make sure everybody else knows that she knows more than you! "You don't understand the physics of the situation," she lectures Tegan. I'm surprised the Aussie gal hasn't landed a good right-hook on the toffee-nosed Trakenite.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is being helped by his greatest ever companion, the TARDIS, which kindly opens up a first aid roundel and chucks a bunch of plasters and ointments at him. Not only that, but the TARDIS, bless her, sends an electric wheelchair to help him get about. This is the same TARDIS which was trying to communicate with its crew in Inside the Spaceship, under very similar apocalyptic circumstances. The Doctor makes his way to the control room, like a benign Davros, quoting Shakespeare as his synapses and neuropeptides spark into life. It's the heat, smoke and noise that's helping, although a nice cup of tea would have done just as well (The Christmas Invasion).

Popping on his brainy specs, the Doctor hurtles around the control room trying to get information out of his stumbling brain and into his companions. He suggests they create the thrust needed to escape the hydrogen in-rush by jettisoning chunks of the TARDIS. An entire quarter of the TARDIS's architectural configuration should create 17,000 tonnes of thrust, he says. But I thought the TARDIS was infinite, so how can he jettison a quarter of infinity? And where do all those rooms go, physically? Do they just float about in the void of space? And do they equate to another TARDIS? If one of the rooms to go was, say, the tertiary control room, would someone be able to hijack the rooms and use them as their own time machine? Questions, questions...

Questions such as, where's Adric? Tegan and Nyssa are still too scared to tell the Doctor that the boy's disappeared, even though telling him would probably be best all round. Adric is still a prisoner of the Master in his TARDIS (which looks very much like the Zero Room sprayed black). Adric's caught in quite an awkward position in the Master's evil web, although sometimes he looks quite "pleased" to be there...

The Master has used Adric's mathematical skills to conjure the calamity the Doctor has found himself in, although I'm not clear at which point Adric learnt block transfer computation. OK, he's good at sums, but block transfer computation was a specialism of the Logopolitans, who devoted their entire lives and personalities to the rhythm of the numbers. Suddenly, Adric has learnt their skills by osmosis, and these new skills have been abused by the Master.

Bidmead writes the Master like a pantomime villain, and any subtlety Anthony Ainley previously showed in delivery has gone out the window. The Master who used to be a scheming, charming, erudite arch-enemy under Roger Delgado, is now a chuckling loon who speaks in heady purple prose. He calls his grudge against the Doctor a "petty feud" (why are you bothering then?), and when he thinks the TARDIS has hurtled into the bowels of Event One, announces triumphantly: "The Universe is purged of the Doctor and his impossible dreams of goodness!"

This Master is as subtle as a Sontaran. He dresses in evil black, has an evil goatee beard, lives in a jet black TARDIS and laughs evilly at the slightest provocation. Ainley is Abanazar to Delgado's Moriarty. And he's very silly too, waving an over-theatrical farewell to the TARDIS at the end of part 1, and making use of a ridiculous mini platform which rises just a metre or so when he speaks to Adric. It takes a full nine silent seconds for that platform to reach its height, giving him negligible advantage. It's just silly, and slightly awkward to watch.

This Master is feeling lonely, and wants a friend to travel the Universe being evil with. He has chosen Adric as his ideal candidate (years later he opts for another young male in Chang Lee (TV movie), and even when he becomes a she, has the youthful Seb to hand (Dark Water)). Adric appears to go along with it, although I suspect he's stringing the Master along. I hope so anyway, because Adric has got history of betraying the Doctor (or at least appearing to).

Ever cautious in his evil planning, the Master has set a trap behind a trap for the Doctor, just in case he escaped Event One, which he has. This trap is "a joy to spring", apparently. What that trap is is unclear, for now...

Unfortunately, jettisoning 25% of the TARDIS has resulted in the all-important Zero Room being deleted (what are the odds?), so in order to try and balance the Doctor's withering mental state, Nyssa builds a Zero Coffin Cabinet out of what's left, namely the doors. As the episode enters its second half, what little pace there was slows right down to a dribble, and we spend too much time listening to Nyssa asking the Doctor what to do next, watching Tegan thinking about flying the TARDIS, and witnessing the scintillating scene of Nyssa unscrewing a hinge.

It's so dull. This is the first story of a new era, a new Doctor, a new season. We have a youthful, energetic cast, a producer keen to make his mark and freshen the programme up, and a new start for a reset Master. But everything so far has been so sedate and pedestrian, with ideas to the fore and action and adventure very much in the backseat. Bidmead even makes a journey to the dawn of the Universe seem like a slightly bumpy cart ride in the park.

What needs to happen is the TARDIS should land somewhere, the people need to get out and get immediately embroiled in some dangerous derring-do or fretful adventure. Like with The Power of the Daleks, Spearhead from Space and Robot. I'm actually getting tired of seeing all those endless grey TARDIS walls. I want out! It's like being in lockdown!

After reading about Dwellings of Simplicity in the TARDIS databank, Nyssa and Tegan decide to take the Doctor, in his Zero Coffin Cabinet, to a place called Castrovalva, in the Andromedan Phylox series. Castrovalva (as well as being a now defunct 'Nintendocore' rock band from Leeds) is best known as a 1930 lithograph by Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher, but did you also know that Escher based his picture on a real place, called Castrovalva, which nestles at the top of a steep hill in the Abruzzo region of Italy? So you can go there too, if you want, and experience its own special brand of simplicity.

Tegan manages to land the TARDIS in the lush green forest of Castrovalva, but on its side rather than upright. It makes for a delightfully eccentric scene, seeing Janet Fielding climb out of the police box prop. Puzzlingly, the dimensions inside the TARDIS reflect the awkward landing, and everything's skew-whiff, even though the internal dimension is separate to the external shell. I'll let that slide though, because Fiona Cumming directs it so well.

Nyssa and Tegan haul the Doctor, entombed in his Zero Coffin Cabinet, out of the TARDIS, and use the wheelchair to push him through the forest towards the fabled Castrovalva. The location filming at Buckhurst Park is gorgeous, and looks crisp and suitably warm on film. Has there ever been a greener green? The trouble is, now our heroes have actually arrived somewhere vaguely interesting, they proceed to do extremely uninteresting things. Yes, the setting is beautiful, but can we have a bit more pace and incident please?

And when I mean incident, I don't mean a wheelchair tumbling into a pond (although I actually punched the air when Nyssa fell in). These scenes are intensely boring. We're essentially watching two young women push a cabinet around a forest, accompanied by a blissfully pastoral score by Paddy Kingsland that soon begins to sound as tired as the plot. It's an earworm, but one that burrows half-heartedly rather than drives you insane.

But there is hope. There's something watching them from the undergrowth, something that looks promisingly tribal, and I'm hoping they attack soon. Tegan and Nyssa gently (but ineffectually) hide the Doctor's Zero Coffin Cabinet with a bunch of fern leaves before trying to climb the rocks to get to the fairytale-like Castrovalva at the top (is Castrovalva a planet or a city?). They do this in heels. Tegan does this in the same heels, and the same air hostess's uniform, that she put on when she woke up on the morning of Logopolis part 1. She's been through an awful lot since - she's run around cloister rooms, been to an alien planet and back, run across fields, been frisked, stolen an ambulance, endured the superheated TARDIS interior, and carried a 6ft 1in Time Lord in a cabinet through an alien forest.

Tegan must stink! But when given the chance to go and change, she decides not to, even though Nyssa has managed to find something remarkably Trakenesque in the TARDIS wardrobe. Tegan, I think you're going to regret not taking that opportunity. At least change your knickers!

Giving up their climbing expedition before they've really started, the girls go back to the Doctor's cabinet to try and wake him up. But, oh no! There's blood on the ground, and the Doctor's disappeared! The sight of an empty box for the cliffhanger sums up how empty and demoralising this entire episode has been.

First broadcast: January 5th, 1982

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Buckhurst Park looks splendid.
The Bad: It's all so dull!
Overall score for episode: ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: Part Three...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Three; Part Four

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site.

Castrovalva is available on BBC DVD as part of the New Beginnings box set. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Beginnings-Logopolis-Castrovalva/dp/B000LE1HLQ/