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 Doctor crash-lands Stotz's ship, and is immediately on the run. Peter Davison puts 100% into his swansong, never forgetting that as well as being hunted like a dog across an arid landscape by mercenaries with machine guns, the Doctor is also dying from spectrox poisoning, and struggling to walk due to the paralysing effect of toxaemia. The Doctor briefly collapses as he stumbles out of the ship, and struggles to stay upright as he flees from his deadly pursuers across the relentless terrain of Androzani Minor. Battered, bruised and torn, the Doctor falls headlong over the side of a cliff, landing upside down on his back, exposed to the mercy of his enemies.

Luckily (for now at least) that's when the planet decides to have one of its periodic mudburst eruptions, affording the Doctor time to escape Krelper and his men (and also affording us an intriguing camera shot of Davison's crotch exploding!). The Doctor is set on finding and saving his friend Peri, but fears there's "not enough time", echoing his words in this story's very first scene where he told Peri he once kept a diary, "but the trouble with time travel is one never seems to find the time". He's certainly short of it now.

Meanwhile, Sharaz Jek is becoming desperate, firing his machine gun into the murk in the hope of killing Chellak. "The war's over!" shouts the General. "NEVER!" growls Jek, pumping several bullets into the cave without aim or target. Chellak manages to infiltrate Jek's base and sets about the leathery lothario, until the point where he tears off his mask and is horrified by what he sees. The audience does not see Jek's face, but Martin Cochrane's terrified reaction tells us everything our imaginations can cope with. Jek shoves Chellak out into the corridor, just in time for him to be engulfed by a mudburst, thus meeting the same burning fate Jek did when he was disfigured in the baking chamber.

Jek (shown via shaky handheld camera) makes his way to Peri, but when she looks up and sees his exposed face, she screams, sending Jek scurrying like a cowering babe under a desk, sobbing in despair. This swift transition from murderous mutant to weeping child is unsettling and utterly compelling. Christopher Gable gives a stunning performance here, and all credit to director Graeme Harper for allowing him the space to do so. Writer Robert Holmes has taken the best aspects of his previous creation Magnus Greel (or 'Bent-face' as Leela called him), fused it with some of the trappings of The Phantom of the Opera, and produced an all-time classic Doctor Who villain. He's not just ugly on the outside, he's ugly on the inside too, but let's not forget that even monsters and madmen have feelings...

We finally see Sharaz Jek's disfigured face when Morgus and Stotz rock up to try and pinch the spectrox. Jek hears his arch-enemy's voice first. "Mmmmmmorgussss!" he spits, turning to confront his nemesis. He's been waiting a long time for this. Threatened with guns, Jek is blinded by his hatred: "Do you think bullets can stop me now?" Tearing off his mask again, he demands: "Look at me!" It's proper nightmare fuel for kids, and although the face make-up isn't quite as disfigured or horrific as I imagined (or as seen in The Talons of Weng-Chiang), it still makes you wonder how they got away with some of this stuff as family viewing (I'm also thinking of the callous way Stotz guns down Krelper). At this time, TV clean-up campaigner Mary Whitehouse was distracted by the evils of Channel 4, so probably wasn't focused very much on her old enemy Doctor Who.

Characters begin to drop like flies. Jek kills Morgus using some indefinable laboratory device, and the android Salateen kills Stotz (shooting him in the back!). As the ailing Doctor, armed with his small phial of bat's milk, carries the dying Peri away, we leave the bullet-riddled Sharaz Jek limp in the arms of his android creation. "Salateen, hold me," are Jek's pathetic final words. Harper takes the camera out of focus, flames licking at the screen as the final stretch of the episode turns its full attention on 'the hero and the girl'.

It's heartbreaking to see the Doctor, battered, diseased and soiled, struggling to carry his unconscious companion across the tumultuous plains of Androzani. The paralysis is kicking, but his one aim, his only hope, is to get to the safety of the TARDIS (how very Doctor Who!) where he can administer the bat's milk. As he stumbles to his knees at the TARDIS door, he spills most of the antidote. His fate is sealed.

Inside the TARDIS he gives Peri - a girl he barely knows - all that remains of the bat's milk, then collapses to the floor. He will be the first Doctor since William Hartnell to regenerate inside the TARDIS (it would become de rigueur subsequently). Davison's final performance is reassuringly breathless and selfless. "Only enough for you," he says, then gives Peri an almost apologetic, puppy-dog look. "Is this death?" he asks, harking back to when Mawdryn asked similar of the Doctor in Mawdryn Undead (and of course, if Mawdryn's plan to drain the Doctor's life force had been successful, what we see at the end of The Caves of Androzani really would have been death).

As Roger Limb's chanting monks return, the Doctor tells Peri: "It's time to say goodbye... I might regenerate... Feels different this time." I've always wondered what he means by that. What feels different, and why? And what was Robert Holmes trying to imply? Perhaps it's a foreshadowing of how tumultuous the regeneration proves to be, and what a complete arse his sixth incarnation will become.

The regeneration effect looks like a strobing time tunnel, the exact same effect the Doctor saw on the screen of Stotz's ship in part 3 when he was hallucinating. Was he seeing a premonition of his future, the VFX equivalent of the Watcher? We get tiny cameos from his previous companions. Tegan, Turlough, Kamelion, Nyssa and Adric ("Adric" being the Fifth Doctor's final word, perhaps fuelled by guilt) all appear to egg him on, pushing him to survive, but it is the overwhelming hate spewed by the Master which drowns out all their love and goodness. "No, my dear Doctor, you must die! Die, Doctor! Die!" Anthony Ainley's cackling face grows larger and envelops the screen as we hurtle along the Doctor's weird regenerative tunnel, and he then emerges in an explosion of energy. A new man.

Peri understandably asks what's happened. "Change, my dear," says the new Doctor, turning to camera to address the eight million people at home. "And it seems not a moment too soon." I like how Colin Baker's face merges into the end titles, but I'm not so keen on Baker getting first billing in Davison's final ever episode. I get the idea, but it seems disrespectful somehow. I'm not sure how I feel about this rather pompous new Doctor. We shall have to wait and see...

The Caves of Androzani is an exciting, exhilarating, almost epic swansong for the Fifth Doctor. It's well written, very well directed, exquisitely lit and acted, and beautifully scored. Some of the costuming occasionally falls short (the shell-suit uniforms of Chellak's army, for instance, as well as the gunrunners' foam-lined outfits), but overall, it is a masterful production, one of the very best in Doctor Who's history. It's a shame it took so long for Peter Davison to get some of the stronger written stories of Season 21, where his Doctor excels, but The Caves of Androzani will forever be the best regeneration story for me (and I judge this as the last 'proper' regeneration story until 2005).

The Fifth Doctor is described by his successor as "feckless" and "effete", which probably says a lot more about what script editor Eric Saward thought than viewers did at the time (or since). To describe Peter Davison's Doctor as lacking initiative and strength of character, of being weak and ineffectual, is to misunderstand the interpretation. The Fifth Doctor was the closest to human the classic series Doctors ever got. Davison's Doctor felt consequences, and suffered for them. He was fallible, emotional, responsible. We see how the lifestyle he leads takes its toll on him through Season 21. He recognises his failings ("It seems I must mend my ways," he admits in Resurrection of the Daleks). In some ways, perhaps the Fifth Doctor is glad it's all over. Perhaps his sacrifice had an ulterior purpose? Maybe he'd just had enough?

As we head into a new era (still at the fag-end of another, oddly), it'll be interesting to see which direction the Sixth Doctor goes in.

PS: There was nowhere obvious to write this above, but isn't it interesting how the only characters who appear to survive this story are the two credited women: Peri and Krau Timmin.

First broadcast: March 16th, 1984

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: That selfless final act.
The Bad: Crediting Colin Baker first.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★★★ (story average: 9.25 out of 10)

NEXT TIME: The Twin Dilemma...

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

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.

The Caves of Androzani is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Caves-Androzani-DVD/dp/B00005B2T7