As it happens I watched this the same week I was listening to the new Big Finish audio, Kiss of Death, which does a lot of the same things (including Turlough's background and subterranean monsters) and does them better, also with added Nyssa.
Resurrection of the Daleks is the first time we have seen the malignant pepperpots since Romana regenerated, four and a half years ago. It looks fantastic - tremendous moody shots of Docklands and studio sets, action scenes with much mayhem (the highest on-screen death toll of any Who story, I believe, making Tegan's desire to get the hell out entirely comprehensible), and decent performances from an extraordinary array of guest stars, Rodney Bewes, Rula Lenska, Chloe Ashcroft, the glowering Leslie Grantham in his first TV role, Terry Molloy doing Davros for the first time.
It's a shame therefore that the story doesn't make a lot of sense. Every time I think I understand what the various factions (human and Dalek) are up to, there is another twist and I lose track. Viruses? Assassinating the Time Lords? I give up. There are some good set-pieces - Rodney Bewes' character's redemption, the confrontation between two sets of Daleks in the middle of episode 2 - but some weak bits as well, including in particular the Doctor's rather contrived decision to execute Davros and his failure to then carry through this decision.
So, farewell to Tegan. I am surprised to report that I found her a much more attractive and sexy character than I remembered - obviously most of all when possessed by the Mara in Kinda and Snakedance, but also when dressed up in Black Orchid, Enlightenment and The Awakening. and even a little when trapped in a duct with Turlough in Terminus. It's a while since the Doctor has had a companion who is so much defined by her emotions - possibly even as far back as Victoria - and Tegan adds to that a willingness to sass the Doctor back that we have not really seen since Jamie, Steven and Barbara. Having said that, she probably stays a season too long, but there's more to her than I remembered. Very glad to hear Janet Fielding as a current companion along with Mark Strickson and Sarah Sutton in this quarter's Big Finish mini-series.
And for the second time in two stories, we get some more of Turlough's background, as he returns to his roots in Planet of Fire. I found that the micro-politics of the story, the interactions between the members of a politically traumatised society, actually worked rather well for me. Had Kamelion actually been a regular Tardis fixture, rather than sitting around in a cupboard for the last year, it could have worked a bit better. Poor Anthony Ainley gets little else to do than cackle maniacally (though the end of episode 3 is a great reveal). But somehow the bits don't gel together into an actual plot, and the point of the story seems to be to write out two regulars and write in another. (And the Doctor's euthanasia of Kamelion is utterly out of character.)
The Doctor's decision to add Turlough to the Tardis crew in the first place, after several attempts by Turlough to bump him off, is baffling, the pinnacle of the Tardis-as-taxi syndrome of the Nathan-Turner era, and particularly of the Fifth Doctor stories. However, the fact that the new guy is given a back-story which runs through his first few adventures, and that we then pick up more bits and pieces of his background, does make him watchable, if not necessarily likeable; he's not heroic by nature but he sometimes does heroic things due to circumstances. Indeed, he's the first companion whose full background is only revealed as he leaves (though I still think last month's Big Finish story was an improvement on that theme); and it's actually fully in character for him not to have given more away at an earlier stage. As I said above, I don't like Turlough as a character but I think he is done reasonably well.
As did Harry Sullivan, Turlough featured in one of the earliest spinoff novels, a rather dire effort featuring a villain called Rehctaht. Mark Strickson has done well for himself since, making documentaries on the other side of the planet (where apparently he discovered Steve Irwin). As with Janet Fielding, it's been good to hear his voice again on recent BFs.
Whenever straw polls on fans' least favourite companion are done, Kamelion is usually forgotten. Unjustly so: he is by far the worst regular character ever to appear on the show. One story - two episodes which could have been used to better purpose - was devoted to introducing him, and then he is removed in a mercy killing by the Doctor (for which the latter shows roughly three seconds of remorse) after a story which again revolved around the need to get rid of him. Yes, yes, I know about the production problems and the tragic aquatic accident, but even making allowances for those circumstances it is badly handled. Kamelion's brief career is a classic example of it-seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time but it wasn't. It really wasn't.
What a relief to have one standout excellent story in this run. It was only a few months since I had last watched The Caves of Androzani, but it's a tremendous bit of storytelling - I love it all, and I get a bit more out of it every time. Morgus and Sharaz Jek, with their utterly different yet intertwined motivations, are two of the greatest supporting characters in the history of the show, and everyone else is good too. Somehow Graeme Harper manages to make you believe that the internal sets are fairly intimately related to the location scenes; the music is good, two of the cliff-hangers out of three are excellent (the first and third) and we see the Fifth Doctor sacrificing himself for his friend as perhaps no other Doctor would do. So often one sees a story crippled by a failure of script, or of performance, or of design, or of camerawork; let's be glad that this one worked.
(Though let's just not talk about the magma beast.)
Peter Davison started with a huge disadvantage for me of being Not Tom Baker. Given that this was a time in my life when I was growing up a bit anyway, and the bloke who had been the Doctor for half my life no longer was (and the jarring shift to midweek rather than Saturday broadcasts), it just didn't feel the same.
I realise now that this was quite unfair. Particularly once you have got to know what's left of the Troughton stories, it becomes clear that Davison was aiming for a more youthful, energetic and idealistic version of Troughton's compassionate and sympathetic Doctor. It ended up less funny, but otherwise it is a success. Even faced with poor scripts and anæmic directing, Davison is able to inject credibility to the role.
And of course he is still doing it - he is the only Doctor from Old Who to have appeared in New Who, and he continues to generate the old magic for Big Finish. Most of my favourite BF audios are Fifth Doctor stories (Spare Parts, The Kingmaker, etc) and at first I thought this was just coincidence. But maybe not.
(And his daughter hooked up with David Tennant. But that is irrelevant.)
Not everyone agrees that The Caves of Androzani is the best Who story ever, though respondents to the DWM poll a few years ago voted for it on aggregate. (There are a number of Tom Baker stories that I'd put ahead of it, also Blink and a couple of others from New Who.) There are also some who dispute whether or not The Twin Dilemma deserved its place at the bottom of the same poll. (I am not one of them.) I believe that Eric Saward, or possibly even JNT, defended it as the best Who story made on their watch. Few even of their harshest critics would disagree.
The worst bit, of course, is the introduction of the new Doctor, who assaults and tries to kill Peri - the only continuing character in a show which has yet again been reinvented - without any serious adverse consequences in terms of plot. This is so wrong on so many levels that I find it difficult to engage with the rest of the story. The production team took for granted our willingness to accept the Doctor as hero - three of the four episodes end with close-ups of Colin Baker gripped by emotion - and did not realise that the new Doctor needed to earn our affection as all his predecessors did. It's actually worse than Kamelion, who was just a wasted narrative gimmick: here, the central character is stripped of virtue for no good reason.
The awfulness of the new Doctor's introduction distracts from the rest of the story, but it is pretty bad too. Maurice Denham as Azmael, and the titular twins, appear to be acting under anæsthetic. Several other characters are played by future big names but fail to come to life. As Tat Wood and Laurence Miles point out, there isn't in fact a dilemma. The rearranging planets story is done better in one of the less impressive Ninth Doctor books. The "bird-like Jocondans" don't look like birds. Mestor The Gastropod's means and motivation make little sense. The back-story of Azmael and the Doctor is not explained. It is everything that Who can do badly combined in one story.
After the crushing disappointment of The Twin Dilemma, it is a huge relief to see something that looks and sounds a bit like Doctor Who. Attack of the Cybermen features, well, Cybermen, Litton from four stories ago, and even a junkyard in Totter's Lane owned by I.M. Foreman. There is some annoying playing round with the Tardis's external appearance, but unlike The Twin Dilemma this at least appears to be a variation of the same show.
It has its problems. The first episode has the bizarre fake policemen, whose behaviour is never explained, and also some scenes where the lighting is so bad that the actors are effectively invisible. The nasty and brutal violence is unpleasant and unfortunately a harbinger of things to come this season. And it is never a wise idea to lock the Doctor in a room full of explosives.
But I actually found the Cryons' story rather effective - I had forgotten that they don't even appear until well into the second of the two episodes - and rather wished the story had just been about them and left the Cybermen and 1980s London out of it.
This has been a rather grim run, with only Caves of Androzani really good, though some allowance can be made for Attack of the Cybermen. On the plus side, the stories are now so short that I will zip through them fairly quickly, and will report back on the next six by the end of this month.
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