The Five Doctors

"The Doctor. Wonderful chap... all of them."

Writer: Terrance Dicks

Format: TV

Broadcast: 23rd November 1983

Series: 20th Anniversary Special

Featuring: Fifth Doctor, Tegan, Turlough, Fourth Doctor, Romana II, Third Doctor, Sarah, Second Doctor, Brigadier, First Doctor, Susan

Synopsis 

The Doctor's past incarnations are being snatched out of time and space and transported to the Death Zone on Gallifrey, where they are reunited with some old friends and pitted against their deadliest enemies in the Game of Rassilon. Someone is manipulating the Doctor and his companions in order to claim the most ancient and powerful secret of the Time Lords... but can they survive the challenges and uncover the traitor before it is too late?

Verdict 

The Five Doctors is just a wonderful Doctor Who story and celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the show in style. Of course, we've since surpassed the fiftieth anniversary but this story celebrated an incredible landmark at the time with the show going twenty straight seasons. That's quite staggering really as even in the modern series, we had a gap year for the 2009 specials and we're currently experiencing a year break in 2016 so for Doctor Who to achieve twenty seasons in a row was quite remarkable. As was the case with the tenth anniversary, past Doctors returned to our screens for this adventure. It's a great shame that Tom Baker declined to reprise his role as the Fourth Doctor and also that William Hartnell had passed away so couldn't appear as the First Doctor. Richard Hurndall instead takes that role and although he looks pretty similar, I only thought his performance and likeness of Hartnell was adequate. This was yet another watch with my young cousin and was actually a story he personally requested I brought up with me. I had only read the Target novelisation a few weeks ago so this is definitely quickest turnaround in doing both versions of the story so to spice things up a little I went with the special edition DVD. I didn't think things were too different but the special effects were certainly noticeably improved. This was my cousin's first experience of the First Doctor and I had some trouble trying to explain that the actors were different but the brilliant inclusion of the First Doctor's speech from the end of The Dalek Invasion of Earth made things a little easier. I talked about the story in some depth with my blogging of the novelisation last month so I'm not going to focus on that so much as you don't need me to tell you how brilliant I think it is. It's a stark contrasting watching a story compared to reading it and I think that comes with the actors a lot for this story. A number of them have aged a lot from what our imaginations envisage them as when it comes to reading and I found that noticeable with both Susan, Zoe and Mike Yates particularly. Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee step back into their roles as the Doctor with absolute ease which was just tremendous to see. Some of the images we get with a blend of Doctors and companions of young and old were magnificent and it's just fantastic when the Doctors all get together and interact. The Brigadier's presence made that all the more interesting which was also great. I loved the references to The Three Doctors but there were also good mentions of The Web of Fear, The Invasion, Planet of the Spiders, The War Games and The Keeper of Traken. I always like references and in an anniversary story they do tend to come in abundance. The Master's inclusion hit home more in the televised version that in novels, I found, and it was just fantastic to see him standing opposite all the different incarnations. That's the one thing you don't get in the novels and the scenes of the Master, as well as the Daleks, Yeti and Cybermen, were outstanding. The Death Zone looked very good and I thought the Tower of Rassilon was overpowering in the scenery which was exactly how it should've been. I honestly forgot that an image of Rassilon appeared in this story with the projection and it wasn't too far from what we saw in The Tides of Time graphic novel. Borusa being the traitor was hinted at more so here than in the book and that was fine but I did think he could have been a tad more emphatic in his speeches. Overall though, a truly brilliant story to celebrate twenty years of Doctor Who!

Rating: 10/10