Recently I met up with a fellow fan down the pub, and since my friend shares similar views to me about where Doctor Who went wrong, inevitably we ended up discussing where ideally the classic series should have ended before it got really bad.I nominated Horns of Nimon- ending the show on a masquerade party knees-up and the Doctor and Romana flying off into the Skonnon sunset for centuries more adventures together. All whilst the Master’s still decaying on his last life and the Dalek-Movellan stalemate is ensuring universal peace. Perfect, but unrealistic. The show wouldn't have ended whilst it was getting such massive ratings.
A realistic ending would be Logopolis where Tom Baker departed to dismal ratings. With its themes of death and rebirth, a panoramic view of the dying universe, and the Fourth Doctor’s dying words “It’s the end but the moment has been prepared for” it’d be perfect, and also open-ended enough to inspire a new novels range continuation, probably beginning with a novelisation of Castrovalva. Ideally a novels range with meticulous, coherent writing, no reliance on cheap spectacle or characters committing nonsensical actions out of the blue, and free of JNT’s creative interference and ban on past Who writers. An 80’s Doctor Who that’d be rewarding and therapeutic to follow rather than spirit-crushing. However, my friend’s choice was The Five Doctors, and the more I think about it, the more ideal an end-point it seems. A retrospective story where past and present intersects, as every incarnation of the Doctor throughout
the show’s history is brought together, and must battle old monsters and enemies on their quest to discover ancient Gallifreyan secrets. Then when their quest is done, the current Doctor makes his farewells with his old friends and earlier selves, and then the Time Lords reward him with an offer of the presidency. In response he flees in the Tardis and goes on the run from his people, and as he reminisces “Why not? After all that’s how it all started”, thus ending the show on a nicely ‘full circle’ note.One possible drawback is that Davison's era would be without a Dalek story, and it’d be a shame if the Daleks missed out on the show’s more tactile, dynamic 80’s visual make-
over. But what if Resurrection of the Daleks happened in Season 20 as originally planned, and wasn't held back a year, and thus came before The Five Doctors?I’m no fan of Resurrection of the Daleks- part of me would gladly lose it. Like much of 80’s Who, I find it incoherent, gratuitously violent, charmless and so desperate to be downbeat it has to reduce the Doctor to a shadow of himself. However it does the job as an apocalyptic ‘final end’ Dalek story. It coaxes one of Peter Davison's strongest performances as the Doctor, and its uncompromising bleakness, fan-service and appetite for destruction makes it almost comfort food viewing if you’re feeling down. Better still it would originally have been directed by Peter Grimwade who’d undoubtedly have delivered the same solid visual flair he did in Earthshock. Also it was originally intended as Kamelion’s departure story. Apparently he was meant to take on Stien’s role in the sory and sacrifice himself to destroy the Daleks, which would explain Kamelion’s absence in The Five Doctors.
Actually no, the Dalek cameo in The Five Doctors would be satisfying enough, whilst preserving the Daleks' mystique.
One issue I have with The Five Doctors is the Master escaping justice again. My friend however argued for its poetry, of both the Doctor and Master being free and roaming the cosmos, on the run from their own people, destined to cross paths again. It’s a welcome tradition that the Master always escapes- in The Sea Devils it was practically a ‘punch the air’ moment. But I feel it's inappropriate after his atrocities in Logopolis for him to get away unpunished. Logopolis is a problematic story because the Master had never gone that far before, and it sat uncomfortably with the cosiness of the Doctor-Master rivalry ever since. If the Master really is that dangerous to the universe, shouldn’t the Doctor destroy him once and for all? Well no, because the Doctor’s the hero of a family show. The best way out of this conundrum would be leaving the Master trapped forever in Castrovalva where he can’t hurt anyone. But they wanted to milk the arch villain for all his worth, resulting in diminishing returns that turned him into a joke.
Maybe ending on The Five Doctors is the best compromise. It restores the Master’s dignity and his malignant sting in his tail- particularly when he tricks the Cybermen to their deaths. Also Rassilon foretells that there’ll be a reckoning and the Master will face retribution soon. Maybe this final reckoning between the Doctor and Master is best left to our imaginations (or the novels) since it would only be a disappointment onscreen.
So with the Master’s future foretold, he must go free because causality demands it, much like how in Genesis of the Daleks, the Doctor couldn’t destroy the Daleks because he knew they had an important part to play in the future. The Five Doctors shares much in common with Genesis of the Daleks. They’re both stories where the Time Lords send the Doctor on a quest into a savage environment that represents a microcosm of the conflict-based universe and all its evil, fear, death and corruption. But as the Doctor traverses many perils and dangers and finds various allies along the way, he comes to realise his true quest isn’t to do the Time Lords’ bidding or make the world’s problems go away, but to discover self-knowledge and peace of mind in a chaotic universe. It’s about the Doctor turning away from a moment of godhood and instead simply letting the natural order of things remain, because evil and conflict will always exist, but as the Doctor asserts there will always be goodness, courage and nobility as universal truths too, and so long as brave, heroic people are around to stand together in unity and resistance, there will always be hope and that essential balance of light and dark forces. Infact maybe even evil has its place.
The Five Doctors isn’t about saving the universe, it’s about the rich life the Doctor has led, the friends he’s made, the wisdom he’s acquired, and how that marks him apart from the rest of his stuffy people. By contrast the Master’s life seems quite sad, lonely and friendless. He’s a failure, and the only allies he’s ever known were always as treacherous as him. So the Master may be free to threaten the universe again, but the Doctor will always be there to beat him. So long as the Doctor remains the hero he is, there will always be hope.
"A cosmos without the Doctor scarcely bears thinking about."
Hence why The Five Doctors should have ended the series, because afterwards followed numerous character assassinations of the Doctor that completely destroyed his credibility as a hero, beginning with Warriors of the Deep where the Doctor places the Silurians’ lives over the lives of the humans they’re massacring, even when one human woman takes a bullet to protect him. The once strong-willed, free-spirited, instinctively pragmatic Doctor becomes reduced to an insensible puppet. The Five Doctors- Terrance Dicks’ final TV story- was sadly the last time the Doctor was truly in character. Infact I think today there’s pitifully few Who writers who truly understand the Doctor’s character as well as Terrance Dicks does. The majority of New Who is testament to that, with the characters of modern Doctors seemingly based more on obnoxious, arrogant, narcissistic superfans. It’s only been Matt Smith who really feels like the old Doctor to me, but even he often lacks the old Doctor’s chivalry and protectiveness towards his companion, as though they’re pushing the asexual disinterest aspect too far.
Sadly today it’s fashionable for fandom to dismiss Terrance Dicks as out-dated and old-hat whilst hysterically praising and brownnosing Russell T. Davies for his success, typical of fandom’s jobsworth mentality (probably instilled by 80’s stories like Time-Flight that resembled soulless workplace orientation videos). Fandom today seems plagued by a cultish dissociative thinking that the show’s ratings and popularity automatically overrules fan opinion, and how it took a deified genius to ‘achieve the impossible’ by making Doctor Who accessible to the masses.
Nonsense! Terrance Dicks did that all the time. Terrance’s stories at their best weren’t just up to date, they were timeless. For a ten-part story The War Games is still today a very fast-paced piece of television with a hard-hitting emotional ending that rivals Doomsday. Likewise Horror of Fang Rock features full-blooded characterisation on par with New Who. Infact I’d rank Horror of Fang Rock equally on par with Blink for quality writing, ingenious plotting and genuine horror, and for a ‘serious’ story it’s actually far funnier and wittier than Unicorn and the Wasp. More importantly a first time viewer doesn’t need to know any Sontaran-Rutan war backstory in order to understand and enjoy Horror of Fang Rock and in-fact the story conveys space battlefleets and galactic empires through spoken word alone, without needing any CGI spectacle. You could also easily show Brain of Morbius to a first time viewer. Terrance Dicks always made his stories well crafted, timelessly accessible and self-sustained. I'd venture that if Terrance’s Seven Keys to Doomsday stageplay was adapted for television and used as the New Series’ pilot episode, it would've been every bit the mainstream success it was, and far more adventurous, exciting and warm-hearted.
Even The Five Doctors is well crafted enough to include all its fan-pleasing elements whilst still working as a self-sustained standalone that could appeal to viewers who’d never seen the show before. Infact it’s often the first story a beginner fan will turn to, rivalling Genesis of the Daleks for highest Classic Who DVD sales. All the recurring characters and enemies are well defined enough for first time viewers to instantly ‘get’ and the story wisely gives greatest prominence to more simple, self-explanatory enemies like the Master and Cybermen.
The show’s 20 year history is made simple and easy to grasp, and even the concept of these various different Doctors all being metaphysically the same man is instantly established when each past Doctor gets abducted, giving the current Doctor severe chest pains, emphasising their existential link- this is even bookended when the Doctors combine their mental powers to break Borusa’s hold on the Fifth incarnation. Infact the idea of four different figures representing the same man playing the game of Rassilon from different approach points really suits the live action roleplaying game feel of the story, of one player manipulating numerous figures. This was a time when roleplaying culture was really taking off (see also Enlightenment and Curse of Fenric). Even Borusa’s model of the Death Zone and various Doctor figures compliments this atmosphere, and I think that’s why the story’s so accessible.
It’s ironic that Terrance Dicks is regarded as out-dated now, when The Five Doctors and Brain of Morbius were crucially about the importance of each new generation breaking with the traditional old guard- harking back to Doctor Who’s countercultural beginnings. They’re both stories about how every civilisation has its dark ages and why immortality would be a curse because if the rulers of a civilisation lived forever, there’d be no change or progress and we’d never have escaped those dark ages. Borusa isn’t an evil megalomaniac, he’s simply a well meaning old ruler who’s set in his ways and fears change and his mortality and who can’t let go of his power because he doesn’t trust anyone else to rule Gallifrey. He even seems genuinely remorseful about the Castellan’s death, but he can’t turn back now.
New Who could learn from the days when corrupt Time Lords had proper, understandable motives, rather than just wanting to destroy the universe for the sake of it, and when Sarah Jane was still the steely, independent woman she always was, happily getting on with her life, not spending thirty years pining over the Doctor. So as well as being a perfect end point, The Five Doctors would be a perfect template for any revival of the show.
Would the revival still have happened though? I once thought that if the show had ended sooner, it would have come back sooner. But it’s not that simple. If the show ended my way on Tom Baker, then it’d be difficult to do a revival without him, because he’d be seen as the irreplaceable heart of the show. Also without the Doctors after Tom Baker who were actually willing to return to the role, Big Finish would never have happened, so we’d have lost a lot of fantastic audio Doctor Who, and I believe it was partly down to Big Finish’s success in sales that the BBC were persuaded to bring the show back. A year ago I’d have happily lost the New Series, but now the show's really improving under Moffat’s producership I’d really hate to lose outstanding stories like Victory of the Daleks, Time of Angels and Amy’s Choice (although I’d gladly erase Chibnall’s Silurian two-parter).
Ending the show on The Five Doctors might increase the chances of the revival happening. With Peter Davison having two solid years to establish himself as the Doctor, coupled with a multi-Doctor story which Tom Baker was mostly absent from, it’d be clear that the show had outgrown Tom Baker’s shadow. The Five Doctors also did well in the States (lets say the BBC had ended the show there in order to sell the rights to America), which would have sowed the seeds for the American TV Movie in some form. After all the TV Movie kept the flame alive and it got the general public talking fondly again about the classic show’s charms that the TV Movie somehow lacked.
There'd probably be a novels range continuation very similar to the Eighth Doctor Adventures, probably drawing heaviest inspiration from State of Decay and Enlightenment. Tegan, Turlough and especially Kamelion could make interesting short-term book companions, but they could eventually be written out and replaced with new companions easily, unlike Ace who became inseparable from the Seventh Doctor. After all, Tegan and Turlough had frequently requested to be returned home onscreen, and they were absent from the Fifth Doctor comic strips. The Fifth Doctor, having witnessed his first incarnation's devious tricking of Borusa, could even be developed into the ruthless, cosmic chess-master Doctor of the novels, proving wrong the naysayers who dismissed Davison as uselessly weak(rather than Season 21 proving those naysayers right).
Whilst the novels range would be safe, the audios are a different matter. Big Finish had its origins in the Audio Visuals fan group in the mid-80’s, where Gary Russell and Nicholas Briggs started doing their own unlicensed audio Doctor Who adventures. However if the show ended in 1983 and the BBC got proprietorial about the copyright back then, the Audio Visuals group might have only gotten away with just their first few releases, at best. But would Big Finish have lasted even if they did happen? Spin-offs like Sarah Jane Smith, Dalek Empire, Gallifrey and Unbound would remain possible (as would Bernice Summerfield if Paul Cornell had still written Love and War), but the backbone of the range would be the main Doctor Who audios, so you’d only have Peter Davison’s Doctor and possibly the TV Movie Doctor too. With Janet Fielding refusing to reprise Tegan’s role, that'd leave an unfillable gap after The Five Doctors, leaving only the option of doing Fifth Doctor-Nyssa audios, and possibly adventures set after the TV Movie. It’d be nice to think audios like Spare Parts, Creatures of Beauty, Time-Reef and Plague of the Daleks would still fit in the canon, but it’s uncertain Big Finish would last that long. Big Finish’s main selling point was its variety. But there’d be very little here to interest fans who didn’t like the Fifth Doctor and regarded the TV Movie Doctor suspiciously. Infact given how the McGann range chased away many loyal listeners when it got bogged down with the Zagreus and Divergent Universe business, if Peter Davison was the only other audio Doctor, that probably would have killed Big Finish for good.
Now here many fans would say Caves of Androzani is the best end-point for being a tour de force high water mark, and a poignant end of an era story (well it’s poignant until Colin Baker’s first lines kill the mood), and it comes right after the Master's ‘death’ and the Daleks becoming an endangered species. Plus it would allow Big Finish to do Sixth Doctor and Peri stories, and audios featuring Terry Molloy’s Davros.
However I believe Caves of Androzani would be too bleak an end-point, and not really how the show should be remembered. It needed a reassuring follow-up. If the show ended there, you'd end with the Doctor still reduced to less than half the hero he is, without the grand redemptive comeback of Remembrance of the Daleks. Even Logopolis would be a more hopeful ending.
Maybe it’d be better if the cancellation crisis and hiatus happened on The Five Doctors, so the show would continue for a while afterwards, but Warriors of the Deep and Twin Dilemma would be thankfully lost forever. Unfortunately this might mean the show ending two years sooner on the indignity of Dragonfire.
Many fans probably wonder how I could ever want the show to end sooner. If the last five years’ hysterical praise of New Who have proved anything, it’s that most fans would always prefer bad Doctor Who to no Doctor Who at all. So if I don’t like what followed The Five Doctors, why can’t I just be happy with the show up to that point, enjoy those years and accept that what came after has fans of its own? Well that’s because unfortunately what came after was so destructively bad, it even erodes my enjoyment of the show’s better years. The disgracing of the Doctor in the 80’s even has a retroactively tarnishing effect on the character’s history. Enough bad work can form a critical mass as corrosive as any other, reducing the show’s achievements to nothing. If the show ended with The Five Doctors, that wouldn’t have happened.
Beyond awful scripts and wrongheaded production decisions, I think what really went wrong is the show simply stopped believing in itself. Doctor Who wasn’t about hard science and its logic rarely bore close scrutiny, but it articulated an idealistic time where anything seemed possible. Whether it’s the Doctor and Harry easily infiltrating the Thal dome in Genesis of the Daleks, or the Doctor and Romana breaking free from Meglos’s time loop by re-enacting their repeating moments, a pinch of make-believe whimsy made those implausible moments work, and they made the show’s universe seem stranger and more hopeful.
But cynicism set in. Maybe times had gotten mean as the modern outlook became more simple-minded and contemptuous, particularly in TV and cinema. Sci-fi worlds of wonder and whimsy didn’t work anymore unless you had the budget to show them, like Star Wars did. Doctor Who didn’t have that budget, but neither did it have faith anymore. The show certainly lost faith in the Doctor and became severely morally confused. It felt defeated. The show tried to make a point by becoming more outrageous, pretentious and forced, trying to prove itself worthy. It tried reasserting believability and ‘realness’ with continuity references, visceral gore and making the Doctor more melodramatic, confrontational, and angry (like New Who). JNT's obsessive attempts to ‘re-define’ the show gradually turned the Doctor himself into an unstable, obtusely negligent, self-defeating control freak. Worse still, the show tried to believe in something by tapping into fandom’s more detrimentally cultish thinking. It never got more cultish than Warriors of the Deep force-feeding the viewer with a twisted, humanity-hating, self-destructive pacifist philosophy at odds with all cognitive reasoning. A pointlessly depressing, mean-spirited parade of suicidal stupidity, where any character who suggests doing the sensible thing is demonised for it.
New Who seems so ratings conscious and audience aware that it seems to consistently cease believing its own fiction. Each season finale has ended with a pixie dust resolution, which proves
that even whimsy needs to be disciplined and reigned in, otherwise it ceases to mean anything, as indeed does the show.The problem is the insincerity of New Who’s whimsy. It doesn’t seem to treat any of its own fiction as real. All the spectacle, tear-jerking and forced comedy are just artificial contrivances to keep viewers watching. It seems so desperate to pander to what’s hip that it lacks the identity of Doctor Who. With the show feeling that limited, insular and distrusting of its audience, I just can’t believe in the show’s possibilities or magic. A once invitingly wondrous show that compelled our investment, getting us to maintain the spell from our own end, has now become so cynical and so much part of today’s trashy, nasty zeitgeist that it’s almost inapproachable. Particularly the way stories like Aliens of London and The Runaway Bride depict humanity as hopelessly stupid and in inferiority to the Doctor.
I can’t help think if the show ended on The Five Doctors with its faith and magic still intact, on a note of celebration rather than disgrace, then it might have come back prouder, sure of its place on TV and far less desperate. Ultimately it was the faith and willpower of fans that brought the show back, coupled with TV’s current nostalgia phase, and that'd remain the case if the show ended on The Five Doctors.
However, if The Five Doctors was the last story, then fandom would probably try to make it impossible to enjoy by constantly harping on about how it only got 7 million viewers and got the show cancelled because its continuity references ‘alienated’ casual viewers. We’d still be told to imagine how non-fans would see the story, and how enjoying its fan pleasing elements was something to be ashamed of. Thus reinforcing fandom’s internalised snobbery, pecking orders and fans’ pathological tendency to parodically ape and adopt our mainstream culture's simple-minded, contemptuous worldview. Fandom would still have a cold, jobsworth mentality that's based around ratings, demographics, archetypal mindsets and consumer resistance, and basically viewing people as statistics rather than individuals, and viewing other fans as inferior and unworthy of speaking critically of the successful. That’s why I’d liked the idea of the show ending with Horns of Nimon because it villainises those fans so well.
But the inviting, warm nostalgia of The Five Doctors couldn’t be further removed from the cold-hearted cultish stories that followed. It’s a tribute to the show’s long legacy with something
for every fan, blending 80’s fan-pleasing continuity with the Williams era’s ethos of never taking the show or life too seriously. It even vindicates the unmade stories. Pertwee's Doctor gets one last confrontation with the Master, and even Shada's sort-of canonised (although why didn’t they use the footage of the Fourth Doctor being chased on bicycle by Skagra’s sphere?)If you were to select some Doctor Who stories to go in a time capsule for future generations to discover, then The Five Doctors would be as mandatory a choice as Genesis of the Daleks. It’s a truly essential, indispensible story, and it was Doctor Who’s last respectable note, before Warriors of the Deep and Twin Dilemma made the series impossible to respect.
Perhaps The Five Doctors was the show's natural end-point, and afterwards the series could only regress and decline. The only better ending I can think of is Parting of the Ways, where for once New Who depicts humanity's strength, with ordinary people joining the Doctor's final stand against the last of the Daleks. And funnily enough, it was all downhill from there too.
Thomas Cookson
