DVD Extras (on 2 discs no less) include:
However, the only element that Robert Holmes' writing really does justice to are his new alien creations, the Androgums, and their overindulgence in sensational eating. Shockeye is the embodiment of this throughout most of the adventure, and with John Stratton's inspired performance, becomes something unique and disturbing to behold. If it was meant to encourage us all to become vegetarians (as apparently Robert Holmes and Nicola Bryant were), it does fall far short. For that, you would really need to balance things by showing characters enjoying vegetarian meals, and looking far more attractive and charismatic at it than the carnivore Shockeye and his like. This story is far more effective in encouraging people to avoid eating raw rats, becoming cannibals, or overindulging, and only one of those is a serious problem in human society.
A Structure for Every EraIt is interesting to note how each Doctor independently suffers the story-structure problems of his own era, something heightened in the six-episode version of the story. I will continue to automatically refer to the 25-minute international versions of this season's episodes, especially since it really highlights these structural challenges in the writing. Patrick Troughton's Doctor has no trouble getting to the scene of the action in the first few minutes of the opening episode - a space station expertly introduced through the TARDIS scanner. We get a lovely scene of his TARDIS's interior, juxtaposed well against the shot of the Doctor and Jamie exiting the police box, and although the materialization effect is left out, a unique dematerialization soon takes place shortly after. The important guest characters are all slowly introduced one after another, all easy to understand and enjoy. Well done. The Doctor gets straight to business with Dastari, and goes through a few really lovely scenes in his office.Things go downhill for Pat's Doctor soon after, as he gets caught in the prisoner dynamic for most of the rest of the story. As was often the case in the sixties, he and Jamie appear to be off on holiday for the second of the six episodes, not making an appearance. Dastari and the uncredited Stike could easily have been carrying an extra across the field as seen by Oscar's binoculars, as the Doctor's face is well hidden from the camera. Pat's Doctor has little to do in the third of the six episodes, one shot of regaining consciousness, and one scene of groggy moaning that is repeated in part four. His Doctor is also absent/suppressed for much of the shenanigans of episodes five and six, while Patrick Troughton plays an Androgum instead (and very enjoyably at that).
Then he falls into a trap that Robert Holmes often laid for the fourth Doctor - instead of interacting with the guest characters, he hides in the shadows and eavesdrops most of the time. This goes to ridiculous lengths, showing Colin's Doctor and Jamie abandoning many rescue attempts, despite the fact that the villains are few and don't seem all that powerful or threatening. Colin's Doctor begins to appear cowardly. However, he does make himself look extremely clever whenever he does interact with the villains, as though he's only going to do it when he can get extremely good value and effectiveness for time spent with them. And, as bizarrely usual for season twenty-two, Colin's Doctor has appeared to have defeated the most powerful villains before the final half-hour episode begins. This has not been a good story for the Sontarans. Although their presence is revealed wonderfully via some interestingly nostalgic model shots and a powerful new musical marching anthem from Peter Howell, director Peter Moffatt doesn't manage to give us a decent shot revealing the Sontarans themselves, in all their magnificent costume and make-up. Their presence on the space station remains mysteriously off-screen, before they simply show up on the Spanish footage as though they were ordinary Joes. "Is that finally a Sontaran?" I asked myself when I first saw the story, squinting at Varl standing motionless in long-shot, and walking meekly behind Chessene in even longer shots. I had thought they were meant to attack the station and its inhabitants, not get friendly with its escaping refugees and get led around by them. Varl needed to explain himself and his motivation, and it seemed he was lucky just to get in a word of dialogue in each of his few scenes that episode. Chessene had mentioned making a deal with "Stike" - which hadn't struck me as a reference to the Sontarans, and doesn't make much impact. "Doctor Who" began to earn its reputation for confusing people again on this story.
Galactic FoesClinton Greyn and Tim Raynham both make wonderful Sontarans in this tale. Stike in particular has an excellent confrontation with Pat's Doctor in part four, and a suitably tense stand-off with Colin Baker's Doctor bridging parts four and five. Unfortunately, Stike only appears in three of the six episodes, and middle episodes at that. After some early shenanigans in part five, cut short as a Sontaran/Doctor chase sequence (the very kind of element the story needed more of) was eliminated from the script, Holmes' boredom with the Sontarans results in them slowly fading out of the story. In essence, Stike dies three times in episode five, with it having less dramatic impact each time, and not really interacting with his enemies during this at all.Most specifically, all the Sontarans' talk of the importance of an outer space battle in the Madillon Cluster raises the anticipation that this will be a significant part of the final episode's exciting action. Instead, episode six gives us nothing of the Sontarans (or the Rutans) other than a 10 second cameo by Stike's dismembered boot. Definitely less than I'd hoped for when I tuned in. With the Sontarans gone, "The Two Doctors" continues the severe anti-climax syndrome of season twenty-two. From defeating major galactic foes, we descend to running around a Spanish city looking to aide the inevitable return of Patrick Troughton to his senses, saving him from his own appetite and a fairly powerless pair of small time crooks. I do like the Spanish city sequences, but they should belong to an earlier stage of the story, escalating to a confrontation with a powerful Sontaran galactic plot, not anti-climaxing down from one. Perhaps the most overlooked part of the heroic template during seasons 21 and 22 are the good local characters that our heroes can be proud to have helped or saved as a result of an adventure. Holmes' writing seems confused as to whether or not this should be the second Doctor and Jamie's role or not. He seems to be using them this way in terms of motivating Colin's Doctor's entry into the tale, and in making sure that they need rescuing often throughout the story. I don't think they really count in that role, since they are arguably as much our heroic regulars as the Doctor and Peri. Plus, whatever your temporal theories may be, it's virtually a guarantee that they will get through yet another adventure unscathed.
"Officer! Promptly on the scene as always..."The characters of Oscar and Anita, on the other hand, fit the archetype of good, friendly characters perfectly. Oscar himself is a bit of a clone of Henry Gordon Jago from "The Talons of Weng-Chiang", and not quite as fascinating, but still works quite well. However, if the Doctors and their companions are going to help and/or save anyone, it should be Oscar and Anita. Thus, they don't do so well in the poor excuse for final action that this story comes up with. Colin's Doctor's party obviously isn't prompt enough for my taste. Why doesn't Holmes let them arrive in the restaurant in time to intervene and save Oscar? It would have given them more of the interaction they so desperately need, and would have elevated the feel-good nature of the adventure as a whole.There's also an off-screen scene of the second Doctor witnessing (if not helping to convince) Dastari's return to the good side of the force. That would have been very worthy of inclusion in the final product. Positive touches like this are instead rendered forgettable and ultimately pointless thanks to what seems to be an unchecked overriding desire on the writers' part (Saward & Nathan-Turner included) to kill off the entire guest cast in a Doctor Who adventure yet again. Dastari's challenge to re-integrate himself into society is worthy of exploration, and would help the entire story cohere since Dastari has featured prominently in the whole thing. Instead we get a cheap cop-out, and our attention redirected to a retarded repeat of the cyanide mistake from "The Brain of Morbius" (story no. 84), now made even more graphic and brutal. The continuing erosion of values and structural sense at this point on the show is sad indeed. The cliffhangers work fairly well in this story, including most of the unplanned ones. The Doctor and Peri get a good chance to wander around the dark, empty space station before the first of the six half-hour episodes finishes with the sudden, sinister introduction of a loud voice announcing "It threatened the Time Lords." At this point, the Spain setting has not been introduced, and we have no idea who or what or how many Sontarans may still be lurking around the corners, so good job. Episode Two's planned cliffhanger in the computer innards is adequate but not great, while episode three's cliffhanger, Anita directing Colin's Doctor's party towards the hacienda with "It's this way", is definitely weak but at least building anticipation that the story is finally going somewhere. Episode Four's cliffhanger is the best, bringing Colin's Doctor into a confrontation with the Sontarans, while Peri faces Shockeye. Part Five has Colin's Doctor by a fountain rambling about the raised stakes now that he is feeling the effects of the Androgum operation. Not a great direction for the story, but in terms of hitting a suspenseful spot to go out on at random, better than many other examples from this season.
Time and ContinuityFans seem to go to a lot of trouble to figure out exactly when during the second Doctor and Jamie's history this adventure could have been squeezed in, and I've been among them myself. My current philosophy of time travel makes it not a problem at all - once accepting that the average person makes about 10 000 decisions each day that shift them from one possible line of history to another, it becomes ridiculous to expect to be able to travel into the past of a planet or of one's own life and witness things happening exactly the way you remember them. This does not erase any of the experiences you had to bring you to where you are now; you simply witness a different version of how things could have been.This is the very essence of what we witness with Pat Troughton's Doctor and Jamie. Victoria has left them to learn graphology INSTEAD OF leaving them to get away from an endless succession of monster adventures. Or at least that's what she told them this time. Perhaps she is studying graphology with the Harrises from "Fury from the Deep" (story no. 42), or perhaps somewhere else. It doesn't matter. She won't be back. It's doubtful that the TARDIS we saw Pat's Doctor had in the sixties could have found its way back to her anyway. Once we accept this is a parallel Troughton Doctor instead of the one we remember, it becomes a moot point. Maybe they never met Zoe, or perhaps they did and Victoria outstayed her. The trial at the end of "The War Games" (story no. 50) has happened, probably with a different outcome for the Doctor. No forced regeneration, no exile to Earth. Instead, a more subservient version of the Doctor continues in the Patrick Troughton form, serving the hypocrisy of the Time Lords more obviously with Jamie at his side. Something similar can probably explain the absence of a double of Jon Pertwee's Doctor in the parallel universe of "Inferno" (story no. 54). This allows Jamie and Troughton's Doctor to age as much as they want, and travel together as long as they want. They can make up as many parallel futures for themselves as they want. This also puts under scrutiny something else that was ridiculous in the script from the beginning - the sixth Doctor's fears that the operation on the second Doctor could somehow affect him as well. It can't possibly do that without telescoping through all the in-between Doctors and negating their history. I don't recall an Androgum Doctor in "The Green Death" (story no. 69), or "Genesis of the Daleks" (story no. 78), or learning to meditate in "Snakedance" (story no. 125). Colin Baker's Doctor is the product of his total experiences up to that point, experiences that cannot be erased simply by witnessing one of the parallel versions of what might have been. In any case, the effects of the only part of the operation that was achieved only last an hour, not the five hundred years they would need to catch up with Colin's Doctor. His immune system can do a lot in five hundred years. His strange cravings near the end of the story only make sense as a case of mind over matter, and it's disappointing that this expert on time can remain so confused and fearful. Far less interesting than the powerful galactic Sontaran plot I had hoped for.
ProductionPeter Moffatt's directing is back on form after the disastrous "The Twin Dilemma" (story no. 137), although things still aren't perfect here. Generally, he gets great performances from the cast, arguably the best of the season, and he manages to tell the story in visually interesting ways and keep everything at a decent level. His knack of knowing when to move on allowed a few scenes planned for the studios to get filmed on location instead, which is a good and worthy bonus. However, he too didn't make sure the Sontarans got all that was their due, including their physical entrance, making sure the collars of their masks were tucked in properly before each of their scenes in studio, and going for the abandoned corridor chase scene. There's a lot of excellent work here, but the subject matter begged for it to go up yet another notch in a few areas.Musically, Peter Howell's score for this story is the tour-de-force for the season. We get a nice creepy theme for the Androgums, and plenty of atmospheric guitar music for the Spanish sections. Best of all, the Sontarans get a compelling anthem with a whole host of easily recognizable variations during appropriate cues, giving them the most distinctive and dangerous musical identity they have ever had. Howell has proved himself to be the musical maestro once more. Excellent!
International Titles:Deutsch: "Androiden in Sevilla"Magyar: "A két Doktor"Français: (Les deux Docteurs)Русский: "Два Доктора"This time we get a most unusual title for the story for German viewers. The story was translated and broadcast in 1995 as "Androids in Seville", despite the fact that there are no androids anywhere in this adventure!
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