Product: Doctor Who [VHS] (1975)
Rating: 5.0
It's the end, but the moment has been prepared for.
Picture the scene: the Fourth Doctor's dying body lying beneath the radio telescope tower of the Pharos Project, his concerned companions Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan gathered around him. He gives them a weak version of his toothy grin, and says "It's the end, but the moment has been prepared for." He merges with the Watcher, an alternate body, and lo and behold, becomes a younger man.So begins Castrovalva, the debut story of Peter Davison. After surviving an attempt by the Master to send them back in time to Event One (the Big Bang), the girls and the Doctor journey to Castrovalva, a Dwelling of Tranquility in order to cure the Doctor's post-regenerative weakness. However, all is not as it seems. When they try to leave, they find themselves caught in a loop, a recursive occlusion, i.e. a space time trap. And how do the Master and Adric, kidnapped by the former, fit in?Nyssa and Tegan's personalities emerge here. Nyssa is calm, rational, and gentle, while Tegan is headstrong, emotional, and cynical. Adric is also rational and intelligent, but weak-willed, as he falls under the Master's thrall. And the Fifth Doctor is more vulnerable than his previous incarnations. Speaking of which, Peter Davison does a good job impersonating the other Doctors during his lapses into their personality, especially Hartnell's Doctor, holding his suspenders in the same way that the First Doctor held his coat lapels: "I wonder, boy, what would you do if you were me, hmm? Or rather, what would I do if I were me?" He even lets out the amusing hmmph.The Portreeve's stacked hat has to be seen to be believed. There is bad make-up at work here, for in episode 3, his face is very very familiar. The medieval costumes of the Castrovalvans are charming, especially the women's hats. Oh yes, and the eye make-up from Robots Of Death has returned, though not with a vengeance.What also works well is the concept of the Zero Room and recursive occlusion, and the puzzle of Castrovalva. The scene where the child teaches the Doctor that three comes after two is precious, and the way he tries to show Mergrave and Ruther that something is wrong with Castrovalva via the map Mergrave has drawn on the back of the mirror is also great.I used to be a computer science major and we had to learn recursion in my Pascal class, where as Nyssa so rightly says, procedures fall back on themselves. A procedure for calculating factorials or Fibonacci numbers are classic examples of recursive programming.Oh, and if the Doctor wanted a place cut off from the rest of the Universe, he can come here to Farmpit, NM as well as Brisbane, Queensland.This is the second of the two John-Nathan Turner trilogies he designed for Season 18, beginning with The Keeper Of Traken, and continuing with Logopolis. The first one was of course, the E-Space Trilogy. Both trilogies provided links towards phasing out old characters and bringing in new. In this case, it was goodbye to the Fourth Doctor, hello to Nyssa, Tegan, the regenerated Master, and the Fifth Doctor.Michael Sheard (the pharmacist Mergrave) has come out in other Doctor Who's, including The Mind Of Evil, Pyramids Of Mars, The Invisible Enemy, and later in Remembrance Of The Daleks, but may be best known to American audiences as the ill-fated Admiral Ozzel in The Empire Strikes Back.Castrovalva serves as a worthy introduction to Peter Davison and Season 19. The cohesive team is at its best here and in The Visitation.