Body horror and shock moments are at their best, but Season 22 is overall the weakest to date
Problems with storytelling run through every title in Baker’s first full season. The stories end up being memorable for brief moments rather than in the round. Who can forget the sewer walls sliding open to reveal a gleaming, backlit army of Cybermen? Or Lytton’s hands being crushed as he is tortured? Is there ever a stronger moment than Natasha in ‘Revelation of the Daleks’ facing her father’s mutant head encased inside a transparent Dalek as he begs her to kill him? Is there a more horrific moment than the mutant jumping out at the Doctor and Peri in the snow? (‘Doctor Who’ would drastically tone down after this season, and it would never dare to be as horrific again.) Then there’s the amusing sequence in ‘The Two Doctors’ in which Patrick Troughton and John Stratton go dining together in Seville. But judging each overall story, one generally finds an incoherent mess. Instalments such as ‘Timelash’ and ‘The Mark of the Rani’ barely hang together at all. Even ‘The Two Doctors’, which brings back ‘Doctor Who’s finest writer, Robert Holmes, is riddled with problems. Between Holmes and script editor Eric Saward, a better reason for involving the Sixth Doctor in the story should have been found than the clumsy coincidence that he agrees to see a Doctor, and just so happens to select Dastari from a dizzying array of calling cards. The season is riddled with such avoidable clunkiness.
