“The Caves Of Androzani” (season 21, episodes 17-20. Originally aired March 8-16, 1984.)
Across all his incarnations, the Doctor’s character has always stayed true to a few core traits, perhaps none more so than his restless, insatiable curiosity and wanderlust. He’s a traveler, winding his way around the universe on a flightplan drawn up with no grand scheme in mind other than to see the next new thing. He rarely knows where he’s going, and rarely plans ahead. He just steps out of the ship and looks around. And from the beginning, that has always gotten him into trouble. Which is only to be expected. That’s the basic setup of the whole show: He arrives somewhere, he gets into trouble, he gets out of trouble, and he leaves. It’d be a pretty boring show without the middle bit. But still: It’s a dangerous universe out there. You’d have to be foolish to go out there without a plan, armed with nothing but your wits. And you’d have to be criminally reckless to take people with you. One of the things that makes “The Caves Of Androzani” great is that it cuts to the heart of this problem and brutally critiques it. Here, the Doctor gets himself and his companion Peri into a deadly mess that rapidly shows itself to be much worse than he bargained for, and against which the best he can reasonably hope for is base survival and escape. In the end, he can’t even manage that. He saves Peri but sacrifices himself to do so, as Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor collapses, and essentially dies, regenerating into Colin Baker’s Sixth.
“The Caves Of Androzani” enjoys a very high reputation in Doctor Who fandom; in fact, Doctor Who Magazine’s 2009 readers’ poll named it the best story in series history. I can’t go quite that far, though it would certainly make my top 10 or 15. For one thing, though this is admittedly minor, you’ve gotta take some points off for the the magma beast, just a sad, sad, weak attempt at the obligatory monster-of-the-week. But what really bothers me about this one is how corrosively cynical and dark it is. And I say this as a fan of corrosively cynical and dark stories in general, and of the cynical and dark mind of Robert Holmes, who wrote this one, in particular. It’s the whole point of the story, of course, so in essence I’m objecting to Holmes hitting the bullseye. But in the final analysis I just can’t buy into the notion that a story this pessimistic is what Doctor Who is about, on a grand scale.
Still, I can see why it won that poll. It’s a terrifically propulsive, twisty thriller, well-directed by Graeme Harper—tense, raw and very dark. It vividly creates a world that has been corrupted, perhaps irreversibly, by the toxic effects of greed, violence, and unchecked corporate power, and which has poisoned the souls of every character we meet—especially the revenge-crazed maniac Sharaz Jek, a creepy and intense but ultimately pitiable Phantom Of The Opera-like figure vividly played by Christopher Gable. And it made excellent use of the extra dramatic weight that all regeneration stories get as the closing chapters of their eras, really putting the increasingly desperate Doctor through the wringer and making him fight with his every last breath. Davison makes the most of it, giving one of his best performances in a script that gives him a lot to work with.
“Caves Of Androzani” is also one of those stories that looks even better in the context of its mediocre era. This was the last really good story Doctor Who would do for about three years, until the Seventh Doctor era started to hit its stride. Season 21 was bookended by two truly awful trainwrecks, “Warriors Of The Deep” and “The Twin Dilemma,” and was helmed by the show’s worst creative team, producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward, whose combined vision, despite their intentions, tended to make the show tacky, vulgar, and nihilistic, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing. And if you look at the plot of “Caves” on paper, it fits almost too well next to Saward’s most misanthropic, least watchable stuff. But somehow “Caves Of Androzani” not only rises above the rest of its era, but shows that Saward’s approach could work very well in the hands of a really good writer—like Holmes, the quintessential Doctor Who scribe.
As the story begins, the TARDIS lands on a desolate, sandy rock, Androzani Minor, part of a twin-planet system with the nearby, populated Androzani Major. The Doctor has come on a benign, almost boring mission: He needs some sand to make a new glass tube for one of the widgets in the TARDIS machinery. He’s been to the Androzani system before, but characteristically, isn’t sure when: “I don't remember. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the future….” And he hasn’t bothered to figure out what’s happening there right now, assuming that Androzani Minor is abandoned because of the deadly mud eruptions that happen periodically.
It’s a crucial mistake, because besides sand, Androzani Minor has another valuable resource—spectrox, which can be refined into a powerful immortality drug and which has made some people on Major very, very rich and powerful. The economics of the spectrox trade combine the worst qualities of oil and heroin, and like them, spectrox spurs bloody wars over who controls it. That’s what the Doctor and Peri unthinkingly walk into: A decades-long bloody stalemate between a Major-based conglomerate led by the cold, ruthless, and viciously self-interested Morgus, and on the other side, Morgus’ former partner Sharaz Jek, a brilliant scientist-turned-terrorist who is hideously disfigured and insane, and who bollixes up the flow of spectrox down on Minor with an army of unbeatable androids. Jek is also working with a motley crew of gunrunners led by the psychotic Stotz, who keep him supplied with arms and equipment in exchange for spectrox.
Things go badly almost immediately for the Doctor and Peri. First, while exploring the caves, Peri falls into a hole and has to be rescued, covering both of them in a white, weblike substance—seemingly harmless at the time, it turns out to be spectrox in its raw form, condemning them to death by slow poison. Continuing on, they walk right into the gunrunners’ weapon cache just in time to be captured by a military raid and brought to the army chief, General Chellak, cursorily interrogated and accused of being spies for Jek, and sentenced to death.
Holmes constantly ratchets up the tension and danger level on the Doctor and Peri, never giving them a safe place to rest but shifting them instead between a series of frying pans and fires. Jek rescues them, but he’s no friend—he’s only done it out of a creepy fixation on Peri’s beauty, and isn’t interested in the Doctor at all. The Doctor convinces a fellow captive, Chellak’s lieutenant Salateen, to help them escape, but Salateen betrays the Doctor and takes Peri back to Chellak. Salateen’s escape, by the way, is the key to the downfall of both Jek and Morgus—his knowledge of Jek’s defenses allows the stalemate to be broken, and the war to reach its bloody conclusion. And here’s the Sawardian weak-hero thing done right: All the Doctor really does is convince Salateen, who has grown despondent after months of imprisonment under Jek, to act. The Doctor had no idea of how significant this would be. He just wanted to get Peri and himself to safety. It’s the only thing he does in the whole story that has real consequences for either of the two major players, Morgus and Jek, and it’s not intentional in that way. It just pushes over all the other dominoes. The Doctor’s work is pretty much over as far as the larger story is concerned, even though still he gets a terrifically exciting scene at the cliffhanger of the third episode, commandeering the mercenaries’ ship to deliberately crash-land it back on Androzani Minor in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to save Peri by finding the antidote to raw spectrox. At last, after being beaten down for so much of the story, the hero gets to act, but it’s a hail-Mary and not a decisive strike to save the day, thrilling in part because this time there’s a real chance it won’t work.
This is a story with no strong heroes but several frighteningly capable and domineering villains, each in their own way. Stotz is a purely physical and immediate threat, asserting his primacy over his disgruntled second-in-command in the time-honored way of cavemen by threatening to kill him by knifeblade, poison and pushing him off a high cliff. Morgus is a fan of murder-by-long-fall as well, but his real danger is his deviousness in service of his greed. Despite Jek’s flamboyance, Morgus is clearly the story’s true villain. Thanks to his political connections, Morgus has the army under his thumb. But because it’s good for the spectrox prices to disrupt the spectrox trade, he also funds Stotz and his gunrunners, who supply Sharaz Jek. This also gives him the excuse he needs to close his factories on Androzani Major and convert them into prison-slave workhouses that do the same job for free. He’s ultimately responsible for all the major horrors we see here, and a powerfully corrosive force on his own society. Without the supplies Jek gets from Stotz, which ultimately come from Morgus, all of this would have ended years ago, without the Doctor needing to show up. Knock Morgus out of the equation, and things will get better. Assuming, that is, that his replacement, Trau Timmons, doesn’t turn out to be just as viciously self-interested in the long run—that’s a happy ending that I don’t think Holmes would want us to assume. There’s not much innocence to be found on Androzani.