Month: February 2026

Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison), Season 19, 1982. Four parts.

Castrovalva^[1] is a frazione of Anversa degli Abruzzi, a municipality in the Abruzzo, region of Italy. The village, which clings to the top of a steep hill, was depicted in M.C. Escher‘s 1930 lithograph “Castrovalva”. The first serial of the 19th season in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who is entitled Castrovalva, which was first broadcast in 1982, was named after this lithograph

After his regeneration, the Doctor is disoriented and unable to function, so Nyssa and Tegan try to help him recover and in the TARDIS’ database find a location called Castrovalva, which seems an ideal place for a rest. Unfortunately, The Master has kidnapped Adric and used his powers of math to create this otherwise fictional Castrovalva, The heroes figure this out when they cannot leave because of “recursive occlusion” which is a technobabble way of saying they’re stuck on MC Escher’s looping staircases.

The Master stupidly reveals himself and one of the NPCs in the village sacrifices himself to free Adric, which cause Castrovalva to collapse around The Master, though our heroes escape through a secret passage. The end!

Every time the Doctor regenerates, he’s out of it for a while, which gives the companions some time to shine. This is a good idea and the young actors do an admirable job here. The Master as always is hammy and moustache-twirling, missing no opportunity for an evil laugh at camera (sometimes with no sound?)

This story could have been half the length. Scenes spent chasing string through the halls of the TARDIS and hauling a box through the woods could have been cut. Also, why did The Master create Castrovalva with free will and a magic tapestry that functions like a scrying pool – or were those parts Adric’s doing? “The Master leaves nothing to chance,” the Doctor says. Oh reaallllyy?

Next: Four to Doomsday

Fourth Doctor, Season 18, 1981 – four 25 minute episodes

It’s Tom Baker’s final Doctor Who story!

Floating through space and time, we learn that the TARDIS has a Cloister Bell to warn of trouble (have we seen this before or since?) but the Doctor decides to go to modern England to fix the TARDIS’ chameleon circuit – the device that allows it to appear as any object, and the reason why the TARDIS has been stuck in the shape of a British police box for hundreds of episodes. For some nonsense reason, in order to effect repairs, he has to take precise measurements of an actual police box and take them to the what I like to call The Holy Order of Maths on the planet Logopolis.

The Doctor’s arch nemesis The Master gets wind of this plan and materializes his own TARDIS around the police box, which causes a recursion loop (whatever that is) and traps the Doctor and Adric. A very big problem but it actually isn’t as they soon appear outside the TARDIS for reasons unexplained.

A mysterious white watcher figure tells The Doctor to go to Logopolis immediately, where a bunch of old white dudes are doing math in their heads to hold the universe together. The Doctor asks their help with his Block Transfer (whatever that is) but the Master ruins the computations by shrinking some of the old men and now the TARDIS is shrinking with the doctor inside. This is resolved in short order with more maths.

The Master keeps messing with the old men and now the universe is unraveling, cause people to be eaten away by special effects, buildings to crumble, and electronics to stop working (sometimes). Entropy is accelerated!

Now to save the universe The Doctor has to team up with The Master. They flee back to Earth to an observatory to use the antenna to shoot a data program into a Charged Vacuum Emboitment (whatever that is), but the dish has to be realigned. Once this is done, the Master naturally betrays the Doctor, and broadcasts to the entire universe that they must acknowledge his rule, otherwise the universal collapse will continue.

The Doctor runs to disconnect a cable but falls off to his death, or rather his regeneration.

So this is a pretty weakly-written story that introduces two new companions (Tegan and Nyssa) and a new Doctor (Peter Davison). Some of the ideas are legitimately great but the execution is mostly sloppy and nonsensical. They could have made the recursion loop interesting and dangerous but instead it’s just a couple minutes of “oh no! we’re trapped!” until they move on. The control room of the Logopolans was, in universe, built to model an Earth observatory for what I have to assume is budget reasons, and the Fifth Doctor appearing as a white shrouded figure throughout the episodes is another interesting idea that really only seems to usher them to the next plot point.

Worth watching if you want to see the transition between the doctors, or if you’re a fan of The Master, but otherwise, meh.

Next episode: Castrovalva