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If you are travelling back & forth through time & space, you're just bound to meet yourself at one
occasion or the other (even though the law of probability would suggest
otherwise, but then, you can't very well film the law of probability,
can you), & for a series like Doctor Who, that's especially
easy, since oh so many actors have played the lead (7 alone during the series'
first run of 26 years), & their only common characteristic is that they have
nothing in common. So the Doctor had already met himself for the 10th (The
Three Doctors) and the 20th (The Five Doctors) anniversary,
& this was the third time (no anniversary though, legend has it that
Patricjk Troughton, the Doctor's 2nd regeneration, just was very keen on
doing it).
The plot has Doctor Who (Patrick Troughton, the second Doctor)
& Jamie (Frazer Hines, who played a juvenile Highlander in his
original run of Doctor Who, but by now he was already in his
thirties) come to a spacestation where a couple of scientists experiment
in timetravelling, but their way of doing so might destroy the fabric of
time itself. On behalf of his race, the timelords, the good Doctor wants
to talk the station's head, Dastari (Laurence Payne), into stopping
them, instead he is taken prisoner himself (you see, only the genetic
anomaly of a timelord can make a timemachine work ! - ?), & the
station is under attack by the Sontarans, a race of warmongers ... When
the Doctor in his 6th incarnation (Colin Baker) & his assistant Peri
(Nicola Bryant) also enter the space station, they find it deserted with
traces of a fight indicating what happened. But they also find Jamie,
half crazed with fear, who turns out to be the only survivor, & who
thinks he saw the Doctor being killed. Soon though, & with the help
of telepathy, it becomes clear the second Doctor was brought to Spain by
Dastari & his assistant Chessene (Jacqueline Pearce of Blake's 7-fame)
& her cook Shockeye (John Stratton) - both Androgums, cannibalistic
& treacherous beings who think of little else but food, & while
she has a genetically augmented brain making her a genius, he is rather
a pure primitive -, as well as 2 Sontarans. Of course, Doctor # 6, along
with Peri & Jamie, comes to the rescue, & in the end - helped by
the fact that the Sontarans & the Androgums turn on each other - they
succeed, even though Doctor # 2 is temporarily turned into an Androgum
himself (and, in an amusing scene, goes to a restaurant with Shockeye).
In the 80's, Doctor Who was definetely past its prime, not at
all helped by producer John Nathan Turner's desperate (& often
embarassing) attempts to modernize the series. This however, is one of
the neater 80's stories, relying more on off-beat concepts (yes,
childish as I am, I rather liked the food-crazy, cannibalistic
Androgums), weird characters (& both Colin Baker & Patrick
Troughton are among the weirder versions of the Doctor, even though
Baker's garish costume more often works against him than for him) &
strange dialogue than on run-of-the-mill action (which Doctor Who,
due to a rather limited budget, was never good at anyways). But
unfortunately, with a running time of 2 ¼ hours, this 3 part episode is
way too long for its rather feeble story, much of it seems just the
characters running to & fro to fill the time. And, the main
attraction, the 2 Doctors actually meeting each other, just isn't
played out except for a few brief scenes in episode 3, making one
somewhat wonder why they bothered to include Troughton & Frazer
Hines in this story in the first place.
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