Doctor Who - New Beginnings

A fairly good story from Tom Baker's last season. It's probably most remembered for bring back a certain major villian. The DVD has the usual extras you'd expect. The point of interest is Anthony Ainley taking part on the audio commentary recorded shortly before his death. Also if you play all on the menu screen watch out for the end of credits for Part 4. There's a nice little outtake from the PC game Destiny of the Doctors.

JUST as the looming, entropic undoing of the universe casts shadows before it the Doctor cannot ignore, this loose trilogy - and Logopolis in particular - has cast a long shadow across many seasoned Whovians' lives. Season 18 was a death-haunted, melancholy thing given it was `children's TV', a moody sequence of stories about partings, loss, societies in decay; in Tom Baker's finale even the Doctor couldn't escape, saving everything, but not himself. Could this box still evoke the same dark feelings it did in a ten-year-old, a quarter of a century on? Delighted to report - appalled to report - it's `Yes.' Logoplis is how to say 'goodbye' properly.

These stories appeal because they're Doctor-centric. ...Traken, the slightest of the three but ideas-rich and beautiful looking, opens with the kind of Doctor-companion exposition not seen since the Hartnell era. John Nathan-Turner's tenure as producer would eventually become top-heavy with references to the show's past, but here it's still beguiling (perhaps thanks to the guiding hand of golden Pertwee-era stalwart Barry Letts), the looks back adding gravity as the end of everything looms. It's all in Baker's face, suddenly older, more gravely etched than before. The excellent commentaries across all the stories add texture, and the lead actor admits in his that, having agreed to stand down, he had many fears about the future - a neat mirror to the Doctor's own unspoken fear that perhaps there wouldn't be a future. The grin wasn't hiding the fear, and so all-the-more heroic, in the face of a dreadful unknown.

Logopolis is the dark heart of this set, brooding and funereal. In terms of its (still slightly wooly) science - perhaps even in its attitude to life and death - this is where the show first started to grow up, and touch on the `after-effects' that Russell T Davies threads through his stories. So many moments still resonate - the darkening control rooms as the Doctor and (not-as-bad-as-you-remembered) Adric explore the recursive loop trap (writer Christopher H Bidmead admits his fascination with the TARDIS as a jumping-off point - and what fan isn't fascinated by the ship?); the Watcher; the Cloister Room and more, the Cloister Bell - a harbinger of doom nightmarishly distorted by the very unraveling it heralds. If you can get this set for under £20 then do; it's worth it just to hear Baker say `the Cloister Bell' in ep. one, though he has so many memorable lines here - `Because he's here' of the Watcher, `Nothing like this has ever happened to me before', the rant at the `companions' he `never chose' and of course `It's the end...' you will see that sequence a dozen times if you watch this lot soup-to-nuts, and never fail to thrill at the sickly dying fall of that helter-skeltering music as the Doctor - The Doctor for so many viewers - lies broken at the foor of the Pharos.

Castrovalva can't compete, but sets up the massively-underrated Davison Doctor neatly nonetheless. To make him so young and vulnerable was a brave and necessary step, and the excellent documentaries and add-ons give both the outgoing and incoming Time Lords a chance to have their say about playing the role. It emerges that Castrovalva was the fourth Fifth Doctor story recorded, to give the new man time to find the characterisation, then unpick it as the regeneration starts to fail; Davison's determined creative struggle with the role throughout his period in the TARDIS (which he rounded out with his finest performance) is one of the fascinating subtexts in this set, as is the help he got from his `second self' - there are many nods to both Patrick Troughton and his portrayal of the Doctor throughout, including the story of his amazing appearance on the Castrovalva set... bending the rules of time, and all that... Davison's archive interviews (Pebble Mill, Nationwide, Swap Shop) hint at a slight zany, unhinged humour under the pleasant open manner and floppy-haired, head boy good looks; shame that couldn't have broken free when he donned the cricket sweater. Still, splendid fellow.

Highly recommended then, though with one small proviso: fans of Christopher H Bidmead (especially his excellent Target novelisations of Logopolis and Castrovalva) might be slightly disappointed to find that he comes across as a slight chump in parts of the commentaries, although it's possible he's sending himself up - possible. He even mentions at one point that he himself had recently re-read the novelisations and thought them rather good. Talk about recursive trap...

Anyway, don't be frightened by that grinding, tolling bell in your mind. You need this. And I didn't even mention the Master (a ghostly chuckle fades on the edge of hearing)...

great to look back and see how it used to be done with the all time best,tom baker.