(How does one milk a bat....?)
As far as I know, the Peter Davison years were never broadcast in my area so while I knew about him, and over the years I've heard a lot of about this particular episode from people who almost universally liked or even loved this episode, this was my first opportunity to actually see it.
It was one of the better written and plotted episodes I've seen.
It opens pretty conventionally (for Doctor Who) with the Doctor and his companion blundering into a Situation and (literally) falling into trouble. As seems to happen all too often to the Doctor, he and his companion find themselves in the middle of a war with neither side regarding him as a friend.
You know, at this point I'm going to say something about clothing. The Doctor, at least, tends to wear clothing that actually offers him some protection from the environment, and his frequent fondness for either sneakers or otherwise "sensible" shoes makes a great deal of sense what with the "outrageous amount of running" his lifestyle entails. (We won't discuss trip-yourself-scarves, that was last regeneration anyhow.) His companions? WTH? OK, I know why there are short skirts and heels in the meta-sense of the need to attract TV audiences, but seriously? Peri and the Doctor are going into a cave. Hello? Maybe some practical clothes?
Some of the things I really like:
The Doctor deduces that the android guards are somehow recognizing human physiology with different senses than human use, and uses that fact that he is not human to escape confinement and deactivate the guards. It shows the Doctor is fucking scary smart, scheming, and yes, he is an alien.
We find this revisited when the Doctor goes off to get the bat milk to cure the spectrox toxemia, when he mentioned that he can hold his breath a lot longer than a human being can. (We see this again in the "Two Doctors", and probably other episodes) The fact he's going to milk a giant "queen bat"
I'm not so fond of, but this IS Doctor Who....The android double of Salateen, which we don't get clued into for quite awhile, who is posing as the perfect assistant and is thus a truly effective double agent.
The thoroughly deranged Sharez Jek. I didn't want to like him, he's a bad guy, but despite being a really unpleasant human being he's the only one who actually tries to help the Doctor and Peri get the antidote to spectrox toxemia whereas everyone else keeps harping on the "you're going to die!" thing. He genuinely does want Peri to live, although his reasons for that are pretty fucked up. In other words, he's not a cardboard villain.
Timmin. I really like Timmin, Morgus's put-upon secretary/assistant who is basically running the corporation for His Evilness. Then, when he goes off planet she stages a corporate coup and takes over. As a former secretary/executive assistant this is one of my long standing revenge fantasies. Not that I have any illusions that she'll be a kinder, gentler corporate despot - after all, she implemented pretty much all of the illegal and/or exploitative plans of Morgus. It's the karmic payback to the bastard asshole she had to work under that has the appeal here.
The Doctor just about killing himself, while suffering some horrible poisoning himself, in order to give the entirety of the antidote to his companion, is of course one of the reasons we love the Doctor. While he is, over his long life, an often irascible, distant, and even cold person it's at moments like these that we remember he actually DOES give a damn about others. He suffers great trials not only for large groups but also for individuals. It what makes him a hero.
The regeneration scene, with the Doctor hallucinating, wasn't bad. Having watched several of these in close proximity it's clear that until NewWho there wasn't a set way of handling them. However --
From his very first line, my reaction to Colin Baker's Doctor is what a colossal, egotistical jackass! As the only other episode with C. Baker's Doctor I've seen is "The Two Doctors" I'm not sure that holds up (he struck me as a bit of a jackass in that story, too), but I expect I will sample a few more episodes with him in the future to find out. If I can stand the eye-bleeding atrocity of his costume. I mean, fuck, what the hell was wardrobe thinking?
