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cringecompanionapologist · 1 month ago

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Why The Caves of Androzani Would Work as a Turlough Story

Warning: we get sidetracked.

A while back, I made a post about The Caves of Androzani as a Turlough story and I want to elaborate a little on why this would work, aside from the obvious shipping fuel. It takes the Doctor’s character arc, that already ends well in The Caves of Androzani as it is, and doubles down on it.

Classic Who Doctors didn’t always have an arc, and when they did, it was pretty loose. The First Doctor became less of an asshole, the Third Doctor found a family at UNIT, and the Sixth Doctor would’ve also become less of an asshole if the show wasn’t a complete trainwreck by that point. The Fifth Doctor, though not as bad as the Sixth, got caught up in a lot of 80s Who Bullshit, which made his arc sort of turn itself off and on again.

The main problem was a lack of cohesion behind the scenes. John Nathan Turner wanted to do soap operas, since they were what was popular on TV at the time. So, he wanted more drama, more conflict between characters, more Big Damn Events. So, the Doctor and companions constantly bickered and went from one traumatic event to another. The problem was that the soap opera thing was kinda his thing and literally no one else’s. Most of the writers brought on to Doctor Who in the 80s were very much sci-fi writers. They wanted to explore alien worlds and scientific concepts. Character-based drama and sci-fi exploration aren’t inherently contradictory. The First Doctor’s era balanced the two perfectly fine. But, 80s Who writers didn’t want to do the character drama bit at all. This meant that between Big Damn Events, the characters tended to fall into what I’m gonna call The Alice Effect.

The Alice Effect is a reference to Alice in Wonderland. In stories that mainly exist to explore strange worlds, the protagonist is often made as bland as possible in contrast to the crazy world they’re in. This makes them relatable to everyone and doesn’t distract from the worldbuilding. Alice is usually the least interesting element of Alice in Wonderland. Dorothy isn’t nearly as interesting as Oz. The strange worlds and the people they meet along the way are more interesting than the characters you’re following.

A common thing you’ll notice with a lot of televised Fifth Doctor stories is that the one-off characters are often more interesting than the regulars and that one-off side characters usually get more attention than companions. The Doctor and companions arrive somewhere and get separated. The Doctor takes on a local as a temporary companion while the usual companions get locked in a box or something until the story’s almost over. Some companions got locked in boxes more than others, but it happened to all of them. The mild-mannered Fifth Doctor is basically guided around the strange new world by a one-off character, putting him in the Alice role, meeting the Cheshire Cats and Mad Hatters of the universe. The writers wrote worlds for him to explore.

Of course, there are still the Big Damn Events every now and again. But, since most of writers don’t care about them, they write later stories as if they never happened. Companions are traumatized and then promptly forget about it. Characters are introduced with an arc and then the arc is put on pause until their last story. In this way, the Fifth Doctor ends up with a sort of arc that only factors into the character at a few points.

Five’s arc doesn’t begin until the end of his first season. Adric dies. Five’s era becomes defined by death and failure to save the day. But, Adric himself is rarely mentioned, so the arc gets a bit lost. The only moment, not counting the damage control the EU did, where Adric’s death motivating the Doctor’s arc is explicitly mentioned is at the literal last second. The Doctor sees all his companions before regenerating, including Adric, and that’s his last thought. His last spoken words are “Feels different this time…”, but the audience can here him think “Adric?”. This drives home the point of why the Doctor is about to regenerate. He gave up this life to save Peri’s life. He isn’t sure he’s even going to regenerate at that moment. He died to avoid losing another companion. In his mind, he atoned for Adric’s death.

There is at least one other plot point that apparently the scripts confirmed was inspired by Adric’s death, but it’s never made clear. This plot point is the Doctor being so eager to have Turlough join him in the TARDIS. He sees this vulnerable young man as someone he can help. A second chance. He might’ve failed Adric but he won’t fail this one.

If you look at Season 19, you can sort of see an arc with Five and Adric that might not’ve even been intentional. Adric isn’t doing very well at this point. He was an orphan who finally found himself a family, only to lose it. Romana left. The Doctor died and then turned into a different person. He didn’t have a chance to properly adjust to the change because he was getting kidnapped at tortured at the time. He was kidnapped at tortured. The Doctor took longer in rescuing him than he normally would due to an inconvenient bout of amnesia where he forgot Adric and not his two newer companions. Speaking of them, Nyssa and Tegan are both also traumatized and need the Doctor’s attention. He has a bit of a Former Only Child issue, especially with Tegan, who is very good at making people pay attention to her.

So, being a teenager who isn’t good at expressing his feelings, Adric lashes out, gets into trouble, sides or pretends to side with any authority figure who offers positive attention, and complains loudly and frequently. The Doctor is either oblivious to why Adric’s acting out, or he knows but is being just as immature as Adric and ignoring things that challenge him. The Doctor doesn’t want to talk about feelings. It’s awkward. So he argues with Adric on his own level.

The most obvious bit of this is the fallout of Kinda in The Visitation. In Kinda, the Doctor and Adric get stuck in a military base where the guy in charge is having a nervous breakdown. Adric pretends to take his side to look for a way to help them escape. The Doctor and his one-off companion find their own escape, with the Doctor deliberately choosing to leave Adric to escape on his own because “he’s very resourceful”.

Things get worse in the base, now with two insane authority figures trying to blow the place up. In order to escape, Adric finds a sort of armed mecha suit that these people sometimes walk around in that’s controlled by thought. He steals it, but he can’t control it properly, panics, and in the process, shoots one of the natives of the planet that the Doctor had befriended.

Later on, the Doctor yells at Adric for putting others in danger by meddling with technology he didn’t know how to use properly. He should’ve found a different means of escape. The Doctor is being unfair to Adric here, who was desperate to escape a building that was about to be blown up, and he wouldn’t have been put in that situation if the Doctor had rescued him when he escaped instead of leaving him to escape by himself. So the Doctor was worried for Adric’s safety and probably feels guilty about leaving him, but feelings are hard and he expresses them through anger at Adric.

At one point in The Visitation, Adric and Nyssa are in the TARDIS, working on a plan to save the Doctor and Tegan from the monster of the week. Adric gets frustrated, because the Doctor would know what to do here and asks “Why is he never around when you want him?”. This moment has more impact in the context of Kinda. Adric has good reason to feel like the Doctor abandoned him.

Adric and Nyssa figure out how to fly the TARDIS well enough to bring it to where the Doctor and Tegan are, though everything’s already okay by that point. The Doctor acts irritated with them and isn’t at all grateful for anything they’ve done. The serial ends there with no resolution to the Doctor and Adric’s conflict, probably because the writer of Black Orchid either didn’t know about this arc, or wasn’t interested in it.

But, Earthshock was written by the script editor, the one guy who definitely knows the season’s continuity, so we get more of the Doctor and Adric fighting. Adric’s sick of feeling like a screw-up and he wants to go home. He’s figured out the coordinates to get himself back to E-Space but the Doctor is angry because it’s too dangerous. Their argument is interrupted by the plot.

After Adric helps out with the plot, everyone calms down and Adric admits that he doesn’t really want to go home. He’s able to do something right, the Doctor shows some appreciation, and he’s fine now. My own interpretation is that Adric never actually wanted to leave. He threatened to leave so the Doctor would insist that he stay. He wanted to know if he was actually wanted. If the Doctor had argued against Adric’s plans with “you shouldn’t do that because I’d miss you” instead of “you shouldn’t do that because it’s too dangerous”, the conflict most likely would’ve been solved right then.

But, even though the conflict was resolved for the moment, it isn’t resolved completely. Adric still feels like he makes too many mistakes. He isn’t worthy of the Doctor. That’s why the Doctor’s always mad at him and left him behind. He has some self-esteem and abandonment issues from a combination of teenage angst and unaddressed trauma. So, he has to prove himself. He has to use his Super Math Powers to save the day, prove his worth to the Doctor. And, because history says so, he fails. He’ll never know if he was right. He’ll never know if he was worthy.

The Doctor kind of realizes he hadn’t treated Adric very well and now he doesn’t have a chance to do better. He should’ve realized how badly Adric was doing mentally. Adric was begging for help and he should’ve helped him. But, feelings are complicated so the Doctor insists that everyone act like nothing happened.

This is where Turlough comes in. I think the Doctor knew about the Black Guardian, or at least that something was wrong with Turlough pretty much the entire time. Turlough was another person who seemed to be asking for help without asking. This time, the Doctor would listen. This time, he would help. This time, he would get it right.

But, the situation flips. Adric told the Doctor that something was wrong and the Doctor didn’t listen. Now, the Doctor is listening but Turlough won’t tell him anything. Still, the Doctor looks after him, saves his life, and wins his loyalty.

It stands out that, out of all of Five’s companions, Turlough had the best ending. Adric dies, Kamelion dies, Peri will eventual sorta die but sorta not, Tegan runs away traumatised, and Nyssa…well, she’s happy, but she chooses to stay in an unsafe place, so it’s bittersweet. It’s bittersweet with Turlough as well, since Turlough doesn’t want to leave the Doctor. But Turlough goes home. He’s safe. He’s become a better person. He’s one of the few companions from this era who was definitely better of from having met the Doctor.

And that sort of closes Five’s arc a serial early. He was given a second chance and he succeeded. Adric may have died, but Turlough went home safe. Adric lost his brother, Turlough found his. He gets to be home with his family like Adric would’ve been if the Doctor hadn’t met him. Five’s main conflict really should be solved by this point. The Caves of Androzani is powerful and it’s a fitting end to the arc, but back-to-back with Planet of Fire it’s a lot. On top of that, as the companion the Doctor saves, she doesn’t really parallel Adric in any way and she’s so new that the audience and the Doctor, not counting the damage control the EU did, don’t really know her. If she was a one-off character or had been introduced at the beginning of The Caves of Androzani, she would’ve had the same level of impact in the story itself.

But, if Turlough is the character that most represents the Doctor getting a second chance after Adric’s death, the Doctor dying to prevent him from dying would be the most fitting end to the story. This prevents the situation where the Doctor has already resolved him arc and ups the emotional investment of the audience with a character they’d be familiar with by that point.

You could also play the last three serials as an interesting progression. The Doctor starts with Tegan, Turlough, and Kamelion. If Kamelion hadn’t been a complete non-entity, this progression would work far better. But, you have Resurrection of the Daleks. Tegan leaves because too many people have died. Then, Planet of Fire. Kamelion dies. The Doctor loses another companion. By The Caves of Androzani, the Doctor is even more determined not to lose the only one he has left. The only one he hasn’t let down yet. And he gives his life for it.

So, I’m not saying the The Caves of Androzani should’ve been a Turlough story and this was a mistake to correct. The Caves of Androzani and the Doctor’s sacrifice works perfectly well as it is. Also, the reason Turlough wasn’t around for this one was because Mark Strickson decided to leave for understandable reasons. It couldn’t have happened. Still, it’s fun to imagine the AU.

#fifth doctor #vislor turlough #the caves of androzani

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