The Collection: Season 22 - A Review

The latest Blu-ray box set release is for Season 22 - Colin Baker's first (and, in some ways, only).

The stories covered are Attack of the Cybermen, Vengeance on Varos, Mark of the Rani, The Two Doctors, Timelash and Revelation of the Daleks. Two very good stories, three okay ones, and one pretty bad one.

The Cyberman story is famously bogged down by continuity, which is a shame. There is the hint of a good story here, but there are too many references to previous Cyberman stories. Even fans disliked this as they failed to honour the continuity properly. Controller and Tombs look nothing like the ones seen previously. Lots of characters get introduced whose plot goes nowhere.

Varos is the only story to have no references to previous stories, and is a far better story. Sil makes for a great villain. Mark of the Rani suffers from the Master's presence. He is simply one Time Lord too many. A lot of nice location filming. The Two Doctors is a bit of a mess. Robert Holmes was presented with too many plot elements, which don't all gel. The biggest problem is that the two Doctors don't get to spend more than about 10 minutes screen time together, and Troughton is even separated from Frazer Hines for much of it. Apparently Holmes was not happy with the previous Sontaran story, but they are woefully underused here.

Timelash is the season's turkey. This one gets new CGI effects which help a little, as this was one of its biggest embarrassment areas. The plot and acting can't be improved with CGI, however. One of its issues was that JNT took the regulars out of rehearsals for his pantomime, which he prioritised over the programme.

The Dalek story is the other very good one. It also has new CGI, dating back to the DVD release.

Apart from the Rani story, the level of on-screen violence has certainly been upped this year - which is one of the reasons given for the hiatus imposed upon the programme, announced part way through The Two Doctors. This event runs like a thread throughout the various interviews and documentaries on this set.

There are three interviews courtesy of Matthew Sweet. The first is with Colin Baker. This is an excellent piece, which only gets to Doctor Who in its final third. The rest is very much about his early life and other work, plus the events surrounding the death of his baby son. The interview with Nicola Bryant seems to get stuck on the fact that she only pretended to be an American to get the role, which Sweet just can't get over. She has more to say about JNT, especially his more controlling aspects.

The reason she did not feature in the Jim'll Fix It Sontaran skit was because she had refused to do the pantomime.

The third interview is with Michael Grade, in which he admits that there was never supposed to be a hiatus but a complete cancellation. He seemed surprised to learn that the series continued for a further four years after the suspension. He is quite unapologetic about his actions, claiming (rightly in a way) that the series was past its best, was too violent, and it was a mistake to throw licence payers money at something which just could not compete with other sci-fi TV and movies of the mid 1980's.

He certainly does not come across as the villain fans thought him to be.

As far as documentaries go, only The Two Doctors gets a new one. The others all had perfectly good ones accompanying their DVD releases. This new doc has its issues. We get a bloke in a Sontaran costume wandering around Seville - except he's just badly superimposed over some still images. There's also a really annoying deliberate image flicker prior to each interviewee being introduced, enough to trigger an epileptic fit.

One other doc associated with this story is a 2006 piece, wherein Nicola Bryant went back to Seville with some fans to visit the locations. This comes across as a very amateurish piece, and should have been better edited. It would have worked far better with Bryant presenting on her own, instead of being part of a large group. More than half the doc sees the group visit locations which didn't even feature in the story, like being forced to watch someone's holiday video.

Sticking with The Two Doctors (which does get two of the eight discs to itself) the short A Fix With Sontarans is included. This comes with a commentary (Baker, Fielding and Gareth Jenkins). The piece is edited to entirely omit Jimmy Saville, his appearance at the end being replaced with an image of Sontaran spaceships on the TARDIS scanner.

Another extra on these discs is the radio serial Slipback. I have to admit that I had managed to go 36 years without listening to this. I really wish I could have gone another 36 years without listening to it.

A popular extra on these sets is "Behind the Sofa". We have three sets of viewers for these stories. The first is Baker and Bryant, joined by Terry Molloy, who features in the first and last of the stories present). The second group comprises Peter Davison, Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton. The third is Sylvester McCoy, accompanied by Wendy Padbury. She gets one of the best lines when, after commenting on the violence in the Varos story she longs for the return of one of her old foes - "Bring back a Quark, I say".

I know there are those who refuse to buy these sets. The reasons given are usually that most of the content is already out there on DVD, the picture quality can't get all that much better due to the nature of the archive video material, and cost. 

I certainly agree that these are expensive, but thanks to the (over)long gaps between releases you can budget for them easily enough. The picture quality is noticeably improved, and I long to see what they can do with older monochrome material. There are always enough new items as extras to justify the purchase as far as I'm concerned.

Talking of those long gaps, we have yet to be told what the next release is going to be. There are two seasons where we know for definite that new material has been recorded - Season 2 and Season 20.

Of the two, I'd obviously prefer the Hartnell season to be next, but Davison is now lagging behind, with only the one release (19) going back a few years now. An anniversary season for an anniversary year would make sense, so if not next then Season 20 will certainly be seen before 2023 is out.