The Two Doctors brings Partrick Troughton back to the series. It's the 141st serial and it first aired February 16 to March 2 1985. Colin Baker is the 6th Doctor and Patrick is the 2nd Doctor. Nicola Bryant plays Peri Brown and Frazer Hines plays Jamie McCrimmon. It would be the last time that Patrick and Frazer would play their characters. The 3 episode story was written by Robert Holmes and directed by Peter Moffatt. Jacqueline Pearce plays totally villainous Chessene, I had been seeing her in Blake's 7 as the evil head of the Federation, she plays a similar evil character there.
Doctor 2 and Jamie are in the Tardis, they land on Space Station Chimera where they meet Dastari, the Head of Projects, and explain they are on a mission from the Time Lords. The station has some scientists experimenting on Time Travel and the Time Lords want them to stop. The Time Lords lack any interest in sharing their control over time. Dastari introduces Chessene to Doc 2 and Jamie. She's been experimented on, changing her from a primitive bestial Androgum to a more human with great intelligence. Still, underneath she's an evil and murderous creature with thoughts of univeral domination.
Chessene has made a deal with the Sontarians to steal the time experiments and kill everyone on board the station except the Doctor, Dastari and the Androgum cook. They all leave and a short while later Peri and the 6th Doctor show up. They follow the trail to Seville Spain on modern Earth where Chessene gets her plans rolling. The Docs put that plan to rest but it takes a while so there's the usual chasing, getting caught and escaping. There are some nice scenes in the Spanish countryside and Seville.
The program got some negative feedback for the violence. That all ramped up and the show got put into a year hiatus when the season ended. I liked the episode well enough but I was more interested in seeing the return of Patrick Troughton than seeing the plot play out. At one point Dastari starts the process to change the 2nd Doctor into a Androgum. That's him and the cook below. The cook does murder several people in a rather horrible manner. He's a pretty awful creature, not human, but willing to eat them.
It's a 2 disc set and the episode disc has a fairly good commentary with Peter Moffatt, Jacqueline Pearce, Frazer Hines, Peter Davison and Nicola Bryant. There's an Easter Egg with some footage of the credits, an info track and an isolated score. The only other extra is a clip from Jimmy Savile's show Jim'll Fix It called A Fix With Sontarians. Jimmy sets up a scene for a little Doctor Who fan. He gets to do a scene with Peter Davison, Janet Fielding and some Sontarians. Recently it was revealed that Jimmy Savile was a sexual predator who carried on his dirty business for decades.
Disc two has a whole bunch of extras. There's a nice featurette on writer Robert Holmes. He died in 1986 and there isn't much of him on video. There's over an hour of raw video shooting, some in the studio and some on location. There's a promo celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Doctor. There's a featurette on location shooting in Spain with production manager Gary Downie. It was his job to recce the Spanish locations where he returns to talk about the experience. There's a nice Photo Gallery and an episode of the radio program Wavelength which talks about Doctor Who.
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