Doctor Who: The Caves of Androzani

The scripting, pacing, and performances in this episode are simply brilliant. Peter Davison turns out the best performance of his time, skillfully balancing the Doctor's struggle for his own life with his unwavering impulse to protect the innocent. Superior production values and direction create gritty, edge-of- your seat drama throughout.

With the obligatory extras and the excellent remastering courtesy of The Doctor Who Restoration Team, Caves of Androzani is a five star disc all around. If you can only buy one episode from Peter Davison's era as the Doctor, this should be it.

It's the final story for Peter Davison, the 5th Doctor, and is notably gloomy and dark. Roger Limb's militaristic score, replete with a rattlesnake motif, and Graeme Harper's inspired direction -- full of cross-fades, matched dissolves, and Shakespearean soliloquies to the camera -- is light-years beyond the dull visual look for which so much "Who" is unfortunately remembered. The script is Robert Holmes at his darkest: a planet run by a mega-corporation is involved in a bitter war against a deformed mad scientist and his android army over supply of a life-preserving drug. Into this picture stumble the Doctor and Peri, who both contract fatal poisoning within minutes. The acting is superb, from John Normington's evil-CEO Morgus, who delivers chilling asides to the camera, to former dancer Christopher Gable as the mad Sharaz Jek, stalking the camera (and Peri) in skin-tight leather and a memorable black-and-white mask.

The features are a slight decline from those in the first set of DVD releases. The raw studio footage of Peter Davison's regeneration scene is tolerable only with Davison and Harper's voiceover commentary -- but the DVD doesn't inform that this track exists over the featurettes as well as over the story. Similarly, the extended scene (featuring just 20 seonds of new material) works best with this commentary. The photo gallery and TV trailer strike of tokenism.

Better is a featurette narrated by (the late) Gable, describing the creation of Sharaz Jek: possibly the best original featurette on a DW disc thus far. Also grand is a 1983 TV interview in which a female reporter tries to bully Davison into admitting that his casting as the Doctor was a mistake!

Harper and Davison's full-length commentary is an absolute riot -- celebrating the story, while poking vicious fun at its (few) plot-holes and visual goofs. Davison's description of the Part Two cliffhanger is roll-on-the-floor funny. Nicola Bryant says little, but her regret at Peri's performance in this story is a revelation (considering what awful roles Peri would be assigned when Colin Baker became the Doctor). Also fine are the pop-up production notes, which describe Holmes's original script in tantalizing detail. You might not choose to sit through 90 minutes of the music-only sound option, but I enjoyed watching key scenes (including the regeneration) in this fashion.

Overall, one of "Doctor Who"'s finest TV stories, with a couple of nifty DVD-only additions that make this 20 year-old story a 21st-century triumph.