Vengeance on Varos

Perhaps the most well known act of myth revisionism in recent years is the correction of the famous Acid Bath incident in "Vengeance on Varos". For many years fans added the murder of two guards in this story to the list of crimes perpetrated by the evil old Sixth Doctor. In fact, as can fairly be seen by watching the story, the two hapless extra's plunge into the acid bath in no less accidental fashion than Harrison Chase meeting his grisly justice in "The Seeds of Doom". Yet perhaps the question should always have been, did we really need an acid bath in Doctor Who at all?

Or, indeed, a planet of torture devices. The infamous attention given to the Acid Bath sequence is all the more mystifying when you note that far more clear proof of guilt is offered later on in the same story, where a plan actually worked out by the Doctor revolves around some very nasty poisonous vines flying in the face of his enemies. I'm aware that I'm on shaky ground here; discussing Season 22 opens up old wounds, and a lot of Colin fans may wind up hating me. But I love Doctor Who, and I'm just being objective, as is my self-appointed job. The production team got careless at this time. If you watch other era's, you can see the action is carefully contrived so various villain's deaths are accidental, or in some way poetically justified. When you watch Shockeye being smothered by cyanide at the direct hands of the Doctor, you can't help imagine that, had Barry Letts been there, recording would have been halted immediately. Can't Shockeye fall onto the cyanide pad? Is there some way the Doctor can be assisted by someone else who kills Shockeye? As much as these scenario's don't change the outcome of the scene in question, it was always just the way it was done. But during the mid-eighties, they started to forget to care. It isn't a great crime, but it is a somewhat unfortunate one. The reason why "Vengeance on Varos" was perhaps a bad idea is different, however.

The problem with "Varos" is not so much the lapses into acid baths and hangman's nooses, as the overall aim of the production; the story is frequently defended because its whole point is to portray the wrongdoings of sickeningly violent people. I would argue that this is exactly why it was such an unwelcome foray for Doctor Who in the first place. Had the show been a hard-hitting, post-watershed drama, then those defenders might have a point. But it wasn't. It was still commissioned as tea-time terror for kids, or at the very least young adults. "Varos" is a dark adventure, and thus along with some other less than colourful settings that season (incubation rooms in "Revelation", sewers in "Attack", underground caves in "Timelash") lends the whole year a grim, grimy feel. The essence of why the Season was seen as too violent wasn't, in my opinion, just down to a series of incidental mistakes, as much as a culmination of grim ideas and settings. And where it isn't grim, it's gaudy.

What this season needed above all else was to be more fantasy based. "Mark of the Rani" featured brain alteration, so did "Revelation of the Daleks". There are crushed hands, burned faces and cannibalism. When, in "Terror of the Autons", Doctor Who got into trouble for straying too near reality, it was a notable lapse. Here, it seems the Doctor has entered a world where nothing but realism pervades. Again, it was probably carelessness; we could have had stun guns where we saw knives or 'magical deaths' like vaporisation where we had acid. "Varos" sums it up by setting a Doctor Who story in a torture prison, a very real place full of very real deaths. The laser bolts in episode 1 and the hallucinatory attacks are the right way to go, non-bloody fantastical inventions. Alas Varos also takes its visual cues from old-fashioned instruments of torture, winding up like a story set in the London Dungeons. It's a dark, seedy environment which isn't the right kind of scary when you're ten. "Varos" is the ultimate example of telling a good story in the wrong programme.

"Caves of Androzani" is to blame of course. Doctor Who discovered it could do gritty realism really well, and when you find you can make excellent show's for adults, it's very hard to go back and make your show less like it was when it was very popular: it was tried in the Graham Williams era and in "Trial", and each time the humour only ends up diluting the overall impact of the series, and complete reinvention (Season 18 and 24) is ultimately required. Unfortunately, the Colin Baker era was doomed when it didn't completely reinvent itself, and "Vengeance on Varos" kicked off a season with too much of the very thing that had proved the most popular the previous year.