Doctor Who: Survival

As the last adventure of the original series proper – separated from the first episode of the new series by fifteen years and the one-off TV movie starring Paul McGann – it almost seems like the DVD release of Survival has a lot of ground to cover, and a responsibility to bring the show’s story from the making of Survival itself up to – at the very least – the beginning of production on Christopher Eccleston’s first episode as the Doctor. And perhaps surprisingly, this 2-DVD set covers quite a bit (but not all) of that ground.

Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred and script editor Andrew Cartmel – widely acknowledged as the architect of the seventh Doctor’s reign and the series’ return to a more mysterious and powerful Doctor – are along for the ride in the commentary for all three episodes of Survival, and are also the chief participants in the impressive documentaries accompanying McCoy’s final televised adventure. A lively two-part documentary looks into the making of Survival specifically, and makes a very strong case that this story could have been a turning point for Doctor Who and still casts a long shadow well into the revived series. Lisa Bowerman and several other guest stars are interviewed as well (Bowerman having gone on to essay – at least in audio form – the role of Bernice Summerfield, the first companion originated in the New Adventures novels that picked up the Doctor’s travels after his cancellation from television). Deleted scenes and some very amusing outtakes – many of them featuring McCoy going off the script, off the cuff and occasionally off his rocker – are also included.

The second disc features what may emerge as the meatiest original documentary yet to have emerged from the Doctor Who classic series DVD releases. “Endgame” tells, warts and all, the story of Doctor Who’s final few seasons on the air, a story of declining ratings that eventually led to the BBC quietly putting it on “hiatus”. The controller of BBC1 at the time, Peter Cregeen, is interviewed at length and deals with the subject quite frankly…and as much as any true fan of the show hates to say it, it’s hard to come away without appreciating the logic behind his decision to “rest” the show, even if one doesn’t appreciate the result. Later in the documentary, Cartmel, writers Ben Aaronovitch and Colin Brake, FX designer Mike Tucker and the stars of the show discuss what would have been the 27th season, a series of adventures that would have seen Ace bow out in favor of a new companion for the seventh Doctor. This “would have been” segment tantalizingly recreates glimpses of these unmade stories with original artwork and faux title sequences, and offers a peek into a future that was decidedly different from the direction that the authors of the New Adventures took.

Or would it have been? Numerous connections are made to the New Adventures, including the abandoned-as-a-TV-script-but-revived-in-print Marc Platt story Lungbarrow, and the probability that many of the writers who tagged along for the formative stages of the popular book series would have found their way into the ranks of the TV series’ writers. This brings me to one of my few complaints about “Endgame” – it stops short of really covering the “wilderness years” of Doctor Who, where the stories were told by the fans themselves. Given what a major influence that the New Adventures, the Missing Adventures, the BBC-published novels and the Big Finish audio adventures – or at least their writers – have been on the current series, the lack of a documentary at least offering a cursory glance at the expanded universe of Who is a major omission. If the new series wasn’t penned by the likes of Paul Cornell and Rob Shearman, and wasn’t offering up “special thanks” to Marc Platt, I could see leaving the New Adventures in the past. But when that very same series of novels included an early print story by Russell T. Davies himself, it’s a very large gap of the show’s behind-the-scenes story to leave unfilled, and a part of the story that should be told, if not here, then perhaps somewhere in the bonus features of the new series’ third season.

Other than that, however, I have no complaints about “Endgame”. Far less heavy viewing can be found on the second disc as well, from the cringe-inducingly funny 1990 “Search Out Science” special (McCoy and Aldred’s true final appearance in character for the BBC as a one-off educational video about space), and a compilation of Anthony Ainley’s cutscenes recorded for the 1997 PC game Destiny Of The Doctors (which has already been reviewed elsewhere on this site). Much respect is given to the late Mr. Ainley by his co-stars in the various featurettes, by the way, so the addition of this, his final performance as the Master, is a fitting tribute, however cheesy the meant-for-PC-monitors production values may have been.

For a DVD that’s built around three 25-minute episodes of a single story, Survival is jam-packed with some of the most memorable features that have yet been put onto a Doctor Who DVD, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.