‘Thank you, all of you. Goodbye.’
As a coda to the Fifth Doctor’s time, we have a strange, but in the end rather beautiful little tale where Winter comes to the Fifth Doctor. The play starts with Doctor living the life of a rural farmer, with his wife Anima and children Tegan and Adric. It is a harsh, brutal winter (hence the title) and a blizzard is raging outside the farmhouse (which has aspects of the TARDIS in its design). A long way away, Nyssa, now grown up, is also a mother of one and a wife to Lasarti. Nyssa has been dreaming of the Master and the Doctor, her husband is a specialist in dreams and she uses a device he is working on to explore her dream, fearing that it might be real and the Master is attempting to contact her telepathically. Instead she appears to have entered the Doctor’s dream. She and Lasarti meet the Doctor, which leads to a very funny piece of dialogue:
Doctor: You’ll wake up Tegan
Nyssa: Tegan’s here?
Doctor She’s upstairs, in bed – with Adric
Nyssa: Oh…
Across the play, we start to realise that what we are actually seeing is the prelude to the Doctor’s regeneration. His brain is shutting down under the Spectrox Toxaemia – he is calling out to his friends – Nyssa, Tegan, Adric, Turlough and Kamelion for help. In the dream, the Master is trying to use Kamelion to stop the others from giving him the help he needs to regenerate. Tegan offers to give anything – including her life to help him. Nyssa takes the Doctor out to his barn to his ‘coffin’, which turns out to be a zero cabinet he has constructed from his memories, climbing into it his mind begins to clear. He tells her that he is in the TARDIS, dying on Androzani Minor, having saved his new companion Peri. Out in the snow in the forest the Watcher is waiting for the Doctor, after saying goodbye to her, he runs towards the white figure, falling into him and becoming a new man.
Ultimately, Winter isn’t quite as successful as Autumn, the opening setup is confusing – deliberately so, but for me doesn’t quite hang together. It is a concept explored much more fully in Human Nature – an ordinary life lost, than this play really has time for. It is interesting nonetheless, with Doctor at one point bemoaning the fact that he never has time for cricket and that he has always wanted a normal life in linear time with a wife and children. This fits with the Doctor of the DWM strips, spending time as an English gentleman in Stockbridge for which the Time Lords upbraid him in ‘The Stockbridge Horror’. We also gain an insight on The Master directly from the dying Doctor – he does the things he does because he hates being alone so much – something the TV series returns to later.
In the end the whole piece is strangely uplifting and the central conceit that the Doctor’s mind actively sought out help from his friends in his moment of need, to give him the strength to go on and that is what we see during his regeneration – them helping him through his death and re-birth is really rather affecting. There are also glimpses of the man to come – the Doctor perceives ‘and what a person he will be – all of those colours inside the white’ (of The Watcher) and in re-affirming his wandering spirit he uses the same Kipling quote from The Cat That Walked By Himself Just So Story that Colin Baker used in interviews when talking about the cat badge on his costume:
‘He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him’
The return of the Watcher, the zero cabinet and his friends give a lovely sense of completeness to the life and death of the Fifth Doctor (the Circular Time of the title – where heroes die and are resurrected) and it is rather a nice coda to Caves of Androzani.
I’ll leave the last rather elegiac words to Nyssa, in some ways they are reminiscent of the sad ending of The House at Pooh Corner where Christopher Robin says goodbye to his childhood friends:
‘He took my hands and he kissed my forehead.
Then he started to walk forwards towards the white figure.
He turned back once and looked around
And somehow he found where all of us where looking at him
‘Thank you, all of you, Goodbye!’ he said
And then he started to run with determination, without a hint of reluctance, because he still had things to do.
He had someone to save back in the real world, he had a whole other self that he had to be to do that.
He ran right into the white figure of The Watcher and he fell, spiralling down until he was lost in the distance…
I suppose if I never meet him again and grow old myself, I’ll have to say that was the last time I saw him – in a dream.
But without evidence, I’ll say to people that I know, that I know he’s still alive, somewhere out there, I’ll know he’s still travelling, I’ll know that he’s still having adventures, I’ll know he always will be…’
A Journal of Impossible Things 