Early in the Fifth Doctor’s time on screen, one of the big questions faced by actor Peter Davison was how to differentiate his incarnation from the massive, infectious, striding performance of his predecessor, the longest-running continuous Doctor to date, Tom Baker. Davison was significantly slighter of frame, in an outfit that was a symphony of beige and cream, and he could – and just occasionally did – fade into the background by comparison. 

But where he worked best in his first season, he brought a quieter authority, a penchant for diplomacy, and a young-old, steel-spined approach to his Doctoring, in stories like Four To Doomsday, The Visitation, and Earthshock.

Davison showed a nation of Who-fans that not only was there a different way of playing the Doctor, but that actually, despite the wonderful work of Tom Baker, it was really quite a relief to see it done differently.

In that first season, Davison established himself as a Doctor who couldn’t perhaps be all things to all people, and certainly couldn’t be the Time Lord he had been. He was an incarnation occasionally prone to hurt feelings, to a little exasperation when badgered, and who, while always too polite to say “Get out of my Tardis and don’t come back,” often operated on the basis of wanting a little more peace and quiet than was ever to be his.

None of his companions were his choice – they had either stowed away on the Tardis or been foisted on him by other powers, but of the first three he had, the most interesting in terms of the relationship shift at the point of regeneration was Adric, the boy genius from E-Space played by Matthew Waterhouse. 

Envisaged initially as a kind of “Artful Dodger” character, Waterhouse rarely got the chance to bring the mischief, and on-screen scripts rarely dealt with the shift between the burly father figure of Tom Baker’s Doctor and the vastly different, younger incarnation of Peter Davison. Eric Saward would eventually have Adric and the Fifth Doctor getting into a blazing row and Adric storming off on the basis that “since his regeneration, he’s become decidedly immature!” – just before Adric would save the world and end up losing his life, an event that continues to plague the Fifth Doctor even in audio dramas to this day.

All of which is a long-winded way of introducing the emotional dynamic at play in Will Hadcroft’s new audio story, Dark Contract. The elements of the Artful Dodger, the simmering but rarely spoken tension between Adric and the new Doctor, and the continual quest for ways to deal with situations that are noticeably different from how the Fourth Doctor would do it are strongly in evidence here, and setting the story in 1830s London gives the Doctor who traditionally dressed like an Edwardian a (relatively) close contextual setting for his mindset.

We arrive in the time of Dickens, and while there are quips aplenty about singing, dancing urchins and the Oliver! movie, Hadcroft dispenses with them early in favour of the grimmer reality which, in fairness to him, was Dickens’ actual intent. These are smelly, grimy, bone-hungry, soul-weary dangerous days and nights in a city in which the workhouse takes the place of human compassion. 

And then there are the alien chemical vampires.

Bodies are found aged almost, or entirely, to death. That’s reasonably stock Doctor Who fodder – aliens who depend on some element of human biochemistry for some purpose or other. What Hadcroft does though which gives the whole story more depth and more value for the price of admission is twist that concept through 90 degrees in terms of the alien villainy at work, and the solution to the whole conundrum.

There’s some solid possession, some creepy alien gestaltery which would have worked excellently on-screen, and a peculiar take on how the aliens deal with both the people from whom they take their necessary chemicals and the people they leave behind, that takes Dark Contract out of the realms of simple, standard fare and into something that not only moves with intelligent fluidity but also makes you question the real nature of the villainy here. 

It’s Adric, naturally, who first gets involved with the explanatory side of the alien operation, and it’s a great opportunity for Hadcroft, and Waterhouse on reading duties, to explore the psychic and emotional impact that the Doctor’s change of body and demeanour has had on the boy from E-Space. 

When offered the chance to imagine a perfect “Heaven” zone for his mind to wander while in a kind of physical stasis, one of his instant reactions takes him back to his time with the Fourth Doctor and Romana, the clever, nurturing “parent” figures in whose care he could both intellectually thrive and enjoy being young and undeniably klutzy. And in that scenario, Hadcroft has Adric admit the difference with this new Doctor, who seems to have forsaken that relationship with him as easily as he forsook the Fourth Doctor’s body and scarf. 

Romana left him to pursue a noble cause, but the Doctor just changed into someone largely unable to fill the same role for his young “apprentice,” especially once the other two young people have joined his Tardis. It would never be especially fair to feel abandoned by a Time Lord’s regeneration, but Hadcroft shows us that for a young person in need of a strong mentoring voice in his life, it’s not unfair either – it simply can’t be spoken out loud.

It’s extremely effective writing, and Waterhouse delivers it with believable emotion that rather takes you aback if you’re mostly used to his on-screen performances from some (breathe!) forty years ago, making Dark Contract punch significantly above the weight you might have expected from an Adric-centred story.

Meanwhile, in true Oliver Twist fashion, the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa get caught up in an involuntary tour of early Victorian London, from police cells to public “benefactors,” from workhouse bosses to the drawing rooms of the well-to-do, trying not to get sidetracked by the human realities of the world while on the trail of something altogether more alien and sinister.

And when, eventually, they find out what really is going on, there’s something entirely Fifth Doctor about the plan on which they resolve. On the one hand, potentially, that’s a factor of having a Tardis with two young scientific geniuses on board, but on the other, Hadcroft is canny enough about the Fifth Doctor’s early era to find that thread of doing things differently. 

We’re not about to spoiler you with the resolution, but there are days on which the Doctor has to go to war with unscrupulous aliens… and there are days when he doesn’t. Days on which, to coin a phrase, there really is another way, and in Dark Contract, there’s the sense of those days being an enormous psychic relief to the new and young-bodied Doctor, who would really rather prefer it if no one had to go to war with anyone. 

So why should you get Dark Contract?

Firstly, if you love the Fifth Doctor, and have an inkling of the character interplays which (in fairness to the team) they cobbled together episode by episode, this is a story that will reward you richly. If you’re at all in the market for a script that gives you a missing piece of the puzzle between the Doctor and Adric, you’ll love it. If you enjoy a solidly plotted alien vampirism story with a deeply surprising ending, Dark Contract will stroke your pleasure centres. And if you’re ready for a well-read Fifth Doctor tale that fits in perfectly with the feel of his first season, you’ll have spent your money wisely.

Dark Contract is a Fifth Doctor story that can stand alongside some of this year’s finest Doctor Who stories from BBC Audio, like River of Death, by John Peel, and Escape The Daleks! by Steve Lyons. Pick it up today and take a trip back to 1982, when the Fifth Doctor was new, and everything – including peace – was possible. Tony Fyler 

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