I idly glanced at the cover of my DVD of The Two Doctors and was surprised to see it had been granted a G rating, for a general audience. That’s a bold call, given this is a story which features, among other things, a stabbing, a dismembered leg, the murder of an old woman, a character eating a rat and another lapping up spilled blood. Perhaps when determining the rating back in 1993 for the VHS release, the overworked assessor simply slept through most of his/her viewing of story. Or maybe they were genuinely content with giving a story which shows an attentive viewer how to poison someone with cyanide the same rating as other G rated titles from 1993 like Bananas in Pyjamas and Babar.

(Mind you, Australia’s classification of Doctor Who home video releases has always been a bit eccentric. Other stories confidently rated G for “go kids, go!” include The Seeds of Doom, The Robots of Death and The Talons of Weng-Chiang. All rated lower than PG (parental guidance recommended) outings like City of Death, Arc of Infinity and The King’s Demons. Only two classic stories scored an M (mature audience) rating, and while we might nod worthily about Attack of the Cybermen, you do have to wonder what it was about The Ambassadors of Death that so twisted the classification bureau’s knickers. It’s not like anyone clubs an old woman or eats a rat in that one.)

When DWM’s Time Team of fresh-faced millennials came to view The Two Doctors Part Three, they were so appalled they couldn’t finish the episode. “I certainly wouldn’t show that to children,” said Beth, who should clearly be applying to Australian Classification for a job. As a father of two little Spandrells, I can report that lots of kids’ entertainment contains surprisingly adult concepts and the average kid can probably safely absorb more of it than you might think, but I take her point. I’d hesitate to let my 6 year old watch this. I’d veto Arc of Infinity too, but for different reasons.

This is a violent story, but no more violent than say The Seeds of Doom or The Deadly Assassin. What differentiates The Two Doctors and Season 22 in general, is its love of gore, which it adds to the punch/shoot ‘em up violence of the Hinchcliffe years. A Hinchcliffe story might blow up an alien monster but only Season 22 waves about the resultant, bloodied limb.

It’s interesting that for the Time Team members, drawn to the show by its carefully crafted 21st century version, the tone and content of The Two Doctors makes it unwatchable. We’re an age away from both 1985 and 1993, when it was considered by broadcasters and censors alike to be suitable for children. But seeing as the Time Team were recently counselled that “you can’t judge the past by the standards of the present,” I think it’s only fair that we consider what was happening in 1985 to make the show take this alarming turn towards blood and guts.

*****

“It’s the eighties,” Matt Smith’s Doctor says in next week’s random story. “Everything’s bigger.” This is certainly true of The Two Doctors, which lies smack in the middle of that garish decade. This is a story bigging it up in order to be a blockbuster. It’s got two Doctors, two companions and two sets of monsters. It’s got an overseas location. It’s the longest story for seven years. It’s huge. It’s also the story which was on air when Doctor Who got cancelled for the first time.

One of the things that gets lost in the retelling of that drastic intervention in the show is how much of a surprise it was to everyone involved. The Two Doctors, brash and brutal as it is, is no example of a show in crisis. If anything, it, like the rest of Season 22, is supremely confident about the changes it’s making to the show. Its move towards a tougher, bloodier aesthetic was made in the assumption that that was what a public watching The A-Team and Miami Vice wanted. And on average, it rated almost exactly as the previous season, so you could argue the production team were giving the public what they wanted. Doctor Who’s budget couldn’t compete with the stunts and action of those US imports, but it could use cut price gore instead. And it could put a busty girl in a halter top just as exploitatively as The Dukes of Hazzard.

It’s tempting to point to The Two Doctors’ early evening timeslot, its generous ratings classification and the more action oriented milieu of the 80s and say that the Time Team’s disgust for this story shows how tastes have become more conservative over time. But it wouldn’t be true; this story’s gross out violence had its fair share of criticism in 1985. Not least of all from Michael Grade who called the show violent and its makers complacent when cancelling the show. So times haven’t changed that much.

No, the point is that The Two Doctors has always polarised views. For some, this story is so over the top and cartoony that its violence appears no more confronting than that of your average Doctor Who story. For others, this is Doctor Who turning bewilderingly and offensively to the schlock horror genre for inspiration. But it was done loudly, confidently, unapologetically and in response to the colourfully tasteless 1980s themselves. It’s the narrative equivalent of the sixth Doctor’s coat of many clashing colours.

*****

Into the colourful but blood-splattered world of Colin Baker’s sixth Doctor lands Patrick Troughton’s second, looking quietly out of place. You’d think that if you were going to bring back Troughton’s shabby, sly aging schoolboy of a Doctor, you’d attempt in some way to harken back to those base under siege stories of old. Rassilon knows, Season 22 doesn’t mind asking its audience to recall stories from the 1960s.

But this feels nothing like a Troughton story and it’s partly because the second Doctor’s not allowed to do anything particularly Doctorly. He starts as an emissary from the Time Lords, is captured and tied up for an episode and then transformed into a permanently hungry Androgrum. He’s this story’s damsel in distress and had Troughton suddenly become unavailable to shoot the story, his role could have easily been reassigned to some generic Time Lord diplomat.

So although it’s called The Two Doctors, we only really get one. And that’s a shame when you think of the fun which could have been had two Doctors. Steven Moffat has said the show doesn’t really work with more than one Doctor (didn’t stop him writing it like that twice though), but surely we needn’t have had The Two Doctors prove that. Couldn’t we have had each Doctor unwittingly working against each other, unaware of each other’s presence, one comically undoing the other’s efforts? Or could they not have been farcically just missing each other all the time? Some mechanism which would have shown the different modus operandi of each Doctor.

But perhaps we should be grateful that the second Doctor is relegated to the status of a more interesting than normal guest star. Had he been fully integrated into Season 22’s gratuitous tone, perhaps he, rather than the boisterous sixth Doctor, may have been the one smothering someone with cyanide. And for an encore, he could have beaten a Sontaran to death with its own severed leg. Surely that would have bumped it up to PG.

LINK TO The Woman Who Fell to Earth: Hmm, not much here, except that the Doctor briefly gets excited about eating in both.

NEXT TIME… Rug up, we’re off to fight a Cold War.