I suppose I should chronicle my great Fifth Doctor rewatch with some reviews, as if my opinion matters in any way. Castrovalva was a bit of a letdown. I used to consider this the best post-regen story, but I didn't enjoy it nearly as much this time around. I think I remembered its best parts and didn't retain most of the weaker bits. And by "weaker bits" I pretty much specifically mean the location scenes.

I like the idea that the regeneration is a bumpy process that continues after the physical transformation, but I think they milked it just a little too much. In all honesty, I think The Twin Dilemma handled it better. The bit where he's flashing through old personalities was not as funny as the writers clearly thought it was. And then there's the Zero Cabinet. The Zero Cabinet just doesn't work. At first, you might think Davison was unavailable for the location filming, but then he pops his head out of the Zero Cabinet, meaning that wasn't the case. The Zero Cabinet looks stupid and looks even stupider on the wheelchair. Obviously the Doctor needs the Zero environment to help his regeneration, but since they're going to Castrovalva for that very purpose, Nyssa and Tegan could've just told him to suck it up and wheeled him in the chair directly. The Cabinet's logic doesn't make sense- the Doctor's supposed to be relaxing, but he needs to focus to remain levitating, which doesn't sound very relaxing to me. I'd imagine that's putting a lot of strain on his underdeveloped mental faculties, thus defeating the purpose of the Zero environment. They certainly don't need the Cabinet once they actually get to Castrovalva, or so I'd assume, and yet they make a big deal of it being the Doctor's property and have it delivered to his room. I suppose it does come into use towards the end when they trick the Master, but I think there were other ways this could have been written. The actual destruction of the Cabinet is not very effective. Anthony Ainley slowly tips it off the table and it falls apart, and the sound effects struggle to make this seem anything but lackluster. I'd like to give special mention to the bit where the wheelchair somehow ends up rolling into a small body of water, and Nyssa heads down to retrieve it but somehow slips and ends up in the barely knee-high water which she would have had to do anyway to reach the wheelchair and literally says "ew" in the climax to possibly the most unnecessary scene in all of the classic series. The location shoot from part two should've been excised almost completely, and much more of the story should've actually been set in Castrovalva.

On that note, Castrovalva itself is wonderful. It's the part of the story that I actually remembered, and it's good that I did. The story should've focused on this world a lot more, because it's a fabulous setting with a great guest cast. That's not to say the recurring cast is bad, of course. They're not on their A-game, but this is still one of my favorite TARDIS teams. Ainley's Master has settled into the cornier character we see him as for most of the decade, rather than the softer menace from Logopolis and Survival. That's fine by me; he's one of my favorite Masters, but I will miss his performance from Logopolis. I think Logopolis might've ruined Castrovalva for me. I really clicked with that story upon my rewatch, and it set a high bar that this story didn't quite meet. It's clear that this was a bit of a rush-job to replace the original premiere, although it's definitely not bad and I think Christopher Bidmead did a good job considering how short-notice it must have been. I think a lot of my love for this story came from the fact that my dad was tricked by the Shardovan red herring twice on two separate viewings, and had no clue that the Portreeve was actually the Master either time despite him appearing quite frequently in the first two parts.

What else? I didn't expect to have this much to say, honestly. I guess I'm really good at complaining. It's still a perfectly good story and the rest of the season more than makes up for a bumpy start. I like the bit with Adric in the mirror.

I was very surprised to find that there were no reviews on this site for Human Nature. Not just that- there's a review for The Family of Blood but not Human Nature. I suppose that makes sense. I can only assume that reviewer covered both parts in one go. I didn't read it, obviously.

This is why ranking individual parts of stories separately is bad and stupid and dumb. You'll notice this site doesn't break up the Hartnell serials just because they had individual titles. And yet, obvious two-parters like The Empty Child / Doctor Dances, World Enough & Time / The Doctor Falls, et cetera get split. The only reason I can think of is ambiguity. Is Utopia in a three-parter with Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords? I'd say yes, but I'm sure others disagree. And don't even get started on the Monks storyline from Series 10. Where does that one begin? For the record, I'm a weirdo who considers it a four-parter with Oxygen. While it is kinda annoying to see Extremis, Pyramid and Lie all getting their own spots when The Daleks' Master Plan (once considered just as ambiguous by some fans) only gets one, it's not entirely unreasonable. At the end of the day, this is all pedantry. Plus, some people would really like to rank these episodes separately. For instance, Turn Left, Stolen Earth & Journey's End are very difficult to rate as one conglomerate.

But Human Nature? Human Nature and The Family of Blood are indisputably one story, in the same way the classic serials are one story. That's the whole point of using obtuse terms like 'story' and 'serial' besides trying to sound smarter than other people. I mean, come on. They're adapted from the same book!

On that note, yes, the book is better. I exclusively use this site for television material, so I'm not gonna give the book a rating, and that's okay because I don't even remember what rating I gave the TV version. Ratings are immature and overly critical. They lack nuance. I consider The Seeds of Death to be an incredibly lame story, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't greatly enjoy it. A three-and-a-half star rating doesn't convey that. A three-and-a-half-star rating also doesn't convey that I could hardly focus during Power of the Daleks or The Space Pirates, but still thought they were perfectly decent stories that would be much more enjoyable if they still existed in full. I suppose that's the point of writing a review, but if you really think the majority of people care about your opinion enough to read several paragraphs about it, then you should reassess your priorities in life, and if you actually care that much about other people's opinions about a sixty-year-old TV show, then I pity you. But yes, the book is better. Legend has it that RTD rewrote a lot of Cornell's script, but I could also just be making that up. You probably won't care enough to Google it.

The glaring issue is Martha. Martha is a black woman, and so the white men writing this episode saw to it that she was subjected to the kind of appalling treatment that black women got in Britain in 1913. She endured all of this for the Doctor, who'd turned himself into a racist human, and at no point did he apologize once he got back to normal. It's never even acknowledged. If this were aired twenty years earlier, fans nowadays would completely write off the Tenth Doctor as an irredeemable ne'er-do-well who left a permanent stain on the show. This two-parter would've forever marred the Tenth Doctor among the majority of fans, just as the strangling, acid bath and cyanide scenes did to the Sixth Doctor. But the fact remains that these episodes did not air in the eighties and David Tennant is a twink. The 'John Smith' persona and his romance with whatever-her-name-was is still heralded by many fans as one of the show's most impactful tragedies, despite both of them being most despicable characters.

The great irony of it all is that this abuse does not occur in the book, which stars the Seventh Doctor. The Seventh Doctor is often flanderized among fans as a manipulative little prick (the token 'bad egg' of the Doctor's incarnations), when in the show he's anything but. I can't speak for the expanded universe, of which I've read and listened to very little, but the original authorial intent is a personality no crueler than the First, Third, or Tenth. The Seventh Doctor in Human Nature is just as compassionate as he was on TV, and his 'John Smith' alter ego is notably not racist. It probably helps that Benny is white, and so racism doesn't really come up, but despite that, Benny still refers to Smith's girlfriend as racist at one point. The characters in the book are overall more interesting and more likeable than in the episode(s). The Family are cool and all, but the Aubertides have personality and are a brilliant concept for a Dr. Who monster that could only be realized in the wild, unrestrained realm of the nineties novels. Such potential being harnessed so well is a very rare thing. Perhaps I'm just peeved that the TV story is heralded as an all-time great when the book is right there. It's a good book, and I highly recommend it.

The very setup of the episode is inferior. The Seventh Doctor changes himself into a human willingly, so that he can know what it's like to feel love. The Tenth Doctor does it just because he had the Family on his ass. Certainly there was a less extreme way of getting out of that predicament, yeah? The Chameleon Arch concept was later used in Utopia, and is presumably the only reason why Human Nature was adapted at all. While I prefer the characters and characterizations of the book, the acting in the episode(s) is phenomenal. And you'll never catch me slagging off that cliffhanger. That guy and his goofy grin deserve an Oscar, even if the big entertainment awards institution is completely and utterly phony and merely a degenerate waste product of the global capitalist system.

So, at the end of the day, I only wrote this so I could get to say I'm the first guy to write a review of Human Nature on TARDIS Guide, and my opinion is ultimately worthless in the vast, vitriolic sea of the internet. That's all.