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DOCTOR WHO: THE FIVE DOCTORS

"The Five Doctors" is a nostalgia piece, and at times not a very good one at that. There are far too many characters, a script requirement which writer Terrance Dicks himself decries in his commentary. There's a profusion of Cybermenanother fact Dicks loudly and amusingly criticizesbut little Daleks and a brief attack by a Yeti. And as with most DOCTOR WHO stories, there are several plot holes that never quite get plugged.

The production was troubled from its inception, though very little of that trouble appears in the finished product. Popular Fourth Doctor Tom Baker refused to appear in the special at all, but there was unused video material available; and First Doctor William Hartnell had been dead for years, leading to the casting of Richard Hurndall in his place. The production team wanted so many nostalgia elements that original writer Robert Holmes backed out of the project. It's to Dicks' credit that he was able to come up with a coherent story at all.

This version is the digitally remastered Special Edition, originally released on video in 1995. It features extended scenes (most of them people walking out of shot or delivering lines that don't add much to the story), an extended musical score, and new special effects (none of them any more staggeringly impressive than the original's, and in some cases even worse). A very few elements, such as the very human-sounding exclamation of surprise by a Cyberman, are removed. But you know that old saying about silk purses and sows' ears...

The new version does have its moments, such as an added scene in which the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) asks his companion Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) to hold off the Cybermen while he gets their escape route ready. And she tries... by throwing a rock at them. Sadly, great additions like that are few and far between, and the additions don't do much more than pad out an already unwieldy story.

When this first DOCTOR WHO DVD was released in the UK, it came with no additional features. Unfortunately, the extras on the US release, with the sole exception of the commentary by Dicks and Fifth Doctor Peter Davison, hardly justify the Special Edition name. The root menu is a hard to navigate TARDIS console with some of the most obnoxiously loud sound effects imaginable. Instead of presenting the 33 minutes of soundtrack music as an isolated audio track running alongside the story, the disc features a screen with the DOCTOR WHO logo and the listing of track numbers. This would be fine, except the sound level here is far lower even than that of the commentary, and that's very low indeed. Expect to blow out your eardrums if you're not on top of the machine at the end of the last track.

The "Who's Who" gallery, featuring biographies and filmographies for each of the stars and secondary players, is by turns enlightening and laughablesome entries are full of typographical errors, and the actors' "Key Films" cover the barest minimum of their work. Possibly the biggest omission on the disc are subtitles of any kind, neither for the story nor for the commentary. The "Closed Captioned" symbol in the back copy refers to regular subtitles of the kind you'd get on a videotape, and these are only available if your TV has closed-captioningand only if you can figure it out for yourself, since the packaging never tells you. Maddening.

But the commentary almost makes up for it all. It's a joy to hear Dicks raving about then-script editor Eric Saward's constant demands to add more Cybermen or to do several last minute rewrites, and to hear him good-naturedly sharing stories about his own time as script editor and his experiences with former Doctor Jon Pertwee. And Davison, whose commentary on this year's UK release of WHO episode "Caves of Androzani" made that disc a must-have, is once again in his element as he remembers details that would keep the saddest fanboy happy. It's far more enjoyable listening to these two talk about the story than watching the story. Unfortunately, you get a lot of it anyway, as the producers have made the annoying decision to bring the main audio track back up whenever the two fall silent. The discrepancy in the volume is enough that you might need those missing captions for the hearing impaired before it's all over.

Granted, this is still more than the British gotbut did any of us really get that much?