N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!

On pure nostalgia alone, Castrovalva would be my favourite Doctor Who story.

“Recursive occlusion. Someone’s manipulating Castrovalva. We’re caught in a space-time trap!”

The Doctor, Castrovalva: Part Three

I can’t remember how much I knew of of M. C. Escher before seeing Castrovalva — I know that it was definitely much later that I came across his lithograph of the actual Italian hamlet — but the ideas of recursion, perceptual anomalies and optical illusions have appealed to me for as long as I can remember.

Thanks to an old Radio Times cover featuring Bugs Bunny (Easter 1980 I think), I had also seen the similarly mind-bending Droste effect in action long before I saw Castrovalva aired — even if I didn’t know it was called the Droste effect for some time after! It’s with this fascination with impossible objects and perceptual trickery that, to an almost-eight year-old me, Castrovalva‘s Part Three cliffhanger was mind-blowing.

Even as an adult, aware of the limitations of Doctor Who‘s miniscule early 80’s BBC special effects budget in trying to recreate Escher’s Ascending and Descending (with a bit of Relativity thrown in!), the Doctor’s ‘We’re caught in a space-time trap!’ still sends a tingle up the spine. There’s a part of me that would love to see 21st century Doctor Who‘s (or Inception‘s) budget tackle an Escher-inspired landscape, but if it never happens I’m happy to retain my memories of how I long imagined Castrovalva’s space-time collapse to be.

As with Logopolis, Christopher H Bidmead’s ambition with Castrovalva is almost breathtaking — and more than enough for me to forgive it is flaws (the main one being that it takes until the third episode for us actually to get to Castrovalva). Once we do reach the so-called Dwellings of Simplicity, there are so many moments of wonder that it’s hard just to list a few of them (although I’ll give it a try!). There’s the Doctor’s response to being given different directions in which to travel — ‘That’s democracy for you’; there’s his getting Murgrave to draw and plot a map of Castrovalva — with his single pharmacy in four locations; amongst many great moments, one of my favourites is the point at which Shardovan and the Doctor realise that the seemingly ancient history books are misleading.

It’s arguably even more beautifully expressed in Bidmead’s novelisation: ‘For the first time in his life Shardovan now managed to convey to a fellow being this haunting perception of a dreadful hollowness at the heart of the world.’: Castrovalva, Chapter 11.

Elsewhere, I should remark that the location footage looks absolutely stunning now that it’s been remastered for Blu-ray, that I’ve always liked the fact that the Doctor literally unravels his old self in the trauma of post-regeneration and that I love how Peter Davison immediately snaps into character the moment the Doctor enters the zero room.

Once again Antony Ainley is vastly more impressive playing another character — in this case the Portreeve — than he is as the Master. I also like the massive hint the Master drops in Part Two that he had another trap laid beyond the TARDIS crashing into the biggest explosion in history. His use of Adric’s precocious genius to create a conceptually mathematical trap is also exactly the kind of over-complicated shenanigans we’ve grown accustomed to the Master attempting.

But it’s within that trap and with the Castrovalvans themselves that my admiration for this story truly lies. Such is their impact that even though they never truly existed, you feel the loss of Shardovan, Murgrave, Ruther and even the false Portreeve keenly.

“That’s the trouble with regeneration. You never quite know what you’re going to get.”

The Doctor, Castrovalva: Part One

Oddly, on the flip side, once Adric rejoins Nyssa and Tegan, you realise how little you’ve missed him and that although his presence (or lack thereof) is essential to the plot, the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan make for a strong team in their own right. I suppose you also have to buy into the idea that the Doctor cares deeply for Adric, which I have to confess didn’t really come across all that much in Season 18 (although I suppose Tom Baker’s Doctor was always more aloof than Davison’s Doctor already appears to be).

It would be wrong to say my love of Castrovalva is all nostalgia — Parts Three and Four remain for me two of the greatest episodes of Doctor Who by any measure I could apply — but it’s perhaps my fond memories of the story that have made it such a difficult serial to write about — and which may well account for the consequent disjointedness of my thoughts in this post. Then again, perhaps a disjointed ramble is apposite given what happens in the story. Nevertheless, one thing I am certain of, in what might be an act of recursion on my memory’s part, I’ve never forgotten those images of Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan’s endlessly running down and down the staircases of the small town of Castrovalva.

And I probably never will.