Do I need to say anything? I mean, everyone knows that
this one is an all-time classic, don’t they? Or do they? I’ll tell you why I
ask. I don’t know whether you’re aware of this, but it’s a fact that “Doctor
Who” has featured on the cover of the Radio Times more times than any other BBC
TV series. I can still see in my mind’s eye the cover of the Radio Times the week
that the first episode went out – the three Doctors staring moodily out, Jon
Pertwee behind, his cloak spreading expansively, William Hartnell not looking
well, below and to his right, and Patrick Troughton, wearing a very strange
looking wig, to his left. I’d already made my mind up that it was going to be a
classic, and to the 9 year old me, it certainly was. After all, the whole point
of the exercise was putting together Jon Pertwee together with MY first Doctor,
Patrick Troughton, and THE first Doctor, William Hartnell. If we got anything
resembling a decent story into the bargain, well, that was all a bonus.
8 years later, when it formed part of the “Five Faces of
Doctor Who” season I was surprised to find that it had somehow got a little
worse, and rather more childish than it had been in 1973. Of course, it had
always been that way, but I had changed and become just a little more
discerning in the interim. Watch anything at the age of 9, and then watch it
again at 17 and chances are that your opinions will have changed, even though
what you are watching remains the same.
I still enjoy it every time that I watch it on cable,
but I have to work hard on not letting nostalgia cloud my view of it as a
Doctor Who story. So I will force myself to take the opinion that this is not a
sacred cow, and try to judge it on its own merits. It’s interesting to
speculate why such a prestigious assignment was given to Bob Baker and Dave
Martin, nicknamed The Bristol Boys. Over the years they became stalwarts among
the stable of regular and reliable Doctor Who writers, and in their time they
wrote: -
The Claws of Axos
The Mutants
The Three Doctors
The Sontaran Experiment
The Hand of Fear
The Invisible Enemy
Underworld
The Armageddon Factor
-
while Bob Baker scripted
The Nightmare of Eden on his own.
Now, I don’t wish to be horrible, but it may well strike
you, as it has struck me, that what links pretty much all of these stories is
that for the most part they are good, honest, watchable Doctor Who stories, but
there aren’t any real classics there either. Their track record doesn’t really
compare with their contemporary Robert Holmes, for instance. But then Holmes
was writing the next story “Carnival of Monsters” anyway. Holmes reputedly
liked the Bristol boys’ work, enough to entrust them with his Sontaran
creations for “The Sontaran Experiment”, but that, as they say, is in the
future. So, anyway, working on what we know about Baker and Martin’s work, it’s
reasonable to expect that what we’ll find in “The Three Doctors”, once we strip
away the razzmatazz over the alliance of Doctors from different eras, is a
decent, watchable, but workmanlike and uninspired script. In the words of Harry
Hill, there’s only one way to find out.
After Watching
There’s two ways of assessing “The Three Doctors”, one
of which is blatantly unfair. The temptation may well be to say that despite
the fact that this is a story which was popular when it was first shown, and
has retained a certain amount of affection ever since, and this is solely due
to the cameo appearance by William Hartnell, and the 2nd and 3rd
Doctor tag team pairing – other than that is has very little going for it.
That’s the blatantly unfair way of viewing the story. Which is not to say that
it does have a huge amount going for it other than the Doctor double act – but
that’s the whole point of the story anyway. Saying “The Three Doctors” is a
lacklustre story apart from the fact that it has Three Doctors in it is pretty
much tantamount to saying that “The Daleks” is a terrible story apart from the
fact that it has the Daleks in it. It IS a terrible story apart from the fact
that The Daleks are in it (just my opinion and feel free to disagree) but
that’s totally irrelevant. The Daleks are the point of “The Daleks”, and the
combination of Doctors IS the point of “The Three Doctors”.
Baker and Martin had several obstacles to overcome,
several constraints while coming up with this story. For one thing the need to
include all three Doctors must have been something of a headache. After all,
they had to come up with some rationale to explain why and how the different
versions of the Doctor came to inhabit the same time stream for the story. That
means some serious transgression of the laws of time, which necessitated the
Time Lords being involved. At the end of the story, as well, there was a requirement
for the Time Lords to reward the Doctor by ending his exile, which really
necessitated some real threat to them and their Society, which the Doctor has
to overcome to thus earn their gratitude. After all, they gave him sod all for
his good work in “The Colony in Space”, “The Curse of Peladon” and “The
Mutants”, so it has to be something on a really cosmic scale. Essentially, a
renegade Time Lord, then, and not the Master, since the Time Lords in “Terror
of the Autons” made it clear that they considered him to be small fry with whom
the Doctor was capable of dealing on his own. So really it needed a
super-renegade Time Lord, in the shape of Omega. Now, having come up with the
concept of our super renegade, the question has to be asked – what is he doing
that necessitates breaking the laws of time to bring the three Doctors together
to defeat him? Once again, the solution that Baker and Martin came up with
makes sense. Surely, had the Time Lords known that Omega still existed, and was
planning action against them, they would have dealt with him somehow before
this point. So we have the situation whereby Omega is the great temporal
engineer who created the black hole, via supernova, that provides the energy
for the Time Lords. They believed that he was killed doing it, while in fact he
was exiled to an anti-matter universe, kept in balance solely by the power of
his own will. So when he attacks it is totally unexpected, and something they
have no idea of how to counter.
Now, ok, I don’t have the scientific knowledge to be
able to say whether this is all complete nonsense – I’m guessing that it
probably is – but that’s neither here nor there in the context of the story. Am
I willing to accept it – of course I am. I was when I was 9, when I was 17, and
I still do now I’m 50.
Having thus negotiated all bar one of the plot hurdles
they had to overcome, there just remained the not insignificant conundrum of
how exactly the Doctors were to overcome Omega, in a world of his own creation.
I may well be in a minority here, but I felt the deus ex machine of the
recorder, having fallen into the TARDIS field generator and not having been
converted from matter to anti matter, worked nicely in the context of the
story. This relies on one of the clever bits of the story. This world where
Omega rules is a creation of his will. The Doctors have the power to influence
it, building a doorway through the power of their mind, but not to recreate it
or reshape more than a small part of it. This they are forced to negotiate with
Omega, agreeing to take his place in return for the release of Omega’s
prisoners, including Jo and the Brigadier. Omega takes off his helmet, and we
find that he has no body left – as much as this world is a construct of the
fore of his will, his consciousness is only maintained through this world. He
can never leave it, and in fact all that the Doctors can do for him is to
provide him with an ending to his suffering – which he will get if he touches
the recorder.
So if we think that “The Three Doctors” is a less than
satisfying piece of work, and I know quite a few people who do think exactly
that, it doesn’t seem to be a fault of the story or the script. In which case
it is merely a case of how good the execution and realisation of the story is.
The Script
The script is a mixture of the very good, the good, the
adequate, and the bad. The very good is every scene between Patrick Troughton
and Jon Pertwee. We’ll never really know exactly what Patrick Troughton thought
of his successor, and what Jon Pertwee felt of his predecessor, but Baker and
Martin made the eminently sensible decision to play up tension between the two,
and every scene between the two of them is absolute gold dust – in all honesty
worth the price of admission by itself. Poor old William Hartnell was so ill he
could hardly be used in the story at all, but even allowing for that he still
gets one of the best lines in the whole script, “So you’re my replacements – a
dandy and a clown!” When the third Doctor tries to explain to Jo who the second
Doctor is, “ you see – I am him, and he is me” , Jo quotes from the Beatles’ “I
am the Walrus”, saying – “- and we are altogether, coo coo coo choo.” Even the
Brig, the strait-laced, stiff upper lip Brig, gets a couple of silly old
bufferish one-liners. Arriving in Omega’s anti matter world he refuses to
accept it as an alien world, maintaining “I’m pretty sure it’s Cromer.” Then
also his words of praise at the end of the story, “Splendid chap – both of
him”.
Not that everything in the garden’s rosy, of course. My
gripe with the script isn’t just a gripe with the script, since the sequence in
question isn’t very well realised either. At one stage the Third Doctor is forced into a
battle of minds and wills with Omega, which is realised through what appears to
be a dream sequence in which the Doctor wrestles with what appears to be a
bloke in a suit with a vaguely oriental looking mask. It’s worth comparing this
with the far superior battle of wills between the Doctor and Morbius in Season
13, to which we will come in the fullness of time.
Performances
I’ve already mentioned the Pertwee Troughton double act,
but it’s so good it’s well worth mentioning it again. It’s one area where the
story far surpasses the enjoyable 20th anniversary special “The Five
Doctors”. In that story the only real interaction between Doctors is between
Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor, and Richard Hurndall’s recreation of the First
Doctor. Well, we’ll get to that story all in good time.
We’ve already mentioned the Brigadier’s comic turn,
which is all part of the fun, and all of the regulars do their bits as well as
could be asked for. Omega is played by Stephen Thorn, whom we last saw as Azal,
the Daemon in “The Daemons”. He gives a similar performance in this story, but
then that’s what was required for this role. There is a subtle difference
between his portrayal of Omega and Azal – this time round he makes it clear
that Omega is only a wibble away from full blown cluck-cluck –gibber-gibber –
my-old-man’s – a-mushroom psychopathic mania. It’s a shame for Stephen Thorn
that both of this most famous roles on TV saw his features obscured by a mask.
Still we did get the benefit of his sonourous voice, which in this case meant
that we had a literal example of an empty vessel making the most noise. Having
said all that, I’m not sure that the full extent of which Omega is essentially
a Tragic character is actually realised. He is the villain of the piece – no
doubt about that – but he is a character for whom it should be possible to have
a significant amount of sympathy, bearing in mind the circumstances that put
him here, and conspire to prevent him from leaving.
The Design
I thought that this story looked fantastic in 1973 – and
I suppose that’s the problem with it. In 1973, this looked just like we
expected a weird and alien place to look like. The doorways were strange
shapes, and the walls were covered in bubbles in different shades of garish
orange, red and brown. Watch it today, and it looks very 70s.
Doctor Who fans are a difficult lot to please. Stick a
man in a suit with a mask on to represent an alien and they’ll complain that it
looks like a man in a suit with a mask on. Stick a man in a costume designed
specifically NOT to look like a man in a suit, and they’ll complain that it
looks unrealistic. The blobby, rather amorphous ‘plasma’ creatures that Omega
sends to fetch the Doctor, which attack UNIT HQ have not stood the test of time
very well.
As for Omega himself, well, his appearance is dominated
by the welding mask to end all welding masks. It’s rather impressive actually,
and it does make the reveal, when Omega removes the mask to reveal that his
body has been worn away by the something or other rays within the anti matter
universe, a very good, very dramatic moment.
------------------------------------------------------
As we’ll see when we get to “The Five Doctors”, making
an anniversary special where you have to include more than one Doctor, and be
fair to them, where you have to make some major additions to the whole
Doctor/Time Lords mythos, and where the outcome is settled before you’ve even
written one word of the story isn’t easy at all. For me, the Bristol Boys
pulled it off. I loved “The Three Doctors” in 1973. I still enjoyed it a lot in
2015. I’m more than happy to settle for that.
What Have We
Learned?
It’s Omega that
the Time Lords have to thank for all of their power and mastery of time. At
least until Robert Holmes invents Rassilon
There are
circumstances under which the Time Lords can circumvent the Blinovitch
Limitation Effect.
When you life
Time Lords out of their time stream, a significant proportion of the time they
are going to get stuck in a time eddy.
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