65: The Three Doctors

Before Watching

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 2^nd and 3^rd 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 20^th 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. 

57: The Claws of Axos

Before Watching

You wouldn’t forget the two Axon costumes in a hurry. If I recall it correctly, the first costume, which is the appearance that the Axons take on when they first come to Earth, is of golden humanoids, which have expressionless faces and no pupils or irises in their eyes and which look like Greek statues come to life. The second , and real appearance is I’ve got stuck in my head as a creature that has 2 arms, two legs and a head of sorts, but still looks like it has been made from spaghetti and meatballs.

I must have seen at least one of these episodes round a mate’s house in colour, since I still remember the brightness of the colours, especially in Axos itself. If I seem to remember quite a few plot details despite not having watched the story in 4 decades, it must be lingering memories of the Target novelization. I’m not certain, but I think that this one may well have the Doctor and the Master working together to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow – which hardly ever actually really happened despite what people think they remember.

Anything more before we start? Well, I have a feeling that this was the first story to be scripted by the ‘Bristol Boys’ , or to give them their real names, Bob Baker and Dave Martin. They are going to be regular writers until season 19, and in this time they’re going to produce a string of stories, none of which I look back on as an absolute classic at the moment, but none of which were complete turkeys either. So that’s pretty much what I’m expecting here.

After Watching

Maybe I’m going a bit soft, but I really rather enjoyed that. It’s a four parter, and you know the temptation with the 4 parters. I know that the sensible options , to keep Dr. Who fresh for me, is to only watch two episodes in one sitting. Well, no, actually, even that’s a compromise option. Really and truly the most sensible option would be to watch one episode a week, preferably on Saturday teatime, but that just isn’t going to happen. With a 4 parter, you watch your permitted two episodes, and what happens? You’re into it, and you think, well, another one wouldn’t hurt. So then you watch it and think – well, there’s only 1 to go now, it’s silly not to finish it tonight. Before you know it you’ve watched the whole story – which is probably not the best way to watch it, and maybe means you won’t be getting the full benefit from it.

Well, for better or for worse I did watch it in full go, so I promise I will try my best to be fair about it. There were some quite clever things going on in this, the Bristol boys’ first Doctor Who story. Basically, what seems to be an alien spaceship lands on Earth. This happens at a time when a nasty little Ronnie Barker lookalike called Chinn from the Ministry of Defence is poking his nose around about UNIT, and getting himself all worked up about the fact that the Doctor isn’t British. There’s also a visit from an American agent called Bill Filer, who is there to see what’s happening with the Master, and to take him back to the USA if he can be found. Watch this space, Bill.

Back at the spaceship, a tramp rejoicing in the name of Pigbin Josh (one of the Dungeness Joshes?) is snared by the ship and killed. Bill Filer has made his way to the ship, and he too is snared on board. When he comes to he is being held by the eponymous claws of Axos, the name of the organic, living ship, and he is in bad company, since the Master is being held as well.

The plan of Axos is to spread bits of itself, which it calls Axonite, throughout the world, where it can then start feeding on the earth’s matter and energy. It dupes that fat idiot Chinn into agreeing, by showing him how Axonite can blow up a small frog to the size of a large cow, and somewhat mysteriously pronounces this as the answer to the world’s food shortages. Only in France. Sorry, that was uncalled for. I too have eaten frogs’ legs, and d’you know what? They tasted like frogs’ legs. Chinn, though, all along plans to keep Axonite for Britain, which holds up the plans of Axos, allowing the Doctor to discover the nature of Axos’ plans. Axos lets the Master go, but keeps his TARDIS as a guarantee of his good behaviour, to go and get the Doctor and the TARDIS. You see, Axos wants to be able to travel through time so that it can absorb all the energy and matter that has ever been and ever will be. Well, you’ve got to set yourself goals in life now and again, haven’t you. So basically the Doctor gets the Master to fix his TARDIS for him, and fly it into the middle of Axos. Incidentally, we get a nice shot of an unchameleoned TARDIS , since the Master’s looks like the parked TARDISes in the last episode of the War Games. The Doctor suggests he can link up the TARDIS drive with Axos to turn Axos into a time machine. Amazingly Axos falls for this old toffee, and gets itself trapped in a time loop for eternity. The Doctor escapes, although the TARDIS has been programmed by the Time Lords to yo yo back to Earth, and we’re led to believe that the Master has got away.

Written down like that it looks like there’s a lot of story to this story, and there is, but not oppressively so. If we take “Terror of the Autons” as a prototype season 8 story, then this one fits the template a hell of a lot better than it would have fit in season 7. If you read my views on the Hartnell era stories, then you might remember that the mingers v. pretty people score stood at 1 all after “The Daleks” and “Galaxy Four” This story manages the achievement of making the baddies into both pretty people AND mingers!

The story then has a lot going on in it, but for all that it’s a relatively simplistic one. There’s a certain very basic set of assumptions here. Axos has come to Earth. Its purpose is an evil one – to absorb all the matter and energy on the planet. Why is it so evil? Because it is an alien monster and alien monster are evil. That’s what they are and what they do. Trust me, it’s perfectly logical when you’re 8 years old. The Earth has already been invaded so many times  in the show since season 5 (I’m thinking Ice Warriors, Web of Fear, Fury from the Deep, The Invasion, Seeds of Death, Spearhead from Space, Terror of the Autons) you just kind of start from a basic assumption that this is what an alien is going to try to do. You know that however benign the alien is on the surface, it is sooner or later going to be trying to take over the world, and you know that the Doctor is going to foil its plans. You just don’t know how it is going to try to take over the world, and you don’t know how the Doctor is going to foil its plans.

So this month’s alien then is Axos. I say alien, singular, advisedly, since although Axos manifests itself as a number of beings, it is in fact one entity. Neat trick if you can do it. In order to lull those stupid Earthlings into a false sense of security, Axos manifests itself as humanoid beings with golden skin and hair, and overly large strange featureless eyes, the effect of which is to give them something of the appearance of classical greek statues. It was only when the credits came up that I saw the leader of the Axons (alright, they are all one being, but let’s try to simplify it a little shall we) is played by Bernard Holley. Bernard Holley is another of those actors whose name might not mean anything to you, but whose face you’d surely recognize – well, you would if he wasn’t wearing those strange eyes and that dodgy syrup, anyway. ( For those of us who don’t speak 1980s Mockney – syrup is short for syrup of figs, and syrup of figs rhymes with hairpiece). The other manifestation of the Axos – the afore mentioned spaghetti and meatballs monster isn’t to my mind quite so effective. The worst shot of all is when poor Wisher, sacrificial scientist number 1, becomes one. Or rather, he doesn’t. What he becomes is A Man In A Large Brown Bag. I have to say that it’s probably one of the least impressive shots of the season so far, alongside the CSO kitchen in Terror of the Autons.

I said that I enjoyed this story, yet reading back what I’ve written so far I haven’t really said a great deal about why I liked it. So let’s try to be positive. I do wonder whether the outline at least of this story as written before the decision was made to have the master appear in every story (so far) of season 8. Why I say so is that you’d only need to make minimal changes to the plot to take the Master out of it entirely. Which would be a huge mistake. No wonder Roger Delgado was as hugely popular as he became. Here we get to see another facet of the Master’s character, since this is a Master in desperate straits. The criticism has been made that the Master can’t be all that smart since every alien ally he makes seems to dupe him and ditch him in the end. The interesting development in this story is that the Master has already been suckered in by Axos before the story even starts. Blow me if I wasn’t even a little bit sympathetic towards the Master, and never more so than when the Doctor seemingly makes an alliance with him to escape from Earth. That was a great little scene, and it said a lot about the Master and the Doctor’s relative strengths and weaknesses. The Master, it turns out, is the engineer. The Doctor freely acknowledges that only the Master could get his TARDIS working. And, bless him, the Master SO wants the Doctor as a mate, whatever he says.

What Have We Learned?

Beware of Greek statues bearing gifts

56: The Mind of Evil

Before Watching

This one didn’t live in my memory as much as its predecessor did, but then that’s hardly surprising. I haven’t watched it since, either, although I have read the Target novelization since. So what do I remember? There’s a prison in it, and prisoners, and I think that they get hooked up to a machine at one point which is supposed to sort their heads out for them. Shades of “A Clockwork Orange”? Well, I’ve read and seen that, and I can’t say that the comparison particularly struck me before. There’s the Master again, a stolen missile, and a dragon too. That is honestly just about it, and I’ll be interested to see just how all these disparate plot elements come together.

After Watching

Well, the one main plot element I missed out of the before watching section was The Keller Machine.  This was a machine ‘invented’ by Professor Keller. He turns out to have been the Master – and that must be one of the few times that he used an alias which was not a dead giveaway that he was in fact the Master. From my miniscule knowledge of German I do know that it means ‘basement’ or ‘cellar’ – as in bierkeller. ‘I am the Basement, and you will obey me.” Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it really. The Keller Machine is a miraculous invention which ‘cures’ criminals by taking away all their nasty, evil impulses. So one of the tropes we’re returning to in this story is mind control.

It’s probably a coincidence that this story was broadcast in the same year that Stanley Kubrick’s film version of Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange” came out, but that dealt with rehabilitation of prisoners essentially through brainwashing techniques – and if you’ve seen the film you’ll know that there the similarity to The Mind of Evil” ends. The film was released a few months later than the story was broadcast. I can’t say whether Don Houghton had read the book and was at all influenced by it.

At the heart of the Keller Machine is an alien creature that feeds off these negative impulses. It becomes clear, though, that this is a mental parasite, which feeds its victims a succession of horrifying images drawn from their own deepest fears. In the case of the first victims of the machine a man who is killed by his fear of drowning is found with his lungs full of water, and a man killed by his fear of rats is found with scratches and bites all over him. The US delegate to a peace conference – more about that later – is so scared of dragons – honest to gosh – that he actually physically manifests one until the Doctor tells it to go away in either Cantonese or Hokkien, and it becomes the Master’s Chinese pawn again. Now, this is an interesting idea which is just left as an idea and not explored at al by the show. The Doctor dismisses the dragon as a collective hallucination. Yet collective hallucinations cannot fill your lungs with water, and they cannot cover your body in rat bites and scratches. So was the machine using its victims’ mental energy to materialise these things, or was the victims’ extreme fear unlocking latent mental powers which made their fears corporeal? Either way it would have been interesting to know.

That’s the Keller Machine. It’s all part of the Master’s rather convoluted plan. He’s installed the Machine in Stangmoor Prison. The idea is that the Machine will use the Machine to create enough confusion in the prison for him to walk in and use the Prisoners as his own private army to help him hi-jack the Thunderbolt Missile which UNIT are overseeing the disposal of so that he can fire it at the World Peace Conference and create World War III. Phew. Before he goes along to the Prison, the Master hypnotises Captain Chin Lee, incidentally played by Don Houghton’s wife, the rather lovely Pik Sen Lim, and gives her an electronic doohickey which enables the Machine to kill the leader of the Chinese Delegation by proxy.

Well, there we. There’s been better stories and there have been worse. Now, when I reviewed “Terror of the Autons” I made the point that the plot was developed at pretty much breakneck speed. Being a six parter this wasn’t so much the case here. Actually, I think that the first three episodes worked rather well because of this slightly more measured approach – for example, we didn’t actually get to see the Master until the second episode. He was posing as a telephone engineer so he could tap the Brigadier’s phone, and he had one of those little red and white stripey tents. Here’s a funny thing. Maybe it was because it had been on Doctor Who, but when I was a little kid I used to wonder whether you would go into one of those tents one day and find the inside was just like the TARDIS.

Now, here’s a point which is worth making about the Third Doctor. Throughout Troughton’s tenure, the Doctor was clearly not a super being. Yes, he usually won, but it was through using his brains alone, either his knowledge or his cunning. This story for me sees the Doctor taking another step towards superhumanity. At one stage Captain Mike Yates appears, telling the Doctor that the Brigadier insists on seeing him at once. When the Doctor refuses Yates says that he has been authorised to being him by force if necessary. He has the temerity to lay hands on the Doctor, at which the Doctor takes his hand in what I can only describe as ‘the Gallifreyan wrist-pinch’ and immobilises him without batting an eyelid. Then when he does go to help the Brigadier, who is having awful trouble with General Fu Peng of the Chinese delegation, the Doctor immediately deduces that he must be Hokkien, and addresses him in (so the General said, although I have my doubts) perfect Hokkien dialect. All smiles, problem solved.

As the story developed, maybe it was because I actually have seen this before that I was thinking – I’ve seen this before – but I do also think that this story was a little bit of a rehash of some of the elements we have already seen in the Pertwee era, even though it’s only story 6. The hi-jack of the missile – the hi-jack of the space capsule in “Ambassadors of Death”. The Master’s alien ally/tool getting out of control – “Terror of the Autons”. Mailer – Reegan in “Ambassadors of Death”. To that extent this story is a little formulaic, and I certainly don’t think it’s as good as Houghton’s previous story, “Inferno”. Which is not to say that it is without things to enjoy. Basically, I think that you could have put Roger Delgado’s Master into any old rubbish and he’d always have been worth watching so long as he had his fair share of scenes playing off Pertwee’s Doctor. Once again, every scene they appear in together is compelling. I almost think that the two of them could have recited the South Wales phone directory to each other and it would still have been worth watching. Well, Houghton’s dialogue is quite a bit better than that. I particularly enjoyed the last exchange. In order to solve the situation the Doctor’s plan involves exploding the Thunderbolt missile on the ground – more about that later – since this will also destroy the Machine. In order to get close enough to do that he lures the Master into letting him approach by offering to return the dematerialisation circuit he stole from the Master’s TARDIS in the previous story. In the confusion the Master steals back his circuit. At the end he rings the Doctor to say he’s fine, and he’s on his way to pastures new, but will return in time to destroy both Earth and the Doctor. Nyahh haaa haaa. It’ll be a lot more quickly than anyone thought as well.

There are a few other things I’d like to mention. Firstly some of the guest stars. I’ve already mentioned Pik Sen Lim. Then we had good old Michael Sheard as the prison doctor. We last saw him the 3^rd season’s “The Ark”, and we’ll see him again in no fewer than 4 more stories. The only classic series Doctors he didn’t appear with were Patrick Troughton’s and Colin Baker’s. Next time will be in the all-time classic “Pyramids of Mars” so that’s something we can all look forward to. We also saw Neil McCarthy as Prisoner Barham. You might not know the name Neil McCarthy, but if you’re at least in your 40s you’ll probably know him when you see him. He had a striking physical appearance, the result of the condition acromegaly, and would die at the tragically young age of 52. He appeared in tons of TV shows – most notably as a regular in the first series of Catweazle, and played one of John Cleese’s Robin Hood’s Merry Men in the Terry Gilliam film “Time Bandits”. At the start of the story, the Doctor and Jo are attending a demonstration of the Keller Machine, and it is Barham who receives the treatment. In the course of removing his evil impulses it turns Barham into rather an innocent and helpless soul, but it later turns out that he is immune now to the Machine, which is key to the Doctor’s solution of the situations.

Now, sometimes when I watch a story I ended thinking that either I missed something, or there is a huge plot hole. It’s such a big one in this story that I’m sure I must have missed a vital piece of information. The Thunderbolt missile is supposed to have a warhead full of deadly nerve gas. Now, surely, surely when the warhead was exploded on the ground in Stanham disused airfield, the nerve gas was released? If it wasn’t then how not? Had it been removed from the warhead and I just missed that vital piece of information? While we’re discussing the denouement as well it was worth noting that the Doctor and Jo make their escape from the airfield in a helicopter, leaving the poor sacrificed lamb Barnham behind. Maybe it’s just me, but from “Fury from the Deep” onwards the production teams seemed to leap at any opportunity to use a helicopter. We’ll note the further appearances of helicopters as and when they happen.

Oh, and here’s another thing. If you watch the story now, pay particular attention to the UNIT attack on the prison in episode 5. For me this was notable for 2 things. Firstly, the Brigadier posing as a ‘cockney’ delivery man. I mean, we’re not exactly in Dick Van Dyke/Bert the Chimney Sweep territory here, but it was pretty much a case of don’t give up the day job, Alastair. Then the attack on the Prison. Now, although we didn’t see a drop of blood, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a firefight quite like it in Doctor Who. We already knew that the Brigadier is a crack shot, but suddenly so is every UNIT soldier too. This little section was like Doctor Who reimagined by Sam Peckinpah. Either that, or it’s the new government’s initiative to solve prison overcrowding. I didn’t count the number of prisoners and UNIT men gunned down in the 5 minutes’ action, but I’m sure it was comfortably into double figures.

Now, you wouldn’t necessarily say that, when you analyse it, this story was really up to the standards of season 7, and yet, for all that I found it extremely watchable. I kind of think that when you get right down to it, that’s the point.

What have we learned?

The Doctor can paralyse a man with a single pinch of the wrist (or Mike Yates is a total wimp)

The Master is now free again to wander Time and Space. So that’s the last we’ll be seeing of him for a while, then.

55: Terror of the Autons

Before Watching

There is a school of thought that says that it was a conscious decision on the part of Barry Letts and his team to ‘dumb down’ the show from the intelligent and mature level of the stories of the previous season, the seventh season. Now, I don’t know if that’s a particularly flattering way of putting it, but if it was their intention to make the 8^th season more appealing and accessible to the 7 and 8 year old section of the audience, then it must have worked for me. Before watching the 7^th season stories, with the exception of the first story “Spearhead from Space” I had precious few memories of watching any of these stories, although I definitely did. All of which suggests that they may well have been too complex for me to grasp properly at that time of my life. Maybe.

What I can say is that there are surely other reasons why “Terror of the Autons” made such an impression on me. The first and most obvious being Roger Delgado’s The Master. Wasn’t he just! We’re going to discuss his portrayal of the essential Moriarty to the Doctor’s Holmes as we watch the stories, but in my memory he was just brilliant- certainly the man I loved to hate. By all accounts the late Roger Delgado was a wonderful man, every bit as charming as his screen counterpart, but with none of the accompanying megalomaniac and psychopathic tendencies, and it was a tragedy that he was killed in a car crash just a few short years after his first appearance. It also introduced Miss Jo Grant. Jo, it is fair to say, most certainly was not a top scientist. But she was brave, utterly loyal to the Doctor, and posed in Playboy with a Dalek. Well, alright, it was Katy Manning the real life actress rather than the fictional character Jo Grant who did the posing.  Not that this mattered. It is fair to say that Katy appearing in Playboy wasn’t of the slightest concern to me at the time. Be fair, I was only about 10 when she left.

Yes, I’ve watched this one again within the last couple of years, but even before that there were elements of this story which had stuck in my memory for over 40 years. I was certain that the Doctor was warned about the Master by a Time Lord floating in thin air, dressed with a bowler hat and a rolled up brolly like a city gent out for a stroll, and I was right. Then there was the cliffhanger which probably affected me more than any other at any time, when the Doctor was strangled by the phone flex. Ooh, it makes me start to tingle just thinking about it. Let’s go and start watching.

After Watching

This was the story where I finally ‘got’ the Third Doctor era, or more accurately, the 2^nd Third Doctor Era. Was I scared when that telephone cord wrapped itself round his neck as the episode 2 cliffhanger? You bet I was. I knew he’d get out of it, well, I hoped he would, but I didn’t know how. Did I understand the nature of the threat to the world? Yeah, of course I did. It’s the ugly old Nestenes again using plastic to kill humans and take over the world. Got it. Did I ‘get’ the Master? Not ‘alf. At that age if you’d tried to explain his purpose using the names Holmes and Moriarty I wouldn’t have had a clue what you were on about, but that didn’t matter. Here we had a villain as smart as the Doctor, at times as charming as the Doctor, and at times as evil as the Doctor is good, a Time Lord with his own TARDIS. An arch enemy in fact. Yeah, I got that alright, and I loved it. This didn’t make me a Doctor Who fan – I was already a fan – but this story cemented the relationship. If Barry Letts’ purpose in the change of direction he brought to the show was to make it more accessible to the youngest members of the audience, in my case, at least, he succeeded.

Right, that was just so you know where I’m coming from when I write about this story. Because … it’s not as good as I remembered it to be. If I’m totally dispassionate, and don’t allow the 7 year old me to get a word in, then I can make these criticisms. If you’ve never watched it since it was first broadcast, watch it again now, and see if you’re not surprised when you find yourself noticing these things: -

The Doctor is absolutely horrible to Jo Grant. His attitude towards her is foul, recalling the very worst of Hartnell from his earliest stories. He is at his most unlikeable in the first episode.

As well as what seems to be a heretofore unseen streak of misogyny, the Doctor here exhibits also his most blatantly Establishment credentials, threatening a ministry pen pusher to have words with his superior, ‘Tubby’ Rowlands next time they are in their gentlemen’s cub together. I’m not a betting man, but if I were, I’d lay odds it’s the Carlton Club he’s referring to.

I’m afraid that the evidence is that nothing has happened to enlighten the show in its attitude to race since Sonny Caldinez played the mute strongman Kemel in “Evil of the Daleks”. In its careless use of actor Roy Stewart as the mute circus strongman it again plunges the depths of institutionalized racism of “Tomb of the Cybermen” and “Evil of the Daleks”. In fact, Roy Stewart actually was Toberman in the former. I can’t even excuse the show by saying that this was typical of the time when it was made, because it was wrong then, and it is still wrong now.

Barry Letts was first of all a director on Doctor Who – he directed The Enemy of the World – and he had a clause in his contract as Producer allowing him to direct one story every year, and this is the one he directed. The thing about our Barry is that he did love his Chromakey, the CSO box of tricks used throughout the colour eras of classic Who. Now, there were very good reasons for a lot of the use of Chromakey in the show, since it enabled us to see things which just couldn’t have been shown otherwise. But Barry goes way above and beyond what’s necessary in this story. He uses chromakey for a domestic kitchen, for heaven’s sake. The thing about Chromakey was that although it did allow you to do things which couldn’t otherwise be done, it did often leave a fringing around objects and people, and was best not being done when it wasn’t absolutely necessary. A little went a long way.

Unless I’m very much mistaken, in “Spearhead from Space” the Doctor is told that the Nestenes do not have their own physical form. Yet in the denouement of “Terror – “ we are told that the Master is using the radio telescope to allow them to manifest on Earth in their own physical form. Huh? While we’re at it as well, the Master really doesn’t need a great deal of persuading to abandon his Auton allies either, and work with the Doctor to repel the Nestene. This is the first time he turns coat and works together with the Doctor – I promise you it won’t be the last.

The ending worked great for me when I was 7, with the Doctor seemingly glad that the master has escaped, since it means that they’ll be able to lock horns again in the future. It doesn’t sit quite so well now, considering all the death and destruction that the Master has been responsible for, in fact if anything it appears rather heartless.

Thankfully, that’s the negatives over with for now. Now we can talk about why I still like “Terror of the Autons”. You see, what it is, and what we can celebrate, is a succession of great ideas and great set pieces, riding on the back of Holmes’ earlier, and more complex “Spearhead from Space”. In terms of plot, it’s a bit like the Readers’ Digest version of the earlier story. It’s Auton Lite, if you wish, but it works. Maybe not as well as the earlier story, but if you accept its limitations there’s quite a lot to still enjoy about it.

There’s the visit by the Time Lord to warn the Doctor of the Master’s imminent arrival. He’s played by Solicitor Gray from the Highlanders, actor David Garth, and it’s a typically Holmesian touch that this is rather played for laughs to some extent. Yes, the first Time Lord the Doctor met, the Meddling Monk, was a comic turn, but that was years before the name or concept of the Time Lords had ever been formulated. In “The War Games” the Time Lords were solemn, almost monk-like beings of deeply serious mien, and incredible powers. In this, David Garth’s unnamed Time Lord is incongruously dressed as a city gent, and materializes in mid-air by mistake. The Time Lords of the War Games could easily have dealt with the Master, probably without lifting a finger, but this one makes it clear to the Doctor that he’s on his own.

Ah, the Master. While I might at times criticize the Master’s actions, or the concept of the character, you’ll not find one word of criticism here for the late, great Roger Delgado. An evil villain can be good. A charming evil villain can be incredible. I loved his Master. Oh, I hated him too, and was scared of him, but then that was the point. Watch any scene that he’s in during “Terror of the Autons” and I can pretty much guarantee you won’t be able to take your eyes off him. That’s just when he’s playing off good old pros like Harry Towb, last seen in The Seeds of Death. The scenes between him and the Doctor fairly sparkle and crackle with energy.

Let me point out the sheer variety of different ways that the Auton threat was portrayed. There was the killer sofa which ‘ate’ McGregor, played by the afore mentioned Harry Towb. The Autons with huge clownlike heads. The phone flex. The deadly daffodils. The devil doll. The Auton policemen. Actually the team got a strongly worded complaint from the police, asking them not to show the police (even bogus ones) in this light again, since it meant that people at an impressionable age might become scared of the police force.

If we look at “Terror of the Autons” as the first true story of the Barry Letts era, can we notice any huge differences to what went before in season 7? Certainly. There’s the hint that relationships – between the Doctor and Jo, the Doctor and UNIT, the Doctor and the Master – are going to become key elements of the era. More creative energy is applied in this story to ways that the Doctor and those important to him are put under threat than to the rationale of why it is all happening. In season 7 the ‘why’ was as important as the ‘how’. Now the how is everything. However, on the positive side, this story really motors, although it was bound to contrast with the three 7 parters which preceded it. The acid test will be how fast the 6 parter which comes next seems to move.

What have we learned?

The Nestene actually does have a physical form now

Every renegade Time Lord seems to have a more modern TARDIS than the Doctor

In Jo Grant’s case, it’s certainly not what you know

50: The War Games - Parts 6 - 10

Before Watching

The Bottom Line: I don’t have to watch all five of these episodes in one go like I watched the first five. On the other hand, I’ve been looking forward to this all day. There’s so many goodies which still have to be in store with this story that I can’t see that it won’t be at least as good as the first five episodes. There’s the revelation that the Doctor is a Time Lord, there’s got to be a meeting between The Doctor and the War Chief, and then there’s the entry of Philip Madoc into the story, and the way that the Time Lords get called to come and save the day. Oh and then the final episode with the Doctor’s trial. My memory of the story is of it essentially being a 9 parter, followed by a one parter, this final episode with the trial, which was very different to everything that had gone before. Oh, stuff this for a game of soldiers, I can’t wait to watch it any longer, and I’m not going to.

After Watching

Patrick Troughton deserved a truly great story to finish his era, and boy, did he get one. He started with an absolute corker in “The Power of the Daleks”, and now he’s finished with one too. There is a line of argument that holds that his first and last were his two greatest stories, but I’m not sure that I could completely go along with that. After all, there is always “The Mind Robber” to be considered.

Ok, well I ended my review of the first five parts with the observation that nobody yet had mentioned the words Time Lord. That happened at last early on in episode 6, when the extremely uptight Security Chief casually drops it into the conversation that this is what the War Chief is. Alert viewers would have been immediately thinking – the Doctor recognized him, and so there is a chance that the Doctor is one too. Full marks to anyone who worked that one out the first time round. Now, mid-story of a multi parter is always something of a padding magnet. In this case, the padding takes the shape of the relationship between the War Chief and the Security Chief, played with almost neurotic tension by James Bree. In fact watching the two of them it’s almost like the sparring between two people who fancy each other despite themselves, but are both too scared to make the first move in case the other one laughs. There’s also a little scene between one of the resistance soldiers – private Moor, and David Garfield, the war lord posing as the German commander Von Weich. I thought I recognized the actor playing Private Moor, but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. When I checked the credits, it turned out that this was none other than David Troughton. Nepotism? Oh, come on, be fair. David Troughton is a terrific actor in his own right, who has a great track record, and Moor was the kind of role where you would cast a promising young actor. Oh, and the star of the show was his dad too. At least he got a few lines to say. Frazer Hines’ brother Ian had to make do with clinking around in a tin soldier costume and he got to say nowt in “The Mind Robber”.  Wrapping up episode 6, respect for the cliffhanger ending again. The Doctor, Jamie and Carstairs manage to get into a SIDRAT, but can’t get away because the War Chief is at the controls outside. They know they can’t be attacked from outside, so prepare to wait it out while the Doctor overrides the remote control. Only outside, the War Chief starts fiddling with the dimension control, and the SIDRAT rapidly begins to shrink in, threatening to crush them to death. Magic.

Just when you thought it wasn’t going to get that much better – Philip Madoc turns up! He’s got a lot to live up to by not appearing until episode 7, when a lot of strong characters have already been established, but remarkably he manages to do so. His character, the War Lord (capital letters) manages to be the most frightening thing in the episode, well, the whole story, by doing nothing more than speaking rather quietly, and adding the odd pause in the right place. If that wasn’t enough, we also got a scene between the War Chief and the Doctor. I knew, well, I hoped, that there was a bit more to the War Chief than a motiveless megalomaniac, and there was a bit. The War Chief, it seems, has a thing about order. He doesn’t care that much for the fighting in the war zone, but sees it, and the war lords’ plans, as a means to an end, a way of bringing order to a chaotic galaxy. Alright, it’s a little extreme, but at least it makes some sense. It might have been nice to have been given just a little bit more. For example, in “The Time Meddler” we learn that the Monk left Gallifrey about 50 years after the Doctor did. We don’t know anything like this about the War Chief – we don’t even know if he and the Doctor have ever met each other before. The War Chief suggests that they have met when he passes the comment that the Doctor has changed his appearance, but that’s the only hint. As for recognizing the Doctor, well it wouldn’t be the first time that Time Lords recognize each other having regenerated since the last time they met. Now, a slight negative note, if I might. The Doctor escapes and starts coordinating resistance, but is recaptured, and that proves the cliffhanger ending. It’s fine, but nowhere near up to the standard of the shows so far.

Now, I’ll be honest, of all the episodes so far, I thought that episode 8 was the most padded. Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it, but it smacked at times of having the action held up so that we don’t reach the climax too soon. So, what have we got? The Doctor is taken in for interrogation. The War Chief takes this over so that he can explain the plot to all of us at home, and try to recruit the Doctor for his own nefarious purposes. The war lords’ plan has been to sort out the wheat from the chaff amongst the various Earth armies to build a super army from the survivors. The rationale behind it being that human beings have an unparalleled ability at and appetite for killing their own kind. Hmm, yeah well, I’m not sure that this would cut a lot of ice against the Daleks for instance. And while we’re on the subject, a roman legion with spears and swords, versus a small platoon of tommies with machine guns, and my money’s on the machine guns, I’m sorry. It maybe doesn’t do to well to over analyse this particular aspect of the story.  It does though throw the Time Lords’ edict against interfering into some perspective. It is aimed at preventing amoral chancers like the War Chief aiding psychopathic nutjobs like the War Lord.

By the start of episode 9 I’m starting to think that there’s a lot of legwork going to be needed to end off the story AND have time for the Doctor’s trial. Early doors the Doctor and the War Chief had a little discussion about TARDIS and SIDRATs. It runs out that the war Chief is only after the Doctor for his TARDIS, the minx. Now, when I’ve read synopses of the story I’m sure I’ve seen it stated clearly that the War Chief has cannibalized his own TARDIS to construct the SIDRATs, the time machines that the war lords have been using to bring soldiers from Earth’s history, but this is not stated clearly in the show itself. What is stated clearly is that the SIDRATs are remote controlled AND have remarkable directional stability. This allows the Doctor to info dump all over the War Chief that these two features hugely reduce a time machine’s lifespan. This is an important plot point. When it transpires that only 2 SIDRATs have any juice left in them the Doctor realizes that he cannot get all the soldiers back to their own time. Now, I can only think he’s thinking that he can’t control the TARDIS well enough, for the inside is huge, and he could probably fit an army in there. So this is what finally decides him to call in the Time Lords. I loved the gimmick of constructing a little white box from cards, and this presumably is the kind of Time Lord box that Matt Smith found in “The Doctor’s Wife”. The ending of the episode was terrific too, since it looked as if the Doctor was in as much danger from the Time Lords as the rest of them were, and also hinted at their awesome powers with the way that they slowed time as the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe were trying to reach the TARDIS.

In any list of the greatest and most important individual episode of classic Doctor Who, the last episode of “The War Games” would have to be a serious contender for top slot. Boiled down to its essentials, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe try to escape in the TARDIS. All their attempts fail, and the TARDIS is brought in by the Time Lords. Presumably this is Gallifrey, but it is neither stated that this is Gallifrey (the name won’t be coined until The Time Warrior)nor that it is the Time Lords’ home planet. In fact it looks a lot like the war lords’ HQ, especially the TARDIS garage where they first arrive. The War Lord stands awaiting trial, and when this begins he refuses to answer questions. The Time Lord’s eyes begin to glow and he starts to scream, and then starts to talk. Even so he still retains his arrogance. There is an abortive attempt by the War Lord’s guards to rescue him, but the Time Lords are too powerful. They put a forcefield permanently around the War Lords’s home planet, and then wipe the War Lord and his guards out of existence, as if they had never lived at all.  Jamie and Zoe get a touching leaving scene – “Now Zoe, you and I both know that all Time is relative”. That’s a very good line at exactly the right time. Finally the Doctor is condemned, although he is treated with a lot more leniency than he was in the court martial in the first episode. He is exiled to Earth indefinitely, with a new face, and no knowledge of how to work the TARDIS. Epic.

A lot has been written and spoken about the three Time Lords who try the Doctor. The tallest one is played by Bernard Horsfall. He went on to play Chancellor Goth in my favourite Doctor Who story, “The Deadly Assassin”. Therefore it is certainly not impossible that it may actually be future Chancellor Goth. These Time Lords seem far more mysterious and powerful than they will ever seem again. There may be an explanation for this which we can work out from future stories. In the Pertween era, several times references are made to the Celestial Intervention Agency (CIA), who are the Time Lord Agency that the Doctor blames for sending him off on errands during his exile. The CIA are sometimes alluded to as an entity which acts outside of normal Time Lord government, ethics and procedure. So it’s not impossible that these Time Lords are acting for the CIA, and therefore would seem far more mysterious and powerful than the ordinary levels of Time Lord society that we get to see in later stories. It’s not impossible.

What Have We Learned?

When they want to use them, the Time Lords have remarkable powers and can really kick bottom.

Unless they get themselves into silly accidents the Time Lords can live forever. (The 12^th regeneration law has yet to be expressed)

In some circumstances the Time Lords can impose a specific appearance on one of their number. 

50: The War Games Parts 1 - 5

Before Watching

Well, this is going to provide us with some true watershed moments, I’m quite sure of that. First Terrace Dicks scripted story – he co-wrote it with The Faceless Ones’ Malcolm Hulke. The two of them had some great things in store over the next couple of years after this. Last Troughton story (sob). Last story for Jamie and Zoe. Last story in black and white. Last story in which we embarked upon it knowing virtually nothing about the Doctor’s race and his people. Last story before the Doctor’s exile to Earth.

I did say in my review of “The Space Pirates” that I’m sure that the story is going to live up to its generally very high reputation amongst the fans who have actually watched it. Partly this is based on 45 year old memories of watching it first time round. Partly it’s based on the Target novelization, and partly it’s based on what I’ve been told.  It has Philip Madoc and Bernard Horsfall among its guest cast as well, and both of those always seem to raise the quality of the stories in which they appear. I only approach this story with a slight trepidation about the length of it. We’ve already seen “The Invasion” get away with 8 episodes without a huge dip in quality in the middle this season, and so this one smacks of tempting fate. If we compare it with an even longer story, “The Daleks’ Master Plan”, that story had some episodes which were considerably weaker than others, and it could be even argued that it’s not one 12 part story, but a 5 parter, followed by a 6 parter, with a pantomime in the break. Well, coming back to “The War Games”, the only way to find out how successfully the story is carried out is to watch it. So for the last time in black and white, let’s do just that. As has become traditional with these epic length stories, I shall split my review into two installments.

After Watching

You know, I’m tempted to start off in neutral tones, and leave you wondering for a while just how much I liked or loathed the story. But I can’t. Remembering that I’m only talking about the first five episodes, I still thought that this was absolutely great. The World War I milieu for the setting of the first episode was a really good choice. Even now I’m sure that it’s instantly recognizable to all but the youngest viewers, and remember that the First World War was still in living memory when the story was first broadcast 46 years ago.  It’s important to remember that the original audience wouldn’t have had any more idea about what was actually going on in episode one than the Doctor has. For me the first few episodes are beautifully paced, as there are little hints that all is not what it seems to be, before the massive clue of the SIDRAT and the video screen in General Smythe’s room.

It is possible to see some rather biting satire on the way that the commanding officers acted during the First World War. Smythe’s eagerness to condemn the Doctor to the firing squad on the flimsiest of evidence – in fact pretty much no evidence at all, is a bitter echo on the travesty of a court martial many men in the British Army received. General Smythe’s excuse is that he really is inhuman, a member of the race of the war lords. Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s excuses for refusing to grant clemency in so many cases, thus condemning so many men to a firing squad are far more difficult to accept. On a lighter note, we’re also reminded how so many officers in the British Army during World War I were not really soldiers at all, just men with the right educational or social background who were doing their duty, through the way Captain Ransom is distracted into a discussion of paperwork by Zoe while the Doctor is searching General Smythe’s room.

For a multi parter the pacing of the first five episodes seems really well worked out to. In episode one you get time to get used to the World War I setting, and just the clue that Smythe is more than he seems with the whole hypno glasses thing. Then in episode 2 you see the first SIDRAT and learn that something very strange is going on, and the cliffhanger reveals even more as the Doctor drives an ambulance through some fog, and meets the Roman Army charging him head on. If it’s your first ever exposure to the story, then this will be the first time that you see that the World War I war zone is just one of several.

Then the third episode takes us into the war lords’ control room for the first time, and introduces the War Chief. I have to give full marks to the late Edward Brayshaw who plays the War Chief, here. Like most people who were kids in the mid to late 70s I remember him as Mr. Meaker in the comedy series “Rentaghost”. Here, despite being encumbered by a late entrant to the ‘most ridiculous eyebrows in Doctor Who’ stakes, and a medallion so large he would have been laughed out of a late 70s disco for wearing it, he gives a terrific and sustained performance. We’re only on episode 3! This upping the ante with each episode is most appealing. Even knowing the story I find it’s working effectively on me. It would have seemed even more amazing in the 60s, first time round.

In episode 4 the Doctor and Zoe travel inside a SIDRAT to HQ, and posing as students they attend a lecture on the processing machines. At the end, the War Chief enters, and he and the Doctor clearly recognize each other. BUT – and this was a stroke of genius on Hulke and Dicks’ part – having made this fact perfectly clear, they then make sure that the two don’t actually meet or speak to each other. Then in episode 5 we get to see a lot more of the hub, while the Doctor evades capture, and rescues Zoe, while Jamie gets pally with the resistance back in the war zones, and they hi jack a SIDRAT and come into the hub. It’s all go, I tell you.

I mentioned cliffhangers in the previous paragraph, and I think I want to make a special mention of the cliffhangers in the first half of this story. They’re really a rather good set, it must be said. Episode 1 ends with the Doctor seemingly being executed by firing squad. Episode two has the roman army bearing down on the ambulance with the Doctor and friends, while they try in vain to get the engine started. Episode three ends with the Doctor and Zoe’s SIDRAT dematerializing, leaving Jamie to face the confederate soldiers who are firing indiscriminately into the barn where he waits. Episode 4 has Zoe facing the newly reconditioned Lieutenant Carstairs who is holding a gun to her head, about to pull the trigger. Then episode 5 shows Jamie and his resistance friends walking out of a SIDRAT into an ambush which apparently leaves them dead on the floor.

Classic Doctor Who stories (other than Mission to the Unknown) were never written or made to be watched in one sitting. Despite this, though, I do tend to think that the acid test of a classic Doctor who story is if you watch two episodes consecutively, and then you still want to watch the next straightaway. I wouldn’t attempt to watch all 10 episodes of “The War Games” in 1 sitting – partly because I don’t think it would be fair to the story if I did. Once fatigue sets in I can’t be sure of giving any story a fair hearing. But I did watch the first five episodes consecutively, and let me tell you that they slipped down like butter, one after another. And nobody has even said the words “Time Lord” yet.

What Have We Learned?

Remember those thick bottle lensed glasses that you always thought looked slightly sinister? Now you know why.