For the tenth season of Doctor Who, the BBC knew that they needed to start things off with a bang.  The first serial of season ten, The Three Doctors, brought together the first three actors who had played the Doctor.

A crisis was needed to explain why the Time Lords would decide to break their owns laws by bringing the Second Doctor and then the First Doctor out of their respective time zones.  Writers Dave Martin and Bob Baker came up with a story about the Doctor’s homeworld having its energy drained through a black hole.  If Gallifrey is destroyed then all of time and space will unravel.  (Everyone who has seen an episode of the original Doctor Who knows the drill.)  The villain is Omega (Stephen Thorne, who also played Azal in The Daemons), the first Time Lord, who has never forgiven his fellow Time Lords for abandoning him in an anti-matter universe that looks like a quarry.  The story is silly in the way that Doctor Who often could be but I think anyone watching will understand that the story is not that important.  Omega, the black hole, the energy blob that is sent to Earth to capture the Third Doctor, all of it was really just an excuse to bring back Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell.

Hartnell does not get to do much.  He was in increasingly poor health when he returned as the First Doctor and was also suffering from memory problems.  Sadly, this prevented him from sharing the same physical space as Troughton and Jon Pertwee.  Instead, it’s explained that the First Doctor is caught in a time eddy and can only communicate via the TARDIS’s viewscreen.  Even if he isn’t physically present, the First Doctor reveals himself to be the smartest of the three Doctors.  When he isn’t scolding the Second and Third Doctors, he’s figuring out how to enter Omega’s universe.  It’s not always easy to watch Hartnell looking frail and clearly reading some of his lines from cue cards but, even when ill, he still had the natural authority that he brought to the first two and a half  seasons of Doctor Who.

Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee are a delight to watch.  Their bickering is one of the highlights of the serial and both Troughton and Pertwee appear to have really enjoyed their scenes together.  The show also gets mileage from including the Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney) and Sgt. Benton (John Levene) along with the three Doctors.  I’ve always enjoyed how both of them come to accept the strangest of things with barely a shrug.  This is the episode where Benton enters the TARDIS and, when the Third Doctor asks if Benton’s going to point out that it’s bigger on the inside than the outside, replies, “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

The Three Doctors is hardly a perfect Doctor Who adventure.  (If any adventure needed the presence of the The Master, it was this one.)  It is, however, a tribute to the men who played the first three Doctors and the role they all played in making the show an institution.  The Three Doctors was also the final acting role of William Hartnell, who passed away two years after the serial was broadcast.