Tag Archives: Doctor Who

Doctor Who — The Ark In Space, The Sontaran Experiment, Genesis of the Daleks, Revenge of the Cybermen, Terror of the Zygons

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The 12th season of Doctor Who got off to a shaky start with Robot, a serial that was ultimately distinguished only by the introduction of Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor.  The best thing about Robot is that it ended with The Fourth Doctor peeking out of the TARDIS and inviting Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) and Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter) to join him on his further adventures.  By inviting them, he was inviting the audience as well.

The remaining episodes of the 12th season not only established Tom Baker as the Doctor but it also reestablished Doctor Who as being a show about an alien who could travel through time and space.  After several seasons of The Third Doctor largely staying on Earth and in the present, the 12th Season reminded everyone that the Doctor could turn up anywhere.

The Ark In Space (1975, directed by Rodney Bennett)

The first place that the Doctor takes Sarah and Harry is to Nerva, a space station that floating above the Earth.  The time is 10,000 years into the future.  Forced to flee the Earth due to solar flares, the crew of the space station has spent a millennia in suspended animation.  During that time, the space station has been invaded by the Wirm, a space insect that has laid its eggs in some of the crewmen.  When everyone is revived, the infected crewmen are transformed into creatures that are half-human and half-insect.

The Ark in Space is a classic space opera.  When I was a kid and our PBS station first started to broadcast Doctor Who, they started with a four-hour bloc, which included Robot, The Ark In Space, and The Sontaran Experiment.  After Robot, with its basic plot and bad special effects, it was a relief to then see The Ark In Space, a serial that lived up to all of the Doctor Who hype.  Not only did Tom Baker fully step into the role of the eccentric Fourth Doctor but this serial also featured Elisabeth Sladen and Ian Marter in active roles as well.  This serial said that the days of the passive companion were (temporarily) over.

The plot of The Ark in Space does have some similarities to Alien, which came out for years later.  I think that’s probably just a coincidence.

The Sontaran Experiment (1975, directed by Rodney Bennett)

Having defeated the Wirm and saved the remaining colonists on the Ark, The Doctor, Harry, and Sarah transport down to Earth to repair a receiver terminal.  They discover that the Earth is not as deserted as they assumed.  A group of human astronauts returned to the planet earlier but they were captured by Styre (Kevin Lindsay), a Sontaran who has been sent to Earth to prepare it for an invasion so that the Sontarans can use the planet as an outpost in their never ending war with the Rutans.

This serial was only two episodes long but The Sontarans were always good villains.  They’re relentless, destructive, and very, very stupid.  This story featured one of Tom Baker’s best moments, when he convinced Styre to throw away his weapon because it made him look weak.  Styre fell for it because Sontarans will fall for anything.

Genesis of the Daleks (1975, directed by David Maloney)

This is it.  This is the first true classic of the Tom Baker era and also the best of the classic Dalek stories.  Terry Nation was invited back to Doctor Who to write about his most famous creations and he created one of the show’s most enduring villains in the process.

A Time Lord appears to the Doctor and his companions and tells them that they need The Doctor to change history.  (This goes against all Time Lord law, which is why they gave the job to a known renegade like The Doctor.)  The Daleks have been determined to be too much of a threat.  The Doctor is to go back to the time of their creation and “interfere.”

The Doctor, Harry, and Sarah Jane find themselves on Skaro, where the war between the Thals and the Kaleds have left the planet ravaged and inhospitable.  The Thals and the Kaleds each live in a domed city and spend their days shooting missiles at each other.  Terry Nation often said that the Daleks were meant to be a stand-in for the Nazis and he makes that clear in this episode with the Kaleds wearing SS-style uniforms and spouting theories about racial superiority.

In this episode, Nation introduces Davros (Michael Wisher), the horribly scarred and crippled scientist who will ultimately be responsible for transforming the Kaleds into the Daleks.  (The Kaleds who don’t want to be Daleks are wiped out by those who do.)  Davros would appear in every subsequent Dalek episode of classic era Doctor Who and his effectiveness would be diluted by repetition.  In his first appearance, though, he immediately establishes himself as a frightening and truly evil Doctor Who villain.  If their first appearance suggested that the Daleks retreated into the shells for survival in their nuclear-ravaged world, this episode shows that it more about Davros wanting to play God.

A six-episode serial, Genesis of the Daleks more than justifies its epic length.  The heart of the serial is a moment when the Doctor, on the verge of wiping out the Daleks forever, stops to wonder if he has the right to do so.  This was a key moment in the development of The Fourth Doctor.  The Fourth Doctor may have been an eccentric but he was an eccentric with a conscience who realized that even the worst creatures deserved a chance at redemption.  In the end, The Doctor does not destroy the Daleks, though he does set back their evolution by an undetermined number of years.  As the Doctor explains it, good will always rise up to counter the evil of the Daleks.

This episode features the apparent destruction of Davros but you can never keep a good villain down.  Both Davros and his creations would return.

Revenge of the Cybermen (1975, directed by Michael Briant)

After a classic Dalek story, I guess it was inevitable that Doctor Who would feature a Cyberman episode.

Following the events of Genesis of the Daleks, the Time Lords return The Doctor, Sarah Jane, and Harry to the Nerva space station.  They arrive several centuries before the events in The Ark In Space.  Without the TARDIS (it’s traveling back through time to meet them), The Doctor and his companions discover that the majority of Nerva’s crew is dead and that the remaining members are using the station as a space beacon to warn people about a drifting planetoid.  The planetoid is made of gold and the Cybermen show up at Nerva because, being uniquely vulnerable to gold dust, they want to destroy it.

If Genesis of the Daleks re-imagined the Daleks, Attack of the Cybermen proves to be just a typical Cybermen story and a disappointing one.  The best thing about this episode is that it gave Tom Baker a chance to once again prove his Doctor bonafides by defeating a classic Doctor Who villain.

Terror of the Zygons (1975, directed by Douglas Camfield)

Terror of the Zygons was the first seral of the thirteenth season but, since it’s also Harry Sullivan’s final appearance as a regular member of the TARDIS crew (though he would return in a later episode for a one-off appearance), it still feels like a twelfth season episode.

Having been reunited with the TARDIS, the Doctor, Sarah Jane, and Harry return to present-day Earth.  The Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney) and UNIT are investigating attacks on oil rigs by a giant sea creature.  Sea Devils, again?  No, this time it’s the Zygons, who are far less sympathetic.

This was a typical UNIT story, the type of thing that Jon Pertwee did regularly.  Tom Baker’s more mischievous version of the Doctor feels slightly out-of-place with UNIT but it is still a pleasure to see Nicholas Courtney and John Levene again and this episode finally explains what everyone has been seeing in Loch Ness over the years.  This episode ends with Harry returning to UNIT while Sarah Jane and the Doctor returned the TARDIS.  Harry Sullivan was a strong character and producer Philip Hinchcliffe later said it was a mistake to write him out of the series.

Ian Marter, who played Harry Sullivan, continued to be associated with Doctor Who as one of the better writers of the Doctor Who novelizations.  He also wrote two stand-alone novels featuring Harry’s adventures without the Doctor.  Ian Marter died of a heart attack when he was just 42 but Harry Sullivan lived on, frequently being mentioned in both the classic series and the revival.

That’s it for the 12th season, the season that truly made Tom Baker the Doctor and which was one of the best of the classic series.  As these were the first episodes of Doctor Who that I ever saw, I have a lot of nostalgia for them.  The Ark In Space, The Sonatarn Experiment, Genesis of the Daleks, and even Terror of the Zygons still hold up well to this day.

 

Doctor Who — Robot (1974-1975, directed by Christopher Barry)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Robot, the first serial of Doctor Who‘s 12th season, introduced us to a new Doctor.  The Third Doctor has regenerated and in his place is a slightly younger and more eccentric man.  Robot was the first regeneration story to introduce the idea of the Doctor being disorientated after regenerating.  The Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) wakes up without the Third Doctor’s pressing concern for Earth or the goings-on at UNIT.  At first, at least, he has the wanderlust of the First Doctor without the Third Doctor’s sense of duty.  He wants to get in his TARDIS and explore the universe.

The only thing that stops him from leaving are his companion, Sarah jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen), and the Brigadier (Nicholas Courtney).  When they tell him that there have been some technology thefts and that they need his help to investigate, the Doctor agrees to stick around and help out.  Of course, before he investigates, he changes his costume.  Out are the Edwardian clothes that the Third Doctor favored.  In are wide-brimmed hats, trenchcoats, and scarves.  Very, very long scarves.

(His scarf in Robot is nowhere near as long as it would eventually get.)

When he was cast as the Doctor, Tom Baker was a character actor who has found some success (even receiving a Golden Globe nomination for his performance as Rasputin in Nicholas and Alexandra) but not enough to give up his part-time job as a construction worker.  When he wrote to the BBC asking for a job, the letter was forwarded to Doctor Who producer Barry Letts.  Letts, who was struggling to find someone to replace the popular Jon Pertwee, hired Baker for the role after watching Baker play a villain in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.  (There’s a movie I might have to review before the month is over.)  Tom Baker would go on to have the longest run of any actor as the Doctor and, for years, he was consistently voted the most popular of the actors who have played the Doctor.  That’s not bad for someone who, before receiving the role, was tauntingly called “Sir Laurence” by his co-workers at the construction site.

Tom Baker was also the first Doctor that many Americans experienced.  When I was a kid and my local PBS station first started showing Doctor Who, they started with the Tom Baker years.  For many American, Tom Baker was the one who introduced them to things like the TARDIS, Daleks, and Cybermen.  Tom Baker’s Doctor, with the scarf and the sneaky smile and the eccentric humor, became an iconic figure the world over.

Considering how important Tom Baker would be to the show, it’s interesting that his first serial is nothing special.  The thefts are the work of a group of humans who want to construct a robot out of “living metal” so that they can steal Britain’s nuclear command codes and hold the world hostage.  An attempt to shoot the robot with a disintegrator gun causes the robot grows to supersize.  It develops a crush on Sarah Jane, and is destroyed by an early computer virus.  The giant robot special effects rival the dinosaurs from Invasion of the Dinosaurs for ineptitude.  The episode ends with asking Sarah Jane and UNIT’s Dr. Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter) to accompany him on a trip in the TARDIS.

The only thing that really stands out about this episode is Tom Baker’s performance as the Doctor.  I hesitate to say that anyone was ever destined to play a role but Baker is so confident from the start and seems like such a natural while interacting with veteran cast members like Nicholas Courtney, Elisabeth Sladen, and John Levene that it’s hard to believe that anyone other than Tom Baker was ever considered for the role of The Fourth Doctor.  From the start, Tom Baker just seems like be belongs there.

Robot may not have been classic Doctor Who but Tom Baker was the classic Doctor.

Doctor Who — Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974, directed by Paddy Russell)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Fresh from defeating an attempt by a Sontaran to disrupt British history, the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) and his newest companion, reporter Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen), return to present-day London and discover that it has been transformed into a ghost town.  Dinosaurs are roaming the streets.  The Doctor teams up with UNIT to try to figure out who has been monkeying with time but what he doesn’t know is that the trusted Captain Yates (Richard Franklin) is working with the people responsible for the dinosaur invasion.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs was the second serial of the 11th season.  Like The Sea Devils, this was another case where I read the novelization long before I got a chance to see the actual serial.  Well-written by Malcolm Hulke, the novelization really got me excited to watch Invasion of the Dinosaurs.  It did not prepare me for how fake the dinosaurs would look.

It was to be expected, though.  Classic Doctor Who was never known for its wonderful special effects.  Instead, it was known for rubber monsters, torn costumes, and alien landscapes that were often made out of cardboard.  For many of us, that was a part of its charm.  The dinosaurs in this serial look like toys that have been unleashed on a still photo of London.  I’ve read that the serial was criticized for its bad dinosaur effects when it originally aired 1974 and that was long before Jurassic Park made everyone take the idea of seeing a realistic dinosaur for granted.

 

Despite the very fake dinosaurs, Invasion of the Dinosaurs still has one of the better scripts of the Pertwee era.  The villains aren’t the typical evildoers who usually showed up on Doctor Who.  Instead, they are people who have convinced themselves that the only way to save humanity is to dial back time to what they consider to be the “Golden Age,” before technology and industry blighted what they believe to be the ideal landscape.  Of course, they plan to take only the very best among the population to their golden age with them.  The villains are elitist environmentalists, convinced that they and only they know what is best.  This may be the first episode of Doctor Who where the main antagonist, Sir Charles Grover (Noel Johnson), is a member of Parliament.

Captain Yates’s betrayal of UNIT and the Doctor adds some emotional depth to this story.  While Yates was never as important a character as the Brigadier or Sgt. Benton, he was still present for almost all of the Third Doctor’s adventures and the small scenes where he would flirt with Jo Grant were some of the most awkward moments of the Pertwee era.  Captain Yates was a loyal member of the Third Doctor’s entourage and his betrayal was motivated not by greed or resentment but instead by a desire to make the world a better place.  The novelization made it clear that it was actually the terrible things that Yates saw as a member of UNIT that convinced him that time needed to be turned back.

This was the final Jon Pertwee story to be set entirely on Earth and, though Yates and the Brigadier would return for Pertwee’s final serial, it was the last true UNIT story of the Pertwee years.  Jon Pertwee had already decided that the 11th season would be his last.  The 12 season would feature a new Doctor.  And while the BBC considered actors like Graham Crowden, Bernard Cribbins, and Jim Dale for the role, the Fourth Doctor was ultimately be played by Tom Baker, an actor who was working as a construction worker when Invasion of the Dinosaurs first aired.

Doctor Who would never the same.

Doctor Who — The Three Doctors (1972-1973, directed by Lennie Manye)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

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.

Doctor Who — The Sea Devils (1972, directed by Michael Briant)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Having been captured by UNIT at the end of The Daemons, the Master (Roger Delgado) is now a imprisoned on a small island in the English channel.  He claims that he is reformed and he now spends most of his days watching the BBC.  (Has he not been punished enough?)

When the Doctor (Jon Pertwee) and Jo Grant (Katy Manning) visit the Master to try to learn the location of his TARDIS, they come up empty.  They do, however, learn that several ships have gone missing and, understandably, they suspect that the Master is involved.

They’re correct.  The Master has duped his warden, Trenchard (Clive Morton), into helping him steal electrical equipment so that he can contact The Sea Devils, a race of bipedal reptiles the live under the sea.  The Sea Devils, much like their cousins, the Silurians, were the original inhabitants of Earth.  They’ve now woken from hibernation to discover that mankind — who they last knew to be a collection of barely evolved monkeys — have taken over the planet.  And they’re not happy about it.

The Silurians and the Sea Devils appeared in three serials during the original run of Doctor Who and all of them followed the same basic plot.  The Silurians or the Sea Devils woke up from their hibernation.  The Doctor tried to broker a peace with humanity.  Humanity reacted by blowing them up.  The Sea Devils were usually more reluctant to make peace than the Silurians.  In The Sea Devils, the Doctor himself is forced to sabotage their base to keep them from attacking humanity but that’s nothing compared to the atomic bomb that the British government wanted to drop on them.  Whenever a Silurian or a Sea Devil shows up, it means that the Doctor is going to disappointed in humanity once again.

The Sea Devils is a serial of which I have fond memories because Malcolm Hulke’s novelization was the first Doctor Who book that I ever read.  (Malcolm Hulke also wrote the serial itself.)  I read the book before I even saw the show.  The novelization was my introduction to the Doctor, UNIT, and especially the Master.  Hulke was one of the best writers of the Doctor Who novelizations, taking the time to add depth to the characters.  This was especially true of Trenchard, who is portrayed far more sympathetically in the novel than he was on the show.

The Sea Devils also features one of Roger Delgado’s finest turns as the Master.  This was the Master’s first appearance during the ninth season of Doctor Who and Delgado shows that, even when imprisoned, the Master never stops manipulating and scheming.  This episode shows why Delgado’s Master was such a classic villain and truly a worthy opponent of the Doctor.  Delgado does such a good job in the scenes where The Master pretends to be reformed that it’s easy to understand how he managed to trick Trenchard.  At the end of the serial, The Master makes another escape, again by fooling the humans around him.  Delgado made The Master into a magnetic and compelling villain.

Roger Delgado appeared twice more as the Master before his untimely death in an auto accident.  Jon Pertwee later said that Delgado’s death was one of the reasons that he decided to step away from the role of the Doctor.  The Master would eventually return and he would be played by several different actors.  For me, the true Master will always be Roger Delgado.

Doctor Who — The Daemons (1971, directed by Christopher Barry)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

When I was growing up and watching Doctor Who on PBS, I had a friend whose mother forbid him from watching the show because she thought that it promoted Satanism.

Her opinion was almost totally based on the cover of the novelization of one of the Third Doctor’s most popular adventures.

She took one look at that cover and decided that both the book and the show were promoting Satan.  I warned him that would happen when he first bought the book but, back in the day, it was nearly impossible to resist the temptation of the shelf of Doctor Who novels at Walden Books.  It was almost as if the books had been put there by you know who.

If my friend’s mother had read the book or even watched the serial when it eventually aired on PBS, she would have discovered that The Daemons did not feature the Devil.  Instead, it features Azal (Stephen Thorne), an evil horned alien who had spent centuries experimenting on humans and who had inspired many ancient myths and religions.  If my friend’s mother had watched the show, she would have seen that, rather than celebrate Satan, the show instead suggested that there was no Satan and that all of mankind’s Gods were actually visiting aliens.  She would have also seen that while The Master (played by Roger Delgado) disguised himself as a vicar, it fell to a local white witch to warn everyone in a quaint British village that the local archeological dig was a mistake.  Because of the Master’s religious disguise, everyone followed him when they should have been listening to the pagan…

In hindsight, it’s probably a good thing my friend’s mother never watched the show.

The Daemons has a reputation for being one of the best of the Third Doctor’s adventures and I’m inclined to agree.  The Doctor (Jon Pertwee) and his latest companion, Jo Grant (Katy Manning), try to stop the dig and instead find themselves trapped by a heat shield that has suddenly sprung  up over the village.  One of the defining images of this episode was a helicopter busting into flame when it hit the invisible barrier.  With the Brigadier and the majority of UNIT outside of the village, The Doctor, Jo, Sgt. Benton (John Levene), and Captain Yates (Richard Franklin) try to stop the plans of The Master and Azal.  Unfortunately, the villagers themselves have fallen under the sway of evil and are planning a special maypole sacrifice.

 

So many different actors have played The Master (and the character has become so overused) that it is easy to forget just how good Roger Delgado, the first Master, was in the role.  Delgado played the Master as being incredibly evil but he also played him as having a sense of humor and style about his evil, which is something that subsequent Masters have often failed to do.  Delgado’s Master appeared in every serial of the eighth series and he proved to be more than a worthy opponent for Pertwee’s Doctor.  Off-screen, Pertwee and Delgado were close friends and Pertwee later said that Delgado’s death in a traffic accident was one of the factors in Petwee’s decision to step away from the show.  The Daemons featured Delgado at his best as the Master did his worst and tried to claim the powers of someone who humans considered to be Satan.

The Daemons is also remembered for one of the best lines in the history of Doctor Who.  When confronted by Azal’s gargoyle servant, the Brigadier calls over a UNIT solider and orders, “Chap with wings there, five rounds rapid.”  I can only imagine how tired Nicholas Courtney got of having that line repeated to him over the years but his delivery of it is perfect.  The Brigadier was such a uniquely English character, imbued with the unflappable attitude of a country that had survived the collapse of an Empire, the Blitz, and the Suez Crisis.  Nicholas Courtney took a line that sounds like something Graham Chapman would have said on Monty Python and instead made it into an iconic piece of dialogue that reminded those of us American watching on PBS that, in Doctor Who, the entire universe was British.

Though it led to the show being forever banned in my friend’s house, The Daemons is a Doctor Who classic.

Doctor Who — Spearhead From Space (1970, directed by Derek Martinus)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Two meteorite showers have fallen in rural England and a poacher has come across a strange plastic polyhedron at one of the sites.  Brigadier General Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart (Nicholas Courtney), the head of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT), fears it could be the start of another alien invasion.  He explains to UNIT’s skeptical scientific advisor, Dr. Liz Shaw (Caroline John), that UNIT was specifically created to protect the Earth from such invasions.

Meanwhile, a bushy-haired man has collapsed in front of an old-fashioned blue police call box.  He’s been taken to a hospital, where the doctors are confounded by the fact that he appears to have two hearts.  The Brigadier, hearing the news, is convinced that the man is his old friend the Doctor and heads to the hospital.

The Brigadier is right.  The man (Jon Pertwee) is the Doctor but, as a result of being found guilty of stealing a TARDIS and breaking the Time Lord code of non-interference, the Doctor now looks and sounds completely different.  While the Doctor works to convince the Brigadier that he is who he says he is, a tentacled alien known as the Nestene is using the Autons, a race of plastic humanoids, to do its deadly bidding.

I’ve always really liked Jon Pertwee’s interpretation of the Doctor and the reasons why are to be found in his very first adventure.  While Pertwee’s Doctor was just as intelligent and egocentric as the two Doctors who came before him, he was also a man (or an alien, I guess) of action.  Rather than just stay cooped up in that hospital room, the Third Doctor is constantly trying to escape.  When the Autons show up and try to abduct him, the Third Doctor doesn’t go without a struggle.  Unlike the first two Doctors, this Doctor has no problem commandeering a car and then demanding one just like it in return for working with UNIT.  Pertwee combined intelligence with action and humor and that brought a unique feel to his five years in the role.  I’ve often seen Pertwee’s Doctor compared to James Bond.  I think a better comparison would be to Patrick McNee’s John Steed from The Avengers.  The Third Doctor was an intelligent, erudite gentleman who dressed well and knew how to throw a punch.

The majority of the Third Doctor’s adventure would involve UNIT in some way.  Exiled to Earth and with a locked-down TARDIS, the Third Doctor was the most Earth-bound of the Doctors but, as shown in Spearhead From Space, that worked well for Pertwee’s interpretation of the character.  Pertwee and Nicholas Courtney were a good team and, for Pertwee’s first season, Liz Shaw was a companion who was actually the Doctor’s equal.  (I had a huge crush on Caroline John when her episodes were first broadcast on PBS.)  The first Auton Invasion showed why UNIT was so necessary and also why it needed the services of the Doctor.

The Autons have a reputation for being the scariest of Doctor Who’s monsters.  They definitely were creepy, with their expressionless, plastic faces.  Imagine mannequins that can walk and who will also shoot you on a whim and you have an idea of why the Autons inspired many bad dreams in 1970.  (Like the Cyberman in Tomb of the Cybermen, the Autons were soon at the heart of a debate about whether or not Doctor Who was too scary for children.)  The Autons are certainly more scary than the Nestene, which was quite obviously a puppet and not very well-put together one at that.

Spearhead from Space was a wonderful introduction to Jon Pertwee’s Doctor and it remains a classic of the original series.  The first serial to be broadcast in color, it not only allows us to get to know the Third Doctor but it also introduces a classic new threat.  As this story ends, the Doctor is settling to his new role as an advisor to UNIT.  Waiting in the future are many more adventures and the Master.

Doctor Who — The War Games (1969, directed by David Maloney)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

The War Games is an episode of firsts and lasts.

It featured the last regular appearance by Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor.  (Troughton would return for three guest appearances.)  Having played the role for three years, Troughton feared getting typecast and felt it was time to leave.  It was also the last episode to feature Frazer Hines (as Jamie) and Wendy Padbury (as Zoe) as companions.  (Hines holds the record for appearing in the most episodes as a companion.)  Finally, this episode was the last to be broadcast in black-and-white.

The War Games also featured a very important first.  This episode featured the first appearance of the Time Lords and the first trip to their home planet.  This was the first episode that showed the society that the Doctor fled when he stole his TARDIS and went to Earth.

At ten episodes, The War Games was either the second or third-longest serial in Doctor Who history, depending on whether or not you count The Trial of the Time Lord as just one long (and regrettable) serial.  The serial opens with the Doctor and his companions apparently landing in No Man’s Land during World War I.  As things progress, the Doctor notices anachronistic technology and Jamie is shocked when a redcoat shows up in a World War I prison.  The Doctor discovers that an alien known as The War Lord (Philip Madoc) has determined that humanity is the most bloodthirsty race in the universe and that he has abducted soldiers from Earth’s bloodiest wars.  They are fighting war games on The War Lord’s planet and the survivors will become the members of the War Lord’s army.  Helping the War Lord is the War Chief (Edward Brayshaw), a renegade Time Lord.

(Just as with The Time Meddler‘s Monk, there’s a fan theory that the War Chief was an early incarnation of The Master.  I don’t believe it, myself.  The Master was far more cunning than The War Chief.)

Despite running for four hours, The War Games is a rare Doctor Who serial that doesn’t have any slow spots and the scenes where the characters cross from war zone to war zone are creatively realized.  The serial starts out as if it’s going to be yet another dry historical episode and then it gradually reveals that all is not as it seems.  I especially liked the performance as Jane Sherwin as Lady Julia, an ambulance driver in the World War I zone.  (Jane Sherwin was also the wife of Doctor Who’s then-produccer Derek Sherwin.)

What really makes The War Games stand out is the final episode.

Having brought an end to the War Games, the Doctor is faced with the impossible prospect of returning the soldiers to their proper times.  He is forced to call upon The Time Lords for help.  Bernard Horsfall, Trevor Martin, and Clyde Pollitt appear as the Time Lords, who dematerialize the War Lord and send the soldiers back home with no memory of what happened.  Unfortunately, The Time Lords are not just going to let the Doctor off the hook for violating their police of non-interference.

First, Jamie and Zoe are sent back to their original times, both with no memory of their life on board the TARDIS.  The Doctor is then put on trial for having stolen his TARDIS and interfering in time and space.  The Doctor argues that he has been fighting evil.  The Time Lords accept his argument and then say that his punishment is to be sent to 20th Century Earth.  He’ll keep his TARDIS but he won’t be able to use it.  And, because the Doctor is well-known on Earth, he’ll have to regenerate.  He’s given five faces and told to pick one.  The Doctor refuses them all.  The Time Lords pick one.  “That’s the worst one!” the Doctor says before he finds himself spinning through space and time.

It’s a poignant ending to the Second Doctor’s adventures.  The Time Lords do not come across as being as bad as the Doctor often made them out to be but it is easy to see why an adventurer like the Doctor would feel constrained by their society.  That the Second Doctor called them for help despite knowing what the consequences would be not only shows how dangerous The War Lord’s plan was but also how the Doctor would always do the right thing even when it was dangerous for him to do so.  The Time Lords could have just as easily dematerialized The Doctor as punishment for stealing his TARDIS.  Jamie and Zoe are spared punishment but they lose their memories of the amazing adventures they shared.  And the Doctor changes once again.

For viewers like me, who got to know Doctor Who from the episodes that were broadcast late at night on PBS, The War Games is a bridge between “old” Doctor Who and the classic era of Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker.  In America, we didn’t get to see much of Patrick Troughton’s Doctor but what we got established him as one of the best to ever play the role.

 

Doctor Who — The Tomb of the Cybermen (1967, directed by Morris Barry)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In 1966, Doctor Who changed forever.

William Hartnell was in failing health and having difficulty remembering his lines.  He was also not getting along with the current production team and was unhappy with the direction of the show.  (He felt that it was getting too violent and dependent upon the bug-eyed monsters who he had originally been told would have no part of the show.)  It became obvious that Hartnell would not be able to continue as the Doctor.  At the same time, Doctor Who was an unqualified hit and one that the BBC wanted to keep going.

Producer Innes Lloyd and story editor Gerry Davis decided that since the Doctor was an alien, they could just say that he could transform himself physically at will, which would allow them to recast the role.  Hearing the news, Hartnell is said to have replied, “There’s only one man in England who can take over, and that’s Patrick Troughton.”

William Hartnell was correct.  Patrick Troughton, 46 at the time, was a stage-trained character actor who had become a television mainstay.  As opposed to Hartnell, whose Doctor was stern and stubborn, Troughton played the Doctor as being “a comic hobo,” (to quote show creator Sydney Newman).  The Second Doctor enjoyed his travels and had an unquenchable curiosity.  Like an interstellar Lt. Columbo, The Second Doctor often played the fool to get the better of his enemies.  He also become a father figure to many of his companions, a role that Troughton also played offscreen as well.

Unfortunately, many of the Second Doctor’s adventures are missing or are only available in audio form.  When I was growing up, my father and I would watch Doctor Who on PBS.  PBS started with the Fourth Doctor and the Fifth Doctor before then going back to the Third Doctor and then finally broadcasting what they had of The First and Second Doctor.  There were so few of the Second Doctor’s serials available that it only took PBS a month and a half to finish up with Troughton.  People like me got to know Troughton’s Doctor more through his later guest appearances (The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors, The Two Doctors) than through his original adventures.

The Tomb of the Cybermen is the earliest serial known to exist in its entirety to feature Troughton as the Second Doctor.  In this 4-epiosde serial (which also launched the show’s fifth series), The Doctor and his companions Jamie (Frazer Hines) and Victoria (Deborah Watling) materialize on the desolate planet Telos and discover an expedition of humans are trying to enter the Tomb of the Cybermen.

In those days before The Master, The Cybermen were one of the Doctor’s main recurring enemies.  Former humanoids who sacrificed their emotions and individual personalities to become cyborgs, the Cybermen were relentless and ruthless and just as dangerous as the Daleks.  (The Cyberman also had something Daleks lacked, the ability to climb stairs.)  In Tomb of the Cybermen, the expedition assumes that the Cybermen buried in the underground tomb are no longer functioning.  It turns out that the Cybermen are just waiting for someone to revive them.

Tomb of the Cybermen is a classic Doctor Who serial.  The plot borrows considerably from the legends about mummies and cursed Egyptian tombs.  The expedition arrogantly enters the tomb, despite being warned not to.  It turns out that the expedition’s leaders want to use the Cybermen as their own army and their willing to sacrifice everyone with them to try to achieve that goal.  The revived Cybermen aren’t interested in an alliance.  The Doctor and his companions try to escape the crypt while also ensuring that the Cybermen will never escape again.  The plot is simple but exciting.  The Second Doctor pretends to be baffled by the tomb and its technology but later reveals that he always understood more than he let on.

The Tomb of the Cybermen is not only a great Troughton showcase.  It’s also historically important as one of the first serials to really upset Britain’s moral guardians.  Reportedly, British children were left terrified and unable to sleep after witnessing the Cybermen bursting forth from their tombs.  The infamous Mary Whitehouse would often cite Doctor Who as being detrimental programming for children.  The Tomb of the Cybermen was one of the serials that she often cited as just being too violent and frightening.

It’s a shame that we don’t have more of Patrick Troughton’s serials to watch because The Tomb of Cybermen reveals him to be the prototype for almost every Doctor who would follow.  (There’s a small moment where The Doctor, Jamie, and Victoria hold hands while stepping into the Tomb and it says so much about who the Doctor was, post-Hartnell.)  I’m glad, though, that we do have this showcase of the Second Doctor at his best.

Doctor Who — The Time Meddler (1965, directed by Douglas Camfield)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Today, everyone knows the origins of the Doctor.  We know that the Doctor is a Time Lord and a native of the planet Gallifrey.  We know that the Time Lords had a policy of not interfering with other civilizations.  They could travel through time but they were never to change history.  We know that the Doctor, even after stealing the TARDIS, remained true to that belief while other renegade Time Lords did not.

It wasn’t always like that.  During the show’s early years, the Doctor was meant to be a very mysterious figure and it was implied that he himself had invented (rather than stolen) his TARDIS.  It wasn’t until nearly two years into the show’s original run that we met anyone else from the Doctor’s home planet and that we finally got to see a TARDIS that could actually change shape.

All of that happened in The Time Meddler, a four-episode serial the originally aired from July 3rd, 1965 to July 24th.  In this episode, the Doctor’s TARDIS materializes in Northumbria in 1066.  With Ian and Barbara having recently returned to their own time, the Doctor (William Hartnell) is now traveling with Vicki (Maureen O’Brien) and Steven Taylor (Peter Purves), both of whom come from the future and who are much less argumentative than either Ian or Barbara.  Finally, the Doctor has companions who are not only happy to be there but who are willing to do whatever he says.  Though the Doctor tells Vicki that he will miss Ian and Barbara, he does seem much more relaxed in this serial than in previous ones.

The Doctor’s arrival is observed by The Monk (Peter Butterworth), a mysterious figure who doesn’t seem to be surprised at all to see a blue police call box materialize in 1066.  A time meddler who it is implied has met the Doctor before, the Monk is plotting on changing the course of history by wiping out King Harald Hardrada’s Viking invasion fleet, therefore leaving Harold Godwinson and his troops fresh and fully armed so that they can then defeat William The Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings.  The Doctor is captured early on by the Monk, leaving Steven and Vicki to deal with the suspicious locals.

The Meddling Monk was truly a great creation.  As played by Peter Butterworth, he wasn’t so much an evil-doer as he was just someone who thought it would be fun to change history.  (I’ve always disliked the theory that the Meddling Monk was an early incarnation of The Master.  The Master was always evil while the Monk was basically a prankster.)  Peter Butterworth gives an amusing and energetic performance as the Monk and the highlights of the serial are the scenes between him and Hartnell.  They both bring out the best in each other and Hartnell, who could often seem testy while acting opposite the younger actors who played his companions, truly seems to enjoy playing opposite an actor who was basically his equal in both skill and experience.

This episode is best-known for being the first episode to introduce another member of The Doctor and Susan’s race.  It was also the first episode to feature a TARDIS other than the Doctor’s.  (The Monk’s TARDIS works, which reminds the viewer of just how broken-down the Doctor’s vehicle actually is.)  It is often overlooked that it was also one of the better “historical” episodes.  Doctor Who was originally envisioned as a show that would teach younger viewers about history.  Unfortunately, the purely historical episodes were often dry and uninvolving.  This episode teaches about the Battle of Normandy but it also livens things up by giving the Doctor a worthy adversary.

It can be difficult to judge Hartnell’s time as the Doctor, just because so many of his serials are either incomplete or totally missing.  For viewers who are used to a younger and friendlier Doctor, Hartnell’s Doctor can seem rather grouchy.  The Time Meddler, though, features William Hartnell at his best and is one of the highlights of Doctor Who‘s early years.