Lennie Mayne | Through the Shattered Lens

The TARDIS materializes in a quarry and, for once, it’s an actual Earth quarry and not just an alien plant that looks like a quarry. An explosion both knocks Sarah Jane Smith out and also exposes a fossilized hand that has been hidden away under the rocks for centuries. The hand belongs to an executed alien was criminal named Kastrian Eldrad (Stephen Thorne, playing yet another Doctor Who baddie). When the hand is found, it starts to search for sources of radiation so that it can fully regenerate back into its original form and then seek revenge on its home planet.

The Hand of Fear would have been a standard Doctor Who adventure, except that it ended with Sarah Jane (Elisabeth Sladen) announcing that she can no longer handle the death, violence, and occasional mind control that goes along with being the Doctor’s companion. She asks the Doctor (Tom Baker) to return her to South Croydon. The Doctor reluctantly agrees. While Sarah is packing her things, The Doctor suddenly gets a telepathic message telling him to come to his home planet of Gallifrey and he realizes that, even if Sarah wasn’t leaving, he would not be able to take her with him. When The Doctor tells Sarah this, it upsets Sarah. Even though she impulsively decided to go home, it’s obvious that it’s not really what she wants. When The Doctor drops her off on Earth, she tells him not to forget her and we know that he never will. As the Doctor dematerializes, Sarah looks around and sees that she’s on Earth and probably in England but nowhere close to South Croydon.Plenty of companions had come and gone before this episode but none of them had quite the impact of Sarah Janes Smith. Sarah was one of the few companions to actually be viewed as being an equal of the Doctor. Even though she spent a lot of time doing typical companion things like being menaced by aliens and asking the Doctor to explain things, Sarah Jane still always projected a determination and inner strength that made her more than worthy to be traveling through time and space. Even dressing like Andy Pandy during her final appearance couldn’t diminish Sarah Janes Smith as a character.

Elisabeth Sladen had the perfect rapport with both Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker. Sladen and Baker were apparently close enough that they improvised their final goodbye and the emotions in that scene feel very real. For viewers like me, who were introduced to Doctor Who by PBS airing the Fourth Doctor’s adventures, Sarah Jane was the first companion that we met and her suddenly leaving came as a shock. She just seemed as if she was meant to be a part of the TARDIS crew forever.

Sarah Jane Smith would return, of course. There was K-9 and Company in 1981. There were the Sarah Jane Adventures, which ran from 2007 to 2011. Sadly, the wonderful Elisabeth Sladen passed away in 2011. For many of us, it felt like losing a valued a childhood friend.

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.