Category: Complete Review
Doctor Who episode 333: The Three Doctors – Episode Four (20/1/1973)
The theme of this episode, and I suppose the moral of the story, is freedom. Omega believes he’s been abandoned in exile by his fellow Time Lords, and wants the Doctor to take on the burden of maintaining the anti-matter universe, and when this proves impossible threatens to destroy everything in a massive fit of pique. Meanwhile, the Doctor, who actually has been exiled, is willing to sacrifice himself to save the universe and is therefore given back the freedom Omega craved. It’s a nice little fable of the deserving character winning the prize.
Doctor Who episode 332: The Three Doctors – Episode Three (13/1/1973)
Fittingly, this episode focuses on the power of myth and the lasting influence of heroes from the past. Omega is a kind of Gallifreyan Moses, the ‘solar engineer’ (I love the idea of someone who can create suns, no wonder he has a God complex) whose sacrifice gave his ‘brother Time Lords’ (no mention of Tecteun or the Shobogans here) their time and space travel. But while he’s been revered and remembered by Gallifrey, his continued existence, as a force of will, has left him jealous and resentful at his imagined betrayal and abandonment. I like the idea, the sense that the past can come back to haunt the present, especially in an anniversary story. In a sense, Omega is fulfilling the same role as the War Doctor in The Day of the Doctor: the guilty secret underpinning the show’s current incarnation. Only by acknowledging the past can we move on from it.
Doctor Who episode 331: The Three Doctors – Episode Two (6/1/1973)
The first few minutes of the episode feel like a proper Troughton comeback, as he takes centre stage to battle the anti-matter blobs at UNIT HQ. It’s a lovely showcase of his character, as he pokes at the creature then runs back into the TARDIS when it reacts. He forms a surprisingly effective double act with John Levene, with Benton clearly taking on the unavailable Frazer Hines’ role (you can practically hear Jamie saying the lines when the Doctor leaves Benton in charge of an electronic gizmo). Later, when the Brigadier is stubbornly refusing to take him at his word, there’s a flash of his old wolfish grin, and a sort of pained exasperation (and later, outrage when the Brigadier presents him as the third Doctor’s assistant). And he gets another great scene where he apparently wrecks the Brigadier’s radio before cleverly turning it into a better version, like the scatty genius of The Krotons. He doesn’t play this exactly like he did in the 1960s, acting a lot of scenes with a vaguely amused superiority that, possibly, suggests that he knows he can’t actually be too badly hurt because he has to live to be the third Doctor, but this is probably the episode that gives us the best idea of what a Season Seven Troughton might have looked like.
Doctor Who episode 330: The Three Doctors – Episode One (30/12/1972)
The series’ 10th anniversary season begins innocuously with a weather balloon drifting down to earth in the middle of a bird sanctuary. This rural idyll is rudely interrupted by an electronic flash that kidnaps a gamekeeper – odd, but nowhere near as odd as the events that unfold next. Because, thanks to some fuzzy logic, the Doctor quickly deduces this is all a plot to get to him, and soon blobby orange monsters are surrounding UNIT HQ while a similarly blobby electronic effect is menacing the TARDIS. Only the Time Lords can help – but they have problems of their own – something is draining away all their power into a universe of anti-matter. That escalated quickly.
Doctor Who episode 329: The Time Monster – Episode Six (24/6/1972)
After four weeks of running on the spot and a week introducing the power politics of Atlantis the final episode wraps everything up slightly too expeditiously to be satisfying. Hippias gets summarily dispatched, and the Doctor plays matador with the late Dave Prowse’s minotaur. Having cleverly seduced her last week, the Master stupidly treats the Queen with high-handed arrogance, over-stepping the mark and bringing their relationship crashing down minutes before Atlantis does the same. This is all much too brief a turn of events to be convincing, and a waste of Ingrid Pitt, who we last see, rather wonderfully, using a sword to free the Doctor as her world crumbles around her.
Continue readingDoctor Who episode 328: The Time Monster – Episode Five (17/6/1972)
And after four weeks of playing with us, everyone finally arrives in Atlantis, and the story immediately improves. It’s still by no means very good, but the location is colourful, the cod-Shakespearean hamminess is more watchable than the gratingly arch performances back in the 20th Century, and finally the story seems to be about something – the Master corrupting a civilisation to get his hands on their secret treasure – rather than the baffling stream of consciousness we had in the earlier parts. This is now more like The Underwater Menace, with the Master in the Zaroff role. And the fact that this is a good thing says pretty much everything about the story so far.
Doctor Who episode 327: The Time Monster – Episode Four (10/6/1972)
Rather than getting us to Atlantis – something the serial has been promising for a month now – we get another episode where nothing really happens, dressed up with some urgent-sounding technobabble. While the Doctor, the Master, Jo and Krasis banter in the time vortex, Stu and Ruth exchange terrible dialogue and fiddle with equipment, and the Brigadier literally spends the episode doing nothing as he’s been frozen in time. Oh, and Benton gets turned into a baby.
Doctor Who episode 326: The Time Monster – Episode Three (3/6/1872)
The story goes that Robert Sloman was originally meant to write a serial called The Daleks in London to conclude Season Nine, but Barry Letts decided the Daleks would instead be a great hook to launch the season. Sloman then came up with an idea involving timewarps that transported World War One biplanes to battle UNIT. The seed of that idea dominates this episode. And it’s garbage. This is thoroughly abject.
Doctor Who episode 325: The Time Monster – Episode Two (27/5/1972)
Maybe there’s something about Atlantis that makes everyone forget how to make Doctor Who? The Time Monster gives us a glimpse of the place, which is populated by a child, a young man with copious eye make-up, and a bewigged old queen in a pink cape waving his arms about. It’s not as if this episode is struggling to meet its campness quota: you have Ian Collier declaiming ‘It happened just after the cup and saucer appeared… Like a tongue of flame… All my body was on fire… All my energy was being sucked out of me’ , Richard Franklin simpering down the phone and Wanda Moore playing every scene like she’s in Acorn Antiques (mind you, what can you do with lines like ‘So that’s what you meant when you talked about terrible danger’?)
Doctor Who episode 324: The Time Monster – Episode One (20/5/1972)
At this stage, producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks have every reason to be pleased with themselves. They’ve turned a show that by all accounts seemed to be on the brink of cancellation between 1969-71 into a success story about to go into its tenth series; they’ve weathered the storytelling challenges of the previous producer’s decision to strand the Doctor on Earth, and they’ve created a team of regulars and an aesthetic for the show that’s added two million onto the viewing figures, pushing it back towards its mid-1960s heyday. In this imperial phase, surely they’re entitled to enjoy themselves.
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