Category: Complete Review
Doctor Who episode 260: Doctor Who and the Silurians – Episode 3 (14/2/1970)
The scale of this serial keeps increasing, as events begin to escalate. As well as Dr Quinn’s cottage, this episode features the biggest action sequence the show has attempted: a cordon of UNIT soldiers sweeps across the moor in a ‘man’ hunt for the escaped Silurian, as a helicopter flies overhead, and the Doctor and Brigadier drive along the ridge observing it all. And all this is just the middle part of the episode, passing without much comment. A year ago, Douglas Camfield’s set pieces were battles between small squads of soldiers and monsters in the confines of Covent Garden or the IE factory. This scale feels like a real difference in Season Seven: the scope of what’s achievable on the budget opening up just as the show’s fictional scope is closing down.
Doctor Who episode 259: Doctor Who and the Silurians – Episode 2 (7/2/1970)
After establishing the research centre and its main personnel last week, this time Malcolm Hulke’s script focuses on what lies beneath, with most of the episode following three expeditions into the caves, and the flight of an injured Silurian across the moors.
Doctor Who episode 258: Doctor Who and the Silurians – Episode 1 (31/1/1970)
Blimey, there’s a lot going on here. Both of Malcolm Hulke’s previous scripts have featured a realistic setting (airport, WW1 battlefield) infiltrated by something uncanny, and this continues in the same vein. The Wenley Moor research centre is TV realistic (all the very serious briefings and personnel problems – Major Baker, for instance, ‘slipped up badly once some years ago’), and feels very 1970s contemporary with its backdrop of energy crisis and atomic power. This is offset by the very dodgy-looking dinosaur lurking in the caves, and Spencer’s regression to a caveman state, which fits much more in the 1970s strand of the ‘return of the repressed’. It’s obvious the two plotlines are connected, but so far this doesn’t indicate how. If this were an ITC series the dinosaur would probably turn out to be a special effect to keep people away from the enemy agents’ base, but as this is Doctor Who it’s clearly going to be something alien.
Doctor Who episode 257: Spearhead from Space – Episode 4 (24/1/1970)
Everyone is putting a lot of effort into making this gripping and actually scary: the creepy doll factory; the waxworks at night; a pulsating sphincter in fish tank; faceless shop dummies jerking to life and smashing their way out. Derek Martinus directs it effectively with fast cutting, as scenes and conversations happen in parallel. It has a real pace, and – given the budget – a sense of scale. We only see about three Autons and a dozen civilians in the famous Ealing high street scene, and famously no glass was damaged in the making of it, but it leaves the impression of something much more spectacular.
Doctor Who episode 256: Spearhead from Space – Episode 3 (17/1/1970)
The new Doctor comes more sharply into focus in this episode, which starts to give Pertwee the opportunity to define how he plans to play the part: flexing from spiky condescension to charm to sheepishness in the space of a couple of minutes. Dismissing the ‘primitive’ UNIT lab, he woos Liz into stealing the TARDIS key from the Brigadier, trying to make a run for it, and then admitting defeat. When I was a teenager Pertwee used to get a bad rap from the upper echelons of fandom, but he’s instantly likeable because the arrogance and pomposity is only ever a pinprick away from being deflated.
Doctor Who episode 255: Spearhead from Space – Episode 2 (10/1/1970)
Having kept him off stage for most of the previous episode while establishing the new series premise and companions, this is our first proper glimpse of the third Doctor in action. Interestingly, given both Troughton’s performance and producer Derrick Sherwin’s original conception of the new Doctor, he’s presented as a whimsical character (which is reinforced by the jaunty music Dudley Simpson adds whenever he is onscreen) which is quite unlike how Pertwee will develop the part.
Doctor Who episode 254: Spearhead from Space – Episode 1 (3/1/1970)
New Doctor, new decade. Our first glimpse of the new lead is in the title sequence which pops in vivid reds and greens for anyone who had a colour TV, but for the majority of the audience still viewing in black & white is reassuringly familiar howlround patterns.
Doctor Who episode 253: The War Games – Episode Ten (21/6/1969)
‘You have returned to us Doctor. Your travels are over.’ The final episode of the story, the Troughton years and the 1960s ties up the series as neatly as An Unearthly Child introduced it, 253 episodes ago. It all began with the Doctor declaring himself an exile, and promising one day he would get back. This is the day. And it ends with him exiled again, back to where he started: Earth, in the 20th Century.
Doctor Who episode 252: The War Games – Episode Nine (14/6/1969)
After two months’ build-up, the climax delivers despite a clunky fight sequence and everyone seeming a bit less on top of their lines than they have been until now. The warmonger aliens are defeated in a fairly conventional way – having tricked them, and lured away most of their guards, the Doctor and the resistance are able to defeat the remaining skeleton staff in central control and bring an end to the war games. But the real issue is the Doctor’s inability to follow through on his promise to the resistance. With the SIDRATs running out of power (the episode’s one weak contrivance) and the TARDIS un-steerable, the only way to put things right is to call in the Time Lords.
Doctor Who episode 251: The War Games – Episode Eight (7/6/1969)
This is an episode all about negotiating alliances. Again, the theme is explored in parallel with Zoe organising the various resistance groups into an army while in the central control the War Chief tries to tempt the Doctor into joining with him, as the truth behind the aliens’ plans becomes clear.
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