In John Lucarotti’s historicals, there was always the sense that the TARDIS crew were learning a lesson, either literally, as in the case of the various longueurs of Marco Polo, or morally, as in The Aztecs. The Reign of Terror is different: here, the TARDIS crew are knowing commentators on the action – ‘Remember the name, Napoleon Bonaparte,’ Ian says to Jules, with a wink. They know what is supposed to happen, and the drama comes less from discovery than it does from avoiding being swept away by events. Barbara even finds it all a bit ridiculous, laughing at the futility of Lemaitre’s attempt to rescue Robespierre: ‘It’s this feverish activity to try and stop something that we know is going to happen. Robespierre will be guillotined whatever we do.’

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The episode is built around three big sequences, one each for Hartnell, Hill and Russell. Hartnell’s scene is the comic highlight, and it comes when Robespierre summons Lemaitre away, giving the Doctor an opportunity to free Barbara and Susan, and escape Paris. To do so, though, he needs to trick the jailer into leaving Barbara’s cell door unlocked on the pretext that she will escape and lead them to her associates. The sequence is brilliantly written and acted, with the Doctor firstly manipulating the jailer into suggesting he lets Barbara escape, and then blaming the plan’s apparent failure on the jailer’s incompetence to the point where he has the man begging for his help in a cover up.

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This is a much better episode than last week. It picks up from the cliffhanger with the Doctor brought before Robespierre to explain the dismal results of the Reign of Terror in his province. But, figuring out that attack is the best form of defence, the Doctor immediately challenges Robespierre on the situation in Paris, putting the tyrant of France on the back foot and forcing him to justify the glut of executions. In so doing, the Doctor unmasks Robespierre’s insane, paranoid control freakery. Many more diabolical masterminds – Davros, the Pirate Captain, Sharaz Jek – will be similarly confronted in the future, and with the same result. It’s an excellent scene, with a genuine sense of danger (will the Doctor push the madman too far?), and is the shape of things to come.

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Once more, the only thing that makes this episode in any way worthwhile is Hartnell, who again gets all the best scenes and carries the thing. The episode begins with him striding into Paris. Hartnell implies the unsanitary conditions by a grimace at a hacking and spitting old woman and a wave of his handkerchief. The subsequent scene of him bartering with a shopkeeper to effect a change of identity – to a Regional Officer of the Provinces – isn’t exactly played for laughs, but it is witty and light. So is the subsequent scene between the Doctor and the jailer, in which the Doctor uses his assumed position to intimidate the jailer into revealing a whole load of information. The little martial piped theme as we first hear and then see the Doctor emerge in his plumed glory is hilarious.

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The only significant bit of this week’s plot features William Russell, on film, before he went away on holiday (making him and Carole Ann Ford the only two regulars to have appeared in every episode to date). Ian is entrusted with a dying man’s secret: find the spy James Stirling and warn the English government of French war plans.

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The first thing I noticed about this episode was Dennis Spooner’s name in the opening titles. As David Whitaker’s successor as story editor, he’s one of the big three writers of the Hartnell years (along with Nation and Whitaker himself). This begins quite differently from previous adventures. Rather than heading out and having to decipher a mysterious new environment (as in the ‘space’ stories) or immediately getting embroiled with the locals (as in the ‘time’ stories), the first few minutes of A Land of Fear are a humorous TARDIS scene in which Ian and Barbara mollify a comically grumpy Doctor, who’s adamant he’s got them back to 1963. Through a series of encounters – with a small boy, who tells them they’re near Paris, and the discovery of 18^th Century clothes, and letters signed by Robespierre – they discover they’ve actually arrived in revolutionary France. Presumably at around the same time of year as the episode was broadcast as Susan says ‘it must be summertime.’

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Barbara is back, and it looks like she’s been making the most of the spaceship’s tanning salon during the previous fortnight. She doesn’t mess about – while the Doctor and Ian are lost in the tunnels under the city, she organises the rescue mission, commandeers the Sensorites’ telepathic transmitters and heads into the caves herself. This all adds a sense of urgency and purpose to this episode that was sorely missing from the last one.

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A new director, Frank Cox, takes over from Mervyn Pinfield for the final two episodes of this adventure. He’d previously handled The Brink of Disaster, which was an immediate improvement over Richard Martin’s The Edge of Destruction. The difference is less perceptible here, mainly because Pinfield did a decent job with the earlier episodes, but I did notice more use of close ups (Kidnap begins with a close up on Hartnell and ends with one of Ilona Rodgers), and a neat cross-fade to represent telepathic communication. I also had a slight sense that this is a bit under-rehearsed – nearly everyone fluffs a bit (especially the Sensorite that takes an age to spit out the mangled line ‘I heard them over- over- over-talking’), and steps on each other’s lines.

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Watching episode by episode from the start, it’s fascinating to see the Doctor go from a slightly sinister antagonist for Ian and Barbara to the heroic central character in his own series. Aside from a slight, and perfectly reasonable grumpiness towards the flip-flopping First Elder, there’s not a hint of the selfish, suspicious anti-hero of An Unearthly Child. Instead, the Doctor’s pledging to find an antidote to the poison, cure everyone, and to top it off, go down into the caves under the Sensorite city to confront the problem at its source. 30 episodes earlier, he’d be plotting to steal back the TARDIS lock and leg it. Now, when he’s warned that ‘there are monsters!’ in the aqueduct, he’s positively excited by the idea.

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Back in The Forest of Fear we learned ‘fear makes companions of us all.’ The message of The Sensorites is ‘it’s suspicion that’s making them enemies’. After The Unwilling Warriors removed some of the peril from the Sensorites, Hidden Danger pretty much completes the job, transforming them from the sinister menace of Strangers in Space into ‘timid little people’ pained by loud noises, and wailing piteously when Ian turns the lights out. Even by July 1964, Doctor Who was becoming synonymous with monsters – after the success of the Daleks we’ve had the Voord, the Brains of Morphoton, and the screaming jungle. This means that the series is already able to play with the audience’s preconceptions of funny-looking aliens, so that the reveal that they’re civilised people much like human beings is a surprise that’s only blunted by the fact most of us already know the general plot going in.

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