Inferno

Listen to that! It's the sound of this planet screaming out its rage!--the Doctor

Evil Liz and Evil Brigadier

Episode one, 9 May 1970
Episode two, 16 May 1970
Episode three, 23 May 1970
Episode four, 30 May 1970
Episode five, 6 June 1970
Episode six, 13 June 1970
Episode seven, 20 June 1970

Written by Don Houghton
Directed by Douglas Camfield
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Barry Letts

Jon Pertwee as the Doctor
Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Caroline John as Liz Shaw (last regular appearance)
John Levene as Sergeant Benton

Liz and the Brigadier, not evil

And now, finally, we have our first unambiguously mad-scientist story, making our alien invasion/mad scientist record 3-1-1.  The mad scientist in question this time is Professor Stahlman, who's heading a government project to drill through the Earth's crust.  He theorises that beneath the crust is a substance called Stahlman's gas, and by releasing it, he'll be able to provide Britain with an inexhaustible energy reserve.

Stahlman's not evil; he doesn't want to take over the world, or destroy it.  He's just arrogant: he's convinced of the rightness of his theory regarding the existence of Stahlman's gas, and he's so eager to get to it that he keeps speeding up the rate of drilling, regardless of any concerns for safety.  He refuses to listen to any warnings--from his assistant, Petra Williams (played by Sheila Dunn, wife of the story's director, Douglas Camfield); from the project's administrator, the civil servant Sir Keith Gold; from Greg Sutton, an oil-drilling expert the government has brought in from a drillsite in Kuwait; or from the Doctor, who's hanging around the project because he's hooked up the TARDIS to its nuclear reactor for some experiments he's running in his continuing quest to overcome the exile imposed upon him by the Time Lords.  UNIT are also hanging around, in order to ... well, actually, I'm not sure why UNIT are there, but they're there.

(A casting note: Derek Newark, who plays Greg Sutton, played Za in the Doctor's very first adventure in 1963, while Christopher Benjamin, here making his first entry into the programme, as Sir Keith, most recently appeared in Doctor Who in 2009, opposite David Tennant and Catherine Tate.  So in "Inferno", we've got 46 years of Who history playing opposite each other.)

But there are problems besetting the project.  Something is happening to a few of its technicians, and to a few of the UNIT soldiers: they're turning into hairy green monsters who are burning hot to the touch, and who are horribly strong and manically homicidal.  Unbeknownst to the main characters, this metamorphosis is caused because the unfortunate individuals are coming into contact with a strange green slime that's been oozing up from the drill head deep beneath the Earth's surface--the drilling is unleashing dark forces from the Earth's core.

The story takes a sudden, unexpected swerve when one of the Doctor's experiments with the TARDIS goes awry.  The TARDIS dematerialises, but it takes the Doctor neither forward nor backward in time.  Instead, he rematerialises in the same place and time, but in a parallel reality--an alternate history.  He soon discovers that he's somehow transported himself to a world where Britain abolished the monarchy in 1943 and turned into a brutal, right-wing fascist dictatorship.

Everything is present in the alternate world that was present in the real world, but it's been twisted.  The Stahlman's gas drilling project is still going on, headed by Professor Stahlman, but now the project is at a "scientific labour camp"--meaning slave labour.  The UNIT team are still providing security, but not as UNIT--they're now members of the Republic Security Forces.  They're led by the Brigadier, who has lost his moustache and gained an eyepatch and now goes by the rank of Brigade Leader.  His second in command is the stern, no-nonsense Section Leader Elizabeth Shaw, who's a far cry from being any sort of scientist.

(The "leader" ranks are a nice touch--even Benton is ranked "Platoon Under Leader".  It's an echo of Gestapo ranks, which all ended with -führer, from Reichsführer, the unique rank held by Heinrich Himmler, all the way down to Unterscharführer, or Squad Under Leader, the equivalent to lance-corporal or PFC.)

Of course, the Doctor is quickly apprehended by the dark, brutal counterparts to his friends from UNIT, who conclude that he's a spy for a foreign power.  So he has to avoid getting put in front of a firing squad, but he's also got another concern--figuring out what's going on with the drilling.

The alternate-world drilling project is further along than its real-world counterpart, and the Doctor is present when it penetrates to the Earth's core.  And it might surprise you to learn, but the result isn't the discovery of a new, inexhaustible energy source--it's the end of the world.  Tremors begin all across the country, and spontaneous volcanoes form.  The Doctor realises it's only a matter of a short time until the Earth's entire crust breaks up.

As the situation deteriorates, people's true characters come out.  The Brigade Leader becomes even more militant, more shrill, more megalomaniacal, convinced his vaunted Republic will save everyone.  (Nicholas Courtney is clearly relishing playing a shrill, paranoid villain.)  But Section Leader Shaw is gradually coming around to the Doctor's story of where he comes from, and she's showing a willingness to help the Doctor get back to the real world so he can save our own reality from suffering the same fate as hers.

Which is, of course, what happens.  The Brigade Leader hatches a plan to force the Doctor to take him back with him to our reality at gunpoint, but of course it doesn't work.  The Doctor makes it back alone, and he's able to stop the drill just before it penetrates the Earth's mantle.  One world has died, but the other has survived.

What Lisa thought

She really didn't like it.  She found it slow and turgid, and she's finding the UNIT format really repetitive.  When I told her "Inferno" is one of the most highly regarded Whos of all time, she asked, "... But why?"

She did like Evil Liz's look--she thinks Carolina John looks good as a brunette.

It's a shame, because I, like most of Who fandom, is really neat--the opportunity to see Britain as a fascist state, the opportunity to see UNIT turned to evil, and the opportunity to see Benton metamorphose into a green, hairy monster.

The next story is "Terror of the Autons".

The War Games

The War Chief: If we hold the only space-time travel machine, we can rule our galaxy without fear of opposition.
The Doctor: Yes, but without me and my TARDIS, your ambitions are going to be rather hard to realise, aren't they?
The War Chief: That's right. And without my influence, these aliens will surely kill you.

Jamie and Zoe ally with a Mexican revolutionary, a German officer, a British officer from 1917 and a British sergeant from the 1890s.

Episode one, 19 April 1969
Episode two, 26 April 1969
Episode three, 3 May 1969
Episode four, 10 May 1969
Episode five, 17 May 1969
Episode six, 24 May 1969
Episode seven, 31 May 1969
Episode eight, 7 June 1969
Episode nine, 14 June 1969
Episode ten, 21 June 1969

Written by Malcolm Hulke and Terrance Dicks
Directed by David Maloney
Produced by Derrick Sherwin

Patrick Troughton as the Doctor (last regular appearance)
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon (last regular appearance)
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot (last regular appearance)

This is exciting.  This is one of the great moments in Doctor Who, a moment that recaptures that sense of mystery--that sense of the sinister--that surrounded the Doctor as a character in "An Unearthly Child", "The Time Meddler" and "The Power of the Daleks".  It builds up on you--at first, you think it's a straight historical adventure.  Then you realise it's more complicated than that--there are aliens involved.  And time travel.  And then you start to suspect that it's going to be even bigger than that--because we're about learn the grand secret of the Doctor's origins.

But all that is unfortunately lost on the modernday viewer, because we already know all about the Doctor's people.  There's no tension about them for us.  In fact, we probably go into it already knowing that this is the story that's notable exactly because it's the first time we ever heard of the Doctor's origins.  Certainly I think most viewers nowadays don't even consider that up until this moment, it hadn't even been definitively established that the Doctor isn't human.

Which means that "The War Games" has a reputation nowadays as a flaccid, bloated, boring story, and that's wholly unfair.  It could stand a bit of trimming, to be sure--I don't think you'd have a hard time reducing it to only six or seven episodes.  But really, the reason most people nowadays find it dragging are because it spends its second half depending for its tension upon a mystery that is no longer any mystery at all, and as a consequence the modern Doctor Who fan basically spends the first nine entire episodes waiting for revelations that don't arrive until part ten, and that don't tell him anything he hasn't already known for forty years.

The TARDIS arrives in the hell on Earth that is No Man's Land, the desolate, lethal wasteland between the Allied and German trenches during the First World War.  They're soon apprehended by British troops, and it's shortly after that that we realise all is not as it seems: the general commanding the British troops has a pair of odd-looking glasses that, when he dons them, allow him to give hypnotic commands to his troops, altering their memories and telling them how they should perceive certain people and events.

The Doctor, of course, quickly realises that the general is either an alien or a time traveller.  He, Jamie and Zoe managed to break a pair of British personnel--a lieutenant named Carstairs and an ambulance driver called Lady Jennifer--of the conditioning that makes them obey the general's hypnotic commands, and together the five of them escape the British base.

Pursued both by British troops and Germans, they pass through a strange mist, and come out on its far side to find a completely changed landscape--the churned mud of concussion of artillery from No Man's Land has been replaced by a beautiful, breezy virgin hillside--and a Roman legion bearing down upon them, led by distinctly unfriendly-looking charioteers.

So the Doctor and his friends turn and charge back into the mist, only this time, when they get to the other side, they find themselves caught between Union and Confederate troops from the American Civil War.

It takes a while for the team to figure out what's going on.  None of these wars are actually real; when they pass through the mist, they're actually moving from one zone of an alien planet to another.  Human soldiers from each of the various wars in Earth's history are being removed from their proper time and space by an alien race, and transported here to re-enact these wars as training so that they can be used as soldiers in the aliens' war of conquest to take over the entire galaxy.

And to kidnap these human soldiers, they're using TARDISes.

(Actually, they're using scaled-down versions of TARDISes called SIDRATs.  No prizes for guessing how they came up with that name.)

Eventually, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe escape from the war zones and sneak into the aliens' command centre.  There, they find a political power struggle in progress, between the Security Chief and the War Chief.  The Security Chief is responsible for the operation of the command center; the War Chief oversees the abduction of human soldiers and the conduct of the war games.

And there's something else about the War Chief--he's not a member of the same species as the rest of the aliens.  Rather, he comes from a time-travelling race; he's the one who brought time travel technology to the aliens, so that they could implement their plan of building a brainwashed human army.

Which time-travelling race is he from?  Well, when he catches sight of the Doctor, the two of them instantly recognise each other.  (It's a nice moment, because the implications of that aren't explained for a little while.)

The Security Chief therefore concludes that the Doctor is from "the War Chief's people--the Time Lords!" and that the War Chief is betraying the aliens.  He has two hypotheses: either the War Chief and the Doctor are working for the Time Lords, or else they are both renegade Time Lords intent on subverting the aliens' plan so that they can take over the galaxy themselves.

Again, the revelation over the Doctor's and War Chief's people is very nicely done.  "Time Lords" gets mentioned very infrequently, and when it does, it's only in passing.  It's not until episode nine that they're discussed at length.  Up through episode eight, you learn about the Doctor's background so gradually that you don't realise just how much you've learnt.

There's a theory, by the war, that the War Chief actually constitutes the first appearance of the Master.  It's a theory I'm not unsympathetic to, though there's nothing direct to indicate that--besides the fact that the War Chief matches the Master in temperament and ambition, and even has a Mediterranean complexion and a goatee.

It's in episode nine that matters come to a head.  The Doctor realises that matters are simply beyond him; he cannot return the human abductees to their own time on his own.  He therefore sends a message to the Time Lords (using a mentally-constructed box that was harkened back to in 2011's "The Doctor's Wife") explaining the situation to them.

And it's now, for the first time, that we become aware how terrified the War Chief and the Doctor are of being recaptured by the Time Lords.  The Doctor is desperate to get back to the TARDIS before he arrives, and it's his fear that does such an effective job of conveying their power and their ... amorality.  We then have that power demonstrated, as the humans simply vanish into nothingness as they're returned to their own times, and time itself slows down to prevent the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe from getting back to the TARDIS.

Eventually, of course, the TARDIS team are captured by the Time Lords--or rather, they choose to surrender themselves when it becomes clear they can't escape.  And the Doctor is placed on trial for having violated his people's cardinal law (their prime directive, if you like)--he interfered.  Time Lords only observe history; they do not become involved in it.  Yet the Doctor has become involved time and gain.

The Doctor defends himself by saying that every time he becomes involved, he prevents evil.  But the Time Lords reject that--whether he worked for good or evil, he still interfered.  Eventually, though, they concede that perhaps his working for goodness does mitigate his crime, and they tailor an appropriate sentence for him.

Jamie and Zoe are forcibly returned to their own times, with their memories wiped.  They remember only their first adventures with the Doctor, and completely forget having gone away with him in the TARDIS afterwards.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is sentenced to exile on twentieth-century Earth--shackled to one time, one planet.  Furthermore, he will have his appearance changed, as it has changed before.  The story ends with the Doctor falling into the time vortex, his appearance in flux ...

Renegades from their people: the War Chief and the Doctor

What Lisa thought

Lisa, who didn't have the benefit of knowing fandom's low opinion of episodes one through nine, had a lot of fun with this one--and she didn't pick up until very late on just how important, from a continuity standpoint, the last episode and a half were.  (She even needed me to point out this is the first time we've heard "Time Lord".)

She certainly felt it could stand some tightening, which it definitely could.  The general plot movement of "The War Games" is that we start off in the First World War, where our heroes learn is not as it seems; move to the American Civil War, where they first encounter the Resistance, human soldiers on whom the aliens' conditioning hasn't worked; move to the alien command centre, where we find out what's really going on; go back to the First World War, to meet a new group of resistance fighters; then back to the alien command centre before the Time Lords get introduced.  That whole "back to the First World War to be introduced a redundant group of the Resistance" could easily stand to be culled, cutting two episodes from the story instantly.

But still, "The War Games" is great--all it requires is putting yourself in the shoes of a 1969 viewer, who'd never heard the words "Time Lords" or "Gallifrey" or "regeneration".

The next story in our rewatch is "Spearhead From Space".

"The Ark"

You must travel with understanding as well as hope. I said that to one of your ancestors, once; a long time ago.--The Doctor

Monoids

"The Steel Sky", 5 March 1966
"The Plague", 12 March 1966
"The Return", 19 March 1966
"The Bomb", 26 March 1966

Written by Paul Erickson and Lesley Scott
Directed by Michael Imison
Script editor: Gerry Davis
Produced by John Wiles

William Hartnell as the Doctor
Peter Purves as Steven Taylor
Jackie Lane as Dodo Chaplet (earliest extant appearance)

In the prior (no-longer extant) story, "The Massacre", Steven became involved with a kind serving girl in sixteenth-century Paris, Anne Chaplet. Anne turned out to be one of the victims of the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and when the Doctor and Steven escape the Massacre at the end of the story, the Doctor failed to bring Anne along with them, insisting that saving her would have changed history. Steven was so enraged that, when the TARDIS rematerialised (in 1966 on Wimbledon Common), he stormed outside, leaving the Doctor alone.

Just as Steven is about to leave for good, however, a teenage schoolgirl shows up--and she's the spitting image of Anne Chaplet, and she introduces herself as Dodo Chaplet (short for "Dorothea"). Steven concludes that Dodo is some long-lost descendant of Anne, and the three of them enter the TARDIS and head off to times unknown.

That's where we are, then, at the beginning of "The Ark", Dodo's first adventure. The TARDIS materialises in a tropical forest teeming with life. Dodo--whose character is essentially that she's always blithely cheerful, almost always unflappable, and refuses to take Steven seriously when he attempts to put his foot down as a parental authority--at first refuses to believe they've travelled in time, or even very much in space, guessing that the Doctor has taken them to Whipsnade, a zoological garden outside London.

But she's soon forced to abandon that hypothesis. For one thing, all the animals here roam freely amongst each other--Gila lizards and tropical birds and even elephants. For another, the sky over their heads is made of metal. The Doctor concludes (correctly) that they're aboard a generation ship, an interstellar colony ship that takes centuries to reach its destination solar system, so the ship is equipped to allow the original colonists to grow old and die while they're aboard, being replaced by their descendants, and eventually by their descendants' descendants.

Soon, the TARDIS team are ambushed and arrested by the ships' crew, the Monoids. These are a man-shaped alien race, completely green, with no mouths and only a single, cyclopean eye in the middle of their faces.

A word about the Monoid makeup. Given the limitations under which the 60s production team were labouring--a shoestring budget, basically, that prevented any sort of waste whatsoever--the Monoids are, I think, a brilliantly creative achievement. Their "eye" is a ping pong ball, painted with iris and pupil, then held in the actor's mouth. The actor then dons a Beatles moptop wig and positions it so that it covers the upper half of their face, which both makes the "eye" look well-proportioned and obscures any facial features that would break the illusion. It's a great idea, and it has only one failure (a real shame of a failure, really)--the very first time a Monoid appears on camera, he's shown in extreme closeup, to better drive home his startling appearance; but the closeup is so extreme that it's impossible not to notice that his eye socket is actually his mouth.

The Monoids take the team to the ship's main living area, which is much more metal-corridors-and-spaceshippy than the animal and plant habitat. There, they discover that most of the people aboard are actually human. They are, in fact, the last humans; the Earth, visible on the spaceship's viewscreen, will shortly be destroyed as it falls into the sun. The Doctor calculates that in order to see the end of the Earth, the TARDIS must have travelled at least ten million years into the future.

The humans and their Monoid allies have come up with a plan so that their races can survive the Earth's destruction. They have identified a distant planet, Refusis II, of a size and gravity and atmosphere entirely similar to the Earth, orbiting a star very much like the Sun. But it will take them seven hundred years to travel there, so they have shrunk the entire human and Monoid populations down into their constituent parts, essentially preserving them. The populations will be restored once they reach Refusis II. In the meantime, a skeleton staff mans the spaceship; they're called the Guardians, and they and their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren will guide their two races to salvation.

Of course, something soon goes wrong. Dodo has a cold, and both the Monoid and human populations quickly start catching it. Bacterial and viral infections were wiped out literally millennia ago, and Guardian science has no recollection of how to deal with them. On such fertile territory, the virus quickly mutates, and soon enough, both Guardians and Monoids start dying from it.

This is an even more serious problem than it would be other times, since the operation of the ark spaceship is so finely balanced--if one crewmember unexpectedly dies, there's no one to take their function. And of course, the ark's second-in-command--who takes charge when his superior is the first to fall ill--is deeply suspicious of the TARDIS team, and concludes that they have infected the humans intentionally. He therefore imprisons them rather than allow the Doctor to research a cure, and of course, soon Steven falls prey to the mutated virus. The whole thing has strong echoes of "The Sensorites".

You can, of course, guess how things turn out. The Doctor is released and develops a cure, saving both Steven and the crew of Guardians and Monoids, just in time for everyone to witness the Earth's final disintegration on the ship's viewscreen. The team head back to the TARDIS and depart.

And that's when we discover "The Ark"'s central conceit: that's it not actually one four-part story, but rather two two-part stories, set on the same sets, but hundreds of years apart. For the TARDIS rematerialises once again in the ark's zoological garden, but when the team make their way to the main habitation section, they discover that seven hundred years have passed. The ark is about to reach Refusis II.

This is conveyed through a neat little piece of storytelling. The Guardians are building a massive statue of a human male, about the size of the Statue of Liberty. They're using the "old methods" of construction, building by hand; it will take seven hundred years to complete. In the first two parts, only the feet have been completed, but now the team find a finished statue. Only, something's changed: instead of a human head, it bears a Monoid head.

That's not the only thing that's changed, though. The Monoids have risen up and established themselves as an overclass, following a bloody revolution; the Guardians have been reduced to a small group of slaves. The Guardians have been led to believe that they will accompany the Monoids to Refusis II and serve them there, but the Monoids secretly have a different plan: they will leave the humans on board the ark, which will then be destroyed when the fission bomb they have hidden inside the giant statue's head explodes.

The TARDIS team are taken prisoner and added to the Guardian slave labour force. The Doctor and Dodo accompany one of the Monoids down to the planet, as advance scouts. They discover a verdant forest world. In a valley, they find a luxurious house, but they see no signs of intelligent life.

It turns out the Refusians are disembodied psychic beings. They have known of the ark's approach for some time, and have welcomed the idea of humans and Monoids living amongst them--they built structures like this house for just that purpose. But now they have discovered the violence and oppression that marks Monoid rule of the earthlings, they're having second thoughts.

That problem is about to take care of itself, though. The Monoids start arriving on the planet in numbers, but one of them, named Four, is plotting to overthrow the ruling Monoid, named One. A civil war breaks out against the Monoids, and pretty soon, both sides have annihilated each other.

This leaves only the problem of the fission bomb hidden aboard the ark. The Doctor and Dodo have learnt from One that the bomb is in the massive statue's head, but the statue is so heavy that there's no way to move it before it explodes.

One of the Refusians takes care of that. He heads up to the ark and, as a disembodied psychic force, has no trouble lifting the statue into the ship's launch bay, from where it tumbles out into the vacuum of space and harmlessly explodes.

The Guardians then begin the process of moving the Earth's miniaturised population down to the surface so they can be repopulated. The Refusians agree to let them live on their planet, so long as they and the few remaining Monoids can make peace and live in harmony.

What Lisa thought

The high-concept idea that forms the basis of "The Ark" is an intriguing one--the Doctor coming back after centuries and being forced to deal with the consequences of his first visit to a location. The programme will tackle it again, in the 1970s ("The Face of Evil") and 2005 ("The Long Game" and "The Parting of the Ways").

But the results of this first treatment, Lisa and I are both agreed, are fairly disappointing. What we end up with, by splitting the serial up into a pair of forty-five minute stories, is an early cautionary tale about the length of Doctor Who adventures--a lesson (two lessons, in fact) about how limiting the forty-five minute format can be for a programme that has to spend the first twenty minutes of every tale setting up a brand new milieu, and that Who is generally able to provide much deeper, more satisfying stories if given ninety minutes to tell them, rather than forty-five.

The first two-parter has absolutely no twists or subplots. Dodo makes everyone sick; the team get imprisoned; the team get released; the Doctor finds a cure. You know, when the ark's commander falls sick as part one's cliffhanger, exactly how part two is going to go.

And the second two-parter never manages to elicit much dramatic tension at all. First, it has the same barebones-plot problem that the first two-parter has, but then also, by midway through its first episode, the Doctor has made contact with the Refusians, who turn out to be an omnipotent alien race who explicitly will not allow the Monoids to continue ruling the humans as slaves. So we know that Monoid defeat will be soon and easily accomplished.

It also bothered that we saw two generations of a generation ship--and never once did we see a child from either species (and, in fact, only one person over the age of forty).

The next story is "The Celestial Toymaker", which has been lost. It's the first of that tradition of Doctor Who stories taking place in fantasyland, continuing right up to 2010 with "Amy's Choice", which typically do very well with fans and very poorly with general viewers. The next story up on our rewatch will be the one that follows it, Doctor Who's trip to the American West, "The Gunfighters".

I

Doctor Who: "The Time Meddler"

But that means that the exact minute, the exact second that he does it, every history book, the whole future of every year and every time on Earth will change, and nobody will know that it has?--Steven Taylor

The Viking scouting party land in England

"The Watcher", 3 July 1965
"The Meddling Monk", 10 July 1965
"A Battle of Wits", 17 July 1965
"Checkmate", 24 July 1965

Written by Dennis Spooner
Directed by Douglas Camfield
Script editor: Donald Tosh
Produced by Verity Lambert

William Hartnell as the Doctor
Maureen O'Brien as Vicki (latest extant appearance)
Peter Purves as Steven Taylor

The Doctor and Vicki are in the TARDIS control room, commiserating about how much they miss Ian and Barbara, when they hear a noise from the interior rooms--someone's back there! They take up position on either side of the door, prepared to attack whoever it is when they come out, but it's Steven Taylor who emerges, and as soon as he does, he collapses from exhaustion.

Once he's come to, Steven explains that after escaping from the Mechanoid city, he searched through the forest for our heroes, eventually coming upon the TARDIS and stumbling inside. He's grateful for finally being rescued from his captivity on Mechanus, but he's openly scornful of the Doctor and Vicki's assertions that he's now on board a time machine.

Vicki gets him new clothes and apparently gives him a thorough shave, and by the time that's finished, the TARDIS has landed. The crew head outside and find themselves on the shore of an angry sea, at the foot of imposing English cliffs. The Doctor finds a horned Viking helmet on the beach and shows it to Steven as proof that they've travelled not only through space, but also through time.

"Well, maybe," Steven concedes doubtfully.

"Maybe?" the Doctor says. "What else do you think it could be? A space helmet for a cow?"

Unbeknownst to the team, the TARDIS's arrival has been witnessed: a monk was watching from the clifftop. He hides until our heroes walk off, then inspects the TARDIS. But he can't get in, because it's locked.

The Doctor finds an easy, gentle path up to the top of the cliffs, and in a fit of pique he declares that he will take this route, while Steven and Vicki can take the harder, steeper path and meet him at the top.

But once he gets to the top, it's not his companions that he meets. He finds himself at a mediaeval peasant's cottage. The man of the house is away, but his wife, a friendly woman named Edith (played by Alethea Charlton, who previously played Hur in "An Unearthly Child"), gives him some dinner and a flagon of mead.

In conversation with Edith, the Doctor is able to ascertain just when they've landed. Harold Godwinson is the new King, having succeeded Edward the Confessor at the beginning of the year. This news instantly alerts the Doctor that he's landed in 1066, one of the two most famous years in the history of the English-speaking world.

I'm sure it's alerted you of that, too, but nevertheless, I'm going to insult your education and give a brief recap. Harold Godwinson was the last of the Saxon Kings of England. Shortly after his accession, England was invaded by two different armies. The first of these was led by Harald Hardrada, King of Norway and the last great Viking. (He's only ever referred to as Hardrada in this story, presumably to avoid confusion with Harold Godwinson.)

Godwinson defeated and killed Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire, then immediately had to march south to meet a second invasion, from William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy. His exhausted army was defeated by the Normans at the Battle of Hastings in October, heralding the Norman Conquest and ensuring that William the Bastard would be known to history as William the Conqueror.

The Doctor calculates that it's currently midsummer, and Edith informs him that they're in Northumbria. This means that Hardrada's army will be landing soon, not too far south of here, at the Humber.

All the time they're talking, the Doctor and Edith have a soundtrack playing behind them: monks from the nearby monastery, chanting. But as they're listening to them, the Doctor hears an abrupt glitch in the singing, like it's not actually live singing, but rather a recording.

But of course, here in the eleventh century, that's ridiculous.

The Doctor leaves Edith and heads up to the monastery to investigate. He finds it apparently abandoned. He enters, and in a small chamber off the main hall, he finds a twentieth-century phonograph, playing a record of Gregorian chants. But then wooden bars slide down, trapping him inside the chamber. He's been captured by the Monk we saw earlier, who now steps out from hiding, laughing.

We cut to the next morning, when the Monk is preparing breakfast--using an electric toaster and an electric griddle. After serving the Doctor breakfast in his cell, the Monk heads back to the cliffs, where he surveys the sea with a pair of modern binoculars. And soon, he sees what he's evidently looking for: an approaching Viking longship. It's not yet the whole army--just a single scout ship.

Out in the forest, meanwhile, Vicki and Steven have spent the night asleep beneath the trees after failing to meet up with the Doctor. Steven is still sceptical that they've travelled through time--especially when he finds a golden wristwatch that someone has lost in the bushes.

The two of them soon run into some Saxon peasants, who capture them and take them to the village. They think that they must be a pair of Viking scouts and want to execute them, but the village headman--Wulnoth, Edith's husband--chooses to believe their story that they're just travellers and releases them. When they tell they're looking for the Doctor, Edith recognises his description and directs them toward the monastery.

They arrive at the monastery and knock on the door, which is answered by the Monk. He tells them, of course, that the Doctor hasn't visited him. But Steven and Vicki are suspicious, and they decide to come back after dark and have a look around.

Meanwhile, the crew of the Viking scout ship have come ashore. They need provisions, so they raid a cottage they come across in the wood--Wulnoth and Edith's cottage, though only Edith is home. After the Vikings have gone, Wulnoth returns home, to find his house sacked and Edith brutalised (but still alive). He collects the men of the village together, and they go hunting the Vikings.

A battle ensues between the villagers and the Viking party. The villagers win, but two of the Vikings escape. They need a place to hide until the main body of Hardrada's army arrives, so they decide to head to the monastery, planning to take the monks hostage.

Once night falls, Vicki and Steven sneak into the monastery. They come across the Monk's phonograph and toaster, and then find the cell where he's holding the Doctor. But they discover the Doctor is no longer inside--he's left his cloak on top of a mound of blankets on the sleeping pallet, to make it look like he's asleep, and has escaped down a secret passage he must have discovered in a corner of the cell.

Vicki and Steven follow the passage; it disgorges them in the woods, near the clifftop. They return to the TARDIS to see if the Doctor has returned, but he hasn't. In the bushes on the clifftop, though, they discover what looks like a modern grenade launcher mounted on a tripod. Someone (the Monk, obviously) has left it there, pointed out to see.

The Monk, unaware that the Doctor has escaped, has headed to the village, where he asks a favour of Wulnoth and the other villagers--because they believe him a man of God, they're always more than willing to do whatever he asks. He asks them now if they would light beacon fires for him on the clifftop, so that approaching ships will know where to land.

The Monk tells Wulnoth that he needs the beacon fires because he is expecting some building materials to arrive by ship. But what he doesn't know is that, after escaping from his cell, the Doctor returned to Wulnoth and Edith's cottage, where Edith gave him dinner. The Doctor told her that soon a Viking invasion fleet would land at the Humber, but that King Harold would defeat it.

Though he doesn't let on to the Monk, Wulnoth now concludes that the Monk wants beacon fires to lure Hardrada's fleet towards the beach. He's right, of course, but unlike us, he hasn't seen the cannon the Monk has hidden there, so he doesn't know that the Monk is only trying to attract the fleet in order to blow it out of the water. He instead concludes that the Monk is a Viking spy.

Failing to find the Doctor at the cliffs, Vicki and Steven have returned back up the secret tunnel to the monastery, which is now deserted. Looking around more, they find an electrical cable which appears to run directly into a heavy stone sarcophagus. Steven presses the side of the sarcophagus, and finds that it opens just like a door. He and Vicki enter--

--and find themselves in the control room of a TARDIS. The Monk has a TARDIS. He isn't just a time traveller: he's a member of the Doctor's own people.

They explore the interior of the Monk's TARDIS. They discover a whole trove of treasures from all periods of Earth's history, as well as what look like projectile grenades, but Steven is able to identify them as neutron bombs. They're ammunition for the cannon on the clifftop.

"What's he trying to do?" Steven asks. "Sink a ship?"

"He could sink a whole navy with one of these," Vicki responds.

They also find a big sheet of paper labelled PROGRESS CHART, on which the Monk has conveniently detailed his entire eight-step plan, including "Sight atomic cannon", "Light beacon fires", "Destroy Viking fleet", and "Battle of Hastings". The final step is "Meet King Harold", which is our indication that he's definitely planning on changing the course of history, since Harold, of course, was killed at Hastings.

The Monk, still under the impression that Wulnoth will help him, is just returning to the monastery when he's apprehended by the Doctor, who presses a stick into his back to make him think he's carrying a gun. But before the Doctor can get an explanation out of him, there's a knock at the door.

The Doctor can't afford to ignore the knocking, as that would alert whoever was there that something was wrong, so he answers the door--to find the two survivors from the Viking scout party. They storm inside and take the time travellers captive, but they're so certain that a pair of old men pose no threat to them that they let their guard down, allowing the Doctor and the Monk to take them captive.

After the Vikings are tied up, the Doctor gets the Monk to tell him his whole plan. He's going to destroy Hardrada's invasion before it can land; that way, Harold Godwinson won't have to march north. His army will therefore be well-rested at Hastings and will defeat the Normans. With England thus spared a line of Norman kings, she will be able to avoid centuries of entanglement in French conflicts like the Angevin Empire and the Hundred Years War. With the country thus stable, the Monk will be able to accelerate technological progress: "Jet airliners by 1320! Shakespeare will be able to produce Hamlet for television!"

The Doctor is horrified by this, but since it's William Hartnell, that horror doesn't take the form of the moral outrage that later Doctors would give us; instead, it's the exasperated berating of a schoolteacher toward the foolish children under his authority. He demands the Monk show him to his TARDIS, where the two of them encounter Vicki and Steven.

As the four of them are emerging from the Monk's TARDIS, however, they encounter the two Vikings, who have managed to escape. The Monk manages to convince them that he's on their side, and they tie up the Doctor, Vicki and Steven. The Monk tells the Vikings that his neutron bomb missiles are "magical charms" that will help Hardrada's army, and gets them to carry them with him up to the cannon at the clifftop.

As they're leaving the monastery, though, they're attacked by the men of the village, led by Wulnoth. They're chased into the woods. The Vikings are surrounded and killed, though the Monk escapes. Edith frees the Doctor and his companions.

The Doctor goes back into the Monk's TARDIS and ties a long piece of string around a piece of equipment inside the control console. It's evidently a very delicate operation: after it's completed, the Doctor exits the TARDIS, then very carefully pulls the string until he also pulls out the piece of equipment. Pleased with himself, he slips the equipment into his pocket.

With the Monk being hunted by the villagers, the Doctor is confident now that he won't be able to destroy Hardrada's fleet, and that the Battle of Stamford Bridge--and the Battle of Hastings--will go off as history says they should. He, Steven and Vicki return to the TARDIS and depart.

The Monk, meanwhile, eventually eludes his pursuers and returns to the monastery. But a nasty surprise awaits him: when he attempts to enter his TARDIS, he discovers it's no longer bigger on the inside. The Doctor has removed his dimensional control, thereby shrinking the TARDIS's interior so that it now fits into its exterior; the Monk cannot get inside. He's stranded in 1066 England, with the country about to undergo successive invasions and the Harrowing of the North.

The Doctor and the Meddling Monk

What Lisa thought

Lisa's word to describe this one was "okay". She did like that she didn't see coming the revelation that the Monk had a TARDIS and was one of the Doctor's own people.

(The part three cliffhanger, with Steven and Vicki entering the sarcophagus and finding themselves in a TARDIS control room, is probably my favourite 60s cliffhanger.)

"The Time Meddler", put in context, is arguably a very important Doctor Who story. It's the first time we've met one of the Doctor's people besides the Doctor himself and his granddaughter; indeed, at this point, there still hasn't been any comment on whether the Doctor's people are, in fact, human.

But even beyond that, it's the first time a historical has had a science fiction component, besides the presence of the main characters. Such a development is approached with real freshness--even though there's science fiction, there's still no traditional "Doctor Who monster", for instance. And it's done in such a way that the audience learns a whole lot about the time period in which it's set, without ever once feeling like they're having a history lesson. Maybe all those reasons are why I love it so much.

(Well, okay. I also love the "space helmet for a cow" line.)

"The Time Meddler" marks the end of season two, but it also marks the beginning of something else: that period of Doctor Who that has been almost eradicated by the BBC's wiping policy. In the first two seasons, we've missed only two stories ("Marco Polo" and "The Crusades"). But we're about to cover seasons three, four and five in only six stories, two of which will have missing episodes.

The next story after "The Time Meddler" is "Galaxy 4", in which the TARDIS team fight a race of militant, cloned interstellar conquerors who all look like attractive twenty-year-old blonde women. I'm particularly upset that it's missing.

Then is "Mission to the Unknown", a one-part prologue to "The Daleks' Master Plan" that contains none of the regular cast. "Mission to the Unknown" was Verity Lambert's last involvement in the programme, after which she was replaced with producer John Wiles.

Then "The Myth Makers", in which the TARDIS lands in the middle of the Trojan War. Vicki falls in love with Troilus during the story, and at the end she leaves TARDIS to marry him and become the mythological Cressida.

Then there's "The Daleks' Master Plan", a twelve-part epic. The late Nicholas Courtney makes his first appearance in Doctor Who, though he's not yet Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart; instead, he's evil Earth Security Agent Bret Vyon. (A two-minute clip of his performance has been preserved, because during Peter Purves's long period hosting Blue Peter in the 1970s and 80s, it's the clip that would be played of Steven whenever Blue Peter did a Doctor Who segment.) The Meddling Monk also appears in "The Daleks' Master Plan", having allied himself with the Daleks.

And then we come to "The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve", in which, unsurprisingly, the Doctor and Steven get caught up in the events leading to the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre. New companion Dodo Chaplet is introduced at the very end of the story, and we'll pick up our rewatch with her first adventure, "The Ark".

I

Doctor Who: "The Space Museum"

Doctor, why do you always show the greatest interest in the most unimportant things?--Ian Chesterton

The TARDIS team: exhibits in the Space Museum

"The Space Museum", 24 April 1965
"The Dimensions of Time", 1 May 1965
"The Search", 8 May 1965
"The Final Phase", 15 May 1965

Written by Glyn Jones
Directed by Mervyn Pinfield
Script editor: Dennis Spooner
Produced by Verity Lambert

William Hartnell as the Doctor
William Russell as Ian Chesterton
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright
Maureen O'Brien as Vicki

We start with the team gathered round the TARDIS console, still in their mediaeval costume from the previous (missing) story, "The Crusdade". Some force has frozen them, and they stare unblinkingly at the control column. The camera (unusually) actually moves slightly, panning slightly up and to the right, and that's a lovely touch--it adds three-dimensionality to the shot, and it shows us that the actors really are standing there, motionless, rather than a still image being used. (Later on, the moment will be recreated, and it's painfully obvious at that time that a photograph is being used to do it.)

There's a fade to black, and then we find the TARDIS team blinking awake--only they're no longer wearing their mediaeval clothing, but instead, their everyday clothes: twentieth-century gear for Ian and Barbara, frock coat and check trousers for the Doctor, and deeply age-inappropriate pinafore and kneesocks masquerading as twenty-sixth-century garb for Vicki. Ian, Barbara and Vicki are greatly concerned at the unexplained change, but the Doctor, in a genuinely amusing moment, dismisses their worries and declares how pleased he is that the crew have been saved having to take the trouble to change their own clothes.

The Doctor sends Vicki to get him some water. She heads into the back room and fills a glass, but as she's turning away from the TARDIS food machine, the glass slips from her hand and shatters on the floor. But then, instantly, the glass pulls back together, water pours itself back into the glass, and the whole thing rises from the floor and returns to Vicki's hand. It's obviously just a reverse of the film of it shattering in the first place, but again, it doesn't look like they're just rewinding the film, and it's achieved quite effectively. Vicki tells the Doctor about what happened, but again, he just chuckles and dismisses her concerns.

The TARDIS has landed, so the Doctor pulls up their surroundings on the scanner. At first they think they've landed in a spaceship graveyard, but then they realise they're actually in a space museum. It appears deserted right now, so they head outside to explore.

The strangeness continues. The planet's surface is covered in a thick layer of dust, but the team leave no footprints as they walk. And after a few moments, they realise they can hear no sound whatsoever, apart from each other's voices.

As they approach the entrance to the main museum building, the doors start to open, and the team dart undercover to hide from whoever's coming out. A pair of big men in white military tunics emerge. They're only yards away when Vicki can't suppress a sneeze--there's no way they could fail to hear her. And yet they do not react at all, merely walk away on patrol.

The team head inside and start looking at the exhibits. They find the empty casing of a Dalek on display. Vicki, though she's read about the Dalek occupation of Earth in her history books, has never seen one, and--much to Ian and Barbara's amused disgust--she's not impressed: "Why, this one looks quite friendly."

The museum is mostly deserted, but there are a few small groups walking around--and they clearly can't see or hear the TARDIS team, walking right past them. What's more, they're talking amongst themselves, but none of our heroes can hear anything they're saying.

Then Vicki makes the discovery that nothing in the museum, including the walls, is solid to the TARDIS team--they can wave their hands right through solid objects, or even walk right through them.

No sooner have they realised this than they enter a new hall--and come upon the TARDIS. It's not the real TARDIS, though, because they can walk right through it--it's an exhibit in the museum. And on display, right across from the TARDIS, are the team, stood in glass cases, staring lifelessly at the other exhibits, somehow preserved or embalmed.

The Doctor has by now worked out what's happened: when materialising, the TARDIS somehow jumped a "time track", and so the team somehow haven't really arrived yet. What they're seeing is their own future: they're going to end up in the museum. Or rather, it's one possible future: the team must somehow find a way to break the chain that will lead to it.

As he's explaining this, a strange sensation comes over the team, and they once more fall into a trance. Outside, we see their footprints appear in the dust, and the two patrolmen find the TARDIS. Inside the TARDIS, Vicki's glass of water shatters across the floor. Back in the museum, the team once more wake from their trance.

"Yes," the Doctor declares. "We've arrived!" It's an effective ending to a really well-done creepy first episode.

The three following episodes are completely different in tone--it's seriously a disconnect on the same order as that between part one of "An Unearthly Child" and parts two through four. We soon find out that there are two different species of aliens at the space museum: the big, brawny, militaristic men in white are the planet's rulers, the Moroks. The slight young men (they're all about twenty) with blond hair, black clothes and what appear to be Converse trainers are Xerons. The Moroks are the planet's rulers and museum curators, while the Xerons are an underclass. As soon as the Morok governor learns that there are aliens wandering around his museum, he orders them found and caught, so that they can become his newest exhibit.

The TARDIS team decide to try to make their way back to the TARDIS without being spotted, though there's some debate about that--is that exactly the course that will lead to them ending up in the display cases? Unfortunately, they've wandered so far into the museum that they're now thoroughly lost. Much to Barbara's dismay, Ian insists on unravelling Barbara's cardigan, so that they can track their path as they try to find their way out.

The first member to get separated from the group is the Doctor, who lags behind examining a display and is captured by a group of Xeron boys, led by a very, very young Jeremy Bulloch (better known to you and me as Boba Fett). He escapes from them (by hiding in the empty Dalek casing) but is quickly captured by Moroks and taken to the governor for questioning.

The governor interrogates the Doctor about where the rest of the TARDIS team are and where they came from. He has the Doctor hooked up to a machine that displays whatever image enters the Doctor's head when asked a question, but the Doctor is able to defeat the machine, sending it false images. The governor, angry, declares that if the Doctor will give him no useful information, then it's time he was processed for the museum, and he sends him into the embalming room.

The others, meanwhile, have found their way to the museum's entrance (after completely unravelling Barbara's cardigan), where they run smack into a party of Morok guards. The guards pull out their guns, but Ian has lost any fear of death: he rationalises that either the guards will kill him, which will break the chain of events leading to his embalming, or else the chain can't be broken, in which case there's no way he can die.

His fearlessness disconcerts the guards long enough for him, Barbara and Vicki to flee, through the three of them get separated from each other in the commotion. Vicki runs into the group of Xerons who earlier tried to make contact with the Doctor. They take her to a secure hiding place, where they explain the relationship between the Xerons and the Moroks.

The Moroks are a conqueror race, who have an interplanetary empire. This planet, Xeros, is one of their conquests, and the Xerons are a conquered people. The Moroks have turned Xeros into a museum to their conquests; Xerons are only allowed to live on their own home planet until they reach adulthood, at which point they're shipped offworld to serve as slaves. These Xerons would like to start a revolution, but they can't--though there are only a very few Moroks on Xeros, the Xerons have no access to weaponry of any kind.

Ian, meanwhile, manages to take a Morok prisoner by sneaking up behind him and stealing his gun. He has the guard take him to the embalming room to rescue the Doctor. There, he manages also to capture the governor, but he finds the Doctor has already entered "the second stage of preparation", and is as good as dead--no one has ever been revived after being prepared for display.

Ian, of course, nevertheless insists the governor attempt to revive the Doctor anyway, and after a little while he succeeds in doing so. But then another party of Moroks bursts in; Ian and the Doctor are once again taken prisoner. The governor locks them in the embalming room until he has also caught Vicki and Barbara.

Meanwhile, the Xerons have taken Vicki to the Morok armory. It is guarded by a lie detector-computer that asks a series of questions to anyone who wants to enter: "What is your name and rank?", "Do you have the governor's permission?", that sort of thing. The answers must be bother the right answer, and true.

Vicki reprograms the machine. She can't fix the requirement that the answers be true, but she can delete the list of "right" answers. "What is your name?" the machine asks.

"Vicki."

"For what purpose do you want the weapons?"

"Revolution!"

And the door opens. A small army of Xerons quickly gather, and Jeremy Bulloch distributes guns to them.

Vicki, now armed, heads for the museum, picking up Barbara along the way. But they're captured by Morok guards and taken to the embalming room, where they're imprisoned with Ian and the Doctor. It now appears that the four of them will, indeed, end up on display.

But events have taken on a life of their own, and the Xeron revolution is fully underway. The Xerons storm the Morok headquarters, freeing the TARDIS team and killing or capturing the Morok high command. Morok rule on Xeros is ended. As the Xerons dismantle the space museum, the TARDIS team depart. Before they do, the Doctor identifies and fixes the machinery that caused them to jump a time track--he likens it to when you flip a light switch and have to wait a moment for the light to come on; until that part activated, even though the TARDIS had landed, they hadn't "really" arrived.

What Lisa thought

Rob Shearman, author of the 2005 episode "Dalek", has a monologue on the DVD release of "The Space Museum" speaking in defence of the story, which is, after all, generally considered a low point of 1960s Doctor Who. But "The Space Museum", according to Shearman, is actually rather a good story, only it's let down by three elements--"and those three elements are episode two, episode three and episode four."

After "An Unearthly Child" and "The Sensorites", this makes the third time it's happened, which I guess means we can consider it a theme--though whether it's a theme of the William Hartnell era or the Verity Lambert era, I can't tell, since the majority of the post-Lambert Hartnell era no longer exists. But time and again, the programme during this early period shows a definite talent for opening a story with a wonderfully creepy, atmospheric setup built around a solid science-fictional concept (ordinary things in our everyday lives being camouflage for a wondrous, undreamt-of world; torture by telepathy; "jumping a time track" in this story), which promise is then squandered as the story abruptly shifts gear and becomes a straightforward political morality play with characters in outlandish costume and makeup.

Certainly that's always been my feeling, and at least with "An Unearthly Child" and "The Space Museum", that's generally been fandom's feeling too. (Though I don't know if I've ever seen the dots connected before to point out that it's something the Lambert era does repeatedly.) But here, just as with "The Sensorites", Lisa disagrees.

She really liked "The Space Museum" a lot. She describes it (and I think she's thinking here of parts two through four) as "Doctor Who chick lit", meaning that she found it light and frothy--for parts two and three, she was actually surprised when they ended, because they'd gone by so quickly, she didn't think enough time has elapsed.

I asked her what she thought of the first episode, and she agreed that it was that that carried the tension through the rest of the story. Without the TARDIS team having to worry about whether or not they've broken the chain of events leading to being entombed in the museum, there might not be much left. ("The Doctor and team come to a planet where the peaceful inhabitants have been enslaved by an alien warrior race, and help them overthrow their conquerors. But get this for a twist--the whole revolution happens in the corridors of a museum!")

One thing Lisa picked up on (and really liked) that I hadn't noticed is that the Morok technology itself has a theme, based around an ability to read minds--the televisual mind reader with which they interrogate the Doctor, and the lie-detecting lock at the armoury.

Another thing she picked up that I didn't, and which really annoyed her: Barbara's cardigan. She's wearing it in the glass case, yet by midway through episode two, it's been completely unravelled. But no one comments on this or whether it means the chain of events has been broken--and this despite the fact that just a few minutes earlier, the Doctor had made a huge deal about Ian having lost a button on his jacket, and how it's a pity he hadn't noticed whether or not the button was missing in the exhibit case. He makes a big enough deal, in fact, that it very much comes off as an unsubtle piece of setting up having Barbara's cardigan be significant.

The next story is "The Chase".

I

Doctor Who: "The Edge of Destruction"

Barbara: Do you think something could have got into the ship? The doors were open.
Ian (laughing): What do you mean? An animal or a man or something?
Barbara: Yes. Or ... another intelligence.

"The Edge of Destruction" directed by Richard Martin, 8 February 1964
"The Brink of Disaster" directed by Frank Cox, 15 February 1964

Susan confronts Ian with the scissors

Written by David Whitaker
Script editor: David Whitaker
Produced by Verity Lambert
Associate producer: Mervyn Pinfield

William Hartnell as the Doctor
William Russell as Ian Chesterton
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright
Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman

I don't really remember "The Edge of Destruction" as anything special. I think experience shows us that it's much more difficult to put a strong Doctor Who story in 45 minutes than in ninety--particularly during the classic series. But watching again, it's wonderfully, effectively creepy.

As the TARDIS is departing Skaro, a sudden disturbance knocks everyone aboard unconscious. Slowly, they start to recover--Barbara first, then Susan, then Ian. But they're confused; at first, they don't recognise each other. The Doctor has cut his head as he fell and remains unconscious. Susan goes into a back room to cut him a bandage that looks disconcertingly like a ribbon of condom wrappers.

There's something odd going on in the TARDIS. Ian sees that the doors have opened, but whenever he walks toward them, they close; when he steps back, they open again. The impossibility of the doors opening in flight drives Susan to a fit of hysterics. Finally the Doctor comes to, but not before Susan, adjusting controls on the control console, cries out in pain and faints.

While Barbara tends to the Doctor, Ian carries Susan to bed. She wakes, and she's changed--guarded, paranoid. She threatens Ian with a pair of scissors. He attempts to talk her down, but she cannot stop herself from stabbing at him--at the last instant, she manages to shift her aim, instead slicing into the mattress.

Barbara is now convinced that something entered the TARDIS when the doors opened--if not a man or animal, then "an intelligence"; Ian and the Doctor laugh at her concerns. While the two men try to locate a technical fault in the TARDIS's workings, Barbara visits Susan, who has taken to her bed after Ian disarmed her of the scissors. But she's snuck back out and retrieved them, keeping them clutched in her hands as she and Barbara talk. Susan suggests that the intelligence Barbara is scared of might have taken up residence in one of the TARDIS crew. And indeed, Susan herself is very much coming across as if she's under alien possession--a hawkish, predatory stare; a quiet menace in her voice.

Susan's paranoia seems to have spread to the Doctor. He accuses Ian and Barbara of engineering the crisis, of knocking he and Susan out from behind and tampering with the TARDIS console. But his accusations come suddenly to a halt when Barbara makes a terrifying discovery: the TARDIS's clock has physically melted, like The Persistence of Memory. The crew's wristwatches have also melted.

In an effort to restore calm, the Doctor passes out a cup of tea to each of his companions; no one drinks. Some time later, after everyone else has fallen asleep, the Doctor is working at the TARDIS's controls when Ian attempts to strangle him. The Doctor knocks him to the ground, stunning him.

When Ian comes out of his daze, he claims he was only trying to protect the Doctor by knocking him away from the control console, as both the Doctor and Susan had previously found that trying to operate the controls had caused them to pass out. The Doctor, though, is having none of it, and, despite Susan's entreaties for mercy, determines to put Ian and Barbara off the ship permanently--even if the TARDIS doors open to reveal uninhabitable surroundings.

Everyone is thoroughly unhinged by now. Ian, after protesting his innocence, actually sneaks up behind Barbara and attempts to strangle her. But before a final climax can be reached, the fault locator--which up until had stubbornly refused to respond--suddenly goes off, and now it's indicating that everything in the TARDIS is faulty. The fault locator's alarm keeps going off steadily every fifteen seconds.

The Doctor acts like this is a major brainstorm, giving him the information he needs to fix the problem, and excitedly he tells Susan and Barbara to wait at the door; if it opens, they are to tell him exactly what they see outside. But as soon as they're out of earshot, he confesses the truth to Ian: he is merely giving the women false hope, so that when the end comes, they won't know about it. The TARDIS is doomed--it will disintegrate within five minutes. (He mashes up the titles of this story's two episodes when he describes the TARDIS as being on "the brink of destruction".) The control column attempts to veritably leap out of the console, which the Doctor says is the TARDIS's power source, contained beneath the console, attempting to escape.

But it's Barbara who realises the truth--all these strange things that have been happening are in fact the TARDIS defence mechanisms, trying to convey to the human crew that something they are doing is causing harm to the ship. (This is why the fault locator wasn't showing any faults earlier--the TARDIS isn't at fault; the crew are.)

This is a fairly important moment in Doctor Who continuity. Barbara is making the first suggestion here that the TARDIS is alive and sentient--though the Doctor dismisses the idea derisively. But despite his objection, Barbara's theories lead him to a revelation, and he realises that the TARDIS is rushing toward the birth of the solar system: outside right now, atoms are rushing together, and the Sun is being born in a burst of nuclear fusion. The stresses of it are about to pull the TARDIS apart. And it's all happening because when the Doctor pressed the switch that sent the ship spinning back in time from Skaro, the spring inside the switch failed to work, and the switch failed to release. In effect, the TARDIS console thinks that someone has been pressing that switch continuously, sending the ship further and further back in time.

Ian and the Doctor take the switch apart and fix the problem, and the TARDIS crew have been saved. The greatest damage done is probably to the Doctor's relationship with Barbara--she's deeply resentful of his earlier insistence that he was going to strand Ian and her wherever the TARDIS next landed, regardless of where that was. But she's mollified somewhat when the Doctor provides her with a heavy coat from the TARDIS's wardrobe for her to wear outside, as they've landed in an icy, snowy landscape.

What Lisa thought: I said to her, "What did you think?", and without missing a beat she said, "Still don't like Barbara. She's so pissy." On the story itself, she largely agreed with me--the first episode was exceptionally creepy and atmospheric, though the second episode was a letdown. (I think it very much comes across that this story was filler, a bottle show with two different directors.)

The next story was "Marco Polo", but that one's unfortunately lost. We'll therefore pick up with "The Keys of Marinus" in our next post.

I