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 Seeds of Death

The Doctor, Zoe and Jamie peruse the rocketry museum

Episode One, 25 January 1969
Episode Two, 1 February 1969
Episode Three, 8 February 1969
Episode Four, 15 February 1969
Episode Five, 22 February 1969
Episode Six, 1 March 1969

Written by Brian Hayles
Directed by Michael Ferguson
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Peter Bryant

Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot

It's the end of the twenty-first century.  Travel on Earth has been revolutionised by the invention of T-Mat, a teleportation device able to transport people and goods instantly from anywhere with a T-Mat terminal to anywhere else with a T-Mat terminal.  Life on Earth is now fully integrated with T-Mat; food and medical supplies are teleported across the globe all day long, such that a sudden breakdown in T-Mat would lead to massive food shortages in Earth's major cities within just a few hours, and to complete societal breakdown shortly after that.

(Spoiler: Earth is about to have to endure a total shutdown of the T-Mat network.)

Humanity's reliance on T-Mat has become so total, and so second-nature, that they don't even have a backup transport system for if T-Mat fails--no rockets or other forms of physical transport.  This also means exploration into the solar system has stopped; T-Mat can't send you anywhere that doesn't already have a T-Mat terminal at the far end, and no one is interested in travelling by rocket to set T-Mat terminals up in outer space.  So humanity has only ever got as far as the Moon, where we've set up the most important T-Mat terminal of all--a relay station whose good operation is essential for keeping Earth's T-Mat network running.

So there's a lot of consternation when the T-Mat moon base suddenly shuts down totally.  T-Mat stops working all over the world, and those vital food and medical shipments stop flowing.  And communications with moon base have also been cut off--T-Mat Control in London can't raise them on the radio.  Without a backup fleet of rockets, there's no way for technicians from Earth to get up to the Moon to find out what's wrong.

Luckily, and in a spectacular piece of plot-helping good luck, the TARDIS materliases on Earth at just this time, and it actually lands in a museum dedicated to the lost art of space rocketry, run by a cantankerous old man who just happens to be the respected former colleague of Commander Radnor, who's now in charge of the T-Mat system.

And but so, in short order we've got Jamie, Zoe and the Doctor piloting Earth's one working rocket up to moon base to see what's up.  I don't know about you, but if I were responsible for restoring Earth's teleport network and alleviating an imminent global societal collapse that's entirely down to my own failure to keep a backup rocket in reserve, I'd certainly be sending in three strangers who conveniently showed up right when the teleport system collapsed, and not any of my own expert technicians.

Anyway.  Our heroes get up to moon base, and discover it's been taken over by Ice Warriors, the spearhead of an invasion force from Mars.  They've killed everyone on the base except for two men, one who escaped into its labyrinthine corridors and another who agreed to help the Ice Warriors rather than be executed.

(Fewsham, the technician who collaborates with the Ice Warriors, is probably the most interesting character in the whole serial.  He really looks like a moral coward for the first four episodes--"I don't want to die like that!  I want to live!"--but then saves Zoe's life from an Ice Warrior at the start of episode five.  When everyone else T-Mats back down to Earth, however, he tricks them into letting him stay behind, and goes back to working for the Ice Warriors.  But he secretly opens a direct video link to Earth, so that T-Mat Control hear everything the Ice Warriors say to each other and thereby learn their invasion plan; when the Ice Warriors discover this, Fewsham faces his execution defiantly and bravely.)

The Ice Warriors' full plan is to take control of T-Mat, then teleport some special seeds to major cities throughout Earth's cold-weather regions.  These seeds release spores, and the spores quickly grow into a fungus that covers much of the planet, sucking oxygen out of the atmosphere at a rate that will reduce Earth's atmosphere to a level comparable to Mars's (and kill most human life in the process).  One Ice Warrior will teleport down to Earth's weather control building to stop the weather control bureau from making any rain over the affected parts of Earth, as water (in a rather comic-book development) is the fungus's one weakness.  A radio signal from moon base will then guide the rest of the Ice Warrior invasion fleet into Earth orbit, and the Ice Warrior army will land on the depopulated planet and take it over.

The TARDIS team and the Ice Warriors spend a couple of episodes chasing each other around the corridors of moon base, until the Doctor defeats them by using their own comic-book weakness, turning up the heat.  (Moon base turns out to have both the most baroque and fastest-acting thermostat in the solar system.)

By that time, however, the fungus has already been released and is threatening the Earth, so next the TARDIS team have to head to weather-control in London, where they get to spend another episode chasing the last Ice Warrior around corridors that look remarkably like the moon base corridors.  After that's taken care of, the Doctor then sends a satellite into orbit broadcasting a signal that mimics the guidance signal for the Ice Warrior invasion fleet, so that instead of entering Earth orbit, the signal leads the fleet into plunging straight into the Sun.

All done and dusted in time for tea.

What Lisa thought

She really liked this one, which was a big pickup from "The Invasion", which she hadn't liked.  She found Fewsham's character arc a compelling one, and she was also fascinated with the idea of T-Mat.  It's a concept that had had a degree of thought put into it, with side-effects like the idea that Earth had completely abandoned space exploration beyond the Moon.

The next story is "The Space Pirates", an effort from Robert Holmes.  It's also the very last Doctor Who story with missing episodes, so we'll be missing it and heading on to "The War Games".

"The Krotons"

We've been slaves for a thousand years; do you think you can free us in one day?--Beta

Episode one, 28 December 1968
Episode two, 4 January 1969
Episode three, 11 January 1969
Episode four, 18 January 1969

Written by Robert Holmes
Directed by David Maloney
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Peter Bryant

Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Herriot

A thousand years ago, the Krotons' spaceship landed in the midst of the humanoid Gorns' settlement.  The Gorns were a primitive people, and apparently stereotypically so; without understanding what was going on, they immediately attacked the spaceship.  The Krotons retaliated by making a dark rain fall, which turned the land surrounding the Gorns' settlement into a wasteland where nothing would grow.

The Krotons remained in the Gorn settlement after this brief war as their overlords and protectors, though the Gorns never saw them--they always remain in their spaceship.  In fact, using knowledge the Krotons gave them, the Gorns built a learning centre around the spaceship, with computerised learning machines on which all Gorns are educated.  Periodically, when a Gorn scores highly enough on the learning machines, they're called to be a "companion of the Krotons", meaning that they get to enter the Krotons' spaceship--and are never seen again.

The Gorns have become much more advanced under the Krotons' tutelage, but there are gaps in their knowledge--the Krotons forbid the Gorns, for instance, from studying anything to do with chemistry.  And no Gorn ever ventures into the wastelands, for according to the Krotons, anyone who visits them will die.

The TARDIS arrives, causing a great flurry of consternation amongst the Gorns.  Almost straight away, the Doctor makes two discoveries that completely shake the foundation of Gorn society: first, that the wasteland isn't poisoned at all.  Maybe it was once, but it has recovered a long time ago.  And second, those who are selected as companions of the Krotons--the best and brightest of the Gorns--are secretly murdered.

The story therefore depicts a moment in Gorn history, the moment when the Gorns, in shock over learning their entire culture is based on a lie, take up arms and throw off their technologically advanced Kroton overlords.

And of course, predictably, that's exactly what happens.  The plotline isn't the interesting part of "The Krotons".  The interesting party, besides Zoe's costume (a very nice miniskirt and go-go boots combination), is the people for whom this story marks their first involvement in Doctor Who.

This is the first Doctor Who written by Robert Holmes, who's generally seen as the greatest script writer the programme has ever had.  He's produced a fairly standard, unmemorable effort for his first attempt, but it does have a few interesting ideas.  The Krotons, for instance, turn out to be a sort of cross between living organisms and machinery; they don't die, but rather "cease to function", in just the same way their ship does.  And they've been killing the cleverest Gorns because their spaceship runs by extracting mental energy; the Gorns' death is just a side effect.

The other significant first-timer here is Philip Madoc, playing the Gorn villain, Eelek.  This is his first appearance in the television series, but not in the Doctor Who franchise--he had previously played the black marketeer in Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD, the 1965 big-screen adaptation of The Dalek Invasion of Earth.  Both then and as Eelek, he plays exactly the sort of role he'll become such a virtuoso of during the next decade.

He's ruthless, ambitious, consummately self-serving and thoroughly amoral, interested only in accumulating power to himself.  Even when he's being friendly, he exudes menace--there are precious few smiles more chilling than his--but, whenever his aims are frustrated, he can burst on a moment's notice into a thoroughly intimidating fury.  For me, only Jon Simm rivals him as the best villainous actor the programme's ever had--yes, that means he even surpasses Roger Delgado.

Here as Eelek, he demonstrates all those qualities that make him so great.   He's the assistant to Selris, the Gorns' headman.  When the Gorns learn the truth about the Krotons, he uses it as an opportunity to make a bid for power, overthrowing Selris, by positioning himself as rabidly anti-Kroton, ready to lead a crusade against them.  But when the Krotons offer to leave the Gorn planet if only Eelek will turn the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie over to them, he agrees unhesitatingly, happily abandoning the very allies who are the ones who showed the Gorns the truth in the first place.

What Lisa thought

 She liked three of the four parts, essentially--she felt part two really dragged.  Part two, incidentally, is the only episode that doesn't feature Philip Madoc.

The Invasion

Animated Cyberman!

Episode One, 2 November 1968
Episode Two, 9 November 1968
Episode Three, 16 November 1968
Episode Four, 23 November 1968
Episode Five, 30 November 1968
Episode Six, 7 December 1968
Episode Seven, 14 December 1968
Episode Eight, 21 December 1968

Story by Kit Pedler
Written by Derrick Sherwin
Directed by Douglas Camfield
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Peter Bryant

Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart (earliest extant appearance)
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot
John Levene as Corporal Benton (first appearance)

We can essentially divide "The Invasion" into two halves, though that division is done pretty seamlessly during the actual story.  In the first four episodes, the TARDIS lands in a near-future Britain.  Dialogue places this story five years after "The Web of Fear", which was forty years after "The Abominable Snowmen", which took place in 1935, so that would seem to indicate "The Invasion" takes place in 1980--but such a date would give us problems when we try to reconcile it into the dates for other, later UNIT stories.  (Both "Web" and "Snowmen" are amongst the missing stories.)  So we'll go with "sometime in the 1970s" for the story's setting.

Anyway.  The TARDIS lands in near-future Britain, where it discovers a corporation named AppleInternational Electromatics has become the world's dominant company through the production of copious amounts of personal, portable-sized, affordable consumer electronics.  But all is not as it seems with International Electromatics--the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe soon end up investigating the corporation when they discover that it's holding prisoner Professor Watkins, a brilliant scientist who's also the uncle of their friend Isobel.

(Professor Watkins and Isobel are pretty obvious stand-ins for Professor Travers and his daughter Anne from "The Web of Fear", who have "gone off to America", presumably because their actors were unavailable to reprise their roles in "The Invasion".)

In the process, they fall in with UNIT, the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, a global secret police.  UNIT are headed by Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, a British Army officer who knows the Doctor and Jamie from "The Web of Fear", when the Yeti invaded the London Underground.  (Lethbridge-Stewart was a colonel in "Web"; he's now been promoted to brigadier.)  UNIT are also investigating International Electromatics and its CEO, Tobias Vaughn, though for something far more sinister than the kidnapping of a single professor.

The second four episodes deal with Vaughn putting his nefarious plot into action: he's allied with the Cybermen, and together they stage an attempt to take over the Earth.  Vaughn and his minions sneak a Cyber army into the sewers beneath London, and then the Cybermen transmit a signal through all the International Electromatics products that renders every human on Earth unconscious.  The plan is that the Cybermen will then emerge from the sewers and take control of London long enough to land the full Cyber invasion force from "the dark side of the Moon", and humanity will regain consciousness to find their whole planet under Cyber control.

(The Cybermen marching through the streets of London produces the famous image of a platoon of them marching down the steps with the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral behind them.)

But the Doctor has figured out Vaughn's plan, and he's able to shield himself and UNIT from the hypnotic transmission's effects--leaving UNIT (and Jamie, Zoe, Isobel and Professor Watkins) the only waking human beings on Earth.  A UNIT contingent flies to Moscow, where the Russians were about to launch a manned mission to the Moon; the UNIT troop replace the life pod on the rocket with a nuclear warhead, and are able to destroy the Cyber fleet while it's still in orbit.  Meanwhile, the Doctor leads a separate UNIT contingent in an assault on International Electromatics' tightly controlled corporate countryside compound, defeating those Cybermen who have already reached Earth.  Vaughn is, of course, killed in the process.

There's a whole lot to talk about with "The Invasion".  The most apparent is the way this story functions as a pilot episode for the way Doctor Who is going to get reformatted at the start of next season.  (We still have two more stories before we get there.)  No longer will the Doctor be a carefree wanderer in time and space; instead, he'll be partnered with UNIT on a near-future Earth, investigating, in Malcolm Hulke's immortal phrase, "mad scientists and alien invasions"--James Bond meets Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons.

It's to that end that the Brigadier is brought back from "The Web of Fear", giving the programme what's probably its best-loved character, at least amongst its fandom, and an actor who'd remain actively associated with it for the rest of his life.  (I'm writing this 44 years after the first broadcast of "The Web of Fear", and right now, the most recent episode of Doctor Who ever aired--three or four months ago--contained a wonderful scene dedicated to the Brig, as a commemoration of Nicholas Courtney's death earlier this year.)  The Brigadier will function as Captain Scarlet to the Third Doctor's James Bond--in fact, the Third Doctor is closer in characterisation to Bond or Simon Templar than he is to pretty much any of the other ten Doctors who've headlined the programme throughout its history.

(Given that the parts of the Watkinses were clearly originally written for the Traverses, one has to wonder if the original plan was also to have them on the UNIT staff for season seven, as well.)

The next thing that's so interesting about "The Invasion" is its depiction of near-future Earth--a depiction that's exceptionally prescient, even if it did till longer than 1980 to get here.  Over its eight episodes, we see a number of things that are commonplace today but weren't present in 1968:

1. A computerised, automated telephone-answering system at a corporate headquarters, that specifies to the caller what sort of input it needs and then responds to simple voice commands;

2. A device that looks and acts a whole lot like a cell phone;

3. Microchips! Referred to as "micro monolithic circuitry";

4. Disposable electronic devices (in this case, a transistor radio), like the disposable cameras that have permeated our society;

5. Webcams! Tobias Vaughn maintains a visual surveillance system throughout International Electromatics's headquarters, and this system takes the form of cameras that are small, white spheres about the size of a tennis ball, which can be placed unobtrusively at points in rooms where they won't be noticed, like on cluttered shelves. And they really do look just like webcams.

And the last (and to me, coolest) thing about the story is the fact that we can now watch it in its entirety.  Episodes one and four are missing, but about five years ago, the story was released on DVD with those two episodes reconstructed as Flash animation, set to the original episodes' soundtracks.  The first episode in particular is effective--it has a noirish feel that matches the spooky soundtrack and not-quite-sure-what's-going-on quality of the storyline at that point.

What Lisa thought

She thought the opening four episodes--the Tobias Vaughn and International Electromatics portion of the story--didn't work.  It simply wasn't credible to her, once she knew it was the Cybermen who were Vaughn's unseen allies, that these allies had been willing to put up with him for so long.  Vaughn keeps demanding more control and authority over the invasion than the Cybermen want to give, and the Cybermen keep caving in to his demands, because they need him.  The thing is, though, they don't need him--not once things have reached the stage that they've already positioned their commando force in the London sewers.

Her other reaction was that she thought the two animated episodes were a pretty weird experience--which is fair enough, I suppose, though when I went back and checked my original reaction post to this DVD release back in 2007, she agreed with me that part one was very effective.

The next story in our rewatch is "The Krotons".

The Mind Robber

Zoe: Doctor, we're not actually in flight, are we?
Doctor: No, why?
Zoe: Well then, presumably we've landed, so why isn't the scanner showing anything?
Doctor: Well, because, well, we're nowhere.  It's as simple as that.

Zoe clings to the TARDIS console as it floats through nothingness.

Episode 1, 14 September 1968
Episode 2, 21 September 1968
Episode 3, 28 September 1968
Episode 4, 5 October 1968
Episode 5, 12 October 1968

Written by Peter Ling
Directed by David Maloney
Script editor: Derrick Sherwin
Produced by Peter Bryant

Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines and Hamish Wilson as Jamie McCrimmon
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot

During its hurried departure from Dulcis, the TARDIS blows a fluid link, forcing the Doctor to activate the emergency unit to escape.  This transports the TARDIS into a void beyond time and space--they've left the universe as we know it entirely.  The Doctor withdraws into the TARDIS's innards to make the repairs necessary to get them up and running again

But something strange is going on.  Both Jamie and Zoe are lured outside into the void when they see images of their homes on the scanner--the Scottish Highlands for Jamie, and a futuristic conurbation called "the City" for Zoe.  But outside they find only a white, featureless nowhere, where they soon fall into a strange, hypnotic trance.

The Doctor realises what's happened when he returns to the TARDIS control room and finds the doors wide open.  He's able to sense that some sort of malevolent presence has entered the TARDIS through the open doors, and he engages in a telepathic battle with it.  Through this battle, he's able to free Jamie and Zoe of the influence that's controlling them, but in the process, the TARDIS flies apart, and Jamie and Zoe are left clinging to the control console as it floats through black emptiness.

(Zoe in her sparkly catsuit, clinging to the console, is possibly the single greatest frame in all of Doctor Who.)

Eventually, the TARDIS team wake up to find themselves in a dark, spooky forest.  They're in some sort of strange Land of Fiction, where riddles and wordplay take on physical reality.  For instance, the Doctor and Jamie find Zoe trapped behind a painting of a door, but they can't open it because it's not a real door.  When is a door not a door?  When it's ajar, of course--as soon as the Doctor figures out the answer to that riddle, the door transforms into a giant jar, with Zoe trapped inside it, and the Doctor and Jamie are able to rescue her by removing the lid.

There's a neat little trick where the Doctor finds a cardboard standee of Jamie, with a blank face.  Next to it are several different facial elements--for instance, three pairs of eyes, three noses, three mouths.  The Doctor has to reconstruct Jamie's face onto the standee.  Of course, he gets it wrong, and Jamie comes to life with the wrong face, allowing Frazer Hines to have a week off while Hamish Wilson takes his place.

The TARDIS team also encounter several figures from literature and mythology: Gulliver (played by Bernard Horsfall, in the first of several appearances on the programme), Medusa, Rapunzel and the Karkus, a superhero from a comic strip popular in Zoe's native time, the far future known as "the year 2000".  But any of these characters who attempt to obstruct our heroes--like Medusa or the Karkus--remain real only so long as the TARDIS team think of them as real.  For instance, Zoe is able to defeat the Karkus by convincing himself that he's just a work of fiction; this then allows her to overcome his super-strength and defeat him in a wrestling match.

Eventually the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe reach a castle on a mountaintop, and at its centre they find the Master of the Land of Fiction, an old man hooked up to a massive computer.  He is a writer of boys' fiction from 1920s England who fell asleep at his desk one day and was kidnapped to serve as the brain for this massive computer.  The computer is what generates the Land of Fiction, but it needs an imaginative human to serve as its creative impetus.

Now, though, the Master is growing old, and he needs to be replaced--by the Doctor.  The Doctor, of course, refuses, so the Master traps Jamie and Zoe inside a giant book, turning them into fictional characters.  The Master himself won't release them, so they can only escape if the Doctor agrees to take the Master's place; this will allow the Doctor himself to free them, as his first act of office.

The Doctor still refuses, but the Master is able to use Jamie and Zoe--who, as works of fiction, are now under his control--to entrap him and hook him up directly to the central computer.  With both the Doctor and the Master now in control of the Land of Fiction, a write-off ensues, with the two of them summoning up various literary characters to battle each other, though the Doctor is hampered in that he cannot write about himself, or he will turn himself into a work of fiction.

The Doctor is able to free Jamie and Zoe, who then sneak into the control centre and override the central computer.  This sends the white robots that serve the Master haywire, and they destroy the computer and therefore the Land of Fiction.  The TARDIS team are able to free the Master--who, disconnected from the computer, has no memory of anything since his kidnap in the 1920s--and the four of them depart in the TARDIS.

What Lisa thought

She really liked this one--a whole lot.  She thought it was a fun romp, and she really liked the post-modern air to a story in which the regular characters are explicitly attempting to preserve their reality in the face of attempts to turn them into works of fiction.  She also felt like she was getting a peek into British schoolyard culture (at least, of the 1960s), as with the schoolchildren who kept asking the Doctor riddles. ("What can you make of a sword?" "Why did the chicken cross the road?" "Where was Moses when the lights went out?" "Adam and Eve and Pinch-me went down to the river.")  She gives "The Mind Robber" a wholehearted seal of approval.

Me?  I like the sparkly catsuit.

The next story in our rewatch will be "The Krotons".

The Dominators

Cully admires Zoe disguising herself in Dulcian costume.

Episode 1, 10 August 1968
Episode 2, 17 August 1968
Episode 3, 24 August 1968
Episode 4, 31 August 1968
Episode 5, 7 September 1968

Written by Norman Ashby
Directed by Morris Barry
Script editor: Derrick Sherwin
Producer Peter Bryant

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

On the planet Dulcis, war and strife are unknown.  Also unknown is basic scientific curiosity--172 years ago, Dulcian scientists detonated an atomic bomb on an isolated island, so that they could study how long it took for radiation levels to subside.  But when all the radiation levels suddenly drop to zero, the Dulcians don't respond with, "Holy crap, that must mean the advance force from a race of merciless alien invaders must have landed on the island and used that radiation for fuel as they prepare to destroy our planet!" or even the perhaps more reasonable, "Hmm, that's weird.  Maybe we should head over to the island and try to figure out why the radiation suddenly vanished."  No, instead they say, "Well, now we know--radiation from an atomic blast lasts 172 years, then vanishes completely."

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  The formerly-radioactive island.  Four groups have arrived there at roughly the same time: a trio from a Dulcian university, studying radiation; a party of adolescent adventurers, visiting the island without passes as a way to spice up prosperous-yet-monotonous life on Dulcis; the TARDIS team; and a spaceship carrying two Dominators.

The Dominators are a race of merciless alien conquerors, "rulers of the Ten Galaxies".  Their spaceships are powered by radiation, but this particular ship is almost out of power.  Detecting the radioactive island, they've come to Dulcis, where they immediately suck up all the radiation to refuel.  But this replenishes their power levels only enough to give them the energy for a full refuel, which involves drilling to the molten core of Dulcis and dropping an atomic bomb down the shaft, to irradiate the whole core--which incidentally will also turn all of Dulcis into a radioactive cinder, destroying all life on the surface.

Of course, the TARDIS team and the Dulcians soon discover this.  The story's what-makes-this-story-different-from-others quality comes in the difficulty our heroes have in getting the Dulcians to fight back, because of the ethos of nonviolence and incuriosity that permeates society on Dulcis.  First, the Dulcians flat out don't believe that aliens have landed on their planet, because they don't believe in aliens.  Then, they refuse to accept the threat the Dominators pose, and continue to maintain that if only they treat the invaders with friendliness and obedience, they'll be able to bring out the Dominators' peaceful side.  And then when they do finally realise what danger they're in, they don't even know how to fight back.

(This is illustrated very well in a meeting of the High Council of Dulcis: "The way I see it, there are only three courses of action: fight, flight or submission."

"Flight is out of the question!"

"And we have means with which to fight."

"Then that leaves only ... submission.")

Eventually, the Doctor and a small group of Dulcians are able to foil the Dominators' plan by tunneling beneath the radioactive island so that they gain access to the Dominators' drill-bore from the side.  This way, when the invaders drop their atomic bomb down the shaft, the Doctor catches it, then stows it aboard the Dominators' spaceship.  The spaceship lifts off so that the Dominators can get away from the planet before it explodes, but of course, the only thing they end up destroying is their own ship.

But none of all that is really what sticks with me about "The Dominators".  The most memorable thing about this story is that it's our first chance to get a look at the Doctor's new companion, Zoe, the girl genius from the year 2000.  (In 1968 terms, "from the year 2000" means "lives in a space station".)

Zoe is a chipper, undeterable character, utterly guileless, completely selfless, friendly, and entirely comfortable with the fact that she's a scientific and mathematical genius.  And actress Wendy Padbury is one of the most adorably sexy women ever to make it onto a television screen.

That sexiness and the mores of 1968 combine to ensure that, over the course of her one season on the TARDIS, Zoe is clad a succession of wonderfully enticing costumes, and the one in "The Dominators" is one of the best.  The people of Dulcis all walk about in short gowns.  For men, this means dresses of a curtain-like material that come down to mid-thigh (longer for figures of authority).  But for women, it means a choker and a revealingly short babydoll negligee, easily transparent enough to show off the bikini bottoms being worn underneath.  It's glorious.

What Lisa thought

She enjoyed it fine.  She did complain about the broad strokes with which the story was told--the utterly good Dulcians contrasted with the utterly ruthless Dominators; the simplicity of, "Well, we'll just burrow in from the side and catch the bomb when they drop it."

This sort of block-colour approach to storytelling even extends to interpersonal dynamics.  The two Dominators have a running conflict throughout the story: the first officer wants to destroy everything in sight, murdering any Dulcians he sees, while his commander insists that the natives pose no threat, and they should be spared as killing them will dangerously deplete the spaceships' already dangerously-low levels of power.

In fact, all four cliffhangers in this story involve the first officer ordering the Quarks (diminutive robots that the Dominators use as both a labour force and their footsoldiers) to kill a character, which is then resolved by the commander appearing out of nowhere and countermanding the order. The cliffhangers at the end of part two and part three are in fact identical, with the first officer deciding to destroy a house standing on an opposite hill just to have some fun, unaware that some of our main characters are hiding in the house, and the image fades out as debris falls around our heroes from the blasts of the Quarks' molecular cannon.

(It's interesting that we're supposed to see the first officer as a bloodthirsty fool, while the commander is the voice of intelligence and reason, considering that in the end, it's the first officer who was right the whole time--the natives do pose a threat, and the Dominators' best course of action would have been to slaughter them.)

There is a wonderful example of the comic chemistry between Frazer Hines and Patrick Troughton, when the Dominators (thinking they have captured native Dulcians) subject the two of them to intelligence tests, to evaluate the native populations. The Doctor and Jamie quickly conclude that they should do their best to appear stupid, so as to present less of a threat.

The same scene also illustrates Troughton's nimbleness as an actor, when he convinces the Dominators that there are two species on Dulcis: the stupid ones, represented by him and Jamie, and the smart ones. "There aren't very many of them left. We don't like them very much--they tell us what to do, you see," he says, and all of a sudden his demeanor has changed completely, and with it, the whole tone of the scene. It's not that he's suddenly become threatening, because he hasn't--but with those two sentences and his sudden change in tone, he's managed to summon forth an entire picture in the viewer's mind, and one that's much, much darker than any actual images that appear onscreen in "The Dominators".

But essentially, "The Dominators" is a story where Doctor Who definitely comes across more as a children's programme than a family programme.

But whatever.  Zoe, man.  In a see-through microdress.

The next story in the rewatch is "The Mind Robber".