"The War Machines"

Doctor Who is required.--WOTAN

Ben and Polly meet for the first time

Episode 1, 25 June 1966
Episode 2, 2 July 1966
Episode 3, 9 July 1966
Episode 4, 16 July 1966

Written by Ian Stuart Black
Directed by Michael Ferguson
Script editor: Gerry Davis
Produced by Innes Lloyd

William Hartnell as the Doctor
Jackie Lane as Dodo Chaplet (final appearance)
Anneke Wills as Polly (first appearance)
Michael Craze as Ben Jackson (first appearance)

The TARDIS materialises in London in 1966, the first time it's landed on postwar Earth (at least, in its normal size and apart from a brief interlude atop the Empire State Building) since abruptly abducting a pair of schoolteachers from Totter's Lane in 1963; since this raises the possibility that someone might now mistake it for an actual police box, the Doctor leaves a notice on the front door: OUT OF ORDER.

The Doctor and Dodo have arrived in London shortly after the completion of the GPO Tower, whose futuristic, highly technological silhouette dominates the skyline. Fascinated, the Doctor decides to visit the Tower. On its top floor, he finds WOTAN (Will-Operating Thought ANalogue), the most powerful computer the world has ever known. WOTAN, effectively a functioning artificial intelligence, is so powerful that it is able to instantly solve the mathematical problems the Doctor sets it.

(I think it's a wonderful artefact of its time that the production team apparently think that the greatest challenge a human being could pose to a computer would be in presenting it with a straightforward maths question.) Rather more impressive is Dodo's question for WOTAN, "What does TARDIS stand for?", which it also manages to answer correctly.

From WOTAN's operator, Professor Brett, the Doctor learns that in a few days, all the computers in the world will be linked up under WOTAN's control. Intrigued, he decides to learn more by heading across London to a meeting of the Royal Scientific Club, which is holding a press conference about the linkup chaired by Sir Charles Summer. Dodo, means while, heads off to go clubbing in London with Brett's assistant, a pretty twentysomething named Polly.

But of course, all is not well with WOTAN. The machine has apparently determined that humanity has reached its maximum potential, and that further development of Planet Earth cannot occur with us in charge. It therefore decides to take control itself. After the Doctor, Dodo and Polly have left, the machine uses some sort of thought ray to take control of Brett, and shortly thereafter of a second operator, Professor Krimpton, and the security chief for the Tower, Major Green.

Polly takes Dodo to the Inferno, "the hottest nightspot in London", where they meet Ben Jackson, a Royal Navy able seaman. At first, Ben and Polly take a dislike to each other, as Polly finds Ben rather grumpy. But when Ben comes to Polly's defence after a male clubgoer tries to impose himself on her, the two soon become fast friends.

Dodo misses out on this, as she's been called away by a phone call--from WOTAN. The machine has determined that in order to take over the world, it needs to add the Doctor to its hypnotically controlled army. It therefore takes control of Dodo over the phone, so that she can gain control of the Doctor. (In my head, when Dodo put the phone up to her ear, she heard the class 1990s staticky whistle of a modem, which instantly hypnotised her.)

The next morning, the Doctor is having breakfast at Sir Charles's house when Dodo gets him on the phone with WOTAN. The machine transmits its hypnotic signal, but the signal has no effect on the Doctor. At this point the Doctor realises that Dodo is under mind control, so he places her into a hypnotic trance to remove WOTAN's influence from her. She then falls into a deep sleep; the Doctor says she'll probably sleep for two days. Sir Charles therefore orders her taken out to his country house, where his wife can take care of her while she recovers. This rather underwhelming departure moment is Dodo's very last appearance in Doctor Who--we won't see her again.

From Dodo, the Doctor has learnt that WOTAN has ordered the construction of "war machines" at strategic points around London, to facilitate its takeover of the city and from there, the world. When Polly fails to show up for a lunch appointment, the Doctor sends Ben to look for her.

She has, of course, been hypnotised by WOTAN. Ben finds her at a warehouse in Covent Garden, where she and a team of other WOTAN-whammied labourers are busy constructing one of the war machines, which are essentially small, unmanned robotic tanks. Ben doesn't understand that she's under hypnosis, and so attempts to rescue her, but this results only in his own capture by WOTAN's servants.

He's put to work on the war machine's construction, albeit without being hypnotised. Soon enough, he escapes; Polly, though still under mind control, sees him but fails to raise the alarm. Ben returns to the Doctor and Sir Charles and tells them about the war machine.

At Sir Charles's instigation, an army unit descends on the warehouse, but the war machine makes short work of them. As the army retreats, the Doctor stands his ground with the war machine bearing down upon him, and he's able to get behind the machine and pull out its connections, cutting its power.

But the danger isn't over yet--other war machines are under construction all across London. And one of them now emerges, trundling its way through the streets and sending Londoners fleeing in panic. The streets become deserted, and for the first time in Doctor Who, we get a faux-news report, with a real television news anchor (Kenneth Kendall, in this case) warning Londoners that the government wants them to stay inside.

At the Doctor's direction, the army lure this new war machine into a three-sided square of giant electrical cables. As soon as the war machine enters the square, Ben drags a fourth electrical cable across the ground behind it, closing the square and completing the circuit. This cuts the war machine's signal from WOTAN, and it powers down.

The Doctor is now able to reprogramme the captured war machine, and once that's done he restores power to it. He then leads it to the GPO Tower, where it destroys WOTAN, thus freeing all his victims from mind control.

The Doctor now makes plans to leave London once again. He's standing outside the TARDIS, waiting for Dodo to arrive, when Ben and Polly approach him with a message from her--she's decided to stay behind and won't be returning. A little disappointed, the Doctor heads inside, preparing to depart for points unknown. But as she and Ben are leaving, Polly realises she forgot to return the TARDIS key that Dodo had given her. She and Ben therefore head back to the TARDIS, which they of course think is just a normal police box. They find the door unlocked and, despite Ben's protestations that he has to be back to his barracks soon, head inside. Of course, as soon as they do, the TARDIS dematerialises.

What Lisa thought

I don't know that this one made much of an impression on her. She says only that she was constantly surprised that the war machines being constructed kept turning out to be war machines and not Daleks.

We did both get a chuckle out of WOTAN's famous line that, "Doctor Who is required," rather than "The Doctor is required." My theory? Well, it's established when WOTAN deduces the meaning of the word "TARDIS" that it's capable of understanding things without having any input that should enable it to reach that understanding. I think WOTAN has correctly deduced that it's in a television programme.

The next story is "The Smugglers", in which the Doctor, Ben and Polly land in seventeenth-century Cornwall and get caught up with a band of pirates trying to discover the whereabouts of Avery's Gold. (It's not until the 2011 prequel "Curse of the Black Spot" that we discover what actually happened to Avery's Gold--it was dumped overboard by Captain Avery, the Doctor, Rory and Amy Pond to prevent the Siren that was hosting their ship from having any reflective surfaces in which to manifest itself.)

"The Smugglers" has now been lost, so our next story will be "The Tenth Planet".

I

"The Gunfighters"

The Doctor: Oh, quite so. Allow me, sir, to introduce Miss Dodo Dupont, wizard of the ivory keys, and Steven Regret, tenor, and lastly, sir, your humble servant, Doctor Caligari.
Bat Masterson: Doctor who?
The Doctor: Yes, quite right.

The Doctor, Steven and Dodo meet Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp

"A Holiday for the Doctor", 30 April 1966
"Don't Shoot the Pianist", 7 May 1966
"Johnny Ringo", 14 May 1966
"The OK Corral", 21 May 1966

Written by Donald Cotton
Directed by Rex Tucker
Script editor: Gerry Davis
Produced by Innes Lloyd

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

At the end of the previous (no longer extant) story, "The Celestial Toymaker", the Doctor had badly chipped his tooth on a piece of booby-trapped candy, and so when the TARDIS materialises at the beginning of "The Gunfighters", his only thought is to find a dentist who can extract it.

The TARDIS, it turns out, has arrived next to the entrance to the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, in 1881. The team venture out into the streets of Tombstone, where they soon start meeting the town's inhabitants: the Clanton brothers, town marshals Bat Masterson and and Wyatt Earp, and ultimately the town dentist, who is, of course, Doc Holliday.

The Clantons have arrived in town looking for Holliday; they intend to shoot him down in vengeance for the death of another brother, Reuben. The story's first two and a half episodes revolve around a case of mistaken identity, with the Clantons convinced that the Doctor is, in fact, Doc Holliday. Holliday, who's a weaselly, conniving character, helps further this misunderstanding by supplying the Doctor with his own, easily recognisable six-shooter, and even Wyatt Earp--who's a good friend of Holliday's--goes along with it. The Doctor ends up locked in Tombstone gaol for his own protection from the posse the Clantons have raised, while Steven and Dodo are forced, at gunpoint, to play piano and sing in the saloon, with Dodo turning out miraculously to be a talented pianist and Steven displaying a hitherto unhinted-at professional skill as a singer.

Two events midway through part three change the story, redirecting it into the inexorable leadup to the Gunfight at the OK Corral. The first is the arrival in town of Johnny Ringo, a cold-blooded, psychopathic outlaw who's hunting Holliday because his old girlfriend, Kate, has taken up with the Doc. The second is the murder of Earp's youngest brother, Warren, while the Clantons' are springing one of their own brothers, Phineas, from Tombstone gaol.

Ringo allies with the Clantons and hatches a plot to murder Holliday and Wyatt Earp. The Clantons, though portrayed as the villains of the piece, had at least been planning to confront Holliday and Earp in a straight-up gunfight. But Ringo instead insists that while the Clantons confront Holliday and Earp, he will sneak up behind the two men and shoot them in the back.

The story culminates, as we've of course known it will since episode one, in the famous gunfight, by which time another Earp brother, Virgil, has arrived in Tombstone to act as backup. There's a brief diversion from the main gunfight when Johnny Ringo takes Dodo hostage and Holliday, living up to the chivalry that he's always been falling short of so far in the story, throws away his gun to save her life. But he then produces a hidden pea-shooter and shoots Ringo, killing him. All three Clanton brothers also get killed, and Holliday and the Earps have their historic victory.

The events depicted in "The Gunfighters", it should be noted, bear about as much resemblance to the historical Gunfight at the OK Corral as the movie Sahara does to actual American Civil War archaeology. It wasn't Wyatt Earp who was the Tombstone sheriff, but his brother Virgil; Wyatt occasionally acted as Virgil's unpaid deputy. Warren Earp wasn't killed by the Clantons; he wasn't even in Tombstone at the time of the gunfight. In fact, he lived until 1900, when he was killed in a barfight. Johnny Ringo had absolutely nothing to do with the Gunfight, and there was no barfly Kate who formed a love triangle with Ringo and Holliday.

So anyway, with all that settled, the TARDIS team head off to parts unknown. This is the last time we'll see Steven in the rewatch. The next story after this is "The Savages", now completely lost. In it, the TARDIS arrives in the far-distant future, at an advanced city where the inhabitants have reached the culmination of human society, giving themselves completely over to creativity and advancement. But then it's discovered that these people have built their social order on a tribe of cave-dwelling, illiterate barbarians who inhabit the wilderness beyond the city; the city's inhabitants maintain their own vital energy by capturing tribesmen and sucking the energy from them. The Doctor, of course, puts a stop to all this, and Steven stays behind to be mediator of the new society that must be built, as the savages and the city people learn to live together.

What Lisa thought

When I first got into Who fandom in the nineties, conventional wisdom was that "The Gunfighters" is the single worst Doctor Who story ever made. Like "The Romans", it approaches a bloody episode of history as an opportunity for farcical comedy; it's full of British actors making poor approximations of American accents (though I always feel that standards for accents should be lower in television than they are in film). And on top of that, there's the Song.

No straight plot summary of "The Gunfighters" can convey the experience of watching the story, because it leaves out the Song--the ballad "The Last Chance Saloon". "The Last Chance Saloon" summarises and comments on all the action in "The Gunfighters", and it gets played incessantly--at the beginning and end of each episode, and between most scenes. It's also the song that Steven and Dodo perform when held at gunpoint by the Clantons.

Lisa, of course, turned out to love "The Gunfighters", as is her way. She found it very experimental, specifically citing the song as a manifestation of that.

In the time since the mid-90s, fandom has reconsidered "The Gunfighters" somewhat, apparently concluding it's not as bad as we thought.

I'm of the opinion that reconsideration is wrong. "The Gunfighters" is just as poor as we though fifteen years ago, and that's almost entirely because of "The Last Chance Saloon". It stops the story from ever achieving any sort of tension.

So it's time to move on. Since "The Savages" has been lost, the next story in the rewatch will be "The War Machines".

I

"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