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.
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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 ...
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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".
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