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".

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".

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