Movement Point

In many ways, Patrick Troughton is both the “missing” Doctor and the most important Doctor of them all.

When Patrick Troughton took over the role from William Hartnell in the famous dissolve shot at the end of “The Tenth Planet,” he proved that Doctor Who as a concept could last beyond the tenure of a single Doctor. A failure of the audience to embrace this change in actors—indeed, this change in the very nature of the character itself, from wizened curmudgeon to puckish raconteur—would have ended the series for all time. It is to Troughton’s credit that he succeeded quite resoundingly, becoming the Second Doctor, not the Final Doctor.

And yet, he’s nearly unknown to modern viewers of Doctor Who, perhaps remembered for his pipe flute and iconic showdown with the Cybermen on Telos but not recognized as the Doctor who fully advocated aggressive intervention when necessary to fight evil in all its guises, who allowed people to underestimate him (to their own chagrin and, often, peril), who managed to combine slapstick with seriousness. He’s merely that “other” black-and-white era Doctor, the one without the scarf or the car or the celery stick. It’s a status worth changing.

Read more

I had every right to leave.

Doctor Who begins here. Or, perhaps more accurately, the Doctor begins here.

If “The Tomb of the Cybermen” provides the essential formula for what has come to be understood as a “proper” Doctor Who story, then Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke’s ten episode opus, “The War Games,” (Story Production Code ZZ) establishes the character of the Doctor for all time to come. For here, we learn that the Doctor is a Time Lord, and a renegade at that, on the run in a stolen TARDIS.

The Doctor’s people had been hinted at, if not named, back in Dennis Spooner’s “The Time Meddler,” with the Meddling Monk possessing a TARDIS of his own, and a sense of their prevailing ethos of non-interference comes through via the Monk’s counter-example. The Doctor expresses utter shock, on a moral level, not merely at the intended effects of the Monk’s mucking about with history but even more so at the very thought of any direct, intentional interference at all. “The War Games” explains why the Doctor feels that way, even as he is hoist upon his own interfering petard in the end.

The notion of the Doctor being called to task for his own interference could have been a story all its own; instead, Dicks and Hulke brilliantly weave the Doctor’s growing sense of dread at re-encountering the Time Lords throughout another story about the human propensity for war, with the Time Lords only appearing in the very final episode of the story and the season. It’s a reveal more powerful than any Dalek surfacing from the Thames or Cyberman punching through plastic, because this time, we don’t know if the Doctor will win.

Read more

Jumping galactic gobstoppers!

It’s sadly fitting that the last of Doctor Who‘s “missing episodes” stories happens to be one of its most visually ambitious to date. Robert Holmes’s “The Space Pirates” (Story Production Code YY) features extensive model work, with three well-differentiated types of spaceships on display both inside and out, not to mention an underground mining complex and a series of exploding space beacons. And of its six episodes, only one is known to exist.

That one episode, Episode Two, features nine model-centric telecine inserts according to the shooting script, quite on the high side, and it’s just as well we have all these shots of spaceship models drifting against a starless, all-black background, because the story itself, much like Holmes’ debut story, “The Krotons,” lacks the same degree of ambition. It’s not a bad story per se, but it doesn’t feel very much like a Doctor Who story, because, as has been the case for much of this season, the Doctor and his companions are not the most important characters.

Oh, the Doctor saves the day, of course, and it’s likely that many lives would have been lost had the TARDIS not materialized at random inside Space Beacon Alpha Four just when the eponymous pirates arrived to plunder it for its valuable argonite ore, but we don’t even see our time travelling heroes until more than ten minutes have elapsed, by which time the viewer has met a good half-dozen speaking characters, all of whom are engaged in prodigious info dumps on a scale not seen since “The Daleks’ Master Plan.” Even the Doctor’s coat of many objects cannot save Patrick Troughton from playing second fiddle to the only actor in the show to have ever challenged William Hartnell for fluffing lines: Gordon Gostelow as Milo Clancey. Think erratic Forty-niner miner with a muddled Wild West accent who somehow owns a decrepit interstellar ore freighter and you’re on the right track.

Read more