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Doctor Who Project: Patrick Troughton Retrospective

July 24, 2023July 19, 2016 by Chris Baer

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.

Doctor Who Project: The War Games

July 24, 2023July 4, 2016 by Chris Baer

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.

Doctor Who Project: The Space Pirates

August 30, 2022June 2, 2016 by Chris Baer

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.

Doctor Who Project: The Seeds of Death

October 14, 2023May 1, 2016 by Chris Baer

Use the air conditioning!

Some wag must have put a classified ad into the Intergalactic Times, offering up one planet, sold as-is, slightly used and with annoying inhabitants who need to be exterminated, because Earth gets invaded quite often during Patrick Troughton’s tenure on Doctor Who. Season Six alone features three stories using the invasion of Earth as a plot device: “The Mind Robber,” “The Invasion,” and Brian Hayles’ sophomore effort with his Ice Warriors, “The Seeds of Death” (Story Production Code XX). To his credit, Brian Hayles creates, again, an interesting take on human culture and civilization, but he falls prey to the continued flattening of Doctor Who monster motives.

In our first encounter with the reptilian Martians, their leader, Varga, wants to get his ship, and his crew, back to Mars after centuries buried under a glacier. Though ruthless, Varga shows at least suggestions of character and cunning, with some hint of honor and duty in his otherwise sibilant menace. The leader of the Ice Warriors in “The Seeds of Death,” Slaar, comes across as nothing more than petulant and impulsive, killing a human key to his scheme and then throwing a hissy (sorry!) fit when, as is inevitable, the Doctor outwits his invasion plans.

Still, for a while, Slaar’s plans work quite well, as they hinge upon an isolated base (on the moon, of course) that contains the technological linchpin required for continued human survival. Rather than the Gravitron that the Cybermen sought as a prelude to invasion in “The Moonbase,” here the wonder technology is the Travelmat Relay, or T-Mat, for short. Using the moon as a relay station, T-Mat allows for near instant dematerialization and rematerialization between any two T-Mat cubicles on Earth. This transit technology has supplanted all other forms of travel, including space flight and ground vehicles, such that there’s (almost) no way to send help to the moon. With the lunar T-Mat relay knocked out of operation, human society begins to collapse, as all foodstuffs and medical supplies move via T-Mat. Eventually, a weakened Earth would be ripe for invasion.

But that’s not the plan. Instead, the Ice Warriors intend to send foam-filled fungal seeds to a few cold cities in the hopes that the foolish humans will open the T-Mat cubicles out of curiosity and let the fungal spores escape. Sadly, that actually works, too…

Doctor Who Project: The Krotons

July 26, 2023April 4, 2016 by Chris Baer

No one goes into the wasteland.

Imagine a warship, piloted by crystalline life-forms, that runs out of energy on a planet populated by a mentally undeveloped species. Because their ship is powered by mental energy, the crystalline life-forms must raise that primitive society to high intelligence over thousands of years in order to find suitable candidates to plug into the engine. Sounds smashing and just a bit sinister, yes? Well, not the Doctor Who version of the story, Robert Holmes’ “The Krotons” (Story Production Code WW).

Despite the relative strength of the concept, “The Krotons” just falls a bit flat in almost all aspects, from the uninspired design of the malevolent Krotons themselves through to the weak characterizations of the native Gonds and their internecine politics. Thrown in a bit of Keystone Kops near-misses between Zoe and the Doctor on one hand and Jamie on the other and the result is a workmanlike yet unremarkable four episode story that nevertheless hews to the overarching theme of the Second Doctor’s tenure: the importance of thinking for oneself rather than letting a machine do it for you.

The story starts agreeably enough, with the Doctor, Zoe, and Jamie arriving on a planet with two suns, necessitating the deployment of the Doctor’s “favorite umbrella” to ward off the heat. The TARDIS lands in a malodorous area of high sulfur content and interesting mineral deposits such as mica and tellurium, allowing the Doctor and Zoe to banter a bit about chemical compositions. And, pleasantly, it’s all foreshadowing, because the particular minerals play directly into the plot’s resolution. For, you see, if you know enough chemistry, you know that tellurium, from which the Krotons’ organic spaceship is conveniently made, is soluble in sulfuric acid, which the Doctor knows how to manufacture from the rocks at hand. It’s fairly clear how this one will end…

Doctor Who Project: The Invasion

July 26, 2023March 3, 2016 by Chris Baer

Ah, shut up, you stupid machine!

On tuning in to “The Invasion” (Production Code VV), you could be forgiven for thinking you were watching ITV instead of the BBC. That moody, suspenseful, jangling music! The sense of dread and dark shadows caused by the angular camerawork! Is this Doctor Who or Danger Man? Only seeing Patrick Troughton instead of Patrick McGoohan puts the matter firmly to rest.

While writer Derrick Sherwin (working from a story by Cyberman creator Kit Pedler) grounds events firmly in the realm of Doctor Who, there can be little doubt that director Douglas Camfield kept abreast of his contemporaries’ work. The style breaks new ground for the show, bringing a more modern feel to the framing and pacing, and carrying on from his earlier work on “The Web of Fear.” Indeed, in many ways, “The Invasion” serves as a sequel of sorts to that show about Yeti in the London Underground, as the Doctor and his companions Jamie and Zoe arrive in contemporary London and seek out Professor Travers, himself a veteran of “The Abominable Snowmen” and “The Web of Fear,” for help in repairing some faulty TARDIS circuits.

Prior to reaching London, however, there’s a little matter with a missile. Upon materializing in orbit around the dark side of the moon, the TARDIS finds itself under attack and just barely escapes a missile fired at it from an unknown lunar base that has a spaceship guarding it. The TARDIS makes an emergency materialization on a farm in the English countryside, and, in the first of many curious non-sequiturs in this eight episode story, the focus turns directly to fixing those circuits, with no more worry paid to the source of the missile. The Doctor and friends hitch a ride to London from a truck driver, who quickly pulls off the road to hide. The TARDIS has arrived inside The Compound run by The Company, and when the driver realizes that they are not part of The Community, he endeavors to sneak them out. The weight given those words echoes, perhaps unintentionally, another ITV product, The Prisoner. There’s a very real sense of danger and the unexpected, rather new for Doctor Who, compounded by the driver being gunned down in a most violent fashion by toughs in dark glasses and motorcycle helmets after he has gotten the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe out of harm’s way.

And then, in an exceedingly odd transition, we’re treated to a fashion show.