Doctor Who Season 7: Doctor In Exile

The story so far: after William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton had fronted Doctor Who throughout the 1960s, 1970 saw sweeping changes come to the show. Incoming producer Derrick Sherwin and Peter Bryant (the previous producer prior to Sherwin) had selected Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor, and had a bold new plan for shaking up the show – bring it down to Earth for an extended period and not only do you freshen up the concept, but you also help save some of the budget which might otherwise go on unusual costumes or unique sets. The length of seasons would also be slashed to 20-something episodes per season (which would last all the way through season 21), leading to a much less arduous production process than the 1960s seasons, and the show would go out in 625-line colour, rather than the 405-line black and white format it originated in back in 1963.

There’d also be a new logo; indeed, this is arguably the first time the show had an actual logo, rather than just the name “DOCTOR WHO” written in a generic font.

We kick off with a brand-new Doctor, brand-new title sequence visuals (though still with the classic music), and an iconic story – Spearhead From Space, penned by Robert Holmes and the shortest tale this season at 4 episodes (the other serials this season are all 7-parters). England is undergoing a heatwave, UNIT’s picked up something strange flying down to earth in formation, and as for the Doctor – well, the Time Lords didn’t like him so they exiled him from pace. As well as forcibly regenerating him and dispatching him to Earth, the Time Lords have broken the Doctor’s TARDIS and excised key bits of knowledge from his mind to prevent him fixing or circumventing their sabotage.

However, in the Doctor’s trial he did persuade the Time Lords that Earth needed an eye keeping on it – so they exile him to Earth and ends up picked up by UNIT. The Brigadier isn’t sure of him – having not yet experienced his regenerations – but soon is convinced of his credentials, and makes him an offer: work in conjunction with Cambridge academic Liz Shaw (Caroline John) as a scientific advisor to UNIT and he’s welcome to have room, board, and a workshop to tinker on the TARDIS in. The Doctor is not sure about this, and Shaw is initially not keen on the job either – but when they come up against the Nestene Consciousness and its plastic puppets, the Autons, the Brigadier’s point is made: Earth has made itself known to the wider galaxy, and we’d better expect visitors.

Doctor Who Season 6: Doctor In Triumph

The story so far: with the Hartnell era concluded, Patrick Troughton has spent a season bedding in and a season largely assisting Bases Under Siege. His tenure in the role has thankfully avoided the backstage drama that derailed the mid-to-late portions of season 3, and the show is going from strength to strength – and now we’re in the last season of the 1960s, and the most complete season we have had for quite some time. In fact, only two of the serials here are missing any episodes, so unless I specify otherwise you can assume the stories under discussion are fully intact.

We kick off with The Dominators, by a mysterious man called Norman Ashby. In fact, it’s Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, who wrote The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear – but this serial got caught up in rewrites, and Haisman and Lincoln were so upset with the changes made to it that they asked for the Alan Smithee treatment. Specifically, it was originally being written as a six-episode serial, but Peter Bryant decided that it was running too long, so Haisman and Lincoln were told to down pens and Derrick Sherwin as script editor rewrote episode five to conclude the story there. This reflects a change in approach – aside from Tomb of the Cybermen, season 5 had followed a six episode-per-serial pattern, but for this season Bryant and Sherwin were happy to let serials run longer or shorter as needed, which is probably the sensible way to do things.

The titular Dominators are humanoid alien invaders given to padded shoulders, because they’re power dressers just like they’re power trippers in many other spheres. The Dominators show up on the planet Dulkis for the sake of blowing it up to get rare resources, with their robotic agents, the Quarks (think refrigerators on legs), as their main source of labour and muscle. The peaceful Dulkians need the Doctor to help, and what follows is an exercise in anti-colonialism featuring toyetic robot adversaries which feels very much like a throwback to the Hartnell era.

“Help, we’re being oppressed by a vending machine!”

There’s some interesting stuff going on here. As in The Rescue, the Doctor’s showing up on a world he’s visited before, and loved it the first time around, to find that things are awry; in this case, the Doctor appreciated the utter ban on warfare and weaponry the Dulkians enforced while he was there, and is perturbed to learn that since his last visit they’ve developed nuclear weapons – though this is explained as a by-product of the development of atomic energy, prompting the Dulkian Council to immediately forbid further research along those lines once the destructive potential was apparent.

This sort of sense of an entire alien world with an entire history of its own was the usual way the Hartnell era established a sense of place, created a little society for us to visit, and generally do worldbuilding – so far, the Troughton era has resorted to the Base Under Siege format to do this. Perhaps after season 5 was the right time to do a mild throwback story like this – both to test if the series could still tell this sort of tale, and also to see how subsequent production techniques and refinements could be applied to it.

Doctor Who Season 5: Doctor In a Base Under Siege

The story so far: William Hartnell had a good run, until his health collapsed and he needed to be written out. The process was complicated by the fact that John Wiles, who had replaced Verity Lambert as producer of Doctor Who, managed to alienate BBC management and the cast of the show alike, so the problem caused by Hartnell’s decline was not able to be addressed until Innes Lloyd, Wiles’ replacement, had been able to mend bridges and get his agreement to stand down. This led to season 4, in which Patrick Troughton stepped into the role and was a fantastic breath of fresh air straight out of the gate. The season ended with the Doctor and Jamie adopting a brand-new companion, Victoria Waterfield, and heading off on new adventures with her – and I was so enthused by it I blitzed season 5 almost immediately.

After two seasons which are mostly incomplete, at least in terms of their visual footage (audio of all episodes exists), we’ve now got past the hump – this is a 40 episode season of which only 18 episodes are missing. We actually have a couple of fully intact serials, would you believe it – and several other serials are almost complete bar for an episode or two. We’ll still need to resort to animations or audio reconstructions from time to time, but the end of all that is in sight.

We kick off with one of the intact serials – The Tomb of the Cybermen, written by Kit Pelder and Gerry Davis, and wouldn’t you know it – we’re in a quarry!

Look! A quarry! We’ll see a ton of these from the 1970s onwards but for the 1960s show they’re a rarity.

That’s right, “outdoor” scenes in pokey little studios with painted backdrops are no longer the invariable rule, now we get an outdoor sequence set in on the planet of Telos, where an archaeological expedition is unearthing an ancient alien settlement (spoiler: it’s the titular tomb, which is full of Cybermen and horrible traps). It’s a little hard to say, due to how many lost episodes we’ve had, but I think this is the first time we have an old quarry somewhere standing in for an alien world; some shots are composited in or were otherwise clearly done indoors, but some were very clearly shot on location, so what would eventually become a Doctor Who cliché (once they had the budget and technology to do more quarry shoots) was born right here.

The serial is also a landmark because it’s the first one to be produced by Peter Bryant – Innes Lloyd hadn’t stepped down, he just let Bryant have a go at producing this one (with Victor Pemberton taking on Bryant’s usual script editor role for the serial) as a test run for him later taking on the job full time midway through this season, with Lloyd and Bryant resuming their producer/script editor roles after this.