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.
The story so far: Doctor Whobegins, develops, and continues with William Hartnell in place as the Doctor. All is not well. Though season 2 saw the show go from strength to strength, and season 3 included some of its most ambitious stories yet, Hartnell’s health is sharply declining – a dire circumstance when you are one of the lead actors in a show which shoots seasons of over 40 episodes at a pop. Something clearly has to give – and after a bit of a churn behind the scenes when it comes to the production staff, current showrunner Innes Lloyd and script editor Gerry Davis have a cunning plan. If only Hartnell would say yes to it…
Season 4 of Doctor Who might be one of the must crucial turning points in the show’s history – at least as important as its debut, and arguably even more important, because it was the season where it had to either reinvent itself or die. It’s frustrating, then, that it’s the show that has been the worst hit by far by the BBC’s shortsighted policy on erasing footage; of the 43 episodes, only 10 survive with the visuals intact, the remaining 33 having survived in audio format only.
That said, in recent years the season has benefitted greatly from an endeavour to produce animated visuals to marry up with the surviving audio, allowing something a bit closer to the original presentation to be enjoyed. Think of it as Doctor Who: The Animated Series, because we’re going to have more cartoons than live action footage this go around.
This smuggler doesn’t know the First Doctor’s weakness is “getting sleepy”, which is what kills him in the next story.
We kick off with – alas – one of the serials which is no longer extant save for audio and hasn’t had an animated version made, Brian Hayles’ The Smugglers, which would be the final historical of the Hartnell era. With Ben and Polly about to witness, in the next story, the Doctor’s first regeneration, it was perhaps important to give them this opportunity to experience something resembling business as usual for the Hartnell era; after all, if Ben and Polly don’t get a sense of what the First Doctor is like, they won’t be able to appreciate how different the Second Doctor is, and The War Machines was far from a standard adventure for this era.
So, at the end of The War Machines, Ben and Polly blundered into the TARDIS, and now they’ve ended up whisked away in time and space. Well, not that far in space, at any rate – they’re still in England. They’re in 17th Century Cornwall, specifically, in an era when smugglers and pirates are up to no good, and they have a bit of an adventure. It’s basically Doctor Who doing a generic pirate story, like how The Gunfighters was Doctor Who doing a comedy Western and The Myth Makers was Doctor Who doing Homer and The Crusade was Doctor Who doing Shakespeare and The Romans was Doctor Who doing bawdy comedy.
The story so far: after a season spent developing itself, Doctor Who really began to hit its stride with its second season, in which the Doctor played a notably more active and heroic role than the somewhat aloof stance he was wont to take in the early phases of the first season. With season 2 ending with The Time Meddler – a true high point of the series showcasing both the Doctor’s slightly ambiguous nature and some great chemistry between new companion Steven and by-now seasoned hand Vicki, surely the show would go from strength to strength, right? So far, we’ve seen no compelling reason why Hartnell couldn’t keep fronting the show for years and years to come…
There’s a cruel irony when it comes to looking at season 3: it’s the show’s longest season ever at 45 episodes, but it’s also the second most incomplete season by a comfortable margin. Season 1 had 9 missing episodes – annoying for sure, but at least they were concentrated in the more mediocre historicals. Season 2 had 2 missing episodes, both in The Crusade, a fun serial but not an especially significant one. Season 3 has an eye-watering 28 missing episodes, with only three stories surviving with all their episodes intact. This issue will get worse before it gets better, unfortunately, though at least audio recordings have survived of all the shows thanks to audience members making recordings off the air (that being what you did as a proto-nerd in a pre-VCR era), so we can at least experience all of the stories somehow, even though it isn’t quite in the way the makers intended.
We kick off with Galaxy 4, a four-part serial of which only one part (episode 3) is available to us with its visuals intact; for the rest we must resort to audio – or animation, for like a swathe of other stories from missing seasons of the show the BBC has arranged for animated visuals to be produced to match to the surviving audio. We’ve actually gone past one of the serials with animated reconstructions of episodes already – The Reign of Terror enjoyed this treatment, but I didn’t comment on it because I couldn’t be assed to actually track down the animated versions of its fourth and fifth episodes. The animation there is a bit off – it’s clearly trying to be at least somewhat realistic, and equally clear that they just didn’t quite have the resources to make it work, so it alll looks very uncanny valley.
Galaxy 4 is the only season 3 serial to get the animated treatment so far, though the style is largely in line with what I’ve seen of many of the animated adaptations of Troughton-era stories. It reminds me a bit of Archer – it’s probably using the same or similar underlying technology – and I actually think that’s kind of apt. Archer, after all, is a loving spoof of 1960s genre fiction, this is 1960s genre fiction, it kind of fits in that sense. It’s all in black and white, mind, but this feels like a good call to me – doing the animation in colour when the sole remaining episode is still in black and white would be incongruous.
Anyway, what of the story itself? The TARDIS has landed on a world which seems deserted. The Doctor is puzzled – all the signs suggest that the world is actually quite well-suited to life, and yet none is in evidence. Then a small beeping robotic thing shows up and starts examining the TARDIS – Vicki decides it’s cute and dubs it a “Chumbly”, in keeping with her ongoing habit of giving pet names to things. Tentatively leaving the TARDIS, they encounter another Chumbly, which seems to be both studying them and attempting communication with them, but is hampered by an apparent inability to speak conventionally.
In a textbook example of inappropriate fan behaviour, a Chumbly rolls up to the TARDIS and starts humping it.
Showing off a heat ray, it persuades the TARDIS crew to accompany it – but is then ambushed by a group of Drahvins, an all-female race of miniskirted blonde hotties from the planet Drahva. The Drahvins warn the crew that the Chumblies are probes sent by the Rills – a monstrous, hostile species that are in conflict with the Drahvins – and insist on taking the gang to meet with the Drahvin leader Maaga (Stephanie Bidmead). Maaga explains that the Drahvin and Rill space empires are in a state of all-out war – a conflict which Maaga insists will only end with the genocide of one species or the other. After a conflict in orbit, Maaga’s ship and a Rill vessel crash-landed on this planet – which is unstable, and will explode before long. Both ships are damaged – but Maaga is determined to make sure that the Rill ship is not repaired and they cannot escape.
The Doctor smells a rat right from the start – perhaps noticing the somewhat totalitarian attitude of the Drahvins to leadership – and sure enough, it transpires over the serial that the Drahvins are actually the assholes in this equation, the Rills having offered them assistance in leaving the planet and been rebuffed due to Maaga’s insistent adherence to genocidal Drahvin policies. The script by William Emms (his only serial for the show which actually got accepted for production) is not remotely subtle about this – the Doctor, Steven, and Vicki all twig to to the Drahvins being wrong’uns by the time they’ve had a chat with Maaga – and the overall aim here seems to have been to present a story inverting the aesthetic of The Daleks, in which the monstrous creatures which interact through futuristic mechanisms turn out to be more humane than the human-seeming aliens with the attractive appearance.
Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy 