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Doctor Who season four: Say hello to the cosmic hobo

The fourth season is a landmark one for Doctor Who – and one that is almost completely missing. There is not a complete filmed serial intact, and really only scattered episodes to watch Patrick Troughton grow into the role. From listening to these storylines, you can hear both the development Troughton put into the character and the overall transformation of the series into something that is much more like is produced today. The concepts of regeneration were put into place from the start: The Doctor is always a bit confused at the beginning (well, that’s really not surprising) and it takes a while for the character/actor to find his feet in the role.

Power of the Daleks

Thankfully, David Whitaker gives him a real fun adventure to kick things off, as the confused crew lands on a colony world that has discovered a crashed ship that – as the serial’s title indicates – has some Daleks inside. These are unusually stealthy Daleks however, as they pretend to serve the humans while they marshal their resources and numbers. You can hear some of Troughton’s mannerisms and eccentricities coming out even in this early episode, along with the distinct “I’m pretending to be stupid while actually being brilliant” vibe he honed to perfection.

The Highlanders

The other half of the Third Doctor double act shows up here, as Jamie McCrimmon makes his entry into the show. Frazer Hines is as much an essential piece of the Third Doctor’s years as Troughton. The two had terrific chemistry. It was so good, in fact, that Ben and Polly started to feel superfluous to the adventures. Having the pair around was good for a time, as it let the story beats be distributed among more characters, but these holdovers never felt all that comfortable in Troughton’s new world.

The Underwater Menace

The Doctor makes his first visit to Atlantis. There’s a mad scientist and a bunch of daft costumes (which you can see in one of the rare episodes that still exist). Next…

The Moonbase

The Cybermen return in what is essentially a remake of The Tenth Planet, only with Patrick Troughton mucking things up for the cyborgs instead of William Hartnell. The Cybermen costumes are a bit closer to the classic look this time around – they appear to be made of rubber instead of gauze – and the adorable-but-deadly cybermats also make an appearance.

The Macra Terror

About five seconds of this serial exist, as a scene of a character being traumatized by a giant claw was deemed too frightening for viewers in Australia. The crab-like Macra would disappear from the show for 35 years before coming back for a bit of fan service in Gridlock during David Tennant’s second season.

The show’s merging of comedy and horror can make the listener a bit queezy. We have another group of colonists being terrorized by alien forces, though this time, they keep up an innocent, hip-hip hooray façade. That includes composing happy tunes and, I’m not making this up (as much as I wish it were part of some kind of fever dream), cheerleaders. Goofy and Patrick Troughton go hand in hand, and that’s evident throughout here.

The Faceless Ones

We say goodbye to Ben and Polly, who at least get to say goodbye on screen. We also meet a companion that could have been in Samantha. She is ensnared in the plot, where aliens are stealing youth from the Earth for nefarious plans. Her brother has gone missing and her dogged search connects early on with the Doctor’s own investigations. It’s a mostly missing adventure that plays OK via audio. The intriguing story manages to stay engaging even without the visuals, and actually is one of the best non-monster stories for the Second Doctor.

The Evil of the Daleks

When it was rumored that a number of the missing episodes had been found in 2013, this mostly missing episode was on the top of most people’s wish lists (Marco Polo and The Fury from the Deep were also popular choices). It’s one of the absolute best Dalek stories and served as a fitting send off for the creatures in the '60s.

Creator Terry Nation was taking his pepper pots to America to try and develop a series there (it didn’t work) and Skaro’s best wouldn’t be seen for four years in the program.

The send off includes human agents, time travel back to Victorian times and a final confrontation as the Doctor puts a “human” element into the creatures. There are plenty of guest characters, who – in typical Dalek story fashion – all end up dead by the end of this story. Well, there is one survivor. Victoria (not Vicki), is orphaned after her father sacrifices himself for our heroes.

That sets up the first classic Patrick Troughton crew, which leads nicely into his second batch of stories: a season of monsters!

Doctor Who Season Three: Sea changes

While most of season two still exists in video form, the opposite is true of the third. From here onto the end of William Hartnell’s reign (which includes the first two serials of season four) only The Ark, the Gunfighters and the War Machines are complete.

Galaxy 4

I guess this is pretty sophisticated for its time, apart from the rampant sexism that is. The Doctor and crew land on a dying planet. Two spaceships have crashed. In one, there is a bunch of beautiful ladies. In the other: hideous alien creatures. In this case, it is the hideous aliens that are the good “guys,” having had their advances to aid the war-obsessed ladies rebuked. There are also cute robots called chumlies. That’s about it, really.

Mission to the Unknown

No Doctor or Tardis in this one-episode teaser for an upcoming adventure, but there are Daleks. They have a nefarious plan that we get some hints about, but we’re going to have wait four weeks before it comes into view because first…

The Myth Makers

We have to head ancient Greece and the siege of Troy. While the previous season’s mix of comedy and action in the ancient world, the Romans, worked very well, this falls flat. It’s hard to laugh when we know that at least half the cast (the Trojans) is going to end up massacred because of the Doctor’s suggestion of a giant wooden horse. We also see the end of Vicki, who stays in the ancient world, but we do pick up Katarina, who I’m sure will be around for a long time.

The Daleks’ Master Plan

OK, Katarina lasted all of four episodes (of 12; 12!) in this adventure, before ejecting herself and the man threatening our heroes out of an airlock. We also get to what appears to be a new companion – Jean Marsh’s Sara Kingdom – but she dies in the finale. Even future Brigadier actor Nicholas Courtney shows up, only to get killed of early on the adventure. The story involves the Daleks and a plan – a master one, I guess – to take over the known universe. Twelve episodes is way, way, way, way, way, way too long – six would have likely sufficed – and it is hard to listen to all the to-ing and fro-ing and stay focused. We also get the first Christmas episode of the series, which goes so badly you can understand why it was 40-some years before the program revisited the concept.

The Massacre

Amid all of season three’s silliness comes this intense and quite dark for 1960s Doctor Who adventure. The historical wheel of fortune lands in 1572 France, just in time for the titular massacre of the Protestant Huguenots. The story gives Peter Purves the one real chance he has throughout his time in the Tardis to stretch his acting chops, and it sounds (there isn’t a frame of video of this one in existence) like he takes full advantage of it. The adventure wraps up partway through episode four, giving Purves and Hartnell to have what would be an iconic moment – if we could just watch it. The Doctor has forced Steven to abandon his new friends, contending that they can’t change history. In a rage, Steven finally tells the Doctor to stuff it and, when they materialize he goes off in a huff, contending that he won’t come back. Alone, The Doctor thinks back to all of those who have joined – and left him in the last few years.

Steven does come back, and young Dodo runs into the Tardis, thinking it is a real police box, and we are off to…

The Ark

An interesting concept that falls down in execution. The multigenerational human ark concept is a well-worn one in science fiction, and it still – even to this day – has legs. This is really a pair of two-part adventures glued together by the same location a few hundred years apart. There’s an inadvertent plague in the first part (brought by Dodo, maybe her one major contribution to the series) and then there is a bit of a revolution to lead. It’s hard to not hate on this serial because of what is missing around it, however.

The Celestial Toymaker

Like half of this adventure, which includes deadly games, killer clowns and an invisible Doctor. For the first time, the Doctor travels beyond normal space into a land controlled by the Toymaker. The crew has to win… or die. There are a couple of notable parts of this episode. First, it features Michael Gough (his most-seen work was probably as Alfred in the Tim-Burton string of Batman movies), who gives an impressive, over-the-top performance a the villain; and there is very little William Hartnell.

The actor, while not as old as he appeared, was in poor health. In fact, legend has it that the reason the Doctor disappears for most of the series – apart from giving Hartnell a couple of weeks off – was that when he reappeared at the end, he would be a different actor. Hartnell chose to stay on for a few more stories, but it was clear the end was near for the first incarnation, and that the idea of regeneration was already kicking around.

The Gunfighters

First, back to the past with this infamous adventure, which has been rehabbed a bit in recent years as some kind of intentional comedy. I can see that it has a light tone, but the execution – oh the execution is extremely poor. You can sense that the show is running on fumes right now. That was reflected in chaos behind the scenes, as a new producing team was almost in place, all that it needed was some housecleaning.

The Savages

First up was Steven, who got left – in fine Doctor Who tradition – to help a people rebuild their lives after the Doctor destroys their old, despotic ways. It’s not a bad science fiction adventure, which takes a lot of cues from The Time Machine, though here the beautiful people are actually in charge.

The War Machines

And then we lose Dodo, who – in keeping with the character’s rather pointless run on the show – wanders off midway through the episode and is never seen again. On the upside, there is an improvement as Ben and Polly make the scene. These two will carry over into Patrick Troughton’s era, though they often felt like an awkward fit.

This is the first series set completely in contemporary Britain, with a computer hell-bent on taking over the world, decades before Skynet. It also marks a key transformation in the Doctor’s character. In the early days, he and the crew would have been scrambling to get out of the trouble they were in, lending a hand because it would help them get back to the Tardis. At the end of episode three, Hartnell stands defiant before a pack of War Machines, ready to defeat them with his just his brain and his guile. Saw hello to something resembling modern Doctor Who!

The Smugglers

Hartnell’s reign extended into the fourth season, and he got one final historical romp. This one manages to find a good balance between humor and adventure and danger, as our heroes get ensnared with pirates and other lowlifes in the 17^th century. It’s audio only, which typically works fine in the early era of the show, as the action was limited by the very nature of the show (recorded in studio; very quickly).

The Tenth Planet

William Hartnell’s era on the show ends with the introduction of an iconic villain and by working out a way to keep the show alive for 50 years. The Cybermen make their first journey on the show, wrapped in gauze and wandering around with giant lamps on their heads. While the costuming wasn’t as intriguing as later years, the concept certainly was, as we met a race that had replaced themselves bit by bit until there wasn’t any humanity left. I’ve also always loved the sing-songy voice the Cybermen employed early on. It’s almost frightening, because you can hear that last vestiges of their original selves trying to break out through the voice box, but unable to even replicate convincing speech anymore.

Meanwhile, the sickly Doctor finally succumbs at the end of the adventure and turns into Patrick Troughton, who – with recorder in hand and absurd hat on his head – will lead the show into its second era.

Doctor Who Season Two: The only constant is change

Changes were underway at the start of the second season of Doctor Who – another constant from five decades of the show. By the end of the year, there would a turnover in the Tardis crew and new producers in place of the show’s creators.

Even with this chaos, there was still plenty worth watching through the year. Only a pair of episodes are missing (sadly, from a really good historical adventure set  during the Crusades) so it is an era that is well represented in the archives.

More importantly, these adventures really defined the early Doctor Who. There are Daleks, historical adventures and ones spent in the far future. You get a sense that everyone is stretching their creative muscles throughout, reaching to some pretty wild places for mid 1960s science fiction.

Planet of Giants

Up first, however, is the little-loved three-episode adventure that found the crew shrunk to a few inches high and terrorized by everyday objects and slightly interfering with a murder-of-the-week plot involving a scientist and an overzealous investor. The effects actually aren’t all that bad for low-budget 1964, but the story is pretty slight (and they cut it down from four to three episodes).

Dalek Invasion of Earth

Now we’re talking. While it’s certainly overlong (you can say that about much of the early era of the show) there’s a good energy from beginning to end here – and there are Daleks on location, including a famous Sunday morning shoot of them (well, the three or four of them that they had) terrorizing future and conquered London.

It also marks the first cast change, as Carol Ann Ford – tired of being stuck screaming all the time and not playing the odd space-age teenager from the show’s original brief – left the show. The Doctor stranded his granddaughter on a rebuilding Earth and William Hartnell gave a wonderful little speech that has been used time and time again in retrospectives (and allowed the producers to include the late actor in the 20^th anniversary show, The Five Doctors).

The Rescue

Hey, hi there Vicki (not Victoria, that comes later) rescued by The Doctor, Ian and Barbara from a marooned spaceship of the future. Following Susan – Ford really did a good job with within the limitations of the scripts – was a tough act, and Vicki would be one of a number of interchangeable female companions until the arrival of Victoria (not Vicki) a few years hence.

The Romans

The pure historical shows (with no science fiction content) slowly weakened over the course of the series, before being abandoned after The Highlanders, but this one was a real romp from scriptwriter Dennis Spooner. The Doctor and Vicki get to romp around in Nero’s court, while Barbara and Ian get sold into slavery (it’s pretty clear who got the short end of the stick there). Spooner’s script is a lot of fun and there’s plenty (often pretty grim) of humor to move it along.

The Web Planet

OK, this probably looked like a good idea on paper – a planet inhabited by several races of giant and sentient insects – but the budget didn’t stretch to pull it off. What we get is something that is damn weird as actors in bee and butterfly-like costumes dance around the soundstage. The finale – as our intrepid crew face off against the Animus, a controlling brain-thing – is actually pretty effective, but it takes six long episodes to get to that point.

The Crusade

We go back into history to, well, the Crusades and Richard the Lionhearted. This is the only partially missing serial from the second season, which is a shame. The existing episodes and the audio version show us an intriguing story built on some fine performances from the core crew and the guest cast, including Julian Glover (not wearing aluminum hot pants like he did on Space: 1999) and Jean Marsh.

The Space Museum

The first episode of this is great, as the crew wanders around the titular facility, seeing the sights (including a Dalek) and discovering, at the end, that they are fated to end up as permanent parts of the collection. It falls apart quickly after that, as the two main factions on the planet are inept to the extreme. I don’t know if this was an intentional bit on scriptwriter Glyn Jones or just some half-hearted writing, production and acting.

The Chase

Dalek adventure #3 arrives, and it isn’t that great of a romp. OK, the Beatles show up in the first episode. Well, they did in the original broadcast. Apparently the BBC didn’t want to pay the fee to include “Ticket to Ride” in the DVD version, so that scene is now missing.

Back to the story. The Daleks want to destroy the Doctor and crew and, as you would expect from the title, chase the Tardis through time and space. They stop on the Empire State Building, the Marie Celeste and at some weird robotic horror show before getting to the finale, as the Daleks face off with the Mechanoids… and you know what, I really don’t have the energy to think about the chase more than that. We do get our first glimpse of Peter Purvis, first as a stereotypical American (and southerner at that) in New York City and then, at the end, as Steven, who is brought in to replace Ian and Barbara. The pair uses the Dalek time machine to get back home, and their era ends with a rather nice photo montage of the pair frolicking around London.

The Time Meddler

There are a number of firsts here. It’s the first adventure without any of the original crew apart from the Doctor. It’s the first pseudo-historical, where we go back in time but the adventure actually turns on a science-fiction plot. And it is the first time we meet another member of the Doctor’s race, though not identified as Time Lords as of yet. The Meddling Monk, especially with Peter Butterworth at the helm, is a terrific character who sadly only appeared one more time in the series. More amoral than the evil of the likes of the Master or the Rani, the Monk just wants to have a bit of fun in 1066 Britain.

Next time: William Hartnell's era ends, but not before we have 12 episodes of the Daleks (well, 11 and an odd Christmas-day episode) and the introduction of... the Cybermen.

Doctor Who season one: Wanderers in time and space

This fall, as the show prepared for its 50^th anniversary, I thought it would be a good idea to go back and watch Doctor Who. Instead of picking favorites episodes from each era or some other sane approach, I decided to watch (or listen – more on that in a bit) all of the episodes.

That’s 800 if you are curious.

What have I done?

Part of the way through, my friend David Davies said I should write about them, so over the course of the coming months, I’ll give you thoughts on each of the episodes. I hope to do a season a week. That’s 26 for the original run, seven for the current show (or maybe eight; it gets a bit odd at the end of David Tennant’s reign), Paul McGann’s TV movie and some other ephemera, including the two Peter Cushing movies from the 1960s. And by then, I should have some Peter Capaldi episodes to write about as well (not to mention spin-off shows, audio adventures, New Adventures books...)

Up first, the season that started it all. The early days of the series have been well documented, including in a film I will tackle on the other end of this series. The beginning of the show was as fraught as much as the program – which often was on the edge of collapse – was during its long history). The BBC was unsure of this new enterprise, but Sidney Newman and Verity Lambert were dogged, and were rewarded with a hit.

An Unearthly Child/The Tribe of Gum

The debut episode (which was recorded twice) set up the adventures that would follow, but featured a decidedly different Doctor than would be seen in later years. William Hartnell, a character actor through and through, played the character as an enigma: aloof, hard-edged and even a bit angry when schoolteachers Ian and Barbara burst into the Tardis for the first time, concerned about Susan, one of their students and the Doctor’s granddaughter.

And that’s a startling moment. Barbara pushes her way into a dusty, disused police box and emerges into the gleaming white of the control room, with an electronic hum behind it all. In a fit of pique, the Doctor sets them on their travels, and wouldn’t return to 1960s Britain – at least in normal form – for as long as the pair was on board.

The rest of the series isn’t nearly as memorable: The quartet get ensnared in a political struggle 100,000 years in the past, and – in a story beat that will be repeated quite a bit early on – are just trying to get back to the Tardis and away from the trouble.

The Daleks

I’m writing this just a couple days after the 50^th anniversary of the Daleks’ first appearance on the show. What a Christmas week that must have been for the young viewers! At the end of the first episode – after exploring a frightening petrified forest and what seems like an abandoned city – Barbara is alone, and stalked by something (all we see is the end of the plunger arm). She gives the first great companion scream and then roll to credits.

Like the Tribe of Gum, the actual serial is a bit of a slog that stretches the action out over seven episodes. The Daleks are wobbly and a bit daft, but you can understand where the terror and fascination came from, especially when we get a glimpse of what’s inside the travel casing: a clawed hand reaching from underneath a blanket.

The Edge of Destruction

Doctor Who started with a 13-episode order, which meant there were two episodes left and really no additional budget. That resulted in this interesting experiment, where the Tardis is in trouble and the crew struggle to work out what’s going on. The solution is a bit charming in its simplicity (a broken spring?) but the episode is best at deepening the relationship among the characters, and a bit of softening in Hartnell’s character.

Marco Polo

The first of the “lost” series. About a third – 97 to be exact – of the shows from the six black and white seasons are not known to exist. At the time, the show was recorded to video tape and then broadcast. The BBC chose to junk the existing tapes during the ‘60s (short sighted as it turned out). Plenty of episodes were lost that way. Over the decades, film copies made for foreign transmission have emerged, which has led to the return of a number of the missing episodes.

That’s not true of Marco Polo, where all seven of them are missing. Not all is lost for intrepid Doctor Who fans, however. When the shows were transmitted, there was a committed legion of fans who, armed with early home tape machines, recorded the audio. Armed with these tapes, the one-would-think sheepish BBC compiled audio adventures (with surviving cast members doing additional narration) of each of the missing stories.

Marco Polo usually gets mentioned in the list of “I wish I could watch it” series. Imbued with the early success of the series, Marco Polo featured, at least from the stills, some impressive costumes and sets. This is a pure historical story, with our quartet interacting with Polo and Kublai Kahn in 13^th century China. It’s certainly a fun listen, and among the best of the historical series.

The Keys of Marinus

Dalek creator Terry Nation wrote the script for this uneven adventure, which is notable for taking the Doctor out of action for a couple of weeks. The show was rehearsed and recorded (in about 75 minutes!) each week, which put a strain on the lead actor. Occasionally, Hartnell (and later Troughton) needed a break from the nearly year-round schedule. Often that meant knocking out the character and having hang out in the corner for a episode. Here, they just split up on their quest for the keys.

The Aztecs

Early on in the series, they would alternate between future science fiction adventures and purely historical stories set in the Earth’s past. Apart from the Daleks, the historical adventures owned the first season, as Marco Polo was followed by the Aztecs. We have an intriguing story and the first real examination of what kind of affect the Doctor and his companions could have on history. Barbara, after putting on a bit of bling in a tomb, is heralded as the reincarnation of an Aztec god. She wants to put an end to the human sacrifices, but the Doctor forbids her to do this, intimating that he has tried to interfere with history in the past and failed.

The Sensorites

And then there’s the Sensorites, which apart from the mysterious first episode never really goes anywhere, and features alien creatures with rather preposterous feet. This is a series that has fans shouting at the TV gods, as it exists fully in the BBC’s archives while the likes of The Evil of the Daleks does not.

The Reign of Terror

The first season ends with a romp during the French Revolution, with Hartnell wearing a magnificent hat and coat for much of the series (he’s in disguise you see) and featuring the first-ever location shooting of the series. Don’t get too excited though, it’s just the Doctor (and not even Hartnell) walking along a road. It’s also an example of a series partially in the archives. In recent years, there has been an effort to animate the missing episodes of these stories. It’s not a perfect solution, but it is a bit easier than listening to the audio and watching tele-snaps of the episodes, which was how they were bootlegged down the years.

Up next: The crew gets tiny, goes to ancient Rome and tangles twice with the Daleks in the second season.