The Time Warrior

Chapter The 144th, where the Doctor is back in time for a new companion.

Plot:

UNIT bring the Doctor in to investigate as scientists from a top secret research establishment keep going missing. Also investigating is a young reporter Sarah Jane Smith, who has blagged her way in by pretending to be her Aunt Lavinia, an esteemed virologist. The Doctor rigs up a gizmo which shows that someone is travelling through time to kidnap the scientists and steal equipment, dragging them back to the middle ages. He follows their time signal in the TARDIS, unaware that Sarah has stowed away aboard. A Sontaran, Linx, has crash landed and done a deal with a local robber baron, Irongron. In exchange for anachronistic weapons, Irongron gives Linx shelter, and Linx repairs his spaceship with help from the kidnapped scientists.

Sarah gets the wrong end of the stick and thinks the Doctor is the one helping Irongron. With soldiers from the nearby castle of a local nobleman, who fears attack by Irongron, they kidnap the Doctor. After the Doctor explains, they join forces to repel Irongron's attack, then sneak into Irongron's castle, drugging his men's food with a sleeping potion. They send all the scientists back to their proper time, but cannot stop the launch sequence of Linx's mended spaceship. Linx kills Irongron, and a stray arrow kills Linx in the ship, when it goes into the probic vent on the back of his neck - a Sontaran's only weakness. Linx collapses onto the lift-off button, meaning the ship's engines will fire and destroy the castle. Everyone else escapes, and the weapons Linx built get destroyed in the blast. Sarah Jane joins the Doctor in the TARDIS to travel back to her own time and place.

Context:

Back to random selection from the whole of the Doctor Who TV oeuvre, after a slightly more guided trip to the North Pole for Last Christmas. I watched this stripped an episode a day over four days in the Chrimbo Limbo, the days between Christmas and New Year's Day. All the family (the Better Half, boys of 13 and 10, girl of 7) were up for it, and watched along with me. Everyone was on hols from school or work, and we took a break for 25 minutes every day from indulging in the usual preoccupations of the period: pondering over whether it's still acceptable to have the Christmas lights on (yes), to have the seasonal playlist still in rotation (that's a no apparently - I was outvoted), not knowing what day it is, and having the usual panic waking up every morning that one has probably missed a bin day and might have to wait two  weeks to have the mounds of wrapping paper, wine bottles and uneaten sprouts taken away. The Time Warrior is an apt story to watch at this time, as it was originally broadcast starting just before Christmas 1973, crossing into the New Year period of 1974 by its final episode. It was viewed from the DVD but with the - frankly unnecessary - updated CGI effects switched off, as nature intended. 

First time round:

Having been far too young to watch The Time Warrior on its BBC1 debut broadcast in 1973 / 74, this was one of very many 'classic series' stories that I caught for the first time on VHS. This release was more notable than a lot of those other tapes, though. It was one of the earliest, before distribution was reliable, before future releases were even advertised (or at least they weren't advertised anywhere the young me would ever have seen them). As such, back then, one stumbled across them - they were always a find. This particular find (on a Saturday in 1989 in the Bognor Regis WHSmiths) was particularly special, as a head-spinning three new titles hit the shelves at once. I've written about this moment in the First Time Round sections of the blog posts on the other two stories that became available that day, The Ark in Space, and The Daleks. The Time Warrior, like most of the stories released at that time, had its episodes stitched together into one feature-length omnibus. Most of those stories, though, were later re-released on VHS during the 1990s unedited; for some reason, The Time Warrior never was, so it was only when the DVD came out eighteen years later that I first got to enjoy the full Time Warrior experience.

Reaction:

Every story of Jon Pertwee's five year tenure in the title role of Doctor Who was deliberately planned to have a hook, a big audience-grabbing unique selling point. Each of these bagged the series opener the cover of that week's Radio Times. In the first year, it was a new Doctor, and the show being on TV in colour for the first time. In the following years, there was the launch of a new Master villain, the return of the Daleks after many years, and the first ever story to bring back old Doctors alongside the current model. For the eleventh season, which started late in 1973, producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks must have felt hard-pressed to come up with another new idea. In the end, they went with the Doctor travelling back in time. Now, or in the early years, this wouldn't be seen as remarkable at all, but in 1973 time travel backwards hadn't been done for a while: a couple of brief interludes only in the previous seven years, no whole stories. Doctor Who was by then a show about space monsters - either the Doctor went to them, or they came to him - not meeting Kings and Queens and other historical personages. Whether reintroducing this was a sufficient hook for the new series is debatable (the Radio Times cover completely ignored this aspect of the story, for example), but it worked as a way to expand the canvas and allow different types of stories to be told.

What writer Robert Holmes makes of the brief is deceptively simple. It is probably the epitome of what fans refer to as a 'romp'. It's a slightly nebulous label, so there's room for differences of opinion, but to my mind a Doctor Who romp is one where the tone is quite light-hearted but energetic, the stakes aren't that high, and the main aim is fun rather than scares, action or drama. As such, it's a very difficult style to do well. Make it too low stakes and light-hearted, and it doesn't look like it's being taken seriously enough, which means people watching don't care, which means they don't have fun, defeating the point. Holmes was a craftsman, and well versed in writing Doctor Who by this point, having written one a year on average since Patrick Troughton was the Doctor, so finds the right balance. He creates an interesting enough premise: the present is being invaded by the past, because a futuristic space villain has crash-landed in Earth history. He thereby distills everything about Doctor Who into these four episodes, and introduces a new sub-genre. The pseudo historical, as it is called in old school Who fan circles, features an alien menace terrorising a historical setting. Like most story styles it was tried as a one-off experiment in an early William Hartnell outing (The similarly named The Time Meddler in Doctor Who's second ever season), but from this point on it gets used regularly, particularly by Holmes himself in such stories as Pyramids of Mars and The Talons of Weng-Chiang.

Not content with sub-genre innovation, Holmes also creates an enduring new alien race, perhaps the last great returning monster of the classic series, the Sontarans. A jingoistic species with an overriding passion for war is another deceptively simple premise, but Holmes makes it work because he writes it (and Kevin Lindsay as Linx plays it) straight as an arrow. The (excellent) design of the creature belies its nature, being squat and potato-headed, but not a figure of fun despite some taunts from the medieval bandit characters; the sense in the script is that Linx knows he may appear ridiculous to these primitives, and uses it to his advantage, taking Irongron by surprise, for example, and besting him in one scuffle. The subplot of Linx perverting the course of history by providing weapons to Irongron that are too advanced for the current undeveloped society is nice enough in itself, but is also interesting for how it illuminates the Sontaran's character. Even past the point where he no longer needs to bother, he still follows through on his side of the bargain - he has a sense of honour and integrity. Even though Irongron isn't particularly interested, Linx continues working on a fighting robot for him too, and it's clear that he's doing this because he loves it! He loves making weapons and stirring up conflict. It's an honesty of purpose that's never quite recaptured in the future Sontaran stories, until maybe the new series appearances.

As well as expertly treading the fine line regarding the tone of the story, and creating a new story type, and a new monster, Holmes has to introduce a new companion. And what a companion it is: Sarah Jane Smith. She doesn't quite arrive fully-formed, it's a slightly embryonic version of the character that will endure for almost forty more years, but it's still a very impressive debut. Sarah is self-possessed, clever, resourceful, indefatigable, and won't let anyone push her around. Elizabeth Sladen performs the role with gusto, managing to make every line seem lovable, even when the - middle-aged male - production team give Sarah material that's veering towards shrill and hectoring. Pertwee has an instant rapport with his new co-star; his performance here is charming and unforced, with all the irritating, patronising bits from previous years gone, either because they weren't relevant to this new relationship (unlike the more 'mother hen' role he took up with regard to previous companion Jo Grant) or perhaps because he was getting better at it after four years. The guest characters are all written and played perfectly for the romp style too; larger than life, yes, but still expertly calibrated. David Daker as Irongron, particularly, is having enormous fun, but so is the audience watching him. It's a shame he gets killed at the end. But everyone is great: Jeremy Bulloch as Hal the Archer, Alan Rowe as the pallid, worried Edward, and pre-Eastenders June Brown as his wife. My favourite is Donald Pelmear as Professor Rubeish, a wonderful comic performance.

Connectivity: 

Both stories were first broadcast starting in December. Both feature actors (Kevin Lindsay, Dan Starkey) who have appeared multiple times in the show as Sontarans, as well as occasionally in other roles.

Deeper Thoughts:

The end of 'The Tens'. The end of this decade, like the last one, has caught me by surprise. It's only very recently that I realised that the end of a ten year block - what to call it, the Teens, the Tens? - was fast approaching, and I remember the end of 2009 taking me similarly unawares. The end of the 1970s or 1980s seemed much more apparent, and much more celebrated, by comparison. I don't know if it's my getting older, or because we're still early in the century (making the naming convention a little tricky) that's the reason for this. As with everything we pattern-seeking humans consider, twentieth-century Doctor Who can get lumped together, and appraised in ten-year chunks; indeed, a very good trio of reference books were released in the 1990s that did exactly this for the previous three decades (The Sixties, The Seventies and The Eighties, each by David J. Howe, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker; hard to come by now, but thoroughly recommended). Until now, twenty-first century Doctor Who hadn't been going long enough to be similarly treated. Now, it has reached the end of its first full decade, which can be compared to the stories broadcast between 2005 and 2009. You never know, similar books might start being published soon.

The decade started with new Who firmly established after its re-launch five years earlier. The years from 2010 to 2019 would then be about it enduring as that established show once its first major phase came to an end on the very first day of the decade, January 1st 2010, which saw the final David Tennant / Russell T Davies episode, part 2 of The End of Time, broadcast. The departure of such big hitters both in front of and behind the cameras could easily have been the end of the show altogether. But the show carried on to the end of the decade, with the final two years seeing another new phase, with eleven stories broadcast starring Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor, under the showrunner-ship of Chris Chibnall. These were bookends, though: the responsibility for the lion's share of the 2010s fell on one man: Steven Moffat. He was the main reason that the show was still on air ten years later. He cast two new actors to the starring role, Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi, and produced three successful seasons of stories for each. He wrote an astonishing eight Christmas specials, every year from 2010 to 2017.

In this time, the show built on the reach it had had in the previous decade to become a truly global phenomenon; this maybe came at the cost of the size of the UK TV audience - Doctor Who rarely made the ratings top ten as it had the previous decade. TV was increasingly consumed in new ways in the last decade, though, and Doctor Who embraced this, becoming a huge streaming hit (all of the twenty-first century episodes are still available on BBC iplayer). Another new way in which Doctor Who could be consumed during this decade was on the silver screen, with cinema releases for a couple of big episodes. This was all kicked off by the 50th anniversary in 2013, one of the most significant and successful times for Doctor Who in the decade, and a triumph for Moffat on every level.

Doctor Who on home media also evolved over the course of ten years. The regular classic series releases from the previous decade (like The Time Warrior) were coming to an end by the early years of the 2010s. By the end of 2013, all complete stories had come out, the range only running until then because of multiple re-releases. Three more semi-missing stories - two in 2014, and the final ever unreleased scrap in 2015 - stretched things further, but it looked like the days of the shiny disc as distribution method were over. A new all-animated version of The Power of the Daleks was released a year later, but the physical format version seemed secondary to its launch on the BBC Store, an archive streaming service. As it turned out, though, that streaming service was pretty short-lived, whereas the idea of animating stories for physical release looks set to run and run. This, together with the Blu-ray box set range (a well-planned and budgeted attempt to produce the definitive collection of classic Doctor Who) means a shiny disc renaissance, and opens up the possibility of releases for many years to come until - by the end of the next decade, perhaps - every single classic Doctor story might be available for the home shelf, with visuals for all the missing stories. This, of course, can feed in to other platforms too: the recently launched Britbox subscription streaming service put up hundreds of Doctor Who episodes, including some animated ones, on Boxing day, and they are already proving very popular.

On a personal note, the last ten years has seen one final addition to my family (a girl, currently 7 years old), and seen her and her two brothers grow up. They are all still interested in watching Doctor Who with their Mum and Dad, sometimes reluctantly, but usually with joy. Tomorrow, the first episode of Doctor Who in the Twenties will be broadcast, and I hope they'll all be joining me to watch it. In 2020, new Doctor Who stories will still be showing on TV, and innovations will still continue to be made in presenting the old stories for purchase. That's something to celebrate in dark days. So, to you and yours: Happy New Year, and Happy New Decade! 

In Summary:

Simple (deceptively simple), honest-to-goodness fun, in 25-minute long bursts - what a nice way to end the year!