Index: Patrick Troughton

Patrick Troughton's Second Doctor Stories...

Season 4:

The Power of the Daleks

The Highlanders

The Underwater Menace

The Moonbase

The Macra Terror

The Faceless Ones

The Evil of the Daleks

Season 5:

The Tomb of the Cybermen

The Abominable Snowmen

The Ice Warriors

The Enemy of the World

The Web of Fear

Fury from the Deep

The Wheel in Space

Season 6:

The Dominators

The Mind Robber

The Invasion

The Krotons

The Seeds of Death

The Space Pirates

The War Games

Return Appearances:

The Three Doctors

The Five Doctors

The Two Doctors

In Summary:

The scruffy one.

The Two Doctors

Chapter the 336th, is a Doctor Who two for the price of one offer, a BOGOF with Bug-Eyed Monsters.

Plot:

The Doctor takes Peri fishing on an alien planet, then collapses in the TARDIS. He's somehow been linked across time to his second self. That Doctor, accompanied by Jamie, is on a mission for the Time Lords, just like he always wasn't. He is visiting Professor Dastari, who runs a research centre space station, trying to persuade him to stop some of his team doing time travel experiments that could endanger the universe. Dastari's own research is in genetic manipulation; he has augmented an Androgum (aggressive, food-obsessed aliens) called Chessene - she is planning an attack on the station, having allied herself with the Sontarans. The attack happens, Jamie escapes and the Doctor is apparently killed. Really, he's been taken to Earth by Chessene, with another Androgum called Shockeye plus Dastari (who's in on the conspiracy). They are joined by two Sontarans. The other Doctor and Peri arrive on the abandoned station to investigate, and find Jamie living wild in the ducts. The Doctor recreates the mental link with his former self and works out that he is being held in Seville. The three of them travel there in the TARDIS, and run into Oscar and Anita, who have just witnessed the Sontaran ship land. Oscar has been setting up moth-catching equipment for later that evening, but he and Anita need to go back to their jobs at a nearby restaurant.

The Doctor, Jamie and Peri attempt to sneak in to the hacienda where the other Doctor is being held. Chessene, Dastari and the Sontarans are trying to get that Doctor's help to get the experimental time capsule to work. He refuses. Chessene betrays the Sontarans, killing them with acid. Dastari operates on the Doctor turning him into a hybrid Androgum to make him more amenable, but he and Shockeye escape and go to the centre of Seville to have a meal at Oscar's restaurant. When he won't accept alien currency for the meal, Oscar is stabbed to death by Shockeye. Shockeye escapes; the second Doctor is left behind, and returns to normal. The sixth Doctor, Peri and Jamie arrive just in time to get him out of the restaurant before the policía arrive. Chessene captures them all and takes them back to the hacienda. The sixth Doctor pretends that he has made the capsule operational. Shockeye is going to cook a human (Jamie) for himself and Chessene to eat before they leave. When the sixth Doctor tries to free Jamie, Shockeye wounds him; the Doctor flees outside, with Shockeye pursuing him, following the blood trail. The Doctor stumbles across Oscar's cyanide jar and uses it to kill Shockeye. Chessene sees some of the Doctor's blood and licks it up, much to Dastari's disgust. He turns against her, so she kills him, and tries to escape in the capsule. It blows up, killing her. The second Doctor summons his TARDIS by remote control, and he and Jamie say goodbye. The sixth Doctor decides that he and Peri should become vegetarians.

Context:

It has become an annual tradition that I download a Doctor Who story to watch when I'm away on holiday. It's not always possible, but often the selected story is vaguely appropriate because it includes scenes filmed in my holiday destination, or just scenes filmed in a country other than the UK. Sometimes, the characters in the story themselves go on holiday. The Two Doctors has not been selected for any trips before; I was holding it back thinking the day would probably come when the family visited Seville. We came very close in 2025; a nice Airbnb was very nearly selected, but we decided instead that the kids would prefer somewhere with a beach. So, to Menorca we went and - with very few stories left to blog - The Two Doctors had to finally accompany us (well, me, anyway, I didn't try to get any of the rest of the family to watch with me). Menorca is at least Spanish territory, so there is something of a link. I downloaded the three episodes from the BBC iplayer and watched them on my phone over the course of the break. 

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. This story completes another season and another Doctor. The tally stands at 12 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-9 and 11-14), and 38 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 11 now remain.

First Time Round:

I have a clear memory of watching the first episode on its initial UK broadcast on BBC1 on Saturday 16th February 1985. My Mum had made me a 'boil in the bag' prawn curry (definitely not a Vesta, probably Birds Eye or Tesco's own brand) for my tea. I watched Doctor Who in the living room, with the plate of food on my lap. I remember seeing the scene where the Doctor lands a weird alien fish on screen, and this momentarily putting me off my food. It didn't last long, and the plateful was scarfed down soon afterwards. An underlying message of the story is a promotion of vegetarianism but this didn't take with me. I've no strong memories of the rest of that episode nor my first watch of the others on the following two Saturdays, but I do remember a general feeling - in my serious fan manner - that it was too early in Colin's era for him to be sharing the spotlight with a returning Doctor. Now a lot of time (more than 40 years) has gone by, would I feel the same way?

Reaction:

Robert Holmes, who penned The Two Doctors, was one of the writers most instrumental in the success of 20th Century Who. There's a run of stories through the 1970s that he was involved with, directly or indirectly, that is seen by a majority of fans as a golden period, a template for Doctor Who excellence. As I mentioned in the blog post for one of his two 1960s stories The Space Pirates, though, that golden period doesn't quite extend to everything he wrote for the show. His first two stories are not generally liked, and neither are his last two. The final one was The Trial of a Timelord, co-written with many other people, and with so much negative stuff happening behind the scenes (including Holmes' failing health and death before his scripts were realised) that it would be churlish to criticise him or any single contributor. What, though, of his penultimate story? The Two Doctors was commissioned and produced before the BBC had threatened Doctor Who with cancellation in 1985; the series was ostensibly in rude health. The story Holmes had written immediately before was The Caves of Androzani, one that forever after would be in the top tens of all-time Doctor Who story polls. He was on a hell of a high. Immediately before Caves, though, Robert Holmes had been the first writer commissioned to write 20th anniversary special The Five Doctors, and he could not manage it. He tried but failed to weave the excessive set of 'shopping list' demands of returning actors and plot elements into a coherent narrative. The Two Doctors is a similar challenge: it requires the inclusion of a returning Doctor, companion and monster, and the arbitrary locating of some sequences in a foreign country (originally planned to be New Orleans, but when filming there fell through changed to Seville).

Maybe Holmes wanted to prove that he could achieve a 'shopping list' story after all. Or, perhaps, he was chosen because the story slot was the equivalent length of an old six-parter. There hadn't been a story of such length broadcast since the late 1970s when Holmes was last regularly writing the show. Even then, though, he didn't often write those longer ones. Usually in the 1970s, Holmes would work with writers to shape such stories to have a "dogleg", a sharp turn of the plot to a new focus after the two or four episode mark, to feel like a new but linked story was starting, keeping audience interest from sagging. He eschews that approach for The Two Doctors. There's a more gradual move from the action set on the space station to the action in Seville. It might have worked better to confine the space station stuff to part one and concentrate on Seville for parts two and three, or maybe vice versa. Probably, Holmes thought he had enough elements to keep things interesting without such a structure, and to be fair he does almost pull it off. The sixth Doctor doesn't appear early enough at the beginning, and the Sontarans are dealt with too early before the end; with a couple of tweaks to resolve both those points, the story would flow pretty perfectly. The second point is more forgivable as his new creations the Androgums are conceptually strong and nasty enough to carry the climactic villainy on their own. The first point, though, is much more of a problem. Aside from his face in the beginning credits, Colin Baker doesn't appear for the first 10 minutes of his own show.

The story starts with Patrick Troughton (seen in black and white at first, and using an older TARDIS console prop, both nice touches), and that is okay; it's an intriguing hook. It then stays on him, and the minutes stretch out. At several moments, I was inwardly screaming "Cut away!" and not just because it would be polite to the leading man. I was right in my feeling in 1985 as mentioned in the First Time Round section above; it's too soon for Colin's Doctor to be sharing the spotlight, and being pushed so far out of it delegitimises him - it feels like Troughton is conferring official status on him, rather than the other way round. Cutting away, and then intercutting between the parallel action of Colin and Pat's exploits would additionally have given the story a boost to its dynamism. A restless intercutting approach, a combination of script and direction decisions, was one of the things that enlivened The Caves of Androzani, after all. That, though, was directed by one of the most dynamic Who directors of the time, Graeme Harper; The Two Doctors, on the other hand, is directed by Peter Moffat. He is a safe pair of hands, and known for getting all the needed material in the can efficiently, even sometimes ahead of schedule (almost unprecedented for Doctor Who with its complexities far exceeding its budgets); the material that ends up in the can, though, isn't usually energetically paced. There's a couple of major issues with how key story beats are revealed; these may have stemmed from the script rather than having been introduced by the director, but one can't help but believe that a different director would have seen the issues ahead of time, and nudged the more than competent writer or script editor to fix them. Alternatively, of course, they could very well have been introduced by the director.

The first reveal of a Sontaran, and the moment where it becomes clear that Dastari is a traitor who is allied to the bad guys, are both handled in the same way: the reveal is held back for a long time, then finally achieved in a pedestrian long shot that might usually be used just for establishing a location. In both instances, the long shot is from no character's POV, so the moments are robbed of any drama. It should be a big deal for the Doctor (either of them) to discover that his old enemies are involved in the plot, and his old friend allied with them. As it is, the moments are underwhelming, and the impression is given that there was no need to hold the revelations back at all. Moffat achieves better things in the quieter moments. Though not perfect, the interactions between the sixth Doctor and Peri are much warmer and wittier than elsewhere in the season, with the squabbling dialled down. The sixth Doctor's haunted monologue as he worries about the fate of the universe is one of Colin Baker's standout moments in the role. Troughton and Frazer Hines effortlessly recreate the second Doctor and Jamie, with many funny lines and bits of business. Moffat gets two compatible but interestingly different takes on villainy from the two actors playing Androgums, building on the script's efficient world-building, establishing the race's culture and attitudes. John Stratton gets the showier Androgum role, drooling over the prospect of eating many different members of the cast, the hissable panto baddie. Jacqueline Pearce gives a masterclass performance throughout of savagery suppressed and hidden behind a veneer of elegance. The shocking moment where she cannot control her animal impulses and licks up spilled blood from the ground is magnificent, even though it is again mostly filmed in a long shot. At least there's a cut to a reaction from Dastari watching in disgust (a medium shot).

This era of Doctor Who comes in for some flak for excessive violence; but, as shocking as Shockeye's actions are, I don't think anything here is gratuitous. The underlying theme of the piece is about the ethics of how we treat creatures we perceive as lesser than ourselves; Shockeye's sadism is therefore very much in keeping. His callously offhand murder of bumbling comic foil Oscar fits with character and theme, and ups the ante when he has the Doctor cornered towards the climax of the story. The Doctor's use of Oscar's abandoned cyanide jar on Shockeye comes in for a lot of criticism. Again, though, I think it's the direction that's the problem. It needs to be urgent: the Doctor is about to be killed, and stumbles across the only thing he can find with which to defend himself when his adversary is almost on him. Because what made it to screen is instead done at a much more leisurely pace, it makes the action seem too premeditated. People don't like the Doctor's quip afterwards "Your just desserts", but I think it's rather funny. The tone is consistently of a dark comedy. Given the theme, all the subplots about genetic manipulation also integrate rather well. As such, I'm not sure it needs the prototype time travel machine as the MacGuffin. The Sontarans could just want to weaponise the genetic augmentation process somehow, and Chessene could just be planning to upgrade her whole planet en masse. This would mean no need to feature machinations by the offscreen Time Lords - a plot idea already overused in the series at this point - and would also mean that the second Doctor doesn't need to be working on his people's behalf (which breaks the established continuity to such an extent that a lot of complicated backstory has needed to be reverse-engineered by fan writers over the decades since the story's broadcast).

Other points to note: there's very good lighting in the scenes of the sixth Doctor, Peri and Jamie in the space stations ducting; Colin's lighter, more summery version of his costume works much better than the usual version; Peter Howell's score is one of his best. Although there is no reason at all why the action has to take place in Seville, it's still interesting to get away from the usual visual textures on occasion. The story can't resist the insertion of some touristy moments in the chase scene, which does slow things down when they should be speeding up as the denouement approaches. The only truly heinous moment is when Dastari has a flower thrown to him from a woman on a balcony. The characterisation, costumes and masks for the Sontarans are different from what went before, but work well. All in all, it is not as bad as its reputation; Holmes script is pretty close to the quality of his 'golden period' work; with more dynamic direction, and a few tweaks, this could have been another classic.

Connectivity:

Both The Two Doctors and Search Out Space feature the current Doctor unexpectedly teaming up with at least one character from the show's past (Colin working with the second Doctor and Jamie, Sylv with K9).

Deeper Thoughts:

The joy between the land and the sea. Perhaps a summer holiday is not a conducive time for too much original thought; I'm undoubtedly not the first to notice it, but it struck me in a contemplative moment in the sun of Cala'n Forcat that travel is all about dwelling in liminal spaces. The hotel we stayed in appears in photos like it's sitting atop a rocky outcrop in the middle of the ocean. In fact, it's on a high cliff edge, and behind the hotel are paths and steps down to multiple small coves. This is Cala'n Forcat; though there weren't the huge expanses of sand that you might except on a Spanish beach, there were clear blue waters to swim in at the base of ravines, with tall rock walls either side. It was a dramatic landscape, similar to (but a lot warmer than) the Welsh cliffs featured in 2024 story 73 Yards. In the script for that story, its writer Russell T Davies highlights such areas at the edges of things as places of magic, but also of conflict. I half suspect he just introduced the line about the war between the land and the sea to be a reference to the planned spin-off series, but there is a truth there nonetheless. The Balearics have been of strategic importance in many wars, annexed and occupied multiple times. The nearest town to where we were staying was Ciutadella (literally, the Citadel), which has been a fortification since the times of Ancient Carthage. Obviously resorts don't tend to be warzones these days, but liminal spaces come with risks as well as potential; this is possibly why we are drawn to them. Even if one doesn't go for beaches, the act of travelling takes one to the liminal spaces that are airports and train stations. Even if one never leaves home, taking a break puts us in the liminal mental space of being between work and play.

Cala'n Forcat

Looking back at the first holiday trip I covered for the blog in 2016, we again stayed in a place on the boundary between one area and another, outside a castle on the edge of woods. I started the blog the previous year, but had fit my posts around holiday breaks in the summer of 2015. As this time we were staying at Leeds Castle, somewhere that was the location of a Tom Baker story, and said story could be brought with us to watch in the cottage, it seemed too good an opportunity to waste. This started an annual tradition. I took The Leisure Hive (a story where the Doctor goes on holiday) to Shanklin in 2017 (between land and sea again), but ended up watching the story when back home, much closer to the liminal space of the Brighton beach on which some of it was filmed. The following year was the first foreign trip for the blog, to Tenerife, and I took along a story that involved the production team taking a foreign trip (Vincent and the Doctor). In 2019, I visited a European location with It Takes You Away (in which the TARDIS fam visit a European location). After a couple of years' suspension of holidays away because of Covid and lockdowns, I took Hell Bent to watch on the island where it had been filmed, Fuerteventura, in 2022 (and stayed in a resort at the edge of sand dunes). The year after, I listened to Marco Polo (The Doctor and friends on a long trip) while on a short trip to Kos. In 2024, I revisited Fuerteventura, this time with The Ice Warriors (completely thematically divorced from the surroundings, but I did at least experience the Troughton era mainstay of a foam machine during that break). That brings things up to this year and The Two Doctors.

Ciutadella

Holmes's Sontaran story itself comes from a liminal space in Doctor Who's span. It was a watershed between celebration (the hoopla of 20th anniversary) and chaos (the hiatus and the aforementioned crises in the making of the subsequent Trial of a Time Lord season), between when the series was seen as an unassailable institution able to film abroad, and when it had to struggle to endure. The production team were adjusting to a new format of 50 minute episodes before circumstances dictated they revert back again to half that length. Given another year, someone might have realised that they could have had a one-part self contained story (or even more than one) rather than three part stories like The Two Doctors. Would that have made a difference to the programme's longer term survival? At the time of writing, Doctor Who is in another such uncertain space. Will it endure? As said above, liminal spaces contain risk, but they also contain potential. Recent announcements up to August 2025 have been of a new multimedia event for 2026 in the mould of previous years' Time Lord Victorious and Doom's Day, and a new fan show on the official Youtube channel. Neither are things that tend to happen for shows that have been cancelled. Even more positively, news reports on the 21st August 2025 quoted an interview with Kate Phillips, chief content officer at the BBC, at the Edinburgh TV Festival. She said that the series will remain on the BBC "with or without Disney". Comments from the Beeb in 1985 were nowhere near as friendly to the show. Amusingly, she summarised the position as "The TARDIS is going nowhere" which perfectly summarises both the potential and the risk of this liminal space. Anyway, I'm almost out of stories to blog, and they'll have to get their fingers out to have new ones before summer 2026, so I might have to vacation without a Doctor Who story next year. What a thought!

In Summary:

Not too bad, and quite a dark comedy for something filmed in such bright sunshine.

The Invasion

Chapter the 328th, re: UNIT, and it feels so good.

Plot:

After narrowly avoiding a missile attack on the dark side of the Moon, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe land on Earth sometime in the late 20th century (we could argue forever about exactly when). The TARDIS is on the blink and becomes invisible. To fix it, the Doctor needs to work on some circuits, and trying to get help with this embroils him in the machinations of a global electronics corporation, International Electromatics. The head of this company is Tobias Vaughn, and he's in league with the Cybermen planning an invasion of the Earth. The TARDIS team meet Isobel Watkins, an aspiring photographer in swinging 60s (or 70s or possibly even 80s) London; her uncle went to work for IE and hasn't been seen since. Investigating this, the Doctor and Jamie are picked up by UNIT, a military taskforce run by the Colonel Lethbridge Stewart that they previously met fighting against the Yeti in the London Underground, who has now been promoted to Brigadier. UNIT has been keeping tabs on IE and Vaughn: people who have gone in to IE headquarters have come out changed, under Cyber control. There are also mysterious extra circuits in IE devices, and the Doctor can't immediately discern their purpose.

Vaughn is planning to double-cross the Cybermen, and is using Professor Watkins for this purpose. The Professor has invented a prototype teaching machine that provokes emotions in the user; Vaughn kidnaps Isobel and Zoe to coerce Watkins into turning his device into an anti-Cyberman weapon. The Doctor, Jamie and UNIT rescue the two women, but Vaughn bluffs the Professor and he finishes the job. UNIT then rescue the Professor before Vaughn can mass produce the machine. The Cyber army are hidden in the sewer system of London, and Isobel, Jamie and Zoe almost get killed trying to get photographic evidence of their presence. The invasion begins when a hypnotic signal, boosted by the hidden circuits in IE equipment, takes over the populace (the Doctor, UNIT and Co have a method of resisting the signal). The Cybermen emerge from the sewers and attack. The Doctor goes to the IE headquarters and persuades Vaughn that he can't control the Cybermen. They use the Professor's device to fight their way to the IE transmitter, with UNIT battling the Cybermen around them. Vaughn is killed, but transmission of the hypnotic signal is switched off. There are a tense few minutes while everyone waits to see if a missile will destroy the Cyber ship on the dark side of the moon before it can launch an attack on Earth. It does. Later, after the Doctor has mended the TARDIS circuits, the TARDIS team leave for new adventures.

Context:

The random number generator that dictates the order in which I blog Doctor Who stories indicated that it was time to cover my final black-and-white 1960s story, my final story with episodes missing from the archives, and - potentially - my final Cyberman story. I watched the version from the DVD, which has animated first and fourth episodes paired with the surviving soundtracks. I viewed the story spaced out over about two weeks of early May, accompanied by the Better Half for the early episodes. As this is one of her favourite eras of the show, and she was intrigued by the animation, I was able to persuade her to watch at first. Once the animated episodes were over, she lost interest and left me to watch the rest alone. 

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the completion of another Doctor's televisual era, with the second Doctor joining the first, third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth Doctors, to make it 11 on the 'done' pile so far. It also marks the completion of another season with 37 completed out of the 41 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14.

First Time Round:

I first saw The Invasion when it was released on VHS in 1993. It was the first tape released - in a range that had started a good few years before in the mid-1980s - that was presented as a self-contained story but had episodes missing because they were no longer in the BBC's archive. Starting a couple of years earlier, there had been tapes that collected together orphaned Who episodes within a documentary framing; these, though, had made no effort to contextualise the surviving material within the overall narrative. The Invasion plugged the gaps in the same way as the 1991 VHS release of Shada, which had sections that were unfinished rather than lost: an actor from the story (in the case of The Invasion, this was Brigadier actor Nicholas Courtney) gave a brief to-camera precis of what the viewer had missed. It's fair to say that Courtney's links were not detailed (his material lasted three minutes, and that included credits and a preamble where Courtney introduces himself and the character of the Brig). My first opportunity to experience the two missing episodes fully (or as fully as then possible) was in November 2004 when their audio, alongside that for the other extant episodes, was released on CD as part of a Cyberman box set. Finally, I got to see the two episodes with moving pictures when the aforementioned DVD, with animation plugging the gaps, was released in November 2006.

Reaction:

Doctor Who is famously the show with the flexible format that can go anywhere and anywhen, telling any kind of story. Equally famously though, it is a show that exists to serve a broad audience (it was brought into being in 1963 to keep all ages amused between sport and pop programming on a Saturday night, and was still performing this role in mid-May 2025 when one Ncuti Gatwa episode nestled in the BBC1 schedules between the year's FA Cup Final and Eurovision Song Contest). Throughout its history, the programme has thus swung between the experimental and the crowd-pleasingly formulaic. The Invasion comes during such a swing. Peter Bryant and Derrick Sherwin, who were effectively co-producers by this point, had taken over gradually from the previous producer / script editor team of Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis. With input from a scientific advisor Kit Pedlar, Lloyd and Davis had hit upon a successful formula for Doctor Who that had been used increasingly throughout Patrick Troughton's time as the Doctor: a base under siege by a monster of the week. By the season before The Invasion, this template was used for all but one story, with Yeti, Cybermen, Ice Warriors and sentient seaweed all getting a chance or two to kill or take over members of isolated, locked-in communities one by one before the Doctor defeated them. The formula had served its purpose and then some, and it was definitely time for a change. The first two stories of Troughton's third and final season preceding The Invasion were wildly different, both from what went before and from each other. But with experiment comes risk. Sherwin and Bryant wanted to create the certainty of a new winning formula, and The Invasion was a trial for an approach that they wanted to apply to every story from the next season onwards.

Though the storyline for The Invasion came from Kit Pedlar, and there are a few links to the most recent previous Cyberman adventure The Wheel In Space (the metal meanies use of a signal to control humans, and our heroes use of depolarisers worn at the back of the neck to combat this, are callbacks to that story), it is much more focussed on the future shape of Doctor Who than the past. The action doesn't take place on alien planets or in space, it's set on Earth, with the monsters coming to us; the characters aren't stuck in one base represented by a big set in Television Centre, but able to roam to many different places, many of them outdoors and filmed on location. The Doctor has a team to support him in banishing large-scale invasions too big to be handled just by him and the couple of friends with whom he tended to travel: UNIT was born. Leading this team was the Lethbridge-Stewart character, promoted to Brigadier, reused from a popular story of the previous season The Web of Fear. The Web of Fear - directed, like The Invasion, by Douglas Camfield - was very much a base under siege story, but had one key action sequence (the attack by Yeti in Covent Garden) that inspired many similar set pieces in The Invasion. Like in Web, there is a significant military presence in terms of both soldiers and hardware. The story world is expanded beyond the parochial, though: rather than the troops being from the British army as they were in Web, these are a United Nations taskforce (the story even involves an offscreen Russian missile team) with an investigative remit that allows for some espionage as well as shooting and blowing things up. The set-up has lots of potential, and would serve as the model for a lot of the Jon Pertwee era stories. It's not without drawbacks, though.

The importance of the Doctor and his companions is diluted by being part of a bigger team. Jamie is missing throughout the latter part of the story; part of this is because the actor was on holiday for an episode, but even when Fraser Hines is present in the studio, his character spends the best part of a whole episode asleep. His usual role of being the Doctor's minder isn't needed when the Doctor has the assistance of his own army. Early on, though, when the protagonists are more in investigative mode, there's some fun to be had in the sequences where Jamie and henchman Packer (played mostly for comedy by Peter Halliday) indulge in one-upmanship, squabbling like a pair of children. The Troughton Doctor too seems a bit diminished by becoming part of a professional investigation outfit; his usual schtick is to lure his enemies into a false sense of security by appearing to be bumbling and absent minded, but he can't really do this when he's in a role of expert advisor. There's the odd nice moment smuggled in - the Doctor undercutting tense sequences by stopping to play cards with Jamie, or posing for photographs - but in general, he just has to be serious and professional, which doesn't fit well. The series would struggle for quite a while in the Jon Pertwee era to square the circle of finding the fallible, human element in a serious establishment organisation: if its creator Sydney Newman was right, and Doctor Who needs a kid to make mistakes and get into trouble, why would UNIT hire such a person? Nepotism was the answer they finally decided upon, with Jo Grant having secured a job at UNIT because of a powerful relative.

In The Invasion, it is left to the character of Isobel Watkins to trip up herself and others into jeopardy, but she isn't sympathetic enough to provide the necessary heart. Her romance with a UNIT captain isn't given much air time, and doesn't convince when it is. The script also tends to patronise her and the other younger characters. The Brig casually disregards Isobel's evident knowledge of photography, and later refers to her, Zoe and Jamie as "crazy kids" when they venture into the sewers to secure evidence of the Cybermen. The Brig has only been involved in one and a half alien invasions, whereas Jamie and Zoe see off monsters every week; he should show them more respect. A lot of the early part of the story focusses on the fate of Isobel's uncle Professor Watkins, taken captive by Tobias Vaughn; once he's rescued, though, he disappears from the narrative - he's last seen early in the penultimate episode after having been shot in the leg, and - unless I blinked and missed it - he's never mentioned again. It's an odd paradox; The Invasion has too much going on to fully complete all characters' subplots, yet there is only six episodes worth of story here stretched to fill eight. On VHS, as mentioned above, it was reduced to a six episode story; annoyingly, the missing two episodes are from early on when the plot's put together fine. It's in the latter half that it falls apart. The ending is structured oddly, with the climax of the fight against Cybermen in the IE factory, including main villain Tobias Vaughn's death, happening too early. There's then a lengthy sequence of characters standing around waiting to hear about whether a missile has destroyed the Cybermen's ship in orbit. The sequences should have been swapped around, or - better - the missile could have been dispensed with altogether. The Doctor and Vaughn have a device that emits a Cyberman-destroying signal, plus a big transmitter to beam that signal into space; it would make more sense for that to be the mechanism that saves the day.

There's a lot of good stuff in here too, even later on: for example, the famous sequence of the hypnotic signal taking people over across London, and the Cybermen then emerging from manholes and strutting about near St. Paul's Cathedral. The special sound created for that signal and for other sequences like the revivification of dormant Cybermen is perfect, as is Don Harper's score. Little touches too, such as the repetition of Packer being summoned and appearing on a monitor, only for this to be twisted: the final time Vaughn calls for Packer, the scary blank face of a Cyberman appears on the monitor instead. This design of the Cybermen is probably the best of the 1960s, and the decision to hold them back for the first half of the story is a good one. The character of Vaughn is a joy to watch. Kevin Stoney creates a silky smooth psychopath, with occasional flashes of hysteria and anger. The way he says Packer's name is so fun, and so easy to imitate. Many a villainous character in Doctor Who's history has tried to ally themselves with the Cybermen, thinking they can turn the tables on them; Vaughn comes closest to pulling it off, with only Professor Watkins dragging his heels meaning Vaughn runs out of time to mass produce a machine to kill Cybermen (I was almost rooting for him to succeed). Though not a part of the original presentation, of course, it's worth noting that the two animated episodes are gorgeous, the art in character designs and backgrounds is probably the best ever created for a Doctor Who missing episode animation project. I had a slight twinge of disappointment both times the story returned to live action.

Connectivity:

The Invasion and Lux both feature the antagonists using entertainment technology to assist them in invading Earth: Lux uses movie projection equipment to corporealise, the Cybermen and their ally Tobias Vaughn use circuits in products like Jamie's transistor radio to send a hypnotising signal, quelling any resistance from the population. 

Deeper Thoughts:

Animated Meanderings. The Invasion started something by creating UNIT in 1968, and then started something again in 2007 - it was the inaugural story using animation to represent episodes that were missing from the story (because they were missing from the archives). As mentioned in the First Time Round section above, Doctor Who initially made do with brief linking synopses delivered by actors from the original story, specially filmed many years later. Sometimes these were in character, sometimes not. Occasionally, things got a bit more sophisticated with surviving audio recordings and off-screen photographs put together to form reconstructions of missing episodes (as happened for The Ice Warriors and The Tenth Planet) but often they fell back on that original approach of brief linking material (The Crusade, The Reign of Terror) even to the very end of the VHS range. These approaches were also only felt to be viable to replace two episodes of a story maximum, and usually only if the surviving episodes outnumbered the reconstructed / summarised ones. The Crusade VHS release in 1999, with the story split 50/50 between two surviving and two missing episodes was the only exception - this was because an episode of the story had been recently discovered, so half the story was felt to be enough of a draw (even then, though, it was released in a box set with the adjacent complete story The Space Museum). After the UK animation company Cosgrove Hall Studios (who had produced Doctor Who webcast Scream of the Shalka) created animated episodes one and four of The Invasion for its DVD release, the sky was the limit. Animated visuals of missing episodes matched to those surviving soundtracks were much more watchable than a reconstruction, and much more faithful than an actor's brief summary.

Though more possibilities had been opened up, with even the potential for a wholly missing story being released in 100% animated form one day, what happened next for the DVD range and animations was... nothing, for a good long while. There were still plenty of intact adventures to release, and it was six more years before another story had episodes animated, by which time Cosgrove Hall had alas closed down. There were other companies, though. In 2013, either because the range was running out of other classic series stories to release, or because the costs of animating episodes had become more affordable, or both, three stories came out: The Reign of Terror (two episodes animated) in January, The Ice Warriors (two episodes animated) in August, and The Tenth Planet (one episode animated) in October. With its recovered episode old news by 2013, The Crusade did not get similar treatment (it has loads of different characters and locales too, which would make the animation a challenge), but a different 50/50 story was done instead. In early 2014, The Moonbase was released on its own shiny disc. Parts one and three were animated, parts two and four live action. It was the first story that animation allowed to have a release on DVD that had not been a title on VHS. To date, thirteen stories have had their own moment on DVD or Blu-Ray that never got to be centre stage in the video tape days; for only one of these - The Enemy of the World - was this wholly down to the live action episodes being recovered. The remainder have had some or all of their episodes animated for release on disc. Nearly three years on from The Moonbase, The Power of the Daleks was the first wholly missing animated story; a couple of years later, it was followed by The Macra Terror.

By the 2020s, two different teams (one led creatively by Gary Russell, the other by AnneMarie Walsh) were working away, with The Faceless Ones, Fury from the Deep, Galaxy 4, The Evil of the Daleks and The Abominable Snowmen being released between 2020 and 2022. Many of these included episodes that had been animated even though they existed in the archives, to allow the cartoon version to be watched as one consistent piece. Animating episodes you didn't 'need' to would have seemed the height of extravagance even a short few years earlier. Beyond the five new stories released in that period, there was also an improved version of Power of the Daleks, and a new version of The Web of Fear with its single missing episode (part 3) animated; the initial vanilla DVD edition had used a reconstruction. By the end of 2022, a source of funding from BBC America had dried up and there was a worry that the animations would go on hiatus. This situation didn't last long, though. Towards the end of 2023, The Underwater Menace was released; in 2024, there was The Celestial Toymaker, and in 2025, The Savages. Those of us who've been collecting home video Doctor Who since the VHS days can only boggle at the things that have been achieved that we wouldn't have thought of as feasible back then. To pick just a couple of examples, there are now only three - three! - Patrick Troughton stories left to be released (his era amounted to a pitiful handful of video tapes); and - bar a five-minute introduction at the end of an adventure where she was otherwise not present, every moment of companion Dodo's time with the Doctor (from The Ark to The War Machines) is available to buy on individual shiny discs.

There now remain only nine stories that haven't had a dedicated disc release. One of these is the longest story (The Daleks' Master Plan at 12 episodes) but one is the shortest (single episode prologue to Master Plan, Mission to the Unknown), so it evens out. Of the remaining stories, most are historical stories (Marco Polo, The Myth Makers, The Massacre, The Smugglers, The Highlanders), which might be more challenging to animate, and might be a harder sell. The other two (The Wheel in Space, The Space Pirates) are science fiction tales with metallic monsters and / or spaceships, so might be an easier proposition. Additionally, The Crusade  - which had 50% of its running time represented by reconstructions for its Blu-ray release alongside the rest of the second classic season - may be animated before the end. If two teams continue working at the established rate, and with technological advances still gathering pace in parallel that could be brought to bear, all these stories could be out in as little as five years. Exciting. 

In Summary:

Massively successful as a reusable formula, slightly less successful as a story in its own right (mostly because it's a couple of episodes too long). 

The Ice Warriors

 

Chapter the 306th, Ice Cold in Ealing (and Lime Grove studio D).

Plot:

The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria arrive in a very cold future Earth.  A drastic fall in carbon dioxide has brought catastrophic climate change, a global cooling. The TARDIS team meet Leader Clent and his crew, who run the nearby base that is just one of many around the world that are going to work together using ionisation to defeat the advancing glaciers of a new ice age. They are having trouble with their ioniser as their expert Penley has left to become a scavenger (an underclass that are not participating in the plans to save the world) and is hiding out with friend Stoor nearby. The Doctor is roped in to replace Penley's expertise. One of the base crew brings back to the base what they believe to be archaeological find from the ice. When defrosted, it is revealed to be Varga, an Ice Warrior, who had crashed there thousands of years before. Varga takes Victoria hostage and goes back to where he was found, digging out his spaceship and reviving his crew of Warriors. The Doctor helps to sort out the ioniser, and the base is ready to go. There's just one complication: the Ice Warrior spaceship's power source will be destroyed when the ioniser is used, and could cause an explosion and fallout. Various different parties go to try to rescue Victoria and find out about the ship's power source. Storr is killed by the Warriors when he attempts to ally himself with them. Varga and his warriors attack the base, but the Doctor uses weaponry from their ship to drive them away. With every surviving human including the TARDIS team back at the base, and the glaciers almost upon them, it comes time to choose. Clent cannot bring himself to take the risk, so Penley makes the decision. The explosion of the Ice Warrior ship is small, only destroying the Warriors, who have returned there. The Earth is safe.

Context:

As I've done almost every year for the blog, I took a Doctor Who story away on holiday with me. The family (Me, the Better Half and our three offspring, boys of 18 and 15, girl of 12) went back to Corralejo, which we'd visited a couple of years earlier (see Deeper Thoughts section below and the blog post for Hell Bent for more details). There are so few Doctor who stories left to blog now that it would be difficult to pick something that tied in to the holiday location as in the past. The Romans is still in the 'To Do' pile and it features the main characters having something of a vacation in a villa; there's The Two Doctors too, with its location filming in Spain. These, though, are my final stories left to blog for the first and sixth Doctors respectively; I wasn't sure whether I was ready to deliberately accelerate goodbyes to those old boys yet. So, I left it to chance. The randomiser picked Patrick Troughton story The Ice Warriors, a story so misaligned to viewing in a warm climate that the incongruity tickled me and the choice was made. I downloaded the episodes to my phone using the iplayer app, parts two and three being officially made animations, and watched an episode every other day while away, the final one watched on the flight home. 

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the completion of another season, the 27th out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing). In full, these are classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13). Though there are a couple of black and white stories still left to blog after this one, The Ice Warriors marks the final story for the blog with any episodes missing from the archives.

First Time Round:

I borrowed a pirated VHS in the early 1990s (probably from David, long time fan friend mentioned many times before on this blog) that had recordings of some, but maybe not all, of the extant episodes (it can't have been many years after they were recovered in 1988) burned with a timecode. I don't know where they'd been sourced from before several generations of copying from tape to tape had led them to me, and I didn't ask. They were anyway of too low quality for me to follow. So, I properly engaged with the story for the first time when it came out as a sell-through VHS release in November 1998, the range's big release for the end of that year. The Ice Warriors was part of a box-set with a documentary and an orphaned episode of another Troughton story; the missing episodes were reconstructed from the audio and still photographs. Later still, I got the DVD with the two episodes replaced by animations; this was in the Summer of 2013. I took those shiny discs on a holiday that year (a couple of years before the start of the blog) and remember that at that time the youngest, still a babe in arms back then, was in the process of being weaned. There were a few four o' clock in the morning stints of rocking my grizzling wee daughter in my arms, accompanied by the episodes, volume low, on the living room TV of the cottage we'd hired in Shanklin, Isle of Wight. The theme music seemed to soothe her.

Reaction:

Briefly starting with the animation, the recreations of missing episodes two and three, married to the off-air soundtracks that still survive, are perfectly good at bridging the gap, covering narrative developments in the middle of the story. The simple style might have struggled to visualise more kinetic or climactic action, but there isn't much of such action in those two parts or, frankly, in the remainder. The visual design of the Warriors is a highlight, and they are equally as effective in cartoon form, a demonstration of the strength and distinctiveness of the costumes of Varga and the other Martians. They're a little bit unwieldy, but that isn't much of a problem as Varga and the other Martians don't do a whole lot, and certainly not much that's kinetic or climactic. They are an interesting complicating factor in the narrative, but most of their activity is just a lot of walking about. Bernard Bresslaw's performance - the breathy, whispered sss-ibilance that laid the foundations for how the creatures would be played forever after - is great, but it would be pretty much as great just vocally. The other performances are also strong, and it would be a bit of a shame to lose the facial expressions and physical touches, but the one thing that most struck me about the story this watch was that it could function perfectly well as an audio play. It is the least animated of any story that has had all or parts animated. There's only three significant locations (and you could probably lose one of them without too much trouble), and the question of how to defeat the nominal forces of antagonism is answered early on (they like it cold, and the base by necessity has a massive heat gun at its disposal).

What moves and develops in the story is instead at the interpersonal level. For this is a bromance tale, a weird semi-professional (but going beyond the bounds of professionalism in places) interaction between Clent, Penley and the Doctor. Penley has spurned Clent, leaving his important role on the base team to go off into the frozen wilderness; the Doctor is the replacement boffin who turns up and takes Penley's place. Ice Warriors and glaciers take second place for most of the running time to this odd platonic love triangle. Aside from Varga and maybe Storr (Penley's new partner, the exact opposite of Clent) none of the other characters has much of a look in. Victoria spends all her time as prisoner of the Ice Warriors, including a whole episode playing hide and seek with one in ice caves; Jamie spends a few episodes knocked out and then lying down; the other base staff are mainly bit parts and/or sonic cannon fodder. Instead, this is mainly a simple tale of who Clent will end up with, mysterious new man the Doctor, or will he tempt Penley back from the arms of the rugged Stoor, into which he was forced by Clent's uncaring robot heart? Yes, I'm taking the piss but only a bit - the plot never gets quite to homoerotic levels, but it does at times veer towards Mills and Boon. Many of the bases depicted in Patrick Troughton's time have brittle bosses in conflict with their underlings, but it's never normally played so emotionally. A clue might be that Peter Barkworth is playing Clent with a pronounced limp. Reportedly, he unsuccessfully tried to persuade the director to let him give Clent a stutter too. This seems to me to be a talented actor making a dull part more interesting. According to multiple lines of dialogue, Clent is supposed to be a robotic drone, but Barkworth just doesn't play him like that.

It may be that some adjustments in rehearsal meant the intended central dramatic question isn't very clearly delineated, but I don't think it can all be blamed on the actors - the script is contradictory in many places. As will be dwelt on a little more in the Deeper Thoughts section below, The Ice Warriors was being broadcast at the same time as the first run of another 1960s telefantasy classic, The Prisoner. Like the central character of that series, Penley has dropped out of a society that he has found to be dehumanising. Both these shows were reflecting fears / hopes in the wider world of 1967 about "dropping out" and there were no doubt some early-adopter hippies in the UK then attempting to create an alternate lifestyle to the rat race. But Penley has dropped out at a time of international crisis, and is neglecting his essential role in combatting that crisis such that the world is put at risk. His motivation for this is sketchy. Sometimes it seems that he's rejecting the computerised nature of the world; but it stretches credibility that he could have grown to become a scientific expert in this society without having used computers extensively, so what's changed recently (apart from the crisis)? In one telling moment elsewhere, he bemoans Clent using "scientists' craniums as stepping stones for his ambitions". So perhaps his reasons for going were more personal. This also muddles up Clent's characterisation some more - can he be both robotic drone and ambitious user of others? In the technologically advanced society as presented, it's hard to rationalise how there would be scavengers like Storr. The threat of societal collapse may have pushed people to abandon society and technology, but Storr is an expert hunter. Has he learned those skills since the ice age, or did he have them before? It seems like the former, but why and how would such skills be learned in the civilisation as presented?

No skills will be enough to keep Penley and Stoor alive anyway: their lifestyle is shown only to be sustainable if they steal supplies from the society they're denouncing (as seen in a couple of occasions in the story) and in a very short period they and everyone else is going to be frozen to death because Penley has abandoned his post. There's separate scenes where the Doctor and Miss Garrett implore him to come back as he's desperately needed, and Penley stubbornly refuses. He's no hero, and Clent's not exactly a villain either: he's someone with an exemplary record, is shown to care about his team (witness his consoling of Arden when the latter is beating himself up about bringing the frozen warrior to the base), is pretty brave in playing for time when the Warriors invade the base, and always has his focus on the important job at hand. When the crunch moment comes, the decision to be made is whether to go against the computer (which doesn't have enough information to give a decisive instruction) and use the ioniser, even though it risks a nuclear explosion. Dramatically, the logical person to make the final decision is Clent: the influence of Penley and the Doctor convince him to trust his instincts above the data, and he takes the risk, the culmination of the plot linking in to decisive character growth for him. This isn't what happens, alas. Instead Clent can't make the decision and Penley steps in. So, Penley is the ultimate protagonist and his journey is to end up working as the ioniser expert of the base, which was exactly where he started; the drop-out has dropped back in and there's no real character growth at all. At least Clent and Penley are reconciled at the end, sharing a few nice words as well as a hug and a kiss (I may have made some of that up).

A few other points of note: the story has a special title sequence for all the episodes, with some interesting music by Dudley Simpson (including vocal performances - eat your heart out, Murray Gold). The TARDIS materialises on its side, for I think the first time ever in the history of the series, and there are a few chuckles had from the regulars extricating themselves from their mobile home (shame that this orientation is forgotten about by the time of the dematerialisation in episode six). The whole running reference to people being shipped off to Africa as if that's the worst fate imaginable is pretty dodgy. Also dodgy is the dialogue at the end of episode one where Jamie leeringly discusses short skirts and attempts to persuade Victoria to wear one (also a minor continuity error as she has already worn a minidress two stories earlier, with comments arising on the length thereof). The ioniser base is not the only workplace with overfamiliar colleagues: Varga seems to spend the whole of one episode chanting Zondal's name. Troughton has some great bits of business with the Doctor using stink bombs against the Warriors, or using a chemical machine to get himself a drink of water. The sets of the icy areas aren't too bad; the movement of the glacier is effectively sold by sound effects and the actors' conviction. One other personal note: the hotel where me and the family stayed had a foam party in the swimming pool during our stay (it's a weekly occurrence apparently). It was fun for the kids particularly, but it had extra resonance for me: what could fit better with the Troughton era story I'd taken with me than the ubiquitous foam machine. It isn't used in The Ice Warriors (it would be in its sequel story The Seeds of Death and many other stories around this time); you can't get away from it!

A foam machine in Fuerteventura

Connectivity:

Both The Ice Warriors and 73 Yards feature snow, and the TARDIS landing in a cold environment with the Doctor wearing a big coat.

Deeper Thoughts:

Back to Life, Back from Gallifrey. We were away in Corralejo, Fuerteventura for 10 days at the start of August 2024; the weather was hot during those days but it was the UK that we'd left behind that seemed to be on fire. As explored in the Deeper Thoughts section of the post for Hell Bent, which I posted after our holiday there two years ago, somewhere in the dunes and volcanic hills of Fuerteventura is the shooting location for Gallifrey as seen at the end of Heaven Sent and for a lot of Hell Bent. Those episodes, and indeed every reference in Who's long history to the Doctor's relationship with his people, align with the - slightly muddled, see Reaction section above - themes of The Ice Warriors about the freedom of the individual versus the compromises of collectivism. By coincidence, such themes were also prevalent in one of the holiday reads I took with me to enjoy poolside, Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. The book is a thoughtful and sometimes breathtaking overview of recent politics as illuminated by the ongoing situation where Klein gets confused with another writer with a not dissimilar background who has covered similar subject matter to her in the past and shares the same first name: Naomi Wolf. This was a manageable inconvenience for many years, but got more and more difficult for Klein as Wolf delved into more and more extreme conspiracy theories about Covid vaccines. This culminated in Wolf being banned from Twitter in summer 2021, around the time that she was opining that vaccinated people's urine and faeces should be separated from the rest of the general sewage system until the impact of the waste on unvaccinated people through drinking water could be ascertained. She's back on the platform now, having been reinstated when it came under new management.

Klein is generally empathetic towards her namesake throughout the book, believing that conspiracy theories are based on a kernel of real, understandable feeling, but with the response to that feeling wildly misdirected. The book brings back to mind a period one could easily forget. The first time we went to Fuerteventura in 2022, less than two years before this latest visit, we needed to bring proof of vaccination status with us, and spot checks were made as passengers disembarked and made their way to passport control. At the time, we didn't see this in any way as a restriction on our freedom, nor as a scheme by some shadowy cabal of world governments and big pharma corporations to monitor us. On the contrary, it seemed like the important latest step of many collective steps, lockdowns and social distancing and masking, that had to be taken to break the virus's hold on individual freedoms. Unfortunately, a vocal minority felt very differently about the vaccine (and lockdowns and social distancing and masking). Klein eruditely sees that a cultish focus on the individual can come from many places. Unexpectedly, the anti-vax conspiracy was bought into not only by the usual rabble-rousing suspects like Steve Bannon but also a good deal of online wellness and workout influencers who had previously seemed apolitical in their content and outlook. The belief in the power of the individual to shape their own health overpowered everything else, and Klein gives examples of such people making some dodgy statements along the lines of letting the weak go to the wall. If there's one thing that demonstrates more than anything else that healthcare must be a collective and universal endeavour it's surely a pandemic. If everything that happened with Covid-19 didn't manage to convey that message, then I worry about the future of the human race.

The Doctor as lone wolf outside of his society?

I can't get too high and mighty about this of course, because my favourite TV programme, Doctor Who, a programme I've spent nearly ten years documenting, championing its politics and philosophy, has at its heart a character who has rejected his own society and become a lone-wolf individualist. The programme was born in the 1960s, and it's a particularly 60s theme, though still lingering in our collective unconscious many decades later. It's not that simple, though, as the Doctor separated himself from the Time Lords because they weren't interventionalist enough. He champions science, so could never be an anti-vaxxer - he's definitely shown as different to the resolutely anti-science character of Storr in The Ice Warriors, so blinded by his hatred of big science that he's driven to attempt to ally himself with forces that have no interest in his wellbeing. Even the 1960s programme The Prisoner (which, as mentioned above, was first being broadcast at exactly the same time as The Ice Warriors) is not all it seems. It appears to be the epitome of individualist cheerleader, with it's central character's repeated cry of "I am not a number, I am a free man", something one can imagine Penley in The Ice Warriors saying; but, in the final Prisoner episodes (broadcast a few weeks after The Ice Warriors had finished) it's shown that the individual, no matter their achievements on their own, cannot necessarily make significant changes outside of society. The protagonist of the programme is literally shown to be his own worst enemy. If even a genre drama like Doctor Who or The Prisoner is complex, then reality is even more so, and it would be wrong to trust anyone - of any political stripe - that says there are easy answers, or even easy problems. The misinformation keeps on coming, though.

The Prisoner

As well as depicting Gallifrey, Fuerteventura was site of some location filming for the two-part story The Zygon Invasion / The Zygon Inversion, earlier in the same season, its - slightly muddled, see Reaction section of the Zygon post - theme being immigration-related paranoia leading to stand-offs and violence. This is another topic covered in Doppelganger, and sadly at the end of July and start of August, while me and the fam were unaware enjoying a holiday many hundreds of miles away, it was re-enacted in cities of the UK. There were riots, initially sparked by one terrible act of violence by an individual. It was another case of feelings misdirected that were stirred up or harnessed by other people acting in bad faith (misinformation online connected the wholly unconnected topic of immigration to a terrible tragedy that was not being treated as any kind of terror incident and whose suspected perpetrator was born in the UK). Again, there was the desire for easy answers to problems: it would be less difficult to believe that these were some kind of anti-immigration protest, rather than an excuse to have a racist riot, if it was clear exactly what the protestors wanted: more budget for quicker processing of arrivals on UK shores? More agreements with France for processing centres on their side of the channel? Or a magic barrier around the country that protects a nation state as defined imprecisely in each individual's own prejudiced head? The story didn't end there, though. Hearteningly, for an overseas observer (the news where we were having caught up), the plan for a rolling wave of violence overreached themself, and the wave collided with a wall of counter protest. A much hyped rally in Brighton ended up with four - four! - 'anti-immigration protestors' versus thousands of anti-racist counter protestors. It made me worry just a little less about the future of the human race.

That's still not the end of the story, though. Doppelganger urges a collectivism within class lines, ignoring distractions like race being pitted against race, to fight against the excesses of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy. I would like to see such a collectivism exist, and I still have hope (even though sometimes it feels like I'll be waiting until the next ice age).

In Summary:

A cool mess, but not without some good points (though they're buried a bit and might need digging out).