Doctor Who: The Third Doctor Era (1970-1974) - Part 2

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, the second half of my Third Doctor reviews, covering seasons 10 and 11 (that's The Three Doctors to Planet of the Spiders if you're curious).

That also covers this surprise new opening title sequence that appeared at the beginning of season 11. I had no idea that the Tom Baker's diamond logo was introduced in Jon Pertwee's last series! I've never been keen on the logo itself, it looks like it belongs on a bottle of ketchup, but the people in charge of licencing were apparently keen on it. It ended up on VHS tapes, books and even a video game made long after the series itself had gone through its terrible neon tube and 3D logo eras (and then died). Man, I hate that neon tube logo, I hate it so much!

I love the psychedelic slit-scan time vortex effect though. It was created using the same technique they used for the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and by 'technique' I mean 'dark forbidden magic', as I've seen the process involved and it still seems like sorcery to me.

It's my duty to inform you that there will be SPOILERS beyond this point, but I'll only be spoiling the serial I'm reviewing and occasionally stories leading up to it, nothing that came afterwards. So for example, you won't have to worry about me ranting about the terrible neon tube logo from season 18 when I'm talking about the diamond badge logo from season 11. Oh, wait...

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I can't assume you've read all the other posts, maybe you just want to know what I thought about Monster of Peladon, so I'll quickly go over what you might have missed: I watched a classic Doctor Who marathon on Twitch with absolutely no intention to write reviews afterwards and then I wrote reviews. So I didn't exactly fill a notepad with my detailed thoughts on every story, but I did at least give each serial a score from 1-9, measuring how engaged I'd been with what I was just watching. Which generally wasn't all that much to be honest, seeing as I was sitting through 16 episodes a night and I was tired.

10	It's hard to give out 10s to anything so I just don't bother with them.
9	For when an 8 just doesn't quite seem good enough.
8	A fantastic episode, but not one of my absolute favourites.
7	A good solid story I really enjoyed.
6	In the middle ground between 'really good' and 'watchable enough'
5	I can't say it didn't keep my interest but I don't want to be too nice to it.
4	At some point I caught myself checking my email.
3	I didn't turn it off entirely but it wasn't my priority.
2	I tried, but I couldn't make it through it all.
1	A fascinating disaster.

1972-73 - Series 10
065	The Three Doctors	4 parts	6
The Three Doctors was the first of the big anniversary multi-Doctor stories, starting a tradition of bringing back a previous Doctor or three for a team-up every ten years (in this case it was for the series' 10th Anniversary). It's also the only multi-Doctor story to feature all of the Doctors and have them played by their original actors, though William Hartnell wasn't in great health so the First Doctor had to spend the story trapped in a time pyramid. This is perhaps the reason why the youngest and least experienced version of the Doctor was the one giving the other two advice, which is something that really bothers me. It had a fairly rubbish story, but it got the most important thing right, and that's putting Pertwee and Troughton together and having them bounce off the UNIT family for four episodes. It was great to see Troughton again after a week of watching Pertwee episodes and he really got to shine in this story. Not that Pertwee was entirely overshadowed by him. In fact, it was the Brig who struggled in this story weirdly, mostly because he'd been written as an idiot for whatever reason. Up to this point he had always been unflappable and open-minded (in his first appearance he took the Doctor at his word that he had a time machine!), but in this serial he was a thick-headed sceptic in denial, whose mind was apparently broken by the concept that there could be two of the same person in the same place. I'm starting to think that maybe Bob Baker and Dean Martin weren't the greatest writers Doctor Who ever had. This was fun story I thought, but it wasn't entirely played for laughs and there was one point I felt some genuine tension: the villain was the ultimate Time Lord who could bend his reality to his whims and send CSO blobs out to raid our universe for rebel Time Lords and classic cars, and for a while there I thought we weren't getting Bessie back! I really believed this was going to be the end for the car, as it was abandoned on a distant alien world which was engulfed in an anti-matter explosion that annihilated its entire universe. But nah, it just ended up back home again without a scratch thanks to bullshit science. Happy ending! Oh, plus the Doctor finally got his knowledge of time travel back from the Time Lords, who even gave him a replacement part for his Tardis to get it working properly! So the exile was officially over from this point on in the series and I guess the Time Lords were now totally cool with him going around history in his (formerly) stolen Tardis. In fact, the Time Lords grabbed the First and Second Doctors in this story without too much trouble and allowed them to go back on the run afterwards, which implies that they could've stopped him any time they wanted to and just didn't. I guess Gulliver and friends weren't allowed to press the 'bring the Doctor back' button until he phoned them up in The War Games.
066	Carnival of Monsters	4 parts	6
This one lost me right at the very start, with its blue aliens in dodgy makeup and the human-looking aliens in dodgy costumes decorated with party ring biscuits. In fact, it lost me earlier than that, because I caught a couple of minutes on TV a few months back and it seemed like someone had taken all my worst preconceptions about classic Doctor Who and packed them into one four-parter. Except for my preconception that there'd be a carnival in this story, because there isn't one. But I'd given The Web Planet a couple of episodes before bailing on it so I had to give the serial that much at least, and I was surprised at how quickly it won me over once the Doctor and Jo arrived on the mysterious boat. A good chunk of this story was taken up by the two of them dealing with a time loop on the ship or wandering around giant circuitry, but the interaction between the two was good enough to keep me entertained regardless, which I guess is the secret of all good Doctor Who stories. It took me longer to give a damn about the blue guys and their scheming, but I eventually came around to appreciating what was going on there. I even found myself enjoying the scenes of Vorg and Shirna, the intergalactic carnies, despite the fact they were worse dressed than the Sixth Doctor. The actors were likeable enough to overcome their characters' poor dress sense. Jo came across well in this story too, as she got more frustrated with being the only one who knew what was happening on the boat and having to deal with everyone else's endless routines; it was like she was living the Doctor's life for a few hours. In the end, this went from my most dreaded Third Doctor episode to my fourth favourite, which is an outcome I can live with.
067	Frontier in Space	6 parts	4
The title had me thinking this serial would be a bit Star Trek, but the events taking place actually had more in common with Babylon 5 and The Expanse. Not that I'd recommend ever comparing the series directly, because this was not Doctor Who at its best. It started off well enough, with characters seeing each other as hostile aliens and the Doctor and Jo stuck on a freighter when raiders stole their Tardis, but then the two of them spent the rest of the story going on a tour of the galaxy's prison cells. First, they were locked up in the freighter's brig on their way to be imprisoned on Earth. There were a few false escapes before the Doctor was sent to a high-security prison on the moon, but before anything of interest could happen there, he was picked up by the Master who locked him up in a prison transport cell! They took a trip to Draconia where they were miraculously not locked up... but then they went and got locked up on the Ogron homeworld soon after. That's five separate cells in one six-part story. And not once did anyone ever search the Doctor and confiscate his sonic screwdriver... unless I dozed off and missed it. Though the scenes of the Doctor and Jo locked up together were actually some of the better moments in the serial, as the rest of the time they were constantly being questioned and interrogated by people who only wanted to hear an answer that fit the story they were already convinced of. It was interesting at first to see the Doctor go up against their extreme closed-mindedness, especially as the serial went out of its way to let me see things from their point of view and understand their position, but it took five episodes to finally get through to them and man I was exhausted by that point. Plus it was depressing to get another glimpse at humanity's future and see it continue to suck. On the plus side, the Master elevated any scene he was in and got some great lines ("Thank you, Ms Grant, we'll let you know.") But Roger Delgado deserved a better story to go out on. In the end, I think the most notable part of this serial is that they actually managed to keep the revelation that the Daleks were behind it all a secret right until the last episode. It helped that they didn't call it The Cells of the Daleks, making it one of the very few classic Dalek stories without 'Dalek' in the title. Though the Master's stylised Dalek logo on his outfit was a bit of a giveaway in retrospect.
068	Planet of the Daleks	6 parts	3
Right now I'm fairly sure this is my least favourite of the Pertwee serials. I liked how it started off right where the last story ended, with the Doctor unconscious in the Tardis and Jo having to figure out what to do on her own. But after she wandered off to get into danger the Doctor woke up to discover that his spaceship was running out of air because plants have been spitting goop at it and had covered all the air holes! I realise that at this point they hadn't decided the ship was absolutely massive on the inside and would have easily had enough air to get them through a six-parter, but I'm fairly sure they'd decided it was a spaceship, capable of supporting a crew without pulling in air from outside. Anyway, this was clearly an urgent crisis, so the Doctor decided to change into new clothes first before dealing with it! Not entirely out of character for Pertwee's Doctor though to be fair. But the trouble with Planet of the Daleks is that I found it to be very very dull and very very serious and I'm thinking that the two things were likely related. It was full of people doing what they had to in tough situations and having grim conversations, mostly the latter because there wasn't a whole lot of story stretched over its six episode. And when things did happen I was always trying to remember where I'd seen it before. People hiding in a Dalek shell, escaping the Daleks in a lift, dropping something down a shaft onto a Dalek, and trying to find another way out while the Daleks outside were taking a blowtorch to the door - that was all in The Daleks right? Or maybe Dalek Invasion of Earth? I'm fairly sure I haven't seen the heroes escape by grabbing the corners of a sheet and rising up with the hot air before though, and there's likely a reason for that (because it's crazy). It all felt a bit like a dated relic from the Hartnell era, like a lost script edited to remove Ian and Barbara being awesome, all trace of the Doctor's eccentricity, and anything else resembling joy. Though I did love the scene where the invisible alien in the blue Muppet-skin cloak released the Daleks' bioweapon inside their base, because of the way the two Daleks in the room freaked out when they realised that that the other Daleks outside the sealed door weren't immune to it like they were. "We can never leave here! NEVER NEVER NEVER!"
069	The Green Death	6 parts	5
This is a gross episode, with all the giant maggots everywhere, so it really shot itself in the foot there if it was hoping for a high score from me. But I ended up liking it anyway because there was so much else going on in it and a lot of it was good. There were glowing green corpses in a Welsh mine, giant maggots killing people and turning into giant bugs, environmentalist hippie scientists making fungus superfoods, an evil corporation making superpollution (which turned out to be run by an evil supercomputer), Mike Yates was hypnotised into being a double agent, Jo fell in love, and UNIT blew shit up! Plus the Doctor actually tried to sit this serial out, going on his own adventure to that planet he'd been trying to reach ever since getting his exile lifted, Metebelis III. So the first episode kept cutting to scenes of him running around a blue alien landscape on his own without any dialogue. Though he might as well have had 'I am regretting all of my choices' written across his face the way things went from worse to even worse for him. Anyway, the Doctor eventually came back to Earth, stuff happened and he ended up breaking into to evil HQ dressed first as a milkman and then as a cleaning lady, and that amongst other reasons is why I'm going to remember this story a lot longer than Planet of the Daleks. It was great to see the Doctor actually playing a role and tricking people again like he used to do as Hartnell and Troughton sometimes, even if it seemed a little out of character for the Third Doctor. He's been more the 'get annoyed, raise voice, use violence if that doesn't work' type. It's nice that Jo Grant had a half-decent story to go out on, even if the best excuse they could think of to write her out was 'she fell in love over six episodes and now she's getting married'. I think I actually preferred Liz Shaw leaving off-screen because her character had better things to do than be an assistant, because at least that wasn't as much of a cliché. Speaking of things that have happened in episodes before, it's interesting that this episode's villain was a computer that hypnotised people into obeying him, just like Wotan in The War Machines. Though in this case, BOSS had the ability to think like a human, which gave him the ability to merely get annoyed at logical paradoxes instead of exploding, and more importantly he could talk clearly without an irritating vocal filter! That alone made him the best computer in Doctor Who so far, but I also liked that everything it did, like hypnotise people and pump mutagen into the sewers, was all to make profit for Global Chemicals. It was just another greedy boss who cared more about money than about the consequences for the rest of the world, because that was its role in the system. Personally, I found the most annoying part of the story to be that the only reason the heroes managed to save the day at the end was because of two unrelated chance occurrence: the maggot eating their fungus food and the fungus powder falling on the sample. Fate went and gave them two massive hints free of charge and it still took them forever to notice. Well okay, Professor Jones had worked it out earlier, but it didn't occur to him to write it down before getting himself into a coma so that wasn't much use. Did the man learn nothing from Doctor Who and the Silurians?

1973-74 - Series 11
070	The Time Warrior	4 parts	6
Before I watched this story I'd already decided that if I ever wrote a review of it I'd have to remember to make some clever insightful observation about how the new companion, Sarah Jane Smith, has the same last name as the Doctor's alias 'John Smith'. But then the first episode pointed it out almost immediately so I'll have to think of something else to say now. Okay here's something else worth mentioning: The War Games was the story that gave the Doctor's people a name, but this was the serial that told us what his planet is called. It took ten years and two regenerations but after this aired fans finally knew that he was a Time Lord from Gallifrey. Also, aside from the trip to Atlantis at the end of The Time Monster, this was the first and only Third Doctor serial to take place in the past. It aired six years after the last proper pseudo-historical, the Second Doctor's The Abominable Snowmen (set in the 30s), and it was another two years before the Fourth Doctor visited the early 1900s in Pyramids of Mars. I knew they'd lost interest in pure historicals by this point, but as a modern fan the idea of them going entire seasons without any monsters screwing around in the past is just weird to me. It also seems weird to me that I liked this story so much. Sure I liked serials like The Time Meddler and it was by Robert Holmes, but right now I'm putting this as my favourite Pertwee story, above all the ones with the Master, Jo and the Brig in them. I think the main reason for that was how entertaining the villains were together, with robber baron Irongron figuratively eating the scenery and literally smashing objects into his table, and Linx struggling to put up with the idiot he'd allied himself with. I mean Linx built the guy his own robot knight, an actual killer robot in the Middle Ages, and Irongron's first reaction was 'let's see how hard it is to break it!' Plus he decided to train his troops to use Linx's rifles by assembling them into a firing squad and having them try to shoot the Doctor as he ran around the other side of the room! Neither of them was as good as Delgado's Master, but he never got to play off another villain so well. Sarah Jane also made a great first impression to me as the protagonist of her own time travel adventure, even if her first impression of the Doctor wasn't quite as positive. In her defence, it wasn't that ridiculous to assume that the guy from the scientists' secret bunker with a time machine was the one kidnapping the scientists and bringing them through time. Even kidnapped scientist Dr Rubeish turned out to be surprisingly awesome, even taking down Linx at one point! I guess Green Arrow and friends from the good castle weren't all that interesting as characters, but I was too distracted by Dot Cotton from EastEnders showing up as Lady Eleanor to care. Other good things include: the Doctor! I've never really disliked Pertwee in the role, but he seemed more charming than usual here, plus he got to do more than share a cell with people or grumble about things. Also, the episode looked great; apparently castle interiors are easier to fake than spaceship hallways, at least for the BBC.
071	Invasion of the Dinosaurs	6 parts	6
I was kind of dreading this one as I'd gotten the impression it was supposed to be one of the rubbish ones, but I liked it well enough in the end. In fact, to be honest, this might be my second favourite Pertwee serial, so series 11 started off pretty well for me. It took a long while to get going as the first episode or so was about the Doctor and Sarah Jane wandering around deserted London streets, wondering why it looked like 28 Days Later. Except instead of zombies they found looters and ended up getting arrested for carrying a bag of jewellery around like idiots. But then it's a six-parter so I suppose it made sense to delay the actual story for a bit while they built up the mystery of what was up. Turns out it was dinosaurs, but I can't mock the story for giving the villain away in the title this time because episode one was just called Invasion. The Doctor and Sarah Jane eventually met up with UNIT again which meant they could stop fighting against their own side and get on with solving the problem... except not really, as it seemed like every character aside from the recurring cast was secretly part the conspiracy working against them. In fact, even one of them was a traitor too, as Mike Yates decided that rewinding time and erasing all civilisation was probably a good plan. He drew the line at hurting people to do it, but he was all for murdering billions of people. It's like an inversion of The Green Death, where this time the well-intentioned environmentalists were the crazy villains. The ones who were running the show outside of the spaceship anyway. I liked how the story was on Sarah Jane's side as she took offence at being benched, went out on her own and discovered the whole fake spaceship plot herself. That's when I really sat up and started paying attention, when it was revealed that the dinosaurs were brought from the past purely to scare everyone out of London... for some reason. I don't think they ever explained why they did that, as all it did was draw attention to them and ruin their plan, but whatever. So Sarah Jane, on her own, broke out of the ship by walking out of the airlock, and then later broke back inside to blow the whole scheme wide open. It's like she had agency and competence! Though one of the people on board the ship was called John Crichton, like the hero of Farscape, and that threw me off a bit. Speaking of Farscape, there's an episode of Red Dwarf where the crew comes across a car dressed up to look like their Starbug shuttle (Carbug!) with little fins on it and stuff. I'm bringing this up because the Doctor's new Whomobile in this looked like the Carbug version of Crichton's Farscape 1 module. This car was probably the most confusing part of the whole serial for me as the Doctor brought it out especially and then did absolutely nothing with it. Nothing he couldn't have done with Bessie, or any other car at least. He didn't even drive it in the big chase scene after he was assumed to be the villain again for the second serial in a row and went on the run! So I looked it up and it turns out that the Whomobile was a custom-built road legal car commissioned by Jon Pertwee himself that was quickly written in to replace an ordinary motorbike after he showed it off to the producer. I guess he'd gotten bored with driving Bessie. But just as the Doctor lost all his support, his own side had turned on him and things were at their bleakest, the Brig and Benton saved him like big damn heroes! In fact, this kind of felt like it could've been a great finale for the UNIT family, as it showed how much they had each other's backs by this point (except for Mike Yates, the big traitor). It even had the Doctor and the Brig working together to blow up a London Tube station, just like when they first met back in Web of Fear! I also liked the Doctor using his resistance to time weirdness again to simply walk over and flick the 'time reverse' lever off to save the day. He even gave the villains what they wanted, as they were teleported back in time to where they wanted to be without having to pointlessly wind back time to do it. I doubt it brought them much happiness in the end though. Oh, plus the dinosaurs looked bad.
072	Death to the Daleks	4 parts	4
This one started out interesting, with the Tardis drained of power, and the Doctor and Sarah Jane finding themselves separated and having to deal with hostile alien problems in the dark. The first ep became all drama and very little dialogue, and was much creepier than your typical Pertwee story. Then the human crew and the Daleks turned up and that was kind of interesting too, as the Daleks found their guns had been drained too and they all had to work together. Well it had the potential to be interesting at least, but the rest of the story couldn't live up to the promise of a Doctor-Dalek team up, and eventually the Daleks were just stalking the Doctor as he solved puzzles in a temple with his weird new alien friend. Even the worst cliffhanger in the whole series (oh no, it's a red and white tiled floor!) couldn't reclaim my attention by that point. But the serial does get bonus points for all the hilarious ways that Daleks got killed. One of them even got beaten with sticks until he exploded, which I guess means their armour has actually been terrible against everything but bullets all this time and we never knew. Plus they were so adorably helpless when their guns didn't work! They may have developed psychokinetic powers to move their shells without the need for static electricity, but these Daleks had none of the menace that their disarmed cousins in Power of the Daleks had.
073	The Monster of Peladon	6 parts	6
This one was an actual sequel to The Curse of Peladon, which jumped forward 50 years to show the effect of the Doctor's actions in the last story, a bit like The Ark back in the Hartnell era. Turned out that the people did not get their fridges, microwaves and iPads after joining the Federation, and no one was all that happy. Earth aside, it's strange for Doctor Who to actually visit the same planet twice, and they did a good job of matching the feel of the original serial, even if the actors were (almost) all different. It almost inverted the plot of the original in fact, with the Federation and the Ice Warriors being the villains this time... well, a rogue group of them anyway. There were a few things I can remember liking about this story, such as Sarah Jane telling the queen to stand up for herself (with the Doctor's encouragement), and the way the two antagonistic groups on Peladon immediately joined forces when they were up against an outside threat. And to be honest I've kind of grown to like the monocular pickle in a curtain from Alpha Centauri as well. Not so sure I liked the Doctor killing a whole lot of rogue Ice Warriors, but then he's been doing that since he was Troughton so I can't really say it was out of character. Overall, I liked this approximately equally as much as Curse of Peladon, which puts me in the minority I think as that Doctor Who Magazine poll ranked it at 216 out of 241 stories, just above Love and Monsters and The Web Planet. I can only presume that a lot of the people who voted hadn't watched it right after Death to the Daleks like I did.
074	Planet of the Spiders	6 parts	3
This one was just a dull mess from start to finish to me. Every time I try to remember what exactly happened in it all I can think of is people with invisible spider backpacks chanting 'om' and shooting people with Sith lightning from their hands. Though I'm pretty sure I saw a council of spiders, ruled by a giant spider with mind control powers living in a radioactive cave, and they were all on the Doctor's favourite planet, Metebelis III. If there's one thing I've learned from these last two seasons of Doctor Who, it's that you should never attempt to visit Metebelis III. The serial's lone saving grace for me was the epic chase scene that took up half an episode and featured Bessie chasing the Whomobile, the Whomobile chasing a helicopter, and a hovercraft chasing a speedboat! Or at least it was the saving grace, before I realised that it was just the Doctor following someone around until it was time to switch vehicles. Aside from the police almost getting involved at the start there was no story to the chase. There wasn't even a proper ending, as the villain just decided he was bored with it and teleported back home instead. Also, I thought that the Doctor had to be flying the same autogyro featured in You Only Live Twice, but it turns out that Bond was in a Wallis WA-116 Agile, and the Doctor apparently flew a Campbell Super Cricket. I guess it was more fitting for the Third Doctor this way, as it means that right up to his last serial he was James Bond, except not quite. This was the first Doctor Who story to really deal with regeneration and it featured two versions of the Doctor's old Time Lord mentor he mentioned back in The Time Monster. So far that's not all that unusual as the Doctor was hanging out with his past self in The Three Doctors. But just to confuse the hell out of me, it turned out that the second version wasn't his future self, as he joined with him during regeneration to become his future self. Uh... what? I have a feeling this was due to co-writer Barry Letts taking the opportunity to throw in some Buddhist concepts into his last episode as producer, but he could've thrown in a good explanation while he was at it. Oh plus the Third Doctor himself regenerated here, leaving the series the same way he came in: by falling out of the Tardis. So now I can add 'spider cave radiation' to the list of causes of death, which currently reads: old age/Cybermen energy drain and Time Lord punishment.

CONCLUSION

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By the end of the 60s, Doctor Who was in a little bit of trouble. The Second Doctor era had really nailed down what the character and the series was, but ratings were falling, black and white was on the way out, and the cast was tired from making so many episodes a year, so when the Third Doctor came along he flipped the table over and said: "We're not doing that anymore!" Well not the Third Doctor personally, he was more bothered than anyone about the fact he was exiled to Earth for most of his run. He had a good thing going as the Second Doctor, wandering the universe and helping people out; he'd found his calling, and then those bastard Time Lords took it away from him.

The last thing the Second Doctor did before regeneration was yell at authority figures and the Third Doctor carried that indignation with him his entire run. He was an irritable, sometimes rude Doctor who'd lost interest in concealing his true feelings and alien abilities. A lot of Doctors put on a performance to mislead their enemies and impress their audience with their wit and ingenuity, but the Third Doctor was exactly what he seemed. Not that he didn't want people to be impressed by him, he just did what he needed to get the job done (sometimes reluctantly), and believed that his skills and knowledge should've been impressive enough on their own. That was one of his weaknesses really, as he struggled to talk people around without just yelling them into submission and he was too sensible to have the chaotic thinking that let other Doctors outfox opponents who thought more logically. He was more fond of the 'I secretly rewired it to do the opposite of what you want' trick.

But he made up for his weaknesses by being way more into the fearless action scientist side of his character. He was like someone tried crossing James Bond with Doc Brown to create a secret agent who could make his own tricked-out cars, but discovered that Bond's suaveness and Brown's eccentricity mostly cancelled each other out, leaving a guy who dressed in stylish velvet suits, enjoyed the occasional drink, and went on mild rants about science while showing off gadgets to his young sidekick. Plus he got a classic roadster to drive around in and martial art skills, and he sometimes even got to murder people with guns!

Pertwee's era was supposed to be confined to Earth to save money, but you wouldn't know it by looking at it, with all the action scenes and location filming and colour. Plus he had a whole army backing him up! Extracting all of space and time out of Doctor Who was a risky move and it was inevitable he was getting back into that Tardis at some point, but while it lasted the Doctor had a home and an actual supporting cast of characters with their own lives he wasn't responsible for, and that justified the temporary change in format all on its own. Unfortunately, they also gave Pertwee's Doctor a lot of six and seven-parters to spread the cost of sets over more episodes, which made watching them a bit of an endurance run for me (especially as I was sitting through three serials a night.)

The Third Doctor also gained something else during his stay on Earth: a recurring arch-nemesis. I liked Pertwee well enough, but whenever Delgado's Master turned up I felt like I wanted to watch what he was doing instead. The Master was written to be polite, charming and evil to contrast the Doctor's rude, grumpy heroism, but when the two of them were together I couldn't help but notice how rude and grumpy the Doctor was being. They were great at bouncing dialogue off each other though.

The Doctor's exile ended after three years, but he kept returning to UNIT HQ as his home base even after reclaiming his freedom because... I guess it was the one place and time he could get the Tardis to travel to accurately. But this was the era where he finally managed to get that vintage time machine of his to occasionally hit the destination he set, and all it took was four years of repair work, a lot of help from the Master, a replacement part from the Time Lords, and wiring the space-time coordinates directly into the programmer! But he left his successor a far more reliable machine than the one he inherited from his previous persona and introduced a new status quo where he could invite companions on board with a reasonable hope of getting them back home again.

Speaking of companions, the Third Doctor only had three of them during his whole run, despite having a similar number of episodes to his predecessors (though that number doubles if you count his UNIT colleagues):

Dr Elizabeth Shaw: Liz was only in four stories, taking place during Pertwee's first year when Doctor Who decided to be a serious sci-fi thriller for a bit, but man those stories lasted forever. Liz differed from most companions as she worked with the Doctor at UNIT and never once set foot inside the Tardis (though he did bring the console out to her once). But she served a similar purpose in stories and I thought she was pretty good in that role. She had a weird departure though, just disappearing between seasons without even getting married to someone she barely knew. Plus it was also weird how she reappeared as an archeologist in the movie Prometheus, this time played by Noomi Rapace.

Jo Grant: I'd barely heard of Jo before this marathon, which is strange because she really was the Third Doctor's main companion. She was with him for three seasons, she actually travelled with him in the Tardis, and he was mildly devastated when it was time for her to get married to someone she'd just met and leave the show forever. Jo was an enthusiastic but slightly inept agent who got her job thanks to relatives in high places and got passed onto the Doctor because no one else wanted her. But she had the right level of ignorance to set the Doctor up to deliver exposition and she had the right amount of training to occasionally surprise everyone with her skills. Plus she was all kinds of likeable.

And there was also Sarah Jane Smith, but I'll write about her in the next article.


My top three Third Doctor serials:

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1. The Time Warrior (6)
2. Invasion of the Dinosaurs (6)
3. The Sea Devils (6)

There are no serials that everyone else hates in my top three for a change! First place went to superstar Doctor Who writer Robert Holmes (and fourth place, and fifth place), but Malcolm Hulke also did pretty well, with two of his episodes taking second and third. Shame he never came back to the series after this.

Bottom three Third Doctor serials:

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1. Planet of the Spiders (3)
2. Planet of the Daleks (3)
3. Day of the Daleks (3)

The Third Doctor era really did have problems with planets and Daleks.

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COMING SOON

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the Philip Hinchcliffe/Robert Holmes/Tom Baker era of Doctor Who at last! Gaze in amazement as I give all your favourite classics a rubbish score.

I'm sure you've got all kinds of opinions you're dying to share right now. Fortunately, there's a box below that you can leave a comment in right now.