Doctor Who: The Third Doctor Era (1970-1974) - Part 1

Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, my epic Doctor Who review saga continues.

I watched Twitch's classic Doctor Who marathon a few weeks back without any intention whatsoever to write anything about it, because reviewing 600 episodes in a hurry would be crazy, but then afterwards I decided to do it anyway. It wasn't too much work to write about the First and Second Doctor's stories, due to the BBC thoughtfully erasing all their tapes and giving me less to review, but from this point on all the classic serials have been recovered. Plus I found more to write about the Third Doctor's stories because I actually wrote some notes down for them while I was watching, sometimes even three or four sentences per serial! (It was something to do to pass the time).

That's a lot of opinions for one article, so I'm going to split the Pertwee era into two parts for both your sake and mine. I'll give you the first three seasons now and you can come back for the last two and my conclusion later.

There don't seem to be any notes here to let me know what I feel about the Third Doctor's flashy new opening titles sequence, but I'm going to assume that I like it. The effect was produced using the same black and white process as the first two opening titles, but when they tinted the footage it came out looking less spooky and more psychedelic. I definitely like this version of the title text as it's probably my favourite of the classic logos, and I guess the people who made the TV movie thought so as well as they brought it back for the 90s.

I should inform you that there'll be SPOILERS in every review, but nothing from serials later than the one I'm writing about. So there'll be no speculation here on who would win in a fight between Bessie and K-9.

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It doesn't seem right to review a bunch of episodes at once without giving them ratings, so while I'm breaking format I might as well throw some in for you. I've come up with a 1-9 rating scale based on how much I cared about the serial, so I can be reasonably consistent with it while also keeping things strictly subjective. Though I will add or subtract a few points if there were elements in a boring episode that really impressed me, or vice versa. So, hypothetically speaking, if there was a really good six-parter full of action, great dialogue, a submarine and even a swordfight, but it had a soundtrack summoned from the infernal depths of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, it'd get knocked down from a 7 to a 6.

10	Reserved for inachieveable perfection for psychological reasons.
9	My favourite episodes of my favourite series.
8	Loved it, but there are some stories I like just a little better.
7	A good solid episode but nothing really spectacular.
6	Decent enough.
5	Kept me watching.
4	I was checking the Twitch chat a lot.
3	I kept listening to it for the most part.
2	I gave it my best shot but I couldn't stand it for long.
1	A really badly made clip show.

Expect lots of ratings in the 5 and below range, because that's how things have been going so far. Possibly because a: I'm a modern TV viewer with no attention span and b: I watched 16 episodes a night over 8 weeks and I've been informed that's not the optimal way to appreciate the series.

1970 - Series 7
051	Spearhead from Space	4 parts	6
One of the weird things about classic Doctor Who is that you can split up the series into decades pretty cleanly, with the black and white era of the first two Doctors spanning 1963 to 1969, the grim and garish John Nathan-Turner era of the last three Doctors running from 1980 to 1989, and the colour era of the series beginning here in 1970. Season 7 was a massive change for the series, with a new Doctor, a new companion, a new format, a new script editor and a new producer... eventually (he didn't work on this first serial). So if I seem to be more interested in the behind the scenes story than the one I watched on my monitor screen, that's probably because I am. Spearhead from Space really did feel like it belonged to a different TV series, though a lot of that's due to it being the first (and only, unless you count the TV movie) episode in Doctor Who's 55-year history to be shot entirely on film and on location. It was a bit cruel of them I reckon to start the season with a new cinematic look, with proper single-camera cinematography and actual locations instead of cheap sets, and then go back right to shooting on video for the very next serial. Though to be fair they had upgraded to colour video cameras, and recording onto tape was much cheaper than using film. Exiling the Doctor to Earth was another way they tried to save money, though weirdly the Time Lords decided to drop off his iconic, yet unimaginably dangerous and incredibly stolen time-travelling spaceship along with him. I guess they knew he'd punish himself worse than they ever could with his futile attempts to get it working without the knowledge they stole from his brain. I don't know who was punishing Liz Shaw by forcing her to wear that horrific bubble wrap panel coat though, but thankfully it didn't last past this story. Plus, coat aside, she was great as a take-no-shit scientist on the Barbara/Zoe side of the companion scale, and promoting the Brig to a regular was genius. The Doctor's new UNIT family wasn't much of a family at this point but I found them very watchable. Jon Pertwee's first year only had four stories in it, making this the shortest season yet by a long shot. But not the shortest of the classic series, because three of those serials were seven-parters! Three seven-parters in a row... I know they were trying to save money but that was just inhumane. Thankfully this one was a mere four-parter, which came as a relief after ten episodes of The War Games, though the pacing could've been faster and it sure spent a lot of time showing the adventures of a poacher I didn't give a damn about while the Doctor was still in a hospital bed ranting about shoes. But the Third Doctor quickly won me over once he'd finally got up and by the end he was going all Seeds of Death on invading aliens with his cobbled-together murder device like the action scientist he was (before getting strangled by a tentacle, like the comedian that Pertwee was). His killing spree was fine here though because he was shooting plastic mannequins and they're creepy. They were also the Ninth Doctor's first enemy in the Russell T. Davies revival series, which I believe was a deliberate clue that this era more than any other was the inspiration for the regenerated version of Doctor Who. They didn't go as far as putting Christopher Eccleston in a frilly shirt and velvet coat though.
052	Doctor Who and the Silurians	7 parts	4
The title of this one was a mistake and not just because the writer apparently got the Silurian's name wrong (in a later story the Doctor says they should be called the Eocenes). Seems that the folks making the series had gotten into the habit of putting 'Doctor Who and' before a story's title on documents during production, without any intention to air that way, and they didn't take it off this time for whatever reason. Another interesting thing about this serial: it was the first to be shot on colour video, meaning that they could use blue screens (or yellow, or whatever) for the first time to put scary dinosaurs in the background of shots. Though the analogue technology they were using meant they had to composite the effects in live, like they were doing a weather forecast, which seems crazy to me. But I guess it worked for them! Sometimes. A less interesting thing about this serial: the story. I found I couldn't really give a damn about this one for whatever reason, even though I can't think of anything to really complain about. Too much wandering around in caves maybe? Though I did wake up a bit when the plague got out and people in London started dropping in the streets; I definitely didn't expect that. Turns out that UNIT is about as good at containing a deadly virus as they are at killing aliens with bullets. Unfortunately watching someone try to cure a plague was actually kind of boring, especially when their only assistant got called away to man the phones instead (to her great annoyance). A more interesting part of the serial for me was the ending, where the Brig decided to wait until the Doctor had driven away and then blew up the Silurian base! Sure the Silurians had come dangerously close to ending humanity twice that day, but they were all helpless in their sleeping pods by that point and the Doctor believed he could've made peace between the two species. It was a surprisingly dark ending that drove a wedge between the two heroes and left it there for the next serial to deal with. But the most interesting thing about the serial is that it introduced Bessie! Those bastard Time Lords clamped the Doctor's antique vehicle so he found another one to play with. Before watching the series I assumed that the producers had given him a distinctive classic roadster as a gimmicky accessory to make him seem more eccentric, like the Fifth Doctor's celery, and that's probably true, but it suits the character perfectly. It's like the car equivalent of the Tardis, so as a bonus feature it also helps to illustrate how archaic his time machine actually is underneath the police box disguise. The car they used was apparently a Siva Edwardian kit car from the late 60s, made from a fiberglass shell attached on top of a Ford Prefect chassis, so it wasn't quite as ancient as we were intended to believe. But then neither was Jon Pertwee so whatever.
053	The Ambassadors of Death	7 parts	5
I lost track of what was happening at times in this one, which isn't a good sign. It usually means that the story's not explaining things well, or it's not holding my attention. Though I didn't need to know why the Brig was shooting folks in a warehouse to appreciate the scene where the Brig was shooting people in a warehouse. I thought they set the Pertwee era on Earth to save money, but then they went and put in all these chases and shootouts and now I don't know what to believe! I'm not sure the Hartnell or Troughton era ever looked as expensive as this serial did at times. Every story this season was an attempt to do something new with the 'alien invaders vs UNIT' plot, as being stuck on Earth really limited their options (or at least they thought it did; later series like The X-Files and Fringe managed to get plenty of sci-fi out of one planet and one time period). So the first serial was 'invaders from space... who had to beam their consciousness into bodies made on Earth', the next was 'invaders from underground... who were actually living on Earth before us', and this time it was 'invaders from space... who were actually being coerced by a conspiracy inside our own military into helping to create anti-alien sentiment among the population so that they'd support a preemptive strike'. So that's kind of different! I guess classic Doctor Who could've actually taught The X-Files a few things. One thing I do remember is that a lot of the story took place in what was basically the British version of Cheyenne Mountain from Stargate, which functioned as the command centre running all British space missions to Mars... so there's a bit of a clue right there that this wasn't really taking place in 1970, despite what later stories like Mawdryn Undead would imply. As far as I can figure out, one of their space capsules had returned to Earth, but the crew had been replaced by alien ambassadors wearing their spacesuits, who had a natural tendency to destroy everything they touched (aside from their own gloves). You might wonder how a race that can't touch anything invented space travel, but I was too busy trying to figure out how kidnapping astronauts and putting aliens in their suits who can't communicate verbally or even hold a pen was supposed to lead to friendly relations between their two species. It doesn't seem to me like a great way to make contact and inspire trust. But it's entirely possible there was an explanation for everything buried in the three hours of story and I just missed it. We never got to see how things were supposed to play out though because somehow the Evil Brig knew about their arrival in advance and had a plan to catch them and have them commit crimes as part of a smear campaign (because it was his 'moral duty'). I knew that guy was shady the minute I realised he was played by Rimmer's dad from that episode of Red Dwarf. It was kind of an insane plot really, but I didn't entirely dislike the serial in the end. I can't hate any story which had the captive Doctor requesting certain hardware so that he could build a gadget for the enemy and then just building a radio with it and calling for help. Plus he got to go up in a space rocket again!
054	Inferno	7 parts	6
The Third Doctor's first season took a real turn into humourless sci-fi thrillers after the slightly goofier Spearhead from Space when producer Barry Letts took the reigns, but Inferno turned out to be the final serial in the epic 'corrupt authority figures and serious professionals standing around grey control rooms full of computer banks and blinky lights' trinity. Almost an entire season of seven-parters was just cruel, but I think this story came closest to justifying its epic length; mostly because the writers just kept throwing in extra complications to keep it interesting. It's about a drilling rig almost causing a disaster! Also, it's about a weird chemical that turns humans into monsters! Also, it's about a parallel universe where everyone's a fascist! And now it's about the characters trying to escape the end of the world! Ending part six with the Doctor actually failing to save the Earth and the characters all turning on each other as the planet exploded around them was a pretty dramatic twist which really raised the stakes for the last episode. It's just a shame that the science was utter bullshit, as drilling a big hole wouldn't actually blow up the whole planet... probably. It didn't blow up when the Daleks did it in season two at least! There are many reasons why this serial falls short from being an absolute classic like The War Games for me, but the Brig in an eye patch isn't one of them. Nicholas Courtney was great playing the opposite of his normal heroic role and I found I suddenly cared a lot more about what was happening whenever he and Pertwee were on screen together. It seemed like an obvious homage to Goatee Spock to me at first, as Inferno was made three years after the classic Star Trek episode Mirror Mirror, but it actually aired a few months before it in the UK, so I suppose it's possible that the two series came up with the idea of an evil Mirror Universe where a main character's doppelganger has different facial hair entirely independently! I've got no idea how well ideas like that travelled in those pre-internet, pre-VHS days.

1971 - Series 8
055	Terror of the Autons	4 parts	6
More like Terror of the CSO. This serial's got more bluescreen shots than Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (not literally)! Though somehow the rubbish look of the effects actually made it creepier, especially in the scene where the troll monster doll got up and attacked someone in their own home. It did not enhance the shot of a woman just standing in her kitchen however. I don't remember the CSO ever getting quite this bad again until Underworld halfway through Tom Baker's run. And by 'bad' I mean 'hilarious'. I'll always remember this as being a serial of awesome kills and near misses, with a guy being murdered by a toy, a dude being basically eaten by an inflatable chair, and the Doctor getting to do his 'I'm being strangled by a tentacle' face again as he was strangled by his phone cable. But it was also the serial that that introduced Jo Grant and The Master. I was surprised by how much I liked the cheerful, inexplicably qualified UNIT agent, even though she was a little closer to the 'hamfisted bun vendor' side of the companion scale than Liz was, but Roger Delgado's Master was amazing. Though I did have one problem with him: he was more interesting and charismatic than Pertwee's Doctor! In fact, the story was a bit more fun and entertaining than last season's stories in general, with the series taking a step away from Quatermass-inspired horror and 70s grittiness and letting some of the dumb childish joy back in, and I fully approve of this. Though I do have to subtract points because it featured a circus.
056	The Mind of Evil	6 parts	5
It's hard for me to really remember what happened in this story because it was like three different unconnected serials bolted together. There was the mind-controlled Chinese captain sabotaging a peace conference, the mysterious deaths related to an experimental device at a prison, and a nuclear nerve gas missile being stolen. Plus the Master was involved in everything because I guess he needed something to keep him occupied after the Doctor stranded him on Earth as well. I do remember liking most of the episodes though, when they weren't driving me mad with that bloody prison alarm. Plus I was rolling my eyes so hard at the device that could physically extract a prisoner's negative impulses and put them in a box, until they revealed it was actually a con. Psychic fear parasites teleporting around I can deal with, but a jar full of bad thoughts is just taking the piss. But my main memory of the story is of Jo Grant expertly taking care of people holding her at gunpoint like the trained agent she occasionally claimed to be. I loved her rare moments of extreme competence. I also want to say that at one point the Brig put on a disguise and an accent and then led a raid on a castle, but I can't be sure I didn't doze off and dream the whole thing.
057	The Claws of Axos	4 parts	3
This was the one where they went aboard a crashed alien spaceship and found that it was all gross and organic inside, and the crew were spray painted gold with giant eyes, and there were red spaghetti monsters... but I wasn't interested in any of that. As far as I'm concerned, this was a story about the Master breaking into the Doctor's Tardis and dealing with the utter mess he'd made of it in his attempts to fix the thing without the knowledge the Time Lords had taken from his mind. And when the Doctor eventually joined him they actually sort of got the ship working again! Those two make such a good team it's always a little tragic to me that they're entirely opposed in their agendas until the Master screws everything up and needs help. It's also a shame that the Time Lords programmed the Tardis to always return to Earth, so the Doctor's exile continued regardless. But yeah I have no opinion about anything else in this serial because my attention drifted away any time Roger Delgado wasn't on screen. I really did try to give it a fair chance though, I even rewatched an episode to try to catch up on what I'd missed, but my brain wasn't having any of it. Decent idea for a story, rubbish execution.
058	Colony in Space	6 parts	6
I knew that the Doctor's exile was going to end before Tom Baker took over, but I'm not sure I expected it to end just four serials into Pertwee's second year! And it didn't really, as this was just a brief trip off-world arranged by the Time Lords who hijacked the otherwise Earthbound Tardis so that the Doctor could do some interfering for them. Sure interfering is what got him exiled in the first place, but hey the Time Lords aren't a hive mind, there are different groups with different agendas. Plus this at least means there's some explanation for why they let him keep the Tardis. These particular Time Lords basically wanted him to stop the Master from getting hold of Starkiller Base, but chose not to give him any hint that the Master was involved or that the planet contained a giant star-destroying superweapon. Which means a: the Time Lords are dicks, and b: the writers were really working their asses off to come up with good reasons for why the Master kept showing up in every single story this year. It was getting a bit daft at this point. I remember this story holding my attention but it was touch and go there at times, partly because it is very very long. Well okay, it's 'only' six episodes, but they did not fly by. And the Tardis didn't fade away when it dematerialised either, it just popped out of time, which is a really strange mistake for them to make 293 episodes into a famous TV series. It's like if the Star Trek folks forgot to Spock's ears on for one episode. But it was nice to finally see the Doctor out and meddling with things on some other world again after almost two years stuck on semi-contemporary Earth (even though for me it'd only been a week since I watched The War Games). I didn't like how he persuaded Jo to come out with him though, insisting that "there's nothing to worry about", considering that the last 50-something times he'd stepped out of that box he was soon in mortal danger (including his return to Gallifrey and his exile to Earth!) It's also a shame that the planet they visited was so rubbish, with the colonists basically trying to grow food in a quarry. The soundtrack was a bit rubbish as well, which is weird because I assumed Doctor Who's music wouldn't fall apart until the 80s. If you listened to it without the video each episode would be like a Game Boy game with voice acting. In the serial's defence, it did occur to me while watching it that it was impressive how they pulled off all those spaceships, colony buildings and landscapes for the price of pint of lager and some crisps, while Star Trek: Discovery's epic first season budget barely got them a forest with some twinkly lights in it. But the most amazing part of this serial for me though is that the endlessly reasonable colony leader was played by the same actor who played the evil high priest in The Aztecs! I had absolutely no idea, as he was so subtle in this one and didn't have a stripe painted across his mouth. It was hard not to recognise Gail from Coronation Street as his daughter though. The main villain in this story consumed less scenery than Tlotoxl (he had robots with monster hands to do that for him), but he was still an impressive bastard, and then the Master turned up as well with his rocketship Tardis to double the villainy! Also, I might be wrong, but I think this was the very first time that the Doctor took someone out on a Tardis adventure and then brought them right back afterwards. Granted the Time Lords were doing the steering on this occasion, but this did set Jo up as being a more modern Doctor Who companion, who returned home to her ordinary life as a government agent between trips.
059	The Dæmons	5 parts	6
I shouldn't have liked this one, with its morris dancers and its supernatural demons, but I somehow did. Even though the first episode was about the Doctor trying to drive somewhere, getting lost and asking for directions, and it felt like a big chunk of the rest of it was taken up by the Doctor yelling instructions through an invisible forcefield to a UNIT technical officer (called Osgood!) I guess it's impossible for me to hate the story that gave us the phrase 'five rounds rapid', especially when it featured a scene of Benton making the Doctor appear to be a wizard with his secret sharpshooting. Plus the story had the best scientific explanation for demons (they're aliens from the planet Daemos, obviously), and the heroes basically beat the bad guy the same way Captain Kirk talked computers to death, as his limited logical brain could not comprehend Jo Grant. Also, the archaeological dig at the start was being filmed by BBC3, proving once and for all that the UNIT seasons take place after 2003 because that's when the channel launched. The stories were really supposed to be set 'the day after tomorrow' I think, so late 70s-ish, but post-2003 would've at least given the UK a few decades to get those manned missions to Mars from Ambassadors of Death started.

1972 - Series 9
060	Day of the Daleks	4 parts	3
More like Day of the Yaaaaaaaaaaaaawn. Somehow they managed to make this four-parter feel like a slow six-parter. Evil of the Daleks was apparently being intended to be the Daleks' big finale on Doctor Who, but when Terry Nation's shouty tank-wannabes failed to get their own spin-off show on American TV they eventually came crawling back. To be honest, this story had me thinking it was might have been better to just leave them dead and move on because as villains they were as one-note as their irritating voices. Plus at one point Mike Yates stole Benton's cheese and wine and that bothered me too. Though I did like how the director was fond of using clever zoom out shots to reveal the Daleks watching, even if he seemed to have caught a boom mic in one of them. That scene with the Daleks watching the Doctor on the TV was especially impressive to me, considering it must have been a bluescreen shot and they presumably had to zoom out with two cameras simultaneously. Plus to be fair the serial did have an interesting premise (for 1972), with the human resistance from a post-World War III Earth using a homemade time machine to assassinate the person they believe caused to it, inadvertently bringing about World War III themselves in the process in a predestination paradox. It was all very Terminator. But the Doctor spent half the story in the present thinking he was James Bond, discussing his wine and gunning down Ogrons with a pistol, and when he finally got the chance to be the Doctor again in a crapsack sci-fi future, he was absolutely useless! I was not impressed by his performance in this story. Though he did manage to break a stable time loop from the inside, which I'm considering to be a subtle demonstration of his Time Lord abilities.
061	The Curse of Peladon	4 parts	6
Curse of Peladon is a story about an indecisive monarch facing a choice about whether his planet should join the space EU. At first this confused me, because his world seemed a bit too medieval to belong to a galactic federation (I doubt they even had steamships never mind spaceships), but then I remembered that I wasn't watching Star Trek and Doctor Who's Federation could do what they liked. There ain't no Prime Directive here. Hopefully, joining means that Peladon will be able to start importing fridges, microwaves and iPads after this, and maybe if they're really lucky there'll be a Federation regulation about those unlabelled mazelike hallways. That's not the only problem with the castle, as their policy about letting random people claiming to be princesses wander into the throne room looking like they've just climbed a cliff in heels probably needs reviewing too, but if the smartest man in the universe can't find the bathroom without accidentally wandering into a forbidden room and being sentenced to death, I think they really need to stick some signs up. Man, there were so many secret passages in this story. If there are three things I'll remember about the serial years from now, it'll be the Doctor singing a soothing song to Rhino Alf, the giant one-eyed high-pitched panicky bug in a cape, and people continually lifting torches to open endless secret doors. Maybe if I'm lucky I'll also remember the Doctor ending up in an actual fight to the death against an actual warrior and winning as well. Plus I guess I should reserve some room in the trivia section of my brain for the fact that this was the story where a former villain race (the Ice Warriors) was now an ally, which was cool. I'm glad they didn't end up in Silurians situation where the status quo must be maintained and villains can never be rehabilitated.
062	The Sea Devils	6 parts	6
This is the story that features the Doctor's epic swordfight against the Master where he steals his sandwich, a slightly less epic scene later where he steals Jo's sandwich as well, and the iconic "reversed the polarity of the neutron flow" line, so it's a bit sad really that my main memory of it is how bad the soundtrack was. I realise that music is very subjective, but for me it was so distinctively awful that it sabotaged what should've been of Pertwee's very best stories. This is probably the closest classic Doctor Who came to being a James Bond movie, The Invasion aside, and man I wish they'd gotten John Barry to do the score. I could write a little about how this was a sequel to The Silurians, with the creatures coming from the sea instead of the underground and the Doctor blowing up their base after failing to make peace himself this time, but I feel that it's more important to mention that the Doctor cleared a path for Jo through barbed wire by leaping onto it! I guess velvet and frills are more resistant to spiky metal barbs than you'd think. Also, that scene came after a sequence where Jo crept into a prison, silently communicated her plan to the captive Doctor through a window, and then successfully broke him out! Jo wasn't always the most effective companion, but every now and again she made Ian and Barbara look like amateurs. I suppose without UNIT backup she was forced to step up her game. This was actually the first 'present-day' Earth-based serial not to feature the Brig since Troughton's first year, and awesome as he is I think they did quite well without him.
063	The Mutants	6 parts	4
In this story the Doctor checked on humanity's future again and found that it still sucks. Between this, Day of the Daleks and Colony in Space the Third Doctor's era really didn't fill me with a lot of hope for tomorrow. Turns out that if you want to meet the real bastards you should go visit an Earth colony and check in with the guy trying to exploit it, as the space station commander here really gave the asshole mining ship commander from Colony in Space a run for his money. He wanted to make the atmosphere on the planet unbreathable to the original inhabitants and wasn't going to let little things like Earth withdrawing from the planet stop him. Meanwhile, the Doctor was busy running around with a football he'd been given by the Time Lords trying to figure out who he was intended to bring it to, because once again they'd told him nothing. Delivering parcels on Gallifrey must be a real pain in the ass. I was confused for a while during this one, because it's called The Mutants and features human-looking people mutating into bugs, so I assumed that they were human colonists who'd adapted to the environment. It seemed like they were being affected by the natural life-cycle of the planet and I got a little concerned that Jo had been down there too long and was going to suddenly turn into a bug creature too. But this wasn't the Colin Baker era so she was safe. Even repeated exposure to high levels of radiation barely fazed her. The folks on the planet, on the other hand, went Star Trek and turned into god-like energy beings, as turning into bug people was just an intermediate stage of their mutation! Like a bug-shaped chrysalis, I guess. The story held my attention better than Claws of Axos did, but I wasn't exactly looking forward to the next scene of the Doctor being forced to do the Marshal's evil work the space station lab, or Jo having more radiation adventures with the worst actor in Doctor Who history. Bob Baker and Dave Martin were responsible for both stories so it wasn't a great start for the pair.
064	The Time Monster	6 parts	6
Doctor Who Magazine readers voted this as their least favourite Third Doctor story, 25th out of 25, so of course it turned out to be one I liked. I'm not doing this deliberately! I didn't check the poll before watching The Space Museum and The Dominators to check if I needed to force myself to like them. I can only presume that the typical Doctor Who fan has a different sense of humour to me. Comedy is definitely something I'm grateful when I'm watching a classic episode and this was one of the funniest so far for me, with Benton and The Master outwitting each other with the oldest tricks in the book, and the stupid confrontation between the Doctor and the Master in their Tardises which felt like a skit from Curse of Fatal Death. Plus the fearsome time monster itself turned out to be a crap looking chicken creature and Benton suffered a Babality! Though I should take a point off for the Doctor building that stupid thing out of bits and pieces from a kitchen to short out the Master's time device, because that crossed the line into just being dumb. I don't want to just list things I liked about it... but it's been three months since I watched it and I didn't make notes so: It had someone standing up to the Master's casual sexism (and surviving the serial). The Master attacked UNIT with armies and missiles from different time periods. The Doctor got to use his Time Lord powers to walk through a distorted time field while everyone else was in slow motion. It featured the first use of the Tardis's telepathic circuits, which she activated by herself so that Jo could save the Doctor. The Master visited Atlantis, immediately schemed his way to the throne, and then destroyed the place on his way out! It had the scene of the Doctor telling Jo about his mentor on Gallifrey who taught him to look at the world differently. Plus Jo sacrificed both their lives to stop the Master unleashing Kronos the chronovore when the Doctor couldn't bring himself to kill her. To be honest The Time Monster wouldn't even make it into my top five Pertwee stories, but it kept me entertained and I don't take that for granted with these serials. So far the Third Doctor's doing pretty well with his season finales. Three seasons down, two to go.

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COMING SOON

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, the last 10 serials of the Jon Pertwee era. Be astounded by how much I can almost still remember about 21 hours of television I watched months ago!

Do you have any opinions about any of these stories or my reviews? I hope so, because it would give you an excellent reason to leave a comment in that box down there.