As always, spoilers abound. See Wikipedia for production details

Doctor Who - Jon Pertwee
Jo Grant - Katy Manning

The Three Doctors

After the last two stories… that's a bit more like it. Not brilliant, but gets the job done.

The scuttling CSO-ed thing is an unusually early monster appearance, which signifies that this isn't going to be just a single-monster story. It's even moderately effective, more so than CSO-ed real objects tend to be. The shambling mounds ("Gell Guards") are obviously more practical (both in the effects sense and in ease of setting up), but less convincing.

Another new TARDIS interior; this one lasted a bit longer than the washing-up bowls.

It's a shame to see the Emergency Plot Device Switch from The Time Monster used again, so soon, for a different purpose. Granted, Carnival of Monsters and Frontier in Space had been shot in between and this was under a different director, but I suppose I'm just the sort of person who doesn't see why such things can't be got right.

The new UNIT stuntmen are, alas, no better at taking cover than the old HAVOC crew.

The Time Lords have had yet another complete redesign, both of interior decor and of personal fashion. Perversely enough, I find that sort of inconsistency quite appealing; the Time Lords have a society based on the use of time travel, after all, so why should they be consistent? (We may come onto this again with The Deadly Assassin, which I loved at the time: talking too much about it makes Gallifrey too known, too understandable.)

One has to admit that Omega has, or at least had, something of a point. (Why didn't anyone later attempt to time-travel and snatch him out of his solar engineering ship just before whatever went wrong? This, put more generally, is a question that the show always skates round (see Earthshock); other books and games have done a better job of exploring it, perhaps because gamers and readers can't be trusted to go along with things just because they're convenient to the author, and because TV audiences are assumed not to notice or care about inconsistencies as long as they serve the story.) And his helmet is splendid, and Stephen Thorne plays him in a pleasingly kinetic way, always restless and moving about rather than with the slow ponderous affect one often associates with major villains.

But a world that's running off the imagination of the boss is a direct call-back to the Land of Fiction (The Mind Robber), and it's a bit of a shame not to hear that acknowledged. Though it's perhaps a bit too close, what with the needing the Doctor to come in and take his place again. And it's clear that Omega doesn't really have very much by way of imagination. (I may be misremembering, but I think this is somewhere expanded on in the Target novelisation: that, at first, Omega had created huge fantasy palaces, but in the end all of that had got boring, and he'd gone with the simple stuff.)

It's odd to see Dr Tyler given such a prominent role; given my druthers (and I realised one can't always get the cast one wants) I'd have brought back Liz Shaw rather than bring in an entirely new character to talk science. But that would have made Jo look even more useless than usual. (Apparently there was a suggestion that Wendy Padbury come back as Zoe, but this was torpedoed by Pertwee who didn't want too many old characters around distracting attention from the new ones.)

There are timing errors: everyone except the Doctors gets out of the Omegacave in episode 3 and then drives back to UNIT HQ in Bessie, while the Doctors themselves come out in episode 4 and on foot… but they arrive only about thirty seconds later.

The "wrestling in the dark" sequence that takes up the end of episode 3 seems frankly spurious. And the delay as everyone walks through the column of smoke really just feels like padding, particularly since everything is going to get snapped back to normal space anyway. But at least this is a four-parter; apart from those two incidents, the pace is mostly maintained.

As story it's not all that strong. Mostly this is a character piece, with the Doctors particularly shining. Troughton seems to be deliberately irritating Pertwee, playing up to the "clown" stereotype, but still effortlessly stealing the show; he's still "the actor's Doctor". It's good to see Hartnell again, in what turned out to be his last acting work; the short pieces (assisted by cue cards) were well within his capabilities even with his state of illness at the time.

As an anniversary story, The Three Doctors was one of the first consciously to hark back to the show's past. In later years this would be done rather more.

At this point the show was reinvented again, but not back to its original form. Yes, the Doctor was freed to travel in space and time, but by this point the two-tier companion system had kicked in: Jo Grant would travel with him, but the rest of the UNIT crew wouldn't. Indeed, only one more story this season would have any significant role for UNIT. Even in The Three Doctors they're being downplayed, being more an example of why military force is irrelevant than a useful component of the story.

This newly-established model of the Doctor with a single female companion would carry on, with occasional intrusions from Harry Sullivan, until series 18.

Carnival of Monsters

"One has no wish to be devoured by alien monstrosities. Even in the cause of political progress."

If The Three Doctors was the introduction to the reinvented show, Carnival of Monsters was the story that would show us what it might look like. Robert Holmes had written the series 7 and 8 openers, so was reasonably used to setting up a strong theme.

And I'm rather fond of this one; it doesn't hurt that it's another four-parter, and it's always pleasing to see the show working at a small human scale rather than invoking the entire universe in peril ("but that's where I keep all my stuff"). The duality of stories stays unexplained for a pleasantly long time, giving the new viewer something to speculate about and the repeat viewer (admittedly not a target audience considered at the time) something to enjoy in full comprehension. What's even better, we have something that superficially looks like a time loop, but turns out not to be. But this may also be the nadir of Jo Grant, scared by a pair of chickens and then apparently interacting with them as intellectual equals. She spends almost all the story trapped inside the 'scope, and most of that trapped aboard the Bernice, with nothing to do but run and hide. Still, at least she now has skeleton keys.

Some of that duality of story was a cost-saver given all the epic and location-based stories expected in this series: the Bernice actors could be shot in one production block, the Inter Minor actors on another, and the only cast members who needed to be paid for four weeks' filming rather than two were Pertwee and Manning. And yet, the script for this cost-saver was given to Holmes, who'd been one of the better writers, so it wasn't just meant to mark time before the next big story.

The third set is probably the best, in fact: the interior of the 'scope, which is a solid state fantasy in garish colour. One could also regard it as a metaphor for the escape from Earth-bound stories, if one were so inclined.

Once again the implications of time travel are ignored. If the Time Lords banned and destroyed the scopes, wouldn't they have got rid of them throughout time, retroactively? If, in the end, the Bernice arrived on time, why is she a famous mystery of the seas? (I know, remember that it's just a show, I should really just relax.)

But actually what I find rather more interesting is the "outside" political plotting, something not present in the original script concept; yes, it's simplistic, but neophyte plotters very often do think that they are the first people to have come up with some technique or tactic. I think this may be a key to writing Who stories that I enjoy, actually: don't try to write people vastly cleverer than you are, and admit that you aren't the cleverest person out there.

The Drashigs are less convincing than they might be; the hairy back isn't bad at all, but when they rear up their heads are as bad as the plesiosaur's. Of course, the CSO when it's in the hold is as jarring as this era's CSO always is.

One could regard this whole thing as a riff on the idiocy of television (and the little men inside it; and you, yes, you are evil for wanting to watch Jo Grant get chased by monsters). I don't think that's necessarily helpful; rather, this is Holmes going just a bit outside the lines, and doing a good job with it. What's missing is anything dealing with the treatment of the Functionaries: the Doctor's normal role as friend of the oppressed is oddly absent here.

Cheryl Hall and Jenny McKracken (Shirna and Claire Daly) had both been on the shortlist for the part of Jo Grant. They're both under so much makeup, hair product and odd clothing here that it's hard to evaluate how they might have done.

Don't miss a fine nose-plant from Pertwee during his last moments inside the 'scope in episode four.

Location filming for the Bernice was done in two days aboard the RFA Robert Dundas, a coastal stores carrier, while she was on her way down the Medway for scrapping. This explains all those high- and low-angle shots: if you could see far over the sides, the banks of the river would be visible.

Some critics seem to think that the term "Tellurian" was invented for this story. I refer them to etymonline; it was first used to mean "inhabitant of planet Earth" in 1847.

Frontier in Space

My word, those space crew shoulder pads! Not like The Dominators, of course, but gosh.

The Draconian battlecruiser is strangely phallic and rivety, reminiscent of Flash Gordon at its most innocent. I rather like these spacecraft; not clean-lined like most SF vehicles, these are obviously working beasts, and not new. It's not the show's usual approach, but it seems to work pretty well in this story. (The models were apparently acquired from Gerry Anderson's Century 21, though details are hazy.)

The basic plot is an interesting one: not terribly original now (particularly if we've seen You Only Live Twice, which Fleming would write the next year), but in 1973 still a bit more unexpected. Unfortunately the story needs to fill six episodes, and an awful lot of that is capture and escape, capture and escape. That's its real problem. The padding is very often good stuff; the problem is that it is padding, it doesn't advance the story at all, and especially if one watches the whole show at a sitting this becomes very blatantly obvious.

(It's been suggested that the drinking game for this story should involve taking one drink every time the Doctor or Jo gets locked up somewhere. More cruelly, start drinking every time they escape and stop again when they get recaptured.)

It would have been interesting for the Doctor to explore this history a bit further: in his memory, does this series of incidents exist at all? If it does, what defused it? Or did a huge war really start? In other words, does he think this is June 1914 or October 1962? The answer of course would be that historically these incidents didn't happen, and therefore it's reasonable to assume that there's another time traveller mucking about. Of course, this would then slightly defuse the splendid surprise of the Master turning up in episode 3, this time not foreshadowed right at the start of the story. (This is in itself a lovely bit of misdirection. "Aha!", says the viewer who remembers Colony in Space from two years back. "Last time they did this they messed up, so the Master wasn't a surprise. This time they got that right. OK, this is all the Master's fault." Heh. The brief hint of the Master's "employers" in episode 5 is carefully skated over until very nearly the end.)

The President (Vera Fusek), and General Williams (Michael Hawkins), are small gems of acting in a story that's mostly about the action sequences. Though there's a perversity about the setup: the President is painted as a good woman struggling to avoid war, but she's apparently quite happy to have people sentenced to life without parole for disagreeing with government policy. The whole lunar prison sequence is effectively disposable anyway, and really feels as though it belongs in a different story, probably The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

In fact there's a classic SF feel about a lot of this: the importance of spacewalking, and especially the pulling off of the air hose to get some delta-V, are the sorts of thing one would expect to find in a Clarke juvenile, for example. In a less impressive way, the Draconians and their "women may not speak in the throne room" fit in here too.

The Draconians have vaguely cod-oriental accents that don't suit them well, but this is beautifully subverted the first time we see them on their own: "The ways of the Earthmen are devious. They are an inscrutable species." (They're also not much smarter than the Earthmen. Yeah, when the "saboteurs" escape and you give them sanctuary, the Earthmen won't find that suspicious at ALL. Actually, the joint questioning plan that's merely a cover for their arranged escape would have been a much better idea!) In Hulke's original scheme, they were to be more like post-Napoleonic Hapsburgs, an interesting conceit.

What does the hypnotic sound do to video recordings? How about if you watch them without playing back the sound? Just asking.

It's always nice to recognise a location, in this case the (then about five years old) concrete blocks and exterior staircases of the South Bank Centre (Queen Elizabeth Hall, Hayward Gallery), complete with wood patterning on the concrete walls from the planks used to hold them in place while they set. The Earth costumes are also rather splendid, particularly the charming silver evening number (plus pale heliotrope elbow-gloves) that's apparently professional uniform for mind probe operators. Well, maybe they had to call her in from a hot date and she didn't have time to change.

Nice use of Apollo footage when the Master's ship is taking off from the Moon. It seems an odd vehicle "especially adapted for the conveyance of prisoners" that has no telltales on the airlocks, or indeed any sort of defence in depth. And really, an airlock door that opens outwards?

I wonder whether the accidental war was the inspiration for the whole "gun ports open" thing that started the Earth-Minbari War in Babylon 5…

It's unfortunate that on one of the few occasions when Jo Grant has shown some real gumption and competence it should have been entirely in accordance with the Master's plan. She does rather better when resisting his personal magnetism and the fear gadget.

The ending is somewhat confused, largely because it had to be re-edited: the director hated the Ogron-eating monster and omitted it from the final interior scenes, and this had to be patched round with new material (the in-TARDIS scene). It's a shame that this means Delgado's send-off is so muddy and unclear. The direction in general relies a bit too much on the kinetic camera (even rocking back and forth sometimes) but it never becomes offensive. But after all the time we've spend talking about the tensions between Earth and Draconia, and the possibility of war, and so on, all that's resolved in a couple of sentences, as this epic story takes a wrenching drift turn to tie in to Planet of the Daleks.

In the end, this one's actually bloody good on its own, if you can stomach all the captures and escapes. It's possibly best viewed piecemeal to make the padding a bit less obvious.

Oh dear. I think I may have passed the Padding Event Horizon.

Planet of the Daleks

What a very Habitat wall unit, with pull-out bed. What are those shallow drawers on the left used for? Ties?

And the TARDIS log is built into a compact cassette case? Sure, why not.

Jo, dear, you probably shouldn't hang your coat on the TARDIS controls. One snagged pocket and you'll find the entire universe has been turned inside-out.

This was Terry Nation's first script credit since The Daleks' Master Plan in 1965. His price for allowing Day of the Daleks to be made was a first refusal on writing any new Dalek stories, and he chose to take up this one as work was slack at the time. Among other changes, the producers had to strip the individual episode titles off his scripts, as he hadn't been watching the show in the meantime and wasn't aware that they were no longer used. He also lent the BBC the Dalek Supreme, a prop from the 1960s films, though the torch on its eyestalk was new. That was necessary: the BBC still only had the three and a half original Daleks it had had for Day of the Daleks, and for this show built seven more casings in wood, though they were basically static. For the next several years the wooden ones were used as frameworks to hold up the surviving parts of the originals; it was only for Revelation of the Daleks in 1985 that new working props were constructed.

In many respects this really is just a rework of Nation's The Daleks: the Doctor's companion becomes ill and is cured by the indigenes, the Doctor and a small band of Thals make an attack on the gleaming Dalek base, the Doctor gets briefly paralysed, someone uses a Dalek casing as a disguise. It's the bits that aren't rework that are interesting. (And not just Nation's original plan to kill off all the Thals at the end of a late episode.)

Given the budgetary constraints of the BBC, that's not a bad jungle at all. The squirty plants are slightly too obviously a plot device of some sort, even if their nature isn't apparent at first. The pseudo-Aztec temple surround that the Daleks have taken over for their base works well too.

If Jo was poking about the spaceship hoping to find someone to talk to, why does she hide when she does find someone to talk to? (And why was the dead Thal pilot left propped up behind the controls?)

Invisible aliens have been given a rest on this show since, hmm, The Daleks' Master Plan, and a good thing too; it's easy to overdo. The dancing objects are a bit heavy-handed, but I do like that footprint effect. And the idea of invisible Daleks is an excellent one. Strangely enough the CSO when the Spiridons manipulate objects actually works rather well, one of the first times it has. Let's face it, in some stories the fur-robed Spiridons would have been passed off as the actual monster.

Although, as in Frontier in Space, there's a fair bit of padding, it's mostly good padding. The three Thals trying to sneak in through the ice tunnels before the eruption, well, that's pure thriller action, and effectively and claustrophobically filmed. In between that we have Jo dancing around between the Daleks' fields of vision keeping an ear on what's going on. And then we have the escape up the vent shaft (even if it could be confounded by simply turning the cooling plant back to normal operation).

Actually, everyone gets a lot more up close and physical with the Daleks than they have ever been before. It really does show up the shortcomings of the travel machine design.

Yeah, there are plenty of plot holes. Dalek surface party A chooses to detonate the captured Thal explosives, and this blast catches Dalek surface party B completely by surprise, destroying them. No, I think Daleks report that sort of hazard to each other, just like any vaguely competent military force. And just what, in terms of the big picture, is the virtue of cold-storing Daleks anyway? For the invasion of the smoking ruins of Earth and Draconia, I suppose, but while you're waiting for that why not employ them in exterminating other non-Daleks? It's not as though you had a shortage. And how is it that shoving a Dalek into an ice pool kills it, but flooding them all with ice will just keep them asleep?

Mind you, I think this may be the only occasion in fiction when someone's said "the detonator's damaged" and not then had to stay behind to die setting off the bomb by hand.

What this script does very well, that few other Jo Grant stories have attempted, is to split her up from the Doctor and then give her something to do. Instead of fawning over the Doctor and saying "gosh, how wonderful you are", she actually gets a storyline of her own; yes, she's getting into trouble, but she's also discovering more about the Spiridons. And when the Doctor meets her again, practically the first thing he does is shut down her enthusiasm. (For that matter, if she'd stayed in the TARDIS as he says she should have done, they'd both have died together when the air supply ran out and nobody knew where to find them.) I believe that this is what the kids today call a "dick move". In another such move, he doesn't share with the Thals his knowledge of the existence of the Louis Marx Daleks in cold storage, which means the radical tendency sees nothing wrong with blowing up the cooling plant.

Also problematic is the treatment of the natives. The Good Native Wester cheerfully sacrifices himself to save the White Dudes, and is not only narratively but literally invisible. (And once you're alert to that sort of thing, Latep asks the Doctor's permission to take Jo back to Skaro with him, before he's even asked Jo.)

This is a story that I loved when, as a child, I read the Target novelisations (repeats rarely happened, and home video was unaffordable). There are some fine bits from Pertwee (like the standard explanation of courage, and "we're not trying to deal with a door, we're trying to deal with a Dalek"). It does probably work better in print than on the screen, and maybe I've just been desensitised by Frontier in Space (to which it's really not an effective sequel; all it gains from the previous story is a wounded Doctor and the idea that there's a specific place the Daleks are trying to invade, not just a generic target), but I ended up really enjoying this one. How I learned to stop worrying and love the padding.

(It was during this serial's broadcast that The Tomorrow People was first shown; that was a Monday afternoon/evening programme for kids coming home from school, not a Saturday evening fixture. I was never a huge fan, so I won't say much more about it except to note that it's the sort of thing that British television was producing when asked for "science fiction". I'll drop bits of context like this in when they become relevant; I think this show only makes sense at all in terms of the times for which it was made.)

The Green Death

All of a sudden we're back in the 1970s sensibility of DOOM that the show briefly touched in back in series 7. And just to rub it in, the initial scene at UNIT is a weird mix of a marital argument and a teenage girl insisting on her parents letting her go to the latest groovy concert. The continuing on-screen physicality of the acting relationship between Pertwee and Manning pushes one towards the former interpretation, which makes the portrayal of Jo in petulant brat mode a distinctly uncomfortable contrast. That Stewart Bevan (as Clifford Jones) was engaged to Manning in real life just complicates things further, and he was at the bottom of the casting list (the director "feared on-set ramifications", I wonder why?). With these interpretations in mind, it's somehow fitting that the first actual meeting between Jones and the Doctor should have neither of them recognise the other; and the Doctor's reaction when he is introduced is just like a stereotyped father meeting the lad his daughter's been raving about. The scene towards the end of part three where the Doctor breaks in on them canoodling, then deliberately distracts Jones, really can't be interpreted any other way.

On the other hand Stewart Bevan gets one thing absolutely right: he plays Jones as enthusiastic about science rather than sounding like a man who's reading his lines.

Meanwhile the Global Chemicals people are so blatantly dodgy that they might as well be wearing waistcoats made out of sliced-up Welsh babies. Really, when everyone knows that someone came up out of the abandoned mine near your factory glowing green and nearly dead, your public face needs to be saying "oh no, let me help find out what went wrong". Imprimis, that's what someone would do if they actually weren't responsible (because whatever it is might be a danger to the factory too), and secundus, that way you can get involved in the investigation and try to misdirect or derail it from inside. Looking shifty and changing the subject does not help defuse suspicions; it only works at all here because the Brigadier is suddenly being written as terminally unperceptive.

But what this script does well is factions, something that has generally been a good thing when the show's tried it: yes, the Global guys, the Nut Hatch guys, and the locals are all simplistic stereotypes, but at least two out of the three come off as sincere stereotypes, and they're all human rather than being "the nasty aliens" or "the eco-warrior aliens".

Jo's split off from the Doctor again in this story, and is better off for it. When they're together, she falls into the dumb blonde hero-worship trap. As with Planet of the Daleks, when she has to face challenges on her own, she gets a lot smarter (if still disaster-prone) and more interesting.

Yeah, when I'm exploring a mine from which two people have come up glowing green and dead, obviously I'm going to stick my bloody great mitt in the glowing green stuff I've just found. What harm could it do?

This is, famously, "the one with the maggots", and the end of part 2 actually tries to make maggots look menacing. It doesn't do as badly as Night of the Lepus from the previous year did at making rabbits look menacing. The sequence moving the mine-cart through the giant maggots is one of the better recent uses of CSO (to produce a scale variance). When Bessie's being driven across the slagheaps it feels more gratuitous, and the flying version of the Bug of Doom is really a bit of a shame; having only CSO to play with meant there was really only one way it could be realised, and there was a limit on the quality that could be achieved.

The odd thing to me is the use of BOSS. The mad computer doesn't seem quite to fit in with the rest of the story; yes, it's necessary that there be a mad computer or something like it in order that Stevens not shut down the operation when it becomes apparent everything's going completely wrong, but the fight against the politically-connected chemicals company and the insectoid products of pollution ought surely to have been enough for one story. (It may just be the quality of the acting, but to me the computer sounds rather more human than the corporate stooges. It's certainly getting more enjoyment out of the whole affair than Stevens manages.) The Doctor is depressingly biochauvinist when he meets BOSS, though this may just be his standard provocation of everyone he doesn't like.

Why did the Brig and Jo both bring their fancy evening duds on ths mission? The UNIT family is very flaky here; Yates of course fails and is broken, but the Brig's not a great deal of use either, and Benton's scarcely here at all.

But Pertwee carries off the farewell scene very well indeed.

Overall impressions

This series contains what was intended to be nearly Roger Delgado's last appearance on the show. After his presence in every story during series 8, it seems that casting directors assumed he had an ongoing full-time commentment, and he found it hard to get other work. During production of Frontier in Space, he therefore asked to be written out in a permanent fashion. It was in February 1973, during the broadcast of Carnival of Monsters, that The Final Game was commissioned, intended to be that farewell to the show, and the finale for series 11. However, on 18 June, between the broadcast of the penultimate and final episodes of The Green Death (though The Time Warrior was already filmed for series 11), Delgado died in a car accident while on location for Bell of Tibet (never completed) in Turkey, and the story was abandoned.

The Final Game was to be written by Robert Sloman again. Details are scanty, since development didn't progress very far, but it would have been revealed that he and the Doctor were in some way two aspects of the same person (he the id to the Doctor's ego; note the lack of superego). He would ultimately perish in an explosion, with the effect of saving the Doctor and others; it would remain unclear whether this was deliberate on his part.

This was cut short when Delgado died; there doesn't seem to have been any thought at this stage of re-casting the part.

I've now seen all the stories with Delgado as the Master. And my first impression is, my goodness, no wonder there was such a fuss among the old-time viewers when it was announced that he was being brought back in 1976, and when he was actually re-cast (as more than just a special effect, with all due apologies to the actors who played him under heavy makeup) a few years later in 1981. Delgado made a series of thinly-written and often stock villainous parts entirely his own, and brought a sense of verve and vim that was often missing elsewhere in the production. Quite apart from any sense of respect for the dead, to suggest that anyone else could fill those shoes is pretty much laughable. There had been plenty of other megalomaniacal villains in the show by 1976, and none of them had ever come close. Delgado has made these three series, even more than Jo Grant did.

My favourite Master story is probably The Daemons, but both Colony in Space and Frontier in Space have some excellent Master moments; this sort of thing is where the dark mirror of the Doctor is most visible, in that he insinuates himself into local power structures rather than just ranting at them the way the Doctor does.

Some people claim to see an arc in Jo Grant's development, from "gosh Doctor, what now" in her early days to a competent and independent character in the latter. I'm not convinced; I can't help remembering that The Mind of Evil was her second story, and Carnival of Monsters near the end of her run. She came off a lot better in the books. Even so, she gets a late promotion in my list (I originally had her below Ben and Polly) purely on the basis of her last three stories.

Jo was however the longest-running companion so far in the show at three full series, and set a lot of expectations for future occupants of the role. She's acted too often, for my taste, as audience identification figure rather than female lead.

At this point we're roughly half-way through the show, in terms of screen minutes; the details depend on just how one counts. I started this re-watch late in 2011.

Next: A new companion, and the retirement of a key writer.

Favourite story of this series: Frontier in Space.

Departed companions to date, ranked by how much I like them:

1. Zoe
2. Barbara
3. Liz Shaw
4. Susan
5. Ian
6. Steven
7. Sara Kingdom
8. Jo Grant
9. Jamie
10. Ben
11. Polly
12. Vicki
13. Victoria
14. Dodo
15. Katarina