The Reign of Terror

The season finale opens with the Doctor attempting to return Barbara and Ian to Earth again, and he succeeds to an extent. The TARDIS lands not in England, but in France of 1794, during the bloody and violent French Revolution. The country is paralysed with fear, and all traitors are rounded up and decapitated on the guillotine in Paris. Swept up in history once more, the Doctor's companions become prisoners and are sentenced to death, and the Doctor masquerades as a high ranking official in his efforts to rescue them. Barabara and Susan narrowly escape death on the guillotine by being rescued by sympathizers, and Ian is entrusted with a message to be delivered to English spy James Sterling. The Doctor is not the only one masquerading, though, and enemies are everywhere, and he is taken to meet Robespierre, the Tyrant of France. And waiting somewhere outside the sphere of events in Paris is Napoleon Bonaparte, ready to take his place in history and rule the country.

As with Marco Polo and The Aztecs, the Doctor and company are once more players in history, although this time Barbara finds it amusing to see how the French attempt to stop Napoleon from ascending to power; a far cry from her belief that the past can be changed. The Doctor throws himself into the role of an imposing Regional Governor, although on the road to Paris resorts to clocking the watchman of a road crew over the head with a shovel. Ian is Ian as usual, and Susan copes very well with events for a change, only getting alarmed by the rats in her prison cell.

The Reign of Terror is a 6 part story, but due to the aforementioned clearing of the BBC archives, episodes 4 and 5 are missing. I didn't have an audio version of the missing episodes available to me but the missing material is abridged on the VHS release of the adventure. Carole Ann Ford (Susan) provides liking narration against a backdrop of recovered clips, dialogue samples an still images. Unfortunately, the Doctor's meeting with Robespierre in episode 4, The Tyrant of France , is missing, and we are deprived of the spectacle of the Doctor confronting one of history's most notorious figures. The adventure is a lot of fun to watch, the period detail amazing for the limited resources that the BBC had to operate with at the time. At the end of the adventure, William Hartnell provides a voice over set against a backdrop of stars; the Doctor says that their destiny is out amongst them, and they should go and find it.

NEXT EPISODE : PLANET OF GIANTS