The Highlanders
It's the Jacobite Rebellion of 1746, and the TARDIS brings the Doctor, Polly and Ben to the Scottish moors. The Scots have been routed by the English, and the time travellers fall in with a fugitive band hiding out in a cottage. Polly and a Scottish lass named Kirsty are separated from the others, who are taken to Inverness only to be sold into slavery. The Doctor does a bit of clever dodging and gets free, Ben causes trouble for his captors and gets a good dunking from the bow of the ship for his trouble, and Polly and Kirsty blackmail an English lieutenant into helping them find and rescue their friends. And in the end, Jamie McCrimmon, a young piper, joins the TARDIS crew under the condition that he teaches the Doctor how to play the bagpipes (which he never does, but whatever).
This is the last of the purely historical adventures until 1982, so every other time the TARDIS lands in the past from here on, there will be some alien menace hiding in history. The Highlanders is a very enjoyable story, full of all the things that make for fun in the past. The Doctor practices his talents for adopting disguises, first as a German official, then in drag as a cleaning woman. Polly gets to be the modern girl this time and berates Kirsty for being reduced to tears in helpless situations. Ben... well Ben gets locked up a lot with the prisoners and is exploited by being dunked underwater but only escaping by remembering to flex his muscles before being tied up... or something ("body contours" ahoy, Gary Russell!)
The addition of Jamie, played by Fraser Hines, puts the TARDIS crew back up to four, the magic number on the show that always leaves one of the regular cast with too little to do. Jamie's character is a departure for the show though in that everyone else to date, barring Katarina, has been either from the modern (or as modern as the 1960's were) era or from the future. Here we have a period character, through whom we can see all the joys of time travel again, but not from the perspective of scientific curiosity and wonder, but from confusion, and even terror. Jamie will stick around for a while and become a very popular character with the fan base (and Fraser Hines is a very nice man - I met him at a convention we threw in Toronto in 1993).
Alas, The Highlanders is missing from the BBC archives, save for a few scraps of censor footage from episode 1. I enjoyed the adventure on the BBC Radio Collection CD over the last two days, with Fraser Hines providing the narration. The myth centre claims that there was an alternate ending to episode 4 with Jamie staying behind in Scotland rather than coming along with the TARDIS crew, but who can say for sure without even the broadcast version to see for ourselves.
Maybe one day.
NEXT EPISODE : THE UNDERWATER MENACE
This is the last of the purely historical adventures until 1982, so every other time the TARDIS lands in the past from here on, there will be some alien menace hiding in history. The Highlanders is a very enjoyable story, full of all the things that make for fun in the past. The Doctor practices his talents for adopting disguises, first as a German official, then in drag as a cleaning woman. Polly gets to be the modern girl this time and berates Kirsty for being reduced to tears in helpless situations. Ben... well Ben gets locked up a lot with the prisoners and is exploited by being dunked underwater but only escaping by remembering to flex his muscles before being tied up... or something ("body contours" ahoy, Gary Russell!)
The addition of Jamie, played by Fraser Hines, puts the TARDIS crew back up to four, the magic number on the show that always leaves one of the regular cast with too little to do. Jamie's character is a departure for the show though in that everyone else to date, barring Katarina, has been either from the modern (or as modern as the 1960's were) era or from the future. Here we have a period character, through whom we can see all the joys of time travel again, but not from the perspective of scientific curiosity and wonder, but from confusion, and even terror. Jamie will stick around for a while and become a very popular character with the fan base (and Fraser Hines is a very nice man - I met him at a convention we threw in Toronto in 1993).
Alas, The Highlanders is missing from the BBC archives, save for a few scraps of censor footage from episode 1. I enjoyed the adventure on the BBC Radio Collection CD over the last two days, with Fraser Hines providing the narration. The myth centre claims that there was an alternate ending to episode 4 with Jamie staying behind in Scotland rather than coming along with the TARDIS crew, but who can say for sure without even the broadcast version to see for ourselves.
Maybe one day.
NEXT EPISODE : THE UNDERWATER MENACE
Labels: Ben Jackson, Jamie McCrimmon, Polly Wright, The 2nd Doctor
posted by Sean Hoover @ 7:32 PM
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