The War Games

The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe arrive on the dirty bloody battlefields of World War I in 1917 and are immediately embroiled in the hostilities. Captured first by Germans and then the British army, they are accused of spying and become fugitives. Things are not what they seem, though; the generals in charge of the different armies have high tech telecommunications equipments hidden in their private rooms, and somewhere else the events are monitored by technicians with freaky sunglasses. And practically next door to 1917, just over a hill and through a fog bank, are Roman soliders, and other soldiers fighting in the American Civil War. The Doctor discovers that they are not even on Earth, and someone has set this place up and kidnapped soldiers from various wars in Earth's history. And they have used travel machines that dematerialize with a familiar sound, and are bigger inside than outside. The Doctor is suspicious of these factors and then realizes that the entire operation is being run by the War Chief, one of his own people, who has allied himself with the War Lord and an entire race out to enslave the galaxy. To save the soliders from death on this planet and to defeat the War Lord, the Doctor must call upon his own people - the Time Lords - to assist him, even though he himself is on the run from them, and by calling for help he may well be signing his own death warrant.

10 episodes. My friend Dan grimaced at the prospect and said that aside from episodes 1, 9 and 10, watching The War Games is like having teeth pulled. I admit that at times I felt like I needed a nap, but hey it's over 4 hours in front of the TV, anyone would need a stretch. So I recruited Jay once more, and between episodes 5 and 6 we enjoyed the fine dining experience of the Gerard Square McDonald's and observed the plight of the area. Jay usually has a lot to say about the production values of the show but The War Games is actually done with some very high production values for its day, although the use of transparent plastic sheets as walls and the hideous photographic blow up walls of the TARDIS console room gave us both cause to groan. And we can't figure out why there was a need to have a bubbling maze of streams in episode 10 on the Time Lord planet when any old corridor would do. Running away is, after all, a time honoured tradition, and it is traditionally done in corrdiors. But it's a minor point. So is the sex fetish look of the War Lord's guards, even though their weapons are pretty cool for 1969.

This is the last regular performance of this ensemble TARDIS crew. After a year together, the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe will be separated, and not by choice. Caught by the Time Lords and put on trial for his involvement in the affairs of other worlds, the Doctor is taken from his friends, and they are returned to their proper places in time; Zoe is returned to the Wheel, and Jamie finds himself back on the Scottish moors, neither of them remembering their time in the TARDIS with the Doctor. The Doctor is forced to defend himself against the accusations of the Time Lords by showing them the evils he has faced, and he is granted a slight bit of mercy; the Time Lords decide to exile him to Earth, and he will be regenerated. Amid a storm of protest, the Doctor is last seen spinning into infinity on a Time Lord monitor screen, his future hanging in the balance.

Another Doctor down. There was probably less hesitation about regenerating the Doctor again as it had proved to add to the show's popularity back when Patrick Troughton took over the role from William Hartnell, and when the series returned with the new Doctor in the form of Jon Pertwee, things would certainly be very different all over.

There has lately been a lot of development in the revisionist elements of the series, a lot of it centering around exactly what did happen to the Doctor at the end of The War Games. As we never see him regenerate into his new body, it is now being speculated that maybe the Time Lords didn't send him to earth right away and kept him in a form of stasis for a while, using him as an agent when it suited them. In future adventures, the second Doctor will be seen with his other incarnations but without his companions, and even in 1983's The Five Doctors the Doctor will reference Jamie and Zoe's departure, which would certainly seem to place him in a strange kind of limbo. One BBC novel called Players contained a segment involving the second Doctor, obviously in the employ of the Time Lords, and another, called World Game, takes this even further and sees the Doctor paired with a new companion to assist him in his mission. Unfortunately it's only early September now and I am not willing to put the whole blog on hold for the sake of one novel, so if you're reading this as a first time Doctor Who enthusiast, you can hop over to amazon.ca (or.com or whatever is local to you) and reserve your own copy and see for yourself. And if you want to have some fun on the "what if.." side of the coin, Big Finish's audio adventure CD Sympathy for the Devil sees David Warner as an alternative Doctor arriving on Earth in 1997 to serve his exile.

Oh that's what I'm going to do next...

NEXT EPISODE : SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL