World Game

Contrary to what the Time Lords decreed at the end of the Doctor’s trial, the charges of interfering in other civilizations proved to be too great to let go lightly, and the Doctor’s execution is ordered. The Celestial Intervention Agency, a shadowy branch of Time Lord beaurocracy, sees the Doctor as a potential agent and offers him a lifeline: service to them in exchange for his life. As a convicted criminal he has no official standing and if their hand were ever detected in any interventions they could always deny sending him. The Doctor is wary but accepts, and is sent on a mission to Earth with a Time Lady named Serena as his assistant. The Agency has detected meddling in the timelines around the Napoleonic Wars, and the Doctor must stop it, but he has to defeat an omnipotent group simply known as the Players to do so.

There really is nothing more potentially disastrous than retconning established lore in Doctor Who; it’s one thing to try and tie up a perceived loose end or maybe seize on a trivial aspect in the background and give it a backstory, but to try to overwrite something and insert more detail requires skill and discipline. Author Terrance Dicks doesn’t have as much of both as he would like us to think with his work in World Game.

There’s a widespread belief, made canon by BBC Licensing, that since there is no real visual record of Patrick Troughton regenerating into a new Doctor then he may well have been used as an agent by his own people for some time before he did indeed regenerate. The first inklings of this were in licensed (and therefore actually canon) Doctor Who comics published between the finale of The War Games and the new season premiere Spearhead From Space six months later, wherein the Doctor did do the dirty work of the Time Lords while on Earth and then did eventually regenerate into a new form in time to emerge from the TARDIS in a new season. There’s further proof to support the theory in future episodes such as The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors and The Two Doctors where the second Doctor meets his future selves at the behest of the Time Lords themselves; obviously he could have no contact with his own people prior to The War Games so logically this all is afterwards when he should have been sent into exile. It just stands to reason he did not go directly to Earth.

Terrance Dicks was script editor for the series at the time and had embraced this whole “season 6b” notion in World Game although it at times feels a bit too thin of a tale with action sequences lacking a lot of detail and characters such as the villainous Countess feeling two dimensional at best. I feel it’s an ambitious task to try and create the narrative for this hidden section of the Doctor’s past and although as an elder statesman of the series Dicks wants to do it and feels he should, his narrative skills are really not the best for the task. A co-writing credit with someone like Simon Messingham could have done just as well with the tale really going into some dark places of Time Lord secrets, and the Doctor trying harder to escape from this dirty work. I don’t mean to diss Dicks and his contribution to Doctor Who as a whole but his strength is not in writing prose, it’s in translating script to screen. He even takes the opportunity to set up an explanation for the second Doctor’s presence in The Two Doctors but it feels almost a bit too rushed like he thought of it at the end and stapled it onto the manuscript. In fact there are a few too many times where things feel like they were hurriedly put into the story instead of developed properly. Case in point: the Doctor's one-off companion for this one, a Time Lady named Serena who finds herself quickly buying into the allure of freedom from Time Lord society, probably because the Doctor keeps taking her to cafes and parties and eating a lot. See - not exactly credible.

And it’s not like this is the only time this sort of thing ever happens; with a time travel series the temptation is just too great to go back and tweak or replay or simply overwrite – one only has to look at how the time travel rewrite cop-outs have reduced the current series of the show to drivel where proper writing was obviously too difficult to master. There was even an ambitious fan made video tacked onto the DVD release of The War Games entitled Devious following the adventures of a halfway Doctor – Doctor 2.5 in effect – midway through his regeneration where he is visited by his future self. In many ways it is actually done better than most of what hit the screens from 2011 onwards.

 

So with Jamie and Zoe still flashing back to their time with the Doctor, their friend is still adventuring in time and space, albeit on a bit of a leash until the day comes for him to regenerate.

Which is now.

NEXT EPISODE: SPEARHEAD FROM SPACE