The Three Doctors

A strange cosmic force has scanned the Earth and started an attack - and its target is the Doctor. Trapped inside the immobilized TARDIS, the Doctor sends a message to the Time Lords asking for their help, but they too are under attack and their energy reserves dangerously low. In desperation, the Time Lords do the unthinkable and lift the second Doctor from his time stream and deposit him with the third, and eventually the first Doctor is also sent to help his beseiged selves. But they are not up against any ordinary foe; the attack originates from a black hole, from a universe of antimatter, and on the other side of the hole waits Omega, one of the greatest figures in Time Lord history, presumed lost. But Omega is alive. And angry. Very, very angry.

I think this one has to qualify as the first major fan-wank episode of the series, bringing the previous Doctors not only into contact with their successors but also onto a colour screen for the first time ever. The precedent is set with this one of the Doctor not being able to co-operate with his previous incarnations, choosing instead to squabble and argue and criticize each ither; mostly this is between the second and third Doctors with the older-looking (yet chronologically younger) first Doctor keeping them in line as a sort of elder statesman. The first Doctor doesn't get as much screen time as the others, which is a shame, but William Hartnell was of very ill health when this was done and there was no way he was going to be able to interact and dash about the sets and locations like the other actors. Had the novel of the episode been published back in the late 80s when there was license to include extra scenes or even rework sequences in prose, that might have been a bit different. But no. Terrance Dicks wrote the adaptation to a minimal standard, so, yeah.

This is the second time we get a glimpse of the Time Lord homeworld, although this time it reminds me of some tacky apartment foyer from "modern" residential units like in Soylent Green. The Time Lords run things like air traffic controllers, and this is the first time we see that there is a heirarchy to their world, with one identified as the President and the other as the Chancellor. And what lovely shiny capes they wear. Nothing pretentious about that at all, oh no.

And not only is there revelation about the homeworld but here we get another nugget of info about the race; they let their greatest stellar engineer die in a supernova so they could harness its power for time travel, and assume the mantle of Time Lords. Omega is resentful to the extent of revenge on the entire cosmos - clearly driven mad by centuries of isolation with only scary gelatinous blobs as company. He's really the most dangerous kind of madman; he's not only powerful but he is emotionally wounded by the abandonment by the Time Lords, and anyone who has ever been dumped or betrayed knows how that fury can burn long and deep. And by his own admission he has some slight personality disorder; he is a congenial host when the Doctor first arrives but explodes into sudden rages and unleashed the "dark side" of his mind on the Doctor for a bit of slow motion professional wrestling.

So here's an interesting bit here. The third Doctor is in exile on Earth for the sins committed by his earlier two selves, yet here they are acting on behalf of the very race who condemned them. There was certainly no contact between the Doctor and the Time Lords prior to The War Games so the question is where did these incarnations of the Doctor spring from? This is where the fan theory of season 6b comes from, with the second Doctor employed by the Time Lords before being sent to Earth to begin his exile, which would explain why he is without Jamie or Zoe or any of his other companions. As for the first Doctor, there was a bit of retcon employed at the start of Empire of Glass where the Doctor is aware that something has happened and he can't remember what it was, employing a cop-out mind-wipe excuse to cover up the gaps and his lack of companions as he never travelled alone.

But the biggest moment is at the end, the Doctor is redeemed and forgiven by the Time Lords. He is free. The TARDIS works again.

Where will he go now?

NEXT EPISODE: THE WAGES OF SIN