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Ongoing Dr. Who Thread of Doom...

Volpone

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
Watching a lot of the classic 20th century old epsiodes and need a place to talk about them. It shall be here.
 
I applaud this. Someone else can watch them so I don't have to (except for the really good ones or the ones that are referenced in the modern show)
 
A bunch of clunky exposition for now: I post to a Dr. Who prop building BBS but their focus is very much on building props. You're not supposed to discuss episodes, storylines, likes, and dislikes--only the technical aspects of building props and costumes from the show. There is an "off topic" forum, but it wouldn't be appropriate for this.

I started watching Dr. Who as a little kid in the 1970s. At the time a lot of PBS stations across the US carried the show and hooked an entire generation on the 4th Doctor, Tom Baker. I went to college in a city that didn't show Dr. Who on PBS so I missed the final few seasons of the original run of the show, but I have fond memories of midnight Fridays within broadcast range of Minneapolis/St. Paul, where the PBS affiliate had bought the entire run of the classic series and showed them in "movies," with each serial edited together into a complete story. Flash forward to around 2016. Digital broadcast television meant that each TV station got a handful of extra channels they could use to show whatever they wanted. It was a little like the early years of cable television. One of these "stations" was called "RetroTV." I was channel-surfing, to look for background noise while eating lunch and saw a hauntingly familiar flash of black & white rising up from the bottom of the screen with an electronic background whistle. I froze and waited. The white pillar swayed and dissolved into a "howlaround" feedback pattern as the familiar theme music came out of the set: "The Keys of Marinus." Classic Dr. Who.

Now since the 1980s, the BBC has gotten a lot savvier--and greedier--and some of the most important serials weren't in the rotation for Retro. After a few years, with much ballyhoo, they announced some serials were going "back in the vault" to make way for other ones. As it happens, this sucked. They added a handful of mediocre stories, a couple really good and important ones--and cut out about half the previous lineup. The BBC is shooting itself in the foot with chopping up the catalog like they are, but it's their material. They can do with it what they like.

Which brings me to the actual catalog and what they did with it. Around the time I was first starting to watch, the BBC had decided their vaults were filling up with a dumb children's sci-fi show that had no value, so the started just blanking tapes of existing stories. Around 1/3 of the 1st Doctor stories are incomplete or completely lost. Around 2/3 of the 2nd Doctor stories are missing. They've managed to find a number of "lost" episodes in places like Kenya TV stations. Back in the 1980s, a lot of "lost" 3rd Doctor stories were only available in black & white because the color versions had been blanked and they had to use black and white versions from backwater TV locales. But they were able to use a fairly neat technology using reference points to recolor all but the 1st episode of "Invasion of the Dinosaurs."

I think that's about all for now. I started this thread because Retro was showing the handful of 2nd Doctor serials it has in rotation and they're very frustrating and annoying in many ways so I needed a place to bitch about them. Now we're on to the 3rd Doctor. His stories are annoying in a completely different way, but we'll get to that later.
 
I started watching Doctor Who with the 8th Doctor. 9 and 10 are my favorite Doctors. Never got into the older Doctor Who which is a shame because Sylvester McCoy(6th Doctor?) will be at Terrificon in August in Connecticut. On the plus side I will instead be meeting Quark, Garak, Kira Nerys, and Chekov.
 
Oh, there is so much to say. The JNT era, the 1996 TV movie... But for now I'll just say if I were going to try to turn someone on to the classic series, I'd start where I started--the first half of the 4th Doctor Tom Baker era. The FX are laughable a lot of the time but the stories are really solid. Watch from "Robot" up to "The Image of the Fendahl," skipping "The Invisible Enemy." Basically, if the Doctor is wearing a long scarf and doesn't have a pet robot dog, it's a good story. Maybe watch the very first episode: "An Unearthly Child." The actual serial is nothing special--the crew get captured by cavemen who have lost the secret of fire--but the first episode, where two teachers at Coal Hill School take interest in a very strange student of there's and decide to investigate her home life--finding a police box in the middle of a junkyard as her listed home address--a police box with a mysterious electronic hum no less--and then a mysterious little old man tries to shoo them off...that's a fun episode.
 
OK. Quick thumbnail sketches of the Doctors.
#1 Cantankerous old man. Suspicious, secretive, unpleasant. Over the years he becomes more lovable and heroic, but at the start of the series he isn't a very nice person.
#2 A bit of a clown. But is he just playing the fool to get people offguard? Who knows? There are so few serials from his era that I've been able to watch that it's challenging to form a solid opinion.
#3 Pompous, arrogant. Foppish. A bit eccentric. This Doctor is exiled to 20th Century Earth by his race (who we only learn the name of at the end of #2's last serial. )
#4 A bit of all the above. Plays the clown but has a layer of complexity beneath the surface. Longest running Doctor and during the 70s, so by the end there is a painful tendency for camp. This is where they start to flesh out the Time Lords and Gallifrey.
#5 Youngest actor. Starts promisingly enough but winds up kind of a pussy. By this point the producer running the show made some Bermagaesque choices on the production and (IMO) ultimately led to its cancellation.
#6 Ugh. Good actor. Decent person. Saddled with a rodeo clown costume, terrible scripts, and a series in danger of cancellation. Got the shortest end of the stick of any actor in any long-running series, IMO.
#7 Interesting. Didn't get to see any of his stories until around 2016. Costume isn't terrible. Stories are. IMO, #7 stories start out very promising (OK, some of them don't, some--OK, a lot--start out complete ass--and only go downhill from there but I digress) *some* of his stories start out very promising--and then in the 3rd act they just shit the bed and the writers just pull some garbage out of their asses that ruins everything up to that point.
#8 Only got one story (initially). I got the biggest boner in the Cub Foods checkout, seeing the TARDIS on the cover of TV Guide and learning Dr. Who would be relaunching on Fox. A flawed story--but not terrible. Just not good enough to merit getting picked up for a series.

I've seen a couple #9 stories, more #10 stories than I need to see, not enough #11 stories, and none after that, so we'll stick to the stories from the 20th century for now.
 
Oh, I should mention one more thing: Format. The classic series was a serial format, originally airing one half hour episode a week. The episodes would usually end with a cliffhanger. Then the next episode would start with the cliffhanger, show its resolution, and move on with the story. Almost to the very end of the 1st Doctor, each episode had its own title and there was often a cliffhanger that led into the new story. Starting with "The War Machines," the serials got a title and the episodes got a number: "The Tenth Planet: Part Two," etc. In America the most common way the episodes are aired is on a daily basis. PBS used to show one episode a day (or sometimes airing them weekly, edited together as "movies"). Weekdays, Retro does two episodes a day, back to back. On the weekends they'll do like, a 2 or 4 hour block with the weekday, Saturday, and Sunday runs each having their own rotation so you don't have to watch 7 days a week for hours and hours to stay in the rotation. At this point there are enough episodes left out of the Retro package that it is very chopped up anyway. This isn't horrible except you'll expect a cool story like "Terror of the Zygons" and instead get the fairly meh "Planet of Evil." Some serials were as short as 2 episodes while some ran 10 or 12 parts. Generally they were about 4 episodes long--a 2 hour story.

Since we just started the 3rd Dr. run (Jon Pertwee), I'll get caught up on that to pick up commentary, but first a quick comment on regeneration, to get us up to speed: #1, William Hartnell, was 55 when the series started. In 1963 in England, 55 was actually fairly old. He was in the role for something like 4 years and by the end his health had deteriorated to the point that he couldn't keep up with the production schedule (a lot of the Doctor's mannerisms--forgetting names, etc--were to accommodate the actor's failing memory). Since the character was an alien with a mysterious past (early on, we know nothing about Time Lords except that they have some telepathic ability, possess time travel, and The Doctor apparently is an exile of some sort) and the show was still popular, they decided to recast the lead. The Doctor announced that he needed a "renewal" (or words to that effect, that is from a lost episode), he collapsed and with a flash of light his face transformed to Patrick Troughton. They kept the costume somewhat similar, only #2's look was more shabby and ill-fitting than the prim and proper Edwardian attire of #1. When Troughton decided to step down from the role, they had him wind up captured by the Time Lords. As punishment for his behavior, they changed his appearance and exiled him to 20th century Earth, blocking his memory of how to operate the TARDIS. He fairly quickly unites with an old ally and helps fight an alien invasion. But that's for another time.
 
My story is similar. Late 70s, local PBS station started running Dr Who "movies" as you describe. I started with "Robot," the first ep for Tom Baker. Effects were Lost In Space level bad, but the story and characters hooked me right in. Best part of Baker's run was when he had Leela as his companion, IMHO. Anyhoo, I have since dipped in and out of Dr Who. Thought Capaldi was the best Doctor since Baker, felt bad for Jodi as she was victimized by some truly atrocious writing, and haven't seen any of the latest guy.
 
So Jon Pertwee's run as The Doctor also marks the conversion of the show from black & white to color. The Doctor being exiled on earth was partly a way to explain the Doctor's change of appearance--punishment by the Time Lords--but I suspect it was also practical from a production standpoint. The show had been on for something like 7 years* at that point, so the TARDIS prop was getting pretty beat-up--both the exterior and the interior. And the interior set had never been designed to be shot in color so I suspect stranding the Doctor on earth was a cost effective way to avoid having to build a new set.

Anyhow, it's quite an impressive story. Haven't seen it in awhile and I quite enjoy it. Shot on film and has some very nice production values. We start out with a RADAR observer tracking some "meteors" approaching earth. There's something funny about the meteors. They seem to be in a kind of formation. And they don't burn up in the atmosphere. UNIT sends out teams to search for them.

Meanwhile the TARDIS materializes in a meadow and The Doctor falls out the door, collapsing in the grass.

Then a soldier escorts a woman through security to an office. The woman is Doctor Elizabeth Shaw from Oxford and she's quite annoyed at being shanghaied by Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge Stuart, the head of UNIT. He tells her about the meteors and explains he needs her scientific brilliance. The Brigadier explains that UNIT was created to deal with strange happenings and confides that the earth has faced alien invasion twice in the past--but they had help. (The invasions were by the Daleks and the Cybermen and the help was The Doctor.) Ms. Shaw is skeptical. During their meeting, the Brigadier is informed that the meteor searchers have found a police box in the middle of a field with an unconscious man. The Brig has a guard put on the police box and heads off to the hospital to see the stranger.

Meanwhile, strange things are afoot at a plastics plant. An inventor is back from America and wants to know why the project he's been working on has suddenly been cancelled. The secretary is strangely quiet and expressionless and has a slight sheen to her skin. The rest of the factory appears to be mostly automated and his old office now has a "OFF LIMITS SECURITY AREA" sign on the door. After a fight with the plant foreman, the man leaves, lingering at the door to his old office for a moment. Another man with a slightly shiny face and blank expression comes in. He seems to have a hypnotic hold on the foreman.

Back at the hospital, the attending physician is confounded by his patient. The lab is apparently playing a joke on him because the X-ray shows 2 hearts. He heads off to get to the bottom of this when he is called by the blood lab, asking why he's playing a joke on *them*, sending them blood that clearly isn't human. A janitor overhears the exchange and tips off the press.

The Brigadier shows up and is disappointed because he assumed the unconscious man would be The Doctor, but he doesn't recognize the patient--who promptly wakes up long enough to greet the Brigadier by name. When the Brig doesn't recognize him, he borrows a mirror and marvels at his new appearance before passing out again.

While all this is happening, a poacher finds one of the meteorites and hides it in a trunk in his shed. His wife is suspicious. And nosy.

Speaking of nosy, the toy developer breaks into the factory and finds his old office full of mannequins in blue jumpsuits and other strange apparatus. While he is looking around, one of the dummies steps down and advances on him. His hand drops open, revealing a kind of gun. The man manages to escape and, hysterical, finds his way to UNIT.

While Ms. Shaw is investigating the shell of one of the meteors that UNIT managed to recover, The Doctor escapes from the hospital. The strange man from the plastic factory attempts to abduct him but he gets away and makes his way to the TARDIS, where he gets shot by UNIT troops.

Luckily it is just a slight wound, but The Doctor is back in his coma. The doctor suspects it is self-induced.

Eventually The Doctor regains consciousness, steals some clothes and an old fashioned car and makes his way to UNIT headquarters (his watch has a TARDIS homing device). He proceeds to help Liz get to the bottom of the Auton invasion (yep, it's Autons if you haven't guessed). At one point he gets Liz to get him the TARDIS key (which the Brigadier has gained but can't use) because he "needs some equipment" and tries to escape, but can't get the TARDIS TO WORK. Next they find out about the poacher and his meteor. So do the Autons. They get there shortly after the poacher's wife finds the meteor and then gives an Auton both barrels of a shotgun--to no effect but the Brig and his men manage to drive it off. Unfortunately on its way back to the factory it manages to kill the toy developer.

The Brig decides he needs support from the regular Army--but the general he's talking to has a meeting to go to. A plastic factory is creating replicas of important people for an exhibit at Madame Tussaud's. By the time the Brigadier has enough evidence to act, the general has been replaced with his Auton copy, store mannequins across the city come alive and start slaughtering people wholesale, and the last "meteor" has found its way to the factory so the Nestene consciousness can create its new form to take over earth.

Without support from the Army, the Brig has to head to the factory with the troops he has. Luckily The Doctor and Liz have managed to build a machine that should "kill" Autons. The Auton general shows up with troops and tries to arrest the Brigadier but The Doctor and Liz "kill" it, with its face turning to a plastic blank when it "dies." The Doctor and Liz head off to fight the Big Boss while the Brig and the troops do battle with the Autons. The Doctor is almost killed when the machine malfunctions but Liz gets it running again and the earth is saved.

In the wrap-up, The Doctor agrees to work for UNIT in exchange for facilities to work on the TARDIS. He begs the Brigadier to let him keep the car he's stolen but can't so he asks for something similar. The Brigadier says he'll see what he can do and we're off to the races.

***

One of the things I enjoy about this story is that the Brigadier is actually a smart complex character. He know's what's going on and is resourceful. He's taking the best steps he can in the face of a potential alien invasion. As the series goes on he becomes more cardboard and boring. He exists to shoot at things ineffectively and have The Doctor explain things to him. But in the early stories he's a formidable character.

*I should note I'm winging all this, so don't take any of it as gospel fact. I may be misremembering some things.
 
It was the first Auton story. Autons are nice because they're creepy but don't require a lot of FX. They did a nice job in this story of making the human impostor models have slightly shiny skin and the actors kept fairly blank expressions.

One thing that may be challenging on the old stories for contemporary viewers is the pace of the stories. They can drag a bit by today's standards. There's a lot of getting captured and escaping and capturing someone and them escaping and getting captured and escaping and capturing someone and them escaping and Sciencing a solution to the menace. On "The Silurians" right now and the Doctor is trying to find a cure for a disease. Instead of a quick montage, we see him waiting around for a scanning microscope to be delivered, then set up, and an assortment of drug being delivered for testing, blood samples being taken, slides being examined, notes being written down--while the epidemic rages in London. It can seem a bit slow and padded if you're not used to that pacing.
 
Yeah, this isn't going to a comprehensive episode guide--apparently just me bitching about the annoying aspects of it. I forgot how goddamn long and plodding the Pertwee (#3) stories are. Just wrapped up "Ambassadors of Death." It goes on and on and on and on. Astronauts, lost in space on the way back from Mars. Then the rescue astronaut they sent up loses communications with Earth--but does manage to make it back. While they're bringing the capsule to space command people in civilian clothes but with funky gas masks, a helicopter, and access to UNIT's radio communications steal it. But The Doctor employs a ruse to steal it back. Oh, by now a scientist at space command has pulled a gun on The Doctor and Liz because he was trying to decode an electronic burst from the spaceship while still in space. And some bureaucrat gives them the run-around. Eventually they cut open the capsule (the door is locked from the inside) and find it empty. And it turns out impostors dressed like UNIT troops had kicked everyone out of the hangar the capsule was in (apparently to steal the astronauts). Meanwhile, they find that the scientist who pulled the gun on them has sabotaged his own computer to keep them from decoding the signal. So they head back to the bureaucrat, who brings out some General who was an astronaut on the previous Mars Probe, who explains the astronauts have a new, contagious radiation and are in his care. The Doctor wants to see them, but mysterious hoods show up and steal them, killing the doctors watching them. Next... You know, I'm going to stop right there. I've left a lot out to speed this up but I don't think I'm much past the 2nd episode of a 7 part serial. Long story short, the "astronauts" are actually aliens that need radiation to live, are bulletproof and can kill people just by touching them. Th general went cuckoo in space and lured the aliens to earth so he could create hysteria and use that leverage to launch nuclear missiles in an attempt to kill off the rest of the aliens.

Whew. So we're through that. What's tonight? "Inferno." Christ. That one's even longer. A mad scientist is running a project to drill through the earth's crust for unobtanium, a new power source, but instead he gets a green ooze that turns people into kind of blue werewolves that are too hot to touch--and infect anyone they touch. Meanwhile, The Doctor is using the project's nuclear reactor to run tests on the TARDIS' console and winds up sending himself to an alternate reality where the Nazis apparently have won WWII. There he fails to prevent the fascist alternate versions of everyone from stopping the project and the Earth is doomed. But! He manages to get back to our reality--which isn't as far along on the project yet--so he can try to stop the project before the world ends all over again. It's kind of a fun story, but god, it drags on.
 
A few more 1st season Pertwee observations: I like UNIT and the Brig best in the early episodes, but I hate their uniforms. For some reason instead of the standard British Army uniform, they went with some kind of tan polyester Action Man outfit that alternates between an Ike jacket and a V-neck vest and turtleneck combo. The other thing is how quickly they settled into Pertwee's character. In "Spearhead..." and "The Silurians," he's written (and to a degree, acted) a lot more like Troughton--eccentric, somewhat secretive, and self deprecating. By "Ambassadors of Death," he's become the arrogant bossy stubborn dick we all know and love, regularly calling the main authority figure for that serial a "nitwit" or announcing "the man's an idiot," to the Brig while "the man" is standing right there.

Oh, and one other thing: The Doctor's car. In "Spearhead..." he steals a quite fancy big old early 20th century style car. When he has to give it back, he gives having a car like it as a condition that he works for UNIT. He gets...Bessie, which looks like a canary yellow Model T convertible with no doors that is actually a "Siva" which was a kind of hobby/kit/repro car. In fact the wheels are actually conventional modern wheels with a wood spoke pattern "hubcap" over them (you can't 100% tell that from the episodes, but I learned it from the Dr. Who prop building BBS I hang out at). While it is strictly head canon, it amuses me to think a fairly young British Brigadier General in a small niche command that reports to Geneva Switzerland would have to find something as inexpensive as possible due to both budget constraints and having to justify why it was needed, so instead of a big powerful antique, The Doctor gets a cheap funny little jalopy.
 
Finished up "Inferno" (and Pertwee's first season) tonight. Started his second season. Noteworthy for a number of reasons:
We kick the season off with the Autons again, but we also get introduced to The Master. UNIT has changed over to conventional British Army uniforms and Capt Mike Yates shows up (Sgt Benton came in about midway through the previous season). Dr. Liz Shaw has gone back to Cambridge. Jo Grant, some kind of MI5 or something agent, shows up to be The Doctor's new assistant. After wrecking an experiment, The Doctor confronts the Brigadier about her. The Brig tells him her family is well connected so he had no choice but to add her to the team. The Doctor retorts that he's foisting her off on him and that he needs a scientist on caliber with Dr. Shaw for an assistant. The Brig counters that, when she left, Liz said he didn't need a scientist, he needed someone to hand him his test tubes and tell him how brilliant he is. IIRC, this is the reason actress Caroline John gave for leaving the show--she felt her character was wasted with The Doctor around. Incidentally, I believe she said she did enjoy playing Evil Nazi Liz Shaw in the "Inferno" serial (she winds up helping The Doctor get back to his multiverse.) Oh, and while The Master has a TARDIS (his can actually change shape and shows up as an RV type thing), we're treated to our first instance (that I'm aware of) of a Time Lord travelling without a TARDIS. The Time Lords send someone to warn The Doctor about The Master. This shows up a few more times in the Pertwee era and the Time Lords send humans from "The War Games," the last Troughton (2nd Dr) serial, back to Earth without a TARDIS.

Oh, another fun thing about the old Dr. Who is watching actors reappear. Shoot, can't remember the actor's name and I'm too lazy to look it up but Chancellor Goth from the 4th Dr. story, "Deadly Assassin" plays a Time Lord at the end of "The War Games" and Bernard Horsfall. Bernard Horsfall is the actor. Anyway, he also plays Gulliver in the 2nd Dr. story "The Mind Robber." The 2nd in command of the Gonds in "The Krotons" goes on to play...the 2nd in command at the methane refinery in the 4th Dr. Key to Time story "Power of Kroll." (The voice of K9, John Leeson, plays the junior refinery worker in that story.) The timid, weasely scientist in the 2nd Dr. story "Tomb of the Cybermen" played a timid weasely scientist in the Pertwee story "Ambassadors of Death." And I mention this because we haven't gotten to it yet, but I think the big strongman in "Tomb of the Cybermen" plays a big circus strongman in "Terror of the Autons" (this serial).
 
Recently wrapped up "Claws of Axos," which goes down in my book as the most trippy, psychedelic Dr. Who story (with the Hartnell story "Web Planet" a close second and an honorable mention to Troughton's "The Mind Robber.")

In a nutshell, the USA is interested in The Master (who apparently left the planet at the end of the previous tale) and has a CIA agent, Bill Filer, visiting UNIT when a UFO crashes to earth. Interesting FX in that the UFO is clearly "breathing" in the shots of it flying through space. Anyway, it buries itself when it crashes, protecting it from artillery (and saving the prop department from having to make an entire full size alien ship) and captures a hobo to learn about humans. Filer has been iced out once the alien ship stuff starts unfolding so he decides to investigate himself--and also gets captured by the aliens and put in a holding cell with...THE MASTER *DUM-DUM-DUM!*.

Eventually The Doctor, the Brig, et al, show up at the ship and enter it. The interior is a funhouse organic spectacle with random giant lobster claws in the walls, a big eye on a stalk, curtains and blobs in shades of gold and pink. Eventually the Axons show up in gold bodysuits with gold faces and curly gold wigs with gold ping-pong ball eyes and explain their ship was out of power and had to make an emergency landing. They offer the miracle substance, Axonite, which will solve all the world's problems, in exchange for help. Axonite turns out to be a parasitic tool that, when activated, will drain the earth of all its energy. The Master and The Doctor have to team up to stop the Axons (who all turn out to be part of a single living entity--axonite, axons, the ship, all of it is one thing) and The Doctor traps the Axons into a time loop before escaping (The Master has also escaped to his own TARDIS in the confusion).

Once the earth is saved, the Doctor winds up back on earth. It seems the Timelords have rigged his TARDIS so even if he gets away briefly, he'll wind up back on 20th century earth.

But since we get to see the TARDIS interior in this story, the production has freed up enough time and money to build a TARDIS interior set that might as well get some use and in the very next story "Colony in Space," the Timelords enlist the Doctor (and Jo) to recover a missing Doomsday Weapon.
 
While it is out of what I'm watching, we'll touch on the high points of "Web Planet." The TARDIS is being pulled down to a planet, losing power. The water turns out to be acid and odd things happen with gold.

It turns out the planet is held by some kind of intelligence who control the Zarbi, bit fiberglass ants with "larvae guns", actors on hands and knees with a kind of scarab on their back with fringes to hide them that can fire blasts to kill things. The Zarbi make a kind of festival midway car ride/video game beeping. Everyone gets split up and at least a few meet the Menoptera, a kind of bee/moth hybrid who claim the planet was stolen from them.

They're staging a raid to take the planet back but it doesn't look good because their weapons are useless and the Intelligence is prepared for their attack. Captured Menoptera have their wings ripped off and are sent to labor at the Crater of Needles, to feed the Carcinome, home of the Intelligence.

Eventually we discover the Optera, a larval form of the Menoptera, who live underground and hop around with dreadlocks and multiple arms and shout about everything.

In the end, everyone gets together and, in the darkest hour, manage to defeat the Intelligence and save the planet. The Zarbi return to their role as mindless drones. The Menoptera vow to restore the planet and the Optera hop around happily on the surface as the acid pools return to healthy water.

The lead Menoptera, an actress playing Vrestin, is a dancer who handled the alien creature actions and it is trippy to watch. The Optera hop around stoicly and shout their lines, while the Menoptera are melodramatic, expressive, and have a hard time pronouncing human names. Very strange story.
 
Just wrapped up the 10th anniversary story "The Three Doctors." It's cheesy fan service and the Brigadier steals the show. They get props for keeping it to 4 episodes, which is impressive for the Pertwee era, where they can stretch a story out for 137 episodes or so. Skipped over "The Mutants" and "The Time Monster," even though I generally enjoy those serials, but I'm suffering a bit of 3rd Doctor burnout.

Anywho, a weather balloon lands. The game warden finds it and calls the relevant scientist. But as the scientist is driving there, a flash of light disappears said game warden. So said scientist calls UNIT. Everyone is interested and the Doctor heads off with Jo to interview the game warden's wife while the Brigadier is stuck with some random scientist, using the Doctor's lab to develop some film--in a TOP SECRET international facility. As the film develops, the scientist opens the device and is disappeared by a flash of light.

The Brig shows up with an important printout, only to find the scientist missing, so he whistles up Sgt Benton to track him down. Meanwhile, the Doc and Jo get back and are almost eaten by the mysterious energy creature, which disappears the Doc's car, Bessie.

It turns out this is a bigger deal than the usual Earth invasion and back on Gallifrey the Time Lords are experiencing an energy drain from a black hole and decide to send The Doctor some help. ... In the form of his earlier self. Here's where it gets really fun, because both Benton and the Brig know the 2nd Doctor from a Yeti and a Cyberman invasion story and are completely confused when he shows up. The Brig never sees the 2 together so he decides the Doc has just somehow reverted to his earlier from. Meanwhile, UNIT is under attack by antimatter creatures. The Docs are bickering so the Time Lords decide to send the 1st Doctor too, although the power loss means he is stuck in transit and can only advise via the monitor (because actor William Hartnell was old (65) and ill so they had to shoot all his scenes at his house. He died before the story aired, IIRC.) Eventually the Doctors decide to send Doc #3 off to wherever the antimatter critters came from. Jo accidentally tags along.

Shit, I want to write more on this, but time is valuable. Back on Earth Doc #2 winds up having to bring the Brig and Benton into the TARDIS when one of the antimatter critters gets riled. The Brig is dumbfounded and annoyed that the Doc has been blowing UNIT funds on parlor tricks: "How's it done? Mirrors?" Benton was amazed too, but he adapts more quickly. The show is funny because the Brig staunchly refuses to believe anything he can't understand (and spends most of the story walking around with a pistol in his right hand because costumes didn't give him a holster). Eventually the TARDIS, the aliens, and the entire UNIT building are spirited off to the black hole, where Jo and Doc #3 have met the scientist, found Bessie, been evaded by the gamekeeper, and captured by monsters who take them back to the evil lair of...Omega, the Gallifreyan who gave Time Lords time travel--but was trapped in a black hole in the process.

When #2 shows up, the Brig is appalled that UNIT HQ has apparently been transported to a beach and sets off to find a phone, ignoring Doc #2's explanation of the situation. Benton and the Doc get captured by the monsters while the Brig unites with the game warden.

Omega wants to get out of the black hole and needs a Time Lord to stay behind (like Atlas, holding up the world and having to get Hercules to take over so he can leave) but it turns out the effect of the antimatter has made it so he can never leave. The Doctors devise a ruse to free everyone. leading to Omega's final death and everyone (except Omega) lives happily ever after.
 
"The Green Death." 6 parter. So it is long. And suffers from low budget 1973 British children's television FX. And a fairly tired story. Skipped the first 2 episodes, but decided to circle back for the rest of the story. Partly because I kept getting roped into marathon/binge programming on Story Television, but also because it is a fairly important story.

The basic plot is pretty straightforward. EEEEVIL greeeedy corporate monsters want to rape the Earth while the Doctor and hippies protest. Global Chemical has a new way to refine oil. But they've been dumping their waste into an abandoned coal mine where it creates an antifreeze green slime and giant indestructible maggots. The Doctor, Jo, and the Brig go to investigate. Nearby there is a hippie commune, the Nut-hutch, led by a scientist who is trying to cure Global Hunger by making people eat mushrooms. But he's brilliant and passionate and handsome and Jo is quite taken by him. Before showing up, the Doctor finally made it to Metebelis 2, a planet he's been bragging to Jo about for months, and brought back a big blue crystal. Preoccupied with the Professor, Jo barely notices.

People are dying from the slime and maggots and suspicious happenings are going on at Global Chemical, but the Brig gets hamstrung because its CEO is connected to the Prime Minister. Still, he manages to get Captain Yates inside as a spy.

The Doctor manages to infiltrate by dressing as the cleaning lady and finds out everything is run by the BOSS, a sentient computer. (The story has strong parallels in this regard to the 1st Doctor story, "The War Machines," where a sentient computer called WOTAN takes over people's minds and enslaves them in its goal of world domination.

OK. I can't be assed to sum up more of this. Long story short, it turns out the mushrooms the Professor is cultivating to solve World Hunger can kill the maggots and cure infected persons. The Doctor manages to use his blue crystal to de-hypnotize people under the BOSS' control, and (once deprogrammed) the CEO blows the BOSS (and the whole place) up minutes before it's plan to take over the world comes to fruition.

Jo leaves UNIT to marry the professor, everyone celebrates, and The Doctor slips out into the night to drive away, alone.

Nice story. Bittersweet ending. At least once The Doctor, while mostly paternal to his companions, tries to cock-block the Professor and Jo. The next story introduces the companion so important to many people my age: Miss Sarah Jane Smith. But that's another story.
 
The Time Warrior. New credits for Pertwee's last season. Introduces the Sontarans. Introduces Sarah Jane Smith. 4 part story with 1 alien and a spaceship and almost entirely set in the middle ages. Makes for a very enjoyable story.

In the Middle Ages...a falling star lands near a local bandit's castle. In the present top scientists and expensive equipment start disappearing. The Brigadier hits on the bright idea of moving all his valuable scientists into hastily built dormitories in a secure facility. The Doctor (and his TARDIS) are moved there too. The Doctor is introduced to renowned virologist Dr. Livinia Smith, whose paper he's read and, doing the math, realizes "Dr." Smith is an impostor. It is really Intrepid Girl Journalist Sarah Jane Smith. But he doesn't blow her cover because "someone's got to make the coffee." This riles her feminist mentality but there isn't much time for it. The game is afoot. And The Doctor has some ideas. So he builds an "alarm clock." Sarah asks him about it and he eventually reveals it goes off when Delta particles are present. And he's "very fond of Delta particles."

In the middle of the night the device goes off and sure enough, a scientist disappears. The Doctor hunts around with a magic flashlight and sees a projection of someone in armor. After a brief discussion with the Brigadier, he sets off hot in pursuit--but not before Ms. Smith manages to stow away on the TARDIS.

Sontaran Linx needs to fix his ship, but a medieval brigand lacks the skill and equipment so he uses tech from his ship to steal stuff from as far into the future as he can reach.

The Doc (and Sarah) show up. There's a great bit of Sarah deciding she's at some kind of theme park before finally coming to terms that she's time travelled. Fuck, this is going on too long. The Doctor winds up (with Sarah's intervention) allied with a neighboring castle whose troops have been stripped off for the Crusades. Irongron (the bandit) and Linx try to take the opposing castle but with the Doctor's trickery, they are rebuffed. The Doctor and Sarah infiltrate Irongron's castle and drug his people while defeating Linx and sending the scientists home. When Linx dies, his repaired ship blows up, taking the castle and all future tech he gave Irongron with it. All in all, a very satisfying story.
 
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