WHONIVERSE: THE THIRD DOCTOR, 1970-71.

With over 800 episodes of Doctor Who now available through the BBC iPlayer – via the streaming service the ‘Whoniverse’ – what better time is there for a rewatch than the series’ 60th anniversary month?

Although 21st century Doctor Who has absorbed the alien defence force UNIT into its creative DNA, watching the 1963-1989 run of the show in order, the Doctor’s exile to 20th century England sticks out like a sore thumb. Aliens, helicopters, espionage, gun battles, soldiers… it’s like The X-Files (1993-2002, 2016-18) if it was based in the Pentagon. When this mixture of science fiction and action adventure works, it’s stunningly original – ‘The Ambassadors of Death’, ‘Inferno’ (both 1970) and ‘The Mind of Evil’ (1971). When it doesn’t, at its worst it’s engagingly daft – ‘The Three Doctors’ (1972-73, although it can be argued that the 10th anniversary story was deliberately written and directed as a comic romp).

It's visually apparent that ‘The Claws of Axos’ (1971) was the first story written with an awareness of colour television (introduced to the BBC in 1968). The gestalt organism Axos is a gift to production designer Kenneth Sharp and lighting designer Ralph Watson, realised as a very surreal, psychedelic, organic environment, the like of which hadn’t been seen in Doctor Who before – alien worlds in the 1960s were made in black and white and, consequently, were usually hi tech and hard edged. Axos is a big step forward in the series’ always expanding gallery of alien life.

Continuity gatekeepers have it that the Season 8 would work better if ‘The Claws of Axos’ was shown after ‘Colony in Space’ (below), principally because of Jo Grant’s reaction to the TARDIS – she sees it dematerialise and land in the former story, while in the latter, Jo thinks that the time machine is an eccentric hobby invented by the Doctor.

OK, the order issue is a piece of untidy script editing by Terrance Dicks, but the way the Master is presented in ‘Colony in Space’ confirms that Malcolm Hulke’s story of space capitalists versus subsistence farmers was always intended to be fourth in the run.

The Master has stolen the Time Lords’ file on a super weapon and spends some time searching various planets for it, also finding time to kill and impersonate an Earth Adjudicator. He's also learned from the Doctor breaking into his TARDIS in ‘Terror of the Autons’, installing an alarm beam and knockout gas. When the two opponents meet, the Master refers to the Doctor escaping his “long exile on Earth”, suggesting it’s been some considerable time since the renegade Time Lords saw each other.

In the previous three stories, there was gentlemanly banter between them. Here, the Master’s black gloves are off – he’s moved on from wanting revenge on the Earth to desiring control of the cosmos. His respect for the Doctor sees him offer his opponent a share in the use of the Doomsday Weapon, but ‘Colony in Space’ is where the battle lines are clearly defined between them. “You just don’t understand, do you?” the Doctor tells the Master wearily. “I want to see the universe, not rule it.”

Putting ‘The Claws of Axos’ (above) after ‘Colony in Space’ derails all this carefully constructed continuity; in practical terms, it would also have meant two six-part stories in a row. The Barry Letts-produced seasons usually favored two four-part stories in close proximity at the beginning, giving viewers more ‘opening nights’. 

‘Colony in Space’ is an interesting story. It’s the first to highlight how industrial pollution was damaging the Earth, although it isn’t set there. It’s also the first to tarnish the reputation of the Time Lords (below). They’re shown as hypocrites in a way that would later so intrigue scriptwriter Robert Holmes – sending the Doctor on a mission to explicitly interfere in the timeline of another planet, the exact crime they’d exiled him to Earth for. No wonder he resented being used as “an intergalactic puppet.”

Doctor Who’s summer 1969 replacement on BBC1, the American film series Star Trek, is also in the mix of ‘Colony in Space’. The trio that run the Interplanetary Mining Corporation (IMC) taskforce opposing the colonists – Captain Dent, Morgan and Caldwell – are cynical takes on Captain Kirk, Mister Spock and Doctor McCoy in Star Trek. The IMC personnel work for a ruthless company rather than a philanthropic federation of planets; Dent is pragmatic and amoral, Kirk is idealistic and honorable; Morgan is cold-blooded and violent, Spock is cold-blooded and logical but – like McCoy – Caldwell is the conscience among the crew of his spaceship.

Notably, the eighth series loosens Doctor Who away from the Season 7 template of being largely set in scientific establishments. Stangmoor Prison in ‘The Mind of Evil’ allows a horde of working class, cockney villains into the programme for the first time. William Marlowe’s Harry Mailer is one half of a superb double act with the Master, each unashamedly using the other. Mailer’s cool response to the Master telling him a Thunderbolt missile is British – “Of course” – elevates the series to the level of mature, contemporary television dramas of the time like Public Eye (1965-1975) and Callan (1967-1972). I’d love to know why writer Don Houghton didn’t contribute any more stories after 1971.

‘The Daemons’ takes another leap forward, locating the Doctor and UNIT in a rural setting for the first time. The village Devil’s End (in reality, Aldbourne in Wiltshire) was also a breakthrough in production terms, with extensive location filming for set-pieces such as night filming, a helicopter chase and UNIT shooting at a living gargoyle. ‘The Daemons’ also initiates a little recognised Doctor Who trope for the 1970s and beyond – archaeology. From here on, it’s a major story engine within the series – see ‘The Mutants’ and ‘The Time Monster’ (both 1972), ‘Pyramids of Mars’ (1975), ‘The Image of the Fendahl’ (1977) and many more after that.

The striking thing about Episode One of ‘The Daemons’ is that, tonally, it plays like the Hammer movie The Devil Rides Out (1968), with a charismatic cult leader – the Master (above), Mocata in the film – plotting to conjure up d(a)emonic spirits with a black mass. Everyone in the first episode, including the Doctor, takes the threat of impending supernatural disaster seriously, something that had never happened in the series before. In the previous decade, the censorship rules regarding Satanism had been relaxed but, all these years later, it’s still surprising to see a family show like Doctor Who embracing the adult horror milieu so wholeheartedly.

Morris and maypole dancers are something no one had seen before either in Doctor Who, certainly not in the context of threatening the Doctor. These sequences are so suggestive of the domestic menace of the thriller The Wicker Man – in cinemas two years later – that it’s hard to believe its writer Peter Shaffer didn’t watch ‘The Daemons’.

Season 8 ends with the Master captured and the Doctor more at ease. He’s no longer the outsider of Season 7, happily tinkering with Bessie in the UNIT garage and balancing his exile with the limited freedom of missions for the Time Lords. His taste in haute couture has moved on from the severity of the previous year to include a striking red velvet smoking jacket, while his garage overalls even include a pocket handkerchief that matches his cravat.

A stand-out moment is the Brigadier nearly making the rudest comment on television up to 1971. Trapped outside the Master’s heat barrier in ‘The Daemons’, he’s frustrated at waiting around and stops short of describing himself as something vulgar, opting instead for “a spare lemon waiting for the squeezer.”

Even on the umpteenth rewatch, Doctor Who can still surprise you.

That’s why I still love it.