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Sunday, 20 July 2025

Doctor Who: Season 11

Free to travel in time and space once more, the Doctor joins forces with journalist Sarah Jane Smith to investigate new mysteries. Their trips involve a meeting with the clone warriors of the Sontarans, a renewed threat from the Daleks, a return visit to Peladon and an unexpected infestation of dinosaurs in Central London. But a previous decision is coming back to haunt the Doctor, and will lead him to a fateful meeting with destiny on Metebelis III.


The tenth season of Doctor Who marked a fateful change for Jon Pertwee's tenure as the Doctor. Katy Manning departed as companion Jo Grant after three seasons, and the actor playing the Master, Roger Delgado, was tragically killed in a car crash. Pertwee made the decision to leave at the end of the following season, his fifth in the role. Producer-showrunner Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks both also decided to move on, though they'd also stay on into the start of Season 12 to oversee the transition to a new team.

The first task for Season 11 was to find a new character and actress to follow in Katy Manning's footsteps, a formidable challenge given her popularity in the role: at that time, she was the second-longest-serving companion. Actress April Walker was cast in the new role but she and Pertwee had no chemistry and she was quickly dismissed (with full pay for the season). Letts was approaching panic mode until a fellow producer recommended him a young actress he'd recently cast in Z-Cars, leading to a fateful meeting between Letts, Pertwee and Elisabeth Sladen. Pertwee was so taken with Sladen's performance that he stood behind her and gave up a thumbs-up to Letts.

History now records Sladen as the most popular Doctor Who companion of the Classic era, and maybe the most popular overall. She would have one of the longest runs in the show's history (three and a half seasons), return for an anniversary special, appear in a pilot for a spin-off show and then, in the Modern era, make multiple appearances alongside David Tennant's Tenth Doctor before getting her own TV show, which ran for five seasons and 53 episodes (featuring further guest appearances by Tennant and Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith), easily making her the most prolific companion of them all.

Her arrival on the show is a bit of a mixed bag. Like Jo before her, the writers came up with a great job and abilities for Sarah - she's an investigative journalist, good at making people feel at east and trusting of her and great at research, handy skills for a companion - but have a tendency to forget about that at times and she just runs around screaming at things and getting captured. Fortunately, she suffers from this far less than Jo and her skills prove useful multiple times through this first season. Her chemistry and repartee with Pertwee is also not as great as it would later be with Tom Baker, but they still spark off one another reasonably well.

The opening story, The Time Warrior, introduces Sarah and sees her join forces with the Doctor to investigate the mystery of scientists going missing from a facility under UNIT protection. Robert Holmes starts the story as a standard UNIT mystery but pivots hard (UNIT fails to appear after the first episode) to it becoming - amazingly - Pertwee's only period story. Aside from the start of Carnival of Monsters, where the Doctor mistakenly believes he's on a 1926 steam ship in the Indian Ocean, none of the Third Doctor's other stories take place in Earth's past. They're all in the near future, distant future or on an alien planet, making this a unique story in his era.

The bulk of the story takes place in the medieval period, with robber-baron Irongron (David Daker chewing the scenery with relish) joining forces with crashed Sontaran warrior Linx (Kevin Lindsay). In return for helping Linx fix his golfball spaceship, Irongron receives advanced weapons to help him conquer the neighbouring castle. The Doctor and Sarah decide to stop Linx and Irongron from changing the course of Earth's history. This is a splendid story, with Sladen immediately making a positive impression (at one point taking the Doctor prisoner because she thinks he's a villain, an unusual spin for a first companion story) and Irongron and Linx sparking so hard off each other as a villainous double act I'm surprised the set didn't catch fire. Holmes's script is witty enough to almost be considered a comedy, and the supporting cast is surprisingly accomplished, including the mind-boggling sight of Boba Fett and Dot Cotton working together (Jeremy Bulloch and June Brown, natch). It's a pacy and funny story which establishes the Sontarans, in their very first appearance, as a popular foe, mainly due to the success of the prosthetics, which are unusually excellent for Doctor Who in this era. Alongside Day of the Daleks, a very underrated story, and easily Season 11's high point.

Invasion of the Dinosaurs is, very easily, Doctor Who's most hopelessly ambitious story. Malcolm Hulke is gleefully writing cheques the BBC vfx department is not only unable to cash, but could never in a million years even start to think about cashing. He literally has things like a tyrannosaurus rex engaging the British Army in running battles on the streets of Central London, a pterodactyl attacking the Doctor in a parking garage and a confused stegosaurus materialising in a London Underground station. Obviously, none of this is remotely going to work or be convincing, and you have to respect the sheer insanity of them even trying, whilst goggling at some of the worst special effects in all of Doctor Who's history.

Still, when it's not trying to be Jurassic Park on a 1974 BBC budget, the story has its high points. The opening sequences, filmed at ridiculous o'clock in the morning to show London's streets utterly deserted (something that wouldn't work at all now), are very effective. London under alien attack and the Doctor having to defend it is a very rich idea for Doctor Who, following Season 2's The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Season 5's The Web of Fear and Season 6's The Invasion, and so it proves here. As a Malcolm Hulke joint, the serial has a deep bench of very well-drawn characters, with convincing motivations and competing agendas. It's a also a full-blown UNIT epic, with the Brigadier, Benton and especially Yates all having some excellent scenes. Sarah also gets some prime storylines, especially in the latter half when, to stave off six-part-itis, Hulke pivots the story into being what appears to be a post-apocalyptic space opera! There are several long stints without any dinosaur effects at all (ropey or otherwise), when the story becomes quite engrossing. Then, inevitably, they decide to have two dinosaurs fighting each other on a London high street and it all gets a bit silly. This story is crying out for a Day of the Daleks-style special edition to try to fix its glaring vfx limitations.

Death to the Daleks sees Terry Nation return and assemble a script out of what appears to be prefabricated flat-packs of his storytelling's greatest hits. So we have Daleks (natch), a crashed spaceship with a crew of marooned soldiers (almost directly lifted from Planet of the Daleks in the previous season), a mysterious alien city (mirrored from the Daleks' first appearance) and an exploited civilisation of locals who are divided into potential allies and enemies. This is all so rote you could fall asleep for the middle two episodes, wake up and be able to perfectly tell everyone what happened. However, there are some promising ideas here. The planet Exxilon drains the power of all ships that pass near it, and early scenes of the TARDIS losing power and the Doctor having to crank open the doors are entertaining (unless you start pondering how the power loss doesn't cause the TARDIS's internal dimensions to collapse and oh no I've gone cross-eyed). Even better are the newly-arrived Daleks finding their weapons don't work and having to nervously join forces with the humans for their own protection, since a Dalek without a working gun or defences is just a very slow target.

The idea of the Doctor and Daleks joining forces for a story is a bit under-developed though, with the two only briefly cooperating (and mostly offscreen!) before the Daleks are able to restore their dominance (through the comical medium of the Daleks re-arming themselves with machine guns and test-destroying a model TARDIS), whilst the Doctor undergoes an overlong game of The Crystal Maze to uncover the secrets of the alien city. There's some amusement here, but it's all a bit passionless. The human starship crew are severely under-developed compared to last season's Thals (and actor Julian Fox stares at the camera so much it's hilarious), and the Daleks are extremely inept. One explodes after being hit by an Exxilon native like three times using its bow as a club, and another self-destructs after some prisoners escape rather than trying to recapture them. There's some dumb fun to be had here, but not much more.

The Monster of Peladon is a sequel to Season 9's Curse of Peladon, but two episodes longer despite only having about half the plot. As its set fifty years after the events of Curse, most of that serial's cast of characters also fails to return, though fortunately we do get the return of Ysanne Churchman's outrageously bonkers vocal performance as Ambassador Alpha Centauri, who does a lot of the heavy lifting to keep the story watchable. The cast is game, and it's good to see the Ice Warriors back to being villains even if it's a bit of a shame that The Curse of Peladon's attempts to give them more depth has been ignored. The serial feels less like a sequel than a retread of the original, complete with debates over whether sightings of Aggedor are real or not and the wisdom of Britain Peladon joining the European Union Galactic Federation. There are some good elements to the story, but these are weighed down by its unwieldy length and pedestrian ultimate villain.

Planet of the Spiders is a strange story. It starts off with the Doctor straight-up killing an innocent guy in one of his experiments (however inadvertently), which he doesn't seem too concerned about, before being drawn into mysterious events at a monastery where Mike Yates is convalescing after the events of Invasion of the Dinosaurs. Giving Yates a redemption arc here is a good idea, and he has some good material (as well as a very flash car). John Dearth, with a splendidly villainous voice, also has a good punt as the villainous Lupton, but he runs out of story material about two-and-a-half episodes in and then spends most of the rest of the time standing around like a lemon. The alien spiders are also a mixed bag vfx-wise, sometimes coming across as menacing and threatening (arachnophobes should beware this story) and sometimes looking like overgrown Halloween decorations. Still, Invasion of the Dinosaurs has reset the baseline for vfx quality this season, so in comparison these spiders look state-of-the-art.

The story also has some quite ridiculous padding, most notable in Episode 2's infamously insane/inane chase sequence, which takes up half the episode and sees the use of the Doctor's new hovercar, Bessie, a gyrocopter, a speedboat and a mini-hovercraft. It's all very silly but somewhat entertaining. More fatal are the sequences set on Metebelis III with the downtrodden human natives/slaves who are just itching for an inspiring speech by the Doctor before rebelling. Some of the worst "yokel" accents you'll ever hear in your life can be found here, along with some of the worst acting ever seen on all of Doctor Who. Atrocious stuff.

The story does recover towards the end, when it takes on more mythical overtones as the leader of the spiders, the Great One, fills the Doctor with overwhelming fear and he has to confront that fear to defeat her...at the cost of his own existence. Cue a touching regeneration scene as the Third Doctor bids farewell to Sarah and the Brigadier, and we get our first glimpse of Tom Baker as the soon-to-be legendary Fourth Doctor. Changes are coming...

Season 11 (***) of Doctor Who is, unfortunately, Pertwee's weakest. Only The Time Warrior emerges as a clear winner here, with the other four stories all having their moments but also a lot of weaknesses that prevents any of them really impressing. A clear winner of the season is Elisabeth Sladen, who impresses as Sarah Jane (even if her best is yet to come), whilst Pertwee gives a more restrained, modest and emotional performance as his end approaches. The result is a watchable, solid, but rarely outstanding season of Doctor Who.

The season can be seen right now on the BBC iPlayer in the UK, BritBox in much of the rest of the world, and is also available on DVD. A Blu-Ray release is planned but has no confirmed date at the moment.
  • 11.1 - 11.4: The Time Warrior (****½)
  • 11.5 - 11.10: Invasion of the Dinosaurs (***½)
  • 11.11 - 11.14: Death to the Daleks (***)
  • 11.15 - 11.20: The Monster of Peladon (**½)
  • 11.21 - 11.21: Planet of the Spiders (***)
Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Friday, 18 July 2025

Doctor Who: Season 10

A mysterious power emanating from a black hole threatens to overwhelm our universe, with even the Time Lords powerless to stand against it. In desperation, they recruit the first three incarnations of the Doctor with a special mission: locate the source of the danger and eliminate it.

In 1973, Doctor Who turned ten years old. The BBC was determined to celebrate the show's longevity, and the production team decided to create a story where the three Doctors - William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee - joined forces to face down a mutual threat. Producer/showrunner Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks also decided it was long past time to end the Doctor's exile on Earth. The format had succeeded in freshening up the show, but was also becoming limiting in the kinds of stories that could be told.

Slightly oddly, they decided to lead the season with the anniversary story, although airing in January 1973 made it closer to the ninth anniversary than the tenth (in fact, the first story of Season 11, airing in December 1973, was actually closer to the date). The Three Doctor is the first "multi-Doctor special," a concept that a lot of fans and creatives on the show love, and one that a lot hate (most famously, Russell T. Davies and Peter Capaldi). These stories, although still in canon, are generally an excuse for knockabout fun rather than doing anything too serious, and so it proves here.

That said, the story should really be called The Two-and-a-Bit Doctors, as William Hartnell was rather unwell at the time and found it difficult to stand and remember his lines, so is limited to pre-recorded VT footage on the TARDIS and Gallifrey scanners. This is a shame, but his warmth and irascible wit still comes through nicely in what would turn out to be his swansong (he passed away in 1975). The story itself becomes the Troughton-and-Pertwee Double Act and it is splendid, the two veteran actors sparking off one another with aplomb. The script also gives Jo Grant, Sergeant Benton and the Brigadier a lot to do, so the Doctors don't overwhelm proceedings. There are some superb visuals, with the entirety of UNIT headquarters sucked into a black hole, and some effective location filming in the inevitable quarry location. The monsters for this story - the Gel Guards - are both deeply stupid and highly prescient, acting as early predecessors to British television icon/nightmare from hell, Mr. Blobby.

Stephen Thorne is certainly...enthusiastic as long-missing Time Lord stellar engineer Omega (here not looking quite so much like a giant skeleton demon thing, as he was inexplicably portrayed in New Who's fifteenth series), but doesn't give a lot of nuance to his performance. I get the impression his mask was confining so he has to yell his lines rather than act them. But it does add to the "expensive panto" feeling of proceedings. The script has some great lines, and it's so much fun seeing Troughton and Pertwee joining forces you can forgive the slightness of it all. The story's biggest weakness is that the Brigadier acts like a total military dolt for most of it, an easy mistake to make when writing the character. Still, highly enjoyable, knockabout fun.

Carnival of Monsters starts as a weird one, with two apparently disconnected stories. In one, two new arrivals, entertainers, try to get through customs on the planet Inter Minor only to run afoul of customs. In the other, the Doctor and Jo arrive on a ship that famously disappeared in the Indian Ocean in the 1920s, which is attacked by what appears to be a dinosaur. The Doctor realises the ship is trapped in a time loop. The oddness of the two disconnected storylines is soon resolved: the entertainers are carrying a device called a Miniscope, in which a whole load of miniaturised creatures are being carried to entertain the crowds. A potentially fascinating premise is let down a little by the limited sets and locations available: the Doctor and Jo spend ages stuck in the guts of the machine, making their way across massive circuit boards. The serial hints at the possible return of the Cybermen before annoyingly pivoting to featuring creatures called Drashigs as the main threat, which are a very nice design but don't have a lot of depth to them.

More successful is Robert Holmes's banter-laden script, with a lot of funny lines and some early appearances for future Davros Michael Wisher (as Kalik) and companion Harry, Ian Marter (as Andrews). Leslie Dwyer and Cheryl Hall are also most entertaining as Vorg and Shirna. Potentially a great story is let down by what feels like budget limitations (the makeup for some of the aliens is poor, and some sets are overused) and pacing problems. This is a four-parter that can feel longer than some six-parters. Still, entertaining stuff, especially for the implication that the SS Bernice was a missing ship as famous as the Marie Celeste, but, thanks to the Doctor's actions, its disappearance never happens and the timeline adjusts (hence why we've never heard of it).

Frontier in Space is that rare Doctor Who beast, a full-blown space opera. Arriving in the 26th Century, the Doctor and Jo find the mighty Earth and Draconian Empires on the brink of full-scale war, with both sides accusing the other of attacking their ships. A full-blown Malcolm Hulke Special, packed with convincing, intricate worldbuilding (I would kill for some of this in the modern show), genuine political intrigue and the Doctor in full diplomat-pacifist mode, and with Jo getting some meaty plotlines. The Master showing up is much more tolerable here than normal, especially if you know this is Roger Delgado's last appearance: he tragically died in a car crash just a few weeks after the story was transmitted.

The story is very busy, avoiding the normal problems of duller six-parters, with the story moving from Earth to a penal colony on the Moon, to various spaceships and the Draconian capital. There's a lot of macho posturing, more subtle political overtures and military shenanigans, to the point where this story feels like a dry run for both Blake's 7 and Babylon 5 (Joe Straczynski is a noted Doctor Who fan, and the backstory of the previous Earth-Draconia War feels somewhat familiar). Throw in the Master, Ogrons, the surprise return of an old enemy, and you have what should be a total winner. What lets the story down is the fact that the Doctor and Jo spend most of it in prison. They go from being prisoners of the Earth Empire to incarcerated by the Draconians to prisoners of the Ogrons to prisoners of the Master, sometimes in what feels like the same episode.

Planet of the Daleks starts a rather dim trend for Doctor Who Dalek stories, with the appearance of the Daleks kept a surprise for the end of Part 1 of the story, despite "Daleks" appearing in the title, and in this case the last story pretty much letting us know that the Daleks might be about. This is Terry Nation's first Doctor Who script for almost a decade, and it's clear he hadn't been keeping up with the show in the interim as the script showed up with individual titles for each episode (something that hadn't been done for seven years at this point). The story has promise, as it brings back the Thals from the OG Dalek story and has a very small, focused cast, with each character getting a solid amount of development. There's also a rare moment of continuity as the Doctor talks about some of his former companions. The characters in this serial feel like their stories actually continue when the Doctor isn't around, which is rare at this point in the show.

Again, this is a four-parter masquerading as a six, and the pacing is a bit sluggish. There's a lot of people running around and getting captured and split up and infected with a fungal virus and needing a cure. The vfx are again a bit too ambitious as well, and Nation seems to be fall back too readily on ideas from earlier scripts (the sequences in the Dalek base feel a bit too reminiscent of the very first Dalek story). But there's a solid action-adventure story here, and the ending is a major cliffhanger which eventually gets tied up in a great comic story (Paul Cornell's Emperor of the Daleks).

The Green Death sees shenanigans down a coal mine in Wales, sparking an investigation from both the Brigadier (on the side of the local big energy conglomerate) and Jo Grant (on the side of the local eco-warriors). The Doctor, in something of a huff at everyone getting along without him, goes off to Metebelis III alone and, in one of the funniest sequences in the show's history, gets ten shades of trouble knocked out of him by the local flora and fauna. This sequence put me in mind of playing Dungeons & Dragons and one player has a strop and flaps off on a solo side-quest where the DM kicks the hell out of them until they get with the program and rejoin the rest of the party for the actual main story.

The rest of the serial unfolds as something of a spiritual successor to Season 8's The Dæmons, with the full UNIT team getting lots to do, with the locals pitching in to help or hinder as required. There's a right-on ecological message where the metaphor drives the story without the need for the writers to give a TED Talk on what it all means, a winning guest cast and one of the show's more outrageous villains. The ultimate bad guy is a very overused trope (one Star Trek had rather over-used a few years earlier) but the writers give him a ridiculous sense of humour and whimsy so he becomes a bit of a scene-stealer, and arguably loses because he's too busy trying to impress the Doctor with witty repartee rather than actually enacting his Evil Plan.

The story is also notable for seeing the departure of Katy Manning as Jo Grant after three seasons, making her (at this point) the show's second-longest running companion (after Jamie in Seasons 4-6, back when the seasons had far more episodes). It's probably fair to say that Jo had a mixed run as a companion, especially early on. She was supposed to be a skilled UNIT agent, trained in escapology as well as armed and unarmed combat, but the writers had a tendency to forget about that and have her screaming and getting captured. But when the script allowed it, Manning's superb sense of humour would come through (quoting Beatles lyrics to a confused Second Doctor in The Three Doctors), as well as her ability to unexpectedly take command of threatening situations (shutting down the prison riot in The Mind of Evil; posing as a royal princess in The Curse of Peladon; defeating the Master in a battle of wills in Frontier in Space, earning his grudging respect). Her departure is one of her best stories, especially for the impact it has on the Doctor, who seems more quietly devastated by her leaving than any other companion bar his own granddaughter Susan (at least at this point). Pertwee is particularly superb at this point.

Season 10 (****½) is a very enjoyable season of Doctor Who, with some great scripts, ideas and performances. Even when stories fall short of their potential, the ideas are at least very interesting. You can criticise the season for maybe being a bit too ambitious at the time, with the vfx creaking to realise the writers' vision, but it's all solidly fun stuff.

The season can be seen right now on the BBC iPlayer in the UK, BritBox in much of the rest of the world, and is also available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

  • 10.1 - 10.4: The Three Doctors (****)
  • 10.5 - 10.8: Carnival of Monsters (****)
  • 10.9 - 10.14: Frontier in Space (****)
  • 10.15 - 10.20: Planet of the Daleks (***½)
  • 20.21 - 10.26: The Green Death (*****)

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Monday, 14 July 2025

This is Free Trader Beowulf: A System History of Traveller by Shannon Appelcline

Back in 1977, Game Designers' Workshop released a curious black box emblazed with a line of dialogue: "This is Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone...Mayday, mayday, we are under attack...main drive is gone...turret number one not responding...mayday...losing cabin pressure fast...calling anyone...please help...this is Free Trader Beowulf...mayday." Underneath, in striking red on a black background, was the name TRAVELLER, which we were told means, "Science-Fiction Adventure in the Far Future."


Traveller is to science fiction what Dungeons & Dragons is to fantasy: an in-depth, rich roleplaying game which allows players to take on one of a myriad of roles, from soldier to explorer to engineer to medic to socialite, and explore the galaxy of a distant future. Players and Referees can create their own worlds, star systems and areas of space, or use an incredibly-detailed setting with almost fifty years of worldbuilding and detailing behind it, the Charted Space of the Third Imperium in (roughly) the year 5626 CE. Thanks to the stewardship of Mongoose Publishing and the popularity of YouTubers like Seth Skorkowsky, Traveller is enjoying possibly the greatest level of popularity in its history, with high sales and successful Kickstarters resulting in one of the most prolific release schedules for a contemporary roleplaying game, all of an unusually high and consistent quality.

But it wasn't always this way. Traveller has enjoyed periods of popularity before but also long hiatuses due to publishing problems, companies going bust and licences being moved around. For the first time, someone has attempted to tell the full history of the Traveller roleplaying game from its inception to the present. Shannon Appelcline is best-known for his magisterial four-volume Designers & Dragons series, which tells the story of roleplaying games from the 1970s to the 2000s (a forthcoming fifth volume will cover the 2010s). Here he takes that wide-ranging focus and here narrows in on one game and tells its full history over a generous page count of 300 A4 pages. It's entirely possible that no roleplaying game, except maybe Dungeons & Dragons, has had its story told in such detail before.

The book is divided into 14 chapters, exploring each edition and sub-edition of Traveller in a lot of detail, with additional chapters on various licensed producers of material and the history of the fandom. The early chapters cover the founding of Game Designers' Workshop and the early development of the game, created by Marc Miller, with sterling support from the likes of Loren Wiseman, Frank Chadwick, John Harshman and many more. There's discussion of the differences between Traveller and other SF games, in particular its strong focus on a hard science fictional approach (hyperjumps aside) rather than the science fantasy of the likes of Gamma World, Starfinder and Star Wars. There's also some interesting discussion on the early tension between those who wanted Traveller to remain a setting-less rules system and those who wanted to develop a detailed setting; the latter won the argument, very quickly. Appelcline's enviable industry-ranging knowledge means he can also contrast Traveller's position in the industry at any given time versus contemporaries, so we get frequent check-ins with what D&D was doing, what other games were coming out and what the trends were in gaming.

This is all accomplished in impressive depth. A lot of these kind of books can feel superficial, but This is Free Trader Beowulf certainly does not. Appelcline goes above and beyond the call of duty in referencing third-party sourcebooks and licences, and getting art from the most obscure corners of the fandom and the franchise, and setting it all in the context of the wider industry. He notes how Traveller's history impacted not only itself, but also other games, such as Warhammer 40,000, BattleTech (FASA started as a licensed Traveller production company), Stars Without Number and Alternity, and how its lifepath system inspired Cyberpunk, the darker tone of which inspired (for good or ill) Traveller's "darker and grittier" period as MegaTraveller and Traveller: The New Era. This era is when GDW learned that building up a beloved, detailed setting and annihilating it will not win you goodwill from the fans, something both Wizards of Coast and Games Workshop failed to learn from later on.

Appelcline's attention to detail extends to providing regular maps of various sectors in Charted Space showing where the various adventures released in one era take place relative to one another, as well as possibly the most exhaustive checklists of Traveller products ever put together, covering not just official releases but also licensed sourcebooks and even individual issues of fanzines.

The book has less art than I was expecting. It still has a lot of imagery, including iconic images from the various game editions, but rarely full-page spreads. This is not an art book in the same way that Dungeons & Dragons: Art & Arcana is, for example. The focus here is on the text and incomparable detail.

Appelcline's writing is engaging and detailed, with occasional bursts of wry humour as he considers the sometimes preposterous swings of fortune that accompany the history of the game and its various editions. I was a bit surprised to see that Courtney Solomon, who directed the risible D&D movie released in 2000, at one point owned a stake in Traveller's main licensee. At other points, a Traveller TV show was under development, and multiple video games (though only three ever saw the light of day). Fortunately, the story of Traveller never gets really dark as Marc Miller was very careful in maintaining ownership of the franchise and, whenever a business decision looked like getting totally out of hand, he'd pull the licence. Several times, this stopped Traveller from going under or getting stuck in development hell. If the book has a weakness, it's an unavoidable one in that it was published just a few months before Marc Miller sold the Traveller IP in its totality to Mongoose, finally satisfied (after a mere sixteen years of proven hard work!) that he had found a company who would do his vision and legacy justice. This would have provided a stronger ending to the book.

If the book has a weakness it might be that it's too detailed, though given that's the point of the book, that's like going to a Chinese restaurant and complaining the menu is a bit heavy on noodles and rice. But the richness and completeness makes the book as successful as it is. Another weakness is a couple of glaring typos that slipped through the net, but this is not a major problem.

This is Free Trader Beowulf: A System History of Traveller (****½) is simply the last word on the history of the world's oldest hard(ish) science fiction roleplaying game, and one of its most consistently popular TTRPGs. The wealth of detail may make this a bit more appreciable for hardened Traveller veterans rather than newcomers, but this is still an impressive, richly interesting work. The book is available now from Mongoose Publishing as PDF and print editions.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Doctor Who: Season 9

The Doctor's exile on Earth continues, but he has convinced the Time Lords into sending him on at least some clandestine missions, although they keep him on a short leash. The Doctor's latest adventures also include the return of some very old foes.


A key tenet of the Third Doctor era of Doctor Who is that the Doctor is exiled to Earth, where he joins forces with UNIT to combat various threats to the planet. This premise was meant to keep costs down whilst the show made the expensive transition to full-colour filming and more action. However, executive producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks began to find the format confining. One writer colleague opined that the format reduced the show to just two types of episodes: alien invasions and mad scientists. To shake things up, they introduced a new recurring threat in the form of the Master, the Doctor's opposite number and nemesis, which both made Season 8 very enjoyable but also rather predictable. More importantly, Season 8 had a test-run in the form of Colony in Space, the first story in two years to take the Doctor away from Earth.

For Season 9 they continued to shake up the format, with the Time Lords sending the Doctor on missions away from Earth. Even whilst on Earth, they decided to remove the Doctor from the environs of UNIT to have him have to combat threats without the resources of the Brigadier and his troops. As a result, of Season 9's five stories, only the first and last are "standard" stories for this era, with the Doctor and UNIT fighting a mutual threat.

Things get off to an absolutely splendid start with Day of the Daleks, in my opinion the most underrated story of the Pertwee Era and possibly the single most underrated Classic Who story of them all. As the title subtly indicates, this serial marks the return of the Daleks for the first time since Season 5's Evil of the Daleks. The Daleks have used time travel to alter history and invade and occupy Earth again (having done so previously way back in Season 2's The Dalek Invasion of Earth). However, they are opposed by a well-organised resistance force. The rebels have worked out that the Daleks took advantage of the chaos of the destruction of a 20th Century peace conference between the Soviet Union and China (currently teetering on the brink of a nuclear exchange) to invade, and believe that diplomat Reginald Styles sabotaged the conference. They plan to kill Styles to avert the chaos. The Doctor gets mixed up with events after the first assassination attempt on Styles fails.

This is a great story because it deals, for the very first time in the show, with the idea of a temporal paradox, a closed loop that is causing time to repeat in an inexorable way leading to disaster, which only the Doctor might be able to shut down. It's also excellent for how it presents the Daleks, as master manipulators ruling over a wrecked Earth from lofty towers, leaving it to human soldiers and Ogron shock troops to do all the running around for them (in reality this was to spare the increasingly ancient Dalek props from further wear and tear). Caught between is the Controller (Aubrey Woods), the overlord of the human population on behalf of the Daleks who likes to think he can reason with the Daleks and mitigate the damage to humanity, but clearly is weighed down by his conscience. It's Woods who helps carry the story, as his moral code struggles to assert itself and only finally succeeds after being exposed to the Doctor and Jo's compassion. The rebels are all a bit too posh (despite mostly good performances), but there's a unique feeling of Cold War doom to the story as the Brigadier gets reports increasingly indicating the outbreak of global annihilation. Given how unflappable the Brigadier normally is, his real worry as things get more tense is palpable. Things culminate in the long-awaited clash of UNIT and the Daleks, which has to be said looks laughably cheap even by 1972 standards in the original cut.

However, a "special edition" of the serial is featured on the various physical media and streaming releases, which uses moderate CGI, revamped Dalek voices (the originals are a bit tinny) and re-edits the final battle into something more impressive, though it also enhances one of the story's oddities, where the Doctor grabs an energy weapon and vapourises an Ogron. The special edition has him shooting two Ogrons to death, which feels a bit weird given the Doctor's well-known disdain for guns. The special edition is worthwhile for its much-improved final battle, but the CGI environments feel a bit much. Still, an underrated classic of a story.

The Curse of Peladon is another very fine story, though not quite as accomplished. The Doctor and Jo arrive on the planet Peladon at a crucial moment in its history, as it debates whether to join the Galactic Federation. The Federation has sent delegates from the planets Alpha Centauri, Arcturus and Mars to engage in negotiations, and the Doctor is disquieted that the Martian delegates are Ice Warriors, his old foes who have now apparently forsworn violence and are famed mediators. Someone is trying to sabotage the negotiations and the Doctor, mistaken as the Earth emissary, has to find out who. This is a great story for its whodunit aspect and fine political intrigue, with David Troughton (son of former Doctor Patrick) giving a stately performance as the young King. Katy Manning also shines as Jo Grant posing as a princess, giving haughty orders to her retainer, the Doctor. The alien delegates are great, with the Doctor trying to overcome his prejudice against the Ice Warriors. Special shout-out to Alpha Centauri here, a giant phallic creature with a massive eyeball who operates in a continuous state of anxious panic, but has a fine cutting line in the type of observations you wish more people would voice in Doctor Who more often. Like The Dæmons, this is a story whose critical reputation has waxed and waned over the years but feels like it's been on the slide recently, but I think is a winner, with a cracking pace and some excellent dialogue, even if the contemporary political satire (the story is based on the UK's debate on whether to join the European Common Market) is a bit on-the-nose.

The Sea Devils sees the Doctor visiting the Master, who was captured at the end of the aforementioned The Dæmons and is now imprisoned in a maximum security facility on an island. The Master's inevitable plans to escape coincide with some ship disappearances in the area, and the Doctor's discovery of the Sea Devils, aquatic cousins of the Silurians he met back in Season 7. This is another cracking story, with the usually-interminable length of the standard six-parter here alleviated by shifts in tone and setting. The three-way conflict between the humans, the Master and the Sea Devils is well-handled, and the full cooperation of the Royal Navy in the episode means some insane production values, complete with the use of a Royal Navy warship, rescue helicopter, hovercraft and speedboats making the story feel epic in a way no other story of this era (or possibly the whole Classic show) really gets close to. It's also nice to see the Doctor cooperating with a Royal Navy taskforce rather than UNIT (although exactly why he doesn't call in UNIT is unclear) and Captain Hart (Edwin Richfield) and Commander Ridgeway (Game of Thrones' Maester Luwin, Donald Sumpter) are splendidly-written characters. There's also a nice scene here of the Master enjoying watching The Clangers, setting up a gag thirty-five years later when a later incarnation of the Master finds himself watching Teletubbies.

The Mutants is a bit of a mixed bag. This is possibly the most "standard" Doctor Who story of Pertwee's run, with the Doctor encountering a tyrannical government and helping the freedom-loving rebels rise up against them. There's a bit more nuance here as the government is actually a colonial force from Earth and the rebels are the natives of the planet Solos angrily demanding independence from their overlords, who literally live in an orbital "Skybase." This is Bob Baker and Dave Martin channelling Malcolm Hulke, with a familiar mix of solid worldbuilding, some interesting characters and some biting contemporary political satire, this time riffing on apartheid in South Africa. There's also some hard science about the planet Solo's complex multi-century orbit resulting in seasons that last for decades (foreshadowing, if only coincidentally, Brian Aldiss's Helliconia Trilogy and George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire).

However, it's a story that feels like less than the sum of its parts. There's some great performances, and Paul Whitsun-Jones' Marshal might be one of the most despicable Doctor Who villains of all time for being an officious bureaucrat with zero morality whatsoever. Most of the rest of the cast is solid, generally getting the assignment of being earnest or incredibly hammy, but it's Christopher Coll and Rick James who stand out as the Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern-like (or Bodger and Grift, for JV Jones fans) Stubbs and Cotton, two ordinary guards who inadvertently trip over into becoming main characters. It's definitely a story that's very interesting in its ideas but, like most six-parters, feels too long.

The Time Monster rounds off the season in even more frustrating style. The Master is back, this time posing as a Scottish scientist (even if his accent veers from "tenuous" to "non-existent") trying to create matter transmission technology to help summon Kronos, a powerful chronovore from outside space/time. The battle of wits between the Doctor and the Master is splendid stuff, with the Master having his own assistants (who reluctantly swap sides once the Master's evil schemes are exposed) and there being a complex bit of business as the Doctor and Master try to materialise their TARDISes inside one another to defeat each other's plans, which is visually arresting (enough that the idea later gets revisited in Season 18). There's also some strong gags, like Sergeant Benton being turned into a baby and the Master time-shifting a V1 rocket from 1944 to take care of a UNIT column. Unfortunately all this good work is undone in the final two episodes, which reverts to nonsense as the Doctor and Jo run around in ancient Atlantis trying to stop the Master. If this had a been a four-parter set on contemporary Earth it would have been great, but the final two parts weaken the whole story.

Still, the ninth season of Doctor Who (****½) is mostly excellent, with three great stories in a row and two more which, if more flawed, still have much to commend them. The return of the Daleks, Ice Warriors and Silurians (if a different type of them) are all successful, and restricting the Master to just two stories works much better than him turning up every week. Jon Pertwee is also at his best this season, giving a mellower performance with less shouting, and Katy Manning has better material to work with than the previous season, particularly in The Curse of Peladon, The Sea Devils and The Time Monster.

The season can be seen right now on the BBC iPlayer in the UK, BritBox in much of the rest of the world, and is also available on DVD and Blu-Ray.
  • 9.1 - 9.4: Day of the Daleks (*****)
  • 9.5 - 9.8: The Curse of Peladon (****½)
  • 9.9 - 9.14: The Sea Devils (****½)
  • 9.15 - 9.20: The Mutants (***½)
  • 9.21 - 9.26: The Time Monster (***)
Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Tuesday, 8 July 2025

Doctor Who: Season 8

The Doctor's exile on Earth continues, to his consternation. A new threat arises with the arrival of the Master, a fellow renegade Time Lord but one who bends his skills towards conquest and destruction. UNIT, the Doctor, and new assistant Jo Grant have to take on the Master in a series of battles with the fate of Earth hanging in the balance.

The seventh season of Doctor Who saw an improvement in the show's fortunes, which had been looking dicey as the 1960s came to an end. The show moved into full colour with a new Doctor, a new companion and a whole new paradigm, along with more action, explosions, stunts and gadgets. Season 8, airing in 1971, saw the production team refusing to rest on their laurels and changed things up again, though a bit more modestly this time around. They decided to make five stories rather than four, meaning they could drop the episode count per serial. The three seven-part stories in Season 7 were a bit on the long side. Season 8 would instead have two four-parters, two-six parters and, splitting the difference, a five-parter.

The decision was also made, for the very first time in Doctor Who history but certainly not the last, to have a season-spanning arc, revolving around a new Time Lord nemesis called the Master. The Doctor had previously - twice! - faced off against an antagonistic Time Lord called the Monk (in Season 2's The Time Meddler and Season 3's The Daleks' Master Plan) but the feeling was that he was more of a bumbling comedy foe than a serious threat. The Master was conceived of as a Moriarty to the Doctor's Sherlock Holmes, his direct nemesis and counterpart on the side of evil. Not only was the decision made to introduce the Master, but to have him in every story of the season, with a loose linking storyline with the Doctor trying to capture his foe whilst he in turn is trying to escape Earth (after the Doctor inadvertently traps him there in the first story of the season). Roger Delgado plays the Master with absolute charm and relish, and sparks off Jon Pertwee most excellently.

Things kick off in Terror of the Autons, a direct sequel to the previous season's excellent Spearhead from Space. The alien Nestenes are once again planning to invade Earth with their plastic-controlling powers and Auton warrior-constructs. The Master joins forces with them, but the Doctor is alerted to his presence by the Time Lords, who are concerned about the Master's level of threat to them and to innocent lifeforms. The Doctor also has to join forces with a new companion, UNIT assistant Jo Grant (the splendid Katy Manning) after the somewhat abrupt, off-screen departure of Liz Shaw. The resulting story is a bit overstuffed - it has multiple guest stars, the first appearance of the Time Lords since the Doctor's exile started, and also introduces Richard Franklin as UNIT Captain Yates - given its runtime. It also has some of the less effective vfx of the season, such as the character killed by an inflatable sofa and the ugliest murderous doll known to man. It's entertaining but not a patch on Spearhead, though at least Roger Delgado gets a good workout from carrying the serial on his shoulders.

The Mind of Evil makes better use of its greater episode count to incorporate more characters and tell a bigger story. The Master plans to use a mind-control machine, disguised as a way of curing career criminals, to help him start WWIII by sabotaging a peace conference between the United States and China, which the UK is hosting. This plan involves taking over a prison and capturing a passing biological warhead (as you do). Oh, and he also needs to recover his missing TARDIS dematerialisation circuit, so has to lure the Doctor into a trap.

The result is a surprisingly pacy story with lots gong on, with returning writer Don Houghton employing some of the same techniques that made Inferno such a success in the preceding season (sadly, this would be Houghton's last script for Who). The segues from diplomatic thriller to prison break-out drama to action movie as UNIT storms the prison are well-handled, and the guest cast is great. The story even manages to be pretty good (by early 1970s standards) at how it handles the China subplot, employing actors of Chinese origin and having a minor plot point revolve around being able to speak Hokkien rather than the more common Mandarin (we'll assume the TARDIS was totally offline in this story, so its translation circuits were not working...I'll get my coat). Jo is also on great form here, using her UNIT skills to single-handedly stop a prison riot in its tracks and constantly working to undermine the Master's plans. Throw in some decent action sequences and you have a reasonably entertaining story, though not as good as Inferno.

The Claws of Axos is the most disappointing story of the season, despite the presence of a respectably gargantuan frog. It has a terrific opening as UNIT is collaborating with British and American forces on how to find the Master, only for an alien spaceship to arrive on a collision course with the Earth. Cue fusillades of defensive missiles, the Doctor arguing with a bloodthirsty-but-dim British politician as only Pertwee can, with the Brigadier caught in the crossfire. Things improve as we find out the Master is a prisoner of the Axons (putting him on the same side as the Doctor and UNIT from the off, for once) and the humanoid Axons are terrifically realised, with some great prosthetics work and eery performances.

Unfortunately the story goes for a bit of a wander, and the story feels more poorly-paced than Mind of Evil despite being an hour shorter. The conclusion to the story is unnecessarily convoluted as well, and Jo gets a lot less to do (though her single-handedly storming an alien spaceship to rescue the Doctor is kind of badass). Still, there's a lot of great ideas here, like the Brigadier having to reluctantly employ the Master as interim scientific advisor in the Doctor's absence, even if they don't entirely succeed.

Colony in Space is a test-run for the producers hoping to end the Doctor's exile on Earth, with the Time Lords reactivating the TARDIS and sending it (with the Doctor and Jo on board) to the planet Uxarieus in the year 2472 to apprehend the Master, although oddly the Time Lords don't actually bother telling the Doctor any of this, hoping he'll figure it out. On Uxarieus, the Doctor finds a group of peaceful colonists at odds with a ship from an interstellar mining corporation which is planning to strip-mine the planet, whilst the native inhabitants are either ignored or killed. This is a Malcolm Hulke (The Silurians) special, putting together some complex worldbuilding and dealing with themes like colonialism, corporate corruption and environmental devastation, but wrapping it in a lot of fistfights, gun battles and creepy aliens. The episode is let down by some terrible effects (the colonists being scared off by a back-projected image of an iguana is particularly dumb) but some very effective location filming in a quarry. The Master feels a bit shoehorned in and the six-episode length kills the pacing in the home run, with the colonists and mining corporation turning the tables on one another so often you often forget who's got the upper hand at any moment. The ending also feels a bit random. But, an entertaining enough story.

The season wraps up with The Dæmons, a story whose reputation has waxed and waned over the years. At one point it was considered the best Pertwee story and one of the best Classic Who stories full stop (top ten, certainly), but it then went through a lengthy period of derision. Watching it for the first time in around thirty years, I was relieved to find it's closer to the former than the latter. This is easily the best-written Pertwee story to date, with a witty script full of top banter between the UNIT crew and the Doctor. Captain Yates and Corporal Benton have way more to do than normal, including at one point flying into the threatened village in a helicopter hilariously emblazoned with G-UNIT on the side, with Yates wearing a most fabulous coat. Guest star Damaris Hayman destroys everyone else with her unhinged-but-upper-crust performance as a white witch (who 100% ruthlessly seduces Benton the second this story is over), and the Master as the leader of a sinister coven prone to saying things like, "so mote it be!" is 100% a brilliant idea.

The story also goes to some wild places, with the entire village sealed off from the entire world via a "heat dome" that will make you ponder if Stephen King and/or the writers of The Simpsons Movie watched this story at some point, and a tone that veers seamlessly from The Wicker Man to Hot Fuzz. The Brigadier unable to get into the village and having to work with his Doctor-from-Temu Sergeant Osgood (probably the father/grandfather/uncle of UNIT's Petronella Osgood from New Who's Series 7 through 9) is also comic gold. The only major weaknesses are that Jo really does get sod-all to do, and in fact is treated rather harshly by both the Doctor and Yates for no real reason, and the way the sinister Azal is defeated is a bit out of left field, likely a result of the last minute rewrite that saw the story move from a six to a five-parter. 

Season 8 of Doctor Who isn't quite as accomplished as its predecessor, but is still an entertaining enough instalment of the show. Roger Delgado is charming, charismatic and occasionally menacing as the Master, but he's also overused here, with too many rapid-fire appearances diluting the character. The stories can also be a tad repetitive: the Master joins forces with the evil alien invaders of the week, only to realise they're going to double-cross him, so he then swaps sides and helps the Doctor defeat them instead, and manages a last-minute escape. The stories here - especially The Dæmons - thus benefit more from being watched individually than binged sequentially. Even in the weaker moments there's usually some good ideas going on. We also get a splendid new companion with Jo Grant, but she suffers from serious character decline over the season, with the effective UNIT agent trained in escapology, armed and unarmed combat of the first two stories replaced by a standard ditz-who-needs-constant-rescuing by the end. Still, future seasons offer opportunities for improvement.

The eighth season of Doctor Who (****) can be seen right now on the BBC iPlayer in the UK, BritBox in much of the rest of the world, and is also available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

  • 8.1 - 8.4: Terror of the Autons (***½)
  • 8.5 - 8.10: The Mind of Evil (****)
  • 8.11 - 8.14: The Claws of Axos (***)
  • 8.15 - 8.20: Colony in Space (***½)
  • 8.21 - 8.25: The Dæmons (*****)

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Sunday, 6 July 2025

Doctor Who: Season 7

The Doctor has been finally tracked down and captured by his own people, the Time Lords. Found guilty of interfering in the affairs of other planets, he has been exiled to the planet Earth in the late 20th Century, his TARDIS disabled and even his knowledge of space/time travel blocked. He's also forced to regenerate. Arriving on Earth, the new Doctor joins forces with his old ally, Brigadier Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce (UNIT), just in time to help thwart a series of attacks on the planet by aliens, obstinate scientists and even its ancient, original inhabitants.

If you're going to start watching Classic Doctor Who, probably the optimal entry point is the start of Season 7. Originally airing in 1970, this was the first season of the show to be made in full colour and to adopt a restrained episode count of 25-26 half-hour instalments. It's also the first season not to have any missing/destroyed episodes (earlier seasons have gaps that have been bridged by animated reconstructions or audio tracks). It's also, uniquely in Classic Who's 26-year run, the only time we get a new Doctor and a new companion at the same time. The season also acts as a reboot of the premise, with the Doctor now exiled on Earth and working with UNIT to face down a series of hostile threats as he tries to either escape or earn his freedom by doing good deeds for the Time Lords. Finally, it's very good, and sometimes even said to be the single finest season of Doctor Who, although I think that's a bit more of a stretch.

The decision was also made to make the show more action-packed, taking inspiration from James Bond and the much higher-budgeted, glossy shows made by ITC (The Prisoner, The SaintUFO, Thunderbirds and so forth). The Third Doctor is as likely to disarm an enemy (non-lethally!) by using Venusian Karate then to talk them down, and his favoured way of resolving a situation is to build a fancy machine and "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow." Unable to use the TARDIS, the Doctor instead gets around with a car, Bessie, a vintage roadster he updates with a huge number of space age gadgets. The scripts also have a little more humour, and take advantage of their larger casts with numerous recurring UNIT characters on hand, as well as the Doctor and his various companions in this era. Compared to the six seasons that came before, it was dynamic, fast-moving and pacy.

Compared to 2025, the pacing feels considerably less dynamic. Season 7 consists of just four stories rather than the normal five, meaning that the stories had to be significantly longer than was normal. Only the opening serial, Spearhead from Space, is the standard four episodes in length (equal to two modern episodes). The other three all clock in at seven episodes apiece, which is on the longer side even for Classic Who (only three stories in the whole run of the series are longer, all earlier on). Subsequent seasons have more four-parters and their longest stories never rise above six episodes, with even those being phased out before the end of the 1970s.

Spearhead from Space gets things off to a strong start. We meet the Third Doctor, played by Jon Pertwee, suffering from post-regenerative disorder/stress. It's fortunate that he is quickly found by UNIT and the Brigadier (played splendidly, as always, by Nicholas Courtney). UNIT's own new scientific advisor, Liz Shaw (Caroline John), is quickly sidelined by the Doctor's superior knowledge, but holds her own intellectually and has a sardonic sense of humour that is quite entertaining. The serial introduces the recurring menace of the Nestene Consciousness, a powerful alien intelligence that can animate plastic to serve its needs, resulting in the onslaught of murderous shop dummies, the Autons. There's a reason why Russell T. Davies borrowed heavily from this story when he relaunched Doctor Who in 2005 with the episode Rose (even down to re-staging the shots of shop dummies coming to life and bursting through windows). This story also looks superb, as a result of being the only Classic story to be entirely shot on film and hence to get a full, native HD upgrade. The guest stars are pretty good and the four-episode run keeps things ticking over nicely.

The Silurians - more technically Doctor Who and the Silurians due to a titling error - also introduces a new, recurring element in the mythology with the titular Silurians, intelligent, humanoid dinosaurs who went into suspended animation when the Moon was captured into Earth's orbit, causing global disturbances. Awoken tens of millions of years later, the Silurians are understandably annoyed to find the planet overrun by apes, but are divided on how to handle the problem, with one leader willing to try diplomacy, another violence and another caught between. The Doctor and UNIT are drawn into the crisis when the Silurians tap a nearby power plant to aid in their revivification.

Although its seven-episode, three-hour runtime feels a little steep, it actually makes some interesting shifts in the story to avoid feeling too dull. Early episodes deal with a manhunt for a single Silurian after it is cut off from its fellows, the middle episodes revolve around the Doctor trying to broker a deal, and the conclusion revolves around a genetically-engineered plague the militant Silurians unleash upon humanity. The story has a strong moral core as the Silurians are shown to be a complex society of individuals who do not always agree with one another, and the Doctor has to try to talk UNIT down from blowing up the Silurian base. Some bad production values aside (a dinosaur stalking the cave network is definitely writing cheques the BBC's vfx department can't even hope to cash at this point), this is a complex and rich story with a lot of thorny questions and no easy answers. It is let down a little bit by the plague being resolved off-screen with some blink-and-you-miss-it dialogue.

The Ambassadors of Death sees a manned mission to Mars returning to Earth and almost immediately being hijacked by unknown forces for their own ends. The Doctor and UNIT find themselves in a battle of jurisdictions and wills with the British government and also the unknown assailants, all the while trying to negotiate a possible alien first contact situation. To be honest the main story is a bit bobbins and the serial has the worst pacing of the season, but this is made up for by the show's first employment of Havoc, a specialist stunt team. Previously, stunts on the show were handled by the show's own personnel, who were not well-versed in this area. This story goes berserk with frankly unnecessary but hugely entertaining fight sequences, hijacks, explosions and a use of helicopters that boards on the gratuitous. This story not only went overbudget but vapourised it, possibly explaining why the subsequent serial is so claustrophobic and doubles up most of the cast to save money. Everyone looks like they are having a lot of fun, so it's hard to criticise it too much for the number of times UNIT is tactically defeated by a bunch of East End thugs for hire, or why the aliens put up with a ludicrous amount of manipulation from small-minded criminals.

Inferno has sometimes been cited as the best story of the Pertwee era, and one of the best serials in Doctor Who's history. I wouldn't go quite that far, but it's the highlight of the season. The Doctor is drafted in to help assess a huge drilling project that is tunnelling deep into the Earth's crust to generate cheap energy. Intriguingly, the Doctor has another and more personal agenda, which is to use the energy that's being released to help repair the TARDIS. The initial episodes set up possible sabotage at the project, and the complex political intrigue between the project's leader, drilling advisor, the government oversight official and UNIT, who are handling security. Just as that is threatening to get boring (pun unintended), the Doctor is blasted into a parallel universe where Britain is a fascist state. Scenes of the Brigadier, now the evil Brigade Leader (without his moustache, in an amusing inversion of Star Trek's approach), and military commander Liz Shaw subjecting the Doctor to Nineteen Eighty-Four style interrogation, remain fairly disturbing. This is also one of Pertwee's finest hours, as the Doctor has to remember his compassion for saving lives even extends to these darker versions of his friends. Nicholas Courtney in particular gives an absolutely chilling performance as the Brigade Leader, and Caroline John is outstanding as both versions of Liz in what turns out to be her swansong from the show. The ending is one of Doctor Who's most powerfully bleak moments, and is terrifically-written and acted.

Season 7 of Doctor Who comes with all the caveats of watching a season of television produced by the BBC on a very tight budget in 1970: production values rarely rise above adequate (overuse of cool-looking helicopters aside), some of the guest stars are sublime and some others are hamming it up like panto dames, effects shots are mostly risible, and the shooting on video results in some iffy lighting set-ups. But, overlooking the production weaknesses, the ideas are often very strong, the scripts are often quite smart and the performances by the regulars are excellent. Pertwee's Third Doctor is a little pompous and arrogant, but he is also moral, a firm believer in science and diplomacy, and if you're up against an alien invader, there's nobody else you'd rather have at your side.

The seventh season of Doctor Who (****½) can be seen right now on the BBC iPlayer in the UK, BritBox in much of the rest of the world, and is also available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

  • 7.1 - 7.4: Spearhead from Space (****½)
  • 7.5 - 7.11: The Silurians (****½)
  • 7.12 - 7.18: Ambassadors of Death (***½)
  • 7.19 - 7.25: Inferno (*****)

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.