Gavin WintersLethbridge-Stewart is amazingly more credulous at this point, believing in the idea of the TARDIS without even seeing it, and how it could be a means of escape. A huge contrast to his later attitude in The Three Doctors! #DoctorWho
Fury From The Deep: Bases! Monsters! Choppers! Possession! Traitors! And foam! Endless, endless foam. The ultimate Season 5 story? (Well, maybe with a more traditional lumbering two-legged monster…) #DoctorWho
The sonic! Or rather, the random bit of plastic Troughton used to represent the sonic…
The TARDIS team again comment that they keep landing on Earth. If this was today there’d be furious internet speculation that it’s a deliberate plot point leading up to something. #DoctorWho
The scene of Oak and Quill breathing gas onto Mrs Harris really is one of the strangest and creepiest horror moments in all of #DoctorWho, mainly due to the editing.
Thank you, over-sensitive Australian censors, that we still have it to look at! 😀
The nature and origin of the weed creature is left a bit vague. Apparently it was seen by ancient sailors as a sea-monster, but usually #DoctorWho takes mythical creatures and does the whole “it was real…but aliens!” explanation. Not this time though.
Once again a companion leaves without there being much of a sense of why they’ve chosen *this* particular time and place to stay in. At least it’s not as abrupt as some though, and Victoria gets a nice farewell scene with Jamie. #DoctorWho
Silly addendum: Victoria impersonating Scaroth over a decade early: “I’m sick of being frightened by monsters, Jamie… I WILL CHANGE IT!” #DoctorWho
The Wheel In Space: funny how David Whitaker returns and we get a story in which the TARDIS fluid link runs out of mercury and there’s a food machine dispensing square pieces of flavoured food.
The Doctor falling ill and missing an episode is very Hartnell-like too! #DoctorWho
Jamie comes up with the Doctor’s ‘John Smith’ alias after seeing it on a piece of equipment. The subsequent history of #DoctorWho could have been very different if he’d seen something like ‘Tommy Hilfiger’ on a shirt, or ‘Smeg’ on a fridge…
Completely nuts how that guy sees a Cybermat roaming around and just thinks it’s some cute little ‘space bug’ he can keep in a cupboard! Like, what the hell? 🤷🏻♂️ #DoctorWho
“I’ll put you across my knee and larrup you!” says Jamie to Zoe, not long after he’s met her in The Wheel In Space. Crikey. 😳 #DoctorWho
Victoria may have been more on his wavelength, but that means Jamie’s sparky relationship with the totally contrasting Zoe is much more fun to watch. #DoctorWho
These early Cybermen have all sorts of mind-control and telepathy powers, even the ability to read images from human minds and project them onto a screen, which were all forgotten about in later years. #DoctorWho
Look he definitely says “sectional”, but yeah, I accept it’s far funnier to hear it this way. 😁 #DoctorWho
Ah, why couldn’t it have been a clip from a missing episode that the Doctor mentally projects for Zoe to watch? #DoctorWho
The Dominators: (phew, it was exhausting mentally-projecting a “repeat” of my previous comments about Evil Of The Daleks. Hope you all received them, but anyway…)
Ah, Dulkis. Having “dull” in its name makes it the most accurately named planet since Aridius in season 2. 😐 #DoctorWho
The contrast between the studio scenes, with their photo backdrops of a quarry, and the location filming of a real quarry seems particularly pronounced here. Also very obvious that Troughton wasn’t on location, but his younger skinnier body-double was. #DoctorWho
Odd that Cully’s ship is mostly seen as a model, but when it gets blown up it’s suddenly a full-size replica with a proper, to-scale, explosion. The first time I think we’ve seen anything like that. #DoctorWho
When the fiery young rebel of this planet is actually a balding middle-aged man you know things aren’t great.
Very funny though when lead Dominator Rago angrily bursts into their council chamber to take over and someone suggests “If you could make an appointment…” 😄 #DoctorWho
Rago and Toba throughout this story. #DoctorWho
The Mind Robber: one of the best Part Ones ever, even more impressive given the last-minute circumstances in which it was cobbled together. I’m glad we lost part of The Dominators for this. This is the Alice-In-Wonderland surrealism of The Celestial Toymaker, but done right. #DoctorWho
Hamish Wilson does a commendable job as temporary-Jamie, though you’d wonder why, when he’s initially just heard calling out, that the Doctor recognises the very different voice as “Jamie”. #DoctorWho
This should have been a playable game on the BBC #DoctorWho website. 😁
Although I’m not sure Frazer Hines’ face is actually in there…
I’ve always thought this looks like Graham Chapman.
Imagine him playing Jamie for an episode and a half…
Zoe’s comical judo fight with the Karkus always cracks me up.
She claims he’s from a comic strip she read in the year 2000… but in The War Games she says she was “born in the 21st century”… 🤔
Which means she must have been a very advanced baby… #DoctorWho
I love the dream-logic of Jamie and Zoe becoming fictionalised versions of themselves by being trapped in a book. There’s a definite influence of late-60s psychedelia here. #DoctorWho
“Have you heard of the adventures of Captain Jack Harkaway?”
“No, but I know someone of a similar name…”
I could have watched a whole episode of the escalating ‘Top Trumps’ battle between the Doctor and the Master (no, not that one) and various fictional characters.
I wish we’d found out more about the Land of Fiction and the entity behind it. Overdue for a TV return! #DoctorWho
The Invasion: a preview of what’s to come in the following season, with much of the action taking place in factories and offices and contemporary streets.
Plus UNIT and the Brig of course, properly promoted to Brig at last! And Benton’s quietly introduced too. #DoctorWho
You’d wonder where the villains in #DoctorWho manage to find all these henchmen who are so willing to carry guns and murder people in cold blood whenever they’re ordered. ‘Psychopaths-For-Hire’?
The Doctor’s off on one again about computers and answering machines and how terrible they are.
Get with it, Grandad!
“It’s exactly the same as your office in London!”
Okay, clever idea to make your budgetary limitations part of the plot, but perhaps it could be done a little less obviously! #DoctorWho
Unintentionally funny whenever Packer talks into his watch-communicator thingy, then puts it to his ear to hear the other person, who’s only heard as a sped-up squeaky cartoon voice. #DoctorWho
The latter half of The Invasion has some good Cybermen/UNIT action but you can feel the story’s ambitions stretching beyond its budget. More and more elements are reported as happening off-camera: “30 UNIT soldiers in a raid” or “Hundreds of Cybermen on the streets!” #DoctorWho
In hindsight it’s surprising they waited until the fifth Cybermen story before doing the “Now see them walking around YOUR world!” plot, which the Daleks and the Yeti had in their second outings. #DoctorWho
You’d think there’d be worldwide plane crashes, nuclear reactor meltdowns, etc, with the whole human race having been put to sleep for a day. #DoctorWho
Tobias Vaughn is the latest genius to think he can exploit the Cybermen for his own ends and then discard them. Let’s see how that works out fo… oh he’s dead. 🤷🏻♂️ #DoctorWho
Bit of a drab ending though, trying to wring drama out of people standing around in a room waiting, while we see stock footage of missiles being fired. And then just “oh hooray, we’ve won!” 🫤 #DoctorWho
The Krotons: Hmmm, well… yes… a less than auspicious start for Robert Holmes, eh? 😬
Season 6 has a greater variety of stories than season 5, which fell into the base-under-siege plot too many times, but the quality varies a lot more too. #DoctorWho
Do the Krotons sound more like Brummies or South Africans? I’m never quite sure which. #DoctorWho
Ah, the perennial problem with monster/robot/alien costumes - what do you do with their feet to stop the whole thing looking silly? #DoctorWho
The whole ‘Direction Point’ thing doesn’t make much sense. Can they not see? In which case, why do they look at monitor screens? They seem to be able to see anyone in their ship okay. #DoctorWho
The Seeds Of Death: it’s the Ice Warriors again. And… it’s ‘The Ice Warriors’.…again. As we get rehashed bits from the first story:
Hi-tech base, older male commander, younger female second-in-command, silly computer voice, former colleague who’s now an outsider…
This weeks future space-fashion is to wear uniforms that make everyone look like they’ve got their underpants on the outside. #DoctorWho
I never noticed before that Radnor is on first name terms with Eldred and calls him ‘Dan’… #DoctorWho
The early episodes of The Seeds Of Death place such emphasis on the idea of rocketry being *completely* obsolete that it’s a bit surprising when they later say “Oh but we use unmanned ones to send up satellites!”. Feels like a bit of a fudge/last-minute rewrite. #DoctorWho
“Look we can’t do G-force effects so you’re just going to have to pull your own faces back.” #DoctorWho
Troughton’s sideburns by the end of this story.
(Apart from in the pre-filmed bits when they mysteriously disappear 😄) #DoctorWho
I pity the poor Ice Warrior actors in their bulky costumes, since the set designer decided to include steps and ramps and narrow doorways.
There’s also that mad hall-of-mirrors Troughton runs through at one point. I guess the moonbase crew needed something for fun. #DoctorWho
The foam machine gets another outing. Not been used this much since Fury From The Deep. Lol at Wendy Padbury corpsing when Troughton falls through the door covered in the stuff. 😄 #DoctorWho
The Space Pirates: hmm, always feels like a chore to get through this one. After season 6 mostly existing, to have this final batch of missing episodes, with no proper telesnaps and poor quality audio… it’s a bit of a slog. 😬 #DoctorWho
And we’re nearly halfway through before the Doctor, Jamie & Zoe get off that bloody space station thing they’re stuck on!
Still, Frazer Hines always cites this as a favourite and recalls it being very good. Who knows? Maybe it was found we might reevaluate it. #DoctorWho
I love how the super advanced Space Corps ship uses a 1960s telly on a wooden table as a monitor screen. 😆
There’s a lot of that in space stories of this era. Just any old bits and scraps they have to hand get used as set decoration. #DoctorWho
At least Milo Clancy injects a bit of fun into proceedings. And things perk up a bit in the later episodes.
At one point the Doctor rigs up a booby-trap that electrocutes and kills a random guard. Ruthless! And to think of the crap Colin got over that acid bath… #DoctorWho
Anyway, no more missing episodes! Full glorious 625-line video from here on in. Yeah baby! 😎 #DoctorWho
The War Games: on paper this could have been a disaster. A ten-part epic, four hours long, with no popular antagonists like the Daleks or Cybermen? But it’s paced out perfectly and never feels overlong or like any episode is just filler. A fitting end for Troughton. #DoctorWho
Sydney Newman may have created #DoctorWho, but here Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke start to solidify the mythology of the show and lay the groundwork for, well, everything that comes after. For me, The War Games is the central story around which the whole history of Who pivots.
Carstairs and Lady Jennifer are good supporting characters, who have a slight Ian and Barbara vibe to them. Appropriate as we round off the 1960s. #DoctorWho
Throughout this story Jamie is wearing the black shirt he obviously nicked off Packer’s still-smouldering corpse after the events of The Invasion. What a vulture! 😆 #DoctorWho
The seething, bitchy hatred between the War Chief and Security Chief that escalates throughout The War Games is always very funny to watch. Put your handbags away, gentlemen! #DoctorWho
The first mention of the Time Lords, and in such a casual throwaway manner.
The SIDRATs are also briefly named, without ever expounding on the acronym (Space and Inter-time Directional Robot All-purpose Transporter, nerdy fact-fans!) #DoctorWho
Damien Scully@gavinwinters waste not want not, especially in times of alien invasion
Tim Richards@gavinwinters @iainjclark Great story too
Neil Corry@gavinwinters This is the best way to watch the series: take the mickey and love it even more.
@gavinwinters So amazing.
@gavinwinters If you have a base on the moon, and have conquered instantaneous transmission of matter, it would be way easier to launch satellites from there… THEY DIDNT THINK IT THROUGH! :)))))
Metebelis Two PodcastThe Brigadier and Bishop sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus comes to mind.
