What's Wrong With... The Talons of Weng-Chiang

Before we look at the story itself, we must address the issue of "yellow face" in these episodes. This has been an issue in the series before - e.g. the Hartnell historical adventures Marco Polo and The Crusade.

Actors of an ethnic minority background were employed in these stories, but only as background characters. All of the principal roles went to Caucasian actors - and the same thing happens here. The argument is always that the UK did not have enough leading actors from the minorities at the time. True, institutional racism had contributed towards them failing to break out on stage and on screen, but by 1977 this should not have been the case. We only have to look at The Mind of Evil in 1971 to see two Chinese actors in significant speaking roles, helping to carry the earlier instalments. The actor who we see in the background of the image above - Vincent Wong - could easily have portrayed Li H'sen Chang. He was a good enough actor to be given a significant role in one of the Bond movies (Die Another Day).

The other controversial issue, of course, is the representation of the Chinese people in the story. This goes back to one of the main source materials which Robert Holmes was using for inspiration - the Fu Manchu novels of Sax Rohmer. The first of these - The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu (aka The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu) - was published in 1913, and reflected attitudes of the time. Despite comprising only a couple of streets, Limehouse's 'Chinatown' district was regarded as a den of sin. The locals were employed almost exclusively in the laundry business - and the drug trade. White women ran the risk of being abducted and sold into slavery abroad. The newspapers were full of the "Yellow Peril". The Chinese were pretty much, as an entire nation, criminals who could not be trusted. Rohmer's books are full of stereotypes - including other ethnic minorities who are generally described as intrinsically monstrous.

Talons features no sympathetic member of the Chinese community - someone from within it who is opposed to the Tong.

On to the story itself.

The geography is all wrong. The River Fleet ran down through the area between the Cities of Westminster and London. Walk along Fleet Street today and you'll notice a prominent dip / rise between the Strand and St Pauls - the old course of the vanished river. The Holborn Viaduct crosses it. What is left of the river, now part of the sewer system, comes out on the Thames close to Blackfriars Bridge.

The Palace Theatre is located firmly in Limehouse, which is much too far east for the Fleet to pass underneath it.

The Doctor's mention of the Venerable Bede sounds as if he was local, whereas the Tyneside monk never left the North East of England.

It's a very big coincidence that the pathologist examining the Tong's victims just happens to be the very person whom the Tong's leader is searching for.

From what Litefoot says, the Time Cabinet has been in his London home for a long time. The fact that young women have only just started to disappear suggests that Greel has only been in the city for a short time. If the British were the main foreign presence in China at the time of Litefoot's parents' stay there, then surely Greel should have looked at searching London first. Why hunt all over Europe for it?

Couldn't Li H'sen Chang's hypnotic powers have been used to find out from palace staff exactly who the cabinet had been gifted to?

Another big coincidence is that the Peking Homunculus just happens to be taken back in time to... China. If Greel had some previous connection with that country it certainly isn't mentioned.

Mr Sin is a homicidal maniac, yet it doesn't kill Litefoot - despite two attacks on his home.

The dummy Mr Sin at the end of the final episode is particularly obvious.

The giant rat is another obvious misfire. As the producer himself noticed too late, it needed to be dirtied down, with wet, slicked back hair, instead of looking fluffy.

You can clearly see a 1976 newspaper in the laundry hamper at one point.

Greel has a giant laser weapon in his secondary base. Why? His plan is to get the Cabinet and leave immediately, so why would he plan for a battle within the confines of his base? If he was worried about Time Agents or other undesirables coming for him, wouldn't some more subtle booby-traps do the job more efficiently?

Why have as his main base a chamber right next to a stinking sewer, when he has that other place?

The theatre is one of the few buildings in London which has people moving around it for much of the day and night. Wouldn't somewhere only used for a few hours a day, or an abandoned place, have been more practicable for sneaking in and out of?

How does Chang get to the opium den so quickly, considering he's lost a lot of blood - and one of his legs?

The Time Cabinet is clearly not dimensionally transcendental - so how did Greel fit all that equipment into it? Even if he built a lot of it himself locally in China, it would still have taken a fair bit of 5000 AD equipment which could hardly have fitted into a space which had to accommodate himself and Mr Sin as well.

What's Wrong With... The Robots of Death

Well, there's the title for a start.

The story sets out to be a "whodunnit?" - a murder mystery set on a high-tech alien mining machine rather than an isolated country house - but the title gives away from the off that the robots are doing the killing.

We haven't seen a title this stupid since The Android Invasion, which totally screwed up the mystery of the opening instalment.

Proof that Hinchcliffe and Holmes sometimes got it very wrong.

Beyond the killer robots, there is a further "whodunnit?" element in identifying the crew member who is behind these killings. However, this is also spoiled as no amount of Top of the Pops video effects trickery can disguise the fact that it is Dask who we see issuing orders, and his distinctive black and white striped pantaloons also give him away, when the camera dwells on his lower portions.

Dask also seems to know a lot about robots, and tends to be rather po-faced. He might as well wear an "I control killer robots" T-shirt.

Where does the TARDIS materialise? It lands in a metal chamber which is used for collecting minerals blown into it. This appears to be a fixed structure on the surface of the planet - but it then suggested that it is actually part of the Sandminer. Yet the Sandminer is moving to catch a storm, whilst we see the view which the Doctor and Leela see and they are definitely not moving. The geography is confusing.

The robots are incredibly strong, yet the first victim manages to let out a very long scream before dying. Why does the robot not kill him instantly - which it is perfectly capable of doing - rather than risk detection by giving him time to scream? How does he manage to scream like that when he's being strangled anyway?

Poul's nervous breakdown characterises the mentality of this robot-dependent society. Everyone is convinced that robots cannot harm a human. However, when we first meet the crew, a couple of them are happily joking about a robot twisting someone's arm off. It rather undermines what the script is trying to set up - that the mere thought of this could drive people mad or cause their entire way of life to collapse.

What sort of detectives fail to carry out a rudimentary background check, to make sure that each member of the crew is who they say they are? D84 is gobsmacked to consider that their target might have swapped places with someone. They know Capel is on board, yet haven't thought about him posing as one of the crew - the most obvious way of infiltrating it.

Why does Poul scoff at the idea of someone being able to turn robots into killers - when he's been sent to this Sandminer specifically to find someone who is able to turn robots into killers?

If this society is so robot-dependent then surely Poul's robophobia  would have shown up before now? People stuck on a long-haul mining mission, trapped together for months at a time, must surely have some sort of psychological evaluation before being selected - so why did that not pick up his phobia?

How exactly does he manage to function, mentally, with a robot partner?

Whilst this may be the fault of his security service superiors, rather than the mining company, the latter must surely be held to blame for placing Zilda on the same Sandminer as Uvanov, when he was in command when her brother died. It's as if they are deliberately putting together a dysfunctional crew.

Toos claims that if SV7 has gone bad, then all of the robots will have gone the same way. But we later see that Capel has had to switch off the unaltered ones. 

One minute communicators can tell exactly where someone is (Uvanov knows that Zilda is in his quarters), but the next minute they can't - when Leela has Toos claim to be somewhere else when she's talking to SV7.

SV7 kills Capel because it can no longer recognise his voice. But we have already seen that robots can recognise people visually. And why does SV7 have to ask Toos to confirm it's her, if they recognise voices?

It's suggested that there is a corpse marker for each of the humans who are to die - but surely Capel isn't carrying one himself?

Do we have to put the Doctor's talk of Taren Capel having a robot father down to him speaking metaphorically - in that Capel had a robot father figure? It would be possible for a robot to have been his actual father - though not in any biological sense. Some sort of artificial insemination would would need to be involved, which means that at least one of his biological parents must have been party to it.

Any robot involvement in the process would have been as little more than a delivery mechanism - hardly enough for Capel to regard it as his father.

The robots are all too clearly seen to be wearing Marigold brand rubber gloves. 

The Doctor claims that it is aerodynamically impossible for the bumble bee to fly. He had said this before, in The Daemons. A generation of fans believed him, and quoted this "fact" to their school friends: the Doctor said it, so it had to be true. 

It was wrong then, and it's still wrong now.

What's Wrong With... The Face of Evil

Let's get the big question out of the way first: when exactly did the Doctor first encounter the Mordee expedition and carry out his repairs to its computer?

In his novelisation of the story, Terrance Dicks claims that this event took place whilst the Doctor was still recuperating from his last regeneration - slipping away from UNIT HQ during the events of Robot.

It can't have been whilst he was confined to the sickbay, however, as we see when the Doctor first finding the TARDIS key, and we also see when he adopts his costume. The giant sculpture of his face clearly shows that he was wearing his scarf when the Mordee descendants designed it.

It may well have been an unseen trip with Sarah, or even one post-The Deadly Assassin, when he is travelling on his own for a bit. However, the fact he has trouble recalling his last visit to this planet suggests that it cannot have been recently.

Not so much something wrong, but unanswered questions.

Who made the sculpture? The Sevateem seem scared of the area where it is located, so it won't be them. They also associate the face with the Evil One who has abducted their god, not the god itself. The Tesh are a more obvious candidate as it is the location of a gap in the energy barrier, leading to their spaceship home, and they may have seen Xoanon using the Doctor's features - but they are religious ascetics, and don't strike us as being prone to such monumental iconography. 

Presumably, then, Xoanon caused it to be made - using its mental powers to manipulate the Tesh, or the expedition members before they divided? However, when we see Xoanon's features in the inner sanctum - those of the Doctor - it isn't wearing the scarf either.

We later hear that Leela's ancestors - the expedition members - are from Earth. Who or what, then, is "Mordee"? Is this the name of the planet? We call an expedition to the South Pole a "South Pole Expedition", or an expedition to Mount Everest an "Everest Expedition" - i.e. it is named after its destination / goal. Was Mordee the planet they were heading for and, if so, was it this one or did they crash land here before they got there? Or, was Mordee the name of an Earth colony from whence they came?

On film Calib's name is pronounced differently to when he's in the studio. "Xoanon" is pronounced differently at times as well.

Leela will have seen pieces of spacesuit, as Neeva uses them in his ceremonies, yet she still thinks the Tesh in the tunnel is a person with another person inside it. She and her tribe wear clothes, so why does she not just assume this to be costume as well?

Why have the Sevateem never tried simply going around the mountain, or followed the path which must exist up to the mouth? Trial and error over generations should have told them something.

Why would psychokinetic projections of a huge face leave footprints?

The Doctor assumes that invisible creatures don't see, as they have no need for conventional sight, yet he's encountered other invisible beings (Visians, Spiridons etc.) who could see in the normal spectrum perfectly well.

Xoanon electrifies the walls of the spaceship - but doesn't do the same for the floor, which would achieve its goal of killing the Doctor and Leela. Why not do the same when the Sevateem break in?

Why does the Tesh leader only have a single guard on the whole inner sanctum level, if it's such a vital area and he knows the Doctor is heading for it?

The Doctor is supposed to be the Evil One, but after five minutes the tribe simply treat him as an unwelcome visitor. Then they're following his orders.

It's a problem in several stories - generations of belief are simply set aside just because the Doctor says so.

Why would the Test of the Horda prove him to be mortal? Wouldn't passing the Test equally prove he was the Evil One, with special evil powers?

From everything we see of Leela subsequently, why is she frightened to take the Test - to the extent that she meekly allows her dear old dad to take it in her place? She is presented after this as a fearless, highly skilled warrior. The scene is totally out of character for her.

Why does Neeva go to the bother of sending assassins after her, if everyone thinks that the Evil One's invisible creatures are sure to get her?

The molecular examination sequence is just plain annoying. How big a coincidence is it that one of them just happens to be holding a mirror when they've been rendered unconscious and strapped to a table, and that the beam should start with that particular hand?

Why does Xoanon take so long to overload the reactor? If it was serious about blowing itself and everyone else to bits then surely it could have done it quicker. If it has been bluffing in trying to destroy the Doctor and / or itself, why hasn't the Doctor deduced this - he's come across enough computers that are programmed for self-preservation?

Xoanon takes over the minds of everyone on the ship - Tesh and Sevateem alike - to stop the Doctor. Why not just concentrate its energies on him? We have already seen him overpowered by the Tesh alone, so he's not immune.

Last, but by no means least, just how did Leela manage to dematerialise the TARDIS when she's only been in there for a matter of seconds? Remember - at this stage the Doctor had stated that the controls were isomorphic, responding only to him, so that's what the audience of the time had been led to believe.

What's Wrong With... The Deadly Assassin

Two questions: Who is this Rassilon bloke, and whatever happened to Omega?

The Three Doctors had seemingly explained how the Time Lords came to have their mastery over time travel. Omega was a stellar engineer, who detonated a star. His people harnessed the resultant energy, but Omega had perished in the process - or so everyone had thought.

At no point was Omega ever said to be the leader of the Time Lords, but he was certainly a member of the High Council (as the Doctor tells him he could reclaim his seat).

The Deadly Assassin introduces us to Rassilon, who is very definitely the leader of the Time Lords in their ancient past, when they gained the power of time travel. Omega doesn't get a mention, and the Time Lord records seem to say that it was Rassilon who came up with both the idea and the execution of the event which provides them with their power.

This revolves around a Black Hole, with no mention of any star being detonated. The Three Doctors saw Omega dwelling in the alternative universe of anti-matter beyond a Black Hole. At no point is it ever said that this Black Hole had anything to do with the Time Lords' power source (until the end of the story when the Doctors make it so).

Rassilon flies into a Black Hole and captures its nucleus, which he then brings back to Gallifrey and sets it within a monolith, buried under the floor of the Panopticon - the great council chamber.

This is totally at odds with what we were told in The Three Doctors.

Omega / blown up stars is out, and Rassilon / Black Hole nucleus is in. 

The Time Lords have records of these ancient events (the Rassilon one). One is a full version, and the other is an abridged version - the one which the Doctor listens to. 

Bizarrely, no-one on Gallifrey seems to be aware of their own history. They have all these relics named after Rassilon - but don't know what any of them actually do, beyond some ceremonial value. They seem to be unaware of the Eye of Harmony - the very thing that gives them their power.

No-one seems to have wondered what that key-hole in the floor was for.

The Doctor listens to a couple of lines of the abridged record, and works everything out in a few minutes - yet the Time Lords have failed to work any of it out, despite millennia of thinking about it, or have somehow managed to forget something which is key to their existence.

The Master has deleted any mention of himself from the Time Lord files - but surely someone senior on Gallifrey would have actually remembered him. Borusa taught him, and he remembers both the Doctor and Runcible, but fails to recall that student who caused years of trouble for the Time Lords.

The Master has another ill-conceived plan. In order to gain the power of the Eye of Harmony, he has to destroy the planet - but he's standing on the planet. Won't he be killed trying to achieve his goal? He doesn't have his TARDIS sitting next to him as he uncouples the stabilisers on the Eye, ready for a swift getaway. (And if he has a TARDIS, why did he need Goth to bring him from Tersurus? And what was a high ranking Time Lord politician doing going off on his own to Tersurus in the first place?).

He also plans to destroy the Doctor's reputation by setting him up as a murderer - but there will be no-one around to think about his reputation once Gallifrey has been destroyed.

His scheme regarding the Doctor's guilt is already under way when he kills Runcible, whilst the Doctor has the alibi of standing right next to the chief of police at the time of the murder - a very stupid move on the Master's part.

Hasn't he worked out by now that the Doctor's involvement always leads to the ruination of his schemes? Here, he goes out of his way to bring the Doctor into events, when he could have just gone to Gallifrey and destroyed it behind the Doctor's back (as a future incarnation will eventually do).

Setting Goth up to be President seems to be key to his plan, as though that is the only way he could get his hands on the artefacts of Rassilon. He could have simply murdered and hypnotised his way to the same result, without getting involved in convoluted political shenanigans - as he eventually does anyway once Goth has been killed.

Some quick ones:

The Doctor fails to recognise Goth's voice when they are in the Matrix, when it is clear to us who it is.

In the big fight in the swamp, you can clearly see that it is Terry Walsh doubling for Baker, and Eddie Powell doubling for Horsfall.

Runcible suggests that there are more than three chapters of Time Lord, yet we only ever see the three - and why is the leader of the Prydonian Chapter wearing the colours of the Patrexes? Shouldn't Borusa be wearing orange colours - or scarlet if he's a Cardinal?

Hilred is pointing a gun straight at the Master, yet is still over-powered by him. Spandrell despairs of him, and you have to wonder how he ever got to be a commander.

How did the Doctor see Goth raise a small pistol during the ceremony, when he's way above and behind him (and he's wearing big robes with one of those massive collars)?

The Master stops the Matrix warning the Time Lords by intercepting the prediction of the assassination. Why did it not predict him intercepting the prediction? And if he intercepted the prediction of him intercepting the prediction, why did it not predict him intercepting the interception of the prediction...? And so on, ad infinitum.

Robert Holmes thought he knew all about the Time Lords, but one look at The Two Doctors shows that he was very much confused as to their history.

The War Games had shown the Time Lords to be an aloof, god-like race, who saw themselves as being above the concerns of minor species.

Holmes believed that the Time Lords didn't just start sending the Doctor on the odd mission after his exile. He thought that they had been sending him on missions right from the start - including the Hartnell and Troughton eras - which is why he made such a continuity mess of the Colin Baker / Patrick Troughton story.

In showing the Time Lords as, basically, a bunch of doddery old men, complaining of their aches and pains, certain sections of fandom disliked this presentation. Actually, "dislike" isn't strong enough an emotion. They positively loathed it - and the section of fandom we are talking about just happened to be the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, and in particular its president Jan Vincent-Rudzki. He took to the DWAS journal "Tardis" to express his complaints - like a maiden aunt from Tunbridge Wells who had just heard a swear word on Gardeners' Question Time writing to Radio Times. In green ink.

Not only had the previously established image of the Time Lords as omnipotent beings been ignored, but they were now seen to be politically devious, happy to rewrite the truth to make it more palatable to the public, and open to the use of torture to learn what they wanted to know. There was also mention of a group in their society who appeared to be vandals. In a nutshell, Holmes had rendered them human.

His response was that they were hypocrites (that mistake in their history mentioned above), and the fact that, if Gallifrey was so great, why had the Doctor abandoned it - and, more to the point, why had it produced so many super-villains?

What's Wrong With... The Hand of Fear

As mentioned before, we have to allow a certain amount of coincidence for the sake of drama, but it will be pointed out as something wrong when it stretches credulity too far. 

Like here...

• The Kastrians send Eldrad millions of miles into space, presumably in a direction where they know there aren't any inhabited planets, 
• then blow him up so that not a single fragment will survive,
• yet a significant chunk of him manages to end up, intact, on an inhabited world, 
• which is advanced enough to have restorative nuclear power,
• and the bit which has survived just happens to hold the ring which he needs to regenerate himself,
• and the person who finds the bit with the ring just happens to be accompanying the only person on the planet who has a space / time machine that can get him home...

Sarah's position after the explosion, safe under a huge big block, is also a bit hard to swallow.

On hearing the warning siren, Sarah fails to recognise it as an alarm - despite it sounding for a while as they stroll along. 

Why do they run in the direction they do, it they don't know what's going on? Wouldn't it have made more sense to run back to the TARDIS? We later see that the TARDIS was quite untouched by the explosion.

The hand of Eldrad which Sarah finds in the blast looks slight and feminine - despite the fact that in his natural form, when he was executed, he was a big burly male character.

How could Eldrad have programmed his ring to mentally take over people when he died 150 million years ago - when there weren't any human beings?

Eldrad has Sarah take his hand to the nuclear power station - all the way into the outer reactor chamber. It even has Dr Carter possessed so that he can protect her and ensure she fulfils her mission. But once in the chamber, Sarah just sits down and Eldrad is content to have his regenerated hand wriggle around for a bit - allowing the authorities to remove her, and take the hand away from where it wants to be. It is only later that it takes over someone else to be taken inside the reactor proper.

Why did it wait?

Since when would bombing a nuclear power station ever make things better than if it was going to go critical on its own?

The RAF missiles should have still destroyed the station's structure. There ought to be a great big hole in the roof at the very least. It appears here that Eldrad consumes the energy of an explosion which never happens in the first place.

The dome on the surface of Kastria appears to be quite unscathed despite 150 million years of blizzard passing across it. Its power planet even comes on again after all those millions of years. If they had this sort of technology, why did they meekly submit and allow themselves to die out?

Could no-one in 150 million years do anything to improve their situation?

They sent Eldrad off into space to be executed - so if they had spaceships why did they not use them to leave Kastria and set up home somewhere else?

A number of lethal traps are left - just in case Eldrad ever returned. If these things are fatal to Kastrians, why go to all the trouble of sending him millions of miles into space, with all its attendant risks of failure to obliterate properly, when they could have just executed him on site?

Why do they do so many things which anticipate Eldrad's return, when the whole point of their execution method is that he should never be in any position to do so?

It's as if they knew they were doomed to fail, which makes their failure to abandon the planet, or use a more certain means of execution, all the more odd.

Eldrad seems to think his homeworld will be just like it was yesterday, even still under King Rokon's rule, despite 150 million years having elapsed. He's angry to learn everyone is dead. But he sabotaged the planet's protective barriers. What did he think would happen?

You name it - Eldrad invented it. On Kastria he claims he was responsible for everything. Why did the Kastrians turn against him, after he had given them so much - even their physical forms? For once, he's a super-villain who might well be justified in his actions.

The very worst thing about The Hand of Fear - Lis Sladen leaves the show as a regular. Doesn't come much worse than that.

What's Wrong With... The Masque of Mandragora

From the earliest days, people have asked why it is that everyone in the universe speaks English. From a production point of view, it's simply a dramatic convention, which means the writer doesn't have to include people asking why everyone in the universe speaks English. It's something that is just glossed over so we can get on with the drama.

In this story, however, Sarah actually asks the question about understanding a foreign language. It's not a throwaway line but a plot point - signalling to the Doctor that Sarah's mind has been tampered with.

Question is: why hasn't she, or someone else, asked about this before? 

Why does the Doctor see threat in someone asking a perfectly valid question?

It's one of those things that they should either have explained from the start, or simply left alone.

Nowadays the Doctor has to go through it all with every new companion. 

The opening episode introduces us to a new TARDIS console room. Except we're told that it's an old TARDIS console room. The suggestion is that it is the very first console room, used by the Doctor before we met him. However, the presence of a recorder and a frilly shirt suggest that the Second and Third Doctors have, at some unseen moments, quit the usual console room and gone back to the wooden one, only to quickly revert back to the regular futuristic one. We know that futuristic is the default, so just when did the earlier Doctor(s) use this console room?

Hieronymous claims that he was told that someone from the stars would be coming, but says it as if this will be an ally rather than a foe. Why then does he seek to destroy the Doctor from the off? And why, when the Brotherhood have the Doctor at their mercy, does the Helix choose that moment to descend on the temple and deflect the attentions of the brothers away from him and allow him to escape?

The brothers are twirling around the altar in a dance, quite close together, and Hieronymous and his high priest are overseeing the ceremony, yet no-one notices when the Doctor gets right up to the stone and pulls Sarah clear until he's almost out the door.

The authorities have never been able to stamp out the Brotherhood despite them surviving since Roman times - so around 1000 years - yet the Doctor just stumbles onto their temple looking for Sarah after 5 minutes.

Count Federico has been going to great lengths to keep his plans to usurp the dukedom secret - yet yells out "Death to Giuliano!" at the top of his voice in front of his men, and when any passer-by might hear.

Later, his lieutenant Rossini claims that the brothers are emerging from every street in the town, yet we never see more than about 10 of them at any time.

Quite a few of the guests are killed at the Masque before the Doctor stops them. Were none of these significant figures of the Renaissance? How did the brothers manage to miss all the really important ones like Dukes, Doges and Leonardo Da Vinci?

The Doctor claims that had they been 50 years later they could have used Galileo's telescope. He was only born 60 years after the events depicted here (in 1564) - so a century would be nearer the mark.

Marco scoffs at the very idea of the telescope - yet Giuliano has one sitting in his study.

Hieronymous, with added Mandragora intelligence, fails to twig that the Doctor is wearing a metal breastplate until he's almost drained his energy. Why not notice sooner, and shoot him in the head instead?

Russell T Davies did admit that the Ancient Lights in the SJA story Secrets of the Stars was going to be the Mandragora Helix, but chickened out at the last minute. If they weren't Mandragora, why didn't the Helix try again in the late 20th Century?

K.O. Round 1.13

 

This is the final knock-out competition of Round One - Season 2 versus Season 14. Both see the departures of hugely popular companions.

Season 2 has Verity Lambert as Producer throughout, but we have three different Story Editors over the course of its run. David Whitaker hands over to Dennis Spooner for most of the season, but he is replaced by Donald Tosh for the final story.

On screen, there were also big changes this year. Only one of the four regulars who started the season made it to the end - William Hartnell's Doctor.

The first two stories were actually recorded as part of the first season, then held over to launch the new. Planet of Giants makes for a low key beginning. The BBC weren't too keen on it - preferring the following The Dalek Invasion of Earth as a season premiere - but issues with Susan's departure and replacement precluded this. As it was Planet of Giants ended up having two episodes edited into one to to try and make it more exciting.

The new companion, Vicki, made her debut in The Rescue. This and the following historical story The Romans were made a one 6 episode block. The Romans is notable for its comedy elements, especially the farcical third instalment.

The Web Planet was a brave experiment in trying to give us a planet devoid of any human beings. There are four different alien species on screen, all based on insect life. It wasn't an unqualified success, but you have to admire the effort. The Crusade is David Whitaker's second contribution to the season (the first being Vicki's two-part introduction). It is regarded as one of the greatest of this genre, the language almost Shakespearean. From the sublime to the ridiculous... The Space Museum is this season's attempt at a "sideways" story. An excellent first episode gives way to a standard runaround, with fairly bland protagonists. 

The Chase is the second Dalek story of the season. Weaker than its predecessors, it has some feeble attempts at humour, such as a stupid Dalek. It does come good at the end with the battle between Daleks and Mechonoids, plus the departure of Ian and Barbara. Peter Purves plays two different roles, being invited back to play new companion Steven.

Steven was apparently left behind on Mechanus, but he turns up in the TARDIS at the beginning of The Time Meddler. This story introduces the Monk, played by Peter Butterworth, who is another member of the Doctor's own race and has a TARDIS of his own. It's the first of the pseudo-historical stories, in which alien intervention occurs against the backdrop of a period of Earth's history - in this case the events of 1066.

This is the final year for the Hinchcliffe-Holmes partnership, which had been running for the last two years. These had been characterised by an emphasis on horror and the Gothic.

Hinchcliffe would be forced to move on at the end of this season, though Holmes would agree to stay on for a few months and help the next Producer settle in.

There would also be a change in front of the camera, as Lis Sladen would bow out and Louise Jameson would be introduced as the latest companion.

Sladen had intended to leave the series in Season 13, but stayed on as it was hoped that the movie planned by Tom Baker and Ian Marter might finally get off the ground. When it looked unlikely to happen, she agreed to depart midway into this season. She is there in The Masque of Mandragora, which introduces a new wood-panelled TARDIS console room. The setting is an Italian Dukedom in the Renaissance period, and the location filming took place in Portmeirion (famous as the locale for The Prisoner's Village). Sarah spends most of first half of The Hand of Fear possessed by the silicon-based alien Eldrad. At the story's conclusion, the Doctor receives a summons to return home to Gallifrey, and she cannot go with him. It's a terribly sad departure, made more bearable in hindsight as we will get to see her again.

The Deadly Assassin was a controversial story at the time. The Doctor has no new companion - something allowed by Hinchcliffe to try and convince Baker that he needed one. We get our first visit to Gallifrey for many years, but the once god-like Time Lords are now seen to be corrupt politicians, or doddery old men. The Master is brought back in a cadaverous state - so that a future production team could cast their own new incarnation.

Leela is introduced in The Face of Evil, a story which looks at the consequences of a previous visit from the Doctor. Tom Baker didn't like the character of Leela, but was lead to believe that she would only be featuring in three stories.

The Robots of Death is a murder mystery set in a high tech environment instead of a country house. A huge pity that the title gives the game away.

Hinchcliffe's final story is The Talons of Weng-Chiang. It is written by Robert Holmes, and he crams it full of many of his literary and cinema favourites. The Victorian setting provides a backdrop to a story influenced by The Phantom of the Opera, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, Fu Manchu, and Jack the Ripper. The one weak element is a giant rat (inspired by Sherlock Holmes' mention of the giant rat of Sumatra), but at least it isn't on screen too much.

Whilst Season 14 has some highly regarded stories, which usually feature in the upper reaches of every fan poll, my own personal favourite between these two has to be Season 2. When you consider the facilities which they had to contend with, it's amazing what they managed to achieve. I love the variety of the stories and the imagination on show.

Round 2 will feature the following winning seasons - 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 22 and 25. As this is an odd number, I'll permit a close second season to be added back in. This will be Season 21, meaning all the Doctors will be represented. The first contest will be between Seasons 10 and 13.