Episode 81: Checkmate

Synopsis:

Vicki and Steven find a power cable snaking out of a stone sarcophagus. Bending low, they push through a set of doors and find themselves in a familiar futuristic control room. The Monk has a TARDIS!

In the corridor nearby, the Doctor has identified the Monk as a meddler in Time, and demands to know what he is up to here in 1066.

His companions find that the Monk has been looting treasures from various periods of Earth history. Vicki comes across his diary, which mentions a number of schemes he has been involved in - such as depositing money in a bank in 1968, then jumping forward 200 years to collect the interest.

They are then joined by the Doctor and the Monk, who outlines his present scheme. He plans to lure the Viking fleet into a trap - attacking it with the atomic bazooka which Steven had earlier found on the clifftop. With this invasion defeated before it has even begun there will be no need for King Harold to march north and fight his brother Tostig and his Viking allies - which weakened his army and contributed to their defeat at Hastings, when they had to rapidly march south again so soon after.

The long term plan is that Europe will be spared many future Anglo-French conflicts, the Industrial Revolution will occur sooner, and the human race should develop more rapidly. 

The Monk reveals other instances of his meddling with history, much to the Doctor's exasperation. 

His TARDIS is of a more advanced design, able to remain safely in deep space, and the Doctor deduces that he hails from around half a century after his own time.

A recovered Eldred sees Sven and Ulf in the monastery and runs off to warn Wulnoth. The Monk exits his TARDIS and runs into the two Vikings, but manages to convince them he is on their side. They capture the Doctor and his companions instead, tying them up and leaving them in the chapel.

The Monk has the Vikings help carry the ammunition for his bazooka to the clifftop, claiming they are magic charms which will help guide their fleet into harbour.

As they move through the woods, they are attacked by Wulnoth and the villagers. The Monk flees, whilst Sven and Ulf are brutally slain.

Edith finds the Doctor and his companions and unties them, before going to find her husband. The Doctor re-enters the Monk's TARDIS and begins working under the control console - attaching a length of string to one of the components. Ensuring he, Vicki and Steven are safely outside the sarcophagus, he pulls the string and out comes the component. 

He leads his companions away - leaving a note behind.

The Monk reaches the monastery and goes to the chapel where he finds the note. In it, the Doctor claims to have put a stop to his time-meddling, and says that he may one day come back and free him. The Monk is scathing that the Doctor could sabotage his more advanced ship - until he looks through the doors. The component which the Doctor removed was the one which controlled the internal dimensions. The interior is now the size of the exterior sarcophagus shell. He is stranded in 1066...

The Doctor, Vicki and Steven return to the TARDIS and embark on new adventures...

Next episode: Four Hundred Dawns

Data:

Written by: Dennis Spooner

Recorded: Friday 2nd July 1965 - Television Centre TC4

First broadcast: 5:40pm, Saturday 24th July 1965

Ratings: 8.3 million / AI 54

Designer: Barry Newbery

Director: Douglas Camfield

Critique:

This episode marked the end of The Time Meddler, and so concludes the second year of Doctor Who. Of the four regulars who stepped out onto the Planet of Giants, only the Doctor himself remained on board the TARDIS.

The Monk is seen to be the first member of the Doctor's own race he has encountered, after Susan of course. Not only does he have a time machine, but it is specifically another TARDIS - causing us to wonder about Susan's claim to have made up the name.

Wherever it is that they both come from, the Doctor left it around 50 years before the Monk did. The Monk has a Mark IV TARDIS. The Doctor's model is unspecified. The main difference appears to be that the console is on a raised dais - one so high that it makes it look difficult for the Monk, who is hardly tall, to actually reach all of the controls...

Another difference from the Doctor's TARDIS is that the Monk's floor is black rather than white.

The Monk refers to a "camouflage unit" - what will later be known as the Chameleon Circuit. In The Chase, the Doctor had suggested that the TARDIS could not suspend itself indefinitely in space (Terry Nation presuming that it must draw its oxygen from outside). The Monk claims to have "automatic drift control" that gets round this.

The Doctor is impressed by the ship, even though he tries to belittle it - claiming that it only landed within the chapel and took on an appropriate form by accident. There's clearly an element of jealousy there.

Vicki seems to think their TARDIS can be washed away by the tide, but the Doctor tells her that this can't happen, and it should not be damaged in this way. It's odd that she hasn't realised this by now.

The dialogue is a little confusing as to whether or not the Doctor and Monk know each other. The Monk obviously recognises the Doctor as a fellow time traveller as he saw and heard the arrival of the TARDIS on the beach. The Doctor knows the Monk is a time traveller from the anachronistic items in the monastery. It is only in this episode that the Doctor seems to finally identify him specifically as a time-meddler, and asks him what he is up to this time (my emphasis). The latter suggests that they have met before, but the Doctor may simply be surmising - rightly - that this isn't the first time he has interfered with history. They have this conversation before entering the Monk's ship and hearing of his various activities.

Examples of the Monk's time-meddling include the aforementioned bank deposit / compound interest scam, plus helping to build Stonehenge using anti-gravity lifts and giving Leonardo Da Vinci ideas for powered flight. Should his plan to destroy the Viking fleet succeed, he thinks that Shakespeare might be able to mount Hamlet on television, and there could be jet liners by the early 14th Century.

It will later be seen that the Doctor has met Leonardo on at least one occasion - in which he also seems to have given the polymath some ideas. Da Vinci has never featured in the series, to date, though the Doctor has been seen to just miss him in The Masque of Mandragora and City of Death. The latter story confirms that they certainly know each other by this point.

For the final time, Dennis Spooner gets to tell the audience his ideas about time travel and interacting with Earth history. As they sit trussed up in the chapel, Steven states that he knows William the Conqueror wins the Battle of Hastings as he has read about it in the history books, but Vicki points out that history for him can be rewritten, as events haven't happened yet. If the Monk succeeded, Steven's memories of what the history books say will simply change to match the new time-line. This goes against the discussion at the end of The Reign of Terror (in our last season-ending episode), when the Doctor and his companions claimed that history would simply bend and shape itself to make sure it ran as fated. In The Aztecs, however, the Doctor had argued that history could be changed, implying terrible consequences.

The Monk seems to imply that it is someone's decree -  a rule or code - which prevents history being changed ("And who says so?" he asks), rather than some immutable cosmic force.

Some of the scene where the Doctor removes the dimensional control was ad-libbed by Hartnell. Maureen O'Brien finds it hard to keep a straight face during this sequence.

Peter Purves' "Doc... tor" joke was also an ad-lib.

The Monk staring into his shrunken TARDIS was not achieved by inlay. Peter Butterworth was filmed looking through a photographic blow-up of the TARDIS set.

As this was the end of the season, Camfield recorded a special closing scene, with the over-exposed faces of the Doctor, Vicki and Steven superimposed over a starscape - much as Henric Hirsch had ended Prisoners of the Conciergerie on a similar starscape rather than cut straight to the usual fade to black / end credits.

Whilst this story appears to be complete, there is a 12 second segment missing from this final episode. This was the actual slaying of Sven and Ulf by the villagers. This had been censored by the local TV station which had bought the story, discovered when it was returned from Nigeria. The soundtrack of the scene exists, but none of the recovered versions of the episode have the footage. The cut needn't necessarily have been made in Nigeria. Episodes sold to overseas territories could be passed on to other countries after locally decided deletions were made. The receiving broadcaster would have to transmit the story as they received it.

This was Dennis Spooner's final solo contribution to Doctor Who. He left the BBC to join Terry Nation at ITC to help him with The Baron - an action-adventure serial which was produced on film and in colour and was aimed at the lucrative international market. Nation had found himself struggling with the scripting on his own, and needed help. 

Spooner would return to Doctor Who on a couple of occasions, both involving Daleks. He would partner Nation in writing episodes of The Daleks' Master Plan, and redraft much of David Whitaker's work on The Power of the Daleks, defining and refining the character of the new Doctor.

As mentioned, Checkmate brings the successful second season of Doctor Who to a close. Unlike the first, it was a season of great change - on both sides of the camera. Of all the key players who embarked on the journey in November 1963, only one - star William Hartnell - remained to carry the series into a third year.

Three of the four regular cast had now departed, the series was onto its third story editor, and - though Verity Lambert was still producer in name - John Wiles had now taken over the day-to-day running of the programme. 

Wiles had been introduced to Hartnell during one of the rehearsals, and the two had failed to hit it off. The South African was left-leaning, opposing Apartheid and supporting other issues which might have rubbed the more conservative star up the wrong way. He also came from a serious theatre background, which Hartnell was wary of. Over the next few months, a battle of wits would develop between the two men, with Tosh often having to act as peacekeeper. Hartnell would throw tantrums or feign illness in order to get his way - unaware that he really was suffering from a degenerative illness.

Before he departed, Dennis Spooner had given Wiles and Tosh a list of all the stories to date (a piece of paper which has helped give titles to some of these). This list went up to a planned single episode story - coded DC, for "Dalek Cutaway" - which would be recorded last in the second production block, and mark Lambert's final episode. One further story, which would dominate the next season, had been commissioned by her and Spooner - to be reluctantly inherited by Wiles and Tosh.

Season 3 would would see these - and even greater experimentation - plus many more changes, both on screen and behind the scenes.

If Season 2 was the year of the three story editors, Season 3 would be the year of the three producers...

Trivia:

• The ratings end the season on the up - just over half a million viewers more than the previous week. The appreciation index remains healthily above the 50 mark, up one point.
• When The Time Meddler was repeated on Friday evenings on BBC2 in 1992 (thanks to a fan who worked at the BBC) it had an average audience of around 2.6 million.
• There was a recording break just before the death of the Vikings, so that the actors could be replaced with dummies for the villagers to attack.
• On Wednesday 28th July, Doctor Who was featured yet again on Late Night Line-Up. Amongst the guests were Verity Lambert and the dour Manxman Nigel Kneale - creator of the Quatermass serials. He was not a fan. He had been approached to contribute to the series, but had declined as he thought it childish - but did not allow his own children to watch it. Over the years other script editors would approach him and he always refused their advances, stating that he did not like a series which he thought often stole his ideas.
• If his notebook is taken literally then the Monk's banking scam would mean that he collected the interest around 2168 - which just happens to be in the middle of the Dalek invasion of Earth. Question is - why would a time traveller want money? Has he done this just for the fun of it?
• It was around this point that writer Brian Hayles first approached the series with a submission. This was "Doctor Who and the Nazis". However, Spooner had decided that no recent historical period would be allowed in the series. The war was still too recent in peoples' memories, whilst other historical periods were too well known to the audience and might lead to criticisms from viewers if not accurate enough. Future script editor Robert Holmes hated historical stories as he was annoyed at school children lecturing him on any inaccuracies.
• In September 1965 the BBC began broadcasting the serial Hereward the Wake, and one newspaper critic claimed that it might be hard to take seriously after having seen the Doctor visit the Anglo-Saxon period.