DWM 60th Anniversary Poll (5)

The latest poll results cover the tenures of the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors. For Matt Smith stories, we only have the 2014 poll to compare with, whilst the majority of the David Tennant ones are covered by the 2009 poll as well (only his last two stories missed the cut-off for this).

Unlike the last few polls, which showed a great deal of consistency in voting over the years (mainly due to there being so few stories per Doctor), we have 36 and 39 stories respectively for Ten and Eleven. There is a lot more movement, up and down the poll.

Of the David Tennant era, only 4 of the 36 have retained their last poll position - but this includes the first, second and last placed stories.

The top rated Tennant is Blink. It has held this position in every poll. Of the top three for both these Doctors, Steven Moffat wrote the first and third placed story for each.

In second place, where it has always been, is Paul Cornell's adaptation of his Virgin novel Human Nature (Human Nature / Family of Blood). Only his second story for the TV series - and he's never written for it again since.

In third place we have another two-parter - Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead. It has moved slowly up from 7th to 3rd.

Propping up the bottom, as it always has done, is Fear Her, in 36th position. Just above is The Lazarus Experiment, and the marmite Love & Monsters is in 34th place.

Some items of interest - all of the Christmas Specials lie in the bottom half of the poll, as do all but one of the series openers. All of the series finales, on the other hand, sit in the upper half.

When it comes to movement over time, Partners in Crime is the biggest winner, having risen from 22nd in 2009 to 14th this time out.

Biggest losers are the celebrity historicals Tooth and Claw and The Shakespeare Code, which both drop 11 places (13th to 24th and 15th to 26th respectively).

Only three of the Matt Smith stories maintain their poll position, though we now only have the 2014 poll to compare results with. One of these is the top scorer - The Day of the Doctor.

In second place we have Richard Curtis' Vincent and the Doctor, and in third is Smith's debut The Eleventh Hour. These two stories have basically swapped places since 2014. 

Just outside the top three are The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang and The Doctor's Wife.

Neil Gaiman's other story - Nightmare in Silver - sits squarely in the bottom three.

It is second from bottom. Beneath it lies The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe, and just above it is The Curse of the Black Spot.

Despite getting the bottom spot with his 2011 Christmas Special, Moffat can console himself by having the majority of his self-penned stories in the top half of the poll. Let's Kill Hitler is his next worst, in 29th place.

The previous lowest ranked Smith story was The Rings of Akhaten, but it has been re-evaluated upwards by a good 5 places, to 34th.

Other lower ranked stories include Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS, Closing Time and a couple of Mark Gatiss scripts - Night Terrors and Victory of the Daleks. Gatiss' The Idiot's Lantern was fourth from bottom in the Tenth poll, so between them these represent a poor opinion of him as a writer. Even the one he guested in as an actor (Lazarus) is poorly regarded.

Perhaps it's a reaction to what he did with the series when he got hold of it, but Chris Chibnall stories languish in the lower quarter of both polls.

Movement over time isn't as pronounced as with the Tennant poll. Stories have mostly moved up or down by only four or five places. Biggest winner is A Christmas Carol, which rises from 17th to 8th place. Biggest loser is Asylum of the Daleks which drops ten places to 17th place.

The final pair of poll results come next month. Unfortunately, they won't have any previous poll to compare them with, so it will simply be a case of which Capaldi / Whittaker stories were liked, and which weren't. The next stage of the process is then to have the top three for each Doctor voted on again, to determine overall winners.

Apparently they aren't going to produce an integrated list of all the polls combined. Scared to annoy Colin Baker again - or is it fear of showing the Chibnall era to be more unpopular than DWM (famous for reviews devoid of criticism) has ever cared to admit?

Inspirations: The Stolen Earth / Journey's End

This story doesn't just bring Series 4 to a conclusion, it draws a line under much of the Russell T Davies era. It also acts as a sequel of sorts to much older stories...

As far as the current season goes, we have explanations for the bees going missing, and for the lost planets. The bees are actually alien in nature and have abandoned the Earth in advance of it being removed from its orbit. Earth has joined the other missing worlds in the Medusa Cascade - brought here by the Daleks.

The Daleks had previously plotted to move the Earth in The Dalek Invasion of Earth. The Doctor mentions having experience of moving planets, and may be referring to this story - but he might also be recalling the roving Mondas (The Tenth Planet).

The Medusa Cascade had previously been mentioned by the Master in Last of the Time Lords. The Doctor had sealed a rift there.

Rose was seen to have returned from "Pete's World", where she had been trapped since the events of Doomsday, in Partners in Crime, and had been glimpsed on TV screens in The Poison Sky and Midnight, before revealing her work with Torchwood to cross the void in Turn Left.

Pompeiian Petrus Dextrus had foreseen her return in The Fires of Pompeii.

Jackie Tyler and Mickey Smith follow Rose to our Earth. They had also been trapped on "Pete's World" at the conclusion of Doomsday. Mickey's grandmother - seen in Rise of the Cybermen - has now passed away. Apparently this was to allow the character to appear in a third series of Torchwood, had it followed a conventional episodic pattern.

The Doctor traced the Earth after a visit to the Shadow Proclamation - an organisation first mentioned in Rose, but referred to in several later stories as some sort of galactic lawmaker.

Working there, as law enforcers, are Judoon, who were introduced in Smith and Jones.

That was Martha Jones' first appearance. She was seen to have joined UNIT in a trio of Torchwood episodes (Reset, Dead Man Walking and A Day in the Death) and in The Sontaran Stratagem / The Poison Sky. 

UNIT still employ the aerial aircraft carrier Valiant, but it is attacked and apparently destroyed by the Daleks here. It first appeared in The Sound of Drums, and was last seen in the Sontaran two-parter.

Dalek Caan is present on the Crucible. It is the last surviving member of the Cult of Skaro - introduced in Army of Ghosts / Doomsday, and last seen in The Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks. It had fled New York via an emergency temporal shift, and we learn that it ended up back in the Time War.

It is locked in a vault with Davros. Sarah Jane Smith recognises his voice before she even sees him, having encountered him on Skaro in Genesis of the Daleks. She had previously met the Daleks on the planet Exxilon in Death to the Daleks.

The Doctor had come back into Sarah's life after the events seen in School Reunion, and the character now had her own spin-off series (The Sarah Jane Adventures). This introduced her adopted son Luke. Mention is made of Clyde and Maria. The latter was to leave the series at the beginning of SJA series 2, whilst Clyde Langer was a regular companion to Luke and Sarah throughout all five series.

K-9 is also seen in Sarah's attic base. She had acquired K-9 Mark III in the spin-off K-9 & Company: A Girl's Best Friend - an event confirmed by its appearance at her home in The Five Doctors.

Davros had survived extermination by his own creations and had been resurrected in Destiny of the Daleks. Imprisoned on Skaro and taken to Earth to stand trial, he had later been freed by the Daleks in Resurrection of the Daleks, but had then been captured and taken back to Skaro for trial in Revelation of the Daleks. On that occasion, he had lost his remaining hand - but in The Stolen Earth we see that he has an artificial one. Davros had later managed to stage a coup on Skaro and become Emperor (Remembrance of the Daleks). He appeared to have sacrificed the remainder of his old body to become the Emperor. It may be that the Daleks brought him back in the form which had successfully beaten their Supreme in order to help them in the Time War, in the same way that the Time Lords had brought Rassilon back in his younger, warrior incarnation.

In this story, the Daleks are once again ruled by a Supreme. This rank of Dalek was first seen in The Dalek Invasion of Earth when it was simply known as the "Black Dalek". The Dalek Supreme is the first red Dalek we have seen outside of the Peter Cushing Aaru movies - despite The Dalek Book claiming that Daleks could not see the colour red.

Like Sarah, Captain Jack Harkness recognises the voice of the Daleks when they intercept their radio messages. He had encountered them in Parting of the Ways when they had exterminated him. Rose, in 'Bad Wolf' form, brought him back to life - inadvertently making him immortal.

Jack is seen with Gwen Cooper and Ianto Jones at the Torchwood Hub in Cardiff. Mention is made to them only recently having lost colleagues Tosh and Owen (killed in the Torchwood Series 2 finale Exit Wounds). 

Torchwood was the first of the new Doctor Who spin-off series, its location in Cardiff deriving from The Unquiet Dead, which had established that a space / time rift ran through the city. Rose recognises Gwen as looking identical to servant girl Gwyneth who she had met in Victorian Cardiff, and the Doctor explains the similarity as a side effect of the rift.

Martha already knows Jack from her Torchwood episodes, as well as from Utopia and The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords.

Then, the Master had obtained from Jack the Doctor's severed hand - which he lost fighting the Sycorax leader in The Christmas Invasion. The Doctor retrieved it after the Master's apparent demise, which is how it came to be back in the TARDIS to become part of the Metacrisis Doctor.

The Metacrisis explains the Ood reference to the Doctor-Donna (Planet of the Ood).

The Doctor and his old companions are brought together on-line by Harriet Jones. You know who she is. First seen as a lowly backbencher in Aliens of London / World War Three, the Doctor knew that she would one day become Prime Minister. He did not realise that he would bring her down, causing her to be forced out of office after she destroyed the retreating Sycorax spaceship (The Christmas Invasion). (By forcing her out, the Doctor inadvertently opened the door for Harold Saxon - the Master - to become the new PM in The Sound of Drums).

She has employed the Subwave Network to contact everyone - technology funded by the Copper Foundation. This was established by Mr Copper - an inhabitant of the planet Sto who had been one of the few survivors from the spaceship Titanic, which almost crashed onto London (Voyage of the Damned). The Doctor had helped him set up home on Earth, with a fortune in local currency.

Finally, Davros taunts the Doctor with reference to all the people who have died trying to help him - allowing for a set of clips from stories covering all four of the RTD series.

Donna's fate - to forget everything which she had learned through contact with the Doctor, so a death of her new personality rather than a physical one - was hinted at by River Song in Silence in the Library, and Dalek Caan, amongst others. She reverts back to the person we first met in The Runaway Bride.

The TARDIS has always had a six-sided control console, and here we see it being operated by half a dozen people. It travels smoothly - as though this is the only way it can work properly. Since 2005, the TARDIS has been seen to travel erratically, throwing its passengers around - despite the fact that it has always had a hexagonal control console, and travelled perfectly smoothly from 1963 - 1989 with just the Doctor at the controls.

Next time, Cyber-steampunk...

M is for... Master (7) - Missy

The Doctor's next encounter with the Master, after he had thwarted Rassilon's attempt to draw Gallifrey out of the Time War, came in his Twelfth incarnation when he was accompanied by Clara Oswald. She had been in a female form since his Eleventh incarnation at least - as it had been as a woman that she had brought the two together. Calling herself "Master" was no longer appropriate to her new gender, so she retitled herself Missy - for Mistress.

Clara had rung an IT helpline, and Missy had given her the number for the TARDIS phone.

Still in male form - his "Harold Saxon" incarnation - the Master had been forced to leave Gallifrey. He took a piece of Time Lord technology with him - a Matrix Data Slice. This created and maintained an artificial environment within itself. After becoming stranded on a colony spaceship from the planet Mondas, the Master had encountered Missy - the future version of himself - and the two had attacked each other. Dying, he made it back to his TARDIS but regenerated into the very incarnation who had just "killed" him.

The trauma of this event somehow caused her to forget the circumstances of her regeneration.

Having been shunned by the Time Lords, Missy sought to forge a new relationship with the Doctor. 

Her plan involved monitoring the Doctor's activities for some time, whilst uploading the minds of those who died as a result of his adventures into the Matrix environment, which she named the Nethersphere. She and an AI called Seb welcomed them to what they claimed was the afterlife.

When Clara's boyfriend Danny Pink was killed in a road traffic accident, she attempted to force the Doctor to change history and bring him back. He refused, but decided to see if the TARDIS could locate where he had gone. Clara would link with the ship's telepathic circuits to take them to him.

They arrived not in "heaven" but in the 3W Institute - a huge funerary complex. Missy appeared, pretending to be an AI interface. Like the Doctor she had a Scottish accent. The Doctor recognised the Time Lord technology, however.

The 3W Institute proved to be full of Cybermen. Missy was downloading the minds of the recently deceased from the Nethersphere into their bodies, creating a new army of Cybermen loyal only to her.

She revealed her true identity to him, but was then captured by Kate Stewart and Osgood of UNIT.

Whilst being transported on UNIT's command aircraft, Missy escaped and murdered Osgood before having the 'plane attacked and destroyed by Cybermen.

When the Doctor confronted her in a graveyard in England, Missy unveiled her scheme. She had created the Cyber-army as a present for him - so that he could use it to help him fight injustice throughout the universe. He would no longer have to struggle alone.

The Doctor rejected the gift, and an unconverted Danny took charge of the Cyberman army, ordering it to destroy itself. The Doctor stopped Clara from killing Missy, but she was apparently destroyed by a surviving Cyberman - one which contained the mind of Kate's father. Just before this, as a means to save herself, Missy had claimed to know the location of Gallifrey - but when the Doctor went there he found that she had lied.

Missy had not been killed, however, having managed to teleport herself away at the last moment. She reappeared some months later, when she used a stasis device to suspend time for every aircraft in the skies above the planet. This was simply her way of attracting the attention of Clara, who had gone to UNIT when the event took place. The Doctor had recently disappeared. He had left his Confession Dial with Missy, and she wanted Clara's help in tracking him down. This Dial contained a Time Lord's final thoughts, and was operated only when its owner expected to die. Also seeking the Doctor at this time was Davros, who had sent his security chief, the serpentine Colony Sarff, to seek him out.

Missy had been traced to a Mediterranean island, and UNIT transported Clara there. UNIT were able to trace the Doctor to medieval England, and Missy took Clara there using a Vortex Manipulator.

The Doctor has been hiding here, delaying his inevitable confrontation with the creator of the Daleks.

Colony Sarff traces them due to a Dalek agent at the castle where the Doctor has been staying. 

All three were captured and transported to Skaro. Missy was, once again, apparently destroyed by the Daleks - but she had simply transported herself out of the Dalek city with Clara at the last minute. Missy was using Clara as a means to protect herself from traps - pushing her into danger before herself. They decided to break back into the city via its sewer system. Daleks flushed the dying members of their race down here. Missy arranged for a Dalek guard to be overpowered by the still living remains, and had Clara hide inside the empty shell to gain access to the city.

The Doctor managed to defeat Davros' scheme to steal his regeneration energy. Missy tried to get him to destroy the Dalek containing Clara - claiming it had killed his companion - but he was able to spot the ruse and free her. As the city was destroyed, Missy attempted to ally herself with the surviving Daleks. The Doctor and Clara fled the planet, leaving her behind.

Some time later, when the Doctor was now travelling with a young woman named Bill Potts, he was summoned to an obscure alien planet to witness the execution of Missy. As the only other living Time Lord in the universe (Gallifrey being stranded in a pocket of time at the end of the universe), the Doctor found that he had to act as her executioner. He agreed to stand guard over her tomb for a period of one thousand years. However, he sabotaged the execution so that she was merely rendered temporarily comatose. The Doctor would still honour his promise, but would now be guarding her prison rather than her tomb for a millennium. He had the vault installed in the basement of St Luke's University in Bristol, where he based himself as a lecturer, with Nardole as his servant. He was an ex-husband of River Song, and the Doctor had provided him with a new body after he had lost his head to a giant robot.

Earth was invaded by a race of mysterious Monks who altered people's memory of history to make themselves a constant part of it - benevolent helpers of the human race over the millennia. Bill had allowed them to take over, in exchange for them restoring the Doctor's sight. Seeking a way to overthrow them, the Doctor, Nardole and Bill entered the vault to consult with Missy. She revealed that she had encountered them before, and the only way to break their mental hold was to kill the person who had given them permission to invade. This is what she had done - pushing a child into a volcano.

Bill used powerful memories of her dead mother to overpower the Monks' control instead, and they were forced to flee the Earth.

The Doctor and Bill were later stranded on Mars in Victorian times, and Nardole took the decision to free Missy so that she could pilot the TARDIS to come and rescue them.

The Doctor then decided to try to rehabilitate Missy whilst she remained his captive. This involved her confronting the actions and behaviours of the humans whom she had frequently sought to destroy or conquer, so that she might better understand them - and why the Doctor loved them so much.

The Doctor's programme saw him allowing Missy to take charge of the TARDIS and go exploring, with Bill and Nardole as her companions. He would accompany them, but remain on the ship and observe only. However, after landing on a massive colony ship beached on the edge of a Black Hole, Bill was mortally wounded. The Doctor had to intervene. Missy identified that the ship had originated on the planet Mondas, home of the Cybermen. Bill had been cared for by a man named Razor, in a section of the ship which was moving at a much faster timeframe than the control room where the TARDIS had materialised. Razor travelled up to this level and met with Missy - revealing himself to be her previous incarnation in disguise.

United with her former self, he quickly began to undermine all the work which the Doctor had done to rehabilitate Missy - reminding her of her true nature.

She quickly reverted to her old ways, helping the Master attempt to kill the Doctor. When he sought their help in defending a community of humans from attack by Cybermen, both rejected him. Missy gave the Master a spare dematerialisation circuit to replace his damaged one - the result of a memory of her having advised him to carry one. This would allow him to repair his TARDIS so that they could both escape the colony ship together. However, neither trusted the other. Missy had taken on board some of what the Doctor had taught her, and was wavering in her decision to run away. She had also come to hate her former self. He, in turn, hated what the Doctor had done to his future incarnation, and determined that it should never happen. Their distrust of each other resulted in them attacking and mortally wounding each other. The Master had attacked Missy in such a way that she would be unable to regenerate this time...

Played by: Michelle Gomez. Appearances: Deep Breath, Into The Dalek, The Caretaker, Flatline, In The Forest of the Night, Dark Water / Death in Heaven (2014), The Magician's Apprentice / The Witch's Familiar (2015), Extremis, The Lie of the Land, Empress of Mars, Eaters of Light, World Enough And Time / The Doctor Falls (2017).

• Michelle Gomez was an old friend of Peter Capaldi, having grown up in Glasgow as he had.
• Her surname comes from her Portuguese father. He was born on Montserrat.
• Her earliest TV roles, which brought her to the public's attention, were comedic (such as the hospital-set Green Wing).
• She is married to actor Jack Davenport (of The Pirates of the Caribbean fame).
• Steven Moffat decided to sow Missy's presence throughout the whole of Series 8, with a few short coda scenes where she would encounter someone who had been killed in the preceding adventure. In The Caretaker, she simply passes through a scene involving Seb and a dead policeman, and in In the Forest of the Night, she is observing what the Doctor and Clara are up to.
• When we learn of her real plan, we have to wonder how the robot Knights and the Half-Face Man fit, if they have no human minds to upload to the Nethersphere.
• When she first meets the Doctor, pretending to be a hologram, Moffat teases the viewers by having her call herself a Random Access Neural Integrator - R.A.N.I.
• Clara mentions a woman on an IT helpline, who gives her the Doctor's phone number, back in The Bells of St. John. Fans at the time assumed this to refer to River Song.
• It transpires that it was Missy who also put the adverts in the newspaper which brought the newly regenerated Doctor and Clara back together in Victorian London in Deep Breath.
• Missy mentions a few events to Clara relating to her past and that of the Doctor, but it is difficult to know which, if any are true. It isn't clear either which incarnation she is talking about - such as claiming to have a daughter.

Next DWM

DWM have stopped previewing the next month's issue on their inside back page, and apparently Panini don't even get the opportunity to release their own magazine's covers anymore, so we have to wait for official BBC channels to let us know what's coming. Presumably, as the anniversary approaches, Bad Wolf want tighter control over the release of information. 

The cover release today coincides with some new promotional images of Tennant and Tate, with a pinkish blue starfield backdrop. The magazine cover promises a feature on the Season 20 Collection trailer, but not the set's preview. Two online retailers, one in the UK and one in Germany, are quoting 18th September as the release date, so a preview may come next again issue.

Presumably The Girl Who Waited feature is this month's Fact of Fiction. Jane Asher played Susan Foreman on radio, as well as appearing in the first series of The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Countdown to 60: "Feels different this time..."

What is it about The Caves of Androzani that fans love so much? How could the series possibly have gone straight from this story into The Twin Dilemma?

The success of Caves is all the more remarkable when you consider that it is basically a rewrite of a story which was far from successful - The Power of Kroll. Indeed, that was one of Robert Holmes' least favourite stories.

Clearly Holmes could see some merit in the basic storyline for Kroll, and no doubt felt that it suffered in execution. He had been told to include the biggest monster ever seen in the series - and he always hated it when he was given any sort of "shopping list". The "Swampies" were pretty generic stereotyped natives, and some of the inspirations were a little too obvious - the parallels with native Americans being pushed onto Reservations by colonists (and pushed off again when that land proved to be more valuable than previously thought), and the 1933 movie King Kong.

Given the chance to rewrite it, Holmes jettisoned the natives and the Kong references, and concentrated on the villain and his motivation:

• In Kroll, someone (Thawn) is paying a gun-runner (Rhom-Dutt) to supply weapons to the person who everyone thinks is his enemy (Ranquin) on a satellite, and he's doing it as it provides him with an excuse to fight and destroy that enemy. The villain comes from the prime planet of a system (Androzani Major), but the action is taking place on its satellite (Androzani Minor), where his enemy is based.
• In Caves, someone (Morgus) is paying a gun-runner (Stotz) to supply weapons to the person who everyone thinks is his enemy (Sharaz Jek), and he's doing it as it provides an excuse to fight and destroy that enemy. The villain comes from the prime planet of a system (Delta Magna), but the action is taking place on its satellite (Third Moon), where his enemy is based.

Just in case you hadn't noticed the similarities before. There are others - chiefly the fact that both stories have monsters which aren't very well realised - Kroll itself and the Magma Beast. The monsters come across as an afterthought - insisted upon by the producer - and Holmes is more interested in the core plot of the conflict between the main characters. Both stories are the penultimate ones of their respective seasons - stories which traditionally get little attention, or share of the budget. In both stories, the Doctor and companion arrive on the satellite, and he is mistaken for a gun-runner.

Why the big difference between two stories which bear such close similarities? Director, (re)writing, music, casting, and performances - and the significance of Caves being a Doctor's swansong.

The director of The Power of Kroll was Norman Stewart. He had been a production assistant since the Hartnell era, but had only directed one previous Doctor Who - and that was Underworld. That story has usually sat in the bottom two or three of the Tom Baker era, and bottom ten overall.

The director of The Caves of Androzani was Graeme Harper. He had also been a production assistant for a number of years, and had never directed a Doctor Who - but he had one huge advantage over Stewart. That was Douglas Camfield. Arguably the greatest director in the history of the series, in any era, he acted as mentor to Harper and the student learned much from the master.

As mentioned, Holmes rewrote his Season 16 story, jettisoning a lot of the surface, keeping the core, and adding some new political elements. John Normington's Morgus is Ian Richardson's Francis Urquhart a decade early - though I couldn't possibly comment...

Kroll suffers from its placing as fifth story in Season 16 - the Key to Time season. It stars Tom Baker, at a time when his popularity was beginning to wane. He was difficult to work with, failing to take the role seriously, and this was coming across on screen. Holmes had only written the story late in the day after another script fell through, and there were problems with the casting, due to actors pulling out at the last minute. Philip Madoc is wasted in the part of Fenner, when he clearly should have been given the part of Thawn. The usually reliable John Abineri seems to be a little embarrassed here. Despite extensive location filming in an interesting terrain, the story looks cheap.

The overall tone is "business as usual" for the Baker / Williams era. Dudley Simpson gives us a very generic score.

Caves, on the other hand, has a funereal feel throughout: it definitely benefits from being a regeneration story. It's physically darker, as well as in mood, thanks to much of it being set in dimly lit caverns.

Peter Davison realises that he has a fantastic script to end with, and is determined to make something special of it. He has always tended to take the part seriously anyway, and has been happy with his final season (even stating later that had he known it was going to be far better than Season 20 then he might have done another year). 

Harper selects Roger Limb for the music, and he provides a creepy "rattlesnake" motif - and plenty of quiet moments. £ for £, Caves is probably as cheap as Kroll - but it simply doesn't look that way. Even the blatantly unrealistic backdrop to Morgus' office seems acceptable, because of the performances which are going on within it. As the old saying goes - if you're looking at the set then there's something wrong with the performances going on in front of it. Harper casts well. Compare Morgus to Thawn, Stotz to Rhom-Dutt, or - especially - Sharaz Jek to Ranquin.

There is definitely no sense of "business as usual" with Caves. It's unique within its season, within the Davison era, and within the overall classic era.

Regarding that other question - of how this could possibly have been followed by a mess like The Twin Dilemma - there's more to it than simply reversing the answers as to why Caves is so good.

Colin Baker's debut does suffer from perfunctory direction, and poor writing, design, casting and performances, but there's more to it than that. Its placing as the final story of a season is one of its special problems. To sign off for nine months on such a weak story leaves the viewer with a negative view of the series overall. Had Baker offered us a more popular version of the character, it would have helped - someone we liked and wanted to see more of. The decision to have him a less likeable Doctor wasn't, in and of itself, a bad one. Just compare with the Capaldi Doctor in his first year. The problem was that this was the set up we were presented with just before that long break. An unpleasant character who dressed like a clown. His final "whether you like it, or not..." comes across as a threat to the viewers. 

A lot of us opted for the "not"...

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?

Episode 76: The Death of Doctor Who

Synopsis:

Vicki, trapped on the Dalek time machine, is horrified to see their android copy of the Doctor explain that it is to infiltrate and kill the TARDIS crew...

The Doctor completes the device he plans to use against the Daleks as the TARDIS materialises at its next destination. Emerging, he and his companions discover that it is a swampy, densely-jungled world - ideally suited for fighting Daleks.

They are attacked by giant mushroom-like plant creatures - carnivorous Fungoids. It is night-time, but they are surprised to see huge floodlights illuminate the area. They form a sort of corridor through the  trees, and the Fungoids seem to shrink from the light. At one end of the corridor of lights they discover a cave, and decide to rest there.

The Dalek time machine arrives in the jungle. Once they have exited their ship, Vicki sneaks out after them. The killer robot has been sent on ahead to seek out the TARDIS crew.

Realising that the corridor of lights will draw the Daleks straight to their hiding place, the Doctor, Ian and Barbara search for its power cable in order to break it. As they achieve this, Vicki finds herself plunged into darkness, and she is attacked by a Fungoid. She screams and faints.

This is heard and recognised by the others, and Ian and the Doctor rush out of the cave to find her.

The robot takes this opportunity to infiltrate the group. It goes into the cave where Barbara is waiting, and informs her that Ian has been killed by a Fungoid. It then lures her outside to go to him.

The Doctor and Ian find Vicki and bring her to the cave. She wakes up and tells them of the robot duplicate, and they realise that Barbara would not have left the cave unless it was at the urging of one of them.

In the jungle, the robot attacks Barbara but she manages to run off. The others arrive and in the confusion no-one knows which Doctor is the real one and which is his deadly double. The robot gives itself away by calling Vicki "Susan" - suggesting out of date information has been fed into it. The Doctor fights his duplicate and defeats it. 

They return to the cave, and as they doze they fail to notice a camera descend from the roof to scan them. 

In the morning they see that a massive metal city, built on columns, has been towering over them the whole time they have been here. They then spot the Daleks closing in on them. 

The Doctor attempts to fool them by pretending to be the robot, but the Daleks see through this immediately. Trapped in the cave, the Doctor and his companions prepare to fight.

Suddenly a huge panel opens in the rockface. Beyond is an elevator containing a large spherical robotic creature. It instructs them to enter...

Next episode: The Planet of Decision

Data:

Written by: Terry Nation

Recorded: Friday 28th May 1965 - Riverside Studio 1

First broadcast: 5:40pm, Saturday 19th June 1965

Ratings: 9 million / AI 56

Designers: Raymond P Cusick & John Wood

Director: Richard Martin

Additional cast: Murphy Grumbar (Mechonoid), David Graham (Mechonoid voice), Jack Pitt, John Scott Martin, Ken Tyllsen (Fungoids).

Critique:

This marks the first occasion in which the Doctor is referred to directly as "Doctor Who" - but fortunately only in the episode title. Dialogue in the original draft had included the Doctor claim: "There's not enough room in the Universe for two Dr Who's", and "... should make an interesting item for my memoirs - the death of Dr Who".

The Daleks have plenty of opportunity to name their greatest enemy, yet fail to do so.

The robot gives itself away by calling his younger female companion "Susan". Unless there have been a series of unseen adventures with the Daleks, this means that they have deemed the Doctor their ultimate foe purely on the basis of his initial visit to Skaro, and later interference in their 22nd Century invasion of Earth.

In the case of The Dalek Invasion of Earth, there is no evidence on screen that they recognise the Doctor from Skaro, and on watching it again there seems very little sign that they are even remotely aware of his involvement in events in London and Bedfordshire post 2164. They have him captive on their saucer, but see him only as a possible human threat that needs to be "robotised", and they don't actually clap eye-stalks on him after he gets to their mining operations.

We therefore have to wonder how, and when, the Doctor came to earn this reputation with the Daleks. They even know that he has a machine which can travel through time, and that it is bigger on the inside.

His defeat of their Time Destructor "masterplan" might seem a much more likely impetus to have them construct a time machine to pursue and exterminate him, and that this story comes after The Daleks' Masterplan - but then why would they programme their robot to have Susan amongst his companions?

The planet Mechanus was originally going to be called "Vapuron, the planet of mists" in Nation's original draft.

His new robotic race, which he hoped would prove to be as successful as the Daleks, were the Mechonoids. At first called a "Mechon", the name was changed as it sounded too much like "Mekon" - Dan Dare's regular villain from The Eagle paper. At one point a Dalek will still refer to the robots as "Mechons".

The robots are called "Mechonoids" throughout the script, though their first on screen credit mistakenly calls it a "Mechanoid".

It was originally intended to be a tall, bollard-shaped machine - slightly bulbous in the upper half - with the operator standing upright inside. It would be covered in flashing disc shapes.

Ray Cusick opted to make it spherical and covered in triangular panels, based on the geodesic designs of architect Richard Buckminster Fuller.

Three Mechonoids were built in total, and they were big enough to take a second operator from the design department to work the VFX at Ealing.

Whilst one of the props would be seen in the TV studio, it was planned that the later battle involving all three would be filmed at Ealing, so it was okay to give it a flame-thrower as a weapon. It would never be operated at Riverside.

The inspiration for the city was the work of another architect - Frank Lloyd Wright.

The robot Doctor is seen properly this week - perhaps seen a little too well. Wherever possible, William Hartnell is used to portray both the Doctor and his deadly double. Where actor Edmund Warwick does have to be used more prominently, it is very clear that he doesn't look very much like Hartnell at all.

Warwick has thinner, sharper features.

Hartnell took time off rehearsals for this episode to pre-record some dialogue for his robot double.

Knowing that the duel would be exhausting for her star, Verity Lambert arranged for the sequence to be recorded during the afternoon camera rehearsal period, so Hartnell would have time to recover.

Hartnell was filmed by two cameras simultaneously, one with him facing left (as the Doctor) and the other facing right (as the robot), with a third camera catching the companions' reactions.

Whilst Hartnell played the robot in the cave scene with Barbara, Warwick played the real Doctor briefly.

Relying on the Doctor to say the right thing is a mighty risky way of deciding which is the real one and which the robot. The real Doctor often makes verbal slip-ups - like never getting Ian's surname correct - so it is a wonder that the companions accept his calling of Vicki "Susan" as a sign of him being an imposter. Earlier in this season, he was calling out for Susan in the TARDIS, having forgotten that she had just left.

As previously mentioned, the Fungoids were originally going to feature in the Aridius section of the story. Nation described them as egg-shaped, black in colour and having a texture "like tripe". The costume designer simplified this to giant toadstool shapes made of rubber. 

Terry Nation loved the word "fungoids" - a name conjured by Ian, and not necessarily their true nomenclature - and he used it on other occasions, such as in The Planet of the Daleks.

As jungles go, this is one of the weakest we have ever seen in the series, as it lacks any three-dimensional elements. The supposedly swampy ground is clearly the flat studio floor, painted with some odd lines, whilst the trees and plants are simply printed on hanging gauzes. 

The designer of the jungle was John Wood.

The cinema Daleks are in evidence once again, static and confined to the background, but at one point we clearly see Camera 5 intruding into shot on the right of the screen.

Trivia:

• The ratings drop by another half million, but the appreciation figure rises by two points.
• On the Monday of rehearsals (24th May), Hartnell was formally issued his contract for a third season of Doctor Who.
• One line of dialogue from Warwick is actually spoken in his own voice, instead of miming to Hartnell.
• The trio of Fungoid actors were nicknamed Fungoid Fred, Toadstool Taffy and Mushroom Malone.
• There was another overrun in studio - the fourth consecutive one - and this time it was a whole 27 minutes.