TV Club: Doctor Who, “The Time Warrior”

“The Time Warrior” (season 11, episodes 1-4. Originally aired Dec. 15, 1973-Jan. 5, 1974)

Considering that it’s a show about a guy with a time machine, Doctor Who went for a very long time without visiting the past. “The Time Warrior,” which brings the Third Doctor to the Middle Ages, was the first story since Season Four’s “Evil Of The Daleks” to take place in a historical setting. The Doctor and his friends engaged in plenty of time travel, but it was all between contemporary Britain and the future with its dazzling array of spaceships, ray guns, and aliens. The show’s first three seasons, on the other hand, were full of trips to the past—about half the series consisted of stories where the TARDIS crew were entangled in ancient history, and ran into people like Roman emperor Nero and King Richard the Lionhearted. But they were never as popular as the sci-fi thrillers, and dropping them was a conscious choice on the part of the producers. It seems shortsighted to eliminate half the potential story lines. But the historicals had a lingering bad rep among the Who behind-the-scenes crew, apparently because they had a hard time seeing them beyond their educational mandate from Doctor Who’s original mission statement—they felt like school, in other words. “Time Warrior” scriptwriter Robert Holmes certainly felt that way: He’s quoted in the DVD extras as saying “I hate Doctor Who in history mode because I think it’s too whimsy and twee.” Instead, he came up with a compromise that’s become the default method ever since for the way Doctor Who deals with the past: The pseudohistorical, in which the setting is in the past, but the story line emphasizes science fiction over historical accuracy, and generally doesn’t involve real historical figures. It wasn’t the first time the show had done this—”The Time Meddler” and “Evil Of The Daleks” both had strong sci-fi elements. But “Time Warrior” marks when the show’s creative staff got a handle on how a pseudohistorical should work. It helps a lot that Holmes’ story is full of lively humor, a memorably repellent yet strangely compelling villain in Linx the Sontaran—and of course there’s the introduction of the Doctor’s new sidekick, feisty journalist Sarah Jane Smith, played with intelligence and charm by Elisabeth Sladen.

Originally published Aug. 14, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

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