TV Club: Doctor Who, The War Games, episodes 1-5

“The War Games,” episodes 1-5 (season 6, episodes 35-39; originally aired 4/19-5/17/1969)

At the end of the 1960s, Doctor Who was in the throes of its second major crisis, and so by extension was the Doctor himself. After three years, Patrick Troughton had decided he wanted to try other things, which meant that for the second time, the show would need to figure out how to get along without its lead actor. That in itself wasn’t such a devastating problem, since William Hartnell’s departure in “The Tenth Planet” had led to Doctor Who’s uniquely freeing solution to the problem of change, the concept that the Doctor periodically regenerates into a wholly new body with a new personality. The problem was that this time, the show itself was on the rocks. Ratings were way down—from 12 million for “The Dalek Invasion Of Earth” to 3.5 million for the least-watched episode of “The War Games,” episode eight—and there was general agreement that something major had to change, beyond even another regeneration, if Doctor Who was going to survive.

“The War Games”—the last appearance of the Second Doctor as the lead character of the show—was not meant as the story that would solve Who’s problems, or even set up that solution. Just the opposite. By the time Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke wrote the script, the producers had already figured out how to reinvent the series: The Third Doctor would be exiled to Earth starting with season seven’s “Spearhead From Space,” which would allow the show to use familiar modern-day settings to a) bring in greater relevance and sophistication to the storylines, and b) be made more cheaply. And the necessary groundwork for the Doctor joining UNIT had been laid down in “The Invasion” earlier in season six. So “The War Games” didn’t have to worry about any of that—instead, its focus is on capping off the Second Doctor era itself, and ending his story in such a way that justified the radical changes of the next season. To that end, Dicks and Hulke confronted the Doctor with a situation that was a dark mirror of his own habit of interfering in the natural course of history, and what’s more, was too much for him to handle. The Doctor fails, and he’s forced to face the consequences of his failure when he’s caught and put on trial by the Time Lords, the people he’s been running away from since before the series began.

Originally published Nov. 20, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

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