Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start... 

Day 377: The Time Warrior, Episode Three

Dear diary,

Mark today’s date in your own 50 Year Diary (surely you’ve all got one by now?), because today I realised… I quite like Jon Pertwee as the Doctor.

I know.

Let’s be honest, I’ve been vaguely suspecting as much since as far back as about Season Seven, when I was surprised at just how much fun I was getting from watching him in stories like Doctor Who and the Silurians or Inferno, but over the last few seasons I’ve been back and forth on my opinion like a bit of a yo-yo. If I were to draw a graph to represent my feelings towards this Doctor since Spearhead From Space it would generally bit a bit luke-warm, with sparks of love.

But there was a moment in today’s episode – I can pin-point it exactly, it’s when he’s throwing the ‘stink bombs’ over the castle battlements and has such a happy look on his face – where I just realised that actually, yeah, I do like him.

Now, that’s not to say that I’m suddenly revising my opinion of him as my least favourite Doctor, I’ll not really be able to analyse that until I’ve finished the marathon next year sometime. In actual fact, his current story average is sitting slightly above Hartnell’s, and yet I think I still prefer the First Doctor on the whole, in my heart.

Besides, Pertwee is probably taking something of a boost from the fact that today is the third episode of another very strong story for him. He’s being given a load of great dialogue, his spark with Sarah Jane is just right (At first, I was a bit disappointed that he’d managed to talk her round to his side so quickly, but actually it seems entirely fitting that he should do just this – he’s the Doctor! Of course he can bring her round!), and he even looks the part. I was never all that fond of his green jacket (like the purple one from last season’s Dalek story, it’s always felt a bit too bold), but it looks great against the medieval backdrop.

Speaking of the backdrop – how good does the time period look? It’s been a while since the production team have had to provide this kind of historical setting (I can’t think of any since at least Season Three), but it merely reinforces that old adage about how good the BBC are at the historical stories. The Time Warrior signals the start of several stories using locations like this – not necessarily historical tales, but ones set in a Middle Age society – over the next decade, so it’s good to see them mastering it so well.

And when Irongron goes to storm a neighbouring castle… we’ve sat through two and a half episodes of him boasting about the number of men currently in his employ, but now we actually get to see them! It’s quite small by some standards, but there’s still quite a lot of extras involved in the attack. The only downside is the one extra who seems to be having far too much fun as the explosions go off around him!

I’ve already touched on the Doctor’s brilliant dialogue in today’s episode, but it really does bear coming back to. It seems to be a running theme in Robert Holmes stories, and once again it’s becoming something that I can’t avoid drawing attention to. Today’s highlight is the Doctor explaining the Time Lords to Sarah, even if describing them as ‘galactic ticket inspectors’ does somewhat rob them of their mystery! This kind of stuffy bureaucrat image will go on to be typical of the way that Holmes sees them during his own time as Script Editor on the programme, and will characterise them for the rest of the ‘classic’ series.

This same scene also includes Sarah Jane growing to understand more about the Doctor’s character when she asks why he doesn’t simply just leave if he’s not behind all of this trouble, and he explains that he has to stay because he’s got ‘a job to do’. It’s the first time that this incarnation has towed the party line, as it were (it’s this statement which leads him into explaining how the Time Lords try to stamp out unlicensed time travel), and it’s a great way of looking at the Doctor.

He’s got the freedom to leave Earth whenever he pleases now, and Jo’s departure cuts another tie to the planet, but he continues to stick around with UNIT because he’s grown some affection for them. It’s quite sweet, in a way, and it’s the perfect end-point for the evolution his character was experiencing during Seasons Seven and Eight.

It also puts me in mind of a similar scene between the Doctor and Rose during Bad Wolf, in which they discuss how easy it would be just to hop in the TARDIS and leave the Gamestation to its fate. It’s the Doctor who makes the suggestion to Rose, telling her that it is another option, but she replies that he’s never do it. It’s not hard to see the correlation between that scene, and this one here. If you’re going to borrow from Doctor Who’s past, then borrow from the best!