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

Day 254: The War Games, Episode Four

Dear diary,

In June 1966, Peter Cushing went into a radio studio to record a 23- minute pilot for a potential Doctor Who radio series. This first episode - Journey into Time - serves as a brief introduction to the series as a whole, featuring a loose retelling of An Unearthly Child Episode One, complete with Susan baffling her teachers at school. The story differs after that and it's a boy from Susan's school who ends up stumbling into the TARDIS and being whisked off into time and space. The episode is written by Malcolm Hulke, one of his earliest contributions to the franchise, and ends with the Doctor, Susan, and Mike finding themselves caught in the American Revolution, surrounded at gunpoint by a group of soldiers.

It's not a million miles away from the American civil war that Jamie and Lady Jennifer have spent today's episode in, and the cliffhanger could be right out of The War Games, too. I'm surprised in some ways that we've never had this kind of setting in the series before now - it seems like such an obvious period of history to explore, and if The Space Pirates taught us anything, it's that the production team aren't afraid of filling six episodes with 'American' accents.

Sadly, Jamie and Lady Jennifer are relegated today into the role of filling out the episode. Their entire twenty-five minutes is spent being captured by and then escaping from different groups of soldiers. First they're tied up by the North, and set free by the South. Then the German commander turns up and uses his hypnotising monocle (that's not a sentence you often type) to have them tied back up again. A resistance fighter then sets them free, before they're rounded back up and brought back to the barn again. They just can't catch a break!

It could dent the quality of the episode that it's been reduced to such a runaround, but thankfully the Doctor and Zoe are given a far more interesting storyline to follow as they make their way into the headquarters of the war zone operation. All the stuff aboard the 'TARDIS' (look, I know it's not been identified as actually being one on screen, only being like one, but it's easier to keep typing than 'bigger-on-the-inside-space-and-time-machine') is fantastic, and the idea of seeing all the different soldiers lined up in their different compartments, waiting to be deployed, is a great concept. I'd love to see what a modern budget could do with this - a whole army waiting to be taken to the front line. I'm also glad that the Romans here make an effort to go round the back of the set and make multiple passes across the screen. At the end of yesterday's episode, when the American troops were deployed, Zoe commented on there being 'so many' of them, when only about five had actually turned up.

The real meat of the episode comes in the form of Lieutenant Carstairs' 'reprocessing'. I've never noticed it before now, but it's almost like a preview of what's going to be happening to Jamie and Zoe at the end of the story - he recognises the Doctor in the crowd, and then his mind is wiped leaving him with only memories of their earliest encounters, when he still believes the Doctor and Zoe to be German spies. I'm so glad that I've spotted it on this occasion, as it feels almost like the episode is foreshadowing future events, and really hammers home the fact that we're running out of time for this TARDIS team.

David Savile turns in a simply flawless performance as Carstairs in this episode, and really makes it sinister when he 'turns' on his friends. 'These are my brother officers,' he confirms, looking around the room of students, before fixing his gaze squarely on our heroes; 'Except those two people! They're German spies!' Even better is his simple exchange with Zoe during the cliffhanger moments - 'you're a German spy. It's my duty to shoot you.'

More and more, there's suggestions building that the Doctor really is out of his depth this time. Today's addition to that plot line is his response to Zoe's question as to who else could have a TARDIS-like machine, and he comments that there is an answer to that, but that he really hopes it's not the one he's thinking of. It's no wonder I'd always thought of this story as being some epic of the 1960s - it's fantastic, and treating itself as such...

Don't forget to 'like' the 50 Year Diary Facebook page - I'll be asking about your favourite Troughton stories this time next week!

8/10