June 16: The Three Doctors Episodes Three & Four

Omega warns the Doctors not to deceive him. (The Three
Doctors Episode Three) ©BBC

After two episodes of mystery (other than a brief look from behind), episode three finally introduces us to our host: a man named Omega, who was the solar engineer who turned a star into a black hole and gave the Time Lords the source of their power.  Omega was believed to be destroyed in the supernova, but it turns out he was sucked inside the black hole and survived.  And now Omega has decided to take his revenge against the Time Lords for abandoning him (as he perceives it) by draining away their power and then escaping from this world of antimatter.  But the catch is that the world is maintained by Omega's will, so he needs a fellow Time Lord to maintain it while he makes his escape.  And so that's why Omega needs the Doctor.

Then there's the infamous moment where the Brigadier, upon finding that UNIT HQ has been transported to some new location, believes they've been transported to Cromer (a coastal town in Norfolk), rather than a different universe as the Doctor says.  The Stupid Brigadier archetype really begins here, sadly -- although he still handles the rest of the situation well, as he watches the second Doctor and Benton get led away by Gell Guards and taken inside Omega's place and tries to figure out how to get inside.  (He doesn't, for instance, ask Mr. Ollis where the nearest phone is.)  Still, we're a far cry from the Brigadier of The Invasion or Spearhead from Space.

But the best parts of this episode are the Doctors' interactions with Omega, as he explains the plot and backstory to them (at exactly the right part in the story for the audience as well).  The oddest part is when Omega discovers them wandering around his place and examining Singularity (which is consistently treated as a proper noun rather than a thing) and declares that the Doctor must fight the dark side of his mind, which looks like a weird bloke in vaguely racist Oriental make-up exchanging judo throws with Jon Pertwee in an entirely black void.  Stranger still, this fight ends up being the cliffhanger, as the third Doctor starts to lose to Omega's dark side.

The first Doctor advises the other two from the TARDIS scanner.
(The Three Doctors Episode Four) ©BBC

The third Doctor is only saved at the top of episode four by the second Doctor pointing out that Omega still needs him in order to escape.  This leads to the best part of the episode, as Omega instructs them to remove his mask in order to prepare for his escape, only to discover that there's nothing of Omega's body left: he exists purely as a force of will, the rest having been eroded by countless centuries of exposure to the "light stream".  The moment where he lifts the whole helmet off, revealing nothing but the sight of the second and third Doctors standing behind him, is a marvelously memorable scene. This revelation drives Omega mad(der) though, as he vows to destroy "all things".  It does give the Doctors a chance to escape and regroup, however, which means we get to see William Hartnell again, and even though he's still confined to the screen, flashes of his Doctor still come through.  They come up with a plan, but we don't really find out what that is, as a better opportunity presents itself: the second Doctor's recorder fell into the TARDIS's forcefield generator and thus wasn't converted into antimatter when it was brought into Omega's realm (just go with it).  So after a lengthy scene where each of the other characters transported into the black hole are sent back to Earth by passing through Singularity (which, you may be surprised to learn, is a column of white smoke), the second and third Doctors offer Omega his freedom by handing him the recorder.  Omega is angered by this, though, and knocks it aside, thus causing the matter of the recorder to come into contact with the antimatter of everything else, creating a massive explosion that results in a(nother) supernova.  The Time Lords and the rest of the universe are saved.

And at the very end, in gratitude for saving the Time Lords, the Doctor's exile is revoked: he receives a new dematerialization circuit and the memory of how to properly travel in time.  The Doctor is no longer stuck in one time and place (thus making official what had basically been the situation last season anyway, only without needing to constantly refer to the Time Lords interfering with the TARDIS).

The Three Doctors is a story that gets a bit of a rough ride from fans, but it's frankly hard to see why.  It's sometimes derided as cheap and gaudy, but it's not noticeably any cheaper or gaudier than any other "space" story from this era, and in fact the striking Glam rock design is one of this story's charms.  There's also the fun interplay between Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee, and it's nice to see William Hartnell, even if he's not as strong as he was when he was the star.  Add to all this the sense of scale that the Bristol Boys have given us with their script, and the result is a highly entertaining adventure.  And it's got a great ending, too, as Mrs. Ollis demands to know where her husband has been all this time.  Mr. Ollis pauses, trying to come up with an explanation, before simply saying, "You'd never believe me, woman.  Supper ready?"  Season 10 is off to a strong start.