June 29: The Time Warrior Parts Three & Four

Oh, look, they've edited in a shot of Hal and Sarah in order to make his rescue seem less abrupt.  Although according to them it's not a rescue, "it's a capture."  I doubt the Doctor minds much, though.

Sarah watches the Doctor make stink bombs. (The Time
Warrior Part Three) ©BBC

Part three has a lot of moments that seem rather silly, but as they're endearingly silly we can overlook any small problems that arise as a result.  Certainly the Doctor and Sarah clear up Sarah's misunderstanding really quickly (quite handy if she's going to be the next assistant) and get on with repelling Irongron's invasion.  The Doctor's strategy involves making stink bombs with some extra bits added, and lots of dummies to line the battlements.  It's not exactly high Shakespearean drama, but it's still entertaining to watch huge (and I mean huge) plumes of orange smoke fill the screen and billow around Irongron's small group of ragtag men as they try to scale ladders before just giving up and running back home.

The second half of the episode also has these wonderfully fun moments (what About Time calls "children's television" moments), with Sarah and the Doctor dressed as monks who want to get into Irongron's castle because they've heard of his great charity -- and the guards just let them through, apparently on a lark.  But they're there to enact their plan to take care of Irongron and Linx, and when they enter Linx's workshop, the Doctor is able to break the hypnosis of one of the scientists -- but then Linx enters and blasts the Doctor...

Part four resolves this problem by having Sarah knock the gun away and then Rubeish striking Linx on the back of the neck, on his probic vent -- the one weakness that a Sontaran has, apparently.  Then the plan proceeds, with Rubeish dehypnotizing scientists, Sarah heading to the kitchen to drug the food⁷⁹, and the Doctor forced to divert Irongron while the other elements of the plan take effect.  This is another silly-but-fun moment, with the Doctor dressed up as Linx's robot knight and attempting to distract Irongron for a bit -- but then forced to defend himself against both Irongron and Bloodaxe.  The game is soon up though, and Irongron decides to use the Doctor as target practice for his new "star weapons" (aka rifles).  The Doctor manages to escape, though, when Sarah swings a chandelier at him, which he then swings across the room on like Errol Flynn, and then they both escape to Sir Edward's castle.

Some drugged soldiers later, they return to rescue the scientists and stop Linx.  The Doctor manages the former (using Linx's osmic projector to send all the scientists back to the 20th century), but Linx is starting up his spaceship, which will destroy the whole castle.  Irongron is killed by Linx after Irongron attacks over a perceived betrayal, and a well-aimed arrow by Hal subsequently pierces Linx's probic vent, killing him -- but the spaceship still leaves, so the Doctor gets everyone out (except, it seems, the serving girls), causing the castle to explode, destroying everything anachronistic in the process.  And while you can sort of see the logic of using a stock explosion shot to save money, it's still a wonder that director Alan Bromly thought he could get away with what's clearly a quarry explosion substituting in for a castle being destroyed.  (Although perhaps it's not that surprising, if the stories about Bromly's directorial abilities and instincts are to be believed -- certainly the next (and final) Doctor Who Bromly directed, Nightmare of Eden, was an unmitigated disaster behind the scenes.)

So, having given us a story where different locales and times are successfully intermixed in Carnival of Monsters, Robert Holmes pulls a similar trick here, by taking an historical time period and throwing an SF element into it to see what happens.  This is by no means a novel approach, not even for Doctor Who (The War Games and The Time Meddler, which are both stories that The Time Warrior has in its DNA, played at something similar), but the difference is that the sheer confidence on display in Holmes's script makes this a viable thread of storytelling in a way that, say, The Time Meddler isn't.  The Time Meddler didn't lead to a subset of stories where a time traveller tries to alter history, but The Time Warrior did (albeit with aliens substituted for time travellers) -- see, for example, things like Pyramids of Mars or Horror of Fang Rock (and even into the modern day, with stories like, most obviously, "The Fires of Pompeii").  In part this is because the script is very confident about what it's doing, even when what it's doing is silly pantomime fare -- again, the stink bomb stuff comes to mind -- and it sparkles with lots of great dialogue (I've mentioned some of it before, but we also get lines like "By the stars, Bloodaxe, I swear I'll chop him up so fine not even a sparrow will fill its beak at one peck" and a description of the Doctor as "a long-shanked rascal with a mighty nose").  But it's also because it's clear how supremely comfortable both Jon Pertwee and Elisabeth Sladen are in this.  Pertwee is definitely at home here in history, engaging in swordplay and chivalry equally well.  Sladen is particularly impressive, finding her feet from the start and doing a convincing job of first mistrusting the Doctor and then being firmly on his side.  It's obviously not clear how the original actress cast as Sarah Jane would have done (the identity of whom Barry Letts insisted on taking to his grave, but subsequent research (after his death) revealed to be April Walker), but Elisabeth Sladen nails the part from her first scene.

It's fun, it's witty, and it's well-acted.  The Time Warrior is a stand-out story, and one that single-handedly revitalized a whole type of Doctor Who story, the pseudo-historical.  A marvelous tale, and probably the highlight of season 11 -- though, as we're only on the first story, we'll have to wait and see before we confirm this.







⁷⁹ It's well-known that there are anachronistic potatoes in this episode, a point which apparently caused some grief for Terrance Dicks, who then took it out on Robert Holmes -- so when Dicks wrote his own historical-based story for season 15 (Horror of Fang Rock), Holmes made certain all the research was done properly.  Except, as The DisContinuity Guide suggests, About Time confirms, and I verified, there don't appear to be any potatoes in the show.  There might be one on the table (briefly visible at the lower left edge as the camera pans), and Sarah might pick one up, but it's not like anyone's prominently peeling spuds or anything.  And besides, why would Dicks berate Holmes for something the set dressers did?  This has the feel of one of those stories with a grain of truth (the novelization (by Dicks) does mention Sarah peeling potatoes) that's been subsequently distorted beyond recognition, à la the story about Pertwee and the ship compass from Carnival of Monsters.