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| Standard and special edition DVDs |
It's an understated beginning, with a weather balloon wafting gently in the breeze and a gamekeeper waving at a scientist in a jeep before suddenly disappearing. There are also some nice little moments in the subsequent laboratory scene with the Doctor, Jo, the Brigadier, and Dr. Tyler (the scientist from the beginning), such as the Brigadier asking what he can do to help. "Yes," the Doctor replies. "Pass me a silicon rod, will you?" The Brigadier does so, only for the Doctor to use it to stir his tea, much to Lethbridge-Stewart's exasperation. There's also the Brigadier's oft-quoted, somewhat bizarre fit of pique at the tail of the scene, as he chastises Dr. Tyler for treating his top-secret facility like any old lab: "Liberty Hall, Dr. Tyler, Liberty Hall." Even the DVD subtitles are at a loss to explain this, but the best explanation I've seen is that it's a reference to Oliver Goldsmith's 18th-century comedy She Stoops to Conquer, which has a Liberty Hall that's inadvertently believed by the characters to be an inn -- and which had just been adapted by the BBC in 1971, so it would have been fresh in the memory.
But the danger soon reveals itself, with a nifty electronic effect that looks like a red, black, and blue amorphous jelly (and which they've done a fabulous job of making it look like it's going in and out of drains and such), which causes things and people to vanish in an off-white flash. And it seems that the beam of light that sent the jelly to Earth in the first place is also draining the Time Lords of all their power, since it emanates from the black hole that provides the Time Lords with said power. This gives the story the feel of an epic tale without really even trying. And coming on the heels of The Time Monster, this is both a revelation and a relief. With things on the Time Lords' home planet just as dire as the situation on Earth, which escalates from an electronic effect to blobby red jellies attacking UNIT HQ (all of UNIT HQ! How much more exciting than anything in The Time Monster) and UNIT soldiers helpless to stop them (even after Corporal Palmer's legendary response to his first sight of the Gell [sic] Guards (as the script calls them) of "Holy Moses, what's that?!"), the Time Lords are forced to transgress the First Law of Time and send the Doctor back to help himself. And that's how Patrick Troughton enters the scene, sent by the Time Lords to help Jon Pertwee's Doctor. Except it's quickly clear that these two aren't going to get along. Troughton starts prickly ("I can see you've been doing the TARDIS up a bit. Hmm. I don't like it." -- he should have seen it last story), and Pertwee responds in kind, and it's clear that these two (rather wonderfully) aren't going to get along. It's also nice to see how effortlessly Troughton slips back into the role, even if it's not quite the same second Doctor as we're used to (his obsession with his recorder, for instance, feels more like the original characterization of the second Doctor than the one we had by the end of the '60s).
The Time Lords try again with the first Doctor, William Hartnell, but he gets stuck in a time eddy and can only advise from the TARDIS scanner (this is because Hartnell was so ill at this point that he could only do a few short pre-filmed segments -- sadly, he's noticeably ill in these scenes and is transparently reading off cue cards, although a few flashes of the old Doctor still come through (e.g., "So stop dilly-dallying...and cross it!") -- but it's still rather nice to have him there). And to Bob Baker and Dave Martin's credit, they don't waste time getting all the Doctors involved in the action (they don't, for instance, save their appearance for the first cliffhanger) but have them interacting and bickering right away. No, the first cliffhanger sees the third Doctor and Jo made to vanish by the antimatter effect. (Well, right after the Brigadier and Corporal Palmer spot it, leading Palmer to say, "Good grief, sir, what's that?!" Palmer doesn't come off the best in this episode, does he?)
Episode two continues the fun, with the Brigadier in disbelief at the sight of the second Doctor instead of the third. Troughton is trying to work out how to contain the antimatter creature ("What are we going to do now?" Benton asks. "Keep it confused," the second Doctor replies. "Feed it with useless information. I wonder if I have a television set handy?"), while the third Doctor and Jo find themselves not dead, as Jo initially believes (just as she did at the end of The Time Monster), but in a bleak and desolate place -- "at the other end of that light streak of yours," the Doctor tells Tyler, who's also been transported here. "That's in the black hole," Tyler replies in disbelief. "Yes, exactly... On a stable world in a universe of antimatter. An anomaly within an impossibility," the Doctor responds -- and it's clear that their host wants them to join him, as the Doctor, Jo, and Tyler are all surrounded by Gell Guards.
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| The second Doctor prepares to turn off the TARDIS's forcefield. (The Three Doctors Episode Two) ©BBC |
It's not all perfect, though; there's a noticeable bit of padding as Tyler, while waiting inside their host's blobby palace (the decor looking an awful lot like the Gell Guards), decides to make a run for it, which leads to him dashing down some corridors to fill the time before ending up right back where he started. "That was a bit of a waste of time, wasn't it?" he says ruefully. But fortunately there's not much of this, and the episode does end strikingly: after being told by the first Doctor to switch off the TARDIS's forcefield, the second Doctor does so ("Because he told me to, and I've always had a great respect for his advice," Troughton explains to the Brigadier and Benton), which leads to the entirety of UNIT HQ vanishing, disappearing down the light stream into the black hole...
71 Yes, yes, Steven Moffat, I see you in the back there pointing out that this was broadcast a lot closer to the ninth anniversary than the tenth, but the point of this story is clearly to celebrate ten years of Doctor Who and you know it.