May 3: The War Games Episodes One & Two

The good news is that now we have video for every remaining episode: with The Space Pirates we leave behind not just the series' brief flirtation with putting titles in quotation marks (or inverted commas, if you prefer) but also the missing episodes.  Video from here on out (even if there are occasionally problems with the colors, but we'll discuss that when we get there).

Random observation: the picture of Troughton on this DVD
is almost but not quite the exact same photo as on the cover
of the CD of The Space Pirates.

The bad news is that The War Games is Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines, and Wendy Padbury's final story.  It had been announced that Troughton was leaving during transmission of The Krotons, but now we've reached the end.  Well, sort of; the fact remains that this is the either the second- or third-longest serial (depending on how you count The Trial of a Time Lord) in Doctor Who's history.  So we're not quite at the end yet.

Episode one is actually a pretty bleak affair.  The TARDIS arrives in 1917 in No Man's Land, where they're almost immediately fired upon -- though not specifically aimed at them, it would seem.  They've arrived in the middle of World War I, and the episode is designed to make it clear just how horrible that war was.  The Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe are treated as spies by the British soldiers and court-martialled with only a thin veneer of a fair trial.  The Doctor, it seems, can defeat anything except the closed military mind.

Except things aren't exactly as they seem; a number of the people we see have difficulty remembering where they've come from or how long they've been near the front, and there's the curiousness of General Smythe, who not only has the power to hypnotize people by putting on a pair of glasses but also has a video screen in his room in 1917 France.  But despite these slight oddities, this is treated as a straight historical story, full of brutality and irrationality, and as the Doctor is tied to a post before a firing squad, you get the sense that the real issue is everyone's blind obedience of orders.

Episode two starts to highlight the oddities.  It begins when the Doctor is rescued by someone who appears to be dressed in an American Civil War uniform, sniping at the British soldiers.  We also get a strange machine that fades into view and carries General Smythe off somewhere -- it sort of sounds like a TARDIS when it appears, but then the door makes the "Dalek door" sound when it opens, so maybe we shouldn't read too much into these things.  And Jamie, convicted of being a deserter, is in the military prison when he's joined by a Redcoat from 1745...

But Lieutenant Carstairs and Lady Jennifer, both of whom met the TARDIS crew in No Man's Land, start to have doubts about how the court-martial was carried out.  This means that, while the regulars are still fighting the bureaucracy and dominance of the General's orders, they have some allies on the inside.  The anachronism of the video screen is highlighted, and we see General Smythe somewhere with a man wearing strange glasses looking through the viewscreen at the Doctor and company.  It's enough to convince Carstairs and Lady Jennifer to help them out, and so they drive away from the chateau and into a strange mist, on the other side of which is a Roman legion...