January 2: "World War Three"

The Doctor and the Slitheen confront each other. ("World War
Three") ©BBC

There's some action at the beginning and a big explosion at the end, but what's striking about "World War Three" when you stop to think about it is how much the middle is just talking.  But it's not a case of our heroes talking to the villains -- they really only have two conversations, and neither of them involve the Doctor trying to convince the Slitheen to stop.  Instead this is more concerned with exploring the effect the Doctor has on the people he travels with, and how he can convince people to be greater than themselves.

It's the first point that's most obvious in the episode.  Jackie asks the Doctor point-blank if Rose will be safe on her travels with him, and the Doctor either can't or won't reply.  But then when the solution to the Slitheen problem involves endangering Rose's life, the Doctor hesitates because of Jackie -- even though the alternative is the destruction of the planet.  "This is my life, Jackie," he tells her.  "It's not fun, it's not smart, it's just standing up and making a decision because nobody else will."  Although when Harriet Jones orders him to do it, he grins happily -- perhaps because he knows that the decision to do the right thing is no longer his.  Jackie really doesn't want Rose to keep traveling with the Doctor, though, and Rose's reassurances about it being a time machine (in a scene quite close (albeit probably unintentionally so) to the end of Scream of the Shalka) don't hold up.

But for me at least, the more interesting character arc is Mickey's.  He's clingy and fearful when we last see him in "Rose", but since then he's started boning up on the Doctor and the sorts of things he gets involved with.  He's become useful -- certainly enough so that the Doctor is willing to rely on him to help save the day.  And at the end the Doctor has come to respect him enough -- despite calling him "Mickey the Idiot" -- to invite him aboard the TARDIS.  Mickey declines the offer, but you can see how he's grown over that year.

This episode isn't just about character moments though.  The Slitheen are still there to provide a comical yet deadly threat, and while their scheme is basically the same one as in The Dominators, with some capitalism thrown in (more people motivated by money, rather like "The End of the World"; interesting, that), it's a hell of a lot more exciting here than it was in 1968.  Nice move, by the way, on making "Slitheen" a family name rather than the name of the entire race -- it lends a feeling of diversity to the inhabitants of Raxacoricofallapatorius (which feels like the sort of name Douglas Adams might have come up with to annoy the secretary tasked with typing up copies of the script).  Shame the CG versions of the creatures don't quite feel like the practical costumes -- it's the movement differences between the two that are really apparent.  But the Slitheen still look good, and their giddy, child-like behavior ("Oh, look at that!  The phone is actually red!") as they wait to bring about the destruction of the planet is highly entertaining.

This two-parter is occasionally uneven in tone -- it wants to be a serious examination of how the Doctor's lifestyle affects the families and friends of those who travel with him, but it also wants to have wonderfully grotesque aliens that are nevertheless highly dangerous.  Paradoxically this unevenness is something of a strength; it's hard to imagine any other show trying for so many different registers at once, but here they absolutely go for it, in a combination we don't really ever see again.  No subsequent story is domestic AND international AND comedic AND grotesque AND dangerous in quite the same way as "Aliens of London" / "World War Three".¹⁶⁷  When this was all we had to go on, the results felt a bit off; now that we know there won't be anything else like it, this story's virtues become very apparent.  It's not brilliant, but it is worth savoring.







¹⁶⁷ Unlike the Hartnell stories, which all now have generally agreed-upon titles, there's no such consensus for the BBC Wales multi-part stories -- and there doesn't generally seem to be a working title for the whole story of any of them.  Occasionally you'll get portmanteaus of the individual episode titles (e.g., Bad Parting for "Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways") or references to things like "the 'Aliens in London' two-parter".  Some people will refer to the whole story by the first episode's title, but while that works for things like The Impossible Planet it's a bit of a damp squib for other stories (as, say, "Evolution of the Daleks" is a significantly better name than "Daleks in Manhattan", but it's the name of the second part).  Or you can just do what I'm doing and list them both out -- unwieldy but effective.