The Deadly Assassin: Ranking - 229

 The Deadly Assassin

(Season 14, Dr 4, 30/10/1976-20/11/1976, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script editor: Robert Holmes (uncredited), writer: Robert Holmes, director: David Maloney) 

'I'm here in this virtual alternate reality that could be based on any part of any planet in all of space and time and do you know what it reminds me of? An Earth quarry. Typical!' 

Ooh controversial! 

 All of us fans know that time and opinions are relative. Every episode is one fan’s favourite and another least favourite someone else’s favourite and the general consensus as to what makes good or bad Dr Who is always changing. After all, this is a series about change, whose ideas reflect the audience at home who are themselves always changing and shaping and the fabric of society twists and turns. Throughout this series’ long history there have been shows heralded as classics that now get a rum deal (‘The Web Planet’ ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ and a little bit ‘Tomb Of The Cybermen’ and ‘Talons Of Weng Chiang’) and others that weren’t all that well regarded at the time that are now hailed to be out and out classics (‘The War Games’ ‘City Of Death’ ‘Hell Bent’ ‘World Enough and Time’). With the exceptions of the odd returned ‘missing’ episode that proved to be a lot better/a lot worse than people assumed from the telesnaps and audio, perhaps no story has had such a bumpy ride in fan’s affections than ‘The Deadly Assassin’. Ask any fan about it nowadays and they’ll probably tell you that’s it’s a milestone of the series, a major event that for the first time described what the Doctor’s home planet was really like and why he left it, a story that punctured the idea of the timelords as a semi-Gods and revealed them to be a petty squabbling bunch of children much like the humans they look down on, a society of decay as men in dodgy ruffs stood around pontificating about the need to protect the universe while putting it in danger. Nowadays fans don’t think twice about this story’s classic status: so many stories that came after built upon this one and the fact that it was written by long-term script writer and one of Dr Who’s most prolific authors Robert Holmes means that it’s pretty much sacrosanct. To assassinate the character of this story is as unthinkable as, well, to assassinate the president. 

 However, that’s not what people thought at the time. Had you taken a Tardis and travelled to the night of broadcast of, say, episode four then the fallout was similar to ‘The Timeless Child’. ‘The Deadly Assassin’ was a story that contradicted everything that come before in one fell swoop without any by your leave, undoing over a decade of storytelling full of endless possibilities in favour of some cheap shock scenes. ‘Assassin’ was assassinated, coming bottom of that year’s season polls and seen in the same ‘well, let’s never talk about that again and pretend it never happened’ hushed tones as the Doctor being half-human in ’The TV Movie’ or our everyman hero the Doctor being ‘special’ in ‘The Timeless Children’ (as opposed to being borderline special needs in Gallifreyan terms). Time has dulled this story’s approach so that most of what it presents here seems ‘normal’, but at the time this story’s ‘as above so below’ depiction of the timelords as a corrupt, conniving society was every bit as big a change in the hearts of this series. And it’s not hard to see why: the timelords hadn’t even been mentioned for the first six years and when they did arrive they were every bit the mysterious, omnipotent, all-seeing beings that the Doctor fought against, using their great powers to observe instead of act who sat as judge and jury over every other species in the universe across time. They were exactly the sort of race our beloved rebel Doctor fought and after seeing them and their inability to understand his need to help people in need made them seem impossibly alien and other-worldly as well as adding whole new dimensions to the Doctor’s character. Making them just like every other race in the universe undoes a lot of the Doctor’s reasons for leaving and it’s hard to see why in previous stories, including the end of previous adventure ‘Hand of Fear’ when he has to leave Sarah at home and obey a summons home, the Doctor is quite as scared as he is. We’ve seen him take down civilisations tougher, cleverer and more powerful than this most weeks. Far from being the big bad we thought we’d never get to see the timelords are reduced to the standards of every other race out there, just another flawed species who should know better. This revelation was the single biggest change in the series since the timelords were created and sentenced the Doctor to exile on Earth and a lot of fans all-out hated it calling it a travesty of justice, a farrago, etc. 

 That’s not how writer Robert Holmes saw it, mind you. He hated automatic authority in any form with a passion and didn’t see why the timelords should get let off Dr Who’s scalpel of truth and justice, even if they had been largely created by his good friend Terrance Dicks. In his mind’s eye there must have been something rotten about this society if we kept getting rebels like The Doctor, The Meddling Monk, The Master, Omega, Morbius et al leaving in droves. So Holmes set about writing a story that punctured the myths of timelord brilliance with the same zeal as other stories, writing the Doctor’s homecoming as a sort of school reunion where he’s the prodigal son whose learned things about the universe outside the door while they’ve all stayed the same, decaying in stasis in their own little worlds. While to us the Doctor is a hero, a legend in his own lifetimes and a person to look up to it’s clear that on his home-world the Doctor is just a very naughty boy (Runcible commenting that he thought he’d been expelled, which the Doctor neither confirms nor denies). Everyone in this little world has to follow the same tiring rules and regulations that seem to make no sense and are there just to maintain authority – just like school! – while the timelords are divided up into ‘houses’ (the Doctor is a Prydonian, in a red and orange costume that looks just like a public school uniform in red and orange and which sounds from what the timelord ‘teachers’ say here as a sort of Slytherin filled with the school’s undesirables and rebels – it makes sense that The master would be in this chapter too). The Doctor even turns up in the same ‘car’ he had during his years there, one that’s now obsolete and outdated and receives their scorn, but at least the Doctor has travelled, adapted and grown – they’re the same as they ever were stuck in one place. And we know from other adventures that the universe just doesn’t work like that. In Holmes’ eyes if the timelords live for so many regenerations without anything bad happening to them then they must be impossibly ancient and like all institutions that don’t change with their ways by now they’re seriously behind the times to the tune of a few millennia. In many of Homes’ scripts he uses the old adage that nothing really changes from species to species and his view of impossible races is ‘as above, so below’ – that these semi-Gods are like the old Romans and Vikings who fought and sinned and schemed and connived just like humanity modelled in their name, not the all-seeing omnipotent Gods of Christianity. So the Doctor ends up having a showdown with his old headmasters, the ones who told him that he’d never get anywhere with his attitude of facetiousness and flippancy, who has done more good and coped with more serious things and learned more compassion than they will ever understand. In Holmes’ eyes the Doctor’s return home is his ultimate battle because it’s his purest battle, reiterating all the reasons he left his home and all the reasons why he doesn’t belong there anymore. In the context of this series being an ongoing discussion between two different generations watching it together this is the moment when the youngsters come of age and by solving the mystery at the heart of this story when the others can’t see it the Doctor shows why he was ‘right’ and they were ‘wrong’. 

 You and I both know that time and space are relative, dear reader and I can see the argument from both sides. I love Holmes’ other attacks on big faceless constitutions and this story is utterly in keeping with the writer’s other scripts for the series. At the same time, though, it unravels so much of what came before it, much of which was a lot more interesting than what we get here. ‘Assassin’ and all the stories set on Gallifrey that follow feel like slight disappointments compared to the grandeur of the end of ‘The War Games’. One of the big things that kept the momentum of Dr Who running its first decade was the mystery of who exactly the Doctor was and what his background consisted of. Taking that away, puncturing the myth that had built up round the series, while a very Dr Whoy thing to do, is a very un-dramatic thing to do. After all, this story leaves nowhere to go: you can’t have the timelords of ‘The War Games’ back again: one this bubble of perfection is punctured they can never go back to being the same way again and all the re-set buttons in the world won’t repair the damage done here. It’s damaging to the series’ long term future too. Just think how quickly series like ‘Lost’ and ‘Twin Peaks’ unravelled when the big reveals about the core of the series were made and the plots had nowhere to run anymore except round and round in circles. Every time the timelords return after this they feel slightly cheaper and shabbier each time, until by the end of the original series (and their last appearances in ‘The Five Doctors’ and ‘Arc Of Infinity’) they’re not just another race but arguably one of the sillier, duller, easier to defeat ones. Had this story been saved for a big occasion, for an anniversary special or even a series finale they might have gotten away with it, but no – this big sea-change is all rather thrown away, in a story written to pad out the middle of the season. 

 There’s another big change here too: the plot depends on the Doctor being at least sort of telepathic, but he isn’t – at least not by Gallifreyan standards (his grand-daughter Susan in ‘The Sensorites’ is a star pupil and even The master has his moments but the Doctor, not so much). While we’re on the subject of plotholes too how come the timelords, the most intelligent beings in the universe, have never sat down to work out what powers their home-world? They seem shocked when the Doctor points out they use a black hole and The Master has power of it. I know they’re a spectacularly uncurious race but seriously, did no one think to check something as fundamental to their world as this?

 There is one great addition to the Whoniverse at least: the matrix. Some thirty years before the Matrix film franchise made it a thing and the internet made avatars in online dimensions a natural part of scifi land this story was breaking new ground, with ideas that (for once) couldn’t possibly have been dreamed up by Nigel Kneale or H G Wells or Isaac Asimov or Arthur C Clarke or John Wyndham or all the usual inspirations that go into this series. The idea of there being another fake ‘reality’ that’s an ‘illusion’ is very in keeping with the denial with which the timelords run Gallifrey and a very clever concept. It’s also typical that the timelords should use such an open-ended invention for something so boring, treating the matrix as a sort of intergalactic Hansard, as a place to store timelord brains from centuries past and to uphold all the senseless ancient traditions that the timelords have been maintaining for apparently no other reason than because they always did. Basically the matrix is Holmes’ sly dig at the House of (Time) Lords, a place full of ancient voices who haven’t been part of the real world for thousands of years still having final say over the rules being made to represent a changing world (nowadays we Brits are almost fond of the House of Lords, one last barrier between us and some of the wretched self-serving laws the politicians serving in the House of Commons put through to help themselves at our expense, but this is a relatively new feeling – for the most part the Lords was seen as the barrier to getting changes made that needed to be made). After all, the other place that Gallifrey resembles in this story is the House of Commons, deciding on endless laws and regulations by rote and compromise, rather than understanding the heart of what societies – all societies beyond Gallifrey – are like. At one point the Doctor is sentenced to be executed even when he’s been proven innocent, simply because that’s what the law states must happen (and no one has the imagine to see that sometimes it’s for the good of everyone that rules are broken). Holmes hates politicians with a passion (you only need to see ‘The Sunmakers’ for that) and thinks that the idea of a democracy where our representatives can be paid off to make laws and are selected from only a handful of candidates from privileged backgrounds is deeply flawed. In Holmes’ eyes the timelords play everything straight from the book and see all rules as a transgression, labelling The Doctor along with The Master, even though his crimes of ‘interfering’ and breaking rules to help people is so much more understandable than The master’s desire to exterminate whole cultures including his own. All the best scenes in tbis story come from the Doctor pointing something obvious out, the timelords being shocked, then hastily looking through their rulebooks for what to do about it and condemning the Doctor to death anyway because they don’t know what else to do. 

 There’s one particular politician linked to this story though: John J Kennedy. Dr Who’s story had been intertwined with the president’s ever since the first episode, transmitted the day after his assassination, was delayed by news reports (and was repeated the following week based other correct assumption that very few people were in the mood to see it). We don’t learn much about the president assassinated during the course of this story – the hint is that he was another old duffer just like all the rest, on the verge of retirement which makes his murder doubly odd (just as JFK was 3/4s into a largely unpopular term and seen as a mild disappointment in his lifetime, with odds were against his getting re-elected unless something major shifted). In his actions JFK was as Republican as any Democrat president ever was, more likely to uphold constitutions than tear them down. However that’s not how he was viewed. JFK was a good decade or two younger than al his predecessors and looked it too the picture of youthful health (even if he secretly had a chronically bad back that may have cost him his life, given that he was all but tied in place in his presidential limo through his back brace). He understood the camera and appealed to a youth desperate for change at just the right time for the ‘baby boomer’ explosion of the war years to come of age and vote. Despite his great wealth and family contacts was viewed as something of an ‘outsider’, the sort of liberal politicians to make the swinging sixties sing. Actually JFK did precious little his first two years in office and was only just beginning to knock on the door of civil rights when he died (indeed, depending on your theories of what happened in 1963, that might be the exact reason why he died). Now that his term was coming to an end and his poll number were coming to a close JFK had nothing to lose. His rivals were terrified of the changes that might be coming next. A generation and beyond had taken the president to their hearts as a symbol of what could be possible, if not now then in the future. It wasn’t just a president they liked people were mourning for when he was assassinated but hope that anyone would be allowed to change the old ways.

 Which is why so many people openly wondered about the official version, that JFK had been shot by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, a republican who objected to his policies. For a start there weren’t that many policies the right could object to – yet. For another the gunman was young and that just seemed wrong: the young trendy substitute teacher all the pupils like doesn’t get their car egged by their pupils, they get stern lectures from their elder teachers and lectures from their headmaster. There are a number of whacking great holes in the official stories: the dozens of eye and ear witnesses who swear that they heard an extra gunshot that isn’t in the official report, the direction of the shots, the ‘magic bullet’ that defied all known physics by passing through two bodies, the strange direction JFK’s head moved while in the limousine, the fact that Oswald was considered a useless shot with a gun and yet fired off three rounds almost perfectly against a moving target from a distance (just about possible for an experienced marksmen, according to various reconstructions down the years but this was a kid in his twenties who’d only had a gun a couple of years), the odd activity over in the grassy knoll (although I think it much more likely JFK was shot from the bridge, by ‘workmen’ who disappeared immediately afterwards and were never seen again), the odd way that JFK’s body was commandeered by the FBI and given a rushed autopsy and burial against all protocol. Plus of course the fact that Oswald himself said he didn’t do it, that he was a ‘patsy’ who’d defected to Russia because he hated capitalism (though Russia, in turn, seems to have given up on him very quickly) and who had only got his job in the Dallas book store depository a few days before the shooting (with no time to set it up) who other members of staff could vouch for at the time of the shooting , who would tell his story to everyone – who was then conveniently assassinated in turn by Jack Ruby, live on air, a quasi-criminal who shouldn’t even have been in the police station at the time. Knowing there were murmurs the government opened ‘The Warren Commission’, an independent inquiry that spent most of 1964 interviewing eyewitnesses and came to the conclusion Oswald acted alone. Except this made it worse: dozens of eyewitnesses were ignored or said their comments had been twisted, while potential leads were ignored and evidence fudged over. 

 Robert Holmes, foe one, doesn’t believe a word of it. ‘The Deadly Assassin’ bravely puts out beloved Doctor in the role of Lee Harvey Oswald and has him in the ‘wrong’ place at the ‘wrong’ time, investigating why a gun is positioned above a gantry at the president’s head just as a bolt comes from the opposite direction. Of course everyone assumes he did it: the Doctor is a disruptive influence, a force for change in a stable unchanging world. People like that are bound to shoot authority figures. It never occurs to anyone that the Doctor was trying to save the president’s life. Note too the shadowy presence of the CIA, on Gallifrey ‘The Celestial Intervention Agency’ in one of Holmes’ best gags and the quadrangle town square, which is situated exactly like the Dallas plaza where JFK was shot. And the fact that the event is being filmed for television, with the Doctor’s old school friend ‘Runcible the Fatuous’ presenting a live broadcast he cameraman Zapruda who shot the famous JFK footage. All Gallifrey needs is a grassy knoll and it’s a slam dunk. Admittedly the Doctor has been caught with the evidence, but Homes is clearly of the ‘Oswald was brainwashed’ brigade and sets this story up like ‘The Manchruian Candidate’, a 1959 novel by Richard Condon that is cited by many as a way they could have done it, having Oswald hypnotised so that at a certain trigger he pulled his gun trigger and had no memory of it afterwards. And who hates the Doctor enough to pull such a diabolical scheme and even send a summons home to make sure that he returns to Gallifrey just in time? 

The Master. The character hadn’t been seen in Dr Who since fading out at the end of ‘Frontier In Space’ (where problems during the shoot and bad editing means we never quite see where he goes), Roger Delgado’s tragic death in a taxi car crash while location filming for a TV series in Turkey in 1973 robbing us of a planned final showdown the following year. There had been much speculation what had happened to him off-screen (you can read two contradictory semi-official versions in the ‘sequels’ list below) but whatever it was is quite extreme: he’s badly scarred and charred, at the end of his final life. A lot of fans love Peter Pratt’s scheming version and the actor gives a great performance, but for me it’s one of the things this story gets wrong. This is so it’s hinted, the same Master – a Master who never let his revenge and hatred get in the way of his charm. The Doctor, at least, has no recollection of what happened to him (though the ‘other’ versions make it out to be tragic accident or grand-daughter Susan’s fault) which makes The Master’s need for revenge odd: admittedly he’s been playing cat and mouse with the Doctor since their first meeting on-screen in ‘terror Of the Autons’, but a lot of the time it’s to prove a point and show The Master is his superior. This is the one story where the Doctor positively absolutely wants the Doctor to die horribly, in a disgraced timelord execution, rather than simply beat him and mess up his favourite planet. There’s nothing of the Delgado Master left, which makes this an odd sort of tribute and seems so at odds with the character know and love they might as well have made up a whole new villain. Plus having an actor disfigured and burnt, just three years after this happened to Delgado for real, seems rather crass and tasteless. After all, this isn’t an entirely new production team who just didn’t get it: Holmes was the actor’s good friend. Pratt does incredibly well given that he can only use his voice and how far this story was out of his usual comfort zone (he was a star in the Gilbert and Sullivan world of operettas and had never done scifi before – unbeknown to him the microphone in the studio picked up all his mutterings between takes and he really suffered, moaning nearly constantly about the heavy costume for hours, heard only by technicians!), but his costume’s lousy as well as being uncomfortable and impractical (the original plan was much better, to have phials of fluid circling his body to make him look as if he was only alive through sheer stubbornness, but they didn’t show up under camera lights so were taken out, leaving just what looks like a sack cloth and golfball eyes). 

 What we have then, is a story that’s the epitome of a curate’s (Slitheen) egg: parts are delicious and other parts make no sense at all. The first episode, when the Doctor appears to have gone rogue but has no memory of it, is a great plot, making the Doctor an instant outsider again just as his home world seems to have welcomed him back. Episode two and four are good too, but kind of vamping waiting for the plot to kick back in. The biggest casualty is the matrix runaround which is episode three. A lot of fans will tell you this is the single most ground-breaking episode of Dr Who, with two actors, one of them dressed in a mask and almost no dialogue stalking each other across the Matrix (and if the matrix is the ‘internet’ then he’s very much a troll!) It’s meant to be a surreal nightmarish world where the usual rules don’t apply (in contrast to Gallifrey where every rule is applied, in triplicate) that’s based on every nightmare scenario Holmes could think of: samurai swords, gas masks, clowns, injections, biplanes, trains and water. It’s meant to be creepy, as an assassin in disguise stalks the Doctor, trying to shoot him, drown him and run him over with a train, even though all these things seem oddly 20th century earthbound for a race with all of time and space to play with, without speaking a word (there are less lines in this episode than any other one in Dr Who). At times it looks ridiculous, like a bad parody of The Prisoner and it’s symbolism, although I also know more than a few fans now who also say it was the single most disturbing image of their childhood, especially the cliffhanger where the Doctor’s head is held underwater, a rare bit of peril in Dr Who that could actually be copied by uncomprehending children at home (that’s the difference between having to wait a week between episodes and waiting a minute for the next episode on video I guess; I don’t often agree with Mary Whitehouse on censorship – in fact I never agree with Mary Whitehouse on censorship, given that she completely misunderstands that being frightened by something fictional on a TV you can turn off while surrounded by family or friends is a whole different experience to something in life you have no control over – but she may have had a point this once. The fuss was so big the BBC even took steps to edit the master-tape itself, the transmitted version of which only exists on the DVDs thanks to fan Ian Levine, who’d taped a personal copy at great expense, while it’s a big catalyst in the removal of producer Phillip Hinchcliffe- ratings wise the most consistently popular producer the series ever had - onto ‘Target’, a new crime drama project more suitable to an adult audience). 

Usually Dr Who being bold and daring makes for some of my favourite episodes and so should this one on paper, but this one just doesn’t work. There’s no logical reason at all why a matrix on Gallifrey should be filled with so many 20th century Earth designs, not one of the threats is actually that scary, there’s been no build up to this episode like the Doctor admitting he has a phobia of clowns or injections and they even re-create this impossible world in the most boring of laces, a quarry, the likes of which we’ve seen so many times before (at 19 minutes 43 seconds this episode has the most location filming of any 20th century story and it’s all sodding quarries!) It’s hardly a surprise that the assassin in a mask turns out to be Chancellor Goth as no other actor looks like the distinctive Bernard Horsfall and it’s pretty obvious who the cagey timelord is He also happened to play a timelord in ‘The War Games’, omnipotent and all-seeing and one of the most memorable guest parts in the series, so it’s a shame to see him, too, reduced to being just another zealous villain type (although, admittedly, not necessarily as the same character: it seems to have been a coincidence he was cast again and we know now how timelords can pinch each other’s faces. Certainly he doesn’t behave the same at all). It just doesn’t work: he’s not that kind of a rough and tumble actor and he’s best at playing coldly stern, not Master-like passionate villains. Robbing the Doctor of his words, for the most part, also removes him of his best features. And then there’s a big re-set button in episode four when the Doctor escapes anyway, which coupled with the lack of dialogue makes it look as if Holmes just couldn’t find enough material in the main plot to fill four episodes and couldn’t think up his usual witty dialogue so just wrote some stage directions and put his feet up. Far from being a surreal masterpiece the result is one of the biggest, most pointless wastes of time in the series. If I wanted to see Tom Baker wildly improvising during a pointless run-around in an exotic location I’d watch Fort Boyard! 

One of the reasons I think Holmes wrote this episode as filler was because he wrote himself out of the usual chance to do the usual ‘companion’ sub-plot. One of the reason his story was written was because Tom Baker was making demands of who his companion should or shouldn’t be and after making suggestions that would have been fun but dramatically were bit of a non-starter were constantly rejected (a talking cabbage that sat on his shoulder, a snaggle-toothed street urchin who never spoke, Miriam Margoyles playing an overweight character who needed to sit down every few yards - did I mention in real life Tom Baker is as mad as a box of Urbankan space frogs?) decided that the show would be better off if there was no companion at all. Holmes wrote this story mostly to show Tom that he was wrong – and yet, if anything, this story proves him right. This is a Doctor whose always talked to himself with or without anyone there so at first it makes no discernible difference; while it’s hard to imagine another Doctor flying solo it suits the 4th Doctor, perhaps the most ‘outsider’ regeneration of the whole lot so far. Tom Baker is masterful in the part and you can’t take your eyes off him, running rings around his elders and supposed betters and reverting back to being a naughty child, sneakily drawing pictures of his old teachers during his second ‘trial’ and thumbing his nose at the petty laws and regulations every chance he gets. Baker even sounds natural reading out the extraordinary opening ‘scroll’, complete with dialogue on the screen that ‘Star Wars’ pinched entirely for the first film the following year but which was done for here first, despite being nothing like anything else the series had ever done before (and won’t again until the ‘TV Movie’ twenty years later). This sets rather a daft precedent. I mean, who is the Doctor talking to exactly? Himself? Us? Is he making a record for the matrix? This is never explained and the episode doesn’t gain anything by this voiceover that a pre-credits clip of waving Sarah Jane goodbye couldn’t have done better, breaking the fourth wall in a far more needless way than the much criticised festive moment in ‘The Daleks’ Masterplan’ (which is at least in en episode where all sorts of weird things are happening – this one’s meant to be serious). It’s great though, after so many stories where the Doctor stands up for the little guy, basically stand up for himself against the greatest tyrants he’s ever faced, his own people. After all, last time things got too much for him he fled – this time he stays and stands his ground. For all the plotholes and contradictions and changes to history it’s Tom’s performances that papers over the cracks and keeps you watching, in what might well be his greatest season of performances as the Doctor. 

 The setting too does a lot of the good work of this story and looks fabulous. We might not get to see any more of this world than the single courtroom and prison cell we saw in ‘The War Games’ but this feels more like a world and less like a stage set. The panoptican – named after the prison design where guards could see prisoners but prisoners couldn’t see guards andf thus never knew when they were under surveillance or not – looks gorgeous, one of Who’s biggest sets with maybe a hundreds extras milling around, all in colourful ceremonial robes that look both old school early and alien. A lot of the distinctive designs we associate with Gallifrey start here and there’s a reason they made so much impact: everything looks exactly the way it should, a cross between parliamentary costume, school uniform and alien-ness. It’s a shame, though, that almost the first thing the Doctor does when he walks out of the Tardis is take up a disguise: thematically it would have been great if he’d kept his bohemian anti-costume, a riot of stripy colour in a world full of rigid unchanging hues, better representing the chaos he signified to this rigid world. Then again, some of what we get on screen is pretty risible: the big surreal journey into the matrix, for instance, is obviously Dr Who’s current opening credits sequence with the writing removed (they don’t even use one of the Pertwee opening sequences that would fit the idea of passing through a barrier far better than the ‘tunnel’ one and must have still been in a corridor somewhere).The bodies of The master’s victims, shrunk with the tissue compression eliminator, are clearly Action Man dolls that look nothing like the actors they’re meant to convey. Also, I still can’t quite tell if it’s a moment of spectacularly poor budgeting or a comedy moment of absolute genius that the timelords simply chalk round the dead president’s body as if they’re in a cop show. Possibly it’s both. 

The result, then, is a story that looks amazing and takes a lot of big risks, with some great performances that allows the production team to just about get away with it: George Pravda, for instance, shines as Captain Spandrell, the only ‘teacher’ imaginative enough to start believing the Doctor’s world and Eric Chitty is delightful as co-ordinator Engin (dotty Professor Price from ‘Please Sir!’), well meaning but impossibly old and senile but put in charge of the world’s latest technology (a recipe for disaster!) There are little nuggets of Holmesian dialogue magic sprinkled throughout, such as the Doctor’s protest that ‘vapourisation without representation is against the constitution!’, which scholars of 18th century laws will recognise (though sadly they cut what would have been my favourite gag, a fake credit that thanks ‘The High Court of Time Lords and the Keeper Of the Records, Gallifrey for their help and cooperation’, dropped because it seemed too facetious – as if that’s a bad thing as the Doctor shows!) 

Having the Doctor run amok amongst his own people and bring them down to size feels ‘right’ in so many ways, the only person who can save his people because he’s the only one who doesn’t think the way they do and can see outside this tiny world’s borders (travelling really does broaden the mind). But in other ways it doesn’t at all: removing the mystery of the timelords removes a lot of their impact, having this long-awaited journey to the Doctor’s home planet we thought we would never see ends up being a big letdown when it turns out Gallifrey is just like every other squabbling lesser planet we see in the series and the amount of padding and poking around waiting for ideas makes this Homes’ weakest script in so many ways. Worse yet, it undoes a lot of the best moments of past Dr Who stories that set Gallifrey up to be something special. This story isn’t special, it’s ordinary, with moments of greatness but nothing that important to say and no great joy in the way it says it (the ending is the worst bit of all, the Doctor only briefly patted on the head and thanked before he runs off again, with no sense that the timelords of this broken society can now see through the cracks and acknowledge what they got wrong. Making The Doctor into the president and having him run away all over again isn’t right either – if anything they’ve learned why having one single person in charge who can be corrupted and/or assassinated is not really democracy. As much as we’re told this is the biggest most monumental moment in the history of the timelords, ultimately all the future stories will show that nothing on Gallifrey fundamentally changes, just as a the assassination of JFK didn’t actually change anything much at all constitutionally. Given Gallifrey’s long great history this event is a footnote at best, remembered by this generation of regenerations maybe but no others.I still think that ‘Invasion Of Time’ does a much better job all round of portraying timelord society and a lot of the love ‘Assassin’ gets for inventing Gallifreyan folklore really belongs to that much misunderstood and unloved set of episodes. This is a badly flawed idea in other words, one that they should never have tried. For all it’s ‘wrong’ though it’s well made wrong. Unlike some other adventures like ‘Voyage Of The Damned’ and ‘The Dominators’ I can at least see why so many fans would love it. This is the peak of who as a natural storytelling vehicle when all the pieces are in place: a great storyteller, a producer with a vision, the actor at top of his fame, best sets, best costumes, best ideas. Scary and funny, serious and silly, the balance is right all the way through. It’s the thing that’s being balanced that isn’t. The very beginning of this story and bits elsewhere really are everything people say this story is and worth re-arranging history for, I just wish the rest of this story could match it. Honestly, as much as ‘Assassin’s reputation has grown high sky in the past forty years, the fans who shot it down the first time round were ‘right’. 

 POSITIVES + Until now the Doctor, especially the 4th one, has seemed pretty invulnerable. This is the first time for a long time it feels as if he’s ‘lost’ and the moment at the end of episode one, when it looks as if The Master has gained the upper hand and framed him, with no obvious way out of execution, with even the evidence of our own eyes telling us the Doctor is wrong ‘un. just as we work out who he is, is a classic cliffhanger and one of the best in the show’s long history. If only the rest of the story had been up to this standard, instead of the Doctor coming up with some law to get a stay of execution and falling into a matrix. 

 NEGATIVES - I’m not the first fan to point out how stupid the title is. I mean, it’s kind of hard to find an assassin that isn’t deadly when you think about it! Holmes said that he thought he could get away with it on the understanding that some assassins are really bad at their job and thus not deadly at all! (his working title was ‘The Dangerous Assassin’. Which is even sillier). BEST 

QUOTE: ‘If heroes don’t exist it is necessary to invent them’ 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Ever wondered how The Master ended up the decrepit husk he is in this story and what happened since the events of Frontier In Space’? So have a lot of Dr Who writers and there are various, often contradictory, versions kicking about: ‘Legacy Of the Daleks’ (1998) has author John Peel turning Susan into a kick-ass companion, although it’s actually an 8th Doctor book. Taken as his hostage during the course of the book (which is really more of a Dalek story), she wires up the Master’s Tardis when he’s not looking so it can tune into her telepathic circuits, letting out a shrike that incapacitates him. Staggering blindly out onto the surface of the nearest planet, Terserus (where chancellor Goth is said to have discovered him – Steven Moffat recycles the planet for comedy sketch ‘The Curse Of Fatal Death’ in 1999), he ends up poetically killed in an explosion that was set up by the 8th Doctor to wipe out the Daleks – hence why he so desires revenge on the Doctor even though, by all accounts, the Doctor’s a bit clueless as to what he did. 

 Not every fan was convinced by that, so BBC Books had a second go with ‘Last Of The Gaderene’ (2000), part of the ‘past Doctor’ range that featured one last showdown between The Delgado Master, the 3rd Doctor and Jo following the events of ‘Frontier In Space’. An early work by Mark Gatiss before he joined the ‘comeback’ series writing team, it has The Master cheekily opening a fete near Unit HQ under his latest nom de plume Le Maitre, a senior policeman from Scotland Yard whose helping a giant space worm (amazing how many of these there are in the books and audios) known as the Gaderene take over the planet. Only, of course, it goes wrong. The Doctor and The Master have to team up to stop it, The master being caught in the Doctor’s ‘dimensional transference’ beam and being badly wounded. No wonder he’s so keen on revenge, then, although it is an accident. No explanation for how he ended up on Terserus though. 

 Big Finish had a third go in 2016 with their 7th Doctor tale ‘The Two Masters’ (#213 in the main range), which is the conclusion of a master trilogy. Geoffrey Beevers plays the emaciated versions (he was the ‘Melkur’ version in ‘The Keeper Of Traken’) while Alex McIntosh, the ‘Big Finish’ Master when Beevers isn’t available, turns up too both of them on Terserus again. It’s a little like ‘World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls’ with the John Simm Master and Missy the following year but is even more daring, portraying everything from The Master’s viewpoint so that the Doctor is mostly noises off, always interfering with is grand schemes (which sound quite sane to him). The Masters are just as up themselves though, but not without some Doctor-style bickering (such as the debate as to whether it’s right or wrong to deliver a bad pun whole executing someone!) 

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