Battlefield: Ranking - 175

  Battlefield

(Season 26, Dr 7 with Ace and The Brigadier, 6-27/9/1989, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Andrew Cartmel, writer: Ben Aaronovitch, director: Michael Kerrigan) 

Rank: 175

In an emoji: ⚔

'Each week in 1989, September to September

Doctor Who gave us a story to sit back and remember

Of Camelot

Or not!

Ask every person if they've heard the story, 

When Ace was Ace and Brigadiers brigged

When everyone beat Morgaine by doing the things they did

Of the Doctor and his question mark umbrella

Destroying the destroyer and that other fella,

It really is quite a story

Ending with a fleeting wisp of glory

Or not!

Though the weakest of the four

At least in terms of plot

Remember that at the end, for one brief shining season

Once again Doctor Who was hot!'

There’s a difference, I think, between when a ‘good’ production team gets a story ‘wrong’ and when a ‘bad’ production team gets something ‘wrong’. Something like ‘Timeless Children’ ‘The TV Movie’ or ‘Time and The Rani’ are a series of concepts that were never going to work in a month of Saturday tea-times, but a story like ‘Battlefield’ is a number of near misses where you can see what everyone was shooting at, even when none of those arrows come close to hitting their target. On paper this story is a mess: there are so many plots going on yet none of them quite meet up, there’s characters who come and go, plot points hammered home with all the subtlety of a pistol in a swordfight and there’s some fudged notion that The Doctor is ‘more than just a timelord’ and spent a lifetime as Merlin in Ancient Britain that comes out of left field, isn’t explained and really doesn’t fit with anything else we’ve ever been told (this story ha a lot more in common with ‘the Timeless Child’ than most fans accept, although at least has the decency to hint that our missing gaps in knowledge come from the Doctor’s future not the past we’ve seen). This is the closest Dr Who has ever come to swapping scifi for fantasy and while the ever-elastic format ought to have at least one swords ‘n’ sorcery tale in there somewhere it’s not the most comfortable of fits (although it makes much more sense in the wake of ‘Merlin’, the under-rated BBC drama that came the closest to any filling in the Saturday family viewing audience of the new-Who slot which featured many Who alumni including our ‘discovery’ Colin ‘Jethro In Midnight’ Morgan and John ‘The War Doctor’ Hurt stealing scenes as a grumpy dragon). You only need to look at the last time Nicholas Courtney and Jean Marsh were in a Dr Who story together (‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’) to see how far this show has fallen in 23 years, where the former brother and sister Bret Vyon and Sara Kingdom, both killed in a dark and powerful epic story that did something new every week, now stand around and gurn a bit while stuff happens around them not to them. The Brigadier’s return after six years away is wasted, ‘The Destroyer’ this week’s big bad being behind all this turns up at the very end for a few minutes cameo and the link to King Arthur is skirted around rather than explained (besides this is all filmed in the wrong place: Camelot was Carlisle in all the earliest legends and poems, most of them French, before the Cornish tourist board got busy, so I’m even more puzzled Clara and the Doctor hate it in ‘Hide’ with all that history). No it really doesn’t work and the viewing public stayed away in droves, with part one getting the lowest viewing figures of the entire original run of Who (3.1million), a low only beaten in all the years since by the 2.2million that sat through ‘Legend Of the Sea Devils’, although admittedly that was partly because most people didn’t even know the show was back on; even the ever loyal Radio Times only plugged it on the children’s page and the show had long ago stopped being for children. Erm, me excepted). The few people who did tune into John Nathan-Turner’s last season opener just saw a most creaky opening scene with two old dears hobbling round a garden centre (showing that he hadn’t learnt all that much from his first, a two minute panoramic shot of deckchairs in ‘The Leisure Hive’). 

 And yet…I have a real fondness for this story that goes beyond anything that actually made it on screen. The idea behind this story is lovely and – though nobody making this story would have had anything but the slightest inkling at the time – this is the perfect story to start our four-story long goodbye with. There’s a sad air of a changing of the guard to this story, the feeling that no matter how many battles you fight and win time gets everyone in the end, even in a series about change and regeneration, perfect for the funeral air of a show in its last days. Writer Ben Aaronovitch, whose the closest Dr Who had to a breakout writing star who went on to better things after the series ended (as opposed to other brilliant star writers who all but ended their careers with the series) had submitted this story as his first go for a story, before script editor Andrew Cartmel needed someone to write ‘Remembrance Of the Daleks’ at pretty much the last minute. ‘Battlefield’ was a natural re-submission given how well ‘remembrance’ had gone down with fans, but it makes more sense as Ben’s first go for the series. He had been a huge fan of Dr Who in the UNIT era of the early 1970s but had lost touch with it and was surprised when his agent suggested submitting a script to the Who production team: he thought the series had gone off the air decades ago. Andrew Cartmel was, of all the many script editors down the years, the one keenest on hiring new talent and loved Ben’s sample work so sent him a bunch of videos to work from, one of which happened to be ‘Mawdryn Undead’. Aaronovitch was horrified by what that story had done to his favourite character, The Brigadier, reducing him from being in charge of the most important military patrol in Britain to a forgotten and fading teacher at a boys’ school (to be fair Cartmel didn’t know when he sent the tape out but he was a last minute replacement for Ian Chesterton, who dropped out so late in the day they didn’t have time to change much).

 Aaronovitch’s first draft, with the far more memorable and Whoy title ‘Storm Over Avallion ’, was a story that can’t quite believe this show is still going, a dark story about ageing and lost opportunities, leaning on that famous Neil Young phrase ‘is it better to burn out than it is to rust? and about a fading UNIT facing a centuries-old battle when an ever-youthful Doctor turns up to help one last time. Realising that Nicholas Courtney was available (actually he wasn’t but he loved this show so much he cancelled a production of ‘Madame Butterfly’ in the West End built round him as the star to make this) The Brigadier got added into a second draft to give the story more of a ‘face’ and aiming to give him a better farewell than ‘Mawdryn’. By now the Brigadier is retired and happy, having settled down with wife Doris (a second tape Ben came away with was ‘Planet Of the Spiders’ where she gets a single throwaway line – which confused Courtney, who’d long considered her a joke about the brig having a ‘bit on the side’) but with that fire still burning inside him waiting for one last battle. But he’s not fully retired: he might tell Geneva to get lost because he’s too busy ‘enjoying’ retirement, but he still has his uniform and his revolver and perks up greatly when he hears the Doctor’s name mentioned. In the original second draft the battlefield isn’t so much between UNIT soldiers and the aliens of the round table but between his two characters: the retired soldier whose done his duty and wants a stable but happy life and the man who never grew old and has been restless without the sense of adventure in his life. It’s much more like Amy’s character arc in series 4-6: is she better off as a domesticated wife with extras and various responsibilities as an adult or travelling in the Tardis as a big kid? The contrast with the Doctor, whose never had to retire or grow old and who keeps changing his face and regenerating every time he gets close to getting old, would have made the contrast between the two even more striking. And then in this second draft. The Brigadier pays for his bloodlust and refusal to give up his old ways even after they gave him by dying, in one last heroic sacrifice to save the Doctor’s life. Courtney was up for it (he sensed this might be his last appearance in a show the BBC seemed to be trying to kill) and everyone was keen to make this a great last battle, but then JNT got cold feet about the backlash of killing off a beloved character and the whole gist of the story got toned down. 

 That’s a real shame. Not just because what we got in the foreground instead is a lot of silly medieval imagery and that daft sub-plot about the Doctor being Merlin from the future/parallel world (now we’ve had the biregeneration it’s much much easier to make sense of this plotline: it must be another 7th Doctor who woke up in the San Francisco morgue in 1999 and had their brain scrambled by the cold, setting off to have all-new adventures or maybe one of the others who came later?) But because the bits of the plot left in by that change are the best things here. There’s the constant theme of archaeology, of digging up a past that’s best left buried in a series that’s always worked best when it’s looked forward not back, of how what’s left behind in the ground or in memories is a pale shadow of what it once was. No one personifies that more than The Brigadier was always old school, even in the 1970s (or whenever the hell the UNIT stories are set, a confusion they keep going in this story: note that beer costs £5 in whatever year this is and doesn’t even cost that now). But now he has to cope with seeing his replacement is a black woman who has very different ‘modern’ ideas to him. You can feel his stiff upper lip wobble, even though he’s too much of a gentleman (and too open-minded after his run-in with the Doctor) to say anything (I bet his parallel world self from the ‘Inferno’ world would have been furious, though, if their Professor Stahlmann hadn’t blown them all up first). His bust–up comes with Ace whose everything he isn’t: young, undisciplined, bolshie, a woman who knows her own mind and I not only happy to flout authority but considers it the most important thing she could be doing. A lot of the best scenes of this story are Nicholas Courtney and Sophie Aldred squaring off against each other, before coming to the inevitable conclusion that they have a lot more similarities than differences; they both love an adventurous life, are both courageous to an extreme and both would give up their lives for the Doctor in a heartbeat. The real crux of this story isn’t anything to do with Excalibur or Camelot, it’s the moment the Brigadier retires (again) praising Ace that he knows now that the Doctor is in safe hands, having also found common ground with Brigadier Bambera and returned to prune his roses. Even if the story is crying out for that sacrifice, it’s still a strong ending for one of Who’s most beloved characters (give or take a very final appearance in The Sarah Jane Adventures which was set to become a regular role before the actor grew too ill and a truly wretched one where his corpse turns into a Cybermen and makes another last sacrifice in ‘Death In Heaven’). 

 Elsewhere ‘Battlefield’ is, well, it’s different that’s for sure (even if, again, it borrows heavily from Quatermass: the writer’s jokey working title was ‘Quatermass and the Lake’). This story feels the closest Dr Who ever came to putting one of its comic strips on TV (note that I wrote this when ‘The Star Beast’ was just a rumour!) perhaps no surprise that Marvel comic strips were one of the influences Cartmel and Aaronovitch bonded over, during informal writing sessions in the script editor’s back garden (there’s an X-Men series called ‘Excalibur’ that’s basically the super heroes as UNIT, defending a present-day Earth invaded by mythological creatures from yesteryear). Comics don’t care as much for reality or canonology by and large, they just want to tell a bright bold colourful and often impossible story and that’s what this one does, based on a far-fetched premise (the Doctor is Merlin?) told in big dramatic set pieces and epic battles that’s too bold to ever have worked fully on TV with a BBC budget (you can tell that this story is a sort of folklore memory of UNIT rather than based on one of the actual UNIT stories themselves, back in the days when there were only a few Who videos on sale to the public, because none of them looked anything like this except in memory or in novelisations). Yet this is also one of those rare Dr Whos where it doesn’t matter so much how nonsensical the plot is because it’s not trying to be realistic. This is the ‘near’ future, where the Doctor carries strange alien coins to pay for his drinks, where people dressed in armour carry swords and where the only ‘root’ to normality the entire story is the Doctor planting flowers. Indeed, when this story does start trying to be at least vaguely realistic (in a number of half-hearted battle sequences) it comes the most unstuck. ‘Battlefield’ is meant to be a sort of crazy dream, where UNIT is now so old it’s become a sort of myth itself told as a legend rather than a bit of continuity. 

Not least because it’s a story that’s less black and white than usual, with everyone trying to do what they think is right and getting on each other’s toes by accident not design. The soldiers follow orders, on both sides of the magical realm even though nobody really knows what’s going on (even the Doctor this week, who falls into his own booby-trap at one stage). Note, though, that the people who get on best in this story are those who adapt to the situation. The Brigadier has respect for his replacement not because he becomes any more used to her but because she does what he used to do – listen then make a decision based on the best thing for everybody. Ace is at her best when both working off her own initiative and listening to the warnings of the Doctor. Even Morgaine isn’t your 100% villain: she pays for her drink in the pub with a rare moment of kindness that utterly makes the character, restoring the pub landlord’s blind wife’s sight. As for the Doctor, he’s the way he always used to be, in the middle, sympathising with both sides the way he always used to, UNIT’s conscience more than their scientific advisor seeing things from a bigger perspective. Even The Destroyer is just doing what gigantic creatures of incredible natural powers are born to do, nothing personal planet Earth. If there’s anyone you can’t quite trust or pin down its the Doctor, even though we’ve known him so well or for so long an idea that works really well and breathes new life into Who’s final year. Mostly, though, UNIT don’t belong in the world as it is in 1989 because we’re not in that sort of a world anymore of point-and-shoot to solve all our problems. You can’t have a normal everyday UNIT story in 1989 Who any more than Hartnell would have lasted more than 5 minutes stuck on earth with only the Brigadier for company. The world has moved on. Even if some of the people in it haven’t. 

 And even if some of the people haven’t moved on to what they will be yet and what they will be comes a surprise. Though they’ve played it up before it’s this story where the ‘Cartmel Masterplan’ of gradually revealing more about the Doctor’s origins most take flight: Sylvester McCoy is mercurial throughout, switching allegiances at the drop of an umbrella and playing for bigger stakes than anyone else can see. He’s come a long way from the clown of his first year and really comes into his own across this story, playing the part in a way no one envisioned when he first got the part, least of all himself based on his fairground background, but which suits him to a tee. As with ‘Remembrance’ Aaronovitch really gets the 7th Doctor better than most: he’s elusive, evasive and distant, yet also warm-hearted and brave, visibly confused for most of this story but never allowing himself to lose control. Ancelyn, meanwhile, gets forgotten but he’s an intriguing character, a rare character (a first character?) who knows more about the Doctor than he himself does (something tells me Steven Moffat was a big fan of this story as he borrows from its fairytale feel and idea that a future Doctor can leave his younger self clues heavily during his time as showrunner!) There are no less than four really strong female characters walking round too, with four very different takes on women’s lib unusual for a story that’s otherwise so macho and army-heavy (so much so that JNT joked about changing one of them into a man!) None more so than Bambera, the kind of tough streetwise no nonsense but fair 1990s career woman whose as suspicious of The Brig’s very 1970s attitudes as he is of hers. She’s cold and harsh and has become masculine to compete in a man’s world. Then there’s Morgaine, a timeless being who really isn’t fair at all and makes men quake back in her century, err whenever that is (Jean Marsh plays her as Cruella De Vil with armour, a villainess whose so used to getting her own way it hasn’t even occurred to her someone might say no to her). Then there’s Ace, streetwise, streetsmart, so different to the companions of old (just check out the contrast of her using Liz Shaw’s old UNIT pass in the first episode where she ‘pretends’ to ask the sort of questions her predecessor did and quickly ends up in a discussion about blowing things up, blowing their cover at the same time). Back in the 1970s, as strong as many of the companions were, the 3rd Doctor saw it as his duty to keep an eye on them and rescue them as a matter of course; for Ace protecting the Doctor is her ‘job’ in these adventures, getting on with the destruction while her beloved professor does the thinking. And then there’s Shou Yuing who gets roped into this story after sharing drinks and a giggle with Ace down the pub: she’s a woman to Ace’s teenage girl, less triggered, more adult (she has alcohol while Ace is on lemonade), standing up to everything that comes her way with bravery of her own but without the same love of destruction and making people scared of her. She doesn’t need to be tough or masculine or scary. A lot of fans ask why she’s even there, given that even the writer admitted he had one too many characters to juggle in this story, but I for one am glad she is: she’s where every other female character else in this story wants to be, comfortable in her own skin instead of looking over her shoulder the whole time. Had she ended up on the Tardis in some parallel dimension, as the calmer level-headed Nyssa to Ace’s boisterous Tegan, I’d have been more than happy with that. Contrast all this with Doris, whose the archetypical prim and proper ‘silent generation’ wife, fussing over her husband and disagreeing with him but not willing to stand up to him and supporting him wherever. 

There’s another, all too brief sub-plot too, about nuclear missiles, making this Dr Who’s last in a long long line of anti-Cold war stories. The production team weren’t to know that Communism was on its last legs and the Berlin would fall less than a month after this story went out, so we have one last great bit of riffing about how a stupid it is for two superpowers to be in a stalemate holding weapons that can destroy the earth over each other. Especially in a story where magic people from another land can just swan in and abuse them, with a destroyer who turns up at the end who can destroy everything without such desperate measures. The nuclear missiles are painted as a relic from a distant past that humanity shouldn’t have in this day and age, as archaic and out of touch as the Brigadier. 

 Those are all strong ideas – alas what we get on screen is mostly people running around not that convincingly, while we get some cringeworthy ‘magic’ shots of Camelot extras running around fighting soldiers. It’s not exactly ‘The War Games’: Dr Who works best when it’s a case of the ordinary world coming against the extraordinary one of space, but adding a second extraordinary world of magic feels at odds with what this series usually does. Not least because stories like ‘The Daemons’ went out their way to explain that ‘magic’ doesn’t really exist. Had they used it right this world of myths and legends turning ‘real’ with a scifi explanation this could have potentially been one of Who’s most interesting settings (and I so want a proper dragon in DW!) Alas they don’t use it right: this is every cliché under the sun and there’s no real reason given for why this world has suddenly broke into ours (yes the Doctor gets an SOS but why does this incarnation who hasn’t got a clue what’s going on pick it up now? The Tardis must have a filter for this sort of thing or it would be getting stray messages all the time and it’s a cheat as a story starting point). It looks like cheap children’s telly, just when the big themes at the heart of these stories are getting more and more adult (I mean, a polemic about ageing in a children’s programme on a Saturday teatime?! What other series would even think of trying this?) There are some really silly scenes here that keep piling up and getting in the way of what the story should be telling us: Ace’s hand coming out the lake clutching Excalibur (like the legends in reverse), the sword in the stone flying across a pub and ending up embedded into the wall, every time one of our greatest and most respected actresses Jean Marsh is asked to cackle like a witch, the ‘magic’ chalk circle that keeps the bad guys away (of all the scenes for Russell T to revive in the 60th anniversary stories…) As integral as the Camelot stuff might seem to this story, as much as it’s meant to run in parallel to the long-running history of Dr Who, the immortal traditions and age-old tales against which England became England even though the people who live today age and die without really thinking about them, ultimately it’s just window dressing when you unravel it, a gimmick that feels out of place in a story about the realities of life catching up with you; it would have been better still as a more ordinary story about a more ordinary alien threat and spending more time seeing how the Brigadier and UNIT cope with the usual kind of threat in a more unusual timezone. Oh and it’s all more than a bit slow: surprisingly so for a story with so many characters and so many battle sequences (of all the old templates from the 1970s UNIT stories to borrow the ‘we need to fill an extra episode so let’s pad the script out with nonsense until the characters meet up together and it can get moving again’ wasn’t the one I wanted to see back again, especially in an era when so many other more deserving stories got shrunk to three parts).

 Of course ‘Battlefield’ is mostly remembered for a scene that was a bit too real for comfort. There’s a cliffhanger at the end of episode two where Ace has walked into a booby-trap and finds herself trapped inside a glass tank when water fills inside. During recording the glass buckled and Sylvester McCoy (who was nearest) saw it and screamed at the stagehands to pull her up before it cracked and exploded, before urging the cast and crew to leg it to safety (this being a typical TV recording studio there was no end of cables on the floor; that’s genuine footage of this you can see in the story, of Sophie Aldred being hauled up by her armpits, because they weren’t going to risk this take again). It turns out that it was a bit of a miscommunication between the production office and the contractors hired to build the tank: they hadn’t known that it was actually going to be filled with so much water and hadn’t made the glass strong enough for the extra weight; for years this clip was used in BBC training videos about ‘what not to do’ in scenes involving water and cables. It could have been nasty all round; luckily no one was hurt. How perfect that it should be in this show that the Doctor becomes a ‘hero’ for real (although I guess it would have been even more fitting if it was Nicholas Courtney – who wasn’t in this scene). 

 That’s a near calamity in a story that otherwise falls just the wrong side of it. There’s just too much going on in a plot that seems silly until you dig deep (like all good archaeologists) and has too many characters running round doing ‘magical’ and unlikely things. And yet, underneath, there’s treasure, with this story only a re-write or too from greatness rather than one that’s out-and-out hopeless. There’s an altogether too much of a copout ending too: Morgaine is effectively given a life sentence in prison: erm, how’s that going to work exactly? She’s practically immortal! The meek way she just gives in to it suggests that, like The master, she’s already plotting her escape and yet The Doctor lets her, most odd. There are just too many things like this that get in the way to let this story soar. Had these characters properly met in battle, had Morgaine had more of a showdown with The Doctor, had there been any true explanation as to what was going on in the days of King Arthur beyond a scifi-bow and Excalibur, had everyone had more faith in The Destroyer than hiding it away at the end for a few minutes where traditionally only the worst Dr Who monsters go, had the Brigadier sacrificed himself for the Doctor and asked Ace to look after him then this could have been one of the best things Dr Who ever ever did, with real people facing real obstacles in a supernatural setting that shows how mysterious the universe is beyond the everyday. Especially when tied in with the bits this story gets oh so right: the Brigadier being the same in a changed world where even his best friend has a new face and us surrounding himself with a different sort of companion, where time distorts the truth into myths and legends so they’re easier to deal with than the harsh and disappointing realities of life, that we’re seeing the aftermath of a battle that’s often the cause of more hurt and suffering than the battle itself. Not to mention that fine cast with Nicholas Courtney, Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred all as great as ever and Jean Marsh gamely trying to be despite the lines she’s been given to say. This is a much much much better send off for the brigadier than ‘Mawdryn Undead’ or ‘the Five Doctors’ would have been, as he gets a lot of screentime and sounds much more like his old self, even if this is actually one of the worst stories he actually appeared in all the other ways (‘Mawdryn’ is just a tad lower at #198 in my ranking, otherwise it’s ‘Claws Of Axos’ at #152). Alas when the war is over and the final toll is taken ‘Battlefield’ is a list of good points that just miss, a plot that doesn’t quite meet up and weakened by the pantomime aspects that never should have been allowed in, a battle if you will between everything that was good and evil in the series in 1989. No ‘Battlefield’ doesn’t quite work, but the emphasis there is on the word ‘quite’ not the ‘no’ and, honestly, compared to where we were even two seasons ago that’s a huge step forward. The final season of ‘classic’ Who will only get better from here too…

 POSITIVES + The Destroyer Of Worlds mask is one of the best of the pre-CGI era, a triumph for the prosthetics department and a rare Dr Who monster that comes in a shade of blue (traditionally the colour that was hardest to do in the ‘old’ days when it was the colour that was easiest to mask out using the colour-separation-overlay technique common from the 1970s up until the mid 1990s that swapped one ‘picture’ for elements of another. The destroyer was immune to this purely because it was an actor wearing a mask without any other technical jiggery-pokery. It’s not just how it looks though but how it acts: unlike some other aliens that don’t quite cut the mustard in the 1980s this one really does feel like an all-powerful creation that can destroy humanity without a single thought. Even if he doesn’t actually do all that much on screen, it feels as if he can do anything and it deserves more than the few minutes of screen-time we get. It’s almost as if the production team just assumed they were going to get a shoddy monster and decided to hide it away before finding out how great it looked. 

 NEGATIVES - I could have done without the comedy bits in merrie old England, where Ancelyn doesn’t quite understand Morgaine’s plans or the bits in modern day England when Ancelyn is scared by all the changes in humanity since. In fact, why is Ancelyn there at all? Morgaine’s totally the sort of person to talk about her plans out loud to the ether, she doesn’t need a companion. The Doctor wins in this story mostly because he’s surrounded by people like Ace and the Brig and Shou who are prepared to give their lives to defeat evil. Morgaine has even greater powers than the Doctor but the best henchman she can come up with is a comedy sidekick who doesn’t quite believe in her powers? If you’ve ever seen The Gummi Bears (which started the year before this show was on air and might have been an inspiration, of sorts – weirder things have happened) and which is also set in a mystical Britain that’s as near as close to it as King Arthur’s time as Disney could get away with, then you’ll never see this pair again without thinking of Duke Igthorn and Toady. This would make the Doctor a combination of reluctant grumpy action hero Gruffy and absent-minded mystical Zummy, which is as close a description of the 7th Doctor as I’ve ever seen. Ace is clearly Cubby, the child who wants to all the dangerous things her elders are up to and Shou is a good match for preening teenage bear Sunny, though that leaves the two Brigadiers as Tummy and Grammy and though I’d have fun debating which one is which even I can’t quite make that work. 

BEST QUOTES: ‘The point of archaeology is to carefully discover the past – not disintegrate it!’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Brigadier Bambera makes her only other Who appearance in the ‘New Adventures’ novel ‘Head Games’ (1995) by Steve Lyons, when she helps the 7^th Doctor defeat an even more unlikely foe,  Jason, the former Master in ‘The Land Of Fiction’ who can conjure up imaginary armies at will. And she thought she was having a bad day in ‘Battlefield’!

Confusingly the Doctor meets Merlin twice in the comic strips ‘The Neutron Knights’ (1981) and ‘The Tides Of Time’ (1982) but on neither occasion do they give any hint that they’re his future self as per this story!

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